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slicks had understandably been a bitter disappointment.
Michael van der Mark experienced the highs and lows of racing in front of a home crowd at the weekend. The Dutch superstar gave it his all to win Race 1 but his fast and loose approach ultimately caught up with him and he crashed. It was another lesson for van der Mark, who continues to impress. Racing at the front against Davies and Rea is a hard fought scrap that you need to be at ten-ten at all times. Unfortunately for van der mark he turned the dial to 11 and crashed.
In Race 2 he was much more considered in the tricky conditions and rewarded a huge home crowd with a podium finish. The Honda rider has quickly developed into one of the best Superbike riders on the planet and is already a hot commodity on the rider market. His first win looks to be only around the corner but it’s so competitive in WorldSBK at the moment that nothing can be taken for granted.
When confidence is high a rider’s performance soars and it truly is the difference between standing on the podium or missing out. The first four rounds have given almost the entire grid reason for optimism as the business end of the season nears. With races coming thick and fast until Laguna Seca in July, the fight on track will come down to who can build and maintain their confidence. Right now Jonathan Rea has put himself in the best possible position to remain the man to beat. His 45 point title lead is as difficult a mountain to climb as any in the world.Lionel Messi of FC Barcelona continues to add to his list of achievements by becoming the first player to score more than 300 La Liga goals. The five-time Ballon D’Or winner achieved the feat when Barcelona played Sporting Gijon, rifling in a 25-yard shot at the 20-minute mark.
Messi actually delayed reaching the milestone, which would have taken place as early as Sunday. Rather than hog the limelight, the Argentine star did the next best thing when he set up teammate Luis Suarez for a penalty spot.
This time, there was no denying the feat after hitting a 25-yard attempt in the first half of their match against the hosting Sporting Gijon squad. Barcelona won that tiff 3-1.
However, Messi was far from finished. He connected a second goal when the host squad pulled abreast. That allowed him to jack up his point total to 301 while also improving his club’s goal total to 10,000. With the feat, Messi now holds a sizeable 50 goal lead over Telma Zarra of Athletic Club, who has 51. Cristiano Ronaldo of Real Madrid CF is third with 246.
Aside from setting his mark in La Liga, the goal total also places the 28-year-old forward as only the fifth player to score 300 goals in any of the top five leagues in Europe. He joins an elite cast that includes the likes of Jimmy Greaves, Gerd Muller, Dixie Dean and Steve Bloomer.
The feat also overshadows earlier fears of slowing down, following kidney problems tied up with the FC Barcelona star forward. Earlier this month, there were anxious moments regarding the overall health of the Argentine hotshot. It was reported that Messi would need treatment to address for renal colic, a type of abdominal pain tied up with kidney stones.
Though Neymar and Luis Suarez were still around to hold fort, it was obvious that things would be better with the big three around to lead the Barcelona charge. And as things have been panning out lately, Messi seems to be playing as if there were no health issues to be worried about.
With the performance, Messi was even feted when he was named Spain’s player of the month. After scoring six goals in five games last month, it was the first time that a Barcelona player won the award.
The feat overshadows an earlier issue tied up with that passed opportunity to reach 300 against Celta Vigo. Rival Cristiano Ronaldo shed more light on possibly why saying, “I know why he did it and I am not going to say anything more than that. You can think whatever you like."
Apart from Ronaldo’s take, some believe that it was done as a tribute to Barcelona legend Johan Cruyff who is battling cancer.
'I know why Messi did that' A cryptic @Cristiano wades into the debate surrounding THAT penalty. #UCL https://t.co/ZsOXFJDqRY — BT Sport Football (@btsportfootball) February 17, 2016
"It made me very happy what Messi did," Cruyff said.A new installment of Microsoft's marquee car franchise, Forza Motorsport, is set to arrive in October. We've not had a chance to turn any laps in Forza Motorsport 4 yet, but in anticipation of a full review in the coming weeks, I spoke with Dan Greenawalt, Lead Game Designer at Turn 10, about the studio's latest arrival and the nuts and bolts of making a driving sim.
The Forza Motorsport franchise has been the Xbox 360's answer to Sony's Gran Turismo series. The first installment arrived in 2005 on the original Xbox, and Forza Motorsport 2 and Forza Motorsport 3 arrived at two-year intervals. The series has done a great many things to innovate the world of racing games, and that trend looks to continue in the newest release.
So, what goes into making a racing game?
One of the reason's for Forza's success has been its ever-evolving physics model. Drive an actual car on an actual track, and the information you're given through the steering wheel and the seat of your pants is the result of thousands of variables: the stiffness of the car's body, its mass (both of the whole thing and the unsprung bits), the amount of power to go and stop, the design and geometry of the suspension, the ever-changing relationship between the four tires and the track surface, and so on.
With over five hundred cars in the game, Turn 10 had to somehow turn all of that into data into something that you feel through a fancy steering wheel setup or the Xbox 360 controller to give the player the feeling of turning into a corner, of tires losing adhesion and beginning to spin, or of moments of inertia.
"We do have extensive information for example on the [Ferrari] Enzo," Greenawalt tells me. "By having the Enzo, and knowing the cars we are simulating, we're able to say 'this car's suspension geometry on the front is more similar to the Enzo than the Corvette,' for example."
They started with five cars, going as far as to take them apart to measure the several hundred points of research data, from simple things like weight distribution to measuring inertia on the driveline. Over the years more cars have been quantified, some to a greater degree than others. This has built up a database that provides the starting ground for each of the cars in the game.
Turn 10 doesn't use any data submitted by the manufacturers, who might not be above sending them a ringer. But their system is surprisingly accurate. "Even though we don't have the real numbers, we've actually been able to find errors in cars through this simulation," Greenawalt claims. All this work results in around 9,000 parameters for each car that are used by the game's physics engine to simulate everything from a tiny European hatchback to a Le Mans winning prototype racing car.
For Forza Motorsport 4, the team has thrown away all its previous tire data and started from scratch. Forza Motorsport 3 had data from Toyo, Michelin, Pirelli, and FAE, and it had to be manipulated so that it would all work together, despite being gathered at different testing facilities and with different testing methods. This time the game is built with new data: custom tests from Pirelli across a huge range of variables (tire height, width, compound, temperature, pressure, camber angle, etc) that was imported directly into the game. "That was the only way we saw to be as up-to-date as possible. We weren't copying the textbooks of racecar engineers from a couple of years ago but putting in the data that would write the textbooks of the coming years," Greenawalt explains.
This attention to detail shows up elsewhere too. Racing games have been getting better at recreating the sounds of cars, but usually only on full throttle. Now, as you build your cars up from shopping-spec to highly strung race monsters, you can expect backfires, burbles and pops on over run. Other aspects have also been worked on to add to the feeling of reality; cars sound different under load—up a hill on full throttle, say—"you can hear it straining, frankly," Greenawalt tells me.
User generated content
Forza Motorsport has been famous for the strength of its user-generated content, and it truly is amazing what some people are able to achieve with what seems like pretty basic image editing tools and a lot of layers. It's been a focus of the series for a long time, and that's set to continue in Forza Motorsport 4. Greenawalt is proud of what the livery editor has allowed gamers to achieve: "A lot of people want the tool to work like this, or work like that... we made a tool that was very powerful, but that doesn't mean that anyone can just go in and slap a texture on it. The important bit about that is we're creating a class of creative that's able to show off their skill with the tools."
One of Gran Turismo 5's new features was the introduction of a track editor, and I asked Dan if we might see anything like this in the future. Imagine being able to take GPS or Google Earth data of your favorite driving road, for example, and sharing it online. Sadly, this just isn't possible right now, mainly because of that perennial Ars topic, intellectual property (IP).
It's something they've considered. Greenawalt has spent time studying the various PC games and communities that have allowed it, and there's very little interest in anything other than virtual recreations of real tracks, both former and current: "Those are things that we really can't condone—the stealing of other people's IP. The first thing that gets made is Spa, or Bathurst, or Brands Hatch. When people make original tracks, they don't do well in these communities."
As to whether Spa or Bathurst or Brands Hatch will appear in the game, I was told enigmatically "we haven't announced all the tracks yet." Cue Internet speculation in 5, 4, 3
I also asked about whether we might see easier ways of getting user-generated content out of the game. Getting pictures out of GT5 is a lot easier than Forza Motorsport 3, as you can save them locally rather than having to upload them. Unfortunately, security concerns mean that Forzamotorsport.net will remain the portal for exporting images or movies from the game for now.
While we're on the subject of intellectual property, it is sadly true that Porsche will be absent from Forza Motorsport for the first time. Electronic Arts (EA) have an exclusive license with the Stuttgart manufacturer, and in the past has allowed Turn 10 to include them, but with their move towards a more sim-based game, the studio that everyone loves to hate has just given me another reason to curse their name. When asked if the German cars could reappear as DLC if EA relented, Greenawalt told me he's said everything he's really able to say on the matter, but the situation will be continually evaluated.
It's frustrating that digital rights issues have to raise their head, but they don't dampen my enthusiasm for the forthcoming game. It's due out in the US on October 11, which means I have to go out and find a Kinect in the next few weeks; for the head-turning, mind you, not the driving-with-no-steering-wheel. And it goes without saying, you'll be able to read a review of the game here at Ars.On Wednesday, an Italian Coast Guard vessel rescued 774 migrants in the Strait of Sicily between Italy and North Africa, one of a seemingly endless series of new waves of migrants moving north as the weather becomes more temperate.
So far this year, the Italian interior ministry has documented 16,075 migrants crossing to its shores, compared to just over 10,000 during the same period in 2015. The Italian coastguard reported that it had rescued 1,482 migrants off the Libyan coast last weekend, and another 1,500 migrants and refugees were received in Italy on Tuesday as rescue ships carried out 11 operations in the Mediterranean.
The deal between Turkey and the European Union (EU) to send migrants back to Turkey came into effect on March 20, effectively closing the so-called “Balkan route” north from Greece into Europe. Since then, traffickers have been scrambling to devise new routes to bring prospective migrants into the continent, primarily through Italy.
As the EU’s migrant relocation program has flopped and borders have been closed along migrant routes, Italy may be now forced to hold on to the majority of people landing on its shores.
European officials have predicted that Libya will become the new route of choice for both African and Middle Eastern migrants, and expect some 500,000 to 800,000 migrants to arrive in Europe from Libya this year.
With the new EU-Turkey agreement, only 1,000 migrants arrived in Greece from Turkey in all of last week, as compared with daily arrivals of 2,000 in previous weeks. This drop does not signal a tapering of demand, but rather a strategic regrouping as traffickers redesign their travel itineraries.
In 2014, the largest group of migrants arriving in Italy were Syrians, while in 2015 this flow decreased, since Syrians preferred the Greek route into Europe, according to Flavio Di Giacomo, the spokesman in Italy for the International Organization for Migrants (IOM). With the closing of the Balkan route, Syrians will once again have to gain entry through Italy.
Meanwhile, the number of sub-Saharan Africans who arrived to Italy by sea in 2015 more than doubled compared to 2014. The most represented country of origin was Eritrea, with 39,162 Eritreans entering Italy last year, Di Giacomo said.
So far this year, 13,829 migrants have arrived into Italy from Libya, as compared with 10,075 for the same period in 2015.
Italy has struggled to expand its capacity to receive and process migrants. In March 2014, it was hosting 29,000 asylum seekers; by 2015 the number had increased to 67,000, and this March the number has risen to 106,000. This number is sure to increase dramatically in the next several months.
According to reports, human smugglers have already reworked their routes, and are now charging up to €5,000 to take migrants in larger vessels from southern Turkey, around the bottom of Greece and on to Italy.
The larger vessels will reportedly carry up to 300 passengers, though they will be ordered to hide below decks until they reach international waters. The new trips are scheduled to begin the first week of April.
Listen to Dr. Williams discuss this on Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM:
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsromeNo other.22 LR pistol provides the feel of the classic 1911 pistol with the proven reliability and value of the Ruger® 22/45™ pistols. The perfect trainer, it allows for low-cost practice and provides shooters with the familiar and preferred grip shape and feel of the famous 1911 45 caliber pistol.
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This MKIII 22/45 bull barrel pistol comes drilled and tapped for Weaver® style scope base adapters, for a simplistic addition of optics. Other great features include a contoured ejection port, push button mag release, two magazines, a hard plastic carry case, and tapered bolt ears that couldn`t be easier to grasp.I recall, as a child of perhaps eight or nine, the dread with which I faced the bitterly misnamed "spring" term in the cold slumpy days following Christmas. One of the few things that got me out of my bunk bed was the prospect of Ready Brek. "Central heating for kids" they called it. I haven't had a bowl for 15 years but I remember the milky, malty puddle and the beige-streaked spoon as vividly as I remember my teacher's implacable beehive.
Ready-Brek was one of the best things I ate as a child, and I say that without flippancy or exaggeration. It instilled in me a lifelong love of porridge, a dish that seems perfect for today as intermittent blizzards howl and the evening gloams at four.
The "instant" oats of Ready Brek are the most processed: a machine refines them so that, when you add the milk, they soften almost instantly into a smooth, lumpless bath. Oats can be milled in eight principal ways (outlined in the excellent Cook's Book of Ingredients). The most important milling for porridge is probably medium oatmeal, which takes around five minutes to cook. Others include pinhead oatmeal, useful in haggis; the American rolled oats of flapjacks and muesli; whole oats or groats which swell and plump deliciously in stews; and of course coarse oatmeal, perfect for herring-coating.
For a dish that traditionally contains three very basic ingredients, it's remarkable how much the methods for porridge-cooking deviate from one another. I allow 30-40g of porridge a person: 40 keeps me going merrily till lunch but 30 has the stomach rumbling by 11 o'clock. For rolled oats, add one cup of oats to two cups of boiling water; they take about five minutes. Using half-milk and half-water makes the dish rather more filling, and I find 100% milk a bit too rich. For pinheads, which take half an hour to cook or 15 minutes with an overnight soak, you'll need eight times as much water. Delia stirs with a balloon whisk but the correct implement is of course the spurtle, a glorified stick which allows one to scrape out every sticky morsel from the pan, and for which the annual World Porridge Making Championship is named. A former category winner of that competition has an excellent video recipe: she cooks hers in a bain-marie.
Sad to say it, but porridge isn't authentically Scottish. It's a direct descendant of pottage, the British serf's staple which, between the 9th and 15th centuries, was typically made with oats. 5,000-year-old bodies dug out of Central European bogs have had traces of oat porridge in their stomachs. But at least since Dr Johnson's time oats have been thought of as Scottish, and the Scots now market their porridge as a proud national emblem.
Different regions of the auld country historically tweaked the starchy starkness of oats, water and salt. Some would add buttermilk or whey, some let it go cold and kept it in the "porridge drawer" of a dresser before slicing it and schlepping out into the glen. And the dish developed a disproportionate share of lore and symbol: you had to stir it clockwise to ward off the devil; you referred to it in the third person plural as they or them; you ate it standing up from a wooden bowl, this last probably because the wood kept it hot for longer. You certainly never dreamed of adding sugar, a Sassenach adulteration.
As with most dishes, though, I'd rather have porridge that deviated from the "correct" method than no porridge at all. Why adhere to dogmatic tradition for the sake of some ancient cotter? A dollop of treacle, which sounds lovely, is apparently traditional in Yorkshire. Ramsay recommends honey and flaked almonds, both eminently sensible; and Levi Roots has a fine recipe for porridge with allspice, coconut milk, tropical fruits and pecans.
Britain has a sweeter tooth, especially at breakfast, than it used to. Children brought up eating Coco Pops or even cornflakes must see the morning meal differently from those reared on kippers and kedgeree. So I gladly let demerara dissolve over porridge into a sweet black slick, and stir sacrilegious spoons of jam or marmalade into the mix. Assuming this stuff isn't inedible glue to you, how do you take yours?
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Adrian Harvey, aged 42, of Stonepit Lane, Inkberrow, near Worcester, was convicted in the summer after admitting possessing pornographic images of minors following the visit to the French beach.
The director of firm Common Nonsense appeared at the High Court of Beziers, France, on June 2, this year where the court was told he had sneaked up on children and teenagers at the naturist resort in Cap d’Agde, France.
Harvey is said to have bought a mini spy camera hidden in a key fob before the holiday and he claimed it was to take photos of model aeroplanes, despite photographic equipment and the use of it being banned at the beach.
But he was spotted pointing the device at groups of youngsters and when the French police were called, they found images of naked or nearly naked minors aged between six and 18.
He told the court he visited the resort for its beauty during a break from work and while he and his wife Kate were experiencing difficulties.
When asked why he took the images, he said it was out of curiosity adding that he planned to delete them.
He said he was ashamed of his behaviour, and that he understand the gravity of the situation, which would never occur again.
Harvey, who had no previous convictions, admitted possessing pornographic images of minors and was given a six-month prison sentence, which was suspended for five years.
Yesterday he was due to appear at Worcester Magistrates Court for an application for a notification order on the ground he had been convicted of a relevant offence, and an interim order to be until the main application is determined.
He is said to have been in the building, but did not appear in the court room.
Amy Clarke, prosecuting, addressed District Judge Nigel Cadbury alongside the defence, Emma Prosser.
“Mr Harvey has been convicted of an offence in France,” said Miss Clarke. “He is appealing that offence. In France, it’s not considered final while it’s being contested.
“We also disagree about the fact even if he has been convicted if that’s a relevant offence.”
The case was adjourned until Thursday, November 27 for legal arguments to be heard in full.The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas will release his sophomore solo album, Tyranny, on September 23rd via his own Cult Records imprint. In anticipation, he’s released the 11-minute track “Human Sadness” as the album’s lead single. It’s streaming below, or can be purchased via iTunes.
To go along with the single, Casablancas has also revealed the album’s artwork (above) and 12-song tracklist (below). Among the awesome track titles: “M.utually A.ssured D.estruction”, “Business Dog”, and “Nintendo Blood”.
Pre-orders for the album are also ongoing through Cult Records’ website. In addition to standard CD, LP, and digital formats, Tyranny will be available on cassette and as a cigarette lighter. Update: According to Cult Records, it’s actually a USB drive in a lighter sleeve.
Serving as the follow-up to his 2009 debut, Phrazes for the Young, Tyranny was recorded by Casablancas’ new band, The Voidz. In support of the release, he and The Voidz will hit the road beginning in mid-October. See the full schedule here.
Tyranny Tracklist:
01. Take Me in Your Army
02. Crunch Punch
03. M.utually A.ssured D.estruction
04. Human Sadness
05. Where No Eagles Fly
06. Father Electricity
07. Johan Von Bronx
08. Business Dog
09. Xerox
10. Dare I Care
11. Nintendo Blood
12. Off to War…ORG XMIT: S125C7909 Cowboys v. Eagles - Philadelphia, PA - Cowboys WR Michael Irvin is taken off the field in a stretcher and was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia after suffering an injury in the first half. Cowboys 10, Eagles 13.
In the 14 years since Michael Irvin was carried off the field on a stretcher, you have never heard him criticize the Philadelphia fans who cheered his final play in the NFL.
You may not know why.
“I remember my dad, and a lot of those fans are just like my dad,” the Hall of Fame receiver said before the Cowboys left for Sunday’s NFC East showdown in Philadelphia. “It’s the only place and the only time their opinion counts, the only way they can voice their disappointment, and I can’t have a problem with that.”
Irvin grew up in Fort Lauderdale. He remembers sitting in front of the TV with his father, Walter, on Sunday afternoons watching their beloved Miami Dolphins.
“There wasn’t one Sunday that went by that he didn’t say, ‘God, I’d do anything if I could just save enough money to get to a game,”’ Irvin remembered. “I watched my dad cry every Sunday in that undefeated Miami Dolphin season. He would have done anything to get to the game.”
Walter Irvin died before his son made it to the NFL. He was a roofer and a Baptist preacher who barely made enough to feed his 17 children. Taking his son to a Dolphins game was a luxury beyond his reach.
That’s why Michael Irvin isn’t upset with Eagles fans. That’s why he’s appalled that commentators have blasted Houston fans for cheering when quarterback Matt Schaub left last week’s game with an injury.
“If you want to say I was disappointed with that reaction, you can say that,” Irvin said. “But calling those people classless, that’s way out of bounds.
“You don’t know what that man went through to get those tickets and the only way he has to respond to this situation is that. If you don’t know that, shut up. You don’t know what sacrifices he made.”
Irvin’s last game was Oct. 10, 1999 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. He was carted off the field after a hit by defensive back Tim Hauck to the cheers of the crowd.
“It was a compliment for Philly to cheer me,” said Irvin, who later learned that a narrowing of the spinal column made it too dangerous for him to continue his career. “Philly wasn’t cheering my injury. They were cheering my departure.
“Thank God he’s leaving the field, he’s been killing us. Thank God, maybe now we have a chance to win.
“You’ve never heard me say one negative thing about the Philadelphia crowd.”
Now you know why.
Catch David Moore on The Ticket (KTCK-AM 1310) three days a week with The Musers (Mon-Wed-Fri) at 9:35 a.m., twice a week (Tues-Fri) with The Hardline at 4:15 p.m. and once a week (Mon.) with BaD Radio at 2:35 p.m. during the regular season.
Follow David Moore on Twitter at @DavidMooreDMN
Get the latest Dallas sports news at SportsDayDFW.comKenny Miller beat goalkeeper Sebastian Flauss at his near post to make it 1-0.
Kenny Miller scored the only goal as Rangers made a winning return to the European stage against Luxembourg's Progres Niederkorn.
The Europa League first qualifying round was the Ibrox club's first match in Europe for six years.
Miller raced on to a Niko Kranjcar free-kick and fired low past Sebastian Flauss to edge his side ahead.
But Pedro Caixinha's outfit were unable to add to their lead and now face a testing time in Luxembourg next week.
Rangers have had a busy summer on the transfer front and three of Caixinha's new signings started the match - Fabio Cardoso, Ryan Jack and Dalcio. Fellow new boys Daniel Candeias and Alfredo Morelos were on the bench.
Niko Kranjcar was the star man for Rangers but he was unable to add to Kenny Miller's strike.
It was a signing from last summer, Kranjcar, who took centre stage early on, spreading passes all over the Ibrox surface and drilling a long-range effort just wide of goal.
The Croat missed a glorious chance after 25 minutes, heading a James Tavernier cross wide when he was perfectly placed a few yards from goal.
Rangers continued to dominate but another chance went begging as Kranjcar's corner fell to David Bates, only for the defender to knock the ball high over the bar.
The opening goal came courtesy of one of Rangers' old guard after 37 minutes. Kranjcar was alert as he played a quick free-kick on the edge of the area, releasing Miller who beat Flauss at his near post. The goalkeeper really ought to have done better.
It was almost 2-0 before the break but Cardoso's powerful diving header from Kranjcar's corner was well saved by Flauss.
Miller skewed a low effort narrowly wide at the start of the second half after carving a path through the Progres defence, aided by Jason Holt.
Former Aberdeen captain Ryan Jack made a comfortable start to his Rangers career.
The visitors then had a couple of efforts on goal, with Max Watzka firing over the bar before Alexander Karapetian drew a stop from goalkeeper Wes Foderingham.
Miller had a sight of target as Flauss flapped at a long through ball but the home side were not creating as much as they had done in the first half.
Daniel Candeias and Jordan Rossiter were introduced for Rangers, with Holt and Kranjcar making way.
Candeias soon had a shot saved by Flauss as Rangers looked for the second, before Rossiter drilled one well over the bar from distance.
Another new face, Alfredo Morelos, made his debut with the ineffectual Martyn Waghorn going off.
Defender Bates had a header cleared off the line as the hosts pushed for a second in stoppage time.
But that was as close as they came to adding to their lead over a side that had scored just one goal in their previous 12 European encounters.
Caixinha's side could now face a nervy evening in Tuesday's return leg.Working in R&D since '95, Mark became Magic head designer in '03. His hobbies: spending time with family, writing about Magic in all mediums, and creating short bios.
Last week I started answering your questions about Hour of Devastation. You had so many good ones, I had to keep on answering them.
From day one, we knew Zombie tribal was going to be a part of the block. Cat tribal also happened very early in design. The rest of the tribal cards just happened along the way. I don't remember us particularly thinking about either Naga tribal or Jackal tribal, but I also wouldn't be surprised if one popped up in design or early development and then got cut as the set evolved.
My social media accounts have really been hammering home recently how much players love tribal, so I think doing more tribal themes and one-of tribal cards is something for us to be thinking about. We already tend to do some each block, but I've been wondering if our levels are just too low as a baseline. I'm very curious what you all think about our level of tribal support and whether or not we're supposed to be ramping up—and if so, to what extent.
Each has its challenges. The challenge of a new plane is that you have to figure out everything from scratch. What kind of creatures are here? What kind of gameplay? What's the focus mechanically? What's the emotional feel we're trying to get out of the world? A blank slate can be fun, but it's also intimidating. Amonkhet, for example, allowed us to explore an Egyptian-inspired world and also let us dig a bit deeper into Nicol Bolas's psyche. It was fun seeing where these new inspirations took us, but it was also frustrating. New worlds create a lot more dead ends and require more rework and polishing than return sets. Part of figuring out an identity is trying various things and slowly coalescing as you iterate.
The challenge of an old plane is that it comes with a lot of baggage. There are tons of expectations that have to be met and you have the specter of previous visits hanging over you. You have to deliver the world the players remember while still finding new ways to innovate. The trickiest part is that different players enjoyed different aspects of the old plane, so there's no way to capture what everyone wants in a return. Also, if you change too much, then players are unhappy that the world they love is not the same as they remember it. It's a tricky balance.
The question though is which one is harder. If I had to pick one, I guess I'd pick new worlds. While old worlds have a lot of issues, they at least come with a template of success and failures to help guide you.
Interesting question. In a vacuum, my guess would be that yes, we're planning to do this cycle some time in the future in a set that revolves around arcs (three colors that appears in a row around the color wheel). It's clean and practical. The one thing that gives me pause though is the name. It's pretty world/story specific. Okay, my guess is yes, we'll eventually see the cycle, but the blue-black-red one might get renamed.
Tribal support falls into three categories for me.
First is significant support. These are tribes that we routinely support with tribal rewards. The best examples of these are what I call characteristic tribes, race creature types that show up pretty regularly in their respective color (Humans, Merfolk, Zombies, Vampires, Goblins, and Elves—yes black has two). There are also some class creature types (such as Soldiers, Warriors, Wizards, Shaman, and Clerics) that we support often. This first category houses creature types that we plan to support on an ongoing basis, something that I would expect to show up every three to four years, even if only on a single card.
Second is occasional support. These are things like are iconic tribes (Angels, Sphinxes, Demons, Dragons, and Hydras) that show up at rare as ideals of the color. It's also tribes that we print in just enough volume that we show tribal support now and then (things like Minotaurs, Snakes, and Cats). This second category contains creature types we plan to support ongoing, but at a lower level. These I would expect to show up every seven to eight years, sometimes on just a single card.
Third is sporadic support. These are creature types that mostly don't get tribal rewards. We might throw them a bone every once in a rare while, but it's not something to expect.
Amonkhet block had Zombie, Cat, Sphinx, and Horse tribal. Zombies are in the first category. Cat and Sphinx are in the second (although the popularity of Cats could potentially get it into the first category one day). Horses are in the third category.
Because Zombies are way easier to make than Planeswalkers. Anyone can be turned into a Zombie. Only a person with a spark can become a Planeswalker. Here's my little play about what would happen if Bolas tried a Planeswalker farm rather than a Zombie farm:
Nicol Bolas: I'm back!
The Scarab God: It's great to see you again. Can't believe it's been 60 years.
Nicol Bolas: How's our little project going?
The Scarab God: Excellent! We are ahead of schedule.
Nicol Bolas: That's good to hear. Can I see my army?
The Scarab God: Absolutely, walk this way.
Nicol Bolas follows The Scarab God into a room.
Nicol Bolas: This is it?
The Scarab God: Yes!
Nicol Bolas: Two Planeswalkers? My army is two Planeswalkers?
The Scarab God: The average for our population so far would be 1.3. The fact that we have two is super lucky.
Nicol Bolas: How are my master plans going to work with two Planeswalkers? The four of us in this room couldn't even form a basketball team!
The Scarab God: If your plans involve basketball, we could ask The Locust God to help us. If flying isn't illegal, he'd be great at dunking.
Nicol Bolas: Two Planeswalkers?! Two!
Samut: If you're going to keep yelling, I'm out of here.
And scene.
No, for two reasons. One, while I had high hopes for the Cat tribal in the block, it was done more speculatively than anything else. It was never intended as a major theme, just something light that some players could build around. Two, we tend to build our legendary creatures from the story, and Cats just aren't a big part of it. They were much more for Egyptian-inspired flavor than anything else. Now that we've made some Cat tribal cards and seen the extremely positive reaction, that increases the possibility that we'll make a green-white legendary Cat in the future.
I would make a horrible Eternal. First, I'm pretty small. Have you seen this video?
Bolas would recruit one of us, and it isn't the man in flannel. Unless there's some need to fit in small spaces, I'm pretty sure I don't meet the height requirement.
Second, I can't fight. Physically speaking. I can debate. I'm not bad at arguing, but I don't think that's what Bolas is looking for in a Zombie soldier.
Third, I don't think I'd fall for the whole |
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Wu, K. M., Lu, Y. H., Feng, H. Q., Jiang, Y. Y., and Zhao, J. Z. (2008). Suppression of cotton bollworm in multiple crops in china in areas with Bt toxin-containing cotton. Science 321, 1676–1678. doi: 10.1126/science.1160550 PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google ScholarAt first I thought this was more like a travel guide to a spot in Mexico. Mr. Burke does a very good job of giving the reader a good look at the area he has set his story in and it is quite a story! La Independencia / Barrio San Luisito was a small part of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon which had been formed to settle the workers from other parts of Mexico to build the city. Now Monterrey is a huge modern city but the Barrio is not so much so. The author shows the problem the people face living there. A government that is uninterested in it’s people and more interested in how much money they can siphon out of the system. ( hum.. sound familiar?) We have many similar spots in America, Chicago and New York come to mind. Places where even the Cops stay out of.
So in this settling, we meet our main characters. Padre Miguel, and Pepe his childhood friend and Pepe’s now orphaned granddaughter, Antonia who is around nine years of age. The two men had been as brothers all throughout their younger years but Miguel became a Padre and Pepe had started to run with one of the numerous gangs associated with the area. Pepe got in way over his head and then had to run leaving his wife and young daughter to fend for themselves. She lives long enough to raise her child Maria, Antonia’s mother and then dies of cancer. It is Maria and her husband Arturo who were killed leaving Antonia alone. Pepe has come back to take care of his granddaughter. This is the setting and backdrop for the story of Antonia and Lobo.
There are parts in this book that are hard to read. Especially if your an animal lover but our author is writing about the realities of that life and the animals living them. We have exactly the same situations on this side of the border but thank goodness we have come to realize that gangs, dog fighting and crime all go hand in hand and our police force seems much more willing to crack down on them than the more corruptible local police of the barrio.
I admire how Mr. Burke creates a great narrative that is fast paced and in depth. You, the reader, will become involved and learn to care about the lives created in this book. I can’t guarantee that your EVER gonna find a dog that “thinks” like this one but it sure would be fun. The author gives you a lot to think about and quietly teaches you some important lessons while making you root for the people you have come to know. I highly recommend this book but it is not for the faint of heart and just because that is so, then you should read it. This kind of thing is rampant in his world of Mexico and here in the United States.Upstream Color reviews are popping up on the Internet finally after its premiere today at Sundance.
They do a good job of giving impressions without giving too much away, but be wary of clicking on any links here if you want to be unspoiled. I haven’t actually seen the movie, and I’m actually no where near Park City, Utah where Sundance resides, so I can only go off what others have said.
It’s a hit.
Time gets the award for most clickable headline for an Upstream Color review with “Sundance Surprise: Did One of the Best Movies Ever Made Just Debut in Park City?”
Now, this doesn’t mean some haven’t panned the movie. But they did it unconvincingly. For one, they ended up just looking very dumb. For instance, one Guardian reviewer starts by saying he had to watch Carruth’s first film, “Primer,” three times before he understood it. Then he goes on about how obscured the plot was, and how baffled he was about what he just watched — the result being bad, for him.
The first time I watched Primer I understood every scene, and when twists landed I immediately rewrote my understanding of every scene. I paid attention. I did what any fictionphile does when he watches something, reads something, etc. So when a reviewer shows he doesn’t have the ability to pay attention, I lose my attention for their reviews.
Meanwhile, at the AV Club, known for its serious approach to even obscure cinema, the film landed at once. “[H]aving the movie wash over me was one of the most transcendent experiences of my moviegoing life.” Yep. Now, that sounds like someone who paid attention. I’ve spent most of my life figuring out, and building a template for figuring out, who was pretending to understand things and who actually understood things. Someone who understands the use of [SPOILER]Walden[/SPOILER] in the movie and uses the term “transcendent,” possibly by accident, while writing their review actually did have a transcendent moment. He describes Upstream Color as a tough-to-understand film but he never says he didn’t get it, and he gives it an “A.”
Of course, I’ll have to wait until April at least to see it myself before forming an opinion. But, after the somewhat flop of Don Jon’s Addiction, though it did pick up a distributor, these early Upstream Color reviews give me hope.(Natural News) Even while the hopelessly dishonest, scientifically illiterate oldstream media continues lying to the public with the ridiculous narrative that “vaccines are safe” — read WashPost, The Atlantic, NYT or USA Today for a daily dose of vaccine holocaust denialism — the federal government has publicly released vaccine injury payout figures that prove vaccines routinely maim and kill children all across America.
The government’s own document, found at this link, reveals statistics of over 18,000 petitions filed for compensation by families of children who were seriously injured, maimed or killed by vaccines in the United States alone.
A backup copy of the document has also been posted Natural News, in case the government attempts to “memory hole” the report:
https://www.naturalnews.com/files/monthlywebsitestats04_01_17.pdf
The document reveals that a shocking 633 petitions for serious vaccine injury or death have been filed in fiscal year 2017. This follows 1,120 petitions that were filed in 2016.
The number of petitions filed is a tiny fraction of the total number of children who are seriously harmed by vaccine injuries, as doctors aggressively brainwash parents into believing that seizures, convulsions, autism and other serious conditions are never caused by vaccines. Furthermore, families of vaccine-injured children must hire an attorney to file a petition with the U.S. government, then wait anywhere from two to ten years for a decision by a “kangaroo court” that’s stacked against them. Thus, in nearly all cases of vaccine injury, parents are convinced into either believing that vaccines had nothing to do with the injury or that trying to fight the government for compensation is a complete waste of time. (This is all by design.)
As a result, the real number of vaccine-injured children in America is at least 100 times larger, and more reasonably as much as 1000 times larger when you consider “minor” brain damage, short-term seizures and other conditions that are difficult for parents to notice.
In other words, there are at least 63,000 vaccine-injured children in America from 2017 alone, making vaccine injuries a leading cause of injury in children. This is all hidden and denied by the pharma-controlled media, of course, which wants you to focus on 48 children with measles in Michigan rather than 63,000 vaccine-injured children all across America.
As reported by Waking Times:
Yet another shocking blow has been delivered to people who still ardently claim that vaccines are “safe and effective,” and that the only complications they can cause are “mild.” The US government department for Health Resources and Services Administration has recently released the running tally of the just-past-half-way-complete US Fiscal Year (FY) of 2017 for compensable vaccine injuries. It currently stands at over $142 million dollars. You read that right. That covers the 377 cases that were thus far successful in obtaining compensation in fiscal year 2017 through the heavily biased (to put it politely) system allegedly in place to redress damage done by vaccines in the USA.
At the rate things are going, we might expect the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to pay out around $220 million or more by the close of FY 2017. To clarify, US Fiscal Year 2017 runs from October 1st, 2016 to September 30th, 2017 – there’s still over four months remaining to rack up more carnage.
According to the CDC’s website, there are “limitations in our knowledge of the risks associated with vaccines” and vaccinations have “the following problems”:
Limited understanding of biological processes that underlie adverse events Incomplete and inconsistent information from individual reports Poorly constructed research studies (not enough people enrolled for the period of time) Inadequate systems to track vaccine side effects Few experimental studies were published in the medical literature.”1 (emphasis added)
The above very revealing admissions from the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) completely undercut the pathological overconfidence exhibited in the extreme portions of the community pushing for mandatory vaccination.
To date, the U.S. government has now paid out nearly $3.6 billion in vaccine injury compensation, absolutely shredding the lies of the fake news media outlets (The Atlantic, CNN, WashPost, NYT, etc.) which continue to stupidly claim that vaccines harm no one. (Are all their science and medicine reporters vaccine damaged themselves?)
Follow more news on the CDC’s vaccine zealotry at CDC.news, or stay informed about vaccine injuries and deaths at Vaccines.news.Submitted by Paul Craig Roberts,
In The Matrix in which Americans live, nothing is ever their fault. For example, the current decline in the US stock market is not because years of excessive liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve have created a bubble so overblown that a mere six stocks, some of which have no earnings commiserate with their price, accounted for more than all of the gain in market capitalization in the S&P 500 prior to the current disruption.
In our Matrix existence, the stock market decline is not due to corporations using their profits, and even taking out loans, to repurchase their shares, thus creating an artificial demand for their equity shares.
The decline is not due to the latest monthly reporting of durable goods orders falling on a year-to-year basis for the sixth consecutive month.
The stock market decline is not due to a weak economy in which after a decade of alleged economic recovery, new and existing home sales are still down by 63% and 23% from the peak in July 2005.
The stock market decline is not due to the collapse in real median family income and, thereby, consumer demand, resulting from two decades of offshoring middle class jobs and partially replacing them with minimum wage part-time Walmart jobs without benefits that do not provide sufficient income to form a household.
No, none of these facts can be blamed. The decline in the US stock market is the fault of China.
What did China do? China is accused of devaluing by a small amount its currency.
Why would a slight adjustment in the yuan’s exchange value to the dollar cause the US and European stock markets to decline?
It wouldn’t. But facts don’t matter to the presstitute media. They lie for a living.
Moreover, it was not a devaluation.
When China began the transition from communism to capitalism, China pegged its currency to the US dollar in order to demonstrate that its currency was as good as the world’s reserve currency. Over time China has allowed its currency to appreciate relative to the dollar. For example, in 2006 one US dollar was worth 8.1 Chinese yuan. Recently, prior to the alleged “devaluation” one US dollar was worth 6.1 or 6.2 yuan. After China’s adjustment to its floating peg, one US dollar is worth 6.4 yuan. Clearly, a change in the value of the yuan from 6.1 or 6.2 to the dollar to 6.4 to the dollar did not collapse the US and European stock markets.
Furthermore, the change in the range of the floating peg to the US dollar did not devalue China’s currency with regard to its non-US trading partners. What had happened, and what China corrected, is that as a result of the QE money printing policies currently underway by the Japanese and European central banks, the dollar appreciated against other currencies. As China’s yuan is pegged to the dollar, China’s currency appreciated with regard to its Asian and European trading partners. The appreciation of China’s currency (due to its peg to the US dollar) is not a good thing for Chinese exports during a time of struggling economies. China merely altered its peg to the dollar in order to eliminate the appreciation of its currency against its other trading partners.
Why did not the financial press tell us this? Is the Western financial press so incompetent that they do not know this? Yes.
Or is it simply that America itself cannot possibly be responsible for anything that goes wrong. That’s it. Who, us?! We are innocent! It was those damn Chinese!
Look, for example, at the hordes of refugees from America’s invasions and bombings of seven countries who are currently overrunning Europe. The huge inflows of peoples from America’s massive slaughter of populations in seven countries, enabled by the Europeans themselves, is causing political consternation in Europe and the revival of far-right political parties. Today, for example, neo-nazis shouted down German Chancellor Merkel, who tried to make a speech asking for compassion for refugees.
But, of course, Merkel herself is responsible for the refugee problem that is destabilizing Europe. Without Germany as Washington’s two-bit punk puppet state, a non-entity devoid of sovereignty, a non-country, a mere vassal, an outpost of the Empire, ruled from Washington, America could not be conducting the illegal wars that are producing the hordes of refugees that are over-taxing Europe’s ability to accept refugees and encouraging neo-nazi parties.
The corrupt European and American press present the refugee problem as if it has nothing whatsoever to do with America’s war crimes against seven countries. I mean, really, why should peoples flee countries when America is bringing them “freedom and democracy?”
Nowhere in the Western media other than a few alternative media websites is there an ounce of integrity. The Western media is a Ministry of Truth that operates full-time in support of the artificial existence that Westerners live inside The Matrix where Westerners exist without thought. Considering their inaptitude and inaction, Western peoples might as well not exist.
More is going to collapse on the brainwashed Western fools than mere stock values.Suggestions For Promoting Gender Equity In Ultimate Broadcasting
A personal case study.
“I think the best commentator should be on the mic.”
Thus began Rob McLeod’s response to Team Canada player Rena Kawabata’s tweeted demand for a female commentator for the World Games, which led to his resignation as WFDF Communications Director. Of course, it was McLeod’s more-overtly misogynist comments which followed that triggered the online petition for his resignation, but I believe the initial statement also deserves scrutiny.
In this article, I explain how subjective assumptions about what makes someone the “best commentator” may be preventing women from calling high-profile ultimate matches, and I offer suggestions for promoting gender equity in ultimate broadcasting.
Within the heated exchange, McLeod asserted that WFDF had done a better job of promoting gender equity in ultimate broadcasting at “the last two major events [by] having women on the mic for mixed and women’s games.” I was one of the women on the mic at one of those events: the 2017 World Championships of Beach Ultimate in Royan, France. Though WFDF had hired three women and three men as livestream commentators in an impressive initial demonstration of commitment to gender equity, three out of the seven final matches had just one woman, placed in the secondary “color” role, and the other four, including the Mixed Division final, had two men.
I was not a party to the discussions which led to the decision to have men outnumber women 11-3 on the arena mics in the highest-profile games, but I observed enough of the process to have some understanding of what factors shaped that decision and what we can do to prevent that from happening in the future, without sacrificing the quality of the broadcast.
Suggestion #1: Make a Woman the Play-By-Play Commentator at least 50% of the Time, Including High-Profile Games
At the arena field at WCBU, we used the model of sports broadcasting most commonly used in American sports, which has two distinct roles: “play-by-play” and “color” (also called “analyst”). In this model, the play-by-play commentator is the main voice. In addition to literally describing what is happening on the field as the disc is in play, he/she directs the flow of the discussion, and it is only once the play-by-play commentator has either specifically invited the color commentator to speak (often with leading questions) or has otherwise made it clear he/she is done with the point that the other commentator can bring in the color (i.e. interesting background information) or analyze the play. While this model potentially gives the analysts substantial opportunities to express their unique opinions and perspectives, in practice, those opportunities may be circumscribed by the direction of the play-by-play commentator. In order to promote gender equity, it is crucial that the person directing the discussion is sometimes a woman.
It is generally assumed that the play-by-play role should be filled by the most-experienced broadcaster. Indeed, in the sports broadcasting world, play-by-play is that coveted senior role that broadcasters spend their careers jockeying for position to one day obtain, and which even the “best” female sportscasters are never given in mainstream broadcasts.
But, here’s a secret: “play-by-play” isn’t harder to do than “color.” It’s simply different, with a distinct learning curve and required skill sets. As long as one is an experienced ultimate player and a comfortable talker who can see the field and jersey numbers, one can learn the roster and call out what’s unfolding on the field and then ask the color commentator to chime in about it means or why we should care. Thus, while it makes some intuitive sense to have the person who is directing the show be the most-experienced broadcaster, it is a bit of a misguided assumption, since both roles benefit from practice, experience, and chemistry with one’s partner. And this assumption is widening the gender gap, because in big-game ultimate broadcasting, the ones with the most on-air experience are currently men. If we keep putting men in the play-by-play role, then women will never direct the conversation. Even if we let women practice play-by-play on some relatively insignificant games, it is unlikely they will catch up in experience to the men who have been doing it longer; when the big games come up, we’ll still put the more-experienced announcers in charge of the conversation.
This appears to be what happened at WCBU this year, where the commentators with the most broadcasting experience were men. Before the two most-experienced men, Tom Styles and Evan Lepler, arrived mid-week, the other four commentators had turns trying out different distributions of the play-by-play and color roles together, often with two women on the mic, including on men’s games. Once Tom and Evan arrived, they generally were given the play-by-play role, with one of the less-experienced commentators on color.
Pretty soon, there were more commentators than needed, and a behind-the-scenes pecking order was established, wherein Evan rose to the top and got the play-by-play position on each finals match, and the color position was distributed among four of the other five commentators, with a couple male guest appearances taking some of the slots. While Evan, an American who regularly calls AUDL and USA Ultimate games on many platforms including ESPN, brings undeniable experience, skill, and dedication to the job, selecting him as the only play-by-play announcer for every final meant that only his particular ultimate vision and voice was directing the show. As a consequence, distinct gender, cultural, and playing perspectives were excluded from or minimized in the broadcast.
It is possible that WCBU presented the rare situation where the male commentators had so much more broadcasting talent and experience than the available women, and the planned use of the finished product was so important to WFDF, that it was an appropriate decision to put a man on play-by-play for each of the finals. However, based on my observations of the week, it appears likely that unintentionally discriminatory factors also influenced that decision and will continue to influence other broadcasting decisions, unless the following suggestions are also heeded.
Suggestion #2: Carefully Examine your Criteria for Determining who the “Best” Commentators Are, to See if They Involve Potentially-Discriminatory Factors
When the schedules came out for the last couple days of games at the arena, my name had dropped off altogether, and I was sent to try to get on some of the Field 2 & 3 games being streamed on Fanseat. This may be a red flag for readers, believing I must have taken this apparent demotion personally. Of course, I don’t like any form of rejection, and I am not eager to be reminded of my shortcomings or discover new ones in the wake of this article. Nevertheless, I can honestly say I have no trouble accepting that I was not chosen to represent WFDF in its most high-profile games. Rather, because some of the reasons that were shared with me or which I suspect were behind the decision to have such a limited female voice in the WCBU finals may reflect gender bias, I am speaking out to try to prevent those reasons from keeping other female voices off future broadcasts.
I received feedback about my commentating from three different men involved with the livestream at WCBU. From one, it was consistently positive, praising my pacing, tone, and content. From another, it was almost all negative (though noting some improvement over time) and included noting my apologizing on-the-air for misstatements, showing emotion at big plays (demonstrated back to me with a high-pitched voice), speaking too quickly or “too legato,” and interrupting the play-by-play commentator’s pauses. The third provided a direct response to my eventual request for feedback about the scheduling decision, which he explained had just come down to a narrowing of the field of too-many commentators, and I had dropped off the end. The only reason he identified for why Gee-Gee Morrison was chosen to represent our gender for the two women’s divisions finals was that Gee-Gee had a relatively low-pitched voice. (The other female commentator, Ange Wilkinson, was playing in the Mixed-Masters Division and was understandably put on that final.)
While non-gendered factors may well have been enough to move me off the big games, I invite producers to carefully consider whether any of the notes I received may reveal gender bias that could haunt future broadcasting decisions.
I’m sorry…
Gender differences in apologizing habits were famously lampooned by Amy Schumer, and have even led to apps aimed at helping women ditch apologies. Nevertheless, some feminists embrace the habit as an effective communication method. While male broadcasters may apologize less on the air and some viewers may prefer that style, the assumption that avoiding apologies is an objectively-preferable broadcast model to all viewers is open to debate. (Of course, not making the error in the first place would be objectively preferable.)
No sopranos (except for the National Anthem).
Unrealistic expectations about vocal pitch are well-recognized as a potential factor in gender inequity in the broadcasting profession.1 Perceived preferences for lower-pitched voices in female broadcasters vary according to the forum, but appear to be connected to how “authoritative” a particular gender is perceived in that forum. (Think Sports Center versus Home Shopping Network.)
Thus, it is hard to separate a perceived preference for male voices from an assumption that men know more about sports, including ultimate. Furthermore, studies show that listeners incorrectly associate women’s higher vocal pitch as signaling a faster rate of speech, which suggests that even the note I received for speaking too quickly may have been skewed by gender bias.2 If only women with relatively-low voices are encouraged to be broadcasters, then an already shallow pool is needlessly reduced to a puddle.
Don’t get excited!
Closely-related to vocal pitch is the apparent disapproval of my female voice expressing excitement on the air. This is a particularly difficult factor to objectively assess, since listener preferences for the degree of excitement expressed by a commentator can have both cultural and gendered components. The European producer at ECBU2013 encouraged me to voice more excitement. (“This isn’t tennis,” I was told.) Sitting between the English and French broadcasting teams in Royan, I enjoyed hearing more-dramatic expressions of excitement by the all-male French broadcasting team, who had no prior experience with ultimate. But even at the English-speaking table, I frequently heard exclamations of excitement by male commentators in both the play-by-play and color roles.
Trying to reconcile this particular note with what I observed behind the mic, I believe it may have been influenced in two gendered ways: 1) discomfort with or exaggerated perceptions of women as being emotional or excitable; and 2) perceptions of my excited exclamations as interrupting the play-by-play commentator.
Womanterruption?
As explained above, the color commentator is not meant to speak until it is clear the play-by-play commentator is done with the point or invites him or her to do so. It generally takes a new pair a few games together to get the play-by-play commentator’s pacing down, so that the color commentator can avoid interrupting him or her in a manner which detracts from the broadcast experience.
Many readers who are less familiar with broadcasting roles may recognize interruption as a familiar topic in discussions of male and female interactions. For example, female Supreme Court justices are more often interrupted by male attorneys than their male colleagues are. What may be less discussed is how men perceive being interrupted by women.
Linguist Deborah Tannen has explained that men’s conversational patterns tend to be more competitive and their interruptions typically function to assert rank in a conversation.3 By contrast, women may have a more cooperative style, which includes “speech overlap” to indicate agreement in a point and encouragement. Because men may anticipate competitive one-upping as the communication norm, speech overlap meant to indicate agreement may be incorrectly perceived as a hostile interruption. In such circumstances, and also when women utilize a more-competitive conversational approach to assert opposing views, women may be socially penalized as “bossy.”
A listener attuned to speech overlap may find its use conducive to a congenial sports broadcast, while competitive interruptions would seem jarring to listeners of both genders. It could be revealing to evaluate and compare WCBU matches with male and female color commentators to see who, in fact, interrupts the play-by-play commentator the most in a manner detrimental to the broadcast or what is simply congenial speech overlap between various gender (and cultural) pairings, and to what extent this factor is reflected in the pairings assigned to the finals.
***
Thus, within the notes I personally received at WCBU, I can recognize several factors which feminists have identified as potentially discriminatory. Regardless of whether they were actually employed in a discriminatory manner in my case, or whether non-discriminatory factors governed the casting decisions, I suspect that gender-biased broadcasting standards and assumptions have been playing some role in the relative paucity of “experienced” female ultimate broadcasters. If the producers of high-profile ultimate broadcasts are committed to gender equity, they should think carefully before basing casting decisions on these factors.
Suggestion #3: Support Female Broadcasters Who Voice Their Opinions On and Off The Air, Even if You Personally Disagree with Them.
Women often experience playing ultimate differently than men do, and that experience is as important to the broadcast as the kinds of hands-on experience broadcasters get calling games. Ironically, while the three female commentators may have had less on-the-air experience than the men at WCBU, I believe we were the only ones with actual playing experience in Worlds events. Ultimate broadcasting can benefit from our on- and off-the field experiences in ways which may not always be recognized or shared by our male counterparts.
For example, in one of my post-game notes, a male commentator criticized my applauding the tenacity of one of the top women in European beach ultimate, Inês Bringel of Portugal, for making an unsuccessful play on the disc against Isaiah Masek-Kelly, one of the top male Canadian players (but playing for Russia). He told me that Bringel hadn’t done anything in that point, and I shouldn’t have noted it. The male producer heard the conversation and agreed. I told them both that I had a different perspective: making the decision to follow the disc, hold your position, and make a bid as a much larger man is running straight at you, is doing something, and it was something that none of Bringel’s male teammates were doing at that moment. Re-watching this point at a later date, I understood why they had their concerns – it did not look like she did anything at that moment. But, having personally been in that position before, I knew exactly what she was doing and why it mattered, and it was important to me to say it.
Maybe not every woman playing at this level would have found it noteworthy (and Bringel had plenty of more-dramatic on-field moments that were noted). But, what is clear is that I had an opinion about something that happened on the field that the male broadcasters did not share, and if I hadn’t been there, the only story that would have been told about that point was what the male receiver did. And, there is so much more to ultimate than that.
I do not know whether the content of my commentary influenced the finals’ casting decisions, but I would expect it to be a factor, for good or ill. I recommend that producers carefully evaluate content-based decisions for gender bias and err on the side of allowing commentary that does not closely align with one’s personal perceptions of what is important. If it is significant to that commentator, it may be significant to other viewers with diverse cultural and gender perspectives.
Suggestion #4: Seek Out and Include Women in Ultimate Broadcast Management.
Having diverse cultural and gender perspectives within the broadcast management team could help enable diverse perspectives, styles, and vocal traits in the commentators they are managing. Such diversity was not present at WCBU, where the broadcasting management was entirely male and almost all American (a distinctly-relevant concern for an international competition, in my opinion). As a female commentator slipping down the casting totem pole, I did not feel empowered to inform those making the casting decisions about the gender bias I believed was influencing their decisions. While I may have felt more comfortable approaching a female manager with my observations, ideally, this kind of attention to gender bias would come from within the broadcast management making the casting decisions.
Given that sports broadcasting has been a notoriously hostile environment for women over the years, it may be understandably hard to find women with significant broadcasting experience who are available for ultimate broadcast management. To rectify this situation, it is important to take proactive steps to support and promote the women trying to break into this field. Bringing in female managers without specific broadcasting experience, but who have other valuable experience in media and/or the ultimate community and share its commitment to promoting gender and cultural diversity, could provide a valuable second-choice, until today’s female broadcasters gain the experience needed to become management.
Afterword
While working on this article, I learned that USA Ultimate and Fulcrum Media made gender equity a top priority for their livestreaming of the recent US Open tournament and had lined up majority female commentators. I shared a draft of this article with Fulcrum Media producer Luke Johnson, who was also at WCBU, and he said it had a significant impact on him and renewed his commitment for the tournament.
Unfortunately, I did not realize that the livestreamed games on ESPN had separate management, and the two games I watched suffered from many of the problems I had witnessed at WCBU. Watching the Women’s final, I found it especially ironic that the male color commentator frequently interrupted the male play-by-play commentator (including with expressions of excitement) and apologized at least once for an error, while the female color commentator covering the Women’s semifinal stayed cautiously in her lane. I would not place the occasionally rogue male commentator as a detractor in my listening experience; however, the fact that two men were calling the game was a huge disappointment.
I am inspired by the women and men who are speaking out for gender equity on the field and in the broadcasting booth, and I hope this article provides a useful tool to help us get there. It’s an upwind battle, full of personal and institutional challenges; but, I can’t think of anyone better equipped to fight that battle than ultimate players.CCTV of a "frenzied" chicken shop stabbing has been released in a bid to find the culprits.
A 17-year-old had to be airlifted to hospital after sustaining multiple stab wounds at the Tennessee Chicken Shop in Oval, south London.
He was later discharged.
Detective Inspector Ian Kenward said: "This was a frenzied attack in which a knife was used to inflict life threatening injuries on a teenage male.
"Police will do everything in their powers to bring the offenders to justice. We are appealing for help from the public to assist in identifying those involved."
The attack took place at about 5.30pm on 29 February - but the suspects are also believed to be responsible for another assault at the Brixton Road takeaway earlier that day.
Police want to speak to anyone who saw either incident.
The footage shows two black men thought to be teenagers, wearing black clothing and hooded jackets.
One suspect was about 5ft 11ins, with grey tracksuit bottoms.
Anyone with information is asked to call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111 or Lambeth CID on 07785 774 447.Why replace your drums? Reface them with a custom wrap and be the envy of every drummer in the audience.
How It Works 1. We customize your kit in one of three ways: a) You choose from one of our stock designs - browse the folio, make your choice, your order! b) You send us your artwork - artwork needs to be a minimum of 300dpi and 200mm High x 400mm Wide in CMYK format. c) We create an entirely new design that is right for you - Let us know the kind of custom design you are after and we will send you out a few ideas to get the ball rolling. 2. You send us your kit: It seems daunting but it's actually really easy. For freight instructionsLast week, BuzzFeed executive editor Doree Shafrir wrote a strong argument for using Tinder to find a relationship if you’re over 30, despite the app’s image as a hookup facilitator for twentysomethings. The company has evidently determined that lots of people agree with her, because its new premium app, Tinder Plus, will charge people over 30 twice as much as their younger counterparts.
Tinder Plus users in the U.S. under 30 will pay $9.99 per month, while those over 30 will pay $19.99. The premium version of the app includes two main features: Rewind, allowing users to undo a left swipe, or indication that they’re not interested, in case they rejected a profile by mistake, and Passport, allowing users to search for profiles in other geographic areas, for example in advance of a trip to that region.
According to NPR, Tinder’s market research supported the tiered pricing by age. “Over the past few months, we’ve tested Tinder Plus extensively in several countries,” said a Tinder spokesperson in a statement. “We’ve priced Tinder Plus based on a combination of factors, including what we’ve learned through our testing, and we’ve found that these price points were adopted very well by certain age demographics. Lots of products offer differentiated price tiers by age, like Spotify does for students, for example. Tinder is no different; during our testing we’ve learned, not surprisingly, that younger users are just as excited about Tinder Plus, but are more budget constrained, and need a lower price to pull the trigger.”
It’s hard, of course, not to see the move as a statement of desirability–set the entry bar higher for older users, you’ll get fewer older users in the pool of available daters. But the truth is probably as Tinder claims. Older people looking for love are willing to pay more for the premium app’s flexibility. We’ll see if that holds once the uneven pricing is now public. Because…ouch.HorrorConUK is one of the UK’s leading horror conventions, running annually since 2015 at the Magna Science Adventure Centre in Sheffield/Rotherham. HorrorConUK is now in it’s 4th year and is host to special guests, short film screenings, horror vendors, cosplay, exhibits, Q & A's and talks on all things horror related. Previous guests have included genre icons such as Tom Savini, Doug Bradley, Lamberto Bava, Claudio Simonetti, Linnea Quigley, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, Heather Langenkamp, David Warner, Barbara Crampton, Jeffrey Combs, Gunnar Hansen and Kane Hodder.
HorrorConUK also hosts screenings that includes feature film trailer premieres from UK based filmmakers, as well as screenings of international short films.
As HorrorConUK grows so does our desire to showcase the best short films from around the globe to create awareness of the fantastic crop of filmmakers coming through. For the the second year running Horror |
tax rate for wealthy Americans to 37 percent and slash the tax rate for corporations to a level slightly above what businesses and conservatives wanted.
Republicans in Congress rushed Tuesday toward a deal. Lawmakers and aides labored to blend separate tax bills that were passed recently by the House and Senate. The Republican goal is to deliver to President Donald Trump the first major rewrite of the U.S. tax system in more than three decades.
GOP lawmakers hope to finalize blended legislation no later than Friday, vote next week and deliver the package of steep tax cuts for corporations and more modest cuts for families to the president before Christmas.Less than one week after capturing the UFC lightweight championship, Ben Henderson is taking fire from all sides. Such is life at the top. On Wednesday's edition of The MMA Hour, the man he defeated at UFC 144, Frankie Edgar, practically demanded an immediate rematch. Shortly after that, the manager of rising contender Anthony Pettis called in to make "Showtime's" case as the man who should have the first crack at Henderson's belt.
Apparently, Pettis was among the show's live listeners, and though he was feeling under the weather, asked his manager Mike Roberts to call in on his behalf. Roberts said that while Pettis respects Edgar's resume and stance on a return bout, that he believes he made his own solid case with a spectacular knockout of Joe Lauzon.
Beyond that, sprinkle some added rivalry into the equation, as Pettis felt slighted by Henderson's recent comments about Pettis' place in the pecking order and seeming disinterest in a rematch.
"He's heard some stuff that Ben Henderson has said in the last couple days that really got under his skin," he said. "Ben has said some things basically implying that Anthony is beneath him and he has to do all this stuff to work his way back to a title shot. He keeps referring to him like, 'I see you. You're doing big things. One day…' And Anthony's like, 'Wait a minute. I just beat you over a year ago. I put your face on ESPN for a year and you're talking like you're so much ahead of me.' It got under Anthony's skin a little bit."
Pettis did in fact defeat Henderson in December 2010 in the last match in WEC, aided by an innovative fifth-round "Showtime Kick" off the cage that floored Henderson and sealed the win.
Given that history between them and the fact that Pettis is one up, Roberts said Pettis is actually surprised that Henderson isn't jumping at the chance to face him again and avenge that defeat.
"Anthony was thinking, 'Ben should want this rematch more than anything,'" he said. "He said if he would've lost like that, he would've wanted it. He's perturbed because he just keeps implying that Anthony is so much beneath him. He respects the fact that he won the belt and Anthony was glad that he won the fight, but he's a little perturbed that Ben keeps talking like Anthony is so far beneath him."
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Pettis' displeasure likely stems at least partially from some of Henderson's comments in a post-fight interview with MMA Fighting in Saitama.
When asked by Ariel Helwani if he expected to next face Pettis, Henderson had some good things to say about him but indicated that matchup wasn't likely his next one.
"He's spectacular," he said. "He does a lot of big moves, but I think there's a line. I don't think he's first in line. I'm going to handle my business. I'm going to defend my belt a couple times. He's going to handle his business. I'm sure he'll get 2-3 more wins, maybe highlight-reel wins, maybe sturdy wins against solid wrestlers. He can show he worked on his takedown defense or whatever. He's going to do his thing, I'm going to do my thing and I'm sure we will match up one day. I'm sure it will be for my UFC belt. I don't know if it will be next but I'm sure it'll happen."
For now, Roberts said he hasn't heard anything from UFC officials about whether Pettis would draw Henderson, or whether Edgar's campaign would push him back to the front of the line.
If it's the latter, so be it. Roberts acknowledged Edgar made several good points about his own rematch, but this situation has everything to do with Pettis and Henderson, and what they believe to be a champion's distorted viewpoint.
"I don't think he's dodging him, but Anthony feels like he's disrespecting him by the things he's saying," Roberts said. "Anthony's like, 'I just beat him a little over a year ago, or a little over a year ago, fair and square, and he's talking like he's so far ahead of me, like, 'Hey kid, I got you in my sights,' and that's rubbing Anthony the wrong way."Russia, Serbia to Carry Out Joint Air Force Drills
Sputnik News
16:39 12.03.2015(updated 18:07 12.03.2015)
Russian and Serbian military pilots will have joint tactical drills in September.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Military pilots from Russia and Serbia will conduct joint training exercises in September 2015, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.
'Air Force officials from Russia and Serbia agreed at planing conference in the Russian Defense Ministry on March 12 to carry out joint tactical drills in September this year,' spokesman Col. Igor Klimov said in a statement.
Klimov added that pilots from both countries will represent tactical and ground-support units in mixed crews.
'Aircrew on MiG-29 fighters will perform tasks to intercept air targets, while Mi-8 military transport and combat helicopters will work on tactical landings, covering ground units from the air, firing missiles at ground targets at the site, as well as aircrew search and rescue operations,' the spokesman said.
Aspiring EU member Serbia has maintained friendly relations with Russia despite the European Union's numerous sanctions against Moscow, including in the military field, over its alleged involvement in the Ukraine crisis.
Serbia's leadership has repeatedly stated that it is not afraid that its refusal to mirror the bloc's restrictive measures against Moscow will delay the country's accession to the union.
© Sputnik
NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email AddressI’m guessing this is our Zionist Death Dung.TM
The Border Guard has begun using a new means of contending with riots coined “Skunk”.
The police developed this new method for scattering violent demonstrations and tested its effectivity in the last demonstration which took place in the West Bank village of Naalin.
Use of the “Skunk” is by means of an especially foul-smelling liquid spraying machine.
Over the past few years, security forces have been compelled to deal with a large number of demonstrations against construction of the separation fence in the West Bank village of Bilin and lately, in Naalin.
Until now, forces used rubber bullets, tear gas and shock grenades in order to disperse crowds who burned tires and threw stones at soldiers.
The police searched for a solution in order to deal with riots and simultaneously reduce the number of injuries. Thus, it was decided to “enlist” the “Skunk” for dispersing riots.
On Friday, during a protest that took place near Naalin, Border Guard officers used the “skunk” for the first time in order to scatter the violent rioters in the area.
Use of the new apparatus began upon receipt of all necessary authorizations and after operational, health-related and legal instruction were given by the body which created this technology.
Border Guard Commander Yisrael Yitzhak, who is responsible for use of the “Skunk”, also authorized its usage.
“Skunk” is operated by two manual systems and one water-spraying machine. However, instead of spraying water the foul-smelling material is sprayed.
The Border Guard reported that after the first usage of the “skunk” the Palestinians fled in order to shower and change clothes.For other uses, see Glitter (disambiguation) Close-up of holographic glitter Glitter describes an assortment of small, reflective particles that come in a variety of shapes and colors. Glitter particles reflect light at different angles, causing the surface to sparkle or shimmer. The size of glitter is similar to confetti, sparkles, or sequins, but somewhat smaller. Since prehistoric times, glitter has been made from many different materials including stones such as malachite, and mica,[1] as well as insects[2] and glass.[3] Modern glitter is usually manufactured from plastic and is rarely recycled leading to calls from scientists for bans on plastic glitter.[4] Contents
Modern glitter Edit
The first production of modern plastic glitter is credited to the American machinist Henry Ruschmann, who found a way to cut plastic or mylar sheets into glitter in 1934.[1] During World War II, glass glitter became unavailable so Ruschmann found a market for scrap plastics ground into glitter.[1][5] He founded Meadowbrook Inventions, Inc., in Bernardsville, New Jersey, and the company is still a producer of industrial glitter.[6] Decades later he filed a patent for a mechanism for cross-cutting films as well as other related inventions.[7] Today over 20,000 varieties of glitter are manufactured in a vast number of different colors, sizes, and materials.[8] Over 10 million pounds (4.5 million kilograms) of glitter were purchased between the years of 1989 and 2009 alone.[9] Commercial glitter ranges in size from 0.002 to.25 inches (0.05 to 6.35 mm)[10] a side. First, flat multi-layered sheets are produced combining plastic, coloring, and reflective material such as aluminium, titanium dioxide, iron oxide, and bismuth oxychloride. These sheets are then cut into tiny particles of many shapes including squares, triangles, rectangles, and hexagons.[10]
Ancient glitter Edit
Mica Glittering surfaces have been found to be used since prehistoric times and the arts and in cosmetics. The modern English word "glitter" comes from the Middle English word gliteren, possibly by way of the Old Norse word glitra.[11] However, as early as 30,000 years ago, mica flakes were used to give cave paintings a glittering appearance.[1] Prehistoric humans are believed to have used cosmetics,[12] made of powdered hematite, a sparkling mineral.[13] 8,000 years ago people of the Americas were using powdered galena, a form of lead, to produce a bright greyish-white glittering paint used for objects of adornment.[14] The collecting and surface mining of galena was prevalent in the Upper Mississippi Valley region by the Cahokia native peoples, for regional trade both raw and crafted into beads or other objects.[14] From 40,000 BCE to 200 BCE, ancient Egyptians, produced "glitter-like substances from crushed beetles"[15] as well as finely ground green malachite crystal. Researchers believe Mayan temples were sometimes painted with red, green, and grey glitter paint made from mica dust, based on infrared scans of the remnants of paint still found on the structures in present-day Guatemala.[16]
Uses Edit
Glitter nail polish Iridescent fishing lures Prior to fabrics made with modern glitter, sequins were sewn or woven on to fabric to give it a glittering appearance. Edible glitter made from gum arabic and other ingredients is even used by culinary artists.[17] Glitter is used in cosmetics to make the face and nails shiny or sparkly. Additionally, it is used in children's arts and crafts to color and texture items. The small, brightly colored particles often stick to clothing, skin, and furniture, and can be difficult to remove. Glitter coatings or finishes are frequently used on fishing lures to draw attention by simulating the scales of prey fish.[18] Due to its unique characteristics, glitter has also proven to be useful forensic evidence. Because of the tens of thousands of different commercial glitters, identical glitter particles can be compelling evidence that a suspect has been at a crime scene. Forensic scientist Edwin Jones has one of the largest collections of glitter consisting of over 1,000 different samples used in comparison of samples taken from crime scenes. Glitter particles are easily transferred through the air or by touch, yet cling to bodies and clothing, often unnoticed by suspects.[19]
Subculture Edit
Glitter can be seen as a tool of fashion used various subcultures, as it allows for a visible statement to be worn and seen on the body. This is because it has been theorized to be a "flickering signifier", or something that destabilizes known notions of popular culture, identity, and society.[20] Glitter is associated with "fringe cultures", which often use excessive glam and glamor such as glitter to evoke a deeper understanding between the relationships of commercialized popular culture and "high" culture, or "high-brow" art.[21] Used by glam rockers, such as David Bowie, Gary Glitter, and Iggy Pop glitter is also used as a tool to help blur gender lines. This helped to create the more extreme "Glitter Rock" – an even more heightened version of glam rock.[22] Glitter is also used by nail artists and make-up artists to make statements about femininity and beauty standards. The flashy, sparkling nature of glitter allows users to push standard ideas of beauty and what is and isn't considered "excessive" in terms of make-up. Glitter is usually associated with nightlife and not professionalism, but wearing it in different settings can push these boundaries.[20] Glitter is also used for glitter bombing, which is an act of protest in which activists throw glitter on people at public events.[23] Glitter bombers have frequently been motivated by, though not limited to, their targets' opposition to same-sex marriage.[24] Some legal officials argue glitter bombing is technically assault and battery. It is possible for glitter to enter the eyes or nose and cause damage to the cornea or other soft tissues potentially irritating them or leading to infection,[25] depending on the size of the glitter. Whether a prosecutor would pursue the charges depends on a number of factors.[26]
Ethical implications Edit
Trisia Farrelly, an environmental anthropologist at Massey University, has called for a ban on glitter made of polyethylene terephthalate (PETE) and aluminium, as it is a microplastic that can break down to hormonal disruptors in the environment.[27] Furthermore, plastic glitter takes about one thousand years to biodegrade, according to Victoria Miller, a materials and engineering scientist at North Carolina State University.[28] When dozens of British music festivals pledged to ban single-use plastics by 2021, the proposed ban included plastic glitter.[29] Biodegradable glitter made from eucalyptus tree extract is metaled with aluminium and can be coloured.[30] It is "40% softer and more delicate on the skin than conventional glitter," and it decomposes in soil or water.[29] Cellulose glitter is also available.[31] According to Dr. Chris Flower, Director-General of the Cosmetic Toiletry and Perfumery Association, "the total contribution to marine plastic litter from glittery cosmetic products is negligible when compared to the damaging effects of bags and bottles... [The] total effect of giving up traditional glitter might not be great in comparison with other harmful plastics, we should still do everything we can."[32]Afraid to Watch the News, Millions Turn to Fox
Fake news by Andy Borowitz
NEW YORK — With unprecedented crises engulfing the world, millions of television viewers are finding the news too stressful to watch — and are turning to the Fox News Channel instead.
“Things are so bad in the world right now, many people are afraid to watch the news,” says psychologist Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, who studies the relationship between news consumption and stress. “For them, Fox News represents a welcome break from reality.”
Tracy Klugian, 37, a systems analyst from Lansing, Mich., said that he was flipping the channels to find “anything but news” and found himself watching Fox for the first time. “They had this guy on — something Beck I think his name was — and he was just going on and on, making stuff up,” he said. “I was like, this is the kind of mindless junk I need right now.”
Klugian says he now records the program and watches it every day when he gets home from work: “For one hour at least, I know that I can kick back and not hear anything that’s going on in the world.”
He said that watching Fox had also introduced him to “my favorite new comedian — this hysterical woman named Michele Bachmann.”
“She was doing this bit about how the American Revolution started in New Hampshire, not Massachusetts, and then she started mixing up where Lexington and Concord were,” he said. “OK, I know it sounds really stupid, but I almost peed myself.”
Elsewhere, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said he is not worried about how history will remember him “because if I have my way, there won’t be any history teachers.”
Award-winning humorist, television personality and film actor Andy Borowitz is author of the book “The Republican Playbook.”Get the biggest rugby 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
In form flanker James Davies has signed a new contract with the Scarlets that will keep him at the region until at least the summer of 2018.
Davies has been one of the Scarlets’ top performers during their surge to the top of the Guinness Pro12 and tops the region’s charts for the most tackles, jackals, carries and turnovers.
He made his breakthrough in earnest last term, winning the Players’ Player of the Year award, and now Davies, 25 and currently out of action with a broken foot, has been rewarded for his excellence.
Scarlets head coach Wayne Pivac said: “We’re very pleased to see James extend his contract and remain here at the Scarlets for at least another two seasons.
Read more: Dan Biggar named BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year
Read more: Ospreys, Scarlets...or even Wasps? Where should Wales star Scott Williams play his rugby next season?
“Statistically he’s our top tackler, he’s top of the breakdown list and he tops the chart with most carries; he’s a very valuable player for us.
“We’re obviously disappointed to be without him on the field for the next few months as he recovers from his foot injury but he’ll no doubt make a return hungrier than ever for those all-important final few months of the season.”
Davies added: “I’m delighted to have signed an extension to my contract with the Scarlets. I’m looking forward to continuing my development with the Scarlets and continue to play with my mates again for the next couple of years. It will also be a great honour to play alongside Jon at the club.
Read more: The incredible array of top talent you WON'T see playing in the 2016 Six Nations
“Things have been going well for me personally but also for the team. The injury is frustrating but I will be working hard on my recovery over the coming months to get back to fitness as quickly as possible.
“The goal is to make a return to finish the season off strongly with the Scarlets just as we have started but it’s also every player’s dream to play for their country.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to do that on the 7s circuit and cherish those experiences but would be delighted to be able to achieve the same in the 15-a-side game.”
Davies joins hooker Ken Owens, second row Jake Ball, flankers John Barclay and Aaron Shingler, props Rob Evans and Samson Lee, full-back Liam Williams, scrum-half Aled Davies and his returning centre brother Jonathan Davies, in committing to the Scarlets.This article is from the archive of our partner.
Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly wrote a note claiming responsibility for the attacks on the marathon one month ago — and stating that he and his brother were motivated by a desire for Muslim retribution for the U.S. role in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ever the elusive young terror figure, Tsarnaev allegedly penned the note on the interior of the boat where he was found after a day-long manhunt on April 19, and CBS reports that this note will now be used in court. CBS's well-sourced John Miller had the scoop this morning:
Sources tell Miller that Tsarnaev wrote the note in the boat he was hiding in as police pursued him, and as he bled from gunshot wounds sustained in an earlier shootout between police and his older brother. The note, scrawled with a pen on the interior wall of the cabin, said the bombings were retribution for what the U.S. did to Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, and called the Boston victims collateral damage in the way Muslims have been in the U.S.-driven wars. When you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims, the note added.
Sources told CNN and NBC News that these were similar to sentiments Tsarnaev expressed in his bedside interrogation in a Boston hospital the next week. But it sounds likely that Tsarnaev thought he was going to die between his bloody escape that Thursday night in Watertown, Massachusetts, and when authorities stormed the boat in an early Friday evening siege. It's already being described as a last confession of sorts. The note doesn't necessarily provide any firm answers as to whether or not Tsarnaev was brainwashed by his brother or if Dzhokhar was more independent than his friends and acquaintances painted him to be — two big questions that may determine what kind of punishment Tsarnaev will face.
Indeed, putting together the puzzle of the younger Tsarnaev's motivation has been difficult, at least in the public's understanding of him. Law enforcement officials have consistently described Dzhokhar as "a suspect who looks more like an agreeable follower of his elder brother's instructions" The Wall Street Journal reports in today's paper. Interviews from Dzhokhar's friends, from both college and high school, seemed to fit this portrait as well. Many of Tsarnaev's friends expressed their shock and disbelief when asked if they thought he was capable of such and attack— some blamed this older brother, Tamerlan. And though Dzhokhar reportedly cited the war retribution in this note on the boat, it remains unclear how much of that kind of influence might have been from within or from his brother.We knew this was coming a year ago, but it's still pretty amazing seeing it actually happen. We can now officially announce that Bill Caswell, Jalopnik's very own $500 Craigslist rally car driver, is getting a Jeremy Renner-produced movie — called "Slingshot" — made about the exclusive story first reported on these pages.
Variety is reporting that Jeremy Renner, the "Hurt Locker" star, has made a deal with Paramount to produce and star in "Slingshot," an "underdog story set in the high-octane world of rally racing." Renner and Don Handfield will produce through their recently minted production company, The Combine. Handfield will also write the screenplay.
Frankly, we're excited as hell for Bill Caswell and we're proud to have played the role we played in taking his awesome story from a minor side-story in the world of rally racing — to the world of the silver screen.
We'll bring you more on the story as soon as we're able to say more. But for now, go read the story that made this movie actually happen.(Washington Post illustration, iStock)
In the late 1960s, Walter Mischel, a researcher at Stanford University, invited several hundred children to participate in a game in which they were given a choice: They could eat one sweet right away, or wait and have two a little later. Initially, the goal was simple: to see how and why people (kids in this case) delayed gratification. But after the end of the experiment, Mischel began to check in with as many of the participants' families as he could, and over the following decade he learned that his little experiment probably had much larger implications than he had anticipated.
Many of the children had trouble resisting the single, immediate treat (a marshmallow), which was to be expected. The magnetic force that exists between kids and candies is no secret. What was surprising, however, was that that tendency — the inability to forego something good right now in exchange for something better in a bit — was associated with all sorts of negative life outcomes, including lower levels of academic achievement and higher rates of obesity.
Over time, Mischel's experiment, which is often referred to as "the Marshmallow Test," has turned into perhaps the most famous study of its kind, inspiring many others, including follow-ups by Mischel himself.
Walter Mischel led the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here he speaks about the test and its implications. (Bob Greenberg)
Time and again, poor children have performed significantly worse than their more fortunate counterparts. A 2011 study that looked at low-income children in Chicago noted how poor children struggled to delay gratification. A 2002 study, which examined the physical and psychological stresses that accompany poverty, did too. And so have many others.
The realization has sparked concerns that poverty begets a certain level of impulsiveness, and that that tendency to act in the moment, on a whim, without fully considering the consequences, makes it all the more difficult for poor children to succeed. But there's an important thing this discussion seems to miss. Poor kids may simply not want to delay gratification. Put another way, their decisions may not reflect the sort of impulsive nature we tend to attribute them to.
"When resources are low and scarce, the rational decision is to take the immediate benefit and to discount the future gain," said Melissa Sturge-Apple, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who studies child development. "When children are faced with economic uncertainty, impoverished conditions, not knowing when the next meal is, etc. — they may be better off if they take what is in front of them."
A recent two-part study conducted by Sturge-Apple shows how the tendency of poorer children to pounce on immediate rewards might not be the result of impulsiveness but rather of careful consideration.
In the first experiment, she monitored the heart rate of 200 low-income 2-year-olds. The monitoring allowed her to approximate each child's vagal tone — a measure of the activity of the vagus nerve, which has been shown to indicate how well a given individual performs under stress (i.e., reads social cues, reacts to environmental contexts, and adjusts behaviors). High vagal tone is good: it suggests a heightened ability to act relatively calmly under stress. Low vagal tone is bad: it suggests just the opposite.
Two years later, at the age of 4, the same children were presented with a choice. Each was sat a table where two plates and a bell were placed. One plate held two M&Ms, while the other held five. The children were told that they could either ring the bell and have the two M&Ms immediately or enjoy the plate of five as soon as the experimenter returned.
Interestingly, each child's vagal tone appeared to have a significant effect on their decision. But — and this is an important but — it didn't have the sort of effect many would have imagined. The higher the child's vagal tone — the greater, in other words, a child's ability to act calmly under pressure — the more likely the child was to ring the bell. The calmer the children were to think it through, the more likely they were to choose the immediate reward.
In other words, they probably weren't acting on impulses or whims, as one might assume. The calculation might have not have been optimal, but it was likely considered, and that informs the sort of intervention psychologists might use to help.
In the second experiment, Sturge-Apple used data from a longitudinal study, which included a sample of 140 mother-and-child pairs. The information gathered was similar. Vagal tone was measured for each child at 18 months. The same test was also administered, this time with three and eight M&Ms, and at age 5 instead of 4. This time, roughly half of the mothers were both college-educated and wealthy, while the other half were both non-college-educated and poor. And it produced a fascinating outcome.
The children born to college-educated mothers of high socioeconomic status acted exactly as one would expect. The higher their vagal tone, or calmness under stress, the more likely they were to hold out for the five extra M&Ms. For children born to non-college-educated mothers of low socioeconomic status, on the other hand, the outcome was exactly the opposite. The higher their vagal tone, the less likely they were to wait.
The chart below, plucked from the study, shows just how stark the divergence is.
(Source: APS journal Psychological Science)
Why exactly socioeconomic status appears to have such a severe influence on how children approach this problem is unclear, but Sturge-Apple believes it probably has to do with context. The circumstances in a controlled experiment might be the same for poor and rich kids alike. But the reality for poor and rich kids, which influences not only their behavior but also the inner pendulum that informs their decisions, is quite different.
"One size does not necessarily fit all," Sturge-Apple said. "Our theories, which are based upon limited samples, may not reflect the realities faced by many children."
This might seem like a nuanced point, but it's an important one, because it shapes how we label certain behavior and lift up impoverished youth. If a child is choosing immediate rewards at the expense of future gains not because the child is impulsive, then helping that child adjust to an environment in which resources such as money and other assets (or even just marshmallows and M&Ms) are easier to come by should reflect that understanding.
"It changes the nature of the question from one asking is this a 'bad' or a 'good' behavior to asking, 'What is the function of this behavior for survival and thriving in a resource-poor environment?' " said Sturge-Apple. "I think once we start asking that question, we may find better ways to tailor intervention and prevention work for children at risk."
In some ways, this uncovers a broader problem with how we perceive the actions of people who live very different lives than we do. We brand certain actions and choices as mistakes, when they might simply be developmental adjustments necessary to cope with their environment. For those who don't worry about their next meal, because they never had to, choosing a marshmallow now instead of two marshmallows in a few minutes, all things equal, could only be the result of impulse-driven folly. For those who do have to worry about the next meal, passing up food now for the promise of food later is the misguided move.
While Sturge-Apple's research has focused on children, there's reason to believe the same dubious assumption likely affects how we treat low-income adults. In the United States, contrary to international trends, poor people are far more prone to obesity than their wealthier counterparts. And while there is good reason to believe it is, at least in part, a result not of how much poorer households are eating but of what they are eating, there is also evidence that those who suffer through poverty at a young age develop a fractured ability to regulate eating that can last a lifetime. A three-part study conducted earlier this year found that adults who grew up in low-income households tended not only to eat but to eat roughly the same amount of food, whether they were hungry or full.
To some, this might seem like a question of willpower, but that's likely a bit shortsighted. Assuming the poor are more prone to impulsivity doesn't properly consider the severe circumstances in which many are forced to live, and how those circumstances shape a person's rational behavior.
"When you grow up in these types of environments, you’re effectively being trained to eat when you can instead of when you’re hungry," Sarah Hill, who teaches psychology at Texas Christian University, told The Washington Post earlier this year.
You might also be programmed to eat when possible because experience tells you the next bit of food, however large it might be, is never guaranteed.Some FX stills from Wolves have arrived, and they warm our hearts in the most practical of ways. Ya see? Practical werewolf effects. That so hard, Hollywood?
Directed by David Hayter, Wolves stars Lucas Till, Stephen McHattie, John Pyper-Ferguson, Merritt Patterson, and Jason Momoa. Look for it Thursday, October 16th, on Video on Demand and Friday, November 14th, in select cities nationwide.
Synopsis
Popular high school student Cayden Richards wakes from a horrific nightmare, only to realize that he’s living it. He is changing into something vicious, unpredictable, and wild. Forced to hit the road after the brutal murder of his parents, Cayden tries to hunt down the truth of what he is. In the remote mountain town of Lupine Ridge, he discovers others like himself – including the beautiful Angelina, a young woman caught between two ancient clans of “wolves.” And when he finally discovers the shocking truth behind his ancestry, Cayden realizes there is only one way to save the woman he loves… a grisly fight to the death against forces more savage than he could have ever imagined.Police in Pasco County, Florida are looking for a man who reportedly attempted to sexually assault an 80-year-old woman, but fled from her Zephyrhills home when she fought back.
According to the Tampa Tribune, the unidentified woman struck her assailant — who police describe as a clean-cut African-American male in his mid to late 20s — with part of a vacuum cleaner that was close at hand.
The attacker reportedly grabbed the entire vacuum and fled the scene. The attack took place shortly after 3:00 p.m. on Friday in the woman’s home. Police have withheld her name.
Pasco County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Eddie Daniels said that the woman called 911 immediately after the assailant left.
The suspect is still at large and is described as being 6 feet tall with a lean, wiry build. He was wearing a multicolored shirt and camouflage pants and carrying a book bag.
Sheriff Chris Nocco said it’s unclear why the suspect targeted the woman, but witnesses said they had seen the man in the area and that he had returned several times to the woman’s house. They said they did not recognize him as an ordinary inhabitant of the neighborhood.
“If anyone finds that missing vacuum cleaner, don’t touch it,” said Sheriff Nocco. “Call us up via cell phone and we’ll be right on it because that is part of our evidence.”
The sheriff’s department released a composite sketch of the subject. Anyone with information about the crime is asked to call (727) 847-8102.Maru (まる, Japanese: circle or round; born May 24, 2007[1]) is a male Scottish Fold (straight variety[2]) cat in Japan who has become popular on YouTube. As of September 2016, videos featuring Maru have been viewed over 325 million times, a Guinness World Record for YouTube video views of an individual animal.[3][4] Videos featuring Maru have an average of 800,000 views each and he is mentioned often in print and televised media discussing Internet celebrities.[5] Maru has been described as the "most famous cat on the internet"[6] (although Grumpy Cat is another candidate for that description).
Maru's owner posts videos under the account name'mugumogu'. His owner is almost never seen in the videos, although the video titled "Maru's ear cleaning". is an exception. The videos include title cards in English and Japanese setting up and describing the events, and often show Maru playing in cardboard boxes, indicated by "I love a box!" in his first video.
Videos of Maru are collections of clips - usually around 3–7 minutes in length - of Maru engaging in various activities, with most videos having a central theme or activity as indicated by the title card. Maru, during these videos, shows his fascination with boxes, his placid personality, his amusing antics, and an inventive intelligence and intuition.
In August 2013, Maru's owner adopted a two-month-old mixed-breed cat named Hana from a veterinarian. During the two-week trial period, Maru and Hana got along very well and Mugumogu decided to make Hana a new member of their family.[7]
Fame [ edit ]
Entertainment Weekly mentioned Maru alongside Keyboard Cat and Nora in its "Notable Kitty Videos" article.[8][9] The New York Times mentioned Maru in an article about cats and dogs in the media and included pictures of the cat.[10] Maru's videos have been featured on the Fresh Step's commercial on the Fresh Step YouTube Channel.[11] Maru has also been featured in advertisements within Japan, for various products.[12] As of December 2011, Maru's channel is the 7th most subscribed in Japan.
After the March 2011 earthquakes in Japan, Mugumogu reported from Maru's blog that Maru was safe and unharmed, though a carrying case was prepared in the event of an evacuation.[13]
In March 2017, Maru was certified as the most viewed animal on YouTube.[14] His videos have been watched a total of 341,840,777 times as of 3 June 2017.
Published media [ edit ]
A book and DVD (containing English and Japanese text) entitled I am Maru was released in Japan in September 2009.[15][16][17] A further DVD Maru Desu followed in February the year after.[18] A second book, もっと、まるです (More Maru) was released on August 31, 2011 (Japanese only).[19]
See also [ edit ]SALEM — Confined animal feeding operations in Oregon can now work under state-issued water quality permits instead of the federal Clean Water Act permitting system.
As of Oct. 21, the Oregon Department of Agriculture has made available “water pollution control facilities” permits to livestock operations that don’t discharge runoff into surface waters.
These state permits won’t require CAFOs to file annual reports to farm regulators, thus reducing paperwork, and they won’t be subjected to public notice-and-comment requirements if they expand, said Wym Matthews, manager of ODA’s CAFO program.
“We don’t have to inform the public of changes on the farm,” he said.
Expansion plans at several Oregon dairies recently met with opposition from vegan and environmental groups, which used the public comment procedures to object to CAFOs as inhumane and unhealthy.
Livest |
6) and steals (1.0) per game -- is also not in the type of shape he needs to be in after playing in only one of the Cavs' five preseason games because of a sprained left ankle.
"Missing the whole training camp and getting hurt the second day of practice really set him back as far as being able to fly around and push the pace offensively and defensively fly around," Lue said. "He's trying to work himself back in shape, but the games are coming so fast and it's hard to really do that. The best way to do that is by him playing more minutes and getting in game shape and we just got to go from there."
James is averaging 37.0 minutes per game, down from his league-leading 37.8 minutes per game a season ago, but still tied for fourth this season as a 32-year-old. Love would like every player to max out his energy when he's on the court, even if it means playing fewer minutes and conceding to a fresher player coming off the bench.
"I'm not saying that guys are taking plays off, but just (not) going super hard," Love said. "We have the luxury of being able to put guys in different spots and a really deep roster where we don't have to necessarily log 30-plus minutes, even the starters. So just go hard; if you're tired, ask for a sub."
The Cavs host the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday, followed by a road game against the Washington Wizards on Friday and another home game against the Atlanta Hawks on Sunday.
Love said that even before the team meeting, the Cavs started the week off right at James' annual Halloween party. James dressed like Pennywise the clown from "It;" Love was WWE wrestler Sting, complete with red face paint; Thomas was Eazy-E from N.W.A.; Kyle Korver was Willy Wonka (the Johnny Depp version); Tristan Thompson was Khal Drogo from "Game of Thrones"; Dwyane Wade and his wife, Gabrielle Union, dressed up as Milli Vanilli; JR Smith was a Conehead; Channing Frye was Blankman; Jae Crowder was Prince Akeem from "Coming to America"; and rookie Cedi Osman wore a Freddy Krueger costume so intricate that it took him two hours to put it on and two hours to take it off.
"I think it was good for us," Love said. "I think it definitely lightened the mood and it was definitely a get-to-know-you moment with a lot of guys.... I think in some odd way it will definitely help us."Two British VICE News journalists arrested in Turkey on terrorism charges were released Thursday, but their local translator remains in custody.
Correspondent Jake Hanrahan and cameraman Philip Pendlebury, as well as their Turkey-based Iraqi translator Mohammed Ismael Rasool were detained by Turkish authorities last Thursday, reports al-Jazeera.
On Monday, the three were charged in a Turkish court for “deliberately aiding an armed organization.”
One of the lawyers representing the trio, Ahmet Ay, told al-Jazeera that the “legal process” for Rasool was ongoing. Hanrahan and Pendlebury were released in the southern province of Adana.
They were reportedly filming clashes between police and supporters of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Diyarbakir province when they were arrested in front of their hotel.
The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office released a statement Thursday saying the two journalists were set to be deported from Turkey.
“Two British journalists arrested in Diyarbakır on Aug. 27 have now been transferred to a Migration Department Deportation Centre in Adana. Our consular officials in Turkey are liaising with the Turkish authorities and in contact with the journalists and their lawyer,” the statement read.
VICE News said it had received confirmation of the release but called on the Turkish government to free Rasool.
“While we are grateful that they have been freed, we are deeply worried by reports that our other VICE News colleague, Mohammad Ismael Rasool, has had his appeal rejected by the Turkish government,” it said in a statement.
“Rasool is an experienced journalist and translator who has worked extensively across the Middle East with VICE News, Associated Press and Al-Jazeera. We call on the Turkish authorities for a swift end to this unjust detainment and to grant his immediate release.”
[al-Jazeera]
Write to Helen Regan at helen.regan@timeasia.com.Guayaquil -
En un movido partido, Barcelona se estrenó con un triunfo de 2—1 ante Atlético Nacional, en duelo del Grupo 1 de la Copa Libertadores.
Los goles del compromiso fueron de Jonatan Álvez(24m) y Marco Caicedo (45m), para Barcelona; John Mosquera (13m), para el Atlético Nacional.
El inicio del partido para Barcelona fue prometedor puesto que los toreros arrinconaron a su rival que no encontró forma de salir al contragolpe.
Los mejores avances de los locales se dieron gracias a las rápidas corridas que realizaron por los costados Pedro Velasco, Mario Pineida, Ely Esterilla y Marco Caicedo.
Corrían 4m cuando Esterilla desde fuera del área sacó un disparo que se fue desviado sobre la puerta de los cafeteros.
Al instante, Erick Castillo aprovechó un error en la salida de la zaga visitante y remató pero el tiro no tuvo dirección.
Atlético Nacional, a los 9m, inquietó el arco de Máximo Banguera luego de que Macnelly Torres gane un balón ante una mala salida de Yefferson Mena, el visitante disparó pero Banguera pudo contener.
Cuando Barcelona era el dominador del duelo, en una rápida jugada por la derecha, Alejandro Bernal envió un centro que John Mosquera tomó y ante la marca de Darío Aimar remató y consiguió abrir el marcador para la visita, era el 0—1 (13m).
Esa anotación provocó a momentos desesperación en los dirigidos por Guillermo Almada que se lanzaron al ataque sin orden alguno.
A los 24m, la insistencia amarilla se vio premiada cuando, desde la derecha, Matías Oyola levantó un tiro de esquina y este le quedó a Álvez que con un cabezazo concretó la igualdad (1—1).
Ese gol despertó a los amarillos que no les dieron espacio a la salida de los actuales campeones de América.
El portero Franco Armani fue exigido desde fuera del área con zapatazos de Castillo, Caicedo y Velasco.
Cuando la primera etapa estaba por concluir, un saque rápido de Banguera le quedó a Esterilla que puso un pase hacia la izquierda donde Caicedo ingresó al área y con un zapatazo puso la ventaja amarilla, era el 2—1 (45m).
En la segunda parte, el partido no varió en su ritmo, mantuvo la misma intensidad que en el primer tiempo, con un Barcelona que presionó a su rival que trató de sorprender con el contragolpe.
Atlético Nacional fue mas atrevido y mejoró en ataque.
A los 51m, una mala salida de la zaga torera, la pelota le quedó a Torres que sacó un zapatazo que pasó cerca del arco de Banguera.
Luego, un pase en callejón de Torres la pelota le quedó a Luis Ruiz que ante la salida de Banguera se lanzó en el área, lo que el juez no consideró penal, la pelota quedó boteando y Bernal solo ante el arquero canario no pudo.
Los de Medellín fueron punzantes ante un club torero que tenía dificultades en la zaga. A los 70, Moreno quedó solo frente al arquero amarillo pero este último pudo evitar la caída de su arco.
En los últimos minutos, Barcelona controló las arremetidas de su rival que no pudo lograr el empate. (D)Share Pinterest
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Graham Rahal figures to soon be driving for his father's IndyCar Series team, but a deal hasn't been finalized just yet, he told Autoweek on Tuesday.
The driver referred all additional questions about his 2013 employment status to his father, Bobby Rahal, after veteran motorsports reporter Gordon Kirby wrote that a three-year deal was in place with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing.
Bobby Rahal told Autoweek that it's “not a done deal yet.”
The pairing of the Rahals is one of the most anticipated moves of IndyCar's off-season. Graham has been on the cusp of being a frequent race winner, with seven top-five finishes over the past two seasons with Chip Ganassi's team.
RLLR nearly won this year's Indianapolis 500 with Takuma Sato. The team has been consistently strong at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, with Buddy Rice winning in 2004 and Bertrand Baguette nearly winning in 2011. Danica Patrick finished fourth in 2005.Unless you have been living in the upside down the past few weeks, you know Stranger Things 2 has long since hit the Netflix shelves. And if you have been paying attention to the snowboarding world, you would also know that snowboarding’s own Gabby Maiden has gone from the the Big Bear streets to the big screen as a character on the latest season of the show. We caught up with Gabby for a quick interview about her strange journey and to find out if Eleven can rip.
We can also tell you that we have yet to finish season 2, so don’t worry about any spoilers, unless seeing Gabby AKA Mick slide on snow is going to ruin the show for you.
Right off the bat, you know we have to ask, what is the “Strangest Thing” in snowboarding?
The strangest thing I remember, because I did it as well, was the bandanas hanging off of our belt loop. Just having it hang off us like a flag.. That was pretty strange. I remember I have a picture of me doing my first indy grab at High Cascade when I was 14 or 15. I had a Volcom bandana just flying and I thought it was so cool, haha. I don’t know how that became a thing.
Gabby playing baseball on set during filming.
For the people that don't know, your family is also in show business right?
Yes, my dad is a musician and his claim to fame is the 70's band Rufus & Chaka Khan. He’s the lead guitarist and vocalist next to Chaka. I could talk forever about my dad because I’m so proud of him. My mom, she’s an entertainment manager. She managed a few people back in the day, but her main focus is our family and it always will be. I also have a sister and a half brother. My sister's a singer and an actress as well. My family is very tight knit, we always help each other out.
So that is where you got the acting bug?
Since I was 5, I wanted to be an actress, for sure. I was a very shy kid, haha. A lot of people don’t believe me when I say that. I tried to pursue acting at that age, but I was still so introverted, I decided to take a break from that dream and find something to help me break me out of my shell. Thats when snowboarding came into play and when I was 12, I started to ride.
Do you still consider yourself active in snowboarding?
I don’t ride as much as I’d like to. I would definitely skate around though, getting from audition to audition. I didn’t have a car when I moved back to LA three years ago, so I would ride the bus and skate everywhere. I missed being on a board and I wasn't able to travel out as much as I used to. Before, I would take random trips out to Big Bear or where ever I wanted, but that wasn't much of an option these past few years. Ive been fully committed to being based in LA, auditioning and working. I think this winter I’ll have more chances to get away and ride again, which I'm excited about.
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Anything still catch your eye?
That’s the thing, I think this year specifically, I’ve been starting to get the itch again. I really miss going to all the premiers and just watching what everyone has been up to. I go in and out though. I check out the Too Hard edits because it’s a badass group of women and it’s so nice to see Dangy branched out from when we were in Peep Show. Its so awesome. Always nice to represent and support the women riders.
I was just going through your IMDB. It doesn't list your scorpion. I was a little upset.
It should list that. Did you know Gabby Maiden has the top 10 scorpions of all time?
Who was your crew that you rode with the most?
Marie Hucal, Terra Michilot, Melissa Evans, Desiree Melancon, June Bhongjan, Estee Preda.
Strange or cool?
Bibs: Cool. Id rock one, why not?
Big Air in Olympics: Cool. Super exciting to watch!
Wide Stance: Freakishly wide? Strange.
Pants rolled up above boots: Cool. Pre and post lace up only.
One-footers: Cool. Wish i had those tricks in my bag!
Quad Corks: Strange. Thats a lot of cork.
Too Hard: Coolest ladies on the block!
Sweatpants instead of snowpants: Ugh.. Strange.
Vlogs: Strange. Seems like a lot of work to keep up everyday.
Burton Step-Ons: Strange… I prefer strapping in.
Stan Levielle: Cool! And hilarious.
Goggles outside hood: Cool. How else do i keep my ears warm and my fro contained?
Lift Ticket Prices: Strange/Cool. Depends on where you ride.
Super 8mm in snowboarding edits: Cool. I think it looks rad :)
Would Eleven be a better snowboarder than you?
Don't think so… But Max might.
Anything you have taken over from snowboarding into your acting life?
That time of my life with snowboarding was extremely important to me. Those were my “college years", when I was really starting to learn about myself, experimenting with travel, challenging myself with snowboarding tricks, terrain and meeting new people. On set, It was so inspiring to watch the young actors on Stranger Things be able to reach such emotional ground. Its so impressive to me. Those years of snowboarding really helped me break out of my shell and get me confidently back into acting.
So you never went to acting school or anything like that?
I take acting classes. I think studying a craft is the most important thing you could possibly do. Keeping your acting chops and instincts fresh and sharp. I feel there is always something new to learn.
Is there going to be a season 3?
Yes, there will be a season 3.
Have you ever been starstruck by a snowboarder?
Laura Hadar. That was when I was 18, first did the Nikita Chikita and started getting flow from them. Laura Hadar was there as a guest judge and I was super pumped. I didn’t win the contest, but what I did win, was Laura Hadar making up a prize for steeziest/stylish rider and giving it to me. I was like, what?! It was this old school army-style Nikita jumpsuit. It was too big for me, but it was so cool! I still have it actually, one of my favorite snowboarding memories.
What about being starstruck by someone in the entertainment business?
If I met Halle Berry, I would just melt. She’s such a talented actress and seems like a strong woman with fun and down to earth energy. Theres a hilarious video I absolutely adore when there promoting Kingsman 2 at Comicon. She's not promoting day drinking by any means, but you can tell that she's always up for a challenge, especially if a man yells "chug, chug, chug!" haha.
Well done Halle.
What should we expect from you next?
I’m a reocurring guest star on the half hour comedy SMILF out now on Showtime. I play Regina, a type A older sister who's a Harvard law student that wishes her sister would be more responsible in life, as she is herself. Catch it on Sunday’s at 10pm. Since filming the show, Ive been home in LA, reading scripts and auditioning for the next fun project that catches my eye. Im excited for whats to come!
More from TransWorld SNOWboarding here!Slidell police said the three people arrested Thursday in connection with a July 20 shooting at a college acceptance party did not know the victim. Police said 26-year-old Jamar Wilson was shot multiple times outside of a party taking place in a home near Daney and 10th Streets at around 2 a.m.
The three arrested were:
Tyrone Ward, 21, booked with attempted second-degree murder.
Michael Harris, 24, booked with principal to attempted second-degree murder.
Ashley Brandon, 17, booked with accessory after the fact to attempted second-degree murder.
The three suspects are cousins from Slidell, Slidell Police Detective Daniel Seuzeneau said. They are being held in the St. Tammany Parish jail. Bond has not been set.
Wilson and the suspects were attending a party to celebrate a young woman's acceptance into college, Seuzeneau said. Wilson was helping the homeowner ask people to leave the party when he and Harris accidentally bumped into each other.
The two got into a verbal argument, and Seuzeneau said Harris and his cousins left the party. Harris, Ward and Brandon returned a short time later with a gun, police said.
Harris and Wilson got into another argument outside of the house. While they were arguing, Seuzeneau said Ward "snuck off into a lightly wooded area and opened fire," striking Wilson several times.
Harris, Ward and Brandon fled after the shooting, he said.
"The victim never saw it coming," Police Chief Randy Smith said. "This was an ambush type shooting."
Police did not immediately specify the type of gun used.
"Our detectives have spent hundreds of man hours identifying and putting together a strong case against those responsible for this senseless act of violence," Smith said.
Wilson remains in guarded condition at a New Orleans hospital, Seuzeneau said. Wilson's family told WWL-TV this week that he is paralyzed from the waist down.A prominent Roman Catholic priest in Pilsen has been removed from his ministry after the Archdiocese of Chicago received an allegation from an adult woman of an inappropriate relationship.
The Rev. Brendan Curran, a Dominican priest, well-known immigration activist and longtime pastor of St. Pius V Catholic Church, acknowledged the relationship happened a number of years ago and apologized.
"I deeply regret not self-identifying sooner about my immoral behavior: that was a mistake," Curran said in a statement released the Dominican Friars, Curran's religious order, on Sunday. "I failed to remember my ministry and my commitment as a priest, and for that I cannot apologize enough. I am heartbroken to know that my actions have caused pain to so many people. From the bottom of my heart, I apologize and ask for forgiveness."
According to the statement, Curran said the relationship was an "isolated instance." Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans, said Curran called him to apologize personally and explained that the relationship with an unmarried woman lasted several months and ended five years ago.
"It's all very sudden," said Hoyt, former director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "He's a good priest. He made a mistake and his career should be judged in its entirety."
"Father Brendan was a priest who put the poor and the vulnerable at the center of his ministry," he said. "He will be sorely missed."
Curran, who has served at St. Pius V since 2001, had avoided a premature ending to his appointment at St. Pius V after the parish announced last fall it would honor Attorney General Lisa Madigan for supporting its domestic violence program. The award irked superiors because Madigan supports abortion rights. The event also took place just a few days before Madigan's re-election, which made the award seem like an endorsement. Dozens of community leaders and politicians came out to the parish to show support for Curran's ministry, including then-Republican state Rep. Tom Cross, Democratic U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez and Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin.
"I feel terrible. He was such an important part of the community," Durbin said Sunday at an unrelated event. Durbin most recently saw Curran just over a week ago, at a Children's Day event in Pilsen. "There was hardly an important event involving immigration or the Hispanic community that Father Brendan wasn't front and center."
Hoyt said that controversy had nothing to do with the woman's recent allegation.
The statement from the Dominican Friars said Catholic clergy are held to a higher standard because of their celibacy vows. Furthermore, the breach threatens to damage the cause he was so passionate about.
"Father Brendan made a poor choice. Everyone does, to varying degrees. But he and his choices are held against a higher standard because he professed religious vows as a friar in the Dominican Order," the statement read. "His poor judgment in this instance casts a shadow on his enlightened and courageous ministry to Latino immigrants and the poor at St. Pius V parish and Chicago's southwest side."
The Rev. Charles Bouchard, head of the local Dominican order, commended the woman for coming forward.
"She deserves a sincere apology and we also have a responsibility to respect her anonymity and her privacy," Bouchard said in the statement. "We admire her courage and we're keeping her in our prayers."
Sally Daly with the Cook County State's Attorney said there is no criminal investigation of Curran.
As of last Thursday, Curran can no longer celebrate Mass or the sacraments. He left his position at St. Pius V and left the Chicago area shortly thereafter. Bouchard said Curran will seek evaluation, treatment and spiritual healing in another Dominican community.
"Brendan is leaving this ministry, but we, as a religious order, have a different level of responsibility to him," Bouchard said.
"The pain of the victims and the publicity surrounding priestly misconduct has brought the Church to a much deeper understanding of ministerial integrity. We love and support Brendan and we will be here for him. But, at the same time, there is a purity of heart required to preach the Gospel with integrity and we know that only truth will get us there."
Congregants at St. Pius V were informed Sunday during an announcement from the pulpit at each Mass. Many were disappointed that they didn't have an opportunity to say goodbye.
"We all make mistakes. What are we going to do," said Jose Guadalupe Ruiz, of Pilsen. "Ask that God forgives him more than anything."
Parishioner Martha Santos has worked with Curran as part of the parish's ministry to immigrants for about six years.
"I feel very sad, very disappointed but he is human and we all make mistakes," Santos said. "He's human. Things happen. I'm not going to be the first to throw stones. He was not just a great pastor. He was a great friend."
Yolanda Gallo expressed similar sadness. She said Curran empowered many people to lead.
"I like the idea that he leaves so that he finds his peace that he needs in his difficult moments," said Gallo, who has known him since he arrived at the church. "I understand because only God is perfect."
Bouchard has asked Archbishop Blase Cupich to appoint a temporary bilingual administrator for St. Pius V Parish. A new pastor will be named before July 1.
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@merjournMore than 70% believe Coalition not doing enough on energy – poll
More than 70% of voters think the Turnbull government is not doing enough to ensure affordable, reliable and clean energy for Australian households and businesses – and a clear majority also supports Labor’s goal of sourcing 50% of energy from renewable sources by 2030.
The latest Guardian Essential poll suggests that the Turnbull government’s relentless partisan attacks on Labor’s 50% renewable energy policy, and its concerted efforts early in the new political year to position itself as the party of cheaper and more secure power, haven’t yielded the desired result.
The Guardian-Essential Report, 21 February results Read more
The poll shows 71% of the sample think the federal government is not doing enough to ensure affordable, reliable and clean energy – and only 12% rate the current effort as satisfactory.
Even among their own constituency, Liberal and National voters, 62% of the sample said the government was not doing enough.
When asked about the ALP’s aspirational goal to source 50% of energy from renewable sources by 2030, 65% of voters registered their approval of the concept.
The policy – which has been repeatedly branded reckless and ideological by the prime minister – won strong majority approval from both Labor and Green voters. Coalition voters were also more likely to approve of the target than disapprove.
The political campaign by the government hasn’t moved the dial in any significant way. Attitudes to the policy have changed little since it was unveiled by Bill Shorten in 2015.
Hard facts unmask the fiction behind Coalition's 'coal comeback' | Lenore Taylor Read more
Voters were also divided about whether or not Australia should build new coal-fired power stations but a clear majority opposed the idea. Forty-five per cent of the sample said it was a bad idea and 31% supported building new coal-fired power stations.
The people positive about the idea of building new coal-fired power stations were Liberal/National voters (47%), men (39%) and people aged 65 and over (53%).
The Turnbull government has been trumpeting the potential contribution of “clean” coal power. The energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, has indicated the government is considering changing the Clean Energy Finance Corporation rules to fund new coal-powered plants.
One week after the CEFC chief executive, Oliver Yates, told a Senate committee that investment in new coal plants was a risky proposition for taxpayers, Frydenberg said the change was a live option because “it’s called the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, not the renewable energy corporation”.
Most voters are also attributing power blackouts in South Australia to failures of the energy market in responding to extreme weather events (45%), rather than to problems with too many windfarms.
Nineteen per cent think the blackouts are mainly due to privatisation of electricity supply and only 16% think they are a result of too much reliance on renewable energy.
Climate scepticism is a far-right badge of honour – even in sweltering Australia Read more
Since the statewide power blackout in South Australia last year, the government has been critical of the state’s comparatively high share of power generation from renewable sources, pointing to problems with intermittency with technologies such as wind and solar.
The latest poll also indicates there has been a bounce in the number of people who think climate change is real and is being caused by human activity.
After a summer of sweltering temperatures in Australia, 60% (up 6% since December) agree that climate change is happening and is caused by human activity and 25% (down 2%) believe that we may just be witnessing a normal fluctuation in the Earth’s climate.Probably the most important ingredient of Americans' ideology is their belief in the freedom of the individual (called “individualism” for short). The following may serve as a succinct catechism of its principles: What is this country’s highest ideal and greatest blessing? It is freedom. To what purpose should freedom be employed? That is for each individual to decide; everyone should set his own goals for himself. What will determine his success or failure in attaining them? That should depend on his innate qualities, like talent and temperament; external factors, such as the material or social circumstances of birth and upbringing, should not be decisive.
Those are the basics. To understand the ideal of individualism in its larger and higher dimensions, one may refer to an author who has the best claim to be its philosophical champion, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his own day, his emphatic pronouncements won wide applause, and they have remained popular ever since. This was only natural. Emerson took hold of sentiments that most Americans already felt to a greater or lesser degree, consciously or semiconsciously; he worked them into coherent form, pushed them to their logical conclusions, and above all, gave them memorable expression. Despite a somewhat baroque prose style, his writings such as “Address at Divinity College” (1838) and “Self-Reliance” (1841) still ring out with memorable phrases despite a distance of over a century and a half.
The fundamental essence of each individual has been divinely created and inspired, Emerson declared. “The fountain of all good” is in yourself; “obey thyself;” “judge for yourself, reverence thyself.” The young nation agreed with him—and so did its posterity. In 1986, for example, a sociologist remarked that “the sanctity of the individual” was a “common American, quasi-creedal phrase.”
Emerson was drastic in his conviction that an individual should obey himself and himself alone. “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.... I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” This very sentiment can be heard from today’s lifestyle individualists, who declare, “Next week I might quit my career in banking, leave my wife and children, and join a Buddhist cult.”
An individual goes wrong when he follows the dictates or even the example of others, Emerson maintained. “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” Each person should act “from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window.... Let me admonish you...to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men.” This has become a pervasive ideal in American culture, high and low alike. In 2000, one journalist and media critic remarked that a single theme dominated nearly all of the award-winning Hollywood movies—contempt for “external moral authority” and glorification of “personally designed morality.”
Emerson warned the individual, not only against following others, but also against leading others. “Dominion over myself” should be sufficient. Whenever I “undertake the direction of him also [i.e. my fellow man], I overstep the truth, and come into false relations to him.” A man becomes “weaker by every recruit to his banner.” The bold novelty of this stance is remarkable. Innumerable proponents of new doctrines have declared: Do not follow others, follow me. Emerson was declaring: Do not follow anyone, do not lead anyone, take charge of yourself alone—an exhortation which Americans then and now have endorsed with verbal enthusiasm and which is reflected in various popular attitudes, ranging from the perennial mistrust of government officials to the maxim of the 1960s New Left, “Don’t follow leaders.”
Emerson was extremely dubious about people acting in groups. He feared that they beguiled a man into deserting his own individuality and abandoning its superior insight. “They think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.” It was the duty of each person to resist collective influences and demands. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.... The virtue in most request is conformity.... Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.... Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” Americans of subsequent times have spoken with similar vehemence at merely the theoretical possibility of a threat to their individual freedom. The following is a synopsis of prevailing opinion, as reported by a sociologist in the 1980s: “Anything that would violate our right to think for ourselves, judge for ourselves, make our own decisions, live our lives as we see fit, is not only morally wrong, it is sacrilegious.”
There was, Emerson admitted, a vast distance between ideal and reality, between the free and full development of all individuals and the actual behavior of people living in the world. But again and again, he insisted that everyone contained within himself a splendid treasure and that everyone was capable of possessing it. And Emerson did mean everyone. Different people possessed various talents in varying degrees of ability, of course. But when these were all sorted out and measured up together, it would be apparent that every man was “equal to every other man.” Emerson wanted an elite, but he believed that everyone was capable of belonging to it.
Listen to the buzzing stream of articulate American opinion during most any era, and you will hear expressions of optimistic idealism and professions of radical egalitarianism similar to Emerson’s. In 1990, for example, a usually realistic and perceptive analyst of society declared that she wanted “a world in which even the lowliest among us—the hash-slinger, the sock-finder, the factory hand—will be recognized as the poet she truly is.” In 2001, an educator with many years of practical experience asserted that “genius is as common as air” and that society was utilizing only a “minority of the human talent” available. Back in 1963, when “conformity” was something many people worried about, an article in Time magazine pointed out that after all, few individuals are able to disregard social pressures and act solely on their personal convictions. The very idea that everyone should develop his own independent notions about such things as “politics, ethics, [and] culture” is “to ask the impossible. It is, in fact, to ask for a mass elite.” To which a prominent academic commented with approval, “In all its outrageous innocence, this is what America has asked for from the beginning.”
— ♦ —
So basic and widespread is America’s allegiance to the ideal of individualism that its strength is reflected even in the criticism it has sometimes received. Careful analysis reveals that many of the attacks are aimed, not at individualism in its entirety, but at one of its two currently popular forms, by proponents of the other.
“Economic individualism” is the term I would use to indicate what people on the political right tend to favor. In their view, each person should express his individuality by striving to succeed in his chosen line of work (that is, in frankly mercenary terms, by trying to make more money) and so improve his situation in life. This is America’s traditional form of individualism. Throughout her history, it has attracted immigrants and motivated natives, and it continues to do so.
“Lifestyle individualism” is what people on the political left favor. They believe that each person should express his individuality by developing or changing any part of his life that he wishes. This is much broader in scope than economic individualism, is a more recent development, and includes an acceptance of the unconventional—everything from selecting an unusual occupation to altering one’s sexual preference.
The advocates and practitioners of one form of individualism regard those of the other with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Economic individualists think lifestyle individualists are frivolous and irresponsible, even degenerate, and blame them for high rates of divorce, crime, drug use, juvenile delinquency, and other social ills. Lifestyle individualists regard economic individualists as squares, prudes, and authoritarians and blame them for social inequality, economic exploitation, and national philistinism.
The significant fact—easily overlooked amid the noise of controversy—is that both sides are supporting a form of individualism. The hard-bitten old businessman who growls, “I did it my way,” and the dewy-eyed hippie kid who says, “Do your own thing,” are both proclaiming the ideal of individual freedom. They are both Emerson’s progeny, which can be found everywhere, even in the most unlikely places. On hearing the assertion that the United States should “insure to every child [the] opportunity to develop its natural abilities to their utmost,” one might assume this to be a statement from someone on the liberal left. Actually the speaker was the Imperial Wizard and Emperor of the Ku Klux Klan in 1926.
— ♦ —
Aside from the squabbling of these two factions (economic versus lifestyle), there is another much more fundamental objection to individualism as a national ideal and practice. Tocqueville first mentioned it when he observed that the American always thinks of himself as “standing alone,” which tends to separate him from others and threatens “to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” Following Tocqueville, various social commentators have declared from time to time, in tones of urgency or regret, that their countrymen were excessively devoted to the principle of individualism, that they took too little account of social needs and realities, and that a new balance ought to be struck between the individualistic and the collective.
By the Era of Progressivism in the late Nineteenth Century, a number of social critics were expressing dissatisfaction with individualism as a national ideal. Its connection since the 1880s with unrestrained capitalism had brought it into disrepute in intellectual circles. There was much talk about reforming it or finding a balance between it and socialism. “Association” was proclaimed as an alternative to individualism, and it had become a buzzword by the 1890s.
But association proved to be a tenuous and temporary concept that failed to provoke much of a response from the man on the street or the worker in the factory. By the 1920s, the popularity of association had come to an end, and individualism began to be openly and widely approved by journalists and various other retailers of public opinion.
The prominent engineer and administrator Herbert Hoover reflected the transition. In 1917, he had been speaking of the evils that had resulted from “a hundred years of unbridled private initiative,” specifically a “lack of responsibility in the American individual to the people as a whole....” In 1922, with a book entitled American Individualism, he became a prominent spokesman and advocate of the notion of a |
gone along with this belief that it is women who need supervision, who need policing, monitoring, surveillance.
Yes, we have been shamed, controlled, patrolled.
What we wear. How we speak. How we look. What kinds of jobs we should go for. Whether we should drink (ooh, much less than men) or eat (don't put that in your mouth, darling, you'll get fat). What time we should get home at night. Don't send photos of your glorious naked bosom because they could fall into the wrong hands. Or are in the wrong hands.
So the truth is out there. It's not us women. It's you. Men. Some women have described this hateful male behaviour as "toxic masculinity" but you won't get out of it that easily with my permission. Toxic masculinity makes it sound like there is some other kind, along the lines of the "not all men" argument.
It's "locker room behaviour" or what we in Australia call the change room. They don't really mean it. Photo: Pat Scala
Now it's our turn to take charge.
My hunch, all along, that it is indeed all men who behave this way has been illustrated by the remarks of Republican presidential nominee(!) Donald Trump. Tapes revealed he said he could get away with grabbing "pussy" because he was a star. Men, sadly, are so bad at policing and that includes policing their own unacceptable behaviour. It's not just that this is a terrible for a politician. It's terrible for a person.
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And is it all men? In the past few days, we've heard eminent person after eminent person say that this is how men speak to each other in private. It's "banter". It's "locker room behaviour" or what we in Australia call the change room. They don't really mean it. But they do mean it and our society suffers. We need to make change and here's the answer.
Men and boys, you need chaperones.
Which is why the time has come for the handcuffs to be handed over. Curfews to be set. New steps.
I am thrilled to learn University of Melbourne academic Elise Holland thinks I'm on to something. She has researched objectification for more than seven years across several continents and the women she has studied report that, on average, they experience this male behaviour every couple of days. And that's just what they actually notice. Who knows what's going on behind them?
Now Holland is about to start a study about the impact the presence of women has on male behaviour, on "locker room banter".
"These are the things men say when they are among other groups of men. I think men find it difficult to say that's not OK and to challenge the status quo."
Her research stemmed from conversations she had with her male friends who confessed that it's hard to intervene in conversations like that. It's hard to challenge those dominant norms of male bonding, where you are supposed to be masculine and dominant.
So what's her hypothesis?
"Men would be more cautious about what they say in front of a woman."
If Holland's hypothesis holds true, then we have an instant fix for appalling male behaviour. Just to be clear, this is not what Holland has found yet – but if she does, the answer is in front of us. We put women in charge of everything. No men in groups would be allowed to proceed unaccompanied unless going to a cubicle on their own.
Oh yep. I hear it. I know. Men are objectified too. Of course they are, what with their cute earlobes and everything. But as Holland makes clear: "The ramifications are much less severe. Even if men are objectified, the negative consequences are much less pronounced for men than for women."
Let's be honest, women don't objectify men in the same way that men objectify women. We don't reduce them to their bodily parts in quite the same way. And it's not done in that way that leaves a woman feeling utterly terrified.
Seriously, I can't imagine ever saying the words: "Grab them by the weenie." Or salami. Or snakey. I just can't. Grab a groin is slightly catchier but sadly gender neutral. Pinch a penis perhaps?
And I have evidence about the ubiquity of this style of remark from the doyenne of shock politics, Senator Pauline Hanson. Her remarks on Monday were persuasive. Hanson said of the Trump remarks: "It was said, not on camera, it was said behind the scenes and was a tape recording. There are a lot of men out there that say horrific things."
Then, strangely, she said: "There are serious problems facing the US... and it is up to the people to decide." As if sexual abuse of women is not a serious problem. Would someone please tell Hanson that a woman ends up in hospital in Australia every three hours as a result of family violence.
Senator David Leyonhjolm said: "Well, he is 70 years old and saying stuff – I mean, what he said was pretty distasteful, quite frankly – but saying stuff like that used to be a lot more common than it is these days.
"He is a man of his times, perhaps. So perhaps you could cut him a little bit of slack. A lot of nasty things are said about men, too, incidentally."
Yes, bad things are said about men. That's mostly because they are true. Men make up the vast – vast – majority of murderers, of rapists, of paedophiles. They don't make up the majority of rape victims or of those who are killed by their partners.
And there's one way to make sure that stops. Start policing men. There's an army of women ready to volunteer.If you buy a new Google Pixelbook, you get 6 months free Netflix, and more
If you’re thinking about importing a Google Pixelbook in Australia, Google has a few offers in store to sweeten the deal. Granted, getting a Pixelbook here isn’t as easy as ordering from the Google Store because – as yet – Google doesn’t seem to want to sell them into Australia just yet. However, you can order one via Amazon and get it shipped to Australia, and now there’s a few bonus offers to tempt you.
The headline offer? You can get six months of free Netflix by redemption before 31 December 2017. You don’t need to be a new customer, either, as the credit can be applied to your existing account via the Google Offers page for Chromebook users.
There’s other offers available too, including:
Free car pack in Asphalt 8 with any Chromebook
$20 Google Play Store credit, though this is only for Samsung’s Chromebooks
100GB of Google Drive storage (valued at $47 USD)
90 days of free Google Play Music
So how do you get one of these Chromebooks in Australia? It’s simple. You can buy direct from Amazon and ship to Australia with the following links:
Google Pixelbook i5, 8GB RAM 128GB storage for $999 USD (which you can configure up to 256GB storage for an additional $200). This works out at about $1312 in AUD, and with shipping fees you’re looking at a total of around $1,725 delivered in Australia with priority 5-8 day shipping.
Samsung’s Chromebook Pro is $499 USD, and with priority shipping you can have it in Australia for about $750. It has 4GB RAM and 32GB storage, but it’s also quite a bit cheaper.
There’s also the Samsung Chromebook Plus for about $411 USD. It’s virtually identical to the Pro, except it has a slightly less powerful processor. At $628 into Australia, it’s the most affordable of the three, and is eligible for all the offers above.
Let us know if you’re getting one of the latest Chromebooks! Dan has tried the Netflix offer on his Pixelbook he ordered a couple of weeks ago, and it works perfectly.From the 'it's not just for servers' files:
PC-BSD the desktop distro version of FreeBSD, is now out with its 7.1 'Galileo' release. It's one of the most exciting releases of PC-BSD since 2006 when I first started writing (and using) PC-BSD.
The new release is built from FreeBSD 7.2 which just hit beta last week, and uses KDE 4.2.2 as its desktop.
This release has a few incremental improvements including an improved installer, package management, Wi-Fi and networking tools.
There is however at least one feature in PC-BSD 7.2 that I haven't seen before. Galileo includes something called 'Warden' which is a utility for FreeBSD server setup. More specifically it can be used as a graphical front end for virtualized FreeBSD instances -- or jails.
According to iXysystems (which since 2006 has 'owned' PC-BSD), "The Warden makes jail creation and management accessible to a greater number of users, and provides a secure and isolated environment for all sorts of uses, such as a mail server, database server, or webserver, to name a few. Warden configurations, called Inmates, can be used to instantly load pre-configured jails into the Warden."
That's pretty neat in my opinion and could be the use case that helps to but PC-BSD
7.2 on more enterprise desktops as an admin tool for FreeBSD servers.
With the incremental improvements to existing features, it all amounts to a solid and easier to use version of PC-BSD than past versions. It's part of a trend that I've seen consistently building with PC-BSD since at least the 1.5 release.The basics
Last spring, Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly launched a broad Cancon policy review, saying "everything was on the table" in how the federal government funds Canadian culture and media. After months of consultation and study, these are some of her key recommendations.
1) No new taxes on streaming services or Internet service providers, but a five-year, $500-million planned investment by Netflix in Canadian content and distribution.
2) Increasing the federal contribution to the Canada Media Fund (a key funding mechanism for TV and digital productions), to compensate for the decline in levies from cable and satellite distributors. There is no number yet on this commitment, but it is expected to grow over time as more Canadians “cut the cord.”
3) $125-million in new funding over five years for a Creative Export Strategy to boost the sales of CanCon around the world.
4) Keeping the Canada Periodical Fund as the main tool to help the news industry, starting with changes to eligibility criteria that are currently based on subscription numbers. The fund could be broadened to “better support innovation, business development, start-ups and export,” although there will be no bailout for non-viable business models.
5) Refreshing the CBC’s mandate with the new senior executive team to be appointed next year.
6) Adapting the eligibility criteria for the Canada Music Fund and the Canada Book Fund by 2020.
7) Using a $300-million investment in cultural infrastructure to fund new “creative hubs” where “creators can build their entrepreneurial skills, create, collaborate and innovate.”
8) Reviewing the Broadcasting Act, Telecommunications Act and Copyright Act, and modernizing the Copyright Board of Canada.
9) Creating a new Creative Industries Council, chaired by the ministers of Heritage and Innovation, to foster growth in cultural industries.
10) Seeking “commitments and agreements” with large Internet-based companies to invest in Canada, including convincing Facebook and Google to help the news industry.
AP, MATT ROURKE/THE CANADIAN PRESS
The Netflix deal
The global streaming giant has agreed to a five year deal with the federal government in which they will spend up to $500-million on developing and distributing Canadian television shows and movies.
A "Netflix tax," which would have been levied upon digital media producers and Internet service providers, had been discussed previously as a potential source of revenue to fund more and higher quality Canadian content. Liberal and NDP MPs on the House of Commons heritage committee proposed the idea but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in June that such a tax would not be included in Ms. Joly's plan, a pledge that has been upheld.
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Under the agreement Canadians will be able to more easily watch movies and television shows that are made in Canada. Additionally, Netflix will establish a production house in the country.
In her speech Thursday, Ms. Joly said she wants to ensure all foreign platforms, not just Netflix, are part of the promotion and protection of Canadian stories:
We want them to participate in our goals to support the creation and discovery of Canadian content that showcases our talent, our cultures and our stories. I’m pushing for commitments that benefit our industries.
The Netflix reaction
With few concrete details announced about the Netflix deal – and no one from Netflix present at the announcement to explain the company's plans – political and industry reaction was mixed.
Quebec Minister of Culture Luc Fortin:
This deal is like Netflix paying itself $500-million to produce content that it will sell for a profit. This is an unfair situation for Canadian companies.
NDP MP Pierre Nantel:
Are we allowing foreign multinational companies to basically set their own rules when we already have regulations in place for our broadcasters?
Maureen Parker, executive director of the Writers Guild of Canada:
It seems like the privates [commercial broadcasters] aren't interested in making Canadian content, they do so most reluctantly, and now we have a company saying, 'We want to work with Canadians.'... It's exactly what we needed.
What was left out
Although one of Creative Canada's pillars is to strengthen public broadcasting and strengthening the news ecosystem, especially at the local level, no plan to rescue failing news media companies is part of the framework. In her speech Thursday, Ms. Joly said supporting outdated business models isn't part of the plan:
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Our approach will not be to bail out industry models that are no longer viable. Rather, we will focus our efforts on supporting innovation, experimentation and transition to digital.
The government says it is still open to changing the Canada Periodical Fund in 2018 but in the meantime it is relying on digital giants Google and Facebook to continue its partnerships with Canada's news industry.
The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage looked into a sustainable funding model for journalism earlier this year. In its report, which was released in June, several measures were recommended, including creating tax incentives and supporting local news producers.
"My hope is that we don't get forgotten. Canadian cultural policy is a hugely broad area. Traditionally, news gathering wasn't put in the category of Canadian cultural content. But it is important," Bob Cox, publisher of The Winnipeg Free Press and chair of News Media Canada, said before the plan was unveiled.
The plan put forth by Ms. Joly doesn't mention the Indigenous Languages Act, a piece of legislation that Mr. Trudeau had promised in 2016 that the government would introduce in the future. The 2017 federal budget reiterated the promise and introduced nearly $90-million in new funding over three years to help preserve and support Indigenous languages and culture.
Although under Creative Canada the government said that it will continue to promote the use of French in Canadian society, the framework doesn't include any new Quebec-specific initiatives.
How funding is changing
The new framework calls for increased funding from the government in some areas and a revamp of how funding is decided for certain programs.
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The Canadian Media Fund, which has been facing a steep budget as Canadians cut the cord, is set to receive a cash injection that will stabilize its operations. Currently, the government contributes around $130-million to the CMF, which supports Canadian television and digital media producers. In 2018, Ottawa will cover the public-private partnership's revenue shortfall in addition to its annual contribution.
$125-million will be spent over five years to promote Canadian content globally through the Creative Export Strategy. The initiative aims to help Canadian content producers find overseas markets.
Part of the government's investments in Canadian culture that were announced in the 2017 federal budget will be allocated to develop creative hubs for prospective entrepreneurs.
Although no additional funding was announced for either the Canada Book Fund or the Canada Music Fund, the government wants to modernize the eligibility criteria for both.
Heritage Minister Melanie Joly poses for a portrait along the Ottawa River on April 19, 2016, in Gatineau, Quebec. Dave Chan/For The Globe and Mail
Why is the government doing this?
An overhaul of Canada's framework for creative industries was not in the cards when Ms. Joly, a rookie minister from Quebec, assumed her role. Mr. Trudeau didn't include it in her mandate letter and it wasn't included in the Liberal Party's electoral platform during the 2015 federal election. Despite this, she launched a cultural policy review 18 months ago and said that "everything is on the table" at the time of the announcement.
Policy governing Canadian culture – the government considers everything from movies and television to virtual reality under this umbrella – is wide-ranging and the broadcasting, media and cultural industries are worth around $50-billion. Changes this broad haven't been seen in more than a quarter-century.
Cultural stakeholders had long complained that government programs to help creative industries lacked funding and weren't up to date with the digital and technological landscape.
With reports from Susan Krashinsky Robertson, Chris Hannay and The Canadian Press
MORE FROM THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Kate Taylor: Mélanie Joly’s Netflix deal fails to address the real issues for Canadian content creators The deal, which coincides with a commitment not to tax online services, is merely political cover for Joly as she fails to resolve the central issue her review was supposed to address: how to update analog-era supports for Canadian creators so that they can thrive in the digital age.
John Doyle: The Netflix deal is a very sweet deal for Netflix, not Canada It's peachy that some creatives involved in Canadian TV and movies will have their work seen around the world via Netflix, but that is nether new nor is it the rescue of Canadian TV that the government wants you to believe.I can’t knock the Tinder service. I love Tinder. If you don’t know what Tinder is, then think of it as Hot or Not. If two people mark each other as Hot, then a connection is made. From there, you can chat, flirt, and set up a date if you so choose.
All of this action took place on your phone, but thanks to an update, you can now Tinder on your Android Wear smartwatch. Dating on your smartwatch. Welcome to the future, folks.
Once you have updated the Tinder application on your phone, an extension is automatically placed on your Android Wear device. When you are ready to start swiping through pretty faces, simply say “Ok Google, start Tinder.”
From there, you will see a basic UI, complete with pictures, snippets from a user’s profile, and can receive “Match” notifications all on your wrist.
To try it out for yourself, go grab the update through Google Play. And if you happen to meet the love of your life on there, please invite me to the wedding, because I love to party.
Play Link
Cheers jerflash!Okay, now THIS. Was a lot of work.Working with two different light sources was really fun, especially the contrasting colors between the two sources!The landscape was actually easier than I thought it would be; and it came out better than I expected! Though it\'s not completely show accurate, haha....Well, anyways. This is yet ANOTHER commission for ~ kaioha, because he randomly gave me 120 and told me to go buy some refill bottles from my markers...OMFGYAY.8DOkay so uhm, I hope you enjoy this piece of brother-sister fluff :3Also, sorry, no easter eggs this time :cTools used: Mechanical pencil and eraser for the sketch, Copic fineliner for the lines...Copic markers for the coloring with a white gelpen for the accentuationsArt and Violet Freckles © MeWildstripes and idea © ~ kaioha MLP © Hasbro & Lauren FaustLast Monday’s post, in which I ranted a bit about the opposition to estimating linear probability models (LPM) instead of probits and logits, turned out to be very popular. In fact, that post is now in my top three most popular posts ever.
Last Monday morning, when my wife left for work, I told her I was expecting a meager number of page views that day given my choice of post topic. I was wrong: people really care about binary dependent variables.
The post generated quite a bit of commentary. Some said that if you have experimental data, you would not want to run a regression. But that’s not completely true. Sure, with experimental data, you can run a t-test comparing the means of the control and treatment groups. But I can think of many cases where you would still want to run a regression in order to increase the precision of your estimate of the treatment effect.
The most interesting response came from Penn State’s Christopher Zorn in a post on his blog. If you want to read the remainder of this post, I suggest you read his post and come back for mine (and make sure to add his blog to your RSS feed while you’re at it).
Done? Okay, here goes:
I did not read the King and Roberts working paper Christopher links to (with my upcoming move halfway across the country, I need all the time I can get to work on my own research), but in the comments to my post, Conner responds “The King and Roberts results are more relevant for the case when identification of all parameters of interest requires that we have the correct model, e.g., forecasting probabilities. This isn’t the case when looking at binary treatment assignment and are interested in estimating average treatment effects. You just need the expectation of the error term to be the same in the treatment and control groups. King and Roberts more or less make this point themselves on page 3 of their paper.” Moreover, the probit standard errors model one kind of variance (that due to the Bernoulli structure of the dependent variable), but they are not robust to other kinds of heteroskedasticity. And with heteroskedasticity, the probit and logit coefficients are inconsistent, even with robust standard errors (ht: Tim Beatty.) I must insist that forecasting probabilities is not what I am interested in. Most of the time, I’m interested in getting as close as possible to the average treatment effect. If you are interested in forecasting probabilities, then by all means estimate a probit or a logit. On nonlinear functional forms, in the example Christopher gives (the likelihood that extremely poor or extremely wealthy people will purchase a TV will not change much if their income increases by $1,000, but the change will be much larger for someone with an average income), the nonlinear function is best modeled by including both income and its square, so as to model nonlinearities in the impact of income on the likelihood that someone purchases a television. But even then, this assumes that we know the exact shape of the nonlinear relationship.
And in response to Christopher’s last two points, I do not use R, but I plugged his example in Stata. What happens here is that the LPM will give a coefficient estimate of 0.6, but the logit omits x altogether because in those cases where x = 1, y is perfectly predicted, i.e., whenever x = 1, y = 1. Having compaed the LPM with fixed effects with the conditional logit with fixed effects for one of the applications I have worked on, the latter does the same thing.
I don’t know that not dropping those observations is a bad thing, though: Even in Christopher’s example, those observations contain a lot of information about the relationship between x and y, namely that the two are highly positively correlated. To see this, supposed you wanted to know the likelihood that people who smoke will die of lung cancer. You collect individual data on smoking and on causes of death, and you find that everyone who smokes dies of lung cancer, but that only about half of the people who don’t smoke die of lung cancer.
If you wanted to know how the decision to start smoking changes the likelihood that someone will die of lung cancer, would you throw away all the observations for which an individual is a smoker? I wouldn’t, as they contain valuable information that help us quantify the marginal impact of the decision to smoke on the likelihood of dying from lung cancer.
With that said, I add the caveat that I am not an econometrician and that, to paraphrase a soon-to-be-colleague, I have strong opinions that are weakly held. It looks as though one’s preferred estimator for binary dependent variables is really all a matter of disciplinary cultural norms (economist love probits; other social scientists, not so much), if not of field cultural norms within disciplines.
So ultimately (and this deserved to be in bold), because no estimator is perfect, you should you always estimate all three (LPM, probit, and logit) and compare their results to make sure nothing is amiss.
No related content found.Despite the posters for ‘Taken 3’ declaring: “It ends here”, Liam Neeson has admitted that ‘Taken 4’ could happen if the latest film does well at the box office, even if he thinks the tank may have run dry on the franchise.
“I don’t think [the ‘Taken’ franchise] can develop any more to satisfy audiences, but you never know,” Neeson says in our interview below.
“We’ll see. We’ll see how successful ‘Taken 3’ becomes.”
Without giving too much away, ‘Taken 3’ leaves room for Neeson’s character Bryan Mills to return for a fourth film, but the Irish star thinks for that to happen they have to ditch the “family under threat” formula.
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“I can’t see there being a ‘Taken 4’ happening unless they take Bryan Mills and put him into something completely different, [a new] scenario with his buddies, you know his little covert group of military buddies.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s not surprising. Both Neeson and director Olivier Megaton said that ‘Taken 3’ would never get made while promoting ‘Taken 2’.
Neeson told Empire in September 2012, “I don’t think it’s going to happen [‘Taken 3’]. I really don’t. I can’t see a possible scenario where audiences wouldn’t go, ‘Oh, come on…! She’s taken again?’”
Megaton agreed telling Cinemablend, “We want to work with Liam again on another movie, and the priority is to do something else, another movie. I don’t think that it will go on for ‘Taken 3’, I don’t see the point. The second one, it was fine, we closed the books.”
He did concede though it could be on the cards if it made enough money… which it did, raking in an impressive £250m at the box office in 2012.
“Even Luc [Besson] or Robert [Mark Kamen, the screenwriter]- if this one’s a success too, maybe they’re going to think about it, money is money for them. But after it will be very difficult to ask Liam to be back again. The logic of his character has ended for this one, for me.”
So, “It ends here” could be a hollow promise after all. Watch this space.
‘Taken 3’ is in cinemas today.
- First Ant-Man Trailer Unleashed
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Image credits: 20th Century FoxRoy Moore loves his many attorneys.
On Thursday, a whole gaggle of them got another 15 minutes of fame as he sued the state of Alabama to block the certification of Doug Jones as a United States senator. On December 12, Jones beat Moore in a special election.
If you’re reading this, you’ll remember that just hours before that fateful day, Moore’s wife, Kayla Moore, insisted her family couldn’t be Jew haters because, well, “One of our attorneys is a Jew.” Not even a friend — an attorney. I launched an immediate search for this unicorn.
For the 9,000 of us living here, Kayla Moore’s comment about having a Jewish attorney wasn’t a sign of her and husband being out of touch with reality. All jokes aside, the Jewish attorney comment drew national attention to our reality. In Alabama, Jewishness is strange and delicate, and the Jewish attorney, by merit of his mention, has come to represent all the Jews of the state.
As a Jewish educator in this small community, I felt that a quick tap of my network would locate any attorney working on the campaign. But, bupkis. Was this a New York Jew lawyer? A convert-to-Christianity lawyer? A zealous advocate in the office and a messianic Jew in the pews, praying to Jesus Christ? No, not even this Jew publication could find him or her — until now.
Turns out he was nothing so exotic, and he wasn’t working on the campaign, either. Rather, he’s a regular Jew with a common Jewish name and an unsurprising law practice. Richard Jaffe was hiding in plain sight. Born and raised in Birmingham, he is a Jewish lawyer whose family I have known for years now, and whose niece I used to have Shabbat dinner with.
And who is friends with Doug Jones.
I had neglected to turn over a major stone in my search for the Jewish attorney: Roy and Kayla Moore’s troubled son, Caleb Moore. The last time he made headlines for his legal issues was in 2015, when none other than Richard Jaffe, a Jewish lawyer born and raised in Birmingham, represented him.
The lawyer who defended the son of the defender of American morality wrote a book in 2012, titled “Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned.”
Meet Richard Jaffe, Nice Jewish Lawyer
Considered one of the national defense bar’s top lawyers, with a license to practice law in three states and in Washington, Jaffe has kept nearly 20 people off death row.
Jones and Jaffe, as high-profile legal peers in the same small city, have spent decades intertwined in each other’s careers, appearing in headlines and articles together.
In a video on Jaffe’s website, he and Jones discuss the nuances of work as a defense attorney. “As the defense, our job is to make absolutely sure that the client did or did not commit the crime before they go to prison,” Jones says. Jaffe nods his head slowly in agreement, responding: “Exactly. If defense and prosecuting attorneys could all switch jobs for a while, we would have a much fairer justice system.”
Jaffe’s most famous case was his defense of Eric Rudolph, whose attacks including the bombing of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and in 1998 the bombing a clinic that offered abortions in Birmingham. The clinic no longer operates, but I spent all of high school parking in its lot to go to the greasy spoon across the street. Rudolph was a Holocaust denier who, according to his sister, called the television “the electronic Jew.” Rudolph was involved with the white nationalism-motivated Christian identity group Army of God. Jaffe eventually withdrew from the case, though he never cited Rudolph’s Jew hatred as a reason.
At the time of the trial, Jaffe had discussed defending someone like Rudolph with the then-Temple Beth El rabbi Brian Glusman, who stated that as much as he may “detest Eric Rudolph,” the man was “entitled to a good defense.” Glusman has a particular interest in serving as counsel to addicts in his community (now Atlanta, not Birmingham), which brings us back to Caleb Moore.
Caleb Moore’s criminal record started with DUI and drug possession in 2011. He was 20 years old. In 2016 he was charged with drug possession again and chose to enter rehab. Working on his case: Jaffe. He had assured the local media that Roy Moore had not influenced the case. Typically, getting someone’s son off the hook for drug possession results in some form of relationship.
While on my Jewish attorney journey, I discovered some horrifying truths — like the Moore family being somewhat normal, going on vacations where they eat french fries and wear wrinkled T-shirts, taking pictures with very adorable grandchildren in their living room, which looks, well, lived-in. While most politicians are deemed to be entirely out of touch with reality, the Moores seem to be the average white Alabama family. They’re not out driving fancy cars or walking around in high-end clothes, they’re wearing Abercrombie polos in low-quality photos with Steve Bannon. It’s a strange thing to see this family beyond the news articles in which they stare dead-eyed at a crowd of journalists as they try to defend themselves into a microphone. But I am not here to defend the damned.
Meet Richard Jaffe: Complicated and Challenging
Richard Jaffe has made a career of giving publicly despised individuals a chance to be judged with fairness. He has had an incredibly impressive career: Jaffe is a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and a member of the National Association of Distinguished Counsel, three-time “Lawyer of the Year” by Super Lawyers, the subject of an off-Broadway play and a member of the Alabama Death Penalty Assessment Team. He also has embarked on a quest to exonerate the Scottsboro Boys. Jaffe is not the schmuck I had imagined the Moores’ Jewish attorney to be. He is not someone with loose ties to the Jewish community. He is not masquerading as a Jew; he is not an apostate. He is not applauding Roy Moore’s dedication to enforcing the Noahide Laws and then some across the land. He is not going to churches to endorse Moore. He is not helping Moore wedge his way into the Senate despite his defeat, which Moore has refused to accept.
Jaffe is a man who is dedicated to justice and believes in the sanctity of the law. He is Jewish. He is an Alabamian. He is complicated and challenging. We may have all laughed at Kayla Moore’s comment, or recoiled in disgust at how grossly stereotyped it was, and perhaps those reactions were well deserved. And maybe I should have given up my search to find the Jewish attorney. It would have been the sane, reasonable thing to do. But it lead me to a man with an extraordinary career, a man who saves lives, a man who hears people out in ways the most righteous among us could never imagine.
The Jews of Alabama have been through a lot in 2017, from the Levite Jewish Community Center bomb threats to the threat of a senator who believes Jews are “not of American culture.” Jaffe, whether or not he is the Jew attorney Kayla Moore truly had in mind, is, in a way, a triumph for us. If there hadn’t been a lawyer, the Jews of Alabama would remain enigmatic and complicit in Moore’s campaign.
Justice can be hard to find, especially when it’s right in front of you.
This story "I Found Roy Moore’s Jewish Attorney" was written by Liz Brody.The Welcome to Bend sign, seen on Century Drive on Wednesday, May 18, 2016. (Andy Tullis/Bulletin file photo) 6776297
The Welcome to Bend sign, seen on Century Drive on Wednesday, May 18, 2016. (Andy Tullis/Bulletin file photo) - Bulletin
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Deschutes and Crook counties had the highest rates of population growth in Oregon from July 2016 to July 2017, according to a preliminary report released from Portland State University’s Population Research Center.
Deschutes County’s population is estimated to have grown from 176,635 to 182,930, a 3.6 percent increase and the highest rate of growth in the state. In Crook County, the estimated population grew from 21,580 to 22,105, a 2.4 percent increase.
Washington County, in the Portland-metro area, was the third-fastest growing county with a 2.1 percent increase.
The report noted Bend had the second largest population gain for an Oregon city behind Portland. Bend added 3,265 residents in one year to reach 86,765 residents, according to PSU. That equals about 9 new people in Bend per day.
Portland gained 11,705 residents in that time, or about 32 people per day.
Each year, Portland State’s research center prepares the population estimates using mostly data from housing permits and housing developments. The preliminary numbers are sent in November to the state and local governments for review. The numbers are then revised and certified by Dec. 15 for a final report published in the spring.
Portland State’s estimates for Bend are traditionally more conservative than the U.S. Census Bureau, which recently estimated Bend’s population above 90,000.
The Census Bureau compiles its estimates through different data than Portland State, including federal tax records, Social Security information and changes in driver licenses at the DMV.
Both population reports offer a good range for planning, according Bend Assistant City Manager Jon Skidmore.
Skidmore has pointed to the city’s work on its urban growth boundary expansion and its plans to upgrade water and sewer infrastructure and roads as ways the city has addressed the continued growth.
The city is predicting and preparing for 30,000 more residents by 2028.
Statewide, Portland State’s preliminary report estimates Oregon added 64,750 residents between July 2016 and July 2017, a 1.6 percent increase. That brings the state’s estimated population to 4.1 million people. Migration from other states accounted for most of the newcomers to Oregon.
The three largest counties in the Portland-metro area — Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas — had the highest increase in population, the reported showed. Multnomah and Washington each added about 12,000 residents and Clackamas added about 8,000.
As for the smallest growth in the annual report, Grant and Sherman counties each added five people.
— Reporter: 541-617-7820, kspurr@bendbulletin.com
18767741By Elias Hazou
THE FANATICS won: that’s the view shared by a growing number of modern historians and researchers on the outbreak of inter-communal violence on the island exactly 50 years ago.
Mutual distrust was aided and abetted by false-flag operations and disinformation on both sides. Perhaps the only ingredient missing was the spark to light the powder keg, and that came on December 21 1963.
A historical analysis of the period both before, during and right after is like navigating a minefield.
The dominant narrative on the Greek Cypriot side has been that in 1963 the Turkish Cypriots mounted an ins |
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To Sum It All Up
That’s what it’s in store so far when it comes to your Distortion needs. One thing’s for sure, though, you can’t go wrong here with whatever your choice ends up being. If you’re left wanting for more, check back again as we’ll update this list continuously over time.
Back Stage Indie Report
I Want Upcoming Gear Reviews Sent To Me!Flight 19 disappearance in Bermuda Triangle
The saga of Flight 19 remains as one of the most mysterious disappearances in Bermuda Triangle. Flight-19 was the code name for Five Avenger bomber planes that took off from the Naval base at Florida on 5th of December 1945, but never returned. U.S Navy's final report mentioned "Reasons Unknown" when citing the cause of the incident. Thus Flight-19 also became known as The Lost Patrol.
So what was actually Flight 19 and what really happened? Flight 19 was a training flight with five TBM Avengers or Torpedo Bombers and was led by Commander Charles Taylor. Each was a 3-seater plane, very robust, safe and US Navy's best bombing planes to destroy enemy submarines. It could carry up to 2,000 pounds of bombing ammunitions and had a range of 1,000 miles.
Other than Taylor, there were 13 others in the flight (in different planes) but were all trainees. Taylor was the only experienced pilot. On December 5, 1945 at 2:10 p.m., the five Avengers of Flight 19 took off one after the other from the Naval Air Station (NAS) of Fort Lauderdale at Florida for a routine training session. It was a clear day.
As per plans, the flight's path was to first go towards East into the sea for 56 miles up to Hens & Chicken Shoals to practice bombings. Then they were supposed go further east for another 67 miles towards the Bahamas. At this point they would turn north and go for 73 miles. Then turn back and head straight for the Naval Base back in Florida. This way they would cover a triangular area over the sea.
US Navy Avenger planes similar to Flight 19
The triangle with the yellow line on the picture below was the planned route of the flight 19. The weather over the route was reported as excellent, a typical sunny Florida day. At about 3:30 p.m., Taylor sent a message to the control tower that his compass was malfunctioning and he thought he was somewhere around the Florida Keys, which is a chain of islands south of Florida (i.e. further south of the location where they took off). So instead of heading towards East, he thought that they actually flew southwards due to compass problems.
Immediately an instruction was given from the tower to turn north and fly towards Miami, only if he was sure that they were at the Florida keys. However, Taylor's idea of being close to the Keys was wrong. They had probably gone to the East as originally planned, but for some reason he got confused. As he guided the flight more towards north, further out to the sea the avengers traveled.
At 3.45 p.m., Taylor's voice was heard again at the control towers. This time he sounded worried and confused... "Cannot see land, we seem to be off course". At this stage there was another transmission that was picked up when one trainee student said to the other "If we would just fly west, we would get home." He was right. But who would care? After all they had to follow a stubborn leader.
While these days the pilots use modern navigational equipment like the GPS, in 1945 a pilot had to rely on his starting point, speed, time of flight and the direction indicated by the compass to know where he would exactly be during the flight. If any of these deviated, there was a high chance that the flight would be lost.
However, let me also state an interesting fact here before we go further into the Flight 19 story. While Taylor was an experienced pilot, he did have a history of getting lost. He was lost thrice during the World War II. And in two of such occasions, he had to ditch his pane into the sea to get rescued. Secondly, he did not have good knowledge about the area around east and south of Florida.
So, an interesting twist to the story?
Yes. In fact, at about 4:45 p.m. on that day, it was quite clear to the men on the Base Station that Taylor was hopelessly lost, and he was still trying to go further North and then East again. He was then instructed to hand over the control to one of the students. Apparently he did not.
At 5:50 p.m. the ComGulf Center somehow managed to trace the Flight 19 avengers on its radar. It was apparently at the east of New Smyrna Beach, Florida. By then communications had become so poor that this information could not be passed on to the lost planes. It was getting dark. The weather started to become rough too and the Avengers were very low in fuel. Hope was rapidly fading for the Flight 19 by then.
Officers at the naval base station thought it was enough. At 7:27p.m, two Martin Mariner planes were sent to search for the Flight-19 planes. These mariners were like flying boats that could also land on the sea. The last transmission from Flight-19 was heard at 7:04 p.m. Search continued all through the night and the next day. There was no sign of the Avengers. The rescue Mariners were supposed to meet at the search zone. But quite strangely the second Mariner never showed up, it too disappeared never to return again.
So what actually happened?
So what eventually happened to Flight 19 Avenger Planes? How did they get lost in the triangle? Is there any trace of any of the five planes? Check out What happened to Flight 19 to know how the search operation was carried out, the conclusions reached and what finally came out in the Navy Board's report.
And what happened to the Martin Mariner plane that was sent for rescue operation but never returned? Read PBM Martin Mariner's fate to know the full story about this rescue plane that could never be traced in Bermuda Triangle and itself became part of the mystery.
Related Articles
1) Check out Flight-19 Route and Events to know the exact route of the flight and the sequence of events that took place.
2) Check out Bermuda Triangle Incidents to know about many other amazing mysteries of Bermuda Triangle.
3) Check out Bermuda Triangle Theories that try to explain the major disappearances.
4) Check out Bermuda Triangle Mystery to know about the mystery of Bermuda Triangle, how it originated, what's happening in the area, its history and more.“May your will be done, dear Lord, this day and each day by these, your servants,” said the Rev. Wallace Adams-Riley.
“I pray that at the conclusion of this gathering that all matters whether confirmed, completed or channeled will have been divinely directed while also being considered by your judgment as good and as acceptable,” said the Rev. Carlos Jordan.
“We ask you Lord this day to guide this body in respecting human life from the moment of conception until natural death,” said the Rev. Dennis Di Mauro.
You might expect to hear such religious intonations in a church setting. But Adams-Riley, Jordan and Di Mauro weren’t directing their words to congregants; they were addressing members of the Virginia General Assembly.
Each meeting of the General Assembly begins with a prayer led by a religious leader. The practice dates back to colonial Virginia, and it is common throughout the United States.
Almost all state legislatures use an opening prayer as part of their tradition and procedure, and the custom has operated on the federal level since the first Congress convened under the Constitution in 1789.
You may be thinking: Doesn’t this practice violate the separation of church and state? Some people believe it does, but the courts have ruled otherwise.
The First Amendment of the Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Those provisions, known as the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, were written to protect the religious liberties of Americans and prohibit the state from endorsing one religion over another.
But they don’t specify what constitutes the establishment of a state religion.
“There’s a pretty robust history of government institutions in this country engaging in practices that one could very plausibly argue is suggestive of, denotes, is the equivalent of establishing a religion,” said Dr. John Aughenbaugh, professor of constitutional law at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Official symbols and rhetoric often blur the line separating religion and government.
Examples include our national currency (which reads “In God We Trust”) and the oath of office taken by elected officials (who place a hand on a Bible and end with “So help me God”).
The constitutionality of legislative prayer was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1983 decision in Marsh, Nebraska State Treasurer v. Chambers. The high court ruled that legislative prayer did not violate the First Amendment because it “has become part of the fabric of our society.”
The issue re-emerged more recently when some residents of the town of Greece, New York, sued the town council for opening its meetings with a predominantly Christian prayer. The lawsuit said such prayers discriminated against people of minority religions and non-religious citizens.
However, in 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, saying the town council had not violated the First Amendment.
Like the town of Greece, prayer in the Virginia General Assembly is overwhelmingly led by Christian faith leaders, who invoke Christian ideas about the will of God and the role of government in addressing legislators.
During the 2017 legislative session, Christian ministers led 95 percent of the prayers that opened the House and Senate, according to an analysis by VCU Capital News Service.
Fewer than three-fourths of adults in Virginia identify as Christian, according to the Pew Research Center. However, about 90 percent of Virginia legislators identify as Christian, and that is reflected in the religious leaders chosen to address the General Assembly.
The only other faiths invited to address the General Assembly were Judaism, Unitarian Universalism and Islam – the only other religions to which legislators belong.
The largest group excluded from leading the daily invocation at the General Assembly was non-religious people, atheists and agnostics, who make up 20 percent of adults in the state, according to the Pew study.
Over the course of the 2017 legislative session, the General Assembly spent a total of 1 hour, 53 minutes, and 43 seconds praying. Each invocation lasted an average of 1 minute, 38 seconds. To some, this is time well spent.
“I’m glad that it’s a part of our state government,” said Rabbi Dovid Asher, one of two rabbis to lead the General Assembly in prayer this session. “If I’m going to put somebody in office and vote for somebody, I want them to have a moment of reflection, of introspection during the course of the day.”
Other people, like Patrick Elliott, staff attorney for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which advocates for the separation of church and state, view prayer in the General Assembly as an inappropriate and inefficient use of time.
“The legislators have a lot better things to put their energy and efforts into. It’s a waste of time. And if they were to want to pray or engage in religious practice, they should do so on their own time, not on taxpayers’ time,” Elliott said.
Words and photos by Megan Schiffres via Capital News ServiceA Minnesota man was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and killing his coworker’s 5-year-old daughter before dumping her body in the woods, police say.
Zachary Todd Anderson, 25, who was friends with the young girl’s parents, was staying overnight in the family’s home when he disappeared with 5-year-old Alayna Ertl and her father’s truck, police said.
Authorities tracked the truck to a cabin Anderson owns about 90 minutes north of Alayna’s Watkins, Minn. home, and found Anderson alone in a wooded area about a quarter mile away, according to a statement from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. Anderson told the officers where to find Alayna’s body in a “swampy wooded area a few hundred yards from the cabin,” the statement said.
Anderson was arrested and was being held Monday on suspicion of murder and kidnapping. He was awaiting charges and was expected to make his first court appearance early this week. It was not immediately clear if he had a lawyer, the Associated Press reported.
Anderson worked with Ertl’s father at Vanguard, a company that locates underground utility lines, Meeker County Sheriff Brian Cruze told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Investigators are working to determine a motive.
“We are at a loss as to why this happened at this time,” Cruze said.
Related:
For more news videos, visit Yahoo View.Let them eat cake. But not one with a Trump logo on it.
I’ll confess I didn’t see this one coming. A 17 year old from Louisiana who is excited about voting in her first election and happens to be supporting Donald Trump got an unexpected surprise while preparing for her birthday party. Going to the local baker, she was met with rejection when she asked for a cake with the candidate’s logo on it. (Fox 8 News)
A Facebook post shared by a Bossier Parish teen is getting a lot of attention. It reads, “Just left Albertsons. The woman behind the cake counter just refused to make me a birthday cake because I wanted Trump 2016 on it. Did that really just happen.”… “We just need an American flag cake with Trump 2016 on it, and right when I said Trump the lady just (makes face) kinda Trump? And she was like I can make you a flag cake but I’m not going to write Trump on it,” explained Gill. Gill says they decided to take their order elsewhere, and notified store officials. “It’s your job, we’re not really going for your opinion on what you think of the candidates we were just wanting Trump 2016 on the cake.”
This one isn’t going to wind up in court (hopefully) because the situation seems to have resolved itself. The store already issued an apology, blaming the refusal on a case of an employee who, “misunderstood the training provided regarding copyrighted phrases.” They also went on to say that if the customer returns they would be happy to provide the cake requested. There’s not much more they could do at this point, so the whole thing may be allowed to drop.
But it does raise a couple of interesting questions. What if they hadn’t backed down? We’ve seen plenty of court cases involving wedding cakes for gay marriage ceremonies and the courts seem to be holding that neither the rights of free speech or religious freedom apply and protect the baker. If the customer is asking for something which any customer should be able to purchase, the business owner has no right to refuse under the law in the era of the Social Justice Warrior. Isn’t that the rule? Then how could anyone refuse to prepare a Trump cake?
Also, it’s more than a little curious how they chose to invoke a misunderstanding of copyright laws here. Remember when CNN Headline News blurred out the Trump logo on an interview subject’s shirt? That’s the same excuse which popped up then. Our byzantine copyright laws can clearly get people into trouble in unexpected circumstances, but we’re talking about a political campaign here. On a couple of levels this is a ridiculous dodge. First of all, we’re not talking about somebody abusing the Coke logo or some Lord of the Rings images to boost their sales. It’s a political campaign which would no doubt love to see people supporting them in that way. The risk of prosecution is essentially zero. And beyond that, political symbols are treated very differently than corporate logos and other copyrighted material. Whether the girl was supporting or opposing Trump, the cake could readily be defined as either support for the candidate or satire in an attempt to lampoon and oppose him. Shutting down that sort of speech wouldn’t make it far in court.
My guess – particularly when you take the description of the employee’s reaction into account – is that the family ran into a liberal at the store who really hates Trump and refused to decorate the cake as the customer wished. Once the news broke out, the store needed to cover their tracks quickly to avoid a lawsuit, so they went with the lack of training excuse. None of this addresses the question of whether or not a private business should be able to refuse service when they wish (and they should), but under the current rules of engagement it seems like they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on if they held the line and refused to deliver the cake.Cape Schanck 17 September 2017 - Page 1
17 September 2017 Cape Schanck A fairly long drive on a nice early spring day down the Mornington Peninsular to the strangely named Cape Schanck.
This is not Cape Schanck at all, this was taken a week prior near Richmond in Melbourne.
Now this is the strangely named Cape Schanck, we walked along the Bushranger track away from the lighthouse.
Great view, back towards the lighthouse, more on that later.
The path was pretty easy, about an hour in each direction, mostly dirt/sand combo with trees and cows in a pasture in the distance.
Eventually you get to here, for excellent photo opportunities.
Now with moss. Notice there is a guy on the top of that big rock!
I attempted a long jump across a creek running into the ocean, made it halfway, got wet, but it allowed me to explore further for photos.
There werent many people about.
This rock is much bigger than it appears here, its the same one the guy was picture on top of earlier. I didnt have enough time to attempt such a climb myself, plus there were signs declaring it a conservation area.
Slightly redundant.
Looking back at the main beach, you can see a few people in the distance.
I really enjoy photographing into sunlight with my Fujifilm X70.
Nice rocks.
Nearly back at the start point, time for a bit more view.
I was having so much fun I decided to continue in the other direction, heres the boardwalk.
The lighthouse. Great light.
I was really enjoying the light.
Another hidden cove, note the guy in the white t-shirt on the right climbing where he should not be and almost slipping to his death.
More lighthouse, but in great light. Not sure whats happening at the bottom in the foreground though.
Sun reflection
One last photo of Cape Schanck before heading back to the city. A top location for taking photos.For other people named Thomas Kean, see Thomas Kean (disambiguation)
Thomas Howard Kean Sr. (;[1] born April 21, 1935) is an American businessman, academic administrator and politician who served as the 48th Governor of New Jersey from 1982 to 1990 as a Republican. Kean is best known globally, however, for his 2002 appointment as Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, widely known as the 9/11 Commission, which was responsible for investigating the causes of the September 11, 2001 attacks and providing recommendations to prevent future terrorist attacks. He was appointed to this post by U.S. President George W. Bush. Upon the completion of his second term as Governor, he served as the President of Drew University for 15 years, until his retirement in 2005.
Early life and education [ edit ]
Kean was born in New York City to a long line of New Jersey politicians and family of Dutch Americans. His mother was Elizabeth (née Howard) and his father, Robert Kean, was a U.S. Representative. His grandfather Hamilton Fish Kean and great-uncle John Kean both served as U.S. Senators. His second great-uncle was Hamilton Fish, a U.S. Senator, Governor of New York, and the 26th U.S. Secretary of State. Kean's relative, William Livingston, was a delegate to the Continental Congress and the first Governor of New Jersey.[2]
Kean was initially educated at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia When he reached the fourth grade, he entered St. Albans School. In 1946, at the age of eleven, his parents then enrolled him at St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts, the alma mater of his father and two older brothers.[3]
After graduating from St. Mark's, he attended Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, where he received his B.A. in history in 1957 and participated in the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.[4] After working on his father's unsuccessful senatorial campaign, and as a history teacher for three years at St. Mark's School, Kean attended Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City and earned his M.A. in history.[2]
Kean was a longtime resident of Livingston, New Jersey.[5]
New Jersey political career [ edit ]
Originally a teacher of history and government, Kean was elected, in 1967, as a Republican to the New Jersey General Assembly. He ran with Philip Kaltenbacher, a Short Hills Republican who had served as an aide to Assemblyman Irwin Kimmelman in 1964 through 1966. (Kimmelman would later serve as Attorney General in Kean's administration.) In the Republican primary, Kean and Kaltenbacher defeated Donald Fitz Maurice, Vivian Tompkins Lange, the sister of former U.S. Attorney William F. Tompkins, and Joseph Shanahan.[6]
At the start of the Assembly session in 1972, Democratic leadership had wanted to name S. Howard Woodson of Trenton as Speaker, until Assemblyman David Friedland made a deal as one of four Democrats who voted to give the minority Republicans control of the General Assembly, electing Kean as Assembly Speaker. Woodson would have been the Assembly's first African American Speaker, and charges of racism were leveled by fellow Democrats against Friedland.[7] In the next Assembly, in 1974, the Democrats united behind Woodson for Speaker; Kean then became the minority leader of the Assembly. In 1973, he briefly served as acting New Jersey governor.
During the 1976 presidential campaign, Kean served as Gerald Ford's campaign manager for the state of New Jersey.[2]
1977 gubernatorial loss and aftermath [ edit ]
In 1977, Kean ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for the governor of New Jersey. Although he spent most of his career as a political moderate, in this race Kean ran to the right of New Jersey Senate Minority Leader Raymond Bateman. Kean was unable to obtain the endorsement of many county Republican chairmen, or Gerald Ford, despite having served as his campaign director for the state of New Jersey the previous year.[2] Bateman defeated Kean and won the nomination, though Bateman went on to lose the general election to Brendan Byrne.
After the election, Governor Byrne appointed Kean as a commissioner on the board of the New Jersey Highway Authority. Kean also worked as a political commentator on New Jersey public television.[8]
1981 gubernatorial victory and 1985 re-election [ edit ]
Kean fared better four years later, in 1981, when he again ran for governor. Kean made campaign promises to foster job creation, clean up toxic waste sites, reduce crime, and to preserve home rule. He also received the endorsement of Gerald Ford his second time running for governor.
Kean defeated Democratic Representative Jim Florio in the closest election in New Jersey gubernatorial election history; Kean won by 1,797 votes.[8] The election was controversial due to the involvement of the Republican National Committee, who appointed a Ballot Security Task Force that allegedly intimidated voters.[9][10][11] One of his strategists for the Kean campaign in 1981 was Roger J. Stone, a self-proclaimed "GOP hitman."[12]
Kean proved hugely popular in office. In striking contrast to his slim 1981 victory, he won re-election in 1985 with the largest margin of victory ever recorded for a gubernatorial race in New Jersey, defeating Peter Shapiro, then Essex County Executive, 71%–24%.[13] Kean won every municipality in the state except Audubon Park and Chesilhurst in Camden County and Roosevelt in Monmouth County.[14] His coattails were long enough for the Republicans to take control of the General Assembly, flipping it from a 44–36 Democratic majority to a 50–30 Republican majority.
1988 Republican Convention speech [ edit ]
In 1988, reflecting his stature as an up-and-coming leader of the Republican Party's moderate wing, Kean delivered the keynote speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans. The same year, he also authored a book, The Politics of Inclusion, published by Free Press, which urged political cooperation among historically divided interest groups and politicians.
Gubernatorial legacy [ edit ]
Limited to two consecutive terms as governor by the New Jersey State Constitution, Kean left office in January 1990 as one of the most popular political figures in New Jersey political history. Former New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Doug Forrester, New Jersey Congressman Bob Franks, and other leading New Jersey and national Republican figures began their political and public policy careers in his state administration. He was succeeded by James Florio, who won a landslide victory in November 1989.
In the aftermath of Governor Kean's gubernatorial tenure, the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University New Brunswick's Center on the American Governor, established the Thomas H. Kean Archive.
His legacy includes a "federally replicated welfare reform program, landmark environmental protections, and more than 30 education reforms," according to the Carnegie Corporation of New York.[15] While governor, Kean served on the President’s Education Policy Advisory Committee and chaired the Education Commission of the States and the National Governor’s Association Task Force on Teaching."[16]
Kean gained a degree of national recognition as the spokesperson for a New Jersey tourism commercial, in which he recited the state's tourism motto: "New Jersey and You: Perfect Together." The campaign, which was revived in 1998 by Governor Christine Todd Whitman, capped a long-term, multibillion-dollar effort to restore New Jersey’s shoreline as an environmentally sustainable cornerstone in the state’s tourism industry.[17][18]
One unique facet of Kean’s leadership was his advocacy for the arts. Leaders in the arts community praised the Governor for his work. This work culminated in the creation of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, a highly successful cultural and entertainment center in Newark. Although its creation required roughly $200 million in funding, Kean believed that the cultural center had the power to revitalize the city, making the risk worth it. The Governor also believed that improving the city would strengthen the state as a whole.[19] Kean has remained involved in advocacy for the arts years after his time as governor, criticizing recent state-level funding cuts for being too quick to do away with arts spending.[20]
Kean’s inclusive practice of government remains central to his legacy. This legacy found expression in his urban policies and outreach to traditional Democratic constituencies, his aggressive divestment of public retirement funds from South Africa, embrace of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as an opportunity to raise awareness of race on a statewide basis, and his successful primary sponsorship of the bill that established the Educational Opportunity Fund.[21][22][23] This fund appropriated $2 million for direct student aid and support programs for low-income students who demonstrated academic capability but lack sufficient preparation for college. It continues to serve disadvantaged New Jersey students nearly 50 years later. The fund’s longevity is indicative of Kean’s long-term outlook and the overall strength of his legislation.[24][25]
Drew University [ edit ]
Following the end of his second Gubernatorial term, Kean was named President of Drew University, a small liberal arts university in Madison, New Jersey. Kean's considerable standing as a popular former governor of the state was helpful as he undertook an upgrading of the university's campus and academic programs by stressing the primacy of teaching, the creative use of technology in the liberal arts, and the importance of international education. During Kean’s presidency, applications to Drew increased by more than 40 percent; the endowment nearly tripled; and more than $60 million was committed to construction of new buildings and renovation of residence halls and other older buildings. Kean was extremely popular among the student body; he would frequently eat lunch unannounced with students in the dining hall, and was a regular spectator at Drew sporting events. Kean served as Drew's President until 2005, teaching a highly selective political science seminar.[26][27]
National policy leadership [ edit ]
Involvement beginning in 1990 [ edit ]
While leading Drew University, Kean also continued to expand his role as a national political leader, forging close working relationships with the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton (with whom he had worked closely in the National Governors Association) and George W. Bush, who saw Kean as an important national political ally.
Former Heritage Foundation foreign policy analyst Michael Johns and other national policy and political leaders were recruited by Kean to support and help administer his growing involvement in a broad range of national policy initiatives in the fields of education, environmental, low-income housing, foreign policy and other issues. As governor, Kean had some degree of national recognition as the spokesperson for a New Jersey tourism commercial, in which he cited the state's tourism motto: "New Jersey and You: Perfect Together." With Johns' support, Kean also quickly established foreign policy and national security credentials following his governorship that ultimately proved important in his gaining appointment by President George W. Bush to head the 9/11 Commission.
Beginning in 1990, Kean for the first time began expressing views on foreign policy and national security matters, views that generally mirrored those of the Republican Party. In a December 15, 1991, speech to The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., Kean endorsed the free trade initiatives under way by the administration of then-President George H. W. Bush. He also advocated continued U.S. aid to anti-communist resistance forces in Afghanistan, Angola, and to those engaged in supporting democratic change in the former Soviet Union. "To those supporting the Afghan resistance," Kean told the Heritage Foundation audience in 1991, "I say, carry on."[28]
Kean quickly was appointed to the boards of several important foreign policy bodies, including the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was heavily engaged in supporting democracy-building programs in former Eastern bloc and other nations around the world, and a Presidential advisory commission on a post-Castro Cuba, chaired by former U.S. Presidential Republican candidate Steve Forbes.
Several years later, in 1997, Kean was appointed as an Advisory Board member of President Clinton's One America Initiative. He also serves as an Advisory Board member for the Partnership for a Secure America.
Heading the September 11 Commission [ edit ]
Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States by al-Qaeda, political pressure grew for an independent commission to independently investigate why the attacks were not prevented by U.S. national security organizations, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, National Security Agency and others, and to provide recommendations for preventing future terrorist attacks.
The Commission will reassemble in Washington on July 22, 2014, for the tenth anniversary of the issuance of its report. It will assess how well the government is performing given current terrorist threats and make recommendations for changes moving forward.[29][needs update]
Kean serves as a co-chair of the National Security Preparedness Group (NSPG) at the Bipartisan Policy Center.[30]
Bush appoints Kean [ edit ]
Bush initially selected former Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger to head the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission). But on December 13, 2002, Kissinger resigned as the Commission's Chairman, under pressure because of potential conflicts with his global business consultancy.
Noting Kean's post-gubernatorial foreign policy involvement and his reputation as a consensus-oriented political leader, Bush nominated Kean to succeed Kissinger in leading the important and politically sensitive Commission.[31] The Commission is widely considered the most important independent U.S. government commission since the Warren Commission, which was charged with investigating the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and perhaps the most important in American history given its mammoth responsibility for investigating the causes of the first foreign attack on the U.S. mainland since the War of 1812, and recommending steps to defend the U.S. from future attacks. Kean's appointment to head the Commission, and later the work and final report of the Commission, drew substantial global attention.
Criticisms of Kean's 9/11 Chairmanship [ edit ]
Just as some had criticized Kissinger's nomination, Kean's leadership of the Commission also drew some criticism. Some alleged that Kean did not have the depth of foreign policy and national security expertise needed to manage an investigation so integral to the future of American national security. Supporters of Kean in the Bush administration and elsewhere, however, countered that Kean's work since 1990 as a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, the post-Castro Cuba Commission and his foreign policy and national security commentary and analysis following his governorship established adequate national security and foreign policy credentials for him to assume such a critically important assignment.[32]
Kean on bin Laden: "We had him" [ edit ]
In December 2003, Kean said that the September 11 attacks could have been prevented, stating: "As you read the report, you're going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn't done and what should have been done. This was not something that had to happen."[33]
On April 4, 2004, Kean again stated that the September 11 attacks could have been prevented, saying that the United States government should have acted sooner to dismantle al-Qaeda and responded more quickly to other terrorist threats. "When we actually saw bin Laden on the ground, using the Predator or other means, did we have...actionable intelligence? Should we have sent a cruise missile into a site where he was at that point? I think those early opportunities are clear. We had him. We saw him. I think maybe we could have done something about it."[34]
On July 22, 2004, the Commission issued its final report, the 9/11 Commission Report, which concluded that the CIA and the FBI had ill-served President Bush and the American people in failing to predict or prevent the September 11 attacks, which the report concluded was preventable.
Without Precedent [ edit ]
On August 15, 2006, a book by Kean and 9/11 Commission Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, titled Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, was released regarding the September 11 attacks and the September 11 Commission.[35]
In the book, Kean and Hamilton write that the 9/11 Commission was so frustrated with repeated misstatements by The Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration that it considered an investigation into possible deception by these government bodies concerning their response to the attacks.[36]
ABC's The Path to 9/11 [ edit ]
Kean served as a paid consultant and spokesman for the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which aired nationally and without commercial interruption on September 10, 2006. On September 11, the second part of the miniseries aired, also without commercial interruption, with the exception of a 20-minute break at 9 pm ET, when President Bush addressed the nation on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.[citation needed]
While not technically considered a documentary by ABC, prior to its airing, the series drew criticism for misrepresenting facts leading up the September 11 attacks. Many former high-ranking Clinton administration officials, including Clinton himself, and other scholars, publicly questioned the accuracy of the miniseries and asked that it not be aired. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the miniseries' portrayal of her "false and defamatory."[37] Former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine also strongly criticized her character's portrayal, complaining in the Los Angeles Times about the "mythmakers" who created the film, calling the project "false."[38]
On July 4, 2007, the terrorist group al-Qaeda publicly released a video, featuring its Deputy Chief Ayman al-Zawahri urging all Muslims to unite in a holy war against the U.S. in Iraq and elsewhere. The 95-minute video was discovered and released by U.S. intelligence sources and, in addition to al-Zawahri's comments, prominently featured video excerpts of Kean citing al-Qaeda as one of the most formidable security threats that the U.S. has ever confronted, presumably with the intention of bolstering the morale of al-Qaeda supporters through Kean's citation of the magnitude of the movement's strength and threat. Comments by Kean cited on the video include a reference to the fact that al-Qaeda remains as strong in 2007 as it was before the September 11, 2001, attacks.[citation needed]
The video also appeared to validate that al-Qaeda was closely monitoring U.S. political developments, especially including the work of the September 11 Commission, which Kean chaired. It also suggested that al-Qaeda intended to focus not just on engaging the West in Iraq, but also in other countries. "As for the second half of the long-term plan," al-Zawahri says on the video, "it consists of hurrying to the fields of Jihad like Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia for Jihadi preparation and training."
Corporate boards [ edit ]
Kean has served as chairman of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest health philanthropy; the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy; the Carnegie Corporation of New York; Educate America; the National Environmental Education and Training Foundation; MENTOR: The National Mentoring Partnership and the Newark Alliance. He has sat on corporate boards including ARAMARK, UnitedHealth Group, Hess Corporation, Pepsi Bottling Group, CIT Group Incorporated, and Franklin Templeton Investments.[15][16][39][40]
In 2006, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating the conduct of the United Health Group's management and directors. Additionally, the Internal Revenue Service and prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York subpoenaed documents from the company. The investigations came to light after a series of probing articles in The Wall Street Journal in May 2006, which reported on the apparent backdating of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of stock options by UnitedHealth Group's management. The backdating allegedly occurred with the knowledge and approval of the directors, including Kean, who sat on the company's compensation committee during three crucial years, according to the Journal. Major shareholders have filed lawsuits accusing Kean and the other directors of failing in their fiduciary duty.[41][42]
Awards [ edit ]
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Giant... He walked over to our trampoline and I was really little, I was only about three or four-years-old, and he put his hand out. I actually stepped in his hand, having never met him before, and he brought me up to his cheek and I gave him a kiss. My mom called him my Gulliver.
There's a famous photo of you and Andre...
Yes it was after WrestleMania I. It was actually in People Magazine. He and I were sitting outside the Rainbow Room. I had noticed that everybody always treated Andre differently, right? And I was a little kid and some people treated me differently, because of who my father was. I think that's something we bonded over, because I just knew Andre as my friend. And it bothered me that people would treat him one way or the other, just because of the way he looked. I just loved him for who he was.
What is it like working for your dad?
Working for my dad is incredibly challenging, in a variety of ways. It can be challenging from a family standpoint, right, because I think sometimes working with family you take certain things for granted, and that can be challenging, as I keep saying! But from an opportunistic standpoint, I would never have had the opportunities that I have been given and afforded if it weren't for my father.
I think you have to work that much harder when you are part of the family to prove yourself and to keep growing, but again those are the best life lessons that you can possibly have. The best part of working together, at least in my family, is this incredible shared passion. We all love what we do. To be able to bring different aspects of that passion literally to the table is a unique proposition and one I would never give up.
(Image: © WWE)
WWE is a unique family business...
It really is!
Fans will never forget the four of you in the ring together [at WrestleMania 2000].
Yes, 'a McMahon in every corner'.
And the following year, when Shane and Vince had a match [at WrestleMania XVII].
Yes and my cute little mom...
(Image: © WWE)
What would you say is next for the women of WWE?
For the women of WWE, it's to continue this evolution. You know I think that we've come a long way, they have been regularly featured and competing in main events at pay-per-views and on television, but I think there's still a long way to go. Ultimately, I would love to see our women main event WrestleMania.
You're a master of trash-talking - much like your dad. You're known for your catchphrase: "You're fired!"
Yes, I stole that from him though!
You deliver it with aplomb though - you've made it your own.
Ha ha.
(Image: © WWE)
Have you had much training in that specifically, or did it come naturally?
In terms of saying you're fired?
In terms of really riling people up.
I guess experience in the ring, just because my character has been a villain for so long. I have been trash-talking for nearly 20 years you know. I hope I'm good at it!
I hope you're not going to fire me at the end of this...
Are you kidding? I'm never going to fire you!
Thank you very much, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you again for everything you do for WWE and thank you to all the fans here in the UK.
WWE Live visits Glasgow, Brighton, London, Cardiff, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Nottingham this November. For more information regarding all WWE Live events in the UK visit www.bookingsdirect.comImage copyright AP
Amazon is to stop selling video-streaming TV devices from Google and Apple because they don't "interact well" with its own media service.
The online retailer said it had made the decision to avoid "customer confusion" and the devices will be removed from sale by 29 October.
Amazon wants to sell products that work with its in-house streaming video service known as Prime Video.
Prime Video is not available on Apple TV and Google's Chromecast.
But it can be watched via an app on Apple and Android smartphones and tablets.
Amazon said along with its own Fire TV, it will continue to sell other companies' devices that are compatible with Prime Video.
These include Microsoft's Xbox, and Sony's Playstation.
Amazon has rapidly expanded its online content, using it to attract subscribers to its Prime loyalty membership scheme which offers fast delivery on purchases.
'Sledgehammer approach'
Google has just unveiled a new version of its Chromecast TV device, and Apple is due to release the latest version of its TV this month.
Richard Windsor, analyst at Edison Investment Research, said that by refusing to sell such products, Amazon could be diminishing the experience of its customers.
"These days it is all about enticing users to join one's community and then providing great digital life services so that they stay.
"This is why Amazon's sledgehammer approach... is very likely to backfire.
"This approach implies that Amazon is doing everything it can to prevent users from accessing what very well may be superior services from its competitors," he said.
Tough tactics
Amazon has used similar tactics with book publishers.
Last year it blocked pre-orders for some books from the publisher Hachette, while the two sides negotiated over prices.
Many authors were angered by the move and accused Amazon of being anti-competitive.CLOSE Henry Friedman, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who never had the chance to get his high school diploma, will soon have one courtesy of a Seattle-area school district. VPC
Henry Friedman will finally have the high school diploma he's always wanted when the Kent School District gives him one Wednesday. (Photo11: KING)
SEATAC, Wash. – An 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who never had the chance to get his high school diploma will soon have one courtesy of a Seattle-area school district.
Henry Friedman will receive his honorary diploma from the Kent School District on Wednesday.
"I always felt something missing in my life, especially when I went to my children's graduations, then graduating from college," Friedman told KING 5 News. "I don't have the words in my vocabulary to describe what it really feels like."
Chris Loftis, Chief of Communications for the Kent School District, said administrators are honoring Friedman after he volunteered his time educating students for more than 20 years.
"How many hundreds and hundreds of students have heard his story and have been inspired by that story," Loftis said. "Education is more than reading, writing and arithmetic. Education is about learning about the community of humanity. Henry Friedman is one of the best instructors we could possibly have in that community."
Students hear first-hand how Friedman and his family survived the Holocaust. Two Christian families risked their lives by allowing the Friedmans to live in a barn for 18 months.
"I come from a city that had a Jewish population of 10,000," he said. "There were less than 100 of us that survived."
Friedman often uses his story to teach students how important education is.
"We had properties in Europe. Most of it was lost. We had money. Most of that was lost. But I was able to carry through borders whatever teachers had put through my head," he told a freshman history class at Kent Mountain View Academy.
"Nobody can take that away from you."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1xlclhHSurviving the Journey: Spacecraft on a Chip
If Breakthrough Starshot can achieve its goal of delivering small silicon chip payloads to Proxima Centauri or other nearby stars, it will be because we’ve solved any number of daunting problems in the next 30 years. That’s the length of time the project’s leaders currently sketch out to get the mission designed, built and launched, assuming it survives its current phase of intense scrutiny. The $100 million that currently funds the project will go into several years of feasibility analysis and design to see what is possible.
That means scientists will work a wide range of issues, from the huge ground-based array that will propel the payload-bearing sails to the methods of communications each will use to return data to the Earth. Also looming is the matter of how to develop a chip that can act as all-purpose controller for the numerous observations we would like to make in the target system.
If the idea of a spacecraft on a chip is familiar, it’s doubtless because you’ve come across the work of Mason Peck (Cornell University), whose work on the craft he calls ‘sprites’ has appeared many times in these pages (see, for example, Sprites: A Chip-Sized Spacecraft Solution). Both Peck and Harvard’s Zac Manchester, who worked in Peck’s lab at Cornell, have been active players in Breakthrough Starshot’s choice of single-chip payloads and continue to advise the project.
Image: A small fleet of ‘sprites,’ satellites on a chip, as envisioned in low Earth orbit. Can single-chip spacecraft designs now be developed into payloads for an interstellar mission? Credit: Space Systems Design Studio.
Meanwhile, NASA itself has been working with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) on the design of single-chip spacecraft. A key issue, discussed at the International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco in early December, is how to keep such a chip healthy given the hazards of deep space. For Starshot, the matter involves not just the few minutes of massive acceleration (over 60,000 g’s) of launch from Earth orbit, but the 20 years of cruise time at 20 percent of the speed of light before reaching the target star.
The first part of the question seems manageable, as hardening electronics against huge accelerations is an area well studied by the military, so data are abundant. The cruise phase, though, opens up concerns about radiation. According to KAIST’s Yang-Kyu Choi, interstellar radiation can degrade performance through the accumulation of positively charged defects in the silicon dioxide depths of the chip. Such defects can produce anomalous current flow and changes to the operation of critical transistors. The matter of malfunctioning chips is discussed in this recent story in IEEE Spectrum.
At the San Francisco meeting, self-healing chips were the theme, drawing on work that comes out of the 1990s that showed heating could help radiation sensors recover their functionality. Mixing this with work on flash memory out of Taiwan’s Macronix International, an integrated device manufacturer in the Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) market, the new NASA study uses concepts developed at KAIST to make on-chip healing more efficient. From the IEEE story:
This study uses KAIST’s experimental “gate-all-around” nanowire transistor. Gate-all-around nanowire transistors use nanoscale wires as the transistor channel instead of today’s fin-shaped channels. The gate, the electrode that turns on or off the flow of charge through the channel, completely surrounds the nanowire. Adding an extra contact to the gate allows you to pass current through it. That current heats the gate and the channel it surrounds, fixing any radiation-induced defects.
It might seem natural to simply provide more shielding for the chip during the two decades of interstellar cruise, but shielding adds mass, a critical issue when trying to drive a payload to a significant fraction of the speed of light. Thus the self-healing alternative, which assumes potential damage but provides self-analysis of the problem and heat inside the chip to work the healing magic. We also gain from the standpoint of further miniaturization — at scales of tens of nanometers, nanowire transistors are significantly smaller than the kind of transistors on chips currently used in spacecraft, adding savings in chip size and weight.
According to the IEEE report, KAIST’s “gate-all-around” device is likely to see wide production in the early 2020s at it begins to replace the older FinFET (Fin Field Effect Transistor) technologies. From the standpoint of single-chip spacecraft, it’s heartening to learn that radiation repairs can be made over and over, with flash memory recovered up to 10,000 times. A scenario emerges in which a chip on an interstellar flight can be powered down, heated internally to restore full performance, and then restored to service.
Pondering interstellar performance for chips that weigh no more than a gram is cause for reflection. Within just a few years we’ve gone from the idea of massive fusion-driven designs like Project Daedalus to payloads smaller than smartphones. The idea invariably brings to mind Robert Freitas’ concept of a ‘needle’ probe that could be sent in swarms to nearby stars, loaded with nanotech assemblers that would construct scientific instruments and communications devices out of material they found in the destination system.
It wasn’t so long ago that former NASA administrator Dan Goldin was speaking of a probe as light as a Coke can, but the Freitas probe and Breakthrough Starshot go well beyond that. The trick here is not getting too far ahead of the curve of technological development. With a 30-year window, Starshot can anticipate breakthroughs that will solve some of its key challenges, but relying on the future to plug in a solution doesn’t always go as planned. Thus it’s heartening to see potential answers to the cruise problem already beginning to emerge.One of the great challenges of sustainable development is to combine society's desires for economic prosperity and social security. For decades economists and politicians have debated how to reconcile the undoubted power of markets with the reassuring protections of social insurance. America's supply-siders claim that the best way to achieve well-being for America's poor is by spurring rapid economic growth and that the higher taxes needed to fund high levels of social insurance would cripple prosperity. Austrian-born free-market economist Friedrich August von Hayek suggested that high taxation would be a "road to serfdom," a threat to freedom itself.*
Most of the debate in the U.S. is clouded by vested interests and by ideology. Yet there is by now a rich empirical rec-ord to judge these issues scientifically. The evidence may be found by comparing a group of relatively free-market economies that have low to moderate rates of taxation and social outlays with a group of social-welfare states that have high rates of taxation and social outlays.
Not coincidentally, the low-tax, high-income countries are mostly English-speaking ones that share a direct historical lineage with 19th-century Britain and its theories of economic laissez-faire. These countries include Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. The high-tax, high-income states are the Nordic social democracies, notably Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, which have been governed by left-of-center social democratic parties for much or all of the post?World War II era. They combine a healthy respect for market forces with a strong commitment to antipoverty programs. Budgetary outlays for social purposes average around 27 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the Nordic countries and just 17 percent of GDP in the English-speaking countries.
On average, the Nordic countries outperform the Anglo-Saxon ones on most measures of economic performance. Poverty rates are much lower there, and national income per working-age population is on average higher. Unemployment rates are roughly the same in both groups, just slightly higher in the Nordic countries. The budget situation is stronger in the Nordic group, with larger surpluses as a share of GDP.
The Nordic countries maintain their dynamism despite high taxation in several ways. Most important, they spend lavishly on research and development and higher education. All of them, but especially Sweden and Finland, have taken to the sweeping revolution in information and communications technology and leveraged it to gain global competitiveness. Sweden now spends nearly 4 percent of GDP on R&D, the highest ratio in the world today. On average, the Nordic nations spend 3 percent of GDP on R&D, compared with around 2 percent in the English-speaking nations.
The Nordic states have also worked to keep social expenditures compatible with an open, competitive, market-based economic system. Tax rates on capital are relatively low. Labor market policies pay low-skilled and otherwise difficult-to-employ individuals to work in the service sector, in key quality-of-life areas such as child care, health, and support for the elderly and disabled.
The results for the households at the bottom of the income distribution are astoundingly good, especially in contrast to the mean-spirited neglect that now passes for American social policy. The U.S. spends less than almost all rich countries on social services for the poor and disabled, and it gets what it pays for: the highest poverty rate among the rich countries and an exploding prison population. Actually, by shunning public spending on health, the U.S. gets much less than it pays for, because its dependence on private health care has led to a ramshackle system that yields mediocre results at very high costs.
Von Hayek was wrong. In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness.
*Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this essay misattributed the date of Hayek's suggestion.Twins pitching coach Neil Allen was suspended indefinitely by the team after being arrested early Thursday morning for suspicion of drunken driving.
Minor league pitching coordinator Eric Rasmussen will take over as Twins pitching coach for the time being.
The Twins issued a statement Thursday:
“The Minnesota Twins are aware of the pending DWI charge against pitching coach Neil Allen. Mr. Allen has been suspended, with pay, indefinitely and the matter will be handled in accordance with the policies and procedures of the Minnesota Twins Baseball Club.” The statement also said the team will have no further comment.
According to the incident report, Allen was stopped by officers for the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office around 2 a.m. Thursday at 6th Street S. and Park Avenue in Minneapolis. Allen refused to take a test after being stopped and was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving.
Allen
He was booked into Hennepin County jail a little before 4 a.m. and released around 10:30 a.m.
Allen frequently has admitted that he struggled with alcohol throughout much of his 11-year major league career pitching for five teams. He said in a 1990 interview with the New York Daily News that in 1989 while with Cleveland, he blew a.285 in a Breathalyzer test administered by a concerned teammate after a night of heavy drinking.
“Someone told me I was one drink from death,” Allen said in the interview. “That was June 19 [1989]. That was my last drink.”
In 1989 — his last season in the majors — Allen spent a month at the Valhalla Clinic in Sarasota, Fla. He told the Daily News that he had “lost my dignity and my personal pride in my life” to alcohol. “And it ruined my career,” he said.
Allen joined the Twins as pitching coach before the 2015 season, after Paul Molitor was named manager. Allen told the Star Tribune in the spring of 2015 that he had not had any alcohol since 1994.
Rasmussen, 64, has spent 26 years in the organization, including the past eight as the minor league pitching coordinator, traveling to all the Twins’ affiliates to work with prospects. He interviewed for the pitching coach job last year but Allen beat him out.
Rasmussen has been a pitching coach for Twins minor teams at the rookie level, at Class A Fort Myers and Class AA New Britain. The last time he was a piching coach was at Fort Myers, from 1999 to 2008.
He pitched eight seasons in the majors for St. Louis, Kansas City and San Diego, going 50-77 with a 3.85 ERA.It was clear by January 5, 2009 that something terrible had happened to the Al-Samouni family, after a few survivors of the bombed building reached the hospital. In front of Al Jazeera cameras, a father gestured toward the bodies of several of the family's toddlers and said in Hebrew: "We just want to understand what these children did, that they killed them."
A cloud of smoke billows over Gaza after an Israel Defense Forces strike during the 2009 war. AP / Archive
A statement from the IDF Spokesman's Office said: "In light of the complexity of the incident, the chief of staff has ordered that it be investigated by an expert."
In fact, it took several days to recreate exactly what led up to the incident that claimed the lives of 29 members of the Al-Samouni family. Haaretz documented and reconstructed these events in at least six articles.
In the Gaza Strip, Operation Cast Lead was experienced primarily as a war against civilians. In the neighborhood of Zeitun, it was manifest in the point-blank killing of civilians in front of their families; preventing the arrival of rescuers, including shooting and killing them; stopping civilians fleeing the neighborhood from taking the injured with them (at least five people died this way, including two children, not only from the Al-Samouni family ); shooting at people waving a white flag; using human shields (in a home that was turned into a temporary a command post ); destroying homes, greenhouses and agricultural areas; spraying graffiti on walls, with "Kill the Arabs" being the most innocuous of the messages left behind; and leaving filthy homes that had been used as bases.
What was "unique" in Zeitun was that soldiers, who spoke in Hebrew to some family members, ordered them, according to every testimony given, to gather in a one-story house. About 100 members of the Al-Samouni family did so, certain they would be safe because the soldiers had seen that there were elderly people and children among them. The next day, the house was bombed (it is hard to know from testimony and the remains of explosives whether by tank or from the air ).
What is clear is that the members of the Al-Samouni family were not killed due to the error of a single soldier.Poland's Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski attends a news conference after the meeting of Foreign Ministry officials in Warsaw, Poland June 27, 2016. Agencja Gazeta/Slawomir Kaminski/via REUTERS
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland’s foreign minister demanded on Tuesday that the European Union’s executive leaders step down because its policy failed to preserve EU’s unity given Britain’s decision to quit the bloc.
Witold Waszczykowski said also that some prerogatives of the Commission should be transferred to a grouping of member states’ heads, known as the European Council, who unlike the Commission possess a democratic mandate.
Poland’s eurosceptic ruling party (PiS) is at loggerheads with Brussels over issues including its constitutional court, migrant policy, climate policy and logging in ancient forests.
“We are asking if this... leadership of the European Commission, which only a few months ago called on politicians to... stop listening to their electorates, has... a right to continue functioning, fixing Europe,” Waszczykowski said.
“In our opinion, it does not,” he said. “New politicians, new commissioners should undertake this task, and first of all we should give new prerogatives to the European Council, because it consists of politicians who have a democratic mandate.”
In May, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said some heads of member states were listening exclusively to their electorates and not developing a “common European sense”.
“Usually in politics when a political project fails... and here it is a political project to preserve European unity... then one either has to change the rules of the game or give other politicians a chance to improve this project,” Waszczykowski said.
Juncker has also criticised the reluctance of central and eastern European states, who mostly joined the bloc in 2004, to accept migrant quotas proposed by the Commission.LEWISTON — A woman who worked briefly as the executive assistant to the president of Bates College has filed a discrimination lawsuit against the school, alleging she was expected to play tennis, jog and watch “chick flicks” with her boss.
Sarah Hulbert, of Auburn, wrote in her complaint in Androscoggin County Superior Court that she was intentionally treated differently from her male co-workers, which she said was a violation of the Maine Human Rights Act.
The Sun Journal reports that the 59-year-old Hulbert worked for Bates President A. Clayton Spencer for a little longer than a month in the summer of 2012.
Hulbert is seeking damages, back pay and other costs.
A Bates spokesman said in a statement that “The college strongly disagrees with the allegations” and will defend itself in court.
ShareSome of us may turn up at the polling station today and decide that actually, we don’t want to choose a political party.
However, you still want your vote to count, so what can you do?
Well, you could draw a massive penis on the paper instead – as some people will undoubtedly do this polling day.
That’s because spoiling the ballot is a tradition that has been around for years.
Wildfires destroy part of Winnie the Pooh's 'Hundred Acre Wood' as UK temperatures rise
Deliberately filling in the ballot incorrectly will render it invalid, but the paper will still be counted along with the other votes.
The number of spoiled ballots is announced in the election results, and are a way of showing up to vote – but making your feelings known in a different way.
Here are some of the inventive ways people have spoiled their ballots in the past.
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Get artistic.
remember the only true anti establishment vote is a spoilt ballot pic.twitter.com/xFCyihf8p5 — COMMIE hanra (@hahahanra) June 7, 2017
Make your feelings clear.
Use colourful language to get your point across.
Did my postal vote ages ago pic.twitter.com/xeJJp835wO — 🔫 (@VOTEfascistCOW) June 8, 2017
Make up your own ballot paper (a vote for ‘Duck’ probably won’t be counted, unfortunately)
#GE2015 Spoilt ballot paper at the Merton count, who would you vote for? #SWLGE2015 pic.twitter.com/S4flORz6Eb — Zainab Al-Deen (@zainab_aldeen) May 7, 2015
Set the dog on it.
Does this constitute a spoilt ballot paper? Our dog must be an anarchist #election 2015 pic.twitter.com/CzikhQXDKj — John McGoldrick (@johntmcgoldrick) April 8, 2015
Let people know you’re on the fence.
Use the opportunity to have your voice heard on a different topic.
A spoilt ballot with a stark message in Tilgate & Furnace Green #wsccelections pic.twitter.com/ormwwDVVHw — Crawley Observer (@Crawley_Obby) May 3, 2013
Write an essay explaining your decision.
Let them know you’re over this voting sh*t.
MORE: Are dogs allowed in polling stations?
MORE: When will the General Election results be announced?Share the News
We live in an economically-segregated world, so much so that it’s sometimes difficult to get a wider view and see things as they really are. That’s why I’m a fan of websites like Rich Blocks, Poor Blocks, where a savvy data journalist has combined U.S. census data with Google Maps technology to create a stark visual representation of who lives where — and how much it costs.
The maps at RBPB layer data about median income and median monthly rent over block-by-block census tracts, allowing both an overview of general patterns (people earn more and pay more in the suburbs!) or a super-zoomed in look at individual neighborhoods. In the map below, you can see how Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus drives up rents — and also how York Road seems to serve as a buffer holding off those rising rents.
Or look at downtown: The area around Patterson Park is a checkerboard of low, medium, and rising rents. (The darkest color on the map represents rent of $1,643 or more, while the lightest color is rents of under $451.)
If you look at the income data for the same areas, similar (but not identical) patterns emerge. One clue: Gentrifying neighborhoods will have a higher ratio of rent to income, while suburban areas reverse that. See anything interesting?
(The darkest red indicates median incomes under $26,355.75, while the darkest green is incomes over $140,410.75)Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
Telltale Games has announced the next episode of its Batman series will launch digitally on October 25 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Titled "New World Order," Episode 3 will "dig deeper into the web of intrigue surrounding the newly revealed Children of Arkham."
"Penguin's brutal attack broadcast on live TV has left Gotham City reeling," the studio said in a press release. "Meanwhile, behind closed doors, the mysterious Selina Kyle reveals more of herself to Bruce.
"And in the aftermath of the attack, Bruce's friend and Gotham's new mayor, Harvey Dent, is a deeply changed man. Who can be trusted when the future of Bruce Wayne--and the Batman--could be determined by the flip of a coin?"
Telltale's Batman series is also available to buy on disc and includes the season pass entitling owners to the entire series. Only the first episode is actually on the disc and the remaining episodes must be downloaded, with new episodes unlocking once they become available.
Telltale's Batman series features the voice of Troy Baker (Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare) as Bruce Wayne. Richard McGonagle (Uncharted series) plays Carmine Falcone, while Laura Bailey (Gears of War 4, Halo 5: Guardians) portrays Selina Kyle.
You can read reviews of Episode 1 here and Episode 2 here.Hull City's George Boyd has been charged with misconduct by the Football Association after allegedly spitting at Manchester City's Joe Hart.
The incident took place during Hull's 2-0 Premier League defeat at the KC Stadium on Saturday.
It was missed by referee Lee Mason, but Boyd was charged after a three-man panel reviewed video evidence.
The former Stevenage and Peterborough winger has until 18:00 GMT on Wednesday to respond.
Hull manager Steve Bruce insisted Boyd had not spat at Hart after the two clashed in the penalty area.
"George Boyd wouldn't do that, no chance," said Bruce. "Not deliberately, anyway. He is as honest as they come."
George Boyd factfile Started his senior career with Stevenage
Capped at England 'C' level
Full international for Scotland
Won three promotions with Peterborough
Joined Hull in May, 2013 following successful loan
Hart, angry that Boyd had gone to ground following a challenge by the goalkeeper, will face no further action for his part in the incident.
The England international, 26, touched foreheads with Boyd but was booked by Mason.
As a result, the FA considers the matter dealt with.
Boyd, for his part, felt Hart should have been shown a red card.
"He didn't nut me, but he's put his head in, so he should have got sent off really," said Boyd.
"He said afterwards that he didn't touch me, but I thought he touched me a little bit. He apologised for the reaction and that's it."
Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany has also avoided any further punishment for his reaction to being sent off in the same game.
Kompany, 27, was dismissed for a professional foul on Nikica Jelavic in the 10th minute and reacted angrily to the decision, kicking a wall as he made his way down the tunnel.
The Belgium international also appeared to make a gesture towards fourth official Anthony Taylor but, having explained his actions to the FA, will face no further censure.
As a result, the defender will now serve his mandatory one-match suspension in this weekend's home clash against Fulham and will then be eligible for the derby against Manchester United on 25 March.A look at the new unions emerging as part of the reforms of the garment industry – and Western influences on them. Plus workers continue to struggle to be paid what they are owed...
In the aftermath of the 2012 Tazreen and 2013 Rana Plaza factory disasters(1) all interested parties were agreed that the garment industry had to finally make major changes to working conditions in order to guarantee stability and industry expansion and to improve Western consumer perception of clothing brands. Local and foreign governments, NGOs, garment buyers, employers and unions have both cooperated and disagreed on what measures must be taken.
As well as the implementation of improved factory health & safety measures the freedom to form and join trade unions has been guaranteed by government. (Although previously legally possible, in practice employers and state used many obstacles to prevent workers using these rights.) The US government had last year cited lack of workers rights as a primary reason for suspending the Generalised System of Preference (GSP) which gave Bangladeshi products preferential access to the US market. American Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have been at the forefront of lobbying for unionisation and aiding existing unions in becoming functioning workplace representatives and ‘responsible organisations of civil society’. (Till now existing garment ‘unions’ have been prevented by employer and government resistance from functioning as workplace representatives and negotiators and have functioned more as lobbyists and NGOs or in partnership with Western NGOs.)
One US NGO, the Solidarity Center, has recently become prominent in advising existing and emerging new unions. Before we analyse further its role we’ll describe a brief history of this organisation to try to determine its present function and goals.
According to the Labour Ministry, 152 trade unions have registered following last year’s Rana Plaza disaster. There are allegations that 142 of those unions were linked with nine federations “affiliated” with the Solidarity Centre. (Dhaka Tribune, 26 Jun 2014) Quote:
In 1997 the main US union federation, the AFL-CIO, merged its four international regional labour institutes to establish the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS), commonly known as the Solidarity Center. With the end of the Soviet bloc AFL president John Sweeney, supported by some activists, sought to now distance the AFL’s international work from its traditional anti-communist Cold War role. Though often little-known by its rank’n’file membership, the AFL-CIO has a long tradition of political intervention abroad - which began in the early 20th century with AFL leader Sam Gomper’s role in influencing US policy in the Mexican revolution. This role intensified after WWII during the Cold War and climaxed in the successful collaborative efforts of the AFL-CIO, CIA and the Vatican to aid the Polish Solidarność/Solidarity union when it emerged in the early 1980s(2). There has also been evidence of numerous collaborations with the CIA and local allies to destabilise governments in such places as Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Allende’s Chile, Nicaragua and, more recently, Venezuela.
The Solidarity Center (SC) maintains field offices in 20 countries around the world. Though the official stance is that the SC is an independent NGO the funding tells a different story. Over 90% of SC’s $38 million budget comes from the US State Department with the US federal government channeling these funds via the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy(NED). Only around $500,000 comes from AFL-CIO itself.
“A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
– Allen Weinstein, one of National Endowment for Democracy’s founders. (Washington Post - Sept 22 1991) Quote:
The National Endowment for Democracy describes itself as “a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world”. Yet it is primarily funded by the US Congress and is effectively a tool of US foreign policy. It promotes governments, parties, unions and groups that are US-friendly and those that oppose forces seen as antagonistic to US interests. Labour unions are seen as important channels for this; as institutions of civil society they encourage social stability, productivity and (usually) respect for the rule of law – all key goals of the democratic governance the US state seeks to promote in its sphere of influence. They can also harness a large constituency of members and target where members’ political support is placed. Depending on the desired outcome AFL-CIO, its Solidarity Centers (and its predecessors) have sometimes promoted highly politicised union movements to destabilise regimes ‘problematic’ to US policy – while at other times promoting apolitical unions restricting activity to the arena of bread’n’butter worker-employer relations which would be no threat to US-friendly regimes.
In the specific case of Bangladesh the US appears concerned to try to stabilise the country’s political arena and civil society – which has been turbulent and unstable, punctuated by periodic suspensions of democracy, ever since the nation state was born in the aftermath of the 1971 War of Independence resulting in the breakaway from Pakistan. Those pan-Islamic forces who resent the more secular society of an independent Bangladesh remain a powerful and often militant, if minority, national political force. The US is concerned that internal unrest does not lead to a “failed state” in the country where an ideal strategic location and terrain could become a regional haven for Islamic (and possibly other) terrorism. Nor does it want to see established an Islamic state antagonistic to US interests and allied with its rivals. South East Asia is also increasingly an arena where the US and China are contesting for regional influence.
“ “It is a moderate and generally secular and tolerant — though sometimes this is getting stretched at the moment — alternative to violent extremism in a very troubled part of the world,” said Dan Mozena, the U.S. ambassador to Bangladesh. “ (Washington Post – Mar 22 2014) Quote:
Bangladesh – a democracy with a Muslim majority and economic growth averaging six percent GDP over the past decade - is considered a bright spot in South Asia by Western observers. The Bangladeshi garment industry is the main generator of this growth and has a workforce 80% female. This employment in urban factories has changed the life options for millions of young women and partially overcome the restrictions imposed by traditional Islamic and village values on women. The new intense and dangerous factory exploitation of low paid wage slavery is no liberation for women but it has given opportunities to escape and undercut some of the older social conservatism.
Solidarity Centre and NED know that trade union blocs with mass memberships can function as important leverage tools in the political arena; their backing in political contests – whether elections or coups - can help tip the balance towards desired outcomes for US foreign policy. The imposition of the US neo-liberal ‘free market capitalist’ vision for developing countries ideally desires a democratic political framework – it is obviously harder to influence political forces, bargain and play off rivals against each other and influence ideological debate in a dictatorship. Policy makers now consider more authoritarian regimes as politically and economically less cost-effective and less conducive to the |
Multiplier: 2.53 => 2.91 [*] speed: 4875.0 => 4144.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0294 => 0.025 [*] 200mm Prototype Gauss Gun [*] damageMultiplier: 2.64 => 3.04 [*] speed: 4875.0 => 4144.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0294 => 0.025 [*] 200mm Railgun I [*] damageMultiplier: 2.2 => 2.53 [*] speed: 4875.0 => 4144.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0294 => 0.025 [*] 200mm Railgun II [*] damageMultiplier: 2.64 => 3.04 [*] speed: 4875.0 => 4144.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0294 => 0.025 [*] 250mm 'Flintlock' Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 3.3 => 3.8 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] 250mm 'Scout' Accelerator Cannon [*] damageMultiplier: 3.3275 => 3.83 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] 250mm Carbide Railgun I [*] damageMultiplier: 3.17625 => 3.65 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] 250mm Compressed Coil Gun I [*] damageMultiplier: 3.47875 => 4.0 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] 250mm Prototype Gauss Gun [*] damageMultiplier: 3.63 => 4.17 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] 250mm Railgun I [*] damageMultiplier: 3.025 => 3.48 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] 250mm Railgun II [*] damageMultiplier: 3.63 => 4.17 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] 350mm Railgun II [*] requiredSkill1Level: 1.0 => 4.0 [*] CONCORD 250mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 3.65 => 4.2 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.023 => 0.0196 [*] Caldari Navy 200mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 2.64 => 3.04 [*] speed: 4875.0 => 4144.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0294 => 0.025 [*] Caldari Navy 250mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 3.63 => 4.17 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] Caldari Navy Dual 150mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 1.98 => 2.28 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Dread Guristas 200mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 2.64 => 3.04 [*] speed: 4875.0 => 4144.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0294 => 0.025 [*] Dread Guristas 250mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 3.63 => 4.17 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] Dread Guristas Dual 150mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 1.98 => 2.28 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Dual 150mm 'Scout' Accelerator Cannon [*] damageMultiplier: 1.815 => 2.09 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Dual 150mm Carbide Railgun I [*] damageMultiplier: 1.7325 => 1.99 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Dual 150mm Compressed Coil Gun I [*] damageMultiplier: 1.8975 => 2.18 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Dual 150mm Prototype Gauss Gun [*] damageMultiplier: 1.98 => 2.28 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Dual 150mm Railgun I [*] damageMultiplier: 1.65 => 1.9 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Dual 150mm Railgun II [*] damageMultiplier: 1.98 => 2.28 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Federation Navy 200mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 2.75 => 3.16 [*] speed: 4875.0 => 4144.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0294 => 0.025 [*] Federation Navy 250mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 3.78125 => 4.35 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] Federation Navy Dual 150mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 2.0625 => 2.37 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Shadow Serpentis 200mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 2.75 => 3.16 [*] speed: 4875.0 => 4144.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0294 => 0.025 [*] Shadow Serpentis 250mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 3.78125 => 4.35 [*] speed: 6375.0 => 5419.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.02415 => 0.0205 [*] Shadow Serpentis Dual 150mm Railgun [*] damageMultiplier: 2.0625 => 2.37 [*] speed: 3900.0 => 3315.0 [*] trackingSpeed: 0.0441 => 0.0375 [*] Basic Gravimetric Backup Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 5.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 35.0 [*] Basic LADAR Backup Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 5.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 35.0 [*] Basic Magnetometric Backup Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 5.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 35.0 [*] Basic Multi Sensor Backup Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 5.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 35.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 35.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 35.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 35.0 [*] Basic RADAR Backup Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 5.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 35.0 [*] Emergency Gravimetric Scanners [*] cpu: 15.0 => 7.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 37.0 [*] Emergency LADAR Scanners [*] cpu: 15.0 => 7.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 37.0 [*] Emergency Magnetometric Scanners [*] cpu: 15.0 => 7.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 37.0 [*] Emergency Multi-Frequency Scanners [*] cpu: 15.0 => 7.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 37.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 37.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 37.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 37.0 [*] Emergency RADAR Scanners [*] cpu: 15.0 => 7.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 37.0 [*] F-42 Reiterative Gravimetric Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 15.0 => 8.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 38.0 [*] F-42 Reiterative LADAR Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 15.0 => 8.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 38.0 [*] F-42 Reiterative Magnetometric Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 15.0 => 8.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 38.0 [*] F-42 Reiterative Multi-Frequency Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 15.0 => 8.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 38.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 38.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 38.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 38.0 [*] F-42 Reiterative RADAR Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 15.0 => 8.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 38.0 [*] F-43 Repetitive Gravimetric Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 12.0 => 14.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 44.0 [*] F-43 Repetitive LADAR Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 12.0 => 14.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 44.0 [*] F-43 Repetitive Magnetometric Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 12.0 => 14.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 44.0 [*] F-43 Repetitive Multi-Frequency Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 12.0 => 14.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 44.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 44.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 44.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 44.0 [*] F-43 Repetitive RADAR Backup Sensors [*] cpu: 12.0 => 14.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 44.0 [*] Gravimetric Backup Array I [*] cpu: 15.0 => 10.0 [*] LADAR Backup Array I [*] cpu: 15.0 => 10.0 [*] Magnetometric Backup Array I [*] cpu: 15.0 => 10.0 [*] Multi Sensor Backup Array I [*] cpu: 15.0 => 10.0 [*] Protected Gravimetric Backup Cluster I [*] cpu: 14.0 => 11.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 42.0 => 41.0 [*] Protected LADAR Backup Cluster I [*] cpu: 14.0 => 11.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 42.0 => 41.0 [*] Protected Magnetometric Backup Cluster I [*] cpu: 14.0 => 11.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 42.0 => 41.0 [*] Protected Multi-Frequency Backup Cluster I [*] cpu: 14.0 => 11.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 42.0 => 41.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 42.0 => 41.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 42.0 => 41.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 42.0 => 41.0 [*] Protected RADAR Backup Cluster I [*] cpu: 14.0 => 11.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 42.0 => 41.0 [*] RADAR Backup Array I [*] cpu: 15.0 => 10.0 [*] Reserve Gravimetric Scanners [*] cpu: 13.0 => 12.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 44.0 => 42.0 [*] Reserve LADAR Scanners [*] cpu: 13.0 => 12.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 44.0 => 42.0 [*] Reserve Magnetometric Scanners [*] cpu: 13.0 => 12.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 44.0 => 42.0 [*] Reserve Multi-Frequency 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Cluster I [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 44.0 => 43.0 [*] Secure Ladar Backup Cluster I [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 44.0 => 43.0 [*] Secure Magnetometric Backup Cluster I [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 44.0 => 43.0 [*] Secure Radar Backup Cluster I [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 44.0 => 43.0 [*] Shielded Gravimetric Backup Cluster I [*] cpu: 12.0 => 15.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 45.0 [*] Shielded Ladar Backup Cluster I [*] cpu: 12.0 => 15.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 45.0 [*] Shielded Magnetometric Backup Cluster I [*] cpu: 12.0 => 15.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 45.0 [*] Shielded Radar Backup Cluster I [*] cpu: 12.0 => 15.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 46.0 => 45.0 [*] Surplus Gravimetric Reserve Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 6.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 36.0 [*] Surplus LADAR Reserve Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 6.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 36.0 [*] Surplus Magnetometric Reserve Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 6.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 36.0 [*] Surplus Multi-Frequency Reserve Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 6.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 36.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 36.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 36.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 36.0 [*] Surplus RADAR Reserve Array [*] cpu: 15.0 => 6.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 40.0 => 36.0 [*] Surrogate Gravimetric Reserve Array I [*] cpu: 11.0 => 16.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 48.0 => 46.0 [*] Surrogate LADAR Reserve Array I [*] cpu: 11.0 => 16.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 48.0 => 46.0 [*] Surrogate Magnetometric Reserve Array I [*] cpu: 11.0 => 16.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 48.0 => 46.0 [*] Surrogate Multi-Frequency Reserve Array I [*] cpu: 11.0 => 16.0 [*] scanGravimetricStrengthPercent: 48.0 => 46.0 [*] scanLadarStrengthPercent: 48.0 => 46.0 [*] scanMagnetometricStrengthPercent: 48.0 => 46.0 [*] scanRadarStrengthPercent: 48.0 => 46.0 [*] Surrogate 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=> -6.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Armored Warfare Link - Rapid Repair I [*] commandBonus: -2.0 => -4.8 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Armored Warfare Link - Rapid Repair II [*] commandBonus: -2.5 => -6.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Information Warfare Link - Electronic Superiority I [*] commandBonusECM: 2.0 => 6.4 [*] commandBonusRSD: 1.2 => 4.0 [*] commandBonusTD: 1.2 => 4.0 [*] commandBonusTP: 2.0 => 6.4 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Information Warfare Link - Electronic Superiority II [*] commandBonusECM: 2.5 => 8.0 [*] commandBonusRSD: 1.5 => 5.0 [*] commandBonusTD: 1.5 => 5.0 [*] commandBonusTP: 2.5 => 8.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Information Warfare Link - Recon Operation I [*] commandBonus: 2.0 => 6.4 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Information Warfare Link - Recon Operation II [*] commandBonus: 2.5 => 8.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Information Warfare Link - Sensor Integrity I [-|y] gangECCMfixed [+|n] gangSensorIntegrity [*] commandBonus: 3.0 => 9.6 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Information Warfare Link - Sensor Integrity II [-|y] gangECCMfixed [+|n] gangSensorIntegrity [*] commandBonus: 3.75 => 12.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Mining Foreman Link - Harvester Capacitor Efficiency I [*] commandBonus: -2.0 => -6.0 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [*] Mining Foreman Link - Harvester Capacitor Efficiency II [*] commandBonus: -2.5 => -7.5 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [*] Mining Foreman Link - Laser Optimization I [*] commandBonus: -2.0 => -6.0 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [*] Mining Foreman Link - Laser Optimization II [*] commandBonus: -2.5 => -7.5 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [*] Mining Foreman Link - Mining Laser Field Enhancement I [*] commandBonus: 4.5 => 13.6 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [*] Mining Foreman Link - Mining Laser Field Enhancement II [*] commandBonus: 5.625 => 17.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [*] Siege Warfare Link - Active Shielding I [*] commandBonus: -2.0 => -4.8 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Siege Warfare Link - Active Shielding II [*] commandBonus: -2.5 => -6.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Siege Warfare Link - Shield Efficiency I [*] commandBonus: -2.0 => -4.8 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Siege Warfare Link - Shield Efficiency II [*] commandBonus: -2.5 => -6.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Siege Warfare Link - Shield Harmonizing I [*] commandBonus: -2.0 => -4.8 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Siege Warfare Link - Shield Harmonizing II [*] commandBonus: -2.5 => -6.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Skirmish Warfare Link - Evasive Maneuvers I [*] commandBonus: -2.0 => -6.4 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Skirmish Warfare Link - Evasive Maneuvers II [*] commandBonus: -2.5 => -8.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Skirmish Warfare Link - Interdiction Maneuvers I [*] commandBonus: 3.0 => 6.4 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Skirmish Warfare Link - Interdiction Maneuvers II [*] commandBonus: 3.75 => 8.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Skirmish Warfare Link - Rapid Deployment I [*] commandBonus: 2.0 => 5.6 [*] power: 200.0 => 100.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Skirmish Warfare Link - Rapid Deployment II [*] commandBonus: 2.5 => 7.0 [*] power: 210.0 => 110.0 [+] disallowActivateInForcefield: 1.0 [*] Ice Harvester I [*] volume: 100.0 => 25.0 [*] Strip Miner I [*] volume: 100.0 => 25.0 [*] Capital 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Upgrade II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Capital Memetic Algorithm Bank I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Capital Memetic Algorithm Bank II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Capital Signal Focusing Kit I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Scanning) [*] Capital Signal Focusing Kit II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Scanning) [*] Large Emission Scope Sharpener I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Large Emission Scope Sharpener II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Large Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Large Gravity Capacitor Upgrade II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Large Memetic Algorithm Bank I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Large Memetic Algorithm Bank II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Large Signal Focusing Kit I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Scanning) [*] Large Signal Focusing Kit II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Scanning) [*] Medium Emission Scope Sharpener I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Medium Emission Scope Sharpener II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Medium Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Medium Gravity Capacitor Upgrade II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Medium Memetic Algorithm Bank I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Medium Memetic Algorithm Bank II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Medium Signal Focusing Kit I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Scanning) [*] Medium Signal Focusing Kit II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Scanning) [*] Small Emission Scope Sharpener I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Small Emission Scope Sharpener II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Small Memetic Algorithm Bank I (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Small Memetic Algorithm Bank II (Rig Electronics => Rig Scanning) [*] Small Signal Focusing Kit I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Scanning) [*] Small Signal Focusing Kit II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Scanning) [*] Capital Ionic Field Projector I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Capital Ionic Field Projector II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Capital Targeting System Subcontroller I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Capital Targeting System Subcontroller II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Large Ionic Field Projector I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Large Ionic Field Projector II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Large Targeting System Subcontroller I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Large Targeting System Subcontroller II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Medium Ionic Field Projector I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Medium Ionic Field Projector II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Medium Targeting System Subcontroller I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Medium Targeting System Subcontroller II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Small Ionic Field Projector I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Small Ionic Field Projector II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Small Targeting System Subcontroller I (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Small Targeting System Subcontroller II (Rig Electronic Systems => Rig Targeting) [*] Banshee Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Caldari Navy Inferno Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Caldari Navy Mjolnir Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Caldari Navy Nova Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Caldari Navy Scourge Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Dread Guristas Inferno Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Dread Guristas Mjolnir Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Dread Guristas Nova Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Dread Guristas Scourge Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Guristas Inferno Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Guristas Mjolnir Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Guristas Nova Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Guristas Scourge Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Inferno Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Mjolnir Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Nova Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Sansha Mjolnir Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Scourge Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] True Sansha Mjolnir Torpedo [*] agility: 500.0 => 5.22012569356 [*] Inferno Rage Torpedo [*] agility: 851.952801968 => 5.22012569356 [*] Mjolnir Rage Torpedo [*] agility: 851.952801968 => 5.22012569356 [*] Nova Rage Torpedo [*] agility: 851.952801968 => 5.22012569356 [*] Scourge Rage Torpedo [*] agility: 851.952801968 => 5.22012569356 [*] Abandoned Sleeper Artifact [-] lootRespawnTime: 1200000000.0 [*] |
relentless with them about their "chores." He's an alcoholic, and it seems to make him a perfectionist. He's tall, balding, handsome in that Harry Smith way. Allis is small, tidy, worried. There are tapes of screaming rages involving Charley and his sons; their daughter, Morgan's mother, not much heard, leaves home at 16, following the advice in Philip Larkin's famous poem about destructive families "This Be the Verse:"
Get out as early as you can.
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The first line of that poem certainly describes the marriage of Charley and Allis. All four children are angry, miserable, neurotic in various ways. The family falls into the clutches of a psychiatrist named Lenn, who wrongly sends one son to a mental institution, diagnoses Charley as "the worst inferiority complex I've ever seen" and strews misery and anguish as freely as his advice. What we learn of the children later in life is that three of them, anyway, grew up into apparently happily married adults with children.
It was the family itself that was toxic. They needed to get out. Charley is hated by the children, and Allis thinks of herself as not meant for such a life. She and Charley never have a real talk about "open marriage," but it certainly suits good-time Charley, a man without a single moment of introspection in this film.
Home movies and now the ubiquitous videotape mean that everyday lives are now recorded with a detail not dreamed of earlier. We will never hear all Allis' recordings and see all her images, but this distillation by Morgan Dews might have been what she had in mind when she stored away those records of pain. They act as her justification of her life, her explanation of the misery of her children. I watched this film horrified and fascinated. There is such raw pain here. Allis might have read or seen "Revolutionary Road" and by comparison envied that marriage.
There are things you will see here that will lead you to some conclusions. I will leave you to them. All I can say is that I believe the daughter's guess at the end is correct. We learn that after Charley died, Allis moved to her own small cottage in Vermont and "continued her volunteer work." She lived another 30 years. She never mentioned Charley again.
The film opens today in New York and Los Angeles, and is available online at www.giganticdigital.com.[There was a video here]
The Occupy people took to the high seas for some mischief today. 'Twas aboard the USS Yorktown where they found Michele Bachmann, who was delivering a big foreign policy speech to god knows who.
They interrupted her and started to do their chant-repeaty schtick:
The protesters, who read from a script, used the "human megaphone" technique as they shouted, "This will only take a minute... You capitalize on dividing Americans / claiming people that disagree with you / are unpatriotic socialists / and you promote discrimination." Bachmann first stood frozen at the podium, seemingly unsure whether to let the protesters continue or try to stop them. Members of the audience started a loud counter-protest of "sit down!" to no avail.
Bachmann was escorted offstage by police and returned a few minutes later, saying, "Don't you love the First Amendment?"
And so it was, that the good ship Yorktown was retaken.Feb 6, 2016; Charlotte, NC, USA; Washington Wizards guard John Wall (2) during the second half of the game against the Charlotte Hornets at Time Warner Cable Arena. Hornets win 108-104. Mandatory Credit: Sam Sharpe-USA TODAY Sports
NBA Trade Deadline 2016: Do the Washington Wizards Have Any Untouchable Players?
NBA Trade Deadline 2016: Do the Washington Wizards Have Any Untouchable Players? by Ben Mehic
Washington Wizards Mailbag Monday: February 15, 2016
It’s Monday, people.
The NBA All-Star break is over. Valentine’s Day is over and your pharmacy-bought chocolates are probably stale. The Washington Wizards‘ fun time is over. It was cool to see John Wall perform well in the All-Star game, but we’re back to reality. The Wizards are below.500 and if they want to make a push towards the playoffs, the time is now.
Before the second half of the season begins, we took your questions.
If you want to be featured in next week’s edition, send us a question: @WizofAwes.
Today’s questions come from Twitter and Reddit.
Thanks for participating, and as always, happy Monday.
Is Marcus Markieff Morris a fit on the Wizards? I bet you could get him very cheap. I know he has attitude problems but he would be younger and help improve our defense. -via ethanw214
I know they’re twins, but I don’t think they’re conjoined. I’m assuming you mean Markieff — the Phoenix Suns’ Morris.
I wanted Kieff on the Washington Wizards. I thought he needed a change of scenery.
But then he tried to fight his teammate the other day.
No thanks.
Why wouldn't the wiz resign sessions this summer? He has been great. https://t.co/S0CVFRRvCr — Daniel Barish (@dmbarish) February 15, 2016
I’d want Ramon Sessions back in D.C. next year.
He’s fast, does a fantastic job of getting to the free throw line and might be the only dude on the team besides Wall that could create his own shot. But he’s going to get a raise and the Washington Wizards will consider adding Tomas Satoransky this upcoming season. Satoransky is already hesitant to join the Wizards and won’t come over if they have a backup point guard.
With that said, I don’t think it’s settled. The Wizards will probably reach out to Sessions’ representatives at the end of the season.
@WizOfAwes if you trade nene, who is our backup center? — Daniel Barish (@dmbarish) February 15, 2016
Ideally, the Washington Wizards would trade Nene and get another center back in a separate deal.
For instance, if the Wizards were to trade Nene to the New Orleans Pelicans in a package for Ryan Anderson, they could probably acquire Miles Plumlee from the Milwaukee Bucks for essentially nothing.
So, if they trade Nene, they would get a center who’s currently not on the roster.
@WizOfAwes What is your take on Randy Wittman? I kinda think he's one of the few Thot Coaches in the @nba #MailbagMonday — Domo Burger (@BurgerzBusty) February 15, 2016
He’s one of the few Thot Coaches? I don’t know what that means, Domo.
But, here’s my take on coach Randy Wittman: he’s a great dude and did a fantastic job of rebuilding the team’s culture. Without Wittman, the Washington Wizards never would’ve made the progress they did a few years ago. But he’s terribly flawed. His rotations are still horrendous and it’s February. Plus, he’s a defensive-minded coach. The team isn’t playing defense.
I want Wittman to get fired. It’s just the nature of the business.
Every coach is hired to eventually be fired. That’s just how professional basketball works. No one has survived besides Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich. Wittman isn’t the exception.
It’s time to get someone who will get the most out of the talent, specifically John Wall and Bradley Beal.
@BenMehicNBA @WizOfAwes Any good reason we are not exploring a trade for Markieff Morris? What do you think of him on our roster? — DL3 (@Davidacosta1980) February 15, 2016
He fights his teammates, guys.
Look, I think Kieff is really talented. He has all the tools to thrive as a stretch four. But you can’t fight your teammates. That’s a no-no. The Washington Wizards don’t need a locker room cancer on their fragile-minded roster.
@WizOfAwes Wall wore three different (Kobe's, Jordans, Buscemi's) shoes yesterday during the All Star Game…why? — John Cannady (@John_Cannady) February 15, 2016
John Wall is a sneaker free agent and he’s trying to steez while he can. Soon, he’ll probably get locked up by one of the major companies and his freedom will be gone. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t land with Jordan.
But, yeah, I’m not a shoe expert. I have friends who drop thousands of dollars on shoes and I never got it. I bought Wall’s first Reebok sneaker.
I think he’s just trying to have fun. But I’m clearly not the right person for this question.
@WizOfAwes will Wall ever play with another all star? Or will it be only during All Star weekend? — Arthur Reinaltt (@DistrictMamba) February 15, 2016
How cool was it to see Wall share the court with other actual NBA players? It was kind of weird, actually. He had teammates that knew how to play ball. Drew Gooden was no where to be seen. It was dope.
All jokes aside, Wall needs help. Wall has never played with another All-Star, and while Bradley Beal could become one, he’s oft-injured and can’t put together a string of consistent games.
I really, really hope the Washington Wizards don’t waste Wall’s prime like the Minnesota Timberwolves did with Kevin Garnett. Everyone on the roster is reliant on Wall. It’s not fair.
Eventually, I think the Wizards will feel the pressure and get an All-Star. I don’t think they’ll get a top-tier All-Star, but they could get someone like Paul Millsap or Al Horford. That’s certainly better than what they’re currently rolling with.
@WizOfAwes Has Wall surpassed Gilbert on the all time Wizards list? And do you believe Wall will retire as the greatest Wizard ever? — ¯_(ツ)_/¯ (@SamueIWhitter) February 15, 2016
As much as I love Gilbert Arenas, we kind of have to relax. He was awesome, sure — but he never led the Washington Wizards to the Conference Finals. He couldn’t stay healthy and was a knucklehead. In terms of fun-value, Wall might never surpass Gilbert. But in terms of overall production, Wall has passed Gilbert.
Wall is an All-Defensive team player and he’s an elite distributor — two things Gilbert wasn’t great at. He was also an injury away from leading the team to the Eastern Conference Finals. He’s done a lot for the Wizards.
I don’t think he’ll retire as the greatest Wizard ever, though — unless you’re leaving the Bullets out of it. If you are, then maybe. The franchise hasn’t had much success since they changed their name.
Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld are probably the best players in franchise history.
@WizOfAwes Give me your reasons why so many Kirk Cousins fans root for the NATS/CAPS and not the wizards?? #MailbagMonday #KeepItOneHundred — Domo Burger (@BurgerzBusty) February 15, 2016
The Washington Wizards are tough to root for. Football is way more popular than basketball, so the Washington football team will always have the advantage. As for the Nats and Caps, well, they’re actual contenders. The Wizards aren’t.
If the Wizards were a top-3 team, I think they’d get a bunch of bandwagon D.C. fans. But they’re not.
To check out the previous mailbags, click here. If you want to be featured in the next edition, feel free to give us a shout: @WizofAwes.The fall auction season was off to a strong start at the Sept. 8 Heritage Currency sale in Long Beach, Calif. It marked a return to normalcy in that, with the exception of small-size high-denomination notes, the biggest prices were all for large-size issues. Original images courtesy of Heritage Auctions.
The fall auction season was off to a strong start at the Sept. 8 Heritage Currency sale in Long Beach, Calif. The auction included 682 lots of large-size notes and 463 small-size notes (excluding national bank notes of both sizes), and realized $3,884,582 in total, including the buyer’s fees. It marked a return to normalcy in that, with the exception of small-size high-denomination notes, the biggest prices were all for large-size issues.
The highest price of all was the $152,750 attained by a Series 1891 $100 silver certificate (Friedberg 344) graded Paper Money Guaranty Extremely Fine 45 Exceptional Paper Quality. Only 31 examples are recorded of this note, all but a few in grades lower than this. Only an About Uncirculated 50 example has ever sold for more, and that was $176,250 in 2013.
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An F-167a Series 1863 $100 legal tender note (the Spread Eagle note) that sold for $135,125 in PCGS Currency Very Fine 30 Premium Paper Quality reached the highest price ever recorded for this note in a grade other than Uncirculated. The Spread Eagle note is one of the more iconic pieces of U.S. paper money, and one of the earliest. When this particular note last sold in 2000 it was for $25,300. Only 22 examples are currently recorded.
The $32,900 paid for an F-321 Series 1891 $20 silver certificate in PMG Gem Uncirculated 65 Exceptional Paper Quality was the fourth highest price ever reached for this note, and the highest ever for one in a grade below Gem 66, for which notes have twice exceeded $54,000. The relatively wide gap despite the closeness in grading is becoming familiar when buyers place a premium on perceived quality.
Foremost among the 797 national bank note offerings, at $35,250, was a fantastic discovery, a $10 Series 1882 Brown Back note (F-482) of the National Bank of Raleigh (North Carolina), graded Very Fine 30 Exceptional Paper Quality by PMG. Heritage called this an “extraordinary find” in that it is the first note ever reported for the bank. The story behind the note is as interesting as its rarity — it was part of a Christmas present along with two gold $2.50 coins from the bank’s cashier, F.K. Briggs, to a family member. It was consigned by the heir of Briggs’ granddaughter. Included in the lot were the two coins and the Christmas card.
Even with its a less interesting story, a Series 1902 $5 Plain Back note (F-601) of the First National Bank of Crows Landing (California) in PCGS Currency Very Fine 35 caught the attention of more than enough bidders and brought $32,900. Only two large-size notes are recorded from this bank, to go with nine known small-size issues, and none had been offered for sale in 40 years.
No comments on the state of the U.S. currency market these days would be complete without mention of high-denomination issues. In Long Beach, two $5,000 notes broke $140,000 each. The more significant of the two, at $152,750, was a Series 1928 $5,000 Federal Reserve note from the Chicago District (F-2220-G) in PMG About Uncirculated 55. Series 1928 notes are much less frequently seen than ones from the 1934 series. Heritage, in fact, reckons that only about two dozen of them exist, from all districts. The other $5,000 issue, this from Series 1934 and also a Federal Reserve note from Chicago (F-2221-G), sold for $141,000 with a grade of PMG Choice Uncirculated 64.
Next up on the auction docket is a sale by Stack’s Bowers Galleries at the Whitman Baltimore Expo Nov. 1 to 5 followed by a Lyn Knight sale Nov. 17 to 19 at the Professional Currency Dealers Association Convention in Rosemont, Ill.Library > Media > Sunset of the Habitable Worlds
Data used in the creation of the previous image: Star Star Type Apparent Magnitude from Planet Apparent Size from Planet (°) Sun G -26.7 0.53 Gliese 667C M -26.8 1.39 Kepler-22 G -26.6 0.56 HD 85512 K -27.4 1.10 Gliese 581 M -25.3 1.39 For more information about these worlds check the Habitable Exoplanet Catalog (HEC). This data is also available to construct similar views for any of the confirmed and Kepler exoplanets candidates in the full database of HEC. Individual frames are available under request for editorial and educational purposes only. The image of the beach was taken June 14, 2012 @ 6:45 AM AST in Puerto Rico while relaxing. This figure shows an actual image of a sunset on Earth compared to artistic representations for the best candidates of potential habitable worlds so far. The image corrects for the size, colors, and brightness of the star and sky as seen from an Earth-like world located in the orbits of these worlds. The size of and colors of the star of Kepler-22 b look similar to Earth because it orbits a Sun-like star. The sunsets of Gliese 667Cc and 581d look much redder because they orbit a red dwarf star, with the sky of Gliese 581d much darker due to its greater distance. The star of HD 85512b is the brightest of all cases although the star of Gliese 667Cc is the biggest. CREDIT: PHL @ UPR AreciboA Melbourne photographer has launched a not-for-profit watch line to support charities, the arts and “random acts of kindness”.
Chris Cincotta, founder of the Humans in Melbourne Facebook page, said he was inspired to tap public support and goodwill after gaining more than 100,000 followers in just six months.
"It dawned on me that it could be a great opportunity to do something that would have a fantastic effect on the city,” he told 9news.com.au.
The line of watches is named “EnruobleM” - Melbourne spelled backwards - reflecting the “backwards” approach of his company, whereby all proceeds will go directly back into the public.
The four watches, available via crowdfunding website Pozible, come in several colours and feature leather straps, stainless steel casing and are water resistant.
Already Mr Cincotta has managed to raise more than $18,000 of his total campaign goal of $30,000.
Sixty percent of that sum he expects to dedicate towards charities and organisations in Melbourne, while the remaining 40 percent would be divided between the arts and “random acts of kindness”.
Mr Cincotta said that while the project is still in its early days, he is currently in the process of obtaining not-for-profit status for his company.
He told 9news.com.au he also intends to launch a website where members of the public can apply for grants, and will form a board to decide upon the distribution of his company’s funds.
"As close as I am to EnruobleM, I want other's input as well,” he said.
Have a good news story you’d like to share? We’d like to hear from you. You can reach us at contact@9news.com.au.
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019One camera that many have been looking forward to from Canon in 2017 is the EOS 6D Mark II, the follow-up to the popular entry level full frame 6D. But an interesting report from Canon Watch is now suggesting that we may not get a 6D Mark II at all, instead of seeing Canon launching their own full frame mirrorless camera to go head to head with Sony’s A7 series.
We have heard reports of secret Canon tests on full frame mirrorless cameras going back to as early as 2014, so the idea that big red could be nearing the launch of such a camera is not all that surprising. However, the revelation (though unofficial) that this could be a camera that Canon launches in place of the 6D Mark II is a surprising thing to note for sure.
So why would Canon ditch the 6D line in favor of a full frame mirrorless? Well, the report goes on to say that this full frame Canon mirrorless actually features a full-fledged EF mount, a spec that will simultaneously incite cheers and crying. So it would not be a stretch to think that Canon still considers mirrorless lower than its professional level DSLRs, so replacing its entry-level DSLR with an entry-level full frame mirrorless could seem like a better move as a full frame mirrorless launch would no doubt command more press buzz than simply a 6D refresh.
Now this is complete speculation, but Canon could also be considering something like they have done with the 80D and the EOS M5. Which is to say that the 80D and EOS M5 are virtually the same spec wise and perform very similarly, one just being mirrorless and the other a DSLR. Maybe Canon could launch something like an EOS M6 and the EOS 6D Mk II, where the two cameras feature virtually identical specs, just one being mirrorless full frame and the other being DSLR.
That honestly, would be a strategy that makes a lot of sense to me. It allows Canon to appeal to the photographers considering a mirrorless move (which right now would almost certainly mean moving to another system), keeping them in the Canon family, while at the same time appealing to those who still prefer a mirrored world with a 6D DSLR.
Regardless, this could be a really interesting year from Canon should any of the above occur, and I honestly don’t feel like things have been all that exciting from Canon in a while, so it would be nice to see them hit the market with something totally unexpected – like a full frame mirrorless – that just knocks everyone on their asses.The elephant in the room had another superb season worthy of his large mammalian status.
Coming into this season, LaMarcus Aldridge had been an All-Star in his previous three campaigns. Since those accolades started coming in, the evaluation, expectation and perception of his game has remained largely the same. The man is steady, almost to the point that he can be overlooked. Many consider him underappreciated and it's really only obvious how important he is when he's not there. In that way, this season has been more of the same.
Any conversation about Aldridge has to begin and end in the post. He's one of the tallest power forwards in the game and he uses his size, along with a host of moves and counter moves, to score over, through and around defenders. LaMarcus had the second most post ups and scored 0.96 points per possessions. That's good for the ninth best rate in the league but no one ahead of him was even close in terms of volume.
When he first came into the league, Aldridge relied on his fadeaway so much he was almost a one trick pony. The last few years, that has flipped and he tries to get to the middle first, using the fadeaway as a counter. He's started using his up and under more frequently these past few years, but all of that was true last year. In the post, Aldridge was as dominant as ever using mostly the same arsenal we've come to know and love.
Moving forward, Aldridge said in a Bleacher Report feature that he wants to focus on his left hand.
I feel like my right hand is pretty good in getting to the middle, making plays and doing up-and-unders. But I feel like if I can have a consistent left-hand jump hook or left-hand drive, that's going to take my game to the next level.
Next level would be right. Pretty much the only way people handle Aldridge is to overplay him to the middle and force him into his fadeaway. That works, sort of, but trading more of those fadeaways for spin moves and easy jump hooks could make him even more unguardable.
What goes less noticed is the job he does on the other end. His elite size for the power forward position bothers people. He combines that with active hands and good positioning to limit opponents to a paltry 0.67 points per possession. That's second best in the league (minimum 100 possessions). Only Blake Griffin really came close to matching Aldridge's efficiency on both ends. Given how many more possessions Aldridge spent on the block, it's fair to say he was the best post player in the league this season.
Speaking of things Aldridge doesn't get enough credit for, the guy is a great rebounder. Not only does he average over 10 rebounds a game, he dominates the offensive glass and rebounds his area better than almost anyone. LaMarcus secured 72.2% of his rebounding chances, defined as anytime Aldridge is within 3.5 feet of the rebound. That's fourth in the league (minimum 300 total rebounds). If he's near it, he's getting it. That's huge for the Blazers and the team rebounded much better with him on the floor as a result.
LaMarcus' job in the pick and roll was a little shakier. The Blazers' defensive philosophy is sound, dropping back and encouraging mid-range jumpers. However, lots of teams employ this strategy and few drop as far back as Aldridge and company. This gives opposing ball handlers more room to operate and puts a lot of pressure on Portland's guards -- pressure they haven't been able to handle yet. Aldridge allowed 0.88 points per possession when defending the roll man, right around league average. By no means is LaMarcus bad at defending the pick and roll, but he's not exemplary like he is in other areas. The team's struggles to contain pick and rolls falls partly on his shoulders.
Ideally, Aldridge could mix up his pick and roll coverages, dropping against some matchups and hedging others. It's unclear if this is a decision by the coaching staff or a limitation to Aldridge's game but some matchups are more difficult because the Blazers can only defend one way. They can only drop.
Unless they switch. Another thing LaMarcus doesn't get enough credit for is being one of the few bigs who can defend the post at an elite level and contain guards along the perimeter. His exceptional mobility also helps him defend rangier, quicker bigs like Ryan Anderson. He can blow up small ball matchups by competently checking small forwards on one end and taking them down to the block on the other. This gives LaMarcus an interesting versatility. He does some things few others can but almost never hedges, something many other bigs can do.
Even if hedging is never a part of Aldridge's game, the ability to change the level he meets opposing ball handlers would go a long way to pressuring opposing teams. Marc Gasol almost never hedged but he picked up Lillard near the three point line making it difficult for Damian to get to his pullup. Aldridge could do something similar in certain matchups. This is a team decision as it changes the extent of weakside help that's required but it's something to look for next season. Given his success switching pick and rolls, he should be capable of meeting guards higher up the court and this would give the Blazers a new defensive wrinkle they lacked this season.
By the numbers, Aldridge isn't a great pick and roll player on offense either. He scored 0.83 points per possession as the roll man. That puts him right between Roy Hibbert and Zaza Pachulia in the rankings. This isn't necessarily surprising given his propensity to pop for long two's. However, it misses the hub effect he has on the offense.
The threat of Aldridge's mid-range jumper creates an easy way for the Blazers to swing the ball from side to side and force defenders into tough closeouts. It's a relatively simple pass to hit Aldridge once he's popped. This forces weakside defenders to stunt, bothering LaMarcus and then recovering to their men if Aldridge swings the ball. LaMarcus took the highest number of spot up attempts of any big man in the league and nailed a solid 46% of them. These recoveries are difficult and the extra movement from the defender can be enough to help Portland's wings beat their men off the dribble, get into the paint, and keep the offense humming.
This effect can be most easily seen in the on/off numbers. Aldridge had the largest effect on the Blazers' offense, except for Arron Afflalo. Afflalo's time with the Blazers loosely matched the stretch when they started to get their offense going during the second half of the season, so his numbers are a bit inflated. LaMarcus was certainly Portland's most important offensive player this season.
Probably the biggest change Aldridge made to his game was moving some of those spot up attempts out to the three point line. Aldridge shot seven times as many threes as last year and made a career high 35% of them. Interestingly, he took about the same number of long two's in the 20-24 foot range but traded 15-19 footers for threes. Even so, his effective field goal percentage rose as a result and his continued progression out to the three point line is another to thing to watch for.
All of that is to say, while Aldridge might not be the league's most efficient scorer, he's still the most important player in one of the league's best offenses. This becomes obvious anytime he misses a game.
On January 19th, LaMarcus tore a ligament in his left hand. At the time, the Blazers were 30-11, comfortably ahead in the division. They would lose two in a row to the Suns and Celtics before Aldridge made the courageous decision to postpone surgery and return against the Washington Wizards. Not only would he return, he would string together three monster performances in a row.
Besides his first two games against Houston, those three games are probably the most memorable stretch of his career. Aldridge took a huge risk, gutted through significant pain and somehow came out a better player. Both his shooting and rebounding percentages actually rose after the injury. Aldridge didn't just give what he could. He gave everything the Blazers needed.
Without Matthews, Afflalo, or Wright the odds were stacked against the Blazers versus a Grizzlies team whose defensive performance against Golden State might indicate the first round had more to do with the Grizzlies' brilliance than the Blazers' struggles. However, a few themes remained true.
Against Houston, Aldridge found success in the post and in isolation, winning games, forcing doubles and then passing out of them. Against the Spurs and Memphis, they used bigger players to bother him on the block and hedged screens to contest his pick and pop jumpers. This limited two of LaMarcus' strengths and put him in a four on three with the ball in his hands.
When a team aggressively hedges a pick and roll, they double team the ball handler for a short period of time. If he can pass the ball to the rolling big man, they have a brief four on three (because two defenders are guarding the one ball handler). It's the big's job to attack and make the right read before the defense can recover.
Aldridge has never been a good passer off the dribble or in the pick and roll, and the Blazers have struggled to burn teams in those situations. In that same Bleacher Report article, LaMarcus said he thought he was a better passer out of the post than in pick and rolls and I have to agree. It's a part of why Portland struggled against teams like Memphis and the Clippers all year.
As is typical in basketball, the Blazers were as successful as their best player and their identity as a team mirrors their star's strengths and weaknesses. They play through the post and out of the pick and roll but struggle when teams trap. They play solid defense in isolation and rebound well but could improve against the pick and roll. They're one of the best in the league but are just on the fringes of the elite. You could say all the same things about Aldridge.
In some sense, LaMarcus' season was a confirmation of what we already knew. However, he also showed some new wrinkles that should give fans hope that he, and by extension the team, can continue to improve and reach the mountain top. His three point shooting is a big deal. Improving his left and passing could take the offense to a whole new level. His mobility could help the team increase its defensive pressure and control pick and rolls better. The potential is all there. It's just a question of if Aldridge wants to continue on this journey.
If he does, then this season will go down as the year he sacrificed his health and his financial security for the good of the team. It will go down as the season when he chose to be a Blazer for life and took a big step towards being the franchise's greatest player. If he leaves, this season will be a final goodbye. A heartwarming campaign that was fleeting and came up short. Everything changes with his decision, including the legacy and interpretation of his season.
It may not be fair, but that's what happens when you're the biggest animal in the room.
*All stats are from stats.NBA.comTransportation infrastructure is too important to the economy to be subject to across-the-board cuts in federal funding without first ensuring that alternate revenue streams are available. Ideally, each transportation mode should be made as self-supporting as possible via direct user fees. This would also make it feasible to use revenue-bond financing to do more reconstruction and new construction than would occur under the current policy of funding capital investment from operating cash flow. This approach would also tend to weed out projects whose benefits don’t significantly exceed their costs.
One inspiration for this policy brief is the report of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Simpson-Bowles Commission) in 2010. While its recommendations were not implemented, its proposals for transportation infrastructure reflected the above approach, including utilizing highway user tax revenues to make the Highway Trust Fund once again self- supporting, removing large and medium hub airports from the federal airport grants program to allow them to support themselves via passenger fees, and making inland waterway systems fully user-funded. This policy brief seeks to apply these users-pay/users-benefit principles more thoroughly to transportation infrastructure.
Problems with Current Federal Transportation Funding
The federal government assists the major modes of transportation via several systems of user taxes and trust funds:
Highway users pay several federal user taxes (mostly on gasoline and diesel fuel) that support the Highway Trust Fund, from which grants are made for highway and transit programs.
Air travelers pay a tax on airline tickets, and aircraft operators pay fuel taxes, with the proceeds of these and other user taxes feeding the Aviation Trust Fund, which pays for airport grants and for the capital costs and some of the operating costs of the air traffic control system.
Ships unloading cargo at U.S. seaports pay a harbor maintenance tax, which streams into the Harbor Maintenance Trust Fund, from which funds are allocated for harbor dredging projects overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers.
And users of U.S. inland waterways pay a diesel fuel tax for the Inland Waterways Trust Fund, which pays for a portion of the cost of maintaining and improving waterways, locks and dams.
While this approach sounds somewhat market-oriented, it fails to direct resources to their most productive use, for the following reasons:
First, user taxes are still legally taxes. Seen as such, Congress is often reluctant to increase their levels, even though in many cases transportation infrastructure urgently requires additional investment.
Second, each of the above programs builds in significant redistribution from some parts of the country to others, from some categories of users to others, and from general taxpayers to specific transportation modes, with political factors far outweighing any rigorous assessment of whether the economic benefits exceed the costs of the projects being funded.
Third, federal involvement significantly increases the cost of building projects with federal money, via such policies as the Davis-Bacon Act, Buy America Act, the Jones Act, and other regulations and requirements.
Fourth, since many of the federal grant programs focus on new capacity, decisions made by infrastructure owners tend to be biased in favor of more capital-intensive projects (e.g., light rail rather than bus rapid transit) than would be the case were they spending mostly their own money. This same focus on capital programs tends to encourage the ever-present temptation of state and local policymakers to under-invest in proper levels of maintenance in favor of creating more-politically desirable ribbon-cutting opportunities.
Another underlying problem is that the current federal grant funding approach has encouraged state and local infrastructure owners to fund most capital projects out of annual cash flow, rather than financing them. A basic principle of public finance is that long-lived infrastructure can and should be financed (i.e., capital should be raised up-front from the capital markets) and paid for over time, as the users of that infrastructure derive benefits from it. This is analogous to the way most people acquire their homes: not by saving until they can afford to pay cash, or building the home a room at a time as cash flow permits, but by taking out a long-term mortgage and paying it off over time, so as to obtain the benefits of home-ownership much sooner. Non-transportation infrastructure entities-electric and gas utilities, pipelines, telecommunications and water utilities-generally finance their major projects via revenue bonds, paid for by their users over many years. Railroads and toll roads do likewise, as do airports (to some extent) and air traffic control providers overseas. The United States is one of the few advanced developed countries that makes relatively little use of revenue-based financing for its transportation infrastructure.
Thus, the emerging and ongoing fiscal crisis of the federal government offers an opportunity to rethink how this country pays for and manages its critically important transportation infrastructure.
AttachmentsStory highlights A new video of Asiana plane crash shows firefighters spotting girl on ground
Video shows firefighters failed to save Chinese girl, her family's attorney says
"The video... shows at least five firefighters who saw her," attorney says
Video challenges city's account the girl was concealed by firefighting foam
A new video of last year's Asiana Airlines plane crash in San Francisco shows firefighters spotting a 16-year-old Chinese girl lying on the ground, but failing to help her, an attorney for the girl's family charges.
Ye Meng Yuan was later run over by two different fire trucks, killing her, said Justin Green, a lawyer for the girl's family.
The newly released video challenges an account by fire officials that the Chinese teenager was accidentally run over because she may have been covered in firefighting foam, Green asserts.
In fact, the video depicts one firefighter alerting |
$1.2B • 2013: $1.55B • 2014-2015: $1.65B to $1.68B • 2015: $1.99B
The Met Council also said changes are needed to address operational and safety requirements, including five gated light-rail crossings and improvements at five shared freight and light-rail crossings.Citing the meteoric rise of the round-ball game in Australia, code-hopper Karmichael Hunt has flagged a possible switch to the Hyundai A-League to stake an early claim in its booming recreational drugs market.
“I’ve been around long enough and involved in enough different sports to know how this works,” explained Hunt. “The young players come through all innocent at first, but before long they’re regularly trawling through their phonebooks at 6am looking to get their hands on some rock.This league needs somebody it can trust.”
Hunt has held discussions with a number of clubs across the country, but is believed to be favouring two Victorian teams, Melbourne Victory and Melbourne City, for their close proximity to Revolver nightclub.
Stay connected by liking Inside Sauce on Facebook. Or you can follow Inside Sauce on Twitter if you are into that sort of thing.TNMCorps is an online crowdsourcing mapping project with volunteers successfully editing structures in all 50 States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. As part of The National Map, structures include schools, hospitals, post offices, police stations, cemeteries, and other important public buildings. By updating and verifying structures data, volunteers are making significant contributions to USGS National Structures Database, The National Map, and ultimately U.S. Topo Maps!
Anyone with an interest in contributing can volunteer. It is easy to sign up and get started! All you need is access to the internet, an email address, and a willingness to learn. “How to” documentation including a comprehensive User Guide and a Quick Start Guide will have you up and editing quickly. Begin editing in your own hometown or anywhere in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Volunteers earn virtual badges for participating and are recognized for their contributions (with permission) via USGS and National Map social media.
Follow us on Twitter @USGSTNM or #TNMCorps or LIKE us on Facebook!
Our new editor:
Volunteer Contributed Points:A 2-year-old Missouri girl died after her mom’s boyfriend injured the toddler using “wrestling moves” that included picking her up and slamming her on the ground, authorities said Tuesday.
Richard Gamache Jr., 24, of House Springs, was charged Tuesday with abuse or neglect of a child resulting in death. His girlfriend, 19-year Cheyenne Cook, is charged with endangering the welfare of a child.
READ MORE: Man acquitted in 18-month-old boy’s wrestling move death
Jefferson County Sheriff David Marshak said detectives found “digital data” exchanged between Gamache and Cook that documented the abuse, including communications related to concealing it.
“This child was essentially tortured,” Marshak said in a news release.
Detectives determined that one of the moves Gamache used, called a “Batista bomb,” involved picking up the girl by her waist, lifting her above his shoulders and throwing her onto the ground.
The alleged abuse was discovered after the girl had a seizure on May 16, Marshak said. The child, identified only by her initials “AC,” was taken to a hospital and died three days later.
Gamache was originally charged last week with abuse and neglect of a child. The charge was upgraded after the girl’s death.
Gamache is jailed on $500,000 cash-only bond and does not yet have a listed attorney who could comment on the allegations.Everybody knows about the Loch Ness Monster and Megalodon. You might also be aware that there is supposed to be an Apatosaurus living in the unexplored depths of the Congo. But there are quite a few other prehistoric animals said to be still walking the Earth in various remote places.
10 The Mapinguari
“The moment you hear it, all your hairs stand on end,” said Manuel Vitorino Pinheiro dos Santos of his supposed encounter with the South American cryptid known as the Mapinguari. According to a Discover Magazine article, the Brazilian was hunting in the Amazon when a blood-curdling scream echoed around the forest. Dos Santos, an experienced hunter, immediately ran and hid in a river. He heard the call four more times as the creature moved away.
While some have likened the Mapinguari to a South American Bigfoot, it has also been described as an enormous, sloth-like creature with large curved claws, reddish fur, and a stench to peel paint. This has led cryptozoologists to speculate that the myths actually refer to a surviving species of ground sloth, a group of gigantic, bear-like creatures believed to have gone extinct around 5,000 years ago. In 1994, ornithologist and scholar of the Amazon David C. Oren set out to try and track the Mapinguari in the rainforests of western Brazil, collecting over 100 eyewitness accounts of the creature. Unfortunately, Oren’s expedition was largely unsuccessful, coming away with only some casts of footprints, a clump of fur that turned out to be from an agouti, and fecal matter that was later identified as belonging to a giant anteater.
9 The Lukwata
One of the more legendary entries on our list, the Lukwata is a Sudanese cryptid said to lurk within the swamps around Lake No. It is usually described as a great serpent up to 30 meters (100 ft) in length. According to a 1937 article by Captain W. Hichens: “its eyes flash deadly fire and... it feeds on men and large animals, which it seizes with monstrous bristling tentacles protruding from its muzzle.” Admittedly, this doesn’t sound much like any known prehistoric beast, but other accounts describe only a long neck with a small head, similar to a Saurian such as Apatosaurus or possibly Plesiosaurus.
The Lukwata was also known in Uganda, where the Baganda, Wasoga, and Kavirondo tribes supposedly associated the creature with sleeping sickness and made burnt offerings of sheep and cattle to the beast.
8 The Japanese Plesiosaur Carcass
In 1977, a Japanese fishing vessel was trawling for mackerel near New Zealand when its nets dragged something very peculiar up from the deep. The carcass, which nobody could positively identify, but which looked remarkably like a Plesiosaur, caused such a stir that the Japanese government issued a commemorative stamp depicting a Plesiosaurus skeleton that same year.
While the media might be expected to play up the “surviving dinosaur” angle, a few scientists surprisingly did so as well—perhaps because they weren’t used to working with samples as badly decomposed as this one was. But it wasn’t long before other, better scientists pointed out that carcasses of this sort are discovered fairly regularly and usually turn out to be sharks or whales. Soon after the carcass became international news, tissue samples produced evidence that the creature was actually a dead basking shark. Decomposing basking shark carcasses lose the dorsal and caudal fins first, followed by most of the lower head area, making them resemble a “sea serpent” or Plesiosaur.
Unfortunately, after a crew member took a few samples and measurements, the carcass was released back into the ocean to prevent it from spoiling the mackerel catch, making it impossible to definitively refute claims of prehistoric origin.
7 The Queensland Tiger
The Queensland tiger is a catlike, German Shepherd–sized marsupial long rumored to live in Australia’s Queensland Rainforest. Known to the local Aborigines as the Yarri, it first came to the attention of white settlers in the 1870s. There were a flurry of sightings in the 1940s and ’50s before, in 1961, Craig Black claimed to have seen a female carrying a pouched cub in Ben Lomond National Park. Three years later, a traveler named Rilla Martin took a picture supposedly depicting the beast. Martin’s picture gained instant notoriety as “the Ozenkadnook tiger photo.” The jury is still out on whether the photo is authentic, although what looks like an artificial prop supporting the creature has been identified sticking out of the bushes.
Fake photos or not, cryptozoologists have theorized that the “tiger” is a surviving species of Thylacoleo, a genus of carnivorous marsupials often called “marsupial lions.” Others believe that the Queensland tiger is a mainland version of Thylacine, the famous Tasmanian tiger, which is believed to have gone extinct in the 1930s.
6 The Kaiaimunu
One of the strangest dinosaurs to have ever lived, Therizinosaurus looks like a bizarre mixture of horse and bird, with awkward, Edward Scissorhands–like claws sticking from its forelimbs and feathery protrusions coming from its elbows. Oh, and, at least according to a missionary group from Creation Ministries International, the creature is still around as part of a lost world of living prehistoric creatures on the small islands of West New Britain in Papua New Guinea.
According to the group, nine natives of West New Britain have spotted the creature since the late 1990s. To make the story even more interesting, the group also claims that the islanders have seen a second creature, this one matching the description of a sauropod, possibly Apatosaurus, swimming between the islands. Of course, why a fundamentalist creationist group that believes the world is less than 6,000 years old would have an interest in proving dinosaurs still exist is anyone’s guess. But that isn’t the end of prehistoric sightings in New Guinea.
5 The Gazeka
The Gazeka legend was originally started in 1910, when a widely syndicated newspaper account described explorer C. A. W. Monckton’s ascent of Mount Albert Edward in the west of British New Guinea. There, he supposedly came across the tracks of some enormous beast, which came to be known as “Monckton’s Gazeka.”
According to the story, which does not appear in Monckton’s own memoirs, the explorer supposedly discovered the monster attacking a village of pygmies and opened fire on it. “The huge Gazeka at once turned upon him. As it reared upon its hind legs and pawed the air it looked to the hunter as big as a house, standing fully 25 feet high. Two of Monckton’s bullets seemed to take effect, as a stream of blood flowed freely from the animal’s shoulder, but before Monckton was able to reload the animal turned and fled. By that time it was too dark to follow him, and Monckton never had another opportunity to renew his pursuit.”
While there are a number of holes in the story (New Guinea is not known for its pygmies), the article states that the supposed description of the creature reminded Dr. W. D. Matthew of the American Museum of Natural History of a Diprotodon, the Pleistocene epoch’s “Giant Wombat.” Diprotodon was the largest marsupial to ever live, growing up to 3 meters (10 ft) from nose to tail.
Accompanying the article was a depiction of the pygmy race reportedly observed by the expedition, with an artist’s reconstruction of the giant footprints of the Gazeka. Creationists have claimed there are similarities between the reconstruction and Diprotodon‘s footprints. Unfortunately, they don’t match nearly as well as the creationists claim.
4 Ngoubou
In 2000, cryptozoologists William J. Gibbons and David Woetzel were in Cameroon doing preliminary research for an expedition to search for the fabled Mokele-mbembe when local pygmies told them of yet another cryptid in the area. The creature, which supposedly fought elephants over territory despite being smaller in size, was described as a Ngoubou (“rhinoceros”). However, the pygmies insisted that the creature had an additional six horns around a frill, reminiscent of Styracosaurus, a Late Cretaceous beaked dinosaur similar to the better-known Triceratops.
“Dutifully, we showed them the drawings of the Triceratops and again were rebuffed by the comment that while it looked like the Ngoubou it did not have nearly enough horns and that they were in the wrong place on the triceratops. I asked what they meant by that, the men told us that Ngoubou had six horns on the frill itself and one of them drew the configuration for me on a scrap of paper.”
The difficulty with this theory is that Styracosaurus fossils have never been found outside of North America. Because some natives of the region describe the Ngoubou quite differently, and do not recall a frill, some cryptozoologists instead identify the creature with Stegosaurus or Kentrosaurus (which at least had the decency to come from Africa).
3 Quetzalcoatlus Northropi
On September 25, 2001, a 19-year-old driving along Pennsylvania’s Route 119 reported what he described as “flags flapping in a thunderstorm” coming from above his car. When he looked up, he was astounded to see what looked like a bird with a 3–4.5 meter (10–15 ft) wingspan and a strange, elongated head flying above him. Over the next few months, two more witnesses would report seeing similar creatures in Greensville and Erie County, Pennsylvania. The reports were reminiscent of a string of sightings that took place in Texas in 1976 and 1982. In all cases, the creature described sounded remarkably similar to a Pterosaur. The sightings in Texas even occurred near to where the fossil of Quetzalcoatlus northropi, a large Pterosaur of the Late Cretaceous, was first discovered.
Interestingly, these “Pterosaur” sightings seemed to occur close to each other in waves. That suggests that people were really seeing something—but what? One obvious candidate is the frigate bird, whose grey feathers can look like leathery skin from the right distance and whose wingspan can reach up to 2.5 meters (8 ft). The frigate bird hardly ever lands except to tend its young and can soar effortlessly over long distances.
Over in Africa, the peoples of the Congo, Zambia, and a number of other regions speak of Kongamoto: “the Overturner of Boats.” It is described as featherless with smooth skin, a beak full of teeth, and a wingspan of 1–2 meters (4–7 ft). On the Gold Coast, British explorers in the 1920s heard tales of the Susabonsam, which grew to the height of a man and had thin, tenebrous wings like a bat.
The truly large sightings of Kongamoto could be a surviving group of Quetzalcoatlus northropi, which, at the height of a giraffe, was the largest flying animal to have ever lived. Of course, they could also be condors, various storks, or other large birds seen in silhouette—or they might only be legends or outright hoaxes. But in 1988, Professor Roy Mackal led an expedition into the deserts of Namibia. He was investigating intriguing reports of a creature with a 9-meter (30 ft) wingspan seen gliding through the air. Eyewitness reports stated that it would appear at dusk, flying between two hills. Some even claimed that the winged monstrosity glowed in the dark. While the mission was unsuccessful, one expedition member claimed to have seen it from a distance, describing it as “a giant glider shape, black with white markings.”
2 Titanoboa Cerrejonensis
Titanoboa cerrejonensis was a prehistoric snake measuring up to 13 meters (42 ft), making it the largest snake known to science. Its fossil remains were found in northeastern Colombia and Jason Head of the University of Toronto says that he “just about screamed” when he saw the size of the fossils. We would, too.
So it shouldn’t come as much surprise that the Amazon has legends of giant snakes much larger than the anaconda that makes the region its home. Natives of the Amazon call it the “Yacumama” (“Mother of the Water”), “Black Boa,” “Sucuri Gigante,” or “Cobra Grande” and reports have ranged from 50 meters (164 ft) to a more realistic 18–24 meters (60–80 ft). There have been reports of anacondas that have reached lengths approaching the bottom range of Yucumama sightings, but none have been confirmed by science.
Opinion is divided as to whether or not such reports, if they are to be believed, represent cases of giant anacondas (meaning that science has yet to document the true upper limits of their size), an entirely new species of snake, or a prehistoric survival of Titanoboa or Gigantophis garstini. In 2009, a man from Northern Ireland named Mark Warner and his son Greg traveled to the region to try to capture evidence of the creature, assembling a team to carry out aerial surveys of selected locations. After 12 days in the jungle, hazardous weather conditions, hundreds of still photographs, and hours of video, the two men captured a photo of what they claimed to be a gigantic snake, about 40 meters (131 ft) long and almost 2 meters (6 ft) wide.
Now, there has been some debate about just how large the anaconda can grow, but 40 meters is an extraordinary claim requiring a lot more evidence than a rather unclear aerial photograph. Warner and his son have planned additional expeditions to track down the monster and have recommended thermal imaging surveys of the region, but so far no new evidence has surfaced.
1 The Burrunjor
You just knew the real king of the beasts had to be around here somewhere, and of course he’s from Australia, where everything seems to want to kill you anyway.
The Australian Aboriginal peoples call it the Burrunjor, describing it as a bipedal giant reptile with strong legs and small, almost useless arms. Sound familiar? Throughout the 1950s, Australian cattle ranchers reported the bipedal tracks of some large creature that was attacking their livestock. One of the most dramatic sightings (which continue to this day) occurred near the McArthur River in 1957:
“Cattle began to panic. The ranchers were perplexed, especially when one of their team ran screaming into a nearby river for relative safety... a loud grunting and snorting noise was heard. Witnesses viewed the silhouette of a tall monster fleeing into a nearby scrub land and daybreak revealed several mutilated cattle, some half eaten.”
Other candidates for the Burrunjor are Allosaurus, Utahraptor, or nearly any other mid- to large-size Therapod. The remarkable thing about the Burrunjor tales is that, unlike most cryptid stories, reports of the Burrunjor stay remarkably consistent over time. But how could a population of creatures as large as the mighty Tyrannosaur feed themselves, aside from the occasional cow or crocodile? Maybe they ate all the other giant lizards that supposedly live in Australia.
+ The Velociraptors Of The Old West
There have been many little-known sightings of smaller, Therapod-like lizards across the American West, collectively referred to as “River Dinos” or “River Lizards.” Examples include the “Mountain Boomer” of West Texas, said to be a bipedal lizard up to 2 meters (6.5 ft) tall, with greenish or brownish skin. In 1993, an investigator named Jimmy Ward claimed to have heard tales about, “a giant lizard that walked on its hind legs and whose voice sounded like thunder.” The Colorado “River Lizards” and “Oklahoma Raptors,” previously thought by some to be Dromaeosaurs (which, unfortunately for the eyewitnesses, are now known to be feathered dinosaurs), are more commonly sighted than the Boomer. In 1993, a woman came forward to claim she had seen tall gray (or green) lizard-like creatures no less than three times in her life. Her first encounter was in May 1935, when she witnessed five of the creatures near Pagosa Springs.
There are several photographs in existence supposedly portraying living American dinosaurs. One of the best known, pictured above, shows a young man with a rifle holding what looks like the dead carcass of a baby dinosaur that he presumably shot. Another shows what looks like a Tyrannosaurus jutting out from just over a hill.
Reports like this persist because, well, it’s the Wild West with dinosaurs! Who can’t get behind that?
Lance is a science enthusiast, skeptic, freelance graphic designer and writer interested in topics on science and skepticism, history, atheism, religious issues and history, and a wealth of other subjects. You can look for him on Facebook until he starts a blog or something.A 33-year-old Ocala Police Department officer was accidentally shot and killed by a fellow officer Monday during firearms training at the Lowell Correctional Institution.
A 33-year-old Ocala Police Department officer was accidentally shot and killed by a fellow officer Monday during firearms training at the Lowell Correctional Institution.
Jared Forsyth and the second officer were taking part in routine training at the firing range and had completed live firing at about 3 p.m. They were in an area where weapons are cleaned when the accident happened, according to OPD Chief Greg Graham.
The second officer's weapon discharged, striking Forsyth in the arm. The bullet traveled through the officer's arm and into his chest. Forsyth was wearing a bulletproof vest, but the sides are not protected with bullet-resistant material, Graham said.
A somber Graham said the officer was resuscitated by paramedics once in the ambulance on the way to Ocala Regional Medical Center and at least twice in the emergency room before he was rushed to surgery. Forsyth died on the operating table.
Police did not release the identity of the second officer involved in the shooting at the direction of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which is investigating the incident, said Sgt. Angy Scroble, OPD spokeswoman.
“The last on-duty death that we had was 60 years ago, and words can't express the sorrow that I feel for losing an officer,” Graham said, his voice barely audible.
“So if you pray, please pray for my officers. Pray for the one who didn't survive. Pray for the one that hopefully will survive,” Graham said.
Before addressing the media, Graham spoke with Forsyth's fellow patrol officers. He said the officers were devastated.
“Jared wasn't just a coworker. Jared was a friend. He was a great guy. When you work with someone as closely as these guys and girls do, and then fellowship with them after work, we're family. It's like losing a family member. It's like your brother just passed away,” Graham said.
Earlier, a steady stream of officers, both in uniform and in civilian clothes, walked into OPD headquarters on 402 S. Pine Ave. Some were teary-eyed and at least one was openly weeping.
Others hugged one another and uniformed officers were already wearing black bands on their badges.
Three officers stepped to the front of the building where two flagpoles stand and ceremoniously lowered the flags to half-staff in honor of the fallen officer.
Forsyth would have celebrated three years with the department on April 16. He is survived by his mother and stepfather.
The firearm involved in the shooting was a.40-caliber Glock. OPD officers go through live firearms training twice every year. The latest round of training started in January. Several officers were at the range during the incident and firearms instructors were also on scene.
Training is held every Monday. It was not clear if next week's firearms training will go on as scheduled.
“It's something we will evaluate in the coming days,” Graham said.
After FDLE completes its investigation, Graham said the department will determine if its firearm protocols were followed.
“I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure something like this doesn't happen again,” he said.China has developed a new censorship weapon to accompany its Great Firewall in order to silence not only its citizens -- but critics around the globe.
According to a report released Friday by Citizen Lab, the 'Great Cannon' was first used against GitHub and Greatfire.org servers, both incidents of which were high-profile DDoS attacks designed to deny access to materials criticizing China's regime, censorship tools and copies of websites banned in the country.
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, University of Toronto's Citizen LabCitizen Lab, the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and Princeton University suggest in the paper that these attacks were orchestrated by China's censorship barricade. However, while the attacks -- which used malicious Javascript to redirect Baidu connections to overwhelm the servers with traffic intended for China's largest search engine -- originated from the Great Firewall of China, the team say that the attack was carried out by an entirely separate tool.
This system, dubbed China's 'Great Cannon,' is reportedly a "distinct attack tool" with different capabilities to the Great Firewall. Rather than acting as an extension of the wall, Citizen Labs says the tool can "hijack traffic to (or presumably from) individual IP addresses, and can arbitrarily replace unencrypted content as a man-in-the-middle (MITM)."
"The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users. Specifically, the Cannon manipulates the traffic of "bystander" systems outside China, silently programming their browsers to create a massive DDoS attack," the researchers say.
The Great Firewall of China is an on-path system which monitors traffic between China and other countries. If requests for banned content are received -- such as access to Google, Facebook and Twitter -- the system terminates the request. However, the researchers say the Great Cannon works differently. The Great Cannon is in in-path system which is capable of both injecting and suppressing traffic.
In the attacks on GitHub and Greatfire.org, the new tool intercepted traffic sent to Baidu servers which hosted analytics, social and advertising scripts. If the Great Cannon saw requests for particular Javascript files, it could take two actions: pass the request on to Baidu servers or drop the request and instead send a malicious script back. The report states:
"In this case, the requesting user is an individual outside China browsing a website making use of a Baidu infrastructure server (e.g., a website with ads served by Baidu's ad network). The malicious script enlisted the requesting user as an unwitting participant in the DDoS attack against GreatFire.org and GitHub."
The idea that China's cybercapabilities may allow it to divert traffic from surfers outside of the country for its own ends is concerning. Furthermore, the researchers also say the tool only acts on a small percentage of the traffic it has the capabilities to manipulate, and the Great Cannon's functionality likely spans beyond such uses.
According to the team, a few simple tweaks in the Great Cannon's configuration -- switching to operating on traffic from a specific IP address rather than to a specific address -- would allow malware payloads to be delivered to targeted users who are communicating with Chinese servers without cryptographic protections set in place.
In addition, as the tool works as an MITM, it could also intercept unencrypted email and replace legitimate content with malicious code, manipulating email sent from China to other countries. The researchers say:
"The operational deployment of the Great Cannon represents a significant escalation in state-level information control: the normalization of widespread use of an attack tool to enforce censorship by weaponizing users."
The Great Cannon is similar in many ways to the use of QUANTUM by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK's GCHQ intelligence agency. The weapon used by these agencies, revealed in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, can deploy programs which intercept vast networks of traffic in order to redirect these streams to locations of their choosing.
The researchers conclude:
"We remain puzzled as to why the GC's operator chose to first employ its capabilities in such a publicly visible fashion. Conducting such a widespread attack clearly demonstrates the weaponization of the Chinese Internet to co-opt arbitrary computers across the web and outside of China to achieve China's policy ends.
The repurposing of the devices of unwitting users in foreign jurisdictions for covert attacks in the interests of one country's national priorities is a dangerous precedent - contrary to international norms and in violation of widespread domestic laws prohibiting the unauthorized use of computing and networked systems."
Read on: In the world of securityWhen you’re running an epic socialist experiment while simultaneously attempting to preserve the legacy of a now-deceased “anti-imperialist” geopolitcal legend and your country’s most valuable asset has unexpectedly become a liability, it’s sometimes necessary for the common man (and woman) to make sacrifices, which is why it makes sense that at one point this year, 36 condoms cost nearly $800 in Venezuela. Fortunately for the safety of US citizens, The White House has officially recognized the country as a threat to US national security, which means no shady Venezuelans will be able to use the US financial system to procure condoms or bread on this administration’s watch. Rounding out the absurdities, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro predictably decided to use Washington’s charade to his advantage by citing Obama’s “imperialist” ambitions as an excuse to grant himself “special powers” which should help him “preserve the peace and integrity” of the country.
While it’s not entirely clear whether this falls under the purview of “preserving peace and integrity,” we imagine it would be a reputational advantage for the nation’s hotels to be able to provide guests with toilet paper, but as Fusion reports, Maduro’s socialist paradise has left some businesses up the proverbial creek:
Venezuela’s product shortages have become so severe that some hotels in that country are asking guests to bring their own toilet paper and soap, a local tourism industry spokesman said on Wednesday. In Merida, a state in western Venezuelan that’s known for its stunning mountain landscapes, small hotels are struggling to stock their rooms with basic supplies, especially as the busy Semana Santa or Holy Week holiday gets underway. “It’s an extreme situation,” says Xinia Camacho, owner of a 20-room boutique hotel in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada national park. “For over a year we haven’t had toilet paper, soap, any kind of milk, coffee or sugar. So we have to tell our guests to come prepared.” Gerardo Montilla, president of Merida’s tourism chamber, told Fusion that product shortages are hitting smaller hotels particularly hard during the busy vacation week. “Five hotels have told me they are going through this situation, where they have to ask guests to bring their own toilet paper,” Montilla told Fusion. “We’re near the border with Colombia, just two and a half hours away, and lots of [Venezuelan] goods are taken there, because they sell for more money in Colombia.” Montilla says bigger hotels can circumvent product shortages by buying toilet paper and other basic supplies from black market smugglers who charge up to 6-times the regular price. But smaller, family-run hotels can’t always afford to pay such steep prices, which means that sometimes they have to make do without. Camacho says she refuses to buy toilet paper from the black market on principle.
* * *
Yes, “on principle.” And while that position is fine when it comes to toilet paper, it’s not entirely amenable to goods that are necessary for basic human subsistence.During a visit to Moe’s Tavern in a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, a character based on Yoko Ono famously ordered “a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat.”
“A single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat”: That’s the cocktail a cartoon character based on Yoko Ono orders at Moe’s Tavern in the 1993 episode of The Simpsons, “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet.” This perfect parody of conceptual art pretension has now been served up in real life. A plum floating in a man’s hat is one of the works in Yoko Ono: One More Story …, an exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum in Iceland.
"A single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat" on display at Yoko Ono’s Reykjavik Art Museum exhibitionhttps://t.co/FvifKWRrhp pic.twitter.com/63733DRlHw — The Future Heart (@TheFutureHeart) October 16, 2016
The work, by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, fits the show’s vague brief as well as anything would. The 83-year-old Ono asked artists to “supply a vessel for the water… to heal [people’s] minds”:
My dear fellow artists, I want to ask you to supply a vessel for the water to give to specific people, either to heal their minds (such as in the case of warlords), or appreciate their courage in speaking out (such as in the case of grassroots activists). It can also be given to a specific person, people, or the land in desperate need for water (love). You and I will supply the water. Each work will be exhibited in the museum, with the dedication attached to it. Lets have fun in doing this together. My love and respect to you. Yoko
It’s unclear whether Ono herself is aware that Kjartansson’s plum in a man’s hat is inspired by a Simpsons gag. Some sources suggest Kjartansson is trolling an oblivious Ono, while others assume she’s in on the joke. Either way, perhaps it really will heal warlords’ minds.In 2011, the museum also established a separate master’s program in teaching science.
“We have a real gap in the public understanding of science at the same time when many of the most important issues have science as their foundation — human health, biology, environment, biodiversity, climate change, mass extinction,” said Ellen V. Futter, the museum’s president, during an interview at her office. “This museum has a role to play in society in terms of enhancing the role of science.”
The museum, with its dioramas, castlelike turrets, cavernous hallways and giant whale, is one of the best-known buildings in the city, partly because school trips there are such an integral part of a New York City childhood. Many others have come to know a version of it through the film “Night at the Museum.”
The expansion will probably face close scrutiny from residents of the Upper West Side. That neighborhood is known for its fierce development battles, such as the 1956 fight over the Adventure Playground at West 67th Street in Central Park, which the city’s “master builder,” Robert Moses, had wanted to turn into a new parking lot for Tavern on the Green. More recently, there were conflicts over renovation of the New-York Historical Society’s museum.
Though Central Park is only a block from the museum, proposals to reduce any open space in the city can be particularly contentious. Museum officials said that while there were no drawings yet defining the addition’s footprint, they recognize the interest in preserving city parkland, which the museum sits on. “The vast majority of the open space on the west side of the museum, between 77th and 81st Streets, will remain open space when the project is completed,” said Ann Siegel, the museum’s senior vice president for operations and capital programs.
The museum is a veteran of such debates, having successfully weathered protests over its Rose Center, which some neighbors had argued would ruin the neighborhood.© Jack Taylor/Getty Images Sun sets over The London skyline from the Shard, the tallest building currently in the European Union, on March 28, 2017 in London, England.
LONDON (AP) — Police say a vehicle struck pedestrians on a road in north London, leaving several casualties and one person has been arrested.
Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the scene on Seven Sisters Road at 12:20 a.m. Monday. The London Ambulance Service said it was responding to the incident.
No other details were immediately available.
Earlier this month, a van veered into pedestrians on London Bridge, setting off vehicle and knife attacks that killed eight people and wounded many others on the bridge and in the nearby Borough Market area. Three Muslim extremists who carried out the attack were killed by police.Bringing the Star Power
Chris Cannon knows how to throw a party. He knows how to turn on the star treatment. And he knows how to serve up a damn good meal.
The high-wattage restaurateur’s newest endeavor, Jockey Hollow Bar & Kitchen, opens its doors in Morristown today and if you love food, it’s an experience you won’t want to miss.
There’s already been plenty of press about the multi-million-dollar facelift given to the historic Vail Mansion to create this new four-part concept restaurant, and Inside Jersey magazine has already named it among the state’s 10 most important restaurants. As the opening date slipped from September into October, eager foodophiles have been buzzing about when they’ll finally get the chance to walk through the doors. Well, the wait is over.
What can you expect when you visit Jockey Hollow? Chris Cannon promises stylish surroundings and spectacular dishes, casual elegance and a celebratory atmosphere. “The whole point is the juxtaposition of formality and accessibility,” he explains. “I want people to come in and try something new. Have a dozen oysters and a beer for under $20. It’s accessible.”
Cannon, who spent years making his name in the NYC dining scene, is committed to establishing destination dining that draws deeply on location. “We’re going to make New Jersey into a totally different destination,” says Cannon. With a farm-to-table approach, the menu crafted by Executive Chef Kevin Sippel will feature produce from Ralston Farm in Mendham and oysters from Forty North Oyster Farms in Mantoloking, while the extensive bar offerings will include Ramstein beers from the High Point Brewery in Butler among its selections. Desserts will be created by Morristown’s own Andrea Lekberg, who helms The Artist Baker, and acclaimed NYC pastry chef Erica Leahy.
“When you go to the greenmarket in New York City, 80% of what’s there is from New Jersey, and New York manages to take credit for most of it. That’s total bulls—t,” Cannon cracks. “I’ve opened a lot of restaurants. The most beautiful and most resonant is here. We’re celebrating culture, celebrating New Jersey.”
The Oyster & Wine Bar is now taking reservations for dinner. Lunch service will follow shortly, and the official opening of The Dining Room at Jockey Hollow will not be far behind. General Manager Ron Morgan explains that “four weeks or so from now, we’ll |
Stolarcyk, the program manager for the Eyak Preservation Council (EPC).
The waters in the Gulf of Alaska are some of the most pristine in the world, rivaled only by those in the Antarctic, and among the purest and most nutrient-rich waters anywhere. Northern Edge will take place in an Alaskan “marine protected area,” as well as in a NOAA-designated “fisheries protected area.” These war games will also coincide with the key breeding and migratory periods of the marine life in the region as they make their way toward Prince William Sound, as well as further north into the Arctic.
Species affected will include blue, fin, gray, humpback, minke, sei, sperm, and killer whales, the highly endangered North Pacific right whale (of which there are only approximately 30 left), as well as dolphins and sea lions. No fewer than a dozen native tribes including the Eskimo, Eyak, Athabascan, Tlingit, Sun'aq, and Aleut rely on the area for subsistence living, not to speak of their cultural and spiritual identities.
The Navy is already permitted to use live ordnance including bombs, missiles, and torpedoes, along with active and passive sonar in "realistic" war gaming that is expected to involve the release of as much as 352,000 pounds of "expended materials" every year. (The Navy’s EIS lists numerous things as “expended materials,” including missiles, bombs, torpedoes.) At present, the Navy is well into the process of securing the necessary permits for the next five years and has even mentioned making plans for the next 20. Large numbers of warships and submarines are slated to move into the area and the potential pollution from this has worried Alaskans who live nearby.
"We are concerned about expended materials in addition to the bombs, jet noise, and sonar," the Eyak Preservation Council's Emily Stolarcyk tells me as we sit in her office in Cordova, Alaska. EPC is an environmental and social-justice-oriented nonprofit whose primary mission is to protect wild salmon habitat. "Chromium, lead, tungsten, nickel, cadmium, cyanide, ammonium perchlorate, the Navy's own environmental impact statement says there is a high risk of chemical exposure to fish."
Tiny Cordova, population 2,300, is home to the largest commercial fishing fleet in the state and consistently ranks among the top 10 busiest U.S. fishing ports. Since September, when Stolarcyk first became aware of the Navy's plans, she has been working tirelessly, calling local, state and federal officials and alerting virtually every fisherman she runs into about what she calls “the storm” looming on the horizon. "The propellants from the Navy's missiles and some of their other weapons will release benzene, toluene, xylene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and naphthalene into the waters of twenty percent of the training area, according to their own EIS [environmental impact statement]," she explains as we look down on Cordova’s harbor with salmon fishing season rapidly approaching. As it happens, most of the chemicals she mentioned were part of BP’s disastrous 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which I covered for years, so as I listened to her I had an eerie sense of futuristic déjà vu.
Here’s just one example of the kinds of damage that will occur: the cyanide discharge from a Navy torpedo is in the range of 140-150 parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s "allowable" limit on cyanide: one part per billion.
The Navy's EIS estimates that, in the five-year period in which these war games are to be conducted, there will be more than 182,000 "takes"—direct deaths of a marine mammal, or the disruption of essential behaviors like breeding, nursing, or surfacing. On the deaths of fish, it offers no estimates at all. Nevertheless, the Navy will be permitted to use at least 352,000 pounds of expended materials in these games annually. The potential negative effects could be far-reaching, given species migration and the global current system in northern waters.
In the meantime, the Navy is giving Stolarcyk’s efforts the cold shoulder, showing what she calls “total disregard toward the people making their living from these waters." She adds, “They say this is for national security. They are theoretically defending us, but if they destroy our food source and how we make our living, while polluting our air and water, what's left to defend?"
Stolarcyk has been labeled an "activist" and "environmentalist," perhaps because the main organizations she’s managed to sign on to her efforts are indeed environmental groups like the Alaska Marine Conservation Council, the Alaska Center for the Environment, and the Alaskans First Coalition.
"Why does wanting to protect wild salmon habitat make me an activist?" she asks. "How has that caused me to be branded as an environmentalist?" Given that the Alaska commercial fishing industry could be decimated if its iconic “wild-caught” salmon turn up with traces of cyanide or any of the myriad chemicals the Navy will be using, Stolarcyk could as easily be seen as fighting for the well-being, if not the survival, of the fishing industry in her state.
War Gaming the Community
The clock is ticking in Cordova and others in Stolarcyk’s community are beginning to share her concerns. A few like Alexis Cooper, the executive director of Cordova District Fishermen United (CDFU), a non-profit organization that represents the commercial fishermen in the area, have begun to speak out. "We're already seeing reduced numbers of halibut without the Navy having expanded their operations in the GOA [Gulf of Alaska]," she says, "and we’re already seeing other decreases in harvestable species."
CDFU represents more than 800 commercial salmon fishermen, an industry that accounts for an estimated 90% of Cordova’s economy. Without salmon, like many other towns along coastal southeastern Alaska, it would effectively cease to exist.
Teal Webber, a lifelong commercial fisherwoman and member of the Native Village of Eyak, gets visibly upset when the Navy's plans come up. "You wouldn't bomb a bunch of farmland," she says, "and the salmon run comes right through this area, so why are they doing this now?" She adds, "When all of the fishing community in Cordova gets the news about how much impact the Navy's war games could have, you'll see them oppose it en masse."
While I’m in town, Stolarcyk offers a public presentation of the case against Northern Edge in the elementary school auditorium. As she shows a slide from the Navy's environmental impact statement indicating that the areas affected will take decades to recover, several fishermen quietly shake their heads.
One of them, James Weiss, who also works for Alaska's Fish and Game Department, pulls me aside and quietly says, "My son is growing up here, eating everything that comes out of the sea. I know fish travel through that area they plan to bomb and pollute, so of course I'm concerned. This is too important of a fishing area to put at risk."
In the question-and-answer session that follows, Jim Kasch, the town’s mayor, assures Stolarcyk that he'll ask the city council to become involved. "What's disturbing is that there is no thought about the fish and marine life," he tells me later. "It's a sensitive area and we live off the ocean. This is just scary." A Marine veteran, Kasch acknowledges the Navy's need to train, then pauses and adds, "But dropping live ordnance in a sensitive fishery just isn't a good idea. The entire coast of Alaska lives and breathes from our resources from the ocean."
That evening, with the sun still high in the spring sky, I walk along the boat docks in the harbor and can’t help but wonder whether this small, scruffy town has a hope in hell of stopping or altering Northern Edge. There have been examples of such unlikely victories in the past. A dozen years ago, the Navy was, for example, finally forced to stop using the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as its own private bombing and test range, but only after having done so since the 1940s. In the wake of those six decades of target practice, the island’s population has the highest cancer and asthma rates in the Caribbean, a phenomenon locals attribute to the Navy's activities.
Similarly, earlier this year a federal court ruled that Navy war games off the coast of California violated the law. It deemed an estimated 9.6 million "harms" to whales and dolphins via high-intensity sonar and underwater detonations improperly assessed as "negligible" in that service’s EIS.
As a result of Stolarcyk's work, on May 6th Cordova’s city council passed a resolution formally opposing the upcoming war games. Unfortunately, the largest seafood processor in Cordova (and Alaska), Trident Seafoods, has yet to offer a comment on Northern Edge. Its representatives wouldn’t even return my phone call on the subject. Nor, for instance, has Cordova’s Prince William Sound Science Center, whose president, Katrina Hoffman, wrote me that “as an organization, we have no position statement on the matter at this time." This, despite their stated aim of supporting "the ability of communities in this region to maintain socioeconomic resilience among healthy, functioning ecosystems.” (Of course, it should be noted that at least some of their funds come from the Navy.)
Government-to-Government Consultation
At Kodiak Island, my next stop, I find a stronger sense of the threat on the horizon in both the fishing and tribal communities and palpable anger about the Navy's plans. Take J.J. Marsh, the CEO of the Sun'aq Tribe, the largest on the island. "I think it's horrible," she says the minute I sit down in her office. “I grew up here. I was raised on subsistence living. I grew up caring about the environment and the animals and fishing in a native household living off the land and seeing my grandpa being a fisherman. So obviously, the need to protect this is clear."
What, I ask, is her tribe going to do?
She responds instantly. "We are going to file for a government-to-government consultation and so are other Kodiak tribes so that hopefully we can get this stopped.”
The U.S. government has a unique relationship with Alaska’s Native tribes, like all other American Indian tribes. It treats each as if it were an autonomous government. If a tribe requests a “consultation,” Washington must respond and Marsh hopes that such an intervention might help block Northern Edge. "It's about the generations to come. We have an opportunity as a sovereign tribe to go to battle on this with the feds. If we aren't going to do it, who is?"
Melissa Borton, the tribal administrator for the Native Village of Afognak, feels similarly. Like Marsh’s tribe, hers was, until recently, remarkably unaware of the Navy's plans. That’s hardly surprising since that service has essentially made no effort to publicize what it is going to do. "We are absolutely going to be part of this [attempt to stop the Navy]," she tells me. "I'm appalled."
One reason she’s appalled: she lived through Alaska’s monster Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. “We are still feeling its effects,” she says. “Every time they make these environmental decisions they affect us… We are already plagued with cancer and it comes from the military waste already in our ground or that our fish and deer eat and we eat those… I've lost family to cancer, as most around here have and at some point in time this has to stop."
When I meet with Natasha Hayden, an Afognak tribal council member whose husband is a commercial fisherman, she puts the matter simply and bluntly. “This is a frontal attack by the Navy on our cultural identity."
Gary Knagin, lifelong fisherman and member of the Sun'aq tribe, is busily preparing his boat and crew for the salmon season when we talk. “We aren't going to be able to eat if they do this. It's bullshit. It'll be detrimental to us and it's obvious why. In June, when we are out there, salmon are jumping [in the waters] where they want to bomb as far as you can see in any direction. That's the salmon run. So why do they have to do it in June? If our fish are contaminated, the whole state's economy is hit. The fishing industry here supports everyone and every other business here is reliant upon the fishing industry. So if you take out the fishing, you take out the town."
The Navy’s Free Ride
I requested comment from the U.S. military's Alaskan Command office, and Captain Anastasia Wasem responded after I returned home from my trip north. In our email exchange, I asked her why the Navy had chosen the Gulf of Alaska, given that it was a critical habitat for all five of the state’s wild salmon. She replied that the waters where the war games will occur, which the Navy refers to as the Temporary Maritime Activities Area, are "strategically significant" and claimed that a recent "Pacific command study" found that naval training opportunities are declining everywhere in the Pacific "except Alaska," which she referred to as "a true national asset."
"The Navy's training activities,” she added, “are conducted with an extensive set of mitigation measures designed to minimize the potential risk to marine life."
In its assessment of the Navy’s plans, however, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), one of the premier federal agencies tasked with protecting national fisheries, disagreed. "Potential stressors to managed species and EFH [essential fish habitat],” its report said, “include vessel movements (disturbance and collisions), aircraft overflights (disturbance), fuel spills, ship discharge, explosive ordnance, sonar training (disturbance), weapons firing/nonexplosive ordnance use (disturbance and strikes), and expended materials (ordnance-related materials, targets, sonobuoys, and marine markers). Navy activities could have direct and indirect impacts on individual species, modify their habitat, or alter water quality." According to the NMFS, effects on habitats and communities from Northern Edge “may result in damage that could take years to decades from which to recover.”
Captain Wasem assured me that the Navy made its plans in consultation with the NMFS, but she failed to add that those consultations were found to be inadequate by the agency or to acknowledge that it expressed serious concerns about the coming war games. In fact, in 2011 it made four conservation recommendations to avoid, mitigate, or otherwise offset possible adverse effects to essential fish habitat. Although such recommendations were non-binding, the Navy was supposed to consider the public interest in its planning.
One of the recommendations, for instance, was that it develop a plan to report on fish mortality during the exercises. The Navy rejected this, claiming that such reporting would "not provide much, if any, valuable data." As Stolarcyk told me, “The Navy declined to do three of their four recommendations, and NMFS just rolled over."
I asked Captain Wasem why the Navy choose to hold the exercise in the middle of salmon fishing season.
"The Northern Edge exercise is scheduled when weather is most conducive for training," she explained vaguely, pointing out that "the Northern Edge exercise is a big investment for DoD [the Department of Defense] in terms of funding, use of equipment/fuels, strategic transportation, and personnel."
Arctic Nightmares
The bottom line on all this is simple, if brutal. The Navy is increasingly focused on possible future climate-change conflicts in the melting waters of the north and, in that context, has little or no intention of caretaking the environment when it comes to military exercises. In addition, the federal agencies tasked with overseeing any war-gaming plans have neither the legal ability nor the will to enforce environmental regulations when what’s at stake, at least according to the Pentagon, is “national security.”
Needless to say, when it comes to the safety of locals in the Navy’s expanding area of operation, there is no obvious recourse. Alaskans can’t turn to NMFS or the Environmental Protection Agency or NOAA. If you want to stop the U.S. military from dropping live munitions, or blasting electromagnetic radiation into national forests and marine sanctuaries, or poisoning your environment, you'd better figure out how to file a major lawsuit or, if you belong to a Native tribe, demand a government-to-government consultation and hope it works. And both of those are long shots, at best.
Meanwhile, as the race heats up for reserves of oil and gas in the melting Arctic that shouldn't be extracted and burned in the first place, so do the Navy's war games. From southern California to Alaska, if you live in a coastal town or city, odds are that the Navy is coming your way, if it's not already there.
Nevertheless, Emily Stolarcyk shows no signs of throwing in the towel, despite the way the deck is stacked against her efforts. "It's supposedly our constitutional right that control of the military is in the hands of the citizens," she told me in our last session together. At one point, she paused and asked, "Haven’t we learned from our past mistakes around not protecting salmon? Look at California, Oregon, and Washington's salmon. They’ve been decimated. We have the best and most pristine salmon left on the planet, and the Navy wants to do these exercises. You can't have both."
Stolarcyk and I share a bond common among people who have lived in our northernmost state, a place whose wilderness is so vast and beautiful as to make your head spin. Those of us who have experienced its rivers and mountains, have been awed by the northern lights, and are regularly reminded of our own insignificance (even as we gained a new appreciation for how precious life really is) tend to want to protect the place as well as share it with others.
"Everyone has been telling me from the start that I'm fighting a lost cause and I will not win," Stolarcyk said as our time together wound down. "No other non-profit in Alaska will touch this. But I actually believe we can fight this and we can stop them. I believe in the power of one. If I can convince someone to join me, it spreads from there. It takes a spark to start a fire, and I refuse to believe that nothing can be done."
Three decades ago, in his book Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez suggested that, when it came to exploiting the Arctic versus living sustainably in it, the ecosystems of the region were too vulnerable to absorb attempts to "accommodate both sides." In the years since, whether it’s been the Navy, Big Energy, or the increasingly catastrophic impacts of human-caused climate disruption, only one side has been accommodated and the results have been dismal.
In Iraq in wartime, I saw what the U.S. military was capable of in a distant ravaged land. In June, I’ll see what that military is capable of in what still passes for peacetime and close to home indeed. As I sit at my desk writing this story on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, the roar of Navy jets periodically rumbles in from across Puget Sound where a massive naval air station is located. I can’t help but wonder whether, years from now, I’ll still be writing pieces with titles like "Destroying What Remains," as the Navy continues its war-gaming in an ice-free summer Arctic amid a sea of off-shore oil drilling platforms.Puigdemont has already travelled to Belgium, according to Spanish daily El Periodico. The former Catalan delegate in Brussels, Amadeu Altafaj, allegedly organized the trip.
Belgium's controversial Minister for Asylum and Immigration Theo Francken yesterday said Puigdemont could be offered asylum in Belgium because there was no longer clear evidence that he would receive a fair trial in Spain.
That intervention by the Flemish nationalist was met with scorn from Spain and even Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel, the leader of his own government.
The spokesman for Spain's ruling conservative Popular Party (PP), Esteban Gonzalez Pons, described Francken's comments as "unacceptable".
These are "serious accusations against Spain's legal system" which should be "corrected immediately", he said in a statement. Francken has "violated the principles of solidarity and loyal cooperation between EU member states", Pons added.
Belgian PM Michel, who is the only serving EU leader to have criticized Spain's approach to the Catalan crisis, stressed however that there was no official offer of asylum for Puigdemont.
"No request has yet been filed but things are moving fast," Francken told Belgium daily Le Soir. "We'll see what happens in the next hours and days."
In an analysis piece published yesterday, Le Soir suggests Francken could be using Puigdemont's case to bolster the cause of Flemish nationalism and put pressure on Belgian PM Michel.
A senior official in Spanish PM Rajoy's PP party, Fernando Martínez-Maillo, said it was a contradiction for Puigdemont to go to Brussels "where one of the key values is the defence of the state, the rule of law and the constitution," according to El Periodico.
READ MORE: Belgium could offer Catalan leader asylum: ministerMonero (XMR) GPU Miner 6500 H/s
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Please see the video installation below :US officials continue to maintain that American policy towards Israel will undergo changes in the wake of pre-election comments made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he stated that no Palestinian state would be established on his watch.
Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories has lasted for nearly five decades and “must end,” White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said in a Monday address to the left-leaning Jewish American lobby group J Street.
“Israel cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely,” he said. “An occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end, and the Palestinian people must have the right to live in and govern themselves in their own sovereign state.”
McDonough reiterated America’s long-standing support for a two-state solution to the impasse between Israelis and Palestinians – an agreement that would be based on 1967 lines and include mutually agreed land swaps. However, he said Netanyahu’s comments have cast doubt upon Israel’s commitment to such an agreement, despite the prime minister’s attempts to backtrack in the wake of his re-election on March 17.
“We cannot simply pretend that those comments were never made, or that they don’t raise questions about the prime minister’s commitment to achieving peace through direct negotiations,” McDonough told the crowd, as quoted by the Guardian.
According to Haaretz, McDonough – one of Obama’s close advisers – did not detail just how US policy would change over the coming months, but he did reject the notion that US reaction to Netanyahu’s comments is based on personal feelings of anger. Netanyahu has had a troubled relationship with President Barack Obama since he came into office, and the White House was widely believed to have preferred a new leader to take the reins in Israel.
READ MORE: Israel, US ‘boycott’ UN session on Gaza conflict
McDonough said US commitment to Israel’s security and military will remain. Several reports over the past week have suggested that the US could stop shielding Israel from resolutions at the United Nations that seek to recognize a Palestinian state or outline the parameters of a two-state deal.
Meanwhile, in an interview with Israel’s Army Radio, US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro also said America’s approach to the country would be re-evaluated – again pointing to Netanyahu’s comments.
“This was not Israel’s stance until those comments. It is confusing and raises doubts regarding Israel’s true stance,” Shapiro said, as quoted by Jewish news website JP Updates. “The question we are still focusing on is how to progress towards the solution of two states for two nations.”
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“I cannot deny that we have serious issues with some statements said during the elections season. One of them is the shirking of a ‘Palestinian’ state. We believe that it is the only solution that will safeguard a Jewish and democratic Israel. Netanyahu said that he will not lend a hand to the establishment of a ‘Palestinian’ state so long as he is Prime Minister,” Shapiro said.
Netanyahu has tried to walk back multiple comments since his victory last week. He has denied changing his position on Palestinian statehood, saying he actually meant that he doesn’t believe the possibility for a Palestinian state exists in the current political climate. Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer also said that Netanyahu’s comments were misinterpreted.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, President Obama himself stated that change could be coming, adding that the US is “evaluating” its policy based on the prime minister’s statements.
“We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn’t happen during his prime ministership, and so that’s why we’ve got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don’t see a chaotic situation in the region,” Obama said.
“We can’t just in perpetuity maintain the status quo, expand settlements. That’s not a recipe for stability in the region.”
Obama confirms ‘evaluating options’ after Netanyahu’s ‘no Palestinian state’ pledge
Since Netanyahu apparently meant what he said in announcing that there would be no Palestinian state on his watch, the White House is re-evaluating its policy towards Israel and seeking other option to avoid chaos in the region, the US President has said.
Commenting on the Israeli elections for the first time after PM Netanyahu’s victory, US president Barack Obama made it clear that the US supports the two-state solution in the Israeli conflict despite the PM’s strong pre-election rhetoric.
The two-state solution is “the only way for the long-term security of Israel, if it wants to stay both a Jewish state and democratic,” US President said in his interview with Huntington Post.
The US president said that he had been “evaluating” his policy towards Israel in the wake of Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election and campaign statements. The day before the March 17 elections Netanyahu made it clear that he wouldn’t allow the creation of a Palestinian state.
“I indicated to [Netanyahu] that given his statements prior to the election, it is going to be hard to find a path where people are seriously believing that negotiations are possible,” Obama said. “We indicated that…[this] kind of rhetoric was contrary to what is the best of Israel’s traditions.”
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Although Netanyahu tried to soften his rhetoric after the elections, Obama apparently thinks that he meant what he said initially, so the White House is now considering other options available to make sure situation in the region does not become “chaotic.”
“We take him at his word when he said that it wouldn’t happen during his prime ministership,” Obama stated.
Obama said that his team will take part in “close consultation” with the Knessett as Netanyahu forms his new coalition government. Meanwhile the US leader warned that continued construction of Israeli settlements is “unsustainable” for the status quo. “While taking into complete account Israel’s security, we can’t just in perpetuity maintain the status quo, expand settlements. That’s not a recipe for stability in the region.”
Read more
Keeping Israel safe involves a tense string of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, which Israel and Netanyahu in particular have always opposed.
But Obama doesn’t think that Netanyahu’s reelection will have any “significant impact” on the ongoing negotiations process, despite there being a “skepticism in Israel generally about Iran.” The bigger challenge for Obama will be to show not just the American people or the Israeli people but the whole world that there are “mechanisms in place that will prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”Hull City midfielder Jake Livermore has tested positive for cocaine and will not play again for Hull City this season.
The club have confirmed they have suspended the player and although they have not given an official explanation for that decision, the Telegraph has been informed it was because of a failed drug test.
Livermore, who has made one appearance for England, failed a post-match drug test after Hull’s 2-0 win over Crystal Palace on April 25 and although he played in the 1-0 defeat by Burnley last weekend, the club had no choice but to ban him once they were informed of the test result.
A club statement released on Friday evening said: "Following suspension by the FA the club has subsequently suspended Jake Livermore pending further investigations to be made by the FA and our own internal disciplinary procedures. The club is unable to make any further comment during this process."
The Football Association, under whose auspices Livermore was tested, later issued its own brief response: "In line with its Anti-Doping Regulations The FA can confirm it has issued a provisional suspension to a participant following a positive test for a prohibited substance. The FA will make no further comment until it has completed its investigations into this matter."
The player, who cost £8m last summer when he signed from Tottenham Hotspur, is likely to be banned for at least six months if the test results are confirmed, but he could also be sacked by Hull for gross misconduct.
Jake Livermore has made 35 appearances for Hull this season
That would allow him to join another club as a free agent once he has served his ban, but Hull may decide to put him on the transfer list as his behaviour has appalled both manager Steve Bruce and owner Assem Allam.
There is also a chance Hull will take legal action against him. Livermore is the highest profile player to be banned for taking cocaine since Chelsea striker Adrian Mutu, who was ordered to pay more than £14m in compensation to the London club.
Mutu was banned by the FA and sacked by Chelsea after failing a drug test in 2004, resulting in a long legal battle as both sides sought compensation.
However, the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld an early Fifa verdict in favour of Chelsea after an appeal by the Romanian was rejected.
No decision has been made on Livermore’s long term future at this stage as everyone is trying to focus on an increasingly perilous relegation battle, but if Hull can get their money back they will be sorely tempted to follow Chelsea’s example.
Hull are expected to release a statement this afternoon, but it is a massive setback for Bruce, whose side are desperately trying to avoid relegation.
Livermore, who came through Tottenham’s Academy, was superb for Hull last season as they managed to stay in the top flight and also reach the FA Cup Final. But his form has dipped badly, along with the rest of the Hull side.
Jake Livermore played for seven clubs on loan during his six years as a Spurs professional
Bruce is understood to be furious with the player for not only putting his career in jeopardy, but also Hull’s top flight status.
The loss of such a key player when Hull are going to need to win at least one of their remaining two games, against Tottenham this weekend and at home to Manchester United, to have a realistic chance of avoiding a return to
The Tigers are currently two points behind Newcastle and Sunderland and three points adrift of 15th-placed Leicester.
Bruce was impressed with the midfielder when he spent the 2013-14 season on loan at the KC Stadium, praising his character as well as his ability. He became Hull’s record signing last summer, although thhe £8m fee has been passed since, as the idea was to shape a new look midfield around him.
Livermore, whose solitary England cap came as a second-half substitute against Italy in 2012, left Spurs as he was frustrated by the lack of first team opportunities, making just 58 appearances in six years. He has also had loan spells at MK Dons, Crewe, Derby, Peterborough, Ipswich and Leeds.
He initially arrived with the aim to prove he is good enough to be a regular in the England squad, but Livermore has not been selected by Roy Hodgson and has not been as effective alongside his former Spurs team-mate Tom Huddlestone in recent months
The FA conducts drug testing both in competition and out of competition, which can mean at training sessions and player’s home addresses. Players are also selected randomly after games by drug testers.
However, cocaine is thought to be difficult to detect as it is flushed out of the body quickly.NASA/NOAA
Turn off everything, stop eating and stop building -- on August 13 humanity used up nature's biocapacity budget for the entire year. According to estimates, yesterday was Earth Overshoot Day, the day when humanity's consumption overtakes Earth's ability to generate resources for that year.
The day, which has been measured since the 1970s, has moved from early October in 2000 to 13 August this year, with our ecological overspend being driven by deforestation, fresh-water scarcity, soil erosion, biodiversity loss and -- more than anything -- global warming. "Humanity’s carbon footprint alone more than doubled since the early 1970s, when the world went into ecological overshoot," said Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network and co-creator of the system that calculates Earth's annual budget. "It remains the fastest growing component of the widening gap between the ecological footprint and the planet’s biocapacity."
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Humanity’s carbon footprint alone more than doubled since the early 1970s Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network
If left unchecked, Earth Overshoot Day would occur on 28 June 2030, essentially meaning humanity would need the resources of two Earths to power itself. If carbon emissions were reduced to 30 percent below today's levels by 2030, in keeping with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recommendation, Earth Overshoot day would fall on 16 September in 2030.
Read next This map plugs a 500-million-year gap in the history of Earth This map plugs a 500-million-year gap in the history of Earth
Global Footprint Network
The figures are calculated by looking at humanity's hunger for resources balanced against what Earth is thought to be able to produce. Food, timber, water and other resources are all taken into account and then balanced against how much area is needed to provide those resources. A final calculation works out how much productive space is available on Earth.
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Earth Overshoot Day is the day when humanity falls into the red. In 1970 it took place on 23 December, but it has steadily moved forward ever since. In 1980 it fell on 3 November, in 1990 humanity overshot on 13 October and in 2000 we reached capacity on 4 October. This year is the earliest day yet, with 13 August four days ahead of 2014's previous record.
Going forward, we cannot stress enough the vital importance of reducing the carbon footprint Mathis Wackernagel, president of the Global Footprint Network
The continued strain on Earth's resources highlights the crucial importance of the United Nations Conference of Parties taking place in Paris in December. If humanity can keep global warming within two degrees celsius of pre-Industrial Revolution levels, then Overshoot Day could be kept in check.
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"Going forward, we cannot stress enough the vital importance of reducing the carbon footprint, as nations are slated to commit to in Paris," said Wackernagel. "Sustainability requires that everyone live well, within the means of one planet. This can only be achieved by keeping our ecological footprint within our planet’s resource budget.”
The overshoot day of individual countries varies greatly. Densely populated nations with small biocapacities reach their limit much sooner -- Singapore overshot on 2 January, with Barbados following on 15 January.
Large countries with sparse populations and large ecological footprints fair better -- Senegal won't experience its overshoot day until 23 December, a day after Cambodia. The United Kingdom overshot on 30 April, the United States on 14 July and China on 14 May. This doesn't mean that counties such as Singapore are 'bad' and Senegal 'good', but rather shows how a wiser use of resources across all countries would balance things out.Washington (AFP) - US President Donald Trump's ban on refugees and travelers from six mainly Muslim countries went into effect late Thursday, after a Supreme Court decision allowed it to go forward following a five-month battle with rights groups.
The Trump administration says the temporary ban is necessary to block terrorists from entering the country, but immigrant advocates charge that it illegally singles out Muslims.
The 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, and a 120-day ban on refugees, will allow exceptions for people with "close family relationships" in the United States.
But activists said the government has defined that too narrowly, excluding relationships with grandparents and grandchildren, aunts and uncles and others.
And many were concerned about a possibly chaotic rollout of enforcement of the ban, like that in January when it was first announced.
Immigration rights activists and lawyers were waiting to help arrivals at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and other airports to be sure those from the six countries with valid US visas were allowed in after the ban went into effect at 8 pm Thursday Eastern time (0000 GMT Friday).
The Department of Homeland Security, which was heavily criticized for mishandling many arrivals when the ban was first attempted in January, promised a smooth rollout this time.
It stressed that anyone with a valid visa issued before the ban begins would still be admitted, and that all authorized refugees booked for travel before July 6 will also be allowed.
"We expect business as usual at the ports of entry |
Worshipping him will lead to rise in crime against women."
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Their counter theory is that leftism is an efficient, centralized, and competently run conspiracy of evil people who for entirely rational reasons want to rule the world, and that leftism is composed of coherent, well defined, and unchanging beliefs.
Well if that was the case, we are toast. But I am pretty sure it is not the case.
Observing leftism in action, it is all holiness spirals. Social Justice Warriors continually out left each other and form circular firing squads. Every few years they find something new to be holy about. There is no consistent and unchanging core of leftism. One day they love the proletariat the next they hate the rednecks. One day they love the peasants, the next they liquidate the kulaks. The only consistent things in anglosphere leftism have been war on marriage and war on Christmas, but other outbreaks of leftism have not had those elements.
Leftism is a thousand points of doctrine, but new points continually get added, and old points reinterpreted, or altogether dropped. Remember when Obama and Clinton opposed Gay Marriage? Well you may remember, but somehow very few other people do.
The Bolsheviks were a largely an evil Jewish conspiracy – except that the Jews in question were largely self hating Jews, who proceeded to enthusiastically purge each other until Hitler was able to congratulate the Soviets on having achieved a Judenfrei ruling elite. The Khmer Rouge were foreign educated intellectuals, who proceeded to murder all the foreign educated intellectuals, then all the intellectuals, then murder most Khmer Rouge members who could count.
When I read up the writings of the proto puritans, the members of the Church of England who were industriously being ever holier – well at first it was conventional Christian holiness. Very sincere people being very holy. Suspiciously holy. Then, by the time the Puritans set off for America, it was conventional Christian holiness that had turned distinctly pharisaical. And then by the later Cromwell years, the most holy were pushing standard twentieth century leftism, which so alarmed Cromwell that he cracked down.
Communism is not directly puritan descended, though Marx was influenced by the leftists suppressed by Cromwell, and proceeded to do to Judaism what they had done to Christianity. Marxist Dialectics is Talmudism transmogrified into left wing politics, and Dialectical Materialism is God’s plan for the Jewish people transmogrified into History’s plan for the Vanguard of Proletariat. Obviously today’s progressivism is massively influenced by Jews, Communism, and through communism, influenced by Judaism, particularly the recycling and global warming movement. But Anglosphere leftism are the winners, and anglosphere leftism has organizational continuity going back all the way to the proto Puritan Brownists mentioned by Shakespeare. Harvard was the state Church of New England. Harvard conquered America, and then the world. This is an accident of history; there were several other strains of leftism that could have conquered the world. But they did not. And here we are. If you look at the desegregation of the Boston school system, which is where desegregation and affirmative action started biting Northerners, not a Jew in sight.
Communism never had organizational continuity with any Jewish synagogue, whereas leftism does have organizational and institutional continuity with Puritan religious institutions, in particular Harvard, a religious seminary and the central authority of the New England State Church.
If the world was currently ruled by the Soviet Union, then Jew hypothesis would be largely true. But it is ruled by the US state department, which wants Israel destroyed, so the Jew hypothesis is largely false, and the Puritan hypothesis is true. There are a lot of Jews in today’s progressivism, but they are all conversos. They are intermarrying, and if they have any children, which they seldom do, their children seldom identify as Jewish. If any Jew in Harvard started to wear conspicuously Jewish Orthodox gear, the way the Happy Merchant in the Happy Merchant meme does, the Social Justice Inquisition would be on to him in a flash and he would lose tenure. George Soros wants whites in Europe genocided, but he wants Jews in Israel genocided even more, even sooner.
Tags: the puritan hypothesisIt was an interesting July and August in the local sports talk radio race.
Ratings released this week in the dream demographic -- men 25-54 -- show a close race between Sportsradio KTCK-AM (1310) and KTCK-FM (96.7) The Ticket and rival KRLD-FM (105.3) "The Fan."
If you ask the folks at The Ticket, they'll insist they won the demographic in what is known as the "August book" (July 13 to Aug. 10) by a score of 6.9 to 6.3.
If you ask the Fan folks, they'll call it a tie at 6.3.
Here's why: The Ticket includes those who listen via stream. The Fan, which doesn't have enough stream listeners to make the ratings provided by Nielsen, doesn't believe those listeners should be counted.
Both sides have experts in the field to support their cases.
Bottom line: We're not setting the cost of advertising based on ratings here. We're simply attempting to guide readers in what's happening on the local radio sports talk scene.
We'll leave it to the spin masters at the stations to sell their product. Here we are going to count all listeners.
(And if you must know, KESN-FM (103.3), also known as ESPN Radio, finished at a distant 1.9 with no discernable listeners via internet stream.)
In the end, it was a sensational month for sports talk in the market. The Ticket's 6.9 and the Fans' 6.3 ranked first and second among all stations in the dream demographic. ESPN finished No. 21.
Rounding out the top 5: KZPS-FM (92.5), which features classic rock; KLNO-FM (94.1), a Spanish language music station; and KHKS-FM (106.1), better known as KISS-FM, a top 40 station.
The Ticket's strength remains its Monday-Friday 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. lineup of homegrown, big-dollar hosts. The Fan benefited from broadcasting Rangers games. That's no slight. You think NBC doesn't ballyhoo that its NFL "Sunday Night Football" has been television's No. 1 prime time show four consecutive seasons?
Here's a breakdown:
Men 25-54, weekdays 6 a.m.-7 p.m.:
Ticket - 9.3
Fan - 5.9
ESPN - 2.1
Men 18-34 (presumably the next generation of 25-54), weekdays 6 a.m.-7 p.m.:
Fan - 7.7
Ticket - 4.8
ESPN - 1.0
Monday-Friday 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. breakdown by show for men 25-54
The Musers (Ticket) 6-10 a.m. 12.2 The Hardline (Ticket) 3-7 p.m. 9.0 Norm & Donovan (Ticket) 10 a.m.-noon 8.0 BaD Radio (Ticket) noon-3 p.m. 7.1 Ben & Skin (Fan) 3-7 p.m. 6.7 G-Bag Nation (Fan) 10 a.m.-3 p.m. 6.4 Shan & R.J. (Fan) 6-10 a.m. 4.1 Mike & Mike (ESPN) 5-9 a.m. 3.6 Cowlishaw & Mosley (ESPN) 3-6 p.m. 2.0 Dennis & Friedo (ESPN) 11 a.m.-3 p.m. 1.3 More Mike & Mike (ESPN) 9-11 a.m. 1.1
Hot seat
Jon Gruden looks at Dak Prescott and sees a young Donovan McNabb.
Gruden, the ESPN Monday Night Football analyst, eyeballed the Cowboys rookie quarterback in the preseason opener. Before that he hosted Prescott at his made-for-TV "Quarterback Camp."
ESPN hosted a conference call that featured Gruden this week and invited me to ask about Prescott.
Back in his coaching days, Gruden, who won a Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, worked with McNabb at the 1999 Senior Bowl.
McNabb played 13 NFL seasons, 11 with the Philadelphia Eagles. His best was 2004 when he led the Eagles to Super Bowl XXXIX, where they lost to the New England Patriots. That regular season, McNabb completed 300 of 469 passes (64 percent) for 3,875 yards and 31 touchdowns with only eight interceptions. He also rushed for 220 yards and three touchdowns.
It was McNabb's sixth NFL season. As a rookie, he sat out the Eagles opener behind Doug Pederson and went 2-4 in six starts.
Keep in mind, McNabb was the second player selected in the 1999 draft. Prescott, a fourth-round selection, was the No. 135 overall pick in May.
How did you rate Prescott going into the draft?
He was the one real dual-threat in this year's draft. And what I loved about Prescott is he got progressively better throughout his career at Mississippi State. He improved as a passer dramatically from Year Two to Three, Three to four. I really like the fact that he finished. He's not one of these guys that came out two years early. He finished. He won at Mississippi State, which is really unprecedented. That's a tough league (SEC) to win in, let alone at Mississippi State.
Why the comparison to McNabb?
Similar size, similar option football background. And I think you're seeing a little Donovan McNabb, dual-threat, physical stature-type traits throughout the preseason. I'm not shocked that he's played this well. I am stunned, however, that he looks like the opening day starter for the Dallas Cowboys.
Do you think he'll have problems with NFL defenses early in the regular season?
Well, the thing that he does to NFL defenses, as you know, after watching Cam Newton and some of these dual- threat quarterbacks like Tyrod Taylor is you're just not allowed to do the things you want to do against these running quarterbacks. Trust me. The playbook is going to change in Dallas. You're going to see quarterback-driven runs. You're going to see option football whether you like it or not. And that regulates what a defense can do. One thing the Cowboys are certainly going to do is they're going to run the ball right down your throat, and they're going to command an eight-man front, which is going to give Prescott some of these one-on-one isolations to guys like Dez Bryant and Jason Witten.... Prescott can be really hard to defend because of his dual-threat abilities and what he does to defenses. He makes you play assignment football.
Talkin' Cowboys
The Cowboys wrapped up their preseason schedule scoring a 13.8 rating on KTVT (Channel 11) for their Thursday night loss to the Houston Texans. That wasn't as impressive as last week's 15.5 for the loss at Seattle, but consider this: No. 2 to the Cowboys-Texans was KDFW's (Channel 4) news at 9 p.m. at 3.1.
With the start of the regular season next week, the Cowboys return to national TV with a 3:25 p.m. Sunday kickoff on Fox against the New York Giants. If you couldn't predict that Joe Buck and Troy Aikman will be on the call, you haven't been paying attention.
Talkin' Rangers
I hate to call out someone for taking time off, but Eric Nadel's absence from Rangers radio makes a significant difference in the broadcast. After all, 22 seasons as the lead "voice of the Rangers" makes Nadel the highest authority.
Nadel reports that he has three off days remaining this season. He already has spent 11 games away. Nadel is scheduled to miss Sept. 17 and Sept. 18 home games against Oakland. He is also planning to take a game off during the final week of the season unless, of course, the Rangers haven't clinched the AL West by then.
Here's the good news for Nadel, 65, and the bad for the rest of us. He reports his contract calls for 16 games off next season, 18 in 2018 and 20 in 2019.
Around the Horn
Verne Lundquist kicks off his 17th and final season as CBS' lead SEC football announcer at 2:30 p.m. Saturday when he calls UCLA at Texas A&M.... With all the college football games on TV Saturday, SMU-North Texas couldn't find a network or local station interested in the 6 p.m. kickoff. Wonder what the Big 12 decision-makers think about that.... We all knew former Rangers TV voice Josh Lewin as a high-energy frenetic type. Lewis currently works radio for the New York Mets, San Diego Chargers and UCLA Bruins. Here, according to Tom Hoffarth of the Los Angeles Daily News, was Lewin's schedule for this weekend: Thursday -- 6 a.m. flight from New York to San Diego for Chargers 7 p.m. exhibition; Friday -- 6 a.m. flight from Los Angeles to New York for 7:10 p.m. Mets game; Saturday -- 5 a.m. flight from New York to Houston for 2:30 p.m. kickoff of UCLA-Texas A&M in College Station; Sunday -- 7 a.m. flight to New York for 8 p.m. Mets game. "I always get to airports super early and double-book myself [on the next flight] if it's a tight flight, just in case," Lewin told Hoffarth.Lionhead chieftain Peter Molyneux claims that his original vision of a "physically correct" creature for Black & White ended up with an artist threatening to pull a knife on him.
This can get filed under the header "Things I never thought I'd find myself writing":
While speaking on a podcast with IGN UK (via iTunes) during the Gamescom event in Germany last month, Peter Molyneux mentioned that the sausages in the recording booth - because those Germans have sausages everywhere or something - reminded him of his earlier game Black & White.
Specifically, they reminded him of the creature's penis.
Now, if you've played Black & White, you probably know that the creature didn't actually have a (visible) Sgt. Peppy. No, this monstrous wangerdoodle was only in an early prototype of the game: "I for some reason had this obsession to make them anatomically correct. So the first version of this giant ape had this sort of beautifully physically correct - I'm going to say the word - penis dangling between its legs."
And in case the mental image in your head wasn't bad enough, said member "morphed depending on how excited your creature was."
That sort of thing would never fly in a game, of course, and Molyneux knows it. "I don't know what was going through my mind. I wasn't even on class A drugs! It was this bizarre thing," he says, and don't think we didn't notice that "class A drugs" qualifier, Peter. "It was this bizarre thing. Especially in America! Even if you show nipples they go insane, rating it under-the-counter product. It just goes to show you just how rubbish I am as a designer, really."
Nevertheless, Molyneux initially persisted, and the poor modelers working at Lionhead had to create the creature's morphable schlongalong. "The artist that modeled it ended up going completely insane. [He] threatened to knife me... absolutely true story. He went on to found Media Molecule. Chap called Mark Healey."
Having never met Mr. Healey myself, I cannot say whether or not the founder of the LittleBigPlanet studio is likely to threaten to knife somebody (if only in jest). In all fairness, spending your work day painstakingly rendering a monster tallywhacker would probably drive most people insane, so it's hardly just him.
"Driven mad by making huge, sausage-like penises on apes - that's the sort of thing I get people to do at Lionhead."
Whether or not you believe Peter Molyneux's story here - because the only indication we have that this is the truth is the eccentric designer's word alone - I think we can all agree that it is, in fact, a story. A very interesting one. About a game artist going crazy from working on an animated giant monkey porker.
Happy Friday, everybody.
(Via CVG)Hello! If you don’t remember, last time Rylo was surrounded by spooky trees and spooky zombies and was having some wacko hallucinations due to being accidentally high as ballz.
Sooo I don’t wanna give anything away but… you know how Zombies and Yu occasionally has R rated posts? This chapter has the same likelihood of being R rated as any other chapter. So it may or may not contain adult elements.
Hint: It does.
Anyways.
Rylo lurches through the smoky, bitter air, groaning and growling with the crowd. It’s so much easier being one of the undead. No thoughts, no feelings, no hurt, no hatred. Just two feet shuffling around on a hillside.
For the first time, a thought invades his mind in the form of vague awareness at being at the top of the hill. Rylo’s innocent emptiness pushes him onward.
The building ahead seems to be falling in on itself, and Rylo presses thoughtlessly on towards a hole in the crumbling foundations.
The pungent smoky aroma is less strong here, and allows Rylo’s consciousness to struggle back to the forefront. The world is still foggy and distorted, but Rylo begins to feel more in control, more aware of his surroundings.
As badass as Rylo looks, I just realized… Tonto, is that you?
I’ve never even seen The Lone Ranger and don’t plan to, so I was having a hard time figuring out why that last picture of Rylo screamed Johnny Depp to me. IMDB answered that question for me.
Feeling more in control of his legs, Rylo creeps in through the opening in the foundations. The inside of the house seems to be emitting more of the same flickering firelight as the outside.
Interspersed among the rubble of the caved-in basement is, strangely, pots and pots of leafy plants. Rylo’s thoughts come slow and thick, and the concept of caution escapes him. He staggers curiously around the corner, and is stopped in his tracks by the strangest sight he’s seen all night.
At the end of a long room stands a glisteningly white woman, arms extended with shimmering hair cascading down her figure.
Rylo stands rooted to the spot, and an expression of total shock and wonder takes over his face. He wants to back away, to escape, but the dancing girl is the most graceful thing he’s ever seen and his clouded mind can’t seem to get his feet to move.
His head pounds, and he stares on at the slow, elegant movements. The flickering firelight gleaming against her hair seems to lend the girl an ethereal glow.
Rylo wonders how she hasn’t seen him yet. Will she scream? Will she attack? All of these questions enter his mind, but none seem to matter now that he is entirely at the mercy of the painfully lovely scene ahead.
He’s not even startled when she calmly gazes back at him. His dazed mind hungers only to stay, to watch, to know this creature dancing by firelight.
Silently she steps towards him. Her ice coloured eyes pierce his, and she runs a hand up his arm.
Rylo shivers at her touch, and stands perfectly still but unafraid.
And then she presses herself to him, and the world smells of bitter smoke and tastes of spices. Rylo’s normally unyielding mind forgets to resist, and he allows himself to be taken along.
It’s very much the same as outside in that his consciousness keeps going in and out of focus, but this time rather than cold numbness Rylo is filled with warm, syrupy desire. The entirety of existence seems to be her lips against his and the curtains of golden hair wrapped around them.
He’s unsure if it’s been hours or minutes, but every time he comes up for breath they seem to be somewhere new, with her fingers dancing on his cheek and her hot breath on his neck.
Somehow he finds himself up the stairs, onto what must have once been the first floor. The entire place is filled with strange things, but what he sees in front of him takes his breath away.
Rylo’s limbs seem to turn to water and his mouth goes dry. His breath speeds up, quick and shallow. Her whole body seems to glow from the firelight and he aches to bury himself in her hair.
But it’s her who grabs him by the front of his shirt and pulls him over, across the room. Rylo winds his fingers through her hair and lets her run hers up under his shirt.
Again Rylo’s mind feels full of fog and sand and water and he’s not sure what comes next, but she’s sure, and pushes him down onto the creaking bed.
And then he’s just as sure as she is, and everything is skin and firelight and sweet, heavy smoke.
She falls asleep almost immediately afterwards. Rylo fights sleep for as long as he can, drinking in the sight of her breathing softly next to him. The eastern sky is just turning the blue of her eyes as Rylo’s finally close.
OHMYGOD did I really just write that. What.
Half of me is like dayum baby get it but the other half is five years old and like eww stahp. This might be the last and only super sexy sex scene I ever write. Too much sex.
Do you know what sex makes?
Babbies. That’s how babby is formed.
This one is named Reuben Yu and he belongs to Joey and Marina. They originally named him Reginald but then I was like, fuck that. So I changed it to the first decent R name that popped into my head. Reuben is a brave natural cook. I assume that means he’s totally okay with using really big knives when cutting vegetables. I always get so nervous, but this lil baby don’t give a shit.
It’s a pretty nice morning, and Rylo is sleeping right through it. He’s down under the triangle thing somewhere.
There he is.
Nice bum where ya from.
The bright sunlight flooding in through the windows gently eases Rylo awake, and he rolls over to figure out where he is. The fires burn low in the barrels, and the smoke sits much lighter in the room. Though still groggy, Rylo is able to piece together what happened last night. He remembers the boy in the warehouse, the stew, running up the lighted hillside.
Suddenly it all comes back to him and he leaps from the bed and scrambles for his clothes. His heart rate slows a little when he realizes he’s alone, but he is still filled by the need to be far away from here.
Also, sorry guys, but Rylo’s coin slot is in every damn shot and there’s nothing I can do about it. Let’s all just accept it and revel in its glory.
Once dressed, Rylo puts off departure for a moment to satisfy his curiosity. He creeps back into the caved-in basement and heads for the potted plants. One breath in answers his question. The leaves are thick and oily, and give off the same strong scent as the flames in the barrel. Knowing how far they took his mind last night, Rylo makes a mental note to avoid those from now on.
He takes one last look before departing out what must once have been the front door.
As soon as he’s away from the flames Rylo breathes the fresh cold air in deep to clear his hazy mind. In no time he’s back to his same old routine of trekking solo through the wasteland, with no goal other than forward.
Aaaaand that’s the end, I’ll leave you with this nice last lil shot.
Yeah so that was crazy as hell, I don’t know. Sorry for posting a day late, I was on a trip and didn’t get back until late last night.
AdvertisementsIf you would like to know the procedure used to get these results, see part 1 (Procedure).
Reintroduction
Results
Digital Control (D5600, 35mm f/1.8G)
102℉, 3'30" Developer, 6'30" Blix (Analog Control, recommended settings)
76℉ (Room Temperature), 20'00" Developer, 8'00" Blix. Note: no agitation
*Same as above with color correction
76℉ (Room Temperature), 20'00" Developer, 8'00" Blix. Note: constant agitation
90℉, 3'45" Developer, 3'45" Blix
90℉, 8'30" Developer, 8'30" Blix
108℉, 4'00" Developer, 6'00" Blix
Bonus: identical Superia 400 slice developed in D76 black and white developer (single use). This was using the recommended development time (7'00" I think) and room temperature.
Conclusion
The color shifts were minor for all but the room-temperature 76℉ slices. I believe all color shifts would be correctable in a digital workflow. Using an analog workflow (printing with an enlarger), the colors could be corrected to a level I would accept.
I conclude that the color shifts are not as significant as stated, but developing under the recommended conditions will give you the best quality.
Potential Sources Of Error
Only one film emulsion was tested. It's likely different films will react differently
Only one chemical kit was tested. Different developers may have different chemical compositions and react differently.
Agitation level was not carefully controlled. Comparing the results for 76℉, it seems agitation makes a much bigger difference than temperature.
The pictures were underexposed. Perhaps they would have acted slightly differently if properly exposed, but I doubt it would have made much of a difference.
The chemicals were reused. Even though C41 chemicals are meant to be reused, they supposedly lose quality or effectiveness after multiple uses. (An experiment for another day).
The snippets were developed over the course of multiple days. Similar to chemical reuse, the mixed chemicals supposedly lose quality or effectiveness over time.
I cross contaminated developer into my stabalizer and stabalizer into my blix. In the first development cycle after the developer, I poured in a dash of stabalizer before I realized my mistake and replaced it with blix.
Timing was not kept super accurately. I used a stopwatch on my phone, but there was latent time between the timer ending and replacing one chemical for another. I tried to counteract this by reducing the timer by ~15s.
Temperature was not finely controlled. After the chemicals and bath were at the correct temperature, little effort was put into maintaining that temperature during the development process. As seen in the chart below, I measured the temperature drift over the course of 10 minutes and found it to be about 2.5℉, when starting at 101℉. The developer (recommended 3m30s) and blix (recommended 6m30s) steps must be kept at the target temperature while stabalizer can be applied at room temperature. So, I suspect the temperature was stable enough to give meaningful results. Time (s) Water Temp (F) Ambient Temp (F) 0 101.5 75.7 60 100.8 120 100.2 180 100.6 240 100.4 300 100 360 99.7 420 99.7 480 99.5 540 99.3 600 99.1 79.3
I've heard rumors that developing color film (C41) requires holding the chemical temperature constant ±1℉ for fear the color shift demons will recolor your film in strange and unusual ways. I developed slices of the same shot at different chemical temperatures to test that claim.All pictures were taken at f/8, 1/1000s, ISO400, including the digital control. ISO was forced by the film speed I had, aperture was selected arbitrarily, and shutter speed was set by using the recommended meter reading of the FE2 film camera.The digital control histogram is scaled to the image minimum and maximum.The analog histograms are scaled to the minimum and maximum supported density of the scanner.This means the analog histograms can be compared with each other fairly but the digital histogram has a different scale.All analog pictures were scanned with auto-exposure. The scanner auto-mapped each RGB channel film densities to image minimum and maximum.Comparing the film photos against the digital photo, the digital image is more vivid and has a higher contrast. The film photos have lifted shadows. The film photos are bluer than the digital. All of the pictures are slightly under-exposed, perhaps my film camera metering is a bit off. Going by the'sunny-16 rule', these shots should all be about 1 ⅓ stops underexposed.When in-scanner adjusted for exposure, the color shift is subtle at best. [76℉] has a mild red shift, and [90℉, 3'45"] photo has a mild magenta shift.Looking at the histograms, temperature affects exposure somewhat. [90℉, 3'45"] is less exposed, but this result disappeared when development time was adjusted for the lower temperature as in [90℉, 8'30"]. [76℉] has extreme red positive and green negative color shift, lowered contrast and less exposure. When agitation was increased only a positive blue color shift existed.SASKATOON -- A man has launched a complaint with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission over a police raid on a Saskatoon medical marijuana dispensary.
Kelly Anderson took the action Friday after police arrested four people at the Saskatchewan Compassion Club on Oct. 29, including owner Mark Hauk.
The complaint names Mayor Don Atchison and police chief Clive Weighill.
Anderson says the unlicensed club was the only place he felt safe purchasing marijuana to treat his chronic pain caused by a weakening of one knee and surgery on the other.
He says the closure of the dispensary denies him access to his medicine and is therefore discriminating against his condition.
Anderson says he fears that going to a licensed producer will cause him to lose his own growing license.
"It's cruel. It's denying people medicine that need it,'' he said outside Saskatoon Police headquarters Saturday where around two dozen people protested the dispensary's closure.
"This is not about recreational marijuana, this is about access to medicine,'' he said.
The Saskatchewan Human Rights Code protects people from discrimination based on disability or medical condition.
Anderson said he has prescriptions for stronger opioids but prefers marijuana. Before the dispensary, he relied on street dealers.
It's unclear how long it will take for the commission to review his complaint.
Weighill has defended the decision to raid the club, explaining that it was simply shutting down an illegal business under current Canadian laws. He said people will still be able to get medical marijuana through licensed suppliers at Health Canada.
Hauk was charged with trafficking and possession for the purpose of trafficking marijuana. He and the three others who were arrested were released on bail.
Hauk said in September that he knew opening a storefront for medical marijuana was illegal, but said it was the only option that made sense, because otherwise patients have to order it online and wait for their prescription.
ALSO ON HUFFPOST:The Latest: Trump tries to distance himself from Cohen
The Latest on President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen (all times local):
Michael Cohen to Tell Congress That Trump Is a ‘Con Man’
Mr. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, plans to testify on Wednesday that Mr. Trump knew an adviser was talking to WikiLeaks about the release of Democratic emails.
Michael Cohen Is Preparing to Testify that President Trump is a ‘Cheat,’ ‘Conman’ and ‘Racist’
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer is preparing to tell a House committee Wednesday that Trump knew ahead of time that WikiLeaks had emails damaging to his rival Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and that he is a “racist,” a “conman” and a “cheat.” Michael Cohen suggests in prepared testimony obtained by the Associated Press that Trump also implicitly told him to lie about a Moscow real estate project.
Pak Claims "Strikes Across Line Of Control From Within Pak Airspace"
Pakistan claims "strikes across Line of Control from within Pak airspace", says "purpose to demonstrate right to self-defence" This is a breaking news story. Details will be added soon. Please refresh the page for latest version.
Senate confirms Trump nominee for 9th Circuit Court over Democrats' objections
WASHINGTON The Senate has confirmed President Donald Trumps nominee to be a judge on the 9th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a party-line vote. The Seattle attorney, Eric Miller, was confirmed 53-46, as the Republican-led Senate focuses on reshaping the federal judiciary in the Trump era. The appeals court oversees the Western states and is often a target of Trumps complaints about the judicial branch.The Libtiff library, which has been a reference implementation of TIFF for many years, has disappeared from the Internet. It was located at remotesensing.org, a domain whose owner apparently was willing to host it without having any close connection to the project. The domain fell into someone else’s hands, and the content changed completely, breaking all links to Libtiff material. Malice doesn’t seem to be involved; the original owner of remotesensing.org just walked away from the domain or forgot to renew it. Who owns it now is unknown, since it’s registered under a privacy shield.
Originally Libtiff was hosted on libtiff.org, but that fell into the hands of a domain owner with no interest in the project. I don’t know why. It still holds Libtiff code, but it’s many years out of date.
As I’m writing this, people on the Libtiff list are trying to figure out exactly what happened. There’s talk of trying to get libtiff.org back, though that may or may not be possible.
For the moment, there’s no primary source for Libtiff on the Web. I’ll hopefully be able to post more information later.Comedian Azhar Usman performing at the Desi Comedy Fest talks about:
- [4:17] finding out he's made it on the Celebrity Pronuncopedia YouTube Channel
- [5:11] why CNN and Fox News, who can't agree on anything, both think he's a funny Muslim
- [5:46] how he met Donald Trump at the Fox News studios in the Celebrity Apprentice days
- [7:35] his thoughts on Donald Trump then and now, the media, fake news and conspiracies
- [12:35] being a former attorney and why he made the jump to comedy
- [15:05] his community activism especially around the time of 9/11
- [16:50] my reading somewhere that Dave Chappelle performed with him over 50 times
- [19:05] what he learned from the comedy great Dick Gregory about comedy and activism
- [21:28] how he feels when he hears his name on the Celebrity Pronuncopedia YouTube Channel
- [25:53] being a comedy writer for Hasan Minhaj's 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner speech
- [43:36] his upcoming performance at the Desi Comedy Fest
- [46:08] his episodes of the show "Patriot" on Amazon and going into season 2 filming
[34:07] We also got a question via Twitter from Imran Mulla who's from Leicester, England. Imran asked Azhar, do you ever experience tension between your art and religious values?
[37:39] Then we quiz Azhar to find out how smart Chicagoans are with Chicago trivia questions.
[49:22] We also played the song "Captive Ones" from the Indie Electronica Band Unknower.
[2:39] In Moments With Michael, you get to know the PodCast Of 1000s host Michael as he tells you why the harassment of his little brother stopped one day.
Find more about Azhar Usman at:
- How to Pronounce Azhar Usman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KRjuPs7j6Q
Find more about Desi Comedy Fest at:
- Dates - August 10th-20th
- Cities - San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Clara, Berkeley, Mill Valley, Mountain View, Santa Cruz, Union City, Livermore
Find more about Unknower at:
Cast Party Giveaway
Win 2 FREE tickets to any of the remaining shows of the Desi Comedy Fest in the Bay Area, California!
- Listen to Win - http://www.podcastof1000s.com/p/cast-party/
Important reviews
Thank you for the podcast reviews! Your written Apple Podcasts reviews encourage us and they help other people find the podcast. If you appreciate the podcast, please write your own review:
Tell all your performer friends they should be on our podcast Here's how they get on our podcast: - Get On - http://www.podcastof1000s.com/p/get-on/ See what we're up toRubbery, wishy-washy supermarket fruit and veggies got you down? You’re not alone. It’s the flipside of plants bred to produce bumper crops that can survive 1,000-mile cross-country treks and then look pretty on store shelves. Tasty? Not so much. But the problem goes deeper than a bouquet of blandness.
We’ve known for a while that our food has been dropping in nutritional content thanks to 50 years of this kind of thinking. The go-to source for this information is this 2004 study that found significant reductions in the amounts of little things like calcium, iron, |
said 'Once a rave becomes established, it is very difficult to close it down safely, especially during the hours of darkness.
'Early warnings of events, either from people living close by or from information gleaned from social media, enables police to attend and prevent people from accessing the site.'Nearly 50 Turkish soldiers were killed in clashes over the past two days in southeastern Turkey, the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) military wing said Saturday.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The People’s Defense Forces (HPG) claimed in a statement that 48 Turkish troops were killed after an hour-long shootout in the province of Hakkari on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan. It added that 15 of the soldiers have been buried.
© Flickr / Defence Images Turkish Air Force Strikes PKK in Country's Southeast, North Iraq
HPG said it lost two of its fighters in the clashes that began early Friday.
The group also took credit for downing Turkey’s Kobra military helicopter that led to the deaths of two pilots on Friday.
Tensions between Ankara and the Kurds escalated in July 2015 as fighting between the PKK and the Turkish army resumed. Ankara has imposed several round-the-clock curfews in Kurdish-populated towns, preventing civilians from fleeing the regions where the military operations are taking place.
On Friday, Turkish jets launched airstrikes in the northern Iraq province of Dohuk where Ankara suspects militants use as a hideout to stage attacks on Turkish security officers.BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - A Libyan Islamist militant alliance joined forces with local people in Derna to drive back Islamic State fighters, capturing the group’s Yemeni commander and retaking a city courthouse, local residents said on Saturday.
Earlier in the day, a suicide bomber blew himself up in Derna, killing at least three people and wounding five more as rival militants fought on the streets. A second bomber also detonated his explosives later but there were no casualties other than the bomber, who died.
Islamic State loyalists, who have been expanding their foothold in the North African country, have been engaged in fierce fighting for control of Derna for a week with local Islamist umbrella group Majlis Mujahideen.
Confirming developments is difficult in Libya, where two rival governments and their armed forces are fighting for control, leaving a power vacuum militant groups have exploited to expand their influence.
But local residents say Majlis Mujahideen, with local armed people, have pushed Islamic State out of much of Derna, taking back the courthouse, and killing several of the group’s fighters including an Egyptian.
Fighting was continuing in the city center, with most shops and businesses closed. Islamic State is mostly in the Ras El Hilal and Fattiah areas of the city, residents said.
Derna, a conservative city where Islamist hardliners resisted Muammar Gaddafi before his 2011 fall, was the first place Islamic State tried to gain support in Libya.
The group recruited from other militant groups, slowly implemented sharia law, banning public smoking and shisha pipe cafes. The Yemeni, who locals believe to be named Abu El-Bara El-Azadi, arrived in Derna late last year as a representative of Islamic State’s Iraqi leadership.
But the group also faced competition from locals with more domestic agendas. Majlis, which is linked to former rebel groups who fought Gaddafi, enjoys local support going back to the revolution.
Fighting erupted last week when a Majlis commander was killed and the group declared a holy war against Islamic State fighters in the city.
European states have grown particularly alarmed at Islamic State’s expansion beyond its strongholds in Iraq and Syria to a chaotic country just across the Mediterranean sea from mainland Europe and with little control over its porous borders.The Project Gutenberg EBook of Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889, by Barkham Burroughs This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 Author: Barkham Burroughs Release Date: November 19, 2004 [EBook #14091] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BURROUGHS' ENCYCLOPAEDIA *** Produced by Alicia Williams and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
BARKHAM BURROUGHS' ENCYCLOPAEDIA
OF
ASTOUNDING FACTS
AND
USEFUL INFORMATION
1889
For Melba Conner
Universal Assistant and Treasure-House of Information to be Consulted on Every Question That Arises in Everyday Life by Young and Old Alike!
Including: 521 Recipes * 236 Remedies * 150 Themes for Debate * How to Be Handsome * Mother Shipton's Prophesy * The Cure for Baldness * How to Distinguish Death * PLUS 20,000 Things Worth Knowing, and Much Much More.
THE HIGHEST BUILDINGS IN THE WORLD
1. An imaginary tower, 1000 feet high. 2. Cathedral at Cologne, 501 feet. 3. Pyramid of Cheops, 480 feet. 4. Strasbourg Cathedral, 468 feet. 5. St. Peter's, Rome, 457 feet. 6. Pyramid of Cephren, 454 feet. 7. St. Paul's, London, 365 feet. 8. Capitol at Washington, 287 feet. 9. Trinity Church, N.Y., 286 feet. 10. Bunker Hill Monument, 221 feet. 11. St. Mark's, Philadelphia, 150 feet.
HOW POOR BOYS BECOME SUCCESSFUL MEN, 6
THE ART OF PENMANSHIP, 7
ORNAMENTAL PENMANSHIP, 18
HOW TO WRITE A BUSINESS LETTER, 19
ELEMENTS OF SUCCESS IN BUSINESS, 28
DETECTING COUNTERFEIT MONEY, 32
HOW TO ADVERTISE, 37
HOW TO BE HANDSOME, 39
MULTUM IN PARVO. (110 MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS), 41
HOUSEHOLD RECIPES, 71
HOW TO DESTROY HOUSEHOLD PESTS, 73
ACCIDENTS AND INJURIES (236 ITEMS), 75
THE FAMILY PHYSICIAN, 83
LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS, 93
MASTERPIECES OF ELOQUENCE, 94
SUNDRY BRIEF ITEMS OF INTEREST, 95
PHYSICIAN'S DIGESTION TABLE, 95
THEMES FOR DEBATE (150), 95
COOKERY RECIPES (521), 98
HOW TO COOK FISH, 106
HOW TO CHOOSE AND COOK GAME, 108
HOW TO MAKE ICE CREAMS, WATER ICES AND JELLIES, 109
HOW TO SELECT AND COOK MEATS, 111
HOW TO MAKE PIES, 113
HOW TO MAKE PRESERVES, 114
HOW TO BOIL, BAKE AND STEAM PUDDINGS, 116
HOW TO PUT UP PICKLES AND MAKE CATSUPS, 119
HOW TO ROAST, BROIL OR BOIL POULTRY, 121
SAUCES FOR MEATS AND FISH, 121
HOW TO MAKE SOUPS AND BROTH, 123
HOW TO COOK VEGETABLES, 125
HOW TO CALCULATE, 128
20,000 THINGS WORTH KNOWING (20,000 ITEMS), 130
How Poor Boys Become Successful Men.
You want some good advice. Rise early. Be abstemious. Be frugal. Attend to your own business and never trust it to another. Be not afraid to work, and diligently, too, with your own hands. Treat every one with civility and respect. Good manners insure success. Accomplish what you undertake. Decide, then persevere. Diligence and industry overcome all difficulties. Never be mean—rather give than take the odd shilling. Never postpone till to-morrow what can be done to-day. Never anticipate wealth from any source but labor. Honesty is not only the best policy, but the only policy. Commence at the first round and keep climbing. Make your word as good as your bond. Seek knowledge to plan, enterprise to execute, honesty to govern all. Never overtrade. Never give too large credit. Time is money. Reckon the hours of the day as so many dollars, the minutes as so many cents. Make few promises. Keep your secrets. Live within your income. Sobriety above all things. Luck is a word that does not apply to a successful man. Not too much caution—slow but sure is the thing. The highest monuments are built piece by piece. Step by step we mount the pyramids. Be bold—be resolute when the clouds gather, difficulties are surmounted by opposition. Self-confidence, self-reliance is your capital. Your conscience the best monitor. Never be over-sanguine, but do not underrate your own abilities. Don't be discouraged. Ninety-nine may say no, the hundredth, yes: take off your coat: roll up your sleeves, don't be afraid of manual labor! America is large enough for all—strike out for the west. The best letter of introduction is your own energy. Lean on yourself when you walk. Keep good company. Keep out of politics unless you are sure to win—you are never sure to win, so look out.
The
Art of Penmanship
How to Become a Handsome Writer.
The subject of the importance of good writing is as broad as its use. Reaching out in every direction, and pervading every corner of civilized society, from the humblest up to the highest employments, it is a servant of man, second only in importance to that of speech itself. In the world of business its value is seen, from the simplest record or memorandum, up to the parchment which conveys a kingdom. Without it, the wheels of commerce could not move a single hour. At night it has recorded the transactions of the Bank of England during the day; of London; of the whole world.
Through the art of writing, the deeds of men live after them, and we may surround ourselves with the companionship of philosophers, scientists, historians, discoverers and poets; and their discoveries, and reasonings and imaginings become ours. In the amenities of social life, through the medium of the pen, heart speaks to heart, though ocean rolls between. Thoughts of tenderness and affection live when we are gone, and words and deeds of kindness are not preserved by monuments alone. What fountains of grief or joy have been opened in the hearts of those who have read the records of the pen! The pen has recorded the rapturous emotions of love reciprocated. The pen has written the message of sadness which has covered life's pilgrimage with gloom. The pen has traced the record of noble and useful lives, spent in humanity's cause. The songs of the poet, the beautiful tints of his imagination, the flights of the orator in the realms of fancy, and the facts of history, would all perish as the dew of morning, without this noble art of writing.
As a means of livelihood, there is perhaps no other department of education which affords such universal and profitable employment, as writing. From the mere copyist, up to the practical accountant, and onward into that department of penmanship designated as a fine art, the remuneration is always very ample, considering the time and effort required in its acquisition.
Teachers, editors, farmers, doctors and all persons should possess a practical and substantial knowledge of writing, and should be ready with the pen. Business men must of course be ready writers, and hence, in a treatise on business, designed for the education and advancement of the youth of the country, it seems eminently fitting to first make the way clear to a plain, practical handwriting. Neatness and accuracy should characterize the handwriting of every one. Botch-work and bungling are inexcusable, as well in writing as in the transaction of business. No person has a right to cause a tinge of shame to their correspondent, by sending a letter addressed in a stupid and awkward manner, nor to consume the time of another in deciphering the illegible hooks and scrawls of a message. Every one should have the ambition to write respectably as well as to appear respectable on any occasion.
MATERIALS USED IN WRITING.
Having a suitable desk or table, arranged with reference to light, in order to learn to write, it is necessary to be provided with proper materials. Writing materials [pg 8] are so abundant and so cheap in these times that no excuse is afforded for using an inferior or worthless quality. The materials consist of Pens, Ink and Paper.
PENS.
Steel pens are considered the best. Gold pens have the advantage of always producing the same quality of writing, while steel pens, new or old, produce finer or courser lines. Notwithstanding this advantage in favor of the gold pen, steel pens adhere to the paper, and produce a better line. The pen should be adapted to the hand of the writer. Some persons require a coarse pen, and some fine. Elastic pens in the hand of one writer may produce the best results, while a less flexible pen may suit the hand of others best. Pens are manufactured of almost an infinite grade and quality, in order to suit the requirements of all. About the only rule that can be given in selecting pens, is to write a few lines, or a page, with each of the pens on trial, and then compare the writing. If it be shaded too heavily, select a less flexible pen, if the hair lines are too delicate, select a coarser pen.
INK.
Black ink is always preferable. That which is free from sediment and flows well, should be selected. Use an inkstand with broad base as being less liable to upset. With persons in learning to write it is perhaps best to have a quality of ink which is perfectly black when put on the paper, in order that they may see the results of their labor at once. Business men and accountants prefer a fluid ink, however, which, although not black at first, continues to grow black, and becomes a very bright and durable black, notwithstanding the action of light and heat. Avoid the use of fancy colored inks, especially the more gaudy, such as blue, red or green, in writing all documents which you desire to command attention and respect.
PAPER.
There are almost as many grades of paper to be found in the stationery stores, as there are of pens. For practicing penmanship, nothing is more suitable than foolscap, which may be easily sewed into book-form, with cover of some different color, and thus serves every requirement. The paper should have a medium surface, neither rough and coarse, or too fine and glazed. Have a few extra sheets beside the writing book, for the purpose of practicing the movement exercises and testing the pens. Be provided at all times with a large-sized blotter, and when writing, keep this under the hand. Do not attempt to write with a single sheet of paper on a bare table or desk; there should be many sheets of paper underneath, in order to make an elastic surface.
STUDY WITH PRACTICE.
Aimless, indifferent, or careless practice, never made a good writer, and never will. In order to succeed in this, as in other things, there must be will and determination to succeed, and then persevering and studious effort. Study the models until their forms are fixed in the mind.
No one can execute that which he does not clearly conceive. The artist must first see the picture on the white canvas, before he can paint it, and the sculptor must be able to see in the rough and uninviting stone, the outlines of the beautiful image which he is to carve. In writing, a clear idea of the formation of the different letters, and their various proportions, must become familiar by proper study, examination and analysis. Study precedes practice. It is, of course, not necessary, nor even well, to undertake the mastery of all the forms in writing, by study, until some have been executed. It is best that each form should, as it is taken up, be first measured and analyzed and then practiced at once.
It is the act which crowns the thought. After study, careful and earnest practice can hardly fail to make a good writer of any one. Some persons secure a good style of penmanship with less labor than others, and attain to the elegant, and beautiful formation. But it is only fair to presume that no greater diversity of talent exists in this direction than in the study of other things. All do not learn arithmetic or history with like ease, but no one will assert that all who will, may not learn arithmetic or history. And so, all who will put forth the proper exertion in study and practice may learn to write a good business style, while many of the number will attain to the elegant. The conditions of practice in writing are, Positions of the Body, Position of the Hand an Pen, and Movement.
POSITION of the BODY.
Sitting squarely fronting the desk, with feet placed firmly on the floor, and both arms on the desk, is, as a rule, the best position for practice in writing, or correspondence. The right side, may, however, be placed to the desk, with the right arm, only, resting thereon, and some persons prefer this position. Avoid crossing the feet, sitting on the edge of the chair, or assuming any careless attitude. The body should be erect, but slightly inclined forward, in order that the eye may follow the pen closely. This position will never cause curvature of the spine. The body should never be allowed to settle down into a cramped and unhealthy position with the face almost on the paper. By thus compressing the lungs and the digestive organs they are soon injured, and if the stomach lose its tone, the eyesight is impaired, there is such a close sympathy between these organs of the body. The practice of writing should be, and properly is, a healthful exercise, and injurious effects result only from improper positions of the body, at variance with good writing as well as good health.
When wearied by sitting and the effort at writing, lay aside paper and pen, arise from the chair, and take exercise and rest by walking about the room or in the open air. Then come back refreshed, and vigorous, for the practice of writing.
In general, the light should fall on the paper from the left side, thus enabling a writer to clearly see the ruled lines, and render the labor of writing easier and more rapid. If one writes left-handed, of course He will sit so as to get his light from the right side, or over the right shoulder.
SHADING.
As a beautifier of the handwriting, by causing a diversity of light and shade among the letters, shading has its value; but in the practical handwriting for business purposes, it should, as a rule, be classed with flourishing, and left out. Requiring time and effort, to bring down the shades on letters, business men, clerks and telegraph operators find a uniform and regular style of writing, without shade, the best, even though it may not be as artistic.
UNIFORMITY.
A most necessary element in all good penmanship is uniformity. In the slope of the letters and words which form a written page there must be no disagreement. With the letters leaning about in various directions, writing is presented in its most ridiculous phase. Uniformity in the size of letters, throughout the written page; how greatly it conduces to neatness and beauty. All letters resting on the line, and being of uniform hight, adds another condition towards good penmanship. This essential element of uniformity may be watched and guarded closely and cultivated by any learner in his own practice.
SLANT OF WRITING.
As said before, it matters not so much what angle of slant is adopted in writing, provided it is made uniform, and all letters are required to conform exactly to the same slant. Writing which is nearest perpendicular is most legible, and hence is preferable for business purposes. The printed page of perpendicular type; how legible it is. But for ease in execution, writing should slant. It follows then that writing should be made as perpendicular as is consistent with ease of execution. The slant of writing should not be less than sixty degrees from the horizontal.
POSITION of the BODY WHILE STANDING
The practical book-keeper finds it advantageous to do his writing while standing; in fact, where large books are in use, and entries are to be transferred from one to another, the work of the book-keeper can hardly be performed otherwise than in a standing position, free to move about his office. Cumbrous books necessitate a different position at the desk, from that of the correspondent, or the learner. Since large books must lie squarely on the desk, the writer, in order to have the proper position thereto, must place his left side to the desk. The body thus has the same relative position, as if squarely fronting the desk with the paper or book placed diagonally. In other words, the writer, while engaged in writing in large, heavy books, must adjust himself to the position of the books. Should the correspondent or bill clerk perform his work while standing, he would assume the same as the sitting position—squarely fronting the desk.
LEGIBILITY.
Children, in learning to write, are apt to sacrifice all other good qualities of beauty, regularity and grace, for the quality of legibility, or plainness. With some older persons this legibility is considered of very little consequence, and is obscured by all manner of meaningless flourishes, in which the writer takes pride. In the estimation of the business man, writing is injured by shades and flourishes. The demand of this practical time is a plain, regular style that can be written rapidly, and read at a glance.
FINISH.
By a careless habit, which many persons allow themselves to fall into, they omit to attend to the little things in writing. Good penmanship consists in attention to small details, each letter and word correctly formed, makes the beautiful page. By inattention to the finish of one letter, or part of a letter of a word, oftentimes the word is mistaken for another, and the entire meaning changed. Particular attention should be devoted to the finish of some of the small letters, such as the dotting of the i, or crossing of the t. Blending the lines which form a loop, often causes the letter to become a stem, similar to the t or d, or an e to become an i. In many of the capital letters, the want of attention to the finish of the letter converts it into another or destroys its identity, such, for instance, as the small cross on the capital F, which, if left off, makes the letter a T. The W often becomes an M, or vice versa, and the I a J. Mistakes in this regard are more the result of carelessness and inattention than anything else. By careful practice a person will acquire a settled habit of giving a perfection to each letter and word, and then it is no longer a task, but is performed naturally and almost involuntarily, while the difference in the appearance of the written page, as well as the exactness and certainty of the meaning conveyed, may be incalculably great.
While practicing penmanship, or while endeavoring to correct a careless habit in writing, the mind must be upon the work in hand, and not be allowed to wander into fields of thought or imagination; by thus confining the attention, any defect or imperfection in the formation of letters may be soon mastered or corrected.
POSITION OF THE HAND AND PEN
The right arm should rest on the muscles just below the elbow, and wrist should be elevated so as to move free from paper and desk. Turn the hand so that the wrist will be level, or so that the back of the hand will face the ceiling. The third and fourth fingers turned slightly underneath the hand will form its support, and the pen, these fingers and the muscles of the arm near the elbow form the only points of rest or contact on desk or paper. The pen should point over the shoulder, and should be so held that it may pass the root of the nail on the second finger, and about opposite the knuckle of the hand. An unnatural or cramped position of the hand, like such a position of the body, is opposed to good writing, and after many years of observation and study, all teachers concur in the one position above described, as being the most natural, easy and graceful for the writer, and as affording the most freedom and strength of movement.
Avoid getting the hand in an awkward or tiresome position, rolling it over to one side, or drawing the fore finger up into a crooked shape. Hold the pen firmly but lightly, not with a grip as if it were about to escape from service. Do not say, "I can't" hold the pen correctly. Habits are strong, but will may be stronger, and if you hold the pen correctly in spite of old habits, for a few lessons, all will then be easy, and the pen will take its position at each writing exercise, with no effort whatever. Everything being in readiness, and the proper position assumed, the writer must now obtain complete control of hand and pen, by practice in movement.
RAPIDITY.
One of the essentials of a practical business style of writing must be rapidity of execution, in order to be of any avail in the necessities and press of a business position. The demand of the merchant is, that his clerk shall not only write well, but with rapidity, and the volume of letters to be answered, bills to be made out, or items to be entered on the books of account, compel the clerk to move the pen with dexterity and rapidity, as well as skill. While there is great diversity among persons as to the rapidity as well as quality of their penmanship, some being naturally more alert and active than others, yet by securing the proper position of the hand, arm and body, favorable to ease and freedom of execution, then following this with careful practice in movement, until all the varied motions necessary in writing are thoroughly mastered, the person may, with suitable effort, acquire the quality of rapidity in writing, gradually increasing the speed until the desired rate is accomplished.
BEAUTY.
In the handwriting, as in other things, beauty is largely a matter of taste and education. To the man of business, the most beautiful handwriting is that which is written with ease, and expresses plainly and neatly the thought of the writer. To the professional or artistic taste, while such a hand may be regarded as "a good business hand," it would not be considered as beautiful, because it conforms to no rule as to proportion, shade, and spacing. In the practical art of writing, it is not very unfair to measure its beauty largely by its utility.
MOVEMENT.
Finger movement, or writing by the use of the fingers as the motive power, is entirely inadequate to the requirements of business. The fingers soon become tired, the hand becomes cramped, the writing shows a labored effort, and lacks freedom and ease so essential to good business penmanship. In the office or counting-room, where the clerk or correspondent must write from morning till night, the finger movement of course cannot be used.
What is designated by writing teachers as the Whole Arm, or Free Arm Movement, in which the arm is lifted free from the desk and completes the letter with a dash or a swoop, is necessary in ornamental penmanship and flourishing, but has no place in a practical style of business writing. The man of business would hardly stop, in the midst of his writing, to raise the arm, and execute an "off-hand capital," while customers are waiting.
But adapted to the practical purposes of business is the muscular movement, in which the arm moves freely on the muscles below the elbow, and in cases of precise writing, or in the more extended letters, such as f, is assisted by a slight movement of the fingers. The third and fourth fingers may remain stationary on the paper, and be moved from time to time, or between words, where careful and accurate writing is desired, but in more rapid, free and flowing penmanship, the fingers should slide over the paper.
MOVEMENT EXERCISES.
Having everything in readiness, the student may begin his practice on movement exercises, the object of which is to obtain control of the pen and train the muscles. Circular motion, as in the capital O, reversed as in the capital W, vertical movement as in f, long s and capital J, and the lateral motion as in small letters, must each be practiced in order to be able to move the pen in any direction, up, down, or sidewise.
The simplest exercise in movement. Try to follow around in the same line as nearly as possible. Do not shade.
The same exercise, only with ovals drawn out and and slight shade added to each down stroke.
Sides of ovals should be even, forming as nearly a straight line as possible. Reverse the movement as in third form.
The following three exercises embrace the essential elements in capital letters, and should at first be made large for purposes of movement:
Capital O, down strokes parallel.
Capital stem. Down stroke a compound curve. Shade low. Finish with a dash.
Capital loop. Curves parallel. First curve highest.
Having succeeded to some extent with these exercises, the learner may next undertake the vertical movement. In order to obtain the lateral movement, which enables one to write long words without lifting the pen, and move easily and gracefully across the page, exercises like the following should be practiced:
Down strokes straight. Even and resting on line.
In all movement exercises the third and fourth fingers should slide on the paper, and the finger movement should be carefully avoided. The different movements having been practiced, they may now be combined in various forms
Lateral and rolling movement combined. Vertical movement and rolling movement combined.
Do not shade the circles. Lines should be parallel.
Movement exercises may be multiplied almost indefinitely by studying the forms used in writing and their combinations. Repeating many of the small letters, such as m, u, e, r, s, a, d, h and c, also capitals D, J, P, etc., forms an excellent exercise for the learner.
PRINCIPLES IN WRITING.
In order to enable the learner to examine, analyze and criticise his writing, the following principles are given as his standards of measurements and form. By combining them in various ways the essential part of all letters in the alphabet may be formed.
The principles must be first carefully studied, and separated into the primary lines which compose them and the form of each principle well understood. The student may then form a scale like the one following, by [pg 14] dividing the distance between the blue lines on the paper into four equal spaces, with a lightly ruled line. The letters of the small alphabet should then be placed in the scale and the height of each letter fixed in the mind.
Notice that the contracted letters, or those which occupy only one space, as a, m, n, o, s, v, w and e, and that part of d, g, h, q and y, found in the first space, are all well rounded and developed. These letters and parts of letters, found in the first space, form the essential part of all writing, and therefore deserve especial care. Also notice that the loop letters, above the line, such as b, f, h, k and l, extend two and one-half spaces above the blue line, while the loop below the line, such as g, f, j, q, y and z, extend one and one-half spaces below the blue line, thus two and one-half and one and one-half making the four spaces of the scale, and the upper loops on one line will just meet the lower loops of the line above, but never conflict, to the destruction of neat body writing. Notice the type of the printer. The extensions above the shorter letters are quite insignificant, and are only used to save the letter from resembling some other letter of the alphabet. They never conflict, and how legible they are.
The Types. A Resemblance. An Absurdity. The Types. A Resemblance. An Absurdity.
Besides, to make long loops, requires more time, and more power with the pen, while shorter loops are in every way easier to acquire, quicker, and better. Telegraph operators, some of whom are among our best business penmen, make all extended letters very short, while accountants, and business men, favor the style of short loops, well developed letters, and small capitals.
In order to practice capital letters to advantage, as well as to study them, collect in a group or family all those letters which have some one form or principle as an essential part. Take first the 6th principle, or oval, and we group the letters as follows:
The excellence of an oval depends largely on its fullness and roundness. No corners or flat sides.
In the capital loop, or 8th principle, another oval may be made within the large turn at the top, but for practical purposes the letter is perhaps better without it, and may be simplified even more, as in the N below.
FIGURES.
Make figures small, neat, and of form exact. Each figure must show for itself, and cannot be known by those which precede or follow it, as is the case with letters. The common tendency is to make figures too large and coarse. Mind the ovals in figures and have them full and round. The chief excellence of the zero lies in its roundness; the 3, 5, 6 or 9, without care in making the ovals, may degenerate into a straight line, or simply a meaningless hook, which it would hardly be safe to use in expressing sums of money, ordering goods, or the transaction of other business.
COPIES FOR PRACTICE
Having proceeded thus far in the study and practice of writing, and having obtained the proper control of the pen through the movement exercises, all that is necessary now in order to secure a good handwriting, is continued and well-directed practice.
$1100.00 Chicago, Jan. 10./80.
Due Henry Harrington, on order, Eleven
Hundred Dollars in Merchandise, value rec'd
No. 43. Newton P. Kelley, Sr. $1100.00 Chicago, Jan. 10./80.Due Henry Harrington, on order, ElevenHundred Dollars in Merchandise, value rec'dNo. 43. Newton P. Kelley, Sr.
ORNAMENTAL PENMANSHIP
Charming and fascinating are the graceful and harmonious curves produced, when, wielded by some trained and skillful hand, the pen becomes an instrument of beauty. As by the power of speech, men may pass from the common tone of conversation up to the melodious strains of music, or may soar in flights of oratory into the sublime, until the multitude is entranced; so the capabilities of the pen are not limited to the common uses of life, but may take on forms of beauty in elegant outlines of bird, or landscape, or graceful swan or bounding stag.
Ornamental writing is not a practical art, and has no connection whatever with the practical business of life. It is in the realm of poetry. The imagery of graceful outlines must first be seen by a poetic imagination. While the great masses may acquire a good style of plain, practical penmanship, few have the necessary conception of mind, combined with the skill and dexterity of hand to become successful ornamental penmen.
The ornamental pages which follow are given, not as models for imitation or practice by the learner, but merely to show the possibilities of the pen in the hand of a master, and as a fitting closing to this, our chapter on penmanship.
To any one who may have an artistic quality of mind, and delights in beautiful lines and harmonious curves, these pages of ornamental penmanship will serve as models for practice and imitation, and every attempt at such an exercise as the one on this, or the following pages, will give greater strength and freedom of movement, and better command of the pen, so that it will conduce to an easy, flowing and elegant style of plain business writing, while affording a most pleasant and profitable employment in the cultivation of the taste.
Various beautiful designs or pictures may be made with the pen, in the hands of one that possesses the skill of a penman and the eye of an artist.
HOW TO WRITE A BUSINESS LETTER
Considering the vast amount of business transacted by correspondence between the parties, Letter Writing seems only second in importance to bookkeeping. The merchant of the smaller cities or towns, perhaps in the far west, desires to order articles of merchandise from the wholesale house in New York or Boston. Possibly a remittance is to be sent. It may be that an error has occurred and needs correction. Credit is to be asked, references given, and a multitude of other matters call for adjustment through correspondence. To write every conceivable variety and shade of meaning, expressing the proper thought in the most fitting and appropriate language, is indeed a rare and valuable accomplishment. And when the proper language takes on the graceful and businesslike air of the well written letter, with its several parts harmoniously arranged, it is a combination of brain and skill which can hardly be overestimated.
This subject, therefore, naturally divides itself into two parts: The Mechanical Structure, and the Literature of a Letter. The former of these being the less difficult will be first considered.
THE STRUCTURE OF A BUSINESS LETTER.
Consists in the arrangement of its several parts, with a view to the most harmonious effect. Excellent penmanship is very desirable, but not absolutely essential. The penmanship may indeed be poor, but the arrangement of the several parts of the letter, the neatness, and finish, may be such as to give it an attractive appearance, while on the other hand, the letter may be clothed in the most elegant penmanship, and yet the construction be such as to stamp its author as a careless and indifferent person, devoid of precision and order.
No one great thing, but many little things carefully watched, and attentively practiced, make up the structure and dress of a business letter, and give it a businesslike air. The penmanship should be a neat, strong hand, very plain and legible, and devoid of all flourish.
PAPER AND ENVELOPE.
The paper and envelopes used in business correspondence should be of a good, durable quality, and a white color is preferable. Cheap materials are not only unsatisfactory to the writer, but may give the reader an unfavorable impression, which would be an injury far exceeding the cost of the best stationery for a life time. Persons form impressions from very little things sometimes.
The size of a letter sheet in business correspondence should be about 8x10 |
Kandahar, Mohmand, Tawazuh’s owner, showed me a certificate of appreciation signed by the battalion’s commander. “I worked with the Americans very honestly and sincerely,” he said. “My rates are also less than other contractors’.” When the Desert Eagles returned later that year, Hikmat’s business recovered. Woodall, who was in charge of the service detachment, obtained a “sole source” memo, which the Desert Eagles used to bypass TOIFOR’s selection process and to work with Hikmat when they wanted. Hikmat set his own prices, and, according to his lawyers, they were reviewed by both TOIFOR and the military. “I think I remember hearing that it was more expensive to use Hikmat than the other companies, but that was all right with my chain of command because the mission was more dangerous and he was the only one who could and would do it,” Caleb Hardin, one of Woodall’s subordinates, wrote in a declaration submitted by Hikmat’s lawyers. Hikmat’s invoices to TOIFOR reached new heights. Bradley and Myers were back in Kandahar during the Bush Hogs’ next rotation, which replaced Woodall’s in early 2011. In September alone, Hikmat’s invoices to TOIFOR amounted to $17.4 million. One form from the Bush Hogs requesting a trucking mission contains a handwritten justification for Hikmat’s higher prices: “Always on time, never any issues, and understands how [Special Forces] operates.” Hikmat’s bid was five thousand dollars; those of three other Afghan subcontractors were $2,500, $2,124, and $1,000. Hikmat told me that his higher prices were the result of the extra flexibility he gave the Special Forces. Often, he said, they would change the mission at the last minute, for security reasons. “I told them, don’t tell me the date, don’t tell me the time, and don’t tell me the destination,” he said. “I promise to love, honor, and stay the hell off Facebook.” Hikmat’s earnings from TOIFOR made up the lion’s share of a highly lucrative business. According to his bank statements, his logistics companies took in a hundred and sixty-seven million dollars between late 2007 and the end of 2012. During that period, he withdrew eighty-eight million. Even assuming that the withdrawals were all for business expenses, rather than investments or personal spending (Hikmat also owned a gas station and an energy-drink company, and employed a mostly Filipino office staff, led by Western expatriates), that left him with almost eighty million dollars—a profit margin of nearly fifty per cent. (According to Hikmat’s lawyer, Hikmat has millions of dollars in unpaid debts, and is owed between fifty and sixty million dollars by the U.S. government.) By the time he was in his early twenties, Hikmat was one of the wealthiest men in Kandahar. He got married, made the hajj, and travelled through Europe, visiting the Eiffel Tower and the stadium where Real Madrid, his favorite soccer team, plays. Every Ramadan, he showered money on those in his neighborhood he judged to be poor and deserving. Rumors spread that Hikmat would drive around in an old car, a scarf half obscuring his face, handing out hundred-dollar bills to laborers. One cash giveaway at his gas station led to a near-riot that had to be dispersed with live ammunition. It was around this time that people started calling him Shadman, which means “happy.” The vast sums that he was handling also impressed the foreigners on KAF. Once, Hikmat told me, a Canadian soldier who searched him at the entrance found ten thousand dollars. He marvelled at the thick bundle of bills. “He said, ‘Oh, wow, just hit me with it on my face. I like it, I’ve never seen such money,’ ” Hikmat said, smiling at the memory. Hikmat outfitted his living quarters on KAF with flat-screen TVs and opulent furniture, including an oversized bed. “Nothing fits together, because it’s the most expensive stuff that’s picked out of every magazine,” one of Hikmat’s managers said. “Everything’s gold and shiny, and it’s got crystal in it.” Yet Hikmat never used his ornate bed, preferring, like most Afghans, to sleep on a mat on the floor. “He sat cross-legged with the locals, with baba and the guy that makes the food,” the manager said. The Special Forces were frequent visitors. In 2011, Hikmat hosted a Christmas party, and Myers attended. In a photograph, Myers is wearing a checked shirt, and appears conspicuously massive next to Hikmat’s diminutive Filipino employees. There was a plastic Christmas tree on a stand draped in an American flag. The guests ate pizza and drank Red Bull, and Hikmat, beaming and rosy-cheeked, handed out gifts from a secret-Santa exchange. Myers took part in a three-legged race, pulling one of the Filipino staff people along with him. “It was one of the most bizarre evenings of my life,” Franco Swart, a South African who managed one of Hikmat’s trucking companies, said. But Hikmat was under pressure in Kandahar. He said that the Taliban had attempted to kidnap his brother, and had also threatened him at his family’s house. “After a few days, they stuck a letter on the door, that in three days if you don’t leave the job we will kill even the kids,” he said. In February, 2011, he had applied to a State Department program that allowed interpreters and other Afghan employees of the U.S. to emigrate to America. “I am requesting a Visa to the US in the case of an emergency,” he wrote, citing the Taliban’s threat to his life. Bradley and three other Special Forces soldiers provided supporting letters. The Bush Hogs’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel William Carty, wrote, “The loyalty and commitment Hikmatullah displays in supporting [the special-operations task force] and its mission goes unmatched.”
In November, 2009, Scott Lindsay, a staffer on the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, was flying back from Pakistan when George Miller, a Democratic representative from California, handed him an article from The Nation. “How the US Funds the Taliban,” by Aram Roston, claimed that Afghan trucking companies working for the American military were paying off insurgents. “Scott, do you know anything about this?” Miller asked. Over the next eight months, Lindsay and a team from the subcommittee interviewed U.S. military officials and contractors and reviewed thousands of documents. “It was immediately glaring that, oh, my God, this could be as bad as alleged,” Lindsay told me. The U.S. military had decided to make trucking companies responsible for hiring their own security. As the country descended into violence, the companies were forced to pay off the men who controlled the roads, whether they were crooked officials, warlords, or Taliban. “The whole thing became this inadvertently but inherently corrupt enterprise that, to me, symbolized the failure of the entire adventure,” Lindsay said. “If you have to pay your enemy for the right to be there, something’s gone wrong.” In June, 2010, the subcommittee released a report, titled “Warlord, Inc.,” which concluded that U.S. government funds were likely going to the same people who were killing American soldiers. According to the subcommittee, the military had known about the problem for at least a year, but, Lindsay told me, “absolutely nothing was done.” The perception among many of the trucking companies on KAF was that the U.S. military was turning a blind eye to where its money was ending up. “We all knew what was happening,” Rodney Castleman, an American employee of an Afghan trucking company, told me. “You could be hardcore about stuff and say, We’re not going to pay nobody, but, I’m telling you, you were going to get hit on the road.” The report landed amid a growing realization in Washington that corruption in Afghanistan was jeopardizing President Obama’s plan to stabilize the country before withdrawing American troops. That fall, Afghanistan’s financial system nearly collapsed after it was revealed that a group of well-connected businessmen and officials—including the brothers of President Karzai and his first Vice-President—had fraudulently acquired nearly a billion dollars in loans from Kabul Bank. Far from being a source of stability, American money was part of the problem, and U.S. officials had little idea where it was going. “I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters,” John Sopko, the head of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), later wrote in a quarterly report to Congress, “but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract.” “Damn it—I think I just butt-donated to a charity.” “You know, Taliban soldiers are a hundred times cheaper than American soldiers,” Pashtoon, the member of parliament from Kandahar, said. “So for a lot less money the Taliban can fight for a long time.” The military had long been reluctant to address corruption. But now General Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, conceded that the flood of U.S. money into Afghanistan was “both an opportunity and a danger.” He added that, uncontrolled, it could “unintentionally fuel corruption, finance insurgent networks, strengthen criminal patronage networks, and undermine our efforts in Afghanistan.” Money, it seemed, was a double-edged weapons system. The military created Task Force 2010, a team of forensic accountants, law-enforcement agents, intelligence analysts, lawyers, and auditors, to scrutinize Afghan contractors. The team reported that, of the thirty-one billion dollars in contracts that it inspected, an estimated three hundred and sixty million dollars had reached corrupt officials, criminals, or the Taliban. Thomas Creal, the lead forensic accountant on the task force, told me that U.S. taxpayer dollars reached the insurgents through a layer of intermediaries that began with the contractors. “I always viewed them as an aider and abettor of terrorist acts,” he said. In 2010, as investigators descended on KAF, contractors there began to come under scrutiny. “The military came in and did their audits,” Castleman said. “We got audited.” In October, the U.S. military detained Mohmand, Tawazuh’s owner, on suspicion of making payments to the Taliban. Though he was quickly released, his company was barred from receiving further contracts. In May, 2011, Hikmat, too, was banned from receiving contracts from the military, because of allegations that he had “direct association with individuals who have been involved in significant criminal activity or insurgent operations,” according to a declassified report presented in court. Creal said that his team had initially flagged Hikmat because his invoices were so high. “It wasn’t hard to come to the conclusion that Shadman was getting way more money than he should have,” Creal told me. But Hikmat’s allies in the Special Forces believed that his rivals, including General Raziq Sherzai, were jealous of his success, and that the accusations were based on false information that they gave to military investigators. “Some of Hik’s competitors were always trying to make his life difficult,” Bradley wrote. (Raziq Sherzai denied this.) Myers told the court that he “began digging deep into both sides of the allegations.” After Hikmat took a polygraph test, Myers got the Bush Hogs’ commander to lead a successful effort to remove the ban on him. In the next six months, Hikmat’s companies billed TOIFOR for more than fifty million dollars. But the military investigators had come to believe that Hikmat may have been paying off the Taliban. According to Creal, they discovered transfers from his account to an alleged Taliban “money mover,” who, it was rumored, was connected to a suicide bombing on KAF. Twice that year, attackers had detonated cars packed with explosives at the base’s main gate, killing dozens of Afghan civilians. Around 4 A.M. on October 1, 2012, a U.S. military team raided Hikmat’s compound.
Hikmat’s first thought, when armed men kicked in his bedroom door, was that the Taliban had come for him. The men cursed him in Pashto, but when they dragged him outside he saw, to his relief, that there were American soldiers with them. He was blindfolded, shackled, and flown across the country to the main U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan, at Bagram Airfield. “The way they treated me and the place they put me in the jail,” Hikmat told me, his voice trailing off. “It was a toilet.” In intake, he was subjected to the same fate as those he had once hunted alongside the Special Forces. His head was shaved, and he was forced to strip and wash under the guards’ supervision, an ordeal that Hikmat, having grown up in conservative Kandahar, found particularly humiliating. “This is why President Karzai says that this is the factory of the Taliban,” he said. “How they treat people!” Hikmat denied any connection with the Taliban, and passed a polygraph test. “In Pashto, we have a proverb that you cannot hold two watermelons in one hand,” Hikmat told me. “When I was fifteen, I started working with you guys. I am one of the family members of the Special Forces, and I worked against the Taliban.” According to a declaration submitted in court by Hikmat’s lawyers, the civilian interrogator who questioned him for two months at Bagram came to believe that he was innocent. The evidence against him was flimsy and, the interrogator suspected, provided by “disgruntled former employees or business competitors who were known to be jealous and resentful of Hikmatullah’s success.” At the time, Afghans detained by the U.S. military were entitled to a hearing within sixty days, at which three officers determined whether they were still a threat to U.S. and allied forces and, if not, whether they should be released. A group of Hikmat’s Afghan supporters approached Gul Agha Sherzai, the former governor of Kandahar, and asked for his help. Sherzai remained close to the U.S. military leadership and often intervened in support of detainees; he had already helped secure the release of Mohmand, Tuwazuh’s owner. On December 9, 2012, the day of the hearing, Sherzai arrived at Bagram, along with a group of tribal elders from Kandahar. He, too, was unimpressed by the evidence presented by the military investigators. “They had no documents,” Sherzai told me. Even so, he found it plausible that both Mohmand and Hikmat were paying off the Taliban, since it was a widespread practice in the trucking business. “They weren’t powerful enough to face the Taliban,” he said. “Why would it be that easy for them to pass with their convoys?” With Sherzai and the Special Forces vouching for Hikmat, the three officers voted to clear him. After he was released, he flew back to Kandahar. “I think it broke his spirit for a bit,” Hikmat’s employee Franco Swart told me. In Hikmat’s absence, the business had largely shut down. On January 23, 2013, Hikmat flew to Dubai, and started shopping for a piece of very expensive real estate. “I like his earlier work better, particularly the ones I said I didn’t like at the time.”
Since the beginning of the war, Dubai has been a magnet for Afghans seeking to move their fortunes out of the country. Hikmat told me that, since he could no longer operate on KAF, he had decided to invest in property. He settled on Ahli House Tower, a residential apartment block of approximately two hundred units. On February 23rd, he signed a contract to buy it for forty-three million dollars. But when he called his bank in Kabul he was told that his accounts had been frozen. While Hikmat was detained at Bagram, the Justice Department, working with SIGAR, had filed a civil-forfeiture suit, claiming that Hikmat had paid bribes in order to obtain contracts. “The civil route made sense,” a former Justice Department official who worked on Hikmat’s case said. “There’s no extradition agreement, no way that he’d be arrested in Afghanistan.” Since Hikmat’s bank accounts were in Kabul, the Justice Department section at the U.S. Embassy had to persuade the Afghan attorney general’s office to recognize the warrant, something that had never been done before. The attorney general, Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, a Karzai protégé, was out of the country undergoing medical treatment; in his absence, his deputy acquiesced. When Hikmat returned from Dubai, on February 28th, he went straight to the attorney general’s office, where he was told that he was under investigation. Later, prosecutors called him back and arrested him. He was thrown into prison for several hours, until a call came from the Presidential palace, ordering his release. “Shadman’s case was a very fishy case,” a former senior official in the Afghan attorney general’s office said. “Karzai was calling us saying, ‘What happened with this case? The money was supposed to be released.’ ” Aimal Faizi, a spokesperson for Karzai, denied that Karzai had any personal interest in the case. “For President Karzai, it was just another case of illegal detention of an Afghan citizen by the U.S. forces in Afghanistan,” he said. Hikmat’s accounts were unfrozen, and he transferred seventy-four million dollars to bank accounts in Dubai. When the Justice Department officials at the Embassy learned that the Afghan government had unblocked the accounts, they were furious. “One of our people went over and confronted the attorney general about it,” the former official said, telling him that he had “lost a great opportunity to demonstrate to the international community the integrity of your legal system.” But Hikmat was still vulnerable. When funds targeted by a civil-forfeiture suit are held outside the reach of the U.S. government, it has the authority to seize equivalent funds held by those foreign banks in the U.S. In May, 2013, the U.S. restrained funds in the correspondent accounts of Hikmat’s banks in New York, forcing the banks to freeze fifty-seven million dollars of his money in Dubai and Kabul.
The civil-forfeiture suit has not yet gone to trial, and both the Justice Department and SIGAR declined to speak with me about it. Hikmat’s lawyers have filed reams of documents in court—including bank statements, depositions, and business records—but the government has barely outlined its case, which alleges that Hikmat paid bribes to both U.S. soldiers and TOIFOR contractors, including some of Stowell’s successors at the Jingle Truck Office. Yet the Justice Department has prosecuted a series of related criminal cases in North Carolina, where Fort Bragg, the home of the Special Forces, is situated. On September 29th, five current and former Army sergeants were sentenced for taking illegal payments. Several of them wept as they spoke of their betrayal of the military and their families. If “you did something that impaired the Army’s fighting ability,” Judge Terrence Boyle said, referring to earlier wars, “they would court-martial and shoot you.” He then handed down sentences that ranged from ten months to ten years. “I mean, how do you explain it to somebody whose child or spouse or loved one, you know, died in one of these theatres?” Four of the soldiers had worked in the Bush Hogs logistics section in Kandahar from February, 2011, to January, 2012, Hikmat’s most lucrative period. According to court documents, the soldiers created fake trucking missions—some signed with names like Bongo Truck and Touchi Meh—and allowed Hikmat’s drivers to steal fuel in return for cash payments. These criminal cases suggest long-running fraud within the Special Forces’ service detachment on KAF. The lawyer for the soldiers’ leader, Sergeant First Class Jeffrey Edmondson, said that Edmondson learned about the scheme from his predecessor on KAF, a staff sergeant who worked for Woodall and the Desert Eagles. The prosecution stated that it was in the process of investigating that unit. (“My military career is over, and I’m done with that portion of my life. And that’s that,” the staff sergeant told me when I reached him by phone, before declining to speak further. He has not been charged.) Another soldier, Sergeant First Class Robert Green, admitted to receiving at least forty-five thousand dollars from Hikmat in 2008, and said that fraudulent practices had existed before his arrival. In exchange for a reduced sentence, he coöperated with the government against his former superior, an Army captain, who recently pleaded guilty to similar charges. “This is a cycle that goes through every year,” Judge Boyle said at the sentencing hearing. “When the new guy shows up, they say, Well, you can get a good meal over here and you can get, you know, a beer over here, and, by the way, you can pick up a quarter of a million dollars if you feel like it—we just run this operation.” Similar cases involving fuel theft and Afghan contractors have been unearthed at other military bases in Afghanistan. “We’ve interviewed a lot of the people we’ve caught,” a law-enforcement official at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul told me. “One of the things they say is that the system is so loose, and it’s so obvious that you can get away with it.” “Hang on, I think they’re just aiming for our hats.” The Army’s Special Operations Command, when asked whether it was aware of systemic corruption within its logistics section on KAF, declined to comment. Its commander at the time, Lieutenant General Charles Cleveland, offered this statement to the court on the impact of the cases: “The majority of the Afghan population views the United States as one more in a long line of occupiers. When people they regularly do business with, in this case the Soldiers listed above, are exposed as thieves and conspirators, the established trust and respect is destroyed.” In late December, the Justice Department filed criminal-conspiracy and bribery charges against Hikmat. A warrant was issued, though it’s unlikely that he’ll be arrested, since he spends his time in Dubai and Kabul. He and his lawyers have denied that he paid bribes or committed any illegal activities. In court hearings, Hikmat’s lead counsel, Bryant Banes, has said that Hikmat was paid out of logistics funds for intelligence work for the Special Forces, and that classified evidence will exonerate him. Bradley has stated that he recruited Hikmat to be part of classified “compartmented programs.” Bradley, Myers, and Woodall have not been accused of any wrongdoing or criminal acts, and they remain loyal to Hikmat. Woodall, who is now a major, wrote to me, “Hikmat is a friend to not only myself but to the American servicemen who operated in Afghanistan. To say differently is a disgrace.” “I don’t want nothing else to do with Afghanistan,” Bradley told me, before refusing to comment. “Everything about it gets twisted into something wrong.” Myers also declined to speak. Both he and Bradley have retired from the Army. Myers has started a nonprofit, The World Is My Country Foundation. His Web campaigns have solicited funds for earthquake relief efforts in Nepal, and for him and his best friend to drive around the world, “helping people in every country we drive through.” According to his social-media posts, he plans to work on charitable campaigns with Hikmat in Afghanistan. The World Is My Country Foundation is registered as a nonprofit in Texas by Banes, Hikmat’s lawyer.What the developers have to say:
Why Early Access? “Early Access has been a tremendous boon to our design process. From the start, our goal with CodeSpells has been to give players as much freedom as possible, even as we were pioneering untried systems and tools.
We purposefully made our current plan as malleable and open to players as possible in order to find and polish what people want out of the game. This feedback has guided our every step, and we know it will continue to shape us.
CodeSpells is currently an enjoyable experience, but we are confident that we can push ourselves harder through Early Access.” Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access? “Originally, we had planned to release the full game in Summer of 2016. However, while we were working and listening to our beta testers, we realized that our in-game systems for explaining coding and motivating people to create spells were lacking. Tutorials were a feature we had subconsciously relegated to the unreached NPC Stretch Goal of our Kickstarter campaign, but we have realized since then that in order to create a truly accessible and enjoyable experience, we should have a more interactive coding window, and perhaps even a small guided campaign where players could test their skills. However, the campaign mode is a dream goal, and last on our list. Our primary concern is to make the best procedurally-generated spell-crafting sandbox game the world has ever known.
We are so grateful for everyone’s help in making CodeSpells as magical as we all want it to be. We hope you will continue to give us feedback as we bear down on the final product.” How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version? “Air magic and Multiplayer are now fully implemented!
Going forward, we will make our Life ecosystems more robust, implement a coding tutorial, design tools that allow the game to be internally moddable, and possibly create a basic campaign mode.” What is the current state of the Early Access version? “The current version of the game features Earth, Water, Fire, and Air magic. These elements are not at their final state, but are at a close enough state that will allow us to move on to incrementally adding new aspects to interact with.
The game has not been fully optimized or tested, so although we believe it is at a fairly stable state, bugs and hitches are very possible.
We will be doing major updates about once or twice a month, if not more often, up until the completion of the project.” Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access? “We currently don't expect the price to change while in Early Access.
After the Early Access is completed, it is possible that the price of the game will change, but if it does, it will not be substantial.” How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process? “Our team is active on the CodeSpells forum (https://the-codespells-forum.herokuapp.com/). We love to hear about how things are going and any features that are missing from the game.
Every month for the duration of the development of CodeSpells, we have and will continue to do Developer Updates on progress.”lawrence.jpg The Hunger Games trilogy describes a dystopic future world rife with government lies, severe economic inequality, and impressive archery skills. But like many works of science fiction, the world of "The Hunger Games" isn't as comfortably distant as you might think.
1. Desperate Appalachian Poverty
Huge portions of the Hunger Games trilogy are set in District 12, where Katniss, Gale, and Peeta are from.
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live below the poverty line.
Suzanne Collins' father was in the Air Force, and grew up during the Depression. She has said that her father's stories about military life, sacrifice, poverty, and having to hunt to feed his family were strong influences in her creation of District 12.
The novel and subsequent movie "Winter's Bone" is a contemporary portrayal of rural impoverished Appalachia. And it's no coincidence that the star of "Winter's Bone," Jennifer Lawrence, was chosen to play Katniss in the movie adaptation of "The Hunger Games."
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2. Rich Kids Don't Sacrifice Their Lives As Often As Poor Kids
In the Hunger Games trilogy, the children of wealthy families are much less likely to be chosen to participate in the Games. The tessera system means that you can earn an extra ration of food and cooking oil by putting your name in for the reaping draw an extra time - up to once for each member of your family.
Iraq War Protest: 3,000 dead. Courtesy Flickr/ allen.goldblatt
Katniss, for example, has taken out tesserae for herself, her mother, and her sister. This means that her name is three times as likely to be drawn as that of a privileged child whose family can afford to buy food and cooking oil.
In contemporary America, the children of wealthy families are more likely to attend college. This protects them from the draft when it is applicable (like during the Vietnam War). It also means they are less likely to enter military service voluntarily.
As a result, the young men and women who have died in military service in America are much more likely to be from poor and rural families. The military is one of the few options you have to get out, if you can't afford college. But unfortunately, it's not a choice without risks.
3. "Reality Television" Isn't Real
The Hunger Games themselves aren't necessarily scripted, although the players are certainly coached on their behavior and appearance. But the games are manipulated and engineered in order to achieve specific results. For example, the initial cornucopia is designed to start each Hunger Game off with a big splash. And dramatic tension is often artificially created based on which items are dropped in to which players.
The same is true of today's so-called "reality television." Whether it's the Real Housewives or on the Jersey Shore, the producers are constantly nudging the participants to amp up the drama. And the footage is often edited in order to achieve a specific result.
Just like the millions of viewers in Panem, we're not watching to see real life. We want something a lot more interesting and lurid! We're watching to be entertained - and woe to the actor who isn't sufficiently entertaining!
4. TV Is Just A Distraction
When Rome was on the brink of collapse, some Roman leaders decided that the best course of action was to give the Roman people as much free entertainment as possible, to distract them from the political problems and inequalities of the time. This led to the rise of the Roman coliseums, where various blood sports (from gladiatorial battles to bull-fighting and battling lions) kept the populace distracted and entertained. At the same time, the government handed out free wheat so that everyone at least had enough bread to eat (if little else).
In the Hunger Games trilogy, the Hunger Games themselves are the circuses, and the tesserae system is the bread. Between the two, President Snow's regime is able to keep the population fed and distracted enough to prevent an uprising. (For a while, anyway…)
Many people feel the same is true with today's glut of cable television, much of which is produced with some form of government subsidy (particularly in the form of tax breaks). Meanwhile, the SNAP program ensures that every American has a minimum level of food to eat (if little else).
Store brand bread in the pantry and cable TV in the living room… what more could a good citizen want?To mark Romania's independence day (each year on May 10 it celebrates freedom from the Ottoman Empire, earned in 1877) here are a few quirky facts about the country.
1. It’s home to the world’s heaviest building
Bucharest’s vast Palace of the Parliament, begun during the final years of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule and not finished until 1997 (seven years after his death), is 240 metres long, 270 metres wide, 86 metres high (12 storeys), and cost a staggering €3 billion (£2.5bn) to build.
That's €3 billion worth of building right there Credit: krivinis - Fotolia
The other numbers are remarkable. As many as 100,000 people worked on the site, hundreds of whom are thought to have perished. It has 1,100 rooms (the vast majority of which lie empty) and an annual heating bill of $6m (£4.63m), equivalent to that of a small city. There are eight underground levels, as well as a nuclear bunker linked to other government buildings by 20km of tunnels.
It all adds up to an area 365,000 square metres, second only to The Pentagon as far as administrative buildings are concerned, and it has a volume of 2.55 million square metres, a shade more than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Inside you’ll find 3,500 tonnes of crystal, 480 chandeliers and 1,409 ceiling lights, while 700,000 tonnes of steel and bronze was used for monumental doors and windows. Guinness World Records recognises it as the heaviest building on the planet.
The decadent interiors are largely unused Credit: GETTY
2. And the world’s most beautiful road
In his search for the “world’s best driving road” Jeremy Clarkson declared that he had found it in the middle of Romania – in the form of the Transfagarasan highway. Whichever way you look at it, it is an extraordinary feat of engineering: a stretch of tarmac packed with tunnels, viaducts and bridges and which takes the skill of navigating hairpin bends to new heights. The road was another Ceaușescu creation. He wanted to ensure that in the event of a Soviet invasion there was a speedy way of escaping through the strategic (and scenic) mountain passes of the Southern Carpathians (not that it was ever used for that purpose).
Heaven for motorists Credit: www.alexandrucoman.ro/Alex Coman
10 great European road trips you must do in your lifetime
3. They love a drink
Romania is the fifth booziest country in the world, behind four more Eastern European states: Belarus, Russia, Moldova and Lithuania. As the map below shows, the average Romanian consumes 14.4 litres of pure alcohol each year, compared to 11.6 litres in Britain.
The country places 16th when it comes to wine consumption (not a surprise given that it’s one of the largest wine producers in the world) and 10th for beer.
4. Visitors might spot Europe’s largest mammal
Tipping the scales at 1,400lbs, the European bison was nearly hunted to extinction, but in recent years has been reintroduced to several Eastern European countries, including Romania.
“We encountered a herd in a forest clearing near the village of Armenis, in the Tarcu range of the Carpathian Mountains,” wrote Mark Stratton for Telegraph Travel back in 2014. “Staring towards us in docile fashion, tails metronomically swishing at flies, they were protectively encircling a newborn calf. Beneath tassels of shaggy fur their powerful, beefy shoulders and bulbous humps elevated them from family saloon cow to V8 turbocharged bovine.”
The country also has Europe’s largest population of brown bears.
A V8 turbocharged bovine Credit: Naturecolors - Fotolia
5. It’s the real home of Borat
In Sacha Baron Cohen’s film, scene’s purporting to show Borat’s Kazakh hometown were shot in the village of Glod, Romania, while its Roma residents were cast as extras. Those same extras later took (unsuccessful) legal action claiming they were unaware of the film’s subject matter.
Other films shot in Romania include Cold Mountain and, er, Anaconda III starring David Hasselhoff.
6. Bucharest has one of the world’s prettiest bookshops
Cărturești Carusel opened in 2015 in a restored 19th century building. It contains more than 10,000 books, 5,000 albums and DVDs and a top floor bistro.
Cărturești Carusel Credit: ALAMY
16 of the world's most beautiful bookshops
7. Its 4G network is the envy of the world
Romania is one of the best places in the world for 4G speed, occupying an impressive fourth place out of 78 nations, according to OpenSignal. Users in the country can expect speed of 35.61 Mbps, on average, compared to just 21.16Mbps in the UK.
8. The rail network is also impressive
Romania's 22,298km network is the 15th most extensive on Earth, even though it is only the world's 81st largest country in terms of total area.
9. There’s a dead ringer for the Arc de Triomphe
Who needs Paris? Bucharest has got its own.
Bucharest's triumphal arch Credit: Alamy
16 reasons why your next city break should be Bucharest
10. And an answer to Mount Rushmore
This sculpture, on a rocky outcrop at the river Danube’s Iron Gates gorge, was made between 1994 and 2004 and depicts Decebalus, the last king of Dacia, who fought against the Roman Empire.
A post shared by Oana Precup (@oanalauraprecup) on Oct 25, 2016 at 1:49am PDT
11. It also ripped off the Hollywood sign
Brasov and Rasnov have LA quaking in its boots.
This is Brasov's sign. Rasnov has one just like it Credit: ALAMY
12. It’s the surprising birthplace of good coffee
Francesco Illy, the founder of the Italian coffee roasting company, was actually born in Timișoara, Romania. He later moved to Vienna, and then the Italian city of Trieste. He didn’t make a 2006 list of the 100 Greatest Romanians, however, which was topped by Stephen the Great and featured the likes of Nadia Comăneci and Gheorghe Hagi.
13. They made the world’s largest flag
A five-ton flag that measured 349 metres by 227 metres, and used 44 miles of thread, was unfurled in Romania in 2013. Well, why not?
14. And can boast a few other quirky records
Romania was also responsible for the world’s |
rude. But, I love my church and it’s founder, Jesus Christ, enough to be blunt. We as the membership as well as the apostles are thumbing our noses at an indispensable commandment. We are thumbing our noses at obedience. As a result, nobody really knows if we are following God’s will or not. We don’t know what policies or doctrines are of Christ.
Divine Plan of Church Governance
The Savior has specified how doctrine, policy, scripture, callings, and every other matter that affects the members, are to be established. Encapsulated in four simple steps, Christ’s plan bears witness of His great trust and love for EVERY member of His church.
1. The prophet is to listen to the people in all things.
2. The prophet and apostles present proposals to the people.
3. Whatever is accepted by the people is accepted by God.
4. Whatever is rejected by the people is rejected by God.
This is only happening with regards to callings. I recognize and sustain President Monson because he was confirmed by common consent. I accept the inclusion of the blacks in the priesthood, as it was confirmed by common consent. The exclusion of blacks was never confirmed by common consent. It was never the will of God.
Without common consent, we are left with a dictatorship. That is not in any way, shape, or form God’s plan. We are left to the inevitability of the errors of men, subject to being led astray, justifying doing things that are wrong just because a prophet said so.
It also leaves our prophets completely open to the temptations so common to men in authority. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. According to our scriptures “unrighteous dominion” almost always results when just a little authority is given. If the apostles have unfettered & unaccountable authority, what kind of risk does this pose to these very leaders? Let alone to the church?
Jesus knew His apostles and prophets would be imperfect men. His solution was to establish the Law of Common Consent. Disobedience to God’s law by the entire church is wreaking it’s havoc already. More havoc is to come.
Solution or Destruction
The solution to the problems in The Church of Jesus Christ is in plain view. We as members should demand that “all things MUST be done by common consent.” We as members must consider the policies & doctrines that have not been confirmed as God’s will and weigh-in on them.
This morning, I discussed this with my wife. She said that the challenge is that we are all so busy that we just let the apostles handle everything. Of course, she’s right. There’s the problem. We are so busy that we don’t care about our important place in the governance of God’s earthly kingdom.
This will ultimately result in the destruction of the LDS church. Maybe not complete destruction. But, the church has already been destroyed in the lives of two-thirds of the membership. The vast majority have already fled. More took flight during the time it took to write this article.
Where are the Good Men?
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” ― Edmund Burke
Where are the good men who will do something?
Where are the good men who will demand that we follow Jesus?
Where are the good men who will demand that the church obey the law of common consent?
Where are the good men who love the church enough to stay the course, so that His church changes course?
Emotions
As I write, my eyes fill with tears. I try to hold back the sobs. The words I type are blurred as I cry. Can the church of my youth, the church of my adult years be saved? Can it be redeemed before it’s destroyed in my life and the lives of so many others?Only one Atlanta theater will be participating in a special nationwide Star Wars Marathon Event on Thursday, Dec. 17 — one day before J.J. Abram's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" film hits theaters.
Regal Atlantic Station is among several theaters across the country to host this "ultimate fan experience" where guests will be able to watch all six of the previously-released movies before a 3-D screening of the newest film.
The Atlanta theater will also feature a special "Star Wars Saturdays" event every Saturday from Dec. 19 through Jan. 9. where the first 500 guests who experience the new film in IMAX will get to take home a collectible ticket featuring new film art.
If you can't make it to the Atlantic Station theater for the big Dec. 17 marathon event, Athens' University 16 theater in Athens, Ga. is also participating.
Find a full list of participating theaters across the nation here.An Amish farmer works in the fields near Dover, Del. Amish are prohibited from driving automobiles but not from using fuel-powered motors and engines.
Amish also feel strain of high fuel costs Inside his workshop near Dover, Del., Bennie Troyer, an Amish man, shapes and assembles wood. He builds about 30 to 35 custom kitchen cabinet sets a year, and each set takes about a week and a half to make. Cabinetmaking, a trade Troyer learned from his father, Sam, who started the business in the 1960s, has become much more expensive lately. The price of diesel fuel that powers Troyer's tools — a traditional table saw and wide-belt sander among them — has skyrocketed the past several months. At this time last year, Troyer says, he paid $2.35 a gallon for diesel. It cost him $4.49 a gallon recently. Burning 125 gallons a month, that's an extra $267.50, not counting fuel surcharges suppliers are tacking onto deliveries of things such as stains and drawer slides, Troyer says. "Our profit margin is not going to be this year what it was last year," he says. The Amish, widely known for their horse-drawn buggies and a lifestyle that shuns many modern conveniences, are as susceptible to the sting of rising oil prices as anyone else. From the diesel fuel for tools used in milking cows, building cabinets and sawing timber, to the gasoline used to power washing machines and freezers, the pinch is real. Amish are banned from driving cars and trucks because Amish leaders worry that faster transportation could "pull the community apart." The prohibition, however, does not extend to fuel-powered motors and engines such as those used to run power tools and washing machines, says Donald Kraybill, a scholar on the Amish at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa. "I don't know that there ever was a categorical taboo on the engine," Kraybill says. "They used steam engines in the late 19th century." In addition to his own fuel costs, Troyer says, the Baltimore company that provides him with stains and finishes has tacked an additional $12 on each delivery. He says he may have to raise his prices to compensate. "If this keeps on, we're going to have to do something different," he says. At his sawmill, also west of Dover, Ervin Miller burns 250 gallons to 300 gallons of diesel each week, sawing and mulching timber. Miller, who remembers paying 95 cents for diesel only five years ago, paid $4.39 a gallon recently. Loggers, who are also facing higher fuel prices, want more money, too, he says. And adjusting prices can be difficult because the struggling lumber companies are unwilling to pay more. "I just get what they give me," Miller says. "It kind of puts a jam on you." For David Miller, a dairy farmer nearby, diesel fuel powers his milk pump and the compressor that keeps the milk cool. The good news is that prices for milk have also gone up: Miller is earning more than 60% more for his milk this summer than he did a couple of years ago. "It's helping a lot," David Miller says. Still, he faces extra charges from haulers because of higher fuel prices. He calls such prices "ridiculous." Harvey Yoder, who runs a nearby nursery, says the belief that the Amish are not affected by such modern factors as soaring fuel prices is a misconception. "People think the Amish are old-time," Yoder says, "but we do use gas." The water pump Yoder uses to water the plants in his greenhouse — from petunias to ponytail grass — is gas-powered. His 5-gallon jug of gasoline usually lasts two weeks or so, he says. Through the spring, it may only last one week. "We used to get it for half the price," Yoder says. "It knots you." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreIn light of the recent initiatives to implement changes to Bitcoin’s protocol, the present signatories — representing the main exchanges, companies, service providers, and hundreds of thousands of users in the region, hereby collectively denominated as the “Brazilian and Argentinian communities” — wish to voice their deepest concerns over the upcoming November hardfork as mandated by the so-called New York Agreement (“NYA”), also known as SegWit2x (“S2X”).
As enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, developers, businessmen, it is our belief we all share the same goal of making Bitcoin succeed and fulfill its huge potential as a disruptive technology, allowing for greater financial freedom, monetary sovereignty and empowerment to each and every individual around the world. We also value Bitcoin’s technological breakthrough for applications well beyond money and borderless payments. But regardless of the use cases, a secure and reliable blockchain is paramount.
We do believe the NYA signatories have the best of intentions in attempting to improve Bitcoin’s protocol, and we also recognize the invaluable service historically provided by the companies and the talented individuals associated with S2X. We profoundly disagree, however, with the means chosen to carry out such a plan. And therein lie all the discord, controversy, feverish debates, and even resentment for some actors.
What follows is a non-exhaustive list of the main reasons why the Brazilian and Argentinian communities deem SegWit2x an ill-advised and unwarranted pursuit:
1) An agreement, instead of a proposal: the NYA narrative framed the situation as a scaling gridlock that needed be solved, thus an agreement between relevant actors (developers, miners, exchanges, payment processors) was sought after. But the very nature of an “agreement” between a few parties in a decentralized consensus protocol can be interpreted as an aggression against the network. Bitcoin’s governance model is certainly not perfect, nonetheless it is far from dysfunctional. If a proposed change lacks adherence, status quo remains. That is a strength. Difficulty in changing the protocol — especially when affecting the consensus layer — really is a feature to be commended. BIP stands for Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, there is no Bitcoin Improvement Agreement for the simple reason that users cannot and should not be coerced into adopting unwanted changes to the protocol. As a community, we should strive to propose, educate, and convince. Overriding the governance mechanisms through closed agreements does not foster unity.
2) Lack of development and objective transparency: from the onset, there was a clear deficiency of transparency and clarity from the leading S2X’s developers. Countless cases of interested parties being barred from freely subscribing to the mailing list, or accessing the slack channel, were verified. That cannot be considered open participation. Although this has somewhat been resolved, it contributed to confusion and suspicion, resulting in many parties simply distrusting or not believing SegWit2x true intentions. In the end, we are left wondering if NYA is genuinely about Bitcoin scaling or simply a subterfuge for a “governance takeover”, if the latter was even possible. Moreover, participation was encouraged only on the basis of obedience to a pre-agreed upon decision. If the technical and security merits of a “2mb hardfork in 3 months” are not permitted to be discussed, participating seems a sterile exercise.
3) Political compromise, instead of technical upgrade: it has been frequently stated that SegWit2x represented a compromise. Immediate activation of SegWit (BIP141), as many users desired (by conservative measures over 70% of full nodes were already running SegWit ready software by then), and an increase in base blocksize limit to 2mb, as desired by miners and in accordance with an alleged agreement made during the Hong Kong Scaling Conference — though such an agreement was nothing more than a few developers promising to do research and make an open code proposal. A compromise in a decentralized consensus protocol poses a grave problem as it shows little regard for the technical consequences on the whole network. Changes impacting the consensus layer should not be adopted based on accords simply because some participants (be it miners, or merchants, or developers) are insisting on them. It is immensely difficult to make the case this isn’t a politically motivated change, one which has little to do with technological enhancements of the network. If Bitcoin’s protocol can be altered by the sheer pressure of select participants, it means decentralized consensus has failed. It means Bitcoin cannot and will not withstand even greater attacks in the future. To assert that S2X, if successful, sets a bad precedent is a gross understatement.
4) Consensus imposition, instead of consensus building: as a decentralized free open-source software, changes to bitcoin’s protocol cannot be forced upon users of the network. As previously argued, had the proponents of S2X merely proposed a change, engaged in open and truthful debate, the divisive situation could have been avoided in its entirety. If upgrades are in fact needed, let us build consensus around them.
5) Replay protection and unnecessary disruption: this was perhaps one of the most controversial stances by the S2X developing team. The outright refusal, followed by persistent reluctance, to implement strong replay protection gave a sense of recklessness to the entire community. It seems, at times, that S2X aims at deliberately causing disruption in the expectation users will capitulate and end up upgrading to its incompatible implementation. This posture undermines S2X’s own credibility as a legitimate attempt to improve the protocol.
6) Emphasis on mining to the detriment of users: trust is an emergent property where multiple parties must act in strict conformity to the rules or risk consensus failure. Consensus is achieved by: i) full nodes independently validating transactions, ii) miners aggregating transactions into a block and producing a proof of work, iii) full nodes verifying miners’ blocks, and iv) full nodes selecting the longest valid chain. Seeking majority hashpower as a means to demonstrate consensus is pointless. Miners provide an essential service to the network, but they do not determine consensus. Mining does not define what the rules are. Full nodes enforce rules and defend the network against arbitrary changes by rejecting invalid transactions or blocks. If miners did have the sole power of affecting protocol changes at their own discretion, Bitcoin wouldn’t be a robust and secure network.
7) Impatience over prudence: hardforking, by definition, means breaking backwards compatibility. Hardforking without consensus guarantees a chain split. For a network worth billions of dollars being used by millions of users, allowing for sufficient planning, testing, and preparation should be a self-imposed best practice. Unfortunately, S2X’s implementation (btc1 core) adopted a hasty timeline for activating a hardfork, risking leaving a significant portion of users adrift. Additionally, the so-called “quiet period” before the date of activation makes S2X all the more worrying. We would have preferred to see the risk of a chain split being mitigated by open and intensive testing instead. Downplaying backwards compatibility and security issues makes us extremely uneasy about running btc1 core software.
8) A non-solution to a perceived problem: we obviously prefer low fees to high fees, faster confirmations than longer confirmations, but simply raising base blocksize limit to 2mb now is a partial solution at best. As acknowledged by the very proponents of S2X, even 2mb is considered already insufficient and further increases should be implemented soon. If that is the case, does S2X plan on hardforking every 3 or 6 or 12 months? Congestion in the network is not a fundamentally technical problem to Bitcoin’s protocol. It certainly prevents some use cases in the short term, but does not imperil the network’s functionality and utility. We believe preserving Bitcoin’s censorship-resistant properties should be a top priority in protocol development.
9) Externalizing risks, network and market turmoil and potential liabilities: the chances of a chain split overburden exchanges, payment processors, and wallet services that must plan, prepare, and support a new coin in the event of a permanent split, encumbering these third-parties with potential liabilities should they refrain from doing so. Furthermore, it causes network turmoil by requiring participants to take extra precautions prior to the fork to safeguard wallets and by exposing users to possible loss of funds. Averting disorder in the network should be a prime concern in protocol upgrades, it is unfortunate to realize S2X might accomplish the very opposite. Lastly, uncertainty originated from S2X tends to reverberate negatively in the markets affecting asset prices across cryptocurrencies in general.
10) Misleading miners: it seems that miners have been misled into signing to a promise that overwhelming agreement in the network would be achieved. But since this is clearly not the case, if miners do run btc1 core, they endanger their operations by mining a chain the majority of users will invalidate. A more prudent approach would have been to recommend miners to “execute a hardfork if the signs of consensus in the network are unequivocal”, but never “do hardfork at all costs”.
11) Misleading statements by some proponents: unfortunately, companies we do admire and have business with have released misleading statements regarding S2X inadvertently withholding crucial information from its users about what is really at play in the network. Everyone is free to choose the software they want to run, but customers should be rightfully informed if its service provider is adopting an incompatible implementation and what the risks are.
We believe sooner or later upgrades to the protocol will necessitate a hardfork. With due planning and preparation the network can smoothly coordinate to effectuate such changes with minimal chances of chain split and disruption. That, however, requires time, education and testing.
Governance in a free open-source software is a complex business and some parties become frustrated by the lack of agility or ability to upgrade the protocol. Roadmaps, promises, and compromises are innocuous in a decentralized consensus network where no entity or group of actors can unilaterally dictate and enforce rules at will. We are all part of consensus.
For all the reasons above, the Brazilian and Argentinian Bitcoin communities stand in opposition to SegWit2x. We consider any potential benefit arising from a hardfork as per the NYA is not worth the risks. Therefore, we urge its proponents to discontinue this endeavor and reengage the community towards a healthy and collaborative process for improving Bitcoin’s protocol.
Signatories
From Brazil:
Bitcoin Brasil (Facebook group with 65K members)
Bit.One
Bitsendal (Bitwage in Brazil)
Blinktrade
CoinBR
Coinkite, Opendime
Criptomoedasfacil.com
FoxBit
ITS Rio
MercadoBitcoin
OriginalMy
SuM Law
TradeBit
Walltime
From Argentina:
laBITconf/Latin American Bitcoin & Blockchain Conference (labitconf.com)
ONG Bitcoin Argentina (bitcoinargentina.org)
Bitcoin Argentina Meetup group (meetup.com/Bitcoin-Argentina)
Bitcoin Argentina forum/Largest Spanish speaking Bitcoin forum (facebook.com/groups/BitcoinArg)
EspacioBitcoin
Individual Signatories (many more to be included soon):
Alexandre Ferraz
Alexandre Leite
André Baptista
André Ramos
Arthur Campos
Edilson Osorio Jr.
Fabiano Dias
Felipe D’avila
Felipe Micaroni Lalli
Fernando Cesar
Fernando Ulrich
Gabriel Aleixo
Geraldo Bastos
Helena Margarido
Hygoor Jorge Cruz Freire
Jéssica Lima
Jhonatas Wesly
Joana Santos
João Dias
Joeldo Holanda
José Wilker
Marco Agner
Marcelo Henrique Sáez Quiñónez
Marcelo Zola Zanotim
Mathias Negrão Kux
Murilo Valadares
Nelson Lowenhaupt Junior
Paulo Aragão
Rafael Motta
Rafael Nogueirol
Renato Nunes
Renato Oliveira Santos
Rocelo Lopes
Rodini Netto
Rodolfo Novak
Rodrigo Cassio
Rodrigo Saraiva Marinho
Rodrigo Souza
Safiri Felix
Thiago Cesar
Úrsula Vergilio
Victor Hugo Guimarães Costa
Vitor Augusto Pedrozo Dias
Wendel Smith
View original content here: Medium.com
Fernando UlrichShiv Kumar Sharma, the face of the ongoing farmers’ agitation in Madhya Pradesh and a former leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated Bharatiya Kisan Sangh, may have come from the same political stream as the Bharatiya Janata Party, but he firmly believes that farmers are worst affected in states where the party is in power.
“Farm distress is not unique to any particular state, but the situation is worst in BJP-ruled states,” Sharma, nicknamed Kakkaji, told Scroll.in on Monday. “In total, there are 16 states where the BJP has its government, and in almost all of them farmers are miserable.”
Sharma, who formed the Rashtriya Kisan Mazdoor Sangh after working for the Bharatiya Kisan Sangh for years, is believed to be the man behind the violent agitation by farmers that has rocked Madhya Pradesh this month. The state’s agrarian community is demanding farm loan waivers and better prices for their produce. The situation remains tense after five farmers were killed in police firing on June 6 in Mandsaur district.
On Saturday, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan started a fast in a bid to restore peace in the state, but broke it the very next day.
“He is a very weak person,” said Sharma. “He does not have the guts to go and ask directly from [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi any financial help for the state. He sat on fast to hide his weakness. Everyone knows that he is helpless because the Centre is not helping him out.”
Phase 2: Gujarat, Rajasthan
Sharma said the events of the past two weeks in Madhya Pradesh and in neighbouring Maharashtra, where also farmers were agitating for relief from debt and for fair prices, are just the first phase of a larger movement. In the second phase, the agitation will be much more widespread, engulfing states like Gujarat and Rajasthan, he added. Along with Maharashtra, these two states are also ruled by the BJP.
A nationwide block of national highways is planned on Friday as part of this next phase. “The decision for the second phase was taken in a meeting of 140 farm leaders belonging to 62 organisations from different parts of the country,” Sharma said. “The mega meeting, held on June 10, decided to organise a nationwide protest on June 16, when farmers will block all national highways from 12 noon to 3 pm.”
The date (June 16) is significant as it comes the day after the Modi government’s 21-day-long celebration of three years in office is scheduled to end.
“The next major protest is scheduled to be held on June 21, which is Yoga Day,” Sharma added. “For one hour, farmers across the country will do yoga with Modi. But unlike Modi, farmers will do only shavaasan [corpse pose], not in their homes or parks but on railway lines, stations, roads, junctions and bus stands and will thus bring the nation to a halt for the time Modi will do his yoga.”
According to Sharma, Gujarat is of special interest, not just for Modi and the BJP, but also for farmers of the country. “Gujarat cannot be insulated. The farmers have suffered for so many years in the state,” he said. “The agitation, once it builds up, is bound to be a fierce one. I could feel this in our June 10 meeting, which was attended by several farmer leaders from Gujarat.” He added, “No matter what the government does, Gujarat and Rajasthan are likely to take the agitational route sooner than later.”
Loan waiver or eyewash?
The farmer leader, however, appeared worried that a loan waiver announced by the Maharshtra government on Sunday might take the steam out of the agrarian unrest, without giving the state’s farmers anything substantial. Following the government’s announcement, Maharashtra’s farmers have reportedly called off their stir.
“This is similar to what happened in Uttar Pradesh, where the government after announcing a loan waiver has kept diluting its promises,” Sharma said. “First, the Uttar Pradesh government said loans of all farmers would be waived off, then it announced the relief only for medium and small farmers, and thereafter it climbed down further, saying benefits would be given only to very small farmers and only loans up to Rs 1 lakh would be waived off. Even this promise has not been implemented so far,” he pointed out.This diehard Packers-loving groom said “I do” to the love of his life, Marie Packer, in a Green Bay-themed wedding on June 17.
Ryan Holtan-Murphy said it was a “no brainer” to take his wife’s last name.
“We’re the Packer family now,” he proudly told ABC News.
Green Bay Super Fan Says It's a No Brainer to Take Fiance's Last Name of Packer
PHOTO: Green Bay super fan, Ryan Holtan-Murphy, marries woman with the last name of Packer in elaborate Packers-themed wedding. (Courtesy JPP Studios) More
The couple tied the knot at Willis Tower in Chicago with elaborate Packers decorations, mostly arranged by the groom.
PHOTO: Green Bay super fan, Ryan Holtan-Murphy, marries woman with the last name of Packer in elaborate Packers-themed wedding. (Courtesy JPP Studios) More
“I kept most things a surprise form her, but she knew about the mailbox because we ordered that together,” Holtan-Murphy, 41, said.
PHOTO: Green Bay super fan, Ryan Holtan-Murphy, marries woman with the last name of Packer in elaborate Packers-themed wedding. (Courtesy JPP Studios) More
The groom even surprised his bride with a Green Bay-themed suit after the ceremony.
“I ordered it three months ago and have been hiding it under the bed in our guest room. She was a lot harder to find on the dance floor once I showed up in the suit,” he said with a laugh. “She’s a great sport. She’s a lot of fun.”
Packer, 38, said she was “surprised, but not surprised” when her husband came out in the suit, which she now knows was his pièce de résistance from the wedding.
“I was waiting for something,” she recalled. “I was thinking, ‘This is a lot more toned down than I was expecting.’ Everyone was in black tuxedos and everything and I was like, ‘Where is the green and gold? I know it’s around here somewhere and he just hasn’t busted it out yet.’ I just stood with my head down laughing easily for two or three minutes. He looked amazing. I thought he looked hilarious.”
PHOTO: Green Bay super fan, Ryan Holtan-Murphy, marries woman with the last name of Packer in elaborate Packers-themed wedding. (Courtesy Ryan Holtan-Murphy) More
Holtan-Murphy first made headlines when he announced he was going to be taking his wife’s football-themed last name upon marriage.
“I grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, where the Packers are the unofficial state religion,” he told ABC News in January. “Everyone from grandmothers to little kids are diehard fans and we live and die with the team.”
PHOTO: Green Bay super fan Ryan Holtan-Murphy plans to take his fiancee's last name, Packer, when they wed in June. (Courtesy of Ryan Holtan-Murphy) More
When the lovebirds first met at a karaoke bar in Madison, Wisconsin, he thought Packer was too good to be true.
“Marie is beautiful, strong, hilarious. And then she told me her last name,” he recalled. “I didn't believe her and made her show two forms of ID and a credit card.”
Holtan-Murphy even proposed while wearing a Green Bay jersey.
“I was wearing my favorite Aaron Rodgers jersey and we were in a water tank at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and I had arranged it with them to have a baby beluga whale bring over the ring in a waterproof box,” he said. “I was relieved he didn't try to eat it!”
PHOTO: Green Bay super fan Ryan Holtan-Murphy plans to take his fiancee's last name, Packer, when they wed in June. (Courtesy of Ryan Holtan-Murphy) More
Story continuesIt's an odd juxtaposition. The Dell PowerEdge R715 sits in a rack just below a recently decommissioned 2U, two-socket server that cost about as much when it was new five years ago. The difference? The older server has a total of two CPU cores, one per processor. The R715 has 32 cores, running at the same clock speed. If that's not progress, I don't know what is.
The R715 has been around since February (see InfoWorld's review), so strictly speaking, it's not a new server version. What's new: the R715's twin 16-core AMD Opteron "Interlagos" CPUs and support for 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM. Best of all, existing R715 systems can be upgraded to support the new chips with nothing more than a BIOS update. Otherwise, Interlagos is a drop-in replacement for Magny-Cours.
[ Also on InfoWorld: Stress test: AMD Opteron Magny-Cours versus Intel Xeon Nehalem-EX | Virtualization shoot-out: Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware ]
Like Magny-Cours before it, Interlagos promises to bring unbeatable price-performance to heavily multithreaded workloads such as virtualization. It costs considerably less than its closest Intel counterparts and offers twice the cores of the leading Intel chip. However, Interlagos is based on a new core architecture that is not yet supported by a number of popular operating systems (more on that below).Nursing diplomas can be bought for as little as £43 in the Philippines, I can reveal today.
Doubts about Victorino Chua’s qualifications emerged after this newspaper alerted police to suspicions over his credentials back in 2012.
And – helped by my photographer colleague Jamie Wiseman - I have found there is a rampant trade in bogus exam certificates in Manila, with fixers and forgers always on hand to fabricate any document.
Scroll down for video
Reporter Stephen Wright has uncovered a rampant trade in bogus exam certificates being sold in Manila. He managed to obtain all the documents he needed to work abroad for £43 - including a fake graduation photo
Stephen was also given a fake identification card by a fixer who advised him how to obtain work in the UK
He was also given a fake degree certificate (pictured) after visiting Recto Avenue in downtown Manila
The Mail’s revelations are a major embarrassment to ministers, hospital chiefs and officials at the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which regulates nursing.
In March 2013, the council imposed a temporary recruitment freeze on foreign nurses amid fears that workers could have faked documents to get jobs here. Yet hundreds of nurses are still being recruited from the Philippines by NHS trusts, because of a massive shortfall of staff.
The ‘passport’ to a nursing job in the UK is provided by organised crime networks who employ some of the world’s best forgers.
On Recto Avenue in downtown Manila are stalls openly offering fake nursing degrees, education records, diploma pictures, police clearance to work overseas, passports, driving licences and birth and marriage certificates. Police turn a blind eye in return for bribes.
When Stephen visited Recto Avenue, dubbed ‘Xerox Alley’, a fixer for the forgers went through a list of documents required to become qualified - all of which were easily obtained
The fixer (pictured) even helpfully suggested which date he should graduate from Manila’s respected nursing college at Our Lady of Fatima University
When I visited Recto Avenue, dubbed ‘Xerox Alley’, a fixer for the forgers went through a list of documents I would require to become qualified, including a degree certificate, police clearance to work overseas and employment certificates and references.
All these were supplied for a total of £43. The fixer even helpfully suggested which date I should graduate from Manila’s respected nursing college at Our Lady of Fatima University.
Of course, the vast majority of Filipino nurses are qualified and have the correct credentials to work in the UK.
In this impoverished nation struggle to find the money to finish their degree courses and are tempted to buy their qualifications they need to obtain work in the UK where salaries are vastly higher
But many in this impoverished nation struggle to find the money to finish their degree courses and are tempted to buy their qualifications they need to obtain work in the UK where salaries are vastly higher.
In the run-up to yesterday’s court verdicts, NMC chief executive Jackie Smith told the Mail its vetting system was now ‘robust’ and that her staff insisted on seeing original education documents from prospective foreign nurses.
But a source close to the Stepping Hill case said: ‘Vetting of nurses in the Philippines is very, very poor. A lot is done on the word of the Philippines regulatory authorities.
‘They rely on stamped documents as proof of proper qualifications. This is why police can’t be certain that Chua’s qualifications are genuine.’
Another said: ‘We can’t be certain that the Philippines’ Professional Regulation Commission has exercised due diligence with regard to the NHS. Once you have a PRC stamp, you are more or less guaranteed a job in the UK.’Governments & Central Banks are Now Funding Blockchain Research
Governments are showing increasing interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. A recent press release details that this week the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans on funding $600,000 in grants to government-related distributed ledger startups.
Also read: Korean Web Giant Kakao Invests in Satoshi Citadel
DHS Funds Blockchain Research for ID Services
A couple of years ago no cryptocurrency enthusiast would expect government and nearly every legacy bank in the world to be invested in the technology that supports the Bitcoin network. However, today is a different story with large financial institutions, and government organizations showing they are betting big on blockchain technology. This past week on June 7, DHS announced it will be awarding grants to six companies that are working with these types of protocols.
Each business will be given $100,000 out of $3.1 million divided by 29 companies focused on science and technology. The money comes from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) charter, a program created in 1982. The six startups consist of the Respect Network Corporation, Celerity Government Solutions LLC, Digital Bazaar, Inc., RAM Laboratories LLC, Narf Industries LLC, and BlockCypher. The DHS report states the projects are meant for “blockchain applications for Homeland Security analytics, and the applicability of blockchain technology to identity management and privacy protection.”
One of the grant winners BlockCypher has been known for raising $3.5 million from firms such as Blockchain Capital, Boost VC, Jesse Draper, AME Cloud Ventures, and is also working with the multinational financial institution Deloitte. The project consists of an “infrastructure fabric for blockchain applications” which also supports Ethereum.
Projects like BlockCypher appeal to Homeland Security because the API basically crawls various blockchains providing “queries to general information, notifications system for a wide variety of events on blockchains, and queries information about addresses” among many other resources. As well as recently adding Ethereum’s blockchain, the service supports Bitcoin Testnet3, Litecoin, and Dogecoin networks as well.
Governments See Future in Distributed Ledgers
Governments are looking directly at Bitcoin and blockchain technology these days, and the message is clear they are interested. On June 1st, distributed ledger advocates explained cryptocurrency solutions and blockchains to an audience of central bankers from 90 different countries. The Chamber of Digital Commerce representatives including Founder and President, Perianne Boring, met with Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen as well. According to the press release and various news publications, Yellen and her colleagues are very interested in financial technologies.
Internationally the same thing is happening as government agencies are also entering the race. Back in February the blockchain-based firm Chainalysis signed a memorandum with Europol. Chainalysis also crawls the Bitcoin blockchain finding addresses, clusters, and unique patterns between them all. The company has also helped Tokyo investigators and Kraken with the Mt. Gox scandal.
Government organizations are very interested in the many solutions blockchain technology has to offer to help them fight crime, solve identity and monetary dilemmas bureaucrats face daily.
What do you think about Government getting in the thick of the blockchain technology industry? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Pixabay and Wiki CommonsUAB's football coaching staff is starting to come together as the Blazers prepare for a return to the playing field in 2017.
Four new coaches will soon be announced as full-time assistants, AL.com confirmed through a source.
Blake Shrader and Brian Williams will be on the defensive side of the ball. Both were on the support staff at Georgia, Shrader as a quality control coordinator and Williams as a defensive player relations coordinator.
Shrader coached cornerbacks under Clark at Jacksonville State and he'll coach the same position at UAB. He was UAB's director of player personnel at UAB in 2014. Williams will coach inside linebackers. CoachingSearch.com first reported their hires.
Casey Woods will join the staff as an offensive assistant. A source told AL.com that his role has yet to be determined on that side of the ball, though SI.com reported he was leaving Auburn, where he has been director of player personnel, to coach receivers.
The hiring of Les Koenning as offensive coordinator is also expected to be made official soon. Koenning is a veteran coach who has been an offensive coordinator at Alabama, Texas A&M and Mississippi State. He coached receivers at Texas in 2014.
Those four will join offensive line coach Mike Bennefield, defensive coordinator Duwan Walker and defensive line coach David Reeves, who remained with the program.
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isp" enough that they can be understood and potentially adopted by other languages. In programming languages, the greatest long-term flattery is imitation 🙂
The attached paper is the final version of the. We'd welcome your comments and input on how we might make the paper better, either by comments below, or email to one of the authors, since we may make an extended version. Thanks!
Enjoy!
Don, Tomas and Dmitry.
P.S. Tomas and I have another paper at PADL 2011, Tomas will be blogging about that. See you there!
async-padl.pdfResearchers develop stretchable transparent touchpad (w/ Video)
August 11, 2016
Researchers have developed a highly stretchable touchpad that can be worn on the arm and be used to write words and play electronic games. Scientists from Seoul National University in South Korea published their findings in the latest issue of the journal Science.
While various types of conductors such as carbon nanotubes and metal nanowires have been explored for stretchy touchpads, they are all based on hard materials. To help solve this problem, Chong-Chan Kim and colleagues developed a touchpad made of hydrogel, a network of hydrophilic polymers that are soft and very stretchable. They used a polyacrylamide hydrogel with added lithium chloride salts, which act as a conductor and help retain water in the hydrogel.
Electrodes on both the ends of the hydrogel apply similar voltages which created a uniform electrostatic field across the system. When a finger touches the panel, it closes the circuit within the hydrogel, allowing current to flow from both ends of the strip to the touch point.
At each corner of the strip, meters that capture current detect the electrical signals. The team also developed a controller board to facilitate communication between the ionic touch panel and a computer. Using the touchpad, they were able to draw a stick figure, with the data conveyed onto a computer screen.
The touchpad was still able to operate after being stretched to more than 1,000 percent of its normal size, the team reported. After 100 cycles the resistance was found to increase slightly, which the authors suggest may be due to water evaporation in the gel.
A researcher uses a new, flexible ionic touchpad, placed on his arm, to play video games. Credit: C.-C. Kim et al., Science (2016) A researcher uses an ionic touchpad to play chess. Credit: C.-C. Kim et al., Science (2016) A researcher uses an ionic touchpad, configured on top of his arm, to play an electronic piano. Credit: C.-C. Kim et al., Science (2016)
More information: C.-C. Kim et al. Highly stretchable, transparent ionic touch panel, Science (2016). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf8810GARDEN GROVE, Calif. -- If you thought "Big" John McCarthy had a look on his face during Friday night's Kimbo Slice-Dada 5000 fight like he couldn't quite believe what he was watching, well, you may have been right.
"I honestly thought it would be over within the first round," said McCarthy, who officiated at Saturday night's WSOF 28 here in Orange County. "And you know, when we got to the end of the first round, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this thing's going to go all three rounds.'"
The dean of mixed martial arts officials, McCarthy has forgotten more fights than even the most voracious fans have ever watched. McCarthy practically invented the role of MMA referee, after all, getting his start at UFC 2, helping to craft the current unified rule set, and officiating thousands upon thousands of fights all over the world.
So when McCarthy found himself assigned to the Bellator 149 co-feature bout between Slice, the 42-year-old special attraction who had fought just once in the past five years, and Dada, a street fighter with just two pro bouts legally known as Dhafir Harris, at Houston's Toyota Center, he was ready for anything.
Both fighters got visibly tired early after a first-round ground stalemate. But McCarthy was going to call the fight down the middle like any other bout and wasn't about to do the competitors any favors. That led to frequent restarts and standups, including an instance in the second round of a rare standup call with a fighter, Slice, in full mounted position.
"I always tell them, 'I'm going to stand you up unless you do something,'" McCarthy said. "I'm telling Kimbo, ‘Kimbo, do something.' And he's just tired. He's not trying to punch, he's not trying to go for a submission, he's just trying to catch breath and let time go by."
This marked just the second time in McCarthy's career he has called for a standup from a full mount. The other? UFC 17 in 1998, when Jeremy Horn did nothing with a dominant position against Frank Shamrock in a UFC light heavyweight title fight.
"Jeremy was tearing Frank up," McCarthy said. "And it gets to the point, he gets full mount, and he just sits there, and Frank is underneath just holding on, and he's not doing anything.
"I said, 'C'mon Jeremy, you've got to work,'" McCarthy continued. "And it goes for about a minute and a half, and I said, ‘Jeremy, you have got to do something or I'm going to stand you up.' And he doesn't. So I stop and stand them up."
Shamrock retained what was then referred to as the middleweight title, but is actually the current UFC 205-pound belt, via kneebar at the 16:28 mark, and McCarthy couldn't help but ask Horn afterwards what he was thinking in the heat of the moment.
McCarthy recalled: "I went to the back afterwards, I said, "What in the f--- were you thinking? Did you not hear me? He goes ‘Oh yeah John, I heard every word.' I said, ‘What were you thinking?' He goes. ‘Honestly?' and I said, ‘No I want you to lie, Jeremy.' And he said ‘Honestly, John, holy s---, I'm mounted on Frank Shamrock and I don't want him to do anything to me.' I went, ‘That's all I needed to know, man.'"
In the case of Shamrock-Horn, you're talking about a Hall of Fame caliber fighter in Shamrock and a respected vet of nearly 120 fights in Horn.
Kimbo vs. Dada, on the other hand, was something entirely different. The bout, which Slice won via TKO in the third round, was wildly mocked online before it was revealed that Harris had a cardiac scare after the fight and was rushed to the hospital.
But while McCarthy obviously doesn't wish any ill upon Dada 5000, it was his job to call what's in front of him as a referee, and stop it at the appropriate time based on the available information.
"There was never anything that landed that was hard," McCarthy said. "They didn't hit each other with any hard shots.... Look, there are people that paid money to see this fight. This is not just about you laying on somebody because you're both tired. That's your fault for coming into the fight in that condition."Comcast Tries To Stop Colorado City From Even Talking About Building Its Own Broadband Network
from the Comcast-knows-what's-best-for-you dept
We've noted for years how giant ISPs have literally written and purchased protectionist laws in more than twenty states restricting towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Many of these laws even go so far as to restrict these towns from striking public/private partnerships with companies like Google Fiber, often one of the only options for areas incumbent ISPs have declared not-profitable enough to serve. In this way giant ISPs get their cake and eat it too: they don't have to expand service, but make sure nobody else can either.
Colorado's SB 152 is one such law. SB 152 was a 2005 product of lobbying from Comcast and CenturyLink, and required communities jump through numerous hoops should they want to simply make decisions regarding their own, local infrastructure. Like all such laws the ISP pretense was that they were simply looking to protect taxpayers from financial irresponsibility (an idea often lacking in ISPs' daily business efforts), though it's abundantly clear the real goal was to prop up and protect the dysfunctional broadband duopoly status quo from anything vaguely resembling change or competition.
However, over the last few years ballot initiatives have allowed several Colorado communities like Boulder, Montrose, and Centennial to take back their right to determine their infrastructure needs for themselves and ignore the restrictions SB 152 imposes. Rather unsurprisingly, residents angry at substandard service from the likes of Comcast have been overwhelmingly opting out of the restrictive state law. Again -- not because they think building a network will be fun -- but because they're so disgusted by incumbent service they feel they have no other option.
Fort Collins is the latest city to this week vote on opting out of SB 152. To be clear: opting out of the law's restrictions only opens the door to the possibility of building a network or striking public/private partnerships. But the incumbent ISPs like Comcast that bought the law have spent more than $200,000 to prevent that conversation from even happening:
"Politics is an expensive game, but when an oligopoly is at stake, there's no price tag too high for Big Telecom. In Fort Collins, Colorado—a town of about 150,000 north of Denver—Big Telecom has contributed more than $200,000 to a campaign opposing a ballot measure to simply consider a city-run broadband network. It's the latest example of how far Big Telecom is willing to go to prevent communities from building their own internet and competing with the status quo. "It's been wild," said Glen Akins, a Fort Collins advocate for municipal broadband. "We're overwhelmed by the amount of money the opposition is spending."
That spending, which is breaking local records, has included TV spots -- funded by an ISP policy front group -- that make numerous, misleading arguments about what locals are actually voting on. The ads try to conflate being allowed to have a conversation about the idea with actually moving forward with a plan. The ads also falsely claim that if the city of 150,000 moves forward with such a project, road repair, affordable housing, and other priorities in the city would suffer (also not true since the project would be funded by service revenues and utility bonds that couldn't be used for these other services):
What's Comcast so afraid of? The idea of city-owned or public/private partnerships have opened the door to open access networks in many cities, where ISPs come in and actually compete over core infrastructure. Like Ammon, Idaho, for example, where users can switch between multiple ISPs in seconds if they're not getting the speeds, prices or customer service they'd prefer. Actual competition obviously would mean a notable erosion in Comcast revenues:
"Evidence from other cities suggests that a real choice in broadband services could reduce Comcast's revenues by millions of dollars per month," the group, which advocates for municipal broadband projects, wrote in a policy brief. "Competition in Fort Collins would cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million per year. In Seattle, robust competition would cost between $20 million and $84 million per year."
It's worth repeating that Comcast could prevent towns and cities from going this route by simply offering better service and lower prices. But in a country where incumbent telecom companies all but own state legislatures (as we just saw in Michigan), it's often much less expensive to write and purchase a law. Or in this case, spend half a million dollars to mislead consumers, preventing them from even having a conversation about creative paths toward better, faster, cheaper broadband.
Filed Under: colorado, competition, fort collins, muni broadband
Companies: comcastWith Grand Prix Charlotte and Grand Prix Copenhagen coming up, it’s time to delve into the Modern format once again.
At the Pro Tour Fate Reforged, Junk, Burn, and Splinter Twin dominated. However, Modern players have had several months to adjust to the new metagame since then and have also gained a new set in Dragons of Tarkir.
Today, I’ll bring you back up to speed. Not just with deck lists—with plenty of numbers as well! Statistics on over 28,000 Modern games (collected by scraping Magic Online replays in the past few weeks) were provided to me by Rolle, for which I’m very thankful.
General Format Metrics
The average Modern game on Magic Online takes 6.7 turns, and the average number of lands player per player per game is 4.6. Being on the play is a small advantage, as it corresponds to a game win percentage of 51.5%.
Mulligans happen frequently (even more so than in Standard) and reduce your chances of winning (but not by as much as in Standard). A 6-card hand was kept in 33.5% of games, and a 5-card hand was kept in 6.8% of games. On average, 6-card hands won 40.2% and 5-card hands won 24.7% of the time.
The Metagame and Performance
In the following table, I provide for each of the top 20 archetypes the percentage of games it was played in, the percentage of games (not matches) that it won, and the expected record-based metagame percentage according to my metric that weights both popularity and performance (via expected 3-1 and 4-0 appearances) to represent the winner’s circle metagame.
There is some uncertainty regarding these numbers, as sometimes not enough cards are played in a match to connect them to a deck. For instance, a mana-screwed UBR deck could be either Splinter Twin or Delver. But the numbers in the table, which are based on tens of thousands of games on Magic Online, are still a good indication.
It’s notable that the game win percentage of the decks are all fairly close together. In my estimation, experience can give you a larger edge than deck choice, so I recommend sticking with a deck that you like and can play well. However, I would avoid Mono-Blue Tron and UR Storm for now.
The Two Decks to Beat
So, Burn and Grixis Delver are on top. Here are sample lists:
Aleksa Telarov’s Burn, Top 4 at the Magic Online Championship
Red mages are still roasting their opponents in fiery infernos online. The main new addition is Atarka’s Command. It necessitates Stomping Ground in the mana base, but it’s an upgrade to Skullcrack. The other addition is Rending Volley in the sideboard which has replaced Combust as a way to disrupt Splinter Twin combo. It cannot kill Siege Rhino, but mana efficiency is more important.
Martin Dang’s Grixis Delver from the Magic Online Championship
Delver of Secrets along with Thought Scour is still a good combination, but the cantrip also fuels the graveyard for Tasigur and Gurmag Angler. Although Tasigur is also splashable in Splinter Twin, the delve creatures excel in Grixis Delver.
One key Dragons of Tarkir addition is Kologhan’s Command. Against Affinity, it is akin to Ancient Grudge. Against other decks, it’s easy to set up a 2-for-1. And if you return Snapcaster Mage then you can flashback Kolaghan’s Command for even more value down the road.
The Other Top Decks
Affinity, Twin, Junk, Jund, Gr Tron, Bloom Titan, and Infect are all pretty much the same as before. I didn’t see huge new upgrades, except for the addition of Kolaghan’s Command to Jund.
I don’t have an updated Affinity list yet as I literally haven’t had time to play a game of Modern since the Pro Tour, but I intend to remedy that as soon as possible: I promise to stream and/or record a video before the GPs.
The New Collected Company Decks
The Dragons of Tarkir card with arguably the largest impact on Modern is Collected Company. It has heralded the rejuvenation of two creature combo decks:
Magnus Lantto’s Elf Company, Top 4 at the Magic Online Championships
Turn one: Nettle Sentinel. Turn two: Nettle Sentinel, Heritage Druid, Elvish Archdruid, Elvish Archdruid. Turn three: Ezuri, more Elves, attack for a million. This deck can overwhelm opponents with ridiculous amounts of mana early on. With 33 hittable creatures in the deck, Collected Company will hit 1.94 creatures on average.
Lantto’s deck, which is a typical build for this archetype, splashes white for Burrenton Forge-Tender and Kataki, War’s Wage from the sideboard. These creatures are mainly included as silver bullets for Chord of Calling, but Razorverge Thicket helps cast them if you draw them.
Jasper De Jong’s Melira Company, Top 4 at the Magic Online Championships
Birthing Pod has been banned, but the combo of Viscera Seer, Anafenza/Melira, and Kitchen Finks/Murderous Redcap is still around. With 28 hittable creatures in the deck, Collected Company will “only” yield 1.86 creatures on average, but many of them cost 3 mana, and sometimes you can get two of the missing combo pieces at instant speed.
Jasper’s build goes heavier on the combo than most versions, with extra copies of Viscera Seer, Eternal Witness, and Fauna Shaman. I like the toolbox aspect of the deck, although I would suggest Kor Firewalker instead of Burrenton Forge-Tender and Intrepid Hero instead of Aven Mindcensor in the sideboard. Just seems better against Lava Spike and Primeval Titan, respectively.
The Matchups
The following table provides game win percentages (match win percentages are not yet available) between the seven most popular decks. All numbers in this table are based on at least 50 games, with some based on over 200 games.
The way to read this table is that Affinity smashed Burn in 63% of the games and lost to Twin in 72% of the games. Another lopsided matchup is Gr Tron vs. Junk, which greatly favors Gr Tron.
All things considered, Modern is filled with a lot of viable decks and new ones are born with each new set. What’s your favorite?How The Microbes Inside Us Went From Enemies To Purported Superhealers
"Microbes have always ruled the planet but for the first time in history, they are fashionable," writes Ed Yong in his new book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, on sale Tuesday.
Yong, a U.K.-based science writer, describes how humans ignored, feared and then lauded the "microscopic menagerie" living inside us and other animals. He explains how these resident bacteria, fungi, archaea and viruses, known collectively as the microbiome, form intimate partnerships with their hosts — contributing to everything from the glow of a squid's light organ to the development of our own immune systems.
I Contain Multitudes The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong Hardcover, 355 pages | purchase close overlay Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?
Scientists are testing whether microbes (especially bacteria) have the potential to treat asthma, allergies, obesity and a range of hard-to-treat infections. But Yong questions whether our growing enthusiasm for these microbes has outstripped the scientific evidence.
We spoke with Yong about what the latest science says about microbes and human health.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
Does what we eat influence our microbial residents?
There've been many studies showing that when people change their diet, the microbes in their guts also change. And of course they do. If you think of adding a different set of nutrients into an ecosystem, of course it's going to affect the number and range of species in that place. The critical questions are what kinds of changes are good or bad for health and how can we enact those changes through taking steps in our diet. These are still pretty open questions.
It seems that dietary fiber is a really important driver of microbial diversity in our bodies. Fiber consists of large numbers of different carbohydrates — many we can't digest, but our bacteria in our guts can. If we eat low-fiber diets, we narrow the range of our microbial partners. But the guidance to eat more fiber has been a longstanding part of nutritional advice. The discoveries of the microbiome lend credence to that, but don't fundamentally change it.
NPR YouTube
What about how food influences a baby's developing microbiome?
There is a particular subspecies of bacteria called B. infantis and it seems to have evolved to feed on sugars [in breast milk] known as human milk oligosaccharides. Babies can't digest [the sugars] so they are food for the microbes, not for the babies. These sugars are sort of a way of setting up a baby's first microbiome, ensuring that the right species set up shop rather than those that are likely to cause disease. And it's fascinating to me to think of this very common act, breastfeeding, through this new microbial lens.
Should we be worried that some of the microbes that have been living inside us for thousands of years are becoming scarce?
Many of the trappings of Western civilization have led to a decline in the microbiome — like hand sanitizers, antibiotics, excessive hygiene, changes in diet. A lot of data support this idea, but it's still not clear whether the fall in diversity is a bad thing. What we know is that the diversity of the gut microbiome is much higher in apes than it is in hunter-gatherers and then much higher in hunter-gatherers than in Westerners. So this decline is part of a trend that has been going on for some time and precedes humans. So does it just reflect changes in evolution and diet? And, if so, to what extent is it actually causing us health problems?
What's the evidence behind fecal transplants for treating human illnesses?
The results are very clear for treating infections of Clostridium difficile, a very hardy bacterium that causes recurrent and often intractable cases of diarrhea. Fecal transplants have been used to treat this condition many times over in many countries. It's been tested in randomized controlled studies, which is the gold standard. The first trial had to be stopped early because [the transplants were so successful that] it seemed unethical to not put all of the patients on this treatment.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Urszula Sołtys/Courtesy of Ecco Urszula Sołtys/Courtesy of Ecco
That said, the results for other conditions like irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease have been far more inconsistent. That's because C. diff. is kind of a special case. It's a very invasive microbe that has repeatedly been assaulted by antibiotics which have caused a collapse in other microbes. So it's an easy environment for [microbes in] a donor stool to invade.
It might just be that C. diff. was the low hanging fruit. That said, fecal transplants are arguably our most successful microbiome-based therapy. They show some important principles that we might like to take heed of like the fact that [the treatment] is a community-based approach. There are lots of questions to be answered. [For example], we don't know what the long-term risks are, if any.
It seems like there are a lot of questions remaining about how our microbiomes affect our health. Why don't we have more answers yet?
The way I see it, there are many areas in medicine where the math is simple. Say you have a vitamin deficiency, you add a vitamin and then you're better. With manipulating the microbiome, it is infinitely more complicated because this is an entire world — a community of hundreds if not thousands of microbes interacting with each other and us, their hosts.
Tweaking that is understandably very hard. It's why simple measures like probiotics — adding a few strains of microbes in the hope that they will take hold and remedy health problems — have been largely unsuccessful. It will take more. It will take an understanding of how different microbes interact, whether they feed each other or compete with each other. If we want to add microbes to our bodies, we'll need to think about whether we need to eat certain foods to nourish the microbes we're taking.
Our microbiomes are constantly changing, day by day, hour by hour. It's the flexibility that has people so excited because you should be able to change it so easily — certainly easier than genes. But ecosystems have resilience. You can nudge them and they bounce back.We all have bosses. We also have customers who pay us for running their software projects. They are my bosses for the time of the contract. I’m also acting as a boss for developers who are working for Zerocracy. It is obvious that a good employee/contractor is one who makes his boss/customer happy. But only a bad employee works toward this goal. Trying to make your boss happy is a false target that, if pursued, ruins the project. A professional employee works for the project, not for the boss.
The Million Dollar Hotel (2000) by Wim Wenders
We all work on projects as developers, designers, programmers, managers, testers, you name it. The boss is also a member of the project. More formally, he or she is a stakeholder, same as every one of us. Each stakeholder has his own needs for the project: 1) Jeff, the developer, wants to learn Scala and collect his paychecks every two weeks; 2) Sally, the product owner, wants to attend an expo in Paris and also collect her paychecks; 3) Bob, the CTO, wants to raise round A funding and collect a big paycheck; etc.
The project has its own objectives, to achieve 1 million downloads in less than six months and under $300,000, for example. This is what the project works for. This is what all of us are here for.
Our personal needs may be fully satisfied while we’re all working toward this goal, or some of them may be sacrificed. I mean all of us, including the boss, whoever he or she is, either a CTO, a co-founder, a project manager, or a team lead.
The project is the source of our checks. Not the CFO.
A true professional team player feels himself equal to all other members of the project, no matter how high they are in the hierarchy.
The CFO is a stakeholder, like everyone else. The project gives him more power than others because it’s necessary for the whole mechanism to work properly. Every project member has his or her own roles and responsibilities. I write code; the CFO writes checks. I eat at McDonald’s; he drives a Jaguar. We have different needs, and we both agreed that the project would satisfy them. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, right?
We’re all parts of a mechanism called a “project,” which works according to the rules and principles of project management whether we are aware of them or not. Whether we have a project manager or not. Even if we violate all of them and manage ourselves in total chaos, we still have a scope, cost, schedule, and all other attributes of project management.
A professional and savvy boss understands that his role in the mechanism is to clearly define project objectives and make sure everybody’s needs are aligned with those objectives. In a properly managed and organized project, everybody sees and feels how his or her personal needs are satisfied when the project achieves its objectives: Jeff learns Scala, Sally sees Paris, and Bob buys a new house.
However, if Jeff wants to learn Scala and we’re developing an iOS application, that is a problem for the boss to resolve. Either convince Jeff to fall in love with Swift (I doubt that’s possible) or replace him with someone who is already in love with it. It’s clear that a professional boss will resort to such a tragic act as firing Jeff not because of his personal feelings towards Jeff but because they are both working toward the project objectives. Jeff and the boss will both understand that Jeff’s need to learn Scala is not aligned with the objective of the project.
It is the CTO’s responsibility to do something about Jeff when his personal needs become misaligned with the objectives of the project that is paying his salary. A professional CEO understands that and always acts in the best interest of the project, not of himself or anyone else personally.
I believe a professional team player does two things: obeys and resists.
First, you have to understand that the boss is here in order to help you organize your time, your tasks, your communications, your plans, etc. He knows more about the project and uses that information to help you do your job. Your real boss is the project; the boss you interact with is just a hired manager who translates project objectives into plans, instructions, schedules, etc.
Being a professional team player requires a constant readiness to resist each and every instruction.
This boss is your colleague who does management while you’re writing code. You’re both equal. You and he are in the same boat. Your functions are different than his; that’s all. You’re not working for him but with him on a project. A true professional team player feels himself equal to all other members of the project, no matter how high they are in the hierarchy.
At the same time, he strictly follows the process and obeys all project rules and instructions, not because he is afraid of being fired but because he wants the project to succeed.
Second, being a professional team player requires a constant readiness to resist each and every instruction if you feel it contradicts the project objectives. A true professional doesn’t work for a boss. He doesn’t want to make the boss happy. He actually doesn’t care whether the boss is happy or not. He knows that the real boss is the project and tries to make the project successful and … happy.
A true professional always works for himself. Jeff wants to learn Scala and earn a certain amount of cash. He joined the project in order to satisfy these needs. If the project fails, Jeff won’t get the money and won’t fully learn Scala. So if the boss tells Jeff to do something that may jeopardize the project’s success, will Jeff do it? Does he care about disappointing the boss? Absolutely not. All he cares about is the project’s success, which translates to his personal success.
Thus, making your boss happy is a goal for the immature, fearsome, lazy, and weak. Making your project successful is an objective for professional, strong, mature, and brave team players.Don’t want to pay 30 bucks to carry the 6 extra draws and hexes you bought cuz you thought you’d be a trad climber but instead you just carry protection in case your sport route is too runout? Here’s the guide for you.
Materials:
Trad gear
Shoulder-length (120 cm or about 4 feet) of 1 inch webbing –pick it u online with your other climbing gear for ~33 cents a foot, or 40 cents a foot at your local REI
Thin accessory cord (6mm or less, could probably get away with 7mm though)–same cord as from the last guide, REI: ~30 cents a foot.
Soldering iron OR Hole Punch OR Nail + lighter
Marker
Flat piece of wood/basically anything
Instructions:
Get 1 inch diameter webbing, wrap around your shoulders like a sling to whatever length you find will be most comfortable. Add slightly less than a foot for tying the two ends together using a water knot. (If the images are still confusing, it’s just an overhand knot tied with the webbing folded flat and not all twisted, and the other end retracing the knot from the loose end.) roperescuetraining.com me Put it around your shoulder and adjust the knot and the position of the sling to find a comfortable position, use a marker to mark out at which points you want the gear loops to start and end. Remember that once you put stuff with weight on it, it will naturally slide next to your hip. I personally liked the knot right at my chest, which fell in the chest crease nicely even with weight, and provided a handle for me to move the sling around. Heat up your soldering iron/ready your hole puncher/heat up your nail and form holes where you marked. Flatten the melted nylon edges out with something flat (I used a wooden ruler) wooden car as a soldering stand smoothing and flattening devices relative hole sizes for 6mm cord Thread the cord through the first hole on the side you want to be on the outside of the gear sling, continue threading by going in and out like you’re sewing. (hover for captions) Threading from outside to in first Tie a simple overhand knot once the cord is completely threaded I tied an overhand on a bight (explained later) for the middle Take a lighter and smooth out any rough edges by the holes once the cord is threaded through. Tie simple overhands on the outside ends of the gear sling as shown in the 2nd and 3rd image. What’s the small middle loop for? Key piece of gear that you want to keep separate from everything else.
Keeper loop for overhanging climbs–loop your chalk belt through it to prevent the sling from swinging when you go past 90! The Gear Sling in it’s entirety Chalk Bag Belt as keeper loop for inverted climbing Desk Chair Trad© EditionUsing what is considered to be “accepted knowledge” about ghosts and haunting, as well as the Star Wars Universe in general, it can be argued, simply by watching the movies (not the expanded universe or novels,) that Yoda was ALREADY DEAD by the time that Luke got to Dagobah. In short, the ghost of Obi Wan referred Luke Skywalker to the ghost of Yoda in order to complete his training. How could this be? Well:
10. Yoda Has “Unfinished Business”
Spirits can have unfinished business, binding them to the temporal world. Yoda did not defeat Emperor Palpatine, and he failed to stop Anakin from turning to the Dark Side. Yoda never detected, or divined, that Palpatine was Darth Sidious. The entire prequel trilogy is ultimately marked by Yoda’s failure to pierce the Dark Side and find out what was going on. Only by balance being restored to the Force, and Vader destroying Palpatine, can Yoda hope to cross over. Otherwise, he would be bound to the place in which he more than likely died…on Dagobah.
9. Yoda Is Not Able to Leave Degobah
In tribal societies, the concept of “soul loss” is much more defined that it is in ours. It is a fragmentation of a soul, that is unable to rejoin the rest of it. In Empire Strikes Back, this would mean that part of Yoda’s soul is so traumatized, that it could not yet join the Force. That part of Yoda’s soul was attached to Dagobah, and that was the reason why Luke had to go there. Obi Wan’s soul was already joined with the Force, and could travel to places like Hoth. Once Luke had defeated Vader (or maybe even once Vader had defeated Palpatine,) Yoda’s soul fragment was allowed to rejoin with the rest.
Consider this: even if Yoda did not want to face Vader, his discovery would have been just as important to the Rebellion as it would have been to the Empire. Once found, there is no reason why Yoda could not have rejoined society, especially so close to a final confrontation. But obviously, as a ghost, this could not happen.
8. Yoda No Longer Has A Light Saber
Let’s assume, just for a moment, that Yoda is truly alive in Dagobah. Yoda is a fugitive in constant fear for his life, who can be hunted at any point and time. Any potential visitor (especially a Force-sensitive one) is a threat. Granted, Yoda admits to having followed the son of Skywalker for years, and knows exactly who Luke is. However, you never see a scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Yoda possesses, teaches with, or even holds a light saber. And, thanks to the prequels, we know that Yoda had one at some point, and wielded it better than anyone. So where is it?
Given the Empire’s keen interest in him, Luke’s mere presence on Dagobah should be a threat. Yet, Luke is armed and Yoda is not. That’s because, if found, Luke would be the only one who would have to defend himself.
7. R2-D2 And the X-Wing
R2-D2 has been around Jedi for decades, so he knows how objects can simply float around. Shortly after arrival on Dagobah, R2 attempted to grab a light out of what he thought was the air, only for it to start hitting him, until Luke ordered him to let it go.
This is known as a “force push,” which has been used a few times in the Star Wars universe. A force push would, in theory, create a bubble between two physical objects. As Yoda does not have a corporeal form, there is nothing to “bubble” against. Later on, Yoda moves the X-Wing, but never actually touches it. We don’t even really know that Yoda is the one doing it. It may be Luke channeling through the image of Yoda. Or it could be the ghost of a long-dead Jedi Master, haunting his visitors via moving objects.
6. There Is Already An Intelligent Haunting on Dagobah
Obi Wan is already known as an “intelligent haunting.” This is defined as an activity, taking place around a person or place, that is caused by an intelligent or conscious spirit. An intelligent haunting takes on the personality of someone who has died, and whose spirit has not crossed over to the other side. Obi Wan interacts with Luke, and makes his presence known through sights, sounds, feelings and movements.
Yoda, being a more powerful spirit in the Force, would have been able to transcend Obi-Wan’s simple talk-and-manifestation abilities. He, even as a ghost, would have been able to pick up small objects and be touched by those around him, including Luke.
Which brings us to….
5. The Battle At The Cave
The Cave scene in The Empire Strikes Back brings together many aspects of a residual haunting. As opposed to an intelligent haunting, this is when the ghost cannot interact with the living, and typically manifests itself as a recurring memory. Luke seems to encounter such a haunting. The light saber battle he had with Imaginary Vader actually happened between Vader and Yoda; therefore, the residual haunting of Yoda’s death plays over |
comment) => { const start = comment.indexOf('<@') + 2; const end = comment.substr(start).indexOf('>'); return comment.substr(start, end); }; module.exports = (context, cb) => { // Slack bot token token = context.data.BOT_TOKEN; const name = extractName(context.data.comment).toLowerCase(); findUser(name, (err, id) => { if (err) { // If no such user, assume it's a channel return postMsg(name, context.data, cb); } return openIM(id, (err, channelId) => { if (err) { console.log(err); return cb(); } else postMsg(channelId, context.data, cb); }); }); };
That’s less than 100 lines of code!
The entry point to the code is the line starting with module.exports = (context, cb) => {. When the webtask is triggered, this function will be executed, which will in turn call the rest of the functions when necessary.
For security reasons, we add the bot’s token as a configuration (as described below) instead of in the code. Then we find the mentioned name from the comment text. We check Slack to see if such a user exists. If not, we assume it’s a channel name and post it into the channel with that name. If a user is found, we open an IM channel with that user and post the message.
Save this code in a file named slackmention.js and enter the following command to deploy it as a webtask:
wt create --secret BOT_TOKEN=<Slack bot token from step 1 goes here> slackmention.js
After the webtask is deployed, the CLI will present you with its unique URL. We will use this in the next step.
3. Create a trigger in Zendesk
The last step is to tell Zendesk to call our webtask when it sees a comment that might have a mention in it. You need to be an admin in Zendesk to do this. If you are not, reach out to your friendly Zendesk admin (and don’t forget to give them a cookie!).
In Zendesk, go to Settings > Extensions and create a new HTTP target with the webtask’s URL as the URL (obtained in Step 2), POST as the method, and JSON as the content type.
Now go to Settings > Triggers and create a new trigger with ‘Ticket: Comment text...’ as the condition, “Contains the following string” as the op, and <@ as the string. The performed action should be ‘Notifications: Notify target’ set to the HTTP target created above. Set the JSON body as follows:
{ "id" : "{{ticket.id}}", "title" : "{{ticket.title}}", "comment" : "{{ticket.latest_comment}}", "author" : "{{ticket.latest_comment.author.name}}", "tags" : "{{ticket.tags}}" }
Test it!
Now we are all done. To test our new setup, add the following comment in a new (or existing) Zendesk ticket. You can add it to a public comment or an internal comment.
Hello <@thameera>!
Replace thameera with your Slack username, of course. If you performed all the steps in order, you will get a Slack notification like this:
That’s it! You can customize the trigger and the webtask to suit your company’s needs and deploy your own Zendesk-to-Slack-mentions implementation in a few minutes. For example, you can modify it to send an email or send a DM via HipChat if that’s your chat application of choice.
Conclusion
The next time you need to create a bot, automate something, or write a program, remember that you can use a webtask to say no to yak shaving and focus on your code.
You can start experimenting with webtasks by creating a free Auth0 account below or heading directly to https://webtask.io. Enjoy!By Express News Service
CHENNAI: As there are very few takers for vocational subjects and academic electives, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) will discontinue the subjects for Class X and Plus Two from the next academic session, 2017-18.
Circulars issued by the board on Thursday directed all schools offering the subjects to discontinue, but students pursuing these subjects currently in Class XI shall continue in Class XII. For Class X students also who take up these subjects as compulsory sixth subject under National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF), it will be discontinued.
The board issued two circulars, one each for classes X and XII. The circular for Class XII issued by Manoj K Srivastava, Joint Secretary, Academic, says: “Schools are advised not to offer these subjects at the senior secondary level from the forthcoming session of 2017-18.
However, students pursuing these subjects currently in Class XI shall continue with them in Class XII and shall appear in the same subject in Class XII examinations as per the senior secondary curriculum for 2017-18.” It also listed about seven academic electives and 34 vocational subjects at the senior secondary level that are to be withdrawn by schools.
The circular for Class X by RK Chaturvedi, Chairman, CBSE, says the existing assessment scheme followed by schools offering vocational subject as compulsory sixth subject under NSQF stands discontinued.
However, for class X students with compulsory vocational subject appearing in academic year 2016-17 examination, the existing scheme would apply, the circular said.
The circular also gave a revised scheme of studies under NSQF. According to the revised scheme, if any student fails in any one of the three elective subjects, which include Science, Maths and Social Science, then “it will be replaced by the vocational subject and result of class X Board will be computed accordingly”, reads the circular.
Many schools were relieved by the board’s decision since most of them were unable to attract students for these courses. S Namasivayam, Principal of Maharishi Vidya Mandir Senior Secondary School, said for the past several years there were very limited takers for these subjects. This year his school did not get even a single student.
“We have not opened the vocational group this year. Discontinuing it will makes financial sense. To get a teacher, we need to pay around `40,000 per month. If there are just four-five students, who pay a maximum of `1 lakh each, the returns will be miniscule,” he said.
Echoing him, Radhika Unni, Principal of SBOA School, said because of few takers, for the past several years, the school had not opened this group.
Another Senior Principal of a CBSE school said this decision has been taken because there was lack of response from both parents and students.Beasts of No Nation is not a film to be seen lightly. It will not warm your heart, or lift your spirits. But it should be seen. Because it reminds us of where evil comes from in the world.
The story opens with Agu, a young African boy playing “imagination TV” with his friends, looking through the empty frame of a television set at the world around them. It’s both a perfect way to set up the character as playful and innocent, and a deft metaphor for what the movie itself is trying to do. We’re looking through a frame at reality. The frame might focus our attention on one thing over another, but this is really happening somewhere out there, beyond the safety of our television screens.
Agu lives a happy life with a happy family, but there are rumblings of trouble in the distance. Soldiers patrol his seemingly peaceful town, and his father talks of a fighting force on the move toward their home.
And all too soon, the war is no longer a hypothetical thing happening out of sight, it is real and present, gunshots and explosions tearing through Agu’s old life and sending him on the run into the bush.
Out in the wild, Agu stumbles across a contingent of men led by the charismatic Preacher. They recruit Agu into their fighting force with the promise of revenge against the men who attacked his village. They put a gun in his hand. They teach him to kill. They teach him to hate.
Agu becomes a soldier, in every possible sense of the word. He joins in the murders and atrocities perpetrated by his company with an almost religious fervor. And yet he is still just a little boy, who longs to escape from the endless horror of war to go and do little boy things once again.
With Beasts of No Nation, director Cary Jo Fukunaga once again proves his considerable talent, but aside from one or two notable exceptions, there is not an overabundance of style in the film. This story is rough and brutish and true, and Fukunaga wisely avoids using too many directorial flourishes that might detract from the weight of what is happening on screen.
Likewise the performances from Idris Elba and child actor Emmanuel Affadzi are heartbreakingly real. In particular Elba’s portrayal of Preacher, a character who could have easily been a caricature of a villain, is instead terrifyingly human, yet another somber reminder that the evil men of the world are still men. And those men were once boys who played and laughed and loved and were loved.
Beasts of No Nation is a hard movie to watch, but it’s message is critical. Ultimately it is not only a tale of child soldiers in Africa, but a warning to people of every country and in every time.
Evil is learned. Hatred is taught. But love and good can be taught as well.
Albert lives in Florida where the humidity has driven him halfway to madness, and his children have finished the job. He is the author of The Mulch Pile and A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw.
To hear more of our thoughts on Beasts of No Nation check out Episode 166 of the Human Echoes Podcast.On the 15th of May, Benfica and Chelsea made their way to the Amsterdam ArenA, as they were to face off in the Europa League final. For Benfica, this game had added importance, after their defeat to Porto on the weekend meant that Porto had more or less clinched the league. For the Londoners and Rafa Benitez, the game was a chance at redeeming an otherwise trophy-less season.
Line Ups
Benfica lined up in a 4-3-3. Artur began the game at the back. The 4 man defence consisted of young Melgarejo on the left, and Almeida on the right. In the centre, the experienced Luisao and former Real Madrid player Garay. The midfielders who began the game were Rodrigo, Enzo Perez and former Chelsea man Matic. Up front, Salvio accompanied the dangerous duo of Nico Gaitan and Oscar Cardozo.
The London side started with their usual 4-2-3-1 formation. At the back, Azpilicueta started on the right, and Ashley Cole on the left. Ivanovic and Cahill started in the absence of John Terry. Lampard and Luiz started in midfield. Ramires and Oscar started in the wide areas, and Mata started in behind the striker, Fernando Torres.
Analysis
Benfica started the game playing at a high tempo, trying to ruffle Chelsea’s feathers. They played high up the pitch, and pressed Chelsea with great intensity. The strategy on Jorge Jesus’ part was to pressurise Chelsea into making mistakes, and then have his flair players capitalise. He also used energetic midfielders like Enzo Perez ahead of Pablo Aimar. The kind of pressure they wanted to exert is evident when you consider that the 3 highest tacklers in their side are Enzo Perez, Nico Gaitan and Salvio, 2 of whom were a part of the front 3.
The plan from Chelsea initially seemed to be to bore Benfica to death. In all seriousness, Benitez wanted to play a counter attacking game, that suited his team perfectly. He had the midfield playing deeper, and closer to the back 4, and they looked to kick stat their counter attacking moves by playing the ball down the right for the pacy Ramires. They wanted to draw Benfica onto them, and then get in behind the high line with the pace and strength of Fernando Torres. This plan worked like a charm, with the first goal coming from a long pass down the middle, and the second after Ramires won the corner. The passing, as a result was much longer than usual, with Chelsea attempting 52 long passes. When you consider that this was about 18% of all their passes, as compared to Benfica, for whom long balls comprised a much lower 12%, you can see where the thrust was.
Oscar Cardozo and Nicolas Gaitan have been a revelation in the Europa League, and have been crucial in their team getting to the finals of the competition. Therefore, Benitez needed a strategy to shut the door on them, as they were very capable of causing problems. In order to do so, Benitez pushed both his centre backs into narrow positions. This meant that there was less space across the penalty area for Benfica to exploit and play passes. Chelsea were also very deep, meaning that there wasn’t much space in behind to play through balls into. The fact that they employed a defensive outlook, where the aim was to protect the box, meant that they left space out wide. Benitez tried to cover this by making his offensive wide men, Ramires and Oscar, track back and perform defensive duties. This tactic didn’t especially work out well, with the Benfica full backs getting beyond them regularly. All in all, Benfica played a massive 27 crosses. The space out wide was there to be exploited, but Benfica didn’t make full use of it, as they didn’t really trouble Chelsea with their balls into the box, with the back 4 effecting 21 clearances in all. Gary Cahill stood above the rest with a fantastic 10 clearances. Petr Cech also got involved quite often, as the line was deep, and a number of balls were played between the line and the keeper. Crosses that were played in front of the defence were slightly more effective, but Benfica were guilty of wasting their chances.
Another tactic Chelsea used well was jockeying and marking spaces and passing angles, rather than go after the man on the ball. This systematic form of defending forced Benfica to play the ball back on a number of occasions. It was appropriate because the Benfica players had the movement, pace and passing ability to exploit pressing tactics, and so hanging back a little worked well for Chelsea.
The midfield dominance that Benfica enjoyed was no co-incidence. Of course, the defensive tactics employed by Chelsea were helpful, but their own tactics made it very hard for the Chelsea players to track them, and stop them playing. They managed to create a number of good chances which were wasted despite the numbers at the back. This was because unlike most teams, Benfica didn’t assign any of their midfielders fixed positions i.e. the trio were interchanging their roles on a regular basis. This made them hard to mark.
After Chelsea took the lead, the onus was on Benfica to attack. The Portugese giants decided to try and improve their success from balls into the box by adding more men to the area. In order to do this, Benfica sacrificed a little bit of defensive cover, switching to 3 at the back, as Melgarejo and Rodrigo were taken off to make room for Lima and Ola John, both of whom are attack minded players. This strategy meant that Benfica had more options in dangerous areas of the pitch, and were able to create a lot more danger. The goal came as a result of some good play in such an area, with Lima receiving a one-two and bursting into the box, only for Azpilicueta to get his hand on the ball. However, it also meant that Chelsea had a lot of space to exploit, and this was evident as the Blues were starting to pose a greater threat on the counter towards the end of the game.
Conclusion
In a big game, Chelsea managed to see off their opponents to clinch their second international trophy in as many years. Credit to Rafael Benitez and his team for doing a good job in this competition.
For Benfica though, the defeat will be a tough pill to swallow. They played very well throughout the game, but couldn’t find that little bit extra that was needed to see off their opponents. Losing a European final to a late goal like that, on the back of possibly losing the league to their fierce rivals on the weekend is going to be tough, and it should be interesting to see what Benfica and Jorge Jesus do next.Russian warplanes have bombed a training camp in Syria where foreign instructors trained potential suicide bombers, the Russian defense ministry said. It was one of 49 terrorist targets hit by the Russian Air Forces over the day.
“Not far from Salma in Latakia province, a Su-24M bomber delivered a strike at a building, which was used as a terrorist training ground. According to intelligence, there were ISIL foreign instructors, who were training people, including suicide bombers, for guerrilla warfare in areas liberated by the Syrian army,” ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said.
He added that the facility had its own explosives workshop, which was also destroyed by an airstrike.
Russian warplanes conducted 36 combat sorties on Saturday and attacked 49 militant targets in Syria, including command points, weapons workshops, firing positions, depots and fortified bunkers, Konashenkov added.
The general said that the terrorist group Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL), which suffered serious damage from Russian bombings, is working to rebuild its infrastructure.
“The militants' new tactics is to spread their supply and command facilities, but it does not work. All their new infrastructure objects are being identified and destroyed,” he said.
READ MORE: Russia offers US ‘broader cooperation’ in Syria, but Washington not ready – Defense Ministry
Konashenkov said the civilian population in the areas under terrorist group’s control are aiding the Russian airstrikes by providing intelligence about IS to the Syrian government.
“This information is double-checked by our aviation group with various technical means of reconnaissance. Following this, a decision is made on which objects we should target,” he said.
Russia is providing air support to Syrian government troops, which are currently undertaking an offensive to retake villages and cities captured by terrorist groups. Moscow says its goal is to stabilize the situation in the country enough to allow political dialogue between Damascus and moderate opposition to start.
LISTEN MORE:In remarks likely to deepen his rift with members of his own party, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he wants conservatives to hold Senate Republicans “accountable” for opposing the ill-fated effort to defund the Affordable Care Act.
Echoing his sentiments from earlier this week, Cruz told National Review’s Robert Costa in an interview published Saturday that the defunding campaign was derailed by a “significant number” of his GOP colleagues who “actively, aggressively, and vocally led the effort to defeat House Republicans.”
“Once Senate Republicans did that, it crippled the chances of this effort, and it caused the lousy deal.” he told Costa.
Cruz didn’t identify any specific senators and, as he said earlier this year, made it clear that he won’t be involved in any GOP primaries. But he indicated he wants those lawmakers to pay a price at the ballot box.
“As with every decision elected officials make, the consequences of those decisions are up to the American people,” Cruz said. “But I will say this: from day one in office, I’ve urged the American people to hold every elected official accountable, and far too many elected officials are not listening to the American people… when you’ve got 10 to 20 Senate Republicans going on television, day after day after day, saying, ‘we cannot win, this is a fool’s errand, we will lose, nothing will happen, we will surrender,’ and blaming Republicans every step of the way, it eliminates the ability to get a positive outcome.”
The defunding movement led to the government shutdown and brought the United States close to default. It was also decried as quixotic by a number of Republicans, including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
During an interview last week on Fox News, McCain repeatedly told an anchor for the conservative network that the shutdown was the fault of Republicans like Cruz who chased a “fool’s errand.” And Cruz was reportedly berated by Republican senators for the strategy during a recent closed-door meeting.
But some conservative groups have already indicated that they plan to follow Cruz’s advice. FreedomWorks chief Matt Kibbe said that Republicans who voted for the bill to re-open the government and raise the debt ceiling will draw primary challengers, while the Senate Conservatives Fund — founded by Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint, a fellow defunding leader — endorsed Matt Bevin, the tea party champion who’s challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).PORTLAND – City officials have shut down three waterfront businesses, including the well-known Porthole restaurant, citing numerous health code violations including a “serious rat infestation.”
The Porthole, the Comedy Connection and the Harbour’s Edge banquet hall, all owned by Oliver Keithly, were closed Thursday afternoon after health inspector Michele Sturgeon inspected them in response to a written complaint.
Additional Photos The Porthole restaurant, the Comedy Connection and Harbour’s Edge were shut down Thursday afternoon by the Portland health inspector, who cited numerous violations. Photos by Gabe Souza/Staff Photographer Employees of The Porthole on Custom House Wharf wait outside the building Friday afternoon after the restaurant, along with the Comedy Connection and Harbour’s Edge, were shut down because of numerous health code violations. Business owner Oliver Keithly did not respond to calls for comment Friday, and employees at the Porthole said he was not inside. A sign on the Porthole restaurant says it was “closed due to water issues” Friday. Employees later replaced the sign with one that read: “Closed, sorry for the inconvenience.” A man works on a door on the back of Harbour's Edge on Custom House Wharf on Friday. What appears to be a rat trap is seen outside the Comedy Connection on Friday after it was shut down by the Portland health inspector.
Sturgeon found “rat droppings everywhere” in the businesses’ liquor storage area and on shelves, as well as “rotting, decayed mouse traps,” according to her report. “TONS of flies all over the food” and “lobster and other exposed seafood,” she wrote.
According to past health inspection reports, the Porthole was last inspected in July 2008. That report noted a need to clean up around the Dumpster, improve general cleaning and get a follow-up inspection for plumbing violations.
City spokeswoman Nicole Clegg said late Friday that electronic files showed a follow-up inspection was done in 2009, but the report was not immediately available, even though all past inspection records were requested Friday morning.
Keithly did not respond to calls for comment Friday, and employees at the Porthole said he was not inside. A woman who came outside as a reporter approached Keithly’s home in South Portland said he was at the restaurant.
Initially, employees and a sign in the window said the Porthole was closed because of “water issues.” Later, as reporters gathered, employees replaced the sign with one that read: “Closed, sorry for the inconvenience.”
Many would-be patrons were disappointed to find the Porthole closed Friday. The restaurant was featured on the Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” show in 2010.
“I guess this is the dive part,” said Al Purdy, 51, who was visiting from Iowa.
People who were turned away Friday evening said they were disappointed.
“I wanted fried scallops and the french fries with the vinegar,” said Jen Federico of Kezar Falls. “Ooh, they’re the best.” “It’s always good drinks, always good people,” said Rick Bedrcuist of Long Island. “It’s just a good place.”
The Porthole opened in 1929 as a coffee shop and candy store. In previous interviews, Keithly said he believed it was featured on the Food Network because of its “authenticity.”
He noted that the Porthole hadn’t changed much since he bought it in 1998. It has the same copper countertop and bar stools it had in the 1920s, an open kitchen so customers can see the food being prepared, and lobster buoys hanging on the walls.
The city inspected the restaurant Thursday, the day it got the complaint, which highlighted rat problems and said “several people got sick” from eating “bad potato salad” at a function at the Harbour’s Edge banquet hall.
Included in the city’s inspection report was a copy of an invoice to the Jensen Baird Gardner and Henry law firm, dated July 17, for a company event for 40 or more people. No one at the firm was authorized to comment on the event, said Tiffany Gould, the firm’s accounting director.
Douglas Gardner, director of Portland’s Health and Human Services Department, said the city never called the law firm to ask whether any employees had fallen ill after the event. That portion of the investigation was referred to the state, he said.
The city inspector found windows and doors propped open without screens, dish rags on the floor, and no “employees must wash hands” signs in the bathroom.
A section of her report on Harbour’s Edge noted “excessive violations — many repeat, not corrected from last (Imminent Health Hazard.)”
She also discovered a bar sink and a floor drain that lead directly into Portland Harbor, rather than the city’s sewer system.
Stuart Rose, who works in the wastewater compliance division of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, said he learned of the violations Thursday.
“I don’t have any new details,” Rose said Friday. “This is the beginning of (the) investigation.”
Gardner said the Porthole’s management has called in a pest control specialist to deal with the rats and flies. Several issues still must be addressed, including general cleaning and sealing up areas that lead outdoors.
Owners of nearby businesses said they have not had a problem with rats. They said they do regular pest control.
“It’s a day-to-day routine,” said Jennifer Fox, co-owner of Andy’s Old Port Pub on Commercial Street. “You have to stay on top of it.”
Mark Cutter, who owns Port Bean on Commercial Street, said he hires Orkin pest control to inspect his cafe and its storage area every two weeks.
“It’s only $60, every two weeks,” he said. “I want to make sure we don’t have issues.”
According to city records, the Porthole was inspected seven times from July 6, 2007, to May, 21, 2008, and was out of compliance with codes governing plumbing, hand-washing stations, refuse and garbage disposal, and overall cleanliness.
Each inspection noted the need for a follow-up inspection to ensure that plumbing issues were fixed. But the city did not provide any inspection records from between 2008 and this year.
Shortly after 5 p.m. Friday, Clegg said a follow-up inspection was done in April 2009 and scored a 96.
No one on the staff was available at that hour to provide the follow-up report, she said.
Clegg said the Porthole was the third restaurant in Portland to be shut down for health code violations in the last year. La Bodega and Buffalo Wings-N-Things were closed, but Clegg could not provide any information about the nature of the violations or say how long the restaurants were closed.
Gardner said restaurants are closed when three or more critical violations are found. Numerous noncritical or repeat violations can also lead to closure, he said.
On Friday, Denise Lachance, 53, of Ottawa, Canada, was upset that she couldn’t experience the Porthole. She first tried to eat there 15 years ago, and it was closed then. She took photos of the restaurant, because it appeared to cater to fishermen, and made paintings of it.
This time, she had made her way up from Cape Cod eating seafood, hoping it would culminate Friday at the Porthole.
“You don’t know my frustration!” said Lachance, standing several feet from a black rodent trap. “I’m crushed.”
Staff Writer Randy Billings can be contacted at 791-6346 or at:
[email protected]
Twitter: @randybillings
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I am running my sites on a VPS from Slicehost and have had a very good experience. When I started, I set everything up using Apache 2, since that is what I am most familiar and adept with using. Apache works well, but likes more memory than I have in my server. This caused me to use my swap far too much.
I worked with the Apache configuration, finally coming up with the changes below for my /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file, which minimized the swapping, but wasn’t quite enough for me to be happy. Also, if more than one or two people were browsing the site at a time, it forced everything to go much more slowly, because it now got backed up in a queue instead of being served quickly (this was by design, to save memory and prevent swapping). That was not acceptable. Here you can see the changes I had made to get it to run without swapping all the time in a lean-memory environment. I have removed everything but the necessary changes I had made, just to save space here. Apache is so well documented, you should be able to figure the file out as needed using readily available info, if you need to.
Timeout 30
KeepAlive On
MaxMemFree 262144
MaxKeepAliveRequests 2
KeepAliveTimeout 1
<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 2
MinSpareServers 1
MaxSpareServers 3
MaxClients 4
MaxRequestsPerChild 5
</IfModule>
<IfModule mpm_worker_module>
StartServers 2
MaxClients 5
MinSpareThreads 2
MaxSpareThreads 5
ThreadsPerChild 2
MaxRequestsPerChild 3
</IfModule>
HostnameLookups Off
I did some reading and decided to try nginx as a replacement for httpd. The Slicehost folks also have some great how-tos (not only on nginx) and helpful people in their forums, and my friend, Ryan, has a helpful post as well.
There are lots of how-tos around for installing from scratch on a server. Most are good. I am focusing on migrating from Apache2 to nginx. For that, I will assume you have your site set up and running on Apache, your DNS is set properly and pointing to the server, etc.
First, make sure your system is up to date, especially with all security updates. Then, install nginx, either from source or from your Linux distribution’s package repositories. I chose the latter. You also want to install the cgi version of php5. On my Ubuntu 8.10 server, I did this:
sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
followed by:
sudo aptitude install nginx php5-cgi
I made a couple of modifications to my /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file. Here is what I have. My server has two dual core processors, hence the 4 worker processes. I lowered the keep-alive timeout, added the gzip config, and made a couple more simple changes.
user www-data;
worker_processes 4;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;
events {
worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
#keepalive_timeout 0;
keepalive_timeout 3;
tcp_nodelay off;
gzip on;
gzip_comp_level 2;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml
application/xml+rss text/javascript;
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}
After that, I used the php-fastcgi script I found here and put it in /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi.
#! /bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: php-fastcgi
# Required-Start: $all
# Required-Stop: $all
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: Start and stop php-cgi in external FASTCGI mode
# Description: Start and stop php-cgi in external FASTCGI mode
### END INIT INFO
# Author: Kurt Zankl <kz@xon.uni.cc>
# Do NOT "set -e"
PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
DESC="php-cgi in external FASTCGI mode"
NAME=php-fastcgi
DAEMON=/usr/bin/php-cgi
PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
SCRIPTNAME=/etc/init.d/$NAME
# Exit if the package is not installed
[ -x "$DAEMON" ] || exit 0
# Read configuration variable file if it is present
[ -r /etc/default/$NAME ] &&. /etc/default/$NAME
# Load the VERBOSE setting and other rcS variables
. /lib/init/vars.sh
# Define LSB log_* functions.
# Depend on lsb-base (>= 3.0-6) to ensure that this file is present.
. /lib/lsb/init-functions
# If the daemon is not enabled, give the user a warning and then exit,
# unless we are stopping the daemon
if [ "$START"!= "yes" -a "$1"!= "stop" ]; then
log_warning_msg "To enable $NAME, edit /etc/default/$NAME and set START=yes"
exit 0
fi
# Process configuration
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS
DAEMON_ARGS="-q -b $FCGI_HOST:$FCGI_PORT"
do_start()
{
# Return
# 0 if daemon has been started
# 1 if daemon was already running
# 2 if daemon could not be started
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --test > /dev/null || return 1
start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE --exec $DAEMON --background --make-pidfile --chuid $EXEC_AS_USER --startas $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_ARGS || return 2
}
do_stop()
{
# Return
# 0 if daemon has been stopped
# 1 if daemon was already stopped
# 2 if daemon could not be stopped
# other if a failure occurred
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --retry=TERM/30/KILL/5 --pidfile $PIDFILE > /dev/null # --name $DAEMON
RETVAL="$?"
[ "$RETVAL" = 2 ] && return 2
# Wait for children to finish too if this is a daemon that forks
# and if the daemon is only ever run from this initscript.
# If the above conditions are not satisfied then add some other code
# that waits for the process to drop all resources that could be
# needed by services started subsequently. A last resort is to
# sleep for some time.
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --retry=0/30/KILL/5 --exec $DAEMON
[ "$?" = 2 ] && return 2
# Many daemons don't delete their pidfiles when they exit.
rm -f $PIDFILE
return "$RETVAL"
}
case "$1" in
start)
[ "$VERBOSE"!= no ] && log_daemon_msg "Starting $DESC" "$NAME"
do_start
case "$?" in
0|1) [ "$VERBOSE"!= no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
2) [ "$VERBOSE"!= no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
esac
;;
stop)
[ "$VERBOSE"!= no ] && log_daemon_msg "Stopping $DESC" "$NAME"
do_stop
case "$?" in
0|1) [ "$VERBOSE"!= no ] && log_end_msg 0 ;;
2) [ "$VERBOSE"!= no ] && log_end_msg 1 ;;
esac
;;
restart|force-reload)
log_daemon_msg "Restarting $DESC" "$NAME"
do_stop
case "$?" in
0|1)
do_start
case "$?" in
0) log_end_msg 0 ;;
1) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Old process is still running
*) log_end_msg 1 ;; # Failed to start
esac
;;
*)
# Failed to stop
log_end_msg 1
;;
esac
;;
*)
echo "Usage: $SCRIPTNAME {start|stop|restart|force-reload}" >&2
exit 3
;;
esac
Then, I set the ownership and permissions appropriately.
sudo chmod u+x /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi
and
sudo chown 0.0 /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi
and set it to run at boot
sudo update-rc.d php-fastcgi defaults 21 23
Most how-to articles tell you here to create the directories to hold your website(s). Since I am doing this on a site that was already running Apache, my sites already existed in /home/myusername/public_html/sitename/public. Note where yours is, because you will need that info.
Ngnix works similarly to Apache for multiple domains. With each you can set up more than one domain on an IP address using virtual domains. If you only have one domain, the setup is easier, but outside the scope of this article. Apache2 puts the sites in directories in /etc/apache2/sites-available for setup, with symbolic links to there for active sites from /etc/apache2/sites-enabled. Nginx can do the same, using /etc/nginx/sites-available and /etc/nginx/sites-enabled.
Make a virtual host (vhost) file for each domain/site you plan to use in /etc/nginx/sites-available. Here’s a sample, based on this domain, but with sensitive info changed:
/etc/nginx/sites-available/matthewhelmke.net
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.matthewhelmke.net;
rewrite ^/(.*) http://matthewhelmke.net/$1 permanent;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name matthewhelmke.net;
access_log /home/myusername/public_html/matthewhelmke.net/log/access.log;
error_log /home/myusername/public_html/matthewhelmke.net/log/error.log;
location / {
root /home/myusername/public_html/matthewhelmke.net/public;
index index.html index.htm index.php;
# this serves static files that exist without running other rewrite |
the final graphic for SSI’s flagship product was rendered such that the game was referred to internally as the Toilet of Radiance by the artists.But I digress, back to Desert Strike.The movie cut-scenes are instantly impressive, entertaining and at times a bit humorous (if jingoistic). And the stereo sound is mind-bogglingly good. It’s no wonder that this game shot to the top of the charts and rocked the gaming world, especially on the Amiga. Its unique full-screen world and isometric 3D views as well as beautifully animated sprites share some visual similarities with Cannon Fodder from the UK. And yet some of Desert Strike's animated sprites are even smaller (without the overt gore)! It does make one wonder if the EA UK division assisted with the sound editing for the Amiga conversion, however, as some of the digitized voices seem to have a British accent even though the military characters represent the USA during a fictionalized conflict similar to Operation Desert Storm.Interestingly, the game does not install to hard-drive, nor does it have any copy protection. It comes on three floppy disks and thankfully supports multiple floppy drives. After passing the brilliant intro and movie cut-scenes, you can pretty much put disks 2 and 3 into your floppy drives and not bother with them much after that.The game’s image sprites look really good, and the animations are buttery smooth. Overall, the game is extremely fun to play. When the cynic steps back and accepts that this is not a simulator game, then the pure bliss of arcade-quality action at its finest will wash over them.I’ll put it this way. When I was playing the game in earnest, my 7 year old son walked into the room and instantly declared, “Wow, this game looks really good.” It really does - it’s a sparkling example of what the Amiga is capable of producing on any level of machine, pro or consumer.Below is the original review from Amiga World magazine, published in August of 1993. It pretty much hits the nail on the head.Amiga World Aug 1993Desert StrikeRating: A [highest]FORGET WHAT YOU may have seen on the Genesis and Super NES. Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf (Electronic Arts, S49.95) on the Amiga is an experience all its own. This white-knuckle arcader is even more over-the-top than earlier console conversions like John Madden Football and Road Rash. It's the sort of game that should make cart-gamers turn green. And it's one of the best Amiga games ever.If you haven't seen the console version, so much the better. Essentially, this is Choplifter recast as a massive iso metric shoot'em-up with good whiff of strategy mixed in. You direct an Apache attack helicopter against the strong holds of certain not-so-we!l-disguised Middle Eastern loon using chain-gun and two types of missiles. Using winch and ladder, you collect caches of ammo and fuel (some of which have to be, uh, liberated from their respective storage buildings first) and rescue little tan-suited MIAs wandering the desert.Your wits will have to take you the rest of the way. This isn't straight-up blaster. The playfield (there are four) isn't just the narrow band familiar from shoot'em-ups, but wide and varied world—as seen through the bank's security camera— that rewards exploration with things interesting and even use ful, stowed in out-of-the-way places. And there's not simply one task per level, but several linked missions. On the opening lev el, you'll have to take out radar sites, power station, airfields, and the command centers—and finally rescue the spy whose location you learn only when the command center goes down.Along the way, you'll find jeeps, checkpoints, little guys with rocket launchers, and various annoying buildings. Go ahead. Blow them all up. Virtually everything is combustible if you have the ordnance handy. Finding your way to the next explosion is simple, too. The joystick controls are responsive, and set of screens that tell you where everything is, what's onboard, and what's still to be done is keypress away. Finally, Desert Strike is just lovably slick: You can tell from the way the option and pilot-selection screens zip in and out of view that you're onto something quite special here. (Isn't it fun sometimes to just sit back and watch the software hit the hardware?) It's been rewritten from the sand up for the Amiga. The 64- and 32-Color graphics are much crisper, the explosions are gorgeous (they reportedly each lake up 40K in memory), and the little MIAs on the ground now call out "Over here!" and "Help!" in digitized voices. (OK, so they're yelling in British accents—a clue that this [might be] a product of EA's UK division.) The copter sound comes from the Apache itself.And can't wrap up without mentioning the wealth of delightful minor detail lavished here: the tiny US flag waving on the beach, the flames from burning truck, the Lemmings sized troops waving and running and going down, and the way you don't blow up if you crash for want of fuel. Just two reprimands for the victorious troops: Couldn't EA find a picture for the title screen that has the Apache flying over sand instead of browned-out trees? It looks more like Return to the 'Burbs. And unfortunately, like its brother console-to-Amiga con versions, the three-disk Desert Strike doesn't go on hard disk. That may not be much of an issue OverThere, but it's bound to cost the game some respect in the US market, where HDs are far more common. We can only hope EA takes this into consideration for the next release.Fox News host Jeanine Pirro (Screenshot)
Fox News host Jeanine Pirro on Sunday attacked President Barack Obama for noting a decline in crime over the past 25 years.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has said that the United States is in a moment of “crisis” and that crime is rapidly getting worse. In response to his assertions, Obama said Trump’s vision of American “doesn’t really jive with most people.”
In a monologue, Pirro expressed outrage that Obama was “strangely injecting himself into a presidential race.”
“The president actually said Donald Trump’s vision of America was wrong, and says there is much less violence than 20 or 30 years ago,” she said. “Now I don’t want to rain on your parade Mr. President, but the number of firearms in the United States has doubled in the last 20 years, maybe that’s what is actually making us less violent.”
But within 10 seconds, Pirro attacked Obama over gun violence.
“We are seeing an enormous homicide increases in large cities like Milwaukee, Denver, Baltimore, Saint Louis, Cleveland, Las Vegas, and even his own hometown of Chicago, where kids are so used to the report of a gun that they don’t even run when they hear gunfire,” she said.
Watch video below:The Department of Justice and the Department of Finance websites were both taken offline for a time in the early hours of this morning following an apparent cyber attack.
Both websites were down for around an hour after being targeted with a denial of service attack.
Such attacks often see a website's servers overloaded with huge numbers of simple requests, which brings the website down.
In a statement, the Department of Justice website said it experienced a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
This is not an attempt to extract information from the website but is instead an attempt to stop access to a service.
It said: "There seems to be no damage done to the website, however a review is being conducted this morning. The situation continues to be monitored by the Department of Justice and the Department of Communications.
"The Government is aware of the potential threat of this type of cyber attack and the Department of Communications is co-ordinating a whole of Government response to this threat."
Minister of State with responsibility for Research & Innovation Sean Sherlock described the cyber attack as an ''unjustifiable response for what is simply a move by Government to ensure that we comply with EU copyright legislation and which re-states the rights that already exist in Irish copyright law".
He said such legislative moves were not intended to "block websites or to limit the freedom of the internet".
A Twitter account called Anonymous Sweden (@AnonOpsSweden) appeared to claim responsibility for the attack, saying it was in protest against planned new copyright legislation in Ireland.
"When we attack after office hours, we send a wake up - warning shot. no more no less," Anonymous said in a statement on Twitter.
Subsequent tweets also saw the distribution of email addresses and home phone numbers for all Fine Gael and Labour TDs.
Two other government websites - the Freedom of Information website (foi.gov.ie) and an anti-human trafficking website Blue Blindfold (blueblindfold.gov.ie) - were also apparently affected by the attack.
However, a later Tweet denied that Anonymous had sought to bring those websites down.
There has been a growing campaign in recent weeks against the proposed Irish introduction of the European Communities (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2011.
Since Monday, an online petition at stopsopaireland.com has garnered 31,580 signatures in protest against the proposed enactment of legislation.
Hackers also attacked Polish government websites this week in protest at the country's commitment to sign the international copyright treaty, ACTA.If you don’t really want to watch the news today, I don’t blame you. It’s going to be a run-on sentence of talking heads, messy data, empty punditry, more messy data, “analysis,” man-on-the-street interviews with people who claim they will “storm the White House” while “armed” if their candidate loses, commercials for Aspirin, numbers, numbers, numbers, and — at some point — a new president who hopefully is a woman.
As an alternative — or just a release valve — I suggest watching News 8 WROC’s Facebook Live of Susan B. Anthony’s grave site in my hometown of Rochester, New York. Anthony was an abolitionist and women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in the achievement of women’s suffrage. Here are some examples of very punk rock things she did in hopes that someday women would be allowed to vote:
In 1868, Anthony started an abolitionist and feminist newspaper with her best friend and called it The Revolution.
She attempted to vote in Rochester in 1872 — and got arrested. She was publicly tried and convicted, but refused to pay the $100 fine.
Anthony set up the World’s Congress of Representative Women at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Five hundred women from 27 different countries gave speeches to over 150,000 spectators, making it the most well-attended political congregation at the Fair.
She was the first woman to appear on US currency who was not a fictional character.
Anthony went before Congress every year from 1869 to her death in 1906, asking them to consider an amendment allowing women to vote. When it was finally passed in 1920, it was called the “Susan B. Anthony amendment.”
“Failure is impossible.”
Live broadcast: Susan B. Anthony gravesite (part 3) Posted by News 8 WROC Rochester on Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Update: 8 WROC is now on its third livestream of the grave site.
As of this writing, nearly 10,000 people are tuned into the stream. Repeat: 10,000 people, watching a grave. This is, aside from incredibly relaxing Election Day content, a very interesting use of Facebook Live. I believe it’s the first I’ve seen in which a camera is just trained on a burial site indefinitely. It would be morbid if it weren’t so dang inspiring — there’s been a non-stop stream of women stopping to pin their “I Voted” sticker on the headstone in thanks since the moment I tuned in.
Anthony is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in the historic section of Rochester — it’s very beautiful and famed abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass is also buried there. The cemetery will be open late tonight so that anyone who wants to can give Susan their sticker, lay some flowers at her grave, and take a selfie to commemorate a truly historic day. Having watched this stream for 30 minutes so far I can tell you that a lot of people are bringing their young daughters and I am fully, happily, and cathartically sobbing.Advertisement
He's the king who can't be killed.
But it seems like Jon Snow is still keen to make some powerful allies while he plots his next move in Game of Thrones, as he meets Tyrion Lannister and a contingent of Dothraki when the fearsome warriors land in Westeros.
Shooting scenes for the seventh and final series in Zumaia, Spain, Kit Harington and Peter Dinklage were seen making what appeared to be a king-making pact during the latest spate of filming for the HBO epic.
Scroll down for video
Bad news for Cersei! It seems like Jon Snow is still keen to make some powerful allies while he plots his next move in Game of Thrones, as he meets Tyrion Lannister and a contingent of Dothraki when the fearsome warriors land in Westeros
Meeting on the beach in the midst of a fearsome contingent of the Dothraki, loyal to Daenerys Targaryen, Eddard Stark's son looks to be slightly more inclined towards a pact with a Lannister than his late father was.
Clad in his familiar leather armour and mail, Kit was instantly recognisable as fan-favourite Jon Snow thanks to his trademark long black hair.
Sporting a scruffy beard, the young King looked much more regal than his time as the Captain of the Night's Watch - looking more like his murdered half-brother, Rob.
The deal to end all deals? Shooting scenes for the seventh and final series in Zumaia, Spain, Kit Harington and Peter Dinklage were seen making what appeared to be a king-making pact during the latest spate of filming for the HBO epic
Peter Dinklage's infamous character, Tyrion, wasn't hard to spot either amongst the burly and outlandish garb of the actors playing the warriors of Daenerys.
Looking smarter than he did before he became an ally of the Khaleesi, as well as the usual lordly medieval garbs, Tyrion also appeared to be sporting The Hand's pin following Daenerys' proclamation in the last series that he would serve her in the lofty position.
Though it isn't the half-man's first turn at being The Hand, as he served Joffrey briefly before he was framed for the evil young king's murder.
A Lannister always pays his debts: Meeting on the beach in the midst of a contingent of the Dothraki, loyal to Daenerys Targaryen, Eddard Stark's son looks to be slightly more inclined towards a pact with a Lannister than his late father was
Hello my old friend: Jon and Tyrion are reunited in scenes to be aired in the forthcoming seventh season of Game Of Thrones
Best laid plans: Following on from scene's shot last week(pictured), Tyrion and Ser Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham) have convened a meeting between the newly crowned King in the North and emissary's of the last of the Targaryens
Talking tactics: Liam, Kit and Peter gather round for a chat between takes
Colder than the wall? In-between takes Liam, Kit, Peter and Nathalie Emmanuel (Missandei) all wrapped up as the crew re-set for the next shot. And it seems the gents were getting on well together, as they all shared a joke whilst chatting away
Apparently following on from scene's shot in Northern Spain last week, Tyrion and Ser Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham), Jon's trusted adviser, have convened a meeting between the newly crowned King in the North and emissary's of the last of the Targaryens.
While Jon, Ser davos and a small retinue of soldiers all sporting swords and armour, the Dothraki outnumber the men of Westeros - armed with spears and their deadly arakhs (scythe weapons).
Also accompanying Tyrion is Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), one of the Khaleesi's most trusted confidants and servants.
Hard to miss: Clad in his familiar leather armour and mail, Kit was instantly recognisable as fan-favourite Jon Snow thanks to his trademark long black hair
Here come the horse lords: As the shoot got underway the group of Dothraki are seen arriving on the unknown beach, possibly the rocky royal island of Dragonstone, in a boat
As the shoot got underway the group of Dothraki are seen arriving on the unknown beach, possibly the rocky royal island of Dragonstone, in a boat.
Showing off their strength, the men lift the boat clean out of the water as other surround Jon Snow and his men.
During the shoot, the actors were surrounded by an army of cameras and crew, who worked hard to ensure that everything ran smoothing in the windy and wet conditions.
The crew and cast are currently filming scenes in Northern Spain's Basque Country, where they have taken over the Itzurun beach.
All washed up: Jon Snow was seen arriving by boat in an earlier scene from the forthcoming penultimate series
Fearsome weaponry: Jon looked ready for battle as he examined his scythe like arakh
Fearsom guests: Showing off their strength, the men lift the boat clean out of the water as other surround Jon Snow and his men with spears and arakhs drawn
This way Jon: Davos leads the way as a pivotal Game Of Thrones scene is filmed in Zumaia
Quiet on set: Conleith Hill and Peter Dinklage were surrounded by members of the production team as they prepared to shoot scenes on Sunday
The long walk back: The two actors were joined by co-stars Emilia Clarke, Jacob Anderson and Natalie Emmanuel
The beach is famous for its rock formations called flysch, which has transformed the sand shore into an almost alien landscape - perfect for the fantastical world of Game of Thrones.
Itzurun famed for its rock strata, which is one of the longest continuous examples of the geological phenomenon in the world.
According to When On Earth, the rock formation is 'thought to have formed over a period of over 100 million years by the crashing of the waves against the cliffs'.
Not a dragon in sight: The cast were in high spirits as they gathered round a rental van on the Spanish set
A strange stretch of coast: The crew and cast are currently filming scenes in Northern Spain's Basque Country, where they have taken over the Itzurun beach
Straight out of fiction: The beach is famous for its rock formations called flysch, which has transformed the sand shore into an almost alien landscape - perfect for the fantastical world of Game of Thrones
Life in Spain: Other locations for this run of shooting have also included the shoreline of La Muriola in Barrika, two hours to the West of Zumaia, where Peter and Liam were seen filming last week
The formation is a mix of hard layers (limestone and sandstone) and soft layers (clay and loam), and the strange wonder extends eastward and westward from Zumaia, stretching a total of 8 kilometers.
Other locations for this run of shooting have also included the shoreline of La Muriola in Barrika, two hours to the West of Zumaia, where Peter and Liam were seen filming last week.
It's also believed that cast and crew will be filming on the San Juan de Gaztelugatxe islet, close to Barrika.Legendary sports broadcaster Vin Scully declared Saturday night that he will “never watch another NFL game” in response to the player take-a-knee protests during the national anthem.
“I am so disappointed. And I used to love, during the fall and winter, to watch the NFL on Sunday,” Mr. Scully said during “An Evening with Vin Scully” at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium in California, as shown on multiple social-media videos.
“And it’s not that I’m some great patriot. I was in the Navy for a year. Didn’t go anywhere, didn’t do anything,” Mr. Scully said. “But I have overwhelming respect and admiration for anyone who puts on a uniform and goes to war. So the only thing I can do in my little way is not to preach. I will never watch another NFL game.”
The audience reacted to his comment, which came in response to a question from a moderator, with enthusiastic applause.
A member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Mr. Scully retired last year after 67 seasons calling games for the Los Angeles Dodgers but had also done play-by-play announcing for NFL games for CBS from 1975 to 1982.
In 2000, Mr. Scully was named top sportscaster of the 20th century by the American Sportscasters Association.
He threw out the first pitch for Game 2 of the World Series between the Dodgers and Houston Astros at Dodgers stadium.
Some NFL players began taking a knee or sitting during the national anthem last season in response to the deaths of black men at the hands of police, a demonstration that experienced an uptick after President Trump criticized the protests in September.
The number of protesters has dropped to about 20 since nearly 200 players took a knee during the Sept. 25-26 games.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Craig expected to pursue legal action against Craig following Craig’s revelation about Craig.
Contained within the thundering and snappily titled pamphlet Dirty Politics And Hidden Agendas: Colin Craig Vs The Dirty Politics Brigade and Their Campaign of Lies (PDF here), an unnamed interviewer speaks to someone called “Mr X”, a pottymouth insider.
This morning Colin Craig, the charismatic former leader of the Conservative Party, revealed to TV3’s The Nation the truth about Mr X. Take a seat, ladies and gentlemen:
Mr X is Colin Craig.
It was simply a “nom de plume”, he told Lisa Owen, adding that “nom de plumes are a well-known literary device. Obviously it’s to make the whole thing more interesting.”
And yet Colin Craig won’t be happy about this development, not least because Mr X, or Colin Craig, describes Colin Craig’s supporters as “mostly a bunch of bigots” (see an excerpt from the interview below).
Based on Colin Craig’s previous enthusiasm in defending his reputation, The Spinoff confidently predicts that Colin Craig’s response to these latest shocking developments will be to sue Colin Craig.
It would be no surprise if Colin Craig’s lawsuit were to further charge that it was not he, Colin Craig, that flirted with the idea of chemtrails, wondered about the truth of the moon landing, suggested child abuse leads to gayness, told Helensville voters John Key was “too gay” to be their MP or responded to marriage equality legislation by saying “the day of reckoning is still to come”. No, it was Colin Craig.
Colin Craig must also answer to Colin Craig for appearing as Colin Craig in a sauna interview with David Farrar, the TV3 reporter and National Party pollster who also goes by the name David Farrier.
Colin Craig has done a lot of damage to Colin Craig’s reputation, and Colin Craig is left with little choice but to sue. These are happy days for lawyers: inevitably, Colin Craig will countersue.
Excerpt from pamphlet:
INTERVIEWER: It seems pretty clear that the allegations against Craig are false. That is to say he never harassed [former employee Rachel] MacGregor, there was no sexting, he never paid her out, there is no victim, and no second victim?
MR X: I don’t see why that … matters … just that it gets reported so it looks like it’s true … [laughs] Welcome to politics and the media, it ain’t what happened, it’s what the media say happened that people believe. The damage is done just by the allegations, and anyway Stringer has been going hard on this for weeks so Craig is shaky now even with his own supporters.
INTERVIEWER: That’s an interesting opinion but Craig says he has been getting pretty positive feedback from supporters.
MR X: Yeah well maybe he says that but … don’t forget they are mostly a bunch of bigots, they will dump him, just wait and see. Most media have already written him and the party off.
INTERVIEWER: So there is no way back for Craig after this?
MR X: No chance … well OK there is a chance but only because he [Colin Craig] is freakish under pressure and he seems to be largely unphased by this whole thing … its weird that. You can never say never … Mind you Cam hasn’t finished with him yet.
INTERVIEWER: So the attack on Colin Craig will keep going?
MR X: Yep.. it will keep going as long as Cam and Stringer have information. There is even an investigation going back through Craig’s history. In the meantime its death by a thousand cuts, one little piece of information at a time. Cam thinks Craig is an easy target on this as he [Craig] keeps responding and getting himself in deeper and deeper.
INTERVIEWER: Ok but what if the allegations are false as we have laid out? Craig has always been honest in the past. If he is honest this time it means he has been defamed. What if I were to tell you that Craig is thinking of going public not only with the full story but also that he is planning legal action against Stringer, Slater, and Williams?
MR X: Damn … wow … He might do that too… [laughs] Jeez that would make a mess. It’s unusual for Cam to get it wrong … it’s like he’s got a blind spot when it comes to Craig. … Stringer would be well and … truly screwed. Cam on the other hand is a hard target, still if Craig is in this for the financial attrition then Cam won’t be happy.
This content is funded entirely by Flick, the electricity retailer giving New Zealanders power over their power. With both spot price and fixed price plans available, you can be sure you’re getting true cost and real choice when you join Flick. Support us by making the switch today.The city wants to fight Canada Post's plan to cut door-to-door service — a decision that municipal staff say will cost taxpayers more than $2 million.
A report going to councillors next week says Hamilton should officially oppose the elimination of home mail delivery. It also suggests that Canada Post should "immediately" stop moving forward with installing new super mailboxes until it consults further with residents.
The report says each "community mailbox" will cost the city $522. With roughly 4,000 of them eventually across the city, that's about $2.1 million. Costs include staff time to review each location, permit fees and utility installations. Canada Post is offering the city $50 per mailbox, or $200,000 in total.
The report also states Canada Post has requested additional infrastructure and services for the super mailboxes, including new sidewalks, ramps, lighting, signage, snow clearing and graffiti cleanup — all ongoing costs to be borne by the city.
About 36,500 homes on the Mountain and Stoney Creek — Wards 6, 7, 8 and 9 — are scheduled to have their door-to-door mail delivery replaced by super mailboxes by spring. The rest of Hamilton's neighbourhoods will follow.
The decision means Canada will be the only G8 country without home delivery.
City spokesperson Mike Kirkopoulos says Canada Post has exclusive jurisdiction over the location of its community mailboxes, though the municipality has some control over the installation. The report also directs staff to investigate exactly how much say the city will have in this process.
But Mountain councillors say some residents are concerned they were told out of the blue the road allowances near their homes would suddenly become mail hubs, affecting everything from privacy to property value.
"I just don't see some of the areas they have picked unilaterally as being a good fit," said Ward 7 Coun. Scott Duvall. "They have picked them basically using Google. I just think that they've rushed into this too much, and they've made a lot of people upset."
Ward 8 Coun. Terry Whitehead is holding a community meeting to discuss the issue on Feb. 18 at the Sackville Hill Recreation Centre at 7 p.m. A representative from Canada Post will attend the meeting, he said.UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaking at the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, Sept. 10, 2012.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says the state of Palestine will join the International Criminal Court on April 1, a high-stakes move that will enable the Palestinians to pursue war-crimes charges against Israel.
The Palestinians submitted the documents ratifying the Rome Statute that established the court last Friday, the last formal step to becoming a member of the world's permanent war crimes tribunal.
In a statement posted on the UN's treaty website Tuesday night, the secretary-general said "the statute will enter into force for the State of Palestine on April 1, 2015." He said he was acting as the "depositary" for the documents of ratification.
The Palestinian move has drawn threats of retaliation from Israel and is strongly opposed by the U.S. as an obstacle to reaching an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.Facebook might know more about you than your wife.
In a recent article, a man reported that Facebook uncovered a long-withheld piece of information from within the family annals of that family and began tailoring advertisements towards it. This is not the first instance to be seen of Facebook seeming to understand and deduce interests that, while possibly true, are best kept outside of a social media setting. However, this is fundamentally how social media works. While the applications undoubtedly provide wonderful services of connectivity, communication, and information sharing, the platforms themselves have spiraled into an amber trap for time and information
Most recently, ProPublica broke the story that “Facebook’s ad tools could target racists and anti-Semites using the very information those users self-report.” Following this discovery, a slew of other investigations have shown that even Google’s search engine allows sellers to deliberately place ads next to slanderous and hateful rhetoric, sometimes even suggesting advertisers to include hateful terms in SEO.
According to New York Times contributor and UNC professor, Zeynep Tufekci, “Facebook is a social media which, at its core, is an architecture designed to capture your attention. Except, You may in the moment want to do something, but that is not necessarily what you want to do if you were asked in the morning.”
So, what are the implications of this attentional, political, and statistical bottleneck?
It has become common knowledge that Facebook and social media played an enormous role in the 2016 American political election cycle. After Facebook’s algorithm recognized a person’s political leanings, the application lumped them into silos of their own respective opinions. Facebook thus, created an illusion of freedom for Information but, in reality, had placed its users in a room full of self-reflecting mirrors.
In the aforementioned interview, Zeynep mentions that “people who supported Hillary Clinton and posted regularly about them, never actually saw the posts of Donald Trump supporters. That is unless you are one of the few to be combative and engage in a conversation which, in turn, keeps you in the app for longer.” An argument means more time on site and is a win for Facebook.
In the past, people received their information from Television, Radio, and News writing. These were all public performances where politics and advertisements could be condemned and fact-checked by the opposing view. However, with Facebook, the user is the only one who sees this particular post and it is usually something with which they agree – even it isn’t true. Thus arises the phenomena of “fake news:” as an individual’s digital universe becomes more and more private, exaggeration goes unnoticed because the other side never sees it. It is not that these fictions are a new development to humanity. People have been lying and exaggerating forever. What is most vapid is that now, rather than of using clubs and hammers to provoke a public reaction, people can be surgical and manipulative behind closed doors.
The explosion of social media has thus born a new brand of capitalism which siphons personal and behavioral data to be sold and used in advertising. In a sense, Facebook, Google, and other tech giants have automated a system that force-feeds a person’s tendencies back to him/her, rather than allowing for them to vary. This is surveillance capitalism at its finest: a global machine that both produces and consumes the same resource – data.
One of the scarier aspects of this growth in surveillance capitalism and data sales is the potential socio-political implications further down the line. As a platform that pervades our lives, “Facebook knows what happened in the last election but they’re keeping it as private data. It is asymmetric information and we are not allowed to understand it. The powerful have the knowledge and the masses are kept in the dark,” says Professor Tufekci.
This obscurity is a strange outcome for a concept like social media which, at inception, was based upon transparency and sociability. One would think that Facebook’s ability to understand group and individual actions more thoroughly would not lead to murky behavior, but rather clarity. Instead of using population-level data to analyze what a society really wants and needs, large social media companies are propagating exactly the opposite.
In their defense, this is largely an unintentional side effect of being both a wickedly new technology as well as one that scaled faster than anticipated. It took just eight years for Facebook to grow from 1million users to 1 billion users. That is perhaps the most rapid scaling of anything in the history of mankind. As intelligent as Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg may be, humans did not evolve to wield so much power so quickly. They simply were not prepared.
In the words of historian and biologist Yuval Noah Harari: “what is more dangerous giving nuclear weapons to sheep that unaccustomed to power, or to a wolf who has evolved with it for millions of years?”
There is no doubt that social media and the data it generates can be of great value to the world; however, for the time being, we are just sheep with nuclear weapons.Weak oversight of bad doctors should worry California’s millions of patients. A negligent physician who overprescribes dangerous drugs or abuses patients faces sanctions from a state review board — but that troubling history is never directly told to those in the waiting room.
The state Senate had a chance to illuminate this dark corner of the medical profession, one that shields bad doctors and leaves patients unaware. SB1033 would have required physicians on probation to disclose the offense to patients.
The measure by Sen. Jerry Hill, a San Mateo Democrat, needed a majority of the 40-member chamber but fell short last week with 15 senators in favor and 13 against. Where were the others? They were recorded as not voting, a feature of Sacramento lawmaking that allows elected representatives to dodge an issue even if they are in the Capitol chamber. The practice, known as “taking a walk,” is used to hide from a tough choice — a dereliction of a legislator’s duty. The practical effect amounts to a no vote, denying support for a bill’s sponsor.
This parliamentary ruse denied Hill the majority he needed on a worthy public health reform. The bill aimed at a relative handful of doctors: about 600 out of 137,000 licensed in the state. A survey by Consumers Union, which favored the measure, found overwhelmingly support for public disclosure of doctors in serious professional or legal trouble. Hospitals and malpractice insurers get word about these physicians, and their patients should too.
But the powerful California Medical Association opposed the measure, saying it would waste treatment time. The state Medical Practices Board, which handles complaints against doctors, opposed it, saying its densely worded and difficult-to-navigate website notifications were enough. Neither explanation is convincing.
Public notice would have an undeniable impact, leading patients to drop an offending doctor. But under the present system, patients are virtually excluded from knowing about serious trouble, ranging from substance abuse to life-threatening negligence.
Hill is promising to bring back his measure later this year. If he does, the voters should expect every senator in attendance to cast a vote — yes or no — on SB1033.
How they voted
Voting in favor
Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica; Jim Beall, D-San Jose ; Marty Block, D-San Diego; Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina; Robert Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys; Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo ; Ben Hueso, D-Logan Heights; Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens; Mark Leno, D-San Francisco ; Connie Levya, D-Chino; Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg ; Tony Mendoza, D-Artesia; Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles; Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills; Kevin De León, D-Los Angeles.
Voting No
Joel Anderson, R-Alpine; Patricia Bates, R-Laguna Niguel; Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield; Ted Gaines,- R-Rocklin; Cathleen Galgiani,- D-Stockton; Steve Glazer, D-Orinda; Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara; Janet Nguyen, R-Garden Grove; Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber; Richard Pan, D-Sacramento; Richard Roth, D-Riverside; Jeff Stone, R-Temecula; Andy Vidak, R-Hanford.
No Recorded Vote
Tom Berryhill, R-Modesto; Anthony Cannella, R-Ceres; Isadore Hall, D-Compton, Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley ; Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar; Carol Liu, D-La Cañada Flintridge; Bill Monning, D-Carmel; John Moorlach, R-Costa Mesa; Mike Morrell, R-Rancho Cucamonga; Sharon Runner, R-Lancaster; Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont ; Lois Wolk, D-Davis.Big audience numbers are expected for the ABC/ESPN broadcasts of this weekend’s Little League World Series games in Williamsport, Pa. That is likely to mean big criticism as well.
ESPN has already attracted its share of disapproving columnists and critics, who argue that a children’s event (these players are all between the ages of 11-13) should not be on national TV. Most of the critics question why we need to see the boys cry.
We say why not? What’s so shameful about little boys crying?
This year, in addition to airing all 32 tournament games, ESPN also broadcast several regional qualifiers.
If you haven’t watched any of the coverage, the games are intense. The draw is obvious. This sporting event is all about the boys, from those who have yet to shed their baby fat to |
= 2.7 millions
4 players x 690 000$ = 2.76 millions
5 players x 570 000$ = 2.85 millions
Maximum as a group!
For this, we just have to imagine that all players are pooling their locations and shops to build the highest paying shops, and that they redistribute the money/shops/tiles as they go along.
So for a 3 player games, instead of receiving 5 tiles on the first turn, we will pick 15 tiles (3 players x 5 tiles)…. And so on.
Optimal way of building shops for a cooperative play between 3 players
Turn New tiles Shop placed per turn Added Payout Total Turn Payout 1 15 3 x 5/5 x 110 000$ 330 000$ 330 000$ 2 12 2 x 6/6 x 140 000$ 280 000$ 610 000$ 3 12 3 x 4/4 x 80 000$ 240 000$ 850 000$ 4 12 2 x 3/3 x 50 000$ + 1 x 6/6 x 140 000 240 000$ 1 090 000$ 5 12 4 x 3/3 x 50 000$ 200 000$ 1 290 000$ 6 12 4 x 3/incomplete x 40 000$ 160 000$ 1 450 000$
For a group total of 5 620 000$
Since there is a limited number of complete shops that can be built, the group has to build incomplete shops at the end. Whether they are ¾, 3/5, or 3/6 shops, this does not matter since the payout will be the same for each (incomplete) shop.
So for three players the maximum is 5.62 millions, or divided equally 1.8733 millions. A bit lower than the theoretical maximum of 1.96 millions a player could make on his own.
For a 4 player game
Turn New tiles Shop placed per turn Added Payout Total Turn Payout 1 16 1 x 6/6 x 140 000$+ 2 x 5/5 x 110 000$ 360 000$ 360 000$ 2 12 2 x 6/6 x 140 000$ 280 000$ 640 000$ 3 12 3 x 4/4 x 80 000$ 240 000$ 880 000$ 4 12 2 x 3/3 x 50 000$+ 1 x 5/5 x 110 000$
+ 1 x 1/incomplete x 10 000$ 220 000$ 1 100 000$ 5 12 4 x 3/3 x 50 000$ 200 000$ 1 300 000$ 6 12 4 x 3/incomplete x 40 000$ 160 000$ 1 460 000$
For a game of 4 Group maximum is: 5.74 Millions
Or 1.435 million each (the individual max was : 1.470 million).
For a 5 player game
Turn New tiles Shop placed per turn Added Payout Total Turn Payout 1 15 1 x 6/6 x 140 000$ + 1 x 5/5 x 110 000$
+ 1 x 4/4 x 80 000$ 330 000$ 330 000$ 2 15 1 x 6/6 x 140 000$ + 1 x 5/5 x 110 000$
+ 1 x 4/4 x 80 000$ 330 000$ 660 000$ 3 15 1 x 6/6 x 140 000$ + 1 x 5/5 x 110 000$
+ 1 x 4/4 x 80 000$ 330 000$ 990 000$ 4 10 3 x 3/3 x 50 000$ + 1 x 1/3 x 10 000$ 160 000$ 1 150 000$ 5 10 2 x 3/3 x 50 000$ + (1/3 to 3/3) x 40 000$
+ 1 x 2/incomplete x 20 000$ 160 000$ 1 310 000$ 6 10 2/incomplete to 3/incomplete x 20 000$
+ 3 x 3/incomplete x 40 000$ 140 000$ 1 450 000$
For a game of 5 Group maximum is: 5.89 Millions
Or 1.178 million each.(the individual max was : 1.21 million).
The whole picture
The limits of Chinatown
Nmb Of Players Minimum individually Maximum individually Minimum as a group Maximum as a group 3 900 000$ 1.96 million 2.7 millions 5.62 millions 4 690 000$ 1.47 million 2.76 millions 5.74 millions 5 570 000$ 1.21 million 2.85 millions 5.89 millions
Or to compare the best individual to the equally divided share for the best as a group:
Nmb Of Players Maximum individually Maximum share in a group 3 1.96 million 1.873 million 4 1.47 million 1.435 million 5 1.21 million 1.178 million
Visually, you can see here the limit on cash per player. With the horizontal lines showing how much would be made per player if it was played cooperatively.
As you can see, this does not represent an enormous advantage!
Final word
So there it is. Next time you play, you can compare yourself to those limits!
I understand that this is only partly interesting since the absolute maximum are unlikely to be reached in practice… The odds of picking out adjacent tiles every time being way too small!
But at least, make sure that you make more than the bare minimum!
To get a better idea of where you fit in the grand scheme of things, we need to simulate actual games, with proper tiles drawing selection, and include some trading. This should gives us an idea of how much one (or a group) could expect to make!
I already started the work for this, but, as always, there is quite a bit of things to consider! Here is a quick 4-player game simulation, to whet your appetite.
Here a simulation, only showing the tiles the players choose to keep at each turn (the first turn, they receive 6, and keep 4, after that is 5 -3). And we can see that this simple advantage of tile selection is enough to get some shops of interesting size… And there is no trading implemented yet! (And no consideration of the shops themselves)
Hopefully you had fun with this quick introduction to Chinatown Limits…
Next time: Looking at realistic score distribution in The limits of Chinatown – Part two
Let me know if I missed something.
Or if you would like that I explore some other details (or game) in my coming post!
What other game do you think could benefit from a limit analysis?Televised rights to top college competition to be opened up next season.
The screening rights to Auckland schoolboy rugby will be opened up next season to other media companies, giving them the chance to take on sport broadcasting giant Sky TV.
Auckland Rugby Union's commercial general manager, Ross Halpin, confirmed yesterday that a number of companies are already interested in the broadcast and distribution rights to the 2016 Auckland 1st XV season.
Sky TV has filmed select games from this grade since 2011 but from next year will have to secure these rights, Mr Halpin said.
"They won't have access without the blessing of Auckland Rugby and the schools.
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"Historically, they've done a fantastic job, but they've done that for their own commercial benefit. We're saying that those commercial returns should be directed back to secondary school rugby via the union and the schools."
NZME, publisher of the Herald, is among at least seven companies that have expressed an interest in the rights. They include Sky TV, Maori TV, TVNZ, MediaWorks, Fairfax and Quickflix.
Last year the ARU went to all schools competing in the 1A grade to talk about the streaming plans for the 2015 season, which involved Sky TV, Maori Television and free online coverage via a YouTube channel.
After receiving permission from all schools involved in the 2015 season - with the exception of Mt Albert Grammar - the ARU then engaged production company SportsInc to film the games.
Not wanting to disrupt Sky TV's coverage, SportsInc worked alongside them this year to cover and screen alternate games, with the occasional crossover.
Saturday's 1st XV 1A final between St Kentigern and Auckland Grammar at Eden Park, for example, will be streamed live on the ARU website, with a replay on Maori TV on Sunday afternoon.
Mr Halpin said right now the focus of the union was generating the biggest audience possible for that match.
"Because that'll help us in terms of establishing the commercial value of it, when we go to the market."
This would be in the not-too-distant future, he said.
Last year, Sky TV footage of Sacred Heart College schoolboy Taniela Tupou - nicknamed the "Tongan Thor" - went viral after the prop scored a hat-trick in the opening weekend of 1A. He ended up signing a professional contract with the Reds and the footage brought Auckland's schoolboy competition to a global stage.
Mr Halpin said the union had already been approached by all of the big media companies regarding "their interest and desire to have access to the property in 2016 and beyond.
"And once we have ascertained exactly what that is, we will have to go back to all of the schools involved and make sure that collectively we're happy with whatever those offers may be, make a decision, and then get into promoting the 2016 competition."
Jim Lonergan, chairman of the Auckland Secondary Schools Rugby Union (ASSRU), said there was a meeting to discuss the proposal further in two or three weeks' time.
New Zealand high school rugby sensation Taniela Tupou has gone viral again after scoring this devastating try during the Brisbane club rugby competition last weekend. Video / YouTube: NZRugbyVidz
Mr Halpin said the ARU was working with legal advisers and a process - which was yet to be locked down - will be conducted on its behalf by KPMG. It will provide an information pack to all of the interested companies and from there each company will be asked to present an offer to the ARU and the ASSRU.
KPMG, with help from media experts, will then assess the bids and decide on a successful bidder, or bidders.
Mr Halpin said it was still too early to say what the finished product would look like. "One of the things we will stipulate is that there is some free access." Last night NZME group general manager, digital content, Marcus Forbes said: "We would absolutely welcome the opportunity to be involved with this initiative. We know there is a really great audience who are passionate about Auckland schoolboy rugby and this is absolutely something NZME wants to work on."FTC Disclosure: We may be compensated if you make a purchase via a link on this site.
Divorce And Life Insurance
The following answers regarding divorce and life insurance policies can help you identify and understand some of the issues that need to be considered during divorce negotiations. In many divorces that include provisions for alimony or child support, it is a common practice to include a stipulation that the supporting spouse should carry a life insurance policy. This can guarantee that the children will still be provided for should the supporting parent die.
How long the policy is maintained depends on what the policy was intended for. If it was meant as security for child support, it can be terminated when the dependent children reach the age of majority. Life insurance policies can also be maintained for longer periods of time if the parent so chooses. If life insurance is required to guarantee alimony, it may continue for as long as the alimony payments are required.
When negotiating your divorce settlement, it is important to designate who will be the owner of the life insurance policy. This is a key factor because the owner controls the policy and has the right to name the beneficiaries. One way to insure that the policy is maintained as stipulated in the divorce settlement is to name the custodial parent as the owner of the policy.
You can also include a provision in your divorce agreement stating if the beneficiary designation is changed or if the policy is allowed to lapse, you or your children would be entitled to portion of your ex-husband's estate equal in value to the death benefit.
The following questions and answers highlight some of the other issues that come up concerning divorce and life insurance policies.
Can my husband be required to maintain life insurance for my son?
Tess' Question: My husband says he wants a divorce, and I discovered that he wrote the life insurance agency requesting a change of beneficiary. He has been insured since we got married and I am the primary beneficiary. We have a 12 year old son who is not listed as a beneficiary. What can I do to protect my interest for the life insurance for my son's benefit in case something happens to my estrange husband.
Brette's Answer: As part of the child support aspect of your case, the court can order your husband to provide life insurance in a certain amount with your son as beneficiary. It is also possible sometimes for a person to have to buy life insurance naming the ex-spouse as beneficiary as part of the alimony or spousal support part of the case.
Can the courts require me to have life insurance?
Tiffancy Asks: I'm in the middle of the divorce process and my husband wants me to take a life insurance policy because he has one. Can the courts make me have life insurance coverage if I haven't worked in 4 years?
Brette's Answer: You can be ordered to take out a life insurance policy as part of child support or alimony. Talk to your lawyer for details about the law in your state.
Can he drop me as beneficiary if we are separated?
Lori Asks: We are separated and have not filed for divorce. He was renewing the annual insurance thru his company and removed me as his beneficiary. Is he allowed to change the policy?
Brette's Answer: Yes, it is up to him. You can ask for him to reinstate you as part of your divorce settlement and when it is court ordered he must comply.
What if he changed the beneficiary while we were separated?
Julia's Question: I was married 21 years before I filed for divorce. We were separated (not legally) for not even 3 months when my husband died. I found out later he changed his life insurance over to his 82 year old mother. We paid the premiums every month out of our joint account, so I asked my insurance agent when he changed it. He said he can't tell me because of confidentially. I have 3 kids to provide for. How can this happen?
Brette's Answer: He was the owner of the policy and could name the beneficiary. Unless you had a court order directing him to maintain insurance naming you or your children, it was his choice. Consult with your attorney about the situation.
Is it fraud if he changed beneficiaries because I was filing for divorce?
Kay's Question: I initiated divorce papers and my husband was aware of this. He changed the beneficiary on his life insurance policy to somebody else 1 day prior to being served with divorce papers - however it was not recorded/received by insurance company until 2 days after he was served. He later died. Does changing the beneficiary knowing the divorce was initiated constitute fraud? And which date is legal?
Brette's Answer: If there was no order directing him to name you or your children (if you have any) as beneficiary, it does not sound like fraud. Your attorney can help you understand what your state laws are.
Can I request that he keep me as beneficiary on his life insurance?
Barb's Question: After 38 years of marriage, we are now going through a divorce. He doesn't want to agree to keep paying the life insurance. He's 61 and the alimony payments would end if he dies. Do I have any legal rights to request that he has to keep the policy intact and name me as the beneficiary?
Brette's Answer: This is definitely something you should push hard for. I am sure there are legal precedents in your jurisdiction for this given the length of your marriage. It's a common thing.
Can my divorce be modified to include a life insurance provision?
Mary' Question: I have been divorced for 5 years now and was just informed that a non-custodial parent can be asked to carry a life insurance policy for his children. Can I ask the court to include a life insurance clause now?
Brette Answers: If your decree doesn't order this, you would have to go back and ask for a modification and show some reason why things have changed to make this necessary.
Do I have to pay the premiums on his insurance policy?
Ann's Question: Our divorce decree states that "the husband will carry life insurance on his life in the minimum amount of xx with me as beneficiary. But he says it doesn't stipulate that he's required to pay for it and that since I am benefiting from his death (his words), I should be paying this premium. What do you say?
Brette's Answer: He's wrong. It is standard practice for a court to order a person paying alimony to maintain life insurance naming the alimony recipient as beneficiary. It's essentially another form of alimony.
Are insurance payments considered taxable income for the beneficiary?
Annie's Question: My husband pays for universal life insurance every year in the amount of $4300 and I am the beneficiary. Is that considered taxable income to me?
Brette's Answer: No, unless it is specifically designated as alimony.
He hasn't complied with the court order regarding life insurance.
Angela Asks: My divorce decree states that I can carry a life insurance policy on my former spouse. How do I get him to comply with signing a policy to make it effective? Can I obtain a life insurance policy on my former spouse based on the divorce decree without his signature?
Brette's Answer: Usually the decree requires him to actually pay for the policy, so he has to apply for it. If he doesn't, you file papers with the court for violation/enforcement.
What options do I have if he dropped the policy and is now ill?
Rochelle's Question: My divorce settlement included a $150,000 life insurance policy for our 3 children, with me as beneficiary and a $50,000 policy in my name to be carried by my ex-husband. When he lost his job, he dropped the policies. Now he has a terminal illness and cannot get insurance. What options do I have now?
Brette's Answer: Not much unless he has other assets. You can seek to enforce the judgment and could get other assets instead.
How will it affect the life insurance policy if he has another baby?
Kimberly's Question: It's only been six months since our divorce and my ex-husband's girlfriend is already pregnant. He is supposed to maintain life insurance until our children leave home. How would the life insurance be handled if he were to die over the next 12 years?
Brette's Answer: Life insurance is determined by the policy. Whoever the insured names as the beneficiary is who gets it. If the divorce decree stipulated he was to maintain life insurance with your children as beneficiaries, he is still required to do so even if he has other children. Those other children would not be entitled to the proceeds of any policy naming your children as beneficiaries.
Is a child entitled to the life insurance proceeds if a parent dies?
Cassandra's Question: My child's father remarried, but is now separated from his current wife. Would my child be entitled to any of the life insurance or value of the home if his father dies?
Brette's Answer: Life insurance passes outside the estate. The person named in the policy is who receives it. All other assets pass via the will if there is one, or by state intestacy laws (in which case your son would likely receive an inheritance if there are assets). The home, depending on how it was owned may not be part of the estate. Good luck.
Does he have a claim to the policy if they divorced 7 years ago?
Leigh's Question: My sister in law passed away. She did not leave a will. Her beneficiary on her policy is her husband whom she divorced over 7 years ago. Does he still have a legal claim to the policy?
Brette's Answer: Generally no. Once a couple is divorced there is no insurable interest. There are exceptions so you need to discuss this with an attorney.
Do we have any rights if our mom passed away before our dad died?
Laura's Question: Our parents were married for 23 years and divorced approximately 30 years ago. In the divorce decree my mother is named as having rights to 5 separate life insurance policies. My father remarried and stayed married to his second wife with whom he didn't have any children, until his death eight years ago. (My mother passed away six years before our Dad and never remarried). My siblings and I weren't mentioned in the will and my step mom never shared any details of my father's death, any verbal wishes on his part or any details of his will with us. Do we, as their children, have any rights to a portion of his life insurance policies given our mother passed away before our father died?
Brette's Answer: No, it doesn't sound like it. Your mother was only entitled to the payments if she outlived him, which she didn't. So they wouldn't be part of her estate. This sounds like a painful and difficult situation. I hope maybe you can someday talk with your stepmother and get some information about your father's later years.
Do I have a right to some of my step-dad's life insurance policy?
Amber's Question: When my mother's husband died, they were separated. She was looking into a divorce and had talked to an attorney however she did not follow through. Do I have a right to some of his life insurance? There was no will.
Brette's Answer: If they were not divorced, his estate will be divided according to state intestacy laws, which in most cases means it goes to the spouse and legal children. If he did not adopt you, you are not considered his child. Life insurance is distributed separately according to the terms of the policy. If your mother is listed, she will receive it. Good luck.
Will I still be recognized as the beneficiary if my Mom never divorced?
Julie's Question: My mom has passed away suddenly. We found a big insurance policy which she named me as the beneficiary! She took it out with a loan so it covers her for that and the rest to be paid out on her death. But I have found out she never got divorced even though they haven’t been together for over 15 years. Will the bank still have to pay out as I am the one named on policy?
Brette's Answer: Yes life insurance is paid to the named beneficiary.
If I was named as the beneficiary, can it be challenged when he dies?
Tina's Question: My ex-spouse has died and he left me as beneficiary of his life insurance policy. If I have an adult daughter, can she challenge my receipt of this policy? In other words, can she claim her right to it, versus the ex-spouse?
Brette's Answer: Life insurance goes to the named beneficiary. It has nothing to do with estate law. Whoever he picks gets it. (Note: this only applies if the divorce decree spelled out the beneficiary status or if you were re-designated the beneficiary after the divorce)
Why is the insurance refusing to pay if I am the beneficiary?
Mary Asks: We had a friendly divorce for personal reasons. We had no property settlement as we kept everything in both our names and each remained as beneficiary on life insurance policies. We also continued to live together. He recently died and the insurance company is saying I'm not entitled to his life insurance policy. Help!!!
Brette's Answer: If you're not legally married (because of the divorce) you don't have an insurable interest. You should talk to an attorney to find out if there is a way to prove you have an insurable interest another way (possibly your shared assets). Good luck.
Why is a divorce decree required to change the beneficiary?
Jill's Question: I've been divorced 8 years. The company I work for won't allow me to change the beneficiary without papers saying I'm divorced. We never went to court because we both agreed to the divorce and I have no papers proving I'm divorced. Why do I need to prove this? I thought I could change my beneficiaries whenever I wanted to.
Brette's Answer: This is governed by your subscriber agreement. If you aren't legally divorced you have not had a qualifying event allowing you to make a change.
Is the life insurance beneficiary controlled by the will?
Dale's Question: My mom divorced my dad in 2002. She excluded him as beneficiary in her will, but he still received over $220,000. She had the policy and paid the premiums. Shouldn't the beneficiary be her own adult child that named as beneficiary in her will which included all assets?
Brette's Answer: Life insurance is not distributed via a will, but can only be changed by directly changing the beneficiary on the life insurance plan itself. If she did that, you need to find a copy of the change form she submitted or the confirmation of the change.
Are life insurance payouts divisible in divorce?
Kristina's Question: Last year my husband's mother passed away, and we have just recently decided to get a divorce. I understand that I don't have rights to any of his inheritance (her 401K and the house), but do I have rights to a portion of the money paid out for her life insurance?
Brette's Answer: No, not unless you were named as a beneficiary.
Can he remove me as the beneficiary after 23 years of marriage?
Lynn's Question: I filed a prose packet for a divorce and mailed them to my husband who now lives in another state. Upon receiving the papers he called and said he was going to remove me from his life insurance policy from the union he retired from after 23 years of marriage. I think I should be the beneficiary of the life insurance. How can I make this happen?
Brette's Answer: You have no insurable interest after you are divorced, unless alimony is being paid. You should speak with an attorney about this.
Am I still a beneficiary if life insurance wasn't addressed in the divorce?
Sue's Question: My husband signed ownership of a term life insurance policy over to me and we divorced a year later. Do I still have rights of ownership and beneficiary since this was NOT specifically noted on the divorce decree?
Brette: The problem is that in the eyes of the insurance company you may not have an insurable interest, unless there is alimony or child support that the life insurance is meant to back up.
Can he change the beneficiary if the divorce decree states otherwise?
Cathy's Question: In my divorce settlement, it stipulates that I am to remain the beneficiary on my ex-husbands life insurance policy. My ex-husband is a life insurance agent and I recently found out that he changed the policy and took me off as the beneficiary. Is he allowed to do that and get by with it? In your experience, how negatively would a Judge view his actions being that he is the agent that wrote the policy?
Brette's Answer: You will need to either have your attorney contact his attorney, or go back to court since he is violating the order. It doesn't matter if he is the agent or not - he violated the order. A judge might be more annoyed with someone who works in the industry.
My ex died and never changed the beneficiary like the decree ordered.
Phyllis' Question: I got divorced over 20 years ago. The divorce decree states that our child is entitled to his father's life insurance. My ex just died last month and he did NOT name our son as the beneficiary to his life insurance. How does my son get what the divorce papers say he is entitled to. It was a $40,000 policy 20 years ago. It's worth more now.
Brette's Answer: A claim has to be made against his estate.
Why can't I stay a beneficiary on his work-provided insurance?
Patrice's Question: My ex-spouse has a life insurance policy through his employer of which I am the beneficiary. He has been told that I cannot remain the beneficiary once our divorce is final because I'm not entitled to his employment related policy (which is elective, and he pays into it monthly). Is this a true statement? He pays me alimony and I am a full time student.
Brette's Answer: Even if that is true (it may be a particular term of this policy), he can still take out another with you as beneficiary. It is very common to do this as part of the alimony plan.
Can I change the beneficiary if insurance wasn't part of the divorce?
Sherry's Question: I recently got divorced, and my husband has a $750,000.00 life insurance policy on me. Is there some way to have this dropped? I heard that he can be made change the beneficiary. He also had one on himself naming me as the beneficiary. I don't think it's fair that he will benefit from my death! What advise could you give me?
Brette's Answer: You are the owner of the policy on your own life and you can change the beneficiary. Just call the company and ask for a beneficiary change form. He is the owner of the policy on his life and controls the beneficiary of that policy.
Can my ex take out an insurance policy on our son?
Danielle's Question: I have been divorced from my ex-husband for 16 years and I just found out he recently purchased a life insurance policy on our 17 year old son. My ex now lives in Mexico, neither my son nor I have had any contact with him since our divorce, and I find this HIGHLY unusual. Can he legally do this?
Brette's Answer: A parent has an insurable interest in a child who is a minor. It is weird if he has had no contact for 16 years.
Who is liable if the insurance policy was borrowed against?
Question: My father was ordered during the divorce to maintain a $200,000 life insurance policy naming my mother as the sole beneficiary. My father recently died and it was discovered that the policy was borrowed on and the premiums went unpaid. Does the new wife have any liability?
Brette's Answer: The estate would be liable.
Is the life insurance obligation dischargeable if he declares bankruptcy?
Judy's Question: We were divorced 13 years ago and the final divorce specified he must maintain life insurance for me (should he pre-decease me) for his total alimony obligations -- which is listed as until I die; or remarry). He declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy over a year ago. Through my extensive research I discovered that alimony payments are NOT dischargeable. My critical question: Is the life insurance obligation NOT dischargeable as well? If you can really help me, I want to thank you SOOO much in advance!
Brette Answers: It's advisable to consult with an attorney, but if the life insurance is designated as alimony then it is not dischargeable. You need someone to review the language against the bankruptcy regulations.
Is his estate responsible for my insurance policy if it was ordered in the decree?
MJ's Question: When I divorced, part of the legal agreement was that he would pay for a small life insurance policy for me, benefitting our children, for the rest of my life. He passed away a few years ago and his widow continued to pay the policy, which is in the name of the Estate. She now says she can't/won't make the policy payments anymore. Can she deny the estate payment of the policy? I'd just like a guideline answer if possible.
Brette's Answer: Financial obligations such as child support or life insurance policies end with death. Your ex's estate is not responsible to continue payments.
Copyright WomansDivorce.comJohn Laporte was looking for peace and quiet when he went for one of his usual weekly walks in Brookside Cemetery on Saturday afternoon.
Instead, he found roughly 50 headstones at the cemetery on Notre Dame Avenue in Winnipeg had been pushed off their bases or tipped over. One of them had its faceplate smashed.
"I'm still trying to wrap my head around why. It's senseless," said Laporte. The Winnipegger goes for walks in the cemetery once or twice a week.
"There's no reasoning to it, why somebody would do this. I mean, whatever's happening in somebody's life that would cause them to do it, I'm pretty sure none of these people had anything to do with it."
Laporte said most of the vandalized graves were in the older sections of the cemetery and belonged to people of all ages. The cemetery, operated by the City of Winnipeg, is one of the oldest in the city with its first interment in 1878.
The vandalized graves were mostly in the oldest parts of the cemetery, Laporte said. (Travis Golby/CBC)
After phoning police, Laporte said he posted about his find on Facebook. He's hoping sharing the story on social media will help police locate whoever's responsible.
"A vandalism in the traditional sense is more or less property and spray painting and stuff like that. This is actual people that have been laid to rest, and this is their markers," Laporte said. He has loved ones buried in the cemetery, although their graves were unaffected.
"It's totally different. To me, it's a little bit beyond vandalism. It's more desecration than vandalism."
'That could've been my son's'
"It's devastating. For everyone here," said Cathy Marshall, who saw Laporte's post on Facebook and was concerned because her son is buried at Brookside.
She said his stone was not affected, but she drove around to survey the areas that were. She and the people who visit the graves of their loved ones care about the cemetery deeply, she said.
"There's a lot of people that come here regularly," she said.
"It hurts. It hurts your heart because that could've been my son's. Somebody you know's mother, father, daughter."
She said it will cost affected families a lot of money to repair the damage, and she's thinking of rallying a volunteer group to put the stones back.
John Laporte often goes for walks in Brookside Cemetery, but didn't find the usual peace and quiet on Saturday afternoon. (Travis Golby/CBC)
Like Laporte, Marshall said the act goes beyond vandalism.
"I think because it affects the vulnerable. These people may not have anybody," she said.
"But it should be respected. There should be some respect in this world today."
Winnipeg police are investigating but haven't made any arrests so far. Const. Rob Carver said he hopes that changes.
"Because that's an insidious crime," Carver said. "I mean desecrating grave stones, it's terrible."
A City of Winnipeg spokesperson said monument owners are being urged not to try to repair damaged headstones themselves.
David Driedger said the city is in the process of cataloguing the damage and getting in touch with headstone owners.
He said the city will work with owners to have monuments fixed but trying to fix one alone could result in serious injury and cause even more damage.
The city is asking anyone who owns an affected monument to contact cemeteries@winnipeg.ca.A visionary museum at the base of the Alps | The Liaunig
Riccardo Bianchini, Inexhibit
Who is driving along the narrow road that, bordering the Drava river, runs on the southern edge of Carinthia toward the Slovenian border would probably be surprised by a dazzling vision: a huge cantilevered concrete box emerging from a grassy hillock, apparently floating free over the thoroughfare.
Or, much more probably, you reach it not by chance, deviating from the main road that connects Klagenfurt and Graz to pay a visit at one of the most interesting museums in Austria: the Liaunig.
The museum was created to display the collections of the industrialist Herbert W. Liaunig, composed of over 3,000 modern and contemporary artworks and of a noteworthy selection of African gold objects. An emerging Austrian architectural practice, querkraft, was therefore selected to design the new home of the museum, opened in 2008.
The building architecture is quite peculiar: in order to reduce construction cost and energy consumption, the museum is largely built underground.
From the main entrance, visitors cross a large hall, where the museum deposits are located and visible through a large glass enclosure, reaching a spectacular main exhibition gallery. This has the shape of a 160 metres-long, 13 metres wide, concrete tube forming a single 2,000 square metres hall where paintings and sculptures are exposed. Several ceiling windows provide the gallery of natural light on all its length. Two large terraced openings at both ends of the tube offer a stunning view on the surrounding landscape, one overlooking the street and the hills behind and the other facing the Drava river valley.
Separate rooms for graphics works as well as dedicated to the African gold collection further complete the building program, both spaces are completely underground.
Images courtesy of Museum Liaunig
The 2015 expansion
After being closed for one year for expansion works, the Liaunig museum reopened in Spring 2015 with brand new exhibition galleries. The expansion project, again designed by querkraft architects, complete the space program of the museum.
above: axonometric cut-off of the museum complex
above: the triangular-shaped hall for special exhibitions.
A triangular-shaped hall for special exhibitions at the ground floor, with an adjoining atrium where paintings by Sean Scully are on view until October 2015, two underground galleries where the permanent collections of glass works and miniatures are showcased, and a fascinating circular storage space for sculptures, accessible to the visitors, have been added to the the original building.
Furthermore, the services to the public have been completed with a museum store, accessible from the entrance foyer. The Liaunig museum is now recognized as a listed building and has been awarded the “Austrian Museum Prize”.
above: the new storage space.
All images courtesy of The Liaunig Museum |
Clearly, he’s backed off slightly from the “let’s ban all Muslims” idea that he unleashed last year, and he’s just rebranding it as “extreme vetting,” probably because he realized the idea of banning all Muslims is unconstitutional, because it would violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. But this idea that he thinks that returning to the McCarthy era and having an ideological test and rooting out un-American activities—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s talk about that, an ideological test.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah, well, he’s very clearly, openly invoking the Cold War era as though McCarthyism was a good idea. I think most Americans would look back at that period in our history with shame and regret. And Trump seems to think, and probably some of his voters think, that it’s something that we should go back to. And it’s remarkable that he thinks that this would be a winning political idea in an electoral season.
AMY GOODMAN: Phyllis Bennis, your response in Washington, D.C.?
PHYLLIS BENNIS: You know, Amy, I think this point about the link with the McCarthy period is very crucial. What he’s really calling for is a return of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, that so infamously was involved in destroying so many people’s lives with false allegations of being fellow travelers or members of the Communist Party, with exactly this kind of extreme vetting that kept out immigrants, but also went after residents and citizens in this country. So this notion of establishing a new—what he called a commission on radical Islam, when I saw those words, I thought, “Oh, my god, this is a return to HUAC,” to the House Un-American Activities Committee, which famously continued until the very end, when it was finally brought down by shame when one of the officials turned to one of the prosecutors and said, “Have you no shame, sir?” It was, you know, this moment of ending this extraordinary repressive example of what that period was.
And here he is essentially equating the global war on terror, for which he really has very much the same kinds of policies that are being imposed now, with a few differences, keeping—of asserting keeping Guantánamo Bay prison open instead of hoping to close it, even though it remains open. So, there’s not a lot of difference in the actual policies. But what Donald Trump’s speech tried to do was to assert that this question of terrorism, which is something that is affecting a wide range of regions around the world, certainly, but has not come close to the question of the risks of World War II—when he talked about comparing it to the war against fascism, the war against Nazism, this is a ludicrous comparison. And yet he’s talking about establishing the same kind of response, meaning this ideological test, this notion of extreme vetting. It’s as if he’s asserting the value of extremism as the reason people should support his candidacy, because he’s an extremist.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting, the words he used are sometimes words that are leveled against him. Let’s go back to just a clip of what he said.
DONALD TRUMP: Those who do not believe in our Constitution or who support bigotry and hatred will not be admitted for immigration into our country.
AMY GOODMAN: Linda Sarsour?
LINDA SARSOUR: I mean, I—that was literally like a comedy show. I thought it was like Saturday Night Live. I mean, he’s the first person to be deported. He’s the first person—I’d sign his deportation proceeding, to be at the airport waving him goodbye. He’s running a campaign on the very things that he’s saying he’s going to fight against—bigotry, hatred. He’s talking about taking down fascism and then comparing what he wants to do to the era of taking down fascism. He is an American fascist, and this is what his campaign has been all about.
And again, the scariest part of it, again, is not Donald Trump; it’s the people that come to his rallies and cheer him on in that room, and the people that think that his ideas are good ideas. And you know this, Amy. If there was a committee on radical Islam, you and I would be the first targets. This idea that anyone that criticizes the U.S. government, anyone who is considered unpatriotic, we would be the first people to be targeted. So, we are—he’s creating an environment of law and order. He wants to keep everybody in line. If you don’t agree with Donald Trump and his supporters, you are not welcomed here. So, that’s a big portion of the American people. So, hopefully—I’m just hoping he’s not the next president of the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to go to break and then come back to this discussion and expand it to what he said about—and the recent reports on Russia, talk about Iraq, Iran. We’re talking with Linda Sarsour, Matt Taibbi and Phyllis Bennis. Linda is director of the first Muslim online organizing platform, MPower Change. Matt Taibbi, a Rolling Stone reporter. And Phyllis Bennis is with the Institute for Policy Studies. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.I have exciting news for Disney pin collectors! Starting May 14, we will release the first Disney Park Pack – Trading Edition on the Disney Parks online store. This Online exclusive box of pins includes a limited edition 500 pin that is only available in the Disney Park Pack, as well as two open edition pins guests will receive before they are available in locations at Disney Parks.
“We wanted a way for guests to continue collecting unique Disney pins before or after their Disney vacation,” explained Jeanne Lewis, merchandiser for Disney pins. “I love that the Disney Park Pack will contain a low edition size pin which is something we know guests love collecting. We included two open edition pins to give guests some additional trading power.”
Jeanne told me the limited edition pins are part of a series and may include characters from animated features or attractions at Disney Parks. The limited edition pins will also have two embellishments (like pin-on-pin or special fills) making them a great collectible item.
I tried to get a sneak preview of the pins but she said the Disney Park Pack pins will be a mystery each month.
A new Disney Park Pack will be released on the first Thursday of every month. Retail price at introduction is $39.95 and includes shipping. Due to the unique nature of this item, there are no refunds, exchanges or returns.
For more information, please visit DisneyStore.com/ParkPack.
Happy Collecting!First off, let me just say that I am a serious Ron Paul supporter. I’ve blogged about him, spammed promoted him to friends and family, and even put a Ron Paul 2008 bumper sticker on my car (I don’t do bumper stickers). I’ve been resisting the call to write this piece for some time now, but I can resist no longer.
It’s time for us, as Paul supporters, to stop pretending his flaws do not exist. We are ignoring his more extreme and illogical views because we’re so smitten by his good ones. This is a problem. Our ability and/or willingness to evaluate him as a complete candidate is being suppressed by our surprise and appreciation for his views on foreign policy and personal freedom.
In short, we’re so in love with him that we’re focusing only on his positives while ignoring his negatives.
Not only will his weaknesses get him thrashed during a primary, but we need to have a serious discussion about whether or not he’s too extreme to even get anything done as president. Here are the main positions that trouble me:
He Doesn’t Believe in the Separation of Church and State
The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance. Throughout our nation’s history, churches have done what no government can ever do, namely teach morality and civility. Moral and civil individuals are largely governed by their own sense of right and wrong, and hence have little need for external government.
The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs. Certainly the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both replete with references to God, would be aghast at the federal government’s hostility to religion. — Ron Paul
A “robustly Christian” America? That’s what he thinks the founding fathers wanted? Ouch. And the separation of church and state has no basis in the constitution or the writings of the founding fathers? How about this?
Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law. In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. — Thomas Jefferson
How did he miss that? I’m definitely not with him on this, but I am at least comforted by the fact that he would never force his views on anyone at the federal level.
He’s Not For Federally Supported Public Education
He wants the state and local government to provide education to the public. He also regularly mentions churches when asked about how this will come about. He spoke at Google recently and he was asked how the poor are supposed to get an education if the government doesn’t provide one free of charge. The audience members worried about the rich getting great educations while the poor got none. He has no good answer on this, and if he does he’s not telling anyone. He admits there will be inequality but says that it’ll be better than what we have now. I disagree.
I also fail to see how state governments will have an advantage over the federal government when it comes to providing education to the public. To me it looks like his solution simply creates smaller chunks of corruption and waste rather than one big one. Furthermore, I do think something can be said for having a standard that we as a nation strive to live up to. Ideally it would not federal law, of course, but one has to wonder how else it would come about if everyone was allowed to go off on their own tangents. Is it ok for Kansas to decide that math is evil and strike it from their curriculum? Does the drive to be perfectly constitutional outweigh the need to have us all meet a certain standard? It’s worth having the discussion.
Yeah, That Means No Federal College Loans
He didn’t get any loans to go to college and he doesn’t think you should either. Again, he doesn’t think the federal government should be involved with education at all. Many of the people in the room he was speaking to at Google used federal loans to make it through school and to Google in the first place. Again, I agree that this shouldn’t be necessary, and that it’s unconstitutional. My problem is with simply stopping the program and hoping (or praying) for another solution to materialize.
Having hundreds of thousands of young people who need a college education turn to “the community” is not a solution. This sort of transition would have to be incredibly well orchestrated — with state, local, and charitable infrastructures coming into existence right as the federal one was being dismantled. I simply lack confidence in our ability to pull this off. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but it does mean that we can’t just run out and pull the federal systems without considering the consequences very carefully.
Once again he is right in concept but I fear the extreme tone in which he speaks about the issue. I’m not getting the feeling that he realizes how catastrophic it would be to stop these programs without having something in their place. What I am hearing from him is, “It’s the right thing to do, so whatever happens happens.” I simply cannot accept that despite feeling his position is ideally correct.
He’s Not For National Health Care
Again, not the role of government. His basic view is that the market will find a way. He openly admits that many people will fall through the cracks, but he responds to that by saying that it’ll be better than what we have now. Does this seem hopelessly optimistic to anyone but myself? This is just like the education thing: ideally it wouldn’t be a national plan, but this is simply a matter of practicality given the problem we’re facing. We simply have too many people that need health care right now.
Look at the countries who are handling it better than us. What are they doing? Are any of these highly successful programs completely separated from the national government? Why not? Is there a working model for this anywhere? I just feel like we have to explore the realities very carefully before taking rash actions. This is the type of language I’m not hearing from him.
He Would Abolish Federal Consumer Protection Groups Like The FDA
You think that food you bought at Safeway or Publix is safe? Well, he doesn’t think that’s the role of the federal government to help you with that. Leave it up to someone else. He things some community groups will spring up and organize to help us fill the void, and I agree that will happen to some extent. But in the meantime there will be no standard for determining whether something is safe to consume or not. Imagine the fun the corporations will have with this. They’ll sell all kinds of crap that causes serious harm to uneducated consumers.
He says the answer is consumer groups and litigation. How many people are going to meticulously check consumer reports before buying food and drugs? Does he not see how easily this will be exploited with ill effects? Think of the money to be made by corporations with no oversight. This is precisely the type of policy that will allow the powerful and immoral to stomp all over those who are less educated. The libertarian answer to that is caveat emptor, and that I simply cannot accept.
The extreme libertarian view here is that if people are too stupid to do their own research before consuming dangerous products, they deserve what they get. I agree that’s fine for an ideal society where people would be educated and able to fend for themselves, but it’s simply not a humane approach given how many ignorant people would suffer in the country we live in today.
No More Federal Environmental Protection. If GiantChemCorp Does Something Wrong, Sue Them
He wants to handle pollution in a purely “property rights” fashion, i.e. people who infringe on other peoples’ property rights would get sued. But there wouldn’t be any federal oversight of the matter. No regulation at the national level whatsoever. Again, this sounds great in an ideal world but it neglects the reality of the situation. The fact of the matter is that if corporations can get away with something they will. Oh, you want to sue? Be serious.
So GiantChemCorp dumped something in Bob and Shirley’s backyard? Great, get a lawyer. Exxon will show up with their team that’s paid millions a year. Oh, Bob and Shirley can’t afford a good one? Perhaps they can get help from your local church or consumer group. Please. This is yet another example of having exactly the right idea for an ideal society but not grasping that the reality we’re presented with works differently. Again, the powerful would trounce upon the weak with impunity.
He’s Against Abortion and Would Like to See Roe vs. Wade Overturned
I have become increasingly concerned over the years that the pro-life movement I so strongly support is getting further off track, both politically and morally. I sponsored the original pro-life amendment, which used a constitutional approach to solve the crisis of federalization of abortion law by the courts. The pro-life movement was with me and had my full support and admiration. Those who cherish unborn life have become frustrated by our inability to overturn or significantly curtail Roe v. Wade. — Ron Paul from a House of Representatives Speech
He Doesn’t Believe The Evidence for Man-Made Global Warming Is Convincing
He regularly says things such as, “I think it [the case for man-made global warming] is overblown.”, and “There’s still debate on the issue.” Overblown? What part of the massive IPCC study where over two thousand climatologists from 130 countries agreed on the matter does he disagree with? I find his rejection of this overwhelming scientific consensus to be disturbing. And before you think to retort with the number of scientists who disagree with the report, consider the concept of scientific pseudosymmetry.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that Dr. Paul has significant flaws just like the other candidates, but on different issues. He simply takes things too far given the world we live in. We’re endorsing him because we’re infatuated with his views on foreign policy and personal freedom. We’re in love with the fact that someone will speak out against the absurdity that is the current status quo. But is that enough? Can we still back him if he’s lacking in other important areas? Where’s the line?
Again — I have to repeat this — the problem is not with his views given an ideal world. I agree on most points that his vision embodies the way America should be. That’s why I’m behind him. My point is simply that our country has strayed so far off the path that to try and return it too quickly would cause great amount of suffering.
His overwhelming belief that “the market” will somehow make everything o.k. is naive at best. He trusts this libertarian ideal with an unsettling and almost religious level of faith. Does anyone truly believe that if we remove the safeguards that provide for the poor and uneducated that everything will somehow work itself out? He has to address this question sufficiently in order to get to the next level.
I am not going to stop supporting him and I am not taking the sticker off of my car. I am not going to stop talking about his campaign or about how he’s igniting the political interest of so many young voters. I will continue to speak about his overwhelming positives. But in the back of my mind I’m secretly hoping that he’ll get the message that his more extreme views (or at least how he’s communicating his views) will destroy not only his campaign but his very ability to help our ailing country.
Please wake up, Dr. Paul. This country desperately need you at full strength. You have to show us exactly how you intend to take us from the horrible mess we are in to the ideal you speak of (and we support) without causing so much suffering that you lose your support nationwide. If you are not as extreme as you appear to be on these issues and you do have good plans for transitioning with minimum suffering, you have to communicate this information much better than you are now.
Let’s work out these issues among ourselves before we get hit with the same questions by our opposition.:Missing climbers
Katie Rani Nolan was a multi-faceted diamond, Pastor Rick McKinley said.
Speaker after speaker at her memorial service Tuesday presented those facets:
The 29-year-old who died on Mount Hood was a product of The Palouse, daughter, sister, a radiant smiler, committed Christian, world traveler, humanitarian, adventurer, prolific letter writer, graduate student, tireless social worker and, in her private moments, battler of demons that attacked her self-image.
Hers was "a life filled with adventure and compassion for others," with more experiences packed into her time on the planet than others will realize in much longer lifespans, said Rita Hansen, the person credited with introducing Nolan to mountain climbing.
Several hundred people crowded into the Portland Foursquare Church in Southeast Portland for the service, the third in three days for three climbers who perished after leaving Dec. 11 from Timberline Lodge to summit Mount Hood.
A search for Nolan of Southeast Portland and Anthony Vietti, 25, of Longview, Wash., was suspended last Wednesday. The body of a third climber, Luke Gullberg, 26, of Des Moines, Wash., was found the morning of Dec. 12 on Reid Glacier on the mountain's south side.
Rescuers believe the bodies of Nolan and Vietti are possibly near the top of the steep head wall of the glacier.
Photographs displayed throughout the memorial for Nolan showed her as a child, the second born of five children who grew up in Walla Walla and became the woman attending Portland State University pursuing a master's degree in social work and helping others while living the quintessential Northwest life of outdoor adventure.
She was an athlete, in high school and later in life.
Her outdoor pursuits -- hiking, climbing, backpacking, running in the Portland Marathon, running in Hood to Coast, bicycling a century ride, participating in a triathlon -- "was her way of recharging her batteries," Hansen said.
They needed recharging in part because of the demands she faced with a graduate student's classload and her social work with Catholic Charities.
Margi Dechenne, her supervisor at Catholic Charities, recalled meeting Nolan for the first time during a job interview.
"What else do homeless women need," Dechenne asked the potential employee, "other than a place to live?"
Nolan smiled and, eyes gleaming, leaned toward her questioner and said, "Hope! We have to have hope for them!"
In her time working for the organization, Nolan helped find housing for 62 women in the Portland area who previously had none, Dechenne said.
Recently Nolan was working with another nonprofit organization based in Hillsboro, Transitions Global, trying to establish a shelter in Portland for people enslaved in worldwide sex trafficking, Dechenne said.
"She loved the person sitting next to her," Dechenne said, "and she loved the person all the way across the world."
At points in her life, however, she had trouble loving herself.
Nolan's Portland roommate, Emily Jameson,read a brief essay by Nolan that was included in a photography project called, "Skeletons in the Closet," examining eating disorders.
Nolan describes trying to escape her eating disorder in 2003 by traveling on a humanitarian mission to Katmandu, Nepal, but, "my eating disorder got on the plane and came with me."
She went on to write that she contemplated suicide, but overcame the illness, crediting "two and a half years of therapy, support groups, visits to the nutritionist and hospital" and receiving "God's love for me."
Hundreds of photographs on two screens showed Nolan in locations all over the world.
The final shot was a photograph dated Dec. 11 of Nolan on what is clearly a slope of Mount Hood. She's smiling in her climbing helmet with the blue sky visible over her right shoulder.
A Web site has been set up to remember Katie Nolan’s life:0
Two new clips and 13 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage have been released from Sam Raimi‘s Oz the Great and Powerful. The film centers on a small-time circus magician with dubious ethics (James Franco) who finds himself transported to Oz and drawn into a battle between the three witches Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Glinda (Michelle Williams). We previously saw a clip showcasing the conflict between Theodora and Evanora, as well as Oz and his cohorts “traveling by bubble”, which should be impressive on the big screen in 3D. The new clips showcase the film’s attempt at comedy by showing Oz’s frustration with his traveling companions, Finley (voiced by Zach Braff) and China Girl (voiced by Joey King).
Hit the jump to check out the previously released clips and the new ones as well as the behind-the-scenes footage. Also, click on the respective links for Steve’s set visit: 30 things to know about the film plus a video blog, and his interviews with Sam Raimi, James Franco, Michelle Williams, Zach Braff, and Joey King. Oz the Great and Powerful opens March 8th.
4 Clips (2 are new):
Behind-the-Scenes Footage:
Here’s the official synopsis for Oz the Great and Powerful:Maryland could soon be considering some joint relief.
Republican state Sen. David Brinkley wants to renew an effort to legalize medical marijuana in Maryland. Brinkley said, if re-elected, he plans to reintroduce a bill that would also address the issues of providing a reliable source for marijuana rather than putting it on the black market.
A similar bill passed the state Senate during last session. A version of the bill failed in the House of Delegates.
Under current Maryland law, defendants charged with use or possession of marijuana can argue a medical need as a mitigating factor at their sentencing. But even if a medical necessity is proven, a judge can still fine a patient up to $100.
"While marijuana is certainly not a cure-all, and can be abused like legal drugs, doctors should be able to prescribe it if they believe it will help their patient," said Delegate Dan Morhaim, who also backs the marijuana measure and is a doctor who serves on the faculty of of the University of Maryland Medical School and the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. "Why should this drug be treated differently?''SISONKE
The choices available to women of my age, and of my educational background, represent a signi-ficant move forward in gender relations over the past two decades – but as we mark Women’s Month, it is clear that the progress has been complicated by the continuing reality of sexism. While for millions of black women in this country, change has been far too slow, there is a growing elite for whom the sky – or at least the glass ceiling right beneath the sky – is the limit. In my daily life, I have the kind of access to opportunities that my mother’s generation could only have dreamt of: I drive, I vote, I travel, I do press interviews, I conduct strategy discussions, I deliberate, and most importantly, I lead.
But a TED talk by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, called “Why we have too few women leaders,” (http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl _sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders.html) reminded me of how far we still have to go.
Sandberg makes the point that there is a positive correlation between success and likeability for men, while there is a negative correlation between success and likeability for women.
She talks about a Harvard Business School case study of a few years ago. The class looking at the case study admired the organisational leader of the company they were looking at when they thought he was a man.
The same study, given to a different set of students, with the same information presented, but with the protagonist name as Heidi instead of Harvey, produced a different response. Suddenly the leader was seen as being too political, difficult, and hard to please.
The implications of this are clear: women are constantly managing how they respond to issues so that they can be decisive and firm while not being seen as aggressive. Men are clearly also concerned with being liked but can take stronger stances without being seen as overly emotional.
Sandberg’s comments reminded me of a personal experience while on a work trip. I was at a reception, talking with a small group of men who are colleagues but with whom I am not in frequent contact. And seemingly out of nowhere, came seven spiteful words, clearly intended to cut me down to size.
“Can’t you see that she’s a woman?” It was said with a sneer and was intended as a “joke”’. It made everyone except the aggressor uncomfortable and it had its desired effect: I was particularly embarrassed, although I had done nothing to be ashamed of.
The fact that I am a woman was being pointed out by an obnoxious man, to a bigger group of men, in order to say, “look at her as an object”.
“We are off duty now, we are not colleagues, we are men, and she is a woman.”
It was clearly done to put me in my place and it worked. I felt sick.
The male colleagues to whom this invitation had been extended, blinked in a bewildered fashion, not knowing how to respond. And in that moment, I was disabused of the notion that my job – my formal power as it were – will protect me from sexist abuse.
I deal with sexism every day; it is par for the course when you occupy the position I do. And it comes from many sources. Some of it is even mildly entertaining.
When partner organisations send representatives to meet me for the first time, they invariably shake the hand of the executive assistant (who is male), and greet him as Mr Msimang, expectantly looking to me to get them their coffee.
Each time, as we clarify, everyone laughs – they uncomfortably and Percy and I genuinely – and we move on.
I have developed a tough skin.
But that incident threw me.
If you took away the maleness of the harasser, you might be convinced that he had less “power” than me.
He earns less than I do and is probably less politically and socially connected than I am. But he harassed me with impunity, and despite my education, my assertiveness, my power and my knowledge of the law, I could not find the right words to defend myself.
The moment my radar picked up where this was going, I made a choice to find a more respectful conversation to participate in, in another corner of the room. It was pretty clear why I was leaving, but I did not cause a fuss. I have regretted not doing so.
I could have asked him why he felt it necessary to make sexual insinuations about me. I could have insulted him, or attempted to make insinuations about his genitals, as he had done about my breasts.
I didn’t. Worse yet, I spent the rest of the evening in stereotypical fashion, feeling slightly embarrassed and wondering whether I had been dressed appropriately. I even worried that I should not have put on a fresh coat of lip-gloss before coming downstairs.
And so of course for weeks after the incident, I was wracked with guilt over my (non) response.
Why – given everything – did I keep quiet?
Partly, I was responding to the fact that I am so insulated by my position of formal power (I am the “boss” in my organisation), that this took me completely by surprise. Naïve, I know, but true.
The obvious corollary is to race relations: just as making it to the top for black people in racist societies allows us to believe that racism has disappeared, even when its architecture is evident around us, many women in leadership positions begin to believe that sexism is not as rife as it really is.
Our positions protect us from sexism in its crudest forms, and because we have ascended in the hierarchy, we begin to believe that we are living proof that the system works.
We remember sexism in our own lives, and ascribe it to the past: it used to be bad, we think, but things have changed, otherwise I wouldn’t be here: aren’t we the pioneers who have fought to eradicate it?
There is a way too, in which the more senior you get, the more you have to lose – the system rewards those who behave like alpha males. If you file charges, or cry foul, you become the shrill, anti-male, hys-terical woman who can’t fight her own battles.
If you are tough enough to take on men in the boardroom, the logic goes, then surely you can do a little bit of verbal rough and tumble. But of course the sparring must happen on the terms of the aggressor: you either participate in the sexual banter (which in my view is a non-option), or you allow yourself to become the object of crude sexual jokes (another non-option).
So perversely, the moment you become powerful enough to change the rules of the game, you are less likely to have the informal opportunities with which to challenge the narrative.
And when you can engage power in this way, you often don’t because of the powerful ways in which women are seduced into the likeability trap.
To make a fuss about sexual harassment when you are at a certain level of seniority as a woman, when it is assumed that you are assertive enough to deal with it head on yourself, is to be seen in some ways as “difficult” or sensation-seeking.
When I was younger, I dealt with sexual harassment often, and generally I dealt with it well. I became adept at confronting the harasser, and challenging his assumption that his behaviour would be socially tolerated.
But frankly it has been a long time since anyone has spoken to me in such an outrageously brazen manner.
I am embarrassed to say I am rusty: I stumbled. I also calculated very quickly on my likeability index that if I made a fuss, I would not necessarily have the support of the non-aggressive men in the group. And that of course felt like an incredibly dangerous gamble: to take him on and then be faced with a bigger fight on my hands.
Of course I know that it is not my fault and that there were compelling reasons for my silence. But I also know that had he been white, and had he spoken to me in equally offensive tones, about my race, I would have had no qualms about telling him where to get off.
Indeed, my non-aggressive colleagues would have leapt to my defence. But we live in a society in which blatantly sexist men continue to operate with impunity and in which there is a clear double standard: it is much less okay to be racist than it is to be sexist.
I let the team down. As a society it is important that if the advances that have been made are to be real, we raise the cost of harassment.
Until we do, and in particular, until women with some measure of access to social power do, there are no guarantees that the next generation of women will be able to fight a different set of battles.
I hope this Women’s Month is a reminder that the road ahead requires all of us to contribute to social change.
l Sisonke Msimang is executive director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa.CTVNews.ca Staff
Anyone who wants to use public office for their own benefit should find a new line of work, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Tuesday -- for the first time addressing a deepening scandal related to Sen. Mike Duffy's repayment of improperly filed expenses.
In a rare move, Harper invited reporters and cameras to witness him address the Conservative caucus before he flies to South America later in the day for trade meetings. He took no questions from reporters and wasn't in the daily House of Commons question period Tuesday afternoon.
"I don't think any of you will be very surprised to hear I'm not happy, I'm very upset, about the conduct we've witnessed, the conduct of some parliamentarians and the conduct of my own office," Harper said as he opened his speech.
Last week, CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife reported that Harper's chief of staff, Nigel Wright, had written a personal cheque to Duffy for over $90,000, allowing him to repay the money he owed for improperly filed housing expenses.
Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson confirmed late Tuesday that her office has launched an investigation into Wright’s cheque to Duffy under the Conflict of Interest Act.
“The Commissioner and her Office cannot comment on the examination, as all examinations are conducted in private,” Dawson’s office said in a statement.
The Canadian Press reported Tuesday afternoon that Liberals in the Senate are trying to trigger special parliamentary hearings in an effort to force Wright and other Conservatives to testify.
Liberal Senate leader James Cowan is expected to argue that the PMO violated the privileges of parliamentarians. If Senate speaker Noel Kinsella agrees, he could send the issue to a special committee.
Wright resigned Sunday, while Duffy quit the Conservative caucus on Thursday. Another Conservative-appointed senator facing an expenses audit, Pamela Wallin, recused herself from the Conservative caucus on Friday.
On Monday, sources told Fife that Harper’s former special counsel and legal adviser Benjamin Perrin helped draft a letter of understanding that called for Duffy to publicly declare that he would repay the money. In return, sources said, Wright would give a personal cheque to Duffy to cover the $90,000. Sources also said the agreement stipulated that a Senate investigation into expense claims would go easy on Duffy.
On Tuesday, Perrin said in a statement he was “not consulted on, and did not participate in, Nigel Wright’s decision to write a personal cheque to reimburse Senator Duffy’s expenses.”
“I have never communicated with the Prime Minister on this matter,” he added.
The opposition hammered the government about the $90,000 cheque and the agreement during question period Tuesday.
“Duffy says he agreed to ‘stay silent’ on the orders of the PMO. In exchange, the Prime Minister’s Office agreed to cover the cost of the senator’s fraudulent expenses,” NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair said. “Why were taxpayer-funded lawyers used to negotiate this secret backroom deal between the prime minister’s chief of staff and Senator Duffy? Was taxpayers’ money used to bankroll Senate-gate, yes or no?”
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird responded, saying: “I reject much of the premise of his question. The government’s been very clear that the prime minister was not aware of this payment until media reports surfaced last week.”
In response to a separate question, Baird also denied that taxpayers’ money was used to pay Duffy’s expenses.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau accused the government of having “lost its moral compass.”
Trudeau asked: “Apparently when Conservatives break the rules, they get their debts secretly paid off by their friends in high places. It boggles the mind. Nobody over there even thinks anybody did anything wrong except get caught. When will they release this secret document, allow for a full investigation, and while they’re at it, how about apologizing to Canadians?”
Baird denied the existence of a legal deal.
“With respect to a legal agreement that the member opposite refers to, our understanding is there is no such agreement. This issue has been referred to two independent authorities, which will look into the matter and we look forward to them reporting back to Parliament and to Canadians.”
On Tuesday, Harper touted his own government's efforts to introduce accountability and transparency since they were first elected in 2006 |
solution in methanol, then drawn fourfold in methanol and once in water. The fiber was observed under polarizing light with a 530-nm first-order red plate. Areas of elongation are apparent after the fiber has undergone mechanical testing.
Fibers observed microscopically after mechanical testing were generally uniform with distinct areas of elongation. These elongated areas showed a 12% diameter decrease and were not associated with the break point (Fig. 6E). This phenomenon resembles the deformation behavior of polyethylenes in which chains are pulled into the “elongated” area and a “necking” is propagated along the fiber (38).
Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) verified the ability to spin solid core fibers using our aqueous process. A scanning electron micrograph of an as-spun ADF-3 fiber stored at 50% humidity is shown in Fig. 7. The figure shows the cylindrical, smooth surface of the spun ADF-3 fiber, as well as the solid interior core of the fiber.
Figure 7 Scanning electron micrographs of an ADF-3 as-spun fiber. (A) Analysis of fiber surface (magnification, ×500); (B) analysis at a break point to examine the fiber interior core (×2000).
Spiders have perfected the process by which the non-Newtonian silk fluid/dope is transformed into fine silk filaments at ambient temperature and with low energy expenditure (37,39) by using shear-sensitive liquid crystalline silk secretions, high protein concentration, and low spinning speeds (7). It was previously thought that the silk protein sequence would be the primary factor determining fiber properties. We spun fibers from one (ADF-3) of the two proteins present in dragline silk with a molecular mass of 60 kD (1) and mechanical properties approaching those of native spider dragline silk. This result raises the question of the contribution of the second protein, ADF-4 or MaSpI, to the silk's fiber properties.
Conditions under which the fibers are spun and processed (for example by drawing) are critical in determining mechanical properties. Wet spinning of rc-silk as described here depends on a chemical transformation and several postspinning draw steps for achieving fiber properties presumably due to aligned microstructure (38). In contrast, spiders produce silks as a result of rapid physical transformation in a single processing step in parallel with drawing because postspinning draw is precluded (7, 37,39). The spinning parameters allow for a modular process design resulting in fiber formation diversity starting with a common primary silk protein sequence. It is anticipated that by varying the silk primary sequences and spinning parameters, fibers with a range of specifications can be produced (37). These fibers could be used in a variety of applications: for example, as very fine monofilament sutures in microsurgery or in uses requiring a high level of energy absorption and elongation similar to that provided by Nylon (37, 40). In contrast to the manufacture of aramid fibers, a process that requires highly concentrated sulfuric acid, production of rc–spider silk using water as the solvent offers obvious advantages (40). An additional benefit is that silk will ultimately degrade in aqueous environments, providing a “green” alternative to traditional synthetic fibers (40).Image copyright AFP Image caption Guadalupe Olivas Valencia jumped off a bridge near El Chaparral border post
A Mexican man has apparently taken his own life just half an hour after being deported from the United States.
Guadalupe Olivas Valencia, 45, jumped from a bridge at the border after he was deported for the third time.
He was found unconscious next to a plastic bag with his belongings and died in hospital a short while later.
His death came as the Trump administration issued new guidelines to widen the net for deporting illegal immigrants from the US.
Witnesses said Mr Olivas was shouting that he did not want to return to Mexico and seemed to be in severe distress.
He jumped off a bridge just yards from El Chaparral, the main border crossing point between the US city of San Diego and Tijuana in Mexico.
Local media said a plastic bag like those US customs officers put migrants' belongings in was next to the man.
Mexican officials said it was the third time Mr Olivas had been deported from the US.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption El Chaparral is the main crossing point between Tijuana and San Diego
He died of a heart attack and concussion.
Mr Olivas was a native of Sinaloa, one of Mexico's most violent states and the stronghold of a major drug cartel.
Many Mexicans cite violence as a reason for leaving for the US.
The US released two memos on Tuesday aimed at speeding up the removal of undocumented migrants.
One memo, from Homeland Security chief John Kelly, includes instructions to enforce an existing provision of the US Immigration and Nationality Act that allows authorities to send some people caught illegally at the border back to Mexico, regardless of where they are from.
It is unclear whether the US has authority to force Mexico to accept foreigners.
But Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said Mexico would not accept the "unilateral" immigration proposals.
Mr Kelly and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson are due to arrive in Mexico later on Wednesday.
Mr Videgaray said the new border guidelines would now be the main point for discussion during those meetings.
He also said Mexico would take legal action to defend the rights of Mexican citizens abroad, and take the issue to the UN if necessary.
An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the US, many of them from Mexico. US President Donald Trump made immigration and border control a key part of his campaign.
Read more from BBC News on the Trump administration and immigration:
How an updated executive order expected soon from President Trump will attempt to revive the travel ban struck down by the courts
National Park Service police are investigating after a giant "Refugees Welcome" banner was illegally attached to the Statue of Liberty
More on the border crisis
"I'm afraid to open the door" - Living in fear of US deportation raids
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption US immigration raids leave many 'afraid to open the door'
"All my life is in the US" - Sent "home" to a Mexico that feels like a foreign country
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Through the door of broken dreams in Tijuana...
Ever wondered where exactly undocumented immigrants live in the US?Sen. Sanders isn’t a Democrat, but on MSNBC he mapped out the perfect strategy for a Democratic victory in 2014.
Video:
Sen. Sanders was asked if the Republicans will take over the Senate in 2014.
He answered:
Well, who knows who will take over the Senate. Certainly, the Republicans could do that, and certainly the Democrats could retain strong control of the Senate. We’ve got a long way to go until the election. I think what the Democrats have been very concerned about is the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, and the Republicans have been all over that issue.
I think what the Democrats have going for them is that our Republican friends believe that the way you deal with the deficit, which by the way as the president just mentioned has been cut in half in the last four years, that you do not, what the Democrats, or most Democrats believe is that we don’t cut Social Security, which the Republicans want to do. You don’t cut Medicare or transform Medicare into a voucher program. You don’t make massive cuts in terms of Medicaid, education, or nutrition programs. All of which the Republicans want, and all of which is massively unpopular, and what the Republicans also want to do is defend the wealthy and large corporate interests and prevent them from paying their share of taxes.
So I think if the issues revolves around we create jobs, how we deal with wealth and income inequality. And by the way, the Pope today just made an extraordinary statement on unfettered capitalism, and what it means when so few have so much and so many have so little. I hope that’s a lesson that the Congress can absorb, but I think if you focus on the economy, I think the Democrats will do just fine.The Tampa Bay Buccaneers will be without Kwon Alexander for the next four weeks, according to Rick Stroud of the Tampa Bay Times. The NFL suspended the promising rookie linebacker four games for violating the league's performance-enhancing drug policy. Alexander is believed to have tested positive for a banned substance during training camp.
This is a huge blow to the Buccaneers' defense, as Alexander has blossomed into one of the best young linebackers in the league this season. The fourth-round draft pick out of LSU is second on the Bucs in tackles and has started all 12 games.
Alexander said he would appeal the suspension and the appeals process allowed him to continue to play for two more games, including a 23-19 win over the Atlanta Falcons on Sunday. However, he reportedly dropped his appeal and will miss the final four games of the regular season.
"I've never been in any trouble or anything, so it's very disappointing," Alexander said when the punishment was first announced, via Ira Kaufman of the Tampa Tribune. "I’m definitely going to appeal it, and whatever the (result of) the appeal process is, I’ll come back even stronger."
Alexander is not eligible to return until the postseason or next season, depending on if the 6-6 Buccaneers are able to earn a wild card berth. Tampa Bay finishes the season with games against the Saints, Rams, Bears and Panthers.
The highlight of Alexander's season came Nov. 1 when he recorded 11 tackles, intercepted a pass and forced and recovered a fumble in the Buccaneers' 23-20 win over the Atlanta Falcons. Alexander dedicated the game ball to his 17-year-old brother, who passed away two days before the game.
But now Tampa Bay's defense, which has allowed the 10th-most points in the league, will likely have to move on without him through the final stretch of the season.The Stanford Cardinal ranked 14th in the 2017 edition of the preseason Coaches Poll released on Thursday. Alabama Crimson Tide came in first place, getting 49 first-place votes. Rounding out the Top 5 are Ohio State at No. 2, Florida State at No. 3, USC at No. 4 and the reigning national champs, Clemson, at No. 5.
Stanford of course heads down to Los Angeles for their second game of the season with a chance to knock off early playoff contender USC. The Washington Huskies came in at number seven and the Cardinal will host the Huskies on Friday, November 10th in what could be a top 10 showdown and possibly the de facto Pac-12 North division championship game.
Utah was the 4th team from the Pac-12 to make the top 25. Stanford will travel to play the Utes on Saturday, October 7. The Washington State Cougars, Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Oregon Ducks, and the San Diego State Aztecs are all on Stanford’s schedule in 2017 and were all also just on the outside of the top 25 but may enter the rankings with some early success this season. The full poll is below:
Alabama (49) Ohio State (5) Florida State (4) USC Clemson (7) Penn State Washington Oklahoma Michigan Wisconsin Oklahoma State LSU Auburn Stanford Georgia Florida Louisville Miami Kansas State West Virginia South Florida Virginia Tech Texas Tennessee Utah
Others Receiving Votes
Washington State 99; Colorado 72; TCU 58; Boise State 49; Notre Dame 49; Texas A&M 46; Pittsburgh 45; North Carolina State 39; Oregon 37; Northwestern 25; Nebraska 23; Memphis 22; Arkansas 22; Mississippi State 19; San Diego State 18; Appalachian State 11; Brigham Young 10; Georgia Tech 10; Tulsa 10; Wyoming 9; Western Michigan 8; Temple 8; North Carolina 8; Houston 7; Troy 6; Minnesota 6; Iowa 5; Louisiana Tech 4; Syracuse 3; Arizona 2; Army 1; Colorado State 1; Michigan State 1; Maryland 1; Toledo 1; UCLA 1.
You can See the full poll here:Mar 1, 2016
UtahSBA Reviving Superbike Challenge At Utah Motorsports Campus
Utah Sport Bike Association (UtahSBA) Champion Oleg Pianyhk (57). Photo by Steve Midgley, courtesy of UtahSBA.
Utah Sport Bike Association Announces The Superbike Challenge at Utah Motorsports Campus
Tooele, Utah (March 1, 2016) -- The Utah Sport Bike Association (UtahSBA) is pleased to announce The Superbike Challenge, a pro-am Superbike race that will be a support event to Round 7 of the MotoAmerica AMA/FIM North American Road Racing Championship at Utah Motorsports Campus (UMC) over the weekend of June 23-25. This will be the fourth iteration of The Superbike Challenge at UMC.
“We are carrying on a tradition that Larry Miller started with World Superbike in 2009,” said UtahSBA President Scott Rybarik, “and we’re thrilled that MotoAmerica is willing to partner with us to make this an amazing weekend for racers and spectators alike!”
The Superbike Challenge is designed to attract riders from clubs around the nation. Only competitors in the top five positions of any MotoAmerica championship at the beginning of MotoAmerica Round 7 are excluded from competing in The Superbike Challenge. With a reasonably open rule set and purse money up to $20,000, UtahSBA expects this to be a popular event.
“We’re working on a sponsorship deal that will provide a good amount towards the projected purse,” said Rybarik. “We will also be directing a significant portion of the entry fees to fund the purse, so as more people register, more purse money becomes available.”
Additional information about The Superbike Challenge is available at www.superbikechallenge.com.
The Utah Sport Bike Association is a non-profit, all-volunteer organization that uses 100 percent of its revenue to support rider education, safety and racing throughout the Intermountain West. With a history that goes back more than 30 years, UtahSBA has fostered the growth of some of the nation’s most influential racers, instructors, authors and motorcycling advocates.
The six-race 2016 Vortex Masters of the Mountains racing series will be operated and sanctioned by UtahSBA exclusively at Utah Motorsports Campus (formerly Miller Motorsports Park). The series was created to encourage competitive road racing at the club, regional and national levels. In its tenth year, the series has quickly turned into a premier championship, drawing top-level talent from around the nation. More information about UtahSBA is available at www.utahsba.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/utahsba/.Re: No more "pray away the gay" for CA teens Quote: sky dancer Originally Posted by
The legislation, which will next go to Gov. Jerry Brown for review, prevents licensed psychologists and therapists from seeking to change the sexual orientation of children under 18.
California Bill Bans Gay-Conversion Therapy - WSJ.com
Parents taking their kids to quacks to make them heterosexual is a form of abuse. I'm glad this ban is happening. California's state legislature on Thursday passed the nation's first law banning professional psychological therapy aimed at turning gay and lesbian youth straight.The legislation, which will next go to Gov. Jerry Brown for review, prevents licensed psychologists and therapists from seeking to change the sexual orientation of children under 18.Parents taking their kids to quacks to make them heterosexual is a form of abuse. I'm glad this ban is happening. Thank goodness for some sanity! __________________
DISCLAIMER: Extreme amounts of sarcasm can possibly result in inflammatory situations. Not responsible for keyboard violence, spittle on the monitor, irrational responses mistaken for momentary brilliance, one-sided rages against hypocrisy or individual members or unintended consequences such as poor personal hygiene and bad spelling. Please fasten your seatbelts and put your trays in an upright position.Editor's note: As part of our Classic Film Festival featuring Civil War movies, you can see Gettysburg (1993) at the museum on Saturday, October 20, 2012. Inspired by the film festival, we’re taking you behind the scenes of Gettysburg with guest blogger Brian James Egen. He is the program development officer at The Henry Ford.
"Tom Chamberlain" (C. Thomas Howell) left and the "Cocky Lieutenant" (Brian James Egen, author of this blog post) right during a break in the filming on the Little Round Top set during filming.
The movie Gettysburg, based on the 1975 Pulitzer Prize winning classic novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, was an on-again, off-again film project, almost since the day it was published. In 1992, after ten years of lobbying studios and distributors, writer/director Ron Maxwell was able to collaborate with Ted Turner and Turner Pictures to finance the film. On July 20, 1992, principal photography commenced in and around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Although some of the film's scenes were shot on the actual battlefield (a truly unprecedented National Park Service allowance), the vast majority of combat and opposing fire sequences were filmed on set locations three miles west of town. I spent six weeks on the film and, although was I was originally hired as a background extra, my participation culminated in being cast in a speaking role as the "Cocky Lieutenant."
Brian James Egen left with the film’s on-set historical advisor, Brian Pohanka, who also doubled as Brigadier General Alexander Webb. An author, historian, and battlefield preservationist, Pohanka consulted for other Civil War films including Glory, Cold Mountain, and Gods and Generals. Mr. Pohanka died of cancer in 2005.
Having graduated college in the spring of that year and recently been hired as a part-time historical presenter at The Henry Ford (Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village), I applied for a leave of absences to participate in this long-awaited film project. Arriving in mid-August, I participated in what as known as "Pickett's Charge Week" that was highlighted by filming the advance of Pickett's Division from Spangler's Woods along Seminary Ridge to Emmitsburg Road across the same ground as the original participants.
The initial advance of the Pickett's Charge scenes was filmed at the original location on the battlefield. Here, a portion of the 3,000 extras march at the double-quick up to the fence bordering the Emmitsburg Road. For the tourists and those passing by, it was a moment they will probably never forget.
I have never had a more intimate experience with history as I did the day we filmed that scene on the actual battlefield. The step-off point for Pickett's division started in the hollow west of Alexander's Knoll wherein Cemetery Ridge (the Federal position) could not initially be seen by the Confederate soldiers. As I, along with nearly 3,000 extras, marched toward the Federal position and out of the hollow, we could at first see the tops of the taller monuments, then the top of the infamous Copse of Trees, then the Federal regimental monuments, the fences, and finally the stone wall where the Federal Second Corps was positioned. Sans the monuments and markers and with thousands of armed men waiting for them, this is what the original soldiers would have viewed as they approached—for many this was their last view. As we proceeded toward the Emmitsburg Road (our stopping point for filming), I was brought to tears—overwhelmed by the inculcation of the moment, location, and facile understanding of the historical event we were replicating. The remainder of the Pickett's Charge scenes were filmed on the set location.
"Cocky Lieutenant" (Brian James Egen) left, "Tom Chamberlain" (C. Thomas Howell) center, and Captain Ellis Spear (Donal Logue) rehearse scene 68. This is the first scene in which the "Cocky Lieutenant" speaks, "Colonel, it seems to me all the fighting is on the other side of the hill."
In the last part of August, I participated in the filming of General John Buford (played by Sam Elliot) cavalry scenes as part of the Federal First Corps infantry. On September 2, production shifted to film Colonel Joshua Chamberlain (played by Jeff Daniels) and the 20th Maine Infantry—nearly half of the movie's storyline. A general call went out to the 250 remaining core group of extras that six men were needed to help flesh-out the "officer’s corps" of the 20th Maine. Borrowing some of the necessary officer accouterments, I applied for and obtained selection as one of the six.
On September 14, believing my excitement and participation could not be rivaled, Assistant Director Skip Cosper approached another young officer and I, asking if we, "would care to audition for Ron [Maxwell] for the role of the 'Cocky Lieutenant'?" Of course, the answer was yes, and my counterpart and I were given three script scenes to memorize that feature the "Cocky Lieutenant." Two days later we auditioned for director Ron Maxwell, saying the lines to a tree. Subsequently, I was chosen for the role and finished the rest of the filming in my part. Although I was involved in nearly every 20th Maine Infantry scene in the movie, there were three scenes that I had speaking lines all of which were with Jeff Daniels portraying Colonel Joshua Chamberlain.
Copy of a collodion wet plate process photograph taken of the majority of the Federal cast in front of the Leister House (General Meade's headquarters) set building. "Tom Chamberlain" (C. Thomas Howell), "General Winfield S. Hancock" (Brian Mallon), "Colonel Joshua Chamberlain" (Jeff Daniels), and "Lieutenant Pitzer" (Bill Campbell) are around the table. Ken Burns, who had a cameo appearance as General Hancock's Aid, stands to the right of the table with his hand in his blouse. Brian James Egen stands to the right of Ken Burns. This image was used in the opening title sequence of the film.
Filming wrapped on September 30th, with the final scene filmed being the last scene in the movie wherein brothers Joshua and Tom Chamberlain embrace—and yes, that was the real sunset in that scene.
The entire experience was exceptional and informative in many ways and helped fuel my interest in history and film making. I met many people on set that have become life-long colleagues and friends in the field of history. My brother and uncle were able to participate in some of the filming which added to the memorable experience of making of this monumental film.
The back view of the Lutheran Theological Seminary set building used as a backdrop for the first day battle scenes where Federal General Buford’s Cavalry and General Reynolds's Infantry held back the Confederate attack depriving them of the high ground. This scaled version of the Seminary building was built on a farm about 17 miles west of Gettysburg where the large battle scenes could be staged.
Brian James Egen is the Program Development Officer at The Henry Ford. In August 2011, he was appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to the Michigan Historical Commission and recently appointed chairman of Michigan’s Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee.TV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place.
Black Jesus Black Jesus Black Jesus B- Black Jesus Black Jesus B- B- Black Jesus Season 1
The greatest trick Aaron McGruder ever pulled was making a show called Black Jesus utterly non-controversial.
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When Adult Swim announced McGruder, the far-left provocateur behind The Boondocks, would be working on a Black Jesus series, it called to mind an early episode of his last project: “A Huey Freeman Christmas,” in which the title character, a 10-year-old radical, stages a Christmas play named The Adventures Of Black Jesus. The play features the talents of Quincy Jones, a samurai, and, of course, a black Jesus, all while instigating conflict within the placid suburb of Woodcrest. It might have been fair to assume that Black Jesus would produce similar levels of uproar. Instead, even Bill Donahue was cool with it—the worst thing the president of the Catholic League had to say about the show was that its version of Jesus was a “mixed bag.”
And that’s a pretty fair critical assessment of Black Jesus. At the end of its first season, it’s basically a low-key, ideologically family-friendly sitcom with a bit more plot and a lot more cursing and weed. This version of Jesus, as played by Gerald “Slink” Johnson, is just a nice dude who wants everyone to be a little nicer to each other, and to themselves (and maybe also give him the last hit on the blunt). If Jesus Christ, Our Lord And Savior returned to Earth and decided to just kick it with his homies and do good work in his community, so what?
Johnson’s easygoing energy does a lot to anchor the other characters surrounding Jesus, who are all pretty basic archetypes otherwise—Boonie the lazy loser (Corey Holcomb), Trayvon the nerd (Andrew Bachelor), Maggie the social media-obsessed gossip (Kali Hawk), and Fish the ex-con (Andra Fuller). Almost all of the actors have decent comic chops, and their characters deepen just enough over the course of the season to justify a little emotional investment. But the crucial players in this cast are the villains. Charlie Murphy and John Witherspoon are both hilariously grumpy and acerbic as Vic the landlord and Lloyd the bum, respectively, and McGruder accordingly forces them into increasingly close proximity. (A late-season reference to Vic and Lloyd as The Odd Couple reads like a cruel tease of what the show might have been.)
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Though the first episode serves primarily to introduce Jesus and his crew, the rest of the season explores a single, ongoing plot about their attempt to start a community garden in Compton (to help their neighbors and also grow weed). The obstacles to getting the garden up and running are increasingly ridiculous, but they mostly serve to provide a reason for the cast to get slightly worked up—the back half of the season is surprisingly successful in establishing the show’s vibe, but the finale’s attempt to seriously raise the stakes and bring the story to a climax just feels out of place and forced by comparison.
In fact, even with longer-term plots, Black Jesus is so casual that it sometimes feels as if the show is deploying a sitcom reset button at the end of every episode (or at least the episodes sometimes blur together). That makes sense, since classic sitcoms often read as the biggest influence on the series (there’s literally a “let’s put on a show” episode), particularly in Mike Clattenburg’s direction, which somehow injects a goofy, borderline Looney Tunes-like energy into the proceedings while remaining decidedly unhurried.
Black Jesus’ reliance on some of those tropes allows the show to simply run a lot of standard Christian iconography through a mashup of Pineapple Express and Good Times. Though Vic questions whether Jesus is who he says he is, the show never really threatens to explore this rather dark possibility, and never suggests that ”Pops” doesn’t have a master plan for everyone. Thankfully, as much as McGruder and Clattenburg buy into the ideas of Jesus, that master plan does not include full-on biblical retelling or Boondocks-style political humor. Far from radical, this is a late-period Common or Talib Kweli album: It’ll make you feel good for a while if you like what it’s selling, but it’s certainly not making any big statements.
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Besides, nothing ever really feels important enough to get anyone on this show to put their joint down, let alone protest. For the most part, Black Jesus is a pleasant, relatively mindless high, and like an eager-to-please stoner, it’s generally fun to hang out with for 20 minutes at a time. In “A Huey Freeman Christmas,” The Adventures Of Black Jesus play only goes forward because of Mr. Uberwitz, an “irresponsible white person” whose unthinkingly reactive liberal politics lead him to give Huey full creative control before losing his job over the play. That almost a decade later the same concept has produced something so inoffensive, easygoing, and responsible suggests that, just maybe, that irresponsible white person did something right.Submitted by Charles Hugh Smith from Of Two Minds
Some Thoughts On Investing In The "Bottom" In Housing
Investor buying has helped put a floor under the housing market. The rental housing market is currently robust, but that is dependent on a highly artificial economy supported by unprecedented government stimulus and transfers.
In my previous entry on housing's presumptive "bottom," ( The Housing Recovery: Based on What? June 20, 2012), I showed that the conventional foundations of the housing market were impaired: demand was weakened by demographics and declining income/employment, and supply was still well above the organic growth of new household formation.
The housing "Bulls" who think the millions of young people living in basements can afford to buy a house despite having high student debt, little job security and declining incomes are either delusional or they are studiously ignoring the causal relation between buying a house and qualifying for a conventional mortgage, i.e. the financial factors of current debt loads, income, the need for a down payment, etc.
The majority of wage earners have seen real incomes decline and most households have high debt levels.
Not buying a house is a choice for a relatively few who qualify but who choose to rent. The vast majority of people who do qualify to own a home by conventional standards already own a home (65% of all households). Those who don't own generally do not qualify due to insufficient income, heavy debt loads, poor credit, etc.
There are two significant pools of buyers, however, who have become very active in the U.S. and Canadian real estate markets: domestic and overseas investors. Their buying has soaked up quite a bit of inventory--up to 40% of all home purchases in some areas have been all cash, a transaction that typifies investor buying rather than young people moving out of basements.
Each pool of investors is motivated by different forces. Domestically, the Federal Reserve's ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) has turned cash into trash, and investors desperate for a return above 2% without the risks of the stock market casino have flooded into the rental housing market.
In California, roughly 30% of all house purchases have been for cash (investors). Some may be planning to improve and then "flip" the house as the market improves (the housing bubble redux strategy), while others are assembling a portfolio of rental properties.
I recently came across a local real estate listing in a desirable Bay Area (Northern California) location (near a University of California campus) for a multi-unit rental building: $4.9 million for 40 units, with a net of all expenses of $150,000 (not counting depreciation or tax benefits). That's a 3% return on a cash purchase, but the real yield is much higher if the buy is made with a 35% cash down payment and 65% mortgage. Regardless of the financing, the yield instantly doubles with depreciation and basic tax benefits, and could even be higher in some circumstances.
The higher yield and relatively low risk of owning rentals in a high-demand area make real estate more attractive than other investments such as 10-year bonds or dividends. As a bonus, if housing does recover, there is the potential for a capital gain.
The appeal of rental housing is understandable, and it has long been a favored investment for households (as opposed to institutional investors). According to a March 1996 report from the Census Bureau (I couldn't locate any more recent data), 92% of the nation's rental housing was owned by individual investors. In other words, owning rental property has long been a localized "Mom and Pop" enterprise.
Here is a Quick Fact Sheet on rentals in the U.S. from the National Multi-Housing Council (NMHC). According to this data, there are about 40 million households in rental housing and 78 million households in owner-occupied housing.
Owning rental property as an investment is not like owning a bond or stock or gold. Housing is a "real-world" investment that irrevocably decays with time. Heaters fail in the dead of winter, the roof eventually needs to be replaced, the yard must be maintained, and rapacious local governments generally view property owners as tax donkeys who they can load with ever-higher property taxes unless they are restrained by Prop 13-type limits.
Rental housing is also a "people business:" some tenants might disturb other tenants, others might not pay the rent, and so on. A renter is a customer, though newly minted landlords often seem to regard the tenant as an ATM machine whose only function in life is paying the rent.
The point here is the higher yield promised by rental property must be earned. Those with no experience in rental housing will learn this the hard way. All the rosy projections of steady profits vanish if vacancies rise above a very low level.
The price of rentals, like almost everything, is set on the margins. If the inventory of rentals rises above demand, then prices will eventually decline. In areas with limited inventory and strong demand (Manhattan, San Francisco, etc.), rents are generally high and the rental properties fetch a premium.
In areas without such geographical constraints, the market for rentals might not be so favorable.
In other words, it's quite possible to lose money buying and managing rental housing. There is nothing guaranteed about the return, as there are so many inputs and variables. It can be a profitable business, but that is not guaranteed.
In this chart, we can see the decline in rental income as marginal buyers became homeowners in the housing bubble, and the subsequent rise in rental income as former homeowners returned to the rental housing market.
But this rise in rental income occurred in an era that has been distorted by unprecedented Federal transfer payments, stimulus, etc., and unprecedented intervention in capital and credit markets by the Federal Reserve. The total sum of "extra money" borrowed (or printed) and injected into the economy exceeds $8 trillion, and this does not count banking-sector backstops and guarantees. The U.S. economy was not allowed to experience a "burn the deadwood and rejuvenate the forest" recession, and demand for housing, owner-occupied and rental alike, has been artificially supported by near-zero interest rates, enormous deficit spending and transfer payments.
We can see some of the consequences of borrowing and spending $1.5 trillion a year in these charts. The first chart is employee compensation, wages and salaries. It has recovered smartly from its shallow recessionary trough and has risen above 2007 levels.
One would hope that borrowing and spending trillions of dollars would support employment, but the question raised here is whether the stimulus required to keep employment aloft is sustainable.
Here is a chart of personal transfers, cash transferred by the government to individuals. This has risen by $1 trillion a year in a decade, and roughly $400 billion since late 2007.
If we subtract transfer payments from real personal income, we get a more realistic snapshot of the household economy: minus government transfers, personal income is still about $400 billion below its pre-cression peak.
Thus the rental housing market has yet to experience a "real recession." When it does, household formation may well decline or even go negative and rents may well decline as demand falls and supply of rentals rises as millions of previously owner-occupied units go on the market as rentals.
There are a number of potential (but by no means guaranteed) secondary forces that may influence rents and the value of rental property.
1. Some new landlords may realize the business isn't as easy as expected. Some may decide to cut their losses by dumping their property back on the market.
2. Investors who planned to improve and "flip" the unit may find they can't unload the property, and so they become reluctant (and thus very possibly incompetent) landlords.
3. A peculiar feedback loop may arise as the rental market is flooded with new investor-owned inventory. Rents start declining as landlords tire of vacancy-created losses, and that pushes the value of all homes in the area down, owner-occupied and rentals alike.
4. The trend to "double up" and rent out rooms could go mainstream. These "informal" rentals are already standard practice in high-rent areas such as those found around large universities and geographically constrained markets. For example, it is not unusual for four co-eds to share a 2-bedroom apartment.
Outside these high-demand markets, people who lose their job or see their hours cut to the point they cannot afford their own apartment will move in with family or friends. Anecdotally, I have heard of Mom clearing out the dining room for a returning son and his family.
There are roughly 19 million vacant dwellings in the U.S., of which around 4 million are second homes and a million or two are on the market. Let's stipulate that several million more are in areas with very low demand (i.e. few want to live there year-round). Let's also stipulate that several million more are in the "shadow inventory" of homes that are neither on the market nor even officially in the foreclosure pipeline, i.e. zombie homes.
Even if you account for 9 million of these homes, that still leaves 10 million vacant dwellings in the U.S. which could be occupied. That means 1 in 12 of all dwellings are vacant. Even if you discount this by half, that still leaves 5 million vacant dwellings that could be occupied. Given that the total rental market is 40 million households, that constitutes a very large inventory of supply that remains untapped.
Lastly, it is important to note that the ratio of residents to dwellings is rather low in the U.S., with millions of single-person households and large homes occupied by one or two people. The potential pool of existing homeowners who could enter the "informal" rental market by offering bedrooms, basements and even enclosed garages for rent is extremely large, and that is a difficult-to-count "shadow" inventory of potential rentals.
All of these forces will play out differently in each neighborhood, town and city, depending on the inventory of rentals, the geographical constraints, the employment picture and a host of other factors. The key point here is that the rental market's current robustness is at least partially dependent on unprecedented government stimulus/transfers. The current strength may be temporary rather than permanent.
The second take-away is that demand could weaken considerably in a "real recession" even as supply increases due to millions of investor-owned properties hitting the rental market and the "informal rental" market expanding as people with mostly empty houses seek additional income or accept relatives/friends with a need for shelter.The Norwegian Police Service (Norwegian: Politi- og lensmannsetaten) is the Norwegian civilian police agency. It consists of a central National Police Directorate, seven specialty agencies and twelve police districts. The government agency is subordinate to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security and has 16 |
in the gym do this all the time. Unfortunately, so do high school football players under the often less-than-qualified guidance of their coaches. After all, it's very cool if your entire defensive line is "squatting" 500 pounds. As a general rule, if the bar is so heavy that you cannot squat below parallel with it and stand back up, it's too heavy to have on your back.
The below-parallel squat is the best exercise in the entire catalog for whole-body strength, power, balance, coordination, bone density, joint integrity, and mental toughness -- good things to develop if you don't have them. Learn to do them correctly, start out light and go up in weight a little each workout, and watch the improvement happen faster than it ever has before.
Mark Rippetoe is a powerlifter, trainer, coach and author of Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training.Attorneys working for the Democratic National Committee are hoping a federal judge will throw out a lawsuit filed by a bunch of Bernie Sanders supporters who believe they got duped by the DNC.
‘The DNC was biased in favor of one candidate – Hillary Clinton – from the beginning and throughout the process,” the plaintiffs wrote in their original lawsuit. The complaint, which was filed in federal court in Florida, alleges fraud, as well as negligence as it relates to a Russian Hack on the DNC server. The Bernie backers contend that the trove of DNC emails posted by Wikileaks further proves that the Democratic Party was working against Bernie Sanders from the start.
However, in a motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed this week, attorneys with the DNC fired back. They believe that the lawsuit is completely without merit, and that the Bernie supporters are using “litigation as a political weapon against a national party (and to support their SuperPAC) in the middle of an election.” They also don’t believe the Bernie backers have standing to even bring the lawsuit.
The DNC attorneys also get a bit creative in their effort to get this lawsuit thrown out. They claim that all of the named plaintiffs already knew that the DNC was biased when they donated — so therefore how could they have been duped if they knew? We are not joking, that was one of their actual claims in the motion to dismiss.
Here is a quote form the DNC’s motion:Under the new military strategy developed by Mr. Rumsfeld and the military leadership, the armed forces must prepare to win decisively against one enemy, which includes fighting all the way to an aggressor's capital and toppling the government. Should a second adversary try to challenge the United States at the same time, American forces must be prepared to halt that enemy's offensive, but not necessarily fight to a conclusive victory, as well as carry out other duties, including homeland defense and peacekeeping.
Bringing military strategy and force structure into line has a significant political impact for civilians and the military at the Pentagon. ''The building is loudly in agreement,'' one military officer said, as it argues for full financing of the 2002 military budget now before Congress.
Still, some difficult decisions have been postponed.
Although a sweeping military review required by Congress every four years is due by Sept. 30, Mr. Rumsfeld has given the services until March to answer questions about joint training, money for housing and other personnel issues. The fate of several major weapons programs also remains undecided.
And even before Congress has approved a military budget for 2002, the Pentagon is busy writing its budget request for 2003, which President Bush will propose in January. The armed services are writing that budget under fiscal guidance signed by Mr. Rumsfeld last month that suggests military spending in 2003 of $339 billion to $348 billion, rising to more than $400 billion by 2007, officials said.
The administration is requesting $329 billion for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. Many Democrats have already said that the figure is too high; many Republicans, on the other hand, want to spend the money on different parts of the military, and many at the Pentagon say the figure is tens of billions shy of what they need to modernize the military and build a missile defense system.
Although the results of Positive Match are contained in a report stamped ''Secret,'' a half-dozen senior Defense Department and military officials agreed to discuss the war game on the condition that they not be identified.
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Among the situations in the war game, commanders tested whether the armed forces could decisively defeat one potential adversary, North Korea, while repelling an attack from Iraq. The planners also looked at how military operations would be affected if another event, such as terrorists attacking New York City with chemical weapons, took place at the same time.
The official report on Positive Match said the men and women of the armed forces were subject to ''a high level of moderate risk'' in carrying out the new strategy, which was acceptable to the commanders.
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Had they been ordered to carry out the old strategy -- to win decisively in two theaters almost simultaneously -- the risk would have been extremely high and would have been unacceptable to the commanders. Lowering the risk would have required increasing the budget to pay for more troops and weapons, or finding some significantly new, efficient way to fight.
To be sure, Positive Match, which was conducted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the war fighting commanders, found serious shortages in strategic lift to move forces around the globe and in the broad area of communications and intelligence, officials said. Even so, the findings have allowed a consensus to emerge, with all parties to the debate able to claim victory.
For several months, the central argument at the Pentagon had been over whether America could risk cutting its forces now to finance expensive new weapons the administration says would counter threats emerging in decades to come.
Today, the military can claim success that the imbalance between strategy and force size is being rectified -- and through downsizing the strategy, not downsizing force levels, or at least not in this budget cycle.
And Mr. Rumsfeld can claim success that the right questions are being asked about how best to prepare the military for all these risks anticipated decades ahead, and that the vast bureaucracy of the Pentagon is being pointed in that new direction.
The only public statement on Positive Match was a passing reference by Mr. Rumsfeld today in a Pentagon news conference.
''There was recently a war game that was conducted that used some different approaches that we've been working with,'' he said. ''And there isn't a doubt in my mind but that that approach is going to create some significant changes as to how we arrange ourselves, how we size our force, how we arrange war plans. And that is, I think, something that will be -- when we look back, we'll see it as being very significant.''[This is the second entry from the "Book of Anointings," a record of second anointings administered in the Nauvoo Temple.] [For readability's sake, I have reformatted the entry into smaller paragraphs and have standardized spelling and punctuation. An original, unedited transcript of this entry can be found in David John Buerger's The Mysteries of Godliness, pp. 88-90.]
Sunday, January 11, 1846
31 minutes to 7 p.m. Assembled in President Brigham Young's room, no. 1, in the attic story of the Lord's house: President Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Orson Hyde, Parley P. Pratt, Orson Pratt, Willard Richards, John Taylor, Amasa Lyman, Newel K. Whitney, George Miller, Edmund Ellsworth, Mary Young, Vilate Kimball, Leonora Taylor, Elizabeth Ann Whitney, and Elizabeth Ellsworth. Brother John Taylor started the hymn, "This Earth Was Once a Garden Place," all being clothed in priestly garments. President Brigham Young prayed, all having knelt around the altar. Previous to prayer they all arose, sang a hymn, and offered up the signs of the holy priesthood. Then Brother Heber C. Kimball proceeded to anoint and consecrate President Brigham Young a king and a priest unto the most high God, over the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and over the whole house of Israel: Brother Brigham Young, I pour this holy consecrated oil upon your head and anoint thee a king and a priest of the most high God, over the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and unto all Israel. And I anoint thine head, that thy brain may be healthy and active
and quick to think and to understand and to direct thy whole body; and I anoint thine eyes, that they may see and perceive,
and that thou mayest not be deceived in what thou beholdest,
and that thy sight may never fail thee; and I anoint thine ears, that they may be quick to hear and communicate to thine
understanding,
and that thou mayest hear the secret deliberations of thine enemies,
and thereby thou shalt be enabled to overreach their designs; and I anoint thy nose, that thou mayest scent
and relish the fragrance of the good things of the earth; and I anoint thy mouth, that thou mayest be enabled to speak the great things of
God and confound all the wisdom of man,
and put to nought all who shall rise up to oppose thee in all countries where
thou goest,
for thou shalt build up the kingdom of God among many people and in the midst
of mighty nations. So thy glory shall be established. And whomsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whomsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven; for there shall be given unto thee crowns, and kingdoms, and dominions. And thou shalt receive all thine heart shall desire, and thy soul shall be satisfied with a multitude of blessings which thou shalt receive; for princes shall bow at thy feet and deliver unto thee their treasures, and thou shalt teach them the principles of salvation. And I seal thee up unto eternal life, that thou shalt come forth in the morn of the first resurrection and receive all these blessings in their fulness, and thou shalt attain unto the eternal Godhead and receive a fulness of joy, and glory, and power; and that thou mayest do all things whatsoever is wisdom that thou shouldst do, even if it be to create worlds and redeem them. So shall thy joy be full, to the praise and glory of God. Amen.
Elder Heber C. Kimball then anointed Mary Ann Young a queen and priestess unto her husband (Brigham Young), in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in the house of Israel: Sister Mary Ann Young, I pour upon thine head this holy consecrated oil and seal upon thee all the blessings of the everlasting priesthood in conjunction with thine husband; and I anoint thee to be a queen and priestess unto thine husband, over the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And thou shalt be heir to all the blessings which are sealed upon him, inasmuch as thou dost obey his counsel; and thou shalt receive glory, honor, power, and exaltation in his exaltation. And thou shalt be a strength in thy mind, for thou shalt have visions and manifestations of the Holy Spirit. And the time shall come that angels shall visit thee, and minister unto thee, and teach thee, and in absence of thy husband shall comfort thee and make known his situation. Thou shalt be a wise counsellor to many of thy sex, and they shall look unto thee for precept and for example. Thou shalt be noted and honored for thy generosity and the freedom and good feelings with which thou shalt relieve the wants of the distressed, and the discretion with which thou shalt act in thy sphere in all things. And I seal thee up unto eternal life, that thou shalt come forth in the morning of the first resurrection and inherit with him all the honors, glories, and power of eternal lives, and that thou shalt attain unto the eternal Godhead. So thy exaltation shall be perfect and thy glory be full, in a fulness of power and exaltation. And the glory, honor, and power shall be ascribed unto the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
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FORT DRUM — Riding in a Humvee with soldiers. Going over a rappelling wall. Sitting in the cockpit of an Army helicopter.
It was a meaningful day for Anthony “A.J.” Plyter, getting a taste of the military life that may have been taken out of his reach.
“It was a lot of fun,” he said. “They made me feel like I had been doing it forever.”
Anthony, 16, of Williamson, about 30 minutes from Rochester, was able to spend the day on Fort Drum on July 26 through the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
His initial hopes of serving in the military were shaken after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma last April, a form of cancer that impacts the body’s immune system. Though Anthony has been in remission since December, doctors have told him that the next few years are the most likely for the cancer to re-emerge.
“They’re keeping close tabs on him,” said Anthony’s mother, Melissa.
Anthony said his wish was inspired by his father Mark and brother Joshua, who both serve in the Army, along with older relatives who have served in the Air Force and the Navy.
“I wanted to see the military lifestyle and the things they’re able to do,” Anthony said.
The request was the first of its kind for Cheryl S. Unger, program services director for the foundation’s Western New York office.
“In the beginning, we weren’t sure who to reach out to,” she said. After being connected with the 10th Mountain Division’s chain of command, she learned the post was fully backing the project.
“We’re so appreciative of all they did,” she said. “His one true wish was to do this, and they made his day special.”
From the first contact, Ms. Unger said it took about eight months to coordinate the plan.
The day before going on post, Anthony and his family visited Bradley’s Surplus, which outfitted him with a full uniform in preparation for his day.
“It kind of made me feel like I was there on the first day of boot camp,” Anthony said.
His day on post began by being sworn in as an honorary soldier by the division’s acting senior commander, Brig. Gen. Paul Bontrager.
He was driven by Army Humvee with his brothers and Anthony’s day continued with a stop at the post’s testing area for the Expert Infantry Badge, where soldiers had him throw a model grenade and put on camouflage and taught him to assemble a radio.
Following a meal with soldiers at a post dining facility, he was taken to the post’s Air Assault School, where he learned to rappel and went down a 45-foot wall.
Despite some nerves, Anthony said he got some words of encouragement from the soldiers around him.
“We’ve got you up here and we’ve got you down here,” Anthony recalled being told.
From there, he traveled to Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield, where he was able to sit in the cockpit of a few different aircraft, and fly in a simulator.
The soldiers there presented him with a helmet used by helicopter pilots, along with a photo of a helicopter they used during a recent deployment.
Returning to Gen. Bontrager’s office, Anthony was presented with a few patches and ceremonial coins as a final farewell.
“I was wondering how it was going to go, and what they were going to do, and they made it real, as authentic as they could,” Mrs. Plyter said. “It’s a peek into a soldier’s life, and it’s great A.J. got to experience that.”
After his day at Fort Drum, Anthony and his family spent a few days in the Thousand Islands region, touring places such as Boldt Castle in Alexandria Bay.
Recounting his time on post, Anthony said he was grateful for his day and for the soldiers he was able to meet.
“It shows I’ve got a lot of support,” he said.
Anthony will have one more taste of the military life later this month.
On Aug. 25, he will receive a behind-the-scenes tour of the Army National Guard’s office in Rochester, where he will see military planes, meet with Guard members and receive his own flight suit.
In the meantime, Anthony is focused on his senior year of high school. In the future, Anthony said he hopes to go to college to study criminal justice.
For more information about Make-A-Wish programs, visit wish.org.HI. I'm John, owner and cook for the Juice Burger food truck.
Food trucks, food trucks, food trucks... they're on every street corner in every city you've ever been to. You'd think this fad would blow over already and we could just start going back into restaurants, right?!
Cradle-to-Cradle
Well it seems as though, at least for now, food trucks are here to stay. And for a darn good reason too. Mobile restaurants, up-cycled from old contractor vans, are among the most sustainable ways to start a business. They use very little energy, waste little, and with the right team and menu, can service just as many customers in the same amount of time as brick-and-mortar shops.
And because of how easy it is to be sustainable, my vision is to make Juice Burger one of the most thoroughly sustainable businesses in New England. This means sustainability from cradle-to-cradle (we're not talking about just curly light bulbs here). We're taking into account the entire lifecycle of our products - from when the tomato seeds were planted, to where the tomatoes go when you throw them away - in order to minimize the impact our business has on the world. Hopefully, eventually, it will be none.
Food
But we want to serve some tasty food too. In order to do this we're starting out small. Our war cry is "Sustainability, Technique, Simplicity." It's not as catchy as veni vedi vici, but it means a whole lot more. We have a simple menu, which allows us to hone our technique and make quite possibly perfect burgers and fries. We source nearly all our ingredients from local farms and markets, making us a farm-to-table food truck. And we don't do frills and gimmicks. We're just here to serve you tasty food and not leave a mess of the planet.
Where You Come In
Juice Burger needs your help to make this dream a reality. So far we have three key ingredients: a truck with a kitchen, people to cook, and all the proper licenses and permits. All we need is a little nudge to get the ball rolling by summer. We've won the bid for a permanent location in Portsmouth, NH so now we have to pay up. Right now all our money is tied up in the physical truck and we have to make good on our bid by April 30th. We're close, but not quite there, and with the $3,000 we raise from this project we'll be able to completely pay the bill and focus on what's really important: tasty freakin' burgs.
Thanks so much for your contribution and we hope to see you all this summer!
Incentives
This is a bar cart. I can customize them however you like, but this is the basic style
chair
The music in the video is "Paris" by Magic Man and is the property of Magic Man. I do not claim ownership of the song nor am I attempting to use it directly for monetary gain.As President Donald Trump’s second week in office comes to a close, Seth Meyers told viewers Thursday night that it has been “as chaotic as his first.” And nothing was more bizarre than Trump’s introduction to Black History Month on Wednesday.
“Trump commemorated Black History Month by praising abolitionist Frederick Douglass,” the Late Night host said, “but from his comments, it seemed pretty clear that, not only did Trump not know who Frederick Douglass was, he also seemed to think that Douglass, who died in 1895, might still be alive.”
As Trump said, Douglass has been getting “more and more” recognition for the “amazing job” he’s been doing. “Keep your eye on that Fred Douglass kid, he’s going places,” Meyers said as Trump. Remarkably, White House press secretary Sean Spicer “also thought Douglass might be still alive.”
“Who among us wouldn’t panic if asked to recite stuff we learned in high school,” Meyers said, “but how did you not have time between the president’s comments and your press briefing to Google Frederick Douglass? And not his whole biography, but simple stuff like, ‘Is Frederick Douglass alive?’”
Later, Meyers said “nothing has been more troubling than the incompetence Trump’s administration displayed in rolling out his controversial travel ban on refugees in seven Muslim-majority countries,” revisiting an issue he took on earlier in the week. The host went after Spicer once more for denying that the policy is a “ban” on anyone.
“Yeah, where could the lying, dishonest media possibly get the idea that this is a ban?” Meyers asked, before showing multiple videos of Spicer, Trump, and Kellyanne Conway using that term. “That’s a classic case of gotcha journalism, in that they gotcha on camera saying ‘ban’ like a million times.”
Finally, during a commentary on Trump’s education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos, who may end up getting blocked by members of the president’s own party, Meyers came back to where he started.
“Republicans want to defund our schools and roll back public education, which could be disastrous,” he said, “because then, you end up not knowing who Frederick Douglass is!”Who Loses Under Power Plant Cap-and-Trade Programs?
NBER Working Paper No. 20808
Issued in December 2014
NBER Program(s):Environment and Energy Economics
This paper tests how a major cap-and-trade program, known as the NOx Budget Trading Program (NBP), impacted labor markets in the regions where it was implemented. The cap-and-trade program dramatically decreased levels of NOx emissions and added substantial costs to energy producers. Using a triple-differences approach that takes advantage of the geographic and time variation of the program as well as variation in industry energy-intensity levels, I examine how employment dynamics changed in manufacturing industries whose production process requires high levels of energy. After accounting for a variety of flexible state, county and industry trends, I find that employment in the manufacturing sector dropped by 1.3% as a result of the NBP. Young workers experienced the largest employment declines and earnings of newly hired workers fell after the regulation began. Employment declines are shown to have occurred primarily through decreased hiring rates rather than increased separation rates, thus mitigating the impact on incumbent workers.
Acknowledgments
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX
Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w20808
Published: Who Loses under Cap-and-Trade Programs? The Labor Market Effects of the NOx Budget Trading Program E. Mark Curtis Posted Online March 02, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00680
Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:L
by Daniel Borgströmaura Wells was arrested while attempting to attend a debate between Republican & Democrat gubernatorial candidates. The debate was held in San Rafael on October 12th, Tom Brokaw moderating. When Laura was on the steps of the hall, a private security guard recognized her as the Green Party candidate for governor."You know, don't you? We know you know!" a guard told her. "There's a law that a candidate for the office can't be at the debate unless they're in the debate." And Laura said, "No. There's a rule???"The existence of this dubious law has not been confirmed, but it was zealously enforced. Laura had a ticket for the event, given to her by a supporter, but police said the tickets were non-transferable.Private security guards handcuffed Laura and turned her over to San Rafael police who took her away in a squad car. She was cited for trespassing at a private party and ordered to appear in court on Nov. 2nd, which is election day.This is the first time Laura has ever been arrested.In New York and some other states, third party candidates are invited to participate in debates; in others they are excluded from participating. But banning candidates from merely attending seems truly bizarre. It's hardly the sort of thing that should happen in a country which is so diligently engaged in exporting democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan.One might expect those ever-vigilant watchdogs of our democracy, the mass media, to be all over this thing. Front page headline news stories. Outrage expressed in editorials. Nothing less. Actually, several Bay Area newspapers did report the incident; giving it a brief article and a photo. That was it.Some alternative news services covered the arrest. Nationwide coverage was given on "Democracy Now!" hosted by Amy Goodman and aired on the Pacifica network and affiliated stations. Unlike the corporate media, Democracy Now and Pacifica Radio are listener supported. They report things like this. They also reported that part of Laura Wells' platform is the establishment of a California state-run bank as a way to help free the state from Wall Street.Laura Wells is a former financial and business analyst, and her proposed state bank has a precedent ; it's not a new, untried concept. North Dakota has had a state bank for over 90 years, Laura points out, and is now the only state with a budget surplus and not a deficit. It's a concept that hasn't much interested politicians who are tied to the financial giants of Wall Street, nor has it gotten much coverage from either the corporate media or even from most progressive journalists, who seem mainly absorbed in following the ups and downs and proposals of the Democrats.In previous elections Laura has run for state comptroller on the Green Party ticket. In 2002 she received over 400,000 votes. Considering the difficulties of a 3rd party candidate getting publicity from the press or getting funds or anything else, I'd say that number of votes was phenomenal.So why wasn't Laura invited to participate in the debate? She might raise the proposal of a state bank, and other unwanted thoughts. Nevertheless, it still remains something of a mystery as to why she and other 3rd party candidates are excluded from sitting in audiences at debates. Searching websites, I found this bizarre suggestion:"Same thing happened to Ralph Nader every time he showed up with a valid ticket at a presidential debate. Excluded candidates are not allowed to sit in the audience because the TV producers need to show audience shots, and it would be too awkward to have an excluded candidate sitting there. Their faces are essentially banned images."Is that the way it is? Probably. But not totally. All six gubernatorial candidates were invited to participate in a debate California State University, Sacramento on October 28th. That was helpful, but far from enough to make it a level playing field.DANIEL BORGSTRÖMOctober 2010RELATED ARTICLES ABOUT LAURA WELLS, GREEN PARTY CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNORNORTH DAKOTA STATE BANKARTICLES ABOUT LAURA WELLS' ARRESTCORPORATE MEDIA ARTICLES
Labels: Laura Wells Green Party gubernatorial candidate arrestedSimon Armitage writes a Letter to London
Dear London
I've applied for a restraining order requiring that you remain two hundred miles from Huddersfield at all times and at least one hour fifty eight minutes from Wakefield Westgate station. Sorry I've had to take this draconian measure. You know how proud I am to call you a friend, London, and I admit to being a little star-struck on occasions by your fame and glamour, a little turned on even by your power and swank. We've come long way since I drew you as a target on a wall-map of Britain and threw darts into your bull's eye. I'm not digging for gold, filing for custody of our nation's greatest institutions. I don't want the Bank of England relocating to Rotherham or the Albert Hall rebuilding on a brown field site next to the M62. What I need is my space, London. I need my moors and valleys, my hills and escarpments, my rarefied air and my moral high ground. I need my own place.
We've been seeing a lot of each other recently, London, twice a week sometimes, and I couldn't bear to lose our walks by the river, our visits to galleries and theatres, our nights on the town. But I can't move in with you, London, I can't live in the spinning roulette wheel of your peoples and postcodes, and I'm asking you to respect the distance I need, and for you not to come here looking for me. Please don't send the long arms of your proposed high speed railway lines stretching this way, they'd only pull me in, make me part of your circle, drain the life out of me when what I like about us is our differences. And I'll be honest here, I'm not pretty in a morning. I need that one hour and fifty eight minutes to Kings Cross to straighten my face, to wake up, read the paper, drink an expensive takeaway coffee and to do the work I should have done the night before.
London, If you love and respect me as you say you do and want to shower me with gifts and see me thrive and be happy then just send the money in the post. But keep your distance, London. You stay south and I'll stay north, not coupled but attracted across two hundred miles of magnetic field.
Yours affectionately
Simon Armitage
YorkshireSo in light of a recent lull of work, I decided that I'd try my hand at some amateur cap-crafting to sort of rejuvenate the creative mindset (or something like that, as a motion designer by trade I like to pretend that what I'm doing actually interests me but it wears on you after a while). Researched a bunch of things, found the ideal materials that I was going to be using, and then sat around waiting for everything to arrive.Before I begin, this was an incredibly useful resource that I stumbled upon in my digging, in case anyone else wants to get into resin casting without the slightest degree of experience. It's very in-depth.I went ahead and followed the majority of the recommendations in this article regarding the specific products used. These included Quantum Silicones QM262 for the mold, Innovative Polymers IE3075 for the Polyurethne resin, and some cheap random beakers and wax-carving tools that have proven to be rather helpful.I decided to use the stock PBT caps from my Poker II since I'm missing one of them anyways, and I didn't know whether I'd lose a few brave caps in the process of experimentation. Went ahead and sculpted two caps to just experiment with, maybe half an hour invested into each of these.Didn't take pictures while I was pouring, since I don't have that many hands :vCut cardboard in a + pattern each with a lip to wrap around the side of the adjacent fold, and then used masking tape to secure each of the flaps. Then mixed and weighed the silicone with the reactor (?) and poured it in. 10:1 ratio by volume.Innovative Polymers recommends 8-12 hours for demold time, but I just left it overnight as I wanted to play it safe for the first run.After the first parts of the molds were set, flipped and cleaned up a bit, proceeded to make the second part of the mold. Used Super Sculpey to create channels to pour in the resin as well as allow for air to escape out the top. A little bit of a pain to clean off the resin afterwards, but it seemingly helped.The bottom part of the cap came out really clean in the mold! It's incredibly accurate; even the texture / markings on the inside of the cap were preserved.Rubber-banded these guys up in preparation for the resin pouring.The results! Not too bad, though the details don't really pop without some dramatic light. Perhaps its the material itself (without pigment), or maybe my detail work was too hesitant. Also, lots of bubbles.Here's where things didn't work out:As I figured might be a problem, even though the resin was coming out of the top channel the stems didn't form completely inside the mold. Going to have to perhaps widen the channel to allow better flow within the mold.Going to keep experimenting as time goes on.EDIT: Big thanks to Binge for all his documented trials with crafting, it really helped. Thanks to mkawa for convincing me to not explode myself with a pressure pot <3I tell you, the Careers section of Science magazine is a perpetual source of pain and aggravation. In the latest, Eleftherios Diamandis explains exactly what you need to do to be a success in science. The secret, apparently, is to be noticed, and the way to be noticed is…by doing exactly the same thing all the other lab rats on the exercise wheel are doing.
Be an excellent scholar. Publish well. Work hard. Communicate with the public and your peers. But a well-planned, long-range effort to ensure your visibility among those who have hiring responsibilities can be the deciding factor.
Wait, that last bit is important. So how do we increase our visibility with the people doing the hiring? Unfortunately, his answer is…work really hard. It’s about the most useless advice to scientists ever. Our problem is that we’re ridiculously over-worked as it is, and the useful advice for any new scientist is the opposite: learn to say no. Focus. Prioritize. Don’t forget that you’ve got a life outside the lab to live. But apparently it’s more important for Dr Diamandis to pat himself on the back really hard for working so much. I guess that’s one way to get noticed.
The sad thing is that he already knows that the demands of this profession are excessive. He’s just not aware of it.
I worked 16 to 17 hours a day, not just to make progress on the technology but also to publish our results in high-impact journals. How did I manage it? My wife—also a Ph.D. scientist—worked far less than I did; she took on the bulk of the domestic responsibilities. Our children spent many Saturdays and some Sundays playing in the company lobby. We made lunch in the break room microwave.
Let’s take that apart, shall we?
He’s not exceptional. 16 hour days aren’t unusual; I’d hoped that it would lighten up as I got more seniority, but it doesn’t, and now it’s long hours grading student papers on top of everything else. And it’s still ridiculous.
Add to those long hours the fact that in order to get a position at all, you’re expected to put in 9-10 years of college and grad school training. There’s more: in biology, you’re expected to do a post-doc or two, so make that 12-15 years of training before you can even apply for a real job.
A real job, that is, that typically pays about $50,000/year starting. And demands those 16 hour days. And does not have those strange concepts of “overtime” or even “vacation”.
There’s more! That job, once you get it, has a built-in clock. Five years later, you will be evaluated, and you will either be rewarded with tenure (yes, you get to keep your job! Now we also get to add a bunch of committee work to it), or…you’re fired. It’s very black or white. If you don’t make the cut, you get thrown right back onto the job market, only now you’ve got a black mark on your record, and you get to compete with people 5 years younger than you are.
I love what I do, teaching and developmental biology, but still — there has been an unrealistic and gradual ramping up of the requirements to do this work, and a steady decrease in the likelihood of actually succeeding at it. It does not help to have useful idiots praising the system and making 16 hour workdays seem normal. They shouldn’t be. They are the consequence of an anti-intellectual society that demands excessive sacrifices from scholars, that does not value academic work and cuts the rewards to the bone in a way that would not be tolerated if we tried to pull this crap on bus drivers or custodians or civil servants.
It also requires eliminating part of your humanity. You want family, kids, a life outside the lab? You need a wife to do that work for you. Now there’s a fine way to perpetuate sexist attitudes! Note how he phrases it, too: she worked far less than he did, as if the fact that he only came home to sleep didn’t vastly increase her work load at home.
But I can sympathize. I did exactly the same thing. When my wife and I graduated with Ph.D.s, we made a rational decision. I had better prospects for getting a job, biology paid better than psychology, she was more burned out on the academic life, we had a child and we clearly couldn’t both succeed in academia at the same time while raising a family. So I got got post-docs and applied for tenure-track jobs, while she put full time into raising the kids, and once they were a little older, did part-time adjunct work.
It was entirely reasonable. It was the only choice given the circumstances. But we ought to question the fucking premises.
Why are these jobs so incompatible with family life? This is life out of balance. As much as I love biology, I gave up significant participation in the life of my wife and children. Was this a good bargain? The older I get, the less I think so. I see young people going into these careers now, and what I want to say, with the benefit of hindsight, is “Don’t buy into the game. Demand that you get to live the life of a human being. Don’t let a goddamned grant proposal get in the way of spending evenings with your kids now.” But I also know the system will not reward people who defy the inhumanity of its demands. People, like Diamandis, who cheerfully accept the unacceptable, will advance.
We would have had to struggle even harder if my wife and I switched roles. But why? We have the same educational backgrounds — we attended the same university and grad school at the same time. She’s as smart as I am, or smarter — her grades were better than mine. She put the same |
years in an
artificial hell may one day become a reality.” And, according to researchers, that day could be quite soon.
Incredibly, this research is being championed by a doctor of philosophy at Oxford who is part of their official blog
called Practical Ethics.
Life extension itself is a controversial topic. The era of cyborgs
and transhumanism is fast approaching, as we will soon reach the
theoretical point of Singularity before 2045 when machine intelligence
is predicted to surpass that of humans. Current trends toward autonomous systems of war and the advancement of artificial intelligence are leaning toward a dystopian future. It has prompted
ethicists and international human rights organizations to urge restraint. The research being conducted at Oxford is likely to stir a fresh wave of indignation at the possibilities being considered.
Dr. Rebecca Roache and her research team at Oxford apparently seek to correct the inadequacies of sentencing applied to the most heninous criminals. The prime example given is the deranged parents of a four-year-old boy they horrifically tortured and killed – the pair received 30 years; a “laughably inadequate” sentence in Dr. Roache’s estimation.
If one only had the power to balance the scales, perhaps to inflict endless suffering and pain ….
Technology might hold the answer, as Dr. Roache has previously summarized in her article, “Enhanced punishment: can technology make life sentences longer?” Technology such as lifespan enhancement, mind uploading, altering perception of duration, and robot prison officers comprise several rings of potential hellish torment on earth for those deemed deserving of it.
Technology, then, offers (or will one day offer) untapped possibilities to make punishment for the worst criminals more severe without resorting to inhumane methods or substantially overhauling the current UK legal system. What constitutes humane treatment in the context of the suggestions I have made is, of course, debatable. But I believe it is an issue worth debating.
Her suggestions are indeed debatable. In fact, the extreme negatives surrounding the technologies of war and mind control often overshadow the great benefits that technology can offer. Secondly, the current criminal justice system, especially in the U.S., is already rife with cases of extreme injustice and torture. Nevertheless, Dr. Roache forges ahead seemingly comfortable with governments condoning futuristic methods of punishment to be imposed as prison officials see fit.
Dr. Roache suggests that psychoactive drugs which distort one’s sense of time could be more precisely developed and administered within the prison system. Such distortion could theoretically lead to a prisoner to feel as though they are condemned to eternal torment.
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As I was reading, I could only think, “What if a tyrant or garden-variety sadist got a hold of this type of power? This is like something out of a Nazi experiment or Abu Ghraib.”
Then I scrolled farther down in the Daily Mail article where I encountered the face of Adolf Hitler. Finally, I thought, someone is going to inject sanity into this discussion by showing how dangerous this line of thinking really is.
I was to be disappointed. Instead, Hitler serves as the ultimate example of why we need to extend life … so that we can torture people like him for eternity!
Enter the supercomputer – the transhumanists’ favorite tool to seek immortality. Futurist and a director with Google’s engineering division, Ray Kurzweil, (though recently divorcing himself from the term “transhumanism”) has stated that one concrete goal is to use DNA nanobots to connect people’s minds directly to cloud computing. This new computer mind could also be distorted, according to Dr. Roache, since the uploaded mind could be sped up or slowed down.
In a final appeal to the practical – ya know, if infinitely torturing someone is not quite psychologically fulfilling for you – think of the savings to the taxpayer! Although it’s a bit ironic since the article also mentions billions of dollars being invested in this type of research.
‘This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals’ lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time,’ said Dr Roache.It’s no wonder that so many cinephiles only watch movies at home anymore, considering that the movie-going public is full of assholes. There are the people who talk during the movie, because they somehow believe they’re still in their own living room, and those who text from the theater, inadvertently blinding the rest of us because they can’t look at only a single screen for.002 seconds. So while we’re not saying that 37-year-old Brandon Vezmar of Austin, Texas, isn’t taking this to a bit of an extreme, we can definitely see where he’s coming from.
As reported on Austin-based movie site Birth.Movies.Death, Vezmar was on a first date with a woman he met online, and took the young lady in question to see the exciting new Guardians Of The Galaxy sequel, an action-packed, superior film that should have no trouble capturing the attention of the average human. But Vezmar’s date proceeded to text throughout the movie. Vezmar at first appealed to her, saying that her habit was a particular pet peeve of his, as it is to so many of us who respect the sacred space of the theater. But to no avail: “According to the petition, the woman ‘activated her phone at least 10-20 times in 15 minutes to read and send text messages.’” Vezmar reasonably suggested that she take her texting outside. She did so, and left the theater, leaving Vezmar without a ride.
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The story doesn’t confirm this, but we’re doubting there was a second date—especially now that Vezmar has decided to sue his former movie companion for all of $17.31, presumably the price of the ticket and the Lyft ride home. The article states,
According to the petition, the texting was a “direct violation” of the theater’s policy and that his date “adversely” affected Vezmar’s viewing experience and that of other patrons. “While damages sought are modest the principle is important as defendant’s behavior is a threat to civilized society,” the petition said.
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We couldn’t agree more, but we’ll leave it to the Texas courts to decide. If Vezmar wins his case, however, at least we’ll all have some legal backup the next time some jerk ignores the “turn your phone off” warning during movie previews.Xiaomi has released the MIUI 8 patch ROM, a third-party adaptation tool for MIUI 8, which brings the latest user interface’s firmware to other smartphone brands aside Xiaomi’s in an adaptable form. Although the earlier MIUI versions can be flashed on other smartphone brands like Samsung, HTC, LG etc, this seems to be the first officially available patch for the latest version of Xiaomi’s custom MIUI 8 ROM.
According to Xiaomi, the patch ROM development tools have been adapted for up to 496 models including about 274 domestic models and 222 phone models outside China. The MIUI 8 itself has been adapted for about 100 brands including those in China and abroad as well as popular brands.
A voting line has also been opened on the Xiaomi Mi community forum for fans to vote which of the models running Android 6.0 Marshmallow should get the MIUI third party ROM first and the options include the Samsung S7 Edge, OPPO R9s, vivo X9, glory 8, Huawei P9, music Pro3 Pro, Meizu Pro6, Nubian Z11 etc. Already Lenovo’s VP has expressed his excitement on Weibo that the expected ZUK Edge can have the MIUI 8 installed on it. The MIUI 8 would likely not feature on the ZUK Edge when launched because the device is rumored for next week but this is an indication of better days ahead for users of other brands who admire the innovative Xiaomi UI.
Read More: Top Chinese Flagships In 2016: Best Phones For Your Money (Year End Edition)
Meanwhile the Patch ROM can be downloaded from here, while you can join in on the voting from this link.MEXICO CITY -- A gang of dozens of fishermen overturned inspectors’ trucks, burned or destroyed 15 vehicles and patrol boats, and beat three inspectors from the office for environmental protection in a town on Mexico’s Gulf of California.
The fishermen were angered by Mexico’s attempt to save the vaquita porpoise by banning some types of net fishing in the Gulf --also known as the Sea of Cortez -- where only about 30 of the elusive animals are believed to survive.
The Last Vaquitas
The office said Thursday the inspectors managed to escape after the attack on Wednesday, but that criminal charges were being filed. The attacks were directed against personnel and property of the office for environmental protection, the country’s fisheries council, and the commission for protected natural areas.
Fishermen lured by Chinese demand for the swim bladder of a fish known as the totoaba, which inhabits the same waters as the vaquita, have decimated the porpoise population.
Vaquitas are caught in the same kind of nets that illegal totoaba fishermen use. Prices for a kilogram of totoaba swim bladders can reach thousands of dollars.
The fishermen in the town of Golfo de Santa Clara, in Sonora state, were apparently angered over a delay approving permits for corvina, another kind of fish whose legal season would normally begin around now.
But experts are worried that corvina boats could also illegally carry totoaba nets.
Mexico has announced that special permits would be needed for corvina fishermen, and inspectors said the fishermen had applied for those permits late.
Totoaba fishermen have mainly cut and run when confronted by Mexican Navy patrols in the past, but activists and environmentalists have warned that criminal gangs appear to be involved in the lucrative illegal trade and that threats have been mounting.
Experts and the Mexican government previously announced a plan to catch the few remaining vaquitas and enclose them in pens for protection and possible breeding.
Mexican authorities already banned gillnet fishing in the vaquitas’ habitat, but that has proved difficult to enforce.
A study done in November by an international committee of experts that used acoustic monitoring to survey the population of the porpoise. The results showed vaquita numbers had declined 90 percent over the last five years, and the study estimated that because numbers have dropped so fast there are probably less than 30 now.
It’s not easy to count them because their numbers are dwindling and the animals are notoriously elusive, “60 Minutes” correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi reported last year. That’s one reason why most people have never heard of vaquitas and fewer have seen one.
In May 2016, Alfonsi reported that fishermen were being compensated for their lost catch for two years -- the Mexican government was paying them $60 million not to fish.
The international committee found that illegal fishing continues, saying 31 illegal nets were pulled from the Gulf of California in October and November.
Experts acknowledge the catch-and-enclose plan is risky, because the few remaining females could die during capture, dooming the species.
Still, some experts say the capture program may be the vaquitas’ only hope. But others worry that fishermen may engage in a free-for-all once the endangered vaquita is removed and thus wipe out other species in the gulf.Update: Google has officially acknowledged DroidDream and is taking further steps to correct it. Details can be found here: Google has officially acknowledged DroidDream and is taking further steps to correct it. Details can be found here: Google Acknowledges DroidDream: Remotely Wiping Apps, Removing Exploit, Making Changes To Prevent It From Happening Again
Wow - from our perspective, it's almost like the world exploded overnight. We have more information and details on the virus - which Lookout has named "DroidDream" (the word was consistently used in package names by the malware developers) - and some updates on where things stand.
First, we're absolutely amazed at how quickly Google reacted. As mentioned last night, our own Justin Case pinged a contact and the apps were pulled from the market within minutes. That's quite impressive, but then again, one of the developers whose app had been copied had been trying to get Goog on the job for just over a week. On the one hand, Google was quick to react to our hacker. On the other, they were slow to react to a developer, who should really be made the priority of the two. Either way, they pulled the app in question, and this is definitely one of those times that it's better late than never.
Google wasn't the only one on the ball: we were contacted late last night/early this morning by Symantec, Samsung, and Lookout. As the apps had already been pulled from the Market, they were looking to get their hands on the code - obviously, we obliged. Lookout has already updated their app to identify DroidDream and protect their users. However, the apps are now effectively nuked, and it's unlikely the hackers will attempt to use the same code again, so it may be too late to ever be useful.
Now, on to some more details of the virus. We should point out that this vulnerability was patched with Gingerbread, meaning any device running Android 2.3+ should be fine. In other words, if you're looking to play the blame game (which I'm not, but having read all the comments on the original post, many people are), then there's plenty to go around. The hole was fixed by Google, but it's relatively useless since many phones aren't yet running a version of Android that is protected. It's noteworthy that some manufacturers released updates that patched the exploit for devices without updating to Gingerbread; unfortunately, it appears that minority is quite a small one.
Perhaps most important is the question of what infected users can do about their situation, but it seems the answer is "not much of anything." Because the virus opens up a backdoor and can bring in new code at any time, the only way to really rid an infected device of any damage is to completely wipe it - not exactly the optimal solution, but it looks like the only one available, at least for now.
Finally, Justin notes that ROM developers working with pre-Gingerbread versions of Android can prevent the virus from backdooring in code by putting a dummy file at /system/bin/profile.
Update: XDA to the rescue. XDA Member Rodderik has come up with a ZIP file that does just what Justin suggested, and creates a dummy file at /system/bin/profile. For details and a download link, head on over here.
[Image Credit: MobileCrunchALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Newly released video shows New Mexico police officers stopping a van that was wanted in connection with a Nevada kidnapping and then finding a woman bound by chains in the back of the vehicle.
Video from one of the officer's cameras shows the woman alive but shaken. "Oh my God, thank you," she tells the officers, her cuffed hands clenched into fists in front of her.
Video shows New Mexico police officers stopping a van that was wanted in connection with a Nevada kidnapping and then finding a woman bound by chains in the back of the vehicle. New Mexico State Police
More than a year of planning went into the kidnapping, authorities said. The woman was stalked by an ex-boyfriend and his companion before they dragged her away from her apartment in Las Vegas in late January.
The suspects -- Jack William Morgan and companion Samuel Brown, who identifies as a woman and prefers to be called Sophie -- have pleaded not guilty to federal kidnapping charges and are awaiting trial later this summer in Nevada.
This undated booking photo provided by Santa Fe County Detention Center shows Jack Morgan (L) and Samuel Brown (R) who are charged in a kidnapping case that started in Nevada and culminated in New Mexico. They have pleaded not guilty to federal kidnapping charges and are awaiting trial in Nevada. Santa Fe County Detention Center
Dash and lapel camera video shows the late-night traffic stop on Jan. 30 in Espanola. After being unchained and helped out of the van, the woman told officers she had been dragged from her home almost 12 hours earlier.
"He dragged me out of the place, and I fought so (expletive) hard cause I was like, this is how you die," the woman told officers.
After police take Morgan and Brown into custody, video shows Morgan singing "Amazing Grace" while sitting in the back of the police cruiser. Brown is placed in the back of another police car and tells officers she's frightened.
According to a criminal complaint, Las Vegas police were called to the woman's apartment complex after witnesses reported seeing a woman wearing only undergarments being dragged down three flights of stairs. She was bound and gagged.
A witness told police the woman was put into a white van with Texas license plates.
Video footage shows police pulling over a van in New Mexico. New Mexico State Police
Police found items of clothing on the way to the victim's apartment, and inside there was a stun device and a knife laying on the floor close to the front door. The victim's purse was still inside the apartment, and there were signs of a struggle.
Morgan's cellphone location led authorities to New Mexico, where police stopped the van. Officers reported hearing the woman screaming for help as they had Morgan and Brown get out of the vehicle.
The woman told New Mexico State Police investigators that duct tape was wrapped around her neck and across her face and that Morgan tried to hogtie her but she resisted.
Video shows rescue of woman held by serial killer
Morgan was accused of choking the victim, resulting in her losing consciousness. The woman also had cuts and scrapes on her arms, legs, neck and face.
Morgan had contacted the victim a week before the kidnapping, and the two had coffee, court documents say. Brown was accused of following her to learn where she lived and then went door-to-door pretending to collect church donations to pinpoint her apartment.
A search warrant affidavit filed by New Mexico authorities stated that the woman told investigators Morgan was going to take her to a cave to "brainwash her to be his wife."EMET all exes Jarno Nov 9th, 2011 1,214 Never 1,214Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint Python 1.93 KB print """Simple tool to enable Micrsoft EMET for all executables in system This tool creates a bat file which will call emet_conf with suitable parameters for all exes in c: \ Note that some programs might have problems with EMET memory hardenings I have added special options for programs I found out causing problems in my system. If you find out any additional ones, add them to custom settings and feel free to tell me. Use this program at your own risk, and review the bat file before running it Created by Jarno Niemela Twitter:@jarnomn Usage: 1. Install EMET http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=1677 2. run emet_all.py as admin 3. run_this_as_admin.bat Yes, I know emet_conf has XML import, but that aborts if even single exe has some problems""" import os import os. path output = file ( 'run_this_as_admin.bat', 'w' ) custom_settings = dict ( ) custom_settings [ 'dropbox.exe' ] = "+DEP +SEHOP +NullPage +HeapSpray -EAF +MandatoryASLR +BottomUpRand" custom_settings ['sdiagnhost.exe' ] = "+DEP +SEHOP +NullPage +HeapSpray -EAF +MandatoryASLR +BottomUpRand" skip_dirs = [ 'temp','recycle', 'downloads', 'installer' ] if os. path. exists ( """c: \P rogram Files (x86) \E MET \e met_conf.exe""" ) : emet_dir = """c: \P rogram Files (x86) \E MET \e met_conf.exe""" elif os. path. exists ( """c: \P rogram Files (x86) \E MET \e met_conf.exe""" ) : emet_dir = """c: \P rogram Files \E MET \e met_conf.exe""" else : emet_dir = "DEFINE YOUR EMET LOCATION" output. write ( "". join ( [ '"', emet_dir, '"','--delete_all
' ] ) ) for root, dirs, files in os. walk ( 'c: \\') : for name in files: name = name. lower ( ) root = root. lower ( ) if name. endswith ( 'exe' ) and not any ( x in root for x in skip_dirs ) : if name in custom_settings: output. write ( "". join ( [ '"', emet_dir, '"','--set "%s' % os. path. join ( root, name ), '" ', custom_settings [ name ] ] ) ) else : output. write ( "". join ( [ '"', emet_dir, '"','--set "%s' % os. path. join ( root, name ), '"' ] ) ) output. write ( '
' )
RAW Paste Data
print """Simple tool to enable Micrsoft EMET for all executables in system This tool creates a bat file which will call emet_conf with suitable parameters for all exes in c:\ Note that some programs might have problems with EMET memory hardenings I have added special options for programs I found out causing problems in my system. If you find out any additional ones, add them to custom settings and feel free to tell me. Use this program at your own risk, and review the bat file before running it Created by Jarno Niemela Twitter:@jarnomn Usage: 1. Install EMET http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=1677 2. run emet_all.py as admin 3. run_this_as_admin.bat Yes, I know emet_conf has XML import, but that aborts if even single exe has some problems""" import os import os.path output=file('run_this_as_admin.bat','w') custom_settings=dict() custom_settings['dropbox.exe']="+DEP +SEHOP +NullPage +HeapSpray -EAF +MandatoryASLR +BottomUpRand" custom_settings['sdiagnhost.exe']="+DEP +SEHOP +NullPage +HeapSpray -EAF +MandatoryASLR +BottomUpRand" skip_dirs=['temp','recycle','downloads','installer'] if os.path.exists("""c:\Program Files (x86)\EMET\emet_conf.exe"""): emet_dir="""c:\Program Files (x86)\EMET\emet_conf.exe""" elif os.path.exists("""c:\Program Files (x86)\EMET\emet_conf.exe"""): emet_dir="""c:\Program Files\EMET\emet_conf.exe""" else: emet_dir="DEFINE YOUR EMET LOCATION" output.write("".join(['"',emet_dir,'"',' --delete_all
'])) for root,dirs,files in os.walk ('c:\\'): for name in files: name=name.lower() root=root.lower() if name.endswith('exe') and not any(x in root for x in skip_dirs ): if name in custom_settings: output.write("".join(['"',emet_dir,'"',' --set "%s'%os.path.join(root,name),'" ',custom_settings[name]])) else: output.write("".join(['"',emet_dir,'"',' --set "%s'%os.path.join(root,name),'"'])) output.write('
')Photo: Jack Dongarra An Efficient Engine: Sunway TaihuLight’s computations-per-watt improvement is even more impressive than its raw computing power.
In June, the ranks of the Top500 list were rearranged, and the title of world’s most powerful supercomputer was handed off to a new machine—China’s Sunway TaihuLight.
The Wuxi-based machine can perform the Linpack Benchmark—a long-standing arbiter of supercomputer prowess—at a rate of 93 petaflops, or 93 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. This performance is more than twice that of the previous record holder, China’s Tianhe-2. What’s more, TaihuLight achieves this capacity while consuming 2.4 megawatts less power than Tianhe-2.
Such efficiency gains are important if supercomputer designers hope to reach exascale operation, somewhere in the realm of 1,000 Pflops. Computers with that capability could be a boon for advanced manufacturing and national security, among many other applications. China, Europe, Japan, and the United States are all pushing toward the exascale range. Some countries are reportedly setting their sights on doing so by 2020; the United States is targeting the early 2020s. But two questions loom over those efforts: How capable will those computers be? And can we make them energy efficient enough to be economical?
We can get to the exascale now “if you’re willing to pay the power bill,” says Peter Kogge, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Scaling up a supercomputer with today’s technology to create one that is 10 times as big would demand at least 10 times as much power, Kogge explains. And the difference between 20 MW and 200 MW, he says, “is the difference [between having] a substation or a nuclear power plant next to you.”
Kogge, who led a 2008 study on reaching the exascale, is updating power projections to cover the three categories of supercomputers built today: those with “heavyweight” high-performance CPUs; those that use “lightweight” microprocessors that are slower but cooler, and so can be packed more densely; and those that take advantage of graphics processing units to accelerate computation.
“They produced a processor that can deliver high arithmetic performance but is very weak in terms of data movement” —Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee
TaihuLight follows the lightweight approach, and it has made some sacrifices in pursuit of energy efficiency. Based on its hardware specs, TaihuLight can, in theory, crunch numbers at a rate of 125 Pflops. The machine reaches 74 percent of this peak theoretical capacity when running Linpack. But it does not fare as well on a new alternative benchmark, High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG), which is designed to reflect how well a computer can perform more memory- and communications-intensive, real-world applications. When it runs HPCG, TaihuLight utilizes just 0.3 percent of its theoretical peak abilities, which means that only 3 out of every 1,000 possible floating-point operations are actually used by the computer. By comparison, Tianhe-2 and the United States’ Titan, the second- and third-fastest supercomputers in the Top500 rankings, respectively, can take advantage of just over 1 percent of their computing capacity. Japan’s K computer, currently ranked fifth on the list, achieved 4.9 percent with the HPCG metric.
“Everything is a balancing act,” says Jack Dongarra, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and one of the organizers of the Top500. “They produced a processor that can deliver high arithmetic performance but is very weak in terms of data movement.” But he notes that the TaihuLight team has developed applications that take advantage of the architecture; he says that three projects that were finalists for this year’s ACM Gordon Bell Prize, a prestigious supercomputing award, were designed to run on the machine.
TaihuLight uses DDR3, an older, slower memory, to save on power. Its architecture also uses small amounts of local memory near each core instead of a more traditional memory hierarchy, explains John Goodacre, a professor of computer architectures at the University of Manchester, in England. He says that while today’s applications can execute between 1 and 10 floating-point operations for every byte of main memory accessed, that ratio needs to be far higher for applications to run efficiently on TaihuLight. The design cuts down on a big expense in a supercomputer’s power budget: the amount of energy consumed shuttling data back and forth.
“I think what they’ve done is build a machine that changes some of the design rules that people have assumed are part of the requirements” for moving toward the exascale, Goodacre says. Further progress will depend, as the TaihuLight team has shown, on end-to-end design, he says. That includes looking not only at changes to hardware—a number of experts point to 3D stacking of logic and memory—but also to the fundamental programming paradigms we use to take advantage of the machines.
This article appears in the August 2016 print issue as “China Inches Toward the Exascale.”The Deal
$9.99 for a Samsung Galaxy S III 4G LTE smartphone for Verizon Wireless from Wirefly ($99.99 list price)
Available in black, blue, or white
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####Samsung Galaxy S III 4G LTE for Verizon Wireless Samsung's Android-based Galaxy S III smartphone is a bit of paradox. It houses a wealth of mobile technologies, but its user-friendly design flows so smoothly that you may not notice them right away. The 4.8" SuperAMOLED screen, for example, maintains crisp resolution and vibrant color as you jump between texting, playing games, and watching live feeds of puppies napping. Beneath this curved interface—a design flourish that helps prevent scratches even when the phone is face down—a 1.5 Ghz dual-core processor powers apps and processes data snagged from Verizon's 4G LTE network.
The Galaxy S III includes two cameras—a 1.9MP front camera, and an 8MP primary rear camera that can capture panoramic pictures and HD video at the same time. This is due largely to LED flash and burst shot, a function that takes 20 action shots in rapid succession. These images are instantly shareable with friends via Share Shot, no WiFi required.
Further intuitive touches include motion-gesture controls and Smart Stay eye-tracking technology, which keeps the display from dimming while you're reading. In the event you have questions about the phone, just ask the S Voice personal assistant.
* Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich mobile platform * 4.8" SuperAMOLED curved touchscreen display * 1.5 Ghz dual-core processor * 8MP rear camera with LED flash and burst shot * 1.9MP front-facing camera for giving yourself pep talks * Panoramic pictures and HD video * Share Shot instant photo sharing * Smart Stay eye-tracking technology * Motion-gesture controls * S Voice personal assistant * Integrated Google+ with group video chat * 14-day return policy
**Disclaimer** This offer is fulfilled by Simplexity, LLC, an authorized dealer for Verizon Wireless. This offer is only available with select service plans, features and a two-year subscriber agreement, and is subject to eligibility check by Verizon Wireless, including credit approval or deposit for new customers. Not all US markets are served by Verizon Wireless. Activation and early termination fees apply. Additional restrictions apply. See full offer for details. Offer ends 5/3/2013 or while supplies last. Verizon Wireless Surcharge (incl. Fed. Univ. Svc. of 16.1% of interstate & int’l telecom charges (varies quarterly), 16¢ Regulatory & 90¢ Administrative/line/mo., & others by area) are in addition to monthly access & not taxes (details: 1-888-684-1888); gov’t taxes & our surcharges could add 6% - 42% to your bill. Activation/upgrade fee/line: Up to $35. Verizon Wireless and the Verizon Wireless logos are trademarks of Verizon Trademark Services LLC © 2013 Verizon Wireless.
How to get your goods: click the buy button on this page, which will redirect you to an external site where you can complete your transaction. For questions pertaining to this deal, please visit the deal Q&A on this page. For post-purchase inquiries, please contact Groupon customer service. View the Groupon Goods FAQ for additional information, including how list price is determined.The decision of an Iowa state representative to invite a Wiccan priestess to give an opening invocation at the state capitol last week put the Religious Right group The Family Leader in a bit of a bind, since although the group was unhappy with the decision, it was that very day set to host four potential GOP presidential candidates at a forum centering on supposed threats to religious liberty in America.
In the end, the group responded by holding a voluntary alternative prayer service in the capitol for legislators who wanted to skip what ended up being a fairly mundane invocation from the priestess. Family Leader president Bob Vander Plaats warned that it was a “stunning development” with a potential “spiritual ramification” and quoted a verse from Ephesians about spiritual warfare against the “forces of evil,” but didn’t go so far as to say that the Wiccan priestess didn’t have the right to pray at the capitol.
But in a speech that evening to a forum that included likely GOP presidential contenders Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal, Vander Plaats — after declaring the supposed threats to the religious liberty of conservative Christians would be “the key issue of the 2016 campaign” — made it clear that while it was “totally within the religious right” to invite a Wiccan to deliver a prayer at the capitol, it might in fact give God reason to withdraw his blessing from America.
Vander Plaats led into the story by recalling that after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there was “red, white and blue everywhere,” churches “were filled to overflowing,” and lawmakers of both parties were joining together to sing “God bless America.”
“Almost 14 years later, where are we at?” he demanded. “Just this morning, in the Iowa capitol, which is totally within the religious right, but you had a state representative invite someone to deliver a Wiccan prayer. Now, you may say that’s religious liberty, but I’d say you’d better be careful if you want to start mocking the God that you’re asking to bless this country. That’s a huge concern.”Minneapolis, MN - With the theme of “People before profits” and inspired by the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York, a similar occupation started on Oct. 7 at 9:00 a.m. in Minneapolis. The ongoing Minneapolis occupation is at Government Plaza (300 South 6th Street, downtown Minneapolis), which the Occupy MN movement has renamed “People’s Plaza.” Organizers are inviting people to come any time to learn more and to join the occupation.
As the occupation began at 9:00 a.m. and organizers set up tables for food, media, logistics, medical, and other basic occupation infrastructure, around 500 people were already gathered on the plaza. At 2:00 p.m. a sizeable group of people went on a march around downtown. The official kickoff rally started at 5:30 p.m. As people poured in after work, the crowd swelled to over a thousand.
The rally was started off by American Indian Movement leader Clyde Bellecourt. Spoken word artist and rapper Guante read a poem he had written inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Chris Mato Nunpa, a Dakota elder, expressed his support for this Occupy movement as it protests against Wall Street and capitalism, while also explaining how the word “occupy” has a very different meaning to Native people whose lands were occupied and stolen, including the land the rally was happening on, which was stolen from the Dakota people.
Steph Taylor from Students for a Democratic Society at the U of M spoke next, getting loud cheers when she talked about the massive student loan debt graduating students face. Teacher Chris Gray spoke about the massive cuts to public schools. Antonia Alvaro of Asamblea de Derechos Civiles spoke about the huge profits made from immigrant labor and immigrant imprisonment. Angel Buechner of the MN Coalition for a People’s Bailout and Welfare Rights Committee talked about the ongoing fight against poverty in Minnesota. Javier Morillo, President of SEIU Local 26, spoke about the attacks on unions and union members. Jess Sundin of the Anti-War Committee talked about the 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Farheen Hakeem of the Green Party talked about environmental destruction under this system and the need for political change. Northside activist Mel Reeves spoke about the need for fundamental change, and Nick Schillingford of Join the Impact spoke about the attacks on LBGTQ people. The president of the Minnesota Nurses Association and the President of National Nurses United also spoke, expressing nurses’ full support for the movement against Wall Street. It was also announced that AFSCME Council 5 had passed a resolution supporting OccupyMN and Occupy Wall Street movement.
After the rally, hundreds stayed for the General Assembly meeting and to occupy the People’s Plaza overnight. The occupation is continuing indefinitely, with many more rallies and marches targeting big banks and corporations being proposed for the coming this week.©AP Syrian refugees break through a fence to enter Hungary. The migrant crisis has put the Schengen agreement under strain
Brussels is to propose the creation of a standing European border force that could take control of the bloc’s external frontiers — even if a government objected.
The move would arguably represent the biggest transfer of sovereignty since the creation of the single currency.
Against the backdrop of a crisis that has seen 1.2m migrants reach Europe this year, the European Commission will unveil plans next week to replace the Frontex border agency with a permanent border force and coastguard — deployed with the final say of the commission, according to EU officials and documents seen by the Financial Times.
The blueprint represents a last-ditch attempt to save the Schengen passport-free travel zone, by introducing the kind of common border policing repeatedly demanded by Paris and Berlin. Britain and Ireland have opt-outs from EU migration policy, and would not be obliged to take part in the scheme.
European leaders have discussed a common border force for more than 15 years, but always struggled to overcome deep-seated objections to yielding national powers to monitor or enforce borders — one of the core functions of a sovereign state. Greece, for instance, only recently agreed to accept EU offers to send border teams, after months of wrangling over their remit.
Systemic weaknesses in the Schengen Area agreement were laid bare by this year’s massive influx of migrants, many of them unregistered, into the EU through Greece and Italy. Concerns came to a head after last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris, when it transpired that at least some of the assailants came to Europe from Syria via Greece.
Why Brussels wants to man Europe’s borders Plan sets stage for epic political fight over the price of keeping the |
religion so much as the concept of a guardian angel:
We’re religious in the sense we believe in god. But I felt like the song wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about me literally talking to angels. I felt like it was more me talking about guardian angels. I’ve been seeing angels in my living room. I can literally touch them. They’re close. They’re in my space. They’re around me. I know I have someone I can call who will answer me and help me out. These people were placed in my life for some reason. They were there to help me.
It also deals with people looking down on you. It’s about grief. It’s about all the people who left and are watching out for you to make sure you’re alright.
You can read all the lyrics to Khalid’s debut album American Teen on Genius now.CLOSE The U.S. Golf Association and the R&A have proposed major changes to the rules of golf. USA TODAY Sports
Michelle Wie of the United States leads after the first round of the HSBC Women's Champions. (Photo11: Wong Maye-E, AP)
SINGAPORE (AP) — Michelle Wie rolled in several clutch putts on Thursday and had six birdies in a 10-hole stretch to take a one-stroke lead after the first round of the HSBC Women's Champions.
The 27-year-old Wie, who has struggled with injuries and form since winning the U.S. Open in 2014, shot a 6-under 66 at the new Tanjong course.
"It's a marathon this week, it's not a sprint," said Wie. "But I have to say I'm very proud of where I've positioned myself today."
Five others were tied for second after 67s — Olympic champion Inbee Park, Brooke Henderson, Mo Martin, Anna Nordqvist and Ariya Jutanugarn.
Among other scores in the 63-player field, Stacy Lewis and Paula Creamer had 68s, top-ranked Lydia Ko shot 69, Shanshan Feng and Lexi Thompson 70, Karrie Webb 75 and Cristie Kerr 77.
"I still feel like I'm a little bit rusty, but hopefully that rust goes away as quickly as possible," said Park, who is playing just her second tournament after taking a six-month break. "One round doesn't really matter. I have to do this for the rest of the three days."
MORE GOLF:
Park spent much of the early part of last year sidelined with a left thumb injury, and the break helped give it time to heal.
Wie, who had eight birdies and a pair of bogeys on Thursday, has managed just one top-10 finish since 2014 and only got into the $1.5 million LPGA tournament on a sponsor's invitation after her ranking slumped to No. 179.
But she was in vintage touch Thursday despite playing in tricky winds and light rain.
After making a bogey-5 at the third, Wie's putter suddenly got hot as she made three birdies in a row to go out in 34.
She made another three birdies at the start of the back nine, draining a 12-foot putt on the 11th and then sinking another long putt from below the hole on the 501-yard, par-5 13th to take the early lead at a tournament featuring nine of the world's top 10 players.
Wie slipped a shot behind Nordqvist when she bogeyed the 15th after an errant tee shot and the Swede picked up her sixth birdie, but Wie regained the lead with back-to-back birdies at 16 and 17.
"It feels good to play without much pain, to go out there and just play some golf and focus on my game rather than trying to finish out rounds," Wie said. "It's always exciting to be on the top of the leaderboard."
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.We Begin
D&D has been busy the past few days! How do they love us? Let us count the ways…
Dungeon Master’s Guild (DMs Guild) 5th Edition Open Gaming License (OGL) / System Reference Document (SRD) Adventurer’s League changes The Curse of Strahd (new 5E Ravenloft adventure)
This article will cover the first three and leave Curse of Strahd for another, soon to come post.
Video & Audio Versions Although this post is more comprehensive, you can also get the gist from the following video and podcast version of the video: Podcast version:
http://shaneplays.libsyn.com/special-podcast-dd-dms-guide-5th-edition-ogl-srd
Before I neglect to mention, in addition to doing my own research the following links were very helpful in understanding all of this:
What is the DM’s Guild:
http://www.dmsguild.com/whatisdmsguild.php
D&D Podcast Jan 14, 2016:
https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/podcasts/dd-podcasts
http://media.wizards.com/2016/podcasts/dnd/DnDPodcast_01_14_2016.mp3
D&D 5th Edition System Reference Document (SRD)
http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/systems-reference-document-srd
Searchable 5th Edition SRD with hyperlinked Table of Contents
http://www.5esrd.com/
Reddit AMA: D&D AMA with Mike Mearls and Chris Lindsay 1/15
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/413uu7/dd_ama_with_mike_mearls_and_chris_lindsay_115/
ENWorld: A Million Answers From Mearls & Lindsay About DM’s Guild, DDAL, and the OGL (Compiled AMA)
http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?3161-A-Million-Answers-From-Mearls-Lindsay-About-DM-s-Guild-DDAL-and-the-OGL-(Compiled-AMA)#.Vp275iorKM9
First Things First
It’s very important to be clear… the DM’s Guild is NOT the OGL / SRD and the OGL / SRD is NOT the DM’s Guild.
They are TWO SEPARATE THINGS. Ya gotta understand this to get the rest of it.
So what’s the difference?
DM’s Guild:
Per the DM’s Guild website, the Dungeon Masters Guild is a new program that allows you to create content (adventures, monsters, backgrounds, etc.) using Wizards of the Coast intellectual property (IP) and to make some money while you’re at it. In other words, publish through WotC using their copyrighted content and characters. To my knowledge, this is the first time that copyrighted D&D material has been opened up to the huddled masses to officially design with.
5th Edition SRD / OGL:
The System Reference Document (SRD), on the other hand, contains guidelines for publishing role playing game content under the Open Gaming License (OGL) that does not use WotC IP. You also do not publish through their site in a revenue sharing model.
So, got that?
If you want to create adventures, classes, feats, etc. using the Wizards of the Coast IP, you can do so in the DM’s Guild in a 50/50 revenue sharing agreement with WotC and OneBookShelf.com. You can play directly in D&D’s IP playground and make money doing so.
If you want to self-publish content using the basic 5th Edition engine but not a lot of the extras (such as subclasses and feats), as well as be responsible for all of the publishing but reap all of the reward, then the OGL / SRD is for you.
Or as the recent D&D podcast on the subject put it, “If you want to start your own publishing company, OGL is for you. If you want pushbutton D&D publishing, DM’s guide is for you.”
I’ll give several examples and notes on the DM’s Guild and OGL / SRD below to help. But first…
D&D Adventurer’s League
Regarding the Adventurer’s League there are some big changes the main biggy of which is that AL sessions can now be held anywhere… your home, the library, the laundromat, whatever *in addition* to your friendly local game store (where they could only be held previously). There does seem there will be some store exclusive content, but not the entire program.
I’ve also seen some grumbling about volunteers now having to pay to support the program (although I also heear that DMs that have been given season pass access to AL content have been sharing the credentials around so the problem may be solving itself in a… creative way).
Since the DM’s Guild and 5th Edition OGL is a pretty large topic to tackle, I won’t go into more here about the AL but will try to do a follow up on just the Adventurer’s League in a separate post.
So, on with the DM’s Guild and the SRD / OGL…
What’s the OGL, again?
The Open Gaming License (OGL) allows individuals and publishers to create content and products using D&D’s game engine (but not intellectual property or trademarks, etc), provided those rules are in the SRD (see below).
A copy of the OGL must be included in any product created using the OGL, and product created using the OGL is evidently open to be used in a “share alike” manner by other OGL publishers assuming all copyright information is updated and maintained in the chain.
Pathfinder and Castles & Crusades are both successful product lines using the original OGL and SRD from D&D 3rd Edition (released in 2000). In addition many other modules and supplements for D&D have been produced via the OGL, as well as other derivative systems and works. For instance, you could create an espionage or science fiction game using the OGL and SRD, it doesn’t have to be a fantasy setting.
This article is not intended to be a comprehensive legal resource on what can and can’t be done with the OGL. As Wizards of the Coast employees are currently saying, “if you’re not sure, ask a lawyer!”
What’s available in the SRD?
The System Reference Document (SRD) is the list of rules, classes, races, monsters, spells, weapons, armor, equipment, etc. that are available to be used under the Open Gaming License (OGL). It’s more than the D&D Basic Rules, but less than everything in the core rulebooks (Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual). All D&D IP has been removed. You can think of the SRD as the generic 5th Edition rules engine with all flavor and extras removed.
The official D&D SRD can be found here.
A searchable, third party version of the SRD with a table of contents is online at 5esrd.com.
I found this summary helpful on what you can find in the SRD, from Fantasy Grounds’s press release on how the new OGL / SRD affects their virtual tabletop offerings:
I’m very impressed with the amount of content that is available. If people had any concerns about their ability to play D&D with only the 4 races and 4 classes from the D&D Basic Rules, I can bet that those concerns are now a thing of the past. Every single class and race are present in the SRD content. With the included modules, you can build characters just like you can with the official products. As a DM, you can build encounters full of D&D monsters and build treasure parcels full of equipment and magic items to award your players.
What’s the catch though?
Well, there are some small ones, but they are very minor. For each of the races that have subtypes, they will only give you a single option instead of a choice of options. For classes, you’ll get a single archetype instead of selection here, or a single domain instead of your pick from a wide range of options. The spell list is pretty robust and all but a select handful of spells is included. The same is true for magic items and the entire equipment list is included. A few items and spells have been renamed and descriptions have been altered to remove IP that belongs to Wizards of the Coast, but it is super usable as-is. The Bestiary is full of a few hundred monsters, but the descriptions and images are removed, along with some of my favorite monsters from D&D history.
Notes & Answers
Dungeon Masters Guild Notes & Answers
What kinds of content can be submitted to the DM’s Guild?
There are five featured categories of content. For example, “Background Check” for backgrounds, “Monstrous Compendium” for monsters, “Side Treks” for shorter (one evening) adventures. etc. This was stated during the podcast linked above but I don’t actually see those categories reflected in the DMs Guild right now.
It was said in both the podcast and on the Reddit AMA that they are really interested in seeing shorter adventures created for the DMs Guild.
Will submitting to the DMs guild get you “noticed” by WotC / D&D staff?
The DMs Guild is a place where WotC is actively reviewing submissions to hunt for hot new talent. Based on several things I have heard directly from D&D staff it almost sounds like it is the main (exlusive?) place to get recruited by D&D.
In some (rare) cases they may buy something directly from an author instead of hiring someone.
DMs Guild exclusivity
If you publish something on the DMs Guild, you cannot publish it anywhere else.
Is Kickstarted content okay to submit to DMs Guild?
Yes. However make sure you understand the terms of use for both Kickstarter and the DMs Guild before doing so, that is your responsibility.
DMs Guild content format
Content published on the DMs guild is electronic (PDF) only by default. There is an avenue for print on demand via OneBookShelf, but the burden of preparing the print files is on you, and you must contact DriveThruRPG.com and ask about next steps if you have a print ready file.
So basically, it’s digital PDF only for the vast majority of us.
What D&D rule books, source books, and adventures can be referenced in the DMs Guild?
5th Edition Player’s Handbook
5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide
5th Edition Monster Manual
Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide
Out of the Abyss*
*Note that any Forgotten Realms RPG product can be used in the DMs Guild, but the list above shows all current 5E products that have been specifically stated to be fair game.
What settings can be used in the DMs guild?
Although it appears this might change in the future, at the present time (and probably likely to stay this way for a while) only Forgotten Realms RPG products and non-setting specific RPG material are fair game. This includes iconic Forgotten Realms characters such as Drizz’t and Elminster.
That being said, continents within the Forgotten Realms include Kara-tur, Al-Qadim and Maztica, Zhakara, Malatra, etc. If it is an area definitely known to be in the Realms, it’s fair game.
Per Mike Mearls when asked what can be considered Forgotten Realms for purposes of use in the DMs Guild: “A good rule of thumb – it’s in play if it is a RPG product with a Forgotten Realms logo on the cover.”
Forgotten Realms novels, comic books, games, etc. are not considered okay for the DMs Guild content at this time.
Converting older material and adventures for DMs Guild?
You may convert pre-5th Edition Forgotten Realms and non-setting specific RPG material such as NPCs, monsters, spells, etc. for use in the DMs Guild.
Several Reddit AMA answers indicated yes, you can do 5E versions of older adventures provided that IP falls under the DM’s Guild license*. However it was recommended you put a new spin on things rather than just copying and updating to get attention.
*Man, I would totally double check that before doing so. That’s just me.
Is the DMs Guild content considered canon?
Yes and no. WotC intends the DMs Guild to let everyone play in their IP playground. However, they have stated they are the ultimate gatekeepers of canon so I am sure they will step in if needed. I seriously doubt they would allow, for example, an adventure where a Terrasque eats Drizz’t and Elminster as the intro plot hook to be canon.
What D&D IP artwork and fonts, etc. can be used in the DMs Guild?
Only art assets that are posted to the DMs Guild are available for use. Artwork in general from D&D products is not fair game (this includes maps).
Available art assets are posted to the DMs Guild Creator Resource page. If it is not posted in that section, again, it’s not fair game.
The only fonts that are usable without having to get a license are in the DM’s Guild Adventure Template. The fonts are Andada Small Caps, Gyre-Bonum, and Junction and are all free for commercial use.
Can allowed DMs Guild art be modified?
Yes, art assets provided on the DMs Guild are free to be cropped, edited, manipulated, etc.
Is custom artwork submitted to the DMs Guild protected?
There have been a lot of questions about this. Evidently the terms of use at the present time don’t clearly indicate that any artwork assets you create or pay to have created for your DMs Guild content are protected from becoming DMs Guild community IP (“given away”).
Mike Mearls stated during the Reddit AMA that “OneBookShelf, the company behind the Guild, is addressing exactly this issue. They should have an update shortly.” The gist is that, yes, there is a solution but we are waiting for details.
DMs Guild Logo
The logo included in the DM’s Guild Adventure Template is the logo expected to be used on DMs Guild products.
I’m unclear on whether the logo is required on DMs Guild submissions, but I would assume it is.
Can Adventurer’s League content be submitted to the DMs Guild?
No. However, DMs Guild authors may be recruited to create Adventurer’s League content.
Reselling existing DMs Guild content as “compendiums” and compendium style documents.
This is absolutely not allowed. Not only will their partners at OneBookShelf be on the lookout for this kind of thing in order to pull it down, there may be other repercussions.
DMs Guild age restrictions?
Age restrictions for the DMs Guild are based on existing laws on who can legally sign a contract. The DMs Guild does not add to or try to circumvent existing contract law;
Why is the DM’s Guild a 50/50 revenue sharing model? Isn’t that a bit high compared to other similar services?
Here’s the answer from Mike Mearls, straight from the Reddit AMA: “The big thing comes down to the use of Forgotten Realms, which we feel has some real value. However, that percentage also allows us to fund new content for the Guild, host events, and so on. We don’t have anything to announce yet, but building the community is definitely part of our thinking.”
DMs Guild payments
DMs Guild contributors receive their payments via PayPal. You can withdraw royalty payments 60 days after the date of sell. There is a $2 fee for each withdrawal but there are no other fees (PayPal or otherwise) on top of that.
5th Edition OGL / SRD Notes & Answers
Let’s get the big one out of the way. Can the 5th Edition OGL be used to create another Pathfinder RPG game?
This of course has already been asked a lot. The stock answer from every WotC employee on this is “we’re the wrong people to ask, consult a lawyer.” They’re not going anywhere near this question, and honestly that’s probably a pretty good idea. If you want to engage in a venture on the level of what Paizo has done with Pathfinder, you really should be talking with an IP lawyer at some point anyway.
For my personal (not legal) opinion, I don’t see why not. You can definitely create a “D&D-like” game with a straight up Tolkien-derived fantasy setting as long as you don’t infringe on D&D‘s IP. Using the SRD, you can even use a lot of the same races, classes, monsters and spells. Heck, you can use key rules like level advancement, armor class, advantage, disadvantage, and ability based saving throws.
But, uh, I wouldn’t call it Pathfinder or you’re really missing the point of all of this IP law stuff.
What’s in the 5th Edition OGL / SRD?
The 5th Edition OGL / SRD is not the entirety of the core rulebooks like the 3rd Edition OGL / SRD was. That being said, they gave us a heck of a lot of to work with. Some folks had speculated that the SRD would be just the 5th Edition D&D Basic rules, but the SRD actually comprises more.
Mike Mearls had this to say in the Reddit AMA: “The idea is to encourage people to create new stuff, not just copy the material found in 5e. My hope is that we’ll see people do cool, new stuff with the core, like new settings, new genres, and so on.”
All of the core “game engine” rules are available. The mechanics of the game are all there (character creation and advancement, combat, movement, advantage, disadvantage, saving throws, hit points, armor class, abilities, ability checks, etc.).
All races and classes are included. Not all subclasses are included. Most iconic subclasses are, but not the entire range. Champion for Fighter, Life Domain for cleric, etc.
Only one example feat is provided, designers will need to create their own feats in OGL content.
Almost all spells made the SRD, plus and magic items and a full equipment list.
The monsters are there (unless it is D&D IP like the beholder) but without descriptions or images.
Really, the SRD itself is the best list of what “made it.”
What’s not in the 5th Edition OGL / SRD?
Any D&D IP content is not in the OGL / SRD.
You will not get “proper name” content in OGL. For example, you don’t get Drizz’t Do’urden. You will need to use DM’s Guild to create that kind of content.
Additionally, some rules content such as subclasses and feats is very limited. This is an off the cuff remark, but I would say you get about 70-80% of the core rulebook content, and all of the game engine rules.
5th Edition compatibility with 3rd Edition OGL / SRD.
If it was available previously in OGL, it will be available in 5th Edition OGL provided that material is part of 5th Edition. For example, if a monster was in 3rd Edition but not in 5th Edition, it is not available.
Is there a “5th Edition Compatible” logo?
No official logo is being provided by WotC. There is, however, a logo for DMs Guild content (see above).
This is intended to be a changing document as new information comes to light, announcements are made and corrections are pointed out, etc. Please feel free to leave a comment or contact me if you would like to add anything. Thanks!Ballmer, a Detroit native, is looking for an executive director to run his foundation’s Detroit office
Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, addresses a plenary session entitled "Civic Engagement: Understanding Government by the Numbers" on the third day of the National Governors Association's meeting Saturday, July 15, 2017, in Providence, R.I. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia) (Photo: Stephan Savoia / AP)
Detroit — Former Microsoft CEO and Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and his wife are opening a Detroit office and looking for an executive director for his philanthropic organization that’s dedicated to fighting poverty, according to a job posting.
Ballmer and wife Connie, who has been active in nonprofit work, founded the Bellevue, Washington-based Ballmer Group to back groups and initiatives “designed for those who are disproportionately likely to remain in poverty,” mostly children and families, according to the organization’s website.
The job posting states that the executive director “will establish Ballmer Group’s presence in Detroit, build out and implement a strategy and extend its social investing in the region.”
The Ballmers, who Forbes estimates are worth $32.4 billion, had focused their efforts in Washington state and Los Angeles County. But they are now adding Detroit, which has the worst poverty rate in the country and which fits their description of having neighborhoods that “have suffered from systematic neglect.”
The job posting states that the executive director will be focused on alleviating poverty “in a city where the Ballmer family has deep roots.”
Now a Bellevue, Washington resident, Ballmer, 61, was born in Detroit, where his father worked as a manager at Ford Motor Co. He grew up in Oakland County and was valedictorian at Detroit Country Day School.
Ballmer still has family in the Detroit area and returns at least once a year, Ballmer Group spokeswoman Christine Heenan said Friday.
“Detroit is where he’s from and grew up, and he maintains a strong affiliation and a desire to give back,” she said.
Heenan could not share the number of employees the Detroit office plans to hire or how much money will be allocated to Detroit.
“That’s something they’re going to determine with the local person they hire,” she said. “It will be guided by local needs.”
Detroit already has plenty of philanthropic groups, but the addition of the Ballmers will be invaluable, said Rip Rapson, CEO and president of the Kresge Foundation that invests in part in human services and Detroit-focused initiatives.
“I think the Ballmers are such great people. To have their energy and commitment is unequivocally good news for Detroit,” Rapson said. “They are very serious with how they combat problems and only take on problems they can make a difference in.”
The Ballmers’ move to open an office here is “big news,” agreed Rishi Moudgil, executive director of the GreenLight Fund, a national philanthropic organization that works to reduce poverty in Detroit.
“We welcome new interest in combating a lot of the issues we’re trying to deal with in the city, and as long as it’s done effectively and responsibly, I think it’s a great addition for the city,” said Moudgil, who launched the GreenLight Detroit office in March.
Though both organizations are focused on addressing poverty, Moudgil said he doesn’t view the Ballmer Group as competition.
“To be effective, to lift up the community... we need capital, but we also need people that are willing to work across lines, willing to listen, and that help is always welcome,” he said.
Ballmer being a native Detroiter is only a bonus, Moudgil added.
“He’s shown an affinity toward the city,” he said, “and the fact he wants to put more of his resources toward the city is great.”
The Ballmers have shown an interest in building up effective programs “with serious resources,” according to Inside Philanthropy, a publication the reports on charitable groups.
They want to invest in effective nonprofit initiatives that have been “starved” of money, “making it difficult to build the infrastructure for program innovation and scale,” according to the Ballmer Group website.
The Ballmers also target their giving to help increase “public funding dedicated to the development and implementation of the most effective services” in certain regions and nationwide.
The former Microsoft executive visited Detroit last September during Detroit Homecoming, an event that encourages native Metro Detroiters to return to the area. During that week, Ballmer joked about plans Quicken Loans Chairman Dan Gilbert showed him for a development at the former J.L. Hudson’s site on Woodward.
“He showed me the Hudson’s plan. There was a freaking Apple store in it. Boy, was I pissed,” he said in September.
Ballmer served as Microsoft CEO from 2000 to 2014 and bought the Clippers in 2014 for $2 billion.
At the September event, Ballmer told Crain’s Associate Publisher Ron Fournier that he planned to donate a large portion of his wealth, and that Detroit will “very likely” benefit from his philanthropy.
Greater Detroit is going to be “an area of growth and focus,” Heenan said.
“They’re really very much at the starting gate,” she added. “They look forward to learning more from those working locally, to creating economic mobility and to growing their presence over time.”
Steve Ballmer’s connection to the region will improve the organization’s investments here, Kresge’s Rapson said.
“Whenever someone comes in fully equipped with a personal history to the city, the work will be that much more connected, that much more personal and that much more effective,” he said.
ssteinberg@detroitnews.com
(313) 222-2156
Twitter: @Steph_Steinberg
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2uxLofmUK Prime Minister Theresa May has vowed to continue fighting the country’s war on drugs, despite the approach having contributed to the country’s highest rate of drug-related deaths on record, and exorbitant financial costs.
"It is right that we continue to fight the war against drugs," May announced at a prime minister’s questions session on November 22, citing “the incredible damage [drugs] can do to families and the individuals concerned”.
In the past five years of punitive drug policies under Conservative rule, there has been a 44 per cent increase in drug-related deaths in England and Wales, including a staggering 109 per cent rise in heroin/morphine deaths during the same period. In 2016, the number of drug-related deaths hit the highest figure on record, with drug misuse deaths now outnumbering road traffic fatalities.
May had been responding to a question from Crispin Blunt MP on whether she would look at evidence “from the US on the legalisation and regulation of cannabis markets there, as well as decriminalisation [of drug possession] in Portugal and elsewhere".
Bizarrely, she justified her approach to parliamentarians by referring to research undertaken by the Home Office, when she served as Home Secretary, which investigated and compared how different countries approached drug policy. What the prime minister failed to mention is that this report found there to be “[no] obvious relationship between the toughness of a country’s enforcement against drug possession, and levels of drug use in that country”.
A more recent publication, the government’s evaluation of its own drug strategy, yet again found that drug law enforcement has “little impact on availability”, and that punitive policies actually worsen problems that they supposedly intend to solve by bringing “potential unintended consequences including unemployment and harm to families".
The horrific social harms wrought by the UK’s war on drugs – from the criminalisation of over 40,000 people a year for drug possession, to the disproportionate targeting of black people and young adults in drugs policing – are compounded by the huge financial cost of drug law enforcement: around £1.6 billion annually. This enormous figure is particularly significant as May’s prohibitionist declaration coincided with the UK’s economic growth forecast plummeting, and within the context of public services facing severe budget cuts.
Later in the afternoon of November 22, a parliamentary debate took place on how policies can best respond to problematic drug use, with MPs from several parties suggesting evidence-based alternatives to Theresa May’s war on drugs.
Norman Lamb, a Liberal Democrat, said that we must “accept across our country the principle of safer drug consumption rooms (DCRs) [which] are already saving lives in eight European countries and in Canada and Australia, [and are] endorsed by the British Medical Association.” Ronnie Cowan, of the Scottish National Party, spoke of the importance of providing central government funding to support heroin-assisted treatment (HAT) - something endorsed by the government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, but ignored by the government itself.
Sharon Hodgson, of Labour, pointed to "drug rehabilitation services being closed and budgets to tackle drug abuse cut, all against a backdrop of an NHS under significant pressure" as contributing factors to rising drug-related harms and deaths. John Howell, a Conservative, described how he was "most impressed" by information sent to him by Release - the UK's centre of expertise on drugs and drug law - which argued for DCRs, HAT, and a range of other public health measures that could reduce the harms of drug use.
Crispin Blunt, another Conservative MP, said that "the UK could have a royal commission to make evidence-based policy recommendations free of politicians’ trite response, 'Drugs are bad; they must be banned'".
Backing for drug policies rooted in public health and compassion appears to be growing among members of all main parties. However, the prime minister’s unwavering support for perpetuating the government’s failed “war against drugs” suggests that progressive reform is unlikely to come from the top anytime soon.The number of women in the workforce has fallen to levels not seen in nearly 30 years.
The labor force participation rate of women aged 16 or over – those who are either employed or actively seeking work – hit 56.7% in September, down from 56.9% in August, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday. It hasn’t been at those levels since 1988.
The rate began climbing when women started to enter the workforce in the 1950s and, after a half-century of growth, eventually peaked at 60.3% in April 2000.
“Women have begun to depart the labor force in a way that’s similar to men,” says Mark Hamrick, Washington, D.C. bureau chief of personal finance website Bankrate.com. But he says it’s not just because of economic factors. The ratio of job losses due to the recession among men versus women were 2.6 to 1, in part because women held more jobs in less cyclical, services-related industries. (Male labor participation was 69.1% in September for men aged 16 years and older, down from 69.2% in August.)
The participation rate of women was essentially flat from the mid-1990s through the Great Recession, which represented a long period of economic expansion in the U.S., says Rakesh Kochhar, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center. “All economic models that take demographics into account project an ongoing decline of women’s participation in the labor force,” he says. The increase in the past was largely due to baby boomer women, he adds, “and they are ageing out of the labor force.”
See also: Stay-at-home moms: Leaning in or left out?
Another reason the employment rate could be lower is that younger women are staying in college or graduate school longer, says Mitra Toossi, economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women’s participation rate fell from 63% in 2000 to 53.5% in 2013 for those ages 16 to 24. They’re continuing with their education as long as possible until the economy improves, she says, and the unluckier ones have gotten laid off. “During a recession, the young people are the last to be hired and the first to be fired and facing competition from more senior employees,” she says.
Also see: 40% of unemployed workers are millennials
The number of stay-at-home moms rose to 29% of mothers in 2012, up from a modern-era low of 23% in 1999, although still down from 49% over four decades ago, according to an analysis of government data by Pew, a U-turn on the long-term decline in the number of stay-at-home moms. The category includes mothers who choose to stay at home to care for their families, but also those who are at home because they are unable to find work, are disabled or are enrolled in school.
One reason for the rise in stay-at-home motherhood: Childcare is the biggest household expense in most regions, says Lynette Fraga, executive director of Child Care Aware of America, a non-profit group in Arlington, Va. that works with state and local agencies. The average cost for full-time care for an infant ranges from $4,863 a year in Mississippi to $16,430 in Massachusetts, according to its annual report. The U.S. is one of the few industrialized nations that doesn’t require paid family leave for new parents.
And women don’t always want to make that choice between a career and motherhood. Studies show women want bigger families. Women in the U.S. have an average of 2.1 children (versus their ideal rate of 2.4 children), according to an analysis ofgovernment data by Pew Research Center. And 40% of U.S. women nearing the end of their childbearing years say they have fewer children than their ideal, according to the General Social Survey carried out by NORC at the University of Chicago, a non-partisan, independent research organization.
Also see: More women leaders in D.C. than C-suitesThe Rules:
WINNER: jdcarpe- 71USD
Hello everyone!I'd also like to play my part in raising at least a little money for Geekhack. So I have made 1 special Geekhack pack, from me!This pack contains one orange on charcoal (it actually does look like a piece of charcoal) cake, which is sparkly, and ORANGE SCENTED, GOD DAMN ORANGE SCENTED! I will also be including a sparkly and orange scented 2X backspace, hand signed and protected in varnish by me. It will be signed with the word "Geekhack" on the top, and the username of the lucky winner on the front! It also won't come in my usual packaging, it'll be a little more personalised. The polish I am using for these caps is very hard to work with, and requires a lot of effort for me to get a nice bright orange, while also retaining my trademark thick, gooey texture. The pictures you see are the in progress photos of each cap and what you receive will look MUCH better!The only cost I am looking for here is the possibility of tracked international shipping, so I am going to start the auction at 8USD.1) This is an auction which will end on SATURDAY 24TH NOVEMBER AT 19:00GMT.2) Any bids after 18:55GMT will extend the auction by 10 minutes until we have an actual winner. Alessandro can't keep up with snipers.3) Please bid in USD and in increments of at least 1USD.4) The auction will start at 8USD and this will be removed from my donation at the end of the auction. This will just cover tracked international shipping anywhere in the |
stands out.He can not be forgotten with the flow of time as he is a Legend.Today we list some of the most important things about the animal himself to give him a tribute and to give shout out to all of his fans.
Hope you guys enjoy it!
".......I am Wolverine.I'm the best there is at what I do,but what I do best isn't very nice" __Logan
Old Man Logan
Wolverine was born in late 1880's in the house of rich farm owners in Cold Lake,Alberta,Canada.His real name was James Howlett,son of John and Elizabeth Howlett however,it was later discovered that he was the illegitimate son of Howlett's groundskeeper Thomas Logan.
Hence,the name Jame Howlett Logan.
Old Man Logan
Wolverine has been using his powers for the good in his own way from the very start.He took part in Korean War,Vietnam and World War 2 and possibly more.He even teamed up with Captain America
to fight.
Over the years, he has been seen tied with many historical events.We love Old man Logan just for that.
The War Hero Wolverine
Wolverine doesn't give a DAMN!
Wolverine isn't our favorite just for his powers but also his unique style.He just doesn't roll with your everyday heroes.
He drinks,smokes cigars and doesn't give a damn if he doesn't want to do anything.He doesn't care for the bad reputation and we love it.
Like when he was invited to help against Eric Shaw to save the future of Mutants.His reply was as good as it gets.(If you haven't watched X-Men:First Class yet,go see it! )
Wolverine doesn't give a DAMN
Like when they were going to drop Nuclear bomb over him,he was like 'I will ride it out'.
Wolverine survives Nuclear Bomb
Wolverine Through the years!
Wolverine is loved because he single-handedly changed the past,the future and wasted about 6 movies.He did all that on his own.How much unique can he get?
That is why you should Love Wolverine!
Wolverine is an Assassin
Wolverine knows no Happy Ending
There isn't anything like a happy ending for Wolverine.Every relationship he tries,his partner is killed.Sometimes more brutally than others.Whether it's Jean Grey or Silver Fox.He is destined to be alone and suffer for the most part without his memories and any aim in life.
Peace for him is difficult indeed but, we support him all the way.
Wolverine in Frenzy
Hugh Jackman's Dedication At the center of Fox's X-Men is Hugh Jackman.He has done a total of about seven movies out of which he didn't have a main role in just one i.e X-Men First Class but,his cameo there was something Wolverine fans would never ever forget. Wolverine
It's been 17 years and High Jackman is giving his all in making Wolverine actually come to life.His personality,attitude, physique are all in accord with the Logan we love and admire. After Wolverine 3 in 2017,he has announced himself to retire from the character(sadly) but,we will always see him as Wolverine. That is why you should Love Hugh Jackman and Wolverine!
Thanks a lot, Hugh Jackman for giving us those awesome moments. Hugh Jackman Retiring from Wolverine
Weapon X and Weapon X1
Wolverine is like a brother to Deadpool as his DNA was used to make Wade Wilson a mutate also known as "Merc with the Mouth".
Though this relation is just one sided,they still make a pretty good team and it's always fun to watch them.(Scratch the Deadpool from Wolverine Origins because that's just not it)
Wolverine and Deadpool
Deadpool also currently has the means to bring Wolverine back to life but even the fun-loving assassin is wondering if that was what Wolverine wanted.
Wolverine is an Animal And a Samurai
I am not actually talking about the real Animal but old man Logan is the complete definition of a beast when he gets angry.There is a reason why no one should mess with him because once he goes berserk,see you in pieces.But,being as he is,he is also a master samurai and has proven himself against others in a sword fight as well.
One can say that he not only has the brute strength with animal instincts but also a delicate touch with the sword.
Wolverine is a Samurai
Are there any other reasons for why you love this Black Dragon.Let us know in the comments below.
Also,if you want to know Awesome facts about Wolverine,do check out my other post @ 17 Amazing facts about Wolverine!
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Jonathan Cohn points us today to a Gallup poll with yet more good news for Obamacare. In a recent survey, the people who are actually using Obamacare gave it very high marks: 74 percent said the quality of health care they received was good or excellent, and 71 percent said the overall coverage was good or excellent. What’s remarkable is that these numbers are nearly the same as those for everyone else with health insurance, which includes those with either employer coverage or Medicare. Here’s the bottom line from Cohn:
You hear a lot about what’s wrong with the coverage available through the marketplaces and some of these criticisms are legitimate. The narrow networks of providers are confusing, for example, and lack of sufficient regulations leaves some patients unfairly on the hook for ridiculously high bills. But overall the plans turn out to be as popular as other forms of private and public insurance. It’s one more sign that, if you can just block out the negative headlines and political attacks, you’ll discover a program that is working.
Republicans can huff and puff all they want, but the evidence is clear: despite its rollout problems, Obamacare is a success. It’s covering millions of people; its costs are in line with forecasts; and people who use it think highly of it. There’s no such thing as a big, complex program that has no problems, and Obamacare has its share. But overall? It’s a standup triple.Michael Gove had a point, up to a point. People don’t trust all experts the way they once did, and can be suspicious of their role in public policy. Experts themselves bear some responsibility for this. So too does irresponsible political rhetoric. Whatever the reason, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, simply dismissing the role of expertise tout court, is both wrong-headed and dangerous.
First things first. Gove deserves not to be misquoted. What he was trying to say, before being interrupted by Sky’s Faisal Islam, was that "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’". Yet there is ample empirical evidence that he might have got this wrong. Research by Natcen found that 68 per cent per cent of people trust the Office for National Statistics (acronym ONS) to produce reliable statistics.
That being said, Gove clearly touched a nerve. Anecdotal evidence from conversations at public events round the country reveals a certain frustration with what is seen as the arrogance of experts. As Lee Jones has argued, it is the presumption of authority based on expertise that galls. And this is not helped when experts such as Mark Carney declare publicly that "We are not going to take instruction on our policies from the political side".
One symptom of this arrogance has been a tendency for public policy debates to be couched in impenetrable jargon. New Labour bears a disproportionate share of the blame for the emergence of governance by gobbledegook. And this was not a neutral process in that it frequently implied governance by euphemism. Terms such as "structural adjustment" or "downsizing" were coined to avoid more inflammatory – and comprehensible – alternatives such as "reducing wages" or "sacking people."Ramzan Kadyrov makes denial despite growing evidence that gay men have been rounded up and at least three have been killed
Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov has used a meeting with Vladimir Putin to deny reports of an anti-gay purge in the southern Russian republic he runs.
The newspaper Novaya Gazeta alleges that more than 100 Chechen men suspected of being gay have been rounded up and at least three killed. Despite Kadyrov’s denial, evidence of a massive campaign against gay men is building.
During a televised meeting on Wednesday evening in the Kremlin, Kadyrov raised the “provocative articles about the Chechen Republic, the supposed events … the supposed detentions.” Putin did not ask him to clarify his comments or ask follow-up questions, which made the meeting look more like a public show of support in the face of international criticism.
Chechens tell of prison beatings and electric shocks in anti-gay purge: ‘They called us animals’ Read more
The Guardian has spoken to four men who have been involved in the anti-gay round-up in different ways, including one man who talked about being tortured with electric shocks during more than a week in which he was held in captivity with more than a dozen other suspected gay men.
This week, the Guardian spoke to two men who had been targeted for being gay. Both were outside Chechnya, having already fled the republic, but neither wanted their names, ages or any other identifying factors to be made public, citing a fear of Chechen authorities and their own families.
Ismail (not his real name) said he was first set up by Chechen officials back in October. He exchanged photographs with a man on social media and the men agreed to meet for a date. When they met, instead of taking Ismail to his country house as promised, the man drove him to a forest clearing, where three men in military uniform stripped him naked and beat him up, while another filmed.
“They shouted insults at me, they broke my jaw and left me covered in blood,” he said. “They told me I had to pay them a huge bribe or they’d publish the video online and tell my family I was gay.”
Ismail said he paid the bribe, but when rumours began swirling around Chechnya of the gay persecutions, he fled. Police have been to his family home, demanding to know where he is. They told his mother he was gay, causing a huge family scandal, and Ismail now fears his own relatives may now be on the hunt for him and want to kill him.
The second man was stopped at a police checkpoint on the outskirts of the capital city, Grozny, in late March. When his documents were checked, he appeared to be on a list and was shoved into a police car. He overheard the men arresting him say that they had “found one of those who takes it from behind”.
On arrival at the police station, he was searched and one of the men found medical documents in his bag detailing his HIV positive status. “He took pity on me and told me to run, to leave Chechnya and to never come back,” he said. He fled and he is now outside Chechnya. His family believe he has gone to find work.
Many Chechen gay men who have fled and are in Russia say they fear reprisals. Some European countries have agreed to expedite visas for a small number of the men.
Novaya Gazeta, the Russian newspaper which first broke the story, has been the subject of threats from Chechen Islamic and societal leaders. The paper has received two suspicious envelopes containing white powder.
A gathering in Grozny’s main mosque of 15,000 people passed a resolution which said: “The centuries-old traditions of Chechen society, the dignity of Chechen men, and our faith have all been insulted, and we promise that those behind it will face reprisals, whoever they are and wherever they are.”
Kadyrov said during his meeting with Putin that it was “unthinkable” that anyone in Chechnya would threaten journalists. However, given a history of attacks on critics of the Chechen leader, the newspaper is taking the threats seriously. The journalist who broke the story, Elena Milashina, has said she will leave Russia for a period.
Russian authorities have said they will investigate the allegations if victims come forward, but the men who spoke to the Guardian said they were too scared to speak out without guarantees of safety.
Previously, Kadyrov’s spokesman Alvi Karimov denied the reports of the purge, saying there were no gay people in Chechnya. “If there were such people in Chechnya, law enforcement agencies wouldn’t need to have anything to do with them because their relatives would send them somewhere from which there is no returning,” he said.
Kadyrov told Putin it was “embarrassing even to speak” about the issue, apparently alluding to the presence of gay men in Chechnya, but assured him that the reports were all lies. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Kadyrov assured Putin that the reports were “slanderous”.
However, the Guardian understands that some people in the Kremlin have been alarmed by the reports and are attempting to investigate whether they are true, independently of the official enquiry.'Silent' walk Sunday for Mapleton elk A group of Boulder residents is organizing a "silent" walk on the Pearl Street Mall on Sunday to honor the elk shot in the Mapleton Hill neighborhood on New Year's Day. According to the "Justice for the Mapleton Elk" Facebook page, the walk will take place at noon Sunday between 11th and 15th streets. Participants will be silent during the walk except for the playing of a recording of an elk bugle from their phones.
The elk killed Jan. 1 on Mapleton Hill by an on-duty Boulder police officer is now memorialized in song.
Singer-songwriter Jonathan Bennett, 58, wrote and recorded "Reason to Kill (Ballad of Big Boy)" to pay tribute to the elk and question the judgment of local law enforcement.
"I wanted to honor this noble creature's life," he said of the massive bull elk, which had been given names including Big Boy, Elmo and Bullwinkle. "But this isn't just about animal rights. This goes into the control and discipline of our police department."
Bennett lives more than a mile from the site of the shooting and never saw the elk, but he was compelled to attend Sunday's candlelight vigil, which attracted more than 200 people.
"It was very moving to me that all those people showed up," said Bennett, who began writing the song as soon as he got home from the vigil.
The shooting of the elk, which many Mapleton Hill residents considered a neighborhood guardian, has prompted community backlash, after Boulder police initially denied involvement and then revealed the elk was shot by an on-duty officer. Officials later confirmed that the off-duty officer who assisted in the disposal of the elk had called in sick the night of the shooting.
The officer who shot the elk did not report the incident or notify his supervisors he fired his weapon.
Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett has received nearly 15,000 e-mails, phone calls and letters about the case.
Garnett has met with Colorado Parks and Wildlife -- which is conducting the criminal investigation into the actions of Boulder police officers Sam Carter and Brent Curnow -- and said a decision on charges could be made next week.
"It's sort of mind-boggling that the perpetrators would act with such impunity and recklessness," Bennett said. "I really think we need to scrutinize law enforcement when they don't seem to be following the laws."
Bennett said "Reason to Kill" will appear on his debut album, which he plans to complete this summer. Though he wants people to enjoy his music, he would prefer that the focus be on his message.
"I hope every time someone listens to it, they remember why it was written," he said. "I want to keep the light shining on this issue."
Contact Camera Staff Writer Alex Burness at 303-473-1361 or burnessa@dailycamera.com.TORONTO — As CEO of the Rugby Football League, Nigel Wood was in Toronto last spring to attend the launch of the Wolfpack.
And he has liked what he's seen in the months since.
"I think they've had a very exciting baptism. They've certainly been very competitive on the field," Wood told The Canadian Press. "And we're looking forward to seeing the reaction of the Toronto sports public to their first game this weekend."
Wood, who is also chairman of the Rugby League International Federation, was speaking from Australia where he was attending meetings and taking in the Australia-New Zealand test match.
The Wolfpack, who have won all five of their league matches in England, debut at home Saturday against Oxford RLFC (2-2-0) at Lamport Stadium.
Toronto, the sport's first transatlantic team, has started life in the third tier of English rugby league — the Kingstone Press League 1. Its goal is to win promotion first to the second-tier Championship and then the elite Super League.
Wood says he always had confidence in the Wolfpack's ownership and believed putting a team in Toronto was a "terrific opportunity" for rugby league to get ahead of other sports looking at transatlantic play.
"That's not to say that there aren't still things to prove, because there are," he said. "I will say that fundamentally the first 12 months of this club's existence have been an absolute success."
The Wolfpack have drawn worldwide attention both to the sport and England's third tier, with rival teams benefiting at the box office when Toronto comes to town. But pitting the fully professional Wolfpack against semi-pro opposition has resulted in some lopsided scores — Toronto's last two league wins were 80-0 over the North Wales Crusaders and 82-6 over Doncaster RLFC.
The Wolfpack, who top the table, have outscored their opposition 310-37.
Toulouse Olympique XIII had a similar rampaging run last year when it entered the same league as Toronto. The French team won promotion after a 13-0-1 season that saw it outscore its opposition 702-184.
Wood says there is an expectation in British sports that when teams join "the professional pyramid," they do so at the bottom level and have to earn their spurs.
Starting at the bottom also allows teams "to knock any teething problems out of their operation" before moving up. And while he says the Wolfpack came out of the blocks as favourites to win League 1, that won't necessarily be the case in the Championship.
Wood's schedule hasn't allowed him to attend the Toronto home debut but he says the RFL has officials in town.
"We want to see firsthand the size of the crowd, the reaction of the public, just how much excitement it creates in the Toronto market."
Follow @NeilMDavidson on Twitter.The Metroid series has seen rather sporadic representation in Super Smash Brothers. It’s no wonder why, as Metroid is a major series that has seen several dips and rises in it’s popularity over the years, making it the type of series that can see content just as easily removed as added. This article will examine just how the representation of the series has changed over each installments as well as the reasoning behind each addition.
Smash 64
The first game in the series, Super Smash Brothers, began Metroid representation with the inclusion of series protagonist Samus Aran and a stage based on the Brinstar area of Super Metroid, Planet Zebes. It’s worth noting that Metroid was on a five year hiatus at the time, given that the last game in the series, Super Metroid, had been released in 1994. Super Smash Brothers ended up being the only game on the Nintendo 64 to include Metroid content in any way.
Samus herself in Super Smash Brothers was influenced by her Super Metroid incarnation, possessing the Charge Shot and Grapple Beam, all powerups introduced in said game in addition to the already established Morph Ball and Screw Attack. This, along with missles (an item which debuted in the original NES game) being added as a side special in Melee, became her staple moveset for all future titles. Samus’ Power Suit up until Super Smash Bros. for 3DS and Wii U was based on the Super Metroid design as well, which has been the Varia Suit in all appearances.
The music that plays on Planet Zebes is a remix of the Brinstar area from the original Metroid on the NES.
Melee
When Super Smash Brothers Melee rolled along, Metroid was still without a new game, extending the series’ hiatus to seven years. New Metroid games, Metroid Fusion and Metroid Prime, were under development but would have no input on Samus or the Metroid franchise representation in Melee.
New content introduced in Melee
Samus was updated for Melee, including a change to her Missile attack; inputting the command like a smash attack causes a Super Missile to be fired, which doesn’t have homing and moves in a straight line but is faster and does more damage.
Trophies, introduced in Melee, were collectibles that showed the lore of characters or objects within the universes featured in Super Smash Brothers. Ten trophies represent Metroid in Melee. Most of these trophies are taken from the original Metroid, however Metroid II is represented via the Samus’ Gunship trophy and an allusion to Super Metroid is made in the description of recurring villain Ridley’s trophy. Ridley would also famously appear in the game’s intro cinematic. The space dragon’s design takes inspiration from his Super Metroid appearance.
Items were expanded upon in Melee, and Metroid received its first item in the form of the Screw Attack. This item is a badge that when equipped causes a character to deal damage by jumping next to an opponent, akin to the powerup from Super Metroid onward.
Metroid’s stage lineup was also expanded from the original and now consisted of a redesign of Planet Zebes simply titled Brinstar and a second, new stage, known as Brinstar Depths. Brinstar, as the spiritual successor to the original Planet Zebes stage, features a nearly identical layout; aside from the visuals, the only real difference to this stage is that parts of the stage can be damaged by players attacks. Destroying these can cause the elevated platforms to rise upwards to steep angles and the big lower platform to break apart into two. A large creature, unidentified appears in the background, shaking whenever the lava comes up to it.
Brinstar Depths is essentially a giant, craggy, circular mass of rock that floats above lava, and the stage is routinely rotated by the gigantic lizard Kraid in the background. The latter’s design is also lifted from Super Metroid.
For both tracks, individual remixes of Brinstar are used. Brinstar uses an updated remix of Super Smash Brothers’ Brinstar track, while Brinstar Depths uses a new track of the same name, remixed from Kraid’s Lair in the original Metroid.
Brawl
Super Smash Brothers Brawl was released in 2008, and by that time, Metroid had gained a substantial amount of popularity primarily stemming from the first two critically acclaimed Metroid Prime titles, both released for the Nintendo GameCube. This popularity is likely the main reason Metroid got the amount of content it did in Brawl.
Zero Suit Samus
Perhaps the most significant inclusion to Brawl, Metroid-wise, was the addition of a second character, Zero Suit Samus, to the playable roster. As the name implies, Zero Suit Samus is Samus Aran without her Power Suit which allowed for a faster gameplay style focused on acrobatics rather than raw firepower, creating a contrast between the two Samus characters. Samus could revert to Zero Suit Samus by using her new Final Smash, the Zero Laser(an original move created for Smash), which causes her armor to break and change form. This is also possible by holding down certain buttons (this combination changed depending on the player’s control scheme) during the character selection which causes the change from the beginning. The Zero Suit itself made its debut in the 2004 Gameboy Advance title, Metroid: Zero Mission, although the ability to play as Samus sans Power Suit dates back to the release of the original Metroid on the NES/Famicom.
Ridley
As we’ve covered before, Ridley has been seen in every generation of Smash game since the original, but Brawl is arguably where the space dragon got the most exposure. For the new Subspace Emissary mode, Ridley became a boss character twice in both his original and Meta Ridley forms, the latter from Metroid Prime, where he was a robotized form of Ridley. Appropriately, Ridley also receives two trophies based on these forms. It is worth noting that Metroid is the only represented franchise to feature more than one boss fight.
Other content
Metroid was represented noticeably better in Brawl than any other entry in the series. 27 trophies represent the series in Brawl, of which 15 are exclusively from the Prime subseries, including Prime, Echoes, and Hunters. Metroid would also receive an Assist Trophy in the form of the eponymous Metroid. Assist Trophies are new items introduced in Brawl that will summon assorted video game characters to (hopefully) aid you in battle. Metroid also has 29 stickers representing every game in the series including the Metroid Prime Pinball spinoff(except the original Prime), a Brawl only collectible, in the game.
Given the amount of games represented in Brawl, the musical variety was also stepped up. Remixes based on Sector 1 from Fusion, Ridley’s Super Metroid theme, the NES Metroid ending theme, Norfair, and Super Metroid’s opening surfaced in addition to the music from Melee. With the introduction of the Metroid Prime subseries, music from both console games were featured with the Parasite Queen, Meta Ridley and Main Menu themes from Prime and the multiplayer theme from Echoes.
Stages
Brinstar returns from Melee, and Metroid receives two additional stages. The first, Frigate Orpheon, is representative of even more Metroid Prime content. The area is a recreation of the first area Samus explores in the original Metroid Prime, complete with the trapped Parasite Queen in the background.
The second stage is Norfair. Norfair is a simple stage with five platforms shaped in a “v” pattern. What is unique about this stage is that lava can encroach from several different areas, effectively making your fighting space smaller. Additionally, “bubble doors” occasionally appear that can be attacked and hidden in to avoid the lava flow. These doors are designed after the locked door found in the Metroid Universe.
3DS/U
At the time of Super Smash Brothers for 3DS/Wii U’s development, Metroid was in a second hiatus following the release of Metroid: Other M, a game which was not as well received as the Prime games. As a result of this, most of the Metroid content in both versions was changed to reflect Other M, including both Samus’ designs, and which notably resulted in a dramatic change in content.
Ridley
As one of Metroid’s key element in Smash throughout the entries, Ridley understandably returned to the newest entry in a role reminiscent of his previous Brawl role by being one of three new boss hazards in the Wii U version of the game on the new Pyrosphere stage. Ridley’s design in this game as well as his attack patterns are borrowed from Other M. The powerup Ridley activates when absorbing energy from the sides of the stage is somewhat based on Other M as well; the main difference being that Ridley could activate this naturally[5:40 in the linked video]. It was erroneously referred to as ‘Meta Ridley’ during the 50 Fact Extravaganza, when in reality it has no established name whatsoever and Meta Ridley is an established form of Ridley that appears in the Prime subseries.
Downgrade of Prime content from Brawl
Likely due to the aforementioned hiatus and Other M being the more recent game in the series, there was a noticeable absence of almost all content related to Prime. 13 trophies from the Prime series were removed with the only exceptions being the Dark Suit from Echoes and the Dark Samus trophy which received a new look resembling her Corruption incarnation. All Prime related music tracks with the exception of the main menu theme from Prime 1 were left intact, but notably the subseries received an additional song from Hunters, that being Psycho Bits. This is an odd move considering there are more notable songs to include from both Corruption and within Hunters itself. No stages related to the Prime sub-series were introduced, and Frigate Orpheon would not make a return.
Other (M) content
As stated, the bulk of content in Super Smash Brothers for 3DS/Wii U mostly reflects the latest game at the current point in time, Other M. 10 new trophies explicitly represent said game, and in total 27 trophies are based on it. 34 trophies represent Metroid as a whole between both versions. Aside from trophies, Metroid received a new stage, the Pyrosphere area from Other M. This acts as a stage home to Ridley as a boss hazard, and three enemies from Other M appear as regular hazards on the stage.
Ironically, Other M only has three music tracks to it’s name: Nemesis Ridley, Lockdown Battle Theme and The Burning Lava Fish.
Oddly enough, Metroid received two new assist trophies that had nothing to do with Other M. The trophies are of Mother Brain in her original Metroid/Super Metroid appearance and Dark Samus in her Metroid Prime 3: Corruption incarnation. Both characters act much like they do in their source games. Mother Brain fires a laser from her eye akin to Super Metroid while being guarded by Rinkas (energy circles) and Dark Samus uses three attacks from her Corruption movepool. The Metroid assist trophy also makes a return.
With the amount of available palettes available for characters, Zero Suit Samus, in addition to recolors gained new alternate costumes based on her appearance in the endings of Zero Mission and Fusion, which are orange and blue top and shorts. Samus in her Power Suit retained the original 4 colors she had, with new palettes based on the Gravity Suit, Light Suit from Echoes and Dark Samus being added. An additional original green palette was added, not based on any suit but referred to as “Mass Produced Samus” on the original Super Smash brothers website.
Returning Stages
Both versions of the game received a returning stage. The 3DS features Brinstar making its third appearance in the Smash franchise, and the Wii U is home to Norfair.
Smash Run Enemies
Smash Run, a new mode exclusive to the 3DS, finds players battling against an army of different enemies from Smash’s many franchises. Metroid is well represented here, with Kihunter, Metroid, Reo, and Geemer all being featured.
Conclusion
As of this article, Metroid has resurfaced from its 5 year hiatus with the announcement of Metroid Prime Federation Force, however said game is facing intense criticism at the present time. As for Smash, however, it’s impossible to know what direction it will go. We have covered the possibilities for DLC from the series in this incarnation of Smash, but those are unlikely possibilities. Perhaps in the next Smash game Metroid will receive some more attention.Good-bye, Large Hadron Collider. Hello, Black Mesa.
That's the reader's choice in Wired Science's Large Hadron Collider Renaming Contest, announced last week to fill the vast gulf between the LHC's scientific magnificence and utterly wonky name.
Since then, an electrical problem has shuttered the mammoth atom smasher until 2009 – making Black Mesa, a reference to the bestselling computer game Half Life, a timely choice. It won't take long for delays and malfunctions to sour the public on their $8-billion Large Hadron Collider, but Black Mesa sounds scary and intimidating, like a leaked government project. Criticize it, and you'll end up on a watch list.
Black Mesa was submitted separately by Brian Reed and DSA. Finishing second was the Chuck Norris Roundhouse Kick Simulator, submitted by Anonymous. Among my favorite also-rans were Master Blaster Atom Smasher; Atom Smasher +5, Holy Avenger; What Willis Was Talking About; The Big Banger; and The Thing We Play With When We Aren't Playing Warcraft.
All these entries are better than the winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry's winner: Halo.
The least-favorite choice in our contest was The Blesser, submitted by Vincenzo Maggio. Its sheer unpopularity was likely due to its religious overtones, but at this point, the LHC can use a bit of help, divine or not.
See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.Continue Reading Below Advertisement
So, Prince became another person.
In 1993, he announced he was no longer Prince and would henceforth be working only as an unpronounceable symbol. He told WB he would still provide them with his mandatory Prince albums, but that they had no right to claim the output of this new creature, whom baffled journalists referred to as "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince," presumably because you can't say "Coconut Fucking A Trumpet" in most news outlets.
Warner Bros. Records
If you pronounced it as "fart noises plus angry Tasmanian Devil babbling,"
you were as correct as anyone else.
Note: This is not how contract law works. It does seem like somebody should have told Prince that, somewhere along the way.
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While Warner Bros. cobbled together a greatest hits record, Previously-Prince dove into some very expensive projects in non-recorded music media, such as a weird stage musical based on Homer's Odyssey, an ill-advised perfume called Get Wild, and sending entire crews to Egypt to film Carmen Electra videos that were never released (for an album that tanked). When it became clear that his renaming plan wasn't working out, he went over to Plan B: writing the world "SLAVE" on his right cheek and putting Warner Bros. on blast in a full-page ad in Billboard magazine. In the end, both sides lost millions, and Prince would later refer to the feud as the worst years of his life.
Peter Still/Redferns/Getty Images
He could barely concentrate on having freaky funky sex with the
three dozen supermodels living in his hot tub.
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Prince kept the symbol until his contract expired in 2000, at which point he returned to using his actual name and eventually renegotiated a deal with Warner Bros. that gave him ownership of all his old music. Lesson: Crazy stunts like that always work out in the end. If you're Prince.Little to no progress has been made on improving Indigenous life expectancy and there has been a decline in Indigenous employment but the child mortality rate has been lowered and literacy and numeracy skills improved, the latest Closing the Gap report reveals.
The Council of Australian Governments (Coag) reform council, which will be abolished next month as part of budget measures, has released a report into the five-year performance of Indigenous reform and closing the gap targets. It revealed there had also been improvements in the rate of Indigenous people finishing year 12 or the equivalent.
Targets may have to be reviewed for the deadlines to close the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, the rate of early childhood and education and employment outcomes with little or no progress and even declines.
The Closing the Gap targets were first agreed to by states and territories in 2009 and the prime minister, Tony Abbott, has added another target of closing the gap in school attendance within five years.
The report highlighted obesity as an area of concern; more than 41% of Indigenous people are obese, compared to 27% of non-Indigenous Australians.
In 2012, 88% of Indigenous children in remote communities were enrolled in a preschool program in the year before school and 77% attended. A seven percentage point increase is needed to reach Coag’s target of 95% enrolment in remote communities by 2013, but the figures are not yet available.
In employment outcomes the report shows the gap widened significantly, increasing by 6.6 percentage points. The gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous unemployment widened by 4.1 percentage points.
Life expectancy rates have made little or no progress. Indigenous men were expected to live to 69.1 years and women to 73.7 years in 2010-12, a gap of 10.6 years and 9.5 years respectively compared to non-Indigenous people.
Over five years the gaps have narrowed by 0.8 years for men and 0.1 years for women which means the target of closing the gap by 2031 will not be made at the current rate.
The report recorded a fall of 3.6 percentage points in daily smoking rates for Indigenous people but it was still twice the smoking rate of non-Indigenous people.
The report described education as having “better news” but “not all positive”. School attendance rates for Indigenous people, which Abbott has taken a particular interest in, have fallen and were more widespread than improvements.
Numeracy and literacy results for the Indigenous population were slightly mixed but overall heralded good news. The gap narrowed between 2008 and 2013 in reading for Indigenous people in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, and in numeracy for those in years 3 and 5. The biggest gains were closing the gap by 15.6 percentage points in reading for those in year 5 and by 10.5 percentage points for those in year 3.
More Indigenous people are finishing year 12, or the equivalent, with the gap decreasing by 12.2 percentage points in the five years since 2008.
“A clear positive is that Coag is on target to halve the gap in child deaths by 2018. This is a resounding achievement,” the report said.
From 1998 to 2012, the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous child death rates (0-4 years) reduced from 139.0 to 87.6 deaths per 100 000. The Indigenous child death rate fell by an average of 6.4 deaths per 100 000 a year over this period, fast enough to reach Coag’s target by 2018.
Coag recommended that the government note as areas of concern the widening employment gap, the higher rates of obesity among Indigenous Australians and the lower and falling school attendance among Indigenous students.Ireland has climbed to sixth in the latest world competitive rankings from Swiss business school IMD.
The country has continued its upward trajectory in the rankings, rising from seventh in 2016 to register its best placement since 2000. It was ranked 17th just four years ago.
The rankings are based on 260 indicators; two-thirds of which rely on hard data and one-third which relate to the survey responses of over 6,250 executives from across the globe.
I |
discovered the account, since Thursday, had tweeted comments about "taking out" a whole classroom and "scoring" at least 30 students. Hutson also told Hatewatch that the Twitter user threatened to "shoot up a school" and a synagogue and put "two in the head" of a rabbi or Jewish leader.
E-mail John Tunison: jtunison@mlive.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/johntunisonThe Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket is seen during a time exsposure as it lifts off from space launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., early Tuesday, May 22, 2012. This launch marks the first time, a private company sends its own rocket to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.(AP Photo/John Raoux)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Opening a new, entrepreneurial era in spaceflight, a ship built by a billionaire businessman sped toward the International Space Station with a load of groceries and other supplies Tuesday after a spectacular middle-of-the-night blastoff.
The launch of the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon capsule marked the first time a commercial spacecraft has been sent to the orbiting outpost.
Tracing a fiery arc across the night sky, the rocket lifted off just before 4 a.m. and smoothly boosted the capsule into orbit. The capsule is expected to rendezvous with the space station within days, delivering a half-ton of provisions for its six crew members.
It is considered just a test flight — in fact, the capsule was packed with only nonessential items, in case something went disastrously wrong — but if all goes well with this mission and others like it, commercial spaceships could be carrying astronauts to and from the space station in three to five years.
"Falcon flew perfectly!!" billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, founder of the SpaceX company, said via Twitter. "Feels like a giant weight just came off my back."
Musk later told reporters: "For us, it's like winning the Super Bowl."
Up to now, flights to the space station were something only major governments had done.
The White House offered congratulations.
"Every launch into space is a thrilling event, but this one is especially exciting," said John Holdren, President Barack Obama's chief science adviser. "This expanded role for the private sector will free up more of NASA's resources to do what NASA does best — tackle the most demanding technological challenges in space, including those of human spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit."
NASA is looking to the private sector to take over flights to the space station now that the space shuttle has been retired. Several U.S. companies are vying for the opportunity.
"The significance of this day cannot be overstated," said a beaming NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "It's a great day for America. It's actually a great day for the world because there are people who thought that we had gone away, and today says, 'No, we're not going away at all.'"
Flight controllers applauded when the Dragon reached orbit nine minutes into the flight. Then they embraced once the solar panels on the craft popped open. Many of the SpaceX controllers wore untucked T-shirts, jeans or shorts, a stark contrast to NASA's suit-and-tie shuttle crowd.
A previous launch attempt, on Saturday, was aborted with a half-second left in the countdown because of a bad valve in one of Falcon's nine engines.
Another important test comes Thursday when the Dragon draws close to the space station. It will undergo practice maneuvers from more than a mile out. If all goes well, docking will occur on Friday. Musk will preside from the company's Mission Control in Hawthorne, Calif.
Since the shuttle's retirement last summer, American astronauts have been hitching rides to the space station aboard Russian rockets, and Russian, Japanese and European ships have been delivering supplies.
SpaceX has spent more than $1 billion on the project.
Musk, the 40-year-old entrepreneur who helped create PayPal and runs the electric car company Tesla Motors, has poured in millions of his own fortune, and NASA has contributed $381 million in seed money in a venture that has been likened to the public-private collaboration that built the Internet and won the West.
Even Musk's rivals were rooting for a successful flight.
"The shuttle may be retired, but the American dream of space exploration is alive and well," said Mark Sirangelo, chairman of Sierra Nevada Corp.'s space systems, which is developing a mini-shuttle to carry space station crews in a few years.
The Dragon capsule will stay at the space station for a week and then splash down in the Pacific, bringing back experiments and equipment. None of the other cargo ships now in use are designed to return safely; they burn up on the way down.
Two more Dragon supply missions are planned this year, regardless of what happens this week.
The rocket also blasted into orbit around the Earth the ashes of more than 300 people, including Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on "Star Trek." The ashes were in a section of the rocket that was jettisoned during the climb into space.
___
Online:
SpaceX: http://www.spacex.com
NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/home/
Celestis Inc.: http://www.celestis.comThe state's top crime statistician says there is no basis for claims that lockout laws are working, arguing that it will take at least until Christmas before enough data is available to conduct a proper analysis.
Don Weatherburn, director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, said there is no evidence the laws introduced by the NSW government in February have had any effect on levels of non-domestic violence in Kings Cross and the Sydney CBD.
BOCSAR director Don Weatherburn has called for a re-think on the approach to crime and imprisonment. Credit:Quentin Jones
Dr Weatherburn said two factors need to be taken into account: that there was "very little data after the lockout laws to make any judgement whatsoever" and that the numbers "bounce around quite a bit".
The downward trend of violence in the Sydney CBD and Kings Cross "began well before the lockout laws took place," he said.Seven hundred delegates at the Greens' annual conference in Hamburg voted by a large majority on Saturday to make food and farming reform a key campaign issue, despite their electoral bruising last year.
Part of the Green's two-percent decline in voter support to 8.4 percent in Germany's September 2013 poll was widely attributed to their campaign call for a "Veggie Day," a suggestion that each consumer pick a weekday without meat.
The German farmers' federation (DVB) responded at the time by accusing the Greens of trying to impose eating habits on citizens.
60 kilograms meat
Germans each consume annually about 60 kilograms (130 pounds) of meat, including poultry, pork and beef. An additional 4.3 kilograms ends up in the waste bin, according to a recent study by the Heinrich-Böll Foundation.
At Saturday's Hamburg conference, the party adopted a resolution, saying "what I eat and don't eat is for me to decide according to my tastes. But politicians must ensure safe food products and transparent information."
"It's about many things: feeding all persons with good food products and global justice, climate protection and species diversity," the resolution added.
Agricultural transformation sought
Anton Hofreiter, the opposition Green's caucus leader in the Bundestag said the "agricultural industry with its monoculture is responsible for species extinction worldwide."
Hofreiter also said the party's decision to push further for an agricultural transformation or "Agrawende" had ecological ramifications similar to the "Energiewende."
That was the centerpiece energy transformation adopted by Merkel, taking Germany toward renewables and away from fossil fuels and nuclear power, especially after Japan's 2011 Fukushima disaster.
Hofreiter on Saturday also demanded an end to the massive use of antibiotics in intensive farming of animals. His call for a ban on imported, genetically-engineered soya bean produce drew loud applause from delegates.
Simone Peter accuses Merkel of giving industry a free run
Greens co-chairperson Simone Peter accused Merkel's coalition comprising her conservatives and Social Democrats of backing policies against the interests of consumers.
"The Grand Coalition gives the mass livestock industry a free run and hinders the ecological farming sector," Peter said.
Tough fight, warns Künast
Renate Künast, who was agriculture minister in Germany's center-left coalition government between 2001 and 2005, warned delegates on Saturday that their policy drive would elicit strong opposition from what she called the "agricultural lobby."
"That will be rock hard," Künast said.
The Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva told the Greens: "Agricultural factories must be stopped."
The European Commission estimates that nearly two-thirds of EU cereal production is used as animal fodder, making meat an inefficient way to deliver nutritional value to human consumers.
In 2010, the Commission published a report on climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions from farming. The report concluded that intensification of agriculture had "contributed to biodiversity decline and loss throughout Europe."
ipj/kms(dpa, AFP, epd)The appeal of dumplings is so universal that almost every culture has a variation on them, from potstickers to perogies. They’re perfect as an appetizer, a side dish, and if you're truly ambitious you can make a meal of them. We’ve covered your best dumpling options in San Francisco--as well as some great Dim Sum options-- but the East Bay is no slouch in the dumpling department, either. Here are some of our favorite spots for dumplings in Berkeley and Oakland. Each spot is great on its own, or you can combine them for a cross-cultural dumpling crawl. Did we miss your go-to? Let us know if the comments below.
Berkeley’s Chengdu Style Restaurant, named after the capital of China’s Sichuan province, is a Cal student’s dream, conveniently located steps from the campus and offering hearty portions at affordable prices. The restaurant, owned by Chengdu expats (and Cal alums) April, Bo and Jun Hu includes traditional Chinese-American fare along with spicy, peppercorn-studded dishes native to the region. It’s a homey place with scribbled-on menus (handwritten price updates, “steamed bums” corrected to buns), packed with Cal students watching movies on their phones as they slurp giant bowls of soup and girlfriends catching up in Chinese. The Chengdu Style Dumplings are hearty and juicy, flecked with green onions, but the best part is the red chili oil that characterizes the region’s dishes. Sweet, salty and spicy, it enlivens every bite.
Chengdu Style Restaurant
2600 Bancroft Way [Map]
Berkeley, CA 94704
Ph: (510) 845-5807
Hours: Sun-Thu, 11am-10pm; Fri-Sat, 11am-10:30pm
Price range: $ (Entrees $10 and under)
Like Chengdu Style Restaurant, Berkeley’s Dumpling Express boasts affordable prices: for under $7, you can get a meal of six dumplings. The tiny restaurant, owned by Terry Chan, offers a variety of dishes--from fried rice to ice cream--but the soup dumplings are one of their biggest draws. After placing your order, you'll wait patiently for a worker to steam them before receiving your handmade Xiao Long Bao. They’re plump and chewy, with a salty broth mixing in with succulent pork. Visit for the soup dumplings, or to stock up on sub-$10 bags of frozen dumplings--your future self will thank you.
Dumpling Express
2328 Bowditch St [Map]
Berkeley, CA 94704
Ph: (510) 204-9283
Hours: Mon-Sun, 11am-9:30pm
Facebook: Dumpling Express 鮮餃美食
Price range: $ (Entrees $10 and under)
When introducing your culture’s cuisine to a new audience, there are plenty of tricks for marketing the unknown to a suspicious crowd. You can change seasonings, making it more or less spicy. You can wrap it in a tortilla or bun and transform it into one of the Bay Area’s signature food mashups. Or, like Berkeley’s Turkish Kitchen, from owner George Baylar and chefs Mehmet Vural and Ferzan Yolcu, you can change the names to make it more familiar to a Bay Area crowd. Thus, a kebab becomes a “Turkish burrito,” and manti, a style of dumplings that Turks have been eating since the Ottoman empire become “Turkish ravioli.” They’re tiny, and packed with a flavorful mix of ground beef, onions and spices. Covered with parsley and a warm yogurt sauce, they’re a well-seasoned, herby and filling comfort food, no matter where you’re from or what you call them.WASHINGTON ― The Republican candidate for governor of Montana has ties to Douglas Wilson, an Idaho pastor who once wrote, “one could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery,” and maintains that women are “created to be responsive and dependent to a man.”
Greg Gianforte, the wealthy technology entrepreneur who’s challenging incumbent Steve Bullock (D) for the Montana governor’s seat, served with Wilson on the board of the Association of Classical and Christian Schools, which the pastor co-founded. (Wilson is an ex officio member of the board, which means he doesn’t vote.) Both men spoke at the group’s conferences in 2014 and 2015. Gianforte praised Wilson at the 2014 conference. “We have been Classical Christian from day one ― 20 years,” he said. “And I really appreciate Douglas Wilson’s comments about, avoiding, you know, vision drift.”
The Gianforte Family Foundation, a charitable organization that Gianforte and his wife established, gave more than $30,000 to ACCS between 2012 and 2014, according to filings. Gianforte remains the chairman and a permanent board member of Petra Academy, the Bozeman-based, ACCS-accredited school his son attended. (Craig Dunham, headmaster of Petra, said the school makes its own curricular choices. “We do not use Mr. Wilson’s book on slavery in our curriculum,” he added.)
Gianforte “is unfamiliar with Mr. Wilson’s writings outside of their mutual involvement with ACCS,” Aaron Flint, a spokesman for his campaign, told The Huffington Post.
Wilson’s writings on classical, Christian education inspired the formation of other schools, and he was involved in the effort to accredit them. But his views on slavery are so controversial that after learning about them in February, a Republican lawmaker in Tennessee withdrew a bill that would have helped ACCS. The Democrat who drew attention to Wilson’s views made claims that were “untrue and unfounded,” said ACCS President David Goodwin.
Wilson and a co-author rewrote slavery’s violent history in a 1996 pamphlet called “Southern Slavery, As It Was.” They cite narratives that they claim show Southern slavery was “a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care,” and note that “one could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was under slavery.”
In the same document, they claim “feminists, in rebellion against God, invert the order of the home established by God. They do so in a way that seeks to rob women of their beauty in submission.”
Goodwin said Wilson’s views on slavery are independent of the ACCS, and that the pastor only discussed education at conferences.
“We would distance ourselves from him if we thought he were a racist or a friend of slavery,” Goodwin said. “Wilson, in our judgment, when we read his materials and try to assess these things, is making academic arguments, and as a pastor, we don’t want to censor him for things that are reasonable, if read carefully, interpretations of history that other people have had.”
“We have multiple schools run, some of them by black individuals...I don’t think they’d be there if they really felt this was a racist movement,” he later added.
Wilson wrote four of the 14 classical Christian education books ACCS recommends on its website. The site doesn’t mention the 1996 pamphlet, but it does recommend an education book by Confederate chaplain Robert Lewis Dabney, who wrote in his 1867 defense of slavery that black people are “morally inferior.” (Goodwin was not familiar with that work, but said Dabney’s thesis on education is “consistent with our view.”)
Wilson and Gianforte appear to share educational goals, but are not close friends. Wilson told HuffPost that he would support Gianforte’s candidacy if he lived in Montana (he doesn’t), and described their relationship as “friendly at board meetings,” which he attends about once a year. He said that as far as his views on slavery go, “Greg and I never talked about any of that stuff.” Rather, meetings were focused on education.
Wilson emphasized that he is glad slavery is gone, and pointed to his 2005 publication, in which he argued, “we were not trying to maintain that slavery in itself was a positive good...our central interest was in defending the integrity and applicability of the Scriptures.”
But Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, contends that ACCS “apparently remains the same extremist organization that it was when Doug Wilson founded it.” He pointed to the fact that the association still carries some of Wilson’s writings, adding, “Wilson has unbelievably retrograde ideas about women.”
“I do not think they could possibly have any factual basis for their assertion,” Goodwin said in an email.Joseph Flynn — brother of former presidential national security adviser Michael Flynn, who recently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI — demanded a pardon for his brother on Tuesday.
“About time you pardoned General Flynn who has taken the biggest fall for all of you given the illegitimacy of this confessed crime in the wake of all this corruption,” Flynn tweeted to President Donald Trump, in a post that was later deleted.
Flynn later reposted an edited version of the tweet that used more formal language. That tweet remains up as this is published.
Mr. President, I personally believe that a pardon is due to General Flynn, given the apparent and obvious illegitimacy of the manner in which the so called "crimes"he plead guilty to were extracted from him. I ask for quick action on this. Thank you and keep up the good work! — Joseph J. Flynn (@JosephJFlynn1) December 27, 2017
Flynn’s tweet came in response to one from Trump in which he blasted the FBI for allegedly using a partially unverified dossier as the basis for launching an investigation into his campaign for possible collusion with Russia back in the summer of 2016. Despite Trump’s claim, there’s no evidence that the FBI in fact relied on the so-called “Steele dossier,” parts of which have been confirmed, as the basis for its investigation.
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There’s also no indication that partisanship played any role in Flynn’s conviction. On the contrary, the underlying facts are clear-cut and incriminating.
About a month ago, Flynn pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about the contents of his December 2016 phone calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. According to his plea agreement, Flynn advised Kislyak to refrain from escalating a feud with the Obama administration over sanctions the administration placed on the Putin regime for meddling in the 2016 presidential election. But during an interview with investigators days after Trump’s inauguration, Flynn falsely claimed the topic of sanctions never came up during his communications with Kislyak.
As The Washington Post noted when news of Flynn’s plea broke, court documents show that Flynn “is cooperating in the ongoing probe of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.” The Post also reported that “court records and people familiar with the contacts indicated [Flynn] was acting in consultation with senior Trump transition officials, including President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in his dealings with the diplomat.”
Trump has acknowledged that Flynn lied. But as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has closed in on Flynn and other members of Trump’s inner circle in recent weeks, the president and his supporters in the media and in Congress have launched a campaign to discredit Mueller by smearing the FBI as biased.
After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters – worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
Report: “ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE” Now it all starts to make sense! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017
House Judiciary Committee member Jim Jordan (R-OH) has gone as far as publicly making the case that FBI leadership was colluding with then-candidate Hillary Clinton to bring Trump down.
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But what Jordan and other prominent Republicans who have advanced that conspiracy theory can’t explain is this: If the FBI was colluding with Clinton during the election, then why did FBI Director James Comey go out of his way to publicize the Clinton email investigation just days before the election? Prominent pollsters such as Nate Silver have concluded that the negative publicity Comey’s move generated for Clinton may have cost her the presidency.
While the campaign Trump, Fox News personalities, and Trump-supporting members of Congress like Jordan are waging against the FBI might seem like bad-faith conspiracy mongering, Joseph Flynn’s pardon demand indicates it is being taken very seriously by some.
Trump himself was asked about the possibility of pardoning Flynn during a press gaggle on December 15. Notably, the president didn’t deny that he has considered it.
“I don’t want to talk about pardons for Michael Flynn yet,” Trump said. “We’ll see what happens, let’s see. I can say this — when you look at what’s gone on with the FBI and with the Justice Department, people are very, very angry.”
The word “yet” was particularly significant. By suggesting that he may eventually consider a pardon, Trump could be interpreted as indicating to Flynn that whether or not he gets one depends on the extent to which he protects Trump and his family.
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Flynn’s brother confirmed to Newsweek that he’s the author of the tweet and said of the president, “I said it, and maybe he’s listening.”649 SHARES Share Tweet
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So, apparently you won’t be needing long production lines for motorcycles anymore as this 3-D printed bike speaks for itself. The bike was completely designed on CAD, and then the parts were printed in plastic using 3D printing techniques. Finally, the parts were assembled, and the bike was taken out for a spin. No special production lines and machines needed at all!
Although the bike might not be ready to hit the highways as of yet, it provides an alternative manufacturing process that can make the bike highly customizable. Since even the load bearing items like wheels and bearings have been manufactured by 3-D printing techniques, the parent company TE Connectivity’s attempt to make these parts have been successful.
The bike’s design has been inspired by Harley-Davidson Softail version. The length is 8-feet, and the weight is 250 pounds, and it can support a significant load up to 400 pounds. The frame has been designed with the help of a successful trial and error process. A major part of the bike was 3D printed by the company itself, but some obvious parts were outsourced like the braking system, electrical wiring, battery and some standard bolts.
The fully functioning status of the bike is the highlight of this news as there have been particular design problems associated with the manufacturing 3D body of the motorcycle. The motor is a miniscule one horsepower (750 W). The battery can power a 15mph ride for quite a few minutes. The range and battery power aren’t up for debate, as the company has come up with a working 3D printed motorcycle within a 25,000$ budget. The range and speed will only increase with time.
The main load bearing parts were developed by a 3D printed technology called Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The material used for the 3D printing technique is a complex polymer named ABS that has the required properties of strength. Heat resistant resin Ultem 9085 has been used to make some of the most complex geometries like the body itself. Wheel bearings may sound tricky to make especially the rear one. Equally difficult was fabricating the wheel rims that have to support real inflatable tires. The headlight housing were manufactured through another 3D rapid prototyping technique Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS).
It was a second attempt by the TE Connectivity to make a 3D bike. The previous one got damaged during transportation, and the designers used this as an opportunity to improve the bike further. The 3D printers were provided by Stratasys, and their machines had to work overtime to complete the bikes on time. They are currently advising many other companies like Ducati on the 3D technology, and they intend to introduce FDM at industrial level anytime soon. The 3D printing technology is really starting to take on conventional manufacturing as it has progressed by leaps and bounds. Only a few years earlier, it was just thought as a hobby to make useless plastics. Now it is finding applications from rocket manufacturing to 3D printing of human organs itself!
AdvertisementShe debuted in many artworks but never were the center of it, and except the old one where she is being carried by Laila, she never appeared in full body artwork. Tried a new thing by adding the character name on the artwork, I don't know if this makes it better or not.Hakuba is auto claimed the disciple #1 of Laila (and the only one), somehow like Sen is autoclaimed the disciple #1 of Nulara (and the only one).Her objective however is not being a better adventurer/warrior, but she have a deep admiration for Laila as being a Hippogryph taur, as she just loves the idea on being one, this is why she tries to understand how to taur, despite her eyes can see only the better parts (As Laila is almost often complaining about her "Huge ass").Also she is the little sister of Halcion, this is the only reason Laila tolerates the Hakuba's almost stalker behavior, as Laila have a secret crush on her brother.Her current clothes are the ones she wears when she goes to play at the grassy fields between the cities of Szarnarok and Spaták, and is a mimic of the Sen and his gang outfit, despite hers is not a reused one and have much better quality. Unfortunate for her, once she lives almost 1.5km away from the orphans, she can't join on every single adventure of her friends, but they meets each other at least two time a week in the aforementioned grasslands. In normal days she wears a more girly dress as she actually belongs to a house of traditional Paladins of Zephirous.The Super Smash Bros. franchise has always been popular with fans, and its competitive scene was invigorated last year with performances in Apex 2013 and the community’s $94,683 Cancer Research donation drive to become the eighth official game in Evolution 2013.
According to a report by Boston magazine, the game’s competitive spirit is also finding its way into colleges in the northeast region. Players from Boston University, UMass Boston, University of Connecticut, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Northeastern, UMass Amherst, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Tufts University, and Boston College are set to compete for the Super Smash Bros. Melee Championship from February 11 to March 29.
The event’s organizer, Quincy College Student Matthew “MattDotZeb” Zaborowski, originally set up Northeastern Smash Attack in November for players at the college. He expected an attendance of less than 20 players, but over 100 gamers showed up. Now, more than 65 students (Editor’s note: this figure is now closer to 140) have already registered for Northeastern Smash Attack 2, which will also be host to the grand finals of the intercollegiate Melee Games.
The story is a great example of a player from the community wanting to establish a scene in new territory. Here’s a small excerpt, but make sure to read the entire article at Boston magazine.
People might not know it—mostly because the events are held indoors, tucked away at Tommy Doyle’s during “Game Over”—but Boston is booming with sub-communities of competitive “Smash Bros.” players that meet on a regular basis to defend their titles. They also migrate to Facebook fan pages by the hundreds, and bring their tense rivalries into chat rooms and message boards. “Boston has had a large growth of Smash Brothers players within the last year to year-and-a-half,” said Matthew “MattDotZeb” Zaborowski, a Quincy College student, and the organizer of the upcoming “The Melee Games” between the eight colleges. “The events we’ve been running have seen a really large increase in participants.”
Further information on the Melee Games can be found here, and be sure to visit the New England Melee community on Facebook if you’re interested in regional competition.
Source: Boston, contributions to this article via Matthew “MattDotZeb” Zaborowski.Neill Byrnes and Anthony Rocco Bovo will play Aerosmith rockers Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, respectively, in the Lynyrd Skynyrd biopic “Street Survivors: The True Story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash.”
The film, which begins shooting in Los Angeles on Monday, centers on drummer Artimus Pyle’s recollection of the events surrounding the crash of the group’s touring plane in Mississippi on Oct. 20, 1977. The accident killed original band members Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines, backing vocalist Cassie Gaines, an assistant road manager, and the two pilots.
Ian Shultis plays Pyle, with Taylor Clift as Van Zant, Samuel Kay Forrest as Gaines, and Rich Dally III as Allen Collins. Jared Cohn is directing from his own script and Brian Perera, founder of Cleopatra Records, produces.
One week before Lynyrd Skynyrd boarded the doomed flight, members of Aerosmith were scheduled to board the same Convair CV-300. The band deemed the plane unsafe and decided not to lease the Convair. Byrnes is the lead singer of Aerosmith tribute band Draw the Line.
Also newly cast in the film are Keith Sutliff, who plays an air controller caught up in the fateful flight; Hudson Long plays Skynyrd keyboardist Billy Powell, and Nick Cairo Chandler plays bassist Leon Wilkeson.Today Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, hosted a panel on “World War III” that featured birther conspiracy theorist Trevor Loudon.
“World War III started about 1,400 years ago,” Loudon claimed, referring to the birth of Islam, and was then accelerated by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Since then, he said, “Islam and the Bolsheviks have never parted company.”
Loudon said that Barack Obama “was more interested in aiding your enemies and trashing your allies than any [president] you’ve had before,” but claimed that with Donald Trump, America now has a president “who cares about the country.”
Loudon argued that “the radical left communist groups” and the Muslim Brotherhood were “looking forward to a Hillary Clinton presidency” because “she was going to finish off America for them, give them what they wanted and take this country down.”
Now, according to Loudon, “professional revolutionaries” are leading violent protests against Trump…all with the help of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Evidence that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump, he said, is simply a Saul Alinsky-inspired smear to “accuse others of what you are doing yourself” and “spread hatred.”
“The Democratic Party has been in bed with Moscow for more than 50 years,” he said.Danielson: A Family Movie Advertising poster for the film Directed by JL Aronson Running time 110 minutes
Danielson: A Family Movie is a 2006 documentary film about the Christian indie pop band Danielson. It was directed, filmed, produced, and edited by JL Aronson.
Content [ edit ]
The film follows the life of Danielson leader, Daniel Smith, from the band's inception in 1993 to 2006. The band started with the creation of Smith's senior thesis project, which became their first album, A Prayer for Every Hour. For live performances, members of the band wear nurse uniforms to represent "the healing power of the Good News."[1] As time passes, members of the band leave and return, as some go to college and get married. The film documents Danielson's lack of belonging in either the mainstream Christian music genre, or the indie music genre.[2] Included are interviews with Smith's parents and fans, sequences of animation, and information about Smith's background. Also included is documentation of Smith's mentoring of songwriter Sufjan Stevens, most famous for his 2005 album, Illinois.
The artwork for the film depicts Smith standing with a large tree costume on, with fruit hanging above. The fruit represents the fruit of the Holy Spirit, "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control."[2]
Reception [ edit ]
Danielson: A Family Movie premiered at the 2006 SXSW Film Festival and went on to play at over 25 festivals, internationally, collecting several awards. Critically, it received mixed reviews, reflecting the experimental storytelling approach, as well as the subject's own tendency to elicit conflicting responses. New York Times reviewer Neil Genzlinger found himself "entranced" for a while, but ultimately found Smith to be "pretentious."[3] Bill White of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said Smith has an "irritating squeak of a voice," and that his "comical incompetence wins him the adoration of adolescent misfits."[4] Chicago Reader's Monica Kendrick stated in her review that those who aren't fans of the band will dislike the "relative lack of dramatic tension."[5] However, Joshua Land in the Village Voice called the film "a delight, even for the uninitiated." [6] PopMatters reviewer Jennifer Kelly also responded positively to the film, saying "it brings us so squarely into Smith’s world." Kelly also found the music to be "remarkable," and that the film depicts "ideal Christianity." Kelly noted the fame achieved by Sufjan Stevens, and that the rest of the members of the band seem "genuinely, unconflictedly positive about their friend’s success."[2] And Sean Nelson, writing for Seattle's The Stranger said, "Here’s a rock rebel whose rebellion is the result of faith, imagination, and a stable, encouraging home life. It takes a pretty impressive film not to stumble over such rich contradictions. Danielson observes each one with grace, optimism, and curiosity."[7] Although the film's release was widely covered, review aggregator Metacritic compiled only six critic reviews of the film, yielding a 59/100 ("average").[8]
Among other accolades, the film won the audience award at the 2006 Chicago Underground Film Festival.[9]A 16-year-old girl who plunged nine floors from a parking garage in the Gold Coast neighborhood has died, authorities said.
The girl, of the 3200 block of South Ridgeway Avenue, was pronounced dead at 4:42 p.m., according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.
At 4:21 p.m. paramedics were called to the intersection of Rush and Walton streets for a woman in her teens or early 20s who fell nine floors from a parking garage, according to Chicago Fire Department Media Affairs Director Larry Langford.
She was initally taken to Northwestern Memorial Hospital in extremely critical condition, Langford said.
Witnesses told officials on the scene that her backpack had been located on the upper floor and the area has been taped off during the investigation.
Police News Affairs had no information about the incident.
An autopsy is scheduled for Tuesday that will determine the cause and manner of her death, according to the medical examiner's office.
chicagobreaking@tribune.com
Twitter:@chicagobreakingEditor's note: This story has been updated.
Earlier today, social media posts showed increased floodwaters in the areas surrounding the Houston Texas LDS Temple. The latest photos seen on social media show waters at the door of the temple. It is unclear whether there has been damage to the interior. Many have been offering prayers for the building on Twitter and Facebook. According to weather.com, torrential rains are expected to continue over the next several days in the surrounding area and parts of Houston received over 2 feet of rain in just the past 24 hours.
The Deseret News reported Monday afternoon that the temple was "surrounded by Harvey floodwaters."
The Houston Texas temple holds many fond memories for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and many are still praying for the area.
Nick Newman tweeted his concern for the Houston Texas LDS Temple and said he would be praying for the area.
Thinking about #harvey and Houston... with all that water, wonder what #lds #mormon temple in Houston looks like now... 🙏🏻 #TwitterStake — Nick Newman (@nicknewman801) August 28, 2017
According to Michael Zimmerman, approximately 6-7 feet of water surrounded the temple.
The hand sticking up is from a guy approximately 5'8" so it's about 6-7' of water in front of the Temple Posted by Michael Zimmerman on Monday, August 28, 2017
Zimmerman also posted an aerial view of the area around the temple.
This is the area of the Houston Temple Posted by Michael Zimmerman on Sunday, August 27, 2017
Joel Hilton shared a few photos showing the temple during the day and at night, the lights reflecting off the water.
The temple presidency invited others to pray for the rains to stop. “With the torrential rains, the Cypress Creek has risen about 20 feet and water is now at the level of the front fountain of the temple,” they said in a Facebook post.
REQUEST FOR PRAYERS - TEMPLE UPDATE."We know that all of our temple workers are very concerned about the storm and its... Posted by Friends of Houston Texas South Stake on Monday, August 28, 2017
Earlier, an aerial view of the temple shows a patch of dry ground surrounding the building.
The floods stopped right at the gates of the Houston temple. "Ain |
’ve found most in East Zealand [in Denmark], but also on Bornholm and in Skåne [Sweden], and possible also in Falster [south east Denmark],” says Sloth.
“We’ve got bits and pieces from the excavations because we typically discover them in connection with building projects, but as an archaeologist we need to think about and connect the available information,” she says.
Read More: Stone Age artists used rock art as a billboard
“It must have enclosed something”
Some of the most interesting palisade sites are found on the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea.
Archaeologists discovered a large palisade built of timber on Vasagårds Field on the southern part of the island in 1988. In the middle of the enclosure, they discovered a so-called sun temple containing various sun symbols.
A similar temple was discovered elsewhere on the island. It may be that these sun temples only exist on Bornholm, but head archaeologist at the Bornholm Museum, Finn Ole Sonne Nielsen, does not rule out that the enclosure at Stevns could contain similar finds.
“It could well have had a ritual purpose. What’s really exciting about this place is whether [they] find something else in the enclosure similar to our Bornholm discoveries. It would not surprise me if it was a temple area. It would have enclosed something and I think that these temples were much more widespread than we tend to believe,” says Nielsen.
Read More: Archaeological discovery in Sweden reveals site of Stone Age rituals
Older installations could be predecessors
Nielsen emphasises that there is a difference between the Bornholm palisades and the “new” construction discovered at Stevns. For example, the poles are located much closer together in Bornholm, which was probably built before Stevns.
Sloth is still waiting for precise dates on the Stevns site, but some of the scraps of broken pottery found on site suggest that it could date to the latter part of the Middle Neolithic Funnel Beaker Culture from 2900 BCE to 2800 BCE. The Bornholm sites are even older.
“We’ve unfortunately not found any circular shaped constructions like they have on Bornholm, but the similarities between the enclosures makes me think about rituals in our finds too,” she says.
With no further funding to excavate the rest of the site, it is difficult to know whether for example there ever was a sun temple on the site.
But Sloth and her colleagues already have a lot of work to do before they can find some more answers to this mysterious site.
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Read more in the Danish version of this article on Videnskab.dkEuropean Open 2013 Announced!
Posted by Hugh 6 years ago
The Natural Selection 2 competitive scene is remarkable. It is player run, player driven, player focused. And it makes a bang that belies the fact that Natural Selection 2 is not the size of DoTA2, CoD, SC2, or TF2. It’s time for the next big bang. ENSL.org and Unknown Worlds, in association with Multiplay, are pleased to announce the 2013 European Open!
This tournament is open to all European Union teams, and will begin on the 29th of June. There is space for sixteen teams. Four of those spaces will be taken by teams invited by ENSL.org. The grand final will be played live on stage at Insomnia49, the biggest gaming festival in the United Kingdom.
Unknown Worlds is buying stage time at Insomnia, and providing international flights and accommodation to the two grand finalist teams. UWE will also provide the first $200 of a prize pool for the winning team. You can contribute to the prize pool by donating to it here.
For every $, €, £, or any other amount you donate, UWE will match your contribution. So if you contribute £20, UWE will also contribute £20, for a total of £40. The bigger we all make the prize pool, the more attention the event will get, and the stronger the future of competitive NS2 will be!
But wait, it gets better. The grand final will be streamed live from Insomnia, and during the stream, UWE will reveal Biodome – The stunning new map that is coming in the next content patch. Strayan and BlindNS will be casting live.
Sign up for the tournament here: http://www.ensl.org/articles/794
Contribute to the prize pool here: http://www.gofundme.com/39cl44
Download high resolution announcement poster here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qgtl02alg25a7p2/EuroOpen2013ExoBattleAnnounce.jpg
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Vanilla.Blizzard has been busy in the last few weeks finally shedding some light on the teams that will be competing in the upcoming inaugural season of the Overwatch League. The San Francisco team's roster was announced last week (featuring appearances by Shaq, J.Lo, and Marshawn Lynch), while this week two more teams were unveiled: the Shanghai Dragons and the Dallas Fuel.
Nestled in those last two announcements, I noticed Mei and Genji sporting some sweet team-branded jerseys—or in Overwatch parlance: skins. Was this an indication that Overwatch would be getting OWL-themed skins and cosmetics for players to show support for their favorite teams in game? It seems like a logical move, but I reached out to Blizzard to be sure.
"We were honored to collaborate with the Overwatch development team and Team Envy to announce the Dallas Fuel’s visual identity with a custom Genji skin for demonstration purposes," said an Overwatch League representative. "We look forward to sharing more information about Overwatch League-affiliated in-game items in the coming months."
So is that confirmation that Genji will be able to suit up just like the Dallas Fuel's boys in blue? Maybe not with that skin exactly, but it does confirm that OWL-specific items are planned in some form. Will there be team-branded skins? Quite possibly. I think we can expect something along the lines of what Valve has done with CS:GO, where players can emblazon team and player stickers on their weapon skins. Blizzard might go that route, letting players pick their favorite skin and then slap it with a Dragons or Fuel logo. Either way, I think it's a safe bet players will somehow be able to visually rep their favorite team.Sennheiser, a name known for its audio products and the maker of the open-ended audiophile headphones category, has a huge consumer product offering. From that portfolio, today we have the CX 3.00 earphones from Sennheiser, a replacement for the popular Sennheiser CX 300 II earphones. These earphones are purely for listening pleasure; they don’t come with mic functionality. Their CX 2.00 and CX 5.00 handle the in-line headset functionality.
Build and Design: 7/10
The earphones look pretty, almost like earrings due their shiny stylish back and ‘S’ logo.
Also these earphones are shaped inward to point sound inside, while keeping the earphones in line with ear rather than stick out like normal earphone designs.
Keeping in tune with compactness, Sennheiser has thoughtfully designed the 3.5mm jack to sit parallelly with the phone rather than stick out, very slick indeed. However, as per the user reviews online, some users have expressed concern over the connector sheathing coming off overtime due to tension, unfortunately we cannot test this, but something to keep in mind.
Sennheiser’s packaging exudes premiumness too. As soon as you open, you’ll notice the thought and quality put behind it. There is curious little plastic box that holds the earphones comfortably and an extra pair of earphones tips.
At first I thought, this box was just packaging, but apparently this is the “convenient carry case” that Sennheiser includes. Using it honestly, it didn’t exactly feel “convenient” at all, in fact quite the opposite, am sure Sennheiser team can definitely come up with a better design. Most people will just stow away the box with the packaging.
I like that four different sizes of ear tips are included for everyone, and the smallest sized earphone tips that I’ve ever seen. All the ear tips are silicone based and convenient to swap. The largest or medium size that I generally wear, didn’t feel very comfortable, the large size stretched my ear a bit more than usual and the medium size was a bit loose, but this is an individual case, I’m sure your mileage will vary.
I like that these comes in more colour options than just plain black.
Performance: 7/10
I love it when marketing actually gets things right without exaggeration or muddying literature, in the case of Sennheiser CX 3.00 it’s typically the case after listening to the earphones.
The marketing literature mentions, “High-quality earphones offering detailed sound reproduction and enhanced bass response”. Fantastically all these are correct, “high-quality” – Yes, “detailed sound reproduction” – Yes, and “enhanced bass response” – that is a double YES! And Sennheiser isn’t joking.
These earphones have their “bass response” really pronounced. So much so that I thought I was wearing my ear tips too tight or incorrect size. The bass is so pronounced that it over-powers other sounds and eats away at the mids; couple that with typical Sennheiser highs and you have a sound output that is Bass & Treble high, therefore your typical sound output would be equal to “Rock” equalizer setting of in all players.
That being said, even though I personally don’t like my sound that bass heavy, most people will actually enjoy this. Not to criticize anybody but most people do equate “good sound” with more bass, more highs or loudness. I’d prefer this kind of sound handled by the EQ of the player when required, as I can change a level through software, but I cannot rectify sound with EQ when it is the very-signature (at the hardware level) of a pair of earphones or speakers.
Despite my personal tastes, the earphones do sound good. It was fun listening to the same music with more bass than before; it gave a different flavour to the sound. While the bass did eat the mids, it didn’t sound unclean the way cheap earphones do. Sennheiser highs are very-peculiar and it balances the sound well. And of course EQ settings will help as per your tastes. Just remember to keep the “Rock” EQ setting off, otherwise who are going to have a really bass and treble heavy sound experience, unless of course you like that kind of sound.
Verdict and Price in India
Would I recommend these? Yes, to almost everyone with the caveat that these are bass heavy. To an audio enthusiast who likes a more balanced sound, there are certainly more options around the same price.
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Posted April 21st, 2015 | 11:09am by Ryan
The Arby’s menu has just added some interesting new additions including the new Smokehouse Turkey Sandwich, new Garlic Parmesan Housemade Chips, and Boylan Craft Sodas. The Smokehouse brand started with the Smokehouse Brisket Sandwich back in 2013 and that was the same year Arby’s introduced Housemade Chips. The new Smokehouse Turkey Sandwich is priced at $5.29 at my local Arby’s in Maryland.
Smokehouse Turkey – Our smoked turkey isn’t “smoke flavored.” It’s smoke infused. We smoke it for eight hours over mesquite wood in a smokehouse in Texas. Then we put it on an artisan style roll and top it with smoked cheddar, crispy onions and white BBQ sauce to make our Smokehouse Turkey sandwich. If you’ve never had smoked turkey before, this is the best place to start.
Garlic Parmesan Housemade Chips – Our New Garlic Parmesan Housemade Chips are made from same delicious tubers as our curly fries, but the end product is crispier, more chip-like, and tossed in roasted garlic and Parmesan cheese. Bring your mouth to Arby’s and see if it can taste the difference.
Boylan Craft Sodas (Black Cherry, Creme, Ginger Ale) – Naturally flavored. Naturally sweetened. In a real cool bottle. Boylan Craft Sodas are just like the naturally flavored and sweetened sodas you remember from when you were a kid back in the 1940s. And if you weren’t a kid in the 1940s, Boylan Craft Sodas are going to blow your mind.
Returning to the Arby’s menu for a limited time at select locations are the Pecan Chicken Salad Sandwich and Orange Cream Shake.By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, *Science*NOW
An unlikely, decadelong journey that began with the discovery of a rapidly aging mouse has led scientists to a protein that seems to protect animals from cancer and other scourges of old age—with no apparent downsides. There are still lots of mysteries about the protein, called BubR1, but the work offers clues about how protecting chromosomes can enhance health.
Cancer biologist Jan van Deursen at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and his colleagues were initially interested in studying a common feature of cancers, called aneuploidy. Aneuploid cells have too few or too many chromosomes. Nearly all cancer cells fall into this category, but it's not clear whether aneuploidy actually causes cancer. van Deursen, along with a then-graduate student, Darren Baker, engineered mice to produce less BubR1, a protein that helps cells segregate their chromosomes when they divide. When BubR1 is reduced, chromosomes can't properly separate into identical daughter cells, leaving some daughters with the wrong number of chromosomes. van Deursen, Baker, and their colleagues wanted to see whether these mice would develop cancer.
To their surprise, instead of tumor-filled mice, they wound up with animals that aged very quickly. "These mice were clearly very, very different than a normal mouse," says Baker, who now studies the biology of aging at the Mayo Clinic. Last year, they reported that removing old cells—that is, cells with a genetic marker indicating senescence—from these mice could help them stay healthier longer. Adding intrigue is an extremely rare human condition caused by mutations in the BubR1 gene. Patients with the disease, mosaic variegated aneuploidy syndrome, age prematurely and have an elevated risk of cancer. Too little BubR1 seems to be bad news.
Too much, on the other hand, might be a good thing. In work published today in Nature Cell Biology, the biologists report that genetically engineered mice that make extra BubR1 are less prone to cancer. For example, they found that when they exposed normal mice to a chemical that causes lung and skin tumors, all of them got cancer. But only 33% of those overexpressing BubR1 at high levels did. They also found that these animals developed fatal cancers much later than normal mice—after about 2 years, only 15% of the engineered mice had died of cancer, compared with roughly 40% of normal mice.
The animals that overexpressed BubR1 at high levels also lived 15% longer than controls, on average. And the mice looked veritably Olympian on a treadmill, running about twice as far—200 meters rather than 100 meters—as control animals. All of this left Baker, van Deursen, and their colleagues thinking that BuBR1's life-extending effects aren't due to only its ability to prevent cancer, although that's not yet certain.
A big question now is why having your chromosomes out of order might accelerate aging, says Wei Dai, a cell biologist at the New York University Langone Medical Center who's based in Tuxedo, New York. Although aneuploidy seems less than desirable, studies haven't been consistent about its effects on animals. "We found that when the aneuploidy level became low"—just like in van Deursen's healthy mice—"you had more tumorigenesis," not less, says Cristina Montagna, a molecular geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York. She and her colleague Jan Vijg are collaborating with van Deursen to study the brains of his BubR1 mice. One possibility is that both very low and very high aneuploidy can protect from cancer, perhaps because highly aneuploid cells are so damaged they don't have the ability to quickly divide.
Still, there's hope that van Deursen's group may have identified a new drug target to slow aging. "There [are] no negative consequences that he identified" to having more BubR1, says Paul Hasty, who studies aging and DNA repair at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. "You need to figure out exactly what BubR1 is doing to achieve this desired effect," he adds, but this could be the first step on a long path toward new treatments that delay aging—and possibly prevent cancer.
*This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal *Science.By Andy Kirk | January 13, 2017 | Design
This is part of a series of posts about the 'little of visualisation design', respecting the small decisions that make a big difference towards the good and bad of this discipline. In each post I'm going to focus on just one small matter - a singular good or bad design choice - as demonstrated by a sample project. Each project may have many effective and ineffective aspects, but I'm just commenting on one.
The 'little' of this next design concerns a sensible way of offering 'help' to readers of a visualisation. I'm referring to a project developed by Accurat in partnership with the Google News Lab called 'World Potus'. This work was developed during the US Elections to track the popularity, trends and locations of topics people from outside the US were most interested searching about on Google relating to the Election.
It is often necessary to provide a degree of functional (how to use it) and perceptual (how to read it) guidance with a visualisation and often this involves maybe a 'i' or '?' button taking you to a descriptive page of guidance. The problem with approaches like this (hands up, on reflection I've done this almost always) is that as a user/reader you are often taken away from the screen of interest. This makes the guidance somewhat detached and relies on your memory.
What I liked about the solution in this project was the way pressing the 'HELP' button simply overlayed the guidance on top of the screen you were looking at getting help with. This proximity cemented the instruction. Additionally, with a seamless switch on/switch off (or clicking 'Got it') you could quickly bounce between the help view and normal view without too much obstruction or delay.The Milky Way came into unprecedented focus on Monday as astronomers released the sharpest infrared picture yet taken of the roiling furnace at the centre of galaxy. The new mosaic reveals massive filaments of gas as well as a new population of massive, rogue stars.
The centre of the galaxy is full of hot gas and dust and is thought to harbour a black hole weighing about 4 million Suns. The area is not easily seen at visible wavelengths, which are largely absorbed and scattered by dust, but astronomers can image the centre using infrared light, which passes through intervening material more easily.
The picture, released at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, California, combines images taken during 144 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope with pictures taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope.
The Hubble portion of the panorama is 10 times as sharp as Spitzer’s map, and covers a 300- by 115-light-year area around the centre of the Milky Way. (Earth sits some 26,000 light years from the galactic centre.)
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The new map reveals some 600,000 stars, including a new population of about 200 massive stars. These stars illuminate the gas around them with strong blasts of radiation, and – curiously – seem to be loners.
That is surprising, since most massive stars near the Milky Way’s centre are found in one of three star clusters called Central, Quintuplet and Arches.
The newly found stars, on the other hand, are found in isolation, and researchers are not sure if they were born outside the clusters or were cast away from star clusters that were torn apart by gravitational forces in the violent region around the galaxy’s central black hole.The trend of dual cameras has gotten so big, that even the latest rumors about the iPhone 6s brought up a dual camera on board. Today we came across a Xiaomi leaked phone, a mystery device with two cameras at the back.
Between the cameras there is a dual LED flash and the back side of the phone seems to be made of glossy glass. The handset looks pretty long, so it may end up being a phablet. Its edges at the back are pretty curved and the frame seems to be made of metal. I can’t guarantee it, but my gut feeling tells me there’s an USB Type C port at the bottom.
Now that Meizu has debuted the MX5 and Huawei the Honor 7, Xiaomi must also make a move. We’re getting close to the time of the year when a new Galaxy Note and iPhone will be launched and usually Chinese companies counter that with preemptive launches.
via igeek.com.cnThis FAQ will use official sources as bases for answers related to Liliana’s presence in SOI and EMN. If new facts appear, I’ll update it. Feel free to contribute with other questions and suggestions!
I’m trying to keep this FAQ as free as possible from headcanons, so let me know if you disagree with anything and can point out a canonical source for me to correct it.
What I’m trying to cover here?
Why would Liliana return to Innistrad if she already destroyed Griselbrand?
Innistrad’s humans and angels hate Liliana, right?
If releasing Avacyn was a good move for humans, why didn’t Mikaeus release her in the first place?
Why would a telepath like Jace need Liliana’s knowledge when he could extract it from her mind?
If Bolas helped her reach those four demons, if he even protected her mind, why didn’t she ask his help instead of Jace’s?
Why would Jace help Liliana after she betrayed him?
Does this mean Jace forgave her?
Why do people keep treating this villainess like she could be a protagonist, while she’s clearly an antagonist?
Why are you trying to convince me she’s not an *******!? / I hate her! / She’s vulgar! / I don’t like her, all things Liliana-related means bad storytelling…
Let’s go?
Why would Liliana return to Innistrad if she already destroyed Griselbrand?
For the same reason she suddenly appeared in Ravnica: because she still hopes that Jace is going to help her. Even after he left with Gideon to Zendikar. Guess where is he going to be soon? Yup. Innistrad.
Liliana had come to Jace in search of a loophole, a way out of the mess she’d landed in. The power of the Chain Veil was immeasurable. It had allowed her to kill Kothophed and Griselbrand, two of the demons to whom she owed her soul—part of the pact she’d made to regain some of the godlike magic she had lost with the Mending. But in the process of trying to free herself from one bargain for power, she had unwittingly entered into another. The Chain Veil’s magic came with a cost, a terrible toll on both her body and her mind. In desperation, she had taken it back to Shandalar and tried to leave it there, but she found that she couldn’t. It was bound to her, and her to it. There has to be a way out. Jace was supposed to help her find it—some way for her to continue using the Chain Veil without being enslaved by it and the spirits it carried. Jace was nothing if not clever, and if the Veil had some kind of hold on her mind, she felt confident that he could help her break it.
Innistrad’s humans and angels hate Liliana, right?
Thalia and the cathars probably resent how Liliana managed to free Griselbrand (by blackmailing her to choose between breaking it or witnessing the death of her subordinates). Keep in mind, though, that Thalia didn’t know Avacyn was also trapped there and we don’t know how she would deal with this information.
The released archangel is currently hunting each released demon (as she did before) and Liliana already dealt with the most dangerous threat that resurfaced (in a few seconds in front of everyone). If it wasn’t for her, humans would probably be extinct from Innistrad by now. Anyway, Innistrad’s angels will always attack necromancers without second thoughts. That’s how several of them where pulverized by a not so worried Liliana.
The people of Innistrad are in trouble. With its protector, the archangel Avacyn, trapped in the Helvault, the Avacynian Church has no way to fight back. Humanity is dying out. The vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and other monstrosities of the plane have no plans to sustain humanity as their prey—they’re playing for keeps. If nothing changes, humanity will lose forever, and Sorin’s worst fears of a world without humans will be realized.
If releasing Avacyn was a good move, why didn’t Mikaeus release her in the first place?
Because he thought she might die if she ever leave the silver obelisk.
Mikaeus struggled with what to do about Avacyn’s entrapment. Should he work on magic that could sunder the silver skin of the Helvault, potentially freeing Avacyn? The Helvault contained the world’s savior, but it also contained Griselbrand and the ranks and ranks of unimaginable horrors that Avacyn had trapped over the years. Shattering the Helvault would free Avacyn, but release all those demons back into the world, as well. Worse than that, Avacyn’s heart was pierced through as she fell into the silver prison. Inside the timeless interior of the Helvault the artifact’s magic bound her in a kind of stasis, keeping her alive when otherwise she would die from her wound. If Mikaeus found a way to break open the Helvault, he might complete Griselbrand’s treachery and let Avacyn be destroyed forever. The decision was made, and the nature of the giant silver shard was kept quiet. Mikaeus didn’t even inform his captain of the guard, Lothar, that the Angel of Hope dwelt within the holy obelisk—he only told Lothar to protect it with his life.
Why would a telepath like Jace need Liliana’s knowledge when he could extract it from her mind?
Because Nicol Bolas protected the necromancer’s mind against mind-reading abilities before sending her after Jace (the mentalist doesn’t know it).
Then, “You know what must happen now?” the Other asked. “To ensure the mind-speaker cannot just pull the truth from you?” One deep breath, a second, and a third, to calm a suddenly racing heart. “I do.” “Then do not move.” And then there was only the scream, breathless, endless, a scream that would have drowned even the roaring of the Blind Eternities … as the Other stretched forth inhuman fingers, reached into the planeswalker’s mind and soul, and began, oh so carefully, to fold.
Agents of Artifice, prologue
If Bolas helped her reach those four demons, if he even protected her mind, why didn’t she ask his help instead of Jace’s?
Because she already did, and she realized the price wasn’t worth.
“Great and mighty Bolas,” she said, trying hard to modulate her voice, “please. I came to you because you’re the only one I know with the power to break this pact, strong enough to bend even a cabal of demons to your will. If you could just—” “If I am, indeed, the only one so gifted,” Bolas interrupted, “then I suggest you come up with some other way to make yourself useful. Offer me something else worth the trouble you bring me— and make no mistake, a quartet of demons is trouble even for ‘great and mighty’ me—and I will make you the same bargain. “Alternatively,” he added, his tone suddenly thoughtful, “you might swear allegiance to me. A planeswalker and necromancer of your power might prove useful indeed, and I would, of course, seek to protect my investment…” Liliana’s face went red, her eyes jet black. “You’d have me trade one master for another?” “Why yes, I suppose I would.” “Go find your own personal hell, dragon!” “I’ve got a rather nice one here on Grixis, I should say. When you come up with a better trade, be certain to let me know. You’re always welcome here, my dear Vess.”
Agents of Artifice, epilogue
Why would Jace help Liliana after she betrayed him?
Because he swore it to himself (he may even resist playing her games for a while, but deep down he already made his mind up). He also may need her to find Sorin (she was the first “thing” that jumped to his mind when Ugin mentioned Innistrad).
Because he knew, no matter whether he could ever forgive her, or she him, that he and Liliana would meet again; knew it as surely as he knew that a thousand suns wound rise tomorrow, across a thousand worlds. When that happened, he would have her answer. He swore to himself that he would free Liliana from her bargain, no matter how long it took, no matter how many worlds he had to scour. He would learn who she was beneath the fear and the desperation and the lies. And then, if he could love whom he found, perhaps they could begin again.
Agents of Artifice, chapter 33
Does this mean he forgave her?
Not really, no, but his pragmatic mentality tells him they’re both stronger as allies.
“I don’t expect to get out of this alive. I thought‑I knew‑that if I ever saw you again, you were gonna snuff me like a candle.” “I considered it,” he said. “It would have been an inelegant solution.” “What?” “And… well, not to grind too fine an edge on it, but it seemed rather foolish for me, alive, to kill you in revenge for my murder.” “That wasn’t your attitude at the time.” “I recall. I also recall that I was, at the time, hmmm, a bit emotional. If my eyes had been knives, I would have yanked them both out of my face to throw them at you.” “Yeah,” I said. “I was there.” “Perhaps returning from the dead has altered my perspective. All I know is how I feel now, and what I think now‑which is at some considerable remove from what I felt and thought then.” “So‑what, you’re forgiving me?” “I do not forgive,” he said with a level stare. “But a blood vendetta between us is of no use to anyone but our enemies.”
Test of Metal, chapter “Friends Like These”
Why do people keep treating this villainess like she could be a protagonist, while she’s clearly an antagonist?
Players may describe Liliana the way they want, but R&D members like Shawn Main and James Wyatt, among others, don’t consider her a clear-cut villain (at least until now).
James Wyatt in Inside R&D Magic Origins: Liliana
Why are you trying to convince me she’s not an *******!? / I hate her! / She’s vulgar! / I don’t like her, all things Liliana-related means bad storytelling…
I’m not trying to convince anyone. The goal here is to bring canonical background to the current discussion about her. Her presence in SOI and EMN is coherent with her previous lore, as I hope this post helped clarifying.
Want me to answer other questions? Send me an ask!
You may also want to check my Table of ContentsIt struck a chord with me when, a few years ago, a close family member of mine told me "No offense, but why should I care about the Philippines? I mean, I really don't know our relatives there... I was born here. I'm American an I don't speak the language."
After that conversation, I feared the worst possible scenario: my children (and future generations) who are born here will become so removed from the Philippines and its culture that they'll lose an important part of themselves -- their identity, their being Filipino.
With the founding of the School, I wanted to ensure that there was a resource in the community that provided the educational opportunities for those who wanted to connect to and learn about Philippine languages and culture, and meet other Filipinos as well.
It is amazing to see how in such a short span of three years, that we have taught close to 150 students -- from as young as 4 years old to those around our grandparents' age. We are now serving four areas where the presence of Filipinos is greatest in the Tri-state area: Queens, Manhattan, Jersey City and Bergen County.
We would like to continue expanding our reach, serving more people, and sustaining operations so that programs offered are available on a consistent basis all throughout the year. In addition, we would like to purchase additional program supplies such as textbooks, activity workbooks, flash cards, etc. to enhance each students' learning experience, to rent space at an affordable cost, and to hire more qualified instructors and support staff.
This is a huge endeavor which I believe we can achieve if we work together and contribute in whatever way we can, big or small. The last and only fundraiser we had for The Filipino School was a small happy hour gathering among friends that raised close to $400.
Please consider supporting our cause by giving a donation.
The gift of passing on our knowledge of our Philippine languages and heritage through the learning opportunities we provide is our legacy to our children and to our people.
Maraming salamat sa inyong suporta!
www.filschool-nynj.orgA Portland couple fined $1,000 for the illegal cutting of a protected tree maintained this week that they have no intention to build a house on their hillside property.
But newly released records show it was something they explored in 2013.
As The Oregonian/OregonLive reported Saturday, Clark Binkley and Gail Neuburg say they have no idea who cut down a designated Heritage Tree on their property with panoramic views of downtown.
When they returned home from vacation just after Christmas, it had been mysteriously chopped down, prompting the city to fine the property owners. Binkley was upset he had to pay and hypothesized to The Oregonian/OregonLive that neighbors could have wanted it gone to offer better views.
Records obtained this week through a public records request show Binkley and Neuburg looked into the possibility of building a house in what appears to be the same location as where the 100-foot Heritage Tree once stood.
In February 2013, before Binkley and Neuburg bought their house and the neighboring undeveloped parcel, they submitted a very crude site plan for city planners to review.
"Applicant intends to adjust the common property line to allow a building site" on the vacant property fronting Northwest Maywood Drive, according to the hand-written project description submitted to the city.
The site plan shows a square "Proposed Bldg. Site" along Maywood, next to the existing house.
A schematic from 2013 showing a potential house to be built along Northwest Maywood Drive, where a Heritage Tree was illegally cut down.
And among the questions they wanted answered: Does the land-use history suggest "the vacant property can be developed with a single residence?"
At a March 2013 meeting, a city planner reviewed "drawings, plans and other preliminary information about a proposed project," according to a summary of the meeting.
In an interview Thursday, Binkley explained he and Neuburg were simply performing due diligence before buying the house and property.
"We were not necessarily going to build a house, but the property has value to the extent that somebody could build a house on it," he said.
"It was simply a matter of saying, 'What are our rights, what does the zoning say you can do there?'" he added.
The site is complex. Not only are there two parcels, but the site also has two zoning designations and it is in an environmentally protected area.
Nowhere in the summary of their conversations with the city of Portland is there discussion of the Heritage Tree.
"If they can't even tell you what the story is, how am I supposed to know?" Binkley said.
Binkley works in the forestry industry as chief investment officer and managing director of GreenWood Resources. Neuburg is the executive managing director for the Portland office of brokerage firm ARA Newmark.
Performing due diligence "is the kind of stuff that professionals do," Binkley said of he and his wife, especially for such a big purchase.
They closed the real estate deal in April 2013, paying $1.8 million for their home on.23 acres plus the neighboring 1.48 acres of open land.
As previously reported, Binkley said he and Neuburg didn't discover until last year that a tree on their property was protected under city rules. An employee for Neuburg spent time researching the situation last year, records show. Binkley said he wanted the information so he could complain to the previous property owners for not disclosing the tree's protection.
And then, in December, the tree was mysteriously cut down.
Binkley on Thursday said he has "no idea" if it now would be easier to build a house with the Heritage Tree gone.
"We don't have any intentions to build a house," he reiterated.
Asked how he feels about the tree being cut down, Binkley described the accompanying circumstances as an "extraordinary disruption" and "great aggravation."
But specifically about the tree being gone?
"Given the overlay of everything else, I don't think I can really respond to that. All the aggravation that I've described to you."
"You can ask me that question," he added, "in six months."
-- Brad Schmidt
503-294-7628
@cityhallwatch(ITUNES OR Listen Here)
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roles, is there any work toward compassion for men; in the courts, in the workplace; in domestic violence; in paternity fraud; in false allegations of abuse and rape; in the social misandry that pervades our culture?
In the misandry they are furthering with their summit.
Where is the choice? Where is the compassion?
And ask them how they can pretend to talk about a new kind of masculinity, adapting to modern realities, if there is no discussion of these things; if, indeed, there is not even any acknowledgement that these problems exist.
I encourage everyone to participate; to be earnestly polite but clearly firm; to not accept brushoff answers and to call again and again to speak to as many presenters as possible.
It is our campaign, that of Choice and Compassion for Men, in the only real men’s movement for an end to gender roles that ever existed, and it is critical that we let them know that.
We need to repeat those words, in the midst of their conference, like a sacred mantra.
Choice for Men; Compassion for Men.
…
Please follow the link and read what is on their agenda. Please call them and ask, over and over again about Choice and Compassion for men.
And ladies, this is your chance to let them know what the MRM is made of. If you believe in Choice and Compassion for Men, please call and tell them.
I will be calling them myself, from home, and live from the radio show.
Do not let our movement be usurped, co-opted, diluted and misrepresented. Let everyone listening to this conference know what is happening here and why we are out here, fighting the fight.
It’s a golden opportunity insert the truth where it appears not to be wanted.
When it comes to registering and committing to this activism, can I please get a “done” in the comments?
Thank you.
REGISTER FOR THE SUMMIT HERE.Samantha Ponder joined ESPN in 2011. (Allen Kee/ ESPN Images) (L-R) Desmond Howard, Rece Davis, Eric Church, Samantha Ponder, Lee Fitting, Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit on the set of College GameDay. (Allen Kee/ESPN Images) (L to R) Ryan Riess, Joey Chestnuts, Chris Fowler, Samantha Ponder, Desmond Howard, Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso on the set of CGD. (Allen Kee/ESPN Images) Samantha Ponder interviews Clemson coach Dabo Swinney. (Allen Kee/ESPN Images) Scout Ponder joins mom Sam Ponder in the CGD production meeting. (Joe Faraoni/ESPN Images) Kirk Herbstreit, Lee Corso, Rece Davis and Sam Ponder take a break during the 2016 Chevy College GameDay Campaign. (Joe Faraoni/ESPN Images)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Today, ESPN announced new NFL host roles for Suzy Kolber, Samantha Ponder and Trey Wingo. The trio of commentators will now anchor ESPN’s NFL studio coverage as Chris Berman transitions into his new role in 2017. Ponder will be moving from College GameDay and ABC’s Saturday Night Football game to the studio as the new host of Sunday NFL Countdown. Before taking on this brand new role, now covering NFL, she wrote this thank you note to her college football colleagues and to the many people she met and worked with the past five years.
When Samantha Ponder was asked what her reaction was when she was approached about the job, here’s what she said: “My first reaction in all honesty was ‘WHAT?’ Chris Berman is synonymous with NFL coverage. To me, that’s why it’s so important to not look at this as replacing Chris Berman, because that is an absolutely impossible task. Whenever I see my name next to his, it makes me a little uncomfortable. This is a guy who started on this show the year I was born. It’s a little bit of a daunting task to think of all that he has created. Yet, that’s what’s exciting about this opportunity – to build on what he created because it’s incredible. So, when this was all brought to my attention, I was shocked to say the least.” : “My first reaction in all honesty was ‘WHAT?’ Chris Berman is synonymous with NFL coverage. To me, that’s why it’s so important to not look at this as replacing Chris Berman, because that is an absolutely impossible task. Whenever I see my name next to his, it makes me a little uncomfortable. This is a guy who started on this show the year I was born. It’s a little bit of a daunting task to think of all that he has created. Yet, that’s what’s exciting about this opportunity – to build on what he created because it’s incredible. So, when this was all brought to my attention, I was shocked to say the least.” Read the full Q&A with Ponder on ESPN MediaZone.
On the surface, going from contributor/sideline reporter to host in sports television is a no-brainer. For me, it wasn’t.
It’s not that the offer to host Sunday NFL Countdown wasn’t an incredible opportunity with more responsibility and space to grow. It’s that it requires me to leave the best job I’ve ever had and the best group of people I’ve ever worked with.
Since I started in this industry in 2004, I always promised myself that I would make it about the people. The people I worked with, the people I covered and the people watching at home. College Gameday is special for a lot of reasons, but none more so than the group of people who make it run. It’s not just the special chemistry of the guys you watch on camera. That part is easy to see.
It’s producers like Drew, Jimmy and Nick who lovingly give us a hard time as we selfishly stroll onto set two minutes before air. It’s the high five and “good job Sammy” that Tommy gives me after almost every segment (even when he didn’t hear it).
It’s the 10 times per hour that Bobby the bus driver asks me if I need another snack and the fly fishing equipment he sends me home with for my husband. It’s Trish telling me I look like a hot-mess without actually saying it. It’s a whole team of camera people who work the longest hours in the worst elements and complain the least.
It’s the audio team who know I’m really weird about being touched on the face and magically mic me up without touching me. Seriously, Madio... how? It’s a hug and a “Hey will you watch my daughter Scout, like, now?” that Barbara always obliges. It’s a security team as protective as my own brothers.
It’s talking politics with Paul, family with Mike and Kinely letting this annoying girl half his size have the plane seat with more legroom. It’s “GQ Danny” answering all my questions that don’t remotely pertain to his job with a smile. It’s Chris, who everyone else calls “The Bear,” who was so kind and sweet to me that I refused to call him “The Bear.”
It’s Keri, who I secretly called “Xena Warrior Princess,” and her team for always having my back. It’s Dawn for answering every unnecessary phone call and email. It’s Pat and Lindsey and everyone on the Operations team playing the role of my work parents, the ones I shouldn’t have needed but couldn’t have lived without.
To my big brothers – Kirk, Chris, Rece, Desmond, Gene, Tom, George and yes, even you, David… I can never repay you for your kindness and willingness to accept me into your family from day one.
I know many women in this industry have to deal with men who are belittling, unsupportive or even inappropriate. Not a single moment or day went by when one of you made me feel anything but equal. You all are the absolute best at what you do and more importantly, you are good men. Thank you for embracing me and loving on Scout. She has the coolest uncles ever. I love you all more than you know.
Coach Corso – the man, the myth, the legend. The most important man in our group and yet the man who never let me enter or leave a room without a greeting and a “How’s Bowden [daughter Scout’s first name]?” Don’t tell [my husband] Christian, but you’re my favorite Nole.
So proud of my beautiful wife @samanthaponder. Congrats on continuing to climb the ladder while still being the best wife and mother a guy could ask for. I am 100% confident you will knock it out of the park with this new role and couldn't think of someone who would be a better fit. I am excited for a great new adventure for our little family and to see where it takes us. God is good. A post shared by Christian Ponder (@cpseven) on Mar 23, 2017 at 10:09am PDT
Lee – thanks for taking a chance on the naïve girl throwing spirals on Longhorn Network. Your unnecessary and relentless support when I quickly went from a single girl available to take new assignments at a moment’s notice to a married mom traveling with an infant helped me keep my dreams alive. You challenged me to be better and constantly reminded me to have fun and get over myself. That was annoying, but I’m forever grateful.
To the players, coaches, sports information directors, athletic directors, equipment managers and athletic trainers who were generous with their time and always showed me the utmost respect, you made me fall even more in love with the game that has defined much of my life.
To the hundreds of girls on college campuses I met along the way who shared their stories and aspirations to work in football and do what I was doing, you have inspired me and reminded me of the kind of woman I want to be.
And lastly, to my college football family – you are my people. It was the signs (O.K., some of them), the cheers, the songs we sang, and even the arguments we engaged in on Gameday that made me happy to get up at 3 a.m. to hang with you. From Clemson to Fargo to Eugene and everywhere in between, because of you, a college football town will always feel like home.
Thank you.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In the essay above, Samantha Ponder references College GameDay colleagues past and present including: Drew Gallagher, coordinating producer; Jim “Jimmy G” Gaiero, producer; Nick Sciallo, producer; Tommy Marshall, crew member; Bobby Stephens, bus driver; Trish Ferguson, makeup artist; Mike Madio, audio crew member; Scout Ponder, Sam’s daughter; Barbara Blake, ESPN Communications; Paul Daly, security; Mike O’Leary, security; Kinely Williams, security; Danny “GQ Danny” Reifert, remote senior operations assistant; Chris “The Bear” Fallica, research producer; Keri “Xena Warrior Princess” Potts, ESPN Communications; Dawn Wind, assistant; Patrick Abrahams, remote project manager; Lindsey Lloyd, production manager; Kirk Herbstreit, Chris Fowler, Rece Davis, Desmond Howard, Gene Wojciechowski, Tom Rinaldi, George Whitfield, David Pollack, Lee Corso, CGD commentators and contributors; Christian Ponder, Sam’s husband; Lee Fitting, senior coordinating producerThe tug of war over Ukraine is an extension of the diplomatic spat over Syria, where EU and US plans were thwarted diplomatically by Russia. Now the West is taking the fight to Moscow’s doorstep, geopolitical analyst Patrick Henningsen told RT.
While the pro-EU and anti-governmental protests in Ukraine continue, the country’s leadership finds itself on very shaky ground. On the one hand, the European Union has announced it is freezing its work with the Ukrainian government on a controversial trade agreement, which the country decided to postpone last month, triggering the protests. An American delegation came to the country and supported the protestors, with Senator John McCain claiming the US would consider sanctions if there is any further violence against peaceful protesters. On the other hand, the visit of Ukrainian President Yanukovich to Russia resulted in signing a number of deals aimed at supporting the Ukrainian economy. Among them is the deal that allows Ukraine to start buying Russian gas for $268, instead of $400 per 1,000 cubic meters, from January 2014.
The whole situation is “an extension of what happened in Syria only a few months ago, whereby European and US designs in Syria were usurped diplomatically by a Russian solution,” Henningsen told RT.
“Now they are taking the fight really intensely to Russia on its doorstep,” he said.
“Imagine if Russia went over to Mexico and threatened sanctions against the Mexicans if they entered into any trade agreement with the US, like NAFTA. How ridiculous is this? But this shows you the sort of rich scope of this outside intervention. They want to fold Ukraine into Europe.”
Aiming to involve Ukraine into its orbit, the EU has also promised to give it $17 billion to narrow its financial shortfall. However, given the severe economic difficulties inside the EU, it is very unlikely that Europe has enough resources to incorporate yet another country with a struggling economy.
“If Ukraine goes to the EU, then you have issues of arms sales and other programs, like finance programs via bank loans, and potentially you could turn this economy over in about five years. It’s a very risky prospect for the future of Ukraine,” Henningsen said.
Henningsen pointed out that Ukraine is a ground for the battle of currencies, too, with the undervalued ruble and the overvalued euro.
“Given the influence of the euro, if the IMF decides to maybe have an international currency reset, Ukraine is going to be a massive battleground at Russia’s doorstep because Ukraine is a bread basket in terms of wheat and grains – it’s one of the bread baskets of the world. And that could be privatized, could be leveraged, so you have a lot of issues there. Folding Ukraine into Europe clearly would be an economic disaster for any fledging economy. Clearly it’s an engineered move to pull Ukraine to the EU and to antagonize Russia.”
There may be a political benefit of joining the EU for some people, Henningsen said. Among them are those who can use this issue “to leverage power to get into power, which is clearly what the opposition is doing.”
Henningsen said there are also “people who want to join the EU: the middle class university-educated people, politically active people in Ukraine.”
He added: “They see this as a ticket into Europe to go emigrate there or to go to study there, to get out of Ukraine. That is just a small part of a mosaic of what makes up this kind of artificial issue with joining the EU. And this is also about NATO.”
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.Share
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We’ll go ahead and assume you’re aware of Pokémon Go, the mobile gaming phenomenon that has captured worldwide attention since its release, but you may not be aware of the Pokémon Go Plus. It’s a Bluetooth accessory for Pokémon Go players to wear, that vibrates and lights up an LED to alert you of a nearby Pokémon or Pokéstop. The idea is to lessen the need to stare at your smartphone, meaning fewer angry pedestrians, fewer fatal accidents, and more battery life for your phone.
Once a Pokémon that’s in need of catching has been found, a press of the button will throw a Pokéball, and more vibrations and flashes will let you know if you caught it. It’s not clear whether you need to have the app open at the time, or if you’ll need to trust the Pokémon Go Plus’s honesty when it comes to successful catches. Otherwise, it could be a very fast way to waste Pokéballs. The accessory can be worn attached to a wrist strap, or clipped to a shirt or pocket, and we’re hoping it’ll double as a pedometer to help hatch those eggs.
Pre-orders for the Pokémon Go Plus have ended, and Nintendo, along with Amazon, are showing the device as unavailable or out of stock. While pre-orders may open up again soon due to the delay, the only way to ensure you’re one of the first at the moment is to buy a pre-order space through eBay, where prices are sadly two to three times the actual cost of the product.Today, HRC released the following statement on the revelation that Senator Jeff Sessions -- President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for U.S. Attorney General -- led a campaign to block an LGBTQ student group from holding a conference at a public university while he was Alabama Attorney General. The news unearthed by CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski is just the latest evidence of Session’s long record of opposition to LGBTQ equality.
Yesterday, HRC and nearly 150 civil and human rights organizations sent a letter to U.S. Senators opposing the nomination of Sessions as U.S. Attorney General, and detailing his alarming record.
“As the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Alabama, Jeff Sessions unconscionably targeted LGBTQ students to deny them their First Amendment rights. The job of the U.S. Attorney General is to ensure and protect the freedom of all Americans. Senator Sessions is unfit to serve,” said HRC President Chad Griffin. “As a senator, Sessions earned a perfect 0 on our Congressional Scorecard, and he voted against hate crimes protections, against open military service and against marriage rights. Now we learn he's attacked the rights of LGBTQ students. Nobody with such a clear record against equal rights for so many Americans should be entrusted with running the very system of justice designed to protect us all.”
In his 1996 campaign to block an LGBTQ student group from holding a conference at a public university, Sessions spoke out publicly and wrote to the University President in failed attempts to thwart the conference at the University of Alabama, which included workshops on HIV prevention, interfaith issues, and coming out. Claiming a state law compelled him to do so, Sessions sent a letter to the University President, demanding he, or the university's board of trustees, cancel the conference, saying, "I intend to do everything I can to stop that conference." A U.S. District Judge ruled otherwise, saying there was "an open effort by the State Legislature to limit the sexuality discussion in institutions of higher learning to only one viewpoint: that of heterosexual people. This viewpoint limitation violates the first amendment."
In Congress, he voted for a Constitutional ban on marriage equality; spoke in opposition of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell; voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA); is a co-sponsor of the so-called First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), legislation that could allow Kim Davis-style discrimination against LGBTQ people across the nation; voted against repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; and voted against both the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act and expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation, gender identity, gender and disability. Sessions also opposed the Voting Rights Act, has voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, opposes immigration reform, and has been on the wrong side of every civil rights issue in his long political career. Sessions received a zero on HRC’s congressional scorecard.
In 1986, Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship was rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee because of racially charged comments and actions; at the time, Sessions was one of two judicial nominees whose selections were halted by the panel in nearly 50 years. Now, 30 years later, Sessions will face a confirmation hearing from the same legislative body that denied him a federal judgeship.Representatives from the six broadcast and cable TV news networks are meeting with Pres.-elect Donald Trump today. Insiders tell us the heads of ABC News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News and MSNBC will meet with the Trump at 1 p.m. ET at Trump Tower. We hear David Rhodes, president of CBS News will not be attending but other CBS Newsers will be there. Rhodes is traveling for work. Chris Isham, CBS’s Washington Bureau Chief, was there.
C-SPAN’s elevator cam at Trump Tower showed the arrival of CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker and anchor Wolf Blitzer, NBC News president Deborah Turness, Nightly News anchor Lester Holt, and Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, and MSNBC president Phil Griffin. From CBS, John Dickerson, Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell; and from ABC News, Martha Raddatz, George Stephanopoulos and David Muir. Also in attendance: ABC News president James Goldston and Fox News co-presidents Jack Abernethy and Bill Shine.
More | 2:16 p.m. ET: The meeting appears to be ending as George Stephanopoulos was spotted in the lobby, departing.
The unprecedented gathering follows Trump’s public disdain for most of the media which was evident throughout the election. Beyond what he often considered unfair coverage, the pre-election polling and election day exit polls appeared to predict a Hillary Clinton win. The media contempt was expressed again this morning by Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, during an interview on CNN’s New Day.
“This network will always focus on the divisions…How about accepting the election results & letting @realDonaldTrump form a government?” https://t.co/HhDGw8XIPs — Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) November 21, 2016
(Photos: Howard Mortman/C-SPAN)
CommentsToday, August 20th, Tony Award winner and playwright, performer, feminist and activist Eve Ensler wrote an open letter on the Huffington Post's website in response to Representative Todd Akin. The Republican Senate nominee from Missouri recently stated that in a "legitimate rape" a woman's body will block an unwanted pregnancy.
"Dear Todd Akin," she began. "I am writing to you tonight about rape. It is 2 AM and I am unable to sleep here in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am in Bukavu at the City of Joy to serve and support and work with hundreds, thousands of women who have been raped and violated and tortured from this ceaseless war for minerals fought on their bodies."
Read the full letter on the Huffington Post's website here
Ensler received the 2011 Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award for her work as V-Day Founder and her substantial humanitarian efforts.
As a playwright, Ensler has written The Good Body, in which she appeared on on Broadway in 2004 and toured throughout North America following the New York engagement. She also wrote and took the stage in The Vagina Monologues Off-Broadway. The Vagina Monologues has since been translated into 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries. It won Ensler an Obie Award for Best New Play, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Playwriting, among many other honors. Her play Emotional Creature made its premiere at Berkeley Rep this June. Ensler's playwriting credits also include Conviction, Lemonade, The Depot, Floating Rhonda and the Glue Man, Extraordinary Measures, Necessary Targets and The Treatment.
Ensler is the author of the book Insecure At Last: Losing It In Our Security-Obsessed World and has dedicated further efforts to the films Until The Violence Stops and the PBS' documentary What I Want My Words To Do To You.
Her latest project, Emotional Creature, will get a New York premiere this fall. Directed by Obie Award-winner Jo Bonney (By the Way, Meet Vera Stark) with original music and musical direction by Charl-Johan Lingenfelder, Emotional Creature will begin previews at The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at The Pershing Square Signature Center (480 West 42nd Street) on Friday, October 26, 2012 with an official opening night set for Monday, November 12, 2012, direct from an acclaimed World Premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California.
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More Hot Stories For YouStunning acceleration of a trend.
On the surface, it was the same lackadaisical data we’ve become inured to in this wondrous economy. But beneath the surface, there lurked a nightmare for the already struggling brick-and-mortar retailers.
Total retail sales in July, at $457.7 billion, remained stubbornly flat from June, and ticked up a measly 2.3% from a year ago, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading day differences, but not inflation, according to the Commerce Department.
As crummy as it was, it was propped up by sales of motor vehicles and parts, the largest category at 21% of total retail sales. They rose 1.1% for the month and 2.4% year-over-year to $93.2 billion. Auto sales have been booming. In terms of unit sales, they set an all-time record last year, funded by cheap debt and loosy-goosy underwriting standards; so comparisons this year are on top of a year that may be hard or impossible to beat for a while, with the industry already talking about a “car recession.”
And here’s what else propped up retail sales: Sales by “non-store retailers,” which includes e-commerce, soared 14.1% from July last year to $47.7 billion, now accounting for 10.4% of total retail sales. Their share has doubled since 2002.
So retail sales without autos and without non-store retailers – an approximation for brick-and-mortar retailers other than car dealers – came in at $321 billion in July not seasonally adjusted. A year ago, they were also at $321 billion. They have not moved one iota over the past year. And they’re up only 2% from two years ago.
That’s not counting the impact of inflation. CPI rose about 1% over the two-year period despite the collapse of energy prices. Adjusted for CPI, these retails sales might have gone up only 1% over a two-year period.
The US population grows at a rate of about 0.8% per year currently, according to the Census Bureau. So on a per-capita basis, and adjusted for inflation, these brick-and-mortar retail sales might have actually declined over a two-year period! A grisly thought for brick-and-mortar retailers: on average, each individual consumer might already be buying less there than they used to.
That non-store retailers have been kicking butt at the expense of brick-and-mortar retailers is by now well established. The entire brick-and-mortar industry is fretting about it. Big retail chains specialized in clothing and accessories are struggling with stagnating or now declining revenues. There has been a tsunami of bankruptcies by chain retailers. Mall owners are starting to worry about incessant store closings, including the 141 Macy’s stores; they’re beginning to bite. Eventually, the brick-and-mortar retail debacle will hit mall REITs and commercial mortgage-backed securities.
This has been a slow-motion development that had been denied for its first decade or so, as malls were considered something American consumers could not possibly live without.
And then, as online shopping picked up momentum, brick-and-mortar retailers belatedly tried to gravitate that way too, with only mitigated success. And now, stagnation, at best, has set in for them.
This chart shows retail sales minus non-store sales (blue line) and retail sales minus auto sales and minus non-store sales (black line). Note the circled phase of stagnation. At the bottom, non-store retail sales (red line). At 10.4% of total retail sales, no one is denying their impact on brick-and-mortar anymore:
What the chart above doesn’t show is just how rapidly non-store sales have been shooting up from a very small base. The chart below shows the share of non-store sales as percent of total retail sales (red line, left) and in dollars (blue line, right). This is where non-store sales are turning into a nightmare for brick-and-mortar retailers: note how both the dollar sales and the percent share of total retail have soared since late last year – a stunning acceleration of a trend:
“Declining relevance of brick and mortar stores,” is what Krishen Rangasamy, Senior Economist at Economics and Strategy, National Bank of Canada, called this. He did some additional math about the phenomenon and concluded:
[T]he second quarter took that outperformance to a whole new level, with a record 23% annualized jump for real non-store retail sales. That explains why US goods consumption growth was so strong last quarter.
As Millennials, who are big online buyers, are moving in larger numbers into the workforce and advancing on the income and purchasing ladder, the acceleration of that trend toward online sales that we are suddenly seeing is likely to continue. Any forecasts of a leveling off of the share of online sales – and the chunk they’re eating out of brick-and-mortar retailers – will likely have to be revised. For mall-based retailers, this is going to get uglier even faster than imagined or feared.
As retailers like Macy’s are losing their footing, they try to paper over it artfully, and stock market jockeys feed on it. Macy’s sales dropped 4% in the second quarter from a year ago. Net income plummeted 95%. It had already closed 41 stores last year. Now it’s going to close another 100. And yet. Read… Profits Plunge, Sales Drop at Macy’s. Slashes Jobs, Closes Stores. Stock Jumps 18%
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(Note at 10:30 a.m. Jan. 20: See our update below about the size of that apartment.)
In France, news that an apartment measuring less than 17 square feet had been rented out for 15 years is being cited as proof of an overly expensive real estate market in Paris. A 50-year-old man identified only as "Dominique" had been paying rent of 330 euros, or about $442, to live in the apartment.
The story was highlighted by the housing advocacy group Fondation Abbe Pierre, after the man asked for help dealing with his landlord. He had been living in an apartment whose habitable space was measured at 1.56 square meters — or about 16.8 square feet.
"I come home, I go to bed," Dominique told the French website and radio station RTL, describing how he coped with living in the space.
A photograph released by the advocacy group shows the apartment has a skylight and a slanted roof, but "a person doesn't stand correctly" in the space, it said on its Twitter feed. It added that the photo might make the place seem larger than it actually is.
RTL reported the story Thursday, saying that three different real estate agencies had managed the apartment despite its small size. It added that the door to the minuscule apartment was now permanently closed — and the owner faces a court date later this month.
Le Monde reports that the legal minimum size of an apartment in Paris is 9 square meters. And it must include a shower.
Update at 10:30 a.m. ET, Jan. 20: On The Size Of That "Apartment":
There's a good discussion going in the comments thread about why the apartment is said to measure just 1.56 square meters when the photo seems to show more "space" than that. As we said earlier, that photo may make the apartment appear larger than it really is. But, there also appears to be a legal issue regarding what the law in Paris says about how to measure the "habitable" space. Much of the apartment's space, it seems, isn't counted in that measurement because of the extremely low ceiling.
Here's a helpful contribution from commenter "Raising Eyebrows (Sean Sbragia)":
"I did a little research and, while my french isn't very good, it appears they claimed it was only 1.56m² of 'habitable area' according to the loi Carrez, or Carrez Law. It's a french law that specifies any floor area under 5' 9" in height is excluded from the total footage. So 80% of the space in the photo is not included in the reported 1.56m². http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... http://www.leparisien.fr/paris... "And from this version: http://www.thelocal.fr/page/vi...
'Flats in France are legally measured according the dimensions of habitable space - essentially the amount of room the tenant has to stand up straight without banging his head on the ceiling.' "
More contributions are welcomed in the comments thread.A common trope of many science fiction stories is the ability of characters to be able to improve themselves with science, often in the form of cybernetic enhancements. In the Starfinder Core Rulebook, these kinds of augmentations fall into a few broad categories—cybernetics, biotech, and personal upgrades. Cybernetics and biotech are handled using roughly the same rules, while personal upgrades have their own system.
Personal upgrades represent any system—be it technological, magical, or a hybrid of the two—that increases a character's ability scores. Personal upgrades are useful, but not crucial to most character concepts because of how ability score generation and level-based increases are handled. In Starfinder, when a character reaches 5th level, and every 5 levels thereafter, the character increases 4 ability scores of the player's choice. Also if the ability score is a 16 or lower, it increases by +2, while scores of 17 or more increase by +1. This makes it easy for characters to shore up ability scores that turn out to be too low to produce the effect desired in mid-level and high-level play, without forcing a player to decide between improving a key ability score and improving weak ones.
As a result, personal upgrades are kept very simple. Over the course of a character's career, beginning around 3rd level or so, they can buy one personal upgrade that grants a +2 to one ability score, one that grants a +4, and one that grants a +6. It doesn't matter if these are mystic ability crystals, technological synaptic enhancers, or some hybrid system, each character can successfully use only three of them, each at a different level of ability boost.
Cybernetics and biotech work differently, as they come in a wide range of item levels, and can be as simple as gaining a fully function prosthetic limb to replace a lost body part, or as complex as installing a dragon gland that gives you a breath weapon attack. Other forms of augmentation, such as necrografts, are mentioned as existing in the Core Rulebook but don't have full descriptions there. (Hint: keep your eyes on the Adventure Path!) Here's an example of a cybernetic augmentation:While little Moko's mother was tending her eldest child in hospital, the three year old's carers were routinely and savagely beating him to death.
Moko Sayviah Rangitoheriri's mother was unable to have her children with her at Starship Children's Hospital and so asked David Haerewa and Tania Shailer, who have four children themselves, to mind Moko at their Taupo home.
Haerewa, 43, and Shailer, 26, appeared in Rotorua High Court on May 2 to plead guilty to manslaughter charges. The pair had initially pleaded not guilty to a charge of murder. Hawera stood stoic, head down, while he gave his plea. Shailer looked straight ahead.
MATT SHAND/FAIRFAX NZ Tania Shailer, 26, and David William Haerewa, 43, pleaded guilty to manslaughter at the Rotorua High Court.
Moko's family observed the pair through teary eyes.
The summary of facts for the case paints a grisly picture of Moko's last days. During the two months he was with Haerewa and Shailer, he was kicked, thrown, dropped face first on the floor, bitten, stomped on, had faeces rubbed on his face and was denied medical care.
The abuse only came to light after his little body could take no more punishment. On August 10, 2015, Shailer called for an ambulance after Moko became unresponsive. She said Moko was very cold, not breathing and his stomach was hard. She said Moko had fallen from a woodpile.
Paramedics arrived to find Moko lying face down in the home's hallway. Shailer was by his feet while Haerewa kept the other children away from the paramedics. Ambulance officers realised Moko's condition was dire. All they could do was scoop him up and rush him to Taupo Hospital.
He arrived with swelling to his face so bad it was impossible to open his eyes. His abdomen was distended. He had bruising on his front and back. Multiple abrasions and wounds that appeared to be human bite marks were found on his face and arms.
Starship Hospital was called at 3.45pm and plans were made to move Moko north to the hospital where his mother and sibling already were.
It was a journey he would not make.
He could not be revived and was pronounced dead at 10pm. Shailer asked hospital staff if Moko would have survived had medical attention had been sought earlier, the summary of facts says.
A homicide investigation began and a post-mortem was undertaken. It was difficult to determine the exact cause of death due to the number of injuries. Lacerations and a haemorrhage deep within Moko's abdomen, coupled with a bowel rupture - likely caused by being stomped on by Shailer - was one potential cause. The other cause of death could have been swelling to the brain from repeated blows to the head.
His injuries included facial and neck contusions and abrasions; human bite marks on the left cheek, right cheek and arms; lacerations to his chin, neck, ears and lip; haemorrhages to both eyes; and multiple abrasions and contusions over the skin of his chest and abdomen. His bowel was also ruptured, causing infections, making him very weak.
Both defendants supported each other's attacks on Moko and the "culture of violence" that occurred within the home, the summary of facts says. The viciousness increased over time. Shailer was observed by a witness biting Moko and Haerewa admitted to continually attacking Moko. He said it became routine to pick on Moko and he didn't want him around him.
Two of the child witnesses said it was Shailer who stomped "really, really hard" on Moko's abdomen and stomach. It was after this act, thought to have occurred on Thursday, August 6, 2015, that Moko's body starting rapidly giving out.
On that |
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President Trump has not been in office for a week, but already’s he wilting under the pressure. “President Donald Trump is the first elected president in Gallup’s polling history to receive an initial job approval rating below the majority level,” Gallup reports. “He starts his term in office with 45% of Americans approving of the way he is handling his new job, 45% disapproving and 10% yet to form an opinion. Trump now holds the record for the lowest initial job approval rating as well as the highest initial disapproval rating in Gallup surveys dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
That reality — the rotten poll numbers, the low turnout at his inauguration, the massive turnout at worldwide protests, his widely panned appearance at the CIA and his press secretary Sean Spicer’s disastrous debut with the White House press corps on Saturday — seems to have thrown the narcissistic ex-mogul into an emotional tailspin.
The Post reports that as events unfolded on Friday and Saturday “Trump grew increasingly and visibly enraged.” We know two things from this: 1.) He’s an emotional train wreck before much of anything has happened and 2.) Those close to him already started spilling the beans, perhaps to exonerate themselves and perhaps to communicate to their boss through the media. Trump’s ire simply confirms what we already knew, namely that his insatiable need for approval and his rage when he does not receive it make for an alarmingly unpresidential demeanor.
President Trump questioned media reports and photographs that showed the size of Inauguration Day crowds, speaking to CIA employees at CIA headquarters on Jan. 21 in Langley, Va. (The Washington Post)
Add to the mix multiple power centers and an insecure, defensive son-in-law (“Two people close to the transition also said a number of Trump’s most loyal campaign aides have been alarmed by [Jared] Kushner’s efforts to elbow aside anyone he perceives as a possible threat to his role as Trump’s chief consigliere.”) The picture suggests an unhinged president, too many weak aides and an administration that cannot control itself, let alone coverage of its breakdowns. To repeat, nothing much of substance, certainly no major policy defeat, has yet occurred. One shudders to think what will happen when setbacks do occur.
Trump’s inability to acknowledge his own lack of support prompts him to seek refuge in “alternative facts” — to lie to himself and others. The Post reports, “Days after being sworn in, President Trump insisted to congressional leaders invited to a reception at the White House that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for millions of illegal votes … Two people familiar with the meeting said Trump spent about 10 minutes at the start of the bipartisan gathering rehashing the campaign. He also told them that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote.” The obsession with replaying the election and concocting a phony excuse for losing the popular vote reminds us that despite mockery for constant lying, Trump cannot help himself. He lies because reality won’t conform to his narcissistic view of the world.
Imagine how lawmakers perceive him after a performance like that. Do they imagine he is unstable? Dishonest?
Well, Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants them to think long and hard about Trump’s demeanor. He turned up the heat on Republicans to disavow Trump’s fabulism. Reviewing the weekend events, Schumer said on the Senate floor. “Whatever your politics, in order to debate, argue, compromise, and get things done for the American people, we have to be able to agree on a baseline of facts. Facts aren’t partisan. They don’t have ‘alternatives.’ The alternative to fact is fiction.” He added, “If this presidency is going to be based on ignoring the facts on the ground — we’re going to have huge problems.” He went on to explain why Trump’s credibility (or lack thereof) will pose a big problem down the road. (“If the White House is ignoring facts on the ground and is willing to make up ‘alternative facts’ about crowd size, what else are they willing to stretch the truth about? National security? What Vladimir Putin is really up to? The implications are terrifying.”)
Schumer rightly scolded Republicans, who need to decide whether to enable Trump’s behavior or stand up to him. “The folks who can really help rein in the president in are the members of his own party, who have a special responsibility to do so,” he said. “But they have been totally silent when President Trump has been saying and doing things that they know are wrong. They should be speaking out for the good of the country.” Ironically, Trump accuses the media of trying to delegitimize his presidency, but as Schumer pointed out, Trump does that on his own — and may wind up dragging other Republicans into his morass of lies.Well, yesterday was quite a day, and I’m still sifting through the consequences.
First things first. As with all major claims of discovery, considerable caution is advised until the BICEP2 measurement has been verified by some other experiment. Moreover, even if the measurement is correct, one should not assume that the interpretation in terms of gravitational waves and inflation is correct; this requires more study and further confirmation.
The media is assuming BICEP2’s measurement is correct, and that the interpretation in terms of inflation is correct, but leading scientists are not so quick to rush to judgment, and are thinking things through carefully. Scientists are cautious not just because they’re trained to be thoughtful and careful but also because they’ve seen many claims of discovery withdrawn or discredited; discoveries are made when humans go where no one has previously gone, with technology that no one has previously used — and surprises, mistakes, and misinterpretations happen often.
But in this post, I’m going to assume assume assume that BICEP2’s results are correct, or essentially correct, and are being correctly interpreted. Let’s assume that [here’s a primer on yesterday’s result that defines these terms]
they really have detected “B-mode polarization” in the “CMB” [Cosmic Microwave Background, the photons (particles of light) that are the ancient, cool glow leftover from the Hot Big Bang]
that this B-mode polarization really is a sign of gravitational waves generated during a brief but dramatic period of cosmic inflation that immediately preceded the Hot Big Bang,
Then — IF BICEP2’s results were basically right and were being correctly interpreted concerning inflation — what would be the implications?
Well… Wow… They’d really be quite amazing.
Would this story be bigger than the discovery of the Higgs particle? Certainly at least as big. To try to compare the two gets us into silly discussions; you can’t know the long-term implications of a discovery at or near the time it is made. But the immediate list of implications would certainly be longer.
Some Definitions
Before I start: we’ll need some definitions, given in this article, of:
A unit of energy called GeV (roughly the mass-energy of a hydrogen atom)
The Planck energy, Planck mass and Planck length (processes involving the Planck energy or mass in a region the size of the Planck length will generally involve both quantum mechanics and gravity [“quantum gravity”])
The energy scale associated with dark energy (which is not quite the amount of dark energy — for one thing, despite the name, dark `energy’ is actually an energy per unit volume.)
If any of these is unfamiliar to you, you may want to read that article first and to have it handy, in another tab or window, to serve as a glossary. You may also want to have my History of the Universe or my BICEP2 Discovery Primer hand.
Implications of BICEP2’s Discovery — IF … IF …
IF IF IF BICEP2’s measurement is correct, at least roughly, and IF IF IF it is being correctly interpreted, at least roughly, then there’s a long list of broad implications that I can think of, or that others of my colleagues have pointed out to me in conversations. Some of them are vague — areas where the implications are likely to be important but are not yet very clear. Some of these things were already somewhat implied by the previous experimental successes of the theory of inflation, while some stem directly from BICEP2.
—
IF … IF …
A puzzle that bothered scientists for decades, as to how the observable patch of the universe (i.e. the part that we can actually observe today; the universe may be much, much larger than this — see here) could be so uniform, would indeed be firmly solved, by a period of cosmic inflation. The extremely flat geometry of the universe would also now be firmly explained.
We would also have confirmation about how the universe became hot — about how the Hot Big Bang got started. The picture would be this: a large amount of dark energy first makes the universe big, via inflation, and then the dark energy turns into energetic particles, making the universe hot (and still expanding, albeit more and more slowly [until relatively recently]). Some people like to say that inflation puts the “Bang” in “Big Bang”, but remember that it also makes the universe flat and uniform and huge (typically much larger than the observable patch) before it heats it up.
The existence of cosmic inflation would itself be another feather in the cap of Einstein’s theory of gravity — since it is Einstein’s theory that predicts that the presence of a positive cosmological “constant” [not necessarily constant], also known as “dark `energy’ ” [not really energy, but energy density and negative pressure in just the right combination] actually causes the universe to expand, rather than (as we’d naively expect from gravity) contract.
And (IF… IF…) the confirmation of cosmic inflation would mean that those who pointed it out and its advantages, and developed the idea — people like Starobinsky, Guth, Steinhardt, Linde — ought to be able to celebrate (though not all will do so, because they abandoned the idea…)
Also celebrating would be those who pointed out the possibility of a detectable signal from gravitational waves in the polarization of the CMB, which is what BICEP2 has apparently observed. I believe these would be Kamionkowsi, Kosowsky, Stebbins, Seljak and Zaldarriaga (but the cosmologists should correct me if I’m unfair here.)
Were there any doubt left concerning Einstein’s prediction that gravitational waves exist — perhaps some leftover worry about the 1993-Nobel-Prize-winning indirect detection of energy carried being off by these waves, via precision measurements of a pulsar, one of a pair of closely-orbiting neutron stars discovered by Hulse and Taylor — it would be over.
And if anyone still wasn’t sure that gravity is due to a spin-two field, not a spin-zero field, the BICEP2 result would settle the matter; you can’t get B-mode polarization of the CMB without combining the spin-two polarization structure of the gravitational waves with Thomson scattering.
If there were any doubt that gravity is controlled, just like everything else, by quantum physics, it would erased; BICEP2’s observation would imply that just like other fields, which are subject to quantum jitter (i.e., random “fluctuations“), space and time (somewhat more precisely, the metric that determines distances) undergoes the same type of quantum fluctuations as other fields, fluctuations that any quantum version of Einstein’s theory of gravity would predict. No details about quantum gravity are needed for this conclusion.
The amount of dark energy required during inflation, in order that BICEP2 could observe this gravitational wave signal, would (IF… IF…) be enormous. The energy scale of dark energy [defined here] would be about 1016 GeV, just about 100 times less than the absolute maximum possible, which is the (reduced) Planck scale. This need not have been the case! This energy scale could have been trillions of times smaller, and yet still given acceptable amounts of inflation of the universe and an acceptable Hot Big BAng. Amazingly, the dark energy during inflation, if BICEP2 is right, is much larger than it needed to be, and almost as large as it could possibly be!
Moreover, if the energy scale of dark energy [defined here] had been just a few times weaker than BICEP2 observes — 1000 times less than the absolute maximum — then the gravitational wave signal would have been so faint that it would have been completely drowned out by another process (lensing of E-mode polarization, the solid red curve on the first figure here.) So most of us thought, with this wide range of possibilities, that it was a real long shot that BICEP2, or any future similar experiment, would ever see any signal due to gravitational waves from inflation. That the gravitational waves would turn out to be large and powerful enough to be observed would be an amazing piece of luck for scientists wanting to understand the universe. (IF… IF…)
[The original version of this paragraph overstated what we’d know; thanks to my colleagues for pointing out a blunder concerning the heating after inflation.] Also, this would mean we would now have an estimate for how hot the observable patch of the universe could have become after inflation ended and the region containing the observable patch became very hot — the start of the Hot Big Bang. The energy scale of the dark energy during inflation determines the maximum possible temperature at the start of the Hot Big Bang, more or less. To say it another way: after inflation with dark energy of scale 1016 GeV ended, the universe would have become hot, potentially so hot that the average particle rushing around in the hot dense soup of particles had a motion-energy of 1016 GeV, though perhaps quite a bit less than this. That’s a maximum temperature of as much as 1029 degrees [yes, that’s a 1 with 29 zeroes after it!!!]
The Large Hadron Collider’s data provide direct insights into physics at the energy scale of around 1000 GeV or so. [The mass-energy mc² of the Higgs particle is 125 GeV.] The BICEP2 measurement would arguably be our first direct evidence (IF… IF…) concerning physics at higher energy scales than the LHC (though one could argue we have a little information from the existence of neutrino masses.) And not just a little higher! Since the scale of the dark energy at inflation is at 1016 GeV, we’re talking 10,000,000,000,000 times higher!!! We’ve been trying for years, using various methods, to find evidence concerning how physics works at or near the Planck energy and Planck length. All previous efforts have come up with nothing; proton decay might have given us insight, but it is too rare if it happens at all; neutrino oscillations haven’t given a clear pictures; cosmology might have revealed big surprises concerning the Planck energy, but none have previously shown up. But if BICEP2 is right, then, for the first time, we are seeing phenomena which occurred near this energy scale!
Similarly, data from cosmology has made us very confident that we understand physics in the early universe back to the time when the first atomic nuclei formed during the Hot Big Bang — a few minutes after the Hot Big Bang started, when the temperature was such that the typical particles had energy of about 0.001 GeV. And we have had reasonable confidence that we have a decent understanding, using what we’ve learned about particle physics recently, back to times of a billionth of a second, and temperatures corresponding to an energy of a hundred GeV or so. But now our understanding may be taking (IF… IF…) an enormous leap, back to the very start of the Hot Big Bang, at a temperature corrresponding to an energy of as much as 1016 GeV, and even earlier, into the frigid inflating universe.
The success of the details of the equations that form the heart of inflationary theory suggests that not only did Einstein’s theory of gravity describe physics at very early times and very high energy scales, the basic principles of quantum field theory worked back then too. It could easily have been imagined — and many have imagined, with concrete ideas backed up with equations — that there might be important principles that we are unaware of, or modifications of the ones we know, that would give very different predictions from standard inflationary theory. So far, there’s no sign of that at all. BICEP2’s result (IF… IF…) would be yet another sign that despite having done all our particle physics and gravity measurements at much lower energy scales and longer distances, those accessible to the LHC and to our previous experiments, we’ve actually understood the principles that govern the behavior of phenomena at much, much higher energy scales and much shorter distances!
The energy scale inferred from BICEP2’s measurement, 100 times smaller than the Planck energy — 1016 GeV or so — has appeared in particle physics before! If you take the three non-gravitational forces of nature — the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force — and you first consider how they are rearranged when the Higgs field is turned off, into strong nuclear, weak isospin, and hypercharge forces — and then you look at how the strengths of the forces drift as you study them at shorter and shorter distances and higher and higher energies, you find the forces all become about the same strength at an energy scale of about 1016 GeV or so. This is called “unification of coupling constants” (i.e. force strengths) — or, originally and more ambitiously, “grand unification”, a grander notion that the three non-gravitational forces are actually manifestations of just one type of force. [Unification of that unified force with gravity is yet another question; that’s what string theory might do, though string theory does not require grand unification be a separate process from the unification with gravity.] Originally, back around 1980, inflation was imagined to be associated with grand unification, and if so, would have an energy scale of about … yes, 1016 GeV or so. But that idea died out long ago as people learned more about both unification and inflation. Yet now we must wonder: could that part of the original idea, in some vague way, have actually been right?
Over the years, scientists have invented a plethora of variations on how inflation might have, in detail, taken place. BICEP2’s observation of a gravitational wave signature would sweep away most of them, leaving just a few. (More will be invented in coming months, though!) It also would sweep away some alternatives to inflation and many speculative ideas for how the universe might behave, or might at least have behaved at earlier times. Despite “tension” (meaning mild disagreement) between BICPS2s current data and the Planck satellite’s data, a rather simple observable patch of universe, with rather simple laws of nature and a rather simple form of inflation, are consistent with what we know.
One of the variants of inflation that would be excluded by BICEP2’s data is the notion (admittedly long-shot anyway) that actually the Higgs field could play the role of the inflaton after all. It turns out that no observably large gravitational wave signal would be expected if that were true.
BICEP2’s result would represent the first time that, without any theoretical speculation about quantum gravity, an experiment has forced us to consider processes involving physics at the Planck scale, where quantum gravity is important. Specifically, for a variant of inflation to give such a large gravitational wave signal relative to the size of the other non-uniformities in the cosmic microwave background, the Planck energy scale becomes important. The inflaton field, which (by definition) is the field whose stored “potential energy” is the dark energy, must change by an amount close to or a bit larger than the Planck energy scale. [Sorry for the necessary technical-speak here. This whole business is inherently confusing for non-experts. The dark energy may change or may not change at all while the inflaton field is changing; that’s a separate question. What it means for a field like an inflaton to change by the Planck energy scale is that if a particle interacted with the inflaton field as strongly as it possibly could (the way the electron interacts with the Higgs field, but stronger), then as the inflaton field changed by an amount comparable to the Planck energy scale, the particle’s mass would change by an amount comparable to the Planck mass.]
An extremely simple possibility for inflation that would still be consistent with all the data (IF… IF…) is just to have a spin-zero field (a bit like the Higgs field, but with important differences — no weak nuclear force effects, for instance) which has a mass and no substantial interactions with any other fields. This is a model introduced by Andrei Linde; it’s amazingly simple. Could it really be correct?
Among the other very simple ideas that are likely to feature prominently in discussions of the near future are ones involving a “pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson”, of a type often called an “axion”. [I wrote a little about this in the paragraph just below the figure within this post about the Planck satellite and what it means for variants of inflation.] One of the variants of inflation that is most consistent with both the Planck satellite and BICEP2 (IF… IF…) is an idea called “natural inflation”, from 1990, due to Katherine Freese, Joshua Frieman and Angela Olinto. [Here’s a pdf of the paper.] Such a field has the feature that it is periodic (i.e., if you change it by enough, it comes back to itself, the way an angle that can only range from 0 to 2π.) It also has the feature that its interactions with all other fields are rather weak. When this field varies a lot, the dark energy associated with it varies by quite a bit less… so the field could vary by something approaching the Planck scale yet the energy scale of the dark energy could stay rather constant, at one percent of the Planck energy.
In order for this idea to really be consistent with quantum gravity, it might require some modification, of the sort was introduced in 2008 by Liam McAllister, Eva Silverstein, and Alexander Westphal, in which the axion is periodic with a larger range than you’d naively expect. [They did this work in the context of string theory, but I don’t believe that string theory specifically is necessary for the idea to work; it might work in other consistent quantum gravity theories, if there are any.] Expect to hear much more about axions. [By the way, it’s long been suggested that dark matter itself could be made from a type of axion… but presumably not the same one…]
One last one which is the weakest of the set… In a recent article, I pointed out that if the Higgs particle discovered at the LHC turns out to be of the simplest possible type — a “Standard Model Higgs” — then because this is “unnatural” (in the sense of “highly non-generic”) it might call into question fundamental conceptual issues, perhaps even the whole framework of quantum field theory. But BICEP2’s measurement would seem to support the framework of quantum field theory in a world of three smooth spatial dimensions up to very high scales and very short distances, so that line of thinking would be disfavored. (IF… IF…) Of course, measurements of the Higgs particle are still in the early days — at this point we can only say the Higgs particle is roughly “Standard-Model-like” in type — and maybe the Higgs will turn out to be more complex, or other new particles will show up at the LHC, possibly rendering the discussion moot. But (for reasons I outlined in my Santa Barbara talk two weeks ago) having only the Standard Model, with the Higgs field turned on just a little, plus quantum gravity and an inflaton field (and plus something to explain dark matter and neutrino masses) would pose many grave conceptual problems, ones that anthropic reasoning would not address. [Experts: Anthropic reasoning can be used to argue why the cosmological constant might be small; it can be used to argue why there is a hierarchy between the Planck mass and the proton and electron masses; but it cannot easily be used, without huge and problematic assumptions, to argue why one would find just the Standard Model at the LHC, with one light scalar Higgs field and nothing else new.] So I would tend to see the BICEP2 result (IF… IF…) as a (rather weak!!) argument slightly in favor of supersymmetry and grand unification, with supersymmetry just a little out of reach of the LHC for some reason, or modified in some way to make it harder to observe than expected. [Experts: “mini-split” supersymmetry, which preserves quantum field theory, with unification of coupling constants at the grand unified energy scale, starts to look better than something more radical.]
Colleagues: what have I left out? Eventually this post will be stored on this site as a reference article, so I’d like to make it complete.
Final Remarks
One more time I must remind you that we’re still some time away from trusting the BICEP2 result, and quite a long time from trusting the interpretation of the result in terms of inflation. All of the implications I’ve mentioned are therefore provisional. But the list is impressive, and there are probably more I have forgotten to mention, or are known to others but not to me, along with still others that haven’t yet been noticed by anyone. So I don’t yet know if BICEP2’s measurement is right, or if inflation occurred and if it created the signal they observe, but I do know this: there’s a lot at stake.The election of Donald Trump has created a great deal of anxiety among Americans, Canadians and people around the world. Everyone is trying to fully grasp what a Trump presidency will actually mean.
To provide some clarity, University of Toronto political scientists invited students and community members to an open forum Monday at U of T Scarborough where they could pick the experts’ brains on a variety of topics surrounding the election.
“I am proud to be part of a university that respects the views of others and where we create spaces for students, faculty and staff to discuss these issues,” said U of T Scarborough Principal Bruce Kidd, who provided the opening remarks.
“We want to understand the issues, the process, and the result of this election and what it means for America, for Canadians, and for citizens around the world.”
The audience raised a wide range of topics for the U of T Scarborough experts such as international security, foreign policy, environmental and energy policy, the treatment of Muslims and minority groups, immigration policy, and how Canada will be affected by a Trump government.
Asked whether a registry of Muslims living in the United States was possible, Aisha Ahmad, an assistant professor and event organizer, said there are many legal mechanisms and constitutional constraints in place that will make it hard to accomplish. She added that the U.S. has always been a staunch defender of liberal democratic ideals.
“If minority rights and civil liberties are eroded in the U.S. it would have serious implications internationally,” said Ahmad, who is also affiliated with the Munk School of Global Affairs. “The U.S. has always led on these principles and to fall back on this commitment would signal a serious decline in leadership, and something we should pay close attention to.”
The event was organized by U of T Scarborough Assistant Professor of Political Science Aisha Ahmad
Professor Matthew Hoffmann, who is co-director of the Munk School of Global Affairs' Environmental Governance Lab, said he is less optimistic about the chances of a registry not being created, adding that while Trump’s transition team could be floating the idea to appease the far right, he could also be testing out the idea with more mainstream Republicans.
Assistant Professor Renan Levine added that talk about the registry could also be a ploy to distract from other controversial policies that are being worked on.
“We all need to be vigilant that this isn’t just a cloud of smoke meant to distract us from the real fire, and that is the other policies Trump could be trying to push through.”
As for what Canada can do if Trump carries through with a registry for Muslims, all agreed that from a legal standpoint not much can be done aside from public disapproval.
U of T Scarborough student Zabikhulla Yari asked what the implications of a Trump presidency will mean generally for Canada.
Associate Professor Chris Cochrane said he hopes the Trudeau government is closely studying how possible American isolationism will affect Canada.
“Canada may be forced to look beyond the U.S. and to diversify. We may not be able to do this militarily, but maybe economically. I hope our government is thinking about these issues,” he says.
Hoffmann said that the Keystone XL Pipeline Project will certainly be back on the agenda again given Trump’s vociferous support of the fossil fuel industry throughout his campaign.
“Canada generally follows the U.S. when it comes to its energy and climate policy, so it will have some hard decisions to make – either take a progressive approach on climate policy or pursue the construction of the Keystone pipeline.”
Asking a question on Facebook, Camille Galindez wanted to know why Hillary Clinton was unable to hold on to the white working class vote the same way Obama had.
Assistant Professor Alison Braley-Rattai says the shift away from Clinton spoke to a larger failure by the Democrats to adequately address economic uncertainty among voters.
“In the modern economy, it’s harder to shift jobs, and it must be said that many felt Obama didn’t do enough to address their interests,” she said. She added that many felt Clinton was just a continuation of Obama, and that many voters are still angry over the bailouts large banks received following the financial crisis |
the wedding. “It would not be appropriate conduct for someone in holy orders to enter into a same-sex marriage, given the need for clergy to model the Church’s teaching in their lives,” said the guidance. The precise repercussions for anyone disobeying were not explained.
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
“The bishops hadn’t thought, ‘Maybe some people will be planning weddings and maybe it’s not very fair to people to expect them to cancel,'” says Pemberton. Nevertheless, prior to the wedding, Pemberton contacted Christopher Lowson, the bishop of Lincoln, where Pemberton worked as a senior hospital chaplain, to discuss his intentions. “He assured me he would not be starting a disciplinary action against me,” says Pemberton. Instead, after the wedding, Lowson sent Pemberton a written rebuke and advised him that this black mark would stay on his file forever. It arrived during the couple's honeymoon. On Pemberton’s return, Richard Inwood, the then acting bishop of Southwell and Nottingham – where Pemberton lives – asked to see him. Inwood had been in his role for just three days before Pemberton’s wedding. At the meeting, says Pemberton, the bishop told him he should not have married, because doing so contravened the doctrine of the Church of England. “At the end he said, ‘I’ll let you know what I decide,’” Pemberton says, so the canon pressed Inwood for the likely outcomes. The possibilities were: that Inwood would do nothing, or he would present Pemberton with a rebuke, similar to Lowson’s, or he would remove Pemberton’s permission to officiate (PTO). The PTO is the piece of paper priests need to be able to do most of their job. Three days later, Inwood chose the last option. It meant, says Pemberton, that in the area he lives, “I can’t take services, I can’t preach or take Holy Communion or marry, bury, or baptise. I can play no ritual part in the life of a church.” Under normal circumstances, he says, a PTO is removed for egregious wrongdoing such as breaking the law – if, for example, a priest is accused of sexual abuse. The letter also demanded that Pemberton return the PTO document to Inwood’s office “as soon as possible”. After more than 30 years of service to the church, what was that like? “Awful,” he says, his baritone voice cutting out. “Absolutely terrible. It felt so degrading. As if I couldn’t be trusted.” Pemberton had been a rising star in the Church of England. After graduating from Oxford he trained to be a priest and was ordained while still in his mid-twenties – exceptionally young. By 2005, after serving in several posts and devoting years to working in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pemberton was made an honorary canon. This title is bestowed upon the best – the most dutiful, long-serving priests. His then bishop advised Pemberton to consider a future as a dean, archdeacon, or bishop. Ten years later, after becoming a canon of Ely as well as Boga in the Congo, that future was stubbed out. He had disobeyed.
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
But as Pemberton talks, his imposing 6’ 2” stature supporting a sweetly authoritative voice, it is compassion and fortitude – albeit dented – that cloak him, not victimhood or embitterment. Given what has happened this seems remarkable – that is, until BuzzFeed News takes him back to his wedding day. What was it like standing opposite his fiancé, exchanging vows? Suddenly, Pemberton cannot speak. His eyes fill. “Well…” he begins, only to stop again, breathing into the depths to control himself, “it was just me and him and…” He looks skywards – not at anything visible or ethereal, but as if at the highest of human experiences. “I realised that I was doing absolutely the right thing for somebody I love.” He pauses and smiles. “I knew it was going to cause trouble.” The problem was he could not be sure what kind – or even from where that trouble would come. The Mail on Sunday had already turned up at his house the day before the wedding. The journalist, he says, paced up and down outside all afternoon before knocking at their door. Fearful that if they refused to cooperate the reporter would show up at the ceremony, Pemberton and Cunnington agreed to speak to him and have a picture taken, on the understanding there would be no unwanted guests the next day.
The Mail on Sunday / Associated Press Jeremy Pemberton and Laurence Cunnington pose in their wedding attire
Pemberton characterises the interview as “stilted”, which certainly comes through in the resulting story – the reporter asks Pemberton how he expects to feel after marrying, and receives the reply: “We will feel married.” Press intrusion was merely one concern, however. Because each bishop can decide how to punish transgressors in their own diocese, the situation now facing Pemberton was almost comically absurd. With one bishop wrapping him on the knuckles and another ripping off his dog collar, every morning he would wake up in Southwell not a priest, and then drive into Lincolnshire for his hospital chaplain job, where, suddenly, across the county border, he was a fully functional priest again. Thus, adds Pemberton, “Not only is my case about discrimination, but the inconsistency of the whole process.” The compounding problem for Pemberton was that during the meeting with Inwood, he advised the acting bishop that he was applying for a new position – a promotion to senior hospital chaplain – this time in Southwell. “[Inwood] said, ‘It would be difficult to give you a licence if I’d removed your PTO.” And so, on 3 July, four weeks after Pemberton was offered the promotion, he received another letter from Inwood, this time informing him that he would not be granted the necessary licence to take up the position. “I was furious,” says Pemberton.
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
Pemberton’s new husband, meanwhile, was “incandescent with rage”. Cunnington, 52, detailed on his Facebook page what had happened and implored friends to write to the acting bishop and his archbishop, John Sentamu, to protest against the decisions. “A tidal wave of post started heading towards them,” says Pemberton, adding that Sentamu “got his act together and arranged a pro forma letter to go out to everybody”. Inwood, he says, replied to no one. With media coverage of the unfolding scandal intensifying and with his job offer looking imperilled – not to mention the removal of his PTO – Pemberton sought out lawyers to help him, despite having no funds to pay them. He approached an ecclesiastical barrister, Justin Gau and two further barristers, Sean Jones QC, an employment specialist, and Helen Trotter, an equalities expert – all of whom offered their services for free. The case, after all, could make legal history. “They said it would be something they would be prepared to do pro bono but would I go home and check my household contents insurance?” he says. “So we went home and discovered we had £100,000-worth of legal cover. I’ve not told anyone this, but thank you, Direct Line!” He laughs joyously: One of Britain’s most recognisable insurance companies, whose logo comprises an old red telephone on wheels, came to fund one of the country’s key equality lawsuits. “The little telephones came good!” says Pemberton, before pointing out that even this cover wouldn’t have been sufficient without his legal team working at “extremely reduced rates” for him. The Church of England hired Herbert Smith Freehills, a top international law firm – not the church’s usual choice in legal matters. And it wasn't the kind of case the firm is known for: Herbert Smith Freehills liberally sponsors LGBT charity events. Pemberton estimates that the church’s legal fees will, by now, be several hundred thousand pounds. (When asked by BuzzFeed News to respond to this claim, the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham declined to comment.) “It’s obscene,” says Pemberton. “I feel sick – we have a government determined to dismantle the welfare state, this is going to mean the voluntary sector is going to have to step in. That’s where the money should be going.” He stops for a moment and looks down.
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
“It’s really sad to see an institution that does a lot of good but the good it does is overwhelmed by this incredible obsession [homosexuality], which gives it such dreadful negative publicity. I get people telling me, ‘I’m not taking my kids to a place where they teach people to be homophobic.’” He pauses again. “When I think about the message of Jesus, he was not one for sticking to the rules, he was for finding people others thought weren’t worth bothering with. Well, there’s a clue in there, guys.” The tribunal itself was still months away. And before any legal preparation could begin, the NHS trust responsible for King’s Mill Hospital in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, withdrew the job offer because Inwood had refused the licence. Pemberton received the news while travelling to France for a break. He returned early. A few days later he was due to go back to work. “I said to Laurence, ‘I can’t.’ I was very depressed.” He went to his doctor. “I got some antidepressants. Some days…” he begins before jolting himself. “Some days I would just get up and get dressed and go downstairs. That would be it. That was all I could manage. I’d be in bed sleeping a lot.” Was there a point where he did not know how to get through it – where he considered ending everything? “Yes,” says Pemberton. “There was.” He had already had a breakdown eight years earlier. But during this period, of late summer and autumn of 2014, Pemberton found something that helped: cross-stitching. “That was my therapy,” he says. “It was something I could hold on to and concentrate on. A cushion cover. It’s my wellness cushion, it helped me get better.” There was something else that helped. “Laurence,” he says. “He was wonderful, endlessly patient and supportive.” When Pemberton hid in bed or in the house all day, “Laurence would say, ‘Do you want to go down to the shop?’” They met on a website for gay fathers in 2008. Both had been married for several decades to women – Pemberton with five grownup children. At 50, the priest finally stopped denying who he was. “You carry on pretending until you can’t,” he says. “I came out to myself first – in the mirror. I looked at myself and said, ‘I’m a gay man.’” The shame he had lived with for half a century “drained, never to return”, he says. “For me, it was a profoundly spiritual moment.”
Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed
Messages between Pemberton and Cunnington on the site led to daily phone calls and, finally, their first meeting. “You know that thing about going weak at the knees?” he says. “I went weak at the knees.”
Pemberton returned to work in the hospital chaplaincy position in Lincolnshire and began to brace himself for the tribunal. In June 2015, before the proceedings started, he says, one of his barristers offered some advice: “Don’t believe everything you see on telly. There’s no drama.” The barrister was wrong. The tribunal was packed – full, says Pemberton, with “suits from London”: a registrar of the London diocese, a “top London solicitor who was there apparently to take notes for the Archbishop of Canterbury”, a legal secretary from the General Synod, also there to take notes, and a representative from the legal division of the pensions board, as well as all the barristers and solicitors from both sides. Pemberton was cross-examined for seven hours. “I don’t think anybody realised quite how aggressive their silk [Tom Linden QC] was going to be with me,” he says. “He was trying to take my character apart.” The transcription from the tribunal, obtained by BuzzFeed News, reveals Linden telling Pemberton, “You are an errant priest,” and “You are not in good standing,” and accusing him of being “disingenuous”. Cunnington had to leave the room, unable to listen to his husband being described in this way. The confrontation was formidable and fractious: two exceptionally well-educated men grappling over ecclesiastical, employment, and equality legislation, the first of which stretches back to the 16th century. “You personally and in family relationships undertook that you would exemplify the teachings of the church. In marrying a man, you did not do that, did you?” Linden asked, before asserting that is a matter of “integrity” that “priests must fashion their lives” in accordance with church teaching. To which Pemberton responded: “As a matter of integrity, no one has the right to tell me who I can and cannot marry. It is unlawful for the bishops to say so.” This was one of the warmer exchanges.
Lynzy Billing
Linden described Pemberton’s wedding as taking place amid a “storm of publicity” that Pemberton had “created”. In an exchange about whether he could have foreseen the precise consequences, during which Pemberton stated that he could not, Linden replied: “The Daily Mail was able to work out the consequences of your actions.” He added, “You know perfectly well you had plunged the church into crisis nationally,” before concluding: “You got yourself in this mess." Several hours in, Linden questioned Pemberton over the decision to remove his PTO. Pemberton began to cry, humiliated by the memory. Linden responded, “Crying isn’t necessarily fair to the respondent.” In the tribunal room, there was “quite a reaction” to this, says Pemberton – his own barristers were taken aback. Amid the unfriendly fire, Pemberton, however, remained resolute. “There was something hugely satisfying about actually being there, getting evidence heard," he says. "That was a big win as far as I was concerned – somebody heard my story and quizzed the other side. Also very present in my mind was that this is a test case that could be influential for other people, that this could raise in the public mind, ‘What are the limits we want to put on the state church in its exemptions from the law of the land?’” There were also moments of sheer absurdity. After the final witness, Malcolm Brown, director of mission and public affairs for the Archbishops' Council of the Church of England, took to the stand, “He said the only thing that really mattered was not using the word marriage,” says Pemberton. “He said perhaps we could have called it ‘civil partnership max’." At this point, according to the transcript of the hearing, Pemberton's barrister suggested the word "morriage" as an alternative. "And he [Brown] said, ‘That's a joke, isn't it?’” Pemberton roars with laughter. Nevertheless, the four days in court, following all the events of the preceding year, proved bruising. “I’m not in love with the Church of England any more,” he says, flatly. “I have a vocation to God, not the Church of England." To be in an institution that views the nature of your relationship as rendering you unfit to work is only one aspect of this: "They have this odd rhetoric about gay people. Take last year: [The church] produced some material about combatting homophobia in schools but still managed to make out [that gay people's] sexuality made them in some ways less good people." The first part of the document in question contains the following passage: "The official Church of England teaching about the human sexual act is that 'it is an act of total commitment which belongs properly within a permanent married relationship and that homosexual acts fall short of this ideal.'" Pemberton continues: "Then there was some pronouncement about homophobia, how we’ve failed to call on people to repent of their homophobia, and I think, ‘Hang on, it’s not about other people repenting their bloody homophobia, it’s you lot and your institutional homophobia!” Pemberton stops, aware his voice is raised. “That’s the problem, because actually, deep down, I think they’re still not convinced that we are ‘good as you’: G.A.Y.” Such rhetoric, says Pemberton, is “seriously damaging”, and partly to blame for dwindling numbers in churches. The only way to rectify such absence in pews, he says, would be for the church to conduct research among church-leavers, to find out why they've left. Why doesn't the church do that? “The Church of England still has establishment and bishops in the House of Lords – all sorts of privileges. It has entitlement, and entitled people don’t bother asking difficult questions about whether their business is working or not. That’s the problem.”
Jeremy Pemberton / Facebook Jeremy Pemberton / FacebookThis is a series of tutorials geared around building up your own customized environment, using emacs, from scratch. You can find part 1 here You can find part 3 here
Installing and Managing Packages
Requirements To follow along with this tutorial, all you need is an existing installation of Emacs 24, or package.el. I note 24 specifically because if you have Linux, your distribution might not have an Emacs package that is version 24 or higher. You can find out your emacs version with the 'M-x emacs-version' in your Emacs. If you don't have 24, Bozhidar Batsov wrote a great guide on installing emacs 24. Conversely, you can install package.el. Simple add it somewhere to your.emacs.d and load it as shown in part 1.
Background Text editors tend to be limited in the initial functionality they provide. Even Emacs, which provides a larger set of base functionality and features than most, will probably not have everything you want. Luckily, like most other editors these days, Emacs provides methodology to extend your text editor by taking code others have written. Vim and Sublime call them plugins, Emacs calls them packages. As of Emacs 24, packages management is now included by default. This means you have a way to: install packages: M-x package-install <package>
list all existing packages: M-x list-packages But we have a couple steps to go until we reach package management nirvana.
The Code For this tutorial, let's add two separate files into our ~/.emacs.d/ directory: my-packages.el
my-loadpackages.el And load.emacs.loadpackages files in your ~/.emacs: (load "~/.emacs.d/my-loadpackages.el") We're going to split our code up into two parts: one file to define what packages we want to install, and another to load and set up those packages.
Adding packages archives Emacs 24's packages manager allows the adding of additional package archives, the places where package.el looks for packages to install. In your my-packages.el, let's tell Emacs to add some more package archives: ; my-packages.el (require 'package) (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa". "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/") t) (add-to-list 'package-archives '("marmalade". "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/") t) (package-initialize) So what are these package archives? Here's some info about them: melpa is a package archive managed by Milkypostman. It's the easiest package archive to add packages too, and is automatically updated when the package is. The go-to source for up to date, and the vast majority of, packages. However it's worth noting that with cutting-edge comes instability, so that is a risk of stability one should be aware of. It's worth noting I've never been broken for any package I've installed via melpa, however.
marmalade is another third-party package manager. Marmalade tends to be more stable, due to the requirement that developers explicitely upload new versions of their packages. I personally use both (and the built-in Emacs 24 package-archive), but if you don't want to use one or the other, remove the offending statements from above. The code above does the following: loads the package 'package' via the require keyword
installs relevant package managers
initializes the package system so definitions are loaded
Installing and Loading Packages on Startup Now that we have the package repositories we like, it's time to install some packages! First, choose a package you'd like to install. I'm going to install magit, a very nice version control major mode for git, and yasnippet, a package to easily parameterize and inject templates as needed (e.g. a java class template). Remember, you can always find more package by using 'M-x list-packages' If you wanted to install these manually, all you would have to do is 'M-x package-install <package>'. However, I believe in reproduceability, so I'm going to explain a method that will automatically install desired missing packages on startup. (To give proper attribution, I adapted this method from snippets in this file in emacs-prelude.) The first step is to define a list of packages you want installed on startup. In your my-packages.el, after the package archives have been initialized, let's create a list and store our desired packages in them: ; my-packages.el ; defvar is the correct way to declare global variables ; you might see setq as well, but setq is supposed to be use just to set variables, ; not create them. (defvar required-packages '( magit yasnippet ) "a list of packages to ensure are installed at launch.") Now that required-packages is defined, we can use it to install some packages! Let's add a few more lines to install these packages for us: Add the following to my-packages.el: ; my-packages.el (require 'cl) ; method to check if all packages are installed (defun packages-installed-p () (loop for p in required-packages when (not (package-installed-p p)) do (return nil) finally (return t))) ; if not all packages are installed, check one by one and install the missing ones. (unless (packages-installed-p) ; check for new packages (package versions) (message "%s" "Emacs is now refreshing its package database...") (package-refresh-contents) (message "%s" " done.") ; install the missing packages (dolist (p required-packages) (when (not (package-installed-p p)) (package-install p)))) So what does this code do? Well: package-installed-p is from package.el and checks if a package is installed
packages-installed-p checks if all desired packages are installed
the unless clause: first checks if all packages are installed. If they are, no need to do extra work. if not all packages are installed: refresh the package indices install each non-installed package.
So whenever I want to install a package, I just add it to the list. If you share your.emacs configuration across machines, or have to start from scratch, this makes it very easy to build an environment. Even if you completely blow away your existing packages. Give it a try! shut down your emacs now and start it back up, and you should install the magit and yasnippet packages.
Loading and Configuring Packages So now we have packages installing automatically. How do we use them? Each package has it's own configuration, so it's best to read the README or documentation. However, almost all packages require you to require it first. Let's add a few lines to our.emacs.d/my-loadpackages.el: ; my-loadpackages.el ; loading package (load "~/.emacs.d/my-packages.el") (require'magit) (define-key global-map (kbd "C-c m")'magit-status) (require 'yasnippet) (yas-global-mode 1) (yas-load-directory "~/.emacs.d/snippets") (add-hook 'term-mode-hook (lambda() (setq yas-dont-activate t))) So each package section starts with a "require", which loads a particular package into the existing emacs environment. This is required before configuring anything related no that package. Notice that I also use the require as a section header, defining what package is related to what configuration. One thing to note here is that once a package is loaded via require, it's methods are globally available EVERYWHERE. There's no concept of importing just for the file in emacs lisp, you just add everything to this global context. However, most packages use a prefix, (such as 'yas' for yasnippet commands) so it doesn't seem too cluttered. Here we also see another use of add-hook, but it's different this time: this time we hook it to a particular major mode. This means that this particular hook will activate when that major-mode is activated. This is useful when you want to activate specific behaviour for when you're editing a particular kind of text (e.g. binding a shortcut to open up a python interpreter if you're in a python major mode) As an aside, here's the configuration I'm setting here: binding C-c m to magit-status: this is an example of a custom shortcut for my environment. Wherever I am, I can hit C-c m and see the status of the git repository I'm in (if I'm in one).
yas-global-mode: this ensures that yasnippet is activated globally. Since yasnippet doesn't typically interfere with anything, and I've found that any sort of text I'm modifying benefits from snippets, It's a good default to have.
yas-load-directory: this allows me to load snippets from a specific location. I have custom snippets I store in there.
(add-hook 'term-mode-hook...): this is a little hack that needs to exist. Otherwise, tab-complete doesn't work in Emacs' terminal emulators such as ansi-mode.
Summary Here's what we learned: emacs has a built-in (as of Emacs 24) package management system.
can install third-party repositories by adding entries to package-archives
can install packages manually with M-x install-package
packages can be loaded via (require '<package-name>)Mohammed Asghar was found guilty of blasphemy after writing letters claiming he was the Prophet Mohammed.
Khalid Mahmood
An appeal has been lodged on behalf of a mentally ill Scot who has been sentenced to death in Pakistan.
Mohammed Asghar, who is in prison in Rawalpindi, was found guilty of blasphemy after writing letters to officials claiming he was the Prophet Mohammed.
The 69-year-old did not post the missives but a disgruntled tenant, whom Ashgar was in the process of evicting, brought them to the attention of the police.
On Friday, lawyers acting for the former Edinburgh resident said they have lodged an appeal against his conviction and sentence.
The appeal challenged his conviction on a number of grounds, including the failure to consider evidence on Mr Asghar’s mental health.
It could take up to five years for the appeal to be heard by Pakistan’s High Court and charity Reprieve are concerned his health leaves him ill-equipped to deal with the wait.
Mr Ashgar was sectioned under the Mental Health Act in Scotland in May 2010 and treated at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Edinburgh, where he was kept under observation for a month.
Maya Foa, from Reprieve, said: "We have grave concerns about the ongoing lack of appropriate medical treatment for Mr Asghar, and hope that the British and Pakistani Governments will do everything they can to ensure that he receives treatment without further delay.
"I trust that both governments are exploring every possible option to ensure that it does not take five years to see the effects of this terrible miscarriage of justice reversed."
At Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this week, David Cameron said he was “deeply concerned” about the pensioner.DACA Was Only One Part of Obama's Seizure of Congressional Power
The DACA program being terminated by AG Sessions was a Federal program started by President Obama. The program was promoted as an administrative strategy to provide eligible youth relief from deportation. Since the entire issue has been clouded with political rhetoric it’s important to look at its legal and constitutional status. The DACA program was started when on November 20, 2014 President Obama issued an Executive Order. It’s important to note that the US Constitution does not allow any president to set immigration policy. Since the DACA EO was directed to delay deportation of illegal immigrants it clearly falls under the authority of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and those Federal rules can only be passed by Congress. The Constitution clearly states in Article I Section 8 clause 3 that only the Congress shall have power “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” It further states that all legislative powers shall reside in Congress, which shall be composed of a House of Representatives and a Senate.
The power to establish any rules regarding immigration do not reside in the office of President and never have. So, at this point the question is moot: President Obama did not have any authority to issue a DACA order through any “executive action.” President Obama himself stated twenty-two times that he has no authority over issues of immigration. This then means he can’t unilaterally change any immigration laws. But President Obama’s entire presidency was an exercise in executive overreach, and several of the changes he made to immigration law were overturned by the Supreme Court. It’s important to understand that whether or not one agrees with what President Obama does about immigration is irrelevant: he has no authority under the Constitution to write or rewrite, or amend, the rules of immigration passed by Congress such as the 1996 Illegal Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act. What President Obama frequently did during his presidency was go around Congress and write his own laws by changing the application of existing law through new regulations and rules. He has no more authority to change laws through bureaucratic rule changes than he does to pass a law. But this was something he established immediately in his first term. The $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), designed to work around existing Federal laws, was clearly established to enable President Obama and his private army of appointed bureaucrats to rewrite existing laws. The Act states, on page two, “The Presidents and the heads of Federal departments and agencies shall manage and expend the funds made available in this Act so as to achieve the purposes specified in subsection (a)…” While this one sentence seems innocent enough, consider that the department heads were then appointed by President Obama as “czars.” These czars were discussed by Judicial Watch in a special report published September 15, 2011. The report states “the number of czars that have been appointed by the President, or by others in his Administration, appears to total 45…there are as many as 18 other unfilled or planned czar positions.” These czars were clearly appointed by Obama to spend money on policies chosen by President Obama. In addition, in 2011, 56% of the Federal budget was dedicated -- pre-spent -- on mandatory programs. This includes the entitlement programs that earn the Democratic Party the votes of program-dependent voters throughout the US. So, between the czars, ARRA act money and mandatory spending, President Obama’s party had seized the will and consent of the voters and used the czars to both choose public policies and pay for them. At the same time, he refused to negotiate with Republicans on a budget. The Republican House after 2010 was forced to just go along with existing mandatory spending programs and through this strategy, President Obama seized control of the Congress as well, even though his party didn’t have majority control. This is perhaps unprecedented in US history -- just as the illegal immigration strategy is unprecedented. The DACA act is just one of many hundreds of major programs. The strategy President Obama used to create DACA, while unconstitutional, is minor compared to the trillions of dollars spent on the mandatory programs already established to keep his party in control of policy and the national budget. It’s no coincidence that the nation’s credit rating was downgraded after Congress passed the Budget Control Act of 2011, which didn’t control the budget in 2012 or in the future. In fact, the budget of the US continues to spiral out of control. Its major component now is mandatory spending, spending that goes on automatically, without the voters having any influence as to how their will and consent, as expressed in national elections, is realized through appropriations. The Democratic Party’s control of the US Government in Washington is now effectively a fact. Since no one, under existing practices, will bring mandatory spending under control, the DACA policy can be seen as just one more usurpation of the power of Congress to control the rules of naturalization. The far bigger issue is the impact the growing debt, interest payments taxpayers are forced to pay, and loss of control they have over Congress has in dismantling the role voters have in the functions of the Federal government. There’s no doubt that Barack Obama, the unknown candidate from Chicago, was put into office to promote the Democratic Party’s control of US government at all levels, since all units of government, from the smallest town to the largest state, now heavily depend upon mandatory spending. This does not bode well for the ability of voters to control the direction of government or for the US to remain a government that is, in Lincoln’s words, “of the people, by the people and for the people.”The suspect wanted in a fatal Monday shooting has been located by Bernalillo County deputies.According to authorities, Dominic Sanchez, 32, shot Mario Estrada, 22, several times in the road and left him there at about noon near Gatewood and Bridge Boulevard.Deputies found Estrada with gunshot wounds to the head, face and upper body. He was pronounced dead at the scene. They blocked off Bridge Boulevard between Sunset and Golf to investigate the shooting.A witness told our partners at the Albuquerque Journal they heard 12 shots.The Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department said Sanchez and Estrada had an ongoing feud over a woman, Rosalie Esquibel.Sanchez was on the loose until 10 p.m. Monday. He was considered armed and dangerous, but deputies said he was taken into custody without incident. He was found on the 1200 block of Dickerson SE.Esquibel was in the home with Sanchez when he was found. She was arrested and charged with harboring/aiding a felon.Esquibel is pregnant with Estrada's child, according to the criminal complaint.Sanchez was booked into the Bernalillo County jail and is being held on a $500,000 cash only bond.Sanchez has been previously pleaded guilty to larceny and receiving stolen property. He had three different cases dismissed because he was found incompetent to stand trial.Mobile users: Tap to watch the story as it airedKOAT Action 7 News is following this story and will update it as soon as more information is available.To continue receiving mobile push notifications, make sure you have the latest version of the KOAT APP.
The suspect wanted in a fatal Monday shooting has been located by Bernalillo County deputies.
According to authorities, Dominic Sanchez, 32, shot Mario Estrada, 22, several times in the road and left him there at about noon near Gatewood and Bridge Boulevard.
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Deputies found Estrada with gunshot wounds to the head, face and upper body. He was pronounced dead at the scene. They blocked off Bridge Boulevard between Sunset and Golf to investigate the shooting.
A witness told our partners at the Albuquerque Journal they heard 12 shots.
The Bernalillo County Sheriff's Department said Sanchez and Estrada had an ongoing feud over a woman, Rosalie Esquibel.
Sanchez was on the loose until 10 p.m. Monday. He was considered armed and dangerous, but deputies said he was taken into custody without incident. He was found on the 1200 block of Dickerson SE.
Esquibel was in the home with Sanchez when he was found. She was arrested and charged with harboring/aiding a felon.
Esquibel is pregnant with Estrada's child, according to the criminal complaint.
Sanchez was booked into the Bernalillo County jail and is being held on a $500,000 cash only bond.
Sanchez has been previously pleaded guilty to larceny and receiving stolen property. He had three different cases dismissed because he was found incompetent to stand trial.
Mobile users: Tap to watch the story as it aired
KOAT Action 7 News is following this story and will update it as soon as more information is available.
To continue receiving mobile push notifications, make sure you have the latest version of the KOAT APP.
AlertMeBREWSTER KAHLE:
I think it's that institutions don't know what roles they're supposed to play going forward. They knew what it was when they were supposed to buy books and put them on shelves, but now, do they do their own digital services? Do they wait for somebody else to do it and subscribe to it?
I'm hoping that, by at least 2020, all right, so in three, four years from now, we're not talking about, wouldn't it be great to build a complete digital library of the Library of Congress online? We say, OK, that's done. Now what do we do? How do we go and make the next better services? How do we make a global brain? How to we go and make it so that Nobel scientists are using these vast resources to go and make new discoveries?
I think we only have pieces now.Utah Wants To Kill Zenefits For Giving Away HR Software For Free
from the no-disruption-allowed dept
When businesses buy health coverage for their workers, they often go through brokers, who play the role that travel agents once did for the airlines. They are middlemen who figure out the best fit between buyers and sellers of health care, then take a percentage of the sale. And the commissions can be quite hefty. After connecting a small business with a health care provider, a broker collects a monthly fee of about 4 to 8 percent of a company’s health premiums.
The commission rates are set by care providers and aren’t usually disclosed to the small-business purchasers. But the fees amount to several hundred dollars or more per employee annually, and they generally continue for as long as a business keeps its health coverage. The broker collects the monthly fee from the care provider even if the business never talks to its broker again.
“I was thinking, wait a minute, that is a ton of money, and these guys don’t do very much for it,” Mr. Conrad said. This presented an obvious business model for Zenefits. It would become a broker itself. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, health insurance providers now publish set rates. This meant that Zenefits could offer brokerage online, letting small businesses buy health insurance pretty much the same way people shop for airline tickets.
Zenefits' providing free software use of its electronic platform and dashboard violates Utah |
season and then some. Because of his get-after-it approach to go with his production, I believe he has the look of a future team captain. But overall the Broncos will likely feature three starting linebackers who were all drafted by the team in Miller, Trevathan and whoever wins the job in the middle between Nate Irving (third round, 2011) and rookie Lamin Barrow (fifth round, 2014).
It's all part of a position-by-position look at where things stand with the team.
Today: Linebackers.
How many coming to camp: 13.
How many will the Broncos keep: The 2013 season signaled a bit of a change from the two previous seasons. Last year the Broncos kept six linebackers as they exited the preseason with Miller having begun the year on a six-game suspension for violating the league's substance-abuse policy.
But when Miller returned to the lineup in Week 7 the Broncos kept the total at six linebackers. That was after they had kept seven linebackers in the initial cut to 53 players in 2012 and seven in 2011.
This year the Broncos seem intent on searching for depth, having invited 13 linebackers to camp. It's the same as the number of combined defensive linemen they have invited at two positions. Miller is still working his way back from ACL surgery and it's still a question as to whether or not he will be ready for his usual allotment of snaps when the regular season begins.
Miller is on track in his return and says he's dropped weight from last season, but the Broncos will play it safe with their Pro Bowl linebacker as they move through training camp and the preseason.
That may impact how many they keep here in the cut to 53, but the number almost certainly comes down at six or seven.
Break it down: The Broncos like their potential depth here and the battle for the final spots on the depth chart will be fierce. As will the potential battle for middle linebacker.
The Broncos have consistently lauded Nate Irving's work in the offseason, he worked as the middle linebacker with the starters in organized team activities and minicamp, but they have tried him in the middle before only to move on to other options. Irving has performed well as Miller's backup on the strong-side, but to stay in the middle he simply has to show he can consistently square up blockers in the run fits, shed and move to the ball.
In the past, including in college, he has tried to run around blocks and left running lanes in his wake that offenses have taken advantage of.
The Broncos will take a look at the athletic Barrow in the middle as well. Barrow was under-rated by many on this year's draft board for his ability to take on blocks and work toward to the ball. If Barrow shows the ability to play mistake-free, assignment football, he will make a significant push for the job. It will take Irving's best to hold him off when the decision is made.
In the end the Broncos want to find the guy who can man the middle in the base, which isn't the primary formation any longer, but also play along-side Trevathan in the nickel when Miller bumps down to defensive end. At minimum Barrow looks primed for that job, an important decision since the nickel is the formation the Broncos played the most last season.
But the scrap for the final spots with the likes of Steven Johnson, a quality special teamer, and Lerentee McCray, who was set to make the roster last season as undrafted rookie before an injury ended his season, as well as Shaquil Barrett, Jamar Chaney and Brandon Marshall, will bear watching.A popular crime drama on German state TV featured a storyline where a group of ethnic Germans molested a Muslim woman in the streets.
The show, named "Tatort," aired earlier this month on the taxpayer funded ARD network.
"Notice that this whole episode focuses on evil right-wingers and a bunch of happyfaced refugees," the YouTube uploader wrote in the description to the video.
"In fact they show this woman getting beaten up after having tried to apply at the German Police. Just wat."
Searching Google, I am unable to find a single case of ethnic Germans raping a Muslim woman in the streets of Germany.
It's quite possible this has literally never happened.
On the other hand, Muslim men raping German women is a weekly occurrence.
Just three days ago, I reported on a case where a 38-year-old Pakistani man raped a 19-year-old German woman and intentionally bit her lip to infect her with his STD.
Follow InformationLiberation on Twitter and Facebook.September 12, 2014 7:30 AM | Konstantinos Dimopoulos / Gnome
With action-RPG Dragon about to allow people to early-access it on Steam in a week, I decided to ask Erik Johnson of Red Level Games (and Arcen Games) a few questions. Happily, he decided to answer them.
Let us get one thing out of the way first... Will we really get to play as fully grown dragons in Dragon?
Yes -- no false advertising on that front. And not just any dragon, your dragon. We want the game to contain a really robust character creator, and for players to have a variety of branching options as their dragon gains experience and evolves (through various means such as completing quests, eating, sleeping, and so on). A fledgling version of the character creator will be in by Early Access next week, and it might still be possible for us to release it ahead of the 19th -- which would give those interested a chance to customize a bit ahead of jumping into the first public Alpha build.
Aren't dragons a bit overpowered though, despite all their undisputed awesomeness? How do you plan to balance this?
Great point, designing a game that is challenging even for powerful dragons has been a fun problem for the team and something we've been thinking about since development started. You begin the game as a young dragon, you're a powerful threat but certainly not the biggest or baddest creature around. There are other dragons to contend with who will reason or fight you depending on your decisions, reputation, and honor. Griffins inhabit many of the same regions as young dragons and frequently attack as well.
Attacking villages and stealing livestock shouldn't be too tricky in general, but attempting a siege on a castle won't be some walk in the park. Scores of archers will quickly deter dragons with softer scales. There are also many heroes, wizards, dragon hunters, trolls, and other mythical beasts that can make short work of a weak, unprepared, or overwhelmed dragon.
What motivates a dragon?
Whatever it is, our goal for it is to match the player's motivations (at least whenever possible). Similar to Skyrim and Fallout, we want Dragon to set the world out in front of any given player and say: Go. Fly. Explore. Intimidate. Burn. Hoard. Slumber. Talk to the guy with the quest. Change your mind and eat him instead.
There will be set stuff to do, and it's up to the player if they feel like doing it; or if they'd rather just go off and figure things out as they move through the open world. Ultimately we'd like the game to compliment any given style of play the player dictates, whether that be deathbringer, chaotic neutral, guardian of the realm, or friendly but a bit antisocial and sleepy. Whatever it might be -- as long as that living/breathing world is able to properly react to the player's actions, the motivations should stem from there.
And, in a nutshell, how will the game play?
Similar to an action RPG, but you're a dragon as opposed to a humanoid protagonist -- meaning you can fly. We haven't taken that portion of it lightly either. A few of us on the team spent a good amount of our time on the road this summer, attending conferences (including PAX Prime, Dragonflight and Denver Comic Con) to build awareness as well as get feedback from attendees on the game's concept and our flight and combat mechanics. I remember worrying that without the RPG layer in at the time, people would see it as a lackluster tech demo. Instead, we had trouble getting folks to give up their seats for the next in line. They wanted to explore all corners of the world by air, and it became clear that many of those who tried the game found flying around the small biome we created for the demo to be its own special experience. I'm not sure how to describe it, maybe relaxing? Cathartic? Regardless, it allowed them to cut loose as a dragon and we know that's the crux of it all.
Another one of our top priorities is to have the initial co-op/multiplayer layer in for our Early Access Launch next week, as we're aiming to develop content that will specifically cater to various PvE and PvP bits as we move toward official launch. We'll be relying on early adopting players to help us test out these new features as we introduce them, along with other aspects of the game like mod tools.
Could you tell me a bit about the team working on Dragon?
Sure! Red Level Games is a team of seven at current. We have our game director Grant Williams, a programmer, an artist, an animator, a writer, a community manager, and myself. We all reside in the Tri-Cities area near the southeast corner of Washington state -- about three hours drive from both Seattle and Portland. The nearby Hanford area draws a lot of potential developer talent out our way, but there really isn't much of a scene for indie developers here. That's something all of us at Red Level are hoping to change in the coming years.
Care to discuss your inspirations and goals? What do you aim to achieve with the game?
The RPG genre in general: Dungeons and Dragons, the aforementioned Western RPGs, franchises like Diablo and Borderlands, the Dragonlance series, even JRPGs like the Final Fantasy series have had influence on our game in one form or another. Most of us on the team have been into fantasy lore since we were kids, which is where our interest in dragons developed in the first place. While we're focusing on the European dragon archetype for now, it would be awesome if we had the ability to invest some of our development time into the wholly different Chinese archetype. If we get things right, I believe some of our player base will naturally lead us that direction anyway. We'll see how it all unfolds.
I'm hoping to see Dragon get the funding it needs during Early Access for the team to work full time on the game over the next 12 months or so -- with new updates released to the Early Access players every 3-7 weeks during that stretch. I believe that would allow us to adequately attempt reaching the game's full potential. We'd also really like players and the community to help shape this game. Just between our forums and Dragon's greenlight page we've gotten a ton of great feature ideas from our awesome community. We'll need the time to see what works, what doesn't, what plays well together, etc.
Anyway, we keep talking to people who seem astonished that there really isn't a game out there today that lets you gallivant around a large, active space as a legendary creature. We'd love for Dragon to be fill that void.
When would you expect the game to be ready for launch?
Hopefully sometime in the second half of 2015, but it depends on how Early Access (and/or any other subsequent funding efforts development may require) goes.The transition to using an iPhone without a headphone jack is one that is taking some people awhile to get used to, but Beats is taking advantage of the situation. In a new ad released today, Beats touts its latest lineup of wireless products, including the Beats Solo3, Powerbeats3, and BeatsX.
Sylvania HomeKit Light Strip
The ad is packed to the brim with celebrity cameos, each wearing a pair of Beats headphones. The ad focuses primarily on the fact that we’re moving towards a world where wireless headphones are the go-to options.
The ad itself is titled “Got No Strings,” while the description touts a “life without strings.” It comes in at 1 minute and 42 seconds in length and is likely destined for primetime TV slots everywhere, given the massive budget that had to have gone into fitting in so many celebrity cameos.
The Solo3, Powerbeats3, and BeatsX all take advantage of Apple’s new W1 chip, which is likely part of the reason Beats is using the “wireless remastered” tagline. Beats touts the following the description:
This is a celebration of life without strings. With Beats Wireless there’s nothing to hold you down, make you fret, or make you frown. Starring: Nicki Minaj, DJ Khaled, Karlie Kloss, Travis Scott, Amber Rose, Rebel Wilson, Ben Simmons, Pharrell, Steve Buscemi, William Chen, Young M.A, Sayo, Juno Temple, Michael Phelps, Karen Civil, Liza Koshy, Al Rocco, Miyavi, PartyNextDoor Introducing Wireless Remastered: The 40-hour battery life Beats Solo3 Wireless, Fast-fuel charging Powerbeats3 Wireless…and the brand new BeatsX – your all-day companion.
While the Solo3 headphones are already available, the Powerbeats3 and BeatsX are set to be released later this year. The BeatsX are set to come in at $149.95, while the Powerbeats 3 will be slightly more expensive at $199.95.
View the new ad below:Loading... Loading...
A scientific study published in 2015 took another pharmacological look at the intensive therapeutic potential of the ancient African plant, iboga, by isolating it to its main hallucinogenic chemical component, noribogaine. Taking a look at the how the administration of noribogaine affected the self-administration that lab rats developed with nicoctine, leading to a clinical physical dependency.
Ibogaine is already renown across the globe for being the most extensive psychedelic for substance-abuse rehabilitation that pharmacology has yet to come across, definitively showing to break things like physical dependencies to heroin, alcohol, and other less destructive substance like nicotine, or surely even caffeine.
What science is now on the verge of showing is that iboga is a habit disrupter–it jostles brain mechanisms and gives a new and altered state of reassessment. This is the template for all psychedelic drugs, but iboga seems as well to be a disrupter of these habits physically, which is quite a novel finding for addiction rehabilitation. Yet, for some reason, this drug as well is still under felony classification in the US.
For those interested, here is the full published study on the effects that iboga has on physical dependency disruption, with nicotine specifically. Most published research studies usually only give the Abstract of the study, and all the references and bibliography for free, but this study is actually published in its entirely, with every single detail of it given for reading comprehension. Enjoy!
Source: http://jop.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/05/26/0269881115584461.full
Help Us Be The Change We Wish To See In The World.You already know the news: The U.S. announced on Monday it was bidding to host World Cup 2026 in a shared bid with neighbors Mexico and Canada. The U.S. would stage 60 of the 80 games, with Mexico and Canada getting 10 each, and the U.S. would have every game from the quarterfinals onward.
But you probably have questions, and we have answers. Let’s break down the key aspects of the joint North American bid:
Q: Why does the U.S. want to host World Cup 2026?
A: This one is easy. U.S. soccer has grown by leaps and bounds since hosting World Cup 1994, but hosting another men’s World Cup in 2026 would boost the popularity of soccer in the U.S. by another order of magnitude. Having a U.S. team that could potentially go deep in that tournament with home support wouldn’t hurt, either.
Q: Why would FIFA want to bring the men’s World Cup back to the U.S.?
A: FIFA still wants to see the sport of soccer grow in this country. But beyond that, after all the controversy surrounding the awarding of World Cup 2018 (to Russia) and 2022 (to Qatar), FIFA needs a controversy-free World Cup bidding process that would make the organization a ton of money. In the wake of the FIFA scandal, FIFA announced last week that it lost $369 million in 2016. FIFA’s only significant money-maker is the men’s World Cup. The 1994 World Cup in the U.S. is still the record-holder for the most tickets sold at a World Cup (despite having only 24 teams in that tournament), and a 48-team World Cup held mostly in the U.S. would set economic records for the tournament that would last a long, long time.
Q: Why would the U.S. want to share the hosting rights for World Cup ’26 with Mexico and Canada instead of hosting it alone?
A: Judging by Mexico and Canada accepting only 10 games each, it’s clear that the U.S. could have landed this World Cup on its own. But including Mexico and Canada reveals a willingness to show the three countries can cooperate, and it will please FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who wants to see shared World Cup bids for the new 48-team tournament. Sharing with Mexico and Canada will also help when it comes to getting votes from the 211 FIFA member nations who will vote on who gets to host World Cup ’26. In fact, it makes the North American bid essentially a slam dunk, which brings us to ….
Q: Who is the North American bid competing against?
A: The FIFA Council announced last October that no countries in Europe and Asia would be able to bid to host World Cup 2026 after hosting the tournaments in 2018 and ’22, respectively. That prevents potential rivals like China, Australia (which is part of the Asian confederation) and any European nation from competing against the North American bid. South America seems pointed toward a joint Argentina-Uruguay bid for 2030 (the 100th anniversary of the first FIFA World Cup in Uruguay). That leaves Africa. There have been rumblings that Morocco might bid, potentially sharing with Ivory Coast. But staging a 48-team World Cup in those countries would provide a lot of obstacles that FIFA likely won’t want to deal with.
Q: Where does President Trump fit into all this?
A: U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati made a point on Monday of saying that Trump supports the joint bid and is especially pleased about cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico on the bid. The main concern that FIFA has about the Trump administration—and the general political tides in the U.S.—is that FIFA wants assurances that all its teams will be allowed into the country that’s hosting the event. That includes, say, Iran, a World Cup regular that was on the list of Muslim-majority countries that were part of Trump’s proposed travel ban. Yes, it’s true that Trump won’t be the president in 2026, but FIFA demands to be 100% assured that political winds in the U.S. at that time—whoever is in charge—will allow every country to be a part of that World Cup.
Q: What are Mexico and Canada getting out of this sharing arrangement considering 10 games isn't a lot (especially for Mexico)?
A: Well, Canada will likely get an automatic bid, which is no small thing for a nation that has qualified for only one men's World Cup in its history. As for Mexico, it came down to choosing between hosting 10 games and zero games. The U.S. could have simply walked away from Mexico completely, and the Mexicans knew that.
Q: What comes next?
A: The North American World Cup bid has requested the chance to get approval at next month’s FIFA Congress to attempt to fast-track its 2026 bid during a 10-month period without any competition from other potential bids. The idea would be to have the FIFA Congress give final approval in June 2018 (instead of the previously planned May 2020) to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada World Cup for 2026. In theory, that could prevent a costly campaigning process and give transparency to the vote while giving the U.S. and its partners even more time to prepare for the tournament. The question is whether FIFA member nations will want to avoid a competitive bid process—and if another credible bid will step up.When certain drugs are outlawed, it doesn’t stop people from wanting those drugs. They either turn to the black market, or try to find some kind of legal substitute for their drug of choice. The pharmaceutical industry is more than willing to fill that niche by producing drugs that, while legal, are often much more harmful, expensive, and addictive than the “street” drugs they replace. That’s probably why the number of Americans who die by overdosing on prescription drugs, has more than doubled since 2001.
So when illegal drugs gain some kind of legal status, it’s not surprising that prescription overdose deaths would fall in those states. At least, that’s what a recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine has found. Researchers looked at death certificates in every US state, and averaged the number of fatalities caused by opioid analgesics, arguably the most harmful prescription painkiller. They found that states that had legalized medical marijuana, had collectively 24.8% fewer opioid deaths when compared to states where pot is still illegal. They also found that this trend is still in progress, and continues to grow over time in legal states.
It just goes to show that the drug war isn’t just violating our rights. It is quite literally killing thousands of people. People who are in pain are given the choice to endure their misery, or pay exorbitant fees for addictive drugs that will probably put them in an early grave. But I guess the nanny state know what’s best for us, right?
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Joshua Krause is a reporter, writer and researcher at The Daily Sheeple. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and is a freelance writer and author. You can follow Joshua’s reports at Facebook or on his personal Twitter. Joshua’s website is Strange Danger.by Nena Perry-Brown
Aerial rendering of the proposed Crystal City- DCA bridge Aerial rendering of the proposed Crystal City-bridge
A little-known fact about Crystal City is that it’s just a 15-minute walk from National Airport. However, it’s not very well-known because the options to make that walk are unsafe and inconvenient. Now, the Crystal City Business Improvement District (BID) is unveiling a proposal for a connection between the city and the airport that would make that walk a lot easier and more pleasant.
On Wednesday, the BID presented their vision for a new bridge or tunnel that will connect to a security gate at the airport that the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority is constructing.
Bridge landing facing east; 1101 Crystal Drive is to the left Bridge landing facing east; 1101 Crystal Drive is to the left
While details on the exact construction of either a bridge or tunnel have yet to be determined, the BID seems particularly taken with the idea of building a bridge akin to the High Line in New York City, a style and aesthetic that seems to have become the go-to model for jurisdictions looking to build walkable bridges.
Bridge seating area Bridge seating area
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Either of the two options could incorporate moving sidewalks similar to those used inside of airports. Each would also have some access to the Mount Vernon Trail.
View approaching the bridge from the airport garage View approaching the bridge from the airport garage
In the short term, the BID plans to coordinate with Virginia Railway Express, which is currently studying a relocation of their Crystal City station. The BID will also seek concept approval from Arlington County in hopes of gaining inclusion in the sector plan, which already mentions the desire for an improved connection to the airport. If approval is obtained, there will be 1-2 years of planning and another 3-6 years before the bridge (or tunnel) is delivered. Additional renderings are below.
View of the bridge from GW Memorial Parkway View of the bridge from GW Memorial Parkway
View approaching the bridge from Crystal City View approaching the bridge from Crystal City
Rendering of a proposed Crystal City- DCA tunnel as approached from the airport Rendering of a proposed Crystal City-tunnel as approached from the airport
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This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/crystal_city_wants_a_high_line_bridge_to_the_airport/13264Editor's Note: Brown paper bags are not necessarily designed to be microwave-safe. Watch the whole time when microwaving your popcorn, and if in doubt, it's better to err on the side of leaving some kernels unpopped rather than trying to pop every last one.
I have a weird sensitivity to certain sounds—there's no reason to go into the details except to say that I'm not generally inclined to make popcorn at home because I can't handle the high-pitched screeching of the pan as I shake it back and forth on the burner, tossing the kernels around so that none burn. I could invest in a popcorn device, like one of those air poppers, but I have enough stuff crowding my kitchen without adding a single-use item like that.
Recently, though, one of my colleagues told me that it's possible to make popcorn in the microwave in a brown paper bag—not the store-bought microwaveable stuff that comes pre-coated in flavors, but my own custom bag of popcorn. I wanted to come up with some fun popcorn flavors anyway, so I decided to test this method out at the same time.
Turns out it works. Here's how:
Start by tossing 1/2 cup of popcorn kernels with 1/2 teaspoon oil (I used a neutral vegetable oil) and salt.
Then dump the popcorn into a brown paper lunch bag.
Fold the bag top down.
In my first batch, the popcorn managed to push the bag open as it popped, so I started locking the corners of the bags by folding the corners down and tearing little tabs, then folding those tabs over. This prevents the bags from unraveling as the popcorn expands.
Then I pop it in the microwave and run it for about 2 minutes, though the exact time will depend on your microwave. A lot of people give the typical advice of letting the microwave run until the popping slows to about 2 to 3 seconds between pops. I tried that and almost lit a bag of popcorn on fire—seriously, it was smoldering.
Making popcorn is fun, but burning your house down isn't, so be sure to err a little on the un-popped side of things to avoid scorching and burning the popcorn: When you notice the popping slowing down just a bit, it's about time to stop the microwave. You'll end up with a few extra unpopped kernels, but they'll be at the bottom and can be separated easily from all the beautiful popped ones.
It's also important not to leave the popcorn unattended while it cooks. It didn't take long for mine to go from popping to smoldering, and it's not worth risking setting your microwave on fire by walking away from it while it's running. You'll want to keep an eye on it to be safe.
This is my ideal method. With no more horrible scratching sounds, I think I'll start making a lot more popcorn at home.
This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.Did you know that puppies start to form play partner preferences very early in development (prior to 7 weeks of age) and their preferences for play with the same individuals intensifies over time? This was found in a study published in prestigious scientific journal Animal Behavior. The study also found that puppies almost never balanced out their play style (i.e. took turns being in the top dog/bottom dog roles).
Lessons learned?
We shouldn’t necessarily break up play just because it looks one sided. We should let the dogs decide. If we separate the bottom dog from the top dog and let the bottom dog go, and she runs right back to continue play with her top-dog friend, then play between these dog partners is probably ok. Another interesting find was that male puppies ‘soften’ their play style when playing with females but not when playing with other males. It’s almost as if they will let the female “win” at play games in order to entice the females to play with them.
The gentlemanly dog behavior is even accompanied with a bow. “We found that self-handicapping tends to occur in conjunction with play bows,” lead author of the study, Camille Ward. “A play bow is a signal that dogs use when they want to communicate playful intentions to a potential play partner,” added Ward. Females were more likely than males to initiate play with their own sex, but that may be to stave off more vicious behavior later. “Because adult female-female aggression, when it occurs, can generally be more intense than female-male aggression, we suggest that females may use play with other females as one way to practice threat and appeasement signals that may serve to ritualize aggression and limit overt aggression later on,” said Ward.
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/27102810/ns/health-pet_health/t/when-puppies-play-its-ladies-first/#.UytiMPldXax
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commentsA police chief was taken to hospital after accidentally eating a cake laced with cannabis that was intended for his younger daughter.
Mike Berkemeier was convinced he was going to die after accidentally eating the pastry at his home in Laurelville, Ohio.
He thought it had been left by a friend in sympathy for his eldest daughter who was in hospital after a major road accident.
Shortly after eating the cake on Easter Sunday, Mr Berkemeier said he felt disorientated and confused.
‘It was flat out the worst experience of my life,’ he said.
‘I have never felt like I was going to die before. Not knowing what has happened to you and feeling like you have no control over what’s happening and not knowing what’s happened, is, I can’t even describe.
‘It’s the most awful feeling in the world. I really didn’t think I was going to live to see the next day. And that’s the God’s honest truth.’
Mike Berkemeier ended up in hospital after eating the cake (Picture: YouTube)
At one point he believed there were toxins in his house so went outside for fresh air.
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‘I was on the phone with my daughter in the hospital, and I’m talking to her and I’m answering questions, but I’m not remembering what I just said. I’m going, “What is wrong me?”‘ he said.
Mr Berkemeier drove to the police station for help and was met by paramedics.
‘I don’t remember much of the drive here, even though it’s just a few blocks,’ he added.
The chief of police was admitted to the Berger Hospital in Circleville for a day-and-a-half while doctors performed tests to discover the problem.
He learned the truth when his fiancee, Vanessa Vara, asked her younger daughter about the cake.
‘When Vara asked her daughter where the cake came from, a scream was immediately heard over the phone,’ Mr Berkemeier told the local paper.
‘I could hear it from the hospital bed. I could hear it over my fiance’s phone. And then I thought, what is going on? She hangs up the phone and says it was the cake, get the nurse,’ he said.
Doctors promptly gave him a sedative and he slept off the impacts of the high.
The source of the cake has not been revealed but it was reportedly brought to the police chief’s home by a friend of his younger daughter, who had pleaded with her friend not to leave it behind.
Hocking County Sheriff’s office is investigating possible charges of corrupting another with drugs and assault.As a friend and ally of the music community, MusiCares cares for music people. And now the four-star charity is pledging its support to those who have been affected by any of the 2017 hurricanes, which follows similar efforts to support victims of the Gulf and Nashville floods, as well as Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina.
Musicians and music professionals can request disaster relief by contacting the South Regional MusiCares office at 615.327.0050 or toll-free at 877.626.2748.
MusiCares has also announced the establishment of a relief fund to support members of the music community affected by the recent devastation of all the 2017 hurricanes. Assistance includes coverage of basic living expenses such as shelter, food, utilities, and transportation; medical expenses, including doctor and hospital bills, and medications; clothing; instrument and recording equipment replacement; relocation costs; home repairs; debris removal; and more.
Anyone can make a donation to the fund. To donate, visit www.grammy.com/musicares/donations and choose Hurricane Relief in the gift designation drop-down menu.
"Now is a time when we must come together and take care of those who need help," said Neil Portnow, President/CEO of the Recording Academy and MusiCares. "It's important that we step up and support the creative community, and take action to provide immediate assistance to members of our music family."
Support MusiCares' Hurricane Relief EffortsBill Maher has suggested that powerful, married men sexually harass women because they have's***y sex lives'.
The host of HBO's Real Time made the bold statement on the Friday episode of his talk show, suggesting that men were going after other women because they're not being'satisfied' at home.
Social media response was rapid with users quick to scold Maher for shifting the blame to the wives of accused men.
Bill Maher suggested on the Friday episode of his show 'Real Time' (pictured, left, with Joy Behar) that married men sexually harass women because they have's***y sex lives'
Maher (left) and Behar were discussing why so many of the men accused of harassment were married, such as media mogul Harvey Weinstein (right), when he made the comment. Behar replied: 'Let's leave the wives at out of it. The wives are home minding their own business.'
Maher was sitting down with comedian Joy Behar to talk about her new book when they got on the subject of Bill O'Reilly and the recent news that he paid $32million to settle a sexual harassment claim in February.
From there, Maher pointed out that many of the recent powerful men of Hollywood accused of sexual abuse - among them Harvey Weinstein, Steven Seagal, and James Toback - always seem to be married.
When Behar wondered out loud why that might be the case, Maher suggested: 'Because they have sh**** sex lives.'
'They're bored at home? No, that's got nothing to do with it,' Behar replied. 'Let's leave the wives at out of it. The wives are home minding their own business while these jerks are jerking off.
Social media users lambasted Maher for placing the blame on a third party.
'Harassment and sexual assault are not about sex, it's about power. If getting off were the only reason, they have two hands and [money],' wrote one user.
Another commented: '@billmaher did you seriously just blame wives for men's sexual assault harassment?'
'Yeah, because single men NEVER EVER sexually harass women????' one user sarcastically tweeted.
Social media response was rapid with users quick to scold Maher for shifting the blame to the wives of accused men
Married men in Hollywood who have been accused of sexual harassment or assault include actor and director Steven Seagal (left) and screenwriter James Toback (right)
Last week, Maher was in hot water after claiming that President Trump's call to a Gold Star widow was 'worse' than Harvey Weinstein's growing list of women claiming sexual harassment and assault.
The political satirist addressed reports that Trump told the widow Sgt La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger, that her husband 'knew what he signed up for' during a condolence call.
'On Monday, Trump called the pregnant widow of a dead American soldier to console her and ended up pouring salt in the wound and feuding with her all week,' said Maher.
'I mean, if you could take a week where it was revealed that Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted every single female in show business and still be the worst fat, gross creep, that's pretty good.'
As of Saturday morning, a total of 60 women have accused Weinstein of behavior ranging from requests for massages to intimidating sexual advances to rape.“Monday was the night Donald Trump became president of the United States.”
That’s what you’re likely to hear from Trump surrogates on television panels for the next couple of days, now that Trump has delivered his address to the nation about what he intends to do in Afghanistan. Republican lawmakers will praise the address as a comprehensive, regional strategy for the South Asian region that was well-considered, deliberative and new.
Minutes after the speech was over, Sen. John McCain was already pushing out a press release that said “the president is now moving us well beyond the prior administration’s failed strategy of merely postponing defeat.” House Speaker Paul Ryan patted Trump on the back for a rigorous inter-agency debate, before adding during his town hall on CNN, “I think I heard a new Trump strategy or a new doctrine, so to speak.”
You have to wonder whether any of them actually watched the speech, because there was nothing new in Trump’s war plan – and the president didn’t offer up any details about what he wants to achieve.
RELATED: No spoilers: Trump Administration not disclosing troop levels or timelines in continued fight for Afghanistan
While Trump certainly talked at length about what he hoped to accomplish in Afghanistan (an annihilation of al-Qaeda and ISIS, the degradation of the Taliban insurgency, a politically self-reforming Afghan government, a Pakistan that stops providing quarter to permitting terrorist groups), he didn’t explain how his proposed strategy would realize any of those goals. Instead we got a series of tactics and a list of assumptions that have guided U.S. policy for the last decade and a half, with the biggest being that an abrupt U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would turn the country into a prime breeding ground for terrorism. Trump all but said another Sept. 11 from Afghanistan would happen if Washington packed up and left, as if the U.S. is at the mercy of whoever rules Kabul.
We were essentially told that more U.S. troops needed to be sent to war because the Afghan security forces were neither strong enough nor capable enough to fend for themselves. We were given a simplistic choice between letting Afghanistan become America’s krypton |
in his role as head of the Muslim Safety Forum, despite Ali also being involved at a senior level in the Islamic Forum of Europe, an organisation dedicated to the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia law in Europe. The two organisations shared office space.
Earlier that year he had been filmed by an undercover reporter from Channel 4’s Dispatches program saying: “Democracy, if it means not implementing the sharia, of course nobody agrees with that.”Co-located with Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s KubeCon, CloudNativeCon and Prometheus Day at Seattle Sheraton
The OpenShift Commons Gathering will bring together the brightest technical minds to discuss the future of OpenShift and it’s related upstream open source projects. With OpenShift Container Platform quickly gaining adoption around the world, the OpenShift Commons Gathering will feature talks from upstream project leads and case studies from users like Red Hat, Google, Microsoft Azure, Amadeus, GetUp Cloud, Dell Technologies, Apache Spark, Click2Cloud, UNC Chapel Hill and more. This event will also include face-to-face meetings for all the OpenShift Commons Special Interest Groups and allow ample time for peer-to-peer networking.
Space Is Limited, Register Today
A panel entitled “Upstream This!” will be moderated by The New Stack’s Alex Williams and will include Google’s Craig McCluckie, CoreOS’s Brandon Philips, Microsoft’s Brendan Burns and Red Hat’s Clayton Coleman. The panel will give the attendees a unique opportunity for Q & A with the leaders of key Cloud Native open source projects and gain unique perspectives on how their respective projects augment the OpenShift Container platform. In addition, Google’s Kelsey Hightower will be giving a talk on the State of the Container Ecosystem.
Attendees will have the opportunity to meet with leading OpenShift and Kubernetes technologists from multiple open source upstream communities and are encouraged to stay and also attend the co-located KubeCon, CloudNativeCon and Prometheus Day on Nov 8-9.
We’re bringing together experts from all over the world to discuss the container technologies, best practices for cloud native application developers and the open source software projects that underpin the OpenShift ecosystem to help take our ecosystem to the next level in cloud native computing. The 2016 event will gather developers, DevOps professionals and SysAdmins together to explore the next steps in making container technologies successful and secure.
WHERE:
Sheraton Seattle
Seattle, Washington
WHEN:
November 7, 2016
Early Bird Price: $99 (Ends October 1)
Full Price: $149
View the full schedule
Our growing list of speakers now includes:
Kelsey Hightower: Staff Developer Advocate, Google Cloud Platform – Google
Chris Wright: Vice President, Software Engineering – Red Hat
Matthew Hicks: Vice President, Software Engineering – Red Hat
Brendan Burns: Co-founder of Kubernetes – Microsoft Azure
Craig McLuckie: Group Project Manager – Google
Clayton Coleman: Lead Architect, Containerized Application Infrastructure – Red Hat
Brian Gracely: Director, OpenShift Strategy – Red Hat
Alex Williams: Founder and Editor in Chief – The New Stack
Brandon Philips: CTO/Co-Founder – CoreOS
What is OpenShift Commons?
Commons builds connections and collaboration across OpenShift communities, projects and stakeholders. In doing so we’ll enable the success of customers, users, partners, and contributors as we deepen our knowledge and experiences together.
Our goals go beyond code contributions. Commons is a place for companies using OpenShift to accelerate its success and adoption. To do this we’ll act as resources for each other, share best practices and provide a forum for peer-to-peer communication.
Join us in Seattle!Marissa Mayer, the technology executive who has worked at Google since the search company’s earliest days, has been appointed CEO of Yahoo.
The news was first reported by the New York Times. The company has confirmed the appointment in a press release, which is embedded in full below.
Mayer’s first day will be tomorrow, which is also when Yahoo’s next quarterly earnings call is slated to take place.
I'm incredibly excited to start my new role at Yahoo! tomorrow: http://t.co/YfwdH07h — marissamayer (@marissamayer) July 16, 2012
It’s been a tough few years for Yahoo — and its last CEO Scott Thompson departed under less than ideal terms — so the appointment of Mayer is clearly meant to be a fresh start for the long-running Silicon Valley company.
There’s no question that Marissa Mayer is certainly a catch for Yahoo. After receiving a B.S. in symbolic systems and her M.S. in computer science from Stanford (no fudged engineering credentials here) she started at Google in 1999 as the company’s 20th employee and its first female engineer. Since then she has stayed on with the company and served as one of its most public faces, making appearances on the tech conference circuit, network television morning shows, evening newscasts such as Charlie Rose, and even as a frequent TechCrunch Disrupt judge.
That this news is surprising is an understatement — it’s fair to say that most people in tech did not see this coming from a mile away. But when you dig into it, it makes sense. Most recently, it had appeared that Mayer’s role at Google had been scaled back a bit. As part of a Google re-organization some 18 months ago, she moved from a role as VP of search product to a somewhat lower-visibility role as VP of location and local services. With that job change, she was shifted off of Google’s highest strata of executives, according to people familiar with the company.
These shifts may have made her a bit more open to considering new offers — and made an opportunity like this too attractive to pass up. Yahoo’s luster may be a bit faded, but it is still a major, publicly-traded company. It will be very exciting to see what Mayer brings to the table as CEO.
Here is Yahoo’s full statement regarding Mayer’s appointment:Black Caviar half-brother sells for record $5m
Updated
A yearling half-brother to world champion Black Caviar has sold for an Australian record price of $5 million.
Lot 131, by champion sire Redoute's Choice out of broodmare Helsinge, was the star lot of the Inglis Easter Yearling Sales, which opened in Sydney on Tuesday.
The blue-blooded colt was knocked down to a syndicate from BC3 Thoroughbreds, which bought Black Caviar's half-sister last year for $2.6 million.
The viewing areas in and around the ring at the Newmarket sales complex were at near capacity as bidding came down to a duel between BC3 and Adam Sangster from Swettenham Stud.
Bidding opened at $2 million and advanced in $500,000 increments to $4 million; from there it was $100,000 per bid before the hammer came down.
What price a champion? While Black Caviar's half-brother attracted a record $5m bid in Australia, race horses in the USA have sold for almost three times that amount...but have not always lived up to their hype.
The Green Monkey: foaled 2004, sold $15.3 million (2006)
The two-year-old colt was sold for a world record price and made his debut at Belmont Park in 2007 finishing 3rd. In his second start, at the same course, he finished 4th. He was officially retired in February 2008 after failing to break his maiden. Career earnings $6,800.
Seattle Dancer: foaled 1984, sold $12.5 million (1985)
The most expensive yearling ever sold at auction finished 3rd in his April 1987 debut before winning the Group 3 Gallinule stakes and the Group 2 Derrinstown Stud Derby Trial. In his next start, at Longchamp racecourse in Paris, he finished 6th. Seattle Dancer ran his final race at the same course running 2nd. Career earnings $162,000.
Meydan City, foaled 2005, sold $11.21 million (2006)
The second most expensive yearling to be sold at public auction broke his maiden at Newmarket in 2008 ridden by Frankie Dettori. He made seven starts in his career with just one other win and a third. Meydan City was retired in 2009 with a total career earnings of $35,000.
The previous national record of $3 million was held by colts sold at the Inglis sales in 2006 and 2007.
The Australasian record had been the $NZ3.6 million paid at New Zealand's Karaka sales for a Zabeel colt, who raced in Australia as Don Eduardo and went on to win the 2002 AJC Derby.
Helsinge's last two yearlings to go through the sales were a colt by Casino Prince - champion three-year-old All Too Hard - and BC3's unraced Redoute's Choice filly named Belle Couture.
BC3 chairman Bill Vlahos said stable clients had put up most of the money but a small share was still available - the smallest share offered would be 5 per cent ($250,000).
"As soon as Belle Couture told us she wasn't going to let the family down, we really started looking at this horse," Vlahos said.
"We're just pleased that the purest of Australian blood stays in Australia."
Vlahos said his vets had given him the green light despite some respected judges putting a knock on the horse.
"We've got some good clients, there's also some of our money in that too, so we're not going to be headless in making decisions like this," he said.
"Our owners trust us implicitly."
The stallion potential of Lot 131 was a big factor in his record price.
All Too Hard, a winner of three Group Ones including the Caulfield Guineas, was bought for $1,025,000 in 2011 and sold last year to Vinery Stud in a deal worth more than $25 million.
Former top jockey Simon Marshall, now BC3 sales manager, said the colt would not be rushed onto the racetrack.
"We know how good Belle Couture's going and it is just great to get the full set with this colt," he said.
"He's typical to the family and has a lot of growing to do, so he'll let us know when he's ready to rock and roll."
No decision has been made on a trainer, although Marshall said Black Caviar's trainer Peter Moody and All Too Hard's trainer John Hawkes would be considered.
The day's other sales were highlighted by Lot 123 - a half-brother to Caulfield Guineas winner Starspangledbanner - which was knocked down for $2.4 million.
Other seven-figure lots were colts by Fastnet Rock ($1.5 million) and Snitzel ($1 million).
The yearling's illustrious relation was also keeping a close eye on the action:
$5 million for little brother. Congrats @gilgaifarm @inglis_sales @bc3thoroughbred — Black Caviar (@blackcaviar2006)
Nervous wait
Meanwhile, Sydney's recent wet weather has the Australian Turf Club facing a nervous wait to see if Black Caviar goes for win number 25 at the Derby Day meeting on Saturday.
The mare's connections are adamant she will not contest the $1 million TJ Smith Stakes (1,200m) if the Randwick track is heavy.
Showers at the track on Tuesday have the track rated as a heavy 8, but ATC spokesman Matt Rudolph says fine weather forecast for later in the week is expected to help dry out the track.
"Just talking to the track manager and it's a heavy track, but with the rain at the moment and the weather forecast ahead of Saturday, it's actually ideal conditions."
Black Caviar worked in Melbourne on Monday and Moody described the speed of her gallop as "scary".
The great mare is one of 17 horses nominated for the Group One TJ Smith, a race she won two years ago.
Meanwhile, the barrier draw for Saturday's feature event, the $1.5 million Australian Derby, was conducted on Tuesday morning, with odds-on favourite It's A Dundeel drawing barrier 8.
Topics: horse-racing, sport, sydney-2000, nsw, australia
First postedThe most versatile material in the world may be here, and it's going to change everything. Aerogels have been around for a while, but new innovations have made the technology even better and more useful. An aerogel is a low-density solid created through the extraction of liquid from the gel using the process of supercritical drying. Most commonly, aerogels are made of silica, yet this material makes the super-light solid incredibly brittle. After years of research, scientists from NASA and other independent companies have created a new product, airloy.
Combining the strength and durability of conventional plastics with the lightweight, super-insulating properties seen in aerogels is what this product does so well. Part of what makes this material so promising is its ability to be engineered for the extremes. Airloys are ultra low density,.01 to.9 g/c², which makes them the lightest solids on earth. Accompanying these low densities are super-insulative properties and extreme material strength. Certain polymer based airloys can be engineered to handle an excess of 20,000 times their own weight. The difference between aerogels and airloys is demonstrated best in the video below.
The super-insulative properties observed in the material are astounding scientists and are making thin lightweight insulation materials a possibility. Not only does this material insulate against temperature, but sound as well. In fact, as an acoustic insulator, this material is 100 to 1000 times better than any other product on the market. NASA has developed a thin flexible airloy, shown below, for use in spacesuits and rocket technologies.
Flexible polymer sheet developed by NASA [Image source: Mechanical Blog]
The list of the material's mechanical and structural capabilities goes on and on. The material can even be made transparent to allow day-light into spaces, without compromising thermal insulation. The future of the material is in the hands of engineers and designers who are continuously working to find more uses for the material. Several commercial companies already exist, there's even a company making high-quality jackets from a modified aerogel.
[Image source: airloy.com]
Further development in the technology of airloys may yield applications in large-scale construction as well as integration into household goods. If you want to get your hands on it, the product is currently being sold to consumers.Fun And Entertainment Are Collateral Damage In 'Batman V Superman'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
It's been three years since the Superman movie Man of Steel arrived in theaters — three years in which DC Comics has released no other superhero movies. Meanwhile, its rival, Marvel, has earned more than $9 billion from a dozen men-in-spandex films.
So the Man of Steel sequel, a ponderously overlong epic called Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (that solitary "V" being pretty much the only thing abbreviated about it) has some serious catching up to do.
Easier said than done, since it's freighted not so much with entertainment value as it is with enough talk of fallen gods, absent parents and dissolute heroes to fuel a Greek tragedy. And for much of the film's 2 1/2 hours, director Zack Snyder seems convinced that that's what he's making. Or, as bad guy Lex Luthor puts it, in an unedited stream-of-consciousness attempt at pizazz: "A battle to the death, black and blue, fight night, the greatest gladiator match in the history of the world, God versus man, day versus night, son of Krypton, versus Bat of Gotham."
It takes a while to pit these two iconic good guys against each other, but the script gives them reasons. Straight-arrow Clark Kent goes after vigilantes both as a reporter for the Daily Planet and as a superdude in a cape, because he feels guilty that whole blocks of Metropolis got wiped out along with the bad guys at the end of his last movie.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Clay Enos/Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures Clay Enos/Courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures
Brooding bat-suited billionaire Bruce Wayne blames Superman for that collateral damage. And worries that it's just the start.
"He has the power to wipe out the entire human race," he says. "And if we believe there's an even 1 percent chance that he's our enemy, we have to take it as an absolute certainty."
Not sure about that 1 percent/absolute certainty matchup, but hey... these guys are smart. Surely they can talk things out. Alas, Lex Luthor is the one doing the introductions.
Jesse Eisenberg mostly manages to make Lex Luthor an annoying villain, rather than an alarming one. But Ben Affleck's graying Batman owns the alarm concession anyway — growling, prowling, literally branding bad guys. Henry Cavill's Superman is comparatively subdued, floating down majestically from on high, lips curled with what looks like indigestion.
The half of the film not devoted to establishing why they're fighting is devoted to making the fight seem plausibly even. Batman is, after all, a guy with gizmos... not superpowers. Everyone acts up a storm, plumbing psychological nuances that are not really what most people go to superhero epics for. But what's a poor studio to do when Marvel has pretty much cornered the jokey, ironic detachment market?
Director Snyder plays to what I suppose you have to call his strengths. He lays on the moody atmospherics and Hans Zimmer's score, while keeping the images grand enough to support the obligatory special-effects dust-up with a monster in the final reel.
The filmmakers save a secret weapon for that battle: Wonder Woman, who shows up more or less unannounced to toss her lasso and brandish her shield. Gal Gadot will doubtless get to do more next time.
And yeah, there will be a next time, even if this time has turned out to be a lot less fun than it should be.Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Joanne O'Donnell ruled on Friday afternoon the Center for Medical Progress has First Amendment rights to release videos it covertly took of StemExpress executives talking about buying aborted baby tissue from Planned Parenthood. Almost immediately afterwards, CMP released a new video that among other thing showed the StemExpress CEO joking about receiving dead babies from Planned Parenthood (over lunch).
This latest video is only two minutes long and is more of a trailer of things to come. Most of its content was made up of bits and pieces of previous videos. The one new section featured Cate Dyer, the CEO of StemExpress in a lunch meeting with undercover operatives posing as representatives of a biotech firm. Dyer is seen laughing about how StemExpress purchases fully intact aborted babies from Planned Parenthood. As she paid the check, Dyer appears to be laughing about how lab recipients of the aborted babies go into shock when they open a box to find an "intact case" (whole body):
“Oh, yeah, if you have intact cases, which we’ve done a lot, we sometimes ship those back to our lab in its entirety." “Tell the lab it’s coming; they’ll open the box and go, ‘Oh, my God!”
CMP explains the terminology used by those in its videos to describe an entire aborted body:
StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer admits that StemExpress gets intact fetuses from the abortion clinics they work with shipped to their laboratory. “Case” is the clinical term for an individual abortion (cross reference with Planned Parenthood Senior Director of Medical Services Dr. Deborah Nucatola’s discussion of “this case, that case” in lunch video), so an “intact case” means an “intact abortion.”
Once the CMP videos began to be released, StemExpress realized a lunch they had back in May was probably an undercover sting, so they sued to preemptively block those videos from being seen. Judge O'Donnell issued a restraining order barring CMP from releasing any videos showing current or former Stem Express employees, at the end of July - then rescinded the order today.
The Center for Medical Progress isn't off the hook yet because the judge said that, even though they couldn't' be prevented from releasing the video, it was likely that StemExpress would prevail in its lawsuit claiming its privacy was violated.
Earlier this week StemExpess announced it was cutting all ties with Planned Parenthood, but denied that it had done anything wrong.
The newly-released video is below, but expect more to come next week.At Sundance, 'Project Syria' Puts Viewers In Center Of Conflict
At the Sundance Film Festival, "Project Syria" places participants in Aleppo during a rocket blast and later in a Syrian refugee camp. NPR's Robert Siegel talks with project lead Nonny de la Pena.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We're going to hear now about "Project Syria," one of the virtual reality experiences that Mandalit just mentioned. The director calls it immersive journalism. The experience takes the audience to the city of Aleppo, albeit a computer-generated Aleppo, and recreates a mortar attack.
(SOUNDBITE OF "PROJECT SYRIA")
SIEGEL: Nonny de la Pena is the director of "Project Syria." Welcome to the program.
NONNY DE LA PENA: Thank so much for hosting me.
SIEGEL: And you have to describe this. If I were in Sundance - seeing what you've done here - I'd put on a pair of goggles with earphones and I just - I'd be in a room walking around where I could experience this scene from Aleppo?
DE LA PENA: That's correct. And when you're walking around the street it's actually changing the imagery one-for-one to match wherever you look, bend, kneel, jump. So that's why it so accurately conveys the sensation of being present on scene.
SIEGEL: The sensation is powerful. The simple question - is it journalism? Is walking and experiencing computer-generated images the same thing as seeing a documentary film you might have made or read an article you might have written for Newsweek?
DE LA PENA: I would certainly argue that, you know, ultimately text is just lines on a page, right? And that to say that a computer-generated imagery isn't going to have some accuracy to it, you know, I think it's disingenuous. So despite the fact that it's computer-generated - and I can tell you that the 3D modeling is getting better much more quickly and that the capturing of scenes is going to get much more photo-real, and it's really up to us journalists to understand what are the best practices for these new spatial narratives?
SIEGEL: So you're saying that if I'm experiencing - if I'm seeing even computer-generated images of people, if they get more realistic and they're closer to the actual image of those people, you're saying that at some point its not different from actually seeing a film taken of them as they were, what they were doing at that moment.
DE LA PENA: You know, I would say that we know that each platform has a different - conveys a different feeling. Newspapers differ from radio, radios differ from television. This is just a brand new platform, and the experience is going to offer different affordances. This is going to have different things that perhaps might not be considered as acceptable by today's standards, but later on we'll understand that there's a real value to telling stories in this way.
SIEGEL: Yeah. Applying today's standards, we would say that the degree of manipulation of the image for photography would be out of bounds. We wouldn't accept that as news photography.
DE LA PENA: That might be the case, but I think that the overall sense of the re-creation would be acceptable certainly in documentary film. And with that background that I have I applied the same sort of techniques that I would when I was trying to re-create a scene that perhaps was not captured on camera, and I think that there's a lot of best practices that documentarians use to make sure that something's accurate and I try to bring those to bear in the virtual environment.
SIEGEL: If one person sees it at one time - are we talking about in effect a museum exhibition as the medium of showing this or could you ever imagine reaching a mass audience this way?
DE LA PENA: Quite easily. There are certain stories that will lend themselves to immersive journalism to be done on a mobile phone within a 48 hours - or certainly within a news cycle. I always cite the Trayvon Martin case as an example. The condo was a cookie-cutter building. It's a dark rainy night. You can't see very well what's going on. George Zimmerman's SUV, I can buy it on one of the modeling sites, exact replica for 130 bucks. We could've had that story up and onto people's mobile phones with mobile viewers, like Google Cardboard, within 48 hours at the most. So yes, I think that it's going to no doubt affect the way that we get our news in the future.
SIEGEL: Nonny de la Pena, director of "Project Syria." Thank you very much.
DE LA PENA: I really appreciate you spending the time with me today.
SIEGEL: Nonny de la Pena spoke to us from the Sundance Festival in Park City, Utah.
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Updated
A child has died after swallowing a lithium battery on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.
The four-year-old was taken to Noosa Hospital early on Sunday with stomach bleeding.
She was transferred to Royal Brisbane Hospital but could not be saved.
Susan Teerds from Kidsafe Queensland says the button-shaped batteries are found in many common household items, and parents must be vigilant.
"When a child swallows a battery it often gets caught in the oesophagus, around the voice box. Once it's been lodged, within an hour, it will start to burn a hole," she said.
"The saliva actually starts a chemical reaction and burns a hole through the oesophagus and can keep burning a hole into the aorta, through to the spine and whatever else is there."
Kidsafe Queensland says several children present to emergency departments with symptoms each week.
Topics: accidents, disasters-and-accidents, noosa-heads-4567, australia, qld
First postedHey folks, Harry here... I get that there's a lot of skepticism about HUGO, based off of trailers that just don't quite convince. I've a feeling you are going to see quite a bit of love spilled regarding Scorsese's latest. Everytime a friend of mine asks me if I really love HUGO, I give them about 30 minutes of excited descriptions of just how intoxicating the world that Scorsese has created is. Well, the Hollywood Reporter sat James Cameron down with Scorsese for what seems like an entirely too brief chat. Seriously. Putting these two next to each other should require a 3 hour session. I would watch every second, but here's a couple of minutes:
Scorsese has really done more to convince me that 3D is a permanent and needed tool in cinema than any filmmaker that has worked with the medium thus far. But then he really studied 3D film before he shot. Thelma Schoonmaker told me in Aruba last year that they were watching new and classic films in 3D to get excited about the medium and see what people have done with it. Well, Scorsese did it best.By Keith Idec
Bob Arum and his brain trust would’ve preferred to make a Vasyl Lomachenko-Orlando Salido rematch for August 5.
But according to Carl Moretti, Top Rank Inc.’s vice president of boxing operations, Salido turned down a $720,000 purse to face Lomachenko that night. Top Rank instead announced late Thursday night that Lomachenko will meet Colombia’s Miguel Marriaga in a super featherweight title fight ESPN will broadcast August 5 from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
“When [Salido’s] financial requests were met, suddenly there were other issues, like a hand problem, which led to a weight problem, which led to Marriaga,” Moretti told ESPN.com. “Funny how that happens. So we moved on to secure the best possible opponent at the time, and Miguel Marriaga stepped up to the plate.”
Marriaga (25-2, 21 KOs) lost his last fight, a 12-round unanimous decision to WBO featherweight champion Oscar Valdez (22-0, 19 KOs) on April 22 at StubHub Center in Carson, California. Ukraine’s Lomachenko (8-1, 6 KOs) wants to fight Salido again because Salido beat him by split decision in just Lomachenko’s second professional fight three years ago in San Antonio.
Mexico’s Salido won that 12-round featherweight fight on two of the three scorecards (116-112, 115-113, 113-115), but was criticized for repeatedly hitting Lomachenko with low blows. Lomachenko’s improvement since Salido defeated him has made the two-time Olympic gold medalist a consensus top-five fighter, pound-for-pound, in the world.
The 29-year-old Lomachenko dominated former WBA title-holder Jason Sosa (20-2-4, 15 KOs) in his last fight, which he won by technical knockout when Sosa’s trainer, Raul Rivas, stopped their one-sided bout following the ninth round April 8 in Oxon Hill, Maryland. The 36-year-old Salido is 2-1-2 in five fights since he beat Lomachenko, who owns the WBO 130-pound championship.
“If you put Marriaga, Salido and Sosa in a round-robin,” Moretti said, “I think they’re all excellent fights, and who knows who would win. Obviously, Lomachenko is at a different level. But in the ring, we know what Marriaga brings – heart, determination, a big right hand, size and no intimidation.”
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.The Dayton Daily News (one of the most consistently interesting regional papers in the country) has a great story on the spendthrift ways of the U.S. Senate, the World's Greatest Deliberative Body that has been unable or unwilling to pass a budget for coming up on four years straight.
It turns out that the Senate excels not so much in deliberating but in flushing tax dollars down the toilet. To wit:
Last year the Senate Hair Care barbershop/salon ran a $401,000 deficit providing $20 cuts to senators, staff and members of the public who visited the shop in the basement of the Russell Office Building, according to Terry Gainer, the sergeant-at-arms and doorkeeper of the Senate, whose wide-ranging duties include overseeing the hair care operation.
You got that? A group of folks not particularly known for their flowing locks are managing to drop almost half-a-million of your tax dollars on their very special heads.
It's not just shaves and haircuts, of course. As the News reports:
The legislative branch budget has grown 73 percent since 2000. Although Congress cut funding by 2.7 percent in 2011 and 5.2 percent last year, the 2013 appropriations request of $4.5 billion is up 4.8 percent over 2012. Embedded in those appropriations is a vast menu of services, an army of staff and an array of supplies, equipment and facilities supporting the 100 senators and 435 voting members and six non-voting members of the House of Representatives.... While senators and representatives receive $174,000, the Speaker of the House is paid $223,000 annually. The president pro tempore of the Senate and the majority and minority leaders in the House and Senate are paid $193,400 annually.... Congress members also receive: A generous pension that allows a member to retire at 62 with a full pension after five years of civilian federal service.
Rides on a private subway system that runs between offices, committee rooms and the Capitol.
Up to 96 cents per mile for mileage reimbursement.
Free postage - known as “franking” - for mailings to constituents.
Read the whole story. And then tell your senators to stop subsidizing their hairdos and hairdon'ts with your precious tax dollars! There's about 30 Haircuttery joints within a dozen miles of the Capitol, fer chrissakes.
Remember the old management saw about "leading by example"? Yeah, well, the legislative branch sure does. Which helps explain why gross federal debt is above 100 percent of the economy and shows essentially no sign of ever coming down absent some sort of global-warming induced meteor attack. If that's what it takes to make Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, and the rest to pay full price for their own goddamned haircuts and dye jobs, then so be it.While North Dakota is a most unlikely place for the Republican presidential campaign to take a critical turn, it nonetheless delivered an apparent setback over the weekend to front-runner Donald Trump in the behind-the-scenes battle for delegates, as Ted Cruz declared victory at the northern border state's GOP convention.
Like most states where Cruz has claimed victory, North Dakota is relatively light on delegates. Trump’s wins in delegate-rich primary states have kept the billionaire businessman well ahead, and the events in Fargo won’t change that.
But the North Dakota showdown speaks to the organizational headwinds Trump is facing – something he’s also dealing with in Wisconsin, which holds its primary Tuesday and where Cruz is polling in front. And if nothing else, the North Dakota convention results could put Cruz in a better position at the party’s July convention if the nomination is still open going into Cleveland.
"I'm thrilled to have the vote of confidence of Republican voters in North Dakota who delivered such a resounding victory today,” Cruz said in a statement. “Whether we defeat Donald Trump before the convention or at it, I'm energized to have the support of the vast majority of North Dakota delegates."
The vote in North Dakota was not a traditional primary or caucus, but a convention. Delegates chosen over the weekend through an internal party process will not be “bound” to any candidate. For that reason, there technically was no winner from the weekend’s gathering.
Yet the presidential candidates still scrambled to try and get their own supporters elected as delegates, banking on their loyalty at the July convention.
In the end, the Cruz campaign claimed that 18 of the 25 delegates selected Sunday are supporters of the Texas senator.
The Trump campaign, though, disputed this, claiming some of those listed as Cruz supporters were actually undecided. One Trump source went so far as to call Cruz’s claims “bull,” saying the senator only has four dedicated supporters of the 18.
The campaign further claimed Sunday that they came into Fargo with “zero expectations” but were “encouraged by the results” in the end.
“Nearly one-third of Sen. Cruz's ‘list’ was not elected, and many of those elected from his ‘list’ are firmly undecided or support other candidates,” the Trump campaign said in a statement, while also touting an endorsement from Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.
The campaign said supporter and former GOP primary candidate Ben Carson “privately met with many of the undecided delegates, and we're confident that we will receive strong support from the delegation in Cleveland.”
And John Weaver, strategist for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, took to Twitter to claim Cruz’s “strong-arm tactics” failed in North Dakota, saying he “helped elect delegates who will vote” for Kasich in Cleveland.
For whom the 25 delegates in Cleveland will vote remains an open question, as they are not bound to anybody. Some listed as Cruz supporters were actually “leaning” toward him, and not necessarily committed.
But the anti-Trump organizing in Fargo was nevertheless robust.
One anti-Trump group, Our Principles PAC, was heavily involved on the ground in Fargo, deploying a field team to speak to convention attendees and distribute hundreds of voter guides to make the case against Trump.
"This campaign is coming down to a ground game battle for delegates,” PAC senior adviser Brian Baker said in a statement. “We will fight for every last delegate vote all the way to Cleveland. We are committed to making sure Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee and that the GOP wins the White House this fall with a principled conservative. Republicans at the North Dakota Convention rejected Trump, just like the entire Republican base will do this summer in Cleveland."
It’s these forces that Trump also is facing down in Wisconsin, which holds its primary on Tuesday. Cruz has led in most recent Wisconsin polls.
Trump is fighting to clinch the nomination before July with the requisite 1,237 delegates, while his remaining rivals try to hold him under that threshold.
Yet the front-runner has faced other setbacks in the grueling battle for each and every delegate. Recently in Louisiana, Trump has vowed to both file a lawsuit and an internal challenge within the Republican National Committee over reports that Cruz, despite losing the Louisiana primary to Trump in early March, could draw the support of enough “unbound” delegates and from Rubio supporters to actually overtake Trump in the state by as many as 10 delegates.
And The Tennessean reports that the Trump campaign is now accusing the Tennessee GOP of trying to stop pro-Trump delegates from being part of the state’s convention delegation.
Trump won the state’s primary, but a state party arm is responsible for appointing 14 of the 58-person delegation. The Trump camp reportedly alleges “anti-Trump” people have made their way onto the delegate list.
"They're picking establishment picks who don't support Donald Trump, and it's just the same effort that they're conducting all over the country to steal a vote here, steal a delegate there, to affect the outcome of the convention in July and take the nomination away from Donald Trump,” Darren Morris, Trump’s Tennessee state director, told the newspaper.
FoxNews.com’s Judson Berger and Fox News’ Dan Gallo, John Roberts and James Rosen contributed to this report.Another bad debut for a CBS drama.
DEMOGRAPHIC DETAIL: For each broadcast program (or hour segment), the chart below displays preliminary key |
. One small word from a gloating Republican will send many Democrats under the covers, where they can hide from what feels inevitable to them after years of incredulity (2004? Really, America?) and lost elections. But hello, 2008 and 2012. The times they are a changin’.
President Obama ushered in a new kind of Democrat. One who is not afraid and does not run away from conflict. One who stays in the fight, armed with facts, and stays optimistic. One who knows that the war is not won in the media or with unskewed polls, it’s won in battles around the country via the ground game. There are more of them, and they ultimately have the power if only they exercise it.
President Obama knows his base is easily depressed by gloating Republicans. He knows that in the weeks leading up to the election, Republicans will do all that they can to depress morale in order to reduce turnout because lower turnout is good for Republicans. President Obama has been tireless in his efforts to better things for average Americans. The midterms are their chance to be tireless in return. To have his back, so he can have theirs.
Democrats shouldn’t put GOP blinders on and just operate in a bubble of false faith, but they should keep their eye on the ball and not let anything or anyone distract them from getting out the vote in their neighborhood and town. Every battle won is a victory, and eventually these victories will add up to what is inevitable if the Republican Party does not adapt. So the President is reminding them: Don’t get depressed. Get mad at being written off by Republicans and the media. Take that energy to the voting booth.
While in Los Angeles, the President has another Democratic National Committee fundraiser to attend Friday morning, this one hosted by Michael and Eva Chow.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:For months San Diego has debated the Chargers’ future and lately has focused on a 15-acre downtown site for a new stadium.
But a challenge 10 times bigger lies eight miles north: The future of Qualcomm Stadium and its 166-acre site.
Ever since the stadium opened in 1967, urban planners, politicians, Mission Valley residents and developers have eyed the site as an opportunity waiting to happen — to turn a centrally located, underutilized plot of city-owned land into something more than just an 18,500-space parking lot and occasionally used stadium.
In the last 50 years, the valley has seen untold numbers of condos, apartments, shops, offices, hotels and restaurants fill up the 10-mile-long valley. New plans are afoot to redevelop the Riverwalk golf course, Mission Valley mall, auto dealerships, low-rise garden office parks and obsolete motel properties.
Now a plan is in the works to tackle the biggest underdeveloped site of all.
A citizens initiative gathering signatures for a November election would authorize the sale of the Qualcomm site to San Diego State University, UC San Diego, the San Diego Community College District or some combination. They would be required in return to convert it into an educational complex, sports and recreation complex and an “urban rivers scientific interpretative center.”
The initiative also includes a means to build a new Chargers’ stadium and expand the convention center east of Petco Park downtown, ideas that have stalled for years.
“One thing that’s been happening over the past many years is that nothing has changed,” said former City Councilwoman Donna Frye, a key supporter of the initiative. “We’re still in the same place we were 15 years ago. At least with this proposal it lays out some ideas and opportunities to address all this.”
The opportunity in Mission Valley could be game changing in many ways.
▪ An asphalt no-man’s land could become a vibrant urban center filled with thousands of students, park goers and fans going to a new Aztec stadium that doubles as a major league soccer venue.
▪ A proposed 50-acre park could fill a long-felt need to meet recreational needs for Mission Valley’s 22,000 residents and restore a portion of the San Diego River.
▪ The car-oriented nature of Mission Valley, dating back to the 1950s, could be undone with the reconfiguration of the streets, roadways, mass transit and biking and walking paths, as modeled at a replanned Qualcomm site.
Said architect and urban planner Frank Wolden: “Why is it that Mission Valley is one-tenth the density of downtown and the traffic is worse? It’s because you have to drive across the street to go from store to restaurant.”
The future of the “Q” property comes at the same time the Mission Valley Planning Group is revising its 1985 community plan. City planner Nancy Graham said the review of the valley’s current conditions is done and meetings are scheduled for April and June to consider alternatives for the future. Public workshops would happen this summer with environmental analysis, community review and City Council action later. The Qualcomm redevelopment would be folded into the final plan.
The San Diego River Park Foundation also is at work independently to imagine how the park will fit into the larger river park planned to stretch from the beach to the mountains.
“It’s that big a deal,” said Executive Director Rob Hutsel.
The foundation has asked landscape architect Glen Schmidt to come up with various scenarios that Schmidt said might include a lake, restored Murphy Canyon Creek, revitalized wildlife wetlands, ballfields and pathways.
Clearly, the biggest piece of the stadium redevelopment idea involves higher education:
▪ San Diego State would get a new Aztec stadium and space to grow. The campus currently occupies only 277 acres, just 111 more than at Qualcomm Stadium, for its 30,000-student population.
▪ UC San Diego, with a student population of 33,735, would get a new field research unit. The campus occupies more than 1,100 acres.
▪ Students would get new housing that might be attractive enough to lure them away from the jury-rigged “minidorms” that property owners have created in College Area single-family homes.
Proponents, particularly former state Sen. Steve Peace, D-San Diego, see it as solving several problems at once — namely relieving SDSU’s land shortage; advancing San Diego’s big ambitions as a science and environmental leadership powerhouse via the new research center; and taking off the city’s hands an obsolete stadium and the maintenance headaches that come with it.
“This is something that has its payoff long after you and I are dead and long gone,” Peace said in an interview.
Neither campus has endorsed the concept, but both SDSU President Elliot Hirshman and UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla have been briefed and reportedly are interested.
The higher education focus grabbed the attention of retiring Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego, who taught at SDSU for 26 years and whose district includes both Mission Valley and the campus. He mentioned the idea at a subcommittee hearing he chaired Thursday on educational capital needs in the fiscal 2017 state budget.
“I wouldn’t foreclose looking at additional ideas,” Block said. “But I think studies have shown that the best economic driver for that area is not housing or shops but an educational center, particularly with a biotech science center.”
But what exactly is the plan for what Block is calling Aztec Riverfront Park?
JMI Realty, the company headed by former Padres owner and SDSU/UCSD benefactor John Moores, spent about $200,000 last year to test various concepts for the property with and without an NFL stadium. Peace, an adviser to Moores, has been sharing the concept publicly and privately over the last few months.
“The work that has been done to date on Mission Valley is conceptual,” Peace said. “Its purpose is to understand the capacity of the site. Actual plans for use would be developed over a period of years while the Chargers continue to play in Qualcomm Stadium.”
As developed by the architectural firm Carrier Johnson + Culture, the non-NFL “education and science campus” could have these components:
▪ Student housing: 3,500 apartments housing perhaps 14,000 students. SDSU currently houses 4,500 students on campus, UCSD, about 13,000.
▪ Faculty housing: 400 apartments averaging 1,000 square feet each.
▪ Academic offices and noninstructional space: 630,000 square feet that could house research facilities and such things as KPBS and the SDSU Foundation.
▪ Commercial offices: 200,000 square feet in two buildings.
▪ Retail space: 50,000 square feet serving student and faculty residents and daytime workers.
▪ Hotel: 200 rooms.
▪ Stadium: 35,000 to 40,000 seats for college football and major league soccer, campus commencements, concerts and other public events, located at the northeast corner of the site. Qualcomm Stadium would be demolished and replaced by the green space called “The Commons” and “The Bowl” amphitheater -- gathering places for concerts and informal recreation.
▪ Park space: A 28.8-acre river park and 10.2 acres of open space, somewhat smaller than the citizens initiative calls for and 65 acres desired by the San Diego River Park Foundation.
▪ Parking: 9,000 spaces in two big garages and 5,760 spaces in surface lots and below or alongside the residential and hotel buildings. That is much less than normally required, because student parking would be provided for only one space for every other apartment. In other words, seven of the eight students in two four-bedroom units would have to rely on car pooling, public transit, bikes and their own feet to get around.
Architect Gordon Carrier carried the analysis one step further and imagined an alternative approach to demolishing the Q new Aztec stadium. He said it’s possible to tuck a small stadium into the existing facility and enclose enough of the perimeter space to create as much as 800,000 square feet for faculty and administrative offices, research labs and classrooms. SDSU counts 3.9 million square feet of academic and administrative space on campus.
The cost of either stadium concept has not been calculated but Carrier said it’s likely half of what an $800 million NFL stadium would have cost. An adaptive reuse option would not only prove more environmentally responsible but also preserve one of San Diego’s most recognized landmarks.
"We'll listen to any idea that comes to us, but obviously a critical step in deciding the fate of the Mission Valley site will be knowing what's going to happen with the Chargers," said Craig Gustafson, spokesman for Mayor Kevin Faulconer.
Developers Dennis Cruzan and Steve Black analyzed the site for JMI Realty from a feasibility standpoint and said it might take five years to secure approval and 10 years to complete.
“We believe the university kicks off more of that development than a (NFL) stadium does in our view,” Cruzan added.
Cruzan and Black did not calculate an overall cost estimate but they discounted the predevelopment land value, to only $50 million given the cost of offsite improvements, entitlement processing and other “soft” costs that a developer or university consortium would have to cover.
Nathan Moeder at the London Group Realty Advisors consulting firm and other experts indicate JIM's redevelopment could cost about $2.4 billion, based on average costs applied to the various elements in the plan.
Other developers and urban experts have raised questions about the JMI approach.
David Malmuth, a partner in the I.D.E.A. District in downtown’s East Village, said he wishes the Chargers would remain in Mission Valley and leave its preferred downtown site for high-tech companies and university-related research facilities. He and his business partner Pete Garcia led a workshop Saturday on that alternate vision at the Newschool of Architecture and Design.
“Simply putting an expansion of SDSU or the UCSD campus in Mission Valley doesn’t accomplish the much larger goal of a cluster to drive high-wage jobs,” he said, because it would not be located in a vibrant urban center that millennials and start-ups crave.
Development consultant Gary London said the JMI plan misses the opportunity to create a much denser urban node with more housing and commercial development that otherwise will scatter to other parts of the county. Plans he previously released called for nearly 6,000 housing units and 2.8 million square feet of offices and related retail alongside a new NFL stadium.
“What could be created on the Qualcomm site would be a new class of master-planned community with a commercial campus, which would include high-rise office and intensive residential, commercial and other uses,” he said.
Just because Mission Valley has had little or no new office development doesn’t mean that big national developer wouldn’t seize the opportunity here, he said, and outside firms have told him as much, he added.
Marco Sessa, development vice president at Sudberry Properties, oversees the 266-acre, 4,780-home Civita master plan community now under construction off Friars Road. He said the educational theme might work at Qualcomm but it would have to be attractive enough for students to live there.
“At the end of the day you are competing with other places that are out there for students,” he said.
He also said the development will have to pay its fair share in public improvements, pencil out financially and secure public support.
“Today most sophisticated real estate development companies understand that they need support and getting that support comes with public benefits,” he said.
Jeff Marston, a former state Assembly member and former SDSU alumni president, organized a panel discussion last month on campus featuring Peace, Cruzan and Black and said their plan was well received.
“If you want to go to the Gaslamp Quarter, you jump on the trolley and there you go,” he said. “It’s as accessible, if not more so, for students to live in Mission Valley than if they were living on campus. I think it would be really cool. Obviously, it has to be planned correctly.”Sony has announced the full timetable for its 2017 PlayStation Experience event, due to be held - and livestreamed - from 4am on Saturday, December 9th, in the UK. Notable occurrences include the first new showing of Media Molecule's Dreams in absolutely ages, as well as a chat with the cast of Uncharted and The Last of Us Part 2.
Sony readily admits that its biggest reveals of 2017 have already been shown at this year's E3 and Paris Games Week, but it does promise "a few stocking stuffers" during PSX's opening event. These will apparently include "candid" discussions with developers, updates on key titles, and special announcements.
Once the initial festivities are over, early risers will have a good few hours to recuperate, as the PSX panels don't begin in earnest until 7pm in the UK.
Up first on the panel front is a session dedicated to PlayStation VR. It begins at 7pm, and will include "a candid conversation between two legends as they discuss developing their new PS VR title and lessons from VR development". But who could they be?
Next on the list - at 8.30pm in the UK - Media Molecule's Siobhan Reddy, Mark Healey, and Alex Evans will be offering an in-depth look at the studio's long-in-development Dreams. It hasn't been shown publicly for (by my calculations, at least) well over a year now, so it'll be exciting to see the progress that Media Molecule has made since then.
There's more new game stuff at 11.30pm, when Sucker Punch will be discussing its forthcoming samurai action title, Ghost of Tsushima. There'll be some insight into the making of the game's reveal trailer, a look at some concept art, and a bit of a chat about the studio's reference trips to Japan. That makes it sound like Sucker Punch is holding the big stuff back for another occasion, but I could be wrong!
Rounding things off are two Naughty Dog panels. At 1am in the UK (that's Sunday, December 10th), various Uncharted cast members will be sharing their memories of the series in this, its tenth anniversary year. You can expect to hear professional mouth sounds from the likes of Nolan North, Emily Rose, Richard McGonagle, Claudia Black, Laura Bailey, Troy Baker, Graham McTavish, and Robin-Atkin Downes.
Following that at 2am, The Last of Us Part 2's director and writer Neil Druckmann, co-writer Halley Gross, and cast members will be discussing the making of that infamous Paris Games Week trailer, perhaps even offering a little more context for the controversial scene.
Here's the full schedule of panel events for your diary:
PlayStation VR game panel - 7pm GMT/8pm CET Saturday, 9th December
- 7pm GMT/8pm CET Saturday, 9th December Media Molecule presents Dreams - 8.30pm GMT/9.30pm CET Saturday, 9th December
- 8.30pm GMT/9.30pm CET Saturday, 9th December IGN ranks the top 10 PlayStation games of all time - 10pm GMT/11pm CET Saturday, 9th December
- 10pm GMT/11pm CET Saturday, 9th December Ghost of Tsushima: From concept to reveal - 11.30pm GMT/12.20am CET Saturday, 9th December
- 11.30pm GMT/12.20am CET Saturday, 9th December Uncharted 10th anniversary celebration - 1am GMT/2am CET Sunday, 10th December
- 1am GMT/2am CET Sunday, 10th December The Last of Us Part 2: Meet the cast - 2am GMT/3am CET Sunday, 10th December
You can watch it all happen live from 4am GMT/5am CET on December 9th, via the wonders of modern streaming technology on the PlayStation website, Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook.First Michael Moore, now MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has made a case for voting for the Republican nominee Donald Trump.
On Monday’s episode of Hardball, Matthews said that Trump isn’t campaigning properly. He calls out the Republican candidate for not giving a convincing enough argument to voters to support him, so the MSNBC host lists reasons why people should vote for the billionaire, and it’s good.
“Why isn’t he spending every hour asking the voters again and again,” Matthews said. “Do you like the way things are, the way they’ve been headed in this country? Do you like to continue the destruction of our manufacturing base, and the jobs that went with it? Do you like the uncontrolled illegal immigration? Do you like the string of stupid wars from Iraq to Libya to Syria?”
“If you want to say yes to all of that, you want to keep all this the way it is, vote for Hillary Clinton,” he continued. “If you don’t like the way things have been headed you got a chance to really shake the system to its roots. And if you wake up the day after the election and it’s the same as it is today, if it’s the same 4 or 5 or 8 years from now, remember you had the chance to change it, but you were too dainty to do it.”
Watch the full clip below:Serbia's last major war crimes fugitive, a Croatian Serb wartime leader indicted for crimes against humanity during the 1991-95 Croatian war, has been arrested.
Boris Tadic, Serbia's president, said on Wednesday that Goran Hadzic was arrested in the mountainous Fruska Gora region of northern Serbia.
"With this, Serbia, has concluded its most difficult chapter in the cooperation with the Hague Tribunal," Tadic said in a televised statement.
Tadic said his country has now concluded its "legal duties... as well as its moral duty", meeting EU demands that it track down and arrest all war crimes fugitives.
The Serbian president denied that authorities in his country knew where Hadzic had been hiding.
"Serbia did not know where Goran Hadzic was," Tadic said.
"Our security and intelligence agency as well as members of the interior ministry have carried out their duties in accordance with law."
Hadzic was a key figure in the breakaway Krajina Serb republic in Croatia and was also Serbia's last remaining figure sought by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
In all, the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted 161 people and Hadzic is the last to be arrested.
His detention follows the arrests of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic in May and that of Radovan Karadzic in August 2008.
Mladic is now on trial at The Hague for his role in atrocities committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian conflict.
Good news for humanity
Serge Brammertz, the prosecutor for the UN's war crimes court at The Hague on Wednesday welcomed the arrest of Hadzic, his special advisor said.
In depth
Barnaby Phillips reports from Vukovar in eastern Croatia on Hadzic's arrest
"The prosecutor of the ICTY welcomes the arrest today of Goran Hadzic. Today marks the arrest of the last of the 161 persons indicted by the tribunal," Frederick Swinnen told a press conference in The Hague.
Jadranka Kosor, Croatia's prime minster, hailed Hadzic's arrest.
"The arrest of Hadzic is good news for humanity, for the world and above all for Croatia," Kosor said during a visit to Poland.
However, she said, it had taken two decades to capture the former leader of Croatia's rebel Serbs, who opposed its split from Yugoslavia.
In Brussels, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary-general, welcomed the news of the arrest and commended Serbian authorities for fulfilling their international obligations.
"Following the transfer of Ratko Mladic to the Hague, this arrest will allow for the most painful chapter in recent European history to be closed," Rasmussen said in a statement.
Evaded justice
Hadzic was indicted in 2004 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including "persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, extermination, murder, torture, deportation and forcible transfer" as well as "wanton destruction... or devastation".
The indictment alleged that Hadzic committed the crimes with an aim to drive the Croats and other non-Serbs from the territories controlled by his self-styled authorities.
He is notably wanted in connection with the massacre of about 250 civilian refugees taken from a hospital in Vukovar, an eastern city on the border with Serbia, in November 1991.
Hadzic has managed to evade justice for years, despite international pressure for his arrest. He narrowly escaped arrest in northern Serbia, apparently thanks to a tip from within the Serbian security authorities.
The country's post-war authorities have for years faced accusations that they were not doing enough to hunt down the war crimes suspects.
The issue had also blocked Serbia's bid at European Union membership.
The EU, which hailed Belgrade for finding Mladic in May, had continued to insist on the arrest of Hadzic for Serbia to make progress towards EU membership.
More than 10,000 people died in the Croatian war which ended when Zagreb, the Croatian capital, retook the territories held by the Serbs in 1995.
Serbia's wartime president Milosevic was extradited to the Hague tribunal in 2001 and died there in 2006, while on trial for genocide.
?Guess what? You probably send out pitches that sound a little like this:
Most likely they do. We outnumber journalists at an alarming ratio. We hammer them – and I mean the we as in the hundreds of thousands of shitty emails we send out a year that are just bulk press releases and really, really crappy pitches.
Chris Dixon recently wrote a piece about how to interact with the press, and many PR people were hurt by it. Many claimed it was unjust – “Heh, that’s not me,” we collectively muttered, many of us ignoring our own pitches, our own internal memos, our own reality, just like we have every single time a new article comes out slamming our profession. We flood PR blogs, talk at PR panels and parties, post on external and internal networks with hashtags like #PRChat and claim that we, as professionals and peoples, are worth a damn. That these people ‘just don’t get it.’
Hi! Hello! How’re you doing? Hope you’re well! Hope things are great with you! Hope things are just fine! And other meaningless platitudes that we start our emails with.
This was sent to us this morning, unsolicited. It was written by a 35-year-old PR executive working in New York City. He has worked at five different agencies, and is now running an independent consultancy. He wishes to remain anonymous. Here's what he has to say.
And they work. Maybe. Sometimes. By sheer numbers you probably get one crappy pitch through to someone, and they maybe respond, and they maybe meet with the client, and they maybe write about it. Congratulations! You’re now ‘good at PR.’
But you’re not.
Journalists hate you because you (whether you know it or not) hate the journalists. You don’t show them respect. You’re sending them an email that sounds like you don’t give a shit. You’re insulting their intelligence. If you’re pitching Jeff Bezos or Tim Cook or someone else of note, someone who doesn’t need a blurb to explain why they’re relevant, then you can email someone asking them if they'd like to speak with them. If you have to explain why the CEO is worth talking to, they’re probably not worth talking to. Nobody cares that they’re the former VP of One Division of a big company that people probably don’t care about.
You probably know they cover startups. You probably know they cover tech. They might have covered something maybe a little close to what you’re pitching. Or you downloaded a 100-person list from Vocus and you’re just sending the same “customized” (you changed the name, maybe a word) pitch to all of them.
You use breathless hype. You use words like exciting or amazing or (“truly!”) revolutionary or evolutionary or ingenius or that it’s amassed users or you’ve found learnings from a study or any of the hundreds of things nobody would ever, ever say in person.
Now, why do we talk like that? Because someone high up has probably told us to. The managers and the Assistant Vice President Chairperson has told us that we need to use these hokey words. And we’re scared. We’re scared of sounding dumb. We’re scared of missing some beautiful part of the statement.
And now I’m not even talking to the managers, because they’re not the ones pitching. They’re telling you to pitch. A whole other ballgame — one that anyone hiring a PR firm should watch out for — is that these smartasses are the ones coming up to you and promising someone else’s work, then whipping them to provide it. Don’t not hire a PR firm, but make sure you’re being represented by the people who sell you whatever crappy package you’re buying.
Anyway, back to you, the pitcher, the guy or girl sending emails. If you really think that shoveling a 300-word or 500-word pile of ass into an email and sending it off is ‘doing PR,’ you are an asshole and part of the problem. Why do you give a shit about what you ‘discussed as the company messaging’?
Facebook is worth billions of dollars. Your company probably has a standard valuation of a hamburger, and nobody cares about it. Maybe it’ll die before you do? Here’s hoping.
***
I’m not saying this to be cruel. I’m saying it because this is what we do, PR people. We don’t read the blogs and newspapers we want our clients to be in. Many of us will claim we do, but we just skim-read some crap that we saw on our RSS feeds, or maybe that one of the writers linked on Twitter.
Then there’s the issue of just not knowing shit, and in many cases being proud of it. In the ten years I’ve been in PR, I’ve seen enough assholes be proud of not knowing tech, saying they are the ‘consumer voice.’
Sidebar: Nobody in the fucking world uses the word "consumer" or "influencer" outside of press releases, and if you do you sound like an asshole.
Okay, we’re back. You’re not the ‘consumer voice’ if you don’t know shit about tech or startups or your industry. You’re another asshole. You don’t give a ‘fresh perspective,’ you give a ‘dumb series of bullshit answers.’ You make suggestions that don’t have any relevance to the client or their problems or their users’ problems. You tell journalists ‘angles’ they can use that aren’t even close to what anyone writes about ever.
When you talk about your client or pitch it, you sound like a dumb PR guy or girl. If you’re a pretty girl, you’re automatically picked apart for being ‘flirty.’ If you’re a guy (who cares what you look like) you’re ‘just another seedy PR guy.’
And when you do that, you damage the entire industry irrevocably. You become the problem. And Chris Dixon sits there, glasses on his nose, teeth clenched, writing another diatribe about you.
You sit there at your desk, filthy Office Depot chair bouncing, and sigh right back at him. He’s the asshole, man. He doesn’t ‘get’ PR. You know your INDUSTRY, duh, you read TECHCRUNCH and the NEW YORK TIMES TECH SECTION BITS BLOG. You follow WALT MOSSBERG on TWITTER.
That is your limit. That’s your ‘work.’ That’s what you do. That is your contribution to society and the industry. You don’t challenge yourself to know more. You take no pride in your clients or your work. You don’t really care about anything other than the paycheck or getting your boss off your back. Which is fine, everyone’s like that. You move through your day like a zombie (even if you think you’re peppy and fun) and contribute nothing but ‘like’ and ‘um’ and a few long-form ways of saying short-form sentences. You go home, and your Twitter profile says “PR pro interested in tech, media, coffee, running and sports.”
Then you wonder why people hate you.
Here’s your answer: you don’t make enough effort to be liked. You don’t read enough. You don’t know enough. You don’t try.
If you want PR to be a respected tradition, stop jacking off on PR blogs about ‘best practices’ and do something more than make yourself feel smart. If you’re pitching, email eight people a day and spend the rest of it reading. Read Technology Review. Read The Economist. Read Monocle. Read a book that isn’t about your work. Read some poetry. Read something that will open your mind further than the little world of startup bloggers and people tweeting about SXSW.
Become a person. Be as funny and interesting as the journalists you’re pitching. Otherwise you’re just another number.
Or don’t, and make my life easier.
Actually, forget everything. Thank you. Thank you for making my job so easy. Thank you for making it so that each reporter who speaks to me is pleasantly surprised that I don’t sound like a retarded robot from the planet asshole.
Best Regards,
Thanks for your time and interest,
All Best,
Thanks!
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!President Trump on Tuesday downplayed concerns about a trade war with Canada after his administration slapped tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber.
“No,” the president told reporters when asked if he fears a trade war. “They have a tremendous surplus with the United States. Whenever they have a surplus, I have no fear.”
Trump’s decision to impose tariffs of as much as 24 percent on Canadian softwood imports ignited a long-simmering dispute between the two close trading partners.
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Combined with his saber-rattling on the Canadian dairy market and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it has sparked concerns about a broader trade conflict that could have significant effects on the U.S. economy.
Canada is the second-largest U.S. trading partner, with $575 billion in two-way goods exchanged in 2015.
Despite Trump’s comments, the trade relationship is relatively balanced. The U.S. only had a $15 billion trade deficit with Canada in 2015, according to figures compiled by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.A man died after being shot in Santa Ana early Sunday morning Dec. 3, police said.
At 2:17 a.m. police officers responded to calls of a shooting at 923 S. Standard Ave., where they found a man with a gunshot wound to the lower part of his body, said Santa Ana police Sgt. Jason Garcia.
The man was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Santa Ana Police investigate the scene of a fatal shooting in Santa Ana on Sunday, Dec 3, 2017. (Photo by Miles Madison, Contributing Photographer)
Santa Ana Police investigate the scene of a fatal shooting in Santa Ana on Sunday, Dec 3, 2017. (Photo by Miles Madison, Contributing Photographer)
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Santa Ana Police investigate the scene of a fatal shooting in Santa Ana on Sunday, Dec 3, 2017. (Photo by Miles Madison, Contributing Photographer)
Police are continuing their investigation. It was not clear if the incident was gang-related.
The shooting is the second deadly shooting in Santa Ana in two days. On Friday, a 36-year-old man was shot in the lower torso and died. Four people were arrested in connection with that shooting.Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton. He has some financial interests in the health care field.
“Medicare, Where Soviet Economic Thinking Lives On,” was the headline on a recent blog offering commentary on an article about Medicare pricing in The Wall Street Journal, accompanied by a videotaped, highly critical interview on The Journal’s “Online Opinion.”
The article and the video are focused on Medicare pricing of physician services. But the Soviet label can also be affixed to Medicare’s pricing for hospital care.
Joseph Antos, the widely respected Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, agrees with the Soviet label. “Medicare ignores the market, setting prices for physician services based on an academic theory with its roots in the Soviet Union,” he wrote in his “Confessions of a Price Controller.”
Dr. Antos writes with authority on this issue. As he acknowledges in the piece, he oversaw both the academic study leading to this pricing system for physicians and its subsequent implementation.
I find it hard to disagree with Dr. Antos. Medicare fees are administered prices, set by a central government for the entire country. And that is Soviet economics.
So naturally one is led to ask: Who imported this fiendish Soviet pricing theory to the United States and imposed it on Medicare?
It was the administration of President Ronald Reagan, with the concurrence of a Congress controlled by the Democrats.
The Reagan administration acted after it became alarmed at the inflationary force inherent in a payment mechanism adopted by Medicare at its inception, at the behest of the hospital industry: retrospective, full-cost reimbursement of each hospital for its reported costs.
After exploring a number of alternatives, most of them probably not politically feasible, the Reagan administration and Congress decided to switch, during 1983-86, to set, centrally administered prices. It’s hardly likely that the Reagan administration or Congress thought themselves inspired by Soviet theory, a notion that has been advanced more recently. These policy makers just thought the new system made more economic sense.
Most health economists — including me — saluted the switch, believing it would lead to more efficient hospital management. Hospital executives took a less kindly view, because it signaled the end of the Golden Era of hospital management.
The new payment system for hospitals used case-based bundled payments for “diagnostically related groupings” of inpatient cases, each with roughly similar reported costs and with a small and tolerable variance of actual costs per case around average costs for that case. The system is now known simply as the D.R.G.’s. It started with about 535 distinct D.R.G. cases and now has 745.
The D.R.G. system had its origin in pioneering research by Profs. John D. Thompson and Robert Fetter of Yale. They intended the D.R.G. classification to be mainly a management tool, a basis for managerial cost accounting and cost control commonly used in other industries.
It soon dawned on policy makers, however, that the D.R.G. classification could also be used as a basis for paying hospitals. That idea was successfully tested in the early 1980s in New Jersey and was put into effect nationwide in 1983.
In the words of Prof. Rick Mayes of the University of Richmond, who has chronicled the genesis of the D.R.G.’s in a fine paper: “The change was nothing short of revolutionary. For the first time, the federal government gained the upper hand in its financial relationship with the hospital industry.” Indeed, that revolutionary innovation has by now been widely copied around the world, first in Australia and France, and subsequently in Germany and several other countries.
The Medicare fee schedule for physicians — the actual focus of the article in The Wall Street Journal — was introduced in 1992, by the administration of George H.W. Bush.
Dr. Antos confesses to having been part of its genesis. I confess that I, too, played a bit part, in my capacity as an appointed commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Commission, established by Congress. The commission unanimously recommended the adoption of the new payment system to Congress at the beginning of the 1990s.
The new Medicare fee schedule was based on research financed by the Reagan administration during the 1980s and conducted jointly by Prof. William Hsiao of Harvard and the American Medical Association. It was implemented in 1992 by the Bush administration, along with what was, in effect, a national budget for Medicare’s total payments to physicians, then known as the “volume performance standard,” and modified in 1997 to what is called the S.G.R. system, for “sustainable growth rate.”
This new payment system for physicians replaced a highly dubious mechanism under which Medicare paid each doctor his or her “customary, prevailing and reasonable” fees, a clone of the “usual, customary and reasonable” system then widely used by private health insurers. It was a bewildering, computer-intensive system, with several filters based on each physician’s own charge profile for each service during the previous year, along with frequency distributions of fees for each service by all physicians in the physician’s market area.
The “usual, customary and prevailing” system, used since the inception of Medicare at the insistence of organized medicine, had proven to be highly inflationary, as could have been predicted at the outset. It also was unfair, because it could result in quite different Medicare payments for the same service to two physicians working in the same |
of Family Violence found many male callers to a national hotline experienced high rates of severe violence from female partners who used violence to control them.
7. Intimate Partner Abuse Against Men:
Some scholars suggest that the motives for intimate partner abuse against men by women may differ from those for abuse against women by men, and that women suffer more severe injuries than men. Nonetheless, the occurrence of abuse by women against men, and its consequences, warrant attention. It is important for the victims of abuse, whether they be men or women, to know that they are not alone – that is, that such experience is not unique to their personal situation.
It is also important for the perpetrators of intimate partner abuse – men or women – to recognize that violence in any form is both morally and legally wrong.
8. Disabusing The Definition of Domestic Abuse:
A law review article by law Professor Linda Kelly that documents the long history of how battered men's statistics and plight have been intentionally covered up.
9. Transforming a Flawed Policy:
This is a cutting edge challenge to the domestic violence industry by Professor Don Dutton, a domestic violence expert who was a prosecutorial witness in the O.J. Simpson case and who challenges the man bad/woman good model and the notion that women mostly hit in self-defense.
10. Why Women Assualt:
California State University surveyed 1,000 college women: 30% admitted they assaulted a male partner.
Their most common reasons: (1) my partner wasn't listening to me; (2) my partner wasn't being sensitive to my needs; and (3) I wished to gain my partner's attention.
For more information see:
A University of Pennsylvania emergency room report found 13% of men reported being assaulted by a female partner in the previous 12 months, of which 50% were choked, kicked, bitten, punched, or had an object thrown at them, 37% involved a weapon, and 14% required medical attention, at Academic of Emergency Medicine
University of Pennsylvania Professor Richard Gelles states: "Contrary to the claim that women only hit in self-defense, we found that women were as likely to initiate the violence as were men. In order to correct for a possible bias in reporting, we reexamined our data looking only at the self-reports of women. The women reported similar rates of female-to-male violence compared to male-to-female, and women also reported they were as likely to initiate the violence as were men," in his article reprinted at The Hidden Side of Domestic ViolenceImage copyright PA Image caption The 76m (250ft) Mark I telescope was the largest steerable dish in the world when it was completed in 1957
Jodrell Bank Observatory has been selected as the latest UK candidate for World Heritage status.
The site, in Cheshire, is home to the famous Lovell Telescope, which was complete in 1957.
If the bid is successful, it would join the likes of Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal on the Unesco list of "globally important" landmarks.
Prof Teresa Anderson, director of the observatory's Discovery Centre, said it has a "rich scientific heritage".
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She described the telescope, which was the largest of its kind when it was built, as "an icon for science".
More than 1,000 places around the world have been granted Unesco World Heritage status.
Currently, 31 sites in the UK and its overseas territories have been awarded the accolade.
Image copyright PA Image caption Professor Bernard Lovell (right) with structural engineer Charles Husband, who designed and constructed the Lovell Radio Telescope
The site was first used for radio astronomy in 1945 by Sir Bernard Lovell and his team and since then, its astronomers have tracked Sputnik and discovered quasars.
Prof Anderson said her team have been preparing the case for years, "so it's absolutely fantastic to reach this milestone".
Director of the Centre for Astrophysics, Prof Michael Garrett, said: "Jodrell Bank has played a leading role in radio astronomy for over seventy years, work which is reflected in the landscape of the site."
What is radio astronomy?
Radio astronomy is the observation of radio waves that are emitted from celestial bodies, such as distant galaxies or stars
Many strong sources of radio waves are invisible in normal light, so looking at radio waves reveals a completely different picture of the universe
Radio waves are better at travelling long distances than shorter wavelengths, so can provide a clearer "view" of very distant objects than can be gathered using normal light
Though the information gathered by radio telescopes is not in a visible form, it can be processed by computers to create images
Source: BBC ScienceIt looks like Sen. Rand Paul, a serial plagiarizer, is at it again or maybe now he’s just making stuff up.
“Did you know that 'right to work' states have created jobs at a rate three times greater than Kentucky over the past decade?” the Kentucky Republican recently wrote in a letter touting a "right to work" for less law for the Bluegrass State.
It’s hard to tell if Paul fudged the facts on his own or if he’s cribbing again. He didn’t cite any sources. Kentucky State AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan says:
It’s amazing how Rand Paul and other 'right to work' for less supporters continually use the false claim that 'right to work' for less states gain jobs upon passage of a 'right to work' for less law. Paul and his cohorts have never proven this key claim and refuse to acknowledge that in the states that most recently passed 'right to work' for less: Michigan, Indiana and Oklahoma, there is no proof—none whatsoever that 'right to work' for less has brought more jobs to these states.
Paul, who is also pushing a national "right to work" for less law, says “passage of a Kentucky 'right to work' law has never been more relevant or essential to the future success of our state.”
Londrigan begs to differ:
No Sen. Paul, it isn’t even close. No new jobs because of RTW. No flood of new companies.
Unlike Paul, Londrigan cites his sources. For example, he notes that while supporters of Michigan’s RTW law promised it would bring jobs to the Great Lakes State, a Dec. 8 Detroit Free Press article says, “no examples could be found of businesses that have [come to the state]…because Michigan is now a 'right-to-work' state.”
Londrigan also invites "right to work" proponents to peruse a Dec. 11 Lansing State Journal editorial that says:
The Michigan Economic Development Corporation acknowledges it can’t point to specific examples of new businesses arriving in Michigan due to the 'right-to-work' change. It also didn’t offer examples of companies that considered Michigan in the wake of right to work.
Paul seems to be especially proud of that Indiana, one of Kentucky’s northern neighbors, has a "right to work" law. The ink was hardly dry on Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels’ signature on the law when backers of the measure—including Daniels—began touting its “success.”
Yet Londrigan says a Dec. 11, 2012, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report by Gordon Lafer, Marty Wolfson and Nancy Guyott reveals that;
Neither the governor nor Indiana officials, however, have been able to provide evidence that ‘right to work’ (RTW) was the determinative factor in even a single company’s decision to locate in the state.
Londrigan also says Lafer’s Jan. 11, 2012, article in The Nation further debunks claims that "right to work" laws help create jobs.
In the 10 years since Oklahoma adopted RTW, the number of manufacturing jobs in the state has fallen by about one-third. The average number of new companies coming into the state has been one-third lower in the decade since RTW was adopted than in the preceding decade.
Other inconvenient facts Paul left out of his letter include:
On average, a worker in a RTW state earns $1,540 a year less (when all other factors are subtracted) than workers in states without RTW laws, according to the AFL-CIO, citing the EPI.
Median annual household income in states with RTW laws is $6,437 less than in non-RTW states ($46,402 vs. $52,839), says the AFL-CIO, based on statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.
In states with RTW laws, 26.7 percent of jobs are in low-wage occupations, compared with 19.5 percent of jobs in non-RTW states, according to the AFL-CIO, citing the Corporation for Enterprise Development.
Concludes Londrigan:
Let’s face it Sen. Paul, it is not about creating jobs but about hating unions. With your sponsorship of a national 'right to work' law that would make every state right to work for less, your claims about creating jobs by stealing them from non-'right to work' states would go out the window and the reality that states are losing jobs to foreign countries due to flawed trade deals you support will be recognized as the real reason for our long term unemployment—not because Kentucky or any other state is not a 'right to work' for less state.
Berry Craig, recording secretary for the Paducah-based Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council and a professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College, is a former daily newspaper and Associated Press columnist and currently a member of AFT Local 1360.The new version of the Chaos Reborn prototype is now public.
If you find bugs, please report them on the Chaos Reborn Prototype Bugs forum. I will, of course, welcome any other comments on this version.
You will not notice many changes in this version, since most of the work for the last month has been re-working of the network multiplayer code. So here are the changes:
Selecting a movement destination shows a movement arrow with attack lines to potential enemy targets. Clicking again on the destination confirms the move, or you can select another destination. There is no ‘undo’ move any more.
There is a range guide displayed for creatures with ranged combat and wizards with magic bolts.
A mount will now not be able to move in the turn a wizard mounts it.
Combat bonuses/penalties for elevation in close combat increased.
Unicorn charge bonus only obtained if distance between start position and enemy position is two or greater.
You can spectate a game which is in progress.
There is a link to Ped209s tournament site from the login screen.
The client/server networking infrastructure has been completely rewritten. The unresponsive lobby buttons should now be fixed. There may, however, be other problems with this new networking system since it has not been rigorously tested yet.
Known issues:
Problems reconnecting on Mac OSX. The client/web browser will need to be restarted to fix this, unfortunately.
Some graphical problems with Goblin and Giant textures.
Rarely the game seems to start without the arena in view
Best of luck with your games,
JulianWhile pointing the finger squarely at Apple, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has chosen to remove its Here Maps app from the App Store just over one year after the app's debut.
When asked to explain the move, a Nokia spokesperson said only that the company had "made the decision to remove our HERE Maps app from the Apple App Store because recent changes to iOS 7 harm the user experience," according to the Indian Express, which was the first publication to notice the app's disappearance. Nokia's representative did not elaborate on exactly what changes the Scandinavian company's maps unit disagreed with.Users of Apple's iOS devices can still use the Here Maps service via their web browser, with search, routing, orientation, transit information all made available in the web interface free of charge.Here Maps first hit the App Store in November of last year in the turbulent aftermath of Apple's flawed in-house mapping service rollout. The app included offline caching, voice-guided navigation, and public transportation guidance.Then-Nokia CEO Stephen Elop heaped expectations on the service when announcing its expansion outside of Nokia's devices, saying that "with Here we [Nokia] can bring together Nokia's location offering to deliver people a better way to explore, discover and share their world."Despite the unexpected removal, Nokia's iOS mapping effort outlasted Elop —the executive moved to Microsoft in September of this year after the Redmond, Wash.-based company's acquisition of Nokia's hardware and services divisions. Here Maps was not included in the takeover and is now one of Nokia's largest remaining business units.A mother who was crushed by an escalator which collapsed at a Chinese shopping mall on Sunday could have been saved if staff were trained properly, according to a CCTV report.
The victim, Xiang Liujuan, 31, was seen pushing her son out of danger before she herself fell into a pit created by the sudden collapse of a metal panel on top of the escalator, according to surveillance footage posted online. Her toddler, who is under three years old, was pulled away by three female shop assistants standing nearby at the Anliang Department Store in Jingzhou, Hubei.
The tragedy could have been prevented if the trio pushed a button to stop the escalator, which they knew was malfunctioning. Instead, they verbally warned Xiang, according to an investigation by state broadcaster CCTV as well as the victim’s sister-in-law.
Ma Peizhong, director of the Chinese National Elevator Inspection and Testing Centre, told CCTV on Monday night that staff members at the mall “probably did not receive training” on how to manage escalators.
The CCTV investigation revealed the shopping mall management office was notified shortly before the accident that a metal panel, which connected the escalator with the concrete floor, had become loose. Maintenance workers who checked the escalator a few days ago may have forgotten to put the panel back in place properly, CCTV said.
The three staff members standing at the top of the escalator warned Xiang about the loose panel but she, and her son, had already boarded the machine, according to the Xiang’s sister-in-law, who was first to break the story on social media.
Video: Viewer discretion advised.
There were no warning signs and Xiang could not have turned back after she received the verbal warning, the sister-in-law whose family name is Ke said on Weibo.
Xiang’s body, which became entangled in the treads, was recovered about four hours later, local firefighters told Wuhan Evening News.
Footage aired on CCTV of the accident scene showed there were two emergency buttons, one on top and one on the bottom of the escalator. But neither button was pushed.
The accident put escalator safety back into the spotlight following several escalator accidents across the country in the past few years.
In March this year, a four-year-old had his five toes cut off after his foot got stuck in an escalator in Guangzhou. In 2011, a 13-year-old boy died and dozens of others were injured after an escalator at a metro station in Beijing suddenly went into reverse. A similar incident in the Shenzhen metro system injured 25 in 2010.
At a press conference on Monday night, authorities promised a thorough investigation into the shopping mall accident.
Update: New footage shows moment staff almost fall victim to faulty escalator minutes before mother is killedThe VSC was introduced this season to avoid the deployment of the actual safety car in areas of the track where double waved yellow flags are needed.
Drivers need to adhere to a delta time on their steering wheel display during the VSC periods.
In Austin, however, both Kvyat and Ricciardo were caught out by the VSC and lost out to Mercedes rival Nico Rosberg, who overtook both despite being some five seconds behind before the VSC period.
Kvyat believes the rules need clarification as the situation is unfair.
"I think we have seen a bit of unfairness because we found that Nico, being far away from us, suddenly he was in our tail, and also because Lewis [Hamilton] because he was leading, he wasn't really following the target," said Kvyat on Thursday.
"So all the guys behind were trying to catch up. I think we'll look for clarifications from Charlie. I don't think it's a big deal. It's very easy to correct."
Ricciardo said he was overtaken by Rosberg because he was not aware that the VSC period had ended.
The Australian admitted the situation was confusing.
"I think for me... I was just confused when it was green, basically, when it was ending," Ricciardo added.
"My engineer came on the radio and said 'VSC ending' and that's normally a 10-second warning, I think.
"So I thought it was going to end soon, but then I never got any... I had to look for the boards. I didn't get anything [on my dash] in that race, so I don't know if there was an internal thing or an issue with the VSC.
"So I sort of just guessed when to go, and you look at the boards and if you don't see VSC anymore you just assume it's going. It didn't seem very clear.
"That's something we could do better. I'm sure we'll get more opinions in the drivers' briefing tomorrow.
"I know Rosberg caught us. That was already bad, I guess. And then when he passed me I didn't realise we were green basically."The toolbox of the average rebel fighting in Syria is full of things you have probably never touched: an AK-47, grenades, sniper rifle. But it also has something you might use every day: Microsoft Skype.
Skype is the go-to social network for communication between rebels, anti-government activists, journalists and officials inside and outside of Syria.
Why? Skype uses wiretapping-resistant Voice over IP (VoIP) technology, making it safer for transmitting messages while under the watchful eyes and ears of government censors. It's free to download and easy to use, both positives for cash-strapped rebels and activists. Its video-based chatting makes it easier to identify the person on the other line, important when verifying information as legit amidst the fog of war. And it provides an easy way for Syrians to gather electronically in areas where assembling in person poses too great a security risk.
"Skype was big in Libya, but it was just kind of emerging and the conflict was shorter," said Lara Setrakian, founder of Syria Deeply, the dedicated Syria news startup. "Skype is now where you go first. And we've been invited into private chat rooms, we've had some of them translated for us in real time. That is where rebel groups are posting updates and activists inside and out are having conversations."
Setrakian said that Syrian rebels have been smart about their Internet use in order to fly under the radar of government monitors.
"They've done a lot of savvy dodging, things like everyone using electricity at the same time of day to gate-crash censors, using satellite connections in hope those are better in terms of Internet," she said. "They know in Syria that Skype itself is not compromised... but if the government gets into your computer, it may be able to access your contact list and that would compromise your contacts."
"But that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone," she added, "and what we have found is that activists inside the country, they figure Skype is better than the phone and any other option they've had, so they're willing to take that risk."
SEE ALSO: Social Media Becoming Online Battlefield in Syria
There are some technology experts among the rebels and activists — but they've also been getting help from the outside. The U.S. State Department has been actively working to keep Syrians connected despite Internet blackouts and other obstructions, including the threat of government monitors and malware.
"The U.S. State Department has been providing a considerable amount of non-lethal assistance with a pretty significant focus on technology to the Syrian opposition," a U.S. government official told Mashable. He added that a part of that assistance is training on the safe use of communications technology, including Skype.
"I've read in some circles people have referred to this particular crisis as the 'Skype Revolution' much as the Iranian revolution was referred to as the 'Twitter Revolution,'" said the official. "I would say that Skype is a primary means of communication for folks within the country and for folks outside the country as well."
In addition to training, the State Department has also been providing Syrian activists with equipment to stay connected. The equipment, which is at least partially satellite-based, was put into "great use" during a country-wide Internet blackout last year, according to the official.
"We equipped the activists so they can communicate where there are no government networks where there's no cell phone or Internet coverage," said the official.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland previously told Syria Deeply that the communications equipment provided to rebels keeps them "secure from regime tampering, from regime listening, from regime interruption."
The official said he has attempted to work with Microsoft to add additional security measures to Skype, but said that it was "mostly a one-way conversation." Microsoft did not return a request for comment for this article.
Skype, for all its advantages, requires an Internet connection to work — a connection the rebels have been working hard to establish and preserve with outside help. The rebels, said the official, deserve credit for leveraging communications technologies "often in a novel way." When asked about those methods, the official declined to comment for security reasons, but did say that "most of them have to do with augmenting these networks in a certain ways that are not necessarily intended."
"It's extremely impressive that all available technologies are being deployed by the Syrian opposition," said the official.
Photo via Khalil Mazraawi/AFP/Getty ImagesWashington: US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Saturday about the consequences of any collapse of the Palestinian Authority, saying it would be a threat to Israel.
Since October 1, almost daily assaults and clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers and violence between Palestinians and Israeli settlers have killed 109 Palestinians, including an Israeli Arab, 17 Israelis, an American and an Eritrean, according to an AFP count.
Israeli officials privately accept that the violence is likely to continue.
Palestinians are frustrated by the failure of decades of peace talks and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, with many also losing faith in the leadership of president Mahmud Abbas.
"President Abbas spoke more despairingly, my friends, than I have ever heard him about the sense of hopelessness that the Palestinian people feel," Kerry, who traveled to the region last month, said in a speech at the Brookings Institution.
He added that the level of distrust between the two sides "has never been more profound," calling for an end to the violence before it worsens yet again.
"Without the PA security forces, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) could be forced to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers to the West Bank indefinitely to fill the void," Kerry said.
"Are Israelis prepared for the consequences this would have for their children and grandchildren who serve in the IDF when the inevitable friction leads to confrontation and violence?"
The top US diplomat also hit out at the building of settlements by Israel on land Palestinians see as part of their future state.
"The continued settlement growth raises honest questions about Israel`s long-term intentions and will only make separating from the Palestinians much more difficult," he said.
"There are no easy answers, but we can`t stop trying to find solutions that move us closer to peace."A WOMAN who claimed she was raped by a stranger when sleeping at her boss’s house has been caught fibbing by her own FitBit.
Jeannine Risley, 43, has been criminally charged after she told police she was sexually assaulted at knifepoint by an intruder while she was staying at her employer’s home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in March.
In her horrific account, ABC News reports she said she was dragged from her bed at midnight and raped in the bathroom by a man who was wearing boots.
But her own fitness watch got the better of her.
Officers who embarked on the manhunt detected holes in Risley’s story when they found no footsteps in the snow surrounding the house, and no signs of an intruder indoors.
Detectives steered their investigation towards Risley and discovered tracking data on her FitBit — which she initially said was lost in the attack — revealed she had been walking around during the time she said she was sleeping.
Things got murkier when police uncovered that her boss had recently told her she would no longer be a temporary director with the company.
The criminal complaint states Risley was directed to inform staff of the change during the week of the reported rape, but she had not yet done so.
She has been charged with false reports to law enforcement, false alarms to public safety, and tampering with evidence for allegedly overturning furniture and placing a knife to make it appear she had been raped by an intruder.Show full PR text
Digital Storm Debuts the Marauder Line for PC Gamers
New Marauder line of affordable high-performance gaming PCs pack game
demolishing components while starting at $799
Fremont, Calif. - (April 18, 2012) – Digital Storm, the predominant name in computer system integration and engineering, proudly introduces the Marauder line of high performance gaming PCs with a ground-breaking price. Designed with PC gamers in mind, the Marauder gaming line delivers an incredibly immersive gaming experience while being one of the most affordable gaming PCs ever offered by Digital Storm.
Gamers who have endured lag filled game-play with unimpressive low-resolution visuals finally can break free thanks to Digital Storm's Marauder gaming line, the first gaming PCs built around Corsair's Vengeance C70 chassis. No longer do gamers have to settle for sub-par performance because of a limited budget thanks to the Marauder's ground-breaking price.
"With this new line, we've set a new standard for the price versus performance ratio. Our engineers have always wanted to create a line of powerful gaming PCs that are within reach of every gamer," said Rajeev Kuruppu, Digital Storm's Director of Product Development. "With complete systems starting at $799, this is the very first time Digital Storm has offered such an affordable gaming PC."
"Digital Storm is known for building dream PCs with leading-edge technology, uncompromising quality, and aggressive styling," said Ruben Mookerjee, VP and General Manager of the Components Business Unit at Corsair. "So we are extremely honored that Digital Storm has selected the Corsair Vengeance C70 case as the perfect foundation for their new Marauder PCs."
Marauder systems are made with the same boutique level quality and care that every Digital Storm system is famous for. Prior to shipping to the customer, each Digital Storm system undergoes a rigorous 72-Hour Stress-Test. Digital Storm technicians stress-test
and benchmark the system via industry standard testing software coupled with a proprietary testing process that detects components which can be prone to future failure.
To view Digital Storm's Marauder line of gaming PCs, click here: http://www.digitalstormonline.com/marauder.aspI'm among those who trust and respect the Supreme Court – and precisely because I believe in what the court stands for, I was flabbergasted to see how Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin overstepped her role by declaring in a recent speech that Canada is guilty of "cultural genocide" against aboriginal people.
This is unacceptable on many counts.
Judges, especially those on the highest court, should be bound by the strictest duty of reserve. They must avoid dabbling in politics and controversies, if only to assure the public that they will be thoroughly objective when confronted with a difficult legal case. Of course all judges come to the bench with their own opinions, but like Caesar's wife, they should appear above suspicion of entertaining preconceived views.
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Yes, their liberty of speech is limited, precisely because their power over governments and individuals is so great. Judges speak through their rulings and these rulings have long-lasting effects on the society. By bluntly stating that Canada's treatment of aboriginals was a "cultural genocide" – a highly inflammatory statement – the Chief Justice opened herself to accusations of prejudice when her court is faced with another cause regarding aboriginal rights. Far from helping aboriginal groups, this declaration will be a disservice to them as long as Chief Justice McLachlin presides over the court.
Even with the qualifier "cultural," genocide is a loaded word. It was defined by the Holocaust, an operation that is unparalleled in human history, and there's been some sort of consensus, lately, that the word could also apply to the cases of the Armenians and the Tutsis. But as badly treated as they've been in past, it's a stretch to affirm that Canadian aboriginals were the victims of genocidal policies.
By any account, the colonization was actually less brutal and cruel in Canada than in the United States and Latin America, or many other parts of the world. In New France, the colonizing process was different than in the West because it took place much earlier: The French settlers quickly made friends within the aboriginal population in part because they needed them to survive in an unknown continent, in part because they wanted to convert them (in that era, saving souls from an eternity in hell was a Christian's duty). Throughout the years, there have been countless mixed marriages in Quebec. Is this a sign of cultural genocide?
What about the children in France's Brittany, who were punished for speaking their language at school (the teachers would hang a clog around the neck)? All of France's regional languages have been eradicated by the central government, yet not even the most politically correct French moralist would dare say that France committed a cultural genocide.
If all the massacres, all the wars of conquest and all the state-sponsored repressions that happened throughout human history were to be qualified as "genocidal," then everything and anything is a genocide, and the word doesn't mean anything.
Serious historians take pains to avoid "presentism," an intellectual bias by which past events are analyzed outside their historical context, in the light of today's values. Presentism is saying, for example, that Plato was "sexist" because his Republic didn't include gender parity. The system of residential schools was terribly wrong, we know now, but at the time it was commonly seen as beneficial because it would allow Indian children to be educated and converted.
In any case, there's an election looming and if Chief Justice McLachlin feels like getting involved in politics, now is the time to run for office.(NaturalNews) An Oklahoma state lawmaker has proposed legislation that would essentially protect all of the state's elected politicians from being arrested for a wide range of criminal activity.According to a report by, taking bribes, breaking laws and enacting unconstitutional legislation as a sop to corporate interests has pretty much been standard operating procedure in American politics.But state Rep. Kevin Calvey, R-Oklahoma City, wants to make it official by preventing the arrest of state officials for many crimes and unconscionable behaviors:Specifically, the bill proposes:"The jurisdiction of a prosecution against a principal in the commission of a public offense, when such principal is a state elected official, state legislator, district court judicial officer, appellate judicial officer or an appointee of a state board or state commission at the time of the commission of the offense, is within the sole and exclusive prosecutorial authority of the Attorney General of Oklahoma. Such an action must be filed in the county of residence of the state officer."Not all state officials are supportive of the measure. And some are distrustful of the bill's intent."It's a big deal to me. I'm upset and concerned," Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater said, as reported by. "This bill creates a different class of citizens that would be protected from the normal prosecution process.""I am suspicious... that is what this is really about," Prater added.Calvey said the purpose of his legislation is to stop "malicious prosecution" of politicians, citing legal action taken against former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Charges were brought against the potential 2016 GOP presidential contender by an Austin grand jury in August for alleged abuse of power after he publicly threatened to defund a public accountability office when its director refused to resign following a publicized drunk driving arrest and conviction, and being recorded abusing her position in an attempt to get out of trouble.Calvey said he doesn't believe anything "so outrageous" would happen in Oklahoma. But he added, "who knows who will get elected to those offices in the future? I do think it's just better to prevent that kind of thing from ever arising."The point is to not allow a locally elected official to effectively have undue influence over statewide policy," he continued.reported that the legislation does not spell out specifics about what would be considered a public offense, or what sort of immunity lawmakers would be granted. That has led critics to assume that just about any criminal activity at the local level would be permissible."Since Calvey himself acknowledges that the point would be to avoid legislators or politicians from being prosecuted for abuse-of-power, this bill proposes to set forth a very dangerous precedence that could lead to even less accountability for politicians," the website reported.As further noted by thesite, if such legislation passes in Oklahoma, it could spread to other states -- and, likely even, Washington, D.C. -- although the Constitution's Article 1, Sect. 6, Clause 1 reads:That said, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1908 case () ruled that the clause does not provide Congress with any immunity from criminal prosecution.Brian O'Driscoll has been cited for stamping on Simone Favaro in Ireland's 22-15 Six Nations defeat by Italy on Saturday.
A brief statement issued by the tournament organisers confirmed that the independent citing commissioner, Aurwel Morgan, has decided the incident warranted further scrutiny.
The date and location for O'Driscoll's hearing have yet to be announced.
O'Driscoll, who was winning his 125th cap for Ireland, lifted and planted his right leg into the chest of Favaro, the Italy openside flanker, and was sent to the sin-bin by the referee, Wayne Barnes.
That act, born of frustration, marred what may be O'Driscoll's final game for his country. The Leinster centre has stated publicly that he is yet to make a decision about his international future but many observers expect the 34-year-old to retire this summer.
However, Declan Kidney, the Ireland head coach, believes that O'Driscoll's form in the Six Nations shows that he can carry on at this level.
"Brian has had a strong Six Nations. He was outstanding against Wales and had a good match against France. I thought he did well against Italy too," Kidney said.
"He's earned the space and time to be able to make up his own mind. Players are the only ones who know when the time is right to go."
A statement issued by the Six Nations read: "Brian O'Driscoll, the Ireland centre, has been cited by the independent citing commissioner for an alleged stamping or trampling on an opponent, contrary to Law 10.4 (b), in the RBS Six Nations match between Italy and Ireland on Saturday 16th March 2013. Details of the hearing will be announced later."Photo via
You may think you know how gross Kirk Cameron is, but unless you saw his latest “movie,” Unstoppable, you have no idea. I have no problem with faith. I find materialists who say bullshit like, “Religion? No, thanks. I don’t believe in fairy tales! “ just as annoying and thoughtless as fundamentalist Christians. That said, I’m not a fundamentalist Christian, so I had to answer a lot of stupid questions before I went to Kirk’s showing of Unstoppable at a movie theater in a mall. For example, I wondered, What should I wear to look like an evangelical, so they’re comfortable answering my questions? I couldn’t wear my gay San Francisco garb, so I threw on a shirt that read, “You Need to Be Nicer,” on the front. (It’s actually a Cardigans band tee.)
Spreading the Word, right?
As it turns out, my anxiety was unnecessary, because there wasn’t anyone to interview at the theater. In the huge cinema, I counted 24 people—some of whom left before the event was over.
When the event started, Kirk appeared on the screen. His tight face hadn’t changed much since Growing Pains, and he was at pains to say that the movie had sold out theaters all across “this nation.” (It’s always “this nation” with Kirk and the other prominent evangelicals.) Again and again, the empty theater was reminded that Unstoppable was a success, and that it was being screened again because of high demand.
After Kirk rambled about his “successful” movie, he spoke to Liberty University students with pop musician Mandisa, who sang the pornographically titled “Overcomer.” Then Kirk brought out a Christian wearing an American-flag tie, who had lost his son in Benghazi, a soldier in a wheelchair, and country musician Warren Barfield.
The woman sitting at the end of my row wore a straw hat. She was all alone, but she seemed to feel some sort of communion with the screen. She clapped to the beat, as Mandisa sang. Honestly, the music wasn’t that bad. Mandisa was no worse than vintage Destiny’s Child. Wash out the vocals and add some clattering background noises and you’d get a solid four stars. And, really, what can you say to the dad or the soldier who lost his legs? They made their own decisions in difficult times. There’s no need to take shots at them.
The movie is another story.
Kirk says the movie deals with the “faith wrecking” question of why God lets bad things happen to good people. It’s a question, he claims, that challenged him when a friend’s teenage son, Matthew, died. Cameron promises that the film will be very personal and a journey into his faith. It isn’t.
Unstoppable isn’t a grappling with theological questions, the work of a wistfully faithful person, or a personal journey. As I’m sure you have already guessed, it’s not the work of thoughtful biblical scholarship either. Unstoppable is the full-frontal display of an egomaniac who has somehow found his way into a position of power.
The movie is mostly a bunch of shots of Cameron talking and looking pretty. We see Kirk sitting on the stairs of his porch to show he’s pensive, picking up dirt from the ground and throwing it at the camera to show off his sex appeal, and walking through a field to prove he’s a deep motherfucker. Seriously, the bulk of the movie is Kurt posing and talking about the Bible. Actually, talking “about” the Bible is too generous—Kirk merely repeats what happens in the Bible while frantically expressing how cool the Bible is. All this is interspersed with music video versions of events from the Bible. Emerging from the mud |
. policy, he believed that Nusra was focused only on fighting Assad. Asked whether it might attack the U.S. in the future, he appeared not to know. After mulling the idea, he said, "The group's policy isn't thinking to attack the U.S."
Yet the continued recruitment of foreign fighters to the Nusra ranks, including Westerners, has alarmed many observers. And while Turkey and some rebel groups are working to crack down on the foreign fighters flowing across the country's border to fight ISIS, they appear to be more lenient if the foreigner has arranged to join Nusra, according to smugglers, rebels, and activists along the border. Syrians say this is because Nusra can still help them overthrow the regime.
Some moderate rebels, on the other hand, remain wary of Nusra's end game. They suspect that the group's approach toward local rebels and civilians — far more accommodating than ISIS's — would change if it gained enough power. "There may be a dirty game," the commander of a battalion of moderate rebels that receives covert U.S. military support said in a recent interview in Antakya.
Adnan Hadad, a Syrian journalist and activist based between Aleppo and the Turkish city of Gaziantep, used a tongue-in-cheek term to describe the softened image that Nusra sought present of itself: "cool terrorists."
But another Nusra member, a fighter who also helped to oversee its oil production in the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor before ISIS overtook it this summer, said he supported Nusra because he saw it as the best way to fight both ISIS and the regime. "They are individuals who want to liberate the country from a tyrant," he said. "The reason I joined Jabhat al-Nusra is because it knew from the beginning that it had to rely on itself. With all due respect to the American public, we knew that our lives meant nothing to them."
He said he didn't blame Americans for fearing the group — "the citizens of the U.S. have every right to say that Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS are two faces of the same coin." But he made the same kind of distinction between Nusra and the global organization of al-Qaeda that many Syrians cite when explaining their support for Nusra. "There is no insurgent in Jabhat al-Nusra who has ever met Zawahiri," he said. "It's kind of an institutional structure that we're part of al-Qaeda. But on the ground, all the decisions are made among the fighters of Nusra themselves."
At his home in Antakya the week before the strikes, the Nusra official warned that U.S. aggression against the group would change the mindset of its local fighters, saying that attacking Nusra would be "the biggest mistake."
"We never talk about the U.S. at all," he said. "Don't attack us, and don't make us attack you."
Reached by phone after the U.S. airstrikes on Tuesday, he struck a more ominous tone: "After this attack, the U.S. has no one to blame but themselves."The next series of The Voice UK will be the last to be broadcast on the BBC, after it was "poached by another broadcaster", the corporation says.
Mark Linsey, acting director of BBC Television, said in a statement that it "wouldn't get into a bidding war or pay inflated prices to keep the show".
The next series, which begins in January, will be the fifth to be shown by the BBC.
The show's new broadcaster has not yet been confirmed.
Mr Linsey said: "The BBC is incredibly proud of The Voice, but the fifth series which starts in January will be our last.
"We always said we wouldn't get into a bidding war or pay inflated prices to keep the show, and it's testament to how the BBC has built the programme up - and established it into a mainstay of the Saturday night schedule - that another broadcaster has poached it."
Funding politics
Last month the BBC said it had made a "final" bid to keep the show for two more years.
Boy George and Paloma Faith will join will.i.am and Ricky Wilson on the judging panel for the next series.
The show is currently made for BBC One by production companies Talpa and Wall to Wall. ITV bought Talpa for £355m earlier this year.
The Voice was singled out in a consultation paper published by the government, ahead of the BBC's charter renewal, as a format that is "similar to ITV's X Factor", and which was bought in from overseas rather than being developed in-house.
Culture Secretary John Whittingdale has questioned whether such shows are "distinctive" enough from those aired by commercial rivals.
In August, the BBC's director of television Danny Cohen - who is leaving his role at the end of November - defended the corporation's right to air entertainment shows like The Voice.There has recently been a claim that in the post-peak oil world, life will go on pretty much as normal. For a while, as the world squeezes inefficiencies out of the economic system and fuel switching occurs, this is true. But one can not seriously believe that the world economy is infinitely elastic with regards to energy. With regard to the agricultural system, there is data which shows the limits to this inelasticity and these limits are due to the laws of physics.
I became fascinated with the connection between our food supply and energy when I first learned of the problems that North Korea was having feeding itself. (see here ). This data showed me something amazing about modern society, we don't live in the information age, we don't live in the industrial age, we live in the agricultural age. Without food, we have no industry or information. Unfortunately many don't understand this. Nor do they understand that today the modern farming system is merely a means to turn petroleum into food, via mechanized planting and harvesting, and the use of petroleum based insecticides and fertilizers which consume huge amounts of energy in their manufacture. According to Wikipedia, who gets it from Science, 1% of the world's energy goes into the manufacture of chemical fertilizer ( here ).
The USDA provides information on the economics of farming. The data comes in the form of dollars spent on various items. I will focus on the dollars spent for fuel, chemical sprays and fertilizer. These three items are directly related to petroleum, and using the cost of the day and the price of oil of the day, one can convert these numbers into barrels of oil spent. For instance, in 1975 wheat farmers spent an average of $11.44 per acre on fertilizer. As noted above, fertilizer is an energy intensive product and its value is largely determined by the amount of energy used. Since the price of oil in 1975 averaged $11.53/bbl, this means that the wheat farmers spent.99 bbl/acre on fertilizer. The farmer spent only $1.19 on chemical sprays per acre meaning he spent.1 bbl/ac. Fuel is much more directly (although not perfectly) convertable to barrels. In 1975 farmers spent $4.02/ac. on fuel and lube, which is converted to.35 bbl/ac. With this methodology I studied the energy expenditures on wheat, corn, rice and barley farming.
These four crops are the major food-grains of the world. How the farming community responds to high oil prices is of immense interest to the world community. If, as that author, mentioned above, claims the world will have 25-30% less oil in 2030 with no ill effects, this can only be true if agriculture has the elasticity to handle such a reduction. Sure we can drive less, take buses to work, drive motor scooters etc. This will seriously reduce the demand for energy. But, can we drive a tractor plowing a field 25% less? I don't think so. This is because of the laws of physics. The energy used to move a tractor across a field is Work = force x distance. The distance is constant, and so is the force (or nearly so). The force here is actually the frictional forces the tractor experiences. They must be over come. If there were no friction, then Newton's first law, that a body in motion remains in motion would come into play and a tractor once set moving could continue to move in a straight line. But because the plow against the dirt, the tires against the dirt, the internal friction of the engine all operate to slow the tractor down, there is a minimal energy which must be expended if one expects to plow that field. The question is, can we see that limitation in the data from the USDA?
In plotting the oil price, yields and fuel costs of wheat farmers over time, I noticed that there does appear to be a minimum energy expenditure in the data. The inflation adjusted price of oil is scaled to fit onto this graph, and both the uninflated and inflated oil prices come from the 2007 BP Statistical Review of World Energy. One immediately sees that when the price of oil is high, the fuel use drops to approximately.3 bbl/ac.. When the price of oil is low, the fuel use rises. One can find a similar thing for rice, corn and barley.
I won't show the same thing set of charts for the other grains (although corns minimum effective fuel use seems to be rising), because one can display the data more effectively in another format. By making fuel use a function of inflation adjusted oil price, one sees the elasticity of fuel use on wheat farms. Below $40/bbl, the use of fuels to drive equipment rapidly rises. Clearly the farmers are having few pangs of guilt about driving any equipment when the prices is below $40. But the behavior is quite different when the price reaches $40/bbl. Fuel use flattens out, as if almost all of the elasticity has been removed from the system. Only at the $90 level is there any evidence of further restrictions in fuel use. I would conclude from this that at $75/bbl, wheat farming has already squeezed out the inefficiencies and given a 20-30% drop in future supplies as is expected, the only way to accommodate this is to not drive as much (although, fertilizer and chemical use will turn out to be more elastic)
Here is the same for corn, rice and barley
What about fertilizer use?
Looking at these charts we see more elasticity in the higher oil price regions. The use of fertilizer with wheat, rice and barley continue to drop as the price of oil goes up. Corn is a bit more complex and it isn't clear why. One sees two behaviors below the $45 oil price. But one thing is clear on all four graphs. Below $45 the application of fertilizer goes way up. This is not a phenomenon related to long term changes in the practices of fertilizer application. Even in the mid-1990s, the use of fertilizer rose more rapidly as the price of oil fell. It is clear that farmers are reluctant to go down in fertilizer use too rapidly as the oil price rises, but, this is the second place that they can cut when oil prices are high.
The next four charts show the elasticity of chemical usage. This includes insecticide. Clearly its use is even more elastic than is fertilizer. And once again we see a split behavior. Rapid rise of usage below $40/bbl and linear reduction above that value. We see this for each of the grains.
One surprise in this data, at least it was surprising to me. One can't easily correlate yield (bu/ac) with oil price. Nor can one see a correlation between farm profits and oil price. The best reason for this that I can think of is that both yield and profits are subject to so many other variables than oil price. Rainfall (and when it occurs), temperature, crop disease, all play a role in both yield and profitability. The oil price signal gets swamped.
Another surprise was that crop yield didn't correlate with fertilizer use in the USDA data. One can have high expenditures on oil based items, only to have the crop fail; conversely, one can have spend little and have the other conditions simply perfect for maximizing yield. That may not be comforting when one looks at controlled experiments with fertilizer. This site reports tests of nitrogen fertilizer on 3 test plots in Montana. One test plot didn't respond to nitrogen, but the other two did. Here are the results from the other two.
Brady Mt,
N Yield
lb/ac bu/ac Protein% weight/ac sulfur %
0 46.2 14.1 58.6 0.171
30 47.3 14.4 58.4 0.177
60 49.5 15.1 58.1 0.181
90 50.0 15.4 58.0 0.188
Sunburst, MT
N Yield
lb/ac bu/ac Protein% weight/ac sulfur %
0 23.4 10.8 58.3 0.160
50 33.3 12.7 57.3 0.177
100 37.7 15.2 56.1 0.204
150 35.8 16.9 54.9 0.228
Studies in Kentucky also show a 3.5 bu/ac increase in wheatyield with nitrogen fertilizer.
And for corn, one can find this abstract
Proper fertility management in corn production is important both from an economic and environmental standpoint. A field study was conducted to investigate the effect of starter fertilizer on corn yield northern Great Plains. The experiment was established within a two-year corn/soybean rotation, with four replications. The experiment was carried out for four years (2000-2003). Starter fertilizer treatments consisted of four nitrogen (N) rates (0, 7, 14, and 21 lb N ac-1). These N starter treatments contained phosphorus (P) and potassium (K). An additional treatment of no starter fertilizer (no N, P or K) was also incorporated into the experiment. All starter fertilizer was applied at planting in a band 2 inches below and 2 inches to the side of the seed furrow. An additional 75 lb N ac-1 was applied side-dress at the V6 growth stage to all plots. Although the magnitude of grain yield varied for the four different growing seasons, largely due to rainfall, the yield trend was consistent with respect to treatment differences regardless of year. Comparison between the no starter (no N, P or K) treatment and the P and K treatment (no N + P and K) resulted in the largest yield increases, with yield increasing up to 36 % for the 2003 growing season. There was a significant positive response to increases in N rate for all years except the 2002 growing season, which was the lowest yielding year out of the four. Application of starter fertilizer can have a significant positive impact on yield and quality of corn grown in the northern Great Plains.
Experiments tell us that lack of fertilizer will reduce crop yields and that is exactly what oil prices cause--reduction in fertilizer. Why the difference? Precision application of fertilizer rather than the spray-it-all-over-the-place techniques have begun to come into play, minimizing the effect of lessened fertilizer application--so far. Eventually, even that might not be enough to avoid a drop in crop yield.
With corn, one of the interesting realizations is that a 19th century farm grew about 30 bushels per acre, while today, with our machinery we can grow up to 160 bushels per acre. How this is done needs some explanation. The first thing is that on a modern farm, 30,000 corn plants grow per acre. This is about 1.5 square feet per plant. This simply can't be done without machinery. I am in the process of purchasing a 100-acre farm. Let's say I wanted to plant corn by hand and achieve those densities. At 5 seconds per seed, it would take 41 hours to do one acre. And 173 days to do the farm. Of course, by having lots of children I can put them to work. With 10 children, I could do it in 17 days. This shows that without machinery, the plant densities will drop. A modern wheat field has 1.3 million plants. Clearly, without machinery, this is a throw-the-seed-out-there-and-hope-the-birds-don't-eat-it-all exercise.
So, having shown the problem of planting without machinery, we can see that any reduction of oil is likely to cause a serious drop in crop yield, leading to famine. When we can only drive our tractors 80% as much as we do today, it will effectively mean only 80% of the land will be under cultivation. And like everything else, we are being squeezed from two sides. The population increase requires a higher rather than a lower yield per acre. In a recent article The Telegraph spoke of this problem. After pointing out that since the 1950s, there has been an 11 percent increase in cultivatable land, yields have gone up 120 per cent. As they say, 'they aren't making new land anymore'. Ferguson further states:
“But can world food production keep pace? Plant physiologist Lloyd T Evans has estimated that "we must reach an average yield of four tons per hectare… to support a population of 8 billion". But yields right now are, as we have seen, just three tons per hectare. And a world of eight billion people may be less than 20 years away.” (Ferguson, 2007)
Irrigation
Many areas of the world are involved with irrigation to support the agricultural efforts. My former sister-in-law lives on a farm in western Nebraska. They tap the Ogallala reservoir to water their land. Over the many years, the water level has dropped forcing wells to go deeper. This has happened throughout the world as the farmers try to get water to grow their crops. Vacuum pumps (the ones with the handle) can only bring water up from less than 32 feet deep. If you go deeper, you need either a bucket system or electricity. And therein lies the rub. As energy supplies grow scarce, electricity will begin to become less and less reliable. Consider these guys from India. Notice the depth of their water wells.
"Since the 1990s, India has been a major net exporter of rice, shipping nearly 4.5 million tons last year.
"But annual yield increases began to slow over the past decade. Farmers cranked up fertilizer and water use, draining the water table. Many began planting two crops a year, taxing the soil. Punjabi area officials discouraged farmers from planting two crops and in some places outlawed it, but many farmers ignored them."
"I'm doing mischief against the government,' concedes Kanwar Singh, a second rice crop recently on a stretch of flooded land near the northern India city of Karnal. He says he now has to pump water from 300 feet below the surface, compared with 70 feet 10 years ago." 'In a year or two, maybe it will be finished,' he says." (Barta, 2007, p. A10)
and
"Lakhbir Singh, 35, this year planted aerobic rice for the first time. He says his costs have tripled over the past decade. His well was about 60 feet deep 10 years ago; now, it's down to 450 feet, and he has to use a special submersible engine to help haul the water to surface. The health of his soil has deteriorated, so he's using more fertilizer." (Barta, 2007, p. A10)
If electricity becomes problematical, as it must in a post peak-oil world, pumping water from those depths will become difficult but not impossible. There is the tried and true wind mill. At this site one can find a table on vertical distances one can lift water with a given size windmill. To lift water 450 feet, as Lakhbir Singh requires, one needs a 14 ft-blade windmill and a 15-20 mph wind. With this, and an estimated 4-5 hours per day of pumping, he could raise 190 gallons per hour during the pumping time for a daily 1000 gallons per day. This is 231,000 cubic inches of water, or enough water to cover an area 231,000 sq. in. in area one inch deep in water. That is 1600 sq feet or 4% of an acre and one inch isn't enough water for most rice varieties. This would hardly be classified as large scale agriculture and I wonder if he could feed his family, much less feed mine.
It can't happen in the U. S., right? Wrong. There was a recent report in the Wall Street Journal talking about how Texas will begin to experience the electricity problems that California is now experiencing. Why? Because we won't build coal-fired electrical plants. For the farmers in the drier parts of Texas, pumped irrigation is the only way they can grow the food we eat. Thus, the effects of peak oil will spread even to our ability to obtain water for irrigation.
Agriculture and Slavery
In discussing these issues with a statistics professor friend of mine, he made a comment that made me think. I had told him my favorite statistic (Price 1995)
“Today, the extrasomatic energy used by people around the world is equal to the work of some 280 billion men. It is as if every man, woman, and child in the world had 50 slaves. In a technological society such as the United States, every person has more than 200 such "ghost slaves."
I also told him that the energy in one gallon of gasoline represents the physical labor of one human for 3 weeks. After hearing this, my friend then asked me if the modern world doesn't have slavery because of cheap energy. I must admit that was something I wish I had thought of. Slavery still exists in the world, but it exists in the poorer parts of the world. Looking at the calculation about planting corn above, one can understand the need for cheap labor, whether that labor is one's children or property. I must make it clear that I think this is absolutely horrible, but every society in the past was a slave-holding society. If we lose our energy and have to live the life they lived, are we naive enough to think our descendants will avoid the mistakes they made?
Conclusion
Peak oil represents a grave threat to our food supply, in my opinion. Few are aware of how important the petroleum industry is to the agricultural revolution in which we live. This is why I am currently trying to buy a farm. Consider this, prior to the agricultural revolution, estimates of hunter-gatherer population sizes, based upon anthropological data show that humans were quite few in number.:
"Measures of world population size on the eve of the transition to agriculture, some 12 000 to 10 000 years ago, come from estimates of the maximum population density that this way of life could sustain. These generally range from 5 to 10 million people, and the highest figure--calculated on the assumption that the world was'saturated' with hunter-gatherers --is only 15 million." (Landers, 1992, p. 402)
Agriculture based only upon animal energy allowed the human population to grow to about 750 million by 1750 (Cavali-Sforza, 1994, p. 68). Peak oil will do several bad things to the world's energy supply. It will force us to use coal, and if one uses coal to replace oil, because coal will be used at a faster rate, the US turns its 200 year supply of coal into a 44 year supply (assuming that there really is a 200 year supply to start with). This implies that by the end of this century, we will no longer have fossil fuels with which we can foster global warming. Nor will we have fossil fuels with which to run our tractors and we will return at the very least to the 1750s. Going back to an animal-energy based economy means that approximately 5/6ths of us must die. The post fossil fuel world, lacking some new energy source, will consist of not many more than 750 million souls. What an ugly century this will be. While there are some long-shot grasps-at-straws possible replacements for fossil fuels, the political turmoil resulting from mass starvation may preclude their development and implementation.
References
Patrick Barta, "Feeding Billions, A Grain at a Time," Wall Street Journal, Saturday/Sunday July 28-29, 2007, p. A10
L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paoli Menozzi and Alberto Piazzi, The History and Geography of Human Genes, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)
J. Landers, "Reconstructing Ancient Populations," in Steve Jones et al, editors, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Niall Ferguson, “Worry about bread, not oil,” The Telegraph, 7/29/2007 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/07/29/do2901.xmlMarilyn Taylor and her husband Dehaven McClain are suing NYPD for civil rights violations, assault, battery, negligence and violations to the state and federal constitutions after an incident at a Manhattan train station when they and their three children got pepper sprayed.
Taylor and McClain were with their 5-month-old baby and 2 and 4 years old children. As they were on their way to board the L-train, McClain opened the service door so he could push the baby stroller through. Police officers, identified as Maripily Clase, Suranjit Dey and Jermaine Hodge accused the family of trying to skip a fare and one of the cops pepper sprayed Taylor, but some of the spray hit the children too. The lawsuit states that “the pepper-spray caused the children to scream out and choked the two-year old, who went into fits of vomiting”.
Taylor was arrested and the cops pushed her down the stairs so hard she got bruises on her wrists and back from handcuffs. She was released with an adjournment in contemplation of a dismissal, meaning all charges against her will get dropped if she doesn’t get arrested again within a certain period of time.
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Weeks after the incident, the children are still suffering from the emotional trauma caused by it.
They are now too scared to ride the subway and get very frightened every time they see a police officer and also have nightmares and trouble sleeping at night. NYPD didn’t release any statements regarding this lawsuit.This evening, United States President Donald Trump authorized a Tomahawk missile strike in Syria. According to news reports, several Tomahawk missiles were launched at Syria. How much do Tomahawk missiles cost? How much did the United States spend on missiles in this attack? Read on.
Tomahawk Missiles: Powerful But Expensive
The Tomahawk missile was created in the 1970s, but it gained notoriety in the 1991 U.S. war in Iraq, Operation Desert Storm. In that war, Tomahawk missiles were used heavily to hit military targets in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Tomahawk missiles were developed by Raytheon and other associated defense contractors as a modular, versatile weapon that could be launched from many different locations and/or platforms. Over the last several decades, Tomahawk missiles have become more and more expensive, due to technology and warhead upgrades. Tomahawk missiles can now be launched from ships as well as other launch devices. Current versions of the Tomahawk missile include features like the ability to look at a topography on land and match it to maps in order to increase accuracy. It can also be reprogrammed during flight, so the target can be changed. Tomahawk missiles can communicate back with base using a satellite link, and they can send images and sensor information about the damage. There are currently plans to turn the Tomahawk into a supersonic device.
How Much Do Tomahawk Missiles Cost
The Tomahawk missile program has been going on for decades, and has cost over $10 billion dollars — just for the development. This does not include the actual cost of the missiles themselves. The cost of each Tomahawk missile varies, depending on the type of missile. More simple versions of the Tomahawk missiles cost $500,000. According to preliminary reports by Brian Williams of NBC News, it appears that the missiles used in the Syria attack cost around that much. However, the Block IV versions of the Tomahawk missile, which are more complex and can hit moving targets, cost up to $1.5 million each. The total cost of President Trump’s attack on Syria, then, is between $30 million and $100 million.A vocal segment of the population has serious concerns about the effect of pornography in society and challenges its public use and acceptance. This manuscript reviews the major issues associated with the availability of sexually explicit material. It has been found everywhere scientifically investigated that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased. It is further been found that sexual erotica has not only wide spread personal acceptance and use but general tolerance for its availability to adults. This attitude is seen by both men and women and not only in urban communities but also in reputed conservative ones as well. Further this finding holds nationally in the United States and in widely different countries around the world. Indeed, no country where this matter has been scientifically studied has yet been found to think pornography ought be restricted from adults. The only consistent finding is that adults prefer to have the material restricted from children’s production or use.
1. Introduction
Recent American national public radio discussions of pornography (Justice Talking, 21 December 2007; 24 March 2008) were large on opinion and anecdote with only a modicum of law discussed. Actual data about any research demonstrated effects of pornography were sparse and many significant studies and findings were omitted from the programs’ presentations and subsequent blogs. This article reviews salient issues and data regarding sexually explicit materials (SEM) that deserve to be considered in any serious overview of the topic.
Pornography can be defined as any media basically construed as intended to entertain or arouse erotic desire. This is the most common definition used by researchers and the courts. Among some persons and groups the term and associated materials have negative connotations and they wish to express that sentiment in the definition (see below). For others pornography is viewed positively. In this paper the term and pornographic materials are considered neutral. In the United States these materials are legal under the First Amendment unless judged obscene in accordance with a so-called Miller standard (see below).
Persons and organizations against the availability and ready access to pornography usually argue such materials are detrimental to social order leading to rape and sexual assault or other sex related crimes. Many such persons are so convinced in the harmful effects of these materials they believe they ought to be restricted in availability and even made illegal. Others argue, that pornography, although not always leading to physical crimes, contribute to the degradation of women. They claim there is harm to the women who perform sexually, (whether or not they appear to consent to participate in it they are being exploited economically or physically coerced to do so): they claim there is harm to the women who do not participate in it but are denied their own, supposedly non-pornographic, sexuality, because they are encouraged to perform the acts depicted in it by men who are acculturated by it: and they claim harm in the sense that the depicted acts can lead directly to conditions of physical endangerment for all women. Among the strongest expressions of such beliefs are in the works of Robin Morgan (Morgan, 1980), Andrea Dworkin (Dworkin, 1981) Susan Brownmiller (Brownmiller, 1975) and Catherine MacKinnon (MacKinnon & Dworkin, 1988).
The other side of the argument holds that pornography is an expression of fantasies that provide pleasure (Christensen, 1990), are media that can inhibit sexual activity (Wolf, 2003), and materials that can act as a positive displacement activity for sexual aggression (D'Amato, 2006). And identified feminists like Camille Paglia (Paglia, 1991), Leonore Tieffer (Tiefer, 1986), N.B. McKormick (McKormick, 1994) and others consider that pornography actually empowers women by loosening them from the shackles of social prudery and anti-sexual restrictions. Deborah Cameron, for instance, argues that she is “propornography” believing that sexually explicit representations have “liberatory potential for women …” (Cameron, 1990).
With such strong feelings at stake what is the evidence for demonstrated negative or positive effects of pornography? Considering that the production, distribution and sale of sexually explicit materials are worldwide and part of a multi-billion dollar industry with ready access to anyone with a computer, or a so-called “Adult” store, one would think the negative affects, if actual, would be obvious and readily available.
2. Availability and Consumer Interest
Consider the following: some 10,000 – 15,000 pornographic movies are produced annually in the United States (Cronin, 2008). The Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry-lobbying group in the U.S., estimates that adult video/DVD sales and rentals amount to at least $4 billion annually; while critics claim the figure may approach $10 billion. Revenues from phone sex alone are thought to exceed $1 billion (Best, 2006).
According to reported statistics the following were noted: Nelsen/Net reports that 9.4 million women in the United States accessed online pornography sites in the month of September 2003 (IT Facts, 2003); 10% of UK teenagers visited adult Web sites in 2005 (IT Facts, 2005); 28% of Internet users download porn at work (IT Facts, 2004b); it was estimated that in 2008 one billion dollars would be spent on mobile phone porn alone (IT Facts, 2004a,b) and it has been estimated that 40 million U.S. Adults regularly visit pornographic internet sites and, of those women that do, 70% of them keep their cyber activities secret (Evans, 2005).
In a “Christianity Today” survey in 2000, 33% of Christian clergy admitted to having visited a sexually explicit web site. Of those who had visited a porn site, 53% had visited such sites “a few times” in the preceding year, and 18% visited sexually explicit sites from a couple of times a month to more than once a week (National, 2000). And it is not just men but women too who are increasingly indulging in both the use and production of porn (Barcan, 2002; Horin, 2007). One study in 1989 reported that college men averaged six hours of porn viewing a month while college women averaged about two and a half hours a month (Padget, Brislin-Slutz, & Neal, 1989). “Safe Families,” a Christian Internet monitoring group, reported that 34% of female readers of Today’s Christian Women’s online newsletter admitted to intentionally accessing Internet pornography (Safe Families, 2003). The Nielson/Net Ratings report for September 2003 stated that more than 32 million unique individuals visited a porn site in September of that year. Nearly 22.8 million of them were male (71 percent), while 9.4 million adult site visitors were female (29 percent) (IT Facts, 2003). A “Cosmopolitan” survey revealed that 56% of their female readers would prefer to view pornography with their male partners (cited in Playboy, November 2007, page 25). A 2004 Elle/MSNBC survey of more than 15,000 persons found that two-thirds of women and more than half of the men claimed that the “pornosphere” has boosted their sex and love lives (Weaver, 2004). And perhaps most telling is a 2007 survey of women by Brigham Young University. In this Mormon school 50% of young women found pornography as an acceptable way to express sexuality (IT Facts, 2007). And a 2008 study of Midwestern college students, a population with more than 50% women revealed that roughly two thirds (67%) of the men and one half (49%) of the women agree that viewing pornography is acceptable, and nearly 9 out of 10 (87%) young men and nearly one third (31%) of the women reported using pornography (Carroll et al., 2008).
Also to be considered is that the production of porn is often not by large commercial entities. The proliferation of amateur and home videos available on the Internet testifies to both the domestication of pornography and the "porning" of the domestic (Hillyer, 2004, page 51). And speaking of commercial entities, in the early 1960s, Beate Uhse opened the first of her many sex emporia in Germany. In 2006 her pioneering business had achieved sales exceeding $ 350 million (Hoovers, 2008). In the United States “Adam and Eve”, the largest “adult” mail-order company in this country claimed similar business success. Despite a downward economic turn for many businesses, sales to 2008 for “Adam and Eve” are up 7% over 2006. And 2007 was a record-breaking year (Reuters, 2008). This North Carolina business boasted of $65 million in sales for 2001. In the year 2000 they shipped more than 26,000 XXX videos ordered by some 21,000 customers in one Ohio county alone (Horn, 2001). And, according to “Family Safe Media, a conservative media watchdog group “The pornography industry is larger than the revenues of the top technology companies combined: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, Netflix and Earthlink … US porn revenues exceed the combined revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC.” (Family Safe, 2008). It is obvious that the porn industry is fulfilling a major human desire.
3. Research
As indicated by Tovar, Elias & Chang (1999), one of the first research concerns deals with the Bauserman (1996) question of whether or not exposure to pornography plays a role in the development or execution of offending behavior. As they indicate (p. 261) the literature provides much clearer data with respect to the commission of the offense as opposed to the development of a pattern of behavior. From his own studies Bauserman concluded: “Rape rates are not consistently associated with pornography circulation. And the relationships found are ambiguous. Findings are [not] consistent with... the view that sexually explicit materials in general contribute directly to sex crimes (page 405).”
Research on pornography has generally been of various types (Tovar, Elias, & Chang, 1999). Probably most common are studies that involve exposing experimental conditions of varying media to students or other |
There are those, who due to their orders will remain to the very end on this planetary hologram, as they shape the awakening of the stragglers and especially the final events.
For others, this means (as in Jahns dream), just to step out of the door and inherit the new heaven, and to find themselves in the new world. How this will technically play out, should not be your concern because we take care of it. What is important for you now is to engage in all serenity and tranquility in your crossing into the light. Above all in times, when you follow the ascension of your siblings and possibly ask yourself why you have not yet been reached by the creator’s call. That’s it for today.
The big event is born, peels out of the time- and space-lines, and will be unleashed.
In summary: The leap into the new world, even if it is a single step for many, is now imminent for some people, while for others it is still necessary to wait. Fulfil your orders, remain rooted in Mother Earth, because ultimately it is she that will release you at the forecast hour for you and in accordance with your soul so that you can arrive at the realms, in which the light casts no shadows.
Do your daily work. Fertilize the soil and plant new trees, because what you sow today, will bring help and power to generations of children of men, will pave the way for them and show them the way. Then, when you have already returned to the expansiveness of creation, the people will still keep you in high-esteem in their memory and they will move upwards on the vines, which have grown from your sowing – until the sweetest grapes will fall into the lap of the remaining ones.
God is with us. The world ascends and before it is ready, the warriors of the first and last hours of this and many other worlds will leave forever and go into God’s infinity and His light. Truthful is, what the heaven gives, Immovable and irrevocable:
The herewith addressed humanity has graduated.
We are the Ascended Masters that await you in the Halls of Agartha. We are lined up and form for every incoming light warrior a corridor of light. You are truly welcome and honored – infinitely.
We are the ones that expect you,
The Ascended MastersLike slasher movies? I know I do! So, when I found out about the shared slasher movieverse being put together by MJ Dixon, I had to get all the deets! Here’s the scoop!
John Lepper: Thank you, Mr. Dixon, for this opportunity to interview you. You’ve put together a series of slasher films, all taking place in the same universe. Sort of like the Avengers films, but with killers. It’s an amazing idea. How did you come up with it?
MJ Dixon: Thanks for having me. Well its kind of funny, it gets compared to Avengers quite a lot but the idea was based more on a business model that I came up with in 2005. Blockbuster was looking for low budget Horror to fill their shelves and I had this idea of making a bunch of films that were seemingly just low budget horrors, but the overarching story would be connected in secret and the idea then was that it would become apparent only over a certain amount of time.
The plan was to do Hollower (The Nathan movie) first, then Thorn, then Cleaver and then do a kind of House Of Frankenstein style movie with all of them, which would be Slasher House.
As you know Blockbuster had some financial troubles and stopped commissioning work by the time I could get the projects off the ground and being impatient I was excited about getting to Slasher House and so ended up doing that first on impulse with the intention of using the film as a kind of 90 minutes set of trailers for these Characters. Ironically we now called it reverse Avengers here.
JL: Awesome! Well, I’m glad you didn’t let Blockbuster’s issues slow you down. Now, it is very apparent that you are someone passionate about the slasher genre. How do you view slasher films in general?
MJD: I think theres certainly a view amongst a lot of the community that slasher films are somehow the lowest art form of horror. To me they are the most fun you can have watching a movie. I think they appeal to me as a fan because I can go in with low expectations and be surprised more often than not because I’m really looking for a variation of the formula that we know so well.
As a filmmaker, that formula gives me amazing creative freedom as its something that film fans understand on instinct and so you can start to play with that expectation and your audience can get on the same page as you very quickly because if you’re a horror fan you understand the tropes of this kind of film.
I love slasher films and always have down, so to me it was kind of a no brainer to start making my own when the time came.
JL: I agree, it’s more about the fun. I don’t think too many people find slasher films “scary”. But they can be the most entertaining by far. I realized my love for them stems from a combination of two things. Horror and superheroes. Mix the two and what do you get? Slashers! Powers, secret origins, and they just don’t stay dead. And your characters have made amazing additions to the genre. Of the ones you have created so far, who would you say is your favorite?
MJD: I agree. I always kind of think of our movies as backwards superhero films, You’ve heard of the Hero’s Journey right? Well I see our films as the Villain’s Journey
My favourite has always been Thorn, I think. He was created when I was a teenager as a kind of antidote to what they had done with Michael Myers in the Halloween franchise after Jamie Lee came back. He’s my classic slasher and there so much fun that can be had with archetype.
In a way though they all have a place in my heart. Red is the most fun to write, because she’s kind of anti-slasher, I think of her as a kind of Blade character in that she’s a slasher, but uses that for good (kinda). Its fun also writing a character who has limited morality, yet is still the ‘good guy’ so to speak.
JL: Lol, I was wondering if there was some connection to Thorn and the mark of thorn from Halloween.
I do like Red. I have mentioned to you that she reminds me of Cassie Hack from Hack/Slash to a degree. I would love to see more of her. With all the other characters from Slasher house getting their own movies, can I expect to see one about her?
MJD: The Thorn thing is kind of a weird coincidence as he was named after Damian Thorn from The Omen due to his hellish origins, which will be covered more as the series progresses, but I kind of like that they almost feel like an unofficial continuation of the Myers story, albeit very different in style.
I’ve always seen Red as kind of Buffy meets Dexter, but her origin really suited the story at the time and we were originally going to scrap that part of her character, but it just suited the story so well. I’ve since become a fan of Hack/Slash and it was a bit of relief to see that we were doing things very differently from the same basic idea.
Slasher House is really Red’s story and so as we move forward with Slasher House 2 this year the plan is to tell her story through those movies and where we see her go is very exciting, for me at least.
JL: Awesome! Can’t wait to see it! Well, I am very well aware of the films you have out and that are coming out, but some of our readers might not be. Why don’t you give a short rundown on what you have done so far and your plans for the future?
MJD: No problem. First up is Slasher House, a kind of rouges gallery of some of the slashers that make up this huge shared universe that we’ve got planned.
Then Legacy of Thorn which delves further into the origins of one of the most popular Slasher House characters and introduces a huge cast of its own. It quite a complex myths that we’ve built for him and so it really needed a feature to lay it all out.
We just finished production on two more prequels that tie into Slasher House directly with Cleaver : Rise of the Killer Clown, which is an out and out origin story of the character and sets up where we’ll be taking the character over the next few years.
And finally in October we snuck off and made a very small, very low budget movie called Hollower, which tells the Nathan that we hinted at in Slasher House with the intention of bringing more depth to it. The film also stars Nicholas Vince of Hellraiser/Nightbreed.
We’re now currently working on Slasher House 2 which starts to build a on the bigger picture that these films are setting up.
JL: Sounds like quite an ambitious vision! And how big do you hope for your movieverse to get?
MJD: When I started out, I figured it would get to Slasher House and then we’d be done, But as it goes on and these characters get richer and their backstairs grow and evolve I’d say that it could go forever potentially. Currently though there are between 16 and 21 films that tell the full story i terms of the characters that we’ve already met (or will meet in the next couple of films).
In all honesty though, I have no real idea. I have a general arch that I’m working with and things change as we go. For Example Cleaver came around much earlier than anticipated to replace something else that we could get off the ground in time, so its constantly evolving.
I think that as long as people are enjoying them, I’ll keep making em.
JL: Sounds great! Well, I hope you keep them coming! I can’t wait to see Cleaver and Hollower. I just want to say thanks again for taking the time to do this interview. Before I let you go, do you have anything else to tell the readers?
MJD: Just that your support means a lot, we’re not a big Hollywood studio, we pull these things together on spit and glue and sometimes we don’t even have that lol. But every share of our stuff, every movie bought it all really goes into us making bigger and better movies and we are incredibly thankful to everyone who has supported us this far.
Thanks for having me, its been pleasure.
JL: That’s what we’re here for. Anytime!
Sounds cool, yeah? Check out legacyofthorn.com where you can pick up a copy of the latest film in the series to be released!Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa DVD Review
Alpha Papa sees Alan Partridge (Coogan) taking to the silverscreen for the first time in his 20-year career. For Partridge it has been patchy (from BBC Chat show host to Regional Digital Radio Broadcaster) but for Coogan the character has gone fromstrength to strength. With TV, Internet Show and Autobiographyall under his belt, a feature length film seems the next logical step. However, with the promise of “heavy kissing and guns” the question whether the former Military-based Quiz Show Host could make the transfer without losing that certain ‘Alaness’ was a concern, especially with so many TV comedy treasures failing heavily when making the cinematic jump (In Da House still being a hard, cold turd to polish). While being extremely popular, Partridge also has the added gift of still feeling like a niche affair, so whether the film would transfer to a wider audience while running for longer period of time was always a risk.
The film see’s Alan become embroiled in a siege at North Norfolk Digital Radio’s HQ with sacked radio host Pat Farrell (Meaney) taking his former colleagues hostage. As the siege goes on Alan becomes head negotiator with what follows becoming an increasingly farcical tale that indeed delivers on the promise of “heavy kissing and guns” albeit with Norfolk’s favourite son at the helm.
The over the top storyline allows the writers to show Partridge in situations too overblown for the lovingly humdrum events of the television series. Any fears of Alan himself being swept away with the Hollywood style plot are soon quashed with the opening scene: a Partridge rendition of Roachford’s 1988 classic “Cuddly Toy”. Towards the final inevitable shootout the plot does occasionally flag, getting in the way of allowing Alan to simply be Alan, but still each line Coogan delivers is still so perfect,every facial expression so Alan, that it can be forgiven.
With occasional back references to his son Fernando, returningcharacters such as PA Lynn (Montagu) and another great Alan love scene, the film still manages to keep the partridge pilgrims (or partrigins if you will) happy. Although some broader comedic moments (Alan losing his trousers) seem a little forced, these are few and far between. The supporting cast are strong with ColmMeaney playing washed up radio gunman Pat Farrell, getting the right balance between comedy and threat. This allows the storyline to generally zip along while still maintaining the amount of laughs per minute needed for a wide release feature film. However If anything the best decision by the writers was to keep to the traditional Alan formula, allowing Coogan the spotlight andletting the supporting cast such as Geordie friend Michael (Greenall) to act as springboards for more Partridisms.
Moving to the big screen was a big risk but has allowed Alan to be shown in a new arena with higher stakes. In the end the storyline doesn’t matter, Partridge is still funny, 20 years of character development and backstory mean it is impossible not to feel empathy for the man, even if he is “a bit of a shit”. Alpha Papa proves he can excel in the more surreal and overblown events of the film as well as the more sedate storylines of the series. Throughout he is still the regional broadcaster and with the sequel rumours already spreading, needless to say this is not going to be Alan’s last laugh. Back of the net!Voter satisfaction with the direction of the nation is down by double digits, as a majority says President Donald Trump is tearing the country apart.
That’s according to the latest Fox News Poll.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POLL RESULTS
The number of voters happy with how things are going in the country is down 10 percentage points since April and stands at just 35 percent. It hasn’t been that low since 2013. At the same time, dissatisfaction jumped to 64 percent -- an 11-point increase.
That shift is not, as is often the case, tied to the economy. Positive views on the economy are higher than in more than a decade: 36 percent say it is in either “excellent” (6 percent) or “good” (30 percent) shape. The last time conditions were rated this positively was August 2004.
The same isn’t true for Trump. His job ratings are increasingly negative -- and 56 percent feel Trump’s “tearing the country apart,” versus 33 percent who say he’s “drawing the country together.”
About two-thirds of Republicans feel Trump is drawing the country together (68 percent), while 15 percent say tearing the country apart and 18 percent are unsure. Nearly all Democrats (93 percent) and over half of independents (59 percent) say Trump is tearing the country apart.
In addition, a record 55 percent of voters disapprove of the job he’s doing as president, while 41 percent approve. That’s a net negative by 14 points and his worst score to-date. In April, around the 100-day mark of the administration, his ratings were at net negative three (45-48 percent). Trump’s first job rating on the Fox News Poll is the only one that’s been in positive territory: 48-47 percent (February 2017).
Since that time he’s lost the most ground with conservatives (down 7 points), Republican men (-9 points), and whites without a college degree (-9 points).
The poll, released Wednesday, was conducted Sunday through Tuesday evenings. Tuesday the president visited Texas to view the state’s flood damage, and earlier that day North Korea launched a missile over Japan.
On North Korea, 42 percent of voters think Trump hasn’t been tough enough -- a significant improvement from 56 percent who felt that way in June.
Despite the latest provocation, concern over war with North Korea is down: 59 percent are extremely or very worried. That was 68 percent last month, after a successful July 4 missile test.
Trump gets his best job ratings on handling the economy (49-43 percent). He also gets positive scores on terrorism (47-45) and Hurricane Harvey (44-26 percent), with the caveat that the poll was conducted mostly before he went to Texas.
He receives net negative ratings on North Korea (43-50), taxes (37-45), immigration (43-54), Russia (35-56), the environment (36-56), and health care (34-60).
His worst marks are on race relations (33-61 percent), where disapproval outweighs approval by 28 points.
Here’s why. Over half don’t think Trump respects racial minorities (56 percent) -- and only about one-third approve of his response to events in Charlottesville (35 percent), where conflicts between neo-Nazi protesters and counter-protesters led to deadly violence.
That violence also led to a series of presidential statements, sharply criticized in the media, in which he condemned neo-Nazis and white supremacists, while adding, “I think there’s blame on both sides.” The poll shows a 52 percent majority of voters blames white supremacists. Far fewer, 17 percent, blame counter-protesters, and 19 percent say “both.”
Many will find this jarring: When asked who poses a greater threat to the United States, nearly as many say the media (40 percent) as say white supremacists (47 percent). Another nine percent say that the threat is “the same.”
Most Trump voters (75 percent) say the news media are the bigger threat. Most Hillary Clinton backers (80 percent) say white supremacists.
Overall, by a 70-13 percent margin, voters think Trump dislikes the media more than white supremacists.
With the controversy heating up across the country, voters by a 2-to-1 margin think Confederate monuments and statues should stay up (61 percent) rather than be taken down (29 percent).
That’s even though more than three times as many have a negative reaction when they see the Confederate flag (36 percent negative vs. 11 percent positive). A majority, 53 percent, says they don’t have a reaction one way or the other.
Forty-three percent of voters think whites are favored over minorities in the United States today, while 23 percent feel minorities are favored over whites. Nearly one-quarter give the unprompted response “neither” (24 percent).
Whites are more likely to feel whites are favored over minorities by 8 points (36-28). Nonwhites feel whites are favored by 54 points (64-10).
Nearly half of Trump voters (45 percent) say minorities are favored over whites (11 percent whites and 34 percent “neither”). Most Clinton voters feel whites are favored (72 percent).
Pollpourri
Virtually all Trump voters (96 percent) and Clinton voters (93 percent) are satisfied with their 2016 vote for president.
Fifty-eight percent of Clinton voters say they’re losing sleep since Trump took office. On the other hand, Trump voters say they’re sleeping better these days (62 percent).
Among all voters, the number losing sleep (31 percent) is mostly matched by those sleeping better (28 percent). Yet the largest portion reports no change to their slumber (40 percent).
By a 58-34 percent margin, voters think Trump will finish his term. An overwhelming majority of Trump voters (92 percent) say he’ll finish. Just 29 percent of Clinton voters agree.
The Fox News poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,006 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from August 27-29, 2017. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for all registered voters.Executive departures (voluntary and otherwise) aren't uncommon after major acquisitions, and that may well be happening in the wake of Lenovo's deal to acquire Motorola's cellphone business from Google. The Wall Street Journal claims that Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside is leaving the company to become Dropbox's first Chief Operations Officer. It's not clear just what would be driving Woodside to take a less glamorous role; we've reached out to both companies for comment. If true, the move would bring an abrupt end to Woodside's brief tenure as Moto's leader. It wouldn't be surprising to see him go, however -- while he reinvigorated the phone pioneer and helped launch some of its best devices in recent memory, the company's earnings didn't follow suit.
Update: Woodside has confirmed the move in a blog post on Motorola's website.What, exactly, makes someone American Indian? Even Indians themselves don't agree as they debate the case of Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, whose disputed claim of Native American identity is shining a rare spotlight on the malleable nature of Indian heritage and the long history of murky claims to such ancestry.
Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and Democrat who is running in Massachusetts against Republican incumbent Sen. Scott Brown, was listed as Native American in several law school directories. Warren has said that her "family lore" described Indian ancestors, and the New England Genealogy Association said it found indications – but not proof – that Warren had a Cherokee great-great-great grandmother, which would make her 1/32 Indian.
"I'm proud of my heritage," Warren said Thursday. Asked how she knew it included Native Americans, she replied, "Because my mother told me so."
Her opponents question whether Warren chose this heritage to gain advantages available to Indians and other underrepresented groups in academia.
"Warren has zero evidence that she is at all Native American," said Brown's campaign manager, Jim Barnett. The genealogy association acknowledges that it found only secondary references to Cherokee family members, not primary sources such as marriage, birth or census records.
Among Native Americans, the varying opinions demonstrate that Indian identity is subjective even among Indians themselves.
When David Eugene Wilkins first saw Warren interviewed during her nomination to a federal post, he was smitten by her intelligence and politics. But when he heard about her claims of Indian ancestry, "I shook my head and said, 'Oh no.'"
"For us it was always about allegiance rather than biology or ancestry," said Wilkins, an enrolled member of the Lumbee tribe and professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota.
"It's where you place your political, cultural, emotional allegiance. She lived her entire life and never had any association whatsoever with any community. So something doesn't wash for me," Wilkins said.
But David Treuer, an award-winning writer and Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, said there is a difference between Indian identity and ancestry – you can have one without the other.
"An Indian identity is something someone claims for oneself; it is a matter of choice," Treuer wrote in a Washington Post essay titled, "Elizabeth Warren says she's Native American. So she is."
There are 566 federally recognized Native American tribes, each with its own rules for membership, according to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA. Some tribes require a "blood quantum" measurement of as much as one-half or one-quarter Indian ancestry; others require a certain place of birth or residence.
Wilkins, the professor, is married to a Navajo with many siblings. "I've asked them what defines a Navajo," he said. "One said you have to speak the language. Another said you have to live within our sacred mountains. Another said no, you have to take part in ceremonial life. All this in one family!"
According to census figures provided by the BIA, an estimated 4.5 million people identify themselves as American Indians or Alaska Natives, including those who say they are more than one race. But in a 2005 report, the most recent available, the BIA counted just 2 million enrolled tribal members – which means that fewer than half of all people claiming Indian heritage are recognized by a tribe.
"There's an old joke in this corner of Indian Country that if you meet someone who doesn't know anything about tribal affairs but claims they're Indian, they'll say they're Cherokee," Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton, a spokesperson for the Cherokee Nation, said by e-mail.
Warren grew up in Oklahoma, home of the 310,000-member Cherokee Nation, the largest Indian tribe. Warren does not claim official Cherokee membership, which is based on the "Dawes Rolls," a federal list of Cherokees in Oklahoma from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many people have legitimate Cherokee ancestry but are not eligible for membership because their ancestors were not among those counted, Krehbiel-Burton said.
But "some people falsely claim Native heritage simply out of ignorance," Krehbiel-Burton said. "They've been told for years that they had a great-grandmother (or something similar) who was a Cherokee princess and assume that it's true."
Warren spoke of a similar oral tradition when she mentioned an heirloom photo of her grandfather: "My Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a thousand times (and) remarked that he – her father, my papaw – had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do."
Even President Barack Obama has an Indian story, about his maternal grandmother, who was nicknamed "Toot."
"If asked, Toot would turn her head in profile to show off her beaked nose, which, along with a pair of jet-black eyes, was offered as proof of Cherokee blood," Obama wrote in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father."
But eyes, noses and cheekbones are not the issue for Rhonda LeValdo, president of the Native American Journalists Association and an enrolled member of the Acoma Pueblo tribe.
"If you're going to claim it, you have to help your people out," says LeValdo. She had seen no evidence of such involvement by Warren, but said she didn't know enough details to judge Warren's claim.
LeValdo said there are many fakers: "A lot of people find some sort of romanticism in being Native American. They think of the warrior type, or the Pocahontas stereotype. They're just taken with the idea of it."
"But to a lot of our people who live this life, it's tough," she continued. "We deal with a lot of things. A lot of us feel like if you're going to claim it, you have to do something. Don't just use it when you want to use it."
Warren has been adamant that she did not seek any advantage from Native American heritage. Records show that she declined to apply for admission to Rutgers Law School under a minority student program and identified her race as "white" on an employment record at the University of Texas, where she worked from 1983 to 1987.
She left Texas for the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where a report on minority faculty listed Warren's name. Her ethnicity became a campaign issue when the Boston Herald reported that Harvard Law, which hired Warren in 1995, listed her as a minority when the school was under pressure to diversify the faculty.
Besides potentially influencing hiring or promotion, Indian identity can have other economic advantages. Some tribes share millions in casino earnings; health care, scholarships and housing are available to some tribal members.
Native Americans have a high rate of intermarriage with other groups. Many are not identifiable by appearance, which has made it possible for almost anyone to assume a Native persona – for various purposes.
Some of the American colonists who boarded British ships during the Boston Tea Party wore Mohawk costumes. During New York anti-rent conflicts of the 1840s, white people assumed Indian garb and pidgin "Injinspeak" as they harassed patrician estates, according to the book "Playing Indian," by Philip J. Deloria.
The actor Iron Eyes Cody starred as an Indian in films from the 1930s to the '70s, and championed many Native causes. He claimed to be Cherokee, but near the end of his life was revealed to be the son of Italian immigrants. In 1976, former Ku Klux Klansman Asa Earl Carter published a fabricated and best-selling memoir, "The Education of Little Tree," under the name Forrest Carter.
"When that kind of fraud takes place it damages our people," said Wilkins, the professor.
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"You have people on the outside claiming this and that to draw attention to themselves," he said, "and then people on the outside may wonder, do Native people really know who they are?"
Associated Press Writer Steve LeBlanc in Boston contributed to this report.British grime artist Jme has had a tweet from 2012 removed following a copyright claim by the Board of Control for Cricket in India.
The 31-year-old, who was born in Hackney, revealed the news in a series of surreal tweets on Sunday morning.
Just got an email, a tweet of mine from 5 years ago has been removed due to a copyright claim from the Board of Control for Cricket in India — Jme (@JmeBBK) 19 March 2017
Bizarrely, the copyright claim appears to relate to Australia’s current tour of India.
It is unclear as to what the content of the original tweet was, but it seems as though the BCCI’s willingness to clamp down on illegal coverage and footage of the ongoing Test series may have gone too far.
Jme added that the email gave the following description as to how his tweet broke the BCCI’s copyright laws: “audiovisual footage and production content relating to cricket matches of the Australia tour of India 2017.”
Man thinks I was streaming a 2017 cricket match in 2012. Ffs — Jme (@JmeBBK) 19 March 2017
Although Jme has not specified, it is likely that the claim relates to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
This law contains what is called the “safe-harbour” provision, which protects a service provider like Twitter from monetary damages from infringing activity of its users so long as it meets certain conditions.
If Twitter receives a DMCA takedown notice for material that infringes copyright, such as a link to an illegal streaming site, they must remove it to avoid being sued for copyright infringement.
And the BCCI employed a Bangalore company as long ago as 2008 to scour the internet for content and links that might infringe copyright.
The organisation has a history of issues with copyright and media rights. In 2012, Sky Sports covered England’s Test series in India from their London studio after the BCCI demanded an additional £500,000 to broadcast from inside their grounds.
This led to a bizarre situation in which commentators Nasser Hussain, David Lloyd and Ian Botham, among others, were left with no control over the pictures being shown by host broadcaster Star TV. Throughout the series, Sky’s commentary team was working from the start of play – at around 3am – and were visibly exhausted by the end of the tour.
Indeed, the BBC’s Test Match Special came close to doing the same, although in their case a deal was eventually struck.
Jme’s links with cricket as a sport are not entirely clear, although in 2015 he replied to user @T33EKO’s question “what cricket team do u support, say Pakistan” [sic] with the simple response “Pakistan”.In retrospect, I should have framed the argument differently.
Back in February, I urged the Clippers to actively sink to the 6-seed to avoid a second-round matchup with the Warriors.
The logic was seductively simple—the Dubs kill us. The Rockets and Spurs don’t. Every round we avoid the Dubs is another round Zaza Pachulia’s dangerously oversized head could cause catastrophic injury. If you slow down the game tape, that Durant collision could have been far worse.
But arguments involving conditional probabilities and demonstrated matchup advantages apparently don’t hold much sway with Doc. Nor am I sure the multiple handwritten letters I sent to Adam Silver demanding to see more Alan Anderson during nationally televised Clipper games ever reached their intended audience. Mr. Silver, I get that players need their rest. But I pay good money to share League Pass with 30 other people. And on a primetime Saturday night game, a game the NBA relentlessly markets as THE marquee matchup of the week, I don’t get to see either Alan Anderson OR Paul Pierce try to guard Kawhi Leonard? Unacceptable.
All those arguments fell on deaf ears. Instead, what I should have said was this: the Utah Jazz are wack, and I don’t want to spend a week and a half of playoff basketball thinking about them.
At their best, the Jazz are vaguely reminiscent of those Frank Vogel-coached Indiana Pacers teams that challenged Lebron and the Heat in the early 2010’s. The Jazz aren’t as accomplished yet, but there’s the underpinnings of something similar: a young, hungry, defensive-minded small-market team with a dynamic wing (Paul George/Gordon Hayward), an intimidating rim protector (pre-sucky Roy Hibbert/Rudy Gobert), a young and talented head coach (Vogel/Quinn), and a fan base whose loyalty and passion is only rivaled by its whiteness.
That Indiana team may not have been exceptionally pleasant to watch, but that squad was fun to root for—or at least had identifiable personalities you could base an opinion on. Lance Stephenson blew kisses at Lebron. Roy Hibbert was funny on Parks and Rec. George Hill didn’t have a personality, but his hair did.
The Jazz are as excruciating to watch as those Pacers teams, without any of the fun. They are literally George Hill without George Hill’s hair.
Look, I know it’s cliche to say, because they’re the Jazz and they play in Utah. But I’m sorry—the Jazz* are fucking boring. Hayward is boring. Hill without his Sisqo hair is boring. Gobert has a great nickname and is French and has a 48 foot wing span and still somehow manages to be kind of boring. And for nearly a decade, no one has definitively proven that Joe Johnson is not in fact clinically dead.
*An important distinction here: we are defining the “Jazz” as those players not named Boris Diaw. Because Boris is objectively awesome and obviously belongs somewhere else. Even Google gets it.
The Clippers have been in the playoffs for so many consecutive seasons (I will never get tired of writing that) that it’s somewhat strange to encounter a first-round opponent with which we don’t have some historically protracted beef. At some point during the series, the combination of playoff tensions and questionable refereeing and the inevitability of Chris doing that thing where he deliberately runs into Gobert at mid-court will make the Jazz and Clippers hate each other (or at least the Jazz hate us). But heading into the series, we’ll have to invent some of the enmity ourselves. Again, mostly because they’re so boring.
In that spirit, here’s a primer to hating your 2016-2017 Utah Jazz.
Gordon
Please, please watch this video. In its entirety.
There’s so much to digest here. Where to begin?
Let’s start with fact-checking our friendly KSL-5 anchors Ashley Moser and Dave McCann. Nothing against the unassailable integrity of the KSL-5 news team—it takes some Ed Murrow-sized journalistic balls to devote a four minute segment to Gordon Hayward’s hair—but in an era of “fake news”, it’s important to get our facts right. Is Gordon’s hair really taking Salt Lake City by storm? Are, as Ashley claims, both “young and old trying to replicate the haircut in the Beehive state?”
I should have never doubted you, KSL-5.
Even Doc, who has repeatedly tried to legally adopt Gordon, couldn’t resist the fad. And honestly, it kind of works on him.
There’s lots you can choose to hate about this video. But perhaps the most objectionable moment comes at the 3:25 mark, when Gordon is asked if he envies anyone else’s hair in the NBA.
Gordon: “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I have the best hair in the NBA.”
Gordon’s stylist: “I think if GQ says it, it’s pretty safe to say.”
Dude.
Jinglin’ Joe
If you would have told me in October a former Clipper would be second in the league in three-point percentage at the end of the season, and asked me to guess who it was, here’s how the exchange would have gone.
“Man, that’s tough. Former Clipper eh? EJ, in a comeback year?”
“Nope. But good guess”
“Collison?”
“Nope.”
“Jesus, not Dudley. Dudley?”
“Nope.”
“CJ Wilcox?”
“Nope.”
“Lance?”
“Nope.”
“Bledsoe?”
“Nope.”
“You sure it’s not Bledsoe?”
“Yes, not Bledsoe.”
“Cause it could be Bledsoe.”
“Dude it’s not Bledsoe.”
“Uhhh Kerry Kittles still active?”
“Dude.”
“Ok, I give up. Who is it?”
“Ingles.”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
Joe Ingles is shooting 45% from deep, and is second in the league among qualified shooters. Ingles is the second leading candidate for the annual Patty Mills Award, aka the “guy who makes you throw your beer at the TV after he hits back to back corner threes against the Clippers in a playoff game.”
The leading candidate?
Trey
If someone on the Jazz is going to start some shit with the Clippers, my money is on Lyles.
First, there’s a documented history of “I’m frustrated so I’m going to hit somebody” clips.
Second, Lyles is also apparently a big Kobe guy. So much so that his twitter handle is literally @treymambalyles. And if you grew up idolizing Kobe, you’re obviously indifferent to human suffering. Even Jazz fans will agree with that.
Third, there’s something about guys who are slightly undersized at the four that make them volatile assholes. Draymond, Z-Bo, PJ Tucker...Once Blake starts backing Lyles down with his patented “how your dad played you 1 one 1 when you were 12” post moves, Lyles is going to start playing dirty. Luckily, Blake |
GI
"Layers of Atmosphere in the Quran": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvO2BtD-F5g
"Big Bang theory in the Quran": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNFwlIS28bs
"The Sea Barriers": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAK6fQQALE4
"Black holes in the Quran": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFavFQKFvZ8
"Big Crunch Theory in the Quran": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUvZx679Me0
"Ants talking / Communication": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uvpgq6UoP0
"The Cat's Eye Nebula": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOxqZrlbKHE
"The Expanding Universe": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyqkAFCaNQM
"Underwater (internal) Waves and the Darkness of the Sea": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qryFbSu5Soc
"Creation from Smoke": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEHuw-wNUTg
Debunking common creationist arguments:
"Top Ten Creationist Arguments" (by TheThinkingAtheist)
Debunking creationist claims in a wide variety of fields:
"Why do people laugh at creationists?" (by Thunderf00t)
"Water is only found on Earth" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS5vid4GkEY
"Hydrogen cannot convert into another element": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=istxUVBZD2s
"An ice meteor landing on the poles caused massive cold spots": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdEZTdOlGss
"A drop of water could cover the Earth if you spread it real thin": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjFeVwuJB7I
"The Earth was covered by a canopy of water above the atmosphere": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvprBLhJx_o
"Water in clouds stops x-rays, and x-rays cause aging damage": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKdfeP1sGIg
"Evolution claims organisms become bigger, better, stronger and smarter": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6_o1GxgNMQ
"It's too improbable for life to have arisen by sheer random chance": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3nvH6gfrTc
"We recognize that designed objects must have a designer": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzDYVFa1TR0
"The universe is fine-tuned for life": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aGEXMyFWyg
"We are born spiritually dead": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttnU8Tbwtd0
Kent Hovind's understanding of genetics and reproduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw80oduQckM
"Complex patterns imply a designer": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPMwDRsfCW8
Creationist behavior during the Dover Intelligent Design trial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z55oWS5vaUM
"The Cambrian explosion refutes the evolutionary tree of life": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sui4CadfhDM
"Radiometric dating is unreliable because decay rates can be tremendously increased": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loPHYsLHb5Q
Where does the majority of information in society exist?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWdvuSUMipM
Creationist use of blocking, flagging, vote-botting, etc.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXUtHtZTXnI
"Evolution is evil": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmUGJ3Jh7fc
"The recession of the moon proves evolution is flawed": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inES_eAexN8
The threat Islam poses to free speech, science and modern civilization: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnC7Nwqw5Dg
"The scientific community discriminates against creationists": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiNGK3y5Ypg
How honest was Ben Stein's production of the film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed"?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3X8aifay678
"Science leads you to killing people": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihYq2dGa29M
"Creationists bite the scientific hand that feeds them": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxtbcOEtpoE
What happens when creationists aspire to the highest office in the world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntEE9Zy-qQQ
"Limiting one's self to the actual evidence is childlike": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0pjFr_vS5U
"The Bible is the most scientifically accurate book in the world": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDUkd5os4xk
"The existence of moral law requires a law giver": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyd6om8IC4M
"Intelligent Design is not the same as creationism": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpL1dmfVoGA
"Creationists KNOW the absolute truth": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqB4FOlCtls
Knowledge is the prime factor in determining the survivability of individuals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tysZObbs4Yo
"Craters on the moon were created by water ejected from the Earth during the Noachian flood": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcxr6KTWIas
Explaining how iridium at the K-T boundary didn't come from the Noachian flood: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8SizmM-_5M
Part 35: Comparing Newton's testable and untestable claims: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEWVt6xyjLU
Part 36: The supposed scientific knowledge revealed in the Bible and Quran: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By17QNKQQ44
Part 37: How William Lane Craig's logic for the existence of God is "garbage in, garbage out": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u6Mz21jTaA
Part 38: What would have happened if the sun had stopped in the sky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-hGFMBpbI
Part 39: The massive problems of distributing species after Noah's Flood: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mjmGbfyPPU
Why so few scientists believe in creationism:
"Why Don't More Scientists Believe in Creationism?" (by Underlings)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEilzDdLmIA
Explaining how each of the Kalam cosmological argument's claims are founded on fallacies or errors of fact:
"Deconstructing the Kalam Cosmological Fallacies?" (by Underlings)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ax27g5ZKa-w
A simple argument showing the problems with the Kalam Cosmological Argument by using its own techniques:
"The Counter-Kalam Cosmological Argument " (by Underlings)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OriymDihU3w
Using the law of complex origins to show how invoking the law of causality causes problems for the Kalam Cosmological Argument:
"Proof That God Did Not Create Our Universe (The Godless Cosmological Argument)" (by Underlings)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMMMVKUhLxM
Addressing each of the best arguments apologists present for the existence of God:
"The Best Arguments For God" (by Underlings)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cYojecGy0w
NEW! Debunking Jason Lisle's fallacious claims that he has proof of biblical creationism:
"Debunking Creationists - Dr. Jason Lisle" (by VoysovReason)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II3XnsYA3c4
Debunking the "hydroplate theory" to explain Noah's Flood:
"Creation Science 101, Hydroplate Theory" (by WildwoodClaire1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McgGP32fvwU
Debunking Kent Hovind's claim that the mammoths were wiped out in a single catastrophe:
"Creation Science 2: Frozen Mammoths" (by WildwoodClaire1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggPdbEO0mBM
NEW! Problems with Alvin Plantinga's claim that evolution would result in unreliable belief systems:
"The Inner Limits - Part 1" (by zarkoff45)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU-wpNOyuas (first of a series)
Techniques to consider when debating a creationist:
"How To Argue With A Creationist" (by Zaunstar)
Contradictions concerning the birth of Jesus:
"The Nativity [An Atheist Reads the Bible - 14]" (by 43alley)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oli0DTmPmGU
NEW! How the historical record contradicts the Christian depiction of the birth of Jesus:
"The Unreliable Birth Story of Jesus" (by 43alley)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oli0DTmPmGU&
Refuting the claim that Mohammed was not a child rapist:
"The Child-Raping Prophet" (by antybu86)--PRIVATE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzfFtcGI4x4
How Genesis is based on previous myths and religions:
"The Evolution of Genesis" (by AronRa)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLviKiEuj30
Determining the reliability of the Bible:
"The word of God" (by askegg)
Extensive series exploring the consequences of Christian beliefs:
"Tough Questions for Christians #1: When can God Forgive?" (by azsuperman01)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igSlSgvXBx4&feature (one of a series)
Bart Ehrman argues why there is good reason to believe the Bible is inaccurate and unreliable:
"Is the New Testament Reliable?" (by bdwilson1000)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0GF6YIk-2s
Contradictions between Genesis and what science has discovered:
"What Genesis Got Wrong" (by Brett Palmer)
Introduction and Christian interpretation of scripture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSDXgT2QAf0
Water didn't exist at the beginning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA6w0R2g4VA
Light didn't exist at the beginning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQXsm203AsY
The atmosphere vs. firmament: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2x-XFI1Ue4
The appearance of land: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJZ399tGJK4
The appearance of plants: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAVP3_99rWk
Formation of the sun, moon and stars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6GTNbPxMso
The evolution of the eye and the use of light: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC4c6tI6DqQ
The appearance of sea life and birds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtfFXj7s9bc
More on the appearance of birds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syUhe76uY0U
Conflicting creationist interpretations of the appearance of sea life and birds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__phB9CTMAQ
The appearance of land animals, including humans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vLEFgthweg
More on the appearance of land animals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3MZJKOtWBc
Conclusion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFpXPIOOfw
Contradictions between the Bible and what science has discovered:
"What the Bible Got Wrong" (by Brett Palmer)
A Flat Earth Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS78uT8j3ok
A Flat Earth Part 2 (Copyright Free): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUpiz6d8Yys
Addressing the supposed "scientific truths" found in the Bible:
"Top Ten (Failed) Proofs for God's Existence: Part 7" (by Brett Palmer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP-B-z1hKUk
Debunking the claims that Job provides advanced scientific knowledge:
"The Amazing Scientific Accuracy of Job:" (by Brett Palmer)
Episode 1 (Introduction): 7http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSK9W5KNxUI
Episode 2 (Atmospheric Science?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPu5MeXZhNc
Episode 3 (Earth Science?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vn1D_tA6mU
Episode 4 (Astrophysics?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLXCIGdruBo
Episode 5 (A Modern Invention?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEfrjWymjso
Episode 6 (Dinosaurs?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ymBUsKhuM
Episode 7 (Conclusion: Why Do They Do It?): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsoAhsLtTMM
Debunking JPHolding's claim about Elisha and the bears:
"Looney Cartooney Apologetics: JPHolding and Da Bears" (by Brett Palmer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycUqSQtbguo
Biblical contradictions, and Jesus' lessons that Christians ignore:
"Christians are not Christian" (by Captain42x)
Salvation requirements and self-defense: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcKoAjLls7s
Material wealth and adultery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvZWkPTyrho
Charity, prayer, demands and humility: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzStXX8L4cM and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pttn5FEVic
Impossible salvation requirements: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLdT4DXj6VA
How many people will Jesus save?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBwiL4QpoVE
What were Jesus' last words?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghWZMgXfOQc
God breaks his promises to Noah:
"Yahweh's Broken Promise" (by Captain42x)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fKhiNuuwz4
How God subverts free will:
"God Believes in Free Will?" (by Captain42x)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXwxBByZDJY
Showing how dramatically and inconsistently the "one true" Bible has changed over time:
"Canon of Scripture" (by crazypills2)
"The Old Testament Canon": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uPqV6X0yL0
"The New Testament Canon": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnKXZOhU95g
Significant contradictions in scripture:
"The Bible" (by crazypills2)
"Scripture Interprets Scripture?" (contradictions in scripture): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqB31bYFGGA
"Bible Contradictions - Ezra and Nehemiah": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLn4M-da7XY
"Bible Math Proofs": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K_B_1MXKzI
A God who needs to fine-tune is a God who is subordinate to a higher power:
"God's Hand Was Forced" (by DarkAntics)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPICs6YbFtA
Ways Jesus' death conflicts with the concept of ancient sacrifice:
"Jesus Wasn't Sacrificed" (by DarkAntics)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gh55gQwF1iY
God took three days to create the Earth, then only one day to create the rest of the universe?:
"The Most Wrong Anyone Ever Was" (by DarkMatter2525)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcQTCoY3wYQ
The inconsistency and illogic of God allowing evil and free will:
"How God Favors Evil" (by DarkMatter2525)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1BzP1wr234
Why metaphorical claims for Adam and Eve undermine the whole point of sacrificing Jesus:
"Real Christians Cannot Believe in Evolution?" (by Discern4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4Gjmk9mS0w
How God's "very good" creation was far from perfect:
"And people pray to this incompetent?" (by dprjones)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zssCCMFHXUU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzB57_jTxxA
The Bible contains provably false claims for how to cure leprosy:
"The bible strikes 13" (by dprjones)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sA-n-Aq3O5A
Contradictions, confusion and nonsense in the Bible (by GreatBigBore):
(the whole series is too extensive to list here, so only the first video in each series is included)
"I...Am Your Father! The Gospel of Luke": Chapters 1 & 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnlrrqMl3ho
"Jesus the Markdown: The Gospel of Mark": Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-vr40rnn8w
"Jesus the Letdown: The Gospel of Matthew": Chapters 1-2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLURjz6ilzA
Thoughts on First Corinthians: Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl5tqhg2Q58
"New Testament Flotsam": "Yahweh's Penis Obsession: Galatians": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgsqqvs-zuQ
"Refudenounce the Roots"—Apostle Paul's Epistle to the Romans: Chapter 1, Verses 1-17: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE4E8r-CUGA
"Don't Acts, Don't Tell": Chapter 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9zenKmqIJo
"Lego Mommy: the Gospel of John": Chapter 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtDriZ4x2tg
"Pseudepigrapha Psalad Psurgery"—Forged epistles of the New Testament: Prologue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5fGIYgWPYE
Contradictions, confusion and nonsense in the Koran:
"Islarme, Religion of Tears": Prologue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUS1j3dCaig
Some of the less well-known examples of "non-Christian" morality in the Bible:
"Sex & Violence in the Bible - David Fitzgerald - Skepticon 6" (by HamboneProductions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY0cniU30zk
Evidence that the authors of the Bible believed the world was flat:
"Flat Earth According to the Bible" (by KingHeathen)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0AuFKNmaaI&
NEW! Demonstrable problems with Mormon scripture and belief:
"The Way of the Mister: The Mormon Testimony" (by misterdeity)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYizpmXMptg
NEW! Contradictions and other problems with the Ten Commandments:
"HOLY $#!% Ep.1: Top 10 Commandments in the Bible" (by Mythicist Milwaukee)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ9_52rxD9g (one of a series)
Applying critical thinking to the Bible:
"Critical Thinking and the Bible" (by nathanaelstacy1)
Introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqOdErsjV5Y
Genesis and dating methods: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iVGnqzEE9M
What makes incest wrong?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlMuJBrOgZY
Defining critical thinking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mh3z5BKJD0w
Is Old Testament justice just?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ric9LzwMhOg
"Causes of Illness": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbyfZRajyqI
"The Ultimate Strongman Story": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCeNfx5hDtM
How did animals populate Australia after the Great Flood?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-_S_-j2aiU
Where are the miracles?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1X3W3A4Tdw
Are non-Bible prophecies evidence of the truth of their religions?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GGGxuHpamQ
Where is the evidence for Hebrews lost in the desert?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3rpnXbYOLw
Was Jesus' death justice?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5udroiCPhc8
Does the Bible give good parenting advice?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tof4dQTMEF8
God loses his powers when it comes to salvation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAWPbgdKpVw
"Requesting Proof from God": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-HbJhJAa-0
"The Tower of Babel": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDeu_JJdPO0
Why circumcision is genital mutilation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG7GKuxbmGg
Comparing God's emotional behavior to our own: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEnTb5rxsUU
Without God, would humans be selfish?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH4PhNz8h4U
Mistakes and oddities in the Bible:
"Brief Bible Blunders" (by ProfMTH)
Nobody asks where Jesus is going: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2EmxXdZ6Zc
God kills Egypt's livestock, then kills them again?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXrIO8xpNn8
On what day and at what time was Jesus crucified?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7cBWm5mh5U
Did Elijah ascend into heaven or not?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdrVvcvvY34
Paul's views on circumcision: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQoYiDWDu-0
Did Jesus know the Ten Commandments?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB24ilDDdqs
Is there one god or many?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqcW-UGAjlw
Did Jesus come to judge or not?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZEWtoXHsN8
Has anyone been righteous?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0wYL5-VqBU
Is it okay to call someone a fool?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG60mRUOOzg
Did Mary and Joseph understand Jesus?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYmfpkIRPhk
Is John the Baptist Elijah who was prophesied to come before the Messiah?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDdq22lGClw
How did the apostle Peter find out that Jesus was the Messiah?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JgDThUg50s
In whose name should people be baptized?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd7ye6-gbYs
When and where did Peter and Andrew first meet Jesus and begin to follow him?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0sAvnWQpUk
Can the commandments impart life?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT032Qn_b5E
God's venomous solution to starving Israelites: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqx7NyxkJyg
How Christians resort to bullshitting to escape facing logical problems in the Bible:
"Christians Do NOT Understand the Bible" (by ProfMTH)
Introduction: Does the Holy Spirit lead to contradictory conclusions, and is God all knowing?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAgrpg5sDFA
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA3i2v6ZuCk
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSdkyjszSt4
Part 3, Could Jesus have called off his sacrifice?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bqK9dNz0gE
Part 4, What Paul has to say about sex, marriage, celibacy, virginity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cV1UJJIlZ8
Response to the claim Jesus' disciples would only have been willing to die for their cause if the resurrection had actually occurred:
"DID the disciples die for a lie?" (by ProfMTH)
Understanding Jesus' failed prediction about the second coming:
"Jesus Was Wrong" (by ProfMTH)
Prophecies that Jesus did not fulfill:
"Jesus Was Not the Messiah" (by ProfMTH)
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx5EKaY1B8g
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv0pgcHkrP0
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyHCxl-5a0A
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RjJXduuNlg
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZOPIBTCHfw
Nor was Jesus the atonement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35A8zAkNjyE
Additional biblical contradictions and discrepancies (by ProfMTH):
"Christianity Refutes Itself": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMP-5jD_oaQ
"Adam + Eve = Plan B": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waV91LS0Atw
"God is love?": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP7SPJllNoc
"Questions for Biblical Inerrantists & Literalists": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPKZVqEr6V8
"Liberal & Moderate Christianity": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iErLsmU_y4U
"When WAS Jesus Born?": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOpMs_c6U2g
Perhaps God is the bad guy and the Devil is the good guy:
"Christians, I am the Devils Advocate: Literally!" (by noelplum99)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzuTtA_Coiw
The problems of getting from the devastated world after the Flood to the population of Abraham's generation:
"From Noah to Abraham" (by noelplum99)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csx4AgqnP0Q
The Bible's vague, trivial, pre-known, false, unsupported, unfulfilled and self-fulfilling prophecies:
"7 Problems With Biblical Prophecy" (by SkepticalStudent)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjp_wET1pfs
Problems with biblical literalism:
"Do YOU Know Your Bible?" (by TaylorX04)
1: Did Jesus end the Old Testament law?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSAJrMyq9-Q
2: The punishments for disobeying the Bible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjHD4QCPa60
3: Can the wealthy achieve salvation?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTRX-L5trMM
4: The concept of hell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxgH5GQjnfc
5: Was Jesus a sorcerer?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAad9fm_img
6: Problems with Jesus' resurrection: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Gyi23eDWw
7: Can young children be judged as sinners?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd2NuLP01Cs
8: Was Jesus crucified or hanged?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-xnlvknJ0
9: Did Jesus only intend to save Jews?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWMe8YY9kfU
10: Jesus preached violence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBttbNqQShY
11: Moses contradictions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9JwwM7XRCs
12: Scientific mistakes about astronomy in the Bible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbSyjQ18YFY
13: Ten Commandments contradictions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7qSw1glvWY
14: Contradictory statements by Jesus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqQPPUEPjA4
15:Is salvation through faith and works, or faith alone?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55j0RotXAgw
16: Inconsistencies concerning the apostles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F87we2l6Rd4
17: Problems with Noah's ark and the flood: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65I-DycEvVk
18: So-called "righteous" people in the Bible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhiIGbKiqNc
19: Problems with various Bible stories: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdpRwkl-mdw
20: Comparing Elisha and Jesus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76RSLi3EagU
21: Comparing Jesus of Nazareth with Jesus son of Sirach (in The Wisdom of Ben Sira): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzkswJlApfo
22: Is God omnipotent?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWNFn6i2BjA
23: Is God omnipresent?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX0VXjsNTDA
24: Is God omniscient?: http://www.youtube.com/user/TaylorX04#p/a/u/1/f2-8GoySomQ
25: Is God all-loving?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc505HkBXm8
26: Astrology in the Bible: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf4xTlz3igc
Would Christians follow Jesus if he had appeared today instead of 2000 years ago?:
"Jesus: Miracles Fail" (by TheAmazingAtheist)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PICEKwnkhA
Absurd Bible claims (by TheThinkingAtheist):
"Noah's Ark-God, Giraffes & Genocide": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CccaGaKOlSI
"The Story of Creation": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah5xFMYbP4s
"Welcome To This World" (message to a newly born Christian): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJrqLV4yeiw
"The Ten Commandments": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QWwzT4ulkA
An investigation of whether Jesus was ever a living human:
"Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?" (by TruthSurge)
Introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVfgVnmKVAg
The second coming of Jesus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=017Cn0JMv2Y http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmN9xCqX454
When was Jesus crucified?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afJx_H3CS8A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3MLKB7vFGU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qMWmbGGkBw
How Jesus was "firstborn from the dead"?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qMWmbGGkBw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNR5Uv2Z4yg
Who killed Jesus?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R3liALvyss http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzVbBmlsW-A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNOn5kw8zdc
Was Jesus ever human?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwlxG3OkjD4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZG-YJ_2fSs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdn3rI9N-YA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qswRQHn3l9M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ7j5fWCMoE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWsKZYIwZ-I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZtYyOm9Q8c
How did early Christians find out about Jesus?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R5q_g1CAdI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFDH0zsxmxU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqCTKsp89Zc
Was Jesus always called Jesus?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4VrqQnsV58 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBIII9yRwCY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJb_bHplWzQ
Where are the missing disciples?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTRKN2pgZrE and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQ9M82mP3U
Addressing the verses that appear to contradict the Jesus myth theory: Introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hwZkiOJwT8 Jesus will appear a second time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wadkWCb_ENU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw9v8zVxVxs Jesus was crucified in the first century: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXuLZsvY6qY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kez1J5ed72s Paul blames the Jews for Jesus' death: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr42-SDPewM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRkEyToUixc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7W4cS__kgU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9PweLtp_T0 Judas betrayed Jesus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDV4IFf3S3c Paul referred to Jesus as a man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIEQoz1dz_0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy9xr4H-2ik http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkK0DNCDfwk and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JytLao3TWRU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgfTsOike8o
Questioning the reliability of the resurrection:
"Excavating The Empty Tomb (beyond a reasonable doubt)" (by TruthSurge)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jOzCMy9e5E (one of a series)
What the Bible actually says about what heaven will be like:
"What Will Heaven Be Like?" (by Underlings)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RT1DTpF_7w
Analyzing the problems with apologetics philosophy:
"Philosophical Failures of Christian Apologetics" (by AntiCitizenX)
Part 1: Why God Matters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lroKN5gdm08
Part 2: Absolute Truth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YnlW59--JE
Part 3: The Null Hypothesis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAR29P6L4rM
Part 4: Word Games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf9q1Ukhefw
Disbelief in God does not mean life has no purpose:
"A Purpose Without God" (by antybu86)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy4B-i3m0eE
Problems with the concepts of omnipotence, omniscience, etc.:
"The Illogical God" (by antybu86)
Why the arguments theists use to prove God simply don't work:
"Poor Apologetics 1: First Cause" (by azsuperman01)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq3dXIpEHe8 (one of a series)
Great minds explain why belief in God is not rational:
"Rationalism Breeds Atheism" (by bdwilson1000)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-x1zGb6dM
Austin Dacey arguing against the existence of God by virtue of the evidence (in a debate against William Lane Craig):
"The Case Against Theism (Austin Dacey)" (by bdwilson1000)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-x1zGb6dM
Tracie Harris explains why there is no way to connect the dots from any unexplained event to a universe-creating god:
"Why is a supernatural hypothesis invalid? (The Atheist Experience)" (by bdwilson1000)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrWrwXl6t60
Why atheism makes more sense than theism:
"Making the Case for Atheists (former preacher Dan Barker)" (by bdwilson1000)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7y5slOkwaU
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respond, yet they are often neglected because of the amount of energy spent on those who have a past association with the parish but aren’t responding any more.
Again, those who leave should be listened to, ministered to, etc. But that’s assuming that they respond when an attempt is made to reach out. They almost never do. Yes, go after the one sheep who is lost, but what do you do when the sheep keeps running away from you and won’t be “caught”? You can seek and seek, but some folks don’t want to be found. I wish I knew why.
Really, I think way too much effort is spent on people who don’t want to respond. They shouldn’t be forgotten, of course, but they also shouldn’t be front and center, not when there are people who are actually ready to engage with Christ and to live the Christian life. They should be included, but they can’t be the priority. That’s robbing other people who are much more receptive.
Yes, we should all try to help people to be saved, even the stubborn and stonewalling, but ultimately, each person will have to give an account for himself before the Judgment Seat. Blaming the priest, the bishop, the parish council, other parishioners, etc., probably won’t get people very far.
Even the lapsed have to be given responsibility for their own spiritual lives. If they’re not willing to take it, no one can take it for them.Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE (I-Vt.) said Thursday that 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 is “more wrong” on climate change than any other policy.
“Donald Trump is wrong about a lot of things, but there is no area where he is more wrong than on the issue of climate change,” Sanders said at a small renewable energy rally outside the Capitol.
“No, Mr. President, climate change is not a hoax. Climate change is real; climate change is caused by human activity. … Mr. President, your job is to listen to the scientific community that is virtually unanimous in telling us that we have to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.”
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Sanders and Sens. Jeff Merkley Jeffrey (Jeff) Alan MerkleySenate confirms Trump court pick despite missing two 'blue slips' Sixteen years later, let's finally heed the call of the 9/11 Commission Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks MORE (D-Ore.) and Ed Markey Edward (Ed) John MarkeySenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Ocasio-Cortez responds to Ivanka Trump: 'I actually worked for tips and hourly wages' Overnight Energy: McConnell plans Green New Deal vote before August recess | EPA official grilled over enforcement numbers | Green group challenges Trump over Utah pipelines MORE (D-Mass.) spoke at the rally with climate activists to announce a bill that would require the United States produce 100 percent of its energy from renewable or clean sources by 2050.
That bill, however, will likely gain no traction in a Congress controlled by the GOP, which generally supports Trump’s effort to promote American production of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas.
All three senators took aim at Trump’s energy agenda. Markey called Trump’s executive orders to help fossil fuels “completely and totally unacceptable” and said this month’s March for Science and People’s Climate March show the public wants more renewable energy.
Merkley said climate change is already having an impact on the environment in the U.S., adding that a switch to renewable energy would turn that industry into a jobs engine.
“The smart investment is in renewable energy, from every perspective,” he said. “Now is the time that we have to quit just looking at these facts and we have to act.”Over the past several weeks DNC Chair Donna Brazile has been pummeled in the media after Podesta's emails revealed that she provided a debate question to Hillary in advance of a March 13, 2016 debate with Bernie Sanders.
Now, the latest WikiLeaks dump reveals that it wasn't just a one-off thing. The following email from Brazile, sent one day prior to a March 6th debate with Bernie, shows yet another occasion of her providing an advanced peak at debate questions to the Hillary campaign. We can't imagine that Bernie supporters are very happy that this is the person chosen to takeover the leadership position at the DNC after Schultz was pushed out for showing favoritism toward the Clinton campaign.
And, sure enough, according to the following transcript from the New York Times, Hillary was well prepared for a question from Lee-Anne Walters about lead poisoning...she even had a handy stat about 500k children having "lead in their bodies"....but those are just stats that most people have on the top of their minds.
COOPER: I want to go to Lee-Anne Walters. This is Lee-Anne Walters. She was one of the first people to report problems with the water in Flint. One of her twin boys stopped growing. Her daughter lost her hair. She says she’s undecided, and has a question for both of you to answer, but we’ll start with Senator Sanders. Ms. Walters? QUESTION: After my family, the city of Flint and the children in D.C. were poisoned by lead, will you make a personal promise to me right now that, as president, in your first 100 days in office, you will make it a requirement that all public water systems must remove all lead service lines throughout the entire United States, and notification made to the — the citizens that have said service lines. SANDERS: I will make a personal promise to you that the EPA and the EPA director that I appoint will make sure that every water system in the United States of America is tested, and that the people of those communities know the quality of the water that they are drinking, and that we are gonna have a plan to rebuild water systems in this country that are unsafe for drinking. COOPER: Let me just point out for accuracy’s sake, there is 10 million lead service pipes delivering water to people all across this country tonight. Secretary Clinton? CLINTON: Well, I agree completely. I want to go further though. I want us to have an absolute commitment to getting rid of lead wherever it is because it’s not only in water systems, it’s also in soil, and it’s in lead paint that is found mostly in older homes. That’s why 500,000 children today have lead — lead in their bodies. So, I want to do exactly what you said. We will commit to a priority to change the water systems, and we will commit within five years to remove lead from everywhere. We were making progress on this in the 1990’s. I worked with then Senator Obama to get more money, more support to do more to remove lead.
And then there is also this follow-up to a previous email in which Brazile promises even more debate questions.
Just more "behavior that is normal" we're sure.
* * *
Donna Brazile was noticeably uncomfortable for every second of the following 10-minute interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News. Kelly pushed hard on the recent Project Veritas undercover videos showing DNC operatives plotting to incite violence at Trump rallies and commit massive voter fraud and over Brazile's leaked email showing that she provided a CNN debate question to Hillary ahead of a March 2016 debate with Bernie. Brazile tried every trick in the book to deflect and pivot but Kelly held her feet to the fire.
Brazile's response on the Project Veritas videos were mostly nonsensical though she did summon the typical democrat argument that O'Keefe is a criminal and has a history of doctoring videos. But the real fireworks came when she was pressed on her leaked email revealing that she shared a debate question with Hillary in advance of a debate.
“I did not receive any questions from CNN, let’s just be very clear.” "First of all what information are you providing to me that will let me see what you are talking about?” “As a Christian woman I understand persecution, but I will not sit here and be persecuted because your information is totally false.” “Podesta’s emails were stolen. You’re like the thief that wants to bring into the night what you found in the gutter.” “I am not going to try to validate falsified information. I have my documents, I have my files.”
Because Donna seems to be afflicted with the same disease that haunted Hillary during her tenure as Secretary of State, an awful condition the causes the host to "not recall" significant life events, below is a refresher of the email in question.
And here is a similar interview by Jordan Chariton of The Young Turks:
Yeah, but Russia.Modern as a format has some issues. But in the last year they have become a lot worse.
From Wizards of the Coast’s perspective, Modern’s primary reason for existing is to provide Standard players the illusion (and historically the reality) that the expensive cards they are buying for Standard will have some future use.
This isn’t really true any more. Since print runs dramatically increased a few years back, the only truly expensive card to have its value propped up by Modern demand has been Voice of Resurgence. Powerhouses and format staples like Thoughtseize and Wooded Foothills are too common to hold serious value.
However, the illusion is there that Modern will ensure that a Standard collection doesn’t become worthless after rotation. This player confidence matters a lot for Wizards’ business model.
_____________
Modern is starting to fall apart. Recent design trends have seen proactive threats get better and better, while defensive answers become weaker. Additionally, several decks that attempt to overload on one strategy (Infect and pump spells; red hyper-aggro with burn; Zoo hyper-aggro with Death’s Shadow; the metalcraft artifact aggro deck that is colloquially known as Affinity despite playing no ‘Affinity for Artifacts’ cards) have reached a critical mass where the fundamental turn of the format is now about 3.75.
There’s also a fair number of decks that are one or two card printings away from becoming extremely good. While all-in mill (with Archive Trap, Glimpse the Unthinkable, Hedron Crab and Mind Funeral) is at best a casual deck to take to FNM right now, I firmly believe that one more high-quality mill spell being printed will push it into the upper echelons of competitive play. I was saying the same thing about Dredge a year ago.
Compare Modern to Legacy.
Modern’s best interactive cards against an unknown field are Lightning Bolt and Path to Exile – one mana answers that eliminate opposing threats at tempo gain. Lightning Bolt does so at card parity, Path to Exile at card disadvantage in the early game, and virtual card parity in the lategame (when the land is irrelevant).
These two cards are better at protecting a winning position than they are at pulling you back into a game where you are behind. There are few feelings worse than a burn player saying “Bolt your only blocker. Swing with Guide and Swiftspear. I cast Atarka’s Command choosing Lava Spike and the team buff, any responses?”
On the flip side, Legacy has a number of interactive cards that are mostly mediocre when you are winning, but are outstanding when you are behind.
Force of Will. Misdirection. Pyroblast. Flusterstorm. Swords to Plowshares. Or the criminally underplayed Pyrokinesis and Abolish.
For zero or one mana, all of these cards can turn around a gamestate where you are losing badly, and get you back into the game.
These cards are also the reason that Goblin Charbelcher is not a big force in the format despite being the deck with the highest percentage of turn 1 and 2 kills using Legacy-legal cards.
______________
Some say that the answer to Modern’s woes is better card selection. Adding Preordain and/or Ponder back into the legal cardpool (or even more dramatically, adding strong tutors like Enlightened Tutor to the cardpool) would indeed allow players to play smaller numbers of narrow hate cards to beat the hyper-focused decks.
But here the cure is worse than the disease. Better tutoring – whether from card selection cantrips or from actual tutors – would significantly strengthen combo. And combo has a lot of powerful offensive interaction available to it – cards like Pact of Negation – that become far stronger when they can be reliably found when needed. Adding Legacy-level card filtering (or even going halfway) would create new monsters worse than the current Burn/Affinity/Suicide Zoo/Infect format.
And that’s not even touching on Force of Will, or its little brothers Daze and Mental Misstep.
Yes, FoW is the glue that holds Legacy together, but in Modern it would be much more at home in Affinity countering Hurkyl’s Recall, or in Storm protecting a Pyromancer’s Ascension. Mental Misstep and Daze would love to protect a Death’s Shadow from Path to Exile, or to protect a Blighted Agent from a Lightning Bolt.
What Modern needs, more than anything else, is strong zero and one mana defensive interaction, that is maindeckable, useful against a variety of decks, and far weaker at defending a winning position but strong when you are behind.
Some cards like this already exist, but they are not good enough. Condemn and Oust don’t get there. Porphyry Nodes, while extremely strong, is not enough on its own. Sunscour often goes 3-for-3 at a tempo gain, but requires too much of a commitment to white cards and is often uncastable.
______________
The heroes Modern needs are reprints of two fringe-playable Legacy cards.
Pyrokinesis and Abolish.
Abolish encourages playing less fetchlands, answers every hard lock piece in Modern (Ensnaring Bridge, Worship, Blood Moon, Chalice of the Void), buys a turn against Affinity, and most importantly does so even when you are locked out of casting spells.
Pyrokinesis is everything Sunscour wishes it could be, and is fast enough to kick Affinity, burn, infect and maybe even Death’s Shadow Zoo.
Those cards would provide the tools Modern control needs to have a chance against aggro and aggro/combo decks. This then allows control to keep combo in check.
These cards are safe to print into Standard – Abolish would do nothing, and Pyrokinesis would be a good card but unlikely to seriously influence the format, just like Dispel and Negate have been.
Both were originally printed as cycles, but that doesn’t matter. Cards can be reprinted out of the context of their cycles – for precedents, see Leyline of the Void, or the most recent reprint of Liliana Vess.
I’ve wanted these cards in Modern for some time, but with the current state of the format it is more urgent than it has been before.
Wizards have five options of what to do with the Modern format, and I do not like the first four of them.
Option 1:
Restore the turn 4 rule with a wide swathe of bannings (starting with Death’s Shadow; Glistener Elf; one of Cranial Plating or Mox Opal; and one of Atarka’s Command or Monastery Swiftspear or Goblin Guide). I think most players would find this unpalatable for obvious reasons. Hell, I’m one of the players most sympathetic to using bannings to improve formats and I would find this unpalatable.
This option would probably kill off player confidence in Modern, which is a bad thing for Wizards’ bottom line.
Option 2:
Acknowledge that Modern is now a turn 3.5-3.75 format, and unban accordingly. Unban cards that are bad or not oppressive in such a format (Umezawa’s Jitte; Splinter Twin; Ponder; Preordain; Stoneforge Mystic; JtMS; BBE; Seething Song; maybe even Sensei’s Stalling Top) and just let the format rip.
This might work – but it would make it harder for new cards (such as Nahiri) to break into the format. This makes it harder for Wizards to grow the format, and risks it losing its appeal to Standard players who see some of their collection rotating.
Retaining players who lose some of their collection to rotation is critical to Wizards, and so I don’t see this working for them. Additionally I’m not sure that a faster Modern would be fun – the existing menaces going away doesn’t necessarily result in a healthy format either.
Option 3:
Reboot Modern.
Let Modern go the way of Legacy (little to no Wizards support) and introduce a new format, perhaps with cards from Innistrad and up, or RTR and up, or even M15 and up. I’ll call this hypothetical format POMO (for POstMOdern).
POMO might be a good format, and in the longer term it could serve the same role Wizards want Modern to serve. But the short-term lack of confidence from the enfranchised Modern playerbase would likely hurt Wizards badly.
I do not endorse this option. But if it is to happen, there will be warning signs – Wizards intentionally fucking up the Modern format via printing cards that warp the format, and/or via shock bannings that undermine confidence in the format. Wizards did something similar when they killed off Extended – they changed the format legality rules creating a horrible format, then announced a while later “Players don’t like Extended, we are killing it”.
Option 4:
Let Modern go as-is, with minimal or no changes. Let players abandon it.
Again, I cannot support this option. Modern is in a bad state right now, but another year of the status quo will probably wreck it.
Option 5:
Intentionally print cards into Standard that will address Modern’s weaknesses; and/or change the rules about supplementary sets and print such cards there.
This is the solution, IMO.
I pointed out Abolish and Pyrokinesis as Standard-safe cards that would have a huge positive impact on Modern.
There are other possibilities too. At the safer end, Pulverize and Cave-In. At the riskier, Misdirection, Flusterstorm or Submerge. All of those provide powerful defensive interaction at 0 to 1 mana.
____________
Modern is not dead like Extended was. It may not even be dying, and dying isn’t a quick process anyway.
But Modern is seriously sick. It’s time to fix it.
sirgog
2,795 total views, 2 views todayIn this July 21, 1992 file photo, then-Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton stands with his wife Hillary Clinton during a campaign stop. (AP Photo/Greg Gibson, File)
Roger Stone, one-time strategist for Donald Trump, is preparing for a Hillary Clinton nomination in an unusual way, according to Reuters. Stone plans to form a political action committee which will focus intently on highlighting the story of Kathleen Willey, a former volunteer who accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment.
It's a simple plan with an obvious rationale.
In the 2004 campaign, John Kerry had an advantage that George W. Bush couldn't match. A decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, Kerry could draw a sharp contrast with Bush on military service and leadership at a time when the country was focused on foreign policy -- and at a time when U.S. casualties in Iraq were spiking.
From which the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" was born. Men who'd served with Kerry stepped forward to suggest that the stories of his service in Vietnam were overblown, putting Kerry on the defensive and sowing doubt that his advantage was actually all that advantageous. Did it cost Kerry the election? No, probably not. But it was a way of turning Kerry's strength into a negative, a tactic warmly embraced by top Bush adviser Karl Rove.
Hillary Clinton is unleashing her biggest weapon on Bernie Sanders: Bill (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
This year, Hillary Clinton has an advantage that the Republicans won't be able to match, save a stunning reversal of fortune by Carly Fiorina. If Clinton is the nominee, she will be poised to be the first woman elected to the White House -- a landmark that will almost certainly spur some voters to give her their vote.
Enter Stone. His former client, Trump, previewed this line of attack late last year when he started attacking Clinton by noting that Bill had been accused of much more unsavory things.
If Hillary thinks she can unleash her husband, with his terrible record of women abuse, while playing the women's card on me, she's wrong! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2015
I hope Bill Clinton starts talking about women's issues so that voters can see what a hypocrite he is and how Hillary abused those women! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2016
The idea, as with the Swift Boats: Get people who were thinking of voting for Clinton because of her gender to reconsider.
It's not clear how extensively Willey would be deployed. Per Reuters: "Willey said she will give interviews and speeches and appear in political advertisements to ensure the accusations remain part of the political discourse during the election campaign."
Her story, as our Glenn Kessler detailed during the Trump-Clinton feud, is a grim one. "The former White House aide said Clinton groped her in his office in 1993," Kessler wrote, "on the same day when her husband, facing embezzlement charges, died in an apparent suicide.... [A]n independent prosecutor concluded 'there is insufficient evidence to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that President Clinton’s testimony regarding Kathleen Willey was false.'" (When being deposed in the 1990s, we'll note, Willey denied having been touched.)
Stone worked for Trump through the first few months of the businessman's campaign. He left (Trump says he was fired) shortly after the first debate -- and after Trump accused Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly of having "blood coming out of her... wherever."
That Trump reply, of course, came after Kelly asked him about his behavior toward women.The International Whaling Commission (IWC) on Friday demanded that Japan provide more information to prove that its revised Antarctic whaling programme was for scientific research, saying it could not reach a consensus based on documents submitted.
The British-based IWC had been expected to judge whether Japan’s “Newrep-A proposal”, which would target 3,996 minke whales over 12 years, had addressed the issues that led to its predecessor being ruled illegal by the international court of justice (ICJ).
But the commission’s 2015 Scientific Committee report found the new proposal “contained insufficient information” for its expert panel to complete a full review and specified the extra work that Japan needed to undertake.
Regardless of the ruling, Japan could still press ahead with plans, scheduled to begin in December 2015, to target whales in the Southern Ocean for “lethal sampling” as it is ultimately up to individual countries to issue permits for whaling on scientific grounds.
However, it would face the ire of the international community if it were to resume whaling without the approval of the global body charged with the conservation of the giant mammals.
Japan believes the world’s whale population, especially the minke stock, is sizeable enough to accommodate a return to sustainable whaling, putting it at odds with campaigners and anti-whaling nations.
Tokyo’s revised proposals set an annual target of 333 minke whales for future hunts in the Antarctic, down from some 900 under the “Scientific Whale Research programme in the Antarctic Ocean” deemed illegal by the ICJ.
The court – the highest of the United Nations – ruled the programme was “not for the purposes of scientific research” and was abusing a scientific exemption set out in the 1986 international moratorium on whaling.
It concluded that Tokyo was carrying out a commercial hunt and using science as a fig leaf. Japan makes no secret of the fact that the meat ends up on dinner tables.
The court said that Tokyo’s programme needed to “improve both biological and ecological data on Antarctic minke whales” and “investigate the structure and dynamics of the Antarctic marine ecosystems”.
Japan argues that knowledge gained by the research killing would help the IWC calculate sustainable levels for hunting and lead to better understanding of the Antarctic marine ecosystem.
The ICJ would have to rule separately whether the new plans met the specifications and were legal. Friday’s report was intended to build a common scientific base for the court and the IWC to work from.
After the ICJ ruling, Japan said it would not hunt during last winter’s Antarctic season but has since expressed its intention to resume “research whaling” in 2015-16.
In March, Japan’s whaling ships returned home from the Antarctic with no catch, as planned, after the UN court’s decision.
It was the first return without a catch since 1987 when the country began the annual “research” hunt in the Antarctic, according to local media.
Japan killed 251 minke whales in the Antarctic in the 2013-14 season and 103 the previous year, far below its target because of direct action by conservationist group Sea Shepherd.Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement
Seven people were killed and at least 50 were injured when the roof of a church collapsed in Sao Paulo, Brazil, fire officials say.
They say the number of casualties could have been much higher but the accident happened between services when fewer people were inside.
The building belongs to the Reborn in Christ denomination, one of the largest Evangelical Churches in Brazil.
The footballer Kaka was married there in 2005.
The fire service says about 400 people were either entering or leaving the church in a central district of Sao Paulo when the roof collapsed on Sunday.
Troubled Church
Hours after the accident, Brazilian television showed pictures of firemen and police officers continuing to search through the rubble for survivors.
The roof of the church appears to have been completely destroyed, the BBC's Gary Duffy reports from Sao Paulo.
A spokeswoman for the Reborn in Christ church said the building, which is also its headquarters, normally holds 2,000 people, and is usually crowded on a Sunday night.
The church, a former cinema, is in one of the oldest districts of Sao Paulo.
In 2007, Reborn in Christ's two founders, Estevam and Sonia Hernandes, were sentenced to ten months' detention in Miami for smuggling cash into the United States.
The couple are said to own a network of radio and television stations in Brazil, where they have also faced an investigation over money-laundering charges.A law requiring US citizens to present federally mandated ID cards for "official purposes" such as boarding a plane is likely to be shaken down at the door under the US Department of Homeland Security's new secretary, Janet Napolitano.
The ex-governor of Arizona, tapped as chief homeland spook by Obama in January, has been an outspoken adversary of the law since its introduction as a rider act for the "Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, 2005."
Revisions to the law being proposed by Napolitano and other officials, however, appear to be motivated by the cost of implementing the law, rather than out of concern for the privacy of American citizenry or states' rights.
Dubbed the Real ID Act of 2005, the law imposes uniform requirements for driver's licenses and state ID cards in order for them to be accepted by the federal government as identification for official purposes. It also establishes new standards for the personal data to be tracked by the cards (similar to that of a passport), and requires each state to share its ID databases with each other.
In the US, driver's licenses are issued by the states, not by the federal government. While the law allows each state to continue issuing non-complying IDs, the old cards must carry a unique design and be clearly marked to show they cannot be accepted for any federal purpose. But the usefulness of non-complying cards is rather put into question by the federal government's running the show at US borders and security check-ins at the country's airports.
Furthermore, the Act specifies needing a Real ID to enter a federal building or nuclear power plant - but leaves the true scope of what is considered an "official purpose" as an ambiguity. For some officials, it's a tempting opportunity to use the system to track more mundane activities such as purchasing over-the-counter medicines as a means to bust meth labs.
Napolitano said earlier this month that her office is working with the National Governors Association (NGA) to propose revisions to the law.
The NGA claims Real ID places unnecessary and costly burdens on states and will do little to achieve the law's intended security goals.
"Governors are committed to improving the security and integrity of state DL/ID systems, but the timelines and requirements mandated by Real ID are unrealistic," the group states in its online policy manifesto.
NGA says implementing the program could cost upwards of $11bn over five years - money the federal government currently doesn't intend to fund and that many states can't afford.
Presently, all 50 states have received extensions to the original May 11, 2008 deadline. A few holdout states such as California, Montana, Maine, and South Carolina have either refused to commit to the plan or even passed resolutions not to participate.
The current deadline for when all US citizens aged 50 years or younger must have a Real ID license is May 2011.
Privacy advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) claim the Real ID law fails to provide critical privacy-security safeguards for personal data.
From the EFF's policy page:
Once the IDs and database are in place, their uses will inevitably expand to facilitate a wide range of surveillance activities. Remember, the Social Security number started innocuously enough, but it has become a prerequisite for a host of government services and been co-opted by private companies to create massive databases of personal information. A national ID poses similar dangers; for example, because "common machine-readable technology" will be required on every ID, the government and businesses will be able to easily read your private information off the cards in myriad contexts.
While financial complaints are prominent in the NGA's policy, it does recommend establishing further minimum guidelines to protect the "security, confidentiality, and integrity of personally identifiable information."
But that's not to say Napolitano and company are against tracking the personal data in the first place. Napolitano is an advocate for states individually implementing so-called "enhanced driver's licenses," which include an embedded RFID chip that allows for remote tracking.
"Enhanced driver's licenses give confidence that the person holding the card is the person who is supposed to be holding the card, and it's less elaborate than Real ID," she told The Washington Times.
Napolitano said she expects the NGA to introduce their package of changes to congress this spring. ®Meet the Barnsbury pub landlord who’s paying for your beer
Hop & Berry landlord Tom Buxton is giving away up to 100 free pints a day during Lent. Picture: Ken Mears Archant
Imagine you are a pub landlord. It’s a doomed trade. Across the country, an average 26 pubs a week are shutting down. How do you combat this? You give away 100 pints a day, silly.
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The Hop & Berry pub in Liverpool Road, Barnsbury, Islington. Picture: Ken Mears The Hop & Berry pub in Liverpool Road, Barnsbury, Islington. Picture: Ken Mears
Tom Buxton, landlord of the Hop & Berry in Liverpool Road, Barnsbury, has come up with the madcap idea of offering up to £16,000-worth of beer free of charge for the duration of Lent.
He took over the struggling pub in December, and immediately had to contend with the ‘dry January’ fad.
And with Lent starting on February 10, he was worried another wave of drinkers would be willing to give up alcohol for its 40-day duration.
So he decided to do something that everyone else said “was f***ing crazy”.
He partnered with mobile phone app Crowdit, from which a customer can claim one free pint every day until March 24 by showing it at the bar.
Not many people would associate Islington with struggling pubs. And why would they? Walk through Upper Street on any night of the week and you will see a plethora of packed bars and restaurants.
But look further out to the likes of Barnsbury, Holloway, Highbury and Finsbury Park. Success is not necessarily a given.
That was the problem facing Tom, 31, who took over the Hop & Berry after spells running pubs in Marlow, Earls Court and the Philippines.
As the Gazette sits down with a pint of Islington Lager - brewed by Holloway brewery Hammerton - and enjoys the pub’s classic rock soundtrack, Tom explains its homely atmosphere.
Hop & Berry landlord Tom Buxton pictured on Saturday afternoon with customers enjoying a free beer. Picture: Ken Mears Hop & Berry landlord Tom Buxton pictured on Saturday afternoon with customers enjoying a free beer. Picture: Ken Mears
“Look at this place, it doesn’t deserve to be quiet. It should be buzzing with lots of people and a great vibe. I just thought, how do you get people to come in and appreciate the atmosphere?
“With Lent coming up, it was more encouragement for people to give up something, starting a few days after dry January. I wanted to beat this obstacle.”
And what better way to attract drinkers to a pub than offer free beer?
So far, Tom and his staff have been giving away up to 40 claimed pints a day. But, as he reasons, there’s a method behind the madness.
“I’m paying out of my pocket but already seeing the benefit. Some people have been coming in every day so it’s building our reputation.
“Everyone said - pardon my language - I was f***ing crazy. People are laughing, saying I’m insane, but two-and-a-half hours later they are still here!
“It’s only one free pint per person, so most people have been claiming that and staying for a couple more because they are enjoying it here.”
It’s this willingness to think outside the box that can help pubs thrive again, says Tom.
“The Hop & Berry has been through a turbulent time, a lack of consistency.
“But I think a lot of people blame external factors, like the difficult pub climate, when actually it’s a lack of willingness to understand the market.
“You can’t expect people to come if your pub is no good.”
Though he adds: “With our free beer scheme, we are at an advantage being a free house [not controlled by an owner or brewery], which means I could make that decision to give away potentially 4,000 pints.
“It’s a statement against working to maximum efficiency - which is not what pubs are about anyway.”
CAMRA: ‘Creativity is welcome’
The Hop & Berry’s free beer scheme has been welcomed by Islington’s leading action group for pubs.
John Cryne, chairman of the Campaign for Real Ale’s (CAMRA) north London branch, praised Tom Buxton’s innovative idea.
He said: “As long as it’s a pint per punter, it’s not really any different to pubs who give discounts all the time. Landlords being creative is always welcome.”
Mr Cryne said it was necessary for pubs in residential areas: “If you get out of the Upper Street bubble, it’s a bit of a struggle for pubs at the moment.
“For those off the beaten track, it can be very hard work. There’s always competition from cheap drinks in supermarkets and property developers are forever looking to snap these places up.”
He also rounded on “dry January”.
“It’s not something we support. We obviously support fund-raising for charity, but why does it have to be at the expense of pubs, which are struggling as it is and offer a lot of benefits to people?”
It’s official: Upper Street has competition
Walk around the leafy residential streets of Barnsbury and you will see a number of pubs - like the Hop & Berry - that are defying the grim national picture for poor trade.
And there’s no reason why this plush area can’t compete with the heart of Islington, says landlord Tom Buxton.
“The way I see it, there’s eight million people in London. We don’t need everyone to come, just a few more. It’s not that much further from Angel station, or Upper Street.
“I don’t think it’s right to have a pub that’s struggling in Islington - it’s too vibrant.
“And with pubs, people are willing to go further for somewhere good. There’s a lot in this area - such as The Albion and Pig & Butcher - that and understand this and are doing brilliantly.”Special Needs Teacher Comes To The Rescue On Flight
When a teenager with special needs refused to get back into his seat on a recent flight, the crew asked if there were any teachers on board and Sophie Murphy answered the call.
LYNN NEARY, HOST:
We've heard it in the movies if not in real life. Someone takes sick, and the call goes out. Is there a doctor in the house? But who's ever heard anyone ask - is there a teacher? Well, that cry for help went out on a flight to Melbourne, Australia, and Sophie Murphy answered the call. Sophie Murphy joins us now from Melbourne to tell us what happened. Thanks for joining us, Sophie.
SOPHIE MURPHY: Oh, thank you very much for having me, Lynn.
NEARY: Sophie, what was the situation that was occurring that required you to help?
MURPHY: Sure. There was a young boy who was about 14 years old, a boy with Down Syndrome. And he was feeling really unwell and so had actually put - was lying down on the floor in the middle of the aisle with his face toward the pilot and lying on his stomach. And his parents were on the plane, and his brother and sister were on the plane. And they were perhaps in their 20s. And he was really upset. He was feeling itchy. He was feeling scared, and no one could move him at that time.
NEARY: And so the plane couldn't land because he wouldn't get off the floor?
MURPHY: Correct. We were circling above Melbourne at the time, as they suggested that it was becoming more of an emergency situation as they were starting to run out of fuel - I only found this out afterwards - that that's when they called for a teacher.
NEARY: What did you do to help him? And how did you get him to finally get into a seat?
MURPHY: Well, when I heard it, I thought this can't be serious |
the adoption
The type of adoption professional you choose and how they structure their costs
American Adoptions specializes in private domestic infant adoptions. If you are adopting from foster care or considering international adoption, how much it costs to adopt a child will differ from what is outlined here. We are specifically looking at the question, “How much does adoption cost in the U.S.?”
How Much Does it Cost to Adopt a Baby in the United States?
The cost associated with adoption will differ depending on the adoption professional you work with. A report from Adoptive Families Magazine found that domestic infant adoption costs families an average of $43,000. At American Adoptions, the average total adoption cost for our program ranges from $40,000 to $50,000.
Those numbers may seem big, and that’s because they are. It’s normal to have a negative reaction to seeing how much it costs to adopt a child for the first time. However, there are reasons for the cost. Understanding those can help paint a clearer picture of why these costs are necessary.
Adoption Costs and Benefits of American Adoptions
Any family who commits emotionally and financially to the adoption process deserves an adoption professional who is equally committed. There are several ways American Adoptions provides important benefits worked into our total adoption costs, all of which exist to help our adoptive families collectively save hundreds of thousands of dollars:
1. Fixed Agency Fees
Our agency fees remain fixed regardless of the total cost of the adoption or the number of hours required by our staff to complete the entire adoption process. Some adoption professionals will increase fees as the adoption process goes on, which can add up quickly and drastically increase how much it costs to adopt a child.
2. Refunds
Many of our adoptive families receive a refund from their adoption, ranging from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. American Adoptions always prepares families financially for the worst-case scenario by collecting medical expenses to cover any retainers, co-pays or out-of-pocket medical expenses not covered by Medicaid or other insurances. Once the adoption is finalized and all final billing is complete, unused money for medical expenses is given directly back to the adoptive family.
3. Adoption Disruption Insurance/No Rollover Policy
Many families never experience an adoption disruption. However, it can happen. It’s something you have to consider, especially when asking how much adoption costs in the U.S. An adoption disruption can occur late in the process after you have already put significant financial investment into the adoption. What happens to all of those costs that have already been covered?
Most adoption professionals are unable to offer any kind of adoption disruption insurance, and the few that do usually use a “rollover” process. This means your lost money will be “rolled over” into a future adoption situation. So, what are the disadvantages of this type of policy?
You and your money are stuck with the adoption professional in hopes that you will receive another adoption opportunity, which is not guaranteed.
If you locate an adoption opportunity with another adoption professional, you are unable to pursue it with the money you’ve already invested.
If the adoption professional goes out of business, your money is lost.
If you would like to step away from adoption to process the emotional loss of an adoption disruption, your money stays with the adoption professional.
Instead of using the rollover process, American Adoptions makes it very simple for families with our Risk-Sharing Program. In the event of an adoption disruption, any post-activation money you’ve invested with our agency, such as living expenses, medical expenses, fixed agency fees and most legal expenses are directly refunded to you. Even though some families may suffer emotional disappointments, they never suffer financial disappointments.
If you are concerned with how much it costs to adopt a baby, remember that you work with your adoption specialist to set your maximum adoption budget and will be presented adoption situations that fall within or below your budget based on the total anticipated cost of the adoption. You may also be presented with adoption situations where the adoption cost is above your budget, based on the prospective birth mother’s circumstances throughout her pregnancy. You are not obligated to accept these adoption opportunities; however, many families have pursued these situations outside of their budget because they were able to adopt sooner.
List of Private Adoption Costs with American Adoptions
Let’s get to the “why” behind all these costs. How much adoption costs is based on a wide array of necessary expenses to complete a successful adoption. There are many moving parts in this process. As an adoptive family, you deserve as much transparency as possible about what your funds are going toward. That transparency is the key to trust, which is vital in the adoption process.
The following is an itemized list of American Adoptions’ services and fees required to successfully complete an adoption:
Professional Services for Adoptive Parents
Counseling and educational preparation for adopting a child
Orientation conferences, meetings and adoption seminars
Arrange, coordinate and oversee entire adoption process
Support and education throughout adoption process
Contact with home study professional
Hospital documentation, retrieval of medical records
General case management services and file documentation
Risk-Sharing Program in the event of a disruption
Post-adoption support gatherings and events
Professional Services for Birth Parents
Screening and evaluating of birth parents’ commitment to adoption
Adoption counseling and education
24/7 support and counseling throughout adoption process
Develop adoption plan around a prospective birth mother’s needs and wishes
Develop a hospital plan and coordinate with health professionals
Organize housing and travel arrangements if necessary
Post-placement adoption counseling
Birth Mother Scholarship Fund
Birth Parent Expenses
Prenatal care not covered by Medicaid or insurance
Delivery and hospital costs not covered by Medicaid or insurance
Court-approved living expenses for pregnancy-related costs
Newborn Care and Services
Hospital costs not covered by Medicaid or insurance
Original birth certificates
Physical examinations by a pediatrician
Any necessary foster care services
Legal Expenses
Termination of parental rights, including publications, court costs and attorney fees
Finalization of adoption
Legal counsel for the adoptive family and birth mother based on state laws
Court reporting services
Investigative Expenses
State and local background screenings
State abuse registry clearances
Diligent search for birth fathers
Adoptive Family and Birth Parent Correspondence
Pre-placement contact mediation
Post-placement contact mediation
Letters/pictures correspondence to maintain confidentiality for 18 years
Media
Extensive advertising: Google/Bing, Yellow Pages, crisis pregnancy centers, hospital/maternity wards, networking with other adoption professionals, branding and marketing across the country
Internal media team: Dedicated to consistently improving AmericanAdoptions.com and building affiliate websites to stay high on search engine rankings, all in an effort to locate as many adoption opportunities as possible for our adoptive families
Adoptive family profile services
Adoptive family video profile services
Website updates and maintenance
Office Expenses
Rent
Phones
Office supplies
Postage
Utilities
Staff
Salaries
Health insurance
Mileage reimbursement
Believe it or not, this is just a brief look into what is required by the overall process of growing a family through adoption. Every adoption is unique. There may be unique needs and expenses involved that can impact how much adoption costs. One constant through all adoptions is this: American Adoptions will be honest and clear about how much it costs to adopt a child and will provide excellent, passionate service to help your family grow through adoption.
To learn more details about how much it costs to adopt a child with American Adoptions, call 1-800-ADOPTION today or request free adoption information.
Disclaimer
Information available through these links is the sole property of the companies and organizations listed therein. America Adoptions, Inc. provides this information as a courtesy and is in no way responsible for its content or accuracy.Nicolas Sarkozy receives us in an eighth floor office where everything, including the desk chair, is bright white. He is wearing a tie and has removed his jacket. It's his working mode, he says. He adds that he doesn't really even have time for a conversation.
"I do what I have to do," he murmurs, as he paces quietly around his office, gazing at the tips of his shoes. He says he has no interest in talking about himself, and that it's obvious what he's up to. Then, out of the blue, he asks: "Do you have any children?"
Raising children is just like politics, he says. It doesn't matter how you explain something. What matters are your actions. It's important to set an example instead of talking about things, he pontificates. We have only been in his office for two minutes.
It took months to arrange this meeting -- months Sarkozy spent pushing his way back into the limelight. But he did so in an unusually subdued manner, at least for him. For a long time, it seemed as if his attempted return to the political arena would not materialize. It was as if he had already had his opportunity and the French were not interested in allowing him to try again.
But Sarkozy, who likens himself to a boxer, bobbed and weaved -- and stayed in the ring. He was elected as party head with a slim, two-thirds' majority. He deflected his opponents' attacks, but not with a knock-out punch, as in the past, but by simply ignoring them. At the same time, he gradually increased his public presence. Now he is back -- and wants to be elected president once again.
We sit down in the seating area, in elegant white Bauhaus chairs. Large, coffee-table art books are stacked in front of us. Still grumpy, he opens a box of chocolates. There is one question that particularly annoys him: Have you changed, Monsieur Sarkozy?
He sighs and rolls his eyes. He has retained his penchant for the theatrical. The question is distasteful because it encompasses a desire, an expectation, that he is no longer the person he once was. A commentator wrote recently that Sarkozy had become tamed, that he can now sit still in a chair and that his voice has lost its acerbity.
Wanting to Be Wanted
Sarkozy shakes his head, as though the article were an annoying fly that he could simply brush away. He doesn't like this question because it suggests that he, the former president, could be treated with anything but deference, even with skepticism. It irritates him because it isn't as much an expression of the desire for his return as for his metamorphosis. But Sarkozy doesn't just want to be needed. He also wants to be wanted. He doesn't like doing things by halves.
What others think about him, what others want from him, is suddenly -- once again -- very important to Sarkozy. And it will only become more important as the spring of 2017 approaches. That is when the French will elect their next president.
Sarkozy turned 60 in January. There is a black-and-white portrait of his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter Giulia on his desk, and framed pictures of the girl are on the wall. There is also a photo of his wife, Carla Bruni, holding a guitar. He has attended more than 50 of her concerts in recent years. But those days are now over. Carla will be performing in Beijing soon, he says, but she will have to go alone this time. He doesn't sound remorseful. His busy schedule as a private citizen and as a well-paid speaker was partly to avoid the risk of being seen as indolent by his own wife. Worst yet, he was concerned that he might begin to see himself as someone with nothing more to look forward to. As though he had already done all there was to do.
Wouldn't his family rather have him spend more time with them than return to politics? "Of course," he says. Despite his increasingly busy schedule, he and his wife still watch a movie together in his home theater almost every day. He loves Capra, he says, and Lubitsch, Hitchcock and Sean Penn -- "but not just as an actor, also as a director." He doesn't have a favorite book or film. "Books, films, it's a concept. You have to love them all." It almost seems as if he were drawing a heart in the air with his hands.
Before books and films, politics was the central "concept" for this man, who is 1.65 meters (5'4") tall. Politics shaped his life for so long that he could envision actually leaving public life behind, as he swore both before and after he was voted out of office. The son of a Hungarian aristocrat and the daughter of a medical doctor, he has achieved everything. He was a city council member at 22 and a mayor at 28. He was the so-called super-minister of the economy and finance, served two terms as interior minister and was the head of his party whenever he ran for office.
Sarkozy's Obligation
He became French president at 52. He had always been open about his desire to attain France's highest political office, saying years prior to his election that he thought often about the presidency, and "not just while I'm shaving." He was unstoppable. He defeated all of his adversaries, including the most powerful one of all, his predecessor Jacques Chirac, whose protégé he had been before becoming his archenemy. But he didn't win over the French, who voted him out of office after only a single term. Is this what drives him? Is being reelected his last great challenge?
When Sarkozy gazes at his interlocutor, he raises his arching eyebrows up towards his high hairline. He has hardly aged at all, aside from his hair turning a little grayer. The beard he grew during his hiatus from the public spotlight is gone, as is the tan he sported throughout the winter.
There was nothing else he could have done, he says innocently. His return to politics was essentially imposed upon him, he explains. He calls it "devoir," an obligation. He lists the reasons: his party, divided by internal struggles; the growing strength of the far-right Front National; a Socialist government that has taken the country to the brink of disaster. "I cannot simply say that none of this concerns me," he says. He frequently ends his sentences with the word "yes," followed by a question mark. He wants more than just confirmation. He wants approval.
The playwright Yasmina Reza accompanied Sarkozy for an entire year during his election campaign. She writes that she was surprised to realize how much Sarkozy reminded her of a child, a little boy. His craving for recognition, the temper tantrums, the demand for affirmation. He told her how he had always anticipated everything, from his successes to the presidency, and how pleased he could have been when it all materialized the way he had predicted. But this, he said, was also perhaps the reason he could no longer feel any anticipation or excitement: "It's not a nice feeling." At the time, in 2007, he also spoke with Reza about his life "beyond ambition," a life he said he was looking forward to. The question is whether that sort of a life, a life without ambition or goals, even exists for Sarkozy.
His only real hiatus from the political stage was extremely brief. It began on May 6, 2012, when François Hollande narrowly defeated him in the runoff election. Sarkozy captured 48.36 percent of the vote: not a humiliation but a defeat nonetheless, all the more so because he had not perceived Hollande as a rival but as a lightweight. That was three years ago, but the period of radio silence between "Sarko" and his country -- which, as he describes it, sounds more like a ward entrusted to his care -- lasted only about three months. He was the hyper-president, the omni-president, a man who preferred to do everything himself and even downgraded his own prime minister to the role of "collaborateur," as though he were but a normal employee.
Jogging and English Lessons
It is difficult to imagine that someone like this could suddenly no longer have any political influence, but instead would spend his time cycling, jogging, going on vacation and taking English lessons. There was talk that he would be back, but it was a little reminiscent of the moment in a horror film when it is unclear whether the monster will be neutralized or will attack again.
Since his party won the hard-fought departmental elections a few weeks ago, his self-confidence has returned -- and along with it, his sometimes tame, sometimes assertive megalomania. Sarkozy's party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), dealt the ruling Socialists their most humiliating defeat in rural France since 1992. Districts that had for decades been firmly in the hands of the Socialists are now controlled by the center-right UMP.
It is also to Sarkozy's credit that he prevented the far-right Front National from achieving an even better result in this test of the political mood. He sees himself as the only rival to Front National leader Marine Le Pen worth taking seriously, and he believes that he alone is capable of stopping her ascent. He may be right, but his opponents are not the only ones who believe that it was also Sarkozy who sowed the seeds for Le Pen's success in the first place.
When Sarkozy was elected in 2007, the Front National captured so few votes that the new president pronounced the party's demise. He was wrong. Indeed, the fact that the far-right movement was able intrude on the prevailing two-party system in the ensuing years is also partly attributable to Sarkozy. After all, he helped make Front National issues socially acceptable. As president, he stirred up a debate over "national identity," which quickly mutated into a forum for all manner of xenophobia. He tightened immigration law and pursued a rigorous deportation policy. Instead of opposing Le Pen with more moderate positions, it seemed -- and continues to seem -- as though he were emulating her.
It's an evening in March and Sarkozy is standing on a town-hall stage somewhere northeast of Paris. He spends 10 minutes ridiculing "François Hollande, the liar," and his failings, but then his voice become serious - and biting. "Are we Frenchmen?" he asks. "Do we speak French? Do we love our culture?" Yes, the audience shouts. Yes, he shouts back. "And that is why they should conform, not us!"
The crowd hoots and claps loudly. He now uses the word assimilation instead of integration when talking about immigration. He wants to get rid of pork-free meals in school cafeterias, because "the republican school model does not conform to the wishes of Muslims" -- as if pork-eating children would grow up to become better republicans.
Pop Star Status
After his appearance, he is standing in the coatroom, a narrow space filled with mirrors. Exhilarated, he loosens his tie and wipes the sweat from his neck with a towel. The standing-room-only crowd had cheered him on for minutes at time. They chanted his name until the French national anthem, the Marseillaise, was played on the sound system, and they continued to chant after it ended. Nicolas! Nicolas! He hasn't lost any of his pop star status.
"Did you see how quiet it was in the room?" he asks, switching to the familiar tu. "Did you see how attentively they listened to me? Did you see it?" He says that he will not allow the Front National to govern France. He estimates that about a quarter of the audience sympathizes with the Front. "I will not allow them to simply carry on," he says. He is literally besieged when he steps outside. It takes him 15 minutes to walk the few meters to his car.
Later, in the quiet of his office, when asked to describe his strategy to fend off the Front National, he replies that his strategy is precisely what we have just observed.
But why do some of his sentences sound as if they were coming from Marine Le Pen herself?
"That's correct," he replies. But if Le Pen says that the sun is shining on a sunny day, he doesn't believe he should be forced to say that it's raining.
His controversial shift to the right has divided both his party and his associates. In the winter, when he said once again that the headscarf should be banned in universities, a former speechwriter said that Sarkozy should not create animosity among the French. His adviser and friend Alain Minc also distanced himself from Sarkozy, saying that he favored Alain Juppé as a candidate for the UMP. Juppé is the opposite of Sarkozy -- tall, dignified and with moderate views. He's also a little boring.
But Sarkozy's strategy seems to be working. Until March 29, 2015, the day of his party's success in the departmental elections, his return was considered a fiasco. He was seen as an ex-president who was only being talked about because of a number of pending scandals, ranging from campaign finance irregularities to suspicions of corruption and the improper exertion of influence. But the fact that Sarkozy was the first former president to be taken into police custody for hours of questioning has less to do with the allegations themselves than with a changing perception of France's highest office.
'I Never Look Back'
Once sacrosanct, the inviolability of the French presidency is now a thing of the past. And it was Sarkozy himself who contributed to its undoing. Unlike his predecessors, he never saw himself as being above the fray. Sometimes he only unsettle his own ministers, but at times he would do the same to his own people. There was, for example, the unforgettable press conference when he announced that there was "something serious" between Carla and himself. Before Sarkozy, it was unthinkable that the private sphere could intervene into political life in the Élysée Palace to such an extent.
Does he regret his behavior today? "I never look back," he replies, sitting on his Bauhaus sofa.
There is nothing he regrets? "All kinds of things," he replies. What, for example? "Of course, I could have done more," he says, beginning to sound bored, and feeling as though he were being treated unfairly. "For five years, I was accused of being too hyperactive," he says. And now, he adds, people say I didn't do enough.
He nods, looking aggrieved. When he looks at himself today, says Sarkozy, he only sees the head of the opposition, not the former president.
But who do the French see when they look back? The bling-bling president with Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, whose watch, a Christmas present from his wife, cost more than 45,000 ($51,000)? The man who counts the country's richest and most powerful people among his closest friends -- and who, as president, often vacationed at their expense? For a long time, Sarkozy was considered the most unpopular president of all time, until another politician came along and accomplished the unbelievable feat of outdoing him: François Hollande. He too is one of the reasons Sarkozy is dreaming of the presidency once again.
His political intuition is another. As opposition leader, Sarkozy is now preaching unity within his party. It may sound banal, but it is no easy task. Even people who are not particularly fond of Sarkozy believe that he has done his job well so far. It is also his only chance: The better his party does, the more powerful he, as its chairman, becomes. Compared to the inner workings of the "Union pour un mouvement populaire," says a senior party official, what happens in the American series "House of Cards," is "cat piss."
"Together" is Sarkozy's current motto. And Sarkozy, the man who spent his entire life polarizing people, has repeated it so often in recent months that he now appears to believe it himself. He intends to rename the party "The Republicans" in late May. He now lunches frequently with his most powerful rivals -- such as Dominique de Villepin, a man he once hated so much that would have preferred to "hang him from a meat hook." Or his rival Juppé, who remains more popular in polls than Sarkozy.
'We Need to Change Politics'
Sarkozy is not just back in the public eye. He is, once again, almost everywhere. He expresses his opinion on the Armenian genocide and on the reorganization of local government. He wants to make French companies competitive once again, and he says that ancillary wage costs are too high and the tax burden on businesses is too oppressive. France must "leave mediocrity behind," he says.
Until his party presents a solid platform, he is primarily using variations on his earlier slogans, including: "Work more to earn more." He tweets that he would like to reestablish confidence in politics. "We need to change, and we need to change politics," he writes.
"Nicolas Sarkozy is still the same person, but he has learned new things," says Brice Hortefeux, who once served as interior minister under Sarkozy. Hortefeux, a tall, pale man, has known Sarkozy since 1976. He was the best man at his first wedding and is the godfather of his son Jean. Hortefeux sees the debt crisis and not his policies as the reason for Sarkozy's loss of the 2012 election. The hiatus from politics was good for Sarkozy, he says. He is now more patient, less ambitious and a better listener. And, more so than in the past, he has the public's interest in mind.
In early April, Sarkozy is visiting a vocational training center in Agnetz, in the Oise département. It is one of those events where members of the ruling Paris class demonstrate that they can also be close to the people, if need be.
When Sarkozy's black limousine arrives, a line of local officials and their wives are waiting to greet him. The men are dressed in dark suits and their wives are wearing a lot of jewelry and Hermès scarves. The small group, dressed to the nines, spends an hour and a half stomping through mortar, dust and bits of plaster, led by Sarkozy, wearing a black suit and a black tie. He watches trainees solder copper piping, skillfully examines a trowel and runs his hand over a freshly poured shower tray.
Kisses for the Women
He occasionally asks a question or slaps someone on the back. Despite the black suit, he strangely does not seem out of place. He is good with people, and he likes playing the familiar, down-to-earth role. He was always more of a "Nicolas" than a "Monsieur le Président." At the end of the visit, the trainees stand in line for selfies with Sarkozy.
After the tour, a television crew arrives to ask him some questions. "You know," he begins, but then he stops talking and walks across the lawn to an office building, where two women are leaning out a window, curious to see what is going on. "This temptation is one I couldn't resist," he says, and kisses them on the cheek. The women giggle gleefully.
Later on, he sits down with local business owners in a classroom, where table have been pushed together on green carpeting. They ask him what he would do differently from President Hollande. Everything, says Sarkozy. He vehemently condemns Hollande's economic policy, his labor market policy, his immigration policy and his European policy. For a moment, his listeners seem to forget that he too was once president, and that government debt and unemployment also skyrocketed during his term.
A man in a gray suit reaches for the microphone. Businesses in France are doing more and more poorly, he says, and so are the people. "What do you intend to do so that things will improve for us?"
"Believe me," Sarkozy replies. "It is possible." With Sarkozy, the sequel.Our season is all but lost, but I think that rather than wallow in the sadness and despair of injuries, poor quarterback play and lost opportunities, as some members here seem to like to do :) I thought I would look for some positives that will come out of this season and sustain us through the offseason and being lots and lots of hope for 2012. I will give a nod to the most famous alum of my alma mater, David Letterman, with a Top 5 Reasons Not To Cry After the 2011 Chicago Bears Season....
5) Health. Obviously, this is an easy one. Next year we'll get Cutler back, as well as Forte (hopefully under the franchise tag, or even better, a long-term extension), as well as get guys like Gabe Carimi, Chris Williams (did we ever think we'd miss C-Dub?), Johnny Knox, Major Wright and Pat Mannelly, among others, like special teamers Kyle Adams, Anthony Walters and J.T. Thomas. Maybe Brian Iwuh will even find his way back to our squad, but either way, this team will be healthier on opening day than it is currently.
4) Better draft pick; Let's face it, this is the most basic reason any fanbase can swallow the pill of a bad season, the draft pick. The draft symoblizes so many things for teams; hope, fresh talent, etc. The Bears are looking like they will finish i what I call the NFL "No-Mans Land" where you're outside the playoffs and outside a top 10 draft choice, usually finishing with a record between 7-9 and 9-7. I think the Bears could end up 7-9 or 8-8. The Bears will get a choice somewhere in the mid-teens and this team isn't exactly short on positions it needs help with; OL, DB, WR and the list goes on (do we finally look at drafting some future LB guys?). While these questions remain to be answered and the nearly endless speculation and wishlists will pop up here on WCG right down to draft day '12, it will be nice to have a higher pick and more choices with which to choose. Even if it is JA making that choice...
3) More willing to make a splash in free agency. As my colleague, T.J. Shouse wrote last week, JA will be returning, and that's OK. Angleo has an iffy-at-best drafting record and the team's lack of free agency moves has often been viewed as all down to him. The outsiders viewing the the organization as "cheap" often comes down on JA, whether that is the case or not, we often don't know. However, as Shouse pointed out "He sees that this season was derailed by two key injuries (and affected by a bunch of others), and that the Bears are going to be all-in for next season to be a success. Next year will be a crucial year for success in part because of the age of key defenders, and the likely franchise tag of Forte which provides no long-term security for either player or team" I am most interested in the "all-in" for next year phrase. Angelo might end up begging for looser purse strings to bring in a good, solid O-coordinator that both he AND Lovie approve of (remember, JA publicly distanced himself from the Mike Martz hire at the time) and sign some key free agents; maybe a solid corner, maybe an established WR. Who knows, but I wouldn't be surprised if JA tries to get this team over the top with a couple key cogs for next year in order to establish a legacy. We can hope any way....
2) A new offensive coordinator. As I referenced above, I believe that we will have a new system next year. Moan and groan and bitch about it all you want, but it's probably, unfortunately, the best thing for this team. Martz's system has been a big bust for the most part, an era that will be remembered for sacks and identity crises more than good offensive football. Martz's contract is up at the end of the season and I doubt he'll be back. He'll either get a college coaching job or get the "fall-guy" status for not having Caleb "The Slump" Hanie ready to go. Maybe both but either way Cutler and Co. will have a new play-caller next fall. I bet we'll see a repeat of the 2010 search with Cutler having a bit of a say and with a push for guys well-known around the league. This time, everyone has seen that Lovie had this team in the NFC Championship Game a year ago and they were playoff bound again this year, until the injuries un-did them, so no one will be afraid of the one-and-gone thing the coaching staff had over their head last season.
and the number one reason not to cry after the 2011 Bears season....
1) Easier schedule next year. The Bears had a brutal September this year and had to face the division winners from a year ago in the Eagles and the Seahawks because we won the division last year, plus we played the entire NFC South. Next year we get the NFC West, the AFC South and then [likely] the third place team's from the NFCs South and East, which would be either the Panthers or the Bucs and the Eagles or Redskins. Now we beat both those NFC South teams this year, although Cam Newton will be better in year two, defenses will have a whole 16 games worth of film to study how to slow him down. The Eagles should improve after the fiasco this year and who knows, maybe they'll have a whole new coach, but the Bears always bring their A-game against the Eagles and Vick.
It was pointed out that the Packers had a very easy-looking schedule for a defending champ and a lot of that was because they finished behind us in the division. This year we should end up with the advantage of the third place schedule thanks to the Lions and have a sneaky-easy schedule that will put us in the driver seat for a bounce-back 2012, with a healthy number 6 and 22 in the backfield. Won't that be nice?
So don't fret fellow Bears fans, and remember this as this tough, gut punch of a season comes to an end. There is silver lining in the coffin of the 2011 season.The International Highline Meeting festival seems like one of the chillest festivals we’ve ever heard of, but it also might be one of the most terrifying – attendees spend most of their time strung up on tightropes stretched across the Italian Alps in Monte Piana.
The attendees call themselves “slackers” because of the slacklines they balance themselves on. This extreme sport differs from tightrope walking in that the rope has a slightly flattened shaped and has slack, meaning that it can move side-to-side or bounce.
Besides the fact that the slackers spend a good part of their days (and nights) on slacklines suspended hundreds of feet above the Italian dolomite Alps, the meeting has all the trappings of a normal festival – a kitchen, a bar, and awesome musical jam sessions. Attendees can also attend a Yoga workshop or take tandem paraglider flights.
More info: Website (h/t: lostateminor)
Image credits: Giordano Garosio
Image credits: Balaz Mohai
Image credits: Sebastian Wahlhuetter
Image credits: Sebastian Wahlhuetter
Image credits: Sebastian Wahlhuetter
Image credits: Sebastian Wahlhuetter
Image credits: Giordano Garosio
Image credits: Sebastian Wahlhuetter
Image credits: Sebastian Wahlhuetter
Image credits: Sebastian Wahlhuetter
Image credits: unknown
Image credits: Flo Taibon
Image credits: Anti Gravity Photography
Image credits: Anti Gravity Photography
Image credits: Sebastian Wahlhuetter
Image credits: Flo TaibonDriverless cars could be on the roads of the Isle of Man in the near future.
The Manx government is reportedly interested in inviting car companies and tech giants such as Google to road-test their autonomous prototypes on the island.
How expansive the project could be remains unclear. At present, the car-makers rely on private roads, test tracks and limited use of public roads to test their self-driving vehicles but, reports Ubergizmo, they could soon have "an entire island at their disposal".
The Washington Post adds that a project spearheaded by Phil Gawne, the Manx transport minister, is underway to lure companies to the island. Given the size of the crown dependency –"about the size of Chicago" and with a population of 90,000 – its ability to move forward with the plan at a considerable rate of knots is thought to make for "an appealing destination for companies developing such vehicles".
Any necessary legislation could be accommodated by summer, while the flexible approach of the government so far has differed from the more stand-offish affairs seen in the current hot-bed of self-driving car testing, California. Late last year, Google criticised Californian authorities over what it thought was overbearing legislation.
At present, Google uses simulated testing for much of its self-driving car development, racking up as many as three million virtual miles a day according to CNET.
Some are sceptical of the island's credentials as a base for autonomous car programmes, though. The space being offered could provide a huge incentive, but criticism has been levelled at the lack of real-world relevance testing on the Isle of Man represents. When the technology eventually becomes available to consumers, big cities are the most likely destinations.
The island is known internationally for the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races. Self-driving cars could turn out to be another motoring coup.– On Friday morning Baylor Hospital in Dallas confirmed a patient with ‘Ebola similar’ symptoms also triggered positive on a verbal screening questionnaire.
Although a positive blood test has not been confirmed, sources say it’s not unusual to have a patient screen positive considering the wider net for Ebola now over Dallas. A positive screening means the patient met some of the criteria to cause concern.
According to Baylor, it was the answers to some of the screening questions — like if a person had been in contact with a known Ebola patient — that triggered the standing protocol by Dallas County Health and Human Services that the person be transferred to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, presumably for further, complete testing.
A source at Baylor said the patient came to the Emergency Room through a private entrance and was then immediately put into isolation.
A statement from Baylor, sent to CBS 11 News said, in part –
“A patient presented at Baylor University Medical Center Thursday evening reporting Ebola symptoms and indicated contact with someone with the disease. The patient was transferred within hours to Texas Health Presbyterian as directed by the Dallas County Health Department.”
But Presbyterian Hospital is denying an Ebola patient was transferred to their facility from Baylor.The 113th Congress is considered one of the richest Congresses in history, and it's possible that there are more millionaires in Washington than ever before. It's easy to assume that everyone in politics is rolling in the dough, that they all have massive bank accounts with six and seven digit salaries coming in from goodness-knows-where.
Yes, the picture of Congress that's often painted is that they are the elite, among America's top 1%. And it's true that many of them are wealthy and successful, |
do a round-trip via pnorm() and qnorm() :
q)`int $ qnorm[ pnorm[3;0;1]-pnorm[-3;0;1]; 0; 1]
3i
Thats it for the distribution functions for now – rmathlib provides lots of different distributions (I have just linked in the normal and uniform functions for now. There are some other functions that I have created that I will cover in a future post.
All code is on github: https://github.com/rwinston/kdb-rmathlib
[Check out part 3 of this series]September 13, 2015
Try to remember the unveiling of the Miles Davis statue, more than a thousand people, all colors of people, all there to honor one of the greatest musicians of all time. The justly proud Preston Jackson, sculptor of the masterpiece, the beaming committee of folks who made the event possible.
Try to remember the folks of whom I asked the question: Why are you here? Oh, said the woman holding the biography of Miles. I just started reading this. I’m reluctant, because I know his personal life was complicated. But his music... oh. Oh, said Jules, an eccentric man with his accordion file of photos of famous people and their autographs in his arms, I am here because Miles was great—the greatest. Do you have a card? I collect cards. This is St. Louis, said the young bearded man standing with his red tee-shirted border collie, I couldn’t miss this. Because, said the middle-aged woman in the large hat, he was a great genius. His music was absolutely the emotional core of the meaning of life. And the twin little boys hugging Miles’ statue around the only part they could reach: the bronze bellbottoms.
Try to remember the speeches. Bobby Shew the great trumpeter, improvising words with the audience. You should be proud, he said to the audience. And I am humbled to be here. Preston Jackson, master sculptor: I will return here over and over to this wonderful place of history. The mayor of East St. Louis who spoke in gospel mode: This is a great day. The sun came out at the moment this ceremony began. The mayor of Alton: This crowd is what American looks like.
Try to remember Miles Davis project member Pete Basola, beaming onstage next to Bobby Shew and just in front of drummer Montez Coleman, holding his sax and madly happy to sit in and play. Bobby Shew immaculately dressed in a suit, having not played his horn for weeks because of two carpal tunnel operations, firing off sixteenth notes with seeming ease, bursts of color and throbbing and glissando sex. Montez Coleman bent over his drums and smiling, his bassist playing standup as if it were a guitar, and the keyboardist watching Bobby and laughing: hot, baby, and the music was all Miles, all the time, and we were all turning kind of blue.
Try to remember the band sitting outdoors, the night fifty degrees cool, man, Bobby Shew saying, “I’m freezing my ass off,” the collective crowd head bouncing up and down, the little girl on her father’s lap, buried in a blanket but her left foot tapping the beat, Bobby hugging me at the end and calling me ‘brother,’ the conversations of strangers over our common bond, liquid music.
Try to remember Alton’s greatest night, Alton looking American and fit and artsy and brotherhood and sisterhood abounding, and watts of smiles, and cries of devotion, oh please let this never end.
Try to remember the kind of September when kind of blue dreams were kept beside our pillows
And follow.Crowdfunding has been around for a bit now and turns out to be one of the best financial reliefs for start-ups around the world. Thanks to the “crowd”, we can make our ideas come true together.
People and investors are more and more willing to contribute to these beautiful projects. Almost all projects can be funded, from a brand new album to a top-market technology. But among the growing quantity of projects, platforms, and ideas, it is very difficult to stand above the rest.
11 Crucial Steps To Pave The Way For Your Crowdfunding Campaign
Here on CrowdDistrict, I want to introduce you to my top 11 tips to succeed with your crowdfunding campaign BEFORE going live:
1 – Envision a 1 to 2 month anticipation to get everything clarified. It might not look like it, but building a crowdfunding campaign takes a lot of time and rethinking. You don’t want to overlook any element: pitch, video, storyboard, perks, budget, etc.
2 – Choose the right platform for your project. Some websites are only targeting niche markets. And if you want a chance for your project to be featured on the front page, you might want to consider being the right fit for that platform. Pick your platform according to the costs, the way you collect the money, the target audience, the number of projects funded, and the popularity of the website. Stick to one platform to gain an initial audience and minimize complications.
3 – Prepare your storyboard – prioritize images and bold text to highlight your major facts. Some successful projects choose to present their fact (or at least part of it) as an infographic. It can be a good idea according to your project. It must look clean, easy to read and understandable at first glance. Stay coherent and simple with your graphic choices. Also, try to focus on the benefit of your project before anything else. Use bullet points to clarify your main features.
Then comes the most striking element of the campaign: the video. Shoot a short video (2 minutes more or less) showing your motivations, your products and some rewards you’re offering. We want to know who’s behind the genius idea; and most of all who’s asking for our money. In the video you can start talking about yourself first, so that people understand your story and motivation. Where’s the idea coming from? Do you have any funny fact to mention? Play with the camera angles to keep people interested. But keep it short, real and attractive.
Your text is a more detailed version of your video. You’ll be able to give them more information there (shipping method, “about us” section, details of the offer and FAQs).
4 – Watch the competition on each platform, as well as other industry leaders. By browsing other campaigns, you can get a clear idea of what’s working or not. You’ll notice the importance of the video and the perks. Take a look at how people describe their idea and what’s noticeable about it (Compete.com is very useful for that also).
5 – Get closer to the press and influential blogs by reaching out with a brief introduction to your project. Set up a media kit for your outreach and display the main reasons of how your idea is a future success (check out Storyboard). Provide bloggers with your logo, designs and benefits for their readers. Offer them a product once the campaign is over or an exclusive post. Be appealing and find out what they want out of your relationship.
6 – Decide – very carefully – what will be your perks for your contributors (between 5 and 12 maximum). You don’t want to have too many rewards. First, it is a pain for you to organize the shipping. Second, you might lose your audience. It is better to set up limited edition offers for early adopters and define proportional stages so that everyone can participate at some level (especially between 10 and 100 USD; where most people donate). Don’t underestimate your lower level contributors. Show them your appreciation by offering more than a simple “thank you”. Look for something different (example: free shipping or tickets to a special event at the end of the campaign). If you make them smile, they’ll be more willing to participate.
7 – Write a very precise financial plan taking into account your perks (production, shipping, etc.), as well as the actions implemented throughout the campaign (platform, social networks, etc.). Even if your perks don’t cost you much, it is important to include them in your total, along with the delivery fees. Make sure you know all the terms of use, so that you don’t forget the platform and payment fees (Paypal for instance).
Explain to potential backers where the money is going and how much it costs you.
Draw a clean chart. Transparency is the key.
8 – Set up launch and closing dates of your crowdfunding campaign, along with production and rewards delivery dates. We say a crowdfunding campaign is like a marathon. You’ll need a lot of energy and coffee breaks to make it to the end. The appropriate period can vary, but I’d recommend 30 days as an optimal length (90 days is the maximum you can do). It can be hard to keep your audience’s attention for more than a month. When you make your plan, don’t forget to forecast the production dates after the campaign closing. Your contributors want to know when their rewards will be delivered.
9 – Prepare the ground with your network: Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter contacts (Pinterest, Tumblr and others as well). Try to personalize the messages you send as much as you can. People need to feel involved. Build anticipation for your campaign by talking about it all the time.
Set up a (free) Launchrock.com page to tease your audience about your future campaign launch. This page allows you to expose short glimpses of your project in order to draw people’s attention. This is also a great way to collect your would-be contributors email addresses. The goal is obviously to get as many as you can. To make this easier, implement a contest to push people to register, like, and share your campaign.
10 – Backing up some projects beforehand will help your crowdfunding credibility. On most of the platforms, your creator profile will be displayed. With that, everyone can get a better idea of your crowdfunding experience by your activity and donations to other projects. I’m not saying you should pour millions into strangers’ campaigns, but displaying significant donations and activity can make a difference.
11 – Talk about your projects from a backer’s point of view, not yours. What’s your added value? Why would I invest in your campaign rather than someone else’s? Be mysterious and surprise your potential contributors.
Last but not least, remember to keep your audience in the loop. Your story should never stop being shared.
Feel free to reach out to me for any further help.
Jérémie Lorrain.If President-elect Donald Trump made good on his threat to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, the US would face serious international fallout (AFP Photo/Kevin Lamarque)
Washington (AFP) - The implementation of the Iran nuclear deal marked a major step forward in Washington's cautious rapprochement with Iran, but will further strain ties with Saudi Arabia.
While President Barack Obama's government insists its goal was simply to halt the spread of atomic weapons, experts detect an effort to bring a new balance to its Middle East relationships.
That bore fruit this week with the quick release of 10 US sailors captured in the Gulf by Iranian forces, the freeing of five US prisoners in Iran and the formal implementation of the accord.
But, inevitably, with Tehran and Riyadh daggers drawn, the thaw in ties with Shiite powerhouse Iran can only feed paranoia in the Sunni Gulf monarchies, traditionally close US allies.
"One of Obama's visions for this region, at least in the Gulf, is equilibrium. He uses that phrase a lot," said Frederic Wehrey of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
- 'Equilibrium shattered' -
Beyond ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen, where Saudi-backed forces are fighting Iran-backed forces, broader regional peace can only come if the two build a working relationship.
But, whatever Washington's ambitions, the rival powers are far from that. In fact, the US outreach to Iran over the nuclear deal has only served to make Saudi Arabia more anxious.
At the New Year, Riyadh executed a Shiite cleric for sedition, provoking protests in Iran that led to the sacking of the Saudi embassy and a breakdown in diplomatic relations.
Wehrey said Obama had hoped that if the rivals could, "if not reach some detente or rapprochement, at least be balanced and to sort of get along" then US focus could turn to Asia.
"Of course that ambition of equilibrium has been shattered," the Oxford University academic added.
Experts predict that after the dust settles following implementation of the Iran deal, Obama will arrange a visit to the Arabian peninsula to mollify skeptical Saudi and Emirati leaders.
And Secretary of State John Kerry pre-empted the signature by flying to London on Thursday for talks with the angry Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir.
Jubeir, a former ambassador to Washington, is used to getting a sympathetic hearing from his ally, but Kerry made it clear going into the meeting that there were issues to discuss.
Kerry did not say so, but officials in Washington have made it clear that the administration was dismayed by Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr's execution, which dramatically worsened the crisis.
"The United States will stand with our allies and friends in the region, and we do. But we also want to see diplomacy work," Kerry told reporters ahead of the talks.
- 'Destruction' -
For his part, Jubeir was keen to remind Kerry how Saudi Arabia had worked closely with its US partner in the past, and had tough words for the Iranian leadership Kerry is courting.
Asked whether he was worried the windfall that Iran is about to enjoy as trade sanctions are lifted, Jubeir told Sky News: "Every country in the world is worried about this."
"Iran's record has been one of war and destruction, terrorism, destabilization, interference in the affairs of other countries," he insisted, speaking after talking with Kerry.
This week, Jubeir could be forgiven for seeking to underline what he sees as the Iranian threat to America: Iranian forces seized two boatloads of US sailors in the Gulf.
Instead, the sailors were released within 16 hours and the State Department chalked up the resolution of the crisis to Kerry's relationship with Iran's foreign minister.
Many in Washington, never mind Riyadh, are furious -- alleging that the White House is soft-pedaling Iranian provocations to protect the Iran nuclear deal, despite the loss of face.
- Junior partner -
"In my opinion what's paramount for Obama is to protect the Iran deal," said Karim Sadjadpour, Iran expert and another senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment.
"You could argue it's not only the top of his agenda for the Middle East but arguably what his administration believes to be the crowning foreign policy achievement."
Before Iran's Islamic revolution, former US presidents like Richard Nixon had a two-pillar strategy of maintaining ties with both the shah's Iran and Saudi Arabia.
After the United States cut its own ties with Tehran in 1979 in the wake of the embassy hostage drama, Riyadh became the preferred partner, and with the oil boom a rich one.The former Avengers star has criticised women who "moan and carp" about male attention, saying she is now "delighted" for men to treat her differently.
Holding doors open and pulling out a chair for a lady is simple "good manners", she said, as she condemns those who find it "belittling".
Dame Diana, who is soon to appear alongside her daughter in an episode of Doctor Who, added: "You can’t pat bottoms, though. You deserve to be slapped for that."
Speaking to this week's Radio Times, the actress disclosed she believed women to be "more bitchy than men", motivated by a competitive instinct over their looks.
Saying "it's all about men and sex", she added women are "dangerous and competitive" as she dared her own gender to disagree.
When asked about being considered a feminist icon for her 1960s television roles, she told the magazine she "never was really", preferring to "keep my mouth shut for the most part".
"It’s a question of economics," she said. "If you’re paid the same as a man, which now you are in this profession, you’re equal.
"If a man holds a door open for me or pulls back a chair so that this old bag can sit down, I’m delighted.
"If they put an arm round a woman and say, ‘You look good today,’ they could find themselves in the small claims court.
"Women who moan and carp about that sort of thing are stupid. They find it belittling, but it’s just good manners.
"You can’t pat bottoms, though. You deserve to be slapped for that. It’s condescending. I wouldn’t allow it.”
Despite arguing women were “bitchier” than their male counterparts, Dame Diana did concede they had one saving grace: a talent for trout fishing,
A fan of the sport herself, she explained women’s pheromones made fish leap onto their rods.
Dame Diana is currently playing Lady Olenna Redwyne in hit television programme Game of Thrones.
Speaking of the role this weekend, she told the BBC: “She says all the things that other people dare not say.”
In 2011, a study by the Society for the Psychology of Women suggested men holding doors open and giving up their seats could be guilty of “benevolent sexism”.
Writing for the Psychology of Women Quarterly, co-authors Julia Becker and Janet Swim said: "Many men not only lack attention to such incidents but also are less likely to perceive sexist incidents as being discriminatory and potentially harmful for women.
"Women endorse sexist beliefs, at least in part, because they do not attend to subtle, aggregate forms of sexism in their personal lives."
Follow Telegraph TV & Radio on TwitterNEW ALBANY, Ind. (AP) — Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday when a woman becomes pregnant during a rape, "that's something God intended."
Mourdock, who's been locked in one of the country's most watched Senate races, was asked during the final minutes of a debate with Democratic challenger Rep. Joe Donnelly whether abortion should be allowed in cases of rape or incest.
"I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen," Mourdock said.
Mourdock became the second GOP Senate candidate to find himself on the defensive over comments about rape and pregnancy. Missouri Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin said during a television interview in August that women's bodies have ways of preventing pregnancy in cases of what he called "legitimate rape." Since his comment, Akin has repeatedly apologized but has refused to leave his race despite calls to do so by leaders of his own party, from GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on down.
It was not immediately clear what effect Mourdock's comments might have during the final two weeks before the Nov. 6 election. But they could prove problematic. Romney distanced himself from Mourdock on Tuesday night — a day after a television ad featuring the former Massachusetts governor supporting the GOP Senate candidate began airing in Indiana.
"Gov. Romney disagrees with Richard Mourdock's comments, and they do not reflect his views," Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in an email to The Associated Press. Romney aides would not say whether the ad would be pulled and if the Republican presidential nominee would continue to support Mourdock's Senate bid.
Other Republicans did not immediately weigh in. Indiana Republican Party spokesman Pete Seat referred comment to the Mourdock campaign. A spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday night.
National Democrats quickly picked up on Mourdock's statement and used it as an opportunity to paint him as an extreme candidate, calling him a tea party "zealot." DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz described Mourdock's comments as "outrageous and demeaning to woman" and called on Romney to take his pro-Mourdock ad off the air.
Later Tuesday after the debate, Mourdock further explained he did not believe God intended the rape, but that God is the only one who can create life.
"Are you trying to suggest somehow that God preordained rape, no I don't think that," said Mourdock. "Anyone who would suggest that is just sick and twisted. No, that's not even close to what I said."
In response, Donnelly said after the debate in southern Indiana that he doesn't believe "my God, or any God, would intend that to happen."
Along with Romney's ad, top Republicans have been flocking to Indiana as part of an effort to break open the high-stakes race for the Senate seat, currently held by veteran GOP Sen. Richard Lugar who was defeated by Mourdock in the May primary. Republicans need to gain three seats, or four if President Barack Obama wins re-election, and seats that were predicted to remain or turn Republican have grown uncertain.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell came to Indianapolis for a fundraiser Monday, and Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham campaigned for Mourdock last week. New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte is due in the state Wednesday.
Romney's coattails carry special significance in deeply conservative Indiana, where Mourdock has underperformed Romney by 12 points in most public polls. Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS also has bought another $1 million of airtime in Indiana, making his group the biggest player in Indiana's Senate race. A message left for Crossroads GPS spokesman Nate Hodson was not immediately returned.Mr Knight, the professor of anthropology at the University of east London who is organising protests under the banner G20 Meltdown, told BBC Radio 4's PM on Wednesday: "We are going to be hanging a lot of people like Fred the Shred from lampposts on April Fool's Day and I can only say let's hope they are just effigies.
"To be honest, if he winds us up any more I'm afraid there will be real bankers hanging from lampposts and let's hope that that doesn't actually have to happen.
"They should realise the amount of fury and hatred there is for them and act quickly, because quite honestly if it isn't humour it is going to be anger.
"I am trying to keep it humorous and let the anger come up in a creative and hopefully productive and peaceful way.
"If the other people don't join in the fun – I'm talking about the bankers and those rather pompous ministers – and come over and surrender their power obviously it's going to get us even more wound up and things could get nasty. Let's hope it doesn't."Why it’s awesome: Situated in the Cantabria region of northern coastal Spain, Santander possesses the kind of beauty that will have you nearly gasping with amazement. From the city’s quaint historical center to the stunning Picos de Europa mountain range and lovely little beaches, this Spanish city is truly a dream destination. Long frequented by Spanish royalty, Santander is also home to the Palacio de la Magdalena (Magdalena Palace), a majestic palace that was the official summer residence of the Spanish King in the early 20th century. In short, Santander is practically teeming with history, culture, and beauty — making it the perfect study abroad program location.
What you’ll do during your experience: During your program, you’ll enjoy taking language classes at the Universidad de Cantabria, Santander’s local university. You’ll get to partake in some awesome afternoon electives, which include Flamenco Dance, Photography, Northern Spain Cooking, Surfing, and more. And you’ll go on some seriously cool cultural excursions, including (but not limited to!) a tour of beautiful Madrid, a visit to famed Segovia, and a hike in the glorious Picos de Europa.
What you’ll gain from the program: Confidence in your ability to speak Spanish, a whole new network of friends from across the world, college-worthy global leadership skills, a deep appreciation for Spanish culture and history, and a serious taste for the best paella Spain has to offer!IT IS FRIGHTENING the rate at which our childhood heroes are retiring from football – slowly descending away from the turf, slipping out from the present and into a deep-sea of nostalgia that is as lucid as it is warm in our abiding memories of them.
The past three seasons have seen all of Thierry Henry, Alessandro Del Piero, Luca Toni, and Antonio Di Natale leave the game to an eclipse of tributes and praise. They were in many ways stalwarts of the noughties era of football, when globalisation further developed the game into the money-soaked commercial entity it is today.
But we note them adjacent from this not only because of their achievements and the silverware garnered throughout their careers, but also due to the fact that they played into their mid-to-late 30s, because they are strikers and, sometimes, because of their legacy at international tournaments.
Miroslav Klose is a paradox of a footballer. May 15, 2016, marked the final time he would play in top-flight European football as he eyes a potential move to Major League Soccer amid failed contract negotiations at Lazio in order to see out the final years of his career at the ripe old age of 37.
In that 4-2 loss to Fiorentina, Klose packed away his 54th goal for the Biancocelesti – bizarrely the player’s first penalty in Serie A during his five-year stay. Before kick-off, the Stadio Olimpico had erupted in a frenzy of kindred tributes in recognition of the German, responding to each rendition of the announcer’s ‘Miroslav’ with a jovial ‘Klose’ as the player made his way through a guard of honour featuring teammates clad in Lazio jerseys emblazoned with his name across the front.
The warmly bland, completely modest, Klose we have come to know over the last decade-and-a-half would say it was all too much for a player undeserving of such a send-off. But it was indeed justified for a player often only praised every two years come World Cups and European Championships, but likewise too often overlooked on a grander scale of world football’s top strikers.
Klose is a case study in not only why we warm to quiet, shy footballers that are so far apart from the outspoken and self-assured bravo of players like Zlatan Ibrahimović and Cristiano Ronaldo, but also in why we love the communal frenzy of international tournaments, which can cement a person’s legacy forever in time amid good feeling, warm weather and shared enjoyment of a game loved by many.
Born and raised in Poland until the age of eight, he too represents the multiculturalism of Germany’s success story in winning the 2014 World Cup, and likewise why we love to love footballers that play beyond the standardised cut-off point of 35 years; but rather ignore the constraints of their body’s biology that tells that to slow down, and keeps on keeping on when the results are not of the same prolific heights of youth.
Emblematic of his career, football was a humble beginning for Klose who, three years before announcing himself spectacularly on the world stage via a hat-trick of headers versus Saudi Arabia in Germany’s opening game of the 2002 World Cup, had been playing regional league football for FC 08 Homburg in the fifth tier of German football.
Klose had not grown up playing football at youth level, turning out for his local village club Blaubach-Diedelkopf after he had followed his father to Blaubach, West Germany, in 1986 having fled the Communist regime in Poland.
His father, of German descent, had played football in Poland’s third division, the Trzecia Liga, while his Polish mother had played volleyball, representing her country 62 times. It was here that the teenaged Klose would later train as an apprentice carpenter before his football career began to flourish, amid a household of split nationality and language, but shared passion for athleticism.
The cogs in Klose’s own career began to turn when, at 21 and still playing in the fifth tier of German football, he was spotted on the off-chance by a scout representing FC Kaiserslautern on an irregular visit to the isolated village community. Playing first for their amateur team, he would make his Bundesliga debut for the club in April 2000, going on to score 16 goals in the 2001-02 Bundesliga campaign – just two shy of the top goalscorer.
This changed everything for Klose – and German football alike – as he was drafted into the national team for the first time in 2001, notwithstanding the efforts of then-Poland manager Jerzy Engel, who flew to Germany in order to convince the 23-year-old to play for his country of origin.
“I have a German passport,” Klose said at the time. “And if things are still running this way, I have a chance to play for Rudi Völler.”
The awe in those words were clear even at the beginning of his international career. It would take the striker no less than 15 minutes into his debut for Die Mannschaft to register what would come to be the first of 71 goals for Germany in a desperate 1-1 draw with Albania; this presenting the world with the first instance of his infamous backflip celebration – something so creative and un-renowned at the time that it stood in stark contrast to the striker’s formulaic and deadly style of finishing in front of goal.
Unknown during that World Cup qualifier, Klose would later eclipse every one of German football’s tapestry of great goal-poachers, including Gerd Müller, Uwe Seeler, Jürgen Klinsmann, Oliver Bierhoff as well as his own manager, Rudi Völler, standing on the touchline on that March evening in 2001.
Those 16 goals in his debut season complied Klose toward the backwardly conservative criteria of a German national team player at the beginning of the millennium, which was to be a recognised performer within the Bundesliga, going on to score seven more goals for the national team prior to the 2002 World Cup, including hat-tricks against Israel and Austria.
This combination of form for both club and country meant that Klose would spearhead the German attack in Japan and South Korea. A stunning hat-trick of headers sent reverberations the world over as to who this striker was – beginning his World Cup tally as he would mean to continue as it were – against Saudi Arabia in Germany’s opening 8-0 win, before two more against Ireland and Cameroon.
Read | Germany 2002: the worst World Cup finalists ever?
This meant that the forward finished second top-scorer in his first major international tournament with five goals, three years on from his fifth division FC 08 Homburg days, and in the process becoming the first player in the history of the World Cup to score five headers in one competition, as Germany would later go on to lose the final to Brazil.
Nineteen goals in his next 58 Bundesliga performances earned Klose a move to Bundesliga champions Werder Bremen in 2004 where, after winning a historic double the year previous, Bremen finished third with Klose having scored a respectable 15 goals for the holders.
Klose’s form built towards a defining crescendo in 2005-06 when he scored 31 goals in 40 appearances on the cusp of Germany hosting the 2006 World Cup. This was to be the tournament for Die Mannschaft; a chance to show the world how it had grown into a unified being, West and East, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 in a celebration of culture, diversity and sporting prowess that should and would culminate in a victory on home soil for the hosts.
This was just the surface, however. What the world had not seen was the rigid underbelly of transformation that had taken place within German football following its dismal performances at Euro 2000 and 2004, which saw the three-time world champions fail to qualify from their group on both occasions, resulting in the departure of Rudi Völler as manager.
A process of exhaustive research, development and internal restructuring within both the national team and the Bundesliga put a focus on grassroots football which offered its first shoots in the form of Bastian Schweinsteiger and Philipp Lahm, led by the dynamic and inspiring management duo of Jürgen Klinsmann and his assistant Joachim Löw.
Klose fired Germany into the semi-finals via braces against Costa Rica and Ecuador in the group stages on top of an 80th minute equaliser against Argentina in the quarter-finals, meaning he finished the tournament’s top goalscorer this time around with five – his personal tally now standing at ten in 14 games played.
Despite the bitter comedown of a semi-final exit to Italy, Klose was now regarded as a stalwart of the national team throughout Germany. This, as in the past, present and forever for the top Bundesliga players, earned him a move to Bayern Munich in the summer of 2007, where a horrid mixture of the player’s lack of form, combined with persistent injuries and a lack of chemistry with his Bayern teammates, resulted in a disappointing term at the Allianz Arena.
One goal in 20 appearances ended his final season at the club, which did in fact feature two Bundesliga titles, two DFB Pokals and a UEFA Champions League final throughout, but Klose’s role in these successes was not at the prolific heights he played at Werder Bremen, frequently displaced by the underwhelming Ivica Olić throughout the 2010-11 season.
Parallels of the careers of two current Bayern forwards – Thomas Müller and Robert Lewandowski – offer a window into what could and many thought should have been for that of Klose in Munich. It cannot be escaped that the likewise Polish-born Lewandowski’s form in 2015-16 with 42 goals was what Karl-Heinz-Rummenigge saw within the reach of Klose off the back of the 2006 World Cup when he signed him a year later.
Similarly, Müller’s own World Cup tally of ten goals and his similar meteoric rise for the national team, scoring five goals in South Africa in 2010 to Klose’s five in 2002, and Müller’s five in 2014 to Klose’s five in 2010, represents another contrasting parallel whereby Müller could confidently balance both club and national performances with graceful ease, something which Klose could not manage post-2006.
Oftentimes this can justify why Klose is omitted from conversations surrounding this generation’s top strikers. Others who have left the European game in recent years, such as Henry, Drogba, Eto’o and Del Piero, pulled their clubs toward domestic and European glory on the back of their own ability, resulting in league titles, European Cups, doubles and trebles for the world’s top sides.
Klose could not do this due to injuries and the lapse of a late-blooming career that began at 21, where others had been playing across Europe’s top clubs since the age of 18. Research has shown these lapsing years as crucial to a top professional’s development, something which Klose had to catch up on, and ultimately teach himself.
This lends itself to his style of play; predatory, live, based on nothing but instinct and positional sense within the box. His play is intelligently primal – headed goals, slow movement and as few touches as possible inside the box, in order to upend the ball into the net by any knee, head, shin or toe possible.
And yet, Klose’s form for his country never waned. South Africa in 2010 presented four more goals, against Australia, England and a brace against Diego Maradona’s Argentina. Like in 2002, 2006 and even Euro 2008, Germany again fell short, ranking Klose’s personal trophy case with the national team to solely individual awards eclipsing two semi-final defeats and two final losses.
But this changed in 2014 when an elderly 35-year-old Klose was chosen as Joachim Löw’s only recognised striker going into the tournament in Brazil. Klose was among a growing group of injured German players picked for Löw’s squad despite the manager stating in months previous that he would only select those in top physical condition.
The absence of Marco Reus meant that what little of Klose’s game he had left – felt useless by most to the untrained eye – was sought as goldust to Löw and co. Klose’s basic instincts to score inside seven yards could not be found among the girth of talent among the German squad and was therefore essential.
None of Mesut Özil, Mario Götze, Lukas Podolski nor Andre Schürrle could put the ball into the net in as basic and repeatedly successful a pattern as Klose. As such the striker matched Ronaldo’s record of 15 World Cup goals versus Ghana before claiming it his own in the 7-1 demolition of Brazil in the semi-finals.
Klose reflected a number of years ago that he would, in fact, have been happy to take the call from Poland and represent his country of origin. One wonders at the tricks and trades he could have passed on to a young Robert Lewandowski and perhaps what the Bayern Munich star could have taught an old veteran in these later years.
Klose represents so much more than the sum of his parts and did what he could with what he had. Though he was not graced with lightening speed or the technical ability that Germany’s network of coaches now breeds into its young hopefuls, Klose still managed to capture the hearts of a nation he is proud to call his own.
Rarely outspoken, his actions represent more eloquently that which words could ever express; in a game for Werder Bremen in 2005 refusing a penalty given to him he thought was not deserved, and in September 2012 admitting having scored a goal for Lazio with his hand to the referee.
In a beautiful game plagued by money, greed, corruption and wealth, Klose represents one of football’s good guys that will forever rekindle memories of long summers of football, long summers of goals – forever cast in a youthful humanity that defies even time itself.
By Aaron Gallagher @AaronGallagher8Taken for a Ride
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Photo Sam Slotnick
In a nondescript building on Monkland Ave. sometime in July, David decided he’d had enough.
The 18-year-old student’s strange journey began in his home in China when he decided to come to Montreal to study finance at Concordia. A few weeks, a long flight and thousands of dollars later, he ended up in a crowded $900 a month homestay that he shared with 12 other people, where breakfast, lunch and dinner were two slices of bread—sometimes with margarine or a hot dog.
David’s English wasn’t good enough to enroll directly at Concordia. Instead, he went to New Oriental, one of many agencies in China that helps students apply to foreign universities. He paid the company about $15,000.
That agency—which is facing a class-action shareholders’ lawsuit and an investigation from the U |
. But the deal depended on Soviet acquiescence (and, according to some accounts, on Stalin’s personal authorization).
The arms deliveries made it possible to provide every Israeli recruit with his or her own weapon and ample ammunition. And the guns arrived in the nick of time, allowing the Haganah to go on the offensive in the lead-up to independence (“Plan Dalet”).
At the start of 1948, the Soviet Union gave a nod to crucial arms deals between Czechoslovakia and Israel, assuring the latter an advantage in its war of independence. “They saved the country, I have no doubt of that,” Ben-Gurion said.
“They saved the country, I have no doubt of that,” Ben-Gurion would say two decades later. “The Czech arms deal was the greatest help, it saved us and without it I very much doubt if we could have survived the first month.” Golda Meir, in her memoirs, similarly wrote that without the arms from the Eastern bloc, “I do not know whether we actually could have held out until the tide changed, as it did by June 1948.”
(4) In June 1948, as Israel gained the upper hand, the Soviets backed the most important Israeli objections to the plan for a settlement being pushed by the UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte. Responding to Bernadotte’s proposal to transfer the entire Negev to Transjordan, foreign minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov advised Stalin that this would put four-fifths of Israeli territory into the hands of Transjordan—“i.e., into British control”—and should be rejected. (“Comrade Stalin agrees,” Molotov scribbled on the document.)
(5) The Soviets also supported Israel on the question of Palestinian Arab refugees. Instead of Bernardotte’s proposal that these Arabs be given the right to return to the territory of the Jewish state, the Soviets preferred that “the Jews be given the opportunity to come to an agreement with the Arabs on this matter in the course of peace negotiations.” Near the end of the war, in December 1948, the Soviet Union and its satellites voted against General Assembly resolution 194, later cited as guaranteeing a “right of return” for Palestinian Arab refugees. (The United States voted in favor.)
In sum, Israel could hardly have asked for more. In October 1948, Sharett reported to the Israeli cabinet that “the Eastern bloc supports us staunchly.... In the Security Council the Russians are operating not just as our allies, but as our emissaries.” Eban noted that for these “two or three years,” the Soviets “were more constant in their assertiveness in support of Israel than even the United States. There were no wobblings, no vacillations.” Through it all, moreover, the Soviets had “attacked the Arabs vehemently.” To Eban’s mind, this had to do with the Soviet political style, so totally at odds with the American:
Then and afterward, the Soviet Union were either for you or against you. If they were for you, they were 100-percent; if they were against you, they were 100-percent. The United States always had a plurality in their objectives and tried to combine their objectives in a single policy. So they were never 100-percent for you, and they were never 100-percent against you. Nobody could completely trust them and nobody could completely despair of them.
IV. Why Stalin Did It
Why did Stalin do it? The question has perplexed historians for 70 years. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars have studied and published hundreds of Soviet documents on early Soviet-Israel relations. These documents include policy recommendations made to Stalin and instructions from the Soviet foreign ministry to its diplomats, but no document has revealed Stalin’s own thinking.
Because the sudden shift defied belief, some questioned whether Stalin gave much thought to it at all. This was the view of the historian Walter Laqueur. A decade after the events, Laqueur expressed
some doubt whether the decision to support the establishment of a Jewish state was taken at top level; in view of subsequent developments it is at least possible that this course of action was recommended by some foreign-ministry advisers and approved by Stalin in a fit of absentmindedness.
Possible, yes—but, to judge from the Soviet documents, unlikely. In July 1947, the first secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington insisted that “it was only after a careful and comprehensive analysis of the situation that Gromyko had been authorized to make his statement.” Throughout that period of high-level analysis, nearly all of Stalin’s foreign-policy advisers opposed partition (as did Truman’s). Their consensus was that support for a Jewish state would provoke “an unfavorable reaction” across the Arab world.
Only Stalin could have overturned this consensus. So great a pivot in official policy, argues the cold-war historian Vladislav Zubok, “was unthinkable without Stalin’s personal decision.... [It was] a gamble, a probe, that only Stalin could come up with.” Indeed, it would have been perilous for any underling to propose support for the Zionist project of a Jewish state. Molotov, foreign minister and Politburo member at the time, later recalled that when it came to the idea of a Jewish state, “everyone objected but us—me and Stalin.”
So again: why did Stalin decide as he did? No historians give any weight to pro-Jewish sentiment. At Yalta in February 1945, Stalin had described the Jews to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “middlemen, profiteers, and parasites.” There is no evidence that his view ever changed, except for the worse. Benny Morris has gone the farthest in speculating that the Soviets, in addition to considerations of realpolitik, might also have been “moved by the horrors of the Holocaust and by a sense of camaraderie with fellow sufferers at Nazi hands.” Bernard Lewis is not persuaded: “It is difficult to believe that Stalin, who killed countless millions in his own concentration camps, was moved by compassion for the plight of Hitler’s surviving victims.”
An American view, commonplace at the time, was that Stalin simply wanted to create turmoil. Partition would end in war, which, whatever its consequences, the Soviets could somehow exploit. Thus, the American number-two at the United Nations wondered “whether the Russians want partition or whether it is chaos they seek in Palestine.” George Kennan, the foremost Soviet expert at the State Department, called partition “favorable to Soviet objectives of sowing dissension and discord in non-Communist countries.”
How exactly such discord would serve Soviet interests remained unclear, however. Right up to Gromyko’s May 1947 speech (and in some cases, even later), every relevant agency of the U.S. government assumed that the Soviets would oppose partition in order to win Arab favor, while America would pay a heavy price in Arab opinion for supporting it. Not surprisingly, then, the Americans remained befuddled by the Soviet move, which seemed to them utterly counterintuitive.
Dean Rusk, head of the UN desk at the State Department, admitted to being “puzzled” by the “novelty of what seemed to be a pro-Zionist [Soviet] policy.” Robert Lovett, under-secretary of state, professed himself “mystified.” Kennan’s imagination also came up short: “There is no way of telling in exactly what manner the USSR will attempt to turn partition to its advantage.” (“It must be assumed, however,” he lamely added, “that Moscow will actively endeavor to find some means of exploiting the opportunity.”)
Astute observers of Soviet policy have attributed a plausible motive to Stalin: the Jewish state would be a useful lever for dislodging Britain from the heart of the region.
Most astute observers of Soviet policy, then and now, have attributed a more precise and plausible motive to Stalin. By 1947, the cold war had already seeped into the Mediterranean and the Middle East via Greece, Turkey, and Iran. Stalin may have concluded that the cause of a Jewish state would be a useful lever for dislodging Britain from the heart of the region. The British might still hold sway over their Arab clients in Transjordan and Iraq, and keep Egypt in their grip. But a Jewish state would drive the British out of Palestine, lock, stock, and barrel. True, supporting it would come at a cost: the (small) Arab Communist parties would be devastated. But it was a negligible price to pay in return for securing Britain’s ignominious retreat from one of its biggest bases in the Middle East.
This was clear as early as June 1946 to a leading Zionist diplomat, Eliahu Sasson, whose field was Arab politics. From this vantage point, he observed the Soviets acting everywhere in the Middle East to counter the British. His prescient conclusion:
Not only is there no reason to expect Russian policy to be hostile to us, there are grounds for thinking it will be friendly. Not out of sympathy to us or out of hatred toward the Arabs, but in order to settle political accounts with England.
The anti-British logic also figured in some Soviet policy papers, and in retrospect it makes perfect sense. But as there is still nothing straight from Stalin’s mouth, the riddle lingers. Molotov didn’t solve it in 1972, when he gave a confused account of his rationale:
It’s one thing to be anti-Zionist and anti-bourgeois and quite another to be against the Jewish people.... The Jews had long struggled for their own state under a Zionist flag. We, of course, were against Zionism. But to refuse a people the right to statehood would mean oppressing them.
Thus the paradox: the state of Israel came into being with the crucial support of a regime that continued to see itself as “against Zionism,” “of course.”
V. The Zionist Grooming of Russia
An additional and crucial element—the one I signaled early on—will help fill out the picture. Soviet support for partition and for Israel has usually been described as a “windfall” (Eban’s word) that took the Zionists by surprise. But, years before Gromyko’s speech, Zionist leaders themselves had begun to pursue Soviet support. Although they were surprised in 1947, many would come to believe that their own earlier efforts had produced the turnabout.
The central figures in this saga include Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. But at the very center there may stand a man largely forgotten to Israel’s history: Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky.
From 1932 to 1943, Maisky served as Stalin’s ambassador to the Court of St. James. Of Polish-Jewish ancestry, he had been a revolutionary as a young man and spent World War I in British exile. Returning to Russia after the 1917 revolution, he joined the Bolshevik party and put his charm to work as a diplomat.
Posted back to London, Maisky befriended a who’s-who of the British political and intellectual elite, from Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill to George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice Webb. Today, historians of the Soviet Union celebrate Maisky for his copious diary, in which he tells how, through treacherous waters, he adroitly steered Soviet-British relations through most of the war.
Chaim Weizmann, who conducted Zionist diplomacy from London, had taken notice. During the earlier world war, Weizmann had anticipated the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, placed his bet on Britain, and been instrumental in securing the Balfour Declaration. By 1941, as Zionism’s elder statesman and president of the World Zionist Organization, he was anguished by Britain’s betrayal of its pledge to facilitate a Jewish national home in Palestine. Now the new world war seemed likely to undo the British Empire, throwing open the Middle East once again. Who would fill the vacuum? Whom should the Zionists cultivate?
Weizmann had no illusions about Stalin. In addition to the familiar catalogue of the Soviet dictator’s treachery, Weizmann had personal experience of his cruelty. Although most of the Weizmann siblings had left Russia before 1917, his younger brother Shmuel had gone back to build the “revolution” and disappeared in the “Great Purge” of the late 1930s.
Weizmann had no illusions about Stalin, whose forces had killed his brother. Yet, despite this, Weizmann thought that under certain circumstances, Stalin might prove willing to aid the Zionist cause.
Yet, despite this, Weizmann thought that under certain circumstances, Stalin might prove willing to aid the Zionist cause—and Ivan Maisky was Stalin’s most proximate agent. “A few days ago I had an unexpected visitor,” wrote Maisky in his diary in February 1941: “the well-known Zionist leader Dr. Weizmann.” Maisky was impressed by the dignified demeanor of this “tall, elderly, elegantly dressed gentleman” who spoke calmly and deliberately in “excellent Russian.”
In their conversation, the man credited with winning the Balfour Declaration anticipated the final demise of the British-Zionist entente. The English, he offered, “don’t like the Jews,” and “prefer the Arabs to the Jews.” They were “hardly likely to agree” to mass immigration into Palestine of Jews who might survive the war. “And if they don’t agree, what will happen?” Weizmann sharpened the question: “What has a British victory to offer the Jews?” The implied message: once the war ended, the Zionists would finalize their divorce from Britain and be open to new relationships.
So began the wooing of Maisky, a joint effort by Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. It consisted of overtures and memos in which the Zionist leaders hammered away at set themes: the Jews were resolved to fight for their freedom, a Jewish state would be neutral, and the Arabs were either British agents or collaborators of Nazi Germany.
In particular, the two leaders worked to persuade Maisky that Palestine was a one-stop solution for Europe’s desperate Jewish masses. All through the Mandate period, critics of Zionism claimed that the country couldn’t absorb enough Jews to solve Europe’s Jewish “problem.” The Zionists worked especially hard to persuade Maisky otherwise.
Thus, when, at their first meeting, Maisky “expressed some surprise about how Weizmann hoped to settle five million Jews on territory occupied by one million Arabs,” Weizmann replied that the Arab was “the father of the desert.... Give me the land occupied by a million Arabs, and I will easily settle five times that number of Jews on it.” In their second meeting, in September 1943, Maisky repeated his worry about the “smallness” of Palestine, to which Weizmann responded by invoking a report by the renowned American irrigation engineer Walter Clay Lowdermilk, who estimated that the country could absorb another four million European Jewish refugees. The following month, Maisky raised the same issue with Ben-Gurion: “We want to know the truth, what is the capacity of Palestine?” Ben-Gurion spoke more modestly of two million Jews, and in due course provided Maisky with a supporting memorandum.
The two Zionist leaders also assured Maisky that the yishuv’s social and economic organization was not only compatible with Communism but even resembled it. The kibbutzim, Ben-Gurion emphasized in October 1941, while not ideologically Communist, “from an economic point of view... were communistic.” Palestine was home to “the only organized labor movement in the whole of the Middle East” and “the nucleus of a socialist commonwealth.”
In March 1943, Weizmann sent a memo to Maisky, which included this deftly ingratiating passage:
Three of the most fundamental aspects of Soviet social philosophy are embodied in the national system being built in Palestine by the Zionist movement: collective welfare and not individual gain is the guiding principle and goal of the economic structure; equality of standing is established in the community between manual and intellectual workers; and consequently the fullest scope is provided for intellectual life and the development of labor. There are no fundamental psychological barriers to mutual understanding, and the Zionist movement has never felt antagonistic to Soviet social philosophy.
As the war progressed and the Soviets began to push the Germans back in Europe, Zionist leaders gained the sense that their efforts were beginning to pay off. In September 1943, as Maisky prepared to leave London for Moscow to help plan the postwar settlement, Weizmann met him one last time. The Zionists, Weizmann said, “had been friendly toward Russia and hoped that the Soviet government would understand their aims.” Maisky replied that “he could not commit his government, but he believed that the Soviets would support them.... He thought that Russia would certainly stand by them”—an early hint (or hunch), offered three-and-a-half years before Gromyko’s dramatic bombshell at the United Nations.
Maisky’s route back to Moscow took him through the Middle East, and in October he visited Palestine. Now he was the one to seize the initiative, reaching out to Ben-Gurion, who took him and his wife on an afternoon visit to two kibbutzim near Jerusalem. As if on an official fact-finding trip, Maisky expressed keen interest in all aspects of kibbutz communal life and even posed for a photograph with Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir.
On the return ride to Jerusalem, Maisky told Ben-Gurion that “after the war there will be a serious Jewish problem and it will have to be resolved; we have to express an opinion, so we must know.” Ben-Gurion could hardly believe this turn of events. “It was all a great surprise to me,” he reported to his colleagues. “For me it was a revelation. I could hardly believe it. It obligates us to act—here is another country that is taking an interest in this question.”
Maisky wrote a memo on his visit to Palestine. No historian has been allowed to see it, so it remains the subject of endless speculation—but while the details aren’t known, its thrust is well-attested. The Ukrainian foreign minister at the time called the report “full of admiration at the wonderful progressive achievements of the Jews in Palestine.” Harold Laski, the British socialist leader, told Ben-Gurion in 1944 that “I read Maisky’s secret report and I became a Zionist.”
Did the memo have a similar effect in Moscow? The historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, the translator and editor of Maisky’s diaries, has dismissed the notion that Zionist cultivation of Maisky made a decisive difference. Maisky “misled” Ben-Gurion by suggesting that he exerted a vast influence over Soviet foreign policy; although he did prepare a “glowing report” for Stalin, he had already been shunted aside. On his return to Moscow in 1943, Gorodetsky writes, “he found the doors to the Kremlin bolted.” While he continued to advise Stalin at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, he was out of the ministry by the end of 1945. Zionist leaders only imagined that their wooing of Maisky had anything to do with Stalin’s decision.
In one obvious sense, this is true: Stalin made his decision more than three years after Maisky’s report, and in the context of the cold war. But the Zionist outreach to Maisky was itself only the most high-profile facet of a more extensive campaign that mobilized another layer of Zionist diplomats (including Sharett, Epstein, and Nahum Goldmann), involved overtures to Soviet missions from Washington to Ankara, and continued right up to Gromyko’s speech.
Would the transformation in the Soviet view have occurred without years of activist Zionist diplomacy? Zionist leaders had no doubt: somehow, they had tipped the scales.
The Zionist statesmen involved in this pursuit were neither naïve nor uninformed about the workings of the Soviet state. In particular, Ben-Gurion’s knowledge of the Soviet Union was deep and wide. As a young socialist organizer, he had spent three months there in 1923 and would later testify that “we [Zionists] were constant in our love for the great revolution in Russia.” But in 1928 the Soviet regime banned even the most socialist forms of Zionism, and Ben-Gurion found that things then became visible “in their true light.” He understood perfectly that reconciliation with Moscow “will come neither as a result of kibbutz settlement... nor by translating Lenin or Stalin into Hebrew.”
Still, he and his colleagues also knew just what to say (and in Russian) so as to make support for a Jewish state appear consistent, if not with Soviet ideology or propaganda, then with Soviet interests. And, at the moment of decision, consistent the two seemed to be. In July 1947, the second secretary of the Soviet embassy in Washington told Epstein that the Soviets knew perfectly well “that [Zionist] social experiments in collectivism have nothing to do with the Marxist interpretation of collectivism.” But, he added, the yishuv seemed to be “a peaceful, democratic and progressive community... which can block anti-Soviet intrigues, so easily hatched among the reactionary circles ruling the Arab countries at present.”
Would this transformation in the Soviet view have occurred without years of activist Zionist diplomacy? And would it have occurred in time? Historians might differ. But Zionist leaders had no doubt: somehow, they had tipped the scales.
VI. Why the Soviets Turned on Israel
Summarizing the support given the Zionists by the Soviet Union, Walter Laqueur wrote that “without it they would not have stood a chance.” Yet that support never became the foundation of a lasting alliance. Indeed, already by 1949, the Soviet Union and Israel were headed for a collision. What went wrong?
If it is true that the Soviet aim was to push Britain out, then by 1949 this aim had been achieved. Israel had won a decisive military victory and had even conquered the Negev, which Britain had hoped to keep as a bridge between Egypt and Transjordan. Britain’s final exit from the Middle East would take another decade, but its retreat began with the creation of Israel. As far as Soviet strategy was concerned, it was “mission accomplished.”
But the Soviets didn’t just withdraw support; they were becoming openly hostile. Driving the pendulum back were a number of factors, including Stalin’s increasingly severe paranoia on all fronts. And then there was a domestic problem where Soviet Jews were concerned.
During the war, Zionist leaders had assured Soviet authorities that the country’s Jews were out of bounds for Zionist proselytization. “I’m not worried about [Soviet Jews],” Weizmann had told Maisky at their first meeting.
They are not under any threat. In 20 or 30 years’ time, if the present regime in your county lasts, they will be assimilated.... Soviet Jews will gradually merge with the general current of Russian life, as an inalienable part of it. I may not like it, but I’m ready to accept it: at least Soviet Jews are on firm ground, and their fate does not make me shudder.
But when Gromyko in 1947 announced the turn in Soviet policy, a wave of euphoria swept Soviet Jewry. From synagogues to labor camps, Jews openly expressed their Zionist yearnings. This fever only intensified upon the partition resolution, the declaration of the state, and finally the arrival of Golda Meir as Israel’s first envoy in September 1948. On her first sabbath in Moscow, tens of thousands of Jews filled the streets around the city’s main synagogue, and they did so again on the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur. Meir gave a vivid description of the scene in her memoirs:
A crowd of close to 50,000 people was waiting for us. For a minute, I could not grasp what had happened—or even who they were. And then it dawned on me. They had come—those good, brave Jews—in order to be with us, to demonstrate their sense of kinship and to celebrate the establishment of the State of Israel.... Someone pushed me into a cab. But the cab couldn’t move either, because the crowd was cheering; laughing, weeping Jews had engulfed it.... I stuck my head out of the window of the cab and said: “A dank eich vos ihr seit geblieben Yidden” (Thank you for having remained Jews.)
It was all very moving. But Mordechai Namir, the first secretary of the Israeli diplomatic mission, recalled that the spontaneous demonstration produced “a sinking feeling in our hearts because of the suspicion that the blatant conduct of the congregation had crossed the acceptable limits... and that we had participated in a very tragic event.”
In the wake of USSR support for Israel, a wave of euphoria swept Soviet Jewry. In response, by the end of 1948, Stalin launched a “secret pogrom” against leading Jews accused of Zionist conspiracy.
The sequel bore out these apprehensions. Gromyko had specified in his speech that “no Western European state” had assured elemental Jewish rights (emphasis added). The implication was that the rights of Soviet Jews hadn’t been compromised; for them now to be asserting the contrary by hailing Israel as their redemption caught the authorities off-guard. With each passing month they grew more alarmed at the percolation of Zionist sympathies at home.
Stalin thus had ample reason to be alarmed by the impact his own policy was having on the two-and-a-half million Soviet Jews who after the Holocaust formed the largest mass of Jews in Europe. Decades of repression had been suddenly lifted, releasing a surge of ethnic and nationalist fervor that would in turn necessitate even more brutal measures of repression. Already by the end of 1948, he had launched what one historian has called a “secret pogrom” against leading Jews accused of Zionist conspiracy.
The subsequent persecutions of the early 1950s, from the show trial and execution in Prague of Rudolf Slansky and other high-placed Jewish members of the Czech Communist party to the Moscow “Doctors’ Plot,” warrant their own grim telling. Suffice it to say that in the Soviet Union and its satellites, domestic anti-Semitism and opposition to Israel became inseparable twins.
VII. Zionists Prefer the West
Nor was it simply that Stalin deplored Zionism and hated the Jews. For its part, the mainstream Zionist leadership had no great regard for Stalin or the Soviet Union. Their preference lay with the West.
True, this did not apply to the far-left Zionist factions that in 1948 coalesced in Israel’s Mapam party. Until the Prague trials in 1952, most of its members, many of whom had also played leading roles in the yishuv’s military defense, looked favorably upon the Soviet Union. Portraits of Stalin brooded over the dining halls of some of their kibbutzim, and the KGB successfully recruited leading Mapam members as agents. But the pro-Soviet left, even at its height, did not appeal to more than 15 percent of the public—its share in Israel’s first elections in 1949—and it declined steadily thereafter.
True, too, at the height of Soviet support, a wave of gratitude had swept the yishuv as a whole. One especially astute witness was the Jewish-Hungarian author Arthur Koestler, who spent much of 1948 in Israel. Koestler, a former Communist and Comintern agent during the Spanish Civil War, owed his fame to his 1940 novel Darkness at Noon. Set in 1938 in the midst of the “Great Purge,” the book accused Stalin of criminal betrayal.
In a piece of reportage from Israel in June 1948, Koestler noted (with understatement) that “this correspondent is hardly susceptible to Stalinite leanings”:
And yet, had he suffered what people here have suffered in the past six months, while one leading Western democracy [Britain] waged an almost undisguised war on them and a second [the United States] looked on, the psychological pressure of circumstances might have turned even him into a fellow traveler [of Communist Russia].... The almost weekly oscillations of American policy, and the paradox that America recognized Israel but by maintaining the arms embargo deprived it of its means of defense, increased the general feeling of bitterness and disgust with the West.
Koestler had witnessed the “spontaneous surge of sympathy and gratitude” toward the Soviet Union among Israelis. Nevertheless, to his mind, this “emotional leaning” was a transient thing. The majority of Jews in Palestine, including in Ben-Gurion’s Labor party,
realize[d] that Russia’s gesture was exclusively designed to serve her own political aims. They remembered well that for 30 years Russia had persecuted Zionism as a fascist movement. The sudden and total reversal of Soviet policy... was too obvious a maneuver to take them in.
For Koestler, there was no question that mainstream Zionists preferred the West; the shallow sympathy for the Soviets arose only from the West’s own reluctant reception of Israel.
That same sympathy, however, had fed a malicious narrative among American opponents of Zionism in the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon who asserted that a Jewish state would become a Soviet satellite, infiltrated by Soviet agents in the guise of Jewish refugees. Zionist leaders denied this claim at every turn. The first to do so was Weizmann, in a letter to Truman on the very eve of the partition vote. Weizmann cautioned the president against believing predictions “that our project in Palestine may in some way be used as channel for the infiltration of Communist ideas in the Middle East”:
Nothing is further from the truth. Our immigrants from Eastern Europe are precisely those who are leaving the Communist scene with which they do not wish to be integrated. Otherwise, they would not leave at all. Had there been a serious attempt by the Soviets to introduce Communist influences through our immigration, they could easily have done so in previous decades. Every election and all observation in Palestine testifies to the trivial hold which Communism has achieved in our community.
Not only that, but the yishuv felt a growing attraction to the United States, now home to the largest Jewish community in the world. Weizmann, once installed as the new president of Israel, assured James McDonald, the first U.S. ambassador, that “our people are democratic and realize that only through the cooperation and support of the United States can they become strong and remain free.” Ben-Gurion chimed in, telling McDonald that “Rome would become Communist before Jerusalem [would].”
McDonald agreed. “When the chips were down and Israel was forced to make her choice,” he later wrote, “that choice was almost always pro-Western.” The Soviet ambassador, Pavel Yershov, concurred, lamenting that Israel was “slid[ing] further and further toward the American position” and “might capitulate completely to the Americans, becoming a tool for the realization of their expansionist plans.”
American wariness that Israel would tip in Moscow’s direction may have figured in the very decision now celebrated as the birth of U.S.-Israel relations.
Formally, however, Israel had declared its “neutrality” between East and West: this was crucial to its efforts to extricate hundreds of thousands of Jews remaining in Soviet satellite countries. Nor did Israel’s early leaders, however much they craved the favor of United States, shy away from leveraging their Soviet ties by hinting that they might yet tip in Moscow’s direction. Weizmann himself warned that if the West “humiliated and deserted Israel in the UN and elsewhere,” its people would become “alienated” and (by implication) drift toward the Soviets. Koestler thought this quite impossible, but he worried that Ben-Gurion and Sharett were “too coy” to say so, giving rise to suspicion in Washington that Israel might “might topple over to the other side.”
In retrospect, such a scenario seems incredible. But wariness of it, and the desirability of pre-empting it, may actually have figured in the very decision now celebrated as the birth of U.S.-Israel relations. In the crucial meeting at which Truman decided in favor of immediate recognition of Israel, White House counsel Clark Clifford made the compelling argument that, by recognizing Israel first, the U.S. could “steal a march on the USSR.” One observer of the decision noted the prevalence of the “fairly well-founded suspicion that the U.S. speedy recognition was prompted primarily by fears that the Soviet Union might do it first.” Among the mix of Truman’s motives, one-upping the Soviets could not have been too far from the surface.
As Israel grew stronger, the cold-war argument became more compelling. By July 1948, Philip Jessup, the number-two in the U.S. mission to the UN, could already describe Israel as “more than a match” for any combination of Arab forces. Jessup also reported that Israel was “aware of the disadvantages to it of too close an association with the Soviet Union” and “recognize[d] that greater advantages would be gained from a closer association with the U.S. and other Western powers.” Warning that were Israel “thrown into the arms of the Soviet Union it could become a force operating to a very great disadvantage to the U.S., the UK, and other Western powers,” Jessup drew the clear conclusion: treating Israel “fairly” would transform it into “a force operating to our own advantage.”
The journey from “fair treatment” of Israel to the post-1967 strategic alliance with the United States would prove to be a long one, with many ups and downs. But it originated in the desire to keep Israel out of the Soviet orbit—an American reaction to a highly improbable scenario that was itself made plausible only by Stalin’s surprising but consistent support for the Jewish state at the moment of its birth. That being the case, perhaps there is another reason for Israel to thank Stalin: he inadvertently helped Israel build its first bridges to United States.
VIII. Lessons for Today
In 1961, the Soviet foreign ministry published a volume of basic documents on Soviet-Arab relations. Although Gromyko himself chaired the publication committee, none of his UN speeches in support of Israel appeared in the book. Nor did his 1988 Russian-language memoirs mention the fact of Soviet support for Israel in 1947 and 1948, or his role in proclaiming it. The Soviets wanted nothing more than to forget the entire episode, and so encourage their Arab clients to do the same. “Israel has turned out badly,” reflected Molotov in his last years, when asked about Soviet support for its establishment. “But Lord Almighty! That’s American imperialism for you.”
Thankfully, a few diligent historians have done much over the past two decades to unearth the record and tell the story in detail. In mustering evidence for this essay, I’ve relied largely on their efforts. They include, most notably, Yaakov Ro’i, Arnold Krammer, and Uri Bialer, whose detailed book-length accounts appeared before the fall of the Soviet Union; and Gabriel Gorodetsky, Benjamin Pinkus, and Laurent Rucker, who in the aftermath of the regime’s collapse plumbed accessible archives to add many new dimensions. What with important scholarly articles by others also filling gaps, the story is there for all who seek it.
And yet, too few do. Both Israeli diplomats and American Zionists prefer to tell the same simple tale reflected in Ambassador Danon’s statement: “From the moment President Truman became the first world leader to recognize the new Jewish state, Israel has had no better friend that the United States of America.” Everyone likes the story of a 70-year love affair between scrappy little Israel and the world’s greatest superpower and democracy. But as we have seen, this statement, however accurate it would become in later years, was untrue in the earliest ones when, as Abba Eban attested from his experience as Israel’s first ambassador to the UN, the Soviets were “more constant in their assertiveness in support of Israel than even the United States.”
Unfortunately, this historical misrepresentation exacts a cost. First, it tends to obscure the real significance of the international legitimacy conferred on Israel by the partition vote. Yes, it took heroic efforts by partition’s supporters, including the United States, to round up the required two-thirds “yes” votes in the General Assembly. But the successful outcome was due to the fundamental fact that both of the victorious great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, supported partition and the creation of a Jewish state. This convergence created the updraft that drew in the others.
Abba Eban regarded partition as “the first American-Soviet agreement in the postwar era.” That it was an agreement over the creation of the Jewish state suggests just how deep lie the foundations of Israel’s international legitimacy. Many Arab apologists still seek to demonstrate that this or that ballot in the General Assembly was obtained through threat or barter, and it is true that in November 1947, advocates of partition pulled out all the stops. But with both superpowers aligned, it required a special animus against Zionism to prompt a “no” ballot. With few exceptions, this existed only in countries with Muslim majorities.
Second, the false idea that the United States was Israel’s “best friend” in 1948 subtracts from the debt owed to the first Israelis themselves. It would have been much easier to defeat the Palestinian Arabs, and even the combined Arab forces, with the backing of the world’s greatest power. But Israel didn’t enjoy that backing. Sharett, in a meeting with secretary of state George Marshall, spoke bluntly to this point (as summarized by Israel’s first cabinet secretary, Zeev Sharaf):
The United States, [Sharett] continued, had not helped to establish the state; [it] had assisted only by taking part in the vote at the United Nations, and this would not be forgotten. But we, the Jewish people, he said, were carrying on the fight in Palestine ourselves without any aid whatever. We had asked for arms, but they had not been given; we had asked for military guidance, but it had been withheld; finally, we had asked for armor plating for buses, but even this had been refused. Whatever we had secured was with our own capacities alone.
Sharett was too diplomatic to remind Marshall of just what, by contrast, the Soviets had done for Israel.
In May 1949, Truman sent a threatening letter to Ben-Gurion criticizing Israel’s postwar position on borders and refugees. Truman mentioned that the American government (and people) had “given generous support to the creation of Israel.” In his diary, a fuming Ben-Gurion derided this claim, discounting even U.S. support of partition:
The state of Israel was not established as a consequence of the UN resolution. Neither America nor any other country saw the resolution through, nor did they stop the Arab countries (and the British mandatory government) from declaring total war on us in violation of UN resolutions. America did not raise a finger to save us and, moreover, imposed an arms embargo, and had we been destroyed they would not have resurrected us.
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the difference between a grant and a loan, let alone that some federal programs will reduce their monthly payments to nothing while their incomes are low. The fact that people with low earnings are defaulting shows that not enough of them have enrolled in those programs, Dynarski of the University of Michigan said.
Last year, Indiana began requiring all institutions that enroll students who receive state financial aid to provide students with an annual estimate of their total loan debt and future monthly repayments. A new Nebraska law requires all publicly funded postsecondary educational institutions in the state to provide that information to students.
Colleges, which are penalized by the federal government for high default rates, are trying to help students graduate and keep them from falling behind on payments.
To keep students on the path to graduation, Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), the largest two-year college in Virginia, has redesigned remedial math classes and hired counselors to work with freshmen to help them find a major and schedule courses. The school also has contracted with a company that sends delinquent borrowers automated phone calls and another that counsels them over the phone.
Some colleges warn students not to take out too much money for living expenses, and some will deny loans.
“We see a significant number of students who are coming to us with existing loan debt,” said Joan Zanders, head of financial aid and support services at NOVA. If a borrower owes $70,000 from prior education, say at a for-profit college, “it makes no sense whatsoever for them to dig a deeper hole for themselves to get a certificate.”
NOVA officials say there’s a link between financial education and academic success. When students can budget their financial aid money and pay their bills, they’re more likely to stay in school. So NOVA’s required orientation course now includes a unit on how to stick to a budget, manage credit cards and understand student loans.
Like community colleges across Virginia, NOVA saw a spike in borrowing during the recession. Now, Zanders said, “it’s actually going down.” She said she thinks this is partly due to the improving economy and partly due to better outreach.On Thursday, Rick Santorum reached into his bag of awkward analogies in order to evoke his stringent opposition to marriage equality.
Waxing poetic in an interview with Iowa radio show host Simon Conway, Santorum airily opined that legalizing same-sex marriage is not unlike saying “the states have the right to redefine the chemical equation for water, it can be H3O instead of H2O.”
Conway asked Santorum what he thought of Senator Ted Cruz’s recent suggestion that conservatives should align with one presidential candidate (Cruz, naturally), which gave Santorum an opportunity to hatch his odd analogy. He derisively called Cruz a “libertarian” for wanting to return the marriage equality decision to the states:
“Look, I’m very proud of the conservative record I’ve put together. There’s no one who’s fought more on moral and cultural issues. I’m not a libertarian. There are people in this race that want the states to decide whether there should be same-sex marriage or polygamy or marijuana use. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that the states have the right to redefine something that’s not capable of redefining.”
“For me, when you say the states have the right to define marriage, it’s like saying, well, the states have the right to redefine the chemical equation for water, it can be H3O instead of H2O. Well, the states can’t do that. Why? Because nature dictates what water is, nature dictates what marriage is, and the states don’t have the right to violate what nature has dictated.”
Listen to his speech below:
h/t: Right Wing Watch
This Story Filed UnderI'm sure many of you who are planning to start their first trip have asked or googled "How much do I need to travel 3 months in Southeast Asia or Europe?" or "Is $20,000 USD budget enough to travel around the world for a year?". I've read my share of travel budgeting articles on Google and r/travel subreddit before my trip to try to get an idea what to expect for my monthly budget. Curious to see if other travelers have kept track of what they spent on a daily basis so I could get an idea to prepare myself mentally. No one likes surprises, especially when it comes to their own hard earn cash.
I have saved up well over $24,000 USD by the end of December of 2012, but I still questioned myself if that is enough to be able to travel for a full year! Family and friends who have lived and traveled there assured me a bowl of noodles will cost as cheap as $1, accommodation can get as cheap as $5 per night, and a 10 hour train with a sleeper will only cost $30 the most. I wanted to believe it, but it's hard when I have gotten used to how much things cost in a first world country.
I don't know about you but for me it's always interesting to see how travelers who travels long term manage their finances. I couldn't find any of that information on the web so I decided to record my own on what I spend on a daily basis for the majority of my year long trip. The photos are just an example when I was in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand for the month of December 2012 and January 2013.
I wanted to keep the categories as general as possible just to make it easier for myself to keep track. Alcohol, bottled water, snacks... etc are all under the food category. The rest are pretty self explanatory.
My budget for SE Asia was $1000usd a month and it wasn't so hard to achieve that goal. As you can as, I was able to keep my meal costs pretty low. I was able to eat pretty well just for $10 to $15 per day. I was eating really well anything over that amount. Hostels were usually between $2 to $10 per night. Again, at $10 I was able to have my own room. The $2 ones were pretty much staying at a refugee camp. Depending on the distance and how comfortable you want the rides to be, bus rides from one destination to the next could cost between $7 to $30.
If you are a smoker which I'm not, you could buy a pack of local cigarettes for as low as $1 or less. Compare to an $8 pack in the states, no wonder why so many backpackers smoke over there.
Alcohol was pretty darn cheap as well. It cost around a $2 or less for a bottle of Saigon beer or Tiger beer. Any local beers should cost around that price. In Hoi An, $. 12 cents was the cheapest beer I have ever bought in my life. It comes in a small plastic cup and probably not the best beer to drink but backpackers will pretty much do anything at that price. I'm not a big drink to begin with but I did get a fruit drink every day.
Of course, it depends on the person's traveling style. I certainly did not have to be so frugal but my objective was to stay on the road as long as I possibly can. While others might just want to go for 3 months and be able to stay in a decent nice hotel or try out different types of fine cuisines.
So if you feel like you will be traveling on a tight budget and don't mind staying at cheap hostels or trying out dirty looking streets stalls (It's really not that bad) then I hope this will give you a brief idea of what to expect if you are heading to SE Asia.
To other backpackers who have traveled in the region before, what was your budget like?High overhead, the Milky Way galaxy twists itself into a whirling pinwheel, its glittering stars and dense, dark clouds weaving spirals on the sky.
At least, that’s the view photographer Christian Sasse revealed when he shared this image of the nighttime sky over southern Australia. Seen from Earth’s vantage point in one arm of the Milky Way, our galaxy appears to dive through the cosmos, its curling spine anchored to the sky by the southern celestial pole — one of the points around which the stars and all their minions appear to wander as Earth spins on its axis.
Sasse made the image he shared on Twitter from a series of 30-second-long exposures, each taken 50 minutes apart, over 10 hours on April 28. He stacked those photographs using Startrails software, and then edited the final composite image using Photoshop.
“The southern sky is fascinating in so many ways,” says Sasse, who set up his gear near one of the telescopes at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. “I remember hearing the dome roaring deeply all night whenever the telescope moved from object to object.”
Based in Vancouver, Sasse had traveled to Australia to visit a friend. He rented a small camper van, decked out its interior with the gadgets he’d need to capture both wildlife and the glorious southern sky, and headed out to a spot where “the skies are pristine and you can be all on your own at night … often accompanied by curious kangaroos.”
Indeed, some of the most notable treasures in the immediate cosmic neighborhood are visible primarily in the south: Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own, the bright star grouping known as the Southern Cross, a dark blotch called the Coalsack Nebula, small satellite galaxies known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, and the glowing backbone of the Milky Way.
View Images When images of the Milky Way taken 30 seconds apart are combined, the result is a “star trail” that highlights motion but loses the galaxy’s details. Photograph by SassePhoto
“In the Northern hemisphere, I tend to look South, and in the Southern hemisphere — well, I also look South,” says Sasse, who captured those curiosities in the great looping footprint he constructed.
Photographers often use a similar technique to create images depicting stars tracing circles around the celestial poles. Sasse initially did the same thing, stitching together roughly 1,250 images from the same night. But when he smeared the stars into circles, Sasse saw that our home galaxy had vanished, taking with it some of the most striking textures in the sky.
So he experimented with layering images taken at different intervals (see gallery), and was astounded by the result.
“What appeared were circular patterns with intrinsic beauty. Each feature of the Milky Way has its own distinct pattern, and details became finer the closer one moved to the pole,” Sasse says. “The Milky Way is creating this incredible pattern all the time, and the way we freeze it is the way we like it.“
I've been looking at the heavens all my life, and that great, milky spiral is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before — it reminds me of a galactic mandala, a demonstration of celestial geometry, an accidental fractal, a rippling kaleidoscope of stars.
“I have a fascination with light patterns in nature — iridescence of birds and fish, feather structure of eagles, anything that changes with small angles such as diffraction and reflection,” says Sasse, who has a doctorate in optics.(CNN) The site of a horrific mass killing will become a house of worship again.
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, will hold a service at 9:30 a.m. Sunday, according to CNN affiliate WCSC.
Nine people were shot to death Wednesday night at the church.
Authorities said Dylann Roof, 21, of Lexington, South Carolina, admits he shot and killed the people he'd sat with for Bible study at the historicall y black church, two law enforcement officials said.
Roof is white and all the victims are black. He told investigators he did it to start a race war, according to one of the officials.
The church premises remained a crime scene, and thus off-limits to church members, until Charleston police released it Saturday.
One of the victims was the church's pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. The Rev. Norvel Goff, presiding elder of Emanuel AME, told CNN he will give the sermon at the service.
Charleston, nicknamed the Holy City because it has so many churches, will remember the shooting victims in other ways.
Unity chain planned
At 10 a.m. Sunday, many churches plan to ring their bells, WCSC reported
On Sunday night, a unity chain will be held on the 13,200-foot-long Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge. Organizers hope to attract enough people to hold hands and stretch from Charleston to the town of Mount Pleasant on the other side of the Cooper River.
"When something this horrendous happens this close to home, you are compelled to do something," event coordinator Dorsey Fairbairn said on the Facebook page.
On Friday, Roof appeared at a bond hearing. Families of the victims addressed him and said they forgave him.
That message was echoed by Arthur Hurd, the husband of victim Cynthia Hurd. He's in the Merchant Marines and arrived in Charleston on Saturday.
'Hate's not in me'
"This is all surreal but what I can say to that young man is that in time I will forgive you," Hurd told CNN affiliate WCIV. "I won't move past this but I will forgive you. But I hope for the rest of your life, however long or short that may be, you stop and play that tape over and over and over again in your head and see the sheer terror and pain you put purely innocent people through...."
"I would love to hate you but hate's not in me. If I hate you I'm no better than you."
People angry about the killings took to the streets Saturday.
In Charleston, hundreds joined the March for Black Lives.
The group began the march in total silence as they walked to Emanuel AME Church from a nearby park, stopping outside the church to lay flowers at the makeshift memorial.
Once they passed the church, the group filled Charleston's iconic King Street, usually packed with tourists this time of year. Many carried signs of support for the victims of the Charleston shooting and the black community: "STILL WE RISE," "Hand in Hand," "Do the right thing," "Black Lives Matter," signs read.
The march ended with a rally outside the historic Daughters of the Confederacy building.
'Take it down'
"That terrorist did not win. He wanted to invoke terror and fear in our community, but we are not for that," an organizer said to the crowd. "We are standing up together, arm in arm... We will not bow down, but we will stand up."
Despite the sweltering heat, a large crowd filled the front grounds of the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia calling for the Confederate flag to be removed.
"Take it down, take it down," chanted the crowd filled with people of all races and ages holding signs.
One woman's sign said, "Love breeds love, hate breeds hate" and another man's sign says, "Remove my ancestors sign."
Organizers of the event, the South Carolina Progressive Network, estimates between 1,500 and 1,700 people attended.
Investigators are looking at a website featuring a racist manifesto that mentions Charleston as the "historic" target of an attack and displays images of Roof.
Racist website
The 2,000-word text explains the writer's philosophy of white superiority, saying the Trayvon Martin case "truly awakened me" and that "I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country."
Motive has become the biggest question as state and federal investigators work on the case -- and statements and photos on the website match what investigators have determined so far.
For instance, CNN Charlotte affiliate WBTV, citing a source, says Roof told investigators in Shelby, North Carolina, where he was arrested, that he researched the church and targeted it because it turned out to be a "historic African-American church."
Three photos show Roof posing with a pistol. One closeup shows a gun that can be identified as a.45-caliber Glock -- the model of gun investigators say was used in the church shooting. Those photos were taken in April, after his 21st birthday, when his family said he purchased a.45-caliber gun.
The website, called the Last Rhodesian, is bare bones. Roof's name doesn't appear anywhere on the site but he is shown in many of the photos. An Internet ownership search shows the website was registered to Roof and listed as the administrator.
Roof on suicide watch
While the nation rallies behind Charleston, an insight into Roof's state of mind came from Charleston County Sheriff's Office spokesman Maj. Eric Watson.
Roof, he said, "is in protective custody. He is currently sitting on his bed being monitored by two detention officers. He is on suicide watch."
Roof may be prosecuted by federal authorities if it's determined he committed a hate crime. The Justice Department said "it is looking at this crime from all angles, including as a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism."
Funeral plans for Pinckney, who was a state senator, were announced Saturday.
Pinckney's casket will be at the State House rotunda lobby from 1-5 p.m. Wednesday. Public viewings will also be held Thursday at St. John AMC Church in Ridgeland and Emanuel AME Church.
The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Friday at TD Arena on the College of Charleston campus. The service is open to the public.CEOs' salaries are ballooning thanks to tax breaks that turn bonuses into government subsidies for corporate America
It’s no secret that US CEOs are some of the best-paid people on earth. After all, for the first time ever, the two top-paid corporate executives took home billion-dollar pay checks. What seems to be a better-kept secret, though, is that a large portion of their pay is tax deductible – which creates, effectively, a government subsidy for corporate bonuses.
It’s all thanks to a lucrative tax break that's completely legal. In 1993, when Congress capped the tax deductibility of executive pay at $1m, it allowed US corporations to deduct performance-based pay –including stock options – from their federal income taxes. The companies use the tax-deductible stock options to lower their IRS bills. That, in turn, means that those rich executive bonuses turn into government subsidies.
The total cost to the US: in the neighborhood of $7bn a year at last count, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The fast-food industry, in particular, has racked up $64m in tax savings by giving its CEOs big bonuses.
According to recent research by the Institute for Policy Studies, “the CEOs of the top six publicly held fast-food chains pocketed more than $183m in fully deductible 'performance pay,' lowering their companies’ IRS bills by an estimated $64m” over the past two years.
Those companies included McDonald's, YUM! Brands, Wendy’s, Burger King, Domino’s and Dunkin’ Brands.
According to IPS's figures, last year the CEO of McDonald's, James Skinner, received a performance bonus of $23m, making his company eligible for a $8m tax break. Within that same year, his successor, Donald Thompson, received a performance bonus of $10m, making McDonald's eligible for a $3.5m tax break.
David Novak, the CEO of Yum! Brands, which includes Taco Bell and KFC, did even better with a $48.8m performance-based bonus, which shaved $17.1m from the company's tax bill, IPS found.
CEO tax breaks come at the cost of the US economy and minimum-wage workers, says research from the IPS. Photo: Institute for Policy Studies
Two subsidies for fast food companies?
Many of the workers at those companies live on salaries of roughly of $20,000 a year each, which in many cases qualifies them for food stamps and other government assistance. Some workers at McDonald's would have to work for 550 years to accumulate the salary and bonus the CEO makes in a single year, Bloomberg Businessweek found.
Many argue that there are two subsidies at work: tax breaks to keep CEO pay high, and a low minimum wage to keep worker costs low.
Similarly, many of these companies' employees are paid the national minimum wage of $7.25 and depend on government assistance for many of their daily needs. Increasingly, that's hitting the older population: half of those working for minimum wage are over 25 years old.
Consequently, some argue, not only is the government subsidising large chunks of executive pay for these companies, but it’s also subsidising pay for their lowest paid employees by providing them with food stamps and other forms of public assistance.
“These fast food CEOs are a double burden on taxpayers,” says Sarah Anderson, author of the IPS report. “They’re gorging on huge taxpayer-funded bonuses at the same time they’re fighting to keep low-level workers’ wages so low that many must rely on public assistance.”
"The issue of executive compensation goes beyond the companies, it affects the people, the taxpayers," Anderson said. "That's why we are trying to reframe the conversation."
The wage gap and the culture of the workplace
A large part of the conversation in recent years has been the wage gap between executives and regular workers, and the effect that large difference in compensation can have on the workplace.
There are still only a handful of companies that are mindful of the fact that increasing wage gaps within the workplace affect morale and often lead to a high turnover. For example, Anderson points to Whole Foods, where co-founder and co-CEO John Mackey has been outspoken about maintaining pay ratio between workers and executives at 1:19.
“Employees really do care about this issue, and a smaller gap makes for greater solidarity, and as a result better performance, throughout the workplace,” Mackey wrote for the Harvard Business Review earlier this year.
Twenty years ago, when we were only a fraction as large as we are today ($40m in sales then compared to $8bn now), the salary cap ratio was 8 to 1. Today it’s 19 to 1. That puts the maximum cash compensation anyone can make at Whole Foods at about $650,000."
However, the rest of the US is far from following in Mackey’s foot steps. According to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), “The CEO of an S&P 500 Index company made, on average, 354 times the average wage of a rank-and-file US worker.” This isn’t just about retail or fast food companies. Those working the bottom-rung jobs within the banking industry aren’t faring much better.
Bank tellers on food stamps
When surveyed by the Committee for Better Banks, 25.5% of bank workers said they had their take-home pay cut, 24% said their benefits were cut and 32% said they were not always paid for overtime jobs.
Another study found that bank tellers' pay in New York is so low that 39% of bank tellers and their family members are enrolled in public assistance programs. All the while bank CEOs are still raking pay packages worth millions of dollars.
New Day New York is leading protests this week advocating for the closing of tax loopholes and a minimum wage high enough to ensure that workers would be able to support themselves and their families. Fast food workers are planning more strikes against the minimum wage this week.
Strikes and protests have done little so far to change corporate compensation practices.
Pay ratios and why they matter
The government, however, has not turned a blind eye to the growing wage gap within many of the companies.
In September, the US Securities and Exchange Committee (SEC), which has been tasked with enforcing the number of provisions contained within the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act, issued a proposal that would require US corporations to publicly disclose their pay ratios.
Those in support of the proposal shouldn’t get excited just yet, said Carol Bowie, head of Institutional Shareholders Services' Americas Research group. It’s likely that the proposal won’t be finalized until 2014, which would means that it would go into effect in 2015, requiring companies to publicly disclose it in their filings in 2016.
“We are a long way from seeing it on the form,” she says, adding that it’s too early to predict if it would have any effect on executive compensation going forward.
Even if the pay ratio was available now, Fabrizio Ferri, associate professor of corporate governance and executive compensation at Columbia Business School, thinks it wouldn’t make much of a difference.
Compensation levels at US corporations are fairly detailed and if investors were truly interested, they could easily find out what the pay ratio is, he says. However, “to an institutional investor, it doesn’t make a difference. It’s good for discussion, it’s good for press, but won’t make the institutional investors vote differently.”
Anderson agrees, noting that the majority of research addressing the wage gap and the dependence of minimum wage workers on government assistance has done little to affect the way shareholders vote.
“The shareholders aren’t really on our side,” she says. “They have very narrow interests.”We walk on it every day. Get it under our fingernails. Track it into the house. But do we really appreciate the vital role soil plays—not just in the environment, but in human health?
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is giving soil its due. Friday, December 5, is World Soil Day, and 2015, the FAO has declared, will be the International Year of Soils.
"The minerals, the nutrients that make up our muscles and bones almost entirely come from soil," says Jerry Glover, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and agroecologist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
"This is, of course, very critical because we're supposed to be increasing agricultural production to feed and nourish some of the ten billion people, but it's at the same time that our soils are the thinnest and most nutrient depleted."
Here are five things you should know about soil.
1. Soil, like oil, is a finite resource.
Poor farming practices deplete soil nutrients faster than they are able to form, leading to loss of soil fertility and degraded lands. Glover compares it to the concerns that surround oil depletion.
"We still continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace in soil," he says. If a country is extracting oil, Glover points out, people worry about what will happen if the oil runs out. But they don't seem to worry about what will happen if we run out of soil. (Read "Our Good Earth" in National Geographic magazine.)
By 1991, an area bigger than the United States and Canada combined was lost to soil erosion—and it shows no signs of stopping. In fact, says Glover, native forests and vegetation are being cleared and converted to agricultural land at a rate greater than any other period in history. To restore soil in the United States to its pre-Columbian levels would take about 200 years.
View Images Cletus Reed, 80, and his grandson Sam stand at a cross-section of exposed ground on their Iowa corn farm. Photographer Jim Richardson created the cross-section to illustrate the potential impact of erosion. The Reeds, who lost more than a foot of topsoil to erosion, subsequently altered their farming practices. Photograph by Jim Richardson, National Geographic
2. Misusing soil can topple civilizations.
Modern examples of the impact of soil erosion are well-known: the Dust Bowl in the American and Canadian prairies, the erosion of China's Loess Plateau, the famine in Africa's Sahel. Ancient societies also reaped what they sowed when it came to their farming practices.
"The Romans still plowed themselves out of business, as did the Greeks, and Easter Islanders," says David Montgomery, who studies topography at the University of Washington in Seattle and is the author of Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.
On the flip side, few societies have actually taken care of their soil, he says. Inca terracing practices and agroforestry on the Polynesian island of Tikopia are on the short list of exceptions.
3. Good soil usage helps prevent droughts.
During recent droughts in the western U.S., farmers who used no-till practices—for example, not disturbing the soil through plowing—produced healthier crops, according to Montgomery. Soil conservation goes hand in hand with water conservation, he says; healthier soils retain more water.
The impact of poor soil use, meanwhile, goes beyond food production. Wind can carry thinned topsoil off fields and onto large bodies of water. Through a process known as eutrophication, the excess nutrients hasten plant growth and algae bloom, sucking up oxygen in the water and killing fish and other marine fauna.
"In the Gulf of Mexico, dead zones have developed during certain parts of the year," says Glover. "These are often prime fishing areas and prime biodiversity areas, now dead because of soil carried thousands of miles downstream."
4. High-tech makes a difference.
There has been improvement in soil conservation in the United States since the introduction of no-till and low-till farming, but reducing soil disturbance is not enough. The restoration of soil health, experts say, will require new practices and old-fashioned "soil husbandry."
Experts agree that healthy soil requires a marriage of ecology and technology, such as planting perennial strains of grain crops. Another approach: sophisticated farming systems that integrate crop production with native vegetation and livestock—a system that has successfully restored soils in northern Ethiopia, says Glover. (Related: "Why Tiny Microbes Mean Big Things for Farming.")
View Images Date trees line a terrace in the Loess Plateau region of China. Restoration projects like this one mix forestry with agriculture to improve soil fertility. Photograph by Jim Richardson, National Geographic
5. Soil is alive.
Chemical fertilizers, which replace three or four nutrients, are simply not enough to replace the complex system that is soil. They're "not a full health package," says Glover.
That's because soil is crawling with microbes and bugs, which nourish the soil. They help cycle nutrients in exchange for plant sugars. It's a symbiotic relationship that is the root of life, but we don't fully understand it, according to Montgomery.
"This is brand-new science. Over the past 30 years, there's been a big shift in our understanding of microbial connections and the community dynamics under the ground," he says. "It's the hidden half of nature."Why Do Sharks Have Two Penises?
Is it true that sharks have two penises? Why?
Kalvin from Richmond, Ont.
Neat question, Kalvin!
Technically, male sharks don't have penises. What they do have are grooved organs that are used to deposit sperm into the genital duct of sexually receptive female sharks. These organs, called 'claspers', are developed along the inner margin of each pelvic fin (the paired fins located behind a shark's belly). Because the pelvic fins are paired, so are the claspers. That's really all there is to it.
Curiously, although male sharks have two claspers, they only use one at a time. Unfortunately, mating behavior has been observed in only a few species of sharks, but already some basic features of courtship and copulation are clear. When not in use, both claspers lie flat against the undersurface of the body. After communicating its amorous intentions to a sexually receptive female shark through ritualized swimming and gentle 'love nips' along her back or flanks, the male grasps one of her pectoral fins (the wing-like fins located behind the gill slits) in his mouth and arches his body so that his pelvic fins are brought close to hers. If the amorous male happened to 'dock' along the left side of the female, he flexes his right clasper across the mid-line of his body and inserts it into her vent (genital opening). To secure the inserted clasper in place, its tip unfolds in complex, species specific ways often anchoring by way of one or more spike-like clasper spurs (ouch!). Often, shark mating occurs on the bottom, with the larger female inverted (upside-down), but in some active species such as the Great White (Carcharodon carcharias) mating apparently occurs right side-up and at or near the surface. In any case, if the male shark happens to dock along the right side of the receptive female, he uses his left clasper.
There is, however, a report from British waters of a pair of Tope Sharks (Galeorhinus galeus) that were captured together, a male and a female locked belly-to-belly by both claspers. So, in case you thought it might be fun to have two penises, you have been warned!If you don't like the heat, I hope you enjoyed the cool air over the weekend — it won't be sticking around. Instead, lots of heat and humidity is in the forecast this week.
In spite of all the clouds and a few showers this weekend, rainfall was still quite light. And, by the middle of this week, any rain that fell will have long since evaporated.
High pressure is building in today and will clear away the clouds, bringing in more sunshine. As the high slips to our south and east, a return flow of warm and humid air will ensue. The warmth arrives tomorrow with highs well into the 80s, and then it’s 80s to lower 90s the rest of the work week.
A cold front may kick off a few afternoon or evening storms on Friday, and then the upcoming weekend will see a return to somewhat drier air. But temperatures will still be very warm.
July is our warmest month and although temperatures during the first 10 days have averaged below normal, the upcoming warmth will likely erase the below average readings. By the time the month is over, I suspect we will have seen a slightly above average month in terms of temperature.
Ironically, we need more warmth and humidity to bring scattered showers and storms, which is the primary way New England receives rainfall during the summer months. Since it’s been relatively cool and not very humid, showers and storms have been occurring less than is typical, contributing to the ongoing drought.
If you are on vacation this week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are your best days with Friday still great, but bringing a chance of an afternoon storm.
You can follow David's weather updates on Twitter at @growingwisdom.
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Today: Cloudy, then gradually becoming mostly sunny, highs in the 70s.
Tonight: Mostly clear, with a low around 60.
Tuesday: Mostly sunny and turning very warm. Highs 84-89.
Wednesday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 90.
Thursday: Lots of sunshine and hot. Very humid. Highs 85-92
Friday: Partly sunny with a few showers or storms possible in the afternoon. Highs 85-92.A Bernie-bashing brawler who heaps praise on Hillary Clinton while decked out in 'Not My President' t-shirts and tight spandex trunks has become the most hated man in professional wrestling.
Daniel Harnsberger, a 36-year-old real estate broker who puts people in headlocks in his spare time while working as an independent wrestler, has shot to fame by performing as Dan Richards, aka 'The Progressive Liberal'.
To get into character for his performances, Harnsberger - who was profiled by Deadspin this week - pulls on his ring gear that usually consists of a pair of tights emblazoned with the Democratic donkey, black boots, kneepads, and a t-shirt covered with Hillary's face.
In recent months, the 36-year-old has used his shtick to become the top heel - the professional wrestling term for a character the crowd is meant to dislike - working in Kentucky's Appalachian Mountain Wrestling federation.
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Daniel Harnsberger, a 36-year-old real estate broker who moonlights as a professional wrestler, has become one of Kentucky's most hated characters for playing a smug 'Progressive Liberal'
Harnsberger gets in the ring wearing trunks emblazoned with the Democratic logo - much to the annoyance of his southeastern crowds
'This is how I feel, that's why it resonates,' the 'Progressive Liberal' told DailyMail.com about the success of his left-leaning lectures to the audience
Traditionally in professional wrestling, characters who proudly portray their American-ness are seen as the heroes of the over-the-top storylines, and frequently fight against dastardly foreigners who dare to speak badly of the US.
However, videos from 'The Progressive Liberal's' performances show he had flipped that narrative on its head, presenting his Democrat-leaning views in a cartoonish fashion to predominantly Republican crowds in the southeast.
He's smug, condescending, calls Fox News'maggots' and Donald Trump a 'conman', and closes his bouts with a 'finishing move' known as the 'Liberal Agenda'.
In a video posted online earlier this month by Appalachian Mountain Wrestling, the 36-year-old spouted the sort of comments usually made by paranoid right-wingers about alleged evil plans of the Democratic Party to'reprogram' Americans.
'I'm going to take care of all these people in Appalachian, Kentucky,' the character said at the start of the video.
'You people need to be reprogrammed, you continually vote against your own interest, you put people in congress – in the White House – that aren't going to help you, that aren't going to bring your jobs back.
'Dan Richards' posted this picture online earlier this year showing some of the gear he wears in the ring
'So let me tell you what the Progressive Liberal Daniel Richards is going to do: we're going to reprogram you, we're going to reeducate you, we'll teach you to read and write, we're going to help you get jobs with clean energy.'
In another 'promo' clip, he lectures: 'You people can't handle the truth, so you want to mislabel what I say… you want to call it controversial.
'As each win builds on the Progressive Liberal's record, you are going to know my message to be the truth.'
He also mocks the way locals talk and pronounce certain words, correcting them in an arrogant manner, mocks Sanders by saying he would have been a great secretary of state under Clinton, and told a Kentucky crowd he wanted to: 'exchange (their) bullets for bullet points of knowledge'.
Harnsberger told DailyMail.com he first started doing the character at a show in West Virginia shortly after then-candidate Trump entered the race.
'He was relatively new at the time,' he said, before explaining how he told the crowd if Trump was to win, he'd want him to build around that town instead of Mexico'so none of you people can infiltrate the population'.
'We have this thing in wrestling we refer to as heat (when a crowd boos), it was instant heat.'
'They started chanting Trump straight away... it still surprises me. For them, other than him saying positive things about coal, I don't get it.'
Harnsberger told DailyMail.com the character has gotten stronger since Trump's win, as the crowd can jeer him with the result, and he |
." #DNCinPHL pic.twitter.com/MtIepm68CK — Brad Mielke (@TheBradMielke) July 29, 2016
Photos from the DNC show multiple Bernie supporters holding up signs with blacked out letters used to form the word “Liar.”
Folks have taken their "Hillary" signs and filled in the letters so a four-letter word remains #DemsInPhilly pic.twitter.com/ZtiqbnKk0G — Brigid Bergin (@brigidbergin) July 29, 2016
Pro-Bernie delegates wore yellow shirts Thursday after DNC efforts to suppress anti-war protesters by blacking out sections of lighting which would have shone on them.
DNC shuts off lights over Bernie protestors chanting "no more war" during former defence secretary Panetta's speech. pic.twitter.com/hHRHMGDYdX — Dan Roberts (@RobertsDan) July 28, 2016
The yellow shirts glowed and stood out prominently when lights went out during the event.
Bernie delegates' shirts glow in the dark. Should be quite a visual effect during the main program. pic.twitter.com/rlZB9bKiJB — Jordan Fabian (@Jordanfabian) July 28, 2016
Other Bernie supporters also wore shirts with #DNCleaks stamped on them, in an effort to call attention to a trove of leaked documents released last week by Wikileaks showing clear favoritism for Hillary on the part of the DNC.
The “liar” signs are more evidence the Democrat party is not unified but instead coming apart at the seams, despite DNC efforts to put its best face forward.And there have been almost four weeks of defiance, in the face of the government’s repeated, uncompromising and violent efforts to restore the status quo. The government did succeed in keeping people off the streets in the previous 11 days, leaving many to simmer on their own as political insiders and clerical heavyweights slugged it out behind the scenes.
But there was an opening to take to the streets again on Thursday in a collective show of defiance, and many protesters seized it, even though the principal opposition leaders stayed away. Mir Hussein Moussavi, who claims he won the election; another candidate, Mehdi Karroubi; and former President Mohammad Khatami have agreed to pursue their complaints through the legal system and to protest only when a permit is issued.
But the mood of the street never calmed. One witness said that had it not been for the overwhelming show of force, it appeared, tens of thousands would have turned out.
The day was supercharged from the start, with a protest called for 4 p.m. to honor the students who 10 years earlier were bloodied and jailed during a violent confrontation with the police.
Under a hot summer sun, police officers in riot gear patrolled the streets in roving bands of about 50. Then the crowds started to form, men, women and children packing the sidewalks. Traffic stopped and drivers honked or stepped from their cars in solidarity. The people chanted, “Down with the dictator,” “God is great” and “Mouss-a-vi” as they walked along Revolution Street.
Photo
“Tell the world what is happening here,” one 26-year-old engineering student said. “This is our revolution. We will not give up.”
Asked what he wanted, he said, “We want democracy.”
One witness gave this account: “The crowds are too huge to contain. Riot police running up and down Fatemi Street, beating people, barely got out of the way. The crowds just get out of their way and come back.”
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Scenes like that were reported all over the city, though the main skirmishes seemed to have occurred near Tehran University and at Enghelab Square. The police shot tear gas into Laleh Park. As night fell, the scene grew more severe. The air filled with acrid smoke and soot, and police officers and Basij militia members ran along the streets.
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A man in a business suit pulled out a collapsible baton and beat a person who had a camera until the baton broke. A middle-age woman ran through the crowd, her coat covered with blood stains. Protesters hurled rocks at security officers. Two men held a huge arrangement of yellow and purple flowers on green leaves, in commemoration of those killed last month and in 1999, a witness said.
But still, no matter who stopped to talk, witnesses said, there was a sense of mission and unity that seemed almost validated by the brutal government response. A 55-year-old woman on the streets in support of the marchers said: “This is Iran. We are all together.”
The security forces did not fire on protesters, witnesses said, and it was unclear how many people were injured or arrested.
Until now, the government has relied on three main tactics to try to put the turbulence of the presidential race behind it: detentions; the violent suppression of street protests; and a shifting of blame for the unrest to “meddling” foreign nations, primarily Britain and the United States, but also Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has sanctified the election, and the powerful Guardian Council has certified the results. But the opposition has continued to insist that there were widespread irregularities, rendering the vote and the results invalid. It has refused to concede, which has served to keep the conflict from fading.
Cellphone messaging was disconnected Thursday for a third consecutive day, apparently to prevent communication among protesters. The government also closed universities and declared an official holiday on Tuesday and Wednesday, ostensibly because Tehran has been shrouded in a cloud of heavy dust and pollution.
But neither the announced holiday nor the murky air seemed to thin the crowds.
Many people thrust their hands into the air, making the V-sign for victory. The crowds remained mostly peaceful, a witness said, even as they watched, and sometimes tried to stop, police officers and militia members beating unarmed men and women. Many women were on the street, as they have been throughout the crisis.
A crowd chanted, “Please stop,” and chased two Basij members away.
The streets burned with garbage fires. Tear gas settled all around. And on one street, thousands of people pushed on, proclaiming their solidarity and defiance.
“We don’t want war,” said one 27-year-old man in a black shirt. “We just want freedoms.”Photos of a frog riding a beetle have been flooding the Internet over the past month. Think it looks cute and adorable? Reactions to the series of photos have been split between blind praise and outrage over the authenticity of the photo-story and welfare of the subjects. So, did this scene really occur naturally as claimed? We don’t think so, and here’s why.
In compiling this article, we spoke to herpetologists (those who study amphibians and reptiles, including frogs and lizards), and particularly frog experts for their take on these photos. These are people who spent most of their lives studying frogs, and there are no better people who understand the anatomy and biology of frogs.
Question #1. Would the frog jump onto the beetle?
Giddy up! Photographer Hendy Mp captured this daring frog hop a ride on a beetle and it even stuck its front leg in the air cowboy-style. —Daily Mail
This frog, Rhacophorus sp., is nocturnal. In the day, it is not active and will not hop around, much less onto a beetle. Even if placed beside the beetle, it would remain indifferent to the beetle unless it were provoked or hurt… in which case, it would jump away rather than onto the beetle.
Question #2. Can the frog’s mouth remain open in so many of the shots?
Frogs could possibly open their mouths like what’s seen in the photos, but aside from when they are eating something, it is a sure sign of distress. The only time when the frog had its mouth open naturally is when a frog is incredibly distressed — like when it’s being eaten by a snake.
Question #3. Are the positions of the hands natural?
The fingers on the raised hand are in a very unnatural position and not possible on the frog’s own accord. It is like twisting a human’s fingers to awkward positions that are impossible without external force.
Question #4. Were the subjects discovered in the wild?
There is strong evidence posted by the photographer himself that the frogs and many of his subjects were captive animals (i.e. “pets”). Those photos are not published here due to privacy reasons.
Here’s one of the quotes from a herpetologist we spoke to:
I can’t stand these images. To someone very familiar with frogs, it’s really sad to see the poor frog in this situation. I don’t believe that these photos are of a naturally occurring situation. To me, they appear to be highly staged, and there is evidence that the frog is distressed. Frogs are so amazing without being used as props, it’s upsetting that they felt it necessary.
Staged photography is not prevalent only in certain countries. Sony Photography Awards 2014 shortlisted a similar and highly dubious entry from Europe.
How a supposedly prestigious photography award by a well-known brand shortlisted such an entry in the “Nature and Wildlife” category is inconceivable. However, at least this was clarified to be shot in a controlled environment during a workshop.
This article is not a personal attack against the photographers — each of them is talented in his or her own right. The purpose of this post is to discourage such genres of fake nature photography and to educate the public on the ethical questions involved.
We also hope that the various news sites, platforms and camera brands would STOP promoting these fake nature photos using BS stories. Nature is already intriguing and beautiful on its own, that staging such unnatural scenes is an insult to mother nature herself.
The next time you see a similar photo that claims to be natural, please share this article for everyone to understand the questionable ethics involved in taking such “perfect timed shots”.
About the author: This article was contributed by an anonymous group of nature photographers who have started a campaign against faked nature photography. You can follow along with their efforts through the new Facebook page “Truths Behind Fake Nature Photography.” This article originally appeared here.
Image credits: Photographs by Hendy Mp/Solent NewsEating healthier food would not only be good for our bodies; it would also improve the health of our farmland, our environment, and our rural communities.
This is the message of The Healthy Farmland Diet: How Growing Less Corn Would Improve Our Health and Help America’s Heartland, a 2013 report which uses economic modeling techniques to estimate the effects of changing food consumption on agricultural land use.
The findings? Increased consumption of healthy foods would lead U.S. farmers to grow more of these foods and less of the commodity crops that currently dominate U.S. agriculture. This in turn would produce healthier soil, air and water, as well as providing economic benefits in the form of job growth and increased access to healthy foods for farm communities.
Our Unhealthy Farm Landscape
Only about 2 percent of U.S. cropland is used to grow fruits and vegetables, while 59 percent is devoted to commodity crops, such as corn and soybeans, which are used primarily to produce three things: meat, processed foods such as high fructose corn syrup, and biofuels such as ethanol.
Current farm policy encourages this pattern by providing subsidies for commodity crop farmers; farmers who receive these subsidies are usually prohibited from growing fruits and vegetables. Furthermore, federal crop insurance programs are tailored for commodity crop farmers, making it hard for fruit and vegetable farmers to obtain insurance and credit.
Why is a landscape dominated by commodity crops unhealthy? These crops are grown using monoculture practices that rely on heavy application of fertilizers and pesticides to compensate for their soil-depleting and pest-attracting effects. Monoculture is also less beneficial for local economies than more diverse farm landscapes.
Healthier Food Choices = Healthier Crop Choices
With the aid of a sophisticated economic model (see appendices for more information about methodology), the report estimated the market changes that would result from changes in the American diet. Here is what the report found:
If Americans ate fruits and vegetables at recommended levels, U.S. farmers would grow a lot more of these foods. How much more? The report found that if Americans increased their fruit and vegetable consumption by the amount needed to meet the recommendations in USDA's MyPlate dietary guidelines, U.S. production of these healthy foods would increase by 88 percent.
Changing our protein choices could also lower commodity crop production. Because corn and other cereal grains are used as livestock feed, reducing consumption of meat and dairy products in favor of more fish, poultry, beans and nuts would result in a reduction in commodity crop acreage.
Potential Benefits of a Healthy Farm Landscape
The Michigan farms pictured here incorporate a mix of orchards and field crops. Such diverse farm landscapes are good for both the environment and rural economies.
The report finds that shifting land from commodity crops to healthy foods will have a positive impact on multiple fronts:
Health and nutritional benefits. Increased consumption of healthy foods could help reduce the human and financial toll of cardiovascular disease and other diet-related illnesses.
Environmental benefits. Replacing corn and soybean acres with fruit and vegetable acres will reduce the environmental damage caused by monoculture farming. Reduced demand for meat would also lower agriculture's contribution to global warming.
Local economic benefits. Increasing production of healthy foods will have ripple effects in local economies, creating jobs and spurring regional economic development.
Recommendations
Smart, forward-looking farm policies can help attain the goal of increasing production and consumption of healthy foods. UCS recommends that Congress and the USDA should do the following:Pictured: Heroic female medic who ignored shrapnel embedded in her shoulder to save SEVEN soldiers during Taliban attack
Hero: Lance Corporal Clarke stayed behind to treat wounded soldiers including Corporal Mather despite being injured herself after a Taliban attack
An heroic army medic treated seven injured comrades after a Taliban attack in Afghanistan despite being wounded with shrapnel herself, it emerged today.
Lance Corporal Sally Clarke, of 2 Rifles, ignored the searing pain caused by the shards embedded in her shoulder and back and set about treating the rest of her patrol.
The worst hit was Corporal Paul Mather who incredibly managed to radio instructions for jets circling above to open fire on Taliban insurgents despite bleeding heavily from wounds the size of his fist.
Corporal Mather, 28, and Lance Corporal Clarke, 22, from Cheltenham, were on patrol south of Sangin when insurgents fired rocket propelled grenades over a wall as soldiers dealt with an anti-tank mine.
Hot flying shrapnel sliced open Corporal Mather's body, leaving gaping holes across his arms, legs and buttocks.
He said: 'It hurt like hell, but once the explosions stopped and my hearing came back, I managed to climb through a ditch towards a group of soldiers treating other casualties.
'I had a hole in my left bicep, so the medics applied a field dressing and tourniquet to stem the blood flow.'
Despite being entitled to get out as soon as she was hit Lance Corporal Clarke refused, insisting she would not leave the patrol without a medic.
She said: 'I didn't feel like my injuries were bad enough to go back to the hospital, particularly as I was the only medic on the ground at the time.
'I couldn't leave them on their own - I came out here to support the troops on the ground and give them medical care when they needed it the most.'
Realising the jets and Apache attack helicopters above the patrol had seen the explosions and needed to know what had happened, Corporal Mather told one of the soldiers to take a smoke grenade and throw it into the compound where the grenades had come from.
'The pilot immediately picked up the smoke signal and I gave directions for a strike on to the compound,' said Mather.
He continued to radio instructions until he was on the helicopter where he finally took some morphine to ease the pain.
Corporal Mather is now recovering at home with his parents, Phil and Rose.
He said they were looking after him well and feeding him 'pizza and ice cream'.
Lance Corporal Clarke, who stayed on the ground and accompanied the rest of the patrol back to base, was later treated by a doctor in a medical aid post. She is due home within weeks to visit her parents Chris and Rosemary Clarke.
Tories and Lib Dems clash over best way to boost pay for British troops in Afghanistan
David Cameron and Nick Clegg have clashed over competing proposals to increase pay for British military personnel serving in Afghanistan.
Both party leaders claim that British forces receive a rough deal while serving in what has become Britain's bloodiest conflict since the Falklands.
Today Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg proposed a £6,000 pay rise for the most junior Army ranks to help boost morale.
Other privates and lance corporals should get an salary increase of £3,000, he said, with an extra £1,000 for higher non-commissioned officers.
David Cameron's Tory party has proposed a plan under which soldiers on active duty would be excused some taxes, while Nick Clegg (right) wants a £6,000 pay rise for even the most junior Army ranks
The Conservatives, on the other hand, have proposed a plan under which soldiers on active duty would be some excused some taxes.
The competing proposals open up a new political front as parties jostle to appeal to a public which is becoming dismayed at the high death toll in Afghanistan.
The deaths, on Monday, of Sergeant Stuart Millar, 40, and Private Kevin Elliott, 24, marked the 209th and 210th British fatalities since hostilities began in 2001.
The British Army currently pays its lowest-paid recruits £16,681 a year - a figure described as'shameful' by Nick Clegg. He wants to increase that sum by £6,000 to put new recruits on an equal footing with new police or firefighters.
The proposed rises would see also see average basic pay across the ranks of private and lance corporal rise to around £25,000. The pay rises - which the Lib Dems claim would cost £400 million - would be funded with cuts in MoD bureaucracy.
Mr Clegg said: 'Nobody can put a price on the sacrifices our troops make on our behalf, but it is clear to everyone that pay levels are shamefully low for the lower ranks. We can't continue to reward the bravery of lions with peanuts.'
The Conservatives' proposal to review tax rates for serving servicemen and women chimes with troops' anger that they are made to pay income tax whilst out of the country and on duty.
British soldiers try to get some sleep in a makeshift compound in a Taliban-held area of Afghanistan. They could be set for a salary increase or reduced taxes under Lib Dem and Tory plans
Last weekend L/Cpl Dean Byfield told Gordon Brown - who was visiting Afghanistan - that he thought it was 'unfair' that UK troops pay income tax whilst other serving NATO troops do not.
The Tory party has already claimed credit for embarrassing the Government into introducing an up to £2,240 tax-free bonus for all serving soldiers in 2006.
Today a spokesman for the party said: 'We led a campaign for soldiers not to pay tax in theatre three years ago and the Government responded with the in-theatre payment.
'We will review how the in-theatre payment is working and come forward with proposals to improve what our soldiers are getting.'
British Army servicemen and women were awarded a 2.8 per cent pay rise earlier this year when the Government accepted the recommendations of the Armed Forces Pay Review Body.
The rise - described by the Ministry of Defence as one of the best in the public sector - meant the basic pay for a private on operations rose to between £16,681 and £25,887.
Yesterday former army officer Tim Collins said that while a further pay rise would be welcomed, more had to be done to look after soldiers generally.
He said: 'It's not all about money. The British Army is a vocation, men and women join really to serve their country. It was never really about money. What they would prefer is to be treated decently.'
A Ministry of Defence spokesman pointed out that Britain's Armed Forces have received good pay increases every year for the past three years.(CNN) Is President Donald Trump trying to force out Jeff Sessions as attorney general so he can "recess appoint" someone to the job who would fire Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller?
Sources familiar with the President's thinking tell CNN that he is being urged by some associates that a recess appointment is an option worth pursuing in order to avoid a messy confirmation process in the short term.
Although there are multiple political and procedural road blocks, the theory, if he could find a way to pull it off, would be to install a new attorney general while the Senate is in recess, which would allow that person to stay in place through 2018.
A new attorney general might be willing to more aggressively oversee Mueller's probe into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia or fire the special counsel outright, as Trump has suggested he wants.
But the catch is that for a recess appointment plan to work, the Senate would actually have to formally adjourn into recess, and Senate Democrats are already working on strategies to prevent that from happening.
So spooked are Democrats that the audacious Trump might actually try to pull off a switch, they are now speaking out publicly against it and double-checking long-established procedures to make sure there is not a loophole he can exploit.
"All Americans should be wondering: why is the President publicly, publicly demeaning and humiliating such a close friend and supporter, a member of his own Cabinet? They should wonder if the President is trying to pry open the office of attorney general to appoint someone during the August recess who will fire Special Counsel Mueller and shut down the Russia investigation," Schumer said in a floor speech Wednesday. "Let me say, if such a situation arises, Democrats would use every tool in our toolbox to stymie such a recess appointment."
The Democratic leader pressured Republicans to make clear such a move wouldn't fly with them either.
"I can't imagine my friends on the Republican side and particularly my friends in Republican leadership -- the majority leader and Speaker (Paul) Ryan -- I can't imagine that they would be complicit in creating a constitutional crisis," Schumer added. "They must work with us and not open the door to a constitutional crisis during the August recess."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, who vigorously defended Sessions this week against attacks from Trump, has not addressed the recess appointment issue publicly.
But GOP senators take the confirmation process seriously -- especially for critical and sensitive posts like attorney general -- and might be reluctant to clear a path for Trump to install a loyalist especially when Trump himself maybe under investigation.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the second-ranking GOP leader, warned Trump Wednesday that the recess appointment idea "would be a mistake."
"I think Jeff Sessions is doing a good job, and I think it would be incredibly disruptive and make it more difficult for the President to accomplish his agenda," Cornyn told CNN's Manu Raju.
Sen Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, declined to comment on the recess appointment, but urged Trump to ease off Sessions.
"I hope that the President reassesses and figures out that Jeff Sessions is a very good man that does a very good job, and he ought to keep him where he is," Hatch said.
In the meantime, Democrats decided to "explore possibilities" to ensure Trump can't find a way to force through a recess appointment, according to Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat.
"I don't know if it is serious but it has been raised in the press and now we watch what he's doing to Sessions -- trying to hound him out of the office," Durbin said. "It appears he has a plan in mind and we don't want to make it any easier."
Partisan disputes and deep distrust have prevented presidents from making recess appointments for several years. It started under the George W. Bush administration, continued under Barack Obama, and is still in place now.
Obama tried to challenge the practice when he made a series of recess appointments, despite the Senate meeting in pro forma sessions every three days. But the Supreme Court ruled against him, saying the Senate was not technically on recess unless it didn't meet for at least 10 days.
JUST WATCHED Obama loses recess appointments case Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Obama loses recess appointments case 01:35
While Republicans control the Senate now, the only way they can formally adjourn -- which would set up a period when recess appointments are allowable -- is to pass an adjournment resolution. The problem is that Democrats can filibuster that resolution, which they have been doing and plan to continue to do to prevent Trump from installing a replacement for Sessions or make any other appointments.
So, as has been the case for many years, when senators are away from Washington for extended periods, a least one senator will trudge to the chamber every three days to lead a brief gavel-in, gavel-out pro forma session to prevent recess appointments.
Whether Trump tries to find a way around the court-tested practice remains to be seen.After months of watching the free agency pool dry up, Visanthe Shiancoe will finally get another opportunity to show that he can still play in the NFL in 2012.
Several months after the veteran tight end visited with the Seattle Seahawks, Shiancoe will head to the Northeast to meet with the New England Patriots on Thursday.
Shiancoe, who last played for the Minnesota Vikings, has arrived at the backend of his NFL career. A nine-year veteran, the 32-year old has compiled 243 receptions for 2,677 yards and 27 touchdowns throughout his career. His production declined in 2010 and 2011 after peaking in 2009, leading to the Vikings allowing him to leave via free agency this offseason.
Back in March, Shiancoe turned down a one-year, $1.2-million offer from the Seahawks. Even if the Patriots do see enough in the aging pass-catcher, it’s unlikely that their offer will amount to much more than the Seahawks’ offer did.
The Patriots, who already boast the talents of Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez at tight end, will most likely be looking to incite some competition for the No. 3 spot during training camp if they add Shiancoe. Their options currently included veteran Daniel Fells and undrafted rookies Brad Herman and Nick Melillo.
Even though he’s been on a steep decline over the past couple of seasons, it’s not completely irrational to believe that Shiancoe could find himself in that No. 3 role if he can prove that some of that 2009 magic still exists.
Like Brett Favre taught us when he was throwing touchdowns to Shiancoe with the Vikings, it’s never too late to resurrect a seemingly-dead NFL career.
Follow Gil Alcaraz IV on Twitter.Perfectionism is one of the most destructive diseases among American children today. Perfectionism is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword drives children to be perfect. These children push themselves to get straight A's, be top athletes, and save the world on weekends. The other edge of the sword is that I have never met a happy perfectionist. They can't be happy because they will never be perfect.
What is Perfectionism?
Perfectionism involves children setting unrealistically high standards for themselves and striving for a goal that they will never, ever achieve. Yet they believe that anything less than perfection is unacceptable. When they fail to meet those impossibly high standards, they berate themselves unmercifully. Perfectionistic children are never satisfied with their efforts no matter how objectively well they perform and they punish themselves for not being perfect. After I spoke to a group of high- students recently, a girl from the audience described to me how she had gotten a 100 on a recent test that also offered ten extra-credit points. She got seven out of the ten points for a total of a 107 out of 100, yet missing those three extra-credit points had been eating her alive ever since!
At the heart of perfectionism lies a threat: if children aren't perfect, their parents won't them. This threat arises because children connect whether they are perfect with their ; being perfect dictates whether they see themselves as valuable people worthy of love and respect. The price these children believe they will pay if they are not perfect is immense and its toll can be truly destructive:,,,, and.
By the way, children don't have to be perfectionistic in every part of their lives to be considered. They only have to be perfect in areas that they care about, for example, there are perfectionists in school who have messy rooms or perfectionistic athletes who don't care about their schoolwork.
Perfection and Popular Culture
We live in a culture that reveres perfection. Our culture has elevated success to absurd heights where being good is no longer good enough. Children must now aim for the Ivy Leagues or the pros. They must make lots of money and have the perfect house and the perfect car. Our culture also worships at the altar of physical perfection. Children are bombarded by images of perfect people with perfect bodies, perfect faces, perfect hair, and perfect teeth, as evidenced by the popularity of cosmetic surgery and reality TV shows such as Extreme Makeover.
Perfectionism and Failure
Though it appears that perfectionistic children are driven to succeed, their singular in life is actually to avoid failure because they connect failure with feelings of worthlessness and loss of love. Perfectionistic children view failure as a voracious beast that stalks them every moment of every day. If these children stop for even a moment's rest, they will be devoured by failure and that is simply unacceptable.
Though perfectionists often achieve some degree of success, because of this profound of failure, these children often don't fully realize their ability and achieve true success. The only way to attain true success is to risk failure, and perfectionistic children are often unwilling to take that risk. Though the chances of success increase when they take risks, the chances of failure also increase. So perfectionistic children hover in a "safety zone" in which they remain safely at a distance from failure (so they can still feel good about themselves), but are also stuck at a frustrating distance from success.
Perfectionism and Emotions
You might think that perfectionistic children experience excitement and elation when they achieve their high standards, but those emotions are far too normal for them. The strongest emotion perfectionistic children can often muster is relief! Where does the relief come from? They dodged another bullet of failure and can feel okay about themselves...but not for long. Recently, I asked a group of students how long they thought the relief lasts and a girl threw up her hand and declared, "Till the next exam!"
What emotion would perfectionistic children who inevitably fail to meet their high standards experience? You might think disappointment. But disappointment, a normal reaction that all children should feel when they fail, is far too kind an emotion for perfectionists. Perfectionists experience devastation because they perceive the failure as a personal attack on their value as people.
Where Does Perfectionism Come From?
After almost every parent talk I've given, a parent says to me, "I swear that my child was born a perfectionist." Yet there is no scientific evidence that perfectionism is inborn. The research indicates that children learn their perfectionism from their parents, most often from their same- parent. Through their parents' words, emotions, and actions, children connect being loved with being perfect. This doesn't mean that there are no inborn influences; some genetic attributes, such as temperament, may make children more vulnerable to perfectionism.
Parents pass on perfectionism to their children in three ways. Some perfectionistic parents raise their children to be perfectionists by actively praising and rewarding success and punishing failure. These parents offer or withdraw their love based on whether their children meet their perfectionistic expectations. When children succeed, their parents lavish them with love,, and gifts. But when they fail, their parents either withdraw their love and become cold and distant, or express strong and resentment toward their children. In both cases, these children get the message that if they want their parents' love, they must be perfect. Thankfully, in my twenty years of practice, I have only come across a few parents who were this overtly perfectionistic.
Other parents unintentionally role model perfectionism for their children. Examples of how perfectionism is communicated by these parents include having to have themselves and their home look a certain way, their efforts, their competitiveness in and games, and how they respond when things don't go their way. Children see how their parents hate themselves when they're not perfect, so they feel they must be perfect so their parents won't hate them. These parents unwittingly communicate to their children that anything less than perfection won't be tolerated in the family.
The final type of parents that convey perfectionism are not perfectionists at all; in fact, they are the antithesis of being perfect. But they are going to make sure their children are perfect! These parents project their flaws onto their children and try to fix those flaws by giving love when their children don't show the flaws and withdrawing love when they do. Unfortunately, instead of creating perfect children and absolving themselves of their own imperfections, they pass them on to their children and stay flawed themselves.
Excellence: The Antidote to Perfection
You should remove the word perfection from your vocabulary. It serves no purpose other than to make your children miserable. You should replace perfection with excellence. I define excellence as doing good most of the time (I use poor grammar intentionally because that's how most children talk-and I'm not perfect either!). Excellence takes all of the good aspects of perfection (e.g., achievement, high standards, disappointment with failure) and leaves out its unhealthy parts (e.g., connecting achievement with self-esteem, unrealistic expectations, fear of failure). Excellence still sets the bar high, but it never connects failure with the love you give your children (or the love they give themselves). Excellence actually encourages your children to fail-not repeatedly on the same thing due to a lack of effort, of course-because it understands that without some failure, true success isn't possible. Without a fear of failure, your children can turn their gaze toward success and pursue it with commitment and gusto knowing that you will love them no matter what.
You Don't Have to Be a Perfect Parent
There's even a book titled Perfect. What an impossible standard to live up to! But here's some news: you don't need to be a perfect parent, just an excellent one (I can hear the collective parental sigh of relief across America). Being an excellent parent means being good with your children most of the time. You can actually make mistakes with your children. You can occasionally lose your temper or act like a soccer-or stage or chess-parent. So cut yourself some slack about being a perfect parent. Make sure you and your children do good most of the time and you will be a lot less and they will turn out to be excellent people.Leader of the Opposition – Jeremy Corbyn
Shadow Foreign Secretary – Emily Thornberry
Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer – John McDonnell
Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury – Rebecca Long-Bailey
Shadow Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union – Sir Keir Starmer
Shadow Home Secretary – Diane Abbott
Shadow Secretary of State for Business – Clive Lewis
Shadow Secretary of State for Education – Angela Rayner
Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade – Barry Gardiner
Shadow Secretary of State for Defence – Nia Griffith
Shadow Lord President of the Council and National Elections and Campaigns Co-ordinator – Jon Trickett
Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions – Debbie Abrahams
Shadow Secretary of State for Health – Jonathan Ashworth
Shadow Secretary of State for International Development – Kate Osamor
Shadow Secretary of State for Transport – Andy McDonald
Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government – Teresa Pearce (standing in for Grahame Morris, who is on leave)
Shadow Secretary of State for Justice – Richard Burgon
Shadow Attorney General –Baroness Shami Chakrabarti
Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport – Tom Watson
Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – Rachael Maskell
Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland and Northern Ireland – Dave Anderson
Shadow Secretary of State for Wales – Jo Stevens
Shadow Secretary of State for Housing – John Healey
Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities – Sarah Champion
Shadow Minister for Diverse Communities – Dawn Butler
Shadow Minister for Voter Engagement and Youth Affairs – Cat Smith
Shadow Minister for the Cabinet Office – Ian Lavery
Shadow Minister for Mental Health and Social Care – Barbara Keeley
Shadow Minister without Portfolio – Andrew Gwynne
Shadow Leader of the House – Valerie Vaz.
The frontbench members of the ruling national executive committee are:
Leader of the Labour Party – Jeremy Corbyn
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party – Tom Watson
Shadow Cabinet – Rebecca Long-Bailey, Jon Trickett, Kate Osamor.Firefly Space Systems is part of a new wave of launch services startups looking to capitalize on a small-satellite boom fueled, at least in part, by a combination of advances in microelectronics technology and Silicon Valley investment capital.
The company’s founder, Tom Markusic, believes the boom is still in its early stages and envisions the day when companies like Google fulfill long-articulated but unrealized visions of darkening the skies with satellites. Cheap access to space will help make that vision a reality, he says.
The propulsion expert has a solid “new space” pedigree that includes stints at Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the most successful of them all to date, Blue Origin and, most recently, Virgin Galactic, which aims to launch small satellites in addition to taking paying passengers to suborbital space. But he spent the first half of his 18-year career working as a civilian for the U.S. Air Force and NASA, which until fairly recently were unapologetic bastions of traditional space.
Along with former SpaceX and Virgin Galactic colleagues, Markusic founded Firefly in January because he did not believe his now-former employers were doing enough to address the small-satellite launch market.
As envisioned, the endgame for Firefly looks something like this: a fleet of what Markusic calls Delta reusable spaceplanes capable of lofting about 400 kilograms to an equatorial orbit about 340 kilometers up — alternatively, about 175 kilograms to a 600-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit — for under $1 million a shot. For the near term, however, the company is focusing on an expendable pathfinder rocket, fueled by liquid natural gas and dubbed Alpha, that can reach those orbits for around $8 |
unloading an airship at a place where there's no way of taking on water ballast. A traditional airship struggles to manage such operations, as once the payload is gone the ship becomes uncontrollably buoyant and is likely to soar up through its "pressure height" - the point at which the lifting gas has expanded to fill the entire envelope - and lose most of its helium via the automatic safety valves (or burst). Helium being expensive, this is not ideal.
P-791 style ships have another ace up their sleeve for unloading, in that the hover undercarriage can be switched from blow to suck, thus sticking the ship firmly down on the ground (or sea) even if it might have become a bit flighty during unloading. This is also handy for preventing the vessel being blown around by the wind.
The P-791 itself was originally built by Lockheed in 2006 as a contender for the US military's proposed "Walrus" project, intended to deliver a brobdingnagian airship capable of hauling an entire US army combat battalion of 500+ troops - plus all their vehicles, heavy weapons and other kit - in one lift. But a heavy-lift airship needs a lot of gas, and this in turn means that "pressure height" can't be too high or the envelope will have to be unfeasibly huger still.
Thus the Walrus was specced for 10,000 feet maximum altitude, which was realistically a show-stopper for the military - even shoulder-launched missiles can reach that high, and the ship would have been a very easy target.Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
March 31, 2015, 5:16 PM GMT / Updated March 31, 2015, 5:16 PM GMT / Source: TODAY By Ree Hines
Darius Rucker is currently busy blazing up the country charts with the No. 1 hit "Homegrown Honey." But the country crooner will return to his rock roots — and to his old bandmates from Hootie & the Blowfish.
That's right! Rucker explained during a Tuesday morning visit to TODAY that Hootie & the Blowfish will be back in business.
"People still ask me if we're getting back together, and we are," he told Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb. "It's just a matter of doing it at the right time."
TODAY
Apparently, the time isn't quite right yet. That's because Rucker just released his latest album, "Southern Style."
Of course, die-hard Blowfish fans know that the band is never too far away from a mini-reunion. The guys still get together for a few charity concerts each year despite going on hiatus in 2008.
Hootie & the Blowfish will be back together, sooner or later. AP
When Rucker first announced the band's break seven years ago, he said they wouldn't record or go on tour until he had "three or four country records" to his name.
Maybe it is time to get excited — "Southern Style" is his fourth country release.
Follow Ree Hines on Google+.The winter storm was slowly releasing its icy grip Saturday on parts of the Portland area.
Power was being restored to utility customers throughout the region, where about 8,700 Portland General Electric customers were still without power on Saturday night, the company said, primarily because of power lines snapped by ice-weighted tree branches. As many as 37,000 customers in those utilities' service areas were without power Saturday morning.
The two-storm's grip was strongest on the region's east side and especially in the Columbia River Gorge. All lanes of Interstate 84, eastbound and westbound, were closed Saturday morning from Troutdale to Hood River, because of icy conditions. The highway's westbound lanes reopened at 5 p.m. Eastbound lanes remained closed.
Power was restored to about 40,000 PGE customers throughout the day Saturday and crews continued to work into the night, the company said.
Pacific Power reported on its website that about 3,500 customers were without power Saturday night.
"It's pretty wild out there," PGE spokesman Steve Corson said Saturday morning. "Last night, quite a bit of that accumulated ice weighed down and all of these frozen limbs started to drop." Corson said the agency did not have a projection of when power would be restored.
Downed power lines and ice-covered overhead wires on the east side that disrupted MAX service severely Saturday morning had moderated by the afternoon.
At 3:30 p.m. Saturday, the transit agency said all MAX service had been restored after crews removed trees and tree limbs blocking tracks on the east side. Shuttle buses were serving some trips between Gateway Transit Center and Cleveland. Delays were still expected: up to 30 minutes on the Blue Line eastbound between Gateway and Cleveland through 5 p.m.; up to 30 minutes on the Green Line through 5 p.m.; up to 15 minutes on the Orange, Red and Yellow lines through 4:30 p.m. The agency advised riders to check trimet.org/alerts.
About 100 people were stuck on a MAX train for at least three hours Friday night after a power line fell on the tracks near Interstate 84 and Interstate 205, KATU reported. Portland firefighters freed the passengers.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation reported that these streets were closed Saturday because of downed power lines, downed trees and other debris in the roads: Northwest Skyline from the Portland city limits to Highway 26; Northwest Cornell from Skyline to Northwest 30th; Northwest 53rd from Thompson to Cornell; Northwest Germantown Road from Bridge Avenue to Skyline.
The Oregon Zoo was closed Saturday because of icy conditions in the West Hills, thus putting its popular Zoo Lights off limits until at least Sunday.
Eight flights -- six on Southwest and two on Alaska Airlines -- had been canceled Saturday morning at Portland International Airport. No other cancellations were reported on the airport's website.
Earlier Saturday, the National Weather Service had predicted a high of 46. That target was reduced to 42, with a likelihood of rain throughout the day. Rain and showers were projected for Sunday with a forecast high of 46.
"We feel pretty strongly that things will moderate today and we'll be quite a bit warmer as we go through the day," hydrologist Andy Bryant said Saturday morning. "But it's been a tricky one. We've been waiting for this warm air to show up."
--Allan Brettman
503-294-5900
@allanbrettmanThe FBI seems to think we should all be OK with this
By Jennifer Lynch, Electronic Frontier Foundation:
In the last few years, FBI has been dramatically expanding its biometrics programs, whether by adding face recognition to its vast Next Generation Identification (NGI) database or pushing out mobile biometrics capabilities for “time-critical situations” through its Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC). But two new developments—both introduced with next to no media attention—will impact far more every-day Americans than anything the FBI has done on biometrics in the past.
FBI Combines Civil and Criminal Fingerprints into One Fully Searchable Database
Being a job seeker isn’t a crime. But the FBI has made a big change in how it deals with fingerprints that might make it seem that way. For the first time, fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes.
The change, which the FBI revealed quietly in a February 2015 Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), means that if you ever have your fingerprints taken for licensing or for a background check, they will most likely end up living indefinitely in the FBI’s NGI database. They’ll be searched thousands of times a day by law enforcement agencies across the country—even if your prints didn’t match any criminal records when they were first submitted to the system.
This is the first time the FBI has allowed routine criminal searches of its civil fingerprint data. Although employers and certifying agencies have submitted prints to the FBI for decades, the FBI says it rarely retained these non-criminal prints. And even when it did retain prints in the past, they “ were not readily accessible or searchable.” Now, not only will these prints—and the biographical data included with them—be available to any law enforcement agent who wants to look for them, they will be searched as a matter of course along with all prints collected for a clearly criminal purpose (like upon arrest or at time of booking).
This seems part of an ever-growing movement toward cataloguing information on everyone in America—and a movement that won’t end with fingerprints. With the launch of the face recognition component of NGI, employers and agencies will be able to submit a photograph along with prints as part of the standard background check. As we’ve noted before, one of FBI’s stated goals for NGI is to be able to track people as they move from one location to another. Having a robust database of face photos, built out using non-criminal records, will only make that goal even easier to achieve.
This change will impact a broad swath of Americans. It’s not just prospective police officers or childcare workers who have to submit to fingerprint background checks. In Texas, for example, you’ll need to give the government your prints if you want to be an engineer, doctor, realtor, stockbroker, attorney, or even an architect. The California Department of Justice says it submits 1.2 million sets of civil prints to the FBI annually. And, since 1953, all jobs with the federal government have required a fingerprint check—not just for jobs requiring a security clearance, but even for part-time food service workers, student interns, designers, customer service representatives, and maintenance workers.
The FBI seems to think we should all be OK with this because it has (ostensibly) given people notice and because the program is limited to only those people who are required by federal or state rules to provide prints. But in many parts of the country, this could amount to a very large percentage of workers (including each and every attorney at EFF)—and for many people, especially the poor and underemployed, opting out of this program by choosing a different line of work is truly a not a choice at all.
This is not OK. The government should not collect information on Americans for a non-criminal purpose and then use that same information for criminal purposes—in effect submitting the data of Americans with no ties to the criminal justice system to thousands of criminal searches every day. This violates our democratic ideals and our societal belief that we should not treat people as criminals until they are proven guilty.
It also subjects innocent Americans to the very real risk that they will be falsely linked to a crime. In 2004, the FBI mistakenly linked American attorney Brandon Mayfield to a bombing in Madrid based solely on forensic fingerprint evidence. The FBI seized his property, and he was imprisoned for two weeks before agents finally recognized their error and apologized. Researchers have postulated large face recognition databases could also result in false matches. This means that many people will be presented as suspects for crimes they didn’t commit.
Unfortunately, individuals don’t have much recourse. The only way you can get your prints out of the FBI’s database and stop this repeated invasion of privacy is either with a court order or if the agency that requires your prints to be collected also requests for them to be removed. There appears to be no way for an individual to ask to have their prints removed on their own.
We are disappointed that the FBI chose to go down this path. It could just as easily have designed its database to keep non-criminal data separate from criminal data. Or even better, the FBI could go back to its old practices and not keep the data at all.
FBI Plans to Populate its Massive Face Recognition Database with Photographs Taken in the Field As Privacy SOS reported earlier this month, the FBI is looking for new ways to collect biometrics out in the field—and not just fingerprints, but face recognition-ready photographs as well. The FBI recently issued a request for quotations (RFQ) to build out its mobile biometrics capabilities. Specifically, it’s looking for software that can be used on small Android-based mobile devices like Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets to collect fingerprints and face images from anyone officers stop on the street. If the plan goes through, it will be the first time the FBI will be able to collect fingerprints and face images out in the field and search them against its Next Generation Identification (NGI) database. According to the RFQ, FBI’s current mobile collection tools are “not optimized for mobile operations” because they are large and are limited in scope to determining if a person has “possible terrorist links (in the U.S. or abroad) or is likely to pose a threat to the U.S.” This plan appears to be a broad expansion of the FBI’s “ RISC ” program. RISC provides mobile fingerprinting tools to determine whether someone is an “Individual of Special Concern” by allowing access in the field to a database of “wanted persons, known or appropriately suspected terrorists, sex offenders, and persons of special interest.” The FBI says RISC is intended for “time-critical situations” and to identify a limited subset of people within its criminal fingerprint database. But now it appears FBI intends to use its mobile biometrics collection tools much more broadly. The biggest concern with this new mobile program is that it appears it will allow (and in fact, encourage) agents to collect face recognition images out in the field and use these images to populate NGI—something the FBI stated in Congressional testimony it would not do. Specifically, in 2012, Deputy Assistant Director Jerome Pender stated: Only criminal mug shot photos are used to populate the national repository. Query photos and photos obtained from social networking sites, surveillance cameras, and similar sources are not used to populate the national repository. But the new RFQ contradicts this because it appears the desired software would allow officers to submit non-mug shot photos to NGI. The RFQ says the FBI is looking for a mobile biometrics tool that would, “at a minimum... include fingerprints and facial photographs for submission and receipt of a response.” Photographs taken in the field are clearly not “mug shot photos” because they’re taken before booking and possibly even before arrest. And it’s hard to see how a mobile tool that allows officers to collect these non-mug shot photos and “submit” them to a database is not also “populating the national repository.” Unfortunately, as we have noted many times before, we don’t know exactly how the FBI plans to populate NGI with face images because it hasn’t updated the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for its photo database since 2008—well before the development and deployment of NGI’s facial recognition capabilities. Mr. Pender testified to Congress in 2012 that FBI was in the process of updating this PIA to “address all evolutionary changes” since 2008. But despite a 2014 letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder signed by EFF and 31 other organizations calling for FBI to update the PIA, the Bureau still fails to explain to Americans exactly how it plans to collect, use and protect face recognition data. Our calls for an updated PIA are clearly falling on deaf ears. But without one, it is impossible to tell exactly how the FBI is limiting its acquisition and use of facial recognition data now and in the future. As EFF testified during a Senate Subcommittee hearing on facial recognition, Americans should be very concerned about the government’s plans to build up its facial recognition capabilities: Facial recognition takes the risks inherent in other biometrics to a new level…[it] allows for covert, remote, and mass capture and identification of images, and the photos that may end up in a database include not just a person’s face but also what she is wearing, what she might be carrying, and who she is associated with. Given the FBI’s broad goals for face recognition data, the time is right for laws that limit face recognition data collection. By Jennifer Lynch, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Enjoy reading WOLF STREET and want to support it? Using ad blockers – I totally get why – but want to support the site? You can donate “beer money.” I appreciate it immensely. Click on the beer mug to find out how:
Would you like to be notified via email when WOLF STREET publishes a new article? Sign up here.I often see and hear that print is dead, usually shortly before boarding a train and flicking through the free copy of the Metro. I try to rationalise that the advertisements and paywalls that shields content are soon to be the main revenue stream for newspapers and magazines, usually before forking out a fiver for a copy of PC Gamer.
I’m not right, but I’m not wrong either. October 2015 only saw one UK newspaper to grow its’ print circulation, The Times. Meanwhile The Guardian suffered a decline of almost 7 percent year on year, the Daily Mail was hit with a 4 percent decrease and The Independent saw print circulation decrease by 8 percent.
In contrast to this, The Guardian’s website saw an increase of 31 percent year on year in the same month, while the Daily Express saw 53 percent. So as Britain’s ‘Fourth Estate’ continues to adapt to the digital age, how has the way we consume news changed alongside it?
Social Journalists
One of the biggest changes we’ve seen due to social media is the rise of civilian journalism. Journalism was once reserved for those whose shorthand exceeds 100 words per minute, but now those with a phone and a twitter account can easily report the news.
Jay Rosen described citizen journalism as:
“The people formerly known as the audience”
Examples can be found far and wide, but The Arab Spring perfectly summarises its importance in modern society. The instant documentation of events as they unfolded, mostly across Twitter, gave consumers a completely different way to consume news. The news breaking in Egypt, Libya and beyond wasn’t filtered through an agency, paper or channel, but delivered direct from the source.
The influx of citizen journalists is unpredictable and unmoderated, but it shouldn’t be seen as a threat - they can even work in tandem with the professionals. After a TV blackout of coverage of any aspect of the Arab Spring, the only footage came from a protester streaming from his phone with over 12,000 viewers.
The revolution was televised, but it was via a smartphone.
Does this mean the instantaneous avenues of news the digital world has introduced are going to make the professional journalists obsolete? No. While citizens were uploading their videos, images and opinions, they often only showed their own view. There was no investigation or further context and this is where journalists usually excel.
Writing for The Guardian, David Batty commented:
“The material led investigations, for example, when a tank appeared to fire on a school early in the Egyptian revolution. Journalists found there were escaped prisoners hiding in the building.”
So how does civilian journalism influence digital marketers? Well, while the press may have an unofficial motto - ‘If it bleeds it reads’ - the scope of those posting on Twitter can be much wider.
While it may not have started as a newsworthy story, the hashtag #GiveGregTheHoliday blew up on Twitter, eventually gaining coverage from Buzzfeed, The Daily Mail and BBC to name but a few.
Companies around the world saw an opportunity to use the hashtag to promote their brands: ELEMIS sent a gift basket to Greg, VO5 provided free hair products and TrekAmerica gave Greg free flights to Vegas.
However, it’s important to note that these worked well as they were relevant and generous, sometimes brands try to piggyback onto trends where they don’t belong and it rarely ends well.
Greg do you need to learn about #Soundproofing before your holiday? Find out more here: http://t.co/GYHkuuY4Dn #givegregtheholiday — Cellecta Insulation (@Cellecta_LTD) May 22, 2014
Ultimately, Greg gave all his free swag to a charity close to his heart, but the brands still got exposure.
Filter Bubbles
As we spend more and more time online posting our opinions and carefully selecting who we follow, we seem to be retreating more and more into our filtered bubbles. It’s not all our fault, it’s not like we want to neglect the news, its more that our digital influences don’t think we should – or at least don’t want to - be presented with certain content.
Our search engines and social networks believe that the content we’re exposed to should be personalised to our likes, interests and cookies (not the edible kind.) Back in 2011, Eli Pariser delivered a speech arguing that our comfortable filter bubbles will ultimately be bad for us.
Cast your mind back to the General Election. While everyone on my Facebook feed seemed to be a #Milifan, Labour suffered one of their worst ever defeats. The personalisation offered by social networks means we only see the content that our algorithmic overlords think is relevant.
While this is a great way to immerse ourselves in the kind of content we like to see, whether that’s breaking news or fluffy kittens, it only offers a narrow view of the world around us. As David Cameron said at the Conservative Party conference:
“Britain and Twitter are not the same thing.”
The potential problem with how we consume news digitally is through our networks and how we tend to surround ourselves with those who share our opinions. Apple’s news app allows you to select what news you want to see, this is what mine looks like:
Star Wars, TV shows and falling locker bags make-up the first page of the news Apple has selected for me. There’s nothing about the US elections, despite Donald Trump wanting to shut down parts of the Internet, nor is there anything about the major drop in UK unemployment.
Google does something similar, with all the data they have about us they probably know what news we want to see better than we do. Once again keeping us in a filtered bubble.
While this filtered view is great for keeping up with interests, is it providing us with just a snapshot of life while the bigger picture is hidden away?
As the digital age marches on, there’s no denying it has revolutionised how we consume news. Ideas from simple live blogging events to massive multimedia projects like The Guardian’s ‘Firestorm’ coverage have added new dimensions to the role of a journalist, changing it, I’d argue, for the better.
Digital gives all of us the power to contribute and digest news that interests us instantly. It’s hard to argue against it, so long as we step out of our filtered view from time to time and experience the rest of the world. The good, the bad and the ugly.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Paul Danahar: "I was watching a mortar land pretty much every minute"
Syrian government forces have renewed their attack on the city of Homs, one of the focal points of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.
Video published on the internet purportedly from Homs showed intermittent shelling and black smoke.
UN mediator Kofi Annan is concerned civilians have been trapped in Homs and al-Haffa, a town in Latakia province also said to be under attack.
The US says it fears the government may be planning "another massacre".
Mr Annan's spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, said civilians had been trapped in both Homs and al-Haffa.
Mr Annan was demanding immediate entry to al-Haffa for UN military observers be allowed, he added.
As joint envoy for the UN and the Arab League, Mr Annan brokered a six-point peace plan, including a ceasefire which came into nominal effect two months ago but has now been virtually abandoned.
Annan's six-point plan 1. Syrian-led political process to address the aspirations and concerns of the Syrian people 2. End to violence by all sides; army troops to stop using heavy weapons and withdraw to barracks 3. Parties to allow humanitarian aid 4. Authorities to free political detainees 5. Authorities to ensure freedom of movement for journalists 6. Authorities to allow peaceful demonstrations
BBC Middle East bureau editor Paul Danahar, who visited Homs with a team of UN observers earlier on Monday, said the Syrian army appeared to be using an unmanned surveillance drone to select buildings as targets for shelling.
Our correspondent reported a steady stream of mortar rounds landing in the old city of Homs at a rate of about one a minute.
He says he understands that the UN team - which has been trying for two days to gain access to the old city - has still not succeeded.
All the UN can do is stand by and watch, our correspondent says.
Helicopter attacks
US state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said it was "deeply alarmed" at "reports from inside Syria that the regime may be organising another massacre".
Such an attack could happen, it suggested, in al-Haffa or the towns of Deir el-Zour, Homs or Hama, or in the suburbs of the capital, Damascus.
According to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, at least 74 people were killed across Syria on Monday.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption UK foreign secretary William Hague believes al-Qaeda linked terrorists are operating in Syria
An activist website, the Violations Documenting Centre, said there had been 29 deaths in the past week from bombardment in al-Haffa. All but three of the dead were civilians, it added.
These reports cannot be confirmed independently because Syria heavily restricts journalists' freedom of movement.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague condemned the violence in Syria, accusing the government of "inflaming sectarian tension".
The Syrian government blames the violence on foreign-backed armed terrorist gangs.
Separately, UN monitors and human rights activists said Syrian government forces had used helicopters to bombard the town of Rastan, in Homs province.
The town has been under intermittent army shelling "for months", the Observatory said.
UN spokeswoman Sausan Ghosheh said monitors had seen Syrian helicopters firing on Rastan and another rebel stronghold, Talbisa.
In Talbisa, rebels from the Free Syrian Army captured soldiers from government forces, she added.Blockchain Feeds the World
On May 30, the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP) announced that 10,000 individuals had taken advantage of its trial to deliver food to Syrian refugees in Jordan using the Ethereum blockchain. The WFP’s platform was implemented by Parity Technologies, a startup lead by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, as well as blockchain big data firm Datarella.
The operation allowed Syrian refugees to collect food paid for by the WFP from participating markets in the refugee camp in Jordan. Individuals had their eyes scanned to confirm they were one of the more than half a million refugees cleared to receive aid, after which they could receive their food.
This project could be a model for feeding refugees worldwide. Five million people have fled Syria alone, and many now live in poverty in nearby Jordan. The country is dealing with a major refugee crisis — in 2016, the UN estimated it is now home to 630,000 Syrian refugees, two million Palestinian refugees, and an ever-increasing number of asylum-seekers fleeing conflicts in Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq.
Is Blockchain the Future?
Blockchain could provide help on a much larger scale, and the WFP has an ambitious goal: to expand to 100,000 individuals by August, help the entire Jordanian refugee population by 2018, and eliminate hunger worldwide by 2030. The project’s success supports claims that blockchain could be used to transform the humanitarian and sustainability sectors.“I always had plans, and thought I would do them later. But years later the single biggest activity I had done was play games.”
Written by a member of the Game Quitters community:
Your latest post with the 17 year old going traveling is a great example of why not to spend too much time gaming. For me, it is interesting that he took up photography. Photography is a creative discipline, and from my experience creativity is the main area that suffers from playing games.
I am a designer and am lucky enough to be pretty successful. If travel is any mark of success; I have lived and worked in a few countries, Japan, UK, and Turkey. I’ve done projects all over, from Africa and China to the US.
My Gaming Has Always Been Pretty Secretive
It’s not good for my image as a designer, and I know it’s a waste of time. Despite this I have managed to sink hours into gaming, culminating in a couple of years in an MMO. I stopped playing that about 4 years ago.
Luckily for me I have always been pretty ambitious which has kept me in work, subsequently having work deadlines in a highly competitive field has kept my gaming in check. But there are two areas affected by gaming that aren’t often mentioned that I want to share with you:
Network
Every job I have ever had has been through someone I know, or a recommendation of someone I know. Creative work is all about trust, companies put a lot of money into a job usually with short deadlines, and part of the future of their business rides on the success of your work.
They will hire someone with a personal recommendation every time. Social media sites do not count. Networking isn’t anything special, it’s just a fancy word for friends.
Creativity
Computers kill creativity, and gaming most of all. Any time spent staring at a screen, even if it is a ‘creative’ program like Photoshop, is time not thinking for yourself. At best, you are just thinking within the confines of the software.
With gaming I found this spills over, sometimes I would think about a game even when not playing, but more often it is a subtle effect. I wouldn’t think about a game, but equally I wouldn’t be thinking very creatively or have much motivation. It is very insidious, and I would only really notice when I had time away.
A week without using a computer, and my mind would start racing with ideas, not only that I would have the motivation to execute them. Just like when I was a kid. Gaming isn’t just about the time spent gaming, it impacts the rest of your time as well.
“We are what we repeatably do. Excellence then, is not a single act, but a habit” -Aristotle
I always had plans, and thought I would do them later. But years later the single biggest activity I had done was play games.
There are many things I would like to be in life, a gamer isn’t one of them.
Want to share your story? Submit yours here.SAN JOSE — Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith pushed hard this spring to bring Tasers into the jails, insisting that a “less-lethal” option was needed to assure the safety of inmates and staff in the face of an increasingly violent population.
But left out of the discussion was the fact that correctional officers were equipped with Tasers decades ago — until they were yanked away by county officials after a mentally ill inmate died while being restrained by jail guards and zapped.
It’s not as if the sheriff was unaware of the history: As an up-and-coming sergeant in 1989, Smith helped lead the investigation into 37-year-old Jeffrey Leonti’s death, according to court documents. The county settled his parents’ wrongful death lawsuit for $650,000, or nearly $1.2 million in today’s dollars.
The coroner at the time ruled that Leonti died of acute cardiac arrest due to the Taser, a finding the manufacturer disputed. Arizona-based Taser International, which rebranded this year as Axon, has defended its product as safe when used properly.
The revelation about Leonti’s death, which surfaced in a murder trial, angered activists who have said it proves that it is too soon after three jail guards beat a mentally ill inmate to death in 2015 to arm correctional officers with Tasers.
In June, Santa Clara County supervisors set aside $45,000 to equip about 40 of nearly 800 correctional officers with Tasers, but prohibited Smith from tapping the funds until she comes up with a use policy by June 30 that meets with their approval.
“I’m appalled we weren’t told about this,” said LaDoris Cordell, the retired judge and former San Jose independent police auditor who chaired the county’s blue ribbon commission on jail reform. Cordell has endorsed John Hirokawa, Smith’s opponent in the upcoming June election. “It boggles my mind that the same person who investigated the death is now advocating to arm 40 jail guards with Tasers — and that she continues to mislead and cover up what is happening in the jails.’’
The omission also disturbed Rev. Jethroe Moore of the NAACP.
“It shows we’ve tried it before and it didn’t work and it cost taxpayers money,” Moore said. “So why introduce an unhealthy outcome into the jails?”
But one of the sheriff’s toughest critics was not particularly perturbed about the 28-year-old incident.
“Did I know about it — no,” said Supervisor Joe Simitian, who raised concerns in May about the potential liability of Tasers and urged the board to require the use-of-force policy first. “Is it useful information — yes. A single incident is noteworthy, but I’m more interested in a broader set of data.”
The sheriff’s office did not respond directly this week to questions about why Smith didn’t mention inmate Leonti’s death, either during the budget hearings or in late August when activists marked the second anniversary of Michael Tyree’s beating death at the hands of jail guards by protesting the Taser proposal. Three jail guards in Tyree’s case were convicted of second-degree murder.
A sheriff’s spokesman noted that things have changed since Leonti died in 1989. Correctional officers who use Tasers will be equipped this time with body cameras, he said. The department also has a new use-of-force policy that stresses de-escalation and “places a high value on a more holistic approach within our custody facilities,” which has led to a new “mindset” in the jails, he said in an email.
He also contended that Tasers have improved greatly since the 1970s model that the coroner said caused Leonti’s death. Now, they “immediately incapacitate perpetrators of violent encounters,” he said.
However, a federal jury in San Jose recently awarded $1 million to the family of Steve Salinas, an overweight man who was high on PCP and died after San Jose police zapped him 10 times in 93 seconds.
San Jose began using the Tasers in 2004 in hopes of cutting down injuries and reducing the need for officers to fire their guns. At least five people have died in the past 13 years after being shocked with a Taser.
Advocates, including unions that represent sheriff’s deputies and correctional officers, say electronic control devices are an essential tool to save lives because they can break up vicious fights between inmates, as well as attacks on them in situations where pepper spray is ineffective.
For instance, in late March, two men ambushed another inmate and stabbed him dozens of times with homemade shivs, despite being doused with pepper spray by more than one officer. The fight broke up only when multiple officers arrived.
Jail dorms are also frequently staffed by just one guard — at a time when more than 40 inmates at a time can be mingling in the pod, as the result of legal agreements between inmate rights groups and the county that call for more out-of-cell time.
The jail also houses more higher-risk inmates than it used to, including members of the Nuestra Familia and other Northern California gangs. And advocates also point out that as a result of a federal lawsuit, the county and the Prison Law Office have overhauled the use-of-force policy for the jail, greatly increasing inmates’ rights. For instance, intentional cruel punishment, such as once-common public humiliation, is prohibited under any circumstances.
But opponents aren’t ready to trust correctional officers with the devices yet. Some at the rally for Tyree in August noted that at least a dozen guards — including the previous president of the correctional officers union, who was fired as a result — repeatedly exchanged racist text messages, mixing vile slurs with casual brutality, and even sharing images of a Nazi swastika and a lynching.
“A culture doesn’t change overnight,” Shannon Tyree, one of Michael Tyree’s sisters, wrote in a letter read at the protest, “and I believe too much opportunity for the misuse of these Tasers exists.”British armed forces now operate 37% fewer unmanned aircraft systems than last year.
The UK Armed Forces Equipment and Formations document details statistics on vessels, land equipment and aircraft of the armed forces.
The section of interest is quoted below:
“Following the withdrawal of Black Hornet from service during 2016/17, there were 281 Unmanned Aircraft Systems as at 1 April 2017, a 37% reduction since 2016. The majority of these Systems are Desert Hawk-III (221).”
The Desert Hawk III and Black Hornet are small, hand-launched systems designed to provide tactical video and image feeds to enable to front-line soldiers to look ‘over the hill’ and ‘round the corner’ respectively. Both were acquired as urgent operational requirements but the MoD had indicated they will be retained as core capabilities. That did not happen for Black Hornet.
Desert Hawk-III is a man-portable, hand launched system. It can fly for approximately one hour within a 15 km radius of its ground control station.
Black Hornet is a nano-UAV, a tiny hand-held helicopter that flies less than 300 metres. It provides still images and video feed. Total approved cost: £20 million. The MoD had 324 Black Hornets in service in 2013.Her name is Cortana and she's bringing plenty of underdog attitude to the competition for the title of best digital personal assistant. Who can best fill out your calendar, call a friend or find the nearest French restaurant on command? We shall see.
Cortana's home on the Windows Phone doesn't have the cachet of Siri's hipster digs on iPhone. In a world in which Apple and Android phones dominate, Cortana's chances of widespread adoption appear slim.
Pixelated hero: Cortana, from the game series Halo, is also the name of the new voice of Windows phones.
But Cortana is eager to please, oozing friendly confidence compared with sometimes-aloof Siri. Plus, Cortana gets extra geek cred for drawing her name (and some of her conversation topics), from the artificial intelligence character in the Halo video game series.
"We built Cortana to really model a real-life human personal assistant," says Greg Sullivan, director of Windows Phone product marketing at Microsoft.Shortwave listeners are interesting, creative people who do interesting, creative work: they’re scientists, veterans, corporate employees, students, retirees, volunteers, politicians, musicians, inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, humanitarians, reporters, artists, researchers, sailors, pilots, pirates…and most seem to be travelers. But to say the least, they’re very diverse. The joy of the SWLing Post, for me, is the fascinating readers here and the great variety of questions and comments I receive from you.
On this blog, I often write about selecting the “right” radio for home, boating, preparedness, off-grid living, and |
Corrêa Carvalho‘s Flickr photostream. Used under a Creative Commons License.
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5. Spend About $25 on “Fuel” Every Month
This one is based on a US average per kilowatt hour (kWh) charge of 12 cents, 12,000 miles driven per year, and an EV efficiency of 5 miles per kWh. This number could be much lower or higher depending on your driving needs and utility rates, but your savings versus gasoline will scale with those considerations. Also, this assumes a model where you own the battery instead of lease it.
Image Credit: it’s life’s Flickr photostream. Used under a Creative Commons License.Practical Tips for Reducing Screen Time and Increasing Play Time
Contributor Post by @lunchesandlittles
Imaginary friends, mid-day campouts, building forts – When I was younger I would spend hours outside or in our basement playroom engaging in imaginary, open-ended play. I remember borrowing my Mom’s pans and apron and being a cook some days, or lining up my dolls, pretending to be a teacher or doctor the next, and so on. I would stay busy for hours, and often I just had items from the house; no expensive toys or elaborate set ups. Mainly just my imagination.
Unfortunately, today it seems that these kinds of activities are becoming less and less attractive as technology has been moving in and taking over. And while some technology can be good and even educational for our little ones (and a welcomed break for parents!) it can’t be the go-to. While I’m not an expert in this area, I am a mother of three little ones, and my husband and I are constantly working to find more balance in our home, so below I am going to share 3 practical tips for reducing screen time and increasing play time with toddlers that have worked for us.
1. Play with your Children
Emphasis on the with. This may seem obvious, but as parents, we can get so busy with our own to-do’s that we fall into the habit of just being around or in the other room while our children are playing in the next. It can become more like supervising them, versus engaging with them. I have caught myself doing this from time to time too much. But, playing with your children is so important, and is much different than simply watching them play.
Whether it’s having a tea party, playing a game, doing crafts. focusing your attention completely on your children and being fully present in those moments with them is an entirely different experience (for both them and you) than just being in the same room together. Playtime with your children is so important, and the undivided attention makes them feel special and says, “you matter.” If you have more than one child, having one on one time with each, as well as family time with all of the kids/parents in the home is crucial. Your children playing on their own of course has its time and place too; see below.
2. Choose Open-ended Play
Toy stores are full of toys that are single purpose, and will only entertain children for a short time. Of course, toys like this are fine, but if you want your children to be more excited about play, I suggest including open-ended play toys, dress up clothes, building blocks, etc. to your play space or toy box.
When children get bored playing, that is when they look for the next thing to do, and unfortunately, that can be a look in the direction of the television. So, to reduce screen time and increase play time, you need to get your little ones really excited about play, and we have found, in our home, that imaginative play is where it’s at! One of our current favorite toys in this category are Magna-Tiles. All 3 of our little ones love them. For our youngest, they help develop fine-motor skills as well as teach different colors, patterns, and shapes. And when older, Magna-Tiles help with the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, while the child is mastering building and spacial relationships. It’s educational learning that’s fun and doesn’t include a screen. Other great options: Tegu blocks, playhouses/figurine sets, costumes, play kitchen sets and accessories, etc.
Open-ended play is a great way to engage with your children but is also a great way for them to take the lead and play on their own. I love watching my three and four-year-olds come up with story lines and play with their figurines or build monster trucks and towers and other things with their blocks. Let them write the narrative! The times when we really see our children’s imaginations soar are the times when my husband and I are actively encouraging open-ended play; the days when screen time is non-existent. All smiles, stories, and fun; no electronic toys or apps needed; just their imaginations! According to the American Academy of Pediatrics children, two years of age and older should spend no more than two hours in front of the television or other electronic devices per day. Infants 18 months and younger should not be exposed to any digital media, the academy says. Yes, iPads, iPhones, Netflix, etc. can be educational and/or serve as child-friendly entertainment, but these things cannot become go-to activities for our little ones. When we think about our children and play, we need to remember that play isn’t just play for little ones; it is how they learn!
( Magna-Tiles Clear Colors)
3. Set the Examples
Have you ever been out to eat and see a family sitting together, but the parents are busy staring at their phones while their children stare at them? Sadly, I see this a lot. Just last week I saw a family of four (two parents and two teens) at a table nearby our own family and all four of them were on their phones for the majority of the meal. What a missed opportunity for family time and shared conversation.
Our kids learn by example, so we need to set good ones. If we do not want our children watching a lot of television or playing excessively on iPads, etc. we need to limit our own screen time; children always gravitate towards modeled behaviors. So, if our children see us consistently on our phones, or always watching television, they will learn that is good and even appropriate, and they won’t understand when we tell them they can’t do the same.
Offer to play a game with your child(ren), they will likely join in. Read a book; they are more likely to read. Watch a lot of television, and so will they. Play matters, and sometimes the littlest changes can go a long way. Remember, play with your children, choose open-ended play options, and set the example. You may be surprised at the amount of screen time you can reduce and the increased interest in play time in your home with just a few new focuses.DEMOCRATS WHO have been filibustering the Senate’s consideration of legislation to combat human trafficking cited concerns with language they claimed would greatly expand the reach of Hyde Amendment restrictions on abortion. But when John Cornyn (R-Tex.), chief sponsor of the trafficking bill and Senate majority whip, offered a compromise that would seem to answer their stated objections, it was rejected out of hand. Perhaps Democrats thought they could score political points, or maybe they didn’t want to anger their traditional allies in the abortion rights lobby. Either way, it became depressingly clear that what they weren’t thinking about was the needs of vulnerable people, mostly young women and girls, who are the victims of sex trafficking.
The stalemate over the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015 has now occupied two weeks, and with the Senate next set to take up the budget, it’s unclear when — or how — the impasse will be resolved. At issue in the legislation, which had been expected to glide through the Senate with bipartisan support, is a provision — backed by Republicans and initially overlooked by Democrats — that would prohibit a new trafficking-victims compensation fund from being used for abortions save for exceptions covered by the Hyde Amendment. Democrats didn’t like the application of Hyde restrictions to funds that are not taxpayer dollars — the compensation fund was to be drawn from criminal fines — and they objected to the anti-abortion provision being in place for five years.
Mr. Cornyn responded by offering to create the compensation fund with an annual congressional appropriation drawing on the fines. Since all such appropriations are already covered by the Hyde Amendment, there would be no change in the political status quo on abortion. “Can they take yes for an answer?” asked Mr. Cornyn on Thursday, contending, “We’ve made a proposal to them to give them what they’ve asked for.” The answer was no.
Democrats unfortunately seem to believe that response is in their political interest. Not only are Republicans denied boasting rights for getting something done, but also Democrats don’t risk running afoul of the abortion rights groups that are scoring the vote. The ill-advised decision of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to hold up confirmation of Loretta Lynch, the first African American woman nominated to be attorney general, until the trafficking bill impasse is resolved only gives the Democrats a further motive, as the GOP can be hammered for stalling a highly qualified nominee for a top Cabinet position.
There are legitimate concerns about whether the Hyde Amendment’s provisions — it allows abortions only in the cases of rape, incest and danger to the mother’s life — are broad enough to cover young women forced into sexual exploitation. But the question of whether and how congressional appropriations can be used for abortions has long been settled, for better or worse. There is, as we wrote earlier this week, a reasonable way for the two sides to compromise on the trafficking bill, but both sides need to be reasonable. Sadly, that was not the case for Senate Democrats this week.Introduction
This short story is intended to provide an intuition pump, rather than a formal argument. The intuitions unleashed may help some people to conceive of a world in which consciousness research enabled the creation of a world-wide long-term peace. Enduring peace for the eons to come, incredibly, thanks to a relatively small number of people taking a hard look at the available state-space of consciousness.
We now have a wealth of hints and leads for larger-than-life experiences. There are many modes of first person subjective experience. But it has taken us a long time to systematize the study of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
References to specific chemical agents should not be taken to mean that this is how the project would necessarily go. This is a hypothetical scenario. Use the substances as a guide that point at remarkably specific, but accessible, varieties of qualia.
The Qualia Computing Approach
Setting
We are somewhere in the 2050-2200 time range. Consciousness research has gained popularity among scientists of many disciplines. People are excited to see new technologies that induce a variety of subtle yet helpful states of consciousness. Schools benefit from the development of tDCS, doctors take a variant of hydrafinil to use predictive Bayesian networks to make diagnoses, and couples therapy uses a safe ultrasound stimulation that enhances empathy. However, these technologies tap into states of consciousness that people are familiar with. This facilitates their adoption since people are not alarmed by the novelty. But staying in known territory constrains the search space to an unreasonable extent.
Three Schools of Thought
Even though consciousness research is widespread, there are only a few hubs of exceptionally good researchers who work on these problems full time. There are roughly three schools of thought here. We call them large consciousness research hubs. The first kind only has people who do one activity. The Super-Shulgin Academy is one example of this school of thought. The second kind divides its researchers into those who perform consciousness exploration themselves and those who stay as perennially sober researchers and focus on objective third-person measurements. The main problem that usually arises with this setup is that the sober side does not give much credibility to the value of the experiences of the explorers. They simply lack an adequate evidential base from which to judge.
The third kind has an organizational design substantially more elaborate, which divides the cognitive roles into overlapping, yet specialized roles. This school of thought is called the Qualia Computing Approach, and its main principle is to measure the formal, subjective, and computational properties of every possible state of consciousness. The organization was optimized to do just that. It was first invented in order to meet the demands placed on it by the mission of the Manhattan Project of Consciousness.
Bienavi Institute
The research center known as the Bienavi Institute (from the Spanish Bien-good, and the French vie-Life) was the first to fully embrace the Qualia Computing Approach. The institute hosted, funded and provided the human needs for a total of 400 researchers. These researchers are divided into 10 research units, each with 40 personnel. Each unit is a combination of several modules with specialized functions; we can call these role clusters. There is no fixed number of researchers for each of these role clusters; each research unit gets the flexibility to choose their role distribution (based on their past history of successes and the nature of their current goals). The approach encourages researchers to jump from role to role until they are satisfied with one that truly fits them. If necessary, they can create custom roles (as long as they can argue in their favor). As a general tendency, though, each unit has a role distribution that is fairly typical; organizational structure convergence across research units is expected.
Meet the Team
The role clusters in the research units are named after pioneering investigators in each of the relevant areas: Turing, Shulgin, Lilly, James, and Everett, to name a few. The roles for each of these modules are summarized thus:
The Turing-Hofstadter-Yudkowsky (Turing, for short) module is responsible for computing, modeling, selecting experiments, and providing algorithmic analysis and design. People in this module are often statisticians, computer scientists, psychologists, and/or rationalists. They are people trained in the art of inventing, programming, and computing with made-up symbolic systems.
Researchers in this module do not need to have extensive experience with non-ordinary states of consciousness, but they do have to be acquainted with them, since this is necessary to be able to interact with researchers in other modules effectively.
The research unit as a whole relies on Turing to:
Come up with new psychophysical tools to investigate the computational properties of novel states of consciousness. Test computational and algorithmic models that try to account for the information-processing behavior that consciousness displays in different states. Mine the computational properties detected in the qualia already explored to program new symbolic systems capable of performing efficient computations (by taking advantage of the properties of consciousness).
Turing analyzes the information coming from the other consciousness researchers in order to characterize the convenient properties of consciousness and to develop new applications with it. Turing quantifies these properties, and investigates their computational bounds. Its final goal is to have the best possible models of both the properties and the applications of all states of consciousness.
The Shulgin module focuses on developing a scholastic breadth of knowledge and firsthand experience of the state-space of consciousness. So-called Shulgins (the people who work in a Shulgin module) have a persistent curiosity about what there is yet to be discovered in the terra incognita of the psyche. Shulgins explore a given compound, technique, combination of neural stimuli, set of epigenetic modifications, etc. for a time that ranges from a week to a month. They comprehensively catalogue its subjective properties and note any commonalities with previously experienced states of consciousness. If they encounter peculiar phenomena, they explore it a handful of times in full, but then move on. Even though they know of unfathomable experiential paradises, their sight is fixed forward; they are constantly looking for new methods of mind-altering, and will never stop looking, no matter how seductive previous experiences may be. People in this module need to be (1) very psychologically robust, (2) possess exceptional memory, (3) outstandingly skillful in navigating consciousness, (4) compassionate, (5) tremendously curious, (6) masters of delayed gratification, and (7) cautious.
The Lilly-McKenna-Leary module focuses on depth rather than breadth. Like Shulgins, they experience a large number of states of consciousness with fascinating properties. However, they do so with an eye towards exploring particular phenomena to their ultimate effects. It is often the case that the regions that Lillys explore are first discovered by a Shulgin and then studied by a Turing before they are promoted as an interesting area of research for Lillys to pick up. People in this module share all of the requirements that Shulgins have, except that the bar for navigational skills is a tad higher, and the need for cautiousness is smaller. In fact, some degree of irrational bravery is ideal for this role. Without it, Lillys would not take the plunge and explore alien ontologies that make you feel like you will never return to sanity again.
As do people in all modules, Lillys go to work with a rational mindset and a scientific outlook towards their duties. That said, Lillys are unquestionably the people who are closest to the edge of knowledge. Their firsthand experience with profoundly outlandish varieties of consciousness tends to give them a sense of perspective rarely seen among humans.
A Lilly without guidance can get trapped in a shallow pond. A Shulgin without a Lilly will never know the true merits of the spaces explored. In order to provide an example for what makes these two modules different, take a look at how Shulgin and McKenna reacted to extraordinary phenomena in their consciousnesses:
During an experiment with his wife, both Shulgin and Ann started to experience a profound time dilation. They were both concentrating on a clock, and it seemed to be slowing down progressively. When Sasha realized that this dilation was heading asymptotically towards infinity, he panicked. He was afraid that if time stopped, no one would be able to unstop it. He decided to distract himself, and avoid this asymptote. As Ann describes it, he “chickened out.” What this story illustrates is Shulgin’s cautious approach to particularly weird phenomena. If he took the risk of following the weirdness to its ultimate implication, he would be compromising the continuation of his investigations.
When the McKenna brothers were experiencing a voice in their heads on a high dose of psilocybin, they did everything possible to amplify it. The end result was the phenomenological conviction of mind-melding with extraterrestrial intelligences, and in turn becoming part of the entire cosmos. It caused a temporary psychosis that Dennis McKenna had to endure, and Terrence take care of, for several days. What this story illustrates is how Lillys go full-on in one direction if they are convinced (whether right or wrong) that there are profound landscapes in the state-spaces they are headed towards. They are willing to get lost in the off-chance that they find the phenomenological equivalent of Shambala.
James–Pearce–Goethe (James for short): This module is populated by researchers who are trying to integrate the discoveries made by Turing, Shulgin and Lilly into a unified science of qualia. They are people with outstanding Philosophical Quotients who can switch between interpretative cognitive styles (e.g. empathizing vs. systematizing). They try to make sense of philosophy in the context of consciousness research, and to investigate possible ontologies that may bridge the gap between theoretical physics and cognitive science.
Everett-Maxwell: These are physicists trained in both theoretical physics and dynamical systems. They take into account the models developed by Turing, and try to find natural physical isomorphisms.
These two last modules work together closely: Everett makes sure that the work of James is mathematically and conceptually sound, while the James module guarantees the philosophical adequacy of the interpretations of Everett’s models. These two modules are not always present, but they are required for certain kinds of investigations. In particular, they were crucial in the development of the kinetic energy theory of angry strings.
The Manhattan Project of Consciousness
Unity
The first program, Unity, was started as an attempt to create phenomenal bridges between the experience of universal oneness and everyday states of consciousness.
The purpose of this program was to find a phenomenological technology to address core causes for the failure of cooperation in human societies. Nuclear war, among other disappointments, had shown that neither hegemony nor Mutually Assured Destruction could prevent substantial human conflict in the long term. A paradigm shift was needed.
Ample empirical data showing that both the base-rate of mystical experiences and the presence of a culture of rationality were the best predictors of sustainable cooperation between groups of humans. Starting off with these leads, the Bienavi Institute decided to research therapies to increase both of these predictors simultaneously.
Survival Programs
There were many psychic layers to overcome. People’s self-representation occurs in parallel through many channels. Just as we have a modality for touch, sight, smell, etc., we also have a modality for each of our self-models. The difference between them is, to put it bluntly, the quality and structure of their respective survival programs.
We have (1) a physical bodily representation of oneself, (2) emotional inclinations, (3) intellectual identifications, (4) narrative embeddings, and (5) ontological conceptions. There are other self-identifications, but these are some of the major ones. When the identification with any one of these programs as oneself is made, it begins to accumulate a gloss of ontological qualia.
Ontological qualia provides the deepest experiential context. We could say that one’s experiences are but paint in a large void impregnated with positive ontological qualia. Experiences unfold, but they rarely affect the underlying quality of being very much. Ontological qualia provides the sense of reality that grounds other qualia in a background of happening.
Identifying oneself with one’s physical body, emotional attitudes, etc. makes these representations seem truly real and necessary for survival. By locally binding ontological qualia to any self-representation, one adds psychological weight to the continuation of its existence. A trivial example is the cached selves effect: emotionally identifying with one’s verbal statements subtly redefines one’s self-representation as essentially interwoven with the reinforced programs. In practice, this causes the difficulties that arise with being unable to let go of structures and models one has exercised before. The pain of separation.
Realism
Evolution has recruited one of its orientable positive manifolds to represent what we call realism. When you nod, when you think about what is trivial, when you get a new interesting idea, your experiential field receives a hefty dose of positive ontological qualia. It feels real, present, noteworthy. Your lifeworld is full of hints of a wider reality. A feeling that there is something real to pursue.
Disappointment, loneliness, confusion are all impregnated with low-level negative orientable manifolds in the experiential field. They release energy that is not ready to die.
Non-orientable manifolds provide a sense of timelessness. For example: during youth, math is typically perceived with outstanding realism. It sparks a feeling of presence. However, the cognitive activity of “doing math” gradually becomes populated with non-orientable ontological qualia as a person matures mathematically. Rather than perceiving mathematical ideas as living presences, they see them as timeless and expressionless patterns.
In its extreme form, realism can spark spiritual experiences, which are the result of saturated feelings of being in one’s experiential field. Being overflows one’s sense of time and space, and one experiences an ontologically solid absolute necessity.
Depression, on the other hand, could be described as a low density of realism with an awareness of this absence. However, even in bad emotional states, ontological qualia is still on the whole typically positive. One’s object of interest may feel unattainable, but one’s feeling of the existence of this problem is full of realism.
Without positive ontological qualia, the mind is not able to believe that there is anything at stake in the game. Even though we don’t normally realize it, we have a constant and robust continuous stream of positive ontological qualia in our experiential field. Intuitively we believe that what feels most alive is centered around our senses. And while we do have the ability to turn on our senses’ realism very strongly, what usually has the most realism is our sense of presence as narratives. Our sensory modalities are not the place in which this realism is expressed the most. In humans, there is a typical hyper-expression of the realism of their social logico-linguistic selves.
Coincidentally, a vast proportion of human conflict can be tracked to excessive identification with one’s self as a collective, yet narrow, narrative. This is compounded with a strong, yet naïve, omnipresent phenomenology of realism associated to one’s own experiences. Race, origin, ideology, sexual orientation, self-intimacy, etc. are not intrinsically problematic axes of human variability. But in practice they limit human cooperation dramatically. Even if only a small fraction of people take these differences seriously, it still has the effect of setting the values of Schelling fences in confrontation against the out-group. These differences only matter because of the intuitive, yet metaphysically false, self-identification with one’s particular local context.
Safety
A key technology without which the research program might have produced psychological casualties was a method capable of resetting one’s consciousness. A chemical switch was created that combined two undisclosed brain-modification technologies to lower the overall free energy in one’s experiential field. This reset button guaranteed that participants could come back to consensus reality quickly, and in this way abandon problematic state-spaces. The technology also helped them forget about these experiences on a meta-cognitive level.
Additionally, with the help of ultrasound stimulation, participants could neutralize their hedonic tone whenever they felt the need to do so. Bad trips could be avoided with this method.
Peak
The experience of universal unity was found to be a strong antidote against contextual self-identification. Thus, the full experience of oneness induced by 5-MeO-DMT-like compounds was used to kick-start a profound transformation. It planted a seed of conviction on the potential that comes with Open Individualism. The power of union with the absolute bestows a glimpse of a fully realized world in which all beings recognize themselves as part of the same eternal luminous non-flavor. In turn, this solves many game-theoretical problems related to cooperation. One can finally conceive of a God’s-eye-view utility function for the entire universe. This experience is the maximum possible qualia synchrony level before memory stops working, and is often described as peak bliss in the human organism.
Typically, the realization would be forgotten. The state-dependence of memory is often responsible for an associative disconnection between one’s sober self and one’s mystical recollections. Nevertheless, these experiences remain in the background, ready to reappear when the pieces of the puzzle (one’s mind’s I, and its self awareness) are aligned just right. The deathless state is one memory away.
The experience kindles very deep properties of one’s consciousness which are close to the lowest level of resolution possible. On its own, the experience of oneness makes people happy for many years, on average. In a minority it backfires with a spiritual-philosophical crisis several decades later. But on the whole, people tend to feel grateful for the experience, and the gratefulness is carried over into the rest of their lives.
Interpretation and symbolic translation
Propositional qualia is the experiential modality that compares counterfactuals using symbolic manipulation techniques. On its own it cannot lead to reinterpretations of ontological notions. However, the state-space that it spans is very large and contains remarkable structures. More so, the returns on the exploration of the state-space can be boosted by using Bayesian search. The logico-linguistic algorithms of human thought are not trivial computations; the true generality of the medium is hard to appreciate. But Turings truly understand the astronomical generality of symbolic systems. Even bare bones of instructions can reconstruct any discrete pattern you can conceive of. The symbolic mind is capable of recursion and commentary. It learns from comparing gestalts of experience.
So, what if we could compare, side by side, the experience of oneness with one’s everyday ontological notions?
Mutual Awareness
Traditionally, 5MeO-like experiences are interpreted as graceful glimpses of a broader reality. Their subjective quality is never fully remembered, and one simply takes what one can from it.
Bienavi Institute decided to investigate whether it is possible to fully integrate the experience of universal oneness into one’s conceptual landscapes. For this reason, they focused on creating experiential bridges between sober states and pure oneness.
It is well known that THC experiences are modified substantially after experimenting with a classical psychedelic. The high is different: more psychedelic, emotional, visual, deeply conceptual. A less well-known fact is that fresh peak experiences can profoundly affect how one experiences the classical psychedelic state.
The phenomenon of “drifting” fragments the spatial Euclidean continuity of a qualia field into many islands that are locally bound which, in turn, fail to bind with each other. This fragmentation into small islands of synesthetic sensations permits the simultaneous presence of a variety of clusters of experience. This phenomenon is also called Frame Stacking, and as explained by James L. Kent, it can have information-processing benefits:
The Frame Stacking Model presumes that hallucinogens enable a perceptual frame buffer that allows for sorting and browsing through multiple simultaneous linear frames; or that frame perception might be splintered into a radial kaleidoscope of multi-threaded parallel processing frames (Fig. 6). Within the context of frame stacking psychedelic consciousness may enable the subject to scroll back and forth in time; retrieve multiple simultaneous memories from a single stimulus; and project multiple versions of the self into multiple imaginary future scenarios. If the consciousness of a single person can be momentarily realized within three frames – the arising frame, the fading frame, and a static frame which holds the idealized concept of self – then the persistence of six or more frames could lead to the fabrication of two or more fully realized identities within a single subject. This frame splitting effect may explain how people can have conversations with phantom friends or relatives, or how a shaman might invoke anthropomorphized plant spirits with distinct personalities.
Thus, LSD-like states allow the global binding of otherwise incompatible schemas by softening the degree to which neighborhood constraints are enforced. The entire experience becomes a sort of chaotic superposition of locally bound islands that can, each in its own way, tell sensory-linguistic stories in parallel about the unique origin and contribution of their corresponding gestalts to the narrative of the self.
This phenomenon forces, as it were, the onset of cognitive dissonance between incompatible schemas that would otherwise evade mutual contact. On the bright side, it also allows mutual resonance between parts that agree with each other. The global inconsistencies are explored and minimized. One’s mind can become a glorious consensus.
In therapy, LSD-like states had been used for many decades in order to integrate disparate parts of one’s personality into a (more) coherent and integrated lifeworld. But scientists at the beginning didn’t know why this worked.
The Turing module then discovered that the kaleidoscopic world of acid can be compared to raising the temperature within an Ising model. If different gestalts imply a variety of semantic-affective constraints, kaleidoscopic Frame Stacking has the formal effect of expanding the region of one’s mind that is taken into consideration for global consistency at any given point in time. The local constraints become more loose, giving global constraints the upper hand. The degree of psychedelia is approximately proportional to the temperature of the model, and when you let it cool, the grand pattern is somewhat different. It is more stable; one arrives at a more globally consistent state. Your semantic-affective constraints are, on the whole, better satisfied. The Turings called this phenomenon qualia annealing.
Consciousness Under the Kaleidoscope
LSD-like states were used to help the logico-linguistic mind develop a shared sensory-symbolic system with the 5-MeO gestalt.
Known for thousands of years in the Amazon, the simple fact that the sober mind is incapable of grasping the essential learnings from the 5-MeO experience has invited frustration in those who have seen the potential for this state to change the world. With the aid of LSD-like states’ kaleidoscopic fragmentation, the 5-MeO experience could now be integrated into the mental programs of everyday life. Myriad previous states of consciousness are recollected, projected synesthetically into one’s experiential field, and reinterpreted in the context of a wider evidential base. Distinct states that linear mind would never think about comparing are presented together. Their sensorial, intentional and ontological quality become mutually transparent. The mind becomes a combinatorial laboratory. With sufficient conscious control one can navigate towards high-learning areas. By allowing states of consciousness to be compared side by side, the participants are able to create a scale of preference for each particular state. The results were robust. People chose unity again and again, although it certainly frightened some. The first outlines of a Total Order of Consciousness.
A middle ground is developed. One produces an exegesis of the epiphany, a narrative of the meta-narrative; the ontological terra incognita finally has a voice to make proclamations with. The end result is that the mind integrates components of the 5-MeO experience into a meta-narrative. One becomes capable of interpreting reality both from an implicit Closed Individualist as well as an Open Individualist point of view.
The Connection: Universal Love, Transcendental Joy
The Shulgins discovered a safe protein with MDMA-like psychoactivity. The inventor, to honor the research center that allowed her to make the discovery, named the protein Bienavi.
This is when the final experiential bridge came online.
The bridge from oneness to the full generality of symbolic processing could be made by LSD-like experiences. But to connect these intellectual learnings to an everyday-like sense of emotional presence, an entactogenic hedonic recalibration was necessary.
Bienavi allowed these scientists to unleash the compassion known by their intellect into the vagaries of normal life. They described a sense of being one with universal love in everyday life. Some called it the marriage of the mundane and the sublime. From the point of view of a person on Bienavi, awakening every being alive was a thought that caused a profound sense of transcendental joy. Oh! The immeasurable vastness of the one flavor of knowing!
Done in this highly systematic way, the researchers did not develop delusions of reference, nor believed themselves to be Messiahs. The long, gradual, methodical process spanning extensive preparation, 5-MeO, LSD and finally Bienavi, culminated in radical readjustments to the participant’s reward architecture. The final empathetic blow tended to have a robust effect of increasing self-honesty, which in turn protected against delusions of all kinds.
Some would say that Bienavi translated the qualia integrated with the kaleidoscope into a human readable form. Suddenly, psychedelic researchers were not seen as awkward humans who happened to claim there is a sense in which we all could be one. Instead, they were now perceived as a group of people who embraced oneness at an emotional level, without having to sacrifice any epistemological rigor.
Life on Bienavi
Bienavi has a much slower onset of action and a longer duration of effects when compared to its quaint neurotoxic grandfather. Over the course of several weeks, a little seed of beauty slowly works its way up into larger-than-life experiences.
On the third day of taking Bienavi, people become aware of the phenomenology of transparency. They notice the prevalence of windows, glasses, mirrors, and diaphanous objects in their cities. After five days, this gives rise to a palpable sense of space. Between you and your surroundings you now see, with clarity, a luminous spaciousness. You can’t believe how much bigger you’ve become, to put it one way. But the reality is that the proportion between every region remains the same. What’s different is that now your lifeworld has a much higher phenomenal density.
By the second week space emits a warm rainbow glow, though this does not sacrifice the spatial resolution. You can’t believe how much information can fit in the perception of an apple. Your love towards all beings is not something you particularly question. It is self-evident from your vantage point that the reality of your current experience is founded on the same ontological ground as the suffering of your fellow beings in the multiverse.
On Bienavi the mean hedonic tone is vastly higher than what a typical human experiences. Likewise, compassion and free kindness is outpouring in comparison. Every stimuli experienced is a delight; and yet, the light of love towards all sentients shines as in no other state.
Life-long Bliss
With neuroplasticity peptides, Bienavi can be fixed in place. Additional DNA therapy can be incorporated to help the cells regenerate any lost Bienavi over the long term. Researchers can maintain the entactogen state indefinitely. Since the Bienavi + neuroplasticity-peptide treatment is highly targeted to the protein complexes most associated with consciousness, it has near-imperceptible effects on other areas of the body. Life-long bliss was found to extend life.
Peace
When Bienavi-assisted Oneness Therapy was perfected, it became possible to distribute all-in-one pills that made you invincibly happy over the course of several years. This pill was humorously named The One. The capsules contain a precisely dosed, carefully time-released sequence of proteins that become attached to the the cytoskeleton of one’s thalamic neurons. Rather than a dramatic experience of oneness, the perfected therapy induces a mild degree of neuroplasticity targeted to one’s current development area. One either improves one’s acquaintance with the oneness experience, furthers one’s understanding of oneness intellectually (via the kaleidoscope technique), or integrates one’s intellectual recognition of oneness into one’s everyday life. The pill releases proteins for each of these purposes, one at a time, over the course of a year. Once a cycle is done, the next begins. These cycles are very subtle, and they are not disruptive to one’s daily duties. They do, however, gradually increase both the depth and authenticity of one’s sense of connection to the universe.
The result was a slow but steady upward spiraling towards a fully compassionate state of functional rapture. The change was fast enough to attract the attention of people who wanted to feel better quickly, but it was also slow enough that people felt comfortable with the gradual psychological transformations. The gradual nature dissuaded any early worry about its long-term effects, and its long-term effects made people eager to continue the treatment.
At first, The One was a social oddity. The power of human cooperation, however, was not to be underestimated. Given the consistent and enduring economic advantages of a cooperative mindset across borders, it quickly became obvious that the only way to stay economically viable was to promote The One among one’s compatriots.
The world, it turns out, experienced a virt |
have an obligation to be healthy" because the job requires it.
___
9:30 a.m.
Donald Trump says that standing at a podium, delivering his signature rally speeches, is one of the ways he stays healthy on the campaign trail.
The Republican presidential nominee says that delivering his speeches is "a really healthy act." He was appearing on "The Dr. Oz Show," in an interview that was taped Wednesday and broadcast Thursday.
Trump said giving speech is "a lot of work" and he's "using a lot of motion"
He said: "I guess that's a form of exercise?"
___
8:35 a.m.
Donald Trump is suggesting that, if he's elected president, he would sell some foreign assets to avoid potential conflicts of interest.
The Republican nominee was asked during a call-in with "Fox and Friends" how he would respond to potential sanctions imposed on a country that might hurt his company or hotels.
He responded that he "would absolutely get out in some form." He said: "If it's ownership, we'd have to sell."
Trump has a long list of potential conflicts of interest thanks to his dealings with foreign companies and governments.
Trump said, if elected, he would "sever connections" with his company. His adult children and executives would run it and not discuss it with him.
Other elected officials have put their assets in "blind trusts" to avoid potential
___
8:25 a.m.
Hillary Clinton says she won't comment on emails sent by former Secretary of State Colin Powell attacking her for "hubris."
Clinton was speaking on Tom Joyner's morning radio show.
She said: "I have a great deal of respect for Colin Powell and I have a lot of sympathy for anyone whose emails become public."
The emails were leaked to a website which has been alleged to be an outlet for hackers tied to the Russian intelligence groups.
Clinton said the email leak underscores efforts by the Russians to try to interfere with U.S. elections. She said she's "increasingly concerned" by what she called rival Donald Trump's "alarming closeness with the Kremlin." Trump has frequently praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
___
8:10 a.m.
Hillary Clinton says she wants to respond to "legitimate questions people have" about her health. Clinton says she was "touched" by the concern about her well-being.
That's what she tells the Tom Joyner radio show in a taped interview broadcast on Thursday morning.
Clinton released a letter from her doctor on Wednesday declaring her "fit to serve" as president.
She has faced criticism about a lack of transparency after not revealing that she had been diagnosed pneumonia until a video showed her stumbling after abruptly leaving a 9/11 ceremony.
Rival Donald Trump is expected to make public more information about his health on Thursday. Clinton said he's failed to "even meet the most minimalistic standards" for disclosure.
___
This version of the item posted at 8:10 a.m. has been corrected to delete a reference to Clinton releasing additional health information; it was based on an interview recorded with her before she released a new letter from her doctor with updated health information on Wednesday.
___
8 a.m.
Donald Trump says "something was up" with the Flint, Michigan pastor who interrupted him as he addressed her church on Wednesday.
Trump told "Fox and Friends" Thursday that he "got unbelievably good treatment" during his trip to the city.
But he said that "something was up" with the Rev. Faith Green Timmons, pastor of the Bethel United Methodist Church.
Trump said he "noticed she was so nervous when she introduced me." He said. "She was like a nervous mess."
Trump was interrupted and then heckled after he began to attack rival Hillary Clinton. The pastor approached him calmly to say she'd invited him to the church to thank the congregation, not give a political speech. Trump finished speaking shortly after.
Trump said: "Everyone plays their games, it doesn't bother me."
___
7:40 a.m.
Donald Trump says he weighs 236 pounds — making him overweight for his height.
Trump said in a phone interview with "Fox and Friends" that he is 6-foot-3 and 236 pounds — giving him a body mass index falling into the "overweight" range.
Trump discussed the results of his physical ahead of the airing Wednesday of a taped interview with TV personality "Dr. Oz."
Trump said his health is good, though he'd like to lose 15 pounds. He said his cholesterol is "quite good" and that he had "every single test" and they are good.
He said "If they were bad, I would say, let's sort of skip this, right?"
Asked about reports that he weighs more than 236, Trump joked: "ay-ay-yi, it's bad enough."
___
3:20 a.m.
Hillary Clinton is returning to the campaign trail following a bout of pneumonia that sidelined her for three days and revived questions about both the Democratic nominee and Republican Donald Trump's transparency regarding their health.
Clinton's campaign responded with a new letter from her doctor declaring her "fit to serve" as president and recovering well from her illness. The letter details medications she is taking, her cholesterol levels and other results from a physical exam.
Trump says he, too, plans to release details from a recent physical, though it's unclear when that will happen and how much information he will provide.
In keeping with Trump's unusual approach to transparency, he gave a one-page summary of his recent exam to Dr. Mehmet Oz while taping an episode of Oz's television show.123 What's New!
By: Tally and Chris Fells
My Little Salty
By: Tally and Chris Fells 12gOverflow
By: Tally and Chris Fells
180g Goldfish Tank Table
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By: Tally and Chris Fells 206 Miners Way
This is where Chris and Tally Fells first lived in Colorado. The home was a rental, but the area is what made us really feel at home.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
40g Tank-Stand
By: Tally and Chris Fells
ABQ Pics by Tally - Top Pics
By: Tally and Chris Fells More ABQ Pictures by Tally
This contains many more pictures that didnt quite make it into the Top Pics.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Antique Cabinet Refinish
We found this interesting antique liquor cabinet at a thrift shop and though we would re-finish it for use as a coffee ice-cream liquor type cabinet.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Arizona 2000
Tallys visit to Arizona in 2000-2001, Mostly Scenic Pictures
By: Tally and Chris Fells
A Few Artistic Pictures
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Aurora House Sale Pics
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Aurora Colorado
Many of the photos here are of the house as it was when we first saw it and purchased it. Tons of repairs and cleaning had to be done before we could move in.
By: Tally and Chris Fells AutoFishFeeder
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Origional Pics of our Bailey Home
2 Bed, 2 Bath, 2130 sq ft, Built 1986, 0.78 Acre Lot.,, It is always interesting what you think to take a pictue of and what you dont when you first are looking at a house, so the pics I took really dont give a great feel for the house, but if we get it, I will be sure to take more and probably some videos so that you can see where things lay out.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
BakersRack
Refinish of Our Bakers Rack
By: Tally and Chris Fells Barn
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Bath Remodel Detail
More pictures and details about the bath remodel.
By: Tally and Chris Fells BathRemodel
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Bed Frame
I made this bed frame for a couple good friends of ours and Chris helped me put it together and cut and install the tiling in the shelves.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
BellVisit
By: Tally and Chris Fells
The Big Salty
Currently this is a collection of pictures about my dual Salty system.,, Mostly the new and old corals of the reef tank.
By: Tally and Chris Fells CabinetOrganize
By: Tally and Chris Fells
CabinetProject
By: Tally and Chris Fells Cabinet Refinish
By: Tally and Chris Fells Caron Shared Photos
By: Bob & Sharon Caron
Caron Kitchen
Chris and I helped our friends in Aurora re-do their kitchen. It was quite a challenge to find good deals and make things work, but it turned out very nice and was a lot of fun using my new tools and Mobile WorkShop.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Family Cats
A whole album dedicated to the cats of our families.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Chris Photos
Photos by Chris with Ernies Camera
By: Shelly and Ernie Ackerly
Chris & Tally Wedding Photos 2002
Tally Bell and Chris Fells Wedding,, Golden Gate Canyon State Park,, June 15th 2002
By: Tally and Chris Fells ClutchBooster
DIY Clutch Pedal Extension
By: Tally and Chris Fells Colombia 2015
By: Tally and Chris Fells
ConcreteTestSteps
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Georgia Dog Cooie
Chris and Tally miss Cooie a lot, but after having her hip broken by being hit by a van, she hurt too much in the cold to come to Colorado.
By: Tally and Chris Fells Cooling Band How To
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Coors Brewery Tour
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Coral Frag Tank
Our coral propagation tank. Aquaculturing corals provides corals for the saltwater hobbiests without depleting reefs of our valuable resouces and raises awareness of the beauty in the earths oceans.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
CostaRica 2013 Honeymoon
By: Shelly and Ernie Ackerly
Crafts
An album of assorted crafts we have done.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
DishWasher
We got a nicer used dishwasher, but the wood front didnt match our cabinets, so we re-did the front.
By: Tally and Chris Fells DoorKnobRepair
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Drills
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Edited Other Photos
Photos by Chris, Donna, and Bridget - Edited by Bridget
By: Shelly and Ernie Ackerly ElasticPants
By: Tally and Chris Fells Events and Vacations
By: Tally and Chris Fells
FALL2011
You can see the better pictures full size for printing by clicking on the picture, then clicking the link Click to Enlarge for Printing at the bottom of the picture.
By: Tally and Chris Fells famdown
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Fells Photos
Photos by Chris and Tally Fells
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Freshwater Fish Tanks
An Album of our Freshwater tanks and fish, past and present.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Fishies
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Fishy Project Pictures
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By: Tally and Chris Fells Found Items
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Foxy Love
Just a little proof that color means nothing in the eyes of love.
By: Tally and Chris Fells Fridge Fix
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Garden Of The Gods
A small album of our day trip to the Garden Of The Gods in Colorado Springs. There are many interesting rock formations.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Gardening and Wick Plants
By: Tally and Chris Fells General
By: Tally and Chris Fells
General Pics
Julie, Toby, other family, motorcycle, trips, mountain biking,
By: Michael Fells
Georgia
By: Tally and Chris Fells
GeorgiaGarden
By: Tally and Chris Fells GnomeDoor
By: Tally and Chris Fells
GnomeGarden
By: Tally and Chris Fells GoLoam
By: Tally and Chris Fells GrillLockTemp
By: Tally and Chris Fells
GrillWall More
By: Tally and Chris Fells GrillWall1
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Hiking
Hiking to Mt Evans., (Shelly Pics Included)
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Homes and Places
By: Tally and Chris Fells Hosting Aprons
By: Tally and Chris Fells House Projects
By: Tally and Chris Fells
HummingBirds
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Freshwater Invert Album
An album of our Freshwater Invertibrates. Snails, Shrimp, etc.
By: Tally and Chris Fells JamJamboree
By: Tally and Chris Fells
JigReview
By: Tally and Chris Fells Justy Album
By: Tally and Chris Fells
KagogiAndTess
By: Tally and Chris Fells
KansasTrip2015
By: Tally and Chris Fells LansingFamDown
By: Tally and Chris Fells LintPot
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Little Tables
A couple small tables I made from drawer faces that we got along with a bunch of cupboard doors for projects.
By: Tally and Chris Fells LittleThings
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Mardigras in Baton Rouge
By: Tally and Chris Fells
MasterPaint
By: Tally and Chris Fells MB Fireplace
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Michelle Pics
By: Michael Fells
Mt Evans
By: Shelly and Ernie Ackerly
Ruth Cox Memorial
Memorial for Ruth Cox held in Hugo, Oklahoma,, To print any of the pictures, please click on the picture and then click on the link Click to Enlarge for Printing at the bottom of the photo.
By: Tally and Chris Fells Nature & Outdoors
By: Tally and Chris Fells
New Fridge
By: Tally and Chris Fells NewPotPanRack
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Odd Tanks and Tank Designs
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Our Pets
An Album of our pets... past and present.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Pillows
Home Made Throw Pillows - I have to admit that I am pretty proud of my pillows. Chris helped me pick material and picked up zippers and such, and I made a whole herd of very nice, usable and decorative pillows for our living room and some for my chaise lounge upstairs, too.
By: Tally and Chris Fells PipeValve
By: Tally and Chris Fells
PipeValve2
By: Tally and Chris Fells Pizza2
By: Tally and Chris Fells PizzaPics
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Plant Projects
By: Tally and Chris Fells Plumbing201504
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Prichard Photography
By: Shelly and Ernie Ackerly
Our Photos
By: Carol and Loni Covington Reef
By: Tally and Chris Fells RetainingWall
By: Tally and Chris Fells
RoofRepair2
By: Tally and Chris Fells RyobiWeeder
By: Tally and Chris Fells SaltyCleanup
By: Tally and Chris Fells
SaltyCleanUpdate
By: Tally and Chris Fells
SanDiego 2011 12
By: Tally and Chris Fells
SD Mission
By: Tally and Chris Fells
SD MnK Wedding
By: Tally and Chris Fells
SD Pier
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Zen Garden
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Pioneer Park
We went on the wrong day, so it was closed, but we got to take some pictures.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Sky and Sunsets
By: Tally and Chris Fells SeatCovers
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Septic 1
By: Tally and Chris Fells Strawberry Moon
By: Shelly and Ernie Ackerly SpiceLabel
By: Tally and Chris Fells
StackPots
By: Tally and Chris Fells Flat Stanley's vacation
This was something Michelle needed done for her school so being the good Papa that I am I took Stanley on vacation to Idyllwild California with me for a hiking and mountain biking trip. The guys weekend if you will.
By: Michael Fells StartingTheWeek
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Stringathon 2010
By: Tally and Chris Fells SubyBean
By: Tally and Chris Fells SwingSetup
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Fish Album
By: Tally and Chris Fells TireStorage
By: Tally and Chris Fells ToiletRepair
By: Tally and Chris Fells
ToolTime
Well, I am definitely one of the proud, few girls who asks for power tools for Christmas… and for this Christmas I finally asked to upgrade from randomly failing cheapie cordless drills to nice Ryobi One+ tools. It is a really more than just drills, because the batteries interchange with dozens and dozens of cordless tools. So it is more of a “System”.,, At the same time, I finally accepted the fact that we will not be getting a garage or a workshop any time in the near (or even moderately distant) future. While this is sad in many ways, accepting that fact really made me think about my tools and how much of a mess everything is every time I want to do a project or two. I have frequently spent 4 to 5 times the length of time trying to find my tools in assorted boxes in the spare room, dining room, and shed, than I spend on the project itself! Then… it is no wonder that I am loath to put anything away since I know I will need the same tools for the next project. And when I finally put things away, they just all get shoved back into yet another box, because nothing has a proper home.,, With my new found acceptance, I resolved to outfit a “Mobile Shop”. With two goals in mind. One… to have all of my most used tools, hardware, and other supplies, placed into proper tool totes, etc, that would be not only mobile, but give each item a proper home so that everything could be found (and put away) easily. Two… to have the least amount of totes, etc, to keep the whole “shop” easy to move to needed work locations around or outside of the house, but also able to put away into a corner of the spare room or wherever, so there would not be boxes and such spread all over the house.
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Trains
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Trinity Concert 2010
By: Shelly and Ernie Ackerly
Vacation200705
By: Tally and Chris Fells Vacation2007RMNF
By: Tally and Chris Fells Vacation200805
By: Tally and Chris Fells
Wedding
By: Shelly and Ernie Ackerly Wedding Videos
(Flash Video Versions), by Chris and Tally,
By: Shelly and Ernie Ackerly Wedding Videos
(Apple Video Versions), by Chris and Tally
By: Shelly and Ernie AckerlyThe XMAX Starry is a portable conduction vaporizer made by XMAX. They also make the v2 pro which is one of the cheapest portable vaporizers that I actually recommend.
The Starry vaporizer is nicely designed and small enough to be easily pocketed out on the go. It also comes with a full temp spectrum, an easy to ready digital display and a replaceable battery. Before we get too far into the review I wanted to point out that there are two different versions of this vaporizer. The original by XMAX with the “Starry” logo on it and then there’s another version with the POTV (planet of the vapes) logo. It’s exactly the same vaporizer just different logos. POTV didn’t like the flashy and bright starry logo and many people complained about it so they made it more inconspicuous. I personally think it looks much better overall. Again, same price, same functionality, just a different logo.
Size, Portability, and Build Quality
The Xmax Starry vaporizer retails for $99 and I recommend picking it up here. Read on below to get my full Xmax starry vaporizer review.
The Starry vaporizer is about the same size of the Pax 2. Maybe a smidgen wider but very close. The Starry weighs roughly 120 grams with the battery in which is about 30 grams more than the Pax 2. I’m comparing these two together because they function in a very similar fashion, very similar design wise and only separated in price by about $30. The Pax 2 is $149 and comes with a two year warranty but doesn’t come with a replaceable battery system.
The Starry is very easy to pocket, easy to grip and pass around. It’s perfect the adventurous type whether you’re hiking, biking or just a night out on the town. It’s very easy to conceal and even palm if needed.
Really the only downside with the overall design is the fact that the mouthpiece and upper lid do get pretty hot with prolonged use. I’m talking long sessions at high temps but overall it’s not bad.
XMAX Starry Accessories
The Starry will come with your average cleaning tools, one replaceable rechargeable battery, a USB charging cable, instruction manual and a few extra screens. I recommend picking up an extra battery and the Nitecore I2 external charger if you think you will be using the Starry very often. The batteries will charge faster in the external charger and it’s always nice to have a spare just in case.
Heating Specs and Temp Options
I’m pretty impressed with the heat up times and temp options. Not only does the unit heat up in under 30 seconds but you get a full temp spectrum with on vape display and easy to use temp buttons. You very rarely find a vaporizer under $150 let alone $100 with a full temp display.
The full temp spectrum runs from 221F to 464F. I never really go above 420 but the option is there to really cook your herbs if you wanted. The Starry features a 5 or 10 minute session timer which is user adjustable by holding the power and up buttons.
Battery Specs, Average Charging Times, Battery Life and Charging Options
The Xmax Starry vaporizer uses a 2500MAH 18650 rechargeable replaceable battery. I’ve been averaging about 70-80 minutes of battery life on a single charge which is really good for the size of this device. Charging takes anywhere from 90 to 120 minutes with the included micro USB cable, but you can reduce the charging times with an external charger.
Vapor Quality, Draw Resistance, Usage Tips
While The XMAX Starry vaporizer does have better flavor than other conduction units at or below this price, it is still like most conduction vaporizers. Great taste at lower temps, especially on the first couple rips but as the temp goes up and the session goes on, the taste goes downhill. The good news is that the Starry vape will put out HUGE clouds on the higher temps. With a tight pack and a fine grind, you will be thoroughly impressed with the vapor output. The Starry will also vape very evenly with no need to stir.
The draw resistance is about average when clean but goes up when dirty. The biggest contributor to the draw resistance is the mouthpiece/screen. It tends to clog up after multiple sessions so it’s important to brush out the chamber and mouthpiece after every session. I also try not to leave herbs in the chamber after a session. When possible I Immediately dump the bowl to help keep down on cleaning.
XMAX STARRY TIPS:
I recommend a fine grind. You can achieve a fine grind by picking up something like the MFLB Finishing Grinder OR you can use a regular grinder but just grind it upside down to get it finer.
I have gotten the best results with a fully packed chamber.
Like I mentioned earlier, the lid and mouthpiece tend to get hot with prolonged use. When vaping a long endurance session you can use your hand or fingers to help dissipate the heat from the unit before a draw. Just place your fingers over the mouthpiece when you’re waiting for the next draw and it will cool it down.
If you wan’t to reduce screen cleaning, you can place a small metal screen cut to size over the top of the packed bowl, this definitely reduces cleaning, but its an extra step each time you pack and unpack the bowl so I generally don’t do this.
Cleaning and Maintenance
Overall the cleaning and maintenance is very easy with the Xmax Starry especially if you stay on top of it and brush out the chamber and lid after every session. Like I said, the screen will collect the most debris so try to keep it clean for best results.
A full cleaning is easy. Just throw some ISO on a q–tip, wipe out the chamber (with the unit upside down so nothing drips down into the unit), then wipe or soak the lid and mouthpiece and you’re good to go.
Other Portable Vaporizer Comparisons
L to R: Starry, Pax 2, Alternate, CF, CFX, Airvape XS, SC Grinder.
Pax 2: The Pax 2 is a darn good vaporizer especially now that they dropped price to $149. It functions very similar to the Xmax Starry but doesn’t come with a replaceable battery and the heat up is about 30 seconds slower. The Pax 2 has the bowl at the bottom of the unit with a longer vapor path so it produces a bit tastier and cooler vapor the one other thing that Pax 2 has is a log history of proven reliability and performance. If both units were the same price, I would go with the Pax 2 but once again, you’re spending more money. The Starry price point is tough to beat.
Boundless CF: The CF is one of the most popular portable vaporizers around $100. The CF mimics the Storz and Bickel Crafty with hybrid convection/conduction heating systems (although the Boundless vapes utilize much more conduction). I guess you could say the CF gives you around 75% the performance at under 50% the cost of the OG Crafty.
Summary: Who should buy the XMax Starry?
The XMAX Starry is the perfect vaporizer for someone just entering the vape market. You don’t have to shell out a bunch of cash to get good results and the performance is really unmatched at this price point. It’s easy to conceal, easy to use, and easy to maintain. I recommend picking up the Xmax Starry here. Let me know if you have any questions about the Starry or any other vaporizer by leaving a comment below. Thanks for checking out my site and thanks for reading my x-max starry review!Serial killer Ivan Milat will spend the rest of his life without freedom and also without the little finger on his left hand after he severed the digit with a plastic serrated knife.
Milat, who is serving a life sentence at the Supermax facility inside Goulburn jail for the murder of seven backpackers, calmly handed the finger to prison guards inside an envelope padded with newspaper on Monday.
The 64-year-old had addressed the envelope to the High Court of Australia.
"He was going to try and post it, but then of course, when you cut a finger off it does hurt," NSW Corrective Services commissioner Ron Woodham told Macquarie Radio on Tuesday.
"He got crook and it was hurting and... very painful and of course he had to raise attention to it and hand it over."Keep Fido and your wallet happy with these tips to save money on pets from U.S. News & World Report:
MELBOURNE, Fla. - One hundred cats were found living with a woman inside a West Melbourne home, Brevard County Animal Services said.
[MORE: 14 dead cats found in suitcase | Vermont hotel offers roadkill menu]
A strong smell of feces and urine led animal services to the Parker Road home on Wednesday, according to officials.
Animal Services told News 6 that plenty of food, water and litter boxes were found at the home. The woman told Animal Services that things just got out of hand and didn't know what to do.
No charges have been filed.
Officials will spay and neuter the cats and find them new homes.
[DID YOU SEE THESE? Worst prom pictures | Tattoo spell check | Cake fails]
An investigation is ongoing.
Copyright 2015 by ClickOrlando.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Inspired by: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/i-wash-my-hands-of-this-weirdness/
DescriptionThis deck can easily win turn two. Here's how:
Turn 1: Island - Blistercoil Weird - Paradise Mantle
Turn 2: Equip the mantle - Tap Blistercoil Weird for one mana of any color, then play your 1CMC cantrips to untap him until you hit for 10 and throw a Grapeshot or simply cantrip til you got a 20/20 Weird.
Idea from Masatomo Iwayama's Weirdstorm
Card choices:Cerulean Wisps, Manamorphose, and Gitaxian Probe all net positive mana which is essential for the continuation of the combo.
Faithless Looting, Ideas Unbound, Serum Visions, Sleight of Hand, and to a lesser extent Visions of Beyond help me dig into the deck and make sure that I can get some additional draw power.
Crimson Wisps provides haste which can allow me to play Blistercoil Weird and combo out in the same turn.
Artful Dodge is a backup wincon here and is fairly obvious.
Grapeshot is the main wincon here, hard to counter, hard to prevent.
Pact of Negation a dead draw during the combo, but it will protect your combo against any removal, or if they want to counter your grapeshot, the mana cost is nothing to worry about, because the game will already be over at that point.
Elixir of Immortality is my way of pushing the reset button on the combo. If I'm stalled out by a Mindbreak Trap or a Path to Exile I can reset my combo and try again.Left-wing radical Bill Ayers, a longtime friend of President Barack Obama, recently defended the series of bombings that he carried out as a member of the Weather Underground, saying that his bombings were not like the Boston Marathon attack and that America is the most violent country that has ever been created.
Ayers — who participated in a series of anti-Vietnam War bombings in the early 1970s including an attack on New York City police department headquarters and the Pentagon — answered an Akron Beacon Journal reporter’s questions after giving a keynote speech at an event commemorating the anniversary of the 1970 Kent State National Guard shootings.
Ayers said that there is no equivalence between his bombings and the deadly bombings that rocked the Boston Marathon.
“What I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said.
Ayers reportedly said that the United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, and said that Republican Senator and Vietnam War hero John McCain committed daily war crimes.
“Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question … I’m against violence,” Ayers said.
“To conflate a group of fundamentalist people [in Boston] who are nihilistic in some way with a group of people who spent their lives trying to oppose the murder of 6,000 people a week … and still the killing went on. And still the killing went on. What would you have done?” Ayers said.
“There’s no equivalence [with Boston]. Property damage. That’s what we did,” Ayers said.
But Ayers was involved in a Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in 1970 that resulted in the accidental deaths of three Weather Underground members who were preparing a bomb. Ayers subsequently went underground as a fugitive from justice.
Ayers has since served as a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been a “family friend” to Obama, who previously lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, where Ayers and wife Bernadine Dohrn reside.
Follow Patrick on TwitterStanding Rock (Nov. 2) — Drone footage taken of the ridge overlooking the camp showed that the water protecters worst fears had been realized. Construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline had reached just a quarter of a mile from the river, plowing through burial grounds and sacred sites of the Sioux people. And the only access to the construction site was via a bridge that has been closed since last Thursday’s confrontation with police.
Drone Footage of Dakota Access Pipeline Approaching Missouri River from Paulette Moore on Vimeo.
People at camp were tense and restless. A group of about 20, led by a guy named Angry Bird, decided to build a bridge to cross over a small marshy tributary of the river to “Turtle Island.” The crossing would allow the water protectors to pray by the disturbed gravesite and sacred lands of the Sioux. This is also within a short distance of the pipeline construction.
All night the team worked, using plywood, logs, rope, and other materials scrounged from around the camp. At 2 a.m., someone brought sandwiches.
We arrived at the bridge construction site just as it was getting light this morning, and there were just two sections of the bridge remaining to be rolled over logs along the creek and to be held in place with logs pounded into the creek bed. To the west, a long line of police cars were keeping track.
No worries, the bridge builders said. We are here just to pray. And Turtle Island is Army Corps of Engineers land; it does not belong to DAPL.
As the sun rose, things started happening fast. Word spread in camp that there was a prayer in the offing, and people started streaming in, some on foot, some in pickup trucks along the long rutted road across the flood plain. Young Lakota men on horseback arrived, also, along with a large drum and the team of singers that provide the sound track. High above, on the ridge across from the bridge builders, police cars pulled up to the edge of the cliff, officers looked down at the drummers and the bridge builders, and announced that the bridge would have to be dismantled and that all should return to camp. The suggestion was met with louder drumming, and suggestions that it was the police, not the water protecters, who were trespassing.
Soon, a line of about 50 riot clad police lined the banks of the river across from the bridge builders. After repeated demands by police to dis-assemble the bridge, a boat loaded with heavily armed police pulled up to the bridge, chopped the bridge rope support, and towed a section of the bridge away from the remainder of the bridge.
The action continued for hours after that. On one side was drumming and burning sage, sacred staffs and songs. On the other was millions of dollars spent on helicopters, imported police, heavy arms, helmets, boats, and rifles. Still, the police looked relatively relaxed. By now, they know these are unarmed, peaceful people, and that they have no reason to fear.
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“Consider your own children and grandchildren,” water protecters called out. “What will the drink when the water is poisoned?”
People began to swim to the other side, where they remained in the frigid water facing the police. Some got up on land. Police fired rounds of mace into the crowd of swimmers, and there were reports also of rubber bullets (couldn’t confirm). A small boat carried people back who were overwhelmed by the cold or the mace, and medics waited on the shore to wash out their eyes and treat hypothermia.
It was a stand-off that lasted for hours and the two sides remain in a stalemate, North Dakota bringing in police from jurisdictions throughout the region, sending helicopters and planes to circle the camp and keep the camp under constant surveillance.
Water protectors believe it is not just for themselves that they are protecting the water, but for generations into the future, and that belief evokes the fierceness of anyone who is protecting their children. They repeatedly call for nonviolence, but they will not back down. Hundreds of clergy are here, now, answering a call from the local Episcopal Church. Human rights observers are here, too. And preparations for winter continue.
The stalemate continues as all await the Obama administration decision about whether the black snake will be allowed to cross the Missouri River.Superantibiotic is 25,000 times more potent than its predecessor
The world’s last line of defense against disease-causing bacteria just got a new warrior: vancomycin 3.0. Its predecessor—vancomycin 1.0—has been used since 1958 to combat dangerous infections like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. But as the rise of resistant bacteria has blunted its effectiveness, scientists have engineered more potent versions of the drug—vancomycin 2.0. Now, version 3.0 has a unique three-pronged approach to killing bacteria that could give doctors a powerful new weapon against drug-resistant bacteria and help researchers engineer more durable antibiotics.
“This is pretty special,” says Scott Miller, a chemist at Yale University who was not involved in the new work. “It’s really the culmination of a decades-long effort.”
Vancomycin, long considered a “drug of last resort,” kills by preventing bacteria from |
I remember the TV ad well.
A pudgy father reached across his 1970’s vinyl topped kitchen table with stainless steel knife gripped awkwardly in hand to carve a healthy slice off a solid brick of butter. Fat tongue to the side in hungry concentration, he was a red faced caricature of impending heart failure.
The message was clear: don’t be this guy; butter is bad for you. The fat in it caused heart disease and early death. If you wanted to live, margarine was the new healthy choice.
The chemical culprit was the newly demonised cholesterol. The lecherous little lipoprotein, we were told, had the power to clog up your arteries like flour in a drinking straw. A study from the 1950’s had uncovered the mortal danger and although research in the 1980’s failed to confirm the findings, the medical community maintained a zealous anti-fat rage.
As a kid, I didn’t buy it. I’d tried margarine, and the slimy yellow paste had done nothing for me. It felt wrong in my mouth, it felt wrong in my stomach, and it tasted bad. I was sticking with the glorious creamy warmth of natural butter, regardless of what the “experts” said.
Now, a generation later, it’s becoming clear my rebellious juvenile stomach was right all along.
The Misguided War Against Fat
There is a growing body of clinical and anecdotal evidence showing we have been wrong about fat yet official voices have been slow to admit the mistake. The irony of such hubris would be whimsical if not for the results which have played out in health systems all over the world. Heart disease is still the number one killer of women and men. It now causes more deaths than cancer, chronic respiratory disease, and accidents combined. To this has been added the modern pandemic of obesity – a pandemic which, if not caused by the removal of fat from our diets, was certainly aggravated by it.
The war against fat began with a report in 1958 by American physiologist Ancel Keys. His now infamous Seven Countries Study used some cherry picked data to plot a neat little graph showing that the more fat there was in a country’s diet, the more its citizens died of heart disease.
As has since been shown in detail, there were many problems with the report. Not only did Keys’ ignore data that didn’t fit his conclusion (the original data set included 22 countries of which he only used 7), his study completely missed the influence of other important factors such as the effects of economy upon a population’s ability to buy fat rich foods like meat.
Despite this, a 1950’s American health system staggering at a rate of heart disease responsible for every second male death after World War 2 latched onto fat as the enemy and promptly went nuclear.
A contemporary deconstruction of the report brought Keys’ conclusion about diet into question, but it was too late. Keys’ report became the basis for a wholesale change in national eating guidelines that landed its author on the cover of Time magazine, and made him the most famous nutritionist of his generation.
Carbohydrate, the Real Villain
The result was that fat was effectively removed from dinner plates all over the Western world. Everything became low-fat, or fat-free. Removing one nutrient meant exchanging it for another, so the USDA made possibly the worst choice available: it replaced fat with carbohydrate. The West rebuilt its diet upon a broad cloying base of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta. The era of the familiar “food pyramid” began.
The infamous USDA food pyramid
More than 50 years later, the folly of that exchange is becoming clear. Far from achieving any sort of overall weight loss, people are fatter than ever. The increase in deaths due to obesity related diseases has skyrocketed. Since 1980, for example, the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in “low-fat” USA has almost tripled – an increase of 166 percent – and it’s still rising.
Carbohydrate, it is now understood, is literally killing us. In the words of president of the Institute Responsible for Nutrition in the USA Dr. Robert Lustic, “We’ve traded one disease for another.”
The reason for carbohydrate’s lethality is that when its hits our digestive systems it basically turns straight into sugar. Carbs, especially simple carbs, are just long chains of sugars linked together. Ninety percent of the calories in rice, for example, come directly from carbohydrate. The resulting high concentration of sugars creates blood sugar spikes that can lead to metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance, conditions linked not only to an increase in diabetes, but also heart disease, cancer and a host of other serious health issues.
To add to the irony of carbohydrate being worse for us than the fat it replaced, normal whole fat may not have been the main culprit in heart disease anyway. The low-fat and no-fat foods we added to our diets not only contained more carbohydrate and sugar, they were devoid of the good fat which our bodies needed for healthy function.
Spreading the Mistake
All of which brings us back to butter.
Not much typifies the unfortunate effect of the dietary exchange more than butter and margarine. Butter is loaded with saturated fats and high density lipoprotein, known as “good” cholesterol. HDL-cholesterol keeps the “bad” low density lipoprotein LDL-cholesterol from clogging up artery walls with plaque by binding to and removing it.
Margarine in contrast is by design all unsaturated fat with some trans fat. Trans fat is a deadly product of processed food which increases the balance of LDL-cholesterol in our systems. It is so bad that a 2% increase in trans fat corresponds to a massive 23% increase in the risk of heart disease. And that doesn’t take into account the various artificial preservatives and coloring margarine contains.
Replacing butter with such processed goop was one of the ironies of the long fat-hating crusade. We effectively swapped a natural food for a processed one that potentially increased the risk of the disease we were trying to avoid!
Not More Fat, But Less Sugar and Carbs
The message isn’t that we should be eating large amounts of fatty food, but that we probably shouldn’t be so worried about it. Restricting fat in our diet, it turns out, is less important than reducing the amount of sugar and carbohydrate we eat, and staying well away from trans fat.
So grab a knife and just like that hungry patriarch from last millennium enjoy a wholesome slice of buttery goodness. Not only will it taste better, it will probably help you – especially if it fills you up enough to avoid another sugary dessert.North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un is considering opening a restaurant in Scotland.
His government’s Pyongyang chain of diners already has a branch in Amsterdam.
• North Korean Restaurant in Scotland: What you can expect
And the Supreme Leader’s interest in the Scottish independence referendum means Scotland is high in his thoughts. Michael Madden, editor of the North Korea Leadership Watch, said: “It would not surprise me at all if they opted to open a restaurant in Scotland.
“The Scottish independence referendum catapulted Scotland into the North Korean elite’s thoughts.
“Despite voting ‘No’ they’d consider left-leaning Scotland to be more suitable to deal with than England. Plus, North Koreans love whisky. Tourists in North Korea are told to tip people in Scotch instead of the currency.”
He said the restaurants were one of the few ways to experience North Korean culture without having to go there.$\begingroup$
I have not thought this through very much, so please correct me if I am wrong.
Say $w$ is the width of the poset.
For the poset which is the union of $w$ disjoint chains you need at least $w\log n$ evaluations of $P$ by just applying the standard lower bound on the query complexity of binary search to each chain. Since you give comparisons for free, you can compute a chain decomposition of the poset into $w$ chains for free. Do binary search on each chain to identify the first element that satisfies $P$. Then go over the identified elements and remove any dominated ones. Number of evaluations of $P$ is $O(w\log n)$. This identifies all maximal elements, as there can be at most one maximal element per chain.
ADDED: Actually I am seeing a simple recursive algorithm to do much better ($O(n)$) for the lattice of subsets $2^{[n]}$ (EDIT: domotor described the general strategy in his answer). Here I am assuming $P$ is monotonic downwards (i.e. the subsets $\{X: P(X) = 1\}$ form a lower set), which is I think what you mean. So, here is the algorithm to find a member of the lower set:
a) Test $P(\emptyset)$. If 0, then stop.
b) Test $P(\{n\})$.
b.i) If 0, then recurse on $2^{[n-1]}$ (OK, since no set containing $n$ can be in the lower set).
b.ii) If 1, then there exists a member of the lower set in the sublattice $\{X: n \in X\}$. This sublattice is isomorphic to $2^{[n-1]}$ so once again we can recurse. More precisely, we can run the algorithm for $2^{[n-1]}$, but when the algorithm asks to evaluate $P(Y)$, we evaluate $P(X)$ where $X = Y \cup \{n\}$.
So in each step we recurse on a sublattice which is half the size of original one. Overall, we need to evaluate $P$ at most $2n$ times (in fact you can implement the algorithm to evaluate the predicate $n+1$ times as Yoshio points out, since you only need to check $\emptyset$ once).A group of lawmakers in Maryland has introduced a bill that would deny state support to the National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Ft. Meade, Md., which might see electricity and water supplies cut to the intelligence nerve center.
Eight Republicans from the 141-member Maryland House of Delegates introduced the legislation that would deny the NSA “material support, participation or assistance in any form” from the state or companies with state contracts
In practice, this might mean that NSA facilities would be deprived of water and electricity, prevent state universities from partnering with the NSA in research projects, and ban NSA-derived evidence in state courts.
Any officials working for the state that ignored these sanctions would be fired, while local government departments that refused to comply would lose state funds and companies doing business with the NSA would be barred from state contracts.
The bill was filed as emergency legislation and requires the support of three-fifths of delegates to become law. It has been referred to the chamber’s judiciary committee for further work and consideration.
The bill is the latest measure in a campaign spearheaded by the Tenth Amendment Center, which along with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee launched by the OffNow coalition last year is attempting to cut off water to the NSA’s brand new Utah data center.
The Tenth Amendment states the US Constitution’s principle of federalism that powers not granted to the federal government by the Constitution, nor prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States or the people of the United States.
Lawmakers in Arizona, California, Tennessee and Washington have filed bills based on legislation models from the Tenth Amendment Center.
A bipartisan cohort of lawmakers in California introduced legislation last month that prohibits their state from providing “material support” to the NSA. If it becomes law it would have the same effect as the law proposed in Maryland.
While universities operating research programs with the spy agency might be affected, the bill is largely symbolic as the NSA does not have any large facilities in California.
Ted Lieu, the bill’s Democratic co-author, said in a statement that the NSA’s surveillance capabilities represent a “clear and present danger” to the liberties of US citizens.
“I agree with the NSA that the world is a dangerous place. That is why our founders enacted the Bill of Rights. They understood the grave dangers of an out-of-control federal government,” he said.
A similar bill was also introduced in Arizona in December. Senator Kelli Ward described her bill as a way “to back our neighbors [in Utah] up.” The NSA operates a huge data collection facility in Utah.
The NSA facility in Maryland uses a vast amount of water and electricity. The Washington Post reported in January that the agency signed a contract for water to cool a computer center under construction at its Fort Meade base for nearly $2 million and the Baltimore Sun reported that from 2006 the NSA’s headquarters used as much electricity as the city of Annapolis.
Any federal legislation curbing the NSA’s powers would likely be vetoed by President Barack Obama, who is broadly a supporter of NSA programs; although he has indicted that some reform of the agency is necessary.Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 4 is one of the fastest-selling consoles in the history of video game hardware in general, a great success for the platform-holder. What is interesting is that even Sony itself does not fully understand the reasons behind such massive success. Still, a good news now is that Sony can fulfill demand for the console across the world.
“The 10 million sell through in the first nine months is well beyond what we had hoped for,” said Shuhei Yoshida, the president of Worldwide Studios at Sony Computer Entertainment, in an interview with Eurogamer. “As you know, we have struggled to keep up with demand of PS4 for so many months. It was hard to find and purchase PS4. Now we are able to supply units so in every territory I believe you can find PS4. So we just managed to catch up with demand.”
What is a bit alarming is that Sony does not fully understand the reasons behind PS4’s massive success. It is obvious that the console is available on many markets, it is obvious that at present core gamers prefer it to competing Xbox One from Microsoft, but Sony, at least officially, does not know how to replicate this success going forward.
“I for one am a bit nervous because we do not completely understand what’s happening,” said Mr. Yoshida. “You need to understand why your products are selling well so you can plan for the future, right? It defied the conventional thinking. Lots of people thought the dedicated game hardware might not be needed going forward, but still lots of people are very excited.”
Apparently, the PlayStation 4 platform attracted a lot of gamers who did not own any previous-generation consoles. Therefore, in addition to core gamers, there are a lot of new console gamers as well among the owners of PS4. Keeping in mind rather dull prospects predicted by analysts for the new-generation consoles, it is completely unclear how many gamers could potentially buy PS4 hardware.
“As soon as we see a great sales number, our instinct tells us we should be concerned about future sales, right,” said Mr. Yoshida. “Are we exhausting all the core gamers? If we sell this number of units, there are no more consumers we can sell to. That’s a really terrifying prospect. So we want to understand who are these consumers who we do not necessarily consider core gamers, who are purchasing PS4 and why they are doing it and what they are doing with PS4, so we can create a bit more of a positive future, rather than saying, wow, we have sold to every single core gamer.”
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KitGuru Says: It is rather interesting that Sony does not really understand who buy PlayStation 4 consoles and why at the moment. But will this be a threat for the platform in general? Maybe, if there are too many casual gamers among the current buyers. In fact, it just looks like PlayStation 4 got popular among core console gamers and core PC gamers, which are very similar audiences from many standpoints.Look closely at a swatch of stockinette stitch, and you'll see that the stitches look like rows of little hearts. It's no coincidence -- knitting comes from our hearts as much as our hands, and that shows up in all kinds of ways.
Henry Schmidt found that out firsthand Monday, when Cheri Clark from
arrived with a huge haul of donations sent by crafters from all over the country, who were horrified by
and touched by the compassion he showed the woman accused of leaving him to die. "She's a human being, too," Henry said at the time. "I never like to see a person fall."
Cheri and a few friends had heard about the crash and had decided to put together a care package. When they went public with the project, people reacted immediately. "Portland knitters were crazy generous, and local donations were huge," Cheri says. "But I've received calls and packages from all over the country. Florida, New York, Chicago, California, Washington... "
Helping Henry
In person:
The Naked Sheep Knit Shop will take donations
until Monday, Sept. 30
. Any purchases for Henry are
15 percent off
. He prefers earth tones and has no fiber allergies.
By mail:
The Naked Sheep's mailing address is 2142 N. Killingsworth St., Portland, OR 97217
Online:
A family friend has set up an online account for Henry. Donate at
The gifts were many, Cheri says. "Tons of top-notch yarn," plus a Dreamz interchangeable needle set, double-pointed needles sizes 2-10, books, patterns, knitting accessories and more.
donated baskets, a bag and supplies.
came through with yarn and books. And it just kept -- and continues to keep -- coming.
Henry, for his part, was "blown away." "To a certain extent, I understood the scope of the drive, having heard that people as far away as Florida and Massachusetts were getting involved," he says. "That being said, to unpack those baskets... was to really understand the sympathy people felt for the situation. Those things were
heavy
; I'd never seen so much yarn off the shelf."
Cheri estimates the value of the donations so far tops $1,000. "A lot of what was donated was brand new, and chosen specially with Henry in mind, " she says. "Knitters might be using this as a time to clean out their stash, but [they're] definitely not sending 'what they don't want.' I feel like people are sending their best. It's very touching."
Henry's on the mend, and still trying to process the knitting community's reaction.
"I can't begin to tell you how surprised I was," he says. "All I had to do was mention I was a knitter and all of a sudden you'd think everyone was responding to close family in peril, the reactions were so prompt and heartfelt. I'm just some knitter and all I did was get hit by a car. How in the world do I deserve all this?"
He started knitting in high school, when a friend taught him the knit stitch. Later, in college, another friend helped his interest bloom. "She walked me through my first pair of socks, and from there, I just started knitting like crazy," he says. "Socks really teach you almost everything you need to know, or at least help you prove to yourself that you can figure most things out by that point."
He's since added hats and fingerless gloves to his list of completed projects, and last year he made his first sweater. "It took me way too long to finish," he says, "but I've never felt so accomplished." When he's up to it, he'd like to make himself a new hat. "I also love wearing ties, and I've been eyeballing two skeins that I think would make great wool ties," he says. "We'll see."
As he heals, Cheri continues to collect donations. "We just made the delivery on Monday, and I've received four boxes already (Tuesday) from Washington, California and Florida," she says. "The owner of Alchemy Yarns has a daughter at Lewis & Clark College who became friends with Henry early in their freshman year when they realized they shared a love for knitting. They sent two books and and 18 skeins of amazing yarn in a fun tote bag for Henry."
And Henry's plans for it extend beyond himself. While he'll definitely knit some of the yarn for himself, "I've been really into the idea of paying forward all of the caring and generosity I've received since the accident," he says. "I was planning on trying to teach some friends to knit, and then knitting some soft, warm garments together for the hospital or another willing recipient."
And in that, really, you have the soul of knitting: Tiny hearts in the work; huge ones behind it. Pull out a dictionary and look up "knit." The second definition in mine? "Verb. To become united."
-- Mary MooneyThis summer Telltale Games brought The Wolf Among Us to Android, a game based on the Fables comic book series from Bill Willingham and DC Comics. There was a catch--the game was only available via the Amazon Appstore. It wasn't a Kindle Fire exclusive or anything, but many Android users don't particularly want to deal with the Appstore for content, even if this means missing out on whatever piece of software is currently the Free App of the Day.
The Wolf Among Us comes from the creators of The Walking Dead. It stars Bigby Wolf, the big and bad protagonist whom players can control by clicking on items and navigating conversations. This may not be an action game, but that doesn't mean there won't be violence.
Now that The Wolf Among Us is in the Play Store, it's available to a significantly larger pool of users. The game is an attractively illustrated point-and-click adventure experience consisting of five parts. Players can purchase episodes 2 - 5 inside the app if they find that, after getting to try the first one for free, they like what they see. Each part goes for $4.99 individually, but players can get the full shebang for $14.99.“There is [a lot of] high-level focus on the issue of climate and energy efficiency," Ms Atkinson said at a G20 discussion at a Washington think tank on Wednesday.
“In the G20 – whether it’s Beijing where there are issues of air quality, other countries where there have been extreme weather events or impending water shortages – I think there is a growing understanding of the importance in addressing that.
“The G20 being a political body where leaders can come together is sometimes able to make a breakthrough."
Abbott’s stance questioned
Mr Abbott has pledged to repeal Labor’s carbon tax. After winning last year’s federal election, he closed down the Department of Climate Change and subsumed its operations into the Department of Environment, to remove “duplication with costly bureaucracies".
“World leaders are lining up to question Tony Abbott’s climate policy stance. I doubt Joe Hockey even had climate change as an agenda item at the G20 meeting, but each day Tony Abbott is being reminded that his position is taking Australia backwards while the rest of the world is moving forwards," Labor’s climate spokesman Mark Butler said.
The government remains committed to meeting Australia’s goal of cutting emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, through paying big polluters billions of dollars to reduce their pollution.
However, European countries and Mr Obama are perceived to be more committed to addressing climate change. The US President’s proposed 2015 budget announced this week offered more than $US1 billion ($1.1 billion) in new funding for technologies to help communities prepare for climate change.
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Countries such as Germany, led by conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel, have privately expressed disappointment in Australia unwinding its carbon price.
Sources in Washington say that when foreign governments and stakeholders have broached climate change in G20 lead-up meetings, Australian government officials have told them the issue is not a priority and suggested that other topics be discussed.
Focus on economic growth
Mr Abbott said at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January that the focus of the G20 would be to boost economic growth through freer trade, less regulation, infrastructure investment, better banking regulation and more effective tax systems.
“We do not want to clutter up the G20 agenda with every worthy and important cause because if we do, we will squander the opportunity to make a difference in the vital area of economic growth," Mr Abbott said.
Finance ministers and central bank governors who met in Sydney last month agreed to develop policies with the aim to lift world gross domestic product by more than 2 per cent above the current trajectory over the next five years.
Ms Atkinson strongly endorsed these agenda items, before adding that climate change was an important issue for world leaders.
She made the comments in a discussion at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, alongside Australia’s G20 sherpa, Heather Smith.
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Ms Smith did not mention climate change during her presentation and instead stuck to the Australian government’s script.
“The key thing that is on our mind is the concern about the pace of global growth... and how do we increase growth potential," Ms Smith said.
Dedicated climate change section
Last year’s G20 leaders’ declaration signed in St Petersburg, Russia, dedicated a section to climate change.
“We underscore our commitment to work together to address climate change and environment protection, which is a global problem that requires a global solution," the statement said.
Mr Abbott may come under pressure from other countries to mention climate change in the official communique when he hosts world leaders, including Mr Obama, on November 15-16 in Brisbane.
Australia has listed energy as a priority agenda item but has not mentioned climate change on its G20 website, preferring to focus on well-functioning energy markets, reliable supply to households and business and “energy efficiency".
Colin Bradford, a G20 expert and senior fellow at Washington think tank the Brookings Institution, said Mr Abbott may be able to “fudge" the climate change issue by incorporating it into the energy discussion.
“The most damaging issue for Abbott would be trying to put this issue aside and ignore it," Mr Bradford said.It may sound odd that a couple of investors could swoop in and buy a private San Francisco street in an exclusive development for $90,000.
Presidio Terrace, an affluent street in the northwest of the city, is now owned by Tina Lam and Michael Cheng, who snapped up the private road at an auction this week.
Lam and Cheng don’t actually own the houses on the street, just the road and common areas. But the canny pair can now charge the street’s well-heeled residents for access and parking on a piece of prestigious property they assumed they owned.
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The most unusual part is that the City of San Francisco sold the street in an online auction to recoup a paltry $944 unpaid tax bill, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.
But – in the US at least – that’s just how it goes in real estate law.
The answer goes back centuries and is a very American approach to an age-old question of the role of government
“There’s a variety of ways that property law is odder than what you might think,” says Andres Sawicki, associate professor at the University of Miami School of Law.
But how could the common areas in a street where homes sell for millions go for a relatively small sum? More to the point, how could it be sold at all?
The answer goes back centuries and is a very American approach to an age-old question of the role of government.
Cobblestones for sale
Two decades before Americans dreamed up an idea for independence from Britain, Joseph Basset walked into city hall in New Haven, Connecticut, with what might sound like a terrible idea for the city.
Basset, in 1751, gave his city a fairly worthless strip of old highway he was about to inherit from his father. In exchange, the city awarded him a main thoroughfare in the middle of town.
The exchange was common in colonial America, where cash-strapped cities often didn’t have the money to maintain infrastructure. So they sold off or traded streets for other land to developers who could improve the roads and make money by charging residents to use them.
The trade in streets has been prevalent in the US for a long time - Molly Brady
“There’s always been a very vibrant trade in streets,” says Molly Brady, associate professor of law at the University of Virginia. “It has actually been quite prevalent in the US for a long time.”
Brady came across the Basset example while researching another recent sale of a public street. New Haven, a city of 130,000 overburdened with debt and looking to cut expenses, sold sections of two streets in the city centre of town to Yale University for $3m in June, hoping it would better maintain infrastructure than the city.
With few known examples elsewhere in the world, this appears to be a very American solution to maintaining public spaces. And, it’s a much more common occurrence than you’d think.
In June the city of Houston, Texas, sold $2m in streets to private companies to help with its budget deficit. Atlanta, Georgia, also plans to hand public streets to a developer. In response to new lenient state gun laws, business owners in a part of Kansas City, Missouri, have proposed making streets private so that they could forbid customers from carrying guns. And President Trump has proposed taking an even bigger step: privatising entire roads, highways, and bridges.
The practice is likely to become even more common, as cash-strapped towns look for ways to raise money
The practice is likely to become more common as cash-strapped towns, especially in America’s economically challenged heartland, look for ways to raise money. The buyers typically don’t have to follow the same regulations as government agencies, meaning they can cut corners, like on street lights and the thickness of asphalt, Brady says.
They can also get creative on how to profit from their investment. In San Francisco, the new owners of Presidio Terrace have proposed selling the property to residents. If that doesn’t work, they’ll be able to charge them or others to park on the street.
In a city where the median home goes for $1.5m and parking is at a premium, Brady says that’s not uncommon. Owners of a street are usually restricted from developing the land and must make at least minimum upkeep. The “nuisance doctrine” in US law means owners of a privately owned street must avoid harming others by letting it degrade to the point where nearby property values decline.
And while the residents and owners of Presidio Terrace have asked the City of San Francisco to void the sale, it’s unlikely the deal will get reversed, says Sawicki.
How did it happen? The city had been sending tax notices since the 1980s to the address it had on file, but residents say they never saw any bills, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. That’s all the city is obliged to do. Under US law it’s up to the property owners to inform the city where bills should be sent and to make sure they’re paid.
Roads and kingdoms
It’s an unusual niche, yet investors are increasingly snapping up roads and sometimes even entire towns as long-term investments, says Andrew Feldman, a property broker with Triplemint in New York City.
In 2012, the self-styled tiniest town in the US, Buford, Wyoming, sold to a Vietnamese investor for $900,000. A couple in 2010 bought the tiny town of Wauconda, in Washington State, for $360,000. And a company spent $5m for the town of Nipton, California, in the hopes of turning it into a centre for marijuana production.
An investment in an entire city or just individual streets typically pays off if there’s a clear way to cash in, Feldman says. For example, they could build a factory that will sit at the end of the roadway they just purchased, or simply set up a toll booth and charge anyone who might live on the other end.
“There is an opportunity out there when dealing with a town that has made bad decisions,” Feldman says.
“There are towns across the US ready for people to come in and bring money and buy up streets, or even the entire city.”
To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.I'm kind of a fan of Seapony Lyra. ^^
Really, no matter what incarnation of the Lyra character I can think of, I think there seems to be an overlying theme of Lyra being an outsider, for various reasons. And sometimes that reason is that she's a seapony who is getting used to landpony society.
This picture is supposed to be their first meeting. Lyra hasn't had a very fun day, and somehow ended up being violently thrown against a beach by a storm. Hours later she has lost all hope, and then Bonbon appears, quite shocked to find a seapony on the beach since only moments ago she had thought seaponys were just a myth. But being a kind hearted pony, Bonbon's first instinct is to try to save Lyra's life.They meet every weekday morning at 6:15 at the corner of Clark and Wellington. Snow, rain, sleet, ice, blustery wind or extreme heat... it doesn't matter. A quick greeting is followed by an 8.5-mile run downtown to work.
One is carrying her second baby. The other carries the hopes of a history-making performance at the Rio Olympics in August.
Heather Prekop, a former competitive marathoner due in mid-June, sometimes wonders: Do the people jogging alongside her friend Chirine Njeim realize they're getting passed by an Olympian?
Safe to say most do not. Njeim, 31, has made three Olympic ski teams for her native Lebanon but has not exactly reeled in the magazine covers or endorsements.
Gero Breloer / AP Chirine Njeim after finishing the second run of the Women's giant slalom at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010. Chirine Njeim after finishing the second run of the Women's giant slalom at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010. (Gero Breloer / AP) (Gero Breloer / AP)
Njeim ("n-JAME"; the n is pronounced subtly) is genuinely excited she will receive three free pairs of running shoes this spring as a member of the Fleet Feet Sports racing team.
"She's humble," Prekop said, "so I will brag for her. When she sees that she is good at something, she takes it all the way."
Indeed, Njeim began skiing at age 3 near the family home in Beirut.
"I had no fear," she said. "Head down, try to go as fast as possible."
She trained in France and then moved to Salt Lake City, studying and competing at the Rowmark Ski Academy and University of Utah. She made her first Olympic team at 16, carrying the flag at the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City as one of two Lebanese athletes.
Clive Brunskill / Getty Images Chirine Njeim competes in the women's giant slalom during the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games on Feb. 22, 2002. Chirine Njeim competes in the women's giant slalom during the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games on Feb. 22, 2002. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images) (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
She completed the slalom (finishing 36th) and giant slalom (45th) despite having overcome ACL surgery, a bout with anorexia that reduced her 5-foot-1 frame to 86 pounds and the extreme nerves that accompany the presence of a mechanical arm-camera at the starting gate.
"I could not focus," she recalled. "Still, it was the best experience."
She experienced the Olympics twice more, racing in Torino in 2006 and Vancouver in 2010 with a top finish of 34th in the downhill.
Her life took a turn in 2009 thanks to the whims of air travel. She was returning to school, a trip that required flying from Beirut to Dubai to Atlanta to Salt Lake City, when a Delta rep in Dubai told her there were no available seats.
A handsome Lebanese-American man named Ronny Kamal consoled her as he also hoped for a standby seat. His name was called and then she joined him in first class, seats 3C and 3D, for the 16-hour trip.
"It was the best first date — dinner, drinks, a movie," he recalled. "We woke up next to each other and it wasn't awkward."
Njeim and Kamal, a Toledo, Ohio, native who earned an MBA from Ohio State and works in management consulting, married in 2012 and lived in the West Loop before moving to Lake View.
By then Njeim had begun jogging nearly every day, often starting at 5:30 a.m., to stay in shape and explore Chicago's neighborhoods.
She made friends in the running community, offering a wave and a smile beyond the three languages she speaks: English, French and Levantine Arabic. "Sometimes in the same sentence," she joked.
They entered the 2012 Chicago Marathon, and Njeim ran it in 3 hours, 7 minutes, finishing 120th among women.
"That's ridiculous for someone who just picked it up," Kamal marveled.
Turns out that all the biking she did in the hills of Lebanon to strengthen her quads for ski racing also boosted her cardio. Njeim improved to 3:05.4 in the 2013 Chicago Marathon and 3:03.53 the following fall.
Inspired by friends who exclaimed, "Break the 3!" she boosted her training, following tempo (endurance) and speed workouts designed by Prekop, her current running partner.
Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune Chirine Njeim, right, runs down Michigan Avenue in a training session Monday, Feb. 15, 2016, with friend Heather Prekop. Chirine Njeim, right, runs down Michigan Avenue in a training session Monday, Feb. 15, 2016, with friend Heather Prekop. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune) (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune)
Prekop, who fell about two minutes shy of making the 2012 U.S. Olympic trials with a time of 2:48.1, would work out Njeim at a track by the Lakefront Trail, north of Montrose by Lake Shore Drive.
"When she is training," Prekop said, "she is a machine."
Njeim's breakthrough came in October at the Chicago Marathon with a blistering 2:46.41, 29th among women and 312th overall.
Her next goal was to run a sub-2:45 to virtually lock up a spot on the |
Tuffley is a member of the Corporate Advisory Panel of the World Forum for Natural Capital[Full bio] and is identified as belonging to the “wider project team” of co-founders Polman and Malloch’s Business and Sustainable Development Commission. [Source: BETTER BUSINESS BETTER WORLD, the report authored by the Business & Sustainable Development Commission, January 16, 2017]
The B Team executive committee [1] is comprised of the executive chair (Jochen Zeitz), three senior partners (Jean Oelwang, Joanna Rees and Keith Tuffley) and Managing Director Rajiv Joshi, who “oversees the organisation’s strategy”.
Where White Polar Bears Meet White Helmets
“Ultimately, this is a cultural challenge—linked to our own culture and to wider cultural dynamics. In the good old days, we saw NGOs as leading indicators of change, but today it’s the Millennials, whatever NGOs or networks they may belong to.” — The Stretch Agenda, Breakthrough in the Boardroom [Source]
“Mikael Fraenkel, Rajiv Joshi, Arianna Huffington, Shalini Mehan, Felix Stellmaszek during DLD15 FOCUS Nightcap at Steigenberger Grandhotel Belvédère in Davos on January 21, 2015.” Foto: Hubert Burda Media / BRAUER PHOTOS. Flickr
From the aforementioned Better Business Better World report:
“Rajiv Joshi is a Managing Director and has been with the organisation since its inception. He previously served as Executive Director for the Global Call to Action Against Poverty. Joshi served six years as a Trustee of Oxfam and as a Board Member of CIVICUS. He is currently on the Board of the Centre for Scottish Public Policy, and has served on the Equality and Human Rights Commission and as chair of the Scottish Youth Parliament.”
Joshi has an extensive background pushing forward both the UN Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs/”Global Goals”). He has been groomed by the United Nations, Skoll (2017 Skoll Awardees Convening, 2017 Skoll World Forum) and Branson. From the Skoll website:
“During this time he led global action towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), mobilizing over 173 million people as part of the ‘Stand Up: Take Action’ initiative. He also supported ‘The Elders’ with their Every Human Has Rights campaign and helped spearhead citizen participation in creating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as co-founder of ‘The World We Want 2015’ platform and founding Chair of the Post-2015 Policy and Strategy Group.”
Let this section serve as an introduction to where 21st century environmentalism (which today is, in reality, anthropocentrism) meets the 21st humanitarian industrial complex. [Further reading: The Humanitarian Industrial Complex School of Thought | A Fish Analogy] Where white polar bears (the emotive veneer for economic growth, land and resource theft, privatization, the financialization of nature) meet white helmets (the emotive veneer for economic growth, land and resource theft, privatization, war). This is the intersection where today’s anointed “thought leaders” cut their teeth. Akin to the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, today’s so-called environmental leaders and human rights activists are not (yet) genetically engineered, rather they are socially engineered experiments decanted from Harvard, Yale, Rockwood Leadership Institute and other institutions of indoctrination that serve and expand the global hegemony. One could theorize that today’s 21st century activism is a new process of mimesis – the millennial having assimilated into spectacle – far removed from both nature and reality.
“TEDxSkoll on Twitter: #TEDxSkoll TALK: ‘White Helmets @SyriaCivilDef: The Power of Trained Volunteers'”[Source]
Indicative of the accolades and tutelage showered down upon the aforementioned millennial Joshi, today’s thought-leaders are groomed, molded, and managed – specifically to manufacture and mobilise/engineer world views as desired and designed by the world’s most powerful hegemons. Ego, celebrity fetish, access, wealth, luxury are all Western desires that are fostered and cultivated in today’s assembly-line “activists”. Together, these desires, when nurtured, are an opiate that lures, beguiles and hooks the freshly-engineered plastic “activists” that today flourish like cells within the walls of non-profit industrial complex. The complex is the vehicle for the continued expansion of capital markets (infinite growth) and the protection of existing power structures. Today we witness the world’s richest 300 people having more monetary wealth than the bottom 3 billion people. The same ruling elite invest trillions into the NPIC to ensure this existing power structure not only stays firmly intact, but expands. This is not “philanthropy”, a word created by and utilized by the rich to make theft of labour and commons not just acceptable, but illustrious. Rather, this is the best investment money can buy.
The aforementioned Stand Up and Take Action is an annual global mobilization coordinated by the United Nations Millennium Campaign and the Global Call to Action against Poverty. In addition, the Elders is another Richard Branson NGO, a person who has his tentacles wrapped around an innumerable amount of NGO endeavors owned and sanctioned by the global elite. “The World We Want” is a United Nations SDG campaign.
“Most funding and direction come from the wealthy nations. Often the donors form a conglomerate creating mutual responsibility and considerable ambiguity. CIVICUS, a partnership to promote “civil society” worldwide, is funded by, among others, American Express Foundation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Canadian International Development Agency, Ford Foundation, Harvard University, Oxfam, and United Nations Development Programme.” — Joan Roelofs [Source]
As the grooming is underscored by the collaboration of mentors and mentees in private and public endeavors, it is of course no surprise to find Rajiv Joshi in the company of Avaaz/Purpose co-founder Jeremy Heimens in a We Mean Business video series (since We Mean Business is an NGO founded by The B Team registered to Heiman’s Purpose). However, the following excerpt from the book The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough demonstrates the unity and alliances of multifarious NGOs that prosper in a highly centralised manner outside of the public spectrum (see excerpt below). Public perception is critical for the brand. Thus, NGOs that serve on the forefront of the manufactured movements make a concerted effort to not publicly align with NGOs openly chasing capital and economic growth. The reality is this: the cherry-picked and highly groomed “leaders” of the world’s most influential NGOs, the ones with the faux radical veneer such as 350.org, Avaaz and Greenpeace, run in the same circles as the openly capitalist NGO models such as the B Team – which run/operate in the same circles as the International Crisis Group. NGOs that publicly promote and accelerate market-based solutions that will only further perpetuate our multiple ecological crises. NGOs that perpetuate the myth of “humanitarian interventions” and spontaneous popular revolutions.
Above: Screenshot from The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough By Alex Evans
Here we witness the social-organizational psychology experts grooming tomorrows “new champions“, “global shapers” and “new power” “thought-leaders” as determined and ultimately dictated by the world’s most powerful elites. In the 21st century, psychology is not only an extremely important tool in influencing public opinion, it is now considered to be perhaps the single and most important tool. The necessity to comprehend the mental processes, desires and social patterns of the populace at large cannot be understated. Working in lock-step with controlled media and the best marketing executives foundation money can buy, today’s faux activists, thought-leaders and media lapdogs are the very mechanisms of modern-day perception.
Consider the following claim by Avaaz that “BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera reported that at one point 40% of the images that were used in their coverage of the Arab Spring were generated by the Avaaz-supported citizens’ journalist network”. (See below screenshot.)
If this claim is verifiable, it is indisputable truth that the establishment is able to use its resources to maneuver, influence and control untold portions of protests. Thus, it is critical to question what is a legitimate protest versus what is a protest orchestrated by outside influences.
“We’ve trained them. That translates into diplomatic leverage.”— Supremacy by Stealth, Robert Kaplan
As an example of the opacity prevalent in these various movements, the race to implement the financialization of nature (payments for ecosystem services) under the guise of UN’s “Global Goals” is nothing less than frenetic. Yet for all of the ongoing activity, this corporate triumph is being conducted in the background, with zero dissent, due to the fact that at the forefront of the manufactured movements – there is complete silence. Zero opposition. The non-profit industrial complex being the wall that protects and insulates the coup d’état of nature itself.
“Surveying this new landscape, it is clear that the true role of the thought leader is to serve as the organic intellectual of the one percent—the figure who, as Gramsci put it, gives the emerging class “an awareness of its own function” in society. The purpose of the thought leader is to mirror, systematize, and popularize the delusions of the superrich: that they have earned their fortunes on merit, that social protections need to be further eviscerated to make everyone more flexible for “the future,” and that local attachments and alternative ways of living should be replaced by an aspirational consumerism.” — The Rise of the Thought Leader – How the superrich have funded a new class of intellectual, June 28, 2017
[Further reading: From Stable to Star – The Making of North American “Climate Heroes”]
Establishing New Norms: Future Stewards, Pathfinders and Deep Practitioners
Perhaps there is no better snapshot of the congregation of all this grooming of the next generation of NGO leaders than the 2015 Avaaz retreat. This retreat finds The B Teams Joshi in the company of his peers and “movement builders”. Those identified in the aforementioned book excerpt are as follows:
Robert Gass: co-founder of the Rockwood Leadership Institute, former President of ARC International, a global consulting and training company specializing in transformational change with Fortune 500 companies. Robert has a doctorate in Clinical Psychology and Organizational Development from Harvard University. [2]
Judith Ansara: A former facilitator for the Rockwood Leadership Institute’s The Art of Leadership trainings, she has facilitated organizations and leaders Avaaz, Witness and UNICEF. She has taught Transpersonal Psychology at Naropa University and Strategic Communications at the University of Massachusetts. [3]
Maura Bairley: Leads the Organizational Development Team for Move to End Violence, a project of the NoVo Foundation. [4]
Rachel Bagby: A Stanford Law Degree in Social Change and leadership consultant whose clients include leaders from organizations such as Google, the Sierra Club and Rockwood Institute. [Source]
Radhika Balakrishnan: Faculty director of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University. Past experience includes working for the Ford Foundation as a program officer in the Asian Regional Program.
Ian Bassin: Former Associate Counsel to President Obama, General Counsel and Campaign Director at Avaaz, Current director of United to Protect Democracy [“United to Protect Democracy, which draws its name from a line in President Barack Obama’s farewell address that urged his supporters to pick up where he was leaving off…] Signatory to the Economic Security Project. [5]
Dalia Hashad: Attorney and a campaign director at the global advocacy group Avaaz.org. Prior to Avaaz Hashad worked for Amnesty International UK (Director, USA Program) and ACLU American Civil Liberties Union.
Jamie Henn: 350.org co-founder, Strategy and Communications Director.
“I thought I’d never live to see the day when you could strap on a rocket pack and fly through the air… but then I met Avaaz. They supercharge work across the world, sending campaigns and movements soaring to new heights.” — Jamie Henn, co-founder, 350.org, Avaaz website
Paul Hilder: Avaaz co-founder Paul Hilder is the former Vice President of Global Campaigns for Change.org, a for-profit social venture started in 2006. He is co-founder and Chief International Officer of Crowdpac, “the platform for new politics”. He cofounded 38 Degrees and openDemocracy.net. He played leadership roles at Oxfam, Purpose, Here Now (Purpose) and the Young Foundation. His background in the NPIC and the Middle East is extensive. [6]
Joanna Kerr: Executive Director of Greenpeace Canada. Former Chief Executive of ActionAid International, Policy Director at Oxfam Canada. [7]
Adauto Modesto Junior: Brazil Student Ambassador, Lemann Fellow, at David Rockefeller Center for Latin America Studies, Brazil (Harvard). Served on the Civil Cabinet of the Presidency of the Republic and the Ministry of Finance in Brazil. [Source]
Luis Morago: Campaign Director at Avaaz (Spain). Former head of Oxfam International’s EU Office (2007: “EU institutions are in a unique position to promote the R2P principle and give leadership,” Source] Previously worked on “the concept of rights-based approach in an emergency context” with British Red Cross Society and ActionAid (Research and Programme Learning Officer). [Source]
Heather Reddick: Avaaz Chief Operating Officer, Avaaz. Former Director of Finance & Administration at Let’s Get Ready, International Operations Director at Students for a Free Tibet, and National Operations Director at League of Young Voters. (Avaaz salary in 2014: USD$148,323.00 & USD$5,736.00 misc. expenses)
Carolina Rossini: Coordinates the Brazilian Open Educational Resources Project: Challenges and Perspectives funded by the Open Society institute. [Source] [Source]
Esra’a Al-Shafei: Bahraini civil rights activist, founder and executive director of Mideast Youth and its related projects, including FreeKareem.org and CrowdVoice.org. Featured at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative University. Featured in Forbes’ 2014 “30 Under 30” list of social entrepreneurs making an impact in the world. Listed by the World Economic Forum as one of “15 Women Changing the World in 2015.”[8]
Theo Sowa: An independent advisor and consultant, specialising in international social development. An international consultant for NGOs such as as UNICEF, The Stephen Lewis Foundation, The African Union, Department for International Development, and UNDP. Awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in June 2010. [Source]
Tristram Stuart: English author and campaigner.
Farhana Yamin: International lawyer specializing in global climate change law and policy. Founder and CEO of Track 0, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Visiting Professor at University College London. [Source]
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For further proof of strategic and highly organized grooming, consider the We Mean Business, Leaders’ Quest and Mission 2020 (under the direction of The B Teams Christiana Figueres) document Future Stewards – The Case for Partnership and Investment 2016-2020. The document outlines the desired behavioural change strategy to implement the “new economy”. The term “Deep Practitioners” is applied to a cohort of “30 senior leaders of influential private, public and civil society organizations, who are willing to collaborate across sectors and change their own patterns of behavior.” The budget thus far to train “future stewards” is 10 million. In the sample list of participants from the document outlining the “Pathfinders and Deep Practitioners Programs from 2017, we find recognizable names such as Jamie Henn, Strategy and Communications Director, 350.org, former co-director of Greenpeace International’s Global Climate and Energy Program and corporate pet Tzeporah Berman, Grant Advisor, New Venture Fund and Rajiv Joshi, Managing Director of The B Team. As the machine works to churn out the next generation of leaders more beholden to the system than their predecessors yet with better and increased obfuscation, the following quote from the document best summarizes the goals and aspirations of gatherings such as the Avaaz retreats: “Global Influencers will create public and private opportunities for influential leaders to join the collective movement. Committed leaders will increase pressure on their peers to engage – establishing a new norm.”
Here, in these circles, there is no conscious belief in American imperialism, but only American “exceptionalism”, a description that is beyond debate and unquestionable in mainstream circles. Trees, whales and bees no longer exist except as a means of achieving sought metrics. All/any remaining anti-war sentiment having been replaced with the pathological cheerleading of “coloured revolutions”, exporting “American democracy” and “greening” the military. The NPIC is the vehicle of “transformational change” which can only be honestly described as that which is designed, sought and financed by the world’s most powerful elite. The ideologies underpinning the dream of “ethical globalization” (a term utilized by the group Res Publica), a globalized “deliberative democracy” has been the said driving force of Avaaz co-founders since their founding of Res Publica. Here, in these circles is where the myth of American exceptionalism is perpetuated. This faux belief, is the tie that binds. Here, in these circles, the power of conformity takes hold.
Nowhere is the role of Avaaz more apparent in the advancement of the Nations Sustainable Development Goals (the financialization of nature, global in scale) than in the following paragraph written by Patel in 2014:
“The vision put forward by the UN High-Level Panel on the Post- 2015 Development Agenda is a beautiful one, and one I believe the vast majority of people share. But now comes the hard part: getting our governments to get behind this plan, first rhetorically, and then with actual budgets and political will. And to stay behind it until the job is done. To make that happen, we need one of the largest, most comprehensive and sustained political campaigns the world has ever seen. One that captures public imagination like never before. It won’t be a single campaign or coalition that does this, but a vibrant network of governments, NGOs, businesses and individuals that come together around this shared vision and coalesce into fit-for-purpose groups as needed, to seize opportunities and meet threats. These groups will need to use every tactic in the book, because that’s what entrenched interests who oppose progress will be doing. The threads that tie all this together likely won’t be a single brand, but memes and narratives that define and embody the zeitgeist. One popular meme, often offered tongue-in-check, is the idea of saving the world. It’s a narrative deep in our psyche, the theme of many of our most popular epics. But if ever there were a time to use this meme and its power in all seriousness, it’s now. It’s time for a movement to save the world.” — p. 17, Ricken Patel, Global Development Goals, Partnerships for Progress, 2014
Act Two
“Establishing “heroes” and “villains” adds a moral element that will advance advocacy efforts.” — “Mobilizing Climate Action, To Paris and Beyond” retreat, March 4–6, 2015, New York
Here it is critical to highlight the “Mobilizing Climate Action, To Paris and Beyond” retreat held March 4–6, 2015, in Tarrytown, New York. As it is here that the hierarchy is laid bare and cannot be contested. The organizer of the retreat was the United Nations [9] with the retreat itself being financially facilitated by foundations (in this instance, the Clarmondial Foundation and The Stanley Foundation). The congregation consists of numerous participants that all play a vital role: corporate financiers that rule the corridors of power by way of their purse strings, public relations and media, and the institutions and NGOs that reside at the helm of the socially influential non-profit industrial complex: the United Nations, World Bank, Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, We Mean Business (represented by co-founder Callum Grieve [10]), 350.org (represented by co-founder Jamie Henn) Upworthy (co-founded by Avaaz co-founder Eli Pariser), Avaaz, Here Now (Purpose, sister for-profit arm of Avaaz) World Economic Forum, GCCA (TckTckTck), World Business Council for Sustainable Development (chaired by Unilever CEO Paul Polman), Greenpeace, Unilever, and The Climate Reality Project (founded by Al Gore, co-founder of Generation Investment).
Mobilizing Climate Action, To Paris and Beyond retreat participants:
Emad Adly, General Coordinator, Arab Network for Environment and Development
Susan Alzner, Officer in Charge, Non-Governmental Liaison Service, United Nations
Robert Bisset, Senior Communications Officer, Climate Change, The World Bank
Roberto Borrero, UN Programs Coordinator, International Indian Treaty Council
Karl Burkart, Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation
Patty Carnevale, Senior Account Strategist, Upworthy
Joel Finkelstein, Communications, Climate Advisers
Nick Gaylord, Data Scientist, Idibon
Rhys Gerholdt, Communications Manager, Climate and Energy Program, World Resources Institute
Callum Grieve, Director of Communications, We Mean Business
Michael Hanley, Editorial Director, World Economic Forum
Fletcher Harper, Executive Director, GreenFaith
Jamie Henn, Strategy and Communications Director and Co-Founder, 350.org
Antonio Hill, Executive Director, Global Call for Climate Action
Wael Hmaidan, Executive Director, Climate Action Network
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, College of the Marshall Islands, Co-Founder, Jo-Jikum
Ruth Jones, Head of Leadership Programme, The Climate Group
Iain Keith, Campaign Director, Avaaz.org
Amy Keller, Strategic Partnerships, Live Earth
Ann Kobia, Advocacy Team, Secretariat, Pan African Climate Justice Alliance
Kate Lappin, Regional Coordinator, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development
Carina Larsfälten, Managing Director, Global Policy and Strategic Partnerships, World Business Council for Sustainable Development
Patricia Lerner, Senior Political Advisor, Greenpeace International
Marie L’Hostis, Global Hub Coordinator, action/2015
Thomas Lingard, Climate Advocacy and Sustainability Strategy Director, Unilever
Tracy Mann, Consultant, MG Limited, and Project Director, Climate Wise Women
Michael Mathres, Director, World Climate Ltd.
Nelson Muffuh, Head of Outreach and Stakeholder Engagement, Post-2015 Development Planning Team, United Nations
Margaret Novicki, Chief, Communications Campaigns Service, Department of Public Information, United Nations
Nicholas Nuttall, Coordinator, Communications and Outreach, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Jonathan Rich, President, JCR Communications
Mila Rosenthal, Director of Communications, Bureau of External Relations and Advocacy, United Nations Development Programme
Naysán Sahba, Director of the Division of Communications and Public Information, Office of the Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme
, Office of the Executive Director, Peter Sargent, Campaigns Director, The Climate Reality Project
Dan Shepard, Information Officer, Development Section, Department of Public Information, United Nations
Robert Skinner, Executive Director, New York Office Operations and UN Relations, United Nations Foundation
Sean Southey, Chief Executive Officer, PCI Media Impact
João Talocchi, Campaign Director, Here Now
Denise Young, Head of Communications, International Council for Science
Stanley Foundation Staff [10]
Par for the course, the report includes the standard disclaimer: “Affiliations are listed for identification purposes only. Participants attended as individuals rather than as representatives of their governments or organizations.” This rhetoric is standard across most (if not all) boards that serve non-profit industrial complex. It is best understood as protectionist rhetoric. In reality, participants are absolutely representative of their governments or organizations. Otherwise, they would not have been chosen for, nor would they retain, these lucrative positions.
The purpose of this retreat was preparations for COP21, Paris. 2015 was chosen by the elites as the year to formally implement the necessary policies that would accelerate growth and create new markets. This will be achieved via the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Global Goals) under the guise of environmental protection and poverty eradication. From the report: “Progress on climate change negotiations will take place within the context of broader efforts to establish a sustainable development agenda that addresses the differentiated needs of all countries and provides adequate financing for development projects that will enable growth without negatively impacting the environment and humanity. Therefore, efforts to address climate change will be enhanced by integrating them with the post-2015 development agenda also being negotiated this year.” [Source]
“The retreat will bring together communications and advocacy leaders to discuss how best to communicate about and inspire climate action as an accelerator of sustainable development in the context of the post-2015 agenda.” — Mobilizing Climate Action: To Paris and Beyond, Stanley Foundation Website
The “global goals” of the elites requires approx. 90 trillion dollars (90 trillion between now and 2030 that is required for planned mega-infrastructure projects, which is up from initial estimates of $60-70 trillion as of 2015). The Ceres (partner of the “We Mean Business” project, as well as a partner and advisor of the 350.org divestment scheme) “Clean Trillion” campaign “encourages investors, companies and policymakers to invest an additional $1 trillion per year globally in low-carbon energy alone.” The development projects are contingent on furthering extractive industries (all of which are dependent on fossil fuels from cradle to grave). The most important items to note here are the following:
1) the “global goal” to unleash developments projects that “enable growth without negatively impacting the environment and humanity” is a proven and irrefutable oxymoron, and
2) most critically, the main pillar of the “new economy (“global goals”) is the financialization of nature. That is, privatizing and assigning monetary value to all services on the planet that nature provides. Make no mistake, the financialization of nature is the unspoken, yet absolute key goal of the United Nations (in servitude the oligarchy) that today is being implemented behind closed doors.
“Paris is not the end point. It’s a launching pad”, said Robert C Orr, principal policy advisor to the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.” — Paris Meet will be a Launching Pad: UN official, March 8, 2015 “Nick Henry, CEO of Climate Action, said: “Climate change not only presents the single largest threat to mankind, it also creates the greatest economic opportunity since the industrial revolution. ” — Businesses and Investors Pioneering the Green Economy Highlight Multi-trillion Dollar Opportunity in Tackling Climate Change, December 7, 2015
The emphasis at the retreat was the building of societal consensus for the Paris outcome by establishing new climate “leaders” and “subgroups”, the incorporating of “storytelling”, and the further targeting of youth, as identified in the highlights:
“Climate change messaging should be reframed and rebranded. Messages of despair ought to be transformed into scenarios for hope and opportunity, particularly in the context of sustainable development.” “Increasing mobilization and amplification are critical leading up to COP21. This will include new media strategies as well as outreach to new audiences and advocates.” “Identifying leaders of all kinds in their respective spheres of influence will heighten awareness for newly acknowledged subgroups of climate change actors as well as political leaders; storytelling will incorporate a personal, emotional element of climate change that has been missing from the narrative.” “It is widely agreed that engaging youth is of central importance to encourage future constructive climate action—for the youth of today are the decision makers of tomorrow.”
For anyone who believes local grassroots groups are not prone to be influenced, led or even manipulated by international organizations, the following “broader approach” highlighted in the report demonstrates otherwise: participants acknowledged that the agreed upon broader approach “can then be tailored at the local level so that the varied campaigns are connected”.
To further the continuous targeting of youth, the retreat participants identified key targets “to deepen the pool of activists by mobilizing leaders across the world in their respective spheres of influence and reaching out to even more groups of stakeholders”. The two key “international actors” identified to achieve this goal were trade unions and public-private partnerships. [12]
One particular campaign strategy identified in the report was the shared aspiration to develop a “ribbon symbol” (“create a climate change symbol that is equally pervasive and can be used broadly across all public campaigns to escalate collaboration and solidarity.”) Here, one can recall the “Climate Ribbon Campaign” of the People’s Climate March and Cop21 Paris. Although the document identified blue as the sought colour for the ribbons, the end result was red as outlined in the 350.org “Redlines for Climate Actions Manual Draw the Line for Climate Justice” document. [13]
“Symbols are powerful, inspirational and instantly recognizable. When harnessed effectively by companies, symbols can have a strong impact on corporate culture, recruiting, morale and brand longevity.” — Forbes “No matter what action you do, please also share your action on social media?so the rest of the world can see it. Take a photo or video and post on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook (if it’s on Facebook, please make sure it’s public) and then use make sure you add #D12 or #redlines. You can also send an email to socialmedia@350.org“
[COP21 – Wear Red. Further reading on the Climate Ribbon Campaign: Standing Rock: Profusion, Collusion & Big Money Profits [Part 3]]
“We perceive, understand, and negotiate the world around us by investing meaning in all manner of signs and symbols.” — The History of Logos and Logo Design by Dan Redding
“As people interact with a symbol — whether brand, religious, or otherwise — it gets packed with meaning. It becomes a heuristic of what’s to come.” — Make Your Brand Iconic: The Power of Symbols in Branding, Sticky Branding website
United Nations Development Programme, A Look at the Sustainable Development Goals, 2015
Other essential tasks as highlighted in the report are to “identify business leaders who are willing to take the spotlight and reveal their support for climate change efforts up to and beyond COP21”. This is more than simply greenwashing. Short-term, this is the growing strategy to bring corporate power into the fold of “activism”. The Avaaz partner, Ben & Jerry’s, owned by Unilever and a client of Purpose, is a prime example of this mind-fuck. Long-term, as the financialization of nature is implemented at a global scale, financial markets and business will be assigned as the new “stewards of national natural capital.” Hence, the transformation (in appearance only) of corporations from psychopathic institutions into our future “stewards of nature” has already commenced.
Here, it is of special interest to note the role of media. Journalists are simply to be trained. From the report:
“Train media and establish a rapid response team: Spend time with media organizations to train them on climate change messaging.”
Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary, UNFCCC at launch of ‘We Mean Business’ at the Climate Week NYC 2014
The report identifies specific language that can be utilized by all NGOs. Repetitive language has long been key to successful social engineering. Consider the “de facto slogan”, agreed upon by the participants: “together we can, together we must, together we will“. Examples of the agreed upon terminology have been utilized by the NGOs and can be found in the following excerpts:
“I believe that with clear leadership together we can, and we must, continue to deliver multilateral breakthroughs time after time after time,” — Christiana Figueres, July 18, 2016, former UN climate chief, B Team leader “It will take all of us. But together, we can — and we will — blaze a bright path through this dark day.” — May Boeve 350, November 9, 2016
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Here it is critical to reflect upon the “leadership void”, a concern highlighted by those in attendance at this retreat and their allies, such as The B Team. To this end, there are no limits on who or what the elite and market forces are prepared to exploit in order to fill the niches that will further advance their desired agendas. As par for the course for the further expansion of industrial civilization, Indigenous People will, as always, be on the front lines of those most impacted by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Hence, in regard to the aforementioned need of the NPIC to “reach new audiences and advocates”, to have an Indigenous face as an exotic veneer to one’s brand is a marketing achievement of such grandeur, it is fetishized by those that comprise the non-profit industrial complex. An Indigenous face branding/marketing the SDGs – is the ultimate acquisition.
Activism is the New Sex – And Sex Still Sells
Photography Dan Martensen, “Xiuhtezcati wears Jeans, belt and bracelets (worn throughout) model’s own.”
“That’s the crux of successful marketing today: activism is in. ‘Our activism is currently mediated by brands,’ says Will Fowler, creative director of Headspace. ‘Brands are allowing people to pat themselves on the back without them personally having to sacrifice anything.'” — Sex Doesn’t Sell Any More, Activism Does. And Don’t the Big Brands Know It, February 3, 2017
Today, selling “environmentalism” utilizes the same successful formula utilized to sell designer blue jeans decades ago – as well as the same formula used to promote white superiority in the mid-1800’s.
“This childish figure, outfitted in a short skirt, with pretty moccasins on its dainty feet and a single feather in its long, flowing hair, represents a quintessential, sexually undifferentiated Indian—although the bare breasts and the bow and arrows strewn along the ground reveal this to be a nonthreatening male Indian. The woman is pointing at a map in a book held open in her lap. Following her gaze, the Indian is also looking at the book, and his posture, more than the unreadable expression of his face, suggests that he is open to, if not exactly eager for, the instruction about to be dispensed.” — White Women’s Rights, evolution, woman’s rights, and civilizing missions, page 23
Consider the case of the 17-year-old Indigenous youth Xiuhtezcatl Martinez made famous by the media, who made his debut in the “environmental movement” at age six. Today, Martinez is the youth director of Earth Guardians, a worldwide conservation organization – an NGO which at COP21 shared the stage at the United Nations with international NGO “leaders” including Al Gore (The Climate Reality Project) and 350.org’s May Boeve. Martinez has been sought by, coddled and courted by those most powerful and influential including Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio, The United Nations, Mark Rufallo, Bill McKibben, etc. etc.
At the tender age of 15, Martinez was photographed for a VICE feature (July 11, 2016), with images that deliberately seek to invoke a suggestive, hip prowess. One may recall a very contentious 1980 Calvin Klein ad featuring a 15-year old Brooke Shields (shot by photographer Richard Avedon). What was controversial in 1980 is today lost in a system where sexualisation is used to sell most everything including so-called environmentalism. Jeans yesterday. Faux environmentalism today – both in servitude to capital. The sexualization of children and teens is not so much problematic as it is sought, idolized, and even worshipped by a culture in decline. With almost four consecutive decades of social engineering and conditioning, this exploitation and sexualisation is not only of very little interest, it is rarely, if ever, noticed at all.
“His work has been featured on PBS, Showtime, National Geographic, Rolling Stones, Upworthy, The Guardian, Vogue, Bill Maher, Skavlan, CNN, MSNBC, HBO, VICE, and more. In 2013, Xiuhtezcatl received the 2013 United States Community Service Award from President Obama, and was the youngest of 24 national change-makers chosen to serve on the President’s youth council. He is the 2015 recipient of the Peace First Prize, recipient of the 2015 Nickelodeon Halo Award, 2016 Captain Planet Award and the 2016 Children’s Climate Prize in Sweden. Bill Mckibben of 350.org calls Xiuhtezcatl ‘an impressive spokesman for a viewpoint the world needs to hear.'” — Earth Guardians Website
“Viewing sexualized images tend to elicit a variety of sensations that lead one to making an association of possible pleasurable outcomes for him/herself.” (Adams 1916)
Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez, Earth Guardians speaks at UN Climate Reception – 21 April 2016
“Now that you’ve been denied your former way of life, and can only play at being Indian, let me teach you some geography in accordance with our remapping of a wilderness that once was yours.” — White Women’s Rights, evolution, woman’s rights, and civilizing missions, page 23
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Rebranding Capitalism. Above: The future is here: Corporations as the new “stewards of national natural capital.”
The Final Act
At this juncture, we must take a moment to circle back to 2014. In the report (Towards a Plan B for Business, June 2013-June 2016) on page 32 we find the section titled Fostering Collaboration by Joshi. Here, we can examine exactly why the This Changes Everything project (strategically launched in September of 2014 in unison with the People’s Climate March and the UN Climate Summit) was financed by The Rockefellers, Ford, etc. and how they’ve successfully utilized it.
“We can achieve great things when unlikely bedfellows come together, like last December at COP21 when the Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, joined leading CEOs, including The B Team, to call for an ambitious, long-term goal in the Paris Agreement, standing in solidarity with low-lying island communities in calling for ‘1.5°C to stay alive’.” — The B Team Progress Report June 2013 – June 2016, p. 11 [Source]
The 350.org/Klein slogan This Changes Everything (“to change everything we need everyone”) launched simultaneously with the hype surrounding the 2014 People’s Climate March, served as the foundation |
what we want for the characters, which is a challenge but it is also kind of fun. If you told me going into Season 1, that by the end of Season 2 people were going to care about the state of Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter’s marriage, I’d be like, I don’t think that is a thing that we can get people to care about. And a lot of people do, which is really fun. Some people still don’t, which is also fun.
A big part of the fun for the show for us is not telling people what to think about things. You can watch the show and really believe that Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter are perfect for each other. You can also watch the show and think this marriage is a train wreck. We’re not going to tell you what is right, necessarily, and that gives a lot of opportunities, too. In Season 3, what do we think? We know what we thought in Season 2, but what do we think now? What does Diane think? What does Mr. Peanutbutter think? Or what does BoJack think about his life and his relationship with people? It is not set in stone, and it is constantly shifting. That is very interesting to me.
What I think is striking about that, about the Diane and Mr. Peanutbutter relationship is, in Season 1 it is set up as part of a pretty classical love triangle, and then in Season 2 I think you moved beyond that. Was there a specific strategy there?
Yeah, I think we did Season 1 and we’re like, “Okay, Season 1 is done. What are we going to do for Season 2? We don’t want to revisit that.” I thought we did a good job of explaining in Season 1 why Diane was not a viable romantic option for BoJack, or vice versa that Diane would not want to date BoJack and that wasn’t a relationship that we would see happening at this point. Then we looked at Season 2, and Diane rushed into this marriage with Mr. Peanutbutter. What is the reality of that? What is the first year of marriage like for this couple? How do they interact with each other? A big part of the show for me is what is the silliest thing I can think of, and then how do we take that really seriously? How do we find the beating heart underneath that?
I think that is kind of a trick that we go to over and over again. That is the BoJack story of Season 1. It’s this wacky fun cartoon about a horse. Then, if we are doing our jobs right, by the end of Season 1 you are like, “I actually care about this character.” How did that happen? We’ve been thinking about that throughout. When we did our Christmas special, can we make people care about this fictional horse character and her adopted daughter in the context of this really stupid bad sitcom? At the end of this Princess Carolyn and Vincent Adultman relationship, can we get people to kind of care about Princess Carolyn and Vincent Adultman? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, based on the individual person, but it is always the goal. Let’s start wacky, then, what is real about this? What is relatable about this? What is the real story here?
I want to go back to something you just said. You said a little earlier that you don’t want to tell people what to think about the show. And I read somewhere that you read a lot of what gets written about it…
I shouldn’t, but I do.
Do you feel like people have a good sense of what you personally feel about the show?
I’m hesitant to do interviews like this, honestly, because I’m very proud of the show, and I think it is strong enough to merit multiple interpretations. That is something we try to do. I have my idea for what this scene is about and what this scene means and why BoJack did this or why BoJack said this and sort of why this happens, but I like that other people can have different interpretations.
It was fun to see the reaction of Season 1. BoJack is standing at the Griffith Observatory and some people say this is a very hopeful, uplifting, end of a season and other people say this is a very dark, sad, ending to a season. I know what I think about it, but I don’t want to tell people because nobody is wrong. As soon as I start saying this is what we were trying to do, then all of the sudden that means that is right and other peoples’ interpretations is wrong. As I said, I think the show is good enough. I feel proud enough of it that it justifies different interpretations.
READ MORE: 21 ‘BoJack Horseman’ Gifs Highlighting The Best Jokes You Missed in Season 1
Absolutely, would you say then that the ultimate goal is just to make people feel something?
Yeah, and I think that if you are enjoying the show then you are watching it correctly. If you don’t like the show, then maybe I can say a few words to try and convince you, but if you are getting something out of it, if you think it’s funny, or if it moves you, then that’s great. If it is causing you to think about your relationships in a way or you are relating the characters’ situations to yours then that is fantastic.
Before I pitched the show to Netflix, I had a weekend where I went to a wedding, and I was talking to one of my oldest friends, Carolyn. I don’t know why I said that like you should know Carolyn. You know my good friend Carolyn?
Oh, yeah. Carolyn and I were just talking about this.
[laughs] I pitched at that time what I thought the first season was going to be, and her major reaction was, “It feels like you’re telling me how to feel.” I bristled with that because yes, that is what TV writers do. Ideally, we are good enough about it that you are not feeling manipulated, but yes, we are manipulating your feelings. But my big question for making the show is what if we did that less? There are certain things where I’m trying to push this or trying to make you feel this way, but I also like presenting the evidence and letting the audiences draw their own conclusions. Do you think Diane is being selfish in this episode or do you think she is campaigning for justice? I know what I think, but we have enough evidence on either side that you can draw your own conclusions.
What is perfect about it, too, is that you can take that approach, but you have, in direct contrast to it, representations of broadcast network television [within the show] telling you how to feel, telling you how to experience something.
I don’t think anyone would accuse “BoJack” of being a subtle show, [laughs] necessarily. But I think it works on levels. We have enough background jokes that people think about it as a show you can watch a couple of times. Some of our biggest fans, at least. There is stuff you didn’t get the first time, but that is true of dialogue too. We hit you over the head with some things. This is a metaphor for this. Also, there is other stuff that I think we actually lay in very lightly. There are motifs and we are assuming not everyone is going to get everything. You will catch up the second time or if you put it away for a year and come back you will view it from a different perspective. You will see things that are there that maybe you didn’t notice.
How tricky is the jokes-to-pathos balance?
We trust ourselves. We feel it out. It’s about making sure every scene is interesting in some way. It doesn’t always have to be funny, but it has to be doing something. I don’t worry too much if we haven’t had a laugh in a while. Some people are watching the show as a comedy and they get bored of the sadder sections. Some people are watching purely as a drama and are like, “This show isn’t funny at all.” I want the show to work for both of those audiences. I don’t begrudge either of them.
We do want the show to always be funny. Even our saddest, darkest episodes are full of jokes. Even our saddest, darkest, scenes can surprise you with a joke. I like that feeling, too, of you know never know what you’re going to get. A scene that feels really goofy can all of the sudden take a dramatic turn or a scene that is very dry can all of the sudden become very funny. To me, I have a very strange sense of humor and one of the funniest moments of Season 1 is in the cold open of the finale, where Secretariat jumps off a bridge. [laughs] What is funny about that to me is that we play it very straight and that there is no joke and that we cut to credits. You are waiting for that release. You are waiting for that “When do I get to laugh?” and then it doesn’t happen. To me, that is very funny. Sometimes the most powerful anti-joke is drama, and this is a world that we can do that with.
Now that you have really established the world and what you created, what do you feel like you are going to be able to do in Season 3 that you couldn’t have done in Season 1?
It’s nice to see, even in Season 2, that people trust the show in a way that they didn’t. A lot of the reaction, especially for the first part of Season 1, was a lot of people like, “What is this?” — arms crossed — “I don’t know if I am in this or not.” In Season 2, you have from the beginning the people that watched Season 1, and they are in it, so they trust us. You get a lot more leeway with that. I think we have earned that trust. I think we can say we are going somewhere with this. You might think you know where this is going but then we are going to surprise you, or we are not going to surprise you and that is the surprise [laughs].
I think Season 3 is about taking more advantage of that trust, and going to weirder places and darker places. I don’t want to rest on our laurels. I don’t want to feel like we figured out how to do, we are going to do that. I like feeling like Season 2 was a great season and we did that. People can always go back and watch Season 2 again. How can we be weirder in Season 3? How can we be more surprising, more challenging, darker, more outrageous, funnier, sadder — but also with more warmth? A big part of Season 2, one of the challenges going in, was that we showed in Season 1 that we could be really dark and depressing, but can we also have moments of real warmth and connection? I think we did a bunch of that in Season 2.
I like to think we succeed at everything. [laughs] After Season 3, the conversations are just starting now, well what do we want to do now that we haven’t done yet? While still being “BoJack” and still feeling similar. I think Season 3 is going to be a conversation with Season 2 and Season 1. You will see stuff that you remember — “Oh, BoJack is up to his old tricks again!” — but also things are going to be different. And the way we tell stories is going to be different.
In what way?
We will see. We are still figuring that out. I don’t want to say anything because it is so up in the air and a lot can change, but we do have ideas: “We have never done an episode like this before. Can we do that?”
Like concept episodes or bottle episodes?
Exactly. In Season 1, we had this episode that was just from Princess Carolyn’s perspective, and that was a different way of telling a story. We have a few ideas like that for Season 3. In Season 2, what if it is a whole episode all in New Mexico, or what if it an episode where each act is like a different one act play of different conversations about similar things? A few ideas like that for Season 3 really excite me: some that I’ve seen in other shows and no one has ever done this in the animated world. Some that just feel this is so different and weird, let’s try it. We might chicken out and not do those things. That is why I don’t want to talk about them yet. But we will see.
READ MORE: How ‘BoJack Horseman’ Season 2 Tackles the Bill Cosby Controversy
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.Before we get into this post, let’s review the definition of Antisocial Personality Disorder according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine:
Antisocial Personality Disorder: A mental health condition in which a person has a long-term pattern of manipulating, exploiting, or violating the rights of others. This behavior is often criminal. Now for the symptoms: Symptoms: A person with antisocial personality disorder may: Be able to act witty and charming
Be good at flattery and manipulating other people’s emotions
Break the law repeatedly
Disregard the safety of self and others
Have problems with substance abuse
Lie, steal, and fight often
Not show guilt or remorse
Often be angry or arrogant How about treatment? Treatment: Antisocial personality disorder is one of the most difficult personality disorders to treat. People with this condition rarely seek treatment on their own. They may only start therapy when required to by a court. Behavioral treatments, such as those that reward appropriate behavior and have negative consequences for illegal behavior, may hold the most promise. Certain forms of talk therapy are also being explored. Exactly as many of us have said. Jail time and accountability are necessary to stop these people. Bailouts will only encourage continued sociopathic behavior, which is exactly what we have seen. Think about the above as you read the post below. Enjoy…
The following article by Kevin Roose was published late last night by New York Magazine, and it recounts what the journalist saw when he crashed Wall Street fraternity Kappa Beta Phi’s private party back in 2012. Some elements of his experience were already published a couple years back in a New York Times piece, but his latest article adds an additional perspective and recounts many outrageous aspects of the event I had never read before. This article is particularly important considering the recent trend of billionaires running around on financial television claiming they are being prosecuted for no reason.
Basically, it will confirm what everyone already thought. That a great many of these oligarch financiers are complete and total sociopaths and a menace to society.
From New York Magazine:
Recently, our nation’s financial chieftains have been feeling a little unloved. Venture capitalists are comparing the persecution of the rich to the plight ofJews at Kristallnacht, Wall Street titans are saying that they’re sick of being beaten up, and this week, a billionaire investor, Wilbur Ross, proclaimed that “the 1 percent is being picked on for political reasons.”
Ross’s statement seemed particularly odd, because two years ago, I met Ross at an event that might single-handedly explain why the rest of the country still hates financial tycoons – the annual black-tie induction ceremony of a secret Wall Street fraternity called Kappa Beta Phi.
It was January 2012, and Ross, wearing a tuxedo and purple velvet moccasins embroidered with the fraternity’s Greek letters, was standing at the dais of the St. Regis Hotel ballroom, welcoming a crowd of two hundred wealthy and famous Wall Street figures to the Kappa Beta Phi dinner. Ross, the leader (or “Grand Swipe”) of the fraternity, was preparing to invite 21 new members — “neophytes,” as the group called them — to join its exclusive ranks. Yeah Ross, what’s not to love about a guy like you.
Looking up at him from an elegant dinner of rack of lamb and foie gras were many of the most famous investors in the world, including executives from nearly every too-big-to-fail bank, private equity megafirm, and major hedge fund. AIG CEO Bob Benmosche was there, as were Wall Street superlawyer Marty Lipton and Alan “Ace” Greenberg, the former chairman of Bear Stearns. And those were just the returning members. Among the neophytes were hedge fund billionaire and major Obama donor Marc Lasry and Joe Reece, a high-ranking dealmaker at Credit Suisse. All told, enough wealth and power was concentrated in the St. Regis that night that if you had dropped a bomb on the roof, global finance as we know it might have ceased to exist. If you recall, last year Mr. Benmosche compared anger at Wall Street bonuses to the lynching of black people in the south. I’d heard whisperings about the existence of Kappa Beta Phi, whose members included both incredibly successful financiers (New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead, hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones) and incredibly unsuccessful ones (Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne, former New Jersey governor and MF Global flameout Jon Corzine). It was a secret fraternity, founded at the beginning of the Great Depression, that functioned as a sort of one-percenter’s Friars Club. Each year, the group’s dinner features comedy skits, musical acts in drag, and off-color jokes, and its group’s privacy mantra is “What happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis.” For eight decades, it worked. No outsider in living memory had witnessed the entire proceedings firsthand. After cocktail hour, the new inductees – all of whom were required to dress in leotards and gold-sequined skirts, with costume wigs – began their variety-show acts. Among the night’s lowlights: • Warren Stephens, an investment banking CEO, took the stage in a Confederate flag hat and sang a song about the financial crisis, set to the tune of “Dixie.” (“In Wall Street land we’ll take our stand, said Morgan and Goldman. But first we better get some loans, so quick, get to the Fed, man.”) The neophytes – who had changed from their drag outfits into Mormon missionary costumes — broke into their musical finale: a parody version of “I Believe,” the hit ballad from The Book of Mormon, with customized lyrics like “I believe that God has a plan for all of us. I believe my plan involves a seven-figure bonus.” Amused, I pulled out my phone, and began recording the proceedings on video. Wrong move. “Give me that or I’ll fucking break it!” Novogratz yelled, grabbing for my phone, which was filled with damning evidence. His eyes were bloodshot, and his neck veins were bulging. The song onstage was now over, and a number of prominent Kappas had rushed over to our table. Before the situation could escalate dangerously, a bond investor and former Grand Swipe named Alexandra Lebenthal stepped in between us. Wilbur Ross quickly followed, and the two of them led me out into the lobby, past a throng of Wall Street tycoons, some of whom seemed to be hyperventilating. Once we made it to the lobby, Ross and Lebenthal reassured me that what I’d just seen wasn’t really a group of wealthy and powerful financiers making homophobic jokes, making light of the financial crisis, and bragging about their business conquests at Main Street’s expense. No, it was just a group of friends who came together to roast each other in a benign and self-deprecating manner. Nothing to see here. But the extent of their worry wasn’t made clear until Ross offered himself up as a source for future stories in exchange for my cooperation. “I’ll pick up the phone anytime, get you any help you need,” he said. “Yeah, the people in this group could be very helpful,” Lebenthal chimed in. “If you could just keep their privacy in mind.” This is how these guys talk to everyone, particularly Congress. They are used to getting anything they want because of their money. The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality. No self-aware and socially conscious Wall Street executive would have agreed to be part of a group whose tacit mission is to make light of the financial sector’s foibles. Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis. The second thing I realized was that Kappa Beta Phi was, in large part, a fear-based organization. Here were executives who had strong ideas about politics, society, and the work of their colleagues, but who would never have the courage to voice those opinions in a public setting. Their cowardice had reduced them to sniping at their perceived enemies in the form of satirical songs and sketches, among only those people who had been handpicked to share their view of the world. And the idea of a reporter making those views public had caused them to throw a mass temper tantrum. Cowards, yes. Dangerous cowards, absolutely. Full article here, and I highly suggest reading it as it includes some creepy audio from this oligarch frat party. In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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A dramatic new glass skyscraper is set to soar above the City of London.
The 35-storey tower proposed for Lime Street — already dubbed “The Scalpel” — is expected to be given planning permission by the City Corporation on Tuesday.
It would join a cluster of skyscrapers in and around London’s insurance district, including the “Walkie Talkie” in Fenchurch Street, “The Cheesegrater” at 122 Leadenhall Street and 100 Bishopsgate.
The tower, designed by architects Kohn Pedersen Fox, will serve as the European headquarters for US insurance giants WR Berkley.
It will be 190 metres tall — slightly higher than The Gherkin — and contain more than 560,000 sq ft of offices. The development will include a square providing seating and a potential space for public art.
Work is due to start this year and could be completed by 2017.SAN JOSE — Two gunshot wounds to the back killed a 38-year-old man shot by San Jose State University police after he reportedly charged an officer with a drywall saw last week, the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office said Thursday.
Antonio Lopez Guzman was the man killed in the Feb. 21 off-campus confrontation with two university police officers. Investigators from the San Jose Police Department, which is investigating the shooting, declined to comment on the coroner’s finding.
SJSU police Chief Pete Decena, while declining to comment on the coroner’s report Lopez Guzman was shot twice in the back, revealed that the two police officers involved — Sgt. Mike Santos and Officer Frits van der Hoek — were both wearing uniformed-mounted cameras. He would not say what the cameras recorded.
“Sgt. Santos and Officer van der Hoek responded heroically in a very difficult situation, ” Decena said.
“The suspect is charging Officer van der Hoek with the knife outstretched and is on the verge of stabbing him. Sgt. Santos took the action that he could to prevent that from happening.”
San Jose police, who are investigating the shooting because it occurred just off campus, have said Lopez Guzman was seen on campus about 11 a.m. that morning holding a large knife, prompting a 911 call and spurring the two officers to find him. He walked off campus toward Eighth and San Salvador streets before they could catch up to and make contact with him.
Near the intersection, San Jose police say the officers called out to Lopez Guzman and ordered him to drop the blade, which turned out to be a 12-inch saw typically used for cutting drywall. When he did not comply, police said, an officer fired a Taser, but it had no effect, and it was not clear whether it missed him or if there was an issue with the weapon.
That’s when Lopez Guzman reportedly charged at the officer with the blade raised, spurring Santos to open fire. Lopez Guzman was hit and fell to the ground. He later died at Valley Medical Center.
Decena said van der Hoek was backpedaling from the suspect when Santos fired.
Witnesses reported hearing the Taser deployment and two gunshots, but not everyone heard the officers’ commands. One of the bullets went through the second-floor bedroom window of a nearby sorority house, but no one was injured.
Contact Robert Salonga at 408-920-5002. Follow him at Twitter.com/robertsalonga.Share. Sales figures broken down. Sales figures broken down.
At CES today Sony announced that 4.2 million PlayStation 4s have been sold worldwide. This is an extremely impressive sales figure, but how does it compare to the Xbox One or Wii U? How much faster are the new consoles selling than their predecessors?
IGN has cut through the noise to bring you some real talk on what all these sales figures actually mean:
Where Things Stand Now
Before we go any farther, let’s put all the cards on the table for the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Wii U as they stand right now.
4.2 million PlayStation 4s have been sold worldwide since the console launch on November 15 to December 28 - around six weeks. The console hasn’t launched in Japan yet, either. But since Sony is still selling PS4s as fast as it can make them, the sales figure would essentially be 4.2 million even if the console was available globally. PS4s are still out of stock at most retailers - until supply catches up with demand, it’s hard to gauge how high global demand for the console truly is.
3 million Xbox Ones have been sold from its launch on November 22 through December 31, a period of about 5.5 weeks. Like the PS4, The Xbox One isn’t yet available in Japan, and in 2013 Microsoft also sold virtually every console as fast as it could make them. But unlike the PS4, Xbox Ones are now in stock on Amazon, GameStop, and various other retailers - it appears that supply has caught up with launch demand, and in the coming months we should get a clear look at true Xbox One demand.
Nintendo last supplied official Wii U sales data at the end of October, and at that time the company reported 3.91 million Wii Us sold worldwide, after around 11 months of availability. Estimates for cumulative Wii U sales that include the all-important November and December sales periods range from 4.5 million to 5.2 million, but until Nintendo provides real data, these numbers are just best guesses.
Just How Strong Were These Launches?
So, the PS4 is off to an incredibly strong start, the Xbox One also had a solid launch, while the Wii U is struggling. But how does this compare to previous console generations? Are the consoles selling better than their predecessors?
The answer is yes - absolutely. It’s harder to make a direct comparison because the console launches today are coordinated globally in a much tighter way. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 had slow, staggered global roll outs, making total sales data from the first six or eight weeks of availability a little less useful. But with that in mind, here are the stats:
The Xbox 360 sold 1.5 million in its first six weeks. Remember that the Xbox One sold 3 million units in a similar time frame.
Sony sold 1.7 million PS3s in its first eight weeks, compared to 4.2 million PS4s in a comparable time frame.
Lastly, the Wii U may have struggled in 2013, but it actually launched very strong. 1.53 million consoles were sold in the US and Japan in around the first six weeks of availability. European launch stats aren’t available, but they probably push launch Wii U sales up to around 2 million total consoles, 1 million less than the Xbox One and 2.2 million less than the PS4.
So What Does This All Mean?
It’s certainly fun to compare Sony’s 4.2 million PS4s sold vs. Microsoft’s 3 million and draw all kinds of conclusions. But the truth is that both consoles were virtually sold out through the holidays. Anecdotally the Xbox One was a little easier to get your hands on this holiday season, but it will be the coming months that truly reveal whether either console will experience sustained demand, or if they just launched strong and will now fade fast in a similar manner as the Wii U.
We can draw three real conclusions from these stats:
1) The Wii U is in real trouble.
Both Sony and Microsoft nearly erased Nintendo’s year-long lead in a matter of weeks. Both consoles will be in more homes than the Wii U soon, if they aren’t already.
2) The console business is extremely healthy.
PC gaming may be thriving. Mobile gaming may be thriving. But it seems neither category is growing at the expense of the traditional game console. It’s impressive to see just how much stronger and faster the launch of the PS4 and Xbox One were when compared with the problem-plagued launches of the PS3 and Xbox 360.
3) We have a long way to go.
Fanboys can quibble over launch figures all they want, and they do matter - momentum is extremely important. But with both the Xbox One and PS4 likely to sell 80 million+ units in their lifetime, no one should spend much energy getting overly excited about the first couple million. It’s still the opening few minutes of the game.
Justin Davis runs IGN's features. You can follow him on Twitter at @ErrorJustin or on IGN for tweets about video games, burritos, and general paranoia.
Infographics by Lucas M. Thomas.American democracy is going through one of its periodic bouts of self-loathing. The public disapproves of the performance of all the branches of government, even the Supreme Court. Approval ratings for Congress are so low it is tempting to wonder about the sanity of the small number of people who still express confidence in it. The recent shutdown in Washington provoked a furious round of critical commentary from academics and pundits across the political spectrum. There is near unanimity: This is no way to run a government.
These recent travails have also provided plenty of material for commentators who see in every setback evidence of a broader decline. The historian Niall Ferguson has been predicting the unwinding of American power and influence for more than a decade. In the last few years, his warnings have gathered pace: Every time America's politicians lumber into another hole, Ferguson says I told you so. Even onetime optimists like Thomas Friedman, of The New York Times, are undergoing a crisis of faith.
Yet there is nothing new about this outburst of disgust with the workings of democracy. Nor is it distinctively American. Europeans (with the possible exception of Germans) are just as disenchanted with their elected politicians. Lamenting the failings of democracy is a permanent feature of democratic life, one that persists through governmental crises and successes alike.
There is no decade from the past century when it is not possible to find an extended debate among commentators and intellectuals in the democratic West about the inadequacies of democratic politics. This is not true of only those decades when Western democracy was clearly on the ropes, like the 1930s, when it was menaced by fascism, or the 1970s, when it was threatened by inflation and oil shock. It's also true of the prosperous and relatively stable decades as well. In the 1920s, Walter Lippmann led the charge, arguing that democratic publics were far too ill-informed and inattentive to manage their own affairs. In the 1950s, academics worried about the banality and exhaustion of democratic life. Daniel Bell took a positive stance with his claims about the end of ideology, but for the most part democracy was treated as a cumbersome, careless system of government, in permanent danger of being outwitted by the Soviets.
The history of modern democracy is a tale of steady success accompanied by the constant drumbeat of anticipated failure.
Even the 1980s, which we now look back on as a time of emergent democratic triumphalism, were dominated by prophecies of doom. Consider the two best-selling academic books from the end of that decade. One, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987), argued that the endemic triviality of mass democracy would destroy the minds of the young, leaving them unable to distinguish good from bad. (Bloom blamed, among other people, Mick Jagger.) The second, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988), foretold American decline as the demands of sustaining a global empire would overwhelm the capacity of the American people to put up with them.
The history of modern democracy is a tale of steady success accompanied by the constant drumbeat of anticipated failure. The intellectual commentator who first spotted this distinctive feature of democratic life (and who did most to explain it) was Alexis de Tocqueville. When he traveled to America, in 1831, Tocqueville was immediately struck by the frenetic and mindless quality of democratic politics. Citizens were always complaining, and their politicians were endlessly throwing mud at one another. The grumbling discontent was frequently interrupted by bursts of outright panic as resentments spilled over.
Yet Tocqueville noticed something else about American democracy: that underneath the chaotic surface, it was quite stable. Citizens' discontent coincided with an underlying faith that democratic politics would see them right in the end.
A political system like this creates plenty of space for writers and intellectuals to tut-tut and throw up their hands in horror. Why? First, and most obviously, democratic politics entails free speech, which must include the freedom to say that democracy doesn't work. Second, democracy is, as Tocqueville put it, an "untimely" form of government. Its strengths are revealed only in the long run, once its restless energy produces the adaptability that allows it to correct its own mistakes. At any given moment, democracy tends to look a mess: shallow, petty, and vituperative. Democracies are bad at rising to the occasion. What they are good at is chopping and changing course so that no occasion is too much for them. Finally, rationalist modern intellectuals are inherently suspicious of blind political faith. It is unnerving to encounter a political system that works only because ordinary people believe that it works. Ordinary citizens get frustrated with the workings of democracy but rarely, if ever, give up on it. The people who tend to lose faith are intellectuals who can't reconcile themselves to the mismatch between the glorious promise of democratic life and its grubby reality.
However, this deep-seated bias in favor of counsels of despair encourages contrarian intellectual arguments that things are nowhere near as bleak as they look. In the 1830s, the prevailing view in Europe was that American democracy could not last, because it was so obviously inadequate for the serious business of politics (especially conducting war and public finance). Americans were prone to panics and busts, and they were prey to political charlatans peddling fantasies of rebirth and renewal. Compared with European monarchy, democracy looked like a petulant and childish system of government. Tocqueville achieved instant and lasting fame by insisting that American democracy would not only last, but was in fact the wave of the future. Its energy and adaptability gave democracy the ultimate advantage over any rival system of government.
More recently, other intellectuals have assumed Tocqueville's role as contrarian prophets of democracy's inevitable triumph. The run of doomy academic blockbusters at the end of the 1980s was broken in 1989, when Francis Fukuyama published "The End of History," which achieved its immediate impact because it was so unusual to hear the positive side of the story put in such forceful terms. Fukuyama never claimed to be explaining the events of 1989 as they were unfolding. His was a long-term take on democracy's advantages. (Like Hegel, he dated the triumph of the forces of progress back to the Battle of Jena, in 1806.) Nonetheless, his timing was impeccable. The argument that liberal democracy had seen off all alternative forms of modern politics by dint of the dignity it conferred onto its citizens and the adaptability it allowed to its governments looked profoundly prescient.
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The irony is that Fukuyama was no more cheerful than the typical intellectual commentator on democratic politics. In fact, he was remarkably gloomy. Drawing on a range of earlier writers who included Tocqueville as well as Nietzsche, he came to believe that the triumph of democracy was rife with peril. Any system of government that has all the long-term advantages is liable to become stale and facile in its everyday operations. Democratic citizens would no longer be incentivized to make big decisions or to seize control of their destiny. They would have little reason to take politics seriously at all. "The end of history," Fukuyama wrote, "will be a very sad time." Democracy's ability to outlast its rivals would leave it exposed to its own inherent banality.
The economist Jagdish Bhagwati described the appearance of "The End of History" as "a primeval scream of joy by a warrior with a foot astride his fallen prey," a caricature that has stuck. Indeed, Fukuyama's fate (the academic worrier who became mistakenly known as a triumphant cold warrior) was shared by a small number of other intellectuals during the period. When the victory of democracy unexpectedly arrived, a search was undertaken to discover who had seen it coming. Very few had. Kennedy was routinely mocked. Bloom was soon forgotten. Instead it was the members of an earlier generation who were heralded as the true prophets. One was George Kennan, the intellectual architect of "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment," who had argued in 1947 that the West could defeat the Soviet Union only by outlasting it. When that was indeed what happened, at the end of the 1980s, Kennan was hailed as the wisest of the wise. So too was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who had consistently argued for the long-term advantages of market economies over planned systems of government. When Hayek was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1991, the director of policy planning at the White House declared: "More than almost anyone else in the |
be at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland with Roger Stone “to make sure the popular vote in this country counts."
Jones later said Trump had picked up “our story” about Sen. Ted Cruz’s father supposedly being linked to John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Jones said that observers had “major, major, major freak-outs” at Trump over the Cruz story.
The conspiracy theorist also responded to Fox News host Greg Gutfeld’s assertion that Trump is pivoting into an "Alex Jones" presidency with his conspiracy theories. Jones claimed that he has a better reach than Fox News and other media outlets, and “my sponsorship’s exploding, my listenership’s exploding.”
Jones concluded by literally applauding Trump supporters, telling them: “Congratulations to all the Trump supporters that saw through the hype. Congratulations to people who stood up to the Democrat and Republican system. Congratulations to everybody that understands how epic a time we’re living in. Whether Trump’s real or not doesn’t matter -- this is all a massive test of the will of the people. So I want to salute you, and understand we’re on the path to victory. … You are the resistance.”Washington, D.C. Leads U.S. in LEED-Certified Buildings
January 20th, 2012 by Silvio Marcacci
Washington, D.C. leads the nation by a wide margin in LEED-certified commercial and institutional green buildings per capita, according to a report released by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The USGBC’s report ranked the top 10 states based on 2010 U.S. Census data.
The District of Columbia leads the country with a whopping 31.5 square feet of LEED-certified square feet of space per person in 2011. Colorado ranked number two overall, and was the top-ranked state with 2.7 square feet per person.
Illinois, Virginia, Washington State, Maryland, Massachusetts, Texas, California, New York State, and Minnesota rounded out the top ten rankings. California had the most space to earn LEED certification in 2011, with more than 71.5 million square feet.
The USGBC’s LEED certification program is recognized across the U.S. and world as the foremost system to design, construct, and operate green buildings. Over 44,000 projects currently participate in LEED’s commercial and institutional rating systems, comprising more than 8 billion square feet of space in all 50 U.S. states and 120 countries. Nearly 16,000 homes have been certified by the LEED for Homes rating system, and more than 67,000 homes have been registered in the system.
Two notable factors contributed to D.C.’s top rank and huge margin over all other states, according to Ashley Katz, USGBC media manager. “The District packs in a substantial amount of green buildings due in part to the tremendous leadership from the federal government,” she said. Nearly 30 percent of all U.S. LEED projects are government-owned or -occupied buildings.
Katz also attributed D.C.’s lead to its low residential population compared to its total number of buildings, its small geographic area, and its high commuter rate from Virginia and Maryland.
Several newly certified projects completed the LEED process in 2011, including the U.S. Treasury Building in Washington, D.C.—the oldest LEED-certified project in the world. Other notable 2011 certifications include the iconic Wrigley Building in Chicago, Illinois; SFO Airport’s LEED-Gold Terminal 2 in San Francisco, California; and the LEED Platinum Marquette Plaza in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In December 2011, USGBC announced that LEED-certified existing buildings surpassed new construction by 15 million square feet on a cumulative basis.
Graphic courtesy of U.S. Green Building CouncilIn 2016, many of us will resolve to improve our self care routines, both mentally and physically. We’ll take more bubble baths, or buy one of those coloring books for adults that you see marketed in bookstores. The luckiest of us will schedule regular massages.
Those who travel often can, and should, set aside time, to make an effort on trips to focus on self care. Accepting, for instance, that just because you have a wanderlust and want to see everything in a certain city doesn’t mean you need to be on your feet, socializing and exploring every day of your trip.
A full day, or even an afternoon, or evening, devoted just to recharging and being mindful of one’s surroundings can enhance your senses on days spent sightseeing.
I’ve discovered a few great products that are both easily packable and legitimately relaxing. Remember that self care isn’t about pushing or improving yourself; it’s about doing yourself tiny favors.
Self Care Packing List
When I travel, I like to pack the following items just for me:
Herbal shower tablets
Vitamin C packets with melatonin
Badger balm
A rubber door stopper
Thick wool socks
Meditation and hydration apps
Noise cancelling headphones
Tiny notebook
Herbal Shower Tablets
Aura Cacia makes fantastic aromatherapy shower tablets that come in scents like eucalyptus and peppermint. You can toss one of these tabs into your backpack, since they’re incredibly light, and half of a tablet on the floor of a hostel shower is guaranteed to make washing off the mass transit grime feel like time spent at a spa.
Vitamin C Packets, With Melatonin
Emergen-C recently came out with packets of night-time powder which contain a small amount of melatonin, a natural hormone our bodies produce when it’s time to go to sleep. I like packing a couple of these to pour into hot water at night when I’m sleeping away from home.
They’re a double whammy, calming me down after a long day, which allows to sleep in unfamiliar or uncomfortable places, and providing a baseline of germ-fighting Vitamin C. Nothing is worse than catching a cold from your seatmate on a flight, and having to deal with the sniffles the entire length of a trip. You can get a free sample here.
Badger Balm
These tubes look like chapsticks, but they’re intended for application on your wrists, chest and temples, sort of like a soothing Vapo Rub without the chemicals. Every Badger Balm has a slightly different scent, and they’re all equally relaxing.
Door Stopper
I’ve become really passionate about staying in Airbnbs, but although I love the website, I’ve had several encounters with owners who turned out to be less approachable than their profiles made them seem. On nights like these, I’m grateful that I typically pack a cheap rubber door stop. Although wedging one of these babies under a door won’t necessarily lock it, they do make breaking into one’s room a lot harder to do. A door stop is a great product just to maintain a traveler’s peace of mind while settling into bed.
Thick Wool Socks
Years ago in my travels, I noticed a woman sitting next to me on an airplane had switched from her walking shoes into a thick, fresh pair of socks. Ever since that flight, I’ve always made sure to pack a pair of thick, woolen, comfort socks specifically for long plane journeys.
Clean socks are important for a lot of reasons, but setting aside one pair of ridiculous socks that you’d never wear out of the house can be a great way to define your relaxed, indoor mindset. Maybe it’s one of those pairs of socks with rubber shapes on the soles, for traction, or maybe they’re a cashmere blend too delicate for everyday wear, but too luxurious to leave at home. Either way, a pair of quality socks can make air travel, or staying in a hostel, much more pleasant.
Meditation Apps
In addition to the many travel apps we carry on our phones, there are apps out there for self care.You may have already heard of Headspace, which aids the user in meditation. That’s a great app for centering yourself on the road, and relaxing. My favorite self care app, Mywater, simply reminds you throughout the day to drink water.
It’s fun to drink your prescribed amount of liquids and add them into the app’s interface. You feel better as you do it (because water is a magic and natural tonic that solves everything), you win little digital rewards for being consistent, and you get to watch your hydration level rise with every new drink.
Noise Cancelling Headphones
Sometimes, I think back on the trips I took while only wearing the earbuds that came with my iPod, and I wonder how I survived. Admittedly, a lot of over-the-head earphones are overpriced – I’m not recommending you run out and buy yourself a pair of Beats just to take on a backpacking trip – but making the switch to noise-cancelling headphones will change the way you perceive public travel. Bose makes a great set.
If I ever stop into art museums by myself when traveling, I tend to wear these and walk around a wing of paintings feeling like I’m in a vacuum. It’s a very specific way to cancel out your surroundings, if you’re looking to hone in on the visual details of your trip. Just don’t forget to take them off and experience where you are with your ears, too!
A note of caution: you should never wear these if you’re ever in a situation that requires vigilance, whether you need to be on the lookout for traffic or folks who might steal your wallet, but a pair of headphones that seals out white noise can work wonders if you’re trying to relax, or read, in a public space.
Tiny Notebook
Personally, I suffer from racing thoughts, especially if I’m over-stimulated and trying to take in a new city. If I’m ever waiting in line somewhere, riding the metro, eating alone in a restaurant, or spending time in a park, I like to have something to busy myself that isn’t as heavy as a book.
I also find that people are more likely to approach you if you’re writing something, rather than reading something, because there’s an inherent openness to taking notes. Sometimes using a little notebook can just be busy work, to focus myself and reflect on what I’m doing, but other days I’m thankful just to have a place to jot down stray thoughts, directions from locals, or names of places I ought to remember.
Many of us still rely on tech gadgets to be our notebooks, but traveling abroad can sometimes render our smartphones useless. Also it’s just silly to lose all of your important notes if you forget to bring your charger with you.
A notebook is a logical thing to pack for many reasons, but it can be a great tool for self care and emotional wellness on the road if you commit to using it in positive ways. Maybe your notebook will become a place to jot down everything you enjoyed doing on your trip, or it might be a place to record contact information for people you meet. One of my friends, who I met on a trip in Chicago, likes to write out, in calligraphy, snippets of conversations he has with people, which makes his notebooks into collections of both doodles and transcripts of exchanges he might otherwise forget. That’s cool.
TL;DR
Packing for self-care means including little things that make you feel comforted, safe, and calm.
Shower tablets can make any hostel bathroom feel fancy
can make any hostel bathroom feel fancy Packing a door stopper can help with peace of mind
can help with peace of mind Meditation and hydration apps remind you to take care of yourself
remind you to take care of yourself Noise cancelling headphones can help you focus
can help you focus Vitamin C, melatonin, and aromatherapy balm pamper your body
A physical notebook is often a better option than logging thoughts into your phone
Want more like this?
Get weekly gear reviews, travel hacks, and packing tips sent straight to your inbox. We’ll send you a carry on packing list right away.After taking on a western, the formative years of the NYC folk scene, and for their latest project, Hollywood itself in next year’s Hail, Caesar!, the Coens are set to return to the world of crime. Heading over to Warner Bros., the No Country for Old Men directors set up an adaptation of Ross MacDonald‘s 1966 crime novel Black Money to write with the intent to direct, Deadline reports.
Centered around private eye Lew Archer, he’s “hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave Frenchman who’s run off with his client’s girlfriend, it looks like a simple case of alienated affections. Things look different when the mysterious foreigner turns out to be connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts.”
With Hail, Caesar! set for a release next February, it’s rare for the Coens to begin production before their next film has seen a release, so it’s still the early days. However, with fantastic source material brimming with suspenseful mystery from MacDonald (whose work has hit the screen in Harper, The Drowning Pool, and more), it’s safe to say this is one of our most-anticipated projects. As we await more details, check out a rundown of the Coens’ career below and pick up Black Money here.
Are you a fan of the book? Are you looking forward to their next project?The federal government moved closer to the brink of a shutdown on Wednesday as House Republicans failed to quell a conservative rebellion and were forced to delay a vote on a stopgap spending bill.
The party leadership said it needed more time to build support for a complex legislative proposal it presented to its members on Tuesday. But senior Republicans acknowledged that the plan lacked support from conservatives who are demanding the GOP take a harder line against President Obama’s signature healthcare law.
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“Obviously we don’t have 218 [votes] or we wouldn’t have pulled it,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a member of the whip team who is close to leadership.
The plan devised by Majority Leader Eric Cantor Eric Ivan CantorPelosi warns GOP: Next president could declare national emergency on guns Ousted GOP lawmaker David Brat named dean at Liberty University business school Trump, GOP seek to shift blame for shutdown to Pelosi MORE (R-Va.) would link a resolution withholding funds for the healthcare reform law with a bill to keep the government running through mid-December.
If passed by the House, the Senate would have to vote on the healthcare measure before it could act on the spending bill, and the spending bill could still become law even if Senate Democrats were to vote down the defunding of ObamaCare.
Current funding for the federal government is set to run out on Sept. 30. Leaders can only afford 16 defections on their plan, which would presumably need to be passed without any Democratic votes.
The trouble also raises questions about the debt ceiling, which the Treasury Department says must be raised by mid-October.
Asked by a Hill reporter about his plan for the debt ceiling, Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio) chuckled and said: "Why don't you give me one so they can shoot it down too?"
The House is scheduled to recess during the last week of September, leaving only six legislative days before the end of the fiscal year. But that break could be canceled if a funding bill is not put in place.
“I would say it probably increases the chances that we would be here the last week of September,” Cole said of the vote delay. “I don’t know that it increases the chances of a shutdown.”
Democratic leaders mocked their Republican counterparts on Wednesday, saying the delay was more evidence of the GOP’s inability to govern.
“Today, the Republican record of dysfunction and disarray reached a new low,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement.
“The American people are witnessing yet another sign that Republicans can’t get their own act together, even when a government shutdown hangs in the balance. Now, they’ve simply wasted more time on partisan political games while refusing to work with Democrats to achieve positive results for America’s families and middle class.”
Buoyed by outside conservative groups, the right flank of the Republican Conference complained the Cantor plan did not go far enough.
During a closed-door meeting of the conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC) on Wednesday, lawmakers pushed Cantor to insist on a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act as part of the continuing resolution, and not merely a debt-limit increase likely to be needed in the next month.
“It’s a plan that gets us to where we want to be, and that’s a one-year delay of ObamaCare,” said Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), chairman of the conservative group.
Rep. Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, presented a plan in which the GOP would offer to use savings from a delay in the implementation of the healthcare law to restore money to agencies hit hard by sequestration, according to one lawmaker present at the meeting.
“Making this a government shutdown-type confrontation is probably not our best strategy,” Rep. John Fleming John Calvin FlemingFormer congressmen, RNC members appointed to Trump administration roles Overnight Energy: Watchdog opens investigation into Interior chief | Judge halts Pruitt truck pollution rule decision | Winners, losers in EPA, Interior spending bill amendments Five GOP lawmakers mulling bid to lead conservative caucus MORE (R-La.) said following the RSC meeting.
“Our best strategy is to exchange away or swap away sequestration, let the administration have the dollars back from sequestration, in exchange for a full one-year delay of ObamaCare.”
Officially, Republican leadership aides said Cantor’s plan remained intact and that the debate over military strikes in Syria had left them little time to explain the proposal to members. But it is clear that changes are possible.
“Every reasonable idea is under consideration,” said Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.), the party’s chief deputy whip.
The delay once again laid bare the deep divisions within the party over fiscal strategy. The split has been exacerbated in recent months by a group of Tea Party-aligned conservatives in the Senate who have encouraged their counterparts in the House to push Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his leadership further to the right.
Republicans supportive of leadership warned that the conservative resistance would lead either to a government shutdown that would hurt the party politically or to legislation backed by Democrats with higher spending levels.
“I think there’s a number of people who don’t remember when the government was shut down last time,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said, referring to the budget battles of 1995 and 1996. “And who carried the burden of that? That was Republicans.”
“Now, I’m not saying they want to shut the government down. They want to defund ObamaCare,” Simpson added. “But if the inevitable result of the position you’re taking... shuts the government down — then, yeah, you’re responsible.”
Rep. Patrick Tiberi (R-Ohio) said proposals from conservatives that had more teeth and would directly defund the healthcare law stood no chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“Find me 60 votes in the Senate,” Tiberi said. “That’s what I would say. I’m with them philosophically — completely. But show me how you get 60 votes in the Senate. That’s the key.”
On the right, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) voiced frustration at what he characterized as a watered-down version of the policy that conservatives wanted: a single spending bill that would withhold funds for the healthcare law.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic if the government shuts down because our leadership won’t offer a bill that Republicans will vote for?” Massie said. “I mean, that’s what happened this week. Now we’re a week further into this because they put forward a bill that Republicans won’t vote for.”
Still, other conservatives said they were confident that the conference would ultimately coalesce around a plan that could pass with Republican votes.
“I am not worried about a scenario where the Republicans fall apart,” Rep. Cynthia Lummis Cynthia Marie LummisTrump picks ex-oil lobbyist David Bernhardt for Interior secretary Trump’s shifting Cabinet to introduce new faces The Hill's Morning Report — What a shutdown would mean for the government MORE (R-Wyo.) said. “I just want, as do many members, to see us put our best foot forward, and there are a number of us that are not convinced that the first play call that has been made by leadership is the best play call.”
Lummis said she and other conservatives wanted to find a way to vote on both the spending bill and the debt limit before the Sept. 30 deadline.
— Bernie Becker contributed.
This story was first posted at 1:41 and last updated at 9:29 p.m.Learn how to tweet from your Arduino.
This is chapter thirty of our huge Arduino tutorial series. Updated 16/06/2014
In this article you will learn how to send messages from an Ethernet-enabled Arduino to twitter. For the uninitiated who may be thinking “what is all this twitter nonsense about?”, twitter is a form of microblogging.
You can create a message with a maximum length of 140 characters, and broadcast this on the twitter service. For people to receive your messages (or tweets) they also need to be a member of twitter and choose to subscribe to your tweets.
Generally people will use the twitter service using one of two methods: either using a web browser, or using the twitter application on a smartphone or tablet computer. For example, here is a typical web browser view:
… and here is an example of a twitter application running on an Android OS smartphone:
The neat thing about twitter on a mobile device is that if your username is mentioned in a tweet, you will be notified pretty well immediately as long as you have mobile data access. More on that later. In some areas, you can set twitter to send tweets from a certain user to your mobile phone via SMS – however if doing so be careful to confirm possible charges to your mobile phone account.
Finally, if you are worried about privacy with regards to your tweets, you can set your account to private and only allow certain people to follow your tweets.
So let’s get started.
First of all – you will need a twitter account. If you do not have one, you can sign up for one here. If you already have a twitter account, you can always open more for other uses – such as an Arduino.
For example, my twitter account is @tronixstuff, but my demonstration machine twitter account is @tronixstuff2. Then I have set my primary account to follow my machine’s twitter account.
Now log into twitter with using the account you will have for your Arduino and visit this page and get yourself a token by following the Step One link. The process will take you through authorising the “tweet library” page to login to your twitter account – this is ok. It will then present you with a long text called a “token”, for example:
Save your token somewhere safe, as you will need to insert it into your Arduino sketch. Finally, don’t give it to others as then they will be able to post onto twitter using your account. Next, follow step two from the same page – which involves download and installation of the required Arduino library.
Now for the hardware.
You will need an Arduino Uno or compatible board with an Ethernet shield that uses the W5100 Ethernet controller IC (pretty much all of them) – or consider using a Freetronics EtherTen – as it has everything all on the one board, plus some extras:
Furthermore you will need to power the board via the external DC socket – the W5100 IC uses more current than the USB power can supply. A 9V 1A plug pack/wall wart will suffice. Finally it does get hot – so be careful not to touch the W5100 after extended use. In case you’re not sure – this is the W5100 IC:
If you’re looking for an Arduino-twitter solution with WiFi, check out the Arduino Yún tutorials.
From this point it would be a good idea to check your hardware is working. To do so, please run the webserver example sketch as explained in chapter sixteen (Ethernet). While you do that, we’ll have a break…
Sending your first tweet
If you want your Arduino to send a simple tweet consider the following sketch. We have a simple function tweet() which simply sends a line of text (which has a maximum length of 140 characters). Don’t forget to update your IP address, MAC address and token:
// Simple twitter interface #include <SPI.h> #include <Ethernet.h> #include <Twitter.h> // Alter IP address to suit your own network! byte mac[] = { 0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF, 0xFE, 0xED }; // create MAC address for ethernet shield byte ip[] = { 192, 168, 0, 99}; // choose your own IP for ethernet shield Twitter twitter("aaaaaaa"); // replace aaaaaaa with your token void setup() { delay(5000); Ethernet.begin(mac, ip); Serial.begin(9600); } void tweet(char msg[]) { Serial.println("connecting..."); if (twitter.post(msg)) { // Specify &Serial to output received response to Serial. // If no output is required, you can just omit the argument, e.g. // int status = twitter.wait(); int status = twitter.wait(&Serial); if (status == 200) { Serial.println("OK."); } else { Serial.print("failed : code "); Serial.println(status); } } else { Serial.println("connection failed."); } } void loop() { delay(1000); tweet("Purple monkey dishwasher"); do{} while(1>0); // endless loop } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 // Simple twitter interface #include <SPI.h> #include <Ethernet.h> #include <Twitter.h> // Alter IP address to suit your own network! byte mac [ ] = { 0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF, 0xFE, 0xED } ; // create MAC address for ethernet shield byte ip [ ] = { 192, 168, 0, 99 } ; // choose your own IP for ethernet shield Twitter twitter ( "aaaaaaa" ) ; // replace aaaaaaa with your token void setup ( ) { delay ( 5000 ) ; Ethernet. begin ( mac, ip ) ; Serial. begin ( 9600 ) ; } void tweet ( char msg [ ] ) { Serial. println ( "connecting..." ) ; if ( twitter. post ( msg ) ) { // Specify &Serial to output received response to Serial. // If no output is required, you can just omit the argument, e.g. // int status = twitter.wait(); int status = twitter. wait ( & Serial ) ; if ( status == 200 ) { Serial. println ( "OK." ) ; } else { Serial. print ( "failed : code " ) ; Serial. println ( status ) ; } } else { Serial. println ( "connection failed." ) ; } } void loop ( ) { delay ( 1000 ) ; tweet ( "Purple monkey dishwasher" ) ; do { } while ( 1 > 0 ) ; // endless loop }
You can check the status of the tweeting via the serial monitor. For example, if the tweet was successful you will see:
However if you try to send the same tweet more than once in a short period of time, or another error takes place – twitter will return an error message, for example:
And finally if it works, the tweet will appear:
Previously we mentioned that you can be alerted to a tweet by your mobile device. This can be done by putting your own twitter account name in the contents of the tweet.
For example – my normal twitter account is @tronixstuff. If I put the text “@tronixstuff” in the text tweeted by my Arduino’s twitter account – the twitter app on my smartphone will let me know I have been mentioned – as shown in the following video:
You may have noticed in the video that a text message arrived as well – that service is a function of my cellular carrier (Telstra) and may not be available to others. Nevertheless this is a neat way of getting important messages from your Arduino to a smart phone or other connected device.
Sending data in a tweet
So what if you have a sensor or other device whose data you want to know about via twitter? You can send data generated from an Arduino sketch over twitter without too much effort.
In the following example we’ll send the value from analogue pin zero (A0) in the contents of a tweet. And by adding your twitter @username you will be notified by your other twitter-capable devices:
// Simple twitter interface #include <SPI.h> #include <Ethernet.h> #include <Twitter.h> // Alter IP address to suit your own network! byte mac[] = { 0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF, 0xFE, 0xED }; // create MAC address for ethernet shield byte ip[] = { 192, 168, 0, 99}; // choose your own IP for ethernet shield Twitter twitter("aaaaaaa"); // replace aaaaaaa with your token int analogZero; char tweetText[140]; void setup() { delay(5000); Ethernet.begin(mac, ip); Serial.begin(9600); } void tweet(char msg[]) { Serial.println("connecting..."); if (twitter.post(msg)) { // Specify &Serial to output received response to Serial. // If no output is required, you can just omit the argument, e.g. // int status = twitter.wait(); int status = twitter.wait(&Serial); if (status == 200) { Serial.println("OK."); } else { Serial.print("failed : code "); Serial.println(status); } } else { Serial.println("connection failed."); } } void loop() { // get some data from A0. analogZero=analogRead(0); // assemble message to send. This inserts the value of "analogZero" into the variable "tweetText" at point %d sprintf(tweetText, "Pin analogue zero reads: %d. @username.", analogZero); // change @username to your twitter account name delay(1000); tweet(tweetText); do{ } while(1>0); // endless loop } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 // Simple twitter interface #include <SPI.h> #include <Ethernet.h> #include <Twitter.h> // Alter IP address to suit your own network! byte mac [ ] = { 0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF, 0xFE, 0xED } ; // create MAC address for ethernet shield byte ip [ ] = { 192, 168, 0, 99 } ; // choose your own IP for ethernet shield Twitter twitter ( "aaaaaaa" ) ; // replace aaaaaaa with your token int analogZero ; char tweetText [ 140 ] ; void setup ( ) { delay ( 5000 ) ; Ethernet. begin ( mac, ip ) ; Serial. begin ( 9600 ) ; } void tweet ( char msg [ ] ) { Serial. println ( "connecting..." ) ; if ( twitter. post ( msg ) ) { // Specify &Serial to output received response to Serial. // If no output is required, you can just omit the argument, e.g. // int status = twitter.wait(); int status = twitter. wait ( & Serial ) ; if ( status == 200 ) { Serial. println ( "OK." ) ; } else { Serial. print ( "failed : code " ) ; Serial. println ( status ) ; } } else { Serial. println ( "connection failed." ) ; } } void loop ( ) { // get some data from A0. analogZero = analogRead ( 0 ) ; // assemble message to send. This inserts the value of "analogZero" into the variable "tweetText" at point %d sprintf ( tweetText, "Pin analogue zero reads: %d. @username.", analogZero ) ; // change @username to your twitter account name delay ( 1000 ) ; tweet ( tweetText ) ; do { } while ( 1 > 0 ) ; // endless loop }
You may have noticed a sneaky sprintf function in void loop(). This is used to insert the integer analogZero into the character array tweetText that we send with the tweet() function. And the results of the example:
So you can use the previous sketch as a framework to create your own Arduino-powered data twittering machine. Send temperature alerts, tank water levels, messages from an alarm system, or just random tweets to your loved one.
Conclusion
So there you have it, another useful way to send information from your Arduino to the outside world. Stay tuned for upcoming Arduino tutorials by subscribing to the blog, RSS feed (top-right), twitter or joining our Google Group. Big thanks to @neocat for their work with the twitter Arduino libraries.
And if you enjoyed the tutorial, or want to introduce someone else to the interesting world of Arduino – check out my book (now in a third printing!) “Arduino Workshop” from No Starch Press.
In the meanwhile have fun and keep checking into tronixstuff.com. Why not follow things on twitter, Google+, subscribe for email updates or RSS using the links on the right-hand column? And join our friendly Google Group – dedicated to the projects and related items on this website. Sign up – it’s free, helpful to each other – and we can all learn something.MANDEL NGAN/Getty Images
The president of the United States of America is feuding with a basketball parent.
Donald Trump took to Twitter on Sunday to blast LaVar Ball, saying he should not have helped the three UCLA basketball players who were arrested on shoplifting charges in China.
"Now that the three basketball players are out of China and saved from years in jail, LaVar Ball, the father of LiAngelo, is unaccepting of what I did for his son and that shoplifting is no big deal," Trump tweeted. "I should have left them in jail!"
LiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hill returned to the United States on Tuesday after they were held on shoplifting charges in China. The players allegedly stole sunglasses from a store in Hangzhou ahead of UCLA's season-opening game against Georgia Tech in Shanghai.
LaVar Ball downplayed the role Trump had in bringing the players back to the United States in an interview with ESPN.com's Arash Markazi.
"Who?" Ball said of Trump. "What was he over there for? Don't tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out."
White House chief of staff John Kelly told the New York Times' Mark Landler and Michael D. Shear that Trump's discussion with Chinese President Xi Jinping helped expedite the players' return to the U.S. and reduce the charges. Trump said they faced up to 10 years in jail. All three players thanked Trump by name hours after the president sent a tweet essentially asking for an expression of gratitude.
"I didn't exercise my best judgment, and I'm sorry for that," LiAngelo Ball said at a news conference.
"This does not define who I am. My family raised me better than that."
Trump took a far more gregarious tone with the players after their acknowledgements.
Trump tweeted: "To the three UCLA basketball players I say: You're welcome, go out and give a big Thank You to President Xi Jinping of China who made.........your release possible and, HAVE A GREAT LIFE! Be careful, there are many pitfalls on the long and winding road of life!"
All three players have been indefinitely suspended by UCLA.You Southern California drivers who are on the transportation cutting edge, tooling around in hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles, are getting a new option for filling up: the Orange County sewage treatment plant. Seriously.
The Fountain Valley plant is now using the methane generated in treating wastewater as the fuel in a fuel cell. Most of the hydrogen produced is then being used to make electricity to power the plant – but some of it is going to a fueling station that will be open to the public and can be used to fill up between 25 and 50 fuel-cell electric vehicles every day, according to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Allentown, Penn.-based Air Products was the contractor on the fueling station and Danbury, Conn.-based FuelCell Energy made the Direct FuelCell system that is at the center of this operation, which the DOE called “the world’s first tri-generation fuel cell and hydrogen energy station to provide transportation fuel to the public and electric power to an industrial facility.”
Here’s how it works: methane gas produced at the wastewater plant is purified and pumped into a fuel cell, where it is reformed into hydrogen. The fuel cell produces clean electricity for use at the treatment plant. Excess hydrogen leaves the unit, and is purified to vehicle-grade hydrogen at the fueling station.
According to FuelCell Energy, “The power plant is generating 250 kilowatts of ultra-clean power, enough to power about 200 average size homes.”
The DOE said the system being demonstrated in Orange County “could offer a pathway to low-cost hydrogen and also demonstrates the versatility of fuel cells to utilize multiple feedstocks, such as biogas and natural gas, to produce power and renewable hydrogen that can be used to fuel light duty vehicles such as forklifts or as backup power in applications such as cell phone towers.”
– Additional reporting by Lauren CraigMargaret: Do you have any final thoughts on the broad question
of this whole book, the intersection of anarchism and fiction?
Jim: I hope I was coherent enough about the idea of opening
people’s minds in regards to genre-writing, which is what I
do. That’s one of the reasons that I’m drawn to video games
as well; when it becomes universally accepted that they’re
either art or a sport or both, depending on who wins the
battle, I don’t think that I’ll be as interested |
: crunch through the rough dirt roads in the back-country and zip us along the smooth, paved highways connecting the Americas. More to come from the road!If President Obama wants to work with the new, Republican-controlled Congress to pass immigration reform, he should abandon his plans to implement some reforms through executive actions, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, warned Thursday.
"If he acts unilaterally, on his own--outside of his authority--he will poison the well, and there will be no chance for immigration reform moving in this Congress," Boehner said. "It's as simple as that."
Republicans made big gains in Tuesday's midterm elections, bolstering their majority in the House and winning seven new seats--and majority control--in the Senate.
Mr. Obama on Wednesday said he's interested in working with Republicans on several issues, yet he said he would keep his promise to act unilaterally on immigration reform.
"Before the end of the year, we're going to take whatever lawful actions that I can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system that will allow us to surge additional resources to the border, where I think the vast majority of Americans have the deepest concern," Mr. Obama said. "And at the same time, I'll be reaching out to both [Republican Senate leader] Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and other Republican as well as Democratic leaders to find out how it is that they want to proceed. And if they want to get a bill done--whether it's during the lame duck or next year--I'm eager to see what they have to offer."
Boehner on Thursday reiterated his commitment to pursuing immigration reform, though he said he still must talk with House members about how they want to move forward.
The Democratic-led Senate in 2013 passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill, but Boehner never put that bill up for a vote in the House.
"I could regale you with all of my challenges of trying to get members on both sides of the aisle to go along with this," the speaker lamented on Thursday. However, he added, "Hope springs eternal."
Boehner noted that the politics of the issue changed over the course of 2014, after an influx of undocumented children started crossing the border from Mexico to the United States. Boehner and others have blamed the wave of unaccompanied minors at the border on Mr. Obama's earlier executive actions on immigration.
Boehner on Thursday also reiterated his commitment to repealing the Affordable Care Act, which he and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell had written about in a new op-ed. "The House I'm sure at some point next year will move to repeal Obamacare," he said.
"Whether the can pass the Senate, I don't know," Boehner continued. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't do other things," like repeal certain unpopular provisions of the Affordable Care Act, like the medical device tax.
Boehner also specifically suggested repealing the individual mandate--the provision of the law requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance. The individual mandate, which some Democrats call the lynchpin of Obamacare, was at the heart of the 2012 Supreme Court challenge to the law.
Mr. Obama on Wednesday suggested he would veto any efforts to repeal the mandate.
"The individual mandate is a line I can't cross," he said, noting the concept was created by conservatives years ago. "If you're providing health insurance to people through the private marketplace, then you've got to make sure that people can't game the system and just wait until they get sick before they go try to buy health insurance."Active and passive euthanasia Active euthanasia Active euthanasia occurs when the medical professionals, or another person, deliberately do something that causes the patient to die. Passive euthanasia Passive euthanasia occurs when the patient dies because the medical professionals either don't do something necessary to keep the patient alive, or when they stop doing something that is keeping the patient alive. switch off life-support machines
disconnect a feeding tube
don't carry out a life-extending operation
don't give life-extending drugs The moral difference between killing and letting die Many people make a moral distinction between active and passive euthanasia. They think that it is acceptable to withhold treatment and allow a patient to die, but that it is never acceptable to kill a patient by a deliberate act. Some medical people like this idea. They think it allows them to provide a patient with the death they want without having to deal with the difficult moral problems they would face if they deliberately killed that person. Thou shalt not kill but needst not strive, officiously, to keep alive. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) There is no real difference But some people think this distinction is nonsense, since stopping treatment is a deliberate act, and so is deciding not to carry out a particular treatment. Switching off a respirator requires someone to carry out the action of throwing the switch. If the patient dies as a result of the doctor switching off the respirator then although it's certainly true that the patient dies from lung cancer (or whatever), it's also true that the immediate cause of their death is the switching off of the breathing machine. in active euthanasia the doctor takes an action with the intention that it will cause the patient's death
in passive euthanasia the doctor lets the patient die when a doctor lets someone die, they carry out an action with the intention that it will cause the patient's death
so there is no real difference between passive and active euthanasia, since both have the same result: the death of the patient on humanitarian grounds
thus the act of removing life-support is just as much an act of killing as giving a lethal injection Is active euthanasia morally better? Some (mostly philosophers) go even further and say that active euthanasia is morally better because it can be quicker and cleaner, and it may be less painful for the patient. Top
Acts and omissions This is one of the classic ideas in ethics. It says that there is a moral difference between carrying out an action, and merely omitting to carry out an action. Simon Blackburn explains it like this in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy: The doctrine that it makes an ethical difference whether an agent actively intervenes to bring about a result, or omits to act in circumstances in which it is foreseen that as a result of the omission the same result occurs. Thus suppose I wish you dead, if I act to bring about your death I am a murderer, but if I happily discover you in danger of death, and fail to act to save you, I am not acting, and therefore, according to the doctrine, not a murderer. Simon Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy But the acts and omissions doctrine doesn't always work... The killings in the bath The philosopher James Rachels has an argument that shows that the distinction between acts and omissions is not as helpful as it looks. Consider these two cases: Smith will inherit a fortune if his 6 year old cousin dies.
One evening Smith sneaks into the bathroom where the child is having his bath and drowns the boy.
Smith then arranges the evidence so that it looks like an accident. Jones will inherit a fortune if his 6 year old cousin dies.
One evening Jones sneaks into the bathroom where the child is having his bath.
As he enters the bathroom he sees the boy fall over, hit his head on the side of the bath, and slide face-down under the water.
Jones is delighted; he doesn't rescue the child but stands by the bath, and watches as the child drowns. According to the doctrine of acts and omissions Smith is morally guiltier than Jones, since he actively killed the child, while Jones just allowed the boy to die. In law Smith is guilty of murder and Jones isn't guilty of anything. However, most people would regard any distinction between their moral guilt as splitting hairs. Suppose Jones defends himself by saying: I didn't do anything except just stand there and watch the child drown. I didn't kill him; I only let him die. Would we be impressed? An objection to this analogy You might argue that we can't compare the case of a doctor who is trying to do their best for their patient with Smith and Jones who are obvious villains. Of course you can't. But if you don't find the difference between killing and letting die persuasive in the Smith/Jones case, you shouldn't find it effective in the case of the well-meaning doctor and euthanasia. The importance of intention The Smith/Jones case partly depends on us paying no attention to the intentions of Smith and Jones. But in most cases of right and wrong we do think that intention matters, and if we were asked, we would probably say that Smith was a worse person than Jones, because he intended to kill. Consider this case (and yes, it's a fantasy, doctors don't behave like this): Brown is rushed into hospital after being stabbed.
He arrives in casualty. Although he is bleeding heavily, he could be saved.
The only doctor on duty wants to go home, and knows that saving Brown will take him an hour.
He decides to let Brown bleed to death.
Brown dies a few minutes later.
Brown's mother arrives, and on learning what has happened screams at the doctor, "You killed my son!"
The doctor replies, "No I didn't. I just let him die." No-one would think that the doctor's reply excused him in any way. In this case letting someone die is morally very bad indeed. And if the lazy doctor defended himself to Brown's mother by saying, "I didn't kill him. The dagger in his heart killed him," we wouldn't think this an adequate moral argument either. You can probably invent many similar examples. But there are cases where letting someone die might not be morally bad. Suppose that the reason the doctor didn't save Brown was that he was already in the middle of saving Green, and if he left Green to save Brown, Green would die. In that case, we might think that the doctor had a good defence against accusations of unethical behaviour. Further reading James Rachels, 'Active and Passive Euthanasia'. The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 292, pp 78-80, 1975 Top"Shameful" Secret?: Post-Traumatic Symptoms In The Corrections Ranks by Caterina Spinaris Tudor Ph.D.
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Preface
In Colorado Springs we tend to concentrate on the problems of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in military men and women, a natural bias given our huge military presence. We have also long noted that any man, or woman, who goes through an abusive intimate relationship is almost certain to suffer some level of post traumatic stress that, all too often, develops into PTSD.
However, as Dr. Tudor notes below, PTSD is found in all professions where high stress and traumatic situations occur. Also, we have tended to concentrate on the research and symptoms of the problem, for example see PTSD and TBI Are Not Domestic Violence. But an academic approach is frequently of little use to one suffering from the disorder. Thus, the anecdotes presented by Dr. Tudor in her article below present a much better picture of what PTSD looks and feels like to the individual.
Her work is with corrections officers, many of them at Supermax, America's maximum security prison, where obviously the stress levels are high. But members of any similar profession, police, fire fighters, military, etc., often suffer from the same problems and, all too frequently, are ashamed to seek assistance. It is hoped the following anecdotes will help some recognize their problem and seek treatment. You may also recognize some of these behaviors in your friends and coworkers. If so, encourage them to seek help. And PTSD treatment can be effective, particularly if sought early.
Chuck Corry
Equal Justice Foundation
"Shameful" secret? Post-traumatic symptoms in the corrections ranks
by Caterina Spinaris Tudor, Ph.D.
Top
The following article appeared originally as the April 2010 Correctional Oasis newsletter, Vol. 7, No. 4, of the Desert Waters foundation
It is reproduced here with permission of the author
The anecdotes presented below are used with permission. Some details are changed.
If your own issues get triggered as a result of reading this, please see suggestions for help at the end of the article.
March 15, 2010 When I began talking and counseling with corrections personnel in the year 2000, I noticed that several of them suffered from post-traumatic symptoms. Some even exhibited full-blown PTSD, often self-medicated with alcohol.
I also noticed that, in the proud corrections culture, staff abhorred to admit that they had been negatively affected by traumatic work experiences. They'd often say, "I'm good. It was just an inmate." But their eyes had the 2,000-yard stare.
It didn't take me long to realize that staff feel ashamed about being affected by life-threatening or horrifically violent work-related circumstances. Due to lack of understanding of what psychological trauma does to people's brain, soul and spirit, some corrections staff even call traumatized coworkers "weak." Consequently, trauma sufferers may refuse treatment, sentencing themselves to long-term torment.
Psychological trauma occurs (a) when people are exposed to circumstances that threaten their life or physical integrity or the life or physical integrity of others; and (b) when they experience intense fear for their lives, helplessness because they cannot stop the traumatic event, or horror due to the gruesome scenes of injury or death they witness.
What does psychological trauma look like in the corrections ranks?
Here I offer some examples, by category of PTSD symptoms. For simplicity's sake I'll use the term "C.O. " and "he." However, these examples are not limited to security staff or males. They are found among both genders and in all ranks and positions.
Physiological arousal
Top
C.O. suffers from insomnia, so much so, that he has been consuming large amounts of alcohol to fall asleep. While sleeping, he thrashes about and grinds his teeth. He fights inmates in his nightmares to the point that he has elbowed and punched his wife as she slept next to him. She now sleeps in the spare bedroom. Sometimes he wakes up at 2:00 AM and cannot go back to sleep.
C.O. seeks help after becoming terrified that he may hurt family members without meaning to. His 4-year old daughter walked into her parents' bedroom one night after having had a bad dream. As she tried to climb onto their bed, she bumped against him. C.O. became fully awake due to his wife's screaming, "No! It's Susie!" C.O. realized that, startled in his sleep, he had grabbed his daughter by the throat and was hauling off to punch her in the face. All that had happened in an instant, before he could become fully conscious.
C.O. is almost always irritable. To release his anger to have an adrenaline dump, as he calls it he purposely provokes inmates by staring at them and by saying humiliating things to them in front of their "homies."
As he gets ready for work, C.O. begins to sweat profusely. Sometimes he has to change his undershirt and shirt before leaving the house, because dark stains start to show under his armpits and on his chest and back. He of course does not want inmates or staff to notice. The sweating, at times accompanied by a slight, uncontrollable shaking and "weak" knees, worsens as he gets through the prison gate. He also sweats at night to the point that in the morning the mattress is soaked.
C.O. has become prone to rages. After particularly hard shifts he drives home at 90 mph in 65 mph zones screaming at the top of his lungs.
C.O. can see fear in his children's eyes when he approaches them. His wife has pleaded with him to not give her "the prison look" anymore. She has told him that when he gets enraged at her, she is afraid he wants to kill her.
Wherever C.O. goes, he believes people are watching and studying him. He hides behind dark sunglasses. To lessen his anxiety, he avoids public places as much as possible. His wife does all the shopping now. When he cannot avoid going to a public place, he feels vulnerable, in danger. To him everyone he comes across may be affiliated with a gang or be an inmate family member. At times he gets so worked up in a public venue that he goes to the bathroom and vomits.
A C.O. is confronted by a "road rage" young guy who, at a stop sign, jumps out of his car and starts screaming at him. In a flash, the C.O. bolts out of his vehicle and lifts the guy off the ground. He raises him up over his head and body-slams him on the pavement. He then restrains him and talks to him, like he would with an inmate. "Dude, it's over now. Just relax and let go." C.O. realizes that he only remembers the beginning and the end of the event. Later on his wife fills him in. She witnessed the event while sitting petrified in their vehicle.
C.O. worries greatly about his family's safety. He has installed several security devices in his home and has hidden weapons in key locations in his house. After an inmate escapes from a nearby prison, C.O. "booby traps" his back door and patrols his living room every night, fully armed, until the inmate is apprehended.
C.O. becomes so afraid that it's going to be his life or an inmate's life, that he does the unthinkable. When he gets home, he takes a steak knife and practices putting it through his belt buckle. He even tapes the handle with black tape to make it blend with his belt. He then rehearses pulling it out rapidly. In his mind he practices slashing the inmate's throat with one swift move as the inmate is coming at him. C.O. goes to work armed with the knife hidden under his jersey. C.O. is so locked onto the moment, what he believes is the battle for his life, that he does not consider consequences of his actions. He never stops to ask himself what may happen to him and his family if he indeed hurt the inmate. Having seen so much killing and wounding, he has lost his inhibition about causing serious injury or even death to someone. Thankfully, miraculously, the inmate pleads to have all animosities between the two of them dropped and asks to be put in segregation.
Intrusive memories
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C.O. who was assaulted by an inmate has a flashback of the attack while driving. To avoid the inmate in his mind's eye, he ducks and swerves, driving his vehicle into the ditch. As the flashback subsides, he sits in his car shaking until he can compose himself enough to drive to his destination.
C.O. has nightmares about the violent incident he witnessed. The nightmares are like a movie playing or a slide show of the event. The images remain unaltered, identical to those on the day of the incident. He wakes up with a start, sweating, heart racing. To avoid reliving the event in his sleep, he tries to stay awake as much as he can.
When anyone mentions a gruesome inmate murder that C.O. witnessed, he "sees" the image in his mind's eye, "hears" the gurgling last sounds of the stab victim and "smells" the blood all over again. The rest of the day he keeps having images of the murder pop up in his mind unbidden and causing him grave distress. At night he has 10 beers before he can go to sleep.
Avoidance and emotional numbing
Top
Since a life-threatening incident at work, C.O. has withdrawn from social activities in his community. He now feels safe only at home because he believes that he can control what happens there.
C.O. now sends his family members to get the mail from the mailbox in front of his house. He is uncomfortable getting the mail himself because "you never know who may be driving by and see me standing there."
When asked by family about how is doing at work, C.O.'s response is typically "Not much is going on" or "I don't want to talk about it."
C.O. now avoids friends who do not work in corrections. He cannot relate to them, their interests and their ways of having fun. Instead, he spends hours playing computer and video games at home.
C.O. is told by coworkers that in the heat of responding to a prolonged, particularly life-threatening incident, he did and said things that he does not remember doing or saying.
C.O. avoids going to grocery stores or malls. He is afraid that some "punk" there may provoke him by staring at him or by saying something, and that he'll lose self-control and get arrested for taking him down or worse.
C.O.'s young daughter comes to him crying after she falls and skins her knees while bicycling. While tending to her injury, he realizes that he cannot feel compassion for her like he used to. He remembers that he felt nothing while performing CPR on the dead body of an inmate who had committed suicide by hanging.
C.O. feels like his life has lost its flavor and color. Even pleasant family activities that he used to enjoy now feel to him to be empty, meaningless.
C.O. is haunted by the fear that he will die soon. When he goes to bed at night he wonders if he'll be alive the next day. He particularly fears dying by the hand of an inmate. To defy these fears, he dares death by taking serious risks while riding his motorcycle on winding mountain roads.
Fearing he may get attacked by inmates, C.O. trains himself on his own time to endure physical pain and duress in order to be able to fight in spite of pain or injury. He takes that to the extreme, putting his health and safety at risk.
These are some examples of post-traumatic symptoms experienced by correctional workers. Even if an employee suffers from only one symptom, home life and work performance are impacted, affecting one's overall quality of life. That is why the issue of post-traumatic stress needs to be addressed in corrections in depth, as is currently done in the military. And, as you probably know, several corrections employees are also war veterans, compounding the risk of post-traumatic stress and its dire consequences.
Administrators and supervisors, let your staff know that corrections workers do get affected by what they experience at work, and that these effects have nothing to do with weakness. Terror and horror leave hard-to-erase imprints on people's brain, soul and spirit. These traumatic memories and associated reactions can pop up again and again, unexpectedly and out of control, unless they are processed and "digested."
I implore those of you who relate to these symptoms to get appropriate help to get better and to prevent hurting yourself, your loved ones, those at work or innocent bystanders.
If you've been triggered by reading this, you have several good options. Contact Desert Waters at 719-784-4727 or desertwaters@desertwaters.com. Call our Corrections Ventline at 866-YOU-VENT. Write us at youvent@desertwaters.com. Seek professional help through your EAP, mental health specialists in post traumatic stress treatment, or clergy.
Do not put it off any longer.
Pursue your healing!
Top
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This site is supported and maintained by the Equal Justice Foundation.
Added 5/14/10
Last modified 5/16/18#530: Annual Holiday Reminder: You Don’t Have to “Celebrate” With People Who Treat You Like Crap
Dear Captain Awkward.
You have advised that a person does not “owe” anyone else their time, friendship, or anything, and I agree with this.
However, I am struggling with being on the receiving end of this. My mother in law stopped speaking to me. And I feel SO MUCH anger and hurt over this; I have been obsessed about it for a year and a half now.
A little background: I hit it off with my MIL the first time we met, and we had a great relationship for 8 years. We spoke on the phone at least weekly, having long, fun. and close conversations, and always enjoyed seeing each other. All visits/plans/holidays were coordinated with me, and I was included in everything. We were good friends!
That ended after a visit to help them with an upcoming move. We had a bit to drink one evening, and the conversation turned a bit heated. I went to excuse myself from the table, and my FIL yelled at me, twice, “Fuck you!” My MIL was horrified and yelled at him to stop; he regretted it immediately and apologized profusely, with tears. I forgave, and thought all would be fine.
Following that, she stopped speaking to me. I thought a “cooling off” period would be good, but it never ended. It’s as if I am not in the family any more. I have made many overtures to my in-laws that I hold no grudge, and to try to get things back to normal. I have called, attempting friendly conversation (and get blown off). I have offered to travel to family events with her. I have shared pictures of trips, and sent nice holiday cards. My husband and brother in law have asked her why she no longer talks to me (her answer, “I don’t know”). Nothing changes. All the calls, texts, emails, Facebook posts, etc. that are exchanged amongst the family leave me out.
I HATE this. It makes me so angry and upset! I hate being excluded. I hate that the close relationship we had apparently meant nothing to her. I hate visiting them, where they all act friendly with each other while I sit there quietly. I hate seeing her be nice and friendly to everyone but me. And now, I hate her too. I want to punish her, and never see them again (which I won’t do, because that wouldn’t be fair to my husband). And, I hate feeling that way. I don’t want to have all this anger and hurt. Please help me deal with this. I know she has a right to do this, but I can’t seem to accept it.
Signed,
Sad and Angry
Dear Sad and Angry:
I wish I had insight into your Mother-In-Law’s state of mind, or magic words to say that would make her reconsider her behavior and mend the relationship. Alas, I do not.
People have a right to not like you, but in a family, assuming you haven’t harmed anyone, I don’t think they have the right to give you the silent treatment and subject you to a constant low level of scorn and expect you to stick around for that.
You talk about how going to events where people give you the silent treatment is the “fair” thing to do for your husband, but I’d like to question that assumption quite a lot. Because if we’re talking fairness, I think you do not have to sit quietly and pretend that this is normal. I think you do not have to play this role called “Pleasant, Approval-Seeking Wife” and audition for good will…or basic recognition of your common humanity… from someone who mistreats you. I do not think you have to send cards or presents or remember the birthdays or do all the “wifely” social secretary stuff for people who mistreat you.
What would be the worst thing that happened if you gave your husband’s family gatherings a giant “I’ll be home with a good book drinking wine, catch you later?” He would miss you and feel bad and lonely, probably, but BOTH of you would be free of the tension. What if you gave yourself the gift of a year free of attending stuff with his family or worrying about anything to do with his family? Putting some kind of time limit or scheduling a time to review on the decision to stay away may help your husband come to terms with it and help all parties take pressure off themselves.
I realize this is an anxiety-producing prospect for a lot of people, because it means acknowledging that things are broken and not normal. It means backing out of what “the holidays” and “but we’re a faaaaaaamily!” are supposed to mean. It means putting down a socially acceptable and comforting role and stepping into the unknown, where this person hates your guts and you don’t know why. And it would mean your husband would have to make some choices about how and whether to go to bat for you, which I suspect have been put off indefinitely in the hopes that things will magically get better without him having to say “Mom, what the in the name of fuck is going on?” Your husband may also have to make some choices about whether he is comfortable spending time in places where you are not welcomed. The relationship that needs and would benefit the most from some work right now is the one with your husband, and by work I mean HIM taking care of YOU and doing his best to support and reassure YOU. And the question he needs to ask his mom isn’t “Why don’t you like her?” but “When are you going to stop treating her like garbage? Because, however you may feel, that’s when I/we’ll be back.”
That’s the abusive power dynamic contained in the silent treatment, by the way. Your husband’s mom is the one mistreating you, but by using the silent treatment everything is reframed as you having to audition for her approval and trying to win your way back into her good graces. If you reframe it as “Wow, you are being mean and unreasonable and acting like a bully” instead of “Whyyyyyy don’t you like me?” it’s not a more comforting picture, but it is a more honest one.
You may never find a new normal that feels all the way good here. You will likely never recapture the feeling of inclusion you once had with your in-laws, because even if your Mother-In-Law resumes normal relations you will never be able to trust that it will last. I am so, so sorry. “Good” outcomes here mean “being a basic amount of civil and hoping things thaw over time.” We’re a long way from there, and the work to be done is not yours to do.
The steps I know about in situations like these are 1) admit how bad it is and how broken things are 2) grieve and be really nice to yourself, which includes taking a lot of time away from the situation 3) put up a buffer between you and the badness (so you’re not looking at these Facebook posts and choking down Silent Treatment Pie and The Mashed Potatoes of Guilt and Trepidation), and 4) Reach out to and be around people who make you feel good.If you prefer video over blog posts, here is my talk on this at GopherCon 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyuFeiG3Y60
One of the strongest sides of Go programming language is a built-in concurrency based on Tony Hoare’s CSP paper. Go is designed with concurrency in mind and allows us to build complex concurrent pipelines. But have you ever wondered - how various concurrency patterns look like?
Of course, you have. We’re all thinking mostly by visualization in one form or another. If I ask you something involving “numbers from 1 to 100” you will have your own image of the series in your head, even without realizing it. For example, I imagine it as a line going from me with numbers from 1 to 20, then it turns 90 degrees to the right and continues to the 1000+. I recall from very young period of my life that in our kindergarten there were numbers in a cloakroom, written along the wall, and number 20 was exactly at the corner. You probably have your own image of numbers. Another common example is the visual representation of the full year with four seasons - some people see it as a box, other - as a circle.
Anyway, I want to show you my attempt to visualize common concurrency patterns using Go and WebGL. It more or less represents the way I see concurrent programs in my head. Would be pretty interesting to hear how much it differs from images in your head. I especially would love to see how Rob Pike or Sameer Ajmani imagine concurrency. I bet I’d be quite interesting.
So, let’s start with the very basic “Hello, Concurrent World” example, to get ourselves familiar with the concept of my attempt.
Hello, Concurrent world
The code is quite simple - single channel, single goroutine, one write, one read.
package main func main() { // create new channel of type int ch := make(chan int) // start new anonymous goroutine go func() { // send 42 to channel ch
Go to interactive WebGL animation
Here the blue lines represent goroutines running down through time. Thin blue lines connecting ‘main’ and ‘go #19’ are marks for start and stop goroutine, revealing parent-children relation and, finally, red arrow shows us the send/recv action. While it’s actually two separate actions, I try to animate as a single event “send from A to B”. The “#19” in the goroutine name is the actual goroutine internal ID, obtained from runtime with a trick suggested by Scott Mansfield in “Goroutine IDs” article.
Timers
In fact, you can build a simple timer with this approach - create a channel, start goroutine which writes to this channel after given duration and returns this channel to the caller of your func. The caller then blocks on reading from the channel for the exact amount of time. Let’s run such timer 24 times and try to visualize it.
package main import "time" func timer(d time.Duration)
Go to interactive WebGL animation
Pretty neat, right? Let’s move on.
Ping-pong
This nice concurrency example was found in a great talk by googler Sameer Ajmani “Advanced Go Concurrency Patterns”. Of course, this pattern isn’t very advanced, but for those who only get themselves familiar with Go concurrency it may look quite fresh and interesting.
Here we have a channel as a table of the ping-pong game. The ball is an integer variable, and two goroutines-players that ‘hit’ the ball, increasing its value (hits counter).
package main import "time" func main() { var Ball int table := make(chan int) go player(table) go player(table) table
Go to interactive WebGL animation At this point I’d suggest you to click that link above to the interactive WebGL animation (Ctrl/Cmd-Click to open it in a new tab) and play around with interactively. You can slowdown animation, speedup and see it in different angles.
Now, let’s run three players instead of two.
go player(table) go player(table) go player(table)
Go to interactive WebGL animation We can see here that each player takes its turn sequentially and you may wonder why is it so. Why we see this strict order in goroutines receiving the ball?
The answer is because Go runtime holds waiting FIFO queue for receivers (goroutines ready to receive on the particular channel), and in our case every player gets ready just after he passed the ball on the table. Let’s check it with more complex example and run 100 table tennis players.
for i := 0; i < 100; i++ { go player(table) }
Go to interactive WebGL animation The FIFO order is now obvious, isn’t it? We can spawn a million goroutines (they’re cheap), but for our goal that would be overkill. Let’s see something different to play with. For example, common messaging patterns.
Fan-In
One of the popular patterns in the concurrent world is a so called fan-in pattern. It’s the opposite of the fan-out pattern, which we will cover later. To be short, fan-in is a function reading from the multiple inputs and multiplexing all into the single channel.
For example:
package main import ( "fmt" "time" ) func producer(ch chan int, d time.Duration) { var i int for { ch
Go to interactive WebGL animation As we can see, first producer generates values each 100 milliseconds, and second one - each 250 milliseconds, but reader receives values from both producers immediately. Effectively, multiplexing happens in a range loop in main.
Workers
The opposite pattern to fan-in is a fan-out or workers pattern. Multiple goroutines can read from a single channel, distributing an amount of work between CPU cores, hence the workers name. In Go, this pattern is easy to implement - just start a number of goroutines with channel as parameter, and just send values to that channel - distributing and multiplexing will be done by Go runtime, automagically :)
package main import ( "fmt" "sync" "time" ) func worker(tasksCh
Go to interactive WebGL animation One thing worth to note here: the parallelism. As you can see, all goroutines ‘run’ in parallel, waiting for channel to give them ‘work’ to do. Given the animation above, it’s easy to spot that goroutines receive their work almost immediately one after another. Unfortunately, this animation doesn’t show in color where goroutine really does work or just waits for input, but this exact animation was recorded with GOMAXPROCS=4, so only 4 goroutines effectively run in parallel. We will get to this subject shortly.
For now, let’s do something more complex, and start workers that have their own workers (subworkers).
package main import ( "fmt" "sync" "time" ) const ( WORKERS = 5 SUBWORKERS = 3 TASKS = 20 SUBTASKS = 10 ) func subworker(subtasks chan int) { for { task, ok :=
Go to interactive WebGL animation Nice. Of course, we can set number of workers and subworkers to much higher values, but I tried to make animations clear and understandable.
There are even cooler fan-out patterns do exist, like the dynamic amount of workers/subworkers, with sending channels over channels, but the idea of fan-out should be clear for now.
Servers
Next common pattern is similar to fan-out, but with goroutines spawned for the short period of time, just to accomplish some task. It’s typically |
" color table can be given which all blocks use; if this bit is set, then the header is immediately followed by a global color table. You'll find that virtually all GIFs contain a global color table. x: number of color resolution bits, minus 1. This is the base-2 logarithm of the number of colors that the display unit is believed to be capable of supporting — this is not the same as the number of colors in the actual GIF. If the display can only display 16 colors, and the GIF indicates that it expects the display to support 256, then the software may well just abort the display. These days, this value is informational (at best). y: "sorted" flag. To understand the utility of the sorted flag, suppose a display capable of only displaying 16 colors is presented with a 64-color GIF. The GIF encoder can make it possible for the low-resolution display to approximate the display of the GIF by sorting the color palette by the frequency of the colors — the display can just display those colors (maybe skipping the others entirely or trying to find their closest match). This flag is set if the encoder did so. The setting of this flag isn't particularly important these days, since 16-color displays are pretty few and far between nowadays. z: number of bits in the global color table, minus 1. So the global color table contains 2z+1 entries. Background color index: If any pixels in the rectangular area described by this GIF are not specified this is the color to set them to. How, you may ask, would a pixel value not be set? After all, the GIF itself is described as a rectangle. Recall, however, that GIF permits the image to be subdivided into smaller blocks, which themselves don't necessarily take up the whole image display area. If for some reason the upper-left and lower-right quadrant were defined, but the rest of the block was not, some pixels would be left unset. Pixel aspect ratio: Again this is informational (at best) — this tells the decoder what the ratio of the pixel's widths to their heights were in the original image. How a decoder might make use of this information isn't described; I'm not aware of any GIF decoder that pays any attention to it. Parsing the GIF header, then, can be done as shown in listing 1: typedef struct { unsigned short width; unsigned short height; unsigned char fields; unsigned char background_color_index; unsigned char pixel_aspect_ratio; } screen_descriptor_t; /** * @param gif_file the file descriptor of a file containing a * GIF-encoded file. This should point to the first byte in * the file when invoked. */ static void process_gif_stream( int gif_file ) { unsigned char header[ 7 ]; screen_descriptor_t screen_descriptor; int color_resolution_bits; // A GIF file starts with a Header (section 17) if ( read( gif_file, header, 6 )!= 6 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short)" ); return; } header[ 6 ] = 0x0; // XXX there's another format, GIF87a, that you may still find // floating around. if ( strcmp( "GIF89a", header ) ) { fprintf( stderr, "Invalid GIF file (header is '%s', should be 'GIF89a')
", header ); return; } // Followed by a logical screen descriptor // Note that this works because GIFs specify little-endian order; on a // big-endian machine, the height & width would need to be reversed. // Can't use sizeof here since GCC does byte alignment; // sizeof( screen_descriptor_t ) = 8! if ( read( gif_file, &screen_descriptor, 7 ) < 7 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short)" ); return; } color_resolution_bits = ( ( screen_descriptor.fields & 0x70 ) >> 4 ) + 1; If the fields indicate that the GIF contains a global color table, it immediately follows the header. The size is given by the flags, and it indicates how many 3-byte entries are contained by the global color table; each indicates the intensity of the red, green and blue (respectively) of each index. Listing 2 illustrates the parsing of the global color table: typedef struct { unsigned char r; unsigned char g; unsigned char b; } rgb;... static void process_gif_stream( int gif_file ) { unsigned char header[ 7 ]; screen_descriptor_t screen_descriptor; int color_resolution_bits; int global_color_table_size; // number of entries in global_color_table rgb *global_color_table;... if ( screen_descriptor.fields & 0x80 ) { int i; // If bit 7 is set, the next block is a global color table; read it global_color_table_size = 1 << ( ( ( screen_descriptor.fields & 0x07 ) + 1 ) ); global_color_table = ( rgb * ) malloc( 3 * global_color_table_size ); // XXX this could conceivably return a short count... if ( read( gif_file, global_color_table, 3 * global_color_table_size ) < 3 * global_color_table_size ) { perror( "Unable to read global color table" ); return; } } This concludes the header portion of the GIF file. Following the header is a series of blocks. Each block is marked off by a one-byte block-type identifier. The most important of these is the image descriptor block 0x2C — this is where the indices of the actual image are stored. The next-most-important block type is the trailer block 0x3B which indicates the end of a GIF - if this trailer block isn't encountered before the end of the file, the file has been somehow corrupted. So, once the main header and the global color table (if present, although for all practical purposes it always will be) have been parsed, the next thing to do is to start looking for blocks and parsing them according to their types as shown in listing 3: #define IMAGE_DESCRIPTOR 0x2C #define TRAILER 0x3B... static void process_gif_stream( int gif_file ) { unsigned char header[ 7 ]; screen_descriptor_t screen_descriptor; int color_resolution_bits; int global_color_table_size; // number of entries in global_color_table rgb *global_color_table; unsigned char block_type = 0x0;... while ( block_type!= TRAILER ) { if ( read( gif_file, &block_type, 1 ) < 1 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short)" ); return; } switch ( block_type ) { case IMAGE_DESCRIPTOR: if (!process_image_descriptor( gif_file, global_color_table, global_color_table_size, color_resolution_bits ) ) { return; } break; case TRAILER: break;... default: fprintf( stderr, "Bailing on unrecognized block type %.02x
", block_type ); return; } } } The image descriptor block itself begins with a 9-byte header structure: image_left_position 2 bytes image_top_position 2 bytes image_width 2 bytes image_height 2 bytes fields 1 byte The left, top, width and height indicate where, in the context of the whole image, this block starts and ends — remember that GIF allows for several blocks to make up a completed image. The left, top, width and height indicate where, in the context of the whole image, this block starts and ends — remember that GIF allows for several blocks to make up a completed image. The fields, again, are split up as: w: local color table flag x: interlace flag y: sorted flag z: size of local color table (bits 3 and 4 are "reserved" and undefined. They should always be set to 0.) Here, local color table, sorted flag, and size of local color table are interpreted just as in the case of the global color table. The parsing of the local color table is exactly the same as the parsing of the global color table; I won't repeat it here. You'll find that very few.gif files have image descriptors with local color tables, anyway. (bits 3 and 4 are "reserved" and undefined. They should always be set to 0.) Here, local color table, sorted flag, and size of local color table are interpreted just as in the case of the global color table. The parsing of the local color table is exactly the same as the parsing of the global color table; I won't repeat it here. You'll find that very few.gif files have image descriptors with local color tables, anyway. One bit that appears in this flags byte that doesn't have an analog in the flags byte defined in the global header is the interlace flag. Remember that GIF is optimized for slow display hardware — the idea behind interlacing is that the display can show the image in rough format early in the parsing process, and progressively display more and more detail until the image has been completely processed. Therefore, if the interlace flag is set, then the lines of the image will be included out of order: first, every 8th line. Second, every 8th line, starting from the fourth. Third, every 4th line, starting from the second, and finally every other line, completing the image. Example 3 illustrates how an interlaced file is stored. The idea is that the lines marked in green will be read, and displayed, first, followed by the ones marked in yellow, then the ones marked in blue and finally all remaining lines. This way, the user can get an idea what the picture is going to look like before it has completely downloaded; if it's not what he was expecting, he can abort the remainder of the download and save some bandwitdth. This made a lot more sense back in the days of 28.8 modems — these days, the whole image will have downloaded before the user has a chance to get an idea of what he's looking at. Still, you'll find quite a few interlaced GIF files floating around on the internet, even today. Ignoring the parsing of the LCT, the image descriptor header is parsed as shown in listing 4: typedef struct { unsigned short image_left_position; unsigned short image_top_position; unsigned short image_width; unsigned short image_height; unsigned char fields; } image_descriptor_t;... static int process_image_descriptor( int gif_file, rgb *gct, int gct_size, int resolution_bits ) { image_descriptor_t image_descriptor; int disposition; // TODO there could actually be lots of these if ( read( gif_file, &image_descriptor, 9 ) < 9 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short)" ); disposition = 0; goto done; } // TODO if LCT = true, read the LCT... disposition = 1; done: return disposition; } Following the image descriptor header, still logically contained inside the image descriptor block itself, is a series of data sub-blocks. These data sub-blocks are the LZW-compressed indices into the active color table — if the image descriptor block contained a local color table, these are the indices into the local color table; otherwise they are indices into the global color table. The data sub-blocks themselves are further subdivided into 255-byte chunks; each chunk declares its length as its first single byte. Clearly, since a single GIF can (theoretically) be 655356x65536=4,294,967,296 pixels, almost all image descriptors will be made of multiple data sub-blocks, even though they are compressed. However, the decoder doesn't have enough information at this point to be able to tell how many bytes of compressed data follow. Therefore, the decoder must instead keep reading data sub-blocks until a zero-length sub-block in encountered, indicating that the end of the compressed data. These sub-blocks (of compressed data) can be read into memory as shown in listing 5. Here, I've opted to slurp the whole mess into memory by making repeated calls to realloc — any GIF implementation worthy of being taken seriously would instead be decompressing this data as it was being read, but this implementation is simpler to understand. static int read_sub_blocks( int gif_file, unsigned char **data ) { int data_length; int index; unsigned char block_size; // Everything following are data sub-blocks, until a 0-sized block is // encountered. data_length = 0; *data = NULL; index = 0; while ( 1 ) { if ( read( gif_file, &block_size, 1 ) < 1 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short): " ); return -1; } if ( block_size == 0 ) // end of sub-blocks { break; } data_length += block_size; *data = realloc( *data, data_length ); // TODO this could be split across block size boundaries if ( read( gif_file, *data + index, block_size ) < block_size ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short): " ); return -1; } index += block_size; } return data_length; } static int process_image_descriptor( int gif_file, rgb *gct, int gct_size, int resolution_bits ) { int compressed_data_length; unsigned char *compressed_data = NULL;... if ( read( gif_file, &image_descriptor, 9 ) < 9 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short)" ); disposition = 0; goto done; } compressed_data_length = read_sub_blocks( gif_file, &compressed_data );... done: if ( compressed_data ) free( compressed_data ); return disposition; } At this point, the compressed data is contained entirely in the buffer specified by compressed_data. The next thing to do, of course, is to decompress it. This could almost be done using the decompress implementation from last month's article. There are a few modifications that need to be made for it to work with compressed GIF data, though: Last month's implementation used strcmp and strcat to imlplement the LZW dictionary. This won't work for GIF indices, because they contain embedded zero's which C's string operations interpret as "end of string". That implementation assumed that the compressed data started with 8-bit codes and expanded to 9 bits when the dictionary filled up. In fact, GIF allows variable starting sizes, all the way down to four-bit codes. To solve the first problem, the dictionary itself must be reimagined. Rather than being an array of strings, the dictionary is implemented as a structure of pointers. Recall from last month that when a new dictionary index was encountered, it was created by concatenating (using strcat ) the most recently read code on top of the previous dictionary entry. A more flexible approach is to define a structure that allows each entry to point to its predecessor, as shown in listing 6: typedef struct { unsigned char byte; int prev; int len; } dictionary_entry_t; Now, a string of 5 0x0 bytes will be represented in memory as: Each of these structures will be pointed to by a dictionary entry as well; the index into the dictionary, which is now an array of pointers to dictionary_entry_t, is the expansion code read from the file. So, if the first five bytes were all 0's (which is pretty common) and the global color table contained 64 entries: Here, the length declaration is just a convenience; it's not strictly necessary (and most GIF implementation omit it to speed up decompression). If the code 69 is encountered in the data stream, the decompressor would look up dictionary[ 69 ], find that it's byte was 0, emit a 0, and then follow the backpointer to &dictionary[ 68 ], emit another 0, and so on. However, the entries are built up this way "backwards", so it's necessary to emit them in reverse order. Most GIF implementations push the bytes onto a stack and then pop them back off to do the actual decompression; I instead keep track of the length so I know how many bytes forward in the output buffer to jump ahead when emitting the first code. Once this is squared away, solving the second problem — that of variably sized LZW codes — is simple: just pass the starting code size into the uncompress routine. Listing 7 is the completed GIF-friendly uncompress routine; compare this to last month's text-based implementation. Notice that there's a hardcoded limit of 12-bit codes; once the dictionary expands to 212=4,096 entries, it is not permitted to grow any further. It's up to the encoder to decide if the active dictionary is still doing a good job of compressing, or if it should send a clear code and restart from scratch. int uncompress( int code_length, const unsigned char *input, int input_length, unsigned char *out ) { int maxbits; int i, bit; int code, prev = -1; dictionary_entry_t *dictionary; int dictionary_ind; unsigned int mask = 0x01; int reset_code_length; int clear_code; // This varies depending on code_length int stop_code; // one more than clear code int match_len; clear_code = 1 << ( code_length ); stop_code = clear_code + 1; // To handle clear codes reset_code_length = code_length; // Create a dictionary large enough to hold "code_length" entries. // Once the dictionary overflows, code_length increases dictionary = ( dictionary_entry_t * ) malloc( sizeof( dictionary_entry_t ) * ( 1 << ( code_length + 1 ) ) ); // Initialize the first 2^code_len entries of the dictionary with their // indices. The rest of the entries will be built up dynamically. // Technically, it shouldn't be necessary to initialize the // dictionary. The spec says that the encoder "should output a // clear code as the first code in the image data stream". It doesn't // say must, though... for ( dictionary_ind = 0; dictionary_ind < ( 1 << code_length ); dictionary_ind++ ) { dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].byte = dictionary_ind; // XXX this only works because prev is a 32-bit int (> 12 bits) dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].prev = -1; dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].len = 1; } // 2^code_len + 1 is the special "end" code; don't give it an entry here dictionary_ind++; dictionary_ind++; // TODO verify that the very last byte is clear_code + 1 while ( input_length ) { code = 0x0; // Always read one more bit than the code length for ( i = 0; i < ( code_length + 1 ); i++ ) { // This is different than in the file read example; that // was a call to "next_bit" bit = ( *input & mask )? 1 : 0; mask <<= 1; if ( mask == 0x100 ) { mask = 0x01; input++; input_length--; } code = code | ( bit << i ); } if ( code == clear_code ) { code_length = reset_code_length; dictionary = ( dictionary_entry_t * ) realloc( dictionary, sizeof( dictionary_entry_t ) * ( 1 << ( code_length + 1 ) ) ); for ( dictionary_ind = 0; dictionary_ind < ( 1 << code_length ); dictionary_ind++ ) { dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].byte = dictionary_ind; // XXX this only works because prev is a 32-bit int (> 12 bits) dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].prev = -1; dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].len = 1; } dictionary_ind++; dictionary_ind++; prev = -1; continue; } else if ( code == stop_code ) { if ( input_length > 1 ) { fprintf( stderr, "Malformed GIF (early stop code)
" ); exit( 0 ); } break; } // Update the dictionary with this character plus the _entry_ // (character or string) that came before it if ( ( prev > -1 ) && ( code_length < 12 ) ) { if ( code > dictionary_ind ) { fprintf( stderr, "code = %.02x, but dictionary_ind = %.02x
", code, dictionary_ind ); exit( 0 ); } // Special handling for KwKwK if ( code == dictionary_ind ) { int ptr = prev; while ( dictionary[ ptr ].prev!= -1 ) { ptr = dictionary[ ptr ].prev; } dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].byte = dictionary[ ptr ].byte; } else { int ptr = code; while ( dictionary[ ptr ].prev!= -1 ) { ptr = dictionary[ ptr ].prev; } dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].byte = dictionary[ ptr ].byte; } dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].prev = prev; dictionary[ dictionary_ind ].len = dictionary[ prev ].len + 1; dictionary_ind++; // GIF89a mandates that this stops at 12 bits if ( ( dictionary_ind == ( 1 << ( code_length + 1 ) ) ) && ( code_length < 11 ) ) { code_length++; dictionary = ( dictionary_entry_t * ) realloc( dictionary, sizeof( dictionary_entry_t ) * ( 1 << ( code_length + 1 ) ) ); } } prev = code; // Now copy the dictionary entry backwards into "out" match_len = dictionary[ code ].len; while ( code!= -1 ) { out[ dictionary[ code ].len - 1 ] = dictionary[ code ].byte; if ( dictionary[ code ].prev == code ) { fprintf( stderr, "Internal error; self-reference." ); exit( 0 ); } code = dictionary[ code ].prev; } out += match_len; } } I won't go into too much detail about how this works, since I covered it pretty thoroughly last month. But wait - how does the caller of uncompress know how many bits the decompressor should start reading? GIF actually mandates that the first byte of the image descriptor's data area (before the data sub-blocks themselves) be a single byte indicating how long the first code is. unsigned char lzw_code_size;... if ( read( gif_file, &lzw_code_size, 1 ) < 1 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short): " ); disposition = 0; goto done; } compressed_data_length = read_sub_blocks( gif_file, &compressed_data ); With uncompress defined, and the starting code length known, the image descriptor processor can now decompress the index data. int uncompressed_data_length = 0; unsigned char *uncompressed_data = NULL;... compressed_data_length = read_sub_blocks( gif_file, &compressed_data ); uncompressed_data_length = image_descriptor.image_width * image_descriptor.image_height; uncompressed_data = malloc( uncompressed_data_length ); uncompress( lzw_code_size, compressed_data, compressed_data_length, uncompressed_data ); disposition = 1;... done: if ( compressed_data ) free( compressed_data ); if ( uncompressed_data ) free( uncompressed_data ); return disposition; } And that's it - displaying the image is now a matter of indexing the color table and (if necessary) de-interlacing the lines of the data. so, you may legitimately be wondering why there is more than one block type defined when the image descriptor block type contains the entire image. The GIF '87 standard recognized that the specification might need to be expanded later, so a special block type 0x21 was included to allow for extensions. An extension block first includes a single byte indicating what type of extension it describes. The next byte indicates the length of the extension — by including the length of the extension as a standard part of the extension, decoders that don't recognize the extension can skip over it, but still properly process the file. The remaining bytes of the extension are, of course, specific to the type of the extension. All extensions are followed by data sub-blocks, formatted exactly the same as those in the image data itself — if the extension doesn't have any associated data, it will be followed by a single 0-byte data sub-block. GIF '87 didn't define any extensions, but GIF '89 codified four: plaintext, comment, application-specific, and graphic control extension. Comment extension: This extension allowed for variable-length text to be included as a read-only comment inside the GIF stream. This comment was not supposed to be displayed onscreen and it wasn't clarified exactly how the user might go about viewing it. The use of this extension is rare. Text extension: Like the comment extension, this extension allowed for textual data to be included inside a GIF. Unlike the comment extension, however, this textual data was meant to be overlayed on top of this image as part of its display. Since the encoder has no way to specify font data (in fact, this extension only permits fixed-width fonts, so variable-width fonts or those that permit, say, kerning is not permissible), this is also very rare. I'm not aware of any GIF decoder that honors it. Application Specific: This extension allows for arbitrary data to be stuffed into a GIF; it consists of 8 bytes that identify an application, and 3 bytes indicating a version. The data that follows in the subblocks is, obviously, dependent on the application ID. The last, and most complex, extension type is the graphic control extension. Remember that I mentioned that nobody uses the multiple-block capability of GIF to hyper-compress an image file — instead, this was used to create animated image files. Althought the GIF87a specification states that, when multiple image blocks are encountered, "There is no pause between the images. Each is processed immediately as seen by the decoder", most GIF decoders overlayed images with delays to create the illusion of animation. Since the software of the day was pretty slow to begin with, I suspect that this animation capability was more of an accident, but it became very popular — so popular that today, there are quite a few people who believe that GIF means animated GIF. The problem was, there was no standard way to indicate how much time should pass between frames of these animations. GIF89 embraced this and codified it with the graphic control extension. This extension is very common, not only with animated GIFs — you'll encounter these all the time. The graphic control extension starts with a fields byte: r r r x x x y z r: reserved, set to 0 x: disposal method. This indicates what the decoder should do in between the display of separate frames; should it blank out the display area or not? y: user input flag. If not set, the GIF animation should display automatically; otherwise, the user is expected to click between animation frames. z: transparency: if true, then the last byte of the extension is a transparency index. The flags byte is followed by a 2-byte delay time (in hundredths of a second) between frames and a single-byte transparency index; this index should not be overlayed so that the underlying frame can "show through". The flags byte is followed by a 2-byte delay time (in hundredths of a second) between frames and a single-byte transparency index; this index should not be overlayed so that the underlying frame can "show through". To process these extension types, add a new block type as shown in listing 10: #define EXTENSION_INTRODUCER 0x21 #define IMAGE_DESCRIPTOR 0x2C... static void process_gif_stream( int gif_file ) {... switch ( block_type ) { case EXTENSION_INTRODUCER: if (!process_extension( gif_file ) ) { return; } break; case IMAGE_DESCRIPTOR: And then process the extensions themselves as shown in listing 11: And then process the extensions themselves as shown in listing 11: #define EXTENSION_INTRODUCER 0x21 #define IMAGE_DESCRIPTOR 0x2C #define TRAILER 0x3B #define GRAPHIC_CONTROL 0xF9 #define APPLICATION_EXTENSION 0xFF #define COMMENT_EXTENSION 0xFE #define PLAINTEXT_EXTENSION 0x01 typedef struct { unsigned char extension_code; unsigned char block_size; } extension_t; typedef struct { unsigned char fields; unsigned short delay_time; unsigned char transparent_color_index; } graphic_control_extension_t; typedef struct { unsigned char application_id[ 8 ]; unsigned char version[ 3 ]; } application_extension_t; typedef struct { unsigned short left; unsigned short top; unsigned short width; unsigned short height; unsigned char cell_width; unsigned char cell_height; unsigned char foreground_color; unsigned char background_color; } plaintext_extension_t; static int process_extension( int gif_file ) { extension_t extension; graphic_control_extension_t gce; application_extension_t application; plaintext_extension_t plaintext; unsigned char *extension_data = NULL; int extension_data_length; if ( read( gif_file, &extension, 2 ) < 2 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short): " ); return 0; } switch ( extension.extension_code ) { case GRAPHIC_CONTROL: if ( read( gif_file, &gce, 4 ) < 4 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short): " ); return 0; } break; case APPLICATION_EXTENSION: if ( read( gif_file, &application, 11 ) < 11 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short): " ); return 0; } break; case 0xFE: // comment extension; do nothing - all the data is in the // sub-blocks that follow. break; case 0x01: if ( read( gif_file, &plaintext, 12 ) < 12 ) { perror( "Invalid GIF file (too short): " ); return 0; } break; default: fprintf( stderr, "Unrecognized extension code.
" ); exit( 0 ); } // All extensions are followed by data sub-blocks; even if it's // just a single data sub-block of length 0 extension_data_length = read_sub_blocks( gif_file, &extension_data ); if ( extension_data!= NULL ) free( extension_data ); return 1; } Of course, in this case, all I'm doing is parsing the data; I'm not interpreting it or doing anything with it. Notice that in this case, I'm hardcoding the lengths of each extension structure — this is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, since the length is indicated by a byte in the extension header itself. I'm also terminating on an unrecognized extension, in violation of the specification; I should just skip over them. The next step would be to expand the indices into an actual image and display it, while honoring transparency and animation specifications. I'll leave that to the real GIF decoders; by now, you should have a very good understanding of the ins and outs of the GIF image format. References: Terry Welch "A Technique for High-Performance Data Compression", IEEE Computer, June 1984 The GIF '89 Specification References: Downloads: The source code for this article Add a comment: Name: Name is required
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Comment is requiredToday, we’re excited to bring you Instagram for Windows Phone.
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Learn more about Instagram for Windows phone at help.instagram.com and download it today from the Windows Phone Store!How to catch a crocodile: On patrol with the world's busiest croc-catching team in Darwin
Updated
Nine years ago near the central Darwin boat ramp, a saltwater crocodile locked its jaws around veteran ranger Tom Nichols' hand, spun around and tore off two of his fingers.
A larger crocodile would have taken his arm at the shoulder.
The Northern Territory has the world's busiest and most sophisticated crocodile management program, regularly hauling about 250 of the ancient reptiles from Darwin harbour each year.
A team of five rangers checks 26 permanent croc traps dotted about the harbour, as well as many small creeks and mangrove estuaries.
Smaller ranger crews trap crocodiles in the Adelaide River near Katherine as well as the Litchfield National Park. Nowhere else in Australia are crocodiles controlled on such a scale.
"All we're doing is we're creating a vacuum," Mr Nichols shouted above the roar of the outboard, motoring to a permanent floating trap 18 kilometres from Darwin's foreshore.
"If there was no trapping program the number of crocodiles in the harbour would be extra high.
"There would be more fatalities and more risk for recreational users."
But he said he was against culling.
"It would just create a false sense of security," he said.
Since the NT banned crocodile hunting in 1971, estimated croc numbers rebounded then boomed to more than 100,000.
Over the same period, the human population of the Territory almost tripled to about 230,000.
The men and women of Problem Crocodile Management have created a buffer between the two apex predators and their habitats - between the wild waterways and the city, towns and suburbs.
In the wet season creeks rise and crocodiles slip out of the rivers and ocean to infiltrate places of human settlement.
The croc team are on 24-hour standby, responding to sightings phoned in by residents.
The boat motored passed a natural gas tanker berthed near Wickham Point in the middle of the harbour.
With the Territory's gas boom, the team are advising resource companies to assess crocodile risk.
The team have also begun meeting counterparts in Queensland and Western Australia where crocodiles are being sighted further south.
They're certainly not dumb. They're like humans. You never know what they are capable of. And every year there's one croc with a mongrel eye. Tom Nichols, wildlife officer
To illustrate the danger, before the morning boat trip news broke that a crocodile may have taken a man on Melville Island in the eastern Timor Sea, just north of Darwin.
Mr Nichols was due to fly out to the island in the afternoon, taking with him gear including harpoons, ropes, gaffer tape, a.308 calibre rifle and a shotgun.
There is more than one way to catch a croc.
"They're certainly not dumb," Mr Nichols said.
"They're like humans. You never know what they are capable of. And every year there's one croc with a mongrel eye."
The boat slowed down as it approached the croc trap moored near mangroves. Inside swims a croc about half the length of its 5-metre-long half-submerged aluminium cage.
For crocs trapped like this, the NT catchers have developed their own method, using a winch and cable-ties which they say is safest for both the catcher and the croc.
Did they ever jump on the back of a croc like Steve Irwin?
"We don't do that," Mr Nichols said, spinning the boat's wheel with his maimed hand.
Fellow wildlife officer Emma Jackson stepped out of the boat and stood on the cage, tying a nylon rope into a lasso and lowering it through an aperture to fasten it around the animal's upper jaw.
She tapped its snout with a stick to make it open its mouth.
Using the rope like a dog lead, she walked the crocodile out of the cage and around the side of the boat.
She then ran the rope through a winch and hauled the crocodile up.
As its jaw poked over the gunwale Tom Nichols fastened a standard plastic cable tie to clamp its mouth shut.
The crocodile was then lowered back into the water, walked to the back of the boat and hauled up a purpose-built slipway and laid bow-to-stern on the deck.
Ms Jackson gaffer-taped a hessian bag over its eyes and taped its powerful hind legs together.
In just five minutes the dangerous animal had been transferred from the trap to the bottom of the boat, where it lay hooded and immobile.
The trap was then re-baited with feral pig meat.
The team goes through 80 kilograms of the meat each week.
The pair motored back to the boat ramp, winched the boat onto the trailer, and drove to headquarters in Yarrawonga near Palmerston on the outskirts of Darwin.
Passing motorists had no idea there was a crocodile in the boat.
At headquarters, the animal measured 2.5 metres tip-to-tail - small compared to the five-metre ''monster crocs" they had pulled from the harbour and Top End rivers.
It will be sold to a crocodile farm for a nominal fee.
"They do what they want to do with them," Mr Nichols said.
The largest and most impressive crocodiles are sold for five-figure sums to overseas zoos and reptile parks.
Females may be kept as breeding stock, but this male, which about 24 hours ago was living freely in the open ocean, would probably be killed and skinned for handbag and shoe leather.
Topics: crocodile, animal-attacks, human-interest, environmental-management, environment, darwin-0800, wa, qld, tiwi-0810, nt
First posted5 of the Biggest Misconceptions about Dancing
DanceHub Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 13, 2014
[caption id=”attachment_258" align=”alignright” width=”317"]
Ever wonder if you could be good? Ignore these misconceptions.[/caption]
Whether you’re a dancing pro or a newbie looking to learn more about dancing, when you research or talk to someone about it, you’re bound to hear statements that just aren’t true. There are many misconceptions surrounding the art of dance, some of which are strong enough statements that they put people off from dancing completely.
We’re here to tell you that some of the most common misconceptions are the ones you’ve heard often — and they’re wrong, so pretend you’ve never heard them and let your inner dancer be free.
1. You have to be Trained to be Good
Probably the biggest misconception about dancing is that you have to be trained to be good. This is the furthest thing from the truth. Some people, who have never set foot on a dance floor before, find themselves swaying in tune to the music and make excellent dancers.
The reality is that some people have rhythm and it’s the rhythm that makes you a good dancer. Training is always good, especially if you plan |
make the 2015 taxation year the last one where Canadians are encouraged to give more to political parties than to charities who aim to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and heal the wounded.
While a $400 donation to a political party currently generates a 75 per cent federal tax credit, or $300 reduction, that same $400 donation to a charity only generates a federal return of $88 — 15 per cent tax credit on the first $200 and 29 per cent credit on the other $200.
The changes Falk introduced would give Canadians the same federal tax rebate.
"It shouldn't be any more important to feed a politician than it should be to feed someone that is hungry."
— Ted Falk
"The bill is all about bringing fairness to charitable donations relative to donations made to a political party or candidate," he told The Huffington Post Canada Monday. "It shouldn't be any more important to feed a politician than it should be to feed someone that is hungry."
Falk recently won the Commons' lottery by landing the first spot for private members' business. That means his bill, the Fairness in Charitable Gifts Act, will be the first one debated this year, probably in late March.
Green party leader on board
Already, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has jumped to his side, praising his initiative and asking to be a seconder to his bill.
"It is clearly unfair to have larger tax rebates for people who donate to political parties than those who donate to Oxfam or their local food bank," she wrote to HuffPost in an email.
Falk doesn't blame political parties for giving themselves a larger tax break to help more Canadians to part with their money, but he thinks charities deserve help too.
Elizabeth May, shown here at at 2015 campaign event, wants to second Falk's bill. (Photo: The Canadian Press)
"Having been in politics for two and half years, I recognize how difficult it is to go out there and ask people if they would consider making a donation either to the party or to my campaign — and person needs money to run a campaign," he said.
"But why wouldn't the charity be entitled to the same thing? They have the same struggle, the same issues, it is difficult to get people to part with money even if it is for a good cause."
Falk, who represents the riding of Provencher, one of the most generous regions of the country in terms of charitable donations, said it was ingrained in him as a young child that he should help the less fortunate and contribute a portion of his income to do good work.
'I wanted to make something that was impactful'
He and his wife have supported the local food bank, homeless shelters, youth organizations and summer camps for disadvantaged youth, he said. They have also donated to organizations that work overseas such as MEDA, Mennonite Economic Development Associates and the Mennonite Central Committee.
"[Charities] successfully leverage donation dollars through volunteerism and do way more work, better work, and more effective work than a lot of government agencies could do in the same field," he told HuffPost.
"I didn't want to just have a bill that would declare ‘purple flower day' or something else like that — I've seen some of those [bills] in the past and I wanted to do something that was significant and would make a difference," he said.
Ted Falks serves at Dairy Queen "Miracle Treat Day." (Photo: Ted Falk)
Falk was troubled to discover that while the total value of donations has gone up, the number of Canadian tax filers giving to charities had dropped over the past two decades, from 29.5 per cent in 1990 to 21.4 per cent in 2014, according to the latest figures by Statistics Canada. The median donation in 2014 was only $280.
The provinces also have tax credits. In Ontario, for example, that $400 donation to a charity would get an additional provincial tax return of $50.57 for someone making $85,000 a year, Armando Minicucci from Grant Thornton LLP calculated for HuffPost. It is also far less than the provincial political tax credit which is 75 per cent for donations of up to $399.
Falk said he hopes changing the tax credits might encourage more people to give and to give more.
"I would like to see that number go up, closer to that $400 mark."
He initially thought of making the tax refund even more generous for charities — to help them raise more money — but then decided to go for something that all parliamentarians could easily get behind.
"I wanted to make something that was impactful and something that was difficult not to support."
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ALSO ON HUFFPOST:SOCHI, Russia -- Sweden center Nicklas Backstrom failed a doping test at the Sochi Games, testing positive for a substance found in an allergy medication, a spokesman for the country's Olympic Committee said Sunday.
"I got the message 2 hours before the game that something was wrong," Sweden coach Par Marts after his team lost 3-0 to Canada in the gold-medal game.
Backstrom, who plays for the Washington Capitals in the NHL, was scratched just before the game began.
"I was very sad and obviously... I felt bad for the guys, lots of guys were in the locker room when they called me out," said Backstrom, who watched the game on TV.
Marts criticized the International Olympic Committee's timing, telling reporters Backstrom was tested in connection with Sweden's game against Slovenia, but that he was told only 20 minutes before the final that Backstrom couldn't play.
"I think it sucks," Marts said. "It's like kindergarten."
Asked about Merts' criticism of the doping process, IOC spokesman Mark Adams said, "We will not comment on any potential process until it has concluded."
Backstrom was listed in the lineups distributed before the game, and forward Daniel Alfredsson said the team was told he wouldn't play just before it started.
"It's too bad he couldn't play," said Sweden winger Carl Hagelin. "We lost a really good player."
The failed test won't affect Sweden's silver medal. Violations from two or more team members need to occur before disqualification or other disciplinary action would take place, according to the IOC rules document.
"It was a shocking message to get," goalie Jhonas Enroth told the Swedish news agency TT after the final.
Sweden's Nicklas Backstrom didn't play in the gold-medal game after failing a doping test. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
Swedish Olympic Committee spokesman Bjorn Folin said the banned substance was in an allergy medication that Backstrom has taken for the past seven years.
It is unlikely that Backstrom will face any discipline from the NHL.
"We understand that Nicklas Backstrom tested positive for a substance banned 'in competition' by the International Olympic Committee," NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said in a statement. "It is our further understanding that the positive test was the result of a common allergy medication taken by the player knowingly, with the approval of the team doctor and without the intention of gaining an illegal or improper performance-enhancing benefit. In addition, the specific substance that resulted in the positive test is not currently on the League's Prohibited Substances List.
"Subject to confirmation of the facts as we understand them, and given the fact that the substance is neither prohibited in the NHL nor was used in an improper manner here, we do not anticipate there being any consequences relative to Nicklas' eligibility to participate in games for the Washington Capitals."
The Capitals acknowledged in a statement of their own that Backstrom was taking the medication this season while playing for Washington.
Furthermore, "the medicine was approved by the Swedish national team. It is not anticipated that this will impact his participation in NHL games," the team said.
Backstrom is the sixth athlete to fail a doping test at the Games. Five of the six, including Backstrom, tested positive for minor stimulants that are often found in food supplements.
Several of Backstrom's teammates declined to comment on his positive test after the loss to Canada, with Hagelin saying only that he thinks "it's a bit strange."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.YOU know when someone asks you what you want for Christmas and you’ve got absolutely no idea?
You’ve just got to put your faith in them that whatever they get you will be thoughtful and useful.
Well we’re pretty sure we know what the NRL clubs want so we’ve compiled a wishlist on their behalf and sent it off to the North Pole.
And don’t worry, we guarantee these won’t end up on the returns pile.
BRONCOS
Contract resolutions
Brisbane have a host of players off contract at the end of 2017, so they’ll be wanting to get some of their biggest names locked in as soon as possible.
They’ve got their work cut out for them with the list including Anthony Milford, Ben Hunt, Darius Boyd, Andrew McCullough, Adam Blair, Jordan Kahu, Corey Oates and Josh McGuire among others.
Ben Hunt at Broncos pre-season training. Photographer: Liam Kidston. Source: News Corp Australia
Contract negotiations have the potential to drag on and while players may say speculation doesn’t affect them or the team, we only have to remind you about how things went down at Manly in 2015 involving Daly Cherry-Evans and Kieran Foran.
RAIDERS
A bit of luck
Canberra don’t really need that much for Christmas — they’ve got a powerful forward pack and lethal backs.
They just need a little bit of luck to take them to the next level in 2017, particularly in the injury department.
Both Blake Austin and Aidan Sezer spent time on the sidelines this year, so if they can keep key personnel on the paddock, the Green Machine will be even more dangerous.
Ben Ikin, Nathan Ryan and Ben Glover are back with a two-part off-season Market Watch special podcast, where they break down each team’s rosters ahead of season 2017.
You can also subscribe via iTunes or for Android users, listen on the iPP Podcast Player app.
BULLDOGS
An attacking game plan
The pressure is on Canterbury coach Des Hasler to transform his team’s attack in 2017.
The Bulldogs became all too predictable this season and as a result limped into the finals, then went straight out the back door in week one.
Hasler’s transformed a game plan before and he needs to do it again — his job is on the line.
Des Hasler will be under the pump in 2017. Picture: Mark Evans Source: News Corp Australia
SHARKS
James Segeyaro
Cronulla will need a Chrissy miracle for this to happen.
The club have been left with a hole to fill following the retirement of Michael Ennis and Segeyaro has been touted as a possible solution.
The only thing is, Segeyaro’s still under contract with Super League club Leeds, and the Sharks have declared they won’t be going near anyone tied to a rival outfit.
James Segeyaro wants out of his Leeds contract. Picture: Tim Hunter. Source: News Corp Australia
The former Cowboy and Panther wants out of his current deal, but the Rhinos are refusing to budge and a lawsuit could eventuate.
Leeds have also slapped a $425,000 transfer fee on his head, which will would virtually price him out of any potential move.
TITANS
Jarryd Hayne to hit peak form
Hayne may have been a little underdone when he joined the Gold Coast midway through 2016, but there will be no excuses this time round after a full pre-season.
The Titans have let go a number of outside backs to fit his large wage under the salary cap, so they will need him fit and firing.
We all know what Hayne can do when he’s at his best, and the Gold Coast are banking plenty on him recapturing his two-time Dally M Medal-winning form.
Jarryd Hayne at Titans pre-season training. Picture: Scott Fletcher Source: News Corp Australia
SEA EAGLES
A firing halves combo
Manly fans will be pinning their hopes on new recruit Blake Green when he partners Daly Cherry-Evans in the halves next season.
The Sea Eagles couldn’t quite manufacture a five-eighth out of Dylan Walker this year and as a result all the pressure was on DCE to come up with the big plays.
The pre-season will be crucial for both playmakers and their combination in the maroon and whites return to finals footy.
Manly Sea Eagles signing Blake Green at Narrabeen Beach. Picture: Gregg Porteous Source: News Corp Australia
STORM
A fit Billy Slater
Melbourne fans, staff and players will be collectively crossing their fingers and toes in the hope that their star fullback can make a return to the field in 2017.
Slater himself says he’s no guarantee to make a return from the shoulder injury which has severely hampered his past two seasons, but it would be nice to see him go out on his own terms.
Billy Slater at Storm training. Picture: Colleen Petch Source: News Corp Australia
KNIGHTS
Kalyn Ponga
Newcastle have made no secret of this wish.
They’ve signed up the teen sensation on a four-year deal from 2018, but have gone on the record saying they’d happily welcome Ponga a year early if he could get an early release from North Queensland.
With the Knights not having an established fullback for 2017, Ponga could be that man.
Kalyn Ponga at Cowboys pre-season training. Source: News Corp Australia
COWBOYS
Another prop
North Queensland are looking a little light-on in the engine room following the departure of James Tamou and the sudden retirement of Ben Hannant.
The club have already said they won’t rush into signing just anyone, so they’ll be hoping a suitable candidate appears on the market.
If not, the likes of Patrick Kaufusi and Sam Hoare will be required to step up.
EELS
Peace and quiet
Do we really need to explain this one?
PANTHERS
No more ACL ruptures
Penrith haven’t had the best run of luck with injuries over the past couple of season and it wasn’t much better in 2016 with Dean Whare, Peta Hiku and Sam McKendry all suffering season-ending knee injuries.
They coped well in the absence of the trio, but if they can keep their talented stars on the field, they’ll be even more lethal.
RABBITOHS
A happy pre-season camp
That’s if they decide to have one.
Luke Keary’s clash with club owner Russell Crowe up at Crowe’s Coffs Harbour farm overshadowed much of what was a poor season for the Bunnies.
It was also no doubt part of the reason behind the five-eighth’s eventual defection to the Roosters.
A team full of happy campers will be vital to Souths’ chances of returning to the finals.
DRAGONS
Drew Hutchison to solve halves problem
Benji’s gone, so come on down Hutcho.
The 21-year-old is tipped to get the first shot at the vacant red and white No. 7 jersey next season and fans will be praying he can deliver the points they most desperately need.
The Red V’s attack has been less than impressive over recent seasons so the pressure will be on Hutchison and five-eighth Gareth Widdop.
Drew Hutchison in action for the Dragons. Picture: Gregg Porteous Source: News Corp Australia
ROOSTERS
A settled spine
The Roosters fielded multiple spine combinations throughout 2016, so Trent Robinson will be hoping his round one line-up is one he’ll be able to stick with.
If Mitchell Pearce can avoid any more drama he’s a sure thing for halfback, while recruit Luke Keary will most likely partner him in the No. 6 jersey.
You can lock in Jake Friend at nine, then Robinson will just need to figure out who plays at fullback with Latrell Mitchell and Blake Ferguson both featuring there in 2016.
The club have also bought veteran custodian Michael Gordon, who is eyeing off a spot in the starting side.
New Sydney Roosters recruits Michael Gordon and Luke Keary. Picture: Gregg Porteous Source: News Corp Australia
WARRIORS
Kieran Foran’s registration
If there’s one club who will be hoping their Christmas wish comes true, it’s the Warriors.
Should Foran’s contract be green lit, they’ll have the complete New Zealand Kiwis spine at their disposal.
At his best, Foran is the perfect player to bring consistency to a team and well all know the Warriors could do with a bit of that.
Manu Vatuvei and Kieran Foran training. Source: Instagram
WESTS TIGERS
Early results and contract resolutions
The Tigers probably don’t want to be greedy, but they do need both to happen.
The side needs to get off to a good start otherwise the knives will be out for coach Jason Taylor.
Then they’ve got a host of big names off contract like James Tedesco, Mitchell Moses, Luke Brooks and Aaron Woods.
Rivals are already reportedly circling Tedesco, so the sooner the club can wrap him and his teammates up, the better.
Tigers coach Jason Taylor. Picture: Gregg Porteous Source: News Corp Australia
The writer is on Twitter: @JohnDean_
Download the new FOX SPORTS App to get the latest news and scores from your NRL team.The Carolina Hurricanes have been extremely busy over the past few days, trying hard to re-sign their unrestricted free agents. So far, Chad LaRose, Joni Pitkanen, and Patrick Dwyer have all been brought back into the fold.
At the moment there is still plenty of room in the budget, but there are also several other players to bring in, including highly sought after UFA's Erik Cole and Jussi Jokinen. Both players will hit the free agent market at noon on Friday if they are not re-signed before then.
Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford said this past weekend that the team's budget would probably be a couple of million over the mandatory cap floor (of $48,300,000). Let's take another look to see where the club stands right now salary-wise and where they might end up.
Carolina Hurricanes Salary Chart as of, 6/30/11 Regulars currently under contract 2011-12 Cap Hit Actual Cash 1 F Staal $ 8,250,000 $ 7,750,000 2 G Ward $ 6,300,000 $ 6,300,000 3 F Ruutu $ 3,800,000 $ 4,400,000 4 F Skinner $ 1,400,000 $ 900,000 5 F Samson $ 512,500 $ 525,000 6 F LaRose $ 1,700,000 $ 1,500,000 7 F Dwyer $ 625,000 $ 600,000 8 D Gleason $ 2,750,000 $ 3,500,000 9 D Corvo $ 2,250,000 $ 2,500,000 10 D Allen $ 2,900,000 $ 3,150,000 11 D McBain $ 850,000 $ 735,000 12 D Harrison $ 700,000 $ 650,000 13 D Pitkanen $ 4,500,000 $ 4,500,000 $ 36,537,500 $ 37,010,000 (Unsigned RFA's) 14 F Sutter $ 2,750,000 $ 2,750,000 estimated 15 F Tlusty (UFA)
$ 600,000 $ 600,000 estimated 16 D Joslin $ 700,000 $ 700,000 estimated $ 4,050,000 $ 4,050,000 Sub Total $ 40,587,500 $ 41,060,000 Finished season in Charlotte last year, (2 way) contracts 17 F Bowman $ 845,833 $ 650,000 18 F Boychuk $ 1,195,833 $ 787,000 19 F Dalpe $ 875,000 $ 687,500 $ 2,916,666 $ 2,124,500 Sub Total $ 43,504,166 $ 43,184,500 20 UFA 4rth line center $ 750,000 $ 750,000 estimated 21 UFA backup goalie $ 750,000 $ 750,000 estimated $ 1,500,000 $ 1,500,000 Sub Total $ 45,004,166 $ 44,684,500 Unsigned UFA's 22 F Erik Cole $ 4,000,000 $ 4,000,000 estimated 23 F Jussi Jokinen $ 3,500,000 $ 3,500,000 estimated $ 7,500,000 $ 7,500,000 Grand Total $ 52,504,166 $ 52,184,500
Above is another rendition of a spreadsheet I created a few days earlier, this time with updates including the recent signings, as well as a few subtractions of redundant players. (Although those players could eventually replace some of the ones listed above.) For now, we will go with these. Just keep in mind, nothing is written in stone here.
The Canes currently have 13 regulars under contract, including six defensemen. It's expected that RFA Derek Joslin will be re-signed sometime after all the July 1 fireworks have died down, which would bring that total up to seven.
Brandon Sutter will also definitely be re-signed at some point, although at an unknown dollar amount. (I'm guessing $2.5 to 3 million.) Jiri Tlusty is a strong possibility to also come back, but another team could grab him on the open market. I left Troy Bodie off the list for now because if the team signs a UFA fourth line center, he would be an extra body. (The team might offer him a two-way deal.)
Next, I added in the three young forwards, (Boychuk, Dalpe, and Bowman) who are expected to push hard to make the big club.
Those six players bring the total body count to 19 with an estimated cap hit of about $43.5 million.
Rutherford also said that he wanted to bring in a fourth line center and an experienced backup goalie, so lets assume they will earn under a million each and add them in.
Now we're up to 21 players and have a cap hit, (and budget hit) of about $45 million.
That leaves us to Cole and Jokinen.
I assumed an approximate cap hit of $4 million for Cole and $3.5 for Jokinen which would bring payroll up to $52.5 million including both of them. Of course, the Canes usually don't keep a full roster of 23, so if they send a couple of the kids down to Charlotte you're getting pretty close to where they want to be.
But if both forwards are looking for even more money than that, it means Carolina can't bring both of them back without busting the budget.
(I also left off Cory Stillman, but he will become a factor if they can't sign Jokinen.)
The next 24 hours should be interesting.150 episodes and counting! And today is a great one.
After discussing new careers for Mike, we welcome underwater crime scene investigator, Mike Berry, to the show. Mike was absolutely fascinating. Listen to hear how underwater crime is investigated, some interesting objects Mike has found, and what it takes to work in such a unique field. One of our favorite interviews! Check out Mike and his work at www.ucidiver.com
Then, Tony Borglum of Drive a Tank, joins us from Wisconsin to talk about his business where you can drive a tank! Listen to hear the origings of the tank business, how Tony finds tanks, and even how you can drive a tank through a building! Make sure to check out www.driveatank.com
Another great one in the books. If you like what you hear, share it! Make sure to follow us @VScomedy on Twitter and @verbalshenanigans on instragram.On its journey to product perfection, Apple is well-known for its endless prototyping of the next iPhone, iMac or Apple Watch.
Now the company may add ultra-tough metal alloy Liquidmetal to the list of materials it can use to create these rapid prototypes, thanks to a cutting-edge 3D printer designed for the job.
Apple’s invention, detailed in a patent application filed in 2014 but just published today, would create a 3D mold using a layer-by-layer construction process with Liquidmetal.
Apple signed an exclusive agreement to use Liquidmetal way back in August 2010. The amorphous space-age alloy, which possesses more than twice the strength of high-performance titanium, has been described by NASA as likely to redefine material science in the 21st century “in the same way that the inventions of steel in the 1800s and plastic in the 1900s sparked revolutions for industry.”
However, despite experts insisting ever since then that Liquidmetal was likely to be used as part of the next iPad or iPhone, almost six years down the line we’re no closer to seeing the material pop up in an Apple device. The company has, however, continued to investigate applications relating to everything from antennas to fuel cells.
As you’d expect, the processability of amorphous alloys presents quite a challenge. But a 3D printer able to help Apple quickly and easily make rapid prototypes for a variety of different Liquidmetal concepts surely increases our chances of finally getting that futuristic scratch-proof iPhone or iPad we’ve been dreaming of!
You can check out the rest of Apple’s patent application here.
Source: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Via: Patently AppleImage caption Beefheart's distinctive growl fronted an influential avant-garde rock band
American musician and painter Don Van Vliet, best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart, has died aged 69.
Van Vliet's death in California, from complications from multiple sclerosis, was announced by the Michael Werner Gallery in New York.
Van Vliet was "one of the most original recording artists of his time", the gallery said in a statement.
He rose to fame in the 1960s with a unique style of blues-inspired rock & roll, later devoting himself to art.
Artists including Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Franz Ferdinand, Oasis, Red Hot Chilli Peppers and The White Stripes are among those who have cited him as an influence.
'Experimental rock & roll'
"Don Van Vliet was a complex and influential figure in the visual and performing arts," the gallery said in a statement.
Image caption Trout Mask Replica is considered his masterpiece
"He is perhaps best known as the incomparable Captain Beefheart who, together with his Magic Band, rose to prominence in the 1960s with a totally unique style of blues-inspired, experimental rock & roll."
"This would ultimately secure Van Vliet's place in music history as one of the most original recording artists of his time. After two decades in the spotlight as an avant-garde composer and performer, Van Vliet retired from performing to devote himself wholeheartedly to painting and drawing."
"Like his music, Van Vliet's lush paintings are the product of a truly rare and unique vision."
Van Vliet combined peculiar tones with music that drew on blues, jazz, psychedelia and a barrage of other genres.
The musician recorded under the name of Captain Beefheart with members of the Magic Band through 1982.
Captain Beefheart's first two releases with the Magic Band received positive reviews from music connoisseurs but did not connect with the wider public.
But he soon began a close creative relationship with Frank Zappa, a former high school classmate, who helped him forge his way toward redefining popular music.
In recent years, Van Vliet devoted himself to painting and drawing.
A painting by the musician was on sale at the Michael Werner Gallery earlier this month at a price of $40,000 (£26,000).
Van Vliet is survived by his wife of more than 40 years, Jan Van Vliet.If we want to use scientific thinking to solve problems, we need people to appreciate evidence and heed expert advice.
But the Australian suspicion of authority extends to experts, and this public cynicism can be manipulated to shift the tone and direction of debates. We have seen this happen in arguments about climate change.
This goes beyond the tall poppy syndrome. Disregard for experts who have spent years studying critical issues is a dangerous default position. The ability of our society to make decisions in the public interest is handicapped when evidence and thoughtfully presented arguments are ignored.
So why is science not used more effectively to address critical questions? We think there are several contributing factors including the rise of Google experts and the limited skills set of scientists themselves. We think we need non-scientists to help us communicate with and serve the public better.
At a public meeting recently, when a well-informed and feisty elderly participant asked a question that referred to some research, a senior public servant replied: “Oh, everyone has a scientific study to justify their position, there is no end to the studies you could cite, I am sure, to support your point of view.”
This is a cynical statement, where there are no absolute truths and everyone’s opinion must be treated as equally valid. In this intellectual framework, the findings of science can be easily dismissed as one of many conflicting views of reality.
Such a viewpoint is dangerous from our point of view.
When scientists disagree with one another, as they must to ensure progress in their field, it is easy to argue that it is not possible to distinguish between conflicting hypotheses. But scientists always agree that critical thinking done well eventually leads to a better understanding and superior solutions. All opinions are not equal.
If you are flying in an airplane at 30,000 feet, you will not be content with just any scientific study about whether the wing will stay on the plane. Most people will want to put their trust in the calculations of an expert aeronautical engineer who understands the physics of stresses on the wing.
So why do we not want to trust experts in bushfire management, or climate change? Because most people are happier with experts whose conclusions fit their own ideas.
This encourages people to express their opinions, and the internet allows those opinions to get a wide viewing. This makes for interesting times, but not always effective solutions.
Google experts
The internet is filled with information and ideas. Everyone can quickly find “answers”, and this means that everyone is an “expert”.
But using Google to find the answer to Trivial Pursuit questions is not the same as researching a complex question. Experts do have skills and one of those is the ability to use high quality sources, up to date theoretical frameworks, and critical thinking based on their experience in a particular field. This is why an expert’s answers are going to be more accurate and more nuanced than a novice.
For example, people who use Dr Google to diagnose their symptoms before visiting an actual doctor, sometimes ask to be tested for diseases they do not have, or waste time seeking a second opinion because they are convinced that their “research” has led them to a correct diagnosis. If it were really that easy, would doctors have to spend all those years in medical school?
There is another problem called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that “people who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact”.
In other words, people who think all answers can be found on Google are likely to be unaware of the effort involved in solving complex problems, or why years of specialist training might help.
This is almost more dangerous than complete ignorance, because unlike Donald Rumsfeld, they don’t even know what they don’t know.
Easy access to huge volumes of confusing information sits very comfortably in a post-modern world. Unfortunately, the outcome is that most people are reluctant to do the intellectual hard work of sifting through competing hypotheses. So how are we to engage in robust scientific debates in such a public arena?
Science is not enough
It has been said many times that scientists need to communicate their research more broadly. The challenges are well known – peer reviewed scientific publications are necessary for our careers and time spent engaging with the public is time away from the field, our computers and laboratory benches.
Nevertheless, if we hope to influence government policy we cannot assume that the implications of our research will be understood by those who most need to know what we are doing.
Reaching out to busy bureaucrats and politicians is not something that comes naturally to scientists. To turn science into policy we need a diverse team of people with different but complementary skills who share a commitment to the task.
Skills that are not commonly found in scientists may be found in political scientists, lawyers, sociologists, public relations companies, the arts community and the media.
Forming relationships with people who can translate our findings into something that cannot be ignored may be critical to success.
Consider what we are up against, lobby groups with deep pockets have come up with brilliant assaults on the thoughtful management of our environment.
“Cutting Green Tape” or “No fuels, no fire” – these clever bits of spin threaten decades of rigorous research and policy development. This is not a failure of science, but a triumph of imagination. We have been dramatically out-manoeuvred, shown to be amateurs, in the world of presenting competing ideas.
At a recent fire forum we learned that current policy is: “Based on science, but driven by values.” This means that despite the best evidence, the values of our current society will decide when to act. This introduces another definition of truth seeking, based on who made the best argument in a political or legal process.
Science is meant to be done dispassionately and objectively, so scientists are not well equipped to participate in debates about values. This is the realm of ethicists, philosophers, artists and theologians.
But if we are passionate about applying the lessons learned from our research, we will need marketers, lobbyists, communication experts, accountants and economists. A multi-disciplinary team is required to convince society to change.
Perhaps the people with these complementary skills will be able to help break down the anti-intellectualism we face, for the benefit of all.
This is based on an address delivered by Professor Michael Clarke at the 2nd Biodiversity Forum held at the Royal Society of Victoria, Melbourne in 2014.Even with that relatively unimpressive total, the club was averaging more than nine K's per game and had recorded 84 punchouts for the season. The Cubs would go on to set a Major League record with 1,404 K's.
In the Cubs' ninth game of the 2003 season -- a 7-1 loss to the Expos -- Chicago's pitching staff collected seven strikeouts, which was a fairly low amount for the club in relation to what it had done in the first eight games.
In the Cubs' ninth game of the 2003 season -- a 7-1 loss to the Expos -- Chicago's pitching staff collected seven strikeouts, which was a fairly low amount for the club in relation to what it had done in the first eight games.
Even with that relatively unimpressive total, the club was averaging more than nine K's per game and had recorded 84 punchouts for the season. The Cubs would go on to set a Major League record with 1,404 K's.
Ten years later, the 2013 Detroit Tigers -- in a decisive 11-1 win versus the Blue Jays on April 11 -- compiled six strikeouts (their second-lowest total at that point of the year) to bring their nine-game tally up to 73. They would pick up the pace after that and finish with a new Major League record of 1,428 K's.
The 2014 Washington Nationals are not only ahead of the nine-game pace set by those two record-setting clubs; they are generating strikeouts on a scale that hasn't been seen in more than a century's worth of Major League Baseball.
Strasburg leads strikeout parade
Led by Stephen Strasburg's 12 K's in a superb 6 2/3 innings (three hits, one run, one walk) on Thursday, the Nationals finished their 7-1 win against the Marlins with 17 strikeouts.
Washington's pitching staff now has 105 strikeouts through nine games. That is 12 more than any club over the past 101 years. The 2012 Yankees had 93, followed by the 1966 Indians (91), 2013 D-backs (91) and 2013 Red Sox (90). The Nats opened the season with an 18-strikeout performance against the Mets, and with Tuesday's 17-K effort in their ninth contest, the club is the first -- dating back to 1914 -- to have two games with at least 17 strikeouts through its first nine games. The 100 seasons between 1914-2013 had produced 15 total games with 17-plus strikeouts through all teams' first nine contests.
Tuesday's game was the 39th since 1914 in which a pitching staff compiled at least 17 strikeouts in a nine-inning game while issuing no more than one walk. The Expos/Nationals franchise had one of the previous 38: on June 8, 2010, they defeated the Pirates, 5-2, collected 17 strikeouts and surrendered no walks.
Strasburg enjoyed his 13th career double-digit strikeout game Thursday, giving him one fewer through his first 78 games than Roger Clemens and Oliver Perez had in theirs. Dwight Gooden tops this list for the most through any pitcher's first 78 games, with 28.
Abreu's homers come in pairs
After going his first seven games without a home run, White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu has picked up multihomer games in two of his past three, including two blasts vs. the Indians on Thursday in a 7-3 Chicago win.
Abreu joined Dino Restelli (1949 Pirates) and Mark Quinn ('99 Royals) as the only players since 1914 to have a pair of multihomer efforts through their first 10 career games.
Abreu drove in three runs and has an American League-leading 14 RBIs for the season. Those 14 through his first 10 career games are the most for any White Sox player since 1914, eclipsing the 12 from center fielder Larry Rosenthal in '36.
Dating back to 1914, Abreu's 14 RBIs through his club's first 10 games tie him for the fourth most in club history. Joe Jackson had 16 in '20 for the top mark, followed by Zeke Bonura's 15 in '37 and Floyd Robinson's 15 in '62. Abreu is matched with Jackson in '18, Bob Nieman in '55 and Ron Kittle in '83.
Brewers undefeated on the road
The Brewers collected 11 hits and outscored the Phillies |
, but I still haven’t found a Russian vodka I like. Baltika beer is quite good, best enjoyed with Omul fish on the shores of Lake Baikal. Don’t bother with Baikal vodka though; “rumor” has it the hangover is horrendous.
The places
What you see depends entirely on which of the three Trans Siberian routes you take and where you choose to stop. The most popular stops include the Great Wall of China, Terelj National Park in Mongolia, Lake Baikal in Russia, and Red Square in Moscow. For more on the many cities along the Trans Siberian, check out these other posts.
The Trans Siberian Railway had been my dream trip for years and my expectations were through the roof. It didn’t disappoint – it was absolutely the trip of a lifetime. Even now that I’ve done it twice, it remains an experience I look forward to doing yet again… someday.
Share post:This is the second part in a series on how league insiders view the Lakers' rebuild. Read the first part here.
As the Los Angeles Lakers take the court at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Stan Sheriff Center for a preseason game against the Utah Jazz, Anthony Gonzales, 33, is up against the metal gate, wearing a black No. 24 Kobe Bryant jersey. Gonzales lives in Maui, but he became a fan growing up in Garden Grove, in Orange County, thanks to his father.
"My earliest memory," Gonzales says, "was the '88 title game and watching it with my dad."
He's been a die-hard ever since. Standing beside him now is his son, Kobe-J Gonzales, 10, in a gold Lakers hat and purple No. 24 jersey, holding a white sign with block text. "KOBE," it reads, "I was named after you."
Despite back-to-back losing seasons for the Lakers, the Gonzales family hasn't lost hope.
"We're going in the right direction with these young players," Gonzales says, referring to recent draft picks D'Angelo Russell, Julius Randle and Jordan Clarkson. "Hopefully we can get a big-name free agent this summer to lead all of them. Just a matter of time."
Anthony Gonzales and his son, Kobe-J, still have faith that the Lakers can turn things around. Courtesy of Baxter Holmes
The next pot of gold has never been far away for Lakers fans. The franchise with the second-most championships in NBA history (16) has reached the playoffs 60 times in 67 seasons and missed the postseason in consecutive years only twice. Its longest title drought since migrating to Los Angeles in 1960? Eleven seasons. And even that "rough" stretch featured 10 playoff berths and two trips to the NBA Finals.
So it's easy to picture Kevin Durant as a Laker next summer, or Russell Westbrook the summer after. Or maybe both. Pick a name. Pick several. None is too big, no dream too unrealistic.
"[Rebuilding] happens a lot faster [here] than in other organizations," Bryant told ESPN.com last season. "The Celtics went through years and years and years [of rebuilding]. That doesn't happen with the Lakers, man."
The Lakers don't rebuild, they reload. Hence the term "Lakers exceptionalism."
"Just trust the management upstairs, man," Bryant said. "They're really good about what they do." Bryant preaches faith. The front office believes it's on the right track. Ownership can already envision the next generation of title contenders.
But many around the league see it differently.
"If I'm a Lakers fan, that's the most concerning thing -- at no point in the past two or three years is there clear evidence on an organizational level that they've had some 'Come to Jesus' moment like, 'Wait a minute. Something is not structurally working the way it used to,'" an NBA analytics official said.
"In the last two or three years, they've been so far from their expectations every year, whether it's trades or wins or free agency, all these things are not happening the way they've been hoping. It sounds like they're just waffling after the fact, which is kind of the opposite of doing some soul-searching and figuring out a better way forward."
A Lakers spokesman declined comment for this story aside from the following rebuttal: "Whether I'd use the term'soul-searching' or not, we do always look back and analyze what happens, and try to improve and do better things in the future."
Still, there's widespread concern outside of Lakerland.
"It's like [they think], 'We're not on the Titanic.' Yeah, you are," an executive said. "'No, we're not. It's all right. No, we're good.' No, you're not good. You're not good. It's sinking. People are in lifeboats. They're jumping off. You're not good."
In other words, bouncing back is no longer a safe assumption.
"That's only in Hollywood," one executive said.
Andrew D. Bernstein/Getty Images
The difference between how the Lakers view their rebuilding efforts and how others around the league view them is drastic.
ESPN asked two dozen NBA insiders -- ranging from executives and scouts to analytics officials and agents and coaches -- a few open-ended questions about the Lakers, most of which centered on what the team could and should be doing to contend again soon.
Many emphasized that the Lakers, with their advantages in market, revenue and lineage, are one of a select few teams that could acquire a top-flight star as fast as anyone.
"They're one big deal from being in good position again," one executive said. "That's what it takes. And that's what they've been able to do in their history and I wouldn't count them out from being able to pull it off again."
But many were just as quick to point out several much bigger issues limiting the organization from the fast turnaround it feels increasing internal and external pressure to pull off.
Such problems include management, ownership and coaching, which are addressed in this story, as well as a lack of assets, a shift in the free-agency landscape and the presence of Bryant, all of which are addressed in the three other stories in this series.
"When you mean 'turn it around,' do you mean a championship? Because that's done. That's not happening unless they make a miraculous trade and get four new people. Who do they have on the Lakers? I'm not sure. I'm not joking. Do they even have anyone to trade that somebody would want?" Shaquille O'Neal
Many insiders outlined paths that, at best, would take a few more years, if not considerably longer. Indeed, the portrait many painted was one of the Lakers lying to themselves about their current predicament.
"The Lakers are still the Lakers no matter what," one executive said, "but the Knicks have been saying that forever, too."
Said one agent: "Championship organizations start from the very top. I think the Lakers are hopeless, to be honest. I think they're the West Coast Knicks."
Even former Lakers star Shaquille O'Neal, who won three titles with the team, is skeptical.
"They need to do the same thing Sacramento did -- get new players," said O'Neal, now a minority Kings owner.
Pressed to be more specific on the Lakers, O'Neal said, "When you mean 'turn it around,' do you mean a championship? Because that's done. That's not happening unless they make a miraculous trade and get four new people. Who do they have on the Lakers? I'm not sure. I'm not joking. Do they even have anyone to trade that somebody would want?"
After 116 losses the past two seasons, including a franchise-worst 61 in 2014-15, there was no shortage of skepticism about the future in L.A.
"I think the Lakers tricked themselves into thinking that what they did before was smart and they gave themselves credit for it and, to be honest, it's probably not fair to give themselves credit for a lot of that success," one agent said. "That's probably the No. 1 thing working against them right now -- they feel like they created the success once so whatever they're doing, they'll just do it again."
Said another agent, "They're in major trouble -- and the Lakers name isn't going to save them."
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Underscoring the Lakers' tumult is the edict first decreed by their new owner in April 2014: If the Lakers aren't contending by 2017, Jim Buss will step down from his role as executive vice president of basketball operations.
Neither Jim Buss nor his sister Jeanie Buss, the Lakers' president and governor, has wavered from that stance since.
The uncertain future at the highest level of the organization -- one still trying to find its footing since the 2013 death of famed owner Dr. Jerry Buss -- raises serious red flags, insiders said.
"Rebuilding takes some time, but it doesn't have to take a very long time, especially in a market like Los Angeles. It is a matter of getting things right at the top," one analytics official said. "You just have to have that cohesive decision-making process that seems like it's lacking there. They talk about, 'You can't fire your players so you fire your coach.' Well, you can't fire your owner. That is the hardest thing.... If [management] doesn't feel free to do their jobs, it is going to take a long time to rebuild."
One agent said if he were in charge, "I would clean house."
"The reality to me is that the Lakers aren't going to be better and are going to have a difficult time rebuilding with Jim Buss running the organization, and, to be quite frank, with Mitch Kupchak being in the front office," the agent said. "That's not because Mitch isn't intelligent or doesn't have experience or doesn't have rings; Mitch is still acting like they're winning championships every year or that players care about the Lakers [like they did] in years past."
Editor's Picks Lakers From The Outside: The Kobe issue Kobe Bryant returning for another season after this one is a fan's dream, but insiders around the NBA say it would be a nightmare for the franchise. Here's why.
The instability at the top has also trickled down to the leadership in the huddle. Management has put its full weight behind head coach Byron Scott. Jim Buss told the Los Angeles Times in August that Scott "has the Laker blood in him" while noting that recent Lakers coaches Mike D'Antoni and Mike Brown "weren't Lakers."
"Having that history of the Lakers from the very beginning of when [the Buss family] bought the team, gives you such a family sense," Buss said. "He's a coach, a brother. He gets it. He's a strong personality. He believes in himself and the Lakers."
Indeed, Scott's ties to the franchise run deep. The former guard played 11 of his 14 NBA seasons with the Lakers, winning three titles at the height of "Showtime." He also has a close relationship with Bryant, a teammate for Scott's career finale in 1996-97.
However, more than a dozen NBA insiders said the Lakers need to move on from Scott, who has presided over successful rebuilds in New Orleans and New Jersey but holds a.429 winning percentage in 13 seasons as a head coach. Especially if the team wants to lure top free agent, an issue the past three offseasons and one that seems particularly concerning after a tone-deaf approach to meetings with LaMarcus Aldridge this past summer.
"They need to get a coach," one executive said. "You can't tell me -- and I don't think you can honestly tell a free agent -- that Byron Scott and Nick Young are going to help make Jordan Clarkson and Julius Randle and D'Angelo Russell as good as they can possibly be or that that duo is going to give Russell Westbrook a great chance to win a championship. Those two aren't the only problem, and Nick Young is a relatively minor problem, but they're symbolic of an organization that is not taking winning seriously."
An agent went so far as to say that "the biggest thing they can do to help" is to throw money at a big-name coach.
Said one analytics official, "Frankly, if they're smart, what they do is they bring in the best freaking coach out there. You pay a coach -- that doesn't count against your salary cap -- [and] you get the best coach you possibly can."
The team culture, on the whole, could use a facelift, several insiders said. That includes trimming players who, one executive said, "create a bad basketball environment, like Nick Young. No more guys like that. Only guys that are going to play the right way, that are going to play hard, that are going to work hard. Don't worry so much about whether they're going to help you win games in the short term. If they have some long-term potential, great, if they happen to just be a veteran who just brings great character and effort, that's fine, too."
Said one executive, "Honest to God, the best way to look at this is they have to lock the doors, lock the windows, keep themselves away from themselves and they're just going to have to generate from within and grow organically. And then hope you get to a point where they get a nice young player who hits it [big]."
No doubt, the Lakers are at a crossroads. And the longer they remain in the league's cellar, the longer an almost unthinkable reality settles in: Future fans, and future success, are not guaranteed.
Noah Graham/Getty Images
Ellie Rydeheard, 10, is born and raised in Los Angeles. She loves sports -- skateboarding and doing tricks on her scooter at a local skate park, competing in golf tournaments and playing basketball.
It's not uncommon for Ellie to be the only girl playing hoops in the schoolyard among a crowd of boys, and, her mother reports, they don't go easy on her. The family had a freestanding hoop in their driveway, but Ellie and her friends played on it so much that the backboard kept coming loose and, despite efforts to glue it together, it eventually fell apart.
Ellie's favorite team? The Oklahoma City Thunder.
Favorite player? Kevin Durant.
Why? It's simple, her mother, Dana, says. "It's because he [KD] is a really good player and they [OKC] are a really good team."
Her friends feel the same way. They wear KD shoes, compare KD socks -- "anything with the KD logo," Ellie's mother says.
And if they have time to watch a game, it's the Thunder on the screen, not the Lakers.What’s in a Speech? Putin’s Address to the United Nations Decoded
In the bumper week for Russian foreign policy just gone, we’ve seen war in Ukraine de-escalate and a new intervention in Syria—neither of which were particularly implied in President, Vladimir Putin’s speech to the UN General Assembly on Monday.
Indeed, according to Samuel Greene, “it doesn’t really matter what [Putin] says.” Most of what we know derives from paying attention to what Russia does, and overlaps in its rhetoric and action are, sadly, infrequent. Scouring Putin’s UN speech for hidden allusions to Donbas (the region of Ukraine that Russia has invaded) and Syria is probably time wasted.
This is not to say, however, that nothing can be drawn from this speech. Such occasions are invariably weaponised, and are designed as much to salve domestic national trauma as to drum up new adherents to Russia’s “new Internationale“—a collection of fringe politicos, conspiracy theorists and, increasingly, unthinking European publics that collectively advocate for Russian state interests.
The tools and techniques by which this is accomplished are well-established, and the UN speech held few surprises in this regard. What they really boil down to is the Kremlin’s ability to identify, encourage, and amplify narratives that are supportive of Russian state interests. To this end, conspiracy is a useful tool, as are false equivalences, since its target market lacks either the interest or the intellect to question these most brazen falsehoods.
This intended audience is either more concerned about other matters—wealth inequality, the environment, the power of the European Union—or, as is prevalent among the young, thrives on controversy, on revealing the ‘hidden truth’—that everything’s a conspiracy and nobody’s to be believed—even if that means being a most useful friend to the Kremlin.
Below is Putin’s speech in full, with interesting passages in bold and my annotations indented and italicised. Though fairly standard of Russia’s internationally targeted fare (not too conspiratorial, not unabashedly anti-Western), it does introduce a couple of interesting and novel themes, about which we may soon hear much more.
PUTIN’S ADDRESS TO THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, 28/09/15.
Mr. Secretary General,
Distinguished heads of state and government,
Ladies and gentlemen,
The 70th anniversary of the United Nations is a good occasion to both take stock of history and talk about our common future. In 1945, the countries that defeated Nazism joined their efforts to lay a solid foundation for the postwar world order. Let me remind you that key decisions on the principles defining interaction between states, as well as the decision to establish the UN, were made in our country, at the Yalta Conference of the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition.
Ever a popular theme, it is conveniently forgotten that Russia (or the Soviet Union) was a collaborator with the Nazis in the carving up of Poland long before it was their enemy, and even longer before it ostensibly ‘liberated’ Poland from Nazi rule. Nevertheless the current anti-Nazi narrative, from a country which itself exhibits worryingly fascistic tendencies, overrides fact and takes an expedient view of history, even going so far as to blame Poland for the beginning of the Second World War last month. The Line: Since the Soviet Union killed the most soldiers in the fight against Hitler’s Germany, it has an unrivalled and eternal claim to leadership of the anti-fascist movement. The Reality: In 1939, Nazis were useful co-imperialists; in July 1941 they were traitorous enemies; today only the latter legacy endures, although some neo-Nazis and ultranationalists at home and abroad are still employed when it’s convenient. This contradiction goes unrecognised in Russia.
The Yalta system was truly born in travail. It was born at the cost of tens of millions of lives and two world wars that swept through the planet in the 20th century. Let’s be fair: it helped humankind pass through turbulent, and at times dramatic, events of the last seven decades. It saved the world from large-scale upheavals.
The United Nations is unique in terms of legitimacy, representation and universality. True, the UN has been criticized lately for being inefficient or for the fact that decision-making on fundamental issues stalls due to insurmountable differences, especially among Security Council members.
However, I’d like to point out that there have always been differences in the UN throughout the 70 years of its history, and that the veto right has been regularly used by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and the Soviet Union, and later Russia. It is only natural for such a diverse and representative organization. When the UN was first established, nobody expected that there would always be unanimity. The mission of the organization is to seek and reach compromises, and its strength comes from taking different views and opinions into consideration. The decisions debated within the UN are either taken in the form of resolutions or not. As diplomats say, they either pass or they don’t. Any action taken by circumventing this procedure is illegitimate and constitutes a violation of the UN Charter and contemporary international law.
We all know that after the end of the Cold War the world was left with one center of dominance, and those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think that, since they are so powerful and exceptional, they know best what needs to be done and thus they don’t need to reckon with the UN, which, instead of rubber-stamping the decisions they need, often stands in their way.
This passage appeals to the 1%–99% dichotomy currently popular in the West, and applies it to the somewhat democratic procedures of the United Nations. It (quite rightly) beats the United States for invading Iraq against the UN Security Council’s wishes, but the notion that we must listen to Russia make paeans to democracy and international law—a country whose own parliament can only be described as a rubber-stamp institution, and who has only recently concluded a brutal and illegal ‘special war‘ in Ukraine—is patently nonsense.
That’s why they say that the UN has run its course and is now obsolete and outdated. Of course, the world changes, and the UN should also undergo natural transformation. Russia is ready to work together with its partners to develop the UN further on the basis of a broad consensus, but we consider any attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations as extremely dangerous. They may result in the collapse of the entire architecture of international relations, and then indeed there will be no rules left except for the rule of force. The world will be dominated by selfishness rather than collective effort, by dictate rather than equality and liberty, and instead of truly independent states we will have protectorates controlled from outside.
The first highlighted sentence is all that Russia’s new Internationale need hear to be convinced that Russia is committed to doing ‘nice things™’, and that it must be other powers that stand in the way of progress. The remainder of the passage borders on conspiracy and appeals to the narrative that states which refuse “to bow to Putin’s Russia” are “bending over or getting down on [their] knees for the United States”—NATO-members in particular are its mere protectorates. On this point it is worth remembering that for the majority of states unfortunate enough to border Russia, their relationships are defined wholly by the rule of force, past and present. Only China is nuclear-armed and capable of defending itself; then follow the weak and terrified states that fear nothing more than invoking their neighbours’s ire; and finally, Moscow’s nominally independent protectorates in Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia), Moldova (Transnistria), and now Ukraine (Luhansk and Donetsk). Any belief that Russia sincerely shares the Western obsession with ‘re-thinking’ the post-Cold War era and ‘redefining security’ is seriously misguided; the proof, as ever, lies in what Russia does, not what Putin says.
What is the meaning of state sovereignty, the term which has been mentioned by our colleagues here? It basically means freedom, every person and every state being free to choose their future.
By the way, this brings us to the issue of the so-called legitimacy of state authorities. You shouldn’t play with words and manipulate them. In international law, international affairs, every term has to be clearly defined, transparent and interpreted the same way by one and all.
We are all different, and we should respect that. Nations shouldn’t be forced to all conform to the same development model that somebody has declared the only appropriate one.
We should all remember the lessons of the past. For example, we remember examples from our Soviet past, when the Soviet Union exported social experiments, pushing for changes in other countries for ideological reasons, and this often led to tragic consequences and caused degradation instead of progress.
It is interesting to see some introspection here, even if it’s purely cynical. Why? Because the Soviet period still evokes much reverence among Russians, because its conquests are still matters of pride among some, because a majority of Russians still believe that parts of other countries belong to Russia, and because Russians have few qualms about using military force to reclaim them. Nevertheless, this is a valuable admission, since it allows Putin to paint Western states as naïve, and to draw a false equivalence between Western ‘social experiments’—the genuine encouragement of all the freedoms and values he listed above—with their Soviet equivalent: the military occupation of Eastern Europe and all the myriad atrocities that ensued.
It seems, however, that instead of learning from other people’s mistakes, some prefer to repeat them and continue to export revolutions, only now these are “democratic” revolutions. Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa already mentioned by the previous speaker. Of course, political and social problems have been piling up for a long time in this region, and people there wanted change. But what was the actual outcome? Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention rashly destroyed government institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life.
I’m urged to ask those who created this situation: do you at least realize now what you’ve done? But I’m afraid that this question will remain unanswered, because they have never abandoned their policy, which is based on arrogance, exceptionalism and impunity.
Again, this falsely equates all so-called ‘democratic revolutions’, from Georgia and Tunisia to Ukraine and Syria, and declares them all foreign creations and total disasters. It delivers precisely the space demanded by its intended recipients for a critical and individual assessment of these revolutions (none, that is), since they are happy to declare the crises in Libya—where Western warplanes drew an already-bloody revolution to a close—and Syria, where Western involvement has been extremely limited, as resulting from wanton US imperialism.
Power vacuum in some countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa obviously resulted in the emergence of areas of anarchy, which were quickly filled with extremists and terrorists. The so-called Islamic State has tens of thousands of militants fighting for it, including former Iraqi soldiers who were left on the street after the 2003 invasion. Many recruits come from Libya whose statehood was destroyed as a result of a gross violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1973. And now radical groups are joined by members of the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition backed by the West. They get weapons and training, and then they defect and join the so-called Islamic State.
In fact, the Islamic State itself did not come out of nowhere. It was initially developed as a weapon against undesirable secular regimes. Having established control over parts of Syria and Iraq, Islamic State now aggressively expands into other regions. It seeks dominance in the Muslim world and beyond. Their plans go further.
This is a dog whistle, and plays to the conspiracy already rife in Russia, the Middle East, and European fringe politics, that ISIS and the Islamic State was created by the US or its ‘proxies’ (read: its fully autonomous regional allies) and is their tool.
The situation is extremely dangerous. In these circumstances, it is hypocritical and irresponsible to make declarations about the threat of terrorism and at the same time turn a blind eye to the channels used to finance and support terrorists, including revenues from drug trafficking, the illegal oil trade and the arms trade.
Again, allusions to drug trafficking and the illegal oil trade are clearly aimed at US mistakes in Afghanistan, which has a long-standing opium problem, exploited to fund extremist activity, and Syria, where IS—another US mistake, remember—generates income from its captured oil fields and facilities. Never mind that oil is a minor contributor to IS treasury, that much of its captured oil is consumed by its own needs, not traded, and that some quantity of it is in fact traded with Assad, with his money (and by extension, Russia’s) going directly to the jihadists they so solemnly swear to be fighting.
It is equally irresponsible to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve your political goals, hoping that later you’ll find a way to get rid of them or somehow eliminate them.
Presumably this is wholly responsible, provided you have already found a way to get rid of them, since this is precisely what Russia has been doing in Eastern Ukraine. There, a rabble of ultranationalists and ‘Eurasianists’ like Alexander Dugin—usually neo-Nazis by any other name—have granted Putin “some ideological depth to his Eurasian aspirations”, according to Richard Sakwa, as well as ample ‘volunteers’ to complement Russia’s own deployment in Donbas. When the time came to wind that war down, some more extreme elements would not oblige, but the Kremlin had a plan. The Eurasianists lost their media visibility—an asset carefully rationed in Russia—and the more intransigent commanders in the field were retired, while others died mysterious deaths far from the front.
I’d like to tell those who engage in this: Gentlemen, the people you are dealing with are cruel but they are not dumb. They are as smart as you are. So, it’s a big question: who’s playing who here? The recent incident where the most “moderate” opposition group handed over their weapons to terrorists is a vivid example of that.
We consider that any attempts to flirt with terrorists, let alone arm them, are short-sighted and extremely dangerous. This may make the global terrorist threat much worse, spreading it to new regions around the globe, especially since there are fighters from many different countries, including European ones, gaining combat experience with Islamic State. Unfortunately, Russia is no exception.
Now that those thugs have tasted blood, we can’t allow them to return home and continue with their criminal activities. Nobody wants that, right?
Russia has consistently opposed terrorism in all its forms. Today, we provide military-technical assistance to Iraq, Syria and other regional countries fighting terrorist groups. We think it’s a big mistake to refuse to cooperate with the Syrian authorities and government forces who valiantly fight terrorists on the ground.
We should finally admit that President Assad’s government forces and the Kurdish militia are the only forces really fighting terrorists in Syria. Yes, we are aware of all the problems and conflicts in the region, but we definitely have to consider the actual situation on the ground.
Dear colleagues, I must note that such an honest and frank approach on Russia’s part has been recently used as a pretext for accusing it of its growing ambitions — as if those who say that have no ambitions at all. However, it is not about Russia’s ambitions, dear colleagues, but about the recognition of the fact that we can no longer tolerate the current state of affairs in the world.
This is another theme to look out for. Like Western states, Russia usually shies away from such ‘hard talk’ about interests and ambitions—probably for fear of giving the game away, should it admit to even knowing about such things. Rare exceptions to this rule are inevitably qualified by the charge that everyone is doing this anyway, and the West is at least as nefarious as Russia.
What we actually propose is to be guided by common values and common interests rather than by ambitions. Relying on international law, we must join efforts to address the problems that all of us are facing, and create a genuinely broad international coalition against terrorism. Similar to the anti-Hitler coalition, it could unite a broad range of parties willing to stand firm against those who, just like the Nazis, sow evil and hatred of humankind. And of course, Muslim nations should play a key role in such a coalition, since Islamic State not only poses a direct threat to them, but also tarnishes one of the greatest world religions with its atrocities. The ideologues of these extremists make a mockery of Islam and subvert its true humanist values.
I would also like to address Muslim spiritual leaders: Your authority and your guidance are of great importance right now. It is essential to prevent people targeted for recruitment by extremists from making hasty decisions, and those who have already been deceived and, due to various circumstances, found themselves among terrorists, must be assisted in finding a way back to normal life, laying down arms and putting an end to fratricide.
In the days to come, Russia, as the current President of the UN Security Council, will convene a ministerial meeting to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the threats in the Middle East. First of all, we propose exploring opportunities for adopting a resolution that would serve to coordinate the efforts of all parties that oppose Islamic State and other terrorist groups. Once again, such coordination should be based upon the principles of the UN Charter.
We hope that the international community will be able to develop a comprehensive strategy of political stabilization, as well as social and economic recovery in the Middle East. Then, dear friends, there would be no need for setting up more refugee camps. Today, the flow of people forced to leave their native land has literally engulfed, first, the neighbouring countries, and then Europe. There are hundreds of thousands of them now, and before long, there might be millions. It is, essentially, a new, tragic Migration Period, and a harsh lesson for all of us, including Europe.
This is both an appeal to disillusioned Europeans ‘suffering’ the refugee crisis, and the latest opportunity in Russia’s long-running campaign of trolling Europe. First, Russia supports (and even funds) anti-immigrant parties throughout the European Union; second, it unequivocally backs the tyrant responsible for over 96% of Syria’s civilian casualties, and from whom Syrians are fleeing in such great numbers; and third, Russia censures the West for causing and then failing to manage the refugee crisis.
I would like to stress that refugees undoubtedly need our compassion and support. However, the only way to solve this problem for good is to restore statehood where it has been destroyed, to strengthen government institutions where they still exist, or are being re-established, to provide comprehensive military, economic and material assistance to countries in a difficult situation, and certainly to people who, despite all their ordeals, did not abandon their homes. Of course, any assistance to sovereign nations can, and should, be offered rather than imposed, in strict compliance with the UN Charter. In other words, our Organisation should support any measures that have been, or will be, taken in this regard in accordance with international law, and reject any actions that are in breach of the UN Charter. Above all, I believe it is of utmost importance to help restore government institutions in Libya, support the new government of Iraq, and provide comprehensive assistance to the legitimate government of Syria.
Drawing an equivalence between the governments of Iraq, Libya, and Syria is important, since it obscures a significant difference. Iraq has lost much territory to IS, and likely will not recoup it without substantial assistance; Libya is in dire need of governmental order, and the chances of it establishing this by itself are slim; Assad, on the other hand, has successfully and indiscriminately murdered many thousands of its own citizens. The three are not equally deserving of assistance and legitimation.
Dear colleagues, ensuring peace and global and regional stability remains a key task for the international community guided by the United Nations. We believe this means creating an equal and indivisible security environment that would not serve a privileged few, but everyone. Indeed, it is a challenging, complicated and time-consuming task, but there is simply no alternative.
Sadly, some of our counterparts are still dominated by their Cold War-era bloc mentality and the ambition to conquer new geopolitical areas. First, they continued their policy of expanding NATO – one should wonder why, considering that the Warsaw Pact had ceased to exist and the Soviet Union had disintegrated.
Nevertheless, NATO has kept on expanding, together with its military infrastructure. Next, the post-Soviet states were forced to face a false choice between joining the West and carrying on with the East. Sooner or later, this logic of confrontation was bound to spark off a major geopolitical crisis. And that is exactly what happened in Ukraine, where the people’s widespread frustration with the government was used for instigating a coup d’état from abroad. This has triggered a civil war. We are convinced that the only way out of this dead end lies through comprehensive and diligent implementation of the Minsk agreements of February 12th, 2015. Ukraine’s territorial integrity cannot be secured through the use of threats or military force, but it must be secured. The people of Donbas should have their rights and interests genuinely considered, and their choice respected; they should be engaged in devising the key elements of the country’s political system, in line with the provisions of the Minsk agreements. Such steps would guarantee that Ukraine will develop as a civilized state, and a vital link in creating a common space of security and economic cooperation, both in Europe and in Eurasia.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have deliberately mentioned a common space for economic cooperation. Until quite recently, it seemed that we would learn to do without dividing lines in the area of the economy with its objective market laws, and act based on transparent and jointly formulated rules, including the WTO principles, which embrace free trade and investment and fair competition. However, unilaterally imposed sanctions circumventing the UN Charter have all but become commonplace today. They not only serve political objectives, but are also used for eliminating market competition.
I would like to note one more sign of rising economic selfishness. A number of nations have chosen to create exclusive economic associations, with their establishment being negotiated behind closed doors, secretly from those very nations’ own public and business communities, as well as from the rest of the world. Other states, whose interests may be affected, have not been informed of anything, either. It seems that someone would like to impose upon us some new game rules, deliberately tailored to accommodate the interests of a privileged few, with the WTO having no say in it. This is fraught with utterly unbalancing global trade and splitting up the global economic space.
These issues affect the interests of all nations and influence the future of the entire global economy. That is why we propose discussing those issues within the framework of the United Nations, the WTO and the G20. Contrary to the policy of exclusion, Russia advocates harmonizing regional economic projects. I am referring to the so-called “integration of integrations” based on the universal and transparent rules of international trade. As an example, I would like to cite our plans to interconnect the Eurasian Economic Union with China’s initiative for creating a Silk Road economic belt. We continue to see great promise in harmonizing the integration vehicles between the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union.
Ladies and gentlemen, one more issue that shall affect the future of the entire humankind is climate change. It is in our interest to ensure that the coming UN Climate Change Conference that will take place in Paris in December this year should deliver some feasible results. As part of our national contribution, we plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 70–75 percent of the 1990 levels by the year 2030.
However, I suggest that we take a broader look at the issue. Admittedly, we may be able to defuse it for a while by introducing emission quotas and using other tactical measures, but we certainly will not solve it for good that way. What we need is an essentially different approach, one that would involve introducing new, groundbreaking, nature-like technologies that would not damage the environment, but rather work in harmony with it, enabling us to restore the balance between the biosphere and technology upset by human activities.
It is indeed a challenge of global proportions. And I am confident that humanity does have the necessary intellectual capacity to respond to |
2012 and 2013 on the outside.
Mostly outlined are faults of his in man coverage, but given the prevalence of man coverage concepts in Zimmer’s scheme, it’s worth emphasizing. Further, they do appear in zone coverage—route recognition and reading receivers is a failing of his, and a big part of what make Richard Sherman and Charles Tillman so good at playing in zone schemes is their ability to read routes and anticipate.
This isn’t the death of Robinson as a starting corner, or even as a high-level one; that part of his career is mostly on life support. He might simply be better served by playing even tighter coverage and allowing himself to feel the receiver throughout the route through constant contact, like Darrelle Revis.
A consistent critique of Revis is that he’s constantly holding when he’s not—he’s riding the line, but keeps a feel for the receiver by resting a hand on the receiver’s arm throughout the route. Revis is a master at using subtle signals, like changes in muscle tension, a receivers eyes, or shoulder alignment to determine where a receiver is going to go.
Bengals corners seem to do this fairly consistently. Both Terence Newman and Pacman Jones find ways to anticipate receivers in part due to their constant contact with receivers.
I think the adoption of this technique will be a positive for Robinson, who has the athleticism—both straight line and laterally—to work with the smaller margins of error a technique like this demands. It also allows him to use his physicality and strength to his advantage. From an attitude and baseline athletic talent perspective, it’s good for him and a fit for a corner who originally looked better in zone than man.
That said, it requires a lot of him that he’s proven not to have. It still requires great route recognition, and good play on the ball in the air. Robinson also hasn’t shown the patience to wait on flipping his hips, something that the Bengals defense asked its corners to do—only committing when the investment made sense.
Even Robinson’s impressive recovery speed doesn’t make up for the fact that he had opened the gate and should have allowed an easy completion for 17 or so yards in the air and anywhere between 5 and 38 yards on the ground. Opening his body to the wrong direction allowed the receiver an easy break inside—which is an issue he had in 2012, too.
It’s not often a simple thing to diagnose, because of the techniques encouraged by different schemes—attempting to funnel receivers inside or outside as the case may be. But it happens often enough in man coverage when Robinson’s incentives are clear. Zimmer’s defense would rather that corners be patient when they’re not in tight coverage.
You’ll also see a lot of mixed coverage concepts in these Bengals GIFs—man coverage on one side and zone on the other, with different sets of rules governing what players do when different route combinations appear. Given Robinson’s issues with developing chemistry and an inability to drop receivers off into the next zone at the appropriate time, mixed coverages may be quite the worry.
For the most part, it is extremely unlikely that Josh Robinson transitions into a starting-caliber corner from here on out. My defense of him as an outside corner was probably misguided and he’s had some of these issues for quite some time—issues that haven’t gone away or improved in the two years he’s been in the NFL.
Robinson is physically ideal for the slot. He has quick feet, excellent body control, all kinds of athletic ability and agility and a tackler’s frame. But he hasn’t put it together on the outside or in the slot, and his continued spot on the roster demands that he answer the question of whether or not he can be saved.
He’s in the perfect situation with the perfect coach to revive his career, but the odds are longer than they are short and it may be time to look towards the 2015 draft for cornerback help if Derek Cox, Jabari Price, Kendall James, Shaun Prater or even Julian Posey can’t step up in an enormous way.Sweet tooth anyone? This will get you through, but you’ll need milk or black coffee and then you’ll be in your own swirly heaven. You’ll need someone to save you.
I literally sat around indulging in this while I finished a book I recently became obsessed with. I’m not usually a fiction reader but I found my self engrossed in this tale of love and loss and war and pain and well you know how those books are…I couldn’t put it down until it was done. It sucked me right in. If you are looking for a good read give it a try.
Anyway, I used coconut milk in this bread but you can use regular milk if you like. It was moist, yummy and sweet!
The loaf is nice to look at with a glaze and more coconut on top, who wouldn’t love this gorgeous thing…well…my husband…he dislikes coconut. Isn’t that crazy?!!
While this bread doesn’t require a mixer, it is important to have the right size loaf pan (9 x 5 x 2.75) When the pan is off in size, it really mucks up the cooking times which are perfect for this sized bread.
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Happy Nutella bread baking to you.It's finally here, after all the teasers and the anticipation threatening to boil over into mass hysteria (perhaps an exaggeration) Ireland's 'home' kit for Euro 2016 has finally been revealed.
We were already promised a return to at least a flash of orange in the new kit and Umbro haven't disappointed. So without further ado, here's Ireland's Euro 2016 jersey.
The feint diagonal stripes are a nice touch while we're giving the added touch of the orange on the collar a hearty thumbs up.
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The kit goes on sale across the country next Thursday, March 10th. If you pre-order with Life Style Sports here you'll be in with a chance of getting your brand new Euro 2016 jersey for free.
See also: TV3 And RTÉ Reveal The Irish TV Schedule For Euro 2016 GamesThe speed limit will start to drop to 30 km/h on hundreds of kilometres of Toronto's residential streets this fall, in a bid to improve safety for pedestrians and cyclists.
The politically controversial idea sailed through Toronto and East York community council Monday evening in spite of opposition voiced earlier by the mayor, who does not get a vote on this body. The unanimous decision of these councillors is binding on local roads across their 12 wards, representing a huge swath of the city, "We have an expectation to protect our neighbourhoods," said Councillor Josh Matlow, who introduced the motion dropping residential limits. "It's not going to stop people speeding...but it's going to contribute."
The decision affects about 387 kilometres of local roads in the old cities of Toronto and East York that are now posted at 40 km/h. Staff estimated that changing the signs will cost about $1-million and take three years. Councillors specified that the switch is to begin in September.
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"There is no war on the car," argued Councillor Paula Fletcher. "There's basically been this continued war on people who don't have a car."
Lower speeds are known to reduce sharply the risk to pedestrians and cyclists in the event of a crash. A person hit at 32 km/h has a 95 per cent chance of survival, according to data cited by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Their odds drop to 60 per cent if hit at 48 km/h.
"Errors in judgement should not be punished with the death sentence," said Albert Koehl, speaking to the community council on behalf of the Annex Residents' Association.
In the lead-up to the meeting, the idea of dropping the limit prompted pushback from city staff, as well as from Mayor John Tory and some members of his executive committee.
Mr. Tory said he is not in favour of lowering limits across the board, arguing for a more targeted approach in individual neighbourhoods.
"I don't generally favour these kind of blanket solutions that make people feel better for a short period of time, but then you look and say 'is it being enforced, is it actually being effective? Is it achieving the ends that are stated when it's under review', and the answer comes up no," he said.
Funding to continue replacing speed limit signs after this year will have to be secured as part of the budget process that involves full council. This could offer a chance for councillors from elsewhere in the city to derail this push, though Mr. Matlow was hopeful that would not happen.
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"I would hope that the mayor and council would respect the decision of the Toronto East York community council," he said.
Transportation Services general manager Stephen Buckley was also dubious about a broad reduction in speed limits, raising concerns Monday evening as he walked councillors through the staff report on the issue.
He noted that drivers often adjust their speed in response to the road design and conditions, not responding only to the posted limit. Using what he characterized as artificial or arbitrarily low limits could lead to non-compliance, driver frustration and speed differentials between vehicles that could raise the risk of collisions.
With a report from Ann HuiThe Toronto Board of Health is calling on the federal government to provide "immediate" clarity on pot rules, following police raids on dozens of marijuana dispensaries across the city last week.
A motion passed by the board calls for a regulatory framework with a public health approach, ahead of the forthcoming federal legalization and regulation in 2017.
The Liberal government has said it will introduce new legislation next year, but the city's health board says that's not good enough — there is a need for interim rules now.
Coun. Joe Cressy, who sits on the health board, said the city has been struggling with a "legislative limbo."
"We've been told that criminalization doesn't work, so tomorrow we're going to solve it, but today you're going to have to continue to enforce it," said Cressy, who is the councillor for Ward 20 and chair of the Toronto Drug Strategy Implementation Panel. "That doesn't work."
Not everyone agrees that the health board's motion is needed.
Adam Vaughan, the Liberal member of Parliament for Fort York-Spadina and a former Toronto councillor, said there is no need for extra, interim, rules, tweeting that "the law's the law."
"Cities have the regulatory tools they need, police have the same laws they've always had. Not doing anything was T.O.'s choice," he wrote. Vaughan is also the federal secretary to the prime minister for intergovernmental affairs, informally known as the "unity minister."
<a href="https://twitter.com/gordperks">@gordperks</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/joe_cressy">@joe_cressy</a> New rules are coming. Until they do existing rules stand. Impact of illegal operations is a local responsibility. —@TOAdamVaughan
Cressy made his comments at a board of health meeting, where a report on the public health approach to the regulation of recreational marijuana was being considered. The report, which includes a series of recommendations, outlines how recreational pot could be regulated federally.
The health board, in addition to calling for clarity, also called for the report to be forwarded to provincial and federal transportation ministries, owing to the risks of driving and marijuana use.
The board also passed two motions:
That the medical officer of health be requested to begin an educational campaign on the risks and benefits of the use of non-medical cannabis.
That the board of health urge the federal minister of health to earmark some of the savings and tax revenue generated from the legalization of cannabis toward low-income communities, particularly those affected by the unintended consequences of legalization.
One of the speakers at the hearing brought up a concern that legalization will take away a source of income for some people. The motion seeks to ease that burden of lost income, acknowledging that although it comes from illegal activity, it could create hardships for some people.
'Cities are struggling'
"The federal government has let down cities right across this country," Cressy said on CBC's Metro Morning today. "Cities are struggling. You cannot arrest your way to a solution."
Toronto police raided 43 marijuana dispensaries on Thursday. Police said the dispensaries were operating illegally.
Officers arrested 90 people, laid 186 charges of possession for the purpose of trafficking and 71 charges of proceeds of crime. About 270 kilograms of dried marijuana, among other products, were seized.
Cressy said a new federal regulatory framework should consider such issues as cannabis content, access, distribution, age appropriateness, marketing, pricing and medicinal versus recreational uses of marijuana, he said. The idea is to consider the harmful effects of marijuana while avoiding the consequences of criminalization.
'Failed federal law'
Cressy declined to say whether he agreed with the police raids, but said marijuana needs to be decriminalized.
"The police are enforcing a failed federal law. That law needs to change. It's not the responsibility of the police to decide whether or not to enforce law. It's the role of the federal government to change that law. It's failed. It hasn't deterred people from using pot."
In a statement, Toronto medical officer of health Dr. David McKeown said the federal government can regulate marijuana in the same way it regulates alcohol and tobacco.
"Designing a regulatory approach for non-medical cannabis is complex," McKeown said.
"We are therefore urging the federal government to use an evidence-based public health approach that builds on the lessons learned from regulating tobacco and alcohol. This approach will help reduce potential health harms for the population as a whole."
The approach to regulating non-medical marijuana being proposed to the board includes providing strong government regulatory control on availability and accessibility, setting a minimum purchase age, minimizing promotion, ensuring strong impaired driving policies and restricting use in public places, the statement said.
Medical officer calls for study
McKeown is recommending that the board urge the federal health minister to earmark funding to study the potential adverse health effects of recreational pot use.
His report noted that the potential effects, particularly with frequent and heavy use, include exposure to cancer-causing chemicals, poor respiratory health and increased risk of developing mental illnesses, especially if there is a genetic predisposition.
"The potential for harm exists particularly for people who consume it frequently or begin use in adolescence. Most of the research to date has focused on frequent, chronic use, and more evidence is needed about the impact of occasional and moderate use, as this comprises the majority of non-medical cannabis use in our society," the report says.Two important Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved changes to the warning label of Merck Pharmaceutical’s shingles vaccine, Zostavax, have been made since the controversial drug was introduced in 2006. The first was in August 2014, when, in addition to potentially causing chickenpox, another side effect was added: shingles! That’s right. The vaccine that had been—and continues to be—aggressively marketed to prevent seniors from contracting this excruciating condition was found to actually cause shingles in some individuals.
In February of this year, the FDA approved a label change to warn those who prescribe the Zostavax vaccine of another potential side effect: “Eye Disorders: necrotizing retinitis.”
Vision Damage linked to Shingles Vaccine
This disorder, as well as keratitis, causes inflammation and scarring of the eye tissue and can lead to permanent vision loss if not treated quickly. It was reported by WebMD 20 individuals (children and adults) developed keratitis within a month of receiving a chickenpox or shingles vaccine. Keratitis symptoms for adults developed within 24 days of vaccination, while symptoms in children began within 14 days of vaccination.
“Researchers concluded there is a probable relationship between the vaccine and the eye inflammation, though the study wasn’t designed to prove the vaccine actually caused the condition,” according to an article posted by the personal injury law firm of Matthews & Associates.
While researchers don’t know why the shingles shot may cause keratitis, the condition has been linked to autoimmune disorders. The connection between vaccines and autoimmune disease has been widely acknowledged, most recently by medical researchers worldwide in a compilation of studies published in 2015 in the medical textbook, Vaccines & Autoimmunity.
Insignificant Effectiveness of Zostavax
According to the authors of a Health Sciences Institute (HSI) article in January, 2016, “UCLA researchers found that only one in 175 people who get the vaccine will be able to dodge a shingles flare-up.” While Merck claims Zostavax is 50 percent effective, in the placebo group, 3.3 percent of the study participants developed shingles, compared to 1.6 percent in the vaccine group. So, while that is a 50 percent difference, the real, absolute risk reduction is just 1.7 percentage points.
More Shingles Vaccine “Side Effects”
According to its current warning label, Zostavax’s most common side effects are “headache, redness, pain, itching, swelling, hard lump, warmth, or bruising where the shot was given.” However, more serious “side effects” include:
allergic reactions, which may be serious and may include difficulty in breathing or swallowing
chickenpox
fever
hives at the injection site
joint pain
muscle pain
nausea
rash
rash at the injection site
shingles
swollen glands near the injection site (that may last a few days to a few weeks)
Nevertheless, despite its questionable effectiveness at preventing shingles (and the fact that it can cause shingles!) and the serious side effects it can produce, online sites funded by the pharmaceutical industry (e.g., WebMD) and neighborhood pharmacies continue to ominously advise seniors to get the shingles vaccines—at a cost of $150-$300 per injection to insurance companies. Zostavax is clearly effective at something—and there’s nothing “potential” about the revenue it’s generating for its manufacturer, promoters and distributors.
Correction: The word “Zostavax” in the first paragraph of this article was initially misspelled “Zostamax.” The error was brought to our attention by one of our readers and was corrected.
Note: This article was reprinted with the author’s permission. Claire Dwoskin is founder and president of the Children’s Medical Safety Research Institute (CMSRI).Sweden: Russia biggest threat, 1/3 of its envoys are spies
SOLNA, Sweden (AP) — Swedish security service SAPO on Wednesday accused Russia of using as many as one-third of its diplomatic staff in the Scandinavian country for clandestine intelligence gathering.
Offering an unusual glimpse into the hush-hush world of counter-espionage, SAPO chief analyst Wilhelm Unge described the Russian spies as "highly educated and often younger than during the Soviet era. They are driven, goal-oriented and socially competent."
Naming Russia as "the biggest intelligence threat against Sweden, followed by Iran and China," he said SAPO last year stopped several attempts by Russia to obtain Swedish technology for military purposes, but declined to give specifics.
Wilhelm Unge, chief analyst at Swedish security service SAPO, speaks during a press conference as SAPO released its annual report in Stockholm, Wednesday March 18, 2015. SAPO has accused Russia of conducting "extensive" espionage operations, using as many as one-third of its diplomatic staff in the country for clandestine intelligence gathering. (AP Photo/Henrik Montgomery, TT) SWEDEN OUT
The Russian Embassy didn't immediately answer an email seeking comment.
SAPO warned last year that Russia had stepped up its political, economic and military espionage in Sweden — which isn't a NATO member but cooperates closely with the alliance — amid deteriorating relations with the West over the Ukraine crisis.
"There are hundreds of Russian intelligence officers around Europe and the West. They violate our territory every day," Unge told reporters at SAPO headquarters in Solna, just outside Stockholm, at the launch of the agency's annual report.
"What's notable is that about one-third of the Russian diplomatic personnel are in reality not diplomats but intelligence officers," he said.
"Why don't we send them out?" he said. "Counter-espionage comes with the complication that we're following other governments. This becomes politics directly. So we don't own the decisions of who should or shouldn't be in Sweden. That's up to the government."Since when did Steve Spurrier become the Oprah Winfrey of college football?
Forget paying college athletes: Education is enough!
Anybody who knows what a tightwad Spurrier is will tell you this was a masterful but meaningless grandstand. Charlie Casey, Spurrier's old college teammate at Florida, once said Spurrier was so cheap that when he finally opened his wallet to pay off a golf bet that "moths flew out."
In one of the most ridiculously self-serving statements since he once requested that a sportswriter refer to him as a "mastermind" instead of a "genius", South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier said last week he wanted to start paying his football players a salary out of his own pocket.
But now, suddenly, we're expected to believe the head ballcoach is turning into the Oprah Winfrey of college football? Sorry, but I'm not buying it.
This is clearly a case of a guy who offers to pick up the tab at a restaurant after it's already been paid. … "Oh, I would have gotten that!"
The fact is, the NCAA would never, ever allow football coaches to start paying players. Seriously, can you imagine giving Lane Kiffin actual permission to start promising money to recruits? This would not just be opening up a can of worms; it would be blowing the top off a barrel of snakes.
Color me skeptical that coaches and commissioners from the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference – the two richest, most powerful leagues in college football -- are the ones who are seriously broaching the idea of paying athletes. Is this their way of being noble and philanthropic or is it their way of getting even richer and more powerful?
Don't kid yourself, the SEC and Big Ten, with their billion-dollar TV contracts, can afford a few million to pay their players, but many schools and leagues cannot. So where do you think the top recruits are going to go – to the teams and leagues that are paying them or to the teams and leagues that are not?
UCF athletic director Keith Tribble says he's all for providing more benefits for college athletes – as long as everybody is providing the same benefits.
"It's obvious that those conferences (Big Ten and SEC) have signed very lucrative television contracts that are going to generate a lot of revenue and further the gap between the haves and have-nots," Tribble says. "They are probably in the position to say, 'We can afford it (paying athletes) so why shouldn't we be able to do it?'
"I'm a believer that you need to make sure that all of intercollegiate sports (play by the same rules.) Anytime you start creating separate divisions, I think that's bad."
It's also laughable that many of the testosterone-charged neanderthals out there think that men's football and men's basketball players are the only athletes who should be paid. Somebody want to tell me why the second-team long snapper on a pitiful Vanderbilt football team should get $1,000 a month while the starting point guard on Tennessee's national championship-contending women's basketball team should get nothing?
"Our soccer and softball players put in as much time and effort as our football and basketball players," Tribble rightfully says.Pakistan:
Pakistan launched a special Christmas train to carry a message of goodwill and cheer around the country. The train was decorated in an appropriately-festive fashion, intended to promote tolerance of Pakistan’s minority communities. Minister for Human Rights Kamran Michael and Minister for Railways Saad Rafique jointly opened the peace train for its departure from Islamabad on December 22.
Nigeria:
More than 20 of the Chibok schoolgirls captured by Boko Haram, who were released in October, were reunited with their families for Christmas. This will be the first Christmas spent at home since their capture in April 2014.
Iraq:
In the Iraqi town Bartella, just liberated from the Islamic State, Christmas mass was celebrated for the first time in two years. Hundreds of Christians currently living in refugee camps in the Kurdish city Erbil came to Bartella for Christmas. Worshippers packed into the damaged Mart Shmony Church.
Australia:
Worshippers thronged to St. Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne, despite police foiling a terrorist plot to bomb the church. Australian security services arrested seven people and charged them with planning a terrorist attack, targeted at Flinders Street Station, Federation Square and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Those visiting the church included three imams who came in solidarity. “There was a steady stream of people coming in and out of the cathedral and in the end I had to come out and give the final blessing to people on the forecourt,” the dean of St Paul’s, Dr Andreas Loewe, told The Guardian.
Palestinian Territories:
Thousands of pilgrims and tourists flocked to Bethlehem this year, as every year, to worship at the birthplace of Jesus. Bethlehem, once majority Christian city, has like other areas of the Arab world, shifted demographically and the Christian population is emigrating, stifled by an increasingly assertive Islamic cultural presence in the city and persecution that the community faces from Islamist groups like Hamas, which operates in the city. The Christian population in Bethlehem dropped from 86% to 12% over the past 60 years.
Philippines:
A terrorist attack at a Catholic mass in the Philippines wounded 16 people on Christmas Eve when a terrorist threw a grenade outside St. Nino Church in Mindanao.The one person we haven't heard from in the wake of Michael Malone's firing as head coach of the Sacramento Kings is Michael Malone himself. Last night however, Malone sent the following statement to the Sacramento Bee:
"Coaching in the NBA is an honor and a privilege, one I've never taken for granted. The valued relationships I've garnered over the last 17 months with the entire Kings ownership group, players, team personnel, and members of the press leave an indelible mark on me and my family. I want to thank Vivek Ranadive for the opportunity and wish the franchise good fortune moving forward. Though my time as Head Coach ended much sooner than anticipated, I am extremely proud of what we were able to accomplish during our time together. Anchored by a loyal and dedicated coaching staff, we worked hard to instill a culture of discipline, trust, and respect that progressed this team further than many expected in a short time. The development of our players, both on and off the court, has given me the most joy. Many of them have played the best basketball of their careers and I am happy to be a small part of that. Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't express gratitude for the passionate fans who support Kings basketball every night. They welcomed me like family and lived up to their well established reputation as the best fans in the NBA."
A classy response from a classy guy. Malone will bounce back on his feet in the NBA, probably sooner rather than later. I wish him nothing but the best.The air-raid siren catches us on the highway, driving to Grandpa Yonatan’s place, a few kilometres north of Tel Aviv. My wife, Shira, pulls over to the side of the road and we get out of the car, leaving the badminton rackets and feathered ball on the back seat. Lev holds my hand and says, “Daddy, I’m a little nervous.” He’s seven, and seven is the age when it’s not considered cool to talk about fear, so the word “nervous” is used instead. Following Home Front Command instructions, Shira lies down on the side of the road. I tell Lev that he has to lie down, too. But he keeps standing there, his small, sweaty hand clutching mine.
“Lie down already,” Shira says, raising her voice to be heard over the blaring siren.
“How’d you like to play a game of Pastrami Sandwich?” I ask Lev.
“What’s that?” he asks, not letting go of my hand.
“Mommy and I are slices of bread,” I explain, “and you’re a slice of pastrami, and we have to make a pastrami sandwich as fast as we can. Let’s go. First, you lie down on Mommy,” I say, and Lev lies down on Shira’s back and hugs her as hard as he can. I lie on top of them, pressing against the damp earth with my hands so as not to crush them.
“This feels good,” Lev says and smiles.
“Being the pastrami is the best,” Shira says under him.
“Pastrami!” I yell.
“Pastrami!” my wife yells.
“Pastrami!” Lev yells, his voice shaky, either from excitement or fear.
“Daddy,” Lev says, “look, there are ants crawling on Mommy.”
“Pastrami with ants!” I yell.
“Pastrami with ants!” my wife yells.
“Yech!” Lev yells.
And then we hear the boom. Loud, but far away. We stay lying one on top of the other, without moving, for a long time. My arms are starting to hurt from carrying my weight. From the corner of my eye, I can see other drivers who’ve been lying on the highway get up and brush the dirt off their clothes. I stand up, too.
“Lie down,” Lev tells me, “lie down, Daddy. You’re ruining the sandwich.”
I lie down for another minute, and say, “O.K., game’s over. We won.”
“But it’s nice,” Lev says. “Let’s stay like this a little more.”
We stay like that a few seconds longer. Mommy on the bottom, Daddy on the top, and in the middle, Lev and a few red ants. When we finally get up, Lev asks where the rocket is. I point in the direction the explosion came from. “It sounded like it exploded not far from our house,” I say.
“Oof,” Lev says, disappointed, “now Lahav will probably find a piece again. Yesterday, he came to school with a piece of iron from the last rocket, and it had the symbol of the company on it and the name in Arabic. Why did it have to explode so far away?”
“Better far away than close by,” Shira says as she wipes sand and ants off her pants.
“The best would be if it was far enough away so nothing happens to us, but close enough so I could pick up some pieces,” Lev sums up.
“The best would be badminton on Grandpa’s lawn,” I say, and open the door to the back seat of the car.
“Daddy,” Lev says as I’m buckling him in, “promise that if there’s another siren, you and Mommy will play Pastrami with me again.”
“I promise,” I say, “and if it gets boring, I’ll teach you how to play Grilled Cheese.”
“Great!” Lev says, and a second later, he adds more seriously, “but what if there aren’t any more sirens ever?”
“I think there’ll be at least one or two more,” I reassure him.
“And if not,” his mom adds from the front seat, “we can play it without the sirens, too.”
Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston.
_
Etgar Keret’s short story collection “Suddenly a Knock at the Door” was published earlier this year. His story “Creative Writing” appeared in the magazine.
Photograph by Uriel Sinai/Getty.How wet-suit pioneer Jack O’Neill shaped surfing culture
Surf industry pioneer,, Jack O'Neill at his cliff-side home in Santa Cruz,Ca., on Thursday April 26, 2012. 89-year-old, Jack O'Neill a surf industry pioneer, who invented the wet suit, is celebrating 60 years since he opened the world's first surf shop, in San Francisco in 1952. less Surf industry pioneer,, Jack O'Neill at his cliff-side home in Santa Cruz,Ca., on Thursday April 26, 2012. 89-year-old, Jack O'Neill a surf industry pioneer, who invented the wet suit, is celebrating 60 years... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close How wet-suit pioneer Jack O’Neill shaped surfing culture 1 / 10 Back to Gallery
Jack O’Neill, the founder of the first and most successful surfing wet-suit company in the world, has long had the financial means to live anywhere he wants.
Yet the well-traveled inventor, entrepreneur and surfer has chosen to remain in Santa Cruz since moving here in 1959. So why has he stayed all these years?
“Santa Cruz has great surf,” says O’Neill. “It’s the right latitude. It’s too cold up there (pointing toward San Francisco) and too cold down south (pointing to Monterey). It’s perfect.”
It certainly appears that way as I sit next to O’Neill on a couch in his Pleasure Point home, gazing out through expansive windows at a mesmerizingly beautiful Pacific Ocean. It’s so close that it seems to envelop us. The conditions couldn’t be better — the bright, blue water is smooth and the sky is clear, with Monterey easily visible across the bay. But O’Neill’s focus is more immediate: He’s checking out the surf.
It’s been a long time since O’Neill was out in the water, but old age (he’s 92) and health problems (he suffered a stroke in 2005) can’t keep him from surfing the waves with his mind. The ever-present gleam in his one good eye — the other was lost in a surfing accident in 1972, leading to the use of his iconic patch — and constant grin on his face make it obvious: O’Neill is still stoked on surfing.
Though it was the surf and weather that drew O’Neill to Santa Cruz, leaving San Francisco, where he lived previously, was also a business decision. It may have been a remote, rural town back in 1959, with little in the way of commerce relative to San Francisco, but Santa Cruz had more of something the enterprising O’Neill needed if his wet suit- and surfboard-making business was going to flourish: surfers.
Early surfing in S.F.
In the 1940s, when O’Neill was bodysurfing and surfing San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, only a handful of hardy souls joined him in the frigid water. The surfing wet suit did not exist at the time. The only means this crew had of dealing with the cold was a post-surf bonfire. While the strong currents and powerful waves also deterred people from plunging in, there was an even more obvious factor keeping the number of surfers to a bare minimum: Swimming, much less surfing, was not allowed at Ocean Beach. At least that was O’Neill’s understanding. He says surfing was only permitted at Kelly’s Cove, at the far northern end of the beach, right under the Cliff House.
“There was a guy named Julius, who was a mounted policeman, and that was his territory: Ocean Beach, San Francisco,” says O’Neill. “And when he’d see us in the water, except at Kelly’s, he would say, ‘You better get out or I’m gonna take you in.’”
Though O’Neill bodysurfed regularly, often braving huge surf — “We would go out on any day” — he never acclimated to the cold water; nobody really did. Unlike his fellow water men, however, he set out to do something about it. He knew he needed to create some kind of flexible insulation, one that performed better than the wool sweaters that some surfers wore.
O’Neill experimented with various materials, putting his expertise as a journeyman draftsman to good use. “It started out with some uni-sided foam,” says O’Neill of the first vest he fashioned. “I knew from my physics classes that air was a good insulator. It worked good, except it didn’t have tensile strength, so I had to take it and put plastic on the outside.”
The real breakthrough came in 1952, when pharmacist friend and fellow Kelly’s Cove bodysurfer, Harry Hind, turned him on to an elastic compound originally developed by DuPont in 1930. Explains O’Neill, “He saw what I was trying to do with the plastic foam, and he says, ‘Hey, try this neoprene.’ He had used it in his lab. It really worked well.”
O’Neill knew he had the right material and began to construct vests, initially making them for his friends to test. Then, a few months later, he began to sell them in his newly opened surf shop on the Great Highway near Wawona Street.
At the time, though, surfboard building was the focus of O’Neill’s business, not wet suits. Despite their obvious utility, wet suits were hardly flying off the shelf. Indeed, one of O’Neill’s friends encouraged him to give up on the invention. “Charlie Grimm was one of the hard-core surfers out there,” recalls O’Neill, “and when he saw what I was doing he said, ‘O’Neill, you’re going to sell to five guys on the beach and you’re out.’ Because there were very few surfers out there in those days.”
Though he didn’t agree with him at the time, O’Neill now acknowledges that Grimm did have a point. The availability of a neoprene vest could hardly turn San Francisco into a surf mecca. Santa Cruz was different. The water wasn’t much warmer, but the waves were far more forgiving and accessible, and according to O’Neill, “the surf was much better than San Francisco.” He’d learned this on a number of surf trips to Santa Cruz. On one such occasion, he brought his whole family, including his wife, Marjorie, and five children; they camped out on the bluff above Pleasure Point — not far from his current home.
Move to Santa Cruz
In 1959, when the O’Neill family moved to Santa Cruz, the seven of them initially stayed in a motel on East Cliff Drive, also right above the ocean. Soon, O’Neill got a house on Chanticleer Avenue, fairly far from the beach, though still on the east side of town. To give you an idea of how rural Santa Cruz was at the time, their neighbor raised sheep.
The Chanticleer property included some sheds that O’Neill was able to use for surfboard and wet-suit production. Once his business outgrew these spaces, he rented a 5,000-square-foot barn. Initially, 90 percent of that business was the shaping of balsa-wood surf |
third slowest we tested, taking more than five minutes to heat up the water before pumping. However, tasters noted the coffee was balanced with mild acidity.
The OXO On Barista made it to our final five brewers. Easy to load, the SCA-certified Oxo starts heating and dispensing water after only 30 seconds, but in later rounds of tastings, testers noted the coffee lacked aroma and had a weak taste, which presumably could be resolved by tweaking some variables. Amazon reviews also cite weird glitches with the clock, which appears to reset itself. That might ruin your morning if you plan on waking up to hot coffee that brews on a timer.
The Bunn Heat N' Brew delivered weak, thin coffee from a brew bed that was inconsistently wet. While it has a simple dashboard, the LCD often blinked that the SCA-certified coffee maker was still brewing even after the dripping stopped.
The flip-up lids covering the water tank and brew basket on the Cuisinart Pour Over Coffee Brewer, which plagued a few of the machines we tested, makes it difficult to tuck the coffee maker under upper cabinets—a short power cord didn’t help things either. Tasters commented that coffee from this SCA-certified machine was split between bitter or sweet, and balanced; others noticed an off smell with a lot of body that bordered on over-extracted.
A top seller on Amazon, the Cuisinart 14-Cup Glass Carafe with Stainless Steel Handle Programmable Coffeemaker overflowed when we added our controlled amounts of water and coffee, which were within the brewer’s max fill levels. This is one of the coffee machines that spills water into the brew basket when the lid is up and the power is on.
The Mr. Coffee scored high with one of our pros initially, but it fell short in subsequent taste tests and the brew basket never became fully saturated. Additional testing delivered coffee with a lot of acidity.
Like the Mr. Coffee, the Black & Decker scored well with a coffee pro at first, even if the notes of Serious Eats staffers ranged from “unbalanced” to “nutty and rich.” The build is basic—one switch, no fancy clocks or presets—and while the machine will brew with the lid up, the water is diverted back into the reservoir, not the brew basket. The Black & Decker was the second slowest model we tested, taking nearly nine minutes to empty the water tank.
The Hamilton Beach did well in initial tastings, but later panelists were as likely to describe the coffee as weak as they were to call it balanced. In the end, we disqualified it for its leaky lid design that does not include a water shut-off, but we appreciated the removable water tank and swing-out brew basket—both features save space under upper cabinets.
We disqualified the Krups Savoy early on for brewing and saturating the filter basket with the lid up.
Editor's Note: A previous version of this review misidentified the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) as the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA). We regret the error.
This post may contain links to Amazon or other partners; your purchases via these links can benefit Serious Eats. Read more about our affiliate linking policy.Some observations as the Gaza crisis continues to unfold:
1. The Iron Dome anti-rocket and missile defense system seems to work better than most people expected. Israel is becoming very good at shooting down missiles.
2. Israel also seems to be getting better at not killing civilians in Gaza. The numbers are of course too large, and this could change in an instant, but right now the casualty rate is much lower than in Operation Cast Lead. And yes, of course, much smaller than the numbers from the American drone war in Pakistan. Hamas, of course, is trying to maximize civilian casualties. Which brings me to:
3.The media is biased against Israel. Yes, got it. Yes, Israel is being judged harshly. Yes, I know that probably 300 people have been murdered in Syria since this Gaza affair started, and no one cares. An acquaintance of mine, a Syrian living in Beirut, wrote me in frustration about this last night. "We get very little interest from the international press compared to the Palestinians. What should we do to get more attention?"
My advice is to get killed by Jews. Always works. That said, what do pro-Israel people want? And what does Israel itself want? Israel is more powerful than its Palestinian adversaries, and the press almost axiomatically roots for the underdog. There is much greater sympathy for the Palestinian cause than before, which is partially Israel's fault -- if Israel didn't appear to be a colonizer of the West Bank, it would find more sympathy. Jews, and certainly a Jewish state, are never going to win popularity contests, but the situation wouldn't seem quite so dire to Israelis and their friends if people plausibly believed that the Netanyahu government was interested in implementing a two-state solution.The additional senators are Biazon, Loi Estrada, Jaworski, Lapid, Magsaysay, Marcos, Oreta, Pimentel Jr, and Cynthia Villar
Published 7:42 PM, May 26, 2014
MANILA, Philippines (2nd UPDATE) – Alleged pork barrel scam mastermind Janet Lim Napoles added the names of 9 more senators in her list of officials who supposedly got kickbacks in the pork barrel scam.
In one of the two Napoles affidavits submitted to the Senate on Monday, May 26, the alleged mastermind included more names of senators who got commissions in the scam:
Former Senator Rodolfo Biazon Former Senator Loi Estrada Former Senator Robert Jaworksi Former Senator Ramon Magsaysay Senator Lito Lapid Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr Former Senator Tessie Aquino Oreta Former Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr Senator Cynthia Villar
These names were in addition to the initial list she submitted to Justice Secretary Leila de Lima. De Lima gave the Senate a copy of the list on May 15.
In the affidavit signed, notarized and dated, Napoles made a list of officials she transacted with and enumerated their alleged agents. She classified them according to the following categories: Senators, Senators (Campaign Funds Only), Congressmen, and Agencies.
The alleged mastermind named a total of 20 senators, 100 congressmen, and 10 officials of implementing agencies. This affidavit was written in Filipino, and typewritten. (READ: Napoles details 'transactions' with 20 senators)
Before listing them down, Napoles wrote, “Sa abot ng aking naaalala, sa kasalukuyan kong kalagayan dito sa Ospital ng Makati, ang mga sumusunod na mga senador, kongresista, at kanilang mga agents at ang mga opisyales o kawani ng mga implementing agencies (sic) ng pamahalaan na nagkaroon ng kaugnayan sa akin at tumanggap ng bahagi ng mga pork barrel:"
(As far as my memory permits in my current condition here at the Ospital ng Makati, the following senators, congressman, and their agents, and officials or employees of implementing agencies of government had a connection with me and received their portion of the pork barrel:)
Senators:
Biazon, Rodolfo Barbers, Robert Enrile, Juan Ponce Estrada, Jinggoy Estrada, Loi Honasan, Gringo Jaworksi, Robert Lapid, Lito Legarda, Loren Magsaysay, Ramon Marcos, Ferdinand Jr Oreta, Tessie Aquino Pimentel, Aquilino (sic) Pimentel, Koko Revilla, Ramon Jr Sotto, Vicente (sic) Villar, Cynthia Villar, Manny
Senators (Campaign Funds Only):
Villar, Manny
19. Cayetano, Allan Peter (sic)
20. Escudero, Francis Chiz
(See the full list below)
The list excluded Senator JV Ejercito, who Napoles named in her original list. Her lawyer later admitted there was an encoding mistake and Napoles asked that Ejercito's name be taken off the list.
In the succeeding pages, Napoles detailed her specific transactions with the persons she included in her list.
In her introduction, Napoles said she was the victim and not the mastermind.
“Ako ay naging biktima ng isang maling sistema ng ating lipunan na akala ko noon ay normal at tama at naayon sa batas, dahil ito ay naging kalakaran na sa mahabang panahon,” Napoles wrote. (I became a victim of a wrong system in society because I thought before this was normal and legal because it became the practice for a long time.)
Napoles faces plunder charges for allegedly conniving with top lawmakers and executive officials to funnel pork barrel funds to her fake non-governmental organizations. Her lawyer confirmed she is applying for state witness.
‘In spirit of transparency’
Senate blue ribbon committee chairman Teofisto “TG” Guingona III decided to release the Napoles affidavits, after Justice Secretary Leila de Lima submitted these to his office. A staff of Guingona picked up the affidavits from the justice department.
“In the spirit of transparency, to search for truth and in line with my commitment to uphold the public interest, we are going to release to the media and to the public and to my fellow senators of course, the copies of these two Napoles affidavits,” Guingona told reporters.
Guingona refused to comment on the contents of the affidavit, saying he has yet to read these.
He said the next step for the committee is to wait for the digital files of principal whistleblower Benhur Luy.
The Senate will likely call Napoles and Luy in future hearings.
“There’s going to be a hearing. If you have a hearing, who will you call? There’s an affidavit. You call the person who issued the affidavit. There are Benhur files we didn’t know existed before. Now that we can get the files. Once we get the files, we will read it then we ask the person who read those files to testify,” Guingona said.
Below is the full list in Napoles’ affidavit.
Congressmen
1. Abad, Florencio
2. Agarao, Benjamin
3. Albano, Rodolfo
4. Amatong, Prospero
5. Angara-Castillo, Bellaflor
6. Arroyo, Iggy
7. Arroyo, Mikey
8. Bagatsing, Amado
9. Banaag, Leovigildo
10. Baterina, Salacnib
11. Beratio, Napoleon
12. Biazon, Ruffy
13. Cagas, Marc Douglas
14. Chavez, Leonila
15. Chiongbian, Erwin
16. Chipeco, Joaquin
17. Cuenco, Antonio
18. Dangwa, Samuel
19. Defensor, Matias
20. Del Mar, Raul
21. Dilangalen, Didagen (spelled as Digaden in affidavit)
22. Dimaporo, Abdullah
23. Ducut, Zenaida
24. Ecleo, Glenda
25. Emano, Yevgeny Vincente
26. Espinosa, Edgar
27. Estrella, Conrado III
28. Estrella, Raymund (spelled as Reymund in affidavit)
29. Fabian, Erico
30. Falcon, Jesnar
31. Falcon, Peter
32. Flores, Florencio
33. Fuentebella, Arnulfo
34. Gullas, Gerald
35. Joaquin, Uliran
36. Jaraula, Constantino
37. Lagdameo, Antonio Jr.
38. Lanete, Rizalina Seachon
39. Lanete, Scott Davies
40. Libanan, Marcelino
41. Macarambon, Benasing Jr.
42. Madamba, Sunny Rose
43. Magsaysay, Eulogio
44. Malanyaon, Corazon
45. Malapitan, Oscar
46. Martinez, Clavel
47. Mercado, Roger
48. Miraflores, Florencio
49. Mranda, Anthony
50. Montejo, Neil Benedict
51. Nieva, Ernesto "Banzai"
52. Olaño, Arrel
53. Ortega, Manuel
54. Ortega, Victor
55. Pablo, Ernesto
56. Padilla, Carlos
57. Pangandaman, Hussein
58. Pangandaman, Nasser
59. Pichay, Prospero
60. Pingoy, Arthur
61. Plaza, Rodolfo
62. Ramiro, Herminia
63. Real, Isidoro Jr. (spelled as Isidro in affidavit)
64. Remulla, Gilbert
65. Rodriguez, Maximo
66. Rodriguez, Oscar "Oca"
67. Rodriguez, Rufus
68. Romualdo, Jurdin Jesus
69. Romualdo, Pedro
70. Sandoval, Federico "Ricky"
71. Sandoval, Vicente
72. Santiago, Joseph
73. Solis, Jose
74. Suplico, Rolex
75. Tulagan, Generoso
76. Umali, Alfonso "Boy"
77. Umali, Aurelio "Oyi"
78. Umali, Reynaldo
79. Ungab, Isidro
80. Unico, Renato
81. Valdez, Edgar
82. Valencia, Rodolfo
83. Veloso, Eduardo
84. Villanueva, Joel
85. Yumul-Hermida, Georgilu
86. Zamora, Manuel "Way Kurat"
Received Cash Allowances
87. Alvarado, Wilhelmino
88. Cortuna, Julieta
89. Daza, Nanette Castelo (spelled as Costello in affidavit)
90. Echiverri, Enrico "Recom"
91. Lapus, Jesli
92. Monfort, Narciso
93. Nantes, Rafael
94. Nograles, Prospero
95. Pablo, Ernesto
96. Plaza, Maria Valentina
97. Roman, Antonino (spelled as Antonio in affidavit)
98. Romualdo, Jurdin Jesus
99. San Luis, Rodolfo
100. Zialcita, Eduardo
AGENCIES
DA - Department of Agriculture
1. Ofelia Agawin
2. Alan Umali
3. Proceso Alcala (spelled as Processo in affidavit)
4. Jimmy Patocabe
NABCOR
1. Javellana, Allan
2. Mendoza, Rhodora
DAR
3. Nieto, Narciso
4. Panlilio, Teresita
DOTC
5. Sec. Mendoza
6. Venancio, Santidad
7. Maglanque, Rene
NLDC
8. Sevidal, Alexis
TRC
9. Ortiz, Antonio
10. Cunanan, Dennis
Read Napoles' May 12, 2014 affidavit covering the first batch of pork barrel scam here:
Read Napoles' May 26, 2014 extended affidavit naming more officials here: – Rappler.comThe Gardens Between: Upcoming Indie Game
The worst thing a gamer can face is an information blackout in regards to upcoming projects. As without it, all we can do is base our opinions on trailers and conjecture. However, it happens quite often in the gaming world. That said, at least we can say that The Garden Between, an upcoming indie game, looks rather pretty.
The only information we have on the game comes from it’s website, stating: “The Gardens Between is an adventure puzzle game where best friends Arina and Frendt fall into a world of mysterious gardens. Together they traverse a bittersweet story of friendship. With the forwards and backwards traversal of time, cause and effect is malleable.”
How exactly this story will play out is still beyond us, but stay tuned – as the game will launch on the PC and Mac later this year.
Follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest posts, or to recommend a game for the team to review: @TheSaveSpot1The Washington sightings led one imaginative theorist to outline the command structure of the "intergalactic task force" allegedly responsible. The scare attracted President Truman's personal attention. During the time of the sightings, all intelligence channels into and out of the capital were jammed, leaving the city defenseless if an Earth-bound adversary had chosen to attack. Intercontinental U.F.O. Galactic Spacecraft Research and Analytic Network Archives
A few minutes before midnight on Saturday, July 19, 1952, an air traffic controller at National Airport in Washington, D.C., noticed some odd blips on his radar screen. Knowing that no aircraft were flying in that area --15 miles to the southwest of the capital -- he rushed to inform his boss, Harry G. Barnes. Barnes recalled a few days later, "We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed.... [T]heir movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft." They moved with such sudden bursts of intense speed that radar could not track them continuously.
Soon, National Airport's other radar, Tower Central (set on short-range detection, unlike Barnes' Airway Traffic Control Central [ARTC]), was tracking unknowns. At Andrews AFB, ten miles to the east, Air Force personnel gaped incredulously as bright orange objects in the southern sky circled, stopped abruptly, and then streaked off at blinding speeds. Radar at Andrews AFB also picked up the strange phenomena.
The sightings and radar trackings continued until 3 A.M. By then witnesses on the ground and in the air had observed the UFOs, and at times all three radar sets had tracked them simultaneously.
Exciting and scary as all this had been, it was just the beginning of an incredible episode. The next evening radar tracked UFOs as they performed extraordinary "gyrations and reversals," in the words of one Air Force weather observer. Moving at more than 900 miles per hour, the objects gave off radar echoes exactly like those of aircraft or other solid targets. Sightings and trackings occurred intermittently during the week and then erupted into a frenzy over the following weekend. At one point, as an F-94 moved on targets ten miles away, the UFOs turned the tables and darted en masse toward the interceptor, surrounding it in seconds. The badly shaken pilot, Lt. William Patterson, radioed Andrews AFB to ask if he should open fire. The answer, according to Albert M. Chop, a civilian working as a press spokesperson for the Air Force who was present, was "stunned silence.... After a tense moment, the UFOs pulled away and left the scene."
As papers, politicians, and public clamored for answers, the Air Force hosted the biggest press conference in history. A transcript shows that the spokesperson engaged in what amounted to double-talk, but the reporters, desperate for something to show their editors, picked up on Capt. Roy James' off-the-cuff suggestion that temperature inversions had caused the radar blips. James, a UFO skeptic, had arrived in Washington only that morning and had not participated in the ongoing investigation.
Nonetheless, headlines across the country echoed the sentiments expressed in the Washington Daily News: "SAUCER" ALARM DISCOUNTED BY PENTAGON; RADAR OBJECTS LAID TO COLD AIR FORMATIONS. This "explanation" got absolutely no support from those who had seen the objects either in the air or on the radar screens, and the U.S. Weather Bureau, in a little-noted statement, rejected the theory. In fact, the official Air Force position, which it had successfully obscured, was that the objects were "unknowns."
Want to learn more about UFOs and aliens? Check out these articles:Former Ensemble Studios Lead Engineers join FE Team!
Wow…Hard to believe that it’s been 5 years since the whole “Forgotten Empires” project started. What began as a massive mod project for Age of Empires II, scrambled together by a colourful bunch of passionate players, evolved into us having the opportunity and honour to create new official expansion packs and work on the Age series, well, “officially.” The question is… so what’s next? One thing is for certain: our team has an incredible passion for Real Time Strategy games – can we take this further?
We sure hope so! And to that end we’ve been growing our team over the past year, welcoming some new faces to the team, but also some old faces. Some really old faces 😉 We’d like to introduce you to a couple of them now 🙂 We are thrilled to welcome two former Ensemble Studios senior engineers to the team: Matt Pritchard and Rich Geldreich Jr. Let’s meet them!
Matt “The Optimizer” Pritchard
Matt was one of the very first engineers at Ensemble Studios back in 1996. He was invaluable in developing the first two games of the series, Age of Empires and Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings and the engine (Genie) that they were built upon. He was a senior lead on graphics and was responsible for making sure the games were properly optimized. In 2012, he was also one of the driving forces to turn Age of Empires II HD into a reality. Matt joined Forgotten Empires in 2016 as our Director of Engineering, and his expertise has helped us take huge leaps forward on -thusfar unannounced- projects! Stay tuned for an upcoming interview!
Rich Geldreich
Rich joined Ensemble Studios much later, in 2004, but was active in the magical world of graphics rendering for 20 years prior to that (his codecs were already used in Age of Empires 1 and 2!). At Ensemble Studios, he worked on graphics/shaders/optimization/multithreading for Age of Empires III and was core engine lead on Halo Wars in addition to his work on rendering and graphics tools. Rich joined Forgotten Empires in 2016, and we are looking forward to sharing his amazing contributions to date and to come!
You?
Would you like to join our team as well? We’ve recently opened up a jobs section on our website. At the time of writing, we’re only publicly hiring for one position, but we’re expecting to see more job opportunities pop up in the near future!“This is like the summer of drag music,” says Alaska Thunderfuck. “We’re really gaining some visibility. And everyone is doing their own thing.”
The season five finalist of RuPaul’s Drag Race is right. Since the premiere of the cult show, alumni have been releasing their own songs, following in the footsteps of the queen mother herself. However, this summer, the iTunes music store is brimming with new singles from a number of them — and it’s unlike anything that’s come before.
Each has developed her own unique style appealing to a wide variety of Drag Race fans. Shartistry in Motion, Willam Belli’s latest album, features the season four comedy queen’s own brand of parody. Most songs are a fun and raunchy nod to Top 40 hits from notables like Taylor Swift and Wilson Phillips. And despite First Amendment protection, the blonde bombshell gives more than a passing nod to the artists she parodies. In Ride for AIDS she sings “Please don’t sue us Taylor Swift/we’re dogooders/Gave you credit right down there in the footer.”
However, not every queen aims for comedy, as this season’s contestants are making their own mark on music. Miss Fame’s new album, Beauty Marked, features electronic beats over pop lyrics that are too good to get out of your head. Not into pop? Check out the flazéda style of Pearl’s new house album Pleasure. Less for dancing, and more for chilling, Pearl shows that she’s not just relying on pretty with her music. With distorted vocals, and addictive drum snares, Pleasure shows us a side of the RPDR ladies we haven’t seen before. Last, but not least, we have current Drag Race superstar Violet Chachki’s new album, Gagged. The young queen shows more bondage than beauty in her musical talents, reminding us who’s in charge while serving a style that is a fusion of glam rock and queer punk, with a decidedly 1950s twist.
So why all this new music? Alaska has a theory: “Well, drag queens love money,” she says, “But also, we want our music to appeal to as many people as possible.”
“If I say one [song] is my favorite, then the others will get jealous and I’ll have to take them out for ice cream.”
Appropriately, the quirky queen’s debut album Anus — which recently hit number one on the iTunes Dance chart — features a track called Gimme All Your Money. Alaska’s Anus is an essential playlist for any lover of drag.
“They always tell you to write what you know,” Alaska says, “I know about drag queens, so I wrote about drag queens.” Though silly, Anus is anything but sophomoric. Each song has a distinct sound that ranges from the spoken-word dance vibes of This Is My Hair to the lyrically sweet Pussy. “I love all my songs. I can’t pick a favorite,” she laughs. “If I say one is my favorite, then the others will get jealous and I’ll have to take them out for ice cream.”
Of course, for Drag Race fans, the real fun comes when other queens pop up as featured artists on certain tracks. Listen to the above records and you’ll hear Courtney Act — whose own Kaleidoscope dropped this week — Laganja Estranja, Latrice Royale, and many more. It’s obvious that these queens are a family, dedicated to supporting one another in wherever their post Drag Race endeavors might take them.As the Verizon IndyCar Series prepares for its final four-race stretch of the 2017 season over the next five weeks, new points leader Josef Newgarden is thankful he’s made up a big deficit in the last two races rather than chasing as he pursues his first series championship.
Newgarden moved into the points lead for the first time in his career after winning the Honda Indy 200 at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course three weeks ago, his third win this season and second in a row. Heading into Sunday’s ABC Supply 500 at Pocono Raceway (2 p.m. ET, NBCSN), he has his first chance to win three races in a row in his career, and also to get his first Pocono win after banking three top-five finishes there in four past starts.
Just three races ago at Iowa, before he won at Toronto and Mid-Ohio, Newgarden was 56 points behind then-leader Scott Dixon, in fifth in points. He’s now leading, seven clear of Team Penske teammate Helio Castroneves, eight clear of Dixon and 17 clear of defending series champion Simon Pagenaud.
Naturally, Newgarden’s happy to be leading, but wary of any slip-ups at Pocono while in the No. 2 Fitzgerald Glider Kits Team Penske Chevrolet that could see him lose this slim gap.
“I think with the way I view it, I always prefer to be in the lead,” he said. “I don’t know why you ever wouldn’t want to be the leader. If you can be in a position where you’re leading the championship, I always think it’s better than having a deficit because to me, I don’t really approach a race weekend different if I’m leading or if I’m trying to catch up.
“I think for us it’ll be hard to hold on to it because everyone is so close, so you have one little mistake or one little mess-up in the next race and it’s very easy to slip back. So we’ve just got to try and stay out front if we can, and like I was saying before, the more that we can build a points gap, that only helps to Sonoma, so if we can’t do that, I think we need to just stay at least in touch with the lead as much as possible and make sure that we have a shot at winning the championship on our own terms when we go to Sonoma.”
Moving into the lead at Mid-Ohio puts Newgarden in an interesting position in recent IndyCar history.
Last year, Pagenaud’s decisive win against Will Power was a net 20-point swing in the championship and moved him into a 58-point lead over him with four races to go. That same 58-point spread now covers the top six entering this weekend’s race.
In 2015, Juan Pablo Montoya led Mid-Ohio winner Graham Rahal by nine points after that race, with two races to go. Eventual champion Dixon was third in points, 34 back.
Power led Castroneves by four after Mid-Ohio in 2014 with three races to go, and a dominant win the next race for him at Milwaukee helped seal his maiden championship win by Fontana a few weeks later.
There were still five races after Mid-Ohio in 2013. Castroneves led Dixon by 31 points, and Dixon came back to win that year’s title.
In 2012, Newgarden’s rookie season, Power led Ryan Hunter-Reay by five points out of Mid-Ohio with three races to go. Despite Power building the gap, he lost that year’s title in the last race to Hunter-Reay.
So how does Newgarden, who’s contending for a title in his first season at Team Penske, focus on the task at hand now that he’s thrust into a his first real title-contending scenario? Although he’s been on the fringes of it each of the last two years with Ed Carpenter Racing, he’s never quite been in this position.
Pagenaud seized his chance last year to win the 2016 title. It took Power three straight crushing end-of-year, last-race losses from 2010 to 2012 before he won his first and only title in 2014. Castroneves, despite an eternal number of runner-up finishes, has still never won a title. And Ryan Briscoe’s one shot at a title with Penske came unglued courtesy of an unforced error in 2009.
This is Newgarden’s first real chance at a title and as he explained, something he was hoping for once he joined the team.
“I definitely think I hoped I would be in a championship position. How could you not?” he said. “When joining Team Penske, I think you hope you’re going to just dominate.
“I didn’t know how the championship was going to unfold. I knew that we were going to have work in front of us.
“I feel like we’re still gelling, we’re still learning. So I’m a little bit surprised at how quickly we’ve hit the ground running, but I guess there’s also been moments where we could have been better and I could have been better and maybe as a team we could have been better, and I think with experience that will come.”
Newgarden said he hasn’t drawn on his teammates for any advice in how they’ve handled other title-contending situations, and that makes sense because he’s also racing each of them for the title at the same time. The strength in numbers at Team Penske means the odds of one of the four drivers winning is strong, with only Dixon or Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Graham Rahal poised to steal it otherwise.
“It’s an interesting question,” Newgarden admitted. “I haven’t really spoken much to the other teammates specifically about their mindset or where it was at or where the team was at with regard to the championship.
“It’s actually kind of oddly quiet. You know, it’s almost like we’re just expected to be able to do our job. It’s not that we don’t get spoken to by various people within the teams to make sure we have what we need or make sure we understand what the game plan is, it’s just most of the big broad brush strokes.
“I think they’re just — for them they view it as it should be understood by us. We’re all pretty experienced within the series, and I think everyone that’s come into Team Penske has always had some level of experience.
“I think they expect for you to do the right thing. Penske wants us to work well together. They allow us to race. They allow us to do whatever we want to try and beat each other, but it’s just most important that we work together and take care of each other at the end of the day.
“We try and help the whole group be better, and if it’s not me winning a race or winning the championship, then we focus on trying to get at least one of the Penske cars to do that. You always hope it’s you. You want to be the best within the team. But at the end of the day, we’ve got to have one of the Team Penske cars succeeding, and that’s what we all work for.”
Follow @TonyDiZinnoView more videos at: http://nbcdfw.com.
A woman who refused to give water to her 10-year-old stepson for days during a searing Texas heat wave was sentenced to 85 years in prison on Tuesday, local media reported.
Tina Marie Alberson had faced up to life in prison for her conviction by a Dallas County jury for an injury to a child, a second-degree felony, in the July 2011 death of Jonathan James, NBCDFW.com reported.
Alberson, 44, showed no reaction to her sentence, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Read more on NBCDFW.com
Jonathan James' grandmother, Sue Shotwell, testified in the sentencing phase that the boy couldn't understand why he was always in trouble with his stepmother. Shotwell told Alberson in court Tuesday that she has forgiven her and that Jonathan loved her and also forgave her.
"We trusted you; we trusted you with our baby," Shotwell said, according to the Dallas paper.
Tina Marie Alberson in an undated booking photo
Alberson denied causing Jonathan's death in the record heat wave.
The boy died on July 25, 2011, after he was found unresponsive in his home, NBCDFW.com reported. His death occurred during a record string of 100-degree days and police originally thought his death was heat-related. But the Dallas County medical examiner determined that the boy had been deprived of water for five days before he collapsed and died.
The boy's father, Michael Ray James, 43, is scheduled for trial next month on the same charges.When CNET editor Ty Pendlebury told me to check out the Reference 3A MM de Capo BE speakers at the Park Avenue Audio showroom, I knew something was up. The store is just a block away from the office in NYC, so I figured why not?
He knows what I like, and if anything Ty underplayed how good these speakers sound: They're remarkably present and dynamic, but more than that the sound has soul. Stevie Ray Vaughan's fleet-fingered guitar wizardry really stirred something in me; the MM de Capo BE speakers rock out like few audiophile speakers do, especially ones this size. They aren't all that big, but they're not small either -- they're 15 inches high, and the speaker weighs a rather solid-feeling 27 pounds.
Enlarge Image Reference 3A
I have a history with Reference 3A's speakers; I sold them when I was a hi-fi salesman in the 1990s, and I have fond memories of them. The current-generation Reference 3A speakers are larger and better built than the ones I sold, that was immediately obvious.
Oh man, there was something about the sound of Kurt Cobain's voice on Nirvana's "Unplugged" album that touched me, the way he poured himself into the music, and the MM de Capo BE zeroed in on Cobain's emotional rawness. "Unplugged" is a terrific recording I've played on many dozens of systems, but here on the MM de Capo BE the music felt more vitally alive.
Then I played chamber orchestra/band Alarm Will Sound's "Acoustica" album of Aphex Twin tunes. It was a wild ride, taken with the speakers turned up loud, and the low tremors shaking the room made me wonder if there was a subwoofer in there, but no, all the bass came from the MM de Capo BEs! The soundstage was deep and broad, and stretched wall to wall in the Park Avenue Audio listening room.
A couple of tunes from the hip-hop Broadway musical "Hamilton" demonstrated the speakers' affinity for reproducing the sound of big voices with thrilling immediacy. They were right there, and when the singers belted out a tune the MM de Capo BE speakers let me feel it.
To put the MM de Capo BE's sound in perspective, it wasn't as pure or vivid as I get from Bowers & Wilkins' 805 D3s ($6,000 a pair) stand-mount monitor speakers: the MM de Capo BE sounds hearty and rich, and 805 D3 is tonally leaner, but more accurate. I like both speakers, but they sound different and will appeal to different tastes.
Both MM de Capo BE drivers (the 1-inch beryllium tweeter and 7-inch carbon fiber woofer) are made in Reference 3A's factory in Waterloo, Ontario. Speaker impedance is rated at 8 ohms, the rear panel hosts bi-wire speaker connectors and the only finish offered is dark grey textured paint. The speakers come with black grilles.
The Reference 3A MM de Capo BE price per pair is $3,290.The Cloud storage Google Drive has been an on-again, off-again rumor for years.
Today, GigaOm’s Om Malik says Google Drive will release to the public in the first week in April.
I am told the big day is sometime during the first week of April 2012…Google is going to offer 1 Gb of storage space for free, but will charge for more storage. The market leader Dropbox currently offers 2 Gb for free. Google’s product will come with a local client and the web interface will look much like the Google Docs interface. Interestingly, it will launch for Google Apps customers and will be domain specific as well. Google has also built an API for third party apps with this service so folks can store content from other apps in the Google drive. My sources are impressed, so far with what they have seen.
This could be the last piece of the Cloud puzzle.
Related articlesThis seemed to me to be an ideal opportunity to question her on two issues |
-1-pve and ESXi 6.0.
Although you shouldn’t encounter any problem with a slightly different environment or a diffrent version of ESXi, it is always best to get the latest software.
Enable nested KVM on host
The first thing you need to do is SSH into the node you plan to install ESXi on. Once in determine the processor:
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1245 v5 @ 3.50GHz
In this case I had an Intel CPU, if you have AMD it is not a problem, follow the appropriate tab:
Intel AMD /etc/modprobe.d/kvm-intel.conf Create this file (it shouldn’t exist): Using your favourite editor add the following content to the file: options kvm ignore_msrs=y options kvm-intel nested=Y ept=Y Then reload the modules: # modprobe -r kvm-intel kvm; modprobe kvm kvm-intel If this doesn’t work for you, you will have to restart the node. /etc/modprobe.d/kvm-amd.conf Create this file (it shouldn’t exist): Using your favourite editor add the following content to the file: options kvm ignore_msrs=y options kvm-amd nested=Y ept=Y Then reload the modules: # modprobe -r kvm-amd kvm; modprobe kvm kvm-amd If this doesn’t work for you, you will have to restart the node.
Creating the Virtual Machine
This step is quite straightforward: you just need to create the new virtual machine, but you need to pay attention to three options:
OS Type must be “ Other OS Types “.
must be “ “. CPU Type must be “ host “.
must be “ “. Network Type must be “VMWare vmxnet3“.
Now, take note of the machine id that you used during the installation. SSH in the node hosting the newly created virtual machine and edit the file named: /etc/pve/qemu-server/YOURVMID.conf (of course replace YOURVMID with the ID of the virtual machine you created). And add at the end of the file:
args: -machine vmport=off
Beware! Each and every time you will modify things through the Proxmox interface, you will lose all the custom changes to this file. Unfortunately I have yet to come up with a simple way to avoid this without using glued solutions or configuration management.
In this way you should be able to complete the ESXi installation without problems. However, when you will try starting your first virtual machine, you will notice that you can’t start virtual machines inside of the ESXi host.
Enabling Nested Virtualization inside ESXi
You will notice that you won’t be able to start virtual machines inside of your new ESXi, that is because you would have to add: vmx.allowNested = “TRUE” to each and every virtual machine inside of that host. That doesn’t sit well with me. The first thing you need to do is to enable SSH on the ESXi host.
Enabling SSH on ESXi ESXi Nested – ESXi Installed ESXi Nested – ESXi Troubleshoot ESXi Nested – ESXi SSH Enabling SSH isn’t a big deal. First access its console, then press F2 and enter your password. You will be facing the menu, from there select Troubleshooting Options and press enter. Then just enable SSH.
Now you have to SSH into the ESXi host and edit (nano and vi are available) the file /etc/vmware/config and append the following vmx.allowNested = “TRUE”. Reboot the host and voilà! You should be able to spawn machines correctly now.
Conclusion
It might not be the best for performance, but this setup is pretty good for proof of concept and laboratories if you already have an existing environment. I was even able to install vCenter Server Appliance though with a bit of pain. Thanks to Jitze Couperus for the amazing image on the top.
Thanks to: Matt’s blog and The Perils and Triumphs of Being a Geek blog, from which I gained many information that are part of this guide.Statue will be unveiled during ceremony on Friday
Buy Photo A covered statue sits in front of the San Juan County Administration Building on Monday in Aztec. The memorial statue honoring the Navajo Code Talkers will be unveiled during a ceremony on Friday. (Photo: Jon Austria/The Daily Times)Buy Photo Story Highlights Several other memorials already have been placed at the entrance to the administration building.
Navajo leaders and state lawmakers have been invited to Friday's ceremony.
FARMINGTON — San Juan County will honor the contribution and service of Navajo Code Talkers with a monument that has been placed outside the entrance to the San Juan County Administration Building in Aztec.
The memorial will be unveiled during a dedication ceremony at 11 a.m. Friday at 100 S. Oliver Drive.
County Commissioner Wallace Charley said the entrance area to the county offices already is the site of several memorials, including lists of names of local members of the military who died in the Vietnam War and the Afghanistan conflict. He said the new memorial is one way the county can honor the code talkers.
County Executive Officer Kim Carpenter said the stone memorial includes inscriptions of the code used by the Navajo code talkers.
Read: Kiwanis provides clothes for more than 300 students in annual event
Customer appreciation event at NAPI
"It's something I've been wanting to do for quite some time, and it's well deserved," Carpenter said.
He said the Navajo Code Talkers are a valuable part of the heritage of San Juan County and the Navajo Nation, and the memorial will act as a tribute to their sacrifices.
Charley said the county has invited Navajo leaders and state legislators to the unveiling. He said the county is also hoping to have leaders from the surrounding municipalities at the ceremony.
"I believe that this is one way to tell the neighbors on the Navajo Nation that the county honors them and respects them," Charley said.
Hannah Grover covers government for The Daily Times. She can be reached at 505-564-4652 or via email at hgrover@daily-times.com.
Read or Share this story: https://www.daily-times.com/story/news/local/2017/11/04/county-honors-navajo-code-talkers-memorial/827119001/How good is Murray State? I don't know! Obviously, this is a good team; you can't be 19-0 and not be good. The Racers have a few solid wins on their ledger, including a win at UAB, a win over Dayton, and the win at Memphis that kicked off the whole "Can they go undefeated?" conversation in the first place.
But Murray State's schedule and the woes of the rest of their conference -- the OVC is one of the worst five or six conferences in the country, at least statistically, and that's with Murray State factored in -- have made it difficult to call this one of the 10 best teams in the country, as this week's ESPN/USA Today coaches poll did. It's likewise difficult to begrudge a team that just keeps winning. That counts for something, too. So where should we rank Murray State? How good is this team really?
Murray State leading scorer Isaiah Canaan has helped push Murray State to a perfect 19-0. Andy Lyons/Getty Images
Donnie Tyndall should know. The Morehead State coach has been battling the Racers for years in OVC play. He's seen the Racers at their NCAA tournament best two seasons ago; he's seen them when his own Kenneth Faried-led team usurped Murray State in the NCAA tournament (and notched their own first-round upset win over Louisville last season). Tyndall's rebuilding Eagles led Murray State for much of their 66-60 loss Wednesday night; Murray State needed a late 10-0 rally in the final 13 minutes to avoid their first loss of the season.
So, how does Tyndall see the Racers? In Wednesday night's postgame press conference, he nearly stopped himself before giving his honest opinion:
“Just being perfectly honest, I don’t think that their team is as good as their team was two years ago that beat Vanderbilt (in the NCAA tournament) or as good as our team was last year that beat Louisville,” Tyndall said. “But it’s hard to even say that when they’re ranked (12th) in the country and undefeated.”
It is hard to say that. The wins are the wins, after all. And winning at Memphis, for all of the Tigers' struggles this season, is an accomplishment plenty of teams across the country wouldn't have been able to (to use the XBox 360 parlance) unlock. Besides, it should be noted that the Racers aren't even at full strength. They've managed to maintain this undefeated record without the services of their third-leading scorer, senior forward Ivan Aska, who has now missed five games with a broken right hand.
For what it's worth, Murray State has thus far been better this season on a per-possession basis (current kenpom.com rank: No. 39) than they were in 2010, at least by the end of the season (kenpom.com rank then: No. 50). And Isaiah Canaan has become one of the best players in the country, bar none, leading his team in scoring and distribution while doing so in admirably efficient fashion.
Still, Tyndall's opinion is interesting. The entire question -- how good is this team? -- is kind of fascinating. The Racers keep climbing in the polls. They keep on winning. Maybe the question is beside the point. Maybe it's better to stop trying to figure this out, and instead just enjoy the possibility that a team in the modern era -- even one in a struggling mid-major league with no clear competitors -- could finish an entire season undefeated.
Because it may happen. If it does, I don't care how bad the OVC is. Murray State will deserve every word of uninhibited praise we can muster.Hitchhiker, a long-lost Neil Young album originally recorded in 1976, is reportedly coming out this summer. Neil Young fansite Thrasher’s Wheat found a listing on Diverse Vinyl that says the album will be available on 7/14, and they also recently discovered what appears to be the cover art designed by Young’s longtime art director Gary Burden. Hitchhiker is a collection of solo acoustic songs that Young recorded at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu, and here’s how he recalled the experience in his 2014 memoir Special Deluxe:
I spent the night there with David and recorded nine solo acoustic songs, completing a tape I called Hitchhiker. It was a complete piece, although I was pretty stony on it, and you can hear it in my performances. Dean Stockwell, my friend and a great actor who I later worked on Human Highway as a co-director, was with us that night, sitting in the room with me as I laid down all the songs in a row, pausing only for weed, beer, or coke. Briggs was in the control room, mixing live on his favorite console.
Find Hitchhiker’s rumored final tracklist below. The title track eventually made it onto Young’s 2010 album Le Noise.
01 “Powderfinger”
02 “Hold Back The tears”
03 “Human Highway”
04 “Hitchhiker”
05 “Ride My Llama”
06 “Lookout For My Love”
07 “Lotta Love”
08 “Fontainebleau”
09 “Campaigner”
Hitchhiker is reportedly out 7/14 on Reprise.Millennial Diagnosed With Tragic Inability To Even
BOTHELL, WA—According to reports, local 22-year-old Chloe Kowalski’s world was torn apart Thursday morning, as the millennial barista was diagnosed with a rare disease that prevents her from having the ability to even.
“I just—I can’t even,” Kowalski reportedly sobbed on her boyfriend’s shoulder after the appointment with her regular doctor, which she had scheduled after slowly losing her even functionality over the course of several months.
“I can’t even right now. I can’t even, ever,” she was overheard saying through tears before breaking down.
“We’ve never seen a case quite like this before,” Dr. Elizabeth Eden told reporters gathered outside the clinic where Kowalski’s devastating diagnosis was handed down. “Many millennials will experience short bouts of not being able to even for several seconds, often triggered by a cute video of a cat or other small animal, or perhaps something online that’s ‘so relatable.'”
“But Kowalski—she just can’t even. She may never even again, at least not without assistance,” she said, shaking her head grimly, according to reporters.
Reached for comment, Kowalski noted that she “still can’t even.”
“I seriously just can’t even, you guys,” she confirmed.Jim Burroway
Memphis-based Love In Action has announced that they have “suspended indefinitely” their residential ex-gay program:
Love In Action’s Residential program has been suspended indefinitely. Simply put, there is a significant need to bring all of LIA under one location for it to be more cost effective. We continue to counsel and grow through our 4-Day Intensives, Hourly Counseling, Conferences, Support Groups, and Church Assistance Program.
LIA refers web visitors to Woodstock, Georgia-based HopeQuest for those interested in an ex-gay residential program.
Love In Action became the focus of international attention in June 2005, when sixteen-year-old Zach Stark announced on his MySpace blog that his parents were sending him away to an ex-gay non-residential youth program after he came out to them. He also posted the program’s rules that he would be forced to live under while locked away in the “therapy” program. Advocates protested for several days outside the main offices of Love In Action. That incident has become the basis for a new documentary film, This is What Love In Action Looks Like.
Love In Action’s residential program maintained group homes throughout Memphis in residential neighborhoods for their charges. Clients were placed three to a bedroom, and shared household duties as part of their treatment program. The program itself was horrendously abusive. As former clients related to me, one important element of their treatment program involved undergoing an exhausted “personal inventory” in which they recount in explicit detail each and every sexual “sin” they have ever committed — whether it was detailed descriptions of sexual acts, or if they had been celibate then detailed descriptions of their sexual fantasies. Over the course of weeks and months, they revisit their personal inventory and add to it anything else that they may remember.
Then during the “Friends and Family Weekend,” friends and family members were invited to come to the Love In Action campus to visit with their “struggling” loved one. They were ushered into a room and are seated on one side, but not before undergoing a counseling session before hand. The clients are then brought into the room and made to stand before their families and friends. They are then ordered to read aloud from their personal inventory — with complete details over their most humiliating sexual act or fantasy. This, they read aloud in front of their parents, friends, siblings — whoever happens to be there for the weekend.
In that counselling session before seeing their loved ones, visitors were advised ahead of time that they will likely hear something very disturbing from their loved one, and that a key component of this “therapy” is that they were not to offer any approval for their client. They couldn’t say, “we love you anyway”, they couldn’t say “we forgive you,” they couldn’t say anything positive. Instead, they were instructed to condemn their loved one, to tell them how disappointed they were, how disgusted they were, and so forth. The effects of this encounter was often devastating to clients and family members alike.
Peterson Toscano, a former LIA client and current ex-gay survivor and gender advocate reacts to today’s news:We had a very engaged liveblog discussion during the Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing on Detainee Abuse a few weeks ago. Tomorrow, the Chair of the Committee, Senator Carl Levin, will do a live chat at FDL to talk about the next steps in the Committee’s investigation. Senator Levin will join us at 11 AM ET on Tuesday.
In his statement from that earlier hearing, Levin gave a detailed description of how DOD adapted its SERE training techniques for use on prisoners.
So, how did it come about that American military personnel stripped detainees naked, put them in stress positions, used dogs to scare them, put leashes around their necks to humiliate them, hooded them, deprived them of sleep, and blasted music at them. Were these actions the result of “a few bad apples” acting on their own? It would be a lot easier to accept if it were. But that’s not the case. The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. In the process, they damaged our ability to collect intelligence that could save lives. Today’s hearing will explore part of the story: how it came about that techniques, called SERE resistance training techniques, which are used to teach American soldiers to resist abusive interrogations by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were turned on their head and sanctioned by Department of Defense officials for use offensively against detainees.
During June’s hearing, a lot of new questions were raised (and DOD General Counsel Jim Haynes proved to have as fuzzy a memory as every other senior Bush official). Tomorrow, join us to talk with Senator Levin about how the investigation will move forward.Oracle is preparing an on-premises version of its new Exadata cloud service.
Big Red recently introduced a cloudy version of Exadata, its dedicated database appliance which itself scored a new release.
The headline items in the seventh-generation appliance are the new Broadwell Xeons. Oracle's chosen the 22-core version to power the new machine. Also inside is support for eight-terabyte drives and Samsung's 3D NAND.
The former, says said Tim Shetler, a veep of product management for systems at Oracle, means Exadata is getting denser in a good way: bigger drives means you can get more database inside the box. The latter, he says, improves Oracle's tiering story thanks to its deep understanding of its own database and the ability to do tiering so finely that it can not only put a row into Flash but decompress it only when it lands in that storage tier.
Oracle's plans for an on-premises Exadata cloud follow the template for such appliances: make it look, feel and behave just like the cloud and sell it using pay-as-you-go pricing even though it lives in your own bit barn. Shetler also said Oracle is working on hybrid cloud use cases, although the main attraction of an on-premises public-cloud-like service is for those who need to be able to fondle their own data for regulatory reasons.
Shetler also remarked on Oracle's ongoing use of InfiniBand,which Big Red's used since the first Exadata as the all-but-invisible-to-uers internal network connecting storage and servers. Shetler said Oracle is cognizant that Ethernet's getting faster and cheaper, and also that storage-class memory will mean redesigns for servers of all sorts. For now, however, InfiniBand is deemed well-and-truly sufficient. The technology's roadmap to 100Gbps will, he said, likely appear in the eighth-generation Exadata which will itself emerge once Xeons start using the Skylake architecture. ®Last year, Spotify teamed up with Genius to integrate lyric annotations onto its music player, but the feature has been an iOS-only staple for over a year. Starting today, Android users are finally getting the same benefit.
Rather than letting you tap on specific lyrics and view explanations as you would on Genius.com, Spotify has built a couple of playlists that display information on some popular tracks as you listen. For some songs, it also includes background details provided directly by the artist.
This video from the feature’s introduction last year should give you a rough idea of how it all works:
The playlist structure makes finding information on a specific song a bit harder than it should be – especially if it’s not a current hit – but I guess you can always just go to Genius’ website if that’s what you need.
Behind the Lyrics is rolling our to Android users starting today. If you want to give it a go, check out Behind the Lyrics’ Playlists for Hip Hop and Today’s Top Hits.
Behind the Lyrics with Spotify and Genius, now on Android on Spotify
Read next: Reddit is changing, and Redditors aren't happy about itOn Saturday April 9 I attended the Snohomish County Republican Convention. I am a resident of Snohomish County in Washington State and I consider myself a Republican so this was my county convention.
In Washington State the Republican party selects delegates to its county conventions at precinct caucuses. Delegates at the county convention in turn select delegates to the state convention. At the state convention the delegates will select the delegates who will attend the national convention.
Earlier this year I attended my first organized political function, the Bernie Sanders rally held on the campus of the University of Washington before the primary season had begun. Of course this county convention was much smaller but it was interesting to make some comparisons.
White, Middle Class, Older Voters — the GOP Core
The attendees look like me. White and middle-class. In fact, I was one of the youngest people there; excluding some kids who were obviously “in tow” and a few 20-somethings doing their best Alex P. Keaton impressions, almost everyone I saw was 50+.
At the Sanders rally the crowd was much more diverse demographically.
According to the US Census, in 2014 Snohomish county is estimated to be 80% white and 3% black. I was born and raised here and that matches closely to my personal experiences. In the past 20 years there’s been in inflow of Asian, Indian and eastern european residents due to the tech jobs in the area which with the addition of a small number of latinos accounts for the other 17%. So the lack of diversity in the racial makeup of the county convention isn’t that surprising. The opportunity clearly exists for the Republicans to make efforts at onboarding some of those non-white tech workers though.
Republican Party State Chair Susan Hutchison addresses the convention
One thing that really stood out to me was how many women were at the event, and not just as delegates. The chair of the state Republican party is a woman. The chair of the county party is a woman. I would estimate that there was roughly as many women as men in the delegate assembly. While the Republican party may have a branding issue related to its support for women, the actual organization of the party itself seemed filled with empowered female participants.
That doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been tracking trends in increasing participation by females in high profile occupations and organizations since reading Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed nearly 20 years ago. You can draw a pretty straight line from the disproportionate success of females in high school through success in college to success in post-grad studies in law & medicine right into the ranks of economic and political power. The era of women running our civic organizations is here.
Agenda of the Convention
Of course the marquee function of the county convention is selecting delegates to the state convention. But the county party had other business as well and that was also pretty interesting.
I Pledge Allegiance
After calling the convention to order an invocation was delivered. This was a a fairly anodyne call for “our Father” to bless the convention, the elected officials of the party and the United States. Everyone bowed their heads and gave silent thanks.
Then the assembly turned to the flag and gave the Pledge of Allegiance. As I was reciting the words it struck me that I probably had not done that since I was in college — more than 20 years ago. It felt so patriotic and good to be there doing that with my community in a way that wasn’t cynical or ironic.
Recognition of Elected Officials
The convention chair then asked that any elected officials in the room rise and be recognized. I really liked that too — the point of a political party is to win elections, and the people who ran for those offices had done the thing for which the assembly had gathered to support. It was nice to take a moment to recognize those elected officials who were in attendance from school boards to the state legislature.
After a short bit of organizational activity the convention made time for people who were seeking office to speak. Each was given 2 minutes.
About a half-dozen people spoke. Several delivered a grab bag of positions likely to find some traction: they were for guns, against abortion, for securing the borders, against taxes. Obviously given the audience these comments got generally favorable responses.
There has been a recent shakeup in several state level races on the Democratic side of the aisle and resulting reactions from the Republicans and Ed Barton walked the convention through these chess moves which ended with him announcing that instead of seeking a seat in the state Senate, he was instead going to seek a seat in the state House (this is meaningful because the Republicans currently control the Senate, and are 3 or 4 seats away from gaining control of the House). It was like watching a realtime West Wing episode!
Janice Huxford addresses the convention
The standouts in this part of the program were both women, Janice Huxford who is running for a state legislative seat on a platform of taking on regulatory overhead, and Elizabeth Scott who is a current state legislator and who is running for Congress. Scott was particularly impressive, speaking about her time in Olympia and noting that she’s voted against the Republican party’s wishes over 300 times because she would not vote to increase spending or to accept federal transfers for increased spending. It was notable that in a year where the “elites” are getting hammered that Scott got a standing ovation for her stand on spending in opposition to her own party at that party’s county convention. Oh yes, the times, they are a changin’.
Presidential Campaigning
The chair then permitted representatives of the 3 Presidential campaigns in attendance to address the assembly. Throughout the day this was the only portion of the event that got even a little bit less than polite, and I have to stress, only a little bit.
The Trump and Cruz campaigns had set up tables at the back of the room where they were engaging in some retail politics prior to the convention being gaveled to order.
Donald Trump supporters at the convention take a photo before working the crowd
The Cruz team seemed much more organized than the Trump team. The Kasich team was nowhere to be seen.
Ted Cruz HQ at the convention was a hive of activity
When the representative for the Trump campaign rose to speak someone in the back of the hall shouted “He’s a liberal!”, and there were some scattered boos. The brief speech started with a call to “Make America Great Again” which got a pretty good response — say what you want about the man & his politics, Trump’s got a catchphrase that resonates with the party rank & file. After the Trump rep finished speaking the convention chair reminded the attendees that while partisanship was fine, it was important to be respectful of the speaker’s time and message, and that was the last (albeit minor) disruption.
The Cruz team had distributed Cruz signage to delegates throughout the hall. There were some Trump signs but they were mostly held by spectators.
The Cruz representative got a pretty big cheer from the delegates and much waving of the aforementioned signage which was another clue as to how much impact Cruz was going to have at the convention.
The Kasich campaign pitch was honest if bland: Kasich scores better against Clinton & Sanders in head to head matchups than either Trump or Cruz and Kasich will be a more “electable” candidate. Hardly anyone paid attention or responded to the speaker. A reasonable approximation of the entire Kasich campaign in 2016.
As I watched these proceedings it struck me: some of the people in that room would likely be on the floor in Cleveland at the national convention, a convention I expect to be open and contested, and they might have to make decisions about whom to vote for if their first choice cannot make a majority. There were people in that room who are likely to be making history later this year.
The District Caucuses
After the speeches the convention was separated into individual caucuses by legislative district. Legislative districts are how the state legislature is apportioned and they don’t map to county or congressional district boundaries. I live in the 1st legislative district so I went to observe its caucus.
The 1st Legislative District caucus convenes to select state convention delegates
At the caucus the legislative district would select delegates to the sate convention. The district was allocated 23 delegates. To be eligible, a delegate to the county convention (selected in precinct caucuses in March) had to file paperwork with the county party a few days before the convention. Alternately, anyone could be nominated from the floor by a delegate. I had been prepared to ask to be nominated if it appeared that there would be any lack of willing participants. There were 35 or so candidate delegates so I did not pursue that opportunity — I felt it would be unreasonable to ask to be included since I hadn’t done any of the participatory work the accredited delegates had and they had no lack of willing attendees for the state convention.
Each candidate delegate was allowed 30 seconds to speak to the caucus. Each candidate was assigned a number. Worksheets were handed out to the delegates so that they could track by number the remarks and affiliations of the candidate delegates. Each delegate was asked to state why they wanted to be a delegate, and which Presidential candidate, if any, they favored.
This was where I saw the true level of organization of the Cruz campaign manifest itself. Of the 30+ speakers, at least 90% were Cruz supporters. Just based on sheer numbers, most of the 1st Legislative District delegates to the state convention were going to be for Cruz regardless of the voting.Stephen Paddock, who killed at least 58 people and wounded hundreds more in Las Vegas on Sunday with high-powered rifles, was prescribed an anti-anxiety drug in June that can lead to aggressive behavior.
Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock in an undated photo. On Sunday, Oct. 1, 2017, Paddock opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest festival, killing 58 and wounding hundreds. (Eric Paddock via AP)
Stephen Paddock (courtesy)
Stephen Paddock, who killed at least 58 people and wounded hundreds more in Las Vegas on Sunday with high-powered rifles, was prescribed an anti-anxiety drug in June that can lead to aggressive behavior, the Las Vegas Review-Journal has learned.
Records from the Nevada Prescription Monitoring Program obtained Tuesday show Paddock was prescribed 50 10-milligram diazepam tablets by Henderson physician Dr. Steven Winkler on June 21.
A woman who answered the phone at Winkler’s office would not make him available to answer questions and would neither confirm nor deny that Paddock was ever a patient.
Paddock purchased the drug — its brand name is Valium — without insurance at a Walgreens store in Reno on the same day it was prescribed. He was supposed to take one pill a day.
Diazepam is a sedative-hypnotic drug in the class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, which studies have shown can trigger aggressive behavior. Chronic use or abuse of sedatives such as diazepam can also trigger psychotic experiences, according to drugabuse.com.
‘They can become aggressive’
“If somebody has an underlying aggression problem and you sedate them with that drug, they can become aggressive,” said Dr. Mel Pohl, chief medical officer of the Las Vegas Recovery Center. “It can disinhibit an underlying emotional state. … It is much like what happens when you give alcohol to some people … they become aggressive instead of going to sleep.”
Pohl, who spoke to the Review-Journal from the Netherlands, said the effects of the drug also can be magnified by alcohol.
A 2015 study published in World Psychiatry of 960 Finnish adults and teens convicted of homicide showed that their odds of killing were 45 percent higher during time periods when they were on benzodiazepines.
A year earlier, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry published a study titled, “Benzodiazepine Use and Aggressive Behavior.” The authors wrote: “It appears that benzodiazepine use is moderately associated with subsequent aggressive behavior.”
Dr. Michael First, a clinical psychiatry professor at Columbia University and expert on benzodiazepines, said the Finnish study speaks for itself. But he also told the Review-Journal on Tuesday that he believes the drugs would be more likely to fuel impulsive aggression than premeditated behavior.
“What this man in Las Vegas did was very planned,” he noted, referring to reports that Paddock sneaked an arsenal of weapons into the Mandalay Bay and placed cameras inside and outside his room before launching his attack.
Why was it prescribed?
First said it would be important to discover why Paddock was prescribed the drug.
“That may have more to do with why he did what he did,” First said.
The Nevada state monitoring report also noted that Winkler prescribed 50 10-milligram tablets of diazepam to Paddock in 2016. He also filled that prescription the day it was written, this time at Evergreen Drugs in Henderson. It was for two tablets a day.
Questions have long swirled around whether psychiatric drugs are linked to mass school shootings in the United States, though researchers have yet to find a definitive connections, despite several studies.
Critics of unscientific linkage in the news media and on social media between psychiatric drugs and violence say it stigmatizes those who benefit from their use. That, in turn, can make people quit using medications that can actually be lifesavers, they say.
On Monday, actress Kirstie Alley, best known for her role in the TV sitcom “Cheers,” stirred controversy by tweeting that guns and psychiatric drugs are the common denominators in recent mass shootings in the United States. She cited no evidence that Paddock has used the drugs.Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
The victim of a female transsexual who walked free from court despite admitting abusing him as a child has spoken out about her "disgustingly lenient sentence".
Casey Horler, 24, has waived his right to lifetime anonymity to open up about the horrific abuse he suffered at the hands of Gina Owen, when she was a man known as Gareth.
Owen was employed as a taxi driver by the local council to drive Casey and other children to a special school in Somerset, when Casey was only 13.
During the six-month period of abuse, Gina made a teenage Casey tie her up in bondage sessions, urinate in her mouth and humiliate her by hitting her then-male genitals.
(Image: Roland Leon / Sunday Mirror)
Casey, who is expecting his first child with his wife in November, has decided to speak out after discovering Owen walked free from court due to a loophole in the law.
Owen, 61, admitted two counts of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.
But she was spared jail and walked free from court with a two-year conditional discharge when the judge admitted he had difficulty sentencing a transsexual because courses designed to help sex offenders reform were only available to men.
Casey, who bravely told the police about his ordeal two years ago, said he feels sick about the "pathetic" sentence.
Casey, who still refers to Owen as a 'he', says: "He pretty much got away with it. It's a total disgrace that this is the kind of justice out there for people like me.
(Image: SWNS)
"All I got was £500 in compensation and the judge said he couldn't impose a community order because courses designed to help sex offenders reform were only available to men.
"Basically Owen had a loophole in the law that he slipped through. It's an insult to all victims of sex abuse."
Now Casey, who is currently unemployed, wants the law to be revised to ensure transsexual and women paedophiles are equally punished for sex crimes against children.
"The loophole needs to be closed," Casey says.
"It's something that needs to be looked at. I know only a small proportion of the population are transgender, but because of this loophole Owen hasn't been able to be punished in the same way, and it would be the same for female sex abusers."
(Image: SWNS)
Speaking outside Taunton Crown Court after admitting the crimes against Casey, Owen described being "set free" by the judge.
"I am free - that is all there is to it," she said.
"I am free and I have walked out of court - what does that tell you?"
Casey says the comments have left him feeling sick and that coming forward ten years after the abuse was "pointless".
"What was even the point of reporting it?" he says.
"He has to sign the sex register for two years – that's nothing.
"He originally denied the abuse and dragged me through two and a half years of hell just to say he was guilty on the first day of trial."
(Image: Roland Leon / Sunday Mirror)
Casey was first persuaded to tell the police about the abuse when he wife, who does not want to be named, persuaded him it might help other victims.
"There still could be future victims," says Casey.
"He has been a given a green light by escaping custody."
Casey, who now lives in March, Cambridgeshire, attended a school for children with emotional problems in Somerset.
Owen would drive Casey back and forth from his dad's house to school when the abuse began.
Tragically, Casey blamed himself for the abuse because of his bad behaviour at school and still struggles to be around adult men.
He would be forced to take sick sexual photos of Owen in women's underwear and hit his then-male genitals with sticks and windscreen wipers.
"It was a really frightening time," Casey remembers.
(Image: Roland Leon / Sunday Mirror)
"He terrified me. He drove me to school around 15 times and the abuse happened around 10 out of 15 times because on those other occasions other children were in his car with us too."
Casey only managed to escape the abuse when he moved to another school.
"I worry about what could have happened if i hadn't changed school. It could have escalated and I don't know what I would have done in that situation.
"Maybe if it had of carried on I would have been able to tell someone what was happening."
Casey struggled to deal with the abuse as he went through his teens, admitting that he was a "naughty kid".
"But as things in my life got better, I met my wife and now we're expecting a baby – that has remained the one thing that is so bad," he recalls.
(Image: Roland Leon / Sunday Mirror)
"It still affects me to this day. I have never had any male friends. I won't be |
get up in the morning and cry and wonder, Why me?” Carew says, convalescing in a friend’s house in the suburbs of San Diego after seven weeks in five hospitals. “But you can’t say that. I go back to when my youngest daughter was dying. I never asked my friend upstairs, Why me? And He’s the only one who has the answers.”
Carew is sitting in an easy chair. Minx, a black Bombay cat, is perched above his right shoulder. Both exude a quiet grace—they look equally feline in repose—and there’s a brief silence in the house as Carew considers that a kind of mechanical heart has been implanted in his chest, alongside his damaged one. After a moment, the most elegant hitter of his generation puts his face in his hands and sobs.
“I was dead,” he says, “and they brought me back to life.”
*****
No man was ever more at peace in a batter’s box than Carew, who gripped the bat ever so gently, as if squeezing icing onto a cake. “Relaxed” is how he describes the feeling of awaiting a Nolan Ryan fastball. “With baseball, I could get away.”
As a child, Carew was routinely beaten by his father. At 50, he lost his 18-year-old daughter, Michelle, to leukemia while she waited on a bone-marrow transplant list. His first marriage, to Marilynn Levy—the couple have two daughters in addition to Michelle—didn’t survive that tragedy. It was only between these agonies, while bedeviled by a fear of flying, that Carew was the man you thought you knew: a batter of unsurpassed calm and beauty.
But the man who resembled a Shaolin monk at the plate, who appeared to slow his own heartbeat with his mind, has at times lived a life of near-Biblical trials. “Rod will tell you he had his heart attack because he stopped taking his Lipitor,” says Frank Pace, Carew’s close friend and business manager. “But he has had many stresses in his life.”
And so Carew now has something called a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) pumping blood on his behalf. It was installed, in a six-hour open-heart surgery, at Scripps La Jolla hospital by Dr. Dan Meyer and Dr. Sam Baradarian—“The Barbarian,” as Carew’s 26-year-old son, Devon, says with enormous affection for all the medical professionals who saved his dad's life.
“Ten years ago,” Rhonda says, “Rod would have been dead.” But he survived the arduous, open-heart implantation of the LVAD, which typically acts as a bridge until a patient can receive a heart transplant.
“It’s a big surgery, but it is very clearly working,” Dr. Mariell Jessup, Professor of Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, says of LVAD procedures generally. “We are not watching people die on the [transplant] waiting list.”
Some patients keep the LVAD permanently when transplantation is not an option. At 70, Carew is near the age border for a transplant, though age standards are considerably more liberal in the western United States, where waiting lists are shorter. “I don’t know if I’m going to be bionic or what,” says Carew, who is concentrating now on becoming healthy enough to quality for the transplant list.
He’s off to a promising start. On Nov. 5, Carew became the fastest patient ever released from LVAD rehab at Scripps Memorial Hospital Encinitas. He unzips his FBI SWAT team vest to show off his new lifeline, which consists of a small computer controller worn on his waistband and two battery packs tucked inside the vest. He lifts his shirt to reveal tubes running from the battery pack to the controller and from the controller through his abdomen into his chest, where the LVAD pumps blood to his own heart—from his left ventricle into his aorta.
At night, he plugs his device, and by extension himself, into a wall socket, like a Chevy Volt. Just inside the front door—so he never leaves home without them—he keeps a supply of spare batteries and LVAD controllers in a bag the Carews have come to call “Honey.”
“They told us to name the bag,” says Rhonda, “and to treat it like a member of the family.”
As for the human members of his family, their love moves Carew daily to tears. “She’s everything,” he whispers when Rhonda leaves the room.
“My son and my wife have been my nurses since all this happened,” he says. “It surprises you about people. My son, Devon, he cleans me up and puts me on the toilet. And I’m thinking, This kid really loves me. He cares about me. My wife does the same thing. Where do people get that sense of wanting to help others in distress?”
“The same place you got it with Michelle,” Pace says.
These simple acts of hygiene have become profound, the embodiment of familial love. When his own father whipped him with a cord as a matter of routine, Carew wondered if he could ever grow up to be a good father himself. Sitting across the room, his son can’t help but hear this.
“You were a good dad,” says Devon, whose mother, Rhonda, married Carew 14 years ago. “You are a good dad.”
John Cordes/Icon Sportswire
Devon has seen the public’s love for his father transcend baseball. Carew has been name-checked in songs by the Beastie Boys and Adam Sandler. Pace tells him, “There’s a Rod Carew Drive in Round Rock, Texas,” which comes as news to this Rod Carew, whose ego is not enlarged by such honors. He calls the bronze statue of himself outside Target Field in Minneapolis “a place for birds to poop.”
“We were coming through security at [Los Angeles International Airport],” Devon says, “and the guy there asked Dad if he knew what a ‘Rod Carew’ was on Urban Dictionary.” (It’s a vulgarism that involves going from first base to third base without touching second.) Rod shakes his head in mock dismay upon hearing this, like a put-upon dad in a sitcom, which he often appears to be.
“When he’s getting ornery,” Rhonda says, “we know he’s getting back to normal.”
The Carews have embraced these moments of comedy in the last two months. When the LVAD was installed, doctors told Carew he could do everything with it but swim or arc weld. Rod, whose indifference toward swimming is exceeded only by his apathy for arc-welding, shook his head in faux despair. “No arc welding?” he says now with a sigh.
This banter, as much as his batteries, fuels him now. His physical therapist, Alan Vuong, has Carew doing tai chi and urging him to enjoy every sip of water, to concentrate on every bite of apple. “We treat him holistically,” Vuong says, “with body, mind and spirit working together. And we’re seeing huge progress. The heart can last forever, or as long as the mind lasts.”
“I have to start enjoying this more,” Carew says, “instead of sitting around doing nothing.”
While Carew slowly climbs the stairs as part of his therapy—the handrail is on the left—Vuong asks him which hand he is. Carew answers that he’s righthanded, never letting on that there are two conspicuous exceptions: He swung a baseball bat lefthanded (winning seven American League batting titles, his dominant right eye closer to the pitcher) and he swings a golf club lefthanded (making seven holes-in-one as a 12 handicap).
Vuong confesses that he’s not a baseball fan and had to Google the name “Willie Mays” when a colleague excitedly showed him the Say-Hey Kid’s autograph. On hearing this, Carew gazes into the distance with a look of deep amusement.
Then he tells a story. Not long before his heart attack, he was visiting the batting cages near his house in Orange County. He does this from time to time, offering gentle pointers, like Leonardo da Vinci dropping in on a grade-school art class. When he saw a seven-year-old facing 70-mph pitches from 60 feet away and suggested to the boy’s father that he reduce both the speed and the distance of the pitches for his son, the father suggested that Carew mind his own beeswax.
Just then an older kid walked by and said: “That’s Rod Carew!” Life seldom offers such tidy satisfaction.
“The guy apologized up and down,” says Carew, laughing.
*****
Tony Triolo for Sports Illustrated (left)/John G. Zimmerman
Early in his career, Carew visited a Minnesota hospital at the insistence of Twins owner Calvin Griffith; a nine-year-old boy wanted to meet his hero. “He’d been burned severely,” Carew says. “And when I got there they were scrubbing him. And he was screaming. And when he saw me he said, ‘Don’t get mad at me, Mr. Carew, but it hurts. It hurts.’ The kid was scarred for the rest of his life and he was worried about me hearing him cry. Well, I just turned to the window and started crying.”
After that, he visited children in hospitals whenever he could. In 1977, he won the Roberto Clemente Award as baseball’s exemplar of community service. He has seven silver bats and the 1977 AL Most Valuable Player award, but the Clemente award is the one he shows visitors. “I’m supposed to be this big guy,” he says. “But I cry a lot.” When the Twins traded him to the Angels in 1978, he cried.
It is no wonder, then, that the handful of friends in baseball who know of his plight have comforted him in turn. Former players like Don Baylor, Johnny Bench, Doug DeCinces and Chili Davis have visited or called. So have Twins president Dave St. Peter and Angels president John Carpino. Carew’s advisory contracts with both teams expired 10 days after his heart attack, and both teams renewed him for 2016. Jeff Idelson, president of the Baseball Hall of Fame, has been poised to notify Carew’s fraternity brothers in Cooperstown whenever the first-ballot Hall-of-Famer was ready to go public.
That moment is now. Carew is speaking publicly for the express purpose of inspiring others who may require LVAD surgery or heart transplantation, and to urge the rest of us to be more rigorous about heart health. “The first thing that went through my mind,” he says of his unlikely survival, “is I have to get this message out to people.”
And so he has had the profound decency to reveal himself at his most vulnerable. He will help the American Heart Association do the same kind of advocacy he practiced for those leukemia patients who needed bone-marrow transplants when Michelle died in 1996. Their story increased registrants to the National Bone Marrow Registry, saving untold lives.
Indeed, the night before his heart attack, Carew participated in a fund-raising walk for leukemia research at the ballpark where he was once an Angel and remains a kind of angel. “You are here for a reason,” Rhonda tells Rod, repeatedly. “The Lord wasn’t ready for you yet. He kept you here for a reason.” Whatever that reason is—whatever the meaning of his life—baseball is beginning to look like only a small part of it.
Even so, baseball is integral to his recovery, and Carew has set goals to attend spring training in March and the Hall of Fame induction weekend next July, as Rhonda frequently reminds him. “She’s like a drill instructor,” he says. The man who used to call the weather bureau before every road trip can finally sleep on planes now, freed from teammates throwing their pillows at him during turbulence, as they used to enjoy doing “just to rattle me.”
At the peak of his powers in the summer of 1977, a year in which he hit.388 for the Twins and made the covers of Time and Sports Illustrated in the same week, Carew received standing ovations nearly every at-bat, a memory that edifies him even now.
“I’ll never forget that love,” says Carew, whose friends hope he’ll throw out a ceremonial first pitch next spring, and be buoyed by a ballpark ovation yet again. For Rod Carew knows better than anybody: There are many ways to fill a human heart.1 The Conqueror (1956) : the radioactive set that caused cancer to John Wayne and 90 more
Of the 220 persons who worked on The Conqueror on its location near Utah in 1955, 91 had contracted cancer as of the early 1980s and 46 died of it, including stars John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. Experts say under ordinary circumstances only 30 people out of a group of that size should have gotten cancer.
The cause? No one can say for sure, but many attribute the cancers to radioactive fallout from U.S. atom bomb tests in nearby Nevada.Produced by Howard Hughes, he thought the movie was so bad that he bought up every copy (which cost him about $12 million) and refused to distribute the film. For years thereafter, the only person who saw it was Hughes himself, who screened it night after night during his paranoid last years, this until 1974 when Paramount reached a deal with him. This would be the last film that Hughes would produce.
2 The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) : a helicopter decapitated three actors
During the filming of a segment of the 1983 movie The Twilight Zone, producted by Steven Spielberg, actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le (age 7) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6) died in an accident involving a helicopter being used on the set. The helicopter was flying at an altitude of only 25 feet (8 meters), too low to avoid the explosions of the pyrotechnics used on set. When the blasts severed the tail rotor, it spun out of control and crashed, decapitating Morrow and Le with its blades. Chen was crushed to death as the helicopter crashed. Everyone inside the helicopter survived sustaining minor injuries.
The accident led to legal action against the filmmakers which lasted nearly a decade, and changed the regulations involving children working on movie sets at night and during special effects-heavy scenes. The incident also ended the friendship between director Landis and producer Spielberg, who was already angered before the accident that Landis had violated many codes, including using live ammunition on the set.
3 The Crow (1994) : Brandon Lee, killed by a prop.44 Magnum
As one of the scenes of The Crow was being filmed, Brandon Lee –Bruce Lee’s son– was shot and killed by a prop.44 Magnum.The scene involved the firing of a full-powder blank (full charge of gunpowder, but no bullet) at Brandon’s character; however, unknown to the film crew/firearms technician, a bullet was already lodged in the barrel and hit Lee in the abdomen.
But that wasn’t the only accident; the set was plagued by numerous accidents even before Lee’s death. On the first day of shooting, February 1, 1993, a carpenter was severely shocked and received serious burns when the scissor lift he was driving came into contact with high-voltage power lines. On March 13 heavy storms destroyed some of the elaborate sets causing delays. Later a prop master discovered a live round in one of the prop guns and an enraged carpenter drove his car into the studio’s plaster shop. Also a worker was injured when a screwdriver was accidentally driven through his own hand and a stuntman fell through the roof of one of the sets.
After Lee’s death, a stunt double, Chad Stahelski replaced Lee in some scenes to complete the film. Special effects were used for digitally compositing Lee’s face onto the double. The original footage featuring Lee’s actual death is the source of some controversy. Some accounts claim it was destroyed immediately, without even being developed while others suggest it was later given to Lee’s family. Brandon Lee was buried beside his father.
4 XXX (2002) : Vin Diesel’s stuntman smashed into a bridge and died
Harry L. O’Connor, Diesel’s stunt double on the XXX action movie, was killed on a scene in which he was supposed to rappel down a parasailing line and land on a submarine. When O’Connor failed to rappel down the line fast enough, he hit a bridge at high speed and was killed instantly. His death was caught on camera. Director Rob Cohen decided to include the footage of the scene, with the final moments edited out, as a matter of respect for the stuntman’s final act.
5 Top Gun (1986) : an aerobatic pilot crashed after his scene
Tom Cruise’s worldwide most famous movie Top Gun was dedicated to the memory of Art Scholl.A renowned aerobatic pilot, the 53 year-old was hired to do in-flight camera work for the film and was engaged to fly the difficult “flat spin” scene. When he climbed into his Pitts S-2 camera-plane on the set of Top Gun – as he had so many times before – he had no idea of the dark fate that awaited him.During this scene, Scholl reported a problem with the plane; he was unable to recover from it and crashed his Pitts S-2 into the Pacific Ocean, off the Southern California coast near Carlsbad on September 16, 1985. Neither Scholl nor his aircraft were recovered, leaving the official cause of the accident unknown.
6 The Final Season (2007) : a camera man, killed on a helicopter crash
While filming the baseball movie The Final Season, released on October, 2007, camera man Roland Schlotzhauer was killed while filming some parade sequences. Roland was well-known for his ability to capture shots from helicopters and he was filming from a Bell 206 when it hit power lines. The helicopter then crashed into a field seriously injuring the pilot and a producer on board, while ending Roland’s life.
7 The Return of the Musketeers (1989) : actor Roy Kinnear felt from his horse and died
During the filming of the 1989 movie The Return of the Musketeers, actor Roy Kinnear fell from a horse in Toledo, Spain, sustaining a broken pelvis. He was taken to hospital in Madrid, and died from a heart attack the following day. The film’s director, Richard Lester, quit his own film career as a direct result of Kinnear’s death.
8 Jumper (2008) : set dresser fatally struck by frozen debris
While dismantling an outdoor set in wintry conditions for Jumper, a sci-fi thriller starring Samuel Jackson,set dresser David Ritchie was fatally struck by frozen debris. Investigators later found that the sand and earth frozen to the wall for exterior design came unstuck as the set was being torn down, falling and crushing Ritchie. The film kept going, eventually receiving widespread criticism and poor reviews from critics.
9 Troy (2004) : hurricanes, a broken leg, and ironically, Brad Pitt’s achilles tendon
What could go wrong in a gazillion-dollar epic production starring Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and Diane Kruger?Ironically, during the filming of Troy, Brad Pitt who played Achilles had a mishap during the production and tore his left achilles tendon. But the worst was yet to come when George Camilleri, a keen bodybuilder, broke his leg while filming an action sequence at Ghajn Tuffieha. He was operated on the following day but suffered complications and died 2 weeks later. In addition to that, while filming in Cabo, Baja California Sur, Mexico, the production had to deal with two hurricanes in less than a month; the last hurricane came the last week of production, when everything was pretty much wrapped.Despite all of that, the movie kept going and was finally a box-office hit.The first aspect that really grabbed me was the gorgeous cinematography by Germain McMicking. He uses color and light to reflect the raging emotions of the two lead characters and Clare’s dire ordeal. Shortland uses this to great effect and we’re placed right in Clare’s shoes from the first frame onwards. Stuck in the apartment, she’s forced to figure out various ways of escape, each one more inventive than the last. Pacing can be an issue however, as Berlin Syndrome can be aptly described as methodical. That said, outside of one or two of Andi’s excursions into Berlin, not a frame is wasted. We want to spend time with Clare and root for her to escape.
Palmer is in top form here, giving the best performance of her blossoming career. She’s able to emote with very little dialogue and the results are lovely. This is an actress who is only going to grow in stature over the next few years. Seeing a talent like hers used to it’s full potential is a delight. As for Riemelt, his character never shows all of his cards, but it works for the story being told. Extremely handsome with a cool demeanor, Andi is a powderkeg waiting to explode.
Luckily, you won’t have to wait long to see Berlin Syndrome, as it was recently picked up for distribution by Netflix. This is a picture that you’ll want to add to your Queue immediately. It’s one of the surprises of Sundance 2017 and with the right audience, it should catch on in a big way.Get all of Alex Prewitt’s columns as soon as they’re published. Download the new Sports Illustrated app (iOS or Android) and personalize your experience by following your favorite teams and SI writers.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Beyond the colossal 44-½-foot RV backed into the driveway, the first thing visitors notice upon entering Brent Burns’s home is a life-sized, armored medieval knight keeping watch over the foyer, spear at his side. Fear not, though, for this is a welcoming place.
Burns invited me here one day after practice in late April, between the Sharks’ first-round win over Los Angeles and the start of their Western Conference semifinals series against Nashville. He kicked off his shoes, offered a cheery hello to the cleaning crew and walked out back, underneath the American flags gifted to him by military units that hang over the kitchen and the unopened Brent Burns Chia Pet box sitting on the counter.
Burns and his wife, Susan, bought this place in 2012, after his first season with San Jose. It’s close enough to the team's practice facility that he enjoys biking there in the summer. He also likes the spacious backyard where sometimes the family pitches tents, lights a fire, grills meat, toasts s’mores and camps out under the stars. Right now, he’ll settle for tossing some chicken onto the Green Egg while his two huskies, Zeus and Maia, lounge at his feet.
It was a beautiful afternoon, as afternoons often are in San Jose, and much of our conversation over the next four hours made it into a feature story in this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated magazine. Yes, Burns fully embraces the public’s image of him that he calls “being a goofy donkey.” For instance, during lunch, he’ll open a package of beard wax that had been gifted by a company and begin working his mustache into a curl. “This is pretty soft, this one,” he says. “It’ll be hard to get the twist.”
The story in SI also explores what led Burns to become a Norris Trophy finalist this season, when he scored more goals (27) than any NHL defenseman since Mike Green in 2008-09, and the substance behind his many, many passions. The 300-or-so snakes Burns once owned were given to a friend when he moved here, and what he and his wife had initially budgeted to serve as a reptile room now houses supplies for Susan’s job in interior design. But topics like wine, whiskey, martial arts, surfing, golfing, camping, biking, cartoons, samurai history, tea, yoga and the military help occupy his time. “There’s not enough time in the day for all that stuff,” he says. “I just love life.”
As you can imagine, plenty of topics also didn’t make the cut, so enjoy these leftovers from an afternoon with Brent Burns:
1. Zest runs through his veins
It’s easy to see where Burns gets his spirit. His great grandfather, Patrick Joseph Burns, enlisted in the Canadian Army for World War I sporting tattoos on his left arm (a ship between two flags, a butterfly, a soldier with his hands clasped, and the word May), his right arm (an eagle, the stars and stripes, and the words Good Luck), and around his neck (birds and roses). His grandfather, Patrick Joseph Burns Jr., fought in the European theater of World War II, then later became a semi-pro wrestler, “back in the days where wrestling was like the TV wrestling, but it hadn’t gone to TV yet,” says Rob Burns, Brent’s dad. “It was more good guy, bad guy. A lot of it was staged.” Rob, meanwhile, currently bikes every day to his job at a craft brewery outside Toronto, and was the one who allowed Brent to get his first tattoo—when Brent was 11 years old.
Rob, a former goalie, also tried making fitness fun for his children, telling them to always take stairs two at a time. A trampoline in the backyard was a neighborhood favorite. And Brent conducted his paper route on roller blades. “We’d make a game of it, so it wouldn’t get monotonous,” he says. “We used to have fun walking around the house like a duck, so you’d be in a full squat walking, making duck sounds and farting around, stuff like that.”
The military connections also inform Burns’s love for the outdoors. “As a kid I always wanted to be a Green Beret, just MacGyver my way out of a bamboo tree and make a house,” he says. “That’s how I thought about it. That’s always the way I thought of the Green Berets. These guys are supermen. That was my perfect world. They can do anything. Fix a car, make a house out of a leaf, you’d be good to go. That’s always what I thought.” In fact, whenever Brent’s mother pulled him from school to take him to the rink, his response to teachers who protested was, “I’m either going to play hockey or go into the military.”
For now, camping and traveling help satisfy these urges. (The story contains much about this, including the 15 days Burns spent working out in Walmart parking lots and on highway shoulders.) After the Sharks missed the playoffs last season, which led to the club parting ways with coach Todd McLellan and hiring Pete DeBoer, the Burns family hit the road. First they drove to Disneyland. Next came camp for Team Canada in Austria, then the world championships in Prague, where Burns was named the top defenseman. Then they vacationed in the Peloponnese and Bodrum, Turkey. They flew home briefly before jetting to New Zealand and Australia for a barnstorming tour to benefit the Stop Concussions Foundation, then it was back stateside for the NHL Awards show in Las Vegas, where Burns received one for his charitable work. Finally, from Aug. 3 to Aug. 18, they zigzagged the country in the family’s tricked-out Sprinter van, from which Burns had to remove the disco ball and fog machine when he first bought it.
2. Burns on his physique
“I’ve got a milk body. Got to work. Hard to keep my hockey pants fitting.”
3. The meaning behind the value of Burns’s contract
When GM Doug Wilson and fellow Sharks brass arrived in the Twin Cities for the 2011 NHL Draft, they were dead-set on pilfering one of the favorite locals. “When that guy becomes available, you’ve got to swing for the fences and go get him,” Wilson says today. “And we did. We were not going to lose that deal. We were not going to lose not getting Brent Burns.”
After paying Minnesota the price of Devin Setoguchi, Charlie Coyle and the 28th overall pick, Wilson quickly set about negotiating an extension for Burns, who was slated to enter unrestricted free agency several days later. “You don’t give up what we gave up and not keep this player” Wilson says. “We wanted this guy. I don’t want to say he was the heir apparent to Danny Boyle, but [Danny] was getting up there in age. You need that type of player to be successful in this league, and there might only be five of them in the league."
The two sides reached terms on Aug. 1, settling on five years at $5.76 million in average annual value. Those alone were not particularly noteworthy numbers, but the overall value of Burns’s new contract—$28.8 million—carried specific meaning.
Burns’s love for the number 8, which he wore for the Wild, came from Jari Byrski, who runs the Toronto-based Sk8On hockey school. Burns began training with Byrski at age 8, proposed to Susan on 8/8/08, and would later don 88 for the Sharks. (Much later, on the road that summer, Burns would steal the No. 88 tag from a Whataburger in Texas.) So Burns asked agent Ron Salcer if they could work out a deal wherein the contract included his favorite digit. “Brent said, ‘Do you think it could be this?’” Salcer recalls. “I called up Doug Wilson and said, ‘Could we do it with this number?’ He said, ‘O.K. You’ve got a deal.’”
4. Agent Ron Salcer on the uniqueness of his client
“People see him and think there’s some crazy guy. I’ve got six guys in the Hockey Hall of Fame, and by far he is the most colorful, unique individual I’ve ever dealt with. And I’ve had incredible clients. He reads things. It’s not like he flies off the handle. Who sits and reads? I went back with him to Slovakia to look at Marian Gaborik’s hockey rink. He’s going 120 miles an hour. Burnsie is reading a Harry Potter book. I look at him. ‘Burnsie, are you f---ing kidding me?’ ‘What’s the big deal?’ he says."
5. Venom Hunters snake guru Brian Barczyk on hosting the Sharks at his facility
“Some of them are great. [Joe] Thornton was awesome. But he’s definitely freaked out about things. I’ll never forget, I’ve got couches in my front office and we were talking … Colin White, Jumbo [Thornton] and Burnsie, and you’re like 'we’ve got to get a picture with a big snake.' Jumbo’s like 'I don't know man.' Let’s do it! We pulled out an 18-foot python, draped it over him, they all did well. I’d say the most serious guy that’s been over has been Patty Marleau. The guy had ice in his veins, man. It was crazy. A python struck at him. I opened the cage, and he was never in danger to get bitten, but it came maybe a foot away from him. Most people they’d freak out. He never flinched, but Burnsie ran out of the room. Burnsie screamed and ran and Patty stood there like a statue. I was like, dude. Patty even handled a tarantula that time. He was by far the most brave.”
6. Thornton on the time Burns met a cheetah
“We were in a zoo in Columbus. We’re there and these cheetahs are out, and these are beautiful creatures. Just to see one is very, very cool. We got to go real with them and hold onto them. Burnsie was the first guy. He wanted to get in there and hold this huge cheetah. Like, they’re not small. This thing’s long and big. ‘I’ll do it,’ Burnsie says. So Burnsie’s petting this cheetah, and all of a sudden the cheetah lunges at Burnsie and bites him. And me and [Colin White] look at each other like, what the f—just happened? And he took it like, no big deal. It was so weird. He got bit by a cheetah. How many guys could say that and live? The way he handled it was, of course I’m going to get bit by a cheetah. WE were both terrified and he took it like no big deal, just a little scratch. He must’ve had a mark of the two teeth and a bruise there [on his ribs] for a little while. I think he does have a cheetah tattoo on him now too.
7. Three terms of endearment in the Burns household
• Donkey
• Meatball
• Meathead
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8. The names of Burns’s first two snakes, which he bought for “$15 or so” at Petsmart, largely to cure his fear of snakes
Girlfriend and Boyfriend
9. The contents of Burns’s giant camouflage backpack, which he carries everywhere
“I’ve got bands, fitness bands, yoga strap, a blender at all times in there. A Nutribullet. I’ve got the bigger one in the bag. We’ve got the Nutribullet, sometimes shoes or workout gear, usually a lot of drink packets, vitamins. I’ve got my watch and heart-rate monitor. Just everyday stuff. I like to have it with me.”
10. Sneak attack
Rocky Widner/Getty Images
To work alongside Burns is to understand that an impromptu wrestling match can erupt at any moment. Colleagues in Minnesota recall him knocking on hotel doors and, when they swung open, bursting in, hunting for the arm bar. “I’m the only one who tapped him out,” says John Scott, the NHL All-Star Game folk legend who played with Burns in both Minnesota and San Jose. “He’d wrestle everybody, and finally I wrestled him and I tapped him out. I’m 1-0 against him. I think I jumped on his back and choked him out. I was so much bigger than him. I’m a lot bigger than he is and a little more stronger. I might’ve surprised him a little bit.”
11. John Scott on Burns’s evolution into a Norris Trophy finalist
“He was so talented, but very undisciplined. He would do something crazy and unbelievable, but then he’d be out of position for three straight plays and be –2. You could tell he was going to be really good. You just didn’t know how or when.
“He’s just so happy-go-lucky about it, worked hard. He just did his thing. He has a good attitude when it comes to hockey. He doesn’t get down too much. He doesn’t get too high on things when he’s going good. I think he knew he had that confidence that he was good, and that’s what he rode.
“I think he matured and realized what he can and can’t do, just came of age with his game. He’s definitely toned down a little bit, but not too much. He picks his spots a little more. He’s probably the best defenseman in the game.”'It's definitely a Marvel show...'
It’s still wrapped in the sort of secrecy that would make JJ Abrams smile, but Joss Whedon’s S.H.I.E.LD. TV pilot is now being put through its post-production paces ready to deliver to the ABC network, and Whedon is now talking a little more about the series, even if he doesn’t get into specifics.
“I’m excited about the show because it’s a very hopeful show,” Whedon told TVLine at the Streamy Awards this past weekend. “It’s not about murder, and it’s not about crime, and it’s not people looking into their own belly buttons. It’s about people who are trying to help each other, and that’s one of the things I loved about comic books. They had costumes and the villains were cool but they stood for something, and I like doing a show that does that.”
He’s at pains to stress that it’ll feel very much in the Marvel movie universe, even if the big heroes won’t be dropping in every week to say hello. “We’re trying very hard to be true to Marvel's ethos and also to the structure of their universe,” Whedon says. “So it is definitely a Marvel show. But right now, I want to involve people in the characters that we’ve created for the show, and then we’ll worry about the other stuff.”
Speaking of “the other stuff,” what about all that talk of Avengers’ Maria Hill (AKA Cobie Smulders) possibly signing on? According to Whedon, her schedule is a little tight, but he does want to use her when he can.
The cast as it stands right now includes Clark Gregg as Phil Coulson, Ming-Na as Melinda May, Chloe Bennet as Skye, Elizabeth Henstridge as Gemma Simmons, Iain De Caestecker as Leo Fitz and Brett Dalton as Grant.
ABC is still deciding whether to commission a series based on the pilot, but we’re keeping our fingers, toes and eyes crossed.The rise in the global temperature is on track to double the 2.0 degrees Celsius target, the International Energy Agency warned on Monday, and said four policies were needed urgently to limit climate change without harming economic growth.
“This report shows that the path we are currently on is more likely to result in a temperature increase of between 3.6 degrees Celsius and 5.3 degrees Celsius,” IEA chief Maria van der Hoeven said in a statement.
Nations have set the goal of limiting the increase in the global temperature this century to 2 degrees C at a UN summit in Durban in 2010 in order to avoid devastating climate change effects such as worsening droughts, storms, flood and sea levels.
The IEA’s Redrawing the Energy-Climate Map report found that energy-related emissions of greenhouse gases, responsible for about two-thirds of the total, rose by 1.4 percent last year to a record level.
However the report “also finds that much more can be done to tackle energy-sector emissions without jeopardising economic growth, an important concern for many governments,” added Van der Hoeven.
It made four suggestions to help reduce energy-related greenhouse gas emissions by 8 percent in 2020 from what they otherwise would be according to current trends and bring climate change policies back on track.
It said half of the amount can be made from efficiency gains in buildings, industry and transport with investment costs being more than offset by savings from reduced fuel costs.
Limiting construction of least-efficient coal-fired coal plants, cutting the escape of methane gas from oil and gas extraction and reducing |
). Did you use any of the phrases on this list, or any other words or phrases that may be perceived as limiting or negative? Write down the phrase you used, mark through it, and beside it construct an alternate phrase that more positively communicates your message." Keep this list handy, by your phone or next to your computer monitor, and review it daily.
Enlist a buddy. When you’re in meetings (and may not be able to record), ask a trusted co-worker to listen carefully to your language. "Ask them to write down any career-limiting words, phrases, actions or attitudes they perceive to be negative," she says. "Treat them to lunch, check your ego at the door, and let them tell you what they heard."
Listen for these phrases when others speak. When you hear how jeopardizing these phrases actually sound when spoken by another, it sends a powerful message to your brain heightening your own self awareness. Price says you should ask yourself, “How could she have phrased that idea in a different way?” Or, “What words would have communicated his point more positively?”
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SEE ALSO:In the latest episode of “BBall Breakdown with coach Nick,” Spencer Dinwiddie talks about two things. He and the coach go through how the 6’6” point guard outsmarted and outquicked the Bulls’ defense time and time again Sunday... and how he hopes his future is in Brooklyn.
Here’s the episode... all 23 minutes and 25 seconds of it:
As the Breakdown video shows, Dinwiddie was able to score repeatedly, getting into the lane and using a number of finishing techniques he practices with the Nets’ coaching staff.
Then, with 32 seconds left and the game tied at 103, Dinwiddie notes that Kenny Atkinson wanted the ball in Jeremy Lin’s hands for the key possession. But Jerian Grant did a good job of denying the ball and it was now up to Dinwiddie. He fakes a handoff to Brook Lopez before taking it into the lane himself, getting fouled and making both free throws.
On the next play, where Dinwiddie grabbed the rebound off a Jimmy Butler miss, he admits Dwyane Wade boxed him out, but that the Hall of Famer jumped too soon. That allowed him to get the ball, again get fouled and again make both to secure the game.
After breaking down about Dinwiddie’s performance in the game, Coach Nick asked him about his time with the Nets. Dinwiddie, whose contract runs another two years at the vets minimum, talked about how much he wants to stay in Brooklyn... and why.
“Right now, I have two team options left on my deal, so it looks like I'll be here. Who knows, you never know in this business how anything can happen or how it will all shake out but I've loved my time here and hopefully look forward to being here for a long time. The organization is great. The staff is great and hopefully we can turn this thing around and just make the playoffs next year. That'd be nice.”
As for his off-season on-court plans, Dinwiddie said he hopes to improve his three-point shot, particularly off the dribble. The 24-year-old is shooting 38.9 percent from the arc this season — after shooting 17.3 percent in his two years with Detroit. He thinks he can improve so that he’s shooting “high 30's low 40's” on a regular basis. He talked as well about improving his “defensive pressure.”Hulk Hogan didn’t waste any time finding a way to spend his newfound wealth: the legendary pro wrestler has used his winnings from a recent lawsuit to purchase his former employer, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).
The Wall Street Journal broke the news this morning that Hogan paid an estimated $135 million for the company — a surprisingly low valuation for the sports-entertainment juggernaut — and is now the sole owner of its copyrights, talent roster, turnbuckle stuffing, video library, network, ice cream bars, and vast spandex warehouses.
More from Kayfabe News
Asked by reporters why he purchased the company, Hogan said he wished to tell his brother something:
“Things are gonna be different around here, brother,” he said. He then added, after pensive pause, “dude.”
Hogan then listed a number of changes to the company, effective immediately:
The company name will revert to World Wrestling Federation
The main event of WrestleMania next Sunday will feature Triple H versus Hulk Hogan
The new Chief Financial Officer will be Irwin R. Schyster
America the Beautiful will be sung at WrestleMania by Brooke Hogan
The new General Manger of Raw will be Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake, and the Smackdown General Manager will be Jimmy “Mouth of the South” Hart
The New Orleans Super Dome will be renamed the Silverdome
NXT will be cancelled to make room for re-runs of Thunder in Paradise
Our articles are UNREAL, but our shirts are very real. Get one:A friend is in his 20s and wants to be a writer. He’s mucked around in college some without amassing enough credits to count towards anything, and he thinks he might want to start at a university again in order to become a better writer. I’ve been discouraging him, because of his age and his state goals. He started classes again this semester but seems disenchanted with them, and after talking for a while the other night, I wrote a long e-mail that summarized my views and why college is probably the wrong route for him:
If you said to me that you’re tired of working in coffee shops and want an office job in a corporation or government, a degree should be your number one priority. Not only is that not your goal, but your goal is to be a better writer. To accomplish that, school is at best a mixed bag. At anything below the most elite schools, most students in intro-level writing courses are not particularly good writers or interested in becoming good writers (and even in elite schools, bad writers but good hoop-jumpers abound). Intro courses won’t necessarily be of much help to you. Most intro-level non-writing courses (like “Rocks for Jocks,” AKA geology) are likely to be even worse. My honors students say their classmates in classes like “Love and Romance in the Middle Ages” and “Intro to Art History” are barely literate; the honors students turn in bullshit they’ve slammed out the night before and get 100% because they are, most of them, functionally literate. They complain about not learning anything about writing in their other humanities classes. You will probably have to wade through at least a year or two of courses that provide almost no value to your stated goal—becoming a better writer—before you get a real shot at, say, English classes. Once you are there, however, many professors aren’t especially interested in teaching, even in English classes, and the effect of many English classes on your writing skills might be small. Does reading Paradise Lost and Gulliver’s Travels and the Romantic poets in a Brit Lit I survey make you a better writer of contemporary fiction, essays, and criticism, if your professor / TA spends no time covering the basics of writing? Will sitting through a lecture on Beckett’s role in the Modernism / Postmodernism divide help you understand better metaphors in your writing, or help you construct a plot that has any actual motion? The questions suggest the answers. I’m not saying these English classes will hurt you. But I’ve sat through a lot of those classes, and few have anything to do with writing, which is one of my many beefs with English departments and classes; too little time is spent building concrete writing and reading skills, and too much time is spent discussing works of some historical value and very little contemporary value (I’m not convinced Sister Carrie, which is one massive violation of the cliche “Show, don’t tell” will make you a better novelist today, any more than studying the math of the 1850s in its original context will make you a better mathematician). Some professors teach close reading and who will really work with you to develop your writing skills, especially if you follow the advice I offer. But those experiences are at best hit-and-miss, and more often than not misses. They depend on the professor, and you won’t know if a class might be useful until you’re already in it. Plus, getting to those classes will probably take a long time and a lot of money and hoop jumping. The more direct route for you is through a writers’ workshop, which almost all communities of any size have. That’s the learning part of the equation. From the job/status/credential part of the equation, and as I’ve said before, the effect of school on labor market outcomes is quite binary: you have a degree and make a lot more money in the aggregate, or you don’t and you make a lot less money. Starting a degree without finishing it is one of the worst things you can do, speaking financially and in terms of opportunity cost. That’s why it’s so vital for you to either start and finish or not start. If you were 18 and didn’t know what the hell else to do, I would tell you to go to college because your peers are doing it and most 18-year-olds don’t know anything and waste most of their time anyway. You could noodle around in a lot of classes and maybe learn something and at least you’ll finish with a degree. Beyond that, a lot of college happens between the lines, through living in dorms and developing a peer network. But you’re not 18, you already know something (you do), and you have a (presumed) goal that you don’t necessarily have to go through school to accomplish. If your goal changes—i.e. you decide you don’t want to work in retail or coffee or unskilled labor and you want to get some other kind of job—then my advice will change. A distressingly small amount of actual learning goes on in college classrooms. You can see this in Arun and Josipka’s Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. You can read a different take by searching for “The Case Against Education,” which is the title of Bryan Caplan’s book concerning signaling / credentialism in education. Or you can look at the people around you, who might be the most compelling argument. People who are really determined to get education do get it, but outside of the hard sciences, there’s a LOT of bullshit. The stuff that isn’t bullshit will be hard for you to find. Not impossible, but hard. And you don’t get the monetary benefits without finishing. The college wage premium is still real, but it only applies to people who actually want to work at jobs that require college degrees. If you want to be an engineer, go to college. In “How Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing America,” Scott Gerber points out that “A degree does not guarantee you or your children a good job anymore. In fact, it doesn’t guarantee you a job: last year, 1 out of 2 bachelor’s degree holders under 25 were jobless or unemployed.” I look around the University of Arizona, and it’s clear to me that a variety of majors—comm and sociology are the most obvious—provide almost no real intellectual challenges and hence no real skills, whatsoever. The business school at the U of A seems better, but it’s still hard for me to ascertain, from the outside, if what goes on there really matters. To recap: I don’t think going to school is bad or will hurt you. But I’m also not convinced that going to school is an optimal use of time / money for you. I still think that, if you really want to be a writer, the absolute number one thing you have to do is write a lot—and want to write a lot, because the writing itself comes from the desire. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he discusses the research on the “10,000-hour rule,” or the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery of a skill. I’m not totally convinced that 10,000 hours is the magic number, or that anyone can deliberately practice for 10,000 hours in a given field and master it, but the basic idea—that you have to spend a LOT of time practicing in order to achieve mastery—is sound. To the extent you want to be a writer and that you spend time in classes that are at best tangentially involved with being a writer, I think you are making a mistake in the way you’re allocating your limited time and resources. You might be better off, say, going to the library and reading every Paris Review interview, going back to the beginning, and writing down every quote that speaks to you. All of us have 24 hours in a day. Any time you spend doing one thing can’t be spent doing another. If you want to become a writer, I think you should allocate most of your time to writing, not to classes, unless you want to be a writer in some officially sanctioned organ, like a newspaper. Finally, if you want to be a better writer, write stuff (blog posts, novels, essays, whatever) and send them to me. I will give you more detailed feedback than 99% of your professors. With me, the price is also right.
Beyond that, I want to emphasize just how hit-and-miss my education was, especially now that I look back on it. This was clearest to me in high school: as a freshman and sophomore, I had three really good English teachers from whom I learned a lot: Thor Sigmar, Mindy Leffler, and Jack someone, who taught journalism but whose name now escapes me, though he was very good at what he did and had a very dry sense and hilarious of humor. He also drove a black Miata and was clearly in the closet, at least from the perspective of his students. Then I had two terrible teachers: one named Rich Glowacki, who, distressingly, appears to still be teaching (at least based on a cursory examination of Google, and another named Nancy Potter. The former did an excellent impression of a animatronic corpse and was fond of tests like “What color was the character’s shoe in Chapter 6?” Moreover, one time I came in to talk to him about the “literary terms” he wanted us to memorize for a test. He couldn’t define many of the terms himself; in other words, he was testing us on material that he himself didn’t know.
That moment of disillusionment has stayed with me for a very long.
The other, Nancy Potter, was so scattered that I don’t think anything was accomplished in her class. She also wrote a college letter of recommendation for me that was so screwed up, and so strewn with typos and non sequiturs, that my Dad and I had to rewrite it for her. When your 18-year-old student is a better and more competent writer than you, the teacher, something is seriously amiss.
In college, I went to Clark University, where pretty much all the professors in all the departments are selected for their interest and skill in teaching. I ran into few exceptions; one was a guy who appeared to be about a thousand years old and who taught astronomy. He has trouble speaking and didn’t appear to know what he wanted to speak about on any given day.
Now that I know more about universities, I can only assume he was on the verge of retirement, or was already emeritus, and had been given our class of non-majors because a) he couldn’t do much damage there and b) the department knew it was filled with students who were taking the class solely to fulfill the somewhat bogus science requirement. He didn’t do much damage, except for some infinitesimally small amount to Clark’s reputation, and I assume the other people in the department were happy to avoid babysitting duty.
He, however, was very much the exception at Clark.
Most public colleges and universities are quite different than Clark, and the teaching experience is closer to public high schools, with some good moments and some bad. If your goal is to be an artist, or to learn any kind of skill in depth, you could spend years paying tuition, taking prerequisites of dubious utility, and struggling to find the right teacher or teachers, all without actually accomplishing your goal: learning some kind of skill in-depth.
I don’t think this applies solely to writers, either. If you’re a programmer, there are hacker collectives, or user groups, or equivalents, in many places. Online communities are even more prevalent. I have no idea how good or useful such places and people are. But the price is right and the cost of entry is low. Determined people will find each other. If you’ve got the right attitude towards receiving and processing criticism, you should be ready to take advantage. Knowledgable people should be able to point you in the direction of good books, which are hard to find. You should signal that you’re ready to learn. If you do those things right, you can get most if not all of what you would normally get out of school. But you also have to be unusually driven, and you have to be able to function without the syllabus/exam/paper structure imposed by school. If you can’t function without the external imposition of those constraints, however, you’re probably not going to make it as an artist anyway. The first thing you need is want. The second thing you need is tenacity. The first is useless without the second.
Stories like “Minimum Viable Movie: How I Made a Feature-Length Film for $0″ should inspire you, especially because you need even less money to be a writer than you do to make a movie. Arguably you also need less money to be a musician than you do to make a movie, although I’m less knowledgable on that subject and won’t make absolute pronouncements on it.
Again, I am not anti-school, per se, but it is important to understand how much or most school is about signaling and credentialing, and how easy a lot of school is if you’re willing to stay quiet, keep your ducks in a line, and jump through the hoops presented. It’s also important to understand the people who benefit most from offering arts training: the instructors. They get a (relatively) light teaching load, the possibility of tenure, a cut of your tuition, and time and space to pursue their passion, while you pay for their advice. Getting a gig as a creative writing professor is pretty damn sweet, regardless of the outcomes for students. That doesn’t mean creative writing professors can’t be very good, or very helpful, or improve your work, or dedicated to teaching, but it does mean that you should be cognizant of what benefits are being derived in any particular economic transaction. When small amounts of money are involved, it’s easy to ignore the economic transaction part of school, but now that tuition is so high, it’s impossible for anyone but the stupendously rich to ignore financial reality, like who gains the most when you enroll in a creative writing seminar.
As a side note, I think we’re already starting to see a shift away from the college-for-everyone mentality (that’s what the posts by Gerber and others are doing). Ironically enough, the universities themselves are involved in a perverse loan-based system whose present incentives are eventually going to drive their customer base away through price hikes. Universities are still going to be good deals and useful for some people, but those people will probably turn out to be more intellectual and analytical—the kinds of people who will benefit from knowledge dissemination and who will ultimately feel the need to create new knowledge. I also suspect a lot of non-elite private schools are going to have even larger problems than public schools. This isn’t a novel argument, but that doesn’t make it any less real, or any less likely to happen.
Anyway, I’m broadening the view too far here. The important thing is that you understand yourself and understand the system that you’re entering and how it incentivizes its participants. If you understand that, I think you’ll increasingly understand my skepticism about the utility of college classes for someone in your situation.Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on Monday challenged the other participants on an MSNBC panel to name a “subgroup” that contributed more to civilization than white people.
That smoking hot take came moments after Esquire writer Charles Pierce declared that the 2016 Republican National Convention would be the last time “old white people” would command the attention of the Republican Party.
“This whole business does get a little tired, Charlie,” King said. “I would ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”
“Than white people?” MSNBC host Chris Hayes interjected.
“Than—than western civilization itself that’s rooted in western Europe, eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where christianity settled the world,” King said. “That’s all of western civilization.”
“But what about Africa, what about Asia?” reporter April Ryan asked.
Everyone on the panel then began furiously speaking over each other.
“We are not going to argue the history of civilization,” Hayes said, trying to get the segment back on track.
“Let’s argue the history of this country, okay?” Ryan said.
Watch below:StoryCards are an intriguing product that I just happened to stumble across. Turns out they’ve been around for a while now, but let’s take a look at them anyway.
StoryCards are based on a very elegant idea. That we can use a deck of cards to generate and guide an entire role playing game off the cuff. I’ve been playing with them on and off for several months now and found that while the cards are brilliant, the overall execution is lacking.
The Product
Let’s talk about the actual cards briefly. A single deck consists of 60 cards which have been heavily influenced by tarot decks. The neat thing here is that each card is packed with information. They have attributes, number values, and even keywords. They are also designed to be viewed from only one direction which means, like tarot, an inverted card will appear differently and can have alternate meaning. This is excellent stuff and just thumbing through the deck I am hit by idea after idea.
They’re also quite attractive, at least as far as cards go. Each card has a sign on it front and center and everything is laid out in an easy to read way. Really, there isn’t too much to say. They are playing cards with role playing information on them.
The System
The cards also have an associated role playing system and this is where the product kind of falls flat. The system isn’t bad, in fact it is pretty solid. It covers how to use the cards to generate characters, settings, and even adventures just by flipping over a few cards. This is done through readings and can be likened to the fortune telling process of a Tarot Reader. The rules for resolving challenges (Feats), tasks, anything else that might get thrown at your character are also pretty good. These work by having all difficulties set with a target of 1 and modifying it up based on circumstances. You then get to draw a number of cards based on your character’s skills and attributes and depending on how many rank as a success your character’s results can be anywhere from downright awful to spectacular.
It is a pretty basic system and the real meat of it lies in the generation mechanics and not so much on the resolution side of things. The problem really comes down to it being 80 pages long. The actual StoryCards are easily tucked away in a pocket or stashed with your regular game books and can be a great accessory for whatever game you normally play. You can use it to quickly generate twists, npc disposition, or just for a spot of inspiration. The need for an 80 page rulebook just seems to run counter to everything the StoryCards are aiming for and render it a bit of a pain for pick up and play purposes.
How it Plays
There are really two sides to StoryCards. There is the system and then there is the generation and inspiration mechanics. In the months I’ve had the game only once have we used the system. We did a murder on a train. A typical whodunnit setup that was nonetheless a blast to play. We used the generation mechanics to create the setting and the process felt very natural. It was fun to see how everyone would interpret the cards and the work together to come up with some exciting. In play the system was quick to use, but we found ourselves using the single reading more often for resolution than we did the actual Feats. The single reading, since I didn’t explain it earlier, is a process where a card if flipped over to give a simple yes/no answer.
I really don’t have many complaints about the game, just that it doesn’t really have that magic spark to it that really good games have. I realize that’s vague, but I just didn’t find myself with a desire to run the system again despite having a pretty good time with it. What I did find myself doing was using the cards all of the time, to the point that they have become a standard piece of my GM toolkit. I can use them to generate NPCs or quick plot lines if my players go off in a direction I hadn’t planned for. For this purpose StoryCards are wonderful.
Verdict
I love the cards. They see frequent use both as a player and as a GM. The system, I don’t like so much. It’s a pretty solid shoulder shrug for me. I don’t dislike it but I certainly can’t say that I find it particularly interesting. The generation mechanics, on the other hand, are genius. They’re just a bit too involved to memorize. For my purposes I use a 3 card reading instead of the 9 card reading and this works well to supplement other games.
What StoryCard really needs is to be adopted by the role playing community as an alternative to dice or playing cards. There is a lot of potential here for someone to take the deck and use it a little differently for another game. Ideally, this person would make the rules small enough that they could be folded up and kept in the card box.
I’d recommend this deck to someone who likes to improvise their games, but can’t recommend it on the system alone (which you can get for free here). The price tag also seems a little high for a single deck of cards, but not prohibitively so. If you like the idea of tarot style role play mechanics then this is certainly something to take a look at. Same goes for if you need a little improvisational aid but don’t like the GameMastery style products. If you like the idea of using cards in your game but aren’t too crazy about the system I linked above, then I suggest you go take a look at what 6d6 Fireball is cooking up.
[tags]Cards, RPG, Indie RPGs, GMing, Gaming Accessories, Review [/tags]By the Numbers=> Donald Trump’s Victory in New York Will Be Beginning of the End for Ted Cruz
Guest post by Joe Hoft
Trump Leads in Wins, Delegates and Popular Vote
According to Real Clear Politics,as of April 10 in the Republican Presidential race, Donald Trump is way ahead of Senator Cruz in wins, delegates and the popular vote.
(Chart by Joe Hoft)
Trump currently has twice as many wins as Cruz, and nearly one and half times as many delegates and popular votes as Cruz. What is really telling is the difference in primary wins. Primaries are where every vote is counted and thus appear more democratic than caucuses where all sorts of irregularities can take place. Trump has 17 primary wins to Cruz’s 4.
Cruz has only nine wins total and five are caucuses where Cruz has gained 177 delegates to Trumps 96. It’s clear Cruz has benefited from caucus indiscretions which according to some are a pattern of his campaign.
The only reports of voter scandal in this campaign have been with the Cruz camp, including saying Carson was dropping out of the race before the Iowa caucus and in manipulating and stealing delegates after primaries take place.
Trump will Blow Away Cruz after New York
New York State Poll Numbers from Real Clear Politics as of April 10
Currently Trump is polling greater than 54% in New York. The state primary held on April 19th allocates 14 out of 95 delegates to the overall winner. The winner in each congressional district takes 3 delegates if he wins over 50% of the vote in the district while a candidate must clear 20% of the vote in order to win any delegates in a district.
It is clear Trump will win the 14 statewide delegates but what is yet unclear is the number of delegates Trump will win in each congressional district as well as whether Cruz will win any delegates at all based on his current poll numbers being less than 20%. Assuming Trump wins the 14 statewide delegates and conservatively 2 delegates from each of the 27 districts, with Cruz and Kasich splitting the remaining 27, Trump would end up with 68 delegates, Kasich 14 and Cruz 13. These are conservative numbers for Trump as he will most likely win more than 50% of the vote in many districts and therefore all 3 delegates. This is also generous towards Ted Cruz who isn’t even at 20% of the vote statewide and has to have at least 20% of the votes and more than Kasich with Trump not gaining 50% in any district to gain a delegate.
Only 190,000 voted in the 2012 New York state Republican primary. This low voter turnout was due in part to Romney running away with the race but turnouts have been very high in 2016 in large part due to Donald Trump. In the general election Romney gained more than 2 million New York votes. If we assume conservatively that Trump gains a half a million votes in the Republican primary which is about half of what he gained in Florida and Cruz gains the number of votes proportionally based on current poll numbers, Trump will have accumulated nearly 9 million votes to date in the election cycle.
After New York State GOP Primary
(Chart by Joe Hoft)
Cruz Exit Strategy
After the New York primary, based on today’s numbers and polling data, Trump will have a nearly 5 to 1 ratio over Cruz in primaries. Trump will have 150% of the number of delegates as Ted Cruz. He will have amassed nearly 150% of the number of votes as Cruz.
With the following week having primaries in five more East Coast states, it will be time for Cruz to begin his exit strategy. Cruz will be unable to win the Republican nomination outright after April 26th. He will need more delegates than are available and Trump will have a nearly 6 to 1 ratio over Cruz in primaries. Trump also will have won more than half of the 50 state’s contests and nearly two and a half times that of Cruz.
The longer Cruz hangs on after the April primaries the more dissatisfied Republican voters will be with Cruz. Calls will come for Cruz to resign and the voters will show their disgust. Cruz’s strategy of taking the election from a popular candidate, who will have won nearly six times the number of primaries as he, will become unreasonable and classless.
If Cruz (or anyone else for that matter) were to take the election from Trump at a convention it will be impossible for Cruz to sway the votes of people in his own party, yet alone Independents and Democrats, after having stolen the election in such a circus. The attacks on Cruz by the media will replicate those of Trump attackers and the election will fall to either Sanders or Clinton.
Smart conservative Cruz backers like Mark Levin are hopefully beginning to realize that for the good of the party and the country, and to win the overall election, the best thing Cruz can do is step out of the race and be a graceful supporter of the eventual Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
From that point on the call should be #NeverHillary!In the wake of George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, frustrated liberals talked secession back to within hailing distance of the margins of national debate — a place it had not occupied since 1861. With their praise of self-rule and the devolution of power, they sounded not unlike many conservatives had in the days before Bush & Cheney & Limbaugh wedded the American Right to the American Empire. While certain proponents of the renascent secessionism were motivated by spite or pixilated by whimsy or driven by the simple-minded belief that the United States can be divided into blue and red — as though our lovely land can be painted in only two hues! — others argued with cogency and passion for a disunionist position that bordered on the, well, seditious. Emphasizing both culture (“Now that slavery is taken care of, I’m for letting the South form its own nation,” said Democratic operative Bob Beckel) and economics (Democratic pundit Lawrence O’Donnell noted that “ninety percent of the red states are welfare clients of the federal government”), writing in forums of neoliberalism (Slate) and paleoliberalism (The Nation), liberals helped to disinter a body of thought that had been buried at Appomattox. And — surprise! — three years later, the corpse has legs.
Secession is the next radical idea poised to enter mainstream discourse — or at least the realm of the conceivable. You can’t bloat a modest republic into a crapulent empire without sparking one hell of a centrifugal reaction. And the prospect of breaking away from a union once consecrated to liberty and justice but now degenerating into imperial putrefaction will only grow in appeal as we go marching with our Patriot Acts and National Security Strategies through Iraq, Iran, and all the frightful signposts on our road to nowhere.
Some of the contemporary secessionists are puckish and playful; others are dead serious. Some seek to separate from the main body of a state and add a fifty-first star to the American flag while others wish to leave the United States altogether. Some proposals are so sensible (the division of California into two or three states) that in a just world they would be inevitable; others are so radical (the independent republic of Vermont) as to seem risibly implausible — until you meet the activists and theoreticians preparing these new declarations of independence.
For these movements are, in the main, hopeful and creative (if utopian) responses to the Current Mess engulfing our land. They are the political antidote to the disease of giantism. We are a nation born in secession, after all, and of rebellion against faraway rulers. Ruptures, crackups, and the splintering of overlarge states into polities of more manageable size, closer to the human scale, are as American as runaway slaves and draft resisters.
“SECESSION,” SAYS ROB WILLIAMS — Vermont filmmaker, radio host, Champlain College professor, and singer-songwriter of the ought-to-be classic “Kill Your Television” — “is every American’s birthright.”
It’s been almost a century and a half since any significant number of Americans believed that, but last November Williams’s verdantly democratic state hosted the first-ever nationwide conference of those who wish to make the nation a little less wide.
Yeah, sure, I know: breaking away is impossible. Quixotic. Hopeless. So was dancing on the Berlin Wall.
The Vermont gathering was convened by Kirkpatrick Sale, founder of the Middlebury Institute, a secessionist clearinghouse whose “ultimate task” is “the peaceful dissolution of the American empire.” Sale is the author of the decentralist compendium Human Scale and books on the Luddites and Students for a Democratic Society. So that agents of the Department of Homeland Security won’t have to pore over his works, he offers this description of his political vision: “I am an anarchist who wants to see society organized on a small, human scale, based on self-determining communities.”
Sale scheduled the confab just three days before the 2006 election, not for any symbolic reason but because it was “the first cheap weekend after the fall foliage season.” So upon Burlington converged the divergent. Forty-three delegates from eighteen states met around a long table in the Lake Champlain Salon of the Wyndham Burlington. I saw ponytails and suits, turtlenecks and sneakers, an Alaskan gold miner and one delegate from the neo-Confederate League of the South who wore a grey greatcoat, as if sitting for a daguerreotype just before the battle.
The location might seem, at first, thuddingly inappropriate. Secession talk in New England, cradle of Unionism, bête noire of the Confederacy, source of the “Battle Hymn of the (indivisible!) Republic”? Yet no region of the country has been as fertile a ground for secessionist thought as New England.
Yankees threatened to leave the Union in 1803 when Jefferson doubled the American realm with his constitutionally dubious Louisiana Purchase, and the cries of separation once again rang through the Northeast in 1814, when New Englanders, appalled by the War of 1812, met at the Hartford Convention to discuss going their own way. The Massachusetts Federalist Timothy Pickering heard “no magic in the sound of Union. If the great objects of union are utterly abandoned... let the union be severed. Such a severance presents no Terrors for me.” The subject of an amicable divorce was raised in the 1840s during the debates over the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War. In each instance New England had a strong moral case for secession — and a practical one, too: the country had gotten too damn big to govern from a swamp on the Potomac. Daniel Webster, the God-like Daniel (on his good days), argued in 1846 that “there must be some limit to the extent of our territory, if we are to make our institutions permanent. The Government is very likely to be endangered... by a further enlargement of its already vast territorial surface.”
By the 1850s, with its courageous defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, New England had become the epicenter of states’ rights — the logical end of which is secession — and of localist defiance of tyrannical central government. Yes, yes, a century hence racist governors would take possession of the phrase, but why should the fact that some southern politicians used “states’ rights” to justify segregation in the 1950s forever discredit the philosophy of Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry? I mean, look: George W. Bush uses the word “freedom” as often as a pimpled mall-rat says “fuck.” Does that mean we ought to junk “freedom”? Or should we reclaim it?
In its latest incarnation, secession has something of a greenish cast. It is reaching its fullest flower in Vermont, and if the idea of breaking away from the United States has not yet proven as exportable as, say, Vermont Teddy Bears or Cherry Garcia |
guard at the main gate of the base, reports Open Minds.
Around 7 pm, the former Marine stepped out of the guardhouse, looked over the fence at an empty guardhouse on the other side of the base and saw an enormous white cloud with blue flashing lights near the ground.
U.S. Marines on guard at Guantanamo base in Cuba (pictured), the area where the former Marine witnessed countless UFOs landing on the bay and taking off. He described the UFOs being about 50 feet to 100 feet cross, dull and hazy with a single red light that trailed behind them and blue lights flashed as they landed on the ocean
'It was approximately 7p.m. (dark) when I stepped out of the guard shack and looked across the fence at the deserted Cuban guard house when something caught my eye,' the former Marine said.
'Behind the Cuban guard shack near the ground was a huge white cloud with a blue/white, baby blue pulsating light in the middle of it.'
Bewildered by the sighting, he asked of his comrades what they were seeing as it passed over the shack in their direction.
'ALIENS STOPPED NUCLEAR WAR ON EARTH' SAYS FORMER ASTRONAUT Aliens came to Earth to stop a nuclear war between America and Russia, according the bizarre claim of a former astronaut. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, says high-ranking military officials witnessed alien ships during weapons tests throughout the 1940s. The UFOs, he says, were spotted hovering over the world's first nuclear weapons test which took place on July 16, 1945 in the desolate White Sands deserts of New Mexico. The Nasa veteran has regularly spoken about his belief in aliens ever since he landed on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. 'White Sands was a testing ground for atomic weapons - and that's what the extra-terrestrials were interested in,' the 84-year-old Texan told Mirror Online. 'They wanted to know about our military capabilities. 'My own experience talking to people has made it clear the ETs had been attempting to keep us from going to war and help create peace on Earth.' Dr Mitchell says stories from people who manned missile bases during the 20th Century back up his claims. 'Other officers from bases on the Pacific coast told me their [test] missiles were frequently shot down by alien spacecraft,' he said. He previously said supposedly real-life ET's were similar to the traditional image of a small frame, large eyes and head. He claimed our technology is 'not nearly as sophisticated' as theirs and 'had they been hostile', he warned 'we would be been gone by now'.
He remembers seeing the UFO that looked like a 'big beautiful cloud with a blue and white pulsating light' quietly hovering over their heads.
A few minutes later the silence was broken by someone yelling 'get the hell out of there'.
A sergeant was yelling from the observation tower, ordering them to vacate the area.
The Marine and other soldier walked towards the barracks just 200 feet away, which allowed them to observe the action from a safe distance.
An air view of the Guantanamo US Naval base (pictured) during the 1960s, which is the same time when the ex-Marine swears that 'virtually every night UFOs were flying overhead with altitudes of less than 300 feet'. The Marine, whose remains anonymous, was given orders to monitor the fence line when he spotted the UFOs
They saw Intelligence officers pull up to the scene with what looked like a film crew that recorded the alien vehicle while it hovered for about three hours before shooting off into the west.
'The UFO traveled about quarter of a mile, stopped for a moment, then like a bullet, shot straight up in the air until it disappeared,' he said.
'I would love to go back there just to see if the UFOs are still showing up.'
THINK YOU'VE BEEN ABDUCTED BY ALIENS? IT MAY BE SLEEP PARALYSIS Agents Mulder and Scully may have said 'the truth is out there' in the X Files, but it may instead be buried inside the brains of people who claim they have been abducted by aliens. Those who believe they have had a close encounter of the so-called 'fourth kind' may suffer from false memories or sleep paralysis, a psychologist has claimed. A rare form of the condition, which can involve hallucinations or the feeling of being dragged out of bed, may explain 'alien abductions' that people sincerely believe happened but can't remember. Writing for The Psychologist, Christopher C French, of Goldsmiths, the University of London, who specialises in the psychology of paranormal belief and experiences, said there are plausible explanations for why people'see' flying saucers and think they have been abducted. He noted that most of the people making these claims are clinically sane, but their belief in life in outer space may influence what they see or feel in strange situations.
'The dates that I have put down is a shot in the dark because that was 50 years ago.'
Last year, a former Nasa employee came forward about the agency covering up a series of UFO sightings that they code named 'Santa Claus'.North Korea’s near-complete isolation may have had something to do with the 2010 failure of a Stuxnet-related attack.
Reuters investigative reporter Joseph Menn reported Friday that in 2010, the United States tried to attack North Korea’s nuclear weapons program using a version of the Stuxnet virus it deployed in the same time frame against the Iranian nuclear program.
Menn reports that according to at least one U.S. intelligence source, the developers of Stuxnet made a related computer virus “that would be activated when it encountered Korean-language settings on an infected machine.” But the virus and the attack, which originated with the National Security Agency, was ultimately unsuccessful because it could not gain access to North Korean networks.
North Korea’s communications networks are notoriously isolated and this is, in many ways, a barrier to infecting them. While North Korea may be able to engage in its own cyberattacks, such as the suspected Sony hack, it is not as vulnerable to them:
NSA Director Keith Alexander said North Korea’s strict limitations on Internet access and human travel make it one of a few nations “who can race out and do damage with relative impunity” since reprisals in cyberspace are so challenging. When asked about Stuxnet, Alexander said he could not comment on any offensive actions taken during his time at the spy agency.
Iran, on the other hand, has a much more connected online culture and global business engagement, despite sanctions. North Korea is protected, in a way, by its isolation. Very few have access to the open Internet and the country’s only access to the Internet runs through China.
Suki Kim, a journalist who spent six months in 2011 teaching English at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), North Korea’s only privately funded university, noted in her memoir that even her students, who were technically computer science majors, were unaware that the intranet they used was not the global Internet.
Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs are similar–they both use P-2 centrifuges, for example–so NSA developers would not have needed to change the virus very much to have a similar impact on either country’s nuclear infrastructure. In Iran, the Stuxnet virus was reportedly responsible for destroying nearly one fifth of Iran’s centrifuges.
The Stuxnet worm was designed to target program logic controllers (PLCs) which allow the automation of industrial processes–essentially, the virus compromised these systems causing “the fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart.”
The similarities of systems and differences in digital connectivity aside, it may have been the limited human connectivity that caused the program to fail. Olympic Games, the code-name for the Stuxnet attack on Iran, impacted centrifuges at a nuclear facility in Natanz, which Menn says was not connected to the Internet:
As for how Stuxnet got there, a leading theory is that it was deposited by a sophisticated espionage program developed by a team closely allied to Stuxnet’s authors, dubbed the Equation Group by researchers at Kaspersky Lab. The U.S. effort got that far in North Korea as well. Though no versions of Stuxnet have been reported as being discovered in local computers, Kaspersky Lab analyst Costin Raiu said that a piece of software related to Stuxnet had turned up in North Korea.
Menn ends his report with a line from Jim Lewis, an adviser to the U.S. government on cybersecurity issues and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), who said that a cyber attack “is not something you can release and be sure of the results.”"The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES."
Extract from T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
When we were kids and played with LEGO® alone, naming an element was no issue; we had a mental image of what we wanted and we located it. But many of us also liked to build with our siblings and friends and this is where our naming issues began. I might have asked my sister for "a red two-er" but this did not guarantee I would be passed the red 2X2 brick I had in my mind - she may have given me a red 1X2 plate instead. More successful were our nicknames; if I asked for a "milk bottle" I would confidently get a white 1X1 round brick and an "empty milk bottle" would gain me one in Trans-Clear [BL] / Transparent [TLG]. Those were simpler times. Now milk is sold in all kinds of packaging by many different companies. As the AFOL community formed on the internet in the 1990s, the need to name and categorise LEGO parts suddenly became very necessary. For example, this 1993 thread on rec.toys.lego (RTL), which was one of the first AFOL forums, describes tiles as. Catchy. In those days, TLG didn’t even recognise the existence of AFOLs let alone share information with them, and so inventories with the official names and numbers of everything were not available. AFOLs created lists of sets using the set numbers on boxes and names from sales catalogues, and as shown in the previous link they also created lists of part numbers (what I refer to here as Design ID, to match Pick-a-Brick ) which had begun to be embossed on the undersides of elements from the mid-'80s. However TLG’s numbering systems weren’t fully known, failsafe nor wholly user-friendly and so adaptations or alternate numbers were created by the community. The major players here were the contributions to the sites LUGNET LDraw and Peeron In June 2000 BrickBay was launched by AFOL Dan Jezek. Over the next couple of years this resale site for LEGO sets and individual parts became hugely popular; successful enough for the lawyers at eBay to make him change the name, which he did – to BrickLink. Despite this no-doubt frustrating setback the site went on to arguably become the most important AFOL resource on the web, thanks in part to the semblance of order it brought to the chaos of LEGO parts by naming and categorising them into the BrickLink inventory, which Jezek had always made freely available for anyone to download. The online community supplied much of the data and images and continue to do so to this day, and from what I have read online it seems that in those early days of the site many names, numbering systems and even images came from those co-existing sites LUGNET, Peeron and LDraw. BrickLink’s success grew and grew. It was rumoured in the mid-2000s that BrickLink’s sales were equivalent to a quarter of all LEGO purchased by AFOLs. Competitors appeared and disappeared, unable to match the quality and scale of BrickLink’s offering.In recent years, however, things have changed. Sadly, Dan Jezek died in 2010 aged just 33. Despite rising popularity – these last three years have seen twice as many visitors than the site obtained in its entire first ten years of existence – it had never received the massive overhaul needed to remain competitive in today’s expectations of internet sites. Infuriated by the extensive security flaws of the site, it began to get hacked by person/s demanding these issues be fixed. Response from the new admins, Jezek’s family, was slow and rare and some fixes ruined finer details of functionality. Community frustration and fear grew and it became clear that not only was the time ripe for competition, it was possibly. Indeed, competition began to appear in 2013 and of these it is Brick Owl, which launched in late June, that seems to be most successful and now has over 500 sellers. A proportion of this success is no doubt down to the “BrickLink Sync” functionality they offered, which utilised Jezek’s free-to-access data to allow sellers to maintain stores at both sites more easily.Just a few weeks earlier, the announcement had come that Jezek’s family had sold BrickLink to Jung-Ju “Jay” Kim, the founder of a successful online game company based in Hong Kong, and that development of the long-mooted “BrickLink 2.0” was now to begin. This development was cautiously welcomed by most of the AFOL community, especially given Kim was an AFOL himself. Things have taken a sour turn this month however.On September 10 BrickLink Limited amended the Terms of Service (ToS) of the site with the stated reason:. (That is interesting phrasing on their part, emphasising the perceived harm to the community rather than the financial loss to their company.) Gone was the sentence in the ToS indicating that text and images are the intellectual property (IP) of their creators, and a new clause assigned usage rights to BrickLink Limited. (It’s worth noting these are “non-exclusive” rights, meaning the contributor is allowed to use the image anywhere else too.) Suddenly it seems information collated partially by unpaid AFOLs and initially partially based on data from other sites has been sold and is now thoroughlyThe other main amendment forbids usingwith. The vagueness of this clause is especially disturbing. The intention is to stop competitors using BrickLink’s catalogue data but in its current catch-all wording, this clause could for example stop me providing reliable part availability information on this blog. It could even apply to you ringing up a mate to tell them a BrickLink store is selling a thousand Light Bluish Gray Boat Mast Rigging Long 28 x 4 for 5p each. (If indeed they were. Which they’re not.) I don’t of course suggest BrickLink Limited would ever take things that far, but there’s no guarantee of how far they will take it. But laying down vague confusing clauses like this and expecting the community to swallow them really isn’t the wisest piece of PR.On Wednesday, Lawrence at Brick Owl published a letter purportedly from BrickLink Limited threatening legal action. The more understandable section demands that Brick Owl cease to use the “Bricklink Sync” functionality. It’s sad for Brick Owl sellers to lose this, however the very gray area is whether Brick Owl’s usage of it is more in their own good than the community’s. Lawrence will be disabling the functionality on Saturday at around 4pm.The far stranger and vaguer sentence in the letter is BrickLink Limited’s claim that, a claim restated in their clarification post on BrickLink Forum on Thursday:That’s as much detail as they’ve gone into, and clearly more detail is needed because as it stands the statement is ridiculous – the vast majority of their part and setcomes from TLG and many of the other nomenclature stylings were adopted or adapted from earlier sites. For BrickLink to now claim them wholesale as their own IP is at the very least galling and at worst a breach of IP rights (by their own woolly definition). In the same post they sagely reminded us,clearly forgetting the countless hours that admins and users spent shaping LDraw, Peeron and LUGNET data, and indeed LEGO employees shaping TLG data, which was then used by BrickLink… for financial gain.Theofare far more defendable areas of their claim. TLG’s part names and categories are very different and far less intuitive on the whole. BrickLink’s are by no means perfect and, as with any large and complex system, they take time to absorb. But their system is the dominant one and is far and away the closest thing we have to a community standard. And this is where I think BrickLink Limited are really shooting themselves in the foot. To force every competitor to come up with their own unique naming and categorisation system is compounding the nightmare for us, and if a competitor offers the guarantee of a new catalogue that remains freely publicly available forever, on which site will the community choose to volunteer their time in providing free data?I don't wish to belittle the amazing work Jezek did and I think BrickLink Limited are right to protect their business, but when their business is founded on the work of the community, the situation is far more delicate than their current mishandling of the situation caters for.Reactions on the BrickLink Forum are varied; many welcome the changes but others are leaving BrickLink for good – some are even demanding their image and text contributions to the database be deleted. It will be interesting to see if BrickLink Limited ignore these requests and ride the risk being sued by an angry (and rich) AFOL.Of course BrickLink Limited’s intentions all boil down to not losing money to a competitor who is clearly worrying them, but I’d have hoped that they'd chosen to direct all faith into BrickLink 2.0 rather than altering the open nature of the catalog. The pressure on the new version to exceed every expectation of the community is now even greater, because they need to deliver a product so amazing it overcomes this increased distrust from the disenfranchised sections of the community and sweeps all competition away by merit, rather than with legal weight. In financial terms, Brick Owl are the David to BrickLink Limited’s Goliath and can’t risk an expensive legal battle. Consequently the intimidation has worked and Brick Owl are removing all their “BrickLink” names and numbers, despite the fact that the question of what constitutes BrickLink Limited IP is legally unchallenged. How interesting it would be if TLG played Goliath with BrickLink Limited.I got a bit heavy there didn't I? Enjoy this unrelated brick owl built by alexhui0416, whilst I go trademark the phrases “milk bottle” and “Apollo stud”.I'm indebted to DaveE for the fascinating link to RTL. There are plenty more on his AFOL History Project, including what is possibly the first use of the term AFOL, and Dan Jezek's announcement of BrickBay on LUGNET.Pope Francis has lamented that children are being taught at school that gender can be a choice.
Francis made his remarks during a private meeting last week with bishops from Poland during his pilgrimage there. The Vatican released a transcript on Tuesday of those closed-door remarks.
The pope said he wanted to conclude his remarks by reflecting on this: “We are living a moment of annihilation of man as image of God.” He added that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, had labelled current times “the epoch of sin against God the Creator”.
He said: “Today, in schools they are teaching this to children – to children! – that everyone can choose their gender.” Without specifying, he blamed this on textbooks supplied by “persons and institutions who donate money”. The pope blamed what he called “ideological colonising” backed by “very influential countries”, which he did not identify. One such “colonisation”, he said – “I’ll say it clearly with its first and last name – is gender.”
The Guardian view on Pope Francis in Kraków: what religions are really about | Editorial Read more
The “colonisation” theme is one he has railed against before, including during an Asian pilgrimage in 2015.
On Wednesday, in the meeting with bishops shortly after his arrival in Kraków at the start of a five-day pilgrimage, Francis said he had discussed the issue of gender with his predecessor, who has lived at the Vatican since retiring in 2013.
“Speaking with Pope Benedict, who is well, and has a clear mind, he was telling me: ‘Holiness, this is the epoch of sin against God the Creator, He’s intelligent! God created man and woman, God created the world this way, this way, this way, and we are doing the opposite.’”
Francis ended by telling the Polish bishops he wanted them to reflect on this: “We must think about what Pope Benedict said – ‘It’s the epoch of sin against God the Creator.’”Civility: For a brief moment after Rep. Steve Scalise was nearly killed by a crazed Bernie Sanders supporter, some prominent liberals uttered a few words about "toning down the rhetoric." If that pledge was sincere at all, it barely lasted a week.
Actor Johnny Depp took the prize last week, when at a film festival in England he asked, "Can we bring Trump here," and followed that by asking "When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?" The audience roared with cheers and laughter.
Depp later "apologized," saying it was a "bad joke" that "did not come out as intended."
But Depp was hardly the only one to go back to using extreme, violent, incendiary rhetoric to talk about Republicans.
Earlier in the week, the head of the Nebraska Democrats. Jane Kleeb, ousted a party official after he was caught on tape wishing Scalise had died.
"I'm glad he got shot," said volunteer co-chair of the state party's technology committee Phil Montag. "I'm not gonna (expletive) say that in public." "Well then what are you saying it to us for?" someone else in the recording asks. "I wish he was (expletive) dead," Montag replies.
In Ohio, police arrested 68-year-old E. Stanley Hoff after he left a voice mail for Rep. Steve Stivers saying that "We're coming to get every goddamn one of you and your families. Maybe the next one taken down will be your daughter. Huh? Or your wife. Or even you."
Joseph Lynn Pickett of Illinois was charged with threatening Trump on Facebook, after posting that "the secret service now has a heads up as to my plan to assassinate Trump... let's see if they act."
The left's reaction to the relatively modest Senate health reform bill made it abundantly clear that their rhetoric continues to be unhinged.
Josh Fox, the director of the documentary about fracking — "Gasland" — sent a tweet in which he called Mitch McConnell and President Trump terrorists and proclaimed that the Senate health reform bill "sentences poor people to death."
Late night talk show host Seth Meyers called the bill "breathtakingly cruel."
Harvard professor David Cutler tweeted that "GOP congress may never again get a chance to kill so many people. Could rival the Iraq War in its total."
Sen. Bernie Sanders sent a tweet saying that the GOP bill "could kill up to 27,000 in 2026 so they can give tax cuts to the wealthy."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted that the Senate bill "is blood money. They're paying for tax cuts with American lives."
Sanders later deleted his tweet, but Warren's is still there.
And Barack Obama, in a Facebook post in which he starts by saying how we need "to listen to Americans with whom we disagree," couldn't resists the urge to decry the "fundamental meanness" of the Senate bill.
All of this reads like an open invitation to commit actual acts of violence against Republicans. After all, if they really are terrorists, mass murderers breathtakingly cruel and fundamentally mean, why not try to take them out? That's clearly what Scalise's shooter thought.
For years, we've been forced to listen to endless lectures from liberals about all the "hatemongers" on the right. And all along, left-wingers got away with saying — and often doing — whatever they wanted.
Now, at least, their mask is off. And the consequences of their hate-filled rhetoric can be seen in the rifle shot wounds that nearly claimed Rep. Scalise's life. If another Republican gets attacked, the blood will be on the hands of people like Warren, Depp, Meyers and the rest of the increasingly radical left.
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As Steve Scalise Shooting Shows, Left's Rhetoric Of Anger And Hate Has Gotten Out Of Hand
Left-Wing Bigotry And Hatred Is On Full Display After Trump Win
What 'Line' Did Kathy Griffin Cross, Exactly?Libyan rebels appear to have "summarily executed" scores of fighters loyal to Moammar Gadhafi, and probably the dictator himself, when they overran his hometown a year ago, a human rights group said Wednesday.
The report by Human Rights Watch on alleged rebel abuses that followed the October 2011 capture of the city of Sirte in the final major battle of the eight-month civil war is one of the most detailed descriptions of what the group says were war crimes committed by the militias that toppled Gadhafi, and which still play a major role in Libyan politics today.
The 50-page report, titled "Death of a Dictator: Bloody Vengeance in Sirte," details the last hours of Gadhafi's life on Oct. 20, 2011, when he tried to flee the besieged city. The longtime leader's convoy was struck by NATO aircraft as it tried to escape and the survivors were attacked by militias from the city of Misrata, who captured and disarmed the dictator and his entourage.
Moammar Gadhafi is shown surrounded by Libyan fighters in Sirte, Libya, in a video from the day he died. (APTN/Associated Press)
Misrata was subjected to a brutal weeks-long siege by Gadhafi's forces that killed hundreds of residents, and fighters from the city became among the regime's most implacable foes. HRW says it seems the Misratans took revenge against their prisoners in Sirte.
"The evidence suggests that opposition militias summarily executed at least 66 captured members of Gadhafi's convoy in Sirte," said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch.
The New York-based group's report says that new evidence unearthed in its investigation includes a mobile phone video clip taken by militiamen showing a large number of prisoners from Gadhafi's convoy being cursed and abused by rebels.
The remains of at least 17 of the detainees in the phone video were later identified in a group of 66 bodies found at Sirte's Mahari hotel, some still with their hands tied behind their back. Human Rights Watch said it used hospital morgue photos to confirm the victims' identities.
The dictator himself was seen alive in a widely-circulated video made public shortly after the battle.
"Video footage shows that Moammar Gadhafi was captured alive but bleeding heavily from a head wound," the HRW report says. But footage showed that he was "severely beaten by opposition forces, stabbed with bayonet in his buttocks, causing more injuries, and bleeding. By the time he is filmed being loaded into an ambulance half-naked, he appears lifeless."
Gadhafi son's body also found in morgue
Bouckaert said the group's "findings call into question the assertion by Libyan authorities that Moammar Gadhafi was killed in crossfire and not after his capture."
Gadhafi's son Muatassim was also videotaped alive and in captivity, only to have his body turn up at a morgue in Misrata alongside his father's.
"In case after case we investigated, the individuals had been videotaped alive by the opposition fighters who held them and then found dead hours later," Bouckaert said. "Our strongest evidence for these executions comes from the footage filmed by the opposition forces and the physical evidence at the Mahari hotel where the 66 bodies were found."
Another victim cited by HRW as an example was 29-year-old Ahmed al-Gharyani, a navy recruit from the town of Tawergha. He was seen alive in the phone video as rebels beat him. His body was later found in the hotel and eventually identified by his family.
His hometown, Tawergha, was used as a staging ground by Gadhafi's forces to launch attacks on Misrata, but after rebels broke the siege on Misrata and overran Tawergha, the town's residents fled or were driven out by vengeful rebels.
Suleiman al-Fortia, a member of the dissolved National Transitional Council from Misrata, denied that Gadhafi or his loyalists were executed. "We hoped to arrest Gadhafi alive (to try him). All the killings took place in a crossfire," he said.
But HRW said that "under the laws of war, the killing of captured combatants is a war crime, and Libyan civilian and military authorities have an obligation to investigate war crimes and other violations of international humanitarian law."
The group released its report days before Libya celebrates "liberation day," the anniversary of Sirte's fall on Oct. 23.
Since then, the country's new leaders have heavily depended on former rebel militias to secure cities and protect borders in the absence of a strong national army or other government security forces.
Calls for militias to be brought under the control of the defence or interior ministries have met resistance from some fighters.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
BRENDAN RODGERS has told Raheem Sterling to forget about a new improved contract and focus on maintaining his impressive form ahead of Liverpool FC’s clash with Sunderland at the Stadium of Light tonight.
The teenager has enjoyed a meteoric rise so far this term having broken into the Reds’ line up and earned a surprise call-up to the senior England squad.
Rodgers has been delighted by his progress but is determined to ensure that Sterling, who penned his first professional deal following his 17th birthday last December, isn’t handed too much too soon.
“After I spoke to Roy Hodgson and I had got through to Raheem to tell him about being called up by England, my next call was to his agent.
“I wanted to make sure that when it came out, he wasn’t jumping in the car up to Liverpool to have a chat with me. I want to manage the expectation of the kid.
“The last thing we need is Sky Sports coming up with the yellow bar saying he has signed a five year contract after two games. There is no doubt it is something that we will look at in the next few months. But I have seen it so much with young players.
“You see these young boys play one or two games, they get handed these super-duper contracts and then he goes down to there. When they reach 22 or 23, you hear people ask ‘what has happened to so and so?’ The biggest thing that distorts the reality of people and footballers is money. You have to protect young players and help them.
“I worked with players at Swansea who had spent their lives in football and not earned more than two grand a week. Now you are seeing these young players who are multi-millionaires. No matter what you say, it takes the edge off them.
* GET latest updates and stats from Sunderland v Liverpool as it happens in our live match centre here and keep in touch with all the latest LFC news, views and features by following @LivEchoLFC on Twitter and LiverpoolEchoLFC on Facebook
“The point I have made to Raheem is that he will earn it. What I have done in his career is insignificant. I’ve given him a chance. What I want to see is if he can become consistent with it. If you can be consistent with the chance you get, you will get rewarded for it.”
Rodgers, who is full of praise for Sterling’s attitude and application, intends to carefully guide his blossoming career but says others close to the youngster also have a duty to keep his best interests at heart.
“One area that I specialise in is young players and the one thing I would say about Raheem is that he is a great learner,” he added.
“Over the course of pre-season, I wasn’t harsh with him but he had to learn. I look at him now, a couple of months later, and he plays with responsibility. You try to improve young players technically but tactically as well.
“You could see Raheem against Manchester City when they played 3-5-2. The idea of a young player going into make his (full league) debut in a game like that is phenomenal.
“One of the biggest things that has come out is his ability to learn. If he continues along that vein, he will have a terrific career. But the support mechanism around him have to make sure he is centric to everything. The people around him have to understand that. I can try and educate him but I can’t control everything.”
With Rodgers having ruled out the possibility of boosting his squad by signing a free agent, he is ready to put his faith in more of the club’s youngsters over the coming weeks. And he believes Sterling’s breakthrough into the senior ranks has inspired others.
“I have seen it with a number of players already,” said Rodgers.
“The biggest thing you need in your life, whatever profession you are in, is hope. I think Raheem has given all the young players that. I have seen a marked difference in the enthusiasm and desire of the young players.”
* GET latest updates and stats from Sunderland v Liverpool as it happens in our live match centre here and keep in touch with all the latest LFC news, views and features by following @LivEchoLFC on Twitter and LiverpoolEchoLFC on FacebookGame Details Developer: EA Sports
Publisher: EA
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360 (PS4 reviewed)
Rating: E for Everyone
Release Date: September 29 (WW), September 27 (US)
Price: £40, $60
Links: EA Sports: EA: PC, PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360 (PS4 reviewed): E for EveryoneSeptember 29 (WW), September 27 (US)£40, $60 Amazon (UK) | Amazon (US) | Official website
Despite its consistency over the years, there's always been something missing in FIFA. Drill past the flawlessly recreated stadiums and the blemish-perfect faces, past the stacks of Ultimate Team cards and officially licensed boots, and, no matter how deep you go, you never come across anything close to a footballing soul. There's plenty of opportunity to spend money and ogle celebrity players, but remove the glitz and glamour, and the passion for the sport—the love of the game itself—is sorely missing.
It's often easier to win fans by creating a spectacle than it is by playing the best football, and FIFA 17 continues this tradition with the inclusion of The Journey. An attempt at recreating the kind of athlete-focused narrative that 2K's NBA franchise has had for years, The Journey tells the story of young prodigy Alex Hunter and his bid to become a superstar.
You get to choose what Hunter says to the media, his manager, and a recurring rival. Your choices lead to small alterations in how other characters view you, but the core plot beats remain fixed no matter what you do. As such, there sometimes exists an enormous disconnect between your actions and the resultant outcome. Even if you outscore everyone in the team when you're on the pitch, you won't be treated with the kind of respect such a feat deserves until you've hit the relevant narrative milestone.
Your performance dictates how far and how quickly your skills progress, and you've got the option of taking control of just Hunter or playing as the entire team. Neither selection is perfect given the context of the narrative and your goal to reach the top. If you play only as Hunter then it can be frustrating to have to rely on AI-driven teammates who are, at best, only mildly consistent. On the other hand, playing as the whole team tends to force a predictable style of play as you try to slide Hunter the ball and ignore how open other players might be.
This questionable depth pervades the writing, too, making for a journey that is more novelty than pioneering. Still, embrace it as a frivolous guilty pleasure and there is value to be found. In a manner similar to trashy movies in the vein of American Pie or Pacific Rim, The Journey is so dumb that it's impossible not to love it just a little bit. The only difference is that you can't be sure whether The Journey's writers are in on the joke.
Hunter's story is made possible thanks to FIFA 17's use of Frostbite 3 (in the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC versions), the same engine used to power Battlefield 1 and Mirror's Edge Catalyst. The improved visuals are immediately noticeable throughout the entire product, with facial realism and animation noticeably improved over FIFA 16.
Unfortunately, the improvements in graphical quality don't translate to a better game of football. There might be more variety in how you can approach a free kick, some fresh ways to shoot, and a new technique that allows you to shield the ball from nearby opponents, but so often the game limits what can be attempted, let alone achieved.
There's such a focus on certain features of the football system, like the new shielding mechanics, that not using them puts you at a huge disadvantage. Rather than being able to play the kind of football you like best, you get the sense that there's a right and a wrong play to FIFA 17. This stands in stark contrast to the primary reason this sport is the most popular in world: diversity. Real football is malleable enough to be played in any number of different ways, but FIFA 17 isn't.
By making players use the predetermined tricks, EA Sports is able to more firmly stamp its fingerprint on the game. In a sense, it allows the design team a greater degree of authorship over the football itself. It can make sure that players are seeing the most exciting and instantly gratifying example of the sport that is possible to recreate digitally. What's gained in an immediately thrilling experience is lost in player choice, though. With a right and wrong way of playing there's little point in experimentation and instead you find yourself working to master the same few techniques and exploit obvious loopholes.
However, it can't be argued that if you're after a football game to play with a wide group of friends then FIFA 17 is the right option for you. Its limitations make it easy to play and understand, even for those new to the sport.
While The Journey is an admirable attempt at diversifying a genre that has stubbornly fixated on the same |
‘Hey, how can we make a really great bus?’ They started with ‘Hey, how can we make some money?’ That kind of mentality just really turned me off working on all of that.” A server came by with a tea tray and started making slow, soothing pouring motions from vessel to vessel. Flute music simpered in the background. Leap, like Lyft, is an example of the helpful, Mr. Fix-It style of local techie culture. If a system isn’t working well, your neighborhood entrepreneur will build a better one. The approach has clear benefits for transportation, but it has risks, too. Say you’re a lawyer who rides the Muni bus. You hate it. It is overcrowded. It is always late. Fed up, you use your legal expertise to lobby an agency to get the route fixed. And the service gets better for all riders: the schoolkid, the homeless alcoholic, the elderly Chinese woman who speaks no English. None of them could have lobbied for a better bus on their own; your self-interested efforts have redounded to the collective benefit. Now the peeved lawyer can just take Leap. That is great for him. But it is less good for the elderly Chinese woman, who loses her civic advocate. Providing an escape valve for a system’s strongest users lessens the pressure for change. Kirchhoff saw things differently. Part of the reason the Muni bus was bad, he said, was that there was no market competition to make it better. “I think choice is a wonderful thing, and I think that competition is a good thing, too,” he told me. “Not competition in the sense like ‘Hey, we’re trying to put you out of business’ but ‘Hey, we’re bringing something else to the table, and we’ve got some different ideas about how things work.’ ” If the old activism focussed on public infrastructure, the new model takes privatization as its premise. One afternoon, I visited Leila Janah, whose startup, Samasource, builds digital outsourcing networks that help poor women and youth. (Corporations will outsource computer work anyway, she says, so why not harness the enterprise to get people living wages and teach skills?) People in the Samasource program start out doing things that can be learned with no prior computer knowledge, like tagging images for Getty and Microsoft. So far, the program has lifted fifteen thousand people above the poverty line. Janah sees her program as being distinct from the more casually mission-based commercial startups that have been fashionable in recent years—companies that chiefly sell a product but that donate goods, or a share of the profit, to noble causes on the side—so she initially tried to get grant support from charitable organizations. All of them balked. “I was kind of shocked,” she told me. “The Silicon Valley community got the idea much better than most people in the poverty-alleviation world.” Only after tech angels started investing did poverty and development foundations take her idea seriously. (Recently, Samasource helped inspire the Rockefeller Foundation to open a new hundred-million-dollar funding category.) “We now expect social entrepreneurs to solve problems that government used to solve,” she told me. Public-minded kids in San Francisco seem to have that expectation, which is partly why the startup market has had such growth, and why smart people from around the country keep flying in to try their hands at the game. The result is a rising metropolitan generation that is creative, thoughtful, culturally charismatic, swollen with youthful generosity and dreams—and fundamentally invested in the sovereignty of private enterprise.Download International Morse Code Beginners Course: Learn Code The Easy Way
For hardcore Morse Code nerds only. This LP is straight up basic Morse Code. No instructions, no talking. Just the relentless beeps of the Code. I think they go through the alphabet in the beginning and then spell out some words towards the ends. But who knows. I don’t speak Morse Code.
This sounds like a lo-fi fire alarm with dying batteries throwing a dance party, or somebody hooked up to an EKG whose heart pumps minimal weirdo techno. It’s definitely not the easiest thing to listen to straight through but if you can handle it, fuckin go for it. Or chop it up and make some rad beats with it if that’s your thing.
Also, look at the fucking cover art. Pretty awesome.Take first-year Hall of Fame candidate Vladimir Guerrero's most basic numbers -- a.318 batting average and 449 home runs in 16 major league seasons with the Expos, Angels, Rangers and Orioles -- and hold them up to the statistical spotlight.
He is one of six retired players (plus one active player, Miguel Cabrera) to pair a batting average that high with at least 400 home runs. The others are five of the greatest players of all time: Babe Ruth, Jimmie Foxx, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig and Stan Musial.
Guerrero also had 250 intentional walks, a total that ranks fifth since the stat was first tracked in 1955. The four players ahead of him are Barry Bonds, Albert Pujols, Hank Aaron and Willie McCovey, another group that includes some of the best players ever.
Vladimir Guerrero Career Highlights *.318 BA, 449 HR in 16 seasons * 9-time All-Star * 2004 AL MVP * 24th all-time in slug pct (.553)
But as good as the numbers are, to gain a full appreciation of Vladimir Guerrero, you had to see all 6-foot-3, 235 pounds of him.
“He looked like a velociraptor,” said former major league pitcher Nelson Figueroa, against whom Guerrero hit.500 in 10 at-bats. “What a specimen.”
“He had arms that were the size of four octopuses,” ex-rival and current ESPN Baseball Tonight analyst Doug Glanville said.
And you had to see him play.
Vladimir, the youngster
Doug Sisson, a longtime minor league manager and a current assistant coach at Auburn, worked with the raw, 20-year-old Guerrero as skipper of the 1995 Albany (Ga.) Polecats in the South Atlantic League. In Guerrero’s first full pro season, he won the batting title (.333), with 16 home runs in a ballpark that had 20-foot fences all the way around the outfield.
“He worked hard, and he had an innocence to him,” Sisson said. “He went out and played with a smile on his face. He never thought about messing up. When we’re 6 years old, we’re trying to just go out and do something great. He played like that. He just thought about how much fun he could have and how many great plays he could make.”
Guerrero’s skill set was made to impress. He could hit anything thrown anywhere. The stories of him hitting pitches that bounced date back to that 1995 season. “He hit the ball like a golfer hits a 2-iron,” Sisson said.
He could throw the ball. The legend of Guerrero's lasers from right field to third base or home plate dates as far back as the Sally League All-Star Game. “He was worth the price of admission, just to watch him take outfield practice,” Sisson said.
And he could run. “Him going first to third was tremendous,” Sisson said. “He could cover a lot of ground in a few strides.”
It was a foreshadowing for his major league career.
“Inevitably, you get the question: Who’s the best player you were ever around?” Sisson said. “It’s Vladimir. And the conversation just stops. That’s how good he was.”
Vladimir, the teammate
Expos outfielder F.P Santangelo had heard the stories about Guerrero dating back to when Guerrero was in the Gulf Coast League as a 19-year-old. Pretty soon, the two were teammates, and though there was a language barrier, there was mutual respect.
In his fourth game, Guerrero hit his first major league home run against Braves righty Mark Wohlers, who was then the best closer in the National League. “A majestic opposite-field home run to right field,” longtime Expos play-by-play broadcaster Dave Van Horne said. “That was a 'wow' moment."
On the other side, the Braves announcers referred to the homer, which Guerrero snuck just fair down the right-field line, as “lucky.” But that’s how Guerrero hit. His 400th home run was a carbon copy of his first. And had the broadcasters known Guerrero’s routine before his at-bats early in his career, they would have probably been even more befuddled.
Vladimir Guerrero Average Season
(1998-2010) BA.321 OBP.385 Slug pct.567 HR 33 RBI 107 SB 14 K-BB 68-54 Games 146
“Before an at-bat, he would just start going through the bat rack, and he would pick them up, feel them, look at the name on the bat, raise his eyebrows and nod,” Santangelo said. “One at-bat, he’d use Darrin Fletcher bat. The next one he’d use David Segui's. The next one, he’d use Mike Lansing. He would grab whatever bat, ask if he could use it, and just go up there and swing at anything.
“We would say daily, 'How the f--- did he do that?' The guy went up, saw [the ball], swung and did damage.”
Guerrero swung so hard that he scared his coaches. In the 2001 All-Star Game, third-base coach Tommy Lasorda was fortunate he wasn’t hurt when Guerrero lost the bat on his swing. And then there was the worry of what to do when he made contact.
“You never knew where he would hit the ball,” said Phillies manager Pete Mackanin, who was the Expos' third-base coach for four years while Guerrero was there. “When the pitch was thrown to him, I turned my head and ducked.”
That wasn’t the only way Guerrero could cause discomfort.
“He had so much pine tar on the bat, because he swung barehanded that his hands were all calloused up,” said former Expos teammate Brian Schneider, now a catching coach with the Marlins. “He’d come in all excited. We knew he was going to give us a hard high-five. No one wanted to do it, because his hands were just rocks.”
Guerrero was a gentle giant who always walked with a smile, and whose mom lived with him wherever he called home. In Anaheim, she cooked rice, chicken and beans as the pregame meal for both teams. Guerrero might have just been a big kid out there, but he wasn’t lacking for confidence.
“I saw him rubbing his hands and [smiling, knowing] that we were facing [ace pitcher] Kevin Brown,” former Expos and now Mariners coach Manny Acta said, remembering a game from May 2002. “Brown was so nasty that I was a coach and I feared him. Vlad said, ‘I’ll hit a homer today.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, right.’ In his first at-bat, he hit a bomb to dead center.”
Said Santangelo: “I can remember Brown would ask me, ‘How do I get this guy out?’ I’d say, ‘Just throw it down the middle and hope he hits it at someone.'”
That didn’t work either. Guerrero hit.450 against Brown for his career.
Vladimir, the rival
Glanville saw Guerrero when both were fresh major league faces, Glanville with the Cubs and Guerrero with the Expos. Skipper Jim Riggleman was conducting a meeting, and when Guerrero’s name came up, Glanville’s teammate and pitcher Amaury Telemaco spoke up.
“Bust him inside?” Riggleman asked. “No,” Telemaco said.
“Fastballs away?” Riggleman tried. “No,” Telemaco said. “He can reach those.”
“Slow stuff, get him to chase?” Riggleman asked with a little desperation. “No,” Telemaco said.
“There must be some way to get him out,” Riggleman said.
“There isn’t,” Telemaco said.
Vladimir Guerrero Other Notes * 31-game hitting streak (1999)
(Expos/Nationals record) * 1 HR shy of 40-40 season in 2002 * Hit for cycle vs Mets (2003) * Won Edgar Martinez Award in 2010
(Best DH) * Lowest single-season BA:.290 (2011)
(Final season)
Glanville learned that firsthand once he was traded to the Phillies and got stuck in the same division as Guerrero. Over a four-season span from 1998 to 2001, Guerrero had a.401/.487/832 slash line with 22 home runs and 55 RBIs in 55 games against Glanville's Phillies. This was Guerrero living up to his “Vlad the Impaler” nickname.
“I watched this guy destroy us,” Glanville said. “Everything you threw up there, he hit hard. It was ridiculous. He hit balls that didn’t make sense. And he would hit balls with crazy English and crazy spin. It was like there were chainsaws coming at you.”
Glanville remembers two at-bats in particular. One was a Guerrero missile that sailed past shortstop Desi Relaford's face on a line. “And it was off the wall before I had time to square up to field it in center field," Glanville said.
The other was a 2-0 pitch thrown by teammate Rheal Cormier on July 18, 2001. Glanville estimated its location as “the other batter’s box.” Guerrero stepped in front of the plate and hit an opposite-field walk-off home run.
“I had a good strategy,” Cormier told his teammates, lamenting his fate.
Cormier’s fate mirrored that of Reds pitcher Scott Williamson in 1999. Guerrero had just had his 31-game hitting streak end two days before, and he took out his anger with a walk-off home run.
Guerrero's swing was among the most potent -- and dangerous -- in the major leagues. AP Photo/Todd Ponath
“It disappeared into the darkness way over the wall,” said Aaron Boone, who was Williamson's teammate and is now an ESPN Sunday Night Baseball analyst. “I remember thinking that ball sounded different, like it had been shot out of a cannon.”
Guerrero could hit anything, anywhere. Angels coach Dino Ebel says the only time Guerrero willingly took pitches was at the 2007 Home Run Derby, on the advice of teammate Garret Anderson.
“He took more pitches from me than he did in his whole career,” Ebel said.
That’s not to say pitchers didn’t want their shot at Guerrero. In August 2007, Athletics manager Bob Geren wouldn’t let pitcher Joe Blanton get a shot at a red-hot Guerrero. He had him walk Guerrero with nobody on base in the third inning. Blanton was so mad he threw the four intentional balls at 92 mph.
“Big Joe was not very pleased,” said Dallas Braden, who was Blanton's teammate and is now a Baseball Tonight analyst.
There are many tales of how Guerrero would get hits against pitches that bounced before reaching him -- and video exists to prove it. After Guerrero got such a hit against the Orioles in 2009, broadcaster and Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer said it was the first time in his 47 years in the game that he saw a player essentially do a “drop-kick with a bat.”
Van Horne said that kind of base hit was routine for Guerrero.
“The first time I saw it, I thought it was an accident,” Van Horne said. “But after seeing it many times, I realized it wasn’t an accident. It was great hand-eye coordination.”
Guerrero was as good a bad-ball hitter as there was, and that was true throughout his career. In his last three major league seasons, when he was not at his best -- he batted “only”.290 in his final season -- he hit.249 in at-bats ending with pitches out of the strike zone, 71 points better than the major league average. And he swung at pitches out of the zone more often than any other player.
Vladimir Guerrero excelled against out-of-the-strike-zone pitches even at the end of his career. ESPN Stats & Information
As for his baserunning, Guerrero maintained the fearless reputation that preceded him. Yes, he got caught stealing a lot -- 36 times in 2001-02 -- but in those same seasons he totaled 77 steals. He became a smarter baserunner by the time he got to Anaheim. (His knees also had been damaged from years of playing on artificial turf.) In one three-year span, from 2004 to 2006, he stole 43 bases at an 83 percent clip.
Guerrero also became known for outfield play that bordered on reckless in his early days. “He was the outfielder, and he was going after everything,” Van Horne said. “He felt every ball to the outfield was his. [Manager] Felipe Alou was afraid he was going to get hurt. Once Felipe got that under control, everything fell into place."
Guerrero also had a tendency to overthrow. He led his league in errors nine times, but his arm was so strong that it was intimidating to baserunners and coaches.
"I watched this guy destroy us. Everything you threw up there, he hit hard. It was ridiculous. He hit balls that didn't make sense. And he would hit balls with crazy English and crazy spin. It was like there were chainsaws coming at you." Doug Glanville
“When the ball was hit in his direction, the opposing third-base coach would immediately put his arms up,” Mackanin said.
“He kept hundreds of guys from taking an extra base,” Figueroa said.
Mets catcher Todd Hundley found that out the hard way in June 1997, when he tried to score on Carlos Baerga's double to the wall. Guerrero threw him out with a one-bounce strike from the warning track.
Mets manager Bobby Valentine told reporters after the game: “That was an awesome throw. That guy doesn't need a cutoff or relay. He needs a bigger ballpark."
When Guerrero was in his prime, he could impact a game in as many ways as anyone, even someone like Bonds.
“I can’t remember any player that you had to have perpetual vigilance about like this guy,” Glanville said. “It was like there were five of him on the field.”
Vladimir, the legend
It is entirely possible that Guerrero will not get into the Hall of Fame this time around (writers’ votes must be sent by Dec. 31). Though many stats support his candidacy, there are a few that don’t; for example, he falls below the average WAR for a Hall of Fame right fielder. An early look at results shows he’s on the bubble.
But Guerrero’s legacy is strong and should hold steady for as long as he remains on the ballot.
“With a lot of guys, the older they get, the better they were,” Sisson said. “But the neat thing with Vlad is that all the stories are true. He was a joy to be around. When his name comes up, I think of the greatness, the great plays, the ability and the fearless, passionate way he played the game.”When I was taking Hamlet's avatar around for his virtual makeover, I happened to get an IM from a nice sounding lady who was in a bit of a pickle. You see, she'd recently come back to SL after a nasty relationship, and things had changed a lot since she'd been active. After sharing her moving story, she shyly asked for some L$, telling me that my (Hamlet's) avatar was the nicest she'd ever seen.
Flatterbots like to hang out in high-traffic shops, spamming customers with a story that rarely strays from the script. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with what the first flatterbot I came across that day told me:
Flatterbot1: YOU PUSHED ME!
Flatterbot1: I'm just jokin SL is super wonky and rezzing slow :(
Flatterbot1: wow your avatar looks so cool, what skin are you wearing?
Flatterbot1: I wish I made shapes as good as that, did you make it yourself?
Flatterbot1: I just got back to SL from a long break, omfg everything is so different
Flatterbot1: have you been in SL for a long time?
Flatterbot1: being back here after so long I don't remember anything about the sliders at all, I keep making a chubby round face lol
Flatterbot1:.. mesh is so crazy! and the new skins, I don't even know many of the creators anymore. Who makes the best skins now?
Flatterbot1: I quit because this guy I was seeing from SL asked me to stop playing :(( and I listened because I am stupid :(
Flatterbot1: he said there were too many guys in here and he got jealous.I should have thought it was weird that he was so insecure...
Flatterbot1: meanwhile, he would come on here and give girls his phone number, which I didn't find out until one of them messaged me and I got the offline in my email.
Flatterbot1: I was seeing him IRL and everything like once a month, usually I paid for the plane tickets - meanwhile he was calling girls from SL telling them he loved them.
Flatterbot1: have you ever dated anyone in SL?
Flatterbot1: sorry to treat you like you are my therapist or something :( guess I just needed to talk about it
Flatterbot1: then right after that because I was so angry, I wanted to message the girls and tell them how I felt, but I couldn't bring myself to do it
Flatterbot1: but here I am back again, starting over as a newb. Everything that I had in my inventory was so out of date anyway
Flatterbot1: your avatar is really nice though truly, one of the best ones I have seen since I have been back, you should be proud of it, you did an amazing job
Flatterbot1: mind if I ask a favor :X
Flatterbot1: I know I just randomly imed you and it's so rude of me to ask but do you think there is any way you could help me a little bit with getting started again? Maybe like 300l so I can get a hair or something
Flatterbot1: I want to reinvent myself in SL, no dating unless the guy is just like so amazing that I can't resist it
Flatterbot1: thank you so much!!!
I didn't reply or give her any money, she just ran through her script from start to finish, even after I'd left the area. Now compare the speech above with this snippet from the second flatterbot I dealt with that day:
Flatterbot2: don't you be pushin me!
Flatterbot2: I'm just kidding but we can be bumper car avatars!
Flatterbot2: holy crap you have an amazing avatar!
Flatterbot2: I am art retarded, I never make good avatars! Did you make yours?
Flatterbot2: I just got back to SL from a long break, omfg everything is so different
Flatterbot2: you look like you have been in SL for a long time, have you?
Flatterbot2: being back here after so long I don't remember anything about the sliders at all, I keep making a chubby round face lol
Sound familiar? Though they usually look like regular avatar and have names no different than anyone else's (I changed them for the purposes of this post), there's a pretty clear pattern to identify them by. First she teases you for bumping into her, then she compliments you, then she shares her sympathetic story before driving it home with a compliment and the innocent request for L$. But there's a little more to these bots than just an unimaginative story being repeated ad nauseam. Flatterbots aren't true bots... They may be automating their IMs to beg, but there are still people at the keyboards too... But they'll hardly win your sympathy with their original words.-- they're just as rude and unpleasant as you might expect. This morning I popped over to a store with a heavy bot presence and while I received the same tired story from today's bot-du-jour, she was simultaneously arguing with a customer in local chat who had presumably called her out:
Flatterbot3: I can just tell by what you say that SL is all you have
Flatterbot3: that is reserved for fat people who are quite invested in a subreality
Flatterbot3: because they can't make stuff happen irl
What a charmer. Doesn't that just make you want to give her L$200?
So what can we do about it? It's important to know that store owners are usually aware of they have a Flatterbot infestation. They can ban them until they're blue in the face but the next bot is only an alt away, so there's only so much they can do. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't send the owner of a shop the name of a pestering bot that's harassing their customers; they'll likely still want to ban them, but the most important thing is to make sure that you, your friends, and other customers are familiar with the scam and know to ignore it.
The saddest part of this to me is that helping new players makeover their avatars can be incredibly fun and rewarding and a great way to make friends, but these bullshit bots are ruining it for everyone and jading altruistic fashionistas. If you really like to help people in SL, the lesson to take away from this is not to stop sharing with and giving to others, but to change the way you do it. Get to know someone, offer to buy them something specific off the SL Marketplace, never pay out any L$ unless you really know who it's going to.Bestselling epic fantasy author George RR Martin has sent his fans into a frenzy after announcing that he has written 1,261 pages of the long-awaited fifth volume in his Song of Ice and Fire series.
It is five years since Martin published the fourth novel in the epic series, set in a medieval-esque world where a wall of ice protects the land of Westeros, and the wait for A Dance with Dragons has prompted extraordinary levels of anticipation from readers. Some have even created a poster mimicking the Conservative party's new campaign, which shows David Cameron promising "vote for us and we'll ensure A Dance with Dragons is released in 2010". "I seem to have become a Tory campaign issue," wrote Martin in a message to his publisher.
Fans' vocal impatience for the next instalment reached such a pitch last year that Martin issued an angry statement to stem a rising tide of anger. "Some of you are angry about the miniatures, the swords, the resin busts, the games. You don't want me 'wasting time' on those, or talking about them here. Some of you are angry that I watch football during the fall," the author wrote. "Some of you don't want me attending conventions, teaching workshops, touring and doing promo... After all, as some of you like to point out in your emails, I am 60 years old and fat, and you don't want me to 'pull a Robert Jordan' on you and deny you your book. OK, I've got the message. You don't want me doing anything except A Song of Ice and Fire. Ever. (Well, maybe it's OK if I take a leak once in a while?)"
Now, the author described as "the American Tolkien" by Time magazine has poked his head above the parapet again, telling fans that A Dance with Dragons has now become the second longest volume in his series, that he's been knocking off chapters and having "good, productive" days of writing. Huge excitement ensued from readers, but Martin attempted to douse the flames. "Jeez, guys. Calm down," he said on his blog. "This is why I hate to do updates. I say I have good day, and immediately I have 100 people deciding this means that Dance is finished. I'm not the oracle at Delphi... When I finish Dance, you'll know it. I will write something like this: 'I have finished A Dance with Dragons.' You won't need to parse any hints."
But he failed to calm some readers down. "Where's the book, Mr Martin, where's the book? :) Here in Russia we are waiting, and waiting, and waiting," wrote one of the more eager fans.
Martin is not the only author to come under pressure from avid readers – and the fantasy genre appears to provoke particularly insistent readers. In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King related how he had been contacted by a sick old woman desperate to find out how his Dark Tower fantasy series ended before she died. Might King share his ending with her? The author said he had to tell her that he himself didn't know what was going to happen in the series, which eventually spanned seven books. The Robert Jordan referred to by Martin, meanwhile, is the author of the epic Wheel of Time fantasy series. He died after writing 11 Wheel of Time books, with the series currently being finished by author Brandon Sanderson.Dane Jackson 08/05/2011 | Posted in Whitewater
So far the Whitewater Grand Prix has been epic. We have done 2 stages. The first stage was a big trick contest on the Gladiator wave. That was very interesting and super sweet. It was super beefy that day so lots of people missed the wave trying to avoid the pit. The only way to be sure to catch it was to just man up and drop in the meat. I caught it every time except once that day. Those who did catch it did some nice tricks. I did lots of airscrews and pan ams. Nick did some nice airscrews and pans ams as well. Rush Sturges did some nice stuff. Tino Spect did a huge pan amMarr did some huge pan ams. It was a close call between me and him that day. He came out on top when it came to the judging. But i am fired up with 2nd place. It was a long 6 hours and everyone had a sick day. The next day we headed to the Ruins wave just outside of ottawa city. It was a “rest” day in between the 2 events. Yet it was the most awesome and tiring day of all. It was high water so it was very hard to catch. But once you did it was the most fun wave ever. I think it is my new favorite wave. You could do everything on it. It was a great wave for combos and just going huge. It is a giant garberator pretty much. Its the perfect wave. I wish we could have gotten more than one day on it. But i am still recovering from that one day. Lots of big tricks. The next stage was a boatercross on the Rouge river. It was class 4-5 big water. It was intimidating by itself. And yet we did a 21 person mass start on it. It was chaotic but amazing. Everyone was super fired up with the mass start. It was the greatest boatercross of all time. I didnt make it past the second round but it was still an awesome day. Nick got first with Bryan Kirk in second. Another epic day. Now we are in La Tuque for a time trial creek race tomorrow. Should be sweet.
Ruins Video
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZh1E-dkgpg[/youtube]By Steven Goddard and Anthony Watts
From the New York Daily News via Associated Press reports :
Global warming resolves 30-year land dispute between India, Bangladesh: Coveted island sinks By NIRMALA GEORGE, Associated Press Writer Nirmala George, Associated Press Writer – Wed Mar 24, 9:29 am ET NEW DELHI – For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island’s gone. New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said. “What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming,” said Hazra.
Note in the map below that the island was a river estuary, meaning it wasn’t made out of rock as claimed. It was made out of mud and sand. From Wikipedia:
The island was situated only two kilometers from the mouth of the Hariabhanga River. The emergence of the island was first discovered by an American satellite in 1974 that showed the island to have an area of 2,500 sq meters (27,000 sq ft). Later, various remote sensing surveys showed that the island had expanded gradually to an area of about 10,000 sq meters (110,000 sq ft) at low tide, including a number of ordinarily submerged shoals. The highest elevation of the island had never exceeded two meters above sea level. [1]
… The island was claimed by both Bangladesh and India, although neither country established any permanent settlement there because of the island’s geographical instability. India had reportedly hoisted the Indian flag on South Talpatti in 1981 and established a temporary base of Border Security Forces (BSF) on the island, regularly visiting with naval gunships. [3][4]
Wikipedia Map
The AP claim (probably from Seth Borenstein) is that global warming induced sea level rise has submerged the island, and that is complete nonsense.
Let’s look at sea level trends in the region. Here’s the NOAA Tides and Currents map of the area from their interactive web site.
NOAA’s nearest tide gauge shows sea level rising in that region at 0.54 mm / year, which means that would take nearly 2000 years for sea level to rise one meter. See the plot below:
Note that since the island was first discovered in 1974, the sea level graph above shows 19.4 mm (0.76 inches) rise based on a rate of 0.54mm/year.
Sea level rise is a relative phenomenon. It can be caused by sea rising, or land sinking. Sort of like sitting on a train at the station, and you can’t tell if your train has started moving or the adjacent one.
Looking at a satellite image of the Bangladesh delta, one can see how tides, currents, silts, and other factors shape what is a tenuous boundary between land and sea:
Temporary estuary islands and sandbars appear and disappear all the time worldwide. Sometimes it can take a few years, sometimes a few centuries. Note that most of the area near South Talpatti Island is only 1-3 meters above sea level anyway, which means that such low lying islands made of mud and sand are prone to the whims of tide and currents and weather.
Low lying islands are modified by nature on a regular basis. For example we have Chandeleur Lighthouse in Louisiana
From USGS:
The lighthouse was situated on land until Hurricane Georges (September 28, 1998). After that the island had eroded from under the lighthouse such that the lighthouse appeared to be in open water. Since Georges, although the island had reformed behind the lighthouse, the lighthouse remained in open water. The pre-Ivan photo (August 11, 2004) shows the lighthouse in open water about 30 m from the shoreline, and the northern tip of the island was relatively broad and extended several hundred meters north of the lighthouse. … It was probably the cumulative effect of four hurricanes in 7 years that resulted in the deep erosion (evidenced by lack of shoaling) seen now after Hurricane Ivan.
And looking further back in time, islands have disappeared before: from the Sarasota Herald – May 29, 1937
While we are on the subject of islands disappearing into the Indian Ocean, even more interesting is the 2002 discovery nearby of a 9,000 year old city, submerged 36 metres off the coast of India.
==================
The city is believed to predate the Harappan civilisation
Lost city ‘could rewrite history’
By BBC News Online’s Tom Housden
The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history.
Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old.
The vast city – which is five miles long and two miles wide – is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.
=================
How many Hummers were they driving 9,000 years ago? Chalk up another clueless AGW claim. Sea level rises and/or land subsides, estuary flows change, and sandbars appear and disappear. In this case of a tiny sandbar/island near the Bangladesh delta, it has nothing to do with global warming.
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RedditAccording to Mike Garafalo's Fox Sports report, and subsequently confirmed by Bob Condotta, officials are considering adding 2,000–3,000 additional seats on the 300 level at the south end of the stadium, where there is currently a break in the 300-level seats. This would bring Centurylink's capacity to somewhere between 69,000–71,000, depending on how many they add and the configuration of the additional seats/standing room tickets they can currently sell.
The first impact the Sounders could feel would be construction woes, though I am not enough of an expert to speculate on how long construction would take or even if construction in one section of the upper deck would have any significant impact on Sounders matches. It is a question to be answered, though.
The biggest immediate positive? The Rave Green faithful would have an opportunity to crush the MLS single-game attendance record (which excludes double-headers) set in the league's inaugural game between the LA Galaxy and the New York Metrostars of 69,255. The Sounders have made crushing attendance records passé, but this one is more or less the Holy Grail of attendance records. If the Sounders could manage 71,000, they could also make it the 5th highest attended MLS match of all time, |
"Blackfriday" I will be posting pics and taking pre-orders. I am taking pre-orders because this is the first run of the product and I have no clue how much demand there will be. I do not want to under manufacture or over manufacture since there is considerable cost involved. Production time is approximately 2 weeks and I will be shipping immediately upon receipt of the product. The card will cost $19.99 (BC of course) and that includes. So if you live on a private island I will still ship it to you for free :-). The first batch created will be also branded with "Special Edition" and other cool goodies I do not want to mention just yet. Some of the proceeds from each sale will go to the dev team and back into this community to fund other projects. A website is currently being developed for the card and once we are live I will be doing a promotional campaign promoting BC and the card!!!
PeterPalmBeach
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SellALL, BuyBTC
Sr. MemberActivity: 336Merit: 250SellALL, BuyBTC Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC) | on exchanges | PoS | No premine April 10, 2014, 01:26:42 PM #14186 Quote from: TheGift73 on April 10, 2014, 01:22:52 PM Quote from: IconicExpert on April 10, 2014, 01:16:43 PM A Few Announcements!!!
2.) As everyone here might already know BlackCoin is being added to CoinKite! They have a debit card that can be branded and used at their shops. SoepKip notified me a few days ago about the news and a decision was made I will not longer produce a separate Visa card. We do not want to cause confusion in the marketplace, and we also do not want to incite unnecessary competition amongst ourselves. Instead, I have decided to support the CoinKite project and use my resources in helping that partnership grow.
3.) As I previously announced I will be using my own resources to quickly build a network and infrastructure around BlackCoin. I wholeheartedly disagree this coin or community should take baby steps. We need more talented people who are willing to help in any way they can to help this community grow.
4.) Finally... Today I would like to announce the BlackCoin Card Wallet. As some of you know I am software and product developer, and since CoinKite will eventually supply our debit cards, I wanted to shift focus and create something special for the community. I contacted rat4 and Soepkip about a portable BC wallet the size of a credit card. The dev team liked the idea so I began immediately making it happen.
So what exactly is the Blackcoin Card Wallet?
The BlackCoin Card Wallet is a completely branded BC card with a pull out USB dongle. It will be loaded with a custom BlackCoin start menu and the wallet pre loaded. When you insert the wallet into your computer the menu will automatically launch, and you will have access to your wallet, current market prices, BC news, and other elements all in one place! What makes this exciting is you will not only be able to keep your wallet with you at all times, in the event you need to access your funds you will be able to do it at any Windows computer. The blockchain and all other data will already be loaded on the card. (Obviously if you do not plug the card in regularly it will take longer for it to sync). Also, the launcher will automatically update the wallet to the current version automatically.
Another benefit of the card is you can pre-load as many coins as you like and give the cards away to family and friends as "gift cards". They will not need to be tech savvy to use it! Just insert and go! This is a great way to introduce others to BlackCoin.
And lets be honest, wouldn't it be cool to walk around with a BlackCoin wallet card with the sexy logo?
Tomorrow for "Blackfriday" I will be posting pics and taking pre-orders. I am taking pre-orders because this is the first run of the product and I have no clue how much demand there will be. I do not want to under manufacture or over manufacture since there is considerable cost involved. Production time is approximately 2 weeks and I will be shipping immediately upon receipt of the product. The card will cost $19.99 (BC of course) and that includes free shipping worldwide. So if you live on a private island I will still ship it to you for free :-). The first batch created will be also branded with "Special Edition" and other cool goodies I do not want to mention just yet. Some of the proceeds from each sale will go to the dev team and back into this community to fund other projects. A website is currently being developed for the card and once we are live I will be doing a promotional campaign promoting BC and the card!!! 1.) First I want to thank everyone who supported Blackout Wednesday! Our press release was read over 100,000 times on over 111 sites: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22BlackCoin%20Popularity%20%26%20Value%20Soars%20Due%20to%20Revolutionary%22 2.) As everyone here might already know BlackCoin is being added to CoinKite! They have a debit card that can be branded and used at their shops. SoepKip notified me a few days ago about the news and a decision was made I will not longer produce a separate Visa card. We do not want to cause confusion in the marketplace, and we also do not want to incite unnecessary competition amongst ourselves. Instead, I have decided to support the CoinKite project and use my resources in helping that partnership grow.3.) As I previously announced I will be using my own resources to quickly build a network and infrastructure around BlackCoin. I wholeheartedly disagree this coin or community should take baby steps. We need more talented people who are willing to help in any way they can to help this community grow.The BlackCoin Card Wallet is a completely branded BC card with a pull out USB dongle. It will be loaded with a custom BlackCoin start menu and the wallet pre loaded. When you insert the wallet into your computer the menu will, and you will have access to your wallet, current market prices, BC news, and other elements all in one place! What makes this exciting is you will not only be able to keep your wallet with you at all times, in the event you need to access your funds you will be able to do it at any Windows computer.(Obviously if you do not plug the card in regularly it will take longer for it to sync). Also, the launcher will automatically update the wallet to the current version automatically.And lets be honest, wouldn't it be cool to walk around with a BlackCoin wallet card with the sexy logo?Tomorrow for "Blackfriday" I will be posting pics and taking pre-orders. I am taking pre-orders because this is the first run of the product and I have no clue how much demand there will be. I do not want to under manufacture or over manufacture since there is considerable cost involved. Production time is approximately 2 weeks and I will be shipping immediately upon receipt of the product. The card will cost $19.99 (BC of course) and that includes. So if you live on a private island I will still ship it to you for free :-). The first batch created will be also branded with "Special Edition" and other cool goodies I do not want to mention just yet. Some of the proceeds from each sale will go to the dev team and back into this community to fund other projects. A website is currently being developed for the card and once we are live I will be doing a promotional campaign promoting BC and the card!!!
Awesome stuff Iconic. Really looking forward to checking this out.
Awesome stuff Iconic. Really looking forward to checking this out.
I'll be first to order! I'll be first to order!
digicidal
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Merit: 250
Sr. MemberActivity: 392Merit: 250 Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC) | on exchanges | PoS | No premine April 10, 2014, 01:29:23 PM #14187 Quote from: B737 on April 10, 2014, 01:13:47 PM Is there a way how we can counter attack the dumper who keeps it below 10k? I'm getting pretty tired of his game.
Just a brainfart: Can we just collect the blackcoinpool profits for a few days and than buy the shit up? The whale will shit in his pants when his fake walls gets instafilled by us?
Although it's possible that there is simply one or two massive BC holders who are responsible, it's also entirely possible that this behavior will continue for several days... 10K represents huge psychological resistance for many... and unknown territory for everyone. It's quite possible that even if a single buyer of 25-50BTC were to throw an order in to push the price up... it would fall almost instantly as dozens of people rushed to fill those orders with what they consider 'expensive BC'.
The question you should ask is more "why do you want it above 10K right now?" because that's probably just as important. If you want it at 10K so you can sell... then you aren't actually any different than someone posting those sell orders at just under that mark. On the other hand if you're going to sit on your BC until it hits 100K - then you will still (one day) be him... hoping all your orders get filled at 100K before it corrects again.
However, if you are that second guy... then we're talking about price moves which will then represent less than 1% total volatility... at which point it time BC will be more stable than the US Dollar, the Yen, and the Euro - combined!
@IconicExpert (re: Card) Incredible! Fantastic idea and I look forward to holding one of those'special edition' cards. Although it's possible that there is simply one or two massive BC holders who are responsible, it's also entirely possible that this behavior will continue for several days... 10K represents huge psychological resistance for many... and unknown territory for everyone. It's quite possible that even if a single buyer of 25-50BTC were to throw an order in to push the price up... it would fall almost instantly as dozens of people rushed to fill those orders with what they consider 'expensive BC'.The question you should ask is more "why do you want it above 10K right now?" because that's probably just as important. If you want it at 10K so you can sell... then you aren't actually any different than someone posting those sell orders at just under that mark. On the other hand if you're going to sit on your BC until it hits 100K - then you will still (one day) be him... hoping all your orders get filled at 100K before it corrects again.However, if you are that second guy... then we're talking about price moves which will then represent less than 1% total volatility... at which point it time BC will be more stable than the US Dollar, the Yen, and the Euro - combined!@IconicExpert (re: Card) Incredible! Fantastic idea and I look forward to holding one of those'special edition' cards.
BEECoinfan
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Sr. MemberActivity: 308Merit: 250 Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC) | on exchanges | PoS | No premine April 10, 2014, 01:32:02 PM #14190 Quote from: PeterPalmBeach on April 10, 2014, 01:26:42 PM Quote from: TheGift73 on April 10, 2014, 01:22:52 PM Quote from: IconicExpert on April 10, 2014, 01:16:43 PM A Few Announcements!!!
2.) As everyone here might already know BlackCoin is being added to CoinKite! They have a debit card that can be branded and used at their shops. SoepKip notified me a few days ago about the news and a decision was made I will not longer produce a separate Visa card. We do not want to cause confusion in the marketplace, and we also do not want to incite unnecessary competition amongst ourselves. Instead, I have decided to support the CoinKite project and use my resources in helping that partnership grow.
3.) As I previously announced I will be using my own resources to quickly build a network and infrastructure around BlackCoin. I wholeheartedly disagree this coin or community should take baby steps. We need more talented people who are willing to help in any way they can to help this community grow.
4.) Finally... Today I would like to announce the BlackCoin Card Wallet. As some of you know I am software and product developer, and since CoinKite will eventually supply our debit cards, I wanted to shift focus and create something special for the community. I contacted rat4 and Soepkip about a portable BC wallet the size of a credit card. The dev team liked the idea so I began immediately making it happen.
So what exactly is the Blackcoin Card Wallet?
The BlackCoin Card Wallet is a completely branded BC card with a pull out USB dongle. It will be loaded with a custom BlackCoin start menu and the wallet pre loaded. When you insert the wallet into your computer the menu will automatically launch, and you will have access to your wallet, current market prices, BC news, and other elements all in one place! What makes this exciting is you will not only be able to keep your wallet with you at all times, in the event you need to access your funds you will be able to do it at any Windows computer. The blockchain and all other data will already be loaded on the card. (Obviously if you do not plug the card in regularly it will take longer for it to sync). Also, the launcher will automatically update the wallet to the current version automatically.
Another benefit of the card is you can pre-load as many coins as you like and give the cards away to family and friends as "gift cards". They will not need to be tech savvy to use it! Just insert and go! This is a great way to introduce others to BlackCoin.
And lets be honest, wouldn't it be cool to walk around with a BlackCoin wallet card with the sexy logo?
Tomorrow for "Blackfriday" I will be posting pics and taking pre-orders. I am taking pre-orders because this is the first run of the product and I have no clue how much demand there will be. I do not want to under manufacture or over manufacture since there is considerable cost involved. Production time is approximately 2 weeks and I will be shipping immediately upon receipt of the product. The card will cost $19.99 (BC of course) and that includes free shipping worldwide. So if you live on a private island I will still ship it to you for free :-). The first batch created will be also branded with "Special Edition" and other cool goodies I do not want to mention just yet. Some of the proceeds from each sale will go to the dev team and back into this community to fund other projects. A website is currently being developed for the card and once we are live I will be doing a promotional campaign promoting BC and the card!!! 1.) First I want to thank everyone who supported Blackout Wednesday! Our press release was read over 100,000 times on over 111 sites: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22BlackCoin%20Popularity%20%26%20Value%20Soars%20Due%20to%20Revolutionary%22 2.) As everyone here might already know BlackCoin is being added to CoinKite! They have a debit card that can be branded and used at their shops. SoepKip notified me a few days ago about the news and a decision was made I will not longer produce a separate Visa card. We do not want to cause confusion in the marketplace, and we also do not want to incite unnecessary competition amongst ourselves. Instead, I have decided to support the CoinKite project and use my resources in helping that partnership grow.3.) As I previously announced I will be using my own resources to quickly build a network and infrastructure around BlackCoin. I wholeheartedly disagree this coin or community should take baby steps. We need more talented people who are willing to help in any way they can to help this community grow.The BlackCoin Card Wallet is a completely branded BC card with a pull out USB dongle. It will be loaded with a custom BlackCoin start menu and the wallet pre loaded. When you insert the wallet into your computer the menu will, and you will have access to your wallet, current market prices, BC news, and other elements all in one place! What makes this exciting is you will not only be able to keep your wallet with you at all times, in the event you need to access your funds you will be able to do it at any Windows computer.(Obviously if you do not plug the card in regularly it will take longer for it to sync). Also, the launcher will automatically update the wallet to the current version automatically.And lets be honest, wouldn't it be cool to walk around with a BlackCoin wallet card with the sexy logo?Tomorrow for "Blackfriday" I will be posting pics and taking pre-orders. I am taking pre-orders because this is the first run of the product and I have no clue how much demand there will be. I do not want to under manufacture or over manufacture since there is considerable cost involved. Production time is approximately 2 weeks and I will be shipping immediately upon receipt of the product. The card will cost $19.99 (BC of course) and that includes. So if you live on a private island I will still ship it to you for free :-). The first batch created will be also branded with "Special Edition" and other cool goodies I do not want to mention just yet. Some of the proceeds from each sale will go to the dev team and back into this community to fund other projects. A website is currently being developed for the card and once we are live I will be doing a promotional campaign promoting BC and the card!!!
Awesome stuff Iconic. Really looking forward to checking this out.
Awesome stuff Iconic. Really looking forward to checking this out.
I'll be first to order!
I'll be first to order!
Put me down for one as well! Thanks Iconic for your hard work and making this happen! Put me down for one as well! Thanks Iconic for your hard work and making this happen! ANONIBET BET LIVE MATCHES
hamm3r
Offline
Activity: 245
Merit: 250
Sr. MemberActivity: 245Merit: 250 Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC) | on exchanges | PoS | No premine April 10, 2014, 01:33:23 PM #14192 Quote from: IconicExpert on April 10, 2014, 01:16:43 PM A Few Announcements!!!
2.) As everyone here might already know BlackCoin is being added to CoinKite! They have a debit card that can be branded and used at their shops. SoepKip notified me a few days ago about the news and a decision was made I will not longer produce a separate Visa card. We do not want to cause confusion in the marketplace, and we also do not want to incite unnecessary competition amongst ourselves. Instead, I have decided to support the CoinKite project and use my resources in helping that partnership grow.
3.) As I previously announced I will be using my own resources to quickly build a network and infrastructure around BlackCoin. I wholeheartedly disagree this coin or community should take baby steps. We need more talented people who are willing to help in any way they can to help this community grow.
4.) Finally... Today I would like to announce the BlackCoin Card Wallet. As some of you know I am software and product developer, and since CoinKite will eventually supply our debit cards, I wanted to shift focus and create something special for the community. I contacted rat4 and Soepkip about a portable BC wallet the size of a credit card. The dev team liked the idea so I began immediately making it happen.
So what exactly is the Blackcoin Card Wallet?
The BlackCoin Card Wallet is a completely branded BC card with a pull out USB dongle. It will be loaded with a custom BlackCoin start menu and the wallet pre loaded. When you insert the wallet into your computer the menu will automatically launch, and you will have access to your wallet, current market prices, BC news, and other elements all in one place! What makes this exciting is you will not only be able to keep your wallet with you at all times, in the event you need to access your funds you will be able to do it at any Windows computer. The blockchain and all other data will already be loaded on the card. (Obviously if you do not plug the card in regularly it will take longer for it to sync). Also, the launcher will automatically update the wallet to the current version automatically.
Another benefit of the card is you can pre-load as many coins as you like and give the cards away to family and friends as "gift cards". They will not need to be tech savvy to use it! Just insert and go! This is a great way to introduce others to BlackCoin.
And lets be honest, wouldn't it be cool to walk around with a BlackCoin wallet card with the sexy logo?
Tomorrow for "Blackfriday" I will be posting pics and taking pre-orders. I am taking pre-orders because this is the first run of the product and I have no clue how much demand there will be. I do not want to under manufacture or over manufacture since there is considerable cost involved. Production time is approximately 2 weeks and I will be shipping immediately upon receipt of the product. The card will cost $19.99 (BC of course) and that includes free shipping worldwide. So if you live on a private island I will still ship it to you for free :-). The first batch created will be also branded with "Special Edition" and other cool goodies I do not want to mention just yet. Some of the proceeds from each sale will go to the dev team and back into this community to fund other projects. A website is currently being developed for the card and once we are live I will be doing a promotional campaign promoting BC and the card!!! 1.) First I want to thank everyone who supported Blackout Wednesday! Our press release was read over 100,000 times on over 111 sites: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22BlackCoin%20Popularity%20%26%20Value%20Soars%20Due%20to%20Revolutionary%22 2.) As everyone here might already know BlackCoin is being added to CoinKite! They have a debit card that can be branded and used at their shops. SoepKip notified me a few days ago about the news and a decision was made I will not longer produce a separate Visa card. We do not want to cause confusion in the marketplace, and we also do not want to incite unnecessary competition amongst ourselves. Instead, I have decided to support the CoinKite project and use my resources in helping that partnership grow.3.) As I previously announced I will be using my own resources to quickly build a network and infrastructure around BlackCoin. I wholeheartedly disagree this coin or community should take baby steps. We need more talented people who are willing to help in any way they can to help this community grow.The BlackCoin Card Wallet is a completely branded BC card with a pull out USB dongle. It will be loaded with a custom BlackCoin start menu and the wallet pre loaded. When you insert the wallet into your computer the menu will, and you will have access to your wallet, current market prices, BC news, and other elements all in one place! What makes this exciting is you will not only be able to keep your wallet with you at all times, in the event you need to access your funds you will be able to do it at any Windows computer.(Obviously if you do not plug the card in regularly it will take longer for it to sync). Also, the launcher will automatically update the wallet to the current version automatically.And lets be honest, wouldn't it be cool to walk around with a BlackCoin wallet card with the sexy logo?Tomorrow for "Blackfriday" I will be posting pics and taking pre-orders. I am taking pre-orders because this is the first run of the product and I have no clue how much demand there will be. I do not want to under manufacture or over manufacture since there is considerable cost involved. Production time is approximately 2 weeks and I will be shipping immediately upon receipt of the product. The card will cost $19.99 (BC of course) and that includes. So if you live on a private island I will still ship it to you for free :-). The first batch created will be also branded with "Special Edition" and other cool goodies I do not want to mention just yet. Some of the proceeds from each sale will go to the dev team and back into this community to fund other projects. A website is currently being developed for the card and once we are live I will be doing a promotional campaign promoting BC and the card!!!
Kewl stuff mate! never seize to amaze;) I want one! Also this makes using the coin so much easier for the lesser savvy (but still very modern) people! Kewl stuff mate! never seize to amaze;) I want one! Also this makes using the coin so much easier for the lesser savvy (but still very modern) people!
colinfx
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Sr. MemberActivity: 350Merit: 250 Re: [ANN] BlackCoin (BC) | on exchanges | PoS | No premine April 10, 2014, 01:34:24 PM #14193
We need to get BlackCoin added to
See their tweet here:
https://twitter.com/Bittylicious_/status/454165460314255360
Providing an avenue for the general public to buy BlackCoin directly is of paramount importance. We need to start bringing investors in from outside of crypto world, and this is just another option for the outside world.
So can we do that now please?
Please email admin@bittylicious.com and ask for them to add blackcoin.
This is an awesome community, we can get this done!
Everyone, I need your help:We need to get BlackCoin added to http://bittylicious.com, it will allow BC to be purchased with GBP. Please email admin@bittylicious.com and tell them you are willing to sell blackcoin on their site. They are concerned that there will be no supply. Please take a moment to to this now.See their tweet here:Providing an avenue for the general public to buy BlackCoin directly is of paramount importance. We need to start bringing investors in from outside of crypto world, and this is just another option for the outside world.So can we do that now please?Please emailand ask for them to add blackcoin.This is an awesome community, we can get this done!Pat Riley’s goal for this summer was clearly to sign Gordon Hayward. It had been that way for quite a while. He downplayed it because, well, it was always going to be exceedingly difficult to execute.
Hayward tugged at our heartstrings for a few weeks, when reports emerged that allowed us to believe it was actually possible. For a couple days in there, even likely. But, in the end, the Heat finished right where it was always going to finish. In third. Behind the two, Boston and Utah, who were always going to finish 1-2 (in whatever order).
Riley was prepared. We all were.
The non-Hayward plan: Re-sign Dion Waiters and James Johnson, and try to squeeze out some extra cap room for whatever else might come along.
Perhaps it wasn’t the most exhilarating plan, but it was grounded in something real.
Despite an exasperating 11-30 start to the 2016-17 season, the Heat pulled off an unprecedented reversal in its final 41 games, posting a 30-11 mark that was good for second-best in the league and made it the first team to ever fall more than 12 games under.500 and climb all the way back to even.
They did it by employing the most fundamental of basketball principles: drive, and kick.
The Heat drove to the basket more than any other team in the NBA last season (35.1 times per game), and no single pair of teammates did it more frequently than Dragic (11.9 per game) and Waiters (11.0 per game). Only two players in the league averaged more drives per game than Dragic (Isaiah Thomas and Dennis Schroder) and only two others more than Waiters (John Wall and Russell Westbrook).
What made the philosophy work so well for the Heat was not that they were lethal scorers at the rim. They weren’t. Waiters, in fact, shot a rather awful 42.8% when driving last season (surely an area for improvement this season). What made it work so well is that they both passed so much. When they drove, they passed the ball a combined 44% of the time.
Dragic and Waiters each became exceptionally proficient at collapsing the defense to stop their penetration, then passing back out to create open looks for teammates — which for the Heat led to numerous easy chances at the rim for Hassan Whiteside, and tons of open 3-pointers for its well-spaced perimeter shooters.
So, with such a strategy, it would make sense that the Heat’s 3-point shooting success would correlate strongly with its overall success. Miami shot what would be an NBA-best 41.0% on 3-pointers in its 41 wins, and what would be an NBA-worst 31.7% in its 41 losses.
A full 89.1% of the Heat’s made 3-pointers last season came off assists, the second-highest percentage in the league, most of them a direct assist by Dragic or Waiters or a hockey-assist after ball rotation along the perimeter. Shocking, perhaps, for a team without a true point guard.
Dragic and Waiters developed a wonderful chemistry along the way, not only because they each took the solo burden of driving and kicking to jump start the Heat’s offense off each other but also because they each became the other’s best floor spacer. Consider this: 16% of Dragic’s shot attempts last season came from spot-up 3-point chances, which he converted at a 40.4% clip… and 22% of Waiters’ shot attempts came from spot-up 3-point chances, which he converted at a team-best 43.4% clip. And this: Dragic converted his 3-pointers at a 51.0% clip when he shared the court with Waiters and just 35.1% without him… while Waiters converted his 3-pointers at a 42.6% clip when he shared the court with Dragic and just 35.5% without him. And most of all this: Dragic shot 62.1% on his 3-point attempts after receiving a pass from Waiters… and Waiters shot 42.9% on his 3-point attempts after receiving a pass from Dragic.
Get a couple of guys who can each break down a defense and willingly and effectively space the floor for the other, pair them with a couple of sweet shooters and the league’s most imposing big, and it’s not all that hard to see how a team short on talent can still find success. That’s what happens when you create and capitalize on a perfectly spaced floor (both vertically and horizontally) on offense, and combine it with stellar defense: Dragic (0.1% below), Waiters (4.3% below), James Johnson (4.8% below) and Whiteside (2.0% below) each held the man he was guarding below his season average field goal percentage; and when they missed, Whiteside typically cleaned the glass, finishing second in the league in defensive rebounding percentage (34.9%).
But when Waiters went down with an ankle sprain in mid-March, he took the offense with him. Which taught the Heat a painful but valuable lesson – that secondary playmaker was a critical part of the formula.
Neither Tyler Johnson nor Josh Richardson proved particularly effective at it. Each struggled at times this season, as their roles transitioned from among the league’s best floor-spacing shooters last season (Richardson having led the NBA in 3-point shooting after the All-Star Break at 53%; Johnson having shot 41% on 3-pointers on the season, excluding heaves) to secondary playmakers. These are guys who excel with their feet set. They’re 3&D guys on steroids. They can ferociously attack the rim when the situation presents itself, but creating offense for themselves and others is not really part of their core skill-set.
Ultimately, the answer came from the most unlikely of places: third-string, single-season rental forward James Johnson.
In the absence of Waiters, the Heat unleashed Johnson as its supremely-versatile secondary playmaker. His reincarnation as an in-shape point-forward proved to be a severe match-up problem for opposing defenses — allowing him to effortlessly glide past bigger defenders, and power through smaller ones.
Johnson did a bit of everything for the Heat last season – he led the fast-break, dished out some slick passes, knocked down some big shots, grabbed some big boards, and played some awesome defense while guarding every position on the court. He even shot a career-best 34.0% on 3-pointers. And when Waiters went down, he adjusted accordingly — ratcheting up his basket-driving to 8.2 per game over the final 10 games to compensate, passing out of it less than Waiters but finishing more and with astounding efficiency (shooting 62.8% on his drives).
Dragic, Waiters and Johnson each provided his own brand of fireworks to spearhead the Heat offense at various points in the season. Whether it was in transition, in isolation, or in the pick-and-roll, each player’s ability to attack the paint created easy chances at the rim and open looks for teammates along the perimeter. When they knocked them down, the Heat tended to win. When they didn’t, they tended to lose.
The three didn’t actually play a whole lot together. But when they did, it was highly successful.
During the second half of the season, when Dragic, Waiters, James Johnson and Whiteside shared the floor, in 121 minutes over 20 games, the team produced a staggering offensive rating of 127.2 (points scored per 100 possessions) and a staggering net rating of 24.2 (margin of victory per 100 possessions), each far and away the team’s best four-man-unit that included long-term pieces Dragic and Whiteside. Such lineups shot a combined 53.7% from the floor, and 51.1% from the 3-point line on what would be an NBA second-best 35.7 attempts per 48 minutes. The Heat went 17-3 in those games.
Of course, during the first half of the season, when those same four players shared the floor, in 58 minutes over 14 games, the 3s weren’t falling (23.5%). As a result, the Heat offense was downright awful (84.2 rating). So there’s some risk there – particularly with Dragic, Waiters and Johnson each having shot out of his mind last season.
Which seems to suggest that a Heat team centered around Dragic, Waiters, Johnson and Whiteside can be special if they keep breaking down defenses, and keep hitting the open 3-pointers it creates, but potentially struggle if they don’t.
Which made the Heat’s sans-Hayward summer priorities rather clear – keep that four-man unit intact, and use whatever room was left over to sign the best damn shooter at the small forward position they could possibly find… preferably someone who’s tall enough to ride roller-coasters (vs. Rodney McGruder), and thick enough not to get knocked over by a stiff breeze (vs. Josh Richardson) – as an alternative to McRuder, Richardson and Justise Winslow, who, given his limited shooting abilities, is probably best suited to serve in a quasi reserve point guard role at this point.
The cap space with which to do it was going to be tight.
The Heat went into the summer capable of generating anywhere from $30.9 million to $39.5 million of cap space for Waiters, Johnson and a third — with the difference dictated by the treatment of Wayne Ellington (who had a $6.3 million non-guaranteed salary which could’ve been waived) and Josh McRoberts (who had a $6.0 million guaranteed salary which could’ve waived and stretched into a $2.0 million dead-money cap charge over the next three years). But losing Ellington – the Heat’s best and only 3-point shooter on the move – wasn’t really a viable option in a non-Hayward scenario unless doing so would bring back starter-level talent, otherwise bringing down the top end of the range to $34.1 million.
Waiters and Johnson were certain to get the bulk of that. Who the third was going to be was still a mystery.
Long-time Heat interest Rudy Gay made the rounds, but he was surely never a primary target. He’s recovering from a complete rupture of his left Achilles tendon. Those are devastating injuries. Career-enders for many. Athleticism killers for most. Particularly for 31-year-olds.
As it turns out, there were no ideal small forwards to be had. Such players who combine youth and shooting ability, even without the defense, tend to price way out of the range the Heat was able to allocate anyway.
So the Heat trudged on without one.
Waiters’ deal came first. It was reported on Wednesday that he would accept a 4-year, $52 million contract. The math dictated that such a contract could have a first-year salary as low as $12.1 million, leaving as much as $22.0 million for Johnson and whomever else to split.
Then, on Thursday, within a span of less than four hours, the Heat agreed to a series of rapid-fire transactions that would leave us all stunned and searching for answers.
In a shocking development, the Heat pounced when Hayward choosing the Celtics set off a chain of events that broke Kelly Olynyk free from restricted free agency. It all happened rapidly, and without warning. The first public indication of Heat interest in Olynyk was the reports of a final deal – a 4-year, $50 million pact that could start as low as $11. |
Fueled by high-speed broadband, there's a "booming digital music market" that's driving up sales.
There's no certainty that such high-speed broadband will achieve anywhere near the widespread deployment that would give the entertainment industry heartburn. Verizon has stopped building out its fiber network. It will no longer sell even its slower DSL service without bundling it with voice service that most people don't want.
AT&T isn't breaking any records with U-verse, a copper-based service that is laughably regarded as "high speed." And wireless will be constrained for years in the speeds it can offer. The big carriers, landline and wireless, are putting caps on data "usage" that threaten to slow down, not speed up, the development of alternative delivery systems for video and music.
The Illusion of Comfort
Those developments must, for the time being, give the entertainment folks some measure of comfort. But the heart of the industry's problem is its attitude. If it now takes its cue from the Fiddler, it should learn to take inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt. On March 4, 1933, in his first inaugural address, FDR said: "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear... is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
The entertainment industry should no longer fear technological change. It should no longer cling to a precarious balance on the roof of an industrial structure constructed long ago. It's time to look on technology as an opportunity, and to conquer its fear of the unknown.About the Project
The world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The LHC collides protons at incredible energies, producing an enormous amount of data that must be analyzed using the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). The computing power of the WLCG is immense, with over 170 supercomputers located in 42 countries. However, computing power is always in demand! The LHC@Home project was designed to use extra processing power from Internet volunteers using typical PCs to help compute results for the LHC experiments. When the volunteers’ PCs are not in use (like when the screensaver is active), the software kicks in to use the extra processing power that is available. Until recently, normal PCs had one limitation, however: their internet connections were too slow to download full data sets from the WLCG, which limited the types of jobs that volunteers could do. Now, blazingly fast gigabit fiber connections are becoming commonplace in Kansas City, so a team at CERN reached out to Kansas City to collaborate. New software has been developed specifically for gigabit fiber users in Kansas City that will take advantage of the bandwidth, enabling volunteers’ computers to perform analysis of real LHC data and submit the results back to the WLCG.
How do I join?
Contributing is easy, and takes about ten minutes to set up. You’ll set up LHC@Home and then configure your computer for the KC Gigabit Challenge.
First, you will prepare your computer to run the vLHC@Home software, which needs two parts. One part is a platform called BOINC to manage connections between your computer and CERN servers, and the other part is a program called VirtualBox that runs the CERN analysis software. Install BOINC from this download link. If you are on Windows, be sure to get the version with VirtualBox. If you use Mac OS X or Linux, download and install VirtualBox separately from the VirtualBox website. If you have trouble, consult steps 1 and 2 from this LHC@Home setup guide. Next, add the LHC@Home project to your BOINC installation. When you launch the BOINC client for the first time, it will ask you for a project URL. The CERN+KC Gigabit Challenge project URL is https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/, or you can select “LHC@Home” from the list of options. Note that there are several LHC-related projects in the list, and you need “LHC@Home.” If you have trouble, consult step 3 from this LHC@Home setup guide. Now that your computer is connected to CERN, we need to enable the special options for the KC Compute Challenge! Without this step, your computer will just perform “normal” jobs, not the jobs that are specially-created for gigabit fiber users. For users in KC with gigabit fiber internet connections, your turbo-charged internet can be put to use analyzing full datasets from the CMS experiment! Go to the LHC@Home preferences page and make sure you enable “Run test applications” and check the box for “CMS Simulation.” We recommend that you do not check the other boxes for other applications unless you are having trouble running CMS jobs. The CMS jobs are specially made for gigabit fiber users, so in order to make the best use of a gigabit connection, select “CMS Simulation” only. Theory and Sixtrack jobs have lower requirements and are suitable for all users (not just gigabit users). Finally, to participate in the CERN+KC Challenge, you must join “Team Kansas City!” The special jobs for fiber users are currently limited to participants on Team Kansas City, since this is a limited test. To join, go to the Team Kansas City page, log in to your account, and click “Join this team.” Make sure your account page says you’ve joined the team on the right side. Now you’re all set! Thanks for joining and happy computing! You can track your statistics and see how your computers’ crunching ability ranks against others by logging in to the LHC@Home BOINC site or read more about the software at the LHC@Home project page. If you need more help or have questions, check out the LHC@Home FAQ and LHC@Home forum. Also, share this page:
Tweet #CERNKC
Your Impact
The research at the Large Hadron Collider contributes to our fundamental understanding of the universe. Particle physics research also drives innovation in fields ranging from medical imaging and cancer treatment to homeland security and next-generation energy and transportation technologies. In fact, the World Wide Web was developed at CERN! Read more about the wide-ranging impacts. Contributing to this project is an easy way to help push the boundaries of physics and advance science!
Get stuck? Having problems? First, consult the vLHC@Home FAQ. Second, let us know by posting in the LHC@Home forum.Derrick Favors has heard the criticisms. He, more than anyone else, is disappointed with how his injuries hobbled him and kept him back last season. This year it’s going to be different according to the Utah Jazz power forward.
“I’m ready to go,” said Favors. “As soon as the season was over, I took maybe a week off, and I went back work. I knew what I needed to do to get my body right.”
Many before the start of last season had Derrick Favors pegged as the Utah Jazz player that would be an All-Star and All-NBA player first before Gordon Hayward and Rudy Gobert. But Derrick’s knee had other plans.
“When I hurt my knee I knew I could really move laterally anymore. I couldn’t really explode.”
Derrick Favors had to start from scratch. Without the ability to laterally move last season he had to find different ways to contribute. To his credit, he did. Quin Snyder also moved him to backup center to prevent opposing offenses from isolating him with a quicker player on the perimeter.
When times get tough mentally, a person has to have a good support system. Favors said that he never lost hope that he wasn’t ever going to get healthy again. He cited his support system as helping him through the injuries to keep a positive mentality. Said Favors, “I had to stay positive. I talked to my support system. My family. My mom.”
“I started over from scratch.... I started over basically.”
It’s a shame that Gordon Hayward left before Derrick Favors was fully healthy, but Derrick understands Gordon’s decision. “I’m not mad at Gordon for leaving. It is a business,” he said. “He made a decision that was good for his family.”
So where will the scoring come from in Gordon’s absence? Derrick Favors has a few ideas.
“I thing it will come from a lot of places. We have a lot of guys who can score. Rodney can score. Alec can score. I can score. Rudy is great around the basket.... I think a lot of guys are ready to step up to that position.”
When asked about the current political climate and his instagram post from last night that had red X’s through shirts with the number 45, Derrick explained it this way:
“I think it’s more about what he [Trump] says that anything. This is a hard thing to talk about because everyone has different views or something. I think it’s more about what he said.... You just can’t do that [call someone a son of bitch]. I think everyone still respect the military. Everyone still respect the military. It just what he [Trump] said rubbed people the wrong way.”
It many ways it seems that Favors is already becoming a more vocal leader on this Utah Jazz team in Gordon Hayward’s absence. Speaking out about social issues, getting himself healthy in the offseason, and preparing to take on the scoring mantle. Here’s to hoping Derrick Favors can be this healthy all season long.Inventor of DSL hopes to push 100 metre copper lines to Terabit speeds
A new technology being proposed by US firm ASSIA – headed up by key DSL technologist John Cioffi – is hoping to deliver extraordinary one Terabit per second (1Tbps) speeds over 100 metre copper lines.
Way back when broadband first arrived in the mid-to-late 1990s speeds of 1Tbps were near unthinkable, even the transmission of such a huge amount of data was hard to contemplate at a time when the infamous ‘floppy disc’ was still very much part of the scene. Those early ADSL lines were scarcely delivering 2Mbps to end-users, but with most people just sending emails and browsing the web those speeds were really quite OK – don’t forget wi-fi had not even arrived back then. Yet, twenty years after most people in the telecoms industry could not see how anyone could ever squeeze much more than 2Mbps from those copper lines, technological advances are promising potential speeds of up to 1Tbps over 100 metres of those very same lines.
Meet the good doctor
So, how could copper lines that once puttered along at 2Mbps be made to transmit data around 500,000 times faster less than 20 years later? Well, for that we mainly need to thank a gentleman called Dr John Cioffi who, while Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, worked with his students to help take copper from sluggish to fast. Cioffi initially took ADSL to 6Mbps before his later work paved the way for the creation of ADSL2+ technology that maxed out at 24Mbps. Then he helped design both VDSL, which is capable of providing max speeds of 50Mbps, and current generation VDSL2+ which came along to deliver up to 100Mbps. Most folks would have likely put the cue in the rack at that stage, having designed technology that helped to connect hundreds of millions of people around the world to broadband services that have created extraordinary opportunities – but not Dr Cioffi. Even at the age of 60 – while juggling ownership of DSL technology company ASSIA where he is Chairman and CEO – Cioffi has been searching for the next horizon in DSL technology and he might just have found it.
The speed of light… in the city of lights
At a broadband conference in Paris last month, Cioffi unveiled new DSL technology that he hopes will transmit speeds up to an incredible 1Tbps over 100 metres of copper, 100Gbps over 300 metres of copper and even – and this could be where the real benefit lies – 10Gbps over 500 metres of copper. The premise of this potential new technology breakthrough is that, rather than simply using 17MHz or 35MHz of spectrum for VDSL (nbn uses 17MHz for our FTTN and FTTB technologies), or even the 106MHz or 212MHz that will be used for G.fast deployments that the spectrum channel for DSL could be widened all the way up to 100GHz. Cioffi says the DSL channel could be widened in this way by using the same technology that is currently being used to significantly increase speeds on mobile network called millimetre wave technology. “Fibre-like speeds of 10-1000s of Gbps are possible by using the previously unexploited waveguide modes of current copper infrastructure. Waveguide-mode use is similar to use of millimetre-wave transmissions in advanced wireless and 5G,” Cioffi told the conference in Paris.The southern Russian resort city of Sochi will host the Winter Olympics in 16 months, and according to former Olympic ski champ Jean-Claude Killy, it's a safe bet this will be an Olympics for the ages.
In 2014, Sochi will host the first Winter Olympics in the country's history. Sochi used to be a little-known seaside town, but with the massive Olympic preparations, the future of the city itself is under construction.
The benefits and prestige of hosting the Olympics will far outlast the 2014 Winter Games themselves, presenting a unique chance for this region. Every day, more and more people around the world are going to be able to identify Sochi on the map.
“It's very unique,” the 69-year-old Killy told RT. “You have palm trees where the hockey tournament is going to be played. And then just 25 minutes by train, and you have a fabulous ski resort. It's very specific. It's the south of Russia, a very comparable place to say Nice in France, where you can ski in the morning and swim in the afternoon after just one hour car drive. The world will know about it very soon.”
Hosting the Winter Olympics in a southern climate is what makes the Sochi Games so special – and so challenging.
As a three-time Olympic alpine ski champion, and the current the chair of the IOC's Olympic Coordination Commission, Killy is sure winter will arrive as soon as it's needed, despite the fact that this could be the hottest Winter Olympics ever.
“Snow is going to be made whenever it's possible and stored,” he explained. “Today you can store the snow under protection during the summer time. And then use it, for example, for ski jump events. You can use whenever you want or need it. Obviously, that's the lesson from Vancouver we have to learn.”
The Sochi Games will also create some experiences truly unique to Olympic history.
“The Games are going to be the most compact ever,” Killy said. “Most athletes, for example, skiers will go out of the 'Chalet,' put their skis on and go up there. Hockey players will walk to the rink as well as the skaters. Which is incredible! I don't think, we have ever had it before to that extent.”
The Sochi 2014 official slogan was revealed on September 25: 'Hot. Cool. Yours.'
“I think, it's terrific. Absolutely terrific,” Killy said. “It's winter, summer, yours… north, south, snow, ice and yours… I think it's a way to say the rest of the world is welcome to Sochi…‘Yours’ – that's the gift from Russia to the rest of the world.”
And the best present Russia could give the world would be to make their first-ever Winter Olympics into the most memorable Games ever.Here’s a short looping animation, just in time for the Remembrance Day for Lost Species – I’m taking part in a pop-up exhibition tonight at Baumhaus Berlin, organised by Jenni Ottilie Keppler, together with other illustrators, poets and sculptors.
‘Huia (exquisite corpse)’ deals with cultural memory, and builds on two existing interpretations of the huia – which was one of three native New Zealand wattlebirds. The huia was driven to extinction before photography was prevalent, and before audio recordings could be made of its song. (The last confirmed sighting was in 1907.)
The artist J.G Keulemans’ 1888 illustration of a huia pair appeared as a plate in Walter Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand. His illustrations of native birds have become iconic representations, much reproduced in New Zealand and around the world.
Keulemans was based in London and did not travel to New Zealand. Although he had done some work in the field, he mostly worked from stuffed skins – dead specimens, sent to him from around the world.
The audible ‘bird calls’ are human imitations, recorded with Henare Hāmana in 1949. As a young man, Hāmana was familiar with the huia and had also been part of an unsuccessful search team in 1909. His whistles are created from 40-year-old memories.
This animation that results is also a rather unreliable interpretation, hence the name ‘exquisite corpse‘ – its movement is based merely on videos of the Tieke, a surviving (though endangered) relative of the huia, which I’ve never seen in the wild.
Further reading: Wikipedia’s Huia article is fascinating, particularly this section:
“While we were looking at and admiring this little picture of bird-life, a pair of Huia, without uttering a sound, appeared in a tree overhead, and as they were caressing each other with their beautiful bills, a charge of No. 6 brought them both to the ground together. The incident was rather touching and I felt almost glad that the shot was not mine, although by no means loth to appropriate 2 fine specimens.” — Sir Walter Buller, New Zealand’s well-known 19th-century ornithologist, encapsulating what one source describes as the “ambiguous” 19th-century attitudes towards the declining New Zealand avifauna. [45]
The rampant and unsustainable hunting was not just financially motivated: it also had a more philosophical, fatalistic aspect.[44] The conventional wisdom among New Zealand Europeans in the 19th century was that things colonial, whether they were plants, animals or people, were inferior to things European.[46] It was widely assumed that the plants and animals of New Zealand’s forest ecosystems would be quickly replaced by more vigorous and competitive European species.[46] This assumption of inevitable doom led to a conclusion that the conservation of native biota was pointless and futile; Victorian collectors instead focused their efforts on acquiring a good range of specimens before the rare species disappeared altogether.[44]
A note on the Public Domain
I love to explore the public domain both for understanding our cultural history and for inspiration in my own work (see my snowflake hat project, the recent Arts & Commons workshop, and next week’s DiVersions project in Brussels). I would highly recommend to others to dive in and play around with the wealth of knowledge and culture which we all share. If you just want to browse what’s out there, try the Public Domain Review for a start.
If you’re looking for specific Public Domain material to remix, you don’t always find everything on your first web search – it pays to search in a specific online archive (such as the incredible resources from the New York Public Library or the vast Flickr Commons collection) or ask a likely institution for help.
In the case of this huia image, Fi from Digital New Zealand and archival superhero Mark Crookston both helped me out via Twitter – though it pays to use the proper resources like DigitalNZ’s search tool first.
Note that the huia call audio is not in the public domain. I don’t have permission to use it, and I don’t think that New Zealand or Germany (where I’m based) have a ‘fair use’ protection for cases like this, so I may be asked to remove the audio – I got it from NZ Birds Online, but have since discovered that rights for this work are managed by Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, whom I have now written to, asking for permission to use the audio.
However, I should point out that were it not for the (illegal?) availability of the mp3 for download at NZ Birds Online, I would never have made this animation.
The requirement to first ask for permission and explain what you would like to do with a work, before you even know exactly what you will do with it, whether it’s a worthwhile investment of your time and whether you will even finish the project… this is something that shuts down the creative process instantly, putting certain ideas in a ‘not allowed’ or ‘too hard’ category, and means that artworks and interesting cultural projects which could exist, simply do not.
The lack of downloads on Ngā Taonga is not a complaint against them, they are doing everything correctly according to the law. But this situation is for me a reinforcement of what makes the public domain such a fantastic resource – you don’t have to ask permission first. You don’t have to have a clear plan, or try to explain something before you do it, if you think it might be a good idea, you can just do it. The public domain itself is gradually becoming a lost species, as copyright term lengths are regularly increased (and spread internationally by trade agreements) while the scope of copyrights, patents and design rights are also extended to new areas.
UPDATE: I received a kind response from Sarah Johnston at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, granting me permission retrospectively to display the animation with sound, and sending me more information about this recording’s history. Here’s some context from her email, explaining the legal situation:
Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision doesn’t own the rights to this recording, but we do act on behalf of the rights holders and have an obligation to ensure that it is re-used ‘appropriately.’ This is obviously subjective, but in broad terms, it means we try to ensure that any re-use of a recording respects the intent of the original creator and the integrity of the recording itself. You will find we have given permission for the huia recording to be used in multiple visual and sound art projects in the past, both in New Zealand and overseas.
‘Huia (exquisite corpse)’ by Sam Muirhead is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license. This license covers the video only and does not extend to the audio.
Made with Krita and Synfig, Animation and source files available here.Ray Allen ties Game 6 of the NBA Finals with a three-pointer with five seconds remaining in regulation.
Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images
For a few moments, on a few nights each year, a fact that often seems fuzzy becomes absolutely clear: Watching sports is totally, unquestionably worth our time. Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals was tense, baffling, infuriating, and cathartic. The Heat eventually beat the Spurs in overtime, 103-100, ensuring there will be a winner-take-all Game 7. But no matter what happens next, I’ll think back to the end of regulation on Tuesday night, and the seven seconds that revealed why we watch all these games and what we gain by watching.
With 12 seconds left on the clock and the Heat down to their last possession, LeBron James misses a tying 3-pointer. Chris Bosh grabs the errant shot, just barely outleaping the Spurs’ Manu Ginobili, whose maximal effort leaves him sprawled out underneath the basket. As Bosh snares the ball, Ray Allen quickly backpedals out of the lane and into the corner. Allen’s toes scurry centimeters behind the arc, ensuring he’ll get credit for a three rather than a two; his feet lift off the ground the same way they elevate in the first quarter of a game in February; and his wrist snaps metronomically even as his right arm flails wildly off to the side. The ball goes in. The game is tied.
But that’s not nearly everything that happens in these seven seconds. There’s Tony Parker, running out at Allen, desperately challenging his shot—the reason the NBA’s most prolific three-point shooter flails his arm as he releases the ball. Parker’s effort wouldn’t be all that remarkable except for the fact that, a few seconds before, he’d been the one challenging James’ shot, all the way on the opposite side of the court. As Allen’s shot arcs toward the net, Ginobili lurches up off the ground, getting ready to challenge for the next rebound. And at the top of the key, LeBron thrusts both of his arms above his headband-free noggin, desperate to take another shot to tie what could be the last game of the Heat’s season.
This stuff is at once mundane and life-affirming. These men are the best at what they do, and their desparation creates a remarkably graceful panic. To quote the great philosopher Rasheed Wallace, both teams played hard, and that absolute effort matched with absolute parity is what makes those seven seconds so fantastic to watch.
Competitive sports wouldn’t be competitive if there weren’t winners and losers. But after six games of this series, we can now be reasonably certain that neither the Spurs nor the Heat are superior to the other. That’s why Thursday night’s Game 7 will be so thrilling. And that’s why, though it will decide the outcome of the 2013 NBA Finals, that game can’t possibly be decisive.
Even so, in a couple of days, history will be written by the team that scores the most points. There are rings to be sized and legacies to be assessed, after all.
While Game 6 affirmed my faith in sports, the subsequent press conferences and roundtables, packed as they were with superficial dishonesty, brought me right back down. “It may be shallow, it may be narrow-minded and it may be unfair. But it is also reality and there’s little use talking around it,” wrote ESPN.com’s Brian Windhorst before the Heat’s overtime win. “The next three days will define these three years for the Miami Heat.”
Windhorst is right—it is shallow, narrow-minded, and unfair. If Kawhi Leonard makes both of his free throws with 19 seconds to go or Ray Allen’s shot doesn’t go down, then the Spurs are working through their 500th bottle of Veuve Clicquot right about now. There would be stories written about Tim Duncan’s throwback 30-point, 17-rebound performance, Tony Parker’s amazing pair of shots late in the fourth quarter, and Gregg Popovich’s standout on-court leadership. Duncan is the greatest player of his generation. Parker is the best point guard in basketball. Pop is on the Mount Rushmore of NBA coaches. And LeBron James and the Heat are huge stinking losers.
How does one missed free throw—a shot that hovered over the rim, spun around, and fell out—change any of that? It doesn’t make the Spurs any worse or the Heat any better, but everyone on TV is obligated to pretend otherwise. Now, we have to listen to ESPN’s Michael Wilbon and Magic Johnson talk about San Antonio choking the game away, which is about the least intellectually sophisticated thing a sentient being could say after watching the Spurs and Heat fight each other desperately on every possession. And, of course, there’s the talk about how Tim Duncan should have been on the court when the Heat tied the game, and how the refs rigged the outcome by refusing to call fouls on Miami down the stretch.
There’s plenty wrong with the NBA, from the excessive timeouts to the bad officiating to the incessant complaining about the bad officiating. But the most depressing thing by far is how we so easily put aside what makes basketball great in favor of dumb narratives based on the random spin of a ball on a rim. Pretty much every player on both teams oscillated between greatness and feebleness during Game 6. Duncan had 25 points in the first half and five the rest of the way. Parker made two spectacular shots in the fourth quarter, and was otherwise 4-21 from the field. LeBron pulled the Heat back from a 10-point fourth quarter deficit, then helped give the lead away with two late turnovers. He made a clutch three, and he missed a couple more. If you’re desperate to tell me how any of this cements his or anyone else’s legacy, I’ll be happy to pretend to listen.
After a great game, we too often conflate what’s debatable with what’s worth debating. We can argue about Popovich’s substitutions and the refs and how to tote all this up on LeBron’s career ledger. But we shouldn’t let it drown out everything that went right, for both the winners and the losers, in those seven seconds: the way Ray Allen’s feet illuminated decades of preparation, Tony Parker somehow managing to guard every Heat shooter simultaneously, and Manu Ginobili getting off his butt only to see the ball splash through the net. It’s moments like these that make sports worth our time. Legacies can wait. I can’t wait for Game 7.In 9th grade, I was performing in a variety show for the first time. I did an imitation of Jonathan Winters, who was my first really big idol. People loved it, I got a standing ovation! Afterwards I was backstage, and I thought ‘I think I’d like to be in entertainment.’ My mother came backstage with my brother, saying ‘Oh, you were wonderful, your father is telling everybody around him that you’re his kid.’ But when we got into the car, he didn’t ever say anything to me. That hurts.
My father always criticized us, trying to talk us out of our plans. Because of him, I’m always comparing myself to others, criticizing myself. There is a scene in the movie On the Waterfront, the famous cab scene, where they say ‘You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit. I want to be somebody Charley.’ That’s just like my dad and me. He has ruined my life.
My grandparents were really supportive, they encouraged me to pursue my own interests. My grandmother was on her deathbed at that time and she said ‘Well, if you want to be in entertainment, go for it.’ She passed away when I was 14, and I still miss her so much.
I didn’t go to college, but I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City, and I loved being around all these creative people. Right after that I started doing standup. I liked doing that, but as time went on I gave up for a long time, because I felt I was getting too old.DON'T write off Nic Naitanui's chances of a fairytale finals comeback yet.
That's the message from coach Adam Simpson and retiring big man Drew Petrie after West Coast snuck into the top eight with victory over the Crows.
The Eagles have booked an elimination final against Port Adelaide next Saturday night at Adelaide Oval, where they have won all three clashes against the Power.
While Naitanui will miss that match, there is hope he could make a stunning return to action if West Coast goes on a deep run into September.
Naitanui hasn't played since round 22 last year due to a knee reconstruction but Simpson has left the door open for a last-minute return.
"He won't be playing (next) week, we'll just put that to bed now," Simpson told Channel Seven on Monday night.
"He's training with the players, he's in really good shape, he's looking really good but to throw him in this week would be pretty silly.
"We've got a good break to recover from the weekend, business as usual tomorrow, we'll get on with Port Adelaide and worry about that (Naitanui's potential comeback) if we win."
The 201cm Eagle's pathway back to football became more difficult at the weekend after East Perth missed out on finals.
But Petrie believes Naitanui could "absolutely" return for West Coast even without a lead-up WAFL appearance under his belt.
"He's been training really well, and he's often training before we get out on the track but we usually see Nic striding up the wing and he gets involved in a lot of the match scenario drills now," Petrie said.
"Nic had a setback I think for about a month in the middle of the year. If that hadn't of occurred, we could almost see him knocking on the door at the moment.
"Unfortunately, East Perth lost on the weekend so there's no chance of him playing WAFL.
"But I think if we go far enough into September, he's likely to play."
Naitanui took part in a skills session on Domain Stadium on Monday and has been back in full training for about a month.
In his and Scott Lycett's absence, Petrie has stepped up and played 14 games in 2017 and forged an invaluable ruck partnership with fellow recruit Nathan Vardy.
There was speculation Petrie could continue on next season, however Simpson revealed after Sunday's win against Adelaide that the 34-year-old 'rookie' would retire at the end of the year.
It was a secret known by very few at the club, including Petrie's teammates.
"It was spontaneous. I just didn't want to rain on Pridda (Matt Priddis) and Mitch's (Sam Mitchell) parade yesterday," Petrie said.
"I didn't want to take anything away from the Subi farewell as well.
"The first thing I did, I apologised to the guys 'I'm sorry boys for not letting you know' firstly … but they heard it when you all heard it."
Petrie, a 16-year veteran at North Melbourne, relished the opportunity to say goodbye to West Coast's fans on an emotion-charged afternoon.
He would be open to joining the star-studded 2017 class of retirees in an MCG motorcade on Grand Final day and could remain in Perth next year, potentially working in the Eagles' football department.
But Petrie's No.1 focus is a looming battle with the Power's spring-heeled ruckman Paddy Ryder, who has torched West Coast twice this year.
"It's one of the hardest challenges rucking against Paddy, he's so agile, so quick, such a good jump, so it's going to be hard to quell his influence on the game," he said.
"We'll do our research, find ways of nullifying him and do our best."Danger Mouse And Daniele Luppi Rome: Starring Jack White And Norah Jones on LP
Some five years in the making, the long collaborative effort between celebrated producer Danger Mouse and Italian film composer Daniele Luppi is a record like no other. An homage to the spaghetti western film music that is a passion for both, 2011's Rome takes the original musicians from the Morricone scores of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West and augments them with revelatory vocals from Jack White and Norah Jones. It's an ambitious work with a uniquely modern sound achieved through traditional, vintage means. It is, above all, a fully realized album, perfectly formed and hauntingly beautiful.
"I started out wanting to make film soundtracks because of hearing music like this and I think Daniele was the same way, but when we went to make this album it wasn’t about a tribute or an homage or anything like that; we wanted to make a more modern, current album that had this as a really great backdrop to it. That would be different because I hadn't heard anyone do that before and so that element of it would be almost the scenery or the location if it was a film or something like that." - Danger Mouse
"What Brian and I tried to go for were epic feelings within the music – violence, passion, death, sadness, melancholy, love and happiness. Always very strong, epic feelings because I think Italians as people are used to having these emotions manifest. It's a very deep record." - Daniele Luppi
Danger Mouse And Daniele Luppi Rome Track Listing:
1. Theme of "Rome"
2. The Rose With the Broken Neck (feat. Jack White)
3. Morning Fog (Interlude)
4. Season's Trees (feat. Norah Jones)
5. Her Hollow Ways (Interlude)
6. Roman Blue
7. Two Against One (feat. Jack White)
8. The Gambling Priest
9. The World ((Interlude)
10. Black (feat. Norah Jones)
11. The Matador Has Fallen
12. Morning Fog
13. Problem Queen (feat. Norah Jones)
14. Her Hollow Ways
15. The World (feat. Jack White)The title of Justin Gillis’ recent NYT article is an excellent tip-off of how bad environmental reporting has gotten: “What to Call a Doubter of Climate Change?”
Now, as a skeptical Ph.D. climate scientist who has been working and publishing in the climate field for over a quarter century, I can tell you I don’t know of any other skeptics who even “doubt climate change”.
The mere existence of climate change says nothing about causation. The climate system is always changing, and always will change. Most skeptics believe humans have at least some small role in that change, but tend to believe it might well be more natural than SUV-caused.
So, the title of the NYT article immediately betrays a bias in reporting which has become all too common. “He who frames the question wins the debate.”
What we skeptics are skeptical about is that the science has demonstrated with any level of certainty: (1) how much of recent warming has been manmade versus natural, or (2) whether any observed change in storms/droughts/floods is outside the realm of natural variability, that is, whether it too can be blamed on human activities.
But reporters routinely try to reframe the debate, telling us skeptics what webelieve. Actually reporting in an accurate manner what we really believe does not suit their purpose. So (for example) Mr. Gillis did not use any quotes from Dr. John Christy in the above article, even though he was interviewed.
Mr. Gillis instead seems intent on making a story out of whether skeptical climate scientists should be even afforded the dignity of being called a “skeptic”, when what we really should be called is “deniers”.
You know — as evil as those who deny the Holocaust. (Yeah, we get the implication.)
He then goes on to malign the scientific character of Dr. Richard Lindzen (a Jew who is not entirely pleased with misplaced Holocaust imagery) because the majority of scientific opinion runs contrary to Dr. Lindzen, who is also a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.
Do I need to remind Mr. Gillis that the cause(s) of climate change are much more difficult to establish than, say, the cause of stomach ulcers? There is only one climate system (patient) to study, but many millions of ulcer sufferers walking around.
And yet the medical research community was almost |
and 230 pounds, doesn’t have prototypical middle linebacker size. But even at that position, speed is now more valued than bulk.
“Some people think sometimes you have to be bigger and thicker to be in there,” Davis said. “But in this day and age, with the spread offenses and the no-huddle, you don’t have to be as big as you used to be.”
Booker started last year but injured his knee against Bowling Green. Though he seemed on the cusp of returning for most of the rest of the season, he didn’t.
Worley said the time off has stoked “a burning desire to be great” in Booker.
“A lot of times, you see guys get hurt and they walk around with their head down and they’re like, ‘Maybe next year,’ ” Worley said. “Last year, I saw a guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. It just happened to be that his body wasn’t ready for it.
“When he was ready, it wasn’t smart to play him. Now that he’s back, the offense is going to feel him.”
The reason it wasn’t smart to play Booker late last year was the emergence of Baker, who became a star as Booker’s replacement. On a defense loaded with stars, perhaps no one had as many “wow” moments.
Now Baker is looking to build on that breakout season. Davis has been impressed by the junior’s off-the-field work.
“You tell him once and he gets it, and he asks real deep questions about it,” he said. “I’m very encouraged with where Jerome can go and his athleticism.
“He has a lot of position versatility. I think I could play him at any position, and he’d be fine.”
As good as the Buckeyes feel about their expected starters, they also believe their linebacker depth will be much-improved. Justin Hilliard, whose last two seasons ended prematurely because of separate torn biceps injuries, was one of the most impressive players of the spring.
Malik Harrison and five-star freshman Baron Browning are rehabbing after shoulder surgeries but are expected to be healthy for preseason camp and push for playing time. Tuf Borland and Keandre Jones also could work into the mix.
“I’ve told them that the best three or four are going to play,” Davis said. “We’ll find roles. Your job is to be as good as you can get and be a valuable asset to this team, and we’ll figure out how to get you on the field.”
brabinowitz@dispatch.com
@brdispatchHeffernan & Mehmedinovic, Skyglow. If we could see the city skyline without atmospheric and light pollution, this is how it might look.
Light pollution sounds fairly harmless, and not like the heavy stuff of air pollution. However, it is a serious problem, and actually refers to the way in which city lights interfere with the visibility of dark skies.
To raise awareness of the problem and to show us what we are missing out on, the Skyglow Project - brainchild of renowned timelapse artists Gavin Heffernan and Harun Mehmedinovic - released the mesmerising timelapse video shown below of dark skies in North America superimposed over urbanscapes in Los Angeles.
But even if you could get away from city lights, the naked eye view isn't quite this spectacular. The video simply reminds us of how beautiful the night sky could be if we weren't destroying it with a combination of wasted light and air pollution. It is also serves as the trailer used for Skyglow's Kickstarter campaign to create a book and DVD exploring the psychological price we are paying for loss of access to the stars, and what can be done to fix it.
Urban air pollution is responsible for around a million deaths a year, whereas light reaching the sky seems harmless by comparison. However, every photon of skyglow we see represents light that has either been shone in the wrong direction, or reflected to where it wasn't needed. The energy wasted in the process costs an estimated $3.3 billion dollars a year and its production is a major contribution to global warming. And the loss of truly dark skies is also thought to be disturbing bird migrations.Everyone was primed for the Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault trial to train a spotlight on flaws within the Canadian criminal justice’s treatment of sexual assault. What no one anticipated was that the eight-day spectacle would illuminate the role of the complainants—and perhaps even their power— in determining the “reasonable doubt” required to convict in all criminal cases.
There’s no question that the legal system in place to deal with sexual assault is deeply flawed. But it’s also the only system able to provide the justice the three women sought when they went to police with their allegations. R. v. Ghomeshi was a textbook lesson in how not to navigate that system. It revealed how complainants can squander what power they do have; the three complainants did not appear to understand—or else chose to flout—the courts’ most elemental rules. This compromised the quest explicitly expressed in messages between two of the witnesses, texts they should not have been exchanging, read aloud for effect by defence lawyer Marie Henein: “I want him f–king decimated,” said one. “Let’s sink the prick,” read another.
As it turned out, if anyone was submerged over the course of the trial, it was Ghomeshi’s accusers, who ignored the common-sense rules given by police and prosecutors: Don’t talk to the media. Don’t communicate with the other complainants, even if they provide support, lest it give rise to allegations of collusion. Try to remember every detail of the assault and what happened after, even those that might prove embarrassing. Comb over old emails, correspondence or interactions with the accused that could be used to contradict or undermine allegations. Don’t consume media about the trial before you testify. And, most important: Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The fallout played out day after day, as the gallery gasped with bombshell disclosures of crucial facts withheld. Reversals in testimony were commonplace. Two of the witnesses made last-minute adjustments to testimony, suggesting they were consuming media about the case. Only hours before taking the stand, Lucy DeCoutere told Toronto police and Crown prosecutors that she’d sent flowers to Ghomeshi shortly after he allegedly kissed her, squeezed her throat and cut off her air, and slapped her hard three times across the face in the summer of 2003. It all provided glorious fodder for defence counsel: “The constant late-breaking changes make me feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone,” Henein griped at one point.
Such vertigo-inducing revisions were debilitating to Crown prosecutors Michael Callaghan and Corie Langdon, serving to hamper their ability to prosecute the most difficult type of sexual assault case: historic allegations made by acquaintances.
It’s not surprising that a chorus has emerged, claiming the Ghomeshi trial will result in victims of sexual assault being even more unwilling to come forward than before. Perhaps. The filleting that each of the witnesses endured at the hands of Marie Henein may certainly discourage other women from entering the legal system.The trial also laid bare the reality that the Crown is there as the people’s representative and, contrary to common assumption, not as the complainant’s lawyer. In fact, the complainant is only a witness, with no standing in the court. But there’s another lesson to be learned here: That for justice to prevail in sexual assault cases, complainants need rigorous preparation for the adversarial tenor that accompanies all criminal prosecution. That begins with basic understanding of both the definition of sexual assault and consent. On the stand, DeCoutere said she didn’t think her experience qualified as sexual assault: “I thought you had to be broken and raped,” she said.
The Ghomeshi charges originated what now seems a very long time ago, in the face of shocking evidence including a video, according to CBC management, that allegedly showed a woman being “physically hurt” by Ghomeshi, then host of the radio show Q. The CBC fired its marquee star; hours after, Ghomeshi took to Facebook in self-defence, claiming a penchant for consensual BDSM. The Toronto Star then ran a story featuring numerous unnamed women claiming Ghomeshi had sexually assaulted them; the story ran before the women had reported to police—practically unprecedented. Twitter was a sea of #IBelieveThem and #RapedNeverReported hashtags. The overwhelming support on social media—along with then-Toronto police chief Bill Blair’s press conference encouraging victims of sexual assault “to come forward and report”—paved the way for a number of women, including the four facing off against Ghomeshi in court, to brave the system and report.
But the trial revealed the disconnect between the court of public opinion and the courts adjudicating laws of the land. Ontario Court Justice William B. Horkins made this clear on day one: “My focus is on what happens inside this courtroom,” he said. What the courtroom saw was witnesses who had been celebrated and intrinsically believed outside of the courtroom being undone, not so much by Henein’s legendary cross-examination as by their own words.
The case proved that the “he said-she said” descriptor used in sexual assault cases is a misnomer. There was no “he said”: Ghomeshi, presumed innocent, did not have to testify. The burden was on the Crown to prove him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt on four counts of sexual assault and one of “overcoming resistance by choking.”
That also put a burden on the witnesses, who do not appear to have received adequate coaching, even though two of the three complainants retained independent counsel (the third witness’s lawyer dealt with a third-party record application). While the Crown’s mandate includes witness preparation, it doesn’t “coach” witnesses or prepare them for cross-examination, as a defence attorney does. Its goal is to lay out the facts of the case plainly and without prejudice.
Related from Chatelaine: How are witnesses prepped for sexual assault trials?
The Crown can only do so much, says one criminal lawyer. “I can assure you they would have told the complainants, ‘Do not communicate with each other.’ But they can’t stop them,” he says, adding, “Do you want Callaghan to take away their cellphones?” Nor will the Crown advise complainants to track down emails; anything unearthed has to be shared with the defence. That said, with more rigorous pretrial interviewing by both Crown and police, some of the surprises in court could have been avoided.
Among criminal lawyers there’s also criticism the complainants’ lawyers did not properly prepare them. Clearly the witnesses had been advised not to cower in the face of Henein’s withering cross-examination. What they didn’t seem to grasp is that Henein’s confident interrogation rests, in part, in the intensive prior investigations that unearth the sort of “gotcha” moments that abounded in Ghomeshi.
“The first thing I tell clients is to go back and get every single email and every single text you have ever exchanged with the defendant,” says one criminal lawyer who represents complainants in historic sexual assault cases. “You review them with the client; if I think they’re of benefit to prosecution and wouldn’t help the defence’s cross examination, I’d disclose to the Crown; if not, your client is perfectly prepared to explain on the stand.” He’s baffled by DeCoutere’s explanation that she forgot her Hotmail account password and couldn’t remember if she sent notes to Ghomeshi; they should have accessed the account via a third-party record application, he says.
The fact complainants’ lawyers talked to media and were on social media before the trial has been raised as another concern. “Look at how Marie handled media,” says one lawyer. “There was no comment. Anyone with any experience representing a victim in criminal prosecution knows that.” A lawyer talking about the case on TV and Facebook isn’t leading by example, says one lawyer: “How are you going to say ‘shhh’ to your client?”
Related at macleans.ca: Lucy DeCoutere on nightmares, healing and Ghomeshi
It seems clear the complainants had entered a system they had been conditioned to fear; how they acted on those preconceptions proved to be damaging. The complainants’ plentiful, often conflicting statements to media and police allowed Henein to pick away at inconsistencies and falsehoods to raise reasonable doubt. The problem here was of the chicken-egg variety: the women had gone to media rather than police because problems in the prosecution of sexual assault are so well known. But going to media first opened them up to evisceration on the stand. The unravelling began with the first witness, who accused Ghomeshi of yanking her head back on one occasion in late 2002 and punching her three times on another in 2003. As Henein told the court, the woman had given four media interviews that omitted the kissing that had taken place before the first alleged attack.
DeCoutere, the former Trailer Park Boys actor who became the face of the Ghomeshi scandal, had given 19 media interviews and issued four press releases, some before any charges were laid. But she also spoke publicly after. A June 2015 Toronto Life story about Ghomeshi’s life after charges had been laid (Ghomeshi declined comment) portrays DeCoutere as a self-appointed ringleader of women intent on bringing Ghomeshi down: “The way [DeCoutere] described it to me she coordinated a covert network of women who have spent the last seven months sharing their assault stories with each other,” the author wrote, saying DeCoutere claimed that “over a dozen [women] who never went to the police or the media” had been assaulted by Ghomeshi, one of them “hospitalized.”
As it happened, nothing Henein unearthed or presented to the court was categorically inconsistent with the complainants’ testimony that Ghomeshi sexually assaulted them. And none of the complainants’ behaviour after the alleged sexual assaults, revealed to the court, was unusual, as both Henein and Callaghan made clear. It was their prevaricating and withholding of information that damaged their credibility and reliability.
No behaviour was more damaging to the case than the incessant communication between two witnesses. DeCoutere and the third complainant exchanged some 5,000 emails between Oct. 29, 2014 (the day DeCoutere went public with her allegations) and September 2015, some discussing the specifics of their allegations—contrary to denials made on the stand. The charge of possible collusion prevented the Crown from mounting a “similar fact” case, one that would use the similarities of the three situations to contend that Ghomeshi had a propensity to act in the ways described by the complainants.
Certainly, themes emerged. All of the complainants were taken by Ghomeshi, then the host of a late-night pop culture show on a CBC cable channel—the “perfect gentleman” and “charming,” as the first witness testified. All were shocked by the suddenness of the alleged assault. “He was kissing my neck and I just felt, all of a sudden, I felt his hand on my shoulders and his teeth,” the third witness testified. “Then his hands were around my neck and he was squeezing.” It was like a “switch,” she said: “It wasn’t the same person there.” Denial and confusion were also common.The first witness said she considered the first violent incident “a one-off.”
But the complainants’ testimonies shared another trait: It wasn’t only the court that had entrenched, retrograde notions of how the perfect sexual assault victim should behave—i.e., immediately report the assault and break all ties with the abuser. The complainants had absorbed the message.
Related from Anne Kingston: How Ghomeshi got away with it
Two adopted the script of trauma, even when it wasn’t true, to make their stories more believable. The first witness was so “traumatized” she couldn’t watch Ghomeshi on television or hear his voice; she couldn’t even listen to the new Q, she said. Moments later the court was shown two emails she’d sent long after the alleged assaults, one with a photo of herself in a bathing suit. It was intended to provoke a response, she testified, so she could ask him why he had punched her. The third witness, who claimed she was afraid to be alone in private with Ghomeshi after the alleged assault, invited him back to her place where, in Henein’s words, she “gave him a hand job,” a salient detail absent in her December 2014 police report. The witness said she didn’t know police wanted to know everything, only the “bad stuff.” She was ashamed, she said: “It’s an embarrassing thing to say.”
DeCoutere fared even worse. The woman who inspired #IBelieveLucy appeared blasé toward Ghomeshi on the stand. She denied having any romantic interest in him, a statement detonated by the defence’s presentation of multiple emails she had sent Ghomeshi hours and years after the alleged assault. These went from expressing a desire to “f–k your brains out” to telling him “I think you are magic.” In a handwritten letter written days later, she wrote, “I love your hands.”
Courts understand that delays in reporting sexual assault are common—and, as both the defence and Crown noted, it’s not unusual for victims of sexual assault to communicate with an abuser, to try to smooth over perceived misunderstanding, even to have conflicted feelings. The problem lay not in what the witnesses did after the assault, but in what they told (and didn’t tell) police and the court about it. That message was delivered too late to benefit complainants in the Ghomeshi trial. But it could be seen as the beginning of a new awareness for many others.To the young women who mounted rubbish bins, vomited into paper bags, urinated in bushes and crash-tackled their friends at Flemington yesterday, I have just one thing to say: Ladies, you are an utter disgrace.
Where is your sense of dignity?
How could you consider it appropriate in any way, to behave as some of you did?
Your classless antics don’t just reflect poorly on you. They impact every single Australian woman — and how we are perceived in the eyes of the world.
The crass photos posted online are truly outrageous. They make a mockery out of the race that stops our nation.
It feels to me like the Melbourne Cup has been reduced to an orgy of inebriated fools.
media_camera It might help if you put the bottle down. (Pic: Michael Dodge/Getty Images) media_camera No. Please, no. (Pic: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
Thanks to this drunken nonsense, we are a laughing stock.
An article with the headline “The Melbourne Cup is decadent and depraved” was posted on an American sports website, ridiculing racegoers.
“It’s not until you see these photos of the Melbourne Cup, Australia’s most drunken and depraved horse racing event, that you can really understand just how out of hand the whites can get,” author Billy Haisley wrote.
Since when is it OK to pole dance or to swig straight from the bottle at the most famous sporting event in our calendar? How could you humiliate yourself by flashing your backside — or worse, exposing your vagina to people passing by?
Why go to the effort of buying a new frock and a pair of shoes if you’re intent on trashing yourself in front of thousands?
media_camera This is never a good look. (Pic: Scott Barbour/Getty Images)
It’s shameful. It’s embarrassing. And it completely ruins what should be a stylish, happy and fun social event.
Sure, there’s just as many images to be found of boozed up blokes skylarking — but aren’t we as women better than that?
I want my daughter to aspire to role model racegoers like Julie Bishop or Jennifer Hawkins or Kate Waterhouse.
What I don’t want is for her to be exposed to women demeaning themselves in public.
Nine people were arrested yesterday. Seventy-eight were kicked out of the grounds. Five ended up in hospital.
What have we become?
media_camera Time to call it a day. (Pic: AAP Image/Joe Castro)
Let me just say that I’m all for having a good time. I love a drink and a laugh with my mates when I go to the races.
But to allow your day to degenerate to such depths is simply not good enough.
New statistics show that women are catching up with men when it comes to alcohol consumption, and in some cases, exceeding them.
It seems that was certainly the case at Flemington yesterday.
Young people know better than most that photos posted online are never going away. They are a permanent record of who you are and readily accessible to anyone — that means your family, your friends, your teachers, your bosses.
If you exposed your breasts or passed out in the public enclosure at the 2016 Melbourne Cup, you’re no doubt feeling a little worse for wear today.
But the damage you’ve done to Australian women will be much harder to repair than your hangover.
Wrecked at the races! media_camera MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - NOVEMBER 01: Racegoers enjoy the atmosphere on Melbourne Cup Day at Flemington Racecourse on November 1, 2016 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Michael Dodge/Getty Images) 1 of 26 media_camera MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - NOVEMBER 01: A racegoers walks into a rubbish bin following 2016 Melbourne Cup Day at Flemington Racecourse on November 1, 2016 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images) 2 of 26 media_camera MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - NOVEMBER 01: A racegoers falls over following 2016 Melbourne Cup Day at Flemington Racecourse on November 1, 2016 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Scott Barbour/Getty Images) 3 of 26 media_camera MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - NOVEMBER 01: Racegoers enjoy the atmosphere on Melbourne Cup Day at Flemington Racecourse on November 1, 2016 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Michael Dodge/Getty Images) 4 of 26 nav_small_close Want to see more?( 22 more photos in collection )Continue to full gallery nav_small_left nav_small_right
Originally published as Ladies, you are an utter disgraceThis week, Wake Forest announced that an investigation found former assistant coach turned radio analyst Tommy Elrod had been feeding opponents game plan information for years. The investigation -- since dubbed "WakeyLeaks" -- began after Wake Forest's loss to Louisville in November, and the investigation took only a month. Elrod was fired and hasn't commented on the allegations.
His name will go down in history, but he's not the only man to be accused of participating in some gridiron espionage, traitorous or otherwise. Here are some of the most notorious examples throughout NFL and college football history.
Spygate, 2007. The Patriots' scandal is the gold standard by which all other spying scandals are judged. In 2007, New England fined $250,000 and coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000 for filming the New York Jets' coaches' defensive signals from an unauthorized area. Filming them isn't illegal, but there are prescribed areas to do so. That launched an investigation into the Patriots' past video practices, which led to allegations that the Pats illegally filmed the Rams' walkthrough before Super Bowl XXXVI in 2002. Belichick denied that and the Boston Herald eventually retracted the story, admitting that it had never seen the film or talked to anyone who had seen it.
Spygate: Part II, 2010. Steve Scarnecchia worked for the Patriots from 2001-04, and was with the Jets in 2006-07 when the original Spygate allegations broke from the Jets' side of the scandal. Three years later, Scarnecchia taped a Rams walkthrough before a game in London. The NFL fined ex-Patriots assistant and then-Broncos head coach Josh McDaniels $50,000, along with a $50,000 fine for the Broncos organization. Scarnecchia was fired but worked in video with Syracuse before being hired by the Falcons as an assistant to Dan Quinn in 2015. The most salacious allegations of the original Spygate were never proven, but the second chapter certainly led many to view the initial allegations, which never produced punishment from the NFL, in a new light.
Red River Spying, 1976. Texas coach Darrell Royal publicly accused Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer of spying on Texas' practices ahead of their 1976 matchup. He challenged the alleged spy, Switzer and one of Switzer's assistants to take a lie detector test, and if they passed, he promised to donate $10,000 to a charity. Switzer called the allegations "ridiculous," because he knew the real spying had gone down four years earlier, when Switzer was the Sooners' offensive coordinator. Assistant Larry Lacewell had his friend Lonnie Williams pose as a construction worker and take notes on Texas' practice. His recon gave OU insight into a Texas quick kick. They blocked it and scored, turning a 3-0 Oklahoma lead in the third quarter into a 27-0 rout that was Texas' only loss of the season. Williams got caught only because he bragged about it for years, including once to a Texas booster who relayed the info to Longhorns coaches in 1975, spawning the allegations in 1976.
Country Roads Spying, 2006. During one of its spring practices, Marshall eyed a young man writing detailed notes in a notebook. That fall, the Thundering Herd were slated to play in-state rival West Virginia for just the second time in 83 years. Marshall's practices were open to the public, but coaches from other programs need permission to attend. Marshall said the accused spy originally claimed to be a student reporter. Then he said he went to UAB, one of Marshall's Conference USA rivals. Then he tried to run. Eventually, they found out he was a West Virginia student who worked in the WVU football offices and had a card in his pocket with names and numbers for coach Rich Rodriguez and other assistants. West Virginia said he was acting without the authority of anyone in the department or on staff. He was transferred to work elsewhere on campus, and there's some debate about the quality of the notes he took, but they were laced with derogatory terms about Marshall's players, like calling Marshall's all-conference center Doug Legursky, at 6-foot-3 and 311 pounds, "fat."
Spying from the bushes, 1983. Ahead of its season opener against Tulane in '83, Mississippi State caught a spy with binoculars in the bushes outside the practice field. He said he was an assistant with a New Orleans high school. He was actually Gerald Materne, a volunteer graduate assistant on Tulane's staff, which included future Notre Dame coach Bob Davie. Tulane said he acted on his own, but the details of his staff exit were contested. Tulane said he resigned. Materne said he was fired after he got caught but said that Tulane's staff sent him on the reconnaissance mission. He had been caught in Davie's car and sued for $988,000. Davie ended up being deposed in the lawsuit but denied any involvement. Materne eventually settled for $27,000.
Sugar Bowl Spy, 1950. After a practice in Biloxi, Miss., leading up to Oklahoma's game against LSU in the 1950 Sugar Bowl, coach Bud Wilkinson got a tip that three men had spied on OU's practice from a nearby garage, covered by a tarp. He put together a team to stake out the garage the next day and found a spy atop a ladder. They chased him and eventually got a photo of him. He ran into a nearby house whose owner was willing to protect him and prosecute anyone else who entered. OU displayed a print of the photo at the alumni hotel and the spy was eventually identified as Piggy Barnes, an ex-LSU player and then-Philadelphia Eagle. Another ex-Tiger, Elbert Manuel, owned the house he'd run into. Nothing was ever proven and LSU denied knowledge. Wilkinson was furious when local papers treated the story as a joke, too. Either way, it didn't have much effect. Oklahoma completed its 11-0 season with a 35-0 win.
Swamp Spies, 1980s. Florida coach Charley Pell took the Gators from 0-10-1 in 1979 to 9-2-1 in 1983, but in '82, the NCAA launched an investigation of the program. Two years later, it alleged Florida had committed 107 NCAA violations, including spying on opponents' practices. By '85, the NCAA found evidence of only 59 infractions, but the program was banned from television and the postseason in '85 and '86. Pell resigned in '84 and the SEC banned Florida from playing in the Sugar Bowl the Gators qualified for, sending LSU instead. They also eventually vacated the '84 title, and the program lost 20 scholarships over the next three years.
Disgruntled ex-employee allegedly spying, 2014. Most coaches will tell you stealing signals is part of the game. But giving signals to opponents after a midseason firing? Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury and defensive coordinator Mike Smith alleged that ex-DC Matt Wallerstedt was doing that after he resigned three games into the 2014 season. "They have been passed around," Smith said. "I know other coaches have called and our signals have been passed around the whole time. All I know is karma's a bad deal." Wallerstedt issued a statement through his lawyer denying the allegations and calling them "unfounded." The statement added, "It sounds like something that's done in the political arena -- blaming someone else for what you now control. Coach Kingsbury and Smith would do well to simply execute their own game plan instead of trying to blame others for what may be their own shortcomings." After lawyers got involved, Texas Tech never addressed the issue publicly again.File photo of Lalu Prasad.
Lalu Prasad Yadav has challenged Narendra Modi to the title of the original tea boy. For good measure, he has added biscuits."I used to sell tea and biscuits while studying in school," Mr Yadav, who is the chief of the Bihar-based Rashtriya Janata Dal, told reporters in Patna. He detailed his tea story - "I sold tea with my elder brothers from a shop near the police quarters in the veterinary college area."This evening, Mr Modi, the BJP's prime ministerial candidate, launched his chai pe charcha campaign, designed to highlight his modest origins as a young boy who sold tea on trains. The BJP has leveraged snide comments made by political rivals like the Congress' Mani Shankar Aiyar to launch the mass contact programme, with Mr Modi engaging with thousands of people across the country from a tea stall in Ahmedabad.Mr Prasad said, with a caustic aside, that he quite doubted Mr Modi had actually sold tea on trains.The RJD chief, resurgent after forging a new pre-poll alliance with Congress in Bihar has sought permission to hold a rally in Muzaffarpur on March 3, the same day that Mr Modi is scheduled to address a rally there.We're not big fans of superlatives, but for LG's flagship phone of the season, we'll make an exception. Sprint's LG Optimus G is the best phone from the company, which is saying a lot considering its string of ho-hum handsets that were good but not great.
Like its AT&T counterpart, Sprint's version still retains that powerful Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core CPU, has an impressive display, and NFC capabilities. In addition, while we don't get 4G LTE data connection in our San Francisco area, the device itself is 4G LTE-enabled.
But what sets this model apart is its 13-megapixel camera. Since both devices cost $199.99, the boost in megapixels comes at no extra cost, meriting a higher score from us compared to AT&T's 8-megapixel unit.
Though, even with the improved camera, it's important to keep in mind that when comparing it with other flagship phones, we still have the same reservations with this unit as the other Optimus G. Namely, its design is uninspiring and it has poor speaker quality.
Editors' note: Due to their similarities, sections of this review have been taken from our review of AT&T's LG Optimus G.
Design and build
At 5.2 inches tall by 2.7 inches wide by 0.33 inch thick, Sprint's Optimus G comes in slightly narrower, taller, and thinner than AT&T's model (which measures 5.01 inches by 2.8 inches by 0.37 inch). Its 5.12-ounce heft makes it solid, and also a tad lighter than AT&T's as well.
The handset comes in black and white, and has a familiar square slate design. The corners are ever so slightly rounded, but the edges of the phone face drop in steep, noticeable cliffs. The left and right spines then slope more gently into the back, creating a more comfortable handhold than if you grip the phone by its face. While pleasant-looking and functional, it certainly isn't pushing boundaries, defining your personality, or wowing you with standout machining. In fact, it reminds us of the unlocked Samsung Galaxy S II.
Josh Miller/CNET
Like other jumbo phones, the Optimus G can't be squeezed into smaller pockets, and this is not a device to use one-handed. However, tossing it into a bag or larger back pocket works just fine. We were able to tote it around in a stretchy back pocket. It didn't look very attractive protruding from the material, but ambulation was possible.
LG calls its 4.7-inch Optimus G's screen a True HD IPS+ display; that translates to a 1,280x768-pixel resolution (WXGA). The Optimus G's 15:9 aspect ratio is a little off the 16:9 standard, but that hasn't bothered us so far. Pixel density comes in at 320ppi. For reference, the Nokia Lumia 920 has 332ppi, the iPhone 5 has 326ppi, and the Samsung Galaxy S3 has a 306 pixel-per-inch density.
The absolute pixel density, by the way, only indicates clarity, but suffice it to say that this beautiful screen did not disappoint, giving bright and crisp edges and vivid, appealing color.
There's more to know about the dominating screen as well. LG boasts that its Touch Hybrid Display technology makes the screen 30 percent slimmer because it removes the air gaps separating the cover glass from the touch layers -- and light source -- below. LG isn't the only company to do this; the iPhone 5 and HTC One X advertise a similar process. In addition, the use of Corning's Gorilla Glass 2 on the front and back panels contributes to the weight, but could also lend strength. However, we didn't want to smash the phone on concrete to test durability against cracks.
Below the display are touch-sensitive buttons for Back, Home, and Menu. Press and hold Home to also open your list of recent apps. Do the same to the Menu button to pull up a Google search bar.
Above the screen, you'll find the 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. The volume rocker hangs out on the left spine and the power button is on the right. (We not-so-secretly wish that a hardware camera button were here too, but its absence doesn't earn the phone any black marks.) Unfortunately, you can take a cue from the two screws securing the back panel in place and stop your search for expandable memory right here. Unlike the AT&T model, which has a microSD card slot, you won't find any beyond the 32GB internal storage in the Sprint version.
You'll charge the Optimus G through a Micro-USB charging port on the bottom of the phone, and you'll connect your headset through the 3.5mm jack up top. Nestled into the polarized (and patent-pending!) back panel are the 13-megapixel camera lens and LED flash.
Features and OS
The LG Optimus G runs on the Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich OS. Although we'd prefer to see Android 4.1 Jelly Bean on this device, we can't really fault LG for not being more current. With Ice Cream Sandwich, the Optimus G receives all of Google's services, like Chrome, Car Home, Gmail, Maps with Navigation, Search, Shopper, and YouTube. The Google Play stores for Books, Magazines, Movies & TV, and Music are included as well.
Sprint also loaded Sprint ID, which allows you to customize your phone with preselected apps, widgets, and other items depending on which ID profile you install. There are 59 available packs so far, and they cater to a number of interests including music (CMT and MTV have a Sprint ID pack), sports (ESPN, Fantasy Football), and even colleges like University of Notre Dame and UC Davis (go Aggies!). Note that deleting a Mobile ID package won't uninstall the apps that you downloaded -- you'll have to remove those apps manually. The carrier also included Sprint Zone so you can check your phone and data information.
Other goodies include two file-sharing apps (SmartShare and FileShare), Polaris Office 4.0 mobile office suite, two video editors, and Qualcomm Enhanced Location Services, which lets you determine your location and conserve battery life simultaneously. And of course, there are more basic apps, such as a native browser and e-mail client, music and movie players, a clock with alarm functions, an address book, a notepad, and voice command.
Furthermore, LG packed its flagship device with tons of interesting features. Some we've seen before, like the Optimus 3.0 user interface. We're internally divided over this UI. On one hand, LG has done a nice job of adding some functionality without imposing too much of its own personality on top of Ice Cream Sandwich. On the other hand, it's not as sleek and elegant as Google's vision of the OS, and certain widgets look dated. However, users can customize some app icons with four differently themed choices for completely new icon looks. Rest assured, at any rate, that the OS doesn't get in the way of using the phone.
Lynn La/CNET
LG's signature note-taking app, QuickMemo, comes packaged with Optimus 3. |
Gatorade Circle of Champions High School Player of the Year and to the McDonald's All-America Team. Bryant averaged 30.8 ppg, 12 rpg, 6.5 apg, four spg and 3.8 bpg... He led Lower Merion to Class AAAA state title with a 31-3 record. Bryant scored a career-high 50 points vs. Marple Newtow and scored 34 points to go along with 15 rebounds, six assists and nine blocks to lead Lower Merion to District I Class AAA title over Chester... He scored 117 points and was named Most Outstanding Player in Prestigious Beach Ball Classic in Myrtle Beach, S.C.On Saturday evening, May 16, BASE jumpers Dean Potter and Graham Hunt died after attempting a wingsuit flight from Taft Point, a 7,500-foot promontory that overlooks Yosemite Valley and El Capitan.
Potter has been a fixture on the climbing and BASE-jumping scene in Yosemite since the late 1990s. According to Yosemite chief of staff Mike Gauthier, the pair made the jump late Saturday. Their spotter heard two sounds that could have been impacts or could have been the noises made by parachutes snapping open. She followed standard protocols, first trying to reach the pair by radio, with no luck, and then moving to a predetermined meeting place. “They were optimistic, thinking that the men might have been arrested,” says Gauthier. BASE jumping is illegal in Yosemite National Park.
Yosemite Search and Rescue (YOSAR) initiated a hasty search, but the rangers were unable to locate the pair overnight. Potter and Hunt had been attempting to fly along terrain that required them to clear a notch in a rocky ridgeline. “It’s kind of a trickier flight to go through this notch,” Gauthier says. On Sunday morning, a state police helicopter was able to spot both bodies from the air. No parachutes had been deployed. Two rangers were then airlifted to the site to perform the recovery.
Survivors include Potter’s girlfriend Jennifer Rapp and his dog, Whisper, a blue heeler who has played a prominent role in Potter’s adventure life for the past few years.
Potter first came to prominence in Yosemite in the late nineties, when he began making bold solo and free-solo ascents of many of the park’s classic rock routes. By the middle aughts, he’d elevated slacklining—tightrope walking on a piece of webbing—to an extreme art form, making safe crossings of such notable features as Lost Arrow Spire, in Yosemite, and the Three Gossips feature in Arches National Park. Many times he’d make these crossings with no safety tether.
Potter came under fire in 2006 after he free soloed Delicate Arch, in Arches National Park, a sandstone feature that appears on Utah license plates. After the Delicate Arch climb, sponsor Patagonia dropped both Potter and his wife at the time, climber and BASE jumper Steph Davis. Potter always maintained that the ascent was both lawful and respectful. “I was just climbing a beautiful rock that hadn’t been free climbed before,” he told me in February.
Potter continued to innovate in the world of extreme sports. In 2008, he climbed the 5.12 Deep Blue Sea route on the north face of Switzerland’s 13,020-foot Eiger with only a parachute on his back. He dubbed the sport free-basing. He also began crossing highlines using a parachute for safety.
Last year Potter and Rapp produced a film called When Dogs Fly that chronicled Potter’s adventures BASE jumping with his dog, Whisper. The eventual footage of Whisper, wearing goggles and cinched between Potter’s back and his parachute pack, became an online sensation, though some people worried about Whisper’s safety.
Potter was 43.On the latest installment of Slate's podcast Lexicon Valley, I look at the roots of the festive word carnival, associated with pre-Lenten celebrations around the Christian world. Some scholars speculate that the true origins of carnival actually lie in pagan rituals predating Christianity.
When Americans hear the word carnival, their first thoughts may be of a traveling amusement show. That sense of the word dates back to the 1893 Columbian Exposition, the big World's Fair held in Chicago. On the Midway Plaisance, the Fair had a kind of an elaborate sideshow, complete with rides, like the first-ever Ferris Wheel, and many other enticing attractions.
Afterwards, Chicago's Midway turned into a portable experience, as traveling carnival companies brought mechanical rides, games, and concessions to towns across the country, each of which could have its own "midway." By the 1930s, the folks who worked at the carnivals became known as carnies, complete with their own carny lingo unknown to the "rubes" who frequented the fairs.
But before carnival became unmoored from the liturgical calendar, it was a Christian word, or more precisely a Catholic one. Carnival and related forms in other languages have historically referred to the often raucous festivities culminating in the day before Lent begins, known as Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras in French).
Since the Lenten season involves giving up meat, it's easy to see the connection to the Latin word for meat or flesh: caro (carnis in the genitive case), which also gives us carnal, carnivore, and other meaty words. One popular explanation has been that carnival time is when one says "farewell to flesh," or carne vale, with vale representing a Latin good-bye (literally "be strong" or "be well").
The carne vale explanation goes back many centuries. John Florio's 1611 Italian-English dictionary, Queen Anna's New World of Words, defines the Italian word carnevale as the time "when flesh is bidden farewell." Two centuries later, Lord Byron gave the same etymology in his extended poem of 1817, Beppo: A Venetian Story, which takes place during carnival time in Venice:
This feast is named the Carnival, which being
Interpreted, implies "farewell to flesh":
So call'd, because the name and thing agreeing,
Through Lent they live on fish, both salt and fresh.
But "farewell to flesh" is actually a folk etymology with no historical basis. Etymologists point to the earliest recorded uses of the word in northern Italian dialects from the 12th century, where the forms carnelevale or carnelevare appear. Based on this evidence, it would appear that the term grew out of the Latin phrase carnem levare, or "the taking away of meat," which then became carnelevare in Old Italian, then carnelevale, then carnevale by omission of a syllable (known as haplology).
But some scholars of medieval Europe think that this too represents a folk etymology, taking a pre-existing word for a festivity and giving it a Christian gloss. The chief proponent of this theory is the French historian Philippe Walter, whose book Mythologie Chrétienne, translated in English as Christian Mythology, posits that the word carnival predates Christianity and was rationalized as "taking away of meat" in order to Christianize pagan rituals.
The rituals that Walter focuses on have to do with a mythical figure known as Carna. According to Roman scribes such as Ovid, Carna was a goddess to whom a sacrifice was given of beans and fatty meat, particularly pork. One can see in later carnival celebrations a focus not just on rich, fatty foods (as in Fat Tuesday), but also rituals involving beans. The king cake, for instance, originally was a cake in which a bean was hidden, with the finder of the bean named "king of the feast." (More recently, the hidden item has been a porcelain or plastic figurine.)
As for the val element, Walter suggests a connection to the mid-February feast day of St. Valentine. Long before Valentine's Day was celebrated romantically with cards and chocolates, February 14th was a date on the Christian calendar to commemorate the martyrdom of Valentine. As Walter points out, Valentine actually represents no fewer than five different saintly figures of early Christianity, and he sees that as evidence that the feast day was intended to camouflage an older pagan celebration, perhaps involving that val syllable.
You can find much more on this in the first chapter of Walter's book, entitled "Carnival, The Enigma of a Name." While it may be nothing more than educated conjecture, it's fascinating to think that our contemporary carnival owes its origins to a figure that Walter delightfully dubs "the goddess of pork and beans."DALLAS – The Republican candidate for Texas lieutenant governor spent almost 12 times as much as the Democratic incumbent, David Dewhurst, who spent $8,202,851. Labor’s candidate, Linda Chavez-Thompson, spent $777,860. These preliminary figures, compiled October 25 from last financial campaign reports before the election, were provided by Texans for Public Justice.
Every statewide race was awash with big money. Even at the bottom of the statewide ticket, for Seat 9 of the Texas Supreme Court, Republican Eva Guzman spent $849,744 to Democrat Bailey Blake’s $62,641, nearly 14 times as much. In every statewide race, the Republican spent, by far, the most money and, coincidentally, won.
The gross amounts of money poured into the election, even on the losing Democratic side, were amazing. Governor’s candidate, Democrat Bill White, spent $23,676,423 for a job that pays about $115,000, and his triumphant opponent, Republican Rick Perry, spent almost twice as much, $40,278,788.
A quick sum for all the statewide races contested in 2010 is $82,000,000. Was this money spent to help inform voters about important issues? Hardly.
Nearly all of the Republican campaigns, even at the county level, focused on linking Democratic candidates with President Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and “big government.” Governor Perry found every excuse to avoid any debates at all. He refused to be interviewed by newspaper editorial boards and concentrated, instead, on misleading television ads.
It wasn’t until their success was announced that the Republican winners began claiming mandates for various right-wing causes such as seceding from Medicaid, cutting education funds, and laying off public employees.
Prior to the election, there were national estimates that $4 billion would be spent, $1 billion more than the previous record in 2006. The big difference is the “Citizens United” Supreme Court ruling, which said that corporations are people and can clandestinely spend all they want to buy politicians. They are eroding democracy in America and choking democracy with money.
Photo: Linda Chavez-Thompson, labor’s candidate for lieutenant governor, spent only $777,860 on the campaign.On his radio show today, Bryan Fischer said it was “an absolute mystery” to him why self-identified evangelical Christians would be supporting Donald Trump for president, leading him to conclude that there must be something unnatural, otherworldly and Satanic at work.
“You look at Donald Trump and there is something, to me, that is unnatural about his level of support,” Fischer stated. “Something there that you cannot explain based on the world that we can see, based on natural causes, based on what is rational and logical and understandable. There is something that is beyond the world of nature that’s going on there.”
“We know that not every spirit that’s out there in the unseen world is a friendly spirit,” he continued. “There are spirits out there that mean us harm, that mean our country harm and politics, this power comes from God. Let’s not forget that every bit of political power comes from God. Who is going to be interested in getting their hands on the levers of God’s power? It’s going to be Satan, he’s going to be all over that, he’s going to try to make sure that the man of his choosing has God’s political power to exercise and we as believers need to have our eyes open to that possibility.”A second woman is coming forward with allegations that Democratic Senator Al Franken “stalked and harassed” her.
The accusations come after sports commentator Leeann Tweeden sent shockwaves throughout the media by accusing Franken of groping her “without my consent.” The incident allegedly occurred during a USO tour of Vietnam in December 2006.
Tweeden also sent visual evidence of Franken’s “groping,” and added that he also violated her through “forcible kissing.”
“How dare anyone grab my breasts like this and think it’s funny?” she said.
Franken issued a response:
NEW Stmt from @SenFranken: “I certainly don’t remember the rehearsal for the skit in the same way, but I send my sincerest apologies to Leeann.” Says he “shouldn’t have done” the picture. pic.twitter.com/cJ0avgDroM — Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) November 16, 2017
After that Senate Majority Leader McConnell announced a new ethics investigation.
“As with all credible allegations of sexual harassment or assault, I believe the Ethics Committee should review the matter. I hope the Democratic Leader will join me on this,” McConnell said. “Regardless of party, harassment and assault are completely unacceptable—in the workplace or anywhere else.”
Now, fresh accusations appear to be looming for Senator Franken.
Former radio host Melanie Morgan stated that she will be coming forward with her own accusations against Franken soon.
Morgan, who is also a journalist for Media Equalizer, said on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MelMorgan1350/status/931221482671300609
She wrote:
“Yes, it’s true. I was stalked and harassed by Al Franken. I will have details @ MediaEqualizer shortly.”
We will have to stay tuned for her full statement, which will be updated here as it is made public. In the meantime, Morgan had the following retweet:
It looks like the Congressional Ethics Committee will be having even more to investigate soon.
UPDATE: Melania Morgan has reaffirmed her earlier charges.
https://twitter.com/MelMorgan1350/status/931244347785232389Steve Mascord shares his thoughts on the World Club Series format and proposes an idea of a early-season NRL clash at Wembley Stadium.
By Steve Mascord
As a committed Rugby League internationalist, your correspondent could probably be relied upon to decry the lack of interest from NRL clubs in taking on Warrington during next year’s World Club Series.
Except I won’t.
In case you’ve not kept up with developments, Wigan and Cronulla are locked in to play each other in the World Club Challenge – almost certainly at DW Stadium – in mid-February.
For reasons that have not entirely been explained, next year’s World Club Series was to have been contested by just four teams after six were involved in 2015 and 2016.
But Super League grand final runners up Warrington can’t find an opponent, with 14 clubs headed by NRL grand finalists Melbourne Storm rejecting the idea. Only Brisbane Broncos, coached by England mentor Wayne Bennett, have shown any interest.
Wigan will take on Cronulla in next year's World Club Challenge.
England and Brisbane coach Wayne Bennett is an advocate of the World Club Series.
Re-expanding the World Club Challenge, or World Club Championship, after a lopsided 1997 tournament was championed a decade ago by Leeds chief executive Gary Hetherington. Sadly for him, when it finally happened in 2015, the Rhinos weren’t involved.
They did get to meet North Queensland last year. But in six games of the World Club Series, a British team hasn’t won once.
The sad fact is that the salary cap in the NRL is now roughly twice that in Super League. The World Club Series came along at precisely the wrong time, when the Australasian game was bolstered by some A$2 billion in TV fees.
Therefore, despite my international rugby league predilections, I don’t think there is much point to the WCS concept right now.
Sure, keep the World Club Challenge. In a one off game, there is always a chance of an upset and every sport needs to crown a “world champion”.
2016 World Club Challenge winners North Queensland Cowboys.
Could Wembley Stadium host two big Rugby League events a year?
But matching teams further down the pecking order only serves to highlight what could be seen as a weakness.
Your correspondent is privy to a proposal floating around inside one prominent NRL club which is certainly food for thought.
Under the plan, the NRL runners-up would travel to the UK in February - but not to play Super League opposition. Instead, they would kick off the NRL season in a Grand Final rematch staged in London.
What’s more, the game would be a double-header with a round four Super League game – perhaps also a replay of the previous year’s Grand Final. Wembley has been mentioned in dispatches and this would conceivably be an annual event, a new marquee date on the British Rugby League calendar.
There are some hurdles.
To fill Wembley, a sustained, long-term marketing campaign would be necessary. Secondly, the new event could detract from the drawing power of the World Club Challenge itself.
Thirdly, the NRL’s commitment to foreign markets – and specifically the London expat market - is not something that has so far presented itself.
But the more you think about the concept, the more legs it seems to have – a great way for Super League to expose itself to the tens of thousands of antipodeans living in London and an opportunity for the NRL to do what the NFL has in one of the world’s great cities.
Of course, the NRL will need to lift its profile in the UK, and specifically in London, significantly first.
But the way things are now, NRL teams are better off playing each other to showcase our sport than taking on sides from any other competition.MOBILE, Alabama – A woman who reported she had been robbed last week while working at a Godfather's Pizza was arrested today after investigators determined she was the one who stole from the business.
Lindsey Turley, 21, was charged with filing a false police report and theft of property in the second and third degrees. Two of the charges are misdemeanors while theft in the second degree is a felony.
Police said they found evidence Turley had taken money from the business in two separate incidents.
She told police an unidentified man had stolen the money on Sept. 24.
It's unclear how much was stolen in each incident, although theft in the third degree applies only when someone is accused of stealing less than $500. Theft in the second degree applies when a person is accused of stealing between $500 and $2,500.
According to officials, Turley told police she was counting money in the Godfather's Pizza office at 5442 Highway 90 West around 10:10 p.m. when an unknown man entered the business through an unlocked back door. She said the man threatened her with a gun and demanded both the money she was counting and the money in her wallet.
Turley said she gave the man what he asked for and he ran out the back door, police said.
According to records, Turley had not yet been booked into Mobile County Metro Jail as of 3:15 p.m.A lot of people can handle some minor component replacement. When you’re going a bit deeper on a custom bike ie. replacing the sub-frame, removing the airbox and side covers you need a little understanding of your motorcycle electrics. You’re going to need to do a fairly substantial re-wire. Old wiring looms are renowned for their problems and if you ask anyone who’s been there a total re-wire is your best option.
This guide will aim to give you some knowledge on the crucial components of your motorcycle electrics and help you select the right motorcycle parts. what they do and how they do it. In a later post I’ll tackle re-wiring your bike, I’m still putting the simplified PDF wiring diagrams together.
My old man always told me, the best way to begin to fix something is to understand what it does. Firstly what does it do and second how does it do it. He also said if you can’t explain something in one sentence, you probably don’t know yourself. Here goes.
Electrical components
Stator-
The Generator for your motorcycle electrics. This provides the charge from your rotating crankshaft to the bike and battery. Simply put it rotates a magnetic component around a wire wound basket and produces power. Normally located on the left of the engine.
Regulator/rectifier-
Receives the AC charge from your stator, converts it to a clean DC to charge your battery, at between 13.5-14.5 v normally. If it hasn’t been replaced already get a new high performance one. The original reg/rec on your bike wasn’t great to start with and if it’s 20+ years old, spend the money (they’re cheap) and get a replacement. Lithium batteries will not hold up under a shitty charging system, be warned.
Ignition switch-
Your key hole, this is the first stop for your battery and cuts power to everything bar your starter relay. Minimum of 2 positions, first provides power to your lights and accessories second provides power to your coils and starter circuit.
Points/pulse generator –
Normally on the right side of the engine. This provides the timing for your Coils and spark plugs the pulse generator sends a signal to the CDI. Old bikes had magnetic points that wear out, you can replace them with a Dyna digital ignition which is highly recommended. Shown is a Yamaha RD engine where it’s located on the left side.
CDI or Capacitive Discharge Ignition-
This stores a charge from your battery in a capacitor, when the pulse is received from the points it sends a high power signal from that capacitor to the coils. If your bike is running horribly and nothing seems to be wrong with it, chances are it’s your CDI. These can be very hard to test though so chase down all other options before replacing it.
Coil-
These receive the signal from your ignition, amplify it and send the fire down the wire to your spark plugs.
Starter relay-
The starter relay takes a small signal from your button and closes a heavy duty switch, this pushes the high current to your starter motor. Your starter motor draws a lot of power, if all that power went through your start button it would melt and blow up.
Starter Motor-
Exactly what you think it does, This is the opposite of your stator, you feed it power, it will rotate and start your engine.
Indicator flasher relay-
In times of old these were analogue timing circuits, with a capacitor. Your indicator flashes on, draws 30-46 watts and slowly charges the capacitor, once charged it turns your indicator off and repeats. With new LED lights they draw 3-6 watts, this charges your capacitor a lot faster. This results in a very quick flash or a flicker in some cases, adding a load balancing resistor slows this back down to a normal pace. Newer flasher relays use MOSFET switching which is a digital solid state unit that is not load dependant and will flash at the same rate regardless of what lights you use. Purpose Built Moto is prototyping a flasher unit for use with a slim pushbutton and LED indicators, it also runs your hi/lo beam using MOSFET switching.
Fuses– these protect your wiring from catching fire if overloaded or damaged. ever see a bikes wiring smoke up? The fuse probably blew and the genius just put a bigger fuse in it, it’s important to get your fuse rating right. Now you can get some really great 12v circuit breakers too which I tend to use on my builds, instead of replacing the fuse when there’s an issue you can reset it once the problem is fixed. If you don’t have an original wiring diagram to show the fuse rating I’ll show you how to work out your fuse rating too:
The formula is Power (watts) = Volts x Current (amps)
Or- Current (amps) = Power (watts) ÷ Volts
For a rough example, if you have 80w low 100 watt high beam 4 x 10 watt indicators and a 40 watt brake/tail light plus 20 watts of other lights.
You’ll have:
100+80+40+40= 260 watts
260 watts ÷ 12 volts= 22 amps maximum, use a 20 amp fuse or Circuit breaker.
Hopefully you’ve picked up some knowledge and with knowing these few things, you’ll get a better understanding of what you’re doing when re-wiring your bobber or café racer.
Leave a comment below and sign up to our newsletter for our re-wiring tutorial and diagrams to be released soon.
Thanks for taking the time.
Tom.Research in Motion’s (s rimm)declining fortunes have been well documented. It is losing momentum in sales as consumers drift to other platforms like iOS (s AAPL) and Android (s GOOG). More recently developers have started to back off the platform, saying it’s not worth their effort. And now there are signs that the workforce is restless and concerned, potentially on the verge of losing hope.
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In an open letter sent to BGR, an unnamed senior exec lays out in painstaking detail where the company has gone astray and what it needs to get back on track. Though the post ends on a hopeful note, it is littered with doubt and fears, alternating with anger at the squandered opportunities the company has had.
It is not surprising given the state of the company, but it shows how precarious things have gotten for RIM. RIM responded with a statement that questioned the veracity of the letter and provided some general upbeat talk about the company’s efforts to weather its transition. But it doesn’t address the major points raised by the letter, simply reiterating that RIM is addressing the situation and is still in a strong position to tackle the challenges ahead.
It’s a bland response and doesn’t do much to get at what I see as the real issue: keeping up morale at the company. While losing customers and developers is obviously a huge problem, RIM can’t afford to lose the trust and confidence of its employees. These are the only people who can engineer a turnaround for the company. But they need a reason not to give up hope.
Here’s a look at some of the points raised by the letter:
RIM’s culture doesn’t support open communication and criticism and doesn’t hold people accountable. And executives are too dismissive of competing products instead of learning from them.
The company took too long to understand the disruption brought by iPhone and Apple’s commitment to the end user and instead built devices based on strategic alignments and partner requests or in an effort to achieve “feature parity.”
RIM hasn’t focused enough on its developer community, offering them inadequate tools that have resulted in subpar apps. And it hasn’t prized software enough, failing to recruit the kind of talent that can go up against Apple, Google and Microsoft (s msft).
The marketing message around BlackBerry is muddled and unfocused, latching on to features like Flash or multitasking instead of clearly defining what the company stands for.
RIM’s structure with two co-CEOs needs to be rethought, because it’s not efficient. The company hasn’t been able to move quickly in its response to the iPhone or in its transition to QNX. That has led to too many products, some that were not ready for launch. The writer suggests that they step down, with both still involved but no longer carrying the CEO title. On Thursday RIM said that it would create a committee to explore splitting the role of co-chair and co-CEO.
But more than the individual points, there’s an undercurrent of frustration about where the company is going and how well positioned it is to recover. The writer starts off by stating, “I have lost confidence,” saying the company has fallen further behind during the “chaotic” transition. Later he says, “we are demotivated,” when talking about the state of RIM’s software; he also says that the culture of the company needs to change so that people who fail are let go. But most importantly, there is a sense that all is not well at the top. The writer says the company’s overconfidence clouded its decision-making, leaving it flat-footed when Apple came with its iPhone.
We missed not boldly reacting to the threat of iPhone when we saw it in January over four years ago. We laughed and said they are trying to put a computer on a phone, that it won’t work. We should have made the QNX-like transition then. We are now 3–4 years too late. That is the painful truth... it was a major strategic oversight and we know who is responsible.
I have no doubt that co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have read this note. But the real issue is what they do with it. It seems apparent to me that employee trust is wavering, which tends to happen when you announce layoffs. But the bigger issue is that the rank and file want some direction, some sense of purpose from the top, something to keep them from bolting when the headhunters come. The writer pleads explicitly for that, saying, “We need an injection of confidence.”
I’ve said that the smartphone game is still being played out, and so RIM can afford to see its sales dip for a time. Developers will come back when the user base demands it, though better tools would help. But it’s all dependent on getting back to putting out a top-notch product. And for that to happen, RIM needs to engage its employees and get more out of them than just long hours. It needs to open up those channels of communication and show that it knows how to listen while still being disciplined in setting a course of action.
This is a very pivotal time for RIM. From the sound of the last quarterly earnings report, patience is necessary as deadlines get pushed out and the forecast gets more hazy. Taking this letter to heart could show that management is prepared to do battle again. But if it’s just business as usual, I have little confidence in any turnaround taking root.Submitted by Graham Summers of Phoenix Capital Research
It’s Impossible to “Get By” In the US
While the market cheers on the fantastic job “growth” of March 2010, the more astute of us are concerned with a growing tide of personal bankruptcies. March 2010 saw 158,000 bankruptcy filings. David Rosenberg of Gluskin-Sheff notes that this is an astounding 6,900 filings per day.
This latest filing is up 19% from March 2009’s number which occurred at the absolute nadir of the economic decline, when everyone thought the world was ending. It’s also up 35% from last month’s (February 2010) number.
Given the significance of this, I thought today we’d spend some time delving into numbers for the “median” American’s experience in the US today. Regrettably, much of the data is not up to date so we’ve got to go by 2008 numbers.
In 2008, the median US household income was $50,300. Assuming that the person filing is the “head of household” and has two children (dependents), this means a 1040 tax bill of $4,100, which leaves about $45K in income after taxes (we’re not bothering with state taxes). I realize this is a simplistic calculation, but it’s a decent proxy for income in the US in 2008.
Now, $45K in income spread out over 26 pay periods (every two weeks), means a bi-weekly paycheck of $1,730 and monthly income of $3,460. This is the money “Joe America” and his family to live off of in 2008.
Now, in 2008, the median home value was roughly $225K. Assuming our “median” household put down 20% on their home (unlikely, but it used to be considered the norm), this means a $180K mortgage. Using a 5.5% fixed rate 30-year mortgage, this means Joe America’s 2008 monthly mortgage payments were roughly $1,022.
So, right off the bat, Joe’s monthly income is cut to $2,438.
According to the US Department of Agriculture, the average 2008 monthly food bill for a family of four ranged from $512-$986 depending on how “liberal” you are with your purchases. For simplicity’s sake we’ll take the mid-point of this range ($750) as a monthly food bill.
This brings Joe’s monthly income to $1,688.
Now, Joe needs light, energy, heat, and air conditioning to run his home. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average US household used about 920 kilowatt-hours per month in 2008. At a national average price of 11 cents per kilowatt-hour this comes to a monthly electrical bill of $101.20.
Joe’s now down to $1,587.
Now Joe needs to drive to work to make a living. Similarly, he needs to be able to drive to the grocery store, doctor, etc. According to AAA, the average cost per mile of driving a minivan (Joe’s a family man) in 2008 was 57 cents per mile. This cost is based on average fuel consumption, tires, maintenance, insurance, license and registration, and average loan finance charges.
Multiply this cost by 15,000 miles per year and you’ve got an annual driving bill of $8,550. Divide this into months (by 12) and you’ve got a monthly driving bill of $712.
Joe’s now down to $877 (I’m also assuming Joe’s family only has ONE car). Indeed, if Joe’s family has two cars (one minivan and one sedan) he’s already run out of money for the month.
Now, assuming Joe’s family is one of the lucky ones (depending on your perspective) they’ve got medical insurance. Trying to find an average monthly medical insurance premium for a family in the US is extremely difficult because insurance plans have a wide range in deductibles, premiums, and co-pays. But according to eHealth Insurance, the average monthly premium for family policies in February 2008 was $369.
So if Joe has medical insurance on his family, he’s now down to $508. Throw in cell phone bills, cable TV and Internet bills, and the like, and he’s maybe got $100-200 discretionary income left at the end of the month.
This analysis covers all of the basic necessities of the average American household: mortgage payments, food, energy, gas, driving expenses, and medical insurance. It also assumes that Joe:
1) Didn’t overpay for his house
2) Made a 20% down-payment of $45K on his home purchase
3) Has no debt aside from his mortgage (so no credit card debt, student loans, etc)
4) Only has one car in the family and drives 15,000 miles per year
5) Keeps his energy bill reasonable
6) Does not eat out at restaurants ever/ keeps food expenses moderate
7) Has no pets
8) Pays for health insurance but has no monthly medical expenses (unlikely with two kids)
9) Keeps his personal budget under control regarding cable TV, Internet, and the like
10) Doesn’t spoil his kids with toys, gadgets, trips to the movies, etc.
11) Doesn’t take vacations.
Suffice to say, I am assuming Joe maintains EXTREMELY conservative spending habits. Personally, I know NO ONE who meets all of the above criteria. However, even if the above assumptions applied to the average American, you’re still only looking at $100-200 in “wiggle” room for spending per month!
If Joe:
1) Overpaid on his house
2) Didn’t have a full 20% down payment
3) Owns two cars
4) Eats at restaurants
5) Splurges on heating & A/C bills
6) Has any medical expenses aside from monthly premiums…
… he is running into the red EVERY month.
I also wish to note that my analysis didn’t include real estate taxes and numerous other expenses that most folks have to pay. So even if you are extremely frugal and careful with your money, it is impossible to “get by” in the US without using credit cards, home equity lines of credit or burning through savings. The cost of living is simply TOO high relative to incomes.
This is why there simply cannot be a sustainable recovery in the US economy. Because we outsourced our jobs, incomes fell. Because incomes fell and savers were punished (thanks to abysmal returns on savings rates) we pulled future demand forward by splurging on credit. Because we splurged on credit, prices in every asset under the sun rose in value. Because prices rose while incomes fell, we had to use more credit to cover our costs, which in turn meant taking on more debt (a net drag on incomes).
And on and on.
Does this mean the market is about to tank? Not necessarily, stocks have been disconnected from reality since November if not July. Bubbles (and we ARE in a bubble) take time to pop and this time around will be no different.
Best Regards,
Graham SummersThe city has agreed to spend nearly a million dollars to help Hamilton Police Services build a new investigative services building downtown, but one councillor worries it's setting the city up for a future money crunch.
City council will either debt finance or spend the police budget surplus to contribute $900,000 to the $5 million municipal contribution to the new building. The rest will primarily come from police reserves and the sale of a Mountain station.
Police are cutting deep into their reserves without a solid financial plan, said Coun. Chad Collins of Ward 5, the sole councillor to vote against the project on Wednesday.
I just think it’s fiscally irresponsible. - Coun. Chad Collins
So when the next urgent capital need happens, the service won't be able to handle it, he said, and the city could end up going farther into debt to cover it.
"I just think it’s fiscally irresponsible," said Collins, who supports the project otherwise. "It’s a last-minute amalgamation of funding sources that essentially drained everything they have in the bank and leaves them no financial capacity to pay for future hits."
Everyone else on council supported the 53,500-square foot building, which will include three forensics labs — one for evidence from victims, one for the accused and one for the crime scene.
Police will use the commitment to apply for $5 million from both the provincial and federal governments, for a total of $15 million.
What is going on now must be addressed. We are at a critical stage. - Chief Glenn De Caire
Lack of space is hurting cases
Chief Glenn De Caire acknowledged that the plan depletes the service's reserves. But that shows how badly the building is needed.
"We are at a stage where this project must take place," he said. " |
keep looking frantically out of the window for signs or use the blue current location dot in Gmaps to tell you when you’ve made it to your target destination.
This would be entirely unnecessary if Google was to introduce a tiny feature to its Maps app – notify the traveler via vibration or sound when the vehicle approaches its destination. You could just fall asleep and trust Maps to wake you up 5 minutes before getting out, wouldn’t that be amazing? (Of course there are minor difficulties to overcome such as loss of GPS signal but I’m sure Google’s geeks will come up with a solution for that.)
How can you help in 2 minutes?
Google has a standardized feedback channel that gets systematically checked and indexed for good ideas. The best way to get something introduced, if you don’t have personal connections, is to submit a short snippet outlining the idea. The more people make a suggestion, the more likely the feature is to be implemented.
Here’s a step by step explanation:
Open Google Maps here Click on the menu on the left hand side Click the “Send feedback” button Choose “Other feedback” Copy and paste the following snippet:
Please notify people when their bus/tram gets close to the target destination if people use Maps on their phone for public transport. Often, buses have neither a display of current station nor announcements so I end up looking at the GPS location all the time. If Maps vibrated/gave a sound when I’m 30s off the target that’d be amazing. Click send Share this article on Social Media
That’s it, of course if you’re willing to invest a bit more time you can also write your own suggestion.
Thanks for your help! If you have any other ideas or comments feel free to email me or comment on this post.
Edit: Apparently, the app/website http://www.citymapper.com has a feature called “Get Off Alert” already. I will be testing it and report back.
50.830534 4.399682KPOS G2 & IGB Barrel Fab Defense Conversion Kit for Glock Models 17, 19, 21, 22 with IGB 16" Barrel
A short overview on the KPOS:
Our modern K.P.O.S. (second generation) P.D.W. Conversion Kit upgrades your standard handgun and convert your weapon to a special operations set.
WIth it's small size, it helps you maintain no retention for best use at a medium distance when in close contact secret operations and gives the opportunity to enhance performance competence for excellent results.
The small frame of the K.P.O.S. G2 is made of strong anodized aluminum to give it solid structure and is also very light weight. it keeps proper heat distribution (for C models) due to it's ventilation design, it's AR15 handle mechanism of loading and cocking type makes it easy and convenient to use. It has removable front flash hider for silencer assembles with one bolt only and a non-removable holding plate attached to it's back frame, so you can not lose it.
In addition it combines full length rail on top together with rails on sides and bottom and has a folding rubber buttstock that can be adjusted for perfect fitting on any ground conditions.
This new Model is quick and simple to install, it requires no special modifications and can easily be assembled in hands, while free standing. no table or any other platform needed!
This KPOS is compatible with GLOCK Models (including C and G4):
Glock 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25, 31, 32, 37, 38,
Glock 34 & 35 (Requires pre installation manual adjustment)
Glock 21 & 21sf (Requires back plate replacement that can be ordered separately).
Features:
The Frame is made of One Solid Piece of 6061 T6 Billet Hard Anodized Aluminum
Built-in AR15 Style Charging/Cocking Handle Mechanism making it Ambidextrous and Comfortable.
Folding Rubber Butt Pad Stock Easily Angle and Height Adjustable to Allow Perfect Fit for Mounted Sights & Easy to Conceal
Removable Front Flash Hider for Silencer/Suppressor - Assembles with Only One Bolt
Quick and Easy Installation Requires No Special Assembly or Handgun Modification
May Assemble in Hands, Free Standing, and Does Not Require Lying Down on a Table
Incorporates Full Length Upper Rail with One Piece Side & Lower Rails
Back Holding Plate (spring box) Can Not Be Removed from the Frame to Prevent Loss
Smallest & Lightest frame (Folded or Open) Compared to Any Alternative
Highly Ventilated Frame Provides Appropriate Heat Dissipation for use with C Models
Provided with the F-GGK Trigger Guard Foregrip, in order to Enhance Your Weapon’s Safety by Securing “Loaded Chamber” Carry
Incorporates a Lifetime Warranty!
Generation 2 K.P.O.S. Dimensions Are As Follow:
Weight 960 gr
Width 59 mm
Height 146 mm
Length 370 mm
Length (open / deployed) 598 mm
Note to US buyers: All US buyers need an SBR tax stamp to assemble the KPOS and their pistol together.
Here is a simple guide that explains how to get the stamp: https://www.zfi-inc. com/en/how-to-get-your-sbr- tax-stamp *** The KPOS Pathfinder version does not require a tax stamp. The IGB Austria 16" Barrel We are the official representatives of IGB Austria company in the US. The IGB Barrel will be shipped directly from our Warehouse in the US, And the KPOS will be shipped from our Warehouse in Israel
Shipping time is 1-5 business days.
Only sold in the US About IGB Barrels: Major advantage gives a precision match barrel, which differs from the original barrel by best fitting, special profils and last, but not least, by high end steel material of high viscosity. In contrast to stainless - high end steel with special hardening preserves the viscosity and life time of a barrel. No broken ramps, no cracking of cartridge housings. Lasting best results.
IGB 16" Barrel comaptability: Pistole model Caliber prod. no. 16" Glock 17 9x19 1617009 Glock 17 9x21 1617921 Glock 17L 9x19 1617L009 Glock 17L 9x21 1617l921 Glock 20 10 Auto 1620010 Glock 21 45 ACP 1621045 Glock 21 10 Auto 1621010 Glock 22 40 S&W 1622040 Glock 22 357 Sig 1622357 Glock 22 9x19 1622009 Glock 22 9x21 1622921 Note: Please choose the correct barrel for you model of glock.New Delhi, India - For over half-a-century, New Delhi's Kathputli slum has been home to puppeteers, magicians, folk singers, painters, dancers, acrobats, jugglers and storytellers.
The artists first began moving into the area in the 1950s, which, at the time, was nothing more than a piece of vacant land beside a jungle in West Delhi. Their tent camp evolved into a tinsel slum called the Kathputli Colony, which translates into "the wooden puppets" colony.
Now the Delhi Development Agency, the government body that owns the land, is planning to clear the slum of its 20,000 residents to make way for a luxury retail development.
So far, around 405 families have taken up the government's offer of buying homes at a reduced price, and many have already moved out to transit camps while the new blocks are being built.
But many other artist families, who have remained in the Kathputli Colony, are unsure if the government will provide them with flats or whether the accommodation offered will allow the next generation to continue their cultural traditions.
Related: Tomorrow We DisappearRep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Sunday Chairman Devin Nunes has been a "serious obstacle" in the committee's investigation into possible collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russia.
"We continue the hard work of getting to the bottom of what happened. We faced very serious obstacles and many of them go back to our chairman, who, I think all too often, has been willing to further the work and the viewpoint of the White House, irrespective of what we are finding in the investigation. That's unhelpful," Schiff told ABC "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos.
"But nonetheless, there are plenty of Democrats and Republicans that continue to interview the key witnesses, review the documents and make progress in the investigation," Schiff added. "It's still my hope that notwithstanding all the turbulence created at the top of our committee that we can come to a common conclusion. But, it has been tough. I won't — I won't deny that for a minute."
Nunes announced in April he would recuse himself from the committee's probe in response to an ethics complaint that he improperly disclosed classified information. It's not clear if he is currently involved with the probe, though GOP Reps. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, Mike Conaway of Texas, and Tom Rooney of Florida are supposed to be in charge of the investigation.
Schiff added the White House involvement in getting the Justice Department to lift a gag rule on an FBI informant on the investigation into a uranium deal done in 2009 was "unethical" and indicates deeper problems within the administration and Trump's supporters in Congress.
"If members of Congress are willing to essentially cover for that or worse, become complicit in that — and that was the word Jeff Flake used, in what I think is the most significant speech in Congress in the 17 years I have been there," Schiff said.
"If we allow ourselves in Congress to become complicit in unethical conduct by the president, in taking apart our system of checks and balances brick by brick, by intervening in the Justice Department with a gag rule, by interviewing U.S. attorneys in New York who may oversee potential prosecutions of the president's interests, by picking someone, confirming someone nominated to head the criminal division of the Justice Department who happens to be the lawyer for Alpha Bank, we become complicit in that kind of conduct, we will have to answer to history," Schiff added.
On Thursday, Schiff said he would investigate the Trump administration if he determined Trump "personally intervened w DOJ to advance" the case against his political opponent.Buying a new computer but afraid you'll get caught in a few months by the Windows 8 upgrade cycle? Fear not. According to a report from Paul Thurrott, Microsoft will launch a promotion in June that allows new PC purchasers to lock-in an upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for $14.99.
Microsoft typically offers upgrade deals in advance of its new operating system releases. But unlike the last upgrade cycle—when Microsoft offered free upgrades to corresponding versions of Windows 7 to buyers of systems pre-loaded with Windows Vista—there will only be two consumer versions of Windows 8 for PCs. The entry-level Windows 8 will lack support for Windows Media Center (which will be sold separately), encryption, and other high-end features.
So instead of a free pass, Microsoft will be offering a paid upgrade to the Pro version of Windows 8 to anyone who buys a system with at least Windows 7 Home Basic installed—up-selling new PC buyers to the professional/enthusiast feature set. Microsoft will also offer boxed upgrade "packs," including versions of Windows 8 Pro bundled with Windows Media Center, but no pricing has been revealed for these new buyer upgrades.Former TNA superstar and current Global Force Wrestling champion Sonjay Dutt has an interview on Sportskeeda. Sonjay talked about the future plans of GFW, situation of TNA, joining WWE and more. Below are some highlights.
On the possibility of joining WWE:
"Absolutely. With the cruiserweight division beginning, I know I could be an asset."
On the situation of TNA:
"I've been keeping abreast of the situation and I can only say that it's quite sad what things have come to due to obvious poor decision making. I think we could be here all day trying to analyze exactly what went wrong."
Future plans of GFW:
"I think people will truly notice the difference in GFW with our TV presentation. I've been fortunate enough to watch our Amped episodes that we taped in 2015 and watching those, you truly see how different we are presenting pro wrestling. A much more realistic view of it showcasing what pro wrestling is based on, pro wrestling. I'm hoping that 2017 becomes a very big year for GFW. Our primary goal coming up and since day one has been to secure a television deal in North America. What I've learned over the course of this year is that it's not the easiest thing to do. Trying to get 52 weeks of first run programming on a major network domestically is a hard task and I can assure you that we are working diligently to make this a reality."
Sonjay also talked about how 2016 was for him, GFW venturing into India and more. You can read the full interview here.
Source: SportskeedaAustin Purifoy, the 19-year-old who mistakenly pooped in a Civic he thought was his girlfriend's, is joining the Army. But we will remember him fondly, for his immortal words upon being discovered by the car's real owner in the backseat:
"This is your car? I thought this was Desiree's car."
He fled into the New Mexico night, but was soon located "by a nearby ditch." Purifoy had also smashed the window of the car, and the window of an adjacent business. He has paid back both the business and the car's owner for the damage, and has enlisted in the Army, where he can poop in tanks and hummer and other such vehicles.
The owner was forced to clean out the car himself after being asked by a car wash to take his business (and Purifoy's) elsewhere. "It's an unusual case, to say the least," District Attorney Michael Heitz told the Las Cruces Sun-News.
[Las Cruces Sun-NewsTwo Dutch architecture firms, DUS Architects and Universe Architecture, are each hoping to be the first to print the world's first full-scale, inhabitable house.
"It's kind of Lego for adults," says Hans Vermeulen, one of three architects at DUS. But his plan is not child's play. He wants to print, piece by piece, a classic Dutch canal house, which will become an information center for 3D printing.
To do this, DUS has built its own 3D printer. They call it the "KamerMaker," or "Room Builder."
At six meters-tall, the shiny metal machine is one of the largest 3D printers in the world - it's nearly large enough to print an entire room. The KamerMaker sits in a garden outside the DUS office building, where dozens of tourists stop every day to watch it in action.
The KamerMaker is a popular attraction for tourists, who watch while it creates test pieces for a canal house
While 3D printing has been around since the 1980's, the technology has only recently been introduced to the field of architecture.
DUS began using a much smaller 3D printer five years ago to create models of its designs. Then last March the firm had an idea.
"We thought, OK, we are architects, we have to build a big one if we want to print a house," says Vermeulen.
Just like its smaller cousins, the KamerMaker can be programmed with a digital blueprint of a three dimensional object. It uses these instructions to print - horizontally and vertically - the programmed object.
A sketch of the proposed canal house to be built along a canal in North Amsterdam
Layer by layer
On the day DW visited DUS, the printer is slowly creating a test piece for the proposed canal house. Inside the machine, a long tube runs from the ceiling to a printer head, which moves slowly over the floor along a metal frame. Instead of ink, the printer lays down a thin layer of white, melted plastic. As the layer hardens, the printer retraces its steps, hundreds of times, building a solid plastic object, layer-by-layer over the course of a few hours.
"It's printing and it's working, but it's not yet working perfectly, it's not fast enough," says Vermeulen, who hopes the project will inspire new ideas about architecture and housing construction.
"That's also why we want to do it - to see what this technique actually can mean for housing seven billion people on this planet - because at the moment, with the current construction techniques and how we play with resources in this world, it's not sufficient enough."
Vermeulen and other proponents of 3D printing say the technology could be more ecologically friendly than traditional building techniques.
A plan of the Ruijssenaars designed Landscape House
For example, materials like wood and cement would no longer need to be transported to a construction site. There would be less waste - printers use only the necessary amount of raw material to create each design.
There is even talk of a printer that could be able to print solar panels directly into the structure of a house.
Houses made of plastic?
The KamerMaker currently prints with recycled plastic, but this may change.
"It's the material which works at the moment with this technique," Vermeulen explains. "We already printed with M.D.F. - wood chips with polymer - and it becomes wood. So you can sandpaper it and you can smell wood. You can come up with totally new materials in a new form."
Meanwhile in a third floor office in the center of Amsterdam another Dutch firm is planning to print a more abstract house.
Janjaap Ruijssenaars, the lone architect at Universe Architecture, calls his design the Landscape House.
The Landscape House will be built "in one go" with Enrico Dini's 3D printer, the D-Shape
It was inspired by what he calls the "infinite landscape" of Ireland. The house resembles a Möbius strip, an infinite loop where the floor becomes the ceiling and the ceiling becomes the floor.
Ruijssenaars believes 3D printing is the best technique for building it.
"For the complex turns that we have in this design you would in a traditional way make molds of wood and then pour them with concrete and then later take away the wood," Ruijssenaars says. "It is a very time and energy consuming process. So, in the large scale, 3D printing was not only communicating infinity, but also a more direct way of actually printing the form you want."
The goal is to print the Landscape House in one go - without visible signs of a beginning or an end - to communicate its concept of infinity.
Ruijssenaars has contracted the services of Italian house printer Enrico Dini. Dini's machine, called the D-Shape, uses layers of sand and a liquid bonding agent to construct a design.
"It's sort of a miracle," Ruijssenaars says, "because you actually harden out grinded rock back into rock or sand into rock."
The D-Shape printer lays down layers of liquid chemicals on layers of sand
"You can imagine a really large printer head with hundreds of nozzles actually leaving a liquid, which is magnesium chloride, on a sheet of sand. So what happens is, if you do this layer-by-layer, you can directly print a form that you want and then in the end take away what you don't need. And it's very strong. This artificial rock is unbreakable," says Ruijssenaars.
Construction of the Landscape House is expected to begin in 2014, with costs estimated around 5 million euro ($6.7 million). However, Ruijssenaars thinks 3D printed houses are not just for the wealthy.
"We've been approached by a bank from South Africa to print houses for the poor," he says. "You could actually have the printer print a whole street in one go. This might become one of the larger applications of the technique."
DUS Architects will begin printing its design later this year along a canal in the north section of Amsterdam. If successful, both projects will set large-scale precedents for the future of 3D printing and architecture.THUNDER BAY -- A North End squirrel has a harsh winter ahead of it after a loose cigarette butt caught fire under a residential deck where the animal was living. Emergency services were called to a structural fire on Shuniah Street at 10:05 a.m.
THUNDER BAY -- A North End squirrel has a harsh winter ahead of it after a loose cigarette butt caught fire under a residential deck where the animal was living.
Emergency services were called to a structural fire on Shuniah Street at 10:05 a.m. Saturday to find a burnt squirrel's nest and remnants of food it was saving for winter.
"Seems like he (the homeowner) was smoking out on the deck and his cigarette ignited some peanuts a squirrel had been accumulating over the summer months," said deputy fire chief Ed Hill.
"The squirrel has lost its food supply for the year."
Hill added the smoke hung in the air due to Saturday's weather conditions, making the fire appear a lot worse than it actually was.The Government of India through its broadcasting unit, Prasar Bharati, has announced its plans to set up a global digital news platform to counter the ‘anti-India’ narrative, reports Press Trust of India.
Unlike All India Radio and Doordarshan, this digital platform will cater to international audiences. The committee headed by Prasar Bharati Chairman, A Surya Prakash intends to focus on South Asia, North America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, China and Asia-Pacific with the platform. The reports added that the committee that approved the platform also included Rajeev Singh (acting CEO of Prasar Bharati), board members Shashi Shekhar Vempati and Sunil Alagh, R Jagannathan, (journalist and director at Swarajya Magazine), academician Vamsee Juluri, and Ritesh Bawri, a ‘management expert’.
“India is the fastest growing economy and there have been extraordinary steps taken in the area of governance. These can act as a template for many governments. But the western media portrays a picture as if it is a conflict zone which is absolutely bogus. We need to set it right,” said Prakash speaking to PTI.
According to Indiantelevision.com, this platform will focus on changing the narrative that presents India as a “constant point of conflict between Hindu nationalists and so-called secularism.” This 24×7 platform will have correspondents around the world.
The new digital body will be registered under the Companies Act with an annual operating cost of Rs. 75 crores.The panel has also suggested that the platform will have programmes including talent shows, quizzes, travel, adventure, apps and even humour-based shows with the ‘flagship programmes’ hosted by popular anchors. Though the platform would initially be in English, it plans to also have a Spanish and Chinese desk to reach a larger audience.
It appears that the platform will also be available as a mobile app and be present on YouTube and plans to reach 10 million to 100 million page views in the next three years along with a million mobile app downloads and YouTube subscribers each.An employee of E Pine’s Poco Wine and Spirits was severely beaten in a Pride weekend attack that Seattle Police detectives are investigating as a hate crime. (UPDATE: Poco tells us the person who was attacked is a manager at the venue not an owner as documented in the SPD report on the incident. “Owners Tramale and Jackie are fine, but we were all troubled by what happened,” a Poco rep tells CHS.)
According to the East Precinct report on the assault, the male victim left the Cuff around 11:30 PM on Saturday, June 25th and was walking alone on E Pine when he was approached by an unknown male. The victim told police the suspect walked up, called him a faggot, and punched him in the face.
The victim suffered “significant” injuries from the single punch including “swelling, bruising and cuts around his left eye” and a scraped left shoulder, police said. The victim told police he could not remember what had happened immediately following the punch and may have lost consciousness.
The victim arrived at Poco with visible injuries and told staff he didn’t want to talk about what had happened. According to the report, the victim “did not originally want to report the incident, but after consulting friends and coworkers about the incident he decided to report the incident to police.” The report notes that Poco is part of SPD’s Safe Place program. The police report also notes that the victim was drunk but that one employee at Poco said that the victim had been drinking before being convinced to call the police two hours after the attack and was likely less intoxicated at the time of the beating.
The suspect was described as “a white male, 28-32 years old, 6’01”, 180 lbs, and average build,” with “short to medium length blonde hair,” and wearing “blue clothing.”
Seattle Fire was called to the scene to check out the victim’s injuries.
A reported trans-phobic bashing in Pike/Pine earlier in the week on Wednesday, June 22nd continues to be an open investigation but police have not reported any new developments in that case after asking the public for help. Anybody with information is asked to call the SPD Violent Crimes tip line at (206) 233-5000.
City Hall and SPD pledged to have more officers on patrol Pride weekend following the June 22nd attack and the deadly shooting in Orlando.ATLANTA — Four years ago, the high school basketball standout R. J. Hunter entered his mother’s bedroom in Indianapolis and interrupted her sleep with some news: He would cast his college basketball lot with Georgia State.
Delivering the scoop by phone to his father prompted the boilerplate parental response: Sleep on it, and let’s revisit the decision tomorrow. Ron Hunter immediately wished he could retract those words, seeing as how he was the Panthers’ coach.
“I was mad at myself, thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ ”he said.
R. J. stuck by his decision, delighting his parents. Not only would the three reunite in Atlanta, Ron’s home away from home for the past year, but they would get a close-up perspective of R. J.’s transition to college life that most parents of top athletes are denied. Besides, R. J. might fortify Ron’s job stability at a program that was floundering and largely ignored.
But as the journey apparently approaches the finish line, the Hunters are experiencing a hodgepodge of emotions that have complicated what at first seemed an ideal situation. R. J. has second-guessed himself as player and son. Ron struggled to balance the roles of father and coach.This Spring's honor for "Viking to make the most unusual journey to the Park Blocks" would likely go to
The 25-year old junior punter was neither recruited, nor expected, when he came to Portland State just a few weeks ago. Loomis is in his first term at PSU and is on the football field competitively for the first time since 2006… that's right, 2006.
Oregon State football fans with good memories might recall Loomis. He was a punter for the team as a true freshman in 2006. Loomis earned a scholarship from Coach Mike Riley and the Beavers, and promptly proved his worth. A prep from Roseburg High School, Loomis earned the starting role at OSU, averaging 41.3 yards per punt. He was even honored as a third team All-American by the Sporting News.
"It all happened so fast. I graduated from high school. Two weeks later I was taking classes at OSU in the (summer) Bridge Program, then fall camp started… It took me maybe five games to really get the speed of the game down at the college level," Loomis recollected in a recent interview. "It took me a while to relax. I was nervous, but I finally figured it out the last several games."
The highlights were plentiful on an Oregon State team that went 10-4, beating USC, Oregon and winning the Sun Bowl over Missouri in a thrilling overtime game.
"We beat USC when they were ranked number three. That was a good one. I actually dropped a snap in that game which allowed them to score a touchdown and make it close. So that was really exciting to win. I would have felt pretty bad if we lost," said Loomis.
"One of my best games was against Cal (despite the OSU loss). I was punting to DeSean Jackson and he didn't have any return yards… and, we beat the Ducks."
However, following his freshman season, Loomis grew weary of school and football, and eventually left school. "I told everybody it was for personal reasons. Basically, I got burned out on school from not really having a break. Then, I got burned out on football. I was talking to Coach Riley that whole spring about whether I would stay. He was really good about it. He is an awesome guy. He just said, 'it's up to you.'"
Loomis left school in the summer of 2007. He considered getting a job, then he looked at joining the Marines and finally the Army. "I didn't leave Oregon State to join the Army. A couple months after I was gone from Oregon State I finally decided to do it."
So from July 2008 through February 2012, Loomis was a member of the US Army. His basic training was at Fort Benning in Georgia. He was then stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Loomis served three years and eight months in the 2-325 Airborne Infantry Regiment - 82nd Airborne Division. Twice his battalion was deployed. Once to Haiti and once to Iraq. However, Loomis never shipped out. He had ankle problems and ended up getting two ankle surgeries while in the military. In February 2012 he was honorably discharged.
Upon returning home, he once again had a decision to make about the next step in his life. Working temporarily for the Oregon Department of Transportation, Loomis wanted to go back to school. He looked at Western Oregon, Southern Oregon and Portland State. At no time was playing football again a part of the equation.
While in Roseburg, a family friend, Ryan Carhart, who also happens to be a punter for the Roseburg High School football team, asked Loomis if he would help him work out. Loomis agreed and soon discovered something about himself; he could still punt.
"Ryan asked if I could come punt with him and coach him on some of the finer points. He also plays free safety and wide receiver so he doesn't get a lot of time to punt during practice," said Loomis. "So we started hitting some footballs together, and after a week or so I realized, I can still punt a pretty good football. And I'm pretty sure I can still do it at a pretty high level with a little practice."
That got the wheels spinning as Loomis had a desire to try to play once again. On January 10 of this year, Loomis sent an email to the person who was cornerbacks coach at Oregon State during his one season of college football. That person was Nigel Burton, current Viking Head Coach. Loomis stated his desire to play again and asked for a chance.
"I looked at eligibility and saw that the five-year rule of eligibility (didn't apply) if you went on a mission or joined the military. So I sent Coach Burton an email telling him I can still punt. I had pretty much decided I was coming to Portland State anyway."
Burton needed to see Loomis' level of commitment and asked him to come to campus and meet.
"Coach Burton wanted me to come up and talk to him face-to-face. He wanted to know what I wanted out of it. He knew me from Oregon State as a guy who could punt and kick but not much else because he was a cornerbacks coach. He wanted to know if I wanted to go to school and buckle down, and if I would be committed to the PSU program. I think I got it across that I definitely am.
"I have a little more maturity than when I was at OSU. I definitely realize education is a lot more important now because I definitely took it for granted at OSU. Now I'm school first and football after that. I want a degree," said Loomis.
So, he is relearning the position that he excelled at some seven years ago. Loomis was an All-State punter and kicker at Roseburg. He will compete with freshman transfer Marcus Kinsella, as well as returning kicker Nick Fernandez, for the starting role.
"I want to start at punter, but I still have to relearn everything about kickoffs. Punting, I need to get my consistency back to where it was, and get used to the speed again. I think I can."
It's not likely that the stress and burn-out of his previous college experience will be a factor this time.
"We always used to joke in the Army, because there were some guys who were athletes in college," said Loomis. "College athletes complain about, 'we (are so busy) with practice and study hall and stuff.' Once we were in the Army and did some of those things, with no break at all, going back to college is a piece of cake. I have to turn in a paper next Tuesday? That's the hardest thing about my week right now?" Loomis smiles.
For Loomis, the maturity is there and the spirit is willing. Now a Criminal Justice major on the GI Bill, and a college football punter isn't daunting at all in his second go-around.
REMAINING 2013 SPRING FOOTBALL SCHEDULE
Friday, April 12 1:30-4:00 PM
Monday, April 15 1:30-4:00 PM
Wednesday, April 17 1:30-4:00 PM
Friday, April 19 1:30-4:00 PM
*No practice April 22-26 – Recruiting break*
Monday, April 29 1:30-4:00 PM
Wednesday, May 1 1:30-4:00 PM
Friday, May 3 1:30-4:00 PM
Monday, May 6 1:30-4:00 PM
Wednesday, May 8 1:30-4:00 PM
Friday, May 10 1:30-4:00 PM
Monday, May 13 1:30-4:00 PM
Wednesday, May 15 1:30-4:00 PM
Saturday, May 18 Spring Game, site and time to be announced
Other Key Dates of Spring:
Portland State Football Coaches' Clinic, May 10-11
Evergreen GaveKal Coaches' Open Golf Tournament, May 17 (The Reserve Vineyards and Golf Club)
Viking Football Camps, June 2013[GSL] Liquid`Jinro / EG.IdrA Ro8 Foreigner Special Text by Lovedrop
GSL Code S Ro8 Foreigner Special: Liquid`Jinro & EG.IdrA
By Lovedrop
Images courtesy of playxp
Z7 Game 1 - Game 1 - Xel'Naga Caverns T1
+ Show Spoiler [Show Recap] +
Banshees shoo away the roaches.
After clearing out the mess at his front door, Jinro expands, using his starport and building bunkers as a wall. The banshee makes its way over to IdrA's base, but is unable to deal damage as feisty queens fend off her dearest baby drones. IdrA has started a spire at his natural, and Jinro is unable to scout it. Seven mutalisks spawn with +1 underway, quickly followed by a third at the 5 o'clock base and a baneling's nest. The mutalisks pick off slow medivacs and several SCVs, with IdrA dropping a fourth hatchery to reinforce his macro. Jinro looks poised to take out the rocks at the gold to claim his third, but mutalisks catch Jinro out of position forcing the marines to scatter back and forth. IdrA rushes forward after seeing a skimpy amount of tanks, but Jinro's marine spread was enough to nullify the baneling's effectiveness, forcing IdrA's mutas to pull back. During the attack, IdrA secures his own gold.
Very little tanks.
Jinro this time pushes into IdrA's gold only to be met with an overwhelming amount of units, and loses his whole army in the process. IdrA is adamant about denying that gold for Jinro, as he continuously pokes with his mutalisks, sniping turrets and MULEs alike. Jinro walls in one entrance to his natural with barracks, but mutalisks simply glides their way into the main, taking out the essential add-ons for Jinro's buildings. IdrA's now maxed army is ready to move out, with hive tech ready at his disposal. IdrA takes out Jinro's marines and seeing the mutalisks light each of his buildings on fire is enough for Jinro to tap out. [19:30]
Denying the third. EG.IdrA goes hatchery first, while Liquid`Jinro does not look like he will be applying any pressure as a second barracks is nowhere to be seen. Unknowingly a roach warren has been dropped, Jinro's four marines slowly make their way across the map. A hellion quickly joins the fray looking to deal some damage to IdrA's natural, but four roaches pop out, forcing Jinro to retreat. Jinro barely makes it into his base unscathed, walling in and using the marines' superior range to deal damage to IdrA's roaches. The roaches focus fire the barracks, bringing it down to a single tick of life left on its health bar, before Jinro pulls a handful of SCVs down to repair. The banshee is finally done to thwart IdrA's attack. IdrA smartly splits his remaining roaches to ensure survival of at least one.After clearing out the mess at his front door, Jinro expands, using his starport and building bunkers as a wall. The banshee makes its way over to IdrA's base, but is unable to deal damage as feisty queens fend off her dearest baby drones. IdrA has started a spire at his natural, and Jinro is unable to scout it. Seven mutalisks spawn with +1 underway, quickly followed by a third at the 5 o'clock base and a baneling's nest. The |
automatically start indexing tweets. Go to http://localhost:9200/_plugin/bigdesk/#cluster to visualize your indexes:
To search tweets, enter a URL something similar to this into the browser: http://localhost:8080/tweet/search?q=toronto&max=100.
Using the BigDesk plugin, we can monitor how Elasticsearch is indexing tweets:
Conclusion
In this introduction to Apache Camel we covered how to use this integration framework to communicate with external components like Twitter sample feed and Elasticsearch to index and search tweets in real-time.
The source code of the sample application is available at https://github.com/davidkiss/twitter-camel-ingester.
You may also find this post interesting: How to get started with Storm framework in 5 minutes.
Would you like to learn more about Apache Camel or ElasticSearch? I’m working on some more tutorials and would love to hear what topics you’d like to learn more about?Researchers believe that years of domestication have robbed the animals of the problem solving skills they once had in the wild.
Pet dogs failed basic intelligence tests that wolves and wild dogs passed with ease but proved more adept at social interaction, according to the research.
Dr Bradley Smith, the psychologist who led the study, said: "Wolves will outperform dogs on any problem-solving tasks that are non-social.
"Often feral dogs survive by taking advantage of human leftovers - perhaps scrounged or from rubbish - or domestic livestock.
"It would take a lot of generations of successful dogs to start fostering any such cognitive abilities required for survival in the wild."
Dr Smith, of the School of Psychology at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, put domesticated dogs, wolves and dingoes through a problem-solving test.
Dingoes are domestic dogs that have adapted to life in the Australian outback over many generations.
Researchers placed a bowl of food behind a fence. To reach it the animals had to work their way along the fence away from the food to pass through a swinging door and then double back on themselves.
All the wolves and dingoes found the food in about 20 seconds, while the domestic dogs fruitlessly pawed and dug at the fence and barked out of frustration.
Mr Smith added: "Dogs are great at social tasks such as communicating with humans, using humans as tools, learning from humans via observation. However wolves are much, much better at general problem solving."
He said tests also suggest wolves are better than domesticated dogs at working independently and at using tools, such as ropes.
The study will be published in the journal Animal Behaviour.
A separate study showed last year that dogs are as socially intelligent as the average two-old-child - capable of understanding up to 250 words and hand gestures.France has joined Britain in carrying out reconnaissance flights in support of the U.S. air campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Iraq, the defense minister said on Monday.
“This very morning, the first reconnaissance flights will be carried out,” Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told French troops, including pilots. According to the minister, the flights are being carried out in agreement with the Iraqi authorities.
Shortly afterwards, two French Rafale fighter jets took off from the base in the Gulf, an Agence France-Presse correspondent reported.
The announcment came as French President Francois Hollande called on Monday for a global reponse to counter ISIS militants, saying the group posed a security threat the world over.
Meanwhile, Paris is hosting an international conference aimed at hammering out a strategy to deal with ISIS, which has seized swathes of Iraq and neighboring Syria.
The conference has been given added urgency by the beheading of a third Western hostage, British aid worker David Haines, on Saturday.
According to AFP, Britain had already been conducting extensive surveillance flights over Iraq from its regional base in Cyprus. Britain has not, however, engaged in aerial bombardment.
Le Drian said France views ISIS as a serious threat.
“France stands ready at a time that is decisive for its security – because it is also France’s security that is threatened by this… pseudo-Islamic State,” Le Drian said.
Meanwhile, Iraqi President Fuad Masum Monday urged rapid air strikes against ISIS ahead of the Paris conference, AFP reported.
“They need to act quickly because if there is a delay, if this campaign and this support for Iraq is delayed, maybe Daesh will occupy other territories and their threat will be even bigger,” he said, using the Arabic terminology for the militant group.
[wpResize]The European Union is facing its biggest crisis since… well, since its last big crisis. The perpetually problematic union is threatening to come undone, with Britain in the process of quitting the bloc and numerous populist movements elsewhere also threatening to sever ties.
But economically speaking, the bloc is performing better than it has in a long while. For the first time since 2007, all 28 of the union’s member economies are growing at the same time, on an annual basis.
Inflation-adjusted GDP in the EU will rise 1.8% this year and next, according to the European Commission’s latest projections. This is expected to push unemployment across the region to its lowest rate since 2009. For its part, GDP in the euro zone has risen for 15 consecutive quarters.
This is not to say that Europe’s economy is thriving, which is readily apparent by how successfully populist politicians have been blaming Brussels for their countries’ apparent financial malaise.
The European Commission warns that the risks to its forecasts are “exceptionally large,” thanks to the unclear intentions of US president Donald Trump, high-stakes elections across Europe this year, and the ongoing Brexit negotiations. If Trump follows through on pledges to spend big on infrastructure, it could provide a boost to the EU’s export-oriented members. But if he doubles down on his “America First” policy, it could harm transatlantic trade. Meanwhile, a messy Brexit, tighter monetary policy from the US Federal Reserve, and a shaky Chinese economy could all derail the European economy’s slow but steady recovery.
Pierre Moscovici, the European commissioner for economic and financial affairs, warned that the benefits of growth must be shared more widely—both between and within EU countries—for it to be appreciated by citizens. “With uncertainty at such high levels, it’s more important than ever that we use all policy tools to support growth,” he said. “Above all, we must ensure that its benefits are felt in all parts of the euro area and all segments of society.”The era of data feeds has begun! There is a new dialog in this beta release that can be invoked on the Vote tab that allows you select a data feed. Here are the downloads:
Windows: https://nubits.com/sites/default/files/assets/nu-0.5.3-RC3-win.zip3
md5: 196e4d229892dfcf45eeee30d00f0859
Linux: https://nubits.com/sites/default/files/assets/nu-0.5.3-RC3-linux.zip1
md5: ca63f13d6560ff91feda2a41488d9248
OSX: https://nubits.com/sites/default/files/assets/nu-0.5.3-RC3-osx.zip
md5: 4895fae153d7d7808c38182554f8c8ba
Here is some additional information, the first about how to consume a data feed, and the second about how to host a data feed:
http://docs.nubits.com/v1.0/docs/using-a-data-feed
http://docs.nubits.com/v1.0/docs/hosting-a-data-feed
I would encourage anyone who follows motions, grants and liquidity closely to host a data feed. If you need any help getting it set up please ask @CoinGame for assistance. It allows you to have more influence over the network than your NuShare position would otherwise permit. Please post about your data feed.
On the other hand, if you are a shareholder that doesn’t follow all the latest info on this forum several times a week or more, please consider delegating your vote to someone hosting a data feed who is paying close attention and represents your viewpoint reasonably well. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to a data feed at any time.The dream so many of his contemporaries have chased beyond Canada’s borders still hasn’t taken Joel Friesen away from home.
After a decorated five-season CIS career, Friesen has signed a one-year deal with the expansion Niagara River Lions of the National Basketball League.
The one-time member of the Fraser Valley Cascades and recent Alberta Golden Bears alum will join the St. Catherines, Ont.,-based expansion franchise for the 2015-16 season, which tips off in December.
“The thought of being able to help build a brand new franchise is something that was really appealing to me, as well as being able to stay in Canada and say that I made it professionally by staying in Canada all the way throughout my whole career,” said Friesen. “I think it’s something that is pretty cool and a lot of people who play basketball now can aspire to, to stay in Canada.”
Friesen follows in the pro footsteps of former Alberta teammate Jordan Baker, a 2014 grad who played last season in Germany and has signed to play in Portugal beginning this fall. While he drew interest from teams in countries such as Germany and Norway, Friesen decided on the NBL, which heads into its fifth season with eight teams based in and Atlantic Canada and Ontario.
“Playing pro is something that I’ve been preparing for for as long as I’ve been dreaming about playing basketball … people just tell me to play for the right reasons, and it’s not about the money, especially in a first-year contract,” said Friesen.
“You want to be happy, you want to be comfortable and at the same time you want to make a name for yourself and that’s something that I plan to do. It’s a league that’s young and there’s a lot of good talent in the league, I know that for a fact. There’s a lot of American players and it’s going to be physical game and it’s the next level so you just got to be ready in any way.”
Friesen played the last two seasons in Edmonton, leading the Bears in scoring in 2014-15 when he was named a Canada West first-team All-Star. The Abbottsford, B.C., native had previously spent three years at Fraser Valley, earning Canada West All-Star selections in 2011 and 2012 before transferring to Alberta to continue playing for coach Barnaby Craddock, who left the Cascades to join the Bears prior to the 2012-13 season.
“I’ve learned so much about myself on and off the court being here in Edmonton and just having such great people around me to support me and teach me so many new things about the game,” said Friesen.
“It’s been a really good experience and I just can’t thank the university and basketball community enough for making me feel super welcome and taking me in. I’ve made so many new friends, connections and relationships, and I definitely think of Edmonton as a second home to me now for sure.
“Actually, as of late, more of a first home.”A male is more likely to be gay if he has an older brother, the likelihood grows the more older brothers he has. The percentage of gay males is estimated to be around 3%, this probability can go up to 5% for males with several older brothers, say researchers from Brock University, St. Catharines, Canada.
The researchers are certain there is a biological basis for sexual orientation - in other words, there is a prenatal effect. It is not a case of older brothers having a psychological effect on the male baby after it is born. Males with older stepbrothers, or adopted brothers, are not more likely to be gay, only males with blood brothers. The scientists say the effect has to be through the mother, the only link between them.
You can read about this study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Previous studies have shown a link between male homosexuality and the number of older brothers. This study is the first one to factor out social and environmental effects.
Study leader, Anthony Bogaert, and team examined four groups of men - 944 males. They looked at how many male and female siblings they had, whether they were blood related and lived in the same house when they grew up. The also looked at whether the men had been adopted.
They found that males with one older blood brother were more likely to be gay than males with no older brother(s). The more older brothers a male had the higher his chances of being gay. They said the likelihood had the same increase when blood brothers were raised in different households.
The team stressed that even with several older brothers, the chances of a male being heterosexual is 95%. 97% of all males are heterosexual.
Only males who had an older brother from the same mother had a higher chance of being gay, said the researchers.
The researchers said the environment the male was brought up in makes no difference at all. The only link is that the older brother(s) shared the same womb.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
http://www.pnas.org
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded the research
http://www.sshrc.ca/web/home_e.asp
Written by: Christian Nordqvist
Editor: Medical News TodayHere's what's happening on the DW store! View this email in your browser NEW RELEASES Tracy Nguyen & Lucas Anderson
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PRE-ORDERAbout four years ago I wrote a post showing evidence that Joseph Smith married additional wives without the knowledge or consent of his legal wife, Emma. You can read the post here:
Secret Wives
The evidence is quite clear, and it’s also clear that Emily Partridge spent the night in bed with Joseph Smith on their wedding night, and when asked, she confirmed under oath that she had “carnal intercourse” with Smith. Their wedding night was spent in the home of Benjamin Johnson, who confirmed that they occupied the same room and bed.
That would seem fairly straightforward: a man and woman who have just been married and retire to the bedroom are likely to have sexual relations. It strains credulity to believe that they would have gone to the bedroom, closed the door, and spent the night playing cards.
Apparently, it’s not that clear to some people, as I received the following comment this evening. I’m not sure why the comment came four years after the post, but here it is:
Emily Partridge was sufficiently uninformed that she thought Mrs. Durfee’s original questions in 1842 regarding spiritual wifery were germane to Joseph wanting to get it on with her as per Emily’s interpretation of the conversation he tried to have with her and the letter he tried to pass to her. Lucy Walker’s refusal to testify regarding whether she was intimate with Joseph is telling. This same manner of refusal occurred with Malissa Lott with respect to her own family (who would have loved to know she was Joseph’s factual bedded wife). Malissa always refused to confirm or deny. I grant that we have Joseph spending the evening in the same room as women who would later be known as his plural wives, per the attestation of Benjamin Johnson. But Benjamin wasn’t watching through the knothole to confirm sexual intercourse. He was merely presuming what activity was occurring. It all boils down to the one admission from Emily, where she responded “Yes sir.” when asked if she had engaged in carnal intercourse with Joseph Smith. But recall that this Emily had been the wife of Brigham Young, had lived through the culture wars of the 1870s and later, when her people were being put in jail for polygamy, when women were going on the underground with fake identities to avoid being forced to testify against husbands and fathers. Had Emily not replied “Yes sir.” to that question, she believed that the temple lot of prophesy would be awarded to Joseph’s sons and their Church and therefore forever made unavailable to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Besides this, Emily was by then 70 years old, and knew her way around the English language. Carnal refers to meat. Intercourse refers to commerce or trade (ever visited Intercourse, PA?). Therefore “carnal intercourse” would also be a legitimate description of passing Joseph a platter of turkey or chicken or mutton or beef at a meal, an activity the young Emily had almost certainly engaged in. As I recall the testimony, Emily was really testy after her “Yes sir.” Which I would be too, if I had technically told the truth but actually implied a falsehood.
I would respond to this point by point, but it just doesn’t merit it. I’m sure my commenter is sincere, but anyone who argues that “carnal intercourse” refers to the commercial exchange of meat is not to be taken seriously. If you have to do such violence to language and logic to support your belief, it’s quite likely your belief is erroneous.
Honestly, that is perhaps the worst apologetic argument for polygamy that I have ever read. And that’s saying something.
For what it’s worth, she apparently has a web site dedicated to proving that Joseph Smith did not have sex with those women.
A Faithful Joseph
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Like this: Like Loading... RelatedFrom the June 20 edition of MSNBC Live:
STEPHANIE RUHLE (HOST): If it's so bad, if this isn't democracy, why don't Democrats just let it roll? If this is going to blow up in Republicans' face at the end of the day, why don't Republicans, excuse me, why don't Democrats step out of the way and say, "have at it" and let Republicans fall on their face?
UPDATE: Later, on MSNBC Live, Stephanie Ruhle acknowledged her earlier comments and noted that Democrats “can’t really play games because this is life or death”:
RUHLE: I made the argument earlier, so what if Democrats just said, “Fine. This is on you. Let’s see what this looks like.” They can’t really play games because this is life or death. It’s going to affect 100 percent of the American people.
Previously:
CNN’s Rick Santorum claims secret GOP Senate health care bill is “how things have... always been done”
How the press is helping Republicans keep their health care bill secret
The House Passed A Health Care Bill That Will Kill People. These Media Figures Called It A Victory.On Friday, Iraqi troops reached the small town of Dour, on the outskirts of Tikrit, putting them closer to the city that is their intended target. So far, the offensive even against this town is going painfully slowly.
Officials are still reporting “advances” in the fighting, but are only to the center of al-Dour by Sunday evening, while snipers and improvised explosives are keeping the ground troops from making major moves.
The Tikrit offensive is a huge undertaking for the Iraqi military, and it is being done with the aid of both Iranian artillery backing and large amounts of Shi’ite militia fighters.
It is noteworthy, however, that the offensive continues entirely without US involvement. The Pentagon was never sought to provide air support for the attack, likely owing to the US refusal to coordinate with Iran.
The decision between Iranian artillery and US warplanes can’t have been an easy one, but recent acrimony between the Iraqi Defense Ministry and the Pentagon over the planned invasion of Mosul, which Pentagon officials first confirmed then cancelled, all without Iraqi input, has clearly rubbed Iraqi officials the wrong way.
Tikrit is no Mosul, of course, but could be seen as a test case for the Iraqis, both of their ability to take significant ISIS targets, and of how much difference Iranian backing is to US backing in the grand scheme of things.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzNSA’s one of the known snooping tactics is installing a malware into hard drive’s firmware which makes the deletion of the malware nearly impossible even the malware can avoid formatting of the hard drive.
Nemesis is a malware that can be used for similar purposes as it can avoid clean-up software and can even avoid reinstalling of windows altogether by hiding behind boot records, according to FireEye.
What’s the malware about?
Nemesis is a dangerous malware that is designed for carrying out multiple functions like transferring files, injecting processes, capturing screenshots and keystrokes. It can even steal the financial data from a system. It can even bypass banking systems and can transfer all the financial data to the developers.
What makes it lethal is the fact that it is very difficult to detect by any detection programs. Basically, the malware’s feature of hiding behind the boot records allows it to remain anonymous for any security program even the virus check on the start-up is avoided through this feature.
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How to avoid it?
So, what should users do if they are are infected with this malware? Well, according to the FireEye research team if this ever happens to a user they will be required to replace his hard drive altogether, otherwise there is no chance with normal detection systems, the malware will always remain there no matter what you do.
But, this may not be feasible big businesses or enterprises that run a single hard drive on many computers and a replacement could be real daunting as it would take the time to backup all the data on the systems and then start fresh.
Modern operating system secured
Though, modern operating systems like windows 8 and 10 might not be affected by this malware as they utilize secure boot which prevents a replacement of the window bootkit.
Bootkit usually targets enterprise and financial systems which are usually not that updated and have an older operating system in place. So, there is a need for updated financial and enterprise systems, otherwise they could face the worse.
In August this year, a security researcher created a proof-of-concept attack for Macs that covertly replaced the firmware that boots up most modern OS X machines. (Apple has fixed the flaw)
[src src=”Source” url=”https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2015/12/fin1-targets-boot-record.html”]FireEye[/src]On his last day in office, Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi spoke to The Indian Express on a range of issues, including love jihad, violence in Haryana after Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s conviction in rape cases and the crackdown by NIA on terror funding. Condemning the violence in Haryana that claimed 38 lives, Mehrishi said the breakdown of law and order is dynamic and unpredictable. “Sitting in Delhi, we cannot say anything. It is for state government and CM (of Haryana) to take action if there were any lapses,” said Mehrishi who leaves for Jaipur tomorrow.
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Reacting to the allegations against Hindu outfits for spreading saffron terrorism, the outgoing home secretary said, “I object to the use of term saffron terror. There is no colour to terror. It is for the court to decide on the role of those involved.” His remarks hold significance in view of the release of Sadhvi Pragya and Lt Colonel Purohit in the Malegaon and Samjahuta blasts cases, both termed as incidents of saffron terrorism.
On being asked about the crackdown against separatists by the National Investigative Agency, Mehrishi said terror funding in Kashmir is a matter of investigation. He, however, maintained that the government does not interfere in NIA probes. “NIA is an independent agency. The government doesn’t interfere in their probes. Pakistan agencies pay Lashkar and Jaish as it suits them from time to time in Kashmir,” said the home secretary, adding, “In my two years (as home secretary), I have not come across anything to suggest that agencies are funding separatists in Kashmir.
He asserted that Pakistan is behind all the problems in Kashmir and rejected views that people in Valley feel they are alienated. “Ninety-five per cent people in JK want peace and progress. They have same inspirations as any other youth in any part of the country. This is only the view of media in Delhi that people in Kashmir feel they are alienated. We have been facing problem in Kashmir due to Pakistan. One element of radicalisation among youths is there. We are trying to overcome,” he said.
Mehrishi, however, did not deliberate much on the investigation into an alleged love jihad case in Kerala on the direction of Supreme Court. Love Jihad is a matter of investigation. NIA is probing the matter on the orders of the Supreme Court,” said Mehrishi.
Mehrshi also said that Dawood Ibrahim, key accused in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, is in Pakistan and that country is creating hurdles in getting him back to India to face the law. Mehrishi said the government is taking all required action so that Ibrahim could be brought back to India.Mehrshi also said that Dawood Ibrahim, key accused in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, is in Pakistan and that country is creating hurdles in getting him back to India to face the law. Mehrishi said the government is taking all required action so that Ibrahim could be brought back to India.
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“Dawood Ibrahim is in Pakistan. That country has given him shelter. That country is also putting hurdles in bringing him back to India to face the law,” he said.Looking for news you can trust?
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Fox News republished a video in January that appeared to celebrate cars hitting peaceful “liberal” protesters, apparently as payback for blocking streets. That video now appears to have been taken down from the Fox News website.
“The item was inappropriate and we’ve taken it down,” said Noah Kotch, Fox News Digital’s editor-in chief, in an emailed statement to Mother Jones. “We regret posting it in January.”
In the wake of the white supremacist car attack on protesters in Charlotteville, Virginia, on Saturday, Mother Jones reported on several anti-protest bills across the country that would limit motorists’ liability if they injure or even kill protesters. These laws are part of an array of anti-protest bills drafted in the wake of Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump marches.
Here’s a screenshot taken of the Fox News website earlier today, before the story became unavailable:
The original video was published in late January by the Daily Caller—the right-wing website founded by Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and freshly unearthed by Slate Tuesday afternoon. The video clips show vehicles nudging and hitting protesters. The Daily Caller piece includes this description:
Here’s a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the way by cars and trucks. Study the technique; it may prove useful in the next four years.
Fox News reposted this video two days later.
Calls for violence against protesters have led to public repercussions. In 2016, a St. Paul, Minnesota, police officer was placed on administrative leave after allegedly telling drivers to run over Black Lives Matter protesters who planned to block traffic as part of a march on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Mother Jones has also reached out to The Daily Caller for comment on the video. We’ll update this post if we hear back.
This post has been updated to include a statement by Fox News.
(h/t Jon Swaine from the Guardian, who pointed out the video on Twitter.)
UPDATE, August 15, 6:43 p.m. ET:People help injured persons after a van ploughed into the crowd, killing at least 13 people and injuring around 100 others on the Rambla in Barcelona on August 17, 2017. Getty Images.
ISIS has reportedly claimed responsibility for an attack where a van slammed into a crowd in a busy square in Barcelona, Spain, on Thursday, with the police reporting 13 deaths
Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull says “At this stage, we understand 16 people have been killed.”
The police are calling the incident a terrorist attack and have arrested two suspects
Police killed four suspected attackers during a counterterrorism operation in Cambrils, south of Barcelona, early Friday morning. Police said they believe the attackers may be linked to the van attack.
Police have two suspects in custody after a van crashed into a crowd of pedestrians in a tourist-heavy district killing at least 13 on Thursday in Barcelona, Spain, Catalan President Carles Puigdemont said.
The Catalan police are calling the earlier incident in Barcelona a terrorist attack and have confirmed at least 13 deaths and over 100 injuries, while Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told a press conference his understanding was that “16 people have been killed”. At least 18 nationalities are among the attack victims, authorities said, including three Australians. In a message on ISIS’ news service, the terror group claimed responsibility for the attack, though authorities have yet to confirm a link.
The driver of the van is not among the two suspects who are in custody, the Associated Press reported citing a senior police official. Police are still searching for the driver, who they say is unarmed.
Police initially said the van connected to the attack was rented by a man named Driss Oukabir, reportedly a Moroccan citizen living in France legally. It is unclear whether he is the suspect in custody. El Pais, a Spanish-language newspaper, said Oukabir turned himself into police, claiming that his ID was stolen and planted near the scene.
A driver deliberately rammed a van into a crowd on Barcelona’s most popular street on August 17, 2017 killing at least 13 people before fleeing to a nearby bar, police said. Getty Images.
It’s unclear whether the police have identified additional suspects in the crash. The police dismissed reports from multiple outlets that two armed men had barricaded themselves in a bar near the site of the crash as rumors, though officers were still apparently conducting door-to-door searches as the area around the crash site remained on lockdown for hours.
Four alleged attackers were killed in a separate counterterrorism operation in the town of Cambrils, about 90 minutes south of Barcelona, early Friday morning. Catalan police said they believe the suspects in Cambrils were linked to the Barcelona van attack and a house explosion in the town of Alcanar that happened on Wednesday.
Police checkpoint attack and a house explosion
Reuters, citing police sources, said a second van linked to the crash was found in a small town outside Barcelona. The news agency noted earlier reports from local media suggesting that a second van may have been rented as a getaway vehicle.
A driver of a different vehicle ran over two police officers at a checkpoint in Barcelona, The Associated Press reports, though it’s not clear whether this was related to the earlier attack. Associated Press reports that the driver was killed in a shootout with the police.
Authorities cited by Reuters said a house explosion hours before the van attack killed one person in Alcanar, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) southwest of Barcelona. Officials say the incident may be connected. The Telegraph reported that police found 20 canisters of butane and propane gas among the rubble.
A chaotic scene
The police said the chaos started when a white van mounted a sidewalk on Plaza de Catalunya, a popular square in Barcelona. The Spanish-language newspaper El País said the driver of the van fled on foot after “mowing down” dozens of people.
“There’s a very heavy police presence and what they’ve been doing is going from establishment to establishment knocking on the doors, knocking on the shutters,” John Ward, a resident of Las Ramblas, a pedestrian-heavy street near Plaza de Catalunya, told the BBC. “Now nobody is moving on La Ramblas unless they’re under police escort.”
“All of a sudden, I just sort of heard a crashing noise and the whole street just started to run, screaming,” Aamer Anwar, who was walking on Las Ramblas at the time of the crash, told Sky News. “I saw a woman right next to me screaming for her kids.” Other witnesses said the van zigzagged in a way suggesting the driver was trying to hit as many people as possible.
“Police were very, very quickly there, police officers with guns, batons, everywhere,” Anwar said. “Then the whole street started getting pushed back.”
“Police officers who got there just started screaming at people to move back, move back,” Anwar added.
Another witness, Steven Turner, told the BBC he saw “three or four people lying on the ground” after the van “rammed” into people.
“There are lots of ambulances and armed police with assault rifles around now,” Turner added.
World leaders respond
The White House has said its chief of staff, John Kelly, is aware of the situation and is updating President Donald Trump. The US Consulate is warning people to avoid the area.
“The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help,” Trump tweeted. “Be tough & strong, we love you!”
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said at a press conference that terrorists would be “brought to justice.”
“Terrorists around the world should know — the United States and our allies are resolved to find you and bring you to justice,” Tillerson said, adding that US nationals in Barcelona should check in with their families.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy Brey tweeted that he was “in touch with all authorities” and said the “priority is to attend to the wounded and facilitate the work of first responders and police.” Pope Francis and French President Emmanuel Macron have also expressed support for Barcelona and the victims of the attack.
Pope Francis Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and French President Emmanuel Macron have also expressed support for Barcelona and the victims of the attack.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau said on Twitter: “Thank you for the solidarity we have received from around the world. Barcelona is brave and united. Terror will never change that.”
Catalan emergency services have asked to close public transportation in the area of the crash, and they are asking people to stay out of the area.
Vehicles have been used to crash into crowds in attacks inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group across Europe since July 2016, killing dozens of people in London, Stockholm, Berlin, and Nice, France. No group has taken responsibility for Thursday’s attack.
The Spanish National Police have asked bystanders not to share photos of the crash out of respect for the victims, but some have still been spreading on social media:
Pictures show emergency services responding:
Total panic – we are all getting pushed back- la Ramblas pic.twitter.com/1MwYLfFZJc
— Aamer Anwar (@AamerAnwar) August 17, 2017
Terrorism attack confirmed in #Barcelona
— Mossos (@mossos) August 17, 2017
Sky News has video of the incident, which the reporter described as “pandemonium.”
SKY NEWS: First footage from the scene after a white van mounted the pavement and struck several people on Barcelona’s Las Ramblas pic.twitter.com/sQEO4SSNW4
— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) August 17, 2017
A van drove into a crowd in Barcelona and several people are injured (????: @jordipc) https://t.co/1CmbIRqXxx pic.twitter.com/X4fgmVYh1l
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) August 17, 2017
Terrifying footage out of #Barcelona. Police warning people to stay away from the area around Placa Catalunya #LasRamblas pic.twitter.com/r6WBBmtklA
— Anna Ahronheim (@AAhronheim) August 17, 2017
A Twitter user also posted a picture of what appears to be the van:
Ricard Belis Garcia/ Twitter The van reportedly involved in the deadly crash in Barcelona.
Here’s a map of the area:
Videos show armed police officers looking for the person or people responsible for the crash:
Omg at Las Ramblas the police looking for the guy of the white van. pic.twitter.com/UrLg5RUnqL
— Eric Castellarnau (@EricFeitoza) August 17, 2017
Here’s a video showing the suspect’s arrest:
This is a developing story.
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We are a speech radio and podcasting project covering Newcastle, Gateshead and the surrounding areas, and we make documentaries, host debates and write controversial blog posts that get people talking. Previous discussions have included why women hate their vaginas, why we're all destined for unemployment, and why so many people are on benefits.
What we're up to
This year we'd like to take on the task of going to the Heaton Arts Festival, and making a radio documentary on everything that goes on. Whilst funding for the arts - and community projects in particular - gets smaller and smaller, the Heaton Arts Festival and the incredible volunteers at Charles Street Community Centre, Byker Community Centre and the dozens of galleries and pop-ups around Newcastle are only getting bigger. In the face of some of the worst poverty this country has seen these centres are, as they put it themselves, 'preventing young people becoming more excluded and more disillusioned', and we want to make more people aware of it.
Our £200 fundraiser is for transport expenses, resources (including but not limited to dictaphones and editing software) as well as the opportunity to commission one of our Verbal Remedy aficionados to compile and edit the documentary together. The biggest expense of all for us is time, and we don't want to do this by halves, and rush through edits, and only get half of the good clips we want because one of us has work and the other needs to get the last bus home.
Whatever you can spare, however you can help us scrimp, we would be so grateful. Help Verbal Remedy to help the Heaton Arts Festival - to raise its profile and extend its reach to thousands more families across the length and breadth of our |
including mumps and measles. Bats carrying this family of viruses had previously only been found in Africa, Australia, South America, and Asia.
A second study from some of the same authors, published in August, reported three novel viruses called orthoreoviruses isolated from European bats. These viruses have not been shown to cause disease in humans, but the authors suggest that their zoonotic potential should be investigated further. A final similar example, also published in August, describes the isolation of a previously unknown bat papillomavirus in Hong Kong.
Despite these potential dangers, it’s also important to note that bats do much good for the ecosystem, including eating lots of pesky bugs, pollinating plants, distributing fruit seeds, and providing valuable guano fertilizer. They’re not so creepy either, really. And sadly, they are currently struggling against a mysterious affliction called White-nose syndrome, which appears to disrupt their hibernation and has been charged with the deaths of millions of bats in the US and Canada.
Regardless of whether you think bats are creepy or cute, dangerous or misunderstood, it’s unlikely that they’ll kick their eerie associations anytime soon, so here’s to kicking off a month of spooktacular science.
Citations:Collin Masilela, 49, was charged with murder after the 15-year-old schoolgirl died at the family's home.
Detectives said the father of one fired a shot into the dark late on Wednesday night when he heard noises in the garden and feared the house was being targeted by thieves.
He told officers he later realised he had actually shot dead his daughter as she returned home from a night out with friends. Police spokesman Leonard Hlathi said the man was arrested at the scene of the tragedy.
He said: "It appears that this man shot dead his only daughter.
"He told us that he was at home with his wife and heard noises in the garden late on Wednesday night.
"He apparently believed the house was being targeted by crooks of some sort and wanted to defend himself so he fired a shot into the dark.
"However he later discovered the person he had hit was his daughter, who was returning home.
"She died at the scene and he was arrested later."
Masilela appeared on Thursday before a magistrate where he was formally charged with murder.
He was released on £80 (1,000 rand) bail and told to reappear in court on December 7.
Detectives said his daughter, who has not been named, died from a single gunshot wound.
Police launched a full investigation into the incident, which happened at the family's home near the town of Marble Hall in South Africa's Mpumalanga province.
Captain Hlathi said: "The man had a licensed firearm and he said he was trying to defend himself.
"No doubt evidence will be heard in court about what happened.
"At this stage it seems that it was him who killed the girl, although the full facts are not yet clear.
"We are investigating the matter.
"If he is telling the truth then this was a dreadful accident, but we must check in case there could be something more sinister at play. "He will return to court at a later date when the prosecution's case will be laid out."
The possession of firearms by members of the public is legally permitted in South Africa, where thousands of home owners keep guns for protection.
The distribution of weapons is controlled by licence. Owners are required to complete a proficiency examination and keep their firearms in a locked safe when not in use.Playing with Raspberry Pi is a lot of fun, but what happens when you want to get some real work done? While it’s not difficult to make a RaspPi board do cool stuff, getting it to communicate with the wider world is a bit of a challenge. That’s why Ryo Koyama, Mike Johnson, and Doug Olekin made Weaved.
While the goal is a bit broad – “Weaved is looking to enable Internet of Things for everyone, and sees a vision where IoT capabilities are a feature onto all electronic devices,” said Koyama – the idea is fairly simple. By giving a RaspPi Internet of Things capabilities, you can expand the scope of the hardware immensely.
Essentially, using the service and a Wi-Fi connection, the RaspPi board becomes a secure node in your private IoT network. This means you can login to your Pis and get notifications from various inputs on the board. This has always been the stickiest part of building a Raspberry Pi (or electronics project) and Weaved aims to be the AWS of the space.
“We believe that a software/service solution must exist that allows for ‘drop in’ of IoT capability, without requiring knowledge/engineering expertise for Servers, networking, mobile, security and firmware development,” said Koyama.
The free version allows you to support one Pi while a paid version allows you to handle a fleet of boards. You can try the service right here. While the need for sending notifications to your iPhone via a Raspberry Pi board may seem far-out and wild, remember that it wasn’t too long ago that the idea you could fit an entire computer into an Altoids tin was also pretty wacky.Image: Al Drago/Getty
Thursday morning Senator Susan Collins wrote a strong letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai urging him to delay today’s vote to repeal net neutrality protections, becoming the first Republican Senator to directly urge him to postpone the vote.
Repealing the 2015 net neutrality protections “would cause immediate harm to the innovation economy,” she and fellow Maine Senator Angus King (an Independent who votes with Democrats) wrote. “Access fees, fast lanes, and preferential treatment of content would undermine the openness of the internet and disproportionately hurt startups’ and small businesses’ ability to compete with entrenched incumbents.”
Collins has spoken in favor of net neutrality previously, but with the letter, she has become the highest-profile Republican asking the FCC to keep the protections. Wednesday, 107 Republican Congressional representatives wrote to Pai urging him to repeal net neutrality. One Republican Congressperson, Mike Coffman, asked Pai to delay the vote Wednesday. Collins and King called for “public hearings in 2018” before any official decision is made. Their full letter is embedded below.Person behind leak of government refugee document could be jailed, immigration official says
Updated
The country's highest immigration official says the person behind the leaking of a draft government document could be jailed.
The document, which outlines plans for sweeping changes to Australia's humanitarian resettlement program, was leaked to the ABC's Lateline program late last week.
Neither Immigration Minister Peter Dutton nor Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had seen the document, marked "protected", "sensitive" and "Cabinet".
The leaking of the document has been referred to the Australian Federal Police, a Senate estimates committee was told today.
Department of Immigration and Border Protection Secretary Michael Pezzullo said the matter was referred to the police on Friday.
Mr Pezzullo could not say how long the investigation would take, but said it could result in jail time for those responsible.
"It's a serious breach. It's criminal and people could go to jail," he said.
Mr Pezzullo confirmed that Mr Turnbull and Mr Dutton had not seen the document.
Documents outlines plan for tougher migration program
The document points to the recent attacks in Paris and unrest in Germany as it outlines "a package of reforms to simplify Australia's visa framework and create stronger controls over access to permanent residence and citizenship".
Those changes include:
An enforceable integration framework to assess aspiring migrants' suitability for life in Australia
A revamped citizenship test and citizenship pledge
Enhanced access to, use of and protection of sensitive information to strengthen intelligence-led, risk-based decision making, from pre-visa stage through to post-citizenship conferral.
Presumably, that would mean refugees brought to Australia under its humanitarian program would be closely monitored, even after they became Australian citizens.
The document said Mr Dutton would bring forward the proposals in the first half of 2016 "to reform the visa framework and remove direct access to permanent residence to better align visa and citizenship decision-making with national security and community protection outcomes".
Removing direct access to permanent residence would see bona fide refugees accepted by Australia no longer given the certainty of a life in Australia.
Topics: federal-government, immigration, turnbull-malcolm, australia
First posted2ndVote, a conservative watchdog group for corporate advocacy, is launching a campaign — #AnywhereButTARGET — ahead of Black Friday and the holiday shopping season.
According to 2ndVote’s press release, the campaign is meant to allow communication between Target and conservatives based on Target’s restroom policy, which allows individuals to use any restroom based on gender identity rather than biology.
The #AnywhereButTARGET campaign is also meant to provide alternative retailers for conservatives.
2ndVote Executive Director Lance Wray issued a statement saying this campaign will “send a clear and direct message to Target,” which Wray describes as a company “that seems to care more about a radical political agenda than common sense and safety of its own customers.”
Wray continued:
2ndVote is calling on conservative consumers to engage the country’s second largest retailer on its company-wide policy that allows and encourages individuals to choose restroom and changing room facilities based on gender identity rather than biological sex. Immediate pushback from conservatives forced Target to spend $20 million to add gender neutral bathrooms to its stores shortly after announcing the policy earlier this year. The #AnywhereButTARGET campaign comes at the beginning of the busiest shopping season when major retailers, like Target, expect to bring in over 30% of their annual revenue.
Concerned Women for America President and CEO Penny Nance is also encouraging the members of her organization, which promotes biblical principles, to shop elsewhere this holiday season.
“At Concerned Women for America (CWA), we know we can’t just vote with a ballot, we must also vote with our wallets. Our hope is that Target will hear our vote loud and clear this holiday season,” Nance explained in a statement to Breitbart News, adding:
Target’s decision to open their restrooms to transgendered individuals, who are only 0.3% of the population, is not an issue of inclusivity, it’s an issue of public safety. There are 293,066 victims of rape each year, and the fact that more than 33% of these sexual assaults happen in public places like restrooms should be of concern to Target. My concern is the hundreds of thousands sexual offenders who take advantage of opportunities such as the one Target is presenting. Target has endangered the safety and privacy of women and children in their stores, so CWA and its hundreds of thousands of members will be taking our business elsewhere.
Target has not yet responded to a request for comment about #AnywhereButTarget from Breitbart News.
“Conservatives have many other options to Target this season and that’s why we’re choosing #AnywhereButTARGET,” Wray added about 2ndVote’s campaign. “When a company as large and well-known as Target chooses to insert itself directly into such a radical movement that seeks to ultimately destroy religious liberty and completely goes against our conservative values, it’s our role as an organization to give conservatives a way to communicate directly with the company.”waxwing
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Sr. MemberActivity: 469Merit: 250 Re: [ANN] Joinmarket - Coinjoin that people will actually use September 11, 2016, 12:10:43 PM
Last edit: September 11, 2016, 12:22:14 PM by waxwing #281
================
Best place to start is the
Then follow the installation/upgrade guide on the
In terms of how the experience of Joinmarket changes,
There are some superficial changes (like nicknames) that are there to support using multiple IRC servers. Currently CgAn is kept as the default, but you can add other IRC servers if you like. If the community of users can come up with another fully Tor-supporting and stable IRC server that will allow Joinmarket usage, we could come to a general agreement on that. The code now happily supports at least 3 different servers simultaneously, probably more although I haven't tried. The idea of this is to improve censorship-resistance and reliability, but for now we just have the one default still.
This is a breaking change in the protocol, unlike previous releases - that means, while old and new bots can happily live on the same channel, they will ignore each other. So please upgrade as soon as you can, and don't be surprised if there is some disruption in the meanwhile.
Lastly, there are now only two yield generator bots offered within the codebase - yield-generator-basic.py and yg-pe.py (short for privacy enhancement). The rationale for removing the others I've mentioned elsewhere, but will repeat here:
"it's a combination of 3 things i guess; 1/it's too much work trying to support them 2/there is nothing wrong with them being used and maintained separately 3/i'd quite like to prod people towards running just the simple two versions mentioned for the new version, as those simpler ones are giving away less info to snoopers; but that last point is up for discussion"
A final overall point - this is a substantial, disruptive change and not one that makes usage easier. But, let's not forget that the existing Joinmarket is fundamentally broken in as much as there is no realistic privacy guarantee in any mode of usage. While this change intends to ameliorate this problem, it most likely will not remove it entirely, and its best benefits will only be seen if the level of usage increases considerably, which is likely a way off. So I hope people can be patient!
Please feel free to ask questions here or preferably on reddit (it's easier to keep track of one location). Or IRC of course.
New release version 0.2.0================Best place to start is the release notes - in particular for existing users, please read up to and including "Notable changes".Then follow the installation/upgrade guide on the frontpage/readme which has of course changed a bit. The most notable change is that the libsecp256k1 binding is now required, not optional.In terms of how the experience of Joinmarket changes, this section is the most important, giving a short summary of what changes for Makers and Takers, and the wiki article linked inside gives more details, for Takers (that's sendpayment or tumbler basically). In short, they will have to change their wallet funding behaviour a bit, and in some cases be more patient (or use more expert tools).There are some superficial changes (like nicknames) that are there to support using multiple IRC servers. Currently CgAn is kept as the default, but you can add other IRC servers if you like. If the community of users can come up with another fully Tor-supporting and stable IRC server that will allow Joinmarket usage, we could come to a general agreement on that. The code now happily supports at least 3 different servers simultaneously, probably more although I haven't tried. The idea of this is to improve censorship-resistance and reliability, but for now we just have the one default still.This is a breaking change in the protocol, unlike previous releases - that means, while old and new bots can happily live on the same channel, they will ignore each other. So please upgrade as soon as you can, and don't be surprised if there is some disruption in the meanwhile.Lastly, there are now only two yield generator bots offered within the codebase - yield-generator-basic.py and yg-pe.py (short for privacy enhancement). The rationale for removing the others I've mentioned elsewhere, but will repeat here:"it's a combination of 3 things i guess; 1/it's too much work trying to support them 2/there is nothing wrong with them being used and maintained separately 3/i'd quite like to prod people towards running just the simple two versions mentioned for the new version, as those simpler ones are giving away less info to snoopers; but that last point is up for discussion"A final overall point - this is a substantial, disruptive change and not one that makes usage easier. But, let's not forget that the existing Joinmarket is fundamentally broken in as much as there is no realistic privacy guarantee in any mode of usage. While this change intends to ameliorate this problem, it most likely will not remove it entirely, and its best benefits will only be seen if the level of usage increases considerably, which is likely a way off. So I hope people can be patient!Please feel free to ask questions here or preferably on reddit (it's easier to keep track of one location). Or IRC of course. PGP fingerprint 2B6FC204D9BF332D062B 461A141001A1AF77F20B (use email to contact)Socialized Medicine: More than two-thirds of the public don't think the government can be trusted to run the nation's health care system successfully. ObamaCare is proving these skeptics right.
The public might not agree on much these days, but one thing it overwhelmingly believes is that government is ill-equipped to manage one-sixth of the economy — 67% said so in the January IBD/TIPP poll.
This distrust has only gotten worse as the ObamaCare debacle unfolded, climbing 4 points in one month. Even Democrats — at 44%, up from 34% the month before — are increasingly skeptical.
Little wonder, since every day ObamaCare provides fresh evidence that government can't do the job.
First were the massive technological failures at the health care exchanges, millions of unexpected policy cancellations and sky-high premiums.
Then we saw the administration's frantic efforts to delay and rewrite rules to minimize political fallout.
Now, we read stories about people who thought they'd enrolled in a plan but hadn't, or were told they hadn't, or nobody seems to know for sure.
And doctors, pharmacies and hospitals are now spending countless hours trying to figure out who's covered and for what. Often, even doctors don't know if they're in an ObamaCare plan's network.
The left-wing Huffington Post tells of a cancer patient who had to put off surgery because nobody could tell whether she was covered, even through she'd enrolled via an ObamaCare exchange in December. It took intervention by the head of her state's exchange to sort it out.
Meanwhile, many plans say only 60% of signees have paid their first premium so far. Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield reports that as of Jan. 3 just 8% of those who signed up with Connecticut's exchange had done so.
As a result, even though insurers pushed back payment deadlines that they'd already extended once, many of the 2 million who signed up for ObamaCare will end up disenrolled — creating yet another crisis.
On top of all this, we're learning that the industry will likely need a bailout in the near future, since the young aren't signing up as hoped. Humana, for example, announced in its latest 8-K filing it "expects the risk mix of members enrolling through the health insurance exchanges to be more adverse than previously expected."
ObamaCare conveniently provides for such a bailout through the law's "risk corridor" program, which is designed to limit industry losses in the first three years.
Confusion, bureaucracy, delays, crony capitalism, taxpayer bailouts. This is what health care under government control looks like. And this is just the beginning.WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline) - In a fresh round of lawsuits against the Federal Election Commission, the Republican National Committee and Libertarian National Congressional Committee are arguing that they too should enjoy the same rights as political action committees when it comes to independent expenditures.
On Wednesday the LNCC, joined by the Libertarian Party of Indiana and California businessman Chris Rufer, filed suit against the FEC in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Two days later, the RNC, along with the Republican Party of Louisiana, also filed suit in the D.C. federal court.
The LNCC's lawsuit, which comes only a month after the Supreme Court struck down overall campaign contribution limits in case of McCutcheon v. FEC, builds off the high court's 2010 ruling on Citizens United v. FEC, in which justices opined corporations and unions could make unlimited independent expenditures that are not coordinated with a campaign.
"The Supreme Court has held that 'independent expenditures made in connection with a federal election - such as funds spent on advertisements - are pure speech at the heart of the First Amendment, entitled to maximum constitutional protection,'" the LNCC's complaint states.
"Congress generally may not limit a person's or other entity's independent expenditures, because they do not create a risk of actual or apparent quid pro quo corruption."
In the aforementioned Supreme Court cases, justices cited corruption as a non-issue.
"The Supreme Court has already held that a political party, just like any other group, not only is capable of making expenditures regarding federal elections that are truly independent from the candidates it nominates, but is entitled to do so without limit," the LNCC's complaint states.
"Thus, a political party committee should have the same fundamental constitutional right as a PAC to establish a separate, segregated 'independent expenditure' - only account, which may accept unlimited contributions, for the sole purpose of funding its pure, independent speech about federal candidates, elections, and other political issues."
Both lawsuits challenge the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which puts a ban on unrestricted soft money donations (money raised outside the limits and prohibitions of federal campaign finance law) made directly to political parties.
This is not the first time the act has been challenged.
In the 2003 case McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.
U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., brought the challenge, arguing the act was an unconstitutional infringement on First Amendment rights.
The more current complaints seek a judgment that non-federal-funds prohibitions are unconstitutional.
Reach David Yates at elections@legalnewsline.com.A government task force created to recommend registration guidelines for recreational drones wrapped up three days of meetings in Washington Thursday. It plans to call for owners of drones weighing more than half a pound to register online, according to multiple members of the task force speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss freely the private deliberations. This process would take place through apps or Web sites, including those of manufacturers, so retailers would not be burdened with having to complete a registration process at the point of sale.
The information collected would include the owner’s name and address. In the event of a rogue drone, that would give the FAA a better opportunity to track down its owner. An e-mail address would be collected if the drone owner chose to share it to receive updates on drone rules. The group discussed requiring more detailed information such as Social Security numbers and date of birth, but decided against it.
Drones would be required to display a registration number that’s easily accessible to a person handling the drone. These recommendations are being kept broad, and not making specific suggestions on a font size or style.
No fees would be charged for registration, so as to encourage as close to 100 percent participation as possible.
The FAA is not obligated to adopt the recommendations, but formed the group as its rushes to implement a system that would encourage the safe use of drones ahead of the holiday season, in which drones are expected to be a popular gift.
X
Pilots have reported increased sightings of drones, and they have at times interfered with wildfire fighting. Drones sales are also growing, with projections that 700,000 will be sold this year.
Such a registration system wouldn’t be perfect, but it would provide an improvement over the present situation, which one task force member described as a wild west. They expect the registration of drones would discourage some bad behavior, and provide an opportunity to educate owners on how to fly safely.
The FAA set a deadline of Nov. 20 for the task force to finalize its recommendations. Some of those in the room described the atmosphere as collaborative and including trade-offs and compromises to arrive at a package deal. The most conversation focused on settling on an appropriate weight cutoff for registration.
The task force, which met at the FAA, consists of government officials, drone manufacturers, tech companies and aviation experts. It was chaired by Earl Lawrence, the director of the FAA’s drone integration office and Dave Vos, who leads Google’s drone efforts.
This article was written by Matt McFarland from The Washington Post and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
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This article was published in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 6, (MUP), 1976
Henry Sutton (1856-1912), inventor, was born on 3 September 1856 at Ballarat, Victoria, son of Richard Henry Sutton and his wife Mary, née Johnson. Richard founded a music firm in a tent on the Ballarat goldfield in 1854. After a short stint as a miner he had found that playing a home-made concertina in his tent at night attracted crowds and he began to make them for his friends. Persuaded by the astute Mary to buy a dray-load of musical instruments in Melbourne, he sold them in a few days. He bought land on Plank Road and built a music warehouse of brick and wood with a plate glass window.
Henry, his three brothers Alfred, Walter and Frederick, and his two sisters, Elizabeth and Emilie, were mainly educated by their mother, and all but Henry in their younger years helped in the business. Shy and modest, Henry studied unaided from the age of 11; interested in science and engineering, he had read all the scientific books in the well-stocked Ballarat Mechanics' Institute before he was 14. Although he had little access to current literature, apart from Engineer and Engineering, his own models and machines were ingenious and his drawings revealed great talent. He won a silver medal and thirty other prizes for drawing at the Ballarat School of Design. Observations at the age of 10 of the flutter of insect wings against smoked glass led to his theory on the flight of birds which he propounded in a paper read to the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain and published in its annual report of 1878. Sutton's experimental ornithopter (c.1870), driven by clockwork, could fly in a circumference of twelve feet (3.7 m) and from left to right and upwards at any desired angle. His experiments with heavier-than-air materials for flight seem to be the first of their kind in Australia.
According to his friend W. B. Withers, Sutton designed an electric continuous current dynamo with a practical ring armature as early as 1870. A similar device had been invented in 1860 by an Italian, Pacinotti, and in 1871 the Belgian Z. T. Gramme showed the French Academy of Sciences his own improved version, the Gramme Dynamo; it used the same principles as Sutton's. When it was found in 1873 that the device was reversible and could be used as an electric motor the rapid development of the electrical industry followed. Less than a year after A. G. Bell had received his patent on 7 March 1876, Sutton had devised and constructed more than twenty different telephones, sixteen of which were patented by others. Bell visited Ballarat to see a complete telephone system installed by Sutton in the family warehouse. Thomas Edison's carbon lamp was announced on 21 December 1879; Sutton had been working independently on similar lines, and on 6 January 1880 the Victorian government astronomer R. L. J. Ellery was aware of his successful experiments. Ellery acknowledged him as one of the best lecturers at the Ballarat School of Mines, where Sutton taught electricity and applied magnetism in 1883-87.
He worked tirelessly with 'daylight sometimes surprising him every morning for a week'; he declared that 'eight hours' work won't lift a man in this world'. Always by invitation, Sutton contributed papers to societies in Australia and abroad on topics including electricity, colour photography and the process of engraving by the aid of photography; his paper on his new electric storage battery received acclaim when it was read before the Royal Society of London in December 1881. He rarely applied for patents, partly because he spurned material gain and wanted to 'benefit fellow workers in science'. According to available records, only two patents were taken out in his name in Victoria: in 1886 for 'Improvement in electric circuits for telephonic purposes' and in 1887 for 'An improved process of converting a photographic image on a gelatine surface into a relief or intaglio printing surface …'. Records in New South Wales include two patents: for explosion engines and 'Intaglio … photo-printing'. His mercury air pump, of which details were published in the English Mechanic and World of Science on 21 July 1882, was recommended for the manufacture of lamp bulbs and was developed by others. A vacuum pump, worked by a water jet, was presented to the Ballarat School of Mines for use in chemistry classes. In some respects his most interesting work was in the field of what has since become television: he claimed in the late 1880s to have designed, but not constructed, an apparatus that would transmit to Ballarat the running of the Melbourne Cup.
Sutton's father had died in 1876 and the prospering business was then run by his mother and brothers, with 19-year-old Alfred as manager; Alfred opened a music store in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, in 1884 and the firm became Sutton Bros. In 1894 the four brothers formed a private company, Suttons Pty Ltd. Henry now concentrated on business, although he experimented with radio and built a portable set with a range of 500 yards (457 m). Interested in the advent of the motor car, he designed, built and drove two efficient vehicles with carburettors of his own invention. At a meeting of fifty-five motorists held at the Port Phillip Club on 9 December 1903, Sutton moved the resolution that founded the Automobile Club of Victoria.
Aged 25, Sutton had married Elizabeth Ellen Wyatt at Ballarat. Aged 46, he married Annie May Patti at Malvern; he died of heart failure and chronic nephritis on 28 July 1912. He was buried in Brighton cemetery, survived by his second wife, their two sons, and two of the three sons of the first marriage. He died intestate but left property worth £9984. At the very least Sutton was a gifted innovator and developer over a very wide range; the isolation in which he worked underlines his remarkable talent. He was clearly in the van of several international experimental areas but precise claims to fame remain to be established.CNN falsely reported on Tuesday that the Islamic terrorist who attacked and murdered innocent civilians in New York City shouted, “God is Great,” instead of what he is alleged to have actually said: “Allahu Akbar.”
Sayfullo Saipov, 29, is the alleged terrorist who yelled “Allahu Akbar” — "God is greater" (superlative) and in Arabic — as he got out of his truck, after he ran over multiple pedestrians, the New York Post reported.
However, on CNN’s The Situation Room with host Wolf Blitzer, the left-leaning news network chose to distort what Saipov said — claiming on their banner that he said “God is Great” in Arabic.
Multiple law enforcement sources tell CNN that the incident in New York City is being investigated as terrorism https://t.co/ozdMAz0gY2 pic.twitter.com/IeyY1AprW9 — The Situation Room (@CNNSitRoom) October 31, 2017
The New York Times also falsely reported that Saipov shouted “God is Great” instead of “Allahu Akbar.”
The Associated Press (AP) did the same thing in April when they falsely stated that a suspected Islamic terrorist also yelled “God Is Great.”
“Dyer has said Muhammad shouted 'God is great!' in Arabic while being arrested and had posted on social media that he dislikes white people. All three victims in Tuesday's killings were white men, and Muhammad is black,” the AP reported.
Facebook also did their best to gloss over the fact that the attack was an Islamic terrorist attack just blocks away from the World Trade Center. The social media platform created a “Crisis Response” named “The Violent Incident in Manhattan, New York” for people to identify if they were safe or not.The cascade of controversies buffeting the White House is starting to rankle high-profile Republicans, who are voicing concerns about how the daily drama is impacting the GOP agenda on Capitol Hill.
Even as House Speaker Paul Ryan tried Wednesday to tamp down the furor over the latest accusation -- that Trump asked James Comey to shutter part of the FBI's Russia probe -- other Republicans were showing their exasperation.
"We cannot have this constant chaos and serious questions being raised virtually every single day," Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said. "It is distracting from the ability to work on certain issues like health care reform, and the administration needs to get its house in order."
Most Republicans on the Hill still are not going along with Democratic demands for a special prosecutor, but a handful are. Even more are opening the door to further inquiries into the latest Comey accusation.
Part of this reflects a desire by Republicans not to rush to judgment over the claims in a memo none of them have seen. According to The New York Times, Comey said in a February memo that Trump asked him to end the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
"We need the facts," Ryan said, echoing comments from Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and others.
The White House maintains that Trump did not seek to end any investigations.
But Republicans' fresh inquiries suggest the controversy will continue to play out, as they ask to view the memo and hear from Comey. House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, asked overnight for documents including the reported February memo. Chaffetz tweeted he's ready to subpoena the information if necessary.
Colorado Republican Rep. Mike Coffman tweeted: “We need the memos, Comey should testify and I still believe that a special prosecutor should be named.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican in his first term, tweeted: “For the purpose of transparency, the White House should share a transcript of the meeting with the House and Senate intelligence committees.”
And regarding a separate report -- also disputed by the White House -- that Trump shared classified intel with the Russians, Republican Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock called for "immediate classified briefings."
But as Republicans exercise their oversight responsibilities, they're openly voicing concern about what it means for the GOP agenda.
One senior House GOP source told Fox News that the mood at the House Republican Conference meeting Wednesday was "melancholy."
Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said the White House is "in a downward spiral right now” and the Trump administration has “got to figure out a way to come to grips with all that’s happening.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., also got in on the Trump bashing and invoked “Watergate.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Bloomberg Live that "we could do with a little less drama from the White House" so lawmakers can focus on tax reform, rolling back red tape and repealing ObamaCare.
The Comey controversy followed a high point for Hill Republicans, after the House revived the struggling ObamaCare repeal bill and passed it, sending it to the Senate. The biggest congressional win before that was Neil Gorsuch's confirmation to the Supreme Court.
Ryan and his deputies tried Wednesday to reset focus on tax reform and other priorities.
"If we're serious about letting Americans keep more of their paychecks, if we're serious about bringing jobs back home, bringing manufacturing back home, then we have got to reform this tax system and seize this moment," Ryan said Wednesday.
Whether Republicans can dust themselves off may depend on what the Comey memos and other documents show.
Lara Brown, director of George Washington University’s political management program, told Fox News she expects more fallout as the midterm elections approach. She predicted more Republicans will pull away from the Trump White House around October, giving health care legislation low odds and saying tax reform is "dead in the water."
“In the fall, each individual politician will make their strategic calculations if they can attach themselves to the president or distance themselves,” she said. “We’re going to see increasing numbers of Republican partisans moving away.”
Fox News' Chad Pergram contributed to this report.Video
In 1932, entrepreneur Max Wiseman imported into the UK an entire factory of spectacle frame-making machinery and staff from Germany.
The Algha Works factory was born at Fish Island in east London and fast became a leading manufacturer of frames, including the eternally fashionable "round-eye".
Now the only frame maker left in Britain, the factory is still in business today producing glasses under the Savile Row brand - and mainly exports its products.
The original machines are still used to hand-craft the spectacles, which have been worn by the likes of Harry Potter, Denzel Washington and Johnny Depp.
Staff old and new reflect on the history of the plant and what it is like working with antique tools and machines, which each have a personality all of their own.
Video journalist: John Galliver
Stop/Start is a new series of video features for the BBC News website which follows both new trends that are beginning and old traditions that are coming to an end.Site of the day - PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency
Site of the day - PickyDomains.com, world's first risk free naming agency
Steven Smith has built a career around tea. A rare serial entrepreneur who has made repeated waves in a single industry, the never-satisfied Smith has built and sold companies multiple times, including closing a multimillion-dollar deal with Starbucks. With his latest venture, Steven Smith Teamaker, he is finally succeeding on his own terms. But is he already looking ahead to the next big thing?Forty years ago, Steven Smith stood up at a meeting of disgruntled Oregon farmers and offered them an alternative to the falling price of peppermint oil. He bought up their mint leaves and began selling them to tea giants Celestial Seasonings and Lipton. Eventually, he sold the leaves as bagged tea under the Stash Tea Company name, which he helped grow from an $800-a-month botanicals supplier into a multimillion-dollar brand. Then he created and built a company called Tazo, which he sold to Starbucks. After that, he moved to France to live the good life.It didn't last. Today he dips a spoon into the first of a row of small, handle-less cups of white porcelain, lined up like chess pawns on the counter in front of him. He lets the tea, a green blend flavored with jasmine, flood over it. Then he brings the spoon to his mouth with a loud whooshing sound, like a vacuum seal opening. He nods approvingly, clanks the spoon against an open jug to remove any remaining droplets and leans over to try the next.A lithe 62-year-old whose features might remind you of Bill Clinton's, Smith has been running tea companies for pretty much his entire professional life, all of them within a few miles of the combination workshop, factory and tasting room he now rents in a |
know. We know about VPNs and proxies and torrents and the like. Literally everyone does. And we do not care.
So. With that said, the Netflix library is one constantly in flux; adding, removing, you know the drill.
Though the problem is that they don’t exactly publicise a lot of the new additions to the roster, meaning eyes must be kept at eagle-status at all times.
Those of you with a love of getting schwifty are in for a dang treat, as the cult hit Dan Harmon-penned utterly batshit insane animated series Rick & Morty is now available for all to peruse.
The Adult Swim show’s first season is among the latest in a string of updates for Netflix AU, which also includes the sixth season of Archer, every episode ever of actually really bloody good ABC series SeaChange, Pixar‘s critically acclaimed tear-fest Inside Out, and Hannibal Buress‘s part stand-up special, part comedy documentary film Hannibal Takes Edinburgh, focusing on the comedian’s 2012 trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
All this ought to tide you over for the run up to the colder months.
GET SCHWIFTY.
Source: Netflixable.Kobe Bryant reacts to a recent comment made by Magic Johnson, who said he hopes the Lakers lose every game. (0:52)
Magic Johnson thinks that the Los Angeles Lakers should get serious about losing.
Magic Johnson thinks that Kobe Bryant and the Lakers would be better off losing every game in order to land a better draft pick. Todd Williamson/Invision/Time Warner Cable/AP Images
Johnson, speaking at Steiner Sports' In Their Own Words product launch Tuesday in New York, said he wants his former team to lose enough games to contend for a high lottery pick in next year's NBA draft.
"I hope the Lakers lose every game," Johnson told reporters. "Because if you're going to lose, lose. And I'm serious."
The Lakers owned the second-worst record in the Western Conference and the sixth-worst in the NBA following Tuesday's 98-95 victory over the Kings.
Kobe Bryant scored nine of his 32 points in the final 3:14, leading Los Angeles' fourth-quarter comeback. Carlos Boozer added 15 points for the Lakers, who snapped their three-game skid by rallying from a 12-point deficit in the second half.
After the game, Bryant kept Johnson's thoughts in perspective.
"He's used to being an owner. He's an owner of the Dodgers. He was an owner of the Lakers. That's speaking from an owner's perspective," Bryant said. "I think the fans -- or hopefully some of them -- are probably smart enough to understand his perspective as an owner. I certainly am.
"Magic is one of the most competitive players of all time. He doesn't want to lose. From an owner's perspective, his opinion is to get top picks and to be able to use those as leverage to trade and get a competitive team and so on. From where I'm sitting, I just look at his point of view."
Johnson confirmed Bryant's thoughts on Twitter late Tuesday night.
Last years draft there were no superstars. This year there are about 3-4 superstars in college basketball and we need one of them! — Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) December 10, 2014
Laker Nation: I don't want the team to finish in the middle of the pack and get a 10th-14th pick because that won't do us any good. — Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) December 10, 2014
"I don't see teams tanking. It doesn't happen. Maybe there are certain teams in the league -- and this is not one of them -- where ownership sits up there in their office and they're crossing their fingers quietly and hoping," Bryant said. "But the players themselves? Never. Players play. Players play, and players try to win every single game. That's just what we do."
Nick Young, who had 12 points and four rebounds Tuesday, also made light of the remarks.
"I'm going to have to tell Magic to stay at Dodgers Stadium for a while," he joked. "Don't bring that smile around here. I'll do all the smiling for now!"
Lakers coach Byron Scott didn't agree with Johnson's stance.
"That really is easy to say, but when you're behind the scenes and you're in the trenches and you're coaching, that's not something that you want to do," Scott said before the game. "And I don't think our players look at it that way. We've got to go out here and try to win every game possible. If you lose games, it's one thing, but to go out and try to lose, that's a different story. I think that sends a message to those guys in there."
Los Angeles' poor start comes on the heels of last season's 27-55 record -- the worst 82-game record in Lakers franchise history.
The Lakers landed the seventh overall pick -- used to select Julius Randle -- in this year's draft, and Johnson is hoping for another high pick after this season.
"If you're going to lose, you have to lose because you can't be in the middle of the pack. You either have to be great or you have to be bad to get a good pick." Magic Johnson, on his hope
for the Lakers
"If you're going to lose, you have to lose because you can't be in the middle of the pack," Johnson told reporters. "You either have to be great or you have to be bad to get a good pick."
Scott said he doesn't worry about external feedback of that nature, even if it comes from someone as popular as Johnson.
"It's more of a laughing matter to me than anything," Scott said. "I know Earvin and how competitive he is, and I understand where he's coming from -- 'Yeah, lose every game and hopefully you'll get the No. 1 pick.' That doesn't guarantee that you're going to get the No. 1 pick. You go out here and try to win as much as you can to try to create that culture of winning again instead of having that loser's mentality. That's how I look at it."
The Lakers are expected to have substantial salary-cap space this upcoming offseason. Bryant, who will make $25 million next season, Young, Randle and second-year forward Ryan Kelly are the only Lakers who have guaranteed contracts beyond this season.
Johnson thinks that the Lakers could turn around their fortunes quickly with the right moves in the offseason -- and another high lottery pick.
"The Lakers are in a good space, too, next summer if they can sign or trade for a talented guy," he said. "I'd rather be all the way bad than be in the middle."
Scott said he hasn't spoken to Johnson in a while but joked that he would send him a text that read, "LOL."
"I just think karma is a you-know-what, and if you try to lose games, you're not going to get the first pick," Scott said.
ESPNLosAngeles.com's Baxter Holmes and The Associated Press contributed to this report.By RAY MASSEY
Last updated at 09:39 29 December 2007
Digital speed cameras which capture drivers smoking or eating at the wheel are being introduced nationwide in a new move to hammer motorists.
Drivers will also face fines, bans and even jail for infringements such as driving without a seatbelt, using a hand-held mobile phone or overtaking across double white lines.
The hi-tech DVD cameras, which have instant playback, will also be used to provide photographic evidence against those eating sandwiches or rolling-up cigarettes at the wheel.
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These are now considered serious offences under new guidelines drawn up for prosecutors.
The development will massively increase the number of fines and prosecutions against normally law-abiding drivers for relatively minor offences.
As well as being fined £60 and given three points on their licences, motorists now face two years in jail if their actions are considered to have been a factor in dangerous driving.
Virtually every police force in England, Wales and Scotland is now equipped with the new digital cameras. They were given Home Office approval in April but are quietly being rolled out nationwide.
More than 100 have been sold. The manufacturers have said their order book is full until next April.
The DVD cameras can operate as conventional speed traps. But thanks to the instant playback, they also double up to photograph motorists flouting laws other than speeding.
Set up by a police officer on sites such as motorway bridges, they constantly scan the cars and can digitally record drivers behind the wheel committing a vast array of minor traffic offences.
Crucially the new technology, called Concept, allows officers to play back the footage to locate, view and capture the offence instantly.
Photographs taken using the device show how effective it is, capturing pictures such as a man apparently steering his Renault with his bare feet and the driver of an Alfa Romeo with a mobile phone clamped to his ear.
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The device is made and sold by Tele-Traffic UK whose chief executive, Jon Bond, is a former police chief superintendent in charge of speed cameras in Warwickshire.
He said: "It is the first camera to record offences other than speeding and give an instant playback.
"If the camera is being used for speed enforcement, but the police officer spots another driving offence being committed - or even thinks he saw something - he can play it back in a second. The offences are easily and quickly detectable."
Mr Bond, whose Warwick-based company employs 20, added: "At present, officers can record an offence such as driving with a mobile phone clamped to their ear or without a seatbelt but would then have to look through perhaps two hours of tape in order to find it again.
"Concept means that those operating the camera can digitally log everything. They are linked to the team in the back office who can instantly find the offence, see the proof and send out a penalty charge notice to the car's registeredowner.
"This will cut down massively on the amount of time police officers have to spend on paperwork and so speed up prosecutions. The days of the police having to chase after people who are infringing the law in these ways are gone. That will make the roads a safer place."
The Concept digital DVD technology costs £17,750. But police forces who already use Tele-Traffic's existing analogue (non-digital) system, can upgrade for a fraction of that price.
Smoking at the wheel was recently included in the Highway Code as something which courts can consider as a factor when police accuse drivers of failing to have proper control of their vehicle.
More than 300,000 drivers a day are still illegally using hand-held phones at the wheel, recent government figures revealed.
The penalties for using a handheld phone while driving, which was outlawed in 2003, were increased in February this year from a £30 fine to £60, plus three penalty points.
Under new sentencing rules, motorists using hand-held mobile phones could be jailed for two years and be disqualified if this was an aggravating factor in dangerous driving.
Those who kill while using a mobile face 14 years behind bars, under a charge of causing death by dangerous driving.
Last October, Mr Bond and his Tele-Traffic team were under fire after admitting to undercover reporters posing as customers that speed cameras were a "scam" and that setting up cameras in new areas was the equivalent of having "a blank chequebook" that would result in "bucketfuls" of cash.
Self-styled Captain Gatso of the campaign group Motorists Against Detection said: "This is yet another example of the Big Brother surveillance society where there's no escape from the cameras."On This Day
Sunday 26th December 1965
53 years ago
Paul McCartney fell from his moped and chipped his front tooth. He also got a nasty cut on his lip and was left with a scar from the accident. Also on the night time ride was McCartney's friend, Tara Browne, the Guinness heir whose death later inspired John Lennon to write the opening lines of "A Day In The Life". "I had an accident when I came off a moped in Wirral, near Liverpool. I had a very good friend who lived in London called Tara Browne, a Guinness heir - a nice Irish guy, very sensitive bloke. I'd see him from time to time, and enjoyed being around him. He came up to visit me in Liverpool once when I was there seeing my dad and brother. I had a couple of mopeds on hire, so we hit upon the bright idea of going to my cousin Bett's house. We were riding along on the mopeds. I was showing Tara the scenery. He was behind me, and it was an incredible full moon; it really was huge. I said something about the moon and he said 'yeah', and I suddenly had a freeze-frame image of myself at that angle to the ground when it's too late to pull back up again: I was still looking at the moon and then I looked at the ground, and it seemed to take a few minutes to think, 'Ah, too bad - I'm going to smack that pavement with my face!' Bang! There I was, chipped tooth and all. it came through my lip and split it. But I got up and we went along to my cousin's house. When I said, 'Don't worry, Bett, but I've had a bit of an accident,' she thought I was joking. She creased up laughing at first, but then she went 'Holy...!' I'd really given my face a good old smack; it looked like I'd been in the ring with Tyson for a few rounds. So she rang a friend of hers who was a doctor. He came round on the spot, took a needle out and, after great difficulty threading it, put it in the first half of the wound. He was shaking a bit, but got it all the way through, and then he said, ''Oh, the thread's just come out - I'll have to do it again!' No anaesthetic. I was standing there while he rethreaded it and pulled it through again. In fact that was why I started to grow a moustache. It was pretty embarrassing, because around that time you knew your pictures would get winged off to teeny-boppery magazines like 16, and it was pretty difficult to have a new picture taken with a big fat lip. So I started to grow a moustache - a sort of Sancho Panza - mainly to cover where my lip had been sewn. It caught on with the guys in the group: if one of us did something like growing his hair long and we liked the idea, we'd all tend to do it. And then it became seen as a kind of revolutionary idea, that young men of our age definitely ought to grow a moustache! And it all fell in with the Sgt Pepper thing, because he had a droopy moustache." Paul McCartney AnthologyIn light of the racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia this past summer, the Dallas school board voted to change the names of four elementary schools named for Confederate generals: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, William Cabell and Albert Sidney Johnston.
The board insisted on completely new and different names, eliminating the possibility of, for example, turning Robert E. Lee into just Lee Elementary, which another Texas school district has done.
The KERA radio story
Here's where each school stands in the process:
Robert E. Lee
A parent-school committee began considering new names before the board ever forced its hand — and even before the violence in Charlottesville. With assistance from its trustee Dustin Marshall, it came up with the name, Geneva Heights Elementary. It's the original name of the land where the school sits in the Lower Greenville area.
William Cabell
William Cabell in North Dallas will become Chapel Hill Preparatory.
Albert Sidney Johnston
Albert Sidney Johnston Elementary in South Dallas has not decided a name. Officials there say they need more time, but they're on track to meet the February deadline.
Stonewall Jackson
Stonewall Jackson will become Mockingbird Elementary, named for the street in front of it: Mockingbird Lane.
Principal Melanie Mans said there were over 50 names submitted in the process.
"I’ll say the renaming committee did a great job. When it came down to three names, I liked all of them.”
One option considered for Stonewall Jackson’s new name was Olivia Henderson Elementary, in honor of the school’s longtime principal, who retired in 2013. It also considered East Dallas Elementary.
Mans says students who do well will still be Stars, just not Stonewall Stars. Parents were heavily involved in considering a new name for the Blue Ribbon campus.
“We did have a larger committee than most schools for this purpose,” Mans said. “But our school has very, very involved parents. And with such a big change and the reputation this school has acquired over the years, we really wanted to be very inclusive. We didn’t want anyone to feel left out because this was a huge change for them, and we wanted them to feel like they were a part of it.”
Moving forward
Trustees, including Miguel Solis, spoke at the last school board meeting offering good words about the process schools and citizens used to come up with new campus identities.
“This is bold leadership by this board,” Solis said. “And it’s going to lay the path for, I think, not just acknowledgement of the history and the need to change the history... but also a path for remediation and for real conversations about equity, equality and how to move our city forward.”Has Holloway just had his Newcastle moment? Preview
Friday, 25th Aug 2017 18:50 by Clive Whittingham
QPR have made a far better start to the season than almost everybody anticipated, but Tuesday night’s League Cup tonking by Brentford could easily derail that if Rangers aren’t careful.
Cardiff City v Queens Park Rangers
Mercantile Credit Trophy >>> Saturday August 26, 2017 >>> Kick Off 15.00 >>> Weather – Cloudy, warm >>> Cardiff City Stadium
Ian Holloway’s assertion that ten changes were necessary for the visit of Brentford in the week because “the league campaign is absolutely vital for us” fundamentally misunderstands how league and cup competitions work.
If QPR lose at Cardiff on Saturday, even very badly, they have 40 more matches over the next eight months to recover from it. There are 120 points to play for after this, and just three available in South Wales. It is not, by any stretch of anybody’s imagination, a massive match. It’s not even that important. Unless something genuinely extraordinary happens, we’ll barely remember it ever happened. Be honest, if I asked you how we got on here last season do you remember the score? Do you remember who scored?
Tuesday night, regardless of who it was against, was very different. That loss means the competition is done and over with for the year. No recovery, no second chance. One of only three things QPR can win this season and we’re already out of it before the end of August. QPR are never going to win the Premier League so by deliberately opting out of both cup competitions every season we’re basically condemning the club to not winning anything for the rest of time. Which is a bit miserable and “what’s the point of it all”.
Holloway is far from alone in treating the cups with contempt, and when you’re genuinely in the running for a league title then perhaps focus should be entirely on that – Cardiff rested players during the week and lost to Burton. But not then it should have been a first team on Tuesday and ten changes for tomorrow – if indeed the professional footballers just five games into their season, and off the back of a “ruthless pre-season/toughest pre-season of all time” aren’t fit enough to cope with both. The cups are within reach – Bradford City and Tranmere have been to finals relatively recently – and should be attacked. Rest players for the never ending league games if you must – and you musn’t, actually, because for the last four seasons a League Cup quarter finalist has gone on to win promotion from the Championship so any idea that it’s a horrible distraction or unworkable simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
That’s without getting into who the game was against. The QPR Brentford rivalry isn’t as severe as the Brentford QPR rivalry, but it’s still chastening to get beaten on your own ground by a near neighbour in such comprehensive fashion. You can say it’s only the cup and we’re not bothered about it, you can say it was an entirely different team, you can say we’re not that fussed about Brentford, but for all manner of reasons you don’t want to be getting done 4-1 at home like that. Damages confidence, damages momentum, damages the mood around the place, changes the perception of a good start to the season (which is what we’ve had). He got it badly, badly wrong in my opinion and not in a way that was difficult to foresee – the back four of one kid, one alcoholic, one bloke who wasn’t very good five years ago and has since broken his leg in two places and one bloke with knees so bad he qualifies for shop mobility was never likely to stand up to much examination was it?
It should not distract from what has been a very encouraging start to the season. Seven points from four games is four more than I thought we’d have at this stage, and seven more than many others hoped for. QPR have been playing well and picking up good results from difficult fixtures. September looks kinder on paper so it’s a nice platform to build from, regardless of what happens at Cardiff where I think we’ll get our arse handed to us.
But Holloway burnt off a lot of credit with supporters last season, particularly during the long losing run that ended the campaign, and it only took that one bad performance on Tuesday to bring the fury back to Twitter and the message boards. I just hope this isn’t his equivalent of the Newcastle home game for Jimmy Floyd Hasslebaink last season. I said at the time that whatever the circumstance, you can’t get done 6-0 at home and JFH never really recovered from it in my opinion – despite also making quite a decent start to the season with three wins in August. Losing 4-1 at home to a local rival is a similar faux pas and just because the cup (for some reason) isn’t a priority, don’t think it won’t be included in the prosecution case if Rangers now go on a little dip.
The home games we have coming up look winnable, but we’ve already picked up injuries to key defenders. Talk of sacking the manager, after making a good start to the season, is typical reactionary rubbish but I’ve lived in fear that we’re going to do that stupid October managerial change yet again since May and the complete over the top reaction to Tuesday’s defeat online did show how thin the ice Holloway is skating around on still is.
Links >>> Serial winner Warnock – Interview >>> Ray Jones’ last minute winner – History >>> Hooper in charge – Referee
Saturday
Team News: QPR’s promising start to the season has come at some cost, particularly in defence where Joel Lynch (hamstring) is now joined on the sidelines by James Perch who played the last 20 minutes last week with a dislocated knee cap and is now out for several months. Grant Hall is still struggling with tendonitis and Steven Caulker gave another demonstration on Tuesday of just how many thousands of miles short of being ready for a regular return to action he is. Jordan Cousins is a long term absentee further forwards. Josh Scowen was due to be assessed for an ankle injury he suffered at Perch’s hands last weekend but with Ryan Manning playing for the U23s against Barnsley today it suggests they expect he’ll be ok.
Cardiff rested Sean Morrison, Aron Gunnarsson, Kenneth Zohore and Nathaniel Mendez-Laing for their cup match in the week and will recall all four for this one. Summer signing Calum Paterson is yet to make a debut after signing from Hearts and getting injured in pre-season – his return is set for the end of September.
Elsewhere: When life is stringing you along let the Championship come and cut you loose – starting tonight with Big Racist John and the Boys visiting Bristol City live on Sky Sports Sunderland. The Allam Tigers have also had their game with the Bolton Brassics brought forward to tonight as Hull FC are at Wembley in the Challenge Cup Final tomorrow.
So ten games tomorrow then, finishing in the evening with the Nottingham Trees against the Champions of Europe on the tellybox.
A more run-of-the-mill list of 15.00 kick offs you’ll struggle to find but Sporting Wolverhampton have gone off well and could heap further misery on bottom side Brentford at Griffin Park. The Ipswich Blue Sox have also come out of the traps looking surprisingly sprightly and they’re welcoming Tarquin and Rupert this weekend.
Champions Middlesbrough are at home to Preston Knob End, Nigel Clough’s Burton Albion face the Sheffield Owls and the Birmingham Bad Knees, who lost at Burton last week, are back at home against Reading.
The Millwall Scholars and Brentford are the bottom two in the league despite having the most shots on goal – maybe some will start hitting the net for Neil Harris’ men against Borussia Norwich. Barnsley v Sunderland, and the Sheffield Red Stripes against the Derby Sheep, complete the weekend list.
Then we get a fortnight off for another crucial round of international fixtures. Rejoice.
Referee: QPR are on a five-match losing run with referee Simon Hooper, not that it’s had anything particularly to do with him. Details of his recent appointments and stats are available here.
Form
Cardiff: Cardiff have started the season with four wins from four games. Including last season, they’ve now won their last five matches and haven’t won six in a row since 2000 when they were in what is now League Two. At home in the league they’ve beaten Aston Villa and Sheff Utd 3-0 and 2-0, but they’ve struggled more with scratchy teams out in the cup – narrowly beating Portsmouth 2-1 then losing to Burton during the week.
Darnell Furlong has scored his first ever goal for #QPR - 3788 days after his father Paul Furlong last netted for the club (v Luton). 🔵⚪️— Jack Supple (@JTSupple) August 22, 2017
Since the start of last season, Idrissa Sylla (6⃣) has scored more goals as a substitute than any other Championship player. #QPR— Jack Supple (@JTSupple) August 19, 2017
QPRSeven points from four games played represents a decent beginning from QPR, but they’ve only taken one point from a possible six away from home – drawing with Sheff Wed and losing to Norwich. That continues a winless run on the road from last season which now stretches to nine matches (seven defeats and two draws) since the 4-1 win at Birmingham in February. Rangers completed the double over Cardiff last season, winning 2-0 in Wales (Caulker, Chery) and 2-1 at Loftus Road (Ngbakoto, Smith).
Prediction: This year’s Prediction League is being sponsored by The Art of Football and we’ll be handing out prizes from their QPR Collection at the end of October, January and to the overall winner. Last year’s winner Southend_Rss tells us…
Although QPR have started the league season well, they’re yet to win away and Cardiff are flying under Neil Warnock at the moment so this one looks tough.
Craig’s Prediction: Cardiff 2-1 QPR. Scorer – Matt Smith
LFW’s Prediction: Cardiff 2-0 QPR. No Scorer.
The Twitter @loftforwords
Pictures – Action Images
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Action Images
TacticalR added 19:37 - Aug 25
Thanks for your preview.
Yes, in retrospect Newcastle was JFH's Emperor's New Clothes moment. I don't think Brentford will be for Holloway because it wasn't our first team, 'it's only the cup', and QPR never do anything in the cup anyway.
While the early season league games might not be particularly memorable or important in the scheme of things I guess they are pretty important to QPR managers who know that the QPR board is looking to replace managers in SeptemberOctober. 1
Myke added 22:25 - Aug 25
I agree pretty much with all the above Clive, (except the result, I expect us to lose by more than 2 goals). In terms of it being Olli's 'Newcastle' moment, that fact that it was Brentford certainly burns off more credit than if say they lost 4-1 to WBA or someone of that ilk. If they lose heavily again tomorrow, the total goals conceded in the two games will be bandied about by the media who won't 'give a monkey's' about it being a different defence in either game.
Speaking of which, it won't be that different either; Smithies, Bidwell and Onouha will come back, but any two from Caulker, Baptiste and Furlong will also play, regardless of whether he plays 5 at the back or opts for a flat back four. My own feeling is that he will go 4-1-4-1 and guess who the target man will be? 0
18StoneOfHoop added 05:41 - Aug 26
Brilliant writing and expert analysis as per usual but this is the third time I can remember you have used the word reactionary incorrectly ; a right wing person's views against the prevailing status quo is what I think that word means,'reactive' or 'knee-jerk' would be better.
-1
cyprusmel added 07:16 - Aug 26
I don't remember many changes from the league teams and cup teams that Alec Stock played.
I believe that he played his best available team at all times and I thank him for it as he gave me and my family one of the most memorable times in my long football life at Wembley. 5
simoncarne added 09:01 - Aug 26
There are good reasons why a fan might be disappointed at the absence of a cup run. But to argue that today's game (or any other league game) isn't important is not one of them.
At the end of the season, when the league table identifies who's up, who's down and who's staying put, every point won counts equally and every point not won is equally damaging.
So, unless Clive is confident that QPR are going to be comfortably mid-table or proudly promoted with room to spare, every point counts, from the first day of the season to the last. And, if there is a tolerable chance that Cardiff might be a rival at the same end of the table as the Rs, every point denied to Cardiff has the potential to benefit QPR as well.
Of course there will, as Clive says, be plenty of other games, after today, for QPR to win more points (and for Cardiff to be denied them). But we saw what happened last season when the team got itself into an apparently safe place in the table, with games to spare, only to drop like a stone over the ensuing weeks and end up a hair's breadth from disaster.
Today's game matters. <i>Every</i> league game matters, until enough points have been won for winning more of them not to matter any more. 2
oldmisery added 09:26 - Aug 26
Yes, we've heard all about the'merits' of squad rotation but during our most successful season we played 48 games and used just 16 players, 10 of whom played in 40 or more of those matches. Were the old time players fitter, stronger, more resilient or did the managers of yesteryear believe that continuity brought about the best results? 0
francisbowles added 10:37 - Aug 26
When we compare the 66/67 team or the 75/76 team we are talking chalk and cheese. The game has changed so much since I have been watching it as to make comparisons virtually redundant.
The game is faster and more intense. The players are much fitter and as a consequence, whatever the popular opinion, are more susceptible to injury, especially if they have been injured before. They are obviously much more valuable commodities as well and therefore clubs invest in sport's scientists to advise them, on how to look after their assets, in terms off rest and recovery as well as training and performance.
The other point to consider in this is that we have lost Mackie, Faurlin and Buszacky too long term injuries in cup ties in which we were still defeated. -1
GroveR added 12:56 - Aug 26
Completely agree.
The whole concept of 'rivalry' has become a bit of a joke in the Sky era, where every Sunday game is billed as a titanic battle to the death between mythical demigods upon which rests the very fate of universes (or West Brom v Stoke to the rest of us). How did Fat Frank justify calling Chelsea / Liverpool the biggest rivalry in British football with a straight face? I agree, there's hatred there but they're both eminently hateable clubs.
Locsl rivalry matters and if Holloway thinks any London derby can be written off, let alone a west London derby after having played for us for as long as he did he's an idiot - when you get 12,000 turning up for a pre-season against the neighbours, bending over and smiling coquetteishly over your shoulder isn't an option.
If QPR fielded an U7 girls netball team against any one of Chels**/Fulham/Brentford I'd expect a savage reducer from one of our players no later than the third minute, just to let them know we're on the pitch.
0
simoncarne added 13:00 - Aug 26
@oldmisery You raise an interesting point. In 1975/76 (which I believe you are referring to), we lost only seven league matches. Three of them were in weeks when we played a cup game; and two were at Christmas/Easter when two games were played within three/two days. If squad rotation had turned just one of those defeats into a victory (or two of them into a draw), we would have been champions. 0
simoncarne added 13:02 - Aug 26
... or going out of the cup earlier to reduce the number of weeks with multiple games. 0
isawqpratwcity added 13:26 - Aug 26
Nah, you're wrong about cup games. Always said it, always will: your best chance of income stream is the league, so give that your best shot. 0Image copyright Reuters Image caption Col Robert Stanley, Malmstrom Air Force Base's 341st Missile Wing, is said to have resigned his post in the wake of the cheating scandal
The US Air Force has sacked nine mid-level nuclear commanders and will discipline dozens more in a test cheating scandal, officials have said.
Nearly one in five of the Air Force's nuclear missile officers have been implicated in a ring of cheating on monthly proficiency tests.
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has said the nuclear force is suffering from "systemic problems".
A series of programmes to improve leadership are also said to be planned.
None of the fired commanders is directly involved in the alleged cheating. Each was instead determined to have failed in leadership responsibility.
US nuclear programme scandals October 2013 - Maj Gen Michael Carey, a two-star general in the 20th Air Force, is sacked after accusations of drunken misconduct
Maj Gen Michael Carey, a two-star general in the 20th Air Force, is sacked after accusations of drunken misconduct October 2013 - US Navy Vice-Adm Tim Giardina is removed as deputy head of US Strategic Command and investigated for illegal gambling
- US Navy Vice-Adm Tim Giardina is removed as deputy head of US Strategic Command and investigated for illegal gambling August 2013 - the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base fails a safety test, and its commander is relieved of duty
- the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base fails a safety test, and its commander is relieved of duty May 2013 - The US Air Force temporarily strips 17 officers at Minot base in North Dakota of their nuclear watch authority following a poor grade in a missile launch test.
- The US Air Force temporarily strips 17 officers at Minot base in North Dakota of their nuclear watch authority following a poor grade in a missile launch test. October 2007 - The air force relieves several officers of their duties after a B-52 bomber was mistakenly flown across the US loaded with nuclear-armed missiles
In addition to the nine officers sacked, the senior commander of Malmstrom Air Force Base's 341st Missile Wing, Col Robert Stanley, was allowed to resign.
Commanders of the 341st Wing's three missile squadrons - each of whom is responsible for three nuclear missiles - were also fired, the Associated Press news agency reports.
Ninety-one missile launch crew members at Malmstrom have thus far been implicated in the cheating scandal, including more than 40 who face disciplinary action that may include dismissal.
Cheating allegations first emerged during investigations into alleged drug use by personnel at other bases.
In the wake of the revelations, the Air Force announced the entire team at the base would be re-tested.
It is the latest scandal to hit the US Air Force and nuclear missile force.
Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel had previously ordered a high-level review of the US nuclear forces, saying he was "deeply concerned" about morale and discipline among nuclear officers, while insisting that US nuclear arms were safe.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Oct. 10, 2016, 5:46 PM GMT / Updated Oct. 10, 2016, 5:46 PM GMT By Martha C. White
Tax experts disputed Donald Trump’s claim during Sunday night’s debate that some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters also took advantage of the tax code.
“Many of her friends took bigger deductions,” Trump said. “Warren Buffett took a massive deduction. Soros, who’s a friend of hers, took a massive deduction.”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump supporter, Ken Wilkison, cheers as he watches the |
a prime example.
So what was Buffett's biggest mistake? It wasn't necessarily buying Berkshire Hathaway; that was his worst trade. Instead, his biggest mistake was letting emotion get the better of him. And in the aftermath of Buffett's revelation, we can't help but wonder what would have happened to Buffett if he had received the full $11.50 offer and tendered his Berkshire Hathaway shares.
To learn more from the most successful investor of our generation, head to Warren Buffett's recommended reading list as well as our compilation of the top 25 Warren Buffett quotes.Josh Gerstein over at Politico sent Threat Level his piece underscoring once again President Barack Obama is not the civil-liberties knight in shining armor many were expecting.
Gerstein posts a televised interview of Obama and John Walsh of America's Most Wanted. The nation's chief executive extols the virtues of mandatory DNA testing of Americans upon arrest, even absent charges or a conviction. Obama said, "It's the right thing to do" to "tighten the grip around folks" who commit crime.
When it comes to civil liberties, the Obama administration has come under fire for often mirroring his predecessor's practices surrounding state secrets, the Patriot Act and domestic spying. There's also Gitmo, Jay Bybee and John Yoo.
Now there's DNA sampling. Obama told Walsh he supported the federal government, as well as the 18 states that have varying laws requiring compulsory DNA sampling of individuals upon an arrest for crimes ranging from misdemeanors to felonies. The data is lodged in state and federal databases, and has fostered as many as 200 arrests nationwide, Walsh said.
The American Civil Liberties Union claims DNA sampling is different from mandatory, upon-arrest fingerprinting that has been standard practice in the United States for decades.
A fingerprint, the group says, reveals nothing more than a person's identity. But much can be learned from a DNA sample, which codes a person's family ties, some health risks, and, according to some, can predict a propensity for violence.
The ACLU is suing California to block its voter-approved measure requiring saliva sampling of people picked up on felony charges. Authorities in the Golden State are allowed to conduct so-called "familial searching" – when a genetic sample does not directly match another, authorities start investigating people with closely matched DNA in hopes of finding leads to the perpetrator.
Do you wonder whether DNA sampling is legal?
The courts have already upheld DNA sampling of convicted felons, based on the theory that the convicted have fewer privacy rights. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that when conducting intrusions of the body during an investigation, the police need so-called "exigent circumstances" or a warrant. That alcohol evaporates in the blood stream is the exigent circumstance to draw blood from a suspected drunk driver without a warrant.
Illustration: hibiotech/Flickr
See Also:The late-September right knee injury to Wilson Ramos opened an unexpected door. (Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post)
PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. – For a moment, as he limped onto the field in full uniform at Nationals Park, Wilson Ramos was happy. The inability to help his 95-win team chase a World Series title was forgotten, the reality of losing millions of dollars in future earnings buried. All of the disappointment from the ACL tear he suffered in his right knee with a week remaining in the regular season dissipated as he absorbed the standing ovation before Game 1 of the National League Division Series in October.
And then he realized what throwing out the ceremonial first pitch to Jose Lobaton, his backup catcher and fellow Venezuelan, probably really signified: a farewell after a six-and-a-half-year tenure with an organization that had stuck with him through injuries, inconsistency and a kidnapping, in front of the fan base that had come to love him as “The Buffalo.”
“I wasn’t wrong,” Ramos said in Spanish.
Wilson Ramos is happy in a Rays uniform. (Elsa/Getty Images)
Ramos, 29, said this late last week, sitting in a golf cart under the stands at Charlotte Sports Park. Sturdy as ever, he wore his new garb, a navy-blue Tampa Bay Rays shirt and sky-blue shorts, fidgeting with the team’s workout schedule for the day on the steering wheel. He was a three-hour drive from the Nationals’ new spring training complex in West Palm Beach, whose opening he had been looking forward to because it was just minutes from his year-round home.
Ramos said he would be there if he had his way. He said he wanted to re-sign with the Nationals, but that it quickly became apparent that the club didn’t want to give him the money he believed he deserved, even in a deflated market. And so he moved on.
“They treated me great,” said Ramos, whose replacement on the Nationals, Matt Wieters, had been signed the previous day. “I learned a lot from experienced players in the organization, and, look, I think I did a very good job. I think I helped the team. And I don’t have anything bad to say about them. I’m very happy to have been with that organization and what I did for them.”
Once it was obvious he wouldn’t return, Ramos became one of the more intriguing players on the free agent market because he batted.307 with an.850 on-base-plus-slugging percentage and 22 home runs in 2016 — all career highs — but was damaged goods without a firm return date. How much was a team willing to pay a catcher recovering from a torn ACL that would prevent him from catching until at least midseason, after posting perhaps the best offensive season by a catcher in 2016?
The answer, the Rays determined, was $12 million guaranteed over two years plus plate-appearance incentives spanning the two seasons and escalators based on games caught in 2017, all of which could bring the grand total to $18.25 million. It was a deal Ramos would’ve balked at before his injury — he had turned down a three-year, $33 million offer from the Nationals in August — and a price the small-market Rays, never in the hunt for top-tier free agents, were willing to pay for a potential all-star bat.
“I wouldn’t have expected that he would be a guy that we had a chance on before the injury,” Rays senior vice president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom said.
You wouldn’t know Ramos had undergone ACL surgery in October if not for the scar down the middle of his right kneecap. He has only dealt with minor pain over the past month, after spending the bulk of his winter strengthening the area around his knee, particularly the quadriceps, in sessions he often shared on Instagram and Twitter. He is walking without a limp, and has recently worked up to jogging and pool exercises. But he still hasn’t resumed baseball activities, not even playing catch, and said he was waiting for a customized knee brace before taking that step.
Running day at the pool nice work strong legs better knees @raysbaseball #poolwork Día de correr en la piscina buen trabajo piernas fuertes mejores rodillas #trabajoduro A post shared by Wilson Abrahan Ramos Campos (@wilsonramosc40) on Feb 28, 2017 at 9:34am PST
It was Ramos’s second major ACL injury in the knee, but he emphasized that the first, suffered in 2012, wasn’t a tear, so the knee then was just cleaned and healed. This one was a complete tear and required ligament replacement.
“The rehabilitation for this type of injury is very slow,” Ramos said. “Sometimes I’d go to physical therapy and I left feeling like I hadn’t done anything. Just some simple knee massages. That was the day. I wanted to do more things to recover faster. But everything is step by step, and that’s what I had to do.”
The opportunity to be a designated hitter was a factor in Ramos deciding on the Rays, and his goal is to make his season debut as one in late May. But he is unsure when he will be cleared to catch. Money will provide motivation: Among those aforementioned incentives is that if he reaches 55 games caught this season, his 2018 salary climbs $2 million. He would then receive $250,000 for every five games he catches up to 75 games, which could total another $1 million.
“I’ve always seen my job as behind the plate, but if they give me the opportunity to be the DH to protect the knee, I’ll try to do my job offensively,” Ramos said. “I’ll always be available, once I recover from the knee completely, to go behind the plate.”
Tampa Bay will need him because, barring an acquisition, the Rays’ collection of catchers will topped by Luke Maile — a.214 hitter in 57 career major league games — and Curt Casali — a.195 hitter in 152 games — until Ramos is given the green light this summer.
Meanwhile, the Nationals have moved on, if awkwardly: first to Derek Norris and then, as of last week, to Wieters. Ramos — still No. 40 and The Buffalo around these parts — has, too.
“I’m happy,” he said.
More baseball:
How Ex-Nat Michael Morse revived his career at a wedding
As Nats frolic in West Palm Beach, here’s what they left in Viera
Michael A. Taylor hopes flashes of brilliance carry beyond spring
Nationals christen their new spring home with a walk-off win
Baker isn’t convinced that Turner and Eaton must bat 1-2
More Nats | MLB News | Post Sports | Post Sports on FacebookNew York City has clear guidelines regulating the minimum temperature in buildings during "heat season." View Full Caption Shutterstock
As the days grow colder, your apartment should start heating up.
New York City has clear guidelines regulating the minimum temperature in buildings during "heat season" — the period of time during which landlords must provide heat based on the temperature outside and the time of day.
As of Oct. 6, the city's Department of Housing Preservation & Development had already received 1,036 complaints for the current heat season, with the highest number of complaints coming on Oct. 1 — the first day the regulations went into effect.
Last year year the agency received 237,622 complaints, according to its website.
Here's a look at what you should know about heat in your apartment this fall and winter:
When is heat season?
Heat season runs from Oct. 1 to May 31 in New York City. Landlords must also provide hot water at a consistent temperature of at least 120 degrees Fahrenheit, 365 days a year.
How warm should it be in my apartment?
During heat season, property owners must follow rules about how warm it is in their buildings.
• Between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., if the temperature outside falls below 55 degrees, the inside temperature must be at least 68 degrees.
• Between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., if the temperature outside falls below 40 degrees, the inside temperature must be at least 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
What should I do if the heat's not on in my apartment?
Call your landlord or super to report the problem. If the heat doesn't come on, you can file a complaint with HPD by calling 311 or visiting 311ONLINE. You can also log complaints using the city's 311 mobile app.
You can also check the status of your complaint or look up open heat and hot water violations in your buildings by visiting HPD's website.
If the situation has not been remedied despite reporting it to your landlord and 311, housing court may be your next step.
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► Too Hot or Too Cold: How to Survive Winter in Your Apartment
► How To Fix Your Apartment's HeatThe chairman of the Republican Party says that Donald Trump is “pivoting” ― in other words, that he is re-inventing himself as a thoughtful, responsible political leader Americans would feel comfortable putting in the Oval Office.
It’s not clear whether such a transformation is underway ― or why, if it is, voters should give Trump another chance.
Appearing on television shows Sunday, a day before the official start of the Republican convention in Cleveland, GOP Chairman Reince Priebus vowed that Trump was changing his ways. On ABC’s “This Week,” Priebus told host George Stephanopoulos that he’d already detected a shift in the substance and tone in Trump’s rhetoric. “He knows the pivot is important,” Priebus said. “He has been better and I think he’s going to be great moving forward.” It was one of four times in the show that Priebus used the word “pivot.”
On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Priebus made the same point to host Jake Tapper and cited, as an example, Trump’s decision to modify what’s arguably been his most controversial proposal of this campaign cycle: A ban on all Muslims from entering the U.S. According to Priebus, Trump has abandoned that position and would now target only those countries with records of sponsoring or training terrorists.
“He has pivoted to this position,” Priebus said, again invoking the “p-word.” He went on to explain that Trump’s position “is not a religious test. It is a ban on immigration from countries that harbor or train terrorists ”
Is this wishful thinking? Quite possibly. At times, Trump has talked about Muslim immigration in ways that suggested he was tweaking his position. But his spokespeople have always denied that that’s the case and, as of Sunday afternoon, his campaign website still carried the original policy statement from last fall proposing an all-out ban.
donaldjtrump.com
It’s true that Trump has flashed a less bombastic, more serious persona on a few recent occasions. His initial reaction to the killings in Dallas, for example, were relatively measured. But within the last 36 hours he has given a rambling and weirdly self-centered speech to announce Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate and then, during an interview on CBS “60 Minutes,” criticized “Crooked Hillary” (Clinton) right after Pence, seated next to him, had explained why campaigns need to be less negative than they are.
In short, he’s still the same old Trump. The guy can’t seem to help himself.
Of course, pivoting isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. Trump could execute what the political pros might describe as a “half-pivot” ― showing just a little more discipline, and being just a little less nasty, while continuing to run a campaign based on personal attacks and divisive rhetoric. Trump will have an opportunity to show that ability on Thursday night, when he addresses the full Republican convention. As Priebus noted in his interviews, Ronald Reagan seemed to win over skeptical voters in 1980 with a strong convention speech (and, later, strong debate performances).
“I think Thursday night, Donald Trump on the stage delivering a great speech is going to go a long way for Donald Trump in pivoting to the general,” Priebus said.
Maybe so. But even if Trump decides to act in a way that voters would interpret as more presidential, he still has to answer for his behavior and rhetoric of the last 13 months, while he was running for president ― and for quite a few things he said and did before that.
Whatever he says or does going forward, Trump must answer for his conduct over the last 13 months.
Imagine Trump never said another derogatory thing about women. He’d still be the guy who lashed out at Fox News host Megyn Kelly by suggesting she asked tough questions because of her menstrual cycle. And he’d still be the guy who has at various points called individual women “pig,” “dog” and “fat slob.”
Imagine that Trump never uttered an unkind words about Latinos. He’d still be the guy who claimed that Mexico was sending rapists across the border, who thought he could court Hispanic voters by eating a taco salad on Cinco de Mayo and who questioned the integrity of a judge presiding over an anti-Trump lawsuit because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.
Or think about the Muslim ban, about which Trump may or may not be having some second thoughts. Whatever nuances Trump decides to introduce to the proposal, and whatever retractions he decides to issue, he would still be the guy who said he would support a registry of Muslims, who claimed to see thousands of Arab immigrants celebrating after the Sept. 11 attacks and who repeated a fable about an American general dipping bullets in pig’s blood before executing Muslim prisoners.
Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional. — Governor Mike Pence (@GovPenceIN) December 8, 2015
Trump would also be the guy who spent a year standing by the Muslim ban despite fellow Republicans’ statements saying such a proposal would be both “offensive and unconstitutional,” as Pence once put it. And Trump would still be the guy who was calling for a Muslim ban despite reports that it might be spawning hate crimes against Muslim Americans ― and despite warnings, from a bipartisan chorus of national security experts, that a ban would give ISIS and other Islamic extremists precisely the kind of Islam-versus-the-West war they desire and desperately need as a recruiting tool.
For more than a year, Trump thought this kind of rhetoric and behavior was appropriate. That ought to tell voters everything they need to know about his qualifications to be president ― no matter what they see on Thursday and through the rest of the campaign.Getty images
For an NFL draft prospect, time is of the essence.
Nobody knows this better than running back Isaiah Crowell, who saw his bright future flash before his eyes when he traded the prestige of the SEC for Alabama State following a 2012 arrest.
"I pushed myself because, knowing I was at Alabama State, I was going to have to work harder than somebody playing at Georgia or one of the big schools," Crowell said. "I wanted to be ranked as high and looked at as one of the best, even though I was at Alabama State.”
Shaving a few hundredths of a second off a 40-yard dash can vault a player up draft boards league-wide. Conversely, a lone misstep on the clock-sensitive three-cone drill or shuttle run could be the difference between being drafted and hoping for a rookie contract as a free agent. But stopwatches aren't Crowell's only concern.
On the first Saturday in March, time was again at a premium for Crowell. While he was in Atlanta to celebrate and be honored as a Black College All-American, there was still a lot of work to be done. And precious little time to do it.
“Do I have time to grab a drink real fast?” Isaiah questioned as he transitioned from an autograph session to an interview in the lobby of the Loews Hotel. After receiving the desired response, he disappeared into a corridor of the hotel, presumably into an elevator and up to his room.
A few minutes later he resurfaced, bottle of water in hand. He apologized profusely for the delay, but he was right on time.
Football Dreams
Michael Conroy/Associated Press
At the NFL Scouting Combine, Crowell met formally with the Cleveland Browns, the Oakland Raiders and the Miami Dolphins. According to Nick Birdsong of AL.com, he's also spoken with the Baltimore Ravens. While the realization of a lifelong dream might be near, the last few years have been a far cry from the fairy tale so many expected when Crowell signed with Georgia in 2011.
“Running out on that field for the first time was like a dream come true,” Isaiah said when speaking of his first game as a Georgia Bulldog, a 35-21 loss to Boise State at Atlanta’s Georgia Dome in 2011. “I couldn’t even imagine it. I’d been wanting to go to Georgia for a long time, I’d always been a Georgia fan, so it was amazing.”
Interestingly, Crowell, who was continually portrayed as self-centered during his brief career at Georgia, spoke glowingly of the team's collective effort that year before ever mentioning his own accolades:
Really a lot of people didn’t expect us to do that well just because of the season before. The coaches were telling us to ignore the noise and stick together and play football. And we lost the first two games so that didn’t help us at all. But we stuck together and went through and we had a good season. I think it was a good year overall.
As a freshman at Georgia, Crowell surpassed his own expectations. "I just wanted to play and help the team in some way," he said. He did just that and racked up 850 yards rushing and six total touchdowns in the process.
But his freshman season was defined by turmoil, at least from an outside perspective.
Crowell caught grief from fans for nursing injuries. He contends he tried to play through a number of injuries that would have left others in street clothes. “I used to come off the field for real reasons, you know. I wasn’t taking myself out. That part was frustrating,” he admitted, “because I really was hurt and was trying to play. That was frustrating more than anything.”
Further, Crowell developed a reputation as a troubled young man instigating drama within the team. In reality, his freshman year was plagued by turmoil as he dealt with the death of two loved ones, his nephew and a close friend. He was also coming to grips with becoming a father.
Crowell said these challenges weren’t lost on the Georgia coaching staff, particularly running backs coach (and his lead recruiter, per 247Sports) Bryan McClendon. “I really couldn’t focus on football. He could always see it on my face,” Isaiah said. “He’d always talk to me after the meetings and stuff and just ask, ‘What’s wrong? What’s going on?’ And we’d go talk for 30 minutes just about what was going on with me.”
For the most part, Crowell was in the moment and spoke optimistically of the future during the interview. Despite this forward-thinking nature, he remembered that short-lived thrill of a freshman season as if it was yesterday. And as he reflected on the premature conclusion to his career in Athens, he did so with clarity and brevity that seemed to be the byproduct of equal parts understanding and pain.
“It was childish,” he said of the circumstance that led to his arrest.
Neither words nor emotions were minced.
“I never thought about giving up football, though. That was always going to be there.”
Gut Check
Sharing the bad news of his June 2012 weapons arrest was difficult for Isaiah, but telling his parents and his three brothers and one sister wasn't the hard part.
“The worst part was telling my grandma, actually,” Isaiah said with a feigned laugh to hide still-present remorse. He continued:
I talk to her about everything. She’s always telling me, probably like everybody else’s grandmother, ‘Stay out of trouble. And don’t do this and don’t do that.’ And my arrest was actually at like three in the morning on her birthday. So I had to go that night to have dinner with her for her birthday and it was right after I got out of jail. She didn’t get on me too hard. She got on me, but she told me to move forward and keep pressing on to the next thing.
Crowell admitted that every NFL team he's met with asked about his arrest, but he also mentioned that none of them "dwelt on it."
Ken Herock suggested Crowell's ability to move on following the 2012 incident should prompt personnel executives to do the same.
Herock, who played professionally before becoming a personnel executive with the Oakland Raiders, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Atlanta Falcons and Green Bay Packers, is well-versed in reading players and their accompanying situations. Currently advising upward of 80 potential draftees per year on an independent basis, Herock sees no limiting factor in Crowell’s past.
You say ‘off-the field issues,’ and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Because I’m talking about a guy who was arrested two years ago for something and had all the charges dropped and expunged from his record. He has no criminal record and has not been in any trouble over the past two years. He’s had to live with that for two years but it’s behind him and he’s better for it. A lot of guys do stuff like that when they get to the NFL. He’s already learned from his mistakes.
Starting Over
Per Crowell:
Coach Richt and I talked in person right after I got out of jail. I wanted stay at Georgia and wanted him to keep me on the team initially. But he didn’t just release me. He said it was going to be a mutual decision. He felt like I needed to start somewhere new and start somewhere fresh, and he wanted me to have a better career. He really didn’t want me being a distraction because the case was still going to be pending, that was the main thing. But it was actually a mutual decision that I’d be better continuing my career elsewhere. I don’t have regrets about choosing Georgia, though. Those were some of the best days of my life.
After the separation from Georgia, Crowell was in need of a new direction. He could transfer to another FBS program and redshirt, or he could pursue immediate playing time at a lower division.
Alabama State was the first program to reach out and call. Family ties prompted Crowell to answer.
“My uncle lives there in Montgomery. He actually went to Alabama State. And my mom was very comfortable with me being there, and one of my teammates from high school went there. And it’s close to home, that’s really why I went.”
Jay Sailors/Associated Press
Although he returned to the playing field quickly, the reduced competition offered by the FCS program presented its fair share of challenges to Crowell. Keenly aware of his seemingly squandered opportunity and his finite end goal, he committed to pushing beyond what was required by the Hornets football program.
That preparation has paid dividends as he’s reintroduced himself to some of the most elite prospects in this year’s draft.
Leading up to the NFL Scouting Combine, Crowell spent his days training at EXOS outside of Pensacola, Fla., alongside former SEC stars such as Jadeveon Clowney, Jarvis Landry and Aaron Murray.
Crowell and his management team, led by Kevin Conner, identified returning to the highly competitive atmosphere as a top priority. Conner assessed the situation thusly:
Isaiah’s talent pedigree has not changed. He’s still the same guy who was a 5-star recruit and an All-American in high school. He’s the same guy who was the best freshman in the SEC in 2011. He needed to be back surrounded by that caliber of athlete and be held accountable indirectly by the competition. And it worked. We heard from his coaches and trainers that he embraced the challenges and really emerged as a leader in addition to improving during his time there.
Although the majority of the training—80 percent by Crowell’s estimate—was geared more toward testing well at the combine and pro days and less toward actual improvement as a football player, Isaiah found a level of comfort in the EXOS environment.
“When I started training it felt different because I hadn’t been around that talent in a couple years. But I felt back at home.”
Photo Courtesy of Adam Farrand of EXOS.
Does He Belong?
Crowell said that if he were running a draft war room, he’d select himself in the second round. Based on what’s been seen on and off the field, he thinks that’s where he belongs. Based on his brief experience against top SEC competition, it would be hard to argue with him.
John Amis/Associated Press
In just his second collegiate game, Crowell went against Jadeveon Clowney (also a freshman in 2011) and the South Carolina Gamecocks. Georgia lost a 45-42 nail-biter at home, but Crowell accounted for 158 yards of offense and two touchdowns on just 18 touches.
He ran the ball 16 times, and was not stopped behind the line of scrimmage once.
Following the loss, Isaiah Crowell—not Jadeveon Clowney—was SEC Freshman of the Week according to The Associated Press. The AP also tabbed Crowell with the SEC Freshman of the Year honors.
Over the course of 60 minutes in the Loews Hotel, Isaiah Crowell was multifaceted. He was contrite when speaking of the past. He was humble when speaking of the present. He was optimistic and determined when speaking of the future. He was gracious, accommodating and light-hearted throughout.
At no point did he seem anything but composed, calculated and professional, which made his second-round self-assessment all the more telling. Some of that may be the interview coaching of his agent, publicists and other consultants. But Crowell has either mastered the art of long-form monologues to an Oscar-winning degree, or he’s genuinely self-aware. This disposition makes his draft expectation all the more tangible.
“I’ve been working with athletes like Isaiah for over 30 years,” Herock said the following Monday. “I can tell right away if a guy is leading me on or just trying to say the right things. That’s not the case with Isaiah.”
As time ticks on, however, talk is cheap. The NFL draft is driven disproportionately by two factors: potential and momentum. Right now, Crowell is trying to maximize both.
Robert Brown, Crowell’s agent at Universal Sports & Entertainment, was quick to point out that his client has already caught the eye of NFL scouts with his natural ability. “We polled just about every NFL team,“ Brown said. “And unequivocally they say that Isaiah has the talent—size, speed, strength, everything—to be a starter at the NFL level. Some say he could start on day one.”
Bleacher Report Lead NFL Draft Writer Matt Miller sees the same upside:
Crowell has all the natural talent in the world. He's powerfully built with the legs needed to drive through would-be tacklers and pick up positive yardage. With his combination of size and speed, Crowell definitely fits the model of a franchise running back. In years past, he would have been a 20-carry bell-cow featured in a pro-style offense.
As for momentum, Crowell is doing all he can to create a buzz. He performed well at the NFL Scouting Combine, where he showed off a new bulked-up physique at 224 pounds, but he believes he can do better.
“I think I can run a 4.3, but I know I’ve got 4.4 speed,” Crowell offered when asked how he felt about his measurables. “I think I did good, but I could have been better,” he says of a performance in which he ran a 4.57-second (official) 40-yard dash, jumped 38 inches on the vertical and bench-pressed 23 reps of 225 pounds.
Unfortunately, rainy and cold conditions kept Crowell from improving on his 40 time the next week at his pro day in Montgomery. Crowell told BamaStateSports.com, “If it wasn’t raining I would have run it again, but with it raining I didn’t think it would help me out to run it again.”
A Better Isaiah Crowell
“Marshawn Lynch is a guy I look up to. The first person never brings him down. He runs hard and is hard to bring down, that’s why I want to be like him.”
Crowell perked up once again as the conversation transitioned back to the game he loves. But there’s a broader, metaphorical truth to the Marshawn Lynch comparison that transcends football.
Right now, Crowell is trying to prove to everyone that an early misstep away from the field won’t unravel the NFL dream he’s been weaving since childhood. Off the field—whether in interviews, meetings or in the community—Isaiah is striving to display the same fortitude Lynch shows on the field. He’s aiming to demonstrate that he can’t be taken down the first time.
His troubles, overstated as they may have been, have not hardened him but rather refined him. And family continues to serve as motivation.
“I’m a father now so everything has changed. Everything I’m doing isn’t just for me. It’s for my son now. That motivates me, because I don’t want to let him down,” Crowell expressed with a chilling degree of contentment that does not typify the average 21-year-old father in search of a way to provide for his family.
So when Isaiah proclaimed, “I’m happy with where I am. This is where I’m supposed to be,” the significance surpassed the cliche.
It’s clear that Crowell is appreciative of the opportunity. Even his weekend at the Loews Hotel honoring gridiron legends of historically black colleges, signing autographs for unknown collectors and speaking with the media was worth relishing.
“At Georgia I was kind of childish. I feel like if I’d stayed there and got to the NFL I wouldn’t be as mature as I am now. I think the arrest and everything grounded me and made me humble.”
With a pause that is far more introspective than scripted, he concluded, “Right now I have the work ethic to play at the NFL, I’m not going to let anything block my dream. I’m not the same person I used to be.”
Unless otherwise noted, all quotes obtained firsthand.MANCHESTER -- Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho has ruled Paul Pogba out of Thursday's derby with Manchester City.
Pogba was forced off in the closing stages of United's 2-0 win over Burnley on Sunday. Afterwards, Mourinho said the 24-year-old was "dead" having played 47 games so far this season, and he confirmed at his news conference on Wednesday that the midfielder will not be available to line up against City at the Etihad Stadium.
Mourinho also confirmed that Antonio Valencia is fit to return after missing the win at Turf Moor while Ander Herrera has shaken off an ankle knock and is available.
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Lineups and Stats
However, Chris Smalling and Phil Jones are still out, despite Mourinho's call for the defensive pair to step up their recovery from injury and take the burden off Eric Bailly and Daley Blind.
Smalling and Jones have both missed the last seven games with knee and toe injuries, respectively.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Marcos Rojo and Juan Mata are also unavailable and Mourinho said: "We go with what we have, we fight with what we have, I trust the boys and I go with everything we have and we go until the last second of the season. The boys are fighters and we go."
Victory for United on Thursday would lift them two points clear of City in the race for the top four, but Mourinho insists he is not concerned as to whether or not his team finish above Pep Guardiola's side this season -- only whether or not they earn a place in next season's Champions League.
He added: "It means nothing, means nothing. If you finish fifth and they are sixth, we are above them but it means nothing.
"If they finish third and we finish fourth, they are above us and it means a lot.
"This is not about Pep or City, it's about objectives, and we want to play Champions League football and we still have two doors open."
United can also secure a place in the Champions League if they win the Europa League, with a two-legged semifinal tie against Celta Vigo still to come.
Rob is ESPN FC's Manchester United correspondent. Follow him on Twitter @RobDawsonESPN.Newswise — BOSTON—( December 5, 2012) Being mildly vitamin B-12 deficient could be an indication that some older adults are at a greater risk for accelerated cognitive decline, an observational study from researchers at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (USDA HNRCA) at Tufts University suggests.
Martha Savaria Morris, Ph.D., an epidemiologist in the Nutrition Epidemiology Program at the HNRCA at Tufts University, and colleagues examined data from 549 men and women enrolled in a cohort of the Framingham Heart Study, focusing on scores on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), a short list of questions and tasks commonly used to screen for dementia. The subjects were divided into five groups, based on their vitamin B-12 blood levels.
Being in the two lowest groups was associated with significantly accelerated cognitive decline, based on an analysis of test scores from 5 MMSE tests given over a period of eight years. The average age at baseline was 75 years-old.
“Men and women in the second lowest group did not fare any better in terms of cognitive decline than those with the worst vitamin B-12 blood levels. Over time, their MMSE scores declined just as rapidly,” Morris said. “Rapid neuropsychiatric decline is a well-known consequence of severe vitamin B-12 deficiency, but our findings suggest that adverse cognitive effects of low vitamin B-12 status may affect a much larger proportion of seniors than previously thought.”
In the August 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Morris and colleagues write that MMSE scores dropped, on average, 0.24 points per year versus an average drop of 0.35 points annually in the two groups with the lowest vitamin B-12 blood levels. The authors observed an even steeper decline of about 1-point per year in some people in the two lowest groups who also exhibited high blood levels of folate or took supplements containing its synthetic form, folic acid, although their models indicate the additional cognitive decline is potentially related to other health problems in this particular study population.
The subjects in this study were mostly Caucasian women who had earned at least a high school diploma. The authors said future research might include more diverse populations and explore whether vitamin B12 status impacts particular cognitive skills, as the MMSE results provide only a general picture of decline.
“While we emphasize our study does not show causation, our associations raise the concern that some cognitive decline may be the result of inadequate vitamin B-12 in older adults, for whom maintaining normal blood levels can be a challenge,” said Paul Jacques, D.Sc., the study’s senior author and director of the Nutrition Epidemiology Program.
Animal proteins, such as lean meats, poultry and eggs, are good sources of vitamin B-12. Because older adults may have a hard time absorbing vitamin B-12 from food, the USDA’s 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that people over 50 years-old incorporate B-12 fortified foods or supplements in their diets.
Jacob Selhub, Ph.D., director of the Vitamin Metabolism Laboratory at the USDA HNRCA, co-authored the study. Selhub and Jacques are also professors at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.
This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (grant# 1 R01 NS062877-01A2) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Morris MS, Selhub J and Jacques PF. “Vitamin B-12 and Folate Status in Relation to Decline in Scores on the Mini-Mental State Examination in the Framingham Heart Study.” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. 60:1457-1464, August 2012.
The |
." Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p. 258: hereafter cited as US.
58. According to Hisamatsu. "Oriental Nothingness is not an objective world outside of me like an empty space in which there is not one single thing. Oriental Nothingness is the Nothingness-state of Myself, that is, it is no other than Myself being Nothingness," in "The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness," p. 76.
59. "Non-being and Mu: The Metaphysical Nature of Negativity in the East and the West," Religious Studies 2 (June, 1975): 187.
60. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, p. 547.
61. The Anatomy of Disillusion: Martin Heidegger's Notion of Truth (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 58.
62. Studies in Zen, p. 190.
63. "The Trans-Onto-Theo-Logical Foundations of Language in Heidegger and Taoism," Journal of Chinese Philosophy I (July, 1975): 147.
64. "Das Eigenste und das Beste der Heimat ruht darin, einzig diese Nähe zum Ursprung zu Sein, -- und nichts anderes ausserdem," Erläuterungen zu Hölderins Dichtung (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1944), p. 23; hereafter cited as HD.
65. Elisabeth Hirsch also recognizes time as a stumbling block between Heidegger and Zen, referring to it as "the great watershed that stands immovable between Heidegger and the East," in "Martin Heidegger and the East," Philosophy East and West 20 (July, 1970): 260. And according to Donald Mitchell, "there is to my knowledge no concept in the East of a continuing 'historical' revealment of Being like Heidegger's Historicity or event of Being" ("Commentary on Elisabeth Hirsch's 'Martin Heidegger and the East,'" Philosophy East and West 20 (July, 1970): 268).
66. Aristotle's contention that A can never be not-A.
67. Essays in Zen Buddhism. Second Series, p. 36.Gold and silver were falling Monday morning as disagreements between EU and Greek leaders over the terms of a second release of bailout funding threatens to delay agreements not only for a second round of bailouts, but the establishment of a permanent emergency “firewall” fund to replace the European Financial Stability Facility. Eurozone leaders continue to push for EU oversight of Greek budget decisions — a proposal Greece continues to reject.
Spot gold was nearly 0.3% lower, bid at $1,732.50 per ounce with an ask price of $1,733.50. Spot gold traded as high as $1,733.80 and as low as $1,722.70. The London afternoon reference price fix came in at $1,729, $3 per ounce higher than Friday’s reference price, according to Kitco market data.
Spot silver was showing a loss of nearly 1.2%, bid at $33.59 per ounce with an ask price of $33.69. The morning high as of time of writing was $33.73 and the low was $33.10. Monday’s reference price was set at $33.18 in the London a.m., 30 cents an ounce below Friday’s reference price.
In the U.S., the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that December personal income increased $61.3 billion (0.5%), slightly higher than consensus expectations. Disposable personal income increased $47.1 billion (0.4%) in December, in line with expectations. On the flip side of consumers’ balance sheets, personal consumption expenditures fell $2.0 billion (less than 0.1%).
Gold bullion rose to $1,728 per ounce Monday morning in London, down slightly from last Friday’s close, according to BullionVault’s London Gold Market Report. Chinese buyers were snapping up physical gold during the week-ling Lunar New Year holiday, according to a China Daily report.
“People seem crazy about gold, snatching it up more like a cheap cabbage than such a precious metal,” the paper quoted a Beijing resident.
The value of sales at two of Beijing’s top gold retailers, Caibai and Guohua, reportedly hit 600 million Yuan ($95.28 million) — a 49.7% rise on last year’s sales. The gold price in dollars meantime rose around 25% during the same period.
Turning to U.S. exchange trading, gold and silver trusts were moving lower.
The SPDR Gold Trust (NYSE:GLD) was down about 0.3%.
(NYSE:GLD) was down about 0.3%. The iShares Gold Trust (NYSE:IAU) was showing losses of around 0.35%.
(NYSE:IAU) was showing losses of around 0.35%. The iShares Silver Trust (NYSE:SLV) was moving lower, down nearly 0.8%.
Gold and silver mining ETFs were showing losses as well.
The Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (NYSE:GDX) was down around 0.9%.
(NYSE:GDX) was down around 0.9%. The Market Vectors Junior Gold Miners ETF (NYSE:GDXJ) was down some 1.3%.
(NYSE:GDXJ) was down some 1.3%. The Global X Silver Miners ETF (NYSE:SIL) was about 0.85% lower.
Gold mining shares were were heading south, with Agnico-Eagle Mines (NYSE:AEM) taking the biggest hit so far Monday morning.
Agnico-Eagle Mines was showing losses approaching 3%.
Barrick Gold (NYSE:ABX) was down nearly 0.5%.
(NYSE:ABX) was down nearly 0.5%. Eldorado Gold (NYSE:EGO) was down more than 1.5%.
(NYSE:EGO) was down more than 1.5%. Goldcorp (NYSE:GG) was down between 1.2% and 1.3%.
(NYSE:GG) was down between 1.2% and 1.3%. Kinross Gold (NYSE:KGC) was showing losses of more than 2%.
(NYSE:KGC) was showing losses of more than 2%. Newmont Mining (NYSE:NEM) was down more than 0.2%.
(NYSE:NEM) was down more than 0.2%. NovaGold Resources (AMEX:NG) was showing losses of around 1.3%.
(AMEX:NG) was showing losses of around 1.3%. Yamana Gold (NYSE:AUY) was unchanged.
Silver mining shares were broadly lower, though Hecla Mining (NYSE:HL) and Silver Standard Resources (NASDAQ:SSRI) were bucking the morning trend.
Coeur d’Alene Mines (NYSE:CDE) was moving lower, down around 0.45%.
(NYSE:CDE) was moving lower, down around 0.45%. Hecla Mining was up some 0.2%.
Pan American Silver (NASDAQ:PAAS) was moving between slight gains and losses of around 0.15%.
(NASDAQ:PAAS) was moving between slight gains and losses of around 0.15%. Silver Wheaton (NYSE:SLW) was showing losses of some 0.2%.
(NYSE:SLW) was showing losses of some 0.2%. Silver Standard Resources was moving higher, up around 1.35%.
As of this writing, Andrew Burger did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities. Adrian Ash of BullionVault contributed to this report.President Donald Trump once again blew kisses at Fox News and took a swing at CNN, tweeting Saturday that Fox was “MUCH more important in the United States than CNN,” adding “they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly.”
CNN took no time to fire back, “It’s not CNN’s job to represent the U.S to the world. That’s yours. Our job is to report the news. #FactsFirst.”
It’s not CNN’s job to represent the U.S to the world. That’s yours. Our job is to report the news. #FactsFirst???? – CNN Communications (@CNNPR) November 25, 2017
Also Read:Justice Department to Sue to Prevent AT&T-Time Warner Merger
But what the POTUS may not be aware of is that, according to Norm Eisen, the chief White House ethics lawyer under former President Barack Obama, his latest jab at CNN could be used against his Justice Department in its fight to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner.
“Dear Dodo-in-Chief: u realize that this tweet is going 2be an exhibit against u in the DOJ -TimeWarner antitrust case right? It also smacks of collusion since u did it on day when Vlad cracked down on US networks,” Eisen tweeted. “For that reason, it may open u to other civil liability.”
Dear Dodo-in-Chief: u realize that this tweet is going 2be an exhibit against u in the DOJ -TimeWarner antitrust case right? It also smacks of collusion since u did it on day when Vlad cracked down on US networks. For that reason, it may open u to other civil liability. G’night! https://t.co/acyCYYSYeK — Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) November 26, 2017
Also Read:AT&T-Time Warner Merger in Jeopardy: 5 Scenarios for What Happens Next
Bloomberg reported on Nov. 20 that the Justice Department will file a lawsuit seeking to block the $85 billion merger. The deal, announced last October, would create a media behemoth with assets including the Warner Bros. studio, CNN, HBO, the Turner networks, AT&T’s wireless business and DirecTV. The Financial Times reported earlier this month that AT&T would have to sacrifice CNN to gain antitrust approval for the deal.
Trump has repeatedly railed against CNN as “fake news” both as a presidential candidate and since taking office and opposed the AT&T/Time Warner merger at campaign rallies, while similar mergers having gained regulatory approval in recent years.
Eisen suggests that Trump’s tweet could be used to imply that the Justice Department’s lawsuit is purely his personal dislike of CNN and has nothing to do with antitrust laws. Eisen says that the POTUS’ tweet hints at “collusion” between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who out into law Saturday that foreign media outlets working in Russia must be listed as foreign agents.
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Going to the Super Bowl is every NFL fan's dream, and one lucky person made that dream a reality just from being observant.
According to Suzan Clarke from ABC News, a man named Scott Knowlton was watching an Old Spice commercial when he noticed a woman scribble a phone number for a man (866-617-4247). Noticing it didn't have a generic "555" number, he decided to call it.
When he called, Scott got the surprise of a lifetime.
The number was for an Old Spice spokesman, and he was given two free tickets to the Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium. Scott was one of just two people to call the number and win tickets.
Along with the tickets, Scott received $500 in spending money, $2,500 to offset taxes and a three-night stay at a four-star hotel in Times Square.
It's safe to say that Scott is one happy man.By Kim Tae-gyu
A U.S. state agency's recent use of both Dokdo and Takeshima as names for Korea's easternmost islets is creating a diplomatic stir here.
The United States Congressional Research Service (CRS) was found to have used both the Korean and Japanese names in various reports over the past year.
"This is very serious because an official institution of the U.S. has adopted the use of Takeshima. Japan could encourage other countries to follow suit based on the CRS case," said Park Gi-tae, the founder of the Voluntary Agency Network for Korea (VANK).
"Seoul should pull out all the stops to urge the CRS to drop the use of Takeshima. Washington is required to understand that it may be condoning the rise of imperialist Japan as the latter forcibly took over Dokdo just ahead of annexing Korea in 1910."
Park was also concerned that Japan might leverage the U.S. maps at issue to achieving its goal of taking the territorial dispute to the International Court of Justice. In the belief that Japan's claim to Dokdo has no legal standing, Korea has refused to participate in any such move.
VANK is a non-governmental organization dedicated to promoting a positive image of Korea, mainly through asking foreign Web sites or agencies to correct false data on the country.
Prof. Seo Kyung-duk at Sungshin Women's University, known as a public relations expert in promoting Korean culture, concurred.
"It simply does not make sense. I suspect that Japanese lobbies might have been at work here. We have to come up with sophisticated strategies to stop them right away," Seo said by telephone.
Located approximately 90 kilometers east of Korea's Ulleung Island and some 160 kilometers northwest of Japan's Oki Island, Dokdo is a set of volcanic outcrops, which Tokyo has been claiming as its territory.
It is now under the strict control of Seoul with maritime police officers stationed there, but Japan has refused to stop asserting sovereignty over the small islets, which are rich in fishery resources and minerals.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and top lieutenants of the ultra-nationalistic leader have repeatedly voiced ownership over Dokdo so as to make the hot-button topic one of the main bones of contention between the neighboring countries.
The CRS reports chilled the euphoria of Koreans, who had successfully persuaded many U.S. state legislatures to use both the "East Sea" and "Sea of Japan" for the body of water between Korea and Japan.
The former is the Korean name for the sea while the latter is the Japanese one.
"The controversies on the sea's name are totally different from those on Dokdo. The island is our territory and Japan tries to violate it. From the perspective of Koreans, the U.S. can be misunderstood to be overlooking or covertly helping such provocations," Park said.Keep those pesky flies from doing the backstroke in your mojito with these summery fruit themed perler bead cup covers!
This fun project was spotted on German artist Pfefferminzgruen’s Instagram. I couldn’t find a tutorial, but the photos speak for themselves. You’ll need to use a round perler bead board (available in craft stores) to build your design, and don’t forget to leave a hole in the center big enough to fit a straw.
As an added bonus to keeping bugs out, these also serve the function of a wine charm that can identify your guests’ drinks apart. In the case of an indoor party, they work great as coasters for cold drinks too.
Don’t want to show up empty handed to your next summer party? These make a terrific hostess gift, and I’m sure the recipient will be pleased as punch!As unfriendliness goes, Moscow is the top city for giving travelers the cold shoulder, according to a new survey. Atlantic City, N.J., comes in second, followed by St. Petersburg, Russia; Marseilles, France; and Los Angeles.
Yes, sunny L.A. takes fifth place with a rudeness rating higher than New York City.
Travel + Leisure readers are the ones who weighed in and put 15 U.S. cities, including the nation's capital, on the snarky sites list.
1. Moscow
T + L says: "We suspect the city’s notoriously bad traffic and general “aloofness” of the people contributed to its low ranking, as well as its culinary scene, which was also ranked dead last in this year’s poll."
2. Atlantic City, N.J.
Economically embattled Atlantic City got a punch from the travelers who commented: “It’s fun—if you like to gamble and don’t mind rude, fast-paced people.”
3. St. Petersburg, Russia
The architecture is stunning but apparently the demeanor of the city's residents is not.
4. Marseilles, France
"Unkempt and gritty" is how T+L described France's second-largest city.
5. Los Angeles
Pretty people but too pretentious is what the travel magazine's readers say. “Rude, unhelpful people trying to scam you for everything” one commenter elaborated. Ouch.
And then there's this insult to Miami, which ranked No. 12: "It’s as if someone took the worst part of Los Angeles and slathered coconut oil all over it."
The rest are: 6. New York 7. Philadelphia 8. Baltimore 9. Las Vegas 10. Cannes, France 11. Beijing 12. Miami 13. Washington 14. Frankfurt, Germany 15. Boston 16. Providence, R.I. 17. Naples, Italy 18. Cincinnati 19. Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 20. St. Louis 21. Xi’an, China 22. Nice, France 23. Marrakesh, Morocco 24. Milan, Italy 25. Buenos Aires 26. Lyon, France 27. Shanghai, China 28. Monte Carlo, Monaco 29. Newport, R.I. 30. St. Petersburg, Fla.
Read up on Travel + Leisure's World's Unfriendliest Cities.
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Best cities, best bathrooms, best islands and more on these best listsAfter an uproar from parents, Corte Madera officials are backing off permit requirements for a pedestrian safety program aimed at protecting schoolchildren.
The controversy involves the pedestrian flag system, which parents with Corte Madera’s Safe Routes to Schools program introduced at six intersections along Tamalpais Drive earlier this month.
The program is intended to improve the safety of pedestrians by giving them a flag to carry as they cross the street, making them more visible to drivers.
“These intersections are used by so many kids going to school at Neil Cummins,” said David Macpherson, a Safe Routes volunteer who is also on the town’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. “After a few near-misses, we had to do something.”
But the bright orange flags, purchased and donated by program volunteers, raised concerns about liability.
“There is always a worry of legal implications,” Town Manager David Bracken said. “There are encroachment permit issues, there are traffic concerns about the flags not being a standard traffic control device.”
A traffic control device is a sign or signal used to regulate or direct traffic, much like those used by crossing guards. However, the Safe Routes volunteers argue that using the flag system is akin to wearing a reflective vest.
“It’s just to increase visibility,” Macpherson said.
Last fall, parent volunteers had asked the town’s permission to start the program. Bracken gave preliminary consent.
But after the system was installed, Bracken sent the Safe Routes parents an email requesting that they pay a $250 encroachment permit fee and provide a certificate of insurance. After no response, Bracken explained that the flags would have to come down without the permit.
Strong reaction
The note prompted volunteers to remove the flags — a move that upset residents who had thought the flags were a good idea.
“The public erupted,” Mayor Sloan Bailey said of emails and posts on the social media site Nextdoor.
Since then, the flags have been reinstalled and will likely remain in place, said Bailey, who said that he will ask town officials to waive the permit fees, and place a discussion of the topic on an upcoming agenda.
“Everyone is coming at this with a good heart,” Bailey said, explaining that the goal is “to protect our children.”
Bailey said town officials are aware of the safety issues on Tamalpais Drive. The town has budgeted about $500,000 to construct lighted crosswalks and bulb-outs and make accessibility improvements to sidewalks and curb ramps.
Some key crossings include Chapman Drive, Sausalito Street and Lakeside Drive, where some of the flags are stationed now. The improvement projects are slated to kick off late this summer.
‘A nail-biter’
Safe Routes volunteer Mike Koeppel, who has two children, one at Neil Cummins, said they are grateful that the town has begun to study the improvement projects but crossing Tamalpais Drive “can be a nail-biter.”
“When you hear so many stories, you feel compelled to do something,” he said. “We really needed something now.”
Crossing guards are stationed at Madera Boulevard and Eastman Avenue, two key intersections, said Councilwoman Diane Furst.
“Eastman is really the main route,” she said. “It heads to Neil Cummins and leads to the bike path to the high school and middle school.”
Police response
Furst also asked Central Marin police give the area some extra attention.
“We’ve had a number of issues of people speeding and being on their cellphones,” Chief Todd Cusimano said. He said police have increased patrols daily during peak commute times.
The flags “are another tool in the tool box,” and overall “it’s about educating ourselves,” Cusimano said. “There is a problem here. Let’s slow down and be aware.”
Valerie Pitts, superintendent of the Larkspur-Corte Madera School District, said school officials try to encourage parents to walk their children to the intersection with the crossing guards, but the pedestrian flag system is also worth a try.
“I’ve been out there in the morning with my bright vest on, and it’s great to see the community working together on this,” she said.
Macpherson, who first pitched the flag program to the bicycle and pedestrian committee about three years ago, said he was inspired by his 10-year-old daughter Lucy. While they were on a trip last summer in Ketchum, Idaho, they saw “it had become a part of the fabric of the community, and it inspired us to bring it to the town,” he said.
Lucy, a fourth-grader at the Cove School, said, “I really like them because I know the cars will see an orange flag crossing the street.”
She uses the flags going home after getting off the bus, or when she goes to visit friends, she said.
“I’ve heard a lot of people saying, ‘Make sure they stay up,’” she said. “It just makes me happy.”Chicago — Teenagers who are obese may be doing irreparable damage to their bones, according to a new study being presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
Obesity in childhood and adolescence is associated with a number of health risks, including cardiovascular disease and diabetes. For the new study, researchers are looking at how excess weight may affect bone structure.
"While obesity was previously believed to be protective of bone health, recent studies have shown a higher incidence of forearm fractures in obese youths," said the study's lead author, Miriam A. Bredella, M.D., radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
Dr. Bredella and colleagues set out to determine the relationship between adolescent obesity and bone structure. The researchers have recruited 23 obese adolescents with a mean age of 17 years and a mean body mass index (BMI) of 44 kg/m2 for the ongoing study.
"Adolescence is the time where we accrue our peak bone mass, so bone loss during this time is a serious problem," Dr. Bredella said. "We know from other chronic states that lead to bone loss in adolescence, such as anorexia nervosa, that increased fracture risk persists in adulthood, even after normalization of body weight. Therefore, it is important to address this problem early on."
The researchers performed 3D HR-pQCT—a type of computed tomography exam designed specifically for measuring bone mineral density and bone microarchitecture in the arms and legs—to determine the bone structure of the distal radius, an area of the forearm near the wrist. They also performed dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) exams to determine body composition, including lean mass and visceral fat mass. Visceral fat is the deep fat in the abdomen that surrounds the internal organs.
"There are several mechanisms by which visceral fat exerts negative effects on bone," Dr. Bredella said. "Visceral fat secretes substances that promote chronic inflammation, and chronic inflammation stimulates formation of osteoclasts, which are the cells that resorb or break-down bone. In addition, vitamin D, which is important for bone health, is soluble in adipose tissue and gets trapped within fat cells."
She noted that growth hormone, which is important for bone health, is also lower in adolescents with visceral obesity.
The study results showed that BMI was positively associated with cortical thickness and area. Cortical bone is dense and compact and forms the outer shell of most bones. Visceral fat mass was positively associated with cortical porosity.
Lean mass was positively associated with trabecular density, volume and integrity. Trabecular bone is a spongy inner layer of bone that provides support and flexibility.
The findings suggest that having a high amount of visceral fat coupled with a low amount of muscle mass puts adolescents at risk for weakened bone structure.
"The best way to prevent bone loss is a healthy diet that contains adequate amounts of calcium and vitamin D, along with sufficient exercise, as we have shown in our study that muscle mass is good for bone health," Dr. Bredella said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), obesity has more than quadrupled in adolescents over the past 30 years. It is estimated that more than one-third of children and adolescents in the U.S. are overweight or obese.
Co-authors on the study are Fatima C. Stanford, M.D., M.P.H., M.P.A., Vibha Singhal, M.D., M.B.B.S., Stijn A. Bos, B.S., Ryan Woolley, B.S., Alexander Toth, B.S., and Madhusmita Misra, M.D., M.P.H.Allowing fallen leaves to remain on the ground can be beneficial for local wildlife and the environment as a whole. Colorful Leaves by MelisaTG via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
The auburn hues of fall may make for one of the most spectacular natural events of the year in certain parts, although they also mark a seasonal increase in yard work for lawn enthusiasts the world over. However, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) has now come up with the perfect reason not to bother raking any leaves this year, suggesting that foregoing the battle against decomposing foliage could benefit the environment, local wildlife, and even the state of your lawn.
According to a NWF blog post, autumn leaves create a mini ecosystem that provides a home for a whole host of cute critters, including box turtles and chipmunks. At the same time, layers of decomposing leaves tend to harbor large quantities of butterfly pupae. By getting rid of these, you risk depriving birds of a vital food source in the form of caterpillars in the spring, while also denying yourself the company of the butterflies themselves later in the year.
Those who wish to look at the situation from a more selfish perspective will also find reason to put the rake away, as the NWF insists that allowing the decomposing matter to remain on the ground creates a natural mulch that fertilizes the soil and improves its overall health.
By giving the gardening a miss, you could also be doing the whole world a solid, as yard debris is responsible for 13 percent of all solid waste in the U.S. When this organic matter decomposes in landfill sites, the lack of oxygen causes anaerobic microbes to thrive, breaking down the leaves and releasing greenhouse gases like methane, all of which has a negative impact on the atmosphere. In contrast, when left on the ground, autumn leaves turn to compost via aerobic decomposition, which produces much friendlier by-products like water and carbon dioxide.
This advice from the NWF will no doubt be welcomed by everyone who loathes clearing their yard during fall, and there’s even more good news on that front from the RSPCA, which advises against tidying garden borders and shrubs, as these provide vital refuge for a range of insects.
Main image credit: Colorful Leaves by MelisaTG via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)Rhubarb, I can’t think of anything that brings me back to my childhood more. It may sound a little strange, but I have extremely fond memories of our cabin in the Adirondacks and my Great Aunt Joe whenever I eat it. It always seemed that when we visited my Aunt Joe, she had a fresh, homemade rhubarb pie ready for us, and I loved it. This Sour Cream Rhubarb Dessert is an awesome way to use, eat, and enjoy this unique vegetable.
Rhubarb is a vegetable with a unique taste that makes it a favorite in many pies and desserts. It originated in Asia over 2,000 years ago. It was initially cultivated for its medicinal qualities, it was not until the 18th century that rhubarb was grown for culinary purposes in Britain and America. It is often commonly mistaken to be a fruit but is actually a close relative of garden sorrel, and is therefore a member of the vegetable family. Rhubarb is also rich in vitamin C and dietary fiber. It is a cool season, perennial plant that is very winter hardy and resistant to drought.
Be sure to serve Sour Cream Rhubarb Dessert warm and topped with whipped cream.
PrintThe Freedom From Religion Foundation today sent a letter to the Blount County Commission in Maryville, Tenn., which is poised to consider a resolution tonight "condemning judicial tyranny and petitioning God's mercy."
Resolution 15-10-006 declares that "federal judges have once again usurped powers not delegated to them, and have violated Reason, the Rule of Law and Natural Law by purporting to strike down State laws and acts of the People recognizing and protecting Natural Marriage." The resolution is adopted "before God that He pass us by in His Coming Wrath and not destroy our County as He did Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighboring cities."
"If passed, this resolution would be a slap in the face to Blount County's many gay citizens, as well as to all citizens who recognize the federal and Tennessee constitutions as the supreme law of the land," wrote FFRF Staff Attorney Sam Grover in FFRF's letter.
"As legislators, your principal duty is to represent all citizens of Blount County, regardless of their sexual orientation or their religious or nonreligious beliefs," Grover reminded Chairman Jerome Moon and the rest of the commission. "Your oath of office is to the federal and Tennessee constitutions, not... to 'the moral Law of God.' "
In addition, Grover pointed out that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah "is just that, a story," and charges that Commissioner Karen Miller may as well have authored a resolution "calling for witches to stop luring children to gingerbread houses or asking the Big Bad Wolf to spare Blount County's wooden homes from his gale-force breath."
Grover called for Commissioner Miller to resign if she cannot uphold the law. "Miller may be correct that her personal religion is at odds with the Supreme Court's ruling on same sex marriage, but that does not give her or the Commission a free license to usurp the law."
"We urge the Commission to reject Miller's resolution and respect the right of all Blount County citizens to marry the partner they love, regardless of Gender," FFRF's letter concludes. "All government representatives are free to beg favor from the gods of their choice in their private time. While acting as commissioners, however, we invite you to respect the law, practice empathy and compassion for LGBTQ citizens, and concentrate on secular matters."
FFRF is a national nonprofit state/church watchdog with more than 23,000 members across the country, including nearly 300 in Tennessee.As an art and design director for glossy titles like Complex and Wired, Tim Leong had to craft magazine covers that caught people's eye while simultaneously conveying a wealth of information. For inspiration, he often drew on comic books, whose bold colors and story panels had captivated him since childhood. In 2005 he started the website Comic Foundry as a resource for comic-industry lovers, eventually spinning it up into its own quarterly magazine. For his first book, Super Graphic, due out this August from Chronicle Books, Leong has combined the two forms again, crafting a joyous smorgasbord of comic book data that mashes up super hero stats with graphic design chic. The Verge chatted with Leong about his favorite titles and where he found all the granular details on Marvel's finest.
When did you get interested in comic books?
I’ve been a comic fan since I was a kid. It started with Superman and evolved over time. They have always been a big part of my life. I was a big X-Men guy. I was really sucked into the Jim Lee re-launch of the X-Men in the '90s, that was my jam.
Where did you get the crazy information in this book? I had now idea, for example, that Kingpin weighed 450 pounds. Or like, how did you find out Dr. Octopus is the villain with the worst win / loss record?
I collected the Marvel Universe cards like a fiend. I have the complete set of all the first four series. They were amazing because they provided all this raw data you couldn’t find in the books. Doctor Strange is 6 foot 2, who knew! The hard part about this whole book was that comic books have been around forever, but records are poorly kept. So I definitely remembered the cards when it came to gathering a good data set. The statistical win–loss percentage, that came from the cards.
The hard thing about comic books, when it comes to presenting accurate data, is that there are alternate universes. How did you approach that problem?
This project is hopefully for people that are hardcore comic book aficionados and people who have never read one before. I didn’t want to get too deep into alternate universes. I wanted to generalize it. My thought process was that if it happened, it happened. With comic fans, and I count myself as one of them, we are quite an obsessive bunch. Not everyone is going to be happy with the editorial decisions here. No matter what I chose to include or leave out, someone would have been upset.
I’m trying to present the information so it makes sense to anyone who picks this up. My fiancee is not a comic book reader, and so she was a good litmus test. If I try and explain the multiverse, and it makes sense to her, then I’m getting somewhere.
Do you consider yourself a collector?
I wouldn’t say I’m a collector. I would save up my allowance and my dad would take me to the store. I still have them all in an attic at my parents' house. I certainly have some that are still pristine in bags and boards, but now it’s actually just about the content.
Was there anything you took from comic books that informed your work as a graphic designer?
Yeah, especially when working on magazine covers. I would go back and look at my favorite comic books, the ones that were iconic to me. The hard thing with magazines is you have to actually make it happen: you need a person, and the right lighting, and the right makeup. With a comic you are creating everything yourself, and so it’s easier to create these kind of lasting, iconic images, and I would look to them for inspiration on composition and color.
Is there a particular cover that inspired you?
The one that always jumps out at me is Spider Man: Kraven’s Last Hunt — Spider Man is coming out of the grave and it’s raining and muddy, it’s such a visceral image. That is always one that popped into my mind.
What was a really strange statistic you came across?
One thing I learned that I thought was interesting is that we think of Stan Lee as this genius writer that co-created so many of today’s legendary characters. I knew that before his superheroes really took off he was writing romance and western comics, but I had no idea to what extent. Stan Lee wrote more than four times as many issues of Millie the Model than he did X-Men. And six times as many issues of The Rawhide Kid than he did The Hulk. Which takes nothing away from the books he co-created, but helps put his pre-superhero career into perspective.
What do you make of the way comic books have crossed over into the mainstream over the last couple years?
I think three of the top five grossing films of all time are now comic book films. And they all came out in the last five or six years. The fact that people in the mainstream know who Green Lantern and Iron Man are, that was inconceivable 10 years ago. That is just amazing. So I think that it’s great that people are being exposed to these characters.
Are you a fan of the digital adaptations of comic books?
I like that people are thinking about the digital medium. When they first started doing it, they were taking a print comic and making it move, kind of as an afterthought. Now I think with Marvel Infinite comics they pre-plan, get extra art, and work towards this more animated style. A comic book is a piece of paper with a bunch of panels. The overall shape is vertical. On a tablet device it can be vertical or horizontal. Does it make sense to have a page of panels? Or is it better to have one panel at a time that you can swipe through? I’m glad they are exploring this, pushing things in terms of storytelling.WASHINGTON – The U.S. House of Representatives approved a package of tax cuts affecting businesses, individuals and families on Thursday, moving Republicans and President Donald Trump an important step closer to the biggest tax code overhaul in a generation.
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, was the local doctor who got hooked on pain pills and, in 2010, went to prison for prescribing too many opioids. His case led to others, including the federal investigation of the Petersburg, W.Va., pharmacy that filled his many prescriptions—and ultimately of the distributor that supplied the pharmacy: McKesson.
Graphics show death rate from opioid overdoses in the U.S. and number of narcotic painkiller prescriptions. Nicolas Rapp
Today’s subject is naloxone. Also known by the brand name Narcan, it is a medication used as an antidote for opioid overdoses. An analysis in February by the West Virginia Health Statistics Center found that at least 818 people had died of drug overdoses in 2016 in the state. That was 13% more than in 2015, when West Virginia’s overdose death rate led the nation, with 41.5 cases per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (The next highest rate was in New Hampshire, with 34.3, followed by Kentucky with 29.3.) In response to the crisis, last year the West Virginia legislature mandated that all pharmacies in the state carry naloxone and dispense it to certified users, but many pharmacies were refusing to do so.
The host of the show, Steve Davis, wonders aloud whether naloxone enabled addicts, by reducing the threat of fatally overdosing, and he concedes that he’s sympathetic to pharmacists who don’t want to carry it for fear of being blamed later.
Masih, who’s wearing jeans and a white button-down, counters that the resistance by pharmacists is another example of stigmatizing addicts. “Some have an attitude, ‘These people did this to themselves. Just let them die. Why do we want to bring them back from an overdose?’ ” he says. The same pharmacies, he points out, have no qualms about carrying highly addictive painkillers such as oxycodone. Says Masih, “We need a change of community mindset.”
Masih in his office at the Russ Hedrick Substance Abuse Resource Center in Petersburg W. Va. Photograph by Matt Eich for Fortune
Masih didn’t know what to expect when he moved his family from Texas to this corner of West Virginia in 2000. He relocated there to run the emergency room in a local hospital, a small brick building that shares a hill with a Civil War memorial site. The son of an Indian surgeon and a British homemaker, Masih stuck out in Petersburg, a town of 2,500. He had a taste for flashy cars—his fleet included a Porsche, a Hummer, and a Mustang convertible—and thrill-seeking hobbies like IndyCar racing and hunting with an AK-47.
But even if he was something apart, Petersburg suited Masih. He convinced his brother Ravi to move there as well. He coached youth soccer. He earned a reputation as a good and caring doctor.
In 2007, the Masih brothers opened an urgent care clinic atop a tanning salon in neighboring Moorefield. It was strategically close to the area’s major employers—a Pilgrim’s Pride turkey plant, an American Woodmark factory—and it was outfitted with all the trappings of an ER, from surgical suction pumps to a trauma bay. There was even a helipad out back.
There was just one problem with this American dream. Masih was addicted to hydrocodone, the powerful opioid in pain medicines like Vicodin and Lortab. His addiction began in 2004, when he hurt his back in an IndyCar wreck. When he couldn’t find someone to cover his ER shift the next day, he turned to the hospital’s supply room and took a sample of the drug. He felt amazing on it—not only unburdened of his physical pain, but also of the fatigue and burnout he typically felt on the job. “Everything evaporated,” he says.
He kept taking the samples, only in higher doses and more frequently, and while he knew he was on a slippery slope, he told himself he was in control. He vowed each day that he’d quit the next. But then, inevitably, he found a reason to take the drugs again. When he did manage to “quit,” he experienced the horrible and debilitating sensations of withdrawal within a few hours. He quickly ran through the hospital’s samples and began writing prescriptions for his friends and family members—all of which he’d get filled himself at the area’s various pharmacies.
Raj Masih (in white shirt, facing the camera), a recovering opioid addict, takes part in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting at the clinic he runs in Petersburg, W.Va. Photograph by Matt Eich for Fortune
His secret and the shame of it exhausted him. “I’d be driving and thinking, ‘Where am I going to get my next script from?’ I so badly wanted to be out of it.”
Even while trapped in this cycle of addiction, Masih continued to practice medicine. Indeed, on hydrocodone, he felt at the top of his medical game, energized and hypercompetent. He also became very lax in doling out powerful narcotics like the painkillers that had him so hooked. He’d send patients away with a prescription rubber-stamped with the words FILL AT JUDY’S. “My threshold for prescribing was very low,” he tells me. “I prescribed recklessly. I did.”
It all caught up with him in August 2009, when a SWAT team burst into Masih Medical and handcuffed him to a chair while they searched his files. He was hauled to jail where in a few days’ time he says he contemplated suicide, found God, and resolved to get clean. By the time he pleaded guilty to one count of misprescribing a controlled substance, he felt free. He was sentenced to 48 months in prison.
Masih might have been ready to start over, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of West Virginia hadn’t quite let go of his case. They thought it might lead to something bigger.
The office, which is based in Wheeling, a sleepy and picturesque town just south of the Ohio border, had for years been aggressive in going after the bad actors involved in the region’s opioid crisis. But it seemed to make little difference. The epidemic raged on.
Former coal mine near Beckley W. Va. Photograph by Matt Eich for Fortune
To Alan McGonigal, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the district’s civil division, the rampant abuse of prescription drugs required a more holistic strategy, one that he had often used in prosecuting health care fraud: Find the gatekeepers. Someone had been filling Masih’s many illegitimate scripts, and some company had been sending more and more drugs to rural West Virginia. “We had to stop the flow,” he says.
That strategy wasn’t unique to Wheeling. The DEA had begun contemplating how it regulated the broader pharmaceutical supply chain back in the mid-2000s as the online pharmacies flourished and the opioid epidemic took root. The DEA viewed distributors—the nation’s pharmaceutical fire hose—as key to its efforts to stop criminal misuse of pain pills. By law, in fact, it’s something distributors are required to help prevent.
That law is the decades-old Controlled Substances Act, which requires wholesalers like McKesson to maintain a system to detect and prevent “diversion,” or the nonsanctioned use of prescription drugs. Distributors are required to report any “suspicious orders”—those of unusual size, frequency, or deviating from normal patterns—to the DEA.
McKesson supplied pharmaceuticals to Larry’s Drive-In Pharmacy in Madison, W.Va., which was one of the state’s largest sellers of opioids between 2007 and 2012, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Photograph by Matt Eich for Fortune
But until 2005, these rules had never really been enforced. Distributors generally didn’t identify suspicious orders and the DEA didn’t investigate them, says Larry Cote, a former lawyer for the agency who now represents the industry at the firm Brady & Quarles. Instead, wholesalers were in the habit of submitting monthly “Excessive Purchase Reports”—thick files that sometimes included every order a wholesaler had processed during the period.
With prescription drug abuse spreading, the agency attempted a reset. In the fall of 2005, the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control launched its “Distributor Initiative,” an effort to engage with wholesalers over their legal responsibilities and the severity of the country’s diversion problem. Then, in 2006 and 2007, the DEA sent three separate letters reminding distributors of their obligations. Noting that the country faced epidemic levels of prescription drug abuse, the letters also contained more explicit expectations that registrants “know their customers”—i.e., engage in due diligence to ensure pharmacies and dispensers were aboveboard—and that they report and refrain from shipping suspicious orders.
This new guidance was not well received by the distributors. As the industry saw it, this sort of investigative work fell beyond their purview: They were in the business of moving FDA-approved drugs that had been prescribed by licensed physicians to DEA-registered pharmacies. Tasking them with determining whether or not a particular customer or order was legitimate was, in their view, asking them to meddle in medical decision-making. Plus, distributors don’t have full visibility of a pharmacy’s orders of controlled substances; they only know what they deliver.
There were plenty of other complaints that the DEA’s guidance was unclear or too vague—claims that proved to have some merit. In 2016, DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg conceded the agency had been “opaque” in dealing with the wholesalers.
By the time Masih was in prison, the DEA had begun aggressively ramping up enforcement. And by the agency’s book, Masih’s criminal overprescribing hadn’t happened in a vacuum. He’d been aided and abetted, as they saw it, by the pharmaceutical supply chain. More specifically, his accomplices had been a third-generation mom-and-pop outlet on Main Street in Petersburg called Judy’s Drug Store—as well as the pharmacy’s primary supplier, McKesson.
That was the argument that criminal prosecutors and DEA agents made to McGonigal in May 2012. McGonigal agreed to look into it.
The Petersburg area has a few pharmacies to choose from. But most of Masih’s pain patients went to Judy’s, where he also stopped some mornings to pick up medical supplies. The relationship seemed suspicious to McGonigal (as did the fact that Judy’s had recently opened a second outlet in Moorefield close to Masih’s clinic). The prosecutor was convinced that something wasn’t right about the small-town pharmacy.
“There is nothing you don’t know about what is going on in these counties if you live there,” says McGonigal, who’s trim, mild-mannered, and occasionally reveals a dry wit. “The idea that this pharmacy didn’t know what Dr. Masih was about held no water with me.”
Judy’s Drug Store in Petersburg, W.Va., where many of Masih's prescriptions were filled. In 2014, Judy’s paid $2 million to settle federal claims of improper dispensing. Photograph by Matt Eich for Fortune
In December 2014, Judy’s reached a $2 million civil settlement with the Justice Department for claims of improper dispensing. The pharmacy, which did not admit to any wrongdoing, also agreed to a stricter reporting arrangement, under which it still operates. A lawyer for Judy’s says the store’s pharmacists believed they were filling legitimate prescriptions, and points out that no DEA enforcement action was ever taken against the pharmacists.
The original Judy’s remains in business today, operating as it has since 1965, out of a brick building in the heart of Petersburg. (Its Moorefield location has closed.) On a recent Friday afternoon when I stopped in, an elderly woman stood ready at the cash register in front of a row of neatly hung plastic bags, all filled with prescription medications ready for pickup.
Having dealt with Judy’s, the next target for McGonigal and his team was the McKesson distribution center, three hours away in Landover, Md., which delivered the bulk of the pharmacy’s drugs.
The Landover facility had separately landed on the radar of a DEA investigator named Lindsey Malocu. Malocu, who worked out of the agency’s Washington Field Office, had noticed something strange about McKesson’s suspicious-order reporting in her district—there hadn’t been any. Nothing about Judy’s or any of the other hundreds of pharmacies it serviced, even as the amount of prescription opioids the company delivered to the region climbed. Zero suspicious orders would be unusual for any wholesaler. But it was especially true for McKesson, the country’s biggest drug distributor. (Upon a more careful check of its records, the DEA later found a handful of reports it had missed.)
The conspicuous absence of suspicious-order reports harked back to an earlier investigation of McKesson. That incident had involved six districts where McKesson had allegedly shipped excessive volumes of hydrocodone and other controlled substances to tiny mom-and-pop customers that filled orders for online pharmacies. Those suspicious orders had gone unreported by McKesson. The company settled those claims with the DOJ for $13.25 million in 2008 without admitting wrongdoing. But the DEA’s acting administrator at the time, Michele Leonhart, had offered a brutal condemnation of the company’s conduct: “McKesson Corporation fueled the explosive prescription drug abuse problem we have in this country.”
The 2008 settlement agreement also dictated that McKesson develop an effective system to ensure it didn’t do so in the future. So that year the company launched its Controlled Substance Monitoring Program (CSMP). Under this three-tier system, each of McKesson’s pharmacy customers were assigned monthly threshold levels for their controlled substance orders. Orders at the threshold would block the order and trigger a review process. If the reason for reaching the threshold level was compelling, McKesson would supply the drugs and in some cases raise the threshold; if not, the matter would be passed to a regional compliance officer. If that officer deemed it suspicious, the order would be kicked up to McKesson’s corporate compliance team. If they also judged it suspicious, the company would then report the order to the DEA.
When Malocu examined the DEA’s records for the Landover DC, however, it was clear to her that McKesson’s compliance system had fallen down on the job. In July 2011, she requested customer files for 20 or so suspect pharmacies that had landed on her radar. That winter, McKesson apparently realized there was a problem; in a short period of time, the Landover distribution center filed 318 suspicious orders with the DEA that covered the previous months and weeks. The government considered that number to be relatively few for a distribution center of that size and the untimely filing to be something like an admission of guilt.
McGonigal and Malocu didn’t know it at the time, but across the country, there was a similar investigation taking shape. This one involved McKesson’s Aurora, Colo., distribution center, one of the facilities that had also been at the center of the company’s 2008 settlement. The Colorado facility had drawn the attention of prosecutors again in March 2012, when it alerted the DEA to a handful of suspicious orders related to one pharmacy—the only suspicious orders the facility had reported since 2009. (For more on the Colorado investigation, read Fortune’s story here.)
Both the Landover and Aurora facilities had shipped lots of controlled substances. Neither had done much to determine whether the orders were “suspicious,” according to the government, or to call the DEA’s attention to them when they were.
The compliance files were especially revealing. They showed the company’s casual approach to administering its compliance program. When pharmacies hit thresholds, they typically breezed through the review process. Customers offered vague, flimsy reasons for needing more oxycodone supply—“increase in foot traffic”; “more business”—and they’d get it.
Photo: Matt Eich for Fortune
For McGonigal, the matter was simple. “They didn’t care enough about the issue,” he says. “I’m sure there was no malevolent desire to flood the street with narcotics. There was just too much emphasis on sales numbers and not enough with keeping an eye on suspicious ordering.”
McKesson calls those unfounded allegations and says the company complies with laws and regulations. Furthermore, a spokesman says that “at no point has there ever been a direct correlation between the sale of controlled substances and incentive compensation for McKesson sales personnel.”
The investigations of McKesson were multiplying. By the summer of 2014, prosecutors in 12 districts around the country were looking into possible violations of the Controlled Substances Act at McKesson distribution centers.
According to McGonigal, the government’s conservative estimate is that over a roughly four-year period McKesson had failed to report tens of thousands of suspicious orders in those districts. The question was how big the penalty should be. Prosecutors thought a large penalty was needed to send a message, and the $150 million figure accomplished that. “Recidivism was a real problem,” says McGonigal. “Not only with them but with others. If they’re not going to learn from a $13 million settlement, they have to learn from something, right? Dollars and suspensions and heightened compliance arrangements are the only way it’s going to get done.”
In the aftermath, McKesson has once again overhauled its monitoring programs. And by all accounts the company is redoubling its efforts on compliance.
Leading the effort has been Gary Boggs, who spent four decades as a DEA agent before joining McKesson in 2013 as the senior director of regulatory affairs, in the midst of the government’s investigations into McKesson. There are now some 40 individuals dedicated to McKesson’s controlled substance monitoring program, and many of them, like Boggs, came from an enforcement background.
The company has made significant investments in technology, such as more sophisticated analytics systems to identify suspicious orders. Under Boggs’ leadership, it has started doing deeper, more rigorous due diligence—a change that can be traced through a trail of lawsuits involving McKesson customers who suddenly had their controlled substances cut off in 2013 and 2014.
The settlement process has had a way of bringing McKesson and the DEA together. Both sides say they’re working together productively now. (DEA Diversion Control has also made a concerted effort to engage far more with the industry in the past few years.)
In 2015, Hammergren decided that it was time for McKesson to wade into broader policy conversations about the opioid epidemic. While some may see McKesson as part of the problem, Hammergren believes that his company, given its position in the health care system, might have insights to help with the solution. So last year he formed a task force of several dozen employees, and developed a white paper that McKesson is now circulating in Washington. The document offers six recommendations. Among them: the development of a National Patient Safety System, a data-driven, real-time tool to help pharmacists and physicians to identify patients most at risk of misusing medications.
Odd as it may seem, Masih thrived in prison. At the medium-high security facility in Glenville, W.Va., he quickly became known as “Doc,” and his fellow inmates regaled him with stories of how they’d once scammed physicians into prescribing them oxycodone and other narcotics. Masih was blown away by the variety and ingenuity of their methods, and he obtained permission from the Federal Bureau of Prisons to write a textbook on how drug diversion happens. (His son, who sent him research, and his cell mate, a onetime heroin dealer, both earned author credits.) By the time Masih was released in 2014—early, for good behavior—the team had written a second manual on how prisoners abuse drugs in prison.
When he’s not doing his addiction work, Masih devotes time to a company he started with his friend Wade Rohrbaugh to develop a product he calls “Raptor.” The system, which involves biometrics, electronic health records, and video-recording eyeglasses, is designed to help physicians prevent prescription drug diversion. Right now he’s shopping Raptor to medical boards.
Masih thanks his brush with the law for saving his life—in more ways than one. Not only did he kick opioids, but he was also able to manage a personal health crisis that might have killed him if he’d been using. Last year, Masih learned he had a life-threatening aneurysm. (His father had suffered a ruptured aneurysm and was disabled for the rest of his life.) Masih’s primary symptom was terrible headaches, which he says he never felt when he was on pain meds. In July 2015, he was one of the first patients to undergo a radical, not-yet-FDA-approved, minimally invasive surgical procedure at the West Virginia University hospital with a device called a WEB Aneurysm Embolization System.
Healthy and sober, Masih says he’s “thrilled and grateful to be given a second chance to work in this field helping many people suffering from the disease of addiction.”
Back in McDowell County, Sheriff West is waiting for some good news. Since the county filed suit against the distributors, a number of counties and towns in West Virginia—and a few entities beyond, such as the Cherokee Nation, in Oklahoma—have followed with their own lawsuits. The big three are fighting those, too, and dispute the merits of the claims.
Questions are also being asked about the practices of McKesson and its peers by Congress, where the dire public health crisis is increasingly top of mind. In May, the House Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation into the wholesaler industry’s “pill dumping” practices in West Virginia. The big three each received letters of inquiry, which they were required to answer by June 8.
West isn’t sure the lawsuits will accomplish much, but at least he tried something to counter the opioid scourge. “I’m hoping and praying we can alleviate some of the suffering, not only in West Virginia, but everywhere across the nation just about now,” he says. “It’s a major epidemic, and it’s got to be treated that way.”
A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2017 issue of Fortune.A Reno County, Kansas sheriff’s deputy’s 3-year-old son shot and killed himself on Friday morning with a gun belonging to a friend of the officer’s, the Wichita Eagle reported.
Officials said the child, Kaden Nagel, found the.40-caliber Glock handgun inside the deputy’s Hutchinson apartment at 8:15 a.m. His father, Deputy Andrew Nagel, was asleep at the time before being woken up by a gunshot.
Nagel administered first aid to his son upon hearing the shot, but the boy was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to the Hutchinson News, the gun did not belong to the deputy, but rather to a friend who did not know it was in the apartment. It is unclear whether the friend is Andrew Nagel’s roommate.
Watch a report on the child’s death, as aired on KAKE-TV, below.In May, Alysa Ivy, a 21-year-old Hudson, Wis., woman, died in a hotel room from a heroin overdose. Three months later, Alexandra Stellhorn, a 21-year-old Waukesha, Wis., honor student, died of similar causes.
Wisconsin state legislator Rep. John Nygren almost lost his daughter to an overdose four years ago. Had it not been for the girl’s mother returning home to close the windows before an oncoming storm, she most likely would have died, despite the fact that she was using with friends.
“When I got there, the friends had all left and she was alone. Addicts tend to be selfish. It’s all about them,” Nygren said. “It’s all about their next high. If someone overdoses, they don’t stick around to help them.”
Nygren is trying to bring 911 Good Samaritan Laws to Wisconsin to help curb an increasing surge of opioid overdoses, whether from heroin or prescription drugs. The legislation is made up of four bills he calls the HOPE Agenda, or Heroin Opiate Prevention and Education.
“We in no way think this is a silver bullet to fix the problem, but it’s a step,” Nygren said. “Wisconsin is not alone in this problem.”
Learn About the Biggest Drug Threats Facing the United States »
An ‘Epidemic’ of Overdoses
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say that over the past decade prescription drug overdoses have “reached epidemic levels."
Drug-related overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death for Americans ages 25 to 64.
In 2010, 60 percent of the 38,329 deaths caused by drug overdose in the U.S. were attributed to prescription drugs, and that number has risen four-fold over the last decade. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says that prescription drug abuse affects young adults aged 18 to 25 most often, and caused 3,000 deaths in 2010. For every death, there were 66 emergency room visits.
Read More: How 'Oxy' Has Become the Heroin of the 21st Century »
From Pill to Needle
“How we went from marijuana as the drug to worry about with teenagers to heroin is pretty scary,” Nygren said. “We know how it got there.”
While heroin isn’t normally considered a drug of the suburbs, prescription drugs like Vicodin and Oxycontin are being labeled gateway drugs to heroin.
Experts say the increase in heroin use is linked to prescription opioid painkiller abuse. Young people will often become addicted to painkillers and progress to heroin—which gives the same euphoric high—when pills are hard to come by.
“I know that’s how my daughter started,” Nygren said. “About 90 to 95 percent of heroin users begin that way.”
The most alarming trend is heroin's tendency to cross geographic, socioeconomic, and racial lines.
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), heroin use rose by 75 percent between 2007 and 2011, with an 80 percent increase in first-time use among 12- to 17-year-olds since 2002.
At one time, Florida was the largest distributor of illegal pill prescriptions. Prior to legal crackdowns on these “pill mills,” doctors there filled prescriptions for 89 percent of all Oxycodone sold in 2010, according to reporting by The New York Times.
Find Out More About Addiction and How You Can Get Help »
Now that there are restrictions in place for doctors giving sham prescriptions, opioid pills are harder to find.
“Without access to these strong painkillers, they’re going to look for something else,” Christopher Crosby, CEO of The Watershed Addiction Treatment Programs in Delray Beach, Fla., said.
Would Good Samaritan Laws Decrease Drug Deaths?
Every day, 105 people die from a drug overdose, according to CDC estimates. Another 6,748 visit an emergency room for the misuse or abuse of drugs.
Karen Perry lost her 21-year-old son to an overdose.
Now, as the founder and executive director of West Palm Beach, Fla.’s Narcotics Overdose Prevention and Education (NOPE) program, which helped pass Florida’s 911 Good Samaritan Law last year, she says educating children about drug abuse and overdose is a first step.
“We’re trying to get them to speak up if they know someone who is abusing drugs or alcohol, or if they see someone with the signs of an overdose, they’re willing to call 911 without fear of getting into trouble,” she said. “We know that across the country, it’s the same thing. People are afraid to pick up the phone, mainly young students because they’re typically using with them and they’re afraid to get into trouble.”
With 911 shield laws, that’s less of an issue.
Fourteen states and Washington, D.C. have passed Good Samaritan Laws for drug users. While they don’t cover drug dealing and other such practices, they do shield those who seek medical attention for others who are overdosing. They most often shield a person from misdemeanor crimes, such as minor drug possession, possession of paraphernalia, or being under the influence.
New Mexico was the first state to pass a shield law in 2007, and Nygren wants Wisconsin to be the next.
“Chances are users aren’t alone when they were shooting up,” he said. “It’s really about changing the mindset of people doing the drugs.”
Washington State passed its law in 2010, partially shielding drug users who call 911 during an overdose. In a survey at a needle exchange clinic, 42 percent of opiate users said they’d witnessed an overdose in the last year, but 911 was called during only half of those incidents. After being informed of the Good Samaritan laws, 88 percent of users said they would be more likely to call 911 during future overdoses.
The proposed laws in Wisconsin are similar, with four main provisions:
911 Good Samaritan : gives limited immunity from possession or paraphernalia charges for drug users who call 911 during an overdose.
: gives limited immunity from possession or paraphernalia charges for drug users who call 911 during an overdose. Narcan : allows emergency personnel to use the drug Narcan, which reverses the effects of fatal drug overdoses.
: allows emergency personnel to use the drug Narcan, which reverses the effects of fatal drug overdoses. Clean Sweep Programs : this bill would expand drug turn-in programs to narcotics like heroin without punishment for possession.
: this bill would expand drug turn-in programs to narcotics like heroin without punishment for possession. ID Requirements: requires pharmacists to ask for identification for Class 2 and 3 controlled substances, such as opioid painkillers.
What Isn't Working
While shield laws help people call 911 without fear of punishment, many repeat users—including Nygren's daughter, who is currently incarcerated—aren’t getting the help they really need.
“Simply sending people to prison isn’t working,” Nygren said.
Many small towns and rural areas don’t have adequate treatment facilities. This is evident in Marinette, Wis., where 80 drug offenders sent to prison were put on parole and re-offended within one year.
“It’s just a revolving door,” Nygren said. “When you have a zero percent success rate, you have to start looking at other options.”The Dallas Cowboys have suffered their first serious injury of 2015 with an ACL tear for cornerback Orlando Scandrick. He was the best corner the team had and was also a key on-field leader. Up to the point he went down after a collision with Lucky Whitehead, the cautious approach the Cowboys had been taking with injuries had been paying off, but you can only dodge those bullets so long in the NFL.
Now the team has to move forward. As the shock begins to settle in, it is wise to remember how short-handed the Dallas defense was last year. Sean Lee was out for the year, DeMarcus Ware and Jason Hatcher were playing elsewhere, and Morris Claiborne was not fully healthy before he went out for the year. By the time the season ended, the Cowboys were relying on Scandrick, Brandon Carr, Tyler Patmon and Sterling Moore to handle the cornerback position. There is no way to minimize the loss of Scandrick, but in 2015 Dallas has a much better situation to overcome his absence.
Carr and Patmon return. Carr has been seen as underperforming his large contract, but he is still a legitimate starter. All reports on Patmon are that he is an improved player, and it looks like he will the the first choice to step into the slot position where Scandrick was so potent.
Jerome Henderson said Tyler Patmon will assume O Scandrick's role as slot corner. "We'll start with him and figure out a plan from there." — David Moore (@DavidMooreDMN) August 26, 2015
Claiborne has also had a very good camp and looks to be in better health than he has been in any previous year with the team. He is likely to join Carr as one of the starting corners. There is some legitimate hope that he will finally get to show everyone why the Cowboys traded up to draft him sixth overall.
The team also made two major acquisitions in the offseason that now are very important. First they signed Corey White after he was waived by the New Orleans Saints, and he has impressed so far in camp. Then they drafted Byron Jones in the first round. The ridiculously athletic rookie has also turned out to be very intelligent on the field. Both White and Jones also bring a degree of position flexibility that allow them to play all cornerback spots as well as help out at safety, something the team seems to want to keep as part of their arsenal even with the Scandrick injury. That gives them what looks to be five quality cornerbacks, which is much better depth than they had at any time last year. The loss of Scandrick may also open up a spot for Robert Steeples, Joel Ross or even Rod Sweeting. But the more likely outcome is that the team will go with five corners and perhaps try to stash one or two on the practice squad. The developments also probably firms up safety, with Barry Church, J.J. Wilcox, Danny McCray and Jeff Heath all looking very solid to make the 53.
Pass defense is not only about the secondary. One of the biggest stories out of camp is the quality and depth of rushmen the team has, and it looks like the defensive backs will not have nearly as long to have to cover receivers while players like DeMarcus Lawrence, Randy Gregory, Tyrone Crawford and eventually Greg Hardy are harassing the quarterback, along with several other players who are showing real ability to penetrate and disrupt. Linebacker is also looking good, with the return of Lee the biggest news. The Cowboys will have to start the season waiting for Rolando McClain to sit out his suspension, but Anthony Hitchens, Damien Wilson and Kyle Wilber look to give them some solid options for finding an interim starting three. And Lee is very good in pass coverage, which can take some pressure off the slot corner position.
Injuries are the dark side of football, but also an inevitable part of the game. Dallas has been working to build real depth, and this year it looks like they have gotten there, especially on defense. It is going to be harder now that one of the real stars of the secondary is likely gone for the season. But harder does not mean insurmountable. It is time for the rest of the team to step up.
Follow me @TomRyleBTBSpain, this ancient and illustrious wine country is the place where the old world charms of wineries now blend flawlessly with the ultramodern architecture of the Hotel Viura.
Designed by Spanish architects Designhouses the hotel is located in the heart of the traditional village of Eskuernaga, next to the 17th century church, Viura’s architecture, is a true departure from traditional form: a series of concrete cubes, one on top of the other, that seem to rise out of the ground.
The architecture successfully links the interior to the exterior landscape; floor to ceiling windows throughout and private terraces ensure that there is always a view of the village, the Sierra de Cantabria or the church. Clever use of partitions, glass and sophisticated lighting add to the ambiance and fun. Materials and techniques have been brilliantly used together to create avant-garde work of art, strikingly different to its environment but nonetheless blending in to its surroundings.
[wp_geo_map]Update – Julia Roberts closed the deal for $850,000 more than asking price, which calculates up to $5.35 million.
It must have been love but it’s over now, as Pretty Woman decides to part ways with her New York penthouse. Julia Roberts’ Greenwich Village apartment has hit the market for $4.5 million. The Hollywood star had purchased the 2,000-square-foot co-operative in the summer of 2010 for $3,845,000. Located at 45 West 10th Street, a postwar building between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the U-shaped, two-unit combination is currently configured with three bedrooms and three bathrooms. Walnut color wood flooring runs throughout the apartment that includes a generous 25-foot long foyer with two convenient coat closets and an especially roomy multi-purpose main living space that stretches nearly 53 feet.
The central living room space is anchored by a wood-burning fireplace and is flanked by a lounge and a dining space. All of these open to a 50-foot terrace which offers unobstructed views of the Empire State Building as well as the One World Trade tower and everything between them. The windowed kitchen features graphic black and white striped floor, a two-stool snack counter and high-grade commercial-style stainless steel appliances.
The larger of the two bedrooms, well separated in opposite wings for optimal privacy, each have an en suite bathroom. One of them opens to a small private terrace.
VariertyOAKLAND, Calif. (KTVU) - Oakland neighbors met Wednesday evening to discuss violence and the role night clubs in the downtown area play.
Old Oakland Neighbors, a neighborhood organization, held the meeting in a packed conference room in the Marriott.
Some say they believe night clubs have played a role in four homicides, and at least a half dozen shootings over the last two years.
Old Oakland's Ron Wolf said the group would like to see more police patrols in the area on the weekends, and the group would also like to see more transparency in the cabaret permitting process.
He said he'd also like to see the codes already on the books enforced.
"Typically when a cabaret permit is issued there's conditions to it, and the clubs don't necessarily adhere to those conditions," said Wolf.
He also said he'd like to see the clubs do more to protect patrons and bystanders when the clubs close and the customers spill out onto the street at closing time.
"They all tend to have some sort of security on the premises, but most of these incidents don't happen on the front door. They may happen a block or two away."
Chris Rachal owns Liege Spirits Lounge and said blaming the clubs for violence in Oakland is simplistic and counterproductive.
"When I saw the reports that Old Oakland Association was saying that the nightclubs are the reason for the violence I was offended," said Rachal.
He said clubs already pay an extra fee that goes to fund extra police patrols. He also said that while he is only required to have four security guards on duty he goes above and beyond to keep his patrons and the community safe.
"We have five guards that are in house on any given night, and we have one that's solely outside, so we actually employ six," said Rachal.
The latest shooting to happen in proximity to a club is the shooting death of Emilio Nevarez. Nevarez was struck by a stray bullet after finishing a gig in downtown Oakland.
On Wednesday, his friend gathered at the scene of the shooting, hoping the $20,000 reward would help bring tips to solve the case.
Eric Rivera who knew Nevarez since middle school says he also hopes Oakland can do something to stem the violence.
"They gotta step their game up, I'm not the one to tell them how to do it, but all |
but caching is not meant to be a solution for not optimized code. Again, magento is extremely complex (remember the eight millions line of code?) so to serve a web page in a normal server it can take up to several seconds.
This is due to the parsing of the configuration files and to the querying of the thatabase containing huge EAV tables, among the other things.
EAV means Entity-Attribute-Value, it is a way to store dinamically structured data in a database (e.i. the structure can change at runtime). In other words:
EAV gives you enough rope to hang yourself, and in this industry things should be designed to the lowest level of complexity, because the guy replacing you on the project will likely be an idiot.
So make sure that you keep your cache in a good shape and that you throw a good amount of money on your hosting platform, or your store will be slow.
Community code is low quality code
I found myself refactoring a lot of code from third-party extensions. Often times there are antipatterns, lack of conventions, bad practices, even bad code formatting.
Security
They are willingly shipping, since three months now, a vurnerable version of Magento that can lead to the complete compromise of the webstore.
Their response on the issue:
Due to our lack of automated tests, we have no possibility for a quick release cycles.
They already released a patch file, but they keep the Magento tarball unpatched. This looks like an irresponsible and lazy behaviour to me. Also I wonder about the testing of this patch, after they said (unsurprisingly) that they don’t have automated testing.
You can find more info on this vulnerability here. If you have a Magento store, please make sure to patch it.
Conclusions
Magento is the de-facto standard for the e-commerce platforms and it’s getting old.
I personally think that it fails in the first place in making the developers life easier (if this was a goal at all), and now it is also outdated.
The thing is though, it seems that there is not an obvious successor.
We’ll see how the e-commerce scene will develop in the future.Viktor Blom (born 26 September 1990) is a Swedish high-stakes online poker player, best known by the online poker name Isildur1.[1] His rise to fame drew considerable attention around the poker world in late 2009,[2][3][4] when he took part in all ten of the largest pots in online poker history.[5][6] In December 2010, it was announced that then-anonymous Isildur1 had joined Team PokerStars Pro. Blom's identity was revealed by PokerStars on 8 January 2011, at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure.[1] Blom parted ways with PokerStars in August 2012 and was quickly signed-up by Full Tilt Poker on 15 October 2012, along with rival high-stakes player Tom Dwan.[7]
Career [ edit ]
Viktor Blom was first introduced to poker by his older brother at 14 years old. He played no-limit Texas hold'em heads-up for a few days with his brother before teaching a few of his friends. Viktor and these friends used to play micro stakes, in which he won a bit from his friends. After a while, more and more of the people Viktor knew at school started to play the game. They played at breaks during school with buy-ins ranging from $3–$7, during one lunch Viktor recalls that 25 people turned up to play. Viktor himself ended up winning out of the 25. After turning 15, Viktor and his brother decided to deposit some money onto an online poker site. The first game they entered was an MTT in which they finished in fifth place for $300, which was huge for them at the time. After a few weeks, Viktor's brother decided to set up his own account elsewhere and let Viktor play by himself. This is the point where he created the 'blom90' screen name.[citation needed]
After a few weeks of play, Blom90 was regularly playing at $530 sit n gos. After a few more months of play, the 15-year-old Viktor Blom had made over $275,000 total at various sites. He then collected all the money onto one site and took on the higher buy-in cash games and sit n gos. This resulted in him losing all the money. He then built up a bankroll and deposited $3,000 onto the same site. He played high buy-in sit n gos and started to win more and more money. After building his bankroll back up to $50,000, he took on a $310 sit n go regular and once again lost everything.[citation needed]
After taking a small break from poker, Viktor came back strong. He deposited 10,000 SEK and decided to stick to heads-up no-limit Hold'em. After just two weeks of play, he went from playing 1/2 SEK to 50/100 SEK. After Viktor turned 17, he deposited $2,500 on PartyPoker. He discussed his plans with a friend and off he went. Two days later, the friend asked him how much he had on PartyPoker, expecting him to say he had busted out or had at most $30,000. He was wrong. Blom had actually won over $200,000 in just two days of play. After another hot streak on iPoker, he won over $1.7 million in two weeks. As time passed, however, Blom90 stopped getting action, so he had to find a new site with a new name.[citation needed]
Isildur1 [ edit ]
Isildur1 first appeared at Full Tilt Poker on 16 September 2009, and remained largely unnoticed until November, when he began playing well-known professionals such as Tom Dwan, Phil Ivey, Brian Townsend, Cole South, and Patrik Antonius at stakes as high as $500/$1000.[4] He reached a career peak on 15 November with total winnings of $5.98 million.[8] By mid December, however, he was down $2 million net,[8] including an approximately $4 million loss to Brian Hastings on 8 December, when the two played heads-up $500/$1,000 pot-limit Omaha for five hours.[9] With a few brief exceptions, Isildur1 did not play on Full Tilt Poker between his collapse in mid-December and his return in February 2010.[8]
According to Full Tilt Poker's insider interview with Patrik Antonius, Isildur1 had a bankroll of approximately $2000 in autumn of 2008. He built his bankroll to $1.4 million and began playing on Full Tilt Poker in September. He first played Haseeb Qureshi, a high-stakes regular, at the $100/$200 stakes. After 24 hours, Isildur1 had won almost $500,000. He then resurfaced a month later and played Brian Townsend, Patrik Antonius, and Cole South at the $200/$400 to $500/$1000 tables and suffered a million dollar loss. A columnist on HighStakesDB, a website that monitors and tracks high-stakes activity online, suggested that Isildur1 was overly aggressive, which could cost him against elite competition. Isildur1, however, answered critics by winning approximately $2 million back from Townsend and South during the last week of October 2009.
With a profit of $1 million on Full Tilt Poker, Isildur1 waited at six heads-up $500/$1000 No Limit Hold'em tables for any challenger willing to play for such stakes. His first opponent was Tom Dwan, who was then widely regarded as one of the top online heads-up players. They played six tables simultaneously, with over a million dollars in play for one week. By the end of the week, Isildur1 had gone on the largest run in the history of online poker, winning approximately $4 million from Dwan, prompting Dwan to issue a live challenge to play Isildur1 at the Full Tilt Poker Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge.[10] He then challenged Antonius to a rematch the following day and won $1.6 million from him on 15 November and peaked with $5.98 million in earnings on Full Tilt Poker.
Isildur1 challenged Phil Ivey, widely regarded as one of the best all-round players in the world, to play three tables of heads-up no-limit hold’em at $500/$1000 stakes. After a week of play, Isildur1 had lost $3.2 million and stated in a subsequent interview that Ivey was the toughest opponent he had ever played.
Antonius then challenged Isildur1 to a rematch in Omaha, a game in which Isildur1 admitted he lacked experience. Isildur1 lost $3 million to Antonius after playing for only one day, which at the time, was the largest single-day gain and loss in the history of online poker. This record was broken a month later when Isildur1 played Brian Hastings. The following day, they played a rematch in Omaha, where Isildur1 won $2 million back from Antonius.
His winnings hovered at the $2 million mark until 8 December 2009, when he played Brian Hastings for five hours. Hastings won $4.2 million from Isildur1, making it the largest gain and loss in a single day in the history of online poker to date.[11]
It was discovered afterward that Hastings, Townsend, and South had shared information about Isildur1's play over 30,000 hands. They engaged in activity which Full Tilt Poker defined as "accessing or compiling information on other players beyond that which the user has personally observed through his or her own game play", after Townsend admitted to acquiring hands of Isildur1's play through Hastings, which he spoke of during an interview with ESPN.[12][13] As a result, Townsend lost some of his privileges as a sponsored Full Tilt Poker player (his "red pro status") for 30 days. Blom's play on Full Tilt Poker between September 2009 and October 2010 at stakes of 50/100 and above resulted in a loss of $2,630,230.[14]
In December 2010, he partnered with online poker site PokerStars and launched a four-table of heads-up cash game no-limit hold'em and pot limit omaha "Superstar Showdown" challenge to anyone who is willing to play at stakes no lower than $50/$100 for 2,500 hands, similar to Dwan's Durrrr Million Dollar Challenge. In March 2012, he defeated Isaac Haxton in a $1 million $200/$400 heads up challenge, winning $500,000.[15]
On 7 May 2012, Blom won the SCOOP #2-Med No-Limit Hold 'em tournament and $247,200 in prize money.[16] The very next day, Blom won the SCOOP #3-High No-Limit Hold 'em Rebuy event for $160,000. In May 2013, Viktor won the SCOOP Main Event $10,300 buy-in for over $1 million.[17]
In August 2012, it was announced that Blom would no longer be a member of Team Pokerstars Pro.[18]
In 2015 Isildur won $3.5 million on PokerStars’ cash tables, and lost $1.75 million on Full Tilt, putting him at +$1.75 million for the year.
The year 2016 was a year of struggle when Full Tilt closed[19], and Isildur was down by $735.000. However, he was then seen playing in the WCOOP, finishing 3rd in Event 55 ($530 NLHE), winning $72,861[20]. His absence during several months at the biggest online tables has been widely commented by the community.
In 2017, during the SCOOP Festival on PokerStars, Isildur1 played most of the events of the series. In the Player of the Series Race (Overall leaderboard), Isildur1 accumulated 785 points, taking the runner-up spot, behind Naza114 from Portugal.[21]
Tournament poker [ edit ]
WCOOP Year Tournament Prize 2017 $2,100 HORSE Championship $60,760.00
SCOOP Year Tournament Prize 2012 $215 No Limit Hold'em $247,200 2012 $530 No Limit Hold'em w/rebuys [6-max] $160,000 2013 $10,300 NL Hold'em Main Event $1,096,200.00
Year Tournament Prize 2012 PCA $100,000 Super High Roller $1,254,400.00
Year Tournament Prize 2018 partypoker Millions Germany Main Event €1,000,000.00
Live poker [ edit ]
Since signing with PokerStars in 2011, Viktor Blom has been paying more attention to live tournaments. His first notable live tournament cash was 16th place at the 2010 WSOPE Main Event for £33,582. In January 2012, at the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure, he won the first live tournament of his career, the $100,000 Super High Roller event for $1,254,400.[22]
As of 2015, Blom's live tournament winnings exceed $1,700,000.
Reaction [ edit ]
A number of Isildur1’s regular opponents commented on him in the media buzz surrounding his collapse. On 11 December 2009, Ilari Sahamies appeared on the Finnish radio show Radio Rock Korporaatio, saying, “He’s been playing 9 tables at once against Patrik Antonius, Phil Ivey, and Tom Dwan durrrr – the guy must be missing a chromosome.”[23] Also that day, the Full Tilt Academy released a video in which Patrik Antonius discussed Isildur1 with Phil Gordon.[23] Antonius, who won the largest online pot ever ($1.4 million) against Isildur1,[24] called him “extremely dangerous” because he constantly puts his opponents to difficult decisions. Antonius further opined that the mysterious Swede would return.[25]
The rise and fall of Isildur1 was on nearly every poker top stories of 2009 list, including those of Cardplayer, PokerNews.com, PokerNewsDaily.com, and pokerlistings.com.[2][26][27]
On 22 December 2009, PokerNews.com published an interview with Isildur1 about his loss to Brian Hastings, but Isildur1 again refused to reveal his identity.[28]I’ll be honest. I’m a little nervous. I had no clue (why? because I am ridiculously naive and don’t have the time to think even a week ahead) that our podcast would get covered by the NY Times, the Washingtonian, the Rolling Stone, PBS Newshour, Huffington Post, People, Vanity Fair…and the list goes on. Considering the success of Serial, I certainly should have anticipated it, but not thinking this venture will be at all comparable, I kind of didn’t.
And to be clear as glass, really clear glass all cleaned up with Windex and baby spit, we are not even in the same universe as Sarah and the Serial team.
When Serial ended the brilliantly strategic Shahed Amanullah sat me down and tried to convince to start a podcast to keep the new information about the case coming. I threw my head back and laughed in the evil way I do. I said no. That makes no sense. I would NEVER do that. Like EVER. That’s what blogs are for, so people can read up dammit. I do not podcast, Shahed!
Keep that crown of shame handy for me, Shahed. I now podcast.
Dennis, who’s been volunteering as a Trustee and in lots and lots of other ways, brought it up a few weeks ago. This time, I listened. I thought, no sweat, we got this. How HARD could it possibly be? I’ve listened to two whole podcasts! I can talk, lots!
First came the name. I fought to call it “Shut Up and Let Me Talk*” but was voted down. Susan, clearly more mature and less self-indulgent than me, nailed the name. Then came the logistics and production. I barely knew how to work a headset last week. I had to repress the urge to interrupt Susan and Colin with a “eureka!” or “DUN DUN DUN!” every few minutes. I am realizing how weird and dry and manly my voice is. That’s not static dear editor, that’s just my full throaty-ness. Fun times!
Head-first into the foray we go though. For better or worse. In sickness or health. Dammit, we are going to podcast our butts off. We will be as good as first-timers can be (keep that bar low Charlie), this I vow! It may not be pretty, but we will GIVE YOU LOTS OF INFORMATION.
Gobble it up. Get down and dirty with it. Take notes. Make a crazy-ass board with string and pushpins all over it. Join us in the weeds. More specifically into the weedy vaults that are the minds of Susan Simpson and Colin Miller.
Which takes me to some important information, a PSA if you will:
Susan is not getting paid for this. Colin is not getting paid for this. I am not getting paid for this. The musician/photographer is not getting paid for this. The editor is not getting paid for this. We are all volunteer. The Trust is covering minor technical costs. And that’s about it.
We have a Twitter account. We have a Facebook page. We debut tomorrow at 2pm EST.
I will not sleep tonight.
Do you want to hear a little bit? You can do so on our website here.
*I’m lying. I didn’t fight to call it that. I was rooting for “I Will Pay You Three Dollars To Listen, Mom”.An Iranian security officer displays packages of seized Afghan-made drugs during a media tour in Milak, southeastern Iran, near the Afghan border, on Wednesday. – Photo by AFP
TEHRAN: Three Iranian border guards were killed in clashes with armed drug traffickers near the border with Pakistan, Iranian media reported on Thursday, citing a border official.
Two drug traffickers were also killed in the clash near the region of Koshtegan in the southeastern province of Sistan-Balochistan, Colonel Mehdi Mansourzadeh said.
Mansourzadeh said Iran had seized 50 tonnes of various drugs in the frontier regions with Afghanistan and Pakistan during the past six months.
Iran is a major transit route for drugs trafficked from leading narcotics producer Afghanistan, with much of the substances bound for Western countries.
The Islamic republic says it is fighting a deadly war against drug traffickers who make up half its prison population. Drug trafficking is punishable by death.
More than 4,000 police officers and soldiers have been killed during the past three decades in clashes with the traffickers, who often travel in heavily armed convoys, according to officials.
Iran has spent more than $700 million on building a “wall” along lengthy stretches of its 1,700-kilometre (1,050-mile) eastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan in a bid to stop the trafficking, officials say.
Tehran's anti-drugs efforts are regularly praised by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which regularly provides the country with financial and other assistance.
However, the United States has accused some Iranian officials, particularly within the elite Revolutionary Guards, of facilitating the transit of drugs produced in Afghanistan in exchange for the services of drug lords in its eastern neighbour.
Iranian officials in return accuse Western and Israeli intelligence services of promoting drug in Iran in an effort to destabilise the country.President Trump made it clear: He wants to buy more American-made products and hire American workers.
It's a part of his strategy to help boost U.S. economic growth, which has been sluggish.
But he's said little about a key ingredient to really turn up growth, not to mention workers' lives: job skills and training programs.
That might be because his administration proposes cutting federal funding for job training programs, though it hasn't spelled out how much, according to the Office of Budget and Management. It wants states, cities and towns to carry the weight of funding job training programs.
It's a view at odds with is predecessor, President Obama, who broke records on federal spending for job training and apprenticeships.
It also doesn't jive with the view of many economists and employers. Trump got to meet one of those employers on Tuesday.
Related: What American manufacturing looks like in Trump era
When Trump went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to tout his Buy American executive order he told a crowd of technical students and manufacturing employees at the headquarters of Snap-On Tools: "The buy and hire American order I'm about to sign will protect workers and students like you."
But Snap-On CEO Nicholas Pinchuk too wants to focus on job skills, not H1-B visas. As the head of the tool manufacturing company, he knows where the problem lies.
"The best way to make America successful...is to arm our people with the technical capabilities that enable them to win that global contest for prosperity," Pinchuk said in a statement on the company's website.
Pinchuk isn't alone. America's top economist, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, emphasized that point in a speech in late March.
"Educational programs and training that lead to better paying and more steady work are crucial for people without college degrees, particularly lower-income workers," Yellen said.
Related: This manufacturer helps rebuild lives
In short, research, anecdotes and experts show that job skills and training -- not restricting H1-B visas -- is the solution to a lot of problems for American workers.
For example, former coal workers in Pennsylvania are learning to write computer code -- a skill in high demand -- at a free retraining program called Mined Mines, a non-profit.
America had 5.7 million job openings in February. That's hovering near an all-time high. Part of that is good because employers are hiring. Part of it is bad because it means some employers just can't find skilled workers to match their openings.
Trump did briefly touch on job skills Tuesday, saying education secretary Betsy DeVos "is working to ensure that our workers are trained for the skilled technical jobs that will, in the future, power our country."
Trump also said, "workforce development and vocational training -- very important words," when German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited in March.
But as Trump aims to cut down government spending, his words aren't backed up by important funding for job training and apprenticeship programs.
Related: This Michigan toymaker pledged to never leave the U.S.
Federal job training programs have had issues. The Labor Department's own 2012 study found flaws in the job training programs for workers who lose positions due to free trade. Workers ended up in jobs they didn't want or didn't pay as much as their previous jobs.
However, that is just one type of job training program, and liberals and conservatives alike tend to agree that most job training programs and apprenticeships are key to middle-class jobs, especially for those without a 4-year college degree.
The White House's Office of Management and Budget did not respond to request for comment.
Federal spending hasn't come to a complete halt yet. On Wednesday, the Labor Department approved $3.2 million in grants for training and reemployment services for workers in California affected by layoffs.
--Jeremy Diamond contributed reporting to this articleWith only one phase of polling left in general elections 2014, it is clear that the broad fate of the next government is sealed in EVMs. We will get an early whiff of it on 12 May, when the exit polls start coming in, and the final results four days later.
But it is possible to guess what the comments will be, depending on whether you are a BJP partisan or an anti-Modi one.
If BJP gets below 160 seats.
What Modi haters in the media will say: This is a victory for the secular people of India. So LK Advani was right to challenge the projection of Modi as the PM candidate. In retrospect someone like Shivraj Chauhan would have been a better choice for BJP.
What Modi partisans in the media will say: The elections clearly rigged. Modi's critics in the party will say we need to do serious introspection why we lost.
If BJP gets below 180 seats and NDA around 210-220:
What Modi haters will say: A triumph of secularism. Despite a splurge of spending and the projection of Modi in a hundred ways, voters have rejected him. The Indian voter cannot be taken for a ride with mere marketing. Two-thirds of voters are not in favour of Modi.
What BJP apologists will say: The elections were rigged.
If the BJP gets 200-plus and NDA around 230-240.
What Modi haters will say: High pressure electoral spending driven by crony capitalists has worked, but the Indian voter has been wise to restrict Modi’s mandate and march to Hindutva. It is now upto the BJP’s secular allies, new and old, to make sure India stays away from Hindutva and the poison of communalism.
What BJP partisans will say: The Congress propaganda and deliberate efforts to turn the minority vote against Modi restricted our mandate. This is a bad day for genuine secularism. But we are happy that the corrupt Congress regime is thrown out.
If BJP wins 230-240 seats on its own.
What Modi haters will say: This is nothing but a victory for money power and crony capitalism. Neo-liberals will rule and the poor will suffer as India Inc is shown favours. The Adanis and Ambanis will rejoice. All secularists must stand united against the BJP. NDA allies must set stiff terms to join the coalition.
What BJP partisans will say: Our positive agenda of development and governance has resonated well with the voter. Phony secularists have been shown their place.
If BJP wins a majority on its own:
What Modi haters will say: This is not good news for India, but the Congress has only itself to blame for not stopping Modi. This is a defeat for the Congress and not a win for the BJP or Modi. He won by default. We, however, must respect the mandate, however flawed, and wait for a while to pass full judgment. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
What BJP partisans will say: The people have spoken. The Congress is finished. The dynasty is finished. The people do not want family rule anymore.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.In November I ranked the Marvel Cinematic Universe films from worst to best, adding Thor: The Dark World to the list. I used advanced mathematics and paid - out of my own pocket! - for computer time at JPL so I could crunch the numbers correctly. The results were etched in stone truth, the kind of thing that Moses could have brought down from the mountain.
But times have changed. Variables have been altered. And now Captain America: The Winter Soldier has placed all the previous rankings in disarray. Using some of the latest thinking from the brains at MIT, I have recalculated the entire list, using our modern understandings of cosmology and recent theories about the prevalence of dark matter and graviton displacement and present to you the latest official, indisputable rankings of the Marvel movies. You can leave your comments below, but why bother? This shit is science, man.
Iron Man 2
When there is a movie that ranks below Iron Man 2 on this list Marvel Studios will have hit a truly rough patch. Iron Man 2 isn't just a bad Marvel movie, it's a bad movie, one of the worst of its year. The film is a mess from top to bottom, with too much crap crammed in and totally undercooked, so this turkey is dripping with blood and stuffing and cold to the touch. It's the only Marvel movie that feels cynical and rushed - while others have been not good you can at least see what they were going for. WIth Iron Man 2 the mandate seemed to be 'Make Robert Downey Jr happy and also start a march to The Avengers.' I think Jon Favreau buckled under too many thumbs - Downey, Marvel's Kevin Feige and the weird demands and eccentricities of Mickey Rourke.
Thor
Blech. I know this one has supporters, but my maths have proven them wrong. Even in the wake of the much-improved Thor: The Dark World this movie comes up very, very short. There are good parts to it - the casting is spot-on, and the character interactions are often wonderful - but as a whole this movie is a stinker, a film more in line with the bad Agents of SHIELD TV series than the better Phase Two films.
The Incredible Hulk
I keep wanting to like this movie. They did their best, and out of the pre-Avengers Phase One films this has the most comic book-y action - Hulk uses a car as boxing gloves! - but it just never comes together. It has a lot of heart, though, and I respect it for the attempt. It's the first movie on this list so far I could imagine myself rewatching.
Iron Man
And now we come to the first upset. In the previous rankings Iron Man scored way, way higher. But something has happened: the variables have changed. While Iron Man is still very, very good, the Phase Two films have shown that Marvel can do spectacle as well as character without sacrificing one or the other. Iron Man, the venerable start to all of this, is a movie so low on action it's almost a straight drama. Compare that to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which packs multiple big action scenes into a movie that's also almost a drama. Our current calculations now place almost all of the Phase One films below the Phase Two movies. This doesn't mean Iron Man is bad... just that the rest are better.
Thor: The Dark World
A rewatch confirms this position; while Malekith is a crummy villain, everything else in Thor: The Dark World is fun and well-done. Those same good characters and interactions from the first film are now set against a more expansive and exciting backdrop, with bigger and more thrilling stakes. And Loki gets to do lots of interesting stuff; it's hard to deny that these films are, at their heart, buddy pictures with Thor and Loki as the main duo. This film gets that. Do we want more of that when the film is over? Yes, but that's how you should always walk away from a movie - wanting more, not feeling overindulged.
Captain America: The First Avenger
The first Cap hopped a spot! In November this ranked below Thor: The Dark World, but a rewatch shows that it's simply the best Phase One film. This movie gets Captain America - a difficult character in this post-Iraq world - so effortlessly right it's easy to forget that this looked to be the least sure bet out of the whole MCU. And while The First Avenger definitely has its problems - the third act doesn't really work - its successes are extraordinary. Chris Evans is the living emodiment of this 70 year old character, and the film's tone is absolutely pitch-perfect. This film defines what a Marvel movie should be, and the range of emotions - from chin-up optimism to giddy hopefulness to melancholic loss - is impressive for any mainstream film, letalone a superhero movie.
Iron Man Three
Marvel couldn't have planned a better opener to Phase Two if they had tried. While the Iron Man films had been the spine of the universe, Marvel knew they wanted to transfer that position to the Avengers movies, and so they drew Iron Man's story to (more or less) a close. But along the way they pulled out the rug from what audiences had come to expect, and Iron Man Three is a movie that very much has its own identity, its own rhythms and its own peculiar personality. This was the opening salvo of Phase Two, where Marvel announced these movies were going to feel different, and where they let us know the only sacred thing for them is strong character work.
The Avengers
I don't even know that I have to explain this. It's kind of the opposite of Captain America: The FIrst Avenger in that the first act is sort of weak, but once it gets roaring The Avengers is a popcorn masterpiece. It's crammed with delight, and the careful sketching of each character gives us the same sort of thrill at their team-up comic fans once had before constant crossovers were the order of the day. The team-up here feels special, and the threat feels legitimately tough. As for the math on this film: I watch it all the time. I'm not a big movie rewatcher, but the glorious, delirious character spectacle (and it's the character stuff that tickles me more than the action stuff) makes The Avengers an almost constant Blu in my player. It would take one helluva movie to knock this down from the top spot...
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Oh no he didn't. Oh yes he did! Sure, I've only seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier the once, but that one viewing gave me all the variables I need to place this film at the top of the Marvel heap. It has the best action, the best story, the best character work. But what makes it the top ranked movie is the fact that there are other movies behind it - and I don't mean that in some sort of meta way. The Winter Soldier works this well because it's the latest entry in the continuing Marvel Saga; it's the third main appearance by Cap and it takes place in a world we've been visiting regularly for years. The twists and turns and betrayals in The Winter Soldier carry more weight because there's history there. This is a rare film that shows why sequels can be better than standalones - at least when they're approached not as individual cash-ins but as longterm storytelling.
And The Winter Soldier stands above the other films (especially the Phase One films) in terms of production value; directorial team Joe and Anthony Russo tease so much quality out of the extra pennies Marvel is no longer pinching. While the story is temporally short and personal in nature, it's sweeping in scale and power. Many of the Marvel movies have had the feeling of scrappy down-home productions, but Phase Two has left that behind, and The Winter Soldier in particular feels like it deserves to stand alongside any other big budget action picture from the last thirty years.More evidence that Apple (AAPL) will be adding cameras to the iPod touch and iPod nano: In China, accessories manufacturers are already building sample cases for the new iPod specs.
Culf Of Mac has landed a bunch of pictures of new iPod touch and iPod nano sample cases with holes for cameras. The iPod touch camera is in the center of the device, not the corner like on the iPhone.
We're guessing here, but it might be helpful for image stabilization -- less movement?
What's the point? For the iPod touch, a video camera makes the device a stronger competitor to cheap camcorders like Cisco's (CSCO) Flip, and it makes games and apps that use the camera and video camera easier to sell. (iPod touch owners -- a lot of kids -- buy a lot of games.) For the iPod nano, it lengthens the life on a product Apple already knows is going to head toward zero.
Bonus slideshow: Click here to see a bunch of pictures of the new cases, obtained by Cult Of Mac →Diplomatic tensions have sparked recently between Israel and Brazil over none other than a soccer match, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Wednesday.
The Brazilian government decided to extend a gesture to the Palestinian people and hold a friendly game between two of its leading soccer teams – Sao Paulo's Corinthians and Rio de Janeiro's Flamengo – in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
With famed player Ronaldo as the Corinthians' striker and Flamengo being one of the world's top soccer teams, many Israelis would undoubtedly love to attend the game, but the Brazilians have made it clear that they are not interested in playing in Israel – only in the Palestinian Authority.
Giora Bachar, the Israeli ambassador to Brasilia inquired about the reports in the local media with the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, which confirmed them.
"I intend to make the Brazilians understand that if a similar game is not held in Israel, we will see it as an act of ostracism," he said. "It would be better off if they held two games, or better still – a joint game for the Israelis and Palestinians."NEW YORK – Leading the industry with the first commercial application of next-generation broadband services, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, Nasdaq: VZ) today announced it will launch wireless residential broadband services in three to five U.S. markets in 2018.
As a first application of fifth-generation – or 5G — wireless, these services will use radio signals, rather than copper or fiber cables, to provide customers with unprecedented wireless speeds for Internet access. As 5G continues to evolve, customers will benefit from a wide array of services – including broadband, mobile and IoT (Internet of things) — and the necessary bandwidth and low latency for 3D and virtual reality applications.
Verizon’s first commercial launch is planned to be in Sacramento, Calif., in the second half of 2018. Details of that launch, and the announcement of additional markets, will be provided at a later date.
Verizon has successfully trialed 5G residential applications in 11 markets in 2017. The commercial launch is based on customer experience and on Verizon’s confidence in new technology powered by millimeter-wave spectrum.
Verizon estimates the market opportunity for initial 5G residential broadband services to be approximately 30 million households nationwide.
The 5G commercial launch will not have a material impact on Verizon’s consolidated capital expenditures in 2018. The company expects its full-year 2018 capital spending program to be consistent with the past several years.
“This is a landmark announcement for customers and investors who have been waiting for the 5G future to become a reality,” said Hans Vestberg, Verizon president of Global Networks and Chief Technology Officer. “We appreciate our strong ecosystem partners for their passion and technological support in helping us drive forward with 5G industry standards, for both fixed and mobile applications. The targeted initial launches we are announcing today will provide a strong framework for accelerating 5G’s future deployment on the global standards.”
Additional Disclosures
Verizon will hold a meeting with analysts later today, and presentation slides and videos will be available on the company’s Investor Relations website, www.verizon.com/about/investors/.
At the meeting, Verizon will not address |
the race, was with Saronni when he caught LeMond with about 200 meters to go, but he could not hold his wheel. Said Kelly: "I don't think that Boyer was fading...He got quite a good gap. Nobody wanted to go after him...Yes, LeMond chased down Boyer. Boyer was the only man up the road."[36]
"Boyer really did a good ride. He made a good move, but a move like that has about a five-percent chance of making it...There's no way in the world that I could have helped Boyer in the last 400 meters. The only thing I could have done was throw on my brakes, crash in front of the pack, and hopefully hold off Saronni. I mean, what kind of tactics is that? At 400 meters to go you just don't put on your brakes, especially in the World Championships." —Greg LeMond in response to the criticism he received for his performance in the men's road race at the 1982 World Championships.[38]
LeMond was supported by his teammate George Mount, who observed, "What's LeMond going to do? Throw his bike down in front of everybody because Boyer is such a good buddy of everyone?...Hell no—he's going to start sprinting because it's less than 200 meters to go and the sprint's already been going for a couple hundred meters. LeMond made a good move and a good sprint...Boyer was not going to win that race. The best he could have got was fifth or sixth place."[39]
LeMond did not apologize. The U.S. team was not as set up as the European teams, and did not have an independent race to determine the national champion. Instead, the highest finisher at the World's was considered the national champion. LeMond had argued for the team to compete as the European teams did, but team management and Boyer voted against him. Thus, unlike the other teams at the world championship, the US riders were competing against each other.[N 2] Aged 21, LeMond was the first American pro to win a medal at the World's since Frank Kramer took silver in 1912.[35] Said LeMond: "I'm racing for Renault and I'm racing for myself. It's a business and it's my living. To me, that second place was almost as good as winning, especially at my age."[42]
Two weeks later, on September 20, 1982, LeMond won the mountainous 12-day, 837-mile (1,347 km) Tour de l'Avenir by a world-record 10 minutes, 18 seconds. The victory, and the time advantage LeMond held at the end, stunned Europe and provided broad confirmation that LeMond was indeed fuoriclasse.[35]
The following year, 1983, LeMond won the Road World Championship outright, becoming the first American male cyclist to do so.[43] (Audrey McElmury won in 1969 and Beth Heiden won in 1980.) LeMond's cycling talent—his overall strength, climbing ability, ability to ride a fast time trial and his capacity to recover quickly—all suggested LeMond would be an excellent prospect for the most demanding Grand Tours.
1984–1986: Grand Tours Edit
LeMond rode his first Tour de France in 1984, finishing third in support of team leader Laurent Fignon, and winning the white jersey of the young rider classification. The following year he was brought across to La Vie Claire to ride in support of team captain Bernard Hinault who had regained his form and was attempting to win his fifth Tour.[45] French businessman and team owner Bernard Tapie signed LeMond with a $1 million contract over three years. In the race Hinault led through the early mountain stages, but suffered a crash and came into difficulty. At this point, it was clear that LeMond was an elite rider capable of winning the Tour in his own right. LeMond possessed a natural talent for riding the Grand Tours, and got stronger over the course of a three-week race. The injured Hinault was vulnerable, and his competitors knew it. Stage 17 included three major climbs in the Pyrenees. On the second, the Col du Tourmalet, LeMond followed Stephen Roche in an attack, but was not given permission to help build on the gap over the field. The managers of his La Vie Claire team ordered the 24-year-old LeMond not to ride with Roche, but to sit on his wheel, a tactic to use the rider in front as cover for wind resistance so the following rider uses less energy.[51][N 3] The pace Roche could put out by himself eventually slowed, and other riders came up to join the two men. Hinault recovered as well, though he did not regain the lead group. At the end of the stage LeMond was frustrated to the point of tears. He later revealed that team management and his own coach Paul Köchli had misled him as to how far back Hinault had dropped during the crucial Stage 17 mountain stage.[52] Hinault won the 1985 Tour, with LeMond finishing second, 1:42 behind. LeMond had ridden as the dutiful lieutenant, and his support enabled Hinault to win his fifth Tour.[N 4] In repayment for his sacrifice Hinault promised to help LeMond win the Tour the following year.[53]
For the 1986 Tour, LeMond was a co-leader of the La Vie Claire team alongside Hinault.[53][54] Hinault's support seemed less certain the closer the race approached. An unspoken condition was that his help would be contingent upon LeMond demonstrating that he was clearly the better rider.[N 5] Hinault was in superb form, and had the chance to win an unprecedented sixth Tour. Hinault chose to let the Stage 9 individual time trial be the decider for which rider would receive the full support of team La Vie Claire.[N 6] Hinault won the Stage 9 time trial, finishing 44 seconds in front of LeMond. LeMond had bad luck during the stage, having suffered a punctured tire requiring a wheel change, and later in the stage a bicycle change was required when he broke a wheel. He was frustrated with the outcome and the impact it would have on how the team would function for the remainder of the race. In Stage 12, the first mountain stage of the race in the Pyrenees, Hinault attacked the lead group and built up an overall lead. By the end of Stage 12, Hinault had a five-minute lead over LeMond and the other top riders.[58] He claimed he was trying to draw out LeMond's rivals, but none of these attacks were planned with LeMond.[N 7] He was clearly willing to ride aggressively and take advantage of the opportunities presented. LeMond was never placed in difficulty, except by his own teammate.[61] The following day Hinault broke away again early but was caught and then dropped by LeMond on the final climb of Stage 13, allowing LeMond to gain back four and a half minutes. The next three stages brought the Tour to the Alps. On Stage 17 LeMond and Urs Zimmermann dropped Hinault from the leading group, and the end of the day saw LeMond pulling on the yellow jersey of race leader, the first time it had ever been worn by a rider from the United States.[62] The following day in the Alps saw Hinault attack again early on the first climb, but he was pulled back. Attempting an escape on the descent, he was unable to separate himself from LeMond. The La Vie Claire team leaders were both excellent descenders. As they ascended up the next col they continued to pull away from the field, and maintained the gap as they reached the base of the final climb, the vaunted Alpe d'Huez. They pressed on through the crowd, ascending the twenty-one switchbacks of Alpe d'Huez and reaching the summit together. LeMond put an arm around Hinault and gave him a smile and the stage win in a show of unity,[63] but the infighting was not over. Hinault attacked again on Stage 19 and had to be brought back by teammates Andrew Hampsten and Steve Bauer.[N 8] Commenting on the team situation prior to the final individual time trial at Stage 20, LeMond offered the following with a wry smile: "He's attacked me from the beginning of the Tour De France. He's never helped me once, and I don't feel confident at all with him."[65]
LeMond had to keep his eye on his teammate and rival throughout the race. Hinault rode aggressively and repeatedly attacked, and the division created in the La Vie Claire team was unmistakable.[66] LeMond would keep the yellow jersey to the end of the race and win his first Tour, but he felt betrayed by Hinault and the La Vie Claire team leadership.[63] LeMond later stated the 1986 Tour was the most difficult and stressful race of his career.[67]
1987–1988: Shooting accident and recovery Edit
LeMond had planned to defend his title in the 1987 Tour de France with La Vie Claire, but he was unable to participate. Earlier that year, while riding in the Tirreno–Adriatico spring tune-up race, LeMond fell and fractured his left wrist. He returned to the United States to recover from the injury. The week before returning to Europe, he went turkey hunting on a ranch co-owned by his father in Lincoln, California – in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California. LeMond was with Rodney Barber and Patrick Blades, his uncle and brother-in-law.[68][69][70] The trio had become separated when Blades, who heard movement behind him, turned and fired through a bush.[68] The movement had come from LeMond, who was hit in his back and right side with a devastating blast of approximately 60 No. 2-sized pellets. LeMond's injuries were life-threatening, but fortunately, a police helicopter was already airborne near the scene and transported LeMond on a 15-minute air medical flight to the Medical Center at University of California-Davis. LeMond was taken for emergency surgery. He had suffered a pneumothorax to his right lung and extensive bleeding, having lost some 65 percent of his blood volume.[71] A physician informed LeMond later that he had been within 20 minutes of bleeding to death. The operation saved his life, but four months later he developed a small bowel obstruction due to adhesions that had formed following the shooting.[73] He underwent another surgery to relieve the obstruction and take down the adhesions. Concerned that his team would drop him if they knew the shooting accident required a second surgery, LeMond asked the surgeons to remove his appendix at the same time. He then informed his team that he had had his appendix removed, but the rest of the story was left somewhat vague.[74] The events effectively ended his 1987 season, and in October he announced he would return to serious competition the following February, with the Dutch PDM team.[75]
With 35 shotgun pellets still in his body, including three in the lining of his heart and five more embedded in his liver, LeMond attempted to return to racing in 1988.[68] His comeback was hampered by over-training which resulted in tendonitis in his right shin requiring surgery. He missed the Tour for the second year running. Tensions in the relationship between LeMond and PDM were aggravated when LeMond discovered that doping was going on at the PDM squad. The result was that LeMond moved from PDM, one of the strongest teams in the peloton, to ADR, a team based in Belgium. The team was co-sponsored by Coors Light for American races.[76] The deal was completed on New Year's Eve, just hours before LeMond would have been legally obligated to ride another season for the Dutch team.[77] Joining the Belgian ADR squad allowed LeMond to continue to compete, but with teammates like Johan Museeuw who were better suited to riding Classics than Grand Tours.[78]
1989: Return to elite level Edit
After struggling in the 1989 Paris–Nice early-season race and failing to improve his condition, LeMond informed his wife Kathy that he intended to retire from professional cycling after the 1989 Tour de France.[73] He had some flashes of form with 6th overall in Tirreno-Adriatico and in the two-day Critérium International, sharing an escape with Fignon, Indurain, Mottet, Roche and Madiot and finishing 4th overall. He started the 1989 Giro d'Italia in May as preparation for the Tour to follow, but struggled in the mountains and was not in contention for any of the leaders' jerseys before the final 53 km (33 mi) individual time trial into Florence. LeMond placed a surprising second there, more than a minute ahead of overall winner Laurent Fignon.[N 9] Some of his improvement he attributed to an anti-anemia treatment he received twice during the race.[73][78]
Coming into the 1989 Tour de France LeMond was not considered a contender for the general classification (GC).[80][81][N 10] His own most optimistic hope was to finish his final Tour in the top 20.[73] Without the weight of expectation and other pressures of being a Tour favorite, LeMond surprised observers with a strong ride in the 7.8 km (4.8 mi) prologue in Luxembourg, finishing fourth out of 198 riders.[83] Buoyed by the result, LeMond continued to ride well over the opening flat stages, winning the 73 km (45 mi) stage 5 individual time trial, and gaining the yellow jersey as leader of the general classification for the first time in three years. LeMond seemed to ride himself into better condition during the first week's flat stages, and he was coming into peak form by the time the Tour reached the mountains. LeMond remained at the front of the race in the Pyrénées, but lost the lead to his former teammate and rival Laurent Fignon on stage 10 in Superbagnères.[83] Five days later LeMond reclaimed yellow in the Alps, after the 39 km (24 mi) stage 15 mountain time trial from Gap to Orcières-Merlette. The see-saw battle continued, and when Fignon attacked on the upper slopes of Alpe d'Huez LeMond was unable to go with him, placing the yellow jersey back on the shoulders of Fignon. Fignon held a 50-second advantage over LeMond going into the 21st and final stage, a rare 24.5 km (15.2 mi) individual time trial from Versailles to the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Fignon had won the Tour twice before, in 1983 and 1984, and was a very capable time trialist. It seemed improbable that LeMond could take 50 seconds off Fignon over the short course. This would require LeMond to gain two seconds per kilometer against one of the fastest chrono-specialists in the world.[73][80][86] LeMond had done wind tunnel testing in the off season and perfected his riding position. He rode the time trial with a rear disc wheel, a cut-down Giro aero helmet and the same Scott clip-on aero bars which had helped him to the Stage 5 time trial win. Holding his time trialing position LeMond was able to generate less aerodynamic drag than Fignon, who used a pair of disc wheels but chose to go helmetless and did not use the aero bars that are now commonplace in time trials. Instructing his support car not to give him his split times,[73][80] LeMond rode flat-out and finished at a record pace to beat Fignon by 8 seconds and claim his second Tour de France victory. As LeMond embraced his wife and rejoiced on the Champs-Élysées, Fignon collapsed onto the tarmac, then sat in shock and wept.[73]
The final margin of victory of eight seconds was the closest in the Tour's history.[88][89] LeMond's 54.545 km/h (33.893 mph) average speed for the stage 21 time trial was, at that time, the fastest in Tour history. Since then, only the 1994 and 2015 prologues and David Zabriskie's 2005 time trial performance have been faster.[90][91][N 11] The press immediately labeled LeMond's come-from-behind triumph as, "the most astonishing victory in Tour de France history,"[93] and while LeMond admitted that it felt almost "too good to be true," he personally rated it as "much more satisfying" than his first overall Tour win in 1986.[94]
LeMond's return to the pinnacle of cycling was confirmed on August 27, when he won the 259 km (161 mi) World Championships road race in Chambéry, France, defeating Fignon again and edging Dimitri Konyshev and Sean Kelly on the line.[95][96] Fignon attacked repeatedly on the wet, treacherous final climb, but LeMond and a select group caught his rival and then LeMond made the perfect sprint to take the title. Fignon finished 6th.[97] LeMond was only the fifth person in history to win both the Tour de France and the World Championship in the same year.[98] In December, Sports Illustrated magazine named LeMond its 1989 "Sportsman of the Year", the first time a cyclist received the honor.[99][100][101]
1990: A third tour win Edit
LeMond parlayed the success of his 1989 season into the then-richest contract in the sport's history, signing a $5.5 million deal for three years with Z–Tomasso of France.[99] He entered the 1990 Tour de France as defending champion and a pre-race favorite after leaving ADR to join the much stronger French team. At "Z" his teammates included Robert Millar, Eric Boyer and Ronan Pensec, all of whom already had finishes in the top six of the Tour de France.[102] This unified roster of strong riders appeared capable of supporting LeMond in the mountains and controlling the race on the flats.[103]
The squad's tactical plan was upset on the first day, when a breakaway that included LeMond's teammate Ronan Pensec, but no major favorites, arrived ten minutes ahead of the field.[104] LeMond was prevented from challenging for the lead until the yellow jersey left the shoulders of his teammate. LeMond closed in on race leader Claudio Chiappucci, finally overtaking him in the final individual time trial on stage 20, where he finished over two minutes ahead of the unheralded Italian. LeMond at last had the yellow jersey, wearing it the following day as the Tour rode into Paris. LeMond had the distinction of winning the 1990 Tour without taking any of the individual stages. He remains the last rider to win the Tour while wearing the world champion jersey. Over the course of the 1990 Tour the perceived strength of the Z team was confirmed, as they led the team classification through most of the race, adding the team title to LeMond's yellow jersey.[103]
In September, LeMond attempted to defend his title at the 1990 UCI Road World Championships, but finished fourth, eight seconds behind the winner, his former teammate Rudy Dhaenens of Belgium.[106]
1991–1994: Change in the peloton and retirement Edit
LeMond felt confident before the 1991 Tour de France. He was the defending champion, trained well and had a solid team to support him. LeMond was among the leaders going into the Stage 8 individual time trial, and he finished second to the Spaniard Miguel Indurain. LeMond felt he was riding extremely well, and though his TT-effort had propelled him into the yellow jersey as leader of the general classification, losing eight seconds to Indurain shook his confidence.[13] He held the yellow jersey for the next four days until Stage 12, a challenging 192 km (119 mi) mountain stage. LeMond experienced difficulty on the first climb and he cracked on the Col de Tourmalet, losing significant time to Claudio Chiappucci, and eventual winner Indurain. He continued to race, but was unable to seriously challenge for the lead thereafter, finishing the 1991 Tour seventh overall.[107]
In 1992, LeMond won the Tour DuPont. It would be the last major win of his career. In the 1992 Tour de France he started strongly and finished fourth in a breakaway on Stage 6 that put him fifth overall and he maintained his fifth place until the mountain stages when he lost form disastrously and lost more than 45 minutes on the stage to Sestrieres before quitting the race the next day—when his compatriot and former domestique Andrew Hampsten won atop Alpe d'Huez.[108][109] While LeMond claimed a serious saddle sore caused him to abandon, he had earlier stated, "My climbing is not like usual. I've climbed much better in the past Tours. This year I'm just not feeling my usual self."[110]
Former Tour champions Greg LeMond (fourth from left) and Laurent Fignon (center) climb with the " autobus " to Sestriere on Stage 13 of the 1991 Giro d'Italia
LeMond did extensive endurance training on the road the following winter, but his performances the following spring failed to improve. LeMond had to abandon the 1993 Giro d'Italia two days before the final stage after difficult racing left him 125th on GCC and third-from-last in the final time trial. He was too exhausted to enter the 1993 Tour de France.[111] Following the 1993 season LeMond hired renowned Dutch physiologist Adrie van Diemen to advise him on a new technique to monitor training and measure performance. The (SRM) power-based training would make use of the watt as a guide to power output.[112] In November 1993 LeMond confided to Samuel Abt that power output in watts would become the key metric.[111][N 12] The watt has gained wide acceptance as the best measure of a cyclist's training performance.[113]
The following year LeMond began the 1994 Tour de France but found he was unable to race effectively. He had to abandon after the first week before the race had reached the difficult mountain stages. That December he announced his retirement. At the time the reasons for LeMond's increasing difficulties were not entirely known. At a loss, he speculated that a condition known as mitochondrial myopathy might be responsible for the difficulty he was having performing against the current riders.[114][N 13] In 2007, however, LeMond speculated that he might not have had the condition after all, and suggested that lead toxicity from the shotgun pellets still embedded in his body might have been responsible, the effects of which were increased by heavy training.[116][117]
LeMond has acknowledged since 2010 that the increasing prevalence of doping in cycling contributed to his lack of competitiveness. Said LeMond: "Something had changed in cycling. The speeds were faster and riders that I had easily out performed were now dropping me. At the time, the team I was on, Team Z, became more and more demanding, more and more concerned..."[109] He stated he had been told in 1994 that he would need to blood dope in order to win again.[118] LeMond did not focus solely on doping for his difficulties. He frankly admitted to Abt in 1999: "I figure I had three months that went right for me after the hunting accident," three months in which he won the two Tours and a world road race championship. "The rest were just pure suffering, struggling, fatigue, always tired."[119]
In a wide-ranging interview with American novelist Bryan Malessa in 1998, LeMond was asked if his career had not been interrupted by the hunting accident, how did he feel he would compare to five time Tour winners such as Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain. LeMond responded: "Of course you can't rewrite racing history, but I'm confident that I would have won five Tours."[52][N 14]
Two years after his retirement LeMond was inducted into the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame in a ceremony at Rodale Park in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania. The event was held on June 8, 1996, during the U.S. Olympic Cycling Team Trials.[120][121]
In July 2014, ESPN announced the premiere of a new 30 for 30 film titled Slaying the Badger which centers on LeMond and his former teammate Hinault at the 1986 Tour de France. The film is based on the book of the same name by Richard Moore and premiered July 22, 2014 on ESPN.[122]Blacks and Hispanics living in Roxbury, MA, a low-income Boston neighborhood, prefer riding on safe-from-traffic bicycle routes such as cycle tracks—rather than biking with traffic in roadways—and they want more secure places to park their bicycles to prevent theft, according to a new Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health study. However, like many such neighborhoods across the country, Roxbury does not have these amenities.
The final version of the study was published online May 25, 2017 in Preventive Medicine Reports.
Lead author Anne Lusk, research scientist in the Department of Nutrition at Harvard Chan School, and her colleagues conducted surveys in August 2014 of residents who live and bike near Malcolm X Boulevard in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood to learn about their biking preferences and biking habits.
Among the key findings:
Cycle tracks were perceived as the safest type of bike routes by whites, blacks, and Hispanics.
More blacks and Hispanics than whites preferred to park their bikes inside their homes.
More blacks and Hispanics than whites want to bicycle with family and friends.
Such bicycling preferences should be considered by urban planners to encourage physical activity and healthier lifestyles in low-income, predominantly minority communities, the authors wrote. A 2011-2012 study on the prevalence of obesity in the U.S. cited by the authors reported that nearly 78% of Hispanics and about 76% of blacks are considered obese compared with about 67% of whites. A previous study by Lusk and colleagues found bicycling to be an effective way to control weight.
“Lower income primarily-minority neighborhoods are less likely than other neighborhoods to get the safest bicycle facilities,” Lusk said. The safest bicycle systems, such as cycle tracks, are built because forceful advocates lobby transportation officials, but this takes volunteer time and knowledge about bicycle design options, she said. “This research was intended to give residents in Roxbury a voice.”
Listen to an interview with Anne Lusk on This Week in Health: How can we make biking safer and easier?
Read a June 6, 2017 Streetsblog USA article: Boston Survey Suggests Approaches to Bikeway Design That Will Appeal More to People of Color
Learn more
Read a May 2, 2017 Harvard Crimson article: After Fatal Crashes, Cantabrigians Debate Bike Lanes
Read a September 2016 Fox News article: Bike lanes are a sound public health investment
Read a WBUR September 2015 article: Cyclists Call For Greater Barriers On Boston StreetsNatalia Dyer is straddling two worlds right now.
In one, she’s a 19-year-old student at NYU — she’s studying at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she explains her focus as “looking at semiotics, language, and art and how they interact with each other.” But in the other, she’s one of the stars of Stranger Things, the Netflix show that blends the great high school films of the ‘80s with the horror movies from the same decade — oh, and includes a terrifying monster from an alternate reality known as the Upside Down.
Her character, older sister Nancy Wheeler, has a lot to deal with. High school is never easy; imagine what it would be like if your best friend and your brother’s best friend both went missing. And imagine navigating college while also planning to film the second season of a hit show.
Which reality is the Upside Down? That’s for you to decide. And so far, Natalia and Nancy are both handling it all just fine. Teen Vogue caught up with the actress to talk about how her character turns a classic ‘80s trope on its head, what she’s learned from costar Winona Ryder, and what she hopes to explore when we return to Hawkins, Indiana.
Teen Vogue: What initially drew you to the character Nancy?
Natalia Dyer: I see some similarities to her in high school and me in high school — just the way that she straddles groups. I was always a floater. I had a lot of different social groups, always trying to figure out where [I] really fit in. … As her character developed, she ended up just everything I could hope for — really, just, cool — and I think she's turning into a really strong, self-sufficient girl. … That's credit to the Duffers for being great writers, and [I] hope to get more of that in season two.
TV: It feels like the show is definitely driven by female characters. How does it feel to be a part of that?
ND: Right? Between Winona and Millie, it's cool to see strong leading ladies. They're very cool parts to play, and you don't find them everywhere. You usually find a girl-next-door kind of thing.
I think what I really like [about Nancy] is she doesn't just stay the love interest. Of course, there's this whole love triangle thing that people are very interested in, but she has goals and drive and she's on a mission.
TV: The older sister character is such a mainstay trope in ‘80s movies — Jeannie in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Lisa in Dirty Dancing, for example. But Nancy sort of flips the script. Have you watched a lot of '80s movies prior to taking on the role?
ND: I had never seen the classics with Molly Ringwald, like Pretty in Pink or Sixteen Candles, or '80s horror, like Poltergeist, Close Encounters, and Nightmare on Elm Street. I went back and watched all of those. It's a different kind of movie, for sure. That was fun, going back in time.
I think the show does a lot of that: picking certain archetypes from the '80s and delving deeper into the realness of those characters, and making them more human and more complex, and really exploring the relationships and not necessarily just the plot line.
TV: What is it like to be working with the Duffers? Do you get to help develop Nancy?
ND: We definitely talk and just hang out. They're super cool and super approachable. They do ask for our opinions about what we think and what we might think could happen and [where] we think the character [is] going. I trust the writers of the show to make a really good arc. They're very open to collaborating, I think, which is a gift.Drugs that feature acetaminophen, such as Tylenol, may be quite good at helping people get through aches and pains, but they might also make them less sensitive to the pain or suffering of others.
In a new study, researchers from Ohio State University found that individuals who took painkillers featuring acetaminophen – an ingredient found in popular over-the-counter drugs such as Tylenol, Sudafed, Vicks and hundreds of others – were less likely to empathize with other people’s pain than those who did not take the drug.
“These findings suggest other people’s pain doesn’t seem as big of a deal to you when you’ve taken acetaminophen,” Dominik Mischkowski of the National Institutes of Health, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Acetaminophen can reduce empathy as well as serve as a painkiller.”
Popular painkiller increases risk of ADHD in children, study finds http://t.co/wNGa5yhvFB — RT America (@RT_America) February 25, 2014
Researchers said they don’t currently know why exactly acetaminophen acts this way on people, but that the results have important implications for everyday life that can be concerning. Roughly 52 million adults in the US use some kind of medicine featuring this ingredient every week.
“Empathy is important,” said Baldwin Way, another co-author of the study. “If you are having an argument with your spouse and you just took acetaminophen, this research suggests you might be less understanding of what you did to hurt your spouse’s feelings.”
To discover these results, researchers conducted experiments involving college students. In one, 40 students were given a drink featuring 1,000 mg of acetaminophen, while another 40 were given a drink that didn’t have the ingredient at all. The drug was given an hour to take effect, and the students were then told stories about people who experienced pain, including but not limited to being cut to the bone by a knife and losing a loved one.
Students were then asked to rate the pain experienced by the people in the stories. Those who took the drink featuring acetaminophen rated the pain as less severe than those who didn’t.
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In another experiment, students were hit with four two-second blasts of white noise and asked to rate how unpleasant they were, as well as how unpleasant others may think they are. Those who took acetaminophen were less bothered by the noise – and also thought it would be less unpleasant for others.
Finally, a third experiment involved students who watched two people in a group of three exclude the third person from a game. Those who had taken acetaminophen rated that excluded person’s hurt feelings as less painful than those who hadn’t taken the drug.
“In this case, the participants had the chance to empathize with the suffering of someone who they thought was going through a socially painful experience,” Way said in a statement. “Still, those who took acetaminophen showed a reduction in empathy. They weren’t as concerned about the rejected person’s hurt feelings.”
The findings are not all that surprising, since a 2004 study showed that the part of the brain activated when someone is experiencing pain is the same part that’s activated when they try to empathize with another person’s pain. However, the researchers said that more study is needed to learn more about acetaminophen’s effects, and they also want to determine whether another painkilling ingredient ‒ ibuprofen, the main ingredient in Advil ‒ creates the same results.A Florida zookeeper known to her colleagues as the “Tiger Whisperer’’ died after she was attacked by a rare species of big cat Friday.
Stacey Konwiser, lead tiger keeper at the Palm Beach Zoo, was killed by a 13-year-old Malayan tiger while she worked with him in an area off-limits to the public.
“She loved tigers,’’ zoo spokeswoman Naki Carter told the Palm Beach Post. “You don’t get into this business without the love for the animals and understanding the danger that’s involved.
“I kind of referred to her as a tiger whisperer,” she added.
“They spoke to each other in a language that only they could understand. And I can’t put into words or make you understand for anyone who didn’t know Stacey how much she loved these tigers and how much this zoo family loved her.”
Her husband, Jeremy, is a trainer at the zoo.
Zoo colleagues tranquilized the tiger and had to wait until the drugs took effect to reach Konweiser.
There are fewer than 250 Malayan tigers left in the world and the zoo participates in a breeding program, Carter said.6 years ago
Washington (CNN) – Making an argument for overhauling the nation's immigration system Friday to a crowd of conservative activists, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush claimed immigrants were "more fertile" and thus a great benefit to American society.
His remark appeared to be an inarticulate reference to immigrants' fertility rates, which data show are higher than native-born Americans.
"Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans over the last 20 years. Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity," Bush said at the annual Faith and Freedom conference in the nation's capital.
He prefaced his remarks with an analysis of America's demographic struggles, saying that the rate of Americans entering retirement couldn't be sustained by the current size of the workforce. Economists have long warned that government programs for seniors like Social Security and Medicare face long-term funding problems.
Last year, trustees projected Social Security could pay promised benefits in full through 2036, after which the program could only afford to pay 77% of them. Social Security has already begun paying out more in benefits than it takes in from workers' payroll taxes.
Bush argued Friday the problem lay in an imbalance between working Americans paying taxes and the number of older Americans – living longer – who have been promised government support in their retirement.
"We're going to have fewer workers taking care of a larger number of people the country has a social contract with to be able to allow them to retire with dignity and purpose," Bush said. "We cannot do that with the fertility rates that we have in our country. We're below break-even today."
Part of the solution, he said, was encouraging more legal immigration that would add people to the workforce, thereby creating more payroll tax revenue.
"The one way that we can rebuild the demographic pyramid is to fix a broken immigration system to allow for people to come and learn English and play by our rules, to embrace our values and to pursue their dreams in our country with a vengeance to create more opportunities for all of us," said Bush, a longtime proponent for comprehensive immigration reform.
"This is a conservative idea," he continued. "If we do this we will rebuild our country in a way that will allow us to grow. If we don't do it we will be in decline, since productivity of this country is dependent upon young people who are equipped to work hard."
Bush, unlike many Republicans, has backed a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants, provided they pay fines and learn |
a magistrate’s son from Rouen who became Pierre Corneille, of a boy from Valenciennes named Antoine Watteau.
This confidence in the uniqueness and the supremacy of the capital was reinforced by Napoleon, and by the whole imagery and style of French neoclassicism. It continued to be ratified right through the nineteenth century, up to World War I. The drift of economic history, and the drift of population, fed it, too. France was changing from a nation of countrymen to one of city-dwellers. By 1851 the urban population outnumbered the rural for the first time in France and England. By the 1860s this scheme of opposites—the superiority of the city to the provinces, the hostility of the provinces to the city—was set to become one of the axioms of the modernist creed, and hence of culture itself.
THE IDEA of an avant-garde was born in the nineteenth century, and it was linked to city life. Cities inflicted rapid change on human life. The country stood for slow change, or none at all. The provinces, la France profonde, were inherently conservative; Paris, inherently radical. This image of the dynamic capital set against the torpid provinces was tied into all the main cities of modernism—Moscow and Leningrad, Vienna and Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, New York. But Paris was the place where it was first seen as a great issue. “The interior is going to die,” complained Edmond de Goncourt in 1891, looking at the demolition crews. “Life threatens to become public. I am a stranger to what is coming, to these new boulevards, implacable in their straight lines, which no longer evoke the world of Balzac, which make one think of some American Babylon of the future.”
In this new Babylon, private life gets turned inside out by a new sense of public space. The café and the boulevard are stages that turn life into spectacle. Old social rankings weaken and new ones have to be named by artists—by Degas and Manet, for instance, connoisseurs of the gesture and the passing moment, tracing the fabric of slippages and pretensions. The art of the new Paris, capital of modernism, is fascinated by social ambiguity, with the freedom to make up one’s own life.
The idea of the capital city helped to breed two of the most durable elements in the artistic avant-garde: the sense of not having a fixed self, of being free to invent; and the idea of the artist as subversive. These combined to raise two chief themes of modernist self-awareness in art: disconnection and loss, on the one hand—the loss of a secure social past, of a parental tradition; but on the other hand, artistic self-emancipation. Exchange of information was to the modernist capital what the contemplation of nature was to the eighteenth century. By the end of the 1920s the capital had become a machine designed to contemplate itself, to fill the world with images of itself.
Likewise, modern painting and sculpture were hugely affected by the crowding of resources in the great city. Art has to feed on art. The center would not send things to you—you had to go to it, like Picasso going to Paris from Barcelona in 1900. The forms of fin-de-siècle Paris were to modernism what the marbles of Rome had been to classicism: think only of the Eiffel Tower, or of what Picasso and Braque, in their Cubist paintings, did with the texture of signs and reflections seen in the new Paris street, the billboards, the ads, the newspapers, all the mass-produced imagery of an industrial world. There was no such thing as rural Constructivism or pastoral Futurism. And Paris was the dream city of Surrealism, too.
This fixation on the idea of the capital was carried over to New York City. Forty years ago Manhattan was the capital of change—the Rome of instability. “Tomorrow’s world—today!” The motto of the 1939 New York World’s Fair was also that of America’s growing new-culture industry. Europe, with its more fixed orders, might resist change, thereby creating one kind of avantgardism, in opposition to authoritative culture. But America embraced the new, because its enshrined social and technological myth was one of progress. With a little prodding, it was willing to embrace almost any “radical” cultural change as therapeutic. Its cultural industry was announcing fresh, temporarily unnerving aesthetic changes and telescoping the future into the present. What American was really going to want an academy? Who was afraid of the future? In America the new was strong, tradition (relatively) weak.
Much European modernism, notably Constructivism, had taken its stand on millenarian hope. Abstract art was imagined as the final style, the end of history, in which all tensions and contradictions would be resolved—a religious fantasy at root, like Marx’s fantasy of the withering away of the state after the dictatorship of the proletariat. The tyranny of the past could be counteracted by an equal and opposite reign of the future, by an avant-garde forever gazing ahead to utopian prospects that always recede. But this was not congenial to Americans. Here, avant-gardism embraced a more businesslike model of novelty and diversity, the fast obsolescence of products, the conquest of new markets.
IN THE overcrowded art scene of the 1980s, this would accelerate to the point of hysteria. In the 1950s and 1960s, when there were fewer artists, collectors, and museums, the differences between New York's new-art environment and the “classical” European avant-garde circa 1900-30 were perhaps not obvious, although they certainly became obvious with Pop art. The American idea of avant-garde activity became competitive and inflationary, swollen with excess claims for itself. It still is; but the claims are largely hollow, and the reaction against them, once the false euphoria of the 1980s wears off, will be harsh. In the main, it was a low, dishonest decade for art, American art especially, and part of its dishonesty lay in the pretense that the idea of the “vanguard” still had some relation to aesthetic and ethical values.
Perhaps one of the positive results of the 1980s will be finally to clear our minds of the cant of cultural empire, of nostalgia for the lost imperial center. Under the present circumstances, a great artist can just as easily—and unexpectedly—emerge in Hungary or Australia as in New York. One may bet that in the 1990s the necessary reconstruction work on the strip-mined sites of late modernism will be done in Britain and in Europe, not in the United States. And even there one should not expect too much, or expect it too soon.Houston City Council, just two months removed from Hurricane Harvey, will consider Wednesday whether to consent to the creation of a municipal utility district on the site of the recently closed Pine Crest Golf Club for the construction of homes in a floodplain.
The entire 151-acre site is a flood plain, with its center in the Brickhouse Gully floodway and much of the tract sitting within the 100-year floodplain; the southwest corner of the tract is in the 500-year floodplain.
Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Meritage Homes announced last May that it planned to build hundreds of single-family homes on the site at Clay and Gessner in a master-planned community to be called Spring Brook Village. The finished project is expected to include some 800 houses, with prices ranging from the high $200,000s to the mid-$500,000s.
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Council will consider the approval of a MUD to develop roads, water, sewer and drainage infrastructure.
The proposal comes to council just one week after it approved $10 million to buy out 60 flood-prone homes, including some about three miles downstream from the proposed development, and two months after Harvey flooded thousands of homes in Houston and Harris County.
Councilwoman Brenda Stardig, who represents the area, said in a letter to Mayor Sylvester Turner that she supports the creation of the utility district based on information about "restrictions and commitments" provided by MetroNational officials. MetroNational is selling the land to Meritage for the development.
Meritage Homes's Houston division president Kyle Davison said when the subdivision plan was announced that the firm seeks to "create a community that provides a unique sense of arrival and lifestyle not currently available in Houston."Will Smith will be playing in a lead role as Deadshot in the upcoming super-villain movie Suicide Squad. The highly anticipated film features an all-star cast and is the third film installment of the DC Expanded Universe.
Smith spoke in a recent interview with Beats 1 Radio to promote his music career and also talked about his work on Suicide Squad. He revealed that Jared Leto, who is portraying the Joker, is a method actor. Method actors are notorious for driving their co-stars mad, as they stay in character during the entire movie production, even when they are not filming. Other famous method actors include Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp, James Franco, and Anne Hathaway.
Smith went on to say the following:
“I’ve never actually met Jared Leto. So we worked together for 6 months and we’ve never exchanged a word outside of ‘Action!’ and ‘Cut!’ We’ve never said ‘Hello,’ we’ve never said ‘Good day.’ I’ve only ever spoken to him as Deadshot and him as the Joker. I literally have not met him yet. So, the first time I see him will be ‘Hey, Jared. What’s up?’. Not a single word exchanged off camera. He was all in on the Joker.”
You can watch the full interview below. Smith’s comments on Suicide Squad begins at about the 15:45 mark.
Heath Ledger put in an amazing performance as the last Joker using method acting. Perhaps Leto can pull off a similar spectacular performance as well.
Suicide Squad is scheduled to premiere in theaters on August 5th of 2016.What really caused the value of bitcoin to skyrocket back in April, when the price per BTC shot up to a record high of $266? Was it really because of Cypriot banking controls, where a number of uninsured accounts were lost? Or was it simply the idea that the banking industry could wield so much control over the finances of people that caused bitcoin to go up? Could it be that a wealth transfer effect, where people move from a fiat currency into bitcoin was happening, and continues to do so?
A historical look at prices
Entering the first part of March 2013, the price of bitcoin held in the $30 range. But that didn’t last long: volume caused the price level to move quickly into the $40 range, and it wasn’t long before it was close to $50.
Keep in mind when looking at the following chart that it was 16th March 2013 when it was announced that Cyprus was getting a $10 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. That day was a Saturday, traditionally a slow-moving day for bitcoin exchanges, but you can see the price broke through the $50 barrier during the beginning of the next week.
During this time, Bloomberg Businessweek published an article titled “Fleeing the Euro for Bitcoins”. In it, the author suggested that bitcoin was like an app for avoiding the banking system. Many investors read this and likely considered the possibility of investing in bitcoins. Thus, a wealth transfer effect appeared to be taking place where money was being put into bitcoins.
In the time since, bitcoin has reached new levels of awareness. But that awareness has not been reflected in the price. In fact, the price of a bitcoin has stayed in a more stabilized price support level since the days of March and April.
That’s important to point out since it is volatility that many associate with bitcoin. The sentimental possibility that the price could rise and rise and then drop still exists in people’s minds, which generates a degree of skepticism for the currency in its long term outlook.
It’s entirely plausible that what we’re seeing is a slower version of a wealth transfer effect into bitcoins. The network has an interesting supply-side element to it, as there are early investors and miners who are frequently selling bitcoins.
And there are investors who believe in it more soundly as time goes by. Investor and entrepreneur Roger Ver shared this sentiment with CoinDesk at the Bitcoin 2013 conference in May. When asked about the possible risks in the technical stability of the Bitcoin network, he said that, as time goes by, the threat of such a scenario fades. “There is a risk of that,” Ver acknowledged. “But as every day goes by that there hasn’t been a major catastrophe, [the risks] are lower and lower.”
Indeed, in the days when bitcoin’s price went up and then went back down, it might have been more to do with the growing pains of bitcoin’s largest exchange rather than the network itself. Mt. Gox has experienced a number of problems as one of the most popular exchanges, from hacking attacks to drawing the ire of regulators.
It’s important to see diversity in the bitcoin marketplace, and it appears that bitcoin investors have decided that Bitstamp is a reasonable alternative as an exchange to Mt. Gox. That comes after record highs in volume caused Mt. Gox many problems and got investors thinking about exchange alternatives.
Looking ahead
If historical events are any predictor of future results for bitcoin, it is difficult to dismiss what happened to both bitcoin volume and price earlier this year. It is commonly known in financial circles that investors in stocks and bonds as a result of a credit degrading feel significant wealth transfer effects.
In the case of Cyprus, its own credit rating was downgraded to ‘junk’ status in March of 2012. But it took another year before we saw the events that transpired when the country was provided an influx of cash and capital controls were enacted. Cyrpus’s credit rating was lowered even further in January of 2013, with Moody’s warning that the government there might default outright.
So it is perhaps not inflation, or government control, that dictates a wealth transfer effect into bitcoins as we all witnessed earlier this year. In fact, these pricing swings might actually come from the lack of full faith and credit in governments. Earlier this year, I wrote about a number of countries that would do well by adopting bitcoins, mostly because of either inflation or poor investment options in those countries.
Those are still valid reasons for investing in BTC for citizens of those countries. But it now seems that in hindsight it would be a complete governmental collapse that would fuel increased interest in bitcoins. A loss of faith in a monetary system by a country’s citizens and stakeholders is likely more of a predictor of increased interest in bitcoin.
Countries that are credit risks
So, what are the countries out there today that face big problems in terms of credit risk? Egypt is one country that has had its share of unrest, and it is a place where people have not had faith in their government for some time.
Egypt has put in place capital controls to limit transfers of money outside of the country over the amount of $100,000 according to the US Department of State. A complete collapse of rule of law in Egypt could result in capital flight – if it is even possible to get money out. Recent reports claim that Thailand has declared bitcoin illegal in order to better control capital flight that could happen there as a result of unrest.
What do you think? Is it a loss of faith in governments that causes a wealth transfer effect into bitcoins? What caused the price to spike to $266 in April? Share your views with us in the comments.
Featured Image Source: FlickrWhat we reported The food truck park is the first of its kind to come into Frisco. It opened in October and offers a variety of local food truck vendors. The park also features outdoor games and live music.
The latest Owner Tamme Leff said since opening the food truck park, the response has been better than she had expected. In its first month, Frisco Rail Yard came in eighth in liquor sales within the city, she said.
“There are so many residents that have been here for a long time that really wanted an outdoor venue,” Leff said.
Leff said the deck has been extended and a roof has been placed above the bar.
What’s next In 2017, Leff said Frisco Rail Yard is going to host more events in which a portion of the proceeds will go toward a different local charity. The first event in 2017 will be held around Valentines Day.
There are plans to expand the park by placing a pavilion that would open up the park more and have a separate bar. The expansion would accommodate 125 people.
What we reported When the fine-dining Italian bistro first opened last January in Frisco Square, owner Jeffrey Frankel said he wanted to provide authentic Italian cuisine in Frisco and have guests feel like they have stepped into a restaurant in Boston or Manhattan.
The latest Since opening, Tavolo Italia has added outdoor patio dining, takeout and new specialty drinks.
What’s next In 2017, Frankel said he and his partner are discussing having half price wine nights, wine dinners and Sunday brunches.
What we reported Eggsellent Cafe opened its second location on Sept. 28 in Frisco after the success of the first in Carrollton. The cafe’s menu items include candied pecan crepes, avocado eggs benedict and turkey pesto panini.
The latest Owners Brian and Raymond McGaw said they have received positive community feedback on the Frisco location.
“A lot of people hear about us through word of mouth, which I think is a great testament to our service and our food,” Brian McGaw said.
Did you know Eggsellent Cafe is only open from 7 a.m.-3 p.m. so the menu includes a lot of breakfast and brunch menu items.
What we reported @nerdvana.food+spirits opened in November offering a unique dining experience. The restaurant, which has bits of video game culture spread throughout the dining room and menu, offers contemporary American cuisine.
The latest @nerdvana.food+spirits marketing director Nolan Lee said the Frisco community has been responding to the restaurant’s unique concept.
“As we are a very new concept restaurant, being both fine-dining and celebrating video game culture, a lot of our guests have been eager to discuss their excitement about our restaurant,” Lee said.
What’s next Lee said in 2017 the restaurant will include the addition of brunch and lunch menus.
What we reported Andy’s Frozen Custard opened its first location in October next to Lebanon Trail High School. The ice cream shop gave away free custard a few days before its grand opening in October. The shop is known for its frozen custard mixed with a variety of toppings and candies, as well as malts, milkshakes, soda blends, floats and sundaes.
The latest Owner Eric Reed said the Frisco location is a top performer within the national chain even though the winter months are not necessarily the best time to open a frozen custard shop. Reed said he expects the Frisco location to do well during the spring and summer months.
In 2016, the company opened locations in Grapevine, Lewisville and Carrollton.
What’s next The company plans to open a second Frisco location at Eldorado Parkway and Custer Road.
Reed said the company is hoping to open three to four stores in 2017 in addition to the second Frisco location.
What we reported Frisco Star Cafe opened last May at the location that was formerly Giovanni’s Italian Restaurant, which closed a few months prior. The cafe now offers American dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Menu items include eggs benedict, waffles, chicken-fried steak, burgers and fried jumbo shrimp. A few Italian dishes, including spaghetti and chicken piccata, are also on the menu.
The latest Owner Tony Mehmedi said there are not many restaurants that serve breakfast in Frisco. So when Frisco Star Cafe opened, he said many people were very appreciative.
“I’ve heard a lot of customers describe our restaurant as a hidden gem in Frisco,” Mehmedi said. “For us it means that we’re providing good food and good service. We want to keep pushing forward and for all of our customers to leave these doors happy.”
What’s next Frisco Star Cafe will introduce a new menu in 2017, Mehmedi said.
The new, bigger menu will include new breakfast, lunch and dinner entrees. Some of the new items include Oreo pancakes and a steak and shrimp platter.
Mehmedi also said there are plans for a second location, but he has not determined whether the second location will be in Frisco.August 18, 2014
A Real Syria Policy Starts with Saving Aleppo By Abdulrahman Dadam
As President Barack Obama considers whether to provide forceful assistance to the Syrian democratic resistance forces, one of the last pillars of hope for Syria is dangerously close to falling. My city, Aleppo, just thirty-five miles from Turkey, is the largest city in Syria and it is currently under threat from both the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS, or the Islamic State) and the Assad regime. The city has 7000 years of history and serves as a symbolic center for Syria and the entire Middle East. For the last several years, it has hosted the Syrian resistance, which seeks a real democratic transition and political reform. As the city falls under siege, so does the living spark of the free Syrian resistance.As president of the Free Aleppo Governorate Council, I have worked with the United States and European countries to facilitate the delivery of tons of food and supplies when our people needed them dearly, but wheat and clothing cannot save us any longer. Our Council formed a police force with the help of the West as we struggled to restore law and order, but the influx of bombs and extremists threatens one of the last bastions of moderate civil life. We fight to maintain electricity, water, waste management, medical services, and resources to meet the needs of free Syrians—many of whom have lost so much in the violence. But now, the violence threatens to consume us all. An Assad siege and ISIS invasion can wash away our years of work to preserve Aleppo’s dignity. If the United States continues its current hands-off approach, Aleppo will be lost, and our dream of democratic political progress and stability in Syria may very well be lost with it.Over the past three years, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) helped us defend Aleppo from constant attacks from ISIS and Assad. Thus far, we have held terrorist and regime forces at bay, despite Bashar al-Assad’s relentless barrel bomb attacks and air strikes on civilian areas. While trapped civilians suffer daily bombardments, both ISIS in the northern countryside and the Syrian Army in the south and west of the city squeeze FSA battalions. The telltale signs of an Assad siege have emerged. His forces take steps to cut off supply chains and terrorize the population with bombings. Meanwhile, ISIS advances into our countryside, forcing FSA soldiers to respond to hold strategic areas. Residents take to the streets, begging the FSA to remain in their villages, save their lives, and protect them from ISIS’s signature mass murder, torture, and brutal rape. We have sacrificed much in our fight against these common enemies; we need your help. Our brothers in Deir Ezzor came to the Obama administration with this same warning and call for help several months ago. Unanswered, ISIS invaded their region and established a stronghold in the East, using it to stage attacks on Iraq. ISIS committed countless atrocities in Deir Ezzor since then, including a recent slaughter of 700 people, mostly women and children, belonging to the al-Sheitaat tribe who dared resist ISIS occupation.The fall of Aleppo would precipitate a series of catastrophic events in Syria, further tipping the scales in favor of Assad’s forces and the expansion of ISIS. Without air support and weapons from the United States, we stand little chance to prevent this collapse and sustain our city as a beacon for Syrians engaged in the two-front conflict against both terrorists and the regime.The first step to a strategic partnership with the Syrian resistance for the United States is to help us save Aleppo. The Pentagon and CIA already know which groups they can work with, and President Obama already conveyed a willingness to provide more support. Despite the fact the ISIS is better equipped, better paid, and better fed than us, our moderate brigades in Syria have killed more ISIS soldiers than any other armed group in Iraq or Syria. We have a safety network that ISIS will never have: the support of our local population and our unwavering commitment to protect them. But we need help to keep Aleppo alive. In order to achieve this strategic goal, the United States, Turkey, and other willing states should immediately establish a NATO-enforced no fly zone covering Aleppo and the neighboring Idlib province, with a focus on securing Aleppo city and protecting humanitarian supply chains across the Turkish border.The United States should also provide sufficient heavy military and logistical aid to vetted resistance forces to enable them to defend the city and take the offensive against Assad and ISIS. Only then can Free Syrian forces begin facilitating the return of our displaced civilians, under the protection of air support. As our refugees return, we would welcome the transfer of the Syrian Interim Government from Turkey into northern Syria, setting the stage for legitimate governance and the start of a true political transition. The United States could then help turn the tide by implementing longer-term scalable initiatives to arm and equip vetted resistance forces throughout Syria. This plan would ultimately include arming 50,000 fighters operating in Free Syrian Army battalions. Such support would have a strategic impact on the battlefield in defeating al-Qaeda and ISIS, and force Assad to accept a political arrangement.A strong showing of strategically significant Western support to our Syrian resistance would not only create battlefield gains, it would reinvigorate free Syrians everywhere and spark an expansion in our recruitment of fighters to defeat ISIS and Assad. We do not want to be ruled by brutal Islamists any more than we want to be ruled by a ruthless dictator. Provided with military support, we can succeed in our ongoing fight against both. For us, it is victory or death.Karissa Warkentin calls it the “best Christmas present ever.”
The Manitoba mother of five said she learned Tuesday that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada has reversed its decision and approved the family’s application for permanent residency.
“We’re still kind of in shock – a little bit of disbelief. Like, are you sure this is it?” she told Global News.
Karissa and Jon Warkentin received national attention following a Global News investigation that exposed serious problems with the way Immigration Canada handles permanent residency applications for persons with disabilities.
WATCH: Advocates demand Trudeau end ‘unjust’ immigration law, call it a ‘black eye’ for Canada
The couple’s six-year-old daughter, Karalynn, was diagnosed with epilepsy a little more than a year after the family moved from Colorado to Canada to fulfill a life-long dream of running a hunting and fishing lodge they’d purchased.
Despite having invested more than $600,000 in the rural community of Waterhen, Man. — population 142 — and having the full support of their local school board, municipal council and the province, the family’s application for permanent residency was initially denied. The federal government said the cost of caring for Karalynn’s medical conditions would place “excessive demand” on Canada’s publicly funded health and social services.
READ MORE: Canada rejects hundreds of immigrants based on incomplete data, Global News investigation finds
But after a Global News profile of the family revealed potential problems with the government’s decision, Immigration Canada decided to reopen their case. The family was then allowed to submit new documents to the government — evidence that eventually led officials to reverse their decision.
“It feels like they are acknowledging that she has value — whether she was born perfect or not. They’re recognizing that their policy is probably pretty outdated and that people that are born with disabilities have just as much to offer as those that are born without,” Karissa said.
“As parents, you’re always questioning yourself — was there something I did wrong? Did I eat the wrong food, was I too stressed when I was pregnant?” she said. “And when an outside source questions your motives — your value as a human being and your child’s value – it can really start to cause some self-doubt.”
WATCH: Mother in disbelief family could be sent home by Immigration Canada (July 2017)
The family’s attorney, Alastair Clarke, said support from their local community and sustained media attention were two of the biggest factors leading to the government’s complete 180.
“I agree with the Warkentin family that, to a certain extent, this decision means they have been vindicated,” Clarke said. “This decision was a group effort and I’m glad that in the end [Immigration Canada] was able to make the right decision.”
READ MORE: Immigration Canada ‘breaking the law,’ when denying some disabled applicants, say legal experts
In support of the family’s application, Clarke submitted more than 500 pages to the Department of Justice, who was reviewing the case.
These files included reports challenging the reasons why the family was originally denied.
“New medical evidence supported our initial submissions that the medical conditions for [Karalynn] were exaggerated and that the initial medical reports were not correct,” Clarke said.
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While Clarke welcomes the decision, saying it’s overwhelmingly positive, he says it’s unfortunate families with disabled children have to go through this process at all.
“When I speak to my colleagues at the Department of Justice, especially when there are children involved, there’s a lot of sympathy,” he said. “Hopefully the Minister will realize that the current procedures do not follow Canadian values and that future applicants will not be subject to this kind of review.”
Government considers scrapping ‘discriminatory’ provision
Despite the happy outcome for the Warkentin’s, anyone with a disability or serious medical condition applying to immigrate to Canada could still be denied due to their health – this includes children with intellectual disabilities and behavioural issues.
However, last month Canada’s Immigration Minister, Ahmed Hussen, said his department is reviewing the “excessive demand” policy and that it could be repealed.
“All options are on the table,” Hussen said. “We could eliminate it completely.”
READ MORE: Canada’s immigration minister considers scrapping ‘discriminatory’ law that rejects immigrants
The comments were made before a parliamentary committee that is studying excessive demand and medical inadmissibility.
“This review is necessary and long overdue,” Hussen said. “The current excessive demand provision policy simply does not align with our country’s values on the inclusion of persons with disabilities.”
The committee is expected to table their recommendations to Parliament sometime this month. Possible options could include making changes — such as increasing the financial limit used to deny applicants or exempting certain groups of people — or repealing the provisions altogether.
Karissa, meanwhile, says she’s sorry for anyone forced to go through this system, especially those whose applications were denied. But now that her family’s application has been accepted, it’s time to celebrate.
“This is the best Christmas present ever,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go play some hockey and make some butter tarts just to celebrate my newfound Canadianism.”A few in the I/O psychology scientific community have lambasted me on these pages for suggesting that behavioral event interviewing (BEI) might not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Their comments seem akin to climatologists who discredit anyone who suggests an alternate cause of global warming. To stir the pot even further, we’re holding a public debate on this topic on March 25, 2010, with a bunch of ERE authors (Dr. John Sullivan, Dr. Charles Handler), a BEI luminary Dr. Tom Janz, and your humble recruiter/reporter. This will be a slugfest to finish going all 15 rounds, so you won’t want to miss the excitement.
I’ll lay out my hand and concerns in this article. We’ll address them in the upcoming debate. To get started here are a few of the big problems I have with BEI:
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Is a structured BEI all that predictive? According to the oft-cited Schmidt and Hunter Validity and Utility of Selection Methods study, the correlation between a structured interview and on-the-job performance is.51, meaning only 25% (squaring the correlation coefficient) of the person’s performance can be predicted by the interview. This means that 75% is unexplained. Wouldn’t any structured interview give the same results? Also, what’s the predictive value of an unstructured BEI? Past performance, not past behavior, is the best predictor of future performance. The same study clearly refers to past performance, not past behavior, as the best predictor of on-the-job success. Where’s the research that suggests that past behavior is superior to past performance? As a case in point, I conducted a virtual performance-based interview and assessment comparing Obama vs. McCain before the 2008 election using our 10-Factor Talent Scorecard. If you check it out, the predictions were right on the mark. Using behavior as the criteria, the predictions would have been lopsided. Why is the criteria used to promote someone from within more predictive than hiring someone from the outside? It seems logical that the methodology companies used to promote those who are successful, which is based on their performance, should be applied to those hired from the outside. If so, this would mean emphasizing a track record of past performance doing comparable work in comparable situations combined with the person successfully taking on bigger roles with less experience. This seems like it would be a better predictor than using behaviors and KSAs. BEI misses the forest for the trees. The big goal here is to maximize quality of hire, not conduct accurate assessments. While a professional interview and accurate assessment is part of this, more important is having a pool of highly qualified prospects who are willing to go through the assessment process and accept a fair offer of employment if given. This requires great sourcing, great recruiting skills, and strong negotiation skills, plus managers who are strong leaders who can attract top people to work on their team. I haven’t seen any science that looks at hiring from this end-to-end perspective. If no one is in the forest, can you hear a tree fall? This is a pretty weak analogy, but the point is if no one uses the BEI properly, how can you consider it useful? Most managers find it too clinical, candidates can practice ahead of time, and the best candidates are turned off by it. Plus lack of enforcement and uniformity weakens the pretty weak predictive value even further. The guidance on making the assessment seems to be limited. What’s a good answer? I’ve looked at dozens of BEI rating sheets and each one is relatively subjective. Statistical process control techniques would suggest that wide variances on any factor are indicative of a process that’s out of control. SPC is a valid scientific technique used in six sigma, but seems to be ignored by those in the I/O psychology community. Where is the scientific evidence that companies that use BEI outperform their peers? Wouldn’t this be the big Kahuna? In Jim Collin’s Good to Great, there is no indication that BEI was why they hired stronger people. Could it be that there is something else, other than accurate assessments, that drive quality of hire? There are other techniques that could increase accuracy and improve quality of hire. In Hire With Your Head, I make a strong case that a mashup consisting of a list of pre-hire performance objectives, a few in-depth performance-based interviewing questions, an evidence-based ranking system, strong recruiting and sourcing skills, plus involved hiring managers is the key to maximizing quality of hire. Why don’t the I/O psychologists seek out better techniques, rather than relying on outdated less-reliable methods? One way would be to model all of the managers who consistently hire great people and use this as the framework of a new and better process. BEI is counterproductive by eliminating the top half from consideration. Since the BEI process assumes the person has 100% or more of the experience required, it eliminates those high-potential people who get more done with less experience from consideration. The best people are looking for a career move involving job stretch, learning, and growth. By forcing everyone through the same funnel, some of the best people voluntarily opt out early, since they find the process demeaning, clinical, and one-directional. By inadvertent default then, the only people considered are those with all of the basic qualifications and those looking for a lateral transfer — aka, the bottom-half. The BEI is logically flawed. A correlation between two factors doesn’t mean that one is the cause of the other. For example, just because someone has all of the qualifications and behaviors, doesn’t mean the person will be a top performer, even if all top performers have the same qualifications and behaviors. This is similar to the logical “asserting the consequent” argument. Clearly we’d all agree that there is a high correlation between the number of troops required to win a big battle, but having more troops in the field doesn’t mean they’re going to cause the size of the battle. While having the behaviors might necessary, it’s certainly not sufficient. The relationship between the manager might be a problem. The person might not be motivated to do the work, even if competent. The person might not fit with the team, or company culture, or might not want to work with less-than-current technology. These factors, among others, represents the 75% not covered by the BEI.
Now all of this might be the ramblings of an old-line recruiter who has been in the field too long. On the other hand, maybe the scientists never had to close a top performer for a troubled company with limited funding, and then guarantee the person would actually deliver top-notch performance for at least a year. Maybe they should try to do this and then modify their science accordingly. If they do, I suspect they’ll come to the same conclusion that BEI doesn’t improve quality of hire, and in many cases actually causes it to decline.Turn to the nation's most objective and informative daily environmental news resource to learn how the United States and key players around the world are responding to the environmental...
By Dean Scott and Anthony Adragna
May 18 --It is a question foremost in the minds of international climate negotiators and Obama administration negotiators alike: What exactly will the Republican-controlled Senate do to undercut end-of-year Paris climate talks?
With less than seven months until the nations of the world gather in hopes of reaching the first truly global climate accord, neither Republicans opposed to the deal nor supporters of President Barack Obama appear to know the answer to that question.
(Click image to enlarge.)
Republican leaders are in agreement on one issue: The Senate will have a say in any deal that commits the U.S. to actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions. “[The deal] needs to be reviewed, scrutinized and looked at and I think Congress has a role to play in that,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), a member of Republican leadership, told Bloomberg BNA.
“The congressional oversight role is an important one and I think it’s one we need to exercise,” Thune said. In a global climate accord involving nearly 200 nations, “you’re talking about major agreements that are going to have tremendous consequences in a lot of ways, but for sure economically” |
twice the maximum incubation period for Ebola virus disease. Ebola may still crop up sporadically in the years to come, Bausch says, but “I think ultimately we will eventually get a handle on this, wait 42 days and call this outbreak over, so it is not fair to consider it endemic.”
Yet grappling with how to get answers to this endemic question through knowable, testable research is murky at best. As Bausch says, “What’s the difference between a big long outbreak that takes a long time to control and endemic disease?” The very characteristics of Ebola that make it so lethal also simultaneously block it from becoming a strong candidate to be endemic. Since Ebola kills pretty readily, for example, it doesn’t have the opportunity like HIV to pass itself on. And there’s no chronic carrier of this virus who appears to harbor the virus even after it has been eliminated from a community. Ebola can take months to be cleared from certain protected sites in the body like the gonads, but that’s not like HIV, which has true abilities to survive for years in the body and mount a resurgence if a patient stops taking medications to suppress the amount of virus circulating in the body.
Genetic sequencing can allow scientists to start answering questions about where the virus is coming from – say if Ebola was clearly just being passed from one person to the next or if the virus was being repeatedly introduced to communities from an outside source, likely an animal. One such study published in Science this summer concluded that so far Ebola circulating in Sierra Leone does not appear to have originated from multiple reintroductions of the virus. Rather, by sequencing 99 Ebola virus genome sequences of the majority of Ebola patients in Sierra Leone this past spring the group found that all the cases were traceable to a “patient zero” of Ebola in the community. Yet if there was continuous reintroduction of the same strain of the virus from animals to humans there may not be significant enough mutations to detect what was happening and it could appear to be a continuous chain of transmission, cautions Gary Kobinger, head of the special pathogens program at the Public Health Agency of Canada. And if the virus, hypothetically, somehow adapted to the human population and became less aggressive over time then perhaps that would provide an early sign of endemicity, he says. But tracing that evolution would prove quite challenging. Still, top Ebola experts are not ready to start calling Ebola endemic, at least not yet.
One thing is certain: If Ebola is still persisting a year from now, “The whole response will need to be integrated back into the health system,” says Dye. Although changes to the Ebola response – like creating isolation units at hospitals in west Africa – are under active discussion, no plans are being made right now because the focus still needs to be on the emergency response, he says. Yet if Ebola does become truly endemic – perpetuating itself through the human population – that’s what would be needed. For starters, local health infrastructure would have to be significantly shored up to face such a harsh and long-standing threat. And health officials would need to be ready to immediately transport Ebola patients from one part of the country to isolation wards in another part of the country, says Dye.
The end result would need to look much more like the health care system in the U.S. or western Europe. In those locations dangerous infectious viruses appear relatively rarely and affected patients are placed in special isolation units at hospitals. That setup would be a significant financial and logistical undertaking for African nations, vastly different from the stand-alone specialized Ebola treatment units that currently accommodate hundreds of patients at a time. Gregory Taylor, the chief public health officer of Canada, states that the public health infrastructure build-up would also mean expanding west African lab capacities, something Canada has already been assisting with. And if low levels of Ebola manage to persist throughout 2015, Dye says, such infrastructure actions will need to be taken. After all, underestimating the power of Ebola to spread across west Africa is how the virus was able to flourish in the first place.Archaeologists have found evidence linking hemp and its psychoactive counterpart marijuana back to 8,000 BC when agriculture and hemp textile industries began in Europe and Asia [Medical Cannabis]. By 3725 BC, Shen Nung Pen Ts'ao of China wrote of cannabis in the world's first medical text and Ts'ao declared cannabis as “a superior herb.”[Schaffer, C.] Cannabis sativa have been used for medicinal purposes for 4,800 years and has been prescribed for over 250 illnesses and diseases, for example: Asthma, insomnia, often used to treat pain in childbirth, migraines, used for AIDS and Cancer patients allowing them to have an appetite, glaucoma, relieves anorexia in Alzheimer's patients, mental health, it can be used as suppositories for relieving the pain of hemorrhoids, and depression are just a few examples of the many conditions that cannabis alleviates.[Medical Cannabis] Recent studies in Italy have shown that a chemical found in marijuana, inhibits the growth of cancer cells in rats. THC pills, or Marinol, synthetic THC, are made with the ingredients necessary for the specific treatment of those disease, or illness, but some patients cannot swallow these pills, due to their condition and that is when smoking the plant is applied. There are countless other examples of marijuana’s beneficial medicinal properties, but here are two final and thought provoking examples to contemplate over: Medicinal marijuana is used to treat alcohol addiction and other drugs such as heroin and is used to treat post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in war veterans.Jon Cryer enjoyed a very long run on the hit CBS series, "Two and a Half Men." And now that it's over, he's telling the whole truth about his career. Ben Tracy sat him down for this Sunday Profile:
"It seems that in your life there are three things that people always get wrong about you," said Ben Tracy. "They think you're Jewish. They think you're gay. And they think you are Matthew Broderick."
"Yes," laughed Cryer. "I'm a Jewish, gay Matthew Broderick."
In fact, Jon Cryer is not any of those things. What he is, is an actor coming off the biggest success of his career.
New American Library
For 12 seasons he played Alan Harper on the hit CBS sitcom, "Two and a Half Men." The show ended its run in February, and Cryer decided to write a memoir, "So That Happened" (New American Library), about all the things that have happened to him during 30 years in show business -- some more R rated than PG.
The book's dedication reads: "To my beautiful children, Charlie and Daisy. (Please don't read the part about the prostitute.)"
"Yes, well, I thought I'd give 'em a little heads-up," Cryer laughed. "You know, as my five-year-old is going, 'Oh, okay, this isn't "Dr. Seuss," Dad.' I really felt like I had lived a very sort of sheltered life, and mostly had pretty good experiences in show business. But I had forgotten about some of the weirdness. And thankfully, in the process of writing the book, all of that weirdness came back."
Cryer, who is about to turn 50, was bit by the acting bug early. He grew up in New York City, and both of his parents were actors.
"When you're a little kid and you're backstage seeing all these crazy, magical people floating in and out of your life, it can't help but cast a spell on you," he said. "I wanted to be a part of that."
He spent his summers at theater camp where he honed his skills.
Cryer made it to the bright lights of Broadway in 1983. In both "Torch Song Trilogy" and "Brighton Beach Memoirs," he replaced another actor to whom he had an uncanny resemblance: Matthew Broderick.
And then came John Hughes' 1986 classic, "Pretty in Pink." Cryer played Phillip Dale, also known as "Duckie," and is forever remembered for this moment:
Tracy asked, "How much of you was in that character?"
"Duckie was the guy I wanted to be in high school," Cryer said. "I was a theater geek at a science geek school. So I did not fit in. I wore leg warmers. I'm not proud of it! I wish that I had been as extroverted and sure of myself as Duckie was. But that was not me."
His chemistry on- and off-camera with co-stars Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy was a bit frosty.
"Molly and Andrew were very reserved people, and I'm a very outgoing person," Cryer said. "That could've worked out great, you know, that dynamic. But it didn't!" he laughed. "I think they were irritated by me from Day One "
Ringwald had wanted someone else to play Duckie: Robert Downey Jr. And the original ending of the film, in which Duckie gets the girl, had to be re-shot because test audiences didn't buy it -- and even booed.
Cryer thinks he may know why: "I've been an effeminate heterosexual dork my whole life!" he said. "It's confusing. It's confusing to women, it's confusing to men. I understand."
After "Pretty in Pink" came a series of film flops, including one Cryer thought would be a blockbuster. He played Lex Luther's nephew in "Superman 4." It bombed.
Even Cryer's grandmother didn't like it. "Yes, that was the sword that really hurt."Fogbows
Sunlight making a fogbow follows the same recipe as that for a rainbow. Light enters a water sphere, reflects once from the opposite side and leaves in several directions almost back towards the sun. The difference is that large (1-2mm diameter) raindrops give rainbows while small fog droplets (0.01 - 0.2mm diameter) produce fogbows.
The smaller droplets are only 10-100 times the size of wavelengths of visible light and wave effects are therefore significant. At each surface the light waves are scattered in many directions and these outgoing scattered waves overlap and interfere - in other parlance they are diffracted. The result is a broad and diffuse circle of light rather than the sharper rainbow. However, rainbows themselves are not innocent of diffraction effects - witness their supernumerary fringes.
Supernumerary fringes
Mixing (badly!) ray and wave optics, for any one deflection angle there are two possible ray paths through the drop. Now think of each of those ray paths as carrying waves. The two waves have different path lengths. When they overlap and interfere some directions reinforce, in others the waves cancel. The result - supernumerary fringes.
The fringe spacing depends on droplet size and when there is a range of sizes the fringes get washed out. here the droplets must have had closely similar sizes.The father of a fallen soldier said President Donald Trump offered to send him $25,000 during a condolence call, but that he hasn’t received a check.
Chris Baldridge’s son, Army Cpl. Dillon Baldridge, died in Afghanistan in June, the Washington Post reports. Baldridge says Trump called a few weeks later and they spoke for about 15 minutes. When Baldridge noted he was struggling to make ends meet, while his ex-wife was expected to receive a $100,000 death gratuity from the Pentagon, Trump offered to write a check himself.
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“He said, ‘I’m going to write you a check out of my personal account for $25,000,’ and I was just floored,” Baldridge told the Post. “I could not believe he was saying that, and I wish I had it recorded because the man did say this. He said, ‘No other president has ever done something like this,’ but he said, ‘I’m going to do it.’”
When Baldridge later received a condolence letter, he says, “I opened it up and read it, and I was hoping to see a check in there, to be honest. I know it was kind of far-fetched thinking. But I was like, ‘Damn, no check.’ Just a letter saying ‘I’m sorry.’”
A White House spokesperson told the Post, “The check has been sent. It’s disgusting that the media is taking something that should be recognized as a generous and sincere gesture, made privately by the President, and using it to advance the media’s biased agenda.”
Contact us at editors@time.com.During yesterday’s I/O keynote, Google announced a rather fantastic new feature coming to the Chromecast: soon, your friends won’t need to be connected to your WiFi to be able to send things to your TV. As long as they’re in the same room, it should just work.
But how?
While Google’s Rishi Chandra mentioned yesterday that the new WiFi-less pairing system used a “variety of technologies” to determine when you’re near a Chromecast unit, he didn’t really breakdown what those technologies might be. Bluetooth? Some proprietary protocol that Google had cooked up? Magic?
Turns out, it’s closest to that last one — or at least, it’ll probably seem like magic to anyone without superhuman hearing.
Thanks to a post-Keynote presentation, we now have a better idea of how it’ll work: ultrasonic soundwaves, inaudible to the human ear.
Once you’ve configured your Chromecast to allow nearby devices to connect, the Chromecast will push a uniquely generated ultrasonic sound through your TV’s speakers. Encoded in that soundwave is everything a phone needs to know to get paired up. You can’t hear these sounds, but your phone can.
Apps using the Chromecast SDK will use your smartphone’s microphone to listen for these soundwaves. Once one is detected, it’ll offer up a Chromecast pairing button just as it would if you were on the same WiFi network.
Sound familiar? Google’s engineers have actually been playing with the idea of ultrasonic networking for at least the last year. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF last September, meanwhile, a company called SlickLogin debuted a method of using ultrasonic sounds for 2-factor authentication without the extra typing. They went on to be acquired just five months later. The buyer? You guessed it: Google.
[Via GigaOm]Behold! I give you the problem of Superman. It’s a problem that has less to do with the character himself and more to with DC Comics, which found itself stuck with a flagship character it thought needed fixing. In trying, it broke him nearly beyond repair.
* * *
The storytelling engine Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel devised for Superman when they created him should be, like their hero, bulletproof. Clark Kent is a mild-mannered reporter hiding his secret identity from the world, including his sharp, competent coworker, who happens to be the woman of his dreams. He’s stuck in a love triangle with himself, between the man he is, and the man he wishes he could be. He’s an immigrant driven not by tragedy but by an unshakable sense of right and wrong and a desire to fix the world for the less fortunate—a battle that can never end. As the famed comics creator Alan Moore wrote:
Almost certainly by instinct rather than by psycho-social analysis, two Cleveland teenagers had crafted a near-perfect and iconic fantasy which spoke to something deeply rooted in the psyche of working America [in the early 1930s] … At his inception, Superman seems very much a representative of the downtrodden working classes his creators hailed from, and a wonderful embodiment of all the dreams and aspirations of the powerless.
This is who the character is at his best: not a walking set of superpowers, but a man fighting for truth and justice to the best of his considerable ability.
Superman was so popular in the 1940s that his comic was adapted into a smash-hit radio show, which itself proved popular enough that it helped bring down parts of the Ku Klux Klan. Before long, he was the biggest comic-book character in the world. But Siegel and Shuster, exploited and cast aside by the company whose fortunes they had made, saw barely a dime of the profits. Away from his creators and under DC’s management, Superman changed from a rabble-rousing populist into a bland icon of the establishment, cycling through the same sets of adventures every few years: a hero with nothing better to do than devise elaborate pranks to play on Lois Lane. Despite the gloriously silly super-science of Silver Age Superman, with its time-travel, transformation rays, and bottled cities, the engine rusted under the hood.
In 1962, the competition arrived. In August of that year, the newly christened Marvel Comics, already humming with hits like The Fantastic Four, debuted Amazing Fantasy #15, the first appearance of Spider-Man. Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, his creators, had reinvented the Superman engine, taking the archetype of the superheroic outsider and making him an underdog through a series of clever tweaks. Where Clark Kent’s romantic life was a game, Peter Parker’s was a soap opera; where Clark’s boss was gruff, Peter’s was a jerk; where Kent was ignored in civilian guise, Parker was actively picked on. Marvel had, in effect, figured out how to supplant Superman. In doing so, they began selling not just to children but also to college students, and eventually to adults. It was a challenge that DC, formerly the dominant comics publisher, had to answer."We'll be doubling our size if all of our plans go through and if we receive the money from Congress in 2011 and then again in 2012," James Jeffrey, the US ambassador in Iraq, said.
He said the staff would increase "from 8,000 plus personnel that we have now to roughly double that by 2012," adding that US forces would make up only a very small part of that number.
"This will be an extraordinarily large embassy with many different functions. Some we took over from USFI (United States Forces in Iraq ) and some of them continuation of the work we are doing now."
Mr Jeffrey said that US military advisers and trainers would stay or be added to support the Iraqi military with US-made equipment such as M1A1 tanks and other weaponry. He said the added personnel would not include combat troops.
Fewer than 50,000 US troops are currently in Iraq, down from a peak of more than 170,000 and ahead of the planned full withdrawal in late 2011.
Jeffrey and Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin, the commander of US military forces in Iraq, told members of the Armed Services Committee in February that the embassy would be well protected after the withdrawal.
A private security force some 5,500 strong will protect the large US diplomatic presence in Iraq, Jeffrey told the lawmakers.
He and Austin said they were confident that the force was adequate, and that Iraq will remain stable once US troops have departed.
They said that in 2012, the American presence in Iraq will consist of up to 20,000 civilians at sites that include two embassy branches, two consulates, and three police training centres.
The figure includes armed private security personnel, support staff and diplomats.
Currently there are 2,700 armed security contractors in Iraq, Jeffrey told the senators.“Pain and suffering are to be avoided at all costs.” That is your brain speaking and it’s telling you in a demanding tone that you have likely gone too far and survival is becoming less likely. Understanding our mind’s survival instinct is the beginning of overcoming it. Once we become aware of this stopping force, not only in our lives but in others’ as well, we can apply a system override, expand our limits and become more effective human beings.
Where Do We Begin
Throughout your day you will be faced with options. On one side of the equation you will be given a choice of relative ease—no trouble or possible conflicts here—and there will be the road less traveled. Shrouded in mystery and possible extinction, the painful and more arduous option could be damaging to your ego, to your body, to your precious efficiency at work and to your health in general. I’m going to give you another type of warning message: Choosing the path of least resistance on a regular basis will get you nowhere.
Since this hardship option is not chosen by many humans have developed signposts in an attempt of accepting and downplaying our weak nature. “Don’t work too hard!” A co-worker mentions as he clocks out a few minutes early. “This is the way we’ve always done it,” mentions your department head as everyone blindly sticks to a system that is never questioned. “That last rep was too much, better rack the weight and go home.” This last thought that many gym goers have is one I will expand on for this article.
You Always Have One More Rep
Remember this one simple truth when entering the last set scheme of your lifts: Your mind is going to try and stop you from completing the mission. I know this is somewhat hard to believe, and I forget this regularly, but our mind is designed to get us away from our physical culture alive and well (never push too much); it’s also designed to fill our bellies to avoid starvation (overeat) and to keep our skin free of open wounds (become soft snowflakes); besides, we could die from an open wound by getting some terrible disease we have no cure for.
Alas, that survival instinct needs to be toughened up. In today’s safe, fast-paced world you can be sure that the mind hasn’t really caught up with what is going on. Our bodies and minds are more or less still genetically gifted at thinking the world is filled with possible danger and should keep us out of harm’s grasp. When you go to the gym you are essentially entering a cage filled with sharp and heavy objects, not to mention other beasts who could potentially cause us, or our ego, harm. “Better to be safe and call it good for today.” So you make it out safely and go home, never utilizing your enormous capacity for athleticism.
The reality of having one last rep is easy to remember if you regularly do singles. That is, if you regularly perform one rep of a near maximum amount of weight at the end of a lifting scheme. For example, I will do 5 sets on the incline bench—2 first sets of warm up that get increasingly heavier, and 3 “working” sets with the same weight. My form is solid throughout and doesn’t break down far enough to look as though I’m giving 100%. But then in order to make progress I will push myself a little harder a few times a month. I load the bar up with a new weight and push out 1 to 3 reps and I do this until complete and utter exhaustion. This doesn’t happen everyday, but enough to recover and keep the training block going strong.
A new weight looks a little scary sometimes. “hmm, I don’t have a spotter and I’ve never lifted this much.” If you perform this single, double or triple correctly you won’t need a spotter, and let’s face it if you always wait for a spotter then chances are you have been lifting in a “safe” zone for too long. Go for it. Try and lift that heavy ass weight and see what it feels like. Remember your form and technique for the given move, but try to not be so afraid to push through to new numbers. You are already very warmed up and need to do this. “Why do I need to do this?” Because this is the moment your survival instinct gets schooled.
Retraining Our Survival Instinct
Let’s expand from the gym concept for a moment and spread this idea of pushing to new boundaries into other areas of life. If we keep going through life with the same momentum then we aren’t going to learn anything outside our normal wheelhouse. Moving faster, taking chances and adding some pressure to our lives can be just the training we need to grow. Just like a muscle needs progressive overload—a heavier weight lifted over time—our lives need amping up in order to get rid of our current safe zone and widen the boundaries.
You can see this easily in children; actually you can spot weaknesses in others much more than in ourselves. Often times children play dumb in order for you to help them. It isn’t so much a form of manipulation so they can dominate, it is a way for their safe zone to stay exactly where it is, no bigger or smaller perimeter. Their mind asks the question as it’s time to put their shoes on, “We aren’t going to make any CHANGES are we??” And so out comes, “Can you tie my shoes?” The child is beginning to listen to signals sent in from their own survival instinct. “Let’s keep it normal,” says the mind, “they did it yesterday so they can today as well.”
Watch this behavior and stop it when it comes. You not being there for the child will give it immediate motive to grow by performing simple tasks alone. Learning to tie our shoes was only the beginning and it is not all that different from full-grown adult tasks. How many times have you thought, “hmm, maybe my spouse can do that.” Or did you think a coworker could do this new project, or perhaps your boss. “They’re more qualified than me.” You won’t grow at all or increase your limits, but at least you won’t get hurt, frustrated or disappointed, right?
Staying Safe
Living safely is pretty easy. You won’t notice as time goes on but when life fits into a rhythm it feels good, it feels doable. Actually, try to remember the last time you or someone said, “We’ve gotten into a routine again and everything is better.” Right, the routine is going to save you. The routine is safe and predictable. Growing as a person, uplifting and refining our character, or body or diet—that takes uncomfortable work that is somewhat mysterious at first, and it can be scary. You may think that just because you are an adult the getting fearful or scared is no longer a factor, but look closely and you can notice the little avoidance tactics you’ve taken as an adult.
How about one we can all find in our lives: not approaching our coworker/spouse/friend/family to resolve that last issue. Why are we cautious to approach someone and attempt to share how the last interaction made us feel? Because it’s new and there could be a chance we get hurt, and remember that survival instinct is against pain—physical and mental. Our ego can be bruised if what we set out to accomplish doesn’t work. Perhaps we look at ourselves as less intelligent or versed in a given subject then we previously thought. So, is it better to not tempt the unknown and just be safe? You have to decide if you are truly making progress and feel fulfilled in your comfort zone. I know I’m not fulfilled in the gym if the weight stays the same for too long, and I’m mentally disturbed by those nagging thoughts of that guy I’m trying to avoid at work.
Sidebar: Here’s a tip that people, weak-natured character’s mostly, don’t often figure out on their own: humility is stronger than brute force. I struggle with this all the time. I end up wanting my physical strength to somehow make people respect me—but people don’t respect natures that try to dominate them. Next time you approach the situation with humility the other person will likely bend as well and be open to resolve a past upset. Make sure you do it quickly. Allowing too much time to pass and there could be a missed opportunity. If you are strong enough in character and you have yourself in a solid position in life then there’s no reason you can’t face someone, anyone.
The Pain of A New Weight
Back to the weights…I recently attempted to deadlift close to 400lbs. I hadn’t broken away from my routine and was asked by a friend about my max deadlift. Not knowing left me in awe and I resolved to find out on my next deadlift session.
The day came around and it was time to answer that question, how much could I lift? As I loaded the bar I honestly felt a little intimidated. “Am I going to tear a muscle?” I thought as I filled the bar to its capacity. The survival instinct had kicked in already and I hadn’t even gotten into position yet—and I’m someone who doesn’t shy away from hardship. All of our minds work the same and we all need reminders to go past this warning message, I’m not exempt from this rule. Over time my gym training had gotten soft, luckily my friend was around to poke and prod me into self-discovery. That is an example of positive masculinity and something we all need to embrace in order to grow healthily as men.
The moment of truth came and I felt sufficiently syked enough—it was all or nothing. I wrapped my fingers around the cold bar and felt its normal jagged imprinted steel of a stamped pattern of grip. Feeling the heaviness of the weight on the earth my mind went blank. My normal “safe” amount was only a little more than 250lbs and I was now about to almost double it. I got into position and lifted. After getting a few inches off the ground I could feel every muscle in my body begin to heat up as if I was on fire from the inside out. The sensation was incredible. The weight dropped as quickly as it went up: I failed.
The weight did not get past my knees when the bar began to slowly head towards the earth from where it came. I could not lift the weight I set out to do but I felt amazing. Just the sheer attempt—and the fact that I could actually get it partially off the ground—was a rush that lasted throughout the entire day. But I didn’t stop just because the first attempt failed. I now knew my limits for the time being and worked backwards. Dropping the weight down to 350lbs was easily lifted and a new PR was set, almost a hundred pounds heavier than previously recorded.
New Ground
I couldn’t lift the first attempt at near-400lbs, so what? If I had never tried how would I have been able to succeed at the second attempt just 50lbs shy? I could have stayed at the same weight in the same rep range for weeks or months without going into unknown limits. The very act of me failing or succeeding wasn’t even the greatest point of the lesson—I attempted something new and learned more from trying.
This rush of new information can carry over to other aspects of our lives and new ground can be taken. A war is won by holding new ground over small chunks of time. First a platoon takes an area, establishes itself and then looks for the next target and moves on. Little by little an army can invade a country by gaining new ground and hopefully never having to go backwards to a stronger fort. The same is true for us as individuals. Our strength lies in our potentiality, not our current successes. It isn’t our victory that always defines us but our sheer attempt at it. Those souls who reach out into the mysterious will come out with more knowledge even when failing. Someone who never tries at all, in an effort to maintain a safe and routine lifestyle, will stay in the same place you last saw them.
We have to win our battles over time and not expect victory overnight. You can be sure I will lift that 400lbs soon enough, but only because I tried it—I know it can be done. With a little more effort in training close to those numbers and some variation in my sets and reps I can train safely while breaking new ground, and I can retrain my mind to not fear the same situation. Some amount of caution is good and lifting a weight that is obnoxiously out of my ability is just sheer ignorance that will lead to injury, but we can safely push past our limits with small jumps. Common sense still applies.
The child who attempts to tie their own shoes, even if only to have them unravel a few feet into their steps, begins to understand the dynamic nature of the laces. Then they understand the nature of their whole shoe, then their foot and then into the complex nature of their activity—all because they tried.
I ask that you deeply reflect on this and inspect all the areas of your life that can be taken a little farther than what feels safe. That discipline will breed freedom because you will end up knowing more. Freedom to have more time in the morning will come from the discipline of waking up a little earlier. Freedom to show up to work with less stress will come from having more time to get ready in the morning. Freedom of mental clarity will come from a less stressful mind and the list goes on and on. The little part of you that is unsure of waking up early or eating less sugar or training regularly, that instinct will grow just as you do. But it stays small, it stays safe and routine, it goes nowhere until you break the pain threshold and experience a temporary, uncomfortable and unpleasant discipline. Freedom is the result.
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AdvertisementsThe scariest part about the 2014 chemical spill in West Virginia was that, in the beginning, no one really knew anything about the chemical that poisoned their drinking water. Ten thousand gallons of a licorice-scented chemical called MCHM had leaked from a storage container into the Elk River, a tap water source for 300,000 people in Charleston. Schools closed, hospitals evacuated patients, and the local economy of the state’s most populated city came grinding to a halt. For weeks, citizens were unsure whether they had been exposed to unsafe levels of the chemical, and what exactly MCHM would do to their bodies if they consumed it.
West Virginians did eventually get a clearer picture of MCHM. Tom Burke, who served as the Environmental Protection Agency’s chief science adviser under President Obama, thinks that’s partially because of an EPA program called the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), which assesses the health risks of thousands of chemicals across the country. “When there is a mystery like West Virginia, it’s those world-class scientists in the IRIS program that do the exposure assessment and risk analysis that lead to future decision-making about the chemical,” he told me. Congress is well aware of its value. “From the dusts of the World Trade Center and the faucets of Flint; to the toxic waters of Katrina and Harvey; [IRIS scientists] are there, working selflessly to protect our nation’s environment and public health,” Burke said in September before a House Science Committee hearing on the program. “Our health depends on them.”
We may not be able to depend on them for much longer. On Monday, the Republican-controlled Senate released a spending bill that eliminates IRIS. The bill asserts that IRIS’s functions would be maintained, just transferred to the agency’s Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) program. But Burke and others say the TSCA program is not large or well-funded enough to handle all the different types of chemical risk assessments IRIS does. “EPA’s ability to conduct risk evaluations under the new TSCA would be severely curtailed by the loss of both expertise and capacity that reside in the IRIS program,” wrote Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
But this is good news for companies that produce and disseminate chemicals. IRIS scientists’ findings have huge financial implications for polluters. When chemicals get into the air, soil, or water, regulators often base their cleanup requirements on what IRIS scientists say is safe. And chemical industry–funded scientists have been recently accusing the program of misconduct, claiming IRIS scientists exaggerate the health risks of certain chemicals. (One asserted that formaldehyde is not carcinogenic when inhaled.) A recent report also found that the IRIS program was operating more efficiently and more transparently than ever. That will surely cease being the case if the program is transferred to TSCA.Earlier today I happened upon a conversation about a trade involving Anthony Davis for Paul George. At the time it was more of a circle jerk over Paul George’s greatness than a debate, but that’s not really the point. Predictably, everyone wanted George; sports media outlets have been drooling over the best player on an extremely good Pacers team lately. George’s production is undeniable — he is a superstar, simple as that. Currently George is ranked 3rd overall in Yahoo! leagues, behind only Chris Paul and Anthony Davis.
I, however, would take Davis without hesitation. My justification follows:
Statistical Comparison:
Davis: 43%fg, 92%ft, 0 3ptm 21.2pts, 11.4rbds, 1.4asts, 2.2 stls, 4blks, 1.4to
George: 48%fg, 84%ft, 3.2 3ptm, 25.8pts, 8.2rbs, 4asts, 1.8stls,.6blks, 3.2to
The categories are split pretty evenly, 5-4 in favor of Davis. Although, I’d expect them to switch leads in FG% and FT% sometime down the road. Obviously these guys are both top tier fantasy assets. (It’s also worth noting that Paul George is shooting, absurdly, almost 45% from deep.)
The supremacy of shot blocking:
I’d take Davis, however, thanks to his Kevlar shot blocking skills. Blocks are easily one of the rarest, and therefore the most valuable statistics in 9 category leagues. Blocks are generally a competitive, yet low volume category; it’s not uncommon to see managers ignore blocks altogether and still win it once in a while.
But someone like Davis, who’s blocked shot total feels more like a dissociative hallucination at first, can single handedly carry this category for you every week. This type of domination in any statistical category is essentially non-existent in the NBA, creating a rare and potentially lucrative opportunity. Take a minute to look at the top 10 shot blockers so far this season:
Hibbert – 5.2 Davis – 4.0 B. Lopez – 3.0 Chandler – 2.5 Horford -2.4 Josh Smith – 2.3 R. Lopez – 2.3 Faverani – 2.2 D. Jordan – 2.0 David West – 2.0
And here’s the top 10 from 2012-2013 :
Ibaka – 3.0 L. Sanders – 2.8 Duncan – 2.7 Hibbert- 2.6 Howard – 2.4 Noah – 2.1 B. Lopez – 2.1 McGee – 2.0 A. Davis – 1.8 Biyombo – 1.8
Both cases demonstrate a steep drop in production from #1 to #10. Biyombo produced 40% less swats than Ibaka and still finished in the top 10. The disparity is even greater so far this year. While Davis and Hibbert have to slow down eventually, this is |
popped her head out of her window and said: ‘The council never told us they were coming to live among us until the very last minute. It was sprung on us without us being asked for our views.’
A Syrian couple were due to be housed in the flat above her. ‘I was told the wife gave birth on the way to Scotland and it was thought the stairs would be too much for her,’ she said. ‘She was put in a decent house down the road instead.’
Syrian refugees fleeing violence in their country cross into Jordanian territory, near Mafraq, on the border with Syria
Families living in Syria face daily barrages in their home towns and cities, as well as violence at the hands of ISIS militants
Alerted to my presence on the island to investigate how the Syrian refugees were settling in, I was sent a flurry of emails from locals. They painted a worrying picture of a small society that risked being fractured.
One writer said that even officials working with the refugees had been threatened with police action if they talked about migrant policies on the island.
Another email, from a shop owner with a school-aged child, explained sadly: ‘One recurring theme is anger that there has been no consultation about this, and any anti-opinions are classed as racist. People are angry that what is offered or donated to the refugees is often superior to what working locals can afford in what is officially designated a deprived area.
‘I have an old Samsung Chat phone, a ten-year-old laptop, no internet in my shop and only a wifi modem at home, rather than broadband. I can’t afford anything better — despite having a job and receiving working and child tax credits. My family cannot afford a TV licence, and have not switched on the central heating for two years...’
Another angry emailer declared: ‘How ridiculous to bring refugees here, a poor area, and then having them walking and laughing all over town with branded clothing they have been given free.
‘I saw a chain-smoking woman wearing a North Face parka coat, while my children and I get soaked walking to school in our thin ones. If locals need clothing or furniture, they can only afford second-hand items or pay with some form of credit.
An injured child sits inside a field hospital, after what activists said was shelling by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad, in the Douma neighborhood of Damascus
A medic treats an injured girl inside a field hospital after what activists said were air and missile strikes in the Douma neighborhood of Damascus
‘Our children cannot be taught Spanish, Chinese, or Russian at school because they do not have enough trained teachers. Yet these newcomers will get English lessons and will have translators in their classrooms.’ And it is not only the poorly off with such concerns. A B&B owner told me: ‘Plenty of islanders, whatever their income, feel angry about what the refugees are being given. How will the Syrian men learn to handle money if everything is offered free to them on a plate? We worry they will hang round with nothing to do. We’ve no crime here, but people will begin to lock our doors at night.’
These words may sound unfair and harsh. But the way of life of these islanders is radically different to the multicultural flux of mainland UK — let alone to Syria.
Over the centuries, a number of important religious sites have developed by the Christian population. Just near the ferry terminal, a church displays a banner declaring: ‘Good news! Jesus loves you.’
However, there is undoubtedly a strong streak of xenophobia. But locals deserve their say. And that is clearly what they are not getting as officialdom encourages a conspiracy of silence over the resettlement programme.
Recently, an article in the Independent newspaper quoted a Bute official as saying: ‘There is a policy to keep the circle of those with information (about the migrants) as small as possible.
‘That way the scope for any action against this vulnerable group of people is limited.’
Indeed, a spokesman for the Scottish Government has said: ‘For privacy reasons, our local councils will not be providing any details of the specific arrangements for the arriving refugees’.
The Buteman newspaper this week ran an article confirming the secrecy policy. It explained that any spotlight on ‘our families’ might ‘create problems’ for their relatives still in war-torn Syria.
These may be genuine concerns, but it did not stop the local SNP council allowing copious publicity photographs of the migrants arriving off the ferry in Bute and moving into their new homes just a few weeks ago.
It is not surprising that tensions are growing. I wonder what will happen this time next year, when the Syrians see their settlement hand-outs stopped.Ron Paul supporters’ battle with Romney backers used up all the time for candidate speeches.
PORTLAND, Maine - Maine’s messy GOP convention denied much-needed exposure for six Senate candidates who are hoping to break away from the pack, and the party’s deep divisions that were on display could play into independent Senate candidate Angus King’s complaint that the major parties are broken.
The GOP convention was commandeered by Ron Paul activists whose battle with Mitt Romney supporters took up the time allotted for the Senate candidates.
Denied a spot at the podium, Senate hopefuls who had refined their 20-minute speeches and created video presentations were relegated to speaking to small groups of supporters in empty meeting rooms or in stairwells Sunday at the Augusta Civic Center.
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Candidate Scott D’Amboise, who ended up standing on a chair to address 100 supporters, said all the candidates were frustrated.
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“It hurts us all,’’ he said. “A lot of people come to conventions having not made up their minds yet. We now have to work ten times harder.’’
It was a convention that will be talked about for years to come.
Paul’s supporters installed their own convention chairman and won 21 out of 24 delegates to the national convention even though Paul finished a close second behind Romney in Maine’s nonbinding presidential caucuses. Romney supporters cried foul, and both sides traded accusations of misconduct.
The divided convention and ugly accusations may play to the advantage of King, who says that both major parties are polarized and that the state needs an independent who can bridge the gap to get things accomplished, said Mark Brewer, a political scientist at the University of Maine.
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“If you’re looking at this from the outside, it just gives you the impression that the Republican Party in Maine is a mess,’’ Brewer said.
King, who declined to comment Monday, will face Republican and Democratic challengers from a field of 10 who are seeking their parties’ nominations for the opportunity to vie for Republican US Senator Olympia Snowe’s soon-to-be-empty seat.
The conventions are important for candidates because it gives them an opportunity to address the party’s loyal members who are likely to vote.
Two years ago, strong support for Paul LePage, then mayor of Waterville, at the convention in Portland underscored momentum that carried him to victory in the governor’s race.
Sandy Maisel, director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs at Colby College, said the weekend convention “sort of defies rational explanation about how a political party is supposed to function to me. Isn’t the role of the political party to aid its candidates?’’
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Senate candidate Rick Bennett, a Republican National Committeeman who is a Romney supporter, said that the convention was a sloppy affair and that he would have preferred to have spoken from the podium to the 2,800 people who registered for the convention. But he said the Paul supporters are bringing new energy to the party that will be helpful down the road.
“Democracy is messy. It’s better than coronations,’’ Bennett said in reference to King, the two-term governor who has assumed front-runner status.Stories and even court cases about the uphill battles women working technology face are nothing new. Now, a new survey puts data behind the challenges women in Silicon Valley face.
There are several disheartening results in the survey titled The Elephant In The Valley, which focuses on the experiences of female executives in Silicon Valley. A total of 222 women responded to the survey, all of whom had worked for at least 10 years in the tech mecca. Of the women who participated, three-quarters held titles of vice president or above, three-quarters had children and three-quarters are 40 years of age or older.
Two of the co-authors of the survey, Trae Vassallo and Michele Madansky, discussed the results of the survey with Kara Swisher, the executive editor of Re/code, on the latest episode of the outlet's podcast. According to the interview, the Ellen Pao trial was the event that really got the survey in motion. Vassallo, a former general partner at Kleiner Perkins, was subpoenaed to speak in the trial and share her experiences with discrimination and harassment. Following her testimony, Vassallo said that countless women began sharing their own personal stories of harassment with her. She soon partnered up with Madansky to shed light on the issue.
"It is just to get some underlying data without that finger pointing to say that it is not the exception--it is the rule," explained Vassallo. "It is happening all over the place and it's not happening just to women who you could point to and say that there are some issues where they caused it. The women in this survey are incredibly experienced. They are CEOs, they are founders, they are VPs of organizations."
According to the survey, 60% of women who work in technology have been on the receiving end of unwanted sexual advances in the workplace. Of these women, 65% reported having received such advances from a superior.
“This isn’t asking your coworker on a date. These are power play situations where you are turning someone down in a sexual way and there is some sort of meaningful impact on your ability to do your job,” stressed Vassallo.
Additionally, 66% of women surveyed said that they have felt excluded from key networking opportunities or social events, with 90% saying that they have witnessed sexist behavior at company offsites or industry conferences.
“The real bonding happens at the after party and we are not invited—nor do we want to go in some case,” said Madansky.
Beyond the more blatant examples of sexist behavior in the workplace, Vassallo and Madansky broadened their survey to include other, more subtle instances. The duo explained that they didn't just want to focus on conscious biases, but also unconscious biases that women face every day. Of the women survey, 88% said that they have had clients or colleagues address questions to male peers that should have instead been addressed to them. Another 84% experienced people not making eye contact with them but making eye contact with their male colleagues.
The survey also focused on one ongoing, major issue for women in the workplace: family. Of the women surveyed, 75% were asked about family life, marital status and children in their interviews and 40% said that they felt the need to talk less about their families in order to be taken more seriously. In recent months, both maternity and paternity leave have been graced with a good deal of media coverage between Mark Zuckerberg announcing his two-month paternity leave and Marissa Mayer announcing her two week break after giving birth to twins. The survey found that 52% of the women shortened their maternity leave because they thought it would negatively impact their career.
Ultimately, however, the most distressing statistics are those regarding the resolutions of these experiences and the few number of women who reported harassment in the workplace. Of those harrassed, 39% did nothing because they thought it would negatively impact their career and 30% did not report these occurrences because they wanted to forget about them. Of those who did report, 60% were dissatisfied with the course of action.
Vassallo and Madansky say they their survey can help bring awareness to the problem.
“We think that just getting the story out there and just letting people know how prevalent some of these behaviors are will just spur the conversation," said Madansky. "Maybe 2016 will be the year of the conversation?”It’s hard to believe…a longtime Detroit doctor taking advantage of severely mentally disabled adults to line his own pocket.
Earlier this month, Dr. Alphonso Berry and two criminal colleagues—a married couple named Marcus and Beth Jenkins—pled guilty to defrauding the government by submitting more than $13.2 million worth of phony claims to Medicare over a seven-year period for group and individual psychotherapy sessions that were never provided.
How the scam operated. In 2004, Marcus and Beth Jenkins incorporated Quality Recreation and Rehabilitation (QRR), an adult day care center that claimed to provide psychotherapy services. At the same time, they also operated adult foster care homes in the Detroit area that provided 24-hour personal care, protection, and supervision for individuals who were—for the most part—mentally or physically disabled. The couple obtained Medicare provider numbers for QRR and clinicians working on staff, including Dr. Alphonso Berry.
For four years, the Jenkinses transported Medicare beneficiaries residing at adult foster care homes (both theirs and others) to QRR, and, in concert with Dr. Berry—who often signed patient progress charts and progress notes for individual and group psychotherapy sessions—submitted claims to Medicare for psychotherapy services for these beneficiaries that were never provided. The funds received from Medicare—approximately $1.8 million—were diverted from QRR’s bank accounts into the hands of the Jenkinses and Dr. Berry.
Then, around June 2008, QRR received notice from Medicare questioning its submitted claims and the legitimacy of its psychotherapy services. But rather than shut down their fraudulent scheme, Marcus and Beth Jenkins simply opened a new adult day care facility called Procare a few months later, which also supposedly offered psychotherapy services. Again, the Jenkinses would transport Medicare patients from adult foster care homes to Procare, and Dr. Berry would sign patient charts and notes. Over the next four years, approximately $6.5 million more in phony claims were submitted; Medicare ended up paying Procare approximately $2.5 million on those claims. And once again, the funds were diverted into the hands of the Jenkinses and Dr. Berry, who spent the money on lavish lifestyles.
The case began in October 2010, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) received a referral based on an unusually high number of hours being billed per day by Dr. Berry (sometimes surpassing 24 hours in one day). HHS reached out to the FBI, and we soon began investigating with our partners from HHS’ Office of Inspector General. We examined financial records. We interviewed QRR and Procare office staff, the Medicare beneficiaries, and social workers. And we conducted surveillance of the suspects.
In October 2011, our evidence led to indictments against Dr. Berry and Marcus and Beth Jenkins. The case was brought as part of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, operating in nine cities across the country and composed of interagency teams of analysts, investigators, and prosecutors who target fraud.
And what of the Medicare beneficiaries living in the Jenkinses adult foster care homes? They are being moved to other facilities, where they will get the care and medical treatment they are entitled to.How an expanded Westfield Riccarton mall would appear, looking southeast across on Rotherham St.
The South Island's largest shopping mall, Westfield Riccarton, has plans to get even bigger.
The mall's majority owner, Westfield-controlled company Scentre, announced this month it would spend half a billion dollars making over three Auckland malls but would not revamp Riccarton.
However, Christchurch City Council documents shows Scentre already has permission for a big expansion at Riccarton.
SUPPLIED Access to mall car parks would be reconfigured.
The plan would add almost another hectare of shops and hospitality outlets, plus more car parks at the mall's eastern end – the block bordered by Clarence, Rotherham and Dilworth streets.
READ MORE:
*Christchurch malls seek permission to expand post-earthquakes
*Christmas shoppers in Christchurch face 'diabolical' traffic
The new facilities would be created by extending up the mall's existing buildings in the block.
Westfield Riccarton already has 5.5 hectares of tenant space, including almost 200 shops, cinema seating for nearly 2000 movie-goers, and 2400 car spaces.
SUPPLIED From Rotherham St looking north.
But the expansion may still be a few years off.
Scentre spokeswoman Deb McGhie said there was no date for the proposal, which had been put together to future-proof the mall. Despite having resource consent it might not even go ahead in its approved form or at all, she said.
"We're not in a pre-development phase or anything, this is part of the master-planning we are doing all the time.
SUPPLIED The project would include adding more shops, hospitality outlets and parking above existing buildings.
We are constantly looking at all our properties to improve them and meet market demands."
The consent for the project expires in 2019. Scentre had planned to object to this deadline to give it more time to consider the effects of Christchurch's upcoming new district plan, but has withdrawn that objection.
Westfield Riccarton has already undergone several major expansions, but has had no major additions since the earthquakes. It notches up 16 million customer visits a year, and at peak pre-Christmas times attracts over 60,000 shoppers a day.
The latest expansion plan involves enclosing an upper level of the block's car parking building to create 8000 square metres of new shops, and extending and enclosing the airbridge linking them to the main mall area.
Outdoor first floor hospitality outlets would also be created in this area.
Extra car parking would be added by putting an extra level on top of the building, and above the shops and restaurants facing Rotherham St.
Building facades would also be altered, parking ramps reconfigured, car park entrances opened onto Dilworth St, and more advertising signs and trees added.
Australian-owned Westfield has been concentrating its recent New Zealand development mainly on revamping its Auckland malls, after selling a minority share of properties including Riccarton to raise the funds.
Other Christchurch malls with expansion plans include Eastgate, which wants to build over its car park, and The Palms which wants to rezone nearby land it already owns.Not everyone is convinced a new bylaw will keep Christchurch's windscreen washers at bay.
The Christchurch City Council has voted unanimously to give police the authority to seize windscreen washers' equipment and prosecute them under the council's public places bylaw.
The bylaw prohibits people from undertaking commercial activities in public places without first obtaining a permit from the council. The bylaw has been flouted by the city's roadside windscreen washers, most of whom are youths.
A successful prosecution under the bylaw could result in a fine of up to $20,000 being issued and a conviction being recorded.
Christchurch Mobil franchisee Hemal Besai said he was not sure if the bylaw would make a difference to the window brush thefts that kept happening at his sites, because the culprits were so young.
"Every time they have stolen from me I haven't seen one that looked over 15... they should be in school not cleaning people's windows."
Sergeant Todd Webley, from the Phillipstown Neighbourhood Policing Team, said if a youth under 16 was caught breaking the bylaw they would likely be dealt with by the police's youth aid section rather than through the courts.
They would be brought before the court only if they were already facing other serious charges, Webley said.
"We are expecting there will be a small percentage of hardcore [windscreen washers] who will keep doing this... but that's the group we want to target."
Besai said he had been keeping his window brushes inside for the last month because of the thefts and would continue to do so.
"One time they [window washers] tried to wash a car right on the forecourt, when the customer said no they hit the car with the brush and ran away, but the police caught them and brought the brushes back to me."
Another garage owner said he was happy the bylaw had been introduced because he had brushes stolen at least once a week.
"Our brushes are green so when you see them [window washers] at the traffic lights with green brushes you sort of know where they got them from."
Police have received reports in recent months of windscreen washers shoplifting, stealing tools from service stations and assaulting people.
In one incident a driver had his side mirror kicked off by a window washer when he said he did not want his window washed. When he stopped the car and confronted the window washer he was set upon by a group of six or seven youths.
Police were powerless to do anything about the windscreen washers until fights broke out or formal complaints were laid by members of the public.
Police believed some of the window washers have pocketed big bucks through their illegal trade, with some earning between $60 and $70 cash an hour.
Read more
* Gangs 'running' windscreen washers
* Illegal windscreen washers earning big bucks in Christchurch
* Windscreen washer tired of bad rap
Cr Yani Johanson said after viewing police footage of what was happening at the intersections where the windscreen washers were working he appreciated how frightening their behaviour could be for motorists and how dangerous it was for windscreen washers themselves.
"The evidence is pretty compelling; we have to act on this issue," Johanson said.
"At the risk of sounding heartless this is a no brainer," Cr Ali Jones said. "These kids are at risk of hurting themselves, or hurting others."Indiana's Roy Hibbert tries to ply tight defense on Brooklyn's Brook Lopez in the fourth quarter, but the Brooklyn Nets beat the Indiana Pacers 89-84 in overtime at Bankers Life Fieldhouse Monday February 11, 2013. Joe Vitti / The Star
Through the strangeness of the Indiana Pacers' season, mostly defined by frequent injuries besetting the roster, one of the more abnormal incidents happened on March 21.
Frank Vogel has established a strong defensive identity through his years as coach, however in that Saturday night matchup against the Brooklyn Nets, his Pacers earned infamy with one the worst defensive displays in franchise history.
In their 123-111 win, the Nets shot 61.3 percent from the floor, the highest ever against any Pacers team at home — NBA or even during the free-flowing days of the ABA. As the Pacers prepare to face the Nets again on Tuesday night, the glaring 61.3 statistic remains on Vogel's mind.
"Yes," Vogel said. "Very emphatically yes."
Before Indiana embarked on a two-game road trip to Brooklyn and Boston, the team spent Monday afternoon focusing on the problems that led to the poor defense — namely, the Pacers' inability to defend power forwards and centers who can shoot from the perimeter, described as spread-fours and fives.
Last week, Nets center Brook Lopez averaged an Eastern Conference-best 28.8 points per game to go along with 8.5 rebounds and shot 57.8 percent from the floor. For this effort in leading the Nets to a 3-1 record, the NBA honored Lopez as the conference player of the week.
The recognition did not take into account his March 21 performance against the Pacers, however on that night Lopez played just as dominant as he scored 26 points on 11-of-14 shooting (78.6 percent). Consider that Lopez only attempted two shots at the rim — the rest came from the high post or various spots around the perimeter — and his offensive exhibition against the Pacers looks like a tour de force performance.
"The things that give us the most problems are the spread fives," Vogel said. "Our guys have been challenged over the last couple of months of not getting the job done well enough against shooting bigs, we'll just call it. We're going to see a lot of that coming up, so we got to do a better job."
Besides Lopez, 6-7 rookie Bojan Bogdanovic, who plays the wing, hit all eight of his shot attempts, including three from beyond the arc and another pair near the top of the key. Overall, the Nets surfed out of Indianapolis on a tidal wave of jump shots and that should never happen when pitted against a team as defensive-minded as the Pacers.
"They got 61 percent. I mean, 61 percent doesn't work for anybody or anything," forward C.J. Miles said. "In that game, we didn't play the way we should've played defensively. We didn't play up to par, plain and simple. We gave them some things. Not saying that they didn't play well, too, but they made some (big) shots."
During the team's practice on Monday afternoon, Vogel, with lighthearted intent, said that center Roy Hibbert "subbed himself" out of the workouts and rode a stationary bike on the sideline because he was being worked so hard. Over the next two games, expect to see more of Hibbert on the sidelines.
At 7-2, Hibbert does not move well enough to defend the spread fives of the NBA. On March 14 when the Pacers faced the Boston Celtics and high post-shooting center Tyler Zeller, Hibbert played only 24 minutes while his backup, a more agile Ian Mahinmi, clocked 22. With Lopez and Zeller on back-to-back nights, Vogel confirmed the possibility of playing Mahinmi more minutes in his backup role.
Call Star reporter Candace Buckner at (317) 444-6121. Follow her on Twitter: @CandaceDBuckner.
INDIANA at BROOKLYN
Tipoff:7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Barclays Center.
TV:Fox Sports Indiana.
Radio: WFNI-107.5 FM, 1070 AM.
PACERS (32-41)
Pos. Player PPG Key stat PG George Hill 15.9 4.7 apg SG C.J. Miles 12.6 2.9 rpg SF Solomon Hill 9.2 4.0 rpg PF David West 11.9 7.0 rpg C Roy Hibbert 10.8 1.7 bpg 6th Rodney Stuckey 12.9 38.3 3FG%
NETS (32-40)
Pos. Player PPG Key stat PG Deron Williams 12.8 6.3 apg SG Markel Brown 4.4 2.1 rpg SF Joe Johnson 14.8 4.8 rpg PF Mason Plumlee 9.3 6.4 rpg C Brook Lopez 16.6 7.1 rpg 6th Alan Anderson 7.3 2.8 rpg
STORYLINES:
• Stuckey's hurt again? To steal a line from Frank Vogel, the answer to that question is "very emphatically yes." On Sunday night, Stuckey returned to the lineup after missing three games with a strained calf. However during his 30 minutes on the court, Stuckey apparently injured his right wrist. Therefore, Stuckey did not practice Monday and will be "questionable" against the Nets. "He's in a pretty good amount of pain," Vogel revealed. "Hopefully, he heals up quick."
• He said what?! "It's an appropriate time to have a situation like this during March Madness, but that's the kind of feel that it has. You've got to win all these games and a lot will be decided with these head to heads." — Vogel on the urgency of the upcoming week, comparing the Pacers' next four games to the bracket-style intensity of college basketball.
• Playoff seeding: Brooklyn holds the eighth and final playoff spot, but is just a half-game ahead of Indiana and Boston, and a game in front of Charlotte.
• Prediction:Lopez has returned to playing like an All-Star, rookie guard Markel Brown (career-high 17 points on Sunday) has found his niche in the starting lineup and the Nets have won three in a row. So, as the season draws to a close, Brooklyn has played as the best candidate to take the 8th seed but since this is the wacky East, anything can happen. Even this … Indiana wins 108-102.
— Candace BucknerIPSWICH-based Western Pride are poised to join fellow NPL Queensland club Brisbane Strikers in bidding to join the A-League.
While the Strikers have made no secret of their intention to be part of an expanded A-League, the Pride have gone about their business quietly as they wait for Football Federation Australia to unveil the criteria bidders must satisfy.
Those criteria will reportedly be released early next year, and that’s when the Pride will make a final decision on whether to formally apply to join Brisbane Roar in flying Queensland’s flag in the national competition.
“We’d love to be part of the A-League but only if we can sustain it, and until we see the criteria, we won’t know,” Pride general manager Pat Boyle said.
But there’s no doubt the Pride are making plans.
Boyle said influential Ipswich mayor Paul Pisasale had helped secure wealthy potential investors.
The Pride are also conducting a feasibility study in determining where their potential home ground should be.
A boutique Springfield stadium and a redeveloped North Ipswich Reserve have been identified as two possibilities.
Boyle said Suncorp Stadium, the home of the Roar and where Strikers chairman Bruce Atterton-Evans says his club would play if successful with its A-League bid, was not being considered by the Pride as a home venue.
He hoped the distinction between Brisbane and the burgeoning Western Corridor area would count in the Pride’s favour if and when FFA decide whether Queensland gets another A-League club.
A similar distinction is what makes the Sydney FC-Western Sydney Wanderers rivalry more compelling than that between Melbourne Victory and Melbourne City.
However, the Strikers — the 1997 NSL champions — are confident of presenting a compelling A-League bid to FFA.
Atterton-Evans stressed that the Clem Jones Group would not be funding the bid in any way.
The Strikers have yet-to-be revealed investors via former Roar and Gold Coast United coach Miron Bleiberg backing their bid.
Atterton-Evans said Suncorp Stadium, not a redeveloped Perry Park, was the only realistic home venue for the Strikers if they joined the A-League.
“We’d have to play there. We wouldn’t have much of a choice,” he said.
FFA chief executive David Gallop’s comments in October that south-east Queensland was FFA’s preferred location for a second Queensland A-League club indicates a bid from Townsville-based Northern Fury would seem forlorn.
Fury chief executive Rabieh Krayem said his club would not include itself among the current expansion hopefuls, with the immediate goals being to enter teams in the W-League and the National Youth League.In the previous two posts we looked at a randomization scheme for protecting the privacy of a binary response. This post will look briefly at adding noise to continuous or unbounded data. I like to keep the posts here fairly short, but this topic is fairly technical. To keep it short I’ll omit some of the details and give more of an intuitive overview.
Differential privacy
The idea of differential privacy is to guarantee bounds on how much information may be revealed by someone’s participation in a database. These bounds are described by two numbers, ε (epsilon) and δ (delta). We’re primarily interested in the multiplicative bound described by ε. This number is roughly the number of bits of information an analyst might gain regarding an individual. (The multiplicative bound is exp(ε) and so ε, the natural log of the multiplicative bound, would be the information measure, though technically in nats rather than bits since we’re using natural logs rather than logs base 2.)
The δ term is added to the multiplicative bound. Ideally δ is 0, that is, we’d prefer (ε, 0)-differential privacy, but sometimes we have to settle for (ε, δ)-differential privacy. Roughly speaking, the δ term represents the possibility that a few individuals may stand to lose more privacy than the rest, that the multiplicative bound doesn’t apply to everyone. If δ is very small, this risk is very small.
Update: See a detailed introduction to differential privacy here.
Laplace mechanism
The Laplace distribution is also known as the double exponential distribution because its distribution function looks like the exponential distribution function with a copy reflected about the y-axis; these two exponential curves join at the origin to create a sort of circus tent shape. The absolute value of a Laplace random variable is an exponential random variable.
Why are we interested this particular distribution? Because we’re interested in multiplicative bounds, and so it’s not too surprising that exponential distributions might make the calculations work out because of the way the exponential scales multiplicatively.
The Laplace mechanism adds Laplacian-distributed noise to a function. If Δf is the sensitivity of a function f, a measure of how revealing the function might be, then adding Laplace noise with scale Δf/ε preserves (ε 0)-differential privacy.
Technically, Δf is the l 1 sensitivity. We need this detail because the results for Gaussian noise involve l 2 sensitivity. This is just a matter of whether we measure sensitivity by the l 1 (sum of absolute values) norm or the l 2 (root sum of squares) norm.
Gaussian mechanism
The Gaussian mechanism protects privacy by adding randomness with a more familiar normal (Gaussian) distribution. Here the results are a little messier. Let ε be strictly between 0 and 1 and pick δ > 0. Then the Gaussian mechanism is (ε, δ)-differentially private provided the scale of the Gaussian noise satisfies
It’s not surprising that the l 2 norm appears in this context since the normal distribution and l 2 norm are closely related. It’s also not surprising that a δ term appears: the Laplace distribution is ideally suited to multiplicative bounds but the normal distribution is not.
Related postsJust what is this tiny figure embedded in the top corner of all one dollar bills in circulation in the United States?
Some people think it’s a Great Horned Owl, but others say it’s a spider. You can see for yourself but that might strain your eyes. Let’s take a look using a Canon Macro Photo MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x lens at five times lifesize:
Not as owly-looking. Here’s a closer view:
You’d have to call that a spider. Or a spider/owl. Or a Spowl.
In this age of conspiracy theories, let’s assume a secret organization put on our currency a little figure, one that sometimes looks like an owl and sometimes looks like a spider.
Who cares about spiders and owls? The Bohemian Club, that’s who.
If you want to learn about that unique organization, check out this bit from Jay Barman (now that’s an owl!) of SFist.com.
And check out this scary two-hour movie, Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove, to learn more. We’re through the looking glass here, people!
Beware the Spowl.
(IRL, it’s just a spider, at best, IMO. But whatever you do, don’t read this killjoy’s persuasive webpage!)
Tags: 65mm, bay area, bill, bohemian, california, canon, club, dollar, dollar bill, figure, global elite, grove, KRON, macro, new world order, owl, San Francisco, Sonoma., spider, spowl, summer fire festivalThe overthrow of Gaddafi has brought together strange allies, but few stranger than Abdulhakim Belhaj, the military commander of all rebel military forces in Tripoli, and Nato. An Islamist whom Gaddafi tried to have the US list as a terrorist, Mr Belhaj says he was tortured by CIA agents after being arrested in the Far East in 2004 and later handed over by them to Colonel Gaddafi for further torture and imprisonment in Libya.
Mr Belhaj, the head of the military council for Tripoli, who led an Islamist guerrilla organisation fighting the Gaddafi regime in the 1990s, told The Independent in an interview that he had been directly "tortured by CIA agents" in Thailand after being first arrested in Malaysia.
If true, his story is evidence of the close co-operation between the CIA and Colonel Gaddafi's security services after the Libyan leader denounced the 9/11 attacks. After his stint in the hands of the CIA, Mr Belhaj was kept in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. He says: "I was in prison for seven years during which I was subjected to torture as well as solitary confinement. I was even denied a shower for three years." Other Libyan Islamist prisoners have related how they were sometimes taken from Abu Salim to be questioned by US officials in Tripoli.
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.
Released from prison in 2010, Mr Belhaj, who had military experience from fighting in Afghanistan against the Russians in the 1980s, became one of the most effective rebel military commanders. He is said by diplomats to have played a crucial role in the capture of Tripoli at the end of last month, and is highly regarded by the chairman of the Transitional National Council (TNC), Mustafa Abdul Jalil.
Ironically, given his claims of previous mistreatment at US hands, Mr Belhaj has emerged as one of Nato's most important allies during their air campaign in support of the rebels over the last six months. Speaking in his headquarters in the Mitiga military airbase on the eastern outskirts of Tripoli, he forcefully denied that he and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which he helped found in 1995, had ever been allied to al-Qa'ida.
"We never had any link to al-Qa'ida," said Mr Belhaj, a short, soft-spoken, bearded man, who does not use a military title. "We never took part in global jihad. The fact that we were in the same country, Afghanistan, [as al-Qa'ida] does not mean we had the same goal." He stresses that the sole aim of the LIFG was always to overthrow Gaddafi.
Despite his current close co-operation with Nato, Mr Belhaj says he finds it difficult to forgive his treatment by the CIA in the past.
When first detained at an airport in Malaysia in 2004 he says he was with his wife: "She was six months pregnant and she suffered a lot."
After a few days, CIA agents took him to Thailand as part of the notorious rendition process by which the agency transferred prisoners to countries where security forces were known to use torture. He says that in Thailand CIA |
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At least nine people were killed, including fighters from both sides, and 67 wounded, as the militia seized an army base overlooking the complex and took control of state media.
Yemen has been wracked by unrest for months, raising fears of a collapse of Hadi's government, a crucial ally in Washington's fight against al-Qaeda.
Prime Minister Khalid Bahah escaped to his residence, where he has lived since taking office in October, after his convoy came under fire from Houthi fighters.
Houthi gunmen took up positions outside the residence late on Monday and were in control of all three of its entrances, government spokesman Rajih Badi told AFP.
After a lull overnight, fighting re-erupted on Tuesday near Hadi's residence in western Sana'a when the Houthis attempted to set up a checkpoint close by and were confronted by troops, the witnesses said.
They reported heavy clashes inside the complex in southern Sana'a, one of the few public buildings to remain outside the control of the Houthis since they overran the capital.
Tensions have been running high in Sana'a since the rebels on Saturday abducted Hadi's chief of staff, Ahmed Awad bin Mubarak, in an apparent move to extract changes to a draft constitution that he is overseeing.
Mubarak is in charge of a "national dialogue" set up after veteran strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced from power in February 2012 following a year of bloody Arab Spring-inspired protests.
Saleh has been accused of backing the Houthis and a source in the presidential guard told AFP some Yemeni troops still loyal to the ex-leader had supported the militia in Monday's fighting.
The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said groups of soldiers and fighters left the Sanaa home of Saleh's son Ahmed, Yemen's current ambassador in the United Arab Emirates, "to lend a hand to Huthi fighters".
Residents said some soldiers had also abandoned their positions on the hill overlooking the presidential palace without any resistance to the Huthis.
A Houthi fighter, who gave his name as Abu Hashem, said the militia had taken control of the area to prevent government forces from "shelling civilians".
Before his kidnapping, Mubarak had been due to present a draft constitution dividing Yemen into a six-region federation, which the Huthis oppose.
The militants, who hail from Yemen's remote north and fought a decade-long war against the government, have rejected the decentralisation plan, claiming it divides the country into rich and poor regions.
Since their takeover of the capital, the Huthis, also known as Ansarullah, have pressed their advance into areas south of Sanaa, where they have met deadly resistance from Sunnis including al-Qaeda loyalists.
Yemen's branch of the jihadist network, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is considered its most dangerous and claimed responsibility for this month's attack in Paris on French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo that left 12 dead.
Hadi's government has been a key ally of the United States, allowing Washington to carry out repeated drone attacks on al-Qaeda militants in its territory.
Yemen crisis: Who are the Houthi rebels?Once Upon a Time‘s newly minted Dark One is on a mission — and he’s enlisted a boatload of shady friends to help him.
Infused with the Darkness against his will, as the result of Emma’s desperate bid to save his life, Captain Hook is none too happy, save for relishing the savory prospect of using his new powers to avenge long-ago love Milah once and for all, by vanquishing Rumplestiltskin. To that end, after having lost Round 2 to the “Crocodile,” Hook tapped into a Storybrooke portal allowing access to the Underworld, whence came Nimue and alllll the Dark Ones in between.
With Season 5’s fall finale unfurling this Sunday (ABC, 8/7c), TVLine spoke with Colin O’Donoghue about Hook’s walk on this very dark side, his plan to destroy the world and the “good thing” about playing a polarizing pirate.
TVLINE | How far in advance of the Dark Hook reveal did you learn it was coming?
It was probably two or three weeks, if I recall, when [series creators] Eddy [Kitsis] and Adam [Horowitz] said, “This is what’s going to happen….” I was delighted to be able to explore that side of Hook again, as a dark, villainous character — only this time he’s amplified by a thousand, you know?
TVLINE | What went into developing the Dark Hook persona? Did you bounce any ideas off of Jen [Morrison], who’s been doing things a bit differently as Dark Emma?
I obviously spoke to Eddy and Adam about how they saw Dark Hook being. They were like, “We want him to be like the older Hook,” who had already embraced darkness — not the Darkness, but darkness — so I took that and ran with it and wanted him to basically be maniacal. He’s sort of an unstoppable force who has no empathy or feeling for anybody except himself. That was the starting point, and then playing off that you sort of have fun and enjoy it.
TVLINE | I was going to say, it definitely looks like you’re having a ball, especially in that scene with Bobby Carlyle — “Get your affairs in order, Dearie!”
I read that line and I thought that’s actually one of the first things Rumple as the Dark One says to Hook — “Get your affairs in order,” or something. But whatever way he delivered it, I thought it would be a fantastic way of jabbing a non-Dark One Rumplestiltskin, by pretending to be him. And it was fun, it was fun.
TVLINE | I know this was touched on on the show, but why in your mind is Dark Hook different from Dark Emma?
Dark Hook is different because he’d already tasted darkness, he’d already given in to a part of it, whereas Emma was coming from the place of being the Savior and essentially always saving the day. That’s why she as a Dark One — and I’m not wanting to speak for Jen — comes from a place of struggling against the Darkness, at the start.
TVLINE | Emma’s trying to keep her ish together whereas Hook is more susceptible.
Yes, yes. You saw that when she had Rumple in her head in Camelot — she really was trying to fight it, whereas Hook tried to fight it for all of two seconds until [Rumple’s apparition] says, “I can help you get your revenge on me.” And because Hook has already lived with that for hundreds of years, the Darkness had him. Hook says that just before Emma turns him into the Dark One: “Let me die. I don’t have the willpower to fight this and I don’t want to become the one thing that I hate.”
Watch a sneek peek from Once Upon a Time‘s midseason finale:
TVLINE | Is there any talking sense into him? Will Emma continue to try?
It’s difficult. Because he has embraced the Darkness — not intentionally but because that’s who he is now — he has one overriding mission and that is to kill Rumplestiltskin, and he is willing to let the Darkness use him as a pawn and bring back all the other Dark Ones to do that, if it means he can send Rumple to the Underworld — and whoever else he’s willing to sacrifice. Much in the way that the Rumple character, when he was the Dark One, was willing to sacrifice all the people he loved to get whatever he wanted for himself.
TVLINE | To be clear: Hook’s end game is to get revenge on Rumple one way or another, be it death or banishment to the Underworld. But the Dark Ones that just arrived on the boat, their end game is to “snuff out the light”?
That’s part of Hook’s end game too, because he is the Darkness, they all exist as one in whoever is the conduit. When we see Nimue talking to Merlin in the last episode, she appears to Merlin but she’s still a part of Hook. Now, bringing [the Dark Ones] back from the Underworld, they exist as separate entities but their overriding mission is to snuff out the light. Hook is willing to do that as well — and if he gets his revenge, that’s an added bonus!
TVLINE | So, we’re getting some flashbacks in Sunday’s midseason finale?
We are. You get to see a bit of Hook’s relationship with his father (played by EastEnders‘ Adam Croasdell), which I was really excited to explore. That time was a huge part of what made Killian Jones become who he was.
TVLINE | Those flashbacks are with a kid, though, right? Not you?
There is some with a kid (played by Salem‘s Oliver Bell), but you also get to see a little bit of older Killian Jones, played by me, interacting with “Papa Hook,” as the fans are calling him.
TVLINE | Besides Emma and Rumple, is Dark Hook going to get in anyone’s else’s face? Does he have words with Emma’s father David, perhaps..?
I mean, he kind of gets in everybody’s face a little bit! [Laughs] Eventually he’s trying to destroy the world, so….
TVLINE | Is it safe to say things will get worse for him and Emma before they get any better?
You’ll have to wait and see. You might get an answer to that on Sunday.
TVLINE | We just took stock of TV’s Most Polarizing Characters and Hook is on the list, stirring emotions as he does one way or the other — which I’m sure is not news to you. How does it feel to play someone people either love or… don’t really like much at all?
I understand that and you know what? It’s brilliant, it’s a great thing, because that means you’re doing your job well. Especially for this character, because Hook has done some really heinous things in his past. Even when I came on the show in Season 2, he was not that nice a guy, so I actually expected everybody to dislike Hook. But weirdly, a lot of people really like that in a person for some reason. [Laughs] It’s an interesting thing because I always knew he would be that person who would polarize people, and I guess that’s a good thing for me as an actor. But if I was speaking as Hook, I’d be a bit annoyed, like, “Why doesn’t everyone like me!”
Want more scoop on Once, or for any other show? Email insideline@tvline.com and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line.Remember when "someone" used the Stuxnet virus, or rather worm, in an Iranian nuclear plant several years ago to freeze Iranian nuclear production, leading to a major diplomatic scandal involving the spy agencies of both the US and Israel, as the world learned that in the present day industrial sabotage only needed a flash drive and a computer virus to render even the most sophisticated piece of industrial machinery obsolete? Well, moments ago, Bloomberg reported that a computer virus was discovered in a German nuclear power plant.
A computer virus was discovered at the Gundremmingen nuclear power plant in Bavaria, German news service DPA reported.
No danger to employees or populace
Power plant noticed the virus in its Block B on Mon.
RWE specialists to determine how malware entered computer system built in 2008
* * *
BR (google translated) is reporting that the malware is thought to be brought in by a data carrier, and the affected portion of the system is the fueld assembly loading area.
The affected IT system is part of the fuel assembly loading machine of the power plant. This raises, for example, old fuel from the reactor core and transports it to the storage pool. An influence on the control of these loading machine has the IT system according to the operator but not. In the power plant all other safety-related IT systems have been checked without finding the meantime.
The competent authority and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) have been informed. The reconnaissance takes place with the assistance of IT specialists in the RWE Group. The malicious software may have been introduced by a data carrier.
Ironically, in the case of the Iran "infection", one of the suspected parties was Germany's own Siemens. It would be painfully ironic if the same someone had infected a Germany nuke at roughly the same time.
Developing story.OTTAWA, Canada – Chris Weidman isn’t particularly fond with the way in which Michael Bisping has conducted himself since winning the UFC middleweight title from Luke Rockhold at UFC 199 earlier this month.
Bisping’s (29-7 MMA, 19-7 UFC) stunning first-round knockout of Rockhold (15-3 MMA, 5-2 UFC) didn’t earn him a whole lot of respect from former champ Weidman (13-1 MMA, 9-1 UFC), he said.
Weidman once said he could beat Bisping without a training camp under his belt. And while he doesn’t know if he will be next to fight “The Count” due to Bisping’s apparent desire to rematch Dan Henderson in his first defense, Weidman said he still stands by that statement.
“I don’t think there’s one guy in the top 15 that you could be like, ‘Bisping definitely beats that guy,'” Weidman told MMAjunkie. “He’s challenging the No. 13 guy (in the official UFC rankings) right now, and Dan Henderson is honestly, he’s one of my favorite fighters. I’m not saying anything bad about him. But it’s the way the system works, the rankings system. You work your way up in the rankings and right now he’s that low and that’s who Bisping – really that’s the only guy who he’s talking about.
“It’s kind of embarrassing for Bisping, but Bisping got the title, good for him. He’s trying to hold on to it as long as possible and if he can get himself a fight with the No. 13 guy, it probably brings his odds up a bit from anybody else.”
Bisping, No.1 in the latest USA TODAY Sports/MMAjunkie MMA middleweight rankings, captured the title in the fastest victory of his 26-fight UFC career when he stopped No. 2-ranked Rockhold with strikes in the first round after accepting the bout on just 17 days’ notice. No. 3-ranked Weidman was slated at the original challenger to Rockhold’s belt at UFC 199, but pulled out of the fight on short notice with a serious neck injury.
Weidman recently had invasive neck surgery to repair the neck issue and said he’s already planning his comeback. He wants a shot at Bisping, but the new champ has other ideas, suggesting “All-American” win a fight first, perhaps against Rockhold.
The fact Bisping is trying to call the shots doesn’t sit particularly well with Weidman, he said.
“All of a sudden he’s the matchmaker – Bisping the matchmaker,” Weidman said. “It’s weird. The guy’s been trying to catch my attention, he’s been trying to talk, and he’s just been talking down on my career since I’ve been in the sport, since I got into the UFC. He’s never said a nice thing about me. Now all of a sudden this guy’s champion and it’s really because of me. He should really just be thanking me, kissing my feet. But instead he’s just opening his mouth trying to discredit me still.”
While Bisping gloats from atop the middleweight mountain Weidman is forced to look up and sit idly by waiting to recover from his recent neck surgery. Weidman said he anticipates a complete recovery within six weeks and intends to return to the octagon at UFC 205 this November in his home state of New York. Whether or not Bisping will be his opponent, though, remains to be seen.
“I’ll be ready to go pretty soon here and I’ll be fighting at (Madison Square Garden) for sure,” Weidman said. “I want to fight for the title, that’s obviously where it’s at, that’s where the moneys at. I want to be able to provide for my family and Bisping would be the easiest fight I’ve had in probably five years. Why not win the title and win a lot of money and have an easy fight all in one time?”
For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.Submitted by ZeroPointNow of IBankCoin
A rabidly anti-Trump FBI agent who was fired from Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation relied on claims made in a largely unsubstantiated and highly salacious dossier provided by Washington DC-based opposition research firm, Fusion GPS - which enlisted former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to assemble the 34-page 'Dirty Dossier' in mid-2016.
Veteran FBI agent Peter Strzok - who headed up the Hillary Clinton email investigation, was dismissed from Mueller's Trump-Russia probe in mid-August and relegated to the FBI's Human Resources department, after the DOJ opened an inquiry into anti-Trump / pro-Clinton text messages Strzok sent to his Trump-hating mistress - FBI lawyer Lisa Page, while the two were working together on the Clinton probe. Page was also fired from the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling earlier this year.
Strzok's conduct in the Clinton investigation is now under review by the Justice Department, along with his role in a number of other politically sensitive cases, according to Fox News.
"While Strzok’s removal from the Mueller team had been publicly reported in August, the Justice Department never disclosed the anti-Trump texts to the House investigators." "Responding to the revelations about Strzok’s texts on Saturday, Nunes said he has now directed his staff to draft contempt-of-Congress citations against Rosenstein and the new FBI director, Christopher Wray." -Fox News
Of relevance - Strzok concluded that Hillary Clinton was "careless," in her mishandling of classified information, yet found "no proof of intent," an opinion which former FBI director James Comey based his recommendation not to prosecute. Comey, as it turns out, drafted Clinton's exoneration letter long before the FBI had finished reviewing evidence in the case.
Strzok's team and the Trump-Russia dossier...
In August, 2016 - nine months before Trump fired Comey which led to the creation of Robert Mueller's Special Counsel, the New York Times reported that Strzok was hand picked by FBI brass to supervise an investigation into allegations of Trump-Russia collusion.
The FBI investigation grew legs after they received the infamous anti-Trump "dossier" and decided to act on its salacious and largely unproven claims, According to Fox News:
House investigators told Fox News they have long regarded Strzok as a key figure in the chain of events when the bureau, in 2016, received the infamous anti-Trump "dossier" and launched a counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the election that ultimately came to encompass FISA surveillance of a Trump campaign associate. The "dossier" was a compendium of salacious and largely unverified allegations about then-candidate Trump and others around him that was compiled by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The firm's bank records, obtained by House investigators, revealed that the project was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. -Fox News
Dead ends
Weeks before the 2016 Presidential election, Strzok's team agreed to pay former MI6 agent and Fusion GPS operative Christopher Steele $50,000 if he could verify his claims that the agency had already used to take action. Of note, Fusion separately paid Steele $168,000 to assemble the dossier which had the cooperation of two senior Kremlin officials.
The agent said that if Mr. Steele could get solid corroboration of his reports, the F.B.I. would pay him $50,000 for his efforts, according to two people familiar with the offer. One report, filled with references to secret meetings, spoke ominously of Mr. Trump’s “compromising relationship with the Kremlin” and threats of “blackmail.” He [Steele] provided the documents to an F.B.I. contact in Europe on the same day as Mr. Comey’s news conference about Mrs. Clinton. It took weeks for this information to land with Mr. Strzok and his team. -NYT
After meeting with the FBI in October to deliver a'stack of new intelligence reports,' the agency ultimately decided not to pay Steele because he could not corroborate the information he had provided.
Never let a dodgy dossier get in the way of a good witch hunt!
Despite such a low level of confidence in Steele's dossier that they didn't pay him, the FBI used the document to obtain a FISA surveillance warrant on one-time Trump foreign-policy advisor Carter Page - who was described as having a "secret meeting" with Putin associate Igor Sechin and Deputy Chief for International Policy, Igor Diveykin during a July 2016 trip to Moscow to deliver a commencement speech.
Not true according to Page
While Page did travel to Moscow to deliver a commencement speech, he told the House Intelligence Committee that he's never heard of Diveykin nor met with any of the men mentioned in the dossier.
Page did testify that he spoke with Russia's deputy prime minister, Arkadiy Dvorkovich, who was in attendance at the commencement ceremony. Upon his return, Page relayed their meeting in a memo to the Trump campaign, writing “In a private conversation, Dvorkovich expressed strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together toward devising better solutions in response to the vast range of current international problems.”
Page claims he hadn't spoken more than a few words to Dvorkovich, and had instead gained insight into the Russian's opinion from listening to the Russian's speeches.
Back on point
We now know that the original, pre-Mueller FBI investigation into Trump-Russia collusion was spearheaded by Peter Strzok - an anti-Trump senior FBI agent who was fired for sending anti-Trump / pro-Clinton text messages to his mistress during their investigation into Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information.
We also know that the FBI probe led by Strzok relied on the salacious 34-page Steele dossier, paid for in part by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, to launch their Trump-Russia investigation and obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page.
This raises a multitude of questions about Strzok, the Clinton email investigation, and any other politically charged cases he's worked on - which are now under review by the DOJ's Office of Personnel Management.
And while Strzok is stapling cover sheets on TPS reports in the FBI's HR department, it is of particular interest that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is also honing in on Rod Rosenstein and the new FBI director, Christopher Wray for their roles in the decision to withhold the reasons for Strzok's dismissal in August.When the Raiders hired former San Diego Chargers defensive coordinator John Pagano, I thought he would take over the defense. I thought Ken Norton Jr., who hasn’t done too well for the Raiders in that role, would be demoted. I didn’t think they would change the title but I did think Pagano would lead the way.
How many more times can a team miscommunicate over a coverage? How many more times can a team allow a player to run down the field by himself? They fired Marcus Robertson this offseason so the scapegoat thing is over. What are they going to do now, fire new secondary coach Rod Woodson?
Didn’t think so.
Norton is responsible for more than the communication problems, he just doesn’t put players in position to win. Putting a player in position to win is having them do the things that they’re good at on Sundays. He may have done some of that with the front-seven lately but he surely has not done that with the secondary.
And you wonder why the Raiders gave up more pass plays of over 20 and 40 yards last year.
The problem is Norton doesn’t try to adjust his scheme to fit the players he as. He’s trying to get bump-and-run cornerbacks to play off-man and zone. Norton is trying to duplicate what the Seattle Seahawks did with a different type of cast. The NFL doesn’t call Richard Sherman a shutdown corner anymore because they realize he’s a zone corner.
Meanwhile, Raiders GM Reggie McKenzie was trained to scout CB’s that excel in bump-and-run coverage. That’s what he did as the director of player personnel with the Green Bay Packers and what he knows the Raiders to traditionally be. He took one shot at an off-man and zone CB when he drafted D.J. Hayden and look where that got him.
That’s why David Amerson had an immediate impact when the Raiders picked him up on waivers in 2015. The reason why Washington cut him is because they changed the defense. The former 2nd round pick was a budding star in his first two years (2013-2014) but just couldn’t adapt when Jay Gruden brought the zone.
Amerson broke out in bump-and-run coverage in 2015 and fell off last year in more zone and off-man. You can even tell the difference in the two games he played in this preseason. He gave up a touchdown in the first one in more zone and off-man. Then he played much better manning up on Sammy Watkins Saturday.
Sean Smith was a star CB for the Kansas City Chiefs mainly in bump and run coverage. The last year, he goes to the Raiders and is asked to play outside of his skill set.
Don’t get me wrong, Smith had his problems with eye-discipline at the line of scrimmage in bump and run. But he has no chance with fast, shifty receivers in off-man and can’t break on the ball in zone.
I studied Gareon Conley way before the Raiders drafted him and he’s good in bump-and-run coverage. The good thing about him is he has the fluidity and speed to play off-man coverage too. But while he’s not horrible in zone coverage, he’s nowhere near as good as he is in man.
Norton definitely needs to solve the problems the Raiders have in communication quick. But running coverages players aren’t that good at will hurt you just as bad. I understand switching it up at times but you have to stick with the strength of your players at most of the time.
The Raiders have more talent in that secondary than most people realize. And it just might show if Norton utilized them properly.Next month, Marvel is introducing a whole new line up of comics—and a whole new universe to go with them. Don’t know your Earth-616 from your Earth-65? What the hell is with this Secret Wars thing? Will your favorite hero still have a comic? Will they even be the same person? Here’s everything you need to know going in.
So I wanted to read the latest Ms. Marvel and everything is exploding. Like, literally, the whole Earth. What’s going on!?
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First off: Ms. Marvel is so good, right? But anyway, that’s Secret Wars. You might have noticed over the past few months that your regular Marvel comic series have been replaced by new miniseries under the Secret Wars banner.
Secret whatnow?
Secret Wars! The name comes from one of Marvel’s most famous comic book events—the original, which saw the heroes and villains of the Marvel Universe brought together to duke it out on a plane of existence called the Battleworld by an extremely powerful being known as the Beyonder, came out in 1984.
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This new one doesn’t really have anything to do with that one, so don’t worry about reading it. Basically the name and the “Battleworld” concept, are all that’s familiar. The scenario and setup of the new Secret Wars is entirely different.
So is this why I can’t read Ms. Marvel right now? Because of Secret Wars?
Basically. Essentially, what happened is that... well, the universe exploded. Not just the main Marvel universes (usually designated Earth-616), but pretty much all of Marvel’s alternate realities, including the most prominent “Ultimate Marvel” universe, were destroyed in the process.
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All that’s left is shards of different existences, pulled together into a hodgepodge reality by Doctor Doom called the Battleworld. Outside of the universe, what that means is the current crop of comics Marvel are putting out—yes, including Ms. Marvel—have been ended, and replaced by a bunch of new comic series set during the events of Secret Wars.
But what happens when all this is over? Secret Wars has to end at some point, right?
Yup! Enter the “All-New, All Different” Marvel Universe, being led by the release of Invincible Iron Man.
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Is it really so new and different?
Well, kinda sorta. For the first time in Marvel’s history, this is a complete wiping of the slate in terms of their actual universes. The old comics still happened, and recent events in them will still be reflected in this new universe, but there are some pretty big shakeups happening, and basically every returning character is being thrust into new situations and scenarios, and in some cases, new superhero teams.
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Hit me with some of the biggest changes.
There’s so many! Iron Man has got a new set of armor (okay that one’s not really a big change), and maybe even a love life with Peter Parker’s former flame Mary Jane Watson. The Avengers are getting a whole new main team, composed of Ms. Marvel, Nova, Ultimate Spider-Man, Thor (who is still Jane Foster), Captain America (who is still Sam Wilson), Iron Man and The Vision. Ultimate Spider-Man Miles Morales will be headlining the new main Spider-Man series, while Peter Parker swings around in Amazing Spider-Man. The Inhumans will also have a major role in the universe in comparison to their usually niche appearances in recent Marvel history, thanks to their increasingly prevalent role in the world of the Marvel movies.
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There’s also going to be a lot of scenarios where new heroes will take the place of major ones. X-23 will take on Wolverine’s mantle now that Logan is dead, but will be mentored by a version of Older Logan currently appearing in Secret Wars. Marvel braniac Amadeus Cho will become a new Hulk. Kate Bishop will be the new main Hawkeye, and seemingly have an antagonistic relationship with Clint Barton. Kitty Pryde will become the new Star-Lord, while Peter Quill is jetting off on his own adventures.
Marvel is also going to be putting a spotlight on some minor characters for the first time in a while, giving them new series—Patsy Walker, a.k.a. Hellcat, will star in her own ongoing comedic series. Native American hero Red Wolf will have his own comic for the first time since the 1970s! There’s a lot more, but the overall thrust is to shake up the traditional Marvel universe and try out a more diverse range of comics.
You mentioned Ultimate Spider-Man, but I thought the Ultimate universe exploded. Is there still going to be alternate realities in this new reboot?
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Yes, but Miles is a special case—he didn’t just survive the destruction of the Ultimate universe, but has been fully transplanted into the “main” Marvel universe now, letting him fight alongside the Avengers and the main incarnation of Peter Parker.
And yes, we know that there will be some alternative universes left when Marvel reboots thanks to another Spider-Hero: Spider-Gwen’s new ongoing series will still be set in her alt-universe of Earth-65. So while there’s probably nowhere near as many alternative universes now (it was getting a bit confusing), there’s still going to be some for writers to tell alt-stories with.
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I’ve been reading a lot about all this arguing about the X-Men and Fantastic Four getting cut out of the comics because Marvel don’t own their movie rights. Are they still part of the universe? What’s their deal here?
Well, the good news is that contrary to rumors, the X-Men and Fantastic Four will still play big roles in the new comics... well, the X-Men will at least.
The X-Men have several new comics—three in total—as part of the reboot, but they’re going to be sharing a lot of space with the Inhumans, who are now in the spotlight as they slowly get introduced to the Marvel Cinematic Universe through Agents of SHIELD. In fact, the Inhumans and Mutants will now be at odds with each other. An unexplained event will set the two similarly disenfranchised groups against each other, to the point that some mutants will be joining the Inhumans in their new series, Uncanny Inhumans.
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The Fantastic Four however, are in a much rougher spot in this new universe. The team seemingly no longer exists: The Thing is joining the Guardians of the Galaxy, while The Human Torch will be a part of Uncanny Inhumans. Sue and Reed Richards are nowhere to be found yet in any series, and if that wasn’t enough kicking them while they’re down, their series, which was cancelled earlier this year, will not be returning. There’s even more kicking though: Peter Parker is going to buy out the Baxter Building and move into their former home. Sorry, Fantastic Four fans!
This is a lot to take in. Do I have to have read all of Secret Wars to understand what’s going on?
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No, not really. The “All-New, All-Different” universe is meant to be designed as an ideal stepping on point for Marvel fans who aren’t really reading the comics, but instead consuming the cartoons/movies/TV shows and so-on. You already know what you needed to know about Secret Wars—the universes exploded, got smooshed together, and out of their remains is a whole new Marvel Universe. You won’t even get to see that happen, either, as the new comics that are coming are set 8 months after the formation of this new universe.
Some Secret Wars characters will bleed over into the new universe, like the aforementioned version of Logan from Secret Wars: Old Man Logan, or Red Wolf, from Secret Wars: 1872, and even some series will continue, like the all-female Avengers team A-Force, but on the whole “All-New, All Different” doesn’t require you to read up on a bunch of comics to dive in first.
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So what new comics are actually coming out?
A lot are coming out. As a complete reboot of Marvel’s entire line, the current output is being replaced by a whole new batch of comics: In fact, 60 of them. Here’s an extensive list of 45 of the new comics planned for release over the next two months, complete with small synopses to set them up—there’s so many new series they’re being released in two waves, one in October, one in November. There’s another 15 on top of that that Marvel have been announcing in drips to tease their new launch.
Where do I start reading? Is Ms. Marvel still going to be the same Ms. Marvel I read before Secret Wars started?
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Honestly, if you’ve already been reading Marvel’s comics, the best bet is to find a series you were already reading, and just carry on with the new first issue. It’s the same characters, the same things still happened to them before Secret Wars, just in new situations. Think of it as a new arc in an ongoing storyline, rather than a whole new reboot.
If you’re not a regular comics reader, then my advice is the same as it would always be: find a character you know already, from the movies or the cartoons or wherever you first encountered them, find out what book they’re appearing in, and start there. And don’t be afraid to experiment! The whole point of “All-New, All Different” is that there’s a lot of new changes and stories starting—so feel free to pick up new books you think sound cool, alongside the characters you’re already familiar with.
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Like Ms. Marvel?
Like Ms. Marvel.
It’s so good.
I know, right!?Amid a miserable three-win season, the Panthers will start looking at younger players.
Carolina on Tuesday parted ways with cornerback Antoine Cason, releasing the veteran. The 28-year-old was on a one-year deal and will finish his time under Ron Rivera with a pair of interceptions and 44 tackles.
The move likely opens the door for Bene' Benwikere, the team's fifth-round pick in 2014, to get some more playing time. Cason was merely helping them tread water in the meantime.
Cason will hit waivers on Tuesday afternoon and could be an interesting option for a competitive team looking to secure some cornerback depth down the stretch.
Cason was a first-round pick by the San Diego Chargers in 2008 and spent last season in Arizona.
Cason played in nearly 700 snaps for the Panthers this year, though he was in on fewer than half on Sunday against the Vikings.
The latest Around The NFL Podcast recaps every Sunday game from Week 13 and debates whether Johnny Manziel deserves the starting job. Find more Around The NFL content on NFL NOW.Today, 19 percent of women end their potential childbearing years without having had any children—making childlessness as common as it is irrationally controversial. We had the chance to talk about the topic with Meghan Daum: author, LA Times columnist, editor of the forthcoming essay collection Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, which is out tomorrow, March 31.
By email, Daum and I discussed everything from why childless-by-choice people are often forced to produce a "why?" for the (sometimes) well-intentioned crowd who demand an explanation for their decision to not procreate; the hubbub around egg freezing; what drives people to remain child-free; and why the phrase "child-free" itself needs to be retired.
What was your decision-making process in picking your writers and their essays?
Finding and choosing the writers was a delicate process. It's one thing to figure out who doesn't have children, and quite another to ascertain whether or not this is by choice. So I spent a lot of time crafting very carefully-worded emails to all kinds of writers asking if a subject like this was something that might be relevant to them or appeal to them.
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As for my actual criteria, the biggest priority was that the essays get past the kind of glib one-liners and flippant rhetoric you too often see around this issue. "I'd rather sleep late than have kids!" or, "I'd rather have my Manolo Blahniks!" or words like "brats" and "breeders," jokes about double strollers blocking the sidewalks. There's sometimes entertainment value in that, but more often it feels disingenuous, counterproductive and insulting.
I wanted people who were going to approach the topic in the thoughtful, nuanced way the subject deserves—but also be |
city's southwest, densely situated military camps and Druze-Christian communities facilitate the protection of roads to Beirut, Quneitra, and Deraa. The Sunni localities of Moadamiya, Daraya, the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp -- which is officially a Damascus neighborhood -- and Babila are bordered to the south by the Druze-Christian belt, reinforced since the 1970s by increasing numbers of Alawites, and the southern ring road, which has become an important line of defense for Damascus against the rebel-controlled suburbs.
As a whole, the city is surrounded by a large ring road and cut by wide avenues that create breaks in the urban space. These streets, designed in the 1970s, were not meant to ease traffic flow, a point made especially clear when one considers that few Syrians then had private cars and that developers did not expect private car ownership to balloon. Rather, this was a classic example of security planning, with the road layout optimized for the deployment of armored vehicles to deter any major event. In the late 1970s, Damascus's Old City fell victim to this strategy when a portion of its souks was razed to make way for a shopping area with wide streets that intersected at right angles. The regime did not create wide avenues everywhere, though, allowing informal suburbs with narrow, mazelike streets to proliferate outside the city. These suburbs ultimately became the stronghold of the uprising.
Encirclement of Rebel-Held Suburbs
The rebels' failure in Damascus can be attributed mainly to their inability to unite West and East Ghouta and cut off the road to the international airport. Jaramana was strongly defended by the Syrian army and, above all, by local Druze members of the pro-regime National Defense Army. The population has withstood the rebels' assaults, which have included car bombs and rocket attacks. Thus, from Jaramana the Syrian army has expanded its hold on the two sides of the airport road, encircling both Sunni parts of Ghouta.
The military siege on the rebel areas around Damascus is being accompanied by a food embargo and airstrikes intended to scare civilians. The basic principle of counterinsurgency, to separate civilians from rebels, is being applied here primitively, as it has been in Aleppo. In Daraya, only 4,000 people remain, according to the United Nations, of an original 80,000 inhabitants in 2010. This siege is also meant to encourage other rebel localities to accept a modus vivendi with the regime. Babila, Moadamiya, Qudsaya, al-Qabun, and Barzah have thus concluded ceasefires with the Syrian army, preventing their destruction and the starvation of their populations.
Since spring 2016, the Syrian army has retaken one-third of East Ghouta, and its forces continue to advance from the east. This regime offensive was aided by conflict among the rebel groups Failaq al-Sham, the Fustat Army (led by Jabhat al-Nusra), and Jaish al-Islam. The last of these had been exercising nearly hegemonic control over East Ghouta since 2012, but the death of its founder, Zahran Alloush, on December 25, 2015, has weakened the militia. Alloush's death also represented a deep setback for Saudi Arabia, given that he had been promoted to coordinator of the Syrian opposition in the Geneva talks. For the first time, the political and military opposition had been united. Alloush's successor, his younger brother Mohammed Alloush, has not been up to the job, either locally or internationally, being quickly marginalized in Geneva in favor of Riyad Hijab, the former Syrian prime minister.
Since 2012, a Military Reversal
After the July 18, 2012, attack that claimed the lives of several regime officials, including Assef Shawkat, Bashar al-Assad's ambitious brother-in-law, the rebels seemed close to capturing Damascus. Four years later, the Damascus military situation has been completely reversed. The Syrian army and its allied Shiite militias now encircle the rebel areas around Damascus. Further, the rebels have lost hope of being rescued by outside intervention because the Amman-based Military Operations Center (MOC), which helps coordinate rebel actions, no longer prioritizes supporting an offensive against the Syrian regime but rather one against the Islamic State. The potential conclusion of a U.S.-Russia cooperation agreement against IS and Jahbat al-Nusra could accentuate the feeling of abandonment among rebels and consequently encourage many groups to negotiate with the regime or join the jihadists.
In Damascus, the regime is strongly supported by Hezbollah and Iran. This is largely because the Syrian capital and especially its airports are the main gateway for Iranian weapons to Hezbollah. The influx of Shiite fighters into Damascus is also part of an effort to defend the Sayyeda Zainab shrine, a major Shiite pilgrimage site that, before 2011, welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. Each time a rocket falls on Sayyeda Zainab or a car bomb explodes in the area, the news reverberates throughout the Shiite world, helping attract new fighters to the front. For Iran, Sayyeda Zainab cannot be allowed to meet the same fate as the Samarra mosque, destroyed in an al-Qaeda attack in February 2006.
Assad's Self-Certainty
As compared to government-controlled western Aleppo, which is being buffeted by rebel rocketfire, the Syrian capital is relatively calm. Public services are operating normally, and barring the sound of artillery from Jabal Qasioun pounding rebel areas, the war seems far away. The international airport is operating again, and the main roads to Homs, Deraa, and Beirut are safe. Such developments can only reassure Assad. Although he still does not control most of the country and his army can barely preserve the recent territorial gains facilitated by the Russian air force's intervention, Assad feels less threatened because he holds Damascus. And because he no longer needs Putin to defend the airspace over Damascus, he will be less likely to bow to Russian pressure, not to mention other international pressure, to cede power. What Assad does still need in Damascus is continued strong defensive military support from Iran, its proxy Hezbollah, and Iraq Shiite militias. As it stands, without a real military threat to Damascus, neither Assad nor Iran will accept a political transition in Syria, even if Russia agrees to one.
Fabrice Balanche, an associate professor and research director at the University of Lyon 2, is a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute.“It used to affect me badly,” said Stephanie Sanders, turning to face me from the park bench we’re sharing. “I would get headaches, like everyone else, picking up all these other peoples’ emotions.”
Sander’s fingers graze her belly. She’s pregnant but hasn’t started showing yet. Before she gave birth to her first child seven years ago, she tells me, she already knew it was a girl. She’s sure this one is a girl as well. She’s clearly content and her clothes, hair, and fingernails are all brightly colored.
It’s hard to know what to expect before you meet someone like Sanders, who identifies as an empath. Sanders is a happy empath. Not all people who identify as constitutionally sensitive to the feelings of others learn to live with it. Some empaths are so devastated by the emotional noise that surrounds them that they find it difficult to converse with people or even go outside. Some get over it. Some use their abilities to their advantage. Experiences — to put it mildly — differ.
Empathy research divides the phenomenon into three empathic subtypes: emotional, cognitive, and motivational. The idea is that when you see someone else experiencing emotion, you respond in one of three ways: You catch their emotional state yourself (emotional empathy), think about what they’re feeling and why (cognitive empathy), or feel compelled toward some action (motivational empathy, alternately known as compassion or empathic concern). Empaths seem to experience a heightened, perhaps debilitating level of emotional empathy, taking on the pain and joy of other people to excess.
To regain control when the sensations of being an empath initially began to overwhelm her a few years ago, Sanders began meditating twice a day. She says she’s been centered ever since, to the point where she doesn’t even need to meditate anymore. I gesture at our surroundings — even in a place like this? It’s Memorial Day Weekend and we’re at a park in the Bronx. There are a lot of activities vying for dominance: kids running around with squirt guns, shirtless guys on bikes, a really persistent ice cream truck, a large group of churchgoers chanting Spanish hymns.
This might remind you of a similar sounding, well-documented condition called mirror-touch synesthesia, which causes a person to literally feel what they see someone else feel. But that’s rare, and the empathic community is massive — massive enough, in fact, to have developed its own conflicting lexicon, with people debating what constitutes an “empath” versus a “Highly Sensitive Person” (HSP). Sanders doesn’t believe in the distinctions between empaths and HSPs. She believes everyone is born an empath, just that most end up conditioned to suppress it.
Whether or not you stand by such distinctions, it’s clear that the empath community, at least online, comprises individuals at every point on this fuzzy spectrum. Some experience anxiety and sensitivity and want an identity — an explanation — to be a part of. Those with more severe symptoms may be wired to absorb external emotions, to great personal detriment, but the science just isn’t definitive enough yet to say where those lines get drawn.
Commander Deanna Troi was an empath (and a Betazoid).
“I was an empathic child,” admits Dr. Judith Orloff, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and practicing psychiatrist who specializes in empaths. “I couldn’t go into crowded places without feeling overwhelmed, getting some ache, feeling anxious or depressed. My mood changed my physical status. My parents were both physicians and just said, ‘Get a thicker skin,’ — not because they weren’t loving. They just didn’t have the context.”
Orloff is the author of multiple books on empaths. Some people use that term interchangeably with psychic empaths, while others use the latter only if they believe in such abilities as clairvoyance or ESP. Orloff teaches her empathic patients techniques to help them feel less drained, what she calls “protection and grounding strategies,” such as helping them retain enough control to drive during rush hour, or get into an MRI machine. She agrees that empaths requiring psychiatric medication need much lower doses than is typical, being both more sensitive to the drug and more sensitive to its side effects. She agrees it often runs in the family, and that that trauma is often a factor (though it isn’t necessarily a precursor). Orloff estimates 85 percent of those who find her on Facebook or through her website are women; of course it’s impossible to be sure whether this indicates that empaths are more likely to be women or just that female empaths are more likely to come forward.
Her work hasn’t always gone over well in the scientific community; Second Sight, one of her most well-known works, was once cited in a United States Special Senate Committee on Aging as being unscientific and irresponsible. But she commands a wide respect and a lot of status within the empathic community, and a number of people I spoke to had read at least one of her books.
One of Orloff’s more controversial contentions is that highly sensitive people are a very different breed of person from the empath. For highly sensitive people, light, smells, and excessive talking might feel sickeningly overwhelming. An empath, on the other hand, can literally absorb emotions of others into his or her own body. She is firm about the dichotomy.
Orloff claims to have coined the terms “empath” and “psychic empath” in her 1996 book Second Sight. When I point out that the terms were widely used in popular culture for at least a decade prior — Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987 with an empath as a central character — she maintained that the book came first, strongly implying that the show’s writers got the idea from her, and declined to comment further.
The origin of the word may be in dispute, but the idea of empaths has been woven into global culture for longer than most of us likely realized, from as far back as the 1700s. The following is from Adam Smiths The Theory Of Moral Sentiments, which was published in 1759:
“Persons of delicate fibres and a weak constitution of body complain, that in looking on the sores and ulcers which are exposed by beggars in the streets, they are apt to feel an itching or uneasy sensation in the corresponding part of their own bodies. The horror which they conceive at the misery of those wretches affects that particular part of them more than any other; because that horror arises from conceiving what they themselves would suffer, if they really were the wretches whom they are looking upon, and if that particular part in themselves was actually affected in the same miserable manner.”
Commander Deanna Troi may have also been friends with Tinkerbell.
Laura Wilkinson, a life coach who runs her own holistic medicine practice in California, said she was around nine or 10 when she started to seemingly process and absorb emotions differently than did those around her.
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“I remember somebody was teasing me about a crush I had,” Wilkinson said. “And I got really extra-emotional about it in a way I don’t think most people do. I started crying. I got under the table; I felt like I was being attacked.”
Crowds bring out a deep anxiety that provoke the sensation of being overwhelmed and often manifests psychosomatically: knee problems that linger for months, fluid buildups doctors can’t explain. Wilkinson herself experiences these swings in emotion. “I’ll be like, ‘Wow, my throat feels weird, but I know I’m not sick,’ and then my friend will tell me she has thyroid cancer,” she said of the surreal, almost psychic process.
It’s easy to dismiss extraordinary claims like these when they come from people who are already soft targets. A significant portion of the empathic community devote their energies to alternative medicine and psychic, stereotypically new-agey beliefs. Wilkinson speaks of meeting people on “vibrational levels.” Sanders believes mental illnesses don’t really exist, that they’re all the same — “all under the umbrella of ‘empath’” — and that everyone is ultimately capable of healing themselves. Tina Hines, a Life Transformation Specialist, tells me she’s a clairvoyant medium, plus can heal the people she touches. “I get a lot of grandmothers, they especially like to visit … from the other side,” she clarifies helpfully.
Hines didn’t know about or consider herself an empath until her early 40s, when she experienced a sudden bout of depression. “I could see and feel and hear all these things, and I just couldn’t figure out what was going on with me,” Hines said. “And then I read Second Sight and said, ‘oh my god - there’s my answer. That’s me.’ And the women in my family, too … I wasn’t going crazy, I have all these gifts.”
Like other empaths, Hines saw therapists at various points. The first suggested she might have bipolar disorder; Hines disagreed. She was prescribed the usual rotating cocktail of meds — Abilify, Cymbalta, Pristiq, Fetzima — and took them in the beginning. But soon enough, she said, they made her extremely agitated. She stopped.
“Initially, I didn’t tell psychiatrists I was an empath,” Hines said. “I didn’t want them to put me in the hospital. Eventually I did find a therapist with a spiritual side, and I can talk about it without feeling judged. But [empaths] are wandering around, wondering if they need to be committed — they’re being diagnosed as bipolar, as schizophrenic, and it’s just not true.”
Empath, one of Marvel's New Mutants.
Jamil Zaki, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory says “there are different possibilities” when it comes to figuring out what the medical basis of empaths might be. “One is that there’s a continuum of how empathic people are, and these folks are at the top end,” Zaki hypothesizes. “And the other is that they’re somehow qualitatively different than the rest of us. I don’t know that there’s much evidence for a real bright line between empaths and non-empaths.”
Human neuroimaging, says Zaki, is not yet at the point where we can look at one person’s brain and really tell much about their abilities as an individual. We can make inferences about groups; we can look at a whole bunch of brains and track how they respond to various stimuli and possibly correlate to trait empathy. “I get emails all the time from people who are self-reported empaths, and many report having very difficult lives.”
It’s hard to say for certain. There have been studies showing that people who have experienced hardship exhibit an increase in empathy. There have also been studies showing that people who have experienced hardship exhibit a decrease in empathy. Childhood trauma is a recurrent theme among empaths, as is a heightened awareness for detecting lies.
The data is somewhat inconclusive about whether anxiety is hereditary, but it’s widely acknowledged that genetics play a big role in diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. And on a more basic level, personality traits and dispositions get passed on from one generation to the next.
The scientific community doesn’t acknowledge ESP, but it does acknowledge empathy, sensitivity, and anxiety. And there is indeed evidence that childhood trauma is linked to poorer response to antidepressants later in life. A recent study showed that in rats, at least, anti-anxiety medication inhibited empathetic behavior.
Sometimes people just want to be a part of a community, to have something about themselves explained and validated by others who feel the same — and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. When the empath community comprises such a spectrum of people — empathic, psychically empathic, highly sensitive, all of the above — the language feels secondary to the import of that feeling of understanding, of no longer being alone. If people feel strongly that they are part of a community, then, in the long run, that may be more helpful than scientific approval could ever be. For empaths, who at times struggle to feel at home in the world, that sense of belonging is a blessing.While the New York Rangers have surprised with how well the defense has played, the right side is still a weakness. The Buffalo Sabres may have the solution to this problem.
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Simply put, New York’s defense is unbalanced. The left side of the defense is immensely stronger than the right, and this problem is coming back to haunt them.
While the left half touts strong defensive play and quick puck movement by all three defensemen, the best defenseman playing on the right side is Nick Holden, playing on his off-hand, while the other regular defensemen, Dan Girardi and Kevin Klein, drag the players around them down.
To bolster this weakness, the Rangers need to make a change in personnel. Adam Clendening is a frequent healthy scratch who can make an offensive impact from the blue line; however, he is also the only in-house option.
None of the right-handed defensemen currently playing for Hartford are ready for steady NHL action. This leaves only two options for the Rangers: make a trade or try to find a bargain free-agent.
Free agency is essentially out of the question at this point of the year. Besides, with the players remaining on the market, if general manager Jeff Gorton thought any of them would help the team, he could have made the move months ago. That leaves just one option: make a trade.
The Rangers currently have just over $2 million in cap space. That is not a lot of wiggle room when looking for a solid defenseman, and a right-handed one at that. The Buffalo Sabres are still a work in progress. There is a particular defenseman, Cody Franson, who sticks out as a good option for a few reasons:
Age and Contract
Both Girardi and Klein are exiting their primes. At the age of 32, they are in the downswing of their careers. Franson is not all that much younger at 29, but those three years of wear and tear put loads of extra strain on the body, especially in Girardi’s case, as one of the NHL’s premier shot blockers.
Girardi has one of the worst contracts on the Rangers’ roster, signed for another three seasons at $5.5 million against the cap; however, his no movement clause that turns into a modified no trade clause after this season make him virtually unmovable.
Klein’s deal is much more manageable: $2.9 million against the cap for just next season. Cody Franson is a UFA after this season, but his current contract is not anything ridiculous at $3.325 against the cap.
The Rangers do not have the cap space to move only draft picks for Franson, but the difference in play makes up for it.
Level of Play
There is no question about it. Cody Franson has played stronger than Girardi and Klein this season. Of the trio, only Franson has a CF% above 50: Girardi, a possession black hole, carries a CF% of 39.5 on the season; Klein’s possession stats are below average, but they are much better than Girardi’s, with a CF% of 46.9; Franson out classes them both with a positive CF% of 52.2.
Franson can also play with more of an edge, as he has a much larger frame, 6’5″ 224 lbs, than both Girardi and Klein, 6’1″ 212 lbs, and 6’1″ 206 lbs, respectively.
The Rangers have been called a soft team many times this season and adding a physical presence that plays at a high level would be a great addition.
Acquiring Cody Franson
Cody Franson has played well on a weak team that would likely be willing to part ways with many players. The Rangers would be forced to send a player over to keep under the cap, so Jeff Gorton would have to sweeten the deal in some way.
New York owns tons of forward depth to move around, but the middle rounds of the upcoming draft are looking thin for the Rangers. A plausible deal, then, would be a forward or Kevin Klein, someone expendable, and a second round draft pick in 2018, as the Rangers hold two, for Cody Franson and a low round draft pick.Otto Wanz with the CWA title.
Former AWA World champion Otto Wanz, a legend as a wrestler and promoter in Germany and Austria, has died. He was 74. That he ever became AWA World champion is part of a his lore.
The scene was August 29, 1982, the St. Paul Civic Center, in St. Paul, Minnesota, as Wanz, who had only been working in the AWA a short while, faced the champ, Nick Bockwinkel in a championship bout, in front of roughly 12,000 fans. Wanz used a suplex to win the title.
To call it a surprise is a bit of an understatement.
For years, the rumour was that Wanz, a successful promoter in Europe, had paid outright for the chance to be AWA World champion, though neither AWA promoter Verne Gagne nor Bockwinkel ever confirmed the allegation. Dave Meltzer of The Wrestling Observer Newsletter wrote that it was a “business deal to get himself the AWA title belt” years later.
It was a short reign, as Bockwinkel won the belt back at Chicago's International Amphitheatre on October 9, 1982.
But the reign is part of wrestling lore for a reason. It cemented Wanz on an international scale.
The Pro Wrestling U.S.A. Book, Mat Wars!, written by Gagne and Jim Melby, included Wanz, even though it came out in 1985 and the German had hardly worked in the U.S. at all after the title switch.
"Otto Wanz, a man mountain that walks, is generally considered the best wrestler in the European ring," reads the kayfabe-style book. "Not being one to sit back and bask on the laurels and acclaim that he has gained there, Otto ventured to faraway countries to prove his mettle and merit."
Wanz, billed at 6-foot-3, and 360 pounds at the time of his AWA victory, was born June 13, 1943, Nestelbach, Austria, a small town near the bigger Graz, where he was usually billed from. The big man was initially a boxer, winning two Austrian championships during more than 100 fights, before turning to wrestling.
As an amateur wrestler, he was Austrian champion in the freestyle division. Naturally, an offer to turn pro followed, and he entered a tournament in 1968 in Austria. A bigger break, though, came in 1970, when he worked for promoter Nicola "Nico" Selenkowitsch, who was based in Germany. In April 1972, Wanz won his first tournament, which was the style for that part of Europe, with wrestlers staying in the same location for weeks, facing off against each other. That tournament win in Bremen against Iwan Strogoff set the stage for so much more.
The major German promoter Gustl Kaiser took notice and he put Wanz in the European title picture, a title he'd hold often.
In South Africa in 1977, Wanz made headlines winning the newly-created CWA title from Jan Wilkens. He'd have legendary matches against Don Leo Jonathan, including one on November 9, 1977, in Sun City, South Africa, that had more than 20,000 fans in attendance—a remarkable number for the time.
The CWA title, which he'd win from Jonathan, became Wanz's calling card, and he held the title until dropping it to Vader (Leon White) in Denver, Colorado in March 1987. During his many tours of Germany, Vader had been known as Bull Power.
Vader was hardly the only big star to spend time in Germany. André the Giant actually once allowed Wanz to not only slam him, but to pin him. The likes of Big John Studd, Antonio Inoki, Sgt. Slaughter, and King Kong Bundy competed for and against Wanz in Germany.
Canadian Joe E. Legend is one of those who got a break through Wanz. Calling him "the man who gave me my first gigs in Europe (Germany, specifically... where I now live)" Legend said on Facebook that Wanz "was the source of a litany of great workers and of even more great stories. If he hadn't been kind and generous enough back in 1998 to take a chance on me, my life would be VERY different. Thank you so much Otto, for the memories and opportunities. All of which I am truly indebted to you for. RIP, sir. You really changed my life."
Referee James Beard shared his recollection of the tours of Germany that Wanz promoted on Facebook. Wanz "ran a very unique promotion in Europe that traveled from town to town and would run nightly events in the same building, drawing big crowds each night for several weeks in a row. It's hard to fathom any promotion doing that these days, but he was successful and utilized well known wrestlers from Europe like Fit Findlay and Tony St Clair and stars from different countries to make up his rosters, which competed in a tournament style format."
As well, Wanz worked in Japan on a fairly regular basis in the 1970s, and was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for destroying telephone books with his bare hands. The phone book ripping was a gimmick he often did before bouts, especially during his time in North America.
Big John Quinn, originally from Hamilton, Ontario, was a huge name in Europe, calling it home for 15 years, from 1978 to 1987. While he will admit that he made money with Wanz, Quinn is decidedly not a fan, calling him a "wannabe."
"Otto believed in Otto. Otto should have either been a wrestler or a promoter, and he should have dropped out and been a promoter because he kept pushing himself. The towns were getting smaller and smaller, and he couldn't see it," recalled Quinn. "He was a terrible wrestler, but he started to believe his own publicity. He threatened me in the dressing room one day. I looked at him and said, 'What?' He said he was going to punch me out. I said, 'What?' For one thing, he couldn't even catch me, let alone punch me out."
Of course, the Wanz that Quinn is referring to isn't the Wanz in his prime, but a man that was clinging to past laurels. After winning the CWA title for a fourth time in 1990, Wanz retired for good from active wrestling. He continued as a promoter, though, staying involved until 2000.
Tokyo Joe Diago, Otto Wanz, historian Tom Burke and Killer Kowalski. Photo courtesy Tom Burke
Even in retirement, Wanz continued to be a well-known name, often appearing in commercials, acting in films or even singing. In 2011, an Austrian TV show profiled him. During his later years, he promoted strongmen competitions in Austria with his son Michael.
Details of his death on September 14, 2017, are not known at this time. An Austrian website reported that it was a "short, serious illness."
– with files from Ronald Großpietsch
RELATED LINKSSome consider it to be the most incredible time of the year. Gorgeous colors vibrantly encoring the end of summer as the trees put themselves to bed for the long sleep of winter. The Great Smoky Mountains floods with thousands upon thousands of annual visitors all hoping to achieve a breathtaking view of the beautiful renaissance of nature.
The Science Of It All
It all starts with photosynthesis. Leaves typically produce their vivid hues of green from spring through summer into early fall through the constant creation of Chlorophyll. As we all learned in 5th grade science, Chlorophyll is the key component in a plant's ability to turn sunlight into glucose, which in turn feeds the trees. Many millions of these Chlorophyll cells saturate the leaves, ultimately making them appear green to the eye.
Did you know? Without the presence of Chlorophyll in the leaf, the bright golds, reds, yellows, and browns would be the natural colors seen year round.
The Changing Colors
Chlorophyll is not the only player in the fall leaf-color game. Present in other leaves and trees are the compounds known as Carotenoids and Anthocyanins. As the Fall days begin to get shorter and shorter, the production of Chlorophyll slows to a hault, eventually giving way to the ‘true’ color of the leaf.Even though it’s not my job to educate about anything (especially my own position), I’ve decided to explain the concept of Microaggressions to you all.
According to that oppressive encyclopedia (who encyclopedias to tell me what’s true?), a Microaggression is the idea that small acts like saying something, even when not intentional, are acts of aggression. Something like questioning the belief that a TV show needs to fill racial quotas is considered such an aggression. Of course, those status-quo-huggers say that these are only performed by racial or gender majorities against minorities, but I was recently the victim of one such aggression.
My roommate moved his bike into our apartment because they ran out of space on the bike rack. That hurt just typing it but I’ve got to be strong. He moved the bike inside, forcing me to have to look at it when I want to leave my apartment. I’ve checked local laws and unfortunately I’m still not allowed to destroy the bike. There’s simply no justice in the world.I admire Atatürk and Turks: US defense chief
WASHINGTON
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. AP Photo
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel reiterated yesterday that he admires Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, and Turks in his first press conference in the Pentagon, daily Hürriyet has reported.“Well, I'm glad to know my standing is significant in Turkey. But - and I admire the Turks and the government, and Atatürk and I have over the years noted Atatürk in different speeches I've given, not just in Turkey, but the United States. He did something that was very significant that has had a very important sustaining legacy in the world. And sometimes we -- we in the West don't fully appreciate what Atatürk did.” Hagel said in response to a question."The recent rapprochement between NATO member Turkey and major non-NATO ally Israel was critically important to the region," Hagel said.“It does affect Syria,” he said. “It does affect the neighbors in developing more confidence, I would suspect, among the neighbors in that area that Turkey and Israel will once again begin working together on some of these common interests.”Former Republican senator Chuck Hagel was sworn in on Feb. 27 as the new U.S. defense secretary.2013 AAA research finds average true car ownership cost over $9,000/year*; Technically, one could get a Pedalist in 6 months of car-ownership expense.
Beyond eliminating the costs & headaches associated with cars, Pedalists gain the health benefits of cycling while enjoying the riding experience.
The Pedalist offers enormous environmental benefits. We’re 100% green with zero emissions and provide a physical footprint that’s less than a third of the typical car. Technically, the Pedalist has the potential to reduce traffic congestion by 60%.
Electric bicycle convenience
Our pedal-assist feature and full-electric power options allow you to tackle intimidating hills without even breaking a sweat.
Just like e-bike, no license & registration required in most places*, unless you start going over the top with its massive electric possibilities. The 750W electric motor & 48v 32A li-ion battery would provide a range of 50+ miles per charge. The cargo space would easily fit 10 of them and provide 500+ miles of range; and of course, the pedal-assist mode would add significant additional miles to it.
There are three modes of riding the Pedalist: pure pedal, pedal assist (the electric motor multiplies your pedaling power), & throttle (electric) only. While you could go as fast as you'd like with the first two modes, we limit the throttle-only speed to 20mph on the computer. This is to classify it as a tricycle (not a moped or scooter) in California's, and most States', regulations*.
2+1 Seating configuration
The Pedalist has 2+1 seating configuration, second adult could sit behind the cyclist while a bicycle’s toddler’s seat may be attached in the front cargo space, which would also fit a medium sized pet.
Benefits of being as narrow as a bicycle
While comfortable bicycle lanes are supposed to be 4-5 feet wide, many are under 4 feet. Boasting a width of just 35 inches, the Pedalist can go anywhere a bicycle can: in bike lanes, on sidewalks, across campus, and even through the front door of your home or office.
Our skinny form factor is designed to maneuver between parked cars or congested roads, and you can swiftly navigate between standard car and bicycle lanes.
Safer than a bicycle
Our unique tadpole design features two wheels in front to give the Pedalist added stability and control. Head and tail lights offer optimum visibility while on the road – contributing to the safety of both the Pedalist and periphery traffic – while the Virtue Pedalist’s height provides visibility (to see and be seen) beyond that offered by traditional recumbent-based velomobiles.
Enclosed shell
The enclosed shell offers protection from wind-chill, sun heat, and slight rain, and eliminates the need for a helmet and outerwear – keeping your hair and clothes ready for work. The front and rear interior compartments offer ample storage room or options for additional riders.
Maintenance free... Well, almost
In addition to negating the massive maintenance needs of a car, the Pedalist, as a cycling machine, is equipped with improved cycling components that reduced major bicycle maintenance requirements. The Pedalist features internal 8 speed gear hub, magnesium wheels, & disc brakes.
Join our movement and let’s bridge the gap together – step into the Virtue Pedalist!
Virtue's solutions to cycling lifestyle challenges can be seen throughout their innovative product lines; i.e. Virtue Gondoliere and Virtue Schoolbus for those with kids, Virtue Truck for those with luggage and/or groceries, Virtue Seven & Curve for stylish commute, Virtue Campus for students, Virtue Ortho for those with back problems, etc. For more information, please visit www.VirtueBike.com
* http://newsroom.aaa.com/2013/04/cost-of-owning-and-operating-vehicle-in-u-s-increases-nearly-two-percent-according-to-aaas-2013-your-driving-costs-study/
* 3 modes of riding: pure pedal, pedal assist, & throttle (electric) only. While you could go as fast as you'd like with the first two modes, we limit the throttle-only speed to 20mph on the computer. This is to classify it as a tricycle (not a moped or scooter) in California and most States. European countries would need to limit the computer speed to 15kph to be classified as a tricycle. Please check your local regulations for its classifications.
Reward Tiers
$10 - Thank you for supporting this cause. We'd provide Virtue decals as a token of our gratitude.
$25 - Thank you for supporting this cause. We'd provide a Virtue shirt as a token of our gratitude.
$50 - Thank you for supporting this cause. We'd provide 2 Virtue shirts and decals as a token of our gratitude.
$100 - Thank you for supporting this cause. We'd provide 4 Virtue shirts and decals as a token of our gratitude. We'd also reserve Kickstarter Supporters' pricing for you for one year.
$300 - Thank you for supporting this cause. We'd provide Virtue Campus, one of our bicycle model. We'd also reserve Kickstarter Supporters' pricing for you for one year.
$600 - Thank you for supporting this cause. We'd provide Virtue Regents or Ortho, our bicycle models. We'd also reserve Kickstarter Supporters' pricing for you for one year.
$1,100 - |
.sleep(2000) // Respect the 4chan API rules. }
Step 8: Posting the Tweet
// Choose a comment for Twitter posting. chosenCommentIndex = new Random().nextInt(listOfComments.size()) chosenComment = listOfComments.get(chosenCommentIndex) twitter = TwitterFactory.getSingleton() twitter.updateStatus(chosenComment) Date date = new Date() SimpleDateFormat today = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z") println today.format(date) + " - Updated Twitter status with: " + chosenComment // Wait for a while (15 mins) until the next tweet. Thread.sleep(900000)
Final Step: Putting It All Together
To finish off the script, we wrap all the code logic inside a while loop that continually executes until we decide to close down the console:
import groovy.json.JsonSlurper import java.net.URL import java.text.SimpleDateFormat @Grab(group='org.twitter4j', module='twitter4j-core', version='4.0.5') import twitter4j.Status import twitter4j.Twitter import twitter4j.TwitterException import twitter4j.TwitterFactory @Grab(group='org.jsoup', module='jsoup', version='1.9.2') import org.jsoup.Jsoup while(true) { final String BOARD_NAME = "/r9k/" final String THREAD_CATALOG_REQUEST_URL = "https://a.4cdn.org" + BOARD_NAME + "threads.json" println "Retrieving " + BOARD_NAME + " data..." threadCatalogData = new URL(THREAD_CATALOG_REQUEST_URL).getText() // Makes the HTTP request. List threadCatalog = new JsonSlurper().parseText(threadCatalogData) // Parses JSONObjects into Maps and JSONArrays into Lists. // Store all active threads from the board. listOfThreads = [] numOfPages = threadCatalog.size() numOfPages.times { i -> Map catalogPage = threadCatalog.get(i) List threadsInPage = catalogPage.threads numOfThreadsInPage = threadsInPage.size() numOfThreadsInPage.times { j -> listOfThreads << threadsInPage.get(j).no } } listOfComments = [] // Retrieve all posts from 20% of the most recent threads in the board catalog. 1.upto(listOfThreads.size() / 5) { i -> chosenThreadNo = listOfThreads.get(i) threadPageRequestUrl = "https://a.4cdn.org" + BOARD_NAME + "thread/" + chosenThreadNo + ".json" threadPageData = new URL(threadPageRequestUrl).getText() Map threadPage = new JsonSlurper().parseText(threadPageData) List posts = threadPage.posts // Grab all the thread comments of Twitter-able length (with no URLs or web links). final int CHARACTER_LENGTH = 140 numOfPosts = posts.size() numOfPosts.times { j -> Map post = posts.get(j) if (post.com!= null) { comment = Jsoup.parse(post.com).text() // Removes HTML from comment. if (comment.length() <= CHARACTER_LENGTH &&!comment.contains("www") &&!comment.contains("http")) listOfComments << comment } } Thread.sleep(2000) // Respect the 4chan API rules. } // Choose a comment for Twitter posting. chosenCommentIndex = new Random().nextInt(listOfComments.size()) chosenComment = listOfComments.get(chosenCommentIndex) twitter = TwitterFactory.getSingleton() twitter.updateStatus(chosenComment) Date date = new Date() SimpleDateFormat today = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE, d MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z") println today.format(date) + " - Updated Twitter status with: " + chosenComment // Wait for a while (15 mins) until the next tweet. Thread.sleep(900000) }
Now that you've got the whole script, save it (if you haven't already) as filename.groovy. You can execute it with a groovy filename command or simply give it a double click to run if you installed the Groovy SDK properly.
Congratulations! You now have your very own operational 4chan Twitter Bot.
Now sit back, run the script, and be prepared to be made very uncomfortable, repeatedly.
Update: The original r9k_b script has been Groovy'fied by none other than GR8Conf founder Søren Berg Glasius. You can view the updated script over in the main branch of the r9k_b repo.Welcome back to The Way of Kings reread here on Tor.com. Things are moving fast and furious as we are less than a month away from the publication of Words of Radiance (check out the new Glimpses of Radiance feature), but before we reach that destination we need to finish the journey that is The Way of Kings.
This week we tackle just one chapter, though it is quite an important one. Two sides that are warring against each other within Dalinar. On one side is the Alethi Thrill that has been bred into him, which he no longer revels in. On the other is the influence his conscience and the codes have had upon him. Neither side seems to have the upper hand at the moment, but that will change as Dalinar steps into a new role. Only he has to get past Sadeas to do it. And after he saved Sadeas’s storming life!
Chapter 56: That Storming Book
Point of View: Dalinar
Setting: The Shattered Plains
What Happens: Dalinar finds himself in the thick of battle upon the Shattered Plains atop his horse, Gallant. This is one of his earliest joint plateau attacks with Sadeas’s forces. Both armies seem to complement each other well with Sadeas’s men leading the way and Dalinar’s better trained forces sweeping in behind.
The Thrill is upon Dalinar. He cuts through the Parshendi forces with ease as they fall from beneath his Shardblade’s edge, burning out their eyes as it passes through them.
As Dalinar fights he focuses on the fact that the Parshendi fight in pairs; usually one is bearded while the other is not. Alethi scholars theorize it is a master/apprentice relationship, but after looking at an unbearded Parshendi up-close Dalinar theorizes they fight in male and female—possibly husband and wife—teams, though with the Parshendi’s build and odd carapace shielding it is difficult to tell.
After dispatching many Parshendi, Dalinar sees that the battle near him has ebbed. He dismounts Gallant and sends the horse back behind the lines. Looking again at the pairs of Parshendi, Dalinar decides to have a couple of the Parshendi bodies taken back and examined by his scholars.
Dalinar heads to a more active section of the battlefield. Adolin is in the distance commanding another area while Sadeas’s forces are focused on the chrysalis. Though they could end the battle now by cutting open the chrysalis both Dalinar and Sadeas had decided beforehand to protect, thus it luring more Parshendi into the battle. Their long term plan is to kill as many Parshendi with these sorties as they can in hopes of ending the war sooner.
Even though Dalinar knows he should hate the Parshendi he still respects them for their will to attack a Shardbearer so easily. Most regular soldiers would flee at the sight of a Shardbearer, but the Parshendi go right for them. Dalinar finds himself in the midst of many Parshendi, all of whom he quickly kills. A sudden bout of nausea takes him as he fights against the Thrill. But that doesn’t stop him from slicing through more Parshendi.
In the past Dalinar savored the Thrill, reveling in it during previous campaigns. Once he nearly attacked his brother Gavilar when he was lost deep in it. It was a time not long after Navani had chosen Gavilar over him.
Dalinar notices a second Parshendi army approaching, which had never happened in the past. It appears they are learning from Dalinar and Sadeas’s attacks. He sends runners to inform everyone about the second force. Dalinar runs and climbs up a rock formation for a better look—the army is headed for Sadeas’s side. Dalinar calls for his horse and tells a runner to inform Adolin that he is now in charge of the assault. Dalinar wades through the middle of the Parshendi with his Shardblade twisting around him, clearing him a path forward towards where he had seen Sadeas’s banner fall. Dalinar becomes the Blackthorn in that moment, unleashing himself as he hadn’t in years. “He was a maelstrom of death and steel.”
Dalinar finds Sadeas encircled and being beaten by the Parshendi as he leaks Stormlight from his armor. Dalinar sees the hammer Sadeas must have dropped and picks it up, dispatching many Parshendi. He summons his blade again and finishes those near him. Sadeas’s armor is in bad shape, broken and cracked in many places with the chestplate all but gone, but he lives. More Parshendi come at them, seeing two Shardbearers in their grasp. Dalinar kills them all with the Thrill surging again. Dalinar is in danger of being overrun when Adolin bursts through the ranks from behind, decimating the forces there. Adolin’s men are right behind him. They surround Dalinar and Sadeas and take out the remaining Parshendi.
Adolin expresses his displeasure at his father’s run across the battlefield without any of his soldiers. The plate on Dalinar’s back is a ruin and will require a lot of time and infused gemstones to repair the damage.
Sadeas is removed from his plate by his soldiers and seems to be mostly okay though dazed. He learns they won the battle and the gemheart is being cut now. Sadeas congratulates Dalinar and Adolin. Dalinar makes it clear he was following the Codes to do so. Dalinar departs to check on Gallant. He sees the line of death he caused across the field and seems horrified at what he has done.
Quote of the Chapter:
“You do not abandon your allies on the battlefield. Not unless there’s no recourse. It is one of the Codes.” Sadeas shook his head. “That honor of yours is going to get you killed, Dalinar.” He seemed bemused.
How right Dalinar is yet how right Sadeas hopes to be. What Sadeas later does is unconscionable after what Dalinar risked to save his life. Someday soon being a Lighteyes may just be a curse on this world. Maybe it already is.
Commentary:
That storming book indeed.
We finally get to see the Blackthorn in all his glory and horror. The Thrill is strong within Dalinar, but something deep inside him fights against it. He no longer wants to lose himself in the Thrill, which is a very un-Alethi thing. It gets so bad be becomes nauseous of what he has done to the Parshendi.
This echoes two things for me. Firstly, the fight and destruction Szeth caused in Jah Keved. Both regret their actions even if they are things that must be done. Szeth’s reasons aren’t as virtuous as Dalinar’s, of course. The even greater connection is how similar Dalinar sees things as Kaladin did the first time he saw what a Shardbearer could do in a battle. The massive loss of life in such a short span caused by just one man with a sword that cuts through people’s very souls is a lot to take in if you care about the lives of people. Shardbearers in modern Alethi society seem to think nothing of their actions. They are merely using the tools as they think them designed to work.
Our glimpses into the time of the Knights Radiant and the Codes paints an entirely different picture. A picture that says the Shards weren’t meant to fight men, but a greater evil. The Codes are brought back front and center by Dalinar’s actions. And for the moment Sadeas seems generally interested in them and how they’ve changed Dalinar. This has to be one of Sanderson’s biggest fake-outs revealed in The Way of Kings. Sadeas doesn’t want to change. Sadeas wants to understand how he can utilized whatever weaknesses his adversaries have and in Sadeas’s eyes Dalinar and his codes are a very big weakness. Dalinar still remembers thought that “it is not the destination that matters, but how one arrives there.” And that is another thing that he has in common with Kaladin. Even though both are going through arduous experiences with Kaladin getting the low stick they both find a way to keep moving forward. To do the best they can in that moment whatever it may be.
And maybe, just maybe Dalinar has a piece of Kaladin with him at this moment.
“He felt a breeze through the back of his breastplate. Cooling, terrible, frightening. The cracks were widening. If the breastplate burst...”
Could that be our lovely Sylphrena buzzing around Dalinar? It certainly seems likely as she does display an interest in Dalinar, which we’ll see more of in later chapters. But could an honorspren be connected to more than one Radiant? I’ve always thought that a bit inappropriate as the connect Kaladin and Syl doesn’t seem like something that should really be shared. Dalinar needs his own and hopefully he’ll get it in Words of Radiance.
One last word on the epigraph. It seems to be written from Tanavast in the aftermath of his own destruction yet I struggle to see how after he is shattered/broken he would be able to communicate. Still it shows just the kind of destruction Odium is capable of. Let’s get those Radiants back to beat him and restore honor and the Shard of Honor.
Michael Pye (aka The Mad Hatter) runs The Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf & Book Review where he shares his views on genre books. He can also be found nattering on Twitter or in search of the perfect piece of bacon.CHICAGO – Sabres owner Terry Pegula will be in the spotlight at the NHL Draft. It’s not yet clear exactly why.
Pegula will join other hockey executives for a “special announcement” in support of college hockey at 5 p.m. Friday in United Center. The Sabres’ owner, who is being billed as an “alumnus/patron of Penn State University,” will be alongside NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, players’ association executive assistant Mathieu Schneider, USA Hockey Executive Director Pat Kelleher, University of Illinois Athletics Director Josh Whitman and Chicago Blackhawks CEO John McDonough.
Though outdoor games immediately come to mind whenever the Blackhawks are involved, a source says the announcement is not as significant as that for the Sabres. Buffalo is already playing an outdoor game Jan. 1 in New York against the Rangers.
No further information on Friday's news conference was immediately available.
The University of Illinois has a successful club hockey team but has said money prohibits it from jumping to Division I. Pegula-funded Penn State is in the Big Ten, which is looking to add an eighth member.Di Maria (left) and Falcao have boosted United's creative resources
Former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson has admitted the squad needed "a big injection" of players.
Ferguson retired in 2013 but successor David Moyes was sacked in April as United struggled to seventh last term, their lowest Premier League finish.
Six new players were brought in at a cost of £150m, including Angel Di Maria for a British record fee of £59.7m
"It was really important because you need quality at Manchester United, you need the best players," Ferguson said.
The 72-year-old Scotsman, who won 38 trophies in his 26 years at United, told MUTV: "That's the way the game is going today with fees likes £85m for Gareth Bale.
"When you can identify ability like that needed by Manchester United, they have the resources to do that.
"Those are fees I never quite equalled but nonetheless they were needing quite a big injection this year."
Also in the summer transfer window, United sold Manchester-born striker Danny Welbeck, who had progressed through the youth ranks, to Arsenal for £16m, leading to criticism the club were neglecting their youth policy.
But new boss Louis van Gaal has introduced several homegrown players into the senior squad in his first season at the helm, including defenders Paddy McNair and Tyler Blackett.
"What has pleased me about Louis is he's given seven young kids their debuts this year, which falls into line with the history of our club," Ferguson said.
Van Gaal, who signed a three-year contract with United in May, has won titles with Ajax, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and AZ Alkmaar but has seen his new team lose to Swansea and Leicester, and suffer a 4-0 thrashing by League One MK Dons in the League Cup.
Asked about the new manager's start, Ferguson added: "Maybe he's doing the right thing to clear the decks and build his own team, because he's got the experience and coaching ability to do that. I think the way he's approached [it] is brilliant.
"He's not been getting the results that are expected but when I came to the club I didn't get the results I expected myself at the beginning.
"Louis is going through that same process and there's no doubt in my mind he will sort it out."AUBURN HILLS, Mich. -- Brandon Jennings can hardly wait to take the court alongside Detroit's athletic big men.
"I guess you can say we can bring the 'Lob City' to Detroit this year," Jennings said.
That's quite a boast, considering the Pistons have missed the playoffs for four straight seasons, but if there was one thing Jennings tried to make clear Tuesday, it was that he will absolutely look to pass the ball a bit more than he did in Milwaukee. Detroit acquired Jennings from the Bucks last week, hoping the new point guard can be an important part of an extensive offseason overhaul.
The Pistons also signed forward Josh Smith and guard Chauncey Billups. They traded guard Brandon Knight in the deal for Jennings.
It was a flurry of moves that, at the very least, has people around Detroit talking about the Pistons again. How it will look on the court is anyone's guess -- and Jennings' job will be to help this group become a cohesive unit.
"This year I think you're going to see a whole different player, just with all the talent that I have around me, the veterans that are in the locker room," Jennings said. "Now I can just actually be myself and be who I was five years ago, when I was in high school, playing AAU basketball."
The 23-year-old Jennings seems well aware of some of the knocks against him. He shot 40 percent from the field last season, easily the worst mark in the NBA for any player who took over 1,200 shots. Of course, he also averaged a career-high 6.5 assists per game.
"I definitely have to change my game for this team, for my teammates, everybody to be successful," Jennings said. "The things that I was doing in Milwaukee, I won't have to do here -- take all those bad shots."
The Bucks made the playoffs last season with a 38-44 record. Detroit was nine games worse, and the Pistons made a coaching change this offseason, bringing in Maurice Cheeks to replace Lawrence Frank.
Talented big man Greg Monroe is still only 23, and 6-foot-11 Andre Drummond turns 20 on Saturday. That's what Jennings is talking about when he says the Pistons have a bright future and teammates he'll enjoy playing with.
Detroit added Smith, a 6-foot-9 forward who averaged 17.5 points for Atlanta last season. The question now is how well he'll mesh with the other frontcourt players -- and what Jennings and Billups can add to the backcourt. Drummond was at Tuesday's news conference, when Jennings was introduced.
"It's like I got drafted all over again," Drummond said. "I'm walking into a new situation, a new coaching staff, a new bunch of players."
It's certainly an exciting time for a franchise that has not had many of them lately. Detroit's rebuilding process has been slow. First, Tom Gores became the team's new owner in 2011 following a drawn-out sale. Over the next couple years, the Pistons parted ways with Richard Hamilton, Ben Gordon and Tayshaun Prince, giving themselves flexibility.
It felt for a while like this would be the offseason when Detroit's patience might finally turn into action -- when the Pistons would put some of their salary cap space to use and be aggressive in the trade market. That's exactly what's happened, and although it's hard to say where this lineup ranks in the Eastern Conference, nobody can accuse Detroit of standing pat.
Team President Joe Dumars doesn't anticipate any more major changes, so all that's left now is the waiting.
"I do feel like the roster that we have right now is a roster that can compete for the playoffs," Dumars said. "I don't foresee us doing any more big moves."The following is a message from Peter Kurzweg of The Independent Brewing Co., a local craft beer-focused bar located in Squirrel Hill:
Good evening:
The Carrie Furnace, once a mighty steel mill, now stands alone in a no-man’s land, by the Monongahela river, on the border of Rankin and Swissvale. This long-abandoned monument of industry looms over a wide-open expanse of empty terrain, an Ozymandias-like monument of Pittsburgh’s once-great steel industry.
The mill reached the height of its production in the 1950s and 1960s, producing 1000 to 1250 tons of iron each day. Before falling into collapse with the rest of Pittsburgh’s steel industry in the 1970s.
On Saturday, November 1st, for one night only, The Independent and The Brew Gentlemen will restore the Carrie Furnace to its 50s and 60s era of greatness. We will be throwing a Halloween party in homage to that era’s most prolific director: Alfred Hitchcock. Together with Rivers of Steel, the non-profit steward of this beautiful historic monument, we present: Hitchcock! – A Halloween Party at the Carrie Furnace.
This little party will have all of the components of a great Hitchcock film: suspense, romance, psychological thrills, and murderously good craft beers and cocktails. DJs throughout the evening will keep you dancing the night away on our dance floor centered in an old hangar bay of the mill.
Tickets go on sale this Wednesday. General Admission tickets will be sold for $35 each and will include three drink tickets (beer or cocktail) at the bar. Additional drink tickets will be available for sale at the event.
Food will be available for purchase from our food truck corral, which will be located around a large bonfire in the courtyard of the mill, back-cast by the moonlit shadow of the old blast furnace. Participating food trucks include PGH Taco Truck, Blowfish BBQ, Street Foods, Gyros N’at, and Leona’s Ice Cream Sandwiches, along with a food tent from The Independent.
500 parking spots will be available at the venue and will be sold on a first-come-first-serve basis for $15 each in advance. Free shuttle services will be available from the Pump House at the Waterfront in Homestead. Shuttles will run to and from the venue throughout the evening, beginning at 7:30pm. A shuttle will be available to and from The Independent in Squirrel Hill at the beginning and end of the event for $5 (shuttle tickets available online).
This Hitchcockian Halloween lasts from 8:00pm to 1:00am. The event is rain or shine (well, shine of the moon, that is…)I received an anonymous e-mail saying to expect something very jewey. When I received a package from whole foods I was expecting matzo balls or something along those lines... It was a bonsai tree, Japanese black pine actually. I was more than slightly confused, but still enjoyed it.
Two days later I receive two very large packages, awkwardly jammed into my mailbox I might add. I opened up the first one (a long tube shipping package) and found a poster of a Boxer puppy, loved it, still not jewey though.
The final box was fairly huge and beat up, when I opened it, it contained a JEWISH! cookbook, finally understand.
See what my secret Reddit sugar Santa did here was gift me based upon my most active subreddits, I own a boxer, and post on /r/boxer. I also frequently post on /r/gardening (hence the bonsai tree) and I'm always browsing the assorted cooking subreddits (boom, cookbook) I don't know why its a jewish cookbook, but regardless I'm planning on making some of the recipes this weekend.
To whoever you are Mr. Mysterious reddit gifter, you are awesome!Anyone who has ever hit a baseball off the wrong part of the bat knows the shot of pain that courses through your hands. Now, thanks to acoustics engineer Daniel Russell of Pennsylvania State University, that unpleasant jolt could become a relic of the game’s past.
Russell, who has been devising baseball-centric experiments for years, recently helped solve the physics mystery at the heart of the infamous sting. Nearly a decade ago, baseball equipment manufacturer Marucci Sports put a vibration damper inside its aluminum bats to eliminate the pain, but the technology was not working as well as hoped, so the company recruited Russell.
After interviewing several college players, Russell learned they all felt pain in the same spot: the fleshy tissue between the thumb and forefinger in the upper hand of their grip. They all held the bat in roughly the same place, so Russell analyzed the corresponding region in his lab. He used two rubber bands attached to either end of a frame that suspended the bat horizontally. Then he struck the bat at various points with a hammer. An accelerometer affixed to the barrel of the bat tracked the vibrations while a transducer in the hammer’s tip measured the force applied.
Striking the bat five to six inches from the tip, an area known as the sweet spot, generated virtually no vibration. Smacking it outside the sweet spot, on the other hand, forced 450 to 700 vibrations per second to pulse at the bat’s grip, thereby causing the sting. And these vibrations peaked in intensity right where the player typically holds his upper hand.
Russell realized nothing was wrong with the damper, which consists of a rubber-spoked wheel that transfers vibrations to a brass weight set inside the knob of the bat. The idea was right — the weight should have absorbed the pulses — but the device was tuned to the wrong frequency.
Marucci adjusted its dampers and later used Russell’s findings to develop a new Kevlar-based grip that also cancels the sting. Recently, other companies have begun using the dampers. Now a poorly hit ball isn’t so painful. “This little brass piece vibrates like crazy, but you don’t feel it in the hands at all,” Russell says.
[This article originally appeared in print as "Silencing the Sting."]How the Value of Collateral is Damaged Rehypothecation of Collateral Before you get a headache or a pain in your side, rehypothecation is not as difficult to understand as spelling the word. Definition of'Rehypothecation ':
“The practice by banks and brokers of using, for their own purposes, assets that have been posted as collateral by their clients. Clients who permit rehypothecation of their collateral may be compensated either through a lower cost of borrowing or a rebate on fees. In a typical example of rehypothecation, securities that have been posted with a prime brokerage as collateral by a hedge fund are used by the brokerage to back its own transactions and trades. While rehypothecation was a common practice until 2007, hedge funds became much more wary about it in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse and subsequent credit crunch in 2008-09. In the United States, rehypothecation of collateral by broker-dealers is limited to 140% of the loan amount to a client, under Rule 15c3-3 of the SEC.” Well, now that it is clear, isn’t it? Still need a better explanation, watch the video Rehypothecation. Look at the practice as a giant musical chairs orchestra, conducting a continuous symphony. As long as the tune plays, the multi pledged collateral is safe from foreclosure. Consider that the entire fiat paper financial system is based upon a promise to pay. The original capital plus the interest juice is incorporated within the pledge from the borrower to the lender. However, in the real world only the super privileged and connected negotiate market rate or below, loans without collateral. For the rest of the garden-variety beggars that need to go hat in hand to scrounge money, they had better be willing to put up security for the note obligation. Of course, unsecured credit card usury rates are the exception to manageable interest rates. In the realm of high finance the rules for swinging deals takes on surreal implications when leveraging, gearing and syndication pooling share the risk by pledging security instruments to gain loan approval. The complications are that such guarantees often do not hold unencumbered rights to the underlying security. Obtaining insurance coverage to warrant the value of the collateral is one way to satisfy the lender. Add to this expose the practice of re-insurance when the original underwriter books out their portions of the default risk to another more daring insurer. While the security industry rules limit the percentage of rehypothecation, do not forget this is the same fraternity that invented the practices of derivatives and swaps. The subscription service, Risk.net, offers this assessment in the article, WGMR rehypothecation rules unclear and confusing, say lawyers. "The rules are contained within new margin requirements for uncleared derivatives, the final version of which was published on September 2 by the Working Group on Margining Requirements (WGMR), a body run jointly by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Organization of Securities Commissions.The decision to allow strictly limited rehypothecation of customer assets comes after the WGMR initially appeared to rule the practice out in its first July 2012 consultation document. A subsequent February 2013 ‘near-final' paper asked whether some rehypothecation should be allowed with strict controls, but the latest iteration of the rules is the first time the conditions for rehypothecation have been fleshed out in detail. The WGMR stipulates that customer assets collected as initial margin on uncleared derivatives trades can only be rehypothecated to a third party to hedge the dealer's derivatives position arising out of transactions with customers for which initial margin was posted. This collateral can only be rehypothecated once – so, the third party would not be able to re-use the assets again. Any rehypothecated initial margin must be treated as customer collateral and segregated from proprietary assets – a condition that extends to the third party after rehypothecation. Crucially, the customer must also be protected from the risk of loss of initial margin in the event the dealer or third party, or both, collapse." Do you really believe that any set of rules will prevent the security brotherhood from comingling customer funds? Maybe putting Jon Corzine, the MF Global Holdings guru in charge of regulation enforcement would bring clarity to a complex system of double-dealing. Sure, such an expert on circumventing the law would be the optimum sheriff to round up the rehypothecation bandits. Well, just understand the significance that the lawyers and barristers acknowledge, in the WGMR report. "Cash is fully fungible, making it difficult to segregate from other assets, lawyers point out. Full title to the cash is given to the dealer, and all the customer has is a contractual claim for repayment of an equal amount of cash, meaning it would effectively rank as an unsecured creditor in the event of a default. In contrast, securities posted as collateral under a security interest arrangement can be segregated and traceable." Oh golly, the smoking gun verbalized by the officers of the court... The depositor relinquishes their ownership of funds to the security dealer. When the music is over, turn out the lights. Maybe the message from the Jim Morrison’s song is a warning to investors and borrowers alike. Just close the door on the opaque scheme to overestimate the underlying value of collateral security. When the only recourse to recoup your losses rests upon an unsecure creditor status in a bankruptcy, the capital formation of the economic system ceases to function. Conversely, before the borrower rejoices that the financial institution takes a mortal hit to their balance sheet, the collapse of liquidity brings hardship to the entire economy. Common sense in banking is gone. Indemnity protection in securities is worthless. If left to the financial elites to rescue the paper monitory structure, the gnomes of default will just rehypothecate the entire system by claiming the same ownership, of all-collateral as the financial dealers take full title to your cash. This is how you have become the unsecured creditor of your own assets. When You Wish Upon A Star, Anything your heart desires – REHYPOTHECATION - Will come to you. James Hall – October 9, 2013 Subscribe to the BATR Realpolitik Newsletter Discuss or comment about this essay on the BATR ForumDon't kid yourself, those former staffers are writing the actual legislation. That's because we've cut so much money from congressional staffs, they don't have enough independent, experienced staff members to handle complex legislation. So all that "fat" we cut, all that money we "saved"? It only made the lobbyists more powerful:
WASHINGTON — Restaurant chains like McDonald’s want to keep their lucrative tax credit for hiring veterans. Altria, the tobacco giant, wants to cut the corporate tax rate. And Sapphire Energy, a small alternative energy company, is determined to protect a tax incentive it believes could turn algae into a popular motor fuel.
To make their case as Congress prepares to debate a rewrite of the nation’s tax code, this diverse set of businesses has at least one strategy in common: they have retained firms that employ lobbyists who are former aides to Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a crucial role in shaping any legislation.
No other lawmaker on Capitol Hill has such a sizable constellation of former aides working as tax lobbyists, representing blue-chip clients that include telecommunications businesses, oil companies, retailers and financial firms, according to an analysis by LegiStorm, an online database that tracks Congressional staff members and lobbying. At least 28 aides who have worked for Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana, since he became the committee chairman in 2001 have lobbied on tax issues during the Obama administration — more than any other current member of Congress, according to the analysis of lobbying filings performed for The New York Times.
“K Street is literally littered with former Baucus staffers,” said Jade West, an executive at a wholesalers’ trade association that relies on a former finance panel aide, Mary Burke Baker. “It opens doors that allow you to make the case.”
Like Ms. Baker, many of those lobbyists have already saved their clients millions — in some cases, billions — of dollars after Mr. Baucus backed their requests to extend certain corporate tax perks, provisions that were adopted as part of the so-called fiscal cliff legislation in January. Baucus aides who later became lobbyists helped financial firms save $11.2 billion in tax deferments and helped secure a $222 million tax benefit that is shared with the liquor industry.
Sean Neary, a spokesman for Mr. Baucus, said the senator had regularly rejected requests from those lobbyists for provisions benefiting their clients, like an appeal from one former aide, Pat Bousliman, now working as a wind industry lobbyist, to extend an alternative energy loan guarantee program that expired in 2011.This was a repalcement for an AMD Radeon and so far so good ie it has worked flawlessly. The only snag was when it came to fitting on the dell xps 8700 motherboard. I was of the understanding it was a like for like replaeement and would just slot in but that was not the case. Its bigger than the AMD, not a lot but big enoungh to snag the sata cables and it clips the plastic locks on the memory banks so I had to move cables and reseat the memory locks after the card was in situ. Also it was not possible to replace the dell plastic holder over the card as the power inlet on the new card gets in the way. This is for future people who order card. Other than that it works like a dream and I may not even use its full potential but its fast, very quiet and comes with great instructions.WASHINGTON ― Dr. Yashica Robinson, a 40-year-old gynecologist in Huntsville, Alabama, experiences what she calls a “constant mental beatdown” from protesters every day as she tries to do her job.
At her private practice, Robinson provides birth control, pap smears and maternity care. She also provides abortions at a separate clinic in Huntsville. But throngs of protesters show up daily at both practices to block the entrance and harass her and her patients, including those who are visibly eight months pregnant and just coming in for an ultrasound. Robinson said the protesters sometimes touch or grab the patients, videotape and photograph them, call them “murderers” and leave “WANTED” posters on their cars plastered with photos of Robinson.
“It’s unnerving,” Robinson said. “I call when I get up to my driveway to make sure someone has the door ready for me, so I don’t have to put my head down and take my eyes off the protesters. I never know what they’re going to do.”
“I had a patient who wrecked her car trying to get into the driveway,” she recalled ― a woman in her early 20s who was just coming in for a Depo-Provera birth control shot, and who found herself having to navigate a gauntlet of protesters lining Robinson’s narrow drive. “The protesters pointed and laughed at her.”
Robinson’s patients “come in confused and shaken,” she said. “They’re like, ‘What’s going on out there?’”
The scene outside women’s health clinics has become dramatically more threatening to patients and providers since 2015, when anti-abortion activists produced a series of heavily edited videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood workers negotiating the sale of fetal body parts. The videos have been thoroughly debunked, and Planned Parenthood has been cleared of wrongdoing in multiple investigations. But the percentage of clinics reporting violence and threats by anti-abortion activists nearly doubled after the videos were released, from 19.7 percent of clinics in the first half of 2014 to 34.2 percent in the first half of 2016.
The most common types of violence and intimidation that clinics have reported include stalking, bomb threats |
Linens might be scented by herbs added to the wash-water, or, when starch became popular, to the starch solution.
: little cloth bags or envelopes of dried herbs and flowers, used to keep clothes and linens smelling sweet as well as discourage moths & bugs; very late period: mostly in period, herbs were simply scattered in chests and folded into cloth. Linens might be scented by herbs added to the wash-water, or, when starch became popular, to the starch solution. Tussie-Mussie : bouquet of herbs and flowers, originally used to avoid breathing noxious odors and pestilent humors.
: bouquet of herbs and flowers, originally used to avoid breathing noxious odors and pestilent humors. Conserve : flowers or herbs preserved or jellied in sugar or honey solution.
: flowers or herbs preserved or jellied in sugar or honey solution. Bath : Steep herbs in bathwater or add an infusion or oil of the herbs to the water. Soak. Herb teas were sometimes also used in saunas.
: Steep herbs in bathwater or add an infusion or oil of the herbs to the water. Soak. Herb teas were sometimes also used in saunas. Vinegar : Immerse your herb(s) in vinegar for a few weeks or months. The result can be used in cooking, or as a scent or wash. Mint vinegar was recommended as a mouthwash.
: Immerse your herb(s) in vinegar for a few weeks or months. The result can be used in cooking, or as a scent or wash. Mint vinegar was recommended as a mouthwash. Waters : handwashing and perfume as well as medicinal waters were made by mixing herbs with alcohol and distilling. Nowadays we usually do these as tinctures or mix oils with a water and alcohol base.
: handwashing and perfume as well as medicinal waters were made by mixing herbs with alcohol and distilling. Nowadays we usually do these as tinctures or mix oils with a water and alcohol base. Body Powders: Essential to prevent chafing as well as achieving that fashionably pale look, body and face powders were concocted by mixing powder bases (rice powder, talc, ground orris root, ground calamus root, starch) with various ground spices and herbs: cloves, dried rose petals, lavender.
Essential to prevent chafing as well as achieving that fashionably pale look, body and face powders were concocted by mixing powder bases (rice powder, talc, ground orris root, ground calamus root, starch) with various ground spices and herbs: cloves, dried rose petals, lavender. Soaps: Scented soaps, made by mixing Castile soap with aromatic herbs and waters, seem to have been known at the end of period. Thyme, lavender, and other herbs were used in bathwaters and as oil rubdowns from the time of the Greeks.
Some recipes:
A period sleep pillow from Ram's Little Doeden says to fill a small pillow with ground peppermint, ground cloves, and rose petals.
Lombard (honey) mustard: 2 tbs. ground yellow mustard powder, 2 tbs. crunched up brown and yellow mustard seeds, 1/4 c. wine vinegar, s, mix together and add water as necessary. Blend with 1/2 c. honey; add wine as necessary to thin to watery consistency.
"To make water for washing hands at table: Boil sage, then strain the water and cool it until it is a little more than lukewarm. Or use chamomile, marjoram, or rosemary boiled with orange peel. Bay leaves are also good. " A medieval Home companion (from Le Menagier of Paris)
Sekanjibin, a medieval drink mix, is described in Cariadocs Miscellany (http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cariadoc/drinks.html#2).
Boil together 4 c. sugar and 2 1/2 c. water.
Add 1 c. vinegar when it comes to a boil.
Remove from heat and add your mint or similar herbs (Cariadoc says one handful; I use two)
Let it cool. Strain out the herbs from the syrup and bottle.
A Little on Medieval Herbalism
Some Historical Herbalists:
Dioscorides (Greek) de Materica Medica
Pliny the Elder (Roman), Natural History -- botanist, described plants and uses
-- botanist, described plants and uses Walafrid Strabo, Hortulus, 7th century-- monk in monastery of St. Gall
, 7th century-- monk in monastery of St. Gall Leech Book of Bald, Saxon, 10th century
, Saxon, 10th century Albert Magnus, 1193-1280-- De vegetabilibus
Trotula of Salerno, Passionibus Mulierum Curandorum (The Diseases of Women), 11th century-- famous woman doctor
(The Diseases of Women), 11th century-- famous woman doctor Ibn Botlan, Tables (Taqwim ), 11th Century, Arabic physician
), 11th Century, Arabic physician Hortus Sanitatis. Printed in Mainz, 1460
. Printed in Mainz, 1460 William Turner, Herbal, 1551-1568 in parts-- "Father of Botany" in Britain
, 1551-1568 in parts-- "Father of Botany" in Britain John Gerard, Herbal, 1597; cribbing the work of Dutch Rembert Dodoens ( Pemptades )
, 1597; cribbing the work of Dutch Rembert Dodoens ( ) Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physician, 1652 -- physician and astrologer
Grand Unifying Herb Theories
Theory of Humors
Doctrine of Signatures
Principle of Contagion
Astrological Correspondences
Aunt Jadwiga's Herbal Safety Rant
Before you use any herb-- for food, crafts, or whatever--, check its safety in a couple of modern herbals that give reliable medical information. I like Penelope Ody's Complete Medicinal Herbal, and Sarah Garland's Complete Book of Herbs and Spices; Rodale Press and Storey Publishing also produce some good herbal resources. There is even a Physician's Desk Reference for Herbal medicines. Check the copyright date: anything from a book copyrighted before 1985 should be verified in another resource.
I love herbs and I do a lot of herb crafts and use herbal home remedies. But after 20 years of working with herbs, I still don't consider myself competent to tackle medical herbalism beyond the first-aid/home remedy stage. Like it says on the labels of over-the-counter medicine, for serious or ongoing illnesses or conditions consult a doctor. Herbal home remedies (from Grandma's 'honey and lemon' to Gypsy Cold Care brand tea) are no different. If you choose to use them, treat herbal medicines with respect. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's safe. An old apothecary's saying is that something powerful enough to help is powerful enough to harm. An inexperienced herbalist should never mess with them on his or her own-- consult a reputable medical herbalist, pharmacist or other medical professional. (Any modern book or herbalist who doesn't encourage you to also consult a physician should be considered unreliable and regarded with heavy suspicion.) Avoid things that the period herbals say are abortifacients or mind altering (psychoactive, hallucinogenic, etc.) substances-- these are generally toxic. Also treat things referred to as vermifuges (treatments for human internal worms) with extreme caution: if they can kill worms, what do you think they'll do to your insides? 'Purgatives' should not be taken internally, as they tend to imitate the effects of a really bad bout of intestinal flu, and are often outright poisonous.
Anyone can be allergic to anything. If you are making food for a group, or a fragrance or craft for someone, don't keep your ingredients a secret! Some herbs and botanicals are known to be allergens for many people-- camomile and lavender among them. But there are odd allergies out there. If you're trying something new, be cautious yourself, too.
Scientists rightly complain that herbs and botanicals vary widely in quality and strength of active components (which cooks and fragrance crafters will confirm) from batch to batch, so the strength and potency of an herb mix can vary wildly. Essential oils, extracts, distillates and tinctures generally contain the active ingredients of herbs in much higher concentration than in the herb itself, and so can have different or more powerful effects. (I like to check out safety considerations for oils in The encyclopedia of essential oils.) Also, things that are safe for external use may not be safe for consumption. "Natural" does NOT equal "safe".
Everything in moderation: Herbs and spices that in small quantities are pleasant can be problematic when used or taken too much or for too long a time. One cup of peppermint tea can soothe your stomach, but five or six in quick succession may make you nauseous! Scientists continue to find that too much or too extended use of many botanicals can have negative effects. As they say about all medicines, more is not necessarily better.
Wildcrafting (picking herbs and botanicals from the wild) can be dangerous. Don't ever use or consume anything you find growing wild unless you are absolutely certain you can identify it correctly, and even then it's best to get a second opinion from an expert! Never rely on identifying something from a book. (Just because birds or animals can eat something doesn't mean it's not poisonous, either.)
To sum up:
Medieval Sources are Not Reliable Medical Texts Avoid Self-treatment for Serious Medical Concerns Some Herbs can have Serious Effects Allergies can Kill More of a Good Thing is Not always Better Don't eat anything you can't identify!
Further reading:
*An Herbal [1525 ] Also called Banckes' Herbal. Author unknown, published 1525. Facsimile & transcripted edition ed. by Larkey & Pyles. (NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941)
] Also called Banckes' Herbal. Author unknown, published 1525. Facsimile & transcripted edition ed. by Larkey & Pyles. (NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1941) *Arano, Luis Cogliati, ed. The Medieval Health Handbook (Tacuinum Sanitatis), (NY, George Braziller, 1976) from 14th century illuminations
(Tacuinum Sanitatis), (NY, George Braziller, 1976) from 14th century illuminations *Culpeper, Nicholas, Culpeper's Complete Herbal. (NY: Foulsham & Co)
(NY: Foulsham & Co)
* Culpeper, Nicholas. The English Physician, 1657. (Made available on the Web by the Yale Medical School: http://www.med.yale.edu/library/historical/culpeper/culpeper.htm) Includes the information usually published as the Herbal, plus a number of recipes supposedly taken from the Royal College of Physicians. *Dioscorides Pedanius, of Anazarbos. The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides: illustrated by Byzantine, A. D. 512; Englished by John Goodyer, A. D. 1655; edited & first printed, A.D. 1933, by Robert T. Gunther..
illustrated by Byzantine, A. D. 512; Englished by John Goodyer, A. D. 1655; edited & first printed, A.D. 1933, by Robert T. Gunther.. Forme of Cury, online version: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/foc/
, online version: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/foc/ * Gerard, John. Leaves from Gerard's Herbal: the History of Plants. (Senate Publishing, 1994). (Abridged version)
the History of Plants. (Senate Publishing, 1994). (Abridged version) * Hildegard von Bingen's Physica. trans. by Pricilla Throop. (Healing Arts Press, 1998)
trans. by Pricilla Throop. (Healing Arts Press, 1998) Hill, Thomas. The Gardener's Labyrinth. ed. Richard Mabey. (NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987)
. ed. Richard Mabey. (NY: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987) * Markham, Gervase. The English Housewife. (McGill-Queens University Press, 1986)
. (McGill-Queens University Press, 1986) A Medieval Home Companion: Housekeeping in the fourteenth century. (from Le menagier de Paris) Trans. & edited by Tania Bayard. (NY: HarperCollins, 1991)
(from Le menagier de Paris) Trans. & edited by Tania Bayard. (NY: HarperCollins, 1991) Parkinson, John. A Garden of Pleasant Flowers: Paradisi in Sole. (NY: Dover, 1991.)
Thomas Tusser, His Good Points of Husbandry, 1557. Published 1931 by Country Life Limited, London; edited by Dorothy Hartley.
Clarkson, Rosetta E. Green Enchantment: The Magic and History of Herbs and Garden Making. (NY: Macmillan, 1941)
(NY: Macmillan, 1941) Clarkson, Rosetta E. Magic Gardens: A Modern Chronicle of Herbs and Savory Seeds. (NY: Macmillan, 1939)
(NY: Macmillan, 1939) Freeman, Margaret. Herbs for the Medieval Household: for cooking, healing and divers uses. (Metropolitian Museum of Art, 1943)
(Metropolitian Museum of Art, 1943) Garland, Sarah. The complete book of Herbs and Spices. (Pleasantville,NY: Reader's Digest, 1993).
Bayard, Tania. Sweet Herbs and Sundry Flowers. (NY, Metropolitan Museum, 1985)
(NY, Metropolitan Museum, 1985) Craze, Richard. The Spice Companion. (Allentown, PA: People's Medical Society, 1997)
(Allentown, PA: People's Medical Society, 1997) Fox, Helen. Gardening with Herbs for Flavor and Fragrance. (NY: Dover, 1933)
(NY: Dover, 1933) Freeman, Margaret. Herbs for the Medieval Household (NY: Metropolitian Museum, 1943)
(NY: Metropolitian Museum, 1943) Henisch, Bridget. Fast and Feast: food in medieval society. (University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976)
. (University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976) Genders, Roy. Perfume through the Ages. (New York, Putnam, 1972)
. (New York, Putnam, 1972) Redon, Odile and Francois Sabban. The Medieval Kitchen. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1998)
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1998) Swahn, J.O. The Lore of Spices. (NY: Cresent Books, 1991)
(NY: Cresent Books, 1991) Wilson, C. Anne. Food and drink in Britain. (Chicago : Academy Chicago Publishers, 1991)
Booth, Nancy. Perfumes, Splashes & Colognes. (Pownal, VT: Storey, 1997)
(Pownal, VT: Storey, 1997) Lawless, Julia. The illustrated encyclopedia of essential oils. (NY: Barnes & Noble, 1995)
. (NY: Barnes & Noble, 1995) McNair, James. The World of Herbs and Spices. (San Francisco: Ortho, 1978)
. (San Francisco: Ortho, 1978) Ody, Penelope. The Complete Medicinal Herbal. (NY: Dorling Kindersley, 1993)
. (NY: Dorling Kindersley, 1993) Tourles, Stephanie. The Herbal Body Book. (Pownal, VT: Storey, 1994)What Sen. Bernie Sanders' bill could mean for you 3:04 PM ET Thu, 14 Sept 2017 | 01:01
Bernie Sanders for years has waged a lonely Senate battle for legislation to create a single-payer, government-run health care system. Now, the Vermont independent, who has never had a co-sponsor for his bill, has quite a bit of company.
Sixteen Democrats — including potential 2020 presidential candidates — have lined up behind his "Medicare-for-All" bill, which would eliminate the role of private insurers in basic health care coverage. More than 500,000 people across the country have signed a petition as "citizen co-sponsors" of his bill, which he introduced today in a packed Senate hearing room.
In the House, a record majority of Democrats — 117 — have signed onto similar legislation by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan.
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"There is no doubt about it, momentum is on our side," wrote Sanders, who pushed the idea as a 2016 presidential candidate, in an email to his supporters Wednesday.
But momentum is hardly passage, and the bill faces an uphill climb in a Republican-controlled Congress that is still trying to unravel Democrats' last overhaul of the American health care system: Obamacare.
Here's what a Medicare-for-all bill could mean for you:BY: Follow @LizWFB
The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 to begin the process of reversing the Obama administration's net neutrality rules.
Chairman Ajit Pai said this is "just the beginning," as his proposal will now be open to public comment for 90 days. Pai said eliminating Title II net neutrality rules would return the FCC to a "Clinton-era style of light touch regulation" over the Internet.
The Obama-era Title II rules classified Internet service providers as utilities, instead of information services, for the first time in history. The rules subjected ISPs to broad government regulation and rules for how companies can manage traffic over their own networks.
Pai said Internet companies have told the commission the rules are "heavy-handed" and "rife with uncertainty."
He also pointed to data that show capital expenditure in broadband declined by 5.6 percent since Title II was adopted in 2015, which amounted to over $3.6 billion in lost investment. Pai said this is the first time investment in broadband has declined during a period outside an economic recession.
Pai and Commissioner Michael O'Rielly voted to move forward with the proposal, while Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat and daughter of Rep. James Clyburn (D., S.C.), voted against.
Pai's proposal would also eliminate the "Internet conduct standard," a vague mandate that allows the FCC to investigate ISPs.
"With this expansive authority, the FCC could investigate any provider for offering the public virtually any service that the agency might find problematic," Pai said. "And that is, in fact, what the FCC did."
"Within months of conferring this new found authority upon itself, FCC met the enemy, consumer friendly free data programs offered by several wireless companies," he said.
Under net neutrality rules, the FCC began investigating Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T for offering packages that allowed customers unlimited streaming of HBO and other channels. Pai ended the investigations after he was elevated to FCC chairman by President Donald Trump.
"The FCC is simply seeking comment on these proposals which draw on the Clinton era of a light touch approach," Pai said.
Alt-left protesters picketed outside the FCC building Thursday to protest the vote. The protesters, who claim they want a "free and open Internet," held signs advocating to ban conservative news sites.New software designed to make airport security scanners less intrusive debuted at the Las Vegas airport Tuesday, a response to last year's uproar from passengers who thought the blurry but revealing images were an invasion of privacy.
The machines now produce a gray, cookie-cutter outline of the human form. The silhouette appears on a screen about the size of a laptop computer that is attached to the scanning booth.
If a passenger is cleared by the scan, the screen will flash green with an "OK." Suspicious items detected by the scanner appear as little boxes outlined in red, showing their location on generic front and back silhouettes on the screen.
Passengers who trigger an alert, and anyone who refuses to go through the scanners, will receive the rigorous frisking that has drawn sharp objections.
The new software is expected to debut soon at Reagan National Airport and in Atlanta. If it does as well in the field as it has in testing, it could be installed in the 486 scanners now in use at 78 major airports, the Transportation Security Administration said.
"We believe it addresses the privacy issues that have been raised," said John Pistole, head of the TSA. "It's basically a software modification to existing equipment, so there's very little cost."
Robin Kane, who heads the TSA's technology office, said that once the less-invasive approach is proved effective, then the controversial monitors, on which a TSA officer reviews scans in a private screening room, will be removed from all airports.
The images produced by the current software led to an uproar over privacy concerns. Pistole had said in the fall that he wanted to see modifications, but the technology that was being tested yielded too many false positives. Many passengers found the alternative "enhanced" pat-downs by TSA agents even more disturbing.
In the demonstration at National on Tuesday, "passengers" filed through the scanner, some of them producing gray silhouettes with green "OK" screens, others producing silhouettes with boxes noting where the machine detected something hidden.
Kate Hanni, founder of the California-based group FlyersRights, called the new software "a great step forward."
"We're grateful to the TSA for addressing these issues that were of concern to so many people," Hanni said. "But privacy was our secondary issue. Our primary concern about the body scanners is that they are ineffective. We're also concerned about the possibility of surges in radiation."
Two types of scanning machines - backscatter and millimeter wave - have been installed at airports. Both machines produce the kind of full-body images that attracted controversy; they work by bouncing X-rays or radio waves off skin or concealed objects.The federal Opposition on Monday called on the Harper government to stop credit card companies from charging businesses higher fees for using premium cards.
The call came as a federal competition tribunal prepared to rule on whether Visa and MasterCard are engaging in anti-competitive behaviour.
Small business groups hope the tribunal will recommend that Ottawa forbid the major credit card companies from forcing retailers to accept cards that carry higher payment processing fees.
The high cost of processing credit card payments is hurting businesses, said Glenn Thibeault, the NDP consumer protection critic.
"Ultimately this results in reduced profit margins for merchants and higher retail costs for consumers," he said in a statement.
Canadian companies already pay the highest credit card processing fees in the industrialized world, although Canadians enjoy some of the lowest debit fees among G20 nations.
In 2010, the Harper government introduced a voluntary code aimed at protecting small business from abusive practices by credit card companies.
The code is designed to protect small businesses, said Kathleen Perchaluk, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's press secretary.
"Credit and debit card providers must give small businesses and merchants clear information regarding fees and rates and the ability to cancel contracts without penalty should fees rise or new fees be introduced," she said, while noting that the NDP voted against the code.
Voluntary codes 'don't work'
But voluntary codes don't work and mandatory measures are needed, said Thibeault.
"While governments around the world have regulated the costs of credit card swipe fees, the Conservatives' self-regulatory approach has failed Canadian merchants," said Thibeault.
"Enough is enough; the Conservatives need to act now."
Thibeault is starting a cross-country consultation with business and community groups this week to hear their concerns about the fees.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business says shopkeepers and others who accept credit and debit cards as payment should be given the right to refuse high-cost cards or to add limited surcharges.
The federation, with more than 100,000 members, also argues that Canada's code of conduct needs provisions for mobile payment methods, such as by cellphone.
The tribunal ruling was expected earlier this month but has not yet been made public. A spokesman for the tribunal said it's not known when that decision will be released.
A ruling forbidding credit card companies from forcing businesses to accept all types of cards would benefit merchants by allowing them the freedom to either accept or deny certain credit cards at their registers.
Merchant protected
But it could also mean confusion for consumers or translate into surcharges at the retail level, especially for Canadians who prefer to pay with credit cards that give them travel and other incentive points.
The banks maintain that merchants get value for the fees they pay for accepting credit cards, including a fast, efficient and guaranteed method of payment, reduced line-ups at the checkout, savings on costs related to having staff deal with cash and reduced fraud.
"Merchants no longer have to decide if individual customers are credit-worthy and no longer have to worry about whether a customer's cheque will bounce," says the Canadian Bankers Association.
"If there is fraud on the part of the customer, the merchant is protected because the card issuers cover the cost of fraud."
Under an out-of-court settlement of a long-running legal dispute south of the border, reached last summer, U.S. merchants can now charge their customers more if they pay with credit cards.
The settlement also saw Visa, MasterCard and major U.S. banks agree to pay retailers in the United States at least $6 billion US.
The lawsuit, filed in 2005, alleged that the major credit card issuers conspired to fix the fees that stores pay to accept their cards. Similar allegations have been made in Canada.
Visa and MasterCard hold about 92 per cent of the credit card market in Canada. It's estimated that the fees they charge businesses to use their cards add up to about $5 billion annually.Hornets Draft Buzz: Among numerous unknowns, there lies an answer
Let me preface this final Hornets Draft Buzz column by stating that nobody has much of a feel for what the hell is actually going to happen after the first two picks tomorrow night. There are going to be plenty of surprises – that much I do know.
There are going to be trades in the next 24 hours. That’s not speculation – most of it is rooted in the inevitable fact that there aren’t enough roster spots to go around on teams that have multiple picks this year. Consider the words of the all-knowing Adrian Wojnarowski on his Vertical Podcast this morning:
“Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto have multiple picks, and Phoenix, Denver — they do not want to bring in a training camp full of kids. They can’t come out of this draft with three young players, most of these rosters aren’t built to do that. I think we’re going to see a lot of deals.”
So this is a buyers market, and also ironic because numerous teams have sort of handcuffed themselves via asset collecting. Now that these potential buyers understand that this draft is very meh after the top-8, it will be fascinating to watch how some teams trying to trade picks will make that happen.
As I write this in mid-afternoon on Wednesday, the draft landscape has already rapidly changed today. Jeff Teague is headed to Indiana, George Hill is going to Utah, and Atlanta will get the 12th pick back from Utah. Now it’s reported that Atlanta wants to package the 12th pick with their other first-rounder (#21), move out of the draft, and help create cap-space all in an attempt to re-sign Al Horford.
Wait, there’s more. Derrick Rose is headed to the Knicks in exchange for Jose Calderon, Robin Lopez, and Jerian Grant. This doesn’t directly affect the draft order, but it does have an impact on the way teams will approach their picks. The Knicks now have a gaping hole in the middle, so they’ll be in the free-agency hunt for a big man. Ah, but the Hornets need one too, and you can bet all you buttons that these two teams will be linked to the same PF/C free-agents. See where I’m going here? This Rose trade could change the way Charlotte approaches the draft – they likely won’t be able to compete with New York for a guy like Dwight Howard, so do you now focus on a big in the draft, let Big Al walk, and do everything possible to re-insert yourself into retaining Jeremy Lin?
It’s all influx, and it all will continue to be until tomorrow night.
Prospect News and Notes
Assuming the Hornets are not able to swing a deal and do indeed select 22nd tomorrow night, let’s consider some scenarios and dig in on some news surrounding prospects.
– 22nd is a bad place to be picking in any draft, but with the fluidity of talent from 10-45 in this years draft, it’s very possible that a high-risk, high-reward prospect could fall into Charlotte’s lap. That might put them in a position to draft that player for a team like Brooklyn, Houston, or Portland, who don’t have a first-round pick currently, but might be interested in getting one. Watch prospects like Skal Labissiere, Henry Ellenson, Cheick Diallo and Wade Baldwin to potentially be examples of guys who might fall and fit this scenario.
– Malcolm Brogdon’s name has been quiet this week after he had been quite a hot topic recently. I was also informed by a source close to the Hornets that Brogdon could be dealing with a bone in his right hand that is going to be an issue for him long-term. Any details beyond that are unknown, but this is expected to cement him as a second-round pick, and take him out of play for Charlotte at #22. That said, if Hornets could move back into second-round then I believe they still really like him, and would say it’s probable they draft Brogdon there.
– A player that probably isn’t on the radar of Hornets fans, but should be, is French wing Timothe Luwawu. He has an extremely fluid draft range, but could fit a big need at the shooting-guard position for Charlotte if he falls. Depending on what mock draft you’re reading, he ranges from late-lottery to the end of the first-round. Luwawu played for Mega Leks of the Serbian League, alongside other first-round hopeful Ivica Zubac (who is also a name to keep an eye on if Hornets elect to draft project big man).
Luwawu is an elite athlete with tons of bounce. At 6’7, 205 lbs. and the versatility to impact the game in numerous ways on both ends of the floor, here is a guy that NBA teams want on their roster in the modern day game. Think Orlando lottery pick from last year, Mario Hezonja, as a comparison – especially athletically.
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– Names like Deandre Bembry, Malik Beasley, Demetrius Jackson, and Denzel Valentine have all had a stock that has remained steady throughout the draft process. With a gun to my head, I do believe the Hornets pick will come out of that group if they select 22nd tomorrow night.
– That’s a good segway to my prediction for the Hornets tomorrow night. Charlotte wants to improve now, and I think you will see that theme play out in some form tomorrow. Trading back for numerous picks in the second-round appears to be the best-case scenario. This is a draft that’s deep at the rotation player level, and the team can save some cap-space by taking on non-guaranteed second-round contracts if free-agency tilts in their direction. That said, we’re staring at a market saturated with first-round picks for sale, so Cho must be creative.
It’s too difficult to predict trades, so we’ll assume that the Hornets pick 22nd.
With the 22nd pick in the NBA Draft the Charlotte Hornets select Demetrius Jackson, point-guard, Notre Dame.
Charlotte will have a tough time retaining Jeremy Lin, so Jackson fills a need right away as Kemba’s backup. He’s ready to play now, and although there are some questions about his ability to run an offense, Jackson is an elite athlete and will impact the game on the defensive end immediately. To me, he’s a good fit for this system under Steve Clifford – high character, hard worker, and super competitive prospect.Anyone living in the cramped confines of a city apartment knows the pain of not quite having enough space. There’s nowhere to put that Ping-Pong table you’ve always wanted. Your bike is hanging on the wall, and you’ve already stepped on your kid’s Legos twice this week. Storage is expensive. Every new possession, hobby, and project costs not just money, but precious square footage.
The Sharing Depot, Toronto’s first library of things, helps space-starved urbanites cut costs and clutter without giving up access to the stuff they love. A sort of Zipcar for the little things, the Sharing Depot, which opened earlier this year, lets members borrow items like camping gear, sports equipment, toys, and garden tools. Members pay between $50 and $100 Canadian annually; the higher the level of membership the longer you may keep an item.
When I reach Sharing Depot cofounder Ryan Dyment on the phone, the storefront is busy and loud. Patrons can browse an extensive inventory online or search the Depot’s crowded shelves in person. Skill workshops and swap meets keep sharers engaged, and a volunteer program provides free membership in exchange for working a few shifts per month. “You meet a lot of interesting people,” Dyment says earnestly of the Depot’s growing community.
Before they started up the project, Dyment and cofounder Lawrence Alvarez, a community activist, polled local Torontonians to find out what items people needed occasionally but didn’t have room for at home or found too expensive to buy outright. “The most popular were camping gear, toys, party supplies, those kinds of things,” Dyment says. “So we said ‘OK, let’s do a crowdfund, and see if people want to put their money where their mouth is.’”$10 OFF SHIPPING* to anywhere outside the continental U.S. for orders received from 11/29 through 12/1.
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*Coupon code must be used at checkout. For customers within the continental U.S. use coupon code AMMO2014 to receive FREE SHIPPING. How to Apply Undercoating Dear AMMO Driver,
As 2014 comes to a close, I would like to thank you for your thoughtful emails, video suggestions, and unwavering support. I am forever grateful for your friendship and steadfast loyalty because without you, there would be no AMMO.
And if you are looking for something to help with your long holiday travels this year, be sure to listen to my latest podcast from the 2014 SEMA show. It's available on iTunes or download it at www.ammonyc.com/podcast.
AMMO Drive + Protect.
Sincerely,
Larry Kosilla, Founder
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APPLICATOR PAD FIND US ONLINEHundreds of explorers, theorists and fantasists have spent their lives searching for the infamous 'big-foot'.
But a leading geneticist believes he has found evidence to prove that it - or rather she - could have been more than a myth.
Professor Bryan Sykes of the University of Oxford claims a towering woman named Zana who lived in 19th Century Russia - and appeared to be 'half human, half ape' - could have been the fabled yeti.
Witnesses described the six-foot, six-inches tall woman discovered in the Caucasus mountains between Georgia and Russia as having 'all the characteristics of a wild animal' - and covered in thick auburn hair.
Scroll down for video
Historic: A leading genetecist claims a towering woman named Zana (artist's representation) who lived in 19th Century Russia - and appeared to be 'half human, half ape' - could have been the fabled yeti
Proof: DNA evidence from Zana's granddaughter (left) and the remains of her son Khwit (right) seemed proved that Zana was of African descent even though she lived in the wild Caucusus
Wild: Zana was discovered and trapped by a local merchant who hired a group of hunters to hunt her down in the region of Ochamchir - and she was eventually tamed by a nobleman on his estate in Tkhina
Treacherous: It is thought Zana roamed the remote Caucusus mountains, where Sykes says her African ancestors lived for many generations
Trapped: A merchant found Zana in the Ochamchir region of western Georgia and after hunters caught her, they placed her in a ditch surrounded by sharp spikes
Mythical: Witnesses described the six-foot, six-inches tall woman as having 'all the characteristics of a wild animal' (fabled 'big-foot' pictured)
Experts believe the wandering 'Wild Woman' was found lurking in the remote region of Ochamchir in the Republic of Abkhazia.
She was captured by a local merchant in the 1850s who hired a group of hunters to subdue and shackle her in the mountainous terrain.
Professor Sykes claims Zana was kept in a 'ditch surrounded by sharpened spikes' and sold from owner to owner until she came to serve nobleman Edgi Genaba as a servant.
Famously known as the ape woman, Zana had at least four children by local men and some of her descendants still live in the region, the Times reported.
Sykes made an astonishing discovery when he carried out saliva tests on six of her living relatives and the tooth of her deceased son Khwit.
The DNA analysis revealed that they all contained the right amount of African DNA for Zana the ape woman to be '100 per cent African' but remarkably she did not resemble any known group.
Discovery: Professor Bryan Sykes of the University of |
should have "the right to challenge the government of the day, or hold their decision-makers to account for the conditions in which they are held".
He said: "I think politicians really should try and engage if we did extend the franchise to the prison population.
"It would be incumbent on us to try to engage with that population to take that opportunity to cast their vote, and maybe engage in hustings in prisons. I think lots of people would like to see us in prison from time to time."
Image caption Green MSP Patrick Harvie raised the issue of letting prisoners have the vote in the run-up to the 2014 independence referendum
The committee has also taken evidence from the Electoral Commission, the Law Society of Scotland, HM Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland and an ex-offender, much of it focused on the practical aspect of allowing prisoners to vote.
In a written submission, the Electoral Commission pointed out that if prisoners were enfranchised, consideration would need to be given to how prisoners access information about policies, candidates and parties.
The Electoral Management Board for Scotland examined potential issues with different forms of voting - whether in person outside of prison, at an in-prison polling station, via a postal vote or through a proxy. They noted in particular the importance of maintaining the secrecy of ballots.
The Prison Reform Trust charity submitted a paper outlining "a clear and unambiguous case for reform", saying that "voting is not a privilege, it is a basic human right".
Meanwhile the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service indicated that if the right was applied retrospectively this could result in a significant number of applications from the current prison population, potentially causing delays in the legal system.Get the biggest Business stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
The developer of a £3,500 sex robot says the hyper-realistic doll suffered damage after being "roughly treated" during an electronics fair in Austria.
Arran Lee Squire, 36, from Holyhead, spent nearly four years working with creator Dr Sergi Santos on the hyper realistic sex doll that uses AI to interact with users.
The robot - which reacts to the touch and voice of users - went to market this summer and gained huge media attention, helping drive sales.
The coverage saw the doll attracting considerable interest at the Arts Electronica Festival in Linz.
This was fine when Arran and Sergi were present at the show for two days but when 'Samantha' was left on display on the final day, she was left damaged by "barbarians".
Arran said: "There was so much interest at the festival, people were really interested in how she worked, especially after all the media attention she has received.
"We were there for two days and everything was fine, but then had to leave on the last day and she was left just on display.
"When we got here back it was clear she had been roughly treated which is not how she should be handled, she should be treated with respect.
"There was damage to the neck and mouth, my business partner described these people as 'barbarians'. This is not how she should be treated, she has sensors all over her body and needs a gentle touch.
"I think people have just become over-excited and treated her like a sex doll, she isn't a sex doll, she is a robot with AI.
"We have been able to repair her so she is okay."
He said the media interest has generated additional sales, with couples and older people among those who have bought them. He added that the most sales were to single men.
Arran, whose firm is called Synthea Amatus, said people have dubbed them “strange” and “perverts” for the project.
But the dad of two hit back at his critics and said his wife Hannah Nguyen has always been supportive.
He said: “We get some strange reactions when we tell people what we are doing, but we are not perverts and these dolls are not for perverts.
“They can be used for normal professional couples."
They are now working on a male version.This year's holiday season red cups at Starbucks have stirred up critics who accuse the company of waging a war on Christmas.
Starbucks said it removed "symbols of the season" used in the past, which have included reindeer and ornaments, in favor of a simple, two-toned red cup.
When the cups rolled out in late October, Starbucks (SBUX) vice president Jeffrey Fields said the company "wanted to usher in the holidays with a purity of design that welcomes all of our stories."
Joshua Feuerstein, a former pastor who calls himself a "social media personality," took exception.
He posted a video to Facebook on November 5 that went viral. Feuerstein criticizes Starbucks for removing "Christmas from their cups because they hate Jesus."
Related: Starbucks holiday cups through the years
Feuerstein encouraged customers to say "Merry Christmas" instead of their names in order to "trick" baristas into writing the phrase on the cup. He said to use "#MerryChristmasStarbucks" to post photos online.
In an email with CNNMoney on Sunday, Feuerstein noted that his video has had more than 10 million views.
"I think Starbucks has gotten the message that the Christian majority in this country has awakened and are demanding that our voice be heard," he wrote.
Starbucks REMOVED CHRISTMAS from their cups because they hate Jesus... SO I PRANKED THEM... and they HATE IT!!!! #shareUse #MERRYCHRISTMASSTARBUCKSFollow --> Joshua Feuerstein Posted by Joshua Feuerstein on Thursday, November 5, 2015
In response to Feuerstein's video, Starbucks said in a statement Sunday that it tries "to create a culture of belonging, inclusion and diversity."
The cup is meant to be a "blank canvas" that encourages "customers to tell their Christmas stories in their own way," Starbucks said.
Pictures of cups with "Merry Christmas" written instead of customers' names sprang up on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Others defended Starbucks or criticized Feuerstein's reaction.
Some of the video's most-popular comments point out that the company sells gift cards with "Merry Christmas" written on them and sells a "Christmas Blend" coffee.Throughout its history, the National Football League (NFL) and other rival American football leagues have used several different formats to determine their league champions, including a period of inter-league matchups determining a true national champion.
Following its founding in 1920, the NFL first determined champions through end-of-season standings, but switched to a playoff system in 1933. The rival All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and American Football League (AFL) have since merged with the NFL (the only two AAFC teams that currently exist joined the NFL in 1950—the Cleveland Browns and the San Francisco 49ers), but AAFC championship games and records are not included in NFL record books.[1][2] The AFL began play in 1960 and, like its rival league, used a playoff system to determine its champion.
From 1966–1969 prior to the merger in 1970, the NFL and the AFL agreed to hold an ultimate championship game, first called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game and later renamed the Super Bowl after 1968. Following the merger in 1970, the Super Bowl name continued as the game to determine the NFL champion. The most important factor of the merger was that all ten AFL teams joined the NFL in 1970 and every AFL championship game and record is included in NFL record books. The old NFL Championship Game became the NFC Championship Game, while the old AFL Championship Game became the AFC Championship Game. The NFL lists the old AFL/NFL championship games with "new" AFC/NFC championship games in its record books. The Green Bay Packers have won the most championships with 13 total (9 NFL championships pre-merger, four (4) Super Bowl championships). The Packers are also the only team to win three consecutive championships, having done so twice (1929–1931, 1965–1967). The Chicago Bears have won the second most overall championships with nine (9) (eight NFL championships, one Super Bowl championship).
1920–1932: The early years [ edit ]
For a list of NFL standings champions prior to 1933, see List of NFL champions (1920–69)
At its inception in 1920, the NFL had no playoff system or championship game: the champion was the team with the best record during the season as determined by winning percentage, with ties excluded. This sometimes led to very unusual results, as teams played anywhere from six to twenty league games in a season, and not all teams played the same number of games or against league talent.
As a result, in the league's first six seasons, four league titles were disputed and had to be resolved by the league's executive committee. In 1920, the Akron Pros went undefeated, tying three games, but two teams that had won more games (and who had both tied Akron), the Buffalo All-Americans and Decatur Staleys, petitioned the league for a share of the title; both teams' petitions were denied, and Akron was awarded the first (and only) Brunswick-Balke Collender Cup. According to modern tie-breaking rules, Akron and Buffalo would be co-champions.[3] Akron and Buffalo both awarded their team members with gold medallions.[4]
The next was in the 1921 NFL season, between the same All-Americans and Staleys (with the latter now being based in Chicago). Buffalo had insisted that the last matchup between the two was an exhibition game not to be counted toward the standings, however, Chicago owner George Halas and league management insisted the game be counted in its standings (the league, at the time, did not recognize exhibition matches). The result was that although the two teams were effectively tied in the standings, the disputed game, having been played later, was given more weight and thus ended up being considered a de facto championship game. Chicago also had one fewer tie game.
A nearly identical situation recurred in 1924, when Chicago tried the same tactic of a final game against the Cleveland Bulldogs, but the league ruled the opposite and declared the last game "post-season", giving the Bulldogs their third consecutive league title.
The fourth and final disputed title was the 1925 NFL Championship controversy between the Pottsville Maroons and the Chicago Cardinals. The Maroons had been controversially suspended by the league at the end of the 1925 NFL season for an unauthorized game against a non-NFL team, allowing the Cardinals to throw together two fairly easy matches (one against a team consisting partly of high school players, also against league rules) to pass Pottsville in the standings. The league awarded the Cardinals the title, one of only two in the team's history, but the Cardinals declined the offer and the championship was vacated.
Only in 1933, when the Bidwill family (which still owns the Cardinals) bought the team, did the Cardinals reverse their decision and claim the title as their own, a decision that continues to be disputed, with the Bidwills opposing any change in the record and the two current Pennsylvania teams in favor. The league recognized the Bidwills' claim to the title and has taken no other action on the issue, although a self-made championship trophy from the Maroons sits in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Ironically, it was Pottsville's win in that game against the Notre Dame All-Stars that gave professional football legitimacy over college football.
Part of the controversy over these stems from the criteria the league used to determine its champion. The league used a variation of win percentage as its criterion, in which the number of wins is divided by the sum of wins and losses, and ties were excluded. The league began considering ties in its standings in 1972, counting them as half a win and half a loss, but this was not applied retroactively. Had it been, it would have changed the outcome of four 1920-1931 championships: the Buffalo All-Americans would have tied the Akron Pros for the 1920 title, the Duluth Kelleys would have tied the Cleveland Bulldogs for the 1924 title, the Pottsville Maroons would have won in 1925, and the New York Giants would have won in 1930.
Had win-loss differential (the standard method in baseball) been used, the Decatur Staleys would have won the 1920 title by virtue of being one game ahead of Buffalo, and the 1924 title would have been won by the Frankford Yellow Jackets, who were four games ahead of actual champion Cleveland in the standings by that measure.
At the end of the 1932 season, the Chicago Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans were tied with the best winning percentage at.857, with the Spartans record of 6–1–4 and the Bears record of 6–1–6 taken to be six wins, one loss, while the Green Bay Packers finished 10–3–1. Had pure win-loss differential or the current (post-1972) system of counting ties as half a win, half a loss been in place in 1932, the Packers' record of 10–3–1 (.750, +7) would have won them a fourth consecutive championship, ahead of the Spartans' 6–1–4 (.727, +5) and the Bears' 6–1–6 (.692, +5).
To determine the champion, the league, reportedly at the behest of George Preston Marshall, voted to hold the first official playoff game in Chicago at Wrigley Field. Because of severe winter conditions before the game, and fear of low turnout, the game was held indoors at Chicago Stadium which forced some temporary rule changes. The game was played on a modified 80-yard dirt field, and Chicago won 9–0, winning the league championship. Since the game counted in the standings, Portsmouth finished third behind Green Bay.
A number of new rule changes were instituted, many inspired by the 1932 indoor championship game: the goal posts were moved forward to the goal line, every play started from between the hash marks, and forward passes could originate from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage (instead of five yards behind).
The playoff game proved so popular that the league reorganized into two divisions for the 1933 season, with the winners advancing to a scheduled championship game.
1933–1966: The advent of the postseason [ edit ]
1933–1966: NFL Championship Game [ edit ]
For a list of NFL Championship Games and winners, see List of NFL champions (1920–69)
Starting in 1933, the NFL decided its champion through a single postseason playoff game, called the NFL Championship Game. During this period, the league divided its teams into two groups, through 1949 as divisions and from 1950 onward as conferences.
Divisions (1933–1949): Eastern and Western
and Conferences (1950–1952): American and National
and Conferences (1953–1966): Eastern and Western
and Conferences and Divisions (1967–1969): Eastern (Capitol and Century) and Western (Central and Coastal)
Home field for the 1933 title game was determined by the won-lost percentage in use at the time; the Western Division champion Chicago Bears (10–2–1,.833), having a better record that the Eastern Division champion New York Giants (11–3–0,.786), won the right to host the first title playoff. Thereafter, from 1934 onward, the divisions alternated the site of the playoff, with the East/American hosting in even years and the West/National in odd years. If there was a tie for first place within the conference, an extra playoff game decided who would go to the NFL Championship Game, with a coin toss deciding where the game would be played. (This occurred nine times in these 34 seasons: 1941, 1943, 1947, 1950 (both conferences), 1952, 1957, 1958, and 1965.)
This last occurred during the 1965 season, when the Green Bay Packers and Baltimore Colts tied for first place in the Western Conference at 10–3–1. Green Bay had won both its games with Baltimore during the regular season, but because no tie-breaker system was in place, a conference playoff game was held on December 26 (what was scheduled to be an off-week between the end of the regular schedule and the NFL Championship Game). The Cleveland Browns, the Eastern champion at 11–3–0, did not play that week. The championship game was then held on its originally-scheduled date, January 2, 1966—the first time the NFL champion was crowned in January. Green Bay won both post-season games at home, beating the injury-riddled Colts (with third-string QB Tom Matte) in overtime by a controversial field goal, and taking the title 23–12 on a very muddy field (in what turned out to be Jim Brown's final NFL game).
For the 1960 through 1969 seasons, the NFL staged an additional postseason game called the "Playoff Bowl" (aka the "Bert Bell Benefit Bowl" or the "Runner-up Bowl"). These games matched the second-place teams from the two conferences; the CBS television network advertised them as "playoff games for third place in the NFL." All ten of these consolation games were played in the Orange Bowl in Miami in January, the week after the NFL championship game. The NFL now classifies these contests as exhibition games and does not include the records, participants, or results in the official league playoff statistics. The Playoff Bowl was discontinued after the AFL–NFL merger; the final edition was played in January 1970.
Starting with the 1934 game the winning team received the Ed Thorp Memorial Trophy. The trophy was named after Ed Thorp, a noted referee, rules expert, and sporting goods dealer. Thorp died in 1934 and a large, traveling trophy was made that year, passed along from champion to champion each season with each championship team's name inscribed on it. Teams would also receive a replica trophy. The trophy was last awarded to the Minnesota Vikings in 1969. The actual trophy, however, is now missing.[5]
Late in the 1940 season, NFL President Carl Storck announced that sudden death periods would be authorized for any playoff game needed to decide either division title. It was emphasized that this did not apply to the final championship game, which would crown co-champions in the event of a tie.[6] While a shared championship was deemed an acceptable solution, it must have become obvious that an elimination game leading to the championship must necessarily produce a winner. Commissioner Elmer Layden approved a similar arrangement for the 1941 season, with the same limitation. A coin toss would decide possession of the Ed Thorp trophy that accompanied the league title should the championship game result in a tie.[7]
Sudden death overtime was finally approved for the NFL championship game in 1946[8] and has remained in effect ever since.[9][10] The first playoff game requiring overtime was the 1958 NFL Championship Game.
The 1955 and 1960 NFL championship games were played on Monday afternoons, Christmas having fallen on a Sunday in those years.
1946–1949: AAFC Championship Game [ edit ]
For a list of AAFC Championship Games and winners, see List of AAFC champions
The All-America Football Conference was created in June 1944 to compete against the NFL. Even though the league outdrew the NFL in attendance, the continuing dominance of the Cleveland Browns led to the league's downfall.
For its first three seasons, the league was divided into two divisions: Eastern and Western (1946–1948). The league had no divisions in 1949. The site of the championship game during the first three was determined just as it was in the NFL—a divisional rotation. In 1949, the league held a four-team playoff, with home field based upon won-lost record.
The Browns, led by Quarterback Otto Graham, won all four of the league championship games.
A tiebreaker playoff game was played in 1948 to break a tie between the Baltimore Colts and Buffalo Bills (AAFC) for the Eastern Division championship. Semifinal playoff games were held in 1949, setting up a championship final between the first-place Browns and the second-place San Francisco 49ers.
In 1948, the Browns became the first professional football team to complete an entire season undefeated and untied — 24 years before the 1972 Miami Dolphins of the NFL would accomplish the task, but this feat is not recognized by NFL record books. Unlike the AFL statistics which are treated as NFL statistics, records of the AAFC and its teams (most of which folded) are not recognized. However, individual AAFC player statistics are included in Pro Football Hall of Fame records, and the defunct conference is memorialized in the Hall.
1960–1969: AFL Championship Game [ edit ]
For a list of AFL Championship Games and winners, see American Football League Championship Game
With its creation in 1960, the AFL determined its champion via a single playoff game between the winners of its two divisions, the Eastern and Western. The AFL Championship games featured classics such as the 1962 double-overtime championship game between the Dallas Texans and the defending champion Houston Oilers. At the time it was the longest professional football championship game ever played. Also in 1963, an Eastern Division playoff was needed to determine the division winner between the Boston Patriots and Buffalo Bills.
1966–1969: NFL vs. AFL—The beginning of the Super Bowl era [ edit ]
For a list of AFL Championship Games and winners, see American Football League Championship Game
For a list of NFL Championship Games and winners, see List of NFL champions (1920–69)
In 1966, the success of the rival AFL, the spectre of the NFL's losing more stars to the AFL, and concern over a costly "bidding war" for players precipitated by the NFL's Giants' signing of Pete Gogolak, who was under contract to the AFL's Buffalo Bills, led the two leagues to discuss a merger. Pivotal to this was approval by Congress of a law (PL 89-800) that would waive jeopardy to anti-trust statutes for the merged leagues. The major point of the testimony given by the leagues to obtain the law was that if the merger were permitted, "Professional football operations will be preserved in the 23 cities and 25 stadiums where such operations are presently being conducted." The merger was announced on June 8, 1966, and became fully effective in 1970.
The Packers defeated the Chiefs in the first AFL–NFL Championship Game (Super Bowl I)
After expanding to enfranchise the New Orleans Saints in 1967, the NFL split its 16 teams into two conferences with two divisions each: the Capitol and Century Divisions in the Eastern Conference, and the Coastal and Central Divisions in the Western Conference. The playoff format was expanded from a single championship game to a four-team tournament, with the four divisional champions participating. The two division winners in each conference met in the "Conference Championships", with the winners advancing to the NFL Championship Game. Again, the home team for each playoff game was determined by a yearly divisional or conference rotation.
The AFL on the other hand, raised its total franchise number to ten with the Miami Dolphins joining the Eastern Division in 1966 and the Cincinnati Bengals joining the Western Division in 1968. The league until 1969 kept using the one-game-playoff format except when division tie-breakers were needed. In its final season, 1969, the AFL adopted a four-team playoff to determine its champion.
Following the NFL and AFL Championship Games for the 1966 through 1969 seasons, the NFL champion played the AFL champion in Super Bowls I through IV, the only true inter-league championship games in the history of professional football. The first two of these games were known as the AFL-NFL Championship Game, as the title Super Bowl was not chosen until 1968. Thus the third AFL-NFL matchup was dubbed "Super Bowl III" and the first two matches were retronamed as Super Bowls I and II. The first two games were convincingly won by the NFL's Packers, the last two by the AFL's New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs, leaving the leagues even at 2-2 in "Championship" competition when they subsequently merged.
All participants in those four AFL-NFL championship games were either AFL champions or NFL champions in the record books, no matter the outcome of the Super Bowl. Three of the four league champions who lost one of the first four Super Bowls would eventually win at least one. The exception is the Minnesota Vikings which went to three others and lost all of them.
1970–present: The Super Bowl era [ edit ]
After the 1969 season and Super Bowl IV, the AFL and NFL fully merged and underwent a re-alignment for the 1970 season. Three of the pre-merger NFL teams were transferred to the AFC (Browns, Colts, and Steelers) to level the conferences (AFC and NFC) at 13 teams each; each conference split into three divisions.
The Colts beat the Cowboys in the first Super Bowl after the AFL–NFL merger (Super Bowl V)
With only six division winners in the newly merged league, the NFL designed an eight-team playoff tournament, with four clubs from each conference qualifying. Along with the three division winners in each conference, two wild card teams (one from each conference), the second-place finishers with the best records in each conference, were added to the tournament. The first round was named the "Divisional Playoffs", the winners advancing to the "Conference Championships" (AFC & NFC). Two weeks later, the AFC and NFC champions met in the Super Bowl, now the league's championship game. Thus, Super Bowl V in January 1971 was the first Super Bowl played for the NFL title.
With the introduction of the wild card, a rule was instituted to prohibit two teams from the same division (champion and wild card) from meeting in the first-round (Divisional Playoffs). This rule would remain in effect through the 1989 season. More significantly, the home teams in the playoffs were still decided by a yearly divisional rotation, not on regular-season records (excluding the wild-card teams, who would always play on the road). This lack of "home-field advantage" was most evident in the 1972 playoffs, when the undefeated Miami Dolphins played the AFC Championship Game at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh against the Steelers, who were undefeated at home during the regular season, but had three losses on the road.
Beginning in 1972, tie games were included in the computing of each team's winning percentage. Each tie was then counted as half of a win and half of a loss, rather than being omitted from the computation. Previously, the NFL disregarded any tie games played when they computed the standings, basing it on winning percentage with any ties thrown out and ignored. Overtime games were not played during the regular season until 1974.
The institution of "home-field advantage" [ edit ]
In 1975, the league modified its 1970 playoff format by instituting a seeding system. The surviving clubs with the higher seeds were made the home teams for each playoff round. The three division champions in each conference were seeded first through third based on their regular-season records, with the wild-card team in each conference as the fourth seed.
Teams that earned the top seed became known as clinching "home-field advantage" throughout the playoffs, since they played all of their playoff games at their home stadium (except for the Super Bowl, played at a neutral site).
However, the league continued to prohibit meetings between teams from the same division in the Divisional Playoffs. Thus, there would be times when the pairing in that round would pit the first seed versus the third, and the second versus the fourth.
Further playoff expansion [ edit ]
The league expanded the playoffs to 10 teams in 1978, adding a second wild-card team (a fifth seed) from each conference. The two wild-card teams from each conference (the fourth and fifth seeds) played each other in the first round, called the "Wild Card Playoffs." The division winners (the first three seeds) would then receive a bye to automatically advance to the Divisional Playoffs, which became the second round of the playoffs. In the divisional round, much like the 1970 playoff format, teams from the same division were still prohibited from playing each other, regardless of seeding. Under the 1978 format, teams from the same division could meet only in the wild-card round or the conference championship. Thus, as before, a divisional champion could only play a divisional foe in the conference championship game.
A players' strike shortened the 1982 season to nine games. The league used a special 16-team playoff tournament for that year. The top eight teams from each conference qualified (ignoring the divisional races—there were no division standings, and in some cases 2 teams from the same division did not play each other at all that season). The playoffs reverted to the 1978 format in the following year.
In 1990, the NFL expanded the playoffs to twelve teams by adding a third wild-card team (a sixth seed) from each conference. The restrictions on intra-division playoff games during the Divisional Playoffs were removed. However, only the top two division winners in each conference (the 1 and 2 seeds) received byes and automatically advanced to the Divisional Playoffs as host teams. The 3 seed, the division winner with the worst regular season record in each conference, would then host the 6 seed in the Wild Card Playoffs.
In 2002, the NFL realigned into eight divisions, four per conference, to accommodate a 32nd team, the Houston Texans. The playoffs remained a 12-team tournament, with four division winners (the 1, 2, 3, and 4 seeds) and two wild cards (the 5 and 6 seeds) from each conference advancing to the playoffs. Again, only the top two division winners in each conference would automatically advance to the Divisional Playoffs, while everybody else had to play in the Wild Card round. Furthermore, the league still maintains the names "Wild Card Playoffs", "Divisional Playoffs", and "Conference Championships" for the first, second, and third rounds of the playoffs, respectively.
A proposal to expand the playoffs to 14 teams by adding a third wild card team (a seventh seed) from each conference, and only giving the 1 seeds the bye in the first round, was tabled by the league owners in 2013.[11]
Championship games per season [ edit ]
Below is a list of professional football champions per season as recognized by the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
APFA/NFL standings champions (1920–1932) [ edit ]
For the first thirteen seasons, the APFA/NFL did not hold a championship game, except in 1932, when a playoff game was held. Played indoors on a reduced-size field, it was the precursor to the championship game (though the losing team finished in third place in the final standings). For the 51 seasons from 1921–1971, the NFL did not officially include tie games in the winning percentage, they were omitted from the calculation.
NFL Championship Game (1933–1965) [ edit ]
Click on column heading to sort by teams, venue or attendance.
Super Bowl championship (1966–present) [ edit ]
(The creation of Super Bowl was the first sign of AFL–NFL merger. The first four Super Bowls served as inter-league championship games because of these inter-league championship games this created some confusion amongst football fans that there was a special World Championship series in the pre-merger era. After the merger, the Super Bowl became the NFL's championship game.
The number in the parentheses is the total number of Super Bowl championships and the bolded number in parentheses is the total number of NFL championships.)
NFL championships by franchise [ edit ]
In the sortable table below, teams are ordered first by number of appearances, then by number of wins, and finally by year of first appearance. Does not include the AFL or NFL championships won during the same seasons as the AFL–NFL Super Bowl championships before the 1970 AFL–NFL merger. Does not include AFL titles won from 1960–1965 or AAFC titles won from 1946–1949. Does not include folded NFL teams with zero "Appearances/Top 2 Finishes." In the "Seasons" column, bold years indicate NFL championships won.
Current NFL Team Folded Team
List of various league/world championship game systems [ edit ]
Current NFL championship system Inter-league/world championship system Defunct league championship system
Perfect Season†
(*) Because the NFL did not count tied games in league standings until 1972 (when ties were added to past standings retroactively), these seasons were considered to be "perfect" at the time they finished. Because the rules existing at the times of those championships did not give the teams involved any incentive to avoid tie games in order to maintain a "perfect" season, the accuracy of calling these seasons "imperfect" is still disputed.
See also [ edit ]1969: RCA SelectaVision HoloTape Player Prototype
RCA's competitive system to CBS's EVR was initially called HoloTape, and was later renamed SelectaVision or SV. This represents the first use of the word SelectaVision, which RCA later applied to their aborted MagTape system and, of course, to the CED system. During this period RCA was also using the acronym PREVS (PRerecorded Electronic Video Systems) to encompass all present and future consumer video systems. Like EVR, Holotape was a playback only format using what was believed would be an inexpensive mastering process. RCA gave a color HoloTape demonstration on September 30, 1969, but the system still lacked sound.
Holotape used electron beam recording to make a color encoded master of high resolution. A laser beam was then split, with one beam directed through the master and the other directly onto a plastic tape coated with photoresist- a material that hardens in direct ratio to the light that strikes it. When the two beams intersected on the tape surface, interference patterns (holograms) were formed in the photoresist that encoded all the information needed to reconstruct the video image. The tape was then chemically treated to eat away the photoresist not hardened by the laser beam. The resulting hologram master looked like a relief map of hills and valleys. A coating of nickel was plated on the hologram master resulting in a nickel master. A finished Holotape was made by feeding a sandwich composed of the nickel master and vinyl tape through high pressure rollers. RCA claimed thousands of finished tapes could be made from one nickel master. The home playback deck contained a low power laser whose beam was directed through the tape to a video imager also inside the deck.
Although Holotape may have eventually been a manufacturable system, it needed a lot more research to reach that state after the 1969 demo. Development of the system did continue until June 1972, when it was canceled in the wake of RCA's huge financial loss from selling its troublesome computer division to Univac.During the bit of Jeremy Corbyn's speech to Labour conference where journalists were just beginning to drift off, Buzzfeed Political Editor Jim Waterson posted about a story on The Canary. The pro-Corbyn "alternative" site had posted an article by Steve Topple headlined: "We need to talk about Laura Kuenssberg. She’s listed as a speaker at the Tory Party conference."
As Waterson put it, "It took me two mins to call the event organiser and find out this is bollocks. She's not speaking at Tory conference. Already going viral regardless."
The Canary article claimed that "BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg is listed as an invited speaker at the Conservative Party conference. And the news raises questions about the impartiality of the journalist and her organisation. Again."
Now, it's true that Kuenssberg appears as an "invited speaker" on the event listing for a fringe organised by the Centre for Social Justice alongside former DWP minister Iain Duncan Smith. The chancellor Philip Hammond is also "invited". However, "invited" just means that the CSJ have sent her an email asking if she would attend.
There are two problems here. The first is the way that The Canary - an independent, reader-funded "alternative" news site - uses Kuenssberg as a traffic-driver for hate-clicks. This is a flimsy story - leftwing journalists speak at Tory conference, and vice versa - even if it were correct. Which it isn't, as the BBC press office soon made clear.
@bbclaurak is not speaking at this @csjthinktank event. At Labour & Conservative conferences to report impartially for @BBCNews — BBC News Press Team (@BBCNewsPR) September 27, 2017
So why would the Canary flam up such a small story? Simple answer: for traffic - and therefore revenue. The new left media has learned from the old right legacy press that the BBC is a big institution, and is vulnerable to accusations of bias. The Canary pummels the BBC, and to a lesser extent, the rest of the media. As a story, it's cheap, easy and requires few resources - just switch on your TV or browse the BBC website and find something you don't like. As my colleague Anoosh Chakelian reported in her piece on these alternative sites: "The Canary’s biggest target is the BBC, which it sees as biased in favour of a “neoliberal” establishment. Upon parliament’s return from the summer recess, the Canary website ran three attack pieces on the BBC in two days."
The site has a tag for its Kuenssberg stories, which include "After taking six weeks off, it took Laura Kuenssberg just two paragraphs to reveal her true colours" and "Laura Kuenssberg's response to the Labour manifesto shows the BBC is moving from bias to naked self-interest". A story headlined "petition to sack BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg was 'probably' removed ‘under establishment pressure’, says former UK ambassador" - even features the thoughts of noted Julian Assange fan Craig Murray, just to complete the circle of conspiracy obsessives.
Kuenssberg has become a lightning rod for criticism, particularly since the BBC Trust ruled that she had breached impartiality guidelines with an interview on Corbyn's "shoot to kill" policy. However, it's important to contextualise this: BBC editors receive constant complaints from politicians and their teams about their reporting. Why? Because they reach so many people. What is reported on the BBC matters.
However, it's not hard to spot that some BBC staff get more flak than others. Those in front of camera are instantly recognisable, and so make better targets. So - let's be honest - are women. There is a strain of misogyny which delights in being told that there |
but also vote more moderately on the issue. Thus, failing to contact your legislator could lead to not being seen, which in turn could leave you out of the policymaking process.
So should we feel good about the evidence that contacting your elected legislator shapes their view of the district and subsequent legislative behavior? On the one hand, yes we should. From a democratic perspective, it is encouraging that the simple act of writing or calling your representative makes a difference. It is an important opportunity for “regular” citizens to make their voices heard. On the other hand, scholars have long found that the people who are most likely to write or call their representative are more likely to be white, educated, and wealthy. The concern suggested by my research is that these established patterns of biases in constituency contact will be translated into biases in representation.Hello Community,
you might have been aware of the fact that I recently did not have the time to develop AndNav2 further. (Speaking of the TTS-issues, that caused a couple of Force-Closes )
Due to the fact that I don't see any light on my timetable-horizon I decided to OPEN-SOURCE AndNav2. (This is the moment you are meant to burst out into tears of happiness!)
Within moments you'll be able to find the sources on: http://code.google.com/p/andnav/
Any help is appreciated.
The Plan
My Plan is that everybody can request control to the repository by sending a mail to me.
To prevent chaos, I'll be the one that pushes stable versions to the Android Market, while all current versions can be downloaded from the Google-Code project-page.
The issue-tracker will be the place where bugs and new tasks being worked on will be listed.
The place for all discussions will be this Google-Group
Best Regards,
NicolasMyelin sheaths, wrapping axons, perform the following important functions: support, protection, feeding and isolation. Injury of myelin compact structure leads to an impairment and severe illness of the nerve system. Exact mechanisms underlying the myelination process and myelin sheaths damage have not established yet. Therefore search for substances, which provide regulatory and protective effects on the normal myelination as well as stimulating action on the remyelination after myelin damage, is of special interest. Recently it was shown that extract from mushroom Hericium erinaceus had activating action on the nerve tissue. So the aim of the present work was to study an influence of an extract from H. erinaceus on the cerebellar cells and the process of myelination in vitro. Obtained data revealed the normal growth of the nerve and glial cells with extract at cultivating. No pathologic or toxic action of the extract has been found. The cell ultrastructure was intact and similar to that observed in vivo. The process of myelination in the presence of the extract began earlier as compared to controls and was characterised by a higher rate. Thus, extract of H. erinaceus promoted normal development of cultivated cerebellar cells and demonstrated a regulatory effect on the process of myelin genesis process in vitro.Militants from the Islamic State Group on Saturday are said to have executed four people — including two from its own ranks — on charges of sodomy and practising homosexuality. The four men were thrown off a landmark building in the central part of the city of Mosul in the Nineveh province of Iraq in full public view.
An Iraqi news report quoted sources as saying: "Isis members executed four people, including two of its own members, on charges of homosexuality and sodomy. The execution was carried out by throwing the men from the top of a former insurance company building."
The sources added: "The execution was carried out in dour al-Toub area in central Mosul. Later, the outfit transferred the bodies and threw them at Al-Khasfah hole, situated to the west of Mosul." They also said: "Even thought the National Insurance building is destroyed, the terror outfit is using it for carrying out executions."
This is not the first time the Islamic State group, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), has executed homosexuals in this manner. News had emerged towards the end of May that they had executed people from the LGBTQ community by throwing them off roofs of buildings, and that they had even made children watch the executions, as had been evident from photos released by the group.
Meanwhile, the Nineveh Operations Command, also known as the Nineveh Liberation Operations Command, was quoted by another Iraqi News report as saying on Sunday that a mass grave, containing the bodies of tens of policemen, had been discovered in the Nineveh province.
Nineveh Operations Command member Colonel Ahmed al-Jabouri was quoted by the report as saying: "Security forces at the recently-liberated al-Jawaana village discovered a mass grave containing the remains of 30 policemen of the Nineveh Police. The victims' bodies show signs of torture and [they] were shot in the head and chest."
This was the latest in a series of mass graves that are being discovered as Isis loses ground and retreats, leaving the signs of its actions in its wake. At least 50 such mass graves have been discovered across Iraq and Syria in this year alone.Remember the Human…
In mid-December, I put up an experiment. This experiment had a goal, which was only known to me. The goal was can someone outside the Black community can related or not relate to an article within for a Black audience. The results were not meant to be scientific, but I wanted to see how people would answer as well as if they will cooperate l. More importantly, I wanted to see how people would cooperate in this experiment that only hints but so much.
So, did the target audience gave me the answers I seek? Well, there were no right or wrong answers. It’s a very targeted article towards heterosexual Black couples. What I expected was they can’t relate to the article because it wasn’t written for their race. What I got was actually the opposite. While they do claim word usage was a little bit different, they can’t/can relate for their own reasons, and not one reply was because it was written for a Black audience. And that’s fine and dandy. So, if you’re waiting for the answer to that, that’s it.
I wanted to say even in a non-scifietic study, even if the something was written for a Black audience, White people can or can’t relate to it for about the same reasons the target audience can/can’t relate to it.
And I was going to post some of their answers anonymously… but this turned into something a lot bigger than my initial findings.
First thing I noticed was a miscount in the notes… there were (at the time) 15 notes. But the numbers didn’t match up.
Turned out that some Anti-Social Justice bloggers found a way to block it so that they won’t show up in the notes. So far this is what I found… which by the way, I wasn’t surprised.
But looking for the missing notes lead to something else entirely different.
I went into an analytics software originally to research the experiment post’s traffic. For those who don’t know what an analytics software is, it’s something that helps me track results so I know what topics to expand on as well as where traffic is coming from.
I saw a lot of traffic coming from reddit. Like a huge spike in one day. (1.7 visits)
I was the target of a subReddit called “ TumblrInAction ”, an anti-social justice community, discussing and poking fun at a wide range of social justice topics. They have a full resource on how to search for topic to make fun of.
I noticed that I was getting reblogs for this post, one that I didn’t added commentary to. And I was getting frustrated with the commentary that was being added to it. I would call it “white tears” (a subject which I am oddly an expect on, according to Google), it seems to be more than that.
Like any community, they have rules, one was how to not harass the bloggers/tumblr users. But this clearly wasn’t the case. After I subliminally blog this post, a week later, this sticky reddit popped up.
This subReddit community was built on basically is about one thing: cultivating a close-minded culture of bullying “social justice warriors”. One thing that I don’t like is when people say things like “it’s only the Internet, you shouldn’t take things seriously”. This old standby is meaningless. There’s a reason why you hide behind pseudonyms to the point that there’s an outcry about the YouTube switching to Google+’s commenting system… a method to curve YouTube comments as well as giving you A FACE so that you are careful with what you write. You hide because it keeps you safe and it makes another person’s experience meaningless.
What was the first rule of “ reddiquette ”? Remember the human.
When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself “Would I say it to the person’s face?” or “Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?”
At times, I forget that I’m human. Mostly because I was told all my life, people told me that I am a “strong black male”. That fuels my ego, because I’m suppose to be strong. But I’m not really that strong. Sometimes, I forget that, because I’m literally turning myself into an Android. I didn’t create this forum to snap at people every chance I get, I created it to explain a concept. It’s easy to forget that at times, because of the watch an interface of a computer, or getting illuminated by the glow of a tablet, or you’re feeling the glass of a smart-phone.
But the difference however… is that I probably would say the same things I blog about… to your face… in a tactful matter. Hence why I spend the last few days off tumblr and adjusting myself so that I’m the same across the board. The same experience you get online will be the same you get offline.
So, to the subReddit community… thank you for reminding me that there are still nasty people out there that rather hide behind names, exploiting the experiences of others for their own amusement. Thank you for reminding me that I need to make quality posts and take the harder road. Thanks for exposing yourself and reminding me that sometimes, I’m no better than you when I certain posts.
I will reconsider my stance on how I approach things. I’ll be more tactful.
Except with communities like yours and people such as yourselves. I know yours are a dime a dozen. But it’s your right. You have the freedom to make fun of social justice if you want. But considered this…
… all the reddits I seen so far… are from people who are not so-called “social justice warriors”. No matter what you tell yourself, you are encouraging negative behaviors and a disconnect from humanity of others.
So, my only advice to you?
Remember the human… assholes.Fresh citrus juice has become somewhat of a fetish in our industry, for reasons that are understandable. We are, as a community, still suffering from PTSD caused by too many cloying, artificially-flavored “martinis” served for too many decades.
Fresh citrus juice, however, is very economically unfriendly. It’s labor-intense. There’s nothing worse than staring down a line of customers and having to stop to juice 5 limes. And citrus ain’t cheap, especially at certain times of the year when the cost of fruit triples and their yield halves. There are times when the citrus in the drink costs more than the liquor.
On the other hand, anyone who has ever tried day-old lime juice (or worse, the pasteurized stuff) can tell you it’s just not the same. It doesn’t have that same brightness.
In a perfect world, citrus juice would last weeks. Then you could juice it all at once. (This has the side benefit of making cheap Chinese Zumex knockoffs like the one I got economical. More on that in a second.) If you had extra, you could use it tomorrow. Or the next day. You’d never run out of what you made pre-shift, and never pour any down the drain. You’d also be using all-natural ingredients and techniques, because you don’t want to serve anything you wouldn’t want to eat.
Well, I’ve got a solution.
To understand you have to go back to the whole citrus. The whole fruit contains a number of different things. It’s mostly water. It contains all sorts of other chemicals, trapped in its vesicles, the most flavorful of which are citric acid in lemons, and in limes citric and malic acids, with a touch of succinic. But the most flavorful component of all is the oil trapped in the peels.
When you squeeze a lime, you’re not seeing it but you’re also expressing that beautiful oil into the juice. You probably think that because it’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the juice that it doesn’t make much difference. Go ahead and buy yourself some lime essential oil and squeeze one tiny drop onto your tongue if you want to see just how wrong that is. In fact, even one drop of lemon essential oil added to an entire drink can make it taste like Pledge.
The essential oil is the most distinctive flavor ingredient in citrus juice. Want to try it out more diluted? Get a La Croix or a similar, 0 calorie flavored carbonated water. They’re basically just essential oil flavors emulsified into carbonated water. Lime La Croix has no actual lime juice in it, just lime essential oil.
Essential oils have one problem: they are very sensitive to pH and citrus juice is very acidic. They both have a pH as low as 2. That’s not a problem when they’re sitting in oil sacs in the outside layer of the citrus (called the flavedo) and separated from the juicy vesicles by the pith (the albedo). But when you squeeze citrus and combine the oils that are normally separated from the juice, breakdown begins immediately.
Modernist Cuisine offers two solutions for this problem. The first is to simply dope older citrus juice with fresh stuff shortly before serving time. This is what I do during camper season. If I have a gallon of lime juice leftover from the previous weekend (usually out of 5 gallons I started with) I’ll just add it to the next batch. Easy peasy. I just juice a little less and pour it all into the keg.
In a bar setting this might be less ideal. So another option is to emulsify some lime essential oil (you can buy the food-grade stuff pretty easily online) with gum Arabic and just add it in. I’ve been playing with the idea of diluting it down enough to put it in an atomizer and spray over the drink or onto the glass before the drink goes in, but I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.
Another undesirable reaction is occurring at the same time: oxidation. This is pretty easy to stop, you just put the juice in a keg and purge with nitrogen. Fill the keg with nitrogen, then purge, and repeat a couple times to try to get as much oxygen as you can out. Then shake the crap out of it to try to knock as much dissolved oxygen as you can out of suspension, purge, and repeat a couple times. It takes a minute or two, but you can get it to a pretty low dissolved oxygen level. (Any of my readers want to loan me a DO meter?)
By doing both of these, you get lime juice that lasts. I’ve used week-old lime juice side by side with same day stuff and in a cocktail you can’t tell the difference. My overall process is as follows now.
1. Juice limes no more than a day before serving. If you’re doing regular bar service, Friday shortly before you open would be a great time and probably get you through Saturday.
I found myself juicing at least one case of citrus every Friday, and sometimes more like 5 depending on my weekend. Being a solo entrepreneur, that kind of time commitment with the old hand press just wasn’t going to scale. So I got myself a knockoff Chinese version of a Zumex.
It works great. It has a couple downsides, in that it needs a few modifications I plan to make over the winter. The tray that holds the juice is really hard to clean if you don’t unscrew it every time, so I bought thumbscrews to make that easy. It still needs me to make it a gasket. The thing leaks juice everywhere, and because it’s sized for oranges, it’s probably getting less juice out of smaller citrus than you’d get with a Zumex kitted with the lemon/lime adapters. But, it does a whole case of limes in like 10 minutes with no arm strain, so it cuts my time down enough to recoup that cost.
Cleanup is about 10 minutes, so you don’t save much time if you’re only juicing a few dozen limes. Which is yet another reason to use my method: juicing once every few days for a small bar saves you the daily chore.
Of course you must fine-strain what comes out or else you’ll risk jamming your kegs or faucets. (I find the faucets usually jam due to particulate matter, but the kegs due to sludgy things like honey that wasn’t dissolved well-enough.)
2. Put juice in nitrogen-purged keg, of course keeping refrigerated at all times.
3. Pour lime juice into bottles with pour spouts for service. (Anything left does not go back in at the end but gets saved for cordial down the line.) For big events, I have a dedicated tap for lime juice in my camper, allowing me to keep it under nitrogen the whole time.
4. Repeat next week by adding leftovers to fresh juice. I find at least 50% fresh juice makes it taste great.
After a few weeks of this I’ll usually have a weekend where I run out and start over, but if I don’t, I’ll take the little that’s left and add it to the keg of cordial stuff. (And yes, that’s why I do a preponderance of gimlets later in the season. I’m currently sitting on about 6 gallons of cordial!)
So there’s my process. It’s extremely time-efficient, keeps lime juice from being wasted (I have damn-near zero waste) with minimal effort, and thus saves on both ingredient and labor costs. And with no reduction in quality. It’s really pretty simple, and the investment in equipment (the juice and kegging stuff probably adds up to over $1,000) pays for itself very, very quickly. I am sure it has saved me over 100 hours and a few hundred dollars in limes just this season. If I even valued my time at minimum wage (and of course, it’s way more) it would have still broken even.Milan are paying €80 million on salaries this season, which makes them the club that spends the most after Juventus, Inter and Roma; Carlos Bacca and Luiz Adriano are the highest paid Rossoneri.
It’s the time of the year again when La Gazzetta dello Sport publishes the salaries of every single Serie A player.
The club-by-club & player-by-player yearly wages charts were posted on the pink-newspaper this Wednesday and Milan are in 4th place in terms of spending money on salaries with €80m – before taxes – to be earned by players in this term. This represents a decrease from last year’s €101m, which put Milan in third place that year.
Carlos Bacca and Luiz Adriano who joined Milan last summer are the highest paid players with €3.5m and €3m after taxes before going to their pockets this year. After them comes captain Riccardo Montolivo who renewed his contract at the start of the summer and took a €1 million pay-cut.
Juventus have the highest wage bill in Serie A and will be paying their players €145m. They also have the highest paid player in the league – Gonzalo Higuain – and the highest paid coach – Massimiliano Allegri. They are followed by Inter who’ll pay €120m. Crutone’s bill is the lowest – €14m. Here is the full list of wage bills in Serie A, according to the data of the 7th of September 2016 La Gazzetta:
Team Name Overall Bill (€) Highest Paid Player Salary (€) Coach Salary (€) Juventus 145,000,000 Gonzalo Higuain 7,500,000 Massimiliano Allegri 5,000,000 Inter 120,000,000 Mauro Icardi 3,600,000 Frank De Boer 2,500,000 Roma 92,000,000 Daniele De Rossi 6,500,000 Luciano Spalletti 3,000,000 Milan 80,000,000 Carlos Bacca 3,500,000 Vincenzo Montella 2,200,000 Napoli 75,000,000 Marek Hamsik 3,500,000 Maurizio Sarri 1,400,000 Lazio 55,000,000 Ciro Immobile 2,000,000 Simone Inzaghi 800,000 Fiorentina 44,000,000 Borja Valero 1,700,000 Paulo Sousa 1,500,000 Sampdoria 35,000,000 Fabio Quagliarella 1,200,000 Marco Giampaolo 800,000 Bologna 34,000,000 Mattia Destro 1,800,000 Roberto Donadoni 1,000,000 Torino 32,000,000 Adem Ljajic 1,400,000 Sinisa Mihajlovic 1,500,000 Genoa 30,000,000 Mattia Perin 1,100,000 Ivan Jurić 600,000 Sassuolo 28,000,000 Domenico Berardi 1,100,000 Eusebio Di Francesco 1,100,000 Udinese 28,000,000 Duvan Zapata 1,000,000 Giuseppe Iachini 700,000 Atalanta 24,000,000 Alberto Paloschi 1,000,000 Gian Piero Gasperini 800,000 Cagliari 21,000,000 Marco Borriello 1,000,000 Massimo Rastelli 400,000 Palermo 20,000,000 Bruno Henrique Corsini 700,000 Roberto de Zerbi 500,000 Chievo 18,000,000 Jonathan de Guzmán 700,000 Rolando Maran 400,000 Pescara 16,500,000 Simone Pepe 500,000 Massimo Oddo 300,000 Empoli 15,500,000 Riccardo Saponara 900,000 Giovanni Martusciello 200,000 Crotone 14,000,000 Lorenzo Crisetig 400,000 Davide Nicola 200,000
It is important to note that the wage bill reported above are gross numbers while players’ salaries are net numbers. The total bill in Serie A in this season amounts to €927 million. It’s a rise from last season’s €882m but still much lower than the €1100 million paid in the 2011/12 Serie A. The numbers however do not include performance-related bonuses so in reality they could be higher.
Even Juve, who are paying the most in the league, pay significantly less to their players than other top European sides. For instance, according to Gazzetta dello Sport’s gross numbers, Manchester United pay €304m, Man City €302m, Bayern Munich €273m, Barcelona €248m, Chelsea €237m and Real Madrid €209m. Top coaches are also much better paid abroad: Pep Guardiola earns €18m, Jose Mourinho €16m, Arsene Wenger €10m, Jorgen Klopp €8.5m, Carlo Ancelotti, Luis Enrique and Diego Simeone €8m, Antonio Conte €7.5m, Mauricio Pochettino €6.5m and Zinedine Zidane €5.5m.
You can find all the salaries of every player in Serie A and in particular of Milan below (via Gazzetta):After a bye week hiatus, we’re back with the scouting report. Up next, the Indiana Hoosiers. This is the first time the Huskers and Hoosiers have matched up in the Big 10, and though the Blackshirts may have liked the match up a few years ago, that’s far less true today. In a statistical oddity, Indiana’s offense is ranked 39th in total offense but only 84th in scoring offense. As can be expected, that is largely due to a putrid red zone offense, sitting at 124th (out of 128) in the country.
In other words, this is the perfect type of game to get Nebraska fans needlessly riled up, and not in a good way. The Blackshirts have shown a tendency to give up yards before ultimately tightening up inside the 20. If that holds against Kevin Wilson’s Indiana offense, it’ll make for some serious heartburn for total yardage watchers. Let’s take a look at how Indiana likely puts up those yards.
Initial Thoughts
Game(s) Scouted: Wake Forest, Michigan State
For those of you who don’t remember Kevin Wilson, he was the co-OC and then OC when Oklahoma put up a billion yards on offense between 2002 and 2010. Though the wins haven’t been plentiful in his time in Bloomington, his offensive production has carried over from his Boomer Sooner days. Wilson has a sort of Nutty Professor vibe to him. He wanders the sideline rocking reading glasses with a large play sheet attached to his hands at all times, and he runs the Hoosiers’ offense as a “check with me system.” In other words, prepare yourself for plenty of the Indiana offense running to the line of scrimmage, pausing to look over at Wilson while the camera cuts away to him pouring over the defensive alignment, and then snapping the ball once he’s got everything set just as he likes it.
And for all the jokes about Wilson’s studious sideline demeanor, he’s a brilliant play caller and the main reason why Indiana’s offense has a chance against just about anybody. Not much different than Nebraska’s Danny Langsdorf, everything Wilson calls has a purpose, and he’s excellent at blending concepts that bait a defense to overplay them before pulling the chair out and morphing that concept into something else to gain leverage on a defender.
The issue right now is he doesn’t have a plethora of talent available to him. Indiana has a pretty good back in Devine Redding, and they’ve got a pair of receivers to go with him. But they’re relatively weak on the line and their new QB is on his third FBS school and wears #21. Suffice it to say that’s not ideal from the most important position on the field.
So with that, my player to watch is senior wide receiver Ricky Jones. Jones is listed at a generous 5’10″/185 in the program, but he plays a whole lot bigger than that. He’s got great acceleration out of his breaks, and he can both make a guy miss and run right over him as well. Perhaps most important, Wilson does a great job moving Jones around on the field from out wide into the slot to get him favorable personnel match ups against the defense’s weaker coverage guys. If we somehow control him, we’ll control the Hoosiers’ passing game. If not, though, look out because he can play.
Offense
Formations and Personnel
For Husker fans wondering what the offense will look like next year with Tommy Armstrong out and either Tanner Lee or Patrick O’Brien in, the Hoosiers hit the schedule at the perfect time. The reason? Wilson’s offense looks eerily similar to Langsdorf’s but without the QB run game that we’ve leaned on this year.
Indiana is primarily an 11 personnel shotgun team, though they’re not afraid to dip into 10 personnel or go the other way to 12 or 21 personnel as well. Most often they line the back up next to the QB, but after checking with Wilson on the sideline, they’ll frequently move to the Pistol as well. And, much like the Huskers, the Hoosiers will detach a tight end into the slot or at times even as the #2 receiver in 3×1 sets. They’ll also line the tight end up off the line of scrimmage in Y Off looks to run inside zone Slice and play action off of it.
In fact, this is one of the hallmarks of Kevin Wilson’s offense. He loves to move players around on the chess board to non-traditional spots to get favorable match ups with his personnel. So you’ll see a fair helping of the tight end lining up in odd spots, and you may also see Wilson’s 270lb freshmen running back Tyler Natee (affectionately nicknamed “Big Bacon”) lined up in the Wildcat formation.
They also love to alter their wide receiver splits with tight and stacked looks, frequently using one receiver to run off vertical coverage or stemming both receivers on the same initial path to try and confuse coverage responsibilities.
So when you watch the game on Saturday, do so knowing that this Indiana offense may look a lot like the one Nebraska is moving to in 2017. And the success of the Hoosiers offense over the past few years should give Husker fans some comfort that yes, even without a running QB, you can still move the ball down the field.
Concepts and Motions
For the second straight game, Nebraska faces an offense that loves to move offensive linemen around in the running game. The Hoosiers love the pull the center and the backside OT in their sweep game, though they’re also diverse enough on offense that they’ll pull play side linemen to attack the same side as the back as well. Wilson will also call quick pitches designed to take advantage of the edge defender’s leverage and alignment.
And that’s what makes Wilson so brilliant. The Hoosiers are about as tendency free as you can be on offense, as they’re equally able to attack both sides of the field from every formation they line up in. And they have concepts that blend seamlessly together, able to adjust to what the defense throws at them without having to burn mental energy to do it.
As for the personnel, Devine Redding is a pretty slick back who loves to bend the ball to the backside on zone runs. It’ll be important for the Husker defenders to stay sound in their gaps, and Nebraska’s safeties will have to come down to clean up that bend back by Redding. When Indiana gets into the second half, they’ll give Redding a blow with Mike Majette, Devonte Williams, and the aforementioned Big Bacon.
And while the Indiana running game is pretty solid, it’s the passing game where Wilson’s brilliance really shines. Jones is my pick to click, but it could easily be the Hoosiers’ other big play receiver, Nick Westbrook. Wilson likes to work Westbrook vertical off play action while often bringing Jones underneath him as a second option. That’s not ideal for defenses, as it often means one of them sees solo coverage.
The Hoosiers have a screen package, mostly relying on the Slip screen to the backs and then bubble screens to the WRs. And though they don’t throw many true screens, they love to show that action just enough to get defenses committed to it. When they get there, Wilson will turn those bubble screens into wheel routes to attack overeager LBs and slot defenders. One of the Hoosiers’ best concepts is the Slant/Bubble look straight out of the Huskers’ playbook.
You’ll also see the same horizontal stretch concept used in the Slant/Flat combo, and the Hoosiers WRs are great at faking a block before sneaking off on the Slant. As with much of Wilson’s complementary offense, once the defense starts attacking that Slant, they’ll work the Flat to the back while using the Slant to pick a defender. Much like the Bubble to Wheel concept, they’ll also bend those Flat routes into Wheel routes from slot receivers.
And if that’s not enough for you, Wilson is no stranger to trick plays, and he’ll use everyone in the offense to run them. He also loves to attack LBs with RBs in the passing game, running them vertically out of the backfield after WRs have run off coverage. And of course, as with his WRs, he loves the Wheel route to the RB as well once the defense starts to jump the Slant/Flat combo from above.
So why hasn’t Wilson’s offense been more productive on the year? An offensive line that isn’t as good as last year’s group makes life difficult in the red zone, along with the loss of running back Jordan Howard to the NFL. And of course, as we’ll discuss next, the QB position.
QB Play
The Hoosiers’ offense is manned by Richard Lagow, perhaps the only QB in the country to wear a number in the twenties:
Just like Wes Lunt, the last QB the Blackshirts faced, Lagow took a turn in Stillwater playing for Mike Gundy’s Oklahoma State Cowboys. Unlike Lunt, however, Lagow started at UConn before transferring to OSU, and he then left for Cisco Community College before meandering up to Bloomington and Wilson’s offense.
In a lot of ways, Lagow is still an unknown quantity. When given time, he has a big arm and can hit all of the throws needed in Wilson’s vertical play action attack. At the same time, he also struggles seeing defenders dropping in zone coverage and also tends to have too much confidence in that strong arm when the timing of the play is off. His season started off great, with 4 TDs and 0 INTs against FIU and Ball State. He’s come back down to earth in his last 3 games, with 7 TDs and 5 INTs against Wake Forest, Michigan State and Ohio State.
Lagow is not a running threat, with only 22 yards gained on the year and a season-long run of 9 yards. This makes the Hoosiers’ run game easier to deal with than if Lagow could move, but Wilson protects this aspect by running a lot of play action off his run game and holding edge defenders with bubble screens and crossing routes from the slot receivers.
Which version of Lagow will the Huskers get in this game? Who knows. The Blackshirts front 7 has had issues stopping the run this year, and that means there should be windows for him to throw in the play action game. That said, Nebraska should be in its Nickel package most of the day, and Aaron Williams has been fantastic closing up a lot of space in the passing game while still being able to play edge runs as well.
I think the Blackshirts continue Lagow’s interception streak, though I don’t think it’s going to be a field day for Lockdown U. Mark me down for two Lagow interceptions on the day.
My Prediction
Indiana is going to move the ball in this game. Wilson is too good as a play caller, the Blackshirts defense has yet to put together a shutdown four quarters, and both Ricky Jones and Westbrook will have room to run off play action. That said, with Lagow showing no threat to run, Nebraska should be able to slow down the Hoosiers’ rushing attack enough to prevent an all-out assault on the stat sheet in terms of both yards and points.
I think it’s a game where Lagow puts up sizable yardage in the passing game, perhaps even becoming the first QB to top 300 yards against the Blackshirts in 2016, but also doubling down with interceptions to negate some of that statistical production. Nebraska’s LBs will need to be on point in coverage, as Wilson will attack them with Redding, Majette, and Williams in the passing game.
Conceptually, this will be a test for the Huskers because of how much Indiana does with its offense. I say the Hoosiers get to 24 points in the game, with over 450 yards on the day. Ultimately, though, I don’t think it’s going to be enough for them to win the game. And that’s because of their defense, which we’ll discuss tomorrow.
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FacebookThe essential philosophy of serving youth with diverse SOGIE (Part 1 of 2)
A case study
At Los Angeles Youth Network (LAYN), an inclusive philosophy meets trauma-informed care to create an effective model for SOGIE-conscious programming. CARF spoke with LAYN and one of the transgender youths it serves to explore what successful programming looks like.
(SOGIE: sexual orientation and gender identity/expression)
Background
The rural town where Adam grew up is small by most measures. With a population hovering around 13,000, a single high school serves the area’s teenagers. The temperature rarely rises above freezing in the winter, and storms have been known to drop blankets of snow in a single night. A person can easily walk from one end of town to the other in half a day.
The community is tightly woven; business owners and farmers, teachers and civil servants are often the same person. Adam’s uncle was the family’s landlord. As in many rural communities, residents grew up together, know each other by name, and share similar backgrounds. Opinions and judgments are shared by many and spread quickly. Support and scorn alike are delivered with a force that can feel monolithic.
In such an environment, if someone does not fit into established cultural norms, the fishbowl setting is often amplified. Too large a deviation from what is familiar can result in widespread ridicule and limited advocacy. This was the struggle that Adam confronted at age 15.
Born female, Adam had never felt comfortable in his own skin. When he decided to come out publicly and identify as male, community support was nearly nonexistent. Among peers and family, only his father seemed to appreciate Adam’s situation, and stood up as his lone backer. But even with such minimal support, Adam couldn’t have anticipated the amount of adversity and bullying he’d face.
The wave of ridicule built quickly over the span of two months. The environment at school worsened so much that Adam was forced to drop out. In the dead of winter, his uncle refused to continue providing him residence because he identified as male. It seemed that nearly everything and everyone he knew had turned against him.
Driven from school and home, and with no alternatives in their small town, Adam and his father decided to make a drastic change. The two of them would head west with few prospects and start a new life in Los Angeles. They figured that the warmer climate would take pressure off their financial situation, and a larger city would offer more opportunities for Adam |
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Obama Continues to Stubbornly Link Gun Violence with Guns
7 points
super special forces reporting for, buuuurrrrrrrrrrp, doodieDETROIT (Reuters) - McDonald’s Corp has recalled at least 13.4 million “Shrek”-themed drinking glasses in the United States and Canada after consumers were warned to stop using them because they contain the toxic metal cadmium.
Recalled Shrek-theme drinking glasses from McDonald's in a photo from the Consumer Product Safety Commission. REUTERS/CPSC/Handout
Cadmium was found in the painted design of the movie characters on the glassware, which McDonald’s outlets sold for about $2 each, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Canada’s health ministry Health Canada.
The recall affected 12 million glasses in the United States and at least another 1.3 million in Canada, according to McDonald’s.
“A very small amount of cadmium can come to the surface of the glass, and in order to be as protective as possible of children, CPSC and McDonald’s worked together on this recall,” CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson said in an email.
The CPSC said designs on the glasses, made by ARC International in Millville, New Jersey, contain cadmium and “long-term exposure... can cause adverse health effects.” Cadmium is a known carcinogen that research shows also can cause bone softening and severe kidney problems.
The agency said no incidents or injuries related to the glasses have been reported, but McDonald’s said it was recalling them as a “precautionary measure.”
A spokesman for ARC declined to comment on whether the glasses were made in the United States or abroad.
Shares of the world’s largest hamburger chain were off 1.3 percent at $66.95 on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday afternoon.
Wolfson did not specify the amounts of cadmium that leached from the paint in tests by the CPSC but said the levels were slightly above the new stricter guidelines under development by the agency. He said it was far less cadmium than the children’s metal jewelry the CPSC previously recalled.
McDonald’s said consumers who bought the glasses should visit the company website at www.mcdonalds.com/glasses or call 800-244-6227 beginning Tuesday for instructions on how to return them and get a refund.
“The glassware was evaluated by an independent third-party laboratory which is accredited by the CPSC, and determined to be in compliance with all applicable federal and state requirements at the time of manufacture and distribution,” the company said in a statement.
“However, in light of the CPSC’s evolving assessment of standards for cadmium in consumer products, McDonald’s determined in an abundance of caution that a voluntary recall of the ‘Shrek Forever After’ glasses is appropriate,” the company added.
McDonald’s said about 7 million of the glasses had been sold and about 5 million were in stores or had not been shipped yet in the United States. The company’s Canadian office said 1.4 million had been sold or shipped to restaurants in that country.
The sale of the 16-ounce glasses was part of the promotional campaign for the movie “Shrek Forever After,” which was produced by DreamWorks Animation and released last month by Viacom Inc’s Paramount Pictures.
The glasses, which McDonald’s began offering on May 21, came in four designs with characters from the film: Shrek, Fiona, Puss in Boots and Donkey.
“Shrek,” the fourth movie in the series about the lovable green ogre’s adventures in his fairy tale land, opened May 21 and is currently the most popular movie in North America, having grossed almost $150 million through the end of May.
The CPSC was alerted to the problem through the office of U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, who was contacted by an anonymous source last week.
"Our children's health should not depend on the consciences of anonymous sources," Speier said in a statement posted on her website. (speier.house.gov/)
“Although McDonald’s did the right thing by recalling these products, we need stronger testing standards,” she said. “Cadmium is a toxic substance that is extremely dangerous to the developmental health of children.”
McDonald’s last recall with the CPSC occurred in 2002, involving 100,000 Chicago Bears bobble-head figurines with paint that contained excess levels of lead.THERE were scenes of jubilation outside the Socialist Party headquarters in Paris last night, after François Hollande topped the first round of the presidential election with 28.6% of the vote. As the night went on, his lead over Nicolas Sarkozy narrowed slightly. Official results now put the incumbent president on 27.1%. These two candidates will go on to face each other in the run-off on May 6th.
Some analysts are now suggesting that Mr Hollande's slender lead leaves the race wide open. It is certainly true that it would be a mistake to underestimate the campaigning skills of the energetic Mr Sarkozy. But I just don't see how at this late stage he can pull it off.
The argument in his favour is based on the disappointing score achieved yesterday by the Communist-backed contender, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He ended up with 11.1% when some polls had credited him with 15%, and suggested that he might even come in third place.
By contrast, on the far right, and as previously predicted, the National Front's Marine Le Pen did better than polls had suggested, scooping up 18% of the vote. This figure, while not quite as much as some early exit polls suggested last night, is still more than her father, Jean-Marie, managed when he made it into the second round in 2002; indeed, it is the Front's best-ever score in a presidential election.
Add up the score of the "right" (including a minor nationalist candidate), goes the argument, and you get 46.9%; more than the combined score of the left, at 44%. Ergo, all that Mr Sarkozy needs to secure a majority is half the centrist voters who backed François Bayrou, who got 9.1% yesterday.
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But this reasoning is deeply flawed, in my view. Why? Mainly because although Ms Le Pen may get labelled "far-right" for her anti-Islamist and anti-immigrant rhetoric, she scoops up a lot of anti-Sarkozy and anti-establishment voters who are fed up with the cosy dealings of the Paris elite.
They include lots of working-class voters and ex-Communists in places like the industrial north of France, near her stronghold in the former mining town of Henin-Beaumont, who have no time for Mr Sarkozy or the political right.
Many of Ms Le Pen's voters, therefore, will not simply swing behind Mr Sarkozy in the run-off. However much he may try to court their vote by sounding an even harder line on immigration than he has already, these are people who simply do not like the man. One poll suggests that only 40% of her voters will now back Mr Sarkozy; 27% would support Mr Hollande; and 33% are undecided or would abstain.
In other words, Mr Sarkozy has far less of a potential extra second-round vote than the raw numbers might suggest. This is why Mr Hollande looks so strong. He gets 44% simply by adding up all the left-wing vote, both from Mr Mélenchon and other assorted anti-capitalists. Unlike the votes on the "right", these look safe for Mr Hollande. Last night Mr Mélenchon called on his supporters to vote for Mr Hollande, as did Eva Joly, the Green candidate, who got 2.3%.
So all Mr Hollande needs is a small proportion of Ms Le Pen's votes, and the rest from Mr Bayrou. This is why, however well Mr Sarkozy does in the televised debate, due on May 2nd, his chances now look slim. Early second-round polls give Mr Hollande an eight-point lead in the second round, and not a single poll during the campaign has put Mr Sarkozy ahead.
The Socialist now has the momentum of his first-round victory, and is riding a wave of anti-Sarkozy feeling. My view is that the odds are still heavily stacked in his favour.
(Photo credit: AFP)On Friday night’s edition of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” host Bill Maher took aim at the tendency of conservatives to reflexively object to anything that liberals advocate, no matter how middle of the road or sensible those positions may be.
Take for example, he said, “pink slime,” the gunk made from the slurry off the slaughterhouse floor and ammonia gas that’s in the majority of ground beef in this country. Americans found out about the stuff and naturally recoiled, until conservatives realized that liberals were against it and then three Republican governors rushed to factories that make pink slime to publicly eat burgers containing the additive.
He also touched upon First Lady Michelle Obama’s healthy eating initiative and her efforts to try and curb the soaring rates of childhood obesity in this country. Most Republicans, he said, upon hearing the Michelle Obama suggests they eat more vegetables and take a walk, will promptly lock themselves in the garage with the car running and “eat bacon grease out of a coffee can.”
“I think the Republican party is at war with common sense,” he said, “I think Republicans live in a world now where whatever a liberal says, no matter how sensible, is automatically evil, wrong, and needs to be fought with the fervor of a starving raccoon on crystal meth.”
Watch the clip, embedded via Mediaite, below:In an article for Scientific American, two scientists who are working on the causes of colony collapse disorder (CCD) say that they and other researchers have made some progress in determining what’s killing all of those bees.
The growing consensus among researchers is that multiple factors such as poor nutrition and exposure to pesticides can interact to weaken colonies and make them susceptible to a virus-mediated collapse. In the case of our experiments in greenhouses, the stress of being confined to a relatively small space could have been enough to make colonies succumb to IAPV and die with CCD-like symptoms.
It’s like AIDS for bees…the lowered immunity doesn’t kill directly but makes the bees more susceptible to other illness. One the techniques researchers used in investigating CDD is metagenomics. Instead of singling out an organism for analysis, they essentially mixed together a bunch of genetic material found in the bees (including any bacteria, virii, parasites, etc.) and sliced it up into small pieces that were individually deciphered. They went through those pieces one by one and assigned them to known organisms until they ran across something unusual.Finding a lost wedding ring will bring a sense of relief to any couple. Until the moment you realize it's currently working its way through your kid's digestive track.
Redditor iamclarkgriswold, who we will referred to as Clark Griswold for the remainder of this article, shared a photo of his son's x-ray to the subreddit r/pics on Thursday. In the middle of the x-ray is clearly a ring-shaped foreign object.
"My wife couldn't find her wedding ring yesterday. We decided to have our baby x-rayed just in case," Clark Griswol posted. Fortunately, the kid is doing just fine, but they're going to have a messy wait before that ring will once again signify the couple's eternal bond.
Redditors were quick to call out Clark Griswold's intuition for getting the x-ray.
Others were more concerned for the kid's well being.
Clark Giswold promises to post an update once the ring is freed from his son's bowels, but for now we must wait.
At least he's keeping a positive attitude about the whole thing.Joint Special Operations Command comprises Delta Force personnel that have killed U.S. citizens and acted in support of Obama’s expanded war in Pakistan
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Revelations that a political assassination unit which reported solely to Dick Cheney was in operation during the Bush administration are absent the fact that the unit in question, the Joint Special Operations Command, has been active for decades, has been deployed domestically in the U.S., has killed U.S. citizens, and is an integral part of Barack Obama’s expanded wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell when he told a University of Minnesota audience on Tuesday that the Joint Special Operations Command is, “An executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”
Subsequent media coverage of Hersh’s comments, such as a special feature on last night’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, has framed the story in the inaccurate context that the JSOC was a personal hit team acting on behalf of Cheney alone, when in reality the unit was created in 1980 and continues to play a central role in Barack Obama’s continuation of the so-called war on terror.
As we learn from the Global Security website, the Joint Special Operations Command in fact comprises mostly of Delta Force soldiers and SEALs. The unit was established in 1980 and is located at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina and at nearby Fort Bragg.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
The assassination unit was not a creation of the Bush administration or Dick Cheney, it has in fact been “involved in a number of covert military operations over the last two decades,” including the covert U.S. invasions of Panama and Granada, as well as search and rescue missions in Somalia, and searching for alleged war criminals in Yugoslavia.
Notably, the unit also routinely “provides support to domestic law enforcement agencies” during high profile events such as the Olympics, the World Cup, political party conventions; and Presidential inaugurations, including the 2005 inauguration of George W. Bush, at which a small group of commandoes were “deployed under a secret counterterrorism program named Power Geyser”.
It was also reported that Delta Force were involved in the largest ever single act of slaughter of civilians by law enforcement in US history – the 1993 siege on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco.
In 1999, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair revealed that Delta Force units based out of Fort Bragg had been enlisted as part of the assault team on the Branch Davidian Compound. 76 people died in the siege, including 21 children and two pregnant women.
Alex Jones has gone up against Delta Force on numerous occasions while reporting on urban warfare training drills around the country. Delta Force conducted mock raids, dropping bombs in San Antonio, Kingsville, Alice, and Corpus Christie amongst other Texas towns. In many cases, the local authorities were not even warned before Delta Force invaded, and in one case, they even tried to pay off a police chief in San Antonio before he kicked them out.
Watch clips of Delta Force’s activities inside America from Alex Jones’ Police State 2000 documentary below.
According to Global Security, Bill Clinton’s 1994 Presidential Decision Directive 25 “exempt(s) the Joint Special Operations Command from the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 18USC Sec.1385, PL86-70, Sec. 17[d]. which makes it illegal for military and law enforcement to exercise jointly.”
The Joint Special Operations Command is a sub-unit of the United States Special Operations Command, which is described at the “Department of Defense’s front man in the global war on terrorism”. A New York Times article from last year reported that the Joint Special Operations Command were conducting ground raids in Pakistan supposedly aimed at hunting “Al-Qaeda members”. Such raids have only increased since Obama came to power.
Once again, the corporate media has completely fudged the most prescient issue arising out of Hersh’s revelation, which is the fact that the Joint Special Operations Command (mainly comprising of Delta Force) was not merely the brainchild or personal political assassination wing for Dick Cheney, but it has been in operation for decades, including inside the United States, has been involved in the murder of U.S. citizens, and is an integral part of Barack Obama’s expansion of the so-called war on terror.
By failing to reverse Bill Clinton’s PDD25 and not abolishing the Joint Special Operations Command, Barack Obama is in violation of Gerald R. Ford’s Executive Order 11905, which states, “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”
Dick Cheney is also in violation of this executive order, but with the Obama administration signaling that they will not pursue any members of the Bush administration for war crimes, the Republicans and the Democrats are once again running defense for each other as more illegal acts are committed.
This article was posted: Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 1:45 pm
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Comment on this articleThe producers of The Last Exorcism movies have ways of making you see them; mainly by scaring you before you ever get into the theater.
In 2010, Lionsgate found a clever way to channel the world’s brief fascination with random interaction site Chatroulette into an ingenious, chilling bit of viral marketing. Perhaps you were forwarded the video, in which two hopeful Internet boys think they’re about to see some skin, and end up seeing so much more. Now that the sequel to that film is upon us, new distributor CBS has taken the scares offline and into a beauty shop.
A promotional stunt for the face-palmingly titled The Last Exorcism II shows viewers its hand up front, opting instead to freak out the customers at a beauty shop. An acrobatically inclined woman wearing dead-person makeup and a nightgown hides behind a mirror that becomes two-way when illuminated. Over the course of their visit, some of the women getting treatment see a flash of dead girl in their own reflection, and react as you might to same–with NSFW language.
Watch the full video above.Player measurements from the 2011 NBA Draft Combine in Chicago leaked Friday; many find the cold analysis of body parts unseemly, but there's no denying how much interest the results draw. The biggest story out of the 2011 edition of the combine might be San Diego State forward Kawhi Leonard, who measured just 6'6 in socks, but had a great 7'3 wingspan and truly huge hands (9.8 inches long, 11.3 inches wide). No player at the combine had hands longer than Leonard; only center Greg Smith's hands were wider.
In basketball, hand size is a big indicator of success in rebounding, and plays a role in defense and ball-handling as well.
Leonard's biggest challenge in the workout season will be showing he has the skill level necessary to play small forward at the NBA level. But his measurements should help his reputation as a physical defender, something that he may have trouble getting across in the workout setting.By Megan Wells, PoliceOne contributor
The practice of identification based on human physical variation has been studied since the 1700s. In 1891, the classification system and method to individualize prisoners using fingerprints was first unrolled. This was considered the first use of fingerprint science by law enforcement.
It’s unbelievable how far technology has come since then.
Some futurists predict that real-time iris recognition could eventually replace facial recognition as a key identification mechanism. (Photo/Flickr)
Behavioral biometrics will help paint a more accurate picture.
Humans are creatures of habit. Soon, identifying characteristics not of what you are, but of what you do will find their way into law enforcement biometrics. These include:
Signature recognition
Typing pattern recognition
How a person selects and reads information (verbs and predicates used)
Eye movement tracking
Reading speed
We may not pay close attention to each of these habits, but they can be analyzed to paint a more robust picture of an individual.
Other non-traditional biometrics could include gait analysis (how an individual walks). For example, a woman in Ontario, Canada was identified as the winner of a lottery prize from video surveillance, and behavioral biometrics (such as gait).
Olfactory analysis – the use of a person’s odor to identify him or her is another possibility. Research has shown that body odor patterns remain constant enough over time to allow people to be identified with an accuracy rate of 85 percent – think a high-tech version of the old bloodhound.
Facial recognition libraries will be filled with social media data.
In 2007, the FBI created the Biometric Center of Excellence to continue fine-tuning biometrics programs for law enforcement. Since 2011, the FBI has been actively growing its facial recognition database, used for several purposes, including comparing the faces of suspected criminals to their driver’s license and ID photos.
According to the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology, the FBI database is currently up to 117 million American faces, meaning “one in two American adults [are] in a law enforcement face recognition network.”
It’s not just the FBI taking advantage of increased biometric data: “Across the country, state and local police departments are building their own face recognition systems, many of them more advanced than the FBI’s,” according to the Georgetown Law Center.
Although they are becoming more accurate, current facial recognition systems still have issues with minor differences like poses, resolution and wardrobe changes that can impact reliability. But technology will inevitably advance, and the abundance of available data will improve existing systems.
Facebook and Google already have collected enough data and perfected algorithms to distribute information that can fill in missing faces in the FBI and local department facial recognition library; however, privacy concerns have limited the collection of information to date.
As improved facial recognition for law enforcement moves full speed ahead, the next five to 10 years will bring near-perfect and robust facial recognition abilities, along with laws that accommodate the use of data for law enforcement purposes.
Gaining awareness of potential terrorist threats will become easier.
As biometrics become more fine-tuned, optimists believe potential terrorism will be easier to spot before tragedy strikes.
Lie-detecting robots using biometric sensors have already begun to pop up in airport kiosks. They are called Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessment in Real Time, and you can spot them at the Canadian Border Services Agency.
The robot uses eye detection software along with an array of sensors to pick up on the physiological signs that indicate a person is lying, and once it becomes suspicious, it can flag the passenger for further inspection.
In January, Donald Trump signed an executive order addressing refugee admissions to the U.S., which included a note to expedite biometric exit-entry screening for U.S. travelers.
DNA shaming will be mainstream.
DNA shaming, or using someone’s DNA to link them to a crime and bringing them shame for their missteps, could be a reality for law enforcement.
Maybe you missed the “Face of Litter” ad campaign that went viral a couple of years back. As a way to crack down on litter, Hong Kong partnered with Ogilvy advertising and Parabon Nanolabs (using technology developed in partnership with the Department of Defense) to deploy technology that identified physical characteristics of a litterbug. The technology took a two-dimensional look at DNA, and without identifying a person specifically, extrapolated portraits using DNA found on pieces of litter and posted the images in public places to shame the litterbugs. This technology was crude in 2015 and purposely limited, but it is just the beginning of what DNA shaming can lead to.
University of Calgary Prof. Thomas Patrick Keenan points to a more recent case of DNA shaming. In Florida, residents were required to submit their dog’s DNA, and owners who did not pick up after their dogs were sent a bill.
DNA is only as good as the database matches. We’ve already used technology like Passive Start and Entry, or PASE, while collecting fingerprints to help broaden the available data for law enforcement. Now, companies like TouchDNA have made it easier to collect and analyze DNA left behind, such as a few cells left on a pen or water glass. LEOs can use DNA shaming to deter criminal actions.
Heartbeats could be used for identification.
We already know that facial, iris and ear prints, as well as body odor and vein pattern recognition, have been tested for human identification but biometric identification could become as individualized as a heartbeat.
Traditional security measures like cryptography or encryption can be expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive. Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York, have devised a new way to protect personal electronic health records using a patient's own heartbeat.
The researchers encrypted patient data using a person's unique electrocardiogram (EKG) – a measurement of the electrical activity of the heart measured by a biosensor attached to the skin – as the key to lock and unlock the files.
While heartbeats may not be an absolute biometric, when combined with other biometrics, LEOs can get a unique signature for a person that can't be concealed.
VAWD engineering is a company actively working on ways to use this unique signature. They believe a heartbeat biometric can improve disaster relief and medical care by providing a "reliable, real-time medical status equal to or better than the current devices while increasing the mobility and comfort of the patient."
But they are also using the technology as a part of their “automated human life-form target tracking" system, which has already been explored by the United States Army.
Essentially, they’ve developed a technology that deploys Doppler radar technology to find “Human” signatures. They can detect heartbeats, breathing, postural sway and speech at standoff ranges behind walls/obstructions. LEOs may soon be able to use this technology in situations like police pursuits, or standoff situations – identifying a mark based on their biometric signature.
Advanced biometrics will be connected to body-worn cameras.
The current landscape of biometric measurement in law enforcement is primitive at best, yet as the technology develops in sophistication, the implications will be of high importance.
Imagine if police officers could get real-time facial recognition data through their body-worn cameras: Instead of taking a photo or video and passing it from agency to agency to identify an individual, facial recognition systems will be able to analyze video captured by body-worn cameras, checking faces against databases in real time.
With faster, more accurate facial recognition, police may be able to scan faces the way license plates are scanned now. In the longer term, some futurists predict that real-time iris recognition could replace facial recognition as a key identification mechanism.
Missing persons cases will be easier to solve.
Most police are familiar with the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS database, which can identify and compare DNA profiles electronically. In the future, this database will be enhanced by newer tools such as kinship analysis software that will help to identify missing persons.
By using kinship software, which examines DNA profiles of those related to the missing person, and analyzing metadata police will be better able to identify a missing person’s whereabouts.
The FBI has already stated that efforts to enhance kinship analysis for missing persons data is a top priority for them.
Undercover police officers and agents will need robotic assistance.
The challenge of building a persona for an undercover officer has become much more difficult in recent years. There is far too much information online to ensure anyone’s privacy.
It’s already common practice to create false social media profiles to help advance a persona, but biometrics will work both for and against law enforcement. Many points of entry are employing facial recognition and iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Biometric passports and microchips are also widespread.
Without the ability to travel undetected, undercover missions will become impossible. Employing the use of robotics or tackling matters completely through digital means will be the only ways to remain anonymous in pursuits.
Laws will change to address biometric crime-fighting tools.
As the technology to collect and analyze DNA and other biometric data continues to become cheaper and easier to use, laws about evidence, how it can be collected and what’s admissible in court will certainly need to be addressed.
The substantial advancements in biometric crime-fighting tools are very real and happening in a quick period of time, and the possibilities astounding.The SOM (self organizing maps) are some very intuitive neural networks. There are a lot of more detailed description of these networks but here is a more intuitive description.
You have a number of neurons usually arranged in a 2D or 3D grid, each neuron has an associated weight vector. The input, which is a vector of the same size as the weight vector is connected to each neuron. The natural association is that each vector is a point in an n-dimensional space. By providing, during the learning phase, an uniformly distributed number of n-points to the network the neurons will arrange themself uniformly in the n-dimensions hypercube from which the n-points come from. Otherwise said, the neurons will classify the (sub)space, each neuron representing a partition of that (sub)space. When provided with a new point the network will act such that a single neuron will fire and that neuron will be the one closer to the provided sample. The network will classify the new point in an appropriate partition.
As simple, graphical, example is the one provided bellow where a 2D space is classified using the euclidian distance. By starting with neurons with random weights the network learns itself into an uniform grid by providing random 2D points in the (1,1) – (-1, -1) square.
My interest in these networks was primary classification related and I tried to use them for image classification. By using a weight vector consisting of the 16 point histogram in the LAB colorspace I achieved some interesting results. The method works very good for color comparison of the images but surely it is incomplete as more features are needed to classify an image: texture, object information etc.
Here are some positive results based only on color histogram space:
I implemented everything in python and you can find the base network and the 2d example attached. I am curious about any ideas on this subject.
update: 11-02-2009
There has been some demand for the image algorithms and since the image code is quite a mess of various tries here are the ideas I had, in order to find “the way” to define “features” for an image which I can then use as coordinates in the som space:
histogram [H1, … H8] => no color data combined color histograms [Hred1,…. Hgreen1 …] => some strange effects because the RGB is no a natural colorspace moving to LAB space (these are the results here) => does not count for granularity (you can have the same result for on big blue blob and 10 small blue blobs) image segmentation and applying the algorithm to most representative segments => does not count for texture haar wavelets, …
I think that in the case of images the biggest problem is to find some “coordinates” which define them as required for the comparison and not to compare the images after based on these coordinates.
som.py
#!/usr/bin/env python import gtk import random, math """ Author: Marilen Corciovei Version: $Id: som.py,v 1.9 2007/01/12 23:04:56 len Exp $ Description: Basic SOM algorithm implementation class License: BSD """ class SOM_algorithm: def __init__(self, r, epochs = 100, epoch_iterations = 50, initial_learning_rate = 0.9): self.epochs = epochs; self.epoch_iterations = epoch_iterations self.initial_learning_rate = initial_learning_rate; self.r = r; #internal parameters self.time_constant = self.epochs/math.log(self.r/2) def radius_decay(self, t): """ returns the radius of influence for current epoch """ return self.r / 2 * math.exp(-float(t/self.time_constant)) def learning_rate_decay(self, t): """ returns the learning rate for current epoch """ return self.initial_learning_rate * math.exp(-float(t/(self.epochs - t))) def distance(self, input, node): """ calculates the 'distance' in value space """ dist = 0 for i in range(len(input)): dist = dist + (input[i] - node[i]) * (input[i] - node[i]) return dist def influence_decay(self, dist, radius): """ calculates the neiborhood function depending on dist to bmu and current radius both dist and radius are squared """ return math.exp(- float(dist / 2 / radius)) class SA_two_phases(SOM_algorithm): def __init__(self, r, phaseOne = 200, phaseTwo = 100, epoch_iterations = 50, \ initial_learning_rate = 0.9, phaseOne_learning_rate = 0.1, phaseTwo_learning_rate = 0): self.phaseOne = phaseOne self.phaseTwo = phaseTwo self.epochs = phaseOne + phaseTwo self.epoch_iterations = epoch_iterations self.r = r self.r2 = r/2 self.lr0 = initial_learning_rate self.lr1 = phaseOne_learning_rate self.lr2 = phaseTwo_learning_rate #internal parameters self.radius = self.r2; self.radius_reduction = phaseOne / (self.r2 - 1) + 1; self.delta_lr = (self.lr0 - self.lr1)/self.phaseOne self.lr = self.lr0 def radius_decay(self, t): if t > self.phaseOne: return 1 # lineary discreet function if t % self.radius_reduction == 0: self.radius = self.radius - 1; return self.radius; def learning_rate_decay(self, t): if t < self.phaseOne: self.lr = self.lr - self.delta_lr return self.lr if t == self.phaseOne: self.lr = self.lr1 self.delta_lr = (self.lr1 - self.lr2)/self.phaseTwo return self.lr self.lr = self.lr - self.delta_lr return self.lr class SOM: def __init__(self, r, n, algorithm): """ r * r = the square number of nodes n = the dimension of input """ self.r = r self.n = n self.epoch = 1 self.alg = algorithm def initialize_nodes(self): self.nodes = [[random.random() for j in range(self.n)] for i in range(self.r*self.r)] def initialize_samples(self): """ implement this if needed """ def next_sample(self): v = [] for i in range(self.n): v.append(random.random()) return v def find_bmu(self, v): bmu = (0, self.alg.distance(v, self.nodes[0])) for i in range(1, self.r * self.r): dist = self.alg.distance(v, self.nodes[i]) if dist < bmu[1]: bmu = (i, dist) return bmu def nodes_distance(self, i, j): xi = i % self.r yi = int(i / self.r) xj = j % self.r yj = int(j / self.r) return (xi - xj) * (xi - xj) + (yi - yj)*(yi - yj) def adjust_nodes(self, bmu, v, radius, learning_rate): for i in range(self.r * self.r): dist = self.nodes_distance(bmu[0], i) sqRadius = radius * radius if dist < sqRadius: influence = self.alg.influence_decay(dist,sqRadius) for j in range(self.n): #adjust a single node self.nodes[i][j] = self.nodes[i][j] + influence * learning_rate * (v[j] - self.nodes[i][j]) def train_step(self): if self.epoch >= self.alg.epochs: print "Training completed" return 1 radius = self.alg.radius_decay(self.epoch) learning_rate = self.alg.learning_rate_decay(self.epoch) print 'Epoch %d %0.2f %0.4f' %(self.epoch, radius, learning_rate) for i in range(self.alg.epoch_iterations): v = self.next_sample() bmu = self.find_bmu(v) self.adjust_nodes(bmu, v, radius, learning_rate) self.epoch = self.epoch + 1 return 0
Som2d.py
#!/usr/bin/env python import gtk import som, random """ Author: Marilen Corciovei Version: $Id: som2d.py,v 1.6 2007/01/12 23:04:56 len Exp $ Description: 2D SOM example License: BSD """ class SOMDisplay(som.SOM): def __init__(self): #som.SOM.__init__(self, 16, 2 |
in rockets. The buyer didn’t flinch at the price tag — $2 million — but he repeatedly insisted on secrecy. “This material,” an associate confided in an e-mail, “are danger [sic] goods.”
Only in recent months did the full scope of the ruse become apparent. The destination for the specialty steel was not China but Iran, and the order had nothing to do with toy horses, U.S. investigators say.
“We are certain,” said a law enforcement official familiar with the case, “that the metal was meant for advanced centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear program.”
Last month, the Justice Department announced indictments against two people, one Chinese and the other Iranian, for conspiring to acquire maraging steel and other restricted American technology. U.S. officials say the case is part of a broader effort by Iran to dramatically expand its capacity to enrich uranium — with Chinese firms serving as willing accomplices.
The United States and its European allies have imposed ever-escalating sanctions intended to cut off Iran from sensitive technology and restricted material required for its nuclear program and to reduce its access to the global oil market. The goal is to stop Iran’s progress toward what the West believes is a nuclear arsenal, even as Iran maintains that its nuclear efforts are strictly part of a civilian energy program.
Maraging steel is a critical material in a new, highly efficient centrifuge that Iran has struggled for years to build. Barred by sanctions from buying the alloy legally, Iranian nuclear officials have sought to secretly acquire it from Western companies. In recent years, U.S. officials say, an increasing number of Chinese merchants have volunteered to help, serving as middlemen in elaborate schemes to obtain the steel and other forbidden material for Iran’s uranium enrichment plants as well as its missiles factories.
“They are not just stumbling on opportunities,” said Steve Pelak, the Justice Department's counterespionage chief. “They are professional, studied procurement agents and shippers. They know precisely what business they’re in and how to go after it.”
The Seattle case is at least the fourth in the past two years in which companies based in China have been accused of helping Iran try to purchase sensitive technology. Although Iran has used Chinese go-betweens in the past, U.S. officials said sanctions have forced the isolated and besieged Iranian government to rely increasingly on China for economic help and access to restricted goods.
A senior Justice Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing investigations, said, “As some countries have retreated from the Iranian market with the imposition of increased sanctions, many Chinese companies appear to have moved into the void.”
Although the Obama administration has praised China for reducing its imports of Iranian oil in recent months, bilateral trade between Tehran and Beijing surged in the previous decade, from $2.5 billion in 2000 to $29.3 billion in 2010. The increase has softened the impact of international sanctions, U.S. officials and independent analysts say.
With the latest case, however, U.S. warnings about Iranian-Chinese collusion have gained new urgency. If Iran can buy enough maraging steel on the black market, it can build more-efficient centrifuges, which will enrich uranium much faster than the machines it now uses.
“It is a major bottleneck in Iran’s production,” said David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and author of a new study on Iranian procurement of nuclear technology. While Iran appears to have the know-how to make better centrifuges, the shortage of high-strength materials demanded by the new version — particularly maraging steel and carbon fiber — has prevented its scientists from producing more than a few hundred for testing, he said.
Officially, the Chinese government opposes a nuclear-armed Iran, and U.S. officials say Beijing has been a helpful ally during recent international negotiations aimed at pressuring the government to scale back its nuclear program. In addition, there is no evidence that China has provided nuclear assistance to Iran directly since the early 1990s.
Yet, despite repeated U.S. protests, Chinese businessmen continue to offer crucial assistance to Iran’s procurement efforts without fear of punishment or censure, U.S. officials and nuclear experts say.
An unusual order
Perhaps the most striking fact about the toy-horse plot, investigators say, is that it was discovered at all. The tip came in late 2008 from an obscure Homeland Security program that involves occasional factory visits by U.S. officials to guard against foreign pilfering of sensitive U.S. technology.
During a visit to a Puget Sound steelmaker, an export manager there told a U.S. official about a bizarre query he had gotten from China.
“It was a gigantic order: 20 tons of maraging steel,” recalled a law enforcement official familiar with the case.
The mention of maraging steel raised eyebrows because of the alloy’s use in missiles and centrifuges. Months passed with no follow-up to the initial inquiry from the prospective buyer, and efforts by U.S. officials to investigate the unusual order reached a dead end.
In the spring of 2009, a new query from China turned up in the steelmaker’s inbox. This time, the buyer claimed to represent a toy company, Monalila Co., a maker of playground equipment. The company Web site showed photographs of real toys, including its premier product, Model HF450, the “Magic Horse.”
“No gas, no battery, no power, but can be ride [sic] as a horse and run smoothly on squares, parks, alleys and any other flat grounds,” read the product description, displayed beneath a photo of a black-and-white toy pony with a saddle and cottony mane.
To make its ponies, the company needed the bulk order of maraging steel, wrote the purchasing agent, who identified himself as “Yi.” Except for the names and products, the $2 million order was identical to the one from the previous year.
U.S. investigators were alerted, and they set up a sting. In a chain of e-mails, federal agents posing as salesmen teased out details about the order and who was behind it. Eventually Yi excused himself and handed over the correspondence to his boss, a man he called “Martin.” It quickly became apparent that Martin was not Chinese and had no interest in toys.
“We were able to determine that Martin’s e-mail originated in Iran,” said the law-enforcement official familiar with the case.
Over the following months the shopping list grew, as the Iranian, with increasing boldness, piled on requests — other specialty metals used in uranium enrichment, an array of machines and instruments with known nuclear applications, even a mass spectrometer specifically calibrated to measure uranium fluorine gas, a key part of the enrichment process.
Investigators determined Martin’s real identity — Parviz Khaki. As part of the subterfuge, they confronted him about the possibility that the materials would be shipped illegally to Iran. Khaki did not appear to care, Justice Department officials said in an indictment handed down last month around the time of the man’s arrest.
“Khaki discussed his motivation to make money from this transaction,” the indictment stated.
On July 13, authorities in the Philippines arrested Khaki as he was boarding a plane in Manila. He had been indicted by a U.S. grand jury on charges of running a $30 million scheme to acquire banned U.S. technology for Iran. His alleged Chinese associate, Zongcheng Yi, was also indicted. Khaki remains in custody in Manila. Yi’s whereabouts are unknown.
Persistent flow of material
Khaki’s alleged plan to ship maraging steel to Iran through China was stopped, but federal officials concluded that the network delivered other nuclear-related components and tools to Tehran. Among them were corrosion-resistant nickel alloy and special lathes to manufacture centrifuge parts.
U.S. officials say the items are among several million dollars’ worth of material and parts — from missile components to electronics for roadside bombs — that have passed through China to Iran in the past five years. The flow of Western technology to Tehran is so persistent that it has emerged as an irritant in relations between Beijing and Washington, prompting the Obama administration to dispatch two delegations to Beijing since 2010 to complain.
Chinese officials have made occasional arrests but say they can’t always know of every attempt by a Chinese entrepreneur to make a profit by helping Iran shop for technology. But given the stakes, current and former U.S. officials and Iran experts continue to press Beijing to do more.A Nickelodeon Animated Series
Why Your Analytics Efforts are Failing
Three Easy Lessons from Avatar: The Last Airbender
Corsair's Publishing Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 13, 2015
Avatar: The Last Airbender was an awarding winning animated series that aired on Nickelodeon for three seasons from 2005–2008. As with most successful children’s series, toys, games, and sequels followed.
Disclaimer: Any reference made to M Night Shyamalan’s movie, supposedly inspired by this series, is completely unintended and quite unfortunate.
Three central themes resonated throughout the series. They were developed to explain, in large part, why the Avatar’s world was war torn and ravaged. I offer them here as a useful metaphor for understanding why analytic efforts in your business are failing. Or put more softly, why you are not getting the value, confidence, and output you expect from your analytic teams.
Specialization:
Analyst are rarely good or even competent at everything
The opening to Avatar: The Last Airbender paints a picture of a world divided. A world where nations and tribes have organized themselves around one of the four elements as laid out in the opening narrative of each episode:
Water. Earth. Fire. Air.
This division is expanded because each tribe has members of their society capable of “bending” these elements. Bending is the story’s version of magic, but it also drives much of the culture and lifestyle of the tribes. Water benders live in villages of ice. Earth benders live in walled kingdoms of stone. Fire benders have adapted into a Nation of fire and steel. And alas, as the story begins, only one airbender remains.
The Last Airbender as it happens, is also the Avatar. The Avatar, as we are told, is the only person capable of mastering all four elements. In modern parlance, he is the “Unicorn”. (Not to be confused with the Last Unicorn, which was a very different animated tale.) Unfortunately for the war torn lands of the story, he hasn’t learned any of the other three (more on that later).
As a setup for a fantasy world full of discovery and adventure, this makes for great fiction.
In the world of corporate analytics, this is a reality.
Analysts, like benders, are specialists. Statistical modelers, logicians, those who run experimental design, all have distinct skill sets and cultures. Finance analyst, web analysts, and business analysts focus on very different topics and specialize their tool sets and education accordingly.
Surely there are a few “Unicorns” among us. But true analytic athletes are difficult to find, expensive to hire, and often flawed. Specialization is a good thing for driving outcomes — but it is a challenge for communication, collaboration, and understanding. This brings us to:
Integration:
Silos benefit no one except the competition
The world of Avatar is one divided. The cultures of each of the four elements are at war. At the start, the Air Nomads have already been destroyed. Their isolated cities in the clouds are now just ruins.
The Water Tribes are themselves divided with one tribe at each pole. The Earth Kingdoms have holed themselves up behind great stone walls. Each city isolated behind its massive fortifications.
The story sets the Fire Nation as the antagonist and aggressor. They are a nearly unstoppable force. They are also the only tribe that is united.
When your analytic teams are decentralized, they are left isolated and vulnerable as well
In corporate analytics, isolated camps quickly find themselves at odds. It may stem from differing numbers or analyses, it may come from competition for resources or acclaim, but as long as your teams remain divided — bad things will happen.
This is not a call for centralization — although that is certainly one solution. You may choose to pursue a course more in line with the series. Throughout the course of each season, Aang (our Avatar) works steadily to bring the tribes and kingdoms together.
Communication, collaboration, and coordination can go a long way toward bringing things together. A united front is more capable and can handle many types of common adversity. Though you will definitely need to include:
Training:
Practice and mentoring matter greatly for your success.
No theme is more present than this one. Nearly every episode of the series included some type of training or training montage. Aang is on a near perpetual quest for teachers and mentors.
…my brother and I discovered the new Avatar, an airbender named Aang. And although his airbending skills are great, he has a lot to learn before he’s ready to save anyone. But I believe Aang can save the world.
Aside from the frequency of references, training is also covered with great variety. Nearly every character on the show spends time as both a student and a teacher. The Avatar seeks out teachers, mentors, gurus, and even mystical creatures and spirit ancestors for help and advice.
Analytic teams should show equal dedication to training
Analysts should train often and across many disciplines. They should train to intensify their specializations but also to broaden their reach. They should acquire trainers, mentors, and coaches.
Analyst should also teach. They should teach each other as well as their clients. True understanding is only confirmed once you can teach a subject and teaching provides unique perspective.
Avatar: The Last Airbender was an excellent series. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to share it’s lessons, not only with my children, but with many colleagues who also enjoyed this entertaining and enlightening show.The 2013 and 2014 seasons each had a game that I choose to believe does not exist. If I’m looking for a pattern, the 2013 installment was the last game of the season, 2014’s was the exact mid-point of the season and 2015’s version was the first game. Hopefully that pattern holds true and we got the game of denial out of the way early.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at some 2014 data as our Cougs prep for our "opener" vs Rutgers this Saturday. Last year’s Cougars saw great improvement in total offense going from 54th in 2013 to 7th in the country, picking up more than 6,200 yards, and saw a solid move in the right direction in Offense S&P+ (comprehensive advanced metric that adjusts for opponent strength) from 51st to 39th. With all of that production, how does WSU finish 46th in points per game, in the same ball park as a team like Florida who finished 96th in total offense and 72nd in S&P+?
The disclaimer here is that there are so many factors that go into any drive, let alone an entire game, and it might be a fools errand to try and distill it down to one thing that can help turn all those yards into more points. However, I think it's interesting to compare two teams like WSU and Florida that were on opposite ends of the offensive production spectrum but scored about the same amount per game to see where the differences lie.
While Urban Meyer was at Florida he had four main staples that if delivered on, he felt would create too steep of a hill to climb for their opponent, consistently putting their team in a place to take advantage and win. One of his assistants referred to it as "titling the field." Last season, WSU saw the field tilt in the wrong direction all too often and Florida, even with Meyer long gone from The Swamp, is a great example of how tilting the field via great defense, scoring in the red zone, winning the turnover battle and coming through in the kicking game can help a team overcome an anemic offense.
You may fairly be wondering what I mean by tilting the field. In this case I’m looking at what percentage of a team's drives are short drives and how they’re creating them. Football Outsiders defines a short drive as any drive that starts at the 50 or in your opponent’s territory. Last season WSU was dead last among the Power 5 with only 3.6 percent of their drives qualifying whereas Florida landed at third with short drives making up 19.3 percent of their possessions. The below box plot looks shows how poor of an outlier WSU was last season.
In case you were wondering, WSU had one "short drive" that started in Portland State territory after a Tavares Martin Jr. kickoff return and PSU face mask penalty. It led to the Cougars' second touchdown. Portland State also had one "short drive" -- after Kyrin Priester's punt fumble. It also led to a TD.
This scatter plot shows points per game and percentage of short drives for the Power 5. WSU, Cal and Texas Tech were the only Power 5 teams to average over 30 points a game that didn't go bowling. Excuse me while I sob into my keyboard.
The Cougs could move the ball last year, there is no doubt about that, but I think a big issue with the lack of scoring was how far they had to drive each time to get in scoring position and how few times they got the ball in easier areas to put points on the board. Florida did not have a great season by their standards, but it's interesting to look at how they may have titled the field in their favor.
Below you can select the Y-Axis to flip between turnovers, punt return average and points. Florida was 11th in forced turnovers, 17th in the country in average punt return, and 19th in points given up. WSU was 127th, 73rd and 117th in the same categories. If you're really want to cringe you can select "opponent punt return average" from the drop down and see how the Cougs let their opponent's tilt the field against them by popping 17 yards a punt return.
The encouraging thing pre-Portland State, as Brian Anderson wrote about in his excellent piece on Takeaway Ball, is that we don't need to see WSU enter the top 20 in a bunch of categories to see success and our points per game go up.
If we use the example of seeing WSU land around 80th nationally in scoring defense (select "Points Per Game Given Up" from the drop down), you'll see UCLA and Arizona (77th and 80th in total defense in 2014) make a nice jump to 7 percent and 10 percent of their total drives starting in their opponent's territory. Looking at red zone conversions, Arizona and WSU were equally poor last year, scoring only 80 percent of the time and WSU got to the red zone just as often as Arizona did with 7 percent fewer short drives.
I think it further illustrates we have an offense that can put pressure on the opponent, but needs help from special teams and the defense to shorten the field to generate more scoring opportunities. Whether or not improvements in those areas will tilt the field in our favor remains to be seen, but hopefully Alex Grinch and Eric Mele can improve defense and special teams enough that we'll see Cougar national tilt toward somewhere warm this winter.BREAKING ISRAEL NEWS
A top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Israel’s Mossad spy agency of training Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists, reports Iran’s Press TV.
Alexander Prokhanov was interviewed by the state-sponsored channel. He also claimed US policies in the Middle East spawned the terror group.
“ISIS is a tool at the hands of the United States. They tell the Europeans that if we (the Americans) do not intervene, ISIS will cause you harm,” he told Press TV.
“They launched their first terror attack against us just a few days back in Chechnya,” he added.
Russia is a long-time supporter of both Iran and Syria. Back in September, reported Israel National News, ISIS issued a video threat to Russia.
“Vladimir Putin, these are the Russian planes that you sent to Bashar. Allah willing, we will take them back to your own turf, and liberate Chechnya and the Caucasus, Allah willing… Your throne is being threatened by us,” one terrorist said in the video, which shows the mass execution of 250 Syrian fighters in the Taqba airbase, the last government stronghold in northern Syria to fall to ISIS.
The Jerusalem Post noted that Russia is facing the greatest unrest in Chechnya in over a decade since Putin sent troops to quell an Islamist uprising in the region. Thursday, gunmen attacked a police post and stormed a building in Grozny, the Chechen capital. Ten policemen and ten militants were killed in the fighting.
Prokhanov is not the only Russian with a bone to pick with Israel. Russian officials are demanding an explanation for Sunday’s alleged Israeli air strike on Syrian targets.
“Moscow is deeply worried by this dangerous development, the circumstances of which demand an explanation,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Moscow is quoted by the DPA news agency as saying.
Although initial reports claimed there were no casualties in Sunday’s strike, al-Arabiya reported Monday that two Hezbollah operatives were killed in the assault, including a senior military official.Privacy is a privilege. It is rarely enjoyed by women or transgender men and women, queer people or people of color. When you are an Other, you are always in danger of having your body or some other intimate part of yourself exposed in one way or another. A stranger reaches out and touches a pregnant woman’s belly. A man walking down the street offers an opinion on a woman’s appearance or implores her to smile. A group of teenagers driving by as a person of color walks on a sidewalk shout racial slurs, interrupting their quiet.
For most people, privacy is little more than an illusion, one we create so we can feel less vulnerable as we move through the world, so we can believe some parts of ourselves are sacred and free from uninvited scrutiny. The further away you are from living as a white, heterosexual, middle-class man, the less privacy you enjoy – the more likely your illusions of privacy will be shattered when you least expect it.
For celebrities, privacy is utterly nonexistent. You are asked intrusive questions about your personal life. You can be photographed at any moment. Your family is investigated, photographed or harassed daily – parents, children, sometimes even siblings also losing any semblance of privacy simply because you share the same blood or name. Celebrity is, in some ways, an infection that is only marginally beneficial.
We’re not going to cry for celebrities, of course, not really. When you choose that life, you must sacrifice certain dignities for the privilege of fame, of fortune. For the most part, these intrusions or privacy are all in good fun, fodder for gossip magazines and websites – because... celebrities, they’re just like us! They go to the grocery store! They drink coffee! They wear sweatpants! Celebrities are just like us until they aren’t, until such intrusion involves the celebrity woman’s body, in intimate poses, splayed across the internet for delectation and debauchery and debate.
On Sunday, a user on 4chan made good on a promise made several days ago and leaked nude and otherwise revealing photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Lea Michele, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst, Hope Solo and other famous young women. This leak is likely only the beginning. Because there will always be another leak, because there is an insatiable curiosity when it comes to the nude celebrity woman’s body. She puts herself in the public eye and, in turn, we are entitled to see as much of her as we so desire, or so I am sure the justification goes.
It goes without saying that there aren’t many nude photos of men being released. Men are largely free to bare their bodies as they choose without repercussion, unless, as is the case of Dave Franco with Allison Brie and Justin Verlander with Upton, the man happens to be in a picture with a young woman, collateral damage.
It’s not clear what the people who leak these photos hope to achieve beyond financial gain and a moment of notoriety. I suppose such impoverished currency is enough. The why of these questions is hardly relevant. These hackers are not revealing anything the general public does not already know. BREAKING: beneath their clothes, celebrities are naked.
What these people are doing is reminding women that, no matter who they are, they are still women. They are forever vulnerable.
The racy images of these nubile bodies are the biggest story on the internet, and every site that refuses to reprint the images has already left itself absolved while leaving a prurient trail of breadcrumbs. The permanency of such violation is a bitter thing. These leaked images are instantly widely available and they always will be. The images will be downloaded and viewed and shared. These women’s lives and their private choices will be dissected. They are women, so they must be judged.
Revealing nonconsensual nudes of the famous female body is not new. In 1983, Vanessa L Williams was the first black woman crowned as Miss America. She had little time to enjoy her achievement, however, because Penthouse published naked pictures of her, and she was forced to relinquish the crown. Williams has gone on to a successful career in film and television, but her biography will always have this footnote. She will always be reminded of the time someone decided to put her in her place because she had the audacity, as a woman, to rise too far.
Nor is this exploitative exposure of women’s naked bodies an issue that only famous women must deal with. Celebrities are just like us after all. This practice is so pervasive that it even has its own name – revenge porn, nude photos and explicit videos unleashed on the internet, most often by disgruntled ex-lovers. There are websites and online forums dedicated to this pernicious genre. Lives have been, if not ruined, irreparably harmed, because we are a culture that thrives on the hatred of women, of anyone who is Other in some way, of anyone who dares to threaten the status quo.
The Great Celebrity Naked Photo Leak of 2014 – or perhaps we should call it The Great Celebrity Naked Photo Leak of August 2014, given that this happens so often that there won’t be only one this year – is meant to remind women of their place. Don’t get too high and mighty, ladies. Don’t step out of line. Don’t do anything to upset or disappoint men who feel entitled to your time, bodies, affection or attention. Your bared body can always be used as a weapon against you. Your bared body can always be used to shame and humiliate you. Your bared body is at once desired and loathed.
This is what we must remember. Women cannot be sexual in certain ways without consequence. Women cannot pose nude or provocatively, whether for a lover or themselves, without consequence. We are never allowed to forget how the rules are different girls. I suppose we should be grateful for this latest reminder.His politics is exclusively fire and brimstone variety. But Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath has a softer side too.
The 44-year-old monk is also an animal lover. And his compassion for animals goes beyond cows of which he has around 500 in a cow shelter in the Gorakhnath temple where he is also the head priest.
While his daily schedule has changed following his appointment as chief minister, Adityanath had a gruelling time table as head priest in Gorakhpur.
“He (Adityanath) gets up at 3 am. After yoga and daily prayers, he feeds the cows at his ‘gaushala’. He takes his breakfast only after feeding the cows,” said a close associate.
The ‘gaushala’ is set up across two acres of land on the temple premises. Several volunteers every day tend to the 500-plus cows at the shelter.
“Yogiji likes my dedication towards the service of cows, including Nandini, his favourite one. Yogiji doesn’t take his breakfast till he himself feeds the cows,” Man Mohamed, the only Muslim volunteer at the shelter told HT.
While Adityanath’s love for cows is well known, he is also a pet lover and has a number of animals on the Gorakhnath temple premises, including a dog, a cat, a deer and some monkeys.
His dog named Kallu roams the temple premises all day. When Adityanath is in Gorakhpur, he spends time with Kallu after completing his daily chores and political meetings.
In the morning, he also feeds the monkeys which have made the temple their home.
Recently a photo of Yogi feeding milk to a tiger cub went viral on social media.
His aides in the Gorakhnath temple said the cub was found roaming near an ashram in Tulsipur, in Balrampur district near the India-Nepal border, about 150 km from Gorakhpur. The cub was kept in the ashram for a few months and later handed over to the forest department for rehabilitation. Adityanath used to feed the cub with a milk bottle whenever he visited the ashram, they said.
He used to also feed the deer and antelopes that roamed around the ashram near Tuthibari in Maharajganj district, 100 km from Gorakhpur. The ashram is sandwiched between Sohagibarwa Wildlife Sanctuary in Maharajganj and Chitwan National Park in Nepal.
Adityanath feeds cows at the gaushala in Gorakhpur. ( HT File Photo )
The Gorakhnath Temple Trust has also set up an ashram in Nawal Parasi district across the border in Nepal which Aditya Nath sometimes visits.
In the late 1990s, a young Adityanath had galvanized Tharu and Vantongiyas tribals, settled in the bordering districts of Balrampur, Lakhimpur, Siddharthnagar and Maharajganj to launch a movement against poachers in the forest areas of Nepal and UP.
His love for trees has turned the Gorakhnath temple into an oasis in a concrete jungle. His supporters call him a ‘green saint’ who has planted a number of saplings of peepal, mango, banyan and Ashoka around the residential complex located on the temple premises.
Adityanath is also said to have planted a number of aromatic and medicinal plants in an area between the temple and the cow shelter.
First Published: Mar 21, 2017 08:54 ISTThere is a hell of a lot of story to be told through Amazon's provocative series The Man in the High Castle. The Emmy-award winning show gives audiences a chilling view of 1962 America where Allied Powers lost WWII. Although the series is inspired by Philip K. Dick's 1963 novel of the same name, there are one million directions the TV series could go. Between the intricate plot of complex circumstances, a plethora of intertwined characters, and the possibility of modern-day infusion, nothing is off-limits. Although the cast and producers are celebrating the second season premiere of the series on Friday, December 16th, I sit down with them to see what the likelihood is of a third season. After this riveting second season, I'm certain fans will be ready for more.
Season 2 is nothing short of an intense emotional rollercoaster. The series continues to follow Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos), Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), and more as they fight for their truth and destiny amongst the chaos. The Man in the High Castle is revealed and the story goes overseas. Plus, the mysterious tapes depicting a resistance movement (tied to the Man in the High Castle) are a vehicle in peeling back more layers of the story — namely the Man and Hitler's personal motives. Like I said: rollercoaster. According to producer Isa Hackett, the cast and crew are hopeful about the continuation of the ride.
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"Yes, we’re very much hoping there will be Season 3," Hackett says enthusiastically. The show's star Kleintank is optimistic as well. "Third season’s looking pretty good," the actor says. Although they anxiously await for series renewal, it seems they'll cross that bridge when they get there in terms of figuring out next steps. "We haven’t even begun getting into what that might look like, obviously, we have to get the green light," Hackett explains. As a whole, cast members express that they're definitely game to continue being part of the show.
For the time being, the second season has plenty of surprises in store. Of course, there's the huge sigh of relief (and more questions) to come with the Man in the High Castle's big reveal, which Davalos says is "something to react to on an incredibly-positive level." The plot is also going beyond domestic borders, which Kleintank says will be a surprise for fans. "We’re showing more of the world and slowly putting in pieces of that," the actor explains. "I’m surprised and intrigued to see how all that just opens up a whole new Pandora’s box."
Although the series isn't a commentary on the current state of the world, you never know if it will be influenced by recent affairs in the future. Producer David W. Zucker says the modern "global movement" of resistance is reflected in season two as the show goes overseas. Actor Joel de la Fuente (Chief Inspector Takeshi Kido) also explores the possibility of modern-day infusion in future seasons. "We’re all being influenced by the world we live in today. That all factors into a writer’s room, into collaboration. Art does meet real life at some point," he says.
In the meantime, cast members think about how their character's storylines would ideally play out. Kleintank keeps it simple. "Not to die," he says. Bella Heathcote, who joins this season as Joe Blake's love interest, hopes for change and liberation. "I’d want my character to find a way to be a feminist under the regime," she says. "Try and change the regime from within, that would be a great way to go."
Like fans, star Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Nobusuke Tagomi) sums it up perfectly, and hopes the characters will ultimately find truth and unity. "Tell the truth, be responsible, it’s OK… If we put the best of what the east is and best of what the west is, we’re unstoppable," the actor says.
Needless to say, the possibilities for MITHC's extension beyond season two are limitless, and hopefully the TV gods are listening.
Images: Amazon (4)The US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently compared China’s behavior in the South China Sea with ‘Russia’s activities’ in Ukraine. According to DWN, this demonstrates a dangerous trend in US foreign policy.
Parallels between Russia and China, which Washington is trying to draw, indicate the fact that the US is deliberately trying to escalate tensions worldwide, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten wrote.
© AFP 2018 / FILIPPO MONTEFORTE US State Apparatus Using Crises Across Globe to Keep World on a Tight Rein
The US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week that China's territorial claims are comparable to the actions of Russia in the east of Ukraine and that China poses a serious threat to peace and stability. China is expanding its influence in the region by creating artificial islands in the South China Sea, while the Philippines and Vietnam consider such activities illegal.
According to Blinken, the US does not support any of the parties. But Washington believes that it is important to resolve territorial disputes in a peaceful manner. In Ukraine and the South China Sea there are attempts to change the status quo by adopting unilateral measures, and the US does not agree with this, the US diplomat said.
"The fact that America draws parallels with Ukraine could mean that Washington is seeking to escalate the situation. It also gives rise to attempts to impose sanctions on China. The US hopes that it will help to strengthen their allies in Asia," DWN wrote.
However, according to the newspaper, such policy has already backfired in Europe. EU countries are severely affected by the anti-Russian sanctions, while Russia has managed to ‘survive’ them without any serious losses, DWN wrote.SINGAPORE - The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS ) has eased car loan guidelines, just three years after instituting them.
For cars with an open market value (OMV) of $20,000 or less, buyers can borrow up to 70 per cent of the purchase price, up from 60 per cent. Buyers of cars with OMVs of more than $20,000 can now borrow up to 60 per cent of the purchase price, up from 50 per cent.
The loan tenure has also been raised to seven years, from five.
MAS deputy managing director Ong Chong Tee said: "In 2013, when we introduced the measures, our immediate aim was to help restrain escalating COE premiums and consequent inflationary pressures.
"Since then, demand conditions have moderated and it is timely to ease the measures."
Motor traders said many parties have found ways to circumvent the loan curbs. One common way is to inflate the invoice of the car. Another is to offer leases instead of hire-purchase deals.
Of late, ride-hailing apps like Uber have also been offering high loans to potential car buyers. They can do so because the cars are registered under a company's name, as private-hire vehicles, instead of the buyer's name.The study association, which runs courses in a range of disciplines for more than 350,000 Swedes, has decided to introduce a third alternative in its standard online application form.
"It is a question of letting you as an individual decide for yourself how you want to be defined. Or if you turn it around, you should not have to have one role privately and another as an employee," explained Johan Welander at Sensus to Church of Sweden newspaper, Kyrkans Tidning.
Applicants can now choose between Kvinna (woman), Man or Hen, a gender-neutral pronoun and alternative to the Swedish Hon (She) and Han (He).
Hen is a gender-neutral pronoun that has long been in circulation as an alternative to get round problems that sometimes arise when talking about people in the third person. It is also used by many within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement for people who do not wish to conform to the prevailing two gender norm.
The word does not feature however as a pronoun or definition of a gender in dictionaries of the Swedish language.
The Language Council of Sweden - the official language cultivation body and publisher of an annual "New Swedish Words" list - recommends the use of the pronoun Den (It) or Man (One) for the third person.
"It is difficult to change the use of words that are as deep-rooted and commonly used words as personal pron |
out of Dick's Sporting Goods Park is a much more complicated task to accomplish with a far more vague endpoint. After all, in many ways DSGP is already somewhat of a fortress for the Rapids. Altitude alone provides the Burgundy Boys with a unique home field advantage, and in 2011 DSGP was ranked the sixth toughest place to play in all of MLS.
To the average MLS fan, though, chances are DSGP isn't one of the top ten stadiums they consider to be a "fortress." Once the crown jewel of MLS, a meteoric rise in soccer-specific stadiums throughout the country has left DSGP somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of atmosphere. Less than 10 years old, DSGP is still a fantastic facility, but it's a far cry from the culture and intensity brought at venues in the Northwest and in places like Kansas City.
After all, the way most fans rate the atmosphere of a stadium is by how many empty seats they see on a television broadcast. Is it fair? Not always. But the attendance always has been, and always will, be the deciding factor in determining what stadiums are considered a fortress.
Despite doubling season ticket sales in the last two years, the Rapids still struggle to produce the attendance percentages of "eternal sell-outs" like Providence Park or Century Link Field. Rapids fans will be familiar with the challenges to attendance they face. It can be summed up in one word: location, location, location. Put simply, DSGP is in the middle of nowhere. About 20 minutes outside downtown Denver, the stadium has an alarming lack of retail and restaurant establishments around it, borders a wildlife preserve, and to date has no direct public transportation from downtown. At a time where MLS stadiums are almost exclusively being built in downtown areas, that puts DSGP at a disadvantage.
Hinchey and the rest of Kronke Sports Enterprises feel like they have the solution. The project is called Victory Crossing. Some fans will remember the name, either from when the project was first announced (then known as Prairie Gateway) over half a decade ago, or from those big signs that have been greeting visitors for years as they turn into DSGP. According the the project's website, Victory Crossing will be "where the energy of world-class sport, entertainment and commerce meet." Here's the link to that website.
In short, the project plans on adding over 1 million square feet of retail, hotel, and corporate office space, and additional civic use and sporting development. Basically, if the stadium sits outside the city then KSE is going to bring the city to the stadium. The plan also addresses transportation needs, as shuttle services will be provided to and from the RTD Light Rail line that will extend all the way to Denver International Airport. As exciting as all this looks on paper, will that be enough? While that question can only be answered in time, a study of another MLS club's stadium journey points at good things to come.
When Kansas City were still known as the Wizards, attendance was a major concern for a team that also struggled to succeed on the field. In the 18 seasons prior to the current one, Kansas City had the lowest average attendance for 8 of those seasons. That's more than any other club. Today, Sporting Kansas City has 41 consecutive sellout MLS games at Sporting Park and are the defending MLS Cup champions. While the rebranding certainly played a part, much of the success came down to stadium location.
Forbes published this article back in 2012 and talks about how Sporting Park's location next to the Legends Outlet Mall, the Kansas City Speedway, and Community America Ballpark, as well as its application of STAR bonds, are the reasons for the stadium's success. STAR bonds allow SKC to pay off the bonds used to build the stadium with sales tax.
Despite being about 20 minutes outside of downtown (sound familiar?), the rich area around Sporting Park make the stadium a destination for sports fans in Kansas City. The parallels between Sporting Park and Victory Crossing continue financially as pointed out by this article from the Denver Business Journal. KSE will also be able to use sales tax to pay off the bonds used in the development. The two stadiums also share the same architecture firm, the renowned POPULOUS.
You may have noticed the article above states that ground for Victory Crossing would be broken by the first quarter of 2013. The official Victory Crossing brochure says Phase II of the project (retail, sports, hospitality) was to begin between 2013-2014. But if you have been to DSGP lately, you will have noticed the construction around the stadium is scarce... or nonexistent. A rather negative report from Bloomberg News came out in December of 2013 on the delay in development, especially given the October 2014 deadline before Commerce City has the right to sell the land to someone else. Should fans be worried?
Although official updates on the status of the project are difficult to find, the most recent news is hopeful, and it comes from Tim Hinchey himself. In an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit February of this year, Hinchey responded to a question about development around DSGP. He states that Phase I of the project is going well, and an indoor soccer facility will be the first new building. He gives no definite timeline, but it appears Victory Crossing is still very much a go. Given that building a fortress is where Hinchey will be focusing his efforts now, and his history of delivering on goals like a shirt sponsor and a designated player, perhaps in a few years time DSGP will have a crowd that rivals the best in the league.Georgia Tech plans to leave Russell Athletic when its apparel contract expires in June 2018, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Georgia Tech and Southern Miss are the only schools to be sponsored by Russell Athletic in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), previously Division I-A. In April, Western Kentucky announced it was leaving Russell Athletic for a deal with Nike that begins in July 2017. As of the next college football season in 2017, there are 10 conferences and 130 schools in FBS.
Todd Stansbury, Georgia Tech athletic director, said he is in the early stages of exploring interest from Adidas, Nike and Under Armour and expects to reveal the university’s new partner in the next few months.
The school has been with Russell since 1992.the-mu:
babrahamlincoln:
sylladex: i-dont-need-feminism: An article written by a friend of mine is blowing up the internets. Here’s to you and your scathing sense of humor. They apparently held a rally raging against this article. So proud! this was a thing at my school it’s not funny it’s actually sickening and i don’t know how it could be “funny” to rail against people like THIS you’re a jerk too this is one of the worst things I’ve seen happen at Rutgers since I’ve been here. The Medium would have so much potential as a satire/humor publication if it weren’t run by disgusting people.
what is this even satire of? people want to be comfortable with their bodies and you don’t think that’s acceptable. cool. you’re a waste of a human being and your journalistic prose sucks drop out and dieAustralia has reportedly banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women.
The Australian Sex Party reports even Hustler has seen its publications refused publication, all thanks to the usual moral crusader “think of the children” arguments:
“This is in response to a campaign led by Kids Free 2 B Kids and promoted by Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett in Senate Estimates late last year. Mainstream companies such as Larry Flint’s Hustler produce some of the publications that have been banned. These companies are regulated by the FBI to ensure that only adult performers are featured in their publications.”
With small breasts now considered obscene, Australian adult rags are said to have suffered sharp increase in breast sizes.
Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them.
Australia is also said to have banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as “abhorrent”:
1. That the depictions are a form of urination which is banned under the label of ‘golden showers’ in the Classification Guidelines. 2. Female ejaculation is an ‘abhorrent’ depiction.
It seems the UK and Australia are intent on regressing to Victorian standards of morality (although this time anyone criticising homosexuality may find themselves convicted of a hate crime), between them having now banned everything from BDSM to small breasts, even where participants are entirely imaginary.The wetlands are this Indian city’s free sewage works, a fertile aquatic garden and, most importantly, a flood defence – but they’re under threat from developers. One environmentalist is leading the resistance
The trees on the streets of Kolkata in January are dusty, like neglected pot plants. At traffic lights, salesmen offer feather dusters for drivers to wipe their grimy cars. Shrubs are planted on the central reservation of the city’s new flyovers, surrounded by the implausible boasts on signs proclaiming a “clean and green” city. But the most frequently recurring poster, above almost every street corner, appeals for investors to “Come to Bengal – Ride the Growth”.
Kolkata, a famously cultured city of 14.5 million people – once the second city of the British empire after London – is keen to catch up with Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore, the dynamic and rapidly modernising megacities of the fastest growing major economy in the world.
Kolkata is also a low-lying city, on average it is barely five metres above sea level, served by two major rivers and surrounded by waterways. Its unique wetlands to the east are under pressure from developers like never before, just when they might prove most useful. Hundreds of buildings, from luxury apartments to colleges to more modest homes, are going up in an area which is supposedly protected from development by law.
Faced by the rising sea levels and increased storminess brought on by climate change, cities all over the world – a World Bank study named Guangzhou, Miami, New York, New Orleans and Mumbai at risk of most costly damage – are having to rethink their relationship with flood defences, both natural and artificial. According to the World Bank, an optimistic forecast of just 20cm of sea level rise by 2050 would still make Kolkata the third most exposed city in the world to the risk of flooding.
Such projections no longer belong to a distant future. In November last year, similarly low-lying Chennai experienced cataclysmic floods, which caused the displacement of 1.8 million people. Twenty years ago, Chennai had 650 wetlands in and around the city. Today it has 27. Chennai’s super-powered growth came at the expense of the marshes that could act as an effective natural flood defence; without them, flood water had nowhere to go except cascade into smart new homes.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A farmer plucks pumpkin flowers in Kolkata. Photograph: Rupak de Chowdhuri/Reuters
From the air, Kolkata’s tower blocks are golden in the hazy, smoggy sunshine. To the east, right up against the city sparkles a vast expanse of water: a patchwork of tiny flooded fields bordered by green embankments, ponds, channels and much larger lakes. Take the road to the East Kolkata Wetlands and you’re met by a stream of motorbikes towing two-wheeled trailers, piled high with vegetables and fat silvery carp and tilapia being lugged from the wetlands to city markets.
These waterways are a part-natural, part-human phenomenon and their miraculous character is explained by Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, a slight, bespectacled engineer-turned-ecologist-turned-anthropologist, who speaks English extremely softly and very correctly. Ghosh was asked in 1981 to conduct an investigation into what happened to Kolkata’s wastewater. The city produced a lot of sewage, didn’t have a treatment plant, but didn’t seem to have a pollution problem, either. The waste just sort of disappeared.
Sewage-grown fish may sound gross but Ghosh and others have found them to be safe
“The only English word that suits is serendipity,” says Ghosh, who is now 69, as we stand beside one of its ponds, with the ruins of what resembles a temple behind us. As a young man, he made the short commute from Kolkata to examine these lakes almost every day. He found that the pond water “was beautiful”. To diagnose what was occurring didn’t really require a degree in biology, he says, it was simply common sense. Wastewater is 95% water and 5% problem – bacteria.
Carried by long channels towards the ponds, effluent was broken down by UV rays from the sun. (Ironically, Kolkata’s middle classes pay for UV treatment of their tap water to make it drinkable.) This nutrient-rich water is channelled into ponds where algae and fish thrive. Sewage-grown fish may sound gross but Ghosh and others have found them to be safe; Kolkata’s sewage contains very low levels of heavy metals.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The East Kolkata Wetlands. Photograph: Patrick Barkham
I interrupt to ask about the ruined building behind us. Ghosh smiles slowly. He told local people to leave it standing as an important monument. It is the remains of a conventional sewage treatment plant built by the British, which didn’t work. In tropical countries, expensive water treatment plants struggle to banish bacteria. But Kolkata’s waterways clean its wastewater in less than 20 days. In a conventional water treatment works, thriving algae might become a problem. Here, the algae is removed by fishermen and fed to the fish that grow quickly in these nutrient-rich ponds. “An abundant population of fish growing on nothing,” says Ghosh. “You don’t need fish food.”
The wetlands serve two functions that at first glance seem contradictory: they are the city’s free sewage works and they are also a fertile aquatic market garden. As well as fish, wastewater is used in paddy fields and vegetables are grown on the verdant banks and on a long, low hill created by Kolkata’s organic waste. This recycling makes Kolkata the cheapest major city in India. You can enjoy a traditional breakfast for 30p, a third of the price of Delhi.
Kolkata’s waterways clean its wastewater in less than 20 days
The wetlands produce 10,000 tonnes of fish each year and the wetland “garbage farms” provide 40 to 50% of the green vegetables available on the Kolkata’s markets. This food is fresh and cheap because there are almost no transport costs when it is brought by bicycle from these gardens so close to the centre. “I describe this as an ecologically subsidised city,” says Ghosh. “If you lose these wetlands, you lose this subsidy but Calcuttans are not interested to know why they are the cheapest city.”
Kolkata’s wetlands evolved over several human lifetimes and no public official – until Ghosh came along – grasped how it all functioned. But the fishermen knew. The wetlands were originally low-lying salt marshes and silted up rivers. During the days of the British empire, a Bengali engineer educated in Glasgow designed and built gently graded channels that transferred Kolkata’s wastewater from city to wetlands and on to the Bay of Bengal. In the early decades of the 20th century, local fishermen began using this wastewater to farm fish. Ponds were also converted into paddy fields to grow rice. Some 30,000 people make a living from the wetlands. Ghosh’s findings sound uncontroversial but they were not immediately recognised by the authorities. “Everybody challenged it for at least 10 years,” he says, “but it’s such a simple principle that it cannot be challenged.”
Real estate in waiting
We walk into the wetlands on a grassy bank that contains a straight channel of water from the city. It is dark matte grey in colour and flows surprisingly quickly. I catch a whiff rather like an urban drain in high summer, a slight tang of sewage. “But it’s not much, is it?” says Ghosh, almost offended at the suggestion that these beautiful wetlands, full of palms, brilliant-white egrets and peacefully industrious human activity, might smell ever so slightly fruity.
After establishing the utility of the wetlands in the 1980s, Ghosh’s next task was to define their area. He drew up a map of these ponds and waterways. Around half the wetlands were taken and their ponds filled in so that a smart new suburb, Salt Lake City, could be built. Ghosh did not quibble. “There is no need to get emotional. The city had to grow. It was organised urbanisation. What’s happening now is not an organised urbanisation.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Migratory birds fly above wetlands in Hokersar, another site with Ramsar status. Photograph: Dar Yasin/AP
As Salt Lake City was built, Ghosh persuaded West Bengal’s then chief minister to accompany him on a trip to the remaining wetlands. He sought to demonstrate the effectiveness of Kolkata’s free filtration system to the politician. “I took a glass of water from the pond and I drank it. The chief minister was worried. I told him I do not have a lavatory as a backup,” says Ghosh drily. Of course he didn’t need one. The water was clean. This natural sewer and food bank is “unique in the whole world”, says Ghosh, “and yet we are ready to forget about it.”
In the early 1990s, West Bengal’s government wanted to build a towering world trade centre in the wetlands. Ghosh advised the opposition led by an NGO with the excellent acronym PUBLIC (People United for Better Living in Calcutta). After a judge visited the wetlands, Kolkata’s high court delivered the verdict in 1992 that Ghosh had been hoping for: the wetlands would be preserved for fishing and farming. It was the first major legal battle in India whereby the environment emerged victorious.
They had no idea that a huge number of people depended on wetlands for their livelihoods. Dhrubajyoti Ghosh
Ghosh was not finished, however. He was not confident that West Bengal’s state government would ever conscientiously protect the wetlands. So he sought a higher authority. Like zoologist Jane Goodall and Sir David Attenborough, Ghosh has been given a Global 500 Award, recognition from the UN for environmental achievement. This at least obliges politicians to acknowledge his letters even if, as he quietly points out, they then throw them in the bin.
Ghosh lobbied international conservationists, including officials working for the Ramsar Convention, which designates globally important wetlands. Ramsar understood wetlands to be places where you could watch birds. “Nothing wrong with that but it was incomplete,” says Ghosh. “They had no idea that a huge number of people depended on wetlands for their livelihoods. This was an unknown type of wetland.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ecologist Dhrubajyoti Ghosh at the wetlands. Photograph: Patrick Barkham
It took a long time to gain international recognition for Kolkata’s wetlands but they were finally given Ramsar status in 2002. It was the highpoint of Ghosh’s career – and he felt it came to mean nothing. Ghosh discovered that the Ramsar status gave no additional legal protection. Ramsar demands that the local government draws up a management plan for every wetlands area within six months of its designation; 14 years on, there is still no management plan for Kolkata’s wetlands.
Worse, says Ghosh, the West Bengal government displays no desire to enforce the 1992 high court ruling. Illegal developments are going up all over the wetlands, and staying up. “People have more confidence in a lack of law than in the law itself,” Ghosh says. And why is the government silent? “They also understand what real estate means to their election campaign. Wetlands are real estate in waiting.”
Today, a banner sign above the road to the wetlands tells travellers that the mangrove forests of Sundarbans, a Unesco World Heritage Site, are just 80km away. There are no signs announcing the East Kolkata Wetlands. They are, literally, off the map.
Your home in the clouds
Stalking the highway along the eastern edge of Kolkata are the new apartment blocks of Rajahat, a gleaming suburb built on soil excavated from the wetlands. “Atmosphere. Your home in the clouds,” boasts one billboard. Electronic advertisements for Vodafone blurt from tower block rooftops. Closer to the smartly dressed office workers sat in motionless rush hour cars are fly-posters for “scholarship tests” and mock exams to help you “learn, compete, succeed”.
Beside these aspirational invitations to personal growth are more appeals from West Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, to “Come to Bengal – Ride the Growth.” Banerjee, who faces an election this spring, came to power in 2011 as a populist, pro-market alternative to Bengal’s long-ruling Communist party. She is desperate to grow Kolkata, and declares she will turn the city into the London of India; by the airport road stands a replica of Big Ben, made from fibre-reinforced polymer, one-third of the size of the original.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kolkata’s wetlands. Photograph: Patrick Barkham
Beyond the line of apartments marching out into the wetlands at Rajahat is a shanty town and then Aquatica – “a complete family water theme park and resort”. A dolphin leaping through a rubber ring is painted on its white gates. Beside these is a roadside shack where I drink tiny cups of salty tea with a middle-aged couple, Kartick Chandra Mandal and Shibani Mandal.
Kartick is a fisherman-turned-teacher; Shibani still works in the local fishing industry, packing fish. “The biggest threat to fishing is development,” says Kartick. The water park before us and the low-rise apartment block behind us, fortified with rolls of barbed wire on its walls, were both developments that should not have been permitted. According to Kartick and Shibani, they were paddy fields until a local politician redrew the map – an administrative sleight of hand to move this wetland area into a different parish, which was classified as outside the wetlands and therefore able to be built on.
Such ploys are occurring all over the wetlands, their long-term value trumped by their short-term price as prime real estate. Fishing families allege that ponds are being deliberately sabotaged, with channels blocked up, to force them to abandon their livelihoods. “Land sharks” working for developers use persuasion or intimidation to buy cheap wetland plots and build tower blocks on top. In some cases, the authorities themselves flout their own laws and build small corrugated dwellings on the wetlands for people cleared from the last slums in central Kolkata.
On the rare occasion that the struggle for the wetlands makes the news, its defence is portrayed as elitist. Kolkata’s mayor has declared that the conservation of the wetlands “means little to the common man”. Banerjee, a self-styled champion of the poor, last year stated her intent to find an amnesty for 25,000 illegal buildings within the wetlands area.
Education is usually trumpeted as a saviour of the environment; here, it seems to be the opposite. I wonder if the wetlands could be saved through education, but Ghosh says that no schools bring pupils on trips to the wetlands and no biology lessons are dedicated to understanding this marvellously useful system. Kartick, a teacher, believes that the younger generation are “not as interested or inspired” as his own in preserving the wetlands. “Let there be more ‘dropouts’” he says. “Those who are educated are trying to destroy them.”
Calcutta's architecture is unique. Its destruction is a disaster for the city Read more
Ghosh has dedicated his whole professional life to the wetlands. His wife is dead and his one child lives in Hong Kong, working in high finance. “I worked so hard for recognition from Ramsar and I have got no result. I have lost my life doing this.” It sounds despairing but Ghosh continues to fight for the wetlands. These days, he is less an environmental engineer and more an anthropologist, seeking to describe the unique lives and livelihoods of its residents. If the wetlands can be seen as “heritage”, he thinks, people might cherish them more.
There is one final hope. Aside from providing heritage, a free sewage system and an aquatic market garden, the wetlands’ other urban function – flood defence – is arguably the most indispensable. Chennai’s experience is a powerful lesson. Ghosh realises that it is myopic for his city to mimic Chennai and jeopardise its future by exploiting its wetlands for short-term profit. If Kolkata’s politicians and policymakers can be persuaded too, this famously thoughtful city might avoid the fraught path taken by so many other urban powerhouses who fail to grasp that the sea is always more unstoppable than their own development.
Additional reporting by SB Veda. Patrick Barkham visited Kolkata as part of a Writers’ Centre Norwich, Norwich Unesco City of Literature and University of East Anglia project supported by the Arts Council England and British Council Re-Imagine India fund
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook and join the discussionDonald 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 and 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 are neck-and-neck in Florida, according to a new poll of the likely general election match-up.
Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, is supported by 41 percent of Florida voters, and Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, is supported by 40 percent in the survey from the left-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP) released Tuesday.
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The survey finds little support for third-party candidates in the Sunshine State compared to other states and national polls. Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson gets just 4 percent support in the PPP poll, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein is at 2 percent.
Trump's lead over Clinton remains narrow in a head-to-head match-up without the third-party candidates in the mix. In that scenario, the businessman leads the former secretary of State by 1 point, 45 to 44 percent.
Trump is boosted in that match-up by support from his party. Eighty-three percent of Republicans said they'd support him, while 9 percent would pick Clinton. Clinton is supported by 77 percent of Democrats, with 14 percent saying they'd back Trump.
Both Trump and Clinton had huge wins in their respective Florida primaries in March. Clinton is aiming to clinch her party's nomination over rival Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE in Tuesday's primary contests, while all of Trump's rivals have dropped out.
While Sanders has polled better than Clinton in head-to-head match-ups in other states, the PPP poll finds him locked at 40 percent each with Trump when Johnson and Stein are in the mix. Without the pair, Sanders takes a slim 46-to-43 advantage.
The survey of 737 registered voters was conducted via landlines and the internet June 2–5, with an overall 3.6-point margin of error.Sexual harassment allegations by four women against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain have made the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace headline news. What many people may not realize is that such harassment is a widespread problem in middle and high schools, too.
During the 2010-11 school year, nearly 48 percent of students in grades 7 through 12 in the United States said they experienced sexual harassment, according to a new nationally representative study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) which I co-authored. Additionally, nearly one in three students (28 percent) said they had witnessed harassment that school year.
The forms of sexual harassment most often cited by students included someone making unwelcome sexual comments, jokes or gestures; being called gay or lesbian in a negative way; and being shown or sent sexual pictures that the viewer didn’t want to see. About 30 percent of students said the harassment happened through text messages, emails and social media.
Even more alarming, 13 percent of girls and 3 percent of boys said they had been touched in an unwanted sexual way, and 4 percent of girls (plus 0.2 percent of boys) had been forced to do something sexual.
Since the report’s release, a few people have emailed us at AAUW wondering why this matters, while others have observed that the harassment is just “kids being kids” and that it is a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. Some readers here may have similar thoughts.
We disagree. This issue does matter and it should not have to be a rite of passage. Our students, our children deserve better.
Most students (87 percent) who had been harassed said it negatively impacted their life. Common reactions to sexual harassment included feeling sick to their stomach, having trouble sleeping and having a hard time studying. 12 percent of students said they had missed days at school because of sexual harassment and four percent said they had changed schools. Students should feel safe at school, and the learning environment should not include worries about sexual harassment.
With sexual harassment dominating the news, it is a perfect time to start a dialogue with youth about the issue. Age-appropriate discussions about consent, respect, personal boundaries and bodily rights are crucial, and can begin even before middle school. These are especially important conversations to have with boys, since the majority of students in AAUW’s survey identified a boy or group of boys as their harasser/s.
Speaking with students about sexual harassment and what to do about it can make young people better equipped to deal with it throughout their lives, and hopefully it can prevent would-be harassers from harassing in school and, later, in the workplace. Discussion of sexual harassment is exactly what many students said they wanted to see happen at their schools: 31 percent of students surveyed said they wanted to have in-class discussions on the topic, 24 percent wanted schools to hold workshops and 22 percent wanted to be able to access online information.
It’s important for educators and parents to know that a similar percentage of boys and girls in seventh grade (48 percent) said they had experienced sexual harassment. Much of this harassment was sexuality-based, where students said they had been called “gay” or “lesbian” in a negative way. It’s thus clear that in middle school particularly, efforts must include dealing with the harassment that boys face, too. This need was brought home by the other big headline of last week on the related issue of child sexual abuse involving young boys.
By high school, far more girls face sexual harassment than boys. In AAUW’s study, nearly two-thirds of twelfth grade girls (62 percent) had faced sexual harassment the previous year.
And that’s not all.
A look at the broader picture shows that high-school age girls face harassment in many places, not just on their campuses. My research on street harassment showed that, by age 19, nearly 90 percent of women had faced sexual harassment from strangers in public places. Even more alarming, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network reports that girls ages 16 through 19 are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. It’s crucial, then, for adults to talk to girls about not only what they may face at school but also on the streets and on dates.
If sexual harassment is addressed when students are in school, there is hope that the current generation of students will then face less sexual harassment in the workplace.
Part of the #HERvotes blog carnival.
Photo by flickr user csessums under Creative Commons 2.0Stewart Rahr, a New York pharmacy billionaire, just got banned from the celebrity sushi chain, Nobu.
Why? Well, apparently for a number of reasons. The fight started when billionaire Rahr (who sold Kinray to Cardinal Health for for $1.3 billion in 2010) made a scene at Nobu on 57th street when he found a group sitting at what he considered his table. The New York Post says Rahr called the Nobu manager some very nasty names. The Daily Mail claims he threatened to kill her.
Then there is this email he sent on November 3rd to celebrities, billionaires and sports stars like Arnold Palmer, Andre Agassi, Christie Brinkley, Steve Cohen, Donald Trump, Ray Romano, Micky Arison, Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Jordan--and for some reason, me.
I didn't know what to do with the email when I first received it. It was entertaining and gossipy--but was it really news? I also didn't want to pour rocket fuel on a petty argument. Well, now that the news is out and Rahr's been banned, here's what he wrote to a few hundred close friends (The name redactions are mine, the all-caps and typos are Rahr's).
HI XXX, I GUESS THAT U R MUCH TOO BUSY TO CALL BACK AN UPSET CUTOMER. I HAD TOLD U THAT I HAD A MAJOR PROBLEM & A VERY UNCOMFORTABLE EXPERIENCE CONCERNING A SURPRISE PARTY FOR A VERY VERY CLOSE FRIEND THIS PAST WEDS, OCT 24TH,2012 THAT WAS BEING CELEBRATED AT YOUR UPSCALE RESTAURANT NOBU 57.........HER NAME IS XXX..(THANK GD XXX WAS WORKING THAT WEEK)... U MAY RECALL XXX, THAT I GAVE U SUFFICIENT TIME (48 HRS) TO RESOLVE THE CUSTOMERS PROBLEM (ME)CONCERNING THAT MISERABLE PERSON, XXX.... I GUESS U JUST DID NOT CARE TO RESPECT ME OR MY DESIRE TO SPEAK W YOU....SO XXX U LEAVE ME WITH NO ALTERNATIVE THAN TO "SHOUT OUT TO THE WORLD" & MY FRIENDS HOW MISERABLE THE EXPERIENCE OF DEALING WITH AN EMPLOYEE OF NOBU 57 LOCATED AT 57 ST BETW 5 TH & 6TH COULD B.... ALSO XXX U SHOULD B AWARE OF THE ONLY 2 RULES hanging over my employee entrance for THE PAST 41 YRS WHEN I FIRST STARTED... I HAD ONLY 3 employees & REVENUES OF ONLY $40,000.. WHEN I RECENTLY SOLD MY company last year I EMPLOYED almost 2,000 employees n REVENUES of $5,000,000,000 (thats what 5 BILLION (W AN 'B' AS IN BOY NOT AN 'M' AS IN MAN... THE SIGN OVER THE EMPLOYEES ENTRANCE READ: Rule #1 CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT!!! Rule #2 EVEN IF CUSTOMER IS PLUCKEN WRONG SEE RULE # 1. Now u should speak to that pompous PERSON XXX whom represents ur Nobu 57... despicable behavior.. I think u should dismiss her.. OR AT THE VERY LEAST SUSPEND HER for a Plucken month minimum...lets TALK IF U EVEN CARE ABOUT A POOR CUSTOMER AS I AM.... MR. RAH RAH..
(Follow me on Twitter at @StevenBertoni)- Last Thursday's Thanksgiving edition of WWE SmackDown drew 1.652 million viewers, down 26% from the previous week's 2.229 million viewers. A low number was expected for the holiday, but this is the lowest audience for the show since moving to Syfy in 2010. SmackDown was still #1 on cable for the night.
- Monday's RAW ranked #3 among non-sporting events for the night in Nielsen's Twitter TV ratings, behind Love & Hip-Hop and The Voice. RAW had a unique audience of 1.077 million, which represents the number of Twitter accounts that commented on the show. This is down from last week's 1.277 million. RAW had total impressions of 7.593 million, which represents the number of times tweets about the show were seen. This was up from last week's 7.307 million impressions.
- It's worth noting that WWE is at least trying to find out why fans aren't tuning into RAW. They issued a Fan Council survey this week that asked when they watch the show, what segments they change the channel during and other viewing habits. One fan called it the most comprehensive survey WWE has issued to Fan Council members.On Giving Trump a Chance
An open letter to my fellow white, cisgender liberals.
Kiva Bay Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 15, 2016
I woke to morning in America.
This is an open letter, but there are some people who it doesn’t really apply to and this part of the letter is for them. This part of the letter is for the people who can’t handle hearing about another suicide. This part of the letter is for the trans people who aren’t in the right place to read about transphobia right now. This part of the letter is for the people who can’t stand to hear about conversion therapy. This part of the letter is for the people who already know about the ever growing number of murders of trans women of color and they cannot bear to talk about it right now. This is for the people who know about the violence women of color face. This is for the people who can’t be reminded today of the police murdering black children. This is for the people who know already about the abuse disabled people face and it is a deep and personal wound that they must care for at this time. This is for the people who know all these things already. This is a trigger warning.
The rest of this letter is for the people who don’t know because you need to know. I’m tired of you not knowing. After this election, especially, you need to know.
To whom it may concern,
Not just Donald Trump won the United States presidential election, but his crack team of bigots did too. From the parochially homophobic and misogynistic Mike Pence to men like Gingrich and Bannon who have built their entire careers off |
for a beer, and walking home holding hands. She yelled: "Are you crazy? Do I look homeless? You don't buy a red convertible to keep it in the garage. Never, ever invite me to walk anywhere again!"
Then I had another girlfriend. I loved her very much. (I still love her. She is not with me either.) She lives in River Oaks, near W. Gray and Shepherd Dr. She didn't want to go for walks anymore after the day of the murder. Well, it was almost murder.
We were walking south on Shepherd to a restaurant. We were holding hands and confessing to each other our eternal love. But when we arrived at Westheimer, the thing was ruined. We were crossing the street with the walk signal when a car hurtled from behind us, trying to turn from Shepherd westbound onto Westheimer. We had to jump, literally, not to be hit.
A guy in a huge truck honked his horn and yelled, "Run, idiots! The street is not for people! Get off the road!"
I yelled back. I cannot write what I shouted. This is a PG-13 publication.
Then the truck's engine stopped. A big guy got out and came toward me.
I got brave. I stood my ground. My girlfriend — my eternal love who is not with me anymore — ran to hide in a cell phone store.
The guy stood in front of me, holding up a metal tool. "Idiot," he said. "Look, I won't smash your face just because I'm in a hurry, but you damn pedestrians, you don't own the street. The streets were made for cars!"
I did not hit him. I didn't reply, either. He just left. We both (barely) survived.
My girlfriend from River Oaks didn't walk with me much after that.
WE LIVE in a city suffering a pandemic of obesity. And we have many other problems too: hypertension, stress, loneliness, depression, lack of communication between people. It occurs to me (my ideas!) that many of these problems could be solved if people walked more.
Walking is not just walking. While walking, you see things you'd never notice from a car. It changes your outlook; the city is different. Sometimes I think that in Houston we have not learned to live in harmony with our environment because we strive not to live in our environment.
Maybe I would like Houston a little if there were sidewalks and crosswalks to go to restaurants. Or maybe if motorists did not see pedestrians as a nuisance. Or maybe if neighborhoods had sidewalks. Or if walking were part of everyday culture in the whole city and not just with people on the path next to Buffalo Bayou.
I just want to walk. And Houston does not let me.
David Dorantes (@HDaviddorantes) covers entertainment for La Voz.
Bookmark Gray Matters. You don't buy a red convertible to keep it in the garage.David Villa has not been able to go with his team-mates on the tour of South America which Atlético de Madrid is currently undertaking. Villa, known as 'El Guaje', along with the three Uruguayan players in the squad and the two Spain U-20 internationals, is giving it his all in Madrid to reach complete physical fitness.
He is working very hard, but is still a long way from what the trainers are asking of him. Villa still has quite a long way to go.
His first objective is to get to the opening day of the league season and the final of the Spanish Super Cup. The double training sessions he is doing under Óscar Pitillas, therapeutic trainer at the club, are designed to get him match-fit in time.
As happened last season, Atlético de Madrid trainer Óscar Ortega, has drawn up a very demanding pre-season programme to give himself the maximum number of options for the first possibility of lifting some silverware. And perhaps it is this that is not in David Villa's favour - for if the idea of extra training was for him to reach peak form only in October (as happens in other squads) then he would have a lot more room for manoeuvre.
Villa has made no secret of how hard it is for him to reach the fitness level of his team-mates. "Coach, you're going to kill me", he said to Ortega.
The Super Cup beckons, and the number 9 is working flat out to be in shape. If he doesn't make it in time, it won't be for want of blood sweat and tears. 'El Guaje' is determined to start his new adventure at Atlético de Madrid on the right footing.Buy Photo Natcore Technology Inc. will relocate its corporate headquarters to Rochester. (Photo: File photo)Buy Photo Story Highlights Natcore Technology Inc. will relocate its corporate headquarters from New Jersey.
Solar company says it’s also extended its lease at Eastman Business Park for a R&D center.
A small but growing solar company with a research and development facility at the Eastman Business Park has moved its corporate headquarters to Rochester.
Natcore Technology Inc. announced Tuesday that it recently completed the move from Red Bank, New Jersey, to offices at 189 N. Water St. in downtown Rochester.
The company also announced that it has extended its lease by an additional two years for a research and development center at the Eastman Business Park. Financial details of the lease were not disclosed. The company is not expected to receive public funding as part of the move.
“Rochester has been very good for us,” said Natcore President and CEO Chuck Provini. “We’ve found some extremely talented and creative employees here. Eastman Business Park has everything a research company could need. And the business and investment communities have been consistently helpful to us.”
Natcore has been working on a number of efforts to improve the efficiency of solar panels by increasing the surface area exposed to sunlight. Just last week the company announced that it would pursue license agreements for a new solar cell structure it has been developing out of a 27,000-square-foot R&D facility in Building 308 at the Eastman Business Park.
Natcore, which has about 10 employees, has been working out of that space at the park. It was Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-Fairport) who helped announce Natcore’s arrival to Rochester about four years ago and has been working to concince the company to move its headquarters to Rochester.
“Whether it’s offering access to unique manufacturing tools at Eastman Business Park or providing a highly skilled workforce, Rochester continues to attract state of the art companies and create the jobs that will power the 21st century,” Slaughter said in a statement.
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In recent years, the company has formed new partnerships with large manufacturers for its products. Natcore announced about this time last year that it partnering with Denzo Pty Ltd., an Australian alternative-energy company, to produce solar cells and panels there. That work was in addition to partnerships with companies in China and Germany.
TCLAUSEN@DemocratandChronicle.com
Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/1IXNybFYour immediate reaction to the Aroldis Chapman trade was right on. The Yankees have assembled something silly, a three-headed bullpen monster to rival any in the history of the game. On talent, Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Dellin Betances are three of the five or ten or so best relievers in baseball, and now if this plan comes together, one will hand the ball to the other, who will then in turn hand the ball to the other. While the 2016 Yankees aren’t going to feature a roster full of All-Stars, it’s going to feel like a pitching staff full of All-Stars in the most important moments, and that’s not going to be any fun for half the people watching.
There’s something important to be said, though. On talent, the 2016 Yankees bullpen should be better than the 2015 Yankees bullpen. Yet on performance, it’ll be hard for this coming year’s group to improve on the group that was. You’ve probably seen some of the numbers, like how the Yankees were 66-3 when leading after six, and 73-2 when leading after seven. Honestly, that probably already says enough, but we can make use of some of our own statistics. Whether you go superficial or analytical, last year’s bullpen almost always got the job done, when the job was important.
Obviously, Miller is a returner. And Betances is coming back. Chapman effectively replaces Justin Wilson, and there’s not a person on the planet who’d prefer the latter over the former. Even Wilson’s own family would have to apologize and hope that Justin wouldn’t be offended. He wouldn’t be, because he knows Chapman is something extraordinary. When you’re going into a season, you want Chapman. But looking back on last season, Wilson overachieved. That’s the point of comparison here.
Using the Baseball-Reference Play Index, I looked for the top pitching performances in what they define as high-leverage situations. I set a minimum of 50 batters faced, and then I sorted in ascending order of OPS allowed. The very top of the list:
Wilson’s overall OPS against was.602 — good, but not outstanding. Yet we care less about what happened with him on the mound in less-important situations. He was supposed to get big outs, and when the outs were big, he just about always got them. You can’t really expect to improve on that.377.
Let’s take a quick step back. Last year, 26 Yankees appeared as relievers. Just three of them had an average leverage index above 1.0. That was the Miller/Betances/Wilson trio. Nine more had an average leverage index between 0.5 – 1.0. That leaves 14 with an average leverage index below 0.5. The top group yielded 2.3 runs per 9 innings. The next group yielded 5.0, while the lowest group yielded 5.4. In one sense, the Yankees bullpen was valuable; in another sense, it gave up more than four runs per 9. The key was that the Yankees could decide which pitchers pitched in which situations.
So by WPA, the Yankees bullpen ranked third, at +8.5. By WPA/LI, it ranked 13th at +1.5. The first one is the more important one. The first one is a more accurate reflection of how the bullpen performed as far as preserving close scores was concerned. The group was worse when situations mattered less.
Looking at the past 20 years in the major leagues, there have been 596 individual team-seasons. The Yankees bullpen just ranked 25th in WPA. It ranked just 284th in WPA/LI, and here’s where the difference is — they ranked second in Clutch. Because the bullpen was so lopsided, that worked in the Yankees’ favor, as these numbers go. Now let’s say we’re certain this year’s Yankees will have a top-three bullpen. We can’t be that certain, but let’s just say. Let’s say they’ll finish in the top three in WPA. Over the past decade, top-three bullpens each year have averaged a WPA of +8.4. Last year’s Yankees, again, finished at +8.5.
It’s possible to be better. Last year’s Yankees finished behind the Orioles and the Royals. And in 2012, the Orioles bullpen finished with a WPA of +13.9. Of course there’s room to take a step forward, but there’s at least as much room to take a step back. Last year’s Yankee bullpen performance was outstanding, and they’d be happy this coming year to just repeat. It’s worth noting that, while the top three are fantastic, Wilson is gone. Adam Warren is gone. You figure Betances or Miller (or Chapman) might regress some. Chasen Shreve isn’t reliable yet. Bryan Mitchell isn’t reliable yet. Branden Pinder isn’t reliable yet. The bullpen has three amazing arms out of a number far greater than three.
Here’s one way to see the effect of a great bullpen. We’ll go back to using those last 20 years. Teams with bullpen WPAs north of 10 have averaged 96.5 wins. Teams with bullpen WPAs between 9 – 10 have averaged 94.9 wins. Teams with bullpen WPAs between 8 – 9 have averaged 92.8 wins. Teams with bullpen WPAs between 7 – 8 have averaged 94.1 wins. Teams with bullpen WPAs between 6 – 7 have averaged 89.8 wins. Don’t forget that last year’s Yankees technically made the playoffs, if ever so briefly, and theirs was otherwise an underwhelming roster. If the bullpen does indeed turn out strong, the Yankees will have a great shot at returning, and then, of course, once in the playoffs, the top of the bullpen can pitch even more. I don’t need to sell you on relievers. You know about relievers.
Maybe I should’ve said this before, but now that we’re at the end, it has to be said that last year’s Yankees were no longer relevant as far as future plans go. As soon as the season ended, that was it. The performances essentially disappeared. The Yankees didn’t go into the Chapman trade trying to build on last year’s bullpen performance. They went into the Chapman trade projected for an inferior performance, due to regression, and due to the absences of Wilson and Warren. Sure, it feels like the Yankees won’t easily be able to improve relative to 2015, but that’s not the right comparison point — they’re improved, relative to what would’ve been expected. That’s what’s most critical. Chapman makes the Yankees better, compared to the Yankees without Chapman.
For the roster, it was a good move. And now the bullpen looks great. Maybe even something more than that. Compared to the Yankees before the Chapman move, these Yankees are going to have stronger relief. Just don’t expect them to have stronger relief than they had in 2015, once you take leverage into account. The bar was placed at a very high setting, and that bullpen in large part helped give the Yankees a chance at the championship. They’d love for this year’s bullpen to do the same.Back in April, Space X - Elon Musk's private space company - announced that it was planning its first Mars mission for just two years time in 2018.
Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come pic.twitter.com/u4nbVUNCpA — SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 27, 2016
Now, in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, the PayPal and Tesla entrepeneur has provided more details of what he had in mind. "Essentially what we’re saying is we’re establishing a cargo route to Mars," Musk explained. "It’s a regular cargo route. You can count on it. It’s going to happen every 26 months. Like a train leaving the station. And if scientists around the world know that they can count on that, and it’s going to be inexpensive, relatively speaking compared to anything in the past, then they will plan accordingly and come up with a lot of great experiments."
Musk didn't provide too many specifics, restraining himself despite great temptation to do otherwise ("I’m so tempted to talk more about the details of it"), but he did reveal that if the company "get lucky and things go according to plan", they'd be looking at their first manned flight in 2024, with the first humans on Mars by 2025. That's a big claim, given an external panel reckons NASA's own 2030s Mars landing plans are looking a touch unlikely. There are, after all, a huge number of challenges to be overcome.
READ NEXT: Watch the moment SpaceX employees celebrated the Falcon 9's successful landing
Musk did talk a little about what this would mean, explaining exactly how dangerous the first manned mission would be. "The first mission wouldn’t have a huge number of people on it, because if something goes wrong, we want to risk the fewest number of lives as possible,” he said.
"But I do want to emphasise this is not about sending a few people to Mars. It’s about having an architecture that would enable the creation of a self-sustaining city on Mars with the objective of being a multi-planet species and a true space-faring civilisation and one day being out there among the stars."
"It’s dangerous and probably people will die—and they’ll know that,” he continued. “And then they’ll pave the way, and ultimately it will be very safe to go to Mars, and it will very comfortable. But that will be many years in the future."
Baby steps, first of course, but the words - if nothing else - are hugely exciting, and I think we can accept Musk is sincere in this. In his own words, he is quoted as saying: "I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact."A SOCIAL worker who said he was knifed in a horrific gang attack has confessed that he invented the story and stabbed himself.
But the Herald Sun can reveal Daniel Mallia's elaborate lie was hidden from his employer, to protect his privacy.
His boss has called for privacy laws to be rewritten, saying they had put his clients' safety and his organisation's reputation at risk.
Mallia worked with at-risk teens for Les Twentyman's 20th Man Foundation.
Last July he made headlines when he recounted his "fight for life", claiming he was stabbed twice in the stomach and repeatedly punched and kicked by up to five gang members at Altona beach.
The trained boxer and martial artist said he was robbed.
One stab wound penetrated 8cm into his gut, just missing vital organs, he said.
"I had a knife to my neck. I couldn't yell out, or else they would have cut my throat," he said.
But on December 13, the heavily tattooed Mallia, 29, pleaded guilty in Sunshine Magistrates' Court to making a false report.
He faked the whole story, stabbing himself and giving himself black eyes.
Mr Twentyman said already growing doubts about Mallia's performance had led to his termination in October.
But he was not told by police until a week after Mallia's court appearance that his story was a lie and his injuries self-inflicted.
"Police said they couldn't tell us earlier because of restrictions on passing on information under privacy laws,'' he said.
Mr Twentyman said the safety of his clients and the reputation of the fund had been put at risk by privacy laws that let the man continue working with vulnerable people, even after admitting his self-destructive behaviour.
"He was a ticking time bomb, and we would have sacked him on the spot if we had known, instead of becoming more and more distressed about his inability to do his job.
"He told a friend: `I don't really feel worthy until I've been stabbed like Les'.''
Mr Twentyman called for the creation of a privacy reference panel, to which police or other authorities could refer cases of concern.
Such a panel could determine if, in the interests of public safety, information should be provided to relevant people such employers, family members, or the wider public, as can happen in the case of communicable diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C.
Mr Twentyman said Mallia was hired about a month before he stabbed himself on the strength of an impressive CV, including a valedictorian award at Victoria University.
Crime Victims Support Association president Noel McNamara said it was ridiculous that Mallia had been free to keep working after admitting to such dangerous behaviour.
Mr Twentyman said police told him Mallia had said he staged the stabbing after crashing his car and losing his phone.
Mallia is being considered for a diversion program, which allows first offenders to escape conviction if they admit their crime.
Mark Woods, of the Law Institute of Victoria's access to justice committee, said some employers whose employees were subject to licensing systems - such as those working with children or in security - were notified under certain circumstances if workers were charged.
Mallia could not be contacted yesterday.
WHAT PRIVACY LAWS PREVENT
PARENTS accessing their children's Facebook accounts.
SUPERANNUATION funds from accessing tax file numbers so they can find lost members.
LORD Mayor Robert Doyle's plan to record the ID of passengers who catch cabs at city super ranks at night.
RACING Victoria stewards demanding jockeys hand over mobile phones.
AUTHORITIES using GPS data to locate a child rapist wearing an electronic ankle bracelet who left the so-called village of the damned outside the Ararat jail.
THE Taxi Directorate from telling the public about a cabbie who had killed, and another who played pornography and smoked marijuana while driving, are back driving cabs.
THE Department of Justice from revealing the offences of 2700 criminals - including stalkers, kidnappers and drug traffickers - whose applications to work with children have been granted.
PARLIAMENT naming the State MPs who had unpaid bills for meals, drinks and functions totalling more than $102,000 or those who commit driving offences in their taxpayer-funded cars.
Originally published as Social worker stabs himself to gain street cred36 of the claims were unfounded, proving there was no attack, while 54 lacked enough evidence to prove
Illegal immigrants awaiting deportation are making up rape claims to stay in the country for longer, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Thirty-six claims were found to be false in just one year, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The scale of the false allegations was described as a concern by a watchdog group, who said it raised questions over whether illegal immigrants were trying to delay or dodge deportation by making untrue rape or sexual assault claims.
The allegations proven to be false were all made to Immigration and Customs Enforcement by people held in their detention facilities.
They were part of 273 allegations of rape made in 2015.
Inside a detention center: Immigrants awaiting deportation at a center in Otay Mesa, California. DailyMail.com has obtained figures which suggest some are falsely claiming to be raped or sexually assaulted, possibly to avoid deportation
One of the untrue reports: A detainee at the Otay Detention Facility near San Diego, California, (pictured) fabricated a claim a guard raped them
An investigation by DailyMail.com has found a sexual assault allegation is made in an immigration detention center every two days. One incident involved a boy complaining about a group of minors in Karne County Residential Center in Texas (pictured) who inappropriately exposed themselves and tried to have him touch their genitals
THE FALSE SEX-CLAIM FILES January 2, 2015: Detainee at the Otay Detention Facility near San Diego, California, told officials a guard raped them. An investigation later found the claim was fabricated. February 1: Female detainee in Los Fresnos, Texas, lied about another detainee sexually assaulting her. February 3: In Dilley, Texas, a woman falsely claimed a supervisor was making lewd comments to her. March 3: Detainee in El Paso, Texas, claimed she was being harassed by Muslims. Officers later found she was lying. March 31: Detainee in Bakersfield, California, claimed a guard inappropriately touched 17 women during a pat down after dinner. Investigators later found her claims were fabricated. April 9: Woman falsely claimed a detainee in Bakersfield, California, was touching another female’s breast. April 21: In Eloy, Arizona, a detainee reported that a woman was being sexually assaulted by guards because of a conversation he heard. His claim was later found to be false. May 26: A detainee at the Houston Contract Detention Facility said they were raped by an unknown suspect. Investigators could not identify who it was so closed the investigation June 22: An illegal immigrant in the Adelanto Detention Center in San Bernardino, California, falsely claimed she was sexually harassed by another inmate July 10: An ICE detainee claimed he was touched on the buttocks while sleeping in his bunk July 30: A detainee claimed they were sexually assaulted by a Department for Homeland Security contractor in Sierra Blanca, Texas. Investigators later found the claim was fabricated August 7: In Calexico, California, a man falsely claimed she was receiving threats of violence from a fellow detainee to perform sex acts. On August 25, 2015, a male detainee at the South Texas Detention Complex said a contracted officer inappropriately stared at him while he was using the toilet September 29: An immigration officer at the Yuba County Jail in California sent an email to senior officials saying a detainee had been involved in an inappropriate relationship with a contract officer. The claim was found to be false. October 1: An officer reported rumors a contractor engaged in a sex act with another staff member at the Otay Detention Facility near San Diego, California. The report was later found to be untrue December 11: A senior ICE official reported an allegation that a guard had sexually assaulted a detainee in San Bernardino, California. Investigators found the incident did not take place.
A breakdown of the rape allegations shows that 90 were unsubstantiated, meaning there was not sufficient evidence to prove the incident occurred.
There was evidence proving the attack did not take place in 36 of the cases.
Only 30 of the claims were substantiated by ICE officials, while decisions are still pending in 104 cases. Five of the substantiated claims were attacks on children.
None of 31 allegations against guards or contractors have been substantiated. Five were found to be false.
Thirteen were'referred to management'. The records would not elaborate on what that meant.
The allegations proven to be false included claims by a detainee at Otay Detention Facility near San Diego, California, that a guard raped them.
A detainee in El Paso, Texas, claimed she was being harassed by Muslims. Officers later found she was lying, and a detainee in Bakersfield, California, claimed a guard inappropriately touched 17 women during a pat down after dinner.
Detainees are aware that they can postpone being sent home if they file a complaint - even if it might turn out to be a lie.
They are normally placed inside solitary confinement - or administrative segregation - for five days after they make a complaint, but some can chose to stay longer if they feel they may be at risk of further attacks.
A watchdog group warned that false accusations could be used by detainees to extend their stay in the U.S.
Jessica Vaughn from the Center for Immigration Studies told Daily Mail Online: 'Of course any allegations of misconduct or abuse in a detention center must be taken seriously, and investigated.
'Unfortunately, it happens occasionally, despite efforts to prevent it. ICE has very detailed protocols and regulations to follow, and the agency appears to make every effort to ensure that its contractors also operate with the appropriate standards and safeguards.
'It is important to remember that not all allegations against detention officers or fellow detainees are true.
'I don't wish to downplay the seriousness of this issue, but one has to acknowledge that detainees have some strong incentives to file frivolous allegations.
'I have been told by different sources that these allegations have increased lately because the detainees know that they can avoid or postpone deportation by accusing an ICE deportation officer or detention center guard of abusive behavior.'
There is, however, little doubt that a series of sex attacks have taken place in the detention centers.
Among the cases revealed to DailyMail.com was one at the The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, where a 14-year-old boy from El Salvador attacked a helpless girl from Honduras as she lay in her bed.
The complaint was substantiated, but it's not known what action was taken against the youngster.
Another boy complained that a group of minors in Karne County Residential Center inappropriately exposed themselves and tried to have him touch their genitals.
That claim was substantiated after an investigation.
On the April 29, 2015, a detainee from Guatemala was arrested after 'inappropriately touching' another immigrant in Cameron, Texas.
He was then processed in local courts, but he has not been identified.
In Orange County, California, a group of detainees were found to have been involved in sexual abuse.
A substantiated incident involved a shocking case at the The South Texas Family Residential Center Dilley, Texas, (pictured) where a 14-year-old boy from El Salvador attacked a helpless girl from Honduras as she lay in her bed
And in Karnes, Texas, an underage girl was found to have a sexually transmitted disease.
When border officers conducted a medical exam, they also found 'vaginal scarring', prompting suggestions she was sexually assaulted.
However the allegation was 'unfounded', but the girl and her father were put on 'expedited removal proceedings' for their own safety.
On October 23, 2015, a Management and Training Cooperation officer sexually harassed a detainee in Otero, Minnesota.
Jesse Lerner-Kinglake, the Communications Director at Just Detention International, told DailyMail.com that there was a'major problem' about sexual assault in detention centers.
'I think it's important to draw a distinction between sexual abuse allegations that are unfounded and those that are unsubstantiated,' she said.
'Unfounded reports have been proven false, whereas unsubstantiated reports lack sufficient evidence to show definitively that the assault occurred.
'In other words, when a rape allegation is unsubstantiated, that does not mean it was made up.
Immigration detainees have many reasons not to come forward to report sexual assault. Detainees who speak out often face retaliation — including being placed in solitary confinement Jesse Lerner-Kinglake, the Communications Director at Just Detention International
'Further, false rape allegations are incredibly rare in any setting and, besides, immigration detainees have little incentive to lie about abuse.
'To the contrary, immigration detainees have many reasons not to come forward to report sexual assault. Detainees who speak out often face retaliation — including being placed in solitary confinement, a practice that is known to have a devastating psychological impact.
'Official reports of sexual abuse in immigration detention almost certainly represent just a fraction of the true number of assaults.
'That's because many detainees who have been sexually abused haven't been told how to file a report and that it is their right to do so; others are afraid of being punished, and with good reason.
'But, even if we were to take the numbers of official reports at face value, it would still show evidence of a major problem.
'Any incident of sexual abuse is unacceptable and utterly preventable.'
A spokesman for ICE told Daily Mail Online: 'ICE is committed to ensuring all individuals in the agency's custody are treated in a safe, secure and humane manner.
'Accusations of alleged unlawful conduct are investigated thoroughly and appropriate action is taken to ensure the safety and security of those involved and the others in ICE custody.'
Of the 273 allegations made by foreigners awaiting deportation, six involved suspected attacks on children. Five of these cases were substantiated. Neither of the children pictured in this center in Dilley, Texas, are believed to have been harmed
It is the latest controversy involving ICE. The agency which overseas the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants has an annual budget of $989million.
In April, Daily Mail Online revealed that American taxpayers are forking out more than $300,000 every day to deport illegal immigrants on commercial flights and even on private jets, Daily Mail Online can exclusively reveal.
The government agency spent $116m in 2015 to transport 235,413 people in the United States illegally back to their home countries.
More than 40 per cent of those who had violated visa restrictions were convicted criminals while more than 1,000 were identified as gang members.
The ICE revealed to Daily Mail Online that the average cost of every immigrant in 2015 was $12,213.
The cost includes identifying the immigrant, apprehending them, placing them in a detention center, their process through immigration court and their subsequent removal.
In July 2015, Daily Mail Online revealed that a night's stay for an illegal immigrant in the country's largest taxpayer-funded detention center costs more than a room at the nearest Hilton Hotel.
The government shells out $231 every 24 hours to house just one of the 2,105 foreign detainees at The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley.
That is more than a double room at the four-star Hilton Palacio del Rio 70 miles away in San Antonio, which costs $169.US to launch Fallujah-style attack in Afghanistan
6 February 2010
As US and British troops prepare to attack the town of Marjah in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, military commanders and the media are openly comparing the operation to the November 2004 siege of Fallujah, one of the bloodiest war crimes of the Iraq war.
The operation in central Helmand province, long an area of intense resistance to the US-led occupation, will constitute the largest military offensive since Washington invaded the country in October 2001. At least 15,000 troops are expected to lay siege to the Helmand river valley town, which has 80,000 inhabitants and is said by the US military to be a stronghold of the Taliban.
A total of 125,000 people live in the district around Marjah, which is an agricultural center 350 miles west of Kabul. The population has been swelled by Afghans fleeing villages occupied by US Marines last summer, following President Barack Obama’s order shortly after he took office to send 21,000 more troops into Afghanistan.
US Marines, frustrated and enraged over casualties suffered at the hands of an unseen enemy who is able to attack and then blend back into the local population, will be unleashed against the town in a violent military assault, with predictable results.
Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, commander of the US Marines in southern Afghanistan, spelled out the character of the upcoming offensive. Those found in Marjah would have three options. “One is to stay and fight and probably die,” he said. “The second one is to make peace with his government and reintegrate.” The third would be to attempt to escape, “In which case we’ll probably have some people out there waiting on them as well.”
“We're going to go in big,” said Nicholson, commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade. “I’m not looking for a fair fight,” he added.
In a highly unusual move, the US command has publicly announced plans for the offensive. “It’s a little unconventional to do it this way, but it gives everybody a chance to think through what they’re going to do before suddenly in the dark of night they’re hit with an offensive,” said General Stanley McChrystal, the senior US commander in Afghanistan.
The stated intention of revealing the target of the upcoming offensive is to allow civilians to flee before the Marines move in. It also provides a pre-emptive alibi for the US offensive by painting those who fail to heed the warning as die-hard Taliban who deserve to be killed.
Stratfor, a military-intelligence web site with close ties to the US state apparatus, reported Thursday that “the assault is likely to include the cordoning off of the area, so many of the fighters dedicated to its defense will probably be forced to fight to the death or surrender.”
The article continued: “With assaults on Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq under their belts, the Marines are experienced with this sort of urban assault.”
What is the record of urban assaults of “this sort”?
The Marine assault on Fallujah in November 2004 reduced most of the city of 300,000 people to rubble, as warplanes dropped thousands of tons of explosives and helicopter gunships and battle tanks fired missiles into buildings and strafed the area with cannon fire.
The US military command claimed to have killed 2,000 “insurgents,” but the real death toll remains unknown. Civilians who remained in the town were subjected to the same bombardment. Some were shot to death during the door-to-door raids that followed, and others were killed while fleeing. Wounded fighters were summarily executed, and medical facilities were targeted for military attack. All those in the city were denied food, water and electricity for more than 10 days.
The operation was a vicious exercise in collective punishment against the population of Fallujah for the killing there of four Blackwater mercenaries and the city’s protracted resistance to foreign occupation. It embodied the criminality of the entire war and was characterized by multiple and gross violations of the laws of war.
If American military commanders are to be believed, a similar operation is being prepared in Afghanistan, and for similar reasons. The town of Marjah is to be turned into a killing field.
As in Fallujah, vengeance plays a role. US military forces have seen a steady escalation in casualties over the past year, while the CIA suffered a humiliating attack at the end of December that left seven of its operatives dead on the Afghan border.
In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the US military command sees value in making an example of a population center known as a center of resistance to occupation, sending a message to the entire country that such resistance is futile and will be met with slaughter and destruction.
This bloodletting is officially justified in the name of a never-ending struggle against terrorism. Behind the propaganda, the driving force of the war in Afghanistan, like the war in Iraq, is the attempt by America’s ruling elite to counter the crisis of US capitalism through the use of force and the seizure of strategic positions in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, both centers of vast energy reserves.
A year ago, when Barack Obama entered the White House, there existed hope among broad layers of the American people that his inauguration would turn such words as Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Blackwater, torture and rendition into the lexicon of a dark and shameful, but closed, chapter in US history.
The preparation of the Marjah offensive only underscores that, far from being ended, the crimes of the Bush administration are continuing and escalating under the Democratic president.
Today there are more US troops deployed abroad in colonial-style wars and occupations than under Bush, and the killing has spread from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan and Yemen. The Obama administration is seeking $322 billion for the two ongoing wars and occupations, a figure that will doubtless be swelled by further demands for “supplemental” funding.
The supposed candidate of “hope” and “change” has emerged ever more clearly as the hand-picked agent of sections of the political establishment and military-intelligence complex that wanted to effect certain tactical changes in policy, while continuing to employ militarism abroad and wage a relentless assault on the working class at home.
American working people cannot accept a new round of war crimes carried out in their name. The demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US and other foreign troops from Afghanistan must be joined with a political offensive against the Obama administration and the |
, with its fish-eye depth of field, stark figuration and stony matte light, the photo meets the eye as unreal. Complaints in this vein led to an investigation of the image, specifically its manipulation of tone — a quality central to photography’s evolving grammar of realism. Somehow both a beautifying tool and, in the right hands, possessed of the very texture of reality (as every Instagram filter maven knows), tone is transformative. For that reason, “excessive toning” is against WPP rules; Hansen said he adjusted tone only to balance uneven light, “in effect to recreate what the eye sees.” Ultimately, Hansen retained his prize: the judges stood behind what they saw, though it would appear their eyes prefer altered images a good portion of the time.
Hansen’s image has earned a place in an exhibit, currently on display at the Bronx Documentary Center, comprising a selected history of notoriously faked or otherwise tinkered-with images. “Altered Images: 150 Years of Posed and Manipulated Documentary Photography” is a survey of much more than its title suggests, and manifests the philosophical quandaries the title implies. What image alters nothing? Poses and manipulates nothing? What is “documentary photography” in an age of camera ubiquity, a world of images so replete that no reality seems to exist beyond it? What was it ever?
The practice of photojournalism presses up against these questions in a particular way. “Altered Images,” co-curated by Michael Kamber and Bianca Farrow, evinces a growing anxiety around images that circulate within a sphere of public and professional trust. Of course the impulse to stage and sweeten journalistic photographs is as old as photography itself: Roger Fenton’s 1855 image of cannonballs artfully strewn across a road during the Crimean War, and Alexander Gardner’s posing of a Confederate soldier’s corpse for two 1863 battlefield shots, are both part of the exhibit. But most of “Altered Images” comprises political and war imagery from the last decade or so, and the nature of the manipulations it presents is more diffuse. The lifespan of an image has grown more infinite, in every conceivable way; in politics and elsewhere the longevity of a fact, once considered the great ally of the photograph, only contracts.
Some of the show’s most notable images are not exemplars of vintage doctoring and Photoshop fails but indictments of haste, complicity and context. For instance, Marco Di Laurio’s 2003 image of a child jumping over a row of dead Iraqis appeared in a 2012 BBC story, where it illustrated a recent massacre in Syria. FOX13 Memphis posted a 2014 image of Valencia, Venezuela in flames to illustrate this spring’s riots in Baltimore.
Susan Sontag wrote that a fake photograph falsifies reality; a “true” image placed in a “false” context makes homogenous the reality (extreme, in each case above) it sought to make distinct. Something central to photojournalism’s project — to document and transmit specificity, sometimes to stir a counter-specific empathy for another’s plight — is threatened by the wave of barely distinguishable images that wash over us each day. Bobbing in this rough tide, one depiction of suffering (especially far-off suffering) is as good as another. Until, that is, it involves the U.S. military: the exhibit notes that an unaltered photo of an American soldier killed in the horrific 2004 battle of Falluja, widely published in Europe, was held back by American publications.
The dialectics of truth and fakery in documentary photography are bound by the photojournalist’s urge to narrate — an impulse increasingly absent from the ways in which we document ourselves, and each other. The images that have ratified a new cadence within our spiraling culture of looking and being looked at involve cell phone and surveillance footage of egregious crimes and shocking criminals. Even more than drama, the images of one white police officer choking Eric Garner to death on a Staten Island sidewalk, and another throwing a 14-year-old black Texan girl to the ground, to cite two recent examples, telegraph pure and necessary information. Story drains away from these scenes, and information leaps to the fore. The same might be said of the first published images, captured by security cameras, of the Tsarnaev brothers, and more recently Dylann Roof. In these images, and in the video conference stills of Roof’s bond hearing—perfectly, almost eerily composed, yet roughly textured, blue-toned, “real”—we might begin to make out realism’s last frontier.
On the brink of that frontier, it seems inevitable that we would abandon the image-as-storyteller, as truth-teller—embrace alteration, open up that Periscope feed, see this thing through with grim resignation, with naked or at least knowing enthusiasm. One thing won’t change: we have always sought more from images than they are designed to provide. “It is said that the camera cannot lie,” James Baldwin wrote, “but rarely do we allow it to do anything else, since the camera sees what you point it at: the camera sees what you want it to see. The language of the camera is the language of our dreams.” Thus we are surrounded, immersed in a story of images, an ocean of images with no story. The truth of this predicament—the truth of much photographed predicament—feels trapped not beyond the camera’s reach, but too well inside it.
Michelle Orange is the author of “This Is Running for Your Life,” a collection of her essays.
Photo Illustration: Getty
Photo: World Press PhotoThe chairman of the state budget committee in the Alabama House said he wants to save taxpayers the cost of another special election should another vacancy occur in the U.S. Senate.
Rep. Steve Clouse, R-Ozark, has pre-filed a bill for the 2018 legislative session to change the law on how a vacancy is filled.
Under current law, when a vacancy occurs the governor appoints an interim replacement and schedules a special election.
Under Clouse's bill, the governor would appoint an interim replacement, followed by an election to coincide with the next general election occurring more than one year after the seat becomes vacant. The state holds general elections every two years.
Clouse, chairman of the House Ways and Means General Fund Committee, said the ongoing special election for the seat Jeff Sessions left to become attorney general will cost the cash-strapped General Fund about $10 million.
"I think people now begin to realize that this wasn't one special election," Clouse said. "It was three special elections when you consider the primary, the runoff and then the general."
Clouse said each of the three rounds is expected to cost about $3.5 million.
The primary was Aug. 15. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore and Sen. Luther Strange square off in a Sept. 26 runoff for the Republican nomination. The winner faces Democrat Doug Jones on Dec. 12.
Clouse said the second purpose of his bill is to clarify the law.
Former Gov. Robert Bentley initially scheduled the election for Sessions' seat to coincide with the 2018 election cycle.
That sparked objections from the Alabama Legislative Black Caucus and others, as well as a lawsuit by State Auditor Jim Zeigler.
Critics of Bentley's decision said the law demanded an earlier election date. State law, Code of Alabama 36-9-8, says that if a vacancy occurs in the U.S. Senate more than four months before a general election, "the governor shall forthwith order an election" to fill the unexpired term. The Bentley administration interpreted "forthwith" differently than some others.
When Gov. Kay Ivey replaced Bentley, she rescheduled the election for this year. Clouse does not disagree with the decision, but said the law should be more specific.
"It's probably the right thing to do based on the law that we go ahead and have this," Clouse said. "But I think that language needs to be either changed or more clearly spelled out."
The legislative session begins Jan. 9.Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE is under mounting pressure from supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Bernie Sanders Town Hall finishes third in cable news race, draws 1.4 million viewers Woman to undecided Biden: 'Just say yes' to 2020 bid MORE (I-Vt.) to back California’s ballot measure aimed at reducing steep drug prices ahead of the state’s primary on Tuesday.
The first-in-the-nation ballot measure would allow California’s health agencies to negotiate directly with drug companies to lower drug costs.
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Sanders and his supporters are now pressing Clinton to put teeth behind her oft-repeated campaign promise to crack down on price-gouging by “big pharma.”
“There’s no reason – other than the greed of the prescription drug companies – to not support this ballot initiative,” Warren Gunnels, senior policy advisor for Sanders’ campaign, said in an interview with The Hill on Friday.
“It’s very important, it could lower drug prices in California and it could lead to lower prices everywhere,” he said.
Only about 5 million people would be affected if the provision became law: those with Medicaid plans and those enrolled in the state’s HIV/AIDS drug assistance program.
But the initiative has become the focus of a powerful opposition campaign by groups like the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). Those in opposition are expected to spend as much as $100 million to stamp down the initiative.
Sanders and other supporters say it could become ground zero for a national fight to empower Medicare to negotiate drug prices – an idea touted by both Clinton and Sanders to save billions annually.
Garry South, who leads the group pushing the ballot measure, said it’s crucial for Clinton to throw her weight behind the ballot measure as it is the only one focused on drug pricing on any state ballot this fall.
“It will look pretty odd if the Democratic nominee for president, who’s been making a major push for drug pricing, is basically standing down [on this],” South said in an interview.
He pointed to Clinton’s numerous town halls, speeches and panel discussions on drug pricing and said California’s ballot measure is a chance to show what can actually have an effect.
“She is going to be the Democratic nominee and she has plenty of time to come out on this,” South added.
Clinton has so far avoided weighing in on the initiative, and her campaign did not return requests for comment. South said he has regularly updated Clinton’s campaign about the initiative, including two new endorsements inked in the last week from state branches of the AARP and the Urban League.
It's also received support from bold-faced Democratic names like Rev. Al Sharpton and vocal Clinton supporters like Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.).
Even before Sanders’ endorsement of the provision last month, the idea was buzzing nationally. Opposition groups, led by drug giants, spent $58 million in the first few months alone, making it one of the costliest ballot fights in any state in 2016. Costs are expected to rise to almost $100 million by the date of the election.
Those groups have been up against the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which says it has spent a few million dollars to get the initiative on the ballot this year.
Other states are also almost certain to test the idea if it’s approved in California, given the growing costs of drugs and the scrutiny on companies that make them.
Under the ballot initiative, California would be required to pay the same drug prices as those paid by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. That agency is believed to pay some of the lowest prices nationally for drugs because it’s allowed to directly negotiate with manufacturers – making it an appealing model for drug cost-control advocates.
A 2005 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the VA pays an average of 42 percent of a brand name drug’s sticker price – compares to 51 percent paid by state Medicaid programs.
From the beginning, drug companies have been working to defeat the provision. A spokeswoman for PhRMA recently warned that it would “reduce the number of drug choices available” while costing millions in “state bureaucracy and lawsuits.”
A handful of health advocacy groups, including HIV groups, have also been on the fence because of what they describe as confusing bill language and difficult-to-enforce provisions.
The California Medical Association, which is a branch of the powerful National Medication Association, is also opposing what they call a “deeply flawed and unworkable” proposal, according to a statement from the group’s president, Dr. Steven Larson, last month.
Larson warned that it could create a new “prior approval process” for patients with state insurance and that it would wipe out existing agreements between the state and drug companies that he said are already helping to lower costs.
Similar opposition campaigns have taken root in states like Ohio, where supporters say they’ve been kept off the ballot, in part, because of the drug and business lobbies’ strong stance.
In Ohio, a group that includes PhRMA and the Ohio Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit in February with Ohio’s Supreme Court to block the provision.
Pharmaceutical groups have also played a role in opposing bills in Congress from lawmakers like Sanders to allow federal health agencies, like Medicare, to negotiate drug prices.
Gunnels, the policy advisor for Sanders’ campaign, said California’s bill could help shake up a years-old “David and Goliath” fight in Congress.
“While Congress has not been able to stand up to the greed of the prescription drug industry, Californians can by supporting this ballot initiative,” Gunnels said.The first thing to note when discussing the business secrets of the Pharaohs is an acknowledgement that their era was so completely different from our own that almost all cultural, political and, particularly, business parallels we draw between the two eras are bound, by their very nature, to be wrong.
So then, as the critics and the nay sayers and the tall-poppy-chopper-downers ask with their probing questions and their knowing sneers and unfriendly voices: "Why use the Pharaohs as the basis for a business manual?" "Well," I would answer, "I think any 'business' that lasted for more than three thousand years, as did that of ancient Egypt, is probably worth studying!" (Even if in a strict, or indeed even vague sense, it wasn't really a business at all but a civilization, with no comparable notion of "business".) "And what right have you to write such a book?" the chip-on-the-shoulder, drag-everything-down, cynical anti-globalisation types might ask. Well, I may only be a senior loans sales executive but sometimes the best view is from low down!
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That, after all, is why potholing is such a popular sport. Because of the views. Probably.
So here are my eight habits of the highly effective Pharaohs:
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Getting it wrong isn't necessarily wrong - it might be sort of right (in a weird way)
The Pharaohs believed that the sun died each night and was reborn each morning through the legs of the Goddess "Nut".
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Obviously, they were wrong. However, there is no need for us to crow unduly about this. No doubt many of the things we believe in today such as the Premiership, Pilates, and smoothies will eventually turn out to be wrong. Maybe when our civilization has lasted 3,000 years we can "have a pop at the champ"!
What's important isn't what's "true" or "false", it's the business effectiveness of any given idea. The Egyptians prospered for thousands of years on a religious philosophy that was both incredibly complicated and totally wrong. Hence, it doesn't matter if viral internet marketing works or not, the important thing is to trust that it does. One hundred per cent. Go for it!
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Evolution - not revolution!
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Ptolemy I went as far as to create a new god "Serapis" to try to appeal to both his Greek and Egyptian subjects. However, this new deity, with the body of a whale, the face of a cat and the temper of magpie, never caught on. He was meant to be the deity that ruled over inland waterways, canapés and impatience. But because he was introduced without strong Pharonic backing he withered away to become a minor deity favoured only by the stupid.
There is a clear parallel here with new product launches. New Coke and roast beef Monster Munch both suffered a similar fate because of ineffective brand identification.
Encourage your subjects to consider you divine
The Pharaohs were considered to be divine by their subjects and the fact that they were in contact with the realm of gods like Anubis, Amon-Re, Hubble and She-ra made it easier for them to control and tax their lands.
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Obviously, the modern business leader cannot make out he is an actual functioning deity. But you might want to encourage the notion that you are in contact with "higher powers" such as Sugar, Branson and Gates.
Think ahead - 3,000 years ahead!
Given a real business toughie, try asking yourself this: how will my decision here be viewed in several millennia? No one wants to be the arsehole in the hieroglyphics who failed to see the rise of personal computing. Thinking in terms of awesome stretches of unimaginable time may help to crystallise things for you. For example, in 3,000 years time would you rather be known as someone who paid great wages and was well liked by his colleagues, or as someone who, yes, may have had a few slaves, but built a pyramid that he wrongly believed helped his soul transmute to another realm? I think the answer is clear.
Analyse threats - attack using "chariots"
For the Pharaohs the threats were the Assyrians, the Nubians and the mysterious "Sea Peoples". For you it may be web sales competitors, cheap Chinese imports, or in certain extreme cases, the Assyrians, Nubians or "Sea Peoples".
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The Pharaohs responded with mighty crushing force, using chariots and fast-moving armies. You need also to have fast-moving armies - armies of marketing, research and development, and sales.
The chariots of these armies will be your market flexibility. Also, their chariots will be their cars. Make sure to service your car fleet biannually.
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Build big pyramids!
The Pharaohs are known worldwide for their distinctive trademark.
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The pyramid. It's lasted and lasted, and is an undisputed brand leader as a tomb. Ask yourself if, in your product or service sector, your company has a "pyramid". It needn't, obviously, be a pyramid. It might be some other structure or idea or thing. Bill Gates' pyramid is Windows. Roman Abramovich's pyramid used to be gas (or oil) but now it's football. That's a pretty remarkable pyramid, it's gone from being an inchoate substance to 11 men in blue! If your company doesn't have a pyramid - get one, fast! Something you'll be known for around the world. If you can't think of anything, perhaps you should consider building an actual pyramid. They are hardy, striking and easy to maintain.
You could paint it a weird colour or write something on the side.
Consider wearing a false beard
In ancient Egypt, false beards were worn by Pharaohs because they were associated with kings and gods. They were attached by straps and may have been woven of scratchy materials to remind the wearer of the constant irritation of making the transition to the underworld and forgetting a key item, such as a penknife or set of keys.
If you are lacking "gravitas" in the business environment and fear you are being mocked by colleagues behind your back, who perhaps make funny "jokes" at your expense during meetings, maybe, possibly, although probably not, you could consider taking a leaf out of the Pharaohs book - a beard might help give you more authority.
Read next PR drama Flack might be one of the worst TV shows ever made PR drama Flack might be one of the worst TV shows ever made The Anna Paquin-starring drama set in a London celebrity PR firm is so terrible it might just be unmissable.
Of course, in the modern day the beard is more closely associated with the outsider; the Harley-Davidson fanatic or wandering, shouting loony. But a slimline moustache is a powerful sign of authority and virility. If you find your top lip can't muster one unaided, maybe you could try drawing one on?
Relax!
The historical record is too incomplete to let us know whether the Pharaohs took "holidays" as we know them. One thing's for sure, if they didn't, they should have and their civilization would have lasted even longer. Probably. You and everyone in your team needs to beware the demon stress. Take steps to de-stress.
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Wrapping yourself up like a mummy and drinking only energy drinks through a straw might possibly be one way of de-stressing.
Signs of stress can include, but are not limited to: sustained crying/desire to cry; nausea; blood from unexpected orifice(s). Don't let these things bring down your "civilization" (business)!
As told to Jesse Armstrong. Business Secrets Of The Pharaohs is the indispensable guide to business practice gleaned from the wisdom of ancient Egypt by history enthusiast Mark Corrigan. Originally published in the January 2006 issue of British GQ.Side gig economy
Fellow students, we’re the part of the demographic notorious for having to endure through a below average financial situation. We have been actively looking for alternatives to time deteriorating, non-personality development jobs that keep us on the edge of survival to be able to keep up with personal expenses and student loans of all sorts.
This is when side gigs like cryptocurrency mining shine, to give students a solid financial push without taking their extremely precious time while teaching them a thing or two about what can possibly be the successor to real-world currencies.
Cryptocurrencies are a not too new mostly decentralized digital asset designed to function as a medium of exchange, utilizing strong cryptography algorithms to secure financial transactions. They can be an alternative to regular currency, but we’re not there yet so people usually invest in them with the aim of converting them to real-world currency later on. One of their main perks is that no specific nation, organization or individual has control over their value.
Most of the cryptocurrency ‘coins’ are created by a process called mining, which in short means validating transactions by generating hashes on computer processors (CPU). This process has grown harder and more demanding as cryptocurrency miners have increased, and are all actively mining at the same time, to an extent that the outcome of mining cannot even exceed the power consumption of the hardware it’s running on. That’s why new mining technologies have evolved that utilize the parallel processing power of computer GPUs (graphics cards) and quantum computers to maximize mining efficiency.
Bitcoin
Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, who also created the Blockchain, which is a database of records for every transaction that happens with bitcoins.
By the end of 2017, Bitcoin prices have unexpectedly rocketed in value from an average of 3,800$ in September 2017, to nearing 20,000$ by the end of December 2017. Which has caused a massive disrupt in the world’s economy. The lucky early investors in bitcoins have had the worth of their investment doubled over the course of a month, which is insanely rare to happen with any of the real world assets. Bitcoins have then been in constant plummeting in value and are expected to stabilize in value.
Etherium
Another cryptocurrency that has appeared recently is Ethereum, it’s similar to Bitcoin but in contrast, it is said to be Turing capable. Ethereum has gone up in value up to 13,000 percent in 2017 but has then gone down to around 200$ by the end of September 2018.
In 2016, as a result of the exploitation of a flaw, and subsequent theft of $50 million worth of Ether, Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains. The new separate version became Ethereum (ETH) with the theft reversed, and the original continued as Ethereum Classic (ETC).
Crypto mining
With the growing number of miners and the price of cryptocurrencies rocketing, mining on CPU has become nearly impossible to get solid earnings out of, as in most countries, power costs outprice the mined cryptocurrency, so as of recently, specific mining machines have been developed to solve the efficiency issue by being dedicated to just mining and eliminating redundant tasks while it is working.
Those devices, namely ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits), have been popularized by the growing demand of miners for more mining rates. Those devices range from US 500$ up to exorbitantly priced series’ of devices in the 6 figure realm.
Recently, it has been found that mining on GPUs is the best way to mine cryptocurrency, those overpriced things marketed for gamers mostly, are multiple times more efficient than mining on CPUs, and GPUs are common and general purpose enough to have their initial investment cost justified by their uses. In fact, most Computer science, Engineering, and Arts and design students already own or have access to pretty powerful GPUs that are more than enough to handle the mining task efficiently.
In some developing countries where ASICs are rare to find or even blocked by the government, GPUs are a perfectly fine alternative to get the job done efficiently, and unlike most cheap ASICs, they scale up pretty well, which is why many mining enthusiasts develop specific rack units specifically made for housing multiple powerful GPUs all running in parallel, and have solid plans on adding even more GPUs to double the mining rates, all self-funded.
There’s a fair chance that mining can be non-accessible to students due to the fact that with every mining approach there’s a restrictive first big investment needed that might be hard to manage for students, or other restrictions like physical space that various rack units or mining devices occupy, or even restrictions on power usage. For this reason, cryptocurrency can be treated as just any other exchangeable asset, they can be bought or sold or exchanged and in fact there’s plenty of platforms specifically for this sole reason, buying and selling them. Many investors buy amounts of bitcoins from miners when their prices are expected to go up, and then it’s all a matter of strategizing when to buy or sell more of them.
Cryptocurrencies are having a growing support among various internet based, and even real life based as of recently, sites that have transactions. Sites like Reddit, Steam, Shopify and various other places have already started supporting both Bitcoin and Ethereum as a valid payment method. Also, sites that sell physical items like Newegg have jumped on the non-stopping bandwagon. The more support those cryptocurrencies get, the more the demand on them increases, and the more they go up in value. It’s simply a case of supply and demand, but in modern technical terms where supply is merely processing power!
As of recently, financial experts were expecting Bitcoin to significantly go up in price, maybe reaching US 100,000$ by the end of 2018. Famous Venture Capitalist, Tim Draper was on Bloomberg sharing his thoughts on why Bitcoin will be worth a lot more than what it is today. For reference, he’s the person who predicted it hitting US 10,000$ in 3 years, which did in fact happen. His prediction this time might be too far-fetched this time even by Bitcoin’s insane price standards. Tim predicts that today’s currencies will flat out be majorly dominated by cryptocurrencies in the near future.
Draper gives 3 reasons as to why his prediction might be valid; it’s borderless, it’s not subject to the whims of the government and it bypasses traditional banking systems. These alone are enough to bypass the deficiencies of existing currency and banking systems. Draper strongly believes that Bitcoin is the future and already invests a fair portion of his own personal money into it, with no clear intention of selling it even when Bitcoin prices go up.
Another financial analyst, Llew Claasen, who is also the executive director of Bitcoin Foundation, has recently stated his expectations on Bitcoin’s value to hit, you heard it right, US 40,000$, by the end of this year. Further adding that 90% of other cryptocurrencies will be facing a massive downfall, as according to him they’re a scam and not as credible as Bitcoin. Many of the management will not be able to face and control the risks involved in cryptocurrency based projects, which is why he expects most other cryptocurrencies to turn out to be a scam. His words are aided by him stating that in just 2018, there has been at least 5 detected cryptocurrency scams and thinks there’s more to be added to the list.
Claasen further adds that those incidents are actually a lesson for the cryptocurrency community. With the necessary safety precautions taken, cryptocurrency financial experts should learn how to avoid those mistakes to ensure the security and containment of the cryptocurrency community. He further adds that by the end of this year, Bitcoin will be facing volatility before it hits stable, US 40,000$ levels. Many financial experts, along with cryptocurrency experts and enthusiasts in the cryptocurrency community actually believe Claasen’s words and positively believe in the upcoming uprising in Bitcoin’s value despite the current constant downfall in its value as of 7th December 2018.
Another unnamed analyst has noticed a certain pattern that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple follow, despite being strongly unpredictable and almost solely luck related. He’s positive about those cryptocurrencies doubling in value, despite the current constant plummeting. But as we know, this field is very volatile, no one can make a solid foolproof estimation without providing an unknown degree of natural uncertainty due to the nature of these cryptocurrencies. Thomas Lee, managing partner at the financial research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors, expects a new record peak for bitcoin by July 2019, based on deep analysis of the currency’s behavior since 2010.
Other digital currencies also rose after posting steep losses over the past few weeks. Ethereum, the second-largest by market value, was up 2.5 percent over 24 hours as of the 5th of December, while the third-largest, Ripple, and gained 5.3 percent, according to cryptocurrency price tracker coinmarketcap.com. Bitcoin’s increase has coincided with the rally in global stock markets,’ said Miles Eakers, chief market analyst, at FX brokerage Centtrip.
These are exotic numbers, aren’t they? But for university students, these numbers are hard to achieve in the beginning as you can’t start CPU mining for Bitcoin anymore due to its increased complexity. In the early 2000s, it was easy to mine Bitcoin on low-end PCs that used processors like Intel Pentium 4, but now? It’s impossible to mine Bitcoin using your ordinary laptop or PC. That’s why you should consider going for cryptocurrencies that are easier to mine on your PC or laptop, mostly depending on the CPU as it’s way cheaper than GPUs nowadays.
The best cryptocurrency to mine with a CPU :
Is Monero, why?
Because Moreno’s cryptographic algorithm is currently resistant to ASIC’s mining; the devices we mentioned earlier. But what does that mean for you? It means that if you have a CPU and GPU on an ordinary PC, you can use them to mine Monero coin with ease, but how?
You need to get your PC suited at first by downloading the needed software for it, XMR Stak is great at this as it doesn’t care about your GPU or CPU model, it’s very easy to install and access; it’s results are pretty nice as well in regards to other mining software. Remember to always download it from the official site to avoid malware. Oh, your antivirus might also pick it as a malicious file, don’t worry! All mining applications are picked by antiviruses, nothing new.
After getting your PC ready software-wise, you need to join a mining pool to ensure constancy of profit, you must be asking what a mining pool is.
Imagine a large network of people with their devices connected to each other to do a lot of mathematical operations on their PCs to work together in the mining process to increase their hashing power; that doesn’t mean that you get as much as someone with a high-end PC, but you get what you really contributed with and more when it comes to mining in pools. However, you must pay a small percentage of your profit as an entry fee to join any pool around the world. But how do you pick the suitable one for you?
Pick the larger one, always. Why? Because you’ll get the same amount of coins you’re aiming to get out of a small pool in a shorter time interval with a higher payout frequency that gives you the ability to sell your coins in a quicker rate and time, but we can’t promise you a small entry fee in such pools. Stability is a key also, you must check it’s protection against attacks such as DDoS ones and its security in main; not all pools are secure. However, small to medium pools win when it comes to attack-protection.
Finally, after finishing all the previous processes, you’ll need to only create a new MorenoWallet in order to gain your profits. You’ll enter it through the application when asked to finally start mining your Morenos by using your PC.
And remember, this is only the first step in mining. You can trade these coins for another cryptocurrency of your desire in order to achieve higher prices!
Resources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cant-mine-bitcoin-with-pc,37015.html
https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/cryptos-you-can-still-mine-from-home-on-a-computer
https://smartereum.com/3330/bitcoin-forecast-can-bitcoin-price-worth-more-than-100k-in-2018-fri-dec-7/Something incredible happened at the Paralympic games today! 4 visually impaired athletes managed to clock superior timings than the reigning Olympic gold medalist in the 1500m run.
Algeria’s Abdellatif Baka won the gold medal and set a new world record after finishing the 1500m T13 run in 3 minutes and 48.29 seconds. The T13 event is for visually impaired athletes.
USA’s Mathew Centrowitz was the gold medalist in the Rio Olympics with a timing of 3 minutes and 50 seconds.
Beating the reigning Olympian champion by a good 1 and a half second is a matter of huge pride for Baka and it helps set such a beautiful example in front of the world, that despite being struck with some form of disability, the Paralympic athletes have given it their all to become world beaters.
After winning a medal, an ecstatic Baka said “It wasn’t easy to get this gold medal. “I’ve been working one or two years non-stop and it’s been very, very hard for me.”
It’s so refreshing to see that these Paralympians have given hope to a lot of athletes with some sort of physical disability to sweat it out there and do wonderful things. Overcoming the trauma of having a disability can be one of the biggest hindrances while aiming to do something big and that is where a person’s inner strength comes in.
Once the hard work put in by you overshadows the disability god gave you, you will be able to achieve things that even normal people can’t.
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CommentsDear Editor:
The carryover page headline – “Pitco Republicans spent $17K during campaign” – and the portion of the related article in the Aspen Daily News of Oct. 13, 2010, on Pitkin County Republicans’ expenditures over the last year were grossly misleading. The headline and the article imply that we have spent a large amount of money on activities relating to the 2010 elections when nothing could be further from the truth.
If the article were to be believed, the “campaign” started a year ago, beginning Nov. 1, 2009, about eight months before our candidates were even chosen in the Aug. 10 primaries, and our expenditures have been for campaign activities. Since the primaries, we paid bills totaling approximately $3,000, of which only $131 was for expenditures incurred after the primaries. And, as many folks in the Roaring Fork Valley will appreciate who have attended our events, a large portion of our expenditures have been for room rental, refreshments and advertising to the public for events featuring well-known speakers on a variety of current topics. These events are open to the public regardless of political affiliation.
In addition to the public events we’ve sponsored, our expenditures relate to such typical party activities as the traditional Lincoln Day Dinner in early March, the Republican float in the July Fourth Parade, the Pitkin County Republicans Night at the Snowmass Village Rodeo, and our biennial caucuses and county assembly, which we are required by law to hold. Some of our expenditures are offset by attendance fees and donations related to the event, a fact not reflected in the article in question.
We have encouraged and will continue to encourage members of the public, including the press, to attend our events. We’re proud of our outreach activities.
Frieda Wallison
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Pitkin County Republican chair, Old Snowmass[Bitcoin-segwit2x] Bitcoin Cash's mandatory replay protection - an example for B2X
Please remove me from this mailing list. This project and its supporters are a joke. On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 6:09 PM Peter Todd via Bitcoin-segwit2x < bitcoin-segwit2x at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 09:02:25AM -0700, Jared Lee Richardson wrote: > > Right now between signalling and signatories, btc1 has ~95% of the > > hashpower. ~5% of the hashpower is not enough to be viable without a > > hardfork, in which case it would |
as he thought, especially in the light of new genetic research. Simmons was writing in the period before mitochondrial DNA studies arose in the 1980s to revolutionise the field. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is claimed by those who use it to provide a far more illuminating means of tracing human evolution than older and cruder methods used by researchers such as Simmons.
One of the major mtDNA studies was done in 1989 on the populations of the Pacific region. It was made by two of the leading pioneers of DNA research, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson, then of the University of California, Berkeley, who were the authors of the now famous study that found our oldest modern human ancestor, the 200,000 year-old African woman, “Mitochondrial Eve”. Their Pacific study included data from 21 Aboriginal Australians from four regions: Alice Springs, Darwin, Perth and the Broome-Derby area. It found that mtDNA types were not shared between different regions of Australia and that the distribution of mtDNA types in Australia was diverse, just like on other continents. The most likely explanation, Stoneking and Wilson argued, was that “the populations that colonized each continent (including Australia) consisted of more than one mtDNA type.” In other words, the Aboriginal population was not homogenous.
In fact, Stoneking and Wilson said their work showed that at least 15 different mtDNA lineages colonized Australia. They said this confirmed an earlier study of Aboriginal Australians done in 1987 with a smaller sample, which found seven different mtDNA lineages. The authors acknowledged the smallness of their sample but argued that a bigger size would only increase the number of different lineages to be found. “Probably the most important insight to date,” they summarized, “is that relatively many females were involved in the colonization of Australia and Papua New Guinea.” Stoneking and Wilson were heavily sarcastic about the “one people” thesis:
It has been proposed that Australia may have been colonized by a very small number of females, perhaps even by a single pregnant female who floated to Australia on a log. The mtDNA results contradict this assertion; there must have been at least 15 pregnant females that floated across!
In his last book in 1993, Birdsell predicted that a crucial test of his theory would be a comparison of the mitochondrial lineages of the populations of New Guinea and Aboriginal Australia, especially if descendants of the Cairns rainforest people and Tasmanians were included. While there has not been research that has specifically included these last two groups, there was a study in 1999 that went some of the way towards testing the hypothesis. It was conducted by Mark Stoneking, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at Leipzig, and Alan Redd, an anthropologist from Pensylvania State University.
This time, their mtDNA analysis was done on a larger population of 319. Samples were taken from Australian Aborigines and people from the highlands and coastal regions of Papua New Guinea. The Aborigines comprised 105 individuals from northwest Australia (Great Sandy Desert and Kimberley regions) and 95 from Arnhem Land.
The study found there was a great evolutionary gap between the Aborigines and the New Guinea highlanders. It showed that the Aborigines of the north and northwest were comparatively recent arrivals and derived from the same ancestral population as the people of southern India. The New Guinea highlanders, however, had a completely different and much older ancestry. The highlanders, in fact, still retained some genetic links direct with Africa. Stoneking and Redd went out of their way to point out that this pattern fitted the mode of settlement of ancient Australia proposed by Tindale and Birdsell:
These findings are somewhat consistent with Birdsell’s trihybrid model for the peopling ofSahul [ancient Greater Australia], a model that is based on morphological variation. Birdsell hypothesized that Oceanic “Negritos” first populated Sahul, but that two later migrations replaced most of them in Australia but not in the Cairns area of northeast Queensland or in Tasmania and New Guinea… The gene tree in the present study shows that the PNG3 cluster shares sites with African sequences, a finding that may be consistent with Birdsell’s first-migration hypothesis. Our results also suggest that there may have been a migration(s) from an Indian source that reached Australia but not PNG.
However, they went on to argue that, while these findings were consistent with the Negrito hypothesis, they could not find two separate migratory groups that would confirm the distinction between the Murrayians and Carpentarians. Although their study again found multiple migrations in the peopling of Sahul, there was no mtDNA distinction between the Aborigines they tested from northwest Australia and those from Arnhem Land. Rather, both types showed an ancestry that, although from substantially mixed populations, had links with the Hindu castes of southern India. Nonetheless, this research still left much of Tindale and Birdsell’s original theory intact. It found some correlation between their morphological observations and the genetic evidence. There was a strong connection between the people of India and northern Australia and there was still the possibility of an ancient Negrito migration all the way from Africa to Tasmania.
In 1974, when Lanarch and Macintosh announced that their craniological study had concluded the Cairns rainforest people were no different to those of other Queensland Aborigines, they emphasized their interpretation was not biased by any prejudice against the Tindale and Birdsell theory. “If we had found negrito evidence in the Cairns rainforest crania,” they said, “it would have been shouted from the housetops.” Given the propensity of Australian prehistorians to attract considerable media attention to their major discoveries, such as the skeletons at Lake Mungo, we do not doubt them.
This is in stark contrast, however, to the response over the past decade to the findings of Mark Stoneking and his colleagues. Here we have had one of the world’s leading geneticists announcing results that have dispelled a number of hypotheses about Australian origins and partly endorsed one of the most intriguing of them. Yet, this time, no one has been shouting from the housetops. Indeed, as far as we are aware, the academics of our anthropological community have not, in public, made even a murmur.
Linguistics: The field of linguistics is far from being as blank a slate as the major Australian anthropological textbooks would have us believe. The question of whether the Cairns rainforest people spoke a unique Negrito language was thought to have been decided in the 1960s and 70s when Arthur Capell and R. M. W. Dixon argued that they shared speech characteristics with other non-pygmoid Queensland Aboriginal languages. However, processes of language flow and language replacement mean even comparatively isolated peoples eventually merge some of their speech with geographic neighbours, so a lack of linguistic uniqueness need not decide the issue. Moreover, there are some internationally recognized linguists who have since proposed classifications that give some support to the Tindale and Birdsell thesis.
One of these was Joseph Greenberg of Stanford University who, until his death last year, was one of the best-known scholars in the field. In 1971 he proposed his “Indo-Pacific Hypothesis” in which he argued that there was a linguistic trail that followed the route that Tindale and Birdsell thought the Negritos had originally taken from the Andaman Islands, through New Guinea, to Tasmania. He acknowledged that the Tasmanian linguistic data was incomplete because, while it included vocabulary, it provided little grammatical information. Nonetheless his broad classification of world languages held that, apart from those of the mainland Australian Aborigines and the more recent “Austronesian” languages of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, there was a correlation between linguistic patterns and Negrito migration. Greenberg wrote:
The evidence presented here is intended to demonstrate that the bulk of non-Austronesian languages of Oceania from the Andaman Islands on the west in the Bay of Bengal to Tasmania in the southeast forms a single group of genetically related languages for which the name Indo-Pacific is proposed.
Unfortunately, Greenberg did not have any evidence before him about the rainforest people, so he could not comment on whether they fitted into his Indo-Pacific Hypothesis or not.
In 1987, Greenberg’s Stanford colleague, Merritt Ruhlen, classified Australian mainland Aboriginal languages in a way that bore some similarities to a different aspect of the trihybrid theory. In his massive, three-volume study, A Guide to the World’s Languages, Ruhlen made a broad division between the Pama-Nyungan subgroup, which is found in the east, south and west of the Australian mainland, and the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern and northwestern Australia. At least two reviews of the literature in the past decade have observed that this partition corresponds, very roughly, to Tindale and Birdsell’s division between the more recently arrived northerners, the Carpentarians, and the older indigenous people, the Murrayians.
Moreover, one of these reviews by Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University points out that there is a correlation between this linguistic divide and a “veritable efflorescence” of innovative stone tool technology in the north of the continent about 6000 years ago. The dingo, originally a hunting dog, appears to have arrived at about the same time. Bellwood comments:
There are both linguistic and biological data which could indicate the arrival of new populations in Australia during the Holocene [the last 10,000 years], and the evidence of these microlithic tools in Australia may point towards the same conclusion.
In other words, the evidence connecting linguistics, stone tools and migration provides some circumstantial support to the trihybrid thesis.
On its own, however, the field of linguistics is unlikely to shed a great deal of light on this issue. One of the leading paleo-linguists, Johanna Nichols, says language relationships are difficult to trace beyond 8000 years of separate evolution. Since habitation and population divergence in Australia long precedes this date, linguistic evidence is unlikely to resolve the problem of Australian origins either way.
Human evolution: As we have noted, the supporters of the “one people” thesis characteristically explain away any differences found within the Aboriginal population in terms of local evolution. For instance, the Tasmanians had frizzy hair rather than the wavy variety that prevailed on the mainland, so this must have evolved locally after the Tasmanians were separated from the rest of the population when Bass Strait formed about 8000 years ago. The most commonly advocated mechanisms through which this evolution might have occurred are “founder effect” and “genetic drift”. This means that, if a group of people becomes isolated from the rest of the population, the particular genetic characteristics of these founders will become dominant in their offspring. Random genetic change, which occurs all the time, will thus operate on this group differently to the wider population, which has the numbers and enough diversity to smooth out fluctuations of this kind.
Though plausible in explaining, in general, how evolutionary change can occur in isolated groups, this approach has some very big problems when it tries to account for the emergence of Negrito features. As we noted earlier, Tindale and Birdsell identified Negrito characteristics in at least seven different populations inhabiting a geographic arc from the Bay of Bengal to the eastern islands of Melanesia. They explained these populations as remnants of an ancient migration, an account that has all the virtues of Occam’s Razor. In contrast, the proponents of founder effect and genetic drift have to argue that each of these isolated populations, completely independently and quite coincidentally, developed the very same features of small stature, slender build, frizzy hair, and half a dozen other morphological similarities such as skin and hair colour, teeth patterns and the like. This is a highly implausible scenario.
To many lay observers, one obvious evolutionary influence could appear to be the environment. Because these people inhabited dense tropical rainforests, there might be the same processes of selection and adaptation at work as those that produced not only pygmy humans in the African Congo but also pygmy elephants and pygmy deer. The problem with this argument in the Australian context is that only one particular region of tropical jungle produced human pygmies. The Aborigines of the equally-dense Daintree rainforest to the north of Cairns, for instance, are not especially short in stature but have a similar range of height to those in the rest of Australia. The same is true of people from other Australian rainforest regions. If most rainforests did not produce pygmies, an environmental explanation is hard to sustain.
Moreover, the environment cannot account for the Tasmanians. Their ecosystem was not tropical jungle but, since the end of the last ice age, a temperate maritime environment. Apart from the west coast, Tasmania has one of the most people-friendly climates in the world. Yet this environment, too, harboured people with some Negrito morphological features. Even in the Congo, recent research suggests an environmental account is unlikely since the original ancestral homeland of the African pygmies, the Bambuti, now appears to have been not jungle but mixed forest and savanna, from which they were forced by the expansion of neighbouring Bantu people.
Although Tindale and Birdsell were, for the most part, well mannered towards their critics, Birdsell was not averse to taking them on. He was especially miffed when the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies sponsored a conference in 1974 on “The Origin of the Australians”, which he felt was set up to bury him and his ideas. This conference, he later objected, “made no real contribution to the topic in spite of the presence of 26 researchers of international stature using a wide variety of techniques and data”.
In his last book, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal Australia, published in 1993 when he was 85, he poured scorn on those physical anthropologists who ventured into evolutionary theory without any background in the field. When they invoked evolutionary explanations like founder effect and genetic drift against him, he regarded them as blundering into his own territory where they were out of their depth.
Genetic drift, in fact, had originally been named the “Sewall Wright effect” after its originator, who was Birdsell’s principal theoretical mentor. Birdsell maintained his critics did not understand how to apply the concept. None of their claims about local evolution were based on calculations of how much time was required for genetic drift to produce evolutionary change. In Australia, there had been insufficient time, he argued, for genetic drift to produce the degree of morphological diversity observed within the Aboriginal population. His critics were simply sweeping everything under one convenient theoretical carpet:
Their intellectual bulwark consists of an elastic and untestable hypothesis. They presume that the microevolutionary forces of selection, mutation and stochastic processes of intergenerational drift and founder effect suffice in the time available to produce all of the regional variation now evident in the Aborigines. This view is held by archaeologists as a group, and by anatomists and craniologists. Numerically, this consensus is impressive. But none of the advocates are in a position to contribute substantively to testing the action of any of the various microevolutionary forces invoked… None are equipped to judge microevolutionary processes or the implications of regional variations.
In short, none of the explanations advanced by Tindale and Birdsell’s opponents provide a credible account of the evolutionary processes that produced indigenous Australians with pygmoid status and Negrito features. Nor can they even begin to explain the physical similarities between them and people in South East Asia and Melanesia. Obviously, this is not proof that the trihybrid theory is right but it does mean its major rival is, on yet another score, seriously flawed.
Overall, it is hard not to be skeptical about the “one people” hypothesis. It is disputed by recent genetic studies, by the inadequacies of both its craniological measurements and its evolutionary theory, and by its inherent implausibility.
As recently as the 1950s, the anthropological community thought that Australia had only been occupied for about 8000 years, a belief that gave the hypothesis some credibility. Now, however, we have evidence of human habitation extending for more than 40,000 years. For at least 30,000 of these years, recurring ice ages raised and lowered the sea levels between Australia and Asia, eliminating the Arafura Sea and Torres Strait more than once and reducing the furthest distance needed to cross deep water between Asia and either northwest Australia or western New Guinea to less than 100 kilometres.
If one group of hunter-gatherers could make this journey early in the piece, it beggars all belief that none others could do the same over the subsequent 30,000 years. Indeed, as the evidence of the arrival of the dingo and the introduction of a whole new technology of stone tools 6000 years ago would suggest, hunter-gatherer peoples could make the crossing even when sea levels were not much lower than they are today.
In the process of establishing a better account of the origins of the first Australians, we would hope to see scholarship in the future eschewing political connections and proceeding unconstrained by the ideology of the current generation of radical Aboriginal activists. No scholar should be party to the cover-up that has prevailed for the past thirty years about the people of the North Queensland rainforests. Even though, as we have acknowledged, academic anthropologists arrived at their own theory of homogeneity before any political pressures emerged, the fact that the Australian pygmies have today been so thoroughly expunged from public memory suggests an indecent concurrence between scholarly and political interests.
The story of human habitation of this continent is not the exclusive property of anyone. It should be the concern of all of us, black and white, to ensure it is told as openly and as truthfully as possible.
Postscript: What eventually happened to the Cairns rainforest people? The settlement at Yarrabah still exists at Cape Grafton. After 1897 it was not confined to the local people but accommodated Aborigines from all over North Queensland. The missionaries deliberately disrupted traditional tribal betrothals so that a fair amount of inter-marriage took place. It ceased to be a mission in 1960 when it was taken over by the Queensland Government. In 1986 it became a self-governing Aboriginal community but by then a large number of residents had left.
Mona Mona mission continued until 1962 when it was closed down. Its residents were dispersed to other Aboriginal reserves and into the general population. Some former residents now living at Kuranda want the original mission land returned to them.
Today, there are 14,700 Aboriginal people living in the Cairns region. We presume a good proportion of them must be descendants of the original Kongkandji, Barbaram, Indindji and Djabuganjdji tribes. For those who want to pursue the question, Norman Tindale’s genealogical records can now be consulted in a special indigenous family history section at the South Australian Museum.
Note: A footnoted edition of this essay is available hereDonald Trump seems to think he’s still on his reality TV show shouting, “You’re fired!” while President Stephen K. Bannon is busy drafting executive orders with his favorite black crayon.
Such is the surreal universe in which we find ourselves. Those who thought they were electing Trump to the presidency likely have never heard of Jerzy Kosinski — author of the novel and later the movie “Being There,” in which protagonist Chance the gardener, a simpleton who worked for a wealthy benefactor, is mistaken for an aristocrat named Chauncey Gardiner through a grand misunderstanding born of magical thinking.
When Gardiner’s employer dies and the gardener is forced to enter the larger world, his body of knowledge consists only of what he has seen on television. When he speaks about flowers and plants, others interpret his simple words as insightful and profound observations on economics and foreign policy. They hear and see what they need to see and hear. Finally, Chauncey is selected as the perfect next president based solely on people’s utterly incorrect interpretation of him.
Similarly, candidate Trump shouted nonsense to cheering crowds who decided that he was brilliant and insightful. He’s no simple mind, as far as we know (though one wonders why so much family is constantly in attendance), and the titular president of the United States is currently Trump. But it’s Bannon who seems to be pulling the levers — running the show — unelected, inaccessible and unaccountable.
The rumpled former naval officer and filmmaker must be given credit where due. He obviously has a Soviet’s grasp of the power of propaganda, an admitted mission to restore economic nationalism and a high tolerance for the intolerant. His Breitbart news franchise was a welcoming haven for white supremacists and neo-Nazis.
(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
If Karl Rove was George W. Bush’s brain, Bannon is Trump’s conscience.
The noted parallels to Kosinski’s inspired character, meanwhile, are almost too on the nose to merit further comment. But even those who noticed the similarities much earlier in this electoral psycho-saga may be forgiven if they’re surprised by the accuracy with which life imitates art.
With little more than a week in office, President Bannon has been operating at a frantic pace. As Trump sits dutifully at his desk, signing executive orders and memorandums — banning mostly Muslim travelers and doing away with acting attorney general Sally Yates — Bannon grabs a seat on the National Security Council.
Though true that previous administrations have approved visits by political advisers, including David Axelrod during the Obama years, there’s at least one significant difference. Within a day of the Friday afternoon blitzkrieg that ultimately deleted Yates, two council members specifically required to advise the president on security matters — the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — were stripped of their regular seats on the NSC’s principals committee. Now why would this be?
Perhaps Bannon needed a little more elbow room and fewer ears during discussions about which American citizens should die in the name of national security. Until now, such targets have been limited to al-Qaeda militant Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011. As, too, was his 16-year-old son two weeks later. As, also, reportedly, was his 8-year-old daughter this past Sunday during a raid that also cost the life of a member of SEAL Team 6.
To what end? Was this yet another of Trump’s measuring schticks?
The precedent for killing an American citizen was set by President Barack Obama, to be sure. But who knows where the lines will be drawn now? Every day is a jack-in-the-box — or a dozen — a fresh page from Hieronymus Bosch’s sketchpad. Even some of the so-called deplorables are beginning to get twitchy. At first they wrote me to say, “I’m slightly terrified,” and, more recently, “I’m downright scared,” as just one example.
1 of 83 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × A look at President Trump’s first 100 days View Photos The beginning of the president’s term has featured controversial executive orders and frequent conflicts with the media. Caption The beginning of the president’s term has featured controversial executive orders and frequent conflicts with the media. March 17, 2017 President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, walk to Marine One at the White House en route to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
The smart set says, why are you surprised? Trump is doing what he said he would. He’s a different kind of president. Different rules. The media should sit down and shut up. People who don’t like the president’s policies should get lost.
Whatever tiny ray of hope people held out in the belief that Trump ultimately would behave rationally — respectful of protocol, with caution and care, without haste and with wisdom — has been extinguished by a strategy of maximum chaos executed by shock and awe. With heads spinning, if they’re not rolling, most won’t know what hit them until it’s too late. It’s called distraction.
Just as President Bannon intended.
Read more from Kathleen Parker’s archive, follow her on Twitter or find her on Facebook.Edinburgh lottery winner Jane Park has said she has dropped plans to sue Camelot for allowing her to win £1m at the age of just 17.
Speaking on ITV’s Loose Women yesterday Ms Park, now 21, said she still believed the minimum age to play the lottery should be 18 after she struggled with her massive EuroMillions win.
Last year she was fined £110 for punching a city centre doorman and is currently facing a drink drive charge alleging she was three times the limit at the wheel of her BMW at a McDonald’s drivethrough.
But Ms Park, of Prestonfield, said she had decided against launching a legal action against lottery organisers Camelot after reports were widely circulated at the weekend.
She said: “I’d only spoken to a lawyer and wanted to seek legal advice just to get my point out there.
“But because it’s went so far out there I’m not even going to have to go any further because I feel like I’m being listened to now and I feel like people are actually listening to the difficulties.”
Asked whether she had considered giving the money away, Ms Park added: “I’m not saying it’s completely unhappy because there are parts of my life which are good and there are days where I wouldn’t change anything.”If you are a fan of bonkers build threads, this E28 BMW 5 Series might look familiar. This particular 535i gained serious Internet traction back in 2010 when its owner Mike Burroughs decided to rat-rod and slam it. After a rapid rise to fame, the whole project literally went up in smoke when the car caught fire and burned to the ground.
Two years ago, Rusty rose from the ashes once again. Nearly half of the body panels from the old car were re-used and any new ones were slathered in a cocktail of chemicals and oil to in order to fast-forward the ageing process.
You may notice the wheelbase is slightly different. It’s been shortened nearly a foot, to give an old-school Group 5 vibe complete with wide fenders and a super aggressive stance.
If you’re not a fan of its aesthetic, delay your judgment until you’ve had a look underneath. Dry-sumped with an E34 M5 tuned engine eeked out to 3.7-litres and pushing out 500-hp (identical in power output and architecture to an M1 Procar engine), Rusty now sits on a unique F1-style inboard pushrod suspension system designed by H&R, and guzzles 110 Octane fuel. These are all good things.
Wide fenders, an enormous air dam and staggered, gorgeous gold BBS E57s (worn by four-wheeled legends such as the Porsche 935, Zakspeed Capri and Skyline race cars): is this two-door the most brilliantly modified BMW ever? Let us know below.Mel Stuart, the director of the beloved childhood classic Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, died in Los Angeles on Thursday of cancer. He was 83.
The prolific filmmaker got his start in the early 1960s, directing and producing TV documentaries like The Rafer Johnson Story and Sophia: A Self-Portrait, about the Italian actress Sophia Loren. Stuart was nominated for an Oscar in 1965 for his seminal documentary Four Days in November, about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some of his other notable documentaries include three editions of The Making of a President, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and the groundbreaking Wattsax, about the Los Angeles music festival that commemorated the seventh anniversary of the Watts riots. During this time Stuart directed what was just his second feature film, the 1971 musical fantasy Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder.
In a career that spanned over 50 years, in which he directed or produced over 180 films, Stuart was awarded four Emmy awards, a Peabody, and served as president of the International Documentary Association for two years. “[My father’s] impact on the film industry extended far beyond the films he made and the teaching he did,” praised his son Andrew. “Many Hollywood notables worked under his tutelage, including eminent directors James Brooks and William Friedken, the reality producer Bert Van Munster, and screenwriter David Seltzer.”
Read more:
‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ DVD review
The creepy boat scene from ‘Chocolate Factory’
The top 5 stoner movies (that don’t include actual weed)The UN Security Council has voted unanimously to deploy the first wave of military observers to monitor a ceasefire between the Syrian government and opposition fighters.
The vote on Saturday marked the first time UN diplomats on the council all agreed on a resolution since the conflict began more than a year ago.
It calls on both sides to immediately "cease all armed violence in all its forms". It also calls on the Syrian government to implement the six-point peace plan put forward by international envoy Kofi Annan, including the pull-back of troops and heavy weapons from cities and town.
The resolution calls for the deployment of an advance team of up to 30 unarmed military observers to initiate contacts with both sides and begin to report on whether there has been "a full cessation of armed violence in all its forms by all parties".
The council said it intends to immediately establish a larger UN supervision mission after consultations between Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, and the Syrian government.
Deployment of a larger force will be "subject to a sustained cessation of armed violence in all its forms by all parties".
Annan called for speedy deployment of UN monitors. His spokesman, Ahmad Fawzi, said in Geneva on Friday that an advance team of "around 10 or 12" observers, that could quickly be increased to 30, was "standing by to board planes and to get themselves on the ground as soon as possible" once the Security Council approved their deployment.
Swift action
The first five or six UN ceasefire monitors will be in Syria on Sunday, a UN peacekeeping spokesman said.
"Immediately [after] the Security Council passed the resolution today, we had five or six military observers getting on a plane. They will arrive in Syria probably tomorrow," Kieran Dwyer told AFP news agency.
Bashar Jaafari, the Syrian UN ambassador, responded to the resolution by first citing the capture and confession of two Syrian youth hired to commit crimes as examples of armed military groups in the country.
He then affirmed support for Annan's six-point plan.
"While we feel that this resolution was not balanced, Syria affirms that it is in its interest to guarantee the return of security and stability to the country. We hope that the countries who abide by this resolution would implement it practically and would not send lethal or non-lethal aid to the terrorists and the armed groups," said Ja'afari.
Syria's main opposition coalition welcomed the resolution.
"We express our welcome of the decision," the Syrian National Council said in a statement signed by its leader Burhan Ghalioun, reported AFP.
"We are ready to act to make the Annan plan a success," it said.
Observers prepared
Russia and China vetoed two previous resolutions that would have condemned President Bashar al-Assad's government for its bloody crackdown on protesters and raised the threat of possible further action.
They argued that the resolutions were not balanced and did not address the attacks by rebel fighters.
In the debate on the resolution adopted Saturday, Russia submitted a rival text to the US and Western-backed draft, and raised questions on Friday evening about the final draft.
But Vitaly Churkin, Russian ambassador, said before Saturday's vote that his country "was satisfied" and would vote "yes".
The ceasefire, which formally took effect on Thursday, is at the centre of Annan's peace plan, which is aimed at ending more than a year of bloodshed that has killed over 9,000 people, according to the UN.
It also aims to launch inclusive Syrian-led talks on the country's political future.Regina Garcia Cano And Ken Ritter, The Associated Press
LAS VEGAS -- Law enforcement authorities on Monday said a hotel security guard was shot by the Las Vegas mass shooting's gunman before he opened fire on concert-goers.
Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo had previously said the guard was shot after gunman Stephen Paddock fired at the country music festival and that the guard's arrival in the hallway of the Mandalay Bay hotel may have caused Paddock to stop firing.
It was not immediately clear why the timeline of the shooting changed a week later and what the impact could be on the investigation.
On Monday, Lombardo said security guard Jesus Campos was in a hallway of the Mandalay Bay hotel responding to a report of an open door when he heard drilling from Stephen Craig Paddock's room.
Paddock, who had installed three cameras to monitor the approach to his suite, opened fire through the door, spraying 200 shots down the hall and wounding the guard, who alerted other security officials, Lombardo said.
A few minutes later, Paddock began a 10-minute killing spree that killed 58 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, Lombardo said.
Authorities also said Monday that Paddock targeted aviation fuel tanks, stocked his car with explosives and had personal protection gear as part of an escape plan.
Paddock had power tools and was attempting to drill a hole in an adjacent wall, perhaps to mount another camera or to point a rifle through, but he never completed the work, Lombardo said. He also drilled holes and bolted a metal bar to try to prevent the opening of an emergency exit stairwell door near the door of his room.
Lombardo again expressed frustration with the pace of the investigation, but not with the investigators who have yet to pinpoint the motive behind the shooter's decision to fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel casino on a Las Vegas Strip concert crowd of 22,000 on Oct. 1.
"It's because this individual purposely hid his actions leading up to this event, and it is difficult for us to find the answers to those actions," Lombardo said. "We believe he decided to take the lives he did and he had a very purposeful plan that he carried out."
There is still no evidence Paddock was motivated by ideology, or that there was another shooter, he said. Investigators have found 200 incidents of Paddock moving through the city, and at no time was he with anyone else, Lombardo said.
Lombardo said police and FBI agents, including behavioural profilers, still haven't found a particular event in Paddock's life that might have triggered the shooting. The sheriff added that a complete evaluation of Paddock's mental condition was not yet done. Authorities didn't find a note in his room, only a paper with numbers, he said.
Investigators believe the numbers represented calculations for more precise shots, according to a law enforcement official who wasn't authorized to discuss the details of the ongoing investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The sheriff also confirmed investigators are talking with Paddock's brother Eric Paddock, who travelled to Las Vegas, and continue to speak with the shooter's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, to get insight.
Lombardo declined to reveal what they've said, but he stated, "Every piece of information we get is one more piece of the puzzle."
Eric Paddock said he came to Las Vegas to retrieve his brother's body in hopes of sending the cremated ashes to their 89-year-old mother in Orlando.
Clark County Coroner John Fudenberg said Monday he could not discuss the results of an autopsy done on Stephen Paddock, who police said shot himself dead before officers arrived at the Las Vegas Strip hotel suite from which he rained gunfire on a concert crowd below.
Eric Paddock told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that he plans to put his brother's assets in a trust that would benefit the shooting victims.
Law enforcement interviews with Paddock's brother Saturday and Sunday were part of an exhaustive search through the 64-year-old's life.
Meanwhile, friends and relatives of the victims and other concert-goers who survived returned Monday to reclaim baby strollers, shoes, phones, backpacks and purses left behind in the panic as they fled.
The personal effects being recovered were strewn across the massive grassy concert venue where 22,000 country music fans attended the Route 91 Harvest festival have become sentimental memories of loved ones for some and haunting reminders of the night of terror for others.
People left behind thousands of items, Clark County Emergency Manager John Steinbeck said.
Those who were in two areas of the concert grounds were being allowed to retrieve their things in groups, with authorities expanding the offer Monday to include people who were seated west of the stage. Authorities are powering up cellphones and asking people to text their full names to the phones to ensure they are returned to the correct owners.
At the assistance centre set up at a convention centre in Las Vegas, a steady stream of individuals walked in on Monday looking for purses, wallets, cellphones and even a wedding bracelet. Volunteers filled out intake forms with detailed descriptions of their lost items, and later, FBI victims assistance agents asked for additional questions.
People received their belongings in re-sealable plastic bags and were asked to check them. After identifying their items, some smiled and others hugged the FBI agents or Red Cross volunteers who had helped them.
The sombre mood inside the hall was occasionally deepened by the weeping of some.Poker legend Antonio Esfandiari was disqualified from play in this week’s $5,300 buy-in PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event for something he did underneath the table.
Esfandiari and poker-playing businessman Bill Perkins had a prop bet that called for Esfandiari to lunge everywhere he went for 48 hours. The bet began on Jan. 8.
It’s unclear how much it was for, but the three-time WSOP bracelet winner called the prop bet “massive.”
“Been lunging around my hotel room all day,” Esfandiari later Tweeted. “Just going to the bathroom and back is starting take a toll on my legs. I am in trouble [tomorrow]!”
After awhile of avoiding all methods of getting around besides lunging, Esfandiari apparently found himself with the need to use the restroom during play on Monday and didn’t want to lunge all the way there to the use the toilet. He decided to urinate in a container underneath the table, according to various Tweets and media reports. Esfandiari himself hasn’t explicitly said what he did, but he did confirm what had transpired when replying to a flood of comments on social media.
“Following a violation of our tournament rules for players participating in the PCA, Antonio Esfandiari was disqualified from the main event,” PokerStars spokesman Eric Hollreiser said in a statement. “We do not expect to provide any further details on this issue.”
Esfandiari has apologized for the incident, calling his actions “unacceptable” and saying that he was “not happy with myself today.” He did say he won the prop bet. |
aceans is how big some of their neurons need to be in order to move information from their bodies to their brains and back.
A while back someone asked me over on Quora what the longest axon is. Now, for those of you who don't know, axons are the "cables" that connect neurons with one another and carry information between them (technically most neurons don't actually physically connect because they're separated by small gaps called synapses, but for the purposes of this, you can think of them as connected).
After thinking about it for a bit, my first guess that the blue whale-equivalent of the motor axon that carries information along the sciatic nerve would be the longest because, in humans, the sciatic nerve is the longest. But then I remembered it doesn't have the longest axons.
Check out the figure on the left there. See that second neuron, the "unipolar neuron"? That long cable moving vertically in the image is one long axon.
Those can get really long.
Mammals have a cell called the dorsal root ganglion (DRG). The DRG carries sensory information from the body to the brain. It's unipolar, so it's got a loooong axon, where one end has receptors in the skin and the other end enters the spinal cord, ascends in the fasciculus gracilis and synapses in the nucleus gracilis all the way up in the brainstem.
This means that for the sensations in the toes, the DRG axon goes all the way from the toe to the brainstem, which is at about the same height as the mouth. This can be more than 2 meters long in tall people!
Now think about what this means for a blue whale. Blue whales are almost certainly the largest mammale to have ever existed, which means they're the largest animal that we now to have a very long axon like a DRG (we don't know a whole lot of details about dinosaur nervous systems).
Therefore the longest axon in the blue whale, which is itself the largest mammal, is probably the DRG.
When trying to confirm my guess about the longst axon, however, I learned a lot of crazy stuff.
For example, the largest blue whales are around 30 m long. This would suggest a DRG axon of at least 25 m, or 75 feet, long.
Here's where it gets really nuts and things stop making sense to me...
Axons typically conduct signals between a wide range of speeds: 0.5 to 100 m/s. This means that if I were to flick a whale's tail (as one might do), it could take anywhere from a third of a second (a long time in brain time!) to more than SIX SECONDS to reach the whales' "conscious" perception (assuming they have consciousness).
Even more wild, according to this paper by Douglas H. Smith published in 2009 in Progress in Neurobiology:
...blue whale spinal axons growing at 3 cm/day represent an increase in volume that is likely more than double the volume of the entire neuron cell body—each day. This rapid volume increase for neurons is akin to the peak cellular growth rate observed for rapidly dividing cancerous cells.
(bold emphasis mine)
Basically, these axons are growing faster than cancerous cells and the speed at which they stretch should cause them to tear or rupture.
What?
Man, whale brains are cool.
(This post is adapted from my personal blog, Oscillatory Thoughts.)So what do you do with 14 heads of pickled garlic? I’m not sure that I’ve ever had pickled garlic, or maybe I have… apparently pickled garlic can be used just as raw garlic; simply chop it up, sauté in some olive oil, and serve it with dishes deserving of zest. This recipe is directly from the Joy of Pickling cookbook, the only change I made was increasing the jar yield from 3 half pints to 2 pints (4 half pints). When packing the jars, definitely leave a full 1/2 inch headspace, as the contents will expand during processing. I may have packed my jars too full, as they didn’t deliver the lovely seal popping sound that they typically do.
Ever notice that blue/green tinge color you garlic turns when pickling with vinegar? Why is this? Is it safe? Actually, blue garlic is perfectly harmless and totally normal. The color tinge is due to an enzymatic reaction in which sulfuric compounds begin to break down when exposed to heat and oxygen. Science!! 🙂Don’t worry Ryan Dzingel, Daniel Winnik knows what you’re feeling right now.
The Ottawa Senators forward had to leave the game in the first period after taking a shot to the ear from teammate Erik Karlsson Thursday night. Dzingel was not on the bench to start the second period, but he did return to the game. We didn’t get an update on his status until after the game — and what we got sounded rather painful.
Turns out Dzingel needed to have his ear “reconstructed.”
It was reported that Dzingel also had to, unsurprisingly, go through the league’s concussion protocol, which he passed.
Winnik had a similar incident earlier this season when he took a shot to the ear when he dropped to make a block. He “lost a piece of his ear” on that play, but didn’t have a reconstruction.
You can see video of Dzingel taking the shot to the ear at the top of this post.The main aim of this deck is to force yourself to draw out while Lab Maniac is on the field. I've put in several ways to do this.
1). Drop Lab Maniac, before playing leveler. You can then wait until your next draw step or use a Cerulean Wisps to force a draw to win.
2). Get out Primordial Hydra and Vorel together. Get Hydra to 50-60 counters before dropping a Lab Maniac and Zegana.
3). Get Tamiyo and Omniscience out (Jace helps with getting Omniscience onto the field), then infinitely cast a draw spell until you draw Lab Maniac, play him then continue to draw out until you win.
There a couple of fallback options in this deck. As Lab Maniac is a massive target for removal I have put in an alpha authority to protect him from burn etc. and a Progenitor Mimic to hopefully ensure you do have one out. If none of the combos can be achieved, Mind Unbound, Doubling Season and Archmage Ascension, along with proliferation will help ensure you can at least tutor for the combos, or force yourself to draw out with Mind Unbound. Graceful Adept and Jin-Gitaxias help secure a card advantage while you do so.In the MY STORY section, we present some of the most compelling and pertinent stories and experiences shared with us by our readers. Do you have something to share? Write to us: contact@thebetterindia.com with “MY STORY” in the subject line.
This is a story of two friends, Deepak Chauhan aka DK, who is a self-taught photographer and software engineer; and Bhishma Choudhary, who quit his job in a startup for the sake of travelling. The duo travelled across India for 19 months on their bikes.
It started when Bhishma’s father gifted him a Bullet. Bhishma didn’t know how to ride a bike and on December 16, 2014, he asked me to join him on a road trip to Kanyakumari. I was not sure of how this trip would turn out, but we decided to try and were on the way to Goa on December 27.
We didn’t plan such a long journey initially, but we also didn’t stop once we started. After 19 months, the journey has completely changed our lives.
From Goa, we went to Kanyakumari via the Western Ghats. It was on our way back to Mumbai that we met our first and only accident. Bhishma was riding the bike and he wanted to take a sharp turn at 70km/hr. Two cars suddenly came from the front, blocking the road. We survived and managed to reach Mumbai. After this first adventure, we decided to ride to Delhi, covering Gujarat and Rajasthan on the way.
Our daily budget was about Rs.1,000 for two people including the cost of fuel, stay, food, etc. I had been working full-time during the journey for a multinational software company as a software testing engineer. We used to ride from 5am to 11am. Then I would work till 5 pm from wherever we might have reached, while Bhishma would start reading his books.
I have worked from temples, gardens, beaches, mountain tops, highways, and more.
We spent a month in Gujarat and a month in Rajasthan. By the time we reached Delhi, Bhishma came up with the idea that we should extend the road trip to Leh. It is the most beautiful place I have seen so far and can go there as many times as possible. Bhishma decided to end the trip after Leh and I bought a second hand bike because I wanted to see everything possible.
Two months later, when I reached Dhanbad via Punjab, Haryana, UP, MP, Bihar, and Jharkhand, I got a call from Bhishma. He had taken up a job but his mind was somewhere else and he wanted to start the journey again. I was on the other side of India and we decided to start from Mumbai. So I left my bike at a friend’s place in Dhanbad and took a train. We left Mumbai on Bhishma’s bike – this time crossing Maharashtra and the east coast to reach Dhanabad and continue towards Bhutan and northeast India via West Bengal. We were joined by another college friend, Mrigank.
By this time I had left my job for the love of travelling. Bhishma and Mrigank decided to end the trip again after Bhutan. Mrigank went back for his job and Bhishma started exploring options to work for the betterment of rural India.
Meanwhile, I contacted a friend to develop an app named TripMapic, with the aim of bringing back the old habit of sending postcards to friends and loved ones from the locations we are exploring. The app can be downloaded here.
By the time I reached Guwahati, the engine of my bike stopped working and the cost of repair was very high. I decided not to quit and travelled across Guwahati on foot. This was when I realized that I can walk 30 km in one day. Soon Bhishma called me again with a surprise. He was still at the India-Bhutan border and wanted to travel across Meghalaya. I told him about my bike and he offered that I could ride his bike for the next few months while I was in northeast India. So I sold my Thunderbird to a mechanic in Shillong for Rs. 25,000.
The mechanic introduced me to a rider club of Meghalaya named RERAM, which later turned out to be very helpful. People used to tell me to remain careful in some places of northeast India, because of the fear of militant attacks. One such place was Haflong, where I reached in the evening and didn’t find a hotel to stay in. All hotels were very expensive and I was running short of money. I just parked my bike at the city circle and was thinking of what to do when a person named Bankim saw my bike and asked where I was coming from.
Learning that I need help, he immediately called the rider group named Haflong Highlanders, and they helped me get a free hotel room.
I met Mr. HK Dharmadarshi in Mizoram. He works in Aizawl and is a traveller too. One day he called me over and asked me to narrate my story in front of 200 people who were waiting to hear it. One of them asked how I get the money to travel so much. My answer was the same – I am just running as far as my luck will take me.
I didn’t have money when I started, and at that point I was left with just Rs. 2,000. By afternoon that day, those people collected and donated Rs. 13,000 so I could continue with my ride.
I then visited Manipur and Mizoram. As a traveller on a bike I was welcomed by every family in all these places. I was in Imphal when the earthquake struck and it was followed by the cyclonic rains.
But despite all hardships, I didn’t stop travelling. I had come so far. How could I leave this beautiful part of the country unexplored!
After reaching Mechuka village, I started getting home sick and decided to return. After reaching Nagpur, I came to know that all routes from Madhya Pradesh were blocked because of the floods. So I changed my route again and went to Mumbai instead of my hometown, Haridwar.
What will I do next?
I will work on my travel app and after that, I will travel to Europe soon. I want to see the world before I am 30 and I have only three years left now. You can read the full story here.
Like this story? Or have something to share? Write to us: contact@thebetterindia.com, or connect with us on Facebook and Twitter (@thebetterindia).Pin 0 Shares
We’ve talked quite a bit on this site about the recent tax cut package that was passed, and some of the provisions that were included in the bill. One thing we haven't done, however, is to look at all the changes that we can expect to see in 2011 for individual taxpayers. What tax changes will happen for 2011?
2011 Tax Changes
President Obama and the Congress passed the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 in the last half of December, and as a result tax rates didn't go up for some as would have happened otherwise. But the tax rates remaining unchanged wasn't the only thing to happen due to the bill.
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Here are some of the changes that you can expect to see due to this tax cut bill.
Tax Rates Remain The Same Through 2012
The 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts meant a reduction marginal tax rates for all taxpayers. Those rate reductions will be extended for two years under the tax package. That means the 2011 federal income tax rates will remain essentially unchanged for everyone, including the high income earners. The tax rates for 2011 are shown below. The main changed from 2010 are some rate range adjustments due to inflation.
2011 Tax Brackets Single Married Filing Jointly 10% Bracket $0 – $8,500 $0 – $17,000 15% Bracket $8,500 – $34,500 $17,000 – $69,000 25% Bracket $34,500 – $83,600 $69,000 – $139,500 28% Bracket $83,600 – $174,400 $139,500 – $212,300 33% Bracket $174,400 – $379,150 $212,300 – $379,150 35% Bracket $379,150+ $379,150+
Payroll Taxes Reduced By 2%
A provision that has been controversial, but is liked by those who would like a tax cut is the 2% payroll tax holiday for 2011. Basically you’ll be paying 4.2% in payroll taxes for social security and medicare in 2011, versus the normal 6.2% on the first $106,800 in income.
Estate Tax Reinstated At Lower Rate
The estate tax lapsed in 2010, but would have been returning next year at a rate of 55% with an exemption of $1 million this package hadn’t happened. The tax cut bill changed that to have it be a top rate of 35% and a $5 million exemption.
Date To Apply For Unemployment Benefits Extended
The original date to apply for up to 99 weeks of unemployment for the long term unemployed expired on 11/30. This will extend that date for another 13 months. Note that the 99 weeks of unemployment benefits aren’t available to everyone, but only in some high unemployment states.
$1000 Child Tax Credit Extended
The $1000 child tax credit will remain at $1000 per child instead of dropping to $500 as it was slated to do.
Energy Tax Credits Return At Lower Rate
In 2010 the tax credits for energy efficient home improvements were quite popular because you could receive up to 30%, or $1500 on many home improvements in the form of a tax credit. The 2011 home improvement tax credit is significantly reduced to a lifetime maximum of $500, and only applies to 10% of the cost of the home improvement. So if you took part and got your $1500 credit in 2010, you can't get this one. Details here.
Standard Deduction For Married Filers Kept
The package will maintain the standard deduction for married filers so that it will be twice that of a single filer – negating the so called “marriage penalty”.
Patch for Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)
The amount of income exempt from AMT will rise for 2010 and 2011. In 2010, the amount exempt from AMT will be $47,450 for single filers, $72,450 for married filing jointly. In 2011, it would be $48,450 and $74,450 respectively.
Flexible Spending Account Changes
Workers with Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) may no longer use pretax funds to pay for many over-the-counter medicines—aside from insulin—without a prescription. This should reduce many people's participation is this great tax savings. 2011 FSA Changes.
Roth IRA Conversions
The income limit for conversions has been permanently removed, so this year all taxpayers may still convert ordinary IRAs into Roth IRAs. But taxpayers who convert to Roth IRAs in 2011 no longer have the option of deferring conversion income into later years, as was true for 2010 Roth IRA conversions. Those who converted in 2010 do have until next Oct. 17 to decide whether to use this deferral.
Investment Taxes
Rates for both long-term capital gains and dividends will continue to be low. For taxpayers in the 15% income tax bracket and below, the rate is zero. For those in the 25% bracket and above, the rate is 15%.
Tax Filing Delayed For Some, Deadlines Extended For All
As you prepare to file your taxes this year to either get a refund or pay an amount owed, remember that itemizers will have to wait to file until mid to late February. The reason? The tax cut package was passed so late in the year that now the IRS is playing catch up to implement all of the tax rates, deductions and credits.
Also of note, the 2011 tax filing deadline is April 18th this year, due to the 15th being on a government holiday – on a Friday.
So what do you think of the tax cut package? Is it a good thing, bad thing 0r a little of both? If you don’t like it, what would you have rather seen?
Pin 0 SharesFeatures: October 2015
Signs of Intelligent Life Pigs possess complex ethological traits similar to dogs and chimpanzees.
Jo-Anne McArthur
If you visit Nikki, one of the domestic pigs who lives at Farm Sanctuary’s 175-acre shelter in Watkins Glen, New York, you can expect her loud voice to announce your arrival. Nikki is gregarious and quick to socialize with human visitors. Don’t take it personally, however, if she keeps you at bay from her babies. She has good reason to be wary of strangers. Prior to her rescue, Nikki escaped from a gestation crate during the record-breaking flood of the Cedar River in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in June, 2008. Shortly thereafter, Nikki gave birth to a litter of piglets. Displaced and alone, Nikki protected and nursed her newborns despite her stress, exhaustion, and hunger. Now, years after that traumatic experience, Nikki continues to be inseparable from her piglets and extremely protective of them.
Rose, another mother pig, also escaped from a gestation crate during the Iowa flood. Unlike Nikki, however, Rose suffered the loss of her offspring. After her relocation to the Watkins Glen shelter, Rose exhibited signs of depression. She refused to eat. She ignored her fellow pigs’ attempts to cheer her with invitations to play. Shelter workers had to feed her with a syringe. Observing that Rose was showing interest in Nikki’s interaction with her latest litter, workers moved Rose into a pen with Nikki. Rose began to help care for Nikki’s young ones, and Nikki, the normally cautious, vigilant mother, readily allowed Rose’s assistance. Gradually, Rose began to eat on her own. And with the combined attention of two nurturing adults, Nikki’s piglets flourished. One piglet in particular, a female named Rory, became Rose’s closest companion. Although Rose never displayed the adventurousness of some of her fellows, her recovery shows the importance of social interaction, what we might call friendship, to pigs’ psychological health.
The story of Nikki and Rose is more than an inspiring anecdote. Earlier this year in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, we published the findings of a comparative review we conducted of all the major peer-reviewed journals that have published research papers on pig cognition, emotion, self-awareness, personality, and social complexity. We also conducted a complete search of the websites of the major authors in these fields for all of their relevant projects. Finally, to ensure that our search was comprehensive, we examined the reference section of each paper to find additional articles in miscellaneous journals. We did not place time restrictions on when articles had been published, but we did give priority to more recent papers when appropriate. Our review was a thorough but not exhaustive analysis of all studies of cognition and emotion in pigs. We chose to focus on the more complex capacities in pigs that are arguably at the leading edge of intelligence and sentience. We also identified compelling and promising areas of cognition, emotion, and sociality that we hope will be investigated in future studies.
Our review has put the available research on pigs into a comparative framework that enables us to see how the results of studies on pigs relate to or differ from the results of tests on other animals such as chimpanzees and dogs. Our findings suggest very strongly that pigs deserve inclusion in the “smart” animal club. Pigs live in complex social communities, they love to play, and they recognize each other as individuals. They are adept at solving mazes and other tests involving object location, and they can recognize a simple symbolic language. They have excellent long-term memories. As the interaction between Nikki and Rose demonstrates, pigs feel a range of emotions, and they respond to each other’s emotional states. Connie Pugh
Pigs’ evolutionary history holds one of the keys for interpreting current research on their capacities. As with all domestic animals, many species-specific traits have their origins in the traits of wild ancestors. Domestic pigs descended from wild boars (Sus scrofa), a gregarious species that underwent the first phase of domestication in the Near East about 9,000 years ago. Multiple smaller domestication events occurred over time, with much crossbreeding between Asian and European pigs, until the species we now recognize as Sus domesticus eventually emerged.
In considering the history of domestic pigs, one should remember the particular set of physical and behavioral traits for which they were selectively bred. Domestic dogs were selected for traits that promoted human companionship and work. Pigs were selected for traits that promoted growth and reproduction. Pig domestication did involve some artificial selection for temperament to make pigs easier to manage when kept in close proximity to humans. Primarily, though, they were domesticated to serve as a food source. Consequently, their cognitive and behavioral capacities remained relatively unchanged from their wild forbears. In settings that vary widely in terms of comparative freedom and restraint, domestic pigs express many of the instincts, motivations, and sensory abilities that enable wild boars to survive. Likewise, both species show signs of distress in highly artificial settings.
It should come as no surprise—considering the gregarious nature of their wild counterparts—that pigs are highly social animals. For both domesticated pigs and wild boars, the basic social unit is several females and their offspring, with strong parallels in reproductive behavior, parenting, and development. Tactile information plays an important role in their behavior. The highest density of tactile receptors is found in their snout, which they use to root, carry, and push items, and to interact with each other. Olfaction is the pig’s keenest sense. They can identify fellow pigs, determine each other’s state of sexual arousal, and even detect each other’s emotions during aggressive encounters. In social contexts, pigs also use their sense of hearing. Mother pigs and their offspring communicate by vocalizing, and pigs can determine the identity and arousal state of individuals by listening to each other’s voices. Farm Sanctuary
Pigs’ ability to differentiate each other, part of what is termed social cognition, provides evidence that pigs are as socially complex as other intelligent mammals, including primates. This capacity forms the basis for all pig social relationships, including the establishment of dominance hierarchies. Dogs can discriminate between barks recorded in different contexts from the same individual, and also from different individuals in the same context. Elephants are well known for their sophisticated recognition of other individual elephants even over long distances. Pigs have the ability to discriminate between individuals, even closely-related individuals, by smell and by auditory cues, a finding that suggests pigs vocalize in ways unique to each individual. In one study, sows listening to the calls of piglets responded more strongly to the vocalizations of their own offspring than to unfamiliar piglets, suggesting pigs can tell each other apart by vocal cues alone.
Pigs can also differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar humans. This capacity to tell the difference between members of another species may indicate that pigs have significant cognitive flexibility. While dogs can tell individual humans apart and read some human facial expressions, pigs, who—unlike dogs—were not selectively bred for human companionship, can distinguish between humans by differences in body size and some facial aspects. In one study, young miniature pigs were handled gently and fed treats for five weeks. They were then put in a Y-shaped maze and were free to approach either the gentle, generous handler or an unfamiliar human. Results of the study showed that the pigs could tell the difference between the handler and the stranger by following a range of cues that relied on their senses of smell, sight, and hearing. Surprisingly, smell appeared to be the least useful sensory tool during this study.
The ability to take the perspective of another individual is considered a complex mental capacity that may form the basis of a specific kind of social cognition known as Machiavellian Intelligence, which is defined by such political maneuvering as deceit and manipulation. Perspective-taking is also associated with other sophisticated cognitive capacities, including self-awareness, theory of mind—the ability to perceive another individual as possessing a mind that differs from one’s own—and empathy.
As an example of likely perspective-taking, pigs are particularly adept at taking into account what their peers know and can see when they are in competition for food resources. In one study of pairs of pigs, one was shown the location of hidden food and the other was not. When the two pigs (informed and uninformed) foraged for food, the uninformed pig was able to exploit the knowledge of the informed pig by following him to the food source and displacing him. In a follow-up study, pigs that had been exploited in this way altered their behavior to avoid being exploited again. These experienced pigs were more inclined to go to the food source when they were likely to arrive before potential exploiters. In another study, experienced pigs increased their foraging speed to stay ahead of exploiters. Such behavior may be comparable to those of other perspective-taking animals, including chimpanzees and Western scrub jays, both of whom show similar strategic and counter-strategic behavior in competitive foraging situations. Ellen Portia
Pigs are even sensitive to the visual perspectives of humans. They can use human head cues, for example, to tell the difference between a human who is paying attention to them and a human who is not. If pigs are so sensitive to the attentional state of others and can take the perspective of rival pigs in a competitive situation, how self-aware are they?
The mirror test is one of the few direct measures of sense of self in animals. Subjects are anesthetized and marked on parts of their body, indicators which they cannot feel on their skin or see without a mirror. After animals awaken, they demonstrate mirror self-recognition (MSR) if they use the mirror to touch and explore the newly marked part of their body. Great apes, dolphins, elephants, and magpies show convincing evidence of MSR. Other species, such as macaques, dogs, and pigs, may use the mirror to find hidden food but do not use the mirror to investigate themselves in any demonstrable way. Presumably, these animals comprehend something about the relationship between their own body, the mirror image, and the food. In one mirror experiment, piglets showed signs of a precursor to self-awareness known as contingency-checking: repetitive movements at the mirror to see if the image is doing the same thing as one’s body. Usually, animals that show contingency-checking go on to demonstrate MSR. Therefore, indications of possible pig MSR are intriguing. If subsequent tests are more conclusive, pigs will join an elite cognitive nonhuman group. If not, their behavior still shows they understand something about themselves in relation to their environment. In either case, pig responses in these initial mirror studies hint that they possess a sense of self akin to that of other intelligent animals, such as monkeys.
Pigs have even been trained to play video games. In one study, pigs manipulated a joystick with their snouts to move an on-screen cursor. Despite the visual and physical challenges required by this task—pigs rely on their snouts for many actions, but not typically to play with a joystick—all the pigs figured out how to use the joystick to obtain an on-screen target. Pigs even outperformed dogs in this task. Manipulation of a joystick to acquire a target indicates the beginnings of a complex capacity known as self-agency, the ability to recognize actions caused by oneself versus those controlled by someone else. Chimpanzees and monkeys are also good at performing similar tasks.
Besides intelligence, our review of the literature found abundant evidence for emotions and personality in pigs. Anyone who works closely with them can attest to the anecdotal evidence that pigs are sensitive and emotional characters that do not lack for personality and, dare we say, charm. One of the ways pigs demonstrate their emotional connection to other pigs is through a phenomenon called emotional contagion, the arousal of emotion in one individual when witnessing the same emotion in another. To many scientists, emotional contagion may represent a building block for the more complex cognitive process of empathy, the ability to feel the emotional state of another.
In one study, researchers housed pigs in groups of six and trained two pigs from each group to anticipate food (a rewarding event) or social isolation (an aversive event). Two pigs from each group were trained to associate the music of Bach with food, and two others learned to associate a military march with social isolation. The music was played to two other pigs (“naïve” pigs) without any positive or negative association. When researchers played the music to the pigs in a group setting, a few of the trained pigs showed anticipatory responses in the form of either “happy” behavior, such as play and tail-wagging (yes, pigs wag their tails!), or stress behavior (standing alert, laying their ears back, urinating, and defecating) depending on which music they heard. When a naïve pig was near a trained pig that acted stressed after hearing the marching music, the naïve pig also became more alert and laid her ears back. The contagion response was stronger to negative emotions than to positive ones. From an evolutionary point of view, it makes adaptive sense to be more attuned to threats than positive experiences. When music was played to naïve pigs when they were apart from their group, it had no effect on their behavior. Clearly, the naïve pigs responded to the emotions of the trained pigs as they anticipated either a positive or negative situation. Jo-Anne McArthur
Personality studies of pigs are important for understanding what traits pigs share with other species, as well as for better understanding individual variability in cognitive performance. Studies of personality in nonhuman animals have shown that personality traits are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom; a wide range of fish, birds, and mammals show persistent individual differences that can be organized along core personality characteristics, many of which overlap with those found in humans. But personality is articulated in different ways depending upon the species being assessed. In the case of pigs, we found that the language used to assess personality traits depended on the context of the study. Studies that frame pigs as agricultural commodities use such terms as “coping style” or “temperament,” while authors interested in the basic comparative psychology of pigs were predisposed to the notion that pigs possess personality traits. Taken together, we found that across the literature there is evidence for at least three personality factors in pigs: sociability, curiosity, and aggression. These characteristics correspond to human dimensions of agreeableness, extraversion, and openness.
All of these studies point to the presence of stable individual behavioral traits that reveal a sophisticated cognitive profile in pigs. But comparative studies of pigs and their psychology currently trail behind research on such species as dogs, elephants, dolphins, and chimpanzees. We started this research with two goals. The first was to summarize our current understanding of pigs from the scientific literature and catalyze new basic, non-invasive research. The second was, and is, a bit loftier. We want scientists and nonscientists alike to use this research to place pigs in a new light as animals worth studying and considering on their own terms—to find out who Nikki and Rose really are.One thing most of us know about time is that there isn’t enough of the stuff, and that the problem is getting worse.
“Too swiftly now the Hours take flight,” as the English poet Austin Dobson (1840-1921) was complaining already in 1882, nostalgic for the days before steam and electric light.
“Scant space have we for Art’s delays,” he went on; though it turned out to be sufficient space, in his own case, to produce an impressive number of poems, books and essays, despite 45 years in a day job at the Board of Trade.
For some fortunate philosophers and philosophically-inclined physicists, thinking about time is our day job, or at least a part of it.
And while some of the issues we think about are new and technical, linked to recent developments in physics, some of them lie right on the surface, accessible to anyone prepared to think hard about time and its conflicting faces.
What a difference a day makes
Think carefully about what you did yesterday. You’ll be able to assign the day’s events and activities to times, like the frames in a comic book.
How many frames you can fill in, and how accurately you can tie them to times, depends on how good your memory is, and how much you are assisted by other kinds of records.
If you had a life-cam attached to your hat, you would be able to do it by fractions of a second, for the whole day. But it will still be a static series of frames, one for each moment.
Now think about today. It is a different matter altogether. It is actually happening now, in real time, as you read these words – a lived and changing stream of experience, not a static series of frames.
What a difference a day makes!
Time’s oldest puzzle
The contrast between these two views of time is at the heart of some of the oldest puzzles in philosophy and physics.
One view thinks of time just as we experience it, a live process of flow and change. (“All is flux”, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus put it, around 500BC.)
The other view thinks of time the way we describe it in history, as a fixed and unchanging series of events, lined up in a particular order.
(Here, the credit goes to Parmenides of Elea, another of the early Greek philosophers, who argued that existence is uniform and timeless, and that change is impossible.)
Which is the right view? This is still an issue for fierce debate in philosophy, and Heraclitus and Parmenides both have their contemporary champions.
Philosophers in Parmenides’ camp find powerful allies in modern physics, which is often held by physicists themselves to favour the static picture.
The German mathematician and physicist, Hermann Weyl (1885-1955), for example, insisted that Parmenides was right:
“The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the world-line of my body, does a section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.”
Similarly, in a letter Einstein wrote to the bereaved family of his old friend, Michele Besso, he offers the consoling thought that past, present and future are all equally real – only from our human perspective does the past seem lost:
“We physicists know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” he wrote. (For this, the philosopher Karl Popper called Einstein the Parmenides of modern physics.)
And the great Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), even questions the idea that time has a direction: “For the universe, the two directions of time are indistinguishable, just as in space there is no up and down.”
But even physicists are not unanimous, and some feel that physics is missing something.
Contemporary physicists such as Lee Smolin, and the cosmologist George Ellis, argue that there is a missing ingredient, absent from physics as we have it, corresponding to Heraclitus’s flux.
And the British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), who first coined the phrase “the arrow of time,” also believed that human experience of time provides an insight into a feature of reality which is missed by Einstein’s Parmenidean view.
A third way
Both sides in this ancient argument are taking for granted that the two views are incompatible – that only one of these views could be the correct view of the nature of time.
But is this really so?
There is a third option, which is to argue that the two views are just different ways of describing the same thing.
One, the Heraclitean “today” view, is a description from the point of view of a particular moment within time.
The other, the Parmenidean “yesterday” view, is a description from no particular point of view from “outside” time, as we might say. But they are both right |
, the public and other actors," said Mr. Fox.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, stand by their decision to eliminate the subsidy despite the cash-for-access fundraising techniques being employed by their successors.
Cash-for-access "could be stopped by simply following the Prime Minister's own ethical guidelines. So that's where we should be going," said Scott Reid, the Tory critic for Democratic Institutions.
The per-vote subsidy is problematic for a number of reasons, said Mr. Reid.
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First, he said, it directs money to the party that Canadians supported in the most recent election, but voters can change their minds between trips to the polls. To say someone must continue subsidizing a party they no longer support "just doesn't make sense," said Mr. Reid, "whereas having the money follow where you are giving your donation currently seems reasonable to me."
Second, he said, the subsidy favours the party in power. "You are always giving more money to an incumbent party, it's unavoidable, under a per-vote subsidy," said Mr. Reid. "That increases their chance of winning the next election and indeed winning and getting a larger percentage of the vote than they did the time before."
And finally, he said, the per-vote subsidy costs a lot of money.
But Jean-Pierre Kingsley, the former chief electoral officer, said he has always argued that the subsidy should be maintained.
It provides political parties with a steady source of revenue in between elections that allows them to do a better job of analyzing policy, said Mr. Kingsley.
In addition, he said, it gives funding to parties that appeal to less-well-off Canadians. "We know very well that the disadvantaged don't show up at the polls," said Mr. Kingsley, "and they certainly don't have any money to give to political parties and we need to have people intercede on their behalf, beyond what the more mainstream parties may wish."
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Canadians have said they want party financing controlled by political standards, said Mr. Kingsley, "and by reintroducing the per-vote subsidy, one could be achieving that."This weekend, Tea Party Nation (TPN) sent an email in support of Lynne Torgerson, who is running against Rep. Keith Ellison in Minnesota. In the email, TPN lists the reasons Ellison should be “retired.” Among them: “He is the only Muslim member of congress.”You may remember Tea Party Nation. The much-maligned for-profit group organized the first national Tea Party Convention, then tried to plan a second convention in Las Vegas this year, only to face opposition from other Tea Partiers who called the group a fake. This year’s convention was then mysteriously canceled.
According to The Maddow Blog, the email sent Saturday night read:
There are a lot of liberals who need to be retired this year, but there are few I can think of more deserving than Keith Ellison. Ellison is one of the most radical members of congress. He has a ZERO rating from the American Conservative Union. He is the only Muslim member of congress. He supports the Counsel for American Islamic Relations, HAMAS and has helped congress send millions of tax to terrorists in Gaza.
Nice, right? But it gets better. Because, as The Maddow Blog points out, Ellison isn’t the only Muslim member of Congress. Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) makes two.Comparing Vitamin, Mineral and Energy Content of GMO vs. Non-GMO
by Marco Torres
Consumers select organic foods over genetically modified organisms (GMO) for a variety of reasons, however besides the long list of potential health implications from consuming GMO, the one thing that impacts decision making more than anything else is nutrition. There are convincing differences between organic and GMO foods in nutrient content and health benefits.
Higher antioxidant levels, lower pesticide loads, better farming practices all lead to a more nutritious end product when choosing organic over GMO foods.
For example, tomatoes grown by organic methods contain more phenolic compounds than those grown using commercial standards. That study — published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry — analysed the phenolic profiles of Daniela tomatoes grown either using ‘conventional’ or organic methods, finding that those grown under organic conditions contained significantly higher levels of phenolic compounds than those grown conventionally.
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Other findings published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry showed that organically produced apples have a 15 percent higher antioxidant capacity than conventionally produced apples.
A stunning report on GMO vs. organic corn posted on Moms Across America clearly showing the nutritional value difference between GMO corn and NON GMO corn.
“The important thing to note in these deficiencies is that these are exactly the deficiencies in a human being that lead to susceptibility to sickness, disorders and cancer. People who have osteoporosis are low in calcium and magnesium, people who have cancer are low in maganese. The list goes on and on.”
Non-GMO corn has 6130 ppm of calcium while GMO corn has 14 — non-GMO corn has 437 times more calcium.
Non-GMO corn has 113 ppm of magnesium while GMO corn has 2 — non-GMO corn has about 56 times more magnesium.
Non-GMO corn has 113 ppm of potassium while GMO corn has 7 — non-GMO corn has 16 times more potassium.
Non-GMO corn has 14 ppm of manganese while GMO corn has 2 — non-GMO corn has 7 times more manganese.
Overall, the paper found that non-GMO corn is 20 times richer in nutrition, energy and protein compared to GMO corn.
“Agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.” Scientists must literally ‘ASK’ these corporations for PERMISSION BEFORE publishing independent research on GMO crops.” (Scientific Amerian, August 13, 2009.)
This article written by the Editors in Scientific American goes on to mention how Elson J. Shields an entomologist at Cornell University and spokesperson for a group of 24 corn insect scientists who protested against the ‘blocking’ of ‘unfavourable’ GMO research (ie. research that may not promote GMOs), actually wrote to the EPA. These protests were about the “…selective denials and permissions based on industry perceptions of how ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’ a particular scientist may be toward (seed enhancement) technology.”
Most nations in the world have no GMO-Free platform to protect their citizens and although this is slowly changing, most nations are far behind places like Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, Egypt, Russia and others who have GMO-Free or national bans on GMOs. Nations such as The United States, Canada, China, UK, Australia, Mexico, and most of South America, Asia and Africa who have no formal GMO-free platforms so that they continue their unrestricted and widespread use in all foods.
Marco Torres is a research specialist, writer and consumer advocate for healthy lifestyles. He holds degrees in Public Health and Environmental Science and is a professional speaker on topics such as disease prevention, environmental toxins and health policy.
Sources:
momsacrossamerica.com
via Preventdisease
[msa-ads data-ad-client=”ca-pub-6965588547261395″ data-ad-slot=”7732882042″]Although 2015 was considered the most dynamic years in recent music history, it is without question that 2016 tops it. Not only did music’s biggest stars drop impressive, sometimes unpredictable releases, there were countless tasteful comeback albums from veterans as well as debuts from newcomers. This year was filled with so many compelling releases that even a top 20 roundup is fairly difficult to put together. We witness history being made this year as streaming only free albums are now considered for GRAMMY awards, ultimately placing a gravestone on the traditional record-release model.
For many aspects, 2016 was a not-so-great year. For music, however, it was beyond outstanding. Check out HYPEBEAST’s handpicked list of best LPs, EPs and mixtapes of the year.
20. BADBADNOTGOOD – IV
IV is BADBADNOTGOOD’s fourth studio album, following the band’s 2014 LP III and their 2015 collaborative project with Ghostface Killah, Sour Soul. It’s the Toronto outfit’s biggest, jazziest and most daring release yet, spotlighting an eclectic assortment of guest features like Sam Herring, Colin Stetson, Kaytranada, Mick Jenkins and Charlotte Day Wilson. BBNG started off as a hip-hop cover band but with IV they’ve established themselves as adept, sophisticated musicians with refreshing interpretations of jazz music.
19. Danny Brown – Atrocity Exhibition
It was announced during the summer this year that Danny Brown signed to WARP Records. The move couldn’t have been better as proven in his latest album, Atrocity Exhibition. Primarily produced by Paul White, the album features guest appearances from Kendrick Lamar, Ab-Soul, Earl Sweatshirt, B-Real, Kelela and Petite Noir. Brown’s maturing sonic aesthetic is heard throughout the LP, which features a mix of post-punk, techno and soul. Paired with his recognizable voice and rapping style, the LP is a flavorful, forward-thinking experience.
18. Kendrick Lamar – untitled unmastered.
Because untitled unmastered. is but a compilation album that consists of unreleased demos, it’s nowhere as masterful as its 2015 predecessor, To Pimp a Butterfly. With that being said, however, the project is still one of the year’s best and most impactful. Lyrically, the work explores politically and psychologically-charged themes that could not be more relevant in 2015-2016 America and like TPAB, has an experimental yet luscious sound. With its incorporation of free jazz, soul and funk styles, untitled unmastered. can barely be classified as a hip-hop album.
17. ScHoolboy Q – Blank Face LP
Although Blank Face LP is the fourth studio album by ScHoolboy Q, the project is only his second release under a major label following 2014’s Oxymoron. Guest feature and production-wise, Blank Face tops its predecessor with prominent artists like Kanye West, Jadakiss, Tha Dogg Pound, Miguel, Swizz Beatz, Metro Boomin, Southside, The Alchemist and more. Even thought the album runs 72 minutes long, it does not feel dragged or forced. The LP’s eclectic range of sonic and lyrical content makes it one of the most captivating releases of the year.
16. Rihanna – Anti
Rihanna finally released her eighth studio album Anti at the end of January this year, after a series of delays. The album has been in the making since 2014 after she left Def Jam to join Roc Nation. The 13-track album features production work from Boi-1da, DJ Mustard, 40, Hit-Boy, Timbaland, No I.D., Tame Impala and more, and only contains two features — from SZA and from Drake. Anti is her most progressive record to date, as its title suggests. It showcases a rawer and more unguarded side to the songstress.
15. Drake – VIEWS
Albeit most fans and music critics would not consider Drake’s VIEWS to be his best release, with its 4x Platinum certification it’s certainly one of his most popular. Drizzy’s fourth studio album is the most-streamed album on Spotify and its single, “One Dance” is the most-streamed track on the platform. VIEWS is also the first album to get one billion streams on Apple Music. While there are certainly outstanding elements and moments throughout the project, Drizzy seems to be artistically stagnant, unadventurous and overall, the LP lacks a strong, cohesive theme.
14. Skepta – Konnichiwa
UK grime became commercially recognized in 2015 with the assistance of rap superstars like Kanye West and Drake. After numerous delays, grimes biggest artist Skepta finally dropped his highly anticipated fourth studio album, Konnichiwa. It features guest appearances from JME, Boy Better Know, D Double E, Novelist, Wiley, Chip, Pharrell Williams, A$AP Nast and Young Lord aka A$AP Bari. Konnichiwa is a milestone in British street music; it is a catchy, accessible record that did not have to sacrifice authenticity and street rawness to compromise. It won the 2016 Mercury Music Prize, beating David Bowie and Radiohead.
13. Lil Uzi Vert – Lil Uzi Vert vs. The World
Up until the end of last year, very few people knew who Lil Uzi Vert was. However within a few months the Philadelphia rapper established himself as one of the most buzz-worthy, controversial and popular up-and-comers in music. Uzi’s biggest release thus far is his fourth mixtape, Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World, which he dropped in May of this year. Featuring productions from Cubeatz, Don Cannon, Lyle LeDuff, Maaly Raw, Metro Boomin and WondaGurl, the project contains popular tracks like “Money Longer,” “You Was Right” and “P’s and Q’s.”
12. Donald Glover – “Awaken, My Love!”
In 2015 there was speculation that Childish Gambino has quit rap to pursue endeavors outside of music, namely his hit FX TV series Atlanta. However, throughout 2016 he has teased the possibility of new music and finally released some in the form of his third studio, “Awaken, My Love!” earlier this month. It’s the first time Glover has veered away from hip-hop completely; tracks are sung and its sonic influences include psychedelic soul, R&B and funk. This album proves that Donald is not only a talented comedian, actor, director and rapper, he is also a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist and artist.
11. A Tribe Called Quest – We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service
Many legendary hip-hop groups have made comeback albums in the past but none are quite as epic as A Tribe Called Quest’s. We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service comes 18 years after their last release The Love Movement and a few months after the death of founding member Phife Dawg. The LP features guest appearances from André 3000, Kendrick Lamar, Jack White, Elton John, Kanye West, Anderson.Paak, Talib Kweli, Consequence and Busta Rhymes. The project sonically retains the classic ’90s indie East Coast hip-hop vibe that ATCQ originated but is presented in an experimental and fresh new approach.
10. James Blake – The Colour in Anything
The Colour in Anything is James Blake’s third studio album and follows his Mercury Prize-winning 2013 LP Overgrown. Featuring contributions from Frank Ocean, Justin Vernon, Rick Rubin and more, the 17-track LP contains some of the best, darkest and most tear-jerking work he’s ever released. Blake exhibits a dismal, dark vibe throughout the project; his signature voice over the looming bass and airy piano is a fail-proof recipe for some of the most beautiful music one will ever lay ears on.
9. Bon Iver – 22, A Million
2016 was a good year for artists to experiment and release raw, unpolished bodies of work. Bon Iver did so with his latest album, 22, A Million. While his debut, For Emma, Forever Ago and its followup, Bon Iver, showcased very refined and pretty melodies and soundscapes, his latest, which premiered at Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires Music Festival, record contains fragmented and fractured moments. It captures the sentiment of personal issues in an accurate yet totally new way, purposefully exposing Vernon’s vulnerable side.
8. Kaytranada – 99.9%
Kaytranada has been buzzing in the beat scene for a few years now, and his incredible debut 99.9% helped position him as one of the most talented and forward-thinking producers of our time. The 15-track album features guest contributions from the likes of Craig David, Anderson.Paak, Vic Mensa, Little Dragon, Syd, AlunaGeorge and BADBADNOTGOOD amongst others. While his foundation is hip-hop, the music is mixed with disco, funk, R&B, electronic and other elements. It’s the ideal album to chill to with friends or introduce funk, soul and jazz music to for those who are unfamiliar with the genre.
7. Solange – A Seat at the Table
Solange has always been overshadowed by her superstar sister, Beyoncé, but her latest album A Seat at the Table proves that she is a worthy Knowles contender. It’s her first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 and is widely acclaimed by music critics. Solange explores a mellow R&B aesthetic and examines the pluses and downsides of being black in America. A Seat at the Table is an essential album for 2016’s sociopolitical climate and discussions.
6. Anderson.Paak – Malibu
Anderson.Paak is another up-and-comer who went from obscurity to being one of the most exciting new acts in recent years. The Oxnard singer-songwriter’s sophomore album, Malibu, is his strongest release to date. The 16-track record features BJ the Chicago Kid, ScHoolboy Q, Rapsody, The Game, Talib Kweli and more, and production from Madlib, 9th Wonder, POMO, Kaytranada, Hi-Tek, Hiatus Kaiyote, himself and more. His masterful yet relaxed combination of hip-hop, soul, gospel and electronic vibes is refreshingly unique.
5. Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool
A Moon Shaped Pool follows a five-year gap between Radiohead’s last album, The King of Limbs. The band’s ninth studio album not only features new music but includes several songs written in the past like “True Love Waits,” “Burn the Witch” and “Present Tense.” Although the album was not promoted until the week before its release, it debuted at No. 1 on the UK charts, becoming the band’s sixth UK No. 1 album. A Moon Shaped Pool is one of Radiohead’s most emotionally captivating and vulnerable albums, exhibiting a melancholic, comforting aesthetic throughout.
4. Chance The Rapper – Coloring Book
Coloring Book, the mixtape formerly known as Chance 3, is Chance the Rapper’s most progressive yet accessible project yet, with such good quality it’s befuddling why it’s not considered an album. It spotlights production from The Social Experiment, Lido, Kaytranada, and others and features an eclectic range of artists including Kanye West, Young Thug, Francis and the Lights, Justin Bieber, Ty Dolla Sign, Kirk Franklin and more. It’s the first album to chart on the Billboard 200 entirely on streams. With its incorporation of soulful, gospel and electronic vibes, Coloring Book is not only one of the best rap tapes, but overall releases of the year.
3. Beyoncé – Lemonade
Regarded as one of her most progressive, conceptual and controversial albums in her career thus far, Lemonade is Beyoncé’s second “visual album” following her eponymous 2013 record. Accompanied by a one-hour film premiered on HBO, Lemonade features guest vocals from James Blake, Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, Jack White and more. Sonically, it infuses an assortment of genres like rock, blues, reggae, soul, funk and more. Content-wise, the album addresses personal, raw and relatable subjects such as her husband JAY Z’s alleged infidenilty, socioeconomic matters and more. Like Rihanna with Anti, Beyoncé ventured into a deeper, more experimental and rawer route without losing her pop appeal.
2. Kanye West – The Life of Pablo
Kanye West’s seventh studio album, The Life of Pablo, had possibly the most confusing rollout of 2016. Originally premiering on February 11 during West’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion show, West then continued to make alterations to the music following the release, dubbing it “a living, breathing, changing creative expression.” Despite having an unfinished feel to it, it debuted at No. 1 — his seventh consecutive. The compositions messiness and choppiness feels like it was created that way on purpose, in order for listeners to figure out and put the pieces together themselves.
1. Frank Ocean – Blonde
Frank Ocean’s second studio album Blonde makes the top of our list this year. Following many delays and one of the most dragged-on processes of anticipation (remember staring at the warehouse video on his website for a week straight?), the LP was well-worth the wait. Not only does the album feature guest vocals from Yung Lean, André 3000, Beyoncé and more, production is tackled by Malay, Om’Mas Keith, James Blake, Pharrell, Ocean himself and more. Similar to Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Blonde had obvious, purposeful loose ends, but that rawness rendered as a strength instead of a flaw. It’s hands down the most emotional, deep and alluring record of the year.Story highlights A 39-year-old bus driver was hospitalized last week in southern China
State-run media says he died from what appears to be a contagious strain of bird flu
The Chinese government has suspended supplies of live poultry to Hong Kong
A 39-year-old man in southern China died Saturday from what appears to be a contagious strain of avian flu, state media reported Saturday.
The man -- identified by Xinhua as a bus driver with the surname Chen -- was hospitalized in Shenzhen on December 21 as he battled a fever. He tested positive for the H5N1 avian influenza virus, the provincial health department said in a statement, according to the official news agency.
The man had not traveled out of the city of Shenzhen, nor did he have direct contact with poultry in the month before he came down with the fever, according to the department.
Shenzhen borders Hong Kong, where more than 17,000 chickens were ordered culled on the same day that Chen was hospitalized. That decision came after a chicken carcass tested positive for avian flu.
The territory's director of Agriculture, Fisheries & Conservation declared the Cheung Sha Wan Temporary Wholesale Poultry Market an infected place, the government said then in a statement.
Farmers were told they could not send chickens to the market for 21 days.
The Hong Kong government said it was working to trace the origin of the chicken, which was infected with the H5N1 avian influenza virus. But, as of December 21, authorities did not know the source.
Meanwhile, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine has since suspended supplies of live poultry to Hong Kong, according to Xinhua.
As of mid-December, the World Health Organization calculated that 573 people had been infected -- and 336 had died -- after coming down with the H5N1 avian influenza virus since 2003. Twenty-six of those deaths had been in China, with the largest number of fatalities, 150, occurring in Indonesia. Vietnam and Egypt had more than 50 deaths each.
This summer, the United Nations warned of a possible resurgence of the virus -- which peaked in 2006, at one point infecting people in 63 countries -- saying there are indications a mutant strain may be spreading in Asia.
A variant strain of H5N1 -- which can apparently bypass the defenses of current vaccines -- had appeared as of late August in Vietnam and China, reported the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The group noted that the strain's movement around Vietnam threatened Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Japan and the Korean peninsula. By then, eight people in Cambodia alone had died this year after becoming infected this year, the agency added.
In addition to the health impact, the avian flu outbreaks have also come at a steep economic cost -- with the United Nations estimating earlier this year that it had contributed to the killing of over 400 million poultry and caused losses estimated at $20 billion.A passenger plane with more than 40 people on board has crashed in Pakistan on its way to Islamabad from the northern region of Chitral.
Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) said Flight PK-661 lost contact with air traffic controllers on Wednesday afternoon local time.
Local media reports say those on board the aircraft included Junaid Jamshed, a well-known pop star-turned evangelical Muslim cleric.
The airline said the plane crashed near Havelian to the south of Abbottabad, about 125 kilometres north of the capital.
A government minister was quoted as saying the aircraft had suffered engine problems but it was too early to determine the cause.
Local people at the crash site said there were unlikely to be any survivors. A local official said witnesses told him the plane was on fire before it hit the ground.
That has not been confirmed, but images shown on Pakistani TV and shared on social media show a trail of wreckage on the mountain slope.
The military said more than 20 bodies had been recovered as rescue efforts continued.Sightings of locusts in central west NSW have prompted authorities to warn farmers to be vigilant as they prepare to harvest winter crops.
But while there might be local hot spots the threat of a widespread outbreak of locusts is minimal according to the experts.
Chris Adriaansen, Director of the Australian Plague Locusts Commission, says the number of locusts is extremely low as seasonal conditions have been too hot and dry.
He says for the numbers of locusts to breed up to any significant levels, "that would require a lot of rain, a lot of fresh pasture growth and about six months for 2 or 3 successful generations of breeding".
Chris Adriaansen says given all that, he does not expect to see any significant numbers of locusts this spring or summer, anywhere in Australia.
"The earliest we could see any significant locust numbers would be next autumn.
"We have been monitoring for the last six weeks throughout Victoria, South Australia, NSW and Queensland and the presence of locusts has been very small.
"We think the low numbers are also result of pesticide control and biological control last year.
In the Central West of NSW though, bands of moving locusts and locust nymphs have been seen in the region and farmers are being urged to carefully check their crops and pastures for the insects.
Senior Ranger with the Central West Livestock Health and Pest Authority, Lisa Thomas says the locusts are a worrying sight.
"We can't afford to have crop losses now, the crops are certainly precious. What the locusts eat, again, is going to impact on your pocket.
"Outside the consequences of them laying and having a second generation, which is very likely starting so early now, they'll be second and third generation by the time they've really cleaned you out."After winning the Stanley Cup twice in the past four seasons with the Los Angeles Kings, Jarret Stoll is hoping to help the New York Rangers achieve that goal this season.
Stoll, who became an unrestricted free agent July 1, agreed to a contract with the Rangers on Monday. Terms were not released, but Sportsnet reported it's a one-year, $800,000 contract.
"I realize how good an opportunity it is to play with the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden," Stoll told Blueshirts United. "I know what I can bring to the team, and I just want to help the Rangers."
Stoll, 33, won the Stanley Cup with the Kings in 2012 and 2014. He had a goal and an assist when the Kings defeated the Rangers in five games in the 2014 Cup Final.
He also reached the Cup Final with the Edmonton Oilers in 2006.
Stoll spent the past seven seasons with the Kings, scoring six goals with 11 assists in 73 games in 2014-15. In a statement on his Twitter account, Stoll thanked the Kings front office, coaching staff and his former teammates, saying he "will cherish those memories in Los Angeles forever."
Stoll is looking forward though.
"That group that they have there (in New York) … there's no secret why they've been so successful there the last three or four years," he said. "It must be that they have a great group, a great coaching staff, and guys that care about each other. I love teams like that.
"I learned a lot about them playing in the Final. Obviously, it was five games, but it wasn't just five games. There were a lot of double overtimes, and we had problems with their speed, and I'll never forget that."
A second-round pick (No. 36) by the Oilers at the 2002 NHL Draft, Stoll set NHL career highs with 22 goals and 68 points during the 2005-06 season.
Stoll was sentenced to community service after he pleaded guilty June 25 to two reduced misdemeanor charges to resolve a felony cocaine case. He said he has completed his legal obligations.
"[Stoll is] a real character guy who made a mistake," general manager Jeff Gorton told reporters. "It's a belief in our organization that it's important to have people that have won and been through it. So we view this as he's someone that can possibly help us get over that hump that we haven't been able to do."
Stoll has won 55.1 percent of his faceoffs in his career. He has a faceoff win percentage of 51 percent or higher in every season.
"As far as the faceoff circle goes, I take a lot of pride in that, and I want to be out there in all situations," said Stoll, who is a two-time 20-goal scorer. "It's just one thing I've been working on over the course of my career, and I've gotten better and better. Nowadays, faceoffs have gotten pretty important in the League with all the rule changes."
Stoll has 140 goals and 379 points in 792 regular-season games with the Oilers and Kings. He has 10 goals and 26 points in 93 playoff games.Texas Department of Criminal Justice Agency overview Formed 1989 Employees 37,000 (2005) Annual budget US$3,302,926,598 (2018) Jurisdictional structure Operations jurisdiction Texas, USA Map of Texas Department of Criminal Justice's jurisdiction. Size 261,797 square miles (678,050 km2) Population 24,326,974 (2008 est.)[1] General nature Civilian police Headquarters BOT Complex, Huntsville
Agency executives Bryan Collier, Executive Director, Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Dale Wainwright, Chairman, Texas Board of Criminal Justice Website www.tdcj.state.tx.us
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) is a department of the government of the U.S. state of Texas. The TDCJ is responsible for statewide criminal justice for adult offenders, including managing offenders in state prisons, state jails, and private correctional facilities, funding and certain oversight of community supervision, and supervision of offenders released from prison on parole or mandatory supervision. The TDCJ operates the largest prison system in the United States.[2]
The department has its headquarters in the BOT Complex in Huntsville and offices at the Price Daniel Sr. Building in downtown Austin.[3][4]
History [ edit ]
1800s [ edit ]
In 1848, the Texas Legislature passed "An Act to Establish a State Penitentiary", which created an oversight board to manage the treatment of convicts and administration of the penitentiaries. Land was acquired in Huntsville and Rusk for later facilities.[5]
The prison system began as a single institution, located in Huntsville. A second prison facility, Rusk Penitentiary, began receiving convicts in January 1883.[5] Before the Ruiz v. Estelle court case, the Texas Department of Corrections had 18 units, including 16 for males and two for females.[6]
Various administrative changes where the organization of the managing board of the department occurred over the next 100 years.[5]
1900s [ edit ]
In 1921, George W. Dixon of The Prison Journal published a report on the Texas Prison System facilities. His article stated that the prisons were among the most "brutal" in the world. Dixon said that the prisons featured corporal punishment such as whipping, beatings, and isolation.[7]
In July and August 1974, a major riot at the Huntsville Walls prison resulted in the murder of two hostages.
In 1979, Ruiz v. Estelle found that the conditions of imprisonment within the TDC prison system constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the United States Constitution.[8][9] The decision led to federal oversight of the system, with a prison construction boom and "sweeping reforms... that fundamentally changed how Texas prisons operated."[10][11]
In 1989, the TDJC and the Board of Criminal Justice were created. The board is composed of nine members appointed by the governor with the advice and consent of the senate to six-year, overlapping terms. This new agency absorbed functions of three state agencies - the Texas Department of Corrections, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and the Texas Adult Probation Commission.[12]
In the 1980s, the government of Texas began building more prisons. During that decade, impoverished rural communities viewed the prisons as a boon, as they provided jobs.[13]
In 1987, the Texas State Board of Corrections voted to build two new 2,250-inmate maximum-security prisons in Gatesville and Amarillo and several 1,000-inmate medium-security prisons in Liberty County, Marlin, Snyder, and Woodville. The TDC units in Amarillo and Snyder were the first ones located outside of Central Texas and East Texas.[14]
James Anthum "Andy" Collins, the executive director of the TDCJ from April 10, 1994, to around December 1995, became a consultant for VitaPro, a company selling a meat substitute that was used in Texas prisons.[15] Shirley Southerland, a prisoner at the Hobby Unit, stated that her fellow prisoners discovered that the VitaPro product was intended for consumption by canines. Collins arranged for VitaPro to be used while he was still the head of the TDCJ.[16] Collins had awarded a $33.7 million contract to the company. Robert Draper of the Texas Monthly accused various TDCJ board members and state officials in the early to mid-1990s of capitalizing on the rapid expansion of Texas prisons – from 1994 to 1996 the number of prisoners almost doubled and the number of the prison units increased from 65 to 108 – and trying to establish favorable business contracts and/or get prisons named after them. Draper reasoned, "If [Allan B. Polunsky] and other board members didn't care about ethics, why should Andy Collins?"[15]
2000s and 2010s [ edit ]
According to a December 2007 survey of prisoners from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, five TDCJ units, Allred Unit, Clemens Unit, Coffield Unit, Estelle Unit, and Mountain View Unit, were among those in the United States with the highest numbers of reported prison rape cases in 2006. In 2007, the TDCJ reported a total of 234 reported sexual assaults in its prisons. Michelle Lyons, the TDCJ spokesperson, said, "The actual reports we have are not consistent with the results in the survey, but because it's anonymous, there's no way for us to verify that additional number."[17]
In 2008, the TDCJ planned to install cell phone-jamming devices at its units, but encountered resistance from cell phone companies.[18]
In 2014, the Human Rights Clinic of the University of Texas School of Law released a report stating that the temperatures in many TDCJ units are too high over the summer and that at least 14 inmates had been killed by the heat since 2007. In 2013, the TDCJ had signed a deal for a climate-controlled housing system for pig breeding; this was worth $750,000.[19] In response, John Whitmire of the Texas State Senate stated, "the people of Texas don't want air-conditioned prisons, and there's a lot of other things on my list above the heat. It's hot in Texas, and a lot of Texans who are not in prison don't have air conditioning."[20] That year, a federal judge declared that the TDCJ is making it impossible for Muslim inmates to practice their religion.[21]
In 2017, the use of solitary confinement as punishment was ended.[22]
Governance [ edit ]
The agency has offices in the Price Daniel, Sr. State Office Building in Austin
TDCJ offices in Austin
The Texas Board of Criminal Justice oversees the TDCJ. The board selects the executive director, who manages the TDCJ.[23] The members of the board are appointed by the Governor of Texas.[24]
Current board members [ edit ]
Dale Wainwright (chairman)
R. Terrell McCombs (vice chairman)
Eric Gambrell (secretary)
E.F. "Mano" DeAyala
Thomas G. Fordyce
Larry Don Miles
Patrick O'Daniel
Derrelynn Perryman
Thomas P. Wingate
Major divisions [ edit ]
The department encompasses these major divisions:
Correctional Institutions Division
Parole Division
Community Justice Assistance Division
Correctional Institutions Division [ edit ]
The Huntsville Unit in Huntsville is a prison operated by the Correctional Institutions Division; it houses the state execution chamber and formerly served as the agency's headquarters.
The Correctional Institutions Division, which operates secure correctional facilities for adults, has its headquarters in the BOT Complex in Huntsville.[25] TDCJ-CID, formed in 2003, was a merger of the Institutions Division, the Operations Division, the Private Facilities Division, and the State Jail Division.[26]
The division operates prisons, which are facilities for people convicted of capital offenses and people convicted of first-, second-, and third-degree felony offenses, and state jails, facilities for people convicted of state jail felony offenses. Before the 2003 formation of the Correctional Institutions Division, the Institutional Division operated prisons and the State Jail Division (TDCJ-SJD[27]) operated state jails.[28] As of 2010, of the counties in Texas, the five with the highest numbers of state prisons and jails were Walker, Brazoria and Coryell (tie), and Anderson and Liberty (tie).[29][30]
As of 2001, prisons may be named after people who are dead or who are still alive, and namesakes have included Governors of Texas, TDCJ employees, members of the Texas House of Representatives, mayors, police officers, and judges. In previous eras, prisons were only named after deceased TDCJ employees and state governors. By the 2000s, so many new prisons were being built that the TDCJ had to change its naming policy.[31]
Regional offices of the CID are: Region I, headquartered in Hunts |
Ohio Court of Common Pleas awarded full custody of all of the Goffstein children to their mother, specifically noting the importance of continuity for the boys who had been raised in an Orthodox home.
Nine months later, Peter filed for a reallocation of custody and within weeks Judge Sieve had reversed his decision, awarding Peter full custody of the four younger children, observing that Julie’s insistence on sending the children to yeshiva was not in their best interest. While Judge Sieve’s ruling allowed the children to remain in yeshiva, Julie was held responsible for paying their tuition, with Peter given the authority to make all of the children’s educational decisions. Over time, the situation continued to deteriorate, with Peter filing multiple lawsuits against his former wife and Julie moved with the two older boys to Crown Heights where they continued in yeshiva, while the four younger boys were sent to public school against their will by their father.
As the court battles continued, Peter Goffstein continued to keep the younger children shielded from both their mother and their Jewish heritage, allegedly chopping off one child’s payos, removing the boys’ yarmulkas and making them eat pork. Friends of Julie’s also reported that he smeared urine on one child’s face as a punishment for a religious observance and that Peter repeatedly bullied anyone who supported Julie’s mission of raising her sons in an observant home. Eventually the court forbade Julie from discussing any religious matters with her sons, and she was found in contempt of court for telling one son of her efforts to get him back into yeshiva.
While Peter is extremely wealthy, Julie’s financial situation is very bleak, having been stripped of all marital assets by Judge Sieve. His latest decision, holding Julie in contempt of court for being unable to reimburse her ex-husbands court costs and sending her to jail, seems to be the latest obstacle thrown at Julie simply because she has chosen to raise her sons as practicing members of the Jewish faith. Julie’s sons, ranging in age from nine to eighteen are living a life of turmoil, with the younger boys facing their father’s reported harassment and the two older boys now living alone in Crown Heights because of Julie’s imprisonment.
5 WAYS TO HELP
1. A Chesed Fund campaign has been set up to help raise money for Julie and help with all legal fees and to gain her immediate release. She has been unable to pay her attorney full due to financial challenges.
Click here to help. To donate via paypal:helpthefamily613@gmail.com.
2. A grassroots efforts on Facebook by The Women’s Coalition has been organizing a call in and email campaign asking Ohio Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor to disqualify Judge Sieve for discrimination and to demand Julie’s release.
3. Other ways to help include pressuring Cincinnati media outlets to cover the story.
4. For Ohio residents to reach out to their elected officials and ask them to advocate for Julie’s release and Judge Sieve’s censure.
5. Those wishing to further help Julie can email Stuart Lichter (slichter@irg.cc), president of Industrial Retail Group, where Peter serves as a senior vice president in the Cincinnati office and ask for Peter Goffstein’s removal because of his unacceptable behavior.
Judge O’Connor can be reached at 614-387-9250 or at maureen.oconnor@scohio.gov
Sample text to send the judge:
Dear Judge O’Connor,
I am contacting you today to protest the discriminatory treatment of Julie Goffstein by Judge Jon Sieve, an extremely biased judge who threw Julie in jail on July 11th.
Julie has been found in contempt for not paying her ex’s attorney’s fees and for contacting her children and is being forced to pay $10,000 for her wealthy ex’s attorney’s fees, which she does not have because Judge Sieve deprived her of her rightful marital assets. She is also being found in contempt for contacting her children, who he unjustly took away from her, ostensibly due to her religious beliefs—which is unconstitutional. Tellingly, he only took the four youngest boys because the father did not want the two oldest, proving that it is not really about religion; it is about empowering the father. He also ordered Julie to pay $500 to a fathers’ rights group before he was rightfully admonished by you.
Judge Sieve claims that the children have experienced emotional distress due to their mother contacting them, but the real harm to the children was caused by him taking four young boys away from their mother, their primary bond, who was a loving, stay-at-home mom.
There are many other things which confirm Judge Sieve’s bias. Please stop the injustice against Julie by disqualifying him and send a message to other judges and the public that discrimination against women in family courts will not be tolerated.
Thank you
By The Chesed FundThe Turnbull government will seek to introduce a new levy on telecommunications companies to help pay for the roll-out of the NBN in regional areas, a change it admits will lead to higher prices for internet consumers.
The move goes against the advice of the government's own hand-picked expert panel, which warned such a levy "causes greater distortions than it is intended to remedy".
Communications Minister Mitch Fifield announced on Monday that the government would legislate to create a new Regional Broadband Scheme that is estimated to raise $40 million a year. The Department of Communications has found the cost of the scheme would largely be passed on to consumers through higher prices.
The scheme would see NBN's rival super-fast broadband networks pay a levy of $7.30 for each fixed-line connection, with the contribution indexed to increase each year. By 2022 the levy would rise to $8 per connection.Well, that went just how you’d expect it to go.
The NFL Network’s morning show, "NFL HQ," asked viewers on Wednesday to use the Twitter hashtag #AskJerryJones for its upcoming interview with the Cowboys owner.
Given what has gone on with the Cowboys and Greg Hardy this season, Twitter users were champing at the bit to get in on #AskJerryJones.
Article continues below...
To say things turned ugly would be an understatement.
Here is a sampling of tweets people sent to the NFL Network.
#AskJerryJones if you could go back in time and murder baby Hitler, would you do it or sign him as a defensive back? — Mike Gessner (@calbears96) November 25, 2015
Rae Carruth is expected to be released from prision in 2018. With a need at WR, will you be interested in signing him? #askjerryjones — Parm (@KingFavre) November 25, 2015
Who would you want to see in a Cowboys uniform more Jeffery Dahmer or William Gacy? #AskJerryJones — #1 Eggnog Fan™ (@moleloco) November 25, 2015
Which prisons do you plan on visiting in the off-season looking for new players? #AskJerryJones — #1 Eggnog Fan™ (@moleloco) November 25, 2015
If ISIS could get to the QB on 3rd down, would you sign them? #AskJerryJones — John Q. Cowboys Fan (@HonestBoysFan) November 25, 2015
Is there any crime a football player could commit that would actually stop you from signing him? #askjerryjones — NRGStadiumGrass (@NRGGrassField) November 25, 2015
Is it easier for players to pay hush money settlements to victims to get them to disappear, rather than hassle with court? #AskJerryJones — Brian Marette (@BrianMarette) November 25, 2015
Since Joseph Randle assaulted a police officer do you plan on re-signing him and making him the starter? #AskJerryJones — Anthony Beers (@AnthonyBeers) November 25, 2015
@NFLHQ Why would you cut a guy for not wearing a suit on a road trip, yet defend & empower one that beat his ex-gf to a pulp? #AskJerryJones — Boar Consumer (@BoarConsumer) November 25, 2015
If OJ Simpson, Greg Hardy, and Pablo Escobar were all in their prime and available which one would you sign? #AskJerryJones — Brendan O'Connor (@brendanoconnor0) November 25, 2015
#AskJerryJones What is the secret to finding future Cowboys players? Looking through police blotters? Scouting prison yard pick-up games? — Lane French (@LaneFrench) November 25, 2015
@nflnetwork @dallascowboys @NFLHQ On a scale from 1-Charles Manson, how insane does a person need to be for u 2 not sign them #AskJerryJones — Ryan Roozeboom (@roozeboom36) November 25, 2015William Shatner is back in the studio working on yet another great big pile of Shat-mazing, Incredibly Strange music. It's been over a week since Shatner first formally proclaimed Zakk Wylde's mad skills via Twitter ("Best, Bill"), but our sources on the scene confirm that some big metal heavy-hitters have been engaged to play backup to Captain Kirk.
Peter Frampton and Mike Inez (who will be playing "Iron Man" with fellow Ozzy alum, Zakk Wylde) are definitely participating and our source claims artists slated to perform (but who haven't done their parts yet) include Steve Howe of Yes, Ian Paice of Deep Purple and the god among men, Brian May of Queen. Supposedly it's only a matter of scheduling that prevents confirmation (come on May, make this happen!). Finally, it wouldn't be a space themed album without the space man and his self proclaimed Space Bass, Bootsy Collins!
(Caveat: some of these people might not appear on the final album. Reportedly, Shatner runs a loose (space)ship and sessions are fun and chaotic, nobody knowing how or when they're gonna happen. Picture session musicians standing next to their iPhones waiting for the "Bill is ready RIGHT NOW" text.)Post Full Stack World – What Happens Now?
Around 2011-2014, the idea of a full stack JavaScript developer became mainstream. Browsers became more standardized, hybrid native app frameworks, like Cordova, grew in sophistication.
Then Node.js continued to grow in popularity. We could work on independent small JavaScript projects. Each project had its own client, server, and database.
Yet, there were three main factors that slowed the pace of the rise of full stack JavaScript:
Increasing fragmentation in the client-side JavaScript space, and
Continued superiority of native mobile apps over hybrid mobile apps,and
The power of specialization
What’s Next with Express?
Now, that promise of a single unified client is no longer an imminent possibility.
APIs, REST or otherwise, are more pivotal than ever for unifying disparate clients.
Node.js has a powerful concurrency model, along with a prolific npm and Express ecosystem. So these factors make Express the ideal tool to build your next API.
Shouldn’t We All Just Be Using Firebase?
First of all, there was a time when AngularFire meant the end of backend development. Firebase’s client library maintained a socket connection to a realtime database.
Also, AngularFire integrated with Angular 1’s dirty checking. You know what else? It also synced your changes in JavaScript to the realtime database with no work on your part. So, you just write some HTML and you’re done.
Additionally, you add in over-the-air updates with Ionic 1 and you had a mobile app too. That’s some magic, right?
app.controller( 'MyController', function ($scope, $firebaseObject) { var ref = firebase.database().ref(); $scope.data = $firebaseObject(ref); }); <div controller= "MyController" > <h1> {{data.title}} </h1> </div>
Now what?
Unfortunately, it also became clear that Angular 1 was difficult to optimize and extend beyond building simple forms. Furthermore, Cordova is proving to have similar issues. Not to mention that some sophisticated clients require developers to specialize.
So let’s assume you need disparate clients like an iOS app, an Android app, an Electron desktop app, and a web client and you need a centralized logic layer.
In case you are wondering why – if you use a realtime database directly and your Android app’s logic doesn’t keep up with your iOS app’s logic, you’ve got a problem.
In order to find a good solution, it’s time to bring on the APIs.
What Should APIs Do?
KeenIO summed it up best when they said APIs “boil complex processes down to simple commands that magically do lots of work for you.”
Additionally, like Browserling put it, an API is like a Kraken that lurks under the surface of your apps and ties together logic and data sources so your apps don’t have to.
In order to help you get started, here’s a few examples of tasks, with code snippets, that APIs should take care of for their clients.
Security
In case you missed the memo, clients are insecure. Recently, I was reminded of this when I booked a blocked-off slot for car maintenance. Because the dealer’s site relied on Angular 1 form validation resulting in the fact that the slot I chose was not verified as “available” on their server.
How can developers solve issues like this and prevent bad user experiences?
Express middleware makes it easy to define security rules for a group of routes without repeating yourself. Also, the express-jwt library makes it easy to set up JSON Web Token authentication and you can write middleware to define your own custom rules.
const app = require ( 'express' )(); const bodyParser = require ( 'body-parser' ); const jwt = require ( 'express-jwt' )({ secret:'my secret key' }); // Now all HTTP endpoints that start with `/admin` and `/user` // require JWT authentication app.use( '/admin', jwt); app.use( '/user', jwt); // Add an additional layer of security to `/admin` endpoints to // make sure only admin users reach it app.use( '/admin', function (req, res, next) { // `express-jwt` sets `req.user` for you. Conceptually, jwt's // encrypt the JSON representation of the user using the secret key. // In other words, your access token for the API is your encrypted // user data! if (!req.user.isAdmin) { return res.status( 401 ).json({ err: 'Must be admin!' }); } return next(); });
Concurrency and Locking with Express Middleware
Importantly, Node.js is non-blocking and there’s no standard Node.js notion of a “lock” (as opposed to languages like Java) In addition, when you have multiple servers on different machines, the standard in-memory locks you might remember from undergrad systems programming are not very useful.
Let’s face it – managing distributed locking across different clients is a nightmare. But you need distributed locking, so what to do?
For example, Express middleware makes it easy to lock a resource for a certain group of endpoints and locking a user every time the client hits an endpoint that updates a user. So you might have separate endpoints like updateAdmin for doing special types of updates.
As a good rule of thumb, you’d like to lock the user every time someone hits a PUT endpoint under /user.
MongoDB to the rescue!
In order to help get you started, here’s an example using MongoDB as the store for the distributed lock.
const { MongoClient } = require('mongodb'); const app = require('express')(); const bodyParser = require('body-parser'); async function run() { const db = await MongoClient.connect('mongodb://localhost:27017/test'); app.put('/user/:id/*', async function(req, res, next) { // If we successfully upserted, that means we acquired the lock. Otherwise, // means the resource is already locked const result = await db.collection('Lock').findOneAndUpdate( { resource: 'User', id: req.params.id }, { $setOnInsert: { createdAt: new Date() } }, { upsert: true, returnOriginal: false }); if (!result.lastErrorObject.updatedExisting) { // Acquired the lock! res.on('finish', () => { // Release the lock by deleting the lock document when the request // handler is done db.collection('Lock').deleteOne({ _id: result.value._id }); }); return next(); } res.status(409).json({ error: `Resource ${req.params.id} locked` }); }); app.put('/user/:id/updateAdmin', function(req, res) { res.json({ ok: 1 }); }); app.put('/user/:id/update', function(req, res) { res.json({ ok: 1 }); }); app.listen(3000); } run().catch(error => console.error(error.stack));
Data Validation
Since data formats change fast, and apps can’t keep up unless you force upgrade your users regularly. Because JavaScript is a dynamically typed language, the JavaScript community has a myriad of well-adopted type casting and data validation libraries, including mongoose, joi, ajv, and others.
In addition to the benefits of JavaScript, Express error handling middleware can help you out by enabling you to handle data validation errors in a standard way across your application.
const Joi = require ( 'joi' ); const { MongoClient } = require ('mongodb' ); const app = require ( 'express' )(); const bodyParser = require ( 'body-parser' ); async function run () { const db = await MongoClient.connect('mongodb://localhost:27017/test' ); // `schema` lets you validate that objects match the given schema const schema = Joi.object().keys({ email: Joi.string().required().regex( /^ [email protected] +\..+$/ ), name: Joi.string().required() }); // Express body parser app.use(bodyParser.json()); // Sample endpoint that inserts a user in the database if it is valid app.post( '/user', async function (req, res, next) { const result = schema.validate(req.body); if (result.error) { return next(result.error); } await db.collection( 'User' ).insertOne(req.body); return { user: req.body }; }); // Express error handling middleware. Will execute if an error was passed to // `next()`. When you add more endpoints, they will still have the same // way of reporting errors. app.use( async function (err, req, res, next) { if (err.isJoi) { return res.status( 400 ).json({ err: err.message, details: err.details }); } next(err); }); // Catch-all error handler app.use( function (err, req, res, next) { return res.status( 500 ).json({ err: err.message }); }); app.listen( 3000 ); } run().catch(error => console.error(error.stack));
Interfacing With Externally Facing APIs
For both security and maintainability, APIs should be responsible for most interactions between your software and external APIs.
Also, leveraging external APIs is difficult and error prone, having a centralized layer for communicating with external APIs and reporting errors is critical.
So, keeping potentially sensitive API keys out of the hands of insecure clients is also important.
Error Handling with Express
If you’re interested in error handling, Express could also be a good option due to Express error handling middleware.
Express makes it easy to handle errors from external APIs in a standardized way. This is true as long as the errors are reported through next().
Check out an example of error handling middleware for the Twilio API.
const Twilio = require ( 'twilio' ); const app = require ( 'express' )(); const twilio = new Twilio(process.env.TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID, process.env.TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN); async function run () { app.post( '/sms', async function (req, res, next) { try { await twilio.messages.create({ body: 'Hello', // From number is invalid, this will cause an error from : '+12015550123', to: '+5555555555' }); } catch (error) { // Mark this error as a Twilio error, because the Twilio API doesn't // have a canonical error class error.isTwilio = true; return next(error); } res.json({ ok: 1 }); }); // Express error handler for handling twilio errors app.use( function (err, req, res, next) { if (err.isTwilio) { // Handle Twilio errors from all endpoints return res.status(err.status).json({ err: `Twilio error: ${err.message} ` }); } next(err); }); // Catch-all error handler app.use( function (err, req, res, next) { return res.status( 500 ).json({ err: err.message }); }); app.listen( 3000 ); } run().catch(error => console.error(error.stack));
Moving Along
Since clients are increasingly specialized, APIs are becoming increasingly important. APIs provide consistency across different clients.
The 2013 dream of a single unified JavaScript client for mobile, browser, and desktop is not feasible for most companies.
Due to the prolific npm ecosystem, Node.js’ elegant concurrency model, and code sharing with browser, Electron, and React Native, a Node.js API written in Express is still the way to go.Ford Motor Company has recorded its sixth straight quarter of profits and expects to have its net debt down to zero by the end of 2011. Ford was the only domestic auto manufacturer to avoid bankruptcy or take a bailout from the federal government. Notably, Ford’s North American operations are also profitable. According to the New York Times:
“Ford earned $1.6 billion in North America in the quarter, compared with $314 million in the period a year ago. Automotive operations lost $196 million in Europe but were profitable in other regions.
“Revenue declined $1.3 billion to $29 billion, reflecting the sale earlier this year of the company’s Swedish brand, Volvo. Excluding Volvo, now owned by the Chinese carmaker Geely, third-quarter revenue was up $1.7 billion.
“Ford executives said all of the company’s business units would be profitable in the fourth quarter and in 2011.
“Ford said it paid off $2 billion in debt in September and that it planned to pay its remaining obligation to the United Automobile Workers union’s retiree health care trust — $3.6 billion — on Friday, in cash. Ford had not been required to satisfy its debt to the union trust until 2022.”
Notably, one of the reasons for bailing out both GM and Chrysler was to avoid bankruptcy. Of course, those companies went through the bankruptcy process anyway, using the courts to do the hard work that Ford accomplished through hard-nosed corporate leadership, product improvements, and strategic management.
We’ve blogged a lot on Ford’s progress before, but previous posts on Ford’s success during the recession can be found here, here, and here.He explained that he had visited Northern Ireland a number of times prior to the IRA bombing while working as private secretary to Robin Chichester-Clark, the MP for Londonderry.
"It's not merely these creatures [the Brighton bombers] crippled my wife, but they also murdered five of my friends. I only hope that his death will help to bring some sort of closure to those families and friends of whose murder he's accomplished," he told Good Morning Britain.
Discussing the peace process that Mr McGuinness was instrumental to, Lord Tebbit said: "You might just as well say that if Himmler had succeeded Hitler and wiped out the Jews it would have removed the problem and there could have been peace in Europe."
He added: "He was a coward". Lord Tebbit also said he believed Mr McGuinness' transformation to "a man of peace" was because he feared being arrested and charged with a "number of murders which he had personally committed".
Arguing that while it was possible to leave violence behind, Lord Tebbit said that a person must first "confess his sins and to seek atonement".The attitude and arrogance of Buddy Dyer’s administration is evident once again, as the highly paid city attorney Mayanne Downs dismissed well-liked Orange County Commissioner Pete Clarke as a “rogue commissioner” in newly obtained emails. Downs emailed several senior Orlando City Hall officials, including Dyer’s Chief of Staff Frank Billingsley, urging them to ignore Commissioner Clarke’s attempts to start a discussion on how to save historic Tinker Field last year. Dyer eventually demolished and destroyed the historic site without working with Orange County leaders to save it, and now uses Tinker Field as a parking lot for Citrus Bowl events as well as a liquor bar instead of as a historic landmark.
“Let’s don’t let a rogue commissioner (who isn’t even ours) rush us into a premature discussion and recommendation,” Downs emailed.
“Agree,” Billingsley responded just ten minutes later.
At the time, County Commissioner Clarke was leading the way to represent the interests of many throughout the community who wanted to preserve the 100 years of history associated with Tinker Field. “I just really wanted things to slow down and have a true dialogue,” Commissioner Clarke said in an exclusive interview. “Sadly, I don’t think a real dialogue ever did happen.”
Dyer’s personal friend and top city attorney Mayanne Downs, who also continues to work at the GrayRobinson law firm, is likely a big reason why it never happened. Downs’ blatant disrespect and dismissal of another elected official is another example of what’s wrong in Orlando City Hall.
“I would never in my wildest dreams write an email like that about a City Commissioner or another elected official,” Commissioner Clarke told me. “There’s no reason to do something like that.”
But that doesn’t mean Commissioner Clarke isn’t wearing it as a badge of honor now that the emails are exposing Downs’ comments.
“At the same time, I look at it as kind of an honor to be called rogue,” he added. “I feel like what I was doing was important and it obviously made them take notice. I’m proud of that.”
But it is clear the Dyer administration never intended to work with Commissioner Clarke or Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs to save historic Tinker Field. Clarke’s leadership on the County Commission led Mayor Jacobs to write Buddy Dyer on official business seeking answers regarding the Tinker Field process. Official city records proved that Orlando Venues Director Allen Johnson included false and misleading information in his official response to Orange County on behalf of Dyer. There was also nothing “premature” about Dyer’s plans to demolish the historic site, which were well-documented for months leading up to Commissioner Clarke’s calls for a community solution.
“I just wish the City had told us ahead of time that this was their real plan,” Clarke said. “We never had a solid discussion about Tinker Field and that’s a loss for the community.”
Despite the apparent inflated egos of Dyer’s top staff, officials like Mayanne Downs will not create problems for Clarke, who is seeking re-election to the County Commission this year, from working with City Commissioners. Nor will Downs’ comments get between him working in a professional manner to seek solutions on local issues.
“The city commissioners who I work with that overlap in my district are good people and we have a great working relationship,” Clarke said.
Commissioner Clarke also laughed off the criticism from City Hall officials. “It’s almost like it was Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, in fact now I may want to go watch that movie again,” Commissioner Clarke joked.
There is also a clear difference between how the Dyer administration runs the City Council and how Mayor Jacobs runs the County Commission. “I’m glad Mayor Jacobs’ administration took action and attempted to start conversation quickly after we raised concerns,” Clarke said. “I think we have very, very good dialogue at the County Commission. At the County Commission we have the chance to speak our mind. It’s a chance to speak our mind on the issues, but also a chance for our constituents to get to know what we’re doing and what we’re thinking. It’s a very important step of the process to me.”
An important step of the process that was always missing from Dyer’s approach at the City Council. Byron Brooks, the city’s Chief Administrative Officer, explained in a previous email to Downs and Billingsley that he informed Orange County staffers that city officials “would not be in position to provide anything to the County until our policy makers act.” He added he believed “we should stay with that position,” in a clear attempt to avoid working with Orange County on developing a recommendation. Downs said she “completely” agreed with Brooks.
Clarke’s leadership on the County Commission has positioned him as a man of the people. His approach to local politics and his constituents is a welcome breath of fresh air.
“At the end of the day, it was definitely worth the effort and I wish we would have prevailed,” Clarke noted. “I would rather have had a field sitting there. I always said I wanted a place, not a plaque. I’ve tried to do the best job I can and I’m enjoying it. There will be a lot more important issues ahead and I’m going to keep working hard on behalf of the community.”The editorial staff at Fusion, a digital site owned by Univision’s Fusion Media Group, has voted to join the Writers Guild of America East.
The guild announced on Friday that more than 90% of Fusion’s 70-member bargaining unit voted in favor of unionization. The online vote came one week after the Fusion Union Organizing Committee wrote management, informing them that they were prepared to take action if an election date was not set for a union vote.
“The creative professionals at Fusion’s digital operation have spoken decisively — twice — in favor of collective bargaining,” said Lowell Peterson, the WGA East’s executive director. “We will work closely with these hard-working professionals to ensure that their real needs are addressed in the workplace, and in a collective bargaining agreement.”
Fusion.net is the first digital news site within the Fusion Media Group to unionize. The company recently acquired Gawker Media and assumed its existing WGA East union contract.
The WGA East is also trying to organize Univision’s African-American digital news site, TheRoot.com, and is waiting for the company to voluntarily recognize the union after its entire staff signed union cards.
The WGA East is the collective bargaining representative of digital media outlets the Gizmodo Media Group (formerly known as Gawker Media), VICE, the Huffington Post, Salon and ThinkProgress.Let’s turn now to Helmut Schmidt who was German Chancellor (Prime Minister) for 8 years (1974-1982). In his memoirs, Men and Powers (Random House, 1987), he wrote that American foreign policy is decided by two groups:
This is probably the most public and most brazen confirmation to date by the Globalist Elite that they control the US government. James Jones was appointed through the democratic process approved by Congress, but here he is stating categorically that he takes his orders daily from Henry Kissinger via two other unelected individuals, Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger. Kissinger is a well known mouthpiece for David Rockefeller. Many regard him as the author of several brutal wars and genocidal campaigns. He has been given no mandate whatever by the American people, and yet, as Jones confirms, he has direct control over US national security.
"Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through General Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here. We have a chain of command in the National Security Council that exists today.” [ Remarks by the US National Security Adviser, James L Jones at the 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy, Hotel Bayerischer, February 8, 2009. ]
Let’s start with an astonishing admission by the Globalists in 2009. It can actually be found on the official website of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which is one of several obscure institutions that secretly run the United States:
‘It can’t happen here!’ you say. Really? The following quotations prove otherwise. Not only is it coming down the tracks but the pace of decay is now such that a severe economic collapse in the next 2-3 years is looking increasingly likely.
Industrial employment across the US as a whole has been radically reduced and most of the jobs that remain are in the low-paying, insecure services sector. The erosion of your civil liberties since 9/11 has been so severe that any law-abiding American can now be picked up and incarcerated indefinitely by his government on vaguely-worded security-related charges – against which he or she has absolutely no defense.
Please consider the evidence for yourself. More than forty percent of your industrial base has been ‘off-shored’, with most of it given lock-stock-and-barrel to a Marxist-Leninist regime known as China. Using a host of deceitful practices in the banking system, successive governments have left the country saddled with such staggering levels of debt – at household, corporate, state and federal level, not to mention massive unfunded liabilities such as social security, Medicaid and Medicare – that there is not the slightest chance that even a fraction of it can be paid down from future taxation without destroying the economy. In fact it is so great, and growing at such an alarming rate, that your great nation will very shortly be unable even to service its debt (i.e. keep up its interest payments to foreign and domestic lenders).
If you are living in the United States you need to be especially concerned about the Global Elite since the last major obstacle to a One World Government is the US itself. As a sovereign independent nation, and the foremost player in world affairs, with a long tradition of liberty and democracy, the Globalists believe it cannot be allowed to continue in its existing form. They have long planned to weaken it fatally – a process which is now at a very advanced stage – and destroy its sovereignty. A totalitarian regime of some kind is scheduled to take over, possibly on foot of an engineered national crisis, and abolish the Constitution. The America that has existed since 1776 will then disappear forever.
They are so arrogant and so confident of success that, from time to time, some of their more outspoken members divulge just a little too much information about their intentions.
The following published quotations by members of the Global Elite should go a long way toward dispelling any doubts you may have about their existence. They should also shed considerable light on their mindset, their methodology, their contempt for humanity, and the remarkably sophisticated nature of their plan to destroy the sovereignty of independent nations and create a New World Order.
So, instead of asking ‘Does a global conspiracy exist?’ we should really be asking, ‘What are these power-obsessed, ultra-wealthy people actually planning to do and what are the likely consequences for the rest of humanity?’
Given human nature and its dismal record of murder and corruption, it would be truly astonishing if a group of this kind did not exist!
It is in essence an agreement among like-minded people who are seeking to establish a global monopoly on the commodity they value more than any other – Power.
These super-rich families and those who support them are known by various names, including the Power Elite, the Ruling Elite, the cabal of International Bankers, the Illuminati, the Globalists, and the Black Nobility. One can even think of them as the Trillionaires Club.
"A secret agreement by a number of super-rich elite families to increase their wealth and power on the world stage by covert means, with a view ultimately to impose a unified world government under their control, and to employ a range of subversive techniques and programs in diverse fields – political, financial, economic, military, industrial, medical, educational, religious, and media-related, among others – to achieve this objective."
That is okay as far as it goes, but it does not even begin to capture the breadth and scope of the Globalist agenda. Once you define it correctly, it starts to look less like a conspiracy and more like a business plan – which is exactly what it is:
Many dismiss those who believe in a global conspiracy as cranks and fools. And yet evidence that such a conspiracy exists is fairly easy to establish.
The Establishment and the Council on Foreign Relations
The power of the CFR is well illustrated by the extraordinary number of top government positions that have been filled by its members – 7 Presidents, 7 Vice Presidents, 17 Secretaries of State, 19 Secretaries of Defense, 17 Secretaries of the Treasury, and 14 Directors of the CIA.
“The Council on Foreign Relations successfully drew carefully chosen young people into its discussions and prepared them at first for modest tasks; in the course of their careers they often took on top-level missions in the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House, or other centers of international policy – from trade agreements to disarmament...The foreign policy elite, which had very silent but effective ways of seeing to its own succession, was thus largely a matter of the East Coast.” [pages 221-222]
“One was a large number of outstanding career diplomats and career officials in high positions, who provided continuity; the other was a large reservoir of discerning private persons, who were committed to foreign affairs and who had already served earlier administrations. This reservoir, earlier frequently called “the establishment,” had both its forum and its center in the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Its members were lawyers, bankers, some industrialists, and academics. The council published (and still publishes) the excellent periodical Foreign Affairs...
“...I gratefully recall the yearly so-called Bilderberg conferences that Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands organized and ran, and the yearly meetings of the London Institute for Strategic Studies under the leadership of Alistair Buchan. Some of the United States senators active in foreign affairs...always participated in these two-to-three day international conferences. Conversations with Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and Paul Nitze, which might occur during such meetings, were a treasure trove of information and enlightenment...We were not surprised whenever, a few years later, one or another of the men we had had such good conversations with reappeared as a cabinet member or deputy secretary or head of department; in such cases we could safely assume that the man’s views were the same ones he had espoused in our earlier talks.” [pages 222-223]
“...a class of professional intellectual politicians who never run for office but offer their services to the elected politicians and the candidates – at times even force them on them – as expert advisers and executive officers. They are supported by various institutions, where they work whenever they are not in government service.” [page 227]
Schmidt proceeds to name some of these institutions – the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Georgetown Center for Strategy and International Studies, the Hoover Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Rand Corporation.
In the course of his review of American power brokers [pages 221-227], Schmidt names several of these unelected “professional intellectual politicians,” including some who are still in power today, nearly forty years later – David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The Incredible |
Census public campaign he said: “I cringed when I saw it.”
The 2016 Census was controversial because it sought the names of all respondents, prompting concerns about privacy of information.
That apparently prompted a series of four cyber attacks on the Census website which led to it being shut down.
ROW OVER CENSUS ATTACK CONTINUES
The blame game over the national survey continues within IBM, with the contractor facing a spat with its own subcontractors over the August 9 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
A DDoS attack is not a hack where someone breaks past network security to access data. It simply floods serves with incoming messages, overloading it which prevents it from operating properly.
The fourth DDoS attack which struck the Census website on the evening of August 9 was foreign-sourced and came when IBM had already directed NextGen that geo-blocking was to be put in place, it claims.
“Had NextGen (and through it Vocus) properly implemented Island Australia, it would have been effective to prevent this DDoS attack and the effects it had on the eCensus site,” IBM said in its submission to the committee.
Vocus denies the fourth DDoS attack caused the site to become unresponsive.
“The fourth attack comprised of attack traffic which peaked at 563Mbps which is not considered significant in the industry, and lasted 14 minutes... such attacks would not usually bring down the Census website,” its submission read.
The cause was IBM workers falsely identifying normal traffic patterns as data exfiltration.
“Vocus was not informed of IBM’s DDoS mitigation strategy, Island Australia or its specific requirements, until after the fourth attack.”
Census website crashes due to foreign hackers 0:30 ABS chief statistician David Kalisch confirmed to ABC radio that the Census website was hacked four times last night by foreign hackers. Courtesy: Today
Nextgen says it wasn’t privy to “Island Australia” until July 20, just six days before the eCensus site went live.
Also giving evidence to the inquiry will be Alastair MacGibbon, the special adviser to the prime minister on cyber security.
MacGibbon, who is conducting a review of the events, hasn’t yet finalised his findings. But he has already concluded there was a failure in the geo-blocking service during the fourth denial-of-service attack.
Simultaneously a monitoring system indicated there was outbound traffic from the website, which was feared to be malicious and is now known to have been a “false positive”.
In its submission, the ABS said the attacks should not have been able to disrupt the system.
In Senate estimates committee hearings last week, Australian Bureau of Statistics chief statistician David Kalisch acknowledged it made a number of poor judgments ahead of the Census. He revealed the shutdown cost taxpayers up to $30 million.
However, the ABS remains confident the census will still produce high-quality data, despite the problems.
— with AAPWireless connectivity is the key to convenience in the TecHome, and a new product seeks to achieve an industry first with a Wi-Fi gas tankless water heater.
Rinnai will unveil a wireless module and app for gas tankless water heaters at the 2016 International Builders show, according to the press release.
The wireless module adds remote connectivity to new and existing Rinnai water heaters. Once attached to the system, homebuyers can check on the status of their system from a smartphone or home control platform.
Once the module is attached to the heater, builders can integrate the device with the home’s automation platform for added control over water temperature and maintenance.
The module uses Wi-Fi to easily connect to the home’s platform, and while it adds convenience for the homebuyer, it also has an interesting application for builders.
Builders can use the wireless access as a diagnostic tool even after the job is complete. The module pushes system codes and service information to the builder and dealer, allowing them to get ahead of any service calls that could arise.
While the new module represents an industry first, it is not the first wirelessly controlled tankless water heater. Trutankless’ water heaters also have smart connectivity but use electricity, not gas, to heat the home’s water.
This new product can help builders market the fully-connected TecHome to Millennials and tech-minded clients.
Rinnai’s product lineup will be at booth C1821.Laravel is a clean and classy framework for PHP web development. Freeing you from spaghetti code, Laravel helps you create wonderful applications using simple, expressive syntax. Development should be a creative experience that you enjoy, not something that is painful. Enjoy the fresh air.
That’s the text which can be found on the Laravel homepage and, if we’d believe it, wouldn’t it be wonderful? Let’s test this claim by building a simple TODO application and see how much effort we have to put into it.
Migrations
First we’ll design the database. The application requires a rather simple schema, a single table with 5 columns to store an ID, title, description, and timestamps when the task was created and last updated.
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Laravel has a feature called migrations, which you might be familiar with already if you’ve used other frameworks like Ruby on Rails. Migrations are files which are used to update your database. As they are executed, they change your database schema in such a manner that you can easily apply updates to it.
For our application, the migration looks something like this:
<?php class Create_Todo_Table { public function up() { Schema::table("todos", function($table) { $table->create(); $table->increments("id"); $table->string("title", 20); $table->text("description"); $table->timestamps(); }); } public function down() { Schema::drop("todos"); } }
The up() method is called when the migration is being executed and the down() method is called when the migration is being reverted.
The Model
As Laravel is an MVC framework, we’ll need to create the model. Like with any other MVC framework you might know, the model is the component which is responsible for communicating with the database. Our table is simple, and so it only needs a simple model:
<?php class Todo extends Eloquent { public static $timestamps = true; }
The class name is “Todo” and Laravel will automatically associate this with the todos table in our database. Eloquent is an ORM class for models that Laravel uses, which provides a smooth way to work with database objects.
The $timestamps property is set to true, which means that whenever a new entry is created or an existing entry is updated, the created_at and the updated_at fields will be updated accordingly.
The Controller
Now let’s create the controller. The controller is where all the business logic is located, and should therefore contain functionality to:
Retrieve all of the entries in the table to list them
Retrieve the information of a specific entry with a given id
Delete an entry with a given id
Compose a form to add a new entry
Add the new entry to the database and compose a message to confirm the addition
This gives us the following controller class with five methods, which we call actions. An action’s declaration must be preceded by the prefix “action_”.
<?php class Todo_Controller extends Base_Controller { public function action_list() { $todos = Todo::all(); return View::make("list") ->with("todos", $todos); } public function action_view($id) { $todo = Todo::where_id($id)->first(); return View::make("view") ->with("todo", $todo); } public function action_delete($id) { $todo = Todo::where_id($id)->first(); $todo->delete(); return View::make("deleted"); } public function action_new() { return View::make("add"); } public function action_add() { $todo = new Todo(); $todo->title = Input::get("title"); $todo->description = Input::get("description"); $todo->save(); return View::make("success"); } }
The code is very straightforward. The first method action_list() will get all of the entries in the database. This is where Eloquent makes things easy, requiring only Todo::all() to fetch them. Then it returns a view with all of the entries from the database bound to the $todos variable.
The other methods are also easy to read. They mostly exist to manipulate a database object and return a view with some data bound to it. The last method might be an exception; the action_add() will be called when submitting the form to add a new TODO entry. Input::get() is used to retrieve the submitted form values.
The View
Now we’ve come to the view. Laravel uses its own Blade templating engine which gives us clean and readable code. I will give an example of the first view, the list. With the make / with statement under the return of the view from action_list(), we put all the results of Todo::all() into $todos. We can now use that in the view:
<h2>Todo list</h2> <p>{{ HTML::link_to_action("todo@new", "Add new todo") }}</p> <ul> @foreach($todos as $todo) <li>{{ HTML::link_to_action("todo@view", $todo->title, array($todo->id)) }} - {{ HTML::link_to_action("todo@delete", "Delete", array($todo->id)) }}</li> @endforeach </ul>
That’s all it takes! First we let Blade create a link to the controller’s action action_new(). Then we see the foreach statement which is quite similar to the one native to PHP. For every task we create a link to view the entry. The link text is the second parameter, $todo->title, and any parameters for the action should be provided next. We need the ID of the entry we want to view, which $todo->id provides. We also create a link to delete the task, again including the ID of the TODO as parameter.
Conclusion
So, that was that, and indeed it is simple to make an application using Laravel. The code is straightforward and easily readable. I hope this was useful to you, and you consider using Laravel with your next PHP application. See you next time!
Image via FotoliaCreative Commons: Wikimedia
Liberals and conservatives don't attack one another in the same ways. The Oxford English Dictionary released a blog post about the differences in slurs hurled across the political aisle, but the data, gathered in 2014, feels dusty, as if it were culled entirely from emails forwarded by grandmas. The findings don't square with our current reality, where a meme of a president, elevated by message and image boards, has turned our entire political discourse into a comment thread.
Some political insult truths remain constant. The right tends to go for pithy but broad slaps across the face, while the left seems to go for too-cute-by-half allusions or apt but un-sexy descriptive labels. This disparity in attack methods makes it difficult for direct 1-to-1 comparisons. But I chose to go ahead and write a guide to insults used by the right so, in the interest of parity, here's an attempt at cataloging the zings used by the left.
Basement Dweller
Long before internet subcultures were overtly affiliated with political parties, members of these groups were referred to as losers who live in their parents' basement and rarely leave to see the light of day. The left has simply used the transitive property to deliver this insult to Trump supporters. Basement dweller = internet subculture = 4chan = Pepe = Alt-Right = Trump supporter.
Birther
Donald Trump was one of the key figureheads in perpetuating the thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that asserts Barack Obama forged his birth certificate because he was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, thus making him an illegitimate President according to Article II of the Constitution.
The birther thing could've remained a weird little racist footnote in the history books. Then, last year, Donald Trump dredged it up by falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton had invented the theory and that he had "settled" it.
A play on "truther," a term for one who believes the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job, the birther label is primarily used as an ad hominem attack that would discredit the target. "If they believe Obama was born in Kenya, why should we care about their thoughts on…"
Christian Sharia
Conservatives are the primarily party concerned with the (non-existent) encroachment of Sharia law within the US. An insult mentioning Christian Sharia is pointing out the irony of the group most opposed to Islamic religious-based laws entering the country being the same that cites the Bible when pushing for legislation that would overturn Roe v. Wade or allow for discrimination against homosexuals.
Conned
Many consider Donald Trump to be nothing more than a simple con man with an inheritance safety net. Between the settlements for his sham University or the myriad lawsuits filed against him for fleecing contractors, it's easy to understand why the left asserts that his supporters have been emotionally defrauded in a similar fashion.
Conspiritard
A portmanteaux of conspiracy theorist + retard. Pretty uninspired tbh.
Deplorables
Hillary Clinton made the mistake of referring to Trump supporters who are racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and otherwise unsavory characters as a "basket of deplorables." This was dumb. Trump fans immediately glommed on to the word "deplorable," adopting it as a badge of honor, emblazoning it on T-shirts, hats, and Twitter handles.
Drumpf
On the February 28, 2016 episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver explained that Donald Trump's ancestral family name was, in fact, "Drumpf," but changed over time. When levied at one of Trumps supporters (e.g. calling them a "Drumpf Supporter") this insult wrongly assumes that a) the supporter isn't already aware of Donald's "real" name and b) that they care. This insult has the added bonus of yielding any high ground the insulter may have had.
Fascist
If someone on the left calls Trump, his administration, or those who would support his administration fascist, it's probably because the administration has displayed fascistic tendencies.
Using the 14 characteristics of fascism enumerated by Dr. Lawrence Britt, who academically compared numerous fascist regimes, we see that the Trump administration ticks all 14 boxes: 1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism, 2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights, 3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause, 4. Supremacy of the Military, 5. Rampant Sexism, 6. Controlled Mass Media, 7. Obsession with National Security, 8. Religion and Government are Intertwined, 9. Corporate Power is Protected, 10. Labor Power is Suppressed, 11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts, 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment, 13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption, 14. Fraudulent Elections.
Fake News
America has a problem with unreliable news sources. Unfortunately for the right, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and other historically dependable outlets are not part of the problem.
In a staggering collective display of cognitive dissonance, Trump supporters and the man himself have a tendency to refer to any news source that challenges their world view as "fake news." In response, Liberals have taken to using the phrase against the right. Generally when calling out actual instances of shady journalism.
Milo's Opinion
Milo Yianoppoulos, the weaponized diversity deployed by the right as proof that minorities can be as shitty as majorities, was banned from Twitter last year for leading an attack on actress and comedian Leslie Jones. Since then, the left has directed traffic to his deactivated profile as a sort of schadenfreudistic Rick Roll whenever news of the lad surfaces. Like this Reddit post, titled "Milo responds to Hillary's anti Alt-right speech!".
Misogynist
Do you really need all of these explained in detail? The right is widely regarded as the anti-women side. Hence, y'know, the whole Women's March thing.
Neckbeard
A neckbeard is a slur for a portly internet denizen who, either in an attempt to hide his multiple chins or purely via laziness, grows an unkempt mane of facial hair on his neck. As the realms of internet subcultures and Trump supporters have meshed, the insult has taken on a more politically charged tone.
Re-thug-licans
An embarrassing garbage pile of an insult only used by indignant left-of-center PTA moms, "Re-thug-lican" is awful in not just its clunkiness, but also in its reinforcement of the notion that liberals are a bunch of hall monitors calling out mean ol' bullies.
Rigged!
Before, during, and after his upset win of the presidential election, Donald Trump has insisted that the cards were stacked against him. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he and his supporters have bemoaned the election results. Like many other items on this list, liberals have simply adopted this term as a mocking retort of their own, employing it as a means of taunting the commander in chief or his denizens whenever they complain about faltering polling numbers, political opposition, or even the weather not being to their liking.
Sad!
A favorite interjection of Trump's, Sad! (and that exclamation mark is crucial) has also been co-opted by the left to lampoon him. Best when paired with a fact or news story that would probably get under the president's notoriously thin skin.
Snowflake
The tug of war over insult ownership is nowhere more pronounced than with snowflake. Primarily used by the right to taunt the assumed preciousness and entitlement of the left, liberals have taken to returning fire with the very word used to attack them.
Starbucks Cup
Whether unintentional or calculated, the world's top coffee chain can't seem to avoid the cultural battlefield. After a manufactured November protest (that, for some reason, included buying the company's products) and the above linked controversies, some on the left have taken to referencing a Starbucks cup as a means of highlighting just how short the taking offense fuse is for some on the right.
Sure, Jan
Primarily used as a rebuttal to a flagrant lie being spouted by Kellyanne Conway, "Sure, Jan" turns Christine Taylor's condescending sibling jab from 1995's The Brady Bunch Movie into a doubtful burn for the masses.
Teabagger
The Tea Party isn't really a thing anymore, so this insult is sadly a bit of an endangered species. But it deserves mentioning as it's referencing not just the vehicle by which tea leaves are steeped in hot water, but also the act of dipping one's testicles onto another person's face.
Trumpkin
A way to describe supporters of Donald Trump, this insult is popular partially because it rolls off the tongue so nicely and also because it alludes to a blumpkin, a sexual act where a blowjob recipient is simultaneously taking a shit.
Trumpster
Less impressive than the previous entry, the Trumpster insult is an awkward mash-up of dumpster and Trump. Nobody really calls people they don't like dumpsters, so this comes off as forced. "Cum Trumpster," on the other hand, has untapped potential.
Vanilla ISIS / Y'all Qaeda / YeeHawdists
Twitter users enjoy cracking wise and, when some rednecks holed up in an Oregon federal building and engaged in an armed standoff with law enforcement, the social media site went in on them, firing off a flurry of burns that compared the inept, gun-toting fighters to Middle Eastern terrorist groups.
Velcro Shoes
The assumption that the right is less intelligent is woven into a fair amount of the left's insults and has been for decades. This slam plays upon that stereotype, insinuating that the opposition in unable to handle the complexities of a bowknot.
Wrong Side of History
By most metrics, society, as a whole, has become increasingly progressive over time. Labor rights, women's rights, civil rights, and gay rights were all hard fought movements eventually won by progressive ideology. Progressives view these coups as evidence that conservatives, who are, by definition, diametrically opposed to progressives, are bound to wind up on the losing team in the long run, whatever the cultural battle may be. Though all evidence points to liberals being right in this sentiment, they could stand to come up with a less shit-eating way of expressing it.
Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.Akron City Council is helping the West Hill Neighborhood create the city’s first nut farm across the street from its existing fruit farm.
Council members have donated a vacant lot on Maple Street to the West Hill Neighborhood Organization.
They will be planting chestnut, cashew, walnut and almond trees there.
Karen Noel, the organization’s vice president, says the farm is part of the neighborhood’s beautification process.
Noel on getting the land for the neighborhood's nut farm project
“Got all the neighbors together about two years ago and we created a wish list of what we would like to see for our neighborhood. One of the items that kept coming up was more green spaces. So we developed more community gardens, a Monarch waystation, we built a pocket park…these are all on vacant lots in our neighborhood.”
Noel says the organization will provide about half the trees needed to complete the farm.
She says it will be open to the public in the summer.Dozens of participants have dropped out of the controversial National Energy Board review of Kinder Morgan's proposed Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, saying they can no longer support a "biased" and "unfair" process.
Thirty-five commenters and interveners, including the Wilderness Committee and the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, sent a letter to the board Wednesday announcing their immediate withdrawal.
"It's a sad day. We do not like to fly in the face of regulatory processes," said Wilderness Committee climate campaigner Eoin Madden in a phone interview. "But we can't abide by the system any more. It's too flawed."
The news came as the energy board was to release its draft conditions for the pipeline expansion. Commenters have six days to respond to the conditions, which are legally required and do not mean the board has made a decision yet.
The latest departures are in addition to the earlier withdrawal of two other high-profile interveners. Economist Robyn Allan announced her exit from the "rigged" process in May, while former BC Hydro chief executive Marc Eliesen called it a "farce" when he pulled out last year.
NEB disappointed by withdrawal
Spokesperson Tara O'Donovan said the board was disappointed the participants had chosen to withdraw.
"As interveners and commenters in the process they had an opportunity to add their voice to the record, and work to influence the decision of the board," she said in a statement.
The review includes about 400 interveners, who can provide evidence and testimony, and 1,300 commenters, who can submit letters. O'Donovan said the board will consider all submissions and it is committed to a thorough and fair environmental assessment.
"Our processes are fair and guided by legislation. We are also bound by the rules of natural justice, and our decisions are subject to review by the federal Court of Appeal."
Kinder Morgan's $5.4-billion proposal would triple the bitumen-carrying capacity of the Trans Mountain line by laying almost 1,000 kilometres of new pipe between Edmonton and Metro Vancouver, increasing the number of tankers in Burrard Inlet from five to 34.
'Unbalanced, ill-informed hearing'
The letter, signed by two environmental groups and 33 citizens, states the board has discounted evidence from experts and First Nations, ensuring an "unbalanced and ill-informed" hearing.
It chastises the board for not considering the project's impact on climate change, shutting out the vast majority of citizens who applied to participate and excluding cross-examination.
Peter Wood, terrestrial campaigns director for Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, said his group's voice would be best heard outside the process.
"We will still be able to voice our concerns. The NEB will no longer be able to cite our participation as an example of legitimacy or buy-in by the environmental community."
The society is especially concerned about five parks that the proposed pipeline would cut through, including Lac Du Bois Grasslands Protected Area near Kamloops, B.C. and Bridal Veil Falls Park in Chilliwack, B.C..
Wood called on the B.C. government to conduct an independent review of the project that considers climate change and potential oil spills.
A number of citizens who withdrew today live in B.C.'s Gulf Islands. Sandra Leckie, a former park ranger who moved to Salt Spring Island six years ago, said a tanker spill would completely shut down the region's tourist economy.
"It doesn't take long for salt water to become part of your blood," she said. "I think many people who live on the Gulf Islands have a visceral reaction to the image of an oil spill here."FUTURE'S YOUNG HITMAKER BRIGHTENS UP
The producer is one of the most crucial yet anonymous figures in all of music. Every now and again we aim to illuminate these under-heralded artists with Beat Construction, an extension of our column in the magazine. For today we spoke to Metro Boomin, the 19-year-old Atlanta producer whose high-profile production gig on "Honest," the striking first single from Future's upcoming album of the same name, is a deserved next step after years of "shoot-em-up, bang bang" mixtape tracks. Here, he talks about Future's bat cave, sobriety in the studio and Atlanta's "friend circle" of rising producers.
How'd you get into making beats? I grew up in St Louis. Just with my mom. I always loved music. In seventh grade I was in the band for a second playing bass guitar. I wanted to rap, but I needed beats. I couldn’t buy any so I just made my own. I ended up liking that more than rapping so I just dropped the rap shit. On Christmas when I was 13, my mom got me my first laptop. I downloaded it FruityLoops, cause I had heard about it, and started messing around. Shit just blew from there. I still use FruityLoops today.
Were you a big computer kid? Were you a big Soulja Boy fan? I was, I’m not gonna lie. And I was definitely an inside kid. I was sitting there just making beats every day.
Why'd you move to Atlanta? I’d been going to Atlanta since 11th grade, just to work on music. I knew once I graduated I was gonna move. It was really like Hollywood as far as music is concerned, like how actors move to LA.
Was life in Atlanta as glamorous as you thought it would be? I couldn’t catch a break. I went to Morehouse for a semester. That shit was really a lot. Studio then class right after, I was driving myself crazy. Morehouse has a strict attendance policy—you can only miss two classes before you fail one. With music, I need to be where people want me to be when they want me to be there. Shit like this doesn’t come to everybody. I still value education, but I know I can always go back to school. So it got to the point where I had to make a decision. Then me and Future did called “Hard.” He liked the beat and the song so much that he just wanted me around all the time. That gained me a lot of interest.
“Hard” exemplifies a menacing sound that you became known for. Are you a dark dude? No! A lot of producers say my beats are scary. They make me sound like, He must be evil, this nigga’s crazy. When I play a bunch of a beats in a row people are like, “Man were you going through something?” It’s funny cause I think I’m like one of the most charismatic people you would ever know. I’m really just goofy and shit. It’s really the opposite of me, but it’s just what I like and what I’ve done for so long. My stuff is melodic and hits hard. I’m working to become more well-rounded. But that stuff is just what I do most naturally. Even playing keys I just automatically start there because that’s what I came up listening to. All of that old Gucci and Jeezy, that’s what all their beats sounded like and that’s what I listened to throughout my life. I definitely think that had an influence and an effect.HERSHEY, Pa. — Less than 21 hours after a game in Syracuse, and less than 17 hours after the team bus rolled back into town, Scott Gomez perched astride the boards at Giant Center, awaiting the first shift of the seventh American Hockey League game of his life.
Gomez, a 36-year-old center who was the N.H.L.’s top rookie in the 1999-2000 season, had two assists for the Hershey Bears in that game, a 5-1 win over the Syracuse Crunch here on Saturday, and the sellout crowd of 10,964, including dozens of children tooting vuvuzelas, went home happy.
“I’m not just hanging around,” Gomez, his bag packed and his tie askew, said as he stood in the empty Hershey locker room afterward.
Gomez, who had 181 goals and 574 assists in his 1,066-game N.H.L. career and helped the Devils win two Stanley Cups, was waived on Dec. 30 by the St. Louis Blues, his sixth N.H.L. team. He considered retiring until the man he calls his “paid consultant” talked him out of it.I’ve mentioned their book the “Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics” a couple times already; today I’d like to recommend that you read a wonderful short paper by Gerald Jay Sussman and Jack Wisdom, called “The Role of Programming in the Formulation of Ideas,” which helps explain why understanding physics and the other mathematical sciences can sometimes be so difficult. The basic point is that our notation is often an absolute mess, caused by the fact that we use equations like we use natural language, in a highly ambiguous way:
“It is necessary to present the science in the language of mathematics. Unfortunately, when we teach science we use the language of mathematics in the same way that we use our natural language. We depend upon a vast amount of shared knowledge and culture, and we only sketch an idea using mathematical idioms.”
The solution proposed is to develop notation that can be understood by computers, which do not tolerate ambiguity:
“One way to become aware of the precision required to unambiguously communicate a mathematical idea is to program it for a computer. Rather than using canned programs purely as an aid to visualization or numerical computation, we use computer programming in a functional style to encourage clear thinking. Programming forces one to be precise and formal, without being excessively rigorous. The computer does not tolerate vague descriptions or incomplete constructions. Thus the act of programming makes one keenly aware of one’s errors of reasoning or unsupported conclusions.”
Sussman and Wisdom then focus on one highly illuminating example, the Lagrange equations. These equations can be derived from the fundamental principle of least action. This principle tells you that if you have a classical system that begins in a configuration C 1 at time t 1 and arrives at a configuration C 2 at time t 2, the path it traces out between t 1 and t 2 will be the one that is consistent with the initial and final configurations and minimizes the integral over time of the Lagrangian for the system, where the Lagrangian is given by the kinetic energy minus the potential energy.
Physics textbooks tell us that if we apply the calculus of variations to the integral of the Lagrangian (called the “action”) we can derive that the true path satisfies the Lagrange equations, which are traditionally written as:
Here L is the Lagrangian, t is the time, annd qi are the coordinates of the system.
These equations (and many others like them) have confused and bewildered generations of physics students. What is the problem? Well, there are all sorts of fundamental problems in interpreting these equations, detailed in Sussman and Wisdom’s paper. As they point out, basic assumptions like whether a coordinate and its derivative are independent variables are not consistent within the same equation. And shouldn’t this equation refer to the path somewhere, since the Lagrange equations are only correct for the true path? I’ll let you read Sussman and Wisdom’s full laundry list of problems yourself. But let’s turn to the psychological effects of using such equations:
“Though such statements (and derivations that depend upon them) seem very strange to students, they are told that if they think about them harder they will understand. So the student must either come to the conclusion that he/she is dumb and just accepts it, or that the derivation is correct, with some appropriate internal rationalization. Students often learn to carry out these manipulations without really understanding what they are doing.”
Is this true? I believe it certainly is (my wife agrees: she gave up on mathematics, even though she always received excellent grades, because she never felt she truly understood). The students who learn to successfully rationalize such ambiguous equations, and forget about the equations that they can’t understand at all, are the ones who might go on to be successful physicists. Here’s an example, from the review of Sussman and Wisdom’s book by Piet Hut, a very well-regarded physicist who is now a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies:
“… I went through the library in search of books on the variational principle in classical mechanics. I found several heavy tomes, borrowed them all, and started on the one that looked most attractive. Alas, it didn’t take long for me to realize that there was quite a bit of hand-waving involved. There was no clear definition of the procedure used for computing path integrals, let alone for the operations of differentiating them in various ways, by using partial derivatives and/or using an ordinary derivative along a particular path. And when and why the end points of the various paths had to be considered fixed or open to variation also was unclear, contributing to the overall confusion.
Working through the canned exercises was not very difficult, and from an instrumental point of view, my book was quite clear, as long as the reader would stick to simple examples. But the ambiguity of the presentation frustrated me, and I started scanning through other, even more detailed books. Alas, nowhere did I find the clarity that I desired, and after a few months I simply gave up. Like generations of students before me, I reluctantly accepted the dictum that ‘you should not try to understand quantum mechanics, since that will lead you astray for doing physics’, and going even further, I also gave up trying to really understand classical mechanics! Psychological defense mechanisms turned my bitter sense of disappointment into a dull sense of disenchantment.”
Sussman and Wisdom do show how the ambiguous conventional notation can be replaced with unambiguous notation that can even be used to program a computer. Because it’s new, it will feel alien at first; the Lagrange equations look like this:
It’s worth learning Sussman and Wisdom’s notation for the clarity it ultimately provides. It’s even more important to learn to always strive for clear understanding.
One final point: although mathematicians do often use notation that is superior to physicists’, they shouldn’t feel too smug; Sussman and Wisdom had similar things to say about differential geometry in this paper.
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Tags: functional programming, Lagrange equations, mathematical ambiguity, notationIn another new initiative, the State Department is poised to expand its long-faltering campaign to counter the Islamic State’s propaganda machine, and one of the candidates being considered to lead the effort is Michael D. Lumpkin, a retired member of the Navy SEALs who is the Pentagon’s top Special Operations policy official.
The effort to overhaul the agency responsible for countering Islamic State messaging, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, could draw on Mr. Lumpkin’s understanding of covert operations to improve the State Department’s efforts.
During the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 13,000 Special Operations forces were deployed on missions across the globe, but a large majority were assigned to those two countries. Now, roughly half of the 7,500 elite troops overseas are posted outside the Middle East or South Asia, operating in 85 countries, according to the United States Special Operations Command.
There is other, subtler, evidence of the sway of senior Special Operations officers.
When Mr. Obama appeared before reporters in the Pentagon briefing room this month to discuss his administration’s strategy for fighting the Islamic State in Syria, he was flanked by a coterie of top national security officials, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Standing beside them was Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the head of the Special Operations Command, whose presence raised eyebrows at the Pentagon.
The threat from the Islamic State has become more prominent in the presidential campaign since the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., and many candidates have proclaimed a need for more Special Operations troops to be deployed far and wide. Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, has talked about embedding Special Operations troops with Iraqi soldiers on the front lines, and Hillary Clinton said she would consider sending more special operators to Syria than the 50 that Mr. Obama recently authorized to assist rebels fighting Islamic State.
These calls for more American Special Operations troops have come even as some of the same candidates said they opposed boots on the ground in places such as Syria. Mr. Obama himself tried to draw a distinction during an interview this month with CBS News, when a reporter asked if recent Special Operations deployments in Iraq and Syria meant that he was reversing his pledge.The West Bengal government on Friday told the Calcutta High Court that it would allow immersion of Durga idols till 10 pm on Bijoya Dashami, extending the time by four hours from the deadline earlier announced by chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
The government issued a fresh order saying there was “typographical error” in the earlier one.
The original order had raised the hackles of the BJP, Vishva Hindu Parishad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which accused the government of interfering with the rights of Hindus to appease Muslims since Muharram will be observed on October 1, a day after Dashami, the last day of Durga Puja.
BJP president Amit Shah had also raised the issue during his three-day trip of Bengal earlier this week.
During the hearing of a case challenging the restriction on immersion after 6pm on Dashami on September 30, advocate general Kishore Dutta on Friday told the division bench of acting chief justice Nishita Mahtre and justice Tapabrata Chakraborty that the government was ready to allow immersion till 10 pm.
The advocate general showed |
Dell also sells an optional 12,000 mAh battery that connects to the charging port, and this will almost double the battery life.
Dell Power Companion
Dell's Power Companion accessory is a 12,000 mAh (otherwise known as a 12 Ah) battery, which comes with a couple of connectors to hook up to the various Dell power inputs on their laptops. To charge it, you plug the laptop power adapter into the Power Companion. This may seem like a bad idea, since your laptop charging cable would be indisposed, but you can simply put the Power Companion in the middle, so the adapter charges the Power Companion, which then charges the laptop.
The nice part about the Dell Power Companion is that you can easily charge the laptop while it is in your bag during travels. It will also charge any other USB devices, and it comes with the necessary adapters to hook to any Dell.
Charge Time
With just a 45 watt power adapter, one might be worried about the charge times on the XPS 13. However they seem very reasonable. The FHD model was able to charge the battery in just over two hours. The QHD+ model required three hours, but a significant amount of time was spent at 99% charge, as you can see in the graph below. Also note that if the laptop isn't in use, charge time should go down a bit.
Speakers
Dell has outfitted the XPS 13 with stereo speakers located on the sides of the laptop. They rate the internal amplifier at 1 watt per channel, and Dell states that they are tuned with Waves MaxxAudio Pro. Let’s take a look at the frequency response. All readings were done with the sound meter one inch above the trackpad.
The frequency response is pretty good for such small speakers, and the volume is quite loud as well. Listening to music, the XPS 13 could hit around 86 dB. Sound quality was decent as well with good response in the low range. I was a bit surprised with the speakers' abilities considering how inconspicuous they are on the sides of the device, so Dell has done a nice job engineering them. Putting them on the sides is also a nice compromise between having them on the top (where there is not much room due to the width of this laptop) and having them underneath, where they tend to be on a lot of devices now. There is a good sense of stereo, and the sound is not muffled by whatever surface the laptop is resting on.
Noise
Broadwell-U is a 15 watt CPU and therefore it requires a fan. For many scenarios the fan is not required at all, but if the CPU is working the fan will come on at around 43 dB, and ramp up to a maximum of 47.2 dB. Overall, the noise was quite easy to live with. This is at a distance of 1", so from a normal user position the noise is far less noticeable. The pitch of the fan was low enough that it would not irritate like a smaller, higher rpm fan would.Urgent:
Is Obamacare Hurting Your Wallet? Vote in Poll
Ant: This is incredibly scary... Jay-Z may be a vampire... for reals... fb.me/ICRG2b0J — 92.9 & 96.9 'EHM (@WEHMRADIO) May 14, 2013
JAY z is a vampire like the family on twilight “@jlaine90: Guy from 1939 who looks just like Jay Z twitter.com/jlaine90/statu…” — Camron Giles (@YouMadCuh) May 14, 2013
Jay-Z is clearly a vampire! Wow. RT @ennisnyt Needs to be seen to be believed. A Jay-Z Sighting... in 1939 Harlem nyti.ms/10gsRRw — Rick Maese (@RickMaese) May 10, 2013
A 1939 photo featuring a Jay-Z look-alike went viral this week, giving rise to many conspiracy theories about the rapper being either a time traveler, a member of the Illuminati, or a vampire. The photo was unearthed at the Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture at the New York Public Library last week. Taken by photographer Sid Grossman and titled "Harlem Loiterers," the image was posted on the library's Tumblr page with the caption, "Does the man on the right remind you of someone? Perhaps it was his great-grandfather taking a break in Harlem in 1939."A dead ringer for rapper Jay-Z, a Brooklyn native, the man in the photo has sparked some crazy online theories. Some insist Jay-Z is a time traveler, and must have ventured back to do research for his many tracks on the new film "The Great Gatsby," set in 1922. "He's a time traveler," user "Zen" commented on the New York Daily News' website. "That's the explanation. He's mastered the manipulation of quantum mechanics and creates wormholes regularly to travel back and forth in time."Others maintain he's an immortal vampire.Some people believe the photo is proof that Jay-Z is a member of the Illuminati, supposedly an elite organization of influential individuals that mastermind events and take control of world affairs through governments and corporations. The rapper's wife, Beyoncé, is also rumored to be a part of the underground society.This isn't the first time a historical celebrity doppelganger has made headlines. Perhaps the most well known instance is actor Nicolas Cage. In 2011, a man posted a photo from the Thanatos Archives on eBay for $1 million, which showed a Tennessee man in 1870 that looks like Cage's twin.Cage joked about the photo and the similar conspiracy theories that surrounded it at the time on Letterman."I don't drink blood and last time I looked in the mirror, I had a reflection, so I'm not going with the vampire theory," he said.Some other celebrities also bear a striking resemblance to old, historical photos. Justin Timberlake looks uncannily like the criminal in this old-time mug shot.Similarly, Chuck Norris looks almost exactly like artist Vincent van Gogh in this self-portrait.CLOSE The Colorado State Rams football schedule for the 2016 season. Mollie Muchna/The Coloradoan
Buy Photo CSU defensive back Preston Hodges celebrates after blocking a field goal attempt during a game against CU last season in Denver. The Rams and Buffs plan on bringing the Rocky Mountain Showdown back to campuses in 2023 and 2024. (Photo: Austin Humphreys/The Coloradoan)Buy Photo
Of all places, Longmont will go down in history as the city that saved the Rocky Mountain Showdown.
Twice.
It was at a McDonalds there in the early 1980s where former CSU and University of Colorado athletic directors Fum McGraw and Eddie Crowder, respectively, met to reconcile their differences and renew the annual football rivalry in 1983. And with the apparent end of the Rocky Mountain Showdown looming in 2020, Longmont, an unofficial midway point between Fort Collins and Boulder, is again playing a role in peace talks.
"(CU athletic director Rick George and I) have a secret meeting spot. We go to The Egg and I in Longmont and I think we've connected three times there. The first was August of last summer," Colorado State University athletic director Joe Parker said. "We've met twice after that (at AD meetings in Phoenix and Dallas).
"Those have been the times we've had to visit and make quick intersections about scheduling with football and even other sports. We don't have anything documented yet, but my expectation is that we'll probably have an agreement in place to extend the series before the end of the summer."
RAMS: Root Sports to televise three CSU football games
Though nothing is in writing, the targeted resumption of the rivalry will be 2023. Because of nonconference contracts already in place for both universities, the Rocky Mountain Showdown cannot be played in 2021 and 2022. In addition, the series will not be played in Denver, Parker said, noting plans for home-and-home series with CU.
When the Rams host the Rocky Mountain Showdown at their new on-campus stadium in the final year of the current contract in 2020, it will be the the first time CU will have played in Fort Collins since 1996 and only the fourth occasion since 1958.
"From my perspective, with the on-campus stadium and with what they've been doing for a while, I think the neutral-site play in Denver has kind of run its course," Parker said. "When you look across the country and you see the institutions of our profile in the same state that play one another, it's kind of just an electric week of football within those states. I think of Michigan-Michigan State. I think of, when they did play it, Texas and Texas A&M. Oklahoma-Oklahoma State; those rivalries that I've been a part of.
"It seems natural for us to do it. I love the idea that we're going to bring it back to campus.... I've been here 15 months now and I'm so proud of this campus and this community; I want to show it off. I want people throughout this state to understand what Colorado State means and what this community of Fort Collins is."
COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Early projections will irk Colorado State football fans
Parker added he and George don't want to sign an extended contract that locks CSU and CU into an annual rivalry game. CSU's scheduling of Texas Tech in 2025 and an almost-finalized game against a Power 5 school in 2026 won't allow for the Showdown in those years. Parker thinks the Rams and Buffaloes might get in a rhythm of two years on, two years off, with games at Folsom Field and Sonny Lubick Field during each cycle.
Whether the 2023 game will be played in Fort Collins or Boulder hasn't been decided, and while the hope is to continue the rivalry beyond one home-and-home series, nothing has been agreed to other than games in 2023 and 2024.
For insight and analysis on athletics around Northern Colorado and the Mountain West, follow sports editor and columnist Matt L. Stephens at twitter.com/mattstephens and facebook.com/stephensreporting.Gothic Cabinet Craft will repair or replace any Gothic manufactured product or component that is defective in material or workmanship for as long as you, the original purchaser, own it. Excluded are normal wear and tear (including dents, scratches and finish), negligence or misuse and damage caused by moving or shipping furniture. Knots and natural wood imperfections are not covered. Warranty is only valid when furniture is finished by Gothic. For New York City (five Boroughs), Nassau and Suffolk County customers only, Gothic Cabinet Craft will replace or repair the furniture at no charge for the first year after the purchase. After the first year, and for customers outside of NYC area, if the customer brings the item to our Maspeth Factory for repair, there is no charge, but a travel and/or delivery/pick up fee will apply for in home repairs or pick-ups. Valid only on purchases made on or after 8/1/2011 and your order must be registered on line (www.gothiccabinetcraft.com/lifetime-warranty/) within 30 days of the day you receive your furniture for the warranty to be in effect for Gothic manufactured items. Custom made orders, floor samples, and/or floor models are not covered by this warranty. Any repairs attempted by the customer voids all warranties. In the event of a service request the Service Department may request a photo which can be emailed to service@shopgothic.com Our Glass components are warranted to be free from defects in workmanship, materials, and construction for one year. Minor scratches, air bubbles, surface waviness or lightly pitted areas occur naturally during glass manufacture, and are not considered quality defects. Normal wear and tear, damages which result from improper use, improper care, accidents, abuse or negligence are not covered by the warranty. Our mechanical components are warranted to be free from defects in workmanship, materials, and construction for one year. Normal wear and tear, damages which result from improper use, improper care, accidents, abuse or negligence are not covered by the warranty. All mattresses sold by Gothic Cabinet Craft are warranted solely by the original manufacturer's warranty. Gothic Cabinet Craft reserves the right not to accept any returns on mattresses that have been removed from their original packaging or if Gothic Cabinet Craft determines that the mattress has been improperly used or exposed to any infestation.Grand Willys project
The plan is to build a bit of a hotrod from using all the running gear, wiring, instruments, seats etc for one donor vehicle as much as possible.
Back in December 2007 I bought a Willys Pickup off eBay but it was a year before I got it home as had nowhere to store it. After much jumping through hoops with the council I built my workshop to house it.
After much looking and watching insurance auctions I was finally able to get a donor for the project. Ended up with a 2008 WH/WK Grand Cherokee with a 5.7 Hemi. It was first registered in 2009 and 12 months later T boned by a Harley rider doing a 100 mph! Hit it so hard that the foot well locked the throttle and he steered off the road into a paddock until he hit a tree.
One day these two will become one.
Getting the Grand into the workshop.
The Grand is in place ready for lots of measurements and then the strip down can begin!
Got a start on the project this week. Started by taking every measurement I could think of so I can setup all the suspension under the Willys when it gets transferred across. Also been labeling every wiring plug that I have found so far. Done the whole engine bay and have it all disconnected ready for removing once I can get to the others ends of the harness under the dash. Also unbolted every panel that can come off and removed the seats.
Being careful not to damage any of the trim when taking it apart in case I can sell any that I don't use.
Still go a few more things like the chrome roof bars, rear bumper and tail-lights to go outside.
Airbag under the dash cover was quite fiddly to get out.
What it looks like under the dash with the top cover off. Going to be fun getting all that into my Willys Pickup later. This project has been brewing in my head for many years and been slowing gather parts and building a workshop and sheds to be able to do it.The plan is to build a bit of a hotrod from using all the running gear, wiring, instruments, seats etc for one donor vehicle as much as possible.Back in December 2007 I bought a Willys Pickup off eBay but it was a year before I got it home as had nowhere to store it. After much jumping through hoops with the council I built my workshop to house it.After much looking and watching insurance auctions I was finally able to get a donor for the project. Ended up with a 2008 WH/WK Grand Cherokee with a 5.7 Hemi. It was first registered in 2009 and 12 months later T boned by a Harley rider doing a 100 mph! Hit it so hard that the foot well locked the throttle and he steered off the road into a paddock until he hit a tree.One day these two will become one.Getting the Grand into the workshop.The Grand is in place ready for lots of measurements and then the strip down can begin!Got a start on the project this week. Started by taking every measurement I could think of so I can setup all the suspension under the Willys when it gets transferred across. Also been labeling every wiring plug that I have found so far. Done the whole engine bay and have it all disconnected ready for removing once I can get to the others ends of the harness under the dash. Also unbolted every panel that can come off and removed the seats.Being careful not to damage any of the trim when taking it apart in case I can sell any that I don't use.Still go a few more things like the chrome roof bars, rear bumper and tail-lights to go outside.Airbag under the dash cover was quite fiddly to get out.What it looks like under the dash with the top cover off. Going to be fun getting all that into my Willys Pickup later.
Marcus
My web site below:
http://willyshotrod.com
To try where there is little hope is to risk failure, not to try at all is to guarantee it. __________________MarcusTo try where there is little hope is to risk failure, not to try at all is to guarantee it.I read with mounting horror Aaron’s post about the Ruby conference, and the various things that he linked to from it. Unfortunately, it’s an old and familiar story.
Unfortunately, it reminds me of attitudes in another community I used to be very involved in – Perl. Attitudes within Perl seem to have changed an awful lot in the last 10 years. I’m sure a lot of that had to do with the discovery that Allison Randall was smarter than any half-dozen of the rest of us put together. But, too, it had a lot to do with the examples of folks like Larry Wall and Casey West, who demonstrated by their actions that it was possible to be brilliant, but still be professional. This is a message that many boys (I hesitate to call them men) within the Ruby community haven’t grasped yet.
Having been involved in the planning of ApacheCon for the last seven years, I’m also horrified that the planning committee for a (seemingly) respectable conference would accept a talk that made no secret of the fact that it would use jokes about pornography to make its points.
I’ve written before about how pornography is treated as acceptable for public discourse. That was 6 years ago. At least in the technical circles *I* work in, this attitude has lessened, but not vanished, in that time. It is far less common for me to hear reference to porn in every day technical discussion than it was back then. I don’t assume that the people in question believe, as I do, that pornography itself is damaging. I think it has more to do with the realization that some discussions simply don’t belong in professional settings. When someone spends good money to travel and attend your conference, they deserve to be treated with professionalism and respect, not treated to a stream of pornographic images and sexual innuendoes.
And this isn’t just about alienating the women in your audience. Turns out that some heterosexual men actually believe that objectifying women isn’t a good thing. But even if you don’t accept that belief, you owe it to your audience to treat them with professional courtesy, and recognize that they are paying a LOT of money to attend a technical conference, not a peep show.
Shame on Matt for putting together this presentation. Double shame on GoGaRuCo for accepting this talk. Shame on the decent men in the audience (assuming there were any) who didn’t get up and walk out after the first slide. Shame on the chauvinistic boors who are defending Matt in the various forums where this is being discussed.
Turns out, in the real world, it actually matters if you’re a jerk. It’s time for the Ruby On Rails community to grow up and realize that being professional isn’t a weakness. But it would be grossly short-sighted to merely point the finger at them and not take a close look at the attitudes within our own communities – be they technical or otherwise – and seriously reconsider our common courtesy in the work place.Santa Claus has been granted clearance for Irish airspace on Christmas Eve, the Minister for Transport has said.
In an official announcement, Shane Ross said Ireland's aviation chiefs have assured him Santa will be able to fly into the country despite worries over the impact of Storm Barbara.
Mr Ross said he was "delighted and relieved" to confirm clearance by the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) and urged children to be in their beds early on Saturday to allow Santa to carry out his work.
"I have been informed that a large, jolly man on a low-flying sleigh, assisted by reindeer and perhaps some elves, will be entering Irish air space tomorrow evening," he said.
I would therefore encourage all children to be safety tucked up in their beds as early as possible to ensure Santa and his reindeer can go about their work successfully.
Mr Ross also said he was happy to confirm that Ireland's stock of milk and mince pies, as well as carrots for the reindeer, have been topped up.
It is believed that Santa will be accompanied by a team of nine reindeer and a large flying sleigh.
However it is not yet known whether he will be accompanied by Mrs Claus, who is sometimes in charge of navigation, the Department of Transport said.
Mr Ross added: "I have also just received a very important message from Mrs Claus, who has asked that everyone take special care on our roads this holiday season and if you're having a festive drink, please leave the car at home."Mike Portnoy Throws A Tantrum Over Drum Rig Setup
Tags:
Mike Portnoy
Jason Fisher November 08, 2012
November 08, 2012
Mike Portnoy has issued a statement regarding his onstage tantrum at a recent Manila, Philippines stop of the tour. Mike was upset over the drum gear setup and began throwing equipment around on stage while stage hands tried to put it all back together. (see video below)."On at least a half dozen occasions on this tour we have been incredibly frustrated to arrive at the venue only to find the band’s gear requirements were simply blatantly ignored (wrong keyboards, wrong amps, Zildjian cymbals, etc) AND were not setup and ready for us as was supposed to be the case and what the promoters had promised,” says Mike in a statement.“We have been as patient and understanding as we possibly can be…but when you get 4 guys who haven’t slept more than a couple of hours every night in order to fly to these shows without sleep…sometimes our patience can wear thin."In the case of the Manila show, we arrived hours before the show to find out the drums weren't setup, cymbals were missing, Billy‘s amp was wrong (again) and Tony had a buzz on his gear that would not go away…but we forged ahead because we were VERY excited to play for the fans!"At the start of Stratus (where the video on youtube is from) – my snare drum mic fell off and I motioned for the tech to come put it back on the stand/drum…and instead, he comes up to the drum kit and takes the mic away…leaving me playing with NO snare mic!!! (you’ll hear I begin playing the high tom instead of the snare)…realizing he had no idea what was going on or how to fix the situation, I stopped playing and did my little ‘rap’ while they fixed the situation and we wouldn’t have to play the whole song with no snare in the mix. In the video, you can see I was at least making a joke out of it and wasn’t maliciously trying to hurt anybody or storming off in anger."Moral of the story: WE ARE HUMAN! And sometimes frustrating circumstances create frustrated behavior. I’m not saying I was right in stopping the song…but if you see a video from later in the show, you’ll see I explain to the audience that I’ve been waiting my whole career to play in Manila and I wasn’t going to let ANYTHING ruin my night or their show!! And we carried on and everybody had a great night…And I look forward to returning…(although this may be the last time I tour without my own kit and my own drum tech…hahahaha!!!)"In Philadelphia's Fishtown, A Fierce Debate Over The Fate Of A Polish Church
Enlarge this image toggle caption Kim Paynter/WHYY Kim Paynter/WHYY
For more than a century, the copper spires of St. Laurentius have stood tall over Philadelphia's Fishtown. But the city's oldest Polish church — founded in 1882 — could soon face the wrecking ball.
Former parishioners and other community activists are protesting the building's destruction, and their effort is gaining momentum. On a recent day, dozens of Philadelphia residents who spent their whole lives going to St. Laurentius donned white T-shirts with "Save St. Laurentius" written in bold red letters. Hoping to grab the attention of city officials, they boarded a yellow school bus and headed to City Hall.
"This is heartbreaking because of the community," says Kate Gaber, one of the protesters on the bus. "It's not just a church. It's a community, and friends and families that grew up together... we don't have that anymore."
Disputes Over Money And Safety
Ever since the Archdiocese of Philadelphia closed St. Laurentius last year and told parishioners to attend the mostly Irish church just down the street, the question has been asked: What to do with the empty church from the 1880s?
Critics say the church is looking to make money. The archdiocese argues it's dilapidated and not worth saving.
"There's no financial gain to be had by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia as an entity if this church building were to be demolished," says archdiocese spokesman Ken Gavin.
He says the archdiocese is operating under a nearly $5 million annual deficit and can't afford to maintain the old property. Tearing the building down will be cheaper than repairing it.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Kim Paynter/WHYY Kim Paynter/WHYY
And there's another element, he says: "You got the health and safety issue with a building that may fall down without warning, or portions may fall down without warning, and then you have to figure out how the parish is going to be sustainable."
Church officials are now trying to sell the land, but the movement against redevelopment might halt the process.
New Arrivals, Longtime Parishioners Join Forces
The historically Polish Fishtown neighborhood has become one of the trendiest sections of Philadelphia. Most with Polish roots have relocated and many Polish businesses are long gone.
Retired Temple University anthropologist Judith Goode says to the parishioners, saving the church is no longer about preserving the Polish ethnic community.
"It's about retaining an older way of life when they were respected and where they didn't feel that their position in society was so tenuous," Goode says.
And some newcomers to Fishtown have found common cause with the former parishioners: resisting the Archdiocese.
"You got this immigrant community, and they built this beautiful church. The effort and the money that went into that is such a testament to what that community was and what it thought of itself," says William Ellerbe. He and his wife, both young attorneys, recently bought a home near the church and want it to stay out of respect to history.
"It still is such a beautiful building. You can't rebuild 133-year-old buildings," Ellerbe says.
A Showpiece And A Symbol
The building's soaring copper spires — green from decades in the elements — are some of the most visible symbols of Fishtown. The church is central to the city's Polish community, says Aaron Wunsch, architectural history professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
"This building was really built as a kind of showpiece, or a bulwark, announcing that they had come, and not only come but done well enough to build something like this," Wunsch says.
Over the past five years, church officials have closed nearly 50 parishes across the city.
Wunsch says the diocese won most of the battles over what to do with the vacated properties.
But community activists are hoping this time will be different.
"This is not a building without a group that wants to occupy it," Wunsch says. "This is a building with a group that passionately wants to re-occupy it."
The city's Historical Commission will decide on July 10 whether to protect it from demolition.
Supporters are still trying to find another use for the building. They've raised $500,000 in pledges, but they'd need seven times that to completely restore the church.US Navy photo of K-219 on the surface after suffering a fire in a missile tube History Soviet Union Name: K-219 Laid down: 28 May 1970 Launched: 8 October 1971 Commissioned: 31 December 1971 Struck: 1986 Homeport: Gadzhiyevo Fate: Sunk by explosion and fire caused by seawater leak in missile tube, 3 October 1986, killing 4 Status: Located in 18,000 ft. (6000 m) of water, Hatteras abyssal plain, North Atlantic Ocean General characteristics Class and type: Yankee-class submarine Displacement: 7,766 long tons (7,891 t) surfaced
9,300 long tons (9,449 t) submerged Length: 129.8 m (425 ft 10 in) Beam: 11.7 m (38 ft 5 in) Draft: 8.7 m (28 ft 7 in) Propulsion: 2 × 90 MWt OK-700 reactors with VM-4 cores producing 20,000 hp (15 MW) each Speed: 26 knots (48 km/h; 30 mph) Test depth: 400 m (1,300 ft) Complement: 120 officers and men Armament: 4 × 21 in (533 mm) torpedo tubes
2 × 16 in (406 mm) torpedo tubes
16 × SLBM launch tubes
K-219 was a Project 667A Navaga-class ballistic missile submarine (NATO reporting name Yankee I) of the Soviet Navy. It carried 16 (later 15) SS-N-6 liquid-fuel missiles powered by UDMH with IRFNA, equipped with an estimated 34 nuclear warheads.[1]
K-219 was involved in what has become one of the most controversial submarine incidents during the Cold War.
The incident [ edit ]
Preamble [ edit ]
On Friday 3 October 1986, while on an otherwise routine Cold War nuclear deterrence patrol in the North Atlantic 1,090 kilometres (680 mi) northeast of Bermuda, the 15-year-old K-219 suffered an explosion and fire in a missile tube. The seal in a missile hatch cover failed, allowing saltwater to leak into the missile tube and react with residue from the missile's liquid fuel. Though there was no official announcement, a published source (citing no sources) said the Soviet Union claimed that the leak was caused by a collision with the submarine USS Augusta. Augusta was certainly operating in proximity, but both the United States Navy[2] and the commander of K-219, Captain Second Rank Igor Britanov, deny that a collision took place.[3] K-219 had previously experienced a similar casualty; one of her missile tubes was already disabled and welded shut, having been permanently sealed after an explosion caused by reaction between seawater leaking into the silo and missile fuel residue. [4]
Location of the incident
The authors of the book Hostile Waters reconstructed the incident from descriptions by the survivors, ships' logs, the official investigations, and participants both ashore and afloat from the Soviet and the American sides. The result was a novelized version of events.[5]
Event [ edit ]
Shortly after 0530 Moscow time, seawater leaking into silo six of K-219 reacted with missile fuel, producing chlorine and nitrogen dioxide gases and sufficient heat to explosively decompose additional fuming nitric acid to produce more nitrogen dioxide gas. K-219 weapons officer Alexander Petrachkov attempted to cope with this by disengaging the hatch cover and venting the missile tube to the sea.[6] Shortly after 0532, an explosion occurred in silo six.[7]
An article in Undersea warfare by Captain First Rank (Ret.) Igor Kurdin, Russian Navy – K-219's previous XO (executive officer) – and Lieutenant Commander Wayne Grasdock, USN described the explosion occurrence as follows:
At 0514, the BCh-2 officer and the hold machinist/engineer in compartment IV (the forward missile compartment) discovered water dripping from under the plug of missile tube No. 6 (the third tube from the bow on the port side). During precompression of the plug, the drips turned into a stream. The BCh-2 officer reported water in missile tube No. 6, and at 0525, the captain ordered an ascent to a safe depth (46 meters) while a pump was started in an attempt to dry out missile tube No. 6. At 0532, brown clouds of oxidant began issuing from under the missile-tube plug, and the BCh-2 officer declared an accident alert in the compartment and reported the situation to the GKP (main control post). Although personnel assigned to other compartments left the space, nine people remained in compartment IV. The captain declared an accident alert. It took the crew no more than one minute to carry out initial damage control measures, which included hermetically sealing all compartments. Five minutes later, at 0538, an explosion occurred in missile tube No. 6.[8]
Two sailors were killed outright in the explosion, and a third died soon afterward from toxic gas poisoning. Through a breach in the hull, the vessel immediately started taking on sea water, quickly sinking from its original depth of 40 metres (130 ft) to eventually reach a depth in excess of 300 metres (980 ft). Sealing of all of the compartments and full engagement of the sea water pumps in the stricken compartments enabled the depth to be stabilised.
25 sailors were trapped in a sealed section, and it was only after a conference with his incident specialists that the Captain allowed the Chief Engineer to open the hatch and save the 25 lives. It could be seen from instruments that although the nuclear reactor should have automatically shut down, it was not. Lt. Nikolai Belikov, one of the reactor control officers, entered the reactor compartment but ran out of oxygen after turning just one of the four rod assemblies on the first reactor.[9] Twenty-year-old enlisted seaman Sergei Preminin then volunteered to shut down the reactor, to be enabled by operating under instruction from the Chief Engineer. Working with a full-face gas mask, he successfully shut down the reactor. A large fire had developed within the compartment, raising the pressure. When Preminin tried to reach his comrades on the other side of a door, the pressure difference prevented him from opening it, and he subsequently died of asphyxiation in the reactor compartment.
In a nuclear safe condition, and with sufficient stability to allow it to surface, Captain Britanov surfaced K-219 on battery power alone. He was then ordered to have the ship towed by a Soviet freighter back to her home port of Gadzhiyevo, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) away. Although a towline was attached, towing attempts were unsuccessful, and after subsequent poison gas leaks into the final aft compartments and against orders, Britanov ordered the crew to evacuate onto the towing ship, but remained aboard K-219 himself.
Displeased with Britanov's inability to repair his submarine and continue his patrol, Moscow ordered Valery Pshenichny, K-219’s security officer, to assume command, transfer the surviving crew back to the submarine, and return to duty. Before those orders could be carried out the flooding reached a point beyond recovery and on 6 October 1986 the K-219 sank to the bottom of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain[10][11] at a depth of about 6,000 m (18,000 ft). Britanov abandoned ship shortly before the sinking. K-219's full complement of nuclear weapons was lost along with the vessel.
Aftermath [ edit ]
Preminin was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Star for his bravery in securing the reactors.[10] Britanov was charged with negligence, sabotage, and treason. He was never imprisoned, but waited for his trial in Sverdlovsk. On 30 May 1987, Defense Minister Sergey Sokolov was dismissed as a result of the Mathias Rust incident two days earlier, and replaced by Dmitry Yazov; the charges against Britanov were subsequently dismissed.
Hostile Waters film [ edit ]
In 1997, the British BBC television film Hostile Waters, co-produced with HBO and starring Rutger Hauer, Martin Sheen, and Max von Sydow, was released in the United States by Warner Bros. It was based on the book by the same name, which claimed to describe the loss of K-219. In 2001, Captain Britanov filed suit, claiming Warner Bros. did not seek or get his permission to use his story or his character, and that the film did not portray the events accurately and made him look incompetent. After three years of hearing, the court ruled in Britanov's favor.[12] Russian media reported that the filmmaker paid a settlement totaling under $100,000.
After the release of the movie, The U.S. Navy issued the following statement regarding both the book and the movie:
The United States Navy normally does not comment on submarine operations, but in the [sic] case, because the scenario is so outrageous, the Navy is compelled to respond. The United States Navy categorically denies that any U.S. submarine collided with the Soviet Yankee Class submarine K-219 or that the Navy had anything to do with the cause of the casualty that resulted in the loss of the Soviet Yankee-class submarine.[13]
An article on the U.S. Navy's website posted by Captain 1st Rank (Ret.) Igor Kurdin (former XO of K-219) and Lieutenant Commander Wayne Grasdock denied any collision between K-219 and Augusta. Captain Britanov also denies a collision, and he has stated that he was not asked to be a guest speaker at Russian functions, because he refuses to follow the Russian government's interpretation of the K-219 incident.[14]
In a BBC interview recorded in February 2013, Admiral of the Fleet Vladimir Chernavin, the C-in-C of the Soviet Navy at the time of the K-219 incident, says the accident was caused by a malfunction in a missile tube, and makes no mention of a collision with an American submarine. The interview was conducted for the BBC2 series The Silent War.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:Details of the US whistleblower Edward Snowden's current whereabouts remain unclear, a day after he was reported to have left Moscow for Havana, apparently en route to Ecuador.
Ricardo Patino, the foreign minister of Ecuador, where Snowden is seeking asylum to evade being arrested by the United States for leaking classified details about its spying programme, said on Tuesday that the country knew nothing about his whereabouts or what documents he might be using to travel.
The Russian foreign minister added to the confusion further during the day, insisting |
daughter who comes out as a lesbian mid-Season One and has her first queer relationship in Season Two.
Very Gay
Okay, so there isn’t a lot of queer female action ’til Season Two, but pay attention to Season One — they were telling a story that hadn’t been told before at the time. Santana’s initial story was pretty special, too and Brittany S. Pierce is a rare bisexual character portrayed as having meaningful relationships with both boys and girls. Their treatment of Unique, a trans woman of color, is both groundbreaking and g-dawful. At times, the show gets really, really, truly, horrible. But it was ambitious, campy and brand fucking new — and when it worked, it worked, and damn those musical numbers are fun!
Very Gay
We got one entire season of this uneven, generally terrible yet still somehow totally addictive psychological thriller that starts Naomi Watts as a bisexual therapist who gets wrapped up in a thing with a girl she’s stalking for reasons too convoluted to get into here.
Very Gay (Seasons 1-2 has a gay male lead, Seasons 3-4 have two lesbian leads, Seasons 5-6 have a pansexual and a possibly-sexually-fluid female lead)
Skins’ treatment of its female queer characters is uh… well, it has brought us the best of times, the worst of times, and a horrifying U.S. adaptation I wish I could un-see. But Skins is daring, gritty, honest, ugly, sarcastic and fearless teenage television that sucks you in and never stops surprising you. The show is split into three series — Seasons One and Two contain a few of my favorite characters (namely Cassie) but no female queers, Seasons Three and Four have a lesbian relationship at the center (Naomi and Emily), Season Five has a genderqueer pansexual character who has a lot of sexual tension with the bitchy popular girl, and Season Six retcons that character and makes us all sad. I have been advised by a certified professional that no Skins-loving lady should dare to watch Season Seven, aka “Skins Fire,” so don’t, okay? Just don’t.
Very Gay
The descendent of the legendary Wyatt Earp returns to her family’s stomping ground to rid the world of demonic revenants from the Wild West. The relationship between Wynonna’s gay sister, Waverly, and her cop girlfriend, Nichole Haught, has set the internet on fire and found its way into the the hearts of queer teevee lovers all over the universe
Very Gay
Sara Lance was an established/out bisexual on a whole different show long before Legends of Tomorrow even started, and with no tortured romance holding her back on this spinoff, she flies through space and time, leaving a string of very satisfied women and men in her wake. One of these women is the one and only Ali Liebert, and perhaps eventually we meet a woman who sticks around for a while. Sara Lance is an unapologetic badass bisexual blonde who is very obviously the glue that holds the team together. And in case I haven’t mentioned, it’s queer. Super queer. Super and queer and super queer.
Anne With an “E” (Netflix Co-Production with CBC)
Medium gay
Unfortunately, even canonical queerness didn’t save this adaptation of the beloved Anne of Green Gables.
Medium Gay
This period drama set in 1928 Madrid features a tight-knit group of women who work together at Spain’s only cable company (cable as in telephones, not television) — united for many reasons including their desire to work in the first place, which wasn’t a traditional desire for women at the time. One of the women, Carlotta, is bisexual, married to a man, and has feelings for Sara, another cable girl. The Dart describes it as “Netflix’s hidden gem.”
Degrassi: Next Class (2016 – ) (Seasons 1-4) (Netflix Co-Production with Family Channel Canada)
Medium Gay
Rumor has it up to 50% of kids these days identify as queer in some way, and Degrassi is ON IT. Seasons Three and Four debuted in 2017, bringing with them a cute romantic storyline between a Muslim Syrian immigrant, Rasha, and Degrassi’s Latina lesbian student council president, Zoe. Season Four’s journey for Yael was maybe the first-ever televised situation a young assigned-female-at-birth person realizing that they are non-binary and dealing with that.
Medium Gay
This show straddles a few genres but the gist of it is that a former government employee has a system that predicts crimes before they happen, thus enabling him to put together a tiny team of highly skilled rogues to stop said crimes before they happen, FOR THE GOOD OF HUMANITY. Although romantic storylines are few and far between, Person of Interest made the radical choice to feature only one major romance between main characters, and it’s a queer one: lesbian computer hacker Root (Amy Racker) eventually develops a thing with actual sociopath assassin Shaw (Sarah Shahi), and it’s sexy as hell.
Medium Gay
Nola Darling, the pansexual protagonist of this contemporary remake of the Spike Lee original film that made waves for its portrayal of black female sexuality, has a relationship with a lesbian named Opal and that’s cool except that also it’s kinda not and you should read our review before getting in bed with this one.
Medium Gay
Last Tango in Halifax is about two widows in their seventies who get a second chance with each other (their first shot was in the 1950s). They’re reunited by social media and get back together just as they’re also dealing with their adult children going through various mid-life struggles. One of the daughters ends up falling in love with a woman after being with men all her life.
Medium Gay
Two dudes and one lady are thrust together by a shared circumstance — they’ve all been duped by the same con-woman who infiltrated their lives, married them, and then fleeced them for all they were worth. It starts out a little hokey but if you give it a minute, you’ll find a charming and sometimes lesbionic dramedy with light, often entertaining, twist and turns.
Medium Gay
This stunningly beautiful fantasy show centers around an elven princess, a half-elven dope who looks like Trouty Mouth from Glee, and, perhaps most importantly, a bisexual rover named Eretria. Eretria is established as bisexual in the first season and that remains true and obvious throughout the entire two-season series full of mysterious magic, epic adventures, and three-time bisexual-character-playing actress Vanessa Morgan.
Medium Gay
Another ripped-from-the-comic-book show, Arrow is based on DC Comics character Green Arrow, a rich playboy who becomes a superhero, traipsing about the city with his bow and arrows, Katniss-style, saving the world from danger. In Season two, Arrow became the first DC comics cinematic universe show to feature not one but two queer female characters.
Medium Gay
It takes four (very good) seasons to get to it, but eventually we have ourselves a bisexual character, Callie Torres, who falls for a lesbian surgeon, Erica Hahn, thus discovering that she is bisexual. She goes on to date and marry another doctor, Arizona Robbins. Grey’s Anatomy has certainly had its ups and downs over the years and the way everybody talks becomes a bit intolerable after an extended marathon, but Shonda Rhimes makes damn good television, and her flagship property is (usually) no exception.
Medium Gay
Supergirl’s sister, Alex Danvers, is a lesbian! So is her eventual love interest, the dashing cop Maggie Sawyer.
Medium Gay
Aziz Ansari’s Netfilx show was a critical success, in part for its effortless diversity and also for its surprisingly refreshing take on a familiar tale (young struggling artists in a big city). Season One featured out lesbian writer/comic/actress Lena Waithe as Ansari’s lesbian pal, Denise and although Season Two had less Denise overall as Aziz frolicked overseas, it also had one of the most important episodes in lesbian television history, “Thanksgiving,” for which Lena Waithe won an Emmy.
Medium Gay
Jessica Jones features Marvel’s first lesbian — Jeri Hogarth (Carrie-Anne Moss), a lawyer who works with the title character, private investigator Jessica Jones (Krysten Writter), who is described by Rolling Stone as “a bad-girl noir detective with a taste for rough sex, booze and sarcasm.” The show has garnered rave reviews for its sex-positivity, queer inclusivity, and overall badassery, with Season Two dropping in March 2018.
Medium Gay (Most seasons feature gay men and often lesbian/bisexual women)
Season One of American Horror Story, Murder House, stars Tami Taylor and lacks lesbian characters. Season Two, Asylum, has a really original and complicated lesbian character who is institutionalized for her sexual orientation. I refused to watch Season Three, Coven, because the fact that a season about a witch coven had no lesbian or bisexual women in it struck me as a profound injustice against our people. Season Four, Freakshow, is its own particular beast, with gay men here and there in unexpected places and a lot of gore. We were hooked to the first half of the season but started tuning out as Dandy, a gay sociopath who loves murder, began taking up more and more screen time with murdering people. It just got gross. Season Five, Hotel, was also too graphically violent and rapey for me, but it had a lot of queer women in it.
The whole show is entirely its own beast, though, when it comes down to it, it’s stylish and campy horror with a brilliant cast, including out actress Sarah Paulson. There’s also that ruthless dedication to gratuitous violence and torture, including a degree of sexual violence that I can’t believe is okay to show on television!
The Originals (2013 – ) (Seasons 1-4)
Medium Gay
Bisexual witch Freya Mikaelson joins the cast of this vampire show in Season Two, and gets a bisexual wearwolf love interest, Keelin, in Season Four.
Medium Gay
After all the men are killed in a mining accident, Mary Agnes McNue takes over her husband’s mayorship, starts wearing her clothes… and gets herself a girlfriend, too.
Medium Gay
In Season Four, we learn that recurring character Nurse Patience “Patsy” Mount is in a relationship with another lady, Delia Busby.
Light Gay
Jane the Virgin is an inventive one-hour dramedy with a cast dominated by women of color and a fresh, original style that’ll keep you entertained and delighted even when the lesbian parts are relatively minimal. As Heather wrote, this show premised on the story of a virgin who is accidentally impregnated at the gynecologist, “somehow managed to turn a weird, uncomfortable concept into a feminist home run.” The OBGYN who made the mixup, Dr. Luisa, is a lesbian, and has some very telenovela-worthy affairs.
Light Gay
It’s better that you go into this series expecting nothing queer will happen because then you will be pleasantly surprised in Season Two when two of your fave babes turn out to be into other babes. Come for the apocalyptic dystopia and attractive teenagers rolling around in the mud with weapons and fighting about the new world — and, chances are, drop off in Season Three after the lesbian death that sparked a movement and changed us all forever.
Light Gay
Dark Matter is about six people who wake up on a spaceship with no memories at all. One of these six people, and the obvious choice for leader of this group, is a smart, fierce women of color called Two. Plus, the ship also comes equipped with an Android who looks like Zoie Palmer. The show got pretty queer in its third season just in time to get pretty cancelled.
Light Gay
The Walking Dead is a story about zombies! Who doesn’t love zombies? Well, actually, to be honest: me. I don’t love zombies. But I do know that this show has a queer character named Tara who first appears in Season Four! That much I do know.
Light Gay
This thriller about the early days of the FBI’s criminal profiling department starred the always delightful Jonathan Groff and received largely positive reviews when it debuted on Netflix this fall. Anna Torv played Wendy Carr, a psychologist with a scholarly interest in interviewing imprisoned serial killers to determine what the hell is going on there. Unfortunately her lesbianism is only addressed briefly, but if you’re into murder shows, give it a whirl.
Light Gay
It’s a dark, quiet, suspenseful-and-creepy-as-hell crime series starring Gillian Anderson as a sexually fluid detective psychologically rattled by a particularly challenging case. She kicks ass and takes names, working alongside an adorable lesbian police constable who unfortunately she does not make out with. Look out for Archie Pangabi playing another queer-ish character, Dr. Tanya Reed Smith.
The Returned (2014 – 2015) (Season One)
Light Gay
This remake of the French original got cancelled after one season, which was too bad ’cause it’s got two queer women in its ensemble cast and was pretty interesting and creepy. It’s about a small town where people who died in various appalling ways (suicide, road crash, murder) come back to life and nobody knows why or what to do about it.
Light Gay
Bisexual show co-creator Carrie Brownstein has introduced every type of queer character imaginable over the run of this epic show that ribs on Portland and the social justice oriented uber-liberal contemporary culture so many of us are a part of.
The Vampire Diaries (2009 – 2017) (Seasons 1-8)
Light Gay
If you can hang in there and then uh, not get too attached, a lesbian relationship between two Heretics, Mary Louise and Nora, plows in circa Season Seven.
Scream (2015 – ) (Seasons 1-2)
Light Gay
Teenagers in Lakewood are the prime targets of a serial killer in this reboot of the classic film. Bex Taylor-Klaus stars as Audrey Jensen, the best friend of Emma Duval, a teenage girl somehow tied to the town’s dark past.
Light gay
Dark and British as fuck, the detective team chasing down the two teenagers at the heart of this story are lesbians who hooked up once and now it’s awkward.
Light Gay
Shameless has gay male storylines from the jump, as well as a few recurring and guest lesbian characters. But by Season Seven we get a full-blown triad, y’all! Plus the show’s just brilliant, with scrappy, multi-dimensional characters who are far from flawless yet generally manage to win your heart. Shameless looks at class politics with an unsentimental eye unlike anything else on television.
The Magicians (2015 – ) (Seasons 1 – 2)
Light Gay
When I read these books and people asked me about them I always described it as, “If assholes had magic.” It’s a bunch of realistically selfish college-aged kids who have access to powerful magic, and fuck it up about as often as you’d think they would. The Magicians admittedly has more guy-queer than anything but everyone on it is kind of fluidly flirty, in my opinion. They also have made some missteps (introducing a QPOC in a coma just to kill her, for example) but overall it’s just a dark, gritty, weird, funny show.
Light Gay
The lesbian (and her eventual love interest) doesn’t show up until Season Two of this British drama that centers on the murder of a young boy in a small seaside town and the two detectives on the case.
Hart of Dixie (Seasons 1-4)
Light Gay
Comedy-drama “Hart of Dixie” centers on the tight-knit small town of Bluebell, Alabama, and in Season Three, one of the town’s esteemed Belles, Crickett, comes out! The recurring character only got one season to be queer before the show got axed, unfortunately.
A Little Gay
Phryne Fisher, described as opulent, dangerous and glamorous, is a charming Private Investigator of independent means and impeccable fashion sense. She’s sassy, feminist and bold, and her stories will delight even your grandmother. A few episodes feature lesbian or gay characters, but the real Sapphic delight in this show is Phryne’s dear friend Doc, a dapper lesbian Phryne often must call upon for medical expertise.
Wee Bit Gay (Also has a gay male lead)
Okay, Heather’s gonna disagree with me here that this is only “wee bit gay” but I just cannot with subtext instead of TEXT TEXT. It’s a fun show though, regardless of the generally tertiary sexual orientation of one of the best female characters ever, especially if you’re into nerdy shit and mysterious artifacts and played educational computer games as a kid.
Wee Bit Gay
Susan and Carol were one of the first lesbian couples ever to appear on network television — Carol is the ex-wife of Ross, a member of the main ensemble, and Susan is her future wife. However, Carol only appears in sixteen of the show’s 236 episodes.
Wee Bit Gay
I think everybody is mad at this show for not delivering on all its queer promises regarding lesbian detective Renee Montoya, which include minimal screen time and being written off after Season One, although her ex-girlfriend, Barbara Gordon, did return for Season Two. So I’m not recommending it so much as acknowledging that it exists.
Wee Bit Gay
The first season is very chilly and rainy and there are so many red herrings that you may as well just go fishing instead but you won’t, you’ll keep watching because you can’t tear yourself away. You’ll eventually be rewarded with a baby butch street kid in Season Two as well as a lesbian social worker.
Agents of SHIELD (2013 – ) (Seasons 1-4)
Wee Bit Gay
Agents of SHIELD should be way gayer than it is, and it brought Lucy Lawless in as a character who was a lesbian in the comics just to kill her before anyone even said out loud that she was gay HOWEVER it’s full of badass women, including two lead women of color, kicking ass and taking names. There’s also a subtext ship even the actors support, if that’s something you’re into. #SkimmonsLinksprite has been pretty busy recently. After announcing the $39 pcDuino3 Nano, they’ve now unveiled a new board named pcDuino Acadia 1 powered by Freescale i.MX6 Quad processor with 1GB RAM, 8GB eMMC, a few common ports, and Arduino headers in order to connect Arduino shields to their Linux/Android board.
pcDuino Acadia 1 (preliminary) specifications:
SoC – Freescale i.MX6 Quad with four ARM Cortex A9 cores up to 1.2GHz, and Vivante GC2000 GPU with support for OpenGL/ES 2. x, OpenCL EP support, and OpenVG 1.1.
System Memory – 1GB DRAM
Storage – 8GB eMMC, 2x micro SD card slots (up to 128GB), and SATA
Video Output – HDMI 1.4 with HDCP support, LVDS
Audio Output – 3.5mm analog audio interface
Camera – 1x MIPI, 1x CSI
Connectivity – 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet (limited to 470Mbps)
USB – 2x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB OTG
Expansion Headers – Arduino UNO compatible header with 14x GPIO, 2x PWM, 6x ADC, 1x UART, 1x SPI, 1x I2C
Misc – IR receiver, up to 6 buttons?
Power – 5V/2A via power barrel, Li-Po battery interface.
Dimensions – 12 x 6.5 cm
The company claims to provide Ubuntu 12.04 and Android 4.4 for the board, as well as the usual API and development tools available for other pcDuino boards. The operating systems seem about right, since these are the exact versions you can get with the Wandboard, and the Yocto Project should be easily portable to pcDuino Acacida 1. This board is not the first Freescale i.MX6 Quad board with Arduino headers, as UDOO Quad has been around for a while, and features an external Atmel SAM3 MCU to manage I/Os. On a side note, UDOO is currently flooding my twitter feed with their Biggest Joystick in The World project which has gone viral.
There’s no heatsink on Freescale i.MX6 Quad, but based on the other boards design, one will certainly be needed unless they underclock the CPU. UDOO Quad achieves it without affecting the Arduino header, but adding another set of connector, to move the shields higher, so I’d expected something similar with the new pcDuino.
pcDuino Acadia 1 availability and pricing are not available yet. More information should eventually be published on Acadia 1 product page.Facebook will one day have a conversational agent with human-like intelligence. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana all currently attempt to do this, but go off script and they fail. That's just one reason why Mark Zuckerberg famously built his own AI for home use in 2016; the existing landscape didn't quite meet his needs.
Of course, his company has started to build its AI platform, too—it's called Project M. M will not have human-like intelligence, but it will have intelligence in narrow domains and will learn by observing humans. And M is just one of many research projects and production AI systems being engineered to make AI the next big Facebook platform.
On the road to this human-like intelligence, Facebook will use machine learning (ML), a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), to understand all the content users feed into the company’s infrastructure. Facebook wants to use AI to teach its platform to understand the meaning of posts, stories, comments, images, and videos. Then with ML, Facebook stores that information as metadata to improve ad targeting and increase the relevance of user newsfeed content. The metadata also acts as raw material for creating an advanced conversational agent.
These efforts are not some far-off goal: AI is the next platform for Facebook right now. The company is quietly approaching this initiative with the same urgency as its previous Web-to-mobile pivot. (For perspective, mobile currently accounts for 84 percent of Facebook's revenue.) While you can't currently shout "OK Facebook" or "Hey Facebook" to interact with your favorite social media platform, today plenty of AI powers the way Facebook engages us—whether through images, video, the newsfeed, or its budding chatbots. And if the company's engineering collective has its way, that automation will only increase.
Building an intelligent assistant, in theory
In its early stage, Project M exists as a text-based digital assistant that learns by combining AI with human trainers to resolve user intent (what the user wants, such as calling an Uber) that surfaces during a conversational interaction between a user and a Facebook Messenger bot trained using ML. When the human trainer intervenes to resolve intent, the bot listens and learns, improving its accuracy when predicting the user’s intent the next time.
When met with a question, if the bot calculates a low probability that its response will not be accurate, it requests the trainer's help. The bot responds to the user unnoticed by the trainer if it estimates its accuracy as high.
This interaction is possible because of the Memory Networks created by FAIR, the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) group founded in December 2014. A Memory Network is a neural net with an associated memory on the side. Though not inspired by the human brain, the neural net is like the cortex, and the associated network memory is like the hippocampus. It consolidates information for transfer from long-term, short-term, and spatial navigation memory. When moved to the cortex or neural network, the information is transformed into thought and action.
Facebook open-sourced the Memory Networks intellectual property by publishing its advanced AI research throughout the research community. Artificial Intelligence Research Director Yann LeCun describes Facebook’s intelligent conversational agent of the future as a very advanced version of the Project M that exists today.
“It's basically M, but completely automated and personalized," he said. "So M is your friend, and it's not everybody's M, it's your M, you interacted with it, it's personalized, it knows you, you know it, and the dialogues you can have with it are informative, useful… The personalized assistant that you take everywhere basically helps you with everything. That requires human-level of intelligence, essentially.”
LeCun is a pioneer in AI and ML research. He was recruited to Facebook to build and lead FAIR, essentially leading the first stage in that supply chain between blue sky research and the artificially intelligent systems that everyone on Facebook uses today.
As the advanced research indicates, the current Project M bots are not LeCun’s end. They are a milestone, one of many in reaching the long-term goal of an intelligent conversational agent. LeCun cannot predict when the end-goal will be reached, and it may not even happen during his professional career. But each interim milestone defines the hardware and software that needs to be built so that a future machine can reason more like a human. Functionality becomes better defined with each iteration.
The obstacles to teaching computers to reason like humans are significant. And with his 30 years of research experience in the field, LeCun believes Facebook can focus on 10 scientific questions to better emulate human-like intelligence. He shared a few of these during our visit.
For instance, at ages three to five months, babies learn the notion of object permanence, a fancy way of explaining that the baby knows that an object behind another is still there and an unsupported object will fall. AI researchers have not built an ML model that understands object permanence.
As another example, today sentences like "the trophy didn't fit in the suitcase because it was too small" pose too much ambiguity for AI systems to understand with high probability. Humans easily disambiguate that the pronoun “it” refers to the suitcase, but computers struggle to resolve the meaning. This is a class of problem called a Winograd Schema. Last summer, in the first annual Winograd Schema Challenge, the best-trained computer scored 58 percent when interpreting 60 sentences. To contextualize that score, humans scored 90 percent and completely random guessing scored 44 percent—computers are currently closer to a guess than they are to humans when it comes to these problems.
“It turns out this ability to predict what's going to happen next is one essential piece of an AI system that we don't know how to build," LeCun says, explaining the general problem of a machine predicting that “it” refers to the suitcase. "How do you train a machine to predict something that is essentially unpredictable? That poses a very concrete mathematical problem, which is, how do you do ML when the thing to predict is not a single thing, but an ensemble of possibilities?”Cher will star in the first movie made about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, which has left nearly 100,000 residents in the predominantly Black low-income city without access to safe drinking water.
The singer and award-winning actress will play a resident whose family is impacted by the crisis, a role she scored after reportedly reaching out to producers. Cher has been vocal on the issue and donated thousands of water bottles in January 2016.
Despite her previous charitable involvement, some Twitter users have taken issue with her casting:
@Variety @cher whenever there is a tragedy involving Black people Hollywood makes it about a white person. I’m so tired of Hollywood — Ryan Bowman (@ryancake5) January 6, 2017
Please don’t forget that black women and mothers overwhelmingly have been the on the ground leaders in the #FlintWaterCrisis https://t.co/Ax9UnjUJ8v — Amanda C. Itliong (@MIShouldTalk) January 6, 2017
How dare they make a fucking movie FIRST with @cher before fixing the #FlintWaterCrisis & flint is mostly poc so what is this?! Wtf https://t.co/TM1MEaHilB — Jim Crow Jones (@EphemeraLiberty) January 6, 2017
Many are dismayed that the film cast a White woman to portray a disaster that has disproportionately impacted Black families. Others questioned making a movie while the crisis is ongoing: Flint residents continue to rely on bottled or filtered water for their daily needs as they wait for the city to replace water lines.
“Flint” producers include Craig Zadan, Neil Meron and Cher herself. The plot is based on a February 2016 TIME cover story.
(H/t Deadline, Mashable)RIO DE JANEIRO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Brazilian federal prosecutor filed criminal charges on Wednesday against Chevron and drill-rig operator Transocean for a November oil spill, raising the stakes in a legal saga that has added to Chevron’s woes in Latin America and could slow Brazil’s offshore oil boom.
Greenpeace members protest in front of the Chevron oil company headquarters in Rio de Janeiro in this November 18, 2011 file photograph. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes/Files
Prosecutor Eduardo Santos de Oliveira also filed criminal charges against 17 local executives and employees at Chevron and Transocean, owner of the world’s largest oil rig fleet. Among the defendants is George Buck, 46, a U.S. national in charge of Chevron’s operations in Brazil, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
“The spilling of oil affected the entire maritime ecosystem, possibly pushing some species to extinction, and caused impacts on economic activity in the region,” Santos de Oliveira, a prosecutor in the oil district of Campos de Goytacazes, said in the filing. “The employees of Chevron and Transocean caused a contamination time bomb of prolonged effect.”
The charges stem from a 3,000-barrel leak in the Frade field, about 120 km (75 miles) off the coast of Rio de Janeiro state. They include: failure to realize protocols to contain the leak; failure to take steps to kill the well and stop the drilling process; breach of licenses, legal norms and regulation, including altering documents; and failure to meet legal and contractual duties.
Chevron and Transocean strongly disputed the charges.
“These charges are outrageous and without merit,” Chevron said in a statement. “Once all the facts are fully examined, they will demonstrate that Chevron and its employees responded appropriately and responsibly to the incident.”
Transocean “strongly disagrees with the indictments,” said spokesman Guy Cantwell.
Chevron said it stopped the leak in four days. None of the oil that leaked into the Atlantic reached shore or interfered with marine life, it said.
In November, the same prosecutor filed an $11 billion civil lawsuit over the spill, the largest environmental suit in Brazil’s history. Chevron has already been fined around 200 million reais in fines ($110 million) for the spill by environmental and oil regulators.
Chevron’s shares dropped 1.1 percent to $107.91 on Wednesday, to their lowest in nearly a month. Transocean’s US-traded shares dropped 1.1 percent to $56.77.
Observers warned that the criminal charges could spook foreign companies attracted to Brazil’s offshore oil boom and slow development of more than 50 billion barrels of reserves discovered here since 2007.
“These charges are being used by those who want to shut out foreign investment and vilify foreign companies,” said Adriano Pires, head of energy think tank Brazilian Infrastructure Institute, and a former oil regulator.
The Chevron leak was less than 0.1 percent of the size of the 4 million-barrel BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Transocean also owned the rig in that spill. Past Brazilian oil spills by state-run Petrobras, including some larger ones, have never prompted criminal charges.
Related Coverage The Brazilian who wants to jail Chevron oilmen
Chevron’s troubles in Brazil could force it to rethink its Latin American strategies. A shortage of trained workers, engineers and equipment have driven up costs in Brazil and Chevron faces an $18 billion environmental verdict in Ecuador.
Oliveira’s filings allege that Transocean’s Sedco 706 rig, which drilled the well that leaked, had “grave” equipment failures that were detected by Brazil’s national petroleum agency, the ANP.
In addition to Buck, prosecutors leveled criminal charges against other Chevron and Transocean employees, including five other Americans, five Brazilians, two Frenchmen, two Australians, a Canadian and a Briton. Among them was Guilherme Dantas Rocha Coelho, 38, the Brazilian head of Transocean’s operations in the country.
All were ordered to turn in their passports last Saturday and remain in the country. Each individual will be required to post 1 million reais ($550,000) bail and each company 10 million reais ($5.5 million) to ensure payment of future fines.
JAIL TIME UNLIKELY
Prison sentences could be as lengthy as 31 years, the filings said. Oliveira told Reuters in January that jail terms for the oil workers would be unlikely and a “last resort.” On Wednesday, however, he said the executives should be jailed.
“Yes, I want them to serve the full time and if they don’t it won’t be for any lack of effort by the Federal Prosecutors’ Office,” he said at a news conference in Rio de Janeiro.
Under Brazilian law, a judge must examine the charges and determine whether to proceed with formal indictments, a process that could take days or weeks. Either way, Chevron and Transocean likely face years of legal action in Brazil, one of the world’s most promising oil frontiers.
Few individuals or companies have ever been convicted of environmental crimes in Brazil, and fewer have gone to jail.
ROUSSEFF WARNS OIL COMPANIES
The charges come less than a week after Chevron asked for and received permission to temporarily stop production at Frade after finding new seeps on the sea floor. It was producing 61,500 barrels a day, down from about 80,000 before the November spill.
Chevron has spent more than $2 billion developing Frade, Brazil’s largest foreign-operated field in which the No. 2 U.S. oil company owns a 52 percent stake. Brazil’s Petrobras owns 30 percent and a Japanese group led by Inpex and Sojitz owns 18 percent.
The prosecutor alleges that Chevron and Transocean ignored signs that their drilling could blast through rock and the seabed as they tapped into a high-pressure reservoir in an area whose faults and fissures made it prone to an underground blowout. Chevron has said it encountered reservoir pressure levels far above those in previous wells.
Slideshow (6 Images)
Chevron has downplayed the potential for further environmental damage from the Frade incident, but has pledged to carry out a study of the field’s geology before asking regulators to resume production. Prosecutors said there could be further leakage, citing evidence of damage to the oil reservoir. A technical report by ANP has not been made public.
Chevron said on Wednesday that oil from the new seabed seep differs chemically from crude spilled in November, and that the two leaks are unrelated. Prosecutors allege the newest leak, measured at less than a barrel of oil, is a worrisome complication of the earlier spill. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, a former energy minister who also served as chairwoman of the Petrobras board, warned oil companies on Wednesday that they must strictly follow security procedures in Brazil. “On this question there can be no exceptions to being within safety limits and knowing them, to never test them and never go beyond them,” she said in Rio at the swearing in ceremony for the new head of oil regulator ANP.
($1 = 1.82 reais)Proposed Law Would Require Social Networks to be Private by Default
A proposed California law could significantly change the way social networks operate by forcing them to step up their privacy settings.
Facebook and other Internet companies oppose the proposal, which was put forward by California Senate Majority Leader Ellen Corbett (D-San Leandro) and last week made it out of committee.
The proposed law, SB 242 (full text here), would require social networks to do the following for California users:
Establish default settings that prohibit the public or private display of anything other than a user’s name and city without their consent. Require new users to pick privacy settings during the registration process. Write their privacy options “in plain language” and display them in an “easy-to-use format.” Remove personally identifying information, including photos, within 48 hours of a user’s request. Pay up to $10,000 each time they fail to do any of this.
A previous version of the bill applied to children under 18, but a revision earlier this month made it much broader. It was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.
Corbett’s pitch is this: “You shouldn’t have to sign in and give up your personal information before you get to the part where you say, ‘Please don’t share my personal information.'”
Facebook and other Internet companies don’t like the bill, and industry groups such as the Internet Alliance and NetChoice have spoken out against it. They argue that such tightened privacy restrictions and regulatory oversight could hamstring social networks’ ability to provide valuable and safe experiences to users.
For instance, if the default settings are all private, it could be hard for new members to get value out of the sites because they won’t be found by other users.
Other opponents argue that this should be a national issue, not a state one.
Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes gave this statement to the San Francisco Chronicle:
Any legislative or regulatory proposal must honor users’ expectations in the contexts in which they use online services and promote the innovation that fuels the growth of the Internet economy. This legislation is a serious threat both to Facebook’s business in California and to meaningful California consumers’ choices about use of personal data.
Majority Leader Corbett is further accusing Facebook of secretly lobbying against the bill without disclosing its identity. (Sound familiar?) We’ve asked Noyes for clarification on this issue.
Update: Noyes replied: “We’re confused by the claim raised in the SF Chron story that Facebook is involved in some kind of “stealth” campaign to kill SB 242 when, as the article acknowledges, we met face-to-face with the bill’s author and every other member of the Senate Judiciary Committee to express our concerns.”
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.BURLINGTON, VT. – A U.S. district court in Vermont on April 27 denied a preliminary injunction to stop Vermont’s G.M.O. labeling law from going into effect. The court, however, denied the state of Vermont’s motions to dismiss certain issues brought up by industry groups seeking the injunction.
V |
DucK- wrote:
Well this team chat is a ticking time bomb. Sooner or later, someone will be overheard saying something stupid, and it will be blown out of proportion.
pretty much this
Not going to lie, I fucking loved the idea of the whole teamchat thing (made it more personal for me atleast) but as Duck said somewhere in the future shit WILL happen and everyone will all be like "omg when did it go wrong" pretty much thisNot going to lie, I fucking loved the idea of the whole teamchat thing (made it more personal for me atleast) but as Duck said somewhere in the future shit WILL happen and everyone will all be like "omg when did it go wrong" dats racist
Vaelone Profile Joined February 2011 Finland 1987 Posts Last Edited: 2013-11-28 12:47:08 #15 Bonus shall forever haunt my nightmares.
And yeah while the team chat was awesome I was already worried about it during the tournament, at least now we made it through with just a few f-bombs. I guess DotA could use some pointless drama though, Starcraft hogging it all.
Azurues Profile Joined March 2011 Malaysia 1408 Posts #16 time for Valve to implement turtle team beach chat into in-game voice!
Kazzoo Profile Joined October 2010 France 143 Posts #17 On November 28 2013 22:20 Azurues wrote:
time for Valve to implement turtle team beach chat into in-game voice!
Please no. As much as I would love to hear how teams communicate, it's too much to ask for the players. It was a really nice addition (if the players agreed on it ofc), but it shouldn't go any farther. Please no. As much as I would love to hear how teams communicate, it's too much to ask for the players. It was a really nice addition (if the players agreed on it ofc), but it shouldn't go any farther.
Cinim Profile Joined April 2011 Denmark 89 Posts #18 "Turtle beach team chat" Is nothing new, just to dota 2, it's a feature many years old and has nothing to do with Turtle Beach either, which is just the company which manufacture the headsets.
Even MLG had this loong ago, and used it for WoW tournaments back when that was their main title in the circuits in the two years of 2009 and 2010 Hell, it's about time
Lonyo Profile Joined December 2009 United Kingdom 2 Posts #19 Formula 1 is probably the best comparison, since you get people saying dodgy things on that (e.g. about other drivers), and also team tactical things as well.
What they do for Formula 1 is have a delay so that people can edit/sanitise/select appropriate teamchat and then they play it.
That would work best for showing a replay, where you have a delay anyway, but would pretty much need a dedicated person to deal with it.
The reason they do it in F1 like that is partly because it's for the general population, so they need to remove any swearing, and they also try and select interesting/relevant radio chat, rather than just throwing in anything.
Probably the main problem with live chat is that you just get what you get, and it might not be interesting or add value, or may cause problems. HOLY CHECK!
Slardar Profile Joined April 2010 Canada 2127 Posts #20 Misleading/cruel title choice. First thing I thought of was SC2 at MLG events.
1 2 3 Next AllSEATTLE -- Seattle's Northwest Hospital and Medical Center is asking more than 1300 patients to test for HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C, after discovering that a former employee may have switched syringes at the facility.
The notification stems from a case in Colorado, where 28-year-old surgical tech Rocky Allen is charged in federal court with switching and stealing syringes with fentanyl.
Court documents say Allen worked at Northwest Hospital in early 2012 and at the Naval hospital in Bremerton from 2007 to 2011.
Investigators also found Allen had stolen fentanyl from a hospital in San Diego, lied on job applications and at one point tested positive for marijuana.
Washington's Department of Health said Tuesday two more medical facilities in the Puget Sound region would be named later this week, and up to 700 more patients will be encouraged to test themselves as well. Officials declined to name the facilities.Who is your client?
In every professional relation, you have a provider and a client. Whether she’s your boss or the head of a company you’re dealing with, the client is the one you are creating value for and she is the one you want to bring onboard.
At Theodo we help our clients to solve their business problems with code. It is crucial to us that the people at the company we work with – who often don’t get anything about coding – understand our progress towards the goal we determined together. Which means we need to make visible to them the value we add.
Ideally, we’d work side-by-side with our clients. They’d see us working and we’d show them our deliverable right when we are done. Unfortunately, although they are the ones with the business vision, they’re never full time on our project and tend to be busy with other subjects. As for technical teams, the complexity of our topic makes it even harder to keep them onboard.
So we asked ourselves how to provide transparency to our clients and came out with a powerful tool.
First, what do we need?
We agreed on 4 criteria:
easy to get and targeted : decision-makers are busy people. They want straight-to-the-point info. No noise. With the most important information made blatant.
: decision-makers are busy people. They want straight-to-the-point info. No noise. With the most important information made blatant. understandable for outsiders : your clients have providers themselves and they need to report to someone as well. They need jargon-free reports they can transmit to their clients.
: your clients have providers themselves and they need to report to someone as well. They need jargon-free reports they can transmit to their clients. daily-basis : to maintain contact and allow to be reactive in case of problem.
: to maintain contact and allow to be reactive in case of problem. easy and fast to produce: transparency is essential for the success of a project but is not an end in itself. The time to write this report should not spill over your work. The maximum timebox for this exercise should be 15 minutes. Done is better than perfect.
Second, what do we do?
Let us introduce you to The Theodo Daily Mail™.
It’s a simple and short document with key characteristics:
The short-term objective set for your team (i.e. number of sales completed during a month, number of recruitments achieved, features developed, etc.)
set for your team (i.e. number of sales completed during a month, number of recruitments achieved, features developed, etc.) One key metric updated on a daily-basis (and presented in a visual manner)
(and presented in a visual manner) A check on the goals your team committed to the day before
your team committed to the day before A forecast of the goals you want to reach today
you want to reach today A list of the problems you’re facing and the actions you plan on taking to solve them
In addition, here are 2 pieces of advice we’d like to share: keep your style sober and be precise.
Colors need to be meaningful: use colors as signals, and keep them seldom. At Theodo, for instance, we agreed that we only needed green and red to highlight whether we reached our goals for the day before or not. Same for fonts, sizes and decoration: if you’re going to use them, make sure they help understand your message better, otherwise they add nothing but noise.
Most importantly, be accurate in your report. Precision is key: use actual facts (how many sales appointments did you get?, how many applicants did you meet?, what functionality exists today that didn’t yesterday?). And please, write sentences with action verbs, active forms and check dates. Especially when it comes to problem-solving. Instead of writing “the last functionalities need to be validated”, prefer “Steve, can you validate that the signup form we developed works? We’ll make a check at 3pm today”.
After months of experimentations, here’s what we’ve learned.
So, third,what’s the outcome?
Our Daily Mail was meant to solve the transparency issue (“how do I show the value I create for my client”) and here are two examples of feedbacks we got.
I had no idea of what you (the IT team) were doing, now it’s super clear. I know exactly what to expect today. Thanks. Yahya Tahri, Product Strategy Manager BNP Paribas Investment Partners
I forwarded it to the head of IT of my main investor to show them our progress. The CEO of a cool start-up we worked for
We realized that not only we managed to give more information to our interlocutors and create trust but we also gave them a tool to communicate with their own clients. Digging deeper, we realized that there were other unexpected advantages to our Daily Mail. Here is what we found:
Writing a Daily Mail makes you ask yourself consistent questions everyday. It brings discipline to yourself and the team. It forces you to formulate problems you encounter and track the effect of the actions you take. In other words it helps you begin a continuous improvement process.
With Daily Mails, teams share indicators to communicate their progress towards measurable goals. But the report itself is an indicator of the team’s motivation: motivated teams write efficient and meaningful Daily Mails. If the reports you get don’t match the 4 criteria we listed above, you should see that as a problem and take actions to react.
When you set daily goals, you commit yourself to them. It reinforces your engagement to make the team and the project succeed.
Let’s keep going
At Theodo we are strong Scrum advocates. As praised by the very official Scrum Guide, we believe that Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation are key pillars to help teams improve continuously and eventually succeed in their projects. We found that writing Daily Mails was instrumental in implementing such a process within development teams.
The Theodo Daily Mail™ is one version of this virtuous report we tried to define. It’s still a work in progress and we’d be happy to have your feedback to improve it.
You liked this article? You'd probably be a good match for our ever-growing tech team at Theodo.
Join UsThe users of a hundred programming languages would like to call your low-level code, but they can’t.
Things have changed in the last 20 years. More people are using languages like Python, Ruby, and a hundred more, that are further from the bare metal. People are building service stacks that tie together many lower-level functions.
Libraries and APIs that make low-level features available to convenient high-level languages (HLLs) are a good thing. As a HL coder, it’s pretty handy to install python-foo, type “import foo” and then have access to that functionality.
What if python-foo isn’t there? HLL users are out of luck, unless they are so determined they make their own python-foo that calls system(), and then parses the output using their language’s fancy text parsing features.
But system() is the devil. We hate system(), folks. If your code calls system() it’s bad, for four reasons:
Overhead. It creates a new process and subshell. Security. If your code has elevated privileges and is including text input by an untrusted user, watch out. Remember little Bobby Tables, a semicolon is a dangerous thing. Ease. Parsing command-line programs’ output can be a pain, even if your language helps lessen it. Parsing of errors is even harder and prone to be overlooked. Portability. A different platform may (or may not) have the program you’re relying on, or its output may be different, and you won’t know.
Early on when I was learning Python, I tried to write a gui for OProfile by parsing its output. OProfile did nice (for the user) things like adding headers on its output, and changing the format of output depending on what it found. Great for users, but it doomed my project. I couldn’t parse the output reliably.
You want to make it easy for the people who are language gurus for each of the hundred languages out there to wrap your functionality without having to become an expert in your code, or even change it. Then the hordes using all the hundred languages can use your library without being an expert in your code or being enough of a guru in their language to write a wrapper. They can just happily use it.
Here’s a positive development, kmod. kmod is a new implementation of the utilities in module-init-tools: modprobe, lsmod, lsmod, etc. Not only does kmod include a libkmod C library, but the commandline programs use it, so we know it works. Yeah! This made it super easy for someone (me) to come along and write a language wrapper (python-kmod) without having to know about module internals. python-kmod makes it easy for Python users to manipulate modules using the friendly language features they’re used to, like exceptions for errors, and lists. If I had been forced to use system(), it probably would have mostly worked, but it would have failed when output parsing failed for some edge case.
I encourage all low-level program writers, my fellow Linux Plumbers, to consider how to make native language bindings possible for your code. You don’t have to write them, just make them possible and you will find all sorts of people calling your code, safely, who couldn’t before.Introduction to task switching
A key part of any operating system user interface is how it enables the user to switch between multiple tasks. In most desktop operating systems tasks are encapsulated into windows, and the most frequently used method of multi-tasking is window switching. Desktop OSs have multiple methods of window switching (e.g Alt-tab, clicking on indicators, notifications, etc…) however the most common means of window switching is via using what is variously termed a Launcher, Taskbar or Dock. Traditionally there has been a 1:1 correlation between each window and its representation in the Taskbar (see Windows2000 or Gnome2).
(Ubuntu Hardy Heron used Gnome2 which featured one taskbar icon per window)
With Windows XP, Microsoft introduced a way to aggregate multiple windows that belonged to the same application into a single task bar button. This change was primarily focused towards personas who made heavy use of multi-tasking; this feature only switched on when the number of windows represented in the Taskbar exceeded the length of the Taskbar. It gave the benefits of increasing the number of windows that could be comfortably represented in the available task bar space, and reduced the time and effort it took the user to visually scan a crowded Taskbar and identify an application. The cost of this change was that an additional click was required to switch to a window that was not the most recently focused window of that application.
(The WindowsXP desktop that introduced the concept of representing multiple windows with one taskbar icon)
Unity’s current window switching functionality
Fast forwarding to 2009, when working on the original designs for Unity we knew that window switching was one of the key areas of any OS’s user interface, and we set out to design a window switching paradigm that would surpass the utility and usability of the contemporary competition at the time (Windows 7 and OSX Snow Leopard). The Launcher was only 50% of that equation, the other 50% was a set of functionality we termed the ‘Spread’.
The Spread designs were completed, prototyped and tested well before the launch of Unity with 11.04, but unfortunately due to the huge number of other items that needed to be completed before we could launch a brand new desktop shell, the decision was made to postpone the development of this feature and use the Compiz equivalent of this functionality as a stop-gap measure.
(Compiz window switching in Ubuntu 11.04)
While using the Compiz window switching functionality enabled us to hit 11.04 launch deadline, there are a number ways in which it could be improved. Since then many many bugs, mailing list and forum postings have also requested the same set of functionality that was postponed as a result of this decision. Requests we frequently receive include:
Please make it easier to tell one window from another, all terminals look very similar!
Make it easier to select windows using keyboard navigation and shortcuts
I would like to be able to easily close windows from the window switcher view
Can you make it clearer to see which application’s windows are currently being displayed (in the switcher view)?
I find it difficult to see which window is currently focused in the window switcher view, can this be improved?
Can you find a way to make window switching faster?
Window switching requirements
After researching the window switching problem space and examining the use cases that a window switcher needs to support, we distilled the findings into a set of design requirements. These were:
To aid window identification, the window previews should to be as large as possible, taking maximum advantage of the available screen real estate.
Window switching needs to be very intuitive and easy to understand for new users. In user testing, a user who has never used Ubuntu before must be able to switch windows without encountering any difficulty.
More experienced users should be offered an accelerated method of ultra-fast window switching.
Users should be presented with all the information that is pertinent to making a window switching decision, but no more.
The window switching mechanism should follow the activity/task hierarchy, in order to minimise time needed to identity the required application, support intensive multi-tasking use cases with very large numbers of windows, simplify the Launcher ordering problem, and make the most efficient use of the Launcher’s screen real estate.
A very brief introduction the ‘Spread’
So now with 12.04 almost behind us, we have dusted off our original Spread designs and given them a light spring clean ahead of development starting in 12.10. So without further ado…
This design shows when happens when a user clicks on the Firefox icon to spread the available windows. The maximum amount of screen real estate is dedicated to making the window previews as large as possible. Moving the pointer over any of the previews will display the window name in a window title bar, and a close button is included so that any window can be dismissed directly from this view. When in this view users can also directly switch to spreads of other running applications by clicking on application icons in the Launcher.
In addition to pointing and clicking with a mouse or trackpad, power users can perform all window switching actions without taking their hands off the keyboard. Holding down the SUPER key will reveal the Launcher with numbers overlaid on top of the individual Launcher icons.
Pressing a number performs the equivalent action to a left click, so if a app is already focused pressing its number will reveal a spread of its windows.
When the spread is revealed, numbers are displayed in the bottom left corner of the previews. Pressing a number will then select the relevant window and close the Spread. Added together this allows a power user to switch to any window of any application just by using the SUPER and NUMBER keys. In addition users will be able to navigate the Spread by using cursor keys to move the orange focus box and ENTER to select.
Another new feature is the ghost window ‘New Window’ option. Previously if a user wanted to open a new window for an application that was already running they had to either middle click on the application’s Launcher icon or press CTRL+N. The problem was that new users had no easy way of discovering these options. When using the Spread, a user can select the ghost window to open a new window of the currently focused application. This feature has even more benefits in a multi-monitor context, and if a application does not support multiple windows this option is not displayed.
Other features include the ability to filter the windows by typing…
and of course this new functionality apples to the SUPER+W spread of all windows on the desktop.
Multi-monitors, workspaces, and all the other gory details
This article only takes a very brief look at a few of the Spread’s features, and barely scratches the surface of the Spread design. A lot of thought has also gone into designing how the spread works in multi-monitor and/or multi-workspace environments, and if you are interested in learning more and reading all the gory details of how every corner case and eventuality is handled, head over to Unity Switching section of the The Toolkit to read the full spec.Actor Cho Seung-woo, right, seen from tvN legal thriller "Stranger." / Courtesy of CJ E&M
By Park Jin-hai
Cable network tvN's legal thriller "Stranger," previously known as "Forest of Secrets," concluded its 16-part series last week, after creating a strong fandom. Viewers, still having hard time letting go off it, ask for their wishes to see a second series.
Penned by rookie writer Lee Soo-yeon, the finely intertwined story, starting with the single death of a business man who bribed prosecutors, made viewers breathlessly watch each episode. Viewers closely followed an unprecedented prosecutor character Hwang Si-mok, played by Cho Seung-woo, who lost his emotions after brain surgery. As he reenacts crime scenes and reasons in narrations, audiences also become involved and strive to find pieces of the big puzzle.
In the last episode, it is revealed that Chief Prosecutor Lee Chang-jun, played by Yoo Jae-myung, a tycoon's son-in-law, designed the "forest of secrets" voluntarily to disgrace himself in order to prove the corrupt deeds that he had witnessed and heard about. In his will, he said, "Had our society been moderately corrupt I would've ignored it. I would've enjoyed what I have if that had been the degree of its rottenness… The corruption in our society is no longer just a malaise. It's killing people."
Leaving a bag of documents he collected to Hwang, Lee jumps to his death.
Although the drama was not a smash-hit in terms of viewership ratings, due to the storyline that wasn't easy to follow for new viewers, critics and drama fans alike say that "Stranger" is in a league of its own and that it is the consummate of genre drama, which has recently gained popularity.
As the writer said she got the idea for Hwang from the words "We cannot rule those who want nothing," Hwang is a very unique character. Ha Jae-geun, a culture critic, said Hwang is a "fantasy that was borne out of a time of distrust."
"For those who desire money, those higher-ups buy the elite with money. For those who want power, they lure the elite with power. But there is no way to lure the person with no desires. And if the person has no emotions, he knows no fears and thus is free from any threats. The result is the most ideal prosecutor, Hwang."
The drama through paradoxes tells that in order to stand firm the country's law system, those law enforcers and those in public positions, should faithfully do their duties.
Unlike other K-dramas, which mostly depict romantic relationships, "Stranger" had no romance at all. Also, unlike previous crime thrillers, which embedded small dramatic incidents to grab viewers' attention, the drama had just a single major incident.
With cold reason, instead of loud screams, "Stranger" made viewers focus on the message it wanted to deliver. Viewers gave a strong response to this "drama for thinking people."This post is a transcript of Reverse the ‘Verse: Episode 95, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG, but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. INN edits our transcripts for the purpose of making the various show participants easier to understand in writing. Enjoy!
Reverse the ‘Verse: Episode 95 – Full Transcript
Disco forgot to enable audio when he rendered the video last night, so there’s no audio on the stars floating by.
Intro video is playing, but has no music.
Disco is now doing the music with his voice. Ben ‘my god it’s full of stars’
And they’re live! We’ve got Disco, Ben, Justin, and Alexis. And Tyler in the bottom.
Last week CIG’s ‘stream box’ died. This week it’s kinda back, but they don’t have any audio from Tyler.
Week in Review! – Disco welcomes Ben and Alexis back.
Ben’s 3 weeks – Alexis’ father sadly passed away three weeks ago. They went home to grieve and take care of things. Ben thanks the SC community for the outstanding support they’ve given throughout. Clifford, INN, TEST, Redacted etc… sent flowers. Helped them a lot, and they appreciate all the kindness and the thoughts.
They’re glad to be home back into the regular SC routine. Alexis thanks everyone as well.
This week! Lots of catchup for Ben, some ship kickoffs, including the Carrack review (it’s going into active graybox / whitebox)
Lots of planning for Gamescom and Cit Con. Lots of work on 2.4, there are a couple of ‘go-no go’ meetings per day right now. 2.4 hit PTU last night (NOT LIVE).
When they film an AtV on a week where they expect a patch, they do a few version for different scenarios. It’s not happening, it’s going out today, etc… and Ben said ‘live’ in all three takes re:2.4
Ben has no recollection of AtV this week at all. He was on around 2 hours of sleep and a plane trip while filming it.
Ben was also on various drugs for anxiety for the flight. He has no memory of hosting AtV.
Debuted a brand-new hosting set – Tera. It’s not ‘tera-ble’ – Ali.
Revamped News from Around the ‘Verse section. The original overlay was the first thing Disco ever did for CIG, so it was time to spruce it up.
They’re all on diets, but they’ve been doing lots of work on the buccaneer sale. They’ve filmed some segments with Jim Martin. Jim Martin’s one of the original ship designers. He’s normally a bigwig Hollywood ship designer, and Jim volunteered early on to help. He did the Scythe, the Freelancer, the Cutlass, etc… He’s kinda the ‘drake’ guy now.
Jim did the ships in Starship Troopers, Space: Above and Beyond, the Defiant for DS-9, etc.. Ben’s interview will be next week, and then there’s another video where Disco fan-boys out a few weeks after that.
They’re talking about the orange of Disco’s shirt and hat now. They’re Benny’s themed.
Disco had a meeting at 1am this morning about the gamescom booth. First SC real show-floor booth.
Ben – Star Citizen works the same way as the space program – just get a bunch of Germans to do it’
Alexis and Sandi are working on new merch. They’re working on a polo, a big benny’s shirt, and a SQ42 hoodie. And a Big Benny’s patch.
Space Cactus subscriber flair is coming! it’ll appear in hangar when 2.4 is released.
Coming with 2.4, you get the ability to start arranging flair around the hangar.
Ben’s brother got him a Bat’leth. Disco got a Lightsaber.
Disco and Ben are playing with their swords. Toast is blowing bubbles in the background.
Moving now to 2.4 on PTU!- 2.4 is on PTU. They opened up 2.4 to 5000 new people, and they’ll probably add more over the course of the day. They’ll look at numbers and bug reports etc…
Still lots of work to do on 2.4. It’s one of the biggest patches, biggest since 2.0. Flyable Starfarer, reliant in hangar, shopping system, a complete refactoring of the game to add persistence. Hangars run on servers now instead of on local PC’s, item port system is in, allows ships and characters, everything is connected to item port.
On the surface level it looks cool, but under the hood, it lays the groundwork for everything else that’s coming in the rest of the year.
For those wondering, bubbles are still floating past the camera.
Where’s my Spaceship!
Buccaneer sale next Friday. It’s the second main-line Pirate fighter. It’s going to hopefully do things that people want to Cutlass to do. Focused more on weapons and manoeuvrability. It’s a ‘scrapper’. Look inspired by attack helicopters and an A-10. They’re putting together marketing material for it, Turbulent have a mini-game for it, etc…
It’s an ‘industrial’ style fierce. Gunstar mixed with quinjet from Avengers, Disco thinks.
They might be able to share it a little early, they’ll kick it off later today after the show.
They’re doing a modern marketing things where if people retweet enough, there’ll be an early picture of the buccaneer.
They’re talking about wushu swords now. It’s hard to follow sometimes.
The F7A hornet is getting prepared for SQ42 in the UK, Chris Smith is working on that. The Herald is really close. They’re about to move onto the Carrack. The Carrack will be very cool, cause Crusader keeps expanding, and when the two collide cool stuff should happen.
And now it’s the Question and Answer segment of the show!
[Which team is making the Reclaimer?] It will end up being the folks in the UK. They’ll be doing all the larger ships, but it doesn’t have a person right now.
[Yesterday we saw yesterday someone destroying panels in ATV Fast Forward, will we be able to specialize in repairing them?] There will be some form of repairing, to what extent we don’t know yet as all the piping stuff is prototyping, they’re just exploring different mechanics they can include and such.
[Will we see the Reliant core and variants in 2.4?] No, just the base reliant. With a number of exceptions, they’re doing base ships first before variants. One of the meetings Ben had this week was to talk about the Aurora and the 300 series though.
[DogTags making a return?] Currently in production with the SQ42 ones. They usually bring them back once a year, so they might do them again in fall.
[Will persistence continually evolve?] Absolutely. Everything will evolve as development progresses. This is the beachhead into persistence, but now they’re looking into other things. Chris is now talking about object persistence for abandoned ships, and how to make them last longer, etc… they’re gonna work on persistence a lot.
[When can we get new ship commercials?] Cinematic assets are all working on SQ42 right now, that’s the big focus. They trained folks early-on on the commercials. Once they free up, they’ll make more ship commercials.
[Will 2.4 come with a new keyboard map?] Yes. They had one, and as part of development from Evocati and stuff they’ve been changing keys. When they’re confident on what 2.4’s map will be, there should be some graphics for it. Folks in the UK have a giant design post about the changes they’re making, and it’ll be in the 2.4 live post when that goes out.
[New pictures of the 85X?] None yet, but it is on the schedule.
They agreed that it didn’t need a full concept artist. The current one is cool, so they just need work on how two people fit in it.
Initial patch notes went up last night for five minutes, and everything that said ‘cloud’ said ‘butt’ instead, cause the person that put it up had a app on his PC to turn every instance of ‘cloud’ with ‘butt’.
[Will there be any ships held back to only be released when the game goes live?] They will continue developing ships until they are older and greyer.
[Is the new patch system coming?] They’re actively working on differential patching, yes. Not today, not tomorrow, but it’s in active development.
Should bring patches down from 20+ gigs to much much less.
[Plans on having an anniversary sale with almost all ships available?] They usually do do that in November.
[Orange Big Benny’s polo shirt?] Maybe. They’ll get through the first shirt first.
[Can we have a picture of the Buccaneer soon?] Soon
[Will the Vanguard Warden come back on sale?] Maybe someday.
[How has the Evocati testing been going?] Fantastic, great results Will said. They do wish they explained the process a bit better at first because it created confusion amongst PTU testers. They don’t don’t tend to talk about stuff until it’s actually going. They’re not only developing a game, but process of how to do it.Image copyright REPRIEVE Image caption Khadija Shah's family have previously raised concerns for her health
A British woman has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Pakistan after being convicted of trying to smuggle 63kg of heroin out of the country.
Khadija Shah, 26, from Birmingham, was heavily pregnant when she was arrested at Islamabad airport in May 2012.
Shah, who gave birth to a baby girl, Malaika, while in jail, denied the charges against her.
She had two other children with her at the time of her arrest, but they have since returned to Britain.
In 2012, a court in Rawalpindi heard Shah was arrested after 63kg of heroin, with a UK street value of about £3.2m, was found in several suitcases in her possession.
Tuberculosis fears
Shah claimed she was carrying the cases for someone else and was unaware of the contents.
Analysis Khadija Shah was born and brought up in the UK and only visited Pakistan a few times. She could have faced the death penalty in this case, but Pakistan has observed an unofficial moratorium on executions since 2008. Lawyer Shahzad Akbar said Shah, who also has a daughter aged five and a son aged six, did not speak Urdu at the time of her arrest. The baby girl born in jail with her is being brought up behind prison bars and has already had her first birthday. Most of Shah's family is in the UK. The lawyer said they would appeal against the decision and he obviously is quite keen that her matter is taken up sooner rather than later, but there is no way of knowing.
She was convicted and sentenced on Tuesday by the Special Narcotics Court.
Her lawyer Shahzad Akbar said they would appeal against the decision in the High Court next week.
Her family raised concerns for her health, and that of her baby, in a statement in May last year.
At the time, the legal charity Reprieve said it was worried the child had not received immunisations that are routine in the UK and there had been an outbreak of tuberculosis in the prison in 2012.
Maya Foa, director of Reprieve's Death Penalty team, said the news was "a terrible outcome" for Shah and her baby.
"As happens in hundreds of cases, she was used as a drugs mule without her knowledge and yet is facing life in a Pakistani prison," she said.
"The UK government must ensure that Khadija gets the urgent assistance she needs to appeal her sentence so that her baby doesn't grow up behind bars."
Prison officials have previously said Shah and her baby were being treated well.
A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesperson said: "We are aware that a British national has been given a custodial sentence in Pakistan.
"We remain in regular contact with her and we will continue to provide her and her family with consular assistance."Strike Fighter Squadron 25 (VFA-25) is an aviation unit of the United States Navy based at Naval Air Station Lemoore, California. The squadron flies the Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornet and is currently assigned to Carrier Air Wing Seven, tail code AG. Its callsign is Fist.
Squadron insignia and nickname [ edit ]
The squadron's first insignia was approved by Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) on 28 September 1944 and was indicative of its mission as a torpedo squadron, consisting of a four-leaf clover, horseshoe and flying torpedo.
A black fist clenching a red lightning bolt on a field of yellow became the squadron's second insignia and has been in use, with some modifications, since CNO approval on 9 June 1949. The fist on the Insignia is actually Zeus' fist from Greek mythology.
On 24 July 1959, CNO approved a modification to the insignia which added a scroll with the designation VA-25.
On 24 January 1974 CNO approved another modification to the insignia, adding three black stars. When the squadron was designated VFA-25 it continued to use the fist and lightning bolt insignia but dropped the three stars. Four stars were again added (date unknown) representing wars in which VFA-25 has flown aircraft into combat: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and most recently, Iraq.
History [ edit ]
Two US Navy squadrons have held the designation VA-25. The first VA-25 would eventually become VA-65 and is not related to the subject of this article. The second VA-25 has a direct lineage to the current VFA-25 "Fist of the Fleet".[1]
1940s [ edit ]
The squadron was originally commissioned as Torpedo Squadron 17 (VT-17) on 1 January 1943 at NAS Norfolk flying the Grumman TBF Avenger. On 10 September 1943 the squadron embarked on the aircraft carrier USS Bunker Hill, en route from Norfolk to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii via the Panama Canal and San Diego, California. On 11 November 1943 the squadron flew its first combat sorties, striking targets in Rabaul. The squadron flew numerous combat missions through February 1944, striking targets in Kavieng, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Truk and Tinian.
In February 1945, the squadron flew numerous combat missions against targets in Japan and the Bonin Islands and provided ground support for the Invasion of Iwo Jima. In March 1945, VT-17 aircraft struck Japanese ships in the East China Sea, Inland Sea and around the Ryukyu Islands and land based targets in and around Okinawa. On 7 April 1945, VT-17, along with other units from the task force, attacked a Japanese naval force composed of the super-battleship Yamato and her escorts, scoring several torpedo hits on Yamato and sinking one of her destroyer escorts. From April– |
don’t pay you’ll only squeeze about ten minutes more out of every new session. Who’s really going to play it that way? They’ll get so little out of it.
Again – the option to pay doesn’t trouble me. Games finding new revenue streams in an increasingly digital age only makes sense. It’s that the game conspires against you in such a way that it’s essentially unavoidable which is the problem – all sense of skill and challenge is completely removed, because the game knows full well that you’re going to need a crapload of potions and mates to survive battles against stuff like wolves that can attack three times per turn. If levelling up wasn’t so glacially slow maybe I’d be bothered less too, but the trouble is there’s so little meaningful sense of progression. Excitements seem few and far between. It’s a straight grind, a horribly futile timesink with tedious, repetitive combat, and it expects you to pay for the privilege. ‘Microtransactions’, we’re told. Does this look like micro to you?
For reference, summoning a colleague back to the fight before his 2 hour recharge time is up costs 19 crowns (and will result in the next wait becoming 5 hours). So, for three times as much as buying a copy of Dragon Age II, I can buy enough crowns to respawn party members 315 times. That sounds like a big number. It isn’t. Factoring in the Energy required to play (29 crowns for 5 units of it, which is enough for one more battle, or very occasional two) as well, I suspect that wouldn’t get me much more than a week or two of not particularly intensive Facebook gaming. That is a guess, but I’m pretty convinced the sum total is nowhere near what you’d get for buying three traditional games (and especially RPGs).
The alternative to buying respawns, by the way, is to invite your friends to play. Each one who accepts becomes a usable party member, subject to the same one-shot and recharge/pay system as the standard characters. Invite enough people and perhaps you’d have enough fighters slowly recharging in the background to avoid having to pay for respawns. It is a social game, after all, although there’s no real element of playing together. It was fun to watch a little cartoon dude called Dan Griliopoulos get killed by a werewolf thing, but he had nothing to do with it. Do I want to spam all my friends into joining and then start suckling on the money-teat themselves in the name of my grinding onwards? I really don’t.
Free to play is going to play an ever more important part in PC gaming, and it’s something we’re going to have to get used to to some extent. Surely, though, there are better ways of achieving it than this money-grubbing slap in the face for any Dragon Age fan. Paying for content (i.e. DLC) will grow and grow, and there are ways to do that quite neatly, but paying to keep accessing the basic mechanics of a roleplaying game makes me feel a little ill. How can I possibly invest in my character, my motivations, even in my next piece of uber-loot when I know it’s defined by how many times I’m prepared to take out my bank card? Or even about how often I’m prepared to log back in and squeeze out ten more minutes. It’s not that simple: this is a game built around constantly and immediately wanting more.
Worst of all: the entire game is essentially a walking advertisement for Dragon Age II. An advertisement you need to pay to keep watching. For those who already own the game, it bears the difficult to resist promise of unlocking extra in-game DA2 loot, but you’ll end up either paying an awful lot or spend a lot of time fiddling about and logging in and out to get hold of it. It’s a promotional game at heart, of the sort that would have been free on an official game site a few years ago. But no, even that must come with a price attached now.
Social games and free to play games are, if not the future, a future. We can’t dismiss or ignore them. In fact, we should celebrate those of them, and those elements of them, that do approach things smartly, and in doing so bring worthy gaming to a gigantic audience. But we can make it quite clear that we expect to be treated better than this slovenly, cheating, cynical wolf in in RPG’s clothing. Especially when it’s clothing hundreds of thousands of us were very fond of.
Dragon Age has had better weeks.Maybe we won't see Jay Cutler slinging passes on an NFL football field this fall, after all.
The newly retired Cutler is still considering resuming his playing career and joining the Miami Dolphins, but is now leaning heavily toward staying retired, ESPN's Jeff Darlington reports.
The Dolphins, whose head coach Adam Gase has worked with Cutler before, were the only team with a chance to lure Cutler out of retirement but it likely still won't be enough to convince him, Darlington adds.
The Dolphins are believed to be on the hunt for a quarterback with Ryan Tannehill's season in jeopardy after he re-injured the knee that forced him to the sideline late last season.
It's still unclear if Tannehill will need season-ending surgery.
Unless Cutler comes out of retirement, he will spend the fall as a TV analyst for FOX.The crusading French politician Marine Le Pen hates being called a far-right leader. She says if most French voters endorse her harsh anti-immigration plans, that means she is a centrist.
After her breakthrough result Sunday in the first round of France’s presidential elections, Le Pen will put that view to the test. The leader of a once-fringe party shadowed by its defense of World War II-era Nazi collaboration is just one round of ballots away from a backflip into the center of her nation’s political life.
[France’s National Front co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen says the battle is already won]
If Le Pen captures the Elysée Palace on May 7, it will be a dramatic turnabout for a fiery leader whose bid for France’s leadership was unimaginable a few years ago. But after a wave of bloody terrorist attacks, a surge of refugees and the aching sense that France’s identity is slipping away, many voters appear ready to imagine the woman with the cigarette-tanned voice as their president.
“We cannot afford to lose this war. But for the past 10 years, left-wing and right-wing governments have done everything they can for us to lose it,” Le Pen said days before the election, after a French citizen killed a police officer and wounded two more on the landmark Champs-Elysees boulevard in an attack for which the Islamic State asserted responsibility. “We need a presidency that acts and protects us,” she said.
(Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
The violence played perfectly into the warnings of a woman who has been sounding the alarm for years that France’s identity was slipping away to Muslims — even before a recent spate of terrorist attacks sent France into an official state of emergency. Even Socialist President François Hollande briefly toyed with stripping dual citizens of their French nationality if they were convicted of terrorism charges, a signature Le Pen idea that critics said would relegate many French Muslims to second-class citizenship.
[Marion Maréchal-Le Pen: ‘We’ve won the battle of ideas’]
Born into a political family, the 48-year-old Le Pen was for decades among her father’s closest confidantes as Jean-Marie Le Pen led his National Front party as an eccentric gathering of extremist politicians who thought that the Holocaust was just “a detail” of World War II. Over the decades, he became the living emblem of Europe’s far-right politicians: cranky, offensive, tinged with the odor of being a Nazi sympathizer, but always far from power.
The daughter’s political awakening came when she was 8, she has said, after the family’s modest apartment was bombed and officials appeared to do little to find the culprit. The front of the building was blown off. No one died, but a baby survived only because a tree slowed its fall.
“We were not treated the same as others,” she wrote in her 2006 autobiography, blaming official indifference on her father’s political views.
But if her father was willing to give up ballot-box success in the name of ideological purity, Le Pen has proven a far more adept politician. When Jean-Marie Le Pen slipped into the second round of the presidential election in 2002, there was little question that voters on both sides of the political spectrum would band together to defeat him. He captured less than 18 percent of the vote, a crushing disappointment for a daughter who trained as a lawyer but spent the bulk of her career working inside the party.
[Marine Le Pen wants to be France’s future. But can she escape the past?]
This time, there is little expectation that voters will reject Le Pen simply because of the party’s past association with Nazism.
After the 2002 loss, the younger Le Pen vowed to transform the movement into a force that could actually win elections.
She took over the party in 2011 and quickly moved to distance it from its roots. She said she was the best ally of France’s Jews — because she would protect them against Muslim immigrants. She made a bid for left-behind union members, the core of France’s old left-wing alliance, by saying that she would protect their cherished social benefits by turning back the forces of globalization.
And in a father-daughter drama worthy of Shakespeare, she expelled her father from the party after his views about the Holocaust became a distraction on the campaign trail. They say they no longer talk — although the elder Le Pen is still financing his daughter’s bid.
Now she is a sizzling sparkplug on the campaign trail, firing up crowds who say none of the other contenders has anything fresh to say.
Before the first round, the mood at her rallies was in sharp contrast to her now-vanquished opponents, who sometimes seemed to struggle to indicate to crowds when they were supposed to cheer.
She has gathered supporters from across France’s hard-hit north, where once-proud factories have been shuttered as jobs moved to Poland and China.
“My project is to give France its liberty back, to let it out of jail, to give you France back and to give France back to the world,” Le Pen said to wild applause at her final Paris rally last week. “It is high time to set France free.”
[Charles de Gaulle would roll over in his grave over what has become of French politics]
But if she wins, the France she would create could look radically different from the multicultural, plugged-into-Europe nation it is today.
Le Pen has vowed to erect border barriers and bar immigration both from inside and outside Europe. She says she would rebuild French manufacturing, which has struggled under competition from cheaper foreign goods, by seeking to bring back the French franc. And she has listed a host of tactics she would use to make France less hospitable to its Muslim population, including the serving of pork in schools and the expulsion of any noncitizen who had been flagged for extra monitoring under France’s anti-terror regime.
Critics say her tactics would range from unconstitutional to inhumane, and they warn that the financial panic unleashed by any attempt to leave the European Union would knock down her already-struggling supporters.
She says that the tide of history is on her side, pointing to the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the election of President Trump as signs that voters around the world are rejecting globalization and immigration.
Trump’s main failing so far, Le Pen said this month, is that he is turning into a conventional politician, and not upholding his more extreme campaign promises.
“He is in contradiction with the commitments he made,” she told France Info radio. “I am coherent. I don’t change my mind in a few days.”
Read more
Marine Le Pen: France ‘not responsible’ for deporting Jews during Holocaust
What to watch for in the first round of the French presidential election
A youth revolt in France boosts the far right
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world
Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign newsBandai Namco has released the first details and screenshots of Code Vein, its new Unreal Engine 4 action RPG led by key God Eater staff Keita Iizuka (producer), Hiroshi Yoshimura (director), and Yusuke Tomizawa (team leader).
Get the details below.
■ Buddy
In dungeons, you can choose a buddy to explore with. The buddies that you can take along increase as you progress through the story. Players and buddies will share both fear and chills, and support each other to overcome difficulties. When you finally manage to reach that new area, they are sure to share in the dramatic excitement. Even in desperate situations, by taking on challenges with your reassuring buddy and overcoming difficulties together, new dramas will unfold.
■ World
The Story of the Revenants Unfolds in a Ruined Near Future
In the near future, the world suddenly met its ruin. The “thorns of judgment” mercilessly pierced through the earth’s crust, and the structures of mankind that were a symbol of prosperity now stand still like grave posts. There was a closed society called “Vein” where those known as “Revenants” barely managed to survive.
Revenants are those who abandoned being human in order to resist being destroyed. Although they lose the majority of their memories as compensation for their supernatural powers, they are able to barely maintain their humanity by sucking up blood. If their blood supply runs low, they lose their humanity and transform into a monster called a “Lost.”
In a closed world where countless Lost wander about, and a miasma that stimulates blood thirst is spread, together with your Revenant allies, the journey seeking blood and truth begins. Is there an exit from this world? Why where the Revenants born? Their desperate journey will eventually lead to a major secret that lies dormant in Vein.
Revenants Living in a Ruined World
The near future. The “thorns of judgment” mercilessly pierced through the earth’s crust and the world has fallen to ruin. There was a closed society called “Vein” where those known as “Revenants” barely managed to survive.
Revenants
Revenants live in a closed world. Although they lose the majority of their memories as compensation for their supernatural powers, they are able to barely maintain their humanity by sucking up blood.
Lost
If a Revenant’s blood supply runs low, they are unable to maintain their humanity and transform into a monster called a “Lost.” In order to escape from the suffering of their never-ending thirst for blood, they forever wander the world in search of new blood.
■ Blood Veil
Revenants use original equipment called “Blood Veils” in order to suck up the blood of enemies. It usually takes on the form of clothing, and although it has aspects of armor, it has an exclusive mechanism that appears during blood sucking, and furthermore transforms into an ominous mask that covers the user’s mouth. The blood of the enemy obtained through the blood sucking mechanism of a Blood Veil is transported into the user’s mouth through a pipe in the equipment.
—This is a Blood Veil in the form of a long coat. It has a blood sucking mechanism similar to a scorpion’s tail, and can perform a blood sucking attack from long range.
—This is a Blood Veil in the form of a gauntlet. It pierces the enemy with a huge claw-shaped blood sucking mechanism. It has short reach, but can suck up blood fast in close combat and is highly responsive.
■ Gifts
A Gift is a Revenant’s special ability that manifests various battle effects using the absorbed blood of enemies. It has various effects, including direct attacks on the enemy, self strengthening, and weakening the enemy. Figuring out how to successfully land blood sucking attacks and when to use Gift in battles against Losts are key to exploring Vein and clearing dungeons.
■ Revenant Weapons
You can choose from various weapons to match your play style, including swords and bayonets, halberds, and more, each offering their own unique actions. By combining these weapons with Blood Veils, you can construct your own battle style with a high degree of freedom.
■ The Huge World Within Vein
The old town area that fell to ruin after the giant “thorns of judgment” pierced through. The buildings pushed up to the sky stand still like a grave post of humanity. Since there is a lot of rubble, there are a lot of blind spots, so it is necessary to move forward while looking out for surprise attacks in the shadows.
A huge cave spread out underground. Light shines through the thorns piercing the earth’s crust to create a sad but beautiful landscape. Many dangers await while exploring in the dark. Proceed carefully while relying on the little light available.
An underground structure where people once busily passed through, now reduced to a den for Losts. The empty eyes of the Losts continue to catch intruders in the depths of darkness. Among these intricately complicated structures, there are fires burning like guideposts. Will these help you on your journey… or are they a trap?
A steep mountainous area enclosed by ice. What kind of sight awaits at its summit? With overhanging snow and narrow paths, the risk of slipping follows you along. Where you fight Losts here is an important decision.Over the next several weeks, we’re spotlighting the top 20 3D Jam experiences chosen by the jury and community votes. These spotlights will focus on game design, interaction design, and the big ideas driving our community forward.
A mix between endless runner and shoot ’em up, Studio 17’s Corridor 17 blends old-school and new-school game design tactics in a VR environment. Players can pilot the ship with their head using the Oculus Rift DK2, while freeing up his or her hands to control the weapon system. It’s available free for Windows on the Leap Motion App Store.
What was your inspiration combining runner and shooter mechanics within a space motif?
The funny thing is that we didn’t have any idea what we were going to do for the Jam when we signed up. It took us two weeks of feverishly burning through ideas and prototyping game mechanics before we stumbled upon what would eventually become the runner and shooter mix that is Corridor 17.
While we didn’t specifically reference any game titles, we did spend a lot of time watching Star Wars: Return of the Jedi – specifically the scene where the Millennium Falcon flies through the Death Star and ultimately destroys it.
There’s something undeniably electrifying about the “endless run” mechanic. What sort of obstacles and visual cues did you use to build an addictive gameplay arena?
We wanted to make sure that each category of obstacle/trap would be easily identifiable from a distance to give the player a chance to plan ahead. To achieve that, we gave each obstacle type a distinct color theme. For example, laser-trapped corridor sections are easily identifiable by their glass walls and reddish lights, while closed doors can be identified by the green glow emitted from their locking mechanisms.
After developing for Leap Motion and VR with Unity, do you have any cautionary tales from the trenches?
It’s probably a bad idea to design an app (like we did) which requires the player to have both hands in front of the Oculus Rift for an extended period of time. Apart from being an obvious recipe for sore arms, having both hands up at the same time can mess with the Oculus Rift’s position tracking capability. In a fast paced game like Corridor 17, having position tracking fuzz out mid-dodge can be pretty catastrophic.
Can you delve into how you built the control scheme?
While we’d really like to provide some profound technical insights here, the truth is that both Leap Motion Controller and Oculus Rift come with really great Unity integration packages – so most of the heavy lifting was already done for us. The only modification we had to make was a scaling component for translating slight shifts of the player’s head into movements which would span the width and height of the corridor.
Any plans to continue developing with Leap Motion, Unity, and Oculus in 2015?
Yup, definitely! We’re still deciding where we want to go with Corridor 17 and may revive some of the other game mechanics we had to discard along the way due to time constraints. We had originally intended to have unlockable achievements and an option to publish your high scores, so we might go back and implement that. Either way, it looks like it’s going to be an interesting year!AMMAN: One night last month, a group of masked men broke into Fajr Hamawi’s home and took his father away.
“We thought they were the police and that dad had become a regime detainee,” Hamawi, 28, whose family lives in a small village southwest of Hama city, told Syria Direct.
The next day, Hamawi, 28, received a phone call from his father’s cell phone. The man on the other end of the line was brief and direct: “They told us we would pay SP2,000,000 (≈ $3,773) if we wanted to see him alive again,” says Hamawi.
The Hamawis sold all of their sheep, tantamount to the family’s life savings, in order to secure the ransom money. The kidnappers told Hamawi to place the money in a black garbage bag and leave it in an abandoned cement factory on the outskirts of the village. He did as he was told and waited for his father to be released.
Three days later, the family heard that an unidentified body had been found in a ditch on the Misyaf-Hama highway, a few kilometers north of their village.
“I went to the morgue and there was my father’s body lying on a concrete slab,” says Hamawi. “The authorities wouldn’t give us any more information or allow us to ask any questions,” he adds.
In Syria today, the Hamawi family’s story is not exceptional.
Kidnappings, both politically and financially motivated, are a common occurrence in rebel-held territory such as Idlib and Aleppo provinces. The Islamic State alone has made millions of dollars from kidnapping ($25 million in 2014 alone, according to US intelligence estimates). Meanwhile, a February report by the UN’s Commission of Inquiry on Syria, determined that “tens of thousands” of people detained by the Syrian regime face “cruel treatment, torture, rape, sexual violence, and outrages upon personal dignity.”
For Syrians, “the specter of arrest or abduction, and the near-inevitable horrors that follow, have paralyzed communities across the country,” reads the report, entitled Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention.
But in regime-controlled Hama province, kidnapping is a local affair, and one primarily motivated by “financial considerations,” a local journalist who began documenting abductions in the central Syrian province earlier this year tells Syria Direct.
In the past two months, Ahmed Mohamed, a pro-opposition freelance journalist, says he has documented more than two dozen kidnappings in Hama city and its surrounding villages. Kidnapping here has become “as profitable a business as any,” he says.
Local, regime-affiliated militias and National Defense Force units are responsible for the kidnappings, says Mohamed. Sometimes, kidnapping victims are selected for their “anti-regime positions,” explains the journalist, but more often they are selected for “financial considerations.”
The militias act in their own self-interest and outside any law but their own, says Mohamed. “The regime can’t control these militias. And no one militia listens to another—when they have a disagreement, the bullets come down like rain,” he explains.
It was this gangland chaos that Abu Ahmed, an olive farmer from western Hama, was thinking about when he implored his son, Ahmed, not to make a nighttime trip to a distant olive mill last October.
“I told him I would go but he said it was a long trip and I would have to stand for a long time at the mill,” says Abu Ahmed, whose family brings in extra income by selling olive oil in local markets.
Ahmed and his cousin, Mohamed, set out to process a few bags of olives at a mill near Misyaf, a small town that is a 45-minute drive from the family’s home outside Hama.
“They were gone for 11 hours and we didn’t hear anything from them. I tried to call several times but his phone was shut off,” says Abu Ahmed.
Over the next few weeks, Abu Ahmed sold most of his belongings and twice delivered ransom payments, worth SP4,000,000 (≈$7,547) each, to locations determined by his son’s kidnappers.
“After that I never heard anything from the kidnappers and to this day I don’t know what happened to Ahmed and Mohamed,” says Abu Ahmed.
“I haven’t even been able to hear their voices.”Baltimore police arrest Tionne Jones on April 16, 2016. (WBFF-TV)
Baltimore police came under criticism on Monday after footage surfaced of a white officer pulling an 18-year-old black teen out of his doorway on Saturday while apparently disregarding the lack of a search warrant.
The Baltimore Sun reported that authorities opted not to pursue disorderly conduct charges against Tionne Jones, who is seen in the video telling an unidentified black officer he cannot enter the home without a search warrant.
The officer repeatedly asks to speak to the homeowner, later identified as Jones’ mother, India Epps. But Jones tells him that he lives there and that she is working. The argument continues until the unidentified white officer pulls up to the home and walks to the door without speaking to anyone.
“This is my house,” Jones says.
“That don’t matter,” the officer replies before grabbing him.
Police said in a statement that the encounter began after an officer spotted another teen — Antonio McLaurin, who filmed the encounter — trying to enter the home through both the back door and a window. McLaurin lives in the home with Jones and Epps.
“We have received calls from the community about issues surrounding activity in this home,” the statement read.
However, the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union defended Jones’ refusal as being legitimate.
“If they don’t want police in their house, then they shouldn’t let the police in their house, and they shouldn’t let the police intimidate them into letting them into their house,” ACLU attorney David Rocah said. “What’s troubling with this video is the people seem to be exercising their rights, and the arrest seems to be for them exercising their rights.”
Epps told WBFF-TV that while Jones was released the day after the incident, watching the video was heartbreaking for her.
“I was rattled. I was startled,” she said. “And, although we see this daily, it’s almost as though police brutality is becoming the norm.”
McLaurin’s mother, retired police officer Tawanda McLaurin, was also upset by the video, saying that she “treated people as humans” while serving with the department.
“He said to me, ‘This could have been another Freddie Gray incident,'” she said. “You know, as a retired officer, how that made me feel?”
Tuesday will mark one year to the day since the death of Freddie Gray following his arrest, an incident that sparked protests within the city.
Watch WBFF’s report, as aired on Sunday, below.Liberals maintain strong lead
Leading or tied everywhere but Alberta
TORONTO October 14th, 2015 - In a random sampling of public opinion taken by the Forum Poll™ among 1438 Canadian voters five days before the federal election, just fewer than 4-in-10 will vote Liberal (37%) while just more than 3-in-10 will vote Conservative (31%). These proportions have not changed since we polled last Friday. The NDP has the support of about one quarter (24%) and this has not changed either (October 9 - 23%). The Bloc Quebecois has less than a tenth of the vote (6%), and the Greens much less (2%).
Minority Liberal government seen
If these results are projected up to the newly expanded House of Commons, the Liberals would take a minority of 127 seats, 43 fewer than required for a majority, while the Conservatives would take 114. The NDP would capture 77 seats, the Bloc as many as 19 (more than we have projected since July) and the Greens would seat only their leader.
Liberals lead or tied everywhere but Alberta
In Atlantic Canada, the Liberals are dominant (52%), and the Conservatives have half their vote (28%). In Quebec, Liberals now have a slight lead (29%) over the NDP (27%) and the Bloc (23%) has surpassed the Conservatives (18%). In vote rich Ontario, the Liberals have a very strong lead (42%) over the Conservatives (34%), while the New Democrats lag (23%). In the prairies, the Liberals have a small lead (37%) over the Conservatives (34%) and the NDP are in third (27%). It is only in Alberta that the Conservatives have a clear lead (52%) over the Liberals (31%). The NDP are not competitive (14%). In BC, Liberals and Conservatives are tied (33% each) and the NDP are very close (30%).
Past New Democrats, Conservatives voting Liberal
Three-in-ten New Democrats from 2011 will vote Liberal this time (31%) as will close to one fifth of past Conservatives (17%). Just more than one tenth of past Liberals will vote NDP (13%). Eight-in-ten 2011 Liberals are voting Liberal again this time, while three quarters of past Conservatives will vote their party (73%). Just more than one half of those who voted NDP in the Orange Crush of 2011 will vote for the party again this time (56%).
Gender, Income and age differentiate parties
Conservatives are prominent in mid age bands, while Liberals are older and the NDP voter is youngest. Males are more common among Conservatives, females among New Democrats and there is a relatively even balance between genders in the Liberal party. Conservatives tend to be mid income, Liberals higher income and New Democrats lower income, although income is often a proxy for age.
One quarter of decided voters may yet switch
A quarter of those who have made their vote decision may yet change their minds (23%), and these are more likely to be Liberals (24%) or New Democrats (26%) than Conservatives (14%).
Liberals widely expected to win election
Close to one half of voters expect the Liberals to win the election (44%), compared to fewer than 3-in-10 who think this of the Conservatives (27%) and much fewer who think it of the NDP (14%). One tenth of Conservatives expect the Liberals to win (10%), as do more than a third of New Democrats (36%).
Trudeau seen as best PM
Justin Trudeau is still seen as the best prime minister (29%), while Stephen Harper is second on this measure (26%), very closely followed by Tom Mulcair (24%). In a new development, very few think none of the candidates would make a good Prime Minister (6%).
Close to 3-in-10 voting strategically
Among Liberal voters, more than a quarter say they are voting for the party only because it can defeat the government (26%) in addition to those who will vote Liberal because they share the party’s values (67%). Among New Democrats, a similar proportion (28%) is voting only because of strategic considerations, rather than for their values (60%). In total, more than a third will vote Liberal for either reason (34%), while about one quarter in total will vote the NDP (24%) or Conservative (27%).
“Poll results have not shifted strongly since the end of last week, except that the Liberals lead or are tied across the country now, except in Alberta, and the NDP appear to be out of the hunt”, said Forum Research President, Dr. Lorne Bozinoff.
Lorne Bozinoff, Ph.D. is the president and founder of Forum Research. He can be reached at lbozinoff@forumresearch.com or at (416) 960-9603.UPDATE (17:10 GMT)
Mexican President Enrique Peña Neito announced on Twitter today, in a follow up to US President Donald Trump, that he would not be going to the United States to discuss bilateral ways to tackle immigration and trade concerns. The cancellation of the meeting on Tuesday will only serve to heighten tensions between the two countries as a NAFTA renegotiation and the border wall construction have gone from idle threats to realistic outcomes.
USD/MXN jumped on the back of the latest news, trading as high as 21.3603 a few moments before this report was published.
Chart 2: USD/MXN 1-minute Timeframe (January 26, 2017 Intraday)
--- Written by Christopher Vecchio, Senior Currency Strategist
ORIGINAL (16:00 GMT)
Talking Points
- USDMXN shoots higher on President Trump’s tweets.
- Trump says that US has a $60 billion trade deficit with Mexico.
- See the DailyFX Economic Calendar and see what live coverage for key event risk impacting FX markets is scheduled for next week on the DailyFX Webinar Calendar.
A growing row between US President Donald Trump and his Mexican counterpart Enrique Pena Nieto over who will pay for the proposed border wall pushed the Mexican Peso back towards it record lows Thursday. Nieto re-iterated that his country would not pay for the wall between the two countries, provoking a sharp flurry of tweets from President Trump.
“The US has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers of jobs and companies lost.” Trump added: “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.”
Nieto is scheduled to meet Trump in Washington on January 31.
Trump has already hammered away at the Mexican currency by stating that he would impose border taxes on goods made in Mexico. Several US auto companies have already started re-thinking their production plans, with Ford cancelling its plans for a multi- billion dollar plant in Mexico while GM is under pressure for importing its Chevy hatchbacks from Mexico to its US dealers.
The Mexican Peso continued to deteriorate after the latest set of tweets from President Trump and USDMXN traded as high as 21.2813 before edging a touch lower. The Mexican Peso traded at just over 22 to the greenback a week ago, a fresh record high.
Chart 1: USD/MXN 5-Minute Timeframe (January 18 to 26, 2017)
--- Written by Nick Cawley, Analyst
To contact Nick, email him at nicholas.cawley@ig.com
Don't trade FX but want to learn more? Read the DailyFX Trading GuidesSan Francisco-based Coinbase announced improved security with new API keys on Friday. A good number of users of Coinbase’s services have previously experiencing issues with API keys, particularly theft of their funds — so the news is much-awaiting by those in the community.
For starters, the company says users will now have access to multiple API keys, with separate permissions (including IP whitelisting). This means that no longer will users have to share one key between applications (especially if it had global permissions enabled, which increased the risk of something bad happening).
In additional to multiple API keys, Coinbase is now making use of HMAC authentication, which will include an API secret in addition to the key, further improving security.
Old API keys will continue to work, but users are strongly advised to migrate to the new API keys.
To further fortify access to API keys, Coinbase now requires users to input their password or 2-factor authentication code when creating, editing, and viewing API keys. Coinbase will also email a security token whenever a request to enable a disabled API key is made.
Read about Coinbase’s improved API scheme here.|
It was worth a smile at breakfast that morning in February 2006, a scrap of social currency to take out into the world. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management guru, had grown famous offering competitive strategies to firms, regions, whole nations. Earlier he had taken on the problems of inner cities, health care and climate change. Now he was about to tackle perhaps the hardest problem of all (that is, after the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).
He had become adviser to Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.
There at the bottom of the front page of the Financial Times was a story that no one else had that day, or any other – a scoop. It turned out that Porter and his friend Daniel Yergin and the consulting firms which they had respectively co-founded and founded, Monitor Group and Cambridge Energy Research Associates, had been working for a year on a plan to diversify the Libyan economy away from its heavy dependence on oil. Their teams had conducted more than 2,000 interviews with “small- and medium-scale entrepreneurs as well as Libyan and foreign business leaders.” (Both men are better-known as celebrated authors: Porter for Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors and The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Yergin for The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power and The Commanding Heights: the Battle for the World Economy.)
The next day Porter would present the 200-page document they had prepared in a ceremony in Tripoli. Gadhafi himself might attend. The FT had seen a copy of the report, which envisaged a glorious future under the consultants’ plan. If all went well, it said, then by 2019 – the 50th anniversary of the military coup that brought Col. Gadhafi to power – Libya would have “one of the fastest rates of business formation in the world,” making it a regional leader contributing to the “wealth and stability of surrounding nations.”
From Cairo, the FT’s William Wallis reported:
The Harvard project is part of the efforts of Saif al-Islam, the colonel’s son, to restore Libya’s international legitimacy after his father’s renunciation of weapons of mass destruction and Tripoli’s agreement to pay compensation to the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie aircraft bombing.
A year later, in February 2007, BusinessWeek trumpeted the relationship, first on the eve of another Porter lecture on the “New Dawn” in Tripoli, then again a month later. The Cambridge, Mass., firm that Porter had started fifteen years before with seven other HBS professors had become. BW reported, “deeply engaged in overhauling the Mediterranean petro-state.” It wasn’t clear, the magazine noted, that partial bank privatization and “mini-MBAs” for some 250 emerging leaders would prevail over statism and red tape.
We now know that Gadhafi’s son bribed his way into his PhD from the London School of Economics (LSE); that Monitor Group had been paid to help him write his dissertation there (much of which apparently turns out to have been plagiarized, anyway); that the Libyan government was paying Monitor $250,000 a month for its services; that, according to The New York Times, Libya’s sovereign wealth fund today owns a portion of Pearson PLC, the conglomerate that publishes the Financial Times and The Economist; that the |
than text alone in communicating risks and affecting behavior. Other countries, such as Canada, have blazed this trail already.
As NPR's Richard Knox reports on All Things Considered, David Sweanor, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, says Canada's decade-old warnings do work — up to a point.
"What we see with these sorts of warnings is that it does increase motivation," Sweanor says. "People are more aware of the risks. They are wanting to quit. But that has to be combined with services that make it more likely."
Sweanor says smoking hasn't gone down as much as Canada as they'd hoped because the government hasn't provided enough access to smoking cessation programs.
The U.S. government's new campaign, powered by a new 2009 tobacco control law, does include more coverage of quit-smoking programs through Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance. But some wonder if the funding will materialize.
Others say the scare tactics can sometimes backfire. One study that tested warnings on a bunch of smokers, who happened to be psychology students, found that when smoking was a big part of someone's self-esteem, they weren't deterred by warnings that cigarettes could kill them. In fact, paradoxically, the death warnings might make them want to smoke more.
For those people, the researchers say, it might be more effective to dent that self-esteem with messages that say things like "Smoking makes you unattractive."
Almost two decades ago, comedian (and smoker) Denis Leary poked fun at smokers' ability to ignore warnings in a scathing, very unscientific and yet on-the-mark bit:
It doesn't matter how big the warnings are. You could have cigarettes that were called the warnings. You could have cigarettes that come in a black pack, with a skull and crossbone on the front, called "Tumors," and smokers would line up around the block saying, "I can't wait to get my hands on these [bleeping] things."
But the FDA is betting big that scare tactics will work on some of the 47 million Americans who still smoke – and deter more teenagers from starting. Smoking prevalence has stalled at 20 percent of adults – and, ominously, about the same proportion of high school seniors.
Tobacco companies didn't have much to say about the new warning labels – although a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds notes that the company has already filed a suit challenging the constitionality of the warning label requirements, on First Amendment grounds.Soon after a tornado ripped through North Minneapolis on Sunday afternoon, an estimated 20 looters ripped off Broadway Liquor Outlet.
The high winds that downed trees and tore off roofs in the area also smashed the glass storefront of the liquor store at 2201 W. Broadway Ave., which was closed.
The looters stole liquor, cigarettes and cash, said owner Dean Rose. The store had plywood boards nailed to its exterior by 7:30 p.m., but broken glass and cases of beer could be seen scattered on the floor inside. Rose said Sunday night he didn’t know the extent of the theft.
Minneapolis Police on Sunday night could not confirm reports of looting.
“It’s devastating,” said Rose, the third generation of his family to run the store. “It puts us out of business.”
“It’s an unfortunate disaster,” he said. “The whole community has been hit hard.”
Asia Harris, 26, of Minneapolis said she saw the looters as the storm struck. Debris hit the Honda Accord she was driving, but she took notice of the thefts.
“Once it hit, they started taking things out,” she said.Italian police have dismantled an international ring of ex-special forces accused of plotting to kidnap children caught up in custody battles, using high-speed boats and a base in Sicily to smuggle their charges across Europe.
Investigators discovered “contractors, for the most part veterans of special corps from the armed forces, ready to offer their operational skills to whoever was willing to pay them handsomely enough,” police said in a statement Thursday.
The contractors, operating behind the Norwegian security service ABP World Group, “offered services including the ‘retrieval’ of children caught up in custody battles between parents of different nationalities.”
Armed with Russian weapons, pepper sprays and tasers, the group charged “tens of thousands of euros” (dollars) to kidnap children given in custody to one parent in order to reunite them with their other parent, “putting the child’s life at risk,” the statement said.
The first operation took place in October 2012 when the group kidnapped a child in Tunisia and smuggled him into Norway, via Palermo in Sicily.
The second operation, planned for November 2012, was interrupted when police arrested the kidnappers and uncovered the plot to abduct another child from Tunisia by boat, because a plan to swoop in and carry him off by helicopter had fallen through.
The gang had four other operations planned in Cyprus, Lebanon, Egypt and the Ukraine.
Police in Palermo arrested three Italians and a Ukrainian woman, Moskalenko Larysa, a former Olympic medal winner sailing champion charged with providing the boats for use by the kidnappers.
Arrest warrants were also issued for two Norwegians and a Swede who is being held in Tunisia since his arrest last November, the statement said.I am smitten with Hamburg's Miniatur Wunderland, and I think you will be too. The world's largest model railway fills a 13,000-square-meter layout with 13 kilometers of tracks and hundreds of thousands of tiny people, vehicles, buildings, natural attractions, and of course trains. Over a million people visited the tourist attraction each year, but now we can gaze at the set from home through Google Street View.
Unlike the human-sized Street View camera, Google collaborated with Ubilabs to create an appropriately miniature version of the device. While the itty-bitty camera appears cute at our scale, imagine how horrific a real world version of this robo-cyclops would look zipping down your street.
The Miniatur Wunderland set features moving trains, along with cruise shops, shipping vehicles, airplanes that land and take off, firetrucks that respond to smoky buildings, and police that pull over speeding vehicles. I mean, criminently, it has a flying saucer!
The display is overflowing with surprising little moments, that will make your heart flutter with joy and oh God what is Death doing here?!
Of course you should wander to Wunderland on your own via Street View, but be sure to enjoy this video tour, too:Airport officials could be poised to announce a non-stop flight between Calgary and Beijing within a matter of weeks, thanks to a game-changing deal between Air Canada and Air China.
The newly signed agreement, announced over the weekend by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Beijing, is the first step toward creating a revenue sharing joint venture between the two airlines. Pending regulatory approval, the deal would see greater co-operation between the two carriers on routes between Canada and China — with the goal of stimulating traffic growth between the countries.
“It’s a big change,” said Stephan Poirier, senior vice-president and chief commercial officer with the Calgary Airport Authority, on Wednesday. “Now it looks like within a few weeks, a few months, we should have a big announcement.”
A non-stop flight between Calgary and Beijing has been on top of the local airport authority’s wish list for years. Calgary currently only has one non-stop flight to Asia (an Air Canada service to Tokyo), and local business groups and tourism officials have been clamouring for direct access to the vast Chinese market.
Air Canada has been working closely with the Calgary International Airport on the Beijing file since 2010, but the challenge has been securing a landing slot at Beijing airport. To make a flight from the relatively small market of Calgary commercially viable, it would need to land in Beijing at a time of day that would enable passengers to connect to other destinations — and the Beijing airport is so busy right now that there are no feasible time slots available.
The hurdle seemed so insurmountable that Calgary airport officials had even started to explore the possibility of landing at a different Chinese city instead. But the new deal between Air Canada and Air China allows for increased co-operation in the areas of scheduling and airport operations, making a much-coveted Beijing route a possibility again.
“If it’s a Chinese carrier operating the route in co-operation with Air Canada, the slot issue with Beijing disappears. Chinese carriers have all the slots (at Beijing International Airport), Air Canada only has two daily,” Poirier said.
“The joint venture will provide customers of both carriers additional travel options through the expansion of code-share flights to additional airports in both carriers’ domestic networks as network growth is a core principle of the joint venture,” he said.
Cindy Ady — interim CEO of Tourism Calgary — said “the whole world” is competing for Chinese air passenger traffic right now because of the rapid growth in that country’s economy. She said securing a non-stop flight from Calgary to Beijing would be a major milestone.
“A direct flight out of China, from a tourism perspective for us, is enormous,” Ady said. “With the population base that they have, the opportunities for Calgary are endless.”
Ady added Calgary’s tourism industry will need to adapt to welcome an influx of new Chinese visitors, whether that means offering services in Mandarin or tailoring packages to Chinese interests.
“All of our tourism industry is going to have to prepare to welcome them as guests. Hotels are going to have to be ready, in particular, to manage language and cultural differences,” she said.
Tourism Calgary’s most recent statistics, from 2012, show there were 20,202 visitors to Calgary from China that year. They spent an estimated $10.5 million.
astephenson@calgaryherald.com
Twitter.com/AmandaMStephPlease enable Javascript to watch this video
MILWAUKEE -- A FOX6 News crew was on scene at Milwaukee Police Department District 7 Sunday night, August 14th after a group confronted police at that location. Officers were in riot gear. As of about midnight, the National Guard had NOT been deployed on the streets of Milwaukee. The second straight night of violent protests appeared to be winding down by about 2:00 a.m.
From District 7, the group moved to the area near Sherman and Burleigh. As of 10:50 p.m., Milwaukee police said officers were moving in to disburse the crowd after people began throwing objects and firing shots.
One shooting victim was rushed to the hospital from the scene just after 11:00 p.m.
Police say an 18-year-old man was shot and suffered a serious injury. He was taken by armored vehicle to a hospital. It happened around 11:00 p.m.
MPD is investigating.
Additionally, early Monday, police said an officer was taken to the hospital after a rock thrown near Sherman & Burleigh broke a squad car's windshield.
PHOTO GALLERY
Breaking: Group confronting police at district 7 bldg. Officers in riot gear — Madeline Anderson (@mandersonfox6) August 15, 2016
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MPD officers currently monitoring protest outside District Seven Station. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
MPD monitoring crowd blocking traffic at Sherman and Burleigh. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Officers moving in to disburse crowd at Sherman and Burleigh after crowd begins to throw objects, fires shots. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Crowd continues to throw objects at officers, Sherman and Burleigh. MPD moving armored vehicles in to protect officers. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Unlawful assembly announcement is made to crowd creating disturbance at Sherman and Burleigh. Arrests will follow. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Reports of shots fired, Sherman and Burleigh — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Officers use armored vehicle to rescue shooting victim in 3000 block of N. Sherman. Victim rushed to hospital. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
As of 11:30 p.m., police were moving in near 48th and Center -- in an effort to disperse a small disorderly crowd.
Debris continues to be thrown at officers attempting to disperse disorderly crowd. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Just after 11:30 p.m., police said there was a report of shots fired near 44th and Chambers.
Reports of shots fired in 3000 block of N. 44th Street — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Report of shots fired, 3000 block of N. 41st. Also 3100 N. 40th Street. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
The National Guard has not been called to the areas of disturbance. MPD and partner agencies working to restore order. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Officers continue to have rocks thrown at them as they work to disburse small, disorderly groups in area around Sherman and Burleigh — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Officer taken to hospital for injury after thrown rock breaks windshield of squad near Sherman & Burleigh. pic.twitter.com/At5HDBOXHm — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Report of shots fired near 41st and Burleigh — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
I apologize for cutting our broadcast. It got too dangerous. Shots fired about 15 feet from us and we were threatened multiple times. — A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) August 15, 2016
It got way more intense. Was almost exclusively teens and 20 somethings. They threw rocks at police. Someone also tried to rob photographer. — A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) August 15, 2016
Guy reached into photographer's pockets, keys fell out but he retrieved them. Hearing more shots in the distance. #Milwaukee — A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) August 15, 2016
We're totally blocked in now. Police line moved past our only way off this 1-way street. Sound of shots seems to be few blocks east of 41st — A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) August 15, 2016
Just before 1:00 a.m., Milwaukee police reported a car fire at 45th and Hadley. Officials with the Milwaukee Fire Department and Milwaukee police were en route.
Car fire reported at 45th and Hadley. MFD and MPD en route. — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
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Reports of shots fired near 38th and Burleigh — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
Officers making multiple arrests in the area of Sherman and Burleigh — Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 15, 2016
NEW: After police line clears the intersection at 44th/Burleigh, police get on a bus and are moving out. #Milwaukee pic.twitter.com/iW4XqpgQ2p — Theo Keith (@TheoKeith) August 15, 2016
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PHOTO GALLERY
Sunday marked the second straight night of violent protests after the shooting of 23-year-old Slyville Smith near 44th and Auer Saturday afternoon.
The death Smith triggered unrest beginning Saturday as protesters torched six businesses, including a gas station, and threw rocks at officers. Four officers were injured and 17 people were arrested, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said on Sunday.
The turbulent weekend prompted Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to declare a state of emergency on Sunday.
Earlier that evening residents had gathered to mourn Smith as his family and friends held a candlelight vigil at the site of Saturday's shooting in a residential area of North Milwaukee. At one point, the crowd chanted "ready for war," followed by a a chant of "peace, peace, peace."
Smith's sister, Sherelle Smith, condemned violence carried out in her brother's name, saying the community needs those businesses.
"Don't bring that violence here," Neal said, sobbing as she lamented that she would never be able to again hug her brother.
Residents also came into the streets with trash bags, brooms and shovels to sweep up the debris from burnt down businesses.
Tensions on Sunday gave way to prayers as activists gathered to call for peace.
A group of about 100 gathered at the park near a BP gas station that was burned during Saturday's protests. Crowds ebbed and flowed at the station throughout Sunday; as night fell, community and church leaders led a prayer circle and spoke of a community that needs healing from ongoing "racism, injustices and oppression."
What happened in the shooting
The incident near 44th and Auer Saturday began when a pair of police officers stopped Smith and another person in a car on Saturday about 3:30 p.m., police said. The men fled the car and the officers followed, shooting Smith in the arm and chest when he failed to put his gun down, Barrett said.
The handgun, along with 500 rounds of ammunition, were stolen during a burglary in nearby Waukesha in March, police said.
Police body camera footage showed Smith holding a handgun during the encounter, Barrett said at a Sunday news conference. Police said the officer shot Smith after he failed to comply with orders to put his gun down. His gun was loaded with 23 rounds, more than the officer was carrying.
Smith died at the scene, and the officer who fired the fatal shots was not injured. The unidentifed officer is 24 years old and has six years of service with the Milwaukee Police Department -- three as an officer. He will be placed on administrative duty during an investigation.
The shooting occurred near the location of an August 9 double homicide in which a man was shot dead and another was fatally stabbed, police said.
Smith's sister, Kimberly Neal, remembered a brother who "kept it real," a high school graduate who played basketball, a contrast to "the man with a lengthy arrest record" described by police.
"He should have been tased, if anything," she said. "We want everybody to feel our pain."
Although the National Guard was activated in response to the unrest, it will not be deployed unless authorized by Milwaukee police chief Edward Flynn, Barrett said. By state law, the Wisconsin Department of Justice will lead the investigation.
'Racial problems' in Milwaukee
City Alderman Khalif Rainey said the area has been a "powder keg" for potential violence throughout the summer.
"What happened tonight may not have been right and I am not justifying that but no one can deny the fact that there are problems, racial problems in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that need to be rectified," Rainey said. "This community of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has become the worst place to live for African-Americans in the entire country."
Rainey said Saturday's violence was a byproduct of inequities, injustice, unemployment and under-education.
"Something has to be done to address these issues," he said. "The black people of Milwaukee are tired; they are tired of living under this oppression, this is their life."
Milwaukee mayor on Sunday said that the damage from Saturday's unrest was "unlike anything I've seen," he said. "I hope I never see it again." "A young man lost his life yesterday afternoon. And, no matter what the circumstances, his family must be hurting."
Monitor FOX6 News and FOX6Now.com for updates on this developing story.Google's system of scanning the email content of its Gmail users, in order to generate targeted ads, has been controversial ever since the company launched the service just over 10 years ago. On Monday, Google added a paragraph in its Terms of Service that attempts to better explain how its software scans content from its users.
The new TOS document puts the new paragraph in the "Your Content in our Services" section. It states:
Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.
CNET reports that, according to a statement from a Google spokesperson, "Today's changes will give people even greater clarity and are based on feedback we've received over the last few months." However, that likely won't stop the complaints of many privacy advocates, who believe Google's Gmail scanning polices amount to illegal wiretapping of their users. Google's defense, at least so far, has been that Gmail users have to accept those kinds of features when they sign up to use the service.
Microsoft has attacked Gmail on a number of occasions, including a rather funny video released a few years ago called "Gmail Man" that parodies how a "real" Gmail mailman might go through a person's letters.
Source: Google via CNet | Gmail image via ShutterstockSouth L.A. student finds a different world at UC Berkeley
Column One South L.A. student finds a different world at Cal Kashawn Campbell overcame many obstacles to become a straight-A student. But his freshman year at UC Berkeley shook him to the core.
School had always been his safe harbor.
Growing up in one of South Los Angeles' bleakest, most violent neighborhoods, he learned about the world by watching "Jeopardy" and willed himself to become a straight-A student.
His teachers and his classmates at Jefferson High all rooted for the slight and hopeful African American teenager. He was named the prom king, the most likely to succeed, the senior class salutatorian. He was accepted to UC Berkeley, one of the nation's most renowned public universities.
A semester later, Kashawn Campbell sat inside a cramped room on a dorm floor that Cal reserves for black students. It was early January, and he stared nervously at his first college transcript.
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There wasn't much good to see.
He had barely passed an introductory science course. In College Writing 1A, his essays — pockmarked with misplaced words and odd phrases — were so weak that he would have to take the class again.
He had never felt this kind of failure, nor felt this insecure. The second term was just days away and he had a 1.7 GPA. If he didn't improve his grades by school year's end, he would flunk out.
He tried to stay calm. He promised himself he would beat back the depression that had come in waves those first months of school. He would work harder, be better organized, be more like his roommate and new best friend, Spencer Simpson, who was making college look easy.
On a nearby desk lay a small diary he recently filled with affirmations and goals. He thumbed through it.
"I can do this! I can do this!" he had written. "Let the studying begin! … It's time for Kashawn's Comeback!"
This is the story of Kashawn Campbell's freshman year.
Nothing had ever been easy for Kashawn.
"When I delivered him, I thought he was dead," said his mother, Lillie, recalling the umbilical cord tight around his neck. "He was still as stone but eventually he came to. Proved he was a survivor. Ever since, I've called him my miracle child."
A single mom, she often worked two jobs to make ends meet, at times as a graveyard shift security guard. Someone needed to care for her baby, so she paid an elderly neighbor named Sylvia to house, feed and care for Kashawn.
"Me and Kashawn always had a strong connection," Lillie said. "But Sylvia raised my boy, yes she did."
Sylvia didn't read many magazines, newspapers or books. Only rarely did she take Kashawn outside their neighborhood. Still, she was kind and loving, and he loved her in turn, as if she were his grandmother.
"I used what she taught me and expanded it," Kashawn said. That meant deciding early on that the life he was surrounded by wasn't what he wanted his future to be. "I had to be the one to push myself to do beyond well…. If I didn't do that, nothing was going to ever change."
When I delivered him, I thought he was dead. He was still as stone but eventually he came to. Proved he was a survivor. Ever since, I've called him my miracle child." — Lillie, Kashawn Campbell's mother
Jefferson, made up almost entirely of Latinos and blacks, had a woeful reputation. His freshman year, just under 13% of its students were judged to be proficient in English, less than 1% in math.
"It was so rare to have a kid like Kashawn, especially an African American male, wanting that badly to go to college," said Jeremy McDavid, a former Jefferson vice principal. "We got together as a staff and decided that this kid, we cannot let him down."
By the end of his senior year, Kashawn's 4.06 grade point average was second best in the senior class. Because of a statewide program to attract top students from every public California high school, a spot at a UC system campus waited for him.
But when he got his acceptance letter from Berkeley, he couldn't celebrate like he always thought he would. It was Sylvia. She was losing a battle with cancer.
He sat near her hospice bed on a muggy day to give her the news. "I'm going to Cal, grandma," he said. She could barely open her eyes. "I'm going up there and I'm going to keep working hard and doing great. Nothing's going to change."
Sylvia died later that day.
A month later, when his mother drove him to Berkeley and dropped him off at his dormitory, Kashawn still crumbled into tears at the thought of Sylvia.
Yet he did everything he could to fit in. He lived at the African-American Theme Program — two floors in Christian Hall housing roughly 50 black freshmen, an effort to build bonds among a community whose numbers have dwindled over the last two decades.
He filled his dorm room with Cal posters, and wore clothes emblazoned with the school's name. Each morning the gawky, bone-thin teen energetically reminded his dorm mates to "have a Caltastic day!"
"It was clear that Kashawn was someone who didn't know about, or maybe care about, social norms," said one of his friends. "A lot of people would laugh at first. They didn't understand how someone could be that enthusiastic."
But as the semester got going, he began to stumble. The first essay for the writing class that accounted for half of his course load was so bad his teacher gave him a "No Pass." Same for the second essay.
"It's like a different planet here," he said one day, walking down Telegraph Avenue through a mash of humanity he'd never been exposed to before: white kids, Asian kids, rich kids, bearded hipsters and burnt-out hippies. Many of them jaywalked. Not Kashawn. Just as he'd been taught, he only used crosswalks, only stepped onto the street when the coast was clear or a light flashed green. His shoulders slumped.
"I'm not used to the people. Not used to the type of buildings. Definitely not used to the pressure I feel."
Part of the pressure came from race. After peaking at 7% in the late 1980s and early '90s, the undergraduate African American population at Cal had been declining for years, especially since Proposition 209 had banned affirmative action in admissions to California public colleges. When Kashawn arrived, 3% of Berkeley undergraduates were African American.
The low numbers were the source of constant talk on the theme program floors, the symbolic center of black life for Cal freshmen.
"Sometimes we feel like we're not wanted on campus," Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dorm mates, all of them nodding in agreement. "It's usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions."
He also felt a more personal burden.
He couldn't let his mother down. She kept a box stuffed with each of his perfect report cards. She swore that he was going to be a lawyer, maybe even the president. Back home her bank account was running low, and he sent some of his scholarship money home to keep her going.
He'd never been depressed. Now clouds of sadness descended every few weeks. When they did he was barely able to speak, even to Spencer, his roommate.
The biggest of his burdens was schoolwork. At Jefferson, a long essay took a page and perfect grades came after an hour of study a night.
At Cal, he was among the hardest workers in the dorm, but he could barely keep afloat.
Seeking help, he went at least once a week to the office of his writing instructor, Verda Delp.
Have a Caltastic day!" — Kashawn Campbell Share this quote
The more she saw him, the more she worried. His writing often didn't make sense. He struggled to comprehend the readings for her class and think critically about the text.
"It took awhile for him to understand there was a problem," Delp said. "He could not believe that he needed more skills. He would revise his papers and each time he would turn his work back in having complicated it. The paper would be full of words he thought were academic, writing the way he thought a college student should write, using big words he didn't have command of."
At the end of the first semester, after he turned in a final portfolio of revised essays, Delp asked Kashawn to come to her office. She told him this last batch of work was better. After reviewing his writing, though, it was clear to her that he had received far too much help from someone else.
Both remember the meeting, recalling Kashawn's shock, his admission that friends and a tutor had offered suggestions and made edits, his insistence that the bulk of the writing was his own.
Delp reviewed his record: None of his essays had been good enough to receive passing grades. Still, instead of failing him, she gave a reprieve: His report card would show an "In Progress." The course wouldn't count against his grade point average, but he would have to take it again.
Before the start of the second term, hoping for a head start, Kashawn moved back into the dorm before anyone else on his floor. He imagined how different things were going to be from his first semester.
He couldn't wait to see Spencer. "We're both going to do very well this semester," he said. "I believe I can follow his lead and ace all my classes."
They hadn't known each other before the year began. Now they were like brothers, partly because they shared so much. Spencer was raised in a tough L.A. neighborhood by a single mom who had sometimes worked two jobs to pay the rent. Spencer had gone to struggling public schools, receiving straight A's at Inglewood High. Spencer didn't curse, didn't party, didn't try to act tough and was shy around girls.
As much as they had in common, they were also different. Spencer's mother, a medical administrator, had graduated from UCLA and exposed her only child to art, politics, literature and the world beyond Inglewood. If a bookstore was going out of business, she'd drive Spencer to the closeout sale and they would buy discounted novels. She pushed him to participate in a mostly white Boy Scout troop in Westchester.
A lot of people would laugh at first. They didn't understand how someone could be that enthusiastic." — One of Kashawn Campbell's college friends
To Spencer, Berkeley was the first place he could feel fully comfortable being intellectual and black, the first place he could openly admit he liked folk music and punk rock.
He was cruising through Cal, finishing the first semester with a 3.8 GPA despite a raft of hard classes. "I can easily see him being a professor one day," said his political theory instructor, noting that Spencer was one of the sharpest students in a lecture packed with nearly 200 undergraduates.
In the second term, Kashawn and Spencer volunteered for the same student organizations, and walked each Friday night to a job washing dishes at a nearby residence hall.
They even took a class together, African American Studies 5A, a survey of black culture and race relations. It was key for Kashawn: A top grade could ensure he would be invited back to Cal.
They sat together in the front row. One teacher noticed that Kashawn subconsciously seemed to mime his roommate: casually cocking his head and leaning back slightly as he pondered questions, just like Spencer.
Kashawn reveled in the class in a way he hadn't since high school. He would often be the first one to speak up in discussions, even though his points weren't always the most sophisticated, said Gabrielle Williams, a doctoral student who helped teach the class.
He still had gaps in his knowledge of history. But, Williams said, "you could see how engaged he was, how much he loved being there.... You could also see that he was struggling with his confidence, partly because this whole experience was so overwhelming."
Although the African American studies class was a bright spot — Kashawn had received an A on an essay and a B on a midterm, the best grades of his freshman year — the writing course he'd been forced to repeat wasn't going well.
He knew that another failing effort in the class could doom his chances to return to Cal, so he worked as closely with his new instructor as he had with Delp.
There was little to show for the effort. On yet another failing essay, the instructor wrote how surprised she was at his lack of progress, especially, she noted, given the hours they'd spent going over his "extremely long, awkward and unclear sentences."
He told only Spencer and a few dorm mates how devastating this kind of failure felt, each poor grade another stinging punch bringing him closer to flunking out. None of the adults in his life knew the depth of his pain: not his professors, his counselors, any of the teachers at his old high school. He spoke vaguely about depression to his mother. She told him to read the Bible.
Spencer looked out for Kashawn; he was the first person Kashawn would turn to when depression came. Sometimes in the dorm room, Spencer would look over at Kashawn and see him sitting in front of his computer, body frozen and face expressionless, JVC headphones wrapped over his ears, but no music playing.
One night Kashawn walked briskly from his room, ending up alone in a quiet, beige-walled lounge at Christian Hall. His mind raced. He chastised himself for his college grades, for being too sensitive, too trusting, too naive.
"Why was I even born?" he wondered. It felt like he was outside his body, looking at himself from above. "Is life really worth living under these conditions?"
He tried to calm down. "The way I was stressing myself out, it wasn't good, it wasn't healthy at all," he would recall later. "I just had to find my way out of that lounge. Had to get help, because this was a monster I needed to tame."
It wasn't long before he found himself sitting for the first time in a campus psychologist's office. The counselor urged him to put his life in better perspective. Maybe he didn't have to be the straight-A kid he'd been in high school anymore. Maybe all that mattered was giving his best. The visit seemed to change him. His dorm mates had been so worried about his dark moods that some had called their parents, asking advice on how best to help their friend. As weeks passed and his smile returned, everyone breathed a little easier.
"I've learned the hard way that academics are not who you are," Kashawn said as he walked through Sproul Plaza, heading back to the dorm one day in May. "They are something you need to learn to get to the next level of life, but they can't define me. My grades at Cal are not Kashawn Campbell."
Finals week. The school year was nearly over. After staying up all night to finish, Kashawn turned in the final portfolio for his writing course.
"I'm proud of you," his instructor said, as he handed her the essays in a black folder. "You've tried as hard as anyone I've ever seen."
Soon he'd taken his last test, turned in his last report. He stood on a sidewalk outside the dorm, saying goodbye to Spencer, stifling tears. Then he was on a Greyhound bus, heading home to Los Angeles, where he slept on the floor in his mother's apartment and waited for his grades.
I'm proud of you. You've tried as hard as anyone I've ever seen." — Kashawn Campbell's second semester writing instructor
Would he flunk out?
"All I can do is pray," he said.
One morning this summer he walked slowly to the kitchen table, sat in a black chair and cracked open his laptop. Cal's website had just posted grades.
He scrolled down the page and saw the results for College Writing. His teacher said he'd improved slightly, but not enough. She gave him an incomplete. To get a grade he'd have to turn in two more essays, if he came back to school.
His heart raced. He saw that he'd passed a three-unit seminar. He scanned further, his eyes resting finally on a line that said African American Studies 5A. There was his grade.
A-.
"Yes!" he exclaimed. An A- lifted his GPA above a 2.0.
He wasn't a freshman anymore. He would return to Cal for his sophomore year.
[For the Record, 1:39 p.m. PDT Aug. 18: In an earlier version of this article, a graphic design element highlighting the quotation “I'm proud of you. You've tried as hard as anyone I've ever seen” misattributed the comment to writing instructor Verda Delp. The words were spoken by Kashawn Campbell’s second-semester writing coach.]
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Follow Kurt Streeter (@kurtstreeter) on Twitter
Follow @latgreatreads on TwitterDespite concerns that the physical structure lacks historic integrity, the Historic Landmark Commission has voted to move forward with historic zoning for the home of one of East Austin’s most prominent African-Americans.
Commissioners voted 6-4 to initiate historic zoning on the home at 1308 E. 12th St., which was originally constructed sometime prior to 1933. Commissioners Tiffany Osburn, David Whitworth, Arif Panju and Alex Papavasiliou voted in opposition, and Commissioner Emily Reed was absent. Historic zoning could prevent the proposed demolition of the |
I&D. After return instructions are given, she leaves with an understanding to return if worsening or not improving.
More Reading
Want to know more about abscesses? Check out this great review article about “Management of Skin Abscesses in the Era of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus” [5]
References
Niska, R., F. Bhuiya, and J. Xu, National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey: 2007 emergency department summary. National health statistics reports, 2010(26): p. 1-31. O'Malley, G.F., et al., Routine packing of simple cutaneous abscesses is painful and probably unnecessary. Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, 2009. 16(5): p. 470-3. Kessler, D.O., A. Krantz, and M. Mojica, Randomized trial comparing wound packing to no wound packing following incision and drainage of superficial skin abscesses in the pediatric emergency department. Pediatric emergency care, 2012. 28(6): p. 514-7. Schmitz, G., et al., The treatment of cutaneous abscesses: comparison of emergency medicine providers' practice patterns. The western journal of emergency medicine, 2013. 14(1): p. 23-8. Singer, A.J. and D.A. Talan, Management of skin abscesses in the era of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The New England journal of medicine, 2014. 370(11): p. 1039-47.
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The fall season in gender-gap news has started early and with a bang. A study released yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that male doctors earn over 25% more than female doctors. Why am I not surprised? There is a constant stream of stories showing gender disparities like this: that Obama gave only 35% of Cabinet-level posts to women, that men still write 87% of Wikipedia entries, that they are approximately 80% of local news-television and radio managers, and over 75% of philosophers.
After decades of antidiscrimination laws, diversity initiatives and feminist advocacy, such data leads to an uncomfortable question: Do women actually want equality? The answer seems transparently, blindingly, obvious. Do women want to breathe fresh air? Do they want to avoid rattlesnakes and fatal heart attacks?
But from another perspective, the answer is anything but clear. In fact, there’s good reason to think that women don’t want the sort of equality envisioned by government bureaucrats, academics and many feminist advocates, one imagined strictly by the numbers with the goal of a 50-50 breakdown of men and women in C-suites, law-school dean offices, editorial boards and computer-science departments; equal earnings, equal work hours, equal assets, equal time changing diapers and doing the laundry. “A truly equal world,” Sheryl Sandberg wrote in Lean In, which is still on the best-seller lists months after its spring publication, “would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.” It’s a vision of progress that can only be calculated through the spreadsheets of labor economists, demographers and activist groups.
It would be silly to deny that equality-by-the-numbers researchers can deliver figures that could alarm even an Ann Romney. There’s the puny 4.2% of female Fortune 500 CEOs, the mere 23.7% of female state legislators, the paltry 19% of women in Congress. But while “numbers don’t lie,” they can create mirages that convince us we see something we don’t. Take, for example, the JAMA study about the pay gap between male and female doctors. The study seems to capture yet another example of discrimination against women. But because it fails to consider differences in medical specialty or type of workplace, that appearance may well be an illusion. Surgeons and cardiologists, who have long been in the ranks of the top-earning specialties, remain predominantly male. Meanwhile, as women flooded the profession, they disproportionately chose to become psychiatrists and pediatricians, specialties that have always been among the least lucrative.
(MORE: The Pay Gap Is Not as Bad as You Think)
There are reasons for this particular wage gap that are gender-blind. Surgeons need more years of training, perform riskier work (at least that’s how malpractice insurers see it) and put in more unpredictable hours. Unsurprisingly, according to surveys, women who become doctors approach their work differently than men. They spend more time with each patient; when choosing jobs, they are far more likely to cite time for family and flexible hours as “very important” and to prefer limited management responsibilities. Male doctors, on the other hand, are more likely to think about career advancement and income potential.
This hints at the problem with the equality-by-the-numbers approach: it presumes women want absolute parity in all things measurable, and that the average woman wants to work as many hours as the average man, that they want to be CEOs, heads of state, surgeons and Cabinet heads just as much as men do. But a consistent majority of women, including those working full time, say they would prefer to work part time or not at all; among men, the number is 19%. And they’re not just talking; in actual practice, 27% of working women are on the job only part time, compared with 11% of men.
(MORE: Let’s Not Forget, Many Working Moms Want to Work Less)
Now, a lot of people might say that American women are stymied from pursuing their ambitions because of our miserly maternity leave, day care and workplace-flexibility policies. But even women in the world’s most family-friendly countries show little interest in the equality-by-the-numbers ideal. In Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland, according to the OECD, women still work fewer hours and earn less money than men; they also remain a rare sight in executive offices, computer-science classrooms and, though the OECD doesn’t say it I’m willing to bet, philosophy conferences. Sweden, the gold standard of gender equality in many minds, has one of the highest percentages of women working part time anywhere in the world. Equality-by-numbers advocates should be thinking about women’s progress in terms of what women show that they want, not what the spreadsheets say they should want.
SEE ALSO: The Big Surprise of Martin Luther King’s SpeechBy By JohnThomas Didymus Jul 11, 2012 in Health Pauline Potter, Guinness Book of World Record's heaviest living woman, weighing 643 lbs, turned to seven-times-a-day marathon sex sessions with her ex-husband to help shed 98 pounds. She told Potter hopes that with regular marathon sex sessions of seven rounds a day with Alex, she will achieve her weight target of 532 pounds. Potter describes her fun-filled sex life: “We love foreplay and massages and, as well as full sex, I pleasure Alex, too. My bed is strengthened and, although I can’t buy sexy lingerie, I drape a nice sheet over me.” According to The two were married in 2005. Potter and her son Dillon, moved to Phoenix to live with Alex and his son Sherman. But according to Potter, “From day one Sherman and I didn’t get along." In 2008, Pauline filed for divorce and moved back to Sacramento with her son Dillon. She said: “It was the biggest regret of my life walking out on my family. Sherman and I have since made up.” According to Potter and her ex-husband Alex, spoke to each other on the phone occasionally after their divorce, but Alex had no idea that his ex-wife had gained so much weight until she made the headlines last year as the world's heaviest woman. When Alex heard about his ex's new found fame as the Guinness Book of World Record's heaviest woman, he contacted her and the flame was rekindled. Pauline congratulates herself on winning her man back in an unusual way. She said: “Most women think losing weight is the way to get their ex’s attention — but for me it was just the opposite. Becoming the heaviest woman in the world is what made him fall in love with me all over again and we’re now working on getting our relationship back on track.” Alex, who weighs only 140 lbs, less than one of Pauline's legs, said: “Despite what some may think, Pauline is great in bed. She’s better than any other woman I’ve ever slept with. Within the first day of being back together we had sex six times in 24 hours. Even though one of Pauline’s legs weighs more than I do, we’re able to position her body to make sex enjoyable for both of us." He told Potter admits Alex does most of the work in their "sexercise" sessions, but she insists that “It also helps that I did gymnastics until I was 12 so I’m very limber.” According to According to Fulbright, a rigorous "sexercise" routine leads not only to weight loss, but also improved blood flow, strengthening of the heart muscles, lower cholesterol, better sleep, decreased stress and improved muscle tone. But while Potter's sexercises have helped her shed weight, she has also lowered her calorie intake. She says she no longer consumes 10,000 calories per day but she still enjoys her Big Mac. According to Closer Magazine, Potter said she re-ignited her sex life with her ex-husband Alex, and after rigorous sessions of six to seven rounds of sex a day, she lost 98 pounds.She told Closer Magazine : “I can’t move much in bed, but I burn 500 calories a session –- it’s great exercise just jiggling around."Potter hopes that with regular marathon sex sessions of seven rounds a day with Alex, she will achieve her weight target of 532 pounds.Potter describes her fun-filled sex life: “We love foreplay and massages and, as well as full sex, I pleasure Alex, too. My bed is strengthened and, although I can’t buy sexy lingerie, I drape a nice sheet over me.”According to The Sun, the sex giants met online in 2002, after Alex sent an email to the wrong address that happened to be Potter's. After they exchanged several emails, an online affair blossomed. But Potter said she was afraid she would be rejected because even at that time she was heavy. The Sun reports she said: “After I emailed my picture and told Alex how much I weighed, I switched off the computer, thinking I’d never hear from him again. But three hours later I received an email from him saying he thought I was beautiful and it didn’t matter to him how much I weighed. I fell head over heels in love and we were engaged a year later.”The two were married in 2005. Potter and her son Dillon, moved to Phoenix to live with Alex and his son Sherman. But according to Potter, “From day one Sherman and I didn’t get along."In 2008, Pauline filed for divorce and moved back to Sacramento with her son Dillon. She said: “It was the biggest regret of my life walking out on my family. Sherman and I have since made up.”According to The Huffington Post, Potter began gaining weight after the separation, consuming up to 10,000 calories a day. Her body weight soared to over 600 pounds. The Sun reports that Potter, 47, became so fat that she was unable to move. Her son Dillon, 19, became her caregiver, doing the cooking and bathing her. Closer Magazine reports that she contacted the Guinness Book of World Records in the hope that winning the Guinness title of the "World's heaviest Woman" would shame her into losing weight.Potter and her ex-husband Alex, spoke to each other on the phone occasionally after their divorce, but Alex had no idea that his ex-wife had gained so much weight until she made the headlines last year as the world's heaviest woman.When Alex heard about his ex's new found fame as the Guinness Book of World Record's heaviest woman, he contacted her and the flame was rekindled.Pauline congratulates herself on winning her man back in an unusual way. She said: “Most women think losing weight is the way to get their ex’s attention — but for me it was just the opposite. Becoming the heaviest woman in the world is what made him fall in love with me all over again and we’re now working on getting our relationship back on track.”Alex, who weighs only 140 lbs, less than one of Pauline's legs, said: “Despite what some may think, Pauline is great in bed. She’s better than any other woman I’ve ever slept with. Within the first day of being back together we had sex six times in 24 hours. Even though one of Pauline’s legs weighs more than I do, we’re able to position her body to make sex enjoyable for both of us."He told The Sun : “It’s really dangerous for us to have sex because at any moment the bed could collapse and one or both of us could be seriously injured or even killed from the impact."Potter admits Alex does most of the work in their "sexercise" sessions, but she insists that “It also helps that I did gymnastics until I was 12 so I’m very limber.”According to The Inquisitr, Potter said she lost 98 lbs in the last 7 months with her "sexercising" routine. Alex said: “She can’t walk, dress herself or even go to the toilet on her own — but I’m desperate to be her lover and caretaker again. Plus I miss our sex life. Pauline could be 70st [980 pounds] and we’d still have sex every single day because it’s that good. It was the biggest mistake of my life letting Pauline go and it’s taken her gaining weight and becoming the world’s heaviest woman to realize how much I still love her.” The Inqusitr reports that Potter, who because she is overweight gets $850 a month in disability benefits, said: “My goal is to lose 200lb (14st 4lb) plus and have weight-loss surgery so I can be mobile again and not rely on anyone for help." The Huffington Post reports that using sex as exercise regimen for weight loss is not new. According to Dr. Yvonne Kristin Fulbright, a sex educator and relationship expert who is also a columnist and founder of Sexuality Source Inc.,"Shagging can make you slimmer, if you do enough of it. It can also help the two of you fall for each other all over again. Requiring no monthly fee — dress code optional – you can'sexercise' yourself into shape. This is one gym membership you’ll never want to drop."According to Fulbright, a rigorous "sexercise" routine leads not only to weight loss, but also improved blood flow, strengthening of the heart muscles, lower cholesterol, better sleep, decreased stress and improved muscle tone.But while Potter's sexercises have helped her shed weight, she has also lowered her calorie intake. She says she no longer consumes 10,000 calories per day but she still enjoys her Big Mac. More about pauline potter, sex session, heaviest woman, Sex, Weight More news from pauline potter sex session heaviest woman Sex Weight losing weightPA / LANDOV Heathrow's homeless have blended in amid its masses of stranded flyers.
It is a familiar scene: 3 a.m. at Heathrow Airport, and a gathering of people are sprawled across plastic benches in various poses of contortion. To be in transit is to be disconnected, but for some of those sleeping here, rootlessness is not temporary. Each night, scores of London's homeless men and women take advantage of modern travel delays by posing as stranded passengers in order to sleep in a warm and safe place. They play a cat-and-mouse game with police, often donning floral shirts, fanny packs and other travel accessories to blend in. And their increasing creativity and ability to disappear in Heathrow's swelling crowds of delayed passengers has prompted the airport to try a new approach.
Last month, Heathrow commissioned a local homeless outreach organization, Broadway, to visit the airport once a week and survey its homeless population, while also trying try to coax them into temporary accommodation. They were not prepared for the scale of the problem they discovered: In the first four weeks alone, they conducted 100 interviews with homeless "passengers" although some of those were repeat interviews, the number was far higher than anyone had expected.
When TIME joined the outreach worker and police officers this week, the homeless people contacted included a man sleeping under his coat, another conspicuously hiding behind an open newspaper, and a woman clutching a duty free bag who insisted she was waiting for a flight, only to whisper when police were out of earshot: "I can't afford electricity; it's warm here; please, let me stay."
These men and women may seem to embody the English tradition of the plucky Dickensian Dodger, but it would be wrong to mistake their ingenuity for anything other than desperation, social workers say. Like those to whom the travel ads all around the airport appeal, Heathrow's homeless are also in search of escape: from debts, legal problems, family responsibilities. They often have mental health or substance abuse problems, and they often refuse help. During the day, some travel by public transport into London to beg, busk or take drugs, while others remain in the airport, sometimes scrounging food off sympathetic restaurant and cafe workers.
"When I came from Africa, I couldn't believe people could be homeless in Britain," says Broadway's Nigerian-born outreach worker Jeff Motunde. "But I discovered that homelessness is a way of life. It can be very difficult to convince people to receive help."
Ingenuity is a necessity for Heathrow's homeless to avoid detection by police. "I thought about disguising myself as a passenger, but I have a bit of what you might call 'a luggage issue,' 65-year-old Joseph explains from a bench in the airport's remote bus terminal, pointing at a shopping trolley of bulging plastic bags. "They are hardly Louis Vuitton."
"Rough sleepers," as homeless people are known in Britain, disguise themselves at all major airports, says Sandie Cox of Heathrow Travel Care, the social care organization overseeing the one-year pilot scheme. Indeed, Chicago's O'Hare airport instituted a homeless outreach in the 1990s. But while the problem may not be unique to Heathrow, several factors make it easier for rough sleepers to blend in. It is the busiest airport in Europe, has more delays than other major hubs, and while it doesn't serve Europe's low-cost carriers, it has still seen the effects of the democratization of air travel: gone are the days when you could identify a British air passenger by their suit and shiny shoes. Indeed, on Wednesday, the two scruffy passengers curled in the corner of a remote bathroom turned out to be holding tickets to LAX; they had chosen their spot because it was the only place they could find an outlet to charge their hand-held video game console.
Of the half-dozen homeless who agreed to follow up with social care on Wednesday, it is possible that none will check into Broadway's temporary accommodation, Motunde says. Many of Heathrow's homeless will likely stay at the airport until they are arrested, or become ill. Until then, they will drift for nights on end in an otherworldly limbo of gleaming corridors, somnambulant passengers, and nonsensical advertisements for a life beyond their reach: The Linde Group: Those who split the air reshape the world. Solger Vitamins: Next Stop, Good Health!Somehow not encouraged by analogies likening it to an expensive misfire in need of constant costly repair and ultimately of interest to only a select group of nerds, Netflix has officially passed on picking up Terra Nova, ending two weeks of negotiations and suppressed “extinction” jokes. Deadline reports that 20th Century Fox TV has yet to officially give up on the dinosaurs-and-daddy-issues drama, keeping the actors preserved in the amber of their contracts while continuing to search for a means to revive it and save Terra Nova from inevitable fossilization, with this sentence officially boasting more dinosaur-related things than the actual show. But with three of its stars already signed on to new pilots, plus the necessity of maintaining all those expensive sets and giant wooden dinosaur-blocking fences, that seems unlikely. You can probably go ahead and make those “extinction” jokes now.
AdvertisementThe San Diego Chargers fired the proverbial starter's pistol to ignite the sweepstakes to land receiver Vincent Jackson on Monday when they decided against making him one of the record 21 players to receive the franchise designation by the league's 3 p.m. deadline.
Vincent Jackson caught seven passes for 165 yards against the Bears in their game last season. Dennis Wierzbicki/US PRESSWIRE
Believed to be one of the teams expected to make a run at Jackson, the Chicago Bears certainly aren't complaining. But they'd better be preparing their best offer for Jackson because there's sure to be competition for his services from a variety of clubs, including the Chargers, which continue to negotiate with representatives for the receiver on a long-term contract.
By standing idle as the franchise-tag deadline passed, the Chargers opened the door for Jackson to negotiate and sign with another team when free agency begins on March 13 (many times, deals are consummated before the official start of free agency). Jackson wants to remain in San Diego, and it's believed he'll accept a lesser deal to stay with the club. But it became virtually impossible for the Chargers to franchise Jackson under the new CBA regulations.
Jackson earned $11.4 million as the Chargers' franchise player in 2011. To retain Jackson again in that capacity in 2012, San Diego would have been required to pay the receiver 120 percent of his '11 salary, which all would count against the team's salary cap for the upcoming season.
"We discussed it again this morning, and nothing changed. We did not like the franchise number ($13.7 million), never did," Chargers general manager A.J. Smith said in a statement. "Vincent will enter the market, and we will see what happens. We would like to have him continue on with us, but other teams now will enter the picture."
Two NFC North teams -- the Bears and Minnesota Vikings -- are expected to vie for Jackson, along with a host of other clubs including Carolina, San Francisco, Tampa Bay and Washington. The Vikings actually attempted to land Jackson in 2010 through a trade, and it's likely their interest in the receiver hasn't cooled; especially given its situation at quarterback with inexperienced Christian Ponder, who needs more weapons.
Jackson finished last season with 60 catches for 1,106 yards and nine touchdowns, including a seven-catch, 165-yard outing against the Bears on Nov. 20. At the Senior Bowl, a source close to Jackson -- pessimistic about his prospects for remaining in San Diego -- said the receiver hoped the Bears would express interest in free agency.
The question now seems to be what it would take for a team financially to acquire Jackson. Several agents for receivers around the league believe Jackson's reps -- who couldn't be reached for comment -- are seeking upwards of $13 million per year. Those same agents don't expect the market for Jackson to bear more than $12 to $12.5 million per year, although one cautioned that "all it takes is one team."
New Bears general manager Phil Emery was believed to be interested in Kansas City's Dwayne Bowe -- in part, because of their history together -- but the Chiefs took him off the market Monday by designating him their franchise player. Two other receivers -- New England's Wes Welker and Buffalo's Steve Johnson -- came off the market earlier in the day. The Patriots tagged Welker as their franchise player, and the Bills signed Johnson to a five-year extension.
So while the market at receiver thinned out somewhat on Monday, the biggest target -- Jackson -- remains a possibility for the Bears. The club hasn't stated its intentions publicly, but multiple sources believe the Bears plan to make a legitimate run at the receiver.
Should they fail to land Jackson, several competent options at receiver are expected to be on the market next week, including New Orleans' Marques Colston and Robert Meachem, Dallas' Laurent Robinson, Washington's Donte' Stallworth and Reggie Wayne and Indianapolis' Pierre Garcon.SCIENCE FILE X-rays? From Scotch tape?
UCLA researchers' surprising finding could lead to applications in medicine, other fields.
The phenomenon is known as triboluminescence and is similar to what causes sparks of light to be emitted when one bites on wintergreen-flavored LifeSavers in the dark. The process is not entirely understood but may involve, in part, a separation of charges during the rubbing of two materials together or the separation of the tape.
Although the researchers suspected that the process might produce X-rays, they were astounded by their intensity and duration, said Seth Putterman, a UCLA physicist and lead author of the study. "We're marveling at Mother Nature."
The discovery could eventually lead to, among other things, compact X-ray sources that could be used for treating cancer, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature.
In an unexpected finding that could have applications in medicine and elsewhere, UCLA researchers have found that unspooling a simple roll of Scotch tape produces X-rays -- enough to produce clear images of their fingers.
When the charges reunite, light -- and X-rays -- can be produced, just like in a lightning strike.
To study the phenomenon, Putterman's students Carlos G. Camara, Juan V. Escobar and Jonathan R. Hird constructed a device that would unspool the tape at a steady rate of about 1.3 inches per second.
When they placed it in a vacuum and turned it on, they measured emitted light and X-rays.
What was surprising was that the X-rays were not produced continuously, but were emitted in nanosecond bursts containing about 1 million X-ray photons apiece, the equivalent of about a tenth of a milliwatt of energy. That was enough energy to produce an X-ray image in a second, compared with about a third of a second required for a dental X-ray, Putterman said.
"We're getting flashes," he said. "How do you concentrate the energy? How does it come out as flashes? The mathematical equations are going to be very interesting."
The team's next effort will be to try to build an X-ray generator that brings two pieces of tape together and separates them at, say, 1,000 times per second with a piezoelectric device. "We would have a new, controllable source of radiation, and have to look at the possibility it could be miniaturized," he said.
Putterman also envisions nuclear fusion. If the constituents of the adhesive were deuterated -- hydrogen atoms replaced with deuterium -- it might yield fusion neutrons, although there would be no net energy increase.
He noted that there is no danger in using Scotch tape. Without a vacuum, air molecules intercept the X-rays, rendering them harmless.
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thomas.maugh@latimes.comFifteen minutes.
That’s all it takes for children and people without IDs to buy illegal weapons on Facebook pages dedicated to the sale and celebration of guns.
A VentureBeat investigation has uncovered dozens of pages on Facebook where guns are for sale, including semi-automatic weapons, handguns, and silencers. While the transactions don’t actually happen on Facebook, the social network is a remarkably easy way to find shady people willing to sell you a weapon — no questions asked. The illegal transactions then take place in diners, dark parking lots, and isolated country roads — away from the prying eyes of the feds and local police.
In Kentucky, Greenup County Sheriff Keith Cooper remembers when a call came into dispatch last October saying a 15-year-old student had been arrested on the Greenup County High School campus for carrying an unlicensed and loaded 9mm handgun to school. The boy was arrested and brought to Cooper’s office for an interview.
When Cooper, a former Kentucky State Trooper with a heavy Southern drawl, asked the kid where he got the gun, his reply was shocking: Facebook.
As it turns out, the 15 year old’s purchase wasn’t an anomaly. Facebook pages have been a thriving market for facilitating gun purchases.
Even in their names, the Facebook fan pages make no attempt to hide what their real purposes are: Firearms Only Alamogordo, Guns for Sale, I Love Guns, and even Guns, Ammo & Blades.
Image Credit: J. O'Dell / VentureBeat
The pages have hundreds of thousands of “likes” and members. While many of the sales are no doubt legitimate — federal law governing gun transactions between individuals are fairly lax — hooking up with illicit buyers and sellers via these pages is easy. For instance, you can buy automatic weapons without a permit, guns with their serial numbers filed off, and weapons that may be prohibited by your state’s laws. If you’re under 18, you can buy a handgun, which federal law prohibits.
On Tuesday, a VentureBeat reporter and his colleague spent less than 15 minutes arranging to buy a semiautomatic 7mm rifle and 90 rounds of ammunition from a guy named “Dave,” a member of Facebook “Firearms Only Alamogordo” fan page (left).
VentureBeat made contact through the fan page, and in the ensuing SMS chat, Dave expressed an eagerness to do the deal. The gun was in good condition, he explained.
When a VentureBeat reporter asked Dave if they needed to bring identification to complete the sale, his response was an immediate “no.”
Emerging threats
Numerous interviews with federal law enforcement authorities, city police agencies, and anti-gun advocacy groups show how they view Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms with growing alarm as highly effective and unregulated online arms bazaars where people who shouldn’t be owning — or selling — guns can find a seemingly endless pool of eager customers with no questions asked.
“We look at Facebook and others as emerging threats for unlawful gun transactions in the United States,” a federal law enforcement officer told VentureBeat.
And as the VentureBeat investigation revealed, some of these guns being purchased through Facebook fan pages are ending up on the playgrounds of American schools.
Special Agent Helen Dunkel, with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, called the illegal purchases a fact. Dunkel said, “We are certainly aware social media is being used to sell firearms, and in instances we receive information, whether through confidential informants or other means, we definitely take that seriously and investigate.”
Dunkel said the ATF, which investigates the unlawful use and possession of guns and explosives in the U.S., has multiple ongoing investigations into illegal gun transactions on social media platforms. Citing the ongoing nature of the cases, she declined to specify them. The investigations are being coordinated through the ATF’s office of strategic intelligence in Washington D.C.
ATF spokewoman Ginger Colbrun put it this way:
“We definitely see it occurring, and when we do, we open investigations. [Social media] is a new avenue we’re looking into. We’re definitely taking it seriously.”
A spokesman at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., declined to comment for this story, referring all questions to the ATF.
Facebook responds
For its part, Facebook prohibits the sale or trade of guns, weapons, and explosives through the site and company spokespeople routinely remind reporters that they work with law enforcement on a case by case basis. A spokesperson said that any time user policy violations occur, they are dealt with. Facebook also likes to remind people that it’s not an e-commerce platform.
Nor is Facebook alone in being used for illegal activity. Sites like Craigslist have also been used in the past to sell weapons, drugs, and sex-for-hire schemes. (Craigslist has responded by banning such content, and by actively enforcing those bans.)
“You can’t buy things on Instagram and Facebook, nor can you promote the sale or use of weapons in advertising,” a Facebook spokesperson told us. “We encourage people who come across any illegal activity to report it to us.”
Oddly, buying and selling firearms on Facebook’s platform has been going on right under Facebook’s nose for far too long to go unnoticed.
In the October 2013 Kentucky case, the boy met the gun seller through a Facebook fan page called Portsmouth Pickers, a page where locals share information on the best fishing holes on the nearby Ohio River, recipes and even trading guns.
Cooper then arrested the seller, a man who drove across the river to sell the gun to the young teen. Because the seller drove across state lines, sold the weapon to a minor and violated federal gun laws, the case was eventually turned over to the feds who indicted him.
As the case unfolded, investigators subpoenaed the kid’s and seller’s IP logs. They were able to clearly read the Facebook chat logs which led to the illegal sale. During the investigation, Cooper learned something else: The seller had been moving illegal handguns through Facebook channels before.
“Our investigation showed more than just the one 9mm,” the friendly Cooper said during a series of phone interviews.
“In fact, the suspect admitted to me that he was using Facebook to sell weapons. He met this kid, who we determined didn’t bring the gun to school to hurt anybody, through Facebook, and they made the arrangements through the site.”
The sheriff said buying unlicensed guns on Facebook is a good way to do it: no paper trail, no registration. Nothing more than cash and a handshake.
“That’s how I would do it,” the sheriff said of the illegal Facebook gun buy. “If this thing were to show up at a murder scene, it would be near impossible to trace.”
Quite a few offers
The Facebook page “Firearms Only Alamogordo” is a happening place. Members continually post videos of combat shotguns of the kinds Marines used to clear trench lines in World War I, Chinese-made semiautomatic AK-47 assault rifles with 30 round banana clips, and Ruger 9mms. The page is moderated by someone who identifies himself an active member of the U.S. Air Force.
The page has a prominent policy prohibiting the sale of guns to minors.
Image Credit: Facebook
On a recent thread (right), a flame war erupted between a man who met up with someone he thought was an adult, for the purchase of a rifle. When he showed up, he was met by a minor who opened the door to the trunk of his car to reveal a small arsenal of weapons. When the prospective buyer asked the seller where his father was, the kid said he was sick.
Another recent thread, started by a junior high school student, asked members there if anybody would trade him a gun for his 30 gallon freshwater fish tank.
There were quite a few offers.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based social media giant has been under fire by an activist group of concerned mothers called Moms Demand Action and the powerful Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a powerful advocacy group co-founded by billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The two groups are demanding that Facebook and Instagram “get out of the gun business.”
A petition on Change.org to prohibit gun sales on Facebook and Instagram has over 75,000 signatures, and was recommended by Sarah Silverman earlier today.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg’s group, with 1,100 U.S. mayors aboard and over a million supporters, threw down the gauntlet.
“Anybody can go to Facebook and Instagram and buy a gun online. We’re asking them to review their policies. They facilitate the sale of guns in the U.S., said Erika Soto Lamb, a spokeswoman for Mayors Against Illegal Guns. They also launched a petition to get Facebook to the negotiating table.
The petition, in part, reads:
Facebook and Instagram are currently being used to facilitate sales and trades of firearms between private sellers. Most of these sales and trades can take place without background checks, meaning that there’s no way to stop a Facebook or Instagram user from potentially selling a gun to a felon, a domestic abuser or another dangerous person who would otherwise be prohibited from obtaining a gun. I think of Facebook and Instagram as places to share photos of my kids & family — not as an online market for guns.
It seems to have worked. Facebook and the advocacy groups are currently in discussions about what they can do to curb illegal gun sales through the Facebook platform.
We’ve not yet heard whether the social network is changing its fundamental policies or how they’re enforced.
But if it does, and it succeeds in shutting down social media gun sales, it will make a lot of people in law enforcement very relieved.
Updated Feb. 27 at 12:20pm Pacific: We removed the word “felons” from the introduction to this story, since we report no evidence of felons purchasing guns via Facebook.In 1917, Bolsheviks under Lenin seized control of Russia in the famous October revolution, ending a short-lived experiment with constitutional democracy and replacing it with a one-Party socialist state. As the revolution swirled through the streets of St. Petersberg, a girl of 12 watched many of the events from the balcony of her family’s house. That girl was Alyssa Rosenbaum, who ultimately left Russia for America and became the writer we know as Ayn Rand.
Atlas Shrugged is a revolutionary work, but the revolution it represents is diametrically opposed to the one she lived through as a youth. In the eight years before she left the Soviet Union in 1925, Rand lived through the economic chaos and desperate poverty it caused, as the communists nationalized businesses and expropriated private wealth. Her father was a pharmacist, and Rand was in the shop when soldiers arrived to close the business and seize the property, depriving the family of work, property, and income. In the years before she left, she lived through the tyranny of statism, as the communists used every means to expand their power—including secret police, terror tactics, and executing enemies or shipping them to Siberia. Under the new communist regime, more and more of private life was politicized, including speech, ideas, and education.
Rand was appalled by this system. She was appalled not merely by its visible effects on herself and the people she knew. She was appalled by the underlying ideology of communism, especially the ideas of moral collectivism that made communism possible and were used to justify it as a noble ideal. Even as a child, she knew there was something horribly wrong in the idea of sacrificing the individual to the collective, breaking eggs to make an omelet.
Her first published novel, We the Living, offers a portrait of Russia in those years and of the crushing effects of communism on people of ability, ambition, and independent spirit. But Atlas is her fullest and deepest portrayal of the issues involved. It goes far beyond the specifics of any particular type of system—communist, fascist, communitarian, whatever—to deal with the essence of collectivism |
of these antibacterial clays is a fairly new field.
Dr. Lynda Williams was Morrison’s PhD supervisor and one of the first people to apply the rigours of scientific testing to antibacterial clays. In a 2008 paper, Williams and her team tested the antibacterial activities of two types of French green clay against a diverse group of bacterial pathogens. Despite the fact that both clay minerals had been used to treat Buruli ulcers, a flesh eating disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium ulcerans, only one type of clay was able to kill bacteria in the lab. “Lynda’s lab was the only lab out there doing anything like this,” says Morrison. “I saw it and immediately knew that’s what I wanted to work on.”
Their study of the French green clays prompted them to look for other deposits of antibacterial clays. In the clay deposits near Crater Lake in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, they struck pay dirt. In a 2014 paper, Morrison and Williams showed that the blue clays in the deposit, which is an estimated 20 to 30 million years old, effectively killed cultures of Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus epidermidis. Further testing showed that the clays were also 100% effective in killing other human pathogens including antibiotic resistant bacteria like methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
Building on that paper, the researchers next asked how the clays were killing the bacteria. “We knew that [the clays] were releasing iron and aluminum [and] we knew the cells were taking up some of the iron,” says Morrison. “Our objective was to try and figure out a more mechanistic understanding of how the bacteria are being killed.”
Once released, iron and aluminum stick to and damage the bacteria’s outer layer, a protective coating made of fats and proteins, causing the proteins to misfold into improper shapes. “The cell has to really respond to that [damage] and breakdown those these misfolded proteins and remove them from the cell wall so the cell can function properly,” says Morrison. “As this is happening, you have only [iron] entering the cell.”
Iron is an essential nutrient for bacteria and one that they are constantly scavenging from their environment. But iron can also react with hydrogen peroxide to generate what are known as hydroxyl radicals. These compounds are similar to reactive oxygen species in that they can damage just about anything inside a cell—proteins, DNA and fats. “The cells get greedy and take up as much iron as they can if it is available,” says Morrison. As they become overloaded with iron, more hydroxyl radicals are produced leading to extensive DNA and protein damage.
Morrison believes that it is this dual assault on the bacteria’s outer coating and internal machinery that ultimately leads to cell death. “You kind of have multiple cellular processes just being bombarded all at once,” he says. An attack of this magnitude is likely to overwhelm the cell’s antioxidant defense mechanisms, leaving the bacteria unable to cope with the stress.
Such a strategy also sets antibacterial clays apart from traditional antibiotics on the market, which usually target a single cellular process—for example, DNA replication or cell wall construction. This difference could mean a lower likelihood of bacteria becoming resistant to antibacterial clays. “We would argue that it would be much more challenging for them to establish resistance…because we’re damaging multiple cellular systems,’” says Morrison. “It’s just too many variables for [the bacteria] to overcome on a short timescale.”
While iron and aluminum seem to be the key components in these clays, other properties are contribute to its long-lasting antibacterial effects. When the researchers tested a solution of just iron and aluminum dissolved in the same concentrations as was released from the clay, they did not see the same sustained killing as the original clay compounds. Further, the two metals were synergistic—the combined effect of iron and aluminum was greater than that of either metal alone.
Despite their promising results, Morrison is quick to point out antibacterial clays are still far from reaching the clinic. Thus far, the researchers have only completed in-depth studies of the French green clays and Oregon blue clays but they believe that similar antibacterial clay deposits are common and widespread around the world. A key question that remains is whether all antibacterial clays work in the same way. Figuring out how different types of clays work will provide valuable information that can guide the design of antibacterial mineral mixtures.
Reference: Morrison KD, Misra R, & Williams LB (2016). Unearthing the Antibacterial Mechanism of Medicinal Clay: A Geochemical Approach to Combating Antibiotic Resistance. Scientific reports, 6 PMID: 26743034
AdvertisementsHundreds of thousands of Catalans will take to the streets on Thursday, the National Day of Catalonia, to demand the right to hold a referendum on their future, with some hoping that the sudden surge in support for Scottish independence might boost their cause.
The demonstration will take the form of a huge "v" in the north of Barcelona, where two major thoroughfares converge. The v stands for via, vote and voluntat (will), though implicitly for victory, too. While victory may not be at hand, the separatists are gaining in confidence as their ranks continue to grow, helped by the obduracy of the Madrid government, which refuses to discuss the issue.
The Catalan government has called a referendum on independence for the region of 7 million people on 9 November. Madrid said the vote will be illegal.
Retired teacher Oriol Canals said: "The government treats the referendum as illegal and unconstitutional. It has subjected the independence movement to every kind of pressure, coercion and threats. As a result, the movement has grown by 20% in the past four years." Support for independence now stands at between 40-45%.
11 September marks the 300th anniversary of their loss of independence. Many eyes are now on Scotland and there is much talk about how the outcome of the referendum will influence the course of events here.
"There are many similarities, such as the uncertainties about the economy, the currency or whether we will belong to the European Union or Nato," said Larry Magrinyà, a Catalan who is married to a Scot. "On the other hand, Scotland enjoys greater recognition as a nation and it has, for example, its own football and rugby teams."
Magrinyà said that, while a yes vote would put wind in the separatists' sails, it would very likely make the Spanish government even more determined to prevent a similar outcome in Catalonia.
"The fact that the British government is allowing the referendum to go ahead shows that it is far more democratic than Spain," said Mar Carrera, a communications specialist. "An key difference with Scotland is here the independence movement is capitalising more effectively on social and cultural discontent.
"It's important to bear in mind that the Catalan independence movement is heterogeneous, ranging from members of the rightwing governing party to the far left."
The emergence of the pro-independence movement as a significant force took the political mainstream by surprise when close to 2 million people marched in Barcelona on this same date in 2012. It was grassroots pressure that forced the lukewarm nationalists who govern the country to call a referendum on 9 November on the right to decide.
"The main difference I see between the two is that the Catalan movement has been driven by social mobilisations, demonstrations and so on, often without the participation of political parties, which have tagged along later," said freelance photographer Joan Alvado. "From here it looks like there was much less activity in the street in Scotland and that Salmond's SNP has been the driving force."
Alvado said the impact of a yes vote in Scotland will depend on whether an independent Scotland is recognised by the international community. "If that happens, many Catalans will cease to be afraid of the possible consequences and reprisals that independence might bring."
It is by no means clear whether the vote will go ahead on 9 November. The Catalan president, Artur Mas, is a Christian democrat and loath to do anything illegal. At the same time, his party is in disarray after its totemic founder Jordi Pujol, who ruled Catalonia for 23 years, has confessed to a lifetime of large-scale tax evasion in an effort to keep two of his sons, who face corruption charges, out of jail.
Polls show Mas trailing the pro-independence Esquerra Republicana whose leader, Oriol Junqueras, has called for civil disobedience should Madrid try to block the referendum. He has not spelled out what he means by that but, in the absence of any dialogue between Barcelona and Madrid, there is a fear that things could turn nasty.Kazakhstan Eyes Prestige in Afghanistan’s Uncertain Future
Fueled by the fear of religious extremism and drug trafficking spreading due to the drawdown of NATO forces and enticed by potential trade with the Indian subcontinent, the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan aims to punch above its weight and engage more with its unstable neighbor to the south — Afghanistan.
The 13 year U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan has already transformed the political map in Central Asia, allowing the region’s small, isolated countries to leverage their position along NATO’s Northern Distribution Network to cement bilateral ties with the United States, the EU, Russia, and China. Now, with rising fears over Afghanistan’s deteriorating security situation — and spillover across the northern border — Kazakhstan is hoping that by integrating itself into Afghanistan’s economy and security, it can raise its standing on the international stage and contain that country’s instability.
“Afghanistan could have been a completely different country than it is today and hopefully Kazakhstan can help change its story,” Erlan Idrissov, Kazakhstan’s minister of foreign affairs, told Foreign Policy in an exclusive interview. Kazakhstan’s leadership is hoping that the return of a vital trade hub between Central and South Asia via Afghanistan can spark trade and investment in the typically dysfunctional region. One way that the former Soviet country is aiming to do this is through the U.S.- led New Silk Road — an initiative meant to integrate the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan with Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan by liberalizing trade and building infrastructure.
The New Silk Road has already had its fair share of hiccups since the 2011 rollout but the possibility of accessing South Asia’s 1.6 billion consumers is too much for Kazakhstan to pass up. “For us in Kazakhstan, Afghanistan provides a direct route to a huge market and as a landlocked country, it is our closest way to international shipping waters,” Idrissov explained. Kazakhstan has already allocated $2.38 million for social services projects in Afghanistan, sent more than $17 million worth of emergency food assistance, and launched a $50 million project to train Afghan students at Kazakh universities.
But the government’s biggest play is in spearheading a massive railway network to transport manufactured products and natural resources from Central Asia to South Asia. A major opportunity for Kazakhstan, which has the world’s 11th-largest oil reserves, 14th-largest natural gas reserves, and is the globe’s top Uranium producer. It is this massive resource wealth that has allowed Kazakhstan to emerge as Central Asia’s largest economy.
Yet, with Afghanistan’s security situation perilously in flux, massive infrastructure projects still seem far off. “We no longer want Afghanistan to be unproductive, but in order to do so, we must eliminate the threats that are blocking trade to the south,” said Idrissov. In particular, the regime in Kazakhstan’s capital of Astana is concerned about how increased drug trafficking and religious extremism could derail the government’s plans to become an economic force in the region — causing it to lose out on both riches and prestige.
Afghanistan produces approximately 90 percent of the world’s opium and 2014 saw the highest level of poppy cultivation on record, according the the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries find themselves as transit hubs on the road north to Russia, the world’s largest individual market for Afghan opiates. According to the UNODC, approximately 20 percent of Afghan opium passes north through Central Asia before reaching Russia, leaving a trail of corruption in the process. Kazakhstan has fared better than its neighbors along Central Asia’s heroin highway in stemming the tide of corruption and has even moved to host the region’s UNODC-funded counternarcotics office, the Central Asian Regional Information and Coordination Office. But Kazakhstan’s border with Russia — the second-largest land border in the world — still sees plenty of drugs pass through it and cooperation between Central Asian countries remains low as corrupt officials engage in most of the region’s trafficking.
Tajikistan, which directly borders Afghanistan, offers a clear example of the scale of such corruption. Between 2004 and 2009, heroin seizures in the country fell dramatically — from 10,569 pounds to 2,496 pounds — at a time when drug trafficking in Central Asia majorly spiked. In Kyrgyzstan, another transit country in the opium trade, official complicity is endemic. According to a former senior official from Kyrgyzstan’s Drug Control Agency who spoke to FP, at least half of the agency’s staff was either involved in directly trafficking drugs or providing information to traffickers. The country’s police force is also considered a top drug trafficker. “Since 2010, the role of police in the drug trade has grown greater than many organized crime groups,” Kairat Osmonaliev, an organized crime expert in Kyrgyzstan, told FP. “With large scale official involvement, Central Asia’s drug trade isn’t going away anytime soon.”
The rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State and gains made by the Taliban have also turned heads in Kazakhstan and the region. In late November, a video released by the Islamic State, which has since been removed, showed Kazakh children attending school and participating in military training in Syria. “This is a major culture shock. We thought that Kazakhstan has become immune to these types of things,” Idrissov said.
Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee estimates that 300 Kazakh citizens have traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State. Hundreds have also left their homes in neighboring Uzbekistan, where President Islam Karimov raised alarm bells and urged Russia to increase its regional presence to help combat the threat of militant Islam. “Various elements among the representatives of the Islamic State are already slipping into Afghanistan from Iraq and Syria. All this requires the adoption of appropriate preventative measures,” Karimov said last week in Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital.
“Alarmist rhetoric coming from Central Asian capitals has always been designed to ensure cooperation with big players like the United States, Russia, and China,” Luca Anceschi, a Central Asia expert at the University of Glasgow, told FP. “Hyping threats is a good way to increase visibility on the international scene and legitimize the government at home.”
With natural resource wealth at its back and a well-balanced diplomacy at its front, Kazakhstan believes its ready to take up a larger role in Afghanistan. But in looking for prestige, Astana’s eyes could be bigger than its stomach.
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty ImagesAn Introduction To Bitcoin Lending
Marcopolobot Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 31, 2017
We’ve all heard the stories of those that got into bitcoin at an early stage and now live millionaire lives. Many try to follow in their footsteps and hold a basket of cryptocurrencies with high hopes.
In the physical world, real estate is bought by investors who speculate on value appreciation. Many of these investors also rent it out to generate some rental income. What many don’t know is that in the world of bitcoin, it’s also possible to generate some ‘rental income’.
In this article I’m going to explain what bitcoin lending is, why you should and shouldn’t do it, how it operates and how you can get started. This article focuses on lending on exchanges (margin lending), so not the much riskier peer-to-peer lending for e.g. start-up financing.
What is margin lending?
Margin lending is the process of loaning out bitcoins to margin traders on exchanges. Margin traders are people who wish to increase their exposure by speculating with borrowed funds so they can potentially earn or lose more.
Margin traders are also the ones who pay interest. When the loan ends, the principal and interest are returned to the lender.
Why should(n’t) you do it?
Lending out your funds can be very attractive if you want to generate a bit of extra return on your funds. Interest rates vary and can be found here. For bitcoin, the average interest rate has been averaging at around 8% annually for the past three months. US Dollars fare a bit better with ~22% interest annually (0.06% daily) on average for the past three months. Interest rates however always fluctuate and should be checked before loaning out your funds.
Average daily dollar lending rate
Risks
There are some risks involved with lending. The main risks are associated with having your funds on an exchange. In the past it has occurred that exchanges were hacked and people have lost funds. Another risk is that the collateral of the borrower does not prove sufficient in the event of a flash crash. Up until now it hasn’t occurred yet that lenders didn’t get their loans back, however that does not provide a guarantee for the future.
Of course, make sure you understand what the risks are before you decide if the returns weigh up against the risk for your personal situation. Read more about the risks here.
How to get started?
1: Requirements
If you want to lend out bitcoins, this is what you need:
An account at Bitfinex or Poloniex. Funds in your lending wallet on Bitfinex or Poloniex. Optional: API Keys to automate the lending process.
If you don’t have an account at an exchange yet, you can create an account at Bitfinex or Poloniex. At Poloniex you also need to go through a verification process which takes several minutes. After depositing funds, you can start earning interest by loaning out your funds on the exchange. Another exchange that offers peer-to-peer margin lending is Quoine.
2: The lending process (Bitfinex)
This tutorial covers Bitfinex
If you want to loan out your funds, you can do it in three ways which I’ll briefly cover.
Manually With the “auto-renew” function from the exchange With a lending bot
Manually
You can offer the loans at the exchange by creating new loan offers in the funding (Bitfinex) or lending (Poloniex) page. After you have created a new loan offer, your funds will be loaned out if someone decides to borrow your funds for the interest rate that you specified. Doing it manually is easy, however it has some serious drawbacks because you (1) need to renew loans all the time and because (2) you need to determine an optimal interest rate. If the interest rate goes up after you have placed your loan, you could have potentially made more.
Auto-Renew
The first drawback of lending manually can be solved by toggling “Auto-renew” on a loan. This causes the funds to be offered again when the loan is returned. The same interest rate is used however for each recurring loan, which can cause your funds to sit idle for a long time, or to underperform badly because they could have been loaned out for a much higher interest rate.
You can click on “Renew funding” here (Bitfinex).
Lending bot
To solve the last problem you can use a lending bot. Lending bots offer loans immediately after they are returned and determine an optimal interest rate based on different types of algorithms.
If you want to make use of a lending bot you’ll need to “plug-in” the lending bot to your account at the exchange. This can be done by providing a pair of API keys to the lending bot which is essentially like a username and password but then for a robot. These keys can be generated on the exchange via account settings. You can decide which capabilities the API keys have. It would be advisable to disable trading and withdrawing access on the API keys so the bot only has the capabilities you want it to have.
Dollar lending is also possible on Bitfinex.
Algorithms
Different types of lending algorithms exist. Some bots decide to always offer loans X amount of currency deep in the order book, frequently adjusted to the market activity that is applicable in that lending market. Other bots have algorithms where they place microloans in different depths in the order book. If one of them gets hit they can “sense” that the market has eaten their order. This information can then be used to measure market activity.
Other algorithms make use of statistical analysis and historical loan information to calculate the expected value of a loan. Our algorithm bases its prediction on average loan holding time, recent lending volumes and the current volume of the order book. This way it can be calculated which interest rate is likely to yield highest given an expected duration of the loan and the waiting time (before the loan offer gets hit).
Conclusion
If you would like to generate some extra return and think that the interest rate offered weighs up against the risk, you may want to consider lending. Its advantages are high liquidity and (at times) an attractive interest rate. After you’ve set up the lending process, all goes automatically and you can earn some passive income.
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice and should therefore not be seen as such. Don’t lend out more than you can afford to lose. You may lose some or all of your funds. This article is meant to be purely informational. The writer of this article is affiliated with Marcopolobot.tl;dr: EFS is NFS. Networked file systems have inherent tradeoffs over local filesystem access—EFS doesn't change that. Don't expect the moon, benchmark and monitor it, and you'll do fine.
On a recent project, I needed to have a shared network file system that was available to all servers, and able to scale horizontally to anywhere between 1 and 100 servers. It needed low-latency file access, and also needed to be able to handle small file writes and file locks synchronously with as little latency as possible.
Amazon EFS, which uses NFS v4.1, checks all of those checkboxes (at least, to a certain extent), and if you're already building infrastructure inside AWS, EFS is a very cost-effective way to manage a scalable NFS filesystem. I'm not going to go too much into the technical details of EFS or NFS v4.1, but I would like to highlight some of the painful lessons my team has learned implementing EFS for a fairly hefty CMS-based project.
Monitor EFS Burst Credits
I'm pretty sure this is one of the most mentioned suggestions in every guide to using EFS I've seen. And it's par for the course with AWS offerings—you can usually start out using the free/cheap tier of a service, but once you start putting production loads on the service, you'll have your first major outage with no discernible cause.
That is, if you're not monitoring burst credits.
My team spent over an hour trying to diagnose why MySQL connections were stacking up, application threads were clogged, and extremely few requests were getting responses. Finally, we noticed that file operations were really slow. Really really slow. And then I remembered I had built a dashboard in our monitoring system for EFS, so I looked there, found that our Burst Credits were expired, and our Permitted Throughput went from 50 Mbps to 0.5 Mbps. And this was in the middle of a full EFS backup (more on that later!).
So, make sure you add alerts in CloudWatch or elsewhere on your BurstCreditBalance. If it starts going down, make sure it doesn't keep going down. And if you need more burst credits, or a higher normal throughput limit, see the next section:
Write dummy data to get better performance
For most AWS services (well, at least all the ones predicated on instances and/or clusters), you can always upsize your instances, or change from network-optimized to CPU-optimized, or RAM-optimized, or GPU-optimized.
For EFS, there is no 'instance class'. The only real control you have over what kind of I/O limits you have is switching between 'general performance' (good for low latency, high horizontal scalability), or'max IO' (good for larger volumes of data transfer, but with slightly higher latency).
When you create a new EFS volume, you get a paltry.5 MB/s sustained transfer rate, and 7.2 minutes worth of burst credits (up to 100 MB/s). How do you increase these limits? You write a giant file to the filesystem, and EFS takes up to an hour to increase your limits, according to this chart (taken from the EFS Performance page):
Lesson learned: Immediately after creating a new EFS volume, mount it somewhere, and write a large file to it (or many smaller files if you want to delete some of this 'dummy data' as your data usage expands):
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=test_large_file bs=1024k count=256000 status=progress
Be sure to exclude such files from any backups you take, otherwise you'll be paying for more backup space, as well as all that extra transfer bandwidth to back up the large file that gives you the bandwidth in the first place! I've asked AWS about any chance to create volumes and not have to write big files to jump to higher IO stats (after all, you don't start on a t2.micro instance when you sign up for a beefy c5.4xlarge in EC2!). If you want to pay up front for the performance, it seems odd that AWS won't allow it. I know many people who have been burned by this same problem.
Don't even think about running app code from EFS
I see a lot of people try to use EFS (or NFS in general) as a jerry-rigged deployment mechanism so they can manage a codebase in one directory shared on multiple servers. NFS/EFS, Gluster, ObjectiveFS... all these networked filesystems are not built for low-latency, multi-file access. If you're running a PHP or Ruby application with hundreds or thousands of small files that need to be read from disk (even if using opcache), you're going to have a very bad time. Same goes for using Git on EFS/NFS—almost always a bad idea.
Instead, use a tool like Ansible to deploy your code to a local filesystem on each server (hey, I wrote a book on that!); or build a 12-factor app and use disposable servers or containers to deploy your application code. Whatever the case, run code from a local, fast filesystem. Even a slow spinning-disk local filesystem will be a lot faster than a file system accessed over the network (see Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know).
Use NFS/EFS for storage of things like media assets, exported data files, and asynchronous logs that don't require extremely low-latency to work well. You don't ever want EFS to be in the critical path of your application's code.
Use multiple EFS volumes for latency-sensitive directories
If you do have to have a shared volume store latency-sensitive components of your application (e.g. lock files used by flock ), and there is other data (e.g. media files or logs) being read from and written to your EFS volume, consider adding a second EFS volume used only for the latency-sensitive operations. This still won't make things fly like using the local disk, but you'll have more consistent latency at least. (Note that I'm currently doing some testing in this area—I'll update this post if I find any other helpful improvements for this use case.)
Use the correct mount options
AWS recommends the use of certain NFS mount options when setting up EFS mounts in Linux. Unless you have very specific needs, and have tested and thoroughly benchmarked any other options or changes to the recommended options, use AWS' recommendations.
They likely tweak their NFS backends and networks for the specific rsize and wsize they specify.
Also, use NFS v4.1 if at all possible. It might be difficult to get an NFS 4.1 client installed on some older OSes, and in that case you can consider sticking with something older—but if not, use the latest and greatest; there are a lot of protocol improvements.
Careful with backups
EFS backups are one of the most annoying pain points of using EFS. For many AWS products, like Aurora, there is a dead-simple, easy-to-configure, and inexpensive snapshot process that allows easy backup and restore. With EFS... you're pretty much on your own.
And if you're like me, and you design a backup process that basically copies all X GB of files on EFS to a new server each backup—and you don't rate-limit the server's file copy—then you realize your backup just depleted your EFS burst credits, and now production is offline while EFS scrapes along at 0.5 MB/s 🤬.
Summary
I've used Gluster, NFS, EFS, and a few other shared filesystems for various projects. All have their tradeoffs, and all will, by the nature of being accessed over a network interface, be at least an order of magnitude slower than accessing files on a local (or in AWS, EBS) volume. The best thing to do when needing horizontal scalability is write your applications to not be dependent on low-ms-level file operation latency, and move things like lock mechanisms to a different layer, e.g. Redis or database.3x3x3 Cube First Round Second Round Final 2x2x2 Cube First Round Second Round Final 4x4x4 Cube Combined First Final 5x5x5 Cube Combined Final 3x3x3 One-Handed Combined First Final Pyraminx Combined First Final Skewb Combined First Final Competitors Aidan Chan Alan Ma Alex Chan Alex Chen Ben Chin Ben Fiala Cameron Stollery Charlie Stretton Coen Johnson Daniel Traicos Dene Beardsley Eleanor Shiels Ethan Pride Ethan Yong Kit Soo Feliks Zemdegs Giovanni Contardi Jack Le Jack O'Mahony James Randall Jamie Temouskos Jarrod Tyzack Jarvis H'Jinn Jayden Johnson Jayden McNeill Jeff Plumb Joel Ernest Joshua Evely Joshua Walker Jun Sasagawa (笹川純) Kirt Protacio Lorandt Mozsa Luke Holder Matt Jones Matthew Broome Ming Han Low Ming Jin Low Ming Kim Low Nyny H'Jinn Peter Kiprillis Rhys Campbell Ryan Corr Sam Chaplin Stefan Nikolovski Tim Major Tim McMahon Tommaso Zoffoli Tommy Kiprillis Wilson Cram [refresh] [show]The intake of bioactive compounds and moderate alcohol decreases the risk of cardiovascular diseases. These effects could be joined in a beverage created by a controlled alcoholic fermentation of orange juice. The influence of controlled alcoholic fermentation on the bioactive compound profile of orange juice has not been previously evaluated, and this is the purpose of the present study. Total and individual flavanones and carotenoids significantly increased throughout the fermentation. The reason for this was an enhanced extraction of these compounds from the pulp. Besides, the potential bioavailability of flavanones increased due to a higher content of hesperetin-7-O-glucoside (2-fold higher at the end of the fermentation process). Ascorbic acid did not undergo a significant change, and only total phenolics decreased. Antioxidant capacity was also evaluated. TEAC and FRAP values remained constant throughout the process. However, ORAC and DPPH values significantly increased. Correlation analysis concluded that the increase in ORAC and DPPH values could be due to enhancement of flavanones.New Delhi: Elated at the medal-winning feats of India's poster girls - PV Sindhu and Saina Nehwal - at the just-concluded 2017 World Badminton Championships, BAI interim president Himanta Biswa Sarma said his goal is to create a pool of champion players who will finish on the podium in the 2018 Asian Games and Commonwealth Games.
"We have a great team of able coaches, physios and mental trainers who are constantly working and we are working to create a blueprint for junior and upcoming players," Sarma, a Cabinet minister in the Assam government, told IANS in an interview.
"I'm pretty sure that before the CWG and Asian Games 2018, you will see more and more players finishing on the podium. Our goal is to create a pool of champion players for the next few years and we are working hard to make it possible," he added.
Sindhu clinched the silver after narrowly going down to Japan's Nozomi Okuhara 21-19, 20-22, 22-20 in a gruelling final on Sunday, while Saina had earlier settled for bronze after losing to Okuhara 21-17, 12-21, 10-21 in the women's singles semi-final clash at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow.
"I'm glad that this the first time India had a record-breaking participation at the World Championships and getting two medals from a single World Championship is unprecedented but our players have made it possible. I want to congratulate both Saina and Sindhu on their medal-winning performances and the coaching staff for their efforts," the Badminton Association of India (BAI) chief said.
"The performance of Indian players at the World Championship also says a lot about Indian badminton and our prowess in international platform. I am confident, you will see even more consistent performances at such big stage in the coming times."
Immediately after Sindhu's silver medal feat, Sarma had announced cash awards of Rs 10 lakh for the Rio Olympics silver medallist, and Rs 5 lakh for Saina.
Sarma went on to say that it isn't only about the female shuttlers anymore, as the male singles shuttlers - Kidambi Srikanth, Parupalli Kashyap, HS Prannoy and B Sai Praneeth - have come out of the shadows of Saina and Sindhu and made their mark in various international tournaments.
Srikanth went on to reach the quarter-finals of the Worlds before losing out to top seed Son Wan Ho of South Korea 14-21, 18-21. Kashyap, Prannoy and Praneeth also have been consistently doing well at various Superseries events.
"You have correctly summed up the sentiments. All our players have been performing and winning at the highest level. The growth of our players have been phenomenal and I believe you will see more names and performances at the junior level as well," Sarma said.
While the focus has been on the performances of singles players, Sarma appeared positive despite the repeated failures of the country's doubles players.
For years now, doubles badminton in India has been facing a lack of depth and consistency which proved to be the country's distress at the world stage.
It was in the 2010 CWG when the women's duo of Jwala Gutta and Ashwini Ponnappa clinched the gold medal before staging a phenomenal fightback to reach the semi-final and clinch a podium finish with a bronze at the World Badminton Championships in the following year. A string of good results saw Gutta and Ponnappa make the 2012 Olympics only to miss out on a quarter-final berth by just one point.
Regardless of the result in London, the duo went on to bag several women's doubles titles for India including a silver at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow before parting ways.
"After Jwala (Gutta) and Ashwini (Ponappa), we haven't had an established set of pairs but in the last few months we have seen great spark among the current set of our doubles and mixed doubles players," Sarma said.
A lot have changed since then in Indian badminton, but even now, there is hardly any excitement about the doubles department. A host of shuttlers like Sikki Reddy, Manu Attri, Sumeeth Reddy and Pranaav Jerry Chopra have shown great promise, while newcomers like Satwiksairaj Rankireddy, Chirag Shetty and Shlok Ramachandran have impressed on the junior circuit.
"Our doubles coaches have been closely working with the players and we have seen performances as well as approach to game getting better for each of the players," Sarma said.
"It is a matter of time when they too will start winning, but till that time you will have to give them time. We are very confident that in the new future you will see medals coming even from our doubles players," he added.
He also brushed aside the controversies surrounding national coach Pullela Gopichand, who has been facing the ire of many doubles players for the step-motherly treatment meted out to them.
"I think it's a historic day for Indian badminton and let's not get into controversy and spoil the celebratory mood," he said.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Josh Huff is entering his third season in the NFL. Traditionally, the third season is when things really come together for young receivers.
Receivers such as Odell Beckham Jr. and Amari Cooper have found instant success as rookies. This has fostered the idea that all receivers should be successful right away.
Huff will be in the mix for a starting spot along with Nelson Agholor and Jordan Matthews. He figures to be an option for the Eagles as the X receiver.
Related Philadelphia Eagles head coach Doug Pederson feels the team has lots of talent
Head coach Doug Pederson and offensive coordinator Frank Reich plan to feature a hybrid of some West Coast offense concepts along with the spread offense.
The plan will be to get the ball into their playmaker’s hands quickly and allow them to generate yards after the catch. Huff has already shown that he can make things happen when he has the ball, primarily making his mark as a returner.
As offensive coordinator of the Kansas City Chiefs, Pederson had to find ways to feature players such as Albert Wilson. Wilson is a lot like Huff in stature and ability to make something happen when they get the ball. Both Wilson and Huff are solid in the return game as well.
The Eagles can find ways to replicate punt or kickoff return type situations within their offense. Here is an example of how Pederson used motion to get the ball to Wilson in space and it led to a 40-yard gain:
Pederson and Reich can design plays similar to this that get Huff a free release into his routes. Huff is fully capable of being a big-play receiver for the Eagles this season.
Turron Davenport is the lead Philadelphia Eagles reporter for Eagles Wire. He can be reached on Twitter (@TDavenport_NFL)236 acquitted in Balyoz coup case
ISTANBUL – Doğan News Agency
All 236 suspects in the “Balyoz” (Sledgehammer) coup plot case were acquitted March 31 after the case’s prosecutor argued that digital data in the files submitted as evidence in the case |
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