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comparisons with old charts caused observers to insist that the inner harbor was also filling and created widespread anxiety about the destruction of the Boston Harbor. Although the scientific understanding of hydraulics was still in its infancy and there were high degrees of uncertainty regarding the meeting of land and water, scientists and engineers began to describe the Boston Harbor as a series of channels created and maintained by the scouring force of water moving in and out of the harbor, river systems, and tidal reservoirs. This interpretation came to be known as the theory of Tidal scour. This understanding of the harbor as a dynamic landscape assuaged concerns some had over the negative impacts of land fill operations of land and real estate developers.[12]
As the 19th century progressed the acceleration of urban growth dramatically increased the need for more land. The Ordinance of 1641 extended the property rights of riparian owners from the line of low tide to a maximum distance of 100 rods (1,600 ft; 500 m) from the line of high tide. Generally, other states drew the line of private property at high tide. However, extending shore lines into bordering bodies of water was not unique to Boston. Chicago built into Lake Michigan, New York extended itself into the Hudson and East rivers, and San Francisco reclaimed sections of its bay. The Boston Harbor's unique geography inspired the law that made land reclamation such a widespread activity in Boston. By the end of the nineteenth century the city had created more land in two generations than it had in the previous two centuries.[13]
Harbor Islands [ edit ]
Boston Harbor contains a considerable number of islands, 34 of which are part of the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area since its establishment in 1996. The following islands exist within the harbor, or just outside it in Massachusetts Bay:
Former warehouse repurposed as housing and a restaurant, on Commercial Wharf near Atlantic Avenue
Two former islands, Castle Island and Deer Island, still exist in a recognizable form. Castle Island was joined to the mainland by land reclamation, while Deer Island ceased to be an island when the channel which formerly separated it from the mainland was filled in by the New England Hurricane of 1938.
Nut Island is a small former island in Boston Harbor that was joined by landfill to the Houghs Neck peninsula in northeastern Quincy by the 1940s so it could be used as the site of a sewage treatment facility.[14]
Two other former islands, Apple Island and Governors Island, have been subsumed into land reclamation for Logan International Airport.
Aquaculture [ edit ]
In 1996, the Boston Globe reported that Mayor Thomas Menino and MIT engineer Clifford Goudey were planning a program to use the great tanks on Moon Island as a fish farm or a temporary home for tuna or lobster in an attempt to implement a recirculating aquaculture system in Boston Harbor.[15][16][17] The prices of both these fish types vary by season. The plan was to collect and store fish in the tanks and sell the fish at higher prices when they were out of season. Nothing has come of this plan to date.
Lights and other aids to navigation [ edit ]
Images [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:Virtus.pro have swept Fnatic 2-0 in the ELEAGUE Grand Finals to win the league championship at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta. The Polish squad took home a $390,000 pot in the win.
The series opened up on Cobble, Fnatic’s map choice, and it started off in expected fashion as the Swedes went up 9-6 at the half. VP toggled on and took seven consecutive rounds. Fnatic could only muster a single round of their own before VP slammed the door shut with a 16-7 Game 1 scoreline.
The next map was Mirage, and the nerves were definitely showing for Fnatic. flusha was particularly emotional about the way the second map was going.
Despite taking a pause, Fnatic went down to 10-5 in the half. They took the three opening rounds in the second half, but VP gave them no more and took five straight rounds to closeout the map 16-8.
snax was VP’s sparkplug, posting a 1.49 HLTV player rating across the series, while olofmeister was the lowest rated player in the series with an 0.68 rating.
VP went undefeated in the playoffs, sweeping Astralis in the quarterfinals and mousesports in the semifinals.
Unlike Fnatic, who won their group and were directly seeded into the playoffs, VP had to fight through the Last Chance Qualifier to earn their playoff berth. They swept both Gambit Gaming and Renegades to make it into the playoffs.
VP’s victory comes in the midst of a slump, as the Polish squad have not won a championship since May 22 when they defeated Na`Vi 2-1 to win the SL i-League Invitational #1. Prior to that, their last premier tournament win came in November last year when they won CEVO Season 8.
In the post-game interview with Chris Puckett, TaZ acknowledged the team’s slump but noted that the Polish squad is back where they should be.
“Guys I think that we can all say and we can shout that Virtus.pro is back baby,” he said.Scientists have been monitoring numbers of Sumatran rhinos (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) for some time now, with wild populations rapidly declining in recent decades due to poaching and forestry. Now, sadly, they’ve confirmed that the animal is extinct in the wild in Malaysia, with no sightings in its natural habitat since 2007.
The researchers, led by scientists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, say that the survival of the species now depends on the few that remain elsewhere - it’s estimated that less than 100 Sumatran rhinos still live in the wild in Indonesia, and there are nine animals in captivity in facilities in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the US.
“It is vital for the survival of the species that all remaining Sumatran rhinos are viewed as a metapopulation, meaning that all are managed in a single program across national and international borders in order to maximise overall birth rate. This includes the individuals currently held in captivity,” said Rasmus Gren Havmøller, a researcher from the university’s Centre for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, in a statement.
His research, published in Oryx, the International Journal of Conservation, suggests that decades of existing conservation efforts have so far failed to stem rapid population decline in the species, which peaked with estimated losses of 50 percent or more of the population per decade until the early 1990s.
Havmøller and his colleagues say that intensive management zones are a last-chance solution to save the species. The plan, which was announced by scientists back in 2013 but has yet to be carried out, calls for the creation of areas offering increased protection from poaching – the single biggest threat to the species, due to high demand for the animal’s horn, predominantly in Asia. The protected zones would also enable bringing as many of the animals together as possible to increase the number of potential mating partners.
“The tiger in India was saved from extinction due to the direct intervention of Mrs. Gandhi, the then prime minister, who set up Project Tiger,” said Christy Williams, co-author and coordinator of the WWF Asian and Rhino and Elephant Action Strategy. “A similar high level intervention by President Joko Widodo of Indonesia could help pull the Sumatran rhinos back from the brink.”
Sadly, the Sumatran rhino is not the only endangered rhino crisis we’re facing. There are now just four northern white rhinos left in the world, and the alarming rate at which various rhino species are disappearing is leading researchers to experiment with all sorts of novel ways to save the animals, including fitting rhinos’ horns with spy cameras and alarms and sequencing rhino DNA before it’s too late. We just hope these last-ditch efforts work to save these beautiful animals.The 9/11 Advocates Group is accusing Sen. Lindsey Graham (R – SC) of stabbing them in the back today after he and Sen. John McCain (R – AZ) unveiled what they are called a “fix” to the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), a bill which aimed to allow the 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia for backing al-Qaeda ahead of the attack..
While the Saudis lobbied heavily against the bill, and threatened to collapse the US economy over it, it passed easily earlier this year, though even back then Republican leadership was openly talking about gutting the bill after the November election. The election’s gone, and if the “fix” has its way, so are the lawsuits
That’s because the “fix” requires plaintiffs to prove the Saudis “knew” and were “directly” financing the terrorist organization itself. Since the 9/11 Report’s 28 pages show the funding was all done through a convoluted route, it would effectively end any chance of legal repercussions for the Saudis.
Which of course is the point, though Graham insists that what he’s really concerned about is that the existing bill which allows lawsuits over stuff the Saudis actually did, might also open the US up to lawsuits over the many, many things they’ve done.
That of course has been the administration’s beef with the bill all along, with officials arguing that it is a dangerous precedent to set that countries can be sued for overt crimes against civilians, since the US is intervening so heavily abroad.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzApple is expected to drastically revamp its flagship laptop line in the second half of 2016, according to one informed insider, with the slimmed down 13- and 15-inch models said to sport Touch ID, an OLED display touch bar, USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, among other improvements.
In a note to investors obtained by AppleInsider on Monday, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts Apple to release a new form factor MacBook Pro design sometime in the fourth quarter of 2016. Thinner and lighter than current hardware, the long-awaited redesign will also feature exotic technologies carried over from Apple's mobile device lineup.Specifically, Kuo believes Apple plans to introduce a Touch ID fingerprint reader into the new MacBook Pro chassis, which if true will be the first non-iOS implementation of the biometric security system. In addition, an "OLED display touch bar" is earmarked for integration and will replace physical function keys located above the laptop's QWERTY keyboard.Previous Apple patents have outlined illuminated touch controls embedded within a MacBook's chassis, while others protect rights to switchless keyboards and illuminated trackpads. The company also owns IP relating to in-key displays ala Art Lebedev's Optimus keyboard line, though the inventions yet to ship in a consumer product.Riffing on the "thinner and lighter is better" trend, Apple will attempt to squeeze MacBook Pro's powerful innards into an even slimmer chassis, Kuo said. To help keep thickness at a minimum, Apple plans to employ low-rise butterfly mechanism switches and battery tech introduced with the 12-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. The move should prove to further blur the lines between the company's MacBook pedigrees, which include the 12-inch Retina MacBook, aging MacBook Air models and the beefy (by comparison) MacBook Pro.Like last year's 12-inch MacBook, the new Pro models are expected to adopt speedy USB-C connectivity alongside the usual Thunderbolt ports, which should get a bump up to Thunderbolt 3. Whether Apple intends to ditch its proprietary MagSafe charger, as it did with the Retina MacBook thin-and-light, remains to be seen.Kuo says this year's MacBook upgrades will be the most significant in four years.UPDATE : Date 30 September 2013 (Image Leaks)
UPDATE : Date 25 September 2013 (GFX Benchmarks)
New Benchmarks at GFX website confirm a Snapdragon 800 SOC ( Adreno 330 GPU) Very Very exciting..
Update : Date 18 September 2013 (Nexus 5 Receives WiFi Certification)
Two LG Nexus 5 versions, LG-D820_C and LG-D820_S, have received Wi-Fi certification. It’s not clear what the difference between the two devices is at this time. What we do know from available details is that the two Nexus 5 versions will have dual band Wi-Fi support (2.4GHz and 5GHz) and offer Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac (AC, Take that iPhone) and Wi-Fi Direct support.
UPDATE : Date 17 September 2013
New leaked images of Nexus 5 and Android 4.4 KitKat boot animation video. Enjoy
Google Nexus 5 has also been spotted on GFXBench benchmark site. Full HD 1080p display (1794 x 1080) and Snapdragon 800 2.26 Ghz processor confirmed.
Google LG Nexus 5 (Main Article)
Its that time of year again. After the recent release of Apple iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c with much fanfare, its now time for best of Android, Nexus 5. Google Nexus program started in January 2010 to provide OEM guidelines and direction when making android hardware and as a reference devices for app developers. 3 years on Nexus brand and devices have become more mainstream. Nexus device offers a stock Android experience (No Manufacturer modifications) and receives Android updates directly from Google (Differentiates it from even Google Edition devices). Every successive Nexus release usually accompanies a new version of Android.
Android 4.4 Keylime Pie KitKat :
After no new Android announcements at Google I/O 2013 everyone was expecting Google to put out the next iteration of Android (Maybe Keylime Pie) with Nexus 7 2013 tablet. A new version did come but it was a point release, Android 4.3 Jellybean. After Nexus 7 the next big announcement on the Android calendar is Nexus 5. Android 5 with Nexus 5 on Android 5th year. Waiting for Nexus 5 launch was the plan until Sundar Pichai (senior vice president at Google, he oversees Android, Chrome and Google Apps) announced Android 4.4 Kitkat in a Google+ Post suspiciously timed a day after Apple iPhone event invitation. Another Point release (No Android 5??? ) but we moved to K. Why KitKat is a topic for another blog, here lets stick to Nexus 5. After the announcement Google put out a promotional video of them putting up KitKat Android statue on Google Lawns. however in that video comes an easter egg which I still maintain was intentional. Its a googler holding an unknown, unannounced Nexus device.
Google took the video down almost immediately.
Speculation began that Nexus 5 is being manufactured by LG because of a blurry, what vaguely looked like LG logo at the bottom of the device. LG manufactured Nexus 4 in 2012 which was wildly successful for Google ( most successful Nexus till date) and given that previous 2 Nexus phones (Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus) were manufactured by Samsung it makes sense that LG would manufacture fifth Nexus. however this was all still in the realm of speculation.
Nexus 4 was based on LG Optimus G, LG’s 2012 flagship, the phones were identical in terms of specs (Camera on Nexus 4 was 8 MP vs 13 MP on Optimus G). This year LG announced the G2, successor to Optimus G. So safe to assume that if LG indeed is manufacturing Nexus 5 it will be based on G2. LG G2 features the SnapDragon 800 SOC with a beautiful 5.2″ 1080p full HD IPS display powered by a mammoth 3000 mAh battery (International version have a smaller but replaceable battery).
Then Came FCC (iFixit Style)
A week after the Google video stunt that got everyone excited about Nexus 5, a FCC filing screw up by LG, a device model D820 got leaked in all its, blurry, glory. This leaked device is made by LG and has all the ingredients of a Nexus phone. Device matches the one spotted at Google Android Kitkat reveal (Camera and flash placement and the camera sensor size). Moves the controversial power n volume rocker buttons placed on the back panel of the LG G2 on the sides. Size of the screen from 5.2″ to a 5″ (4.96″) and retains the impressively thin LG G2 bezel.
A day later @evleaks came out and said D820 was not the next Nexus but CDMA version of LG G2, which did not make sense since D820 is nothing like the G2. Later @evleaks redacted and said he might be wrong about D820. Now it is almost certain that LG D820 is the new Nexus 5. With that established lets look at the leaks.
The person from FCC does a iFixit style teardown of D820 (Nexus 5).
Nexus 5 dimensions are 131.9 x 68.2mm (for reference Nexus 4 is 133.9 x 68.7 and Galaxy S4 is 136.6 x 69.8 ) so actually smaller than Nexus 4 and still manages to pack a 4.96″ full HD IPS display. Has the signature Nexus minimal all screen front along with the front facing camera on the top right corner and what looks like a notification light in the center top.
Since this is a FCC device the build material and design is nothing like the final product (Just FYI incase you find the device not particularly impressive). I think the final device will look like the one showed off in the Google KitKat video since the Nexus logo on the back panel matches the sideways design of the nexus 7 (Now Confirmed, See Updates below). The build material will be inline with Nexus 7.
If the Nexus 5 specsheet is inline with the LG G2 it would be powered by a Snapdragon 800 (Confirmed). However because with the Nexus 4 Google has gone the Amazon way and price these devices pretty cheap it would not really be a surprise if its powered by a Snapdragon 600 (Galaxy S4 and HTC One) which is no slouch but I have my fingers crossed for 800.
Next is battery. The phone is powered by a 2300 mAh battery which again is a significant step down from the 3000 mAh battery powering the G2. Nexus 4 was powered by a 2100 mAh and pretty much universally got bad reviews for battery life. 2300 mAh is not a big step up from Nexus 4 however it might not be that bad. With the release of Android 4.3 Google has significantly improved android power efficiency. People have seen a major difference in standby times for there 2012 nexus 7. I don’t see why the trend wont continue in Android 4.4 KitKat. Apart from software optimization’s in android the LG G2 also has something called VRAM (Video RAM). VRAM basically refreshes the display by itself without having the Processor to do it thus further improving battery life (10% improvements is LG’s claims). However we don’t know and can only hope this would be part of the Nexus 5 since this is a G2 feature. Apart from that the Snapdragon 800 is a fairly battery efficient SOC.
Camera: Nexus has conventionally had bad camera’s. This is about to change in the Nexus 5 as it takes the LG G2 camera (Rumors). If thats true then we have a 13 MP camera with OIC (Optical Image Stabilization). the camera software should also get an upgrade in Android Kitkat.
Another confirmed spec is NFS and Wireless charging.
Rumors are the device will be announced October 14 along with Android 4.4 KitKat.
Confirmed Specs NEXUS 5:
4.96″ Full HD 1080p display (1794 x 1080)
Snapdragon 800 2.26 Ghz SOC
Adreno 330 GPU
2 GB Ram
13 MP Rear Camera with OIC (Optical Image Stabilization)
2300 mAh Battery
Dual Band WiFi (2.4 Ghz and 5Ghz)
Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac
Wifi Direct
NFS & Wireless Charging
Android 4.4 KitKat
Will keep updating this blog as we have more updates.
Share you views in comments below.
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Author: Puneet RajputBreaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Oct. 12, 2016, 5:02 PM GMT / Updated Oct. 12, 2016, 5:02 PM GMT By Krista Brunson and Chelsea Bailey
A former Houston 911 operator is facing criminal charges for hanging up on callers because “she did not want to talk to anyone,” according to Houston Police investigators.
Crenshanda Williams, 43, faces two misdemeanor charges of Interference with Emergency Telephone Call stemming from incidents in March.
According to charge documents filed with the Harris County Court, Williams worked for the Houston Emergency Center where managers determined that she was involved in thousands of “short calls” — emergency calls that last less than 20 seconds — between Oct. 2015 and March 2016.
In one case, Williams allegedly hung up on a man who called to report a robbery in progress March 12.
Hua Li told NBC affiliate KPRC that he had been buying lottery tickets at a convenience store when a gunman entered and tried to force his way through the door of a glassed-in security area behind the counter. As two clerks attempted to block the door, Li says he ran from the store and heard several gunshots. When he got to his car, he called 911 for help.
“They just said, ‘This is 911. How can I help you?’ I was trying to finish my sentence, and we got disconnected,” Li said.
Former emergency services operator Crenshanda Williams is accused of hanging up on dozens of people who called 911. Houston Police
Police said that Williams was the 911 operator, and that she terminated the call within a few seconds.
Li called a second time and got a different operator. By the time police arrived, however, the store manager had been shot and killed.
Li told KPRC that if 911 is not there for you, “Nobody, nobody is going to help you. You’re on your own.”
In a separate incident, Williams allegedly hung up on a security guard calling to report reckless driving and can be heard saying, “Ain't nobody got time for this. For real,” according to charge documents.
Williams no longer works for the Houston Emergency Center. She’s scheduled to appear in court next week.Qatar agreed to allow the United States to use a base on Qatari soil to bomb Iran, according to a report in the newspaper Al-Arabiya based on secret diplomatic cables published by the website WikiLeaks.
Qatar also agreed to pay 60 percent of the upkeep costs for the Al-Udeid airbase, which has already been used by the U.S. military to launch air sorties over Iraq.
The Emir of Qatar, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, October 27, 2010. AP
Although Qatar backed the elimination of the Iranian offensive capability by military means, Qatar reportedly agreed to support a strike only in return for U.S. guarantees that operations at the South Pars natural gas field, owned jointly by Qatar and Iran, would not be threatened.
Another WikiLeaks document quoted Mossad Chief Meir Dagan characterizing Qatar as "problematic" and its leader as "annoying everyone". According to Dagan, Qatar is trying to cozy up to everyone – Syria, Iran and Hamas – in an attempt to beef up its security.
"I think that you should remove your bases from [Qatar]," Dagan told American diplomats, according to the WikiLeaks document, "[The Qataris] owe their security to the presence of the Americans]."The US Senate voted Friday (3rd Feb) to repeal an anti-corruption rule, established by former President Barack Obama's administration, that requires energy companies to declare royalties and government payments in their business dealings. The rule, which took effect last year, was part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 – the sweeping regulatory package that established new restrictions and safeguards after the financial crisis and Great Recession of the late 2000s.
Obama's administration imposed the rule as a transparency measure intended to deter corrupt business practices in resource-rich countries. It mandates that oil, natural gas, coal and mineral companies must disclose royalties and government payments to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The GOP-controlled Senate, though, voted 52 - 47 Friday to wipe it from the books. The resolution, which passed the House Wednesday, now needs approval from President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it.
The vote split entirely along party lines. All Senate Democrats voted to keep the rule and all Republicans voted to scrap it. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., did not vote. The White House said the rule imposed unreasonable compliance costs on American energy companies and placed them at risk of losing out to foreign competition. The effort is part of the Trump administration's general strategy to deregulate corporate America.
Also on Friday, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate several regulatory provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that the regulations contained in the law are disastrous and overreaching.
Friday's vote follows another by the upper chamber late Thursday that passed a measure scrapping an environmental protection rule involving coal production. That Obama rule prohibited dumping mining waste in local streams and waterways.[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]
We asked this week’s panelists…
Q: What authors write the best action? What books feature the best action sequences? What does it take to make action really pop in fiction?
Here’s what they said…
Karina Cooper
After writing happily ever afters for all of her friends in school, Karina Cooper eventually grew up (sort of), went to work in the real world (kind of), where she decided that making stuff up was way more fun (true!). She is the author of dark and sexy paranormal romance and steampunk urban fantasy, and writes across multiple genres with mad glee. One part glamour, one part dork and all imagination, Karina is also a gamer, an airship captain’s wife, and a steampunk fashionista. She lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with a husband, a menagerie, a severe coffee habit, and a passel of adopted gamer geeks. Visit her at www.karinacooper.com, because she says so.
When it comes to some of the best action I’ve read, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to Ilona Andrews—notably, her Kate Daniels series. This urban fantasy leans heavily on action, outlining the motion—and painting the intensity—in gorgeous detail that skimps on flowery prose. No superhero with impossible pain tolerance, you’re transported with Kate with every cut, every wound, every agony. When I think about authors and books that feature action, I can’t help but arrow right on this series.
Two other authors that come to mind are Chuck Wendig and Stephen Blackmoore. Both write a kind of urban fantasy genre, but both are extremely different. Wendig’s Miriam Black series—beginning with Blackbirds—shows action with an almost fascinating intensity. He describes combat sequences that aren’t so much “fights” as a grotesquely detached explanation of events that could go wither way. Blackmoore, in both City of the Lost and Dead Things, colors his often vicious action sequences with a noir grit you can feel to your bones. They are terse, which only allows my brain to color in the details with such ease that I’m both repelled and entranced. Exactly where I want to be when I pick up a Blackmoore or Wendig book.
Action can be so hard to get right, and extremely easy to get lost in. Too much detail slows down a scene, and a lot of beginning authors tend to want to block and write every gorgeous detail—like an epic martial arts movie scene. It takes a certain understanding of physical capability, some blocking, and the ability to curtail one’s prose to keep the scene going sharp, fast, tight, like an actual fight is. It’s a hard skill to learn, but one worth every moment spent revising to learn it. A reader caught up in the intensity and speed of a fight is one who is there for every breathless moment.
Dave Gross
Dave Gross is the former editor of Dragon Magazine, Star Wars Insider, and Amazing Stories. By day, he is lead writer for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, which reunites him with the beloved Forgotten Realms setting. Also for Realms, he wrote Black Wolf, Lord of Stormweather, and other stories and novels. More recently he’s written Prince of Wolves, Master of Devils and Queen Of Thorns for Pathfinder Tales, featuring the not-always-heroic Jeggare and his hellspawn bodyguard Radovan. Find more tales of Tales of the Far West, Shotguns v. Cthulhu, and The Lion and the Aardvark. He can be found is the former editor of Dragon Magazine, Star Wars Insider, and Amazing Stories. By day, he is lead writer for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, which reunites him with the belovedsetting. Also for Realms, he wrote, and other stories and novels. More recently he’s writtenandfor, featuring the not-always-heroic Jeggare and his hellspawn bodyguard Radovan. Find more tales of Radovan and Jeggare online. Gross has stories in the recent or upcoming anthologies, and. He can be found on his website as well as on Facebook on on Twitter as @frabjousdave
I usually think of movies for action and prose for character, but two authors from my earliest fantasy reading stand out for action.
Robert E. Howard makes action larger than life. Long before movie stars defined macho with one-liners, Conan struggled with an assassin who boasted of training since birth to be a master strangler, starting with infants, working his way up to young women, and finally throttling grown men. Conan’s response? At sixteen he strangled a Cimmerian bull. Snap! (Literally, he snaps the guy’s neck as his punchline.)
For all the proof you need of the passionate intensity of Howard’s prose, check out Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance as the writer in The Whole Wide World. Watching his face and hearing his voice as the world of Conan erupts from his imagination is as action-packed a scene as you could desire from a twisted little independent love story.
Much as I admired Howard’s visceral action scenes, it was Roger Zelazny whose noir sensibilities stuck with me. Sometimes Zelazny’s action scenes can be too technical, as when he employs fencing terms to describe a duel. Yet his heroes succeed by outsmarting the foe. When Corwin of Amber knows he can’t defeat his brother Benedict in combat, he uses the treacherous environment to escape. He’s got a bit of Brave Sir Robin in him that way.
The best lesson Zelazny taught me is that defeating a foe isn’t always the most interesting outcome. One of his most memorable “action” scenes doesn’t involve a fight against another character but against the hero’s shattered memory, when Corwin of Amber must re-walk the pattern to retrieve his identity. With anti-heroes like Corwin, Zelazny used failure the way Howard used bombast, making the failed assault on Mount Kolvir—and its massive sacrifice of lives—as unforgettable as any of King Conan’s triumphs.
Kelly McCullough
WebMage and Fallen Blade series. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He also dabbles in science fiction as science education, having written short fiction for NSF and co-created a science comic for NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope. He can be found online at Kelly McCullough writes fantasy, science fiction and young adult fiction. He lives in Wisconsin with his physics professor wife and a small herd of cats. He has eight novels in print and four more forthcoming, mostly in hisandseries. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He also dabbles in science fiction as science education, having written short fiction for NSF and co-created a science comic for NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope. He can be found online at KellyMcCullough.com, on twitter as @KellyDMcC and Facebook
Action comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s so central to our genre that it’s hard to narrow it down to just a few authors or books. For modern/urban fantasy settings Jim Butcher and Carrie Vaughn both immediately come to mind as people doing it right. David Weber is brilliant at writing effective space navy engagements for his Honor Harrington and Dahak books, and does a good job in the sword and sorcery department with The War God series. Martha Wells and Douglas Hulick do some great work with fine sword work and individual combat. For tank battles and infantry fights I immediately think of David Drake. And, I will always love Roger Zelazny’s action sequences for their elegance and the beauty of his language.
I did a quick scan through my shelves looking for books that evoked memories of fabulous action sequences, and found a number that I just have to mention: Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, Weber’s On Basilisk Station, Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides, Stirling’s Marching Through Georgia, Wells’ The Element of Fire, The Wild Cards books, Christopher Hinz’s Liege Killer, and, out of genre, Colleen McCullough’s First Man in Rome books.
There are other authors and books that come to mind as I’m writing this, but in the interests of brevity, I’ll call that a pretty good first pass. Now, what ties them all together and makes them pop? First and foremost it’s stakes. It doesn’t matter how well an action sequence is written if the reader doesn’t care about the characters and the reasons they’re fighting, because it’s not going to draw the reader in. Action must always serve the story first if it’s really going to engage the reader.
That’s because action isn’t really about the mechanics of a fight, or the elegance of the language, or near misses and spilled blood, though all of those things need to be done well to make a sequence really fly. You can have a brilliant fight scene that’s told in a staccato burst of impressions that give you the strobe-light version of a fight as easily as one that comes out in the cool voice of a master fencer using the language of thrust and parry, or someone writing the literary equivalent of the Matrix’s bullet-time, or any of dozens of other techniques as long as it’s properly rooted in the story. Ultimately, good action writing is about the emotional context, about how a character deals with the moment and what that tells us about the story and the characters. Get that right and the rest is an exercise in style.
Django Wexler
Django Wexler graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. Eventually he migrated to Microsoft in Seattle, where he now lives with two cats and a teetering mountain of books. When not planning Shadow Campaigns, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts. He is also the author of a forthcoming middle-grade series. Find him on Twitter as @DjangoWexler
For me, there are two major pieces to any action scene: the description and the context.
The description is the scene itself, what happens and how we’re told about it. The chief problem here is walking the fine line between over- and under-describing. Both extremes have problems. If the author errs on the side of under-description, the action feels “mushy”. It’s hard to follow what’s going on beyond the most basic level, and any tension drains away. It’s hard to get excited and think “How is our hero going to get out of this one?” when there isn’t enough detail to keep track of why she’s in trouble.
On the other hand, too much description gets boring quickly, in spite of giving the reader a very clear picture of what’s going on. Going blow-by-blow through a long swordfight, for example, would become extremely tiresome, even if it’s so detailed I could get my friends together and re-enact it.
The trick is to find a middle ground, eliding the details when they threaten to get dull but giving us enough to stay on board emotionally — excitement when things are going well, tension when things are going badly. In an under-described scene, these emotional beats often feel totally arbitrary (“They fought for a while! And then he was losing! But then he won!”) and the hidden hand of the author becomes too apparent. On the other side, too much detail makes a book feel like it wants to be a movie, dazzling the audience with sheer visual spectacle and slam-bang action; this doesn’t work very well in a textual medium.
No matter how good the description is, though, it requires the context to make some sense of it. The context is everything that leads up to the action scene and makes the readers care about the people involved. Without context, we’re back in the realm of visual spectacle, trying to dazzle the reader with grand but somehow unsatisfying pyrotechnics. What context is required to make an action scene work obviously varies as widely as the stories involved, but typically it involves having some sympathy with the characters involved, knowing their goals, and (perhaps most importantly) understand what is at stake if they fail.
Context is why a swordfight between Darkesh the Invincible and Orc #4,592 can be boring, but the exact same description of a fight between the heroine and the man on whom she’s sworn revenge can rivet you to the page. It’s even more powerful if the scene is a contest between two (or more) characters that are both sympathetic, possibly in different ways, and the reader genuinely doesn’t know which way we want things to end.
Both description and context need to be competent, of course, but the balance between the two varies depending on the author’s goal. Different writers focus on one or the other, to achieve a variety of effects. Some of my favorites:
Joe Abercrombie writes probably my favorite action scenes in fantasy. He’s a master of description, and knows how to present a fight or a chase to neatly thread the line between vague and boring. He also provides excellent context; the action means something, both to the characters and the larger story. When Ninefingers, in his berserker rage, attacks his allies, we don’t want either one of them to get killed. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as aware of |
spent the last several years of his unhappy life, 1846-49, in a cottage in the Bronx).
Doctorow came of age at a time when a socialist milieu was very much part of life in New York City, particularly among Jewish workers and intellectuals. In 1948 the Stalinist-influenced American Labor Party elected a Congressman from the Bronx, its second from New York City.
The future writer was a voracious reader as a child. He remarked later in life how influenced he had been as well by New York City’s theaters, museums and concert halls, and the city’s cultural climate as a whole: “As I grew up I was a beneficiary of the incredible energies of European émigrés in every field—all those great minds hounded out of Europe by Hitler.”
Doctorow attended the Bronx High School of Science, where he began to write, and then Kenyon College in Ohio, where he was a student of the conservative Southern poet and founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism, John Crowe Ransom.
In 1960 Doctorow published his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times, set in a small settlement in the Dakota Territory in the late 19th century. A sociopath comes into town and commits terrible crimes, leaving the place in smoking ruins. The survivors have to make the effort to rebuild before the marauder returns. An “anti-Western,” the novel, which presumably alludes not only to the lawless American frontier, but to traumatic world events of the mid-century, takes a relatively dim view of humanity. Critic Douglas Fowler points to the book’s “pessimistic” argument in favor of “the human instinct toward violence and revenge.”
His first major critical success came with The Book of Daniel, centered on a fictionalized account of the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for allegedly passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. That horrifying event must have had a powerful impact on Doctorow as a 22-year-old.
His novel takes place during the student protests of the late 1960s. Its central character, Daniel, the son of the Isaacsons (characters based on the Rosenbergs) gives vent to the anger and political confusion of the time. He is drawn alternately to “revolutionary” gestures and to attempts at a more sober consideration of the first half of the 20th century, which never proceeds very far. Daniel’s sister meanwhile makes an attempt to end her life. Toward the end of the book Doctorow includes a harrowing description of execution by the electric chair.
The novelist told an interviewer that once he started The Book of Daniel he discovered he “could hang an awful lot on it—not only the explicit and particular story of two people…but also the story of the American left in general and the generally sacrificial role it has played in our history.” The writer explained, “Certainly in the history of this country, the radical is often sacrificed and his ideas are picked up after he himself has been destroyed.”
Doctorow suggested that he had been “fully sensitive to the McCarthy period generally,” but that the Rosenberg story “didn’t propose itself to me as a subject for a novel until we were all going through Vietnam.” Ragtime brought Doctorow widespread recognition and, one might add, respect and affection, which is not something one could say about very many of his contemporaries. It his perhaps his greatest achievement, despite some of its storyline extravagances and implausibilities. The novel is set in the first years of the 20th century and employs both fictional characters as well as significant historical figures such as magnates J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford, the anarchist Emma Goldman and black educator and author Booker T. Washington.
The novel in its best sections leaves a genuine imprint on the reader’s imagination. For example, when one of the central characters, the Eastern European immigrant Tateh, goes to Lawrence, Massachusetts seeking work, he ends up involved in the great textile strike of 1912, led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). After the strike leaders have been arrested, Ragtime describes the arrival of the new IWW leader, William “Big Bill” Haywood:
“He was a Westerner and wore a stetson which he removed and waved. A cheer went up. Haywood raised his hands for quiet. He spoke. His voice was magnificent. There is no foreigner here except the capitalists, he said. The place went wild.”
At the time Doctorow’s novel was criticized for the liberties the author took with historical facts. While he may play a bit fast and loose with certain details—the influence of new and increasingly fashionable postmodern trends is perhaps already at work here—the general thrust of Ragtime is an attempt to get at more important truths about the past, including the ones excluded in the official narrative of American history.
What is weaker about Ragtime is the unworked-through and sometimes ahistorical approach to the early years of the 20th century. For example, another lead character in the work, the African-American musician Coalhouse Walker (inspired by the protagonist of Heinrich von Kleist’s 1811 novella Michael Kohlhaas), somewhat improbably forms an organization of black workers to terrorize racists—with the active sympathy of some whites—and ultimately seizes Morgan’s mansion, where he is assassinated. The tone of these scenes seems contrived and stage-managed.
World’s Fair (1985) was Doctorow’s most autobiographical piece, and recreates the world of New York City, again during the Depression era. It is narrated by a boy named Edgar and centers on the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. World’s Fair unquestionably succeeds in evoking the period. It brings to mind a different type of memoir, Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, set in Brooklyn in the 1920s.
Billy Bathgate won the National Book Critics Circle Award and a PEN/Faulkner Award. It concerns a teenager, Billy Bathgate, who becomes an apprentice to Jewish-American mobster Dutch Schultz in 1932. Billy narrates and, although he makes keen observations about the nature of the gangster business, there is little sense of the world beyond this lowlife existence, one in which an economic depression is taking place. Nor is Billy overly shocked by Schultz’s killings and cruelty, even though they appear designed to affect the reader. Billy never seems transformed by his own experiences, let alone the conditions of his era. The author seems to be suggesting that homicidal violence is intrinsic to the national character, a view that is both lazy and untrue.
Dustin Hoffman and Nicole Kidman in Billy Bathgate (1991)
It seems reasonable to suggest that Doctorow was discouraged by the receding of the radicalism of the 1970s and the onset of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years. Between 1989, when the already somewhat cynical Billy Bathgate was published, and 2005, he produced only two minor works, The Waterworks (1994) and City of God (2000).
He then turned his attention to one of the most titanic events in American history, the Civil War. The March, which won another PEN/Faulkner Award as well as the National Book Award, follows the Union army of General William Tecumseh Sherman in his “march to the sea” through the South in late 1864 and early 1865. Its characters are freed slaves, Union and Confederate soldiers, doctors in the Union army and Southern civilians. Doctorow recreates the blood, hunger and death, the pillage carried out by the Union army and the virtual destruction of the South.
Fellow writer John Updike noted in a review in the New Yorker: “Sherman’s march is conjured up as a human entity as large as the weather, a ‘floating world’ that destroys as it goes and carries along some living fragments. It is a revolution in motion—‘On the march is the new way to live.... The world was remade, everything become something else.’”
The novel was written during some of the bloodiest days of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is unquestionably Doctorow’s commentary on the Iraq War and on the evolution and possibilities of the United States as a society. Reading the work, one senses that Doctorow felt obliged to find an episode of justice and progress in American history, portrayed realistically in the midst of an event as violent and ruthless as Sherman’s march.
One senses as well that these are the aims of someone who does not believe that genuine historical progress is still in operation in the 21st century. It would seem that, for all of his attention to history, Doctorow, like many other artists of his generation, was unable to make sense of the great events of the first half of the 20th century, particularly the Russian Revolution, Stalinism, the causes of two world wars.
The Cold War and the McCarthyite onslaught on socialist thought no doubt had a chilling effect on him, creating a certain defensiveness and lack of political confidence in a left-wing perspective that never entirely went away. The eventual collapse of the USSR (which he referred to as the end of a totalitarian dictatorship) strengthened the view that no alternative to capitalism was possible. Doctorow’s art took on the character of a moral stance against all odds, but not one imbued with much hope for the future.
One feels that something is missing in many of his works. There is considerable technical expertise and command of structure and story, but no single novel is entirely satisfying or breathtakingly illuminating. Ragtime ends on a note of unlikely radical terror, Billy Bathgate fails to examine convincingly the connection between the 1930s and the world 60 years later, and The March leaves us wondering why Doctorow has raised the topic of the destruction of the South in the context of the eruption of American imperialism.
Several of Doctorow’s novels were turned into films: Henry Fonda and Janice Rule starred in Welcome to Hard Times (1967, directed by Burt Kennedy) and in 1983 director Sydney Lumet made a film version of The Book of Daniel, simply entitled Daniel, featuring Timothy Hutton. Ragtime (Milos Forman) was adapted for the screen in 1981 and a Broadway version appeared in 1988, winning four Tony Awards. A version of Billy Bathgate (Robert Benton) was released in 1991 starring Dustin Hoffman as Dutch Schultz.
Doctorow was legitimately critical of contemporary literature. In a 1990 interview with Bill Moyers, he commented, “I don’t believe we’re doing work equivalent to our nineteenth-century or even to some of our early twentieth-century novelists. …We have given up the realm of public discourse and the political and social novel to an extent that we may not have realized. We tend to be miniaturists more than we used to be…I think it’s true that we’ve constricted our field of vision. We have come into the house, closed the door, and pulled the shade.”
Doctorow was a defender of Constitutional rights, an opponent of censorship and a prominent critic of the Iraq War. In one of his last pieces of political commentary in April 2012, published in the New York Times, he identified state surveillance, the use of torture and mass incarceration as among those features of life that were rendering “the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world.”
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.European Commission Press release Mobile communications: Fresh €50 million EU research grants in 2013 to develop '5G' technology European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes announces €50 million for research to deliver 5G mobile technology by 2020, with the aim to put Europe back in the lead of the global mobile industry. "I want 5G be pioneered by European industry, based on European research and creating jobs in Europe – and we will put our money where our mouth is," Kroes said. By 2020 worldwide mobile traffic alone will reach a 33 times increase compared to 2010 figures. In this time Internet access will become dominated by wireless devices such as smartphones, tablets, machines and sensors, requiring more efficient and ubiquitous technology to carry the data traffic. Every sector of the economy is going digital. Every EU business and citizen needs to know they can enjoy easy-to-use, reliable and fast Internet on the move. This new wave of research projects promises to bring cutting-edge ultra-high-speed mobile broadband technology to the daily lives of Europeans. METIS, 5GNOW, iJOIN, TROPIC, Mobile Cloud Networking, COMBO, MOTO and PHYLAWS are some of the new EU research projects that address the architecture and functionality needs for 5G / beyond 4G networks. EU industrial players joining forces with academia and research institutes involved in these projects span from worldwide leading telecom operators (British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom/Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Portugal Telecom), to the world's major telecom manufacturers (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Thales Communications), world's leading provider of business software (SAP) and also world-renowned automotive manufacturers (BMW). In particular, the METIS project gains a €16 million fresh EU investment. Overall, from 2007 to 2013 EU investments amount to more than €700 million for research on future networks, half of which is allocated to wireless technologies, contributing to development of 4G and beyond 4G For example, the METIS overall technical goal is to provide a system concept that supports: 1000 times higher mobile data volume per area: network operators will serve many more users at the same time.
10 times to 100 times higher number of connected devices: new smart technologies will be invented when you connect your car, your fridge, your home energy and water controls.
10 times to 100 times higher typical user data rate: you will watch rich video content on the move.
10 times longer battery life for low power Machine-to-Machine-Communications: you will have more autonomy on the move and lower energy consumption.
5 times reduced End-to-End latency: you will enjoy smoother interaction with bandwidth-hungry applications and less waiting time. Background Today there are 1.2 billion mobile broadband users, and the figure is growing by hundreds of millions each year. EU long-term research support has been instrumental to share risks with industry for communication networks, whose development cycle is ten years. Past EU research investments have delivered many of the mobile advances we take for granted today. These include the GSM standard (used today by 80% of the world's mobile networks) and technologies used in the current third-generation (3G) 'Universal Mobile Telecom System' (UMTS) standards and the fourth-generation (4G) 'Long-Term Evolution' standard (see IP/09/1238). Useful links EU research on Network Technologies Digital Agenda website Neelie Kroes' website Follow Neelie Kroes on Twitter Twitter hashtags: #METIS #4G #5G #broadband #mobile Contacts : Ryan Heath (+32 2 296 17 16) Linda Cain (+32 2 299 90 19)Manama: A Kuwaiti daily has come out with a stinging criticism of Pakistan, accusing its leaders of political blackmail and of failure to deliver on their pan-Islamic pledges, in an unprecedented attack.
“The Pakistani stance that was adopted through the parliament’s decision to remain neutral has dropped the blackmail masks about protecting sacred Islamic sites and sharing a common destiny with Muslim countries,” Ahmad Al Jarallah, the editor-in-chief of Al Seyassah daily, wrote in a front page editorial on Sunday.
“The slogans were merely political blackmailing tools and Pakistan thought it could use them to feed its crisis-hit economy. The Gulf countries were well aware since the beginning that the assistance it providing to Pakistan was merely to help quell the rampant extremism there and to help Islamabad overcome the poverty that has largely contributed to the emergence of terrorist groups that are a strategic threat to the Gulf and Islamic security,” Al Jarallah wrote.
The editor said that Pakistan had bowed to Iran amid concerns it would suffer a defeat at the hands of the Iranian religious leaders whom he accused of expertise in generating terrorist groups.
“There is no doubt that the Pakistani leadership has made a mistake by betting on Iran, and even its fear from Tehran is not grounded in reality since the Iranian claims about military and missile capabilities and the nuclear programme are not more than a game,” Al Jarallah said.
“The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries do not need Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan needs them in various areas. The GCC can defend its security, particularly following the alliance with other countries such as Jordan and Egypt. Pakistan needs to look carefully at the Iranian plots, especially its attempt to scare the world with its military capabilities.”
The Pakistani parliament last week voted not to take part in the Saudi Arabia-led military operation to defeat Al Houthi rebels and restore Yemen’s legitimate government.
Riyadh had reportedly wanted Islamabad to assist them with ground troops, fighter jets and naval ships.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, facing a major diplomatic challenge and torn between the wishes of traditional ally Saudi Arabia and neighbouring Iran that backs the Al Houthis in Yemen, opted to turn to parliament for a decision.
However, the lawmakers’ vote for non-participation in the military operations triggered anger and disappointment in the GCC.
On Friday, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Dr Anwar Mohammad Gargash said the Pakistani parliament’s rejection of intervention in Yemen was “unexpected.”
“The Pakistani parliament’s decision about neutrality in the Yemeni conflict but genuine support for Saudi Arabia is paradoxical and unexpected from Islamabad,” he posted on his Twitter account.
“The Arabian Gulf is now going through a critical and crucial confrontation and its strategic security is at stake. Such moments of truth characterise genuine allies and distinguish them from those who are limited to media and statements,” he said.
In another tweet, he said that Pakistan was required to adopt a clear stance in the interests of its strategic relations with the Arabian Gulf states.
“Contradictory and ambiguous attitudes in such crucial issues have a high cost,” he said.
Amid the mounting criticism, Pakistan is expected to launch a damage-control campaign.
According to Pakistani daily The News, Islamabad will likely send a high-level delegation headed by Sartaj Aziz, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs and National Security, to Saudi Arabia soon with a special message from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to the Saudi leadership. The decision is expected to be announced on Monday.(Warning: Graphic) D.C. police say an officer shot a knife-wielding woman at the scene of a house fire in Northeast. The woman is reportedly in serious condition. (Washington Post)
(Warning: Graphic) D.C. police say an officer shot a knife-wielding woman at the scene of a house fire in Northeast. The woman is reportedly in serious condition. (Washington Post)
A woman wielding a knife who was shot by a D.C. police officer Saturday remained hospitalized in serious condition Sunday and is facing several charges, including arson and assault with a dangerous weapon, according to a police report.
The woman was identified by her mother and in a police report as Renita Nettles, 22. Nettles suffered a single gunshot wound to the shoulder, according to police. She was being treated at MedStar Washington Hospital Center.
District police officials declined Sunday to identify the officer who shot Nettles, although a spokesman said the officer has been placed on administrative leave with pay pending the completion of the investigation. Such action is routine.
It remains unclear what prompted the confrontation, but numerous bystanders captured the shooting on Clay Terrace in Northeast Washington on cellphone cameras, and videos of the incident were quickly posted on social media.
On Sunday, several witnesses criticized the officer for firing at Nettles and said police should have disarmed her without shooting.
“She took two steps toward the officer, and he backed up,” said Terrence Boggan, 49, who witnessed the incident. “People were yelling at her to put the knife down. She wouldn’t. She took two more steps toward the officer, and he fired.”
Boggan described the knife Nettles held as small, but he said she had several others attached to her belt or pants. He said he didn’t see her lunge or attack. “This didn’t have to end this way,” he said. “I didn’t see her swing the knife. He shouldn’t have shot. Not at all.”
[Watch video of D.C. police officer shoot woman armed with knife.]
But Delroy Burton, chairman of the D.C. Police Union, noted that Nettles refused several commands from police and pleas from onlookers to drop the knife, and he said it appears the officer acted within his training and the law as she advanced toward him.
“It’s unfortunate that she had to be shot,” Burton said. “But I don’t know what other choice he had.”
The incident began shortly after 6 p.m. Saturday when firefighters were sent to a house fire in the 5300 block of Clay Terrace NE. A D.C. police report obtained by The Washington Post says the fire had been intentionally set “using an open flame.” The report also says that Renita Nettles, wearing a pink baseball-style hat, pink shoes and goggles, was seen “acting very agitated” and was “observed running in and out of the burning home, throwing items into the street.”
Boggan, the witness, confirmed this account.
A second police report describing the shooting says that officers who responded to the fire encountered a woman “holding several knives and a hammer in her hands while standing in the middle of the street.” The report says officers ordered her several times to drop the knife and that she did not. The report says the woman “began swinging the knife” at the officer. Video clips that have emerged show the woman swinging her right hand with the knife by her waist. She also is seen holding something in her left hand, but that item is unclear from the video.
The video shows Nettles eight to 10 feet from the officer and moving toward him. The officer has his hands extended, pointing his gun at her. Other officers are close by, some with their hands on holstered weapons. Onlookers shout at her to drop the knife. A video posted by WUSA-TV shows Nettles staggering after she is shot and finally collapsing as an officer and a woman rush to her and knock items out of her hands.
Boggan said Nettles was combative as police and paramedics restrained her to a stretcher and put her in an ambulance. A police spokesman said that several knives and a hammer were recovered at the scene.
The shooting and the video add to the ongoing debate over the police’s use of deadly force and how officers deal with people who appear as if they might be mentally ill or under the influence of drugs, demonstrating unpredictable behavior and forcing quick action by officers. In this case, officials noted that a large crowd had gathered and that Nettles could have been a danger to herself, police, firefighters and bystanders.
“With a knife, it becomes a really dangerous situation because somebody can stab the officer quickly, or throw the knife,” said Philip Stinson, associate professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University. Stinson, who watched a video of the confrontation, said: “It seems the officer was restrained and there was only one shot. It appears the officer was justified.”
Stinson said officers develop “tunnel vision” to focus on the threat as other officers assess the surroundings — in this case, people screaming at the woman to surrender, bystanders recording, firefighters putting out a fire and children standing nearby.
“You can’t multi-task when you’re holding someone at gunpoint,” Stinson said. “I don’t know if anything could’ve been done to restrain her. She wasn’t in a mood to negotiate.”
But, Stinson said, Nettles “wasn’t lunging,” which could invite questions as to whether “less lethal force could’ve been used.... Those are fair questions.”
William Terrill, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, said these cases “are always tough calls.” He said officers are “universally trained” to act with deadly force if a suspect has a knife and is in within 25 feet.
But he said context is important in determining whether an officer’s actions are equal to the threat. “He must protect himself and everyone else around him,” Terrill said. “It’s a balancing act.”
Burton, the chairman of the D.C. Police Union, said the shooting could have been avoided had Nettles complied with the officer’s orders. “The officer had the absolute right to defend himself and the people around him,” Burton said. “When an officer tells you to do something, do it, particularly when there’s a weapon involved. Drop the knife and comply with the instructions.”
In a text message Sunday, Angelenia Nettles, 48, said her daughter was badly injured and “what I need now is a prayer.”
Angelenia Nettles said she was too distraught to talk. Other relatives returned Sunday afternoon to the burned house on Clay Terrace to salvage belongings but declined to speak with reporters. Some items burned in the fire, including a charred mattress, were strewn about a small plot of grass in the front.
Gwendolyn Crump, the D.C. police department’s chief spokeswoman, said Sunday night that Nettles was charged with assault on a police officer, assault with a dangerous weapon and arson.A lot went wrong before we sat down on those orange stools and delivered our speech and product to the crowd. To start, the demographic of the crowd was not known, particularly because our speech was mis-titled on the event handout. Second, there was barely enough room for two of us on stage. Third, there was no projector tech for our slide presentation. To top it off the second microphone was creating bad feedback and the crowd was baking in direct sunlight. As I learned, public speaking at big events may not always be smooth.
Take time to deliberate but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking
and go in.
—Andrew Jackson
It was high noon in San Diego, the sun was blazing, and there was no shade over the audience. The speaker before us was struggling to keep a crowd. We had to do something.
The stage tent was casting a shadow, so we rounded up folks to pull the stage back and move all the chairs foward underneath the shadow. We had cold water bottles at our trade show tent, so we lined the front of the stage with bottles in hopes to attract passer byers and keep people around. We knocked the podium off the stage to the side and set bar stools from our booth on the stage instead. We took a third bar stool and turned it into a laptop stand facing the audience. By the time we got introduced, everything seemed good, until the second mic was deemed unusable.
This was my first time speaking at a big public event.
It was much different than the typical organized speech when you know your audience and can prepare your topic. We had 1 hour to entertain people in the blazing sun, which is a lot to ask. We had to improvise a lot.
When the second microphone wasn't usable, rather than playing with it and potentially losing the crowd we gathered, we went one mic between the both of us. While we introduced one another we had the people in front pass the cold waters to those behind them. In an open public event, people can just get up and leave; the water kept them around.
Immediately, I knew the crowd wasn't fit for what we prepared.
As you can see in the image, all there is behind us is Petco Park. We did not have the safety blanket of screens or projectors. We only had ourselves and the crowd, and this needed to last for an hour. I immediately start engaging with the crowd, asking: "Who here has a website? Let's see a raise of hands?" But there was little response from them. "Come on, let's see."
They started raising hands, and I attacked.
I picked on the poor girl to the left, and she talked uncomfortably, so I moved to the right, getting feedback from everyone and listening to their woes they have with their current websites. This was perfect and lets us segway into parts of our speech that were relevant. It also allowed me to pass the mic and say, "let's get a response from Andy".
Synergy hit, and the crowd was engaging with us.
This lasted for roughly 25 minutes before I could feel us losing the crowd. The idea going into the speech was to not pitch our product hard, but rather to be a valuable resource to the crowd as experts on a range of topics and send them to our booth afterwards. The crowd was done with us being experts. They wanted to know about the product on our shirts. Right about this time, someone in the audience asked about the difference between a competitor and our product. That set it off, and everyone from there on out started asking questions about our product.
The crowd took the lead.
At one point, I handed the mic out to someone in the crowd to talk about their experience with our product. I had asked this person to visit the night before over a text message. Having him there was key. The Q&A went great for 20 minutes before the San Diego sun started to win. We ended our session on a high note about 15 minutes short.
Key takeaways from speaking at a big public event:
This event had roughly 3-4000 people, attendance to talks were unknown, and the audience type was unknown. Here's what to do if you find yourself in that position.
Prepare to not be prepared. You will have to improvise
When you don't know who has signed up, be ready to talk to the crowd in your opening. This is a great way to ease the nervess. Have your notes but be loose and flexible. Put points on them to use to spark topics during dead points.
Use the crowd
Directly engage the crowd. If they are there for your topic, then their feedback or response will be relevant. Doing this will help them stay engaged and give you a course to use to chart your speech. Give out something.
Hand out a branded product (t-shirts, lanyards, notebooks, etc.). You can reward the crowd members that engage by offering a t-shirt for any question. Doing this lets you limit your questions to say 10 t-shirts and helps keep you on track. Stay calm and talk slow As always, talk slowly and pause between sentences. Let people hear what you are saying and take it in. Speaking this way also helps extend your speech longer. Make them laugh A Little humor goes a long way. Don't over due it; keep the jokes broad ranged. Inside jokes will leave the crowd confused.
In the end, speaking isn't a scripted performance: It's an exercise in improvisation. Enjoy it!
Almost Dropped my Water Bottle by Randy Apuzzo At one point I wanted to put my water bottle down. The angled podium was a bad idea, you can see me using my leg to shift my weight to recuperate as I snatch it from falling. Potentially an embarrassing moment.
We had field workers by Randy Apuzzo Having other team members in the crowd really made a difference. As they asked question, Morgan was on the ball to assist them with material.
Crowd Participator by Randy Apuzzo Having a person in the crowd who knew the product was key. I wish I could have said I planned it that way! If you can pull this off naturally, do it. Otherwise careful it do not look like a set, or it could become a big disaster.
Wind blowing by Randy Apuzzo You can see a good gust of wind blowing my hair. If you are outside, consider the wind will blow away your note card or just your hair in your face if you are long haired like myself. I had to put my glasses up to hold my hair back, which to me doesn't feel very professional.Iji
Genre: Action/Adventure
Content: Animated violence, mild language, themes of war and death
Original release: 2008
Download Version 1.7 hotfix (1 May 2017)
Download high-quality soundtrack for 1.7 (optional) (13 March 2017)
NOTE: These songs replace the MP3s included with the game, and should thus be placed in the "music" subfolder.
Quick 1.7 troubleshooting:
-If you experience problems with the sound, try changing the sample rate in the Speakers settings in Windows.
-If you get a "Failed to load the game data" error, try closing the Print Spooler process in Windows.
Download Version 1.6 (11 March 2010)
Chinese version 1.6 中文版
Korean version 1.6 한국어 - Translation by Team Waldo
Download high-quality soundtrack for 1.6 (optional) (10 October 2008)
NOTE: These songs replace the MP3s included with the game, and should thus be placed in the "music" subfolder.
Watch trailer
Iji is an action-packed strategic platform shooter with a detailed story, large levels with multiple paths, powerful bosses and lots of secrets. There are alternate gameplay events, dialogues and scenes depending on what you do, a wealth of extras and bonus features, and seven stats to upgrade through a leveling system. Iji herself has superhuman strength and abilities, and can crack Nanotechnology, use her enemies' most devastating weapons against them, and be a pacifist or a killer - the story adapts to how you play. Soundtrack by Chris Geehan and Dan Byrne McCullhough, songs also by Tom Mauritzon and Captain Goodnight (and LifeForce, but their song was not originally recorded for Iji).
Iji version 1.6 will remain available for download no matter how many other versions are made. However it was made in an older version of Game Maker, and may have trouble running on modern graphics cards. If you experience slowdown, try turning "Gamma effects" off and setting "Special effects" to Low in the main menu options.
Back to the games menuIt didn’t take long for the Falcons to come under pressure and fire for their performance in 2017. The offense was under scrutiny for their tame showing against Chicago. With only two explosive plays coming from a coverage bust and Austin Hooper’s stiff-arm, everything felt lackluster. Two big plays weren’t going to cut it against Green Bay’s high-powered offense.
The running game was ineffective against Chicago, but Steve Sarkisian’s play calling felt far too conservative. There wasn’t much variety behind his decisions either. It was time to loosen things up and remember what made this offense a dominant unit. That originates from abusing opposing defenses with play action. No team ran more play action than the Falcons did last season. Averaging over 10 yards per play on those snaps provides an easy explanation for their reliance on it. Sarkisian followed that route and called a superb game.
I always rewatch the previous Falcons game and post GIFs on Twitter of the most impressive and disappointing plays. One specific player, positional group, or topic is excluded from the film review to be saved for this piece. Here are four successful play action plays that resulted in big gains.
First quarter: 2nd and 2 at ATL 44
Ryan will get Julio Jones involved early following a relatively subdued performance. Who can forget his 300-yard game against Carolina, after only catching one pass against New Orleans last season? It wasn’t surprising to see Jones make two big plays on the first drive. Jones has a distinct advantage over Green Bay’s smaller cornerbacks. With his ability to physically overwhelm corners at the line of scrimmage and run past them with his blistering speed, Jones is a matchup nightmare. Damarious Randall doesn’t stand a chance on this play.
As for the design, Sarkisian decided to use the yankee concept. This is a two-receiver deep crossing combo, which has both wide receivers running different routes. Since this is a long developing play, it can only be truly effective when using play action. That gives the quarterback enough time to diagnose everything, along with confusing the linebackers and putting the free safety in a precarious situation. Deploying your fastest wide receivers increases the chances of generating a big play.
Jones and Taylor Gabriel is the fastest receiving combination on the Falcons roster. While Gabriel is running a deep post over the top, Jones goes under on the deep over route. Ha Ha Clinton-Dix’s deep positioning allows Jones to be the primary target. Shanahan found great success using this concept last season. With play action being an integral part of the Falcons’ offense, this play should be used on a weekly basis.
First quarter: 1st and 10 at ATL 13
There are some similarities from the previous play. Atlanta loves using crossing routes on play action. Instead of Jones, Mohamed Sanu is crossing behind the linebackers. Whenever Jones is streaking downfield, he will immediately command the safety’s attention. That creates acres of spaces in the middle of the field. Clinton-Dix faces a lose-lose scenario, as he can’t betray his assignment to cover Sanu. He doesn’t want to let Jones have a one on one matchup. Green Bay doesn’t have the talent to trust their corners against premier wide receivers in man coverage.
With the play action fake, no linebacker picks up Sanu. This is a high percentage play design to give the Falcons some breathing room. It sparked a ten play, 87-yard drive. To have a player like Jones creates countless possibilities for other players to get involved. Sanu benefits on this occasion. The versatile wide receiver had one of his best performances as a Falcon. It took some time, but he seems to have found his niche in the offense. By understanding zone coverage schemes and having reliable hands, Sanu is a valuable piece to the Falcons’ aerial attack.
Second quarter: 2nd and 5 at GB 21
With the efficient running game overwhelming Green Bay’s front seven, Sarkisian continued to utilize play action fakes. One of the best things about Shanahan’s philosophy is his knack for ruthlessly attacking an opposing defense’s flaw. If he recognizes a mismatch, it will be targeted for the entire game. Green Bay’s linebackers already showed signs of looking lost in the first quarter. That allowed Ryan the opportunity to make easy intermediate throws, which wasn’t the case against Chicago.
Justin Hardy runs a solid route for the 19-yard completion. The third-year wide receiver showed nice footwork to create separation. With both linebackers taken out, Ryan gets one of his underrated weapons involved. The personnel alignment is fascinating on this play. Sarkisian uses Derrick Coleman on the outside, which brings back fond memories of Patrick DiMarco lining up outside.
It may seem insignificant, but full backs can cause disruption when being used as a wide receiver. They can be utilized on creative designs to spring their teammate free for a big play. While Coleman didn’t affect the play, it’s promising to see Sarkisian employ his starting full back in a pass catching role. Let’s also praise Jake Matthews for his crushing block on Dean Lowry.
Second Quarter: 2nd and 9 at ATL 45
Sarkisian decided to alter this play. After finding earlier success with |
62mm filter ring does not rotate during operation, for easier use of circular polarizers or other filters that require specific positioning.
The 50mm f/1.2 is available in Canon EF-M, Fujifilm X, Micro Four Thirds, and Sony E mounts, and in black or silver finishes for all mount types except EF-M.
21mm f/1.4
Contrasting the portrait-length perspective of the first lens, this 21mm f/1.4 is a standard wide-angle lens offering an equivalent focal length of 31.5mm to 42mm, depending on mount choice. The bright f/1.4 maximum aperture is well suited to working in a wide variety of lighting conditions and also offers selective focus control to emphasize specific subjects in the frame. A manual focus design is employed here again, along with an internal focus system and non-rotating 58mm front filter mount to both maintain the overall length of the lens during use and prevent filters from rotating when focusing. One extra-low dispersion element and three aspherical elements are incorporated into the optical design to limit color fringing and various aberrations in order to achieve greater sharpness and clarity. The Ultra Multi-Coating has been applied to all elements in this lens, too, and a rounded nine-blade diaphragm contributes to smooth out-of-focus areas when using selective focus techniques.
Like the 50mm f/1.2, the 21mm f/1.4 is available in Canon EF-M, Fujifilm X, Micro Four Thirds, and Sony E mounts, and in black or silver for all mounts except EF-M.Inky and perky: But poor tattooed pigs have animal rights campaigners sizzling in anger
Pigs can expect to be branded, but one farm has turned the process into an art form, decorating them from head to toe with tattoos.
Crowds are flocking to Art Farm China in Yang Zhen, Beijing, where Belgian artist Wim Delvoye displays his colourful sows and boars.
The animals are still on display to farm visitors while they are anaesthetised and decorated with designs by Wim and his co-artists.
Pigs at China's Art Farm in Beijing where Wim Delvoye's team of tattooists gives each of them an intricate identity
Artist Wim Delvoye tattoos one of the the pigs which is clearly seen sporting Louis Vuitton logos
One super-trendy porker even features a Louis Vuitton logo – which presumably quickens the process on the handbag production line. Others sport tattoos inspired by patterns found on Russian prison inmates.
But animal rights campaigners complain that the pigs are suffering unnecessarily and are being abused for improper commercial gain.
They also strongly object to a controversial 'adopt a pig' scheme that allows sponsors to have an animal stuffed, get a tattooed hide to hang on a wall, or even have it stretched over canvas.
Pictures, however, seemingly show the pigs enjoying the high life at the farm as they roll in mud and snuffle in the undergrowth in the woods.
Visitors get to stroke the pigs - and get a close-up of Wim and his team's colourful designs - as they snooze the day away.
Up to three tattooists apply a tattoo at the same time to ensure they get plenty of work done while the pig is under anaesthetic.
Some of the pigs seem to be enjoying the high life as they snuffle in the undergrowth close to the farm
Two piglets at the farm already look the part after Wim Delvoye has applied his 'artistic' touches
Each pig is assigned a carer whose job it is to moisturise the skin, keeping the tattoo in good condition.
Wim, 46, from Gent, Belgium, said: 'Instead of producing art I wanted to harvest it.As I see you hysterically banging on our neighbors’ doors, telling strangers that earlier today you saw Lena Dunham eating a sauced-up egg roll on the subway, I think, friend, you’ve changed. We can safely say this has passed through the phases of girl crush, fan, fervent supporter, unsolicited bodyguard applicant, fragrance imaginer, fan again (when you were traveling and pretty busy), and has now crossed the threshold into unhealthy addiction. And please don’t act like it affects just you.
For the past month I’ve seen you counting down the days until you can take your first Season 2 swig of that Brooklyn jungle juice. A kind of Girls Advent Calendar, which you made and sold on etsy. You aren’t the friend I know. The friend who used to meet me at a restaurant for free bread rolls after my unsuccessful job interview and said, “Ah, they’re idiots. Let’s say we’ll egg their office but don’t actually.”
Now it seems like you never hang out. When I asked you to come tipsy ice skating with me and Jessica in the park, you said you couldn’t because you had to work. But as I was leaving, I saw you cutting out and coloring paper dolls that looked like Lena Dunham and Jemima Kirke. You were making motions with them and saying in a British accent, “No, Hannah, boys don’t like to be spanked. -But what about Adam? -Adam’s a freak and needs to learn his manners; he deserves to be spanked. Also, my pants are very billowy; very light and floofy.”
And what about the time you talked like Shoshanna for a week and kept telling me you’re “a combination of Samantha and the bubbles from an orange Fanta”? And I was like, this makes no sense. Then you asked me if what I wrote in my journal about you was true. I said, Oh my God, what? You said, “You know, the Girls episode where Charlie and Ray read Hannah’s journal entry about Marnie? Hey, let’s paint a wall with a bunch of signs that say ‘sorry.’” At which point I crawled under the sofa and got in the fetal position, gently rocking until I cried myself to sleep.
Then you asked me if I wanted to have a spontaneous, late-night Robyn dance party, and I said yes.
This isn’t the first time, either. How many Freaks and Geeks marathons have you competed in? Five? After the first one, yeah, congratulations are in order. After the second one, I don’t get upset if you wear a medal the day afterward. With the third, it’s starting to get a little old. By number five, it’s like, yes, we get it; and we hope the ice you’re applying to your hamstring helps you recover.
There are additional problems. You have started barging in on me when I’m peeing so we can talk, like they do on the show. This is not OK. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a dude.
You repeatedly watched the scene from Tiny Furniture where Lena gets fucked doggy-style inside a tube by some weirdo. You went into a long thing about how it’s not true to your own experience, but it’s true in a broader metaphysical way. I agreed and was like, fine, now please let’s finish this karaoke duet. People are staring at us.
You’ve been staying up all night, reading think-pieces online about what it all means. Why are they all white? Why are they all the daughters of other celebrities? Why does Adam go from being a twisted freak to one of the most endearing, awesome characters on TV? Hard to say, but maybe it has to do with doing push-ups or Oberlin.
Yes, I peeked over your shoulder when you were eating cereal one morning and saw you at your laptop, looking up where Oberlin College is on Google Maps. Newsflash, idiot: I think it’s in Ohio? You even went into streetview and were like, this is the fountain where Lena made her famous stripping youtube video; this is where it all started. I put down my orange juice, got real quiet, and moonwalked out of the room.
So yeah, I’ll watch the next season with you. I’ll even make popcorn and bring my freakishly warm blanket that once lit someone’s chest on fire (I bought it in Taos and it was charmed by an Ancient Healer). But please just chill out about things.There were rumours recently about a live action version of Ghibli’s Kiki’s Delivery Service. What’s more, these reports claimed that Takashi Shimizu, the horror film director who brought us nightmare-inducing classics like The Grudge, would be sitting at the helm of the project. A horror take on the story of a cute 13-year-old witch? It seemed too good to be true! Well, it was a sad day when Studio Ghibli released an official statement quashing the salacious rumours, saying, “We have no involvement in the matter.”
But live action versions of Ghibli films aren’t just the stuff of dreams; Princess Mononoke has a stage version that just premiered in London and is coming to Japan in a matter of days! What we would give to meet just one of our favourite Ghibli heroines in person! Inspired by all this talk of adaptations, we took a look at some of the Ghibli films we thought deserved to exist in the real world.
Ponyo
We’d love to see this cute little fish-girl come to life. Maybe in an Ang Lee-Life-of-Pi-CGI-enhanced-style blockbuster. Boy meets fish; fish turns into human/fish/thing; weird plot involving an old people’s home and a possessive wizard; sounds like a classic to us!
Spirited Away
Joking aside, just thinking about Chihiro’s fantasy world in a Cirque-du-Soleil-type stage adaptation is enough to make us swoon. Complete with a handsome dragon. This needs to be done. Enough said.
My Neighbor Totoro
Sweet Totoro was born to be in a pantomime. But we’d prefer to see the CGI team from the Hulk movie get onto a life-like rendering of our furry friend. As the antithesis to the angry Hulk in a big city, a gentle Totoro exploring the countryside of Japan is something we would pay to see. And another vote for Ang Lee.
Pom Poko
If Cats the musical had decades of success, then there’s no stopping this band of Japanese raccoon dogs from busting out a few musical numbers of their own on Broadway or the West End. Although shape-shifting on stage may be one to work out…
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
The high-speed gliding! The jungle creatures! The warrior battles and dramatic rescues! This classic is crying out for a Star-Wars-prequels-style update. Someone keep Angelina Jolie away from this one!
Howl’s Moving Castle
This one has Tim Burton all over it. With Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (of course) in the roles of Howl and Sophie. Yes please. Pretty, pretty please!
Now we feel a lot better. With so many great possibilities and compelling storylines to choose from, we’re convinced it will only be a matter of time before we get some live-action Ghibli in the future. We won’t go crying into our freshly baked Kiki pot pie just yet…
Sources: Yahoo! Japan News, Jin Anime Movie GuideWelcome to my ~/bin
Length: 3 hours
Description
Class content varies, but will include at least some of the following:
dump, pmud : lightweight keyed databases
, : lightweight keyed databases getstore : copy a web page to a local file
: copy a web page to a local file googles : what google searches are leading people to my web site?
: what google searches are leading people to my web site? mailhold : challenge-response for incoming email
: challenge-response for incoming email makethumbnails : build image thumbnail pages
: build image thumbnail pages mark : manage collections of files
: manage collections of files mypsmerge, mypstrim, mypsup2 : PostScript formatting and conversion
,, : PostScript formatting and conversion print : replacement printer daemon
: replacement printer daemon ticker : watch files grow
: watch files grow unrecv : make email archive directories smaller
: make email archive directories smaller watcher : watch a collection of web pages and report whenever one changes
runN
Outline
I tried something new in this class. Instead of running through the slides in a pre-determined order, I made up a master menu of class sections, and had the audience members raise their hands to express interest in each section. Then I tried to do the sections more or less in order by what was considered interesting.
Master Menu
But it also works to read the slides in order, starting from slide #1, in which case what you will see is:
Source code
Since the point of the class is to discuss my (frequently rather crappy) source code, attendees got a handout with the complete source code under discussion.
Browse complete source code directory
Download.tgz file (15kb).zip file (21 kb)
Return to: Universe of Discourse main page | Perl Paraphernalia | Other Classes and Talks
mjd-perl-yak+@plover.comA screenshot of SheriffRoscoe.com, a site that maps out all the properties up for Sheriff's Sale in Philadelphia.
Like many first-time homebuyers, Alex Roscoe and his wife began their search by bargain-hunting.
"We're priced out of stuff already so we were trying to see if we can find a deal somewhere," 29-year-old Roscoe said. "And initially the Philadelphia sheriff's sale seemed like an interesting avenue to pursue."
The Drexel University alum started combing through the properties listed for sheriff's sale online, but he found searching for a low-priced home on the website arduous.
"Philadelphia is a very big city, so it is hard to tell where everything is located from their list," he said.
Instead of allowing the interface to deter him, Roscoe scraped the sheriff sale data and built his own website, SheriffRoscoe.com.
"I had to develop a script that went through each page [of the Philadelphia Sheriff's Office website]," he said.
The site displays the more than 3,000 properties set for the auction block across a searchable map. Parcels are color-coded to indicate whether the owner fell behind on taxes or mortgage payments. Click on a specific marker and essential information, like the scheduled auction date, opening bid, previous purchase price and market value, appear.
A research tab links out to other government sites so prospective buyers can find out if the real estate is involved in litigation or what potential property taxes they would pay as the new owner.
"When you are looking for homes, taxes could play a big part in it," Roscoe said. "Someone could eliminate a property based off that."
Roscoe spent nearly 40 hours developing the site, which earned him a prize at Philly Codefest.
"It is a cool and useful visualization on top of the relatively poor interface that was available," said Chris Alfano, a Code for Philly co-captain and one of the Philly Codefest judges who evaluated Roscoe's project.
Alfano says SheriffRoscoe.com could also help the city unload tax-delinquent properties.
"Through increased visibility and accessibility, more people become aware of these sales, which could lead to increased revenue for the city," Alfano said.
While one real estate expert admits the site takes some of the mystery out of buying properties at sheriff's sales, he cautions that acquiring a property through this channel can be complicated.
"A sheriff's sale auction is a process that the average investor, let alone the first-time investor, doesn't usually know," said Joe Herzog, a realtor with Coldwell Banker Preferred. "This is an even more valuable tool for an experienced investor....You don't have to read through 100 properties and find the zip codes that you like. It would streamline the research process."
Regardless of the steps required to purchase at auction, Herzog sees the site as a win.
"It is one less barrier to entry," he said.
And the Philadelphia Sheriff's Department sees the potential in showcasing properties listed for sale on a map.
"Something like this is in our future," said Joseph Blake, spokesman for Philadelphia Sheriff's Office. "We will make it uniquely our own."
But, Blake admits, there is no timeline in place for the creation and launch of its own version.
Until it is unveiled, SheriffRoscoe.Com is available to provide some clarity to a murky part of the real estate world.
Contact Alison Burdo at 610.668.5635, alison.burdo@nbcuni.com or follow @NewsBurd on Twitter.What can I say? I love to watch street fights on youtube.com and Worldstarhiphop.com. My reasons for watching street fights ranges from pure entertainment to seeing how verbal sparring can escalate to violence to just wanting to observing the level of technique used in street fighting. I like to observe how the fighters hold up their hands, if they throw technical punches or looping overhands and hooks and what happens if the fight goes to the ground. The old Gracie saying is that 70% to 80% of fights wind up on the ground.
In a clinch situation on the feet or if the fight goes to the ground, knowing basic Jiu Jitsu, wrestling, and grappling techniques like guard retention, over hooks, under hooks, and submission defense can mean the difference between walking away with a few bumps and bruises or going to the hospital with a concussion or head injury.
While watching these fights is a guilty pleasure and allows me to think through what I might have done differently in the event I am ever forced into a self-defense situation, it also highlights the dark side of humanity. I have seen unconscious men take extra punches and kicks to the head which could cause long term brain damage or even death. This makes learning and understanding basic self-defense concepts taught in Jiu JItsu on both the feet and the ground even more important for men and women of all ages.
I want to take select street fights and self-defense scenarios and show how concepts learned during the first 2 years of Jiu Jitsu could have been effectively used for both defense and offense in a street fight and self-defense situation. I am applying my thoughts from my 3-year of training and Blue Belt ranking to this series. I would like to encourage feedback, thoughts and insight from others in the comment section at the bottom of the page and/or on our Facebook page. I am hoping this series will help further educate people on the effectiveness and importance of Jiu JItsu and grappling in the streets and maybe help people who might one day find themselves in a similar situation.
In this first edition, I would like to breakdown a quick 2 minute street fight between 2 teenagers that I found on youtube.com. The fight incorporates both stand up striking and grappling where both teenagers show a lot of aggression, but very little technique. The fight takes place at an apartment complex parking lot on a black top surface which is very dangerous in the event of a knocked out opponent hitting their head on the pavement or someone getting slammed on their back or head.
The two fighters will be referred to as TT (Tank Top) and BS (Black Shirt).
http://youtu.be/yMV0E-o0Zt0
:35: BS, who is Asian, is in a Bruce Lee fight stance. Fighters step into striking range and exchange a few punches and slaps that do little damage.
:40: TT goes to clinch and grabs a head and arm and breaks down BS’s posture to possibly go for some punches from the headlock or do a head and arm throw. BS responds by also trying for a headlock of his in own in the clinch. The better option for BS would be to grab a body lock and get behind TT for a takedown and to block the head and arm throw.
Here is Stephen Kesting demonstrating a very practical defense for a headlock.
:50: TT and BS are battling in the clinch when TT decides to let go of the headlock, but keeps his right arm over and around BS’s neck and puts his left arm and hand between BS’s legs and lifts and spins BS for the take down. While being taken down, BS switches his right arm position into a guillotine position around TT’s head and left arm. They land hard on the ground with TT on top in a mount like position, but BS has a potential guillotine grips.
The risk of TT attempting this takedown while being held in a guillotine is that he can be DDTed to the ground and have his neck broken. TT could have done a better job to cut the corner with his right ear touching BB’s back on the takedown to drive BS down to his left side rather than drive him directly backwards. This would have prevented BS from getting his arms in position for the guillotine grips and reduced the risk of TT hitting his head on the pavement.
BS has potential for a guillotine, but is holding both TT’s head and left arm and doesn’t have a guard. There is a brief moment when they hit the ground, where there was space for him to slip his left knee across TT’s waist line and pull TT into his guard, but that didn’t happen.
:55: TT is in position to get full mount on BS, but BS has an under hook with his left arm and has his right arm wrapped around TT’s head and left arm to keep TT’s posture broken down to prevent a series of blows from coming down on him. TT attempts a few blows to BS’s head with his free right arm to soften up BS’s grips. Instead, he should have worked to maintain mount by crossing his feet underneath BS’s butt, base out his left arm to the side and slide his free right forearm underneath BS’s throat and press down to soften up BS’s grips on him.
1:10: TT has mount, but his posture is broken down. TT decides to stand up with BS still holding an under hook with his left arm and his right arm draped over TT’s head and left arm. TT then violently slams BS back to the ground. This could have caused serious damage to the both of them with BS hitting the back of his head on the pavement and TT DDTing himself to the ground since BS has the guillotine like control of his head. Luckily, BS had his chin tucked in to prevent the back of his head from slamming on the pavement. TT’s head might have hit the pavement since he then gets swept by BS. When TT stood up to go for the slam, BS had the chance to place his feet on the ground and get his hips back to prevent the slam and get back to his feet which would be a much better position than potentially landing back in bottom mount or getting knocked out from the slam.
1:15: After TT’s slam, BS maintained his under hook and guillotine like arm positions and somehow landed in a loose open guard with TT’s posture broken down. TT might of hit his head on the ground and been stunned. BS uses this chance to recover his guard like position and sweep TT using his guard and his under hook and guillotine grip to land in full mount.
1:20: BS is now in full mount and landing blows from the mount on TT, while TT is attempting to cover up and defend the strikes. TT could have bridged forward to break BS’s posture and then clinched BS’s arms and head to keep his posture broken down and prevent significant blows from landing on him. Instead, TT’s instincts take over and he turns belly down to expose his neck to BS.
1:25: BS takes advantage of this opening to cinch a rear naked choke on TT, but he does not secure hooks with his legs or drop TT to the choking side with his hooks to fully secure him. At this point, TT’s is screaming “Hey, let me out.” TT shouldn’t of turned belly down and when he did, he should have tucked his chin and used his arms and hands to fend off the rear naked choke defense.
At this point in the fight, TT has verbally tapped out. However, in a real life scenario, there is no tapping on the streets. If BB lets go of the choke, TT can then quickly recover and resume fighting. It is important for BB to get the hooks and be in a position where if he chooses to let go, he can quickly assume a dominant top position over TT to prevent any cheap shots. For TT, his lack of Jiu Jitsu and grappling skills might have cost him his life or long-term health issues. Unfortunately, there have been cases of people choked to death in street fights or people who have suffered long-term brain damage from chokes being held too long. Learning basic choke defense concepts can help prevent getting trapped in a chokehold.
1:35: Once the choke was cinched, there was still time for TT defend against the choke or alleviate pressure by using his hands to pull down on BS’s arm across his throat. Since BS did not have his head positioned correctly against the backside of TT’s head or have legs hooked in place, TT was able to turn in to the choke and gain top side control position.
1:40: TT has assumed top side control, but is not able to do much with the position. While most BJJ practitioners and wrestlers are conditioned to go multiple 5-minute rounds, the average person who isn’t accustomed to hand-to-hand combat will be exhausted from an adrenaline dump, nerves, and not having the cardio training to punch and grapple for over a minute. Additionally, TT might have been dazed from DDTing himself to the ground and nearly getting choked out.
1:45: BS quickly escapes side control by turning into TT and stands up while holding TT’s head and left arm in an almost inverted guillotine position. He then proceeds to just drop all his weight back on TT to slam him. TT’s head and back hit the cold pavement very violently and he is knocked out cold. BS lands 3 unnecessary shots to the skull of the unconscious TT, which is both wrong and dangerous. The slam combined with the blows could have killed him.
In the final seconds of the fight, TT made two crucial mistakes most grapplers would not make in the same situation. In side control, TT should have gotten chest-on-chest and grabbed a head and arm cross face grip on BS to secure the position. Playing loose in a dominant side control position, allowed BS to escape and get to his feet. Also, TT seemed to try to hold on to a grip that wasn’t there as BS was escaping side control and standing up. Instead of holding on to this grip, TT should have gotten his hips out and squared up to face BS rather than stay in a position to get slammed.
Conclusion: This fight highlights just how important basic Jiu Jitsu and grappling fundamentals can be in a street fight or self-defense situation. Knowing how to stay calm, escape mount, defend chokes, break down posture, hit sweeps, and retain or recover positions doesn’t sound very glamorous or sexy. However, these basic skills that you can learn in your first 2 years of training can mean the difference between walking away from a self-defense situation with a few bumps and bruises or going to the hospital with serious injuries.
I welcome any feedback and comments. Please do not post racially insensitive comments. They are not welcomed on this site.Up to 150 people will wear ankle tags to test if they flout their drinking ban, under 12-month trial launched by London mayor
Binge drinkers who commit minor crimes will be prevented from drinking for set periods using ankle tags that measure whether they are consuming alcohol, under a scheme to be trialled in London.
The year-long test, covering four parts of south London, will be the first in which offenders are compulsorily fitted with the tags, which measure alcohol levels in perspiration and transmit the readings to a base station in the person's home. If alcohol is detected, an alert is sent to probation officers. Breaches of the order, or tampering with the tags, can bring prison sentences.
Northamptonshire police launched a voluntary scheme using the same tags in May, but only three people have been fitted with them. The London trial is expected to involve up to 150 offenders, who will be banned from drinking alcohol for 120 days.
The "sobriety tag" scheme was launched by the city's mayor, Boris Johnson, who visited the magistrates court in Croydon, one of the areas to test the technology, along with Lambeth, Southwark and Sutton.
He said: "Alcohol-fuelled criminal behaviour is a real scourge on our high streets, deterring law-abiding citizens from enjoying our great city, especially at night, placing massive strain on frontline services, whilst costing businesses and the taxpayer billions of pounds.
"This is an approach that has seen impressive results in the US, steering binge drinkers away from repeated criminal behaviour, and I am pleased we can now launch a pilot scheme in London."
The tags, somewhat bulkier than their longer established equivalents that monitor whereabouts to enforce compliance of nighttime curfews and the like, are made by Alcohol Monitoring Systems, a Colorado-based company whose technology has been used for more than a decade in the US.
Under a 2012 law courts are able to order offenders to abstain from alcohol for up to 120 days. A guidance booklet about the use of the tags produced by the mayor's office for policing and crime suggests suggest offences such as drink-driving, resisting arrest, common assault and criminal damage as suitable for the scheme, on the proviso that alcohol played a role in the crime. Offences related to domestic violence are excluded.
Probation officers will screen possible participants, and the trial also excludes anyone dependent on alcohol, who needs treatment and for whom a sudden, 120-day abstinence period would be unrealistic. Those on the programme will also be offered advice and treatment over their alcohol use.
Johnson has closely modelled the scheme on the US experience, where the tags are seen as a success. He sought advice from Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, who was formerly a White House drugs policy adviser. Such round-the-clock monitoring schemes had had "a transformative effect on alcohol-fuelled crime in the US", Humphreys said in a statement released by the mayor's office.
After someone has a tag fitted they will be required to be at home at certain times of the day, usually twice, so the base station can read alcohol measurements from the tag. If no readings are received for 48 hours this is seen as a breach of the order. Offenders will be given a range of guidelines, including being careful not to spray perfumes containing alcohol on the tag or to immerse it in water – baths and swimming are prohibited during the monitoring period with only showers allowed. Spray tans are similarly proscribed.
The charity Alcohol Concern welcomed the scheme but said it must be used in conjunction with effective treatment and other measures. The group's chief executive, Jackie Ballard, said: "About half of all crime is alcohol-related so it makes sense to get to the heart of the problem by tackling drinking amongst offenders. The alcohol detection tag is a good idea and worth trying, but to work effectively it's important that people are given support and access to treatment to truly help them tackle their drinking problems.
"While we welcome local areas taking initiative, it's vital the national government take action through introducing minimum unit pricing which is shown to work in other countries through cutting crime and saving lives."General Atomics – Aeronautical Systems Inc., Poway, California, has been awarded a $399,979,895 firm-fixed-price contract for MQ-9 Reaper production. Contractor will produce 36 MQ-9 Reaper aircraft in the fiscal 2016 production configuration. Work will be performed at Poway, California, and is expected to be complete by Aug. 31, 2020. This award is the result of a sole-source acquisition.
Fiscal 2016 aircraft procurement funds in the amount of $399,979,895 are being obligated at the time of award.
The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity (FA8620-15-G-4040 0001).
The Air Force’s FY-17 budget documents released in February 2016 show the service planned to buy 33 Reapers in FY-16 and 24 in FY-17. Inside Defense reported last month the Air Force believes the 350 Reapers in its inventory, as programmed in the FY-17 budget, are enough to fulfill its current program of record until follow-on capabilities are fielded.
The service is not planning to buy more MQ-9s after FY-17, the House Appropriations Committee wrote in a May 2016 report accompanying the defense portion of the FY-17 omnibus spending bill. All 350 planned Block 5 MQ-9 deliveries are expected to be complete in FY-21, Inside Defense previously reported.
A General Atomics spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday all of the aircraft under this week’s contract will be built in the Block 5 configuration, and the buy is part of the current program of record.
The Air Force said Feb. 23 it would gradually stand up MQ-9 combat lines to replace squadrons of General Atomics MQ-1 Predators as they retire through the end of the year. Reapers are larger, faster and offer a 4,000-pound payload capacity compared to the Predator’s 200-pound payload, with high-definition sensors, among other capabilities.
Air Combat Command will study the MQ-9’s service life until FY-19 to determine that aircraft’s retirement time line as well, Inside Defense previously reported. The service plans to add more Block 5 Reapers to the fleet until at least 2020 as overworked Block 1 aircraft are retrofitted with Block 5 avionics.
The Air Force had planned to field Block 5 MQ-9s this month, Inside Defense reported earlier this year, and a General Atomics official suggested the service should upgrade its Reapers to a more advanced version of Block 5 instead of retrofitting the fleet as it racks up additional flying hours.
Service spokesmen did not answer a request for comment by press time.
Sources: DoD; Inside DefenseMy name is Dom. This is where my flat is, in London, UK.
On the 4th of February 2013, while I was out, someone broke into my flat and stole my iPad and my MacBook Pro.
I was very fond of both of those things and I was sad that they were gone.
I phoned the police and told them what had happened and they were very sympathetic, they came and dusted for fingerprints and consoled me.
I still have no idea where my iPad is, but fortunately I had installed Hidden App on my laptop, just in case it was ever lost or stolen, so I would be able to trace it’s whereabouts. However for over a month whoever was in possession of my laptop did not connect to the internet. Until…How Chicago Reversed Its River: An Animated History
In the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world, according to historian Donald Miller. Yet its future was jeopardized by its own waste, which flowed – untreated – from the Chicago River into Lake Michigan, the city’s source of clean drinking water.
In a herculean effort to save the city from the ravages of typhoid, cholera, and other waterborne illnesses, engineer Sylvester Chesbrough suggested Chicago reverse the direction of its river away from the lake and toward the Mississippi River. It would cost millions of dollars and take years of hard work. To some, the proposal was seen as wildly impractical, a fool’s errand. To others, it was a looming environmental disaster that would doom communities downstream throughout the Illinois River Valley.
But to many, although the plan was ambitious and bold, it was the only hope for Chicago’s future.
Below is the story of how Chicago defied the odds and pulled off one of the greatest engineering feats in U.S. history.
When Sanitary District trustees and laborers broke open the last dam holding back the Chicago River, Sanitary District President William Boldenweck, who lost both of his parents to a cholera epidemic decades before, cried “Let ‘er go,” according to the Chicago Daily News, calling his remark “the nearest approach to formality of the entire occasion.”
A few days later, according to the Chicago Record, “Water that was actually blue in color and had blocks of ice of a transparent green hue floating in it…caused people who crossed bridges over the Chicago River…to stop and stare in amazement.”
St. Louis filed an injunction against the reversal on January 17. Their case eventually went to the Supreme Court, which decided in Chicago’s favor. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that the Mississippi was, indeed, foul – but the putrid waters couldn’t be blamed entirely on Chicago, since several other cities much closer to St. Louis were also discharging their waste into the river. Meanwhile, wrote Holmes, municipalities closer to Chicago were actually benefiting from the infusion of the fresh lake water into their rivers.
Holmes might have been a great jurist, but he was apparently not much of a scientist. As Libby Hill wrote in her book, The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History, two biologists from the Illinois Natural History Survey documented conditions in the summer of 1911 along the Illinois River in Morris, Illinois, approximately 60 miles southwest of Chicago. There, they found, “The water…was grayish and sloppy, with foul, privy odors distinguishable in hot weather…Putrescent masses of soft, graying, or blackish, slimy matter, loosely held together by threads of fungi… were floating down the stream.”
As reported by Michael Williams and Richard Cahan in The Lost Panoramas, the bill that created the Sanitary District included a provision to compensate downstate landowners for any damages caused by the additional water that the new canal would direct towards the Illinois Valley. But as those claims mounted, Sanitary District attorneys fought them vigorously. Most were resolved only decades later and for meager sums. As of 1919, the Sanitary District had settled merely 123 of the 272 claims filed, for a total of just $370,000 out of the $2.4 million in claims.
Meanwhile, there was still work to be done in Chicago. Although the reversal of the Chicago River was hailed as a public health and engineering triumph, the populations of several lakefront suburbs grew and continued dumping their own waste into Lake Michigan. The Sanitary District’s authority and jurisdiction expanded so that it could oversee the construction of the North Shore and Calumet-Saganashkee (or Cal-Sag) Channels.
Neighboring states along the Great Lakes, meanwhile, grew concerned about the diversion of Lake Michigan water to the Chicago River. After the Supreme Court ruled that those concerns were warranted, a series of locks were installed to help control the diversion of the fresh lake water into the river.
Although the death rate decreased in Chicago, the river continued to be an open sewer system, carrying raw human and industrial waste through the city. Since 1929, a series of treatment plants and other infrastructure projects have been constructed in order to treat the region’s wastewater |
the offices of 1923?
At client after client, I watch with horror as innocent employees are forced by business owners and managers to sit at desks across and besides one another, together, in one room. It's a nightmare. Look around. You're making that poor guy listen to his co-worker's phone call about her Tinder hookup from the night before and he's about to lose his breakfast. And what about the guy who eats the same tuna sandwich every day...with his mouth open? How many times does his co-worker sitting across from him have to stare at that stray potato chip hanging in his beard before she goes mad? Does your company's health insurance cover mental breakdowns? Or the cost to reimburse your employees for a pair of Beats just to give themselves the illusion that no one else is around them? How can this be productive?
Apparently, it's not.
At least, not according to William Belk, a process consultant who writes at Hackernoon. His firm anonymously surveyed about 2,000 employees from the software, IT, hardware, financial services, creative, marketing, automotive, architecture and manufacturing industries and found that more than half (54 percent) of those considered "high performance" find their office environment "too distracting."
Belk defines High-Performance Employees (HPE) as people who "are asked to solve the hardest problems in every company. They are the technicians, builders, designers, creatives, culture shapers, narrators and innovators. Together they erect product and industry across the globe." His research shows that the open-air office environment is killing them. You're killing them.
Sure, you created this design with the best of intentions. The idea was that instead of walling people into cubicles or offices, why not have an environment that fosters communication, collaboration and creative thinking? Who cares if the tuna guy hasn't spoken - or changed his shirt - in the eight months that he's been working for you? You say that at least there's a chance that he'll open up to his co-workers and something brilliant will happen that will take your company to new levels of profitability! That's the idea. Sorry, but it's not a great idea.
Actually, it's not the non-communicative, tuna-eating guy that Belk is worried about. He's concerned with the woman who spends her days organizing happy hour, the guy who's always chatting with his buddy about the next softball game, the people sharing funny videos or that employee who has been sniffling and sneezing all day and risks death by stoning at the hands of her fellow co-workers if she does it one more time. They are all disruptive, and high-performance employees loathe them. Belk's survey finds that 54 percent of them find their office too distracting. Hey, these people need quiet, dammit! These are geniuses at work! They have to think! And those constant quips about The Bachelor aren't helping!
So what can you do about this problem? In his article, Belk suggests "more normalized codes of conduct, thoughtfully walled space, visual partitions, alcoves, private work rooms, and vastly more sound suppression. We need space where our HPEs can engage and retreat as needed. We need fluid space with an emphasis on predictability and calm."Excerpts From Steamy Romance Novels for Parents of Young Children
The playgroup was engaged with squeaky toys in the living room. He caught her languidly peanut-buttering slices of organic stone-ground whole-wheat bread in the kitchen for snack time and said, “Why do you insist on buying organic bread? We hardly know these people.”
- - -
“I thought your parents were babysitting the kids this Saturday night.”
“I thought yours were.”
“Well, they’re not. They’re going to a movie theater to watch a Met Opera simulcast.”
“Fuck.”
- - -
Their eyes met across a landscape of wooden blocks and small cars and plastic dinosaurs that really hurt if you stepped on them at night while getting a child a sippy cup of water. He searched her face for exhaustion, and found it.
- - -
Awaiting his return from Costco with the muffins for the bake sale, she picked up the magazine with an article about interior decorating for small spaces, and immediately felt better.
- - -
While Elijah was off playing at a friend’s house, he trimmed the shrubs and she mulched the flowerbeds. Later, over glasses of wine, they agreed: It had been really fun.
- - -
They fell asleep and missed the last 15 minutes of The Good Wife.
- - -
She looked up at him with a question in her eyes. “Did you get the graham crackers?”
“Yes,” he answered.
She moved toward him in her old slippers. He thought they looked like rabbits.
“The cinnamon kind or the plain kind?” she asked.
“The cinnamon kind.”
“Crap,” she said, “that’s the wrong kind.”
- - -
He knocked.
“I’m in the tub!” she cried out, throwing a Pink-Giggle-scented Kidz Fun-Size bubble bath bottle at the door. “Can’t I ever get any privacy?”
He knocked again and with sotto voce said, “I really need to take a dump, hon.”
Moments later she came out of the bathroom wet, angry, and with her underwear on backwards.Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump received a devastating blow Wednesday when a popular Mexican warlock predicted he will be defeated in the 2016 election.
Antonio Vazquez, who styles himself the “Brujo Mayor,” or “Grand Warlock,” has made annual predictions regarding both international and Mexican affairs for decades. He’s also a popular TV guest and has written several books.
During a press conference Tuesday, Vazquez was asked about Donald Trump’s future, and offered an extremely grim outlook for the businessman as he dealt out cards from the tarot deck he uses to make predictions.
“Two triangles of spades! … The man has countless problems,” he said after one card was revealed, according to a Buzzfeed translation. “And see, here is the devil himself! He will never become candidate for the Republican party. And there’s more! I’m certain that in December, Trump will fall into a nervous crisis and will probably have to be sent to a psychiatric hospital.”
Besides forecasting Trump’s failure, Vazquez also predicted that escaped drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán will be killed this year by Mexican police, that Mexico’s economy will thrive, and that World War III will not break out. He was less optimistic about Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, whom he said would tumble from power in a bloody revolution.
“I think that his reign ends this year but not without blood. There were will be strong clashes within the population,” the Grand Warlock said.
That said, Vazquez has been wrong in the past. In 2006 he predicted Germany would win the World Cup (Italy did), in 2008 he predicted the death of Fidel Castro, and in 2012 he had to shave his beard after incorrectly predicting that President Barack Obama would fail to be reelected.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.Automator is one of the easiest ways to automate tasks on your Mac, and the ability to record mouse actions makes it so just about anyone can create their own workflows within seconds. Wildfire is a Chrome extension that attempts to bring a similar feature to Chrome.
Wildfire essentially allows you to create little macros based wholly in Chrome. Tap the record button, and Wildfire records everything you do, eventually turning that into a workflow. These actions can include mouse clicks, changing tabs, creating tabs, scrolling a page, inputting data, and more. How useful this is depends entirely on how much time you spend in your browser and what you do with that time. Regardless, it’s a neat tool that might prove useful for anyone who does a lot of repetitive tasks.
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WildfireToday I found out what happened to billionaire Howard Hughes’ money when he died.
Over his lifetime, Howard Hughes’ wallet became one of the fattest of his time. It isn’t known exactly how much he was worth at the time of his death, but ten years before he died, he was forced to sell his shares in the airline company TWA. The payout? $546 million (about $3.8 billion today), estimated by some to have been about 1/3 of his net worth.
When he died, there was one major problem: Hughes had no direct descendants or immediate family, and he didn’t leave behind a will. At least, that’s what authorities were forced to conclude after an extensive search for one. After contacting his various banks, lawyers, and employees, every hotel he’d ever stayed in, posting classifieds in various newspapers, and even consulting a psychic, they were forced to accept that settling the massive estate was not going to be an easy matter.
So just where did all of that money go after his death?
Most assumed he wanted the money to go to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It was well-known that he didn’t want the money falling into the hands of any distant relatives, but without hard evidence, distant cousins and others began snatching for the cash.
A battle ensued between the temporary administrator of the Hughes estate, cousin and lawyer William Lummis, and those who ran the Medical Institute. It was a multi-state war, with Nevada, California, and Texas all claiming to be responsible for the distribution of the state, and all of which had their own laws about inheritance.
While the various parties were fighting it out, a couple of different wills surfaced, though eventually thrown out as fakes. A notable one was the three-page document that declared Melvin Dummar, a gas station attendant, was to inherit 1/16 of Hughes’ fortune. Supposedly, Dummar once picked Hughes up off the side of the road and gave him a ride to his hotel, and Hughes was so grateful that he left Dummar a huge chunk of money. In 1978, the will was thrown out as a forgery.
Next, “wives” started emerging from Hughes’ past, taking advantage of his reclusive reputation to explain why no one had heard of them before. Terry Moore, an actress, claimed to have married Hughes twice, but provided no documentation to support her assertions. She did, in fact, once live with Hughes in the 1940s, but her claim that they were not only married, but never divorced, was called into question given the fact that she married three times after her supposed marriage to Hughes. Nevertheless, she must have put forward a good argument, or at least pestered the estate managers so much that they decided to pay her just to get rid of her, because she was paid $400,000 by the estate. Later, Moore wrote a book titled Beauty and a Billionaire which made the bestseller list, likely lining her pockets a bit more.
In addition to supposed wives, an extraordinary number of Hughes’ supposed children decided to acknowledge their deceased father. One was said to be the lovechild of Hughes and Amelia Earhart—product of the Mile High Club?—even though Earhart never had any children. At least two were black, but their claims were thrown out as Hughes was known to be quite the racist.
After years of struggle trying to sort the people with legitimate claims from the fakers who were in it to try to grab some of the cash, a lot of the money did end up going to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. However, a huge chunk of it also went to various Hughes heirs. According to the Wall Street Journal, around 1000 people have benefited from the estate, including 200 of Hughes’ distant relatives. After liquefying many of his assets, they collectively were awarded about $1.5 billion.
Interestingly, the liquidation of the estate wasn’t completely finalized until 2010—34 years after his death. The last piece of the puzzle was the Summerlin residential development. In 1996, Rouse Co. (now General Growth) agreed to buy the Summerlin land from the Hughes’ estate on a 14-year repayment plan. With that, finally, the estate of Howard Hughes was laid to rest.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:
Bonus Howard Hughes Facts:
Hughes’ reported relationship with Melvin Dummar was also the subject of a movie— Melvin and Howard —in 1980. The film was nominated for several Golden Globes and Academy Awards, and Mary Steenburgen even won a few for her role as a supporting actress.
—in 1980. The film was nominated for several Golden Globes and Academy Awards, and Mary Steenburgen even won a few for her role as a supporting actress. Howard Hughes was born on Christmas Eve in 1905 into a family who ran a very successful oil tool business. He inherited that business when he turned eighteen—his parents had died the year before—and just like that, he was a millionaire. With his new wealth he decided to fund a few films rather than manage the family business.
His most popular movie was Hell’s Angels, the World War I flying epic, which fueled Hughes’ interest in aviation. It cost around $4 million to make (about $54 million today) and also grossing about $8 million. It helped catapult Howard Hughes into Hollywood fame. His name was even coupled with the likes of Ginger Rogers, Ava Gardner, and Katherine Hepburn.
, the World War I flying epic, which fueled Hughes’ interest in aviation. It cost around $4 million to make (about $54 million today) and also grossing about $8 million. It helped catapult Howard Hughes into Hollywood fame. His name was even coupled with the likes of Ginger Rogers, Ava Gardner, and Katherine Hepburn. Hughes’ true love was flying. He suffered from partial deafness and complained of a constant ringing in his ears, but when he was in the air, the ringing stopped, or at least was drowned out by other noises. Credited with many successful aviation inventions, he was also well-known for the Spruce Goose, a wooden sea plane that Hughes worked on tirelessly until its completion in 1947. The plane was only flown once, partially because Hughes began withdrawing from aviation and from society after being involved in a horrific plane crash in 1946.
, a wooden sea plane that Hughes worked on tirelessly until its completion in 1947. The plane was only flown once, partially because Hughes began withdrawing from aviation and from society after being involved in a horrific plane crash in 1946. Hughes lived a fascinating life, but the end of his life was nearly as interesting, if a bit peculiar. He gained a reputation as a recluse, conducting nearly all of his business from a suite in the Desert Hotel, which he owned. According to the few handlers who managed things for him, the fabulous Hollywood playboy started letting himself go in the last twenty-five years of his life. His hair was constantly dirty and his teeth were rotten, he became addicted to drugs, and he had an obsession with germs. When he died on April 5, 1976, he weighed just 92 pounds.
Expand for ReferencesEarlier in March singer Ariana Grande dazzled Saturday Night Live audiences by performing her latest single, "Dangerous Woman."
Image: GETTY
But it wasn't necessarily the 22-year-old's performance that had Twitter talking. It was what she was wearing, (or lack thereof) that had fans curiously commenting.
Image: Tumblr
The culprit in question: a black silk bomber jacket that was slinking off of the petite singer's slight shoulders, on the brink of falling onto the stage floor. Fans were biting their fingernails in anticipation of the fall. Would the jacket tumble onto the ground, or would Grande be able to save it? Was this performance doomed?
Of course, Grande, the professional she is, rocked it (both the performance and the total ensemble).
In reality, the look was a look, a statement as deliberate as her high C note.
An odd trend? Maybe. But remember the over-the-shoulder blazer/coat that surfaced just a few seasons ago?
This is the new that.
the "unjacket" trend
And it's sticking around. Grande joins the ranks of the "unjacket" trend, which has been spotted on other style stars from Kendall to Kylie Jenner.
Late last week, Kendall posted on her Instagram a photo of a slinky slip dress, thigh-high boots and a duster coat accessorizing the look. The coat wasn't worn, but rather hung off the young model's hands.
Kylie added her own style twist, as seen on her Snapchat story where she sported an oversized denim jacket but only around her wrists.
Go follow @kyliejenner.shoot A video posted by Kylie Jenner Snapchats (@kylizzlesnapchats) on Apr 8, 2016 at 2:04pm PDT
The look has gone international. In a new teaser video for CL, we see that the 25-year-old has equally embraced this jacket-as-shawl trend.
This totally amplifies the "I woke up like this" look. It's the "I was too busy running out the door I couldn't totally wear my clothes" look.
Though we're unsure where this trend is headed, it seems like it's destined for an Instagram post near you.
Brace yourself.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.The Ohio State Highway patrol has identified the one person has died and seven who were injured when a "Fireball" ride malfunctioned Wednesday evening at the Ohio State Fair in Columbus.
The person killed was a 18-year-old man, identified as Tyler Jarrell of Columbus.
The incident took place at 7:24 p.m. local time, which is when Ohio Highway Patrol was notified of the incident.
Among the seven injured, three are in critical condition, according to Paul Pride of the Ohio Highway Patrol. They are identified as Tamika Dunlap, 36, of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Russell Franks, 42, of Columbus, Ohio, Keziah Lewis, 19, of Columbus, Ohio, Jacob Andrews, 22, of Pataskala, Ohio, Jennifer Lambert, 18, of Columbus, Ohio and Abdihakim Hussein, 19, of Columbus, Ohio. 14-year-old boy was also injured but his name is being withheld at the request of the family.
Multiple eyewitnesses said that a row of the ride snapped off, causing several riders to plunge to the ground. A video that has gone viral on several social networking platforms confirms that a gondola snapped from the ride.
Dr. David Evans of Ohio State University's Wexner Medical Center, which received three patients from the incident, said, "Multiple passengers were ejected at high speed" from the ride, traveled at least 20-30 feet and then "crashed at a significant distance from the ride."
Wednesday marked the first day of the 11-day long fair. The ride was said to have been inspected multiple times, including by a third-party inspector. Michael Vartorella, chief ride inspector of the Amusement Ride Safety Division, told reporters Wednesday night that the ride had no red flags during inspections.
Ohio Governor John Kasich has ordered all rides and attractions at the Ohio State Fair to shut down until every ride has been inspected. Kasich called the accident, "The worst tragedy in the history of the fair."
"This particular ride was inspected multiple times, including by a third-party inspector," Kasich said.
Kasich said the fair would reopen on Thursday, but the rides would remain closed pending inspection.
Video contributed by an eyewitness shows medical personnel providing treatment to several riders.
According to Kasich, 11 rides had not passed inspection by Wednesday morning. By Wednesday evening, only four rides at the fair did not pass inspection.
Last year, the Ohio State fair welcomed 921,000 guests, which was just shy of the fair's all-time record.Has your union ever faced an employer that treated bargaining as a sham?
Such employers have no interest in reaching a compromise; they’re intent on forcing concessions or breaking the union. Often they never move off their concessionary proposals. Finally they declare impasse and implement their “last, best, and final offer.”
Winning against an employer like this requires a multi-pronged strategy. Members will need to gather public support and wage a fight that affects the employer’s production or services.
But in this article, we’ll cover another element of a winning strategy: offensive bargaining.
IN GOOD FAITH
Read More Offensive Bargaining: Negotiating Aggressively in Contract Campaigns, by David Rosenfeld, laborbooks.com No Contract, No Peace: A Legal Guide to Contract Campaigns, Strikes, and Lockouts, by Robert Schwartz, labornotes.org/store
How little can employers get away with, and still claim to be bargaining? The National Labor Relations Act doesn’t require much.
The employer and the union must meet at reasonable times and confer in good faith over the bargaining issues. But the law says this obligation to bargain “does not compel either party to agree to a proposal or require the making of a concession.”
Smart employers who want to force concessions will meet often with the union and argue over the issues—but will never move off their major demands.
Bad-faith bargaining is hard to prove. But there are methods the union can use to push an employer to expose its bad faith by violating its obligations.
One legal point helps the union: the employer is required to provide all requested information that enables the union to make an intelligent decision about the employer’s proposals.
UNEQUAL FOOTING
What is impasse? The law says, “If after sufficient good faith efforts, no agreement can be reached, the employer may declare impasse, and then implement the last offer presented to the union.”
In other places the law often refers to impasse as a point where both parties see that no further agreements can be reached.
The rules don’t treat the employer and the union equally. An employer can declare impasse and implement its final offer, cutting pay and benefits. The union can never impose its final offer.
What can the union do? It can strike, but that means union members risking their jobs and livelihoods. The employer risks nothing by declaring impasse—unless the union can prove it hasn’t met its minimal legal obligations.
Bad-faith bargaining, such as declaring impasse too soon, is an unfair labor practice, which gives workers greater legal protection in case of a strike or lockout. For example, in last year’s lockout at Allegheny Technologies, such a charge became a big point of leverage for the Steelworkers to push the company back to the table, because if the Labor Board found bad faith, ATI would be on the hook for back wages.
AVOIDING IMPASSE
Best-Selling Book Secrets of a successful organizer A step-by-step guide to building power on the job. Buy Now. »
Early in negotiations, a union must analyze the employer’s intentions. If it appears that this employer intends to force concessions, the following tactics should be applied:
The union must make sure it has many proposals still on the table when the contract expires.
Do not get into a position where the only items left are the employer’s proposed concessions and a few union monetary proposals.
The union must never simply say “no” to the employer’s proposals, no matter how bad they are.
It must always be ready to bargain over them and to offer alternatives—but these alternatives do not have to include agreeing to any concessions.
For example, suppose the employer has proposed wage cuts, claiming that companies making similar products have higher productivity.
The union could counter with a proposal to address this productivity problem by repairing and updating equipment. It could provide a detailed list of what’s wrong with each machine and what new equipment the employer should buy.
Presenting a long, detailed proposal ensures that there are always further changes the union can make—hampering the employer’s ability to reach impasse.
The union must be willing to meet, but it does not have to engage in marathon bargaining.
Just as an employer can drag bargaining out, the union can choose to discuss just one or two issues at a time, and schedule the next meeting several weeks later.
The union must take very good notes, especially on any threats or comments the employer makes when rejecting compromises.
The union must make aggressive use of the employer’s obligation to provide information.
Failure to provide information is an unfair labor practice—which limits the employer’s right to declare impasse.
REQUEST ALL THE INFO
Here’s an example: During negotiations, industrial supplier Kennametal claimed it needed concessions because of international, national, and “internal competition.” This was also stated publicly. Without the concessions, the company said, it didn’t think it could survive.
By “internal competition,” the company meant that it was considering moving the work to other facilities it owned, where the wages and benefits were lower.
Since the company was basing its demand for concessions on this “competition,” the union demanded information so that members could make an intelligent decision. The union asked for a list of all Kennametal facilities, including:
the jobs and operations performed at each facility
the types of machines used in production, and the ages of these machines
the wages employees received for each job
the benefits employees received, including but not limited to health insurance (with specifics on the plan and costs to employees), life insurance, dental, vision, holidays, vacation schedule, sickness and accident pay, long-term disability, and sick or personal days
for each unionized location, a copy of the union contract
The union also requested a list of competitors, both worldwide and in the U.S., with the same detailed information. For each product line, the union wanted to know who was the competitor and what was its price per piece.
The employer provided a little bit of the information, but failed to supply real details. Management didn’t want to give the union detailed information on wages, hours, and working conditions in its non-union plants—and did not have the information for its competitors’ facilities.
When the employer declared impasse, this failure to provide information became a big part of the union’s proof of bad-faith bargaining.
This was just one of many information requests the union made, forcing the employer to provide facts to back up every demand and statement. When the employer disciplined members for demonstrations and other actions, the union filed more Labor Board charges.
Eventually the employer backed off from the concessions.
David Cohen is a retired international representative for the United Electrical Workers.Montana Fishburne (the former porn star daughter of Laurence Fishburne - Morpheus in The Matrix) was pulled over for DUI near Ft. Lauderdale in March after rear-ending another vehicle. An open bottle of wine was found in her car.She had trouble keeping her dress from riding up above her waist during the stop. At one point, against instructions from the trooper, she climbed over the guardrail, pulled down her underwear and urinated. At 1:02 she tells the trooper (who is trying his best not to look), "I am not tripping. I am a f@$&#!g ratchet."Montana failed the roadside tests and blew a 0.18 - more than twice the legal limit and was arrested for DUI.After Montana's short porn career embarrassed her father she moved to Florida and turned to stripping and exotic dancing.Montana has prior arrests for prostitution (2009), battery and false imprisonment (2010 - when she broke into the home of boyfriend's ex and drug her into a bathroom for a beat down).Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!
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Olfert said some students on campus are afraid to voice their frustration with the changes for fear of being labelled intolerant or sexist, although he couldn’t say how many students feel that way.
“Unfortunately, my access to the fitness centre will be limited during the reserved hours on the basis of my sex. I am concerned that limited access on the basis of sex will negatively impact the university’s culture of inclusion,” the 21-year-old said.
Student Joel Olfert said the changes, spearheaded by the University of Winnipeg Students’ Association and implemented Monday, are pushing a culture of exclusion under a veil of inclusion.
New rules at the University of Winnipeg reserving the use of gym facilities exclusively for women and some members of the LGBTTQ* community are being called discriminatory.
Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 26/9/2017 (518 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/9/2017 (518 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
New rules at the University of Winnipeg reserving the use of gym facilities exclusively for women and some members of the LGBTTQ* community are being called discriminatory.
Student Joel Olfert said the changes, spearheaded by the University of Winnipeg Students’ Association and implemented Monday, are pushing a culture of exclusion under a veil of inclusion.
"Unfortunately, my access to the fitness centre will be limited during the reserved hours on the basis of my sex. I am concerned that limited access on the basis of sex will negatively impact the university’s culture of inclusion," the 21-year-old said.
Olfert said some students on campus are afraid to voice their frustration with the changes for fear of being labelled intolerant or sexist, although he couldn’t say how many students feel that way.
The changes are part of a pilot project that will run at the Duckworth Centre until Dec. 8. Should the project prove successful, members of the students’ association said they will look to continue it — and potentially expand the reserved hours.
The new rules set aside 17 hours per week during which specific gym facilities will be reserved for women and those who identify as non-binary (neither male or female). The lower level of the fitness centre is now reserved for two hours Monday, the upper level for two hours Thursday, and the fitness studio between 5:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. three days a week.
Olfert said his access to the gym facilities will now be limited because the reserved hours fall on times when he usually works out between classes. He said he may have to find another gym.
Members of the students’ association defended the project Tuesday.
"This initiative was based on what students were asking for. Every recommendation we’ve made was based on what we were hearing from a student survey," said Jade DeFehr, the association’s status of women director.
"It started off as a conversation in a classroom where more and more women kept raising their hands and sharing stories about times they felt intimidated, or reasons why they didn’t even want to use the gym. And usually that was because it was so male dominated."
In total, the reserved hours account for four per cent of total recreation time during the week. During the time areas of the gym are reserved, the remaining facilities are open to everyone.
The pilot program was created after DeFehr, students’ association president Laura Garinger and Megan Linton, vice-president of external affairs, conducted a survey of university students on their experiences using the gym. In total, more than 750 people responded.
While not everyone reported negative experiences, many said they were followed to washrooms or change rooms, denied access to equipment, experienced aggressive behaviour, intimidation and sexist, homophobic and transphobic slurs and comments, DeFehr said.
It’s these sorts of reports that led the women to get the ball rolling on the initiative.
The students’ association members said Tuesday they have received negative feedback, including an anonymous, intimidating note which was left for DeFehr.
"Some people who did not want the reserved hours... turned around and used homophobic, sexist language against people who were running the survey and the UWSA in general," said Garinger. "So I don’t see how people can say there’s not a problem. This isn’t about taking things away from people. It’s about trying to provide more space for others."
Olfert said that while he considers the initiative "well-intentioned," it’s ultimately discriminatory. He said he also believes it will be difficult to implement the changes, given that staff would have to guess someone’s gender identity.
While DeFehr acknowledged the association doesn’t yet have a way to deal with such cases, it is something being discussed should it prove to be an issue.
"Our stance is if anyone says they identify as a woman or non-binary, we’re not going to question them. But we still want to take it seriously if people are lying about their gender identity," DeFehr said.
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"The gym staff are aware of people who have been complaining about the initiative, so I think they are aware of some individuals who may be interested in crashing the reserved hours or using the space maliciously," Garinger added.
The UWSA hopes the pilot program will lead to more women and non-binary people feeling comfortable and safe using the gym — which is funded by all students through tuition.
They also stress that any students with concerns are more than welcome to approach members of the students’ association to have a conversation about what the changes look like and why the student association feels they’re needed.
"This is still a process and we’ll continue to look at new ways to make the university gym more accessible," Linton said.
"By no means does everyone now feel safe in the gym, nor does this mean that before everyone felt unsafe in the gym. It just means we’re continuing to work towards creating a space where everyone who wants to use it, can use it."
ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.caThis tweet sent by linebacker Tamba Hali on Thursday would seem to indicate more than a little optimism that he would play for the Kansas City Chiefs in 2015.
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Indeed, that’s the case. Hali said today he and his agent are working with the Chiefs on a restructured contract that would allow him to stay in Kansas City.
“It’s not about the numbers for me,’’ he said. “It’s about whether the situation makes sense for them because I want to be there and play for the Chiefs. The general manager [John Dorsey] and coach [Andy] Reid, they know I want to be there. That’s why I say it’s a matter of how I fit into what the Chiefs want to do for the season.
“They’re talking numbers so I’m optimistic I’ll still be there.’’
I’ve already written that Hali is an asset to the Chiefs at his scheduled cost to the Chiefs this year of about $12 million against their salary cap. While he’s been willing to accept a reduced contract to remain with the Chiefs, he wasn’t going to take peanuts to allow that to happen.
That’s why his optimism is an encouraging sign. The Chiefs are apparently talking numbers that satisfy him.
This is no time for the Chiefs to be parting with Hali. They protected unsigned linebacker Justin Houston by making him their franchise player, but there’s no guarantee he will sign their one-year offer or play for them next season. Likewise, there’s no guarantee last year’s first-round draft pick, Dee Ford, is ready to step in and play as well for the Chiefs as Hali has for the past nine years.
I spoke with Dorsey at the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis last month, and here’s what he had to say about Hali: “We have a plan, and we’re trying to address it. I love Tamba. I love everything he stands for as a player. But what I want to do is I want to be able to sit and talk things out with some more people. I want to be able to evaluate what we’ve got going on here in the [draft] class of 2015 and then I can get some clarity to the overall plan.’’The day that legions of Card Wars fans have been waiting for has arrived. A new set of decks for you to play! While these two new decks play well together, they are also totally competitive against the previous Finn, Jake, BMO, and Lady Rainicorn decks. But today is all about the battle of the Princesses.
First up, Princess Bubblegum has |
in hopes of forcing another Supreme Court review. Their goal is a reinterpretation that would lead to the denial of citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants.
In a recent opinion piece in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, State Assembly member Mike Eng, a Democrat representing the valley's 49th District, wrote:
For many Asian Americans, and especially Chinese Americans, the current debate about birthright citizenship is a debate our community already knows. That is because the vast majority of Asian Americans would not be U.S. citizens today save for the U.S. Supreme Court's 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which affirmed that the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment applied even to U.S.-born children of Chinese and other foreign nationals who were legally barred from naturalizing.
As far as it's known, Wong went on with his life. He had children and they had children. A hundred years after the landmark decision that affirmed his citizenship, SF Weekly ran a story about his 20-year-old great-granddaughter, who went looking for Wong's immigration records at the National Archives and Records Administration in San Bruno on a request from her grandfather.
Alice Wong knew little of her ancestor until then. From the story:WASHINGTON — Congress will force military officials to reinstate tuition assistance funding for the rest of the fiscal year after troops and veterans protested the end of the education benefit.
On Wednesday, the Senate included the tuition assistance rules as part of their plan to fund federal programs through September. On Thursday, the House agreed with the proposal, and the president is expected to sign it into law in coming days.
Congress had until March 27 to pass a new budget bill or risk a government shutdown. But the tuition assistance provision was a surprise for supporters of the education benefit, since partisan infighting seemed to shelve the idea earlier in the week.
Over the last few weeks, officials from the Marine Corps, Army, Air Force and Coast Guard stopped new enrollments to their respective tuition assistance programs. Each had previously provided $250 per semester credit hour and up to $4,500 a year to servicemembers pursuing college degrees.
The new measure does not restore tuition assistance programs for the Coast Guard, since funding for that benefit comes from the Department of Homeland Security.
Service officials blamed sequestration — $85 billion in mandatory agency spending cuts this year, half coming from the military — for the sudden funding change.
But veterans advocates and lawmakers lamented the change as short-sighted and potentially devastating to student servicemembers midway through a degree program.
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., one of the sponsors of the measure, said on the Senate floor Wednesday that numerous troops he has spoken with were dismayed over service officials’ decision to end the education benefit.
He also questioned whether the move was more politics than financial need, adding that plenty of less important programs could cover the funding cuts.
Under the amendment, military officials could cut tuition assistance programs for the remainder of the fiscal year, but only by the amount mandated under sequestration — about 8 percent.
It would effectively undo the services’ plans to zero out the program and use the savings elsewhere.
Roughly 300,000 servicemembers used the military tuition assistance programs last year. The 8 percent funding cut will likely lower the number of applicants eligible for the program this year.
But the congressional mandate will still allow tens of thousands of troops to continue their classes without finding new ways to pay for tuition.
Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C., another amendment sponsor, said after the Senate vote that the tuition assistance program was the wrong place for military leaders to find savings.
“We cannot balance our budget on the backs of servicemembers,” she said. “The brave men and women who serve in uniform have never given up on our country, and today the Senate signaled that we won’t give up on them.”
The Veterans of Foreign Wars, whose members logged more than 12,000 calls and emails to lawmakers in support of the program, praised the move. Ryan Gallucci, deputy legislative director for the group, said the education benefit was too valuable to lose.
“As a former soldier who used tuition assistance, I’m happy to see that Congress agrees that the program is a win-win for the military,” he said. “It not only develops better leaders but boosts troop morale.”
shane.leo@stripes.com
Twitter: @LeoShaneAn unpublished scientific paper by NASA engineers has been leaked. It appears to show that the EM Drive – a form of space drive that appears to produce thrust by electricity alone, in violation of Newton's Third Law of physics – may actually work.
The EM Drive is the brainchild of British inventor Roger Shawyer but is highly controversial, with some tests showing that thrust it produces is either extremely small or virtually nonexistent. But researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center have produced a paper [PDF] showing that the drive appears to be a valid form of space propulsion.
But a very slow one. The EM Drive tested produced 1.2 millinewtons of thrust per kilowatt, compared to the 60 millinewtons per kilowatt that is produced by the best ion drives. It sounds tiny, because it is, however it's still twice as powerful as the thrust produced by solar sails. An ion drive requires a power supply plus fuel – typically xenon gas – whereas an EM Drive can run off just solar power.
In a frictionless vacuum even tiny amounts of thrust add up fairly quickly, and since the only fuel needed is electricity, the drive could be used to keep satellites aloft indefinitely or even to journey to other planets – if you stacked a lot of them together.
The team did multiple tests to make sure there was no outside interference. The tests were conducted in a vacuum to show that air currents didn't influence the readings, and were conducted in a chamber shielded from magnetic and RF interference. Also, thermal expansion was taken into account.
So far it all looks good – except for the fact that no one knows how it works. One theory is that protons fired around the nozzle are providing thrust, but it's going to take a lot more testing to see if that's true.
It's also worth noting that this paper is unpublished, meaning it hasn't been peer reviewed. There may still be errors that haven't been spotted which could settle the controversy once and for all. ®BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The Huntingdon football team rallied from a disastrous first half to knock off Birmingham-Southern 45-38 on Saturday night and bring home the Wesley Cup for a second straight year.
Despite falling behind 17-0 in the first quarter and having three starters leave the game with injuries, the Hawks battled back to outscore the Panthers 28-7 in the final two quarters.
Senior running back Vic Jerald scored on an 18-yard touchdown pass from backup quarterback Blaise Schillace to tie the game 38-38 with 10 minutes to play in the game. Jerald gave the Hawks the lead for good with a 4-yard touchdown run with 8:45 to play.
The Huntingdon defense made the lead stand, stopping Birmingham-Southern on fourth down on the Panthers' final three drives. The last fourth-down stop came with 1:14 left in the game.
Records: Huntingdon (1-1); Birmingham-Southern (1-1)
The Turning Point: Trailing 31-17 late in the third quarter, Huntingdon took advantage of two Birmingham-Southern turnovers and scored 28 points in a span of a little more than 10 minutes.
Following a 14-yard touchdown run by Jerald to make it 31-24 with 3:49 left in the third quarter, linebacker Trey Hayes recovered a Birmingham-Southern fumble at the Panthers' 9-yard line. Two plays later, Schillace found Colton Chinn for a 7-yard touchdown pass to tie the game 31-31.
Birmingham-Southern scored 13 seconds into the fourth quarter to take a 38-31 lead, but the Hawks answered. Jerald's 18-yard touchdown reception from Schillace capped a 69-yard drive to tie the game.
On Birmingham-Southern's ensuing possession, Huntingdon senior Austin Washington intercepted a pass and returned it 36 yards to the Panthers' 4-yard line. Jerald scored from there to give the Hawks the lead.
Notable Performance: Vic Jerald finished with 288 all-purpose yards on Saturday to break the Hawks' previous single-game record of 287. Jerald averaged 7.3 yards per carry as he rushed for 175 yards and two touchdowns. He caught one pass for an 18-yard score and added 95 yards on five kick returns. His 73-yard run early in the second quarter set up the Hawks' second touchdown of the game. The 73-yard burst was the second longest of his career and tied for the fifth longest run from scrimmage in Huntingdon history.
Stat Leaders
Offense
Passing: Schillace: 7/13 for 115 yards, 3 TDs, 1 INT
Receiving: Otis Porter: 3 receptions for 94 yards, 1 TD
Rushing: Jerald: 24 rushes for 175 yards, 2 TD
Kobe Smith: 16 rushes for 85 yards
Kicking: Chase Young: 6/6 PAT, 1/1 field goals (connected on a 36-yard FG)
Defense
Overall: Hayes: 7 tackles, 1 tackle for loss, 2 fumble recoveries
Washington: 6 tackles, 1 interception for 36 yards, 1 pass broken up
Tackles: Anthony Wood (7), Charlie Jones (6)
Tackles For Loss: Jones (1)
Interceptions: Jarrett White (1)
Did You Know?: Huntingdon has a 4-4 all-time record against Birmingham-Southern and has won three of the last four meetings … Saturday's win marked the first time the Hawks have won consecutive games against the Panthers and the first win in Birmingham since 2009
Head Coach Mike Turk on his team's refusal to quit on Saturday: "I'm proud of the guys for the way we played in the second half. We had a lot going against us in the first half with mistakes and guys getting hurt. There were a lot of reasons you could point to as to why we shouldn't win the game.
"But these guys pulled together and found a way to win. When we had to have it on offense, we got it done. When we had to have it on defense, we got it done. I can't say enough about how proud I am of the way we kept believing and kept playing hard. We fought back into it and we found a way to win."
Turk on battling through injuries: "(Starting quarterback) Chip Taylor got hurt scoring our first touchdown. Blaise came in, and he made some mistakes. Anytime you are forced into action, especially at the quarterback position, it's pretty tough. But Blaise played well enough to help us win. I'm proud of the way he played for the team.
"It wasn't just at quarterback. (Offensive tackle) Kodee Kuncho went down in the first half and Connor Caldwell came in and played well. (Defensive back) Demetrius Brown got hurt and Charlie Jones had to step in. A lot of guys stepped in and stepped up for the team to help us get the win. I'm proud of them for getting it done."
Coming Up: Huntingdon returns home to open USA South Athletic Conference play with North Carolina Wesleyan on Sept. 16 at 1 p.m.Microsoft might have more reason to be scared of Chromebooks these days. While the software giant was spooked by Google’s low-cost laptops three years ago, they’ve mostly only been selling well to schools. That appears to have changed over the past year. Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US last year, and now they appear to be contributing to overall PC market growth.
IDC claims the PC market is “up slightly,” recording its first growth in five years. It’s a tiny growth of just 0.6 percent, but it’s a flattening of the market that Microsoft and its PC maker partners have been looking for after years of decline. While percentage growth looks good on paper, it doesn’t always tell the whole story.
IDC and Gartner disagree again
Over at Gartner, another market research firm that tracks PC sales, the story is a little different. Gartner claims PC shipments declined 2.4 percent in the recent quarter. There’s a good reason for the disparity between IDC and Gartner’s figures, and it involves Chromebooks. IDC's data includes Chromebooks and excludes Windows tablets, even machines with a detachable keyboard like the Surface Pro. Gartner counts Windows-based tablets as PCs and excludes Chromebooks or any non-Windows-based tablets.
Without IDC providing the exact split of Chromebooks sold vs. Windows- and macOS-based machines, it’s impossible to know exactly how well Google’s low-cost laptops are selling. However, IDC also claims that Chromebooks are doing well with businesses. The US commercial PC market “came out strong mostly backed by growth of Chromebooks,” says IDC. Gartner has no opinion on Chromebooks as the company refuses to track them as PCs.
Chromebook sales have always been a bit of a mystery just like Microsoft’s own Surface sales, but we won’t know the full impact unless Google is willing to share how many are being used on a daily basis. Until then, it’s a guessing game of vague statements from analyst firms, or victory claims in small markets. Either way, it’s about time Chromebooks are considered as PCs by all involved. Microsoft was worried about a threat that didn’t exist a few years ago, but it’s clear that more and more people are now accepting Google’s laptops into their lives for a variety of tasks that don’t require the capabilities of a traditional PC.If you look at the ExtendedBeaconScanner sample that is included for Delphi in 10.1 Berlin, you will learn how to scan for Beacon devices using different scan modes: Standard, Alternative, Eddystone, and Extended. When selecting the Extended mode, the sample allows you to select the kind of Beacon device to scan: iBeacon, AltBeacon, and Eddystone. The Extended mode allows scanning all different kind of beacon devices simultaneously. This sample shows how to use the Extended scan mode to discover all kind of beacons at the same time. The demo also works with the Standard, Alternative, and Eddystone modes to discover registered beacons.
You can find the ExtendedBeaconScanner sample project at: C:\Users\Public\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\18.0\Samples\Object Pascal\Multi-Device Samples\Device Sensors and Services\Bluetooth\Beacons\ExtendedBeaconScanner
You can also find the sample in the Sourceforge Subversion repository for Delphi at: http://sourceforge.net/p/radstudiodemos/code/HEAD/tree/branches/RADStudio_Berlin/Object%20Pascal/Multi-Device%20Samples/Device%20Sensors%20and%20Services/Bluetooth/Beacons/ExtendedBeaconScannerReady for a sunscreen-shitting seagull?
Sir John Hegarty, co-founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty and all-around advertising legend, was jury president of the Titanium and Integrated Lions at Cannes this year. And his jury recognized plenty of brilliant work, including the Titanium Grand Prix winner, REI's #OptOutside campaign.
But at the press conference announcing the winners, Hegarty didn't open his remarks by talking about the top-notch work. He opened by mentioning a Nivea campaign that was so shockingly wretched, it's a wonder it was entered at Cannes at all. In fact, it's a wonder it's not a parody.
His voice dripping with sarcasm, Sir John told the assembled journalists: "One [campaign] we debated long and hard was the flying seagull from Nivea. Without question, this was one of the pieces that caught our attention. … The big, big problem is kids on beaches don't have enough sunscreen on. They run around and it rubs off. So they developed a [robotic] seagull that flies across the beach and basically shits suntan cream from Nivea. This is, as you can understand, something we had to take very seriously."
He was joking, but not really. The seagull is real. Check out the case study here:
"This is, without question, at the cutting edge of technology and brand integration," Hegarty continued. "I think actually they're also teaming up with the Royal National Institute for the Blind, because if you get this stuff in your eyes from the flying seagull, you'll probably need special attention."
At this point, Hegarty was done with the sarcasm. "You should see it," he said. "It's the most stupid thing I think I've seen in my whole life. I actually thought the Monty Python team had gotten together and entered it into [Cannes], to see if we would vote for it."
The case study does read as parody, down to the agency guys hiding in the dunes watching their weird creation crap happiness on everyone. But apparently it isn't a parody. And it surely wouldn't have been entered at Cannes just as a joke.
The funny thing is, the shitting seagull isn't that out of character for Nivea. This is a brand that has pioneered lots of seaside campaigns, from the print ad with the removable bracelet that lets you track your kid on the beach, to the Gravity Award-winning magazine ad that charges your phone, to the sunscreen-applying beach water slide.
The "Care From the Air" campaign just took things to an idiotic level.
The agency behind it, Jung von Matt/Elbe in Germany, seems to acknowledge as much. Reached by Adweek, a rep there admitted the agency had done the campaign but said "the PR department of the client doesn't want PR for it, so we do not promote it."
You don't say.Alabama law firm claims it's not behind racist ad [YouTube]
Last week, we told you about an online ad for an Alabama law firm featuring a white man playing an “Asian” character while affecting an accent reminiscent of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The man behind the character said in a phone interview with The Raw Story on Tuesday that, contrary to the firm’s statements since it began getting attention, the commercial reflected what it wanted.
“That was, verbatim, their script we read,” Jim DeBerry, who played “Mr. Wong Fong Shu” in the ad, said in a telephone interview, adding that his company, Definitive Television, was contacted by McCutcheon & Hamner, P.C., which selected the character and approved the ad before it was posted on Nov. 9. The commercial depicts the character speaking in an Orientalized voice about “Confucius” guiding him to the firm after being “messed over” by an insurance company.
McCutcheon & Hamner has since denied any involvement with the commercial, saying it was “hacked” and accusing DeBerry’s company of ignoring a cease-and-desist order. DeBerry said that his organization never received such an edict.
“I called them up and said, ‘Why would you make such a statement?'” DeBerry said. “I mentioned to them that if this is not the case, I’m happy to provide you [information] on who this person is. They said, ‘Yeah, we would like that,’ then they retracted and said, ‘We can take care of it ourselves. We want this to go away.'”
But, DeBerry said, McCutcheon & Hamner did not respond to his request to send him a statement for him to post with the video.
DeBerry, who is listed as the vice president for Tennessee and Florida for Definitive’s parent company, DeBar Holdings, LLC, provided Raw Story with several screenshots involving the person he said contacted his company on behalf of the firm, who is only identified as “AC Gee.” The payment for the ad was reportedly done through a third-party service.
The screenshots, DeBerry told Raw Story, constitute proof that “AC Gee” is an alias for an employee of the firm.
However, as National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA) Executive Director Tina Matsuoka told her members in a separate statement, the screenshots are not conclusive proof. DeBerry told Matsuoka he could not provide proof of payment, on account of “concerns” over contacting the third-party service he said handled the payment.
Definitive has also released a series of follow-up videos in which DeBerry, as “Wong,” responds to various comments about the original ad. In one of them, he responds to self-help author Brian Cuban — brother of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban — calling him an “idiot” by saying, “Thank you Brian. You also alcoholic [sic], I know, and you play race card and you use race card to get on TV ’cause you want to be famous like your brother.”
DeBerry also challenges Brian Cuban to appear in a future video, saying, “We listen to you talk about drinky drinky drinky drinky drinky.” When asked about the remarks on Tuesday, DeBerry expressed regret.
“I’m a positive individual,” DeBerry said. “I am surprised at myself that I let the heat of the moment get me to do something derogatory, in that sense. He’s probably a good individual. I did, in fact, get caught up in the heat of the moment.”
As far as his portrayal of the character, DeBerry — who initially defended “Wong” online by mentioning his own Black friends — likened it to the recent use of a racial slur by Los Angeles Clipper player Matt Barnes by saying it makes sense in its own context.
“I can see how an individual could find the character, in their opinion, is racist,” DeBerry conceded on Tuesday. “We’re not here to defend that position. We look at it as an opinion. The definition of racist is really clear. That character is not saying] an Asian-American or a person of Asian descent is inferior to other races. We don’t feel that that character is discriminatory. We feel that it does play off that stereotype.”Win McNamee via Getty Images Trump hosted a press conference on March 15 at his Mar-A-Lago mansion. His campaign later paid the house and club more than $400,000 in rental and catering fees.
Donald Trump's presidential campaign paid more than $1 million last month to companies controlled by the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, according to reports the Trump campaign filed late Monday with the Federal Election Commission.
The figure represents payments for facilities rental, catering, monthly rents and utilities at more than a half-dozen Trump-owned companies and properties. It includes nearly $350,000 that the Trump campaign paid a Trump-owned company, TAG Air, for the use of Trump's private jets and helicopters.
The most striking expenditure in the new filings was $423,372, paid by the Trump campaign for rentals and catering at Trump's 126-room Palm Beach, Florida, mansion, Mar-A-Lago, which Trump operates as a private club.
Though the payment was in May, the Mar-A-Lago bill likely covers a number of campaign events Trump has staged there in recent months. A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign did not respond to an email from The Huffington Post inquiring about the expenditures and Mar-A-Lago.
Other Trump-owned recipients of campaign funds include Trump Restaurants, which raked in $125,080 in rent and utilities; Trump Tower Commercial, which charged $72,800 in rent and utilities in the building that houses Trump's campaign headquarters; the Trump National Golf Club, in Jupiter, Florida, which collected $35,845 for facilities rental and catering; and the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, which billed the campaign for $29,715, for facilities rentals and catering.
It’s not unusual for candidates to tap their own companies for campaign functions. But the law requires that campaigns pay fair market value for goods and services, so that a candidate’s company doesn’t make an illegal donation of office space — or Palm Beach mansions, for example.
But the money flowing from Trump’s campaign to his companies reflects the blending of Trump’s successful brand -- as a real estate celebrity and reality TV star -- with his increasingly gonzo campaign for the presidency.
Trump, who claims to be worth more than $10 billion, has even said he could personally profit from his own campaign for president. “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it,” he told Fortune magazine in 2000.
After Monday, however, that seems very unlikely. Trump’s campaign reported $1.3 million in cash at the start of the hugely expensive general election phase of the race. In 2012, the campaigns and super PACs of President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney each raised and spent more than $1 billion.
According to HuffPost's Paul Blumenthal, Trump's current financial situation "places him further behind [presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton] in terms of funds and campaign infrastructure than any other modern presidential candidate."Daily Mirror foreign editor Not to be confused with journalist, author and formerforeign editor Nicholas Davies or the leading behavioural ecologist Professor Nicholas Davies
Nicholas Davies (born 28 March 1953) is a British investigative journalist, writer and documentary maker.
Davies has written extensively as a freelancer, as well as for The Guardian and The Observer, and been named Reporter of the Year,[1] Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards.[2]
Davies has made documentaries for ITV's World in Action and written numerous books on the subject of politics and journalism, including Flat Earth News, which attracted considerable controversy as an exposé of journalistic malpractice in the UK and around the globe.[3] As a reporter for The Guardian, Davies was responsible for uncovering the News of the World phone hacking affair, including the July 2011 revelations of hacking into the mobile phone voicemail of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Career in journalism [ edit ]
Davies gained a PPE degree from Oxford University in 1974,[4] and started his journalism career in 1976, working as a trainee for the Mirror Group in Plymouth. He then moved to London initially to work for the Sunday People and spent a year working for The Evening Standard before becoming a news reporter at The Guardian in July 1979. Since then he has worked as home affairs correspondent at The Observer; chief feature writer at London Daily News in 1986 and on-screen reporter for World in Action and Channel 4's Dispatches. After the London Daily News folded he moved to the United States for a year, where he wrote White Lies, about the wrongful conviction of a black janitor, Clarence Brandley, for the murder of a white girl.[4] From 1989 Davies was a freelance reporter for The Guardian, for which contributed articles,[5] working from his home in Sussex. He was the winner of the first Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 1999.[6] In September 2016 he retired, announcing that he would travel in search of interesting experiences. His website states he was last seen somewhere between a yoga shala in Indonesia and a cattle ranch in northern Argentina.
Following the publication of Flat Earth News and a Guardian story co-written by Davies claiming that News of the World journalists tapped private mobile phones to get stories,[7] on 14 July 2009 Davies told the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee that the Metropolitan Police Service had done too little to investigate the claims.[8] The Guardian coverage also led to calls from high-profile MPs for the dismissal of Andy Coulson, communications director for the Conservative Party.[9] Davies received the Paul Foot Award 2011 for his work on this story.[10]
Davies's book on the News International phone hacking scandal, Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch, was released in August 2014.[11]
Critical reaction to Flat Earth News [ edit ]
Flat Earth News was greeted in the London Review of Books on its publication as "a genuinely important book, one which is likely to change, permanently, the way anyone who reads it looks at the British newspaper industry".[12] The LRB highlighted the analysis showing that 60% of the content of UK papers was based mainly on wire copy or press releases, a practice Davies called "churnalism", while only 12% are original stories and only 12% of stories showed evidence that the central statement had been corroborated. Mary Riddell in The Observer disputed some of the charges against British journalism in the book, and described it as "unduly pessimistic".[13] Peter Oborne in The Spectator concentrated on the use of illegal techniques to invade privacy rather than declining standards, describing Flat Earth News as "hypnotically readable" and praising the collection of evidence that the practice of journalism is "bent", although qualifying this somewhat by suggesting that Davies "ignores a great deal [of journalism] that is salient and good".[14]
Awards [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]The all-electric series’ original technical roadmap had stipulated that power output would rise to 250kW for its third season, but future power increases will now be introduced more gradually.
Under revised plans, the 250kW mark will now be reached in season five, with an increase to 220kW planned for season four. The 200kW limit remains in place for season three.
A Formula E statement explained the move, saying: “after careful analysis of the performance of the batteries and the cost of developing this technology, the decision was made to phase in the power increase more gradually.”
The limit on overall power usage of 28kWh remains in place for next season, although drivers will be able to use 150kW of regenerated energy from braking next season, up from the current 100kW.
Season three will also see the weight limit trimmed from 888 to 880kg.This article is from the archive of our partner.
Tip: Don't go on national television the night of your election if you don't know the results of your race. South Dakota Senate candidate Annette Bosworth found that out the hard way when Fox News' Megyn Kelly told her the results of the Republican primary — Bosworth lost to Mike Rounds, who won 55.5 percent of the vote. Bosworth came in fourth with 5.7 percent. “Well, that’s news to me,” Bosworth said. “I didn’t know that. I found out on national television.”
Bosworth was actually on the show to discuss the negative, sexist comments that had been written about her during her campaign. Kelly asked if Bosworth thought it was a Republican vs. Democrats issue. "I don't like liberals whining being victims anymore than anyone else, but I did notice that, from the beginning of this race, I was treated differently than my male counterparts," she said.
Watch the full clip below:
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.Oct 15 (Reuters) - Below are key quotes from an appearance by Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney in Nanaimo, British Columbia:
ON THE OUTLOOK FOR MONETARY POLICY
“Monetary policy is very accommodative right now and is likely to remain so for some time.”
ON THE PROSPECT OF ENTERING POLITICS:
“I definitely don’t want to answer that. Look, I am doing my job. I am going to do my job. It’s pretty simple, I’ve got two years and change, at least, left on my mandate.”
“Why don’t I become a circus clown? I appreciate the great concern about my career but I have gainful employment and I intend to continue it.”
ON MONDAY’S HOUSING DATA:
“I wouldn’t put too much weight on one data point. There is a transition during the summer and into the early part of the fall where both the new underwriting standards of OSFI (Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions) and the most recent steps that the federal government has taken on mortgage insurance rules, both of those coming into effect, so there is always going to be some volatility in the data associated with that.”
“Just to be clear, broad brush, we have expected the contribution of housing (to growth) to slow and to reduce. We’ll update precisely how much in the course of the next ten days or so.”
“To put this in perspective, housing as a percentage of GDP has been running well above its historic average for several years now, and things come back down towards their averages. That’s entirely reasonable to expect. We do expect adjustment over the medium term.”
“What that means is housing will not be an outsized contributor to Canadian growth.”
“We see that valuations in some markets have become stretched and we would expect an adjustment over time in those valuations.”
ON HOUSEHOLD DEBT:
“If we ever were to do it (use monetary policy to lean against household debt), absolute hypothetical, then we would be very transparent that we’re doing it, why we’re doing it, and what we expect the impact to be.”
“With respect to the situation in household debt and housing finance in Canada, as you know, the government of Canada has taken action on four occasions to address some issues in mortgage finance and our view, we’ve said this on many occasions and I’ll reiterate today, those actions have been both timely and prudent. OSFI has taken measures to enhance underwriting standards for housing related debt and also banks are in the process of raising capital towards Basel III capital standards, so the sum of those actions are still having an impact on the adjustment in housing finance. And so we, like the government, like OSFI, and the private sector for that matter are watching with great interest the sum of those policies and the effect on the evolution of household debt.”
“The point was a hypothetical one to ensure that people properly understand our overall monetary policy framework. Action has been taken. We’ve always said that monetary policy is the last line of defense.”
ON THE HOUSING MARKET:
“We are expecting an adjustment... we will update our full forecast in the course of the next 10 days and release that with the Monetary Policy Report. We have been expecting a slowing in the housing market. We’re seeing some signs of that and there is some desirability obviously... to (see) an easing there but we continue to watch the situation along with others very closely.”
ON INFLATION MANDATE:
“Our mandate in the end on the monetary policy side is very simple... to ensure that inflation is averaging around 2 percent total CPI inflation in Canada. And so we’ll conduct monetary policy to ensure that irrespective of what happens outside of our shores.”
ON C$ VALUE VS EMERGING MARKET CURRENCIES
“Over time it is reasonable to expect that the value of those (emerging market) currencies are going to appreciate relative to the Canadian currency, which is going to continue to make us more competitive and effective.”
ON BUSINESS INVESTMENT:
“One of the consequences of a strong currency is on the cost of investment goods. A lot of investment goods are imported, which creates an opportunity obviously to boost productivity and we have seen evidence of firms taking advantage of that across the country, the manufacturing sector in particular.”
“Given where productivity is at the moment relative to our major competitors, not just the United States but also including say Mexico for example, we have a sustained need as a country to continue that investment and it’s important therefore we think to put global uncertainty in context.”
ON THE STRONG CANADIAN DOLLAR:
“It’s one of the headwinds on our economy, it’s one of the reasons monetary policy is as accommodative as it is.”this is a great gun first of all, and i highly recommend it if you just play for fun. i bought this gun for wars around my neighborhood and backyard (nothing serious or competitive), and i have got to say i don't know if i could have chosen a better gun. the pros and cons are below, but as for the whole deal, don't buy for the accessories. period. they're very cheap, and break very easily, much easier than the gun itself. when i ordered it i read the bad reviews about the pistol i expected some pretty bad pistol that probably would have a pretty bad fps and range but i would still be able to use in pistol wars with my friends. i'm very glad that i did not get my expectations up very high for the pistol because really, the pistol is a kids toy haha. it literally says ages 3+ on it, and is less than the size of my palm. i read a review about how if you shot yourself point blank with it, it would feel like nothing more than a weak pinch, i thought that this person was surely exaggerating but they really weren'y haha (my friends and i were able to have some fun with it though after doing a little self repair). also i hate to say it but the pistol was cracked already in its package before it arrived, but i was able to laugh about it and forget it when i started to play around with the AK. now finally onto the pros and cons
pros
very durable (although it is an airsoft gun and must be taken good care of, the better care you take of it the longer it will last, it's not going to last forever)
shoots incredibly accurate for a $30 spring rifle (.20 bb's will obviously give you best accuracy results)
the fps will not disappoint you if you are just playing for fun (i haven't measured it, read other reviews for solid numbers)
looks freakin awesome
not too heavy
it feels very sturdy, especially when cocking, magazine fits in nicely and mag release works very well
etc. (i could go on and on about specifics)
cons
the shipping was $21 dollars
the accessories are very hard to get on and off the rail with out cracking the plastic of them or breaking
extra comments
the stock itself (which can be taken on and off) weighs almost as much as the gun itself)(not a problem at all for me but i thought it might be nice to know)
this gun is all plastic, but in my opinion is very high quality (the plastic) and will obviously last a very long time if taken good care of
REMEMBER that this is an airsoft gun. not a toy. it will break if you treat it like a toy and throw it around and drop it. i cannot stress this enough!
i recommend that you order.20's with it
you're spending 30 bucks on this thing, don't get your hopes up TOO high and be disappointed when it arrives (although i think they could sell this for more than $30)
two of my friends in particular who took a look at it and fired it, both (very experienced airsofters and know a lot about guns) said that this was a very good choice
like i said i love this gun and i definitely recommend it, if you are looking for a gun that if you are looking for a gun that |
the current value of the Ref. If the current thread is in a transaction then it calls the doGet method on the LockingTransaction object for the current thread to get the value. Otherwise it calls the currentVal method in the same class. getHistoryCount This method acquires the write lock (probably a read lock would suffice) for the Ref (blocking until successful), calls the histCount method, returns what it returns and releases the write lock. It acquires a write lock instead of a read lock because it walks the history chain to get the count and needs to prevent other threads from modifying the chain while it does this. This is called by the ref-history-count function. histCount This method returns the number of TVal objects associated with the Ref, which is the length of the history chain. isBound This method returns a boolean that indicates whether there is at least one TVal object in the history chain for this Ref. Before checking for this, a read lock is obtained for the Ref. Before returning, the read lock is released. set This method takes a proposed new value for the Ref. It simply passes the Ref and the new value to the doSet method on the LockingTransaction object for the current thread. touch This method simply passes the Ref to the doEnsure method on the LockingTransaction object for the current thread. It is called by the ensure function in order to prevent other transactions from changing this Ref. trimHistory This method removes all the but newest TVal object from the history chain. Before doing this, a write lock for the Ref is obtained. Before returning, the write lock is released. No code in the current version of Clojure calls this method.
LockingTransaction Constants
The LockingTransaction class is defined in src/jvm/clojure/lang/LockingTransaction.java.
Name Description BARGE_WAIT_NANOS This specifies the minimum amount of time (1/100th of a second) that a transaction must have run in order for it to attempt to cause another conflicting transaction to retry. LOCK_WAIT_MSECS This specifies the amount of time (1/10th of a second) to wait for something to happen. It is used by the tryWriteLock method to limit how long it waits to obtain a write lock for a given Ref. It is also used by the lock method to limit how long it waits for the latch in an Info object associated with a given Ref to be decremented to zero. RETRY_LIMIT This specifies the maximum number of times a transaction will be retried before giving up. The current value is 10,000. If it gives up then a plain java.lang.Exception is thrown. This happens in the run method. RUNNING
COMMITTING
RETRY
KILLED
COMMITTED These describe the status of a transaction. Three of these have an obvious meaning. RETRY is the status of a transaction that is going to retry, but hasn't started the next try yet. KILLED is the status of a transaction that was stopped by another, conflicting transaction. The transaction will retry, and have its status changed to RETRY, unless an exception is also thrown (which is done in the abort method).
LockingTransaction Nested Classes
These are static nested classes defined inside the LockingTransaction class.
Name Description AbortException This is a simple subclass of java.lang.Exception that is thrown in the abort method. No code in the current version of Clojure calls that method, so this class isn't currently used. CFn Objects from this class hold a reference to a function ( IFn ) and a sequence of arguments to be passed to it ( ISeq ). They are used to store information about commute functions so they can be invoked a second time when a transaction is being committed. Info Objects from this class describe the status of a transaction. A new one is created at the beginning of each transaction try. The class has a single method, running, that returns a boolean indicating whether the transaction currently has a state of RUNNING or COMMITTING. Notify This class has three fields, one to hold a Ref that changed, one to hold its previous value, and one to hold its new value. An instance is created and added to a list during a transaction commit for each Ref that was modified during the transaction. After the transaction is committed, the information in these objects is used to notify the watchers of the Refs about the changes. RetryEx This is a simple subclass of java.lang.Error. Only one instance of this class is created per thread. It is held in the retryex field of the single LockingTransaction object that is created for each thread. This object is thrown whenever a transaction needs to retry. The fact that it extends Error instead of Exception indicates that your code should not catch this. The Clojure STM implementation catches it in the retry loop of the run method. Since the done flag isn't set to true, the loop continues with another try of the transaction.
CFn Fields
Name Description fn:IFn
(final) This is a reference to a function that was passed to the commute function. args:ISeq
(final) This is a list of arguments to be passed to the function.
Info Fields
Name Description latch:
java.util.concurrent.CountDownLatch
(final) This latch object is created in the constructor of the Info class with a value of one. It is decremented by the stop method in LockingTransaction. The blockAndBail method waits (with a timeout) for it to reach zero before triggering a retry of the current transaction. The barge method also waits for it to reach zero so it knows that the transaction it is barging has been stopped. status:
java.util.concurrent.AtomicInteger
(final) This holds the current status of the associated transaction. startPoint:long
(final) This value identifies the order in which the associated transaction started, relative to other transaction starts, retries and commits.
Notify Fields
Name Description ref:Ref
(final) This is a Ref that was modified in a transaction. oldval:Object
(final) This is the previous value of the Ref. newval:Object
(final) This is the new value of the Ref.
LockingTransaction Fields
All fields in the LockingTransaction class are package level. However, in the current version of Clojure no other classes extend LockingTransaction and no other classes in the same package directly access its fields.
Name Description actions:
ArrayList<Agent.Action>
(final) This field is a collection of Agent actions. When actions are sent to Agents within a transaction, they are saved in this collection (by the enqueue method) and not actually sent until the transaction commits. This is sometimes used to execute code that has side effects in order to prevent the side effects from occurring multiple times due to transaction retries.
The send and send-off functions that send actions to Agents both call the dispatch method in the Agent class. That calls the dispatchAction method in the Agent class which checks for a running transaction in the current thread. If one is running, it passes the action to the enqueue method in the LockingTransaction class. commutes:
TreeMap
<Ref, ArrayList<CFn>>
(final) This field is a map from Refs to the commute functions that have been called on them. CFn is a static, nested class whose objects hold a reference to a Clojure function and a sequence of arguments to be passed to it. When the transaction is ready to commit, all the commute functions are reexecuted to compute the Ref values that will be committed. ensures:HashSet<Ref>
(final) This field holds the set of Refs on which the ensure function has been called in the current transaction try. It is accessed in the following LockingTransaction methods: doEnsure, releaseIfEnsured and run. If a Ref is set using ref-set or alter after ensure has been called on it, it will be removed from this set by the releaseIfEnsured method which is called by the lock method. During a commit, before commute functions are run a second time on on a Ref, the Ref is passed to the releaseIfEnsured method. That releases the read lock on the Ref so a write lock can be obtained for it. info:
LockingTransaction.Info This field holds an object that describes the status of the transaction, the system time when that status was set, and a CountDownLatch that starts with a value of one. It has a single method, running, that returns a boolean indicating whether the transaction is currently running or committing.
When an attempt is made to set a Ref using ref-set or alter, the lock method in LockingTransaction is called. A Ref is "locked" by setting its tinfo field to the value of the info field for the LockingTransaction object of the current thread.
The lock method in the LockingTransaction class assigns the value of this field to the tinfo field of a Ref to "lock" it. There are three places in LockingTransaction where the tinfo field is used. The first is in the lock method. The second is in the doEnsure method. The third is in the run method, during a commit when commute functions are run a second time.
In both the lock and run methods, if the tinfo field of the Ref is set to a LockingTransaction.Info object from a different LockingTransaction and that transaction is currently running then the barge method will be called to determine which transaction should retry. If the other transaction is selected to retry then the tinfo field of the Ref will be modified to refer to the LockingTransaction.Info object for the current LockingTransaction.
See the description of the latch field in the Info class to learn how the latch is used. lastPoint:AtomicLong
(static, final) This field is used to provide long values that indicate the order in which significant transaction-related events occur. These include the start of each transaction, each retry, and each commit. readPoint:long This field is used to track the order of the beginning of each transaction try across all transactions. At the beginning of each retry, including the initial try, the getReadPoint method is called. That assigns the next highest integer number to readPoint by atomically incrementing the lastPoint field.
This field has two uses.
It is used by the lock method to determine if the value of a Ref has been modified by any transaction commit since the transaction try began. If this occurs then the current transaction will retry.
It is used by the doGet method to determine if the chain of values for the Ref contains any value that was set before the transaction try began. When no such value is found in the chain, the number of "faults" that have occurred for the Ref is incremented. retryex:RetryEx
(final) This field holds the exception object that is thrown in several places to cause the transaction to retry. RetryEx is a static, nested class that extends java.lang.Error. sets:HashSet<Ref>
(final) This field keeps track of all the Refs that have been modified inside the current transaction try using ref-set or alter so the new values can be committed at the end of the transaction. Note that the keys of the vals map cannot be used in place of this because it can contain values for Refs that are committed by other transactions when commute is called on those Refs in the current transaction. startPoint:long This field is assigned the value of the readPoint field at the beginning of the first try of the transaction. It is used when two transactions are in conflict to determine which has been running longer. If the the current transaction has been running for at least BARGE_WAIT_NANOS (1/100th of a second) and it started before the other conflicting transaction then an attempt will be made to retry the other transaction. See the barge method. startTime:long This field holds the system time when the first try to execute the transaction began. It is used by the bargeTimeElapsed method to determine how long the transaction has been running. transaction:
ThreadLocal
<LockingTransaction>
(static, final) This field holds the single LockingTransaction object that is associated with each thread. It is used to manage all transactions that are run in the current thread. vals:HashMap
<Ref, Object>
(final) This field is a map where the keys are Refs whose values have been modified within the current transaction and the values are their in-transaction values.
LockingTransaction Methods
The methods in the LockingTransaction class that play a significant role in the STM implementation are described below.
Name Description abort This method stops the transaction, sets the status of the transaction to KILLED, and throws an AbortException. The finally clause in the run method of LockingTransaction will properly clean up the aborted transaction and the exception will propagate out to the caller. No code in the current version of Clojure calls this method. barge This method takes an Info object that describes the transaction to be barged. It determines whether a given LockingTransaction, identified by its LockingTransaction.Info object, should and can be retried in order to allow the LockingTransaction for the current thread to continue.
If the the current transaction has run for at least BARGE_WAIT_NANOS (1/100th of a second) and it started before the given transaction then an attempt will be made to retry the given transaction. This will succeed as long as the status of the other transaction is RUNNING. If that is the case then, atomically with the check, the status of the other transaction is changed to KILLED. Also, the latch field in the Info object of that transaction is decremented. bargeTimeElapsed This method determines whether the transaction has been running for more than BARGE_WAIT_NANOS (1/100th of a second). Transactions that have been running for less time than this cannot barge other transactions. Since they have barely started running, they will retry instead. blockAndBail This method takes a LockingTransaction.Info object describing the status of another transaction. It calls the stop method on the current transaction, giving it a status of RETRY. It then waits for up to LOCK_WAIT_MSECS (1/10th of a second) for the latch of the other transaction to be decremented to zero which will happen if the other transaction is barged or stopped. Finally, it triggers a retry of the current transaction.
This part of the design was inspired by the paper "Software Transactional Memory Should Not Be Obstruction-Free" [11]. If the current transaction were to retry immediately, the conflict that caused it to retry, would likely still be present. The small amount of wait time to allow it to finish what it is doing decreases the odds that the conflict will still be present. However, waiting until the other transaction completes would be pessimistic. doCommute This method takes a Ref, a function whose return value will become its new value, and arguments to be passed to the function after the current value of the Ref. It verifies that a transaction is running in the current thread (status = RUNNING or COMMITTING ). If not, it triggers a retry which will bring the status back to RUNNING. If the transaction doesn't yet have an in-transaction value for the Ref, it gets its newest value which may be a value that was committed by another transaction since this transaction began. The newest value is added to the map of in-transaction values ( vals ). The function and its arguments are added to a list of commute functions for the Ref so they can be executed again during the commit. It executes that function on the in-transaction value of the Ref and the arguments. It replaces the in-transaction value of the Ref with the return value of the function and then returns that value.
During a transaction commit, in the run method, all the commute functions are rerun using in-transaction values. They aren't necessarily called in the same order in which they were called in the transaction body. doEnsure This method takes a Ref. It verifies that a transaction is running in the current thread (status = RUNNING or COMMITTING ). If not, it triggers a retry which will bring the status back to RUNNING. Otherwise it continues. If this method has already been called on the given Ref during the current transaction try, then it simply returns. Otherwise it acquires a read lock for the Ref. If the Ref has been written by another transaction that hasn't yet committed, it releases the read lock and calls blockAndBail which triggers a retry of the current transaction. Otherwise the Ref is added to the set of Refs ensured in the current transaction try ( ensures ). doGet This method takes a Ref whose value is to be returned. It verifies that a transaction is running in the current thread (status = RUNNING or COMMITTING ). If not, it triggers a retry which will bring the status back to RUNNING. If the Ref has an in-transaction value, it is returned. Otherwise it continues. A read lock for the Ref is obtained. If the Ref has no value (unbound), an IllegalStateException is thrown. It gets the newest committed value of the Ref and then repeatedly gets the next oldest value in the history chain until one is found that was committed before the current transaction try began. It returns that value and releases the read lock on the Ref.
If the history of committed values for the Ref doesn't contain a value that was committed before the current tranansaction try began then it increments the number of faults for the Ref and triggers a retry. Faults cause more history to be retained for the Ref in the future (managed in the run method). Each time the history chain length for a Ref is increased by one due to a fault, the fault count for the Ref is reset to zero.
This method is called by the deref and alter methods in the Ref class. doSet This method takes a Ref and a proposed new value. Its goal is to change the in-transaction value of the Ref. It verifies that a transaction is running in the current thread (status = RUNNING or COMMITTING ). If not, it triggers a retry which will bring the status back to RUNNING.
The ref-set and alter functions both result in a call to this method. Neither can be called on a Ref after the commute function has been called on it in the current transaction try. Doing so will cause an IllegalStateException to be thrown. However, ref-set and alter can be called any number of times on the same Ref within a transaction and in any order.
If the Ref hasn't been modified yet in the current transaction, indicated by its absence from the sets collection, three things are done. First, the Ref is added to sets. Second, the Ref is "locked" by passing it to the lock method. Third, the Ref and its new value are added as key and value in the vals map.
Note that doCommute does not call lock on the Ref. The new value is simply saved as the new in-transaction value of the Ref and it is returned.
If the Ref has a validator function, it will not be called until the transaction is committing the changes. Note that a new history chain node (TVal) for the Ref isn't created until the transaction is ready to commit.
The doSet method is called from the set and alter methods of the Ref class. enqueue This method takes an Agent.Action object that holds a reference to an Agent, a function to be invoked on it, arguments to be passed to the function and an indication of the thread pool in which the function should be executed. It adds that object to the list of actions to be invoked after the transaction has committed. getCommitPoint This method takes no arguments. It returns a value that is used to indicate the order in which commits occur. It is called by the run method during a commit, after all the Refs to be modified by the transaction have been locked and immediately before new nodes are added to the history chains of the Refs being modified. It obtains the next highest integer number by atomically incrementing the lastPoint field. getEx This method takes no arguments. It returns the LockingTransaction object for the current thread if one has been created and is running, or throws an IllegalStateException otherwise. Several methods in the Ref class call this. They include alter, commute, set (called by the ref-set function) and touch (called by the ensure function). getReadPoint This method takes no arguments. It is called by the run method at the beginning of each transaction try. The value it returns is used to indicate the order in which transactions start and retry. It gets its value by atomically incrementing the lastPoint field. getRunning This method takes no arguments. It returns the LockingTransaction object for the current thread if one has been created and is not stopped, or null otherwise. isRunning This method takes no arguments. It returns a boolean that indicates whether the transaction associated with the current thread is currently running. A transaction is considered to be running if a LockingTransaction object has been created for the current thread AND its info field is not null. The stop method sets the info field to null. That is called by the run method near the end of a transaction commit, by the abort method, and by the lock method when it is unable to obtain a lock for a Ref to be modified. lock This method takes a Ref, marks it as having its value set since the beginning of the transaction try, and returns its most recently committed value.
Locking a Ref is done by setting its tinfo field to a LockingTransaction.Info object that describes the current transaction. In order to ensure that only one transaction is able to do this, a write lock for the Ref is acquired near the beginning of this method and it is released at the end. Recall that a write lock can only be acquired from a ReentrantReadWriteLock object if no thread holds its read or write lock. If the ensure function was called on the Ref earlier in the current transaction try then a read lock for the Ref is already held. The releaseIfEnsured method is called on the Ref to release that read lock so that the write lock can be acquired.
If the Ref has a value that was committed after the current transaction try began (called the "read point"), it triggers a retry of the current transaction. Next it checks whether the Ref has been modified in a concurrently running transaction. If so, it attempts to barge the other transaction. If that fails, it triggers a retry of the current transaction. Otherwise it marks that Ref as being locked by the current transaction by setting the tinfo field of the Ref to refer to the LockingTransaction.Info object for the current transaction and returns its most recently committed value. It ends by releasing the write lock that was obtained at the beginning of the method.
The lock method is called from the doSet method. releaseIfEnsured This method takes a Ref. If the ensure function has been called on the Ref during the current transaction try, the Ref is removed from the ensures field set and the read lock for the Ref (obtained during the earlier ensure ) is released. Otherwise the method does nothing. This is called by the lock and run methods. run This method is the heart of Clojure STM. It takes a Callable object that represents the code from the body of the transaction that will be executed inside a transaction. It starts by creating an empty list of Refs that are locked and an empty list of Notify objects. Notify is a static class defined in the same source file. Instances hold a Ref, its old value and its new value. They are used to notify watchers that the value of a Ref has changed.
This method then enters a loop that manages transaction retries. The loop exits if the transaction completes successfully, the maximum number of retries is performed (10,000), or an exception other than retry exception ( RetryEx ) is thrown. The body of the loop contains one try block with a catch for RetryEx and a finally block. The catch doesn't contain any code and simply allows execution to return to the top of the loop for a potential retry. The finally block is discussed later.
Inside the loop, the readPoint is incremented. This acts as a unique identifier for all the reads of Refs that occur in the current transaction try. If this is the first try for the current transaction, the startPoint is set to the readPoint and the startTime of the transaction is captured.
The status of the transaction is stored in an Info object. Info is a static class defined in the same source file. Instances hold a status, a start point and a latch whose use was described earlier. Valid status values are RUNNING, COMMITTING, RETRY, KILLED and COMMITTED. The status is set to RUNNING near the beginning of each try loop iteration.
Still in the loop, the Callable passed as a argument is called. This executes the expressions that were in the body of the dosync. Typically more than one Ref is read or dereferenced in this code and sometimes one or more Refs are modified, thus the need for a transaction.
After the body is successfully executed, the status is checked to verify that no other thread has barged this transaction. That changes the status from RUNNING to KILLED. If the transaction has not been killed then, atomically as part of the status check, the status is changed from RUNNING to COMMITTING.
Now the process of committing the transaction begins. This involves four major steps. The first step is to rerun all the commute functions. The second step is to obtain a write lock for every Ref that was modified. The third step is to verify that the validator of every Ref that was modified approves of the change. The fourth step is to commit the change to each modified Ref.
The first commit step iterates though each of the Refs that were commuted. If during the current transaction ref-set or alter was called on the Ref before commute was called on it then its commute functions are not called again and no further processing of the current Ref is performed in this step. This is because commute has already been run on what will become the newest value of the Ref. If ensure was called on the Ref in this transaction then the current transaction already holds a read lock for the Ref and that is released. Next, a write lock is acquired for the Ref and the Ref is added to a list of Refs (in the local variable locked ) that are locked by the current transaction. Note that write locks are acquired for the Refs in the order in which the Ref objects were created. This avoids deadlock in case another transaction is concurrently attempting to commit changes made to the same Refs using commute. If the Ref was ensured in this transaction and a new value was committed since this transaction try began then a retry of the current transaction is triggered. This will happen if another transaction commits a change to the Ref after the current transaction starts, but before ensure is called on it. Question: Why allow ensure to be called if this is the case? It then checks to see if another running transaction has made an in-transaction change to the Ref. If so, it attempts to barge that transaction. If this fails then a retry is triggered for the current transaction. Otherwise, it obtains the newest committed value of the Ref and saves it as its in-transaction value for the current transaction. Finally, each commute function for the Ref is called, passing it the in-transaction value of the Ref and any additional arguments that were passed to the commute function the first time it was called. The in-transaction value of the Ref is replaced by the value returned from the commute function.
In the second commit step, a write lock is acquired for each Ref that was modified in the transaction body. If any requested write lock cannot be acquired then the current transaction will retry.
In the third commit step, the validator function of every modified Ref that has one is called. If any validator function disapproves of the change being made to its Ref then the current transaction will retry.
In the fourth commit step, changes to Refs are written to their history chains. Either a new TVal object is added to the beginning of the chain or the oldest TVal object in the chain (the last one) is changed to become the beginning of the chain and it takes on the new value. A new TVal object is added if any of the following are true: The length of the history chain is currently zero. The length of the history chain is less than the value of minHistory for the Ref. At least one fault has occurred for this Ref since the last time the fault count was reset to zero and the length of the history chain is less than the value of maxHistory for the Ref. If the modified Ref has any watchers, a Notify object is created which describes the change. This contains the Ref that changed, its old value and its new value. The Notify objects are collected in a list. The watchers aren't actually notified until the finally block is reached.
The finally block performs cleanup steps for the transaction. It releases all the write locks acquired for Refs back in the second commit step. It releases all the read locks acquired by ensures that weren't released in the first commit step. This is necessary for Refs on which ensure was called, but ref-set, alter and commute were never called. It then calls stop to change the status of the transaction. If completing successfully, the status is changed to COMMITTED. Otherwise it is changed to RETRY. If any Notify objects were created then it passes the old and new value from each to the watchers of the corresponding Refs. If any actions were sent to Agents inside the transaction, it dispatches them. If the RETRY_LIMIT is exceeded then a generic checked exception is thrown and no more retries are attempted. runInTransaction
(static) This accepts a Callable object that represents the anonymous function that was passed from the sync macro. There is one ThreadLocal LockingTransaction object per thread. If one hasn't been created yet for the current thread, this method creates it. If the LockingTransaction has already started running then the call method is simply invoked on the Callable. This is how an inner transaction joins or is composed into an outer transaction (nested dosync calls). Otherwise the Callable object is passed to the run method of the LockingTransaction object to run in a new transaction. stop This method changes the status of the transaction to a given value and signals that the change has completed by decrementing the latch in its Info object to zero. The blockAndBail method waits for this. It then clears data associated with the LockingTransaction. This includes setting the info field to null and clearing the vals, sets and commutes collections. Note that the ensures collection is not cleared. This means that the read locks acquired by calling ensure on a Ref are retained across transaction tries. Question: Is retaining those locks across retries intentional? Question: Why isn't the actions collection cleared? Couldn't this result in actions being invoked more than once if a transaction has to retry?
When a transaction completes, the stop method is called on it. This sets the status of the transaction to either COMMITTED or RETRY. tryWriteLock This method takes a Ref. It tries for up to LOCK_WAIT_MSECS (1/10th of a second) to acquire a write lock for the Ref. If this fails due to the read or write lock being held by another thread (in which case the timeout will expire) or the current thread being interrupted, a retry of the current transaction is triggered. This method is called by the lock and run methods.
STM implementations are somewhat complicated. However, developing applications that use STM is less complicated and easier to get correct than using a lock-based approach. It seems likely that over time using STM will become as common and trusted as using garbage collection is today.
Watch for updates to this article as the Clojure STM implementation improves, eventually being replaced by an implementation written in Clojure instead of Java.The BBC has launched a thorough investigation into claims that the final episode of Sherlock season 4 was intentionally leaked online by Russian state broadcaster on Saturday (14 January) – a day ahead of its scheduled telecast. The third episode titled The Final Problem was to air on BBC1.
According to the Telegraph, the leaked Russian version of the 90-minute episode featured a short announcement promoting Channel One – the state-run channel that holds the rights to air the show in Russia – suggesting that the episode could have been leaked by the broadcaster. Sherlock producer Sue Vertue confirmed the leak and said that the Russian version had been leaked illegally.
"BBC Worldwide takes breaches of our stringent content security protocols very seriously and we have initiated a full investigation into how this leak occurred," a spokesman for the company was quoted as saying.
The paper quoted multiple analysts who said that it is possible that the leak could have been a deliberate act of retaliation against the BBC and the UK as in October 2016, state-owned British bank NatWest had threatened to close accounts linked to Kremlin-backed English language broadcaster Russia Today's (RT).
RT's director Margarita Simonyan slammed the decision as an attack on freedom of speech and Russia's foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova took to social media and said that the bank's decision "reeked of" the BBC, Reuters reported.
"I wish the BBC Russian service luck. They will need it now, because digging stuff up can be a diverting and unpredictable business," she wrote.
Zakharova also warned of a possible retaliation against British media in response to the move, saying, "Our stance is straightforward – we will stick up for our own," and added that Britain will "get as good as they give".
The publication also reported that Russia may have been peeved with the BBC World Service's recent plans of expanding its Russian output, its biggest expansion since the 1940s.
"Through war, revolution and global change, people around the world have relied on the World Service for independent, trusted, impartial news. As an independent broadcaster, we remain as relevant as ever in the 21st Century, when in many places there is not more free expression, but less," BBC's World Service director Fran Unsworth said of the expansion plans in November 2016.
Lilit Gevorgyan, a Russia analyst and senior economist at IHS Global Insight told the publication that Russia does have a pattern of "making short term tactical gains at the expense of long-term strategic losses. We cannot entirely exclude the possibility that this is a deliberate act."
"But it would be so damaging, one has to question whether it would be worth it. So it could be a simple case of poorly executed intellectual property handling," she noted.
In October, Washington blamed Moscow for allegedly orchestrating cyberattacks against the Democratic National Convention and other organisations in an attempt to influence the US election. European nations – such as Germany and France – are boosting defences to counter cyberattacks, misinformation campaigns and other attempts from Russia to influence elections held this year.
In November last year, MI5 Director General Andrew Parker warned that Russia is "using its whole range of state organs and powers" and is a growing threat to Britain and other European nations.Lessons from NYC: Greenway Success Through Interdepartmental Collaboration
(In advance of my mid-February return to Los Angeles, I’ll be writing up a few L.A.-applicable lessons that I’ve learned back east. – Joe)
After living car-free in Los Angeles for 16 years, I fell in love and decided to move to New York City for a while. Well, not quite in New York City proper, I’ve been residing in Jersey City, NJ, directly across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan. Jersey City is one subway stop from Manhattan. It’s sometimes called the “sixth borough” after NYC’s five official boroughs.
Jersey City is NJ’s second most populous city. It’s population of 250,000 (2000 census) similar to the population of the city of Glendale, CA – but in roughly half the space. Jersey City is about 15 square miles, similar to the size of the city of Pasadena. Downtown Jersey City is fairly population-dense and very walkable.
New York City, already arguably the United States most walkable and transit-friendly city, has undergone a street renaissance in the past few years, becoming even safer and better for walking and bicycling. I am not the person to tell the whole story; it has been well-covered at Streetsblog NYC. If you’re completely unfamiliar with the recent NYC developments, perhaps start by watching this Streetfilm.
Lesson 1 – NYC Greenways
The term greenway isn’t used all that often in Los Angeles. It’s basically a bike and walk path, for the most part, separate from car traffic. Greenway facilities in L.A. include the beach bike path, the river and creek bike paths.
For most of 2013, I worked as Greenway Director for the Bronx River Alliance. The Alliance is a non-profit organization embedded in NYC’s Park and Recreation Department. It’s a bit of a hybrid of L.A.’s River Revitalization Corporation melded with Friends of the Los Angeles River.
The Bronx River, NYC’s only remaining freshwater river, runs 7 miles through the Bronx, with an additional 15 miles through neighboring Westchester County. There are plenty of similarities between the Bronx River and the L.A. River. Both run through population dense immigrant-rich communities of color. Both are cut off from these communities via obstacles including freeways and railroad tracks. Both are making a comeback in recent years.
In 1993, NYC adopted its Greenway plan, designating 350 miles of off-road facilities for bicycling and walking. Most of the mileage is waterfronts. The Greenway plan was strengthened by a later Comprehensive Waterfront Plan.
Typically Transportation departments (DOTs) rightly focus on streets. This is the primary place where people get around, including the majority of cyclists and pedestrians. Parks and Recreation departments (Parks) tend to just focus on what happens in their parks. Greenways end up being a hybrid creature. A lot of greenway users are pedestrians and cyclists enjoying recreation, but there is significant transportation usage of these facilities, too.
What happens in NYC that I haven’t seen in L.A is significan inter-departmental collaboration. While greenways are neither of these departments’ core mission, both NYC DOT and NYC Parks have staff that work on the city’s greenways. Both departments seek funding for, design, build and maintain greenway trails.
The recreation and transportation utility of these facilities diminishes when there are obstacles that result in gaps in trail. These obstacles can include rail, freeways, contaminated sites, and lack of available right-of-way in long-built-out areas. These sorts of obstacles tend to be more common in older, industrial and formerly-industrial areas, which all tend to be (or be very near to) population-dense communities of color – where plenty of people depend on walking and bicycling for everyday transportation.
These obstacle/gap areas include a lot of older waterfronts. Back east there are the Bronx River in the South Bronx, Brooklyn’s waterfront, and many others. In Southern California, it includes the L.A. River through Downtown L.A. and Vernon, parts of Compton Creek, parts of Wilmington and San Pedro, and others.
One welcome practice that I’ve observed back east is that NYC DOT fills in greenway path gaps between parks using on-street bike facilities. One example that I was involved in was a quarter-mile gap closure bordering Westchester Avenue in the South Bronx. When contamination and right-of-way issues prevented NYC Parks from moving forward with a bike/walk path immediately alongside the Bronx River, the NYC DOT added crosswalks, bike lanes, sharrows, and a bike/ped crossing signal. These on-street facilities close a gap between existing river paths in two nearby parks, Concrete Plant Park and Starlight Park.
I haven’t seen enough of this interdepartmental greenways collaboration in Los Angeles. Frequently neither LADOT nor L.A.’s Department of Recreation and Parks (LADRP) will take full ownership of L.A. Greenway facilities. LADOT doesn’t include LADRP bike paths on its website |
searched for information about how to elude manhunts, criminal complaint says
He was captured by a U.S. marshals team
Frein was cuffed with the handcuffs of the state trooper he is accused of killing
Whew.
After 48 days of living with helicopters, heavily armed police officers, the rumors and constant questions -- where is he? -- the people of northeast Pennsylvania can finally relax.
The manhunt for Eric Matthew Frein, accused of killing a Pennsylvania state trooper, is over. Heavily armed U.S. marshals captured Frein on Thursday night and turned him over to state police, who slapped the slain officer's cuffs on him, put him in the back of the trooper's squad car and sent him back to the barracks where the ambush occurred.
JUST WATCHED Inside the capture of Eric Frein Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Inside the capture of Eric Frein 02:51
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"We just thought it was fitting," State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan said.
Frein, 31, is charged with first-degree murder and other charges in a September 12 ambush outside the state police barracks in Blooming Grove.
He's accused of killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson and wounding Trooper Alex T. Douglass before melting into the thick Pennsylvania woods.
JUST WATCHED Commissioner describes Frein arrest Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Commissioner describes Frein arrest 02:24
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Authorities had worried the survivalist and military buff with a reported history of cop hatred might go out in a violent standoff. In the end, he gave up without a fight.
His capture ended a lengthy search that burned through some $10 million, according to the county prosecutor, and likely as many nerves.
"It actually felt like I was in a war zone a couple of weeks ago, and it was hard to sleep for a few nights, worrying about where he is," resident Mark Denny told CNN affiliate WNEP-TV
The capture
The squad of 13 U.S. marshals -- armed like a military special operations squad -- found Frein at an abandoned airport near Tannersville, authorities said.
Frein hadn't been spotted. He was discovered as part of a "routine sweep through the woods," State Police Lt. Col. George Bivens told reporters.
And he wasn't armed at the time of his capture, according to police, much to the relief of authorities who feared a violent showdown.
When marshals surprised him in a field near the airport, he obeyed their orders to get down on his hands and knees and told them who he was, Noonan said. There was no struggle, Pike County District Attorney Raymond Tonkin said.
Investigators searching the area did find a cache that included a sniper rifle, Noonan said. The rifle appears to be consistent with casings gathered during the investigation, he said.
Frein was in good physical condition when he was captured, apart from a cut on his nose that he had before the marshals found him, according to Noonan. He looked "healthier than I would have expected," Noonan said.
"He's been stashing food, he's been staying out in the woods," Noonan said. "He had a lot of locations he knew how to hide in. And also, he had been preparing himself by participating in these re-enactments, especially in the Vietnam era, where he specifically trained himself and trained with other people to hide in the woods and avoid detection."
Officials said they were unsure how long he had been hiding at the airport.
Court appearance
During his court appearance Friday Frein looked thin, with the cut on his nose and abrasions on his forehead. His left cheek was swollen.
His voice was strong as he answered, "Yes I do," to a Pike County judge's question if he understood the charges against him, which include first-degree murder and criminal homicide of a law enforcement officer.
About 30 police were in the room for the 10-minute hearing.
Tonkin, the district attorney, said he plans to seek the death penalty.
Frein is being held in the Pike County Correctional Institute in Lords Valley. In an interview with CNN on Friday, Gov. Tom Corbett said he expects authorities to make sure Frein stays safe.
"I'm sure they will have all precautions taken, not only for his well-being from other inmates but from himself, too," Corbett said.
Motive unclear
Tonkin declined to say what, if anything, Frein has revealed about the attack that left Dickson dead and Douglass critically wounded.
Douglass has since been released and is continuing to recover, according to police.
After his arrest, Frein made statements implicating himself in the shootings, according to a law enforcement official who was briefed on the capture. Authorities also found his diary, but contents of that document haven't been revealed.
Authorities have not discussed a motive but have said Frein has talked and written about hating law enforcement.
JUST WATCHED Slain cop's cuffs used to arrest Frein Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Slain cop's cuffs used to arrest Frein 01:59
"I've characterized his actions in the past as pure evil, and I would stand by that," Tonkin said Friday.
A review of his computer hard drive shows he had planned an attack for years, authorities said.
According to the criminal complaint against him, Frein searched the Internet going back to 2012 for information related on placing supply caches, police manhunt techniques and how to evade them and other topics.
"Eric Frein had a mission that was to attack law enforcement," Noonan said. "If he got out of those woods, we were very concerned that he would then kill other law enforcement. And if not them, civilians. That's why we had to keep the pressure on."
There was no indication that anyone was helping Frein, who was "quite well-prepared," Noonan said.
'A celebration'
Frein's arrest punctured the thick tension that had blanketed the region for weeks.
"It's been a long seven weeks," Corbett said on CNN's "New Day."
During the search, some outdoor activities were curtailed and some schoolchildren didn't go out for recess.
"It's just exciting and we're happy. We didn't go out of school for weeks for recess," resident Shannon Juirad told WNEP.
And then there was the question of Halloween.
At least one community, Barrett Township, canceled trick-or-treating as the search dragged on, instead suggesting children show up at a school parking lot to collect candy under the supervision of local and state police.
But with Frein in custody, the trick-or-treating will go on as normal, said Barrett Township Board Chairman Ralph Megliola.
"I'm ecstatic -- and just in time for Halloween!" Megliola said.
Pennsylvania Game Commission Executive Director R. Matthew Hough lifted the temporary prohibition on hunting and trapping activity in all areas that had been affected by the manhunt.
Outside the police barracks, residents held a sign reading, "Way to Go PSP." Passing motorists slowed, also offering words of encouragement for the Pennsylvania State Police.
"We all have children and we were afraid to go outside, we were afraid to do anything," one woman told CNN affiliate WBRE-TV
"I can't even explain what I'm feeling right now, this is awesome. We are so proud of our Pennsylvania State Police, their hard work," another said.
"Now it's a celebration," one woman wearing a "Barrett Proud" shirt told WNEP.by
Kuala Lumpur skyline after rain. An example image for which there is no perfect output medium at present: web sizes we don’t need to talk about. Full resolution screens lack the tonal resolution to render the clouds in a transparent manner; print comes closest, but ultimately is a reflective medium and so lacks the dynamic range to represent the difference between the foreground trees in deep shadow and the light in the buildings.
Let’s take stock of where we are at the moment in terms of viewing options for images: there’s basically still only digital and print. On the digital side, displays have been steadily increasing in resolution and information density – and to some extent also size; we have 4K monitors in some laptops at 14″ and under, 8K in some televisions with an enormous jump to 50″+, and the majority of devices sit in the 2-4MP range somewhere between 12″ and 30″. There are also mobile devices with HD, QHD or even 4K (the recently announced Sony Z5) resolutions in sub-6″ screens; that’s an absurdly huge range of pixel densities. Everything from about 100PPI to 800+PPI. Clearly, preparing content for this is not going to be easy; viewing distances don’t necessarily have anything to do with perceived information density (say pixels per degree of observed FOV), either. You can hold your mobile at such a distance that it subtends the same angle as your 27″ 5K iMac, but the problem is the iMac will actually have double or more of the information density – just look at the number of pixels along the long axis. Or the converse might be true. As image makers, how do we manage this?
Before I attempt to answer that question, we need to consider the second display medium: print. This encompasses everything from my fine art Ultraprints and contact prints to billboards; they sit everywhere along the effective information density spectrum from 5PPI to 720PPI+. Each subset of the medium has digital analogs: if 4″ drugstore prints are average smartphones, regular prints are normal computer displays, then Ultraprints are 4K on a smartphone (and actually look quite similar in terms of information density); billboards are giant electronic signboards. Once again, we can perform the same experiment as with the phone and the 5K iMac: view so that two images occupy the same angle of view, and the amount of information contained can be wildly different. A print in an average quality photo book has nowhere near the same amount of information as an Ultraprint at the same size – 144PPI or less with four colours offset and a relatively wide pixel mask compared to 720PPI with eleven colors and sub-2 picoliter droplet size with continuous dithering is clearly going to look different. Yet ultimately they may well represent the same image.
On top of this, we need to take into account the way content is consumed: something presented and created with deliberation in mind has to stand up to far higher scrutiny than casual in-your-face advertising. A print is going to be pored over for far longer periods of time than a billboard; you’re probably not going to notice anything amiss in the latter unless there are jarring typos or layout errors. And here we come to our first hypothesis, which should apply to all output images regardless of media:
1. The more deliberate the intent and presentation, the higher the information density must be.
Information density takes two forms: spatial frequency and resolution, and tonality/color. The former is what gives you the ability to resolve hair in a monochrome image; subtle variations in the latter are what creates the impression of transparency in an image. Shifting tonality or color in a plausible but unusual way creates emotion by evoking experience. When you have amounts of both that exceed the limits of our eye/brain combination to process, then the result is indistinguishable from reality.
The problem here is of course photographs are always going to be two dimensional; even three dimensional presentations, stereoscopic experiments etc. will always be approximations simply because your vantage point is fixed. You can’t step to the left or move your head and peer around the tree in front of you. That said, we are really the foundation of the second hypothesis:
2. The limit is human vision: there is no point in presenting more information than we can proceess.
Up to this point, monitors and prints have been clearly lacking simply because we can easily perceive their constituent subelements with little effort: go close to a monitor and the illusion of continuity breaks down into a regular rectangular pixel mask; go close to most prints and see dots. Apple was the first company to actively market a challenge of these limits with its ‘retina’ displays; the premise here was that a 326PPI display with a tight pixel mask (the dark separation grid between adjacent pixels) at typical viewing distances for a phone would exceed the limits of human vision to produce an effectively continuous image. Yes and no; look close and hard and the elements are still there. The problem is that firstly our eyes do not render in a regular, linear way like cameras. We actually resolve closer to 1000PPI at minimum focusing distance for a person with perfect eyesight; ability to identify these and distinguish individual elements is closer to about 600-700PPI in reality (each element needs another contrasting element next to it to separate it from adjacent ones). To produce a truly seamless/continuous viewing experience, you need to either exceed this barrier by a reasonable margin with a regular grid display, or use one that isn’t regular.
For a very long time, capture technology has exceed display technology; until very recently, by a large margin. We had 20+MP cameras and only 2MP displays; that requires throwing or downsampling 90% of the information captured. Of course the Bayer interpolation process means that it isn’t quite that bad, and I suppose a truer approximation is probably something like 13-15 MP of information captured, but there’s still a clear disconnect. Now it’s 20-50MP for the majority of capture, and 4MP-14MP for output: that’s a much better ratio. This downsampling for output display has had two consequences: firstly, oversampling produces a cleaner image; secondly, we don’t quite get all of the information. On top of that, if you look too closely, there are still gaps: each screen pixel’s RGB elements won’t fully light unless that area of the image is white; dark colors appear somewhat murky because tones are not truly continuous – there’s a perceptual gap created by the pixels that are dimly lit. Clearly, there’s still benefit to seeing it presented in a different, and hopefully more complete way: print.
Printing does not display information with a regular array of RGB elements; instead, each physical location, luminance and color information bit (a ‘pixel’) is translated by the printer’s software and hardware into a series of ink dots; many ink dots are used to represent one pixel. The more inks the printer has, the wider gamut of colours it can represent – but the tradeoff is that it has to lay more ink to represent some of these colours, resulting in spread (dot gain). Not only is spread of an individual ink-dense dot a concern, but the accuracy in overlaying these ink dots is important, too: you may land up with a lot more spread than you think, simply because the printer is not laying ink precisely*.
*There are any number of causes for this: imprecise positioning, clogged heads spraying ink at an angle, voltage spikes affecting the piezomechanics that activate ink spraying, old or partially dried ink, changes in humidity and temperature, paper bleed characteristics or fiber types – remember, we are talking about very, very small tolerances here. 720PPI in an Ultraprint means 1/720″ or 35 micrometers between adjacent pixels, with 11 ink colours overlaid on that spot, and droplet sizes of under two picoliters – that’s 0.0000000000002 litres. Fluids don’t even behave as you’d expect at those scales.
The upshot of all of this is basically an irregular and hopefully somewhat continuous matrix of ink dots where information from one pixel location seamlessly blends into the next one as a consequence of the dithering/ printing process. Information is now perceptually continuous; there are no pixel mask boundaries or hard defined elements as with a monitor. And so far, it’s still possible to represent far more information in a print – giclee Ultraprint or optical contact print – than digitally. This represents reality far more accurately: the world is continuous, not made up of infinitesimally small blocks of Lego.
But it may well be only a matter of time before displays catch up. There have been prototype monitors that display 700+ PPI already shown, and smaller ones now available (and that is probably the most widely available representation of an Ultraprint I can suggest – look at a critically sharp image that has been perfectly sized and processed/sharpened on a 4k phone screen, and imagine that in a print). Imagine one of these at say 30″ sizes. The bottleneck now is not production of the output hardware: it’s the signal to drive it. We’re looking at the 100MP range, and a file of this size is enormous; the video processing capabilities aren’t quite there yet, not to mention capture. But at the rate computing power has been advancing, it’s probably not even that far off. And visually, the diminishing returns get ever steeper. At 4″ viewing distance, I can clearly make out the pixel grid in my 27″ Thunderbolt display (109PPI); an Ultraprint still looks continuous. At my usual 2ft working distance from the monitor, I can make out some elements are resolution limited, like text, but images still look acceptable. A 5K iMac adds a layer of transparency, but brings other challenges, as we’ll soon see.
We are now in a transition period for output: even though output information density is increasing to more closely match input/ capture density, adoption isn’t going to happen overnight. I see this most acutely in my day job: I’ve got to make content that’s going to hold up for clients and readers on high resolution retina+ displays, and at the same time still ‘works’ visually for those that aren’t. For the moment, I can’t retouch on retina because I simply cannot see the dots that my clients can with regular monitors; postprocessing is also challenging because it’s difficult to determine how much is enough sharpening. Too much, and you land up with coarse haloes and a gritty micro texture on regular devices. Too little, and everything looks soft – even though the increased information density on retina devices looks great. It means retouching on non-retina, and proofing on an iPad just to check that everything looks fine at higher densities.
Here’s where I gaze into the crystal ball: when we had fewer pixels, they all had to count. When we reach the point that we have more than we can see, they no longer have to be perfect, just plausible. More resolution brings additional possibilities: full translation ideas that require transparency; the enough plausibility to force your audience to suspend disbelief for scenes that cannot be real or appear surreal; even larger sizes. Images that don’t currently ‘work’ at small web sizes because of insufficient information density (e.g. subtle texture in waves, or water, or leaves) will do. Until this point, the medium will have a huge influence on the impact and translation of an image: we have to shoot with the end output in mind, or risk a weak image. Unless a specific assignment requires otherwise, I create images that I know will work as prints; most will work at web sizes, but not as well. I think we will be eventually liberated from this. At that point resolution probably won’t matter other than for scaling of physical size, and even then, to a much lesser degree because of viewing distances.
If it sounds like I’m predicting the death of printing, the truth couldn’t be further. Digital viewing always has an implied transience that never gives an image weight or encourages further contemplation; it is partially due to the ease of creation and partially due to our psychological conditioning in the way we consume content. Perhaps those other ‘forum experts’ who are happy to degrade a print they have never seen, but gush over the 5K iMac might eventually come around – or perhaps not, since that is the way of the internet. For most, the easier it is to visualise the purpose of the Ultraprint and how it appears in person, the easier it is to appreciate – especially the difference in impact between seeing arbitrary subsampling of the information presented in bold (i.e. a reduced-resolution monitor graphic) and all of the information (at least to the limits of capture). My biggest challenge til now has been to explain that viewing experience other than with prints, in person – which is good and bad. Regardless of medium, I think there will always be a place for this kind of immersive experience whether it is delivered via a 100MP 30″ LCD of the future, or today’s Ultraprint. I just hope our lenses can cope! MT
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Images and content copyright Ming Thein | mingthein.com 2012 onwards. All rights reservedRollerCoaster Tycoon 3 for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad just hit the App Store. This popular construction and management videogame franchise that simulates amusement park originally management debuted on Windows PCs back in 1999.
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 released on Windows more than a decade ago (it dropped on October 26, 2004) and today’s release has finally brought the classic strategy simulation title to the iOS platform.
The game costs $4.99 and is free of In-App Purchase schemes.
What’s this all about?
Ported over to iOS by Frontier Developments Ltd., RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 incorporates touch controls and includes all eighteen scenarios from the original PC game. Managing your own roller coaster park requires you to overcome day-to-day challenges such as changing weather patterns, demanding guests who always want more and more.
The happier your guests are, the more in-game revenue you’ll earn from them. And the more in-game money you have, the better as you’ll be able to advance your amusement parks with additional attractions, refreshment stands and other perks.
After you’ve played through all of the included missions, you can custom-design your own generic theme park without restriction in Sandbox mode, or take advantage of built-in designs such as Generic, Spooky, Western, Adventure and Sci-fi.
As you can see for yourself, graphics are top-notch.
You can move your view around, zoom in on every detail using fully controllable cameras and even jump into the front seat to experience the ride yourself with “the jaw-dropping Coaster Cam.”
Highlights
Developers listed the following highlights in release notes:
Create your ultimate theme park in stunning 3D.
Let your imagination run free in Sandbox mode.
Play through all 18 scenarios from the original PC game.
Watch your guests react to your park as you try to make them happy.
Happy guests earn you more in-game money to build out your parks even more.
Design your parks using 5 fun themes: Generic, Spooky, Western, Adventure and Sci-fi.
See every spine tingling detail with fully controllable cameras.
Grab a front seat for the ride of your life with the jaw-dropping Coaster Cam.
Cope with challenging objectives, changing weather patterns and enjoy beautiful vistas, sunsets, moonlight and more.
Unsure if this strategy simulation is for you?
Check out a review by Jeff Byrnes of AppAdvice.
Availability
As mentioned before, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 is a premium release without dreaded In-App Purchases. In fact, developers proudly mention this in iTunes release notes, saying “With a new mobile-friendly UI, the creativity, depth and sophistication of the classic PC game is all here – with NO in-app purchases.”
The 589-megabyte download requires an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad with iOS 7.0 or later. Due to complex graphics, recommended hardware includes the iPhone 5s and later, the iPad Air/iPad mini 2 and later and sixth-generation iPod touch.
The game is optimized for native display resolution of the iPhone 5/5s/5c and localized in English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish
Grab RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 for $4.99 in the App Store.Some 42 pages of highly redacted documents from the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of highly classified materials paint a picture of a serious, but flawed investigation hindered by a lack of cooperation, according to a key watchdog group.
The materials, all part of the probe dubbed “Midyear Exam,” included several documents designated as “grand jury material,” indicating the potential seriousness of the investigation that would ultimately be ended by FBI director James Comey in July, then restarted for a brief period in October before being shut down for good.
One redacted exchange reveals a back and forth subpoena response to the FBI from one of Mrs. Clinton’s private attorneys, Katherine Turner, a partner at Washington DC powerhouse firm Williams & Connolly. In the document, Turner agreed to turn over one of Mrs. Clinton’s non-secure Apple iPads and two of her BlackBerrys to the FBI.
But neither smartphone received from the law firm contain SIM cards or Secure Digital (SD) cards, and a total of 13 mobile devices identified by the FBI as potentially using clintonemail.com email addresses were never located by Williams & Connelly.
Read moreMy initial experiences on MTGO have been largely very positive. Once I learned the basics of the client and how my deck worked, things were pretty great. On two days in the past week or so, I sat down and played a GP worth of matches from the comfort of my bedroom. I can’t really put a value on the amount of extra testing I’m getting in, but it’s certainly more than the $0 I’m putting into the program now that I have a deck. I’m “going infinite” so to speak in terms of value in the Legacy Leagues, so unless I hit a cold streak or the meta shifts, my practice is paying for itself and slowing saving up for other ventures.
I say my experience has largely been positive because setting up a stream has been a nightmare. MTGO inexplicably stopped connecting on one of my laptops. I followed their recommended fix guide to no avail. Whatever, I have a backup laptop. I ordered a new battery for that and got sent the wrong part. Whatever, that’s annoying, but still fine. OBS (the streaming program) streams everything on my screen except MTGO. *tilt* What I’m getting at is the stream is going to be delayed a bit until my tech issues are resolved. I’m working on them, but Zapdos isn’t going to catch itself… I’ll probably give OBS Classic a shot in a few days and see if that works better.
As my apology for falling behind my anticipated schedule, I’ve vastly updated the matchup section of the site. You’ll now find brand new primers for Grixis Delver, Czech Pile, Sneak and Show, Turbo Depths, and RB Reanimator. Enjoy!
For those of you have been known me for years, my hatred for Sword of Light and Shadow in D&T is pretty well known. I think that card is straight garbage. It usually comes in for the same matchups as Rest in Peace, making it hard to get a creature back. Swords to Plowshares also exiles your critters, which also makes it pretty hard to get something back. That means you are playing the sword almost purely for protection, with the random upside of gaining three life. Cool. There’s a good reason why I pushed Sword of War and Peace so hard during the Miracles era. When I played Sword of War and Peace, that sucker was melting people left and right. SoLaS is just disappointing in comparison.
Andrew Calderon hyped up this card a ton in our interview, as did my friend Don Donelson, so I decided to give it another shot. I stand by all of my statements. Against decks like Czech Pile, Grixis Delver, and Maverick it comes in alongside Rest in Peace, and that was frequently awkward. Against Miracles and other Swords to Plowshares decks, it doesn’t really get critters back as intended either. In all of the games I have played with it, I think I have successfully returned a creature in about 3 games.
I say all of that, yet it’s still in my deck. I don’t think SoLaS is objectively a good card, but it fills a weird set of overlapping roles that no other card really does. Against Czech Pile, it is a really threatening card. It invalidates otherwise useful blockers like Baleful Strix while incidentally getting creatures out of range of red removal and shutting off Fatal Push as an option. Against Grixis Delver, it walls or pushes through Gurmag Angler, who is a problem for cards not named Mirran Crusader. Against Miracles, the mirror, and Stoneblade, despite being very noticeably worse than SoWaP, it still gives protection from white; that matters.
If you are lucky enough to start getting creatures back with SoLaS, you are most certainly taking over that game. Let’s make that clear. Chump blocking with Recruiter of the Guard and redeploying it after a SoLaS trigger does feel pretty great. Bringing back an army of disposable Flickerwisps is disgusting.
Even when SoLaS isn’t firing on all cylinders, the role it plays as a card is probably important enough to keep around. I don’t like this card, but I’m not going to ignore how useful it has been. I board it in very frequently, and I do often fetch it first when I board it in. I want to be playing SoWaP (I miss the OHKO with Crusader and the percentage points against combo), but I begrudgingly admit that SoLaS is probably correct. The board also doesn’t have room for two pieces of equipment, so doing something else like running Sword of Feast and Famine alongside Sword of War and Peace isn’t viable.Two of Donald Trump's closest former advisers, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, are now "formally considered'subjects' of a criminal investigation," just as the Department of Justice has finally appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the Trump team's ties to Russia.
Donald Trump and his team are in serious trouble now, thanks to relentless pressure from Democrats.
The Department of Justice has appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to lead the investigation into Russia’s election meddling and the Trump campaign’s connection to that effort.
Mueller served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and stepped down in September 2013.
In his letter announcing the appointment, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote, “What I have determined is that based upon the unique circumstances, the public interest requires me to place this investigation under the authority of a person who exercises a degree of independence from the normal chain of command.”
The scope of Mueller’s investigation includes “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.” He will still be required to notify Attorney General Jeff Sessions ahead of any “significant actions” that he may undertake.
Sessions recused himself from the investigation after it was revealed that he lied to Congress about contacting Russia’s ambassador while he was a surrogate for the Trump campaign.
Trump responded to the news with a press release — he has not tweeted about it, at least not yet — in which he asserted, “There was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity.” He added, “I look forward to this matter concluding quickly.”
Trump previously said that the investigation “should be over.”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Executive Director Noah Bookbinder called Mueller “the right man for the job” in a release, adding, “It is our sincere hope that he is able to get to the bottom of this situation — not just the truth about Russia’s interference with the 2016 election and any coordination it may have had with the Trump campaign, but also the truth about the president’s apparent obstruction of the FBI’s Russia investigation.”
The group has pursued lawsuits against Trump for violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution by continuing to take foreign payments as president.
The DOJ announcement comes as new reporting from NBC indicates that top Trump lieutenants Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn are emerging as key figures in the investigation. Law enforcement officials tell NBC that Manafort and Flynn “are formally considered ‘subjects’ of a criminal investigation.”
The FBI, Treasury Department, CIA, and other agencies are “examining evidence of possible contacts, money transfers and business relationships between a variety of Trump associates and Russian officials.”
The probe will also reportedly also investigate how Russian intelligence sources disseminated anti-Hillary Clinton fake news stories, as well as the leaking of hacked Clinton emails via WikiLeaks.
Manafort was the chairman of the Trump campaign until he was fired when news reports emerged about cash payments he had received from pro-Putin entities.
Flynn was an adviser to the Trump campaign and then briefly served as national security adviser. He was fired after it was revealed that he had lied about making contact with Russia.
According to a memo from former FBI Director James Comey, Trump asked him to cease investigating Flynn, which many are characterizing as an obstruction of justice. Trump later fired Comey, after Comey had reportedly asked for more resources to investigate Russian meddling and its Trump connection.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi cautiously praised the appointment of Mueller, calling it a “first step,” but insisting “it cannot be the last.” She noted that Mueller will still report to the “Trump-appointed leadership of the Justice Department” and “cannot take the place of a truly independent, outside commission that is completely free from the Trump Administration’s meddling.”
“A special prosecutor does not negate the need for vigorous Congressional investigations either,” Pelosi added.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said, “A special counsel is very much needed in this situation and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein has done the right thing.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), said the Mueller appointment was a “good first step.”
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) praised those who have been pushing all along for a special prosecutor:
Why did Justice Dept appoint a Special Counsel? Because of #TheResistance, free press, whistleblowers & millions of Americans fighting back. — Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) May 17, 2017
The resistance has demanded an independent investigation into Trump and Russia, and has been unrelenting in doing so. As several Democrats noted, the appointment of a special counsel is a good first step. But far more is needed to get to the bottom of what Russia did to interfere in our election, and how Trump’s campaign might have been complicit.Russia, Iran, Poland, and several Gulf states successfully got the wording removed from the statement.
Russia led efforts to remove language calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality worldwide from a UN resolution last week.
As world leaders, activists and medical experts gathered at the High-Level Meeting To End AIDS, the push is to reframe the pandemic as a human rights issue as part of the campaign to stop AIDS globally by 2030.
We have the resources to stop new infections and keep HIV-positive people healthy, but stigma—both cultural and legal—is still a major barrier.
The former Soviet Union was joined by Poland, Iran and several other Middle East countries in insisting that language calling for the end of anti-LGBT laws be stricken from the resolution.
Getty
The Russian delegation also balked at calls for needle-exchange programs, even though most HIV transmission in Russia is linked to intravenous drug use.
Health official Dilyara Ravilova-Borovik insisted governments have a “sovereign right” to decide their own public health strategy.
According to Radio Free Europe, Russia sought other changes in the resolution, but they were rejected over fears it would allow countries with anti-LGBT laws to deny antiretroviral treatment to gay men.An Irish oil exploration company has secured court orders aimed at identifying people who allegedly posted defamatory material about it on internet message boards with a view to suing them following a "catastrophic" fall of £132 million in its market value in recent weeks.
It is claimed "wholly untrue" defamatory postings between November 8th and 22nd, including postings claiming the company's drilling project in Nevada, US, was a "scam" by "liars", materially contributed to its share price fall and damaged its company's reputation and ability to raise funds to exploit oil discoveries.
The market capitalisation of US Oil & Gas plc (USOP) on November 5th was £173 million when the share price was £4.15 and is now £41.6m with a share price of £1, the court heard.
Legal proceedings are intended against those who posted the material, Mr Justice Roderick Murphy was told. "There appears to be a view you can say what you like on the internet but that day is gone," Rossa Fanning, for USOP, said.
In an affidavit, Brian McDonnell, chief executive of USOP, said he has been involved in the oil and gas sector for up to six years and USOP, incorporated in Ireland in 2009, was a well-run, accountable and proper business formed to exploit the potential for substantial oil and gas finds in Nevada.
The material posted about USOP had had "a catastrophic effect" on his company's share price and individually and cumulatively alleged serious wrongdoing against himself and his company's employees, directors and officers, he said.
The gist of most of the statements was that he and USOP were engaged in a fraudulent attempt to induce investors to buy shares in a "sham" company, he said. It was also alleged he, the directors or their associates used insider information to trade in the shares and had manipulated company announcements to that end.
It cannot be acceptable that he could, in public, be called a "liar" or it could be alleged he was running a "ponzi scheme", was "corrupt" and "full of sh**" without an opportunity to know who was making such allegations so he could have those allegations deliberated upon in court, Mr McDonnell said.
To suggest without any evidence and falsely he was a "fraudster" and "ponzi scheme creator" was defamatory per se, he said. He had little option but to pursue the authors of such material through the courts.
Mr Fanning said the material complained of was posted on message boards on three websites - www.boards.ie operated by |
world, the game sees you as a high-school student transferred to a small town before discovering he can travel into a twisted world through a TV set. It follows a grittier tone to most games of its ilk (though is still full of charm, only with a dark sense of humour, rather than a naïve one), as you find yourself at the centre of a supernatural murder investigation where the TV World has become the killer’s weapon. More interestingly, though, rather than exploring new, sweeping environments and discovering towns and dungeons, it has you living out almost every individual day of your character’s school year in the small rural town.
This means when you’re not adventuring inside the TV, you’re going to school, going to class, choosing your daily activities and social interactions rather than constant otherworldly crime solving. This calendar system helps Persona 4 establish an entirely different tempo to the usual grind/cutscene/grind/cutscene/boss rhythm of other titles, and as a result, it’s led Atlus to eradicate something else that has come to bother me over the years.
Traditionally in JRPGs, gameplay and storytelling are two entirely different entities, kept at arm’s length for reasons I’ve never fully understood. Rarely have I ever had to make a world-changing decision, or even character defining one for that matter; the story is set in stone and you’re just along for the ride with grinding to make up the gaps in-between. This approach is fine as long as a given story carries any kind of resonance with you (as Ni No Kuni did for me), but with a lot of plots following the same basic premise, it’s a rare case when I don’t find myself bored.
Persona 4, however, brings both elements together in a remarkable fashion thanks to the Social Link system, which perfectly marries gameplay with character development. No matter what you’re doing outside the Shadow World, be it taking part in the school’s social or sports clubs or hanging out with your buddies, you’re progressing their individual narrative journey and working towards gameplay bonuses to the player’s benefit. By ranking higher in your Social Links during and after school, not only will the main character be able to create stronger Personas, but the party unlocks new powers and traits for when you’re ready to jump back into a rescue mission in the Shadow World.
This also helps to provide the player with a lot of unexpected choice. You dictate everything that happens. You decide how your character spends most of his time, who he hangs out with and why. You decide which part-time jobs he takes on, and ultimately the skills you want to develop the most. You decide when he needs to jump back into the Shadow World to grind or rescue the latest victim. You’re given this choice every step of the way. You’re given the time, and told to manage it how you want.
Taking this a step further, the main character is semi-blank canvas on which to project your own personality. You’re given a range of possible retorts in conversation trees, and this has an effect on how other characters act with you going forward. These aren’t just superficial choices either; some characters can fall out with you, hindering your Social Links with them, and later on you are presented with choices that drastically change how and when the game will end for you. Choices made by you that will define the game. This is practically unheard of with this genre.
Exit Theatre Mode
Of course, classic-styled JRPGs will always have their place. The likes of Lost Odyssey and Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch come along every so often and prove without a doubt that the classic guidelines can still be enjoyable and relevant, but convention and tradition shouldn’t hold the genre back as much as it seemingly has. Games that really shake up the formula, such as the excellent Valkyria Chronicles and now as I’ve discovered, the Persona series, are really too far and few between.
If like me, you too have found yourself fatigued with stale JRPG conventions and you haven’t already had the pleasure, then I implore you pick up Persona 4: Golden on Vita. You’ll find a five-year old game, but one that somehow manages to feel like the freshest entry in an entire genre when compared to its modern day peers.
Andy Corrigan is a freelance games journalist based in Australia. You can follow him on IGN here, and why not hang out with the IGN Australia team on Twitter and Facebook too?Photo: SuperStock/Getty Images
On paper, a second and a half doesn’t seem like a long time — but in practice, it’s more than enough time to dramatically influence a social interaction.
“When my brother told my parents he was getting married, they thought he was too young, and there was this long pause on the phone before they said congratulations. You can’t undo that,” William von Hippel, a psychology professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, told Harvard Business Review in an interview earlier this year. “Everybody knows what it means when nothing comes out of your mouth for a second and a half.”
And just as split-second pauses can reveal what we’re thinking, they can also shape how we’re perceived: In a recent episode of the Harvard Business Review’s podcast, William von Hippel, a psychology professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, explained that speed — how quickly you can process and react in social situations — is one of the key components of charisma.
In a recent study on the subject, von Hippel and his colleagues asked volunteers easy general-knowledge questions and timed the responses. (The speedier participants could come up with an answer in about 400 milliseconds, while the slower ones took more than twice as long.) The volunteers were all recruited as groups of friends, allowing the researchers to question each one about how charismatic they believed their friends to be; when they matched up each person’s quiz scores to their friends’ assessments, they found that the quicker ones were also considered the most charismatic.
The study authors left it up to their subjects to define “charisma” for themselves, but on the podcast, von Hippel argued that it manifests as the ability to move nimbly through any given situation. “Charisma is mental quickness,” he said:
[Speed is] a sign that you have the capacity to draw things out of your memory that are going to be most useful in a particular circumstance. If you ask me a difficult question, or we’re engaged in social banter — I need to be witty, maybe, or I need to quickly defuse the situation, or I need to put you in your place. None of which can be accomplished if I take too long … The speed of our response is critical for an enormous number of the kinds of social interactions we engage in.
But not, it bears noting, speed at the cost of accuracy. Charismatic people don’t just blurt out whatever comes to mind, he explained; rather, they’re able to arrive at the correct response more quickly: “If you’re fast, the advantage is that you can pause, so to speak. You can rifle through a bunch of possible responses in your mind and give the appropriate one before anyone can detect that you actually paused,” he said. A few milliseconds make all the difference.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
What would be the future for Wales if, as many fear, Brexit leads to the break-up of the UK?
Sooner or later, Scotland will have another independence referendum. And in Northern Ireland, the choice of a future in the UK or membership of the EU is very different to that previously faced.
Where would that leave Wales? Does the huge subsidy we receive from Westminster, approaching £15bn every year, mean our options are limited?
Or is there another way?
We spoke to several economists to see if they could see a way for Wales to thrive without the UK.
Danny Blanchflower - former Bank of England rate setter
(Image: Handout)
Professor David Blanchflower came to fame as a member of the Bank of England’s interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee.
He is now an economist at Dartmouth College in the USA.
He says Wales might well thrive in the EU without England.
Prof Blanchflower argues that people in Wales may decide they are “better off within the European Union with our friends from Ireland and Scotland and France and the Netherlands”.
The Welsh-educated professor does not think the nation would have a future as an independent state entirely on its own, but suggested one possibility could be “Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland together as some kind of informal grouping of a disunited kingdom with the European Union”.
He said: “The one thing that you might see if Wales went to be independent is lots of people would move there... People have not considered the possibility that people potentially would move to you who are unhappy with this right-wing nonsense.”
He believes Wales might thrive by “attracting-in the sensible”.
He said: “If you were a firm or a worker in Bristol and this was to happen, you’d suddenly think that Newport and Swansea and Cardiff looked incredibly attractive.”
Wales, he said, could look like “a place of rationality and calm and order amidst the chaos around us” and a “place of attraction for firms running away from the madness”.
Other economists who see challenges ahead for Wales as Brexit looms also stress the difficulty the nation would face if it pursued independence in Europe.
Richard Grossman, Professor of Economics at Wesleyan University and Visiting Scholar at Harvard
Prof Grossman has a grim diagnosis of what Brexit will mean for Wales.
He said: “From an economic perspective, Brexit was a mistake. The UK will not collapse because of it, but it will be less prosperous than it would otherwise have been.
“Wales will also be less prosperous, both because of the net flow of EU funds and because the UK will be less well off.”
The economist does not detect a “great deal of sentiment in favour of independence for Wales at the moment” but said this “could change if Scotland leaves the UK, although the ties of Wales to the UK are older and arguably stronger and devolution in Wales seems to be less pronounced than that of Scotland and Northern Ireland”.
He suggested that if Scotland leaves the UK Wales could “negotiate a better fiscal deal with England” by changing the Barnett formula which is used to allocate Treasury cash to the Welsh Government.
Prof Grossman said it was not the case that Wales “could not” be independent within the EU and noted the nation is “certainly more populous” than EU states such as Latvia, Lithuania and Cyprus.
But he said it was “not clear how a hard border between the EU (assuming Wales could gain entry) and the UK would serve Wales’ interests”.
Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, expert on European economies at the Washington DC-based Peterson Institute for International Economics
This economist, who worked with the United Nations in Iraq, considers Welsh independence within the EU an unlikely prospect.
He said: “I think it is quite a long shot, to be frank. I think everybody agrees with that – even the Welsh nationalists probably agree with that.”
Dr Kirkegaard argued the process of “getting there” would be “a little bit like Greece trying to get out of the euro”.
He said: “In many ways, getting its own currency would be probably good for Greece but the process of doing that would be incredibly painful and therefore it’s a bad idea.”
For Scottish or Welsh independence to be economically and politically appealing, he argued, it would have to be predicated on “the UK economy doing very poorly”.
He said: “In some ways I think the best you can hope for from the perspective of a nationalist party in Wales is perhaps what Gordon Brown and others have been talking about, which is a sort of federalising version of the UK rather than outright independence.”
However, he did not expect securing EU membership would be a major challenge if Wales and Scotland decided to take the plunge.
There had been speculation that Spain would try and thwart an independent Scotland’s efforts to join the EU for fear Catalonia might try to follow its example and cut the cord with Madrid. But Spain’s foreign minister this week said his country would not “initially” block Scotland’s attempt to join the EU club.
Dr Kirkegaard said: “I would wager that if [Scotland] voted to leave they could join quite rapidly. They have the same legislative rules and all that and Spain won’t block it.
“The same would apply for Wales.”
Professor Sir Tom Devine, University of Edinburgh
(Image: Sunday Mail)
The scale of the “adversity” and austerity that Wales and Scotland could face if these nations backed independence was underscored by Professor Sir Tom Devine of the University of Edinburgh.
The professor, who is arguably Scotland’s highest-profile historian, said: “Achieving independence either for Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland would be challenging.
"Even more so would be the aftermath: possibly years of austerity as the newly independent [countries] struggle to reduce post-union fiscal deficits and confront other problems.”
He added: “There is some evidence that many Scots are now realistic about this but are still willing to vote to leave the union. That political will (or estrangement) has built over several decades.
“I do not detect the same process in Wales, ie to face short-term inevitable adversity for what nationalists in Scotland see as long-term good.”
Professor Calvin Jones, Cardiff University economist
Professor Calvin Jones of Cardiff University’s business school outlined the stark choices he believes Wales must confront if independence is ever to be seriously considered. This will involve facing up to the enduring weaknesses of our economy.
He said it was “not really possible to judge the long term economic sustainability of an independent (or self-financing) Wales” because it has “simply never been tried in the industrial age”.
Wales, he said, has traditionally been a place where corporations have “gone to employ low cost labour and exploit natural resources”.
Describing the effects of low levels of ownership of the economy, he said: “This, together with broader global economic change that has destroyed demand for working class labour and agricultural products has led to disenchantment, disengagement and poverty – of ideas as well as materials – and the dominance of the central state as a crutch.
“The key issue here is that independence would not, per se, change any of this.”
For an independent Wales to “succeed”, he argued, there were two key options.
The first was to “invent a new economy that captured much more value locally” – as well as “re-orienting citizens to be satisfied with lower levels of material prosperity, but perhaps more robust communities in return”. He noted this would be “legally, politically and behaviourally incredibly difficult”.
The second option was to “go cap-in-hand to Brussels as a poor new EU accession country and put up with continued but perhaps more benign statism.”
Eurfyl ap Gwilym, economist and Plaid Cymru representative on the Silk Commission
Eurfyl ap Gwilym, a Plaid Cymru-supporting economist who served on the cross-party Silk Commission on the future of Welsh devolution, does not anticipate an immediate rush to push for Welsh independence within the EU.
He said: “Posing the question as to whether Wales could thrive in the EU as an independent nation state post-Brexit begs too many questions to elicit an authoritative answer at this stage. Too little is known about the explicit form that Brexit will take for anyone to be able to forecast with confidence the future either in terms of the UK and Welsh economies or the constitutional arrangements within the UK.”
But he does expect that the Brexit drama will spur people to think about the country’s future and he can see “dangers and opportunities”.
He said: “We really need to be very agile and alert, I’m sure the Scots will be, to try as much as possible to both defend and promote our own interests.”
The economist spies an opportunity to push for a new relationship between the UK’s nations – confederalism – which would ensure that England with its comparatively giant population did not dominate all decisions.
He said: “I think there could be much more development looking towards a confederal United Kingdom as a stepping stone. That was an idea floated, by the way, by people like Gwynfor Evans in the 1950s and 1960s before we joined what was then the Common Market.”
Could it happen here?
Supporters of Welsh independence were campaigning for their goal long before anyone had heard of the European Union, and they will keep their dream alive whatever happens with Brexit.
Welsh independence may be an idea that today only sets the pulses of the most committed activists racing, but they can take comfort from the fact that a very short while ago the notion of leaving the European Union seemed an extraordinary and far-fetched proposal.
Likewise, people who were devastated when Wales rejected devolution in 1979 refused to give up the fight. Many of them have lived to cheer the foundation of an Assembly in Cardiff Bay with primary law-making powers.Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in Cincinnati on July 6. (Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News)
When it comes to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Republicans seem to have reached a point where they have agreed to disagree. A month ago, there was pressure for all Republicans to get behind Trump. No more. This equilibrium has been developing for some time, but yesterday’s meetings between Trump and GOP members of the House and the Senate have solidified the political landscape for Republicans. Members such as Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) reportedly pushed Trump on changing his language and tone, while Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) questioned Trump’s fundamental knowledge of government. Members of Congress and others are no longer feeling any inhibitions about displaying their skepticism of Trump, and there is no longer an ongoing, serious dispute as to whether Trump has the desire, skills or temperament to pull the core of the party together.
Despite the Trump campaign’s protestations that members are in “total agreement” with Trump, I think there is now an understanding that everyone will go his or her own way. The appeals to non-supporters will fade. The Trump campaign knows that holding more meetings with the House and Senate caucus is not going to change anything.
Inside and outside the Beltway, Republican leaders are no longer under much pressure to rally around Trump. Trump supporters are being given a pass from their party colleagues, because it is understood they are doing what they think they need to do to keep peace with a bloc of their voters, are doing what they think they need to do for their careers or are at peace being part of an effort to stop Hillary Clinton. And conversely, among Trump’s sincere supporters, very few argue the merits of a Trump candidacy or presidency. There are very few zealous Trump missionaries (as opposed to anti-Clinton crusaders) remaining in the party — even at the state and local level.
Nothing in the past few days has made Clinton any more palatable to Republicans, but to many, the idea that they must support Trump to stop her is an insufficient reason to affirmatively support Trump. And many are beginning to believe that Trump is more likely to lose than not. So they are coming to grips with the reality that eventually, the GOP will probably be without Trump, and Republicans will be left trying to put the pieces back together.
Of course, there are some in both the Trump and anti-Trump wings of the party who think he could win. There could be a miraculous transformation at the convention, another Clinton debacle or some other external force that could hand him the presidency. But Trump actually becoming president is viewed as a problem (or opportunity) for another day. Republicans have four months to try to limit their losses and decouple from the Trump campaign. Many still hope for the best in the presidential race, but even knowing what “the best” might be is getting harder to see.I Saved Against Fear This Weekend
Monday Meeting
At lunch, there were two things I wanted to talk with Eddy about that occurred this weekend; one event inside the other. The larger encompassing one was a convention I attended on Saturday in Lancaster, PA. I drove over there and after dodging a couple of barn raisings, an angry dude in an ill-fitting black suit with an ice-cream cone, and sideswiping a lot of horses and their attendant buggies, found my way into the Save Against Fear convention. The convention, which started as an extended charity game-night, now has several rooms of tabletop RPG gaming, a couple of panels, and snacks and hot meals, with all profits going to help support The Bodhana Group, a nonprofit organization that supports children and adolescents impacted by sexual trauma through treatment, training and consultation services.
This in itself would be a great charity event, but there is an added level of interest for me; The Bodhana Group are mostly all gamers and believe that tabletop RPGs can be used as therapeutic tools in their counseling. It should come as no surprise to long-time readers of this blog that what they are trying to do is very much in line with my thoughts on RPGs having the potential to be more than games. I’ve shared with them, as well as their wacky blog-casting cohorts on Grown As Gamers, some of the stories I’ve heard over the years from our community that touch on the cathartic and healing nature of this hobby of ours. Sometimes, there are things in life you can’t deal with yourself – they are too big, or too painful – that being able to assume and play through a character in an RPG allows you to face.
While I was there, I sat in on a panel of game designers for a Q&A session. One of the questions was about how difficult it was to get your games to market. Since the rest of the folks on the panel were at various stages of getting their projects out there, there was sort of a “oh, this wouldn’t apply to you, Mr Big Time Onyx Path/White Wolf guy” aimed at me from the table. But I pointed out that Onyx has sort of a reverse issue to deal with: we have over 20 years of expectations built into our community, and trying to do anything new can actually be pretty tough. I offered a case-in-point from our Gen Con panel this year when I announced Pugmire and saw several long time WW fans just shut down with looks of appalled disinterest as they sat there.
But that point was actually almost lost, and this is what I wanted to share with Eddy, because of the shouts of interest and glee from the audience (and from one of the moderators!) as I further described the concepts behind the setting. Shout-outs, seriously. This echoes the same woots we got at Gen Con, so it’s pretty interesting that Pugmire generates such enthusiasm.
Our later Onyx Path crew meeting was largely concerned about how we are putting up our blogs and whether they are hitting way too fast for folks to register that they are up – particularly the Open Development ones. A lot of good ideas were passed around, and the first thing we’re going to try is sticking to a regular schedule of Monday being for this blog, Weds we’re going to try and make the day we release new PDFs and/or PoDs on DTRPG and so we’ll be announcing those on a Weds blog, and on Friday we’ll put up an “Open Development Round-up” blog that will gather up the last week’s Open Dev topics to reinforce the blogs that came out, and so you can all check them out over the weekend.
And that’s more times than I ever wanted to say blog in a single paragraph.
Here blog blog blog Updates blog blog:
DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM ROLLICKING ROSE
First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)
Promethean: the Created 2nd Edition, featuring the Firestorm Chronicle (Promethean: the Created)
Beast: the Primordial core book (Beast: The Primordial)
W20 Pentex Employee Indoctrination Handbook (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)
Idigam Chronicle Fiction Anthology (Werewolf: the Forsaken)
Mage: the Awakening 2nd Edition, featuring the Fallen World Chronicle (Mage: the Awakening)
Fallen World Chronicle Fiction Anthology (Mage: the Awakening)
M20 How do you DO that? (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)
M20 Book of Secrets (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)
Cursed Necropolis: Rio (Mummy: the Curse)
Sothis Ascends (Mummy: the Curse)
Secrets of the Covenants (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)
Wraith: the Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition
V20 Black Hand: Guide to the Tal’Mahe’Ra (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)
W20 Novel by Mike Lee (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)
Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Redlines blog
V20 Lore of the Clans (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)
Mummy Fiction Anthology (Mummy: the Curse)
Exalted 3rd Fiction Anthology (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Second Draft
Development
Exalted 3rd Edition core book- Ongoing art notes and final tuning on Charms as the book nears completion. After the operation, John is feeling better and more energized than he has for months and months. (Exalted 3rd Edition)
Firestorm Chronicle Fiction Anthology (Promethean: the Created 2nd Edition)
V20 Red List (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)
V20 Ghouls (Vampire: the Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition)
Werewolf: the Forsaken 2nd Edition, featuring the Idigam Chronicle (Werewolf: the Forsaken)
World of Darkness Dark Eras- Vampire chapter (WoD Dark Eras)
Editing
Book of the Deceived (Mummy: the Curse)
Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition core book (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)
Geist Ready Made Characters (Geist: The Sin-Eaters)
W20 White Howlers (Werewolf: the Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition)
Development (post-editing)
World of Darkness Dark Eras core book (WoD Dark Eras)
ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE
White Howlers – Text should be in. Going to start layout and get that knocked out.
– Text should be in. Going to start layout and get that knocked out. Book of the Deceived – I have art notes divided up and sent out to most of the artists.
– I have art notes divided up and sent out to most of the artists. DtD Seattle – Got fixes Friday afternoon. PDF is updated, working on the PoD.
– Got fixes afternoon. PDF is updated, working on the PoD. DtD Demonseed collection – Got fixes Friday afternoon. Inputting those this week and exporting PoD.
– Got fixes afternoon. Inputting those this week and exporting PoD. DtD Interface – Got fixes Friday afternoon. Inputting those this week and exporting PoD.
– Got fixes afternoon. Inputting those this week and exporting PoD. Book of the Wyrm 20 – New text is with Aileen along with the board headshots.
– New text is with Aileen along with the board headshots. DAV20 – Sketches are rolling in. Managed to get the first 200+ pages roughed in. Intend to have the whole thing roughed in by the end of next week (mainly depends on how long White Howlers takes).
Sketches are rolling in. Managed to get the first 200+ pages roughed in. Intend to have the whole thing roughed in by the end of next week (mainly depends on how long White Howlers takes). Anarchs Unblogged – Deluxe at press. Gonna futz around with some sticker business this week.
– Deluxe at press. Gonna futz around with some sticker business this week. T-Shirts – Going on sale tonight http://www.redbubble.com/people/theonyxpath this year’s Onyx Path t-shirt. Exalted 3rd Edition character shirts: Volfer, Diamond, Shen, Perfect Soul. Scion: Extras cover art t-shirt. Vampire: The Requiem t-shirts:
Blood and Smoke cover, Blood and Smoke art, New Wave Requiem cover, Nomads cover, Ventrue art. Werewolf: The Apocalypse Pentex subsidiaries t-shirts:
Avalon, Black Dog, Endron, Endron art, King Breweries, Magadon, Magadon art, Tellus. Werewolf: The Apocalypse Changing Breeds symbols t-shirts:
Rokea, Nuwisha, Ratkin, Naga, Mokole, Kitsune, Gurahl, Corax, Bastet, Ananasi, Ajaba. Werewolf: The Apocalypse Lost Tribes symbols t-shirts:
Bunyip, Croatan, White Howlers. Werewolf: The Apocalypse badness symbols t-shirts:
Apocalypse, Banes, Black Spiral Dancers, Fomori.
– Going on sale tonight Art O’ The Changin’ Breeds – Made it to the Nagah section. Forgot Bridges didn’t do sketches for his stuff.
– Made it to the Nagah section. Forgot Bridges didn’t do sketches for his stuff. Umbra – Seen sketches for most of the halfs. Have Tucker’s, Cobb’s, Trabbold’s in. All finals for halfs are due this week
– Seen sketches for most of the halfs. Have Tucker’s, Cobb’s, Trabbold’s in. All finals for halfs are due this week VTR II – Prepping a pdf so Rose can find all the references to the B&S title and swap it out for the new title.
– Prepping a pdf so Rose can find all the references to the B&S title and swap it out for the new title. EX3- Not Mike, but Mel Uran has her package of art notes, backer characters and other reference, and contracts, and talking to art director Maria Cabardo about the rest Tuesday.
Not Mike, but Mel Uran has her package of art notes, backer characters and other reference, and contracts, and talking to art director Maria Cabardo about the rest Tuesday.
REASON TO DRINK: Nashville. By night. This week.Graffiti about the Bella case. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Her skull peered out from the hollow trunk of a tree, a limp patch of hair still stuck to its crown. But on a bright spring morning in 1943, four boys from Stourbridge, England, traipsing through Hagley Woods near Wychbury Hill, had no idea what they would find.
They were on the hunt for birds' nests when they spotted the old wych elm, and it was just begging to be climbed. Little Bob Farmer agreed to go first; he scrambled up. When he peered into the tree's hollow trunk, he nearly fell backward. Staring back were the empty eye sockets of a human skull.
The boys raced home to their parents. Police were dispatched to Hagley Wood, where they discovered a crime scene straight out of True Detective.
Stuffed inside the tree was the decomposed body of a young woman - nearly complete. Crepe shoes clung to the skeleton's feet; a gold wedding ring hung from her left hand. The woman's right hand, meanwhile, had been completely sawed off. Police found it buried at the base of the tree in a ritual fashion.
Forensics placed the victim's age at 35; she was the mother of one and had been dead for 18 months. Doctors concluded that she had been strangled and stuffed in the wych elm while "still warm," as her body could not have fit once rigor mortis set in.
Who was she? How did she meet such a grisly end? News spread quickly about the "Tree Murder Riddle." Many cried witchcraft. Others believed it to be the slain body of a prostitute. Then, the graffiti appeared.
"Who put Luebella down the wych elm?" read the hastily painted message on a wall in nearby Old Hill around Christmastime that year. Another popped up in Birmingham: "Hagley Wood Bella." At the base of the crumbling obelisk atop Wychbury Hill, the ultimate version appeared: "Who put Bella in the wych elm?"
Numerous attempts to locate the author behind the graffiti were unsuccessful. The probing slogan spread throughout England and Europe - where it took on a life of its own. To this day, the question still appears scrawled across the walls of back alleyways, reigniting interest in the case.
The actual murder, meanwhile, may never be solved. Since the gruesome discovery coincided with wartime, resources were strained and police were overwhelmed with missing persons reports. Many of the case files have long since been lost. Even the body slipped through the cracks - authorities do not know where it ended up.My take on the subject is that if you're an author, you can get some useful clues to the relevance of your reviews by psychoanalyzing the reviewers.
So how should you approach reader reviews in order to separate the ones you should sit up and listen to from the background noise?
Reader reviews: we get them. And, mostly, we ignore them; because, like all other forms of fiction, 90% of book reviews are junk. And reviews by regular readers, as opposed to professional critics, are like the publishers' proverbial slushpile: a seething, shouting mass of logorrhea in which a few gems may be submerged, if you can bear to hold your nose for long enough to find them.
We live in the age of social media; corporate entities like Goodreads or Amazon use our natural inclination to communicate to generate free reviews and raise a buzz around the content they're trying to sell. We've come a long way since 1999's Cluetrain Manifesto and the internet marketers have worked out that the best marketing tool out there is word of mouth recommendations. And because individual works of fiction are about the ultimate micro-targeted boutique product, word of mouth is about the only marketing tool that works reliably. So: reader reviews. How should we interpret them?
A sad fact, worth repeating, is that it is impossible to write a work of fiction that everybody will read and understand in the same way. Readers (authors included) all approach a text with their own baggage, and what may be unremarkable or even exciting to one reader may be triggery or otherwise unpleasant to another. Whatever you write, and however well you do so, 20% of your readers will hate it—often for reasons that have nothing to do with the text and everything to do with the babble of experiences and memories that reading the text causes to rise to the surface of their mind. (Read this 2006 blog entry on one-star reviews of famous works and weep—tears of laughter, I hope, rather than despair at one's fellow primates.)
Stories which are intended to induce cognitive dissonance—by setting up a sympathetic protagonist then exposing them as a murderer, rapist, and war criminal, for example ("Glasshouse") often trigger aversive reactions from readers who start out expecting a cosy escapist yarn that stays firmly within their comfort zone. (Ditto the Merchant Princes series, which starts out looking like a classic portal fantasy but ends very uncomfortably, when cosy portal fantasy collides with realpolitik.)
Another point, also worth repeating, is that many readers are incapable of separating their own emotional response to a text from the actual content of the text. "I do not like this" is isomorphic in their mind with "this is a bad book".
So: if your work is anything but a literalistic recapitulation of a traditional narrative theme, with sympathetic characters, clearly depicted antagonists, and a cosy sense of closure at the end that reinforces traditional cultural values ("and the prince married the princess and they all lived happily ever after") you can expect a fairy ring of one-star reader reviews to circle your work on Amazon. And the more challenging the novel, the more readers will feel the need to scream I HATED THIS! I DON'T UNDERSTAND IT AND IT MAKES ME FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE! THIS IS A BAD BOOK!
This is not necessary a bad thing.
(Personally, I think it's a good thing.)
Similarly: if you write and publish novels on a regular basis, you will acquire a core of fans, and they will do their five star cheerleader thing in the Amazon fora and reviews every time you emit a new fart, whether fragrant or otherwise. You should strive to ignore these reviews. No, seriously. While it's probably okay to indulge yourself and roll around in them if you're feeling down, you should not take them seriously. Just as 20% of the audience will hate any performance, another 20% will love it to pieces—often for reasons that have more to do with the contents of their own headmeat than the quality of your writing. (There's no accounting for taste.)
The readers you need to pay attention to are the 60% who fall in between these spectral extremes. And, in particular, those readers who can separate their own emotional reaction to the text from the text itself. They may not be experienced literary critics but they can tell you much about how the regular readers have received your work. And the telling clue is that their comments say things like "I had a bad reaction to this book", rather than "this book is bad", or "I didn't understand why [the protagonist did something]" rather than "the protagonist is unbelievable".
The 20/60/20 spread is also worth paying attention to. I pulled those figures out of my arse, quite deliberately: they actually vary quite a bit from book to book—in fact, Amazon provides a neat histogram for every item, in the shape of that bar graph ranking feedback from one star to five stars.
In an ideal world, we'd look at our reader reviews and see a single fat five-star bar with nothing below it. Failing that, a bathtub curve (lots of one star and five star reviews, fewer two and four, very few three) would be satisfying: it means people react strongly to the book. The worst is an inverse-bathtub curve: lots of three stars, some two and four, no fives or ones. It means readers didn't feel strongly about the book; the typical reaction was "meh". I might be sticking my neck out here, but I know no novelists who set out to write a book to which the typical reader response will be "meh".
So. Beware the curve with a fat belly. Dread the analytical reader who can distance themselves from their subjectivity and who still gives the book three stars. Ignore the five-star fans and the one-star butt-hurt trolls. This is the world we live in, and until we learn to clone John Clute and iterate him in parallel over every genre book that is published, this may be all the help we can get.After Democrats used their last day in charge of the Senate to approve a final batch of judicial nominees offered by President Obama and watching a few more |
is that?” I thought to myself. I now had pictures of myself with three prominent Key staff members dating back to last year. I thanked Orito and we shook hands before he returned inside the booth. As far as I’m concerned, that’s about as good as I could hope for considering that Jun Maeda doesn’t travel and both Itaru Hinoue and Na-Ga choose not to have their pictures taken to protect their identity.
Interesting tidbit about Na-Ga: each of Key’s staff members went out of their way to be cordial, and he was no different, sometimes being told that he couldn’t go so far as he wanted. For instance, after taking note of my Little Busters! jumper, he offered to sign it on the sleeve (where an upper-arm patch might be on a uniform) before being told he couldn’t by a staff member. Whenever he signed something for someone, he was always the first to extend his hand for a handshake, thanking the receiver for asking. He is a very likable guy, making it a shame no one could take pictures with him.
As the remaining goods began to clear out, a gentleman came up Na-Ga asking for a sketch. He seemed eager to accept, but hesitated after a moment, considering if he was allowed to do so. He asked Ichinomiya, who responded that they would allow it if he bought one of the remaining -rindou- artbooks. Paul and I looked at one another, as he was presently looking through Key’s display copy and debating whether to buy one. Noting the uniqueness of this opportunity, we asked (technically, he rushed past me to ask just before I did xD ) if he would be willing to provide us with a sketch if we bought one as well. Upon asking, Ichinomiya agreed that Na-Ga could produce another. After a brief discussion, we came to an arrangement where Paul would keep the artbook and I the sketch. A staff member retrieved a crisp shikishi and set it down in front of us. Na-Ga turned towards me and asked who I would like to have sketched. Any guesses? ^^
“Kanade please!”
“Aah, Kanade!” he responded. Watching him work was fascinating; while the video feed during the presentation updated the audience on his progress periodically, it did not show how he began. To prepare, he looked downward while inking some strokes to the side of the board in the air, as though he had trained his hand to follow certain motions for the character. He quickly inked several dots and began the outline of a face, eventually adding features, proceeding onward towards outlines of Kanade’s hair and uniform. In just a few short minutes, he had completed an upper-body portrait of Kanade entirely from memory.
He signed his name and dated the piece, taking a moment to clarify the proper American date format. Looking at the the angel before him, he squinted. Like a father fixing his daughter’s hair for a family portrait, he made one final stroke, adding a strand on her forehead.
“Owarimashita!”
From time to time we all get accustomed to the monotonous routines we find ourselves in. We start days expecting they’ll end a certain way, and oftentimes they go how we predict. However, there are times when our assumptions get turned on their heads, sometimes resulting in experiences which exceed our wildest expectations. Today was one of those days. What could have been a normal day at a con became one truly special, made even better by sharing it with friends. I’ll be sure to look back on this con fondly, and am excited for the future of both Key and it’s fans.
Na-Ga’s illustrations of Kanade & Kud; the prefect end to a convention!
Thanks go out to Austin Ross, Paul Milligan, Sean Fitzgerald, and VisualArt’s for providing photography to this recap.Socialism In America: Where It Began And Failed
What we often do not hear regarding the history of Thanksgiving is the other side of the story. The Pilgrims faced dire problems due to certain decisions that they made. For example, during their first winter in Plymouth, half of them died, and famine was the norm for the first two years:
“1621 was a famine year.
In his History of Plymouth Plantation, the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years because they refused to work in the field. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with ‘corruption,’ and with ‘confusion and discontent.’ The crops were small because ‘much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable.’
In the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, ‘all had their hungry bellies filled,’ but only briefly. The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the usual story claims, it was famine and death.
But in subsequent years something changes. The harvest of 1623 was different. Suddenly, ‘instead of famine now God gave them plenty,’ Bradford wrote, ‘and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God.’ Thereafter, he wrote, ‘any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.’ In fact, in 1624, so much food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.
Video of the sermon
What happened? After the poor harvest of 1622, writes Bradford, ‘they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop.’ They began to question their form of economic organization.
Until this time they had required that ‘all profits & benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means’ were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, ‘all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock.’ A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take only what he needed.
It sounds like ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ They were practicing an early form of socialism, and that is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that ‘young men that were most able and fit for labor and service’ complained about being forced to ‘spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children.’ Also, ‘the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak.’ So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.
To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of the famines.
Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America. Most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. In the winter of 1609–10, called “The Starving Time,” the population fell from five-hundred to sixty. But when the Jamestown colony was converted to a free market, the results were every bit as dramatic as those at Plymouth.”Mises.org
So, the first socialist experiments in America were abject failures. The question then is, why are we following those paths of failure rather than the road of success? The mistake they made was a misinterpretation of Scripture. We read of the early church in Acts 2:44-45, “And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”
Many have concluded that the early church was practicing a form of socialism where no one owned anything individually but held all things in common. But look at what the text itself actually says, “sold their possessions and goods.” These were things they actually owned. And further investigation shows that these sales of goods and possessions were completely voluntary. Look at Acts 5:3-4, “But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land? Whilst it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in thine heart? thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.” So the property sold belonged to Ananias, he had the power to keep the property or once he sold it to keep the proceeds for himself and his wife. His sin was in lying about how much he was giving, not the fact that he did not give the whole proceeds of the sale of that land. Socialism was not being practiced by the early church, rather it was voluntary generosity was on full display.
The problem with socialism is that it is a violation of God’s Law, the eighth commandment: Thou shalt not steal. Property is a God-given right. One element of that right is the right to keep the fruits of your own labor. This is another reason why slavery, unless it is voluntary or due to bankruptcy, is against God’s Law. Slavery is stealing the fruits of another man’s labor, a violation of the eighth commandment.
As we have been studying Philemon, the Apostle Paul’s epistle to his disciple Philemon, we have seen the clear arguments against slavery clearly established. Paul was telling Philemon that he ought to emancipate his slave Onesimus, which history tells us he did in response to this epistle.
We find that both Philemon and Onesimus went on to do great things for the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. They are heroes of the Christian Faith, heroes we do well to emulate.
Schedule an event or learn more about your Constitution with Pastor David Whitney and the Institute on the Constitution and receive your free gift.
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printAn Arizona bill passed last week that would allow business owners to deny service to gays and lesbians has made a lot of people angry. Now it looks like Apple’s CEO Tim Cook may be one of them. After the Arizona statehouse passed measure bill last Thursday, Apple urged Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer to veto it, reports CNN Money.
Lawmakers say the bill is meant to protect religious business owners who don’t want to serve gay and lesbian customers, but Gov. Brewer is facing increasing pressure to veto the measure, which opponents call “state-sanctioned discrimination.” American Airlines and Marriott have warned the bill could be bad for business.
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Apple may be joining in because it has a dog in the fight: in November, Tim Cook announced that Apple is building sapphire glass plant in Mesa, Arizona that would bring 2,000 new jobs to the state. Apple also has six stores in Arizona, according to its website. “[Apple’s] decision to locate here speaks volumes about the friendly, pro-business climate we have been creating these past four years,” Brewer said when Apple announced its plant in November.
[CNN Money]
Contact us at editors@time.com.The Indians took a step in that direction on Thursday, when the club wrapped up the Winter Meetings by taking lefty Hoby Milner with the 15th pick in the Rule 5 Draft. Cleveland grabbed Milner off the Triple-A roster of the Phillies and will bring the reliever to Spring Training with a chance to win a job in the Tribe's Opening Day bullpen.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- The Indians know they have one of the best left-handed relievers in the game in Andrew Miller. What Cleveland would like to do this offseason is improve the level of lefty depth behind Miller in the team's talented bullpen.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- The Indians know they have one of the best left-handed relievers in the game in Andrew Miller. What Cleveland would like to do this offseason is improve the level of lefty depth behind Miller in the team's talented bullpen.
The Indians took a step in that direction on Thursday, when the club wrapped up the Winter Meetings by taking lefty Hoby Milner with the 15th pick in the Rule 5 Draft. Cleveland grabbed Milner off the Triple-A roster of the Phillies and will bring the reliever to Spring Training with a chance to win a job in the Tribe's Opening Day bullpen.
"He's one of those guys who we felt was worth taking a shot on," said Indians assistant general manager Carter Hawkins, who oversees the farm system. "His makeup checked out and it certainly seemed like a guy that potentially could help us out in the Major Leagues. So, we're interested to get a better look at him."
• Hot Stove Tracker
The Indians, who now have one vacancy on their 40-man roster, spent $100,000 to select Milner, who must remain on Cleveland's active roster all season. If the Indians want to remove the left-hander from the roster at any point, they must first offer him back to the Phillies for a cost of $50,000.
As things currently stand, the Indians' bullpen projects to include Miller, Cody Allen, Bryan Shaw, Dan Otero and Zach McAllister. There are a slew of contenders for the two or three remaining spots. The main left-handed options behind Miller include Kyle Crockett, Edwin Escobar (out of Minor League options) and Milner. Ryan Merritt, Tim Cooney and Shawn Morimando are also on the roster, but are starters by trade.
Miller held left-handed batters to a.181 average (.523 OPS) last season, while the rest of the lefties who cycled on and off the Indians' pitching staff combined to allow a.280 average (.714 OPS) to left-handed batters. That group included Crockett, Merritt, Morimando, Ross Detwiler, Tom Gorzelanny and TJ House. Cleveland's 28 1/3 left-on-left innings were the fewest in the Majors last year.
"We're definitely exploring opportunities to continue to improve our team," said Indians GM Mike Chernoff, when asked about the team's hunt for left-handed depth. "That's an area where, especially behind Miller, we have a few internal options, but clearly we could try to upgrade there also."
Milner, 25, posted a 2.49 ERA in 49 games between Double-A and Triple-A in Philadelphia's system last season. Over 65 innings, the lefty struck out 76, walked 15 and limited lefty batters to a.559 OPS. Hawkins said that Milner's work as a starting pitcher early in his career can be beneficial for facing right-handers. The assistant GM also noted that Milner lowered his arm slot toward the end of last year and had strong results.
"We feel like has a chance to be that situational-type guy," Hawkins said. "He had a lot of success as he dropped his slot."
During the Major League phase of the Rule 5 Draft, the Indians lost outfielder Anthony Santander, who was picked by the Orioles. Santander had an.862 OPS for Class A Advanced Lynchburg last season, but is currently rehabbing from offseason shoulder surgery. The Indians also lost pitchers Trevor Frank (San Diego), Nick Maronde (Miami), Jon Fitzsimmons (Arizona) and Grant Sides (Arizona) in the Minor League portion of the Draft.
"We have to make really difficult decisions, obviously," Hawkins said. "There's a limit to how many guys we can put on each roster. At the end of every reserve list filing date, you know that there's a guy who can potentially get plucked. Having this many is really just a great reflection on our Drafts and our player-development staff that, even guys we weren't able to put on rosters were being recognized by other organizations.
"We're certainly excited for those guys to get better opportunities, potentially, with other organizations, and we wish them the best, and we're glad they have that chance to make a new path for themselves."
Jordan Bastian has covered the Indians for MLB.com since 2011, and previously covered the Blue Jays from 2006-10. Read his blog, Major League Bastian, follow him on Twitter @MLBastian and listen to his podcast.If someone told me six months ago that the two teams competing for the American League championship would be the Orioles and Royals, I’d probably have told them they were dreaming. Back in March, I would have argued that while each team was capable of competing with the best, a lot of things would need to fall into line for the two to outlast powerful American League rivals such the Tigers, Athletics, Angels and the defending world champion Red Sox.
Just as the Orioles did to the Tigers, the Royals swept the Angels in the American League Division Series. However, the Royals’ accomplishment came on the back of two hard-fought extra-inning wins away from home to start the series. The third game was the only blowout of the series and the only game in which Royals hitters looked threatening. In the first two wins, which were arguably the most important two, the Royals instead relied on fantastic pitching from starters Jason Vargas and Yordano Ventura and their outstanding bullpen, which is just as impressive as the Orioles’.
The Orioles, on the other hand, relied on offensive power in the first two games and ambushed the underperforming Tigers bullpen late in each contest. With a powerful lineup led by Nelson Cruz and Adam Jones, the Orioles will make any side pay for just the slightest mistakes. The other keys to the Orioles’ ALDS success was their bullpen, which allowed just three runs in 12 innings of relief, and their impressive defense, which made just the one error in three games.
Looking ahead to the American League Championship Series, the two teams are very evenly matched and the winner will simply be the team which makes the most of their opportunities - which, given the pitching strength on display, may be limited. Here’s my scouting report:
Rotation: The Royals will likely go with James Shields, Ventura, Jason Vargas and former Oriole Jeremy Guthrie, while the Orioles will go with Chris Tillman, Wei-Yin Chen, Bud Norris and Miguel Gonzalez. The four Royals combined worked to a 3.56 ERA this season, while the four Orioles combined to work to a 3.44 mark. It has been said by some that each team lacks a genuine ace and while this may be true, the consistency of each rotation has proven that an out-and-out ace isn’t required - as I’m sure the Tigers would now agree.
Bullpen: Each team’s bullpen was outstanding during the regular season, with Orioles relievers working to a 3.10 ERA (third-best in the American League) and Royals relievers working to a 3.30 ERA (sixth-best). The stars for the Orioles are Andrew Miller (1.35 ERA), Darren O’Day (1.70 ERA) and Zach Britton (1.65 ERA). But they are evenly matched by the Royals trio of Wade Davis (1.00 ERA), Kelvin Herrera (1.41 ERA) and Greg Holland (1.44 ERA). One thing that can almost be guaranteed is that if either teams jumps out to an early lead, then it’ll be a tough ask fighting back against quality bullpen arms.
Defense: Despite a poor month of September, when Buck Showalter was somewhat experimental with his infield, the Orioles committed just 87 errors throughout the regular season. By comparison, the Royals committed 104. The Orioles’ regular infielders, despite missing Manny Machado and Chris Davis (for at least the first five games), ooze talent and with a strong showing in the ALDS, Ryan Flaherty has relieved fears as to who would play third base. In addition, Jones and Nick Markakis have had sensational seasons in the outfield and are each capable of making series-defining plays. The defensive stars for the Royals are undoubtedly left fielder Alex Gordon and shortstop Alcides Escobar.
Offense: Quite simply, the Orioles have the power in this department while the Royals have the speed. The Orioles slugged a major league-leading 211 home runs this season, far more than the Royals, who hit the least in the major leagues with just 95. By contrast, the Orioles stole the least amount of bases all season with just 44, while the Royals stole the most with 153. The speed of the Royals would worry manager Buck Showalter, but he has a weapon up his sleeve - and that’s rookie Caleb Joseph. Despite hitting just.207 in 82 games, Joseph was extremely impressive behind the dish and nailed 23 of 57 base stealers - a success rate of more than 40 percent. Despite fellow catcher Nick Hundley being a more reliable offensive option, I expect Joseph to feature heavily behind the plate during the series.
In summary, these two teams are very evenly matched and the ALCS looks set to be very closely fought. Call me biased if you must, but I truly think the Orioles are slight favorites at this stage, largely due to their superior defense and home run power being huge advantages.
What are your thoughts? Do you think the Orioles will be the American League champions?
Daniel Clark blogs about the Orioles at The Big Leagues Daily from Melbourne, Australia. Follow him on Twitter: @DC_TBLDaily. His thoughts on the O’s appear here as part of MASNsports.com’s continuing commitment to welcome guest bloggers to our little corner of cyberspace. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.Santorum: Puerto Rico Must Adopt English If It Wants Statehood
Enlarge this image toggle caption Christopher Gregory/Getty Images Christopher Gregory/Getty Images
Rick Santorum waded into a controversial issue today when he gave an interview to El Vocero, one of the biggest newspapers in Puerto Rico.
The issue? The island's primary language.
The paper asked the former Pennsylvania senator if he would back Puerto Rican statehood if Spanish along with English remained its official languages.
"Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law," Santorum told the paper. "And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language."
Univision News reports that the language question has been long simmering. Univision points out that this is yet another issue that could put the GOP in a harsh light for the Latino electorate and could also complicate Republican politics in the state.
Univision adds:
"While both Santorum and Romney have supported Puerto Rico's right to self-determination on its status, they have faced pressure from conservative Tea Party groups to back certain pre-conditions for statehood, such as the language requirement and proof that the island will not place an undue burden on the federal budget deficit. "But Santorum's statement in particular could put Puerto Rican statehood advocates in a pickle, including GOP-aligned Gov. Luis Fortuño, who has endorsed Romney. Fortuño's party in Puerto Rico, the New Progressive Party, is firmly pro-statehood. "'That presents a difficult scenario for statehood applicants in Puerto Rico... who say we could gain statehood by keeping English and Spanish as the official languages,' he said."
In November, Puerto Rico is set to vote on whether it wants to fully join the United States. Congress would then have to approve Puerto Rico as the 51st state.
As for that claim from Santorum that Puerto Rico would have to meet federal laws to become a state, Reuters explains that "the U.S. Constitution does not designate an official language, nor is there a requirement that a territory adopt English as its primary language in order to become a state."As the saying goes, when it comes to a breakfast of bacon and eggs, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed. A pig in a sow stall: The industrial scale processing of pigs, chickens and cattle would appal most people if they were exposed to the process. Credit:Aussie Farms Because I have a good idea about what happens between those characterful pigs and pork meat, I gave up eating meat. It was an incremental moral process which started 10 years ago and is now complete. I eat fish, lots of fish, but no red meat or pork, and no chicken unless it is the only option. Pigs are full of character and most breeds will readily become a part of a human family if allowed to, yet what the Australian people have tolerated for decades – pigs being raised for consumption in sow stalls in which they can barely move – is a stain on our nation. Australia is bipolar when it comes to the treatment of animals. We have one of the world's most entrenched systems of factory farming, where industrial scale processing of pigs, chickens and cattle would appal most people if they were exposed to the process, co-existing with one of the world's highest rates of animal companionship.
Almost two out of every three Australian households, 63 per cent, include at least one animal, 33 million of them, according to the RSPCA. This is almost 10 million more than the human population. Almost 40 per cent of households include a dog, there are about 4.2 million of them, and 29 per cent of households have a cat. They all certainly make their presence felt, as every animal owner can attest. Our household has changed this year since a little cat decided he wanted to live with us. His needs begin early and end late. I now suffer from cat lag. I have also started visiting the horse owned by the woman who sells me my cat food. When she bought the horse its owner was crying, and this is how she described her first encounters with her new horse: "He stood at the corner of his vast pasture screaming for her and holding vigil at the gate, waiting for days for her to come and fuss over him."
I go and feed him apples. Fortunately, he is not a racehorse. If you knew what happens to most horses bred for racing who can't run fast enough, it would change the way you think about racing. This is another way we casually avert our gaze from reality, for sake of convenience, cheap food, or entertainment. We can no longer avert our gaze from the realities of the greyhound racing industry. It is so weighed down by revelations of systemic animal cruelty, in addition to the corruption that has long been associated with the sport, that it will have trouble surviving. The demise of greyhound racing would be a marker of the social awakening that is gradually dismantling our selective amnesia about factory farming and commercial racing. We know things are bad, but most people don't want to know too much. I was recently on a farm where two orphaned lambs had been rescued and raised at the homestead. They are named Polly and Lilly. They live on the paddock next to the house. When I went to visit, Polly and Lilly, now grown, ambled over to say hello. They are part of the family.
I don't eat lamb. And I grew up eating lamb for the Sunday roast, and regard it as the best of meats. Chickens, we conveniently assume, are creatures with a very small brain, so it is fine to eat them without a thought. Our consumption of chicken has more than doubled to 40 kilograms a year over the past 35 years. But if you saw the conditions in which most chickens are kept, to keep costs down, you would be appalled. Cheap meat always comes at a price, and the price is high for the animal involved. Twitter: @Paul_Sheehan_When we experience something painful, our brain produces natural painkillers that are chemically similar to potent drugs such as morphine. Now research suggests these endogenous opioids also play another role: helping regulate the body's energy balance.
Lauri Nummenmaa, a brain-imaging scientist at the University of Turku in Finland, and his colleagues measured endogenous opioid release in the brains of 10 healthy men. The subjects were injected with a radioactive substance that binds to opioid receptors, making it possible to visualize the receptors' activity using positron-emission tomography.
The study found evidence of natural painkillers in the men's brains after they ate a palatable meal of pizza. Surprisingly, their brains released even more of the endogenous opioids after they ate a far less enticing—but nutritionally similar—liquid meal of what Nummenmaa called “nutritional goo.” Although the subjects rated the pizza as tastier than the goo, opioid release did not appear to relate to their enjoyment of the meal, the researchers reported earlier this year in the Journal of Neuroscience.
“I would've expected the opposite result,” says Paul Burghardt, an investigator at Wayne State University, who was not involved in the work. After all, previous human and animal studies led researchers to believe that endogenous opioids helped to convey the pleasure of eating.
Nummenmaa, too, was surprised. His group's earlier research showed that obese people's brains had fewer opioid receptors—but that receptor levels recover with weight loss. “Maybe when people overeat, endogenous opioids released in the brain constantly bombard the receptors, so they [decrease in number],” he says.
Why more opioids flooded the brain after the goo versus the pizza remains a mystery, but the researchers speculate that faster digestion of the liquid meal may have produced more of the chemicals at the time of the scan, 15 minutes after eating.
The new results may indicate that opioids play a wider role in energy metabolism than scientists previously thought. One possibility is that the opioid system is triggered by the satisfaction of a full stomach and replenished energy, Nummenmaa says.
“If you take a step back and look at conditions that activate opioid release—pain, feeding, pleasure—they are all related to homeostasis,” or keeping the body's energy in balance, he explains. “The most interesting thing is that eating triggered the system even in the absence of sensory pleasure.”SECURITY FIRM Symantec has warned of three serious vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Protection (SEP) software, and is advising users to update their systems.
The bugs affect all builds of the 12.1 version of the SEP software, with the first two flaws allowing authorised but low privilege users of the software to gain elevated and administrative access to the management console, which can be accessed either locally or through a web-based portal.
The third bug is in the sysplant driver and enables users to bypass the SEP's security controls and run malware and other malicious code on a targeted client machines.
“Exploitation attempts of this type generally use known methods of trust exploitation requiring enticing a currently authenticated user to access a malicious link or open a malicious document in a context such as a website or in an email,” said the security firm.
There have been no recorded exploits of the flaws, so it would appear that Symantec has squashed the bugs before they became a real-world problem for its customers.
The first two bugs were discovered by security researcher Anatoly Katyushin from rival firm Kaspersky Labs, which is a little embarrassing. Discovery of the third bug was credited to the enSilo Research Team.
Symantec advises SEP users to update their software to the 12.1 RU6 MP4 version. It also recommends that users should take precautions and restrict remote access to the management console in order to prevent hackers from attacking client systems through the web portal.
While hackers can direct sophisticated malware at even the most robustly secured systems, exploiting flaws in software offers an easier route into machines and networks, providing hackers get in before the bugs are discovered and patched.
Recent examples can be seen with the discovery of iOS malware which threatens iPhones through an Apple DRM flaw, and an error on Code.org’s website which saw the emails of its volunteers exposed. µ
THE INQUIRER'S sister site Computing is running a free web seminar next Tuesday, 22nd March at 3pm entitled "Anti-virus software has had its day - how can you protect against advanced threats?" Register now to reserve your place.Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News
A queen and worker Argentine ant have many, many relatives
A single mega-colony of ants has colonised much of the world, scientists have discovered. Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same inter-related colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination. What's more, people are unwittingly helping the mega-colony stick together. Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) were once native to South America. But people have unintentionally introduced the ants to all continents except Antarctica. These introduced Argentine ants are renowned for forming large colonies, and for becoming a significant pest, attacking native animals and crops. In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the "Californian large", extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan. The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society
Entomologists reveal the ant colony's true size While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct. But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony. Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles. But further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects' global ambition. The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan. They then matched up the ants in a series of one-on-one tests to see how aggressive individuals from different colonies would be to one another. Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn't get on with those from the Iberian colony. One big family But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends. These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another. In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite living on different continents separated by vast oceans. The most plausible explanation is that ants from these three super-colonies are indeed family, and are all genetically related, say the researchers. When they come into contact, they recognise each other by the chemical composition of their cuticles. "The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society," the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings. However, the irony is that it is us who likely created the ant mega-colony by initially transporting the insects around the world, and by continually introducing ants from the three continents to each other, ensuring the mega-colony continues to mingle. "Humans created this great non-aggressive ant population," the researchers write.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionJoanna is 14 and has been in care since she was nine. In that time, she has lived with 11 different families. "At first I used to get attached and want to stay, but now I try not to," she says when I speak to her at the children's home where she is living. "Being in care has taught me that you have only yourself."
The local authority's struggle to find Joanna an appropriate foster family reflects a bigger picture: nationally, there is a shortage of 10,000 foster carers, a situation exacerbated by a 40 per cent increase in children going into care since the Baby P case erupted in late 2008.
Babies often take priority when foster placements become available, leaving children like Joanna with nowhere to go, or being shunted between new homes. Just over 10 per cent of children in care endure three or more moves in a year; 2 per cent are moved more than 20 times. This instability is unsettling for children who have suffered neglect or abuse, and can be compounded by moves across the country that separate them from their birth families.
As became apparent after the high-profile cases of Baby P and Victoria Climbié, the child protection system is straining under immense pressure. It will get worse. The Association of Directors of Children's Services (ADCS) estimates that an additional £173m is needed nationally to provide for the extra children in care. But instead, children's services face deep spending cuts as local authorities prepare for 25 per cent budget reductions.
“Because the government has chosen to protect - to some degree - funding for universal services like schools and health," says Matt Dunkley, vice-president of ADCS, "the bits of council funding for our most vulnerable children are under the most pressure."
Right now, there are 70,000 children in care, with more than three-quarters of them cared for by foster families. Not only is it a big saving for the council - costing roughly £30,000 each year, against £160,000 for a residential placement - but a home environment helps keep children from becoming institutionalised, and can provide much-needed pastoral care. A survey by the Adolescent and Children's Trust published in September 2009 found that 93 per cent of children in care said the most important adult in their life was their foster carer.
Slough is just the start
Akiva Solemani, who has been a foster carer for five years, talks to me about his experience. "When he first came to me, my boy was very unmanageable, but now he is lovely. His behaviour has transformed. He would say, 'You're teaching me to be good.' It is really gratifying."
Yet such good-quality placements can be hard to come by. According to a recent report by the Fostering Network, some carers are already being asked to take on challenging children as their first placement, without sufficient training. Dunkley stresses that most local authorities will try to avoid reductions to foster care, but the Fostering Network notes that |
Bg2 Qd5 8. c3 e5 9. Qb3 Qxb3 10. axb3 exd4) 4... b6 5. e3 Bb7 6. Bg2 Be7?! { (-0.41 → 0.14) Inaccuracy. Best move was d5. } (6... d5 7. Nd2 h6 8. Ne2 Bd6 9. O-O O-O 10. e4 dxe4 11. Nxe4 Nxe4 12. Bxe4 Qh4 13. Bg2) 7. Ne2 d5 8. Nd2 Qd7 9. Nf1?! { (-0.08 → -0.96) Inaccuracy. Best move was O-O. } (9. O-O O-O-O 10. c4 h6 11. b3 Kb8 12. Bb2 g5 13. Rc1 Nb4 14. Nf3 Nxa2 15. Ra1 Nb4) 9... O-O-O 10. Bd2 Ne4 11. Nfg3?! { (-0.89 → -1.84) Inaccuracy. Best move was h4. } (11. h4 Nd6 12. Nfg3 Kb8 13. b3 Rhe8 14. a4 a5 15. Bc3 Ba6 16. h5 f5 17. gxf5 Nxf5) 11... f5?! { (-1.84 → -0.93) Inaccuracy. Best move was Bh4. } (11... Bh4) 12. gxf5 exf5 13. Nxe4 dxe4 14. Nc3?? { (-0.96 → -6.76) Blunder. Best move was c4. } (14. c4 Nb4 15. Bxb4 Bxb4+ 16. Nc3 Bxc3+ 17. bxc3 Qf7 18. Qe2 Ba6 19. Bf1 Rd6 20. Rb1 Kb8) 14... Bh4+? { (-6.76 → -4.95) Mistake. Best move was Nxd4. } (14... Nxd4 15. Bxe4 Bh4+ 16. Kf1 fxe4 17. exd4 e3 18. d5 exd2 19. Qg4 Be1 20. Rxe1 dxe1=Q+ 21. Kxe1) 15. Ke2?? { (-4.95 → Mate in 3) Checkmate is now unavoidable. Best move was Kf1. } (15. Kf1) 15... Ba6+ 16. Nb5 Bxb5+ 17. c4 Bxc4# { Black wins by checkmate. } 0-1In danger of being overrun by feral hogs, Texas is enlisting the help of rock ‘n’ roll legend and noted hunter Ted Nugent.
As part of the Sportsman Channel’s “Aporkalypse: 2013” series — set for Aug. 25 and described as “an entire night of wild hog stories and adventures” — Mr. Nugent will join Brian “Pig Man” Quaca to shoot dead nearly 500 wild pigs on the farmlands of Texas.
The pig hunt will be part of an episode of Mr. Quaca’s show, “Pig Man: The Series.” The duo will hunt from the air, flying above hog-infested fields in a helicopter.
While the term “Aporkalypse” may inspire a laugh, Texas officials say the problem of feral pigs has reached critical mass.
“Two-thirds of the feral hog population has to be killed just to maintain their numbers. They are fervent breeders and we’ve found, for the money, aerial control is the most effective for feral hog management,” said Clayton Wolf, director of wildlife at the state’s Parks and Wildlife department.
Mr. Nugent and Mr. Quaca aren’t the only ones being encouraged to hunt hogs.
“We are reaching out to Texans asking them not to be too conservative with their harvests,” Mr. Wolf added. “We are encouraging them to [cooperate] with their neighbors, share costs and join forces. Working together is the only way we can gain the upper hand on this exploding nuisance and dangerous problem.”
According to Texas authorities, feral hogs inflict billions of dollars of damage to the state’s farmland each year, while also carrying more than two dozen diseases.
The Sportsman Channel’s “Aporkalypse: 2013” series begins at 8 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 25.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.After a trio of teammates chose to leave Ohio State early for the pros, one starter on the defensive line flipped the script.
Redshirt junior defensive end Tyquan Lewis will return to school for his senior season in 2017, according to ESPN's Adam Rittenberg.
Ohio State defensive end Tyquan Lewis will return for his senior season. Lewis was named the Big Ten's defensive... https://t.co/hPloWCYrBb — Adam Rittenberg (@ESPNRittenberg) January 5, 2017
Lewis was the 2016 Smith-Brown Defensive Lineman of the Year award recipient as the Big Ten's best at his position and a first-team All-conference performer. Many thought he would leave Columbus for the NFL, just as Malik Hooker, Gareon Conley and Raekwon McMillan all announced earlier this week.
A two-year starter, team captain and often forgotten star on Ohio State's defensive line, Lewis led the Buckeyes in sacks the last two seasons. He recorded half a sack to push his 2016 total to 8.0 in Ohio State's 31-0 loss to Clemson in the Fiesta Bowl. Lewis also had 8.0 sacks last season.
Lewis is the second defensive end to announce he will return to school, joining redshirt sophomore Sam Hubbard.
An Ohio State spokesman said he has not heard or seen anything from Lewis regarding his future plans.I really enjoy image manipulation in code. Sure, resizing photos is fun in Photoshop, but there's something viscerally enjoyable when you change images with your own code.
I've talked about image resizing libraries like ImageResizer before, but there's certainly room for more than one. Today I want to showcase ImageProcessor, an open source "collection of lightweight libraries written in C# that allows you to manipulate images on-the-fly using.NET 4+." ImageProcessor is available on GitHub.
ImageProcessor methods include; Resize, Rotate, Rounded Corners, Flip, Crop, Watermark, Filter, Saturation, Brightness, Contrast, Quality, Format, Vignette, Gaussian Blur, Gaussian Sharpen, and Transparency.
ImageProcessor has a notable number of configuration options for web apps, and a supporting ImageProcessor.Web package as well. It's an impressive body of work.
I like this simple example of loading, resizing, and saving an image with their fluent API:
You can easily chain functions with the API, like tinting and constraning:
When you add ImageProcessor.Web it adds caching that takes pressure off your web servers. You can easily add HttpHandlers to watermark an image, for example, and cache the result.
This is a library that has as a lot of potential. Since it's open source, I'm sure they'd appreciate help from the community! Personally, I think they could use more Unit Tests and more examples.
Head over to https://github.com/JimBobSquarePants/ImageProcessor and star this project! Get involved, file issues, and contribute! http://imageprocessor.org/
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Sponsor: Many thanks to Izenda for sponsoring the blog feed this week. Please do check out their Intuitive Ad Hoc Reporting with Stunning Visualizations - Embed real time dashboards into your ASP.NET applications for easy, custom reports across all devices. Download a FREE TRIAL of Izenda Today!'Yes I was raped, it doesn't make me a bad person': Agony of victim sexually assaulted by man she met on Match.com who was then humiliated by his lawyers
A woman who was brutally beaten and raped on a first date with a man she met on Match.com has testified about how she faced additional humiliation from defense attorneys who tried to use her Google searches as evidence against her.
Jennifer Bennett was 23-years-old when she was attacked in the apartment of Thomas Bray, a 37-year-old anesthesiologist, and she decided to go public following the attack in hopes of encouraging other sexual assault victims to report their attacks.
Though she expected to be questioned by police and interrogated by Bray's prominent attorney, she did not expect that they would try to use her own Google searches against her in an attempt to diminish the seriousness of the attack.
Victim: Jennifer Bennett, pictured, was raped and beaten by Thomas Bray after meeting him on Match.com
According to The Oregonian, Bray's lawyers ordered Ms Bennett to turn over her Google searches because they wanted to show that around the time of the February 2011 attack, Ms Bennett searched for the definition of rape.
Defense attorneys believed that this would help support Bray's story that their sexual was rough but consensual, and Ms Bennett regretted it after the fact so she was looking for a way to argue her way out of it.
Victims advocates, however, decried the move. Meg Garvin, director of the National Crime Victim Law Institute said 'it's subjecting them to re-victimization by the system'.
Guilty: Thomas Bray (right) was sentenced to 25 years in jail after raping Miss Bennett after his lawyer Stephen Douze (left) attempted to subpoena her Google searches
The filing for the search results was the first of its kind in Oregon, and though the both the county judge ruled that the order was justified and the state supreme court ruled that too much time had passed to appeal, the district attorney did not comply with the order.
Google also refused to turn over their user’s information as protected by the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act unless she agreed, which she did not.
In the end, Ms Bennett didn’t turn over her searches or her journals, but the sympathetic judge did not react with a contempt of court charge.
‘I chose not to because I didn't think it was fair or correct,’ Ms Bennett told The Oregonian.
Case didn't work: Bray's lawyer tried to have the victim's Google searches submitted as evidence in order to suggest she did not really know what rape was
Instead of penalizing the victim, the jury sentenced Bray to spend the next 25 years in jail as he was found guilty of rape, sodomy, strangulation and assault.
He was also facing charges that stem back to an alleged sexual assault of a prior girlfriend, but her claims were dismissed since the judge found them to be less valid because she continued to date him after the incident took place.
He will also have to pay a $112,000 fine, and $50,000 of that money will go the Ms Bennett, who moved to Oregon just months before the attack after accepting a job as a research chemist at Western Washington University.
Aside from the unusual invasion into Ms Bennett’s privacy, the story of the attack is becoming a disturbingly familiar trend as there have been many instances of sexual assaults during dates that came to fruition via online dating sites.
Smirking: Bray, who is a licensed anesthesiologist, also faced charges over sexually assaulting an ex-girlfriend but those charges were dropped
In Ms Bennett’s case, she met Bray at a drink at a bistro in downtown Bend, and they then went together to Bray’s condo which was directly across the street for a glass of wine.
Very soon after entering the condo, Ms Bennett was beaten, raped, and strangled until she passed out. She said that the abuse took place over the course of several hours.
After reporting the crime to police, she suffered scrutiny from both internet trolls and local news reporters, who published the police report and highlighted her bra size. She has since moved to Seattle.
‘Yes, I was raped. It doesn't make me a bad person. I didn't make poor choices. I was not the criminal,’ she told The Oregonian.Richard Danzig, who served as Navy Secretary under President Clinton and is tipped to become National Security Adviser in an Obama White House, told a major foreign policy conference in Washington that the future of US strategy in the war on terrorism should follow a lesson from the pages of Winnie the Pooh, which can be shortened to: if it is causing you too much pain, try something else.
Mr Danzig told the Centre for New American Security: “Winnie the Pooh seems to me to be a fundamental text on national security.”
He spelt out how American troops, spies and anti-terrorist officials could learn key lessons by understanding the desire of terrorists to emulate superheroes like Luke Skywalker, and the lust for violence of violent football fans.
Mr Obama’s candidacy was given an early boost by his opposition to the Iraq war and he has repeatedly said the US needs to rethink its approach to the Middle East.
Mr Danzig spelt out the need to change by reading a paragraph from chapter one of the children’s classic, which says: “Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump on the back of his head behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming down stairs. But sometimes he thinks there really is another way if only he could stop bumping a minute and think about it.”
Mr Obama’s approach will be popular in Europe, where President George W. Bush has spent the week on a farewell tour, arriving in Britain yesterday for meetings with the Queen and Gordon Brown.
In a subtle break from Mr Bush’s belief that the war on terror can be won, Mr Danzig, who is a Pentagon adviser on bioterrorism, warned that while the West can defeat individual terrorist groups and plots, it can never entirely remove the threat posed by nuclear proliferation or the prospect of bioterrorism.
In a briefing which will inform Mr Obama’s understanding of terrorists, Mr Danzig said he learnt much from recent interviews with jailed Aum Shinrikyo terrorists who released sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo underground in 1995.
He said that even people who are relatively well off and successful can feel like failures and become alientated from their societies. He said one terrorist told him: “We have been raised on a theory of superheroes. We all want to be like Luke Skywalker.
"When we’re doing mundane things, we lose track of our ambition but when someone comes along, like Asahara, the head of the cult, and presents himself as a messiah and gives us a picture of progress that is ordained by heaven and that we are carrying out a saintly mission on earth that is for us extraordinarily evocative.”
Mr Danzig added: “The parallels with al Qaeda are obvious.”
He said that another lesson about terrorists can be learnt from studying violent football fans. “One of the best books I’ve read on terrorism in recent years was not about terrorism at all,” he said. “It’s Bill Buford’s book Among the Thugs, which is a description of soccer violence in Britain.
“Buford became absorbed by soccer violence. He describes the most appalling examples of soccer violence by fans against fans. But he describes with relentless honesty how he finds sickening things attractive. He says violence lets the adrenaline flow; it’s like sex, you live in the moment.”With damaged tank cars still lying near to the tracks in Mosier, the site of Friday's fiery oil train derailment, Union Pacific said Monday it would temporarily suspend moving oil trains through the Columbia River Gorge.
"We do not intend to run crude oil unit trains and will inform the community of when we intend to resume operations," said Justin Jacobs, a Union Pacific spokesman.
The company's announcement came just minutes after Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and Reps. Earl Blumenauer and Suzanne Bonamici called for a temporary moratorium, saying it was too soon to allow more oil trains through.
"A train full of toxic crude oil derailing, burning, and exploding near homes, schools, and businesses is a worst fear realized for people who live in Mosier and in other communities along the tracks throughout the Gorge," the lawmakers said in a joint statement. "They deserve to know that the causes of this derailment have been both identified and fixed, and there should be a moratorium on oil train traffic until they get those explanations and assurances."
The lawmakers said they would be pushing the federal Department of Transportation to "take a hard look at alternative routes for oil and hazardous material trains that would put fewer Oregonians at risk of a dangerous crash in their backyards."
It's unclear whether the railroad has canceled movement of any scheduled oil trains as a result. Union Pacific has reported hauling three oil trains a month through the Columbia River Gorge.
The company's announcement leaves open the possibility that crude oil will continue moving in what are called mixed-manifest trains - those that haul a few tank cars of oil interspersed with other commodities. A "unit train" of oil, the wording the railroad used in describing the shipments it was temporarily halting, carries only crude. Those trains can move more than 3 million gallons of oil apiece and stretch longer than a mile.
The group of Democratic lawmakers moved swiftly to call for the moratorium after Mosier leaders passed a resolution Sunday night calling for a delay in Union Pacific's plan to reopen the rail line through the city to any traffic - not just oil trains.
Trains began moving anyway, just more than 48 hours after the wreck.
Mosier Mayor Arlene Burns said she was thrilled the governor and Oregon's federal leaders had listened to the city's plea. But she said city leaders believe it's irresponsible for Union Pacific to move any train next to damaged oil tank cars.
Some Mosier residents remain under a level two evacuation order, she said, meaning they need to be ready to leave their homes at a moment's notice. How can the area be safe for train traffic, she asked, if it's not for residents?
"We feel it's still unsafe for trains of any kind to come through the area when these oil bombs are sitting on our front steps," Burns said.
Burns said the damaged tank cars appear to be dripping oil. "A spark from the train could catch that on fire again," she said. "It still is way too soon to be taking trains through."
-- Rob Davis
rdavis@oregonian.com
503.294.7657Suggesting that they could have been meant for terror activities in J&K, the state government has withheld the release of more than 150 pigeons, despite orders from a local court here.The pigeons, being transported in a vehicle from Amritsar to Anantnag, were seized by police on October 5.
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The pigeons, which were tightly squeezed into cartons, were handed over to SAVE, an NGO working with the Society for Prevention of Cruelty towards Animals. On October 8, a local court imposed a fine of Rs 150 on the men transporting the birds under provisions of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and ordered the release of the birds.
But District Magistrate, Jammu, Simrandeep Singh, in a written order dated October 11, stopped the release of the pigeons, saying, “I consider it a case of apprehended danger which should necessarily be put through a preliminary investigation by the agencies.”
Referring to the caution sounded by the IAF regarding the use of such non-conventional methods by hostile agencies to cause disturbances, he further wrote, “There could be a possibility of these pigeons being used for facilitating insurgency by means of exchange of messages or by using some hidden devices in their feet.”
“This presumption is being made due to their having different body colours, identification marks and different coloured rings on the feet,” he added.
Accordingly, he using the powers vested in him under Section 144 of the CrPC and ordered SAVE not to hand over the birds to the accused until a preliminary enquiry is conducted into the matter. Pointing out that the order will remain in force for 20 days, he said the release order shall be issued by him only after receiving clearance from SSP CID CI.
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A senior police officer said that matter was under investigation. The accused have, however, left for the Valley.
SAVE chairperson Rumpy Madan said the suspicion arouse as a large number of birds were tightly stuffed into cartons using wires, safety pins and other objects, without any ventilation, water and feed.A strange sickness is afflicting congressional Republicans.
Unwilling to team up with Democrats to replace sequestration with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases, and unable to pass a cuts-only sequestration measure on their own, Republicans’ official position is that they’ve made their peace with enduring, across-the-board spending cuts in perpetuity.
But now that those cuts are creating real consequences, individual members are experiencing buyer’s remorse. The only problem is, until they change their underlying position on replacing sequestration, the only thing they can do about it is whine.
Call it sequestration NIMBYism.“It seems difficult to say with a straight face that completely eliminating a source of revenue for the National Park Service is a smart, targeted cut,” said Sen. John Thune (R-SD), a member of GOP leadership.
Thune says he thinks the National Park Service made a political decision to close revenue-generating campgrounds, including at Wind Cave National Park in his home state, to make the cuts more visible to the public.
“Instead of cuts that reduce wasteful and duplicative spending, the administration’s politically calculated cuts are targeting facilities like the campground that actually serve as a revenue source for the park,” Thune added. “It appears NPS is just another agency following the White House’s lead in trying to find the cuts that can trigger a press release before looking to internal cost-saving measures that are less newsworthy.”
Sequestration is intended to be indiscriminate. It requires federal agencies to reduce spending by a certain percentage on each of their programs and activities.
That means all House and Senate members are likely to see some consequences in their districts and states. But when those consequences materialize, Republicans either blame the administration or plead for special treatment.
“Our military trains at Griffiss [International Airport],” said Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY). Griffiss is one of nearly 200 towers the FAA wants to close. “The airport offers some of the most unique infrastructure in the Northeastern United States. And during Tropical Storm Lee and Hurricane Sandy, it was Griffiss International Airport that served as a staging area for relief efforts. It is short-sighted and unnecessary to close this control tower. And I implore the FAA to remove it from the closure list.”
The Obama administration has taken note of these complaints. And while Republicans and the media in Washington limit their focus to the fact that the White House canceled public tours, the administration hopes the problems sequestration is causing back home will create pressure on the GOP to support a balanced tax increase and spending cut measure to replace it.
“[T]hey’re right,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters at his daily press briefing Thursday. “[T]here are real impacts out there. And it’s an unfortunate result of the arbitrary, across-the-board nature of the sequester cuts. That was the — I use this term facetiously — the genius in the design of the sequester — it was written in a way to make it terrible. That was the purpose. Republicans and Democrats alike wrote it that way so that it would be so onerous that it would compel Congress to take alternative action to reduce our deficit in a more responsible way. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. And unfortunately, Republicans in Congress made the choice not to postpone the implementation of the sequester.”
Until the GOP agrees to raise taxes, though, they’re stuck with the sequestration they have, not the spending cuts many of them claim to want.
“My bill will require the Office of Management and Budget to submit a plan to Congress that implements the President’s cuts without harming our civilian employee’s ability to keep pace with their demands and provide for their families,” said Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX). “In the district I represent, the civilian employees of Corpus Christi Army Depot (CCAD) and Naval Air Station Corpus Christi (NASCC) could be furloughed for up to 22 days. Our local airport towers in Corpus Christi and Victoria might also face extreme cuts. Those reductions in force are unacceptable.”
And so it goes.My Transfer application to the Canadian corrections system goes in on that day too, I hope, through the Canadian Consulate here in Seattle. Then, about 6-8 weeks later, I’ll be sent to my designated prison somewhere in the US Bureau of Prison system, it could be Lompoc or Taft Correctional Institution in California, or a place even as far away as Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, New Mexico or Texas. I’m going to request Lompoc, because it will be the low-security prison you can get to with the least difficulty, my sweetheart, to visit me; and even then, you’ll only be able to afford, barely, to see me every second weekend if people are still sending support and the store is doing well. You’ll fly to Los Angeles and then take a commuter flight to Santa Maria, and then a shuttle bus or taxi to Lompoc. If I get sent to Taft, you’ll need to get someone to drive you to Bakersfield, so we’ll need to find some female supporters who live in Bakersfield who can help you out on those visit weekends.PETALING JAYA: The reward for information on abducted pastor Raymond Koh Keng Joo has been raised to RM100,000, thanks to contributions from well-wishers.
The family had initially offered a reward of RM10,000.
“Our family is grateful and touched that concerned well-wishers have stepped up to increase the reward money offered,” Koh’s 61-year-old wife, Susanna Liew, told The Star Online.
The family is hoping the increased reward would encourage people with any information on the abduction to come forward. Koh was abducted on Feb 13.
The Star also quoted a statement by Koh’s son Jonathan that the money would be “divided according to the accuracy and usefulness of information provided”.
He added that the identity of the informants would be kept private if requested.
Those with information can contact Jonathan at 011-3973 2670.
Koh was abducted by a group of masked men on Jalan SS4b/10, Petaling Jaya, less than 100m from the Police Housing Complex. He was driving a silver Honda Accord bearing the licence plates ST 5515 D.
Koh was at the centre of a controversy in 2011 after his NGO, Harapan Komuniti, was accused of proselytising Muslims by the Selangor Islamic Religious Department (Jais), following a raid at a thanksgiving and fundraising dinner at the Damansara Utama Methodist Church.Did you hear the one about the guy who learned how to make friends and influence people with the help of Howard Stern and David Letterman?
David Finch, a former marketing exec who has been dealing with the socially crippling aspects of Asperger’s syndrome, says he overcame his awkwardness by studying the top talk-show hosts.
Each star did one thing exceptionally well, Finch discovered. And by copying what they did, he began — for the first time in his life — to piece together a public personality for himself.
He’s just written a book — “The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband” — about his experience.
Finch was married for five years before he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, an autistic disorder characterized by obsessiveness, egocentricity and difficulty communicating and reading social cues.
His marriage to wife Kristen was unraveling — and the diagnosis alone had not solved their problems.
To save his marriage, Finch — who obsessed over routine, itchy clothes, his favorite seat, fantasies about setting traps and so on — turned his obsession on himself and began studying how other people act.
“I spent a lot of time in my car, and I listened to Howard Stern constantly,” he says.
“He would tell a story about his wife going out of town. He would talk about what he did in the apartment, and he would keep it going for 30, 40 minutes. And I would circle the block to hear the ending.”
Finch said he listened to “how he modulated his voice, he would slow his speech down or speed it up. And he was very deliberate at crafting his point and then expressing it. It always sounds like he’s about to make a point.”
“Fred [a sidekick] would interrupt the conversation three times. Howard used each interruption to his advantage to keep telling the story, which was something I couldn’t do.
“I would get so annoyed when we got off track. I would just stop.
“Howard would find a humorous way to disarm an interruption,” Finch noted.
“I watched a lot of David Letterman for the same reason I [listened to] Stern,” David said. “I don’t care who he’s interviewing. What I cared about was his banter.
“He adjusts his body language, he looks straight into the camera when he tries to land a joke and changes his facial expression.”
Finch, who had been a drama geek in high school, never had a problem playing a part. So, he began mimicking the hosts.
“I knew that if I was talking exactly like them I would get some funny looks,” he said. “I knew this because I tried it.
“I asked colleagues some mortifying questions. I would say things like: ‘When was the first time you noticed you were having sexual feelings for your wife?’ ”
Eventually, he discovered a more nuanced approach.
“As I started doing it more, I found that if... I did it in an exploratory way — try to get to know them better — after a while I was having really nice conversations with people.
“I always thought conversations were overrated. But now that I could actually do it, I thought it was really cool.”
After finding success by paying attention to the people he talked to, Finch branched out.
“I never thought I’d find Regis Philbin funny,” he says, but “Regis talks to people like he is just star-struck in admiration of this person — his enthusiasm really got me.”
David no longer has problems making small talk at parties, though he prefers more intimate conversations.
He left his job as a marketing engineer, and now speaks professionally to groups.
“Yes, I was playing a character, but, after a while, it became a learned behavior. “My good friend GDTeacher has kindly allowed me to post his in-depth analysis of Elder Holland's recent General Conference address titled "Safety for the Soul." I commented on the address myself in a recent entry. GDTeacher's analysis is more detailed and thorough than mine, and I think it complements well my thinking on the sermon. Also included in GDTeacher's analysis are two appendices. Appendix A contains the full text of Joseph Smith, Sr.'s dream of the tree of life, which I mentioned in my comments and which is eerily similar to the dream that Book of Mormon character Lehi had, as mentioned by Elder Holland in his talk (without, of course, mentioning Joseph Smith, Sr.'s dream, which predated the publication of the Book of Mormon). Appendix B contains the full text of the Wikipedia entry on the possible Solomon Spaulding connections to the production of the Book of Mormon. Elder Holland mentioned Solomon Spaulding (and Ethan Smith) in his talk. Many Mormons likely are unfamiliar with the theories concerning the production of the Book of Mormon that Elder Holland dismisses as "frankly pathetic" in his talk. This appendix will provide more background for those whose curiosity was piqued when Elder Holland mentioned their names.
During the Sunday afternoon session of the October, 2009 LDS General Conference, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland gave an uncommonly impassioned and emotional talk, “Safety for the Soul. ” This talk was unusual in delivery and content for General Conference. It left many feeling proud and vindicated in their belief and conviction in the Book of Mormon. It left many feeling satisfied and spiritually fed. Yet others it left feeling confused and still others it left feeling discouraged, hurt, or betrayed. This paper presents an analysis of Elder Holland’s talk in an attempt to help adult members and those in church leadership positions understand why some members were confused or otherwise adversely impacted by this powerful talk.
Elder Holland’s talk was a passionate defense of the divinity of the Book of Mormon. The range of emotion that flowed during delivery was broad and deep. He portrayed undeterred conviction, barely contained anger, deep sadness, and utter disdain. The content of the talk covered obscure references, conventional LDS wisdom, historical facts, historical claims, and LDS fable. The address left many wondering, “Why this talk? Why now?” Many were confused by the unusual delivery, the obscure references, the anger of an apostle of God, the prolific use of rhetorical devices, and the selective use of facts.
An all encompassing identification and definition of those who were troubled by this talk is not possible. However, in general, those troubled by this talk fall into four loose categories. The first is those who react strongly to unusual emotional displays. The second category includes those with inquiring minds who know nothing about Book of Mormon authorship theories. The third includes informed members, usually intellectually inclined, who understand the scholarship behind alternative Book of Mormon authorship theories. The last category, also usually intellectually inclined, includes those who understand the art of rhetoric and persuasive speaking and writing techniques.
The divinity of any sacred text is fundamental, if not foundational to the theology and belief system of any religion. Elder Holland’s defense of the Book of Mormon is understandable, if not expected, in this light. Just as the Book of Mormon was defended by Elder Holland in this General Conference, so also have other sacred texts such as the Koran (Qu’ran) and The Book of the Law of the Lord, been passionately defended by religious leaders and apologists. As Elder Holland’s talk is analyzed, the reader should understand that an impassioned defense of any sacred text could be mounted using the same approach and perspective which Elder Holland employed in his defense of the Book of Mormon. Doing so will allow the reader to more fully understand Elder Holland’s talk from both a spiritual perspective, which he emphasizes, but also from an objective perspective.
This analysis of Elder Holland’s talk will cover the content, historical references, logical references, and the use of rhetorical devices in both the written and the spoken word. The approach will be to analyze the full text of Elder Holland’s talk sequentially, identifying and analyzing key points. Each point analyzed will have a reference number inserted into the text in brackets (e.g. A1), with each point being discussed at the following paragraph break. Following the sequential analysis, a summary of findings, implications, and a request for understanding will be presented.
Let’s move onto the talk.
Elder Holland: Prophecies regarding the last days often refer to large-scale calamities [A1] such as earthquakes or famines or floods. These in turn may be linked to widespread economic or political upheavals of one kind or another.
But there is one kind of latter-day destruction [A1] that has always sounded to me more personal than public, more individual than collective, a warning, perhaps more applicable inside the Church than outside it. The Savior warned in the last days even those of “the covenant,” the very elect, could be deceived by the enemy of truth. [A2] If we think of this as a form of spiritual destruction, [A1] it may cast light on another latter-day prophecy. Think of the heart as the figurative center of our faith, the poetic location of our loyalties and our values, and then consider Jesus’s declaration that in the last days, “men’s hearts [shall fail] them.” [A1]
A1 – Destruction. Elder Holland uses the comparison of earthquakes, famines, and floods, which can and do result in tremendous carnage, to individual “spiritual destruction.” The use of this physical metaphor emphasizes the carnage he perceives when members of the church are deceived by Satan, the enemy of truth. This rhetorical device paints a grotesque picture illustrating the consequences of the deception, yet its nature remains undefined. The notion that members are deceived, in this case by Satan, carries with it a grave warning of the potential Satanic influence associated with a reasoned and informed study and analysis of the Book of Mormon origins.
A2 – The Deceived Elect. In Matthew 24:24, we read, “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.”[emphasis added] Elder Holland’s talk does refer to the elect being deceived, but does not refer to false Christs or false prophets. He eventually arrives at the idea that members may be deceived by what he claims to be false theories of Book of Mormon authorship. Since no proponents of the various non-canonical theories of Book of Mormon authorship claim to be Christs or prophets, the reference is confusing and possibly even inapt. Given the context in his talk, it can be understood that “those of ‘the covenant,’ the very elect,” is meant to mean faithful members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The deception to which he refers is the members’ acceptance, in whole or in part, of one or more non-canonical theories of the Book of Mormon authorship.
Elder Holland: The encouraging thing, of course, is that our Father in Heaven knows all of these latter-day dangers, these troubles of the heart and the soul, and has given counsel and protections regarding them.
In light of that it has always been significant to me that the Book of Mormon, one of the Lord’s powerful “keystones” in this counter-offensive against latter-day ills, begins with a great parable of life, an extended allegory of hope vs. fear, of light vs. darkness, of salvation vs. destruction, an allegory of which Sister Ann Dibbs spoke so movingly this morning.
In that dream, Lehi’s dream, [B1] an already difficult journey gets more difficult when a mist of darkness arises obscuring any view of the safe but narrow path his family and others are to follow. It is imperative to note that this mist of darkness descends on all the travelers: the faithful and the determined ones (the elect we might even say) as well as the weaker and ungrounded |
For the defunct British auto maker, see Xtra (automobile)
Xtracycle Free Radical as fitted to a Trek 820 MTB donor bike.
The extended frame of an Xtracycle allows a cyclist to carry large loads.
Xtracycle is the name of a company[1] and the name commonly used for the variety of load-carrying bicycle, a longtail or a longbike, that results from use of the company's products: the FreeRadical kit, complete long-frame bicycles and associated accessories.[2] Web forums and blogs often use the shorthand Xtrabike, Xtra, or simply X to refer to either the FreeRadical extension or the entire extended bicycle. An Xtracycle may be constructed by modifying an existing bicycle with a Free Radical extension,[3] or by custom-building an extended-tail bicycle frame.[4]
Differences from other load-carrying bicycles [ edit ]
While the Xtracycle is based on a standard hardtail diamond frame with 26-inch or 622 mm (700c) wheels, the Xtracycle differs from other load-carrying bicycles in that it does not employ a handlebar basket, panniers, or a bicycle trailer. Baskets are easy to attach and allow stowing of cargo in plain view. Panniers are often watertight or water resistant, and can be easily removed from their racks and carried as luggage. While trailers come in many designs and allow a bicycle to pull a significant amount of cargo, an Xtracycle allows for more stowage of large containers directly on the extended frame of the bicycle itself. Xtracycles are also called "sport utility bicycles" for their ability to carry larger loads than a normal bicycles having baskets or panniers, while also maintaining the "sporty" maneuverability of conventional "short" bikes.
History and spin-offs [ edit ]
The FreeRadical was conceived by Ross Evans at Stanford University and developed during his work in the mid-1990s managing a "Bikes Not Bombs" project in Nicaragua, where having a bicycle enhances a person's employment opportunities. In 1998 Evans and his friend Kipchoge Spencer created Xtracycle Inc to manufacture and market the invention, as well as a nonprofit organization, Worldbike, devoted to encourage a bicycle-centric lifestyle and culture.[5]
Despite the fact that the FreeRadical qualifies as an aftermarket bike accessory, its growing acceptance has sparked an Xtracycle aftermarket not formally connected with Xtracycle Inc: varieties of specialized kickstands, electric-assist motors, and even bike-mounted blenders have come to market, even though each requires the prior purchase of a FreeRadical or other Xtracycle-compatible frame to function properly.
Big Dummy [ edit ]
Xtracycle Inc has worked with various bicycle manufacturers to build purpose-built extended bicycles compatible with their accessories. The first to actually produce and market an integrated Xtracycle frameset was Surly Bikes with the Big Dummy.[6] XInc continues to form similar covenants with manufacturers in all price ranges, with the goal of making the Xtracycle less of a niche product and more mainstream. XInc is also working on FreeRadical attachments sized for children's and youths' bicycles on the theory of "catch 'em young and train 'em right."
Other applications for the FreeRadical have included linking two Xtracycles to support a mobile stage for use in parades and street fairs, and a computerized chalkpowder-printer device mounted on an Xtracycle that leaves a dot-matrix trail of messages on the street.[7]
Open source [ edit ]
In 2008, Xtracycle put their longtail bike frame specifications online.[8] as part of their project to open source their longtail frame design. They’ve created a Longtail Standard and logoing to allow vendors to design their products to fit in the Xtracycle FreeRadical ecosystem. The "Longtail Technology" logo can be used on bikes, accessories or packaging. The open sourcing of the patented technology was meant to stimulate the cargo bike movement, while developing a standard for "longtail" frames and accessories. Several frame and accessory makers have adopted the standards, while others have developed competing and incompatible long-frame cargo bike designs. However, the documents are no longer freely available, and now require an agreement with Xtracycle first.[9]
Products [ edit ]
FreeRadical [ edit ]
Xtracycle Free Radical closeup
The FreeRadical is an extender for a bicycle.
Radish [ edit ]
In 2009 the Radish was launched by Xtracycle. It is a production long-tail bicycle with a low-standover height frame and matching FreeRadical.
EdgeRunner [ edit ]
In 2013 the EdgeRunner is a second generation cargo bicycle with a 20" rear wheel. The EdgeRunner has been called the "Best longtail ever. No contest."[10]
CargoJoe [ edit ]
In 2013 the CargoJoe is a folding cargo bike developed in a partnership between Xtracycle and Tern.
Sidecar [ edit ]
In 2011 Xtracycle created a sidecar for cargo transport that can carry up to 250 pounds.[11]
See also [ edit ]Hot on the heels of Titan and Enceladus, Dione is another Saturnian moon believed to hold subterranean water. The exciting news was revealed by the Royal Observatory of Belgium who by using a combination of flybys made by the Cassini spacecraft and computer modelling, successfully measured the gravity data of the moon. The results found that Dione’s crust is in fact floating above a 100km long subterranean ocean. Tens of kilometres deep, this space sea surrounds the moon’s icy core. It is yet to be 100 per cent confirmed but if it’s true, Dione will be the third of Saturn’s moons to hold water and the seventh humans have found in the solar system.
So, what does this all mean? Well, locating water on planets and moons within our solar system is one of the first ways to deduce whether it could possibly be habitable in the future. Dione’s ocean could potentially hold microbial life and the relationship between the moon’s core and the ocean could harness potential energy as well as minerals and nutrients. Unlike Enceladus, Dione’s ocean is too deeply embedded to eject water into space. This makes any more in-depth analysis tough but in the future it is not out of the question that a hopper could be constructed that could land on Dione, providing a much closer inspection. Buoyed by this success, future missions will be sent even further afield to Uranus and Neptune in the hope of finding more of these water worlds.
Reference:
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-saturn-moon-dione-harbors-subsurface.html
http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113416076/ocean-on-dione-100316/
http://www.astro.oma.be/en/saturns-moon-dione-harbors-a-subsurface-ocean/
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Why can’t we live on Venus?Source: Yıldız Tar, “Trans activist Figen yaşamına son verdi”, (“Trans activist Figen commits suicide”), Kaos GL, August 24, 2014, http://kaosgl.org/sayfa.php?id=17381.
Trans activist had been tortured by the police on a Mersin street in the recent past.
Trans activist Figen, a member of the Mersin 7 Renk [“7 Colors”] LGBT group and formerly on the board of directors of Pembe Hayat, committed suicide today (August 24th) evening by drowning herself in the sea off Mersin.
Trans women, routinely subjected to transphobic violence by both the Turkish police and local gangs, are trying to survive under harsh conditions. A recent escalation in transphobic attacks is destroying their living spaces.
Torture in the middle of the street!
As reported by the media, Figen and other trans women had been tortured in public by the police on July 22. Seated at a bus stop, the women were approached by a group of police officers who yelling, “Get the hell out of here. You are disturbing people in the vicinity”, attacked them with batons and tear gas. They were then taken to the police station by force.
Not only did the police not process them at the station, but their request to file a complaint was also denied. Both Mersin 7 Renk and Pembe Hayat called the police station following the attack. The police lied in order to cover up the event, saying, “There is no report of such an incident. How did you come up with this stuff?”
At the time, Figen was dealing not only with police abuse but also with the loss of her older brother in the Soma mine massacre. She was unable to attend her brother’s funeral due to family pressure.
LGBTI organizations will claim the remains
Officials from Mersin 7 Renk, Pembe Hayat, and Kaos GL are trying to reach her family in order for them to claim the remains. Evren Çakmak from Kaos GL, and Buse Kılıçkaya and Gani Met from Pembe Hayat have arrived in Mersin to claim the remains, in case the family fails to do so themselves.
Chanting “Murderous State” will work only to relieve ourselves
Umut Güner from the Kaos GL provided the following assessment regarding LGBTI suicides:
“It is not just the violence, but the very heterosexist culture and its social structure that renders life unlivable. There is no truth to claims such as ‘I am not homophobic, I am not transphobic!’ Even LGBTIs can be homophobic and transphobic. Projects such as awareness raising campaigns are no longer enough. We have to organize for and build alternative living networks. The ‘Murderous State’ chants will work only to relieve ourselves. I cannot say ‘rest in peace’ to Figen. I witnessed what she lived through over the past two years. She did not live in peace, how is she to rest in peace?”
https://lgbtinewsturkey.com/2015/03/04/suicide-resources/Kids put everything in their mouths. It’s supposed to be just a stage.
But what’s going on when older kids refuse to give up the habit or regress back to it? And how should they cope?
When kids (and adults) chew on objects, it engages the powerful muscles in the jaw. The chomping powerfully stimulates a VERY important sense, the proprioceptive sense.
If you’re familiar with the world of sensory processing, you probably know that the proprioceptive sense has to do with body awareness, coming from pressure on joints and ligaments.
You may not know that proprioceptive input is universally calming and beneficial to the brain.
And while your child may be unaware, their body is craving that input via the “heavy work” of the jaw muscles.
So it’s really a good thing, a helpful thing.
Unfortunately, it can sometimes be socially unacceptable or even harmful (hurting their fingers, chewing dangerous objects, etc.)
So how can you as a parent help your child cope and find acceptable ways to get the proprioceptive oral input they crave?
Here’s some of our favorite ideas…
(I am honored to have this post sponsored by ARK Therapeutic. My family has used their products for years and they stand out from the crowd!)
Activities
Blow a Ping Pong Ball or Pom Pom from one place to another (Really challenge them and get them in prone position with this idea.)
Blow Bubbles
Suck a Thick Smoothie or Yogurt through a Crazy Straw (This smoothie can actually help with your child’s sensory symptoms and tastes wonderful!)
Bubble Mountain (Learn how to make one here.)
Skip the Brush and Blow Paint (See how here.)
Airbrush Markers (One of our personal favorites, it’s hard work!)
Don’t forget the connection between oral sensory seeking and proprioceptive seeking. Very often, by getting proprioceptive input to other parts of the body, you can help alleviate the need to chew.
If you’re needing sensory activity ideas for every need, situation and budget, you’ve gotta get FREE access to the sensory activities “VAULT” HERE.
Tools
Eat Crunchy and Chewy Foods like Carrots or Gum
Get a Vibrating Toothbrush and have them feel the sensations all over the inside of their mouth as well as along the outside of their jaw line
And the easiest, most travel worthy, and satisfying… the CHEWY!!!
There are so many different types of chewys available through ARK Therapeutic, you’ll be sure to find one that fits your child’s preferences. Some have a lot of give, while others are quite tough. Some are textured, some are smooth. Some are even scented! And they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes!
My son loves the Grabber XXT. It can get way back to his back molars and it can handle his extremely strong jaw for much longer than other products on the market we’ve tried.
We also love the “Brick Stick”. As you can see from his smile, he doesn’t feel “different” from other kids when he wears it. He just feels cool.
This kid loves his Legos and his new chewie from @arktherapeutic! So thankful he found a chewie that’s cool and doesn’t make him feel self-conscious. #spd #sensoryplay A photo posted by Julie (@mymundaneandmiraculouslife) on Jun 15, 2015 at 12:49pm PDT
Looking for more sensory activities? Check out these printable ones with great visuals!Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs is one of the most beloved and critically lauded of rock albums and it’s not hard to see why. It conflates two of the form’s most cherished devices—red-hot electric guitar solos and verses filled with vivid romantic disappointment, and achieves high-water marks in each, especially on its titanic title track. Most true-blue rock fans already know that as the Sixties drew to a close Eric Clapton was deep in the throes of a hopeless infatuation with Patti Boyd, already married to his close friend George Harrison. And that by 1970 Clapton was at a career crossroads. He had made his name as one of rock’s most exalted guitar heroes not long after moving to London from his native Surrey, first with the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, then especially with groundbreaking power-trio Cream. But Clapton soon grew disillusioned with the lengthy (and often overblown) jamming and psychedelic left turns of the virtuosic threesome—not to mention its fractious mix of personalities.
After Cream’s famous farewell concert at the Albert Hall in November of 1968, Clapton was at a bit of a loss. Hard-wired to a belief in the overarching integrity of American blues and averse to the type of adulation that would have hippies tagging London walls with the catchphrase “Clapton is God,” he rummaged around for the right musical fit. Next up was Blind Faith and although Eric may have been musically and personally simpatico with co-leader Steve Winwood (the group also included Cream drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Ric Grech) the band collapsed under the weight of its own supergroup industry hype after only one album. By the end of 1969, Clapton was content to be a sideman with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends, playing his searing lead guitar lines from sidestage while the group’s namesake married couple held the spotlight. His first, eponymous solo LP came out soon after but before this became his chosen career path, there was one more go at working within a group format. Recruiting three members of the Delaney & Bonnie touring group and settling on a band name that obscured his role as frontman, the newly christened Derek and the Dominoes repaired to Criteria Studios in Miami during the summer of 1970. Soon after arriving their producer Tom Dowd suggested they check out a hot new group from Georgia who were playing a gig nearby, a specific request from their Cream-fan lead guitarist.
“Duane should be right along.” From l to r: Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Jim Gordon, Carl Radle
Even without the addition of a second guitarist of equal high standing, the Dominoes would have likely enjoyed a good measure of creative success. Clapton’s three full-time bandmates—keyboardist/vocalist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon—were a highly skilled supporting cast well versed in the soulful, Southern-fried rock and gritty R&B impulses of the Delaney & Bonnie/Leon Russell/Joe Cocker axis so popular at the time. But after seeing the Allman Brothers Band in concert, a mightily impressed Clapton quickly befriended (and recruited) lead guitarist Duane Allman, adding a whole new dimension to a project with a lot of upside already. Although the Allmans, like Cream, often pushed songs past the twenty-minute mark in concert, the jazzy blues improvisations of the Macon-based outfit seemed more organic and less show-offy than the famed British trio. Allman was, according to Clapton in his 2007 autobiography, “the musical brother I never had” and this was borne out by their complementary styles. The stinging tones of Clapton’s trusty Stratocaster meshed perfectly with Allman’s distinctive bottleneck slide sound and of course there would also be the sort of scintillating, fleet-fingered dual soling that would pass into guitar-geek legend.
Allman’s inspiring presence was timely. Clapton admitted in his book to going into the Layla sessions with only a couple of originals (eventual LP opener “I Looked Away” as well as a rough draft of the title cut) and a few blues standards he was keen to cover. But the material came fast and furious over that late summer and fall until it filled four sides with some of the most passionate rock music ever recorded. “I Looked Away” opens the album with a lilting country-rock groove that belies the emotionally-fraught soundscapes ahead, but it doesn’t take long to get a taste. The one-that-got-away lyric isn’t exactly groundbreaking but the vocals, with Clapton’s tenor trading verses with the deeper and somewhat gruff voice of Whitlock, are a marvel. This gambit (nearly as crucial to Layla’s success as the Clapton-Allman alliance) was said to be in emulation of Memphis R&B greats Sam & Dave, quite plausible considering the Stax Records background of fellow Memphis native Whitlock.
One can imagine the legions of guitar-loving rock fans, in the fallout of the psychedelic Sixties, having their ears prick up to this earthy and emotionally direct new music, especially after the two great tracks that follow it. The charming alliteration of “Bell Bottom Blues” came to Clapton after Patti Boyd’s request that he buy her a pair of designer flares when he got to the States. From that we get an absolutely tortured depiction of a spurned lover so in thrall to a woman that he would “crawl across the floor” and “beg you to take me back” for just one day so as not to completely perish from the scene, complete with a delicate upper-register guitar solo so heartfelt that its highlight are the notes almost too painful to play. But self-encouragement soon follows in “Keep on Growing” with Clapton and Whitlock again singing alternating lines of love lost (and offering supportive shouts of “yeah-yeah” when it’s the other’s turn) before the hopeful chorus and a liberating instrumental finish where an army of overdubbed Erics (there’s no Duane on this and two other tracks) lead the charge with the other three in full gallop close behind. In light of the originality of these three tracks, the side one closer—a conventional cover of the blues standard “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out”—can’t help but pale in comparison.
But in the “Assorted Love Songs” of these four sides, fresh approaches far outnumber the inveterate twelve-bar tendencies that once prompted Rolling Stone critic Jon Landau to dub Clapton the “master of the blues cliché,” a comment that deeply upset the guitarist, then still with Cream. The other three Clapton-Whitlock collaborations (“Keep on Growing” was the first) add new hues to the old blues, the vibrant vocal tag-teaming and lofty instrumental constructions don’t let up thru the determinedly soulful “Anyday,” the chugging rocker “Tell the Truth” (a much faster version produced by Phil Spector had been released as a single) and the tour de force “Why Does Love Got to be So Sad?” In this Southern-style rave-up, a near-frantic Clapton rails against romance’s age-old injustices, as well as its confusions: “Won’t you show me a place/Where I can hide my lonely face/I know you’re going to break my heart if I let you.” Most anyone with a pulse has felt at least once in their life “like a song without a name/I’ve never been the same since I met you” though it’s one of the tunes that seems most specific to Patti Boyd: “I can’t keep from singing about you.” With volume levels that could have stripped the paint off Criteria’s studio walls, Duane solos throughout the song with an intensity that is almost superhuman. When Eric joins in, the notes seems to be coming at you twenty different directions and it all ends with a decelerated, Allman’s style outro, a sweet-toned reprieve after the cathartic emotions are fully exorcised.
This YT video of “Why Does Love Got to be So Sad” features lyrics on the screen and a fine photo montage of band members as well as Patti Boyd.
What’s amazing is that all this creative outpouring took place against an admitted background of such prodigious alcohol and hard drug intake that in our own relatively temperate age it would practically constitute a national crisis. Clapton was by now well down the road to the heroin addiction that would derail his life and career pretty much until 1974. And when the original songs ran out the covers that sat beside them were mostly first-rate as well. Their amped-up version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” may lack some of the gentler appeal of the original but the heraldic power chords, ardent vocals and Jim Gordon’s complex drum fills transform it into stirring tribute to Eric’s friend who died during the making of the album. The nine-minute take on Big Bill Bronzy’s “Key to the Highway” is more guitar-duel nirvana and the country seasoning added to Chuck Willis’ R&B stroll “It’s Too Late” made it the perfect choice to perform when the Dominoes made a well-received appearance on the Johnny Cash TV show. The best straight blues here is probably “Have You Ever Loved a Woman” with Clapton’s torrid between-the-lines soloing and its relevant love-triangle lyrics that, though written by Billy Myles, seem to cut straight through to the Eric-George-Patti situation: the obsessed but conflicted narrator backs out of a potential affair with his best friend’s old lady.
Live on the Johnny Cash Show in 1971 doing “It’s Too Late.”
Patti Boyd was first seen by the greater public when, as a young London-based model, she got to play one of a group of uniformed high-school girls flirting with the Beatles on a train ride in A Hard Day’s Night. George asked her out on the set but had to wait a few days for a yes. A toothy, girl-next-door blond beauty who was never quite exotic enough for significant modeling success, Boyd was top shelf as a rock-chick muse. Married to Harrison in 1966, her husband’s deepening devotion to Eastern mysticism may have strained the relationship but they remained married until ’74 and Boyd was the inspiration for several George-penned Beatles tunes, most notably “Something.” Although Eric was convinced the couple were on the outs by the time he and Boyd met and although feelings may have been mutual, it would a long agonizing wait for him.
“What’ll you do when you get lonely/And nobody’s waiting by your side,” began the song he wrote about Boyd that he came to Miami with in an unfinished state. Although directed at the object of his desire, Clapton could just as easily be talking to himself and the mix of self-pity and admonishment in “Layla” is made even more urgent by the relentless repetition of the song’s famous signature riff, reinforced with a reputed six tracks of guitar. Tom Dowd was a key player throughout these sessions and not just for his incandescent production. He was a fatherly facilitator for the self-doubting Clapton and helped build what began as a ballad into a rock juggernaut, especially after Allman came up with the totemic seven-note figure. The missing piece of the puzzle was found when an elegiac piano piece written and played by Jim Gordon was added as the instrumental “coda” (it takes up more than half of the seven-minute running time) renowned for its aching beauty.
In the documentary film Tom Dowd and the Language of Music, the late producer sits in front of his mixing board and deconstructs the song, isolating elements like Allman’s ghostly slide guitar sound and noting that both he and Clapton were playing notes that were “off the top of the instrument.” The quieter second section suggests that the spurned lover of the last four sides finally turns away from the woman who has “turned my whole world upside down” and heads off alone into the sunset (listen for Radle’s “walking” bass line) while Allman sounds his famous “bird tweets” in a majestic fade to black. But wait, there’s more. As if playing over the closing credits of a movie, LP closer “Thorn Tree in the Garden” makes for a fitting and intimate ending, a melancholic acoustic-guitar ballad by Bobby Whitlock that Dowd recorded by having the group sit around a single open mic.
Master producer Tom Dowd on the making of “Layla” from the highly-recommended documentary “Tom Dowd: The Language of Music”
If ever an album had a postscript—or, indeed, many of them—it’s Layla and Assorted Love Songs. First off, the album did well initially (#16 in the U.S.) but the title track only achieved its status as a ubiquitous radio classic after several fits and starts and re-releases over the next few years. The LP didn’t even get its own review in Rolling Stone, instead being twinned with the Allman Brothers’ Idlewild South in a write-up that betrays the higher critical standards of the day (“Bell Bottom Blues” is “filler”?!). Duane Allman, who was only able to squeeze in a few dates with the Dominoes on their subsequent tour, died in a motorcycle accident near his home in Macon less than a year after Layla’s release and a month shy of his 25th birthday. Carl Radle kept in contact with Clapton during the latter’s three-year layoff while battling drug addiction and was with him for the 461 Ocean Boulevard comeback album and tour in 1974—then succumbed to liver disease in 1980 after being unable to conquer his own substance abuse demons. Jim Gordon, the golden-touch session drummer whose voluminous list of credits ran the gamut from Bread to Frank Zappa, developed a severe case of (undiagnosed) schizophrenia and murdered his mother in 1983 in a delusional state that was discounted at trial due to changes in California law—as of January 2019 he is still serving a sixteen-years-to-life sentence. Thankfully, nothing tragic happened to Bobby Whitlock, unless one counts the fizzling-out of his Seventies solo career; he’s still in fine form whenever he resurfaces.
The only other official D&D release was this live album released in 1973, two years after the band broke up.
And what of Mr. Clapton? Everyone knows of his successful run as a solo artist and his elevation to one of rock’s elder statesmen. He got together with Patti Boyd soon after her divorce from Harrison and the two were wed in 1979, an era that produced perhaps the last well-known ode to her, the hit single “Wonderful Tonight.” But in her own autobiography called “Wonderful Today,” Boyd doesn’t pull her punches in recalling how quickly the union hit the rocks, the bottle quickly replacing the needle as Eric’s habit of choice. Her husband certainly has not denied just how far he fell during that period and the couple divorced in 1989, the final straw being Clapton fathering a child with another woman (Boyd was unable to conceive). Still, the ideal of the song she was most famous for inspiring stayed resilient: even his tepid “Unplugged” performance of “Layla” on MTV couldn’t kill it—indeed, it snagged Clapton one of the six Grammy awards he won in 1993. (Co-writer Jim Gordon shared the award but of course was not in attendance, neither was he mentioned in the acceptance speech). Many have commented over the years about the permenance of great art and its ability to rise above the many vagaries of its creators and creation and so too will Layla and Assorted Love Songs forever stand tall over the inauspicious circumstances that trail behind it.
You can check out an excerpt of my book “Rock Docs: A fifty-Year Cinematic Jorney” at http://booklocker.com/books/8905.html or by clicking on the book cover image above. If interested in purchasing, you can contact me directly for a special offer and free shipping! Thanks, Rick.
rick.ouellette@verizon.netBoston should unshackle schools from union-contract provisions and central-office mandates that undermine teaching and learning and instead let all of them operate autonomously, much like charter schools, according to a report being released Tuesday.
The premise of the recommendation is that schools best know the unique needs of their student populations and what measures might hold the most promise in boosting achievement. That, in turn, means the schools should have maximum latitude to make decisions regarding budgeting, staffing, curriculum, and length of school day, instead of being hemmed in by central offices or union contracts, the report concludes.
Providing all schools autonomy would be a dramatic departure from a one-size-fits-all approach to overhauling education that has swept across the nation over the last two decades and has ushered in uniform curriculum, assessments, and other edicts from superintendents’ offices. That movement has flourished even as teachers and principals frequently complain that they are being forced to abandon effective methods for cookie-cutter mandates not suitable for their students.
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“Let people follow their passions as long as they are based on sound and reasonable theories,” said Dan French, executive director of the Center for Collaborative Education, a Boston nonprofit that prepared the report with Education Resource Strategies of Watertown.
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“It’s common sense,” French said. “If you are going to hold a school accountable, then provide school leaders and faculty maximum control over decisions and resources.”
Related Links Lehigh: Calling bluff on charter schools
The report — “The Path Forward: School Autonomy and Its Implications for the Future of Boston’s Public Schools” — is scheduled to be unveiled at a breakfast forum. It was prepared for the School Department, which has been exploring granting all schools some level of autonomy, and was paid for by the Boston Foundation, a charitable organization that favors charter schools and other autonomous school models.
The recommendations are being made on the heels of another independent report, commissioned by the School Department, that found the academic departments in the central offices were “badly fractured.”
John McDonough, the interim Boston school superintendent, said he remains unsure how much autonomy schools should ultimately be granted. For instance, he said, greater central-office intervention might be necessary in cases where academic performance is sliding.
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“What I do believe is access to autonomy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for school success,” said McDonough, noting that some traditional schools perform highly.
McDonough has taken steps in recent years to increase autonomy for all schools. This year, he has given principals more leeway to hire the teachers they want, and in his previous post as chief financial officer, he devised a funding method that gives schools more discretion in how they spend their district-allocated budgets.
Expanding autonomy has been a lightning rod in public education, often because some of those pushing it are business leaders. Many educators, even as they crave more independence, scoff at any perception of businesses influencing educational policy and sometimes see the push for autonomous schools as an effort to diminish teacher unions and to ultimately privatize public education.
Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, said a number of reasons beyond educational merit are fueling the movement.
“On the one hand, many parents are demanding choice, and autonomous schools, as distinct from traditional schools, gives the illusion of choice,” Stutman said. “On the other hand, granting autonomy to more and more schools, like charters, will eventually lead to a dissolution of the public school system as we know it.’’
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Such a dramatic outcome, he added, “will hurt choice in the long run, even as it makes some, especially those who favor the corporatization of our school system, quite happy.”
‘If you are going to hold a school accountable, then provide school leaders and faculty maximum control.’
Boston currently runs a hybrid system. About a third of the system’s 128 schools operate with varying degrees of flexibility from central office mandates and union contract provisions. The schools are known as either pilot, innovation, turnaround, or in-district charter schools.
While many of Boston’s autonomous schools tend to achieve stronger results, some have suffered from chronically low achievement. Just last fall, the state moved to take over two elementary schools, the Dever and the Holland in Dorchester, three years after the state gave them high degrees of autonomy to assist with turnaround efforts.
Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation, said the report makes clear that the successes of autonomous schools far outweigh any shortcomings and that all schools in the system should become autonomous.
“After 20 years of experimenting with various models, the view put forward by this report is this works, and this is the future, and let’s embrace it, rather than staying in the middle,” Grogan said.
Boston has had a fickle history with autonomous schools. It tried, with much fanfare, more than two decades ago to give all schools more control of budgeting, staffing, and curriculum decisions. But that effort faltered because of resistance from the teachers union, the refusal of various departments in the central office to relinquish control, and a change in superintendents.
Boston revived its experiment with autonomous schools a few years later as the state prepared to open charter schools in the city that would operate completely independently of the school system. In response, the School Department worked out an agreement with the teachers union to start “pilot schools,” which operate with some autonomy from the central office.
More coverage:
• Scot Lehigh: Calling the bluff on charter schools
• Review finds Boston schools in disarray
• Mayor Walsh’s top aide on schools steps down
James Vaznis can be reached at jvaznis@globe.comNew Episode of Punkey PoS Malware Airs
Reruns from the 1980s are all the rage these days, and like the sitcom it's based on, we've encountered a second run from the Punkey Point of Sale malware as part of an investigation we're working on with the FBI. In April, we detailed three versions of Punkey that you can read about here. The new version follows pretty much the same plot with a few additions I will talk about here.
Sample
Jusched.exe
Version: 2015-02-10
Compile Date: 2015-02-10
SHA-256: 6d78550d140061607557bac7c9ba70787e9589b200758f4ab8d59f6504bb7563
Dllx64.dll
Compile Date: 2015-02-04
SHA-256: bc07262b062e6a4b5b9f38d71a961299a014c4da6c7d63c91dd285994fb3d790
Command and Control (C&C)
This version of Punkey uses a larger list of C&C servers than previous versions. Like it did in previous versions, Punkey will try each server in the list one at a time until a response is received.
esx.tqurl.net
176.31.93.208
131.72.63.109
178.32.9.105
192.3.201.32
All the World's a Stage
Previous versions of Punkey used a two-stage approach that decoded the Punkey binary and injected it into explorer.exe. The latest version adds an additional stage written in Delphi, which is a programming language favored by many malware authors. This additional stage decodes obfuscated shell code that is responsible for mapping the Punkey injector into memory. A new process is created, the injector is mapped into memory and execution is passed to it. The injector operates exactly the same as previous versions, which eventually injects Punkey into explorer.exe. My previous post on Punkey discusses the details of this process along with diagrams for clarity.
New Functionality
Most of the latest version remains the same as previous versions with some new functionality introduced to ensure that the malware is talking to an authentic C&C server. As before, the binary is copied to %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\jusched\jusched.exe and persistence is added to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run. Before performing the initial check-in with the server, Punkey checks to see if a file called cookie exists in the jusched directory. If the file exists it is read into memory and stored in a global variable that is used in future communication with the C&C server. If the file does not exist, a |
as the North’s habit of expecting others to pick up the tab may be, that is what Seoul had done on all the past three such occasions. Total cost, according to the afore-cited JoongAng article: 2.45 billion won (US$2.4 million)—or a few meters of high speed rail track. Cheap at the price, surely?
But given the North’s propensity to flounce off in high dudgeon on the slightest pretext, what is striking is that that didn’t happen this time. To speculate, for once Kim Jong Un’s apparent impulsiveness may be a plus. A known sports buff, the Young Marshal clearly decided that despite July’s row, Team DPRK is heading to Incheon anyway.
Hint after hint came from Pyongyang, such as Kim personally coaching both the men’s and women’s soccer squads. On August 14, Asiad organizers said North Korea had duly sent in the names of 150 athletes in 14 sports, plus 202 coaches, referees and staff. On August 20, Ryang Song Ho, dean of Pyongyang’s College of Physical Education, flew into Incheon (airport) heading an eight-strong delegation, which took part in the Asiad group draw the next day.
Ryang spoke at a conference on sports in Asia held in Incheon. Unsurprisingly, he trumpeted the “thousands of multifunctional sports facilities and sports parks” built across North Korea in the past 2-3 years—that is, since Kim Jong Un inherited power—“to realise the goal of sports development set by the state,” calling them “facilities which embody the civilisation of the new era.” Evidently the Young Marshal takes his sport very seriously, and is keen for the DPRK to make a splash and do him proud in Incheon.
Maybe that’s why North Korea, unusually, seems minded to compromise. Presumably it was Ryang who conveyed the scaled-back suggestion that MOU announced on August 22. Pyongyang will still send 150 athletes, but has cut the support staff accompanying them from 202 to 123. Nothing was said about cheerleaders. While the North’s downsizing is no doubt driven by costs, Seoul is now hinting that it might pick up some of the tab after all. For some reason the two sides have decided to settle the remaining details by exchanging letters; it would surely be more efficient just to hold a meeting. On August 26, the South kicked off, sending a two-page missive via Panmunjom. This wasn’t published, but according to Yonhap, South Korea’s quasi-official news agency, among other “working issues …there is a problem with the North’s plan to use the Yellow Sea route for a flight carrying the delegation.” Why should that be a problem, one wonders? Could it all still end in tears? Another account, however, suggests Seoul has already approved the flight plan.
Overall, I’m still optimistic about a turn to inter-Korean détente rather than the usual discord.
Indeed, there is everything to play for—and I don’t just mean sport. Let’s hope the Incheon Asiad will spur both Koreas to stop “playing games.” Instead they should keep their eyes on the prize and strive to get North-South relations back onto a win-win track. Kudos to Kim Jong Un for taking the risk of sending hundreds of his people over into enemy territory: a less bold spirit would have backed off. If she is wise, the ever-cautious Park Geun-hye will find some way to reciprocate. Like Gramsci, at this juncture, I dare to hope once more that this time the Koreas won’t blow it. But as Yogi Berra said: It ain’t over till it’s over.Fresh beans can help deliver an espresso with a good crema. Photo: Marco Del Grande
Caleb Podhaczky makes about 20 or 30 espresso coffees a day in his role as a roaster (and taster) for Five Senses, a coffee importer and wholesaler that supplies cafes and restaurants throughout Australia.
Podhaczky no longer works as a barista but still likes to flex his muscle in competition; he was named Victorian Barista of the Year in 2012 and 2013 and will compete at the Australian barista titles in Melbourne this month.
He says making a perfect, cafe-quality espresso at home is achievable with a bit of trial and error. Here are his tips for those with an espresso machine.
1. Beans: Buy your coffee beans from a specialist supplier who knows how old the beans are and when and where they were processed and roasted. Fresher beans produce a better espresso, which should be viscous and full of flavour with a good crema. A bad coffee will be thin and flat-tasting.
Always buy whole beans. Fresh beans should be stored away from light and heat at a constant temperature. There's no need to store beans in the freezer; a cupboard away from a heat source will suffice, but use them within three weeks. Make sure the beans are kept in an airtight container.
2. The roast: Your bag of coffee beans should have a roast date on the back. Podhaczky believes beans should be used between four days and three weeks after roasting for optimal flavour.
You don't have to be a professional to make a great espresso. Photo: Derek Swalwell
3. The grind: It's vital you get the grind right as this controls the rate of extraction, which in turn affects flavour. If the beans are ground too fine, a burnt or "ashy" flavour may result. If ground too coarse, the espresso will taste watery and thin, as the water will pass through too quickly without extracting all the flavours and oils in the coffee.
Podhaczky describes the perfect texture for an espresso grind as being "like flour with a little bit of gritty salt or sand through it". The ground coffee should clump a little when you squeeze it (but not be too sticky). For filter coffee, the grind particles should feel more like breadcrumbs.
4. Clean and dry: Make sure there is no moisture (or old coffee grinds) in your porter filter and basket. If the coffee comes into contact with moisture, it could begin extracting too early. Use a tea towel to wipe the parts clean.
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5. Tamping: Serious home baristas should invest in a tamper to compact their coffee evenly into the basket. Fill the basket about three-quarters full with ground coffee. Tap the basket on your bench to "collapse" the coffee and ensure the basket is filling evenly. Add more coffee and collapse again until full, but not overly.
Tamp the coffee: Podhaczky grabs the tamper like a door knob and leans into it from above with a straight arm – "about 15kg body weight is ideal". If you turn the basket upside down after tamping, the coffee should stay put.
After tamping, the basket should be about four-fifths full. If coffee sits too hard-up against the machine's shower screen, you may get an uneven extraction; too far away and the espresso may taste muddy. Podhaczky uses the analogy of a watering can: water poured from too great a height will hit the soil (coffee) too forcefully and churn it up, resulting in mud.
6. Purge your machine by running some water through it before making your espresso.
7. Make the espresso. Different baristas use different rules to ensure consistent and well-balanced espressos. Some, such as Aaron Wood from Auction Rooms and Small Batch in North Melbourne, advocate weighing both the dry coffee and final wet espresso. Wood says a good "brew ratio" is roughly two parts dry coffee weight to three parts wet espresso. So 20gms of dry coffee grounds should yield a final espresso shot weighing 30 to 40gms, depending on your taste.
Podhaczky's rule of thumb is to go by volume: "30mls in 30 seconds". Espresso cups generally range in size from 60 to 90mls, but Podhaczky's ideal shot is 30ml. If your machine takes longer than 30 seconds to produce a 30ml shot, your grind is likely too fine and could taste burnt.
(Note: While Podhaczky recommends playing with your grind before anything else, you could also try altering the rate of extraction by varying the amount of dry coffee you use. Less coffee will result in faster extraction and vice versa.)
Signs of good coffee: In the first instance the machine will deliver drips before a steady stream of espresso. Fresh coffee will be slightly viscous and will almost look like it's springing back up because of the oils in the beans.
Your 30ml espresso shot should have a nice crema on top. This is the lighter, fluffier substance that sits on the surface. Crema looks like tiny bubbles and is reddish-brown or hazelnut in colour and dissipates after a minute or two. Lack of crema is a sign your coffee beans are past their best.
What's your secret to making espresso at home? Do you use Caleb's method? Share your tips in the comments below.
Experience the journey of a coffee bean from plant to espresso cup at The Melbourne Food and Wine Festival's urban coffee farm and brew bar. On now until Sunday March 17, Queensbridge Square, Southbank, Melbourne. Free entry. Coffee and food available for purchase.Ethereum took its first steps towards simplifying its user experience this week with the release of an EthereumWallet beta, a RushWallet version for the Bitcoin 2.0 platform. Cointelegraph decided to take a look at the 3 wallets that are aiming to end the era of command line and complex usability for Ethereum users.
Cointelegraph has previoualy covered the disruptive potential of Bitcoin 2.0 platforms like Ethereum. However, before we can create the decentralized applications and organizations, we must first make these tools easy to use. And while Ethereum holds a lot of promise, most would admit that it’s not quite ready for the lay consumer.
Hence, the following three organizations are actively working so that everyone including grandma can start using Ethereum.
Ethereumwallet.com by KryptoKit
CEO of KryptoKit and Ethereum Co-Founder Anthony Di iorio, released Ethereumwallet.com on September 4, which functions as a cross platform client-side web wallet.
Similar to RushWallet for Bitcoin, EthereumWallet beta allows the creation of wallets based on a URL book marking system. You can, of course, send and receive Ether and encrypt your private key at creation.
Among the current features the wallet supports include:
Create wallets, send and receive Ether;
Client side wallet creation and transaction signing. (keys are never sent to external servers);
Code is completely auditable through “View Page Source”;
Wallets can be created off-line by downloading the web wallet (Ctrl + S).
No username or log in information required, based on bookmark client side links.
Some of the upcoming features yet to be released include:
Export wallets;
QR code support with android apps;
Cross platform support through soon to be released KryptoKit, iOS, and Android wallets.
For more details, see Ethereum team’s reddit post.
EthereumWallet.org by Allen Dunkley
Developer Allen Dunkley told Cointelegraph:
“Around half a year ago we found out about Ethereum and were fascinated. Recently they decided to release the wallet to the public. And we were a bit scared off from the complexity the console wallet was tied to. So we decided to build a secure web wallet (for us) so we could handle our ETH transactions with ease.”
The wallet can perform a variety of basic functions like wallet creation, sending and receiving, all client side and open source.
Unlike KyptoKit's ether wallet, Dunkley has expressed an active interest and development in supporting Ethereum's second generation features with an easy to use interface.
“Our plans for the future (and this is what we are currently working on) is the interaction with Smart Contracts,” he explains. “This means not only the creation of a smart contract but also the interaction with present ones. Here we plan that (based on the type of the contract) a web [graphic user interface] is automatically generated so that users may view all stored data as well as call contract functions with ease.”
Dunkley adds:
“We really hope that the community joins the project: more manpower means more results. Everyone is invited to fork the code and suggest improvements.”
Among the most noticeable features of Dunkley's EthereumWallet are:
Open source. Developers are encouraged to fork code and collaborate;
Client side wallet creation and transaction signing;
Wallets can be created off-line by downloading the web wallet (Ctrl + S);
Encrypted version of wallet stored on server with Google Authenticator 2FA;
Pass phrase seed backup.
MyEtherWallet
Last but not least it Myetherwallet. Following the same model as the previous two - a model popularized by blockchain.info - this wallet is an “Open Source JavaScript Client-Side Ether Wallet” with a variety of novel features such as:
Bulk generation of wallets encrypted with a password;
Exporting of wallets in JSON, CSV, TXT and paper wallets;
Easy paper wallet creation;
Interface to purchase Augur REP tokens from ongoing crowdsale;
Basic sending and receiving of transactions;
Open Source;
Client side wallet creation and signing of transactions.
A chrome extension for MyEtherWallet is also under development.
Have you tried any of these wallets already? Share and comment about your experience below.Last weekend, we decided to try something new by visiting Stony Creek Brewery! With only two years of business under their belt, this family-owned brewery has grown at a remarkable rate and distributes to all of New England now.
We fell in love with their psychedelic artwork by the entrance! There was live music playing and the place was packed. Eventually, we chose to sit at the picnic tables out on their spacious deck overlooking the Branford River—you know how much I love water views!
Before our tour, we shared a pint of Sun Juice and a flight of Snow Hole, an Irish red ale; Ripe & Cranky, an IPA; La Garza, a mexi-cali lager; and Nitro Belgium, a blonde ale. (Clearly, Dan had to help me write this). Usually, I don’t like beer, but I can genuinely say that I liked the first two drinks in our flight. On the other hand, Dan is a huge fan of craft beer and loved them all. In fact, he has brewed hard cider for fun in our kitchen. He gets away with a lot in our apartment.
Once the tour began, we left the tap room and entered a quieter, more industrial warehouse. Our tour guide used terms that I wasn’t familiar with like hops, wort, and malted barley—those being the easiest examples. (Again, Dan helped me recall these terms). Because of that, I don’t think I would ever recommend a brewery tour until you’ve got the basics down. You don’t want to be that person that slows everyone else down, do you?
The best part of the tour was the taste testing! We tried a drink called Stony Joe, which was a super unique and bizarre brew. Its appearance was light, but it tasted just like dark coffee stout! Oddly enough, I have never drank coffee before, nor do I plan on it. I am far too scared of getting addicted like my mom, haha! Stony Joe and coffee-flavored ice cream will probably be the closest I will ever get to real coffee.
Stony Creek had a great atmosphere. We loved the live music, yard games and the fact that we could bring in our own food to pair with their beers. We will definitely be back this summer!
Have you gone on a brewery tour before? How was your experience?
Follow along Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter | Bloglovin’When did the loudmouths of the American right become such a bunch of fraidy-cats and professional victims? Or is it all just an act?
The hysteria over plans for an innocuous Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan -- two blocks from Ground Zero, amid an urban hodgepodge of office buildings, eateries and strip clubs -- is wildly out of proportion. It would be laughable if it didn't threaten to do great harm to the global campaign against Islamic terrorism.
It is by now firmly established that the project, dubbed Park51, is promoted by a peacenik Muslim cleric whose sermons often sound a bit like the musings of new-age guru Deepak Chopra. It is also undisputed fact that the imam in question, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is such a moderate that the U.S. government regularly sends him as an emissary to Muslim countries to preach peace, coexistence and dialogue.
Yet right-wing commentators and politicians have twisted themselves in knots to portray the Park51 project as a grievous assault -- and "the American people" as victims. Victims of what? Rauf's sinister plot to despoil the city with a fitness center, a swimming pool and -- shudder -- a space for the performing arts?
The whole "controversy" is ridiculous. Yet conservatives who should know better are doing their best to exploit widespread ignorance about Islam by transforming it into fear and anger. They imply, but don't come right out and say, that it was Islam itself that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, rather than an extremist fringe that espouses what the vast majority of the world's Muslims consider a perversion of the faith. They paint Park51 as a "victory dance" over the hallowed ground where thousands of Americans died -- never mind that there wouldn't even be a sight line between the building and Ground Zero -- and suggest that the project, even though it would be run by an imam who's practically a flower child, could somehow serve as a recruiting center for terrorists.
Message to anyone who will listen: You're a victim. Be very afraid.
In the process, this anti-mosque pitchfork brigade is surely recruiting terrorists left and right. As Ahmad Moussalli, a professor at the American University of Beirut, told the Los Angeles Times: "Rejecting this has become like rejecting Islam itself." All the Islamophobic rhetoric tends to reinforce the jihadists' main argument, which is that the United States and the West seek to destroy the faith held dear by more than 1 billion souls.
The thing is, though, that the manufactured brouhaha over the Park51 project is part of a larger pattern in which the far right embraces victimhood and stokes fear. The faction that likes to portray itself as a bunch of John Waynes and "mama grizzlies," it turns out, spends an awful lot of time cowering in the corner and complaining about how beastly everyone else is being.
Witness the frequent eruptions over instances of reverse racism -- real or imagined. The Shirley Sherrod affair was the most recent example of how eagerly the far right wants to sell the false narrative that African Americans, once they achieve positions of authority, will use their newly acquired power to punish whites for historical discrimination. The facts of the Sherrod case, as they finally emerged, argue persuasively against this fictional tale of longed-for revenge. But it will be back.
And look at the hysteria over illegal immigration. Facts don't matter -- for example, that the flow of undocumented migrants has decreased, or that border enforcement under President Obama is much tougher than under George W. Bush, or that illegal immigrants are not responsible for any kind of crime wave. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), has gone so far as to sound the alarm about alleged "terror babies." The idea is that undocumented pregnant women would cross the border so that their children could have U.S. citizenship, then take the babies away to be raised as terrorists -- who would be able to come back in 20 years or so, with legitimate U.S. passports, and presumably wreak untold havoc. No, I did not make that up.
Is the far right really afraid of its own shadow? Do these people really have so little faith in our nation's strength, resilience and values? I hope this is all just cynical political calculation, because there are genuine threats and challenges out there. We'll be better off meeting them with a spine, not a whine.
The writer will be online to chat with readers at 11 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.Details
PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS is a battle royale shooter that pits 100 players against each other in a struggle for survival. Gather supplies and outwit your opponents to become the last person standing.
PLAYERUNKNOWN, aka Brendan Greene, is a pioneer of the battle royale genre and the creator of the battle royale game modes in the ARMA series and H1Z1: King of the Kill. At PUBG Corp., Greene is working with a veteran team of developers to make PUBG into the world's premiere battle royale experience.
MATURE CONTENT DESCRIPTION
The developers describe the content like this:
This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: Frequent Violence or Gore, General Mature Content
© 2017 PUBG CORPORATION ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDPLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS and PUBG are registered trademarks, trademarks or service marks of PUBGA Florida ex-convict with an extensive history of shoplifting says he should be released from jail in DuPage County because police have apparently misplaced his personal possessions, including his Mr. Froggy plush toy.
Ignatius Pollara, who authorities say has sold more than $1 million in stolen goods, argued in court Thursday that the loss of his property constituted a violation of his due process rights, and that he should be released within 14 days if the items are not returned to him.
DuPage Judge Brian Telander asked prosecutors to try to locate the items but told Pollara that he didn't agree with his legal assessment of the situation.
Pollara has been in the County Jail since July, when, authorities say, he stole two paint brushes and some pencils from a Hobby Lobby store in Lombard. Based on Pollara's criminal history, prosecutors secured a high bond on what would normally be considered a petty theft.
He personally filed the motion last week. In it, Pollara said he had a number of personal items that were not seized as evidence following his arrest, but that are now missing. Among them were items of clothing, toiletries, tickets to see the Grateful Dead and U2, and one stuffed "Mr. Froggy" plush toy.
"They seized my property illegally," Pollara told the judge Thursday. "I'm violated here."
His court-appointed attorney, Assistant Public Defender Mark Lyon, told the judge he did not support Pollara's motion and had advised Pollara that the motion contained potentially incriminating information.
"Are you working for me or against me?" Pollara asked his attorney. "I need to know this."
The judge set the case for an April status date, and Pollara asked for a so-called 402 conference, which may lead to a resolution in his case.
"I think I've been here long enough for two paint brushes and a bag of pencils," he said.
Florida authorities say Pollara shoplifted more than $2 million in merchandise in 2012, much of it expensive Lego sets from Toys R Us stores across the country. He was on probation when he came to the Chicago area last summer, a trip that authorities say was motivated by Pollara's intent to steal.
Clifford Ward is a freelance reporter.Despite the controversy surrounding its late release, it appears that Rockstar’s open-world title is selling well on the PC. In less than a month, Rockstar has managed to sell 2 million copies of GTA V (according to SteamSpy’s stats).
For comparison purposes, GTA IV has 3.5 million sold copies on Steam. Therefore, it’s almost safe to say that GTA V will top every other GTA game on Steam, especially when we start getting more interesting mods for it.
Do note that these numbers do not include copies that were sold outside of Steam (thus the total sold copies of both GTA V and GTA IV may be even higher).
The PC version of GTA V was delayed almost two years. Still, Rockstar did not drop the ball and offered an amazing PC version; a PC version that does not suffer from all those awful performance issues found on its predecessor.
You can read our PC Performance Analysis here. Those interested can also purchase the game from GreenManGaming.
Enjoy and stay tuned for more!Brisbane's Courier-Mail has banned the words 'Stuart Broad'. Here are a few other phrases that could be next for the chop
The Courier-Mail has added a much-needed element of teenage girl sullenness to the Ashes campaign with a front-page demand that Stuart Broad be given the silent treatment.
James Franey (@jamesfraney) Brisbane's Courier Mail front page. Paper refuses to mention @StuartBroad8 by name. Aussies scared ahead of #TheAshes pic.twitter.com/mzCIxY06Xd
While the plea to Australian crowds is obviously doomed to drunken, foul-mouthed failure, it is unclear to what extent the paper itself plans to follow through on this proposal. Presumably, it won't just outright omit him from the whole of its Ashes coverage. After all, as the fulcrum of some of the most controversial, fashion-savvy and outright amusing moments of the previous series, the man can't be ignored. Especially if he keeps taking top-order Australian wickets – four at the time of writing.
It has said that – for the first Test at least – it intends to simply replace any reference to Broad with the phrase "a 27-year-old English medium pace bowler". Of course, introducing such a replacement into the autocorrect dictionaries comes with its own risks. How long would it be before we saw references to “27-year-old English medium pace bowler shoulders" (sort of acceptable) or "Tony Award-winning 27-year-old English medium pace bowlerway shows" (bizarre)? Or, heaven forbid, the "Australian 27-year-old English medium pace bowlercasting Corporation" (utterly unpatriotic, even for Queensland)?
Regardless, the Courier-Mail's spirit of omission was picked up by Shane Warne, whose opening voiceover piece for Channel Nine's coverage rambled intrepidly over the great Ashes players and moments of the past 30 years and yet somehow failed to include any reference to Adam Gilchrist, Andrew Flintoff or even Steve Waugh. Don't mention the Waugh!
Inspired by the Orwellian efforts of the Courier-Mail and Australia's greatest ever spinner, here are some other words and concepts that we expect to be replaced in the vocabularies of the two teams and their supporters over the course of this Ashes series.
Australia
Current phrase: Shane Watson lbw
Replacement phrase: Non-bat-based, non-bails-removing, wicket-falling incident
Was there anything more dispiriting to Australian fans during the previous Ashes series than seeing this inevitable mode of dismissal posted against Shane Watson's name? Functioning as a microcosm of Australia's eventual certain defeat, the predictability of Watson's lbw was a grim reminder that fate cannot be denied, no matter how many times you review it.
The first step towards Australia having a chance to regain the Ashes is to remove the inevitability of defeat. And the first step to that is to remove the inevitability of a Shane Watson lbw.
Current phrase: Mitchell Johnson wide
Replacement phrase: Mitchell Johnson bonus run do-over dot ball
He bowls to the left, he bowls to the right. It's the delivery for which Mitchell Johnson is most famous. Songs have been sung about Mitchell Johnson wides. Not very well, admittedly, but they have been sung.
But enough is enough. As philosopher and part-time leg spinner Ludwig Wittgenstein once opined, the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Replacing the negative connotations of "wide" with the positive connotations of "dot ball", even a "bonus run do-over dot ball", is Johnson's opportunity to reshape his world.
England
Current phrase: The 2006-07 Ashes series
Replacement phrase: <empty>
This one is already well under way. Ask any England supporter about the 2006-07 Ashes series and they'll stare at you, blankly. Like a hypnotist removing the number eight from a member of the audience's mind, England supporters simply have a blank space in their brain when it comes to memories of that series.
Most interesting from a psychological perspective is that, on a subconscious level, it can be shown that England fans remain aware of the series. If asked how many Ashes series England have won in a row, they will correctly answer three. But if asked to count back the series victories on their fingers, they will say "2013, 2010-11, 2009, 2005" and be stymied as to how they've reached four.
Current phrase: South Africa
Replacement phrase: South Cornwall
Heartily sick of all the jokes about how their best players are imported from South Africa, it's surely only a matter of time until the renowned professionalism of Team England sees them recruiting an ECB team cartographer and officially reintegrating the independent nation-state as their southernmost county.
Once South Africa is reclaimed as South Cornwall, the jokes will stop and any marginal angst the matter may have caused the team will be eliminated. Yet another one percent gain for Andy Flower and his men.
Both teams
Current phrase: The Ashes
Replacement phrase: A Flimsy Justification for Expressing Superiority Over Another Country Based on Prowess at Hitting Balls with Sticks
Let's be honest. Deep down, aren't we all just looking forward to regaining/retaining A Flimsy Justification for Expressing Superiority Over Another Country Based on Prowess at Hitting Balls with Sticks.
Because, ultimately, isn't that what sport is all about?CLEVELAND, Ohio -- On the eve of the big rollout of credit cards that contain computer chips, a Federal Reserve governor said chip cards that require only a signature may not be safe enough.
But in Greater Cleveland, virtually all banks, including KeyCorp and PNC, are issuing credit cards that only require a signature, not a PIN or any other authentication.
The adoption of EMV chip cards in the United States " represents an important step forward," Jerome Powell, who's a governor on the board of the Federal Reserve, said in a speech last week.
EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa, which collaborated to adopt the cards two decades ago. The chip cards and the point-of-sale terminals to read them are the norm in Europe, Asia and Africa. Banks and merchants that don't issue or accept chip cards by October will be liable for any fraud, per requirements from MasterCard, Visa, American Express and Discover.
Chip cards protect consumers against data breaches and counterfeit cards. Chip cards are safer than cards with magnetic strips because the information you need for an in-person purchase is stored in the chip and isn't visible to someone looking at your card.
Further, each purchase is authenticated individually and that authentication code can't be re-used. So even if your payment information is stolen as part of a breach like those at Target and Home Depot, it can't be used to create a usable counterfeit card.
Your account is vulnerable, however, if you lose a chip card that requires only a signature, because a thief can scribble anything on the receipt or signature pad and there's virtually no chance it will be flagged.
But if the cards required a PIN, a lost card wouldn't be as problematic and it would provide another layer of security (if only peace of mind) in case of a data breach.
Powell of the Federal Reserve said credit cards with computer chips and signatures are nice. "But we should not stop there," he said.
"For many years, traditional authentication methods like signatures and static passwords have been used to verify that an individual is authorized to initiate a payment," Powell said. "New approaches to authentication increasingly offer greater assurance and protection.
"Given the current technologies that we have at our disposal, we should assess the continued use of signatures as a means of authenticating card transactions," Powell said, adding that "it is important to layer security tools and procedures. Methods to devalue payment data, like tokenization and encryption for data at rest, in use, and in transit, mitigate the effect of a data breach."
"Powell's words echo what retailers have been saying all along, which is that outdated technology has been putting American consumers at risk for far too long," the Retail Industry Leaders Association said in a statement, adding "chip-and-PIN card technology is the most secure standard of payment."
But the vast majority of banks are going for "the least complex, least costly path," said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance of New Jersey, a not-for-profit, multi-industry association that promotes payment technology.
That means credit cards with signatures, not PINs.
At Huntington, the bank is in the process of converting its cards to chip technology with signatures, said spokesman Bill Eiler.
"We agree that additional layers of identity verification are a helpful tool to prevent fraud," he said, adding that the bank is "exploring additional options to improve security" at the point of sale and with online transactions.
At KeyCorp, however, the bank is using chip and signature technology for credit cards because that's what customers want, said spokeswoman Drez Jennings.
"Customer preferences drive our decisions, and in this case, customers told us that while they appreciate the additional security EMV cards provide, they are accustomed to signing credit card receipts," she said.
Key will use signatures for credit cards and PINs for debit cards. "We want banking to be easy, and that means making the card transition for our customers as seamless as possible," Jennings said.
PNC is also issuing chip credit cards with signatures, not PINs. "This is an industry evolution and we are moving with the industry," said spokeswoman Marcey Zwiebel.
"Right now the infrastructure is in place to support chip and signature. We can't speculate about when there may be infrastructure in place to support chip and PIN," Zwiebel said, adding that it's industry driven.
Fifth Third spokeswoman Laura Trujillo agreed that chip-and-signature is the standard for credit cards, but said the bank will "keep assessing the viability" of other security options.
Back at the Smart Card Alliance, Vanderhoof said chip-and-signature cards will help make a huge dent in credit card fraud and reduce the likelihood of future large-scale data breaches. Thieves will be less likely to try to steal information if it can't be used to commit fraud.
Stronger authentication besides signatures are available, including PINs and biometrics, and can help with lost or stolen credit cards, Vanderhoof said, but lost and stolen cards are a less serious problem than stolen account numbers and counterfeit cards.
And, the nation should walk before it runs. Chip cards are new.
"There is no compelling business reason to rush to choose which authentication approach will be best for the U.S. market in the future," Vanderhoof said, "while we are still focused on getting the entire market to adopt chip cards that is proven for solving the counterfeit problem that is pervasive today."Sometimes phones spontaneously reboot. The problem isn't too big a deal, unless your phone is encrypted. Then the phone sits, not taking calls, not pulling down email, and wasting battery life as it waits to decrypt.
In Android N, Google is making the experience less painful. When a device reboots on its own, you will retain the ability to receive phone calls. Email clients, instant messengers, and other apps will deliver notifications. Alarms will go off in the morning. In short, your phone will continue to do its job.
This is thanks to new functionality known as direct boot, which provides apps with the ability to perform limited tasks in a restricted mode. This is done using Android N's file-based encryption, which enables direct boot to set fine grained encryption policies for system and app data.
To take advantage of this feature, developers need to make their apps broadcast a LOCKED_BOOT_COMPLETED intent and determine which data should get unencrypted. Android will monitor for these apps, then make the specified data available before a device gets unlocked. All other data remains encrypted and unaccessible until a user unlocks their device.
The Droidcon video below breaks down this feature for developers who want their apps to play along nicely.
Once Android N starts rolling out to devices, more users may actually wake up and leave the house on time. Meanwhile, developers all over will start missing those nights they slept unaware of how many work-related emails came in at 2 AM.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new U.S. intelligence report says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and it remains on hold, contradicting the Bush administration’s earlier assertion that Tehran was intent on developing a bomb.
A technician is seen at the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan, south of Tehran, February 3, 2007. A new U.S. intelligence report says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and it remains on hold, contradicting the Bush administration's earlier assertion that Tehran was intent on developing a bomb. REUTERS/Caren Firouz
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released on Monday could undermine U.S. efforts to convince other world powers to agree on a third package of U.N. sanctions against Iran for defying demands to halt uranium enrichment activities.
Tensions have escalated in recent months as Washington has ratcheted up the rhetoric against Tehran, with U.S. President George W. Bush insisting in October that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to World War Three.
But in a finding likely to surprise U.S. friends and foes alike, the latest NIE concluded: “We do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”
That marked a sharp contrast to an intelligence report two years ago that stated Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons.”
But the new assessment found Iran was continuing to develop technical means that could be used to build a bomb and it would likely be capable of producing enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon “sometime during the 2010-2015 time-frame.”
The shift in the intelligence community’s thinking on Iran comes five years after a flawed NIE concluded neighboring Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction — a report that helped pave the way for the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
No nuclear, chemical or biological weapons were ever found in Iraq and intelligence agencies since have been more cautious about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who have repeatedly accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, were briefed on the new NIE last Wednesday.
Washington, which insists it wants to solve the Iran problem diplomatically while leaving military options “on the table,” is pushing for tougher U.N. sanctions against Tehran but faces resistance from China and Russia.
Iran insists it wants nuclear technology only for civilian purposes, such as electricity generation.
The nuclear standoff has become a major issue in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, with candidates weighing in on the prospects for military action against Iran.
U.S. STILL SEES IRANIAN “RISK”
Senate Majority Leader Harry |
and dry.
The city’s not a failure. The Linkery wasn’t a failure. The city focuses on some things and does it well. They do a lot of other things poorly. The Linkery had a real clear vision of what it wanted to be. We were able to be that thing to a certain extent, and to another, we weren’t able to be that thing.
At The Linkery, we always took more out of ourselves than we could recover. So it was always inherently unsustainable. We did it with the idea that eventually we would reach a critical mass where the workload and the money would make sense. But we got older and time became more precious.
That trade-off became worse and worse. It takes longer to recover from grinding yourself out when you’re 43 than when you’re 35. We always thought that if we really love this, then it would be worth it. Well, it got to the point that it wasn’t worth it.
I know people are out there who want me to blame San Diego for X or Y. This is my hometown. I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew there was a limited market for the things I wanted to do. But we made a bet that we could expand the market for the kind of food we wanted to have in San Diego. We made a bet that we could get a certain number of seats filled and a certain number of people working for the restaurant. And we got close, but we couldn’t push the market to the level where we wanted to do it.
And someone else might come in and do it. Maybe I’m not the right guy to do that.
On his contributions to the food scene he’s left behind:
Everything that we get credited with is part of a much larger thing. We had our oar and we pushed it, but there were plenty of other people pushing in the same direction. The ideas of farm-to-table were in the air.
I think we were really good at was catalyzing that energy, turning it into concrete things and creating a buzz around interesting food.
I think Michael (McGuan) and I had a really good chemistry in the early days that enabled us to do something that was pretty transgressive in San Diego back then. I think that created some energy in the city and accelerated certain things.
Before the farm-to-table movement really got started in San Diego with Region, there was a sense that a lot of things that are commonplace in Portland or Brooklyn or the Bay Area just couldn’t be done in San Diego. It was assumed that you couldn’t do artisanal stuff and you couldn’t use really good ingredients.
I think a place like Starlite now shows that you can. They use fantastic quality ingredients and they’re good cooks and they’re making things from scratch.
And you see guys like Heart and Trotter and lots of places that are walking the walk in a way that wasn’t all that common 10 years ago.
I think we brought some threads together and did some really cool things, but there would still be great restaurants serving craft beer in the city today if we hadn’t done what we did.During their PAX East panel over the weekend, Gearbox Software confirmed that they are indeed working on the next Borderlands game.
At PAX East this past weekend, Gearbox Software confirmed what pretty much everyone already knew: they're working on another Borderlands game. The company's CEO, Randy Pitchford, was straightforward about it, stating, "It's no secret, obviously there's going to be another Borderlands."
Scott Kester, who was the art director for Battleborn, will fill the same role on the new title. Mikey Neumann, whose title with the company is Chief Creative Champion (and who also voiced Scooter, one of the most recognizable characters), will take on the writing duties once again.
Pitchford also mentioned that Battleborn already contains a number of Borderlands easter eggs, and even teased a few additions from the new game, saying, "So what if we put easter eggs for future stuff in the DLC?"
Obviously, there's no word on when the game might come out, what platforms it might be on (though you can probably assume that with Microsoft ceasing production on the Xbox 360, last gen consoles will be left out), or what the story might be. That said, if the previous Borderlands titles are any indication, it'll definitely be worth the wait.Sadio Mane joined Liverpool from Southampton in the summer transfer window.
Liverpool's Sadio Mane in action
Former West Ham United and Manchester City winger Trevor Sinclair has told BBC Sport that Sadio Mane reminds him of Luis Suarez.
Liverpool signed Mane from Premier League rivals Southampton in the summer transfer window.
According to BBC Sport, the Reds had to pay the Saints a transfer fee of £34 million in order to secure the services of the forward.
Former West Ham and City winger Sinclair has stated that the Senegal international reminds him of Suarez.
Luis Suarez of Barcelona celebrating
The BBC pundit has also predicted Liverpool to finish third in the Premier League this season.
“Sadio Mane is an excellent signing who can just ghost past defenders and he reminds me a little bit of Luis Suarez,” Sinclair told BBC Sport.
“Liverpool look like they mean business - they blew away some top teams under Klopp last season and he has had a bit more time with the players now to help them find some consistency.”
Barcelona's Luis Suarez during training
Suarez, now on the books of Spanish giants Barcelona, is one of the greatest players in Liverpool history.
The Uruguay international forward was on the books of the Reds from January 2011 until the end of the 2013-14 season.
Mane scored 11 goals and created 41 chances in 37 Premier League matches for Southampton during the 2015-16 campaign.
SEE ALSO: Jermaine Jenas explains his Liverpool prediction
Liverpool will kick off their 2016-17 Premier League campaign with a game against Arsenal away from home at the Emirates Stadium in North London on Sunday evening.
Liverpool's Sadio Mane celebratesWashington: India has more than 72,000 children and adults with unrepaired cleft lip or cleft palate, says a new study significantly highlighting the unmet need for cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P) care in India.
The findings showed that there are 72,637 cases of unrepaired CL/P in India.
The percentage of individuals with unrepaired CL/P who were older than the respective target age group of 1-2 ranged from 37.0 percent in Goa to 65.8 percent in Bihar.
Also, infants in low and middle-income countries face significant barriers to treatment, leading to prolonged disfigurement, social stigma, speech impairment as well as trouble of feeding food that can result in malnutrition and death.
Safe, timely and effective surgery can result in successful outcomes, the researchers noted, in the paper published online by JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.
However, poor states like Bihar, with less health care infrastructure were found to have with exceptionally high rates for the surgery.
The rate of unrepaired CL/Ps ranged from less than 3.5 per 100,000 population in Kerala and Goa to 10.9 per 100,000 population in Bihar.
“The results describes the prevalent unmet need for cleft surgery in India by each state and includes patients older than the surgery target ages of 1 and 2 years for cleft lip and cleft palate repair, respectively,” said Barclay Stewart from the University of Washington.
Substandard nutrition and a lack of prenatal care are known to be the likely reasons for these congenital disorders.
"Significant efforts must be made to relieve the prevalent unmet need and strengthen health care services to meet the demand of new cases so that the surgical backlog does not grow," Stewart added.
For the study, the data were used from patients who received care at Operation Smile programmes – a non-government supported campaign to provide surgical care to affected babies, indicators of surgical care capacity, wealth, and infrastructure across different states – in 12 low-and middle-income countries from 1 June, 2013, to 31 May, 2014.
Using state-level economic and health system indicators, the total number of unrepaired CL/P cases in each state was estimated.
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.Former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert was indicted on federal charges Thursday, including lying to the FBI in an alleged effort to hide $3.5 million in payments to a person to conceal past misconduct. (Reuters)
We don’t know — we may never know — what former U.S. House speaker Dennis Hastert did that was so bad, if anything. What we do know: Prosecutors say he was willing to pay $3.5 million to cover it up. The former lawmaker was indicted this week on charges that he lied to the FBI and tried to disguise cash withdrawals paid to an unnamed party identified only as “Individual A” to “compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A.” Hastert’s “prior misconduct” was not explained.
While “the indictment did not spell out the exact nature of the ‘prior misconduct’ by Hastert,” The Washington Post reported, “… it noted that before entering state and federal politics in 1981, Hastert served for more than a decade as a teacher and wrestling coach at Yorkville High School in Illinois.”
[The Fix: Why Dennis Hastert got indicted by the feds]
The indictment’s allusion to Hastert’s tenure as a wrestling coach and teacher was provocative. So was its reference to Individual A. Individual A claimed to have known Hastert “most of” his or her life. Individual A met with Hastert repeatedly “in or about 2010" and “discussed past misconduct” by Hastert against him or her that “had occurred years earlier.” And, allegedly, Hastert paid Individual A off.
Indeed, there was far more media interest in what the indictment didn’t say than in what it did. Individual A got as much attention as the relatively mundane details about money allegedly moving in and out of Hastert’s bank accounts. What kind of “misconduct” could the Republican from Illinois have been a part of as a coach and teacher?
The U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who brought the charges, provided no comment. And Hastert, who has yet to comment, provided no answers.
It was “Denny Hastert’s dark secret,” as the Chicago Tribune said in an editorial. “The formal charges against the affable Illinois Republican are as baffling as they are astonishing …. This isn’t just yet another Illinois politician winding up in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors. The underlying narrative leaves much to the imagination.”
The reference sent reporters scurrying to talk with someone familiar with the legislator’s coaching years. The Associated Press turned up David Corwin, whose son wrestled for Hastert at Yorkville. Corwin: “You won’t get anyone to say anything bad about him out here.”
The only accusation against Hastert that got real traction during his years in the House of Representatives concerned his alleged use of earmarks to benefit his property in Illinois, which occurred long after he left coaching. And it’s hard to blackmail someone for activities already publicized.
Blackmail is, after all, a bizarre crime of relatively recent vintage. When blackmailers are successful — unlike, say, bank robbers — no one but their victims know; when blackmailers fail, their intended victims, whose dirty laundry is aired, are humiliated anyway.
“Blackmail, a wonderfully curious offense, is the favorite of clever criminal law theorists,” according to a 2009 academic paper, “Competing Theories of Blackmail: An Empirical Research Critique of Criminal Law Theory.” “It criminalizes the threat to do something that would not be criminal if one did it.” That is, it would be perfectly legal for Individual A to stand up and accuse Hastert of misconduct, but it’s illegal to demand hush money as a condition of keeping quiet.
Blackmail couldn’t really exist until the rise of capitalism and modern social mores. A king was always a king, whether or not he behaved badly, but a businessman or politician who lost his reputation could face ruin — as Josh Duggar is finding out.
“It was a crime that only emerged in the 19th century,” Angus McLaren, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Victoria and the author of “Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History,” told the New York Times in 2009 after David Letterman was blackmailed for his extramarital affairs. “If one was an aristocrat, say, you couldn’t lose your position because of trifling with the housemaids.”
How to respond to a blackmailer is always a conundrum. Pay and cover up — and maybe pay again later — or admit misdeeds and face the music? Letterman’s response was, arguably, masterful: He called the authorities, foiled the $2 million plot, confessed on national television and played the incident for laughs.
Robert “Joe” Halderman, center, at his arraignment in New York City in 2009 for an alleged blackmail plot against David Letterman. (Marc A. Hermann-Pool/Getty Images)
Had Letterman had sex with women who worked for him? “My response to that is: ‘Yes, I have,'” the host said to laughter and applause. “… Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would, perhaps it would — especially for the women.” Cue more laughter and applause.
Letterman added: “But that’s a decision for them to make, if they want to go public…. What you don’t want is a guy saying, ‘Well, I know you had sex with women, so I would like $2 million or I’m going to make trouble for you.'”
Depending on what Hastert’s alleged misconduct was, he may not have had the option of ‘fessing up, Letterman-style. An affair between consenting adults? No big deal — society’s changing attitudes toward sex permitted Letterman to bare all. America would not have chuckled had, say, Johnny Carson made a similiar mea culpa in the 1960s. And gay public figures, long considered targets for blackmail, couldn’t simply walk out of the closet in the decades before Stonewall. Many feel they still can’t.
When it comes to sex, blackmail is sometimes a crime with an expiration date. “After a spike during the moralistic years between the world wars, sexual blackmail has lost some of its zing and sting,” the New York Times wrote.
If Hastert committed a crime, however, the zing and sting of publicly revealing what he was blackmailed for may be as painful as federal charges. Whatever his next move is, it will demand legal creativity to keep alleged misconduct from becoming public. If Hastert chooses to go to trial, the government will presumably have to explain who Individual A is. If Hastert negotiates a deal and a plea, the information could still come out in the criminal information document that usually accompanies a plea, or in a sentencing memorandum later.
As Daniel Ellsberg — he of the Pentagon Papers — explained in a 1959 paper on the crime while an economist at Harvard University: “The answer to successful blackmail is not within the scope of logic: It is an art.”
Related:
Read the entire indictmentDear friends,
A resolution was recently introduced in the House of Representatives that would reaffirm “In God We Trust" as the official motto of the United States and would support and encourage the public display of the national motto in all public buildings, public schools, and other government institutions. This resolution is currently in committee, and will come up for a vote tomorrow in the House. We need your help to ensure that it does not pass.
Stand with the American Humanist Association and urge your Representative to oppose the “In God We Trust” resolution right now.
House Continuing Resolution 13 (H. Con. Res. 13) was introduced in the House by Representative Randy Forbes (R-VA) on January 26th, and currently has 64 co-sponsors. The current motto of the United States, “In God We Trust”, weakens the wall of separation between church and state by declaring our national recognition of a deity. This motto is insensitive to the many non-religious Americans who object to government encouragement of religion and belief, and is opposed to our national tradition of secular governance.
Please take a moment to contact your Representatives and ask them to oppose the resolution. The American Humanist Association supports the wall of separation between church and state, and opposes any government action that violates the secular tradition found in our Constitution.
This bill is a momentous step backwards in regards to religious freedom. I’m asking you, as a supporter of humanism, to make a difference and take action right now.
Sincerely,
Roy Speckhardt
Executive DirectorUsing React, Redux and Webpack with Dotnet Core to build a modern web frontend
Maarten Sikkema Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 26, 2017
As a developer, I consider myself mostly a Dotnet developer. But when building modern applications for the web, there’s no way around it: every web developer now also has to be a javascript developer. So, reluctantly, I have accepted that I also need to know javascript, and have learned to deal with it. My aim for this project is to explore next-generation technologies so I decided to finally go all-in.
This is part of a series in my exploration of a modern web architecture, RROD (React, Redux, Orleans and Dotnet). For the introduction, see here.
Architecture considerations
What Framework to use?
The battle of javascript frameworks is still very much ongoing. Frameworks go in- and out of fashion quickly and the decision on a front-end framework at the start of a new project feels like a gamble. If the selected framework goes out of fashion next year, and your project is successful, it will be harder to attract the right people to work on it, and maintaining it will get more expensive and less fun.
React
As it stands in 2017, React seems to be the most popular javascript framework. It is actively used and maintained by Facebook and has developed a cult of almost religious followers. Big applications have been built with it; it’s proven and well-understood. And it has good support for a feature that is very important to me: Isomorphic (also called Universal) rendering. This means that the page rendering can happen both server-side and client-side, which is important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Redux
React is actually not a complete framework, it is just a View engine. For data handling and logic, most React projects add some additional library. There are several good options, but Redux has become mainstream, after its creator Dan Abramov introduced it with a brilliant presentation. Redux uses an event-sourcing mechanism, where events (called Actions in Redux) flow through the state object tree where they are handled by updating that state, after which React will re-render the View. The difference with traditional event sourcing architectures is that, in Redux, the event handler is a reducer function [(state, action) => state] operating on immutable data, which makes it cheap to keep references to all previous states. This, in turn, allows for “time travel”: rewind events, update code, replay the events on the updated code. It’s pretty cool.
Typescript
As a C# developer in javascript land, I tend to get myself in trouble a lot. Working with.NET ever since it was invented, I have developed some habits that I found unproductive in javascript. For instance, I’m used to quickly upgrade all project dependencies to the latest version; this usually works out fine in.NET projects: breaking changes show up in the compiler and are fixed easily. With javascript, updating dependencies results in things breaking a lot. Oftentimes there are breaking changes, and the new version is totally different. But sometimes things break subtly, at runtime. You may not notice it immediately, and finding what caused it may cost a lot of time later…
Typescript, of course, was made for this. It does not fix all of javascripts shortcomings, but it adds optional type checking, which makes maintaining a larger javascript codebase a lot less painful. Using typescript adds some extra work to maintain type declarations, but support is improving steadily, especially since typescript 2.0 introduced a much better way of importing type declarations files, and ambient module declarations made it easier to reference external javascript modules. Coming from C# or other typed languages, it feels like a no-brainer to use typescript now.
Babel
In my RROD exploration I also want to use new ES2015 javascript syntax, including async/await, the …spread operator and annotations. Those must be transpiled to ES5 (“old”) syntax before they can run in the browser and the stable version of node (native async currently needs the unstable node 7.x version). I use babel to transpile ES2015 to ES5. The typescript compiler can directly compile to ES5, without using babel, but I need babel to do some transforms on the code, especially Hot Module Reloading. So I let typescript compile.ts and.tsx files to the equivalent.js and.jsx, still in modern ES2015 syntax, then babel will take those and compile down to ES5, adding browser polyfills, the “generator runtime” (for async) and HMR transforms.
Typewriter
Even with typescript, working on server-side (.NET) code and client-side (javascript) code concurrently makes it hard to keep data structures properly synchronized between both sides. That is: until I found Typewriter, a project that lets you generate typescript declarations from.NET code. The templates for typescript code generation are part of the project, and they can be adapted to your own requirements and conventions.
AspNet JavascriptServices
A good starting point for a Dotnet Core javascript project is the AspNet JavascriptServices project, maintained by Steven Sanderson, of Knockout.js fame. This project provides Dotnet Core templates for several popular javascript frameworks, such as React, Angular 2, Vue, Knockout and Aurelia. For React, there is a template that also includes Redux and Typescript, and that is the template that I used to start.
The RROD Implementation
Based on these considerations, I created the javascript front-end for my project, implementing all these technologies. Complete code for this project is here on GitHub. In this section I will highlight a few interesting parts of my implementation and share some of my learning.
Starting a Dotnet Core Javascript project
The easiest way to setup this type of project is documented on the JavascriptServices site at github. You use npm and Yeoman to scaffold a completely functional starter website. I selected the “React with Redux and Typescript” variant.
What you get, on top of a normal Dotnet Core MVC project are:
A reference to the nuget package Microsoft.AspNetCore.SpaServices. This references the Microsoft.AspNetCore.NodeServices package that makes it possible to execute javascript code from Dotnet. Configuration for these is in the ConfigureServices function in Startup.cs.
function in Startup.cs. A ClientApp folder with a starter website, written in typescript. In my case, this is an Isomorphic web application with entry points for both server and client, using webpack to drive the compilation and bundling process. The application references the aspnet-webpack, aspnet-prerendering and aspnet-webpack-react npm modules, that support specific features of the integration between Dotnet and Javascript.
, and npm modules, that support specific features of the integration between Dotnet and Javascript. A razor viewpage Index.cshtml that “boots” the ClientApp.
that “boots” the ClientApp. Build targets in the.csproj project file to run npm install and webpack as part of the Dotnet build and publish commands.
Typewriter — generating typescript from C# code
To assist in synchronizing C# and Typescript code, specifically Redux State and Actions, and data passed via Web API models, I used Typewriter. Typewriter works as a Visual Studio plugin, and the generated typescript code is exported at development time in a “server” folder under ClientApp (where all client code is), so it can be referenced by the rest of the typescript client code.
I created two templates:
Models.tst — for all classes with a name ending in “Model” or “Result”, this template generates a typescript interface.
Redux.tst — For all classes with a name ending in “Action” this template converts a Redux Action on the server (where the Type is build-in) to the equivalent typescript interface, with the type as a string property on the object. I also implemented the equivalent, reflection based back-and-forth conversion in.NET. It also generates a string constant for the action name, and generates an interface for classes with a name ending in “State”.
With this in place, I can be sure that models are always correctly translated between server and client, without duplicate work. This works very well, and the type safety of typescript avoids a lot of problems before they happen.
React Components in Typescript
The React Components in the project follow the pattern of AspNet Javascript Services: they are built using TSX syntax, the typed equivalent of JSX. I’m a long-time fan of the Bootstrap CSS framework, so I’m using that. However, I have replaced the default bootstrap code (that uses jQuery) for react-bootstrap, which is a React-based re-implementation of bootstrap that doesn’t depend on jQuery. Typescript typings are available, so you also get code auto-completion. This leads to a very nice developer experience; for instance, here is the bootstrap-based navigation menu:
I think that is very clean. It’s like ASP Web Forms, made cool again :-)
Initializing Javascript Services
AspNet JavascriptServices is initialized in Program.cs like this:
The AddNodeServices() is optional, starting it with LaunchWithDebugging = true makes it possible to attach a debugger. To do that with VS Code, configure a Node.js launch task using “Legacy Protocol” to attach to the node debugger on port 5858 (which is the default). Debugging transpiled ES2015 is not perfect, but I was able to set breakpoints and understand how node was executing my typescript code server-side.
This setup handles requests using normal Mvc routing rules, the home page going to the Index action on HomeController. If no matching route is found, the “spa-fallback” route is invoked, sending the request to the same home page action. This passes the request to the javascript router.
The Controller Action for a JavascripServices web application does nothing unusual. The magic happens in the View Index.cshtml : that will execute the main-server entrypoint using the asp-prerender-module tag helper and also reference the compiled main-client javascript bundle for the client-side follow-up execution:
<div id=”react-app” asp-prerender-module=”ClientApp/dist/main-server”>Loading…</div>
<script src="~/dist/main-client.js" asp-append-version="true"></script>
This statement executes the server-side entrypoint in Node.js, and writes the resulting string inside the div element. This means the page content is pre-rendered server-side, so the page will display even for users who have javascript disabled and, more importantly, for search indexers such as GoogleBot.
Webpack
The app.UseWebpackMiddleware(), only executed in the development environment, is used to instruct AspNet JavascriptServices to start a watcher that will recompile the javascript code, using Webpack, whenever it detects a code-change. The HotModulePlacement = true instructs Webpack to insert extra code that automatically reloads any javascript imports when their source is changed. The middleware does this by manipulating the configuration of webpack before executing it. It takes your webpack.config.js and then dynamically inserts the plugin webpack.HotModuleReplacementPlugin that makes Hot Module Reloading (HMR) work. This means it is important to NOT add those modules in your webpack.config.js yourself, as having them twice results in hard-to-understand conflicts.
The ReactHotModuleReplacement = true does the same, but with extra smarts for React Components, using the react-transform-hmr babel transform. This transform is deprecated and I tried to use the newest way of doing this (React Hot Loader 3), but the new method is, as of this writing, in beta, and I had nothing but problems getting it to work properly. Let Steven Sanderson fix this, then I’ll copy his work. See, I’m learning this javascript stuff already.
Warning: danger ahead
It’s important to know that the webpack, babel and npm configurations are all very finicky. You can very easily break things by changing something in the webpack configuration or in package.json. Things may even break without any participation on your part: when minor new versions of dependencies are published, a new typescript version comes out, you run it on another machine that has another version of node, anything basically…
webpack.config.js
Also, there are many ways to specify a webpack configuration: loaders can be specified as a string, as an array of strings, as an object, as an array of objects, in the (deprecated).loader section or in the (new).use section. Parameters can be specified with a querystring, as an options field, using the.babelrc config file, inside the package.json, etc. It is entirely possible to have a valid webpack configuration structured in a way that AspNet JavascriptServices does not understand, resulting in HMR silently failing. Do not touch it unless necessary, and when you do, do it step-by-step, testing every change before going further.
If you manage to get all this to work without breaking anything you get rewarded with Hot Module Reloading. That means that modifying any typescript (.ts or.tsx) file while running in Development mode results in an automatic refresh of the browser screen, usually without even losing state. You can install Chrome plugins for React and Redux that can show you all the Actions that have happened in the past and lets you change them. You can use a slider to undo Actions, change code, and replay those Actions on the updated code. It is very cool.
Passing data from Dotnet to Javascript
It took me some time to understand how to pass data from the Dotnet side over to javascript. For instance, I wanted to pass the XSRF token that Dotnet Core generates and the Dotnet authentication state into the Javascript-rendered DOM and the Redux State.
This turns out to be straigtforward. Just pass the data from the Controller into the serverside View Index.cshtml and then either render it in the DOM and read it client-side with javascript or pass it in the asp-prerender-data parameter, from where it is passed to the boot-server.tsx component using the param object.
Still another way to pass initial data to the client is by sending it in a client-readable cookie.
Optimization
The average page size on the internet currently stands at 3Mb. That is terrible, but when building a web application, using npm and webpack, adding a few cool libraries to your project, it’s easy to see how pages can grow to that size.
Being selective about importing libraries is important, but an easy tactic to limit bundle size is to use pre-compression. I let webpack generate a.gz compressed version of the javascript and.css assets, and have installed a custom middleware in dotnet to modify incoming requests for static assets so they return the pre-compressed version, if available.The negative response to Suicide Squad was a major blow to David Ayer. The filmmaker, also known for his work on Fury and End of Watch, has discussed the critical reception on more than one occasion. Now in a new interview with Entertainment Tonight, he reflected on how the aftermath of his DC super-villain film affected his approach in directing Netflix’s Bright.
“It was sh–. Yeah, it was sh– reviews. I got my throat cut,” Ayer said of Suicide Squad. Critics called the work “unexciting,” “predictable,” “mind-boggling stupid,” and a film “beholden to the corporate vision of other recent DC adaptations.”
“It was a super polarizing movie. Incredibly polarizing,” Ayer added.
The director went on to explain how the response made him “gun shy” when going to work on Bright.
“It’s like going to the boxing ring and getting knocked out is how it felt. And I had to go into the ring again. And directing is a confidence game, because you’re selling everyone on something that only exists in your head,” he said. “The actors have to feel that confidence to trust that you know what you’re doing, and so does your crew. As a director, you set the tone. Really, it’s coming off that movie, I understood the pitfalls, I understood the dangers, I knew where the alligators hide, you know? And so I made damn sure I didn’t repeat any mistakes.”
It seems, however, history is repeating itself. Bright, starring Will Smith and Joel Edgerton, was described as a “plenty embarrassing” “genre disaster” by critics as the film debuted on Netflix this week.
To one critic who called the film “the single worst movie of 2017,” Ayer tweeted, “This is going on my fridge. Highest compliment is a strong reaction either way. This is a f–king epic review. It’s a big fun movie. You can sure string words together Mr. [Ehrlich]. I’d love to read any script you’ve written.”NEW YORK, NY – Former USA Rugby Men’s Eagles 15s Head Coach Mike Tolkin has been laying low since being replaced. In this Exclusive On-Camera interview, he answers fan questions and opens up about the following with our Matt McCarthy:
-His dismissal
-His relationship with out-going USAR CEO Nigel Melville
-The situation with longtime Eagles Captain Todd Clever
-Lessons learned from the Rugby World Cup
-The domestic set-up for the USA
Here’s the piece, please share it with your mates:
Please feel free to comment below, look for and “Like” our Facebook Rugby Wrap Up Page and follow us on Twitter@: RugbyWrapUp, Jake Frechette, Junoir Blaber, Ronan Nelson, Jamie Wall, James Harrington, DJ Eberle and Declan Yeats.
And remember, if you’re in NYC the Pig N Whistle on West 36th Street is our favorite place to watch rugby. Be sure to stop in."Despite what the others say, war is inevitable."
–Mon Mothma
After following its cast of characters through a web of events that spanned the galaxy, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story built toward its climactic battle on and above the planet Scarif.
With nothing less than the fate of the entire galaxy at stake, Rebels and Imperials fought in the jungles, in the heavy guarded Citadel Tower, in the skies, and even in space. It was the first major battle of the Galactic Civil War between the Galactic Empire and the fledgling Rebel Alliance, and were it not for the Rebel victory, the Rebellion—and the galaxy's hopes for freedom—would have been swiftly eradicated.
But the battle almost didn't take place. At an earlier council meeting, Rebel leaders voted against confronting the Imperials at Scarif. It was only because a few brave individuals disobeyed the council's wishes and risked their lives—sacrificed their lives—that the Rebel Alliance ended up with the Death Star plans and survived to continue in its fight.
Likewise, in Star Wars™: Rebellion, you won't find your Rebel Alliance eager to engage the evil Galactic Empire in military engagements. The Empire is far stronger. Its tools of war are far more devastating. But there are times that key individuals and key engagements can change the course of history.
In the long run, war is inevitable. Combat is inevitable. And with the new units and advanced rules from the Rise of the Empire expansion, that combat is far more nuanced, dynamic, cinematic, and dramatic than ever.
No Retreat
There are a total of thirty-six plastic figures in Rise of the Empire, and these are divided between a total of eight new unit types—four for the Rebels and four for the Empire.
Like the new leaders we explored more closely in an earlier preview, these units all use the expansion's new green dice, which notably only boast icons on two sides—but both are direct hits. In turn, this makes the new units less reliable and specialized in combat than core units like X-wings, TIE fighters, and Stormtroopers.
But it also makes them better able to perform some tasks that similar core units might find more daunting. A Rebel vanguard unit, for example, might not be quite as good at combatting Stormtroopers as a Rebel trooper unit would be, but it matches up better against an AT-ST or an Imperial assault tank.
Similarly, your TIE Strikers aren't quite as effective against Rebel X-wings as your TIE fighter squadrons may be, but they can adapt more readily to the challenges of downing a Rebel transport or Nebulon-B frigate.
But the new units' reliance on green dice isn't the only thing that's notable about them. Whereas the core game offers the Rebel Alliance a couple of units—the ion cannon and shield generators—with unique game abilities, the only satisfaction it offers the Empire is the one that comes from knowing you wield superior firepower. With Rise of the Empire, the Empire still claims the advantage of superior firepower, but it also gains a couple of units with unique abilities.
Even if they never hit their targets, the shield bunker and Interdictor can win you battles simply by being a part of them. So long as your shield bunker remains intact, it grants your Death Star complete protection. Even a well-timed trench run directed by a careful analysis of the Death Star Plans won't avail the Rebellion. And while the shield bunker forces the Rebels to commit to the ground, your Interdictor can trap the ships they'd hoped to retreat after dropping off their troops. Wherever you have your Interdictor, the Rebels simply cannot escape. Their efforts to jump to hyperspace are denied.
Advanced Tactics
In addition to its new units, Rise of the Empire introduces new advanced tactic cards and rules for cinematic combat that can dramatically reshape your battles.
For starters, you remove the ground and space tactic decks from the core game and replace them with the four tactic decks in Rise of the Empire; both the Rebels and Imperials gain their own ground and space tactic decks.
The fact that these new tactic decks are divided by faction is important because each card has two different abilities—one above a dividing line and one below it—and most of the top abilities are associated specifically with one of that faction's units. This allows units to showcase their unique abilities as seen in the films. For example, the Tow Cables card can allow an air speeder to destroy an AT-AT, and TIE fighters can use their greater numbers and Swarm Tactics more effectively in space battles. Or if the Rebels have a transport in the same system as their ground battle, they could play Escape Plan to effect their immediate retreat.
But the changes introduced by these advanced tactic cards and cinematic combat rules go far beyond the additional tactical value they assign to specific units.
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Jack Hayden: You’re welcome. Always a pleasure.
Alan Nuevo: Coming up, residents of Lago call for the UEE to increase its presence in the Nexus System after a series of comm relays were destroyed by pirates. We’ll ask if the UEE has the resources to aid this struggling system. That, and more, when the Empire Report returns.
< Transmission Break >Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a rally at Reverend Samuel Delevoe Memorial Park in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
Hillary Clinton's big problem at the moment is she only has one problem, while her opponent, former reality television star Donald Trump, has lots of them.
Clinton is currently dogged by the latest iteration of her email woes: FBI Director James Comey's announcement last week of a resumed probe into her treatment of classified information after new (or maybe not new) emails were found on a device shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, noted creeper Anthony Weiner. This development has gotten the lion's share of election 2016 coverage over the last few days; cable news is wall-to-wall with segments on it, while the major newspapers have granted it most of their prime column inches.
In addition, last Friday saw the release of a new video of Trump, on stage, humiliating a former Miss Universe winner in 2011. (No, not that former Miss Universe winner, a different one.) The video is just the latest on-tape evidence of Trump's raging misogyny and his belief that women deserve to be publicly degraded.
Editorial Cartoons on the 2016 Presidential Elections View All 596 Images
But did that video earn any play in the political media? Barely. What about any of the above stories? Meh. They received coverage, sure, but nothing like the sustained focus directed on Clinton and her damn emails.
Stuff that should be utterly disqualifying has become so normalized that it's treated like a footnote in the tale of 2016. Stories that should be shocking are just one more bit of Trump info for the pile. Everything is crazy, therefore nothing is.
It's not that the media haven't done their due diligence on Trump's huge downsides. They definitely have. It's that there's so much negative stuff coming out of the Trump fire hose it's become effectively impossible to drink it all down. The noise drowns out all the signals.
Clinton, meanwhile, has one, big, easily digestible negative story that emphasizes a core vulnerability. It's there, all the time, hoovering up clicks and eyeballs. And it drowns out not just Trump antics, but other news about Clinton, as well.
According to an analysis by the watchdogs at Media Matters, major news networks have dedicated three times as much coverage to emails as to all major policy issues in the campaign combined. A Shorenstein Center study on coverage of the 2016 race needed to make email stories a category unto itself, since it so outpaced other genres of Clinton reporting. A Gallup study released in September found that "emails" dominated what people say they've heard about Clinton; for Trump, people report having heard a mish-mash of other terms.
Clinton should still be fine, per the polls, though we'll know more on that front in the coming days. And to be clear, using a private email server was a big, dumb mistake that she shouldn't have made. But the obsession with her emails has obscured the gaping maw between the qualifications and policy proposals of the two candidates in this election.
On the one hand, there's an eminently experienced woman who has been in public service for 30 years, with the errors that necessarily come alongside such a long career. Argue with her policies all you want, but it's clear she believes in trying to make the country a better place.
On the other is a con man, someone who has gamed the system for his own benefit for decades – an utterly unqualified, incoherent narcissist who revels in his own ignorance, and who is dangerous precisely because he has no idea what he doesn't know.
Or we could talk some more about emails.News agency gets €706,000 to use AI for creation of up to 30,000 local stories a month in partnership with Urbs Media
Robots will help a national news agency to create up to 30,000 local news stories a month, with the help of human journalists and funded by a Google grant.
The Press Association has won a €706,000 (£621,000) grant to run a news service with computers writing localised news stories.
The national news agency, which supplies copy to news outlets in the UK and Ireland, has teamed up with data-driven news start-up Urbs Media for the project, which aims to create “a stream of compelling local stories for hundreds of media outlets”.
It won one of the largest grants to date from Google’s Digital News Initiative (DNI), which is aimed at supporting innovation in European digital journalism. PA and Urbs Media will set up Radar – Reporters And Data And Robots – to produce thousands of stories each month.
PA’s editor-in-chief, Peter Clifton, said journalists will still be involved in spotting and creating stories and will use artificial intelligence to increase the amount of content. He said: “Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process, but Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually. It is a fantastic step forward for PA.”
The scheme aims to meet an “increasing demand for consistent, fact-based insights into local communities” for regional media outlets as well as independent publishers and hyperlocal sites and bloggers, said PA.
Journalists will find stories in national open databases from sources including government departments, local councils and NHS trusts, and make “detailed story templates” for topics such as crime, health and employment. Multiple versions of the story will be created with Natural Language Software and will “scale up the mass localisation of news content”.
Clifton said it was “a hugely exciting development for PA” that would be “a genuine game-changer for media outlets across the UK and Ireland”.
PA and Urbs Media are making a workflow plan to generate the large volume of stories for clients. The grant will also be used to make database tools to collect and combine datasets and “editorial intelligence” will guide the automation process.
Radar will auto-generate graphics, video and pictures to add to stories. Money will also be used to boost PA’s distribution platforms to help its local customers find and use the content.
PA has already shared some of its plans with its regional customers. It is recruiting a team of five journalists to spot stories, create templates for them and edit the data-driven content.
Clifton said: “At a time when many media outlets are experiencing commercial pressures, Radar will provide the news ecosystem with a cost-effective way to provide incisive local stories, enabling audiences to hold democratic bodies to account.”
The scheme is likely to begin early next year, as PA celebrates its 150th anniversary.
Tim Dawson, president of the National Union of Journalists, said the union was not Luddite or against technological innovation, but added: “Under-investment in journalism and journalists is a massive problem in the media across the UK. If money’s floating about, that’s really what it should be spent on.”
He said the fire at Grenfell Tower had highlighted the need for “robust journalism”. Dawson added: “I’ve no doubt that it is possible for computers and algorithms to mine data out of stories.”
He said it could give reporters more time to develop the stories, but added: “The real problem in the media is too little bona fide reporting. I don’t believe that computer whizzbangery is going to replace that. What I’m worried about in my capacity as president of the NUJ is something that ends up with third-rate stories which look as if they are something exciting, but are computer-generated so they [news organisations] can get rid of even more reporters.”
Dawson said readers are still attracted by well written and compelling stories and well crafted photographs.What would you do if someone told you that you would never be able to do the one thing you love to do again?
Imagine being a lead singer, sitting down at a Baby Grand piano with the spotlights on you, in front of thousands of screaming fans in an amphitheater, ready to sing one of your biggest hits.
Now, imagine opening your mouth to sing, your voice cracking & breaking, suddenly not being able to hit the notes or match the melodies,. That is exactly what happened to Tom Keifer of Cinderella in 2006, who was onstage in Chicago at a piano, trying to sing “Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Till It’s Gone)”.
He was told that he would never sing again.
If you’re a singer or musician, you play music until the day you die. You do it because you love it. Music is your life. If you’re in it for the right reasons, giving up isn’t an option. You find a way to fight through it and keep doing what you love,which is what Tom found the strength to do.
After numerous doctors visits and continued, daily therapy, his voice is once again solid and only getting better, which he has proved with this year’s release of his first solo record, appropriately titled The Way Life Goes, which has been 10 years in the making.
*You purchase The Way Life Goes here: itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-way-life-goes/id634693996
Tom Keifer, best known as the lead singer & guitarist for the blues based hard rock band, Cinderella, took the time for a phone interview to talk coffee, his solo album (The Way Life Goes), guitars, his worst onstage experience & the craziest bands that Cinderella toured with.
We are a coffee website, so I have to ask, Do you like coffee and if so what kind do you prefer? Yes, I love coffee. My poison of choice is the Starbucks, oh what’s it called? Now I’m drawing a blank… Verona! Starbucks Verona K- cups. We go through them by the dozen here. *laughs* I got one of those K- Cup machines & love it.
Awesome. So do you have a favorite cafe in Nashville? Um, I go to Starbucks. I like their coffee. I like the atmosphere. They play cool music in there and stuff and the breakfast sandwiches aren’t bad.
Speaking of Nashville, how do think that the music scene differs there than it did in Philadelphia in the 80s? Well, it’s two different eras you’re talking about, but I moved here because the scene you know when I was coming up in Philadelphia in the 80s, there was a few clubs that we played, but you know, there weren’t a lot of places that you could play where there was original music, so then, it was more about you put together a band, you were part of a band and you know, we just did everything we could to just bust outta there, you know? When I moved here,it was in the mid 90s when the wheels were kind of falling off of the whole 80s rock scene. The music scene was changing. Grunge was coming in & we lost our deal with Mercury, so we didn’t have an outlet for music anymore and we started drifting apart & I drifted down to Nashville here, cause at that point I was thinking about doing a solo record & I’d been writing with some people down here and the scene down here at that point was very different from the scene in Philly back when we started, I mean the music scene here is deep rooted for years and years and years and in a tradition of like you know, amazing songwriting and there’s a real artistry here to the songwriting and musicianship and it’s just an amazing town for inspiration in terms of playing and writing, you know? The talent level here is crazy. It was a good place to get a new start and to start sowing the seeds for a solo record, which obviously didn’t come until years later, but you know you gotta start somewhere.
What was the writing process like for The Way Life Goes? I know you worked with Savannah on that. Yeah. She co-wrote a lot of songs with me and I co-wrote with a lot of other people too. That was the part about the writing that was different from Cinderella because I pretty much wrote exclusively by myself with the exception of a couple of songwriters and writing with Eric with Cinderella, but on this record, I co-wrote with a lot of people. That’s one of the reasons I came to Nashville was because the writing is incredible here, but in terms of where the inspiration comes from and how the song begins, um that’s the same and I’ve always had a philosophy that I’m not going to force a song, I’m going to wait until real inspiration comes to me or the song finds me and you know, I don’t care if I don’t write a song for a year. I just never force it and there’s always that moment where you’re driving down the road or you’re flying on an airplane somewhere or walking down aisle 6 at Home Depot and this light bulb goes off in your head and you hear a lyric or an idea and a melody and you start to get an inspiration and then you grow it from there and usually when I hear that in my head, I’m just running for an instrument at that point. So you know, with this record I would take those ideas to a co-writer and we’d sit down and work on them together.So, the initial inspiration came from the same place, I just brought some extra people to collaborate on those thoughts.
Do you have a song on The Way Life Goes that sticks out to you as your favorite right now? Well, there’s one that sticks out as being different, maybe, where it maybe pushed the envelope more so than what I was maybe known with Cinderella & that would be the second track on the record. It’s called A Different Light. I would describe the rest of the record as being pretty close to the Cinderella, the same wheel house as with Cinderella, as with it being blues based and American roots based, cause that’s who all my heroes were growing up, the stones and Aerosmith and all that stuff, so for the most part, it’s a hard rock record. It has a lot of dynamics in terms of some acoustic stuff and ranging all the way into real hard drivin’ stuff. Different Light stands out as being a little bit more on the pop side, maybe represents some of the you know, more current bands that I listen to like Train or Imagine Dragons or that kinda thing.
So you said that The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith have inspired you musically. Who else has been a big influence on you throughout the years? Yeah, they were definitely some of the artists that I grew up on. There was also Janis Joplin and Rod Stewart and Bad Company and I mean, I came up in the 70’s, so there was an incredible amount of music then, you know? The rock of the late 60’s and 70’s where it was all just kind of exploding and happening for the first time so there was a lot of great music to learn from back then, you know?
Do you have any advice for aspiring musicians & singers? My advice would be to be yourself and to play what’s truly in your heart and what feels right to you and express what’s inside of you. Don’t worry abut chasing trends or trying to look at the charts and figure out how to sound like those artists, just be yourself and if you can be yourself, and you know, prepare yourself in a way where you are as good at being yourself as you can be, in other words, have the work ethic to really develop your talent and what’s special about you and one day the trend’s going to be you and I think you’ve got a much better shot at doing that than trying to chase other people’s vibe or energy.
Do you have a favorite guitar that you own? Well, currently I do. It’s hard to pick, but I got a really, really cool Firebird a couple months back and it’s actually a reissue of one that I had years ago. I had a ’63. It was a red Firebird that I got rid of, I think in a guitar trade or something, you know? Heat of the moment. I call it the Firebird that got away, but I loved that guitar and for years, I’d see pictures of it & pictures of me after it, onstage and say, man, I wish I hadn’t gotten rid of that. So, just a couple months ago, I was in Guitar Center here in Nashville and there was a reissue of the exact same guitar hanging on the wall & I said I gotta have that, so I bought it and it actually turned out for the better because this reissue is probably better than the original one, so it’s currently my favorite.
What effects have you been using onstage lately? Really simple, you know? Rhythm is straight into the amp and I use very old, early 70’s Marshalls that have no master volume. You gotta crank them all the way up to get the crunch and the gain out of them, but nothing sounds like them, and then that’s for rhythm and if I want a clean sound, I just turn the volume down on the guitar & it cleans up real nice through those amps. For solos, I’ve got an overdrive pedal, uh, man, I got this cool one now, I can’t remember the name of it. I just got it for this tour this year. I think it’s called.. It’s a weird name, but I think it’s called a Timmy pedal and it’s one of those boutique, overdrive things & I like that & I like a little delay on my solos & I have this one. I think it’s called a Deep Blue delay pedal & that’s really all I use is a little overdrive & delay on my solos & the rhythm is pretty much straight into the amp.
During this tour, did you have a favorite song to play live?
Hmmm, let’s see. I always really, really loved singing Shelter Me. We were doing that one on the solo tour and I always like singing that one, so I’ll say that one.
You had a health scare concerning your vocal chords. Do you feel that that has made you stronger as a singer as you’ve been writing the record and going out and touring again?
I learned a lot from it. I was told I would never sing again in the early 90’s due to a partially paralyzed vocal chord and that’s a neurological condition that there’s no medical cure for, you know, they can’t give you a pill or a surgery to fix that and they said I was done. They said my only hope of being able to sing again would be to retrain it and work with speech pathologists and vocal coaches and hopefully find a way to train that chord to respond properly and that’s taken me years to do it, but I have overcome it. When I say overcome it, it’s still there, but I’ve managed to work up a routine from all the teachers that I’ve worked with to kinda get that chord in place & get it working properly, where I’m able to sing and do what I love to do, so that routine involves an hour and a half to two hours every day of vocal exercises, whether I’m on tour or not. When I’m on tour, my warm up is as long as the show, sometimes longer depending on how beat up it is from the night before, so even on a show day, I do about an hour and a half to two hours of warm ups and vocal chord stretching and things like that before the show and it’s just a bunch, well it sounds strange to most people, but it’s a bunch of weird noises and scales and stuff, but it works.
A couple of months ago, you did some gigs with Halestorm, how was that?
Awesome! They are just, you know, a great band, and just some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. They are my favorite rock band out there right now. I love their songs. I think they really stand out in the songwriting department and they certainly stand out in the vocal department. Lzzy Hale’s voice is, you know, one of the wonders of rock n roll right now in my opinion. She really sings. They’re great and we got to do a duet together, Lzzy & I. We did “Nobody’s Fool” together in their show and it was a lot of fun.
What’s your favorite song of theirs?
I love “Miss The Misery”. I mean, that’s just, just bad ass, straight up, but one of the things I really like about them is, and again, when people ask me how do I pick a favorite song on my own record, it’s hard to because there’s a lot of different kinds of songs and that’s one of the things to me that makes them stand out. When you listen to their records, there’s a lot of different kinds of songs, so on one hand I would say I really love “Break In” and I really like “In Your Room”, but I love “Miss The Misery” and “Mz. Hyde” too, and “Here’s to Us” kinda falls somewhere in the middle. It’s hard to pick a favorite there, it really is. I think they’re extremely talented & like I said, in the songwriting department and the dynamics department in terms of putting together a record. I just think they stand out in the crowd. They really do. They have lots of dynamics and great songs on their record. I guess I really didn’t answer your question, but I like a lot of their songs. *laughs*
What was the craziest band that Cinderella toured with in the 80’s?
Hmmm. The craziest band that ever toured with Cinderella…. umm. You know, I don’t know. When you’ve been on the road as long as we have, things don’t seem as crazy anymore. People ask, Tell us crazy stories and there’s so much crazy stuff that’s gone on everyday.. I can tell you the most fun bands, because fun is fun & the people you enjoy being around you know? Some of the things that went on, well, those may seem crazy to other people, but on the road, it becomes old hat. I loved touring with Poison. We did a couple of tours with those guys and they are just like best friends and we always have a great time together. They’re really good people. Bon Jovi too, back in the day, you know? Just great people, great band & we had a blast on that tour, so there was crazy, fun stuff going on everyday.
Speaking of touring, What has been your best & worst onstage experiences?
It’s hard to pick a best, I mean there’s probably one that stands out, and that’s the Moscow Music Peace Festival. I still say to this day, that that was a very special show to be a part of. It was kind of like the Woodstock of the Soviet Union and we were over there before the wall came down and that was a pretty unprecedented gig that happened in Linen Stadium and that was something very special to be a part of and to this day, I’m very proud of being part of that and I think that any band that was there would say the same thing. Ummm, worst onstage moment was in 2006. The vocal problems I had, initially started in the early 90’s and I worked for years to get my voice back and I had a couple of set backs and injuries and had to have surgeries to repair it and I was just starting to get my voice to where I could tour & it was solid & I kinda got hit with a second round of it in 2005 and my voice started to go south again and we did a second tour in 2006, back to back and it was just getting worse and worse and I remember being onstage, it was in Chicago at a giant amphitheater called The World and we were out on tour with Poison and I sat down at the piano in the middle of the show to do “Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Till It’s Gone)” and I couldn’t sing the song. It was just me, sitting there at a Baby Grand with all those spot lights on me and my voice was cracking and breaking and I couldn’t, couldn’t get up to the notes and that was probably the lowest point for me onstage & vocally. I debated that night, when I walked off stage, just leaving the tour & going home & resting or trying to figure it out. I decided to stay, cause it was our 20th year anniversary and the tour was a lot of fun other than the vocal problems I was having, so I went the next day to Target, cause we had a day off & all of our gear was on the truck. I said to my tour manager, You know, I want to stay out here, but I have to re-work some of the melodies on these songs, just bring them down a 3rd or a 4th or a 5th and just get them somewhere where I can sing them, talk them, whatever I gotta do to get through it. I’m going to get through this tour and I’ve never had to do that before. I’ve always been able to sing the melodies that were on the record. So, I said I need a guitar. So he took me to Target and I bought some little, cheap $60 electric guitar called a Lyon. *laughs* and I sat on the back of the bus that day off and I went through every song and I kinda transposed the melodies down and figured out a way to just get through the tour and you know, I got through it and the fans were very supportive, but I didn’t sound like the record, but I finished out the last 6 weeks of the tour or whatever and that began the process of rebuilding my voice for the 2nd time and I had another surgery and we were off the road for several years at that point, but I finally built it back and the last 3 or 4 years, it’s been really strong, so I think I’ve got it all behind me now. Sitting at that piano in Chicago that night was the lowest point.
Wow. I’m so happy that you have been able to get through it and find ways to make it better and better.
Well, thank you.
You’re welcome
What do you think that it takes for a band to make it now? I know it’s probably a little different than it was in the 80s when you guys started, but what would you say it takes for a band to really work their way up there?
Well, from a strategy standpoint, it’s a little different from when we were coming up, but I can kind of speak from both sides because of my solo record is like a new artist, so I’ve stood in both parts of time. So, the reason I approached my solo record with not having a label involved with it when we were producing is because what’s changed the industry the most is illegal downloading and streaming and this mentality that music is free. So, record companies and publishing companies are the people who develop artists and when they don’t have the money because their revenues are down by billions of dollars, literally, because only a fraction of music that’s out there right now is actually paid for and you know, record budgets and artist development budgets and stuff are just nothing. There’s zero and it’s one of the areas in the industry that’s been impacted the hardest, so pay attention out there, kids and listen. You know, when we were coming up, record companies had tons of money, so you could make a really crappy demo and they had A&R people who had ears and imaginations and they could listen to this crappy demo and say “man, we could make a real record with these people” and they would sign you based on that cruddy demo and bring you in and make sure you had the best producers and studio engineers and make a real record with you. That kind of opportunity is few and far between these days. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but in most instances, record companies are looking for a finished product. So, that’s why I decided to finish my record. It took 10 years and we spent a ton of our own money on it, but once you sign with a record company, they tell you when you’re done and I didn’t want anyone breathing down my back on this record, so I really have been in that position, um and that’s why I opted to say I’m going to take a finished record to labels, not go and try to get a deal and make a record with them because that means they’re gonna tell you when you’re done and I just think less and less is going into album budgets and artist development so I think, long story short, the strategy these days is to, more than ever, take something that’s finished, you know & fortunetly, today, with the technology and pro tools and stuff, people can make records in their closets, you know, if you have good ears. It’s all about the ears, always. A lot of people think it’s about equipment, but if someone is twirling those knobs that doesn’t have ears, then, it doesn’t matter how good the equipment is. So, I think that that’s, you know, the biggest way that the industry has changed & I think it’s changed how artists need to go about, you know, approaching record companies. I still think record companies are a great thing to have behind you if you have a great product finished or if you can get one that will help you develop that product, that’s just harder to find these days.
So, back to your album, I have one more question for you. What can fans that are more used to hearing your work with Cinderella expect from The Way Life Goes?
It isn’t really that different. I would describe the record as somewhere between Long, Cold Winter and Heartbreak Station, which I think were some of Cinderella’s better work. The style of music is hard rock that’s american roots inspired. There’s a lot of blues influence in it, a little bit of country and gospel. So it’s you know, the style of it’s the same. I mean, as a songwriter and a singer and a musician, every time you go into the studio, or you write a song, your hope or your wish is that you’ve written a better song and you’re going to perform it better, so hopefully I’ve managed to improve in those areas over the years and also producing, too. You always want it to be produced better and sound better, but the music style and writing is very similar. It’s hard to run from that sound because, you know I was such a big part of Cinderella’s sound, being the singer, the songwriter and I did a lot of the guitar work, so that’s a signature there, that’s on my solo record as well.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
Thanks for having me.
You’re welcome. Have a great Christmas!
You too! Thank you very much.
*You can find more info on Tom, The Way Life Goes & Cinderella here:
tomkeifer.com/
www.facebook.com/TomKeiferOfficial
twitter.com/tomkeifermusic
*You can check out Tom’s newest music video for “The Flower Song” here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u68tl82Ihmk
*You can buy “The Way Life Goes” – Tom Keifer by clicking the link below*
*A Special thanks to Tom for taking the time to talk with us!*
*Photos courtesy of Doug Weber/ New Ocean Media*Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev exchanged sharp words Monday over the true nature of Western military intervention in Libya, leading many observers to wonder whether the gloves have finally come off in the long-anticipated battle over which of them will run for president in elections that are just one year away.
Though the two have sparred indirectly before, they have publicly maintained that everything is fine with the "tandem" arrangement under which they have jointly run Russia since Mr. Putin handpicked Mr. Medvedev to succeed him as president three years ago.
Both men have said they'd like to run again for what will be a six-year presidential term next year, and have insisted that they will decide amicably between themselves which of them will be the establishment candidate – a status that virtually guarantees success in Russia's heavily stage-managed political culture.
Perhaps it's not so amicable anymore.
The tough public words were exchanged over an issue of foreign policy, which is a presidential prerogative under Russia's Constitution. While answering questions from defense workers Monday, Putin slammed the Western-authored United Nations resolution that authorized the use of force to protect Libyan civilians from forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi as allowing "anyone to do anything they want" against a sovereign state.
"It resembles a medieval appeal for a crusade in which somebody calls upon somebody to go to a certain place and liberate it," Putin said. "This is becoming a persistent tendency in US policy," mentioning the bombing of Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo war, and subsequent US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. "Now it is Libya’s turn, under the pretext of protecting the peaceful population. But in bomb strikes it is precisely the civilian population that gets killed. Where is the logic and the conscience?"
A few hours later Medvedev weighed in. Without naming Putin, he made clear that he disagreed with both his tone and the implication that Western powers are acting improperly in Libya.
"It is absolutely inexcusable to use expressions that, in effect, lead to a clash of civilizations, such as 'crusades,' and so on. That is unacceptable," Medvedev said. "All that is now happening in Libya is the result of the appalling behavior of the Libyan leadership and the crimes it committed against its own people."
Russian diplomats did not veto the authorization of force resolution when it came before the Security Council because "I do not consider this resolution to be wrong," he added.
Divergent views
Those two sharply divergent foreign policy views – one bristling with suspicion toward the West, the other frankly identifying Russia's interests with it – have long been on display in Moscow. But never before have Medvedev and Putin so clearly moved into separate corners in what looks like the prelude to a real fight, analysts say.
"What has happened here is the first real clash within the tandem since Medvedev came into the Kremlin," says Pavel Salin, an expert with the independent Center for Political Assessments in Moscow. "In the past they seemed to be working well together and playing to separate audiences. Medvedev appealed to liberals and Putin to more conservative voters, and it was seen as a kind of 'good cop-bad cop' thing."
But the issue of Libya, a client state of the former USSR, appears to have brought on a real split, he says. "Putin, given his past [KGB] experience, is inclined to a conspiratorial view and his remarks had a certain anti-American spin. Medvedev, on the other hand, does not think in cold war terms. He would like to see Russia on good terms with everybody and perhaps play the role of an intermediary in this situation," he says.
Some observers suggest there's less to the public spat than meets the eye. Medvedev's statement about Libya, published on the Kremlin website, contains measured criticism of the Western military campaign as well as the jab at Putin. "These operations have damaged civilian sites, and there are as yet unconfirmed reports that innocent people have been killed, and this shows that, sadly, the countries taking part in these military operations have not managed to achieve [the stated] goals," he said.
"This is not a real conflict between Medvedev and Putin," says Alexei Mukhin, director of the Center for Political Information, an independent Moscow think tank. "It's like Medvedev is Putin's lawyer, he follows him around and cleans up his speech.... Basically, it just means the tandem is working as it was designed. The West sees the good Medvedev trying his best, while other constituencies are reassured by Putin."
Bad move by Medvedev?
Mr. Mukhin points out that if Medvedev had been aiming to make a public break with Putin, he could hardly have chosen a worse issue. An admittedly unscientific online poll conducted by Russian blogger Semyon Petrov currently shows 88 percent of respondents opposing Western military intervention in Libya, while just 6 percent are supportive.
If it does come to a showdown, Putin would seem to hold all the cards. He is leader of United Russia, the party that dominates virtually all legislatures in Russia, from municipal to national level. He also appears close to top business leaders, does most of the hands-on contact with officialdom, and consistently enjoys a higher public approval rating than the president.
Medvedev's vision of "modernizing" Russia appeals to liberals and well-educated young people, but does not seem to play well with wealthy oligarchs whose main business is resource extraction or with the vast majority of ordinary Russians outside of a few major cities, experts say.
Moreover, critics complain, whenever Medvedev has taken a rhetorical stand in the past against corruption, electoral dirty tricks or human rights violations, he has seemed unable – or unwilling – to follow through with any concrete action.
"There are differences between Medvedev and Putin, and they are only now reaching the public space," says Alexei Makarkin, director of the independent Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. "But I wouldn't read too much into it. They still seem to take decisions together, and will probably be able to arrange between themselves who's going to be the next candidate for the Russian presidency, just as they said they would."Syrian forces have retaken another district in the east of the city of Aleppo, now exerting control over 60 percent of the city’s militant-held eastern part, according to a monitoring group.
Joined by allied fighters, the Syrian military seized Aleppo’s Tariq al-Bab neighborhood from the militants, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Saturday.
The advance also restored control on a road leading from Aleppo’s government-held western neighborhoods to the city’s airport, which is also under government control.
Foreign-backed militants amassed in the city’s eastern side in 2012. The government has been controlling its west and fighting to retake the east.
The official Syrian Arab News Agency said the military had also wrested back control over the Karam Al-Qaterji, Jazmati, and Halwaniyah neighborhoods in eastern Aleppo. An unspecified number of the militants were killed in the operations.
The government’s advances have taken by surprise many of the foreign states that have been channeling financial and military support to the militants since the onset of the foreign-backed militancy in Syria in 2011.
Amid the victories, some countries, including France, have called for the implementation of a ceasefire |
US version of game show The Price Is Right, presented the film.
Saying the chickens had “miserable lives and painful deaths”, he added: “This is sickening cruelty and yet the meat from these animals is sold bearing the American Humane Certified label.”
The group’s petition calling on the watchdog to take action and “stop certifying blatant animal abuse” has so far reached almost 9,000 signatures.
Nathan Runkle, the founder and director of Mercy for Animals, criticised the American Humane Association’s standards as being too low to be labelled “humane” and called on it to ban the use of scalding tanks and blades, advocating painless gas instead.
“The humane-certified label is little more than a scam,” he said. “It dupes well-intending consumers into buying meat from factory farmed animals.”
Mark Stubis, a spokesman for the association, said the group has stringent standards and is dedicated to the humane treatment of all animals.
Foster Farms, which has a network of more than 100 producers on 7,000 farms, has suspended five employees since it started an internal investigation into the video.
They were either directly involved in the abuse or failed to report it to management, the California-based company said.
A spokesperson added: “The behaviour of the individuals in this video is inappropriate and counter to our stringent animal welfare standards, procedures and policies.
“Since its founding in 1939, animal welfare has always been a top priority for Foster Farms.
“We believe raising chickens humanely is simply the right thing to do, and we take our commitment to humane values very seriously.”
Foster Farms said its employees receive annual animal welfare training on the proper handling of the birds and anyone violating policies can be disciplined or sacked.
Tony Botti, from the Fresno County Sheriff's Office, said the agency is investigating the allegations after receiving a complaint from Mercy for Animals last week.
Statistics held by the US Government show that hundreds of thousands of chickens are accidentally dropped alive into scalding tanks annually but only 0.008 per cent of all killed birds were found to have been "improperly slaughtered" least year.
Additional reporting by AP
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowYou blew it, Zombieland haters.
Screenwriter and Zombieland co-creator Rhett Reese has been apportioning blame on Twitter.
Our Zombieland series will not be moving forward on Amazon.Sad for everyone involved. — Rhett Reese (@RhettReese) May 17, 2013
I’ll never understand the vehement hate the pilot received from die-hard Zombieland fans.You guys successfully hated it out of existence. — Rhett Reese (@RhettReese) May 17, 2013
Anyway, we did our best, and we’re very proud of our team. — Rhett Reese (@RhettReese) May 17, 2013
His comment about hate might seem like hyperbole, but Reese maybe has a point. Amazon posted the pilot online to garner feedback from fans, and there were certainly a certain amount of harsh ones. Because Amazon allow you to filter by star rating, voyeurs might want to check out some of the 1-star reviews. Perverts.
The chief problem, I think, was the recasting. Fans were so wed to the movie stars that they didn’t like seeing the roles re-filled.
I watched the episode myself and thought it was fine, and I can understand exactly why the recasting was essential. I was never really head over heels with the feature version, though, so perhaps that has some effect on my feelings.
Anyway, I liked both the film and pilot enough to want to see more. And I guess that now I won’t.
(Last Updated )
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FBI warns farmers their crop databases are in danger
As if drought, floods and insects weren't enough, U.S. farmers should also be on guard against a brewing threat to data from cyber thieves and opportunists.
In a March 31 note to the farming industry posted on the Public Intelligence site, the FBI and the Agriculture Department said aggregated farm-level data -- which is used to track and anticipate crop availability, pricing analysis and past yields -- could be stolen and used to exploit agricultural resources and market trends.
To reduce costs and increase crop yield, precision farming methods gather information from a variety of sources, including databases on soil analysis and past crop yields and satellite and drone imagery of crop conditions.
The FBI said the data could be targeted by the growing scourge of ransomware attacks and hacktivists intent on stopping genetically modified crops.
As an example of the potential impact, the FBI cited a contest last January sponsored by USDA and Microsoft. The company hosted 100 years' worth of public climate and crop data so that competitors worldwide could design data visualization tools for farmers. The winning tool allows users to follow trends in local crop availability and prices.
The contest's goal was to explore how to render big data into a tool that allows farmers to make decisions that affect the food supply. In light of such a wide-ranging impact, the FBI said farmers, like their counterparts in the critical infrastructure industry, should make sure the companies that manage and host their data have effective cybersecurity measures in place.
The FBI also recommended that farmers follow the standard cyber hygiene practices practiced in other sectors, such as tracking employee logins, using two-factor authentication, monitoring unusual traffic and blocking unknown IP addresses.Below we publish a letter from a young comrade who had the opportunity to witness revisionism in action, as Rob Griffiths of the Communist Party of Britain was invited to speak at his school.
While it is disappointing that such a rank opportunist and arch revisionist was given the opportunity to speak, it is not surprising given that the decaying husk of the CPB simultaneously presents itself as the revolutionary party of the working class while also being devoid of any revolutionary content, effectively serving the ruling class.
Last Monday, I was walking to my next lesson at Dunraven School when I saw a poster for a Q&A Session with Communist Party of Britain leader Rob Griffiths. I was of course very surprised to see the leader of the CPB come to our school, so despite being no fan of them and their revisionist policies, I went to the session.
I went to the session after school and around 20 sixth-formers were there ready to ask questions but Rob Griffiths was not present. Everybody waited and waited, and he eventually turned up 25 minutes late.
He began the session by saying a bit about his party, which started off with some bragging about how the CPB is the true successor to the original British Communist Party founded in 1920. He then went on to say that the CPB “was never a USSR fan club and is not a Cuba / China / DPRK fan club today”. To conclude his introduction, he briefly described the “British Road to Socialism” which was supposedly going to come about through a left coalition including the Green Party, a Jeremy Corbyn led Labour, and other left leaning parties.
He then let the students ask questions, the first few of which were about what his views on women’s rights were and other questions which he clearly found very easy to answer.
I wasn’t planning to ask a question, but since he was getting such an easy ride I decided to ask him to explain his position on Cuba and North Korea, to which he responded that they were not true socialist states! I asked him if there has ever been a socialist country he has approved of, but he dodged the question by saying that he wanted to get on to another subject.
The next question was from a teacher who had decided to attend the session. His question was whether the CPB was even a Marxist party, observing that Rob Griffiths sounded just like a liberal, to which there were many chuckles and murmurs of agreement across the room. Rob Griffiths once again dodged the question before ending the session.
I caught up with him on my way out to ask a few more questions, and when I told him about my membership of the CPGB-ML he completely switched off, and tried to get rid of me by offering me a free Morning Star. He went on to say that the CPGB-ML need to understand that Labour Blairites would love nothing more than if the trade unions stopped supporting them and the true Socialists left the party. He seemed too delusional to realise that working class voters only vote for Labour because of their pretence to be socialist.
The most worrying thing was that most attendees walked away from the session believing that communist views included backing Labour, opposing socialist states around the world, and supporting imperialism.
I think it would be a great idea if the CPGB-ML could have people do similar Q&A sessions in schools up and down the country to get people thinking about the way we live now and why communism is ultimately better for all of us, and I think it would attract more young members willing to contribute their ideas and help to the party.
Today the enemies of the working class are more pervasive and cunning than ever. They are shrouded in ‘leftist’ organisations and mask their treachery with Marxist language while discarding or distorting revolutionary theory.
Thankfully we are finding more and more members, young and old, who have seen the revisionist organisations expose themselves working against the interests of the proletariat. We look forward to working with them to build the revolutionary movement in Britain!
More:
Corbyn’s attempts to reform the Labour party rebound (December 2015)
Obituaries: Bob Crow and Tony Benn (April 2014)
CPB and the Labour Party (November 2009)
CPB yet again sides with imperialism (May 2009)
CPGB-ML’s reply to the lies and slanders of the CPB (January 2009)Aspiring Santa’s in Australia are being told not to say “Ho, Ho, Ho”:
THERE’LL be no ho, ho, ho this Christmas. Aspiring Santas have been told not to use the term “ho” because it could be seen as derogatory to women.
Thirty trainees at a Santa course in Adelaide last month, held by recruitment company Westaff, were urged to replace the traditional festive greeting with “ha, ha, ha”.
A Santa veteran of 11 years who attended the course told the Sunday Mail the trainer was very clear in spelling out no to “ho”.
Two Santa hopefuls reportedly left the course after the trainer’s edict.
The term “ho” is also American slang for a prostitute. “We were told it (ho) was a derogatory term for females and can upset people,” said the Santa, who did not want to be identified publicly.
“As far as I’m concerned, a hoe is something you dig the ground with.
“I don’t think you’ll hear too many Santas saying `ha, ha, ha’.”COPENHAGEN (Reuters) - Pledges so far by all nations for curbing greenhouse gases would mean a world temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius, above many estimates of “dangerous” climate change, according to a U.N. document seen on Thursday.
The refinery in the central Croatian town of Sisak is seen on a foggy late autumn morning December 2, 2009. REUTERS/Nikola Solic
The internal U.N. paper, dated December 15, was leaked to Reuters as climate talks reached a climax in Copenhagen, where about 120 world leaders were gathering to try to agree a global climate pact, including ambitious carbon cuts.
Industrialized nations have set a 2 Celsius warming as the maximum limit to avoid dangerous climate changes including more floods, droughts and rising seas.
The note by the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat said that present pledges were not enough, exceeding safer emissions limits by about 1.9-4.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases a year by 2020.
That would result in an “unsustainable pathway that could lead to... a temperature rise of about 3 degrees,” it said.
Further steps were “possible and necessary,” it said.
The paper suggested that rich countries may have to cut their emissions by a more ambitious goal than previously thought. It also assessed emissions curbs announced by countries including China, India and South Africa.
A U.N. panel of climate scientists, the IPCC, recommended in 2007 cuts of 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to give the world a 50 percent chance of staying below a 2 degrees Celsius temperature rise.
The U.N. paper said rich nations should cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2020 versus 1990 levels to stay within 2 degrees.
A safe limit required “the aggregated emission reductions by Annex 1 Parties (rich countries) of at least 30 percent below the base-line (1990) levels,” said the paper.
To avoid more than 2 degrees warming developing countries should also “reduce their emissions by at least 20 percent below business as usual,” the paper added.
The IPCC suggested developing nations should limit emissions by 15-30 percent below current trends by 2020.So, if you’ve seen Frozen, and you’re a rational human being, you know it isn’t perfect. You can say good things about it and you can state some valid criticisms. If you’ve been reading along with The Dinglehopper, you might have noticed that we tend toward the former.
There’s a clear reason for this, of course. It worked for our toddler, so it worked on us. It’s now incumbent on me to actually try to figure out what all the fuss is about.
So here we are. Frozen is the most popular Disney movie ever. So much so that it surprised them. The purveyors of our monoculture were all like, “Wait, what?” They ran out of bric-a-brac to sell. That kind of popularity never goes unchallenged.
How it Should Have Ended is an incredibly popular site that animates alternate endings for popular films, television shows, and video games; often identifying something that should be obvious and humorously exploiting it.
To whit, several people drew my attention to this last week:
While I can honor the humor and the accuracy of the HISHE clip, I don’t really like it. It falls into the same category as the takedown, where a work deemed too popular is dismantled via snark and ad hominem in order to knock it from its presumably undeserved pedestal. With Harry Potter this actually became a fully mainstream practice. Critic Harold Bloom counted the cliches on a single Potter page in the Wall Street Journal.
I guess we’re all insufferable hipsters about something. I think I take issue with “How Frozen Should Have Ended” because it only points out the obvious. Or that which is obvious to the viewer. As adults we know the parents fail to heed the trolls’ warning. The tension of the film, the story, lies in the repercussions of that failure.
As a child, I bet it’s nice to have that bookend there at the beginning so that when they come back to it at the end the whole thing makes more sense. Heck, even as a parent you’re interpellated by this egregious failure of communication. It may be easy. It may be obvious. It may be lowest common denominator stuff. But it’s undeniably effective. And I reckon that’s why it made it all the way to print.
It’s also on theme. Contrast that mistake with Anna’s absolute refusal to stop communicating. She eventually brings out the truth in everyone. Ultimately she communicates in the most powerful way possible the message the trolls were trying to impart.
In a perfect world, maybe Frozen should have ended that way. In a perfect world, we, and our kids, wouldn’t need stories.
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Like this: Like Loading... RelatedSerial killer and organist from germany
Karl Denke (August 12, 1860 – February 22, 1924) was a Prussian serial killer and cannibal who killed and cannibalized dozens of homeless vagrants and travelers from 1903-1924. He is often regarded as "The Forgotten Cannibal", or "The Cannibal of Ziębice".
Childhood [ edit ]
Denke was born on August 12, 1860, in Münsterberg, Silesia in the Kingdom of Prussia (now Ziębice, Poland), to a family of farmers.[1] Little is known of Denke's childhood, but it is known[citation needed] that he was often described as a quiet and soft-spoken child who was difficult to raise. At the age of 12, Denke ran away from home.
Later years [ edit ]
After graduating from elementary school, Denke became the apprentice of a gardener, and made a life for himself at the age of 25. Denke's father died and his older brother inherited their childhood home, while Denke received a portion of money, which he used to buy a piece of land. Denke tried farming, but this failed and Denke sold it as a result. Denke purchased a house on what is now Stawowa Street, but inflation forced him to sell it. Denke still refused to move out and lived in a small apartment to the right of the house's ground floor. He also ran a nearby shop where he sold meat (which most speculate to have contained human remains). Denke also worked as an organist at the local church, and was well-liked in his community, often affectionately referred to as "Papa" by the community. Denke quit his membership in the church in 1906.
Murders [ edit ]
Karl Denke, for unknown reasons, began murdering homeless vagrants and poor travelers. His first known victim was Ida Launer, in 1903. Six years later, in 1909, he killed 25-year-old Emma Sander (another slaughterhouse worker, Eduard Trautmann, was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to 12 years, but was released after the truth was discovered). His last known victim was Rochus Pawlick.[2][3] Denke also kept a ledger recording his murders. He is also believed to have sold the flesh of his victims as meat to unsuspecting customers.[4]
Arrest, suicide, and aftermath [ edit ]
On December 20, 1924, a homeless man named Vincenz Olivier escaped Denke after he attempted to kill him with an axe, slashing his scalp with it. He was found by a coachman named Gabriel and the authorities were alerted. Denke was arrested and questioned. He was placed in a holding cell, where he hanged himself just two days later with an unspecified ligature (the exact nature of which varies from account to account). Denke's home was searched and police found the gruesome truth of his murders and cannibalism. While the exact number of his victims is unknown, Denke's ledger had 31 names recorded (including Olivier, the escaped victim), confirming at least 30 victims. But due to the large number of body parts found in his home, Denke's body count was estimated to be as high as 42 or even higher.
A detailed report of what was found includes:
sixteen femurs of which one pair of remarkably strong ones, two pairs of very thin ones, six pairs and two left femurs
fifteen medium-sized pieces of long bones
four pairs of elbow bones
seven heads of radii
nine lower parts of radii
eight lower parts of the elbow
a pair of upper shinbone
a pair of lower elbows and radii, of which extremities still remain well connected
a pair of upper arms and a pair of upper arm heads
a pair of collar bones
two shoulder blades
eight heels and ankle bones
120 toes and phalanx
65 feet and metacarpal bones
five first ribs and 150 pieces of ribs
Decades later, the case of the Ziębice cannibal remains mostly forgotten. Still much about Denke's life, motives, methods, and even the exact number of victims remains unknown. Even the only known photograph of him (the picture above) was taken after his death.
References [ edit ]
^ "Centipede: Nice enough to eat; Cannibals of the 20th century". The Guardian. May 20, 1993. p. 12. ^ Corke, Jonathan (December 7, 2003). "Cannibal's victim in cold packs; Exclusive pleased to meat you". Daily Star. p. 21. ^ "Cannibalism: Hard act to swallow; What drives some people to eat others? We examine the body of evidence". The Straits Times. Singapore. December 14, 2003. ^ Robbins, Martin (September 8, 2010). "What does human meat taste like?". The Guardian.
Further reading [ edit ]So, DC vowed to rectify this inequity by adding an African American superhero to the Legion. This was a full year before Black Lightning entered the scene, so it was a pretty big deal. His name was Tyroc...
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So, How'd That Go?
...and he was a racial separatist. It turns out, (as a way to explain the total lack of black people in the Legion's universe), that all of the black people exiled themselves to an island off the coast of Africa and lived alone, to be away from everyone else. Also, the island disappears every once in a while.
If the idea of a disappearing island that houses all of the world's black people sounds like a racist's wet dream, that's likely because it is. To really understand this move, and everything else about Tyroc, you need to understand Murray Boltinoff, the editor of Legion at the time. We don't want to say anything as libelous as "Murray Boltinoff is a racist," but he's the reason no black people ever made it to a Legion comic and he once ordered the colorists to change a black background character into a white character for no stated reason. And it was because of Boltinoff that Tyroc couldn't be a hero who happened to be black; he needed to be a former slave turned racial segregationist. Also, the disappearing island thing? Because Blotinoff is OK with the idea of black people, as long as they stick to their island that is totally unreachable.
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Jim Shooter, one of DC's artists at the time called the depiction of Tyroc "pathetic and appalling" and co-creator Mike Grell described Tyroc's segregationist backstory as "possibly the most racist concept I've ever heard in my life." Grell was so disgusted with the insulting way the character was being handled that he intentionally designed Tyroc to look like a shithead:
Grell says "I gave him a silly costume. It was somewhere between Elvis' Las Vegas costume and something you would imagine a pimp on the street corner wearing."Washington (CNN) With nearly all of the expected 2016 presidential candidates formally in the race, a new CNN/ORC national poll finds two recent entrants to the GOP field on the rise, while Hillary Clinton maintains her position atop the Democratic field, though holding a slightly slimmer lead.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and businessman Donald Trump top the list of GOP presidential contenders following their back-to-back campaign launches in mid-June, and are the only two Republican candidates holding double-digit support among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
For his part, Trump specifically responded to the poll results Wednesday afternoon saying the numbers are "representative of the response we are receiving from all over the country."
"I am committed to addressing the issues our country is facing and am confident my business mindset and common sense solutions are resonating with the American people," Trump said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. "Politicians are all talk and no action and the American public is ready for a leader with a proven track record of success."
Clinton, though, continues to lead all GOP candidates in head-to-head general election match-ups.
Republicans
Bush stands at 19%, up from 13% in May -- and his best showing in CNN/ORC polling since December. Trump follows at 12%, up from 3% before his announcement. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (8%), neurosurgeon Ben Carson (7%) and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (7%) round out the top five.
Notably absent from this top five -- though statistically speaking not far behind -- are Florida Sen. Marco Rubio (6%, down from 14% in May) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (6%, down slightly from 10%). Both had been top five candidates in each of the last two CNN/ORC polls, and Walker had been in the top five since February.
The poll, conducted just before New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie formally launched his campaign with a rally in Livingston, New Jersey, on Tuesday, also finds that Christie begins his push for the presidency with just 3% support.
The findings suggest Bush is making progress toward being seen as the frontrunner in a field that has long lacked a clear leader. He holds a significant lead over the second-place candidate Trump, is seen as the candidate who could best handle illegal immigration and social issues, and runs about even with Trump and well ahead of the other candidates when Republicans are asked which candidate can best handle the economy.
Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has said his decision to run for the Republican nomination will be based on two things: his family and whether he can lift America's spirit. His father and brother are former Presidents. Hide Caption 1 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has created a political committee that will help him travel and raise money while he considers a 2016 bid. Additionally, billionaire businessman David Koch said in a private gathering in Manhattan this month that he wants Walker to be the next president, but he doesn't plan to back anyone in the primaries. Hide Caption 2 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is establishing a committee to formally explore a White House bid. "If I run, my candidacy will be based on the idea that the American people are ready to try a dramatically different direction," he said in a news release provided to CNN on Monday, May 18 Hide Caption 3 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, has said the United States needs a "political revolution" of working-class Americans looking to take back control of the government from billionaires. He first announced the run in an email to supporters early on the morning of Thursday, April 30. Hide Caption 4 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates On March 2, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson announced the launch of an exploratory committee. The move will allow him to raise money that could eventually be transferred to an official presidential campaign and indicates he is on track with stated plans to formally announce a bid in May. Hide Caption 5 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has said he'll make a decision about a presidential run sometime soon. A potential bid could focus on Graham's foreign policy stance. Hide Caption 6 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid Sunday, April 12, through a video message on social media. She continues to be considered the overwhelming front-runner among possible 2016 Democratic presidential candidates. Hide Caption 7 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Sen. Marco Rubio announced his bid for the 2016 presidency on Monday, April 13, a day after Hillary Clinton, with a rally in Florida. He's a Republican rising star from Florida who swept into office in 2010 on the back of tea party fervor. But his support of comprehensive immigration reform, which passed the Senate but has stalled in the House, has led some in his party to sour on his prospects. Hide Caption 8 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Lincoln Chafee, a Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat former governor and senator of Rhode Island, said he's running for president on Thursday, April 16, as a Democrat, but his spokeswoman said the campaign is still in the presidential exploratory committee stages. Hide Caption 9 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Jim Webb, the former Democratic senator from Virginia, is entertaining a 2016 presidential run. In January, he told NPR that his party has not focused on white, working-class voters in past elections. Hide Caption 10 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Vice President Joe Biden has twice before made unsuccessful bids for the Oval Office -- in 1988 and 2008. A former senator known for his foreign policy and national security expertise, Biden made the rounds on the morning shows recently and said he thinks he'd "make a good President." Hide Caption 11 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has started a series of town halls in New Hampshire to test the presidential waters, becoming more comfortable talking about national issues and staking out positions on hot topic debates. Hide Caption 12 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Rep. Paul Ryan, a former 2012 vice presidential candidate and fiscally conservative budget hawk, says he's keeping his "options open" for a possible presidential run but is not focused on it. Hide Caption 13 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Sen. Rand Paul officially announced his presidential bid on Tuesday, April 7, at a rally in Louisville, Kentucky. The tea party favorite probably will have to address previous controversies that include comments on civil rights, a plagiarism allegation and his assertion that the top NSA official lied to Congress about surveillance. Hide Caption 14 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Texas Sen. Ted Cruz announced his 2016 presidential bid on Monday, March 23, in a speech at Liberty University. The first-term Republican and tea party darling is considered a gifted orator and smart politician. He is best known in the Senate for his marathon filibuster over defunding Obamacare. Hide Caption 15 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Democrat Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor, released a "buzzy" political video in November 2013 in tandem with visits to New Hampshire. He also headlined a Democratic Party event in South Carolina, which holds the first Southern primary. Hide Caption 16 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Republican Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, announced in 2013 that he would not be seeking re-election, leading to speculation that he might mount a second White House bid. Hide Caption 17 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a social conservative, gave Mitt Romney his toughest challenge in the nomination fight last time out and has made trips recently to early voting states, including Iowa and South Carolina. Hide Caption 18 of 19 Photos: Potential 2016 presidential candidates Political observers expect New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to yield to Hillary Clinton's run in 2016, fearing there wouldn't be room in the race for two Democrats from the Empire State. Hide Caption 19 of 19
But there are sticking points for Bush. He fares slightly worse across all three issues tested when only registered voters are considered. Registered voters tend to be more conservative and older than Republicans as a whole, and are more apt to actually vote when the primaries come around.
Looking at how each candidate fares among those subgroups, conservatives split their support between Bush and Trump, 12% back each. Likewise, among voters age 50 or older, 14% support Bush and 14% back Trump. By contrast, among Republicans under age 50, Bush is the only candidate in double-digits with 23%, Trump has just 9% support. And moderate or liberal Republicans back Bush over Trump 27% to 10%.
Trump's competitiveness among those older and more conservative Republicans also helps explain Walker's and Rubio's declines. In April, 16% of Republicans age 50 or older backed Rubio, 14% Walker. Now, Rubio has just 6% among this group and Walker has 7%. Trump grew from 2% in May to 14% now.
Among conservatives in May, Rubio led the field with 15%, Walker was just behind at 14%. Bush had 11%, about the same as in the current poll. Now, Walker has fallen to 8%, and Rubio is down five points to 10%. And Trump has grown from 2% to 12%. Rubio also lost ground among moderate or liberal Republicans, just 1% back Rubio in the new poll, down from 11%.
Democrats
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton continues to hold all the cards. Nationally, she leads all other candidates by more than 40 points, with 57% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents behind her, 16% backing Vice President Joe Biden, 14% Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 2% Jim Webb and 1% or less for former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee
The poll holds better news for Biden than it does for Sanders, who has made gains against Clinton in recent polling in Iowa and New Hampshire. But Biden actually tops the list as national Democrats' second-choice candidate, 35% say he's their second pick, compared with 14% who say Sanders is.
Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 28. The former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state was the first woman to lead the presidential ticket of a major political party. Hide Caption 1 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Before marrying Bill Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham. Here she attends Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her commencement speech at Wellesley's graduation ceremony in 1969 attracted national attention. After graduating, she attended Yale Law School. Hide Caption 2 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Rodham was a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, whose work led to impeachment charges against President Richard Nixon in 1974. Hide Caption 3 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight In 1975, Rodham married Bill Clinton, whom she met at Yale Law School. He became the governor of Arkansas in 1978. In 1980, the couple had a daughter, Chelsea. Hide Caption 4 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Arkansas' first lady, now using the name Hillary Rodham Clinton, wears her inaugural ball gown in 1985. Hide Caption 5 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight The Clintons celebrate Bill's inauguration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1991. He was governor from 1983 to 1992, when he was elected President. Hide Caption 6 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Bill Clinton comforts his wife on the set of "60 Minutes" after a stage light broke loose from the ceiling and knocked her down in January 1992. Hide Caption 7 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight In June 1992, Clinton uses a sewing machine designed to eliminate back and wrist strain. She had just given a speech at a convention of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. Hide Caption 8 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton jokes with her husband's running mate, Al Gore, and Gore's wife, Tipper, aboard a campaign bus. Hide Caption 9 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Clinton accompanies her husband as he takes the oath of office in January 1993. Hide Caption 10 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight The Clintons share a laugh on Capitol Hill in 1993. Hide Caption 11 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Clinton unveils the renovated Blue Room of the White House in 1995. Hide Caption 12 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Clinton waves to the media in January 1996 as she arrives for an appearance before a grand jury in Washington. The first lady was subpoenaed to testify as a witness in the investigation of the Whitewater land deal in Arkansas. The Clintons' business investment was investigated, but ultimately they were cleared of any wrongdoing. Hide Caption 13 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight The Clintons hug as Bill is sworn in for a second term as President. Hide Caption 14 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight The first lady holds up a Grammy Award, which she won for her audiobook "It Takes a Village" in 1997. Hide Caption 15 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight The Clintons dance on a beach in the U.S. Virgin Islands in January 1998. Later that month, Bill Clinton was accused of having a sexual relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Hide Caption 16 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Clinton looks on as her husband discusses the Monica Lewinsky scandal in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on January 26, 1998. Clinton declared, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." In August of that year, Clinton testified before a grand jury and admitted to having "inappropriate intimate contact" with Lewinsky, but he said it did not constitute sexual relations because they had not had intercourse. He was impeached in December on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Hide Caption 17 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight The first family walks with their dog, Buddy, as they leave the White House for a vacation in August 1998. Hide Caption 18 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight President Clinton makes a statement at the White House in December 1998, thanking members of Congress who voted against his impeachment. The Senate trial ended with an acquittal in February 1999. Hide Caption 19 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Clinton announces in February 2000 that she will seek the U.S. Senate seat in New York. She was elected later that year. Hide Caption 20 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Clinton makes her first appearance on the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee. Hide Caption 21 of 43 Photos: Hillary Clinton's life in the spotlight Sen. Clinton comforts Maren Sarkarat, a woman who lost her husband in the September 11 terrorist attacks, during a ground-zero memorial in October 2001. Hide Caption 22 of 43 Photos |
with us is of the utmost importance. These partnerships only serve to enhance this priority. We are proud and excited to welcome KABC-TV, iHeartMedia Los Angeles, KAZA-TV Azteca America 54 and KFWB 980 AM to the Chargers family.”
KABC-TV (ABC7) is the West Coast flagship of the ABC television network. The most-watched television station in Southern California, it is also the first local station in the United States to surpass two million Facebook followers. As the Chargers flagship English-language broadcast television station, KABC-TV will televise all preseason games available to air in Southern California along with pre and postgame shows for those telecasts. Additionally, KABC-TV will air two weekly Chargers series in Saturday evening primetime during the football season as well as weekly Chargers news features throughout the year.
As the Chargers’ flagship English-language radio partner, iHeartMedia Los Angeles will air all preseason, regular season and postseason Chargers games on KFI AM-640 – No. 1 in news, talk and sports in LA, Orange County and San Diego. In addition to game broadcasts, KFI AM-640, Alt 98.7 and AM 570 LA Sports will broadcast 10 hours of gameday coverage. iHeartMedia Los Angeles’ eight radio stations will also support the Chargers with year-round programming and promotional content, including a weekly Chargers series that will air on AM 570 LA Sports during the season. Listeners can also hear the stations’ broadcasts via iHeartRadio, iHeartMedia’s all-in-one digital music, podcasting and live streaming radio service.
KAZA-TV Azteca America 54, which first signed on in Los Angeles in 2001, will serve as the Chargers flagship Spanish-language television station. In addition to televising all preseason games available to air in Southern California, KAZA Azteca will offer pre and postgame shows for the preseason games as well as a weekly Chargers series throughout the season and Chargers news features throughout the year.
KFWB 980 AM, housed under the Lotus Communications umbrella, will serve as the Chargers flagship Spanish-language radio station. As is the case with its English-language counterpart, KFWB 980 AM will broadcast all preseason, regular season and postseason Chargers games, including pre and postgame shows. The station, which dates back to 1925 and was the first to broadcast the annual Rose Parade in Pasadena, CA, will also air a weekly Chargers series throughout the season.
Download the Chargers App and be sure to follow all the Los Angeles Chargers’ social media platforms and Chargers.com to stay up-to-date on all things Chargers.
<u>What They’re Saying – Notable quotes from Chargers new flagship broadcast partners:</u>
Cheryl Fair – President & General Manager, KABC-TV
“As Southern California's #1 source for news and information, we are proud to partner with the Los Angeles Chargers. We can't wait for the NFL season to get here and bring exciting Chargers football to our ABC7 viewers. In addition, KABC and the Chargers look forward to building on our partnership to provide new opportunities to give back to our local communities."
Kevin Legrett – President, Southwest Division for iHeartMedia
“The Chargers’ passionate fans are a huge part of iHeartMedia Los Angeles’ listening community, and we’re excited to bring them the latest Chargers news, games, compelling insights and team events in real time. We are excited for the NFL season to start and to connect our listeners wherever they are with Los Angeles’ newest team, the LA Chargers.”
Enrique Perez – Executive Vice President, Azteca America Station Group
“We are thrilled that KAZA Azteca will be the official Spanish-language home of the Los Angeles Chargers this season. This latest partnership with the NFL allows us to bring the excitement of the city’s newest football team to our audience, underscoring our commitment of delivering the best in sports entertainment to our viewers and advertisers.”
Mike Addison – Regional Sales Manager, Lotus Communications KFWB 980 AMThis version isof GOT7.
GOT7 show their songwriting talents in their latest mini-album Flight Log: Departure which is themed around love and friendship. The eight-track album includes the double title songs Fly, written and composed by earattack, the composer of Everytime from the Descendants of the Sun OST, and HOME RUN, for which leader JB and Junior participate in composing and writing lyrics. Other members were also involved in the songwriting process for various tracks on the album. Young K from JYP's rookie band DAY6 wrote lyrics for the song Beggin on My Knees.
This edition comes with a 100-page Rose Quartz Version booklet, a random photo card, a random photo ticket and a Departure Card.
Note: As autographed albums are arranged according to artist schedule, the release date and availability of this product are subject to change.It's been 10 years since The Simpsons was last on cinema screens, and following its success many have touted the possibility of a sequel.
Last year, producer Al Jean suggested there could be another one on the way, though only provided it was going to be really good.
Well, Jean and fellow producer David Silverman have once again raised the idea of a second film based on The Simpsons, though suggested it was quite a way off yet.
"I'd love for there to be another one," Silverman told Entertainment Weekly. "We're still a ways away from it.
"We talk about this and that. We're thinking it over, but nothing's happening just yet….. It's still daunting because it really knocked the stuffing out of us to do the movie and the show at the same time."
Jean added that the movie had been discussed "just in the vaguest strokes, just in the possibility of it", adding: "I'd say [it's in] the very earliest stages."
It was previously revealed that a season 26 episode where Kang and Kodos take Homer and the family was touted as a movie idea, though was later used as an episode.
"I certainly am cautious about a couple things," Jean added. "I wouldn't want it to be risky in terms of budget, and I would not want it to be anything that we did purely for the money. I would want it to be a really great movie. I personally feel no need for another one unless it's great."
Meanwhile, at Comic-Con last week Jean revealed that the show turned down a guest appearance from Donald Trump many years ago.
Producer Bill Oakley later tweeted: "I continue to thank God that Donald Trump was never invited to do a voice on The Simpsons even during the brief period when he was popular."
Trump has been given various appearances since, though they are not exactly as the president would have liked. And we love The Simpsons even more for it.
Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our @digitalspy Twitter account and you're all set.In this week's Dallas Observer we profile 30 of the metro area's most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Stanton Stephens. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here.
This love story started like so many others: with a clueless rascal who was wily enough to ask the smart, cute coed for help in sophomore English.
But this was different, too. This was Zach Loyd and Casey Nogueira, two of the nation's best soccer players playing at North Carolina, the best soccer school in history. They both had pro dreams and pro expectations. Loyd would go on to become a stalwart defender for FC Dallas. Nogueira would play in Women's Professional Soccer. With any luck, there'd be national team appearances. World Cups, maybe.The time has come – _Attikus and the Thrall Rebellion_ arrives today alongside Face-Off, Battleborn’s newest PVP mode. We’ve been talking about both for a while now, so there’s no shortage of info, but if you’d like to see it in action, you’re in luck! Today on [the Gearbox Software Twitch channel](http://twitch.tv/gearboxsoftware), we’ll be holding our Attikus and the Thrall Rebellion Reveal Stream.
Not only will we be showing off some of the Story Mode action, we’ll also have two teams’ worth of Gearbox Developers on hand to showcase Face-Off mode in all its glory! This time around, Community Manager Joe King will be co-hosting the stream with New Media Manager Elisa Meléndez. Joining Joe and Elisa will be Battleborn Creative Director Randy Varnell and Designer Ian Childs.
The stream will begin at 3pm PT (6pm ET), so come with your questions ready. Make sure to head over and follow the Twitch channel so you can be notified whenever we go live!
Speaking of Attikus and the Thrall Rebellion, you may remember that, during the open beta, we promised you PlayStation 4® players out there that you’d be receiving the first Battleborn add-on for free. Well, that’s still the plan! Not only that, but we’re also throwing in a Hero Key while we’re at it. All you’ll need to do is jump into the game and we’ll do the rest.
We have a few hot fixes to include this week. As always, hot fixes begin rolling out on Thursdays at 12pm PT (3pm ET) unless otherwise noted.
• Increased El Dragón’s base health by 92. This change is additive with previous health adjustments
• Increased the damage of El Dragón’s Clothesline by 133% (from 75 to 175 at level 1)
• The “Master of Phoebe” challenge now appropriately requires Character Rank 15
It’s been a little while since we featured a Community Badass and we thought this would be a good week for one. When scouring the community, one name kept popping up – forum user “lowlines”, who has created a plethora of helpful guides on our forums. Make sure to check out our feature on lowlines on the forums for links to all his incredible guides and some info on what makes him tick.
This week’s lore was a little easier to come by than last week’s. No one had to risk life or limb; it just required a little digging through Nova’s archives:
(19959.16 C.R., transcript of secure-channel messaging between Captain Trevor Ghalt and Sister Ambra, retrieved from Nova’s archived records.)
Sister Ambra,
I’m not really sure who else to go to about this, but uh, Attikus locked himself in the simulation chamber a while ago. I’d get Kleese to shut it down, but he said he’s busy modifying that Magnus we picked up for combat. Nova says that if we really want, she can “airlock” him out—why we have an airlock IN the simulation room, I’m sure I don’t know. Anyway, you’re kind of my last shot here.
-Ghalt
Captain Ghalt,
Though my qualifications are both extensive and substantial, I fail to see how any of them apply to this situation. I am a Silent Sister of the Order of the Sustaining Mother, not a locksmith. Have you tried knocking?
-Sister Claudia Ambralia Divia
Ambra,
I know better than to get anywhere near Attikus when he’s…moody. But even from outside the room, I heard him roaring something about a Silent Sister named “Aria”, I think? I figured maybe being a Sister yourself; you might know what’s going on.
-Ghalt
Trevor,
Aria is my sister, an Incantress Superior of the Order. It comes as no surprise that he is taking his time dealing with her. She can be quite insufferable. I expect he’ll tire of her shrewish face and shrill whining soon.
-Sister Claudia Ambralia Divia
Ambra,
I’m confused. When you say “sister”, do you mean a fellow Silent Sister, or a sibling?
-Ghalt
Trevor,
Both.
-Ambra
Sister Ambra,
Did it not occur to you that there might be some tactical relevance to your having family within the Order? Why didn’t you ever mention her before? Is she dangerous?
-Ghalt
Captain Ghalt,
“Family” is too warm a word for Aria. We haven’t been close for eleven thousand years, not since…the incident. I didn’t think my personal rivalry was germane to our objectives. And I feel I should hardly need remind you that EVERY Silent Sister is dangerous. But yes, Aria especially. She wears that GARISH modified assault frame, and is a practiced hand at pacifying Thrall. During the rebellions, we emphasized non-lethal suppression tactics. Standard procedure was to just drop shock anchors until they calmed down.
-Ambra
Ambra,
That sounds really NOT non-lethal.
-Ghalt
Trevor,
Yes, well, there was “emphasis”, not “exclusivity”. Besides, it’s good for the survivors. Toughens them up. Builds character. Establishes a regular heart rhythm.
-Ambra
Sister Ambra,
He’s been in there for days.
-Ghalt
Captain Ghalt,
Perhaps I should intercede more directly…I’ll see what I can do.
-Sister Claudia Ambralia Divia
With today’s release of Attikus and the Thrall Rebellion and its accompanying livestream in the bag, we’ll turn our attention to everyone’s most anticipated support Magnus, Kid Ultra. You know what that means – time for another Character Reveal Stream! Next Thursday (10/20) at 3pm PT (6pm ET), we’ll go live with our Kid Ultra Reveal Stream and discuss everything from his kit and skills, to his inspirations and evolution. Look for more details including our panel line-up in next week’s Battleplan!ATLANTA — How will Jordan Spieth improve upon one of the greatest seasons in golf? A clue could be found on the seventh hole Sunday here at East Lake Golf Club.
Walking off the tee box after making back-to-back bogeys to fall into a share of the lead at the Tour Championship, an out-of-sorts Spieth received a pep talk from his caddie, Michael Greller. “No more talking about anything that just happened,” Spieth said Greller told him.
Spieth’s facility at putting the past behind him, and Greller’s ease in steering him back on the right thought path on those rare occasions when he doesn’t, are reasons for optimism that Spieth, 22, can build on a season in which he won two majors and five tournaments over all, ascended to No. 1, captured the FedEx Cup title and locked up Player of the Year honors.
“Jordan’s always been good about blocking out the past and being able to not look into the rearview mirror too much, whether it’s positive or negative,” said Greller, who offered two examples.Charlie Austin began his playing career in the lower leagues
A bet on QPR striker Charlie Austin to score for England could earn thousands for speculative Poole Town fans.
A group of 16, including commercial chief Mark Bumford, placed a £155 bet at 50-1 in 2010 when Austin had started at Swindon, having left Poole.
Now with the 25-year-old having received his first call-up, the group are closing in on a £7,905 payout.
"The local bookies are aware they might have to cough up. They don't mind. It's good publicity," said Bumford.
Southern Premier League club Poole were in the Wessex League Premier Division when Austin joined them in 2008 from Thatcham Town.
The forward spent a season at the Dorset club where he had a remarkable scoring record.
Bumford added: "He was always confident and sure of himself. A little cocky.
"But with 46 goals in 46 games in his first season, then 18 goals in his last 11 matches for us, including five in his last game, he could afford to be."The Edward Drake building, a known CSEC headquarters in Ottawa. Image: Wikimedia Commons
To access an unlimited trove of personal information, all a government spy has to do in Canada is pick up a phone and call your internet provider—no written request required.
That revelation, brought to light by three different Canadian lawyers who’ve dealt directly with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, regional police, and the Communications Security Establishment Canada, comes amid a string of startling revelations on the privacy front in Canada. This comes just weeks before Bill C-13 will make it easier for police to access online information without judicial authorization.
While there has been much debate about Bill C-13 and the Harper government's plans to aid data collection, it's already relatively easy for law enforcement to collect data. Under Canadian voluntary disclosure law, police are free to request, obtain, and use personal data. ISPs are free to provide it. Bill C-13 promises to expand law enforcement's data collection power while providing the ISPs with immunity from lawsuits and criminal charges.
The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) regulates voluntary disclosure of user data by telecommunications companies, banks, server farms, or whoever holds the key to one's personal data. Officials requesting the data need only prove they're conducting an investigation, a low threshold for law enforcement.
What's more, one interpretation of section 9 of PIPEDA forbids companies from reporting disclosures to users unless the company informs the law enforcement agency beforehand. There's a fear that doing so would open them up to the ire of the government for going on the record about warrantless data requests.
“I have recently had to deal with a client who had a request from CSIS for information,” said a Canadian lawyer who asked to remain anonymous. The lawyer and client asked CSIS to put the request in writing so it could properly consider the request. "CSIS said ‘it is against our policy to put those requests in writing.’”
Screenshot of the text of PIPEDA. Image: justice.gc.ca
Motherboard reached out to the intelligence service for more information and a spokesperson responded, “CSIS does not comment publicly on our interests, methodologies or activities."
Another frequent customer of this voluntary disclosure provision is the RCMP. One owner of a hosting company, who spoke to Motherboard on the condition of anonymity, says the RCMP sent a request in 2006 asking they provide personal details of a user who allegedly made a bomb threat on a message board. The RCMP was asking the hosting company—which is essentially a server farm and in no way owned or operated by the website—to obtain that user’s data, and sent local law enforcement to meet with the company, but the company refused. The RCMP told Motherboard that they only request users’ name and address.
These powers are regularly used by Canadian law enforcement. For example, one 2011 case, which stretched from Saskatchewan to Sarnia, involved a man’s alleged distribution of child pornography over file sharing site Gigatribe. The case was eventually thrown out for myriad reasons, but it was one particular issue that incised lawyer Craig Penney.
Penney says he tried to log onto his client’s account, only to find that the password wasn’t working. He recovered the account to discover someone changed it. Penney brought that fact to the judge and discovered the culprit was an officer in the Saskatchewan Internet Child Exploitation Unit. The officer sent a PIPEDA request to Gigatribe requesting the password.
“I would never have known,” Penney said, had he not followed the crumbs. “Even the officer in charge in Sarnia and the Crown were left in the dark.” Because the police asserted investigative privilege to bar information from the case to leak, the details of how the request went down are still unclear. Penney said the officer’s plan was to use the account to suss out the accused’s contacts on the site, effectively using the account as a sting operation.
Regardless of the goal, the fact police were able to obtain a Canadian's password without a court order or any oversight, judicial or otherwise, underlines the impunity of the current system. The lawyers I've spoken to in the past confess PIPEDA requests for obtaining so-called "tombstone information"—name, address, phone number—are commonplace. Since police aren’t required to leave a paper trail in the form of warrants or written requests, there’s no way of knowing how many of these requests take place each year.
The fact that police were able to obtain a Canadians’ password without a court order or any oversight, judicial or otherwise, underlines the impunity of the current system.
Sean Carter, a Toronto lawyer who has experience with warrantless disclosure, said off-the-books requests are not exactly uncommon. “They hate putting it in writing,” he said. “It’s so hard to follow the trail back to the actual request.” Carter pointed out that if they obtain data from a company, and use that to put together evidence for a production order or warrant, nobody would ever be the wiser that they obtained the data in the first place.
According to one lawyer who was not at liberty to speak publicly, CSEC was tasked after a charity helping Palestinian orphans that Ottawa believed was funneling money to Hamas. The case never made it into a courtroom and CSEC never obtained a warrant or production order. Instead, the spooks targeted a Canadian permanent resident who was involved with the charity.
The same lawyer says they tracked that permanent resident during a trip to the United Kingdom, and called up an English telecommunications company to obtain his phone data while in the country. The lawyer confirmed the information was obtained through a PIPEDA request. The evidence they obtained was used in the Canadian Revenue Agency’s efforts to deregister the charity. CSEC’s backdoor information-gathering on the permanent resident were never made public.
The media relations office for CSEC was categorical in an emailed statement about their alleged use of voluntary disclosure tracking a Canadian national. “[CSEC] does not direct its foreign intelligence activities at Canadians anywhere in the world, or at anyone in Canada,” the spokesperson said. “Under its assistance mandate, [CSEC] can only assist other federal law enforcement or security agencies when the requesting agency has the appropriate lawful authority, such as a warrant.”
When asked about the incident the lawyer attested to, CRA didn't deny it. A spokesperson for the CRA would not confirm specifics, but did note, “the CRA works with other government and law enforcement organizations to assist in the fight against terrorism and to protect the charitable sector from abuse, including the exploitation of charitable resources to support terrorism.” While the spokesperson did not name CSEC, they mention CSIS as a common partner.
Motherboard reached out to the major Canadian telecommunication companies, asking for information on law enforcement disclosure. Bell, boasting over a quarter of the country as customers, refused an interview. Bell did offer a statement via email, explaining, “We will provide basic 411-style information such as customer name and address based on a phone number, unless unlisted. This information is defined as non-confidential by the CRTC, which regulates the process. Any further information requires a court order.”
Several court documents, however, shows Bell frequently discloses contact information of its subscribers based only on an IP address provided by police. In one case, German authorities provided the RCMP with a list of Canadian IP addresses that accessed pages containing child pornography, some of which were registered with Bell. The RCMP provided the IP addresses and Bell provided a name. The RCMP sent six requests in all, with a letter reading, “Should you agree to this request, please provide the information in the section below and reply via email.”
That’s one in a long line of cases where telecommunications companies gave up data without much hesitation—SaskTel, Rogers, Bell—the list goes on. When Motherboard put that case to Bell, the tune changed. A spokesperson said they never fork over your personal data “except in emergency situations in which lives are in danger.”
Rogers, who counts nearly 10 million Canadians as customers, said similar. Besides an initial categorical denial that Roger’s hands over customer data without a warrant, a spokesperson said “we scrutinize all requests and yes, for child sexual exploitation cases we will provide the name and address associated with an IP address.”
SaskTel similarly denied the practise, only to later note that any circumstances where user data was released without a warrant, “the information was released through legal processes.” Requests to Telus, Manitoba Telecom Services and Videotron were not returned. Several ISPs confirmed that they simply don’t respond to these requests, like Teksavvy, a smaller provider.
The Harper government has deflected criticism of its warrantless disclosure program, saying that the data being surrendered isn’t of real privacy concern. It’s what you’d find in a phonebook, the government argues.
“Only the most basic information, such as the name and phone number, may be released,” Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney told the House of Commons.
But when Motherboard asked the Justice Department what rules are in place to constrain what police are allowed to ask for—say, someone’s call logs—the Justice Department responded: none.On January 18th, 1486 Henry VII married Elizabeth, Princess of York, eldest surviving daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. There is a not a lot of information regarding the wedding ceremony. Henry VII had swore he would marry Elizabeth when he had been in exile in Brittany, at Vannes Cathedral, three years prior. A lot had happened since then though. The papal dispensation that their mothers had secretly plotted to get had to be reissued. The papal dispensation covered the Earl of Richmond and the natural daughter of Elizabeth of York (meaning the Lady Elizabeth, not the legitimate daughter and heiress of Edward IV). It was vital that the couple married under the good eyes of the church. The fifteenth century had descended into chaos when two branches of the Plantagenet House had annihilated each other, their descendants had married off to other noble houses and as a result (after Bosworth), Henry claimed the crown. But he was not blind, conquering and ruling were two different things. He needed stability or at the very least, give the illusion of it to the people to put down civil unrest. Therefore he needed to marry Elizabeth who was the eldest living descendant of the first Yorkist King. The papal dispensation took time, and meanwhile Henry had to establish himself as the realm’s ruler. He established his claim to the throne through his “right of conquest” and his mother, Margaret Beaufort whose family descended from John of Gaunt via his third marriage to his mistress, Katherine Swynford. Nevertheless, his claim to the throne was still seen as weak, which was why parliament asked him on December 1485, two months after he had been crowned, to keep his promise to marry the Princess Elizabeth, and strengthen the claim of his descendants.
The pope had finally granted the dispensation at the beginning of the year, and it was confirmed in England by the papal legate, the Bishop of Imola on 16 January, two days later the coupe were married.
The wedding ceremony was officiated by the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bourchier. Given the statement that Henry wanted to make, as it was mentioned earlier, about their union; the Abbey would have been filled with Tudor imagery that Henry had created that gave a new interpretation of the dynastic conflict that is now known as the wars of the roses. By intertwining the white rose of York (Edward IV’s favorite symbol besides the sun in splendor) with the red rose, Henry VII’s union with Elizabeth meant to give a powerful message of peace. Illusory as this was, its impression lasted and their descendants continued to use this device and celebrate the union of their ancestors, Henry and Elizabeth. The building would have been decorated by royal colors such as “purple and gold, silk, ermine and delicate cloths of tissue.” And the bride, adds Licence: “would have been splendidly dressed and adorned with jewels, lace, brocade and ribbons.” She would not have worn white, given that white was not a color worn for wedding dresses.(The first royal bride who did was in fact her daughter-in-law, Katherine of Aragon, when she married Prince Arthur). Elizabeth would have likely worn purple as it symbolized royalty, or taken one of her many new gowns.
After the archbishop placed the golden ring on Elizabeth, the couple said their vows. Following royal custom, Elizabeth promised to take Henry as her husband “for fairer, for fouler, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to be blithe and amiable, and obliging in bed and at board” till death do them part.
“The wedding was celebrated in the customary fashion, with “wedding torches, marriage bed and other suitable decorations,” followed by “great magnificence … at the royal nuptials … Gifts flowed freely on all sides and were showered on everyone while feasts, dances and tournaments were celebrated with liberal generosity to … magnify the joyous occasion.” (Jones)
Besides the expenses, that no doubt would have been great, Elizabeth would have seen the new rose, the Tudor rose in every corner as well as her husband’s other badges. By intertwining the white rose of York (Edward IV’s favorite symbol besides the sun in splendor) with the red rose, Henry VII’s union with Elizabeth meant to give a powerful message of peace. Illusory as it was, its impression lasted and their descendants continued to use this device and celebrate the union of their ancestors, Henry and Elizabeth.
In recent fiction the two have been portrayed as an unhappy couple, pushed into the marriage by their shrewish mothers, but this is an interpretation based on secondary sources that have come many years (more than a century in fact) after the even took place. Francis Bacon writes very colorfully of Henry, and negatively of his mother but Francis was writing a century after the events took place and the two George Bucks themselves wrote even later. It is very easy to believe these sources, but if we want to look at the couple, we just have to look at their actions, at what they faced and what moral attitudes people had in this period.
A young woman such as Elizabeth would not have missed the opportunity to regain her status as Princess, and much less to be Queen. After being bastardized, and forced into hiding at Westminster, then in the midst of intrigue in the Ricardian court (with rumors -whether they are true or not, we will never know- that her uncle wanted to marry her shortly after his wife’s passing and he later recanted after people protested at such an idea that he began to look elsewhere for a bride, and a spouse for Elizabeth); she would have no doubt welcome this new change in status. Elizabeth was a Princess-born, she had at one point been betrothed to the heir to the French Crown. She could not accept no better offer than to be a Queen, as it would also bolster her family’s position as well and it did. Henry VII rewarded the Woodvilles. Richard Woodville as the third Earl of Rivers lived comfortably, Elizabeth Woodville kept some of her dower properties and when she was present, she always took precedence. Even Margaret Beaufort had to walk behind her as the older woman was Queen Dowager whereas Margaret was just a Countess -a Countess in her own right but a Countess nonetheless. Sir Edward Woodville, Elizabeth of York’s uncle who took after his late eldest brother, was a highly pious and adventurous individual who proved his loyalty many times and was favored. The Catholic Kings themselves spoke very finely of him after his death. The set of ordinances that Edward IV had made for princes and that Anthony Woodville had supervise for Elizabeth’s brother, Prince Edward, was kept and used for Arthur’s upbringing. And Elizabeth herself was not left behind.
“Like her parents, Elizabeth was a patron of William Caxton and his successor at the Westminster printing press, Wynkyn de Worde.” (Weir)
Furthermore, as Queen, she ruled over her own court and her own properties (some of which had previously belonged to her aunt, Isabel, Duchess of Clarence).
As for Henry, this was also a personal triumph. Born to Margaret when she was thirteen (a birth that scarred her immensely. She would have no more children). Given as a ward to William Herbert who was given his uncle Jasper’s earldom of Pembroke, and raised to be the perfect Yorkist to neutralize the threat he might pose in the future, he was then sent into exile after the Lancastrian Readetion failed and every member of the royal house was eliminated. Henry lived in a period of uncertainty, danger, and now it was all over. He was King. And he could also boast of having one important advantage. Many royal couples did not have the luxury of getting to know one another. They were married to this person or that, and whether or not they liked each other, they were expected to fulfill their duties.
Fortunately, Henry did no have this problem. In the five month period that they waited for the dispensation to come, the two got to know each other. So when they walked down the aisle, they were not complete strangers.
After the ceremonies ended, came the consummation. Elizabeth proved herself an exemplary Queen, living by the virtues of the day and this, as well as her fertility, made her well-remembered and loved. She would not be crowned until the following year, after “she proved herself” by giving Henry a male heir that autumn, less than nine months after their marriage. Given the speed in which they conceived, it is possible that the marriage could have been consummated before (since being betrothed was as good as being married. And the pope had given his approval, they knew it was only a matter of time before the bull came). But there is also the possibility that Arthur could have been premature.
Henry and Elizabeth’s marriage would remain strong, and the two would later rely on the other when tragedy came.
Sources:
Elizabeth of York The Tudors’ Forgotten Queen by Amy Licence
Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and her World by AlisonWeir
Tudor by Leanda de Lisle
Blood Sisters by Sarah Gristwood
Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones
AdvertisementsDoes it get much better than beer-themed urban exploring? We didn’t think so… You probably won’t be able to find any of the good stuff still lying around in these defunct breweries, but there are still tons of abandoned items to discover. Massive round holes left over from industrial vats are a mainstay, as are interesting machinery and tons of old labels.
These breweries can be found around the world, especially in the US Midwest and Belgium, where enthusiastic brewers revolutionized the art of beer making around the turn of the century. Although some of the beer brands are now defunct and others have moved on to more high-tech breweries, these massive factories still stand as a testament to a very special time in beer-making history.
Since these buildings are so popular, many have already been turned into modern housing or office buildings, so start exploring soon before the original architecture and machinery are all gone. NOTE: do so with caution! These breweries are private property and can be very dangerous if you enter without permission, get permission and proceed with extreme care.
1. The Dixie Brewery – New Orleans, Louisiana
Image: Baronplantagenet/Wikipedia Commons
This stunning turn-of-the century building was constructed in 1907 to brew Dixie Beer. Built for only $85,000, the plant stayed open during prohibition by producing non-alcoholic beer. When alcohol became legal again, they switched back to brewing the hard stuff, and were still producing Dixie Beer when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.
Like so many other wonderful buildings in that area, the brewery became irreparably flooded during the hurricane, and much of its machinery was looted in the aftermath of the storm.
Image: BecomeTheChange/Flickr
Today it stands ravaged and crumbling, with not much promise of a revival. Since the brewery is situated in the footprint of the yet-to-be-constructed VA Hospital, its future looks grim. Although the brewery hasn’t been torn down yet, there’s real concern over its survival, and a push to grant the building rights as a historical landmark is in the works.
Image: Blake Zenfolio
2. Stella Artois Brewery – Leuven, Belgium
The tax records of Stella Artois date back incredibly to 1366, although it only became an international sensation in the 1920s. The beer was first brewed in Leuven, Belgium, where the now abandoned factory sits today. Although we’re not sure when it was built, this particular brewery seems to have been vacated in the mid ’90s.
Unlike many urban exploration sites, this factory is rumored to be in pretty amazing shape. All the industrial machines were left intact when production ended, and respectful visitors have resisted tagging and looting. From what we hear, the best place to view the town of Leuven is from the factory’s roof, accessible from a starway near the back of the largest silo.
3. Brasserie Eylenbosch – Schepdaal, Belgium
Although we know the Brasserie Eylenbosch in Schepdaal, Belgium was built in 1851 and closed in 1989, there aren’t too many other details floating around about the specifics of this building. Its clear from what’s left of the brewery that it had an incredibly beautiful interior tasting area, left almost completely undamaged.
We also know the factory produced an artisan beer called Eylenbosch which has a thick and almost sticky texture and a lengthy fermenting process. Since the beer took so long it make, it was expensive to produce, ultimately causing the brewery’s demise.
Although it wasn’t financially viable at the time, we hear there’s a small but cut-throat market for any remaining bottles of the brewery’s beer, especially the 1979 Druivenlambic, which is considered a real delicacy by beer connoisseurs.
Images: Carbone14.eu/Flickr
4. Barenquell-Brauerei – Berlin, Germany
Like many things post Wall, the Bärenquell Brauerei never quite made it out of East Germany. The brewery was built in 1888, made some pretty popular beer and did well for years – that is, until it was reclaimed by communist Germany as property of the state and renamed VEB Bärenquell with ‘VEB’ standing for Volkseigener Betrieb, or ‘owned by the people’. Although it kept up production until after the wall fell, the brewery was finally shut down in 1994.
Since Barenquell is still a well-selling beer all over the world, it’s not totally clear why this production site was shut down. Some urban explorers have hypothesized that since the brewery was under Communist ownership for so many years, it was so out of date by the time Berlin reunited, and wasn’t worth fixing up.
Unlike many breweries on this list, Barenquell-Brauerei isn’t under lock and key, lacking (reportedly) any “No Tresspassing” signs. Although this may be |
will cause untold hardship for the hundreds of thousands of working people who rely on BART every day," said John Grubb, chief of staff of the Bay Area Council, a local business-sponsored advocacy group.
Riders plan for alternate commutes
BART will provide a limited number of free roundtrip charter buses at nine East Bay BART stations starting Friday morning.
Buses will pick up ticketed passengers at El Cerrito del Norte, West Oakland, Concord, Walnut Creek, Lafayette, Dublin/Pleasanton, San Leandro, Hayward and Fremont stations starting at 5 a.m.
BART officials said there will be five to 15 buses at each station.
The buses will drop off passengers at San Francisco's Temporary Transbay Terminal.
On the return trip, riders will board buses between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. at the terminal. Those buses will go to West Oakland, where transfers can be made to other buses heading to various East Bay destinations.
If the strike continues into the weekend, BART will provide three buses at the same nine East Bay stations and offer limited roundtrip direct bus service into San Francisco in the morning and evening.
The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which oversees the regional transit system, is advising those who are opting to get behind the wheel that bridges and roadways will be congested.
In an attempt to alleviate the crowded roadways, carpool lanes will have expanded hours starting at 5 a.m. Carpooling, along with casual carpool pick-ups, is encouraged.
Parking lots at 33 BART stations will remain open during the strike and be free to use. However, some parts of the parking facilities, such as elevators, may be closed because of the strike.
Most bus service on AC Transit buses will be on a regular schedule, however there will be additional transbay buses which will provide additional seats across the Bay Bridge.
Some bus stops located at East Bay BART stations will move to nearby streets.
San Francisco Municipal Railway service will be beefed up on "high priority corridors" which includes the 14-Mission bus lines and buses along the Caltrain station near Fourth and Townsend, and in the downtown and Financial District area, and on the J-Church Metro line.
Additional taxi stands will go up at four locations: the Temporary Transbay Terminal; on Folsom Street between Main and Spear streets; in front of the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero; and at the San Francisco Caltrain Station.
The San Francisco Bay Ferry will operate 12 boats instead of its usual eight during the week. Two of the boats are on loan from the Golden Gate Ferry, which is running on a regular schedule from Marin County into San Francisco.
With the additional boats and more departure times, the ferry service will be able to carry up to 20,000 passengers instead of its average 6,000 per day.
At San Francisco International Airport, free shuttles will take passengers between the SFO BART station at the International terminal and the Millbrae Caltrain station and the San Francisco Bay Ferry dock in South San Francisco.
SamTrans will continue to run buses which will take passengers from the San Francisco Temporary Transbay Terminal to SFO.
AC Transit buses will connect passengers between the Coliseum/Oakland Airport BART station and Oakland International Airport. There will not be the usual AirBART bus shuttle available during the strike.
SamTrans buses will stop at all San Mateo County BART stations, while Caltrain service will stay on a normal schedule.
Caltrain officials said if trains reach capacity, more service may be added, if possible.
The MTC is also advising commuters to talk to employers about arranging flexible work schedules or telecommute for the day.
Stay with ABC7NEWS.COM for updates on the looming BART strike and information on how to get around if the trains stop running. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and download our news app for the latest news whenever and wherever you want.Palestinian leaders have welcomed a decision by the United Nations cultural agency to adopt a resolution on occupied East Jerusalem that sharply criticises Israeli policies around the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, while Israel says it ignores Jewish ties to the key holy site.
A spokesman for Paris-based UNESCO said on Tuesday that the resolution, which caused Israel to suspend its cooperation with the agency, was adopted without a new vote after being approved at the committee stage last week.
The text, which touches on Israel's management of Palestinian religious sites, refers throughout to the al-Aqsa mosque compound site in occupied East Jerusalem's Old City only by its Muslim names: al-Aqsa and al-Haram al-Sharif.
Al-Aqsa Mosque compound is the third-holiest site in Islam. Jews refer to the site as the Temple Mount.
Palestine's deputy ambassador to UNESCO, Mounir Anastas, told reporters the resolution "reminds Israel that they are the occupying power in East Jerusalem and it asks them to stop all their violations", including archaeological excavations around religious sites.
The UNESCO resolution also condemned Israel for restricting Muslim access to the site, and for aggression by Israeli police and soldiers, while also recognising Israel as the occupying power.
"By criticising the report for the omission of the words Temple Mount, [Israel] glosses over more than two dozen detailed criticisms of Israeli actions in and around the Old City, which is after all occupied territory," Al Jazeera's Paul Brennan, reporting from West Jerusalem, said.
READ MORE: Israel 'campaigns to change the status quo at al-Aqsa'
The resolution was submitted by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan - and was originally passed with 24 votes in favour, six against, and 26 abstentions.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said in a statement on Thursday that UNESCO had lost its legitimacy by adopting this resolution.
"The theatre of the absurd at UNESCO continues, and today the organisation adopted another delusional decision which says that the people of Israel have no connection to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall," Netanyahu said.
In April, UNESCO also passed a resolution condemning "Israeli aggressions and illegal measures against the freedom of worship and Muslims' access to the al-Aqsa Mosque", also failing to mention the site's Jewish name.
In 2011, the Palestinians were admitted as a member state of the organisation, which led the United States to suspend its payments to UNESCO.
INTERACTIVE: Inside al-Aqsa
The latest resolutions created unease at the top of the organisation, with Michael Worbs, who chairs UNESCO's executive board, saying he would have liked more time to work out a compromise.
"We need more time and dialogue between the members of the board to reach a consensus," he told AFP news agency.
UNESCO chief Irina Bokova had distanced herself from Thursday's vote, saying in a statement: "Nowhere more than in Jerusalem do Jewish, Christian and Muslim heritage and traditions share space."
But Riyad al-Maliki, the Palestinian foreign minister, responded to Bokova by describing her comments as "completely unacceptable".
"The Palestinian government expects Ms Bokova to focus her efforts on implementing the will of member states and preserving Jerusalem from the Israeli systematic colonisation and assault on its Palestinian character," said Maliki.
READ MORE: Israeli rightists push for takeover of al-Aqsa compound
Al-Aqsa Mosque is located in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed following its invasion in 1967 - in a move never recognised by the international community - as part of its subsequent military occupation of the West Bank.
Jewish settlers and Zionist organisations have called for complete Jewish control over the mosque compound.
Jewish groups' incursions into the mosque compound have continuously led to Palestinian protests across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military and armed settler incursions have resulted in Palestinian deaths and injuries in recent years in particular. Muslim access to the religious site has also been tremendously limited by the army.Nebraska lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill abolishing the death penalty with enough votes to override a promised veto from Gov. Pete Ricketts.
The 32-15 vote on LB 268 was bolstered by conservative senators who oppose capital punishment for fiscal, religious and pragmatic reasons. If that vote holds in a veto override, Nebraska would become the first conservative state to repeal the death penalty since 1973.
Nebraska hasn't executed a prisoner since 1997 and some lawmakers have argued that constant legal challenges will prevent the state from doing so again.
Gov. Ricketts has vowed a veto and announced last week that the state has bought new lethal injection drugs to resume executions. Click here for a list of Nebraska death row inmates.
Maryland was the last state to abolish capital punishment, in 2013. Thirty-two states have death penalty laws.Venice Biennale, Maison&Objet, Interieur, Conjunct Design, Decorex, 100% Design – Europe will simmer and transform the design world over the fairs that take place next months. The best brands, the most incredible novelties, designers, architects, artists, photographers and journalists, an entire continent shrouded in shapes, lines, curves, colors, lights and textures.
We’ve talked about the “promises” of Maison&Objet, and after September 11, our plane goes straight to London. Prepare the umbrellas and some disposition for the brit rock nights, ‘cause on September 19 starts 100% Design.
It will be four days of exhibitions and seminars with experts in the field and we made a list of what you can not miss:
Vitra will be at stand L210
A brand of furniture design that is a benchmark in the world will bring innovations to the Queen´s land. Founded in 1986 in Switzerland, Vitra’s main inspiration was the famous North American Eames, and if you do not remember well of what we’re talking about, click here and see that you surely already knew a piece of this brand. Over the 26 years of existence, many icons of the design were released under the label Vitra, and the expectation is big for checking what’s to come here.
Boca do Lobo will be at stand L1
They are from Portugal, and certainly are different of everything you’ve seen when the subject is furniture design. Boca do Lobo’s pieces are trully works of art that blend traditional and contemporary designs and translate it into furniture for sophisticated, stylish and avant-garde tastes.
Magis spa will be at stand L50
The Magis spa comes to represent the whole tradition of Italian design in London. The company founded in 1976, currently exports to 80 countries and shows that time does not let it be disheartened. Despite 36 years of tradition, the Magis continues to launch modern pieces that are full of personality and world references in design.
Delightfull will be at stand L1
Another Portuguese brand goes to London to show that the market of design has many promises of success in that country. Delightfull lead to 100% Design your line of fixtures that is inspired by the greatest musicians of the 50’s, 60’s, 70´s and 80’s. With sophisticated pieces and a clean design, the brand brings floor, wall and ceiling lamps with modern, customizable, creative and untold proposals.
Not Only White will be at stand K7
The Dutch brand lead for the third time to 100% Design the line of products for bathroom and kitchen, and as it did on other editions, will use the fair as a platform to conduct launches of both lines. Who is interested in know what are the trends in this area can not lose.
So … London calling. Let’s pack our bags and met the queen!Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The Kursk disaster in 2000 was an international embarrassment for the Russian military
The European Court of Human Rights says Russia must compensate journalists who were sued for articles about the Kursk nuclear submarine disaster in 2000.
The case was won by Novaya Gazeta, an investigative newspaper often critical of the Kremlin.
Russia must now pay it 3,388 euros (£3,007; $3,984), and 2,170 euros to its correspondent Yelena Milashina.
The paper had alleged failure by the military to properly investigate the deaths of 118 Kursk sailors.
The European court ruled that by prosecuting the journalists, the Russian defence ministry had violated Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which safeguards freedom of expression.
In an investigation, the paper disputed the conclusion of a naval forensic expert, Viktor Kolkutin, that 23 sailors had died eight hours after explosions which had killed most of the crew immediately.
Novaya Gazeta alleged that the sailors had survived longer than that, and that the navy had bungled the rescue attempt. It meant that there was no punishment of Northern Fleet officers for criminal negligence over the Kursk disaster.
An official investigation found that two explosions had wrecked the submarine after fuel leaked from a torpedo during a naval exercise.
Another military expert reported that dull repeated knocking heard from the sunken submarine was not an SOS message from the survivors, but some other unidentified noise from a surface ship.
In 2005 a Moscow court had made the newspaper and Milashina pay 57,000 roubles (£744; $985 at today's rates) in fines for defamation, over their reporting of the military experts' conclusions.OnPolitics Today: Zuckerberg accepts Congress's friend request
CLOSE Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is "actively working" with the U.S. government on its ongoing investigations into Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election. (Sept. 21) AP
Russian-linked entities bought 3,000-plus ads to sway the presidential election via Facebook, that little website you visit daily that, until this week, let customers target their ads to attract self-described "Jew haters."
That's not a great look for Facebook and wannabe president Mark Zuckerberg, who on Thursday caved to Congress and agreed to fork over Russia-linked ads to lawmakers. (Bob Mueller, the investigator slowly circling President Trump's friends and family, received similar data, too.)
Both Democrats and Republicans want a piece of Facebook: Lawmakers on the left say it's grown too powerful, while those on the right dislike the company's public and progressive stances on immigration and other social issues.
"I'm not going to sit here and tell you we're going to catch all bad content in our system," Zuckerberg said Thursday on Facebook. "We don't check what people say before they say it, and frankly, I don't think our society shouldn't want us to."
It's OnPolitics Today, the daily politics roundup from USA TODAY. Subscribe here.
Is Donald Trump a'mentally deranged U.S. dotard'? Depends on whom you ask.
If you ask Kim Jong Un, then, yes, Trump is totes a mentally deranged dotard. So the North Korean leader said, threatening to "tame" Trump "with fire" for the U.S. president's comments to the United Nations regarding North Korea. Trump on Thursday announced he would increase pressure on North Korea by punishing those who do business with it. That set the stage for months (years?) of nuclear-tinged uncertainty. Sounds great!
Also at the U.N.: Trump lectured African leaders on Nambia —a country that doesn't exist.
Mueller?... Mueller?... Mueller?
It's tough to know just what Robert Mueller is up to, but he's reportedly pummeled the White House with requests for documents tied to former FBI Director James Comey and Michael Flynn, Trump's former adviser. The White House has complied, even as Mueller investigates Trump for possible obstruction of justice. But Trump could still fire Mueller, and experts want Congress to keep any evidence from being destroyed.
GOP's latest health care effort comes down to one woman
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski is feeling the heat from all sides as Republican senators try once more to repeal and replace Obamacare ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline, Eliza Collins reports. The GOP needs 50 votes to pass the repeal legislation, and it's a few shy. That makes Murkowski, a Republican who's never backed a repeal attempt, a key target. The vote comes next week on what's called the Graham-Cassidy bill, which would fund states to devise their own health care systems.
Elsewhere in politics
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2ygRWAxNimrod, king of Shinar, was, according to the Book of Genesis and Books of Chronicles, the son of Cush and great-grandson of Noah.
Nimrod may also refer to:
Fictional characters [ edit ]
Military [ edit ]
Music [ edit ]
Nimrod (album), a 1997 album by Green Day
(album), a 1997 album by Green Day Variation IX (Adagio) "Nimrod", the 9th variation in the 1899 composition Enigma Variations by Edward Elgar
by Edward Elgar Nimrod, a band fronted by Zev Asher
People [ edit ]
Places [ edit ]
Antarctica [ edit ]
Nimrod Glacier
Mount Nimrod, in Ross Dependency
Golan Heights [ edit ]
Nimrod, Golan Heights, an Israeli settlement and village
Nimrod Fortress
United States [ edit ]
Science and technology [ edit ]
Nimrod (computer), an early computer to play Nim
Nimrod (distributed computing), a tool for distributed parametric modelling
Nimrod (synchrotron), a proton synchrotron which operated at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory until 1978
Nimrod (programming language), former name of Nim
Vehicles [ edit ]
Other uses [ edit ]
Nimrod International Journal of Poetry & Prose, a literary journal published by the University of Tulsa
, a literary journal published by the University of Tulsa Nimrods, a mascot for Watersmeet Township, Michigan's schools
, a mascot for Watersmeet Township, Michigan's schools Nimrod, a dramatic poem by Robert William JamesonMan Utd U15 4-2 Co. Fermanagh U15
Scorer(s): Odubeko x2, Mengi, Wellens – Curran x2
Man Utd XI: Mastny; Hughes, Mengi, Wyatt (Woods), Sharrock-Peplow (Gallagher-Allison); Smethurst, Pleavin; Mayamona, Shoretire (Wellens), Elanga; Odubeko.
A double from Mipo Odubeko saw Man United retain a 100% winning streak at SuperCupNI.
The Reds dominated early on and deservedly took a lead through Odubeko after he was fed through by the impressive Shola Shoretire.
Utd trialist goalkeeper Ondrej Mastny spilled a free-kick to allow Eimhin Curran to equalise.
Odubeko headed in a second of the game thanks to Sam Sharrock-Peplow’s cross from the left flank. So perfect was the first-touch delivery that Odubeko needed only to direct it into the corner, without providing any power and without having to move his body.
A poor backpass from George Wyatt allowed Curran to equalise once again, with Mastny unable to clear his lines as he rushed out to meet the weak pass from his defender.
Moments later, Connor Courtney almost put Co. Fermanagh but his shot hit off back the post.
United’s Teden Mengi headed home a third, and his third of the tournament after grabbing two against Colina yesterday, from a Sharrock-Peplow corner.
Charlie Wellens sealed United’s victory. After the ball seemingly ran away from Wellens, he poked out a foot to steer it in off the crossbar with a couple of minutes remaining.
AdvertisementsMar 19 2012 12:14AM GMT
It’s funny sometimes how a perfectly ordinary press release can have a lot more to it than appears at first.
Take Carbonite (NASDAQ:CARB). The company issued a press release a few days ago citing a study finding that many small businesses were using old, unreliable methods such as external hard disks, USB drives, and CD ROMs with which to back up their data. The report noted the following:
50% use external hard drives, yet 20% backing up their business data indicated they started to do so because of a hard drive failure
42% use USB/flash drives primarily because it is perceived as easy, yet only 6% believe USB/flash drives to actually be reliable
More than one-third use CDs/DVD drives to back up data, even though 62% feel they are inconvenient or risky
21% of small businesses using online backup were using a free product; since free online backup services are typically capped at two gigabytes, small businesses using these methods could be vulnerable to data loss
24% of small businesses using this method noted USB/flash drives do not work well for backup specifically because they have limited storage space
22% of small businesses surveyed pay for outside tech assistance
40% of those who manage the process in-house spend more than an hour per week backing up their company data, with 6% spending more than five hours per week
Only 24% have backed up their data in the past day, and 24% haven’t backed up their data within the past week
Gosh. Sounds serious.
If one reads further, however, one notes two things. First of all, by an amazing coincidence, Carbonite just happens to sell a service, at what is no doubt a reasonable price, that solves all these problems.
Second of all, there is absolutely no information in the press release about the study itself, other than its name: Carbonite Small Business Data Backup Usage Study, July 2011. Nothing about how many people were surveyed, how they were chosen, or anything. For any vendor survey, this tends to cast suspicion on its results.
Not to mention, July? Really?
If one uses one’s favorite search engine to search for the title of said study, one discovers that Carbonite has in fact referenced the same study in three other press releases, in July, October, and November. It’s in the July one that we learn that the survey itself on which the study was based was actually performed in April. 2011.
That said, several outlets, including no less than eWeek, picked up the survey and ran it as a straight news story.
But Carbonite, which went public last summer, was in the news for something else recently. In response to the Rush Limbaugh lambasting of Sandra Fluke as a “slut” for implying that she actually, gasp, had sex, Carbonite pulled its advertising on March 3 from the conservative radio show — one of some 40 radio talk shows on which it advertises, according to a blog post from the company president.
There have been two results from that. First, Carbonite has been slagged by any number of sites in the right-wing echo chamber, as well as on its own Facebook page, for daring to question Rush — not to mention, as it turns out, because the company CEO had donated money to left-wing candidates and causes. Second, the company’s stock dropped some 10% in a day, from which it is slowly — very slowly — recovering.
So, did the company issue yet another press release on the same July study — now with data nearly a year old — to deflect interest from the Rush flap?People are voluntarily quitting their jobs at the highest rate since the pre-recession era, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey— known as JOLTS — published by The Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The report says that 2.16 million people quit their jobs in the latest data, which represents 53 percent of all job separations — this includes quits, layoffs and discharges — when accounting for retirees.
The graph below, published by Gluskin Sheff Research, illustrates the trend in the quitting rate and the number of people who have quit as a percentage compared to the total number of people employed in the past decade:
Gluskin Sheff Research
So what does this mean about our labor market? In short, it's an indication that people are confident that they can find other opportunities elsewhere and is "a sign of any sustained improvement in the labor markets," Fed vice chair Janet Yellen said in a speech last month.
Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, tells Christopher Rugaber at The Associated Press that this confidence happens when "the economy grows fast enough." Ultimately, people have faith in their own skills to make a living some other way rather than stay in a job they're not satisfied with.
So who are these workers? There's a good possibility that people are leaving their jobs to pursue freelancing, consulting or the entrepreneur route. This need to work for yourself is predicted to reach 40 percent of the American workforce by 2020, and is most common in sectors of the economy that are growing.
Economist Robert Reich tells us that "at least [for] now, a few employees feel they can do better as consultants or freelancers," because "they've been required to take on so much extra work they need more control over their time. Although the labor participation rate is extremely low — the lowest it's been since 1979 — employers are demanding longer work hours from those who are employed.
"This has put a particularly heavy burden on working mothers and others who have primary responsibility for child care or elder care."
Aside from those with an entrepreneurial mindset, another group of people who are quitting tend to be "young, black, Hispanic, female [and] working class," says Pat Buchanan at Free Republic. In this group, workers may be leaving to go back to school for a chance of finding better jobs.
Although the demand for labor is on the rise, there has been a mismatch in the skills employers need and what's currently available. According to the BLS, job openings have risen by 11.3 percent in the past year, yet hiring has declined by 1.6 percent, meaning that jobs are available but there aren't enough people with the needed skills to fill them.
Although workers quitting may be tiresome for companies and HR, the bigger picture indicates that those in the workforce are confident about what's ahead for the labor market.Unlike other members of staff, I was urged not to discuss my home life with students. How can we tackle homophobia when we refuse to be honest with young people?
“Sir, are you gay?”
“Yes!” screams the voice in my head. But coming out to students isn’t as simple as it should be.
Within a week of starting my newly qualified teacher (NQT) year, I’d been asked about my sexuality three times by various students. My responses were always fleeting, “that’s irrelevant right now” or “what has that got to do with Frankenstein?”. I wasn’t worried about them knowing, but I was new to the school and new to teaching. I wanted to be open, but didn’t know how that would be received.
Secret Teacher: Schools have come a long way since I was a gay pupil Read more
I’d soon had enough of dodging the question and asked my NQT mentor for advice. He was a little surprised to learn I was gay and suggested the students might just be asking because I was new and they were nosy. I was reassured that there was no official school policy. “From a behaviour management perspective, it might not be the smartest move,” he said. He was worried I might be putting myself in a vulnerable position with the students, but neither of us realised the bigger issue would be the position I was putting myself in with my employers.
My sexuality didn’t come up again until near the end of term when some students saw me out and about with my boyfriend. It was nothing over the top, we were holding hands outside a shop when I heard the all too familiar: “Hi sir!”
The next day in school, a student asked if it was my boyfriend who I had been seen with. I said yes, and quickly directed the student to the starter activity. Their response? A vague, “alright, let me just find my pen”. I was flooded with an awkward feeling of both relief and satisfaction: they didn’t care, but I knew they wouldn’t.
A week or so later, I was called into a meeting with senior management. I was mildly concerned, but concluded they were probably just checking how I was doing. I was wrong. The meeting started with: “I want to have a chat with you about a discussion you’ve had with one of your classes.” A variety of class conversations rolled through my head – a recent debate about Wuthering Heights had got a little heated.
We, as teachers, should be sending the message to students that being gay doesn’t make you different.
“You’ve revealed to them that you’re gay.” They wanted to know what had happened in detail: what the students had asked; how I had responded; any further discussions. “They had no right to ask you that question,” was the line that was repeated a number of times and “you don’t have to tell them”. I left the meeting bemused but under the impression that this was designed to protect me.
A week later I had another meeting with a more senior manager. I was “strongly urged” not to discuss my sexuality or any matter of my private life with students. I tried to argue my case: many teachers talk about their lives outside of school with students – some form tutors are encouraged to do so to build a relationship with their group. What’s more, for students questioning their sexuality, it can be reassuring to have an adult sending out the message that it’s OK. I began to question whether the issue was that I’d been asked or that I’d answered – and whether a similar meeting would be happening if I’d been seen with a woman.
My answer came when the school newspaper was published, with the headteacher reflecting on the term and commenting on how she was looking forward to a relaxing holiday with her husband and children. There was a double-standard and it angered me, not just because it had put me in a difficult position professionally – I couldn’t be who I wanted to be in the classroom – but because we, as teachers, should be sending the message to students that being gay doesn’t make you different.
Later in the year, I was teaching Of Mice and Men to my year 9s and we discussed the relationship between Lennie and George. “Do you reckon they’re gay?” piped up one of my more challenging boys. I panicked.
“Wouldn’t matter if they were,” another student chimed in. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Mrs French teacher is gay and she’s well ashamed of it,” another piped up.
I don’t want my students to think I am ashamed of my sexuality
I don’t want my students to think I am ashamed of my sexuality. As a student, I spent every day in school surrounded by lads who threw “gay” around as an insult and mates who talked about which girls they fancied. I couldn’t identify with any of this and it was hard. I was in denial for a long time because I identified “gay” with “wrong”. If there’d been an adult there who was trusted and respected by me and my peers, and who was gay, it would have made all the difference to me.
As teachers we’re encouraged to tackle homophobia, but how can we do that when schools are so afraid of openness about homosexuality? I couldn’t understand why the leadership in my school was so fearful of students knowing I was gay. The kids didn’t care and, as nobody had called in, it seemed their parents didn’t care either.
I was told by one member of senior leadership that “nobody else needs to know this has happened” – as though they thought I was worried people would find out. Actually, I wasn’t bothered about other staff in school knowing I’d come out to a class. I am an openly gay teacher and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I found another job and handed in a polite resignation letter. I learned a lot in my first year and I still love teaching, but realising that it’s not always OK to be gay was a big disappointment. It pains me that some school leaders are sending the wrong message to staff and students.
Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach. Join the Guardian Teacher Network for lesson resources, comment and job opportunities, direct to your inbox.Comparing Sublime and Github’s Atom in 10 major categories
Sublime has been the undisputed text editing champion for a while now. But a new contender – GitHub’s Atom – is stepping into the spotlight, making noise and trying to steal the not-so-old champion’s thunder. Some 30 versions after the release of Atom’s beta, we felt it would be a good time to test these two head-to-head. On the left corner, in the black shorts with the orange stripes – the long standing champion Sublime. In the green corner – the young and “hackable” contender – GitHub’s Atom.
Here at OverOps we already have a few new Atom fans and the battle is raging. We’re used to fighting monster Java bugs, so we took our chances with a different kind of fight – Text Editor Battles! Let’s get started:
1. Setting up
Both editors are cross platform and available for Windows, Linux and OS X. Sublime’s stable version is 2.0.2, and version 3.0 is in beta for over a year now. As with the recent beta of Atom (v0.120), you’ll have to jump through some hoops for Windows and Linux. On windows it’s recommended to install through the Chocolatey package manager and on Linux you’ll have to build it yourself.
One thing you’ll quickly notice is that Atom weighs well over 60Mb while Sublime weighs 6x less. We’ll talk about that when we’ll drill down into performance. Once installed, you’re ready to roll.
Bottom line: Installation is easier with Sublime, but Atom is still in beta.
2. It starts with a little peek at Atom
If you’re already familiar with Sublime, Atom will feel just like home. The look and feel of the UI, selection shortcuts and command palette are very similar to those of Sublime. Some might even say too similar, to say the least.
A nice addition you’ll quickly see in Atom are the keyboard shortcut hints that appear on the backgrounds of blank tabs. A useful shortcut or feature you’ve ignored in Sublime might become more accessible in Atom. Other than that, here’s a challenge – try closing your eyes for a few seconds going ⌘+Tab (Or alt+tab god forbid), and then try figure out which editor you’re looking at.
Missing in Atom: The iconic Sublime code minimap
Bottom line: There are a few subtle nuances in the look & feel, Atom has a slight rounder touch to it.
3. Find, select, replace and some magic tricks
My first memory of Sublime going past the dark theme was multiple markers. I guess that’s the way editors show off. Combine this with the ⌘+D multiple selection / find next hybrid and you have one of the flagship features of advanced editors, a fast find & replace that allows quick renaming of variables or attributes.
With Atom it’s very similar and the editors even share the same keyboard shortcut. More than that, the command palette from Sublime is also available in Atom (once again, with the same keyboard shortcut), showing all available commands for a certain context. With Sublime it’s also easy to find HTML tags using the fuzzy finder, try opening it with ⌘+P, and then prefix your search with a hashtag. Atom currently lacks this feature.
The Sublime command palette making a guest appearance at Atom
Bottom line: Atom and Sublime perform pretty much the same here.
4. Tree view, tabs, navigation and file handling
Next up, we would want to load multiple files or projects and see how the editors react. There’s a nice command line shortcut that comes out of the box with Atom. To activate it go through the app’s menu and do Atom -> “Install shell commands”. Navigate through terminal to your desired folder, type atom and there you go, all your files loaded into view. The same is possible with Sublime’s subl tool, but like many other features, Atom just comes out of the box with this.
Atom’s command line tool
Once we have the files loaded, the fuzzy finder allows us to navigate between them real quick, exactly the same in both editors. Playing around with tabs, throwing them around and switching between them also works just the same.
The tree view on the other hand (or sidebar as it’s called in Sublime) is a bit different, notice the color changes (both on a dark theme) and the icons. Another thing that should be coming soon to Sublime’s next version and already available on the Atom beta is image previews – right in the editor. It could be useful in skipping the hassle of going out of the editor when working with images.
Atom on the left and Sublime on the right
Bottom line: Could be a matter of taste, I personally like the way it’s done in Atom.
5. Source control integration
Naturally, GitHub’s Atom comes ready with git integration, committing from the editor is a different story though (Edit: here’s a package that also allows committing to git). When editing a project you’ll find that the tree view has color indicators for.gitignore files and tree view files with changes that have not been committed yet. It also has a status bar with your current branch, a Git Diff package and open on GitHub shortcuts. More advanced features are yet to come.
Sublime is cleaner, but has wider variety of tried and tested integration from external packages including Git, Mercurial and SVN. Atom’s community is showing great signs but it still needs time to prove itself in creating an extensive package ecosystem.
Bottom line: Sublime’s external packages for the win.
6. Web Vs. Native goes back to the desktop ring
Sublime is written close to the metal in C++ using a Python API for plug-ins. A nice little feature not many people are aware of is the ability to open up a Python console from within Sublime or run your Python scripts directly through it without any external packages (except Python of course).
On the other hand, the most amazing thing about Atom is that it’s an all web based desktop app. In fact, it’s built on top of Chromium, Google’s open-source web browser, so… wait wait wait … does this mean… we can fire up the dev tools?
Yes we can! (and the JavaScript console too)
Other than Chromium, Atom is built with C++, Node.js, CoffeeScript and of course HTML, JS and LESS. But how does that affect performance? Well, pretty badly. Atom takes the web native, which means every single tab, window or frame is rendered locally from HTML. Recently it switched to React to improve performance but you can still feel the difference (try resizing Atom or moving to full screen mode for example). One more downfall is that Atom can’t currently handle file sizes larger than 2Mb.
Bottom line: Sublime will keep performing better, but it would be interesting to see just how far Atom could |
have a profound effect on player experience. As far as game designer Ernest Adams is concerned, this effect is negative, inevitably shattering the fictional reality of the game and rendering it impossible to take seriously.
I don't agree with this position. Self-reference in games is not an inherently destructive act. As game scholar Rune Klevjer asserts, "game fictions are not delineated by a 'fourth wall' as they are in film or literature." The fourth wall is, of course, a term from theater that has become shorthand for the boundary between fiction and audience in a variety of media. But applying this term to video games, Klevjer would argue, is a mistake because the line between reality and fiction in games does not function as it does in traditional media.
It is useful to think about the boundary between player and fiction as an elastic membrane -- a threshold -- rather than a wall, like Adams does. Drawing attention to how this threshold functions through self-reference can actually enhance fiction rather than destroy it. It can draw the player and game fiction together rather than driving them apart.
Self-Referential Games
There is a certain conventional point of view that states a video game should do anything and everything possible to make its technological apparatus invisible to the player in order to maintain a better sense of immersion. This view is largely responsible for the growing trend of "invisible" user interfaces in games such as Peter Jackson's King Kong (Ubisoft 2005) or Mirror's Edge (Electronic Arts 2008).
In these titles, traditional graphic overlays such as health meters are avoided. Instead, the necessary information is communicated to the player in a supposedly more immersive visual manner, such as the screen turning red to indicate damage. What Adams is complaining about isn't the existence of graphical interfaces, though. His main problem is with games that admit, within the fiction of the game world itself, that they are games.
The particular game that offends Adams is Metal Gear Solid (Konami 1998), a game in which characters throughout the story make numerous references to the game apparatus, specifically the controller. In one of many such moments, the game's protagonist, Solid Snake, encounters a psychic boss character, Psycho Mantis, who implores him to "put his controller on the floor" so he can move it with his mind. Psycho Mantis also claims he can "read" Snake's memory card to see what games he likes and comments on the prudence or recklessness of his saving habits. Adams concludes:
"I don't know enough about Japanese culture to say whether MGS's self-referential nature was an attempt to be postmodern. But I do stand by my original assertion that it's out of place in a story of adventure." Postmodernism is a tricky concept (and one that I will not deal with in detail here) because in reality, it involves much more than just self-reference. It extends into entire schools of thought on art, architecture, politics. Adams uses the term much more simply, as a kind of shorthand for video games with self-referential habits. Games like Metal Gear Solid cannot hide behind the veil of postmodernism, he seems to be saying, and expect users to be moved, excited, or otherwise emotionally engaged by a story.
This is, of course, my own guess as to what Adams thinks it means to take a game seriously. To take a game seriously, one can imagine, is to believe that what happens to characters is meaningful and real within the sealed bubble that contains the fictional universe of its story. If certain graphical interface elements, like life meters, are projected on the surface, it's not a problem as long as the characters below don't notice. However, if the characters do notice, the whole bubble pops. Reality and fiction, at least in Adams' mind, do not mix. From the moment Snake's commanding officer in Metal Gear Solid mentions the "action" button, the story is finished. It is proof that Snake's world isn't real, so why should we care?
Continued Next: Printer-Friendly Version Pages: 1 2 3 4Today’s diesel buses—including the estimated 500 “tech buses” that shuttle workers around the San Francisco Bay area—get around three to four miles to the gallon. Proterra makes an electric bus that is five times more efficient, and doesn’t clog up streets with diesel exhaust.
There’s a catch: the upfront cost. The buses, which use a battery pack and drivetrain designed by Proterra, battery cells from Toshiba and LG Chem, and a carbon fiber composite fuselage, are more expensive to buy than their fossil fuel-powered peers.
However, Proterra—and the investors who just dumped $55 million into the the Greenville, S.C.-based company—believe falling lithium-ion battery prices, lower repair costs, and long-term fuel savings will allow the buses to compete against diesel-powered models and begin to chip away at transit run on fossil fuels.
“Buses are the least efficient vehicles on the roads, with exception of maybe tractors and mining equipment,” CEO Ryan Popple told Fortune. “And even with historically low diesel prices our business hasn’t slowed because battery prices are dropping.”
Tesla’s massive gigafactory near Reno, Nevada will have the capacity to produce 50 gigawatt hours of battery packs a year once it’s complete, and is already having an effect on prices, Popple says. The first phase of Tesla’s gigafactory is expected to be ready next year.
“All the major suppliers are positioning themselves for life after the Tesla factory and its bringing down prices for everyone,” he says.
The company has raised $55 million, $25 million of which was debt financing with Hercules Technology Growth Capital, as well as $30 million in equity from new and existing investors. The series 4 equity round was led by several new investors—some unnamed—including a family office, a sovereign fund from the Middle East, and early Tesla Motors and Palantir Technologies investors Mike Dorsey and Miriam Rivera. Existing investors include Kleiner Perkins, Tao Capital Partners, GM Ventures, and Constellation Energy.
Proterra previously raised about $135 million.
The debt financing will be used to fund the company’s new factory in City of Industry, California. The factory, which will double Proterra’s production capacity, is expected to be operational by the end of 2015 and will employ 70 people. The factory is also funded by a $3 million grant awarded by the California Energy Commission in April 2014.
Proterra has 110 orders for its buses, which can cost up to $800,000 for customers that buy the battery packs and have the maximum battery configuration. Customers can buy a bus and lease the batteries for about $550,000. The 60 first generation buses have already been delivered and are on the road in Los Angeles and San Joaquin counties in California, as well as San Antionio, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee. Another 50 of its 40-foot second-generation buses will be produced and delivered this year. The company can produce about one bus a week at its Greenville factory, Popple says. Seattle will be the next city to receive the second-generation bus. Lousiville, Kentucky, and Stockton, California are also slated to receive electric buses this year.
In all, Proterra has won awards for 400 units, although not all of those will turn into firm orders, Popple says.
“We’re just getting past our early adopters and now we’re entering into our early majority adoption,” Popple says. If the company stays on track, it will capture 1% of total new shipments to the municipal market in 2016.
The buses can be customized to suit each transit agency’s needs, including an extended range product line that can go up to 200 miles on a single charge.
He believes orders will only accelerate as battery prices continue to fall and as the company expands into the corporate fleet market this year. Proterra will focus its corporate fleet efforts on the Bay area first, Popple says. The company is targeting Fortune 500 companies, universities, and theme parks as potential clients.LA PAZ − On October 7, President Evo Morales issued a government decree that allows workers to establish “social enterprises” in businesses that are bankrupt, winding up, or unjustifiably closed or abandoned. These enterprises, while private, will be operated by the workers and qualify for government assistance.
Morales issued Supreme Decree 1754 at a ceremony in the presidential palace marking the 62nd anniversary of the founding of the Confederación General de Trabajadores Fabriles de Bolivia (CGTFB – the General Confederation of Industrial Workers of Bolivia). The Minister of Labour, Daniel Santalla, said the decree was issued pursuant to article 54 of Bolivia’s new Constitution, which states that workers
“in defense of their workplaces and protection of the social interest may, in accordance with the law, reactivate and reorganize firms that are undergoing bankrupty, creditor proceedings or liquidation, or closed or abandoned without justification, and may form communitarian or social enterprises. The state will contribute to the action of the workers.”
In his remarks to the audience of several hundred union members and leaders, President Morales noted that employers often attempt to blackmail workers with threats to shut down when faced with demands for higher wages. “Now, if they threaten you in that way, the firm may as well go bankrupt or close, because you will become the owners. They will be new social enterprises,” he said.
Labour Minister Santalla noted that the constitutional article had already been used to establish some firms, such as Enatex, Instrabol, and Traboltex, and that more such firms could now be set up under the new decree.
Business spokesmen predictably warned that the new provisions would be a disincentive to private investment and risk the viability of companies.
Santalla also said that firms that do not comply with their workforce obligations under the law will lose preferential mechanisms to export their products to state-managed markets. And he cited some recent cases in which the government had intervened in defense of workers victimized for their attempts to form unions. In one such case last month, Burger King, the company was fined 30,000 Bolivianos ($4,300 US), ordered to reinstate the fired workers and to recognize the union.
In the following article Alfredo Rada, Bolivia’s Deputy Minister of Coordination with the Social Movements, draws attention to some important developments within the country’s labour movement and suggests some means by which the unions can be more effectively incorporated within the “process of change” being championed by the government of the MAS-IPSP, the Movement for Socialism – Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples. My translation from the Spanish.
-- Richard Fidler
* * *
The working class and the political process in Bolivia
By Alfredo Rada, Rebelión, October 8, 2013
Five months ago, I was in Tarija participating in a forum debating the political process in Bolivia, a process we call the Democratic and Cultural Revolution. One of those attending asked me whether it was possible to deepen this revolution, to make it an economic and social revolution, without the participation of the working class. My immediate response was no, that to consolidate a period of transition to the construction of a new form of communitarian socialism it was absolutely necessary that the workers participate within the revolutionary social bloc that has managed this process of transformations starting in 2000 in the so-called water war, when the overthrow of neoliberalism began.
It was a very relevant question since at that moment, in May of 2013, the mobilizations over the Pensions Act called by the leadership of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB – Bolivian Workers Central) in opposition to the government of Evo Morales were at their height.[1] Strongly influenced by ultraleft political tendencies organized around the self-described “Partido de los Trabajadores” [PT -- Workers Party], the COB committed a monumental error in mobilizing their ranks with fevered speeches calling for replacing Evo with “another government,” as a leader of the urban teachers in Santa Cruz put it.
This maximalist orientation led the COB inexorably to defeat, since the strike and the mobilizations never met with popular support and in the end the union leadership had to retreat in virtual disarray. The diversion that led to the defeat originated in the characterization that the ultraleft makes of the present government as “bourgeois and pro-imperialist,” a simplistic deceit peculiar to the political currents of an excessively classist and workerist ideological mould that blocks them from understanding the varied nature of the Bolivian social formation, which can only be analyzed in terms that combine nation and class.
The present process of change is made up of a dynamic deployment of social class struggles within capitalism that are combined, sometimes in a contradictory way, with the historic struggle of the indigenous nations against the internal capitalism. That is the dialectical nature of this process, in which the anticapitalist and anticolonialist structural tendencies expressed in the political action of exploited classes and oppressed nations make possible the revolutionary transformation of the economic relations of exploitation, the political relations of exclusion and the cultural relations of oppression. Yet there is always the risk that this course of transformations, as a result of external pressures, internal fragmentation or programmatic concessions, will become exhausted or reversed.
Turning to the conflict with the COB, following its dénouement the government set itself the task of rapidly mending its relationship with the working-class sectors while at the same time the rank and file workers began to settle scores with the ultraleft leaderships within the unions. That is what has just occurred in the Sindicato Mixto de Trabajadores Mineros de Huanuni [Combined Union of the Mining Workers in Huanuni], an emblematic organization because that district, located in the western department of Oruro, has the largest proletarian concentration in the entire country. Its 4,500 miners more than a year ago had elected a union leadership radically opposed to the government. This leadership led in the May strike, the blockade of roads in Caihuasi and the blowing up of a bridge located in that locality. Today, weakened and isolated, that ultraleft that was perched for some time in the Huanuni union has ended up being removed by a mass general meeting of the workers, who also decided to approve the construction of a new political pacto de unidad [unity agreement] with the government of Evo Morales.
No doubt such repositioning within the workers movement will have a major impact on the future of the PT since that political instrument has now lost its backbone; the effects will also be felt in the orientation of the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia [Federation of Mining Workers of Bolivia] and in the COB itself.
Let’s look at another industrial sector, that of the construction workers. This is one of the fastest growing sources of employment owing to the expansion in public and private investment in new building construction. Everywhere in Bolivia’s cities you can see building and housing complexes under way, and with them the hiring of many workers as casual or piecework labour. But the unions in this sector are weak and dispersed, partly because their leadership tends to be controlled by the big construction companies but also because of the sparse regulation exercised by the state.
This submissiveness of the unions began to change at the most recent national congress of the Confederación Sindical de Trabajadores en Construcción de Bolivia [Bolivian Construction Workers Union Confederation], which met in the city of Santa Cruz. The construction workers elected a new union leadership and set their sights on the mandatory organizing of all the building workers, teachers and assistants, replacing oral agreements with the bosses with collective labour contracts in all construction projects. This will also be a means of overcoming the situation of “informal workers” that is one of the worst legacies of neoliberalism in a country in which less than 20% of the workers are unionized.
Manufacturing workers have been one of the hardest-hit sectors, decimated by the massive layoffs euphemistically labelled “relocations” by Supreme Decree 21060 of August 1985. The manufacturing sector was subsequently subjected for almost two decades to the labour flexibility policies of neoliberalism in order to reduce payloads and increase the profits of capital.
Today the manufacturing sector is undergoing a rapid reorganizing of the unions that has helped to strengthen the Confederación General de Trabajadores Fabriles de Bolivia [General Confederation of Manufacturing Workers of Bolivia]. Yet to be consolidated is the organization of new unions, particularly in the cities of El Alto and Santa Cruz, the two major concentrations of industrial factories in Bolivia.
The importance given to reincorporating workers in the process of transformations around a common programmatic agenda with the Morales government lies not only in the fact that it will help to bring together a strong labour base of support, but also that it will strengthen the anti-imperialist and revolutionary tendencies in the process. The programmatic agenda to which we refer could address the following aspects: (1) a new General Labour Law which, while preserving the advances already in the present law, will grant new rights to the workers; (2) a natonal campaign of massive union organization in all industries that are unorganized; and (3) the strengthening of the social and communitarian sector of the economy, in alliance with the nationalized state sector.
Alfredo Rada is Bolivia’s Deputy Minister of Coordination with the Social Movements.
[1] The COB demanded an increase in state pensions to 8,000 bolivianos ($1140) annually for miners, and 5,000 bolivianos ($715) for other sectors. The government offered 4,000 and 3,200 bolivianos respectively ($600/$470), saying that any more would risk the financial sustainability of its pension scheme.
The conflict saw miners, teachers and health workers take to the streets of La Paz, while roadblocks and strikes took place across the country. Police were deployed to break up blockades in Cochabamba and La Paz, leading to several arrests and injuries, while workers at the state-run Huanuni mine joined the La Paz protests, paralysing tin production and costing several million dollars.
Other social sectors in Bolivia organised counter-marches in favour of the government. Representatives of the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB), and the Confederación de Mujeres Campesinas y Originarias Bartolina Sisa marched in La Paz to reject the blockades and mobilisations organised by the COB, while coca workers also protested in favour of the government in Cochabamba. At a rally in La Paz, Morales strongly criticised the COB leaders, accusing them of being at the service of imperialism, capitalism and neoliberalism.
After 16 days of protest, COB leaders agreed to lift the strike for 30 days to allow time to analyse a government offer to reform the current pensions system. Union leaders negotiated for several days in La Paz with officials from the labour and finance ministries, during which the union lowered its demand on pensions to 4,900 bolivianos for miners and 3,700 bolivianos ($700 and $530 respectively) for other sectors. It remains to be seen whether permanent settlement can be reached. (Source: “Strikes and blockades organised by trade unions in pension protest,” Bolivia Information Forum, News Briefing May-June 2013)David Mellis —
The new Arduino 1.5 software brings a number of improvements, some in support of the new Arduino Due board and others to make it easier to install libraries and to simplify the boards menu. While these new features should work well, we expect to get lots of feedback and to iterate on them in future releases of the Arduino software. That also applies to the new (experimental) libraries for the Due, which add features like USB Host, audio playback, and cooperative scheduling. In the short-term, if you’re not using the Due, you might want to stick with the current 1.0.x (AVR-only) releases of the Arduino software; Arduino 1.0.2 will be out shortly. In the long-term, though, we’re going to be basing the Arduino software on the Arduino 1.5 code. Here’s an overview of the improvements and changes it contains.
Support for Multiple Microcontroller Architectures and Toolchains
While the interface for compiling and uploading sketches remains the same, we’ve made some significant changes under the hood in order to support the new 32-bit, Atmel SAM3X ARM processor on the Due. The new Arduino environment (IDE) can now be configured to target multiple processor architectures, each with its own toolchain and compilation process. To support a new processor family, the core language and libraries need to be ported (as we’ve done for the Due) and some configuration files edited to specify the commands for compilation and uploading. We’ve focused on ensuring that this new system works seamlessly for the Due and our existing AVR-based boards, but with some tweaks and improvements, we imagine that it will allow the Arduino environment to work with many, many more microcontrollers. We’ll be posting more details of this new system soon but, for now, you can look at the “avr” and “sam” directories in the Arduino software for an idea of how it works.
Note: the changes to the underlying configuration files means that older “third-party hardware” folders will require some tweaking to work with Arduino 1.5. We’ll try to improve backwards compatibility in future versions of the software but, for now, you’ll need to work with makers of third-party hardware to update their files for Arduino 1.5.
Easier Library Installation
Arduino 1.5 makes it easier to install libraries. We’ve added a new “Add Library…” menu item (inside of “Sketch > Import Library…”) that prompts you select a library zip file or folder on your computer. It then copies it to your sketchbook folder and adds it to the list of installed libraries. You can still install libraries manually but this is a simpler alternative.
Simplified Boards Menu
With the addition of the Due, the boards menu in the Arduino software was getting so long that we decided to simplify it. To do so, we’ve separated the choice of the board itself from that of the processor (microcontroller) on it. For example, if you’re using an Arduino Mega with an ATmega1280, select “Arduino Mega” from the boards menu and “ATmega1280” from the processor menu. To make things easier, the processor menu defaults to the microcontroller on the most recent version of the selected board. So if you have an Arduino Mega with an ATmega2560, you can simply select “Arduino Mega” from the boards menu and the processor menu will default to the appropriate item (“2560 or ADK”). If the selected board only has one processor option, the processor menu will be disabled. (For example, every Leonardo board comes with an ATmega32U4.) We hope this makes it a little easier to find and select the board you’re using.
We want to hear your feedback about Arduino 1.5 and its new features. For general suggestions and discussion, you can post on the Arduino forum. If you find a bug, please add it to the Google Code issues list. If you’d like to get more deeply involved in the development of the Arduino software, subscribe to the developers mailing list. We’re planning to iterate on the software and its features, so look for Arduino 1.5.1 and other releases to come soon.
Finally, I want to talk about the people who have made this release possible. Cristian Maglie has led the development of the Arduino 1.5 software and has done an incredible job. In the last few weeks, Cristian and I have been ably assisted by Federico Fissore, a Java developer also based in Italy who’s banged out a number of features. The multiple-platform code in Arduino 1.5 was initially based on work by Rick Anderson. And, again, the Due itself is the product of work by a number of additional people, as mentioned in our previous post about the board. Thanks to everyone!ANNOUNCEMENTS MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Film Bar Monday this week (11/20) Film Bar Monday is at Midway Pub. Next week (11/27) it's at Mac Magee's. Check http://filmbarmondays.com for all dates, times, and locations!
Eat, Drink & B-Indie is at Manuel's Tavern Tuesday (11/21) and all about sound composition, music, and foley work!
Actors, do you need taping services in Atlanta? Head to Frat Pack Productions! Are you auditioning for a show like The Walking Dead or Stranger Things? Tape with actors from those shows or similar projects instead of just getting shoved into an empty room and left to your own devices. Plus, your first 30 minutes are free upon your first visit!
Prager Law is proud to sponsor the Atlanta Film Chat podcast. Prager Law offers clients the legal services necessary to bring their stories to life, from idea to distribution. To learn more please visit us online at www.pragerlaw.us or like us on Facebook @pragerlaw.
Frat Pack Productions and Prager Law sponsors us through Patreon. Join them here:Greens, Liberals tied in BC: multiple polls
In the last five polls released by the polling firms Ekos and Harris-Decima, the Greens have climbed precipitously in British Columbia which, when combined with the faltering Liberals, now places them in a statistical tie with the Liberals for the first time ever.
Still behind both the Tories and the New Democrats, the Greens nevertheless have very good reason to be happy whilst the Liberals have very good reason for concern.
Unfortunately for the Greens, however, this surge in support is not translating into any seats in BC in either the Paulitics arithmetic seat projection or the Paulitics geometric seat projection, however both do have them in several very strong second-place showing in BC.
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Click here for the newly updated Paulitics National Polling Resource.
Click here for the newly updated Paulitics Provincial/Regional Polling Resource.
Click here for the newly updated Paulitics 2008 Election Seat Projection.
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Hover, Sit Or Stand On Your Pedals
Mountain biking lessons
Hope24Seven Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 18, 2013
Bam. Crack. Crash.
The tree rejected my slightly turned handlebars and ejected me off my mountain bike.
Splat.
I pressed my palm into the central florida sandirt as it pressed itself into my sweaty body.
Turning over I stared at the canopy while a palm pricked my right thigh.
Sunlight shimmied through the trees. A soft breeze teased.
I love mountain biking.
Not so much the dirt in the mouth part-but rather how the trail refuses to accept anything but my full attention and complete presence and punishes me for anything less.
Moments earlier I’d been making a mental Christmas list. I know it’s not even Halloween yet.
I hadn’t noticed the narrowing of the trail.
BAM. CRACK. CRASH.
Mountain biking it reminds me of important life lessons.
Mostly when I’m on my bike I’m reminded of the connectedness of everything. Every second is connected to the next until time runs out for me and the only way to be ready for what’s ahead is to be entirely present; heart, mind, body and spirit — here and now.
Standing on my pedals.
This is where I was before I was laying on my back in the sandirt. Standing on your pedals is the equivalent of the athletic stance for mountain bikers. It’s especially helpful when I’m climbing and when I’m preparing to launch my full suspension bike over some sort of log, root or rock bent on opposing me. Standing is powerful. It’s an offensive position. And man- is it tiring. The trail has taught me to never approach a challenge, obstacle or opportunity in my life from any other position than standing with the full intent to ENGAGE and WIN.
Sitting.
I’ve never been much of a sitter. I don’t spend tons of time sitting but over the years the trail has taught me to sit more than I use to. Thanks to mountain biking I’ve learned the benefits of rest and relaxation — can I tell you about the cramps you get if you try to stand on your pedals for three hours in the forest? And to boot, it’s easier to breathe when you sit and pedal nice and slowly. And just today when I sat on my seat and pedaled at half the speed of normal a heavenly black butterfly with gold stars or diamonds fluttered next to me for over a minute and a half. And so too it is in life. Resting is useful. Relaxation prepares me for challenges. Sitting helps me regroup so that when the opportunity to stand comes I’ll be ready. Pacing matters. Life is more marathon than sprint. My brain even works better with lots of white space and quiet time to make sense of things especially weird things like- me.
Hover.
I learned early to wrap the bike seat between my thighs and take my butt and hover behind the seat while descending bumpy terrain. It’s the only way I maintain my balance on the bike it’s the only way I can remain entirely prepared to pull and navigate my bike over what shows up on the path in front of me. Unpredictabilty. Hovering is a practice of detachment. First you detach from the seat then from how the trail should be,what and how you should be riding and pretty soon all that is left is the moment and a natural flow of energy; a union of bike, body, mind and spirit. And all because — you are hovering. Loving detachment. I’ve learned it on the trails and now I’m practicing it in life. I’ m learning to let go and allow. I’m learning to detach from my children’s choices and the opinions of others about me and my weird tendency to leap and expect to find my wings on the way down… Mountain biking reminds me I’m not in control. I’m not in control of what the trail will serve up nor for the most part am I in control of what life will serve up. It’s here with the sun radiating through the canopy painting splotches of illumination across the trail I’m learning there is one thing I’m always in control of on the trail and in life. I always get to choose how I will respond and what I believe about everything which shows up in front of me and happens to me. Freedom. It may be the thing I love most about mountain biking and it may just be the thing I most respect about my life now that I realize the one thing I can never lose …my ability to choose how I will respond and who I will be …even when I’m laying on the forest floor staring up at the canopy worried I might have sprained my wrist.
Mountain biking.
Who needs a life coach when you have a tutor like this?
Now. I think it’s time to get back to today’s lesson plan and ride baby-ride!
Hover. Sit. Or Stand On Your Pedals?Microsoft unveiled its first laptop. Called the Surface Book, it doesn’t look like a Surface at all. It has a 13.5-inch display, a trackpad made of glass, a backlit keyboard and a machined magnesium body. Microsoft has one trick up its sleeve — the screen is detachable.
It has the latest generation of the Intel Core processor and an Nvidia GPU with GDDR5 memory. According to Microsoft, it’s the fastest 13-inch laptop ever made. In addition to that, it has 12 hours of battery life. The keyboard is said to be very quiet, and the display has a good pixel density of 267 ppi.
With this device, Microsoft doesn’t compete with the iPad and Android tablet. It competes with the MacBook Pro, Lenovo laptops and more.
With a discrete GPU, the Surface Book is supposed to be twice as fast as the 13-inch MacBook Pro. The company is probably comparing graphics performance, which is unfair as the 13-inch MacBook Pro doesn’t have a discrete GPU.
Yet, it is still impressive that the company managed to fit so much battery life in a powerful 13-inch laptop. Microsoft launched Adobe Premiere Pro and showed how fast you could edit a video on this machine.
And then there is the detachable screen, which is 7.7mm thick and weighs 1.6 pounds. If you want to take advantage of all the machine performances, you need to plug it in to the base, because that’s where the GPU is. And of course, the display is a touch screen. In other words, it’s a convertible laptop done in a good way.
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The Surface Book starts at $1,499 and is available to pre-order on October 7. It will be available on October 26. Microsoft didn’t say if there are multiple versions and didn’t go into much detail when it comes to specs.
This isn’t a cheap device as prices range from $1,499 to $2,699 depending on your configuration. We still don’t know the Nvidia GPU inside this machine. Here’s more details coming from ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley:
The most important question is how the OEM ecosystem will react to the new device. Microsoft risks alienating its partners with the Surface Book. Chances are Microsoft won’t sell as many laptops as Lenovo. The Surface Book is an expensive top-of-the-line machine, and many people don’t want to spend as much money on a laptop.
Today’s move is interesting for Microsoft. It could hint at some bigger changes in the future, or it might be just a flagship device to showcase what Windows does best. OEMs could even be inspired by this new device.
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The eerily empty streets of Namie, a town deep in the evacuation zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, are featured in the latest images captured by Google for its Street View mapping project.
The scene is wrenching: houses flattened by the earthquake and now abandoned for fear of radiation; rows of empty shutters on a boulevard that once hosted Namie’s annual autumn festival; ships and debris that still dot a landscape laid bare by the 50-foot waves that destroyed its coastline more than two years ago.
Namie’s 21,000 residents are still in government-mandated exile, scattered throughout Fukushima and across Japan. They are allowed brief visits no more than once a month to check on their homes.
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Another 90,000 people remain unable to return to their homes in the exclusion zone. Both experts and government officials have said that some of the most heavily contaminated areas in the exclusion zone may be uninhabitable for years, or even decades.
Invited by Mayor Tamotsu Baba to document the town’s deserted streets, Google began mapping Namie earlier this month. It used a car fitted with a special camera that captures a 360-degree view of its journey.
Google has mapped other parts of Japan’s tsunami zone, but the scenes released Wednesday were the first from within the exclusion zone.
“Many of the displaced townspeople have asked to see the current state of their city, and there are surely many people around the world who want a better sense of how the nuclear incident affected communities,” Mr. Baba said in a blog post on Google.
Mr. Baba, as well as Namie’s town hall operations, remain evacuated in Nihonmatsu, a city about 30 kilometers inland.
“Ever since the March disaster, the rest of the world has been moving forward, and many places in Japan have started recovering,” he said. “But in Namiemachi, time stands still.”In this week's Quarterback Index, Gregg Rosenthal noted that Tom Brady might be No. 1 if the rankings were based solely on the last five weeks.
Whereas Brady missed more throws than any quarterback through the end of October, he's converted more jaw-dropping tosses than any passer since Rob Gronkowski and Danny Amendola were back healthy and in football shape for the 55-31 coming out party against the Steelers in Week 9.
It's no coincidence that Brady's season turned around once Gronkowski returned to the lineup. As we pointed out in June, Brady was essentially Aaron Rodgers when Gronk was on the field last season, and Andy Dalton when the All-Pro tight end was sidelined.
Among non-quarterbacks on offense, Gronkowski is the single biggest difference-maker in the NFL. Since entering the league in 2010, he leads the league in red-zone touchdowns, quarterback-to-receiver completion percentage and yards after catch.
Players of Gronk's size (6-foot-6, 265) aren't supposed to be able to bend over in mid-stride and pluck a fastball off the carpet like he did on this spectacular 23-yard touchdown grab last week.
The Boston Globe's estimable Bob Ryan opined Sunday that no tight end in history -- not Tony Gonzalez, Shannon Sharpe or John Mackey -- could match Gronkowski at this point in his career.
He's not lying.
As I pointed out on Wednesday's "Around The League Podcast," Gronkowski has rewritten the early-career expectations for tight ends as Dan Marino and Eric Dickerson did for quarterbacks and running backs in the 1980s. He broke the mold.
Mackey was the Gold Standard, but he Was a Lilliputian compared to Gronk. Wake up, people, you're looking at walking history. Enjoy it! â Bob Ryan (@GlobeBobRyan) December 2, 2013
Gronk might be doing the heavy lifting, but he's also getting help from "making the leap" candidate Julian Edelman.
For all of the early-season handwringing over the loss of Wes Welker, Edelman has the "Slot Machine" beat in receptions (70 to 68) and the two are nearly identical in yards (711 to 717) through 12 games.
Dubbed "Minitron" by Brady this week, Edelman has shown the past two weeks why he's a sneaky choice as one of the best athletes in the league.
A converted college quarterback, Edelman is the active leader in punt-return average -- and sixth in NFL history. He's a kamikaze with the ball in his hands.
With Gronkowski and Edelman taking center stage, the Patriots lead the NFL with 35.75 points and 473.25 yards per game over the past five weeks.
For comparison's sake, Peyton Manning's vaunted Broncos offense is averaging 30.25 points and 442.75 over that span. Drew Brees' Saints aren't even in the neighborhood at 23.2 points and 396.2 yards.
To Brady's credit, he has the offense clicking on all cylinders while Stevan Ridley, Aaron Dobson and Kenbrell Thompkins watch from the sidelines. If Brady |
"Kirbys" are four pieces of Kirby rather than four individual Kirby-like beings. Another common term is 'Dream Landers', a term used in the instruction manual for Kirby's Adventure.[8] This term, however, also refers to anyone who lives in Dream Land, including characters like King Dedede. The biography of Kirby in Super Smash Bros. Brawl says Kirby is a citizen of Dream Land.[11] Sometimes the term 'puffballs' is used referring to the species' round shape.
In Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, Kirby's Return to Dream Land and Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, different colored Kirbys appear as other players in multi-player games. In the case of the latter, they are the result of Kirby being divided into four by Dark Meta Knight.[12]
In the anime, Kirby has also been called a Star Warrior, along with Meta Knight and other characters that have appeared in the Kirby animated series. It is said that Kirby is just a young Star Warrior or an underdeveloped one. In the first episode of the animated series, Kirby's space ship prematurely crashed on Pop Star. The trip was supposed to take him several hundred years and in that time he was supposed to be dormant; however, his ship drifted into a space rift causing it to warp to Dream Land and making his trip shorter, not allowing him to develop into the Star Warrior he was going to become. Kirby was also called a Warpstar Knight or a Warpstar Warrior, but this was only occasionally seen in select advertisements.
In Kirby's Dream Land 3, a mysterious enemy appears called Batamon, notable for its resemblance to Kirby aside from a more flattened shape and different face. These creatures are always seen walking past walls or ceilings beyond Kirby's reach, with the exception of a single stage in Cloudy Park, where Kirby can continue past the exit and come into contact with some.The question the article — and it is reporting, not an opinion piece — seeks to address is this:
What does it mean to cheer a person often described by pundits as having a “passion gap” compared with her rivals, to go bonkers for a detail-laden stump speech that crescendos on words such as prudent and percent of your income?
There are several anecdotes of voters on line for an event that are offered. The first is prefaced by noting a woman looking at a Trump supporter open carrying and yelling, who does not yell back.
“Trump’s angry; Bernie’s angry all the time,” said Smith, a retired elementary schoolteacher who said she was not angry other than whatever frustration she felt toward the other candidates and their followers, which she sublimated. “Just realistically, I think it’s not a matter of pumping the team up, it’s a matter of playing the game. You can’t have that kind of demeanor. I can’t imagine these men being in the room when some crisis really happens. Is emotion going to rule them, or are they going to have a level head and make calm decisions?”
After turning to another person in the line and offering his observations, the article offers this:
To her and others baking in the sun, this was in fact the paradox of being a Clinton supporter at a Clinton rally, the thing that no one seemed to understand. They were excited by her lack of excitability; thrilled by her boring wonkiness; enthusiastic not about the prospect of some dramatic change but about Clinton’s promise of dogged, small-bore pragmatism, a result of decades of government experience they considered a qualification rather than a liability. Theirs was the campaign that voters so often said they wanted — one of substance and detail, of practicality rather than dreamy idealism, of freedom through discipline.
thrilled by her boring wonkiness — for many of us someone who understands policy in detail, can talk about it and its implications, is important, because that is how real change gets started, and maintained. We LIKE that Clinton is willing to talk about the details of policy, including getting it enacted. That is the substance and detail that we actually find exciting. It is was makes us at least nod our heads if not more during debates.
One person waiting on the line rolled his eyes when a Sanders supporter car full of young people went by and the folks inside yelled out their support of their candidate. He talked about the kind of excitement that those supporting Clinton could feel — read these words:
Not the thrill of revolt and rage, he explained, but rather the joy of hearing a candidate speak in excruciating yet accurate detail about Head Start and Early Head Start, the federally funded programs to help low-income children prepare for kindergarten. “Like when she went to Flint,” Medina continued, referring to the Michigan city where possibly hundreds of children have been poisoned by toxins in the water supply. “She was strongly encouraging the government to put Head Start in place because she knows one of the requirements is annual lead screening.”
As I read these words, I think back to a Rolling Stone piece by William Greider during the 1992 campaign, where Bill Clinton brought up the Grameen Bank (later to win Mohammad Yunus the Nobel Peace Prize) and Greider’s being amazed. And yet, Bill almost certainly knew about that, about microfinancing, from his wife, who had already encountered it in her own work among poor minority folk (and here I also recall a savings and loan in Chicago, South Shore Bank, which engaged in some microfinancing).
Yes, I remember that competence was an insufficient argument for Michael Dukakis, but that is very much not why he lost to the first George Bush, and those who make that argument ignore his unwillingness to push back at inaccurate attacks, something I think Mrs. Clinton has long ago learned how to do — after all, she has been subject to inaccurate attacks for decades.
I am not going to go through the rest of the article, although I will encourage you to read it.
Perhaps one reason Clinton does so well among those of us who are older is because we have been through several attempts at revolutionary change, and as we age we want to see certain things established irrevocably, so that in the normal pendulum swings of American politics the advances made do not get undone.
Perhaps it is because one political party has, since Ronald Reagan, taken the approach that government is the problem (except insofar as it can be used to impose their values on others — some sense of liberty) rather than what we have known it to be: a primary mechanism for improving the lives of the American people.
Not all efforts have worked, and we can acknowledge that without abandoning the notion that government of the people, by the people, and for the people has a major role to play in providing a security for the people that goes far beyond merely military security. Just as we can and should acknowledge that not every attempt to provide that military security has worked and also may need to be examined. But NEITHER should be abandoned, nor denigrated.
As I have offered posts that include words of others — columnists, pundits, etc. — and as I have offered some of my own analysis on the state of the race, people often challenge me to explain my support of Clinton. Sometimes they will throw in my face a piece I wrote 8 some years ago. That is their right.
But it is also not relevant. I am different, in large part because of living with my wife’s cancer the past three years. I would also suggest that Clinton, with the additional experience of having worked so closely with the man against whom she contended 8 years ago, has demonstrated that she is different, of greater depth.
For me, there are multiple things that concern me. Key is a real understanding of the international situation, because if we do not properly address what we can, we will as a nation have neither the resources or attention necessary to address issues at home. There was no other candidate running in either party this cycle who has that in the depth that Secretary Clinton has.
Equally important is to understand how to advance our goals by small ball if necessary, rather than waiting for those few occasions where the big thing can be done. Yes, if we get lucky and also take back the House because Trump is the Republican candidate, it MAY be possible to achieve far greater change. But assuming the gerrymandering after the 2010 census and elections makes that highly unlikely, how can we best address an agenda that improves the lives of the most people? Here I think an intimate understanding of the details of policy matter, such as knowing about annual lead screening as a part of Head Start. And here let me note something about which I have remarked before: I have in my somewhat attenuated experience of teaching in inner city DC middle schools seen the impact of lead upon the students in my classrooms.
For my friends who are passionate Bernie supporters — I have no trouble with your passion, with your desire to see radical change. But please understand that for many of us who are Clinton supporters we are not willing to wait for a revolution, we want what change we can get now.
And if I may speak to young people: for many of us this is not for ourselves. Those of us in our 60s and older are unlikely to see the changes we can accomplish right now make a major difference in the rest of our lives. Those with progeny seek it for their children and grandchildren. For a childless couple like my wife and myself, we seek it for nieces and nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews, and for me as a teacher for the young people whose lives and future dominate my thinking because of all the time I spend interacting with them.
For Clinton supporters, I urge you not to attack or demean those who are passionate for Bernie, even if at times their rhetoric towards you and the candidate we favor is over the top.
For Bernie supporters, do yourselves a favor and stop demonizing those of us who strongly support Hillary as not being progressive or liberal, as tools of the establishment.
For each of us, we need always to remember that it is possible to disagree without being disagreeable, that reasonable people can come to different conclusions than do we without it meaning they are corrupt or hypocritical.
I am a Clinton supporter. I have as much passion to see her win as do those rallying for Bernie.
As the article that occasioned this post demonstrates, I am far from alone in the strength of that passion, which is why among Democrats Clinton has pretty consistently outperformed Sanders.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
And if we can, can we be civil and kind to one another?Clickbait much? But seriously. One of the skincare questions a few people have asked me in the last months couple is, “Don’t you have to constantly replace all these products you’re using?!” And, it’s true, I do burn through the products I currently use at a more rapid clip than before. But isn’t that really a good thing? Why spend the money on products you’re not going to use? The key is to not waste products you’re spending money on.
In the past I think I’ve generally used more product per application than is probably necessary. Now, I’m more conservative: most of the products I use that have a pump dispenser need only one pump per application. Start there and build if you need more. For products in a tube like lotions and creams, start with a dime size amount.
Toners and essences that have a watery consistency are where it gets tricky. I’ve read many bloggers who say that they don’t use cotton pads/balls because they feel it wastes too much product. I get where they’re coming from: it takes a lot more product to keep a cotton pad/ball damp enough to adequately cover the skin. But applying with my fingertips has always felt clumsy and equally wasteful.
That’s where these Selena Multi-layer Cotton Puffs come in. They are ultra thin cotton sheets that comes in “booklets” of 5 sheets (see below). I fold one sheet in half to use with my Missha Time Revolution First Treatment Essence and MUN Anarose Toner. These are definitely not as sturdy as an old-school pad/ball, but they work well with much less product on them. And this is your face we’re talking about, so you should be gentle anyway, right?
Each box comes with 80 booklets and 400 individual sheets per box. I use two in the morning and two at night, so each box lasts about 3 months. They are $7.44 per box on Amazon, which is about half as much as it costs for the same number of cotton pads. And another bonus worth noting: they take up SO much less space than 6 sleeves of cotton pads!
One last reason to love these: you can use them to make your own at-home sheet mask with your favorite essence, serum, or treatment! As you can see below, you can soak a booklet of these sheets with your favorite treatment and apply sheets across your skin to create a leave-on mask. These are Japanese puffs and are commonly used in combo with Rohto Hadalabo Gokujun Hyaluronic Lotion (a hydrating toner and cult favorite in the Asian beauty world – I’ve tried it but jury’s still out on if I love it or not). So fun, right?
So! Save product, save money, and save space in your beauty drawer.
What are your tricks to save product or save money on your beauty routine?
AdvertisementsTEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The rupiah is forecast to continue to weaken until it reaches a new equilibrium in the range of Rp 15,000 per US dollar ahead of the regular meeting of the US central bank the Federal Reserve or the FOMC Meeting which was originally planned for Thursday afternoon local time.
"The weakening rupiah is consistent enough to move to a level of Rp 15,000, but should not be responded negatively," said Vice President of Research and Analysis of PT Valbury Asia Securities, Nico Omer Jonckheere, on Wednesday. Moreover, the weakening of the exchange rate also experienced a number of countries in Southeast Asia, such as Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore. "If the rupiah gets stronger alone, it will be considered not competitive."
Nico’s statement was in respond to the weakening rupiah to Rp 14,459 per US dollar on Wednesday or 15.3 percent from Rp 12 545 per US dollar at the beginning of 2015. Meanwhile, the exchange rate in the 2015 State Revised Budget was pegged at Rp 12,500 per US dollar.
This weakening of the exchange rate would trigger a stock market crash. Stock price index (JCI) on Wednesday closed at 4,332.51, or 0.34 percent lower than the previous day. Nico estimated the JCI will be tested at the 4,100 position.
A number of businesses are prepared to peg the exchange rate at Rp 15 thousand per dollar. "Although heavy, we survive. But, if the exchange rate reach 16 thousand, many will collapse," said Deputy Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce (Kadin) Infrastructure division, Zulnahar Usman.
Development Director of Indonesia Stock Exchange, Nicky Hogan, said they will continue to anticipate the impact of the rupiah on the trading floor. He is confident traders have anticipated because issue of the Fed’s interest rates hike has long appeared.
Nicky also assess the swift foreign capital leaving out of Indonesia as excessive concerns. "The contribution of local investors in commercial transactions is excellent, about 50 percent."
First Asia Capital analyst, David Sutyanto, predicts the Fed will raise interest rates to 0.25 percent due to a number of economic indicators improving in the US. "Moreover, the United States will be relieved if the interest rate is rising. If delayed (increase rate), it will be more difficult to give stimulus," he told Tempo.
Finance Minister Bambang Brodjonegoro said that The Fed may not raise interest rates. Even if interest rates go up, he believes the ripple will not be big because it was anticipated by most businesses. "Most of the turmoil in fact has already been factored in our currency changes since 2013," he said.
The government, according to Bambang, believes the financial industry is stable after receiving a report from the Financial System Stability Coordination Forum ahead of the FOMC announcement. "The government also continues to keep the exchange rate under control."
Governor of Bank Indonesia Agus Martowardojo previously admitted that the drop of the exchange rate exceeding Rp 14,400 per US dollar mainly was triggered by the global economic uncertainty.
In addition, Indonesia was hit more because its exports depends on raw natural resources. "In fact, commodity prices have declined since 2012," he said last Tuesday.
ANDI RUSLI | ADITYA BUDIMAN | AMIRULLAH | PRAGA UTAMA | TRI ARTINING | ALI HIDAYATStuffed Peppers with Black Beans and Onions
Ingredients: (4 Servings)
1 Pound Ground Beef ( I use 91/9 from Costco)
4 Peppers
4 Ounces Vidalia Onion
1 Cup Black Beans
1 Large Cucumber
¼ Cup Shredded Cheese
Seasonings: McCormick Montreal Steak Seasoning
Directions:
Brown the ground beef in a skillet, season with steak seasoning. Finely chop the 4 ounces of onion. Cut the tops off the Peppers and remove seeds. Mix Beef, beans and Onions together in the pan and separate evenly into the four Peppers. Place Stuffed Peppers into a deep baking dish and cover with tinfoil. Bake in the oven at 400 degrees for 30 min. After 25 minute remove tinfoil and top with cheese, place back in oven and cook for 5 more minutes or until cheese is melted. Chop Cucumbers, plate and Enjoy!!!
Nutrients: Per Serving
Calorie: 295
Fats: 13 grams
Carbohydrate: 19 grams
Protein: 30 grams
*Nutrients from the Lose it! App
If you look at the meals I cook, I use many of the same ingredients, just prepared differently. This makes my shopping very easy during the week and cuts down the price.OIL does not just provide the fuel that powers the internal-combustion engines in cars. Its by-products are also the basis of many of the materials, such as plastics, from which cars are made. One of these petroleum by-products is isoprene. This is used to make the synthetic rubber in car tyres. About a billion tyres are made every year—each one requiring about 26 litres (or seven American gallons) of oil. Now a way has been found to make greener tyres by using genetically modified bugs to produce isoprene biologically.
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The work is being carried out by Genencor, an industrial biotech company based in California, in collaboration with Goodyear, one of the world's biggest tyremakers. In the laboratory Genencor has produced enough of what it calls BioIsoprene for Goodyear to build and successfully test prototype tyres made with the new material. Genencor is now completing a dedicated pilot factory which will be used to develop a mass-production process, which could be operating commercially around 2015.
Isoprene is a monomer, which is a substance whose molecules can be linked together chemically to form a polymer. Latex, a material obtained from rubber trees, is a natural polymer of isoprene. Isoprene can also be artificially polymerised to make synthetic rubber. Tyres are made of a combination of natural and synthetic rubber to provide the grip and endurance required by carmakers. Typically around a quarter of each tyre is made from isoprene derived from petrochemicals, and about 60% of worldwide isoprene production is used by tyremakers. The rest goes into making other products, including glues, disposable nappies and surgical gloves.
Genencor used a genetically modified form of E-coli, a favourite species of bacteria in microbial genetics, to produce BioIsoprene. By splicing in genes from other bugs, the company was able to engineer synthetic metabolic pathways—ones that do not exist in nature—that enable the bacteria to produce isoprene from the sugars found in plant materials such as sugar cane, corn cobs and switchgrass, a tall-growing variety native to North America. The modified organism ferments sugars in the biomass to produce isoprene, in such a way that it bubbles out as a gas. This makes it easier to collect and purify compared with separating it out from a liquid. Isoprene needs to be extremely pure to make synthetic rubber.
Having the flexibility to use different crops and agricultural by-products as the feedstock for the process is important, says Karl Sanford of Genencor. The company wanted to avoid the contentious issue of using crops that might otherwise provide food. Moreover, supply chains for biomass are still being developed, so the availability of feedstock will change.
Research is continuing into using other micro-organisms, such as yeast, which might be engineered to create similar metabolic pathways. If biologically derived isoprene becomes more widely available, Mr Sanford thinks, industry could find additional uses for it. And if production costs end up being as low as the company hopes, isoprene might itself become a feedstock from which to produce synthetic fuels, such as petrol or diesel. So as well as helping build cars in a more environmentally friendly way, it might eventually help power them in a greener way, too.As per the annual Crime in India report of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), more than 50000 fire-arms each were seized in the country in 2014 and 2015 under the Arms act. Uttar Pradesh alone accounted for 45% of the seized fire-arms in the country.
Possession of a fire-arm or ammunition without a valid license is an offence under the Arms Act. The police can seize any such illegal fire-arm or ammunition and book a case against the possessor as per the laid down procedure. They can also seize licensed fire-arms under other provisions of the act. The details of all such seizure cases and the amount of arms seized under the Arms Act is compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in their annual ‘Crime in India’ report. The NCRB started collecting this data only in 2014 and hence data before 2014 is not available at a central place.
More than 50000 fire-arms seized in the country in 2014 & 2015
As per the NCRB report, more than 53000 fire-arms were seized under the arms act in 2015 while more than 51000 cases of seizure were reported. In 2014, more than 55000 cases under this act were registered and a similar number of fire-arms were also seized. Both in 2014 & 2015, crude & country made arms accounted for the bulk of the seizures. Licenced or factory made fire-arms were the lowest in terms of the seizures. Seized arms include AK47/56, Pistols, Carbine, Revolvers, Guns, Rifles and country made weapons etc. More than one lakh number of ammunition was seized in 2014 while this number went up to more than three lakh in 2015.
The Police also makes seizures under the Explosives Act. In 2014, 3843 cases of seizure of explosives were reported. This number increased marginally to 3571 in 2015. The seized explosives include Detonators, RDX, TNT, Gelatin Sticks, Grenades, Landmines, IEDs etc.
Uttar Pradesh & Madhya Pradesh account for 60% of the seizures
It is not the left wing extremism (LWE) or maoist affected states that top the list of seizures. Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh together account for more than 60% of all the seizures in the country both in 2014 and 2015. Add Rajasthan to this list, the percentage goes over 70%. More than 24000 fire-arms were seized in Uttar Pradesh in both 2014 and 2015. Compared to this, the number of fire-arms seized in all the South Indian states put together was less than 1000 in both 2014 and 2015. More than 1000 fire-arms were seized in eight (8) different states in 2014 and seven (7) different states in 2015.In the 1960s the world was abuzz with the potential developments of the future. From hover cars to Disney’s House of the Future, speculation on how technology may impact our everyday lives was surrounded by wild and whacky solutions to simplify everyday routines.
Fast forward to 2016, when food is both an experience and a chore to make. Palate fatigue reoccurs as culinary trends change, bringing about a myriad of new flavours, which drop out of favour as soon as the next big spice is Instagrammed into the mainstream food market.
Trade has diversified between cultures, broadening the variety of flavours available to consumers. However, as food trends change and the pressure to create interesting and innovative flavours and combinations has increased, what are the taste trends that may be changing our culinary experience in the future?
Food science and the culinary arts
Molecular gastronomy and flavour encapsulation may sound like something straight out of Doctor Who – which it is – but it’s a widely used idea in food production and might hold the key to how we approach food flavouring in the future. The theory is that the flavour found in whole ingredients will be stronger than if it is dispersed, and if this intense flavour can be preserved, it can be used to create new and exciting combinations. As William Hartnell’s First Doctor says: “Flavours are rather like primary colours, you blend two to get the third, and so on.”
British chef Heston Blumenthal has been championing the use of flavour encapsulation for years in his restaurant The Fat Duck, creating a myriad of dishes that break away from our existing perception of foods, such as a fruit bowl made of meat, curry ice-cream, and black pudding chocolate spread.
Although the idea of dressing food up in disguise may be a little niche, it plays on a method of condensing food into small capsules, which contain the flavour and nutrients of a full meal that has been a staple of futuristic science fiction since the 1960s. While the image of William Hartnell’s Doctor Who producing a small bar that tasted like bacon and eggs out of a machine was a fun futuristic joke at the time, it has since become a reality as Blumenthal managed to capture the flavours in his recipe for bacon and egg ice cream.
Molecular gastronomy, the scientific exploration of the transformation of ingredients during the cooking process, has been used by chefs and scientists to identify how flavour encapsulation can be achieved and to prevent palate fatigue. One company leading the development is Canadian-based Molecule-R Flavors.
“We like to think of it as the fusion of food science and the culinary arts,” says the company. “Molecular gastronomy is a new, exciting kind of cooking that borrows knowledge, techniques and ingredients from the food industry and makes them its own in order to combine tastes, shapes and textures in novel, creative ways.”
Molecule-R has been working to transfer the state-of-the-art techniques of creating flavoured foam, gels, liquid bubbles, and other artisan food science presentation, from the kitchens of award-winning restaurants to the tables of amateur chefs worldwide. Gelled food is one such technique that has gathered traction over the past decade; using hydrocolloids chefs can create interesting and strong flavour and colour combinations that hold various shapes, such as boiled fruit spaghetti.
You call that a knife?
While taste buds on the tongue recognise five primary tastes, chemesthesis – the combination of the senses – plays much larger role in the way we identify flavour, and can even change the way that we taste food. Synaesthesia – a neurological phenomenon where a person involuntarily experiences ‘crossed’ sensory responses, such as tasting colours – is present in only a minority of people, but it may be the inspiration behind the multi-sensory food revolutions.
Unlike the ‘just-add-water’ method of food delivery predicted in the 1960s, which focuses on simplicity and convenience, multi-sensory dining explores the eating experience as a whole, combining flavour, appearance and scents to influence the perception, enjoyment and taste of food. Imagine eating your favourite meal from when you were young and inhaling the smell of your childhood home, while using a spoon that makes your mouth tingle, enhancing the flavour with every bite. That’s multi-sensory eating.
Alongside its molecular gastronomy developments, Molecule-R has produced a range of aroma cutlery, which uses our sense of smell to enhance the flavour and taste of food. Aromaforks and Aromaspoons work by placing a drop of flavouring from a range of scents, including herbs, fruits, beans, umani, and nuts, on a small diffusing paper, which sits in the fork handle. The idea is that when you eat, you inhale the aroma and taste the flavour.
Molecule-R has produced a range of aroma cutlery, which uses our sense of smell to enhance the flavour and taste of food
“The initial idea was to reinvent the traditional fork into an improved utensil that would trick people’s mind by liberating an intense flow of aromas, but we soon realised that the Aromafork could also become the perfect educational tool to learn how to better appreciate food,“ explains Molecule-R Flavors president Jonathan Coutu.
Aroma-producing forks are not the only foray into changing flavour through cutlery design. A research team at Oxford University has been looking into the effect that different types of cutlery have on the flavour and taste of food. The experiment, led by chef in residence at Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Charles Michel, saw 130 diners served the same three-course meal, but with half the participants using heavier banquet-style cutlery.
The findings, published in the journal Flavour, claimed that diners using the heavier cutlery experienced a higher quality dining experience: “The diners’ appreciation of the food is affected by the type of the cutlery used to eat (in this case, knife and fork were changed between experimental groups), in terms of liking, aesthetic value, and willing to pay for the food. In other words, a very common set of utensils, present on tables around the world, can potentially make the food ‘taste’ better (or worse).”
Replicating flavours digitally
Alongside the development of enhanced flavours for naturally grown food, scientists have been working on ways to replicate flavours and tastes that are completely divorced from the food products they originated from.
The digital taste interface, also known as a digital lollipop, works by stimulating the sweet and sour taste receptors using two metal probes placed on your tongue. The probes produce thermal and electrical stimulation, which translate to taste when activated.
Prototypes for a working interface have been in progress for a number of years, for example at London City University’s Mixed Reality Lab. Researchers from the lab explain: “Although there are a lot of systems in auditory, vision, and haptic domains, few attempts have been made in the sense of taste. As an attempt to bridge this gap, we introduced a method for digitally actuate the sense of taste by actuating the tongue through electrical and thermal stimulations.”
While the development of digital taste simulation is still in its infancy, it has been touted as a potentially revolutionary concept, which offers the potential of sharing flavour remotely via social media or advertising. If food adverts weren’t already pavlovian enough for your liking, imagine being able to experience the flavour through a device attached to your television set.
While tasting your TV may be all fun and games, the applications of digital flavour replication may play a significant role in how we consume food in the future. With the global population expected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050 and crops failing due to drought and flooding, access to the food we know and love may become increasingly difficult in the years ahead. Changing our eating habits is an incredibly complex task, battling both consumer perception of manufactured food and eating trends; however, if we can capture flavour, digitally or through flavour encapsulation, and apply it to bland, mass produced food (or bugs if you can stomach them), then flavour could be used as a bridge between the old foods that we are accustomed to, and the new foods that can be grown to survive extreme environments, creating new and exciting flavour combinations in the process.Oakland Raiders coach Dennis Allen was asked Thursday at the NFL combine in Indianapolis if his 2014 starting quarterback was already on Oakland’s roster.
Keep in mind, the Raiders currently have Terrelle Pryor, who started nine games last season, Matt McGloin, who started six, and veteran Trent Edwards, who last started an NFL game in 2010, under contract.
Allen’s response? “I don’t know the answer to that yet, you know what I mean? I think that’s obviously a position we’re going to look at to try to improve as well as any other position. But that’s obviously a position we have to [evaluate].
“The quarterback position is the backbone of your football team, and so we have to make sure that when we go out there this year that we’ve put ourselves in the best position to have success with the quarterback position.”
Then after reading between the lines and going over the silver and black tea leaves, the answer would be … no.
Which of course, brings us to this year’s crop of quarterbacks. You’ve got the big guns in Louisville’s Teddy Bridgewater and Central Florida’s Blake Bortles, the intriguing guys in Fresno State’s Derek Carr and Alabama’s AJ McCarron and, of course, the biggest and most intriguing figure of all in the polarizing Johnny Manziel, by way of Texas A&M.
Now, the fact that Allen is a Texas A&M alum should give the Raiders a leg up in scouting Manziel to see if he’s worth the hype, let alone the No. 5 overall pick, right?
Yes, Allen was asked about his fellow Aggie.
“Obviously, he’s accomplished a lot at the collegiate level and has been a very good football player, being the first freshman to win the Heisman Trophy,” Allen said. “I think that speaks in and of itself about how good a football player he is, so I think he’s a very talented football player. I think he is a multi-dimensional football player. I think he’s able to throw the ball. I think he’s able to throw the ball from the pocket, but he’s also able to create things with his feet.
“As we get more into the evaluation process, I think he’ll be a fun guy to really evaluate.”My name is Cameron and I am here to admit today that I used to think this game was terrible. Yes, it’s true and I’m incredibly ashamed of myself. I am very sorry.
I remember buying it shortly after it came out for my trusty Master System (I was a huge fan of the original Wonderboy and Wonderboy in Monster Land) and I just did not get it at all. I couldn’t get past the first few rooms and it was all too hard and weird and am I a lizard? What?
Turns out I completely missed the whole “pause the game to get to the menu where I could do things” bit because who reads manuals? Not me!
I ended up taking it back to the store I got it from and claimed the cartridge didn’t work and I swapped it for Chase HQ. Don’t get me wrong Chase HQ is great and all but man I am an idiot.We’re pleased to announce the release of Tumult Hype 2.0 and the debut of a brand new iOS app, Hype Reflect! Tumult Hype is our award-winning HTML5 animation builder for OS X which is widely used by leading designers for projects such as infographics, portfolios, children’s books, and lots more. Its lightweight runtime makes it fast on mobile and ideal for ads.
Tumult Hype 2.0
Tumult Hype 2.0 is a major update with powerful new creative capabilities. This update contains many frequently requested features, including:
Instant iOS previews Audio actions Curved motion paths Web fonts Swipe and touch events Mobile options Enhanced Preview toolbar button Search engine visibility Ellipse and Rounded Rectangle shapes OS X technology adoption
Read more about what’s new in Tumult Hype 2.0 and watch our video tour of the new features:
50% off until September 10th!
Tumult Hype 2.0 is a paid upgrade and installed as a separate application. Because we want to get it into everyone’s hands, until September 10th we’re offering Tumult Hype 2.0 at an upgrade price of only $29.99 USD — a 50% discount (conversion rates may apply).
Purchase from the Mac App Store or the Tumult Store
Download the 14-day fully-functional trial
We’re also offering a free upgrade to anyone who purchased Tumult Hype 1.x after July 20th; please see the purchasing options page for more information.
Hype Reflect for iOS, the Perfect Companion for Tumult Hype 2.0
While creating Hype documents, a pain point you’ve likely hit is quickly and accurately previewing your creations on the iPhone and iPad. Today, we’re introducing Hype Reflect for iOS to solve this problem.
Using Hype Reflect’s Instant Preview mode, you can send documents directly to your device from Hype’s preview toolbar button to see how your creation plays. After you’ve previewed a document, you can enter Mirror Mode to see all changes made on the desktop (such as positioning, colors, and text metrics) reflected instantaneously on the device.
Read more about Hype Reflect or download it free from the iOS app store.
We look forward to seeing what you create with Tumult Hype 2.0 and Hype Reflect!
Sincerely,Last month, I listened as former President Bill Clinton delivered the inaugural lecture for the Hume-O’Neill Chair in Peace Studies at the University of Ulster Magee Campus in Derry, Northern Ireland. Clinton’s address conveyed a simple, yet powerful, message: Northern Ireland has made enormous strides in the peace and reconciliation process, but the job is still not finished.
These words not only resonated throughout Northern Ireland, they have taken on considerable meaning for the United States — and specifically for the City of Boston.
Boston College is immersed in a complex legal battle with the British government over the Belfast Tapes, an academic oral history project that has been tragically compromised as a result of Northern Irish political infighting and a misguided hunt for criminal justice.
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Boston College commenced the Belfast Tapes project in 2001, appointing former IRA volunteer and prisoner Anthony McIntyre as the interviewer and Ed Moloney, a journalist with deep ties to both sides of the conflict, as the supervisor. With the Belfast Tapes, Boston College sought to intertwine modern academia and the college’s Irish roots to document the Troubles and the peace process of Northern Ireland.
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which incumbent Mr McCluskey - a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn - is being challenged by Gerard Coyne.
The ballot papers for the contest will be sent out later this week, with the result to be announced next month.
Mr McDonnell dismissed talk of any kind of plot to take control of the party, insisting "this is not civil war". "It is all about Tom and the internal battle that he is trying to wage within Unite," he said.
'Democratic deficit'
Currently, a candidate must obtain the support of 15% of Labour MPs and MEPs in order to stand - a threshold a new left-wing contender is unlikely to be able to meet.
Christine Shawcroft, a member of Momentum who sits on the party's National Executive Council, said Labour's MPs could not have a "veto" on the wishes of the membership when the time came to electing Mr Corbyn's successor.
"We have a mass membership now and it wants its voice to be heard," she told Today. "There is a democratic deficit in the Labour Party where the structures we have do not reflect the support for Jeremy Corbyn that has been shown by the mass of the members".
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Len McCluskey (right) is facing a challenge to his leadership of Labour's largest financial backer
Analysis by political correspondent Iain Watson
Tom Watson did not mince his words when he spoke to me on Monday morning.
But was he really more concerned about the future of his party - or the future of his union, the now-inappropriately named Unite? Both are, in fact, currently inextricably linked.
Mr Watson had been personally close to the union's general secretary Len McCluskey - they are former flatmates.
But relations deteriorated when Labour's deputy leader failed to convince Mr McCluskey to persuade Jeremy Corbyn to agree a date when he would stand down as party leader last summer, after eight out of 10 of his MPs declared no confidence in him.
So there is now political and personal animosity.
Mr Watson, she suggested, was "rather right-wing" and wanted to return to a "command and control" system for running the party based on a "Blairite model". She rejected suggestions Momentum was a hard-left entryist organisation trying to infiltrate Labour, describing the terms as "silly labels".
"Jon said nothing that was at all controversial, but I think this is a concerted attempt to interfere in the internal election in Unite for general secretary, which is really shocking."
She added: "The offer is always open for any organisation, any trade union, to affiliate (to Momentum). They are welcome to do so. It is not a question of disaffiliating from the Labour Party and affiliating to Momentum instead."
Momentum sources pointed out that the TSSA union is already affiliated to Momentum, adding that there have been no "significant conversations" with Unite about future funding.
'Entirely inaccurate'
The contest between Mr McCluskey and Mr Coyne, Unite's West Midlands organiser who has said the union needs to meddle less in internal Labour politics, is being seen as a proxy battle for control of the Labour movement. Most Unite branches have backed Mr McCluskey in his bid to be re-elected.
Unite said Mr Watson's comments were "entirely inaccurate" and accused him of trying to "interfere" in the election.
"As Unite has made it clear it is exclusively for our executive council to determine which organisations we affiliate to," said acting general secretary Gail Cartmail. "There are no plans for Unite to affiliate to Momentum."
She added: "Mr Watson is a Unite member with a right to a vote and a view. But he should remember that, first, he is deputy leader of the Labour party with the obligations that this senior post imposes, and second that Unite is not a subsidiary of any political organisation."
But Mr Coyne countered: "To say there are no plans over the next month is somewhat disingenuous in reality because it clearly is John Lansman's belief that Len McCluskey will support Momentum."Modest Mouse’s first record came out 20 years ago, and, while those two decades have been marked by some long quiet periods—including the eight years between last year’s Strangers To Ourselves and its predecessor—the band has produced a remarkably full discography. There are B-side collections and EPs and special editions, and then there are the albums themselves, which are often long, rambling affairs, full of sinewy tracks and Isaac Brock’s folksy lyrics, full of asides and strange recurring motifs.
They are also full of Brock yelping the word “well” a lot—you can sort of hear it in your head now, can’t you?—heading into a new verse as the band loops back around, gaining ever more steam. And, hell, this dude yelps “well!” all the goddamn time, it turns out. For proof:
It’s amazing how consistent his delivery is of this one word, as if it were a vocal tic or a literary fixation. In its almost subconscious repetition across decades, it sort of recalls Owen Wilson’s career-spanning penchant for muttering, “Wow.”
Modest Mouse is apparently hard at work on a second part to last year’s album, and also probably innovating new ways to sing “Well!” before launching into another riotous verse.It’s going to be great seeing everyone again as well as some new faces!
Since our last meetup, Gamescom has come and gone. On show was the Oculus HD prototype (some are saying that the screen still needs to be higher res interestingly) and several competing devices are soon to launch.
The next Meetup will still be an occasion to socialise and do some networking but we have a few talks in place:
Wingsuit VR!
Unfortunately we could not get it set up in time for the last meetup but we will be presenting the skydiving/wingsuit sim on Oculus for the very first time. Commissioned by Nissan to promote their Juke car, the out-of-home experience was originally presented on the Sony HMZ – it’s now even more immersive on the Oculus Rift as you use your arms to control your fall! Check out the video of the original installation below.
http://vimeo.com/46292828 Kevin Williams – “The Attraction of Immersion”
Kevin Stinger is a leading expert in VR and has been in the business right from the start.
He now runs the Digital Out of Home Association (http://www.dna-association.com) and covers VR news for his own online journal – The Stinger Report (http://www.thestingerreport.com/).
His presentation will include:
The story of immersive entertainment in the public-space
The emergence of VR applications in entertainment
Modern applications of VR and immersive entertainment
Exclusive presentation from Mocap Games!
I have been looking forward to trying this myself for a while now and really pleased that Jake Slack from Mocap Games will be bringing the ‘world’s first VR motion game’ to the Inition basement!
This takes the experience of the Oculus Rift to a whoooooole new level!
Also, Jake will be presenting this own game – Private Eye, which he entered into the recent Oculus Rift VR Jam. Check out the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=neg0Wx7Mb74 WizDish – Omni-directional motion
How will we move laterally in virtual environments Julian Williams, inventor of the WizDish (http://www.wizdish.com/) will be giving people demos of a platform that allows you to walk in 360 degree directions from one spot.
You will have a chance to ‘walk’ though a stunning outdoor environment built by TecStar Games facing a large stereoscopic screen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLYPVdy59HYThe request was put to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson three days ago
DONALD Trump has asked Britain to send Winston Churchill’s bust back to the White House so he can return it to the Oval Office, The Sun can reveal.
The request was put to Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson by the President Elect’s senior advisers during talks in New York three days ago.
EPA Trump has asked for the bust to be returned
Last night, Downing Street confirmed that Theresa May has agreed to a loan of the famous sculpture again.
The gesture marks a diplomatic coup for the PM in her bid to win influence over the unpredictable new US leader.
A bitter row over the bust’s location has raged for seven years since outgoing President Barack Obama replaced the wartime leader’s image with one of Martin Luther King in 2009.
pixel GRG This is a win for Theresa May over Nigel Farage who has already met with Donald Trump
Since then, it has been kept at the British Embassy in Washington DC.
Trump’s closest advisers Jared Kushner and Steven Bannon relayed the request for the bust’s return after revealing their boss was a big fan of the legendary Tory, and had even read Boris’s biography of him.
A No10 spokesman told The Sun last night: “The Prime Minister is happy to loan the Churchill bust to the White House and will be delighted to view it on display when she visits this Spring”.
AP:Associated Press Barack Obama replaced the Churchill bust with one of Martin Luther King
The bust – by British artist Sir Jacob Epstein – was originally presented to George W. Bush in July 2001 and stayed in his office through out his presidency.
The idea of returning it to the Oval Office was first suggested to the property billionaire by ex-UKIP boss Nigel Farage in November last year, when he became the first British politician to visit him after the US election.
Boris renewed the controversy during the EU referendum campaign with a stinging attack on Mr Obama.
Hitting back at the US leader’s backing for the Remain campaign, Mr Johnson said the bust’s removal was evidence of his “ancestral dislike of the British Empire”.
But the controversy deepened when Mr Obama then insisted he kept a second identical sculpture of Churchill in his White House private quarters, declaring “I love the guy”.
Epa Bush was presented with the bust in 2001
Churchill, who had an American mother, is the only person ever to be granted an honorary US passport.
Mr Trump enters the White House in 10 days time when he is formally inaugurated on January 20.
Reporting on his US trip to the Commons, Boris told MPs yesterday he had been “frank” over major policy disagreements such as Russia and Iran.
EPA Trump will take office on January 20
Quizzed on what effect that will have, he replied: “Wait and see”.
But he also insisted his conversations with Trump’s aides had been “extremely productive”, adding: “They want a deal and they want it fast”.Rising Stars night is something of a consolation all-star game for teams that don't have real all-stars (yet). With Michael Carter-Williams sitting out tomorrow night's skills challenge, tonight was the only representation the Sixers had. Unfortunately, due to a lack of time together and the combined efforts of every guard the U.S. team had, Covington and Noel had little to work with.
Covington finished with just two points (on six shots) and only one shot attempt where there was an assist opportunity (he missed the three). Noel finished with four points (on five shots) and four rebounds. Both played limited minutes, and they only shared the floor for about a minute of game time. The US guards (especially Victor Oladipo) did very little passing, which didn't mesh well with the off-ball games of the two Sixers.
The standard devolving of the rookie-sophomore game never happened, because the players were trying too hard and the score stayed close throughout. The World's Best beat America's 121-112.
Either due to the format - which pitted Americans against international stars, or due to the new players in the game, there was more of an emphasis on defense than normal, and Noel did shine on that end (though not as much as his counterpart, Rudy Gobert). Giannis Antetokounmpo (who, for what it's worth, the Sixers decided not to draft twice) started off playing hard on both ends, and that began to rub off on everyone.
Covington and Noel got involved in the defense initiative though. Typical with his reach-happy tendencies, Covington recorded four steals in his 16+ minutes of game time. Noel recorded two blocks while being the only of the two American centers who did anything to dissuade a World player from getting into the lane.
Unfortunately for Nerlens, his performance might only be remembered for this rejection on his final shot attempt from Gobert, who really should have been named MVP over eventual winner and number-one-in-my-heart Andrew Wiggins. (Vine via Jazz writer Andy Bailey)
Yeah, so it wasn't a great night all in all for the Sixers, but it'll get better, especially if Sunday eventually becomes the marquis all-star weekend event for our fans.Music Theory – 7th Chords
Most of jazz uses 4 note chords that are commonly called “7th chords.” In order to spell these we are simply going to add a 4th note to the triads we’ve already figured out how to spell. Let’s start again with the Major family – the Major 7th chord.
Major 7th Chord
We are just going to add the 7th note of the scale to the major triad to get the major 7th chord. Simple right? Our triad spelling was R35. So that makes our Major 7th chord spelling:
R357
Let’s use the key of D again:
D E F# G A B C#
Dmaj7 would be:
D F# A C#
R 3 5 7
That’s it!
Dominant 7 Chord
The next chord we’ll create is the dominant 7th chord. This chord is very common both in jazz and pop. The spelling is the same as the major 7th but with a lowered 7th. So it will be:
R 3 5 b7
So D7 is:
D F# A C
R 3 5 b7
Minor 7 Chord
The minor 7 chord is simply a Dominant 7 chord with a lowered 3rd. The spelling is:
R b3 5 b7
Dmin7 is:
D F A C
R b3 5 b7
Minor 7b5 (Half Diminished)
The half diminished chord is a less common chord, but still comes up a lot in jazz. It’s simply a minor 7 chord with a lowered 5th. The name ‘half diminished’ comes from the triad – diminished – but the 7th is a lowered 7th (as opposed to a diminished 7th interval). They commonly come up in the ii-V-i in a minor key as the ii chord.
The spelling is:
R b3 b5 b7
The Dmin7b5 chord is:
D F Ab C
R b3 b5 b7
Diminished 7 Chord (Fully Diminished 7th)
The Diminished chord is another somewhat rare chord. In jazz it’s most often heard as part of a Dominant 7b9 chord. It’s rarely heard in pop or country music. They come up now and then in blues. The spelling of this chord can be a bit confusing though.
R b3 b5 bb7
So they are the same as a half diminished chord but with a double flatted 7th. So the 7th degree has to be lowered 2 half steps. The part of this that gets tricky is that they are still the same LETTER as the original 7th. So in D our 7 was C#. If we lower that 2 half steps we end up with Cb, which is the same as B. The technical name still has to be Cb because the 7th has to some type of C.
Do7 is:
D F Ab Cb
R b3 b5 bb7
Minor Major 7
Minor and Major, huh?! Ok, this one is really a combination of the Minor triad with the major 7th. It’s really only heard as a ‘tonic minor’ – or as the i chord in a minor key. These hardly come up in pop or country music, though they are somewhat common in jazz. The spelling is simple, but the chord is a little strange.
R b3 5 7
DminMaj7 is:
D F A C#
R b3 5 7
Diatonic 7th Chords
That’s how you spell all the 7th chords on their own. These also have a pattern for how they occur in the keys. When we came up with the diatonic triads, we just used every other note. If we add another pitch to that we end up with (in Eb):
D Eb F G Ab Bb C
Bb C D Eb F G Ab
G Ab Bb C D Eb F
Eb F G Ab Bb C D
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Again, analyzing these all compared to the numbers above, we would end up with this pattern:
Maj7 Min7 Min7 Maj7 Dom7 Min7 Half Diminished
In the key of Eb then,
Ebmaj7 Fmin7 Gmin7 Abmaj7 Bb7 Cmin7 Dmin7b5
This pattern holds up in every key, so again we can easily figure out all of the diatonic 7th chords very quickly.
That does it for my music theory basics series! Make sure to check out the others in the series too:
Part 1-Major Scales | Part 2-Key Signatures and Cycle of Fourths | Part 3-Triads
(Photo Credit: Surat Lozowick)
RelatedItalian senator thinks Paulo Dybala could be useful to solve North Korea crisis
Italian senator Antonio Razzi has a bizarre idea on how to solve the North Korea crisis. The right-wing senator (he is a politician of Forza Italia, the party Silvio Berlusconi leads) is convinced that Juventus star Paulo Dybala could help the International community to solve one of the biggest threats of our recent times.
Razzi has travelled several times in North Korea and ensures he is a very close friend of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.
“He [Kim Jong-Us Un is very passionate about sports and music, that’s why I’m trying to get Dybala involved”, Sen. Razzi told Radio Cusano Campus.
“I want to bring Paulo Dybala to North Korea, and I’m also trying with [Italian pop group] Il Volo
“I know that Kim Jong- “If I take Dybala there, there will be 200,000 people in the stadium and they’d have to put up big screens too. It would be a national party.”For the last few days a debate has rolled along between the Sizers and the Deformers. It has carried on in the JIRA. So, it is essentially invisible except to those following it. I’ve been reading the arguments to see what people think and from those that don’t react but actually think: why.
Single Base Deformer Side
Max Graf probably represents the Deformers best and does it rationally. You may remember he was instrumental in creating funding for the Deformer project. His vision for the Deformer was for it to allow designers to make one size of mesh clothes and have that size fit all sizes and shapes of avatar. While he understands there will be stretching, he believes it will be at an acceptable level. The effort to deal with numerous sizes for such a small benefit in texture quality seems disproportionate in Max’s thinking.
Max considers the standard sizing a promotional effort to sell mesh clothes that don’t fit. I suspect most of us know getting mesh clothes that fit right now is a PITA. Max’s belief is standard sizing should go away and the Deformer will make a one size fit all world, which would be ideal. He believes his experience shows the deformer works perfectly using the Default Shape base size.
From reading what Max has written at plurk (Maxwell Graf – see Gianna’s Plurk and EmmaG’s) I think it is clear he believes adding sizes to the Deformer by making them an integral part of the deformer will force all into using them. I don’t see that.
The bottom line is this: if a creator wants to use multiple sizes for items, that’s fine. No one should say they couldn’t. However, making that a permanent and integrated part of the deformer feature, so it is forced on everyone, is a mistake.
Max makes an interesting point about Avatar 2.0. He points out that in several places conversation is turning toward creating a better avatar. He feels that as pressure mounts to make the avatar work better with the Deformer the Lab will be pressed into providing a better avatar. I know that hope and working with the avatar for the last few days I know some of the problems it has are VERY annoying.
Max thinks the Lab is working toward Avatar 2.0. I have to disagree because the Lindens I talk to say that is not so. Oz Linden when specifically asked says not so, no project in motion. Any Avatar 2.0 or improvements will have to come from the community.
That doesn’t mean the 4 Lindens I talked to know everything happening in the Lab. But, I suspect if the Avatar were being worked on they would know. So, either Max’s or my idea of being worked on is different or it just isn’t so.
Max believes if we move toward a Deformer that will use alternate base shapes there will be no need to create a better avatar and pressure on the Lab will drop off. The pressure could drop off. I just don’t see it being that great now. So, a change from little to none going to near nothing doesn’t seem significant. But, I’m pretty sure we have NO WAY to know how much pressure there is or isn’t to change the avatar.
As the debate gets less civil the idea is put forth: designers should design for the problems of texture stretching and mesh distortion and live with the Single Size Deformer. Personally I’m not sure that is possible. I have no doubt a few people can figure it out. But, I think this adds complication while claiming to reduce complication from dealing with multiple sizes. Until one is designing mesh clothes I doubt one has enough information to make this call either way. Then it becomes a matter of what one is personally capable of doing.
Sizers or Multi-Base Side
On the other side we have Elie Spot (SL) AKA EmmaG (Plurk see 5/21) promoting the idea that standard sizes are a useable work-around now and would be a good thing for a set of alternative base shapes. Elie expects some type of flexibility for the base shapes to be added to the Deformer.
Elie believes if the Deformer were to use multiple base shapes and the current standard shapes were used then the clothes being use now would fit well and look good, meaning minimal stretch and distortion. If we get a means to do in-world conversions of existing mesh then this would be a major time and cost saver.
In one post in the JIRA Elie explains her view. To fill in a bit, you need to know that Minnu Palen & Thora Charron (of LeLutka), Siddean Munro (of SLink), Elie & Anouk Spot (of Mon Tissu) and Jaden Celoe & Shay Sibrian (of Celoe) worked to find the average shapes in use in Second Life. The result is the set of standard sizes provided for free in the Market Place. (MP Standard Size Package)
Elie notes that smaller, larger, and more curvy avatars do not fit the standard shapes. I know that. My butt and breasts are too small for large and too big for medium. Like many others I don’t plan to change my shape to fit a dress, even if it is easier in SL than RL.
Elie does not like the texture distortion she sees using the Deformer which uses the current SL Default Shape. Look at Mesh Deformer 0.2 Update to see what you think. I was playing with Deformer 0.2 at the time. Before the Deformer was out in Beta I wrote about the problem concerning texture stretching: #SL Mesh and the Button Problem. You’ll have to decide if the stretching and distortion is a problem for you.
A long with texture distortions another concern is actual mesh distortions.
In the opening image above and in the image immediately above you can see the mesh breaking down when using Deformer 0.2. I have not tried with Deformer 0.3 yet. I think most of the changes between 0.2 and 0.3 are performance changes. The closer the base shape used by the designer is to your actual shape, the smaller this type of distortion will be. Check out MetaReality’s recent podcast where Karl Stiefvater discusses it. I have a summary and time mark index to the audio in Mesh Deformer Update from MetaReality.
Elie wants to see the Deformer support selectable base shapes. She is promoting adding the current 5 Standard Sizes as alternate base shapes for the Deformer. Her belief is that will provide us the best possible result. She believes curvier avatars and large avatars are not going to be happy with the distortion that occurs.
She also wants an in-world converter. If you don’t know, mesh clothes that are to use the Deformer must be uploaded with the Deformer Project viewer so the Deform Flag is set. Otherwise the Deformer ignores it. If it didn’t, then Deformer would try to deform things never intended to be deformed.
All mesh previously uploaded is missing the flag. All mesh missing the flag is NOT deformed. Elie would like to see in-world conversion possible. That task is likely to run into Permissions problems. The way the asset system works is each items has a UUID (Unique Universal ID). Change the object and the system sees it as a new object and gives it a new UUID, essentially making a copy it and changing the copy. So, changing the flag will necessitate making a new object or basically copying it. So, it may be possible for Copy-Mod-OK items.
A Thing About Standard Sizes
You may be one of the people that participated in the survey to come up with the Standard Sizes. I suspect most of us did not. No one has said what the sample size was, how many participated? But, even if 100% of Second Life participated, the sizes are still averages. I think that just guarantees that they will fit no one.
Misleading Market Hype
The standard sizes were made up for a reason and the creators of the system did it as well as they could. As things are now I don’t know a better way, thus the importance of and the excitement about the Deformer.
But… not all the people saying they are building for the Standard Sizes are. In a post Innula Zenovka points out what I have observed. Some designers’ clothes said to be a ‘standard size’ fit me pretty well. Other designers making the same claim have clothes that don’t fit.
This suggests truth in advertising in Second Life is as questionable as it is in RL. So, we can’t blame all the poorly fitting Standard Sized clothes on the standard. Much of the problem is in how people attempt to implement it. I’m hoping my tutorial mitigates some of those problems.
Like this: Like Loading...In the mid-’90s, there was a surprising rise of TV shows in the network syndication space, spurred by the success of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess (the latter of which, at least, is a genuinely fun show).
These shows — basically none of which you will remember, so I won’t make a big list of them — were cheap. They had to be produced quickly and at little expense because the companies creating them were primarily making money from selling them to local TV stations, which would stick them on the air in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and hope people would be too tired to change the channel. You’d watch some low-budget fantasy or sci-fi adventure and wonder how it ended up on the air.
Rating vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
The production values on these shows were often quite low, even when compared to something like Xena. The sets and costumes and effects were glaringly fake, and the film stock was often flat, with poor lighting only serving to make everything feel as if it had been filmed on the set of The Price Is Right between takes.
The acting was just as flat, from performers who clearly knew this wasn’t their first choice of roles and also clearly knew the show probably wouldn’t be around very long. Occasionally, a performer would spark, but the Lucy Lawlesses of the world — actors who could find a way to have fun no matter how cheesy the material — were few and far between, and whoever was directing these programs didn’t particularly care to force them to engage. Scenes would often feature bland, affectless work from performers who seemed as if they’d rather be anywhere else.
And the writing! The writing was almost always riddled with clichés and characters saying exactly what they were thinking or feeling. There was only telling; very little showing. Scripts would repeat the same basic points, over and over, as if viewers were unable to understand the point without having their hand not just held, but squeezed so tightly that all circulation to their fingers was cut off.
These shows were bad, but at least nobody really spent too much money on them. Making a TV show that fits the description above and then trying to tie it to a massive cinematic superhero franchise that dominates our popular culture — while also spending lots and lots of cash to create, say, a giant computer-animated bulldog who interacts with the characters (but whom you shuttle offscreen as quickly as possible in order to save some money), well, that would be a really stupid thing to do, wouldn’t it?
Marvel’s Inhumans debuts tonight on ABC at 8 pm Eastern. Never say I didn’t warn you. (The half-star rating is for the giant bulldog, Lockjaw. Love that dog.)Ernie Cline’s 2011 debut novel Ready Player One is being made into a blockbuster movie thanks to Steven Spielberg, but it looks like Cline might be bringing readers back to the OASIS for another adventure. During a Facebook Live event in which Cline debuted the film’s second trailer, he confirmed that he was working on a sequel to the book.
Set in a massive virtual reality world called OASIS, Ready Player One follows Wade Watts, a teenager who spends his time searching for three hidden Easter eggs left behind by the system’s founder. Aided by fellow hunters such as Art3mis, they have to race against a massive corporation that wants control of OASIS. In the years since it was published, the book has become popular read for genre fans.
Cline’s last novel was 2015’s Armada, another story stuffed with Easter eggs about gaming and 1980s science fiction movies, but it wasn’t connected to his first. Cline noted in 2015 that he had written a couple of outlines for a potential sequel, but hadn’t started writing the book at that point. Later that year, he signed a massive deal for a new novel with Crown Publishing, although there were no details about what the book would be about, other than that it would be in the “sci-fi genre.”
During today’s livestream (at the 27:06 mark), he was asked if it was true that he was writing a sequel. “It’s true. I can’t talk about it too much, but there’s no better inspiration for a writer [than] to return to a world they’ve already worked on when they’re watching Steven Spielberg bring that world to life.” Cline didn’t reveal any other details about what the book would be about or when it would come out, other than to say that he had the chance to bounce some ideas off of Spielberg.The chief secretary of the Uttar Pradesh government, Rahul Bhatnagar, on Thursday told the Allahabad High Court that Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath cannot be prosecuted in the 2007 Gorakhpur riots case. Adityanath was accused of making a hate speech during that time.
As per an NDTV report, Bhatnagar told the court that a forensic examination of a CD of the alleged hate speech by Yogi Adityanath was found to be tampered.
Earlier, the Allahabad High Court had summoned Bhatnagar, directing him to bring along all documents relating to the case.
The order was passed on a petition filed by Parvez Parwaz, the complainant in the FIR that was lodged at Cantt police station of Gorakhpur in connection with the riots, and Asad Hayat, a witness in the case.
In the petition, apprehensions were raised that the CB- CID, which is an arm of the state police and at present probing the riots, may not conduct an impartial inquiry and a prayer was made that directions be issued for handing over the investigation to an independent agency.
Also read Perform or Retire: CM Yogi Adityanath gets tough on incompetent workers above 50
Significantly, on a previous date of hearing in the matter, the petitioners' counsel S F A Naqvi had raised doubts over the CB-CID's ability to conduct a proper inquiry as "the person against whom sanction for prosecution has been granted by the state government has himself become the head of the state".
Naqvi had made the submission in response to an affidavit filed by the CB-CID wherein it had been stated that the state government had granted sanction, under Section 153A of the Indian Penal Code (inciting communal violence), to prosecute all those who have been named in the FIR including Yogi, the then Gorakhpur Mayor Anju Chaudhary and local BJP MLA Radha Mohan Das Agarwal.
With PTI Inputs« Friday Morning News Dump | Main | Upton vs. Landrieu » Has Obama Invited the Supreme Court to Revisit His Obamacare Tax? Interesting post from Megan McArdle. Early in the post, she discusses Obama's metric for counting "enrollees.". There has been a sort of Talmudic debate over the meaning of the word enroll -- should we count folks who had chosen a plan and asked to be invoiced, or should we count only those who paid? Some of the people who enroll will not actually end up paying their premium. However, because premiums for January plans arent due until December, counting only those who have already mailed in their check or money order will substantially undercount those who will end up enrolling. Myself, I leaned toward counting those who have enrolled in a plan and requested an invoice for payment. But there were decent arguments on both sides. The Barack Obama administration resolved this debate by choosing a third metric: They counted everyone who had put a policy in their online shopping cart, even if they hadnt actually gone ahead and signed up. By this logic, I am the proud owner of 28 items in my Amazon.com cart, including a hot pink laptop case and a fridge mount for an iPad model I dont even own. But the most important part is this: The administration is not changing the rules, just declining to enforce them against the insurers. This is becoming a pattern: Obamas position on the law seems to be that its his law, and therefore the law is whatever he and his appointees say it is. Thats dangerous for all sorts of reasons, not least because it makes them vulnerable to court action. Presumably they will also not enforce the mandate against people who have grandfathered plans. But that raises an interesting legal issue. Remember that in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that the mandate was a tax. And as a lawyer of my acquaintance points out, taxes have to be enforced uniformly; the Internal Revenue Service can pick and choose who it audits, but it cannot pick and choose who has to obey the law. If it declines to enforce the mandate against grandfathered consumers, it's conceivably opening itself up to a bunch of legal challenges. There is an old saying that Supreme Court justices are not in fact apolitical actors at all, but are, of course, intensely political people sensitive to the same sorts of things as any other politician, such as politicians: "The Supreme Court reads the election returns too." It is well known that Chief Justice Roberts reversed his legal opinion on Obamacare, that it was unconstitutional, to offer a political opinion, that it was a tax and thus constitutional, in order to save the law. And he did this for political considerations, to preserve the public's good-will towards the Court and maintain its image of nonpartisanship. Now, he did so even when Obamacare was already unpopular. But Historic President and all that. But note, now, how much the political situation has changed. And consider how much he might like to have a second shot at this opinion. And Obama has given him a pretext to write a new opinion. The Court would never simply reverse itself in a year. But if the facts have sufficiently changed, and if Obama is interpreting his "tax" in a lawless way, claiming it only applies to groups which aren't becoming a political headache.... That gives Roberts the cover to say not "I was wrong" (which he won't say) but "I was right, and as I said previously this is a tax, and taxes must be levied even-handedly, and therefore this law must be struck for failure of the executive to apply it equally to all citizens." It's no slam-dunk, I know. And the usual judicial response to a failure to enforce a law even-handedly is to demand the executive enforce it even-handedly, not to strike down the law altogether. But might as well take the shot and see what happens.
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Recent Comments Recent Entries Search Polls! Polls! Polls! Frequently Asked Questions The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick Top Top Tens Greatest HitjobsOrder guides are out, which means we’ve got lots of news to share. There have been a number of changes to the 2014 Corolla…but you’ll have to wait to find out about them.
New Trim Packages All Around
The 2014 Corolla will be offered in four basic trim levels – Base, LE, S, and Eco. With the exception of the “base” model, these trims will come in a standard, “Premium” and “Deluxe” configuration, with the “Premium” being the top of the line option.
The “Eco” grade models will all include a “new” Valvematic engine (read more below).
The SE trim level is discontinued.
New Engine and Transmissions
|
accumulating the league’s third highest yardage total (4,917). Cousins and the Redskins’ offensive staff will now be highly dependent upon Pryor to sustain that level of success, by cushioning an inevitable impact that will result from the collective departure of 2016 starters DeSean Jackson and Pierre Garcon. Both exceeded 1,000 yards, while combining for 135 catches and seven touchdowns last season.
Pryor will share opportunities with incumbent weaponsandAlong with 2016 first roundwho should also become a factor in the offense once his protracted recovery from last year’s Achilles issue has concluded. Crowder will turn 24 this summer, and should continue his emergence as a reliable, productive weapon. But his output will not impede Pryor from providing the Redskins and his owners with a successful season. Reed can dominate defenders when he is in the lineup, but has yet to remain in the field for 16 games during his first four seasons with the team. Meanwhile, Doctson is currently the proverbial wild card. As we only have impressive highlights from his time at TCU, and little else to evaluate concerning his ability to produce at the NFL level. Other candidates to pilfer targets include 33-year oldwho is generally more dangerous in 2-TE sets than when Reed is absent from the lineup, and, who is currently the primary receiving weapon among Washington’s stable of running backs (62 targets/49 receptions in 2016).
Even though targets will be distributed among this cluster of options, Pryor should consistently perform as an integral component within the Redskin passing game. Which will enable him to provide favorable numbers throughout the season. Crowder and Reed will accumulate a sufficient number of receptions to maintain their viability, yet their presence did not prohibit Garcon and Jackson from commandeering a sizable percentage of opportunities during their tenure with Washington. As they combined for 216 targets last season, which was just over 35% of the team’s total. This, after Cousins attempted to locate the tandem on 34% of his throws in 2015. Plus, each member of the foursome procured double-digit Red Zone targets in 2016. Pryor’s unique skill set should allow him to siphon a significant amount of the passes that can no longer be garnered by Garcon and Jackson. Particularly when smaller defensive backs are hampered by his significant height advantage.
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Gridiron Experts Podcast one-year deal will enable him to test the market yet again in 2018. If he delivers high-quality production as a receiver for a second consecutive year, then he could secure a long-term contract with the Redskins or another franchise that needs to fortify its wide receiving position. This scenario seems likely as he will turn 28 in June, and his capabilities as an athlete should remain firmly intact. Plus, his achievements in just the first year as a full-time wide receiver, bode well for his chances of sustaining WR2 status, and even enhancing his numbers this season. Also, the arm of Cousins will be Washington’s preferred weapon of choice when attacking opposing defenses, making it extremely beneficial for Pryor to have Cousins launching passes in his direction. Not only for his chances of attaining a lucrative deal, but also for owners who select him during their draft process.
As with every fantasy forecast that is generated at this point of the offseason, many variables including the NFL draft and subsequent free agency transactions can impact the accuracy of any final prediction. But as Washington’s roster is currently constructed, Pryor should lead the Redskins in catches (75), and receiving yards (1,000+), while generating six touchdowns. Which should enable him to barely edge Crowder as the team’s most productive overall receiving weapon.VFT Racing have announced they will participate in MOTUL FIM Superbike World Championship rounds across the 2017 season in wild card appearances, aboard a Ducati machine. After testing over the winter, the team feel ready to build their pace back up in the competitive series, and hope to make a strong impact in their appearances this season.
Following injuries sustained last year, Italian rider Fabio Menghi was unable to compete in 2017 due to his fitness; he was forced to sit out of racing for eight months after he suffered a hip fracture, and three broken tendons in his shoulder. The news that he will compete in a handful of WorldSBK races this season comes as he hopes to make a full return for 2018.
"It was tough to get back on track after eight months without even riding on a simple scooter,” Explains Menghi. “These tests in Cartagena were important because they allowed me to begin to find the right motivation, and the feeling with the bike and circuit. I enjoyed it, the feeling is positive and I can already be competitive after a few laps. I am working closely with the guys in the gym in Rimini, so I feel ready to get back out there. I will be the only VFT Racing team rider for this season because both the team sponsors have faith in me, and I'd like to thank them for the support they give me."
Testing around Cartagena in Spain, the team are already starting to feel comfortable as they build on their return to the full time series.Prison Slang | Terms, Meanings & Popular Phrases
The following list of prison terms have been frequently mentioned in various books about prison, interviews, documentaries, news articles, guidebooks, and reports by correctional officials. If you know of any slang terms not in this list, feel free to contribute in the discussion are below.
Abolitionism
Criminological approach, movement, or theory that criticizes and seeks to reduce the use of punitive responses to crime. While the ideal type of abolitionism would seem by definition to be concerned with the abolition of incarceration, abolitionists argue that sanctions must only be avoided as much as possible. Abolitionism emphasizes the inclusion of the offender in conflict resolution processes, such as restorative justice and victim-offender mediation, instead of the exclusion of the offender in resolution processes, such as confinement or incapacitation. Abolitionists argue that punishment is only symbolic of justice, and does not represent adequate social processes that do contribute to justice. In contrast to the top-down form of justice, such as those decisions handed down by the court, abolitionism focuses on the bottom-up processes of justice, such as resolutions constructed directly between those involved in the criminal act, such as the victim, offender, and community. Abolitionism criticizes the language of crime, as well, arguing that because penal intervention stigmatizes, classifies, and labels individuals according the offences they have committed,
By viewing crimes as problematic events, one can provide the opportunity for a solution; In contrast, by viewing crimes as crimes, one can provide little opportunity for a solution except for that already stated as "solving" crime, punishment. At a more basic level, one can correct the behaviour (offence) but one cannot, in a democratic society committed to civil-rights, correct the person (offender). With the term "criminal," therefore, comes the inexorable ideology of traditional crime-prevention strategies.
Ace
Another word for "dollar"
Baboot
Inhaling heroin through a makeshift tube. (UK)
"Babydoll"
Texas Syndicate slang for a Mexican Mafia member
"Back Door"
Slang for a corrections officer who smuggles in contraband substances in exchange for monetary payment
"Back Door Parole"
To die in prison. i.e. he got the back door parole
Bacons
Child molesters.
Bag Head
Heroin addict (UK).
"Bang"
A fight to the death, or shoot to kill.
"Base-head"
Refers to a cocaine addict
"Beast"
Sex offender
"B.G."
"Baby gangster," or someone who has never shot another person.
"Bingo!"
Riot!
"Bird-Killers"
Hobbies or activities that kill time or help to whittle away one's prison sentence. For example, sewing, tattoos, drawing, etc..
"Blob"
Crips slang term for Blood members.
"Boned out"
Chickened out.
Boosters
Booster sessions are encouraged by case managers and treatment providers to be taken by inmates at particular risk to reoffend after release. They are part of a broad risk management strategy that includes the Stages of Change and Relapse Prevention. They are a component of the regular "aftercare" many recently released offenders, especially mentally-disordered offenders, should receive in order to reduce the likelihood of recidivism.
"Booty Bandits"
Incarcerated sexual predators who prey on weaker inmates, called "punks."
"Box Cars"
Two consecutive life terms (30-year sentences) (or 25 year sentences before parole eligibility in Canada).
"Breakdown"
Shotgun.
"Break it off"
Hand over your money.
"Bubba-Bus"
prison slang for a trip to a employment agency or recruiting agency for ex-convicts
"Bucket"
Another term for the "county jail."
"Bug"
Correctional staff member, such as a psychiatrist, who is deemed untrustworthy or unreliable. Inmates are cautious of "bugs" and will seldom ever mention other inmates to them.
"Bug Juice"
Term referring to depressant drugs, deleriants, or intoxicants.
"Building Tenders"
Inmates that were selected by guards to assist correctional staff. Tenders were meant to maintain order among the inmate population (often through the use of force), as well as serve as intelligence gatherers. Such people were also called "inmate guards." Up until 1983, building tenders outnumbered and successfully monitored the Texas Syndicate in Texas prisons. However, in 1980, Chief Federal District Judge William Wayne Justice ruled that such a system was unconstitutional, set after the prison lawsuit of Ruiz v. Estelle. Having relied on the system unconditionally for so long, Texas prisons were plunged into a crisis, and two and a half years after the building tender system was abolished, Texas Syndicate membership rose from 56 to 1,400.
"Bumpin' titties"
Fighting.
Bungee-Jumping
Hanging one's self
Bush
Ambush someone.
"Busted a cap"
Shot at another person.
"Buster"
Fraudulent gang member
Cadillac
Inmate dorm bed or single bunk.
"Cantones"
Gang term for prisons
"Carnal"
Term meaning "Brother," especially for Raza Unida
Catch cold
To get killed.
Cell-phone
Old nostalgic term referring to convicts calling home from prison. i.e.: using a "cell-phone" (calling home)
"Chaps"
Term used by the Surenos prison gang to refer to their rivals, the Nortenos or Nuestra Familia.
"Charco"
Texas Syndicate term for Corpus Christi, Texas.
"Chingasos"
Hispanic gang term for Fighting. Spanish for "Hard hits."
"Chiva"
Prison or gang term for Heroin.
"Chocolate Frog"
Informant
"Chomo" (or "Cho-Mo")
Child molester
"Chota"
Police officers, or prison guards
"Chuco"
Texas Syndicate term for El Paso, Texas.
"Click up"
Gang term referring to getting along well with a homeboy, not looking for trouble.
Clifford Olson
Canadian serial killer and sexual molester who lived in Burnaby, British Columbia (a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia) during the time of his murders. Olson was notorious for taking advantage of the RCMP (which patrols the greater Vancouver area and outlying districts), by negotiating a deal whereby he would receive $10,000 for each body he identified to homicide detectives. The money went to his wife and family, as convicted felons are not allowed to keep it serving their sentence.
Control Units
Control Units are sections of a maximum or supermaximum security facility, and most fully characterize the notion of incapacitative deterrence for the most dangerous and criminally-minded offenders in the prison syste. Control Units operate on a panoptical design; cells are arranged around a central security booth that lies on the ground floor. The booth's vantage point allows the constant observation of all cells at the same time through the use of security cameras and sound systems. Sometimes the security booths have computerized access to detailed case-reports of every prisoner in the unit. Prisoners are confined to their cells for 23 hours a day, and are allowed 1 hour of exercise in a tightly guarded and controlled exercise yard. For a more detailed account of Control Unit, see the section on supermax prisons.
"Crank"
Crank is one of the many street words for methamphetamine. "Cranking up," however, is a term sometimes used in prison to refer to the administration of a substance by hypodermic needle. The hypodermic needle itself is sometimes called a "spike."
"Croaker"
A doctor or physician, someone who diagnoses illness.
Criminogenic Need
An empirically-derived, changeable risk factor present in an offender upon assessment that is used for purposes of risk assessment, prison classification, prison re-classification, parole-risk, treatment, and release. Criminogenic needs are also known as "dynamic needs," and include two types: stable dynamic needs, such as long-standing attitudes conducive to violence, chronic alcoholism, or a sexual preference to small male children, and acute dynamic needs, such as stress, recent divorce, hostility, or acute symptoms of substance abuse.
Criminological Psychology
Custody Rating Scale
Canadian risk scale used by Correctional Services of Canada for purposes of intake assessment and classification to custody and security level. The Custody Rating Scale consists of a variety of empirically-derived risk factors, subdivided into three categories, institutional adjustment, public safety, and escape risk.
"Daddies"
Incarcerated sexual predators who prey on weaker inmates, called "punks."
Dancing on the blacktop
Getting stabbed.
"Deuce"
Prison slang for "two dollars." Also the name of a mainly-youth Aboriginal prison gang, Deuce, operating in the Canadian Prairies.
Developmental Criminology
"Diddler"
Another term for child molester or pedophile.
Differential Association
A learning theory of crime introduced by Edwin Sutherland. Involves the association with peers, social incentives, and role-modelling.
"Dissociation"
Prison slang for "solitary confinement."
"Doing the Dutch"
Prison term for committing suicide.
The Eagle Has Landed
Heroin has been successfully smuggled into prison.
Eastern Penitentiary Pennsylvania
Commonly known as "Cherry Hill," Pennsylvania's Eastern Penitentiary was founded in 1829 and was 141 years old when it closed in 1970. As the founding model of the Pennsylvania prison system, Cherry Hill confined inmates to a separate cell, where he or she ate, slept, worked, and repented alone. Religious penance was taught, and the virtues of thinking and acting righteously, forbidding evil thoughts, and praying frequently in their cells. In 1842, Charles Dickens observed prisoners in solitary confinement at Eastern Penitentiary, reflecting upon the inhuman character of the inmates and the paranoia of being constantly under surveillance, in his anti-American novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. (Grass S, 2000. " Narrating the cell: Dickens on the American prisons." Journal of English and Germanic Philology, v.99, no.1)
"Fence"
Prison slang that refers to someone who buys and sells stolen goods
"Flip-Flopping"
Engaging in homosexual acts with other prisoners (Also known as "Making Tortillas")
"Gaming"
Prison slang for trying to manipulate the system in one's favour. For example, enlisting the help of prisoners' rights groups in prison, over-reporting or falsely-reporting institutional assaults and victimizations, etc.
"Ghost-Train"
Prison slang referring to the act of repeatedly transferring a "problem-inmate" from facility-to-facility or unit-to-uint as a security precaution. i.e.: he's constantly getting put on the "ghost-train"
Grandma's
Gang headquarters.
"Green Light"
Prison gang term for a contract killing, or "hit."
"Hacks"
Prison guards.
"Half a Yard"
Prison slang for "fifty dollars."
"Hamburger"
Prison slang for a 10 year sentence. A "Hamburger with fries" refers to a 20-year sentence.
"Hooking Up"
Prison term for developing a protective, sexual relationship with another inmate, providing some resistance to the threat of being victimized by continuing rapes with more inmates. These may appear as consenting homosexual relationships to staff, but the "inmate code" often prevents prisoners from telling the truth, or "crying wolf" about their "protectors."
"Horseman"
Prison slang for a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Officer
Hound
Sex offender
The "Jacket" (and the "Coat")
Slang term referring to an offender who receives an indeterminate sentence. Also known as the "coat."
Jed-Eye
Derogatory term for anyone who lives across the river Mersey (UK).
Jewellery
Slang term for an ankle bracelet or some other electronic monitoring device worn by an offender leaving prison on probation or parole. In this context, his jewellery is a sort of "get-out-jail" token.
"Jockers"
Incarcerated sexual predators who prey on weaker inmates, called "punks."
"Jointman"
Prison slang for an inmate in prison who behaves like a guard
"Jug-up"
Prison slang for "meal-time."
"Killing your number"
Prison slang for serving one's time or getting out on parole.
"Kite"
Prison slang for a contraband letter.
"Kit & Green"
Heroin & Cannabis. (UK)
"Leg-Rider"
Slang for a person who sucks up to the police, as in, "humping the officer’s leg" in an attempt to get favors.
Lick
Robbery. As in, "I did a lick" (committed a robbery).
Lifeboat
A pardon or commutation of sentence.
"Limbo Room"
Prison slang for an area of the prison that is reserved for or encouraging of corporal punishment
"Lugger"
Prison slang referring to an inmate who smuggles in and possesses contraband and illicit substances.
Kiester
A verb referring to the act of smuggling in contraband, like cigarettes, by inserting items into your anus.”
"Making Tortillas"
Engaing in homosexual acts with other prisoners
"Max Out"
Maxing out refers to the practice of releasing or transferring inmates from jail (or from one facility to another) due to overcrowding problems and capacity issues.
"Midnight Express"
Prison slang for an old-fashioned escape attempt
"Nonce"
Someone who attacks children
"Not a Scooby"
Don't have a clue. No idea. (UK)
"On the Road"
Slang for being finally out of prison
Pass System
The Pass System is a Canadian program similar to a temporary absence, where inmates are allowed to leave prison, with a correctional staff escort, for humanitarian, health, rehabilitative, or medical reasons. Frequent leaves are granted for family visits, education and employment opportunities, and recreational activities such as sports events. For those serving life in prison for committing murder, they must first be granted permission by Canada's National Parole Board. After an inmate has served six months of his sentence, he or she is eligible to leave on a temporary absence without a correctional escort. The program has a 99% success rate, although the few breaches that have occurred have proven disastrous, including murderer Daniel Gingras's "birthday" pass that allowed him to escape and kill two people.
Peelers
Slang for police or cops (UK).
Peter
One's prison cell (UK)
Phallometric Assessment (Penile Phallometry)
Medical technique used to measure sexual deviant arousal. Consists of applying an elastic band around the subject's penis, and measuring the variation in tumescence, or girth, of the band before and after a series of sexually-deviant and non-sexually deviant stimuli. Stimuli include videos, pictures, or audio recordings of situations depicting varying degrees of deviant content, such as rape scenes, naked children, or violence against females during sexual intercourse.
"Pigeon Drop"
A short-con game, where a mark is persuaded to give up a sum of money in order to get a larger sum of money, when in reality, the mark will never see the additional sum.
Pisello
Slang term for penis.
"Potting"
Prison slang for throwing or dumping a bucket of excrement on a correctional officer.
"Prison Wolf"
Prison slang for someone sexually-oriented to females on the outside, but becomes sexually-oriented to males on the inside.
Psychopath
Someone suffering from psychopathy. Psychopathy is a classifiable personality disorder endemic to forensic psychology, and is not included in medical practice's mental disorder manual, the DSM-IV. Psychopathy was originally coined by psychologist Harvey Cleckley, in his book the Mask of Sanity. Cleckley described someone who was sane on the outside, but particularly brutal, insensitive, impulsive, manipulative, and socially deviant on the inside. Psychopaths are pathological liars, and strive to manipulate others for personal gain. They do not feel the standard levels of remorse following antisocial hurtful acts. See the Psychopathic Personality Traits Scale (PPTS)
Approximately 25% of the federal inmate population (in Canada) is psychopathic, and approximately 90% of those psychopaths can be diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD). However, psychopathy differs from APD in that APD mainly involves the more impulsive, behavioural features of the disorder, while psychopathy involves both the behavioural and the cognitive and interpersonal features of the disorder.
The standard mechanism of classifying or measuring psychopathy in individuals today is Canadian researcher Robert Hare's "Psychopathy Checklist Revised" (PCL-R), a dynamic and static risk assessment instrument that is validated across many different cultures, countries, and somewhat between both genders, and consistently predictive of prison misconduct, general recidivism, and violent recidivism. It is also predictive of sexual recidivism, especially when a diagnosis of psychopathy is combined with a positive diagnosis of sexual deviant preference.
"Punks"
Inmates subject to rape, usually white, younger, and more submissive than most inmates.
"Rat Jacket"
Someone wearing a rat jacket is known as an informant.
"Red Eye"
Hard stare.
"Ride with"
Perform favors for a fellow convict, including sexual, in exchange for protection or commissary goods.
"Righteous Weapons"
Slang term for dangerous inmates.
Road Dogs
Inmates who do not declare any gang-affiliations but who buddy-up inside prison for protection.
"Rock Spider"
Child-molester
Self-report
A recently-admitted inmate who is allowed to show up at reception on his or her own.
"Set-tripping"
To switch from one gang to another
"Shank"
Prison slang for "knife." The actual act of knifing someone is known as a "shiving."
Sharks
At Corcoran State Prison in California, Correctional Officers who administer mass beatings to newly admitted convicts. At the California Institution for Men at Chino, this group of guards called itself SPONGE, for "Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything."
"Short-Eyes"
Slang for a peodophile
"Shower Shark"
Refers to another inmate known to check out other inmates in the shower.
"Soda"
Cocaine
Son of Sam Law
The Son of Sam Law was passed in 1979, following the New York killing spree of.44 caliber-killer David Berkowitz. Because Berkowitz had in been a potential position of profiting from his crimes, the law was passed, diverting funds earned by convicted felons to the victims and the state.
"Slinging rock"
Selling crack cocaine.
"Snout"
Slang for tobacco inside prison.
"Space City"
Texas Syndicate term for Houston, Texas.
"Special Handling Cases"
Special Handling cases are inmates that require special care, usually psychiatric or medical in nature, and that demonstrate to correctional staff that they are dealing with someone who requires additional supervision. Such individuals may be suffering from suicidal thoughts or may have recently experienced severe trauma or a psychotic reaction.
Statutes 17-20-114.5
1995 statutes that deny those prisoners who sue the state many inmate privileges if the action is found to be insubstantial or malicious. Penalties include denying television, radio and entertainment access as well as limiting snacks and cigarettes.
"Street Newspapers"
Gang term for graffiti, a communication device for gang members.
Survival Rates
Statistical term referring to the proportion of ex-convicts who desist from committing a new crime following release from custody.
"Sweet Kid"
Prison slang referring to an inmate who allies with an older, more experienced inmate, possibly for protection or knowledge.
"Taking a nap"
Short jail sentence, usually for gang members.
"Tecato"
Term for Heroin addict
"Tits-up"
Prison slang for an inmate who has died.
"Topped"
Prison slang for "committed suicide." Also known as "dumped" or "knocked off." Someone who has committed suicide is said to have "topped off."
"Tree-Jumper"
Prison slang for rapist
"Veterano"
Veteran gang member.
Viking
An inmate who has long since given up on bathing or showering.
Wolfpacks
Wolfpacks are recent parolees that have been recruited by prison gang members sometime during their incarceration. Once released, they carry out the orders from their imprisoned commanders, who usually instruct them on generating revenue or carrying out contract killings. They are trained in prison by higher-ranking gang members, in vocabulary, symbols, hand-signals, proper dress, as well as how to profit from criminal enterprise.There's a lot of hullaballoo some days about "you should use reduce more" or "you don't need a filter, use a map", or "For? Why not forEach?"
The truth is, Arrays and all of their iterator functions can be confusing for beginners, so I'm going to try and simplify things for everyone by framing the question from the end: what do you want to get back?
Short version
Return one thing for each existing thing: map()
Return only some of the existing things: filter()
Return only one new thing: reduce()
Don't return anything, but do something with each existing thing: forEach()
I'll give you a quick rundown of each, followed by examples using the older, non-arrow-function syntax as well as the newer arrow-function syntax.
Return one new entry for every existing entry: map()
If you have an array of values, and you want to do something to each entry in that array and return a new array with the new values, then map() is your friend. Here's a simple function that takes an array and doubles every entry:
const originalArray = [ 1, 2, 3 ]; const newArray = originalArray. map ( function ( item ) { return item * 2 ; }); console. log ( newArray ); // -> [2, 4, 6]
Here's the same thing using the newer syntax:
const originalArray = [ 1, 2, 3 ]; const newArray = originalArray. map ( item => item * 2 ); console. log ( newArray ); // -> [2, 4, 6]
Notice that, with the newer arrow syntax, we don't have to use the function keyword, the return keyword, or curly brackets. That's because arrow functions give us an implicit return for'simple' functions like this one. You can read more about arrow functions here, from Wes Bos.
Return a new array with only some of the existing entries: filter()
Filter is probably the easiest array function to understand, because it is so well-named. Filter takes an array of values, performs a function or comparison on each value, and then returns a new array of just the values that pass it's test (what we call 'truthy' values).
Here's an example that takes an array of numbers and returns just the ones that are larger than 5:
const originalArray = [ 1, 9, 4, 2, 42 ]; const newArray = originalArray. filter ( function ( item ) { return item > 5 ; }); console. log ( newArray ); // -> [9, 42]
Here's the filter part with an arrow function:
const newArray = originalArray. filter ( item => item > 5 );
Return one new thing only: reduce()
Sometimes you have an array of values and just want to return one new thing from them. Reduce takes an array, performs a function or comparison on each item, and then does something to what's called an 'accumulator'. This is one of those functions that's actually easier to describe with an example, because the terms one has to use to describe it are just as confusing as the function itself!
Suppose you have an array of names, and you want to count the number of times the name 'Bob' shows up:
const originalArray = [ "Alice", "Bob", "Charlie", "Bob", "Bob", "Charlie" ]; const numberOfBobs = originalArray. reduce ( function ( accumulator, item ) { if ( item === "Bob" ) { return accumulator + 1 ; } else { return accumulator ; } }, 0 ); console. log ( numberOfBobs ); // -> 3
Again with arrows:
const numberOfBobs = originalArray. reduce (( accumulator, item ) => { if ( item === "Bob" ) { return accumulator + 1 ; } else { return accumulator ; } }, 0 );
As you can see, the arrow function didn't save us as much typing this time, because we had to provide two parameters to the function and then had logic before we could return, so we still needed curly brackets.
The 0 at the end of the reduce function is the value we start off the accumulator with, adding 1 to it if the value we encounter is "Bob", otherwise we return the accumulator as it currently is. If you don't return anything, then the next time the function is run the accumulator will be undefined.
Do something with each array value but don't return anything: forEach()
Sometimes you'll have an array of values that you want to do something with, but don't need to keep track of what the return is from each function call. This is what forEach() is for.
const originalArray = [ 1, 2, 3 ]; originalArray. forEach ( function ( item ) { doSomething ( item ); });
And again with arrows:
originalArray. forEach ( item => doSomething ( item ); );
Final Notes
Simple and sweet. These are the simplest use cases I could come up with for each function to try and make it as easy as possible to understand when you should use each. There is a huge amount of tasks you can do with these functions, and there is an 'advanced' form of each of these functions that gives you the current index too:
arr. map (( item, index ) => {}) arr. filter (( item, index ) => {}) arr. reduce (( accumulator, item, index ) => {}) arr. forEach (( item, index ) => {})
If you need it, use it!This is the third article of The Elementary Series. I will cover basics of mechanics, and focus on macro. I will clarify some misconceptions, and provide some generalisable rule of thumbs. Micro will be discussed in another article.
Introduction
This is part one of a two-part article series on mechanics. The series covers the following subtopics,
Definition
Assumptions
Macro
Micro
Trade off
This article covers the first three, so the focus is on the basics and macro. More importantly, I have a set of applicable rule of thumb that players can use to improve macro. This article is not limited to Terran.
What is mechanics
Mechanics is a topic that everyone is familiar with to a certain extent, and generally has his or her own opinion on it. I will start off with the definition (or maybe you can call it a description) on Liquipedia that I agree with.
Mechanics is your execution of micro and macro. Fundamentally, your mechanics, as a player, represent the degree to which you have bridged the divide between mind and game – that is, your ability, as a player, to do what you want to do.
Mechanics is how well you can execute what you want to do. Then, since no one wants to get supply blocked in the game, it is a matter of mechanics to not let that happen. If you are not capable of splitting your bio in the way you want to, then you have poor mechanics. According to this definition, if you are a new player who does not micro the bio as you do not know how bio should be split to be effective, this is not exactly a matter of mechanics. The above examples indirectly explain why many players limit their definition of mechanics to macro, and do not explicitly consider micro when mechanics is discussed. That is, everyone knows what good macro is, but that is not the case for micro.
I have previously proposed adding attention as another dimension of mechanics, but I will keep this article concise to discuss only macro. Micro will be discussed in another article, and I will also elaborate on how that is related to macro and micro later in that article.
Clarification on assumptions
There are two assumptions I want to clarify before I get into the actual discussion.
Mechanics comes before all other skills. Mechanics is a variable that is stable at the individual level.
Alpha, not omega
Mechanics to Starcraft is like stamina to a ball game. You need to have a minimum standard for other factors to be relevant for discussion, as all techniques, tactics, or strategies are developed based on this requirement. I will use basketball for example. You can discuss about how to fake and get past a defender all you want, but it is irrelevant if you can barely move after several minutes of basic movements. Going back to Starcraft, an early expand build will always have better worker production than a one base tech build, and this is based on the assumption that both players can macro at a certain level. The same applies when an early all-in can be defended if the response is correct, and this also assumes that the player has the required micro level to execute the defence.
However, mechanics is the alpha, but not the omega. I always see players given the feedback to improve on mechanics when they ask for help by posting replays, and sometimes they are even advised to practice by building only Barracks and Marines to improve mechanics. While this is a fair feedback to a certain extent, it is not exactly helpful unless that player does not have the minimum requirement to play the game. Realistically, you can always improve your mechanics, as it can never be perfect. Mechanics is something that you will improve all the time along with other skills in Starcraft, and it is not a definite prerequisite for other skills once you have reached a minimum level. More importantly, mechanics is more of an automated skill, which will just get better even if you don’t focus on it. Back to basketball as an example, your stamina will improve automatically as you try to improve your shots by shooting 200 shots everyday, and you don’t have to train your stamina to the level that your fatigue does not affect your 200th shot before you start practising your shot.
Individual variance
There is variance in an individual player’s mechanics. You can perform at a score of 90/100 in one game, and also at a score of 40/100 in another. There is “form” in mechanics. I am sure you have experienced games whereby you just keep getting supply blocked, and things just don’t go smoothly. A good way to visualise it is that, you have your best and worst standard, and then there is a mean. Below image shows what I want mean.
The grey bar is basically the “data” of a player’s mechanics performance in a certain period of time. The blue line is the individual’s best in terms of mechanics performance, the red is the worst, and the purple is the mean. The distance between the worst and best shows the consistency of a player’s mechanics performance, and the closer it is the more consistent the player is. Mean can be seen as how often the player plays to his/her potential, so the closer the purple line is to the blue the better it is.
I use Player C as the base comparison. Player A shows how a professional player’s mechanics should look like, whereby his/her best is close to the possible best. More importantly, the distance between the best and the worst is small, as it shows the expected consistency of a pro. Moreover, a pro’s mean is usually closer to his/her best than to his/her worst. Player B is what a good non-pro player looks like. The distance of the best and worst show that it is hard to be more consistent than a pro due to the amount of practice. A good non-pro needs to bring out his/her best to stand a chance against a pro’s worst in regards to mechanics, so the blue line of Player B is about the same as the red line of Player A.
Player D is probably what most of us look like in general. We are not that consistent, but we usually perform closer to our best than to our worst. Our worst happens, but not as often as our best happens. My personal worst is so low that I forget the first Supply Depot, but it rarely happens.
Player E is someone who is “mechanically gifted” (better best and better worst than an average player), but has performance issue (mean is closer to the individual worst). Player F is basically a new player.
The above demonstration explains why I often get frustrated at myself for performing poorly. I guess I have that “Korean mindset” whereby I get upset for not being able to show what I am capable of.
The purpose of this section is to point out that mechanics performance is susceptible to individual’s form, and it is labile. This is something that has been overlooked when people discuss about how good or bad a player’s mechanics is, and mechanics is frequently and incorrectly assumed to be a stable quality at the individual level. I believe it is important to bring this up before I actually discuss about macro and micro.
Macro
Macro, or macromanagement, is the ability to manage the economy well. This includes, and not limits to, mining, spending mineral and gas, avoiding supply block. It is almost always better to constantly do these few things. You cannot truly recover the opportunity cost lost of not spending the resources. For example, as a Terran, you have bank up 1500 minerals now, so you want to spend it by saturating your production buildings with unit production and build more production buildings |
got rid of what?[sic] 20% of the gay characters at Marvel by killing off this ONE character. I just never took that stuff into consideration while I was writing.
And, although he didn't write the episode, he also regrets the revelations that came out the CDC episode of The Walking Dead. He felt that it gave too much away about the state of the world.
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5. J.R.R. Tolkien: Calling any of his characters "Elves." It's hardly a surprise that the linguist Tolkien has a regret that's less about story than semantics. But Tolkien was concerned not just with how the story appeared in his own head, but also how it appeared in readers' heads. One of the problems, Tolkien felt, was with the Elves.
When Tolkien called one of his races "Elves," he was not thinking of small, slender, point-eared people of contemporary folklore, but of tall, legendary beings. In a 1954 letter to Hugh Brogan (numbered Letter 151), Tolkien writes:
Also, I now deeply regret having used Elves, though this is a word in ancestry and original meaning suitable enough. But the disastrous debasement of this word, in which Shakespeare played an unforgiveable part, has really overloaded it with regrettable tones, which are too much to overcome.
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Tolkien would sometimes rewrite his books for later editions. Most famously, he rewrote the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter of The Hobbit so that Gollum would be more aggressive, as he had been corrupted by the One Ring. He also changed the word "Gnomes" in The Hobbit, which he originally used to refer to certain Elves, but which he felt was mistranslated in readers' minds. The words "Elf" and "Elves" stayed, however.
6. Douglas Adams: Killing everyone off in Mostly Harmless. The fifth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series has a major downer ending when the major characters are brought to Earth just in time for the planet to be destroyed by the Vogons. Adams later decided this ending was far too depressing, the result of a bad year on his part, and announced that he had plans to undo it. In a 1988 interview with Matt Newsome, Adams said:
People have said, quite rightly, that Mostly Harmless is a very bleak book. I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note, so five seems to be a wrong kind of number; six is a better kind of number.
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Adams didn't get to finish that sixth book, so Eoin Colfer undid the Mostly Harmless ending in his own Hitchhiker's book, And Another Thing...
7. J. Michael Straczynski: Making Norman Osborn the father of Gwen Stacy's children. If you thought that Sins Past, the story that reveals that Gwen Stacy fell in love with Norman Osborn and bore him twins, was out of left frakking field, you're not alone. Straczynski himself claims that he hated the idea of Norman and Gwen having kids, and has said that he only went along with the idea because he thought he could retcon it away:
I wanted to retcon the Gwen twins out of continuity, which was something I always assumed I could do at the end of my run. I wasn't allowed to do this, and yes, it pissed me off.
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He hoped that he could undoing during the One More Day arc. But what if Norman Osborn didn't want that particular retcon?
8. Vince Gilligan: Killing the Lone Gunmen on The X-Files. It somehow seems fitting that one of Vince Gilligan's big regrets from The X-Files comes from an episode titled "Jump the Shark." After The Lone Gunmen spinoff show was cancelled, Fox refused to let the conspiracy-loving trio back on The X-Files. So writers Gilligan, John Shiban, and Frank Spotnitz ended up killing them off. Fans were distraught, and in the end, the writers weren't thrilled with the decision either.
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In The Complete X-Files, Gilligan told Chris Knowles and Matt Hurwitz, "I still think we made the wrong choice on that one." Spotnitz was a bit softer on the decision, saying:
I can't say I regret killing them off, as you know, no one really dies in The X-Files [...] But I do feel tonally it was a mistake to end the episode on such a somber note. I wish we'd ended it on a laugh or smile.
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9. David Lynch and Mark Frost: Revealing Laura Palmer's killer in Twin Peaks. This is another decision that came not from the creators themselves, but in part because of network pressures. David Lynch actually didn't want to solve Laura Palmer's murder at all, leaving it as a thread throughout the entire series (though he did say that maybe they could reveal the murderer in the final episode). Mark Frost, however, felt they had an obligation to their audience to eventually solve the crime.
Eventually, they caved to network pressures to reveal the killer, but the show went off the rails for the writers without a similarly impactful moment in the second season. Lynch always maintained that solving the crime so early in the series was a mistake, and Frost eventually came around more to Lynch's line of thinking, saying decades later:
I had to kind of forge a compromise [between Lynch and the network]. I'm not sure that David wasn't right. Maybe we shouldn't have solved the mystery. Let it drift on into the background and churn up more incidents as you went forward.
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10. Sam Raimi: The tree rape in The Evil Dead. It's one of those scenes that people single out, and usually not in a favorable way. "This is a great movie...except for that tree rape scene." And while some viewers have defended the moment, and find it entertaining, director and writer Sam Raimi ultimately regrets including it.
I think it was unnecessarily gratuitous and a little too brutal. And finally because people were offended in a way that I didn't...my goal is not to offend people. It is to entertain, thrill, scare...make them laugh but not to offend them.
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Of course, Raimi would rework the film with Evil Dead II. Then again, Raimi says that if he went back and redid any of his movies, he would do everything differently.Big companies are trying to destroy the Internet as we know it – and they’re trying to do it without us even having the chance to protect it.
Yesterday, WikiLeaks published a previously secret chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership – and it’s even worse than we thought. The TPP doesn’t just impose SOPA-style censorship – it would encourage a three-strike rule on Internet users.
Sign to the right to take a stand against internet censorship -- say "no" to the TPP.
There’s no limit to the problems in the TPP. It would criminalize small-scale downloading, kick people off the Internet after less than a handful of infringement accusations, destroy Fair Use standards, destroy access to medicine for millions of people, and so much more.
It’s no surprise, then, that the actual text of the TPP has been kept secret – it’s the only way laws like this that benefit big Hollywood studios and huge pharmaceutical companies could pass. Now that the text has been leaked, it’s clear we don’t have much time to stop this.
Sign to say no to punishing internet users, censorship, and patent-trolling.
We’ve been most of the policies in the TPP before – and that’s precisely why they’re being bundled into a secret treaty. Fewer people pay attention, and then, at the end of the day, companies can go back to a Congress that refused to play along and say that now these provisions are part of international treaty obligations and force compliance.
Sign to the right to add your name to this petition:
PETITION TO WORLD LEADERS: the Trans-Pacific Partnership is a treaty designed to serve the interests of massive corporations to the detriment of the world's citizens. It would impose extreme censorship and punish everyday internet users. I demand that my government oppose this agreement.
Use these links to get your friends to sign as well:
If you're already on Facebook, click here to share with your friends. If you're already on Twitter, click here to tweet about the campaign: Tweet
Here's the full text of the leaked document from Wikileaks. And a summary from the Guardian.Heather Dinich explains why Tom Herman is a good fit for the Texas Longhorns and how this will affect his players at Houston. (1:34)
The Texas Longhorns have hired Tom Herman away from Houston to be their next head coach, the school announced Saturday.
Herman replaces Charlie Strong, who was fired earlier Saturday after a 16-21 record in three years at Texas.
"The opportunity to come back to Texas is a dream come true for me and my family, and I can't thank President [Greg] Fenves and [athletic director] Mike Perrin enough for providing me with this incredible opportunity," Herman said in a statement. "Longhorn football has been -- and always will be -- a national power, winning and playing for national championships with great pride and passion, supported by an unbelievable fan base."
He said he met with Fenves and Perrin overnight Friday and was "very impressed with their unified vision and commitment to football."
According to the Austin American-Statesman, Herman will receive a five-year deal worth $5 million annually, with escalators to more than $6 million in the final year of the deal. The university still owes Strong $10.7 million on his original five-year guaranteed contract.
Herman will be officially introduced at a news conference Sunday.
Houston acknowledged Herman's departure in a statement Saturday.
"In his short time in Houston, Tom Herman elevated the Houston Football program to new heights, and we are grateful for his contributions to our program," athletic director Hunter Yurachek said in the statement. "The entire University of Houston community wishes he and his family continued success in this new chapter in their lives."
Defensive coordinator Todd Orlando will coach the Cougars' bowl game, the school announced.
Herman's desire to take the Texas job has been one of the sport's worst-kept secrets. He has Texas ties that go back to when he began his career as a Longhorns graduate assistant under Mack Brown (1999-2000).
Overall, Herman spent a decade as an assistant coach in the state, including stops at Texas Lutheran, Sam Houston State, Texas State and Rice. He received a master's in education from the University of Texas in 2000. He also has strong ties to the high school coaches in the state and landed the highest-ranked prospect ever to a Group of 5 school when he signed defensive tackle Ed Oliver from Houston's Westside High.
Tom Herman has been among the most sought-after coaches over the past two seasons. He'll leave Houston to become Texas' head coach. Eric Christian Smith/AP Photo
Before joining the Cougars, Herman oversaw one of the nation's most potent offenses as the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach under Urban Meyer at Ohio State from 2012 to 2014, when he won the Broyles Award as the nation's top assistant coach.
"In Tom Herman, Longhorn football is getting a proven competitor, terrific recruiter, and committed mentor of student-athletes who has shown his ability to succeed at all levels," Fenves said in a statement. "Tom was the hottest young head coach in the country the past two seasons, and I am thrilled we are able to get him back to UT to lead Texas football."
Changing Of The Guard A statistical comparison between Tom Herman's Houston Cougars and the Texas Longhorns under Charlie Strong this season (with FBS ranks in parentheses): 2016 Houston Texas PPG 38.0 (21) 31.9 (48) YPG 459.2 (34) 491.3 (21) Opp. YPG 325.0 (15) 448.3 (99) TO forced 18 (54) 20 (34) Sacks 37 (9) 41 (2)
Strong said Texas is in a good position to win next year.
"The foundation has been laid here," he said Friday. "The thing is, we've been building it for three years. Even when I looked at it, I said the third year we'll make progress, the fourth year will be our year.
"It's just like baking a cake. The cake has been baked. The only thing you need to do now is put the icing on it and slice it. That's what this team is. The cake has been baked. Now it's just ready to be sliced."
In 2015, Herman led Houston to its first New Year's bowl in 30 years, its second 13-win season in program history and its 11th conference championship in program history by claiming the inaugural American Athletic Conference championship. He led all FBS coaches in their first year with a program with 13 wins, as Houston finished third nationally with a 92.9 winning percentage at 13-1. This season Houston is 9-3.
The Cougars were 6-0 against ranked teams during Herman's tenure.
"I want to thank the University of Houston, the administration, the fans and especially the players for an unbelievable two years," Herman said. "My family and I will be forever grateful."
ESPN staff writer Heather Dinich and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Information is power, and Sierra Dawn Thomas gave away that power when she revealed to Sarah on Survivor: Game Changers that she had a Legacy Advantage she would give to Sarah if she were voted out. Whoops! Armed with that knowledge, Sarah sent Sierra to the jury to get the advantage, which Sierra then willed to her — not realizing that Sarah had not only voted against her but orchestrated it as well.
We asked Sierra all about that strategic snafu and more when the rodeo queen called into EW Morning Live (Entertainment Weekly Radio, SiriusXM, channel 105), and she spoke about her fateful decision, why she did not give the advantage to Brad, the loved ones visit from her father, and much more. You can listen to the entire interview below on the EW Morning Live Podcast. Here are a few highlights from our chat.
On why she told Sarah about her Legacy Advantage:
“Ever since the moment I did it, I regretted it. I didn’t think I was going to do it. When I was talking to Sarah it kind of just came out. When I was talking to her I saw the fear in my eyes when I was telling her. I don’t know why I did it. I regretted it. I’ve had so much time to think about it. I still regret it. Survivor got the best of me. There’s no reason why I told her. If I was going to say anything I should have just said it was an immunity idol, not that I got to will it to somebody. I literally dug my own grave.”
On giving Sarah the Legacy Advantage:
“I feel like I got broke up with a long-term boyfriend and my best friend was cheating on him the whole time watching it. That’s literally what it felt like. I thought Brad voted me out. And me and Sarah had a really good relationship. It was hard to see, but we did. I talked to her every night. Every morning, we were cuddle-bunnies under the shelter. Me and that girl had a legit relationship. Because when they were reading the votes, she looked at me shocked. And she said it. I watched her and she said, ‘I’m going to act to make Sierra feel like I didn’t vote her out.’ She did. She played me. She played me like a fiddle. That’s all there was to it.”
On when she figured out Sarah had deceived her:
“Back at Ponderosa. It took a couple of days, but I feel like I’ve had a while to let it digest and so now I’m okay with it. But it really bothered me for a long time because I got played…. I thought it was Brad that wrote my name down.”
On who was in her final three had she survived this latest vote:
“It’s so hard because I want to say Brad and Troyzan, but I did have that relationship with Sarah. I honestly think I probably would have taken Brad and Sarah at this point in the game.”
On why she was such a target after the merge:
“I made a mistake this time. I came in this time saying I am going to come in and I’m going to give it hell from day one. And I did. And I think I obviously went a little too hard. I think the reason I truly went home was my relationship with Brad, but I [also] had a case. I had a case at the end of this game to say I was a part of this, I was in charge of this, I told everyone to do this. And you can’t do that on Survivor. But I learned my first season that I had to have reasons if I got to the end, so I maybe came in a little too hard this time.”
On stuff that never made it to TV:
“There are funny things I wish would have made the episode, like me modeling Debbie’s swimsuit and giving them a little runway show. There was a Tribal where me and Caleb went at it they didn’t show, the episode where he went home. He called me Judge Judy, and I raised my hand and stood up and started yelling at him. And Culpepper’s sitting in between us and I was just telling him, ‘You’ve been sulking all day. You need to fight for your life in this game of Survivor. You think we’re just going to vote for you with you telling us why you deserve to be here?’
“And then we leave Tribal and the look on Brad Culpepper’s face was, you scared the crap out of me. Till this day he still talks about it and says ‘You scared me at that Tribal.’ So that would have been funny to see because nobody’s seen that side of Sierra. I’m excited to meet [Caleb] outside of the game, but I really didn’t like him inside of the game. I think it was just I was irritated, I was starving, and I just didn’t feel like clashing with you at that moment. And for you to call me Judge Judy? I just flew off the handle.”
On comparing her two seasons:
“I really enjoyed season 30. Obviously I made some of my best of friends I’ve ever had in life from season 30. I would say season 30 was a little bit easier for me. I think I just sat back and let things happen. But I think I’m more proud of my season 34 game. Even though I didn’t go as long, I was playing with big competitors. I said at the beginning, not only am I’m going to surprise other players but I want to surprise myself, and I did. I stepped out of my comfort zone. I did things that made me insanely uncomfortable, which is not who I am in real life. So they both were amazing experiences but as far as gameplay, I would have to say my season 34, I’m a little more proud of.”
Listen to the entire interview above — including her thoughts on the loved ones visit and if Brad was hiding behind her strategically — right after our chat with Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Doug Liman about their new film The Wall, and our talk with co-executive producer Denise Huth calling in from the set of The Walking Dead’s 100th episode. Or subscribe on iTunes to listen on the go. Also make sure to check out our Survivor episode Q&A with Jeff Probst as well as Dalton’s full recap, and for more EW Morning Live podcast news, follow us on Twitter @EWMLPodcast.Almost half of Scots would back an independent Scotland in the European Union (EU) if a second referendum was held in early 2019, a new poll suggests.
The Panelbase research for pro-independence blog Wings over Scotland found that 49 per cent would vote for an independent Scotland in the EU if a second referendum on the issue was held in March 2019, around the time the UK is scheduled to leave the bloc.
Pro-Independence supporters hold a march through Glasgow. Picture: Getty Images
Excluding those who gave no opinion, 51 per cent said they would opt for Scotland to stay in the union and leave the EU.
The poll of 1,022 adults found support for the independence option was highest in the 16-34 age category at 66 per cent, compared to 34 per cent who would favour staying the in UK and leaving the EU.
The pattern was almost reversed for those aged 55+, at 36 per cent and 64 per cent respectively.
READ MORE: Soldiers posted to Scotland set for rebate on higher income tax
Exactly the same proportion (19 per cent) of Yes and No voters in 2014’s Scottish independence referendum said they would switch sides.
Of those who voted Remain in last year’s EU referendum, 68 per cent said they would support independence while 32 per cent would back the union, while a large majority (79 per cent) of those who voted Leave backed staying int he UK with just 21 per cent a supporting independence.
Almost half (46 per cent a) of respondents who voted Labour at the 2017 UK election would back an independent Scotland in the EU while 14 per cent of SNP voters said they would prefer to stay in the UK and leave the EU.
An SNP spokesman said: “This poll shows support for independence on the cusp of an outright majority, in line with other recent opinion polls.
“And support for independence is only likely to grow further in the coming months as people react to the Theresa May’s chaotic extreme Brexit plans.
“This is an arrogant Tory government that thinks it can do what it wants to Scotland and get away with it. But people across Scotland see the folly of being dragged out of the world’s biggest single market - which is around eight times bigger than the UK’s alone - against our democratic will.”
READ MORE: Scottish history timeline from 1054 to 2014CLOSE USA TODAY Sports' Scott Gleeson discusses the game plan to beating undefeated (38-0) Kentucky.
John Calipari and Bo Ryan meet in the Final Four again. (Photo11: USA TODAY Sports)
And then there were four.
Each Final Four team offers a different story. Kentucky is on a quest to finish as the first undefeated college basketball team since 1976.
BRACKET HUB: March Madness central
A veteran Wisconsin squad in its second consecutive Final Four is determined to reverse last April's results. Like UConn last season, seventh-seeded Michigan Statehit its stride at the perfect time. And Duke features the most storied coach in Mike Krzyzewski (in his 12th Final Four) and a future NBA lottery pick in freshman Jahlil Okafor.
Five days from tip-off in Indianapolis, here are five predictions you wouldn't expect:
1. Kentucky will not win it all. The Wildcats are undefeated yet far from invincible as Notre Dame illustrated in the Elite Eight and several SEC teams showed. The 38-0 Wildcats are trying to be the first D-I to complete an unbeaten season since Indiana in 1976. How do you beat a team with one of the best frontcourts in college basketball history? Exploit the not-as-dominant backcourt and shoot a high percentage. Easier said than done, but Wisconsin is an ideal team to deny history here. The Badgers have far less talent but match up well against the Wildcats and are disciplined on both ends. Plus, Wisconsin's two best players, Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker, provide a versatile one-two punch that Kentucky hasn't had to deal with all season.
FINAL FOUR VIDEO PREVIEW: KENTUCKY VS. WISCONSIN
CLOSE USA TODAY Sports' Scott Gleeson and Nancy Armour preview the Final Four matchup between Kentucky and Wisconsin.
2. An unsung hero (someone not Frank Kaminsky or Sam Dekker) will lead Wisconsin to victory. Speaking of Kaminsky and Dekker, Wisconsin will need strong performances from those two to beat Kentucky. But the key ingredient will be a role player. Nigel Hayes, Josh Gasser, Bronson Koenig and Traevon Jackson will play pivotal roles. One of them will need to have a breakout game. Hayes is fully capable. The 6-7 sophomore is a much better player than he was when Kentucky and Wisconsin met in last year's Final Four. He wasn't particularly effective against Arizona, finishing with eight points on 3-for-6 shooting, but he's had several big games this season, including a 25-point performance against Michigan State in the Big Ten tournament final.
3. A player without a serious NBA future will be the Most Outstanding Player. Gauging the history of the tournament's MOP award winners, it's usually a college star, not a future NBA star, who excels on college hoops' grandest stage. Shabazz Napier, Luke Hancock and Kyle Singler are three of the last four award winners. A favorite from each team this year:
Wisconsin: Nigel Hayes.
Nigel Hayes. Kentucky: Aaron Harrison.
Aaron Harrison. Michigan State: Travis Trice.
Travis Trice. Duke: Quinn Cook.
4. Duke's potent offense will hit a brick wall. The Blue Devils have a dynamic offense that's difficult to stop. The predicament opponents find themselves in: Double-team Jahlil Okafor or risk getting burned in man-to-man coverage. The problem with double-teaming Okafor? Quinn Cook, Justise Winslow, Tyus Jones and most recently Matt Jones are all capable of lighting it up from beyond the arc. All that being said, the toughest defensive team Duke's faced has been Utah. Michigan State can contain Okafor and is limiting opponents to 25% three-point shooting in the tournament. In that matchup, defense will outdo offense.
The Michigan State Spartans celebrates with head coach Tom Izzo after the game against the Louisville Cardinals in the finals of the east regional of the 2015 NCAA tournament at Carrier Dome. (Photo11: Mark Konezny, USA TODAY Sports)
5. Michigan State will win it all. The Spartans have an underrated ingredient for a Final Four team: Momentum. Michigan State's emergence as a contender has been fast and unexpected but when considering the pieces — veterans Travis Trice, Denzel Valentine and Branden Dawson — and how great this team is playing defensively — limiting opponents to 61 points a game in the tournament, there's no reason to consider No. 7 seed Michigan State an underdog. Michigan State will beat Duke because it's better defensively. If the Spartans draw Wisconsin in the title game, as predicted above, their overtime loss in the Big Ten tournament final shows they're capable of pulling of an upset.
KENTUCKY WILDCATS' SEASON HIGHLIGHTS“Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?” Trump writes. | AP Photo Trump renews complaints of Russian hacking reports
President-elect Donald Trump once again complained about reports of Russian cyberattacks against the U.S. election that he won last month, recalling that one of those hacking efforts yielded an email showing Hillary Clinton had received a Democratic primary debate question in advance.
“Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?” Trump wrote on Twitter just after 6 a.m. Friday morning.
Story Continued Below
Trump and his team have complained loudly in recent days about the renewed scrutiny that cyberattacks from Russia against American political targets have received. The president-elect has refused to concede the assessment of all 17 federal intelligence agencies that Russia was behind the attack and he has taken particular exception to the reported assessment of the CIA that those Russian efforts were specifically intended to benefit his candidacy and help install him as the next president.
It is the fourth time this week that Trump has posted to his Twitter account about the hacking incident, the president-elect’s preferred means of conveying a message directly to his followers. In a two tweet outburst on Monday, Trump wrote “can you imagine if the election results were the opposite and WE tried to play the Russia/CIA card. It would be called conspiracy theory!” and added “unless you catch ‘hackers’ in the act, it is very hard to determine who was doing the hacking. Why wasn't this brought up before election?”
Then, on Thursday, Trump again asked why the issue of Russian cyberattacks had resurfaced, writing “if Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?”
Of course, that Russia was launching cyberattacks targeting the U.S. election process was made public by the U.S. intelligence community in early October, a fact pointed out in White House press briefings by press secretary Josh Earnest on Wednesday and Thursday. Earnest pointed out that Trump had encouraged Russia to continue its hacking efforts and look for emails deleted from Clinton’s private server, a remark that the real estate mogul later said was intended to be sarcastic.
“Mr. Trump obviously knew that Russia was engaged in malicious cyber activity that was helping him and hurting Secretary Clinton’s campaign,” Earnest said at Thursday’s briefing. “It was obvious to everyone who was paying attention, including the gentleman whose thumbs authored that tweet, that the impact of that malicious activity benefited the Trump campaign and hurt the Clinton campaign.”
Trump on Thursday night lashed out at Earnest, calling him foolish and bad at his job.
"He can deliver a positive message and it sounds bad," Trump said during a rally in Pennsylvania.The 60-year-old man who fell to his death from the upper deck at Turner Field in Atlanta on Saturday night was a “passionate Braves fan” who spent his final moments booing Alex Rodriguez, according to witnesses and a statement from the team.
The tragic season-ticket holder, Gregory Murrey, sat in the same seats for 23 years, his family said of the insurance provider from Alpharetta, Ga.
“Gregory ‘Ace’ Murrey was a husband, father, grandfather, son, brother, and friend to many. He dearly loved his family, Atlanta and the Atlanta Braves,” his family said in a statement Sunday. “The night Greg passed away, he was doing one of his favorite things – watching the Braves.”
Before Sunday afternoon’s game, the Braves held a moment of silence for Murrey, with flags at the field flying at half-staff.
“The Atlanta Braves are deeply saddened by the loss of Greg Murrey at last night’s game,” The Atlanta Braves wrote in a statement Sunday. “Greg was a valued and longtime season ticket holder and an incredibly passionate Braves fan.
“This tragic loss is felt throughout Braves Country, and the thoughts and prayers of the entire Braves organization continue to go out to his family and friends.”
Murrey fell during the top of the 7th inning when A-Rod came up to the plate for the Yankees.
“He hit the stairs between two sections,’’ said a fan sitting 20 feet away. “I looked to my right and saw some figure falling down, and the guide wire started shaking.”
“At first, I couldn’t tell what was falling. I assumed since Alex Rodriguez was coming to the plate, somebody threw something from above, but it landed with a loud thud,” said the person, who asked not to be identified.
Murrey was transported to Grady Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Murrey founded N-Surance company in 1985. His son, Jason, joined the company in 2002.
View videoSatellite, Telcos Have Worst Quarter Ever Thanks to Cord Cutting The second quarter was the worst quarter in the history of television for traditional pay TV subscriber losses. Research firm MoffettNathanson estimated these quarterly losses at 556,000 subscribers. SNL Kagan actually estimated even higher losses, saying pay TV providers lost 625,000 subscribers on the quarter.
Historically a denier of cord cutting as a notable trend, Bruce Leichtman of Leichtman Research is out with his own numbers, claiming the pay TV industry actually saw a net loss of 470,000 subscribers last quarter. According to Leichtman, the top nine cable companies lost about 260,000 video subscribers during the quarter, while satellite TV companies saw their worst quarterly losses in history with 214,000 departed users. AT&T and Verizon, traditionally more resilient to cord cutting due to intense attempts to lure away disgruntled cable users, added just 4,000 video subscribers in the quarter. Historically, Leichtman's analysis usually contains some kind of reference at the bottom on how cord cutting is being either over-hyped or barely exists. That's notably missing from this latest report, though the researcher does his very, very best to find the silver lining in the numbers. "Cumulatively, Telcos and DBS providers both had their weakest quarter ever for net video additions, leaving the door open for cable providers to have their fewest cumulative losses in a second quarter in seven years," notes Leichtman. Which is great and all, if it weren't for the fact that cable companies (excluding telco and satellite) still saw a net loss of 260,000 users for the quarter. These losses, combined with major declines in cable TV viewership numbers, recently awoke Wall Street from its slumber on the issue of cord cutting to the tune of Which is great and all, if it weren't for the fact that cable companies (excluding telco and satellite) still saw a net loss of 260,000 users for the quarter. These losses, combined with major declines in cable TV viewership numbers, recently awoke Wall Street from its slumber on the issue of cord cutting to the tune of $60 billion in one day losses
News Jump Tuesday Morning Links Monday Morning Links TGI Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links Friday Morning Links Thursday Morning Links - Valentines Edition Wednesday Morning Links Tuesday Morning Links ---------------------- this week last week most discussed
Most recommended from 24 comments
karlmarx
join:2006-09-18
Signal Mountain, TN ·Charter
10 recommendations karlmarx Member False numbers, they really lost FAR more The reason I call bullcrap, is that the ISP's admitted they GAINED internet users, and admit they lost cable subscribers. Look at the pricing for internet for ALL the cable co's. Comcast, the most egregious, added Internet providers, BUT, the pricing for the internet is CHEAPER if you buy a cable subscription. I was one of those people they counted as a 'cable tv user', but I never even plugged in the tv box. Comcast charges $79.00 for internet alone, but only $50.00 for the same speed internet + tv. The easy way to measure if people REALLY signed up for cable tv, to watch cable tv, would be to look at the number of new internet users who rented DVR's. If they rented a DVR, then most likely, they will watch TV. If they didn't rent the DVR, then most likely they got 'cable tv' just to get a discount on the internet.
Doing the math, Comcast ADDED 407,000 internet users, lost 69,000 TV users. But they only added 47,000 DVR boxes. What does that tell you, they REALLY lost 419,000 video users, NOT 69,000 video users. (the 350,000 internet users who didn't get DVR's probably aren't real 'cable tv' users, they only GOT cable TV to save money on the internet. Having said that, LOSING 419,000 of 23,000,000 users is close to 2% of their 'tv' users, not.3% of their TV users. 2% of their TV users in a SINGLE QUARTER is a HUGE NUMBER. That's 7-8% of TV users PER YEAR!
maartena
Elmo
Premium Member
join:2002-05-10
Orange, CA ·AT&T FTTP
(Software) pfSense
6 recommendations maartena Premium Member Cable/Sat companies rape you.... over and over. $4 for "broadcast surcharge fee".
$4 for "sports surcharge fee".
$6 just to HAVE a tuner box for 1 TV. (2 TV: $12. 3 TV: $18)
$10 on top of that if you like that tuner box to be a DVR.
$10 if you want your channels to be HD. (not all charge this).
$5 combined in bunch of other fees that really want to point out to you instead of considering them part of doing business.
And they are still selling television for a fictitious "19.95". Even if you JUST want 1 TV and a tuner adapter, you still get raped with all the broadcast surcharges and sports charges, and at a bare minimum you are shelling out around $40, and more likely closer to $60 if you want HD or a DVR.
They keep raising the prices every year, and they hide themselves behind: Not our fault, the media companies are doing it to us, we are just passing on the buck. That is because the cable companies are tools. They aren't standing up to the media companies over fears of losing customers to other companies over a blacked out channel.
Additionally, that is the main reason we have no choices whatsoever.
- Want a package without sports channels? NOPE because the sports channels DEMAND to be in the lowest package. So you pay anywhere from $15 to $25 per month for sports, depending on which market you are in. (ESPN alone goes for $6, local RSN's for big sports teams anywhere from $2 to $5)
- Want a package without broadcast channels so you can save on that "broadcast surcharge" because your antenna picks em all up for free? NOPE, you can't have a package without your locals. You used to be able with satellite, but you still got national ABC/NBC/CBS anyways and the fee would still apply.
- Want a package without all the childrens channels or all the MTV crap because you really aren't in that age bracket anymore and you don't have children or teens anyways? NOPE, you don't get to make that choice. And with Viacom's channels its once again (just like most others) either you pay for ALL channels or you pay for none.
The way cable is structured now is keeping channels that wouldn't make it on their own with their own business model alive by subsidizing them through package models. There are many channels that probably few people would choose if they were in some form of a-la-carte model, and they purely exist because they were sold to the cable companies as part of a bundle. This way the media companies can add another channel full of bad reruns and crappy programming, and sell a lot of advertising on it based on "availability numbers" in x million households.
If it was compared to a form of government, cable is actually a form of socialism, where |
the treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases by engineering cells that execute real-time, programmed responses to environmental cues, including pro-inflammatory cytokines. We used genome editing with the CRISPR/Cas9 system to create stem cells that antagonize IL-1- and TNF-α-mediated inflammation in an autoregulated manner. To achieve this, we selected to overtake the chemokine (C-C) ligand 2 (Ccl2) gene, which is also known as macrophage chemoattractant protein-1 (Mcp-1). The Ccl2 gene product regulates trafficking of monocytes/macrophages, basophils, and T lymphocytes (). TNF-α and IL-1 serve as two of the most potent stimulators of Ccl2 expression (); however, the persistence of Ccl2 expression depends on continued exposure to inflammatory cues (), so resolution of inflammation results in rapid decay of Ccl2 transcripts. Thus, we performed targeted gene addition of IL-1 and TNF-α antagonists at the Ccl2 locus to confer cytokine-activated and feedback-controlled expression of biologic therapies. These programmed stem cells were then used to engineer articular cartilage tissue to establish the efficacy of self-regulated therapy toward protection of tissues against cytokine-induced degeneration. We hypothesized that this approach of repurposing normally inflammatory signaling pathways would allow for transient, autoregulated production of cytokine antagonists in direct response to cytokine stimulation. This type of approach could provide an effective “vaccine” for the treatment of chronic diseases while overcoming limitations associated with delivery of large drug doses or constitutive overexpression of biologic therapies.
A number of exogenous anti-cytokine therapies have been shown to effectively counteract the negative sequelae of TNF-α and IL-1 dysregulation. In particular, anti-TNF therapies such as the soluble type 2 TNF receptor (etanercept) and monoclonal antibodies to TNF-α (adalimumab, infliximab) have demonstrated efficacy toward offsetting pain associated with chronic and rheumatic diseases, including arthritis (). The soluble type 1 TNFR receptor (sTNFR1) has also been investigated as a gene therapy for treatment of chronic diseases (). More recently, competitive antagonists of IL-1 such as IL-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1Ra, anakinra) have been shown to alleviate symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis () and the onset of post-traumatic arthritis (). Although they are effective, these therapies are administered at very high and generally unregulated doses. Due to the pleiotropic roles of TNF-α and IL-1 and their involvement in tissue homeostasis, the use of such therapies may have significant side effects, including increased susceptibility to infection as well as to autoimmune diseases such as lupus, interstitial lung disease, and vasculitis (). Moreover, excess inhibition of these cytokines can interfere with tissue regeneration and repair (). Therefore, methods to dynamically deliver precisely calibrated doses of anti-inflammatory biologic therapies could improve treatments by combating cytokine-mediated pain and degeneration while spatially and temporally regulating the production of anti-cytokine drugs.
Chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases such as arthritis are characterized by aberrant activity of cytokines such as tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) and interleukin-1 (IL-1). These pro-inflammatory mediators are expressed by a variety of cells, including synovial cells, osteoblasts, myotubes, satellite cells, chondrocytes, and innate immune cells. These cell types are also capable of responding to TNF-α and IL-1 through canonical signaling via cognate cell surface receptors. Under normal physiologic conditions, appropriate signaling of TNF-α and IL-1 contributes to organ and tissue homeostasis by promoting tissue remodeling (), orchestrating phagocytosis of cellular debris and immunogenic substrates (), and coordinating transitions between niche stem cell quiescence and proliferation/differentiation programs (). However, in chronic diseases, elevated levels of these pro-inflammatory cytokines can lead directly to pain (), cytotoxicity (), accelerated tissue catabolism (), and exhaustion of resident stem cell niches ().
However, Ccl2-driven expression of IL-1Ra was not sufficient to protect against the suppression of the extracellular matrix constituents Col2a1 and Acan by 1 ng/mL IL-1. Coupled with the increased expression of degradative enzymes, this resulted in loss of a significant fraction of sGAG in the engineered tissue ( Figure 6 B). At the 0.1 ng/mL IL-1 level, cartilage derived from engineered Ccl2-Il1ra cells was less susceptible to degradation than tissue derived from control Ccl2-Luc cells, although sGAG loss normalized to total DNA content was still statistically significant after cytokine treatment in both tissue types ( Figures 6 C and 6D). This protection, in comparison with cartilage derived from Ccl2-Luc cells, was imparted by the cytokine-induced expression of 20.50 ± 0.67 ng/mL IL-1Ra, which was higher than the basal expression of 1.82 ± 0.24 ng/mL observed in the engineered cells or 0.88 ± 0.25 ng/mL observed in Ccl2-Luc cells.
Cartilage derived from Ccl2-Il1ra or Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells displayed a markedly different response to cytokine treatment at the gene expression level. Tissue generated from both the Ccl2-Il1ra and Ccl2-sTNFR1 cell lines demonstrated lower induction levels of inflammatory and degradative gene products compared with cartilage engineered from WT or Ccl2-Luc cell lines ( Figures 4 and 5, respectively). Although haploinsufficiency of the Ccl2 gene affected basal levels of Ccl2 transcripts in the Ccl2-Luc, Ccl2-sTNFR1, and Ccl2-Il1ra cells compared with WT cells, cytokine stimulation rendered more marked upregulation of Ccl2 in cartilage derived from the Luc cells than sTNFR1 or Il1ra cells at 72 hr, suggesting that these transgenes ameliorated the impact of cytokine on Ccl2 gene expression, as expected. It is noteworthy, however, that in some cases these genes were still significantly upregulated relative to tissues treated with 0 ng/mL cytokine. In the case of Ccl2-sTNFR1, cartilage aggregates displayed resilience after 72 hr of treatment with TNF-α, with no suppression of Col2a1 or Acan. The preservation of a more homeostatic gene expression profile was consistent with the biochemical composition of cartilage aggregates engineered from the Ccl2-sTNFR1 cell line, which demonstrated preservation of sGAG in the tissue even after treatment with 20 ng/mL TNF-α, as determined by both biochemical and histologic analyses ( Figures 6 A and 6E). TNF-α induced secretion of sTNFR1, as specimens treated with 20 ng/mL TNF-α produced 18.45 ± 0.17 ng/mL sTNFR1 and those cultured in the absence of TNF-α produced only 3.31 ± 0.17 ng/mL sTNFR1.
(C) sGAG/DNA in cartilage aggregates engineered from either Ccl2-Luc or Ccl2-Il1ra cells and maintained in control medium or medium supplemented with 0.1 ng/mL IL-1α for 3 days after maturation.
(A) Sulfated glycosaminoglycan (sGAG) per double-stranded DNA as measured via the dimethylmethylene blue assay in cartilage aggregates engineered from either WT, Ccl2-Luc, or Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells and maintained in control medium or medium supplemented with 20 ng/mL TNF-α for 3 days after maturation.
Fold changes were determined relative to a reference group cultured without IL-1α and by using 18S rRNA as a reference gene. Bars represent group means of fold change ± SEM (n = 3 independent experiments). Groups not sharing the same letter are statistically different (p < 0.05). Notation of n.s. implies no significance for the evaluated gene. Primer sequences are available in the table appended to Figure S2
Fold changes were determined relative to a reference group cultured without IL-1α and by using 18S rRNA as a reference gene. Error bars represent group means of fold change ± SEM (n = 3 independent experiments). Groups not sharing the same letter are statistically different (p < 0.05). Notation of n.s. implies no significance for the evaluated gene. Primer sequences are available in the table appended to Figure S2
Engineered cartilage specimens derived from WT and Luc cell lines exhibited a significant degradative response to this 72-hr cytokine treatment. We measured the changes in gene expression induced by 1 ng/mL IL-1 or 20 ng/mL TNF-α by qRT-PCR ( Figures 4 and 5, respectively) and observed significant upregulation of markers of inflammation, such as Ccl2 and Il6, as well as degradative enzymes, such as matrix metalloproteinases and aggrecanases. Furthermore, significant suppression of expression of matrix components of cartilage, including collagen type 2 α1 (Col2a1) and aggrecan (Acan), was noted in cartilage engineered from either WT or Ccl2-Luc cells. The cartilage derived from these control cell lines also displayed a loss of sulfated glycosaminoglycan (sGAG), a major component of articular cartilage critical to proper tissue function, in response to both concentrations of IL-1 and to 20 ng/mL TNF-α ( Figures 6 A–6D).
After establishing that engineered cells express transgenes in a cytokine-inducible manner and that Ccl2-driven sTNFR1 provides a tunable and effective response to even a high dose of TNF-α in monolayer experiments, we assessed whether tissues engineered from engineered stem cells could overcome the degenerative effects of TNF-α and IL-1. To this end, we further differentiated the WT, Ccl2-Luc, Ccl2-Il1ra, and Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells toward the chondrocyte lineage for the production of engineered cartilage tissue (). Engineered tissues from WT and Ccl2-Luc cell lines were treated with 0 ng/mL cytokine, 0.1–1 ng/mL IL-1, or 20 ng/mL TNF-α. Engineered tissues from Ccl2-Il1ra and Ccl2-sTNFR1 cell lines were treated with only IL-1 or TNF-α, respectively, at the same concentrations as WT and Ccl2-Luc tissues.
When treated with 0.1 ng/mL IL-1, which sTNFR1 should not antagonize, there was approximately 300-fold stimulation of sTNFR1 production ( Figure 3 B) to ∼630 ng/mL. When treated with 20 ng/mL TNF-α, production of sTNFR1 increased only approximately 50-fold over basal levels to ∼90 ng/mL. Similarly, treatment of Ccl2-Il1ra cells with IL-1 resulted in an increase of IL-1Ra protein in the medium of approximately 30-fold over basal levels of expression to ∼180 ng/mL, whereas treatment with TNF-α resulted in an increase of approximately 88-fold to ∼570 ng/mL ( Figure 3 C). In WT cells, IL-1Ra production after a single pulse was 1.65 ± 0.35, 1.74 ± 0.11, and 1.84 ± 0.16 ng/mL after treatment with no cytokine, 0.1 ng/mL IL-1, or 20 ng/mL TNF-α, respectively ( Figure S2 ). Thus, in the case of both Ccl2-Il1ra and Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells, either IL-1 or TNF-α was capable of potently inducing transgene expression. However, a lower level of induction was achieved when an antagonizing therapy was produced in response to the stimulatory cytokine.
(C) The same experiment as described in (B) was performed using Ccl2-Il1ra-engineered cells, and ELISA was performed on samples to determine protein levels of IL-1Ra secreted into the culture media. Error bars represent the mean ± SEM (n = 3 independent experiments).
(B) Ccl2-sTNFR1-engineered cells were treated with cytokine, and 24 hr later media were collected. Cytokine was then withdrawn for 3 days prior to a second and then third stimulation to probe the kinetics of 24-hr sTNFR1 secretion after iterative stimulations.
(A) sTNFR1 levels measured in culture media conditioned for 24 hr prior to (D0) and after (D1) cytokine treatment. On D1, cytokine was withdrawn from all samples, and media were collected at 24-hr intervals for the subsequent 3 days.
We then performed iterative stimulation of Ccl2-driven sTNFR1 and IL-1Ra cells in monolayer with either 0.1 ng/mL IL-1α or 20 ng/mL TNF-α. After 24 hr, the cytokine-containing medium was exchanged for cytokine-free medium, and specimens were collected. Three days later, cells were stimulated with cytokine again to establish the capacity of the cells to respond to recurrent stimulation with cytokine. Control specimens without cytokine stimulation were maintained in parallel. sTNFR1-engineered cells displayed a basal level of production of less than 3 ng/mL ( Figures 3 A and 3B). Engineered cells rapidly produced sTNFR1 after either IL-1 or TNF-α stimulation ( Figures 3 A and 3B). Withdrawal of cytokine-containing medium resulted in a decline in sTNFR1 accumulation over subsequent collection periods, irrespective of whether IL-1 or TNF-α served as the stimulant. In both cases, production of sTNFR1 decreased to basal levels within 48 hr of removing cytokines ( Figure 3 A).
To ascertain whether this attenuation was mediated by cytokine-inducible production of the TNF-α antagonist sTNFR1 from the engineered cells, we measured the expression of sTNFR1 transgene in parallel with Il6 expression. We found that sTNFR1 expression was rapidly upregulated at the 4-hr time point ( Figure 2 C). In the groups treated with 0.2 and 2 ng/mL of TNF-α, transgene expression began to decline between the 4- and 12-hr time points, in accordance with the decreased Il6 expression ( Figures 2 A and 2B). This transition likely reflects an attenuated state of inflammation after low and medium treatment of TNF-α. Ccl2-driven sTNFR1 expression continued to increase through 24 hr in response to the high TNF-α treatment, but this level declined rapidly toward baseline values at 72 hr, consistent with an inflammatory signal at 24 hr that largely resolved by 72 hr, as suggested by the Il6 and NF-κB transcription data ( Figures 2 A and 2B). In accordance with these qRT-PCR data, we measured increased accumulation of sTNFR1 protein in culture media over time in a dose-dependent fashion ( Figure 2 C).
To evaluate whether the observations of Il6 gene expression reflect the general state of inflammation in these cells, we transduced WT and Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells with a lentiviral vector delivering a nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) luminescence reporter. We then treated these cells with 0 or 20 ng/mL TNF-α and after 24, 48, and 72 hr measured luminescence as a surrogate for activity of the NF-κB transcription factor, which is activated in response to various inflammatory signals. At 24 hr, the NF-κB transcriptional activity was upregulated in both WT and Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells. However, at the 48- and 72-hr time points, a sharp decline in NF-κB transcriptional activity was observed in engineered cells expressing sTNFR1 under control of the Ccl2 locus ( Figure 2 B). Taken together, the Il6 gene expression and NF-κB transcriptional assays further support that the Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells are capable of attenuating the TNF-α-induced regulation of Il6 as well as a more general inflammatory state. Furthermore, these results suggest that, after 3 days of TNF-α treatment, the cells are capable of antagonizing even a high (20 ng/mL) concentration of TNF-α, while control WT cells remain in a state of inflammation even after treatment with only 0.2 ng/mL TNF-α.
(D) ELISA data showing the concentration of sTNFR1 protein in culture media in samples treated with the indicated concentrations of TNF-α. Samples were collected at the indicated time. Values represent mean ± SEM (n = 3 independent experiments).
(C) Changes in Ccl2-driven expression of the sTNFR1 transgene over time as measured by qRT-PCR. Values plotted represent the mean fold change in expression ± SEM (n = 3 independent experiments) compared with matched cells of the same genotype treated with 0 ng/mL TNF-α and as normalized by the r18S reference gene. The 0-hr time point (shaded) was not measured and is shown for illustration purposes only, as all samples at 0 hr measure 1 by definition.
(B) Fold change in NF-κB transcriptional activity as measured by the luminescence signal from NF-κB-dependent luciferase expression. Bars represent the mean fold change in relative luminescence units (RLU) ± SEM of cells treated with 20 ng/mL TNF-α for the indicated time compared with controls cultured with 0 ng/mL TNF-α (n = 4–6 independent experiments).
(A) The profile of Il6 expression in response to various doses (x axes) of TNF and across indicated time points. Values plotted represent the mean fold change in expression ± SEM (n = 3 independent experiments) compared with matched cells of the same genotype treated with 0 ng/mL TNF and as normalized by the r18S reference gene. Hash indicates value greater than treatment with 0 ng/mL TNF ( # p < 0.05). ∗ p < 0.05 for WT versus sTNFR1-engineered cells.
As early as 4 hr after TNF-α treatment, the 2- and 20-ng/mL treatments significantly upregulated Il6 transcription in both the WT and Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells, while 0.2 ng/mL did not significantly upregulate Il6 ( Figure 2 A). At the 12-hr time point, Il6 expression was significantly elevated at all TNF-α concentrations in WT cells; however, Il6 was only significantly upregulated in the Ccl2-sTNFR1-engineered cells at the 20-ng/mL level of TNF-α treatment ( Figure 2 A). Even at the 20-ng/mL level of treatment, the engineered cells showed a significantly lower level of Il6 induction than WT cells. At the 24-hr time point, the medium and high concentrations of TNF-α drove an upregulation of Il6 in WT cells, but only the high 20-ng/mL concentration resulted in significant upregulation of Il6 in the sTNFR1-engineered cells ( Figure 2 A). By the 72-hr time point, all three doses of TNF-α resulted in significant upregulation of Il6 in the WT cells, while TNF-α treatment only induced an upregulation of Il6 in the Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells at the 20-ng/mL treatment level ( Figure 2 A). These results show reduced inflammatory response as a result of cytokine-mediated induction of sTNFR1 from the Ccl2 locus.
Initially, we performed a time-course and dose-response experiment, in which Ccl2-sTNFR1 and WT cells were treated with a range of TNF-α concentrations (0.2–20 ng/mL) for a variety of times (4, 12, 24, and 72 hr). We measured the expression of the sTNFR1 transgene at both the mRNA and protein levels by qRT-PCR and ELISA, respectively. We also measured the expression of Il6, a pro-inflammatory cytokine whose expression serves as a sentinel marker of inflammation, at the mRNA level by qRT-PCR in order to additionally characterize the inflammatory response of the WT and engineered Ccl2-sTNFR1 cells.
We then probed the responsiveness of our engineered cells endowed with Ccl2-driven anti-cytokine transgenes. We performed these experiments primarily by evaluating gene expression and transgene production in the Ccl2-sTNFR1 group, as the inability of these murine cells to otherwise produce this human transcript and protein allows for direct conclusions regarding transgene production from the Ccl2 locus.
Next, using two Ccl2-luciferase cell lines, we induced luciferase expression by stimulating cells with 20 ng/mL TNF-α to evaluate whether transgene expression reflected endogenous Ccl2 expression in WT cells. Relative luminescence measurements indicated that transgene expression in both clones was indeed stimulated by cytokine and increased across the 72-hr TNF-α treatment period (p < 8.5e-10, Figure 1 C), consistent with findings from TNF-induced Ccl2 expression in WT cells.
Clones for each transgene with targeted gene addition on one allele were selected for further analysis (referred to as Ccl2-Luc, Ccl2-Il1ra, or Ccl2-sTNFR1) and expanded on murine embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) followed by pre-differentiation in micromass culture (). First, we evaluated whether targeted transgene integration at the Ccl2 start codon would enable cytokine-inducible transgene expression. As a point of reference, wild-type (WT) cells were treated with a range of TNF-α concentrations (0.2–20 ng/mL), and mRNA was collected at 4, 12, 24, and 72 hr ( Figure 1 B). Ccl2 gene expression was evaluated by qRT-PCR. At all TNF-α concentrations tested, Ccl2 gene expression was elevated at each time point compared with cells cultured in the absence of TNF-α (p < 0.016). In the 2-ng/mL and 20-ng/mL groups, Ccl2 gene expression continued to increase throughout the 72-hr period of TNF-α treatment (p < 1.8e-10).
(C) Two cell lines were engineered to express luciferase from the endogenous Ccl2 locus and were then stimulated with 20 ng/mL TNF-α. Cells were lysed at the indicated time after TNF treatment and luminescence was measured as a readout for Ccl2-driven transgene expression (n = 6 independent experiments). Values plotted represent the mean fold change in relative luminescence units (RLU) ± SEM compared with untreated controls of each cell line.p < 0.05 between each time point for each clone, and alsop < 0.05 between clones for each time point. See also Figure S1 and the appended table.
(B) qRT-PCR data showing the expression profile of Ccl2 after treatment of WT cells with various concentrations of TNF-α (n = 3 independent experiments). Values plotted represent the mean fold change in expression ± SEM compared with untreated controls.
(A) Top left: in wild-type (WT) cells, TNF-α signaling through its type 1 receptor initiates a cascade leading to nuclear translocation and increased transcriptional activity of NF-κB, activating an inflammatory transcriptional program. One gene rapidly and highly upregulated by cytokine-induced NF-κB activity is Ccl2 (shown in orange). Top right: a CRISPR/Cas9 RNA-guided nuclease (not depicted) generates a double-strand break in the endogenous chromosomal locus near the start codon for Ccl2. Provision of a targeting vector with a transgene flanked by regions homologous to the Ccl2 locus promotes the use of this template for repair of the damaged allele in a subset of cells. Bottom left: such alleles would then be activated by TNF-α, which would now induce expression of the soluble TNF type 1 receptor (sTNFR1). Bottom right: upon antagonism of TNF-α in the microenvironment, signal transduction through the membrane receptor would halt, NF-κB would remain sequestered in the cytoplasm, and expression of the sTNFR1 transgene would autonomously decay upon resolution of the local inflammation.
The primary goal of this work was to program induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with the capacity to respond to an inflammatory stimulus with potent and autonomously regulated anti-cytokine production ( Figure 1 A). As such, we aimed to perform targeted gene addition to the locus of the pro-inflammatory chemokine Ccl2, which is potently activated in response to cytokine-mediated signaling and of which disruption of a single allele would not be expected to compromise overall cellular function. Thus, transgenes encoding a firefly luciferase transcriptional reporter or a cytokine antagonist, either murine IL-1Ra or a chimeric human sTNFR1-murine immunoglobulin G (), were targeted to the Ccl2 start codon in murine iPSCs () using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing platform. After hygromycin selection, clonal isolation, and screening by PCR of the junctions of the transgene and target locus, multiple clones were identified that possessed targeted integration events at the Ccl2 locus ( Figure S1 ).
Discussion
Overcoming aberrant pro-inflammatory signals in chronic diseases while preserving critical homeostatic signaling nodes represents a significant challenge for regenerative medicine. This work demonstrates the utility of genome editing for the development of “designer” stem cells that sense levels of inflammation and respond according to the degree of the pathology. Using CRISPR/Cas9, we engineered pluripotent stem cells with the prescribed feature of inflammatory cytokine resistance by performing targeted addition of therapeutic transgenes to the cytokine-responsive Ccl2 locus. Transgene expression from engineered cells was feedback-controlled with rapid on/off dynamics and was adequate to mitigate the inflammatory effects of physiologic concentrations of both IL-1 and TNF-α in the context of precursor cells cultured in monolayer as well as in engineered tissues such as cartilage. These cells provide the foundation for a cell-based vaccine for the treatment of a variety of autoimmune or inflammatory diseases.
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Boss J.M. Nuclear factor-κB p65 mediates the assembly and activation of the TNF-responsive element of the murine monocyte Chemoattractant-1 gene. Teferedegne et al., 2006 Teferedegne B.
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Boss J.M. Mechanism of action of a distal NF-kappaB-dependent enhancer. Wang et al., 2000 Wang Y.
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Harris D.C. Lipopolysaccharide-induced MCP-1 gene expression in rat tubular epithelial cells is nuclear factor-kappaB dependent. Hao and Baltimore, 2009 Hao S.
Baltimore D. The stability of mRNA influences the temporal order of the induction of genes encoding inflammatory molecules. In this work, we sought to commandeer an endogenous gene promoter to engineer custom-designed stem cells with the ability to regulate anti-cytokine therapy in an autonomous, real-time fashion. Critical to our selection of Ccl2 as the target locus for controlling transgene expression is the temporal pattern associated with its cytokine-inducible expression profile. By targeting our transgenes to the Ccl2 start codon, we preserved many of the endogenous regulatory features associated with Ccl2 expression, including distal and proximal regulatory regions encompassing two NF-κB regulatory elements as well as SP1 and AP-1 binding sites (). As such, the repurposed Ccl2 promoter did indeed endow engineered cells with the capacity to substantially upregulate transgene expression in an inflammation-inducible manner. Importantly, this upregulation was both dose- and time-dependent and was transient in nature. Treatment with a range of TNF-α concentrations spanning three orders of magnitude resulted in differential induction of transgene transcription. The concomitant decay in transgene expression and transcription of markers of inflammation such as Il6 suggests that cells were capable of autonomously tuning expression of the transgene. Importantly, our experiments also demonstrated that cells continue to respond to cytokines by robustly producing additional therapy after iterative exposure. Insertion of our transgene cassette did, however, uncouple regulation of our system from the endogenous AU-rich elements in the 3′ UTR of Ccl2, which are thought to play a role in driving transcript levels back toward a basal state after inflammation is resolved (). Despite this, expression of our transgenes did decay after resolution of cytokine stimulation, which came about by transgene therapy or simple withdrawal of cytokine. In future iterations of this work, preservation of the AU-rich elements in the transgene cassette may provide a means whereby even more rapid declines in transgene expression may be achieved.
Wang et al., 2000 Wang Y.
Rangan G.K.
Goodwin B.
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Harris D.C. Lipopolysaccharide-induced MCP-1 gene expression in rat tubular epithelial cells is nuclear factor-kappaB dependent. Li and Schwartz, 2001 Li Y.P.
Schwartz R.J. TNF-α regulates early differentiation of C2C12 myoblasts in an autocrine fashion. Li, 2003 Li Y.P. TNF-alpha is a mitogen in skeletal muscle. Basal levels of transgene product were detected in the absence of cytokine by ELISA. This observation is not surprising, as Ccl2 is detected at the protein level from certain tissues without activation from cytokines (). Despite this, even low levels of cytokine treatment were capable of inducing transgene expression and initiating the inflammatory transcriptional program, suggesting that basal levels of cytokine antagonists were insufficient to abolish signaling from low concentrations of cytokine. Concentrations as low as 2–6 pg/mL () of TNF-α are important for proper muscle regeneration and repair. Thus, since the engineered cells are capable of responding to low levels of cytokine, the basal levels of anti-cytokine therapy may not preclude detection and response of niche cells to low but critical levels of cytokine.
Our data reveal apparent differences in cell responses to inflammatory cytokines depending on their differentiation status or lineage commitment. We attribute this discrepancy to potential differences in cell number, differentiation state of the cells, and natural variation in gene expression profiles of cells adopting different phenotypes. These observations could also be strictly related to the physical features of the different culture systems. Specifically, the effective concentration of TNF-α or IL-1 could be reduced by one to two orders of magnitude due to partitioning within a tissue matrix. Moreover, secreted sTNFR1 and IL-1Ra may remain bound by the rich extracellular matrix in the engineered cartilage, whereas factors secreted by cells in monolayer remain more readily accessible to diffusion in culture media.
Garaulet et al., 2013 Garaulet G.
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Rodriguez A. IL10 released by a new inflammation-regulated lentiviral system efficiently attenuates zymosan-induced arthritis. Rachakonda et al., 2008 Rachakonda P.S.
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Schmidt M.F. Application of inflammation-responsive promoter for an in vitro arthritis model. Khoury et al., 2007 Khoury M.
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et al. Inflammation-inducible anti-TNF gene expression mediated by intra-articular injection of serotype 5 adeno-associated virus reduces arthritis. van de Loo et al., 2004 van de Loo F.A.
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et al. An inflammation-inducible adenoviral expression system for local treatment of the arthritic joint. Garaulet et al., 2013 Garaulet G.
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Rodriguez A. IL10 released by a new inflammation-regulated lentiviral system efficiently attenuates zymosan-induced arthritis. Previous investigators have taken various approaches to confer inflammation-inducible, autoregulatory features to target cells. A prevailing strategy has involved cloning approximately 3 kb of characterized, cytokine-inducible promoters upstream of transgene coding sequences. One example of this strategy is the use of the E-selectin promoter (). In other studies, a self-limiting promoter construct was developed based on a truncated promoter sequence of cyclooxygenase-2 upstream of the IL-4 gene to express IL-4 only in the presence of inflammation (). Alternatively, tandem repeats of NF-κB response elements have been used to drive transgene expression (). These expression cassettes are typically delivered to cells by viral gene delivery. While these approaches have indeed been proved to be effective at generating cytokine-inducible expression, notable limitations do exist. Most of these relate to the reliance on viral vectors to deliver the expression cassette and include the limited packaging capacity of adeno-associated virus, which restricts the size of the cloned promoter sequence, and the potential for insertional mutagenesis by lentiviral vectors. Furthermore, reported basal levels of transgenes produced from these promoters have been high, and, in some cases, growth factors other than inflammatory mediators are needed to co-stimulate efficient induction of transgene expression (). While such gene delivery vehicles carrying inflammation-inducible cassettes could be delivered in vivo, this method lacks cell- and tissue-targeting specificity.
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ade Charpentier E. A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity. Our work extends these efforts by directly targeting transgenes to inducible, endogenous loci using the efficient and highly specific CRISPR/Cas9 genome-engineering technology (). In this manner, our strategy forgoes limitations associated with predicting regulatory features in a genetic locus such as distal enhancers. In addition, this approach abrogates the need to consider limitations on packaging efficiency, as the entire regulatory region need not be packaged in a gene delivery vector. Moreover, by performing targeted integration, this strategy absolves concerns associated with random insertion of provirus within the host genome.
Our use of iPSCs in these studies also provides an important advance, as the base cell population can be precisely defined and potentially undergo additional genome modifications if needed. This approach may prove attractive for regenerative medicine strategies, as clones may be screened for function and then expanded and differentiated toward a variety of terminal cell types to treat multiple tissues from the same engineered cell population. To achieve the same end, prior approaches would require isolation and expansion of primary cells from multiple tissues, followed by treatment of each population with gene delivery vehicles, and finally delivery of engineered cells to the host. This approach lacks the specificity conferred by targeting pre-determined genomic sites for modification using gene-editing nucleases and requires that engineered, primary cells do not senesce prior to serving a therapeutic purpose.Inter Milan put Xherdan Shaqiri on the market, and he’s garnered a bit of interest, but it’s taken a while for a Champions League team to show any serious intent.
With the shocking news that Stoke City was posting a serious challenge for the Swiss international, a few other clubs in European play have finally emerged as contenders for his signature.
La Gazzetta dello Sport suggested Inter approached Tottenham Hotspur and offered a swap-deal for Shaqiri with Erik Lamela moving in the other direction. It’s unclear what kind of interest – if any – Spurs would have in that deal, but Lamela was in and out of the starting lineup last season with positive but inconsistent performances. Lamela came to Spurs from Serie A, so he’s a known commodity in Italy, and would be highly valued there despite owning just two goals and eight assists in 42 Premier League appearances for Spurs.
Champions League interest finally comes in the form of Atletico Madrid. According to Spanish publication Mundo Deportivo, Arda Turan’s likely exit is fueling Atletico’s interest in Shaqiri, and the club is looking at a number of players to fill that void, including Carlos Vela and Gohkan Tore in addition to Shaqiri.
Stoke had a formal bid accepted by Inter, but there are reports from Italy that Shaqiri is stalling in the hopes of waiting out interest from another team, with little interest in joining a team like Stoke that doesn’t offer European play.
Follow @the_bonnfireThe company that owns TJ Maxx and Marshalls is continuing to pay employees in Puerto Rico even though many of its stores remain closed.
CNN reported that TJX Companies — which owns TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods — has kept paying the employees after Hurricane Maria tore through the island earlier this year.
"We believe it is the right thing for us to do under these circumstances," TJX spokeswoman Erika Tower told the network in a statement.
The company has 29 stores in Puerto Rico, but it is not clear how many of those stores |
These include vaguely defined “public-private partnerships,” which, for money-losing projects like transit expansion, are more often a method of administering public funds, than of generating them.)
It’s quite a conversation to be having with an electorate that, less than three years ago, voted in Rob Ford on the explicit premise that he’d cut taxes like the Land Transfer Tax and the now-defunct Vehicle Registration Tax. The difference now is the promise of dedicated funding.
“Before, with the LTT, the VRT, it was just another bloody tax,” says Keesmaat. “What we’re doing right now is saying, hold on a minute, what if that tax got you all these transit lines? Then are you willing to pay it? Does that seem worth it to you? That’s very different than kissing your money goodbye and not knowing where it goes.”
But before they start naming all these projects, the city’s bureaucrats want to talk money. It’s a refreshing reversal of the way transit planning has been run for decades, putting politics first and planning second. For the moment, it keeps the unfortunate “subway vs. streetcar” debate at bay. It shouldn’t be complicated: Toronto needs both, but built in the right places for each. Yet there’s no surer way to turn transit planning into a political football, then to start talking about which citizens “deserve” a subway. (“It’s an absurdity to be debating, at a city-wide level, subways versus LRTs,” said Keesmaat.)
The money-first approach is even more meaningful in the long-term. Since the municipality is so limited in the ways it can legally raise money, trying to fund big projects has long meant begging senior levels of government to cough up huge sums.
It hasn’t worked terribly well. In practice, it’s meant waiting for transit-building ambitions to line up with political fortunes. It means waiting for three governments at three levels who are willing to work together, which is like waiting for three gold bars at a slot machine. It also means waiting for the right people to take the right important roles: When the MPP for Vaughan became Ontario’s Minister of Finance, a $2.5-billion subway extension to a scrubby local field managed to become reality.
And then there’s timing. Politicians like legacy projects, but transit schemes take so long to implement that they become ideal targets for cuts when their successors take over. Even if governments survive, their willingness to spend might not. Governments start looking at megaprojects when they want stimulus spending, then lose interest when the economy recovers and the government is left in the red. The result is that we make half-hearted stabs at building transit when the economy tanks, but never keep pace when development’s booming. Toronto’s transit map is dotted with projects that were conceived for bad reasons and cancelled for worse ones.
After all this, the technocracy is fighting back. Shifting transit funding from top-down to bottom-up—cutting a deal straight with the taxpayer—helps depoliticize the process, setting up revenue streams that could survive from one government to the next. Even Ontario opposition leader Tim Hudak, speaking at the Toronto Region Board of Trade, wouldn’t rule out revenue tools, even as he launched once again into how Scarberians deserve subways in order to be “full citizens.”
The irony, of course, is that Rob Ford himself, who wouldn’t talk money, was the one who led us to talk about nothing but. His campaign for subways, subways, subways helped stoke the public appetite for transit expansion, even as he insisted that taxpayers wouldn’t have to pay extra for it. Ford’s rude encounter with reality helped foster a rare consensus that more transit is needed, but that there’s one way to get it built, and it’s not wishful thinking.
“We’re kind of calling that out,” said Keesmaat. “We’re being very clear: There’s no pot of gold. If we want to invest in public transit, we have to find the revenue tools to pay for it. It’s that simple.”The University of Virginia Cavalier Marching Band received word on Wednesday that it has been selected to represent Virginia in the 2015 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The Cavaliers will join the line of march and begin its performance to the sound of “Let’s Have a Parade,” the iconic phrase that has signaled the start of every Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade since 1924.
The band will join nine other marching bands from across the country as well as iconic Macy’s staples: floats, giant character balloons, clowns and superstar performers on Thanksgiving Day 2015. The parade attracts more than 3.5 million live spectators and more than 50 million viewers.
“With just a decade of experience, the Cavalier Marching Band has garnered a national reputation due to its excellent marching and performance skill,” said Wesley Whatley, creative director of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “Macy's Band Committee is proud to have such a fine institution representing the state of Virginia in the 2015 parade.”
William Pease, U.Va.’s director of bands, said, “We are thrilled to be selected for the 2015 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This will be a highlight for all of us participating in the parade. Our current and former members worked very hard to raise the level of our band to receive national recognition. Thanks to everyone for your support. Go Hoos!”
University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan said, “All of us in the U.Va. community are proud of the Cavalier Marching Band and Director William Pease. Here in Charlottesville we have the good fortune to watch our excellent marching band perform frequently and next Thanksgiving Day, millions of Macy’s Parade-goers and television viewers will join us in applauding the band.”
More than 5,000 Macy’s employees and dedicated volunteers work tirelessly to create a spectacular event that entertains the cheerful crowds and provides joy to millions at home watching on Thanksgiving Day. Marching down a more than two-mile long route in New York City, the spectacle is alive with gleaming color, music and smiles.
The Cavalier Marching Band was selected to be one of 10 marching ensembles to perform on Nov. 26, 2015, beating out more than 175 applicants nationwide. Each year, the Macy’s Parade Band Committee looks for bands that have the stage presence to captivate a national audience as well as having the musical and marching abilities to showcase on a national scale.
The Cavalier Marching Band will spend the next 18 months planning for its big debut.Derrick Kahala Watson (born September 9, 1966)[1] is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii.
A native of Hawaii, he graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School before entering private practice in San Francisco. He served as a federal prosecutor for some years in California and then Hawaii, rising to become chief of the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Hawaii. Appointed to the federal bench in 2012 and 2013 by President Barack Obama, he was unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate in 2013. Watson is the fourth Native Hawaiian federal judge in U.S. history, and the only one currently serving.
Early life and education [ edit ]
Derrick Kahala Watson was born in 1966, in Honolulu, Hawaii,[2] to a Honolulu police officer and a worker at a local bank.[3] He graduated from the Kamehameha Schools in 1984 and received his Bachelor of Arts, cum laude from Harvard College in 1988.[4][2] Watson was the first in his family to graduate college.[3] Watson received his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1991, and was admitted to practice law in California the same year.[2] Barack Obama and Neil M. Gorsuch were members of his graduating class.[3][5]
Legal career and service in Army Reserves [ edit ]
He began his career as an associate at the law firm of Landels, Ripley & Diamond in San Francisco, California, where he worked from 1991 to 1995.[4] He served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of California from 1995 to 2000, serving as Deputy Chief of the Civil Division from 1999 to 2000.[4] In 2000, Watson returned to private practice, joining the law firm of Farella Braun + Martel LLP, where he worked on product liability, toxic tort, and environmental cost recovery litigation.[4] Watson became a partner at the firm in 2003.[4] While in private practice, Watson conducted substantial pro bono work on behalf of the San Francisco Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, he also did pro bono work involving human trafficking and wage and hour claims.[3] Watson served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Hawaii from 2007 to 2013 and served as Chief of the Civil Division from 2009 to 2013.[4] From 1998 to 2006, Watson served in the United States Army Reserve in the Judge Advocate General's Corps, with the rank of captain. He was honorably discharged.[2][5]
Federal judicial service [ edit ]
On November 14, 2012, President Obama nominated Watson to serve as a United States District Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii, to the seat vacated by Judge David Alan Ezra, who took senior status on June 27, 2012.[4][6] On January 2, 2013, his nomination was returned to the President, due to the sine die adjournment of the Senate. He was renominated to the same office the next day.[7] Watson was rated "well qualified" by a substantial majority of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary.[8] Watson encountered no opposition in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which reported his nomination to the Senate floor on February 14, 2013, by voice vote.[7][9] Watson's appointment was confirmed by a vote of 94 ayes to 0 nays on April 18, 2013.[10] He received his commission on April 23, 2013. Watson is the fourth Native Hawaiian to serve on the federal bench, and the only currently serving Native Hawaiian judge.[11][5]
Travel ban case [ edit ]
On March 15, 2017, Watson granted a temporary restraining order blocking President Trump's revised executive order banning entry of nationals of six majority-Muslim countries into the United States from going into effect. Watson held that the order would violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause in that "a reasonable, objective observer... would conclude that the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion." Watson justified his opinion by contending that because the intent of Trump's executive order disfavored foreign Muslims, it by extension disfavored domestic Muslims thus violating their First Amendment rights as well.[12][13][14]
On March 29, Watson converted the temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction.[15] On June 12, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the majority of the injunction, unanimously determining that Trump had "exceeded the scope of authority delegated to the president" under the Immigration and Nationality Act.[16][17] The United States Supreme Court granted Trump's request to hear the case, setting arguments for October 2017; in the meantime, the Court partially reinstated Trump's executive order for a travel ban on June 26, 2017; the Court "prohibited the government from enforcing the ban against any 'foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States,' but they allowed the government to enforce it against travelers who lack such a relationship."[18]
Initially, the Trump administration excluded grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relations from the exceptions to the travel ban, arguing that they were not "close" relatives. The State of Hawaii filed an emergency motion to clarify the scope of "close familial relationships" under the terms of the injunction and Supreme Court decision narrowing it, asking the district court to rule "that the federal government may not enforce the controversial bans against fiances, grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins of people currently living in the United States."[19] On July 6, Watson denied the motion, writing that "[t]his Court will not upset the Supreme Court's careful balancing and equitable judgment" and that the State should seek guidance from the Supreme Court. State Attorney General Doug Chin described Watson's action as "procedural" rather than a decision on the merits.[20] Subsequently, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Watson "had the authority to interpret the Supreme Court's order and block any violation of it" and the issue returned to him. On July 13 Watson issued a ruling expanding the class of exemptions from the travel ban. He ordered that the definition of "close family members" be expanded to include grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins in the United States. Watson also ruled that refugees who have a formal promise of placement from a U.S. resettlement agency are exempt from the ban.[21] The following day, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sent out a diplomatic cable to all U.S. diplomatic posts reflecting Watson's ruling; the cable "reversed the State Department's previous, narrow definition of close family and stated that 'grandparents, grandchildren, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, and cousins' are eligible for visas."[22]
On October 17, 2017, Watson again issued a temporary restraining order preventing a later revision of Trump's travel ban from going into effect. In his decision, Watson prevented the blocking of citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Chad from traveling to the United States, while leaving intact the restrictions for North Korean citizens and some Venezuelan officials.[23] He argued that the revised ban “suffers from precisely the same maladies as its predecessor”.[24]
On June 26, 2018, in Trump v. Hawaii the Supreme Court reversed this decision in a 5–4 decision, ruling that plaintiffs did not have a "likelihood of success on the merits" on either their INA or their Establishment Clause claims. The court vacated the injunction and remanded the case to lower courts for further proceedings.[25][26]
Personal life [ edit ]
Watson described himself to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser as a political independent.[3]Why Abbott called for Islam to reform (and it has little to do with religion)
Updated
Tony Abbott has been widely reported as declaring Islam needs reform, but it's not Muslims who are his main target. The institution he's really keen to change is the Liberal Party - and the reform he wants begins at the top. Jeff Sparrow writes.
"It's not culturally insensitive to demand... respect for Western civilisation. Cultures are not all equal."
That's former prime minister Tony Abbott writing for the Daily Telegraph.
He's been widely reported as declaring that Islam needs reform. But, of course, it's not Muslims who are Abbott's main target. The institution he's really keen to change is the Liberal Party - and the reform he wants begins at the top.
After losing the leadership to Malcolm Turnbull, Abbott promised to engage in no sniping. He's kept that pledge only to the extent that the campaign he's now running involves less sniping and more overt sabotage.
In his recent interview with Sky News, he declared that he would have won the next election and then defended all his most controversial policies (with the exception of the Prince Phillip knighthood). He said:
I think it's important to correct the record when the record has been falsified. I did a bit of that last week, but I'm not in the business of replaying events... but it's important I defend the legacy of the Abbott government. If I defend the legacy of my government, I'm helping the foundations of the Turnbull Government.
Except that, of course, the Turnbull Government laid its foundations by distinguishing itself from its tremendously unpopular predecessor. That's why, ever since the spill, the Labor Party has tried to associate the current and former PMs, an endeavour that Abbott seems determined to assist.
The inevitability of a conflict between the old and new is why most defeated leaders leave parliament, where their mere presence serves to destabilise. Joe Hockey acknowledged as much when he accepted the post of ambassador to the US.
"If I was going to stay," he explained, "it'd be overwhelmingly about getting even with people that brought me down."
That's the context in which Abbott just announced he'd like to stick around. He told Sky:
I've had literally thousands and thousands of messages of support and encouragement since mid-September. I've had a lot of people talk to me as I get around the electorate and still, to some extent, around the country. The message that I'm getting from them, overwhelmingly, is that I still have a contribution to make to our public life.
A recent column by Abbott's close friend and supporter, Greg Sheridan, spelled out the next step. Abbott should be in cabinet, Sheridan said: his elevation would enable the Liberal Party to unite its liberal and conservative streams.
Of course, Sheridan knows as well as Turnbull that, once Tony the camel gets his nose in the tent, his hairy body will soon follow.
What's this got to do with Islam and Western civilisation?
Now that the incantation about stopping the boats has lost its magic, Abbott can list very few achievements from his term in office. But he sees national security as a natural strength for him and a natural weakness for Turnbull. Abbott writes in the Tele:
My government boosted funding to police and security agencies, passed four sets of legislation with more power to arrest and detain terror suspects, and committed to stripping terrorists who are dual nationals of their citizenship.
The implied contrast is between his government, which took all those stern measures, and the current mob, who wouldn't have had the bottle.
The problem for Abbott is that Turnbull's response to Islamic State is more-or-less in line with that from Australia's allies. Dumped defence minister Kevin Andrews might want to send ground troops to Syria but no one much else does. Andrews' call for a ground war was effortlessly swatted away by Turnbull's allies, leaving the Liberals' conservative faction looking isolated and irrelevant and a bit batty.
Hence Abbott's careful formulation in his Telegraph article. He writes:
Australian jets are bombing terrorist targets in the Middle East and our soldiers are advising and training the Iraqi army. At best this is containing the death cult - but not destroying it.
He then walks back, ever so slightly, the rebuke by adding: "PM Turnbull is talking to our allies about what else we might do."
There's a limit to how far Abbott can go in debating defence policy, partly because he can't be too explicit in his attacks on Turnbull, and partly because a call for Australia to make a unilateral deployment in Syria would sound unhinged.
Hence the rhetoric about Islam needing reform.
It's all hokum of course. As Kristina Keneally points out, there's something more than a little bizarre to hear an argument about the necessity of an Islamic reformation coming from a man who trained for the priesthood. She says:
I know it was some time ago that you were in the seminary, but surely you remember that the Reformation created Protestantism. You and I are members of the unreformed strain of Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church. You and I and our 1.2 billion fellow Catholics around the world have had no reformation. We are part of a church that has steadfastly refused to embrace, in both internal structures and theological development, modern concepts like democracy or gender equality.
Which is not to equate contemporary Catholicism with the Spanish inquisition so much as to suggest that the modern world cannot be explained by airily invoking a few catchphrases from fourth form history.
The Islamic State; the Taliban; Al Qaeda: these are not ancient organisations with an unbroken lineage going back to the Middle Ages. They're new groups, emerging in the 21st century to impose themselves on nations with very different recent histories.
Take a look, for instance, at Mohammad Humayon Qayoumi's photos of Afghanistan in the 1960s: the women he portrays are wearing miniskirts and studying medicine.
To understand the difference between the Kabul of those images and the Kabul once again menaced by the Taliban, you have to study the last decades in Afghanistan and the process by which secularism in that country discredited itself. The invocation of some eternal essence of Islam explains nothing. As Jason Wilson says:
This demand for reformation has nothing to do with defeating ISIS. In one sense it is a know-nothing cliche, passed from hand to grubby hand in the increasingly bold Islamophobic right. But that doesn't make it any less dangerous. That's because in another sense, it's a political project - in both electoral and broader sense - which attempts to manufacture the kind of fear and insecurity that drags the national political spectrum to the right, and heightens the appeal of rightwing candidates.
That's what Abbott's doing now.
He knows quite well the meaninglessness of bluster about Western civilisation. Do we respect Ancient Athens for democracy or denounce it for slavery? If Western culture means Goethe, it also means Auschwitz: surely we don't defend both, do we?
But precisely because the rhetoric's empty, it puts Turnbull in a difficult spot. If he says nothing, he's allowing Abbott to set the agenda. But when Turnbull distances himself from Abbott's defence of Western values, he fuels fears among grassroots conservatives that the PM's not really a Liberal at all.
How far Abbott can get with this strategy remains to be seen. No matter how much he proclaims himself satisfied with his record as PM, his colleagues remember how consistently unpopular Abbott proved with the public. It would surely require a massive dive in Turnbull's polling for Abbott's wing of the Liberals to foist their man back in the top job.
In the meantime, let's remember that a recent survey showed Muslims were three times more likely to experience racism than other Australians. Shamefully, the tactics Abbott's employing in his mission of revenge are likely to fan such sentiment further.
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and broadcaster, and an honorary fellow at Victoria University. His Twitter handle is @Jeff Sparrow.
Topics: government-and-politics, federal-government, religion-and-beliefs, unrest-conflict-and-war
First postedFor the Canadian Paralympic athlete, see Frank Bruno (athlete)
Franklin Roy Bruno, MBE (born 16 November 1961) is a British former professional boxer who competed from 1982 to 1996. Bruno had a highly publicised and extremely eventful career. The pinnacle of his boxing career was winning the WBC heavyweight title, in what was his fourth world championship challenge. He also held the European heavyweight title earlier in his career. Bruno was one of the most well-loved and recognisable boxers in British history, and faced multiple top-rated heavyweights during his career including two bouts with Mike Tyson and a domestic clash against Lennox Lewis. He won the WBC title in 1995 after defeating Oliver McCall at a packed Wembley Stadium. Bruno was known for his excellent punching power: he won 40 of his 45 bouts and 38 by knockout, giving him a 95% knockout rate from the fights he won; his overall knockout percentage is 84.44%. Like Henry Cooper before him, Bruno has remained a popular celebrity with the British public following his retirement from boxing.
Professional career [ edit ]
Bruno became a professional boxer in 1982, quickly achieving 21 consecutive wins by knockout. This streak caught the attention of international boxing magazines, such as The Ring, KO Magazine, Boxing Illustrated and Ring En Español. During this period Bruno defeated former world title contender Scott LeDoux, the fringe contender Floyd Cummings, Belgian champion Rudy Gauwe, British contenders Tony Moore and Eddie Nielson, and opponents such as Bill Sharkey, Walter Santemore and Ken Lakusta. However, in May 1984 the up-and-coming future world heavyweight champion, American James "Bonecrusher" Smith, halted that streak when he defeated Bruno by knockout in the tenth and final round of their bout, with Bruno leading clearly on all three judges' cards. As a general view, Bruno was carefully guided by his then manager Terry Lawless, whereby he developed well to later give a strong account of himself in the big matches.
European heavyweight champion and WBA title challenge [ edit ]
Bruno won his next six bouts against respected opposition. He won the European heavyweight title with a KO over Sweden's Anders Eklund, KO'd former European champion and world title contender Lucien Rodriguez in one round, was taken the distance for the first time by the useful world rated Phil Brown, and beat fringe fighters Larry Frazier and Jeff Jordan.
Bruno got back into title contention with an impressive one-round KO win over former WBA champion Gerrie Coetzee of South Africa, and, in July 1986, he challenged Tim Witherspoon for the WBA heavyweight title. After once again leading on the cards for most of the fight, he ran out of steam and was defeated by knockout in round eleven.
Bruno once again got himself back into title contention with wins over former contender James Tillis and journeymen Reggie Gross and Chuck Gardner. In October 1987 Bruno faced the veteran Joe Bugner in an all British match up. Bugner although long past his peak, was coming off impressive wins over Greg Page, James Tillis and David Bey. Bruno won by TKO in the 8th round, the referee stopping the bout, although it appeared the protesting Bugner could have continued.
Bruno vs. Tyson [ edit ]
In February 1989, Bruno challenged Mike Tyson for the undisputed world heavyweight title. In the opening moments, the fighters came together with huge punches. Bruno's legs buckled, and he took a big step back, inadvertently stepping off the ring apron. Most agree that he would have gone down, at least to a knee in any event, and this was called a knockdown. Bruno did not complain, and instead gathered himself to continue, ultimately rocking Tyson (for the first time in Tyson's career) with a left hook toward the end of the round. However, Tyson recovered and eventually beat Bruno when the referee stopped the contest in round five with Bruno taking heavy punishment, lying helpless on the ropes.
Bruno kept winning fights, helping him to retain his spot as one of the world's leading heavyweights. He defeated contender Carl Williams, and then journeymen such as Jose Ribalta, Pierre Coetzer, and Dutchman Jan Emmen.
Bruno vs. Lewis [ edit ]
In 1993 he had a third world title chance against young Lennox Lewis, who was making the second defence of the belt (his first of three championship reigns). The Lennox Lewis vs. Frank Bruno fight was the first time that two British boxers had fought for the world heavyweight title.[1] Lewis beat Bruno on a stoppage in round seven, Bruno again failing to take his title chance after leading the contest on points up until what proved the final round.
Bruno again regrouped, dispatching trialhorse Jesse Ferguson in one round, and the fringe contenders Rodolfo Marin and Mike Evans equally easily.
WBC heavyweight champion and retirement [ edit ]
On 2 September 1995, Bruno finally became world champion by outpointing WBC Champion Oliver McCall over twelve rounds. Bruno did not last long as champion – the contract he signed to get McCall meant he had to face Mike Tyson in his first defence. Tyson beat Bruno on a stoppage in round three,[2] Bruno performing unusually poorly in what turned out to be his last bout as a professional, due to a severe eye injury caused by Tyson. Bruno was advised not to fight again to avoid running the risk of causing any more damage to it, which could result in permanent blindness. Bruno retired soon after the fight.
Bruno's publicist throughout most of his career was sports historian Norman Giller, who wrote three books in harness with Frank: Know What I Mean, Eye of the Tiger and From Zero to Hero. His manager for all but his last five fights was Terry Lawless, who signed him as a professional shortly after he had become ABA heavyweight champion at the age of eighteen.
Personal life [ edit ]
Bruno grew up with five siblings in Wandsworth, South West London. His mother was Jamaican and his father was Dominican.[3] In 1990, Bruno married his partner Laura at a small church in Hornchurch, England. They had two daughters: Nicola and Rachel, and a son, Franklyn.[4] However, their relationship deteriorated, and they divorced in 2001.[5]
On 22 September 2003, Bruno was taken from his home near Brentwood in Essex by medical staff assisted by police officers, under the provisions of the Mental Health Act 1983. He was taken to Goodmayes Hospital in Ilford, where he underwent psychological and psychiatric tests.[6] He had been suffering from depression for several months beforehand. He was later diagnosed as having bipolar disorder.[7] On 9 October 2005 he admitted that his cocaine use, which began in 2000, contributed to his mental health problems.[8] Media coverage of Bruno's problems raised controversy, the principal accusations being gross intrusion and insensitivity. Particular criticism was aimed at The Sun, whose headline in the first editions the next day read "Bonkers Bruno Locked Up". Second editions retracted the headline and attempted to portray a more sympathetic attitude towards Bruno and mental health in general.[9] As an attempt at atonement, the paper established a charity fund for people suffering from mental illness, although some mental health charities condemned The Sun's latter action that day as being grossly cynical in the light of the former. On 24 February 2008, Bruno offered his support to former footballer Paul Gascoigne, who on 21 February had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act.[10] Bruno also spoke on his own personal experiences in the mental health system at a conference run by Hari Sewell, on 22 June 2009.[11] In December 2013, Bruno spoke to the Daily Mirror in support of their mental health campaign, stating: "Mental illness is a terrible thing to have to cope with but I’ve learnt it’s a fight you can win if you live your life the right way".[12]
In December 2005, Bruno announced that he was to become a father for the fourth time since finding new romance with old friend Yvonne Clydesdale. The pair, who first met five years previously at a health resort, began dating months after bumping into each other at a wine bar near his home. Yvonne gave birth to baby Freya on 10 May 2006. On 10 October 2006, Bruno and Clydesdale were jointly awarded £50,000 damages for libel against The People newspaper and publishers MGN in respect of false claims made about their relationship.[13]
In 2006, Bruno published an autobiography Frank: Fighting Back. It won the Best Autobiography category of the British Sports Book Awards.[14]
Media appearances and non-boxing interests [ edit ]
Bruno's image was enhanced by his relationship with the BBC boxing commentator Harry Carpenter, his appearances on the early Comic Relief programmes in the 1980s and his frequent appearances thereafter on television and on stage (in pantomime).
In 1991, he opened "The Ultimate" at Lightwater Valley which was, at the time, the longest roller coaster in the world. He described the ride "scarier than Mike Tyson".
In 1993 (aired Tuesday, 30th of March) Frank briefly appeared as a guest on CITV's "Finders Keepers" hosted by Neil Buchanan.
In 1995, the year of his world championship, he released a cover version of "Eye of the Tiger", the theme song of the movie Rocky III. It reached No. 28 in the UK charts. In 1999, he featured on the celebrity special in the second season of Fort Boyard.
In January 2001, Bruno announced that he wanted to stand as the Conservative candidate in the traditionally safe Tory seat of Brentwood and Ongar[15] against the independent Member of Parliament, Martin Bell. His proposed slogan was "Don't be a plank, vote for Frank!" However, this idea was quickly dismissed by Conservative Central Office.[16] But in an interview with BBC Sport at the time Bruno laughed at the story and denied he had any intention of standing.[citation needed]
In 2006, he was one of a number of celebrities who were recorded on the World Cup song, "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Jurgen Klinsmann?".
On 15 August 2009 he appeared on The Weakest Link beating Duke McKenzie in the final for £12,800. He had a small role in the 2008 British crime drama Cass. Bruno made brief guest appearances in episodes of the ITV comedy show, Harry Hill's TV Burp in February and October 2011. On 21 April 2011, Bruno appeared on the ITV1 chatshow The Alan Titchmarsh Show, where he was candid about his previous health issues. In 2011, he made a guest appearance in Sooty. On 20 April 2012, Bruno was featured in the ITV series Piers Morgan's Life Stories.
He supports West Ham whilst also having an affinity for Aberdeen.
Bruno completed the 2011 London Marathon which is the third marathon he has run successfully. He has also run numerous half marathons. He is also a patron for The Shannon Bradshaw Trust, a children's charity. Bruno regularly makes personal appearances and also sells autographed items of memorabilia.[17]
On 23 July 2013, Bruno was featured in the BBC Three documentary with his daughter Rachel in Rachel Bruno: My Dad and Me.[18][19]
Professional boxing record [ edit ]
Professional record summary 45 fights 40 wins 5 losses By knockout 38 5 By decision 2 0Kiribati President Purchases ‘Worthless’ Resettlement Land as Precaution Against Rising Sea
NAVIAVIA, Fiji, Jun 9 2014 (IPS) - You can count the inhabitants of this isolated, tidy village of multi-coloured houses and flower bushes among global warming’s first victims – but not in the usual sense.
They are descendants of labourers from the Solomon Islands who came to Fiji to work on the coconut plantations in the 19th century. In 1947, they were invited to move onto a large one called the Natoavatu Estate that the Anglican Church once inherited and were told they could stay there indefinitely as long as they practiced the Anglican faith.
In late May, the Church sold most of the 2331.3-hectare estate to the island nation of Kiribati, leaving the 270 villagers, who said they used 283 hectares to feed themselves, with only 125 hectares.
“We can’t live on just 300 acres [125 hectares],” said the village headman, Sade Marika.
Kiribati’s president, Anote Tong, said he bought the land so that his 103,000 people will have some high ground to go to when a rising sea makes his nation of 33 low-lying coral atolls unliveable.
“We would hope not to put everyone on [this] one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it,” he told the Associated Press.
For years, Tong has claimed in climate change conferences and in interviews that sea-level rise was already claiming a heavy toll on his people, eroding beaches, destroying buildings and crops, forcing the evacuation of a village and wiping out an entire island.
His views are echoed by Conservation International, a large NGO based near Washington, D.C., on whose board Tong sits. The residents of “Kiribati, where the effects of rising sea levels already are being felt, [are] on the front lines of climate change,” says its website.
In Tarawa, Kiribati’s overcrowded capital island where half the population of 103,000 lives, Tong often warns in speeches that climate change will destroy their homeland but that he is working hard to obtain compensation from the countries that caused it.
Kiribati, with a per-capita income of 1,600 dollars, receives more foreign aid per capita than any other Pacific nation.
This year, the government organised a competition for the best song on climate change. The refrain of the winning song, frequently played in English on the state radio, is “The angry sea will kill us all.”
But while Tong’s warnings of impending doom for atoll dwellers have brought him a measure of fame abroad and even a panel that nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize, in Kiribati they elicit confusion in some people and derision in others.
“I don’t think he did a proper valuation. And it’s clear the government doesn’t have any idea of what it’s going to do with the property now.” -- former Kiribati president, Teburoro Tito
“A lot of people now worry about climate change,” said Tealoy Pupu, a 20-year-old student, as she lay pandanus leaves out to dry. “We just don’t know what to think.”
Tong’s predecessor as president, Teburoro Tito, had read the scientific studies on atoll dynamics. “The scientists tell us that our reefs are healthy and can grow and rise with the sea level, so there is absolutely no need to buy land in Fiji or anywhere else,” he said emphatically. “How can we ask for foreign aid when we spend our own money on such foolish things?”
“We know that the whole reef structure can grow at 10 to 15 mm a year, which is faster than the expected sea-level rise,” confirmed Paul Kench, an atoll geo-morphologist at the University of Auckland.
“As long as the reef is growing and you have an abundant supply of sand, there’s no reason reef growth can’t keep up with sea-level rise.”
Kench and others also say that sea-level rise has had no effect so far on any Pacific atoll. They say that common images of waves crashing into homes give a false impression of permanent flooding when in fact they are caused by inappropriate shoreline modifications like seawalls to protect land reclaimed from the sea or by building causeways between islands.
In Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second-largest island, where the property Tong bought is located, an examination of the sales deeds of comparable parcels revealed that Kiribati paid four times more per acre than other buyers in the last few years.
Tito, the former president, said he believed that the 8.7-million-dollar purchase had been done solely for publicity purposes to highlight Tong’s far-sightedness and how seriously he takes climate change. “I don’t think he did a proper valuation,” he |
campus police that night, according to a campus police report. The student filed a grievance against her.
But in 2008, Dr. Bishop seemed to be riding high. She and her husband had developed an automated cell incubator that was supposed to keep finicky cells, like nerve cells, alive longer and make experiments easier. The university, which would share in any proceeds, was trying to market the device, and the university president, David B. Williams, predicted that it would “change the way biological and medical research is conducted,” according to The Huntsville Times. In the winter of 2009, a smiling Dr. Bishop was shown on the cover of The Huntsville R & D Report.
Prodigy Biosystems, where Mr. Anderson now works, ultimately raised $1.25 million to develop the product.
In March 2009, however, Dr. Bishop received word that her bid for tenure had been denied because her research and publication record were not strong, colleagues said. Such denials are rare, faculty members said, because the university reviews tenure-track professors annually, alerting them to areas that need improvement.
Even though faculty members, including her department chairman, counseled her to look for another job, Dr. Bishop appealed the decision.
“Her attitude was not, ‘I’m going to have to go find another job,’ ” said Eric Seemann, an assistant professor of psychology. “It was more like, ‘When are these idiots going to clear this up?’ ”
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She lobbied for a revote in the department, badgering people for support, her colleagues said. They disputed an assertion by her husband after the shooting that Dr. Bishop had won the appeals process and the provost had overruled the decision. The appeals process identified only a minor procedural problem, which was remedied, they said. Last November, a university spokesman said, her appeal was finally denied.
Increasingly expressing concern about her family’s finances, Dr. Bishop hired a lawyer, her husband said, and filed a discrimination complaint against the university. He said she also began going to a firing range. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, he told reporters, he had gone with her to the range once. He said she claimed to have borrowed the gun she used.
Her lawyer said Friday that she did not remember what happened next. But the police and witnesses say that on Feb. 12, Dr. Bishop went to a routine faculty meeting with a plan. And a loaded handgun.Since Valve's 1996 founding, the company has come out with a rash of well-known games including Half-life, Counterstrike, and Portal, for personal computers as well as the console market. In that time, though, Valve, like the rest of the computer world, has gone through structural changes driven by the falling costs of both computers and bandwidth. These, says Newell, have increased the relative value of design and game quality in general, but also marketing and — crucially — distribution paths. That has ramifications throughout the games industry, including the emergence and growth of online delivery for games and updates. (Valve’s own system, Steam, is up to 50 million users by itself; the console infrastructure is even bigger: Sony claimed that many users three years ago ). The changes in relative costs have also spurred free to play models and large-scale e-sports. (Large scale is no joke: According to Newell, "At the last tournament we held, we had over a million people watching it simultaneously.")Newell describes a trend toward end-users being involved, though, not just as spectators, but as content creators. He describes this in fairly sweeping terms: “Games will becomes nodes in a linked economy, where the majority of digital goods and services are user generated.” That sounds a bit grandiose, perhaps, but it’s grounded in numbers. “The Team Fortress community creates 10 times the amount of content [that developers do],” says Newell. While he says Valve has always been happy to compete with other game studios (“we’re a little bit cocky”), “the one entity we wouldn’t ever want to compete with is our own users; they’ve already outstripped us dramatically. It’s not by a little bit; it’s an order of magnitude already.” Broad-based distributed development like that is what open source has been whipping up in the world of software for decades.Creating games or games content, though, isn’t for the faint of heart: centralized online app stores (Apple’s in particular) “put an enormous number of roadblocks in front of doing that,” including developer approval as well as vetting individual apps and updates to them. In that context, he says, few users have the stubbornness or wherewithal to get through that. A more streamlined system for taking advantage of eater player/developers is needed.“Several years ago, we thought ‘OK, if our model is correct, we need to help making Linux a good gaming plaform for users and developers.” To that end, Valve makes for a case study in how Linux has been creeping in: the company shipped the first dedicated games server running Linux in 1999. Now, most games servers run Linux (now several hundred thousand — and “probably a million”).Those game servers are dishing up prodigious loads of data: “Near as we can tell, we’re generating something like 2 to 3 percent of worldwide mobile and land-based IP traffic, and that tends to startle people who don’t realize what a large sea change is going on. Even ignoring game servers, we’ve delivered over an exabyte of data year to date.” (Internally, he says, there’s approximately 20TB of content in a Linux-based version control system. This, says Newell, is true for companies like Bungie, too.)Impressive as those data-shoveling numbers are, they don’t exactly shout desktop (or living room) success. But steps that Valve (along with other companies) has taken make it easier to swallow the claim. “Several years ago, we thought ‘OK, if our model is correct, we need to help make Linux a good gaming plaform for users and developers.” The first major move, says Newell, was to get a game — a real, graphics-intensive game — going on Linux. The process, though, revealed a “sweater thread” of issues, revealing flaws in in all parts of the stack: faulty drivers, gaps between Linux distributions’ included software, pitfalls in the user experience, and flaws in the company’s Steam tools.In the course of resolving problems in each of those layers, “The good thing is that if we get a game like Left for Dead running, we’ve probably worked through issues for lots of developers. We’ve definitely solved problems for the Call of Duty team, or Tour of Duty, or whatever. The games aren’t that different; the key thing is to get changes all the way through for users. In February, we shipped [the Linux] Steam client; today -- at least when I got on the plane -- Valve has 198 games running on Linux.“The bug-fixing and code-developing isn’t just a sporadic effort; the company has “several guys on SDL,” started by current Valve employee Sam Lantinga, and is co-developing a new Linux debugger, in addition to the work they’ve done on the LLVM debugger.Making Linux a better platform for games is necessary, but may not be sufficient in itself, though. Platforms tend to cluster not just by operating system, but by context: platform, mobile, and console games don’t always play nicely: “As a user, I shoudn’t have to buy new games, or have new friends, or whatever, just because I’m sitting on a couch.” With Linux certainly a more-than-viable software platform for games, but still in the chicken-and-egg world of low user and revenue numbers that discourage spending developer time on Linux end users, Newell says the next step is necessary work on the hardware side of the equation, to smooth the open-source path between the developer and back-end data handling side of the games business to actual end-users.“One of the things we had to do, is we're staging out the different pieces we think are necessary for staging to make Linux the future of gaming,” said Newell. “Our next step, having done these other pieces, is on the hardware side. There are thermal issues and sound issues, but also a lot of input issues.” He closed with this tease: “Our next step on this is to release some stuff we’ve done on the hardware side. Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there, and what are the hardware opportunities we see for getting Linux into the living room."R. Kelly's Ex, Jay Kelly's Mom, On Loving Their Trans Son
'Parents get it wrong when they don't support their children,' says Drea Kelly days after her ex-husband refused to acknowledge their teenage son's gender transition.
In a recent interview with VH1, Drea Kelly — who is the sole full-time parent to Jay, the transgender son she had with singer R. Kelly — opened up about the pride and admiration she feels for her 14-year-old child.
"All I can say about Jay is he makes it so easy to be a proud mom," she tells the network. "For parents, we need to realize our kids have their own journeys. Parents get it wrong when they don't support their children."
Her response comes in stark contrast to R. Kelly's in an interview last month. The R&B star publicly misgendered Jay while implying that news of the teen's transition was fabricated.
In her interview, Drea Kelly readily acknowledges that her son is transitioning — and that it can sometimes be a learning process for her. "You know, it took a minute for [the news of Jay's transition] to click in my head," she says, after explaining that she sometimes uses the wrong pronoun when referring to him.
She adds that pronoun usage is something she and her son work on together with a smile, and the occasional reminder to herself that, "Girl, you got a son, honey, get it together. Get it right."
Of the immense public response to Jay's transition, Kelly says she has to keep reminding herself that "in the urban community, this is like a first." While she says her own family is unsurprised by Jay's trans identity, she "need[s people], especially in the black community, to stop burying their heads in the sand."
"Let's quit playing the game that you just choose to be gay or trans," she urges. "We need to stop worrying about people's gender and sexuality and think about the choices we're making with our youth, period."
Read the full interview here.Suspected al-Qaeda fighters and other armed groups have killed at least 73 people in a wave of attacks in Iraq, gunning down soldiers at an army post and bombing police recruits waiting in line to apply for jobs.
Sunday's violence, which struck at least 11 cities and also wounded at least 213 people, highlighted armed groups' attempts to sow havoc in the country and undermine the government.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks but security forces are a frequent target of al-Qaeda's Iraq branch, which has vowed to reassert itself and take back areas it was forced from before US troops withdrew from the country last year.
In the deadliest attack, gunmen stormed a small Iraqi Army outpost in the town of Dujail before dawn, killing at least 10 soldiers and wounding eight more, according to police and hospital officials in the nearby city of Balad, about 80km north of Baghdad.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorised to release the information.
Police recruits targeted
Hours later, a car bomb struck a group of police recruits waiting in line to apply for jobs with the state-run Northern Oil Company outside the northern city of Kirkuk.
City police commander Sarhad Qadir said seven recruits were killed and 17 wounded. He said all the recruits were Sunni Muslims and blamed the early morning attack on al-Qaeda, but did not provide details.
The carnage even stretched into the country's south, where bombs stuck to two parked cars exploded in the Shia-dominated city of Nasiriyah, 320km southeast of Baghdad.
The blasts were near the French consulate and a local hotel in the city, although the consulate did not appear to be a target of the attack.
Local deputy health director doctor Adnan al-Musharifawi said two people were killed and three were wounded at the hotel, and one Iraqi policeman was wounded at the consulate.
Al-Musharifawi said no French diplomats were among the casualties.
On Sunday evening, another car bomb, this time in the Al Washash neighbourhood of western Baghdad, added a further two to the day's death toll, leaving at least seven people injured. A later car bomb targeted a bird market in the Huriyah district of the city, killing three and injuring at least 14. Meanwhile, also in north-west Baghdad, a car bomb hit a crowded restaurant in the Shullah neighbourhood, leaving five dead and injuring at least 38 people.
Journalist Ahmed Rushdi, reporting from Baghdad, told Al Jazeera that, according to him, it was not only al-Qaeda that was behind the attacks.
"It is also the insurgency against the government and the political parties, because there is a major political dispute between al Maliki and his opponents," Rushdi said.
"It is another day in the major failure of the security forces in Iraq. The people here are asking themselves; what is the government doing to regain control of the situation? There seems to be no real intelligence data concerning these attacks."
Al-Qaeda links
Al-Qaeda's Iraq franchise, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq, has for years had a hot-and-cold relationship with the global network's leadership.
The two shared the goal of targeting the US military in Iraq and, to an extent, undermining the Shia government that replaced Saddam Hussein's regime.
But al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri distanced themselves from the Iraqi fighters in 2007 because their attacks also killed Iraqi civilians instead of focusing on Western targets.
A string of smaller attacks on Sunday also struck nine other cities, including Baghdad.
In the capital's eastern Shia neighborhood of Husseniyah, roadside bombs killed a policeman and a passer-by, security and health officials said.
Another eight people - including four soldiers - were wounded, the officials said.
The rest of the attacks were car bombs that hit cities stretching from the southern port city of Basra, Iraq's second largest, to the city of Tal Afar northwest of Baghdad near the Syrian border.
The blast in Basra killed three people and wounded 24, while the bomb in Tal Afar killed two passers-by and wounded seven, officials said.
A pair of car bombs in southern Maysan province killed five people and wounded 40 outside a Shiite shrine to Imam Ail al-Sharqi, said the holy site's director, Ammar Abdullah.
A roadside bomb in Taji, just north of Baghdad, left two passers-by dead and 11 injured, and explosions in the Sunni towns of Hawija and Ar Riyad, outside the flashpoint city of Kirkuk north of Baghdad, wounded seven people.
In Tuz Khormato near the city of Kirkuk, some 290km north of Baghdad, a car bomb outside of a market killed four and wounded 41 people, said Salahuddin provincial health director Raeed Ibrahim.
And in Kirkuk itself, Qadir said three midmorning explosions - two car bombs and a roadside bomb - killed seven and wounded about 70.
Kirkuk has been a flashpoint for years with its mix of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkomen, who all claim rights to the city and the oil-rich land that surrounds it.What's next for the Longhorns? Make sure you're in the loop by signing up for our FREE Texas newsletter!
DT Keondre Coburn, Spring Westfield
Recruitment: Coburn is viewed by most pundits as the top defensive tackle in the state and was recently invited to play in the Under Armour All-American game. A four-star prospect, Coburn committed to Texas over TCU, Texas A&M, Florida, Florida State and Oklahoma, among many others. At 6-foot-1, 329 pounds, Coburn is currently ranked as the No. 8 defensive tackle in the country, and No. 13 overall prospect in Texas, according to 247Sports Composite.
Strengths: Coburn has a decent frame, and he carries his weight well. He shows a strong first step off the ball, and he uses his hands well. Coburn has tremendous strength that derives from his developed lower half. He’s very difficult to slow down on the bull rush, and he shows a strong motor. Coburn plays with strong leverage, and he’s a strong tackler. He’s probably best suited to play as a two-gap plugger in an odd front, but he shows the ability as a one-gap penetrator in an even front. Coburn plays with a measured streak of aggression, and his ability to push pockets while anchoring on run plays allow him to be a three-down contributor.
Areas for improvement: Coburn is shorter than most ideal tackle prospects, and he could probably benefit from re-shaping his body to gain more explosive ability. He relies heavily on his size and strength, and he could improve on his array of pass rushing skills.
Fit for Texas: The Longhorns didn’t land an impact DT prospect in the 2017 class, so grabbing Coburn ensures quality depth for the trenches. Coburn has the size and ability to play early in his career, and his skillset translates as a two-gap space eater who can play the nose in Todd Orlando’s defense.
Want free VIP access to Horns247? Click here and take advantage of this offer!Clara Guibourg, Chris Parmenter
62 connections on the London Underground take more than five minutes (Source: Getty)
It’s not just your imagination: You really are spending hours of your life wandering around the labyrinthine tunnels that connect the different Tube lines at Bank and Monument.
But as far as long Tube interchanges go, it’s not actually London’s worst. That dubious honour goes to Paddington, where the connection between the Bakerloo and Hammersmith & City line will set you back 15 minutes.
If you’re unlucky enough to have this as part of your daily commute, you’re spending 2.5 hours a week just walking from one end of Paddington station to the other.
A recent Freedom of Information request from postgraduate student Prakash Kumar to Transport for London (TfL) has revealed how long the interchanges are between platforms at all Tube stations.
Excluding National Rail, there are a whopping 62 connections in the London Underground system that will set you back more than five minutes.
That the mazes connecting Bank and Monument rank highly among the worst offenders won’t come as a surprise to many City workers. The walk between the Circle and District lines and Waterloo & City is the longest of all at that station, as TfL estimates it’ll take you 10 minutes from one end to the other.
TfL recently released three-dimensional maps like the one above that reveal how London Underground stations really are.
Looking at Bank, it’s not hard to understand that the tunnels can take so long to manoeuvre, not least in rush hour...
London's quickest connection, meanwhile, can be found in Uxbridge, where changing between the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines takes a mere minute.Senate Republicans recently blocked cybersecurity legislation, but the issue might not be dead after all.
The White House hasn't ruled out issuing an executive order to strengthen the nation's defenses against cyberattacks if Congress refuses to act.
“In the wake of Congressional inaction and Republican stall tactics, unfortunately, we will continue to be hamstrung by outdated and inadequate statutory authorities that the legislation would have fixed," White House press secretary Jay Carney told The Hill when asked about the possibility of an executive order.
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"Moving forward, the President is determined to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today’s cyber threats and we will do that," Carney said.
The White House has emphasized that better protecting vital computer systems is a top priority.
The administration proposed its own legislative package in 2011, sent officials to testify at 17 congressional hearings and presented more than 100 briefings on the issue. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, President Obama warned that a successful cyberattack on a bank, water system, electrical grid or hospital could have devastating consequences.
The president urged Congress to pass the Cybersecurity Act, which was offered by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins Susan Margaret CollinsHouse to push back at Trump on border Hillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators GOP Sen. Tillis to vote for resolution blocking Trump's emergency declaration MORE (R-Maine). The bill would have encouraged private companies and the government to share information about cyber threats and would have required critical infrastructure operators to meet minimum cybersecurity standards.
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But Senate Republicans, led by Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.), worried the bill would burden businesses with unnecessary and ineffective regulations.
The bill's sponsors watered down the regulatory provisions, replacing the security mandates with voluntary incentives, but that wasn't enough to win over Republicans. The bill mustered 52 votes in the Senate, well short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.
If Obama issues an order on cybersecurity, it wouldn't be the first time that his administration has resorted to executive action to bypass Congress.
Obama uses the slogan "we can't wait" to argue that some issues are too important to be allowed to stall in Congress.
When lawmakers refused to pass the DREAM Act to give legal status to students brought to the country illegally, the administration announced that it would stop deporting young immigrants who would have been eligible to stay under the bill.
Jim Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explained that Obama could enact many of the core provisions of the Cybersecurity Act through executive order.
Many companies managing vital computer systems are already heavily regulated. Lewis said the president could order agencies to require the industries they regulate to meet cybersecurity standards.
"You don't need new legislative authority to do that," Lewis said.
He noted that some regulatory agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, are independent and not bound to follow executive orders. But Lewis predicted that even the independent agencies would likely enforce an executive order on cybersecurity.
Lewis said the Office of Management and Budget is already working on security standards for federal computer systems and said those guidelines could form the basis of standards for the private sector.
Lewis acknowledged any provisions that would tear down legal barriers to information-sharing would have to be enacted by Congress. Although those provisions in the Cybersecurity Act were the ones most strongly supported by the business community, Lewis expressed skepticism that they would do much to improve cybersecurity anyway.
"You can have them or don't have them. Who cares?" he said.
But Lewis said that an executive order could even partially address information-sharing. The FCC, for example, has set up a voluntary system for companies to share information about cyber threats with each other, he said.
An executive order may accomplish many of the goals of the Cybersecurity Act, but it could also further raise the ire of Republicans and the business groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who lobbied against the legislation.
Republicans have already accused Obama of making illegal power grabs with his previous executive actions, and a cybersecurity order would likely elicit similar howls of disapproval.
Although Sen. Collins was frustrated by the defeat of her bill, she reacted coolly to the idea of the president bypassing Congress.
"I'm not for doing by executive order what should be done by legislation," she said.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein Dianne Emiel FeinsteinHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Ocasio-Cortez adviser says Sunrise confrontation with 'old-timer' Feinstein'sad' Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid MORE (D-Calif.), one of the co-sponsors of the Cybersecurity Act, said she prefers that Congress address the problem, but she is open to presidential action if Congress fails.
"I suppose if we can't, the answer would be yes," she said when asked whether she would support an executive order.Greens leadership: There's a whiff of Moscow about this all-smiles change
Updated
There was something commendable yet eerie about the unity on display during this abrupt Greens leadership change. Richard Di Natale is taking charge of a party which always puts its own interests first, writes Annabel Crabb.
You have to say this for the Greens: They know how to keep a secret.
In most politicians' lives, party interests and public interests and personal interests swish about in a sudsy muddle, each surfacing in turn from time to time, each undeniably present beneath the surface.
For major party politicians, adversaries can be found everywhere, and those who sit next to you are often to be feared more than those who sit opposite; just look at the left wing of the ALP, which features some individuals - and always will - who'd rather move into a share house with Fred Nile than give each other the time of day.
The Greens party room know who their enemies in Parliament House are, and it's pretty simple: Everyone outside the door.
That's why they tend not to leak to journalists. That's why we only found out that Sarah Hanson-Young had challenged for the party's deputy leadership months after the event, when Bob Brown dropped the news offhandedly in a press conference. That's why, although it's obvious there was some pretty serious internal division within the party this year when it decided not to back the Government's planned increase to fuel excise, despite increased fuel taxes being a central part of the Greens policy platform, the exact details of the division are unclear.
And that's why, when leader Christine Milne announced her resignation this morning (on Twitter, not planted with a sympathetic journalist, or set free via the party gossip-net) just about everyone was surprised.
Not all minor parties practise this kind of iron-clad discipline. The Democrats were a teeming Petri-dish of intrigue, rent constantly by horrid internal warfare. The Palmer United Party is a decreasingly-apt party name synonymous with abrupt storm-outs.
On one hand, iron-clad discipline is a good thing. Individuals don't waste excessive time on their own egos. When they're defeated internally, they tend to suck it up. And that means a lot less time bickering.
On the other hand, it's strange not to know where everyone stands. The abandonment of a central campaign platform item occurs, more or less seamlessly, and the lack of any evident fallout gives the whole thing a slightly eerie, unnerving air - like in Watership Down where the rabbits disappear and no-one says anything.
Today's result (a smiling Richard Di Natale elected unopposed to succeed Senator Milne; a pair of smiling and unopposed co-deputies in Larissa Waters and Scott Ludlam; former deputy Adam Bandt all smiles to be handing the job over) is lovely, but there's a whiff of Moscow about it.
Christine Milne entered the Greens leadership with minimum fuss and she leaves it in the same way. The predictions that were made when Bob Brown departed - that the party was a cult of personality built around him, that without his iconic presence the other senators would fall to petty bickering, that Milne herself was too pragmatic, that the stresses and strains of deal-making with the Labor Party in government would do for the Greens what the GST deal with the Liberals eventually did for the Democrats - proved collectively and separately off the mark.
This is partly to do with Labor, and the fact that that party of the Left can no longer straddle the widening divide between affluent inner-city progressives and further-flung Labor voters who rely on their cars.
But it's also to do with the fact the Greens put their party first. They put their party first when Kevin Rudd was shopping his emissions trading scheme, they put it first when signing deals with Julia Gillard, and they put it first in this first term Abbott Government, by denying the Coalition's agenda even when it accords with their own.
And they put it first today.
Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. She tweets at @annabelcrabb.
Topics: federal-government, federal-parliament, greens, christine-milne
First postedOn March 11, 2011, Japan suffered a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami that destroyed roads, bridges, and buildings; killed nearly 16,000 people; and critically disabled three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. By March 12, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) was already considering urging Americans within 50 miles of the stricken nuclear reactors to evacuate, given an explosion in Unit 1 that destroyed the reactor building and exposed spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive materials to the air.
"If this happened in the U.S., we would go out to 50 miles," said Bill Borchardt, NRC executive director for operations on March 17, according to transcripts of the days following the catastrophe. "That would be our evacuation recommendation."
In fact, in the U.S., more than four million Americans live within 10 miles of the 63 sites of nuclear power plants with at least one operating reactor, according to data compiled by the NRC based on the 2000 census. That number swells when the radius extends outward to 50 miles to affect more than 180 million Americans, and includes major metropolitan areas such as New York City, Philadelphia, San Diego and even West Palm Beach, Fla.
In the wake of the meltdowns in Japan and subsequent evacuations, could all these people in the U.S. be evacuated--or take some form of protective action--in time in similar circumstances?
Planning for the worst
Nuclear power plants are surrounded by two "emergency planning zones" developed out of accident analyses conducted in the 1960s and 1970s: a roughly 10-mile radius around the plant that must anticipate being exposed to a radioactive plume and a roughly 50-mile radius around the plant that must prepare for possibly being exposed to radioactive particles that drop out of a plume. "Neither are zones that are fixed and that is the absolute boundary," explains the NRC's Patricia Milligan, the senior technology advisor for preparedness and response in the Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response. "We don't expect that [nuclear power plant operators] would stop taking action because it's at 10.5 miles. The plans are built so that 10 miles provides a reasonable basis and, if you need to expand, you could."
That is exactly what happened in the case of Fukushima. Just hours after the tsunami on March 11 the Japanese government ordered an evacuation of those living within three kilometers of the stricken nuclear reactors and suggested those living within 10 kilometers stay indoors with the windows closed. As the situation progressively worsened--and radiation hot spots were discovered farther afield--the Japanese government expanded the evacuation order.
The goal in the zones prescribed by U.S. regulations is to avoid any radiation doses that exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's "protective action guidelines" for exposure to a plume of radioactive material being released from a nuclear power plant. The U.S. rules note that evacuation--or sometimes getting indoors--"should normally be initiated at one rem," or 10 millisieverts. (A rem is a dosage unit of x-ray and gamma-ray radiation exposure.)Workers within a nuclear power plant can receive doses of up to 50 millisieverts per year. It takes immediate exposure to as much as two sieverts of radiation to cause sickness straightaway.
As bad as it's gotten
Rulemaking is based on the best available data. So what has been learned from previous close calls from nuclear and nonnuclear incidents alike? On March 28, 1979, the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown that led to the release of radioactive materials. In the fog of confusion that surrounded the event, Pennsylvania government officials advised children and pregnant women within a five-mile radius of the facility to leave. That radius of evacuation ultimately extended some 20-miles around the plant, although the majority of local residents did not evacuate. Those who stayed were urged to remain indoors and farmers were urged to shelter their animals and feed them stored food.
In the end, despite the partial meltdown and release of radioactive material, numerous studies have found limited or no health effects. But the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power history did point out flaws in evacuation planning. "Three Mile Island was a very enlightening accident in terms of how an accident progresses," Milligan notes.
First and foremost, it became clear that nuclear accidents to date, including Fukushima, are slow-moving affairs. In the case of Fukushima, there were at least 14 hours between the loss of electricity to power the pumps keeping cooling water on the nuclear fuel and a melt down. In nonnuclear emergencies, such as the release of toxic gases, only minutes may pass before catastrophe hits. "When there's conditions immediately dangerous to life and health, you don't have hours, you have significantly less time than that to get people out of the way of chlorine gas or a wildfire," Milligan says. Nuclear accidents also tend to affect a much smaller area than, for example, a major hurricane like Katrina that covered a swath of territory 400 miles wide and caused approximately two million people to evacuate Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi coastal areas. "Evacuations can occur very effectively and very quickly in this country," Milligan adds.
Evacuations around nuclear power plants in the U.S. are rare but getting people out and away from their homes is relatively commonplace. Evacuations of more than 1,000 people occur all too frequently in the U.S.--230 occurred between 1990 and 2003, a 2005 study from Sandia National Laboratories found. "A significant evacuation occurs on average every three weeks," Milligan notes, for causes ranging from deadly chlorine clouds to wildfires. "Almost all are ad hoc evacuations," meaning no one has practiced or planned for such events, unlike the nuclear industry. For example, a chemical fire and explosions at a hazardous waste facility in Apex, N.C., required the evacuation of approximately 17,000 people in a roughly four-mile radius late on the night of October 5, 2006, although the officials charged with carrying it out could call on the planning for the 10-mile evacuation zone around the Shearon Harris nuclear plant nearby.
Still, radioactive iodine released from a nuclear power plant accident can travel far and fast. To cope with that, the NRC requires that potassium iodide pills that can block the human thyroid from taking up radioactive iodine be available to those living within 10 miles of a plant--but no further. "You could get a dose out at 50 miles, especially to children, that significantly increases their likelihood of getting thyroid cancer later in life," notes physicist Frank von Hippel of Princeton University, co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials. "I would have chosen 50 miles or even beyond for potassium iodide availability on an emergency basis."
Local planning authorities--either at the state or local level, depending on the place--determine what protective action is warranted in the event of an accident at a nuclear power plant, including an evacuation as in Pennsylvania during the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island. The evacuation begins with whichever way the wind is blowing. "You don't need to evacuate 360 degrees around the plant right away," Milligan says. "At that time, the wind is only going in one direction."
But that wind direction may be a very bad one from an emergency planning perspective. For example, New York City is within 50 miles of the Indian Point nuclear power complex--and could be downwind. "There is no way to evacuate New York City on that time scale," von Hippel argues.
The recommendation is not always to leave, of course, as seen in the case of Three Mile Island. "Evacuations are a big deal," Milligan says. "You are taking people out of their homes. It's not something you want to do lightly, for reasons other than definitely needing to avoid a dose" of radiation. In some accidents, it is better to take shelter. "If it's a plume or puff release, people shelter in houses with the windows closed until the puff has passed overhead," Milligan says.
Necessary changes?
In Japan, even in the wake of the deadly earthquake and tsunami that left local infrastructure in ruins, thousands of people were evacuated from the vicinity of the nuclear power plant within 24 hours. As a result, Milligan, at least, does not anticipate any changes to the rules for U.S. nuclear power plants stemming from lessons learned from Fukushima. "The planning zones in place now provide adequate protection for public health and safety," she says. "There is nothing we can see in our look [at Fukushima meltdowns] that would indicate that we would need to expand the plume exposure pathway."
Nevertheless, in the case of Fukushima, the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier sailed into the plume of escaping radioactive noble gases on March 12. More than 100 miles away, sailors on the aircraft carrier found levels high enough to exceed the EPA's guidelines for civilians after roughly 10 hours of exposure. "They went up to 130 miles from the plant, and we were still reading a direct gamma shine of 0.6 millirem per hour," explained the NRC's Stephen Trautman on March 12, according to transcripts. Gamma rays are among the most energetic--and therefore dangerous to health--forms of radiation.
In the end, the question is one of risk. No one has died from radioactive contamination as a result of the Fukushima meltdowns, at least not yet. And it may prove impossible to disentangle any extra cancers due to Fukushima's radiation from those that happen as a result of all the other carcinogenic factors a person is exposed to in the modern world--from diet to smoke |
of a period, never lose the puck at the blue line. I remember this one time I lost the puck at the blue line early in the game, they came down and scored. And I didn’t see the ice again until the next period. He brought me in and said: “How am I going to tell my second- and third- and fourth-line guys that they have to pay the price for stupid mistakes if I treat you differently? You’re the guy they follow.” I understood. Pat was almost like an actor. He had played all these different roles in his own life. He’d been a cop and he had a certain intuition, I think, about people. He could be the tough guy and the funny guy and the serious guy and the emotional guy. Pat was just real smart about hockey. He had so many ideas and he could feel the pulse of a game. The biggest thing I learned from him was, not only on the teaching side, but being easy on your players when you’re losing and being hard on them when they’re winning. Some nights you just found a way to win even if you didn’t play that well. Or if you were in a drought, hadn’t won in four, five, six games, he’d loosen up on you. Pat had his own way of doing things. Like at the morning skate on game day, if we weren’t quite going the way he wanted us to, he’d say, “Okay, you guys know what you’re doing, right? You’ve got everybody fooled. You guys think you’re ready, eh? We’ll just see how it goes tonight.” Then of course we’d put pressure on ourselves, go out there and stink out the place in the first period. So he’d come into the dressing room: “I told you so. Now are you going to listen to me?” He was very aware of how he felt we were going to play before the puck even dropped.
Former Leafs captain Doug Gilmour and coaching great Pat Burns at practice in October, 1992. ( Star file photo ) NHL award winners Pat Burns (coach of the year) and Doug Gilmour (top defensive forward) pose at 1993 ceremony. ( Star file photo ) Hockey Hall of Fame class of 2014 at Friday availability, from left: Mike Modano, Bill McCreary, Dominik Hasek, Peter Forsberg, Line Gignac Burns (widow of Pat Burns) and and Rob Blake. ( Vince Talotta / Toronto Star )
Pat did enjoy pulling pranks on players. There was one time in Montreal when he got some fingerprint dust and smeared it all over the headband inside Patrick Roy’s mask at practice. When Roy started sweating, his whole face went blue and stayed that way for three or four days. We were always pulling tricks on each other. I never got tired of putting pin-prick holes in his paper coffee cup. I usually tried to do that before games, when he had his suit on. You know how much care Pat took with the way he looked. There’s that picture of us from NHL awards night his first year in Toronto. I’d won the Frank Selke Trophy and he’d won coach of the year. Me with my big hair and my bow tie. He looked real good that night. Pat always made spent a lot of time on his hair so it wasn’t just me. He autographed a bunch of those photos for me, to donate for charity and stuff. I still have about 10 of them. I found them recently in the closet at the cottage.
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We had that great run in the ’93 playoffs that everybody remembers. People forget that we won the first 10 games to start the next season. I really thought, here we go again, all the excitement, and we did get to the semis against Vancouver. After that came the lockout year and a bunch of trades. Wendel was gone, Bob Rouse, Sylvain Lefebvre, Jamie Macoun left not much later. A lot of things changed. Pat phoned me the night he was fired, phoned a few of the guys. As a player, you really hate to see that. It’s almost like it’s partly your fault. For him, at the time, it was, yup, I need a mental break right now, start over again later. And he did. Took the time that he needed and enjoyed his off-ice activities. He loved his Harley and playing his guitar and hanging with the Good Brothers, just getting away from the game for a while. I’ve heard people say Pat wouldn’t be able to coach in today’s NHL. That’s just not true. He was always changing, adapting to the game. Dave Ellett played for him in Boston. I asked him, is Pat still really hard on the guys? He said, nope, totally different, real easy-going. The Hall of Fame induction is going to be very emotional. It would have been awesome for him to be there. But it’s going to be a special night for his wife, Line, and his son Jason, to accept the induction on Pat’s behalf. I have so many memories of Pat. Great memories.The Brazilian rating board seems to believe Quantum Break is coming to PC.
Quantum Break, the Xbox One exclusive by Max Payne and Alan Wake developer Remedy, was never officially announced for PC. The Ministério da Justiça in Brazil, however, (via Gematsu) has approved an age rating for the game on both Xbox One and PC.
The rating page reveals drugs, “improper language”, and violence as some of the game’s themes. Both versions of the game were listed on the same day, but no other details were revealed.
The prospect of Quantum Break coming to PC sometime after Xbox One is not that far-fetched. Alan Wake, the studio’s previous Xbox 360 exclusive, came to PC eventually.
Microsoft’s renewed commitment for Windows 10 is also responsible for games like Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and Killer Instinct coming to the platform, and Quantum Break could be another one.
Update: The rating has been removed since publication of this article.July 25 (UPI) -- Researchers from Hebrew University have found that sperm concentration and total sperm count has significantly and steadily declined in Western men.
The study, published July 25 in Human Reproduction Update, was conducted by Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Researchers reviewed 7,500 studies and conducted meta-regression analysis on 185 studies between 1973 and 2011 to find a 52.4 percent decline in sperm concentration and a 59.3 percent decline in total sperm count in men from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Researchers did not see a significant decline in sperm count in men from South America, Asia and Africa.
"Given the importance of sperm counts for male fertility and human health, this study is an urgent wake-up call for researchers and health authorities around the world to investigate the causes of the sharp ongoing drop in sperm count, with the goal of prevention," Dr. Hagai Levine, head of the Environmental Health Track at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine, said in a press release.
Researchers said the data demonstrates the proportion of men with sperm counts below the threshold for subfertility or infertility is increasing, and findings from other studies suggest that reduced sperm count is related to increased morbidity and mortality.
"Decreasing sperm count has been of great concern since it was first reported twenty-five years ago. This definitive study shows, for the first time, that this decline is strong and continuing. The fact that the decline is seen in Western countries strongly suggests that chemicals in commerce are playing a causal role in this trend," Dr. Shanna H Swan, a professor in the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said.
RELATED South Korean study links male infertility to noisy bedrooms
The study did not delve into the causes of decreased sperm count, but previous research has shown a link between decreasing sperm count and environmental and lifestyle factors.Press release - 2016-04-18
Beijing, 18 March, 2016 – The news that nearly 500 pupils in Changzhou Foreign Languages School have fallen ill, some diagnosed with cancer, most likely due to extremely high levels of groundwater and soil pollution in the school’s vicinity, is yet another reminder of the seriousness of China’s hazardous chemical pollution. Moreover, the fact that the school earlier this year claimed to have solved the pollution problem points to the gaping holes in hazardous chemical management in China.
“The tragedy that has occurred in Changzhou shows just how dangerously lax China’s hazardous chemical management is,” said Greenpeace East Asia toxics campaign manager, Ada Kong.
The Changzhou Foreign Languages School is located adjacent to a former chemicals plant. The environmental evaluation conducted before the construction of the school suggested that pollution was serious and advised that schools, housing or other public facilities should not be constructed in the area. However, the evaluation only included normal pollutants. It did not assess the presence of other hazardous chemicals related to the site’s former use. A more comprehensive evaluation could have exposed the severity of the risks of building on the site
The school was also reportedly using groundwater that was deemed unfit for human use by the environmental evaluation.
The chemicals reportedly found in groundwater and soil at the site include chloroform and benzene, both of which are listed on China’s ‘Hazardous Chemicals List’ and are known to have serious health, including carcinogenic properties, and environmental impacts.
Greenpeace calls on the government to investigate the precise origins of this incident and to establish a comprehensive hazardous chemicals management system to prevent such tragedies from occurring again.
Media contact:
Tom Baxter,
International Communications Officer, Greenpeace East Asia,
email:
phone: +86 188 1134 4861
Greenpeace International Press Desk
email:,
phone: +31 (0) 20 718 2470 (available 24 hours)The Left Can't Have It Both Ways
Since the 1960s the world's left-wing parties have chased two dreams that are in conflict in free societies. One is greater economic equality. The other is value-free multiculturalism--and please do not confuse this with the 18th-century truth that all men are created equal. Postmodernism calls the shots today. It demands that all human expressions and lifestyles, foolish or not, must be treated equally. Thus Mayan science was as good as European science, and female genital mutilation is not for Westerners to judge. You dare not laugh at such nonsense, either.
These two lefty wishes--greater economic equality and value-free multiculturalism--may live together peacefully in college political science departments. They are impossible to reconcile in the real world. Here's why.
In free societies greater economic equality happens only when successful people agree to give back to society more than their fair share of income and wealth. Giving can take many forms. It can be direct assistance to the less fortunate. It can be funds for public goods with practical purposes, such as schools and museums. (Think Andrew Carnegie and libraries.) Giving can also be dedicated to parks, zoos, public swimming pools and concert halls, all of which grant the poor a more equal standing as citizens.
The willingness of the rich to give more than their fair share is the key. When the rich feel forced to give, many will take evasive action and give less. They will spend more money on tax lawyers to reduce their tax burdens. If they control their work hours, they will work less. Harass society's producers enough and they will move to another city, state or country. Recall the mass immigration of rich and ambitious Englishmen to the U.S. in the 1960s, when Britain's income tax rates on the rich approached 100%.
The central question for egalitarians, then, should be: What motivates the rich to want to give more of their wealth to taxes? Now, you'd think this elementary question would be uppermost in any tax scheme. All charities, foundations and universities certainly think about the motivational reasons for giving. Funny, though, the House Ways & Means Committee and the Internal Revenue Service can't be bothered.
The secret of successful fundraising, of course, is to sell donors on the purpose of giving. People like to give when it supports their values. It's no stretch to see why art aficionados donate to galleries and those who love science give money to build engineering wings at universities. But that's charitable giving. What about taxes?
The same principle applies. In free societies, when governments want rich people to pay more in taxes, governments need to motivate them with a sense of purpose. Otherwise the rich will manipulate their taxable income. At this point you might ask: Where in the world have rich people willingly paid more taxes? The answer: in northern European countries and in America's upper midwestern states, such as Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin. Why? Common purpose based on shared values. When tax money goes into public schools that actually work, taxpayers appear happy to pay the taxes. When tax money ends up in terrific parks and bicycle trails, again, taxpayers are happy--or at least willing--to pay for them.
On the other hand, when do rich taxpayers revolt? Answer: when there are no common values. This is why the EU is blowing up. Germans are willing to pay taxes for services that support German cultural values, which include hard work and advancement. But Germans are angry over having to pay taxes to support Greeks, who have different ideas about hard work and retirement ages. Put another way, the Germans are unwilling to underwrite values not their own.
Multiculturalism and Equality Don't Mix
In the U.S. the state of Minnesota provides a laboratory to see where economic equality and multiculturalism are in conflict. During the 20th century Minnesota was one of our most economic egalitarian states. The Democratic Party and Farmer-Labor Party were one and the same and produced such prairie progressives as Hubert Humphrey. Minnesotans were proud of their activist government. Local tax money--willingly paid--gave Minnesotans the nation's best public school system.
More recently Minnesota has become known for being a multicultural haven. Refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia have enriched the Minneapolis-St. Paul culture. Almost every Minnesota town with a population over 5,000 has a Mexican restaurant owned by Mexican immigrants. But politically, once liberal Minnesota is trending conservative. Long a Democratic lock in presidential elections, the state is now in play. The governor, Tim Pawlenty, is a conservative Republican. Tea party leader Michele Bachmann hails from Minnesota. Were the 2008 election held again this November, Norm Coleman would trounce Al Franken.
It's no coincidence that tax revolts in the U.S. are breaking out not in red states but in the bluest multicultural states: Massachusetts and New Jersey, so far, with New York and California to come. The great left-wing dreams of greater economic equality and value-free multiculturalism turn out to be irreconcilable. The two can't coexist when people are free to make their own judgments about values.
Read Rich Karlgaard's daily blog at http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules and banter with him there. See Rich Karlgaard's new TalkBack video series at http://video.forbes.com/talkback/guide or follow him at twitter.com/richkarlgaard.
Special Offer: Free Trial Issue of ForbesTim Evans • May 5, 2017
HERA crewmember shares thoughts ahead of simulated 45-day asteroid mission
Editor's note:
Tonight, NASA's HERA XIII mission begins, when Tim Evans, John Kennard, James Titus, and Mark Settles seal themselves inside a three-story habitat at the Johnson Space Center. The crew will simulate a 45-day mission to visit an asteroid. Crewmember Tim Evans has offered to share his experience with The Planetary Society.
For more information about the program, visit the HERA website, where you can also apply for a future mission.
I have always wanted to be an astronaut, even though I have always understood that the chances of that happening were very small. I have applied a few times, without success—but even getting the rejection letters was sort of fun!
Last year, on a Facebook group I belong to called "Astronaut Hopefuls," a couple posters said they had just finished a mission in HERA, the Human Exploration Research Analog. HERA is a three-story, closed habitat at NASA's Johnson Space Center used to simulate long-duration human spaceflight missions. During these simulations, scientists study crewmembers' physical and behavioral health, and observe how they live and work in isolation.
The Facebook posts encouraged others to apply, so I sent in my resume the very next day—not figuring I had even a remote chance. But a few weeks later, a nurse from NASA called to ask if I was still interested!
NASA HERA habitat HERA, the Human Exploration Research Analog, is a three-story, closed habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center used to simulate long-duration human spaceflight missions. HERA, the Human Exploration Research Analog, is a three-story, closed habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center used to simulate long-duration human spaceflight missions.
I soon learned the mission length was going to be 45 days instead of 30 (NASA has gradually lengthened the missions each year). I do not know if they will be lengthened further; in one sense, scientists may be able to get more meaningful data by having more 45-day missions rather than fewer, longer missions (they can get a greater number of replicates for statistical analyses of the data with the 45-day missions than with fewer, longer missions).
After the phone call from the NASA nurse, I filled out some medical forms and gave consent to a background check. Once I passed those steps, I received a physical and gave a blood sample at a clinic near my home in Grand Rapids, Michigan (this step was contracted out). After passing those steps, NASA flew me down to Houston, where I spent a day and a half undergoing psychological and physical screening, and giving a lot of informed consent.
The main requirements for the HERA program are that you need to have at least a Master's degree in a STEM field (or equivalent experience), have a BMI of 29 or less, be no taller than 74 inches, have no history of sleepwalking, and be no older than 55 years. Participants are paid $10 per hour.
My total time away from home during the mission is 68 to 70 days, which was almost enough to keep me from doing it. But in the end, I realized that I would always regret it if I turned down the offer, and my wife was totally on board.
Each year HERA begins a new "campaign" that consists of four identical missions. My mission is Campaign 4, Mission 1 (C4M1). We are actually the thirteenth overall mission, so we designed our patch based on the Apollo 13 mission patch, with some modifications to reflect our crew makeup and mission. We changed the moon to an asteroid (our simulated mission is to an asteroid), we inserted a strand of DNA to reflect the biological sciences, and included crossed arrows to reflect the military unit of one of our crewmembers.
NASA / Courtesy of Tim Evans HERA XIII mission patch
Our roles are somewhere between astronauts and lab rats (but closer to lab rats!). We are only allowed five hours of sleep per night when the mission begins, except on weekends, when we get eight hours. They are testing us in more ways than I can count, and I am learning SO much cool stuff. The training is fairly intense, and I am tired of completing surveys and providing "biological samples" of various types, but I am having a blast.
It is exhausting, but also neat, and we are contributing directly to NASA's goals of sending humans to Mars.
Tim Evans Associate professor for Grand Valley State University
Read more articles by Tim EvansA new super-PAC is spending millions of dollars to oust four labor-backed black and Latino state Democrats from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and nearby Suffolk County. But most of the $3.17 million campaign, which has already begun to flood the Bronx with mailers, has not been financed by local organizations or concerned constituents.
Of New Yorkers for Independent Action’s sixteen donors, all have addresses listed outside Brooklyn, Bronx, and Suffolk County, according to the New York State Board of Elections. All those registered in New York list addresses on the Upper East Side and in midtown. And all of the super-PAC’s donors appear to be white.
The group’s main issue has been advocating for an education tax credit, which would give tax rebates to donors and companies for donations to private and parochial schools and has long been opposed by most state Democrats.
Supporters of the school tax credit, such as the Catholic Church, describe the program as a way to give low-income students greater school choice. Critics, such as the teachers union, are concerned that the campaign will open the door to vouchers and allow millionaires to get unfair tax breaks.
“The flood of big money into state legislative races has been happening over the last few cycles, especially from the hedge fund and real estate industries,” says Karen Scharff, executive director of Citizen Action, a group that advocates public financing of elections. “But this scale of involvement from super-PACs in Democratic primary races in less well-off districts is relatively new.”
Most of the other donors outside New York list addresses in wealthy enclaves popular with Wall Street commuters, such as Greenwich and Westport, Connecticut. The address farthest away from New York belongs to Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress worth $35.3 billion, who listed a residence in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Scharff argues the spending is an attempt to maintain the financial industry’s influence in Albany, which helped flip the New York senate Republican last cycle. “They see the Democrats keep blocking their legislation and the writing on the wall…. There’s a pretty good chance Democrats are going to take back the state senate, so they want corporate supporters on their side.”
Thomas Carroll, New Yorkers for Independent Action’s treasurer, did not return the Village Voice’s requests for comment.
The state teachers union’s affiliated PAC has given money to fend off some of the attacks, spending $85,048 in recent days to defend Brooklyn Assemblywomen Pamela Harris and Latrice Walker and Suffolk County Assemblyman Phil Ramos.
“The onslaught of the materials has already started — we usually don’t see stuff starting so early in the primary,” says Natasha Capers, a coordinator with the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice and a lifelong resident of Brownsville, which is represented by Walker. “But the teachers union, the Fight for $15, those folks live and work in our neighborhoods, versus those folks on the other side have probably never stepped into Brownsville.”
Michael Kink of the labor-backed research group the HedgeClippers, says that the super-PAC’s school tax credit focus is just a proxy campaign for fighting larger issues, such as a rise in the minimum wage and greater taxes for Wall Street.
“The education stuff is only a small piece of what these guys are looking for,” Kink said. “These four targeted lawmakers are among the hardest fighting for a $15 minimum wage and closing tax loopholes for hedge funders. So they can claim this is about schools, but it’s really about the money.”
Kink’s group recently put out a paper highlighting several of New Yorkers for Independent Action’s big donors, whom it argues are not representative of the communities whose elections they are pouring money into.
Roger Hertog, who donated $150,000 to the PAC, is chairman emeritus of AllianceBernstein, an asset management firm that holds a $4 million stake in private prison operator GEO Group as of its last filing with the SEC. GEO Group has made million off of its prison and immigrant detention center operations, despite allegations of inmate abuse and maltreatment.
Peter Grauer, who donated $75,000 to the PAC, is chairman of Bloomberg LP and currently serves on the board of the Blackstone Group, the world’s largest private equity real estate firm. Blackstone has attracted criticism for its actions after the foreclosure crisis, which disproportionately hurt black and Latino communities. Last year, Grauer made news for being one of only three UNC trustees who voted to keep a university hall named after a notorious KKK leader.
Sean Fieler, who donated $75,000 to the PAC, is a hedge fund manager and one of Wall Street’s top political donors. Fieler has also funded scores of anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion-rights causes. Last year, Fieler gave $200,000, more than any other donor, to defeat California’s transgender-students’-rights law.
Walton donated $450,00 to the PAC. Walmart has been a strong opponent of the Fight for $15 and attempts to unionize the retail sector.
Other donors highlighted in the list include private equity moguls such as Russell Carson and Robert Niehaus.
“I don’t think this [outsider spending] has permeated down to the ground level,” says Capers. “Most people aren’t thinking about who’s funding a candidate, but we have to start, because more and more folks not from Brownsville are coming in and taking up vested interests here. The fact that they’re trying to insert themselves into these races is not about some love for the Bronx or Brooklyn.”The media focused on the wrong thing during SXSW Bloggers bemoaned the difficulty of getting around Austin during SXSW. But they were having the wrong conversation. Transit Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 21, 2017 This month was South by Southwest (SXSW), a huge music/tech festival held in Austin. Austin happens to be one of the few big American cities where Uber and Lyft don’t operate. Now don’t get us wrong: we use ridesharing services all the time. (Only 1 of our 20 employees owns a car.) And yet the reaction to the lack of ridesharing in Austin this month was surprisingly hysterical. Shaking. Disaster. It’s the apocalypse, guys. SXSW’s ridesharing woes were inflamed by an unfortunate incident during the festival: two of Austin’s ridesharing replacement apps (Fasten and Ride Austin) went down because of heightened demand. No alternatives. SXSWers were bereft of their beloved ridesharing services, forced to wait for cabs in the rain with “no alternatives”. We racked our brains for a possible solution. We think we found it: Fixed-route ridesharing.
Joke = Kevin Roose. MS Paint skills = all us.
The tweets are overwrought and ridiculous, but they’re not the end of the world. What’s troubling is that the entire media conversation about mobility during SXSW was about the inadequacy of ridesharing. Whether it was the New York Times, Mashable, or BuzzFeed, practically every article about transportation at SXSW chronicled the issues with Austin’s ridesharing apps — with nary a word spent discussing Austin’s public transit. I mean, look at the headlines:
Ridesharing ridesharing ridesharing.
The media ought to know better, because Austin does have a mobility crisis — but it has nothing to do with ridesharing. I mean, take a look at Austin’s public transit system. It’s not a Transit Desert. Or even a Transit Sahara. It’s a Transit Tatooine:
Red = bad transit access. Green = good transit access. The green block in the center is downtown Austin. The arrow is pointing to the main SXSW convention centre. (Data: Local Logic.)
Compare this to a city with half-decent public transit, like our hometown (Montreal):
So much green!
These transit maps were made by our hometown friends Local Logic. They have an office across the street from ours, and they crunch all sorts of numbers that give you insights about your neighbourhood: nightlife quality, grocery access, public parks, or (our favourite) public transit. What does their data tell us about transit around SXSW? If you calculate the transit friendliness right outside of SXSW’s convention centre (defined as the frequency of service, weighted by the distance you have to walk to the stop), transit friendliness scores a dismal 2 out of 5:
While most of downtown Austin has good transit access, SXSW’s convention centre does not. (Data: Local Logic)A white nationalist group called Identity Evropa has launched a campaign to flood colleges and universities across the United States with its propaganda as part of a recruitment campaign aimed at spreading the group’s message. On its Facebook page, Identity Evropa describes itself as “an American based identitarian organization dedicated to promoting the interests of People of European Heritage.”
The group apparently feels that targeting non-white faculty members at universities is all just part of promoting European heritage. According to Russia Today, Identity Evropa placed flyers specifically on the doors of non-white faculty members at Indiana University. Lauren Robel, the Provost of Indiana University, posted a statement regarding the Identity Evropa flyers on the University’s website on February 6, 2017.
“Dear IU Bloomington Community,” Robel’s statement begins. “Earlier today, I learned of flyers posted on our campus by a group that identifies itself with white supremacy, and which claims in its social media to have posted similar flyers at as many as 30 universities across the country, including universities in California, Texas, Illinois, Washington, Georgia, and Massachusetts. Posted under cover of darkness, targeting the office doors of faculty members of color or scholars of race and ethnicity, these flyers were clearly meant to intimidate, threaten, scare, and provoke anger among faculty, staff, students and visitors.”
Robel goes on to say that Indiana University is working with local police to investigate the incident and that the FBI was also notified.
Charlie Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University, described the flyers as “burning crosses for the 21st century,” on his Facebook page.
The Indiana chapter of Identity Evropa has a post bragging about putting up the flyers on its Twitter feed.
The main Identity Evropa Twitter account similarly brags about flyering a number of other campuses, including Universities in California, Texas, and elsewhere.
According to Los Angeles Times, Identity Evropa was founded by Nathan Damigo, a white Iraq war veteran who once spent time in prison for robbing a cab driver.
“In November 2007, (Damigo) had been home for a month after his second tour of duty and was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, drug and alcohol abuse, paranoia and flashbacks, the article states. “A few days after the anniversary of a friend’s combat death, he spent a night drinking and went for a walk with a gun he’d gotten two days before as a gift. He came across a La Mesa cab driver who he thought was Iraqi, put a gun to his head and robbed the man of $43, records show.”
Damigo spent five years in prison and came out a big fan of former Ku Klux Klan leader, David Duke, and other white nationalists.
The rise in white nationalism and European-American ethnocentrism has been tied directly to the rise of the alt-right movement in the United States. In fact, Identity Evropa seems to be a fan of alt-right leader, Richard Spencer. They retweet him frequently. Spencer is one of the key figures in the alt-right movement. Spencer denies being a white supremacist, according to CNN, despite having mocked the death of Trayvon Martin on Twitter.
The white supremacist campaign to flyer institutions of higher learning across the country is in full swing. According to Berks-Mont News, Identity Evropa recently hit Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, prompting Kutztown University President Kenneth Hawkinson to release a statement.
“Upon further investigation, we learned this group is a national organization that has posted similar materials at other campuses throughout the country over the past several months,” said Hawkinson. “While we must keep in mind that all individuals have the right to free speech on our campus, our university rejects all forms of racism, bigotry and discrimination.”
The University of Chicago has also been targeted by the Identity Evropa flyers, according to Chicagoist.
Identity Evropa, Richard Spencer, and other white nationalists typically reject the view that they promote racism. Instead, they claim that they are simply interested in helping Americans of European descent reclaim their heritage and to rally around white European identity. They think this identity has eroded in our society, leaving white Americans lacking a shared community based on its identity.
[Featured Image by Mimi Soltysik/Facebook]There were more rainbows in the sky than usual Sunday night.
From the World Trade Center in New York to Brisbane's Story Bridge to a local courthouse in Nashville, iconic structures sent their love to a city far, far away.
Their tributes are a powerful reminder that no matter where you travel or where you live, we all share a common story. Take a look:
THE EIFFEL TOWER, PARIS
TEL AVIV CITY HALL, TEL AVIV
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SYDNEY HARBOUR BRIDGE, SYDNEY
Daniel Munoz via Getty Images
MICHAEL FOWLER CENTRE, WELLINGTON
Hagen Hopkins via Getty Images
WORLD TRADE CENTER AND CITY SKYLINE, NEW YORK CITY
NYC skyline lights up with tributes to Orlando shooting victims as city goes on high alert https://t.co/mCJRxydR6a pic.twitter.com/T5fnlENXqI — NBC New York (@NBCNewYork) June 13, 2016
Pacific Press via Getty Images
ORLANDO EYE, ORLANDO
Orlando Sentinel via Getty Images
METRO COURTHOUSE AND GATEWAY BRIDGE, NASHVILLE
Metro Courthouse #Nashville lit up in remembrance & solidarity after tonight's candlelit vigil for #Orlando. pic.twitter.com/ZwDHoLqwyW — Cary Gibson (@this1littlebird) June 13, 2016
Walking over the bridge tonight in Nashville. Praying for you #Orlando. pic.twitter.com/d09IpvhuyY — Lauren Hoffman (@lifeasLH) June 13, 2016
STORY BRIDGE, BRISBANE
ZAKIM BRIDGE AND TD GARDEN, BOSTON
The @tdgarden's exterior lights shining rainbow tonight in support of Orlando. pic.twitter.com/OuR02qIkW6 — Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) June 13, 2016
LOWRY AVENUE BRIDGE, MINNEAPOLIS
The Lowry Avenue bridge will be lit rainbow in memory of the Orlando shooting victims pic.twitter.com/5jJ3cQcor7 — Hennepin County (@Hennepin) June 13, 2016
HENLEY STREET BRIDGE, KNOXVILLE
Henley Street Bridge in Knoxville went rainbow tonight after the shooting in Orlando. pic.twitter.com/Uvqa2CKay5 — Kyle Grainger WVLT (@KyleGrainger) June 13, 2016
BOND BRIDGE, KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
Tragedy in Orlando, @MayorSlyJames reports that the Bond Bridge will remain lit up rainbow colored in #solidarity pic.twitter.com/MsHVg4ojEL — Andrew Mather (@Mather_Photo) June 12, 2016
DALLAS SKYLINE, DALLAS
The Dallas skyline lights up in support of Orlando.
(Photo Credit: @kevinhannphoto) pic.twitter.com/PmLuVueQpF — Visit Dallas (@visit_dallas) June 13, 2016
the Dallas skyline lit up for the victims of the #Orlando shooting. pic.twitter.com/kLAZbojg3t — Tyler ¨̮ (@tylerjp96) June 13, 2016
BIG FOUR BRIDGE, LOUISVILLE
louisville lit the big four bridge up in memory of the victims lost in the Orlando massacre pic.twitter.com/iDRmiCEYWW — Mai (@maizierhianne) June 13, 2016On July 21, 2008, BBC Hardtalk with Steven Sackur had as guest Robert Baer, former CIA Senior Middle East Specialist. The topic of discussion was US policy regarding Iraq and Iran. It is not very likely that this interview and its subject matter will be aired in the United States so I am forwarding this 'front line intelligence' so America can read what transpired. Mr. Baer is a high level CIA person who is now "off the ranch" and telling it like it is. Sackur: "A former CIA analyst says that the US must recognize the power of Iran." Baer: "We simply cannot attack Iran." According to Mr. Baer, despite large volumes of advice to Bush, Cheney and the Pentagon, the US has 'broken the glue' that was holding the various Kurd, Sunni and Shiite factions together. It will not be put back together and the US and UK cannot provide that glue. The Iraqis want us out and right now. As I have suspected all along, the US and UK are not the solution to anything in Iraq, they are the problem. That glue was Saddam Hussein and the fact that he was building Iraq into a European-style nation in the Middle East to the horror of Israel and the various Arab Royal kingdoms that do not want democracy because that will mean they are 'Royally out of power'. Such nations as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, etc were willing spectators to the total annihilation of Iraq and the slaughter of over 1 million so they did not have to have democracy delivered to them by gun point, by their own citizens or by the US UK Faux Empire. In a past email update, 'Enemies within Our Gates', I had this quote as to why Iraq had to be destroyed and it is from a Neocon Zionist Jew named Edward Luttwak. Note the date of this quote and appreciate that the US and UK have totally destroyed a nation to stop it from embarrassing the other "Arab Allies" in the Gulf Region and steal its oil. <start insert> "If you refer back to the comment made by hardliner Pro-Israel Neocon Edward Luttwak as to why Saddam must be attacked (in 1991, not 2002), that Saddam was a threat to the Middle East status quo and then compare to Baker's comment regarding Germany being an enemy under "the war was actually only an economic preventive measure" the picture should become a little clearer on what I am trying to emphasize. "Saddam is not like the Saudi Princes who spend the bulk of their lives outside of their country, and who fritter away the Kingdom's oil profits on prostitutes and bottles of champagne in Paris. No, Saddam is building railways! Creating electrical networks! Highways and other important elements of a serious State infrastructure! After eights years of war against the Iranian regime of Khomeini, he desperately needs to demobilize his Republican Guard, which incorporates so many of this technical elite, in order to rebuild the war-devastated country. These people are his technicians, his engineers. If they are put to work in the way Saddam wishes, they will rapidly make Iraq the most advanced power |
or they will kill us.”
Monday’s heavy clashes followed a particularly bloody Sunday, when more than 45 fighters on both sides were killed, according to the Observatory and a statement from the Kurdish force known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG.
The dead included a Kurdish female fighter who blew herself up, killing 10 jihadists, said Abdurrahman. A YPG statement identified the suicide attacker as Deilar Kanj Khamis, better known by her military name, Arin Mirkan.
Khamis was a member of the Women’s Protection Units, a branch of the main Kurdish militia. The force has more than 10,000 female fighters who have played a major role in the battles against Isis, said Nasser Haj Mansour, a defence official in Syria’s Kurdish region.
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After what could have been a very serious incident, 50 Cent took to Twitter to joke about Rick Ross being the target of a drive-by shooting.
Ross crashed his Rolls-Royce into an apartment building in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., yesterday after he lost control while trying avoiding gunfire aimed at the car, police said.
“Hahaha fat boy hit the building?lol it looks staged to me. No hole’s in da car,” Fiddy tweeted and included an Instagram link to a photo of the car.
“Hahaha that boy was spooked. I ride like OBAMA level 6 built proof, bomb proof,you already know,” he wrote in another tweet.
The two have had a longstanding feud after Ross accused Fiddy of looking at him the wrong way at the 2009 BET awards. Ross came out with “Mafia Music ” which seemed to take shots at his fellow rapper.
Despite 50 Cent’s bizarre accusation on Twitter, the drive-by shooting was a serious incident. Later photos of the scene clearly showed bullets had riddled the side of the car and left holes in the tires, bumper and lights of the car, which Ross crashed into an apartment building as he attempted to escape gunfire. Luckily neither of the car’s occupants were hurt.
The shooting suspects fled before police arrived.
Ross, who lives in nearby Davie, Fla., turned 37 yesterday and had been out celebrating his birthday at a local diner, according to the Miami Herald.
The newspaper reported that one of the bullets fired at the car pierced the diner’s front window.Every year we take some time visiting and talking to SFF publishers about what their most anticipated novels for the year are. The idea is that the people working in the publishing houses are the ones who actually have laid their eyes on the manuscripts. In terms of the already popular authors they know whether Mr Bestseller has taken their upcoming work to a new level or totally dropped the ball with it. When it comes to debut authors they’ve read the work of future superstars we’ve not yet even heard of.
This publishers’ choice article has quickly become one of Fantasy-Faction’s most popular and for good reason: Below you will find an incredible 50+ books to look out for during the course of 2015. That’s about a book a week that you should be reading if you trust our publishing friends’ word! We’ve included the title, the author, the release date (if we were given it), the cover art or author photo, and a description for each. The result is an article that touches on 8,000 words (so you will understand why it’s a little delayed!).
What’s incredible about the list we’ve put together below is the variety of its titles. There’s a little bit of everything in there – you can’t place your finger on heavy trends flowing throughout and the cover art is just…wow! Gone are the hooded men, in come some truly original and eye-catching works. We know you shouldn’t judge books by their covers, but in the cases of Daniel Polansky or Guy Adams, for example, it is going to be very hard not to!
If you enjoy this article all we ask is that you leave a comment. Simply tell us what you are looking forward to, what jumped out at you that you’d never heard of before, and what covers you most appreciate. Now – let’s get those to-be-read lists to astronomical sizes! 🙂
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Tor Books
Marc you are a cruel, cruel man. How can you expect us to select our favourite ones to watch for 2015 when ALL of our books for 2015 are ones to watch? It is like asking us to select our favourite child/cast member of Game of Thrones. You know we love all of them equally!
Since you insist, we have narrowed it down to five of our new writers for 2015 – a selection of debuts and writers who are being published by Macmillan for the first time. You can see the rest of our lineup here.
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Louise Buckley, Editorial:
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
July 2015
“I haven’t read Novik’s Temeraire series, but when Uprooted came into us on submission I was blown away as soon as I started reading it. In many ways, it’s a straightforward coming-of-age fantasy novel, rooted in folk stories and legends, but in other ways it’s so much more than that – the writing is fresh, the story is exciting, the world-building real and believable and the heroine Agnieszka is strong and easy to identify with. Unsurprisingly, Uprooted has garnered some amazing quotes from the likes of Robin Hobb, Tamora Pierce, Cassandra Clare, Lev Grossman, Gregory Macguire and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others, and I fully expect there to be a raft of other fans once people cotton on to how wonderful this book is.”
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Bella Pagan, Editorial:
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
January 2015
The Invisible Library is an explosion of book amazingness in the brain. This wonderful debut grabbed me from the start and to read it is to love it! For me, it’s the perfect blend of adventure, wit, worldbuilding and pace. It’s also steeped in all manner of tempting influences, for example, one character has been crafted in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes. And it also made me think of Doctor Who in places – if the Doctor were a female librarian spy.
In the book, our resourceful protagonist Irene is a dimension-hopping ‘book spy’ for the secretive Library. And along with her enigmatic assistant Kai, they’re sent to an alternative London to retrieve a book. But some will kill to retain it. Irene must be on her game or she’ll be off the case. Permanently. And this is just as ominous as it sounds. Soon she’s up to her eyebrows in thieves, murderers and secret societies – with a dash of the supernatural in store. N. K. Jemisin is also a big fan, saying: ‘I absolutely loved this … flavored with truly unique mythology and a dash of the eldritch. Such clever, creepy, elaborate worldbuilding and snarky, sexy-smart characters!’
As an editor the timescales for books are so long, that it takes ages before readers can share in your excitement about a book. But it’s amazing to say that after months of editorial processes, cover design discussions and planning, it’s out in Jan! And the ebook is out a little earlier even. It certainly is an adventuresome romp from beginning to end — clever and a lot of fun so I wish you happy reading. Get ready for a slice of pure entertainment.
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Julie Crisp, Editorial:
The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
August 2015
“This debut novel by Seth Dickinson is a fabulous read. With the insidious Masked Empire conquering country after country, not through warfare but through trade, economic dependency and political manipulation, the young girl Baru Cormorant grows up knowing if she is to get justice for her people then she needs to do so from within. But in doing so, will she become just as corrupt as the Empire she’s trying to overcome? Beautifully imagined with original characters, sumptuous world building and lots of action and skullduggery I just could not put this down.”
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Lauren Welch, Communications:
Starborn by Lucy Hounsom
May 2015
“Starborn by debut author Lucy Hounsom is most definitely one of our most anticipated books of 2015. The magical world Hounsom has created is completely captivating, and the fast paced story makes it a really exciting and accessible read. We were entirely drawn in by Hounsom’s characters, particularly Kyndra, the reluctant hero, who is forced to flee her village after accidentally breaking a sacred artefact at her coming-of-age ceremony, and find all hands turned against her.
Then, following too swiftly for coincidence, a madness sweeps her home, along with unnatural storms. An angry mob blame her and she fears for her life — until two strangers, wielding a power not seen for centuries, take her to safety. They flee to the sunken citadel of Naris, but worse dangers will lie ahead, amongst the underground city’s politicians, fanatics and rebels. But in its subterranean chambers, she will find her true path – facing betrayal and madness to find it.
Kyndra, like every reluctant hero, has a choice: seize her destiny with both hands or walk away, perhaps dooming a whole world to fall. Starborn is about a girl coming of age, but it’s also about heroism. Its strengths, burdens, responsibilities and – not least – its consequences.
Starborn is a classic coming-of-age fantasy that had us gripped to the very last page. Perfect for fans of Trudi Canavan, David Eddings and Karen Miller, it really is such a fantastic debut. You could easily devour it in one sitting. We can’t wait for the sequel!”
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Sam Eades, Communications:
Underground by SL Grey
July 2015
“One of my favourite books of 2014 was The Three by Sarah Lotz, so imagine my glee when I discovered that Macmillan are publishing a collaboration between Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg called Underground next Summer, written under the pen name SL Grey. And times that glee by a million when I discovered that Louise Greenberg is as cool as Sarah Lotz. He has a Master’s degree in Vampire Fiction! Underground is essentially what would happen if Stephen King woke up one morning as Agatha Christie – imagine a small group of people hiding from the apocalypse in an underground bunker. Each one harbours a dark secret, a reason to hide that they are keeping from everyone else. Whilst they are riding out the end of the world, the only person who has the code to get out of the bunker is found murdered, leaving them trapped inside.”
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Orbit Books
We’re very excited about our list of 2015 titles, and picking just a few is agonising for us, but here are five from new and up-and-coming authors we hope your readers will look out for:
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The Autumn Republic by Brian McClellan
February 2015
The third and final book in the Powder Mage Trilogy from an author who is in real danger of setting the fantasy world on fire. Literally.
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The Mechanical by Ian Tregillis
March 2015
Set in a world that might have been, of mechanical men and alchemical dreams, the new novel from Ian Tregillis confirms his place as one of the most original new voices in speculative fiction. Look out for the red edges. You’ll see what we mean in March.
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A Crown For Cold Silver by Alex Marshall
April 2015
A Crown For Cold Silver is an action-packed epic fantasy from a stunning new voice in the genre. A retired warrior queen returns to battle to seek revenge against an ancient foe, and old friends and old enemies will pay the price. This book is ideal for fans of Conan and Joe Abercrombie, or anyone who likes kick-ass female warrior queens. And who doesn’t?
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Queen of Fire by Anthony Ryan
July 2015
The spectacular conclusion to the New York Times bestselling Raven’s Shadow series, which began with the critically acclaimed Blood Song. But then, you knew that already.
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Battlemage by Stephen Aryan
September 2015
MOAR awesome is unleashed in this magic-fuelled fantasy debut from British author Stephen Aryan. This trilogy will change the way you think about mages. And maybe real ale.
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Harper Voyager
2015 is the 20th anniversary of Voyager and my goodness we’re going to celebrate! We thought 2014 was big with some fantastic publishing and amazing conventions, and of course the cherry on the top – our exclusive event with George RR Martin and Robin Hobb. But this year promises amazing new work from some of fantasy’s finest and most loved authors, as well as the honour of introducing some incredible new voices into the genre. Herewith our five top picks for 2015:
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Half the World by Joe Abercrombie
12.02.15
The first in Joe’s Shattered Sea trilogy was published in July 2014 to huge acclaim and Joe toured the country meeting fans at cons and bookshops across the UK. But don’t take our word for it:
‘My favourite Abercrombie book yet’ Patrick Rothfuss
‘Enthralling. An up-all-night read’ Robin Hobb
‘Joe Abercrombie is doing some terrific work’ GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
‘Joe Abercrombie is fast becoming my favourite writer.’ DEREK LANDY
With Half the World, Joe is back and better than ever with the masterful story of Thorn, a kick ass heroine desperate to avenge her dead father. Thorn lives to fight, she has been named murderer by the very man who trained her to kill. Fate traps her in the schemes – and on the ship – of the deep-cunning minister Father Yarvi. Crossing half the world to find allies against the ruthless High King, she learns harsh lessons of blood and deceit. Beside her on her gruelling journey is Brand, a young warrior who hates to kill. A failure in his eyes and hers, he has one chance at redemption. Will Thorn forever be a tool in the hands of the powerful or can she carve her own path? Is there a place beyond legend for a woman with a blade?
Half the World will appeal to die-hard Abercrombie fans as well as new readers and is bound to make this SFF superstar even bigger in 2015.
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The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig
26.02.15
Sold in nearly 30 territories and optioned by Dreamworks, THE FIRE SERMON is the first of a trilogy set in a post-apocalyptic society where all children are born as twins: one perfect, one deformed.
In the world of THE FIRE SERMON all people are born in pairs, but they definitely aren’t born equal. You’re either Alpha: the elite, physically perfect, free to live as you choose and become what you want; or you’re Omega: mutations born with outward or inward disabilities. You’re the underclass, the unwanted, sent to live with other Omega twins far from Alpha settlements. But your Alpha twin needs you and you need them, because if one of you dies so does the other.
Francesca Haig has crafted a powerful story based around the sinister concept of joint destiny. One twin must defeat the other to see their vision of the future come to pass, but if they’re not careful both will die in the struggle for power.
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The Skull Throne by Peter V Brett
09.04.15
In the grand tradition of George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan, Sunday Times bestselling author Peter V. Brett continues his critically acclaimed Demon Cycle with the next dramatic instalment: THE SKULL THRONE. Peat left his readers will a real cliffhanger at the end of The Daylight War in 2013 so the fourth novel in his stunning series is the most hotly anticipated title ever. Plus massive news for fans – Peat will be touring the UK in April 2015 – watch this space!
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The Vagrant by Peter Newman
23.04.15
Peter Newman is an exciting new novice for 2015. His debut novel, THE VAGRANT is set in a futuristic world filled with horrors, sure to capture the imagination of all fantasy fans. The Vagrant is his name. He has no other. Years have passed since humanities destruction emerged from the Breach. The world and its inhabitants have been changed from what they once were. His purpose is to reach the Shining City, last bastion of the human race, and deliver the only weapon that may make a difference in the ongoing war. But the Shining City is far away and the world is a very dangerous place. A debut not to be missed.
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An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
04.06.15
Those looking for next fix of awesome YA crossover need look no further than Sabaa Tahir’s hot-anticipated debut novel. And with a seven-figure pre-emptive film option from Paramount, this is set to be the hottest YA novel since The Hunger Games.
Laia is a Scholar living under the iron-fisted rule of the Martial Empire. When her brother is arrested for treason, she goes undercover as a slave at the empire’s greatest military academy to try and save him from execution. Elias the academy’s finest soldier— and secretly, its most unwilling. Elias is considering deserting the military, but before he can, he’s ordered to participate in a ruthless contest to choose the next Martial emperor. When Laia and Elias’s paths cross at the academy, they find that their destinies are more intertwined than either could have imagined and that their choices will change the future of the empire itself.
Vow your blood and body to the empire. Keep your heart for yourself.
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Hodder & Stoughton
– – –
Those Above by Daniel Polansky
26.02.2015
Miss Low Town and the Warden? Daniel Polansky’s long-awaited new series kicks off next week with the publication ofThose Above, the first in a two-book epic called The Empty Throne. It’s a little bit Ancient Rome, a little bit The Wire, and all sneaky action and adventure – high fantasy as only Daniel Polansky can deliver it. There’s politics and statescraft and betrayal and tragedy and fighting – so much fighting – all featuring Polansky’s sharp, funny, unforgettable dialogue and characterisation. It’s amazing, it’s a blazing good time, and you’ll love it.
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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Ebook: now! Hardback: 22.08.2015
By lucky accident, the day we had been planning to announce that we’d acquired the rights to Becky Chambers’ wonderful, warm self-published debut novel, it was announced as the first ever self-published novel to be shortlisted for a Kitschies Golden Tentacle. We’ll be keeping the ebook up and publishing a hardback edition – with a new cover, which we’re revealing tomorrow (Tuesday 17 Feb on Hodderscape) – in August of this year. The Long Way is the story of the Wayfarer, a wormhole-tunnelling spaceship, and its crew as they journey to the centre of the galaxy on their biggest mission yet. If they’re successful they’ll make more money than they could possibly imagine. But their journey will take them through dangerous, war-torn space controlled by fragile alliances of warmongering species… The book is a little like hanging out on the bridge of the Millennium Falcon between runs; it’s fun, it’s funny, the characters are memorable and the adventure is awesome. And it heralds the debut of a really fantastic new talent. In short, it’s a book for anyone who loves Firefly, Mass Effect and Ancillary Justice.
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Day Four by Sarah Lotz
25.05.2015
Sarah Lotz’s follow-up to The Three is set in the same world and references, obliquely, some of the action of the previous novel – but it’s not a sequel and can be read without having read The Three. And should. It’s one of the creepiest novels I’ve ever read. Four days into a singles’ cruise on the Gulf of Mexico, the Beautiful Dreamer, an old and problem-prone cruise ship, stops dead in the water. There’s no electricity or running water and no radio contact with the outside world – there isn’t even a mobile signal. The passengers and crew are stranded. And the longer the ship drifts, the worse things get. It seems there’s someone – or something – on board the Beautiful Dreamer that doesn’t want anyone to ever get off.
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Way Down Dark by JP Smythe
02.07.2015
James Smythe’s first YA novel features the same brilliant writing and dark setting and characterization that has made his traditional SF so unforgettable. Seventeen-year-old Chan lives on the Australia, a ship that left a dying earth generations ago but never found a new planet to settle on. Now it floats derelict in space, controlled by violent gangs who prey on the weak and the isolated. Chan’s learned how to survive but the fight is killing her soul. Until the day she discovers an extraordinary secret about the Australia – one that could save everyone. We refer to this book around the office as ‘the dead body book,’ and trust me, you’ll know why when you read it. It has the action of Red Rising crossed with the darkness of The Bunker Diary. It’s unforgettable.
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The Hunter’s Kind by Rebecca Levene
02.07.2015
In Smiler’s Fair readers were introduced to a world where the sun and the moon have been at war for centuries and the shadows hold gruesome, terrifying secrets. Into this world was born Krish, humble goatherd and the moon god reborn. In The Hunter’s Kind, as Krish raises an army to retake his birthright, forces begin to gather in the northern forests of Ashanesland – monstrous, uncanny beasts and the riders who control them, who follow a god known only as the Hunter. And the Hunter has found a prey: Krish. Smiler’s Fair ushered in the start of a fantastic new high fantasy quadrilogy – but The Hunter’s Kind will blow everything you think you know about epic fantasy out of the water. It’s incredible.
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Del Rey
It’s a cruel task, to pick just five books out of our 2015 line-up. Each and every book is special, so I’ve opted for these five for various but specific reasons. Some are exciting debuts, some landmark moments, one of the authors has the most fantastic hair and one book nearly broke my heart. I’ve included one more overtly sci-fi title, which hopefully doesn’t break too many Fantasy-Faction rules! In publication order they are:
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The Devil’s Detective by Simon Kurt Unsworth
March 2015
Every now and again you get sent a book that is so well written, so fascinatingly different, you just have to publish it. Simon’s debut is a masterfully realised blend of crime thriller and horror novel about Hell’s very own policeman, Thomas Fool. It’ll keep you up reading and then give you sleepless nights.
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A Few Words For The Dead by Guy Adams
April 2015
The third book in Guy’s amazing Clown Service series is here because, quite simply, it came close to breaking my heart. This is an emotional rollercoaster, and the blend of spy thriller and supernatural adventure mixed with Guy’s singular wit will have you on the edge of your seat.
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Dark Run by Mike Brooks
June 2015
Our second sci-fi debut this year is from a terrific new author who I think is set to take British sci-fi somewhere very special. Dark Run is an unashamedly fun, grungy, action-packed blend of sci-fi thriller and space opera with a terrific cast of misfit characters. This is perfect for fans of Firefly.
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The Price of Valour by Django Wexler
July 2015
Django’s third book in the Shadow Campaigns series is on my list for many reasons. Book one was a stunning blend of epic desert war and understated, yet fascinating magic. Book two was a perfect evolution into political conflict and revolution. Book three brings those two things together, and it’s just amazing.
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The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantero
Out Now!
Edgar’s first English-language book isn’t just a novel, it’s a living, breathing, literary creation that will captivate and enthral. Part ghost story, part cerebral mystery, this is a dazzling and wholly original supernatural adventure. If you like House of Leaves, The X-Files, Lovecraft and the gothic tradition, this is for you.
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Gollancz
2015 is going to be an amazing year at Gollancz. We have so many astonishing projects to look forward to – for example, new novels from Sarah Pinborough (The Death House), Alastair Reynolds (Poseidon’s Wake), Charlaine Harris (Day Shift), Joe Hill (The Fireman), Scott Lynch (The Thorn of Emberlain) and Brandon Sanderson (Mistborn: Shadows of Self). We also have some fantastic brand-new series which we’re excited about, namely a brilliant new project from Paul McAuley (Something Coming Through), an exceptional new novel from Justina Robson (Glorious Angels) and something totally different from James Barclay (Blood and Fire – imagine a fantasy take on Battlestar Galactica... ).
But the lovely folk at FantasyFaction have asked us to pick just five of the projects we’re most excited about for 2015, so with a great deal of heart-wrench and hand-wringing, we’ve come up with five authors we’re really excited to be publishing. They’re all Gollancz Geek (http://www.gollancz.co.uk/gollancz-geeks/) authors, so sign up to hear all the news about them first. Even better, all of them will be part of a brilliant £1.99 ebook pre-order campaign, so get ready to fill up your ereader with some incredible new novels!
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The Roboteer by Alex Lamb
A fast-paced, gritty, space-opera based on cutting edge science, THE ROBOTEER is set in a future in which the colonization of the stars has turned out to be anything but easy, and civilization on Earth has collapsed under the pressure of relentless mutual terrorism. Gollancz Commissioning Editor, Marcus Gipps said: ‘When I was sent ROBOTEER for consideration it only took me a few pages to know that it was something special. I’d been looking for some big old widescreen space opera, and Alex lamb delivered that in spades, along with a remarkably conceived bit of universe building and a lead character I wanted to shake as often as I wanted to cheer him on. It’s a remarkable bit of hard SF, especially for a debut, and I can’t wait for other people to read it!’
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Twelve Kings In Sharakhai by Bradley Beaulieu
The first novel of a compelling fantasy series, TWELVE KINGS IN SHARAKHAI is an epic tale of mystery, prophecy and death set within the ancient walled city of the Twelve Kings. Gollancz Publishing Director, Gillian Redfearn said: ‘If you love Peter Brett or Trudi Canavan, this is the fantasy novel for you. It’s a rich and evocative epic, with a fantastic central character, and I loved it from the first page. It’s so rare to be swept up and carried away by an adventure like this that, for me, this was a must-read!’
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Crashing Heaven by Al Robertson
CRASHING HEAVEN is the most terrifying and enticing AI to grace SF since the works of Al Reynolds and Hannu Rajaniemi. Gollancz Associate Publisher, Simon Spanton said: ‘I wanted CRASHING HEAVEN on the Gollancz list because it is an artfully written but kinetic cyberpunk thriller for the 21st century from an exciting new voice. But mainly I wanted it on the list because one of its characters is Hugo Fist – an utterly hilarious and wholly terrifying accounting AI who manifests as a wooden ventriloquist’s dummy. He’s like nothing else in SF. Meet him and you’ll never forget him.’
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The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard
Comparable to works of China Mieville and Iain M. Banks in epic scale ambition, and exceptional skill, THE HOUSE OF SHATTERED WINGS is must-read dystopian murder mystery. Gillian Redfearn said: ‘This is a stunning, stunning work. De Bodard is rightly a much-lauded writer already, within the SF community, and has a vivid and sharp imagination –here, she’s used it to craft a superb murder mystery (with a twist I never saw coming) within the most extraordinary dystopian landscape. For me, she has redefined noir fantasy, and I’m so delighted we’re publishing this exceptional and genuinely exciting novel.’
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The Promise of the Child by Tom Toner
Set against the epic scope of that backdrop ranging from 14th-century Prague, to a lonely cove near the Mediterranean Sea, to the 147th-century Amaranthine Firmament, THE PROMISE OF THE CHILD is an intelligent space opera filled with gripping action and an emotional scale that is wonderfully intimate. Simon Spanton said: ‘As soon as I read Tom’s description of “a sleet” of attack ships falling from the clouds onto a massive red-brick fortress I knew I was reading something astonishing. The rest of his amazing novel trumped that image. Here was a debut SF writer with the most unconstrained imagination and ambition. A debut writer with the controlled prose of longstanding author – a writer able to direct his imagination. THE PROMISE OF THE CHILD blew me away. I couldn’t not publish it.’
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Solaris & Abaddon Books
This list is brought to you by lots of arguing, negotiation and some, quite frankly, unnecessary name calling. We kid, of course, but it has been an exceptionally difficult task this year to narrow down just five titles from one of our strongest years to date, and we think this shows in the range our chosen five have: from black satire to Lovecraftian urban fantasy, epic fantasy adventures to gritty paranormal crime.
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Haterz by James Goss
March 2015
Dave makes the internet a nicer place by killing off and silencing the very worst people on Twitter, Facebook and online. The night Dave killed his best-friend’s girlfriend he hadn’t been setting out to change the world, she was just really annoying on Facebook.
But someone saw, and someone made him an offer he couldn’t afford to refuse, and now the bodies are starting to mount up as Dave finds himself in the centre of a dark conspiracy that’s forming at the heart of the internet…
Haterz is deeply, darkly, terrifyingly funny: a fantastic black satire of social media murder (fans of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror this book is a must for you).
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Dreams of Shreds and Tatters by Amanda Downum
May 2015
When Liz Drake’s best friend vanishes, nothing can stop her nightmares. Driven by the certainty he needs her help, she crosses a continent to search for him.
She finds Blake comatose in a Vancouver hospital, victim of a mysterious accident that claimed his lover’s life–in her dreams he drowns. Soon nightmare creatures stalk the waking city, and Liz can’t fight a dream from the daylight world: to rescue Blake she must brave the darkest depths of the dreamlands, and if she succeeds, she must face the monstrous Yellow King, whose slave Blake is on the verge of becoming forever.
Stunning Lovecraftian Urban Fantasy with all the worst excess of Lovecraft removed to create a surreal nightmare of a tale. And look at that cover. Look at it! When Jeffery Alan Love sent this in there were tears of joy in the office.
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The Iron Ship by K. M. McKinley
June 2015
The order of the world is in turmoil. An age of industry is beginning, an age of machines fuelled by magic. Sprawling cities rise, strange devices stalk the land. New money brings new power. The balance between the Hundred Kingdoms is upset. For the first time in generations the threat of war looms.
In these turbulent days, fortunes can be won. Magic runs strong in the Kressind family. Six siblings strive – one to triumph in a world of men, one to survive murderous intrigue, one to master forbidden sorcery, one to wash away his sins, one to contain the terrible energies of his soul.
And one will do the impossible, by marrying the might of magic and iron in the heart of a great ship, to cross an ocean that cannot be crossed.
We strongly think new author K. M. McKinley is going to be one to watch for in 2015, and this progressive new fantasy aptly demonstrates why.
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The Fire Children by Lauren Roy
June 2015
Fifteen years have passed since Mother Sun last sent her children to walk the world. When the eclipse comes, the people retreat to the caverns beneath Kaladim, passing the days in total darkness while the Fire Children explore their world. It’s death to even look upon them, the stories say.
Despite the warnings, Yulla gives in to her curiosity and ventures to the surface. There she witnesses the Witch Women — who rumours say worship dead Father Sea, rather than Mother Sun — capturing one of the Children and hauling her away. Yulla isn’t the only one who saw the kidnapping; Ember, the last of the Fire Children, reveals himself to Yulla and implores her to help.
It’s hard to express just how beautiful this story is, we just want to jump into the book and travel the streets of Kaladim with Yulla. This is YA Fantasy with the heart and soul of Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea.
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Disturbed Earth by E E Richardson
April 2015
A hard-nosed career officer in the male-dominated world of British policing, DCI Claire Pierce of North Yorkshire Police heads Northern England’s underfunded and understaffed Ritual Crime Unit. Injured in the line of duty, Pierce returns to work to find her new Detective Inspector has brought in a self-proclaimed necromancer to question the victim of a murder, there’s a coven of druids outside protesting the sale of their sacred site, and an old iron lantern in the evidence room has just sent out a signal…
We ADORE this author (who came through our 2012 open subs month) and in this old-school British police procedural, with a capable and realistic female lead, she skilfully merges the paranormal and crime to produce a highly original, gritty new urban fantasy.
Now we’re going to lie down and recover until next year when (we hope) Marc will make us do this all over again… whelp.
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Transworld Publishers
We’re super excited to be sharing with you a sneak peek of our picks from our SFF list for 2015, including some brilliant well known and loved authors, a dazzling literary debut and the second in the Tearling series currently being turned into the Blockbuster Film starring Emma Watson.
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The Long Utopia by Terry Pratchett & Steven Baxter
18.06.2015
The fourth novel in a collaborative series that has been hailed as ‘sense-of-wonder SF at its best’ (Independent on Sunday).
After the cataclysmic upheavals of Step Day and the Yellowstone eruption humanity is spreading further into the Long Earth, and society, on a battered Datum Earth and beyond, continues to evolve.
Now an elderly and cantankerous AI, Lobsang lives in disguise with Agnes in an exotic, far-distant world. He’s convinced they’re leading a normal life in New Springfield – they even adopt a child – but it seems they have been guided there for a reason. As rumours of strange sightings and hauntings proliferate, it becomes clear that something is very awry with this particular world.
Millions of steps away, Joshua is on a personal journey of discovery: learning about the father he never knew and a secret family history. But then he receives a summons from New Springfield. Lobsang now understands the enormity of what’s taking place beneath the surface of his earth – a threat to all the worlds of the Long Earth.
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Goodhouse by Peyton Marshall
01.01.2015
Set in a dystopian future, a coming-of-age literary thriller of love, war and genetic engineering set in a corrective school for boys with criminal genes – for fans of Never Let Me Go, The Road and Hunger Games.
A bold and page-turning look into a plausible near-future – where genetic profiling is meant to prevent crime, but instead becomes a tool for oppression. If, one day, we can see into our genetic make-up – both the good and the bad – places like GOODHOUSE could be just around the corner …
‘A page-turning account of one boy’s journey through a vivid and dangerous world’ – KAREN JAY FOWLER, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
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The Immortal Throne by Stella Gemmell
02.07.2015
Epic, involving and thrillingly imagined – the powerful new fantasy novel by the acclaimed author of the bestselling THE CITY.
The emperor is dead… long live the emperor!
The fervent hope of the victorious rebels and the survivors of the uprising that liberated the City from tyranny is that the accession of Archange to the imperial throne will usher in a new era of freedom, peace and stability. If only that were so…
As the the City struggles to return to something resembling normal life after the devastation brought on by the rebellion, word arises of a massive army gathering to the north. No one knows where it has come from or who leads it, but it soon becomes apparent that its sole purpose is to destroy the City and annihilate all – man, woman and child – who live within its battered walls. And while warriors go forth to fight and die on the battlefield in defence of their homeland and all that they believe in, bitter family feuds and ancient rivalries, political and personal betrayals, and mindless murder surface within the palaces and corridors of power: it seems the City is under siege – from both without and within...
With this new novel, Stella Gemmell brings the astonishing story of the City to a |
the inhumanity of her stepchildren you can stop her mouth by telling her that during my 10 months exile here the P.M. has never written me a line of any description." But Raymond's death was shattering, Violet writing; "…to see Father suffering so wrings one", and Asquith passed much of the following months "withdrawn and difficult to approach". The War brought no respite, Churchill writing that; "The failure to break the German line in the Somme, the recovery of the Germanic powers in the East [i.e. the defeat of the Brusilov Offensive], the ruin of Roumania and the beginnings of renewed submarine warfare strengthened and stimulated all those forces which insisted upon still greater vigour in the conduct of affairs."
Fall: November–December 1916 [ edit ]
The events that led to the collapse of the First Coalition were exhaustively chronicled by almost all of the major participants, (although Asquith himself was a notable exception), and have been minutely studied by historians in the 100 years since. Although many of the accounts and studies differ in detail, and present a somewhat confusing picture overall, the outline is clear. As R. J. Q. Adams wrote; "The Prime Minister depended upon [a] majority [in] Parliament. The faith of that majority in Asquith's leadership had been shaken and the appearance of a logical alternative destroyed him."[290][291]
Nigeria debate and Lord Lansdowne's memorandum [ edit ]
"a man called Max Aitken"
The touch paper for the final crisis was the unlikely subject of the sale of captured German assets in Nigeria. As Colonial Secretary, the Conservative leader Bonar Law led the debate and was subject to a furious attack by Sir Edward Carson. The issue itself was trivial, but the fact that Law had been attacked by a leading member of his own party, and was not supported by Lloyd George (who absented himself from the House only to dine with Carson later in the evening), was not.
Margot Asquith immediately sensed the coming danger; "From that night it was quite clear that Northcliffe, Rothermere, Bonar, Carson, Ll.G (and a man called Max Aitken) were going to run the Government. I knew it was the end." Grey was similarly prescient, writing; "Lloyd George means to break up the Government." Bonar Law saw the debate as a threat to his own political position, as well as another instance of lack of grip by the government.
The situation was further inflamed by the publication of a memorandum on future prospects in the war by Lord Lansdowne. Circulated on 13 November, it considered, and did not dismiss, the possibility of a negotiated settlement with the Central Powers. Asquith's critics immediately assumed that the memorandum represented his own views and that Lansdowne was being used as a stalking horse, Lord Crewe going so far as to suggest that the Lansdowne Memorandum was the "veritable causa causans[n] of the final break-up".
Triumvirate gathers [ edit ]
On 20 November 1916 Lloyd George, Carson and Bonar Law met at the Hyde Park Hotel. The meeting was organised by Max Aitken who was to play central roles both in the forthcoming crisis and in its subsequent historiography. Max Aitken was a Canadian adventurer, millionaire, and close friend of Bonar Law. His book on the fall of the First Coalition, Politicians and the War 1914–1916, although always partial and sometimes inaccurate, gives a detailed insider's view of the events leading up to Asquith's political demise. The trio agreed on the necessity of overhauling the government and further agreed on the mechanism for doing so; the establishment of a small War Council, chaired by Lloyd George, with no more than five members and with full executive authority for the conduct of the war.
Asquith was to be retained as prime minister, and given honorific oversight of the War Council, but day to day operations would be directed by Lloyd George. This scheme, although often reworked, remained the basis of all proposals to reform the government until Asquith's fall on 6 December. Until almost the end, both Bonar Law, and Lloyd George, wished to retain Asquith as premier. But Aitken, Carson and Lord Northcliffe emphatically did not.
Power without responsibility [ edit ]
Lord Northcliffe teeing up
Lord Northcliffe's role was critical, as was the use Lloyd George made of him, and of the press in general. Northcliffe's involvement also highlights the limitations of both Aitken's and Lloyd George's accounts of Asquith's fall. Both minimised Northcliffe's part in the events. In his War Memoirs, Lloyd George stated emphatically "Lord Northcliffe was never, at any stage, brought into our consultations." Aitken supported this; "Lord Northcliffe was not in active co-operation with Lloyd George." But these claims are contradicted by others. In their biography of Northcliffe, Pound and Harmsworth record Northcliffe's brother Rothermere writing contemporaneously; "Alfred has been actively at work with Ll.G. with a view to bringing about a change." Riddell wrote in his diary for 27 May 1916: "LG never mentions directly that he sees Northcliffe but I am sure they are in daily contact." Margot Asquith was also certain of Northcliffe's role, and of Lloyd George's involvement, although she obscured both of their names when writing in her diary; "I only hope the man responsible for giving information to Lord N- will be heavily punished: God may forgive him; I never can." They are also contradicted by events; Northcliffe met with Lloyd George on each of the three days just prior to Lloyd George's resignation, on 1, 2, and 3 December, including two meetings on 1 December, both before and after Lloyd George put his revised proposals for the War Council to Asquith. It seems improbable that ongoing events were not discussed and that the two men confined their conversations to negotiating article circulation rights for Lloyd George once he had resigned, as Pound and Harmsworth weakly suggest. The attempts made by others to use Northcliffe and the wider press also merit consideration. In this regard, some senior military officers were extremely active. Robertson, for example, wrote to Northcliffe in October 1916, "The Boche gives me no trouble compared with what I meet in London. So any help you can give me will be of Imperial value." Lastly, the actions of Northcliffe's newspapers must be considered—in particular The Times editorial on 4 December which led Asquith to reject Lloyd George's final War Council proposals. Thompson, Northcliffe's most recent biographer, concludes; "From the evidence, it appears that Northcliffe and his newspapers should be given more credit than they have generally received for the demise of the Asquith government in December 1916."
To-ing and fro-ing [ edit ]
Bonar Law met again with Carson and Lloyd George on 25 November and, with Aitken's help, drafted a memorandum for Asquith's signature. This would see a "Civilian General Staff", with Lloyd George as chairman and Asquith as president, attending irregularly but with the right of referral to Cabinet as desired. This, Bonar Law presented to Asquith, who committed to reply on Monday the following week.
His reply was an outright rejection; the proposal was impossible "without fatally impairing the confidence of colleagues, and undermining my own authority." Law took Asquith's response to Carson and Lloyd George at Law's office in the Colonial Office. All were uncertain of the next steps. Bonar Law decided it would be appropriate to meet with his senior Conservative colleagues, something he had not previously done. He saw Austen Chamberlain, Lord Curzon and Lord Robert Cecil on Thursday 30 November. All were united in opposition to Lloyd George's War Council plans, Chamberlain writing; "(we) were unanimously of opinion (sic) that (the plans) were open to grave objection and made certain alternative proposals."
Lloyd George had also been reflecting on the substance of the scheme and, on Friday 1 December, he met with Asquith to put forward an alternative. This would see a War Council of three, the two Service ministers and a third without portfolio. One of the three, presumably Lloyd George although this was not explicit, would be chairman. Asquith, as Prime Minister, would retain "supreme control."
Asquith's reply the same day did not constitute an outright rejection, but he did demand that he retain the chairmanship of the council. As such, it was unacceptable to Lloyd George and he wrote to Bonar Law the next day (Saturday 2 December); "I enclose copy of P.M.'s letter. The life of the country depends on resolute action by you now."
Last four days: Sunday 3 December to Wednesday 6 December [ edit ]
In a four-day crisis Asquith was unaware how fast he was losing support. Lloyd George now had growing Unionist support, the backing of Labour and (thanks to Addison) a majority of Liberal MPs. Asquith fell and Lloyd George answered the loud demands for a much more decisive government. He energetically set up a new small war cabinet, a cabinet secretariat under Hankey, a secretariat of private advisors in the 'Garden Suburb' and moved towards prime ministerial control.[330]
Sunday 3 December [ edit ]
Sunday 3 December saw the Conservative leadership meet at Bonar Law's house, Pembroke Lodge. They gathered against a backdrop of ever-growing press involvement, in part fermented by Max Aitken. That morning's Reynold's News, owned and edited by Lloyd George's close associate Henry Dalziel, had published an article setting out Lloyd George's demands to Asquith and claiming that he intended to resign and take his case to the country if they were not met. At Law's house, the Conservatives present drew up a resolution which they demanded Law present to Asquith.
This document, subsequently the source of much debate, stated that "the Government cannot continue as it is; the Prime Minister (should) tender the resignation of the Government" and, if Asquith was unwilling to do that, the Conservative members of the Government would "tender (their) resignations." The meaning of this resolution is unclear, and even those who contributed to it took away differing interpretations.
Chamberlain felt that it left open the option of either Asquith or Lloyd George as premier, dependent on who could gain greater support. Curzon, in a letter of that day to Lansdowne, stated no one at the Pembroke Lodge meeting felt that the war could be won under Asquith's continued leadership and that the issue for the Liberal politicians to resolve was whether Asquith remained in a Lloyd George administration in a subordinate role, or left the government altogether. Max Aitken's claim that the resolution's purpose was to ensure that "Lloyd George should go" is not supported by most of the contemporary accounts, or by the assessments of most subsequent historians.
As one example, Gilmour, Curzon's biographer, writes that the Unionist ministers; "did not, as Beaverbrook alleged, decide to resign themselves in order to strengthen the Prime Minister's hand against Lloyd George..(their intentions) were completely different." Similarly, Adams, Bonar Law's latest biographer, describes Aitken's interpretation of the resolution as "convincingly overturned." Ramsden is equally clear; "the Unionist ministers acted to strengthen Lloyd George's hand, from a conviction that only greater power for Lloyd George could put enough drive into the war effort."
Bonar Law then took the resolution to Asquith, who had, unusually, broken his weekend at Walmer Castle to return to Downing Street. At their meeting, Bonar Law sought to convey the content of his colleagues' earlier discussion but failed to produce the resolution itself. That it was never actually shown to Asquith is incontrovertible, and Asquith confirmed this in his writings. Bonar Law's motives in not handing it over are more controversial. Law himself maintained he simply forgot. Jenkins charges him with bad faith, or neglect of duty. Adams suggests Law's motives were more complex—the resolution also contained a clause condemning the involvement of the press—prompted by the Reynold's News story of that morning —and that, in continuing to seek an accommodation between Asquith and Lloyd George, Law felt it prudent not to share the actual text.
The outcome of the interview between Law and Asquith was clear, even if Law had not been. Asquith immediately decided that an accommodation with Lloyd George, and a substantial reconstruction to placate the Unionist ministers, were required. He summoned Lloyd George and together they agreed a compromise that was, in fact, little different to Lloyd George's 1 December proposals. The only substantial amendment was that Asquith would have daily oversight of the War Council's work and a right of veto. Grigg sees this compromise as "very favourable to Asquith." Cassar is less certain; "The new formula left him in a much weaker position[, his] authority merely on paper for he was unlikely to exercise his veto lest it bring on the collective resignation of the War Council." Nevertheless, both Asquith, Lloyd George, and Bonar Law who had rejoined them at 5.00 pm, felt a basis for a compromise had been reached and they agreed that Asquith would issue a bulletin that evening announcing the reconstruction of the Government. Crewe, who joined Asquith at Montagu's house at 10.00 p.m. recorded; "accommodation with Mr. Lloyd George would ultimately be achieved, without sacrifice of (Asquith's) position as chief of the War Committee; a large measure of reconstruction would satisfy the Unionist Ministers."
Despite Lloyd George's denials of collaboration, the diary for 3 December by Northcliffe's factotum Tom Clarke, records that; "The Chief returned to town and at 7.00 o'clock he was at the War Office with Lloyd George." Meanwhile Duff Cooper was invited to dinner at Montagu's Queen Anne's Gate house, he afterwards played bridge with Asquith, Venetia Montagu and Churchill's sister-in-law "Goonie", recording in his diary : "..the P.M. more drunk than I have ever seen him, (..) so drunk that one felt uncomfortable … an extraordinary scene."
Monday 4 December [ edit ]
The bulletin was published on the morning of Monday 4 December. It was accompanied by an avalanche of press criticism, all of it intensely hostile to Asquith. The worst was a leader in Northcliffe's Times. This had full details of the compromise reached the day before, including the names of those suggested as members of the War Council. More damagingly still, it ridiculed Asquith, claimed he had conspired in his own humiliation and would henceforth be "Prime Minister in name only." Lloyd George's involvement is uncertain; he denied any, but Asquith was certain he was the source. The author was certainly the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, with some assistance from Carson. But it seems likely that Carson's source was Lloyd George.
The leak prompted an immediate reaction from Asquith; "Unless the impression is at once corrected that I am being relegated to the position of an irresponsible spectator of the War, I cannot possibly go on." Lloyd George's reply was prompt and conciliatory; "I cannot restrain nor I fear influence Northcliffe. I fully accept in letter and in spirit your summary of the suggested arrangement—subject of course to personnel." But Asquith's mind was already turning to rejection of the Sunday compromise and outright confrontation with Lloyd George.
It is unclear exactly whom Asquith spoke with on 4 December. Beaverbrook and Crewe state he met Chamberlain, Curzon and Cecil. Cassar follows these opinions, to a degree. But Chamberlain himself was adamant that he and his colleagues met Asquith only once during the crisis and that was on the following day, Tuesday 5 December. Chamberlain wrote at the time "On Tuesday afternoon the Prime Minister sent for Curzon, Bob Cecil and myself. This is the first and only time the three of us met Asquith during those fateful days." His recollection is supported by details of their meetings with Bonar Law and other colleagues, in the afternoon, and then in the evening of the 4th, and by most modern historians, e.g. Gilmour and Adams. Crawford records how little he and his senior Unionist colleagues were involved in the key discussions, and by implication, how much better informed were the press lords, writing in his diary; "We were all in such doubt as to what had actually occurred, and we sent out for an evening paper to see if there was any news!" Asquith certainly did meet his senior Liberal colleagues on the evening of 4 December, who were unanimously opposed to compromise with Lloyd George and who supported Asquith's growing determination to fight. His way forward had been cleared by his tendering the resignation of his government to the King earlier in the day. Asquith also saw Bonar Law who confirmed that he would resign if Asquith failed to implement the War Council agreement as discussed only the day before. In the evening, and having declined two requests for meetings, Asquith threw down the gauntlet to Lloyd George by rejecting the War Council proposal.
Tuesday 5 December [ edit ]
Lloyd George accepted the challenge by return of post, writing; "As all delay is fatal in war, I place my office without further parley at your disposal." Asquith had anticipated this response, but was surprised by a letter from Arthur Balfour, who until that point had been removed from the crisis by illness. On its face, this letter merely offered confirmation that Balfour believed that Lloyd George's scheme for a smaller War Council deserved a chance and that he had no wish to remain at the Admiralty if Lloyd George wished him out. Jenkins argues that Asquith should have recognised it as a shift of allegiance. Asquith discussed the crisis with Lord Crewe and they agreed an early meeting with the Unionist ministers was essential. Without their support, "it would be impossible for Asquith to continue."
Asquith's meeting with Chamberlain, Curzon and Cecil at 3.00 p.m. only highlighted the weakness of his position. They unanimously declined to serve in a Government that did not include Bonar Law and Lloyd George, as a Government so constituted offered no "prospect of stability." Their reply to Asquith's follow-up question as to whether they would serve under Lloyd George caused him even mAward-winning Brewmaster Jesse Houck has joined the Maui Brewing Company team as their new Director of Brewing Operations. He brings to the table over 12 years of professional brewing experience which has garnered him medals at both the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup during his tenure as Head Brewer at 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco.
Houck’s resume also includes time spent early in his career as a brewer at Speakeasy Ales & Lagers and as Head Brewer at Gordon Biersch (San Jose) before his seven years on the 21A team. A couple years as the Production Manager & Head Brewer at Drake’s Brewing in San Leandro followed before his move down to Los Angeles in 2013. He was part of the crucial personnel shift that put Golden Road Brewing on the regional map and created crowd-favorites including Wolf Among Weeds and Heal the Bay IPA. Houck left his post as their Brewmaster just months after the brewery was acquired by AB-InBev after serving nearly three years there.
Catching up with Maui Brewing Company Founder and CEO Garrett Marrero, Marrero explained that over the years, he has been hoping to have the opportunity to work with Houck.
“I’m amped on what Jesse is bringing to Maui,” Marrero said. “He’s got great passion for making the best possible beer but also has a good business sense — it’s impressive to find both in the same person.” He adds: “Also, he’s a great team player and is focused on empowering the team; bringing positivity and sense of calm to nearly every situation.”
Marrero first met Houck many years ago while visiting 21st Amendment and the two kept in touch over the years.
“I secretly always hoped I’d have the chance to work with Jesse directly,” Marrero continued. “He’s always worked for close industry friends so given “the code,” I had to wait patiently. When he reached out, I was stoked — it was the perfect time as we had Darren [Moser] transitioning out and needed to fill the position.”
According to Houck, the appreciation is mutual.
“I’m stoked at the opportunity to work alongside such a strong leader as Garrett and the talented team he has assembled here on Maui,” Houck said. “It’s great to walk into a brewery and not only see a friendly face but to see co-workers continuously growing in the industry. “
During the time between Moser’s departure and Houck’s arrival, Marrero also adds that another Golden Road alum who worked under Houck was integral in keeping operations as usual.
“There was a bit of a gap but Matt ‘Ponch’ Ponichtera and the team did a fantastic job of coming together and filling the void.”
When asked about reuniting with his former co-worker, Houck added: “Ponch is both a great brewer and leader and I look forward to working with him again alongside the rest of the team.”
But what will Houck miss about Los Angeles most?
“I’m going to miss the coffee at Dinosaur, pints at the Glendale Tap, but even more the people that I shared those times with. Come visit, you might not want to go back.”
As if joining the Maui ohana wasn’t enough reason for Houck to celebrate this New Year, many people probably don’t know how avid of a scuba-diver he is. In just a few weeks since his relocation, he’s already got some plans.
“The back wall of the Molokini crater is epic and just minutes away by boat; I’ve already dived it a few times and look forward to continued exploration of all the islands.”
Marrero added: “With his obvious aloha spirit, brewing talent, and love of diving I knew he’d fit right in.”
Maui Brewing Company was founded in 2005 and has been the major driving-force for craft beer in Hawaii since its inception. Their major brewery expansion on their Kihei location was completed in December 2014 with the addition of six new 250bbl fermenters added in the past month to increase production of both core brands and experimental one-offs. Their first brewpub on Oahu is also scheduled to open in Waikiki in addition to breaking ground a second brewpub on Maui. Notably, Founder & CEO Garrett Marrero was recently elected to the Brewers Association Board of Directors. 2016 looks like a bright year for Maui Brewing Company. Ho’omai’ka’i ‘ana, friends!
Author’s Note: I had the absolute pleasure of working with Jesse during my three years at Golden Road and I value him as one of my favorite people and dearest friends. I couldn’t be happier for his new adventure and am looking forward to over-extending my welcome as I crash on your couch in the coming months.Julia Parrish, CTV Edmonton
Controversial ads on Edmonton Transit Service buses will be removed, and reviewed by advertising industry officials, and the city is pledging to look at how to handle similar ads in the future.
In recent days, ads were posted on ETS buses, targeting Muslim girls – telling them to get help if they feel threatened by their family - and sparked outrage for a number of Edmontonians, and for some in Edmonton's Muslim community.
The ads were posted by the American Freedom Defense Initiative, and the president of the organization said Monday the ads were meant to reach out to girls who might be looking for help.
Pamela Geller told CTV News she heard concerns from Edmontonians that it could be an issue in the city's growing Muslim community – so the organization purchased 70 ads that were posted last week, and were set to be taken down in mid-November.
“If we have to suffer the slings and arrows of those that wish to protect this honour code, that wish to protect this system of misogyny and violence, then so be it,” Geller said in an interview with CTV News.
The Chair of the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities didn't agree, saying the ads counter-act work being done to prevent domestic violence, and not just in the Muslim community.
"We would just as unequivocally condemn those acts as we would anybody smearing the name of a particular faith group," Masood Peracha said.
“There’s no room for such bigotry and discrimination in our city, and we should not have allowed these ads to start with,” Councillor Amarjeet Sohi said. “But once we found it, we took immediate action and taken them off.”
Sohi also said he is planning to sit down with the City’s Transportation Department, and Pattison, to find ways to improve criteria and standards for advertisements posted on city property.
Meanwhile, the ads have raised questions surrounding the approval process for ads meant for city buses – a city official said the city received a number of complaints over the ads, and the decision to remove them was made Monday evening.
“In this particular case, the concerning nature of these particular complaints being discriminatory in nature, was of concern to us,” Cheryl Oxford with the City of Edmonton said.
Oxford said the ads will seek feedback over the ads from the Advertising Standards Canada, before making a final decision on the fate of the ads.
“I think we’d have to wait for a decision from them and also turn to the citizens we have heard from, to make a decision of what to do here in Edmonton,” Oxford said.
A Pattison spokesperson told CTV News Monday that the ads cleared a checklist, and met required standards – such as identifying the group that bought the ad, and providing contact information for them.
CTV News spoke to Geller again Tuesday – who said she was shocked, and said the disturbing issues related to honour killings can’t be ignored.
With files from Nicole WeisbergThere are many great things about the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Just one of them is that if you happen to pause on seemingly any single frame, that image itself is a work of art.
Artist Bill Mudron would probably agree. And, in fact, he takes the beauty of Miyazaki’s work a step further. He’s done a series of posters inspired by Miyazaki’s films that capture quiet, peaceful moments from the worlds the master filmmaker creates. Here are just a few of those posters, including both reprints and brand-new works.
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Mudron did posters for 11 Miyazaki films, as well as a portrait of the director himself outside of Studio Ghibli, so what you see above is just a small selection of his work. Check them all out, and buy the set if you like, at this website.http://www.flickr.com/photos/ari/2347593532/ Bank of America could soon announce a fresh round of layoffs, reports the Wall Street Journal's Dan Fitzpatrick and Dana Cimilluca.
The Charlotte, N.C., company is planning about 2,000 staff cuts in its investment banking, commercial banking and non-U.S. wealth-management units, said people familiar with the situation.... In the latest round of cuts, less than 400 will come from investment banking, corporate banking, sales and trading, the people familiar with the matter said. An expected sale of the bank's non-U.S. wealth-management operations in Asia, Latin America and Europe would eliminate less than 2,000 positions.
The reporters say that these cuts will come on top of the 30,000 planned layoffs the bank had already announced last fall.
Last week, the WSJ reported that layoffs were soon coming to several Wall Street houses. However, Bank of America wasn't mentioned on that list, which included Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley.
Read the whole story at WSJ.com.
SEE ALSO: The 200,000 Layoffs That Rocked Investment Bankers In 2011 >DOE rules kill due process, sow confusion and red tape — and do nothing to reduce sexual violence.
Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan recently declared, “Being terrible about rape appears as endemic to American high education as barfing on the quad.” Ryan had just heard the news that 55 American universities are facing federal Title IX investigations for possibly mishandling cases of sexual misconduct. Jezebel seems to think that the Department of Education (DOE) investigations are evidence of a sexual-assault epidemic and insidious “rape culture” plaguing our college campuses.
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Actually, the investigations show no such thing. The DOE has made it clear that a college’s investigation “in no way indicates at this stage that the college or university is violating or has violated the law.” What the investigations actually reveal is just the beginning of the messy results of three years of federal overreach into campus rape policies.
Through a series of heavy-handed executive actions, the Obama administration has effectively required universities to serve as investigators and jurors for felony offenses. By doing so, they have placed universities in an impossible position, created costly bureaucracy, trampled students’ due-process rights, and empowered a cadre of hypersensitive, trigger-happy gender warriors on campuses.
#ad#Campus conduct boards are best suited for handling academic infractions such as cheating or plagiarism. But in 2011, the DOE’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlyn Ali, issued a directive warning colleges that failure to aggressively pursue sexual-assault offenders would be considered a Title IX violation punishable by loss of federal funds. As a result of this intervention by the DOE’s office of civil rights (OCR), there are conduct boards composed of English professors, librarians, and math majors across the country determining guilt for what is generally considered the second most serious crime known to man.
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To comply with the new rules of Title IX, universities have been frantically revising their policies. To be sure, many have added valuable resources and programs for victims of sexual assault. But for the most part, universities have responded to new federal guidelines exactly as you would expect — by hiring more bureaucrats to focus exclusively on Title IX compliance. The University of North Carolina has already hired five full-time Title IX coordinators since several students filed complaints, and they intend to hire more. UNC — a university with nearly 30,000 total students — had 21 reported forcible-sex offenses in 2012, according to its latest campus-security report. That comes to only about four cases of sexual misconduct per Title IX officer. (Meanwhile, UNC student activists have taken to protesting Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” at bars and getting DJs fired for perpetuating “rape culture.”) Application of Title IX is complex, but it’s hard to imagine how hiring more college administrators will help solve the problem of campus rape.
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Despite the many resources expended in efforts to comply with Title IX, campus courts have unsurprisingly done a bad job adjudicating rape — not because they’re part of a conspiracy to silence victims or because they don’t take rape seriously, but because they’re charged with an impossible task.
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The result has been a surge of lawsuits from students who allege that their universities mishandled their sexual-assault cases and failed to protect them from gender discrimination. Many schools are being investigated by OCR because of such formal complaints, while others are subject to “proactive” compliance reviews. After a messy Title IX feud erupted last month between OCR and Tufts University, Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, told Inside Higher Ed, “Many universities that have found themselves in a conflict with the OCR believe that this agency does not act in good faith and that it’s little more than a bully with enforcement powers.”
But university administrators aren’t the only ones troubled by OCR’s overreach. The DOE instructs colleges to use the lowest possible standard in our legal system — a “preponderance of evidence” — when adjudicating sexual misconduct. Because of the inadequacy of campus courts and lack of procedural safeguards in place to protect students, this has grave consequences for due process. After the White House released its latest report on sexual assault, Greg Lukianoff, president of the civil-liberties group FIRE, responded:
Sexual assault is one of the worst crimes a person can commit.... But precisely because sexual assault is such a serious crime, providing those accused of it with due process — a term that appears nowhere in the entire report — becomes even more important. Due process is more than a system for protecting the rights of the accused; it’s a set of procedures intended to ensure that findings of guilt or innocence are accurate, fair, and reliable.
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University courts have increasingly become infected with a “presumed guilty” mindset, resulting in serious miscarriages of justice for students falsely accused of sexual assault. Now, universities also have to deal with “reverse Title IX” lawsuits from falsely accused men who say their rights were violated when they were found guilty of sexual misconduct on campus. Men have already filed lawsuits against universities such as Swarthmore, Philadelphia University, Vassar, University of Michigan, and Denison, among others.
Even Brett Sokolow, director of the Association of Title IX Administrators and prominent victim advocate, has expressed concern that universities are violating men’s Title IX rights. In a recent newsletter, Sokolow writes: “In the last two weeks, I’ve worked on five cases all involving drunken hookups. In each case, the male accused of sexual misconduct was found responsible. In each case, I thought the college got it completely wrong.” Under unclear definitions of consent, Sokolow warns, the accused may “suffer an arbitrary and capricious application” of sexual-assault policies that amounts to gender discrimination.
Who benefits from the Obama administration’s overstep into campus rape? There’s no evidence that it has decreased rates of sexual violence or brought justice to more victims. But it has certainly empowered campus gender activists.
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Too often, the people informing new campus rape policies are not sound voices of reason and justice, but overzealous activists who allege that all drunken sex constitutes rape and that we must steadfastly “believe survivors” despite any evidence to the contrary. The campus rape debate has given them a platform, and their extreme views have become enshrined in many universities’ policies. As a result, campuses such as Stanford, Yale, and the University of Montana employ broad and murky definitions of consent that no court would recognize. Activists are also seeing some success in demanding censorship of course materials, statues, and even music that could potentially “trigger” memories of sexual assault for victims.
How has the White House responded to the madness surrounding sexual assault on campus? Not by insisting that we adjudicate sexual assault in courts of law and hold rapists criminally responsible. Instead of such a commonsense solution, the White House is instead issuing more federal guidelines for campus rape response. As FIRE Senior Vice President Robert Shibley wrote in a recent op-ed:
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President Obama and the DOE seem to think that we can solve the problem of campus rape by expending more federal resources and issuing more unclear guidelines. This is madness. The bottom line is that even the most tightly regulated and well-funded campus tribunal will never be able to adequately adjudicate rape. Sexual-assault cases are very tricky to handle, even for trained law enforcement. And even if a campus court manages to deliver a just verdict without trampling the rights of either party, the harshest punishment at their disposal is expulsion. Rapists will never spend a day in jail, and they will be free to offend again.
This strategy will not bring justice to rape victims. It will only result in more bureaucracy, less protections for the falsely accused, grave miscarriages of justice for all parties, and — you can be sure — more lawsuits and Title IX investigations. If President Obama really wants to take rape seriously, he will take the power away from campus kangaroo courts and place such criminal investigations where they belong: in the hands of trained law enforcement.
— Caroline Kitchens is a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute.UFC president Dana White isn't getting off the Cyborg/Rousey hype train yet. After years of discussion between Ronda Rousey and Cris Cyborg about a fight that has never come together, it seems further than ever from actually happening. Cyborg is now in the UFC and has won two bouts in dominant fashion, but there's no way she can get below 140 pounds. And Rousey always said she'd never go up to meet her.
Besides that, Rousey has basically been in seclusion since suffering her first career loss to Holly Holm last November, and no one is 100% sure when she's going to fight again.
With all that being said, Dana told TMZ that Rousey still interested in that fight:
"I can tell you this, Ronda wants to fight Cyborg. She absolutely, positively wants to fight Cyborg, so we will see what happens. I mean, we are talking about her coming back this year, but we will see what happens.
"Ronda wanted time off. The girl busted ass for four years.She wanted time off, deserved time off and she just got a bunch of little injuries fixed up. She is getting nasty again and her head is in the right place and I think we will see her soon. I'm hoping she fights this year."
There have been whisperings of Rousey taking on Amanda Nunes for the UFC women's bantamweight title in December, but nothing is clear at all at this point. In terms of Rousey/Cyborg, I'd still say it's a pipe dream that won't be coming to fruition any time soon. Maybe one day though.Predictive Medical Technologies has developed a system that can mine the medical data of a patient—lab reports, monitors, nurse notes, etc.—and predict whether that patient will suffer from cardiac arrest or respiratory failure within 24 hours.
It's a system that can be integrated into hospitals that are "at a certain technological level" without any new hardware, sampling or extra time. That technological level is rare though, with only 100 US hospitals properly equipped. Bryan Hughes, CEO of Predictive Medical Technologies, explains how it works:
Without giving away too much of our secret sauce, we use non-hypothesis machine learning techniques, which have proven very promising so far. This approach allows us to eliminate any human "expert" bias from the models.
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The current model has been tested and proven retrospectively (looking at old data and determining outcome) and can be used to predict cardiac arrest and respiratory failure. The next version should be able to detect sepsis, renal failure and re-intubation risk, as well. PMT is going to start a validation trial to see how well it works in real times but a formal FDA trial is still a year away.
This sounds deliciously futuristic (even though it's just plain math) |
, and assessing space and power dynamics, these men were on a social media self-promotion campaign, intent on boosting their own image (for future POTUS races, I’m sure). …
How dare these students share a positive message of stopping campus rape when they have penises and white skin!
But at any rate, you judge them by the color of their skin, deciding since it’s white they must have no other motive to stop rape other than political gain. How about their sisters, female friends, future daughters – and a sincere concern for all humanity?
… in celebration of our apparent efforts, we went to a play about rape at a high school that was one of worst-written, misogynistic, heteronormative, atrocious plays I’ve seen. There was absolutely no trigger warning yet the naked body of a rape survivor was shown. There was complete disregard for any type of intersectionality; it excluded male survivors, homosexual instances of assault, and had no acknowledgement of racial dynamics. It neatly categorized high school students into the category of jocks (the rapists), the cheerleaders (the stereotypically “catty” girls who bully the survivor), the survivor and her friend, and the punk emo goth (the outcast voice of reason during the play). The incompetent playwright did not lend the play the gravity, nuance or emotion it required. Despite being based on the Steubenville rape case, there was absolutely no consideration given to the privacy, dignity and humanity of the Steubenville rape survivor. This disgusting play was proof of how much damage is done when people take on serious issues without bothering to educate themselves and do not take into consideration the emotional and social needs of the people who are being impacted. …
Ok, so on the one hand you flip out when a Michigan football player accused of rape isn’t mentioned at a meeting, but when this group of “heterosexual, white, cisgender men” finally do something to get in touch with that whole “self-awareness … assessing their own privilege … self-educating” stuff, you also flip out because they went to a play about white football players’ heinous sexual assaults? Something they could relate to and possibly learn from?
I’m tired of having my voice repeatedly stolen by rich, white, heterosexual, cisgender men like Dishell and Schlissel who claim they care for political reasons but have made it very evident that they do not. I am out of tears, out of cookies to give to privileged folk who sometimes behave like decent human beings, and generally just out of fucks to give.
Yeah, it’s super tough living in America, isn’t it? I have one final message for you:
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on TwitterWASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House oil spill commission said on Monday it found no evidence to support accusations that the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history happened because workers for BP Plc and its partners cut corners to save money, mostly blaming the accident on a series of on-site misjudgments.
An oil sheen is seen on the water at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, May 27 2010. REUTERS/Dan Anderson
“To date we have not seen a single instance where a human being made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,” the commission’s Chief Counsel Fred Bartlit said at a meeting exploring the causes of the Gulf of Mexico spill.
Bartlit said the panel agreed with about 90 percent of the findings of BP’s internal investigation of the accident released this summer. BP’s report assigned much of the blame for the accident to its drilling partners.
Bartlit also said BP’s well design was not inherently faulty, although it did have some impact on the drilling project’s operations.
While the commission has no legal authority to carry out policies or punishment, the findings could help BP’s tarnished reputation, although the panel was still very critical of BP’s procedures to plug the well prior to the explosion, saying the oil giant took unnecessary risks.
Some lawmakers and critics have accused BP and other companies involved in drilling the well of sacrificing safety for monetary savings in the run-up to the rig explosion that killed 11 workers and unleashed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf over the summer.
“What is fully evident, from BP’s pipeline spill in Alaska and the Texas city refinery disaster, to the Deepwater Horizon well failure, is that BP has a long and sordid history of cutting costs and pushing the limits in search of higher profits,” U.S. Representative Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a statement.
Bartlit said the commission’s preliminary investigation found no evidence that individual workers took safety risks to save money, and that it instead found that a series of factors ultimately contributed to the explosion.
Still, Bartlit emphasized that his probe did not focus on company culture and not everything done on the rig was safe.
Workers for BP and Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig, also misread a critical negative pressure test of cement used in an attempt to plug the well. The panel’s investigators said workers may have misinterpreted the test because neither of the companies nor the government had standard procedures for handling negative pressure tests.
There is disagreement over whether Transocean had any responsibility for overseeing the negative pressure test.
“Industry standard is that the operator, BP, interprets the test,” Bill Ambrose, director of special projects for Transocean, told the panel. “Our personnel do not have the experience or authority to interpret the negative test.”
Bartlit released a stinging report last month that said Halliburton Co used flawed cement in BP’s doomed well.
Commission co-chair Bill Reilly, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said the initial findings seem to point to human mistakes as the primary cause of the accident.
While the panel will consider the need for better monitoring of rig data and more standards for negative pressure tests, Reilly said “it was very difficult... to see what we could recommend be required that would have avoided the decisions that were made.”
“However, it’s very difficult for me to conclude that there was not a culture of complacency affecting everything involved with this exercise,” Reilly said.
On Monday, Halliburton’s shares were up 4.7 pct, while Transocean’s shares were up 4.8 pct. BP was off 1.3 percent. Anadarko Petroleum Corp, 25 percent owner of the Macondo well, was down 4.3 percent.
Offshore drilling analyst Longdley Zephirin, of the Zephirin Group, said the offshore drilling industry, and especially Transocean and the service companies came off well after the first day of proceedings.
“We believe the hearing shines a positive light in the sector, as it exhibits the importance of safety versus saving money,” he said.
As he presented the commission’s preliminary findings, Bartlit stressed the probe was not focused on legal liability or assigning blame.
BP has accused Halliburton of using an unstable cement design and said Transocean failed to test the automatic shut-off function on the blowout preventer before it was used on the rig.
Transocean has denied those charges and said BP’s well design was a key factor in the accident. Halliburton has also defended its cement work on the well, and blamed other actions for causing the explosion.
It will be difficult to work out the discrepancies between the companies without the legal power to compel testimony from company representatives under oath, Bartlit said.
“I can’t subpoena people. I wish I could,” Bartlit said. “I think it’s damn important.”
Although a measure providing the panel with subpoena power passed the House of Representatives earlier this year, the measure was held up by partisan gridlock in the Senate.
President Barack Obama created the seven-member commission in the aftermath of the drilling accident. Its ultimate charge is to develop proposals to prevent and respond to major spills in the future.This piece is made from my original ink drawing printed on a page from a vintage, 1976 copy of 'On The Road,' the classic beatnik era novel by Jack Kerouac. The man pictured is a drifter that I used to see from time to time at a downtown cafe. Occasionally I would sketch him as he bummed cigarettes and loose change from the tourists, and finally worked this one into a finished drawing.The original piece of art was rendered in India ink with a traditional dip pen in the strict value range of black and white. One of my favorite things to depict in my art are passing, everyday moments. I believe most of us overlook the beauty in everyday things, and I have made it my mission as an artist to point out the ordinary and the overlooked.PLEASE SUPPORT A STARVING ARTIST and purchase this print here: [link]The News Sentinel Open on the Web.com tour enters it’s final round on Sunday with a pairing that includes the names Hack, Shenk, Yip. For real.
Ladies and gentlemen please welcome the 10:40 am pairing of:
Jhared HACK
Adam SCHENK
Ryan YIP
The Web.com tour is slowly becoming a great source of comedy with just it’s players’ names. Just a few months ago we had a pairing of Huge, Wang. Now we have a threesome with names that we all use to describe horrible players and bad shots.
Hack/Schenk/Yip > Hack/Shank/Yip? A photo posted by Web.com Tour (@webdotcomtour) on Aug 21, 2016 at 7:43am PDT
Shout out to Kyle Thompson for alerting us to these funny coincidences. Without you these combinations of last names wouldn’t be as funny.SYDNEY, Australia — On the fiftieth anniversary of Australia's Baha'i House of Worship, dignitaries have paid tribute to its contribution to the life of the community.
"Our society is enriched and ennobled by the temple," said the Mayor of Pittwater, Councillor Harvey Rose.
"It's a beacon from the sea, and the land and the sky...a beacon which lights the way to a better world – a world where antagonism and division is replaced by one of unity, of construction and of hope," Councillor Rose told a reception ahead of a special anniversary service.
The Mayor added that the temple and the Baha'i community have "an important role not only in our community, but in the broader Australian community."
The reception held last Sunday launched a week of events marking the golden jubilee of the temple's inauguration. The service that followed was characterised by the Baha'i principle of unity in diversity – with singing in the Aboriginal Wirradjuri language, as well as Arabic, English and Samoan. Passages from Baha'i, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Islamic scriptures were also read.
"A silent sentinel of faith"
Located in beautiful hills and bushland above Sydney's northern beaches, the House of Worship opened in September 1961 after four years of construction. It is one of only seven such temples in the world.
Open to all people, the purpose of Baha'i Houses of Worship is to provide a central gathering place for prayer and meditation as well as, in time, a range of facilities to serve the social and educational needs of the population.
Pittwater's Member of Parliament, Rob Stokes – who read at Sunday's service – said that the temple "stands as a silent sentinel of faith, of inclusion, of a real spiritual strength."
Activities marking the fiftieth anniversary have included daily programs at the House of Worship, a children's art show on building a peaceful community, and an exhibition. This coming weekend, there will be guided tours and a program at which visitors can sample Baha'i community building activities.
Last night, neighbors and visitors from further afield approached the illuminated temple along a candle-lit path for a special interfaith prayer ceremony to mark the United Nations International Day of Peace.
Australia's Channel 10 broadcast its three weather segments from the temple gardens. Other media coverage of the anniversary has included articles in the local press, mentions in the Sydney Morning Herald and an ABC radio breakfast show segment outlining the teachings of the Baha'i Faith.
"A momentous occasion"
In a special message, Barry O'Farrell MP – the Premier of New South Wales – wrote that the House of Worship's golden anniversary is "a momentous occasion not only for the Baha'i religion, but for New South Wales as a whole."
"The Baha'i community plays an important part of New South Wales' diverse social fabric, and it is important that we continue to promote and celebrate diversity, tolerance and community in the State," said the Premier.
"This idea encapsulates the ethos of the Baha'i religion as it seeks to unify all religions and humanity. This temple and the Baha'i community have indeed achieved this.
"I believe that there is a lot to be learned from the Baha'i Faith, which through its values of unity and equality has only enhanced the multicultural tapestry of New South Wales."Donald Trump’s only mistake is that he is too trusting.
Donald Trump’s increasingly blatant guilt in the Russia scandal has split Republican opinion. On the one side, a handful of critics, largely those predisposed in advance to distrust him, have questioned the president’s motives. On the other hand, the base remains so invested in the president’s innocence that less than half of all Republicans believe even the incriminating facts Trump has already confessed. Straddling the precarious middling ground between lunatic denial and recognizing the obvious are such organs as The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
The Journal’s editorial page has tried to nudge the administration more closely into compliance with normal Executive branch practices, without applying the sort of pressure that would force any such action. Today’s editorial is a perfect example of this balancing act. The Journal pleads with Trump to increase his transparency, arguing that it would advance his own best interests to make public any secret contacts.
Nowhere in the editorial does the Journal consider the possibility that Trump and his inner circle have lied systematically about the contacts with Russia because they have something to hide. “Whatever short-term political damage this might cause couldn’t be worse than the death by a thousand cuts of selective leaks, often out of context, from political opponents in Congress or the special counsel’s office,” the editorial asserts. But what if the truth is really bad? The Journal does not say.
“If there really is nothing to the Russia collusion allegations,” the editorial posits, “transparency will prove it.” That is true! But what if, as now appears overwhelmingly probable, there isn’t nothing to the Russia collusion allegation? Well, the editorial doesn’t say. It just moves on to other questions.
There are concrete ways to force Trump to engage in transparency. The most obvious is to urge House Republicans to drop their blockade of a Democratic proposal to compel the release of Trump’s tax returns. The Journal doesn’t recommend this, or mention the issue at all. The cause of transparency is left to Trump’s own goodwill. “He and his family,” the editorial laments, “seem oblivious to the brutal realities of Washington politics.” The poor naïfs, hiding their Russia connections for no apparent reason.A LITTLE boy killed by an out-of-control car had been holding his dad’s hand when the 4WD began ploughing into cars and pedestrians, in a horrific accident in Melbourne’s southeast.
Nurses from a nearby medical clinic desperately tried to save the four-year-old as he lay motionless in the Berwick carpark, while his parents watched on.
media_camera Flowers and toys are left at the scene in a car park where the 4-year-old was killed. Picture: Hamish Blair
Paramedics took the boy to hospital — just 300m from the scene — but he could not be revived.
Investigations were on Friday night under way to determine why the driver of the LandCruiser lost control with such devastating consequences.
Major Collisions Unit Detective Sergeant Mark Amos shook his head as he imagined how the Narre Warren South parents were coping with their son’s death.
“It is just the most horrible, horrible thing you can imagine,” Sgt Amos said.
“We have to find answers.”
media_camera The Toyota 4WD that smashed into a carpark and killed a child. Picture: Steve Tanner
media_camera The out-of-control 4WD also damaged a number of parked cars before it ended up on its side. Picture: Steve Tanner
media_camera A aerial view of the crash aftermath in Berwick. Picture: Channel 7 News
Police were probing whether the motorist, a 56-year-old from Pakenham, had fainted or become dizzy behind the wheel.
The man told first-aiders he had been receiving dialysis treatment at nearby Casey Hospital.
Patients new to undergoing dialysis — a treatment for kidney failure, which usually takes up to five hours — are usually told not to drive afterwards.
Shocking scenes unfolded on Kangan Drive about midday when the man left the hospital and swerved over a median strip. His car drove up an embankment into a carpark where patients from a busy medical centre and their families were standing.
media_camera How the tragic crash occurred.
Cameron and Sarah Smith were travelling behind the LandCruiser when they saw it become “airborne” before it smashed into 10 parked cars outside the Epworth Specialist Centre.
“We have two sons of our own, that age,” an emotional Mrs Smith said.
“I remember the dad saying ‘it’s my fault’ — it’s not his fault. Those poor parents.”
Mr Smith ran to the smashed-up LandCruiser to check on the driver, who was conscious but trapped inside the car.
“He stated that he had dialysis, he’s just had blood taken out,” he said.
media_camera Cameron and Sarah Smith witnessed the incident and were overcome with emotion at news of the child’s death. Picture: Steve Tanner
media_camera Sarah Smith breaks down at the scene of the tragic crash. Picture: Steve Tanner media_camera Cameron Smith rendered assistance at the scene.
media_camera Kangan Drive has been closed between Clyde Rd and Casey Hospital after the horror crash. Picture: Steve Tanner
media_camera The 4WD on its side. Picture: Channel 9
A woman in her 60s was also clipped by the car. She was on Friday night recovering in hospital.
Sgt Amos praised the efforts of bystanders who rushed to help.
“They couldn’t have done any more than what they did,” he said.
Police were at Casey Hospital on Friday night to determine the driver’s movements, and whether he had received medical treatment, before he drove off in his LandCruiser.
The man was yet to be formally questioned.
andrea.hamblin@news.com.auI knew it as soon as I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016—I was going to hear about it from Linux Mint fans.
How could I proclaim the best distro of the year before the latest version of Mint arrived? There's nothing like some guy on the Internet overlooking your favorite distro to make the hairs in your neckbeard start twitching angrily [/sarcasm]. I understand, it happens to me every time someone fails to recognize that Arch is the best distro of every year.
But I digress. There is a very simple reason I didn't pick Mint as the best distro of 2016, and I didn't even have to wait to test it: the reason is Wayland.
For better or worse, the Wayland graphics stack is the future of Linux and will undoubtedly be the big story of 2017 (unless the Mir display server actually ships, in which case it might share the spotlight). What's more, once you've used Wayland in my experience, you'll want it everywhere. Sadly, only one of the major distros has Wayland today: Fedora.
That doesn't mean Mint 18.1, which happened to arrive the same day that our Fedora review published, isn't a great release. But this new release doesn't have Wayland. Nor will the distro at large have Wayland until Linux Mint's upstream source, Ubuntu, ships Wayland as part of an LTS release. That likely won't happen until at least 2018, when the next Ubuntu LTS release comes out. By that time, theoretically, Ubuntu itself will be using Mir, and Ubuntu GNOME (and possibly other flavors) will move to Wayland. Then and only then will Mint be in a position to move to Wayland. And even then, it may not happen right away.
That means there's no Wayland in Mint's near future, and it also means Mint will be a little out of the loop going forward. That's an interesting transition for the project given that it started out with a more aggressive development pace, adopting new features and iterating quickly compared to other Linux distros.
All that changed a couple of years ago when Mint opted to stop chasing Ubuntu and built off the LTS cycle. Mint is no longer quite as cutting edge as it once was, which shows up in some important areas like the kernel (which is only at 4.4 even now). Mint is also still plagued by the some of the poorly implemented update and security issues that have dogged it for years. You can keep Mint up-to-date and secure, but Mint actively encourages users (especially inexperienced) users to avoid updates. That more than anything else would prevent me from picking Mint 18.1 over, well, any other distro.
Although Mint 18.1 builds on the same set of base packages found in the previous release ( Linux Mint 18.0 ), which are based on Ubuntu 16.04, there's still plenty of new stuff in 18.1 to make Mint fans happy. Most of what's new is not underlying system change; rather, it's higher level stuff (the stuff that makes Mint, well, Mint).
As always, Mint comes in two main flavors, one with the Cinnamon desktop and one with the MATE desktop. There will be releases with other desktops as well. The Xfce version is quite nice, but at the time of writing, none of those are out yet.
Linux Mint Cinnamon edition
Cinnamon has long felt like the flagship desktop for Linux Mint, and this release is no exception. Though MATE gets roughly equal billing—and, from what I can tell as an outsider, equal development attention—Cinnamon is definitely the flashier, more polished of the two.
Linux Mint 18.1 features Cinnamon 3.2, which is notable for two things that sound rather minor at first glance but open up quite a few possibilities for third-party developers. The first is that all the various menus and panels no longer have what Mint calls "box pointers"—in other words, the shape of the menus used to "point" to their parent object. In Cinnamon 3.2, those are gone. Cinnamon 3.2 also features the ability to dock panels vertically on either (or both) sides of your screen rather than just the top and bottom.
The latter change is immediately useful for anyone working a cramped laptop screen since there's more horizontal space than vertical, provided the panels on the side work with your habits. Eliminating the box pointers is something that will be interesting down the road since it opens up more options for theme designers.
Thanks to some underlying upgrades, Cinnamon 3.2 brings back some of its flash by re-enabling cross-fade animations and fade effects for lists. These features had both been disabled in the past couple of releases for stability reasons. You can also now have Cinnamon play a custom sound when a notification pops up. To do so, there's a new setting in the Sound panel of the System Settings app; head to "Sound" and then "Sound Effects" to find it.
There are also a few really nice features to Cinnamon that have been there quite a while but rarely get mentioned. To start, I've always been impressed with the way the main menu search tool gets you what you want even when you type something that doesn't exist. For example, I wanted to test Xed, the Mint text editor, but within Mint there's no Xed app—it's called "Text Editor." Still, if you open the main menu and search for Xed, the top hit will be Text Editor. Similarly, I can never remember if the app to change desktop backgrounds is called "Desktop," "Appearance," or something else. What's nice is I don't have to remember—type "Desktop," and the top hit is Background. It's a small thing, but this kind of attention to detail and solving small yet common problems is a big part of why users love Mint.
Another very nice under-the-radar feature that's new in Cinnamon 3.2 is that Bumblebee users can right-click any app in the application menu and launch it with optirun by selecting "Run with NVIDIA GPU." That might be the easiest way I've seen to take advantage of the more powerful—but more battery-draining—graphics only when you really want them (e.g. with your favorite graphics editor or game). Again, it's a very small feature, but it's one that's extremely useful.
Another bit of hardware support worth noting is that in addition to synaptics, Cinnamon 3.2 now supports the newer libinput touchpad driver. I've had much better luck with libinput on newer hardware, particularly getting "reverse" scrolling working globally as opposed to globally-except-Chromium (which is what happens if you use a higher level method, Xmodmap for instance, or synaptics). You mileage may vary, but either way, it's nice to have the option to use libinput with Cinnamon.
Listing image by Scott GilbertsonOn Saturday, McDonald's brought back a nostalgic favorite — but so many fans rushed to get it, many of them were left disappointed. But after fans cried foul on social media, they'll get a second chance at the stuff this winter.
The chain's Szechuan Dipping Sauce, which was originally sold as part of a Mulan promotion in 1998, got a second wind thanks to the show Rick and Morty, which featured the sauce in a recent episode. "I want that Mulan McNugget sauce, Morty," Rick says in the episode. "That's my series arc, Morty! If it takes nine seasons!"
A fan frenzy ensued, with fans trying desperately to get their hands on the stuff. A packet of the stuff was going for $99,000 on eBay, and then McDonald's gave away three giant bottles to lucky fans on Twitter. (Naturally, one of those bottles sold for $15,000, to DJ Deadmau5.)
But that wasn't enough for Rick and Morty fans, who demanded they get a chance to try the dipping sauce. So McDonald's decided to bring it back for one day only, on Saturday, October 7, as part of their launch of the Buttermilk Crispy Tenders. And fans came out in droves, lining up around the block at local locations to get a taste.
But the supply of Szechuan sauce was far too small to meet demand, and it was only available at participating restaurants. That led many fans to miss out on it, and those customers were not quiet about it. USA Today reports that people who lined up for hours got angry after the supplies ran out nearly instantly in many locations. Crowds chanted, "we want sauce," and police even had to show up to manage the crowds. And the backlash on social media was swift, with hashtags like #SzechuanGate and #McFail going viral.
Angry crowd chants "We want sauce" as police force them back. 1000+ people camped out to get #szechuansauce but McDonalds had 70 sauces... pic.twitter.com/wEaqC64Hln — Ian J Sikes (@ianjsikes) October 7, 2017
Cops are at Wellington McDonalds where tons of angry people lined up for hrs for Rick and Morty Szechuan sauce only to learn they had none pic.twitter.com/3T272osid4 — Lulu Ramadan (@luluramadan) October 7, 2017
McDonald's responded to the outrage with a new announcement: they would bring the sauce back this winter, in a much bigger way.
You spoke. We’ve listened. Lots more #SzechuanSauce and locations. Details soon. And that’s the wayyy the news goes! pic.twitter.com/ooIrbZBsOw — McDonald's (@McDonalds) October 8, 2017
The full text of their statement is below:
To our customers and Szechuan Sauce lovers,
Yesterday, we were truly humbled by the amazing curiosity, passion and energy this community showed to welcome back Szechuan Sauce—even if just for one day. Thank you, a million times over. Between the costumes, the memes and the cross-state travel, you, the fans, showed us what you got. And our super-limited batch, though well-intentioned, clearly wasn't near enough to meet that demand. "Not cool." We agree. So we're gonna make this right. In the last 24 hours, we've worked to open any portal necessary. And it worked. Szechuan Sauce is coming back once again this winter. And instead of being one-day-only and limited to select restaurants, we're bringing more—a lot more—so that any fan who's willing to do whatever it takes for Szechuan Sauce will only have to ask for it at a nearby McDonald's. We want to make this right. You're some of the best fans in this, or any, dimension…and we plan to deliver on that promise as soon as possible. Stay tuned. -Your friends at Mcdonald's
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A cyclist waited in agony for an ambulance for an hour after being knocked off his bike less than half-a-mile from casualty.
Antonio Parraguez today called the wait “scandalous”.
London Ambulance Service today apologised for the delay, saying the crash happened at a “very busy time”.
Builder Mr Parraguez, 42, was cycling from his north Kensington home to play football at the Westway Sports Centre when a oncoming cab suddenly turned right across the road in front of him.
He slammed on the brakes and was thrown over the handlebars, landing inches from the front of the taxi as it screeched to a halt.
“I had two very bright flashing lights on, but he didn’t see me,” he said. “I was very, very fortunate not to be run over.”
A passer-by dialled 999 as a crowd gathered. A paramedic arrived in seven minutes in a first-response car, and called for an ambulance after placing Mr Parraguez in the recovery position.
He said: “No-one wanted to move me. I was in agony, with pain in my shoulder and my neck, and I was freezing with the shock. I didn’t know what was wrong and they didn’t want to move me.”
As he lay on the roadside, his wife Amanda drove past the scene - less than half a mile from the St Charles NHS Urgent Care Centre - on her way home from work. She was unaware of the accident until a police officer knocked on their door at 9pm.
The ambulance arrived an hour later and Mr Parraguez was taken to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington where he was scanned and X-rayed before being allowed out at 2am yesterday.
He said: “Once I was there, they did everything but I think being made to wait that long is scandalous.”
A London Ambulance Service spokeswoman said: “We were called at 7.07pm to reports of a road traffic collision involving a car and cyclist at Cambridge Gardens, W10.
“We sent a paramedic in a car who arrived at the scene in seven minutes of the call coming into our control room.
“The paramedic established that the patient had a shoulder injury but was not in a life threatening situation.
“Unfortunately, as we were very busy at the time, it took longer than we would have liked for the second ambulance crew to arrive and we are sorry for the delay.
“We prioritise all our calls so those in the most serious or life threatening situation receive the fastest response.
“The second ambulance crew arrived at 8.07pm and took the patient to hospital.”Hi, Yazur here, here's my new project; Walmart
Location:
500, voie de desserte, Sainte-Constant, Quebec, Canada.
Construction infos:
Wiki:
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Walmart
No download is available but you can still visit it on our server!
Server Ip at 'World Seed'!
Built with the help of:
BigAMinecraft Aladdox and Jessegator922
Note:
The newly renovated Walmart is Saint-Constant now with a grocery store.The Walmart was originally built in the arounds of 1992 along 132 road to serve the many cities surrounding it as the population was growing among the years, now with almost 1,000,000 people living in the area, they upgraded it. Renovations started in March 2013., branded as / t ɑr m l ɒ w ˈ /, is an American multinational retail corporation that runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. Headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas, the company was founded by Sam Walton in 1962 and incorporated on October 31, 1969. It has over 11,000 stores in 27 countries, under a total 55 different names.The company operates under the Walmart name in the US and Puerto Rico. It operates in Mexico as Walmart de México y Centroamérica, in the United Kingdom as Asda, in Japan as Seiyu, and in India as Best Price. It has wholly owned operations in Argentina, Brazil, and Canada.The company is the world's largest public corporation, according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2014, the biggest private employer in the world with over two million employees, and the largest retailer in the world. Walmart is a family-owned business, as the company is controlled by the Walton family, who own over 50 percent of Walmart through their holding company, Walton Enterprises.It is also one of the world's most valuable companies (in terms of market value) and is also the largest grocery retailer in the US. In 2009, it generated 51 percent of its US$258 billion (equivalent to $284 billion in 2014) sales in the US from grocery business.It also owns and operates the Sam's Club retail warehouses in North America.The company was publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange in 1972. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the company rose from a regional to national giant. By 1988, Walmart was the most profitable retailer in the USand by October 1989 it had become the largest in terms of revenue.Geographically limited to the South and lower Midwest up to the mid 1980s, by the early 1990s the chain's presence spanned coast to coast - Sam's Club opened in New Jersey in November 1989 and the first California outlet opened in Lancaster on July 28, 1990. A Walmart in York, Pennsylvania was opened in October 1990 bringing the main store into the Northeast Walmart's investments outside North America have had mixed results: its operations in the United Kingdom South America, and China are highly successful, whereas ventures in Germany and South Korea were unsuccessful.Please be aware, this Walmart is made with a texture pack, our special city texture pack ( Huntington City ).Don't forget to subscribe!For more screenshots visit my DeviantART page! http://yazur.deviantart.com/ Don't forget to +watch! :DPainting of a 54mm Saxon Warrior – PRELUDE
I’m always excited to paint kits from Raúl García Latorre, one of my favourite sculptors. This article will focus on one of his old kits, a 54mm Saxon Warrior, 5th Century. The kit was originally released some time ago from his old company, but looks like it will be re-released through MProyec so you can still get a copy if you want!
While this step by step will focus on a specific figure, the information is applicable to a wide range of kits including many historical and fantasy barbarian figures. I’ll touch on painting skin, metal, fur, and cloth as well as weathering the figure. So, even if you don’t plan on painting this specific figure, I hope you will still find this article useful.
Before I begin, I want to give you a quick overview of my approach. I work with acrylic paints. Primarily Reaper Master Series (similar to Vallejo Model Colour) and, unless specified, the paint names will refer to that range. The main exceptions are metallics and inks. For those I used Scale75. My approach to blending is applying many thin (semi-transparent) layers and gradually changing the mixtures. For the following discussion, I will include the mixes for my base layer, shadows, and highlights. But keep in mind, I use many intermediate mixes between these to create the end result.
STARTING THE PROJECT
The figure is white metal and simple to assemble. The body is cast as a single piece and only the two hands and a sheathed dagger need to be glued on. The kit comes with a choice for the left hand, either holding a second axe or holding a shield. I opted to use the shield as it’d give me the chance to do some freehand design work. As the shield would block some of my access to the rest of the figure, I left it off for the time being.
I also left off the dagger for the moment. Prior to starting this figure, I’d received a bunch of photo-etch accessories from Etch-Masters. Because I wanted to give this Saxon a rather beat-up weathered look, I decided to switch out the blade on the axe in his right hand for a chipped one from the Etch-Master sheet. Although there wasn’t anything wrong with the kit, I thought the new axe looked a little more bad-ass!
Pins were inserted into each foot and the figure was primed with white.
PAINTING THE FACE
I tend to start with the face on most figures. If the face is bad, I’m going to redo the piece. So why waste time on the rest?
I began with a base coat of Reaper’s Rosy Shadow. I also based the surrounding parts (helmet, hair, tunic) in dark brown (first image below). I then like to rough in the shadows (second image). It doesn’t look great, but I’ll clean it all up by the end! For the shadows I like to work with reddish browns. In this case, I used Chestnut Brown and then, for the darkest spots, Mahogany Brown. It’s at this point that I like to pause and paint the eyes.
I start with an off-white like Weathered Stone (third image). Never use pure white for the whites of the eyes, it is way to bright and looks “cartoony” rather than realistic |
on it, and that it should be held responsible for initiating relief measures.
The Finance Committee approved the plan in general, with the exception that the question of special relief be left for future decision and that no action be taken on housing until further information had been collected. It did decide, specifically, that the rehabilitation work should continue in charge of Dr. Devine as representative of the Red Cross, and should not be transferred to the Executive Commission while final decision was pending.
Supplying Food Under Difficulties
The Executive Commission got rather beaten round the[21] bush. It was permitted to expend certain appropriations for sanitation, the care of camps, and the distribution of food, clothing, and other supplies, under direction of its chairman and a group of army officers. The relation of the army to the new Commission was practically what it had before been to the Red Cross representative. Under the military régime Major A. J. Gaston was commanding officer of permanent camps; under the new régime he was general superintendent of camps with authority to appoint all camp employes.
In the latter part of June Mr. Phelan, acting on Dr. Devine’s suggestion that the Finance Committee should appoint a Rehabilitation Committee of its own to supersede the work of the special Rehabilitation Bureau, did appoint such a committee with Dr. Devine as chairman and Archbishop Riordan,[22] Bishop Nichols,[23] Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger, O. K. Cushing, F. W. Dohrmann, and Dr. John Gallwey as members. Its scope was defined as including “all aid” to be given to individuals or families other than food or ordinary clothing. It superseded, as has been already stated,[24] the Red Cross Rehabilitation Bureau and took over the latter’s unexpended balance. The Bureau had expended $18,599.70 for 840 applicants.
The Rehabilitation Committee met in Hamilton School July 2, two and a half months after the beginning of the relief work in San Francisco. Mr. Bicknell was elected secretary, Mr. Cushing, treasurer, the latter, with the chairman, having authority to sign checks in the name of the Committee. When Dr. Devine returned to New York, August 1, Mr. Bicknell was appointed a member of the Committee and Mr. Dohrmann then became chairman, a position he was to hold from the first of August, 1906, until the close of the rehabilitation work.
During June and July, to repeat, the pressure to give food and temporary shelter was yielding to the pressure to furnish permanent shelter and other means of rehabilitation. The problem of housing was very complicated. No one knew how far shelter would be provided by private enterprise; no one knew whether[22] manufacturing plants and wholesale and retail business would seek old locations; no one knew where the shifting population would settle. There was delay in collecting insurance, uncertainty as to the land, labor, and materials available and as to the future street car service and water and sewer connections. There was difference of opinion as to whether the subsidized building should be of a permanent or temporary character, of scattered individual dwellings or large blocks, as to whether financial aid should be in the form of bonuses or of loans.
One of the minor notes of irony in this mid-summer situation lies in the fact that the Finance Committee referred to its own Rehabilitation Committee for consideration and report the housing suggestion of one of its members, M. H. de Young, and that the report that followed, July 10, was signed by Dr. Devine as chairman both of the Rehabilitation Committee and of the Executive Commission.[25]
Mr. de Young’s suggestion was that a donation, or as it was commonly called, a bonus, of not more than $500[26] in any case, be made in behalf of any resident whose house had been destroyed, provided that the $500 represented not more than one-third of the value of the house to be built, and that it be paid to the contractor after the house was completed and was clear of liens.
The resultant report as submitted stated that the Executive Commission had, with the approval of the Finance Committee, appointed a board of consulting architects and builders who offered their services as expert counsel on general plans and on designs for suitable dwellings. It also stated that the matter had been carefully considered by the Rehabilitation Committee and the Executive Commission, and that the bonus plan was recommended for such workingmen as could not secure sufficient funds from banks, building and loan associations, or from other business or private sources.
Attention was called to the fact that the Rehabilitation Committee was already studying the general situation so as to estimate how many loans[27] were likely to be called for. It was[23] further stated that there was no anticipation that the bonus plan would carry far in providing shelter for the families living in tents, and that no inclusive plan could be framed to provide housing for all the homeless.
It was recognized, moreover, that first in order of importance came provision of shelter for the aged, the infirm, the invalided, and the other adult dependents who had become permanent city charges. For these the recommendation was to erect permanent buildings on the cottage pavilion plan to house 1,000 persons; the cost of building to be met from the fund, the maintenance to be left to the city. It was recognized that there were two possible alternate plans; namely, to care for the dependent group in existing private institutions, or to board its members in private families. A marked advantage of the first plan was that it provided a permanent addition to the city’s charitable institutions. The suggestion was intended to supplement what was already being done in the way of giving care to the sick in hospitals.
It was further recognized that there should be quick effort made to supply dwellings for the 5,000 persons who before the disaster had paid moderate rentals, but who were housed in tents or other temporary shelters. It was also necessary to make provision for a possible 5,000 persons who were out of the city. No accurate estimate had been or could be made of those who, independent of aid, had readjusted themselves.
The proposal made in behalf of the possible 10,000, a proposal that touched the kernel of the big relief problem, was to use money lying idle to build houses which should be sold on the instalment plan, or rented to families that had been living in San Francisco on April 17. Shelter had to be provided against the rainy season in order that there might be held in San Francisco a population of working people. The proposal was intended also to carry to a workingman the opportunity to own a house of such character as should serve to set a standard for sanitary and attractive dwellings. Through the carrying out of this scheme there were to be brought into happy co-operation the architects, the builders, the municipality, and the Finance Committee itself. The first would supply skill and taste; the second, quick and moderate priced building; the third, suitable conditions of light,[24] sanitation, ventilation, and fire protection; the fourth, capital and business security. To assure the last provision there was a suggestion of the creation of a new corporation to consist of the mayor, the chairman of the Finance Committee, the representative of the American National Red Cross, and representatives from the Executive Commission and the Rehabilitation Committee, all of whom were to be named by the Finance Committee.
The need to incorporate became more imperative when the plans to furnish shelter took, by July 15, the following definite shape:
1. To build a pavilion on the almshouse tract[28] for 1,000 homeless persons.
2. To appropriate $150,000 to construct and to repair temporary shelters in the public parks for the use of the homeless during the winter of 1906-07. 3. To appropriate not more than $500,000 to carry out the bonus plan.[29]
4. To appropriate a second $500,000, to be used for loans to persons who had owned or rented houses within the burned district.[30]
5. To set aside $2,500,000 for the acquiring of suitable and convenient land on which to build dwellings that might be sold for cash or on the instalment plan to residents who were in business or had other employment.
Before passing on to the matter of the incorporation of the funds, one must record the final act of the Executive Commission. On July 31, after six weeks of precarious, and one might almost say uneventful life, the Commission voted to turn its records over to the corporation just created, and to make an inventory of its supplies and equipment for transfer to the same body.
June and July mark a clearly defined transition period. In spite of the politically directed episode of the abortive Commission, rehabilitation plans were being successfully shaped, even though the ordeals of the withdrawing of the army as a factor in[25] relief administration and the introducing of the political appointees were being faced. In spite of temporary set-backs, the work was getting on a strictly business basis. Delays meant suffering, yet ultimate community gain, because the Rehabilitation Committee, in keeping outside the province of the Executive Commission, drew to itself the best experienced service that was available, and escaped the danger of being directed or diverted by any force other than that controlled by right motives.
6. INCORPORATION OF THE FUNDS
Now to return to the suggestion of incorporation. From as early a date as May 4 the question of the incorporation of the relief funds had been discussed within and without the Finance Committee. The New York Chamber of Commerce as a large custodian of relief funds had the matter brought personally to the attention of members of the Finance Committee through its representative, James D. Hague, and in writing by its president, the late Morris K. Jessup. The latter stated, however, that the determining of the question of incorporation lay with the Finance Committee. Correspondence in early July with Mr. Hague, the returned envoy, showed that there was in contemplation the incorporating of an independent body of men, the majority of whom should be appointed by the chairman of the Finance Committee. To this proposed corporation it was suggested should be transferred the $500,000 then held by the Chamber of Commerce, with such other moneys as might be entrusted to it.
If such a plan had been carried out there would have been two authorized bodies administering relief with an encouragement to other foreign custodians of funds to create similar independent agencies. The pressure to incorporate came therefore from without because of the jealous guardianship of funds by the non-local contributors; from within because of the exigency of the situation itself.
In the month of July, as has been said, the imminent need was known to be to provide suitable shelter against the fall and winter rains. The members of the Finance Committee considered the question of incorporation from the standpoint of the provision of a body legally empowered to acquire land and to loan money[26] for building purposes. As a committee, therefore, it decided on July 13 to carry out the recommendations made in the letter written by Dr. Devine to its chairman, three days earlier, which recommendation, it should be recalled, embodied the earlier bonus plan suggestion made by one of its own members.
The certificate of incorporation[31] was issued July 20 to hold for a period of five years. The president of the corporation, the “San Francisco Relief and Red Cross Funds, a Corporation,” was James D. Phelan; the first and second vice-presidents, F. W. Dohrmann and W. F. Herrin; the secretary, J. Downey Harvey. The president and first vice-president, with M. H. de Young, Rudolph Spreckels, and Thomas Magee, formed the Executive Committee. The personnel of the Corporation, with the exception of the governor of the state and the mayor, who were ex officio members and directors of the Corporation, was identical with that of the Finance Committee of Relief and Red Cross Funds which it superseded, and whose funds it immediately took over.
The newly incorporated body held its meetings at the St. Francis Technical School on Geary and Gough Streets, which took the place of the Hamilton School as headquarters for all departments of the relief work. Later a warehouse was added to the building to hold the remaining supplies. The meetings were open to the press, and to officers and employes; and others with whom the corporation had business were invited as was deemed expedient to meet with the Executive Committee. At the third meeting, held late in July, five departments were created:[32]
A. Finance and Publicity
B. Bills and Demands
C. Camps and Warehouses
D. Relief and Rehabilitation
E. Lands and Buildings
Each chairman was required to make an investigation of and report on any undertaking of his department that called for an appropriation. Each chairman was also a member of the Executive Committee and was responsible for the appointment of his employes.[27] He was further responsible for preparing monthly budgets and for the printing and distribution of all printed matter.
From the plan of organization it is to be seen, of course, that housing as a reason for incorporation had yielded to the pressure to make inclusive the treatment by one incorporated body of all divisions of the many-sided work.
The experiments of the preliminary and transition periods had tried out many men and methods, so that on the newly incorporated body were found men of affairs who in the relief work itself were ready to act in harmony and with method and to come together in small groups for frequent meetings. If one looks at the diagram of organization presented,[33] one sees how gradually through the trying three months there had been a shaping through experiment that made the San Francisco Relief and Red Cross Funds itself a fruition that in germ lay in the union of official effort and private initiative.
Step by step the confidence of the public at home and abroad had had to be won. Only through the selection and trying out of generous-minded and capable men could the suspicions of those who controlled the contributions in the east have been dispelled.[34] Only after the abortive effort to make political capital out of positions of relief administration had fallen flat could the work itself get into its steady swing. The lessons are clearly written, however, that there must of necessity be in any great sudden emergency the creation of public confidence in the administration of the relief, and that along with a force of persons trained from within and without to act quickly and with definiteness must be the voluntary services of men and women on whom the community itself has learned to rely.
A few notes of later date are added here to round out the account of organization.
On August 1, 1906, Mr. Bicknell succeeded Dr. Devine as the representative of the American National Red Cross, and he in turn was succeeded on October 1 by Mr. Dohrmann.[35]
[28]
Early in the year 1907 the County Medical Society urged that the balance of the relief fund should be used for the erection and endowment of a free hospital. Impelled by this and similar requests the Corporation did in February consider seriously the possibility of closing the work.
One year after the fire (April, 1907):
The Department of Bills and Demands had completed its work.
The Department of Finance and Publicity was working with a greatly reduced force as it was relieved of the accounting connected with claims and subscriptions.
The Department of Camps and Warehouses had under care a camp population of about 17,614, but no longer distributed food or other supplies.
The Department of Relief and Rehabilitation had finished the bulk of its work. The general taking of applications had ceased for some time. Those on file were being passed upon and closed as rapidly as possible. The final estimates and appropriations for this work had been made. From this time on only exceptional cases, and those few in number, were received. The Housing Committee still had some work to do in connection with the completion and inspection of houses granted by it, and with the payment of the bonuses which it had guaranteed to pay to certain applicants on the completion of houses which they were building for themselves. The work of the Bureau of Special Relief was almost finished. The work of the Hospital Bureau had to continue.
The Department of Lands and Buildings had completed its building work, with the exception of the Relief Home. The Home was expected to be finished in May.[36] A few hundred applications were on file for allotment of bonuses from the second appropriation. The first appropriation was exhausted.
Two years after the disaster (April 18, 1908):
The Department of Lands and Buildings had completed its work.
Camp No. 10, Potrero District
The Department of Finance and Publicity, with a small force,[29] was making the settlements incidental to the closing of the camps and the refunding of instalments to tenants. It was also preparing its financial report.
The Department of Camps and Warehouses had removed cottages from all the public squares but Lobos, where but 479 cottages and 1,287[37] persons remained. This camp sheltered the poorest refugees.[38] Stricter sanitary measures could be enforced here and care be given more cheaply than if the inmates had been removed to cottages on private land. Bubonic plague in this camp as well as elsewhere in the city had made precaution necessary.
The Department of Relief and Rehabilitation had become a supervising agency. It supervised the collection of housing loans, assisted the Executive Committee in making grants to charitable institutions, and advised the Associated Charities which was administering the greater part of the relief needed in moving people from the camps.[39]
The closing chapter of the complicated story of organization was reached when, acting on the suggestion of its special representative, Mr. Dohrmann, the American National Red Cross sent Mr. Bicknell in January, 1909, to San Francisco to confer about final plans. Mr. Bicknell had then accepted the recently created position of national director of the American National Red Cross. The creation of this position may be said to be one of the results of the San Francisco relief experience. As a result of conferences[40] between these two men who had played such a determining part in San Francisco’s struggle to help its people wisely to regain their old standing, the Board of Trustees of Relief and Red Cross Funds was formed in February, 1909.
[30]
II
METHODS OF DISTRIBUTION
1. SOURCES OF CONTRIBUTIONS
The complicated story of organization seems comparatively unimportant when one’s mind is full of questions as to what was to be distributed, and how many human beings were in need of immediate relief. That there was general, quick recognition of the need is shown by the quantities of supplies hurried to San Francisco. Five thousand cars were reported April 28 to be on the road. General C. A. Devol, who had charge of receiving and unloading all supplies, states, however:[41] “The stores that arrived for the relief of San Francisco up to July 20 amounted to 1,702 carloads and five steamship loads, a total of approximately 50,000 tons. At the height of the operations about 150 carloads were delivered into the city daily, in addition to stores arriving by steamers.” The chairman of the Finance Committee reported to Mr. Taft, president of the American National Red Cross, on November 28, 1906, that the estimate of total receipts in kind was 1,850 carloads of food supplies, and 150 carloads of bedding, tenting, clothing, and so forth.
During the first two weeks after the disaster the Southern Pacific Railroad brought 1,099 carloads of relief supplies into the city. Under orders of its president, right of way was given to trains carrying these cargoes, and express time schedules were used for the sake of speed. These receipts were not all direct donations, as the contents of a number of carloads had been purchased by the Finance Committee and by the army from an appropriation of $2,500,000 made by Congress[42] to be distributed under the direction of the officers of the Pacific Division. There were also many donations that were sent to agencies other than the Citizens’ Committee, the Red Cross, and the army. These cannot be included in any estimate as there was no complete record of the amounts.
[31]
Transportation Routes about San Francisco
Larger map (200 kB)
[32]
It was found to be difficult to protect the mass of the rations in the railroad yards and in transit to the warehouse against seizure by ordinary thieves and by those who felt justified in disregarding the usual rights of property. Goods were stolen, in quantities that could not be reckoned, by those who expected to realize a profit as well as by those who considered that they had the right to seize what they felt was destined to meet their need. Some of these confiscated boxes were addressed not to the relief authorities but to specified persons and groups of persons in San Francisco or at other points about the bay. A further incentive to confiscate lay in the action of the police who, as was generally known, acting on the orders of the chief of police, had broken open about 100 grocery and provision stores that were doomed to be destroyed by fire. The police, after making a rough estimate of the value of the stock, distributed freely to the destitute.
When the cars reached San Francisco, along with the bulk of the shipments which were addressed either to the quartermaster of the army, who was designated to have charge of all supplies sent to the American National Red Cross, or to the Citizens’ Committee, were boxes addressed to the mayor, to the churches, to other organizations of all kinds, and to individuals. It would have interfered seriously with the work of relief if an effort had been made to find the persons to whom special boxes were directed. The American National Red Cross through its representative, in whose care many boxes with specific directions were sent, did all that was possible to carry out the intent of the donors, but it could not in every instance find the intended recipient. Many inquiries were received as to barrels and boxes which had not reached their destination, but the cost of tracing these and the cost of making special deliveries under the then existing conditions were often greater than the value of the packages themselves.
An illustration of the difficulty of delivering special packages is the story of eight cases of bread pans which were addressed to the “Relief Committee” and were quickly distributed among the refugees. When the manufacturing company that shipped the cases learned on inquiry of the bakers for whose use they were intended[33] that they had not received them, it threatened to file a claim for loss. The trouble, however, lay in the fact that a letter of instruction addressed to the mayor got effectually separated from the boxes.
No complete record of cash contributions can be made. Some of the committees throughout the country expended part of their funds to purchase supplies to be forwarded to San Francisco or to relieve refugees at home, or failed to collect all the money reported to have been contributed. The money reported as subscribed in the state of California is far from representing the actual value of relief contributed. Being so near the scene of disaster the California communities wisely contributed supplies in large quantities for immediate use and also cared for large numbers of refugees who came to them. The official reports of contributions cannot therefore give credit to all communities for all the relief furnished by each, nor can they show the amounts contributed by the smaller cities when these forwarded their contributions through the larger city committees. Nor can a record of contributions sent to the American Red Cross be found in the published list of contributors to the committee in San Francisco.
TABLE 1.—CASH RECEIPTS OF THE FINANCE COMMITTEE OF RELIEF AND RED CROSS FUNDS, AND ITS SUCCESSOR, THE CORPORATION,[43] TO JUNE 1, 1909
Cash donatiIt was just a rock retrieved off a suspected 18th century shipwreck two miles off St. Augustine.
But Chuck Meide thought there was something special inside the lump scooped from the sand about 30 feet under the waves. So the head of the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Museum's Archaeological Maritime Program took his gut feeling to the hospital.
His gut was right. Flagler Hospital Imaging Center's CAT scanner found a well-preserved flintlock pistol with scrollwork on a wooden or ivory butt still visible after 200-plus years of submergence. Once restored, one more piece of the wreck's puzzle could be revealed, Meide said.
"There is a decent chance we would have some maker's mark on the gun to tell who the craftsman was," Meide said. "That could really tie in the origins of the firearm and also give us insight into the origins of the ship."
Intact metal weaponry from two centuries ago doesn't often survive, said St. Augustine archaeologist Carl Halbirt.
"You just don't find it on terrestrial sites, and if you do, you only find rusted metal, so finding something as intact as they have found is rare," Hilbirt said.
The Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program finds and preserves the underwater history of the nation's oldest city. The archaeology team explored the latest wreck in late 2009 and this past summer. It retrieved a 15-inch-high cauldron likely from 1740 to 1780. The flintlock was dug from a 2-by-3-meter hole.
Flagler Hospital donated its CAT scan to look inside 25 concretions pulled off this wreck. One contained a hammer head, others a small folding knife, scissors, iron hooks on a ring and a navigational divider. Meide thought another lump could be a small pistol.
"The other folks said, 'Yeah, sure,'" Meide said. "I have a history of misidentifying concretions."
But when the CAT scanner checked, cheers erupted as its barrel, mechanism and butt showed on the screen. Experts say it is probably a gentleman's pocket pistol, popular from the 1690s to the early 1800s. Its frame and barrel are probably brass where a manufacturer's name may be engraved.
"It seems likely a highly decorated item, so this would have belonged to a merchantman or an officer, and that is interesting," Meide said.
Also seen in the concretion is a metal disc or coin, a "great find" because it could help date the wreck, Meide said.
He admits they would have to be lucky to identify the ship itself, although research into the artifacts continues and more will be brought up during next summer's dive season.
As for the gun, the staff will chip away concretion using tools as fine as a dental pick, then separate barrel and mechanism from the butt to protect its wood or ivory as the metal is preserved. It may take up to two years before the pistol is ready for display.
dan.scanlan@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4549It has inspired bards, balladeers and artists of every ilk throughout the ages. It’s also inspired hard words, gunfire and more than a few court battles as the centerpiece in a fight that’s likely been going on for as long as humans have been around to fight with one another.
“Water is essential for life,” says Tom McDonald. “Therefore, our existence and economy will ultimately depend on having an adequate supply of water.”
The rub, says McDonald, vice president of environmental affairs with JBS Five Rivers Cattle and chairman of the Texas Cattle Feeders Association, is that the amount and access to water varies greatly from state to state, and even from one part of a state to another. Some places have too much. In many places where cattle roam, however, there never seems to be enough.
“I think the important thing, whether we’re talking about surface water or groundwater aquifers, is that there are increasing and competing demands on water,” he says.
Drought may not be the only reason your water supply dries up. Increasingly, local and state, as well as federal, efforts to control and regulate water use are affecting cattle producers.
In short, if beef producers think water fights have been intense so far, “we ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” as the saying goes. Who uses the water, how they use it and how much they use has always been an issue; the challenge for agriculture will be justifying that use in an increasingly urbanized society.
“Water is in such short supply that it will always be a contentious issue,” says Ron Torell, president of the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association. Along with his wife, he owns Torell Livestock and Custom AI in Elko, Nev., and is a retired livestock specialist with Nevada Cooperative Extension. “Everybody is going to want to stick their fingers in the pot,” Torell adds, a pot that sits on an ever-hotter fire.
The challenges
If there’s a way to bring water issues into crystal-clear focus, it’s drought. Cattle producers throughout the West and Southwest know this all too well. Nevada, the driest state in the nation, is in the middle of the worst drought Torell has experienced in his lifetime. “Our reservoirs are basically depleted,” he says, “and our groundwater situation, that’s always a battle.”
That’s because, he says, water in Nevada is over allocated based on current supply. “So we’ve got our well depths being drawn down and restrictions being put on farmers. There just isn’t enough water to go around.”
Agriculture, while one of the earliest water consumers, now has to jostle with many other competing interests. Mining, for one. Torell says miners at the large pits in the northeastern part of the state, who dig deep for gold, pump water out of the pits because they dig into the water table.
The mines must put the water that is not re-injected to beneficial use, he says, but there are many restrictions on how they do that. “Because they are pumping out so much water, we feel they are often depleting the springs and water holes on the rangeland. It’s like putting a straw in a Slurpee — you suck out the water, it dries up areas around the perimeter.”
And wildlife. “To complicate this whole issue is the potential listing [under the Endangered Species Act] of the sage grouse,” he says. “Here we are in the middle of trying to do habitat restoration and prevent the listing of the sage grouse — then we’ve got this huge water issue and drought, which is basically pulling things in the opposite direction.”
In nearby Washington state, the Department of Ecology this spring was asking irrigators to lease their water rights back to the state. With a warm winter and extremely low snowpack, the agency is concerned that streams could run dry this summer. The department is willing to pay ag water-rights holders to not divert water from the Upper Yakima Basin streams, keeping the water in the rivers to benefit fisheries and river flow.
Then there are people. “My crystal ball tells me that humans are always going to come first,” McDonald says. It’s a conflict that has been happening throughout the West with no solution in sight. “You’ve got your allocation and your limits, and if that doesn’t get you the amount of water you need, you’ve got to acquire more land and more water to satisfy your needs,” he says.
In Nevada, the Southern Nevada Water Authority in Las Vegas is doing just that. It has purchased a number of ranches not for the grazing, but for the groundwater. “Their intention is to transfer the water, via pipeline, to Las Vegas to foster their growth and their water needs,” Torell says, adding that the effort has been tied up in the courts for 15 years. It’s safe to say that landowners in every western state can relate similar stories.
What's a cowboy to do?
While there are no quick, easy solutions, cattle producers — and all of agriculture — must continue to be major players as the water fights roll on. The first is to walk the walk when producers talk the talk about stewardship and environmental advocacy.
“Water is a finite and, in some cases, nonrenewable resource; and while some places in the world have more water than they want at times, other places will always be water-deficient, and good conservation measures are key,” McDonald says.
There are multiple levels and ways to conserve water, he says. “One is obvious: stop the leaks, shut off the hoses — what we normally consider conservation. The other is a little more difficult, and that has to do with recycling.”
McDonald believes this is an area where more research and development could yield great benefit. For the cattle business, the obvious place to start is with feedyard retention ponds. “The key there is, get a system or technology developed that would clean the water to the point where it would be acceptable for livestock use,” he says.
Conversations are already underway about cleaning up brackish water, he says, and desalinization has been investigated for years. The speed bump in that technology is the cost. “But as larger municipalities look more to desalinization, I have to believe the cost of that technology will come down, and we’ll find better and cheaper ways to accomplish that,” McDonald says.
And then there’s production technology. There, McDonald refers to the research Jude Capper and others have done that shows how using production technologies already in place reduces the environmental impact of U.S. beef production. Comparing 1977 with 2007, research shows U.S. beef production uses 30% fewer cattle, and requires 33% less land, 19% less feed and 12% less water.
And, adds Torell, make sure you know where you stand legally. “I know everybody who has ranches and water rights in Nevada are certainly much more educated about the legal side of water rights than they were 10 years ago,” he says. “Many of these people have gone to the courthouse and made sure their water rights are up to date and protected, and all the i’s dotted on the legal documents. I think that’s the main thing — make sure that whatever water rights you own have legal standing.”
Then, be willing to stand with other cattle producers. While challenges for beef producers to use water will come from all angles, McDonald and Torell believe that most of the challenges will come from the state and local levels. While ag organizations have long been involved in water issues, they say now is not the time to take boots off the accelerator.
“Ag needs to be at the table and take an active role in the way water is regulated, whether it’s at the local groundwater level or whether it’s at the state water commissions,” McDonald says. “The key there is for agriculture to be represented and have a seat at the table when those discussions are being held, and make sure our interests are protected.”
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Breedback on first-calf heifers starts with nutritionBridging Upverter and OSHPark
Upverter is the best online circuit creation platform, and OSHPark is one of the best circuit board production services. Put the two together, and you should find bliss - but you won't. Anyone who has had an Upverter-designed board built by OSHPark will be familiar with this problem. When you download gerbers from Upverter, you get a zip full of files like bottomcopper.ger and toppaste.ger. OSHPark, on the other hand, wants names like Bottom Layer.ger and Board Outline.ger.
Here are the name transformations - each pair consists of the Upverter name followed by the OSHPark name. If a file isn't listed here, it should not be uploaded to OSHPark.
var filepairs = new TupleList<string, string> { { "layers.cfg", "layers.cfg" }, { "hole.ger", "Drills.xln" }, { "mechanical_details.ger", "Board Outline.ger" }, { "top_copper.ger", "Top Layer.ger" }, { "top_silkscreen.ger", "Top Silk Screen.ger" }, { "top_solder_mask.ger", "Top Solder Mask.ger" }, { "bottom_copper.ger", "Bottom Layer.ger" }, { "bottom_silkscreen.ger", "Bottom Silk Screen.ger" }, { "bottom_solder_mask.ger", "Bottom Solder Mask.ger" } };
I wrote a quick C# command line app to do the transformation automatically. If you drop a Upverter zip onto the app, it will create an osh_ zipfile using the OSHPark naming conventions.
You can find the source and the binary at https://bitbucket.org/George_Hahn/upvertertooshpark.
BONUS: Create a shortcut to the binary in the %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo directory! This will allow you to right click on an Upverter zip and choose Send to: OSHPark!
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DisqusRuby Constants
2 minute read
I was doing some refactoring recently and made some interesting discoveries about how constants work in ruby.
What tripped me up was how much of a mess this code made:
module Greetings COMMON_GREETINGS = { "hello" => "Hello!", "goodbye" => "Good bye." } end class Greetings::Welcome GREETINGS = COMMON_GREETINGS.merge! { "welcome" => "Welcome" } end class Greetings::Christmas GREETINGS = COMMON_GREETINGS.merge! { "hoho" => "Ho Ho, Merry Christmas" } end
Can you spot the problems here? The first obvious one is merge with a bang, and the other I will explain below.
What is a constant?
Constants in ruby are anything starting with a capital letter. So class names are constants as well as all capital variables.
MAX_EXECUTION_TIME = "60"
Constants aren’t completely similar in other language. For example in Java and PHP you cannot re-assign or change a constant. In ruby you can:
2.0.0-p353 :001 > GREETING = "hello" => "hello" 2.0.0-p353 :002 > GREETING = "goodbye" (irb):2: warning: already initialized constant GREETING (irb):1: warning: previous definition of GREETING was here => "goodbye" 2.0.0-p353 :003 > GREETING => "goodbye"
Now you do get a warning, but its not an error and will not stop you from continuing. In the first example, the merge! actually modified the original constant so this was applied too all other classes using this constant.
There is one thing you can do if you want to ensure that the Object that the constant holds will not be modified, and that is by using the method freeze.
http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.0/Object.html#method-i-freeze
2.0.0-p353 :001 > GREETING = "goodbye" => "goodbye" 2.0.0-p353 :002 > GREETING.freeze => "goodbye" 2.0.0-p353 :003 > GREETING << " and hello" RuntimeError: can't modify frozen String from (ir |
m)! } \cdot y^{2m} \,. $$ Therefore $B_{2m}(0) = \beta_{2m}$.
Comments?
Leonhard Euler, Finding the sum of any series from a given general term. This is a translation into English, by Jordan Bell, of the original in Latin. It is Euler's first systematic treatment of the summation formula. Many of Euler's papers have recently been translated and posted on the arXiv (twenty-five of them at the moment), with Euler assigned as the author! At least one person refers on the internet to a recent arXiv post by Euler himself. So much for current knowledge of history. It is one of the many items available from the Euler Archive, a remarkable collection of papers by and about Euler.
Arthur Knoebel, Reinhard Laubenbacher, Jerry Lodder, and David Pengelley, Mathematical masterpieces, Springer-Verlag, 2007. The last part of Chapter 1 is concerned with the Euler-MacLaurin summation formula. It contains an annotated excerpt from Euler's calculus textbook Institutiones Calculi Differentialis in which he discusses the formula. This is very valuable, but is also curiously unsatisfying. It seems a bit too narrowly focussed on Euler's treatment, without much of a modern perspective. One very odd feature is that it skips entirely over the most intriguing part of Euler's exposition, in which he derives explicit evaluations of the sums $$ 1 +{ 1 \over 2^{2n} } + { 1 \over 3^{2n} } + \cdots $$ The missing parts of Euler's exposition are contained in Pengelley's translation Excerpts on the Euler-MacLaurin summation formula, but without annotation. Another valuable discussion of the summation formula can be found in\Pengelley's Dances between continuous and discrete.
, Springer-Verlag, 2007. Jeffrey Lagarias, Euler's constant: Euler's work and modern developments The second section is a survey of work related to the summation formula.
E. Borevich and I. Shafarevich, Number theory, Academic Press, 1966. The last chapter introduces Bernoulli polynomials in the last section of the book, and shows how they occur in early attempts to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
, Academic Press, 1966. Ronald Graham, Donald E. Knuth, and Oren Patashnik, Concrete mathematics, Addison-Wesley, 1989. The last chapter is concerned with the Euler-MacLaurin formula.
, Addison-Wesley, 1989. The home page of the Bernoulli numbers.
Bill Casselman
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Email Bill CasselmanHundreds of millions of people murdered. Billions of people enslaved. Trillions of dollars of property confiscated or destroyed. In the 20th century alone.
It should be easy enough to remember the three neglected themes of Romans 12-13:
The same Greek word in Romans 13 -- hupotasso -- "be subject" -- is found in 1 Peter 2:18 : "Slaves, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward." This verse does not mean that William Wilberforce was wrong to abolish the institution of slavery. We need to abolish the institution of "the State," but non-violently, taking the blows that "the State" will dish out against us the same way Christ took the blows of the State on the Cross ( 1 Peter 2:21 ).
Most Christians assume that the State is good. It is "a divine institution," we're told. Romans 13 doesn't really teach this, especially in its Biblical context.
Actually, this website is devoted to only the first 7 verses of Romans 13. If we have a "hidden agenda," however, it is to view these seven verses in the context of the entire Bible. Those who see in Romans 13:1-7 a divine approval for "the State" take it out of its Biblical context (which begins in Romans 12, the previous chapter, but also includes the teaching of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation ). Our position is that Romans 12 and 13 must be taken together as a unit. Our chapter divisions are not part of Paul's original letter. Romans 12 says "don't return evil for evil; submit to evil, even (Romans 13) the most evil thing on the planet: the State."
But the passage is also used to justify the presence of governments which are not as bad as some, but are still offensive to God. It is the argument of this website that Romans 13 says all governments are evil (which offends tyrants and their supporters) but we are nevertheless to "be subject" to them (which offends the "Second Amendment" crowd). In other words, Romans 13 prohibits the violent overthrow of the worst imaginable tyranny, and the assassination of the most evil tyrant.
George Washington's Diaries are available online at the Library of Congress. That website introduces those writings with these words: No theme appears more frequently in the writings of Washington than his love for his land. The diaries are a monument to that concern. In his letters he referred often, as an expression of this devotion and its resulting contentment, to an Old Testament passage. After the Revolution, when he had returned to Mount Vernon, he wrote the Marquis de Lafayette on Feb. 1, 1784: "At length my Dear Marquis I am become a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, & under the shadow of my own Vine & my own Fig-tree." This phrase occurs at least 11 times in Washington's letters. "And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree " (2 Kings 18:31).
Under My Own Vine and Fig Tree, 1798
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris
Virginia Historical Society
Lora Robins Collection of Virginia Art Many other American Founders wrote of this ideal. " Vine & Fig Tree " is the original "American Dream." The phrase occurs a number of times in Scripture. These references are visual reminders of the Hebrew word for salvation, which means • peace, • wholeness, • health, • welfare, and • private property free from pirates and princes. When today's Americans hear the word "salvation," they usually think about going to heaven when they die. When the writers of the Bible used the word "salvation," they wanted you to be thinking about dwelling safely under your own Vine & Fig Tree during this life -- much more often than they wanted you to be thinking about what you'll be doing in the afterlife. The best place to see the Vine & Fig Tree ideal is in the book of Micah. Let's look at Micah's prophecy (on the left) and ask a few questions (on the right):
America's Founding Fathers abolished a government they described as a "tyranny." Taxes were 1/20th what they are today, and the government they abolished would never have dreamed of using tax revenue to fund abortions, remove the Ten Commandments from local schools, give foreign aid to Saddam Hussein during his war with Iran, and build more than 700 military bases around the world, all of which the government created by America's Founders went on to do.
You may be deeply offended, irritated, or worried about a proposal to eliminate all "governments." It's a radically different way of thinking. We think it's the Biblical way of thinking. A "Paradigm Shift" You hear that phrase thrown around a lot these days. Everybody wants their idea to be the next "paradigm shift." Paradigm-shifters are now mainstream. We believe Vine & Fig Tree represents a true break with the status quo, a change as momentous as that described by Benjamin Rush, Signer of the Declaration of Independence, upon hearing of Locke's rejection of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings: Never before had I heard the authority of kings called in question. I had been taught to consider them nearly as essential to political order as the sun is to the order of our solar system. Vine & Fig Tree really is a new "paradigm," a "Copernican revolution," a radical way of looking at politics and society. It is one step beyond the radical vision that motivated America's Founding Fathers. It is a vision so old that it appears to be utterly unprecedented. The vision of Vine & Fig Tree gives energy and hope to those who work for it. It inspires dedicated action. Lawrence Cremin writes: American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876,
NY: Harper & Row, 1980, p. 114-15. For Rush, who was present in the Congress as a representative of Pennsylvania, the events surrounding the creation of the Republic marked nothing less than a turning point in the course of human history. "I was animated constantly," he reflected in later years, "by a belief that I was acting for the benefit of the whole world, and of future ages, by assisting in the formation of new means of political order and general happiness."11
___________________
11. The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, edited by George W. Corner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948), p.161. We are convinced that Vine & Fig Tree will contribute to the Glory of God and the greater happiness of mankind. It will animate future leaders and captivate the hearts and minds of many. There is something here that will resonate with a broad section of Americans. Dr. Rush speaks of "a turning point," which is to speak of a turning from something to something else. From what should we turn? To what should we aspire? We must move From a world of priests and princes ruling over the immature and irresponsible, a world which is publicly "secular" and simultaneously suffused with a host of private pagan faiths
a world of priests and princes ruling over the immature and irresponsible, a world which is publicly "secular" and simultaneously suffused with a host of private pagan faiths To a world of self-governing families in which all believers are priests and kings under Christ, where the knowledge of the L ORD covers the earth as the waters cover the sea.
Americans in the 21st century would consider the Americans of 1776 to have been "radical anarchists" or even "terrorists." But, of course, even the most libertarian of the Founders was not technically an anarchist. We are. The institution called "The State" has intentionally killed nearly a quarter of a billion human beings in the 20th century -- not including abortions. That's an average of about 10,000 people per day.
. Billions of human beings are enslaved under states that claim to own all property.
Trillions of dollars worth of private property has been destroyed or confiscated by the State. This monstrous violence against people is always done in the name of "the People"; these crimes are supposed to prevent crimes. We propose a society -- indeed, a world -- of "Liberty Under God."
In spite of the monstrous evil of government violence, we have all been trained to have faith in the State. When a calm, rational, well-documented indictment of the State is offered and a proposal to embrace the world of Micah's Vine & Fig Tree vision is made, most Christians immediately shout, "What about Romans 13?"
"What are you, some kind of anarchist?!?" This website seeks to answer these questions. Vine & Fig Tree has been officially recognized by the IRS as a tax-exempt non-profit organization since 1982. This page was written before 9/11. Your donations will make it possible for us to revise it for the 21st century.
First, why oppose the State? Why even question the prevailing view of Romans 13? Micah's Vine & Fig Tree vision insists that Christians should be working toward beating "swords into plowshares." The traditional interpretation of Romans 13 has resulted in millions of Christians standing idle in the face of horrifying evil, or even waving banners to support it, or even worse, putting on one of the State's uniforms to help carry it out.
As we enter the 21st century, we look back on the most barbaric, lawless, and violent century in human history. How ironic that most Americans think of this century as a period of "progress" and "prosperity." In certain outward respects, it has been. Four decades ago in America, about 10,000 people were murdered in the span of a single year. These murders were "against the law." Overall in the 20th century, "organized governments" have ordered or legalized the murder of 10,000 people each and every day. "The State" turns out to be a far greater criminal than all the criminals it claims to protect us from. And the global "New World Order" -- the epitome of the State -- is contemplating the murder of 15,000 people per hour until the luxurious living standards of the global elite are secure. But don't blame the elite. 10,000 murders require 10,000 working-class people willing to don the uniform of the Empire and kill another human being in the interests of patriotism. This means 10,000 people who have lost touch with Christian morality. The 20th century has seen America transformed from a nation where "religion, morality and knowledge" were taught in every school, to a nation that twice elected Bill Clinton. The greatest criminal on earth is "the State."
No greater indictment can be made
against modern Christian moral discernment
than the failure to question the legitimacy of "the State."
The entire concept of "the State" is unBiblical and supremely dangerous. Our worldview needs to exclude the whole idea that a group of people have the right to confiscate the wealth of others ("tax") to fund acts of vengeance against their competitors or "enemies." We do not allow this idea to become socially accepted in the world of business. The idea must become as socially unacceptable in the field of "government." The future of the human race depends on this conversion. With that introduction to Romans 13 and the Vine & Fig Tree vision, let's consider these frequently asked questions.
The masses have learned a subtle lesson from the teachers of the traditional interpretation of Romans 13. The message of Romans 12 and the Sermon on the Mount -- love your enemies, leave vengeance to God -- is said to apply only in our "private" lives. But as public officials, we must be "practical," "realistic," (or, as Christians might put it) "Godly" men of "dominion." We must kill our enemies and take vengeance on a massive scale through the State. Nobody wants to be "unrealistic," "impractical," or "idealistic." We all know that "public" is more important than "private." That's "the real world." And so the violent techniques of the State inexorably become imported into our "private" lives, and forgiveness and love of enemy are lost in the gossamer bedtime stories of women and children.
In 1994 " criminals " committed 7,885 bank robberies, taking $28 million. That same year, " government agencies " seized $2.1 B illion in "asset forfeiture proceedings," often without "probable cause," and often not returned when innocence was proven. Theft by any other name... would be called "taxation."
Eight hundred years ago, Western Civilization believed without question in "the divine right of kings." Anyone carrying around a copy of the U.S. Constitution as a model of government and suggesting that an orderly society could survive without a king would have been mocked -- or executed. Ideas we take for granted today -- like "consent of the governed" -- would have shocked the conscience of our medieval forebears. In a few generations, a consistent "free market" approach to civil government will be the norm. People will shake their heads when they consider the 20th century State and the support it received from Christians in America -- a society that permitted the confiscation of nearly 75% of everyone's income by organized governments which murdered hundreds of millions of people.
Second, it must be understood that Jesus commands His followers to be "anarchists." In Mark 10:42-45, He says we are not to be "archists." This is what the word "anarchist" really means: "not an archist." The archist wants to be as god, dominating and controlling others. The follower of Christ wants to be the servant of others. When people hear the word "anarchy," they never think of a situation in which all bureaucrats and tyrants have been replaced with Christ-like servants. When people think of "anarchy" what they really think of is " polyarchy " or "multi-archy," with every individual trying to be on top, everyone striving to be his own god, no one willing to lose his life for others.
Romans 13 does not contradict
this non-archist goal. Romans 13 does not say that "archists" have a moral right to ignore Jesus' command. All men are commanded to be servants, not archists. Romans 13 in its context (Romans 12) tells us we are not to overcome archists by becoming like archists, or by being more archist than they are; we are not to render evil for evil. We are to be servants. We are to submit to evil in faith, like Job did. Job was attacked by that great archist, Satan. But Satan was "ordained by God" to attack Job (Job 2:6).
This is probably the toughest issue to come to grips with. All evil is predestined by God. Adolph Hitler did not bear the sword in vain. Saddam Hussein does not bear biological weapons in vain. Osama bin Laden does not bear suitcase-sized nuclear devices in vain. This is what Romans 13 actually teaches. But that does not mean that we are off the hook, or that God is the "author of sin" (James 1:13-17). To understand Romans 13, we must develop the heart of a servant, and see God's sovereignty over evil. If you consider yourself a Calvinist, and are comfortable with the idea of God's sovereignty and predestination of all things, including human beings, please continue reading.
, and are comfortable with the idea of God's sovereignty and predestination of all things, including human beings, please continue reading. If you do not believe in predestination, you will not understand what the Apostle means when he says the powers are "ordained" by God. Please begin your study of this issue by praying for understanding. After completing this Scriptural survey of the powers, please take a new look at the doctrine of Predestination. Both Calvinists and non-Calvinists should be open to a "Paradigm Shift." Romans 13 speaks of the State as (or in conjunction with) "the powers." This is a reference to evil angelic beings. Most Christians have given very little thought to what the Bible says about angels (good and bad). "Angels" has become another lucrative fad for Hallmark and the New Age movement. Most Americans hold a view of the world which bears a striking resemblance to the ancient religion of Baalism. Are you a Baalist? No point in reading any further if you are.An algorithm we’ve depended on for most of the life of the Internet — SHA-1 — is aging, due to both mathematical and technological advances. Digital signatures incorporating the SHA-1 algorithm may soon be forgeable by sufficiently-motivated and resourceful entities.
Via our and others’ work in the CA/Browser Forum, following our deprecation plan announced last year and per recommendations by NIST, issuance of SHA-1 certificates mostly halted for the web last January, with new certificates moving to more secure algorithms. Since May 2016, the use of SHA-1 on the web fell from 3.5% to 0.8% as measured by Firefox Telemetry.
In early 2017, Firefox will show an overridable “Untrusted Connection” error whenever a SHA-1 certificate is encountered that chains up to a root certificate included in Mozilla’s CA Certificate Program. SHA-1 certificates that chain up to a manually-imported root certificate, as specified by the user, will continue to be supported by default; this will continue allowing certain enterprise root use cases, though we strongly encourage everyone to migrate away from SHA-1 as quickly as possible.
This policy has been included as an option in Firefox 51, and we plan to gradually ramp up its usage. Firefox 51 is currently in Developer Edition, and is currently scheduled for release in January 2017. We intend to enable this deprecation of SHA-1 SSL certificates for a subset of Beta users during the beta phase for 51 (beginning November 7) to evaluate the impact of the policy on real-world usage. As we gain confidence, we’ll increase the number of participating Beta users. Once Firefox 51 is released in January, we plan to proceed the same way, starting with a subset of users and eventually disabling support for SHA-1 certificates from publicly-trusted certificate authorities in early 2017.
Questions about SHA-1 based certificates should be directed to the mozilla.dev.security.policy forum.As a GMO Pillar Wobbles, Biotech Companies Promise New Insect-Killing Genes
For all the international furor over genetically modified food, or GMOs, the biotech industry has really only managed to put a few foreign genes into food crops.
The first of these genes — actually, a small family of similar genes — came from a kind of bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt. Those genes make plants poisonous to certain insect pests.
These genes are a pillar of the entire industry. But that pillar is wobbling. Three of the four Bt genes that are supposed to fend off one particularly important pest, the corn rootworm, are showing signs of failure. Corn rootworms have evolved resistance to them.
But the biotech companies say not to worry. More genes are on the way.
This week, a team of scientists from DuPont Pioneer announced in the journal Science that they'd discovered a new rootworm-killing gene.
They found it by searching through the countless bacteria that live in the soil, looking for one that is lethal to the corn rootworm. Many have carried out such searches and failed. The DuPont Pioneer team, however, succeeded.
They first found a protein that killed rootworms, then worked backward to find the bacteria and the gene that produced that insecticidal protein. Then they inserted the gene into corn plants. As they'd hoped, it worked. The genetically modified corn plants killed rootworms.
"This is a very important discovery, because it shows we can find very efficacious proteins from non-Bt sources," says Tom Greene, a senior research director for DuPont Pioneer.
Meanwhile, Monsanto is working on another new weapon against the rootworm. It relies on a different mechanism, called RNA interference. The modified corn plants produce a type of RNA that poisons rootworms when they eat it.
Despite DuPont Pioneer's discovery, farmers can't celebrate quite yet. Greene says this new weapon against the rootworm won't be available for a decade or so. His company will have to convince regulators that it's safe for people and for the environment.
Fred Gould, co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University, says that he hopes that the industry has learned some lessons from the history of the Bt genes. If you overuse a gene like this, it may not work for long.
Years ago, he says, when rootworm-fighting Bt genes were still new, a group of scientists warned the Environmental Protection Agency not to let farmers plant corn containing this gene on all their fields. They predicted that if farmers did so, corn rootworms would evolve resistance to Bt more quickly.
"The majority of the people on that EPA Science Advisory Panel recommended a 50 percent refuge," Gould says. "That means, 50 percent of the corn [seed] that goes out could have the Bt gene, and 50 percent would not."
Seed companies, though, persuaded the government to let farmers plant up to 95 percent of their acres with Bt corn. It encouraged farmers to rely on genetic engineering instead of old-fashioned methods of controlling pests, such as crop rotations — planting their fields with a variety of crops, and not just corn.
It only took about a dozen years for Bt-resistant rootworms to appear.
Gould says that if this new gene eventually does go on sale, he's hoping that regulators manage its use so that it stays effective for longer than the Bt genes have.Battery test 18650, comparator
Comparision of capacity at all currents
4Greer 18650 3100mAh (Black) A123 ANR26650M1A 2300mAh (Green)* AmpMax 18650 2900mAh (Black) AmpMax 18650 3100mAh (Black) AmpMax 18650 3400mAh (Black) Ampsplus INR18650 2500mAh (Black)* Ampsplus INR18650 3000mAh (Black)* Ampsplus INR18650 3500mAh (Black)* Aosibo IMR18650 2600mAh (Yellow) Apexium INR18650 2600mAh (Yellow)* Apexium INR20700 3000mAh (Blue)* Aspire ICR18650 1800mAh (Black-yellow)* Aspire ICR18650 2500mAh (Black-yellow)* Aucooma IMR18650 2500mAh (Orange-green)* Aucooma IMR18650 2800mAh (Purple-blue)* Aucooma IMR18650 3000mAh (Black-red)* AW 17500 1100mAh (Black) 2016* AW 17670 1600mAh (Black) 2016* AW 18500 1500mAh (Black) 2016* AW 18650 2200mAh (Black) AW 18650 2600mAh (Black) AW 18650 2600mAh (Black) 2016* AW 18650 2900mAh (Black) AW 18650 3100mAh (Black) AW 18650 3400mAh (Black) 2016* AW IMR 18650 1600mAh (Red) AW IMR 18650 2000mAh (Red) AW IMR18490 1200mAh (Red) AW IMR18650 2200mAh (Red) 2016* AW IMR18650 3000mAh (Red) 2016* AWT IMR18490 1100mAh (Yellow) AWT IMR18490 1200mAh (Yellow) AWT IMR18500 1200mAh (Yellow) AWT IMR18650 1600mAh (Yellow) bt AWT IMR18650 1600mAh (Yellow) ft AWT IMR18650 2000mAh (Yellow) AWT IMR18650 2500mAh (Yellow) AWT IMR18650 2600mAh (Yellow) AWT IMR18650 2600mAh (Yellow) 2015 AWT IMR18650 3000mAh (Red) 35A 2015 AWT IMR18650 3000mAh (Red) 40A 2015 AWT IMR26650 3800mAh (Yellow) AWT IMR26650 4200mAh (Red) 2015 AWT IMR26650 5200mAh (Red) 2015 Basen 18490 1100mAh BS186H (Black) Basen 18500 1100mAh BS186G (Black) Basen 18650 2100mAh BS186E (Black) Basen 18650 2500mAh BS186D (Black) Basen 18650 3000mAh BS186C (Black) Basen 18650 3000mAh BS186C (Black) 4.35V Basen 18650 3000mAh BS186C (Black) 4.3V Basen 18650 3400mAh BS186A (Black) BattEnergy 18650 2600mAh (Black) BattEnergy 18650 3100mAh (Blue) BattEnergy 18650 3400mAh (Black) BestFire IMR26650 4500mAh (Purple)* BestFire IMR26650 6000mAh (Purple)* BLD 18650 3800mAh USB (Green)* Brillipower 18650 2600mAh (Black) Brillipower 18650 3400mAh (Black) Brillipower 26650 4000mAh (Black) Callies Kustoms 2250mAh (Grey) Callies Kustoms 3100mAh (Black) CaroNite 18650 2800mAh (Purple) Cytac 18650 3400mAh (Black) Eachine BRC18650 2800mAh (Blue-white) EagleTac 17650 1600mAh (Black) EagleTac 18650 3100mAh (Black) EagleTac 18650 3400mAh (White-green) Ebat 18650 2500mAh E7-18P25 (Black)* Ebat 18650 2500mAh E7-18P25 (Black) 2018* Ebat 18650 2900mAh E7-18P29 (Black)* Ebat 20700 3000mAh E7-20P30 (Blue)* Ebat 26650 5000mAh E7-26P50 (Black)* Efan IMR18650 2000mAh (Red) Efan IMR18650 2100mAh (Purple) Efan IMR18650 2500mAh (Purple) Efan IMR18650 3200mAh (Purple) Efest 18500 1500mAh (Black) 2014 Efest 18650 2200mAh (Black) 2014 Efest 18650 2250mAh bt (Black) Efest 18650 2250mAh ft (Black) Efest 18650 2600mAh ft (Black) Efest 18650 3100mAh (Black) Efest 18650 3400mAh bt (Black) Efest 18650 3400mAh bt (Black) 2014 Efest 18650 3400mAh ft (Black) Efest IMR16500 900mAh (Red) 2014 Efest IMR17650 V1 1200mAh (Red) Efest IMR18490 1100mAh (Red) Efest IMR18500 1000mAh (Purple) 2014 Efest IMR18500 1000mAh (Purple) 2016* Efest IMR18500 1000mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR18500 1000mAh (Purple) bt 2014 Efest IMR18500 V1 1100mAh (Red) Efest IMR18500 V1 1100mAh (Red) 2013 Efest IMR18500 V2 1100mAh (Red) Efest IMR18650 1600mAh V1 (Red) 2014 Efest IMR18650 2000mAh V1 (Red) 2014 Efest IMR18650 2000mAh V2 (Red) 2014 Efest IMR18650 2100mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR18650 2500mAh (Purple) 2014 Efest IMR18650 2500mAh (Purple) 2016* Efest IMR18650 2500mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR18650 2500mAh (Purple) BT 2014 Efest IMR18650 2600mAh (Purple) 2016* Efest IMR18650 2600mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR18650 3000mAh (Purple) 2016* Efest IMR18650 3000mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR18650 3100mAh (Purple) 2014 Efest IMR18650 3100mAh (Purple) 2016* Efest IMR18650 3100mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR18650 3500mAh (Purple) 2016* Efest IMR18650 3500mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR18650 V1 1500mAh (Red) Efest IMR18650 V1 2000mAh (red) Efest IMR18650 V2 2000mAh (red) Efest IMR20700 3000mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR20700 3100mAh (Purple) 2018* Efest IMR26500 3000mAh (Blue) Efest IMR26650 3000mAh (Blue) Efest IMR26650 3000mAh (Red) 2014 Efest IMR26650 3500mAh (Purple) 2014 Efest IMR26650 4200mAh (Purple) 2016* Efest IMR26650 4200mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR26650 5000mAh (Purple) 2017* Efest IMR26650 5200mAh (Purple) 2016* Eizfan 18650 2600mAh (Black) 2018* Eizfan IMR18650 2000mAh (Gold) Eizfan IMR18650 2500mAh (Black-purple) 2018* Eizfan IMR18650 2600mAh (Gold) Eizfan IMR20700 3100mAh (Black-yellow) 2018* Eizfan IMR21700 3750mAh (Black-cyan) 2018* Eizfan IMR21700 5000mAh (Black-purple) 2019* Eizfan IMR26650 3500mAh (Gold) Eizfan IMR26650 4200mAh (Gold) Elfeland BRC18650 3800mAh (Red)* Enercig 18650 2100mA (Gray)* Enercig 18650 2500mAh (Gray)* Enercig 18650 2600mAh (Gray)* Enercig 18650 2600mAh (Gray) 2016* Enercig 18650 2600mAh (Green)* Enercig 18650 3000mAh (Green) 2016* Enercig 18650 3200mA (Purple)* Enercig 18650 3450mAh (Purple)* Enercig 20700 4000mAh EC-27B (Red)* Enercig 26650 5200mAh EC-265HC (Blue)* Enercig EC-16500HP 800mA (Gray)* Enercig EC-18500HP 1100mAh (Gray)* Enercig EC-26500HP 2000mAh (Blue)* EnerPower 18500 1700mAh (Gray) BT 2015 EnerPower 18500 2000mAh (Black) EnerPower 18650 2250mAh (Black) EnerPower 18650 2600mAh (Black) Enerpower 18650 3.2V 1100mAh (Blue)* Enerpower 18650 3.2V 1800mAh (Blue)* Enerpower 26650 3.2V 3000mAh (Blue)* EnerPower 26650 4500mAh (Dark blue) EnerPower VC+ 18650 3000mAh (Purple)* EnerPower VC+ 18650 3450mAh (Purple)* EnerPower+ 18650 2200mAh (Blue) EnerPower+ 18650 2250mAh (Blue) EnerPower+ 18650 2500mAh (Blue) BT 2015 EnerPower+ 18650 2500mAh (Blue) FT 2015 EnerPower+ 18650 2900mAh (Blue) EnerPower+ 18650 2900mAh (Blue) BT 2015 EnerPower+ 18650 2900mAh (Blue) FT 2015 EnerPower+ 18650 2900mAh 3C (Blue) Enerpower+ 18650 3000mAh (Gray) bt* Enerpower+ 18650 3000mAh (Gray) ft* EnerPower+ 18650 3100mAh (Blue) EnerPower+ 18650 3350mAh (Blue) BT 2015 EnerPower+ 18650 3350mAh (Blue) FT 2015 EnerPower+ 18650 3400mAh (Blue) EnerPower+ 32600 6000mAh (Yellow)* Evva 18650 3400mAh (Black) Evva 18650 3500mAh (Black) Evva 18650 3600mAh (Black) Evva 26650 5200mAh (Black) Feilong 32650 6000mAh (Gray) Fenix 18650 ARB-L2 2600mAh (Black) Foxnovo 18650 3100mAh (Blue-white) Geteed 21700 4800mAh (Yellow)* GIF ICR18650 12000mAh (Yellow)* GIF NCR18650B 3000mAh (Cyan-Orange)* Golisi IMR18650 2600mAh S26 (Black)* Golisi IMR18650 2600mAh S26 (Black) 2018* Golisi IMR18650 3000mAh G30 (Gold)* Golisi IMR18650 3000mAh S30 (Black)* Golisi IMR20700 3200mAh S32 (Black) 2018* Golisi IMR21700 3750mAh S35 (Black)* Golisi IMR26650 4300mAh (Gold)* Gpower 18650 2500mAh (Yellow-black)* Gpower 18650 2600mAh (Yellow-black)* Gpower 18650 3000mAh (Yellow-black)* GTL 18650 5000mAh (Blue) GTL 26650 12000mAh (White)* GTL LS18650 10000mAh (White)* Hi-Max 18650 2600mAh (White) Ijoy INR26650 4200mAh ( |
Weir said. “It was very brief. Sam’s not exactly a talkative young man.”
There is no timetable for Logwood’s decision on whether he will return.
“I think over the last week or two, Sam’s frustrations with different things in life and in basketball had just kind of reached a point where our conversations had started to progress about what’s really best for Sam,” Weir said. “I think right now, that could mean a lot of things. I think just for his own mindset, he needed some time away to really think about where his future was going to go.”
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Logwood has not been happy as a member of the program for a few years, but seemed to find his footing after a coaching change in the offseason.
Logwood has played in 99 games at UNM and has started 75. He has a career scoring average of 7.3 points, which has blossomed to 14.9 this season, along with an average of 5.1 rebounds per game. He had a career-high of 27 points in a 69-67 loss to TCU on Nov. 24 in the Emerald Coast Classic in Florida and impressed professional scouts there, who spoke to the Journal at the event.
He contemplated transferring after his sophomore season (2015-16), but was talked into staying by the coaching staff. Last season, he and then-head coach Craig Neal did not get along. By the end of the season it was no secret he wanted out and felt he had played out of position as a face-up “3” wing instead of in a stretch “4” role that would allow him to play closer to the basket and use his athleticism to better exploit mismatches.
As he struggled some the first half of 2016-17, some fans were highly critical of his maintaining a starting role. He blossomed late in the season when inserted back into the starting lineup to replace injured power forward Tim Williams. In that time, he had some of his best games playing the “4” but still was never happy being on the team or with his relationship with his coach.
Logwood announced he was transferring in March, but changed his mind after Neal was fired and Weir was hired.
“Leaving wasn’t something I wanted to do,” Logwood told the Journal on April 21, after deciding to stay for his senior season. “It was something I felt like I had to do at that point. But now, with the new coach, I feel like I’ve got to keep establishing a relationship with him and building a family here.”
Logwood, by all accounts, kept his promise throughout offseason workouts.
Weir said Logwood was “pivotal” in getting the groundwork laid for the new coach’s system in place.
“I’m thankful for everything that he’s given me and everything that he’s given us,” Weir said. “I have a good relationship with Sam. I asked him several times if it had anything to do with me and he assures me it’s not. … I think his well being is the top priority right now. And that’s the well being of his mind and his soul and hopefully he comes to that soon.”Mr Bahari said Iran was trying to scare opposition activists A reporter for the US magazine Newsweek says he has been sentenced in absentia to 13 years in jail in Iran, after covering opposition protests. Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari was jailed in Iran for four months last year, but later freed on bail and allowed to leave the country. Mr Bahari said he had been sentenced to 13 years and six months in jail, plus 74 lashes. He was arrested after reporting on protests over disputed elections. Iran has not commented on the sentencing. The Iranian regime wanted to "scare as many people as possible" to prevent them from taking to the streets to mark the anniversary of the June poll, Mr Bahiri said in an interview with the Associated Press. Bloody protests Scores of protesters died in clashes with security forces during protests in the wake of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election on 12 June 2009. Reformists claimed the election had been rigged, a charge the government denied. Mr Bahari said the Revolutionary Court that sentenced him had not informed him formally, but he had heard the news from a relative present at the court. The charges included unlawful assembly and conspiring against the state, collection secret documents, one year for propagandising against the system, insulting the Supreme Leader and the president, and disrupting public order, Mr Bahari wrote in Newsweek. He said more than 30 journalists, writers and bloggers were still being held in Iranian prisons. Five Iranian activists were hung over the weekend. Mr Bahari, 42, is a reporter and documentary maker who had been accredited to work in Iran for more than a decade. He was released in October on bail of 3 billion rials ($300,000) and allowed to travel to London, where his wife was due to give birth. Another critic being held by the Iranians is film-maker Jafar Panahi. He was due to be a judge at this year's Cannes Film festival. At least 30 protesters have been killed in clashes since last year's disputed elections, although the opposition says more than 70 have died. Thousands have been detained and some 200 activists remain behind bars. At least nine have been sentenced to death, and two have been executed already
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This project was produced by News21, a national investigative reporting project involving top college journalism students across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University
Fear of the federal government’s interference with Second Amendment rights and suspicion that elected officials are ignoring the “will of the people” have provoked a resurgence of self-described patriots across the country who say they are preparing to defend themselves and their rights by any means necessary.
Organizations tracking the movement say the number of groups has risen dramatically in the past six years.
“There’s a very unreasonable, ridiculously crazy attack on the Second Amendment and people that own guns,” said Cope Reynolds, a member of the White Mountain Militia in Show Low, Arizona. “If everything were not protected by the Second Amendment, the government would have the opportunity, if they so desired, to go unchecked with impunity and do whatever they want to do.”
Reynolds is the operations manager of Shots Ranch, a tactical shooting range and survival training facility in Kingman, Arizona. He considers this type of training to be necessary preparation for a time in America he sees as inevitable.
“We want people to be able to provide for themselves in a world where we might not be able to just run down to Wal-Mart at any time,” Reynolds said. “We think that at some point in America we’re probably going to experience those times and a lot of us think it’s not going to be far away.”
For individuals like Reynolds, the Second Amendment is an important check on the government and is needed to protect the Constitution.
“It’s the beauty and the danger of America’s Constitution,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Second Amendment expert. “Its great generalities are so vague that anyone can interpret them in light of their own experience and their own interests. And indeed, the Second Amendment is one of the most confusing textual provisions of the Constitution.”
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a firearm for traditionally lawful purposes like self-defense.
“It has certainly given fuel to gun rights proponents and to gun culture,” said Robert Spitzer, a political scientist, author and professor at State University of New York Cortland who specializes in gun issues. “It fortified, in a very specific way, the very idea that there is in law something called gun rights.”
The 2008 ruling held that the individual right to own a firearm is “unconnected with service in a militia.”
“There certainly is a belief, and it’s a long-standing belief, that somehow average citizens owning guns will somehow have a beneficial or therapeutic effect on government behavior,” Spitzer said. “It’s rooted in anti-government sentiment, which has a very long history in the U.S.”
Reynolds disagrees.
Cope Reynolds manages the operations at Shots Ranch, a tactical training facility in Kingman, Ariz. Jim Tuttle/News21.
“We’re not anti-government. We’re anti-corruption in government. There’s a huge difference,” he said. “We cannot survive without government. We would turn into probably one of the most savage nations on the planet with no government at all.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center identified 1,096 “anti-government” patriot groups in the U.S. in its 2013 Intelligence report, an increase from about 150 groups in 2008. Considered part of this movement are 240 militia groups, which the center says have made a resurgence since their earlier popularity in the mid-1990s.
Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League, also has been studying the militia movement for the past 20 years and says the numbers are higher. The ADL keeps an internal list of militia groups, but does not publish it.
“We were tracking around 50 active militia groups in 2008 and now we’re tracking between 250 and 300 active militia groups,” he said. “It certainly represents a serious surge, which we’re able to confirm through the presence of groups and individuals on social networking sites, the number of militia-related events and trainings that we count each year.”
Pitcavage said the last militia movement was sparked in part by events in Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas, sieges that tuned in to deadly standoffs with federal agencies. He noted a similarity between these events and the standoff between Cliven Bundy and the Bureau of Land Management earlier this year in Bunkerville, Nevada.
Bundy had been in a disagreement with the government over more than $1 million in grazing fees and fines owed to the federal government. When the BLM came to seize his cattle in April, many militia groups and other members of the patriot movement joined his resistance, aiming their weapons at federal officers until the BLM withdrew.
“Here’s someone involved with conflict with the government and the government shows up at his ranch and starts taking his cattle that have been illegally grazing off the property,” Pitcavage said. “That’s tailor made for the militia movement.”
Citizens Militia of Mississippi members, from left, Henrietta Simon, Mark Glidewell and David Bowen speak about their group to James Copelan (far left), 30, from Guntown, Miss. Prospective members must undergo a criminal background check. Jim Tuttle/News21.
A Modern Militia
Modern private militias are unregulated by the government. Members of the movement say they feel disenfranchised and believe their conservative ideals are at odds with the current administration.
They say that arming themselves and training with other like-minded people gives them a sense of preparedness in an unstable world.
“When I was my kids’ age, we never locked the door on our cars, on our houses,” said Robert Mitchell, commander of the Citizens Militia of Mississippi. “That doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe it sounds cliche, maybe it sounds like Mayberry. I don’t know, but that’s the way the world’s supposed to be. And we have a strong desire to see our communities at least return to that.”
A little over a year ago, Mitchell started the Citizens Militia of Mississippi, which now claims nearly 150 official members – a number that members believe would probably be higher if not for the word “militia” in their name. They acknowledged a stigma surrounding the word, and said part of their mission is to help remove the negative connotation.
“Our goal is to change the public opinion of what the militia is,” Kevan Owen, commander of the northeast chapter of CMM, said. “We’re not a bunch of guys running around the woods, pretending to shoot bad guys.”
CMM, which formed in 2013, was not included on the list of anti-government patriot groups published this July by the SPLC. It is one of the newest groups to emerge in the last few years to call itself a militia. Members cite a concern about the current state of our country and a need to defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic.”
“It’s supposed to be your neighbors and your friends and your family, working together to better the community,” said Doug Jones, the militia’s co-founder who also serves as treasurer and second-in-command. “That’s really what a militia is.”
Active members typically do field training one day a month. That includes drills to practice patrolling and live-fire target practice, as well as learning about first aid, compass navigation and outdoor survival skills. Mitchell says their exercises are largely focused on team building, much like basic training for new military recruits.
Much of their activity focuses on the community. Mitchell said the group holds regular open meetings at the local public library and helps raise money for local police and firefighters.
“We can see ourselves making a difference in our community and in our state. It hasn’t been easy,” Mitchell said. “It’s not going to get easier, but we’re going to keep doing it because we can see that result.”
While he says he wishes the militia were his full-time job, Mitchell makes his living as a machine operator at Batesville Casket Co. He said most of his remaining time is occupied by CMM business.
“My kids hate it, my ex-wife hates it, my now ex-girlfriend hates it. Everybody in my personal life pretty much hates it, because it consumes all my time,” Mitchell said. “It’s what I live to do. I’m one of those ‘all or nothing’ kind of guys, and I’ve put it all in this.”
Charles Heller, a spokesman for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, talks about gun rights at his home in Tucson, Ariz. Jim Tuttle/News21
Mitchell considers the Second Amendment a priority in his life, one that requires sacrifice.
“If you want to get technical about it, every gun law on the books is unconstitutional. I’m not saying give lunatics guns. There have to be limits. Anybody with common sense knows that,” Mitchell said. “The problem is, the more you let them infringe on your right, the more they’re going to. I’m not willing to let them have any of mine.”
Charles Heller is the co-founder of the Arizona Citizens Defense League and spokesman for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, a national organization that aims to “destroy gun control.”
The group was formed to spread awareness “about the historical evils that Jews have suffered when they have been disarmed.” Twenty-five years later, that mission has expanded.
“I’ll put it in four words: Gun control is poison. Any form of gun control,” Heller said.
Many gun-rights supporters believe that the uninfringed ability to keep and carry guns is necessary to protect all other rights in the Constitution.
“When the guns are taken away, then the rest of it’s all gone,” Reynolds said. “There’s nothing protecting any of it. The Second Amendment is the glue that holds the Bill of Rights together. If you slide the Second Amendment out of there, the rest of it’s going to collapse.”
Reynolds is stockpiling food, medical supplies, guns and ammunition for a time when American society collapses. He said such an event happening is “not a matter of if, but when.”
People who share these beliefs are preparing throughout the country. A majority of states have at least one established militia group.
In Alaska, militias from across the state have gathered annually for the past three years for a weekend Prepper, Survivalist and Militia Rendezvous just north of Anchorage. The public is invited to come out for “free training provided by patriots.” Topics on the training schedule include close-quarter tactics, base defense, camouflage and convoy security.
The Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia marks its 20th anniversary this year. The group trains every month to prepare for “disasters, crime, invasion, terrorism and tyranny.”
This year, its training calendar included topics like winter survival exercises, shotgun and gas mask drills, as well as patrolling in various conditions.
“As ‘individual’ citizens who have the right to ‘keep and bear arms,’ we fund our own equipment and arms, we peacefully assemble with other likeminded ‘individual’ citizens who do the same,” said Louis Vondette, a member of SMVM. “We enjoy the best of times, but prepare for the worst of times.”
Alex Lancial is an Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation News21 Fellow.Cosmic rays provide a free source of high-energy collisions, which have been used in the past to discover new particles. A recent study calculates how often they produce Higgs bosons
On Wednesday the whole of year six from my daughter’s primary school came to visit UCL. They saw the Slade School of Fine Art, the department of Earth Sciences and finally my department, Physics & Astronomy. That’s two classes of 30 children each, and for those of you not familiar with today’s jargon, ‘year six’ is ages 10 and 11. Or ‘fourth year juniors’, as we were called in my day.
The first thing I showed them was a cosmic ray detector. It was ticking away in on the bench at irregular intervals, about one tick per second, and an oscilloscope trace was registering each pulse.
“Can any of you guess what this is detecting? What is making those ticks?” I asked, expecting the answer no.
“Is it Moo-Ons?” said a boy standing by the machine. I was impressed. “How did you know that?”
“It says ‘Moo-On Detector’ on the box”
Never underestimate children, especially once they learn to read.
He did not, however, know what muons (normally pronounced mew-on) actually are. They are fundamental particles, very like electrons but 207 times more massive.
My favourite particle: the muon | Mark Lancaster Read more
The muons being detected in the laboratory at UCL come from high-energy particles from space - called ‘cosmic rays’ - which continually bombard the upper atmosphere. When they hit the atoms in the atmosphere, they smash up the atomic nucleus and produce a spray of hadrons - particles containing quarks and gluons.
These hadrons hit more atoms and smash them up too, and a shower of particles is created. As the shower develops, the number of particles increases, but the average energy per particle decreases. At some point the energy becomes low enough that the new particles can’t smash up any more atoms, and the shower dies down.
The fact that it dies down is good for us, because it reduces the radiation dose we get at ground level. The maximum point of the shower, when it has the highest number of particles, takes place around 10,000m, which is unfortunately about the height at which aeroplanes cruise. Over a year’s work, airline crews can receive about twice the normal background radiation dose of someone working on the ground, and they have to monitor their exposure.
Muons are produced when some of the hadrons in these showers decay. In fact, muons were first discovered, in 1936, in measurements of cosmic rays. They are one of the few high-energy particles to reach the ground, because they are unique: they are massive enough that the electrons in atmospheric atoms don’t stop them, and (unlike hadrons) they don’t interact via the strong force, and so they rarely collide with the atomic nucleus.
Can cosmic rays shoot down aeroplanes? Read more
Some of the cosmic rays which hit the atmosphere release energies far higher than those achieved at the highest energy particle colliders built on the Earth. The fact that this has been going on for billions of years is one of the reasons we could be confident that the current highest-energy machine, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, would not, through some bizarre freak of unknown physics, cause a catastrophe.
Since these cosmic rays come for free, and the LHC does not, you might wonder why we didn’t just use the cosmic rays to hunt for the Higgs boson in the first place. After all, as I mentioned, that’s how we discovered the muon.
To answer that question, you need an estimate of the number of cosmic rays with sufficient energy that impact upon the Earth’s atmosphere. On a recent trip to CERN, a colleague pointed me at the Batchelor’s thesis of Josua Unger of the Technical University of Dresden, which addresses exactly that question. The estimate Unger comes up with, under various reasonable assumptions, that a Higgs boson is produced somewhere in the atmosphere about once every 8 seconds¹. For These Higgs bosons are produced mainly when gluons, inside the various produced hadrons, collide and fuse together. And they would be highly boosted - that is, travelling very, very fast.
Even boring collisions at the LHC tell us something - this time about cosmic rays | Jon Butterworth | Life & Physics Read more
That is not a very high Higgs rate, and the news gets worse, because to have a chance of seeing them, the bosons would have to decay to something distinctive - preferably muons. They do this sometimes, and we have measured Higgs bosons decaying to muons (via W or Z bosons) at the LHC, but the fraction of them that do so is tiny.
Of course, you would also have to cover the whole world with muon detectors something like the one in our lab at UCL, or probably better, because you would have to measure their energy and direction quite precisely to reconstruct the Higgs boson. Overall, it is quicker, simpler and cheaper to build a hadron collider.
Nevertheless, I find it strangely reassuring that nature is steadily making Higgs bosons, up there in the sky, without our help.
¹With a pretty large uncertainty that says there’s a 65% chance the value is between one every 6.5 seconds and one every 30 seconds.
Jon Butterworth’s book Smashing Physics is available as “Most Wanted Particle” in Canada & the US. He is also on Twitter.Ad-blocking apps have surged to the top of Apple's paid iPhone app chart in the US, just days after the release of iOS 9. As of Friday morning, ad-blocking apps accounted for three of the top five paid apps, and four of the top 20. Peace, which launched yesterday at a price of $2.99, is currently at the top spot, followed by Crystal ($0.99) at number two and Purify Blocker ($3.99) at number four.
Read next: The iPhone 6S review.
There's been a lot of recent debate around the ethics of ad-blocking, following the release of the WebKit Content Blocker API in iOS 9, which allows for developers to block ads in Apple's Safari mobile browser. Proponents of the software frame the issue as a matter of consumer choice, while others say the spread of ad-blocking could threaten the revenue model for most news sites and online publishers. Others have noted the irony of paying to block ads (which effectively pay for free content), though as Apple's recent charts show, it's a price many are willing to pay.The Summer of 2013 has descended upon the Portland Trail Blazers. Normally off-season vacation means a relief from day-to-day stress, punctuated by a few high points. For the Blazers the stress is just starting.
This team had it easy during the regular reason. Low expectations, a season spent kicking the tires on their rookies...how could they lose? It boiled down to an 82-game experiment, a time to take stock, explore lingering questions. The waiting is over now. Whether they Blazers have the answers or not, they're going to have to make decisions this summer that will make or break their future. Consider how many issues they face:
1. Don't look now, but LaMarcus Aldridge has only two years remaining on his slightly-less-than-max-level contract. Normally two years is half an eternity in the NBA, but Aldridge's contract just got radioactive. The Blazers have to be concerned about its half life. We don't know the ending of the Aldridge saga in Portland but we do know that the Blazers cannot allow him to walk away without compensation. Next summer the Blazers and Aldridge will choose between two outcomes: extension and trade. That moment will brand this franchise for the foreseeable future both on the court and on the cap roll.
The Blazers will need to know whether they're capable of building enough of a roster around Aldridge to make a deep playoff run. Aldridge will need convincing as well. He'll turn 29 in the summer of 2014. The next contract he signs will exhaust his NBA prime. As one of the premier power forwards in the league he's not likely to sign for less than a max deal and he's not likely to sign with a team that's not going anywhere. The Blazers will need to pony up in both departments to get him to forego the free agency experiment and marry himself to them.
2. Barring a total meltdown and team restructuring, this summer will carry two significant "lasts" for the team: last time with this much cap space, last lottery pick. Talent-for-talent the Blazers will rise to a more advantageous trade position in the future, but that's it. They'll never be able to execute the kind of unbalanced trades they can achieve this summer. They'll not have the cash for free-agent signings. If they're this high in the lottery again something went wrong.
3. This is Neil Olshey's second summer pushing the buttons while sitting in the chair from which two predecessors were abruptly ejected. I do not have any sense that Paul Allen is considering jettisoning Olshey, but that story could change.
The Blazers had significant cap space last summer. Quick, name Olshey's successful free-agent signings. If you're not scratching your head right now, you must be Neil Olshey. Charisma and the ability to lure players to Portland are Olshey's supposed strong points. If he should come up empty again his ability and credibility will be called into doubt...and rightly so. Blazer fans (and one would presume Blazer bosses) have been promised a coherent, if not wonderful, strategy since Olshey came on board. Will anybody believe that's true if the team can't land its man (or men) this summer? Unless we're dazzled within the next few months Olshey's seat will become uncomfortably hot in the court of public opinion if not in actuality.
4. It goes without saying that the Blazers will never be in more desperate need than they are right now. Or at least they better not be in more desperate need. They'd probably need to add 6 guys to the rotation to make a credible second-round threat. They might have.5 of those 6 on the roster already. (Note there was a decimal point in there.) They're not going to be able to get all half-dozen at once but they absolutely, positively need 2 players who instantly raise the level of the roster plus another strategic veteran with their room exception and/or a promising rookie with that draft pick. The only substitute would be a bona fide star in place of any 2 of those assets. If they come up short of that target we're looking at another season of intolerably high minutes for the core group and fading success for the team as a whole.
If you're getting the sense that the odds are stacked against the Blazers, you may be right. The stakes are high, the needs great, and nothing is guaranteed. The last time this franchise saw a summer with this combination of importance and uncertainty was 2007. That's when the Blazers held the #1 overall pick and had to choose between Greg Oden and Kevin Durant. No single choice the team faces this summer will be that weighty but the sum total will certainly shape the franchise for the next 4-5 years. They'll either be heading for the next (much closer to final) step in a big buildup or putting one and a half of their feet on the slippery slide to a tear-down.
This off-season could be a dream come true or it could be a nightmare. Likely the team and its fans will end up having to compromise with something in between. Whichever way it goes, it's guaranteed to be interesting.
--Dave (blazersub@gmail.com)(Claire Bernish) Wikileaks founder Julian Assange suggested on Twitter Tuesday Hillary Clinton and certain unnamed members of the U.S. Intelligence Community are plotting a takeover by Vice President Mike Pence.
by Claire Bernish, March 14th, 2017
“Clinton stated privately this month that she is quietly pushing for a Pence takeover,” Assange tweeted. “She stated that Pence is predictable hence defeatable.”
Follow Julian Assange @JulianAssange Clinton stated privately this month that she is quietly pushing for a Pence takeover. She stated that Pence is predictable hence defeatable.
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“Two IC officials close to Pence stated privately this month that they are planning on a Pence takeover,” he added in another tweet. “Did not state if Pence agrees.”
Follow Julian Assange @JulianAssange Two IC officials close to Pence stated privately this month that they are planning on a Pence takeover. Did not state if Pence agrees.
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Further, he continued, “By handing unilateral power to the CIA over its drone strikes at this time White House signals that bullying, disloyalty & incompetence pays.”
Follow Julian Assange @JulianAssange By handing unilateral power to the CIA over its drone strikes at this time White House signals that bullying, disloyalty & incompetence pays
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In response to shocked reactions to the tweets, Pence lambasted Assange’s suggestion of a takeover as “absurd” and “frankly offensive” in an interview with radio host Laura Ingraham, asserting,
“I would find all of that dialogue to be absurd and frankly offensive. It is the greatest honor of my life to serve shoulder-to-shoulder with the 45th President of the United States. To see his leadership every day, to see the compassion that he has for the American people every day. I would dismiss that out of hand and tell you that I’m just, I’m so excited about the progress that we’ve been made strengthening this country, protecting this country, reviving this country’s economy and all credit goes to President Donald Trump.”…
Source: Assange: Clinton Conspiring With Deep State to Oust Trump for “A Pence Takeover” | Stillness in the StormBITCOIN
Member of European Parliament, and part-time kick ass poker player, Tony G, is on the board of advisors for a new bank specialising in cryptocurrency.
I need a new bank.
I’ve been a member of Barclays Bank since I was 14-years-old. My son lost his debit card, and I wanted them to issue a new one but they wouldn’t. I had to go to the bank to make it so.
I told the customer service representative that if she didn’t send me a new card, I would leave, and break the Davy/Barclays Bank lineage forever. I thought that was a powerful move. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I bet she didn’t blink.
As I said, I need a new bank.
Perhaps, Bankera is the new bank of my dreams?
The bank named after a mushroom is an idea spawned from the brightest minds within the digital currency exchange, e-wallet, debit card, and payment processing giant SpectroCoin.
It’s a new bank, for a new generation of bankers, and I’m writing about it because one of the company’s advisors is the one and only Tony G. G has always been a big supporter of cryptocurrency. During his massive presence in the gambling industry, he made TonyBet cryptocurrency compliant for both withdrawals and deposits, and he also champions the disruptive currency during his role as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP).
In a echoed speech at the 2016 IMCO Committee at the European Parliament, Tony G urged fellow politicians to purchase cryptocurrencies, because how else could they build laws around something they don’t understand.
Tony G is leading by example.
Bankera will be one of the first cryptocurrency banks, giving them a head start on the competition. You will be able to make payments and deposits, take out loans, and take investment advice with the full support of cryptocurrencies.
To kick things off, Bankera is holding an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). The cryptocurrency will be known as “Bankers” (BNK), which interestingly rhymes with a word I used to describe the management that run Barclays Bank.
CommentsFoto: Wikipedia
JEDNA od najpoznatijih slika iz Drugog svjetskog rata stoji na ulazu u zgradu Ujedinjenih naroda u New Yorku, a na njoj se nalazi - Hrvat. Riječ je o čuvenoj slici Stjepana Steve Filipovića, Hrvata i antifašista iz Opuzena, napravljenoj nekoliko trenutaka prije nego što će biti obješen u Valjevu na jučerašnji dan, 22. svibnja 1942., prije točno 75 godina.
Na čuvenoj slici vidi se Filipović s konopcem oko vrata kako prkosno diže ruke u zrak. Filipović se rodio 26. siječnja 1916. godine u Opuzenu, a zbog očevog posla preselio je u Valjevo. Tamo su ga zvali Stevan pa su ga tijekom kratkog života i tako zvali, a od tu i česta zabuna oko njegovog pravog imena. Kao aktivni član Komunističke partije on je u valjevskom kraju organizirao ustanak protiv Nijemaca. Na Badnjak 1941. godine zarobili su ga četnici i nakon mučenja izručili Gestapou.
Slavna je fotografija snimljena 22. svibnja 1942. godine, nekoliko trenutaka prije nego će biti obješen.
Do 1991. godine Filipović je imao i spomenik u Opuzenu. No, isti je srušen po nečijoj zapovijedi.
Povijest je napravila jednu zanimljivu slučajnost. Naime, Filipović je ubijen na isti dan kad je u Šibeniku strijeljan Rade Končar. Hrvata Filipovića uhvatili su četnici i predali na nemilost Nijemcima. Hrvatskog Srbina Radu Končara uhvatile su ustaše i predale svojim gazdama Talijanima.
Iako je Filipovićev prkosni stav jedna od prvih stvari koje političari i brojni svjetski uglednici vide kad uđu u zgradu UN-a, u Hrvatskoj o njemu nećete puno čuti. Nema političara, nema govora ni polaganja vijenaca i sličnih stvari.
UN-u se njime ponosi jer predstavlja jednu od najupečatljivijih uspomena na antifašizam. Hrvatske vlasti ga se stide, vjerojatno iz istog razloga.The immediacy of social media allows musicians to reveal behind the scenes information about what they are working on without having to wait for a magazine to be published or an interview to be transcribed. That's exactly what Devin Townsend did on Twitter yesterday (Dec. 30), updating the progress of new material.
'Ziltoid the Omniscient' was released in 2007. It was a concept album about an alien named Ziltoid that travels to earth in search of the ultimate cup of coffee. It was a solo effort, and Townsend has revealed on Twitter that he is working on a sequel to the album.
"I began writing for 'Z2' about 6 months ago," Townsend tweeted. "Between all the ideas, there's close to 70 songs. Some are really good, but none are 'it'. How do you not repeat yourself? How do you avoid being a caricature? How do I incorporate Ziltoid with what we've done and not just be silly."
In another tweet, Townsend revealed how far along he is on the project: "I'm proud to say that the ideas that are coming now are beginning to take the shape. The theme. It's so exciting. We start recording in May."
2013 saw the release of Towsend's'The Retinal Circus'live CD/DVD. Before 'Z2' sees the light of day, Townsend plans on releasing the album 'Casualties of Cool' next year. He tweeted details about that as well: "'Casualties Of Cool' gets released in May by the way... It's a bridge to the Z2 phase, really important one to me."
Click here for these and several other tweets from Townsend.ARLINGTON, TX - JANUARY 15: Head coach Jason Garrett of the Dallas Cowboys argues a call during the second quarter against the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Divisional Playoff game at AT&T Stadium on January 15, 2017 in Arlington, Texas. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
By: Josh Clark
Follow The Fan: Facebook | Twitter
DALLAS (105.3 The Fan) – The NFL has admitted that the Cowboys should not have been penalized for a 15-yard penalty in the Divisional Round loss to the Packers last Sunday.
According to Michael Lombardi, The NFL says the Unsportsmanlike penalty called on Cowboys’ receiver Brice Butler shouldn’t have been called.
The too many men in the huddle call on Dallas for 15 yards was a mistake, the league admitted this to teams…sorry…. — michael lombardi (@mlombardiNFL) January 19, 2017
Lombardi says he spoke with two teams that called the NFL office for clarification on the penalty, and the league said Dallas was not being deceptive and the call shouldn’t have been made.
Spoke w/ 2 teams that talked to the NFL office about the huddle call and both said it was a mistake. No deception on the part of D, no call — michael lombardi (@mlombardiNFL) January 19, 2017
Other teams saw the call, called the league office for clarification and NFL said Dallas was not being deceptive,no call was the right call — michael lombardi (@ml |
"winBy": "Best Lap", "localDateTime": "1\/5\/2017 6:40 PM", "participants": [ { "url": "http:\/\/kartlaps.info\/v2\/mb2sylmar\/racer\/75116", "id": 75116, "racerName": "ANIMAL" }, { "url": "http:\/\/kartlaps.info\/v2\/mb2sylmar\/racer\/3900", "id": 3900, "racerName": "Isra" },... ], "podium": [ { "finalPosition": 1, "racer": { "url": "http:\/\/kartlaps.info\/v2\/mb2sylmar\/racer\/75116", "id": 75116, "racerName": "ANIMAL" } }, { "finalPosition": 2, "racer": { "url": "http:\/\/kartlaps.info\/v2\/mb2sylmar\/racer\/3900", "id": 3900, "racerName": "Isra" } }, { "finalPosition": 3, "racer": { "url": "http:\/\/kartlaps.info\/v2\/mb2sylmar\/racer\/1279496", "id": 1279496, "racerName": "evilgt500" } } ], "laps": [ { "racerId": 75116, "racerLaps": [ { "lapNumber": 1, "seconds": 30.196, "position": 7 }, { "lapNumber": 2, "seconds": 23.458, "position": 2 },... ] }, { "racerId": 3900, "racerLaps": [ { "lapNumber": 1, "seconds": 22.878, "position": 1 }, { "lapNumber": 2, "seconds": 23.259, "position": 1 },... ] }, { "racerId": 1279496, "racerLaps": [ { "lapNumber": 1, "seconds": 27.753, "position": 2 }, { "lapNumber": 2, "seconds": 25.418, "position": 5 },... ] },... ]...
Top Times
In addition to a points leaderboard, there is also a laptime leaderboard, that displays best times over the last 1, 7, or 30 day(s). Try a URL like https://kartlaps.info/v2/mb2sylmar/laptimeleaderboard/1 with "mb2sylmar" replace with the location you're querying, and the final number replaced with the amount of days history to show (acceptable values are 1, 7, and 30).
Request:
https://kartlaps.info/v2/mb2sylmar/laptimeleaderboard/1
Response Example:
{ "laptimeleaderboard": { "url": "http:\/\/kartlaps.info\/v2\/mb2sylmar\/laptimeleaderboard\/1", "location": { "id": "mb2sylmar" }, "days": "1", "leaders": { "1": { "racerName": "Andrew", "lapTime": "00:19:065", "localDateTime": "8\/26\/2017 2:06 PM" }, "2": { "racerName": "YRUSLOW", "lapTime": "00:19:468", "localDateTime": "8\/26\/2017 11:12 AM" }, "3": { "racerName": "Dan Brown", "lapTime": "00:19:621", "localDateTime": "8\/26\/2017 2:06 PM" },...
You may notice this output is a list of racer objects, but that those objects don't contain a racer id. This is because Club Speed's "Top Times" pages strangely don't include the racer's id in this list. Another quirk of their system that I haven't devised a work-around for.
API Keys
There is currently no limit of requests that you can make, and no key required to include in your requests.
But! Please assume that for each request you make to this API, that there is in-turn a request made to the Club Speed servers for the location. There is some caching done in to improve speeds and to not bombard Club Speed servers by making too many requests of the same unchanged data, but still. Use responsibly please.
"x Doesn't Work!"
Things tends to break sometimes, or not work as expected. Send me a tweet or an e-mail with any questions that come up using this. @itsmetomsmith or tom _AT_ itsmetomsmith _DOT_ com.Editor's Note : Please see our other "Five Ways" articles including: Five Ways D-Day Could Have Been a Disaster and Five Ways a Nuclear War Could Still Happen.
Let's face it. Imperial Japan stood next to no chance of winning a fight to the finish against the United States. Resolve and resources explain why. So long as Americans kept their dander up, demanding that their leaders press on to complete victory, Washington had a mandate to convert the republic's immense industrial potential into a virtually unstoppable armada of ships, aircraft, and armaments. Such a physical mismatch was simply too much for island state Japan -- with an economy about one-tenth the size of America's -- to surmount.
Quantity has a quality all its own. No amount of willpower or martial virtuosity can overcome too lopsided a disparity in numbers. Tokyo stared that plight in the face following Pearl Harbor.
So Japan could never have crushed U.S. maritime forces in the Pacific and imposed terms on Washington. That doesn't mean it couldn't have won World War II. Sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it? But the weak sometimes win. As strategic sage Carl von Clausewitz recounts, history furnishes numerous instances when the weak got their way. Indeed, Clausewitz notes that it sometimes makes sense for the lesser contender to start a fight. If its leadership sees force as the only resort, and if the trendlines look unfavorable -- in other words, if right now is as good as it gets -- then why not act?
There are three basic ways to win wars according to the great Carl. One, you can trounce the enemy's armed forces and dictate whatever terms you please. Short of that, two, you can levy a heavier price from the enemy than he's willing to pay to achieve his goals. The value a belligerent assigns his political objectives determines how many resources he's prepared to expend on those objectives' behalf, and for how long. Taking measures that compel an opponent to expend more lives, armaments, or treasure is one way to raise the price. Dragging out the affair so that he pays heavy costs over time is another. And three, you can dishearten him, persuading him he's unlikely to fulfill his war aims.
A disconsolate adversary, or one who balks at the costs of war, is a pliant adversary. He cuts the best deal he can to exit the imbroglio.
If a military triumph lay beyond Tokyo's reach, the second two methods remained available in the Pacific. Japanese commanders could have husbanded resources, narrowing the force mismatch between the warring sides. They could have made the conflict more costly, painful, and prolonged for America, undercutting its resolve. Or, alternatively, they could have avoided rousing American fury to wage total war in the first place. By foregoing a strike at Hawaii, they could have enfeebled the opponent's resolve or, perhaps, sidelined the opponent entirely.
Bottom line, no likely masterstroke -- no single stratagem or killing blow -- would have defeated the United States. Rather, Japanese commanders should have thought and acted less tactically and more strategically. In so doing they would have improved Japan's chances.
Which brings us to Five Ways Japan Could Have Won. Now, the items catalogued below are far from mutually exclusive. The Japanese leadership would have boosted its prospects had it embraced them all. And granted, enacting some of these measures would have demanded preternaturally farseeing leadership. Foresight was a virtue of which Japan's vacillating emperor and squabbling military rulers were woefully short. Whether it was plausible for them to act wisely is open to debate. With these caveats out of the way, onward!
- Wage one war at a time. Conserving enemies is a must even for the strongest combatants. It's imperative for small states with big ambitions to avoid making war against everyone in sight. Imposing discipline on the war was particularly hard for Japan, whose political system -- patterned on Imperial Germany's, alas -- was stovepiped between the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy (IJA and IJN), with no meaningful civilian political oversight. Absent a strong emperor, the army and navy were free to indulge their interservice one-upsmanship, jostling for influence and prestige. The IJA cast its gaze on continental Asia, where a land campaign in Manchuria, then China proper, beckoned. The IJN pushed for a maritime campaign aimed at resources in Southeast Asia. By yielding to these contrary impulses between 1931 and 1941, Japan in effect surrounded itself with enemies of its own accord -- invading Manchuria and China before lashing out at the imperial powers in Southeast Asia and, ultimately, striking at Pearl Harbor. Any tactician worth his salt will tell you a 360-degree threat axis -- threats all around -- makes for perilous times. Tokyo should have set priorities. It might have accomplished some of its goals had it taken things in sequence.
- Listen to Yamamoto. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto reputedly cautioned his superiors that Japan must win a quick, decisive victory lest it awaken the American "sleeping giant" with fateful consequences for Japan. The IJN, prophesied Yamamoto, could run wild for six months -- maybe a year -- before the United States mustered its full power for combat. During that interval, Japan needed to stun American society into a compromise peace -- in effect a partition of the Pacific -- while firming up the island defense perimeter enclosing the Asia-Pacific territories won by Japanese arms. What if its efforts fell short? U.S. industry would be turning out armaments in massive quantities, while new vessels laid down under the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 -- in effect a second, bulked-up U.S. Navy -- would start arriving in the theater. The balance would shift irretrievably. In short, Yamamoto warned military leaders against "script-writing," or assuming the enemy would do precisely what they foresaw. The admiral knew a thing or two about the United States, and understood the American propensity to defy preconceptions.
- Don't listen to Yamamoto. If Admiral Yamamoto rendered wise counsel on the strategic level, it was suspect on the operational level. His solution to the problem of latent U.S. material superiority was to strike at what navalists saw as the hub of enemy power -- the adversary's battle fleet. For decades IJN planners had envisioned waging "interceptive operations" to slow down and weaken the U.S. Pacific Fleet as it steamed westward, presumably to the relief of the Philippine Islands. Once aircraft and submarines deployed to outlying islands whittled the Pacific Fleet down to size, the IJN battle fleet would force a decisive battle. Yamamoto, however, convinced IJN commanders to jettison interceptive operations in favor of a sudden blow at Pearl Harbor. But in reality, the battle line stationed in Hawaii wasn't the core of American naval strength. The nascent Two-Ocean Navy Act fleet was. The best that Yamamoto's scheme could accomplish, consequently, was to delay an American counteroffensive into 1943. Tokyo may have been better off sticking with the interwar plan, which would have driven up U.S. costs, protracted the endeavor, and potentially sapped U.S. perseverance.
- Concentrate rather than disperse resources. Just as Japanese officials seemed incapable of restricting themselves to one war at a time, they seemed incapable of limiting the number of active operations and combat theaters. Look no further than Japanese actions in 1942. IJN task forces struck into the Indian Ocean, inflicting a Pearl Harbor on the British Eastern Fleet off Ceylon. They saw the need to shore up the northern flank at the Battle of Midway by assaulting the remote Aleutian Islands. And they extended the empire's outer defense perimeter -- and assumed vast new waterspace to defend -- by opening a secondary theater in the Solomon Islands, in a vain effort to interrupt sea routes connecting North America with Australia. It's incumbent on the weaker combatant to ask itself whether the gains from secondary enterprises are exceptional, and what it risks in the most important theaters, before undertaking new adventures. Japan, which had fewer resources to spare, raised the costs to itself -- more than the United States -- through its strategic indiscipline.
- Wage unrestricted submarine warfare. Inexplicably, the IJN neglected to do what the U.S. Pacific Fleet set in motion while Battleship Row was still afire: unleash its submarine force to sink any ship, naval or merchant, that flew an enemy flag. By 1945, American boats dismembered the island empire by severing the shipping lanes connecting its parts. Japanese submarines were the equals of their U.S. Navy counterparts. IJN commanders should have looked at the nautical chart, grasped the fact that U.S. naval forces must operate across thousands of miles of ocean simply to reach the Western Pacific, and directed sub skippers to make the transpacific sea lanes no-go zones for American shipping. It's hard to imagine a more straightforward, cost-effective scheme whereby Japan's navy could exact a heavy toll from its opponent. Neglecting undersea warfare was an operational transgression of the first order.A resident participates in an Effingham County High School Board meeting (WTOC)
Members of the NAACP were booed and called “racist” by white residents on Tuesday as they tried to make their case for removing Confederate symbols at Effingham County High School in Georgia.
According the WTOC, over 500 people showed up at the Effingham County High School Board meeting on Tuesday to debate whether the school should stop using a Confederate soldier mascot and the pro-slavery anthem “Dixie” as a fight song.
“We have come to make a petition to right the wrong that should have been corrected 60 years ago,” Effingham NAACP President Leroy Lloyd announced in front of the rowdy crowd.
Also speaking on behalf of the NAACP, First Union Baptist Church Pastor Franklin Blanks, Jr. asked the school board to respect all citizens.
“We asked that you discontinue the use of Dixie as a school fight song,” Blanks said, sending the crowd into an uproar.
“You try to erase my heritage, you try to erase anything that you think is racist,” one supporter of the Confederate symbols told Blanks. “But the whole time you were over here, sir, I apologize, but everything you said was racist.”
That sentiment earned a standing ovation from the mostly-white audience.
WTOC reported that some of attendees were nearly escorted from the meeting by law enforcement, but it was not clear which was causing the disturbance.
The school board said that a decision would be made at a later date.
Petitions both for and against the Confederate symbols are being hosted by the website Change.org.
Watch the video below from WJCL, broadcast Aug. 18, 2015.
Watch the video below from WTOC.
wistv.com – Columbia, South CarolinaThe editors at CBS asked me to respond to Ari Fleischer's tweets about how tax burdens have changed in recent years:
Are the wealthy paying to much in taxes?: Ari Fleischer, the former White House Press Secretary for U.S. President George W. Bush, has been trying to make the case on Twitter that the wealthy are taking on more of the tax burden than ever. Here's a sample of his tweets:
@AriFleischer The share of total federal tax paid by bottom 60% dropped from 22.5% in '79 to 14.4% today. Source: CBO
@AriFleischer The share of total federal tax paid by middle income dropped from 21% in '79 to 16.5% in '07.
@AriFleischer The share of total federal taxes paid by top 10% rose from 40.7% in '79 to 55% in '07.
The share of total federal taxes paid by top 1% rose from 15.4% in '79 to 28.1% in '07
Of course, the argument is incomplete without knowing how the share of income changed over these years. He uses the CBO as a source, so I'll use the same same data to respond to his claims:
CBO finds that, between 1979 and 2007, income grew by: 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households,
65 percent for the next 19 percent,
Just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent, and
18 percent for the bottom 20 percent. The share of income going to higher-income households rose, while the share going to lower-income households fell. The top fifth of the population saw a 10-percentage-point increase in their share of after-tax income.
Most of that growth went to the top 1 percent of the population.
All other groups saw their shares decline by 2 to 3 percentage points.
Let's take the top 1% first. Between 1979 and 2007 income for this group grew by 275 percent, and the share of income doubled from around 10 percent to around 20 percent of total income. However, the share of taxes for this group less than doubled. Thus, a doubling of income resulted in less than a doubling of taxes. Given that income growth outpaced tax growth, it's hard to see how we can describe this as an increase in the tax burden for the top 1%.
What about the middle of the distribution? As noted above, the share of total federal tax paid by middle income taxpayers dropped from 21 percent in 1979 to 16.5 percent in 2007. However, over the same time period the share of income for this group went from 51.1 percent to 43.5 percent. When the fact that the share of income for the middle income group has fallen is accounted for, it's no surprise that the share of taxes has fallen as well. On net, the two roughly cancel -- the fall in income and the fall in taxes are roughly proportional. Thus, the notion that the rich are paying more, and middle income families are paying less -- that income is being redistributed from the rich to the middle -- does not hold up to further scrutiny. The rich are doing better than ever, tax rates are at historic lows for this group, and their share of taxes has not risen by as much as their share of income.
What about the bottom of the income distribution? First, it's highly misleading to just look at federal taxes for this group. The federal tax burden is relatively low for this group, but when state taxes, sales taxes, and the like are factored in the burden is relatively high. For example:
Data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy show that the poorest fifth of households paid a stunning 12.3 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes in 2010
When all federal, state, and local taxes are taken into account, the bottom fifth of households paid 16.3 percent of their incomes in taxes, on average, in 2010.
Mitt Romney pays 15 percent, or thereabouts (probably a bit more when state and local taxes are accounted for), while this group pays more than 15 percent in taxes even though their incomes are very low. Enough said about who faces a larger tax burden.
Ari Fleischer is trying to make you believe that taxes on the wealthy have risen, and that the increase in taxes is being used to fund tax reductions for lower income classes. However, when income gains are factored in the numbers tell a different story. This graph shows what has actually happened to the tax rates for the wealthy:
The next time Ari Fleischer or any other political operative tries to make the case that the wealthy have experienced an increase in their tax burden, keep this graph in mind.Thank God we have Congress to run our lives:
Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur [(D-Ohio)] came to a House committee hearing on Thursday prepared to ask U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson tough questions about his involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis.
Unfortunately, she was questioning the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
The Ohio Democrat, at a House of Representatives Budget Committee hearing, said she wanted to know what Wall Street firms were responsible for the securitization of subprime mortgages.
She then asked: “Seeing as how you were the former CEO of Goldman Sachs…” But the only person testifying at the hearing interrupted.
“No, no, no, you’re confusing me with the Treasury Secretary,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
“I’ve got the wrong firm? Paulson, Oh, OK. Where were you sir?” Kaptur said.
Bernanke noted that he was head of the Princeton University economics department.The stage is set for another Obamacare showdown at the Supreme Court. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
If the Supreme Court rules next spring against insurance subsidies in states that have refused to run their own marketplaces, these states will face a decision with implications for millions of people who'd suddenly lose subsidies: Do they cave and set up their own health insurance marketplaces, after all?
When most Republican-led states rejected the chance to set up their own marketplaces, or exchanges, two years ago, many offered a few similar reasons: They didn't want to do anything that can be viewed as helping to implement the Affordable Care Act, it would be too expensive to run and they didn't see any difference between state and federal control. That last factor suddenly changes if the Supreme Court rules against subsidies in federal-run exchanges.
The latest Obamacare case accepted by the Supreme Court on Friday revolves around whether the Congress intended for residents to receive financial assistance to purchase health coverage in states that didn't set up their own insurance marketplaces, or exchanges. Subsidies in state-run exchanges aren't at stake in the case, King. v. Burwell.
If millions of people lose their subsidies overnight, though, there could be pressure on states that don't run their own marketplaces to set one up. So what would it take, at this point, for a state to set up their own marketplace? There is a way, and it isn't probably all that expensive to do, according to Kevin Lucia and Justin Giovannelli, insurance experts at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute.
States looking to take ownership of their marketplace would have to establish a legal authority for operating the marketplace; detail a plan to the feds how they'd make sure it works; and set up a governing body to oversee the marketplace. According to the Georgetown researchers, the state-run exchanges have to handle certain functions like overseeing health plans and consumer outreach, but they could still rely on HealthCare.gov for enrollment — which means states wouldn't have to bear the major cost of setting up that technical infrastructure. That's the approach taken by states like Oregon, Nevada and New Mexico in the upcoming enrollment period.
The following map from the Kaiser Family Foundation shows how control of the exchanges is split across the country as things stand now:
(Kaiser Family Foundation)
There are state-run exchanges in 13 states and the District of Columbia. There are another seven "partnership" states —Arkansas, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, West Virginia, Delaware and New Hampshire — that regulate health plans and handle consumer outreach while relying on the HealthCare.gov enrollment portal. They'd seem to be the likeliest candidates to establish a state-run marketplace if the Supreme Court rules against the Obama administration.
"They're already most of the way there," said Georgetown's Giovannelli. "You do need to have legal authority, you need to have some sort of governance structure under the regulations. So there are things a given state might need to do."
Officials in one state, Delaware, specifically chose the partnership model because they didn't think the state was big enough to sustain the funding necessary for maintaining its own enrollment portal. But the politics would be tricky in most of these other partnership states, since they didn't have the political support in the first place to set up a fully state-run exchange.
Governors in states like Kentucky and New York had used executive orders to establish their state-run marketplaces. Others may look to follow that approach if the Supreme Court overturns subsidies in federal-run marketplaces, but that depends on what powers are available to the governors in each of those states.
Going through state legislatures would be tougher. Last week's elections solidified Republican control in statehouses across the country, and as Harvard School of Public Health professor Robert Blendon said last week, state lawmakers will take that as a vote against doing anything to implement Obamacare in their states.
Of course, Congress could also choose to pass a law clarifying that residents of any state are eligible for insurance subsidies. But that seems like a leap right now.SEPTEMBER 26--An argument “over an orgy” turned bloody early Saturday morning when a 19-year-old Floridian repeatedly stabbed her fiancé in the arm, according to cops who arrested the woman on a felony charge.
As detailed in a criminal complaint, Kelci Perkins and Michael McCabe quarrelled “after becoming intoxicated.” The couple “had an argument over an orgy (group sex),” a sheriff’s deputy reported.
Perkins punched McCabe in the mouth, causing a “minor injury” to her beau’s lip. McCabe responded by striking Perkins in her left eye. The mutual combat occurred at a home in Largo, a city outside Tampa.
After exchanging blows, the couple walked to the nearby residence they share at Sun Village, a manufactured home community in Largo.
Upon getting home after 3 AM, the couple resumed arguing, cops say. At one point, Perkins allegedly “took a knife from their kitchen” and stabbed McCabe five times in his left forearm. “The defendant and victim have lived together for 3 years and claim to be engaged to be married,” the complaint notes.
Perkins, seen above, was subsequently arrested for aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. She was booked into the county jail, where she remains locked up in lieu of $20,000 bond. A judge has ordered Perkins to have no contact with McCabe, who suffered "superficial wounds."
Court filings do not further describe the substance of the couple’s orgy dispute. McCabe’s Facebook page still lists him as being engaged to Perkins, who is pictured at left in her mug shot. (1 page)This article is about the province of Belgium. For the neighbouring independent country, see Luxembourg
Province of Belgium
Province of Belgium in Wallonia
Luxembourg (French: Luxembourg; Dutch: (help·info) ; German: Luxemburg; Luxembourgish: Lëtzebuerg; Walloon: Lussimbork), also called Belgian Luxembourg,[3][4] is the southernmost province of Wallonia and of Belgium. It borders on (clockwise from the east) the country of Luxembourg, France, and the Belgian provinces of Namur and Liège. Its capital is Arlon (Luxembourgish: Arel, Dutch: Aarlen), in the south-east of the province.
It has an area of 4,443 km2 (1,715 sq mi), making it the largest Belgian province. At around 250,000 residents, it is also the least populated province, making it a relatively sparsely populated province in an otherwise very densely populated country.
It is significantly larger (70%) and much less populous than the neighbouring Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. About eighty percent of the province is part of the densely wooded Ardennes region. The southernmost region of the province is called Gaume or Belgian Lorraine (main city: Virton).
The Arelerland or Arlon region (in red on the following map of the province) alongside the border with the neighbouring Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg has the particularity that many residents speak Luxembourgish, closely related to German, instead of the Walloon variety of French spoken elsewhere in the province.
The province was separated from the neighbouring Luxembourg by the Third Partition of Luxembourg, de jure in 1830–31 by the Conference of London dealing with the consequences of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, de facto in 1839, after William I, King of the Netherlands and Grand-Duke of Luxembourg, agreed to its decisions and thus the province was given to the newly created Kingdom of Belgium.
Subdivisions [ edit ]
Luxembourg province is divided into five administrative districts (French: arrondissements) containing a total of 44 municipalities (French: communes).
See also [ edit ]Collecting in the Río Tahuayo and the Río Tamshiyacu drainages 2011 by Tom Christoffersen ( Tom C )
In October 2011, I visited the Peruvian Amazon again, exploring
and documenting dwarf cichlid habitats and their fishes ( among other things ).
From the jungle capital Iquitos, I carried out several expeditions to
examine different biotopes, fish and their habitats.
This year, I went alone again, with local friends/fishermen accompanying me on the expeditions.
The first of the expeditions in 2011 brought me to the drainages of the Río Tahuayo and the Río Tamshiyacu, primarily to learn more about the Apistogramma panduro, its habitats and its different forms.
I have kept and bred two of the three known forms of Apistogramma panduro: The "normal" form "A 183", and the form "A 184", with cross-bands in the caudal fin. The latter was said to be found in the Río Tamshiyacu-drainage, only.
The third form, "A 185", equal to "A 184", but with an additional red marking in the very posterior part of the dorsal fin, has almost never been seen in the hobby.
I had never seen any picture of a habitat for any of the Apistogramma panduro forms.
The main focuses on this expedition were therefore :
- to find out more about the distribution of the "A 183" and "A 184"
- to document their habitats
- to find and confirm the existence of the "A 185" form, if possible.
In Iquitos, Peru
In October 2011,
I was in Iquitos,
Peru, again.
This map shows where it's located,
in the Peruvian Amazon:
The actual area for this expedition:
I made deal with a local fisherman who knows a lot of Apistogramma, and who has accompanied me on many other expeditions the latest 7 years, to accompany me on this expedition. We planned to go from Iquitos by a ferry (following the red dots ) to the Río Tahuayo, and to the small village Horizonte (Marked yellow on the map). There "my" fisherman knows a guy who could show us where to search for the Apistogramma panduro. After collecting the actual fish, and documented the habitat, we planned to find a small boat, and to go upstream the Río Tamshiyacu, searching for Apistogramma panduro there too. In both areas we would of course ask the local people to tell us all they know about the different forms of Apistogramma panduro..
The expedition
At 08:30 am we entered the boat which would bring us to the Río Tahuayo:
It would depart from the district of Iquitos called Belén, at Río Itaya:
The departure was at 10:00 am.
Downstream the Río Itaya.....
...and we entered the mighty Río Amazonas:
4 hours later, we passed the town of Tamshiyacu:
This is floating gas-stations:
We passed the mouth of Río Tamshiyacu:
and less than one hour later, we spotted the mouth of Río Tahuayo, entering the Río Amazonas:
Río Tahuayo:
After a short trip upstream the Río Tahuayo:
...we left the boat, and walked up to a small village, Nuevo Horizonte:
We met our host's youngest son:
and we were quartered in this house, with his whole family and lots of ducks and chickens :
Behind and below the house, there was a small pond :
Of course we had to examine the fauna.
Lovely yellow strain of Nannostomus marginatus:
and a few other species too:
We went to sleep early this night.
Heavy rain during most of the night. The cock screamed before 05:00.
We left the village, and walked on paths towards a neighboring village:
After a couple of hours, we could see this.
The water was grayish, not light brown as it uses to be, because of the heavy rain the last night:
The water: pH: 4,88 Conductivity: 9 microSiemens/cm Temperature: 25,2 ºC
and there were fish in it!!!!!! :
Beautiful Apistogramma panduro (Tahuayo):
Amazingly, some of the males had cross-stripes in the caudal fin, while others didn't!
This confirms that the both forms "A 183" and "A 184" not only being forms of the same species,
but also the same location.
There were some lovely Pyrrhulina there too:
We searched every small water for fish:
We started on our way back; we would then fish in all the streams and pools we had passed earlier.
The locals noticed our presence, and they all shouted "Good morning":
We passed the local police station:
After a while we stopped at this small stream :
The water: pH: 6,06 Conductivity: 7 microSiemens/cm Temperature: 26,8 ºC
After having studied the amazing leaf-cutter ants a little:
We searched the stream for fish:
WOW!!! Totally unexpected!!
This fish, with split bars 5 and 6, indicating the Apistogramma-eunotus-complex, and with a bicolored caudal fin with rows of spots in the center; is
Apistogramma sp. "Tahuayo"
I wonder if anybody else has seen this during the last 10 years...:-D
In the middle of this luxuriant jungle...
....local people....
....have cleared the space to grow pineapples,
and they have more than 25,000 plants!:
It tastes delicious when you're thirsty and warm!
This is the place where they process the harvest:
We soon spotted areas with this fern: normally a sign of acid blackwater near by:
And here it is:
The water: pH: 4,74 Conductivity: 7 microSiemens/cm Temperature: 25,7 ºC
There were lots of fish in it:
I was quite amazed, as I totally had forgotten that Apistogramma norberti lives her!
and beautiful Pyrrhulina spilota:
and of course, the always present Crenuchus spilurus (the Sailfin tetra):
and some beautiful representatives of the local flora:
Back in the small village, we examined the pond behind the house better,
including both the supply and the drainage.
And we found beautiful fish:
Apistogramma agassizii (Río Tahuayo):
and a form of Apistogramma cf. eunotus:
Lots of amazing birds in the area:
The pond were also the place we washed after long walks, had a bath when we were hot,
brushed our teeth and washed in the morning etc.
Only minutes after we'd used it, the water was clear and clean again!
In the evening we went down to the Río Tahuayo, to watch the everyday life here:
The next day, Río Tamshiyacu was our focus.
With a small boat (pecki-pecki), we left Nuevo Horizonte at 06:00 am, heading downstream the Río Tahuayo:
We traveled all the way to the mouth of Río Tahuayo, and then downstream the Río Amazonas,
to the town of Tamshiyacu. There we bought gasoline for the engine.
We then traveled upstream the Río Amazonas again, to the mouth of Río Tamshiyacu:
and upstream the Río Tamshiyacu:
After some hours, we made a stop here, and asked the owner for permission to search for a few small fish (important: smaller than eatable size!) on his property:
The owner was a very nice person, and he seemed pleased to have visitors. He willingly showed us where to go through the jungle, to find the small streams inside:
We searched lots of streams (quebradas) for fish, but found not much of interest, if anything at all.
But at last: here we found fish:
The water: pH: 5,88 Conductivity: 22 microSiemens/cm Temperature: 25,0 ºC
Amazingly, exactly what we were looking for:
Beautiful Apistogramma panduro (Tamshiyacu):
The jungle is beautiful in this area, but quite exhausting to explore :
As usual, we found some Crenicichla sp. in several of the small streams:
and Pyrrhulina:
and shrimps:
This was a VERY hot day, and we naturally had to build some shelter for the hot sun, where the fish we brought with us could be kept in the shadow:
We then said "Thank you" and goodbye to the Landowner and his family (and gave him some money and a few cigarettes):
and we then left the area, heading for the town of Tamshiyacu:
In Tamshiyacu we booked seats in a "rapido" (fast boat) to Iquitos, and we arrived Iquitos late the same evening, on Monday 3. October 2011.
Every fisherman, and most of the locals, in the areas we visited on this expedition, were asked if they knew or had heard or seen anything about the Apistogramma panduro form with the red marking in the posterior part of the dorsal fin ("A 185").
None of them, absolutely none, had ever seen it or had any information about it.
This led me to the preliminary conclusion that there very unlikely exists a specific location where the "A 185" lives. Most likely just a few fish develop the red marking in the dorsal fin......
but I'll of course continue to investigate this phenomenon, and I'll not stop until I at least find a person who has seen it, or better: find a live specimen of the "A 185"!
The next day I was planning the next expedition: To |
for €154.28. The letter itself was artfully vague:
Further to your recent enquiry please find enclosed a cheque for the amount:
€154.28 Yours Sincerely,
Refunds Department,
Dell Products.
Now technically Dell haven’t admitted the claim (i.e. accepted that I was entitled to a refund). If they did they should have sent the cheque to the Small Claims registrar. I suppose, It’s possible that their response to the registrar was sent at the same time as my cheque but just hasn’t arrived yet.
Anyway, tomorrow I will post the rejected software and Windows licence key sticker back to Dell and lodge my refund cheque.
AdvertisementsOutreach event is 1-3 p.m. Thursday
$17 million renovation planned for Savarine Hotel
Renovations of neighborhood storefronts sought to boost curb appeal
Detroit-based contractors are being sought for projects around the city, including a $17 million rehabilitation of the Hotel Savarine, former home of legendary beat writer Jack Kerouac.
A contractor outreach session is scheduled for 1-3 p.m. Thursday at Thinkers Coworking Spaces, 14346 E. Jefferson Ave. The free event is being hosted by D2D, Motor City Re-Store and Jefferson East Inc. with the goal of attracting Detroit-based contractors to bid on $20 million worth of work across 80 projects citywide.
"We need to see to it that Detroit-based contractors get the work," said Keith Rodgerson, program manager for Motor City Re-Store. "It's not just because we're using taxpayer money. We are using our resources to keep people in the city employed and to help generate money back into the city from having healthy businesses."
The local outreach is part of a broader goal of employing Detroiters for projects in which they can take pride, like Little Caesars Arena, said Charlotte Fisher, spokeswoman for Detroit Economic Growth Corp. A similar event a couple weeks ago for construction of the Pistons headquarters and Henry Ford medical facility drew about 60 contractors, she said.
The 80 projects being put up for bid this week largely include storefront renovations to boost curb appeal of neighborhoods around the city, Rodgerson said. Much of the emphasis is on the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood on the city's lower east side.
"Enhancing retail nodes along the corridor and helping to create an amenity for the neighborhood there" is the goal, Rodgerson said.
Detroit-based Shelborne Development Co. LLC is leading renovation of the Hotel Savarine in that neighborhood, with Jefferson East, also based in Detroit, as a partner with 25-percent stake. The historic "stag hotel" has fallen from grace since opening in 1926. The hotel closed in the 1990s and after a failed renovation attempt in 2006, it sits gutted and tagged with graffiti.
The plan, again, is to restore the building for housing, said Joshua Elling, executive director of Jefferson East. Construction is expected to begin late next year.
The two developers are also equal partners on a renovation project for two nearby apartment buildings on Marlborough Street, a project expected to start in late November, Elling said.
Small to midsize contractors are being sought for the citywide projects, Rodgerson said. Those who attend the outreach event will be given "preferred consideration."
"This is part of a broader economic strategy to keep the city's resources within its boundaries," he said.Television favourite Bob the Builder is to have his fingers doctored for the Japanese market - because he looks like a gangster.
In Japan the country's most feared mafia - the Yakuza - cut off their little fingers as a sign they can be trusted and have strength of character.
Bob's creators, Hit Entertainment, have also decided to give all merchandising of four-fingered Bob an extra digit so children will not be alarmed.
He is not the first animated character to be altered - in 1994 Postman Pat was considered too scary for export and got the same treatment.
'Too sensitive'
But Japanese journalist Chika Miyatake said she thought the cartoon creators were being too sensitive.
"If Japanese kids saw this cartoon with the character having four instead of five fingers then they might make a joke that he is in the mafia but they wouldn't be scared of it.There’s not a contract agreement yet or even an indication that one is close, but one thing seems clear about this particular baseball offseason: There might not be a larger gap between our perception and the conversations we’re hearing in the real world than in those regarding Nick Markakis. A few weeks ago, it seemed like the Orioles were ready to retain him for the next four years, but that hasn’t quite happened yet, and the latest rumors have the Braves, Blue Jays, Giants, O’s, and potentially others all showing interest.
Earlier this week, ESPN’s Jim Bowden — who’s really very good at this sort of thing — suggested Markakis could get four years and $52 million. MLB Trade Rumors said 4/$48M in October. FanGraphs readers were a little more conservative, coming up with an average of 3.4 years and $39.8M, but we also know that the FanGraphs crowd tends to underestimate free agent contracts somewhat.
Just by those numbers, one would think that Markakis is a desirable player to have, but you probably already know that most of the FanGraphs staff doesn’t really see it that way. A month ago, Dave compared Markakis to Nori Aoki, who clearly isn’t getting a four-year deal. Steamer pegs him for a 103 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR in his age-31 season, and that’s with the benefit of a projected 679 plate appearances. Using Steamer/600 on our Free Agent Tracker, he’s tied for the 15th-best unsigned hitter out there. (The usual “don’t overthink the decimal point” caveat applies.) You’ve probably seen many of us mention how down we are on him via tweets or in chats, as well. He’s not young. He’s not improving. He’s not even a source of righty power, this year’s trendy “must-have.”
And yet, Markakis seems very likely to get a comfortable deal. So before we even know what team is going to give it to him, opening themselves up to inevitable ridicule, perhaps it’s time we shine the spotlight inward first. Where’s the disconnect? What are we missing that makes Markakis so inexplicably appealing?
Is he a better defender than we think?
This is the easiest place to start, because it’s the area that’s got the largest gap. Markakis won a Gold Glove in 2014, his second in the last four seasons. In nine years and 11,758.2 defensive innings, he’s made only 18 errors. A full one-third of that total came in 2009 alone, and in the four years since, he’s fumbled only two balls. He hasn’t made a single error in more than two seasons, not since misplaying a Jeff Francoeur foul fly on Aug. 10, 2012. Clearly, Markakis is sure-handed, and in the three seasons that we have Inside Edge fielding available, he’s made 99.7% of “Routine” plays.
So if you only knew that, you might find it extremely difficult to parse the fact that our advanced fielding metrics find him to be below-average. Here’s Markakis’ important advanced fielding stats for the last five seasons:
DRS UZR/150 Defense 2010 -11 -4.8 -12.8 2011 2 -5.2 -12.7 2012 -7 -13.2 -13.6 2013 -7 -5.8 -14.1 2014 1 5.8 -2.5
That looks pretty miserable, though of course the “defense” stat is adjusted for position, and right fielders get a -7.5 adjustment, since it’s one of the least important defensive positions. If you wanted to just look at Markakis without comparing him to everyone else, he’d be below-average from 2010-13 (but less so), and above-average in 2014.
The obvious next question is why advanced stats dislike Markakis so much, and that’s an answer that’s relatively easy to answer if you’ve lived through any of the endless Derek Jeter arguments over the years. The chart below shows the three major components of UZR to the left, and the results from the Fan Scouting Report at the right.
Arm RngR ErrR Arm Strength Arm
Accuracy 2010 1.0 -8.2 1.7 92 98 2011 1.8 -9.2 1.8 83 91 2012 -0.4 -8.9 0.7 71 73 2013 2.6 -11.5 2.3 57 70 2014 5.5 -1.6 2.3 76 87
While the FSR is obviously not exactly a scientific method, what we have here shows some pretty obvious reasons why the eye test and the metrics test on Markakis don’t align. Again, we see his ability to avoid miscues appear in ErrR, and we see an accurate (though potentially weakening) arm on both sides of the table. You rarely see Markakis look bad in the outfield, and that accounts for a lot when you’re watching on television. But it’s the RngR column that dooms Markakis much as it did Jeter — it’s great to be sure-handed, but if you’re poor at actually getting to the ball, your value is going to be limited.
That’s long been an issue for Markakis, and the seeming rebound in 2014 is what looks like the outlier more than anything. We can’t know for sure what caused that, because it’s not like he’s had any lower body injuries to recover from, and though he’s aged and slowed somewhat, he’s not David Ortiz out there either. Part of me wonders if the Orioles’ increasing (and increasingly effective) usage of shifts have helped Markakis end up in more favorable spots to field the ball in 2014, but that’s just speculation on my part.
Still, perhaps different teams value what he brings with the glove differently. If you’re looking for someone spectacular who is going to regularly make the extraordinary play to keep runs off the board, Markakis probably isn’t that. If you want someone steady who won’t burn you, he’s your man. That’s about as strong of recommendation as we’re going to be able to offer on defense, however. Range isn’t something that’s likely to improve as he ages.
Do teams care more about contact skills?
This is the other defense of Markakis that regularly comes up, and it’s partially a valid one, maybe moreso if you really buy into the idea that teams are going to copy the Royals’ blueprint of adding plus-contact hitters. (As opposed to the wildly great bullpen or fantastic outfield defense.) As the rest of baseball keeps striking out more, Markakis has been able to keep his whiff rate well below the league average.
Of course, there’s a few issues with that. One is that after three straight years of a K% starting with a “10,” Markakis’ whiff rate increased to 11.9 in 2014. Over the last three years, that number is 11.2%, which is good, but not necessarily elite — it’s tied for 18th-best among qualified hitters. His K/BB numbers have remained relatively steady for the last five years, so there’s not much danger of imminent collapse here, and that should help keep what is usually an above-average OBP afloat.
That said, “contact” and “good contact” aren’t always the same thing, because Markakis’ power has all but disappeared over the years, potentially affected by 2012 surgeries on his right wrist and left thumb as well as to fix a hernia. His batted ball distances have been nothing short of terrifying, really:
Avg. Feet MLB rank 2009 297.91 71 2010 291.23 124 2011 279.86 145 2012 284.07 124 2013 271.22 223 2014 267.92 228
There’s also this: Camden Yards is generally a pretty good place for a lefty hitter to find the stands. Here’s every single Markakis homer over the last three seasons, 37 of them, 23 of which came at home:
If he were to end up in a park that didn’t cater so well to lefties, it’s easy to see that homer total dropping from his usual 10-12 into the single digits. Obviously, this all plays into his total wRC+. An 88 in 2013 was terrible, and a 106 in 2014 was adequate. Combine the two, and he’s tied for 128th in baseball in 2013-14. Among the names ahead of him: Michael Saunders, Chris Johnson and Ike Davis.
It’s true that Markakis has better contact skills than most other players. It hasn’t yet been proven that the market is willing to wildly overpay for that, or that he brings a ton else to the table offensively.
I still don’t think we’ve figured out what makes him appealing. Let’s look at some potentially similar players, but…
How about some comps?
…I don’t think this is going to help the case. I really want to know what it is about Markakis that’s fascinating. I’m not sure this table gets us there. This is a list of eight outfielders, Markakis’ age or younger (save for Aoki), with superior performance over the last two years and similar projections in Steamer/600 for 2015.
These are players who are either freely available for a fraction of what Markakis is expected to get or would be reasonably inexpensive to acquire via trade. Blanco seemed like less than a lock to even be tendered a contract last night, though he ultimately was. This isn’t exactly a great market for offense — after Chase Headley, it’s Melky Cabrera and cover your eyes — but it’s not like there aren’t other options that couldn’t provide most or all of Markakis’ value for a portion of the price. Why a team would commit multiple expensive years when there’s other options, well, it doesn’t add up.
Let’s say you disagree with Markakis’ defensive ratings, that you prefer to think of him as a 2 WAR player, which isn’t unfair. That’s a league-average player. Markakis seems like a league-average player. If wins are somewhere around $7 million this winter, you can make the argument that he’s worth $14 million next year. Let’s even call it $15 million, if you really like not striking out. But even if we go with that, he’s already shown that the last two years are the start of his decline. A four-year deal easily takes you to below-average or replacement or worse. It’s hard to see a team coming out ahead on that.
When I started this, I really wanted to see what I’d been missing. I wanted to know why the public perception and the advanced metrics seem so far apart. I’m not really sure I accomplished that. Markakis is a steady player, nothing more, with little upside remaining and age squarely against him, one who could look worse outside of Camden depending on where he winds up. Some team is going to pay heavily for that. Some team is going to regret doing so.Georges St-Pierre is on the shelf for at least a year following his latest knee surgery, and there’s no word whether or not he even wants to return to MMA. Chuck Liddell has been retired for several years now and won’t ever fight in the Octagon again. Brock Lesnar is currently enjoying the luxury of a multi-year deal with the WWE as a professional wrestler.
It would be easy to point at any of those names and say they were either the biggest star in the UFC or the face of the organization at one point in time. Fast-forward to today and names like Jon Jones and Ronda Rousey appear to be the next evolution of stars in the UFC, but who is the real face of the organization?
Some would say it’s actually UFC president Dana White, who is routinely the most recognizable face representing the promotion in press conferences and interviews all over the world. White’s outspoken, boisterous nature has made him a hit with local reporters, and the over the top way he handles just about every situation makes him a sports executive cut from a different cloth than people such as Roger Goodell in the NFL or Gary Bettman in the NHL.
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At a media luncheon in Vancouver on Friday, White was a special guest of the Board of Trade where the star power question came up, and the moderator immediately pointed at the UFC president as the real face of the organization.
White was quick to shoot him down, however, because no matter how many events he attends, shows he promotes or interviews he gives, the head honcho isn’t the star of the show.
Cain Velasquez is a huge star, too. When you have an entire country that’s going to follow and support you, there’s nothing bigger than that — Dana White
"That’s not true. The reception I got here was fantastic, but if I was standing right there and Georges St-Pierre was standing over there, I promise you I would have ate my lunch, I would have had dessert, and I probably would have made a few phone calls," White said with a laugh.
"I am the consistent guy you see promoting the fights, doing the things, and I appreciate it. Don’t ever be mistaken who the real stars are. The fighters are the real stars. Believe me."
It’s never easy to pinpoint why some fighters catch on with fans and others don’t. It’s not as simple as wins or losses or a name like Renan Barao would have been on top of the world prior to his fight with T.J. Dillashaw as he rode a 30-plus fight unbeaten streak into the Octagon.
Some would say the language barrier prevents some foreign fighters from catching on in the United States where everyone speaks English, but again there have been names like Anderson Silva, who remains one of the biggest stars in the sport today.
It sometimes comes down to catching fire at the exact right moment.
For instance look at St-Pierre as the prime example of the right place at the right time with the right kind of fighter.
When St-Pierre burst onto the scene in 2004, the sport of MMA was still very much in its infancy compared to where the UFC is at today. Here was this 23-year old Canadian with all the raw talent and ability to conquer the world given enough time.
As time ticked away, St-Pierre’s legend grew and an entire nation got behind him as Canada rallied around their home country hero as he ran roughshod over the entire UFC welterweight division. Over the course of his UFC career, St-Pierre was three times voted the Canadian Athlete of the year in front of famous and beloved hockey players.
The sport doesn’t have St-Pierre currently, but given the blueprint for how he became the biggest star in the UFC, White sees another person on the horizon ready to fill his role.
UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez is already one of the best pound-for-pound fighters on the planet, but as the promotion embarks on their first pay-per-view card in Mexico later this year, the entire future of the sport south of the border lies in his hands. Velasquez is a well-liked and well-received fighter in the United States, but White sees him transcending superstar status with his fan base growing everyday in Mexico.
"Cain Velasquez, too, we’re literally riding him down to Mexico," White said on Friday. "I wouldn’t even go to Mexico without Cain Velasquez. Cain Velasquez is a huge star, too. When you have an entire country that’s going to follow and support you, there’s nothing bigger than that."
The support of an entire country seems to be the difference between being a star and being a superstar in the UFC. St-Pierre had it with Canada and over time he built his stardom into a brand, and was the biggest draw on pay-per-view in the UFC.
Velasquez could follow suit with the UFC’s push into Mexico, and soon the company could have another megastar cash cow raking in huge numbers at the box office.
"You can argue it’s Jon Jones, it’s Ronda (Rousey), they don’t have Canada riding on their backs. They don’t have Mexico riding on their backs. When you can get a whole country behind you, that’s when you know what a big star you are," White said.
"Cain is, he’s the guy everyone cares about down there. Biggest press conference in Telavisa history when we went down there."Niall Murphy of KRW Law
A MAJOR MI5 surveillance operation against three Co Armagh republicans used methods never publicly revealed before.
New details of the sting have emerged after the case against the men collapsed this week.
Brothers Paul and Damien Duffy, along with their cousin Shane Duffy, were acquitted of all paramilitary related charges at a Belfast court on Thursday.
The charges, which the men had denied, included conspiracy to murder police and prison officers.
The acquittal could now have implications for other cases where security force surveillance is being relied on as evidence.
The men’s solicitor Niall Murphy, of KRW Law, has called on the Public Prosecution Service to carry out an “urgent review” of similar cases.
The Duffys' case collapsed during a disclosure hearing when prosecution solicitors offered no further evidence against the men after a judge ordered them to hand over details of a vehicle tracking device.
The PPS argued that some information regarding the device should not be shared with the defendants, although it could be given to an expert engaged by their lawyers under a confidentiality agreement.
"Whilst the judge accepted the prosecution submissions in relation to the sensitivity of the information he ruled that a fair trial could only be achieved if disclosure was made both to the defence expert and the defendants personally," it said.
"The prosecution were unable to comply with the judge's order and in those circumstances could not rely upon the tracking evidence."
"Having reviewed the remaining evidence, it was decided that the test for prosecution was no longer met."
Defence lawyers did, however, receive other information about the surveillance operation which revealed it was of a type and detail never seen before.
The MI5-led operation, which lasted almost three years, involved the use of audio surveillance and tracking devices fitted to several vehicles.
It is believed a helicopter was also used to monitor the men.
Exhibits presented to defence solicitors included detailed maps and graphics highlighting the movement of cars containing the men.
Information from bugs planted in the cars was ‘overlaid’ with GPS co-ordinates from trackers, meaning surveillance teams could identify the exact time and location comments were made.
Video footage, at times reconstructed by the PSNI, was also added to the computerised exhibits to recreate what could be seen from the vehicles at the location and times conversations were held.
The extraordinary operation was supplemented by ‘aerial platform footage”, which may have involved the use of drones, or ‘heletele’ footage filmed from a PSNI chopper.
At times this aerial footage was also inlaid on the exhibit to show where the car was in real time.
The Irish News revealed yesterday that the huge surveillance operation, which cost millions of pounds, involved 44 MI5 officers, who are known as ‘Pins’.
In addition 35 PSNI officers, known as ‘Oscars’, were involved.
Mr Murphy said “an exhibit of this nature has never been seen before in our courts”.
“The three accused were subject to the most sophisticated and intensive methods of surveillance ever seen in this jurisdiction, involving vehicle tracker devices planted in several cars, helicopter surveillance on many dates, complemented by on the ground covert undercover PSNI and Security Service operatives.”My local sushi place makes the best Magic Mushroom appetizer dish ever, so we asked them what was in it. Ever since then, my husband and I have been making our own at home. We go through quite a bit of Kewpie Japanese Mayo when we make it, so my Santa was nice enough to get me two bottles of it! I've been using it on other meals, too. It's got the right amount of sweetness in it.
The bacon spread is amazing, too. Luckily it was sent in a bag because it was busted on the bottom. I've put it in a separate container, so it should be good. I tried a little plain and it seemed sweet, but when I put some on my egg breakfast I could really taste bacon.
Thanks so much, smacdown55!!!Posted by Mark Williams | April 11, 2014
By Tim Esterdahl
By design, pickup truck bedliners take a beating. And since every truck owner knows this, bedliner manufacturers market their products by talking about how "tough" or "resilient" their bedliners are. Considering this marketing, and considering the tough use that all bedliners face, one might assume bedliner manufacturers offer similar comprehensive warranties. That is not the case.
After taking a close look at the warranties of four major bedliner brands — and reviewing the specific language of each warranty with an attorney — we've learned that some popular bedliner warranties don't live up to expectations set by their marketing materials.
While there are many manufacturers of bedliners, for this story we looked at the warranties for some of the more popular optons; spray-in, drop-in, and hybrid bedliners. We focused on Line-X, Rhino Linings, Duraliner/Pendaliner and DualLiner because they are available throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Exclusions for Commercial Use
After obtaining and reviewing a copy of the product warranties from each manufacturer, we learned that Line-X, Rhino Linings and Duraliner/Pendaliner do not warranty their products for commercial users (DualLiner does). This was a little surprising as these companies go to great lengths to advertise the durability of their products.
Since warranties are legal documents, we asked Arizona attorney D. Jeffrey Craven for some insight as to why commercial use might not be covered. Craven is a construction and commercial litigation attorney and has been practicing law for 20 years. He has litigated warranty claims under common law and express and implied warranties under the Uniform Commercial Code.
"Since these tend to be 'lifetime' warranties, they're written based upon an expected level of use," Craven said. "If a contracting company that had a fleet of trucks received warranty coverage for all their bedliners, they could end up making multiple warranty claims during the life of each of the vehicles in its fleet."
How about farmers and ranchers? Would they be entitled to warranty coverage? "That's hard to know. If the farmer is operating a small family ranch or farm, and the truck and bedliner were both purchased in the individual's name, more likely than not the manufacturer warranties would apply. If the farmer runs a large commercial enterprise that is owned by a corporation or limited liability company, it would likely be deemed 'commercial,' " Craven said.
Open to Interpretation
Cars.com image, Mark Williams
All the warranties we reviewed contained vague language, either in regard to coverage or in regard to limiting liability. Here are a couple of examples:
The Pendaliner/Duraliner warranty stated that it would warranty its product when used in "normal operating conditions."
The Rhino Linings warranty excludes coverage for "misuse."
While these terms might seem like normal "legalese" to some, a precise understanding of "misuse" or "normal operating conditions" is impossible since everyone has their own definition.
"My suspicion is that these terms were intentionally left vague in an effort to afford the manufacturer some discretion," Craven said. Does this mean that Rhino Linings or Pendaliner/Duraliner retailers would refuse a specific warranty claim? Not exactly. As franchisees, in many cases retailers are given quite a bit of latitude as to how to handle specific claims. No one can know 100 percent for sure.
It should be noted that both Line-X and Rhino require bedliner owners to return to their installer with any warranty claims (in the case of Line-X, only if the original installer is within 100 miles of the buyer's location). As noted, these individual installers seem to have the power to determine if your warranty claim is valid or not. With hundreds of installers across the U.S. and Canada, odds are good that each installer's definition of "misuse" — or "commercial use" — will vary.
Limited to Original Purchaser
In addition to commercial exclusions and vague language, the warranties from Line-X, Rhino Linings and Pendaliner/Duraliner are not transferrable, meaning that they are only available to the original purchaser.
On one hand, it makes sense for a company to limit its warranty to the actual person who bought the product. On the other hand, if the bedliners really do last for a "lifetime," what's the logic behind limiting coverage to the original buyer only? Shouldn't a product as durable and tough as a bedliner be warrantied regardless of ownership?
Warranty Comparison Results
All of the bedliner manufacturers we reviewed market their products as strong, tough, indestructible, etc. Yet most of these companies limit their warranty coverage in some specific ways. After reviewing each warranty in detail, we prepared a simple chart pickup owners can use to evaluate each product.
Additionally, here are the links to the warranty policies for Rhino Linings, DualLiner and Pendaliner/Duraliner. We also obtained a copy of a Line-X warranty policy from a local installer; upload it here.
Finding the Bottom Line
Be aware of inconsistencies. The marketing language used by three of the four bedliner manufacturers we reviewed doesn't seem to match their warranty policies. If their products really are as tough as they say, it seems to us their warranties should be better. However, we can imagine some cases where it would be understandable why one wouldn't warranty a product for commercial use and/or offer it as a transferable warranty considering Craven's explanation of the legal ramifications.
Our research indicates that DualLiner has the best warranty since it has the least number of exclusions, and the company states it will cover commercial use along with the option to transfer the warranty to a new owner. Note: We aren't saying that one bedliner is better than the others; we are saying that DualLiner seems to offer the best warranty.
Manufacturer imagesHi everyone! The Dusk Road is an exciting and complex set, so here to help you navigate it is my set review for Draft! I would recommend reading my initial impressions as well prior to this article, which would hopefully help make more sense of the rankings. For this article, I will cover all of the Fire cards.
Draft Rating Scale
For this new set, I’ve decided to adapt LSV’s rating scale (mainly for a reason that I’m keeping as a surprise xP). The lower half of the list is identical to LSV, while the top half is slightly different to better distinguish between 3.0/3.5/4.0/4.5 tiers.
When I release the new tier list, I will also migrate the current rating into the new system. Also, the scale has a relatively linear correspondence to my current scale (S -> 5.0, A- -> 3.5, C+ -> 1.5, F -> 0).
5.0: Premium bomb, card that consistently dominates the game and is hard to answer. (Xenan Obelisk, Accelerated Evolution)
4.5: Bomb, card that usually dominates the game if unanswered. (Pillar of Amar, Mistveil Drake, Memory Dredger)
4.0: High impact card that often generate strong value or tempo. (Annihilate, Cobalt Monument, Ageless Mentor)
3.5: Premium playable that pulls you into a color. (Awakened Student, Minotaur Lighthoof, Morningstar)
3.0: Good playable that basically always makes the cut. (Stormcrasher, Rebel Sharpshooter, Striped Araktodon)
2.5: Solid playable that rarely gets cut. (Stalwart Shield, Awakened Sentinel, Blinkwolf)
2.0: Good filler, but sometimes gets cut. (Alchemical Blast, Refresh, Thunderhoof Warrior)
1.5: Filler. Gets cut about half the time. (Amaran Camel, Amber Ring, Safe Return)
1.0: Bad filler. Gets cut most of the time. (Boltcrafter Shaman, Cirso’s Meddling, Plifer)
0.5: Very low-end playables and sideboard material. (Viper’s Bite, Decay, Centaur Outrider)
0.0: Completely unplayable. (A New Tomorrow, Mating Call, Forgotten Find)
The Fire Cards
Granite Waystone
Draft rating: 2.0
In draft, Waystones are always better than sigils (except when fetches are involved.) However, while this card doesn’t cost you a slot in your deck, it cost you a pick (since you could have picked a playable over it). What this means is that you will always want this card over your 30th playable, but never over your 20th playable. This is very easy to see in pack 4, but becomes slightly more situational in pack 1. The relative strengths of the Waystones also come into play. I think Granite, Cobalt and Amethyst are probably the strongest ones and thus, they all get a 2.0 rating. A 1/1 grenadin is not extremely impactful if you are firmly established as a beatdown. However, in all other cases (racing or stalling), an additional free chump blocker can buy you the extra turn needed to swing the game in your favor.
Helpful Doorbot
Draft rating: 1.0
A 0/3 is not a unit you will be happy to play in draft. However, the tribal mechanics are significantly pushed in draft, so the grenadine type can often matter. This card also bounces most 2 drops, so it could potentially stall the board. All said and done though, I would not be happy with this card in my deck, even with significant grenadine synergy.
Iceberg Frontrunner
Draft Rating: 0.5
1/2 is probably the worst stat-line for a 1 drop. Being unable to attack into or block most 2-drops makes this card very bad. The charge text would rarely matter because of the measly 1 attack.
Kaleb’s Intervention
Draft Rating: 1.0
Why is this spell not fast! It would easily be a 3.0 at fast speed, but right now, it is a bad version of all the common fire spells. Attachments are more common in set 3, making the third option slightly more appealing. Overall though, it is just alright. The bulk of the rating comes from the flexibility that this card offers.
Kennelmaster
Draft Rating: 0.5
Getting 3 spells into your void is no easy task, especially given that spells are much rarer in draft. Unactivated, this card is a 0.0. Even if you were to activate this on turn 4/5, a single 2/3 can halt the summoned hounds in their tracks.
Scrap Hound
Draft Rating: 2.0
1/1 for 1 is not exciting, but it does have an interesting ultimate. Being able to sacrifice a grenadine to turn it into a 5/5 makes it a substantial threat. Moreover, it can synergize with other sacrifice-theme cards, such as Slumbering Stone, Dark Wisp, Stonescar Magus and most notably, the new Devious Drone which is also a drone! With the right synergies, I can see this card going up to 2.5 or 3 in pick order.
Combustion Cell
Draft Rating: 0.0
This feels like a very clear constructed only card to me. Most decks in draft do not have the luxury to sacrifice units for ramp and you can’t really build a draft around a 1-of combustion cell in your deck.
Disassembler
Draft Rating: 2.0
2/2 for 2 is the average stat-line for a 2-drop. The text is mostly flavor unless you have multiple grenadins, but it can potentially be useful to push for lethal or trigger spark. Moreover, the grenadin tribal does show some promise in this draft format, so the grenadin type could matter.
Into the Furnace
Draft Rating: 3.0
This format feels just as light on removal as the previous, so being a 2 or 4 damage spell makes this card superbly attractive. Given how common grenadins are, this card can often turn into a 2-cost slow mortar, giving you a huge tempo advantage.
Miner’s Musket
Draft Rating: 3.0
This card is almost always a strictly better Talon of Nostrix. The difference between 1 and 2 armor is rarely significant, but this card “refunds” the power for the next card. This could enable powerful tempo plays in future turns, especially if the cost reduction hits a huge unit. Odds are though, it will just hit a small unit and allow you to flood the board faster (less impactful, but still significant). Even then, the tempo potential of this card pushes it to a 3.0.
Oni Cavediver
Draft Rating: 2.5
2/2 for 2 is solid, 4/2 for 2 is extremely good. Moreover, it has an additional text of being able to pay 2 to scout, which acts as a nice sink for additional power while also potentially digging you out of influence or power screw. This card is probably pushing the top of 2.5 tier for me.
Spark Hatcher
Draft Rating: 2.5
This is a pretty decent 2-drop. The loss of 1 health matters only in about 20% of games and granting an additional 1/1 on death is sweet. Whether this card remains at 2.5 or gets bumped up to 3.0 depends on how pushed grenadin synergies are.
Unpredictable Outlaw
Draft Rating: 3.0
Another 2/2 for 2 with a powerful text. The threat of being able to exhaust a blocker can often deter your opponents from trying to race or force them to leave back multiple blockers. The gunslinger tribal is also another well-supported tribe in my first impressions, so the unit type confers an additional benefit.
Yeti Sage
Draft Rating: 2.0
As a floor, a 2/1 that gives Trail Stories |
You did a wonderful job, and I really really do mean that!When western anthropologists first heard reports of witch doctors who could issue deadly curses, they quickly found rational explanations. The families of the cursed often felt there was no point wasting food on the “walking dead”, for example. That’s why many of the cursed would die: simple starvation.
However, other case histories have come to light that defy attempts to explain them. In the 1970s, for example, doctors diagnosed a man with end-stage liver cancer, and told him he had just a few months to live. Though the patient died in the predicted time, an autopsy showed the doctors had been mistaken. There was a tiny tumour, but it had not spread. It seemed the doctors’ prognosis had been a death curse.
Though the mechanism remains a mystery, but at least now this kind of phenomenon has a name. The “nocebo effect” is the lesser-known opposite number of the placebo effect, and describes any case where putting someone in a negative frame of mind has an adverse effect on their health or well-being. Tell people a medical procedure will be extremely painful, for example, and they will experience more pain than if you had kept the bad news to yourself. Similarly, experiences of side effects within the placebo groups of drug trials have shown that a doctor’s warning about the possible side effects of a medicine makes it much more likely that the patient will report experiencing those effects.
This is not just in the mind: it is also about physical effects. The stress created by the nocebo effect can have a long-lasting impact on the heart, for example – perhaps serious enough to cause fatal damage.
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The race is on to understand the precise mechanisms behind nocebo. Medical researchers are hoping that such an understanding will help to make the world a less stressful place. “It is a good way to understand anxiety, and to find methods to prevent it,” says Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin, Italy.
Read more: 13 more things that don’t make senseHero who makes Biggles look like a wimp: He's flown more planes than anyone else in history - and took 2,000 Nazis prisoner single-handed. And now, at 94, he's telling his breathtaking story
Making history: Eric Brown (pictured at home in Copthorne, Sussex) has flown more aircraft than anyone else in history, and was the first man to fly a jet on and off an aircraft carrier
Eric Brown must rank as the most extraordinary airman alive. Indeed, open his memoirs at any page and you are left asking a single question: how on earth did this modest Scotsman live to tell the tale?
But Captain Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown RN is very much alive and in sparkling form as he pours me a glass of sherry at his West Sussex home and reflects on an astonishing life. This is the man who has flown more aircraft than anyone else in history.
He was the first man to fly a jet on and off an aircraft carrier. He has set aviation records that will almost certainly never be broken and is revered as one of the greatest test pilots of all time.
But even if you take out the aerobatics, his story is remarkable. Here is a man who narrowly cheated death in the wreckage of a torpedoed ship, helped to liberate Belsen and took 2,000 enemy prisoners armed only with a pistol.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Eric had to interrogate a bewildering cross-section of leading Nazis, including Hermann Goering, as well as plane manufacturer Enrst Heinkel and designer Willie Messerchmitt.
What’s more, he then had to test all their aircraft. And all this before turning 30. Little wonder that when he arrived at Buckingham Palace at the grand old age of 28 for the fourth time, to receive the AFC in addition to the DSC, MBE and OBE he had already received, George VI greeted him with the words: ‘Not you again.’
In fact, young Brown would soon be back once more to receive the King’s Commendation for Brave Conduct.
Years later, he would end up as an aide-de-camp to the Queen, who would add a CBE to his collection in 1970
Pin-sharp at 94, Eric is in constant demand from historians and documentary makers, while his autobiography, Wings On My Sleeve, is a must-read for any self-respecting aviator.
Now he is about to tell all as one of the star speakers at next month’s Daily Mail-sponsored Chalke Valley History Festival.
What’s more, his appearance on the last weekend in June will coincide with the Chalke Valley History Festival Airshow — one of this summer’s most spectacular, featuring replica dogfights from both World Wars. It will certainly bring back memories for Eric, whose flying career was shaped by these conflicts.
When Brown arrived at Buckingham Palace at the age of 28 for the fourth time, to receive the AFC in addition to the DSC, MBE and OBE he had already received, George VI greeted him with the words: 'Not you again'
Brown was introduced to some of the leading lights of the Luftwaffe - including their formidable test pilot Hanna Reitsch (pictured) - having no inkling that, within a couple of years, they would be his sworn enemy Eric’s father had served in the Royal Flying Corps during the Great War and, along with all former RFC pilots, received an invitation from the newly formed German Luftwaffe to visit the 1936 Olympics. A promising scholar at Edinburgh’s Royal High School, Eric had recently lost his mother, so his father decided to take the boy to Germany to see the Games. Among those hosting the RFC delegation was the charismatic Great War ace Ernst Udet, who had become a famous stunt pilot. He took up Eric for a spin — ‘Terrifying stuff’ — and the teenager was hooked. RELATED ARTICLES Previous
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German police arrest former Auschwitz guard, 93, for being... Share this article Share ‘When we landed, Udet gave me the old fighter pilot’s greeting — “Hals und Beinbruch!” [Break your neck and leg] — and told me to learn to fly.’ Eric went on to Edinburgh University, where he studied German and joined the university’s air squadron. During a student trip to Germany, he wrote to Udet, by then a senior Luftwaffe general, who invited Eric into his social circle. The wide-eyed student was introduced to some of the leading lights of the Luftwaffe — including their formidable test pilot and world gliding champion Hanna Reitsch — having no inkling that, within a couple of years, they would be his sworn enemy.
CHALKE VALLEY FESTIVAL, WHERE HISTORY COME ALIVES
Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown will be talking about his extraordinary career at the Daily Mail Chalke Valley History Festival on Saturday, June 29, at 3.45pm. The festival is a unique combination of a literary festival, historical reconstructions and a schools' education programme that offers something for all ages. Speakers include Max Hastings, Ian Hislop, Paddy Ashdown, Antony Beevor, Boris Johnson, Artemis Cooper, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Dan Snow, who will answer audience questions. The festival runs from June 24 to 30 at Ebbesbourne Wake, near Salisbury. To book an event or find out more information, visit cvhf.org.uk or tel: 01722 781133
‘Udet was like a schoolboy who regarded the whole world as a friend,’ says Eric. ‘He had these riotous evenings at his flat in Berlin. One of his party tricks was a shooting game where you had to fire a pistol at a target behind you, using a mirror. It made a mess of the wall, but he was very good at it.
‘I often wondered what the neighbours thought — but I suppose you didn’t complain if your neighbour was a Nazi general.’
In 1939, having recently arrived in Germany on a teaching exchange, Eric received a knock on the door one morning. ‘Our countries are at war,’ said an SS officer, before taking away Eric for interrogation.
Fearing the worst, he was pleasantly surprised to be dumped at the Swiss border, from where he made his way home as fast as possible to sign up with the RAF.
Like all young pilots, Eric was itching to get airborne and was frustrated by the lack of RAF planes and postings. But there were plenty of vacancies for pilots in the Royal Navy following the loss of the aircraft carrier, HMS Courageous, with more than 500 men, in the opening weeks of the war.
So Eric transferred to the Fleet Air Arm — where he was nicknamed ‘Winkle’ — and retrained as a naval pilot. Before long he was on HMS Audacity, an aircraft carrier escorting vital convoys between Britain and Gibraltar.
His bravery in his Martlet fighter soon earned him the Distinguished Service Cross.
Then, in December 1941, his ship was torpedoed and sank 450 miles off Cape Finisterre. He was one of the few survivors after floating in the water for several hours.
‘I couldn’t walk for a week, but I was lucky,’ he said. ‘As pilots, we had proper lifejackets.’
Back home, his exceptional flying skills had been spotted and he was transferred to special duties as a test pilot. Among his tasks was working out ways of flying Spitfires, Hurricanes and Mosquitoes on and off ships, vastly improving the clout of the Fleet Air Arm.
And when he wasn’t testing the boffins’ latest theories, he was also charged with training a gung-ho band of Canadian Spitfire pilots with whom he saw regular action over France.
By 1944, Eric had moved to the top secret Aerodynamics Flight based at Farnborough.
Eric was transferred to special duties as a test pilot. Among his tasks was working out ways of flying Spitfires, Hurricanes and Mosquitoes on and off ships, vastly improving the clout of the Fleet Air Arm. Pictured is a Hurricane IIB
By 1944, Eric had moved to the top secret Aerodynamics Flight based at Farnborough
Winston Churchill needed a solution to the Nazis’ unmanned V1 rocket bombs, which were terrifying the civilian population.
One OF the first had reduced Eric’s home, near Aldershot, to rubble. ‘My wife was injured, our cleaning lady lost an eye and the dogs disappeared, so my interest was personal,’ he says.
Eric helped develop a booster system that could get a fighter alongside a V1 for a short spurt and tip it off-course without colliding.
‘You couldn’t blow it up because you’d fly straight into the debris — but there was a way of nudging its wings using air pressure and not actually touching.’
It led to Eric’s first — and last — bail-out. ‘One day, the engine caught fire and my feet were starting to fry, so it was time to go over the side,’ he says, matter-of-factly.
‘I landed in a pond in a field with this very angry bull in it. Every time I tried to get out of the water, it came at me — and the ambulance and the Home Guard wouldn’t go near it. I shouted at them to get the farmer. I remember him leading it away, saying: “Come on, Ferdinand.”’
As the Allies progressed through Italy and France, Eric became commanding officer of a very exotic unit — Farnborough’s Enemy Aircraft Flight. His task was to capture and evaluate as much Nazi hardware as he could find.
One of the most unappealing was a Messerschmitt 163 — a rocket plane that ran on liquid explosive.
Dozens of German pilots had been killed developing the thing, but Eric still chuckles as he recalls his maiden flight: ‘I soon worked out that the only way to land it without exploding was to run out of fuel first, so you had to get your timings right.’
As commanding officer of Farnborough's Enemy Aircraft Flight, Eric had to capture Nazi hardware. One of the most unappealing was a Messerschmitt 163 - a rocket plane that ran on liquid explosive (pictured)
Eric has never forgotten the sights he encountered nor the remorselessness of the female commandant he interrogated, Irma Grese. 'She was the worst human being I ever encountered,' he says
In 1945, landing at a newly captured airstrip in Germany, he met Allied troops investigating rumours of a concentration camp at Belsen.
Realising that Eric had better German than his interpreter, the brigadier in charge asked him along to assist with translation.
Eric has never forgotten the sights he encountered nor the remorselessness of the female commandant he interrogated, Irma Grese.
‘She was the worst human being I ever encountered,’ he says. She was hanged a few days later.
Soon afterwards, Eric flew in to another air base in Denmark, only to discover the Allies had yet to capture it.
‘I was in this little Avro Anson and there were still 2,000 enemy troops there,’ he says.
‘I thought we were for it as we landed, but the commanding officer came up to me, handed me his sword and surrendered on the spot.’
'Only doing the job': Among his many records is one for the most aircraft carrier landings in history: 2,407. A U.S. naval pilot who tried to beat him got as far as 1,600 before suffering a nervous breakdown
Given his excellent knowledge of German and aeroplanes, Eric interrogated all the enemy top brass. He did not warm to Willie Messerschmitt. ‘We had a bit of a to-do,’ says Eric, with mischievous understatement.
‘I accused him of compromising the integrity of his planes because the wings on some had started falling off. He bridled at that!’
Dr Ernst Heinkel was a ‘funny little man’. Eric’s erstwhile mentor, Udet, had committed suicide in 1941, but one day Winkle found himself in an interview room with Hanna Reitsch, still an unrepentant Hitler worshipper.
‘She was emotional because she had just heard that her father had shot all the women in the family and then himself to spare them from the Russians. So she told me quite a lot.’
He even interviewed Hermann Goering. ‘His uniform was falling off him, but he perked up when I told him he was going to be interviewed by a pilot. He answered all my questions.
‘The first thing I asked was his opinion on the outcome of the Battle of Britain and he said: “A draw.” He said they had not been defeated, but that Hitler had ordered the withdrawal of fighter units to concentrate on Russia.’
After the war, Eric worked with Sir Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, clocking up numerous life-threatening ‘firsts’ in the field of jet aviation.
Among his unappetising tasks was discovering why certain aircraft would crash at certain speeds, and why planes had a habit of disappearing in storms.
Among his many records is one for the most aircraft carrier landings in history: 2,407. A U.S. naval pilot who tried to beat him got as far as 1,600 before suffering a nervous breakdown.
It is also highly unlikely that anyone will surpass Eric’s world record for flying 487 different types of aeroplane.
A proud grandfather and great-grandfather, he is typical of his generation in insisting that he was ‘only doing the job’.Senate Republicans on Thursday filibustered a Democratic bill to avoid a student loan interest rate spike, escalating a fight less than one month before rates are set to double for some 7 million students. But it’s a fight that Democrats are happy — if not eager — to have.Interest rates on federally subsidized student loans are set to double from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent on July 1. Both parties support a legislative fix but differ on how to do it.
Republicans have offered legislation, modeled on President Obama’s own proposal, to tie student loans rates to the yield on the 10-year Treasury bill. (Obama’s plan has more safeguards to provide certainty and cushion the blow for low-income students.) But Senate Democrats went in a different direction, bringing up a bill to freeze the 3.4 percent interest rate for two more years and paying for it by closing unpopular tax loopholes for oil and gas, offshore tax havens and tax-deferred retirement accounts.
Predictably, Republicans blocked it from getting the 60 votes needed to move forward. It received 51 votes — all from Democrats.
“It’s a bill Democrats know will fail. In fact, they actually seem to be indicating they want it to fail,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Thursday before the cloture vote. “Why? Undoubtedly so they can keep this issue alive for their permanent campaign.”
Democrats are indeed picking a fight, conscious that they have a built-in political advantage on the issue, and hoping to expand their margins with the youth vote. A recent report by the College Republicans found that the party is losing its relevance with Americans aged 18-29, and said Millennial voters view student loans as an important pocketbook issue.
“We have no reason to work out a compromise,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told reporters Tuesday, when asked about the debate on student loans. “I’m not looking for compromise. I’m looking to pass our bill.”
The GOP, meanwhile, is eager to take the issue off the table, but not at the expense of relenting on their anti-tax absolutism. House Republicans passed their bill last week and Senate Republicans offered similar legislation. But, notably, GOP senators highlighted that unlike the House bill, their version does more to protect students by fixing the interest rate for the life of the loan when it’s taken out — which also reflects Obama’s proposal.
“The House would have it going up each year,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN). “I don’t like that idea and I don’t think many students would.”
The White House has come out for the Democrats’ plan, even though Obama’s plan is more conceptually similar to the GOP proposals. Some education policy experts argue the the Obama and Republican plans aren’t very far apart — although Reid dismissed that argument Thursday as a “Republican talking point.” The GOP proposal, he said, “is not even close to what we want.”
It’s not clear what the next step is, but lawmakers have less than a month to find a solution to stop student loan rates from doubling. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) this week said Democrats “welcome and relish” a debate on the matter, according to Roll Call, saying it’s important to young people and it “shows the difference between the two parties on a key issue.”There is not a day that passes without missing my daughter Angela. When Angela’s depression did not overwhelm her, she was a loving mom to her three young children. But she bought a gun in May 2011 and two months later she used it to kill herself.
Well-intentioned friends have tried to tell me that if Angela hadn’t had a gun, she would have found another way to end her life. But I know better. The truth is that the United States does not have a higher rate of mental illness than other developed nations. In fact, our overall suicide rate is 17 percent lower here than in other high-income nations. Our rate of suicide with a firearm, however, is eight times higher. And according to CDC data, that number has been steadily increasing over the last two decades.
Gun suicides account for two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States. But for too long, discussion of suicide has been stigmatized and kept separate from conversations about preventing gun violence. The argument has long been that suicide is a mental health issue – not an issue of gun safety. But the facts tell a different story.
Research shows that most people who attempt suicide will not try again. But nine out of ten people who attempt suicide with a gun die immediately and do not get that second chance.
If I close my eyes I can still see Angela, cheerfully picking berries in our backyard and drawing chalk flowers in the driveway with her kids. Her children are trying so hard to remember the sound of her voice, but it gets more difficult every year.
I am so sorry that Angela will never have the chance to watch her children grow up. I am so sorry her children will always miss their mom.
More than 90 Americans are killed every day by gun violence, and even though most of those gun deaths are suicides, loved ones of those who have died by suicide have often remained quiet and out of the public eye.
There’s no one law that can stop all gun deaths, but there are steps we can take and must consider to prevent gun violence.
It’s never easy to discuss the death of someone you love, and when that person chose to die, it can sometimes feel that much more difficult. After the shock of what happened wore off, I was angry at Angela – for leaving her children and for losing faith that she could get better. I felt shame too – wondering if there’s more I could have done to help her or if I could have stopped her somehow.
I want other families who have experienced a suicide to know that while shame and anger will always play a role, they cannot overpower your desire to speak out to prevent future gun deaths.
There’s no one law that can stop all gun deaths, but there are steps we can take and must consider to prevent gun violence. States that require a background check on all handgun sales have about half the gun suicides of other states. Keeping guns locked up and out of young hands can save lives too – often it’s a gun found in a home that turns into a suicidal person’s method of choice.
As part of the Everytown Survivor Network, I use my voice to talk about sensible gun laws and the steps we can take to save lives. I don’t want any other family to be part of the club that no one wants to join – the loved ones of gun violence victims. I encourage you to use your voice too – we can prevent gun deaths, and it’ll take changing our laws and culture.
Diane Sellgren is a member of the Everytown Survivor Network and a resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota.Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick told the Institute of Directors’ Annual Convention that car sharing service UberPool could take 1m cars off London’s roads after it launches by the end of 2014.
“We’re gearing up to launch UberPool here in London by the end of the year,” said Mr Kalanick. He claimed a £21 black taxi trip with UberPool would cost just £6, using the services of Uber’s existing minicab drivers but allowing them to combine trips with parts of journeys common between at least two passengers.
Uber is currently adding 1,000 new drivers per month, but will require 100,000 more to fully provide the “liquidity” Mr Kalanick said would be needed.
The launch is likely to further heighten the already tense relationship between Uber and London’s black taxi drivers as well as regulators. “London has a very sophisticated transport framework and I think there’s an interesting question for how [regulator] TfL will want to approach this or not,” Mr Kalanick said. “We have a few fights that we have to go out there and fight for what we believe in.”
Announcing the original launch of UberPool in San Francisco, Uber said “The idea is simple. With UberPool, you share a ride – and split the cost – with another person who just happens to be requesting a ride along a similar route. The beauty, though, is that you still get Uber-style on-demand convenience and reliability: just push the button like before and get a car in five minutes. When we find a match, we notify you of your co-rider’s first name. Even if we don’t find an UberPool match for you, we’ll give you a discount on your ride.”ISTANBUL -- On April 24, 1915, Ottoman Turkish authorities hauled off Daniel Varoujan, a leading Armenian poet of the time, along with over 200 other intellectuals in the capital Constantinople. To the crumbling Ottoman Empire, the poets, painters, writers, booksellers and politicians at the beating heart of the Armenian community posed too much of a threat.
Soon, much of the empire’s Christian Armenian population would be targeted and nearly wiped out, accused of conspiring against the empire with the Russians. Many Armenians say the genocide was collective punishment for the actions of a few.
In August, after a wave of deportations began that would force hundreds of thousands of Armenians on brutal death marches toward the Syrian desert, Varoujan was tortured to death, according to eyewitnesses at the time. Varoujan was just one of many men, women and children who lost their lives.
This week, Armenians from around the world are gathering in Istanbul to commemorate the deaths of nearly 1.5 million Armenians who died in what would later be known by many -- but not by Turkey, the United States and some other countries -- as the Armenian Genocide. A century on, the killings are hardly a thing of the past, with sensitive geopolitics still fueling the controversy.
Regardless of how it's labeled, here are some figures that explain the size and scope of this tragedy:
Armenians killed by Ottoman Turks during the Armenian Genocide in 1915.
1.5 million
The number of Armenians believed to have been killed between 1915 and 1917.
“Rape and beating were commonplace,” wrote acclaimed historian David Fromkin in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the Ottoman Empire’s downfall, A Peace to End All Peace. “Those who were not killed at once were driven through mountains and deserts without food, drink or shelter. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians eventually succumbed or were killed."
An Armenian man in Istanbul, who as a schoolboy discovered his family was Armenian, told The WorldPost one story passed down to him by his parents: His grandfather, too exhausted to walk any farther in the death march toward the Syrian desert, refused to go on. He would rather drown than walk another mile to his death, he told the Turkish Ottoman guards. And so, the man says, they held his grandfather under the water until he was dead.
250
The number of intellectuals reportedly rounded up by Ottoman Turks on April 24, 1915, in Constantinople (now Istanbul), kicking off what would become a massive wave of arrests, deportations and killings. Many of these Armenians were later deported and in many cases killed. Armenians commemorate the anniversary of the Armenian Genocide every year on April 24.
“They took the intellectuals, the cream of the crop,” one Armenian book publisher who said his father, a baker, lived in Constantinople when the arrests took place, recently told The WorldPost. “They took the head and left the body.”
French Armenian Gerard Bodigoff (R) lights candle with his wife Jacqueline in the Armenian church on April 20 in Istanbul to pay tribute to his grandparents who were massacred and her mother who fled the Armenian genocide in 1915.
60,000
The number of dead bodies reportedly found in 1916 in a mass grave in Maskanah, a northern town in what is now modern day Syria, according to Jesse B. Jackson, U.S. consul in Aleppo. "As far as the eye can reach mounds are seen containing 200 to 300 corpses buried in the ground," he said in a cable to Washington.
300,000
The number of Armenians who died during this period due to war and disease, according to Turkey, which vehemently denies the 1.5 million figure.
“According to independent researchers, 300,000 Armenians lost their lives because of the war and disease,” reads one Turkish state-provided textbook for high school students. “But during that time, Armenians killed 600,000 Turks and forced 500,000 Turks to leave their land.”
2,133,190
The number of Armenians living in the Ottoman empire before 1914, according to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
387,800
The number of Armenians still left in the Ottoman Empire in 1922.
(Wikimedia Commons.)
20
The number of nations that officially recognize the Armenian Genocide. The list does not include the United States, Israel and many others who on the centenary are grappling with labeling the killings a genocide. Germany is expected to finally do so on the anniversary.
The Armenian Genocide still remains one of the most bitterly contested events in history, especially for Turkey, fiercely defensive of its Ottoman past.
If President Obama decided to label the 1915 killings as genocide, already strained relations would likely only worsen with Turkey, where the United States has an important air base in the south, close to Syria. Turkey and the U.S. government have butted heads over the Syrian crisis, with a U.S.-led coalition targeting solely Islamic State extremists, while Turkey insists military efforts must also focus on bringing down Syria's Bashar Assad. The United States has said Turkey, hosting over 1.7 million desperate Syrian refugees, has failed to do enough to counter extremists who often cross its border into Syria with ease.
The White House doesn’t want to use the fateful “g” word because it would anger the wrong people.
That’s essentially what officials said Tuesday when faced with increasing pressure to label the mass killings a genocide.
Citing “regional priorities” in its decision not to say the killings amounted to genocide, the U.S. government insisted it would urge “a full, frank, and just acknowledgment of the facts,” according to a White House statement.
The decision angered many Armenians in the United States and abroad who say they had hoped President Barack Obama would use the centennial as an opportunity to put things right, considering his track record of acknowledging the genocide prior to assuming the presidency.
A box that contains bones of Armenians who were killed in Syria during their exodus from persecutions by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 are displayed at the Vank Cathedral in the historic city of Isfahan, some 250 miles south of the capital, Tehran, on April 20.
There is real concern in Turkey that legal ramifications of calling the 1915 massacres a "genocide" could lead to costly reparations.
In a recent column in the Daily Sabah, a Turkish newspaper known for its staunchly pro-government rhetoric, one columnist wrote that the genocide claimed by Armenians is just a ruse by the Armenian diaspora and descendants in Turkey to tear apart the country and take over Turkish territory.
While Turkey in recent years has taken more conciliatory steps towards addressing the killings of Armenians, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan making what was considered to be a groundbreaking speech last year in which he offered condolences to the descendants of those killed, tempers have recently flared.
With the lead-up to the 100-year anniversary, Turkey has furiously defended itself from genocide claims, lashing out at the Pope and the European Parliament for their views on what is widely seen as a systematic slaughter.
"Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it," Pope Francis said earlier this month after calling the killings the first genocide of the 20th century. Ankara then recalled its ambassador from the Vatican.
Turkey's Erdogan dismissed the genocide debate, just as the European Parliament voted on April 15 to call the events of 1915 a genocide. On Wednesday, Turkey said it was pulling its ambassador to Austria over the debate.
While Turkey acknowledges that some Armenians died -- calling them casualties of war, disease and chaos of the time -- the state says that since the deaths were not methodically planned to wipe out Armenians, it does not add up to genocide.
"It is out of the question for there to be a stain, a shadow called 'genocide,' on Turkey," Erdogan said last week."
Nick Wing in Washington, D.C., and Burak Sayin in Istanbul contributed reporting.
This story has been updated to clarify that while Germany does not currently call the Armenian massacres a genocide, it is expected to do so soon.Two Harvard Law School students have sued the Transportation Security Administration, seeking to restrict the use of full-body scanners and pat-downs at airports and joining a growing number of lawsuits filed across the country that claim the screening procedures infringe on constitutional rights to privacy.
The body scans, which show images of airline passengers’ naked bodies, and the pat-downs, which include touching groin areas, violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, according to the complaint filed Monday in US District Court in Boston. The students, Jeffrey Redfern and Anant Pradhan, are asking the court to ban the TSA from using the screening procedures without reasonable suspicion.
Margaret Paget, a partner at the Boston law firm Sherin and Lodgen, said the Harvard students, who are representing themselves in the suit, have a valid claim and a chance of winning.
“We all expected this case was going to be brought by the ACLU,’’ she said. “There’s a widespread public concern over the scope and extent of the searches.’’
The suit is at least the sixth filed against the TSA since the agency put the enhanced screening procedures into widespread use following the so-called underwear bomber’s unsuccessful attempt to blow up a plane last Christmas with explosives hidden beneath his clothes. A suit filed in US District Court in Denver last week claimed the pat-downs were “disgusting, unconscionable, sexual in nature.’’ The Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group, described the scanners as the equivalent of a “digital strip search’’ in a suit filed in Washington in July.
“I see the lawsuits as part of a genuine citizen rebellion against invasive and ineffective airport screening,’’ said John Verdi, senior counsel at the privacy information center. “These scanners fail every conceivable constitutional test. They are not narrowly targeted at individuals that the government suspects of wrongdoing. They are not the least invasive means. And they are not effective at achieving the government’s stated end, which is detecting powdered explosives.’’
A TSA spokeswoman declined to comment on the lawsuits. The agency, however, is working with technology companies to develop software that would show a generic paper-doll-like figure instead of an actual image of a passenger’s body.
Under TSA screening procedures, passengers selected for full-body scans can opt for a pat-down search instead. Redfern and Pradhan both chose the pat-down at Logan International Airport while traveling separately in November, according to their complaint. The search, which included “prodding and lifting of genitals and buttocks,’’ was so intrusive that, “if done non-consensually, would amount to sexual assault in most jurisdictions,’’ the complaint said.
In an interview with the Harvard Law Record, Pradhan said an agent put his fingers inside the waistband of his pants, lifted his buttocks, and felt his groin. “They’ll go all the way up until — well, they go all the way up,’’ he told the law school newspaper.
Pradhan and Redfern declined to comment yesterday.
Most passengers are still screened by traditional metal detectors. But complaints about the revealing full-body scans and aggressive pat-downs by TSA officers grew to a national controversy as the holiday traveling season kicked off last week. The dissatisfaction over the these screening methods sparked a protest on the day before Thanksgiving, one of the busiest travel days of the year. A loosely organized group urged travelers to opt for more time consuming pat-downs to draw attention to privacy concerns. The protest generated widespread media coverage, but didn’t cause disruptions at airports.
Katie Johnston Chase can be reached at johnstonchase@globe.com.
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.The Calgary Flames qualified for their second Stanley Cup Playoffs appearance in eight years, and although their 2015 showing felt like a team that overachieved and received a favourable first round matchup, this squad feels like the start of something special.
Like the Predators, Calgary is going to be a popular dark horse pick and they have one of the best blue lines from top to bottom in the NHL. Overall, they have some experience (Mark Giordano, Michael Frolik, Troy Brouwer), tremendous youth (Sean Monahan, Johnny Gaudreau), and a proven starter who was on fire down the stretch (Brian Elliott).
On the other hand, the Ducks are your tried and true veteran squad who has been here many times before. This is their 11th appearance in 14 seasons, but they haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 2006-07, when Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry were in their sophomore seasons. Since this became their team, the Ducks have made it to just one conference final, where they fell in seven games to the eventual Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks. There is unfinished business for this core, which now has a few younger weapons of its own (Rickard Rakell, Hampus Lindholm) eager to make a mark.
These two teams sit at different places in their development timelines, which will make for a tough match up both ways.
BROADCAST SCHEDULE
G1 Thurs., April 13 Calgary @ Anaheim, 7:30 p.m. PT CBC
G2 Sat. April 15 Calgary @ Anaheim, 7:30 p.m. PT CBC
G3 Mon., April 17 Anaheim @ Calgary, 7 p.m. PT CBC
G4 Wed., April 19 Anaheim @ Calgary, 7 p.m. PT CBC
G5* Fri., April 21 Calgary @ Anaheim, TBD
G6* Sun., April 23 Anaheim @ Calgary, TBD
G7* Tues., April 25 Calgary @ Anaheim, TBD
ADVANCED STATS:
Anaheim: 49.65 5on5 CF% (19th),.931 5on5 Sv% (5th), 7.73 5on5 Sh% (15th), 100.78 PDO (8th)
Calgary: 50.55 5on5 CF% (11th),.920 5on5 Sv% (22nd), 7.56 5on5 Sh% (17th), 99.53 PDO (20th)
TEAM STATS:
Anaheim: 18.7 PP% (17th), 84.7 PK% (4th), 220 GF (18th), 197 GA (3rd)
Calgary: 20.2 PP% (10th), 81.6 PK% (12th), 222 GF (17th), 219 GA (14th)
HEAD-TO-HEAD RECORD
Anaheim: 3-2-0
Calgary: 2-3-0
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Ducks Outlook: Randy Carlyle was the Cup-winning coach with Anaheim in 2007, and returns with a strict mandate to win it all. Many joked at the hiring of Carlyle, but the Ducks are as good as ever, grinding you down in the corners and playing a tough defensive game. The loss of Cam Fowler for at least one |
. Last night the move was seen as a ratcheting up of the Kremlin's tit-for-tat response to Western sanctions over Vladimir Putin's policies in Ukraine. The Russian agency responsible for consumer rights and sanitary safety, known as RosPotrebNadzor, demanded the suspension of operations at the three restaurants, including the original Moscow McDonalds on Pushkin Square. Two others to be hit are both located close to the Kremlin. The authorities indicated the chain is suspected of 'violations of sanitary standards'. Such tactics are often used by the Russian authorities as a mask for political motives. 'Due to a protocol received from RosPotrebNadzor, the work of three McDonalds restaurants in Moscow was suspended,' said a statement from the operating company. 'We are studying the details of the claims and will figure out the necessary actions aimed at quickest possible opening of these restaurants.' Last month the Russian watchdog accused McDonalds of 'violations which put the product quality and safety of the entire McDonald's chain in doubt'. Inspectors highlighted the chain's Caesar Roll and Vegetable Salad as flouting Russian food standards. When McDonald's first opened in the glasnost era in 1990, it was seen as an emblematic moment in the move away from Communism. Some 30,000 meals were served on day one, with Russians queuing six hours to taste their first Big Mac. The chain now has 400-plus outlets in Russia and is currently expanding into Siberia - but the row with the West amounts to the toughest time for the chain in Moscow since 1990.
Anastasiya Stanko, a journalist with Hromadske.tv, reported: 'I have information from the administration of Lugansk that a column of Russia military hardware entered the city, at least 150 vehicles, including tanks, Grad artillery and infantry armoured vehicles, also about 1,200 soldiers.'
She stated: 'All are dressed in Russian army uniform but without chevrons.
'At the moment they are at the 30th anniversary of war victory street in Lugansk.
'There is information that this column crossed the border about three days ago and got to Lugansk via Severnyi Donets.'
The equipment came from the same vicinity as where the stalled humanitarian convoy was based near the Russian-Ukraine border in Rostov region, she said.
Mr Voronchenko linked the men and hardware to an announcement last week from separatist 'prime minister' in Donetsk, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, that he had obtained 150 pieces of military hardware 'infantry fighting vehicles and armoured personnel carriers' from Russia.
He also boasted the rebels had been boosted by 1,200 fighters 'who have received four months training in the Russian Federation'.
Hiding: Both the Ukrainian army and the rebel fighters have accused each other of targeting civilians
Russia dismissed this report but Mr Voronchenko said the new force in Lugansk 'is exactly what that Russian creature Zakharchenko spoke about'.
Yesterday, the Mail's correspondent in Russia reported movements of heavy military hardware in Rostov, the Russian region which borders Ukraine, in previous days. Tanks were seen carried West towards the frontier on trucks which later returned empty.
TANKS SEEN MOVING IN RUSSIA TOWARDS BORDER WITH UKRAINE Russia yesterday faced accusations of 'throwing new swarms of mercenaries and columns of military equipment' to back up rebels in east Ukraine. New pictures showed Russian military units moving close to the border, as Ukraine's army continued making significant advances into rebel-held areas. Kiev claims that some of this armoured hardware as well as Grad missile systems are crossing the border in support of the separatist cause, allegations strongly denied by Moscow. The Kremlin was making little attempt to hide its show of force in the Rostov region, which borders both Ukraine's Lugansk and Donetsk regions. Some 13 trucks which were seen yesterday carrying tanks towards the border were today spotted empty and moving in the direction of the city of Rostov-on-Don, said locals in an area some 30 miles from the border. There is no proof that the the tanks crossed into rebel-held Ukraine.
Ukrainian military analyst Dmitry Tymchuk said: 'Unfortunately, we can confirm the fact that the column of Russian military equipment broke through to Lugansk to back up the local militants.'
This development came yesterday, he said, though some Russian military hardware had arrived earlier.
'According to our data, a few dozen units of military equipment broke through into the neighbourhood of Lugansk, up to 40 of them are heavy armoured vehicles. Part of this column entered the city.
'How the column of vehicles could have broken through the blockade line, considering the fact that Lugansk is being blocked by a circle of checkpoints and fortified strong points of ATO forces, we currently cannot say.'
Military activity on the ground has been high in recent days in Rostov region in areas close to the border where the West claims Russia has station large forces.
NATO warned last week about the threat of a Russian invasion into eastern Ukraine. Now it looks like such a possibility could overshadow any hopes of defusing the worst crisis to engulf Europe since the Cold War.
At Monday's planned talks in Minsk, Putin will be accompanied by Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko and Kazkahstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Their countries are members of the Russia-led Customs Union which the Western-backed Kiev leadership spurned in favour of EU integration when it seized power in February.
A statement from Poroshenko's administration said the meeting would discuss issues related to implementing the landmark association agreement Kiev signed with the EU, energy security and'stabilising the situation in Ukraine'.
Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said only that the leaders 'will discuss relations between Ukraine and the Customs Union and there will be a number of bilateral meetings.'
Head to head: Russia and Ukraine said on yesterday their presidents would meet together with top European Union officials in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, on Monday to discuss their confrontation over Ukraine
The Minsk meeting will form part of a hectic round of diplomatic meetings for Poroshenko in the next two weeks around Ukraine's Independence Day celebrations on Sunday, when he hopes to be able to celebrate battlefield successes against the separatists.
He will host a key visit to Kiev by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday when he will expect her to voice strong support for his policies to crush the separatist rebellions.
Separately, Poroshenko's website said he had accepted an invitation by the EU to visit Brussels on August 30 and would attend also a summit of the U.S.-led NATO alliance in Wales in early September when he may meet U.S. President Barack Obama, his aides said.
'We can not say for certain yet, but I think that it would be correct if a meeting between the presidents of Ukraine and the United States took place at this summit,' Mr Chaly said.
UKRAINE SUPPORTERS SCALE MOSCOW SKYSCRAPER AND PLANT FLAG Pro-Ukrainian activists scaled one of Moscow's landmark Stalin-era skyscrapers and placed a blue and yellow Ukrainian flag at its pinnacle last night. The yellow star which tops the 29-storey Kotelnicheskaya Embankment building, which is emblazoned with a Communist-era hammer and sickle, was also painted half blue. It is claimed the perpetrators escaped from the building by parachute. One for the scrapbook: A roofer takes a selfie with the Ukrainian flag at the tip of the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment building before taking it down earlier today. Four people were arrested over the stunt Four suspects - two young men and two young women, according to ITAR-TASS - were being held by Moscow police today in connection with the stunt. They deny charges of vandalism. A police source said: 'The unidentified men got inside the building and using the internal staircase reached the top floor.' They then used 'professional equipment' and 'climbed up and attached the flag on the top of the skyscraper'. The building with 26 floors and 540 apartments was constructed between 1938 and 1952 under the close supervision of Stalin's notorious secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, who installed bugging devices in some flats. Ballerina Galina Ulanova, singer Lyudmila Zykina, poet Andrei Voznesensky, and other famous Soviet actors and writers lived in the block, the creaking corridors of which are rumoured to be haunted by Soviet ghosts.
Rebels and locals struggle to maintain normal life in Donetsk as the Ukrainian army closes in
It has been weeks since Donetsk last had a traffic jam.
The regular rumble on the edge of this besieged city in eastern Ukraine is a constant reminder of the government's effort to shell armed pro-Russian separatists out of their stronghold. Rebels give as good as they get, blindly lobbing shells back at an unseen foe.
As fighting edges ever closer to the center, hundreds of thousands have fled a city once home to 1 million people. The bustle of a major industrial center has given way to the stillness of fear.
Life in a warzone: A man stands behind broken glass after Ukrainian army shelling of the business centre in downtown Donetsk, Ukraine, which is poised to fall to advancing troops
College teacher Nataliya Badibina said she would have left to stay with relatives in Russia were it not for her mother and father.
'My parents are ill. They live nearby and I am not going to leave them,' said Ms Badibina, whose apartment block in Donetsk's western Petrovsky district had its windows blown out by shrapnel from a Grad rocket that landed in her courtyard.
Petrovsky district is on the edge of Donetsk and near some of the heaviest fighting seen in the city.
A local supermarket is still open and provides groceries for anybody with the money to buy them. Most people do their shopping before lunchtime, said Ms Badibina, after which the daily booms of artillery start anew.
A few restaurants have braved the shelling and serve customers, albeit typically giving notice that they close well before the 11pm rebel-imposed curfew. After that, the streets become deserted and an even ghostlier silence descends, only to be periodically punctured in the night by artillery booms.
Funds for many are running dry as pensions and government salaries are held up. City council spokesman Maxim Rovinsky said those paid on bank cards still get their money. Many others haven't been paid since June.
On Tuesday, a crowd formed outside the 11th floor rebel headquarters in Donetsk amid rumors that pension and disability payments and child assistance were being given out.
Holding a sheaf of photocopied documents, Vyacheslav Melnikov said he was there to apply for money for his two disabled grandchildren.
'I don't even have enough money to feed them. I hope they will help us,' he said.
One woman in line, Tatyana Ostrovksaya, said she wanted to be paid the money due to her brother, Viktor, who was killed in a rocket attack earlier in the month.
'They're supposed to pay out two months' worth of pension, but nobody will pay it to me,' Ms Ostrovksaya said.
It is not immediately clear where the funds to pay such applicants will come from. Rebel leaders announced months ago that they would raise funds by levying taxes from local businesses, but almost all private enterprises have ceased to operate altogether.
Battered: A woman passes the site of a rocket explosion near the business center in downtown Donetsk
Tragic: A woman stands by the body of a dead man after a Ukrainian army mortar attack hit the city centre
Shops in pedestrian underpasses feel relatively safe from bombardment, although the racket of trams passing overhead can unnerve newcomers likely to mistake it for a rocket hitting the ground. Business owners say they have long become accustomed to the sounds of war. The sheer imprecision of the weapons being indiscriminately used by rebels and government forces alike makes a target of everybody.
Even as chaos brews, a kind of ersatz normality has taken over.
The rebel headquarters, once the Donetsk region administrative building, has been substantially tidied up since it was first occupied and ransacked by separatists in April.
Many windows and fittings are still smashed, but the smell of stale alcohol that permeated the stairwell is largely gone, as are the random piles of binders once stacked up haphazardly in the offices. Rebel bureaucrats sit at their desks and ink documents with their own self-styled stamps.
The barricades of bricks and tires that once skirted the building were removed in late May, although some crude graffiti remains.
The regular police service has been disbanded and in its place are officers from the self-described Donetsk People's Republic. Drivers still mostly stop obediently at traffic lights, not least because the rebel road police now carry automatic rifles. Stories abound of drivers caught speeding having their cars impounded at the point of a gun.
As part of an ostensible law-and-order campaign, the rebel leadership announced this week that it was introducing the death penalty for the most serious crimes. Pressed for information about which offenses would be punishable by death, Alexander Zakharchenko, the leader of the rebel republic, was unable to offer specifics.
Resistance: A rebel-controlled 122-mm self-propelled howitzer moves along a street in Donetsk
The struggle to maintain normal life took a major blow over the weekend as water taps began to run dry. Local authorities explained that damage to an electricity line had cut off power to the water treatment facility that provided for most of the city's needs. Supplies are now sporadic or nonexistent in some neighborhoods.
Electricity and gas supplies continue to be provided to most of the city because of the efforts of utilities workers who, amid the fighting, repair damaged pipelines and overhead cables. Even gardeners working for City Hall continue to carefully tend flower displays; street cleaners have ensured Donetsk's streets do not pile up with trash.
Rovinsky of the city council said the hospitals and the fire service are also still operating, although there is a shortage of personnel and medical supplies.
The rebel FM radio station, Radio Respublika, broadcasts tips on how to behave in the event of shelling. Among the pieces of advice offered by the radio presenter in one afternoon show was to always keep mobile phones fully charged, have an emergency suitcase with basic items at hand and stock up on medicine such as painkillers and tranquillizers.
'And you must also have water. Plus some food, which should be high-calorie and not take up too much room, like dry fruit or hard cheese,' he said.
If larger numbers of people have not fled the prospect of all-out urban fighting, it is partly out of fear that their homes will be looted, as Badibina said happened in the Petrovksy district.
Many once eagerly fulminated against the government or grumbled quietly about the rebels. Now a kind of resigned trepidation is setting in as winter beckons.A promotional still from the movie "World War Z" - Paramount Pictures
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Summertime is money time for Hollywood. And this season has featured a glut of big-budget films: Some blockbusters, like Man of Steel and World War Z; several simply…busts. Think Lone Ranger. Some entrepreneurs are trying to remove financial risk by bringing science to the art of filmmaking.
The thrill you feel when Brad Pitt faces off with killer zombies in World War Z and the way your heart jumps when Daisy and Gatsby are reunited can be measured and priced. Big movie studios have started using big data to predict a film's success.
"We use a computer enhanced algorithm that has the data of many, many, many movies, which have been analyzed by my colleagues and broken down," says Nick Meaney, CEO and co-founder of Epagogix, a consulting firm that works with the entertainment industry.
EpagogiX analysts read a script and place a value on all of the plot points, everything from love scenes to car chases to quirky sidekicks. "And they score them according to a directory, in the way a teacher might score a test," says Meaney.
Those scores are fed into the computer algorithm, which then calculates how much the movie will make at the box office, plus or minus about 10 percent. Epagogix will also recommend script changes to make a movie more marketable and profitable, like setting it in a different place. Or scaling back a character’s role, a recommendation that thrilled one studio executive.
"One of the heads of the studio laughed and said, 'Oh that’s great! You’ve just saved me $12 million!'" says Meaney, recounting the conversation. "And we said, 'How so?' And he said, 'The person I had in mind for the female lead was Ms. X,' a very well known Hollywood actress, 'and you’re saying that role doesn’t need to be as big as it was, so we don’t need her.'"
The profit impact will be known only after the film is released. Confidentiality agreements bar disclosure of specific films and studios working with Epagogix. But Richard Furlin, a movie financier with MovieArb, says he’ll back a film only if it's been vetted by Epagogix.
"As one studio said, they’re shockingly accurate," Furlin notes. "It can have a dramatic effect on your portfolio."
Furlin believes recommendations from Epagogix have boosted revenues of some movies he's financed by more than one-third. But there’s resistance in Hollywood to using big data.
"There’s still a lot of battle over the artist side versus the financier side," he says.
Tinseltown is coming around, says Vincent Bruzzese, head of Worldwide Motion Picture Group, a data consultancy that has analyzed movies like District 9 and Oz the Great and Powerful.
"To me data is a very cold word," says Bruzzese, a former statistics professor. "Our job is to look at what the audience is saying and use that information in an actionable way."
Bruzzese combines data he’s collected with thousands of viewer surveys he conducts. He says studios, producers and even writers are coming to him more and more. Some pay tens of thousands of dollars per script.
Some of the things Bruzzese has uncovered: In films that are based on a true story, sticking to the facts is a must because more than half of the audience will Google that story when they leave the theater.
"If it turns out the ending of the movie was sugar-coated, that actually bothers people," he says "It affects their ability to spread positive word of mouth. They feel cheated."
Also, if you want the scariest possible slasher film, make the killings random, rather than motivated by something rational, like revenge or money, Bruzzese says.
Of course, the rules are never hard and fast, says Epagogix’s Meaney. All of the elements interact with each other in a unique way in each film, which is what makes this stuff so tricky. Even big explosions, the Hollywood blockbuster staple, aren’t always a plus.
"In a film which requires explosions, they add points," laughs Meaney. "If it makes a movie fall between genres, which is almost a cardinal sin, it actually might be a demerit."
Entertainment analyst Porter Bibb says the movie industry should be wary of screenwriting by numbers.
"If you put everything into the meat grinder of big data, you come out with a hugely similar product," says Bibb. "That is taking away a tremendous amount of creativity and it may, in the end, come back to bite the studios."
The again, the studios have had some notable flops this summer and box office take is down from last year.
“I think the best compliment I can give is not to say how much your programs have taught me (a ton), but how much Marketplace has motivated me to go out and teach myself.” – Michael in Arlington, VA As a nonprofit news organization, what matters to us is the same thing that matters to you: being a source for trustworthy, independent news that makes people smarter about business and the economy. So if Marketplace has helped you understand the economy better, make more informed financial decisions or just encouraged you to think differently, we’re asking you to give a little something back. Become a Marketplace Investor today – in whatever amount is right for you – and keep public service journalism strong. We’re grateful for your support. BEFORE YOU GOThe staff of Kotaku nominated nine games for 2012 Game of the Year. One game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, blew the competition away.
The PC and console turn-based strategy game from the masterminds behind Civilization was a dark horse in our staff voting. Last week, as we publicized our nominations, two other games—the dramatic five-part adventure game, The Walking Dead and the moving, quiet multiplayer PlayStation 3 hike Journey—had attracted more attention. Both have won numerous Game of the Year awards from other awards-givers.
Our nominees in 2012 were a diverse bunch. The big budget first-person shooter open-jungle adventure Far Cry 3 turned heads. Smaller, more obscure games like the locked-room interactive-novel Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, the brutal Indiana Jones-esque platformer/roguelike Spelunky, the mesmerizing puzzle "geometric rhythm seizure survival" game Super Hexagon, the complex 400-year dynasty-simulator Crusader Kings II and the autobiographical, wrenching Papo & Yo all drew some votes.
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But the winner was XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a game for the strategic-minded among us, a game that updates a classic and once again presents a worldwide battle of humans against alien invaders as a terrific variation of violent chess. The game is deep but intuitive. It rewards planning and focus, it penalizes failure. It requires patience but can still be exciting. It's an easy game to start playing and a tough one to stop. Plus, that music when you're going into battle, always gets us pumped.
We salute XCOM's developers, Firaxis studios. We still recommend that players invest in plasma weapons. And we look forward to a 2013 full of great video games.The Glenn Beck Drinking Game
Guest blogged by Aunty Em
Out of a coffee shop patio in Sunrise, Florida came the amusing notion: What would a Glenn Beck Drinking Game look like? Many over-caffeinated minds spent almost no time whatsoever developing the rules and a few more minutes pushing it out over Blackberries and iPhones. In the way that only these things can, it went viral. It has now replaced Beer Pong on most college campuses—practically overnight.
Editor's Note: Please note the category: Progressive wit
“It takes much longer to get drunk playing Beer Pong,” hicced Phi Beta Kappa David Sousèd, when asked about the sudden attraction. That comment was representative of most collegians interviewed, when they were able to be shaken awake. However, also among the responses were several echoing Lou Anne Drûnkärd, who cited “The fabulous history lesson we’re getting once we’re a little sloshed and our mind’s been opened. They didn’t teach this stuff in school, unless it was on days I was hungover.”
The problem has become so acute it’s attracted the attention of administrators of institutions of higher learning across the nation. “We’re part of the Triple “E”; Elite Eastern Establishment,” explains University of I Don’t Know’s President Lionel Huffpo Van Jones, Esq. “We don’t need Glenn Beck indoctrinating our students about Conservative History, when we’re trying to cram Progressive History down everyone’s throat. How can we re-write history if he keeps bring it up?”
Several fraternities and sororities have already lost their charters for events that have taken place at so-called Beckchanalia Balls. These begin promptly at 6PM EST, when Glenn Beck signs off the air, and don’t end until the last pledge falls over. Some never fall over. Disturbances at these events have led to mass arrests in Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Idaho, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia (but only among the GOP). Violence has also broken out in isolated regions of Guam, which has military authorities on high alert.
News Hounds has been able to obtain the rules for The Glenn Beck Drinking Game from an anonymous Refounder. It is passed along merely for the news value. Check with your primary doctor before playing The Glenn Beck Drinking Game. May cause dizziness, vomiting and brain damage [which, oddly enough, happens with a control group that is also watching Beck, but not drinking].
If Glenn Beck…
• …mentions his Red Phone Take a sip
• …shows The Red Phone in the background Take a sip
• … picks up The Red Phone and waves it Chug-a-lug
• … calls someone in the Obama administration a Marxist Take a sip
• … calls someone in the Obama administration a Socialist Take a sip
• … calls someone in the Obama administration a Communist Take a sip
• … calls someone in the Obama administration a Fascist Take a sip
• … calls someone in the Obama administration a Brown Shirt Take a sip
• … calls someone in the Obama administration a disciple of Saul Alinski Take two sips
• … mentions Saul Alinski Take three sips
• … mentions people no longer in the Obama administration [Van Jones, Anita Dunn, etc] Chug-a-lug
• … uses his blackboard Take a sip
• … uses his blackboard with chalk Take two sips
• … uses his blackboard with a pointer Take three sips
• … uses his blackboard with chalk and a pointer Chug-a-lug
• … uses his blackboard with magnets only Take a sip
• … uses his blackboard with magnets and chalk Take two sips
• … uses his blackboard with magnets, chalk, and a pointer Chug a lug
• … uses any prop [frogs, éclairs, pie, pipe, lab coat, etc] Take a sip
• … mentions Andy Stern Take two sips
• … mentions the SEIU Take three sips
• … mentions the SEIU and Andy Stern Take four sips
• … mentions the SEIU scuffle and shows the tape again Chug-a-lug
• … mentions President Woodrow Wilson Take a sip
• … calls President Woodrow Wilson an S.O.B. Take two sips
• calls President Obama an S.O.B. Chug-a-lug the bottle
EDITOR’S NOTE: At this point Aunty Em, who had been both playing and transcribing the game for News Hounds, checked herself in to a rehabilitation clinic. Hopefully she will dry out in time for her next column.The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aesop's Fables, by Aesop 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: Aesop's Fables Author: Aesop Release Date: February 27, 2004 [EBook #11339] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AESOP'S FABLES *** Produced by Suzanne Shell, Greg Chapman and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
AESOP'S FABLES
A NEW TRANSLATION
BY
V. S. VERNON JONES
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
AND ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
ARTHUR RACKHAM
1912 EDITION
INTRODUCTION
Aesop embodies an epigram not uncommon in human history; his fame is all the more deserved because he never deserved it. The firm foundations of common sense, the shrewd shots at uncommon sense, that characterise all the Fables, belong not him but to humanity. In the earliest human history whatever is authentic is universal: and whatever is universal is anonymous. In such cases there is always some central man who had first the trouble of collecting them, and afterwards the fame of creating them. He had the fame; and, on the whole, he earned the fame. There must have been something great and human, something of the human future and the human past, in such a man: even if he only used it to rob the past or deceive the future. The story of Arthur may have been really connected with the most fighting Christianity of falling Rome or with the most heathen traditions hidden in the hills of Wales. But the word "Mappe" or "Malory" will always mean King Arthur; even though we find older and better origins than the Mabinogian; or write later and worse versions than the "Idylls of the King." The nursery fairy tales may have come out of Asia with the Indo-European race, now fortunately extinct; they may have been invented by some fine French lady or gentleman like Perrault: they may possibly even be what they profess to be. But we shall always call the best selection of such tales "Grimm's Tales": simply because it is the best collection.
The historical Aesop, in so far as he was historical, would seem to have been a Phrygian slave, or at least one not to be specially and symbolically adorned with the Phrygian cap of liberty. He lived, if he did live, about the sixth century before Christ, in the time of that Croesus whose story we love and suspect like everything else in Herodotus. There are also stories of deformity of feature and a ready ribaldry of tongue: stories which (as the celebrated Cardinal said) explain, though they do not excuse, his having been hurled over a high precipice at Delphi. It is for those who read the Fables to judge whether he was really thrown over the cliff for being ugly and offensive, or rather for being highly moral and correct. But there is no kind of doubt that the general legend of him may justly rank him with a race too easily forgotten in our modern comparisons: the race of the great philosophic slaves. Aesop may have been a fiction like Uncle Remus: he was also, like Uncle Remus, a fact. It is a fact that slaves in the old world could be worshipped like Aesop, or loved like Uncle Remus. It is odd to note that both the great slaves told their best stories about beasts and birds.
But whatever be fairly due to Aesop, the human tradition called Fables is not due to him. This had gone on long before any sarcastic freedman from Phrygia had or had not been flung off a precipice; this has remained long after. It is to our advantage, indeed, to realise the distinction; because it makes Aesop more obviously effective than any other fabulist. Grimm's Tales, glorious as they are, were collected by two German students. And if we find it hard to be certain of a German student, at least we know more about him than We know about a Phrygian slave. The truth is, of course, that Aesop's Fables are not Aesop's fables, any more than Grimm's Fairy Tales were ever Grimm's fairy tales. But the fable and the fairy tale are things utterly distinct. There are many elements of difference; but the plainest is plain enough. There can be no good fable with human beings in it. There can be no good fairy tale without them.
Aesop, or Babrius (or whatever his name was), understood that, for a fable, all the persons must be impersonal. They must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess. The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, just as four is always double of two. The fox in a fable must move crooked, as the knight in chess must move crooked. The sheep in a fable must march on, as the pawn in chess must march on. The fable must not allow for the crooked captures of the pawn; it must not allow for what Balzac called "the revolt of a sheep" The fairy tale, on the other hand, absolutely revolves on the pivot of human personality. If no hero were there to fight the dragons, we should not even know that they were dragons. If no adventurer were cast on the undiscovered island—it would remain undiscovered. If the miller's third son does not find the enchanted garden where the seven princesses stand white and frozen—why, then, they will remain white and frozen and enchanted. If there is no personal prince to find the Sleeping Beauty she will simply sleep. Fables repose upon quite the opposite idea; that everything is itself, and will in any case speak for itself. The wolf will be always wolfish; the fox will be always foxy. Something of the same sort may have been meant by the animal worship, in which Egyptian and Indian and many other great peoples have combined. Men do not, I think, love beetles or cats or crocodiles with a wholly personal love; they salute them as expressions of that abstract and anonymous energy in nature which to any one is awful, and to an atheist must be frightful. So in all the fables that are or are not Aesop's all the animal forces drive like inanimate forces, like great rivers or growing trees. It is the limit and the loss of all such things that they cannot be anything but themselves: it is their tragedy that they could not lose their souls.
This is the immortal justification of the Fable: that we could not teach the plainest truths so simply without turning men into chessmen. We cannot talk of such simple things without using animals that do not talk at all. Suppose, for a moment, that you turn the wolf into a wolfish baron, or the fox into a foxy diplomatist. You will at once remember that even barons are human, you will be unable to forget that even diplomatists are men. You will always be looking for that accidental good-humour that should go with the brutality of any brutal man; for that allowance for all delicate things, including virtue, that should exist in any good diplomatist. Once put a thing on two legs instead of four and pluck it of feathers and you cannot help asking for a human being, either heroic, as in the fairy tales, or un-heroic, as in the modern novels.
But by using animals in this austere and arbitrary style as they are used on the shields of heraldry or the hieroglyphics of the ancients, men have really succeeded in handing down those tremendous truths that are called truisms. If the chivalric lion be red and rampant, it is rigidly red and rampant; if the sacred ibis stands anywhere on one leg, it stands on one leg for ever. In this language, like a large animal alphabet, are written some of the first philosophic certainties of men. As the child learns A for Ass or B for Bull or C for Cow, so man has learnt here to connect the simpler and stronger creatures with the simpler and stronger truths. That a flowing stream cannot befoul its own fountain, and that any one who says it does is a tyrant and a liar; that a mouse is too weak to fight a lion, but too strong for the cords that can hold a lion; that a fox who gets most out of a flat dish may easily get least out of a deep dish; that the crow whom the gods forbid to sing, the gods nevertheless provide with cheese; that when the goat insults from a mountain-top it is not the goat that insults, but the mountain: all these are deep truths deeply graven on the rocks wherever men have passed. It matters nothing how old they are, or how new; they are the alphabet of humanity, which like so many forms of primitive picture-writing employs any living symbol in preference to man. These ancient and universal tales are all of animals; as the latest discoveries in the oldest pre-historic caverns are all of animals. Man, in his simpler states, always felt that he himself was something too mysterious to be drawn. But the legend he carved under these cruder symbols was everywhere the same; and whether fables began with Aesop or began with Adam, whether they were German and mediAeval as Reynard the Fox, or as French and Renaissance as La Fontaine, the upshot is everywhere essentially the same: that superiority is always insolent, because it is always accidental; that pride goes before a fall; and that there is such a thing as being too clever by half. You will not find any other legend but this written upon the rocks by any hand of man. There is every type and time of fable: but there is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything.
G. K. CHESTERTON
CONTENTS
THE FOX AND THE GRAPES
THE GOOSE THAT LAID THE GOLDEN EGGS
THE CAT AND THE MICE
THE MISCHIEVOUS DOG
THE CHARCOAL-BURNER AND THE FULLER
THE MICE IN COUNCIL
THE BAT AND THE WEASELS
THE DOG AND THE SOW
THE FOX AND THE CROW
THE HORSE AND THE GROOM
THE WOLF AND THE LAMB
THE PEACOCK AND THE CRANE
THE CAT AND THE BIRDS
THE SPENDTHRIFT AND THE SWALLOW
THE OLD WOMAN AND THE DOCTOR
THE MOON AND HER MOTHER
MERCURY AND THE WOODMAN
THE ASS, THE FOX, AND THE LION
THE LION AND THE MOUSE
THE CROW AND THE PITCHER
THE BOYS AND THE FROGS
THE NORTH WIND AND THE SUN
THE MISTRESS AND HER SERVANTS
THE GOODS AND THE ILLS
THE HARES AND THE FROGS
THE FOX AND THE STORK
THE WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING
THE STAG IN THE OX-STALL
THE MILKMAID AND HER PAIL
THE DOLPHINS, THE WHALES, AND THE SPRAT
THE FOX AND THE MONKEY
THE ASS AND THE LAP-DOG
THE FIR-TREE AND THE BRAMBLE
THE FROGS' COMPLAINT AGAINST THE SUN
THE DOG, THE COCK, AND THE FOX
THE GNAT AND THE BULL
THE BEAR AND THE TRAVELLERS
THE SLAVE AND THE LION
THE FLEA AND THE MAN
THE BEE AND JUPITER
THE OAK AND THE REEDS
THE BLIND MAN AND THE CUB
THE BOY AND THE SNAILS
THE APES AND THE TWO TRAVELLERS
THE ASS AND HIS BURDENS
THE SHEPHERD'S BOY AND THE WOLF
THE FOX AND THE GOAT
THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPRAT
THE BOASTING TRAVELLER
THE CRAB AND HIS MOTHER
|
Gendai (Apr. 2)Love During a Revolution
March 26, 2014
Ukraine has the world’s attention. The largest country within the borders of Europe, with a population of some 44 million, recently went through a significant revolution. The protesters forced a change of government following a particularly volatile protest staged by civilians against a pro-Russian government. The world’s leading powers are still trading threats and punitive actions over the forceful Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula. Certainly this battle for Ukraine is not over as it has become the center in a struggle between the power and values of West vs. East. A new Cold War era might be upon us.
I have been riveted by the events in Ukraine, a county dear to me since it was where my father was born and where I still have relatives. Watching the revolution unfold on live Ukrainian TV had become a daily activity for me. What particularly struck me was the active participation of leaders of the predominant religious groups in supporting the protestors and/or calling for peace. The Orthodox and Eastern Catholic clergy of Ukraine, along with other Christian ministers, Jewish rabbis and Muslim imams prayed with the demonstrators, broadcast speeches and issued numerous appeals for peace. Their main message for Ukraine was “no bloodshed”, “no civil war”. It is the finest hour for the religious denominations of Ukraine in perhaps a century. Many members of the clergy were willing to risk their own lives. The images of priests and monks having the courage to stand between armed opposing sides, with nothing more than their faith and a cross or icon in their hand is the very definition of the love of Christ.[1] “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13)
Amidst the violence, tragic sufferings and deaths, there were also signs of hope and love. Some of the most beautiful images from the square (maidan) in the capital Kiev were those of marriage proposals and weddings that took place. Some four or five couples were engaged or married during those revolutionary days. With a tent turned into a chapel and several priests who stayed with the demonstrators, having a wedding ceremony in the midst of a revolution was not a problem; choir members, bridesmaids, groomsmen, as well as well-wishers were in abundance.[2] Amidst rubble and barricades, while wearing bullet proof vests and military helmets, love and hope for a bright future flourished.[3]
Many people in the United States, or indeed in any stable society, can’t begin to conceive of falling in love during a revolution let alone being married in the midst of one. The thought of finding a life partner in the midst of armed attacks without significant time spent in various dating rituals is unheard of. Weddings are the very public display of a couple’s commitment that have also come to mean elaborate dinners, a massive wedding cake, and hiring the best band to dance to. No such dating prerequisites or wedding fundamentals were available to those who fell in love and married in the midst of the revolution in Kiev. Many gay and lesbian people have also gone through a revolution to fall in love, and get married as they are subjected to daily attacks, some violent, in order to stay together. Gays and lesbians do fall in love and vow to stay together in spite of a revolution that is waged against their love and commitment. Frequently they are denied the support of family, the blessing of the Church and the protection of the government as if a revolution were taking place.
A typical Saturday evening will find numerous male-female couples of all ages doing something as simple as standing in line and holding hands, while waiting to buy movie tickets. Most gay couples will think twice and three times before grabbing the hand of their date or even spouse in public. Will they be ridiculed, attacked or even arrested?[4] No heterosexual couple has to wonder when walking into a flower shop to order flowers for their wedding, if their business will be rejected because of their sexual orientation.[5] A lifelong member of a church community will beam with happiness telling their pastor that God has led them to someone they want to share their love and life with forever. The gay person hides this joy from the priest knowing that they might be placed under severe penance and certainly denied the mystery (sacrament) of marriage in the church. And yet, in spite of all of the negative pressure from family, society, civil laws and religious institutions, gay people continue to seek love and establish lifelong relationships with people of the same sex. In spite of the war against them, gay people, expressions of same-sex love, and gay marriages survive and thrive.
Love and marriage during a revolution is commonplace for most gay, lesbian and transgendered individuals. Why would we risk our family relationships, our employment, public ridicule, and even our lives in order to be with the person that we love? For many of us the answer is two-fold. First of all, we believe that God has placed within us the powerful and life altering ability to love and to be loved. Second of all, we believe that it is God who has led us to one particular person with whom we share love and all of life’s joys and difficulties and to whom we are joined as a helpmate. “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.” (Ecclesiastes 4:9) Instead of subverting the will of God, the Orthodox Church should “confirm the word which the couple have spoken”[6], and be the vanguard in ending the war against gay people. That would be a worthy revolution, indeed.via Facebook
Boyd, being held somewhere unknown (geotagged to Dartmouth).
Update: Never mind. Boyd says in a follow-up video that he doesn't know if he's still running yet.
Like a mix between Alex Jones and The Brand Review, Paul David Fraser Boyd has crossed over from perpetually-unsuccessful political candidate into ‘satire.’
The Dartmouth cab driver has ended his candidacy for mayor in October’s HRM election via an announcement on Facebook made to parody the kind of videos kidnapping victims make before being executed.
Boyd speaks to a party off-camera, asking if he should stick to the script written on a tablet before making repeated rambling statements announcing his withdrawal from the election and reassurances that there is “no corruption” in government.
Two weeks ago Boyd also used Facebook to accuse mayor Mike Savage of ordering police officers to give him tickets, then warned residents to be on the lookout for voter fraud in the upcoming election. He later erased the posts and (for a time) deleted his account.
Halifax's mayoral race is fantastic: pic.twitter.com/WM7bHoQlpc — Chris Parsons (@cultureofdefeat) August 26, 2016
A perpetual candidate, Boyd has made a habit out of attempting to run for office several times during municipal, provincial and even federal elections. This is his most recent withdrawal.
Of course, there’s still time for Boyd to change his mind and file paperwork before the municipality’s September 13 deadline for candidates, but for now it appears the race for mayor will be between business owner and environmental advocate Lil MacPherson and incumbent Savage.
Boyd will presumably go back to driving his cab and advocating for HRM’s taxi industry, and perhaps making more satirical videos.
Though we suppose it’s possible he really is being held hostage by city council, in which case we’ll all feel really awful about this post. Best of luck, Paul!The defeat of Hillary Clinton in American presidential election has exposed the globalist agenda led by George Soros, as he funded Hillary’s campaign. All liberal mainstream media tried its best to mold public opinion in favor of Hillary, but they failed. The American middle class elected Donald J. Trump to the Oval Office because of his domestic agenda. Hence, why the warmongering party has waged a war inside America to weaken the Trump administration, with the aim of protecting the globalist agenda, as nationwide anti-Trump protests were staged by the globalist Soros immediately after the election. The globalist elite who were involved in regime changes and color revolutions around the globe, from Latin America to Ukraine, by achieving their geopolitical objectives, now they are attempting such efforts inside America against Trump’s legitimate government.
The American media controlled by George Soros propagated Trump as the candidate of the Kremlin. After his victory over Hillary, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) blamed Russia for hacking the election in the favor of Trump. But Russia has not only rejected such baseless allegations, it has also warned Trump that the globalists intent to stab American democracy with a “soft coup” against Donald Trump. Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he sees attempts in the United States to "delegitimize" US President Donald Trump using "Maidan-style" methods previously used in Ukraine, where readers will recall president Yanukovich was ousted in 2014 following a violent coup, which many suspect was conducted under the auspices of the US State Department and assorted US intelligence operations.
Why the globalist elite is anti-Russia
Here the question arises; why is the globalist elite anti-Russia, and why do they declared Russia a threat for the globalist led New World Oder? The answer is very simple because they were involved in the destruction of the Russian economy. Soros was directly involved in the USSR's economic crises during 1990's. After the dissolution of USSR, Soros helped Russian oligarchs to control the production facilities, industries, and oil refineries. There is a long war between this globalist agenda and Vladimir Putin inside of Russia. President Vladimir Putin did not only defeat them in Russia but he also has had success in minimizing their hegemony over the world by introducing an alternative 'World Order', a shared multipolar world. This is why the George Soros owned nonprofit organization known as the Open Society Foundation (OSF) attempted to overthrow President Putin and tried to destabilize Russia many times. As a result Russia has not only regulated international NGO's, but also banned Open Society in Russia.
Obama’s legacy is characterized by the “Blame Russia” mantra, and this came after Putin’s war against the globalist agenda. Therefore on the world stage, they blamed Russia for everything: they are even putting the failure of the Western world’s democracies on Russia. “Russia has hacked American election and now it is hacking European democracies” - this narrative was propagated with the fake news barrage and as a result the info war has become visible between the globalist controlled media and the multipolar media; Russian owned media and alternative media outlets i.e. Wikileaks and Alex Jones’ Infowars.
In fact, the Hungarian-born American business magnet and globalist manipulator, George Soros, has always been seen as the mastermind behind the 1997-08 Asian financial crises. This crisis was created to ruin the Malaysian economy. He meddled in politics across Europe, North America, and even in Asia for decades. Now currently, he is the man behind the migration crisis in Europe. He intended to make money from the destabilization of Europe with an uncontrolled flow of refugees. Besides this, the Soros owned OSF implemented the globalist agenda through regime change and color revolution practices by ostensibly campaigning for freedom, justice, and human rights. But now as the architect of a multipolar world, Russia has appeared as a resistance force against the globalist agenda with a “Multipolar World Order”. That’s why, this world for Soros campaigned, is now falling apart everywhere.
Globalist Mafia’s Control over American Journalism
Currently, the fake news barrage propped up by American liberal and left-wing media organizations is evidence of Soros' influence over the Media. His Open Society institute is directly linked with more than 30 mainstream American media organizations. Soros as a globalist manipulator understands the importance of media to control the public. According to "Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire," he has been fascinated by media from childhood where early career interests included "history or journalism or some form of writing." He served as "editor-in-chief, publisher, and news vendor of", his own paper, "The Lupa News" and wrote for a bulletin newspaper in his native Hungary before leaving, wrote author Michael T. Kaufman, a New York Times veteran.
For George Soros and ProPublica's other liberal backers, funding in journalism is the only way to influence the public, not only in America, but all over the world. According to the American Media Research Center (MRC), “The Soros dream to control mass media naturally started with Columbia University's School of Journalism. Columbia is headed by President Lee Bollinger, who also sits on the Pulitzer Prize board and the board of directors of The Washington Post. Bollinger, like some of Soros' other funding recipients, is pushing for journalism to find a new sugar daddy or at least an uncle - Uncle Sam. Bollinger wrote in his book "Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century" that government should fund media. A 2009 study by Columbia's journalism program came to the same conclusion, calling for "a national fund for local news." Conveniently, Len Downie, the lead author of that piece, is on both the Post's board and the board of the Center for Investigative Reporting, also funded by Soros.”
Soros did not only fund famous journalism schools in America but he seized the journalism industry and journalist associations. He inducted his mafia associates in all mainstream media organizations in the US and around the world. Even the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the Committee to Protect Journalists, is also directly controlled by Soros’s mafia by OSF funds.
According to facts presented by America’s Media Watchdog, “The Open Society Institute is one of several foundations funding the Investigative News Network (INN), a collaboration of 32 non-profit news organizations producing what they claim is "non-partisan investigative news." The James L. Knight Foundation also backs the network and is possibly the most-well-known journalism foundation. Knight President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen is on the board of directors for ProPublica. INN includes the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, the liberal web start-up MinnPost, National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, National Public Radio, and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. The network had included the liberal Huffington Post investigative operation among its grants, but HuffPo investigations merged with the possibly even more left-wing Center for Public Integrity, on whose board Arianna Huffington sits.”
Soros injected his agenda to attack the right wing in the name of quality journalism by investing in academic programs. Currently, the domestic situation in America is evidence that Soros is building a wall around Trump by using the mainstream media. This is why Trump used the word “dishonest” for American media pundits on the occasion of his inauguration.
Monopoly over Time and Space around the Globe
The globalist elite on the name of freedom, justice, and human rights fund these NGO's around the world to accomplish their agenda. NGO's, by establishing contacts with civil society and political classes from the grassroots level to state institutions, always worked for the liberal agenda for globalization, and as a result the Americanization of the world took place. In many countries NGO's apparently acted as tool of regime change and color revolutions with the backing of media. Media always helped them to control and mold public opinion in their favor. The liberal and left-wing media made Americanization of world possible with its globalist agenda.
If we go into detail, we can easily observe the American/Western media influence on all over the world. The State department of the US controls world media with liberal international organizations. The Washington based International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) backed by Knight International Journalism Fellowships and funded by Soros, always works to propagate the globalist agenda in the name of quality journalism around the globe. Even the State Department sponsored journalist exchange program is run by this ICFJ. US-Russia, US-Germany, US-Pakistan and all types of such exchange programs are designed by this Soros controlled ICFJ. Last year they announced a special program for Russian speaking Baltic journalists aimed at disseminating propaganda against Russia on the Ukraine Conflict.
German political scientist and journalist Udo Ulfkotte has published a book, Gekaufte Journalisten (“Purchased Journalists”), in which he describes how American and German politicians sway the German media, so that those journalists give the desired spin to world events. Ulfkotte claims that reporters are urged to bias their writing primarily to favor the American position and to oppose Russia. In his interview translated and published by Oriental Review, he responded to one question about journalists’ corrupt practices in this way, “When you fly to the US again and again and never have to pay for anything there, and you’re invited to interview American politicians, you’re moving closer and closer to the circles of power. And you want to remain within this circle of the elite, so you write to please them. Everyone wants to be a celebrity journalist who gets exclusive access to famous politicians. But one wrong sentence and your career as a celebrity journalist is over. Everyone knows it. And everyone’s in on it.”
So through NGOs and exchange programs, they picked mostly midcareer journalists to polish them for their agenda. Ulfkotte’s purchased journalist concept also comes true in Pakistan. Although Pakistan enjoyed ally status of the US since its creation, American media influence in Pakistan’s media news room came during the Afghan war against the USSR. Some senior journalists have opinion that before the 9/11, Washington and London based media outlets hired the whole slate of Pakistan’s young journalists and when their training was near to complete, then suddenly the 9/11 incident happened. Such journalists played a vital role in opinion making to force Pakistan’s government to assist the US in attacking Afghanistan.
A rough estimate indicates that more than 1500 Pakistani journalists visited the US based media organizations' news rooms, to receive the liberal created “Quality Journalism” training. On their return, they always toe their agenda in Pakistan based news rooms, in both electronic and print media. Media in Pakistan is considered as the fourth pillar of the state and now it has become a very needed necessity for the society. This is why the Open Society foundation of Soros has Pakistan entangled in a web, from domestic level to state institutions by controlling Pakistani media. In the name of internet access to everyone, and media training for journalists, the OSF is injecting his agenda to control democracy in Pakistan.
Unfortunately, the Soros controlled American media has already greater influence on Pakistan’s print media, and now Soros has succeeded to appoint his OSF country director as the chairman of Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA). Absar Alam, the chairman of PEMRA was the country head of the notorious Open Society and after his appointment he is openly toeing the Soros agenda in Pakistan’s electronic media by controlling the media with the state organization, PEMRA. In print media, there is space while in electronic media there is time, and the OSF has fully controlled on both space and time in the global media. Biased coverage over Syria and Ukraine conflicts are also evidence of how they propagate their line in mainstream and social media, while the Arab Spring in the Mideast was also launched by social media, which is additionally under the control of the globalist manipulator elite.
Therefore Russia, China, and some others countries have not only banned such INGO's and media, but they also introduced regulations to monitor them. Pakistan and India also proposed to keep checks and balances on such organizations and to monitor their source of funding, but both have failed due to pressure from liberal elites.
Soros Media brings regime change and color revolution to America
As it is discussed above, media is a powerful tool used to control public opinion by injecting a particular agenda in the targeted audience. Regime change events and color revolutions in the world are painted on the canvas of democracy and freedom, the media is always used to paint a colorful image with the brush of specific agenda within the designed project. If we look closely at the current American domestic situation we can easily observe how the liberal media has launched a campaign for change through the masses by provoking civil resistance against Trump’s administration, at the behest of its master Soros.
Soros' control over mass media, NGO's and his greater influence over state institutions is dragging America towards a visible color revolution by building a wall around Trump to keep him under pressure, or over throw his government for the benefit of the globalist elite. Anti-Trump protesters have already chosen the color pink and they have already formulated a “pussyhat revolution” project to mobilize the masses against the 45th President of the US. The American media is not only giving a full-coverage to these protests but it also awakening a resistance movement against the newly government of Trump.
The plotters of anti-Trump protests have only one intention: to weaken Trump, and they have no love for America and therefore they have diverted protests towards that which is violent in nature. Their war against Trump is damaging America as a whole. Not only state property was damaged but they are also going to attack state institutions, which will lead America towards destruction. The only way remaining for Trump is to strike back, fast and hard.
However, some reports claimed that Soros contributed to the funding the building of the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago, to the tune $160 million. While The Daily Beast claimed, “In 2011, Trump even told conservatives to "forget Soros, leave him alone, he’s got enough problems." But now Soros is committed to topple the Trump government just as before he tried his best to defeat him during the election process.
Soros has not only launched a war on Trump domestically, but he is also creating problems for him all around the globe with help using his fake news outlets. The purpose of this is to build global pressure against the White House. It’s really hard for the Trump administration to silence the vibrant American liberal and left wing media, who controls the pulse of America. This is why the White House has refused to cooperate with the anti-Trump mainstream media, due to their agenda and propaganda against Trump. Meanwhile Trump has also given preference to his twitter account rather than the mainstream media.
In short, America who used Soros and his media for color revolutions and regime change purposes around the globe from Latin America to Ukraine, is now under attack by him domestically. Now it is up to Trump in how he deals with this globalist monster. If Trump will not retaliate in time, he would be overthrown from the White House.In the current edition of the New Yorker, Eric Alterman writes:
And so even if one agrees with all of Huffington’s jabs at the Times, and Edsall’s critique of the Washington Post, it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.
Yes, technologies are biases that enhance some forms of social organisation and inhibit others, but I remain unconvinced that the viability of a nation, let alone democracy as a whole, is dependent on the transmission of news remaining frozen at a certain level of mechanical and technological development.
If you want more, you’ll have to read my column in the print edition of Maclean’s now on sale.Republican leaders in Washington are coming to grips with the possibility -- perhaps even probability -- that Alabama's Roy Moore will win his special election next Tuesday and join them in the capital.
Looking past allegations of sexual misconduct with Alabama teenagers, President Donald Trump formally endorsed Moore, and the Republican National Committee quickly followed suit, transferring $170,000 to the Alabama Republican Party to bolster Moore's candidacy.
"I think he's going to do very well. We don't want to have a liberal Democrat in Alabama, believe me," Trump said Tuesday during a lunch with Republican senators. "We want strong borders, we want stopping crime, we want to have the things that we represent and we certainly don't want to have a liberal Democrat that's controlled by Nancy Pelosi and controlled by Chuck Schumer, we don't want to have that for Alabama."
Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who once called on Moore to get out of the race, changed his rhetoric over the weekend to say that it was Alabama voters who should decide.
The changed tone -- and Trump's decision to do away with any facade of distancing himself from the race -- make it clear they are increasingly confident in Moore's chances of victory despite the continued unease of some other Republicans.
The special election is next Tuesday for the seat once held by Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general. Although the polls have showed a narrowing contest with Democrat Doug Jones, Alabama is a strongly Republican state and Democrats generally have little chance there.
A Moore victory would set up a potential clash with fellow Republicans in Congress, some of whom have resoundingly called on him to quit the race. While some have softened their rhetoric recently, others have said they still will try to expel him if he is elected.
An RNC official confirmed late Monday that the committee would once again be supporting Moore after severing its fundraising ties to his campaign last month. On Tuesday, the official said the RNC had made two transfers to the state party: one for $50,000 and another for $120,000.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss the transfers by name.
Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Breitbart's executive chairman, attended a rally with Moore Tuesday evening.
Buoyed by the taste of his own success in Congress as the Republican tax bill inches closer to passage, Trump telephoned Moore on Monday to offer encouragement as well as support and also argued in a pair of tweets that Moore's vote was badly needed to push the president's policies forward.
Weeks ago, when accusations of sexual misconduct with teenagers first surfaced, Trump's spokesman had said the president believed Moore would "do the right thing and step aside" if the allegations were true.
Top Republicans had vowed to expel him from the Senate if he wins. Publicly and privately, GOP leaders described the allegations against Moore as credible and insisted there were no circumstances under which he should serve in the Senate.
Moore's campaign was wounded by accusations this fall of sexual misconduct, decades ago, made by women who were then teenagers. One of the women alleges he initiated sexual contact when she was 14.
Moore has denied the allegations, saying "I do not know any of these women. I did not date any of these women I did not engage in any sexual misconduct with anyone."
Trump, who has repeatedly noted Moore's denials, took a more political stance on Monday.
"Democrats refusal to give even one vote for massive Tax Cuts is why we need Republican Roy Moore to win in Alabama," Trump tweeted. "We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges 2nd Amendment and more."
In that same vein, longtime Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby said Trump's endorsement didn't surprise him. He said of the president, "I think he's interested, a lot of us are, in the numbers, being a Republican."
And Sen. Orrin Hatch, who traveled with Trump on Monday to Hatch's home state of Utah, said he realistically didn't have any choice. Hatch said of Moore, "That's the only Republican you can possibly get down there at this time."
Trump first appeared to back Moore after his first choice, Sen. Luther Strange, lost the GOP primary for the seat once held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. But the president went silent after The Washington Post reported on the allegations of sexual misconduct with two teens, ages 14 and 16, and efforts to date several others while Moore was a local prosecutor in his 30s.
By late last month, however, with pressure mounting from Bannon and other corners of his base, Trump was making clear that he preferred Moore, raising doubts about the candidate's accusers and criticizing Democrat Jones as the "liberal puppet" of Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
Jones sidestepped questions about Trump's endorsement while suggesting the support of national Republicans like McConnell could do more harm than good in Alabama.
"Our campaign is going straight to the people of the Alabama because that's who my voters are. It's not the president, it's not Mitch McConnell," Jones told reporters outside a steel mill in suburban Birmingham. "Obviously Mitch McConnell has very little credibility in this state anyway, so I'm not worried about him at all."
Expelling a senator is no easy task. The Senate Ethics Committee would have to investigate, and a recommendation of expulsion could take years.It all started when a good friend of mine asked me if I wanted an old electronic organ. He had bought it in a thrift store some years ago, but had now realized that it would remain untouched in his cellar forever unless he could find a new home for it. I accepted the gift on the condition that I could do whatever I wanted with it, in terms of modifications and experiments.
Let me clarify at this point that organs like these are not particularly rare. They were mass produced in the seventies, and most thrift stores in Sweden have at least one of them on display. As can be seen in the pictures below, they are based on solid state technology (transistors), but not integrated circuits.
The organ was in good condition, with only a few contact glitches in the pedals and switches. It featured a set of really plain organ patches, tremolo, reverb and volume controls.
The first step was to remove the back cover. An overwhelming amount of dust was eager to come out and see the world, having been locked up for all those years.
It's always a pleasure to work with old machines that have been designed with maintenance in mind: As you can see from the pictures, there were several hinges and other details to aid the repairman.
The bottom right of these images shows a spring reverb tank, similar to what you'd find in a guitar amplifier. This makes sense because reverb, as I've discovered earlier, is the key to synthesizing organ-like sounds.
The reverb tank is currently not used in the chipophone, but it might be integrated in the future.
Apart from the reverb, there's a huge loudspeaker, a transformer, capacitors for the transformer, and rows upon rows of switches and wires. And then there are twelve oscillator cards:
This struck me as odd at the time, because it seemed like a really backwards way of design a synthesizer, but I suppose it made perfect sense in the analogue world.
There are twelve oscillators, one for each semitone. Each tone is divided down into several versions at different octaves. Then, if I'm not mistaken, these oscillating waveforms are attenuated according to a set of volume signals (presumably voltages or currents) arriving from the keys themselves. Every key acts as two or even three physical switches, feeding the volume signals from a few master signals that are controlled using the switches and knobs on the front panel. So, for instance, the volume signal for F#, second octave, might be a weighted sum of the first overtone of the second F# of the upper manual, and the second overtone of the first F# of the lower manual. Think of it as electronics simulating air flowing through ducts and hoses.
After some deliberation, I began cutting the wires. There was no turning back now.
I had decided to modify the organ into a MIDI keyboard. To do that I just needed a single switch for every key, so a lot of the wires could simply be removed.
The remaining wires were connected to a bunch of 74HC165 chips, 8-bit parallel input latches that can be daisy chained into a single serial line. Two sets of 44 keys, 13 pedals and a couple of switches made for a total of 120 input signals and a daisy chain of 15 chips.
The daisy chain is controlled by an ATmega88 microcontroller, which is responsible for polling all the signals and running a debounce algorithm. The microcontroller also has six analogue inputs, which are directly connected to the five potentiometers on the front panel (the leftmost knob is a switch) and the right foot pedal.
The analogue pedal, used as a volume controller in the original design, was not a potentiometer. This came as quite a shock to me, but again, I suppose it made sense in the good old days of no op amps.
The pedal contained a small light bulb that would shine through an opening, the width of which would vary (non-linearly) as the pedal was operated. This would cause a varying amount of light to shine on a photoresistor on the other side of the opening. Rube Goldberg would've been proud. I do not know whether the lamp was designed to shine with a constant light intensity or if it would actually carry an audio signal.
I replaced the light bulb with a high intensity LED.
Once the MIDI keyboard was up and running (thoroughly tested with a General MIDI softsynth of course), I started experimenting with creating an ATmega88 based synthesizer with typical chiptune sounds. I could re-use code from several earlier projects, of course.
The synthesizer contains eight independent waveform generators capable of generating pulse waves, lo-fi triangle waves and white noise, as well as some experimental features like ring modulation. These eight voices are then allocated dynamically as keys are pressed. Please refer to the chipophone page for further details.
The original electronic organ contained its own amplifier and loudspeaker. I've opted for a traditional line out signal for the time being, so external amplification is necessary. This also enables me to power the chipophone from a single 5V supply.
In the future, I hope to incorporate the loudspeaker and reverb tank back into the chipophone, but then I'm going to need op amps and a dual power supply to drive them. Time will tell if I ever get around to doing this, but it bugs me that I have a perfectly good spring reverb tank just laying around.
Discuss this page
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Jag tar inget ansvar för det som skrivs i forumet, förutom mina egna inlägg. Vänligen rapportera alla inlägg som bryter mot reglerna, så ska jag se vad jag kan göra. Som regelbrott räknas till exempel förolämpningar, förtal, spam och olagligt material. Mata inte trålarna.
Anonymous
Thu 22-Jul-2010 23:52 Sir, this is the most awesome thing of the day. You would rock at Comic Con!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 01:29 I am completely in love with the Chipophone! I neds one!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 02:02 How much would it cost to have you build me one?
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 02:19 This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen, props to you man for having the initiative to actually go through with this conversion. Cheers
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 05:15 holy fuck! this is good. very *very* good!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 06:48 Linus, Bravo! great project, beautiful job, Thanks for sharing. N3, Detroit Michigan, United States
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 07:27 You are a genius!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 07:47 the thing you wrote about the pedal struck me as a very creative solution back in the days. friggin awesome to use photo sensitivity in this context. good to see the love you have for life, music, technology and with everything that you do. cheers!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 09:57 Well done man, seriously. Thank you for doing this. I would love to buy one if you ever start selling them. You stand to make a good amount of money I assume.
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 10:14 AWESOME! Ge mig!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 10:46 AMAZING!!!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 10:54 You're my hero.
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 10:57 ZSÍRADÉK! :)
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 12:19 Wow! Very cool!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 12:44 Absolutely amazing! Looking forward to more video's!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 12:50 This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen, props to you man for having the initiative to actually go through with this conversion. Cheers
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 13:06 This is the coolest shit ever! You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 14:16 your my nerd-idol!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 14:27 Totally awesome!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 15:07 YOU ROCK! Fantastic work! You, Sir, are truly a man for all seasons!
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 15:20 I'm glad that a chip-tune enthusiast also appreciates the value of a good spring reverb!
Great job on this! Amazing to read about what you've done. I hope you write some original compositions for the Chipophone.
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 15:48 This is truly amazing, You just made my day!
cheers from Iceland
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 16:58 Great stuff! Seeing someone as talented in the technical way as in artistic measures makes me happy. Please keep on posting new music on youtube - you could even invite fellow scene musicians to do live-sets at your house, so you don´t have to do it all by yourself. I would love to see / hear zyron or fanta or... what about reyn?
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 18:06 brilliant. absolutely brilliant.
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 18:09 I would love to build the synth to use as a sound source. Are you planning to make schematics and source available? Or at least a pre-programmed AVR chip?
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 18:36 Wonderful project! Congrats!
Regarding why they used the light bulb/photoresistor setup for the expression (volume) pedal - all electric organs at that time took at least some design inspiration from the original Hammond organs - the expression pedals in classic tonewheel Hammonds use an air-variable capacitor - the moving parts don't directly contact each other, which makes for a wonderfully quiet pedal (electronically & physically) that won't ever get scratchy. I'd bet the pedal in your organ was designed with that in mind - they may have found that pots available at the time weren't up to it.
Anonymous
Fri 23-Jul-2010 19:38 You, Sir, seem to be shitting with us. Want to tell us |
get up higher in the tower we'll be able to see over the buildings. There's quite a natural park here, a regular little forest, complete with everything you'd want. Come in here, Harris. This is my office." The old man strode at quite a clip, around the corner and into a large, well-furnished apartment. "Isn't this pleasant? I intend to make my last year here as amiable as possible." He frowned. "Of course, with Deutsch gone, I may be here forever. Oh, well." He shrugged. "Sit down, Harris."
"Thanks." Harris took a chair, stretching his legs out. He watched Watts as he closed the door to the hall. "By the way, any more cases come up?"
"Two more today," Watts was grim. "Makes almost thirty, in all. We have three hundred men in this station. At the rate it's going—"
"Chief, you spoke about a forest on the asteroid. Do you allow the crew to go into the forest at will? Or do you restrict them to the buildings and grounds?"
Watts rubbed his jaw. "Well, it's a difficult situation, Harris. I have to let the men leave the grounds sometimes. They can see the forest from the buildings, and as long as you can see a nice place to stretch out and relax that does it. Once every ten days they have a full period of rest. Then they go out and fool around."
"And then it happens?"
"Yes, I suppose so. But as long as they can see the forest they'll want to go. I can't help it."
"I know. I'm not censuring you. Well, what's your theory? What happens to them out there? What do they do?"
"What happens? Once they get out there and take it easy for a while they don't want to come back and work. It's boondoggling. Playing hookey. They don't want to work, so off they go."
"How about this business of their delusions?"
Watts laughed good-naturedly. "Listen, Harris. You know as well as I do that's a lot of poppycock. They're no more plants than you or I. They just don't want to work, that's all. When I was a cadet we had a few ways to make people work. I wish we could lay a few on their backs, like we used to."
"You think this is simple goldbricking, then?"
"Don't you think it is?"
"No," Harris said. "They really believe they're plants. I put them through the high-frequency shock treatment, the shock box. The whole nervous system is paralyzed, all inhibitions stopped cold. They tell the truth, then. And they said the same thing—and more."
Watts paced back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. "Harris, you're a doctor, and I suppose you know what you're talking about. But look at the situation here. We have a garrison, a good modern garrison. We're probably the most modern outfit in the system. Every new device and gadget is here that science can produce. Harris, this garrison is one vast machine. The men are parts, and each has his job, the Maintenance Crew, the Biologists, the Office Crew, the Managerial Staff.
"Look what happens when one person steps away from his job. Everything else begins to creak. We can't service the bugs if no one services the machines. We can't order food to feed the crews if no one makes out reports, takes inventories. We can't direct any kind of activity if the Second in Command decides to go out and sit in the sun all day.
"Thirty people, one tenth of the Garrison. But we can't run without them. The Garrison is built that way. If you take the supports out the whole building falls. No one can leave. We're all tied here, and these people know it. They know they have no right to do that, run off on their own. No one has that right anymore. We're all too tightly interwoven to suddenly start doing what we want. It's unfair to the rest, the majority."
Harris nodded. "Chief, can I ask you something?"
"What is it?"
"Are there any inhabitants on the asteroid? Any natives?"
"Natives?" Watts considered. "Yes, there's some kind of aborigines living out there." He waved vaguely toward the window.
"What are they like? Have you seen them?"
"Yes, I've seen them. At least, I saw them when we first came here. They hung around for a while, watching us, then after a time they disappeared."
"Did they die off? Diseases of some kind?"
"No. They just—just disappeared. Into their forest. They're still there, someplace."
"What kind of people are they?"
"Well, the story is that they're originally from Mars. They don't look much like Martians, though. They're dark, a kind of coppery color. Thin. Very agile, in their own way. They hunt and fish. No written language. We don't pay much attention to them."
"I see." Harris paused. "Chief, have you ever heard of anything called—The Pipers?"
"The Pipers?" Watts frowned. "No. Why?"
"The patients mentioned something called The Pipers. According to Bradshaw, the Pipers taught him to become a plant. He learned it from them, a kind of teaching."
"The Pipers. What are they?"
"I don't know," Harris admitted. "I thought maybe you might know. My first assumption, of course, was that they're the natives. But now I'm not so sure, not after hearing your description of them."
"The natives are primitive savages. They don't have anything to teach anybody, especially a top-flight biologist."
Harris hesitated. "Chief, I'd like to go into the woods and look around. Is that possible?"
"Certainly. I can arrange it for you. I'll give you one of the men to show you around."
"I'd rather go alone. Is there any danger?"
"No, none that I know of. Except—"
"Except the Pipers," Harris finished. "I know. Well, there's only one way to find them, and that's it. I'll have to take my chances."
"If you walk in a straight line," Chief Watts said, "you'll find yourself back at the Garrison in about six hours. It's a damn small asteroid. There's a couple of streams and lakes, so don't fall in."
"How about snakes or poisonous insects?"
"Nothing like that reported. We did a lot of tramping around at first, but it's grown back now, the way it was. We never encountered anything dangerous."
"Thanks, Chief," Harris said. They shook hands. "I'll see you before nightfall."
"Good luck." The Chief and his two armed escorts turned and went back across the rise, down the other side toward the Garrison. Harris watched them go until they disappeared inside the building. Then he turned and started into the grove of trees.
The woods were very silent around him as he walked. Trees towered up on all sides of him, huge dark-green trees like eucalyptus. The ground underfoot was soft with endless leaves that had fallen and rotted into soil. After a while the grove of high trees fell behind and he found himself crossing a dry meadow, the grass and weeds burned brown in the sun. Insects buzzed around him, rising up from the dry weed-stalks. Something scuttled ahead, hurrying through the undergrowth. He caught sight of a grey ball with many legs, scampering furiously, its antennae weaving.
The meadow ended at the bottom of a hill. He was going up, now, going higher and higher. Ahead of him an endless expanse of green rose, acres of wild growth. He scrambled to the top finally, blowing and panting, catching his breath.
He went on. Now he was going down again, plunging into a deep gully. Tall ferns grew, as large as trees. He was entering a living Jurassic forest, ferns that stretched out endlessly ahead of him. Down he went, walking carefully. The air began to turn cold around him. The floor of the gully was damp and silent; underfoot the ground was almost wet.
He came out on a level table. It was dark, with the ferns growing up on all sides, dense growths of ferns, silent and unmoving. He came upon a natural path, an old stream bed, rough and rocky, but easy to follow. The air was thick and oppressive. Beyond the ferns he could see the side of the next hill, a green field rising up.
Something grey was ahead. Rocks, piled-up boulders, scattered and stacked here and there. The stream bed led directly to them. Apparently this had been a pool of some kind, a stream emptying from it. He climbed the first of the boulders awkwardly, feeling his way up. At the top he paused, resting again.
As yet he had had no luck. So far he had not met any of the natives. It would be through them that he would find the mysterious Pipers that were stealing the men away, if such really existed. If he could find the natives, talk to them, perhaps he could find out something. But as yet he had been unsuccessful. He looked around. The woods were very silent. A slight breeze moved through the ferns, rustling them, but that was all. Where were the natives? Probably they had a settlement of some sort, huts, a clearing. The asteroid was small; he should be able to find them by nightfall.
He started down the rocks. More rocks rose up ahead and he climbed them. Suddenly he stopped, listening. Far off, he could hear a sound, the sound of water. Was he approaching a pool of some kind? He went on again, trying to locate the sound. He scrambled down rocks and up rocks, and all around him there was silence, except for the splashing of distant water. Maybe a waterfall, water in motion. A stream. If he found the stream he might find the natives.
The rocks ended and the stream bed began again, but this time it was wet, the bottom muddy and overgrown with moss. He was on the right track; not too long ago this stream had flowed, probably during the rainy season. He went up on the side of the stream, pushing through the ferns and vines. A golden snake slid expertly out of his path. Something glinted ahead, something sparkling through the ferns. Water. A pool. He hurried, pushing the vines aside and stepping out, leaving them behind.
He was standing on the edge of a pool, a deep pool sunk in a hollow of grey rocks, surrounded by ferns and vines. The water was clear and bright, and in motion, flowing in a waterfall at the far end. It was beautiful, and he stood watching, marveling at it, the undisturbed quality of it. Untouched, it was. Just as it had always been, probably. As long as the asteroid existed. Was he the first to see it? Perhaps. It was so hidden, so concealed by the ferns. It gave him a strange feeling, a feeling almost of ownership. He stepped down a little toward the water.
And it was then he noticed her.
The girl was sitting on the far edge of the pool, staring down into the water, resting her head on one drawn-up knee. She had been bathing; he could see that at once. Her coppery body was still wet and glistening with moisture, sparkling in the sun. She had not seen him. He stopped, holding his breath, watching her.
She was lovely, very lovely, with long dark hair that wound around her shoulders and arms. Her body was slim, very slender, with a supple grace to it that made him stare, accustomed as he was to various forms of anatomy. How silent she was! Silent and unmoving, staring down at the water. Time passed, strange, unchanging time, as he watched the girl. Time might even have ceased, with the girl sitting on the rock staring into the water, and the rows of great ferns behind her, as rigid as if they had been painted there.
All at once the girl looked up. Harris shifted, suddenly conscious of himself as an intruder. He stepped back. "I'm sorry," he murmured. "I'm from the Garrison. I didn't mean to come poking around."
She nodded without speaking.
"You don't mind?" Harris asked presently.
"No."
So she spoke Terran! He moved a little toward her, around the side of the pool. "I hope you don't mind my bothering you. I won't be on the asteroid very long. This is my first day here. I just arrived from Terra."
She smiled faintly.
"I'm a doctor. Henry Harris." He looked down at her, at the slim coppery body, gleaming in the sunlight, a faint sheen of moisture on her arms and thighs. "You might be interested in why I'm here." He paused. "Maybe you can even help me."
She looked up a little. "Oh?"
"Would you like to help me?"
She smiled. "Yes. Of course."
"That's good. Mind if I sit down?" He looked around and found himself a flat rock. He sat down slowly, facing her. "Cigarette?"
"No."
"Well, I'll have one." He lit up, taking a deep breath. "You see, we have a problem at the Garrison. Something has been happening to some of the men, and it seems to be spreading. We have to find out what causes it or we won't be able to run the Garrison."
He waited for a moment. She nodded slightly. How silent she was! Silent and unmoving. Like the ferns.
"Well, I've been able to find out a few things from them, and one very interesting fact stands out. They keep saying that something called—called The Pipers are responsible for their condition. They say the Pipers taught them—" He stopped. A strange look had flitted across her dark, small face. "Do you know the Pipers?"
She nodded.
Acute satisfaction flooded over Harris. "You do? I was sure the natives would know." He stood up again. "I was sure they would, if the Pipers really existed. Then they do exist, do they?"
"They exist."
Harris frowned. "And they're here, in the woods?"
"Yes."
"I see." He ground his cigarette out impatiently. "You don't suppose there's any chance you could take me to them, do you?"
"Take you?"
"Yes. I have this problem and I have to solve it. You see, the Base Commander on Terra has assigned this to me, this business about the Pipers. It has to be solved. And I'm the one assigned to the job. So it's important to me to find them. Do you see? Do you understand?"
She nodded.
"Well, will you take me to them?"
The girl was silent. For a long time she sat, staring down into the water, resting her head against her knee. Harris began to become impatient. He fidgeted back and forth, resting first on one leg and then on the other.
"Well, will you?" he said again. "It's important to the whole Garrison. What do you say?" He felt around in his pockets. "Maybe I could give you something. What do I have...." He brought out his lighter. "I could give you my lighter."
The girl stood up, rising slowly, gracefully, without motion or effort. Harris' mouth fell open. How supple she was, gliding to her feet in a single motion! He blinked. Without effort she had stood, seemingly without change. All at once she was standing instead of sitting, standing and looking calmly at him, her small face expressionless.
"Will you?" he said.
"Yes. Come along." She turned away, moving toward the row of ferns.
Harris followed quickly, stumbling across the rocks. "Fine," he said. "Thanks a lot. I'm very interested to meet these Pipers. Where are you taking me, to your village? How much time do we have before nightfall?"
The girl did not answer. She had entered the ferns already, and Harris quickened his pace to keep from losing her. How silently she glided!
"Wait," he called. "Wait for me."
The girl paused, waiting for him, slim and lovely, looking silently back.
He entered the ferns, hurrying after her.
"Well, I'll be damned!" Commander Cox said. "It sure didn't take you long." He leaped down the steps two at a time. "Let me give you a hand."
Harris grinned, lugging his heavy suitcases. He set them down and breathed a sigh of relief. "It isn't worth it," he said. "I'm going to give up taking so much."
"Come on inside. Soldier, give him a hand." A Patrolman hurried over and took one of the suitcases. The three men went inside and down the corridor to Harris' quarters. Harris unlocked the door and the Patrolman deposited his suitcase inside.
"Thanks," Harris said. He set the other down beside it. "It's good to be back, even for a little while."
"A little while?"
"I just came back to settle my affairs. I have to return to Y-3 tomorrow morning."
"Then you didn't solve the problem?"
"I solved it, but I haven't cured it. I'm going back and get to work right away. There's a lot to be done."
"But you found out what it is?"
"Yes. It was just what the men said. The Pipers."
"The Pipers do exist?"
"Yes." Harris nodded. "They do exist." He removed his coat and put it over the back of the chair. Then he went to the window and let it down. Warm spring air rushed into the room. He settled himself on the bed, leaning back.
"The Pipers exist, all right—in the minds of the Garrison crew! To the crew, the Pipers are real. The crew created them. It's a mass hypnosis, a group projection, and all the men there have it, to some degree."
"How did it start?"
"Those men on Y-3 were sent there because they were skilled, highly-trained men with exceptional ability. All their lives they've been schooled by complex modern society, fast tempo and high integration between people. Constant pressure toward some goal, some job to be done.
"Those men are put down suddenly on an asteroid where there are natives living the most primitive of existence, completely vegetable lives. No concept of goal, no concept of purpose, and hence no ability to plan. The natives live the way the animals live, from day to day, sleeping, picking food from the trees. A kind of Garden-of-Eden existence, without struggle or conflict."
"So? But—"
"Each of the Garrison crew sees the natives and unconsciously thinks of his own early life, when he was a child, when he had no worries, no responsibilities, before he joined modern society. A baby lying in the sun.
"But he can't admit this to himself! He can't admit that he might want to live like the natives, to lie and sleep all day. So he invents The Pipers, the idea of a mysterious group living in the woods who trap him, lead him into their kind of life. Then he can blame them, not himself. They 'teach' him to become a part of the woods."
"What are you going to do? Have the woods burned?"
"No." Harris shook his head. "That's not the answer; the woods are harmless. The answer is psychotherapy for the men. That's why I'm going right back, so I can begin work. They've got to be made to see that the Pipers are inside them, their own unconscious voices calling to them to give up their responsibilities. They've got to be made to realize that there are no Pipers, at least, not outside themselves. The woods are harmless and the natives have nothing to teach anyone. They're primitive savages, without even a written language. We're seeing a psychological projection by a whole Garrison of men who want to lay down their work and take it easy for a while."
The room was silent.
"I see," Cox said presently. "Well, it makes sense." He got to his feet. "I hope you can do something with the men when you get back."
"I hope so, too," Harris agreed. "And I think I can. After all, it's just a question of increasing their self-awareness. When they have that the Pipers will vanish."
Cox nodded. "Well, you go ahead with your unpacking, Doc. I'll see you at dinner. And maybe before you leave, tomorrow."
"Fine."
Harris opened the door and the Commander went out into the hall. Harris closed the door after him and then went back across the room. He looked out the window for a moment, his hands in his pockets.
It was becoming evening, the air was turning cool. The sun was just setting as he watched, disappearing behind the buildings of the city surrounding the hospital. He watched it go down.
Then he went over to his two suitcases. He was tired, very tired from his trip. A great weariness was beginning to descend over him. There were so many things to do, so terribly many. How could he hope to do them all? Back to the asteroid. And then what?
He yawned, his eyes closing. How sleepy he was! He looked over at the bed. Then he sat down on the edge of it and took his shoes off. So much to do, the next day.
He put his shoes in the corner of the room. Then he bent over, unsnapping one of the suitcases. He opened the suitcase. From it he took a bulging gunnysack. Carefully, he emptied the contents of the sack out on the floor. Dirt, rich soft dirt. Dirt he had collected during his last hours there, dirt he had carefully gathered up.
When the dirt was spread out on the floor he sat down in the middle of it. He stretched himself out, leaning back. When he was fully comfortable he folded his hands across his chest and closed his eyes. So much work to do—But later on, of course. Tomorrow. How warm the dirt was....
He was sound asleep in a moment.
Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination: Stories of Science and Fantasy February 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.
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(Table S4 ). Dots represent silicate SPH particles in the midplane for three example impact scenarios (one in each column) that produce substantial disk‐like regions at 48 h after first contact. The dynamical structures identified as: (a–d) sub‐CoRoL, (e–h) super‐CoRoL, and (i–l) co‐CoRoL structures. Solid red lines denote the angular velocity or specific AM of a circular Keplerian orbit around a point mass. Dashed red line indicates the specific AM of material corotating with the inner region. The black particles are either at pressures above the critical point (25.5 kbar) or are pure vapor, and the blue particles are mixtures of liquid and vapor. The super‐Keplerian particles in Figures 9 a and 9 b are the remnants of a disrupting moonlet.
We find that there is a broad range of post‐impact structures, in terms of both thermal and dynamical state. Three example post‐impact structures with substantial disk‐like regions are shown in Figure 9. All structures have a corotating region close to the rotational axis and a Keplerian or sub‐Keplerian disk‐like region farther out. The transition region varies substantially between different structures. A large fraction of our suite of post‐impact states have very narrow transition regions, and the corotating region grades smoothly into the disk‐like region, as is the case for isolated synestias (Figure 5 ). But in some cases there is a shear boundary (an increasing angular velocity with radius) in the transition region which varies in magnitude and width (Figures 9 a and 9 i). The prevalence of structures with narrow transition regions is likely biased by the many high‐AM impacts with fast, small impactors in our suite of impacts. The nature of the transition region is determined both by the AM and thermal state of the structure, as we discuss below.
Rocky bodies are naturally forced into hot, rotating states by giant impacts during the later stages of accretion. We seek to understand the significance of hot, rotating planetary structures by assessing the range of possible structures that could be attained during planet formation and the frequency of occurrence. First, we examine and attempt to classify the dynamical and thermal structures of post‐giant impact states. In order to do this, we calculated the outcome of impacts between Earth‐like bodies with a range of collision parameters using SPH, as described in section 2.1, and combined our results with the simulations from Ćuk and Stewart [ 2012 ]. We examined the instantaneous structures of post‐impact structures at 24 to 48 h after first contact, when the structure had reached a quasi‐steady mass and AM distribution. This suite of impacts covers a range of impact energies but focuses on those that have high enough specific impact energy to be described as giant impacts by Quintana et al. [ 2016 ] (section 5.2 ). The full set of impacts are summarized in Table S4.
6 Discussion
6.1 Dynamic Stability of Hot, Rotating Planetary Structures Rapidly rotating, axisymmetric bodies can be susceptible to dynamic instabilities, such as the bar instability that causes the breakdown of axial symmetry and drives reorganization of the structure [e.g., Chandrasekhar, 1969]. Constant‐density, rotating spheroids are also known to transition from axisymmetric Maclaurin spheroids to non‐axisymmetric Jacobi spheroids above a critical degree of rotational flattening, because Jacobi spheroids are lower energy states [Chandrasekhar, 1969]. If rapidly rotating axisymmetric planetary structures were susceptible to such instabilities, the structure could rearrange or break up. Here we examine the stability of the rapidly rotating planetary structures considered in this work. The stability of rapidly rotating fluid bodies is typically evaluated by the ratio of the rotational kinetic energy, T, to the gravitational potential energy, W. Rotating bodies are unstable to non‐axisymmetric modes if the ratio T/|W| is above a critical value, which varies depending on the body in question. Constant‐density Maclaurin spheroids [Chandrasekhar, 1969], stellar systems [Ostriker and Peebles, 1973], rapidly rotating white dwarfs [Ostriker and Tassoul, 1969], and polytropic stars [Ostriker and Bodenheimer, 1973] have critical values in the range 0.14 to 0.27. All the pre‐CoRoL and super‐CoRoL structures considered in this work have an energy ratio T/|W| below this range of critical values. For example, the highest value for the structures shown in Figure 4 is 0.07. For the post‐impact structures we studied for this paper (Table S4) the maximum value is 0.085 and the average value is 0.042. We also did not observe any instabilities or triaxial structures in our isolated body SPH calculations, where the equilibrium shapes were calculated over many dynamical timescales. Therefore, based on the energy stability criteria and our empirical observations, the rapidly rotating planetary structures presented in this work are likely to be dynamically stable.
6.2 Lifetimes of Hot Planetary Structures Although hot, extended planetary structures are dynamically stable, they evolve by radiating energy. In some cases, AM may be reduced by tides or resonant interactions. For synestias, a sufficient decrease in AM or thermal energy will cause the body to fall below the CoRoL and adopt a more compact, corotating structure. Bodies that are far enough away from their host stars will eventually cool to a silicate magma ocean overlain by a volatile‐dominated atmosphere. Calculating the timescales for the collapse of synestias and the cooling of post‐impact states to magma oceans is key to understanding the influence of post‐impact states on the evolution of terrestrial planets. Synestias formed by impacts are substantially vapor in their disk‐like regions. Unless the body is very close to its parent star, the outer regions of the structure are expected to cool quickly by radiation. When the photosphere is controlled by silicate condensation, the radiative temperature is high [∼2300 K, Lock et al., 2016], but the energy that needs to be radiated to fall below the CoRoL is substantial. Condensing the vapor requires significant energy loss, both to cool to the phase boundary and to release the latent heat of vaporization of silicates. The contraction of the structure upon cooling also releases a comparable amount of potential energy. The amount of energy that needs to be radiated to fall below the CoRoL depends on how the internal energy is redistributed during cooling because the thermal structure affects the location of the CoRoL. We can estimate a lower limit on the timescale to cool below the CoRoL by considering just the potential energy difference between a post‐impact structure and a corotating body of the same AM, with a thermal state slightly below the CoRoL. This approach neglects the loss of energy required to reduce the specific entropy of the outer layer of silicates (for a fixed AM) to below the CoRoL, which could be substantial. We assume a radiative temperature of ∼2300 K for silicate vapor. However, the surface area of the structure will change with time, and the difference in radiative surface area between the post‐impact state and the sub‐CoRoL structure is an order of magnitude. As a result, there is a substantial uncertainty in cooling time. Considering the full range of possible radiative surfaces, typical Earth‐mass post‐impact synestias would require a minimum time of order 101 to 103 years to cool to a state below the CoRoL. Alternatively, a synestia could be brought below the CoRoL by removing AM from the structure by tides, interactions with the host star [Murray and Dermott, 1999], or three body interactions with the host star and a moon [Goldreich, 1966; Touma and Wisdom, 1994; Ćuk and Stewart, 2012; Wisdom and Tian, 2015; Ćuk et al., 2016; Tian et al., 2017]. A significant reduction of AM by tides takes 103–109 years, depending on the mechanism, which is generally greater than the radiative cooling timescale. AM may also be redistributed by viscous spreading, but the whole structure would remain above the CoRoL (for a fixed thermal state). Thus, an impact‐generated Earth‐mass synestia would be stable for greater than tens to thousands of years. The timescale for a post‐impact structure to cool to a fully condensed magma ocean is longer. To estimate the timescale, we calculate the difference in potential, kinetic, and internal energy between post‐impact states and corotating, isentropic condensed planets of the same AM (first column in Figure 4). We again assume a radiative temperature of ∼2300 K and consider radiative surface areas ranging from the post‐impact state to a fully condensed body. For highly extended post‐impact states that are above the CoRoL, the cooling time to a magma ocean state is on the order of 102 to 103 years. For post‐impact states produced by less energetic impacts that do not begin above the CoRoL, the timescale is shorter but still on the order of 102 to 103 years. For all partially vaporized states, the cooling time may be substantially extended if the chemistry of the system produces a lower temperature photosphere. For example, refractory components in the photosphere may form relatively low temperature hazes. The chemistry of the silicate atmosphere will also evolve as it cools, potentially changing the effective radiative temperature. In addition, the energy input from continued accretion will increase the cooling timescale of post‐giant impact structures, especially if the accreting bodies were small and primarily deposited their energy in the high‐entropy outer layers of the body. The lifetime of hot, extended structures affects the accretion and evolution of terrestrial planets (section 6.6).
6.3 CoRoL Versus Solid Body Rotational Breakup The rotational breakup of small rocky bodies has been extensively studied due to its importance in bounding the possible rotational states of minor planets and in understanding the origin of multiple asteroid systems [e.g., Harris, 1996; Pravec and Harris, 2007; Richardson and Walsh, 2006; Holsapple, 2004; Richardson et al., 2005; Ćuk, 2007; Walsh et al., 2008] [see review by Walsh and Jacobson [2015]]. Solid bodies with a range of material strength properties have been considered. Cohesionless asteroids share similarities with fluid bodies, and the spin stability limit for self‐gravitating solid bodies with deformation has been studied in detail [e.g., Holsapple, 2004]. The CoRoL for the larger rocky bodies studied in this work is different than the critical spin limit for small bodies. The typical assumption of incompressibility used in the small body literature does not hold for planet‐sized bodies. In addition, planetary bodies with hot thermal states intersect the liquid‐vapor phase boundary, leading to a significant decrease in average density. Accordingly, the CoRoL is typically reached at a lower AM compared to the critical spin limit for a rigid, condensed body. The outcome of exceeding spin stability is also different for asteroids and hot planets. Upon exceeding the critical spin limit, an asteroid will shear into two or more bodies with relative motions that conserve AM [Ćuk, 2007; Walsh et al., 2008; Walsh and Jacobson, 2015]. In contrast, a hot planetary body that exceeds the CoRoL can remain a single structure with the excess AM forming a disk‐like region. Therefore, the CoRoL is a new dynamical transition that is fundamentally different from the well‐studied critical spin limit for smaller solid bodies.
6.4 Analysis of Post‐impact Structures The structure and evolution of post‐impact states can have a substantial impact on planet formation and the final properties of terrestrial planets (section 6.5). In particular, the properties of the disk‐like regions of post‐impact structures control the mechanisms and efficiency of satellite formation (section 6.6). The numerical methods used to model giant impacts cannot be used to directly model satellite formation. Hence, dedicated disk structure and evolution models have been used to study the formation of moons from the disk‐like regions of post‐impact structures, with initial conditions based on the results of impact simulations. Informed by work on astrophysical disks, most studies treat post‐impact structures as consisting of a distinct planet and disk, both for modeling the disk evolution and for analyzing post‐impact states. However, as discussed in section 5 and shown in Figure 9, above the CoRoL the entire post‐impact structure can be continuous between the corotating and disk‐like regions. Even below the CoRoL, there may be significant vapor pressure in the transition region between the corotating and disk‐like regions (e.g., Figure 10a), and the disk‐like region cannot be treated in isolation from the rest of the structure. Here we summarize previous work on the structure of circumterrestrial disks formed by giant impacts and identify some issues with common approaches taken in these studies. Published studies of giant impacts have made different assumptions on how to divide post‐impact structures into a planet and a disk. Since most impact studies have utilized SPH, in this section we refer to a parcel of material as a particle. The majority of studies [e.g., Canup et al., 2001; Canup and Asphaug, 2001; Canup, 2004, 2008b, 2012; Nakajima and Stevenson, 2014, 2015] have used an iterative routine to divide the structure, e.g., as described in Canup et al. [2001]. First, an initial guess is made to estimate the mass and equatorial radius of the planet. Particles are defined as being part of the planet or disk based on their AM. A particle is classified as being in the disk if it has sufficient AM such that the semi‐major axis of a circular Keplerian orbit with the same AM is greater than the planet's equatorial radius. Bound particles that are not classified as being in the disk are considered to be part of the planet. The equatorial radius of the planet is recalculated based on the total mass and AM of all the particles classified as being in the planet, assuming that the planet has a similar bulk density to the present‐day Earth and limited rotational flattening. The particles are then reclassified based on the new mass and radius of the planet, and the procedure is repeated until convergence. Alternatively, Ćuk and Stewart [2012] used a density contour of 1000 kg m−3 to define the planet's equatorial radius due to the large rotational flattening of the planet. As in the iterative routine, material with sufficient AM to be in a circular Keplerian orbit above the equator of the planet was considered to be part of the disk. Low‐density material that did not meet the AM requirement to be in the disk was considered to be part of a vapor atmosphere around the planet. The combined mass of the planet and atmosphere was used for calculating the orbit of particles. In both methods, once the structure is divided into a planet and disk, the surface density of the disk is calculated by moving the mass of each disk particle to the semi‐major axis of the equivalent circular Keplerian orbit for the AM of that particle. Although the details differ slightly, previous work applied the same principle of dividing the structure based on AM, and we refer to both methods as the conventional analysis. The conventional analysis neglects the connection between the disk‐like region and the corotating region of the structure through the vapor phase. Also, the radius of the planet defined in the conventional analysis does not account for the large mass of high specific entropy, low‐density material in the corotating and transition regions of the structure because the planet is assumed to have a bulk density corresponding to condensed material (of order 103 kg m−3). The assumptions made in analyzing post‐impact states are important as the properties of the post‐impact structure (e.g., the disk mass, AM, and surface density) calculated using the conventional analysis and reported in impact studies are used to inform the initial conditions of disk evolution models, either directly or indirectly. Most studies of disks in the aftermath of giant impacts have focused on the Moon‐forming event [e.g., Thompson and Stevenson, 1988; Ida et al., 1997; Kokubo et al., 2000; Ward, 2012, 2014, 2017; Salmon and Canup, 2012, 2014; Nakajima and Stevenson, 2014; Canup et al., 2015; Charnoz and Michaut, 2015]. In the canonical giant impact, ∼20 wt % of the disk would have been initially vapor [Canup and Asphaug, 2001; Canup, 2004], but in the recently proposed high‐AM models, the disk would have been largely vaporized [Ćuk and Stewart, 2012; Canup, 2012; Nakajima and Stevenson, 2014]. Modeling the structure and evolution of partially vaporized disks is challenging since the material in the disk is composed of multiple phases and chemical components. It is necessary to make a number of simplifying assumptions to make the problem tractable. The simplest disk models are N‐body simulations that neglect the vapor in the disk and treat the disk material as fully condensed particles [e.g., Ida et al., 1997; Kokubo et al., 2000]. As the disk evolves under gravitational forces, material with an orbit that intersects the planet is assumed to be lost from the disk and is removed from the simulation. More advanced disk models have made approximations of the multiphase physics [e.g., Thompson and Stevenson, 1988; Ward, 2012, 2014, 2017; Salmon and Canup, 2012, 2014; Nakajima and Stevenson, 2014; Canup et al., 2015; Charnoz and Michaut, 2015]. Typically, particles of condensate are assumed to experience mutual collisions that damp the eccentricity and inclination of their orbits. Outside the Roche limit, the vapor is assumed to condense quickly and the condensate rapidly collides together to form moonlets. Inside the Roche limit, the condensate separates from the gas and forms a liquid layer [Ward, 2012] or froth [Thompson and Stevenson, 1988] in the midplane of the disk, surrounded by a vapor atmosphere. Viscosity in the disk causes the inner disk to spread and the surface density distribution to evolve. As in N‐body simulations, material that spreads inside the radius of the planet is assumed lost from the disk, although some preliminary work has considered a more complex inner boundary [Desch and Taylor, 2013; Charnoz and Michaut, 2015]. Although the above assumptions are the most important for our discussion here, a number of other assumptions are made in different models of the inner disk, including a constant surface density [e.g., Salmon and Canup, 2012, 2014], neglecting the radial pressure gradient [e.g., Charnoz and Michaut, 2015], and using a single‐component equation of state [e.g., Ward, 2012]. All the disk models are initialized with conditions that are based on the conventional analysis described above and evolve under the assumption of unfettered mass flow to the planet. Our work identifies several issues with the assumptions made in previous studies of post‐impact structures and circumterrestrial disks. First, post‐impact structures cannot always be divided into a planet and disk that can be modeled separately. For synestias, the corotating region and the disk‐like region are continuous, as demonstrated by the angular velocity and thermodynamic profiles of the structure shown in Figures 9e–9h. In such cases, calculating the structure or evolution of a region of the structure without considering the whole will lead to substantial errors. Even for sub‐CoRoL structures, there can be significant pressures (approximately thousands of bars in the transition region between the corotating and disk‐like regions, e.g., Figure 10a), due to the high specific entropy of the material. In such cases, the structure and evolution of the disk‐like region cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the structure because the influence of the vapor in the corotating and transition regions is not negligible. Due to the hot thermal state of the corotating and transition regions, the definition of the planet in the conventional analysis does not correspond to the inner edge of the disk‐like region in the post‐impact structure. For example, for the structure shown in Figures 9a–9d, in the conventional analysis the mass of the planet is 0.98 M Earth using the iterative routine of Canup et al. [2001] and 0.95 M Earth using the approach of Ćuk and Stewart [2012]. The combined mass of the planet and atmosphere using the Ćuk and Stewart [2012] approach is 0.99 M Earth. In contrast, the mass of the corotating region in the SPH post‐impact structure is only 0.88 M Earth but the radius of the corotating region extends out to ∼6500 km, similar to the radius of the planet defined in the conventional analysis, 6532 km or 6691 km. The hot vapor in the transition region extends out to beyond 8000 km, much greater than the conventional radius of the planet. Thus, the inner edge of the disk‐like region is much farther out than assumed in the conventional analysis. The thickness of the transition region may be dependent on the viscosity of the vapor [Desch and Taylor, 2013], and the thickness may not be captured accurately in SPH. However, even if the transition region was much thinner, the large radius of the hot inner portion of the structure cannot be ignored. Second, mass and AM cannot simply be lost from the disk‐like regions of a structure to the planet. The pressure at the interface between the corotating and disk‐like regions in most structures is high (103–104 bar), and these regions tend to be majority vapor. Vapor cannot simply flow across the boundary because of the pressure gradient. The fate of condensed mass in the disk that falls or spreads inward is more complicated. Falling condensate would encounter the high specific entropy of the corotating and transition regions, thermally equilibrate, and vaporize. Vaporizing condensates could increase the pressure support in the corotating region and, in turn, the disk‐like region. Increasing the vapor pressure could add vapor mass to the disk‐like region, particularly in the case of synestias. The magnitude of the effect of the infalling condensate depends on the balance between the potential energy released by the falling condensates and the redistribution of thermal energy. Crucially, mass cannot flow irretrievably from the disk‐like region to the corotating region, and previous studies have artificially depleted the mass in the disk‐like region. Third, the redistribution of the disk mass onto Keplerian orbits in the conventional analysis produces unrealistically compact surface density distributions for multiphase disks. In post‐impact structures the disk‐like regions are typically a variable mixture of condensate and vapor (for example, see the range of specific entropies in Figures 9c, 9g, and 9k). The condensates are not supported by the pressure gradient in the vapor. If the condensates decouple from the vapor, then they would fall inward via buoyancy forces. The codes that are typically used in giant impact studies do not include the separation of vapor and condensed phases. This inability of the impact code to model multiphase behavior is the rationale behind the redistribution of mass in the conventional analysis. The conventional analysis assumes that the mass fraction of vapor is small and so the effect of vapor pressure is neglected. However, for disk‐like regions that are substantially vaporized, the vapor pressure cannot be neglected. Even assuming condensate is decoupled from the vapor, the pressure gradient can support the fraction of mass that is vapor on orbits at greater semi‐major axes than purely Keplerian orbits. If the condensates are coupled to the vapor, then the whole mass of the disk can be supported by pressure gradient forces. If there is a substantial fraction of vapor, the conventional analysis produces a surface density distribution that is more compact than a pressure‐supported disk. In impacts where the majority of the disk‐like region is vaporized (e.g., the example in Figures 9e–9h), the structure of the disk‐like region is correctly modeled by the impact code, given sufficient resolution and time for the structure to reach quasi‐equilibrium (e.g., Figures 9e–9h and 10d–10f). In these cases, no post‐simulation redistribution of mass is necessary. Even so, there is a technical difficulty in calculating the post‐impact structure for a particular impact even in completely vapor structures. The numerical viscosity in the SPH code leads to some redistribution of mass and AM on the dynamical timescales required for the structure to gravitationally equilibrate. For the example in Figure 10d–10f, the mass outside of Roche increased by a few tenths of a lunar mass over days of simulation time. Thus, the equilibrium structure evolves over the calculation time. Given that the real viscosity in the structure is poorly constrained, there is uncertainty in the predicted post‐impact structure for a specific impact scenario. In a mixed phase disk, more careful analysis is needed to correctly model the dynamics and thermodynamics of liquid and vapor both during the impact and in the immediate aftermath. It is possible to quantify the error that is introduced in analyzing the output of an impact simulation using the conventional analysis in the case that the disk‐like region is majority vapor. There is initially no phase separation, and the code used to simulate the impact can accurately model the hydrostatic post‐impact structure. For cases similar to the Moon‐forming impacts proposed by Ćuk and Stewart [2012], the conventional analysis artificially decreases the mass of the disk‐like region by several lunar masses. The surface density of the disk‐like region is correspondingly reduced as shown in Figure 14. The black line in Figure 14 shows the true surface density of the structure, and the surface density of the disk in the conventional analysis is given in red. The blue dashed line shows the original position of the disk material in the conventional analysis. The mass depletion of the disk‐like region is strongest close to the planet and far from the rotational axis. Thus, the mass in the disk‐like regions can be substantially reduced by the conventional analysis. For the example in Figure 14, the mass beyond Roche is reduced from 1.7 to 0.5 lunar masses. Note that the surface density of the disk‐like regions within a synestia (black line in Figure 14) is not constant with radius as assumed in some disk evolution models. In most impact cases, some mass is injected into orbits far from the central mass. This mass will cool rapidly and can be modeled as pure condensate. Figure 14 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Ćuk and Stewart [ 2012 The conventional analysis for processing the output of giant impact simulations artificially depletes the mass in the disk‐like regions for substantially vaporized structures. For example, the surface density in the disk‐like region of the structure shown in Figures 9 e– 9 h (black) is significantly higher than the surface density calculated using the conventional analysis in the style of] (red). The disk mass is moved inward from its original position (blue dashed). Nakajima and Stevenson [2014] have previously noted the significance of pressure gradients in the structure of highly vaporized post‐impact structures. They analyzed the disk structures generated by specific examples of canonical, high‐energy and high‐AM, and intermediate giant impacts. They found that in the disk‐like regions of high‐energy, high‐AM structures, the specific AM was nearly constant with radius, due to strong pressure support. Such structures are likely to be unstable by the Rayleigh criteria. As a result, Nakajima and Stevenson [2014] redistributed the mass in the high‐energy, high‐AM cases assuming an arbitrary stable surface density profile that conserved the mass and AM of the disk. However, they calculated the disk mass and AM to be conserved using the conventional analysis. The disk mass was significantly depleted by the use of the conventional analysis, and the calculated disks have less mass than found in the disk‐like region of synestias formed under the same impact conditions. Given the significant errors in the structure calculated using the conventional approach, it is important that better techniques are developed to analyze the results of giant impact simulations. For vapor‐dominated synestias, we suggest that removing the escaping mass from an SPH simulation and calculating the hydrostatic structure of the bound mass provides a reasonable estimate of the post‐impact structure, as shown in Figure 10. In addition, the treatment of the interface between the corotating and disk‐like regions in disk evolution models requires significant technical developments (as discussed in Charnoz and Michaut [2015]).
6.5 Synestias and Satellite Formation In the canonical disk model (e.g., Figures 9a–9d), recent work suggests that satellite accretion occurs in a multistage process [Salmon and Canup, 2012]. The material outside the Roche limit condenses and accretes quickly (on a timescale of weeks) to form a proto‐Moon. The proto‐Moon temporarily confines the edge of the Roche‐interior liquid‐vapor disk via resonant interactions. As the Roche‐interior fluid disk cools and viscously spreads both inward and outward, moonlets whose orbits are raised beyond the Roche limit are accreted onto the proto‐Moon on a timescale of hundreds of years [Machida and Abe, 2004; Salmon and Canup, 2012; Charnoz and Michaut, 2015]. The multiphase dynamics of a canonical circumterrestrial disk are challenging to model, and our understanding of the physical processes in the disk is incomplete. For example, most studies of the canonical disk evolution make an assumption of energy balance between viscous spreading of the Roche‐interior disk and radiative cooling; however, Charnoz and Michaut [2015] have shown that radiative cooling dominates the system. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that canonical disk models must include the vapor pressure support from the corotating region. Satellite accretion from the various post‐impact structures described here can be fundamentally different than accretion from a canonical circumterrestrial disk. Post‐impact synestias can have a much higher surface density in the disk‐like region (e.g., Figure 9). Consequently, the cooling time of vapor beyond the Roche limit reaches timescales relevant for satellite formation. For example, Lock et al. [2016] estimate that substantial vapor pressure (greater than bars) can persist at the Roche limit for tens of years after the impact for the synestia example in Figures 9e–9h. Synestias do not have a shear boundary between the corotating region and disk‐like region, and therefore, the whole structure can mix more easily than in the sub‐CoRoL structures formed in canonical giant impacts. Condensates that decouple from the vapor in the lowest surface density regions beyond the Roche limit have angular momenta such that they orbit within the vapor structure. In some cases, the proto‐Moon may form beyond the Roche limit and grow to near its final mass while remaining within the Earth‐composition vapor of the synestia. Lock et al. [2016] proposed that accretion within an impact‐generated synestia can explain the isotopic and chemical properties of our Moon. A future paper will investigate the evolution of synestias and the formation of our Moon.
6.6 Planet Formation With Hot Rocky Bodies We have shown that partially vaporized post‐impact bodies are common during accretion (section 5); however, the implications of the highly variable thermal and physical structures of such bodies on the formation of terrestrial planets have not been considered. Here we comment on a few key areas of planet formation affected by the possible range of planetary structures: accretion efficiency, core formation, and chemical evolution. At present, models of the accretion of terrestrial planets do not account for changes in thermal state. The physical size of planetesimals and planets is usually calculated by assuming a fixed bulk density over the entire calculation [typically 3000 kg m−3 in N‐body codes, e.g., Quintana et al., 2016]. For rotating rocky bodies with the highest specific entropy cases considered here, the bulk density could be an order of magnitude lower. Figure 15 presents the bulk density and areal cross sections for the suite of Earth‐mass bodies shown in Figure 4. Partial vaporization is accompanied by a significant decrease in bulk density for all rotational states. Post‐impact states can be significantly larger than isolated bodies with even lower density and larger cross sections. All giant impacts results in some inflation of the radius of a body. The larger sizes of hot rocky planets (Figure 4) translate to larger collisional cross sections and an increased probability of impacts, and hence more efficient accretion (Figures 15b and 15c). In particular, the expanded cross section of a body after an impact will increase the fraction of impact debris reaccreted in the early time period before the debris can be perturbed from crossing orbits. In proposed Moon‐forming giant impacts, typically a few to several lunar masses of material is ejected [Canup, 2004; Ćuk and Stewart, 2012; Canup, 2012], which is accreted onto the Earth and nearby planets within ∼10 Myr under current assumptions [Jackson and Wyatt, 2012; Bottke et al., 2015]. It has been suggested that the warm debris disks by giant impacts would be observable around other stars [Jackson and Wyatt, 2012]. But recently, Kenyon et al. [2016] noted that the observed occurrence rate of warm debris disks around young stars is much lower than what would be expected from the prevalence of extrasolar rocky planets around mature stars and current planet formation models. Kenyon et al. [2016] inferred that terrestrial planet formation must be quick and neat, with efficient reaccretion of impact‐produced debris. Realistic capture cross sections of planets could be a factor in explaining such observations and should be included in planet formation studies. Figure 15 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint. Colored lines show bodies of constant angular momentum. The extended structures of hot, rotating rocky bodies lead to very low bulk densiEgypt’s majority Muslim population spoke loudly against extremism and terrorism when they served as “human shields” in protection of their Christian neighbors on Christmas eve. “We either live together, or we die together,” was the slogan of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon. Indeed, it was a teachable moment: a ray of hope in a sectarian torn world. But fake scholar Robert Spencer is determined to squander any chance at peaceful interfaith coexistence.
Spencer notes that Al-Azhar University condemned the recent attacks on Egyptian Churches:
Al-Azhar is the foremost authority in Sunni Islam, and a case can be made from the Qur’an for what they say: “For had it not been for Allah’s repelling some men by means of others, cloisters and churches and oratories and mosques, wherein the name of Allah is oft mentioned, would assuredly have been pulled down.” — Qur’an 22:40
Of course, the citation of Quran 22:40 is black-and-white proof that Islam does not sanction attacks on houses of worship. However, Spencer as usual turns the Quran upside down:
Thus Muslims should not be among those who “pull down” churches, right? So why, then, would any jihadists target a church, given that they consistently proclaim themselves to be the true and pure Muslims, following scrupulously everything commanded in the Qur’an and Sunnah? Or have they really “hijacked” Islam, as is endlessly claimed? Well, it is worth noting that ‘Umdat al-Salik (Reliance of the Traveller), a manual of Islamic law that Al-Azhar certifies as conforming “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni Community,” contains a section (o9.10-o.9.15) entitled “Rules of Warfare” that says nothing about any prohibition on attacking a non-Muslim house of worship. And Islamic law generally takes a negative view of non-Muslim houses of worship, forbidding non-Muslims in Islamic states from building new houses of worship or repairing old ones.
Suggesting the Quran doesn’t mean what it says, Spencer cites as proof his favorite piece of evidence: Umdat al-Salik, a 14th century medieval Muslim law manual. Spencer assumes the certification of the translation into English by Al-Azhar means that Muslim legal thinking hasn’t moved beyond the 14th century. What he fails to disclose is that these manuals are studied in their historical contexts. Serious Egyptian religious intellectuals do not take the rules of warfare from Umdat al-Salik but from the Geneva Conventions and U.N. treaties, as stated clearly by Egypt’s Grand Mufti, Dr. Ali Gomaa:
“Fight in the way of God against those who wage war against you, but do not commit aggression – for, verily, God does not love aggressors,” (Quran, 2:190) This verse summarizes everything that has been agreed upon concerning guidelines of warfare, including the first and second Geneva Conventions.
Nonetheless, reading in translation (since we know he is not proficient in Arabic), Spencer doesn’t find any suggestion in Umdat Al-Salik that houses of worship should be protected; therefore, he concludes Islamic law in its totality must not have any precedent about protecting houses of worship. What he failed to mention, even in the very piece of evidence he cited, is this:
09:11 It is unlawful to kill a non-Muslim to whom a Muslim has given his guarantee of protection. [Ibn, al-Naqīb A. L, and Noah H. M. Keller. Reliance of the Traveller: The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law ʻumdat Al-Salik. Beltsville, MD, U.S.A: Amana Publications, 1999. P. 603]
Most Muslims reinterpret such clauses in the modern sense of citizenship. The Christians are |
not associated with either telomere length or IL-6, while pessimism is associated with both. This observation feels slightly counter-intuitive; is reduced pessimism not the same as increased optimism? If so, one would expect that if pessimism associates with shorter telomeres then surely optimism would associate with longer telomeres? Clearly this is not the case. As in the previous Epel/Blackburn study, higher levels of perceived stress were also associated with shorter telomeres, leading to the conclusion that “exposure to psychological stressors in pessimists could contribute to to chronic low-level increases in circulating pro-inflammatory cytokines…contributing to telomere shortening”. While this was a small study, it does add weight to the hypothesis that an individual’s psychological disposition is a contributing factor to poor health outcomes.
Cause for further concern for our downbeat friends is that an individual’s score on optimism and pessimism measures generally remain stable across time (important to note that this was not assessed in the present study, but has been replicated in earlier studies). Unfortunately for the happy folk out there, optimism again fails to associate with “better” health outcomes — so we may as well all take the middle-ground on this one.
AdvertisementsHurts Donut is well known in Springfield. For those who aren’t local, they are a trendy specialty donut shop that started downtown and now has a second location.
Many would consider Hurts Donut a small business success story that created jobs. However, while technically successful they are also a perfect example of why so many families are struggling to make ends meet in Springfield, MO.
City-Data shows that Springfield consistently outpaces Missouri’s already dismal poverty numbers. There are several ways to view poverty statistics, and the site goes segment by segment. The entire state of Missouri showed at 19.4% for residents with income below the poverty line. Springfield sat at 32.7%. This calculator shows you the poverty line per family size, to demonstrate how those figures are determined.
This surely has a lot to do with the spiraling homeless and growing panhandling problem. The reality is, compared to working for one of the most successful bakeries in Springfield, panhandling can easily pay more. That’s on us to solve, not the people who are trying to stay off the streets by any means necessary.
Compare 25% of residents below the poverty line to a 3-5% unemployment rate, and it is clear that working hard is not enough to stay afloat.
Enter Hurts Donut. A trendy business, and one that most would hail as a success. But look at it from the perspective of the people who work there to survive and it changes quickly.
Recently, a relatively routine Facebook thread brought in people familiar with Hurts Donut and they contacted me with their experiences. A story began to emerge, and it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. Crafting a quality product under high demand for a thriving and expanding business that runs 24/7 would surely net a living wage, wouldn’t you think?
According to multiple sources who requested they remain anonymous, they earned approximately $8 an hour. Workers do not have benefits of any kind. I was told by multiple sources that they do not get paid sick time and are pressured to come in with the flu or other contagious illnesses. Workers are so impoverished they cannot afford to lose the pay or risk their jobs. They could be homeless before they could locate another job, even if they found one within a week or two, because they have zero extra money to save for emergencies. Hurts Donut did not reply to a Facebook message requesting more detailed information.
But small businesses need to keep their margins tight, correct? That sounds great until you see the post where the owner gets her dream house, with a washer and dryer in every single bedroom. Below, you can see they spent $27,000 on a “hobby” purchase. Just once perhaps it would be great to take some of that hobby money and divide it up among the people who make food they couldn’t afford to buy otherwise.
Considering that many employees cannot afford to pay rent on $8 an hour, it’s beyond tacky to brag about luxury that was earned on the backs of workers who churn out this product every day.
But then what is that compared to the day they bought a plane just as a surprise?
Or is it even worse, as “punishment for buying a plane” she buys “four wheel thing” and jokes about the impulse buy? She doesn’t even know what it is, just that she wants it. Tell you what, I’ll let you read it in her own words.
But before you do: $8 x 40 hours = $320 per week, after taxes approximately $272 per week. $1088 per month. $13,056 per year. Many employees don’t get 40 hours per week and a few said they did not make the full $8, so that means working for Hurts Donut likely drops an employee below the poverty line. According to the Census Bureau, Springfield’s median gross rent is $676, therefore a single person making Hurts Donut kind of money cannot afford to live in the average apartment. The lower cost of living that is hailed so much doesn’t matter if a worker still doesn’t earn enough to eat and keep a roof over their heads.
Two of their employees don’t earn in a year what was spent without thought on a toy.
If they can afford to buy a plane or a $27,000 “thing” on a lark, they can afford to pay a relatively small staff enough to make a significant change in their lives. Their employees could afford their own health insurance, then. This shows exactly how the wealthy continue to exploit the poor to enhance their riches, while refusing to give back. Their people come in with toothaches because they don’t have dental insurance. They come in sick. They live paycheck to paycheck and depend on shady payday loans to get them by when things get really tough.
This is why we have thriving businesses and starving people. It’s why most people have to work two jobs, or sometimes three jobs just to stay afloat. This can be said of hundreds, perhaps thousands of businesses that have worked together and price locked employees into desperation.
If we want to break the cycle of poverty, we must first make it so that working full time is enough to survive. For example, St. Louis has increased their minimum wage because there is no other answer to the issue but to let workers earn enough to remain independent of services and safety nets. Otherwise, government programs are subsidizing businesses like Hurts Donut, and enables them to rake in profits while workers rely on assistance to make it through the month.
“Today, the Supreme Court justified our rights as a city to make sure the people in our city can make a living wage,” Reed said later in a statement. “The people of St. Louis need to be able to afford groceries for their families and a roof over their heads.”
The people of Springfield deserve the same ability to earn a living.
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Like this: Like Loading...Donald Trump surpasses Hillary Clinton in the latest Rasmussen tracking poll, which finds likely voters prefer Trump to Clinton, 43 percent to 41 percent.
In Wednesday’s poll, Clinton led Trump by four points, 43 percent to 39 percent. Her lead has continued to decrease since Monday when she had a seven point lead and then dropped two points to a five point lead on Tuesday.
The survey, which questions 1,500 likely voters, is updated each weekday and is “based on a three-day rolling average.” The latest results have a plus or minus 2.5 percent margin of error and the poll was taken Oct. 12 and Oct. 13.
“Monday’s survey was the first following the release of an 11-year-old video showing Trump discussing women in graphic sexual detail but did not include any polling results taken after the debate,” Rasmussen notes. “All three nights of the latest survey follow Sunday’s debate.”
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson received six percent in the latest survey, while Green Party Candidate Jill Stein received two percent. Four percent of likely voters remain undecided.
The Rasmussen results found:
Eighty-four percent (84%) now say they are certain how they will vote in this year’s presidential election, and among these voters, Trump posts a 49% to 46% lead over Clinton. Among voters who say they still could change their minds between now and Election Day, it’s Clinton 40%, Trump 37%, Johnson 19% and Stein four percent (4%).
The survey reveals that most Republican voters believe GOP leaders who are criticizing Trump are hurting the party.
Seventy-five percent of Republicans support Trump, while 76 percent of Democrats support Clinton.
The New Yorker is picking up 15 percent of Democrats, while the former secretary of state is picking up 13 percent of Republican voters.
Trump has a double-digit lead with likely voters who don’t identify with either major political party, according to the survey.American television personality, producer, businesswoman, actress, author, former model
Tyra Lynne Banks (born December 4, 1973) is an American television personality, producer, businesswoman, actress, author, former model and occasional singer. Born in Inglewood, California, she began her career as a model at the age of 15, and was the first woman of African American descent to be featured on the covers of GQ and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, on which she appeared twice. She was a Victoria's Secret Angel from 1997 to 2005. By the early 2000s, Banks was one of the world's top-earning models.
Banks began acting on television in 1993 on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and made her film debut in Higher Learning in 1995. In 2000 she had major roles such as Eve in Disney Channel's Life-Size and Zoe in the box-office hit Coyote Ugly. She had small roles in the romantic film Love & Basketball (2000) and horror film Halloween: Resurrection (2002), and appeared in television series Gossip Girl and Glee.[3][4]
In 2003, Banks created and began presenting the long-running reality television series America's Next Top Model, which she executive produced and presented for the first twenty-two seasons until the series' cancellation in October 2015. She remained executive producer for the revival of the series, and enlisted Rita Ora as host for the twenty-third cycle before reassuming the duties herself for the twenty-fourth cycle. Banks was the co-creator of True Beauty, and had her own talk show, The Tyra Banks Show, which aired on The CW for five seasons and won two Daytime Emmy awards for Outstanding Talk Show Informative. She co-hosted the talk show FABLife for two months. In 2017, Banks replaced Nick Cannon as host of America's Got Talent for its 12th season.[5]
In 2010, she published a young adult novel titled Modelland, based on her life as a model which topped The New York Times Best Seller list in 2011. Banks is one of four African Americans and seven women to have repeatedly ranked among the world's most influential people by Time magazine.[6][7]
Early life
Tyra Lynne Banks[8] was born in Inglewood, California, on December 4, 1973.[9] Her mother, Carolyn London (now London-Johnson), is a medical photographer,[9] and her father, Donald Banks, is a computer consultant.[10][11] She has a brother, Devin, who is five years older.[12] In 1979, when Banks was six years old, her parents divorced. Banks attended John Burroughs Middle School, and graduated in 1991 from Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles. Banks has said that while growing up she was teased for her appearance and considered an "ugly duckling";[13][14] when Banks was 11 years old she grew three inches and lost 30 pounds in three months.[15] According to a genealogical DNA test documented on America's Next Top Model, Banks is of primarily African but also British and Native American ancestry.[16]
Career
Modeling
When Banks was 15 years old, she started modeling while attending school in Los Angeles. She was rejected by four modeling agencies before she was signed by L.A. Models. She switched to Elite Model Management at age 16. When she got the opportunity to model in Europe, she moved to Milan. In her first runway season, she booked 25 shows in the 1991 Paris Fashion Week. Banks appeared in editorials for American, Italian, French, and Spanish Vogue; American, French, German, and Spanish Elle; American, German, and Malaysian Harper's Bazaar; V; W and Vanity Fair.
She appeared on the covers of magazines such as Elle; Harper's Bazaar; Spanish Vogue; Cosmopolitan; Seventeen and Teen Vogue.[citation needed] She walked in fashion shows for Chanel, Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent, Anna Sui, Christian Dior, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis, Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, Herve Leger, Valentino, Fendi, Isaac Mizrahi, Giorgio Armani, Sonia Rykiel, Michael Kors and others. She appeared in advertising campaigns for Yves Saint Laurent, Dolce & Gabbana, Escada, Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Halston, H&M, XOXO, Swatch, Versace, Christian Lacroix, Victoria's Secret, Got Milk?, Pepsi and Nike.[17][18][19] In 1993, Banks signed a contract with CoverGirl cosmetics, launching advertising campaigns for the cosmetics company. She was one of only a few Black models to achieve Supermodel status. In the mid-1990s, Banks returned to America to do more commercial modeling.
Banks was the first woman on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and the first African-American woman on the cover of GQ.[20] In 1997, she received the VH1 award for "Supermodel of the Year".[7] That year, she was the first African American chosen for the cover of the Victoria's Secret catalog,[21] and became a Victoria's Secret Angel.[22] In 2010, Banks re-signed with her former modeling agency IMG Models.[23] Banks is now a contributor of the Vogue Italia website.[24] In 2013, Banks transformed herself into 15 supermodels, in collaboration with fashion photographer Udo Spreitzenbarth.
Film and television
Banks's television career began on the fourth season of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, in which she played lead character Will Smith's old friend Jackie Ames.[25] She made seven appearances in the series.[7][26] Other TV credits include Felicity,[27] All That, MADtv, Nick Cannon's Wild 'n Out (in which she was featured as a special guest host and team captain)[28] and The Price Is Right (guest-starring as a "Barker's Beauty").[29][30] She also appeared as a guest in the animated talk show Space Ghost Coast to Coast in an episode entitled "Chinatown".[31]
Banks started her production company, "Ty Ty Baby Productions" — soon afterward changed to Bankable Productions — which produced The Tyra Banks Show, America's Next Top Model and the 2008 movie The Clique.[32] Banks is the executive producer and former presenter and judge of America's Next Top Model. In addition, she hosted The Tyra Banks Show, a daytime talk show aimed at younger women, which premiered on September 12, 2005, and ran until May 28, 2010.[33] In 2008, Banks won the Daytime Emmy Award for her work and production on The Tyra Banks Show,[34] and won for the second time in a row for outstanding, informative talkshow in 2009.[35]
Banks's first big screen role came in 1994, when she co-starred in the drama Higher Learning.[36] She then co-starred with Lindsay Lohan in the Disney film Life-Size, playing a doll named Eve who comes to life. Other films she has starred in include Love Stinks (1999), Love & Basketball (2000), Coyote Ugly (2000), Halloween: Resurrection (2002)[7] and Hannah Montana: The Movie (2009).[37] Banks appeared in the fourth episode of the third season of Gossip Girl playing Ursula Nyquist, a larger-than-life actress.[38] She also appeared on the Disney Channel show Shake It Up as a school librarian.[39]
In 2012, Deadline Hollywood reported that Banks would co-create and produce an ABC comedy series based on her teenage years titled Fivehead.[40] However as of 2019 it has not come to fruition. In 2015, Banks starred in the round table lineup talk show FABLife alongside model Chrissy Teigen, fashion stylist Joe Zee, interior designer Lauren Makk, and YouTube personality Leah Ashley.[41][42] Banks quit the series after less than three months to focus on her cosmetics company.[43] In 2018, Banks returned to acting for her starring role in Life-Size 2, which premiered on Freeform on December 2.
Other projects
Cosmetics
In 2014, Banks founded the cosmetics brand Tyra Beauty, which she completed a non-degree certificate program at Harvard Business School specifically for.[44] Tyra Beauty uses a multi-level marketing system to recruit sales distributors, who are called "beautytainers" by the company.[45] Banks held a casting call to find faces for her line, eventually selecting Melody Parra, Monique Hayward, Katy Harvey and Top Model Norge contestant Marita Gomsrud as the cosmetic line's original beauty models. In March 2011, Banks launched her fashion and beauty website called "typeF.com", which she co-created with Demand Media.[46] In 2015, she launched "tyra.com", an interactive cosmetic e-commerce site.[47]
Banks at a book signing
Music
Banks has appeared in several music videos, including Michael Jackson's "Black or White", Mobb Deep's "Trife Life", Tina Turner's "Love Thing", George Michael's "Too Funky" (with models Linda Evangelista, Estelle Lefébure, Emma Sjoberg and Nadja Auermann) and Lionel Richie's "Don't Wanna Lose You". In 2004, she recorded her first single, "Shake Ya Body", which had a music video featuring contestants from cycle 2 of America's Next Top Model. The video premiered on UPN.[48] Banks released a single with NBA player Kobe Bryant, entitled "K.O.B.E.", which was performed on NBA TV.[7] She also had a single on the Life-Size (2000) soundtrack called "Be a Star".[7]
Writing
In 1998, Banks co-authored a book entitled Tyra's Beauty, Inside and Out.[49] She announced in May 2010 that she would be writing a novel, titled Modelland,[50] loosely based on her own modelling experience.[51] It was published in September 2011, intended to be the first of a planned three-part series;[52] Modelland topped The New York Times Best Seller list in October 2011.[53] In 2018, Banks and her mother, Carolyn London, co-authored a book entitled "Perfect is Boring".[54]
Teaching
In August 2016, Banks accepted a position as a personal branding guest lecturer at Stanford University.[55]
Personal life
Banks dated Norwegian photographer Erik Asla during the 2010s, and in January 2016 they had a biological son born via surrogacy.[56] Banks has stated that she tends to avoid drinking and has never used other recreational drugs.[57]
Banks has spoken out about abusive relationships in her past. In 2005, when asked about her relationship history, she stated, "I won't be using a lot of names on the show, but a specific relationship had not just cheating but emotional abuse. It was really bad, but that made me strong."[58] In 2009, she opened up about her past relationships when she made a guest appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, hosting alongside Oprah Winfrey. The episode was dedicated to dating violence in response to the assault of Rihanna by Chris Brown.[59][60][61]
Education
In 2011, Banks enrolled in the nine-week[62] Owner/President Management Program (OPM) at Harvard Business School. Banks completed the executive education training program in February 2012, earning a certificate.[63][64] She has come under criticism for implying she is a Harvard graduate.[65] Jenna Sauers, writing for Jezebel referred to her statements on Harvard as "disingenuous", and called upon her to "stop lying" about Harvard.[66][67] As of 2012, Harvard professor Rohit Deshpande was preparing a case study on Banks's company, Bankable Productions, for use in future coursework in the OPM program.[68][69]
Philanthropy
Banks established the TZONE program, which aimed at leadership and life skills development.[70][71] She has also established the Tyra Banks Scholarship, a fund aimed at providing African-American girls the opportunity to attend her alma mater, Immaculate Heart High School. In 2005, TZONE transformed from a camp into a public charity, the Tyra Banks TZONE.[72]
Filmography
Film
Television
Music videos
Bibliography
Vanessa Thomas, Bush; Banks, Tyra (1998). Tyra's Beauty Inside & Out. Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0060952105.
Banks, Tyra (2011). Modelland. Delacorte Books. ISBN 978-0385740593.
Banks, Tyra; London, Carolyn (2018). Perfect Is Boring. Tarcher Perigee. ISBN 978-0143132301.
Awards and nominationsSex and death are commingled all the time for Anna Paquin in True Blood, but nowhere near as punitively as they are in the trailer for her new movie Margaret, which finds Paquin eagerly flagging down a bus that can speed her to the boy who’s going to take away her virginity, only to distract the bus driver into fatally plowing over an innocent bystander. Wait, wait, you’re saying. The trailer? For Margaret? Yup, this is the first footage we’ve ever seen of the long, long-delayed Margaret, and it’s an interesting portal into who these stars were six years ago when the movie was shot: Paquin was still a former child actress not yet flush with TV-star maturity and polish, while her co-star Matt Damon (as the teacher Paquin seduces) was still solidly in his mid-30s and had a year to go before The Departed would come out. Who’s up for a double feature comprised of this and Fireflies in the Garden? [Playlist/Indiewire]“You have come to your final resting place. This is hell. God does not enter on the orders of President Hafez al-Assad, so do not bother praying to anyone!”
This is how the official welcoming rituals begin for those arriving at the prison in the middle of the desert, according to Ali Abu Dahan, a Lebanese national who was formerly detained in Tadmur prison. Abu Dahan recounted his experiences at the opening session of the “Documenting Darkness” conference held in Bern on 12-14 December 2016.
Faraj Bayrakdar, Ali Abu Dahan, Baraa al-Saraj, Mohammad Berou and Wael al-Sawah are five former detainees who were all held in Tadmur. They came to Bern from different countries at the invitation of Umam Foundation for Research and Documentation and Etana to discuss the issue of prisons in Syria over the course of the two-day conference. They shared with attendees their personal stories of life in Tadmur prison and it was clear that its effects had yet to be erased from their souls or bodies.
Abu Dahan is the head of the Association of Lebanese Detainees in Syria. He still speaks in a hoarse voice after being forced to swallow a dead bird, damaging his vocal cords. He said that he would “never” forget what he experienced in Tadmur prison even 16 years after leaving it, and that everything he experienced is etched in his memory “like engraving in stone.”
According to Abu Dahan, enumerating the different methods of torture is no longer that important as they are the same in every place ruled by a torturer. The methods do not differ according to nationality, belonging or alleged crime. The important thing is for detainees to break the taboo about their experiences in Syrian prisons, which kept detainees silent during the years of iron rule, regardless of their nationalities, according to Abu Dahan.
The former detainee is one of 782 Lebanese nationals whose detention in Syrian prisons Umam has documented. “What we witnessed, experienced and is imprinted in our memory, what you are seeing today in the horrific images of detainees who died of starvation or due to their reproductive organs or tongues being cut out, is the same thing we will continue to witness today and tomorrow – torture, terror and terrorism, killing, blood and crimes unless the United Nations, major powers and non-governmental human rights organizations do something to stop these daily inhumane violations of the rights of Syrian, Lebanese and other prisoners held in all Syrian regime prisons,” said Abu Dahan, summing up his experience of 13 years spent in “hell.”
Mohammad Berou was arrested at the age of 17 in May 1980 and accused of joining the military youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was not executed at the time as he was still a minor but was instead sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, which was then extended to 13 years. He was transferred to Tadmur prison where he spent 12 years, witnessing the most brutal period of torture and field executions ordered by Hafez al-Assad.
Berou quotes the hero of the film “Imagining Argentina”, which tells the story of forced disappearances in Argentina – “The survivors never forget…what is left if we forget? Our lives are just past memories, and if they finish or are lost, nothing will remain.”
Storytelling is a form of resistance where the regime seeks to hide the truth. Documenting these experiences restores value to the victims, even if it cannot restore their rights. It immortalizes them in the national and social memory, as well as identifying the criminal and condemning him, according to Berou.
In Berou’s opinion, the value of documentation lies in the extensive number of witnesses, victims and survivors who have lived the Syrian crisis since the 1980s and who are now recounting their stories and giving their testimonies regarding the violations and injustices they experienced, to identify the perpetrators and condemn them, which is the least that could be done to achieve justice.
According to Berou, Tadmur was the site for the execution of over 15,000 detainees, and all were executed without a single written order from the President. Most of the orders were verbal, as the regime recognized early on that documents and written orders may serve to condemn it later on in any trials or inquires that might ensue. The lack of execution orders is one of the greatest challenges to documenting crimes in Syria.
Tadmur prison was built in 1966 close to the desert city of Palmyra (Tadmur) with its famous archeological sites. It was intended to be for members of the military in particular but during the reign of al-Assad (the father and son) the Syrian regime used it for detaining prominent political and opposition figures. Amnesty International described the prison as “designed to inflict the greatest possible suffering, humiliation and fear on inmates.”
My land “blessed” me with countless lashes that only God could count. The number of lashes I received almost equal the number of words I have written; can you believe that? This is what Faraj Bayrakdar, a Syrian poet and politician, said while describing his experience in Tadmur and Sadnaya prisons. Bayrakdar was detained three times during the reign of al-Assad senior, and was held for 14 years in his last period of detention.
Bayrakdar said that with the passage of time and after repeated slaps, curses and beatings, he learnt to present himself as “Prisoner number 13”. Prison is an attempt to destroy the inmate’s sense of value, “So I had a deep conviction that any creativity or act to create meaning through writing or art or even gossiping was a mode of challenging prison and its effects… Poetry managed to save me and give my life in prison a different meaning or different value than what was desired for me.” Prisoner number 13 left prison having written six poetry anthologies and a story about the prison experience and its most significant incidents.
Tadmur… Our Prison… Our Home… And the Keeper of Our Secrets
On 30 May 2015, “Daesh” blew up Tadmur prison, days after they gained control of the city of Tadmur in Homs’ eastern countryside. The prison’s tale ended there after having borne witness to the many massacres perpetrated against its inmates in the 1980s and during the Syrian revolution.
Ali Abu Dahan said, “When Tadmur prison was destroyed people rejoiced, but my colleagues and I who were in Tadmur cried… we cried over our prison, our home, the keeper of our secrets… We cried over the walls that we leaned on and used to tell our stories to, which heard our pain… We cried over the ground that drank from our blood and our feet…that drank our pain… We cried over the military blankets that we used to cover ourselves with, which were covered in blood and rust after so many years… We cried over the scabies that we carried, the disease and the pains that we lived in Tadmur… We cried over Tadmur prison, the place that should have remained a museum for people to know what happened inside it.”
Activists and Politicians Discuss the Issue of Prisons in Syria
The Syrian organization “Etana” and the Lebanese organization “Umam Foundation for Research and Documentation” held a conference on the issue of prisons in Syria in the Swiss city of Bern on 12-14 December 2016. The conference was supported by the German Institute for International Affairs and the Human Security Division of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Around 20 activists and politicians from Syria and Lebanon, representing various human rights, research and media organizations, attended the two-day conference to discuss the various dimensions of Syrian prisons. The conference saw several discussions and interventions that highlighted the reality of human rights and legal violations that detainees in Syrian prisons experience and the ongoing efforts to achieve justice in Syria.
The conference opened with testimonies of former detainees held in Syrian regime prisons, among them Faraj Bayrakdar, Ali Abu Dahan, Baraa al-Saraj and Basema Jabri. They spoke of their prison experiences and recounted some stories of their daily lives in detention.
The conference focused on the political dimensions of prisons in Syria through the presentation of Wael al-Sawah, manager of the Center for Freedom of Expression in Berlin and Radwan Ziyadeh, manager of the Syrian Center for Political Studies and Research in Washington. Both spoke about the history of detention in Syria and how the situation reached its current condition.
One session focused specifically on documentation and media efforts in Syria and the role of legal and media institutions in advocating for detainees. The session included presentations by Awees al-Dabbash, coordinator of the Center for Justice and Accountability, Bassem al-Ahmad, manager of the organization “Syrians for Truth and Justice” and Jawad Sharbaji, editor-in-chief of Enab Baladi. Some participants criticized the “cautious” approach by Syrian media to defending the cause of detainees to local and international public opinion. Participants called on media and documentation institutions to unify their strategies and draw up a joint work plan to develop a “professional” approach that engages with public opinion and influences it.
Documentation and its role as a tool of transitional justice were a significant part of the discussions, and two sessions were dedicated to the issue. Manager of the Sada Center for Surveys Mohammad Berou, French journalist Gharanas Loukin, program manager for the organization “Next Day” Omar Shnan, and deputy manager of the Arab Reconciliation Initiative Salam al-Kawakibi all participated in these sessions.
The conference concluded with a showing of the two-hour long film “Tadmur” produced by Umam Foundation. The film showing was attended by a number of participants and many interested Swiss attendees. The film portrays the daily suffering of detainees in Tadmur prison through re-enactment by five Lebanese detainees who spent many years in Syrian prisons. Their testimonies and experiences contributed to preparation of the film, which was recorded in a building constructed specially to replicate the desert prison of Tadmur.
What is Next After the Conference?
Luqman Slim, Umam’s director, considers that a conference on the issue of prisons in Syria hosting honest and open discussions is an “achievement” and contributes to pushing western governments to pay more attention to the issue at a time when detainees are considered a secondary consideration on political agendas.
In Slim’s opinion, the conference was an important opportunity to conduct a series of meetings between the relevant institutions, producing many ideas worth pursuing. He expressed Umam’s interest in following up the conference’s outcomes, adding that the institution is working on a regional project on prisons and has begun initiating preliminary contact with other countries on this issue. Slim described the project as transcending Arab borders, especially as the discussion on transitional justice has become part of the public space in the Arab world.
Using the Law to Silence Opponents
Ibrahim Hussein, Secretary of the Supreme Council for Justice
Tyrannical rulers need not find an excuse to execute opponents or imprison them, as they control all the resources of the country. No one holds the tyrant accountable and no authority protects the people from him.
Despite this, a tyrant is at times forced to find legal cover for his actions especially vis-a-vis foreign organizations and countries that may criticize him or open cases of human rights violations against him or in his country.
In Syria, the totalitarian regime hastened to legitimize the dictatorship and its oppression by drawing on a series of laws that are used as mechanisms to silence anyone who dared to oppose it.
It is well-known in criminology and legal studies that legal texts must be written using precise and clear terminology that is not open to all interpretations, but the tyrant’s law is distinguished by the use of language that is flexible, ambiguous and includes broad and vague terms that could potentially apply to all acts and include any person.
The tyrant’s objective is to guarantee a wide margin for judicial authorities when examining cases and determining situations to which the law applies. The accused becomes a hostage of the judge’s disposition, which is usually determined by the authorities and the state’s security apparatus, as so-called “judicial authority” is made completely subservient to the tyrant and turned into one of his tools.
The Syrian dictatorial regime worked according to this principle. The articles of the penal code on crimes against state security, internal or external, are characterized by their generality and vagueness. The same characteristics are found in all the laws and decrees issued after the Baath Party took power.
Decree number 6 of 1964 punishes all who oppose the aims of the revolution and resist the implementation of the socialist system, whether verbally, in writing or other acts. Those who are accused based on this decree are punished with life imprisonment and in serious cases the sentence extends to capital punishment.
The text can be interpreted in many ways to include any action that displeases the authorities. This decree has been used extensively to justify the arrest and trial of persons opposing the regime.
Executive Decree number 4 of 1965 is similar and includes the following clause, “Any person who attempts to obstruct the execution of socialist legislation will be punished with a life sentence of hard labor, and the sentence may extend to execution.”
In addition to these decrees, several laws were used to justify arrests, among them Law 49 of 1981, which is an emergency law that mandates capital punishment for all persons belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood movement, even if the person did not commit any other crime. Perhaps the most absurd aspect of the law, which is currently still in operation, is its retroactive nature as it includes all individuals who joined the group even if their membership ended prior to the law being issued.
The Publications Law 50 of 2001 institutes a sanction of up to three years imprisonment for vague and unspecific accusations such as insulting national honor, insulting the army, violating the unity of society and disseminating false news, which provides room for a “non-neutral” judiciary to bring cases against people working in the media who criticize the state. The law also gives the Minister for Media and Communications and the Prime Minister the power to allow or prevent the issuing of publications. The Minister of Media and Communications holds the power to grant or rescind licenses for foreign and Arab newspaper journalists without any judicial or administrative restrictions. The executive authority can thus easily silence any voice.
Syrian penal law was the basis for security authorities to justify the arrest of opposition actors, relying on court decisions that condemned them. Perhaps the most important articles used were those that condemned any Syrian who sought, through action, speech, writing or other means, to split off part of Syrian territory to unite it with a foreign country, or any person in Syria who, at a time of war or anticipated war, behaved in a way that weakened national sentiment or awakened ethnic or sectarian divisions. Both these accusations were used against Kurdish Syrians or any person who sympathized with their cause.
Other articles that were frequently used as accusations against a number of opposition actors relate to undermining national consciousness, stirring up sectarian or ethnic rivalries or inciting conflict between sects or the different components of the nation, as well as membership in unlicensed parties and organizations.
We must also mention the law on combatting terrorism, which was issued as a substitute for all legislation issued under the state of emergency that was lifted after the start of the Syrian revolution. This law includes broad and very vague terms that can be interpreted according to the dictator’s whim. The law introduced a new unprecedented crime concerning the use of electronic means of communication. Article 8 of the law dictates, “Persons engaged in disseminating printed material or stored information, regardless of its form, with the aim of promoting terrorism and terrorist acts, will be sentenced to temporary hard labor, and the same punishment will be used in the case of any person who managed or used an electronic website for that aim.”
We have tried to cover above some but not all of the laws and texts used by the regime to persecute opponents, and arrest and prosecute them. It must be noted that in many cases, the Syrian regime’s security apparatus made additional accusations of immoral acts against some opponents with the |
alternative media and the modern revolutionary have seemingly become content to merely report the unfolding history as opposed to actively taking part in it.
Thankfully, there are those involved in both the alternative media and the movement in general who are not only willing to hear solutions but are both willing and capable of producing them. Still, scarcely are those voices raised before catcalls of pessimism are hurled back in their direction. Shouts of “that will never happen,” and “but how do we get to that point?” or “we don’t have the numbers” inevitably drown out those that are at least attempting to develop a plan to change the course of the nation and the earth. Obviously, petty squabbles over political pedigree are bound to come into play, with tendencies left over from past experiences, further alienating activists and researchers from one another.
Yet, for all of the bickering back and forth, the fact is that numbers alone will not bring change if they are merely numbers in their own right. As Webster Tarpley has stated on numerous occasions, opinions alone count for nothing. What matters is coordinated political action.
Simple education and outreach is not enough. If we can reach the majority of the public, we have accomplished a great feat. However, if all we have accomplished is educating them in regards to their fate, with no coordinated effort to reverse the course of society, then we have only wasted our energy and made our descent into abject slavery that much more painful a process.
With this is in mind, it is important to understand that there can be no coordinated action based on a series of complaints. Every mass movement needs a program; a set of demands. It is in no way prudent to take to the streets with a series of complaints and no programmatic solution of how to address these complaints. To the uninformed masses, the question looms like an albatross: “What are you going to do if you seize power?” It is incumbent upon those of us involved in redirecting this system to answer that question clearly with a program of our own. After all, as Frederick Douglass once stated, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
Thus, it is high time to put our personal differences aside, as well as our philosophical and political ideologies, and begin to form a coalition around a set of demands that both appeals to the American people and articulates a program that will return the basic civil liberties afforded to every American in the United States Constitution as well as the basic human rights afforded to every human being by the Creator (whatever one believes it to be) by virtue of being born.
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We must begin to build a coalition of like-minded individuals and organizations, but also of those people and organizations that are further afield, in order to advance our own political agenda. A united front must be constructed where the individuals and organizations retain their individuality and independence, but one in which they have come together under one common banner with the ability to unite their forces for a common purpose.
Thankfully, this model has already begun to appear in at least two locations across the world with at least some degree of success. The first, the Syriza party of Greece, represents a grouping of political parties, activist organizations, unions, and other arrangements that alone counted for nothing in terms of political clout. When united under a common front – the Syriza party – these organizations were able to accumulate over 40% of the vote in the first election campaign.
exhibited several necessary ingredients to the formation of a successful coalition, most notably that of a program that spelled out the steps and requirements to end austerity measures in Greece and repair the damage done to the Greek economy by the banker-dominated government at home and in Brussels.
Syriza exhibited expert leadership with the Presidential candidate Alexis Tsipras in front and center of its electoral and public relations campaign. It also demonstrated the ability to reach across national boundaries to connect with similar coalitions and organizations outside of Greece for potential international support.
The fact that Syriza has enjoyed so much success early on in Greek elections not only provides us with much-needed hope regarding our own situation, it also provides us with the ability to analyze which models work and which models do not, along with the ability to analyze how this degree of success was accomplished.
Fortunately, there are some who have learned the lessons of Syriza here in the United States and, as a result, a coalition has been organized and developed within our own borders. Based on the Syriza model, the United Front Against Austerity (UFAA) has itself constructed a set of demands and a program of political solutions. The UFAA is currently working to agitate alongside a variety of organizations that have themselves been splintered by stealthy politics and propaganda on the part of the oligarchy. The UFAA is attempting to build its own base and circle of influence.
The UFAA’s program is one that stands against austerity measures and the cutting and gutting of the social safety net. It is one which exhibits the best aspects of the New Deal, while drastically improving upon the economic rejuvenation features of that historical program. The program also demands Medicare For All, the de-militarization of police, the restoration of civil liberties to the American people, an end to foreign wars, and a more enlightened approach to health and medicine that includes holistic and alternative methods.
However, the UFAA, as anyone building a coalition of this nature should be, is aware that a truly successful political mobilization of the American people can only be structured around the economic issues that they face; not false flag attacks, wars, education, the environment, or any other topic of concern, as important as they may be.
Coalitions centered around false flags face the uphill battle of massive and in-depth education efforts before any mobilization is possible. Anti-war, education and environmentally-based coalitions generally rely on only a quarter of the potential support due to the disassociation and apathy experienced and expressed by most of the populace toward these concerns, at least in terms of political participation.
Economic concerns, however, are the one issue that not only affects every single American, but it is the one issue that most Americans perceive as affecting them. For this reason, any coalition that wishes to attract broad support must use economic solutions to build itself up and ride a wave of popular support into power. In addition, it is important to understand that Austrian school economics of laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation of the banking and finance industry, and the cutting and gutting of social safety programs cannot and should not be used to build such a coalition. Not only are the moral implications disastrous for everyone except the very wealthy, such programs are not likely to win the support of the American people, many of whom may actually rely on one or more of these programs as a last line of defense against homelessness, hunger, or extreme poverty.
Lastly, the forming of a true coalition must be undertaken with much more than mere elections in mind. It is a fact that any and all social and political movements in the United States are vastly stronger without the Republican and Democratic parties, as the failure of the Union protests in Wisconsin have illustrated. Thus, while elections will inevitably enter into the picture, they must also inevitable exclude the two major parties. The most pressing matter facing any coalition, like the United Front Against Austerity, is a forcing of the issues into the mainstream and the seizing of power by the coalition in the vacuum that will ensue.
The method of the coalition must be the general strike. If the coalition merely becomes a lobbying group for the two major parties, then the effort is wasted. If it becomes merely another third party, the effort is equally useless. However, if the coalition is able to become a force within its own right, a part, and an organization which can command the workers into the streets, then the path toward victory is real and attainable.
As Mario Savio once stated,For all the attention paid to ISIS, relatively little is known about its inner workings. But a man claiming to be a member of the so-called Islamic State’s security services has stepped forward to provide that inside view. This series is based on days of interviews with this ISIS spy. Read Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here.
Part Four: Escaping the Islamic State
ISTANBUL — Abu Khaled looked at me across the outdoor hookah café table in the touristy Laleli district of Istanbul. Across the street cars nearly careened into each other every other second in a busy interaction, semi-subterranean shops, their windows half-buried by the pavement, advertised everything from cellphones to toothpaste to the latest designer women’s fashions—or, at any rate, cheap knockoffs for those who didn’t know the difference or much care. Amid the din of an international city at rush hour was the scheduled call of the muezzin, leading the call to prayer, and an unremitting stream of awful European pop music being pumped through the café’s loudspeakers, which we’d asked in vain to have turned down.
Even though ISIS terror had struck inside Turkey the week before, the organization calling itself the Islamic State, al-Dawla al-Islamiya, felt very far away. Truly, Abu Khaled told me, the people who run it want their subjects to live as if in a world of their own, captive minds in a closed society. But the real world is a small place, and this defector from the ISIS intelligence services said he was not the only one who had grown restive.
“People started feeling bad about all the lying,” he said. “If you read the news…There’s no TV, just an ISIS newspaper, Akhbar Dawli Islamiya. It says we’re still in Kobani,” a Kurdish city retaken from ISIS with the help of U.S.-led bombing raids last year.
The pervasive mendacity in the caliphate competes with a climate of ceaseless recrimination and denunciation: Two Minutes of Hate directed every day, at everyone. And typically the accusers are not Syrians but the muhajireen, the foreign fighters, who haven’t spent 1 percent of the time most residents of al-Bab have spent in Syria. They are an arrogant and unruly gang, increasingly seen, according to Abu Khaled, as colonial occupiers.
They see themselves as superior—holier than thou in the proper definition. “First of all, to most ISIS fighters—especially the foreigners—everybody in al-Bab, everybody in Syria, is kafir. Period. They treat people in this way, which is wrong. Even by ISIS’s standards, that’s clearly wrong. They are Muslims, they have to be treated as Muslims.”
“Foreigners are telling Syrians how to dress, how to live, how to eat, how to work, how to cut their hair. Maybe the only place in the world where there is no barbershop is al-Bab. They’re all closed. Because you can’t cut your hair. You have either long hair, or you must wear it the same exact length everywhere. Because even you”—Abu Khaled gestured to your hirsute correspondent—“like your beard. You would do 30 days in prison. It’s too short. You can’t cut your beard, you can’t trim it. You have to let it grow.”
And just like under Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, ISIS has presided over an atmosphere of mutual suspicion, where the errant joke or critical observation can land you in the cage, or worse. Abu Khaled has a big mouth and is amazed he wasn’t killed before he managed to flee. “One time, a guy was telling me: ‘You see this victory against the FSA?… It’s because God is fighting with us!’ So I told him: ‘So why God and the angels didn’t fight with us when we fought the Kurds in Kobani?’”
Abu Khaled was told that if he kept talking like that, he’d lose his head.
***
Nor was his sense of irony directed merely at the braggadocio of the muhajireen. He had been present at the battle for Kobani, the Kurdish border town in northern Syria besieged for months by ISIS and eventually liberated, thanks largely to U.S. airpower. Abu Khaled had witnessed firsthand just how poorly ISIS’s soldiers fought: more like F Troop than Delta Force.
“The first time I realized that ISIS fighters are not well trained was the last day of Ramadan, this year.” Abu Khaled was leading a charge against Kobani, and he and his men bivouacked in Sarrin, one of the nearby towns ISIS controls in the Aleppo countryside. He decided to attack a series of villages held by Kurdish forces.
Abu Khaled was commanding three ISIS units. One of them was dispatched to Khalat Hadid; another to the village of Nour al-Ali; a third to the small village of Ras al-Ayn. The assault began at 1 o’clock in the morning and involved missiles, mortars, and tanks.
“We took Khalat Hadid within 45 minutes,” Abu Khaled said. “Then my guys ran away.” They ran away? That’s right. “‘It’s free,’ they told me,” that is, liberated. Apparently they mistook the fall of a village for the permanent seizure of one. Meanwhile, the other two units refused to enter their designated villages. “They said, ‘Ah, it’s too late, blah, blah,’” Abu Khaled recalled, in disgust. So they returned to Sarrin not so much in defeat as in indifference. Then the coalition started hitting the ISIS locations at 4 a.m. Warplanes killed 23 of Abu Khaled’s men within a few minutes.
Abu Khaled interrogated his soldiers to find out why they had not fought that night. “‘Why didn’t you go?’” he asked some of those who’d gone AWOL. “‘I mean, we were three groups. One of you attacked, the others didn’t.’”
Their response: They were tired of being sent to certain death.
“We had pickup trucks, machine guns. And the Americans were flying all over us. When we left the town, we got bombed. But when we went back to the town, we were fine. The town had never been hit. Then the Kurds besieged it. So we fled, and destroyed all our cars, vehicles, weapons. I destroyed my own car.”
Abu Khaled estimates that ISIS lost up to 5,000 men in the vain attempt to capture Kobani. They went like lemmings over a cliff, without any strategic forethought as to how best to fight both the world’s most powerful air force and one of Syria’s most accomplished militias.
“Everybody I know at that time is dead,” Abu Khaled said. “I trained a Turkish battalion, like 110 people. We had to stop the training after two weeks because they had to go to Kobani. All of them got killed except three. And those three aren’t fighting anymore. I saw one a few days before I defected. He said, ‘I’m not going back.’”
Abu Khaled illustrated just how incompetent he found the ISIS infantry. He used silverware. “Here’s Kobani,” he said, putting a fork on the café table. “Here’s open land, five kilometers of it until the first ISIS position”—a spoon. “When we sent the fighters to Kobani, we sent them one by one. Walking. The logistics for them—weapons, food—came on a bike. Most of the time, the bike couldn’t make it. It’d get hit by an airstrike. So the ones who made it, they entered houses.”
They were instructed to stay inside the house and not do anything. They remained for a day or two. Then, inevitably, one of them stuck his head out a window. Abu Khaled banged the table. “And then the house would get bombed and they’d all get killed!” He let out a mirthless laugh. “People started to think there was an ISIS conspiracy to kill everybody.”He also found it remarkable that, for all the many months of the siege of Kobani, ISIS fighters came and went as they pleased across the Syrian-Turkish border. The second-largest army in NATO stationed soldiers, tanks, and armored personnel carriers was within spitting distance of one of the most intense war zones of the Syria conflict and did virtually nothing, apart from sometimes firing water cannons at Kurds trying to flee into Turkey.“I don’t know the relationship between ISIS and Turkey,” Abu Khaled said. “During the Kobani war, shipments of weapons arrived to ISIS from Turkey. Until now, the gravely wounded go to Turkey, shave their beards, cut their hair, and go to the hospital. Somebody showed me pictures in Kobani. You see ISIS guys eating McDonald’s french fries and hamburgers. Where did they get it? In Turkey.”Abu Khaled has spent plenty of time in southern Turkey and says ISIS sympathizers don’t even try to hide their proselytizing efforts there. In Kilis, a border town, there are two important mosques, he said. “This one [is] for the Islamic State. You go there, everybody says, ‘You want to go to Syria?’ They arrange your travel back and forth. And the other mosque is for Jabhat al-Nusra,” the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria.During the June 2014 invasion of Mosul, ISIS took 49 hostages, including diplomats, soldiers, and children, by raiding the Turkish consulate there. Their release, three months later, went largely unexplained by either party, fueling suspicion that Ankara had either paid a ransom or brokered a prisoner swap with ISIS. Abu Khaled said he knows for certain that the exchange took place because he met two of the jihadists who were swapped for the 49 captives.“They were prisoners of the FSA,” he said, “held for seven or eight months. Right after ISIS captured the Turks, within 24 hours, these guys told me… ‘We were transferred to the custody of Turkish intelligence, which took us on a plane to Istanbul.’” The ISIS detainees weren’t kept in a prison, Abu Khaled says his informants told him, but in “a nice building” with a round-the-clock guard. “They were well taken care of. Then they were exchanged.”
* * *
Eventually, the brutality and the incompetence and the lies became too much for Abu Khaled to take. But he served as an agent of Amn al-Dawla, the caliphate’s state security. So he couldn’t simply run away from ISIS; he had to plan and prepare his escape and hope that he wasn’t caught and undone in the planning and preparation.
“When you’re in the secret service,” Abu Khaled said, “everything is controlled. You can’t just leave Islamic State territory. It was especially hard for me because all the border is controlled by the state intelligence. And I trained these guys! Most of them knew me. I was very well known in al-Bab. So this was also how I got out.”
Abu Khaled’s defection was a very near thing. It started with a friend he had in al-Bab who ran an illegal business printing fake IDs, the kind still issued by the Assad regime. The way ISIS border control works is that if you’re a mere civilian, you can more or less come and go as you please, provided you have identification. Abu Khaled’s passport was still with “Human Resources” in Raqqa. So he needed papers and they had to be a ringer for authentic ones. He showed me the ID he had made for $20. It bore a photograph of him looking much as he sat before me in Istanbul: clean-shaven. It was taken, he said, at a time before his enlistment in ISIS. He stressed that this bore not even a ghost of a resemblance to the appearance he’d adopted for almost a year as a jihadist.
He decided to make his move in early September. And he went solo, at least at first. “When I left, I didn’t tell my wife. I told her only that I wanted to go to Raqqa. ‘I have something to do in Raqqa.’ I left my gun at home—my AK. I had a handgun with me. If you belong to ISIS, you have to have a weapon on you when you are on the street. I had my uniform. I left home at 7 in the morning. I went to my friend’s house, the same one who made the ID. I changed my clothes, I left my weapon at his place. He gave me the new ID. I cut my beard, not completely off, because I didn’t want to get arrested for having no beard. But I looked closer to the ID photo.”
Abu Khaled hopped a motorcycle from al-Bab and drove to Minbij. From there, he hired a minibus, which took him to Aleppo. He says he could have actually hired a bus in al-Bab but for the fact that in every terminal, ISIS had amniyeen, members of the security forces, standing guard to survey the passengers. He was sure he’d be recognized in al-Bab. But the agents in Minbij had no idea who he was. “I gave them the fake ID.” They let him board the bus.
When Abu Khaled arrived in Aleppo—territory held by rebels, not ISIS—he immediately called his wife. “I told her, ‘In one hour, you have to leave.’ I told her to gather her stuff, some clothes to wear, in a small bag, and take a cab. Within 45 minutes, she was on her way, with her mother, brother, and sister. Two, three hours later, they were all there.”
Today, Abu Khaled has built himself a new fighting force—this one to battle ISIS, and the Assad regime as well. The Islamist super-brigade Ahrar al-Sham has evidently helped him finance his startup army, although he says his katiba remains independent. “They gave us 10,000 lira. So it’s like $20 per soldier.” This is the minimum monthly salary to keep a small militia in Syria.
“There are two ISIS brigades in northern Aleppo fighting us,” he said, “and I know the emirs for both of them. One is from Morocco, the other is from Libya. I know how they think and how they fight.”
Part I: An Appointment in IstanbulPart II: Spies Like ISISPart III: Ministries of FearPart IV: Escape From the Islamic State
I asked Abu Khaled again why he’s still in Syria, given the target painted on his back—and on his wife’s and her family’s.
If he made it to Istanbul unmolested, Abu Khaled allows, his wife could probably do so, too. I asked him again: Doesn’t he want a bit of respite, after everything he’s been through? He shook his head no, and said, “I’m not scared of dying.”
Abu Khaled and I walked from Laleli to the Sultanahmet district of Istanbul. He asked to see the Blue Mosque, the celebrated Ottoman complex. It might be the last time he ever got to see it, so I obliged. Female visitors, as signs everywhere instruct, are supposed to wear headscarves out of respect. But as we passed through the courtyard of Sultan Ahmet Camii, we spotted a woman in her twenties. She walked up the steps uncovered. But no one stopped her. Abu Khaled looked at her, as if he’d had an important revelation. “Syria will be like this again one day,” he said.
We wandered around the courtyard of the Blue Mosque briefly before exiting out onto the Hippodrome. Then Abu Khaled stopped for a second and looked up. Not a week earlier, he explained, a Russian warplane had bombed not far from his new home in Aleppo. The walls of his house shook. “Bashar has taught every Syrian to stare at the sky,” he said. “There are no planes here.”For years I have maintained a zero-tolerance policy for warnings in shipping code. To help me enforce this, my “Release” build configurations define the build setting that induces Xcode to “treat warnings as errors”:
GCC_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS = YES
The comedy of this build setting is that it references “GCC,” a compiler that increasingly few of us even remember Apple ever using for macOS or iOS development. Apple’s fork of the popular open-source compiler was the standard for years, until Apple debuted clang, which is built on the LLVM framework.
It’s always been kind of annoying that, as time moved on, we were stuck specifying important build settings with names that included “GCC,” but I accepted it. After all, I configure the vast majority of these settings in “.xcconfig” files that I reuse in all my projects, so I almost never interact with them directly.
As I’ve started to shift some of my code from Objective-C to Swift, I assumed that my ancient GCC build setting would ensure that I don’t ship any builds with warnings. But today I realized that I had built a release build that didn’t treat a warning as an error. What’s the deal?
It looks like Apple has decided to break with tradition and establish a new build setting for Swift:
SWIFT_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS = YES
Adding this to my.xcconfig file breaks the build when a warning is generated, and prevents me from accidentally shipping code that is known to be vulnerable to unexpected behavior. I think it would have been a nice touch if Apple had inferred SWIFT_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS when GCC_TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERRORS is set, so I’ve filed a bug requesting that it does. Radar #35352318.You might be wondering about the following question: Why do I expend so much effort evangelising about explicit instruction and criticising the ideology of progressive education when most teachers use explicit forms of teaching most of the time? I’m not sure I entirely accept the premise. In some schools and sectors, implicit teaching (e.g. ‘balanced’ literacy) plays a large role. However, I would concede that there is an awful lot of explicit teaching out there and this is for a good reason – the alternatives are unwieldy, impractical and lead to worse results.
So what’s my problem?
Progressive education ideology is about more than just teaching methods
I am currently in the process of completing physics coursework with my Year 12 students. The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) is our exam board and they have made it compulsory for my students to design and complete an investigation themselves which they must then present as a poster. As relative novices, this is an educationally vacuous task. Where does it originate? Progressive ideology.
And that is just one example of how bad ideas hamper effective teaching. In my recent blog post on progressivism, I listed many more; the Australian Curriculum, L3 in New South Wales, the framing of discussions about student behaviour and so on.
Default explicit teaching is not research-informed explicit instruction
It is wrong to assume that any kind of teacher-led instruction is what I mean by ‘explicit instruction’. In my experience, default teaching can suffer from a number of problems. For instance, the teacher might be engaging with only a few of the students in the class, allowing others to effectively opt out. This will be related to the teacher not collecting information about what students know and can do. This ‘formative assessment’ is vital to teacher decision making – does a concept need to be reexplained? Without this feedback, teachers are biased to assume that students understand more than they do.
Effective explicit instruction breaks ideas into small, digestible components. One component is presented and the students practice this before moving to the next one. Gradually, components are brought together into larger units. Teachers with little experience of the process may find it hard to identify these components and so their presentation will tend to range over a number of components at the same time before students move into a practice phase. Important points will be left unsaid and students will be required to make inferences which some will fail to do.
There are teaching schemes that are specially designed to apply these principles and avoid student misunderstanding but they are unpopular and so are not widely used. Instead, most teachers are improvising their own programmes and so these ideas are critical.
Up the garden path
Plenty of teachers are aware of the shortcomings of their own teaching but when they look for advice on how to improve they are led into fantasy lands of constructivism or ‘deeper’ learning or pedagogies based upon political ideologies rather than science. This is the greatest concern. The fact that progressivism is the dominant ideology in our schools of education makes it hard for them to pass on knowledge of how to make explicit instruction more effective.
That’s why it is up to us. Teachers need to take charge themselves. Let’s professionalise. Let’s pass on the knowledge that has been hidden from us. Let us learn from each other.
Together, we can improve teaching.
AdvertisementsThis is my basic homemade brown onion masala. It's thick, rich and has a really robust flavour that can be used to create beautiful fragrant meat dishes. The onions are very slowly cooked down to produce a deep rich golden brown mass into which the tomatoes and spices are added. Once cooked down the masala is a dark brown gloopy mass of aromatics and flavour. This technique of slow cooking is used in North India (originally by the Sindhi community) as a way infusing lots of flavour into thick sauces and as a way of preserving too.
This quantity will produce enough masala for at least eight portions and it's a great way to keep some curry sauce in your freezer for when you get that curry urge.PARIS (Reuters) - The United States should coordinate with European countries and G7 partners before imposing new sanctions on Russia, France’s foreign ministry said on Friday, a day after senators approved new measures on Moscow that could impact European Union firms.
U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday backed sanctions against Russia over the country’s alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, including some on certain Russian energy projects. The move was not coordinated with European Union allies.
“For several years, we have underlined to the United States the difficulties that extraterritorial legislation spark,” a French foreign ministry spokesman told reporters in a daily online briefing.
“On subjects linked to security and European industrial policy, we would like the United States to respect the required coordination, notably within the G7 framework,” he said.
He was referring to the group of seven major industrialized nations that also includes Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan.
It remains to be seen if U.S. President Donald Trump will approve the senators’ proposal to sanction European firms that take part in or finance energy projects like the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
Among the French firms that are involved in the Nord Stream 2 project is utility Engie.
Oil and gas major Total is also a shareholder of Yamal LNG, Russia’s second liquefied natural gas plant.I've always wanted to like veggie burgers, but I have yet to find one that really "wows" me.
I am usually left feeling unsatisfied, like I cheated myself out of something better. And the meat burger is over there laughing at me saying "See! I am better, and you know it!".
However, the black bean and quinoa burger falls in a totally different category. It is not a veggie burger because it is not made of veggies. It has the same amount of protein as a meat burger, but it has no meat. It's unique, satisfying, and it's not trying to be something that it is not. And I can even get my smoked flavor fix on with the addition of the smoky avocado spread. So there meat burger.
quinoa & black bean burger with a smoky avocado spread
Prep Time / Cook Time
20 minutes / 25 minutes for the beans & quinoa to cook + 10 minutes to cook the patties
Makes
5-6 burgers
Ingredients
For the black bean and quinoa burgers:
2 cups of cooked quinoa
2 cups of black beans (Canned is fine as long as it is organic, no sodium. If you're using dried, rinse your beans and soak them overnight and drain when ready to use.)
1.5 cups of organic low-sodium vegetable or chicken broth
1/2 teaspoon of turmeric
1/4 teaspoon of cumin
2 cloves of garlic, minced
salt & pepper
olive oil
*toasted whole grain buns or bread for serving
For the smoky avocado spread:
1 ripe avocado
1 plum tomato, seeds removed and diced.
1/4 teaspoon of smoked paprika
1/4 teaspoon of crushed red pepper (optional)
salt & pepper
Directions
While you are cooking your quinoa, combine the black beans, turmeric, cumin, and broth in a large saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce to low, cover partially, and simmer for 25-30 minutes. Drain the beans.
In a large bowl combine the beans, garlic, and a pinch of salt and pepper. When the ingredients are well combined (mashed), add in the quinoa and combine. Adjust the seasoning if necessary.
Form the mixture into patties. Depending on how big or small you make them, you should get around 5-7 patties. Transfer the patties to a plate, cover and refrigerate while you are preparing your avocado spread or until you are ready to use (they will keep for about 3-4 days).
For the avocado spread: In a bowl, mash the avocado until it is smooth. Add in the tomato, smoked paprika, red pepper (if using), season with salt and pepper and combine.
In a large non-stick frying pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the cakes (maybe 3-4 at a time depending on the size of your pan) turning over once it has browned (about 5-7 minutes per side).
Serve immediately on a toasted bun, or bread with the avocado spread.
Enjoy.The team from On The Wild Side just returned from a five week long journey around Europe to interview notable people ranging from activists, major NGOs, to politicians, all of who, are compassionately involved in protecting wild animals.
The "On The Wild Side" team have been traveling around the world to collect interviews from people involved in different aspects of the anti-hunting movement.
While cataloguing material for the post production phase of On The Wild Side, we came across this audio segment. We realised that without video accompanying it, viewers wouldn't have full context about where it came from and what it is. We decided to share a 40 seconds extract.
On the Wild Side is a feature-length documentary aiming to develop several themes related to different types of hunting including, but not limited to, trophy, sport, and subsistence hunting. This film is the first of its kind.
On The Wild Side will bring viewers on a journey around the world to meet people carrying on work against hunting. The film will show different approaches that the anti-hunting movement uses to defend animals. Anti-poaching entities, hunt saboteur, direct action organizations, educational groups, and single individuals as well will be highlighted, in addition to local laws and law enforcement branches that are dedicated to monitor hunting and address poaching.
Journalists and academics will offer their points of view on the matter, helping viewers understand the problems of hunting in depth. The documentary will investigate and expose the effects that hunting has on local ecosystems, wildlife populations, endangered species and will explore which are the most victimized, whether those animals assaulted are creatures from land, sea, or air.
On the Wild Side will attempt to analyze what drives people to kill for entertainment or hobby. Additionally, we will bring to light the power that hunting lobbies have on lawmakers and the media. We will show how their propaganda helps to create in the general public an acceptance of hunting, and an unfounded fear of predators.
The goal of this documentary is to educate people about the realities of hunting and to act as a catalyst towards the eventual end of hunting. It will also inspire people to take a position against hunting and help the viewers to have the knowledge of what they can do to stand themselves, On The Wild Side.About
You sick off all those random simulator games? Can't stand to play another shooter or MMO?
Then Void The will be the perfect game for you! Void The consists of overly complex programming to create a void screen (black screen) where no further interaction will be possible, your PC will be voided till reboot!
We did get allot of questions about the interaction in void. Well fear no more, we got plenty of immersive interaction waiting there for you! including
Different shades of void( up to 255 not noticeable changes!)
Description of the current void writing in void!!
Drag-able voidness for optimal void immersion
Our goal has been reached! So Void The is coming!! for additional functionality´s check the chart
Reached €10 The void will be tamed/made
Reached €25 Sounds shall be added to the game
€50 Accessible Menu with void taming options
€75 Eastern eggs get quadrupled (yup eastern eggs are coming voids love eggs)
€175 Steam green light
€250 Early access and all backers that paid $5 or more get to think up an eastern egg for in the game ( as far as this is possible )
More goals following as new ones are reachedThis article is about the American football player. For the Australian rules footballer, see Aaron Rogers
Aaron Charles Rodgers (born December 2, 1983) is an American football quarterback for the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League (NFL). Rodgers played college football for the California Golden Bears, where he set several career passing records, including lowest single-season and career interception rates.[1] He was selected in the first round of the 2005 NFL Draft by the Packers.[2]
After backing up Brett Favre for the first three years of his NFL career, Rodgers became the Packers' starting quarterback in 2008. In 2010 he led them to a victory in Super Bowl XLV over the Pittsburgh Steelers, earning the Super Bowl MVP. He was named Associated Press Athlete of the Year in 2011,[3] and was voted league MVP by the Associated Press for the 2011 and 2014 NFL seasons.
Rodgers has led the NFL three times in touchdown-to-interception ratio (2011, 2012, 2014);[4] twice in passer rating (2011, 2012), touchdown passing percentage (2011, 2012), and lowest passing interception percentage (2009, 2014); and once in touchdown passes (2016) and yards per attempt (2011).
Rodgers is the NFL's all-time regular season career passer rating leader and is one of two quarterbacks to have a regular season career passer rating of over 100. Rodgers is fifth all-time in postseason career passer rating, has the best touchdown-to-interception ratio in NFL history at 4.23, holds the league's lowest career interception percentage at 1.5 percent[6] and the highest single-season passer rating record of |
34, Issue. 8, p. 752.
Maercker, A. and Augsburger, M. 2017. Psychotraumatologie. Der Nervenarzt, Vol. 88, Issue. 9, p. 967.
Pai, Anushka Suris, Alina and North, Carol 2017. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the DSM-5: Controversy, Change, and Conceptual Considerations. Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 7, Issue. 4, p. 7.
Afzali, Mohammad H. Sunderland, Matthew Batterham, Philip J. Carragher, Natacha Calear, Alison and Slade, Tim 2017. Network approach to the symptom-level association between alcohol use disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Vol. 52, Issue. 3, p. 329.
Russell, Justin D. Neill, Erin L. Carrión, Victor G. and Weems, Carl F. 2017. The Network Structure of Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms in Children and Adolescents Exposed to Disasters. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Vol. 56, Issue. 8, p. 669.
Siqveland, J. Ruud, T. and Hauff, E. 2017. Post-traumatic stress disorder moderates the relationship between trauma exposure and chronic pain. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, Vol. 8, Issue. 1, p. 1375337.
Doran, Jennifer M. Pietrzak, Robert H. Hoff, Rani and Harpaz-Rotem, Ilan 2017. Psychotherapy Utilization and Retention in a National Sample of Veterans With PTSD. Journal of Clinical Psychology, Vol. 73, Issue. 10, p. 1259.
Lassemo, Eva Sandanger, Inger Nygård, Jan F. and Sørgaard, Knut W. 2017. The epidemiology of post-traumatic stress disorder in Norway: trauma characteristics and pre-existing psychiatric disorders. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Vol. 52, Issue. 1, p. 11.
Hartmann, William E. and Gone, Joseph P. 2016. Psychological-Mindedness and American Indian Historical Trauma: Interviews with Service Providers from a Great Plains Reservation. American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 57, Issue. 1-2, p. 229.
Alford, C. Fred 2016. Trauma, Culture, and PTSD. p. 5.
Rosen, Gerald M. 2016. Has DSM-5 saved PTSD from itself?. British Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 209, Issue. 04, p. 275.
de Haan, Anke Petermann, Franz Meiser-Stedman, Richard and Goldbeck, Lutz 2016. Psychometric Properties of the German Version of the Child Post-Traumatic Cognitions Inventory (CPTCI-GER). Child Psychiatry & Human Development, Vol. 47, Issue. 1, p. 151.
Castle, D.J. and Starcevic, V. 2016. Stress: Concepts, Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior. p. 213.
Idsoe, Thormod Dyregrov, Atle Idsoe, Ella Cosmovici and Nielsen, Morten Birkeland 2016. Comprehensive Guide to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. p. 1367.
Vogt, Henrik Hofmann, Bjørn and Getz, Linn 2016. Personalized medicine: evidence of normativity in its quantitative definition of health. Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Vol. 37, Issue. 5, p. 401.
Panagioti, Maria Gooding, Patricia A. Pratt, Daniel and Tarrier, Nicholas 2015. An empirical investigation of suicide schemas in individuals with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. Psychiatry Research, Vol. 227, Issue. 2-3, p. 302.You could be forgiven for assuming that the Fawcett Society has full editorial control of the BBC flagship news programme Newsnight. The latest episode finished about two hours ago:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03pdgth/Newsnight_07_01_2014/
Around half the programme consisted of pieces that must have had gender feminists cackling over their cauldrons. The first piece (1:12 – 11:10) covers the story about the man and woman who pleaded guilty today to sending threatening tweets to Caroline Criado-Perez, and Jeremy Paxman interviews her at length. Needless to say she takes the opportunity to trot out her tedious misogynistic / sexist society speech we’ve heard so many times before, with nobody presenting counter-arguments.
But it was the second piece (22:08 – 33:54) that got a number of supporters and myself hopping mad. Newsnight has a long track record of following gender feminist narratives on domestic abuse/violence (DV) being solely (or overwhelmingly) a male-on-female phenomenon. And so it was again in this programme. Maybe to give some pretence of balance, one of Paxman’s interviewees was a man, but he kept to the same feminist narrative line, presumably because – on the evidence of this piece, anyway – his charity gets its income from supporting female victims and/or seeking to change the behaviours of male perpetrators. Then we had Polly Neate of Woman’s Aid who – of course – also never mentioned female perpetrators or male victims. Not one mention was made in the almost 12 minute long piece about most domestic abuse being reciprocal, or that in 70% of cases of uni-directional DV, the perpetrators are women.
We’re going to file an official complaint against the BBC in relation to the relentlessly biased coverage of DV on Newsnight. We have videos from previous episodes on our YouTube channel.
I end the day (1:40 am) with a request for donations. We’re putting more effort than ever into our work, and it would be good to get more contributions for the cost of my flights (£800 – £1,000) to and from Detroit in late June, where I’ve been asked to give a presentation about our work and strategies to the first international conference on men’s issues. You can make a donation here http://j4mb.org.uk/donate.
Thank you for your support.
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TwitterUsed to be that reading, writing, and arithmetic were all you needed to get by and do well in the world — but that was also around the time that the vast majority of jobs were agricultural, factory work, or service jobs like maids and butlers.
While our society and jobs market has changed drastically since then, our education system has not. Today, our education system focuses too much on learning facts by heart, rote memorization and basic writing and algebra — all things computers can do much better.
Remember asking your maths teacher why you couldn’t use a calculator in class, and hearing the reply that no one would walk around with calculators in their pockets every day?
Enter the smartphone. That’s one excuse destroyed.
In my opinion, our schools are filling students’ heads with trivia rather than teaching them skills that are important and useful in the real world. The popular U.S. TV show, Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? didn’t prove that adults were dumber than children, but rather that the adults have jettisoned much of the “knowledge” they learned in grade school as being unimportant in daily life.
In truth of fact, the people that will be able to compete for the best jobs in the future will be those who work with and alongside computers and AI, that are able to ask new questions, are creative and innovative and have a high degree of emotional intelligence and social skills (the things that actually make us human). I believe we need to focus more on those skills instead of spoon feeding our kids facts.
According to a survey by The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), these are some of the skills top employers say they are looking for in 2016 — and the ways in which our schools are failing to prepare students to fulfil them:
1. Ability to obtain and process information.
As data becomes more and more important and integral in the workplace, companies will be looking for employees who can hit the ground running when it comes to obtaining and processing that data. This means that it’s much less important to know facts and figures that our current education system emphasizes, than it is to possess the skills to locate and process any kind of information required.
Finding data is the easy part; anyone can conduct a Google search or even a customer survey these days. But data is dumb; it may have the answers you want, but it will only reveal them if you ask the right questions. The jobs of the future will require today’s students to think critically about whether the data they have is answering the question they really want to answer.
2. Ability to analyze quantitative data.
Believe it or not, this was in the top 10 skills employers are looking for in 2016, so it stands to reason that it will become more and more important in the future. Don’t assume that skills like this are only needed for “numbers crunching” type jobs any more. Everyone from creatives to HR to sales will be dealing with data more and more in the near future. Having a basic understanding of how statistics and mathematical reasoning work will be essential to understanding data sets and drawing conclusions.
As with facts, it’s less about the ability to solve the maths problem and get the right answer, and more about the ability to understand the relationships between numbers and the underlying principles of statistics and probability. Ask the right questions, and that calculator in your pocket can do the actual computing.
3. Proficiency with computer software programs.
It’s no longer acceptable to learn basic computer skills on the job. Luckily, today’s kids are digital natives and using technology practically from birth. But our education system is not providing students with adequate training in computer programs; students are left to teach themselves.
For example, no matter what your occupation today, it’s time to become familiar with the graphing functions in Excel and the visualisation tools in PowerPoint and the like. Why? Because a big part of business today is understanding, interpreting, and explaining data. Students need to be well versed in these basic tools.
4. Ability to create and/or edit written reports.
Written and verbal communications skills are vital to almost any position these days, and if you can add visualisation skills (creating charts, graphs, etc.), you become that much more marketable. Future applicants who can demonstrate that they can clearly communicate information in a written format will rise above their competition.
But we don’t necessarily need to be teaching students the five paragraph essay. Instead or in addition, schools should be teaching how to write persuasively, how to compose a professional email or letter, and how to effectively communicate information via the written word.
Paper may be going the way of the dinosaur, but text is here to stay.
5. Ability to sell and influence others.
Whether you’re looking for a position in sales or not, many, many more jobs require one person to be in charge of influencing others. Social media managers must influence followers positively, managers and leadership teams must influence employees, anyone who deals with customers must influence those customers (whether they are directly selling or not). These kinds of “soft” skills are becoming more important in separating those who will easily win jobs from those who won’t.
Yet schools very rarely focus on any kind of communications or other soft skills — mainly because they’re difficult to measure and grade in any kind of standardized fashion. But this is to the great detriment of our students. These skills can be taught; it’s not only the naturally gifted speakers, writers and salespeople who can learn them, and our schools are doing our students a great disservice by not teaching them.
Of course, I believe that a certain about of basic knowledge is important to create functioning members of society. But I believe our education systems focuses too much on the memorization and recitation of facts, and not enough on the critical thinking skills that allow us to put those facts to use.We’re talking the draw with Real Salt Lake, and previewing the Saturday matchup with FC Dallas. Plus Ariel Lassiter from LA Galaxy II calls in.
On today’s show your hosts Josh Guesman and Cory Ritzau promise that they’ll try and stay positive – well at least Cory will. It was rough watching that 0-0 draw and the guys will relive the good and the bad and come to some conclusion on whether anything can be taken from that game.
How much have injuries effected this team? Who had the best showing? And why do we miss so many penalty kicks – why Juninho? It’s a full discussion of this struggling team.
Then, fresh off his game winning goal for LA Galaxy II, Ariel Lassiter (son of MLS great Roy Lassiter) calls in to talk about Los Dos, his career, his mindset, and what his goals are for the rest of the USL season.
Finally, the guys get you updated on team news including U-20 call-ups and HOT transfer rumors before looking ahead to FC Dallas on Saturday.
We’re keeping our streak alive by bringing you the players and coaches direct from the field and right into your living room. Where else are you going to get this stuff and have so much fun doing it?
*In-Game Audio Courtesy of Time Warner Cable SportsNet*
Corner of the Galaxy
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commentsThe 2012 College Football All-America Team includes those players of American college football who have been honored by various selector organizations as the best players at their respective positions. The selector organizations award the "All-America" honor annually following the conclusion of the fall college football season. The original All-America team was the 1889 College Football All-America Team selected by Caspar Whitney and Walter Camp.[1][2][3] In 1950, the National Collegiate Athletic Bureau, which is the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) service bureau, compiled the first list of All-Americans including first-team selections on teams created for a national audience that received national circulation with the intent of recognizing selections made from viewpoints that were nationwide.[4] Since 1952, College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) has bestowed Academic All-American recognition on male and female athletes in Divisions I, II, and III of the NCAA as well as National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics athletes, covering all NCAA championship sports.
The 2012 College Football All-America Team is composed of the following College Football All-American first teams chosen by the following selector organizations: Associated Press (AP), Football Writers Association of America (FWAA), American Football Coaches Association (AFCA), Walter Camp Foundation (WCFF), The Sporting News (TSN), Sports Illustrated (SI), Pro Football Weekly (PFW), ESPN, CBS Sports (CBS), College Football News (CFN), Scout.com, and Yahoo! Sports (Yahoo!).
Currently, the NCAA compiles consensus all-America teams in the sports of Division I-FBS football and Division I men's basketball using a point system computed from All-America teams named by coaches associations or media sources. The system consists of three points for a first-team honor, two points for second-team honor, and one point for third-team honor. Honorable mention and fourth team or lower recognitions are not accorded any points. Football consensus teams are compiled by position and the player accumulating the most points at each position is named first team consensus all-American. Currently, the NCAA recognizes All-Americans selected by the AP, AFCA, FWAA, TSN, and the WCFF to determine Consensus All-Americans.[5]
In 2012, there were 13 unanimous All-Americans.
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Notes [ edit ]Jesus-Crowdfunded-Christ.
In 9 days, we managed to raise over 1 million dollars to go towards buying back Tesla's old laboratory, and with the $850,000 matching grant from NY state this puts us at 1.85 million bucks. At its peak, the campaign was raising $27,000 per hour, crashing Indiegogo, and probably setting some kind of land speed record in awesomeness. Indiegogo put together this infographic showing some interesting data points behind the campaign.
So what happens next?
Even though we've already hit our goal, I plan on letting the campaign run the full 45 days. Every extra penny we earn will go toward restoring the property, building exhibits, and turning this land into something worthy of Tesla's awesomeness. The original goal of $850k was enough money to bid on the property, but it's going to take a lot more to turn it into an actual museum.
The non-profit behind this endeavor is beginning the process of working with the realtor to make a bid on the property. I'll post any major updates here, or you can follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
We've added some new perks to the campaign, including more t-shirts, hats, and posters signed by Tesla's last remaining relative.
I know I've said this before, but to everyone who donated: THANK YOU.
THANK YOU SO GODDAMN MUCH. WE ARE GOING TO BUILD A GODDAMN TESLA MUSEUM.
Exciting, yes?
Yes.
Hugs and goddamns,
-The OatmealA Nashville musician lost everything in a house fire, but weeks later received a cable bill in the mail for hundreds of dollars; so he took to social media to make sure he didn't pay for TV he didn't watch.
Vince Romanelli is most comfortable performing in front a crowded audience.
The musician's show has been seen around the world, including on several cruise ships. While he was preparing for a show in Atlanta on January 23, Romanelli got a call from his landlord saying his home caught fire.
He lost everything, including nearly $80,000 in musical equipment. Even his clothes were gone.
"I had the clothes on my back that I was literally wearing,"he said.
Romanelli said he lost drum sets, keyboards and even recording equipment in the blaze. His friends and family, as well as strangers from other states jumped in to help him raise money.
"The humanity through all of this has been really incredible," he said. "I don't know the words. It forces me to find a new emotion deep inside of me."
He spent the next few weeks dealing with insurance companies and then remembered he needed to cancel his Comcast Cable account since he no longer had a home, let alone at TV. So he went to a representative in Nashville.
"She said, 'Oh my Gosh! Yeah we'll cancel you don't worry. You don't have to worry. We'll pay for everything.' I was like good! Comcast is good!," Romanelli said.
Fast forward to Wednesday when Romanelli said he received a bill totaling more than $300 and included an early termination fee.
"I wasn't upset. I was like okay here we go, let's do it right," he said.
So Romanelli took to social media, creating Facebook posts and calling the company. He took to Twitter when he claimed a representative never called him back.
"@comcastcares was told she'd call me back. She didn't. @comcast is a cheating girlfriend. Saying all the right things. Actions not lining up," he wrote.
. @comcastcares was told she'd call me back. she didnt. @comcast is a cheating girlfriend. SAYING all the right things, actions not lining up — vinceromanelli (@vinceromanelli) February 4, 2016
Eventually, the company did call and said everything would be taken care of. Comcast issued a statement regarding the bill:
We apologized to Mr. Romanelli for the billing issue and were able to resolve this to his satisfaction. Our customers deserve an excellent experience, so we take this situation very seriously.
"The employees were actually trying to do well, but i think they were limited by the system," Romanelli claimed.
While the Comcast bill has been taken care of, Romanelli is still in need of donations. If you would like to help, click here.Big thanks to all contributors who made pull requests on GitHub, sent bug reports and helped us in any other way!
As usual, release binary packages are available on SourceForge, the source code can be downloaded from GitHub.
Documentation is also updated for the 2.4.5 state.
The brief list of changes:
experimental WinRT support
new video super-resolution module
CLAHE (adaptive histogram equalization) algorithm on both CPU and GPU
further improvements and extensions in ocl module (stereo block matching and belief propagation have been added, fixed crashes on Intel HD4000)
Visual Studio 2012 cv::Mat visualizer plugin debugger tutorial from Microsoft Research
OpenCV4Android SDK improvements (NDK r8e support, native activity sample using OpenCV Manager, bug-fixes)
~25 reported problems have been resolved since 2.4.4, ~78 pull requests have been merged, thanks everybody who participated!
See the full ChangeLog for more information.
Welcome to use the latest and greatest OpenCV!
Please ask your questions in our Q&A forum.
Best regards,
OpenCV Development Team.Richmond Kickers Coach Leigh Cowlishaw is busy assembling his roster ahead of the USL season, but unlike past winters, he has had to take D.C. United’s desires into consideration.
Thanks to MLS’s new partnership with the third-tier division, several USL clubs will inherit at least four players for full-time assignment and receive others for periodic duty during the year. United and the Kickers are exclusive partners.
So in addition to conducting tryouts and scouting for talent, Cowlishaw has joined United’s technical staff in Orlando to get a better feel for the club’s roster plans and learn more about his possible pupils. An official decision about assignments is still a few weeks away.
Top candidates would seem to include midfielder Lance Rozeboom, who missed his rookie season with a knee injury; goalkeeper Andrew Dykstra, third on the depth chart; Indonesian midfielder Syamsir Alam, who is just 20; and perhaps a trialist who earns a contract this month.
The purpose of the alignment is to provide competitive matches weekly for players who otherwise wouldn’t crack the MLS game-day roster often.
It is a significant upgrade from the MLS reserve league, which has been plagued by scheduling issues and too few games. United had just nine last year. By contrast, the Kickers will play 26 league matches this season, plus at least four preseason friendlies and enter the U.S. Open Cup. (In a scheduling quirk, the Kickers will play 11 of their first 12 league games at home, then have eight in a row away.)
The MLS reserve league still exists, but several sides will opt for a USL partnership. Players on assignment in USL remain eligible for in-season recalls. And MLS teams may send players on temporary gigs in USL.
Last year United had homegrown midfielder-defender Conor Shanosky on a full-season assignment to the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the second-tier NASL. Dykstra made several stints at USL Charleston and others played a few times for Richmond.
“We’ve had good communication with [United GM] Dave Kasper and the coaches through the years,” Cowlishaw, a member of the Kickers family since 1993, said during a recent interview at the club’s Richmond offices.
“It’s a fantastic way to combine resources. We do it right here. We have the experience to run that level of soccer below MLS and it’s a fantastic foundation to come in here and play meaningful games. It will be even better when you are here full-time and you become part of the team and you are competing.”
The proximity between Washington and Richmond — a two-hour drive, on a good traffic day — will allow United coaches to monitor players.
The United guests will remain on D.C.’s books and train full-time with the Kickers, whose training grounds at Ukrop Park include grass and turf fields, plus lights. Richmond plays home matches at City Stadium, an old facility on the west side of town.
Roster-building is a balancing act for Cowlishaw, who has a core group under contract — primarily defenders — and is consulting with United officials about the long-term additions.
“It’s really tricky to go out and aggressively sign players until we identify the positions we will be given by United,” he said. “It’s a moderate budget [in USL] and the last thing we want to do is duplicate positions. It’s going to have its advantages; it’s an exciting piece to the puzzle. It just changes the way we recruit and sign players.”
The D.C.-Richmond deal is for just one year, but if all goes well, an extension would make sense.
Said Cowlishaw: “It will be interesting to see their vision for the future of this, but Richmond can be a beneficial organization, possibly an extension, of their whole player development philosophy.”Updated (December 14, 2018)
If you’re searching for an air purifier to help with weed smoke and odor… you came to the right place. We’ve reviewed a ton of purifiers and we think your best bet is one from Austin Air. Their activated carbon filters are hard to beat when it comes to odor removal. And, just in case there’s something you don’t like about this model (looks, price, size, etc.) we’ve included some others below.
Austin Air Healthmate Jr.
One of the most talked about air purifiers for smoke is the HealthMate Jr. This purifier is small and simple in its design, but trust us it is very powerful. But, it’s power isn’t a result of the fan (it’s not all that powerful). Its purifying power comes from a awesome filter. It pulls air in from all sides into a huge HEPA filter and another with a ton of activated carbon. In fact, you will not find a purifier with more carbon than those built by Austin Air. The Jr model has about 6.5 pounds while the standard model offers nearly fifteen pounds.
If you’re looking to clean a large space check out their full line of air purifiers. But, for most users, this model is more than enough.
Features
Made in the USA
Cleans rooms as large as 700 square feet
6.5 pounds of activated carbon
Medical grade HEPA filter
5 Year filter life
4-stage filter design with 360-degree air intake
Removes most chemicals, gases, bacteria, and viruses from the air
Quirks
It’s pretty loud compared to more expensive options
Weak on features (no WiFi, no timer, etc.)
Slightly more expensive purifiers are better looking and work just as well (e.g. AirMega)
Contents
Our Favorite Purifiers for Smoke
To be completely honest there is not a single best air purifier for weed smoke. But, there is a best one for you. This is because everyone has different needs and different spaces to purify. If a person is trying to purify a large space or smokes a lot they will need a more powerful unit. But, if another person is searching for a purifier to use in a small room then a different unit will be “the best.”
Best Bang for Your Buck
Rabbit Air BioGS 2.0 SPA-550A
Austin Air units are great, but if you want something that has a bit more style check out this purifier from Rabbit Air. This machine features a sleek modern design that is also loaded with some of the industry’s best filters. The BioGS removes odor and pollen well and looks great while scrubbing the air of weed smoke. Buyers rave about how well this air purifier works when eliminating tough odors like cigarette smoke. It is a easy to use machine that can be operated either automatically or manually. It even comes with a remote control.
You may also want to check out the Rabbit Air MinusA2. It costs more than the BioGS, but the feature we really love is that you can mount it to a wall. It also looks really nice… so that’s always a plus.
Features
BioGS HEPA filter rated to last up to 3 years
Charcoal-based activated carbon filter
Energy Star Certified
Super quiet BLDC motor
Quirks
Works best in smaller spaces (less than 550 square feet)
Best Tech & Features
AirMega 400s
If you’re looking for a purifier with all of the bells and whistles… look no further than AirMega’s “s” models. They’re packed with great features and latest tech. Does it work in large rooms? Yep… up to 1,560 square feet. It even works with Amazon’s Alexa.
The AirMega “S” models also use an app for control and monitoring via WiFi. If you’re as lazy as us, you don’t really need the app all of the time though. It has a smart sensor mode to adjust power as it detects more particles in the air.
We think the design is incredible, and the huge filters provide outstanding performance. The biggest downside is that we can’t afford one for every room in our home. These don’t come cheap. But, they are worth every penny (if you can afford one).
Features
Awesome Tech
Works in HUGE rooms
Outstanding Filters
Very Quiet
Quirks
Filters should be replaced annually
It might be too big for some rooms
Best Budget Purifier
GermGuardian AC4825
View on Amazon
The GermGuardian is one of the better budget air purifiers on the market. Now, it’s nowhere near as good as the other purifiers in this list, but not everyone can afford a few hundred bucks. It’s fairly good at smoke removal (mainly light weed smoke) and odor removal. But, you need to be close to the unit while smoking.
It is light, compact, and runs quietly. It is a must-have for those who just want a device that works out of the box. The only con of this product is that it is not made for very large rooms. But, for the price of one of the purifiers above, you can purchase a few AC4825’s. For more details, be sure to check out our full review on the GermGuardian AC4825.
Features
Washable filter
True HEPA Filter
Energy Star Certified
Quirks
We’re not fans of the UV filter… they aren’t effective in a purifier
Why buy a Purifier
Smoking weed is different than cigarettes or cigars. It’s usually less frequent… and doesn’t produce as much smoke. Let’s be honest… it’s mostly about trapping a little smoke before someone else has the chance to catch a whiff.
And it’s a two-way street. For those of you with a neighbor who smokes; an air purifier is a great way to keep your living space smelling fresh and clean. Weed smoke and odor are very good at sneaking through a building’s walls, floors, and windows. Plus, using an air purifier is way easier than having to deal with your nosy neighbors.
Marijuana smokers who live in apartments have the most trouble because they must prevent the odor from seeping out into the hallway and attracting unwanted attention from neighbors and landlords. Even card-carrying users of medicinal marijuana can become self-conscious about the odor. Some simply wish to kill the smell out of respect for their friends, family, or even neighbors with children.
As we said earlier, the good news is that a smoke purifier for weed will help keep odor and second-hand smoke at bay.
How we compared these purifiers
The first thing we compared was the AHAM clean air delivery rate for budget friendly models, mid range, and high end purifiers. Granted, some companies (Austin Air) do not participate in AHAM certification, but we have a good idea of where they’d fall when it comes to CADR. From there we take into account, the price compared to other purifiers on the list, features, and other things like size or long term cost of ownership.
Let’s start with the budget models
Budget purifiers are difficult to judge. In this price range a slight incremental increase in price can result in a large percentage increase. For example a 80 dollar purifier and a 160 dollar purifier both occupy this price range. The latter is a 100 percent increase in cost… you could have literally have two of the 80 dollar models. So when we compare these… we take way more into account than just CADR rating. But, to give you a good idea of how they perform; here’s the data we used to sort them out for consideration.
As you can see from the chart above the Honeywell 50250-s scores very well compared to other budget purifiers. It does fall on the higher end of the price range, however. And, that’s close enough to some of the mid range purifiers to drive us to include the GermGuardian 4825… it’s much much cheaper. So we think adding it better rounds out our list. It’s also one of the most popular lower-end purifiers. Plus, it has a low cost of ownership and widely available filters.
Finally, in the budget purifier category the Levoit purifier scores very well. However, it’s about the same price as the Honeywell 50250-s… but offers slightly worse performance on paper. It is however smaller than the 50250-s… so if you’re shopping those two models against one another it’s worth considering. However, in this guide we thought that the Levoit should be excluded for the same reason as the Honeywell we love so much for other uses.
Next, how do the Mid Range Purifiers Compare?
When you can spend a couple hundred bucks or more, purifier performance really gets impressive. The serious contenders we considered all have great stats, but some have different features that give a slight advantage… or justify spending one or two hundred dollars more on a purifier. Ultimately the purifier we recommend above all others (Healthmate Jr.) was fell into the sweet spot of this price range. It also offered the raw performance and low cost of ownership to help you kill weed smoke.
If we were going off CADR alone, it would be really tough to choose between the Coway and Rabbit Air BioGS models. They’re both great. The reason we chose the Rabbit air as a runner up was the long filter life, ultra quiet operation, and incredible warranty. But, it was super close… in fact one of these days we might rethink this list and add the Coway because it’s at the lower end of the mid price range spectrum and offers awesome performance.
Why didn’t we choose the Blue Pure air purifiers? They look great on paper. Huge CADR, great looks, and awesome price. Plus they’re made by Blueair; one of our favorite manufacturers. The thing that kept them off this list was the decorative external pre filter. Life as a weed smoke filter is messy business. And we’re afraid that the pre filters would start looking pretty nasty when you smoke around them. Other than that… we would totally recommend any of the Blue Pure models. (The little one is by far the best desktop purifier available.)
Finally, what if You Smoke Weed and have a Big Budget?
So, these aren’t crazy expensive… but they are on the upper end of purifier pricing. The IQAir is actually the most expensive, but it’s awesome if you have the cash. The AirMega models are all great, and pack a ton of incredible features into a sleek housing. It’s hard to not pick the AirMega for this list, but fortunately Blueair helped by building the 605.
The 605 has a ton of features… fairly similar to AirMega in everything but the looks department. But, it’s CADR for smoke is off the charts. And, since we tend to consider weed smoke as a little lighter duty than cigar or cigarette smoke, this is overkill for those of you with some extra cash laying around.
Finding a Great Purifier
So what if none of the purifiers we covered meets your needs? Maybe they just didn’t look quite right. Or they didn’t offer the combination of features you desire (sleep mode, auto mode, remote control, etc.). No matter what… we still want to help. So here’s a quick how to that covers what you should look for when shopping for your new machine.
How to Find a Purifier that works on Smoke… Look for a True HEPA Filter Every purifier we considered for this guide has a HEPA filter. It’s pretty much a given when you’re talking about a purifier that’s good enough to help you with any kind of smoke. A lion’s share of smoke particulate is larger than 0.03 microns. In fact the things you can see with the human eye are much, much larger than that. However, a lot of the more harmful things are smaller than 2.5 microns.
The one caveat is that if the HEPA filter is unprotected, or is the first thing to contact smoke-filled air… it will clog. HEPA filters are incredibly fine, and without a prefilter or two; you’ll be shopping for a new filter in a matter of weeks or months. A Large Filter (Surface Area) is Key Since HEPA filters and smoke can be a recipe for frequent filter replacements, you’ll want large filters. The more surface area a filter has the more difficult it is to clog. Every square inch of filter helps extend the life of the filter itself. Make sure the Purifier has Activated Carbon This is really important. You need a filtration material that captures the things that are too small for a HEPA filter. Things like odor and combustion gasses just pass through almost untouched. But, thanks to activated carbon’s huge surface area and ability to adsorb (not absorb) gas from the air… it is a perfect companion to the HEPA filter.
Also, more carbon is better… but you don’t necessarily need a ton of it to work. One gram will adsorb about 3,000 square meters of gas. So a larger activated carbon filter will last longer (in theory), but it will not always soak up more odor. This is especially true if the carbon filter element is also the prefilter. If you’re clogging the pre filter/carbon filter with pet hair and pollen you’ll want something that’s cheap and easy to replace. That’s one of the reasons we |
merely middle-aged declare our populist rectitude; the discursive world goes round.
Yet the exchange of harrumph left me with a lingering aftertaste of unadmitted complicity and unadmitted voices. Before collapsing into sputter against “stoned, horny, ungrateful, and uncomprehending pissants,” Leonard successfully traced a certain habitual tone through Lethem’s work, albeit again one which Lethem himself had already explicitly called out: disappointment.
II. Love is just a lie made to make you blue
Leonard cited Lethem’s summary (“Each of my novels… is fueled by loss”), and then verified it. All well and sad, except that Leonard associated that void with Lethem’s comic book collection — as though writing liner notes for Maria Callas reissues would’ve sprung Lethem’s pop music critic from his fortress of solitude; as if we lived in a world where Greil Marcus ached more than Norman Lebrecht, Pete Seeger lacked John Berryman’s inner resources, and Will Eisner’s post-war experimentation failed him where Jackson Pollock’s did not.
What frustrates Leonard in Franzen’s, Moody’s, and Lethem’s “dorky pathos” is the dorkiness of their references. What frustrates me is the familiarity of their pathos. It isn’t specific to these novelists or their low-culture enthusiasms. Wagnerian opera proved more damaging to Du Bois’s John Jones than hip-hop to Lethem’s Arthur Lomb (Fortress). The same tale’s been told of ballerinas and boxers, twelve-tone composers and blues guitarists: the transmutation of exhilarating matter into glum defeat.
Such stories take advantage of a formal conflict (or, more sympathetically, resolve an emotional tension) between drives generally abstracted as “lyric” and “narrative,” although they’re more varied than those terms might suggest. Non-narrative forms are frequently spoken of by critics and academicians as if they arrive in immaculately sealed and immortally frozen packages, but a sense of performance is as central to aesthetic experience as a sense of closure. George Herriman’s comic strips, Howard Hawks’s Hollywood films, Richard Pryor’s stand-up, and Al Green’s LPs transfix us not by punch-, plot-, or melody-lines but by their tossed-off (if well-rehearsed) gestures, a groove laid by the eternal-now of characteristics rather than the chronological development of character.
Whether tableaux or marathons, when such temporally escapist influences enter psychologically-driven realism, they can only be given too little weight or too much. The writer may minimize disruption through free indirect discourse or may, like Stephen King and James Joyce, quickly cite brand names in passing. More centrally ekphrastic narratives generally tell of loss, as plot tears protagonist, author, and audience alike from lyric’s spell: to return to the groove would be to choose stasis. Transplanted to serious mainstream fiction, Krazy Kat becomes unambiguously female and Ignatz Mouse genuinely destructive (Cantor; Lethem, “Five”), John Wayne plays villain rather than lead (Lethem, Girl), superhuman privileges right no wrongs (Lethem, Fortress, “Super Goat Man”), and auctorial figures themselves shed the solace of siblings and humor (Joyce; Lethem, Fortress). These are generic conventions, loosely associated with the very middlebrow espoused by Leonard. They may be integral elements but when I strike them my stride falters; I slide a bit.
Even across media, a downward turn is taken to indicate depth. Comics creator Chris Ware, like Lethem, attended a high-art institution, revolted against academic pretensions, was attracted by a popular genre, established himself as a star in its most conceptually daring niche, then was welcomed into the market covered by the New York Review of Books with a success that stunned his peer group. Over its long publication history, Ware’s “Jimmy Corrigan” serial downshifted from wild genre-play to an extreme naturalism in which, as in The Fortress of Solitude, unreliable superpowers and America’s racial divide serve to emphasize the protagonist’s emotional isolation. Ware followed his breakthrough work with the even more mundane tale of “Rusty Brown” — like Lethem’s essay collection, the bildungsroman of a collector. For both Ware and Lethem, disappointment, however genuinely felt, was also a vehicle to the mainstream.
Of course, narrative arts support their own varieties of groove and their own extra-temporal structures, and not all careers follow the arc of gravity. Oscar Wilde obediently served vindictive deserts to the wits of “A Woman of No Importance” and The Picture of Dorian Gray but escaped into something like pure music with “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Wilde’s triumph was abysmally short-lived, however, and a survey of award winners from virtually any field will verify that cheerfulness carries a cost. Lethem’s least calculated and most “intuited” story, “Sleepy People,” was, as he ruefully understates, “very quietly received” (“Private Hells”). Although Karen Joy Fowler’s mainstream crossover in some respects anticipated Lethem’s, her love of comedic structures frequently puts her at risk of being reclassified as chick-lit or YA. And the most referential of storytellers — Howard Waldrop, Guy Davenport — unable to sacrifice the gaiety of their scholarship, remain coterie property.
III. Can’t have love without greed
Two-thirds in, Leonard interrupted his harangue of Lethem to harangue:
readers of Lethem who’d rather he hadn’t entered the mainstream, a peculiar resentment indeed on the part of people who otherwise complain that the mainstream unfairly disdains their populist subversions, their pulp-proud underground, their monastic cells and hermetic texts. About the mainstream: love it or leave it. To want to eat the flowers and sleep in the Hide-a-Bed of the very same rectal-thermometer establishment whose walls you have pledged to “tag” — do your graffiti — seems to me to be uncool.
Although I’m not sure where rectal thermometers fit, I certainly agree that keeping-it-real rhetoric is not, as the kids say, “fly.” We genre cosmopolitans find dealing with police on both sides of the border a terrible nuisance, and in exasperation I’ve occasionally sworn off vacation spots for years at a time. Expressing similar annoyance, Lethem once imagined a science fiction community generous enough to award a Nebula to Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973 (“Close Encounters”).
What makes these people act this way? What the fuck are they thinking?
One clue may be found in “As Others See Us” (Ansible), science fiction fan Dave Langford’s long-running collection of dismissive quotes from outside the field, many by “serious” novelists and movie-makers who’ve taken or re-invented its concepts. Another might be found when “serious” gallery artists describe visual references as if they’ve been lifted from an anonymous zeitgeist rather than from fellow laborers. Such blatant hypocrisy has a way of creating resentment among subalterns.
In contrast, the more recent writers targeted by Leonard’s essay strive to keep the human producers and human costs of popular culture in their minds and pages. Lethem has never displayed Kurt Vonnegut’s fear of career contagion, and in The Fortress of Solitude he didn’t use soul music and graffiti solely to gesture at its consumer-hero’s inner life (as such varied authors as Tom Stoppard and Nick Hornby have). Instead, the novel includes musicians and taggers themselves as characters, and its formally-dictated break from those characters created genuine reader distress.
Insofar as ghetto defensiveness is a reasonable reaction to abuse, one would expect effect to weaken with cause. And such has been the case. With The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon gained not only a Pulitzer but the approval of comic book professionals, and when Chabon accepted the 2008 Nebula award for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union Lethem’s One World dream seemed fulfilled.
Still, misunderstandings can blindside the well-meaning tourist.
Lethem has described at various times his fascination with Steve Gerber’s and Mary Skrenes’s short-lived comic book series, Omega the Unknown. In 2005, offered a chance to write for Marvel Comics, he chose to try to re-imagine the original’s compromised ten-issue run as a cohesive story.
Gerber reacted to this tribute on the “Howard the Duck Club” message board:
I am *not* happy about Marvel’s revival of Omega, and the writer of the book has made an enemy for life by taking the job. According to some people, he actually professes to be a fan of my work. If that’s even minimally true, what he’s done is even more unforgivable (“The Omega Revival.”).
Later, Lethem said:
The allure of working with Marvel was to take something that existed and repurpose it, give it a different spin. After all, I work with solitary materials all the time. And it seemed, of course, that Gerber, like so many of the comic book writers that I’d so admired, had himself done so much of this kind of repurposing and knitting in to the collective tapestry. So I couldn’t imagine there being a reason not to do it. I was quite disconcerted when his reaction was so unhappy (“Jonathan Lethem on Omega”).
Indeed, the offense seems difficult to explain. It couldn’t be a question of money, given the series’ nonexistent commercial prospects. Nor was it fear of displacement: Lethem rarely mentioned Omega without praising its original co-writer, and Gerber’s and Skrenes’s issues were brought back into print only after Lethem’s revival was announced. Plagiarism as normally understood by the literary or academic communities was never broached.
This contretemps sprang not from a difference of opinion but from a mistranslation of behavior. As Gerber put it in his first message:
As a rule of thumb, if the creator of a character or series is alive and still active in the industry, another writer or artist’s “revamping” of his work at a publisher’s behest constitutes an expression of contempt, not tribute — and all the more so if the original creator doesn’t even share financially in the enterprise.
Gerber’s implication that Marvel Publishing, Inc., had hired an award-winning best-selling literary novelist to revive a stagnant trademark was a simple error, easily cleared up. The knottier issue is woven into the phrase “his work”: authorship and its properties.
Both the sacred name of the Author and the Author’s sacrificial Death are aspects of high-status art, and the connoisseur’s traditional job is to distinguish “school,” “copy,” and “forgery” from the prized hand of the master. In contrast, lower-status rural art was collected from informants but authored by the spirit of the nation or the race. Equally in contrast, low-status urban art was manufactured by hacks but authored by the capitalist hegemony. Celebrations of the vulgar vitality of comic books or science fiction replayed earlier revivals of folk culture; jeremiads against their corrupting influence replayed earlier fears of empowered peasantry or immigrants. In either case, proper names rarely entered artists’ appropriations or intellectuals’ analyses.
When we wish to raise the status of media and genres, even those of us who’ve read Barthes will reach for proper names. From the absurdly expensive collaborations of cinema we pluck an auteur; from the absurdly profitable collaborations of fashion or gadgetry we pluck a designer. Ambiguities persist — Lethem has noted the qualitative distance between “a Hawks movie” which stars Cary Grant and “a Hawks movie” which stars James Caan (“Noah Baumbach”) — and yet alternative terms seem in themselves demeaning. In a book review, John Banville mocked the idea that “Hitchcock is a major artist”; in a later interview, Lethem protested (correctly) that “These battles were fought and won…. Hitchcock is art.” However, statements such as “The Gaumont British Picture Corporation is a major artist” or “Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock is art” fall bizarrely outside the lines of debate. A victory means among other things burying the bodies.
By this, I don’t mean to denigrate the justness of our cause. The cult of genius and the intentional fallacy linger because both accurately describe communal aspects of aesthetic experience. Exceptional one-person comic strips like “Little Nemo,” “Krazy Kat,” and “Peanuts” were among the first to be championed as high art partly because standard industry practices such as “ghosting” and assembly-line production obscure idiosyncrasies, freeze evolution, and desiccate scholarly and fannish narratives. Our impulse to uncover a human source — to project from reproducible artifact to traceable performer, so that we might begin to speak of cinematographer “John Alton” as we would of “Humphrey Bogart” — isn’t just a taxonomic convenience. It also reflects frustrated feelings of gratitude and intimacy, as evidenced by the career of Walt Disney comics artist and writer Carl Barks. Although Barks wrote, drew, and inked his own work for decades, his employer blocked fan mail and withheld contributor credits on the theory that sales would decline if children thought anyone other than Walt Disney was involved in the comic books. As a result, Barks wasn’t successfully contacted by readers until 1960, and his first interview (conducted in 1962) was only allowed publication in 1968 (Barks, Starback). Given no clues other than style, loyal fans identified and collected Barks as “The Duck Artist,” “The Good Duck Artist,” or simply “The Good Artist,” the last eventually inscribed on his gravestone (Balmer).
In turn, this sense of personal obligation to individual artists was ingeniously exploited by the Walt Disney Company, Marvel Comics, and other media monoliths to extend their corporate control of “intellectual property” through some exceptional assumptions: that “the creator” of “a work” can always be determined so as to assign the work’s ownership, that the legal heirs (two or three generations later) of the original “owner” are best placed to personify “the creator’s” intentions, and, indeed, that a single interpretation of a dead “creator’s” intentions should constrain the actions of the living.
Distinguishing intention from accident and genius from influence can be difficult even in the paradigmatic cases of a garreted writer or painter, and Steve Gerber belonged to a studio system in which every word of a writer received editing, each pencil stroke of an artist was inked over, and gag recycling and compositional “swipes” were, if not celebrated, certainly no scandal. Setting collaborative ambiguities aside, the equation of “creator” with “owner” remains riddled by loopholes like work-for-hire, transferable rights, and corporate immortality. Formulas such as “culture industry” mean to cut through this fog of corruption and to restore something like Kant’s contrast of “mercenary” art with “free” art. But craftspeople (whether Elizabethan playwrights or Kant’s watchmakers) must retain some freedom of movement and judgment merely to be credited with craft, and the artifacts “freest” from established systems of reward are often those whose treatment as art objects are most ethically troubling. When museums exclude “work-for-hire” visionaries like George Herriman and Charles M. Schulz but include factory-managers like Jeff Koons, generic class distinctions seem painfully arbitrary.
In law and in aesthetics, what Authors name (besides one to a hundred or more human beings) are Works. And just as Authority must be redefined at each extension of aesthetic loyalty or copyright protection, so must we redefine the critical and legal derivation of Work from artifacts. When transforming visual ephemera to Masterwork, is the living essence best conveyed by discolored newsprint and halftone dots or by digital retouching and computer coloring? Recent “restorations” of Vertigo and Touch of Evil took editorial liberties comparable to Alexander Pope’s Shakespeare. Intellectual property law stratifies the vagaries of capitalist history, so that pop music lawsuits can be based on expert correlations of sheet music or excavated samples no matter how disjoint the appeal of the recordings involved whereas blatant swipes of performing style are permissible — at least unless they cross “celebrity image protection” and “publicity rights” boundaries. Similarly, while it’s generally admitted that the late-twentieth-century outcome of fine art connoisseurship was a gallery economy based on shtick, shtick has proven resistant to legal proprietorship.
Turning to serial narrative arts, the most stable emotional investment is in a recognizable character or setting. Robin Hood and Deacon Jones drew listeners across singers and songs, Falstaff and Justice Shallow were frequently referenced before 1650 but rarely with Shakespeare’s name attached (Monro), we read “Popeye” rather than contemplating a single ineffable panel of “Thimble Theatre,” and Barks was “the Duck Artist” rather than “the Four Color Comics #189 Artist.” Early research on the brilliant achievements of Warner Bros.’ cartoon unit, “Termite Terrace,” bogged down in counter-claims over which supervising director originated which familiar character (Barrier and Gray; Jones; Barrier).
And again, finance followed personal attachments and litigation followed the finances: corporations gain their biggest return from cross-media cross-laborer merchandising and licensing, and therefore threw their immortal and unconstrained weight behind the notion of character as threatened Work in need of guardianship. No matter who wrote or published the book, if it’s Superman it’s DC’s (except for any portion belonging to Jerry Siegel’s heirs).
Meanwhile non-serial narrative maintains an alternative definition of Work as individual novel, story, poem, play, or movie, and the static visual arts maintain a notion of “masterpiece” somewhat at odds with the valuation of a signature “style.” And the name we follow and guard most intently across such Works is the Author’s rather than the character’s. In literature, Kurt Vonnegut was willing to lend out “Kilgore Trout” until he feared a threat to the more essential “Kurt Vonnegut” franchise (Chapman). And while Lethem would likely be fine with a band naming itself the Subtle Distinctions or Monster Eyes, he might feel less flattered by a political blogger who adopted the pseudonym “Jonathan Lethem.”
Unfortunately for critical and legal arbiters, originally non-serial narrative works can easily enough instigate a series, and incentives are strong. Six sequels to Dune were written after Frank Herbert’s death, but when the sequel-writers announced that they’d found an outline for yet another sequel in Herbert’s own notes, they were rewarded with media attention and better sales. Although Herbert may have left notes behind for other unwritten novels — perhaps even a sequel to Hellstrom’s Hive — “Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’” proved more lucrative than “Frank Herbert” or “Dune” presented separately.
Clashing ambiguities of “work,” “author,” and “property” powered lucrative Shocks of the New in post-WWII galleries along with catastrophes like the boom-and-bust of graffiti art in the 1980s. On the other side of what used to be the tracks, movie and comic book studios have been caught between allegiances to genre, characters, and performers, and allegiances to the “masterwork” as singular artifact and “auteur” as infallible genius.
The job of shifting valuable source material directly from the steady-income low-status groove of the serial to the higher financial and artistic stakes of the blockbuster Work resembles the job of referencing genre material from a mainstream novel, and contemporary movie and comic producers easily fall into the ecstatic-depressive mindset I described in section two of this essay, oscillating between violent closure (Spock Dies!) and vehement regression (Spock Returns!).
Freed of fleshy wear and tear while pledged to continuity, superhero series exhibit the syndrome most starkly. Although popular villains might make improbable returns before the 1980s, heroes were dispatched rarely, and usually out of genuine desire to be rid of a tiresome or unprofitable character. The original “Omega the Unknown,” for example, was simultaneously shot down and canceled. Over the past three decades, however, the comics industry has found fewer commercial outlets for the traditional pamphlet format, lost touch with their original core audience of children, and increasingly relied on long and complex cross-issue “events.” Marvel more or less blundered into fatality with the “Dark Phoenix Saga” of 1980, returning with premeditation in their first “graphic novel,” The Death of Captain Marvel, in 1982. The sales generated by 1992’s “Death of Superman” finalized the formula even as it guaranteed a future of diminishing returns: the big narrative statement kills; the trademark resurrects. Meanwhile, with eyes on the graphic novel market, above-the-title auteurs like Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison were granted the freedom to plan and script full runs of a series as more-or-less coherent units.
1976 was a different story. The eccentricities emphasized by those who write about the original Omega the Unknown are at their purest in issue 1 (which Lethem quotes from liberally). By the second issue, Omega was slugging it out with the Incredible Hulk; by issue #4, Omega lost his muteness and gained a tendency to encounter unimpressive supervillains. Issues seven and eight were fill-ins by other writers who concentrated on “trying to put a little more pizzazz into Omega” (“Omega Mail”). In the two issues remaining to them, Gerber and Skrenes set up a crossover event that they promised to finish in Marvel’s (and Gerber’s) more popular Defenders series, but Gerber’s 1978 dispute with Marvel management blocked that plan. In sum, a mess.
For Gerber, the name’s guardianship was a matter of veto power and financial security. For Lethem, the name’s attraction was a mystery to be justified in a unified and balanced Work. For aging fans caught between the proffered spirit and crafted letter of copyright law, the name’s originator provides some not-quite-definable authenticity by blood-right. The generic stake stays put while the game changes around it.
IV. And these things never cease their continuous exchange of position, at one time all coming together into one through Love, at another again being borne away from each other by Strife’s repulsion
An affective imbalance remains in my accounting. Since a clash of values is certain to clash both sides, why is so much more resentment expressed by one? Why don’t mainstream readers complain about the deceitful appearance of almost entirely mundane stories in Fantasy & Science Fiction? For every ambiguously condescending painting by Roy Lichtenstein or Mike Kelley, there must be dozens of cartoon panels mocking Manet, Renoir, Picasso, Pollock, Warhol, Rauschenberg, and, well, Lichtenstein. Why should cartoonists consider themselves the underdogs in this contest?
Money’s a typical answer, but the mid-list’s dying everywhere, and most practitioners of high art live hand to mouth, on someone else, or by not-so-artistic labor. And in the USA at least, gallery art and high-mainstream literature are more than a little suspect as “cultural capital.” American presidents’ favorite fiction authors have ranged from F.D.R.’s Dorothy L. Sayers through J.F.K.’s Ian Fleming and Nixon’s Herman Wouk to Bill Clinton’s Walter Mosley, and anecdotal evidence suggests that contemporary C.E.O.s don’t sport higher brows.
The answer’s Purloined-Newspaper close at hand. As Dave Langford writes, novelists like Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut have had good reason to deny their connections to non-mainstream genres:
You begin to see why Atwood wants to keep SF at arm’s length when you read the snobby reviewers who didn’t like Oryx and Crake and used its genre as a rude epithet. Sven Birkerts of the New York Times opened his negative review with an enthusiastic display of prejudice: “I am going to stick my neck out and just say it: science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L’…” The same paper’s Michiko Kakutani went further and called it a “lame piece of sci-fi humbug.” Oh dear! And Lorrie Moore of The New Yorker began her review on a note of lamentation for authors who stray into the SF slums: “The novelist Margaret Atwood has wandered off from us before…” (“Bits”)
To quote the critic’s mooching, pretentious, and despised name saint, J. Wellington Wimpy, “Let’s you and him fight.” The stings which lodged in ambitious cartoonists like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes were delivered by their college professors. Inveighing more loudly and continuously than society painters, classical musicians, business executives, or politicians, “snobby reviewers” and hostile teachers have been responsible for raising hackles to a healthy long-lived maturity.
Nor is this the first time I might have found cause to mention our own forms. A downward turn marks the serious review and serious scholarship as much as the serious novel: we must express reservations or risk our own claim to seriousness.
What most marks us, of course, is our naked dependency on reference. We obtain the product of someone else’s labor, usually for free, and then we read, hear, or watch it. From such moral low ground it’s absurd for a glossy magazine’s television critic to denigrate a novelist’s interest in comic books or for a weekly newspaper’s jazz critic to protest a professional musician’s “cultural appropriation.” And yet the pot still calls the kettle a minstrel show.
Working artists may feel ripped off by extra-generic not-quite-peers who haven’t paid their dues, and peacemakers like Lethem and cartoonist Eddie Campbell may argue that those apparent deadbeats pay dues to a different union. But what respect is due the pure parasite?
Near-universally, the answer is zilch. We generate complaints, dismissals, and satires; most cuttingly, we may be excluded from consideration altogether, as when Campbell defends Lichtenstein’s visual quotes by quoting R. G. Collingwood:
Let all such artists as understand one another, therefore, plagiarize each other’s work like men. Let each borrow his friends’ best ideas, and try to improve on them. If A thinks himself a better poet than B, let him stop hinting it in the pages of an essay; let him re-write B’s poems and publish his own improved version. If X is dissatisfied with Y’s this-year Academy picture, let him paint one caricaturing it… (qtd. in Campbell, “Fate”)
Clearly there’s no place for mere critics in this practitioners’ paradise. But Collingwood appears not to realize that philosophers would be banished as well: If R G C doesn’t believe professional photographer N should protect all possible sources of income and credit, let him stop advising it from the pages of a book; let him open a studio and lead by example. A few pages later, in a passage left relatively uncited, Collingwood advises the painter and the poet to “walk as the spokesman of his audience” and, like T. S. Eliot, take as theme “a subject that interests everyone” (Collingwood 333). To which I expect most painters or poets of the common folk would respond, “Who axed you?”
It’s hardly a shocking paradox that reference is built into discourse and that aseptic attempts to bar improper referentiality might therefore stick to the prosecutors’ hands. Class anxiety is plain enough when Leonard claims that “Bible stories, Greek myths, Grimm fairy tales, Romantic poetry, grand opera, anthropology, psychoanalysis” are all in themselves less “obvious, blatant, standardized” than movies, comics, and popular music. But in Leonard’s claim, I also hear a superstitious attempt to fend off contagion by Lethem’s malaise and a keen desire for professional self-justification: these are the concerns which did not waste his life.
And when, some pages ago, I affirmed the eternal now of the finished lyric and the extended groove, wasn’t I simply trying to extend Leonard’s hopeful delusion across the breadth of references I myself happen to cling to and posture beneath? If I suggest that Leonard punished Lethem partly for daring to anticipate (and then discard) the critic’s job, can’t I in turn be attacked for reducing both their achievements to my hobby-horse’s hitching post?
If so, I welcome the slap of the common brush. I could use the company, and tar has at least the virtue of bringing and binding people together.Change over time is not "treatment response" The term "treatment response" is both easy to understand and simultaneously often used when causal language is clearly unwarranted. In this post, I present a non-technical example of when a naïve subgroup analysis leads to the wrong conclusion that a subgroup of patients is treatment non-responders. Read more
New paper: The consequences of ignoring therapist effects in longitudinal data analysis In this post, I summarize our recent paper on the consequences of ignoring therapist effects in longitudinal data analysis, which presents the results of a large simulation study. Read more
Estimating treatment effects and ICCs from (G)LMMs on the observed scale using Bayes, Part 1: lognormal models In this post I show how to make marginal inferences on the untransformed scaled when using multilevel models with a non-linear transformation applied to the dependent variable (a log-transformation is used as an example). Cluster-specific versus population-average (conditional versus marginal) effects are compared using both average effects on the untransformed scale and using relative (multiplicative) effects. Read more
Do you really need a multilevel model? A preview of powerlmm 0.4.0 The next version of powerlmm (0.4.0) will soon be released, besides bug fixes this version also includes several new simulation features. In this post I will show two examples that cover the major new features. Read more
Power analysis for longitudinal multilevel models: powerlmm 0.3.0 is now out on CRAN My R package 'powerlmm' has now been update to version 0.3.0. It adds support for a more flexible effect size specifiation. Read more
Confounded dose-response effects of treatment adherence: fitting Bayesian instrumental variable models using brms Non-randomized comparisons are common in RCTs. In this post I show some examples of confounding and collider bias, using treatment adherence as an example. I present a small simulation study that show that common regression models used in clinical psychology, makes little sense, and that Bayesian instrumental variable regression can be easily fit using the R package brms. Read more
Are parallel simulations in the cloud worth it? Benchmarking my MBP vs my Workstation vs Amazon EC2 In this post I compare the performance of Amazon EC2 instances vs my HP workstation and my MacBook Pro, when doing Monte Carlo simulations. Read moreUpdate- 9/25/17 9:41 a.m.: This story and headline have been corrected after Lifetime backtracked on the way it describes the Oct. 31 episode of “Dance Moms”. Lifetime said in a statement on Monday the episode would be the season finale. It said a previous statement describing it as the series finale, as well as a subsequent email exchange with our reporter, were incorrect.
Original Story:
Following many cast comments and hints about “Dance Moms” coming to an end, Lifetime is continuing to keep fans in suspense. After telling International Business Times in an email on Thursday, Sept. 21, that the Season 7 finale of “Dance Moms” would act as a series finale, the network backtracked on their statement on Monday. Lifetime now states the Oct. 31 episode will serve as a season, not a series, finale.
While Lifetime has claimed the show is not yet over, ahead of the Season 7 finale, multiple stars of the dance competition show have teased the program is coming to a close. On Tuesday, original cast member Nia Sioux told Teen Vogue she was parting ways with the show.
“I was just like, I’m 16 now, I’m growing up, the show has been a great platform, but it’s time to move on. During the show, I couldn’t take all the opportunities that I wanted to, and now since I’m off the show I’m getting to do what I want to do,” she told the site.
Chloe Lukasiak, who officially retuned to the series this season, told IBT earlier this month that due to filming wrapping up, she was unable to wear her new JustFab clothing line on “Dance Moms.”
Camryn Bridges, the show’s newest star, also wrote “that’s a wrap” on Instagram following the final national competition in Lawndale, California, on April 15.
The moms have also dropped hints. Ahead of the last competition, Kira Girard took to Twitter to share her feelings about the then-speculated conclusion. “The memories we have created will never be forgotten. I’m so not ready for tomorrow,” she wrote. After the competition, Holly Frazier and Camille Bridges also hinted at the show’s ending. Holly posted a photo of Nia, Chloe and Kendall Vertes to Instagram with the caption “The survivors,” while Camille shared a telling photo to her account.
That's a wrap! #irreplaceables A post shared by Camille Bridges (@camillebridges) on Apr 15, 2017 at 10:38pm PDT
“Dance Moms” will take a break next week, meaning there will be no new episode airing on Sept. 26. The series will pick up again on Tuesday, Oct. 3. When “Dance Moms” returns from its short hiatus, fans can expect to see the official formation of a new team, The Irreplaceables.
Last on the series, the mothers announced to coach Abby Lee Miller that Kalani Hilliker, Kendall, Camryn and Nia would not be return to her ALDC studio. Instead, they decided to form a new group with their former teammate, Chloe.
In Season 7, episode 23, titled “There’s a New Team in Town,” Chloe and the girls will head to a new studio and receive weekly instruction from Aisha Francis. Their competition dance, however, won’t be what fans, or the girls, are used to. The elite choreographer will teach them an adult, burlesque number, something Abby won’t have her remaining, much younger ALDC students, compete.
“The Irreplaceables and the ALDC go head-to-head at competition for the first time. Abby’s team competes a fan-favorite group number while the older girls shock the audience with a mature routine,” Lifetime’s synopsis reveals. The summary also states that the adult number will result in “an uproar from Abby and her minions.”
“There’s a New Team in Town - Part 1 ” airs Oct. 3 at 9 p.m. EDT on Lifetime. Mark your calendars to tune in for the “Dance Moms” Season 7 finale on Oct. 31 on Lifetime.Leicester City have announced that winger Riyad Mahrez has signed a new four-year contract with the Premier League champions.
Mahrez, 25, had been linked with making a move to Arsenal during the summer transfer window.
But the Algeria international has followed striker Jamie Vardy in committing his future to Claudio Ranieri's side.
Mahrez scored 17 goals and assisted 11 as the Foxes claimed a shock Premier League title last season.
The forward, who was on target in a 2-1 loss at Hull City in the opening game of 2016-17, was named PFA Player of the Year following his stunning campaign.
Mahrez had said only "two or three clubs" in the world could tempt him to leave the King Power Stadium.
In an interview with France Football, he said: "[The Premier League] is a super league and I would like to stay here as long as possible.
"Now, there are two or three clubs in the world, that if they come for me, it definitely makes you think, if you understand what I am trying to say."
Follow @ESPNFC on Twitter to keep up with the latest football updates.Apple allocates $1bn for clean initiatives in response to US withdrawal from Paris climate agreement.
The pollution and dust have barely settled after US president Donald Trump withdrew his country from the Paris Agreement.
Even still, the fallout is growing.
Going green
Apple this week offered a $1bn bond for financing clean energy and environmental projects, representing the first corporate green bond offered since Trump made his move.
This is the second such bond in a little over a year, with $1.5bn previously offered in response to the original signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015.
Apple said this funding is to show that businesses are still committed to the goals of the 194-nation accord.
“Leadership from the business community is essential to address the threat of climate change and protect our shared planet,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives.
Why us?
The move is not surprising. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s move, tech leaders openly responded in shock.
The decision to take the US out of the pivotal global accord prompted Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to pull out of presidential councils that he was involved in.
Top Silicon Valley leaders, including Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, urged the president to reconsider his actions. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, also joined the corporate cohort, indirectly appealing to Trump to keep the US in the pact.
With no change coming from these pleas, Cook acted.
Specific focus on green
Apple said that proceeds from the green bond sales will be used to finance renewable energy, energy efficiency at its facilities and in its supply chain, and to procure safer materials for its products.
According to Reuters, the bond includes “a specific focus on helping Apple meet a goal of greening its supply chain and using only renewable resources or recycled material, reducing its need to mine rare earth materials”.
Last year, Apple allocated $442m to 16 different projects, from renewable energy to recycling, with its first bond offer.
Tim Cook. Image: Laura Hutton/ShutterstockBug Fixes
Fix for the issue where other players could appear dead, but still be running around and shooting.
Fixed issue that caused directive waypoint to not display if user completes the tutorial
Fix for the bug where the tracer is not visible and no audio plays when the constructed AI controlled turret is firing
Fixed an issue that could cause players to lose certs and upgrades when selecting |
that’s the case, any book written before the engine age is guilty and needs to be placed in front of a firing squad. This includes Alekhine’s brilliant books and notes, Capablanca’s comments on his own games, and on and on it goes. Take any old book or look at any old game and your chess engine will slice and dice it.
But wait! Kasparov wrote a book about his games with Karpov using computer analysis, but he decided to rewrite the book years later when computers became much stronger. And when you look at modern games between the world’s best players, computers constantly point out inaccuracies and outright blunders.
Should these games be laughed at? And though chess writers now use engines, should they rewrite their books/articles every time the engines become better and better, ad infinitum?
When I was studying chess a lot in my early teens, I learned everything from chess books and articles. Now, when I look at those same books/articles, I realize that the “big advantage for White due to whatever the subject was” was actually wrong, due to some computer tactic.
Thank god I didn’t have a chess engine to lead me to “never improve-ville,” since the lesson was learned and I became a much better player because of it.
Here’s an extremely instructive game by Fischer; but it’s not just instructive, it’s also a work of art, a thing of beauty.
For many years, Fischer’s play in this game was considered to be perfect. Fischer annotated it and thought so, and many other grandmasters and writers also annotated it and considered it to be, from White’s point of view, devoid of errors.
Though Fischer’s moves were akin to the finest of musical compositions, he botched it at the end and allowed his opponent to draw.
However, Fischer himself never knew that Black had a way to draw, nor did the endless grandmaster annotators who studied this game. It took the engine Houdini to spot the brilliant save.
Does this make the game any less beautiful, any less artistic? No, not at all.
When amateurs look at master games, the point is NOT to find errors, but to learn enough to appreciate the game’s beauty, and learn the lessons that eventually will allow you to create that same beauty in your games.
I remember playing a game vs. Fritz some years ago, and I ended up in a queen and pawn vs. queen endgame. Evidently tablebase was on too, since the computer lit up and announced (I don’t remember the exact number) something like, “Mate in 63 moves!”
Horrified, I tried to ignore this obvious ruse to distract me and played a move. It lit up again and announced, “Mate in 65 moves!”
What??? I played another move and it said, “Mate in 66 moves!”
I was going backwards! So… I turned the thing off.
Some endgame solutions run into the hundreds of moves. Yet, when you look at them, they don’t make any sense at all. And then it struck me! Perhaps the computer is pulling our combined legs! Perhaps it’s telling other engines, “Stupid carbon life forms! They will believe anything! Next time let’s try a mate in 650 and see if they believe that too!”
Sorry for my digression!
Now we’re left with an important question: Is unknowable computer chess real chess, or a form of chess that our human minds can’t comprehend? And even if titled players can understand a good deal of what computers toss our way, the masses of engine addicts can’t and never will. They enter the world of delusion by thinking they are making the machine’s moves, and by doing so, any hope they ever had of improving is stillborn.
I’ve had students that did this. They would give me their computer’s analysis of their game and I would ask, “What does this move do?”
The answer was usually silence.
And now, my recommendations for people that want to toss delusion aside and actually improve their game. Quite a few players will reject this, others will actually get mad, and others will claim that I’m wrong and they are right. That’s cool. Go for it.
As for Mr. weski, please do yourself a favor and turn off the engine. You’ll be a better player if you do.
RECOMMENDATIONS:But Watman reports that refined moonshining hasn’t died—in fact, it’s booming today, taken up by a new generation, mostly in big cities and micropolitan towns. Practitioners make tiny batches not to resell, but mostly to see what sorts of goodness they can concoct. “It’s the same people who drove the home-brewing trend, and they’re just as dorky,” Watman said. “It tends to attract tattoo guys and the more outré farmers’-market types, although in the mountain states the practitioners are a little more snowboardy.”
The science of making small-batch, high-proof alcohol has remained largely unchanged for centuries. You let yeast perform its magic on something containing sugar (fruit, corn, molasses) mashed up in water. Then you separate the alcohol by boiling the potion and capturing the steam. (Alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water.)
I watched the process in action one drizzly, cold evening in a shed behind the house of a white-collar moonshiner I’d recently met. For purposes of plausible deniability (making your own liquor in any quantity is still illegal), let’s call him “Max Watman.” “Max” had mashed up some apricots, added brown sugar, water, and yeast, and let the mess ferment for a week. He then decanted the pulpy slurry into an Erlenmeyer flask set atop an electric hot plate. The flask was connected to a copper coil that passed through a pan of ice water balanced on a snare-drum stand. Max turned on the burner, and we waited.
The first alcohol that trickles out of the still—called the heads—smells like nail polish. You really don’t want to drink this. Nor do you want to drink the end of the run—called the tails—which contains heavier alcohol and is funky, but not in a good way. The trick is, you do want to capture a little of each, to give character to the middle of the run, called the heart. The craft comes in knowing when to begin and end collecting the alcohol. This can be done with precise measurements, but Max prefers to wing it, as he imagines 18th-century home distillers did. As a result, batches from the same base can vary widely, and some offer even bigger surprises. “One batch, I took a sip, half my face went numb,” he said. “And then I tasted cocoa.”
The distillate started to drip from the end of the copper coil, and Max hovered attentively, diverting clear condensate into a shot glass, sniffing intently, and tasting with his fingertip. After 20 minutes, he cut the heat, tested the effluent for alcohol content, and then diluted it slightly with water. We sipped. And it was … quite good, actually. My face did not go numb. I tasted no cocoa. It was a bit hot on the tongue—some aging would temper that—but a subtle apricot flavor came through on the finish. It tasted, for a moment, like a fleeting memory of summer.Current Status: Alert Lifted
Friday, February 15, 2019
06:59 pm CST
Update: 2-18-19, 11:20 a.m. Effective immediately, the Precautionary Boil Water Notice (PBWN) issued by the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority (ECUA) for this area has been lifted. Results of two independent bacteriological samples have both returned as clear.
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Effective immediately, a Precautionary Boil Water Notice -PBWN- has been issued by the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority to customers located in the following area:
N. 77th Ave., from Harvey St. To Campbellton Ln.
Penton St., from Campbellton Ln. to N. 72nd Ave.
N. 72nd Ave., from Penton St. to 22 S. 72nd Ave.
This notice is being issued after repairs were made to a 6-inch water main that was damaged by a contractor working in the area. Precautionary Boil Water Notices are issued as a part of the standard protocol following any loss of water pressure, whether as a result of planned maintenance activities or unscheduled repairs.
Residents located in the specified PBWN area are advised to boil water for one minute at a rolling boil or to use 8 drops of regular unscented household bleach per gallon of water, for water to be used for drinking or cooking purposes. Two independent bacteriological samples have been initiated and the advisory will be lifted as soon as possible. This process routinely takes 48 hours.
ECUA crews completed the repairs to the main and have flushed out the lines. Residents within the PBWN area and nearby are advised that there is a possibility of discolored water as a result of the utility work, and to flush their home’s plumbing by running their taps for a few minutes. If problems persist, customers are asked to contact ECUA Customer Service at 850-476-0480 for assistance. Precautionary boil water notice guidelines are available on the ECUA website at http://www.ecua.fl.gov/water-quality/boil-water-notices-and-why-we-issue-them
# # #Midfielder Marc-Vivien Foe wore the No17 shirt for Cameroon at the 2003 FIFA Confederations Cup held in France. He was only 28 when the Indomitable Lions faced Colombia in the semi-final in Lyon. In the 71st minute of that encounter, Foe collapsed to the ground with no one near him. The pitch-side paramedics did everything they could, but the footballer died because of an undetected heart condition.
His team-mates discovered the shocking news only after their 1-0 win over Colombia. The final against France was played in memory of Foe, with both sides warming up in 'Foe 17' shirts as a tribute to the midfielder. Thierry Henry’s golden goal handed the hosts victory, but instead of the traditional ritual of the captain lifting the cup aloft, both skippers, Marcel Desailly and Rigobert Song, held the trophy together.Just about a year ago we questioned the "demographic demand" thesis for why the US housing'recovery' would become self-sustaining and lead to yet another fiscal and monetary 'nirvana'. However, while the 'household formation' meme remains front-and-center among bloviating Fed apologists; the sad facts are that not only is household formation actually still falling but, as a recent Pew Research study finds, a record 21 million young adults are now living at home with their parents.
Since 2007, young adults have grown increasingly likely to live at home. This is a new trend with a stunning 45-year high 36% (21 million) of 18-31 year-olds back with mom-and-pop. By way of corollary, with one-third of all Italian adults living at home (and 61% of young-adults), it would seem arguing that a housing renaissance in the US is around the corner on the basis of demographics is risible at best.
Household formation is falling among the young adults (a new trend)...
as 18-31 year olds continue to be forced to move back in with their parents...
But as we warned 10 months ago, there is massively more room for this to increase...
In Italy a third of young adults live with their parents. In the US "only" 22%. The "demographic demand" argument for housing is very weak — zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 19, 2012
as we see in Italy, it can get considerably worse...
According to a report published on Wednesday, almost a third of Italian adults (31%) live with their parents. The highest proportion was among 18- to 29-year-olds, for whom unemployment is particularly high, with 60.7% reported living at home.
So with mortgage rates up, household formation down, and the rotation from full-time to part-time jobs, we suspect the exuberance priced into a 'housing recovery'-based growth renaissance is as unlikely as Ron Paul becoming the next Fed Head.Chicago White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu revealed Wednesday in a federal court that he willingly ate a fake passport during his flight to the United States in 2003 to sign a major-league contract with the club, according to Paula McMahon of the Chicago Tribune.
Abreu was testifying as a prosecution witness in a trial related to an alleged Cuban player smuggling ring led by agent Bartolo Hernandez and trainer Julio Estrada.
"I went back to my seat, I ordered a beer - a Heineken beer - and then, little by little, I swallowed that first page of the passport," Abreu testified in Spanish to a federal jury, according to McMahon.
Abreu's testimony shed light on the tactics allegedly used by Hernandez and Estrada to secure massive contracts for highly-touted players who had successfully defected from Cuba.
The first baseman revealed he initially fled to Haiti, where he then signed a contract with the agents and was given a fake Haitian passport. He was then told he had landed a deal with the White Sox, but his false credentials would not allow him entry into the U.S., forcing him to eat the identifying page on the plane before discarding the rest of the paperwork.It is my belief that there is a moment in every writer’s life when they realize they’re trying too hard.
Mine came not when I started work on Missing Stars in mid-January, but on a dreary November long before I “got my shit together"— when I started my love/hate relationship with National Novel Writing Month. In an attempt to write the new science-fiction young adult hit, I decided the best way to do so would be to cram every plot device, every trope, every iota of every sci-fi movie, book, or tv show into one 50,000 word novella.
There was space warfare melodrama (of course), but there was also teen-angst melodrama, sloppily added lesbian melodrama, father/son melodrama, and my personal favorite (only because of how horrible I realized it was later), sad, orphaned children melodrama. The book was a train wreck. But not because I didn’t create each character with care, not because I didn’t spend time drafting scenes, and definitely not because I wasn’t dedicated enough. It was because I mistook “good story” for “everything-but-the-kitchen-sink story.” I recovered, thankfully. I realized my mistakes. I edited, re-edited, wrote and deleted. I learned, but even in my role as a path writer, I find it hard to not throw in everything under the sun— and other writers have the same problems.
Writing Missing Stars isn’t a linear process. We don’t plan a path to the minute details and stick with it. We’re fluid in how scenes are drafted and discussed. But it is hard, when trying to think of a way to hold our audience’s attention, not to try and make each and every character the star of the show— even Erik, our male lead.
It may seem almost too easy not to go:
“Oh, let’s make so-and-so a hacker omnisexual hipster drug addict with a tragic past and a talking chimp!”
Yeah, it’s an exaggeration to the extreme, but it’s pretty damn hard not to try and make your characters appeal to the audience in an eye-catching way. You want your character to be loved, and you want your work to be recognized. An exaggerated gimmick isn’t the way to do that, no matter how simple it is. That’s what makes it hard to write one character in a cast of many. You want them to be heard, but they can’t stand out too much. A cast full of gimmicks and outrageous characters is noisy.
So just how do you avoid this slippery slope? I’m still learning myself. But as a team, we’re working hard to make sure that while every character is a star in the world of Missing Stars, they should all be unique in their own way without overwhelming the audience.
And for goodness’ sake, don’t write a character with a talking chimp.
-analane
credit to blackjackGrowing up in Iran in the mid-1970s, I was reared on a rich diet of wonderful Persian children’s books published by the institute for the intellectual development of children and young adults, aka kanoon, founded by Farah Diba Pahlavi, the former queen of Iran. Comic books such as Persian translations of Hergé (TinTin et al), and a wide range of English books my mother had collected from Britain, particularly the Ladybird Series, were also highlights of those years.
When my family and I moved to Sweden a decade later, I was confronted with a complete lack of books on or from Iran. Our local library in Lerum, Sweden began stocking Persian titles in consultation with my parents, but they were books mainly for grown-ups - a lot of banned fiction from Iran by writers such as Sadeq Hedayat, Shahrnush Parsipour and Mahmud Dawlatabadi.
It would take years for me to realise that much of what was and is available for children about Iran is orientalist with a tendency to induce an inferiority complex in children from that part of the world. Take for instance Donald Duck in Ancient Persia where all kinds of stereotypical tropes (read fictional “Indian,” “Muslim,” “Arab,” and “Asian” oddities) are presented as “Persian,” “Iranian” or “Middle Eastern.” The setting, oscillates between idyllic American suburbia, where Donald Duck and his nephews live, and the oil-rigged sandy deserts of “ancient Persia,” where terror reigns.
There is a very rich tradition of stories in both classical and modern Persian literature that needs to be rendered into children’s stories, with contemporary pedagogical standards that tackle issues such as gender, class, and race. Storytellers thus have their work cut out for them. In the meantime, here are a few of my favourite Iran-related children’s books available in English.
1. The Secret Message
The Secret Message (2010)
Written by Mina Javaherbin and gorgeously illustrated by Bruce Whatley, is a new rendition of Jalaluldin Rumi’s classic story of The Merchant and the Parrot, and appropriate for children of all ages. It’s my absolute favourite book on this list!
2. Monsters are Afraid of the Moon
Monsters are afraid of the Moon (2007)
This is not an Iran-related book per se, but it earns a place at the top of my list due to its author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi. Widely celebrated for her Persepolis trilogy, she is the queen of the Iranian comic strip. Monsters are afraid of the Moon is a fun story about a little girl and her cat who are having trouble sleeping. It is bound to get young readers curious about Satrapi’s other graphic novels, which are highly nuanced representations of Iran.
3. The Earth Shook: A Persian Tale
The Earth Shook (2009)
This book by Donna Jo Napoli and Gabi Swiatkowska is part fiction. A little girl named Parisa from Bam, where there was a devastating earthquake in 2005, manages to unite all the animals that have also lost their homes.
4. Pea Boy and other stories from Iran
Pea Boy (2010)
This title by Elizabeth Laird and Shirin Adl is a collection of famous Persian folklore in accessible English. Beautiful illustrations are made of patterned cloth. Be warned though, not all tales have a happy ending (Halloween suitability thus very high!). One such classic tale is about Auntie Cockroach (Khaleh Sooskeh) and her search for a romantic husband.
5. 1001 Inventions and Awesome Facts from Muslim Civilization
1001 Inventions and Awesome Facts from Muslim Civilization (2012)
This is the National Geographic’s companion book to the ambitious 1001 inventions exhibit from the foundation for science, technology, and civilisation. This encyclopedic feast is a must-have for young science aficionados and anyone interested in Iran and the Middle East. Its collection of beautiful images and fun educational facts do not only tell of historic discoveries and tales stemming from Iran and its neighbouring countries, but show how these facts still apply to our world today.
6. Music of Many Cultures
Music of Many Cultures (1996)
Carol Fisher Mathieson introduces young students to musical traditions of different parts of the world including ancient Persia and modern Iran. She highlights words in English that are Persian (such as Pajama and Khaki), to familiarise readers with musical instruments such as ud, and Taezieh, the Shiite passion play. Despite the author’s erroneous reference to blackface Hajji Firuz as the “Persian Santa” - the book is from 1996, so all’s forgiven - it remains a useful reference book on Iran. It’s bound to expand the horizon of young historians and musicians.
Dr Bashi hosts Persian story time Saturdays in New YorkApple released its third-quarter financials today, reporting higher than expected numbers almost all-around. The company's total revenue reached $45.4 billion, up seven percent year over year. Apple shares increased five percent to hit above $157 after hours—the company's record intraday high was $156.56.
While iPhone sales have increased slightly year over year, the most interesting numbers are for iPad. For the first time in three years, iPad sales grew: the company sold 11.4 million iPads this quarter, gleaning $4.9 billion in revenue. That represents a 15-percent unit increase year-over-year and a two-percent revenue increase year over year. The growth is reportedly being attributed to strong educational and business sales, as school districts buy iPads in bulk for their students and faculty to use.
Apple released the 10.5-inch iPad Pro in June, so only a portion of those sales contribute to that number. But the Pro models and the $329 iPad apparently offered the right options to the right consumers this quarter.
Macs are also a bright point for Apple as the company sold 4.2 million Mac products this quarter. That's up from 4.1 million last quarter, and those numbers represent a seven-percent revenue increase year over year. Apple continues to be vague about the sales for devices lumped into its "other products" category—this includes big things like the Apple TV, Apple Watch, and AirPods, but also miscellaneous things like Beats headphones and charging cables. However, the category continues to grow as its revenue is up 23 percent year over year. The company's revenue from its services division—which includes the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, and the like—is also up 22 percent year over year.
Apple's best-selling product, the iPhone, saw a dip in sales from last quarter—but a dip still means millions of people bought iPhones. While the 41 million iPhones sold represent a small year-over-year increase, it's down from the 50.7 million iPhones the company sold last quarter. This isn't unusual with the highly anticipated release of the iPhone 8s supposedly coming in September—consumers are waiting to buy an iPhone so they can get the latest model. However, with the rumors of iPhone 8 production delays, it's unclear if those sales will be counted in Apple's Q4 earnings.
Overall, Apple continues to increase its revenue yearly across the globe—except in China. The company reported $8 billion in revenue this quarter in the Greater China area, which is a 10-percent, year-over-year drop. Apple recently increased its efforts to do business in China, while complying with the law of the land. The company announced it would open its first data center in the country in the southwest province of Guizhou to comply with local cybersecurity laws, while also storing data closer to customers.
However, China has many laws Apple and other technology companies have to dance around—or figure out how to deal with effectively. Apple recently removed VPN apps from China's version of the App Store because the services can be considered illegal in the country. VPN services let users bypass China's "Great Firewall" that restricts Internet access to certain sites, and they can hide an individual's browsing activity from ISPs. Some have accused Apple of being compliant with China's censorship practices, and there's no telling when those services will come back to the China App Store. Apple CEO Tim Cook commented on the earnings call that those apps will have to meet China's regulations and get licenses before Apple will reinstate them on the app store.Man critical after West Oakland BART Station shooting
Trains did not stop at the West Oakland BART Station for several hours Tuesday night after police said a man shot himself in the stomach during a confrontation with officers. Trains did not stop at the West Oakland BART Station for several hours Tuesday night after police said a man shot himself in the stomach during a confrontation with officers. Photo: CBS San Francisco Photo: CBS San Francisco Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Man critical after West Oakland BART Station shooting 1 / 8 Back to Gallery
A man who authorities say shot himself at the West Oakland BART Station on Tuesday night after transit police confronted him about smoking a cigarette on the platform remained in critical condition Wednesday.
The shooting happened at 8 p.m. Tuesday and shut down the West Oakland BART Station for hours. The station was reopened late Tuesday.
When told by transit police to put out his cigarette, the man, Corey Powell, 28, of Union City gave the officers false names and threatened to jump in front of an oncoming train, authorities said.
Powell then “resisted violently” and reached for his waistband, prompting police to stun him with a Taser, authorities said. The man then shot himself in the abdomen as he retrieved a gun in his waistband, police said.
Powell was taken to Highland Hospital in Oakland, where he was in critical condition but was expected to survive.
He was on probation for burglary and armed robbery, police said.
“Our information is that he shot himself while grabbing the weapon out of his waistband,” BART Deputy Police Chief Jeff Jennings told reporters. “We don’t know what his motive was, but that’s what we have right now, is that he shot himself. I can’t make the assumption that it was accidental or purposeful. The person was acting erratically and he was resisting violently. So I can’t make that leap of why he pulled the trigger on himself.”
The two officers involved were wearing body cameras that captured the incident, and footage along with video provided by witnesses confirm that he shot himself, officials said.
On one video, an officer is heard saying, “He’s going for his waistband. I’m going to Tase” shortly before the gun goes off, said BART spokeswoman Alicia Trost. The Taser is deployed immediately after the gunshot, she said.
The two officers’ guns were checked, and neither weapon was fired, authorities said.
The incident is under investigation by police, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and the BART independent police auditor.
Kale Williams and Henry K. Lee are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. E-mail: kwilliams@sfchronicle.com, hlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfkale, @henrykleeLong before "stimulus" became a dirty word in some quarters of Washington, the federal government put people to work building things. Lots of things.
This spring marks the 80th anniversary of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the biggest and most ambitious of more than a dozen New Deal agencies created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Designed to give millions of unemployed Americans jobs during the Great Depression, the WPA remains the largest public works program in the nation's history. It provided 8 million jobs in communities large and small. And what those workers put up has never been matched.
The WPA built, improved or renovated 39,370 schools; 2,550 hospitals; 1,074 libraries; 2,700 firehouses; 15,100 auditoriums, gymnasiums and recreational buildings; 1,050 airports, 500 water treatment plants, 12,800 playgrounds, 900 swimming pools; 1,200 skating rinks, plus many other structures. It also dug more than 1,000 tunnels; surfaced 639,000 miles of roads and installed nearly 1 million miles of sidewalks, curbs and street lighting, in addition to tens of thousands of viaducts, culverts and roadside drainage ditches.
"A vast amount of our physical and cultural infrastructure went up between 1933 and 1940," said Robert Leighninger, author of Long-range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal. "To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never in our history has so much been built for so many in so little time and been so thoroughly forgotten."
When World War II sent millions of men into the military and defense-related industries, unemployment plummeted and so, too, the need for the WPA. Congress shut it down in June 1943.
The Public Works Administration (PWA) built larger public projects -- New York's Triborough Bridge and Lincoln Tunnel, Washington state's Grand Coulee Dam, Florida's Overseas Highway to Key West. But the WPA provided more jobs and touched more communities by funding smaller, less glamorous projects initiated by state and local governments.
About half still remain. All are showing their age.
"Many of those structures are nearing the end of their useful lives," said Adrian Benepe, a former New York City parks commissioner now with the Trust for Public Land. He fears that a lack of political willpower and resources may condemn some architectural and cultural treasures to the wrecking ball. Hundreds of WPA and other New Deal structures have already been demolished or are in danger of being torn down.
"A lot will last a while longer but they’re not going to last forever. There are diminishing returns. Not everything can be preserved," Benepe said.
Yet at a time when, despite widespread consensus that the country's bridges, roads and other public facilities are falling apart, "This nation doesn't seem to know how to do public infrastructure anymore," Benepe said. Still, he added, "I can't imagine New York without the stuff that was built under the WPA."
Such "stuff" is everywhere. A small sampling of what the WPA left us:As if we didn’t have enough to worry about already, here comes a new issue: The Great Cheese Glut of 2016. The Wall Street Journal reports that as of March 31, 1.19 billion pounds had accumulated in commercial cold-storage freezers across the United States, the largest stockpile ever.
This affects an entire global industry, from Wisconsin Dells to Whole Foods shelves. Yet each American would have to eat an extra 3 pounds of cheese this year, on top of the 36 pounds we already consume per capita, to eliminate the big yellow mountain. Even for a society that piles the stuff on sandwiches and rolls it into pizza crusts, that’s a tall order.
Thanks, Obama!
Just kidding. It’s more like “Thanks, Putin.” In August 2014, he banned European Union agricultural imports as payback for E.U. sanctions punishing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin struck just as the European Union was ending dairy production limits, so the loss of the Russian market was doubly painful to E.U. producers — and rendered them desperate for markets elsewhere. Throw in a stronger dollar due to Federal Reserve policy (thanks, Janet Yellen) — et voila! — U.S. cheese imports are rising.
They are doing so even as the Agriculture Department forecasts record U.S. production of 212.4 billion pounds of milk in 2016, and U.S exports are hampered by the aforementioned strong dollar.
So much for the widely held belief that foreign crises in places like Ukraine don’t affect Americans’ daily lives.
What is to be done? We could try to eat through the problem. You laugh, but the current level of per capita cheese consumption in the United States is 64 percent higher than it was in 1975, due partly to a richer society’s growing taste for richer foods. In the short run, consumption might go up a bit, since the glut is making cheese cheaper.
What’s more, the U.S. government has a long-standing pro-cheese-eating policy, which grew out of the need to do something with the subsidized excess of milk products generated by federal pro-production dairy policy — which, in turn, has persisted for decades despite declining consumer interest in drinking milk.
Two decades ago, in fact, the Clinton administration’s Agriculture Department helped form a promotional organization, Dairy Management Inc., funded by a congressionally authorized, federally collected dues requirement for dairy producers. Its $140 million annual budget has helped develop such fast-food items as Pizza Hut’s cheese-topped crust and Taco Bell’s double steak quesadillas, as well as cheesy pizzas for the federal school lunch program.
Is this little-known offshoot of the federal government up to the task of glut-cutting? No doubt the dairy industry would benefit if Dairy Management had some new cheese-based menu items up its sleeve. (A spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny that, citing “proprietary concerns.”) Whether ever-increasing ingestion of a food rich in saturated fats should be a federal priority, given the obesity epidemic, is another question.
To be sure, some recent research shows dairy fat may not contribute to diabetes and may help some people fight obesity — findings repeatedly, and cheerfully, emphasized to me by that Dairy Management spokeswoman. Yet dietary guidelines from the Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture — the latter being the outfit that supervises Dairy Management — recommend limiting intake of saturated dairy fat.
USDA forecasters are also skeptical about the long-term growth potential of U.S. cheese consumption, in part, they say, due to the growth of nonwhite demographic groups that tend to eat less of it than whites do.
U.S. President Barack Obama visits Vietnam's commercial hub and touts the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, widely expected to benefit Vietnam which already has $45 billion in annual trade with the U.S. (Reuters)
Alas, even with a government-backed organization urging us to consume more, Americans will probably never top the world champion cheese-eaters, who are, of course, the French, with annual per capita consumption of 57 pounds.
And so experts in cheese economics told me we’ll probably have to wait for a stockpile-clearing market correction. If and when that happens, it could mean trouble for some U.S. milk producers.
In theory, dairy farms are protected by a subsidized insurance program in the 2014 Farm Bill. In practice, don’t be surprised to see dairy lobbyists run to Congress for new aid if the shakeout gets bad enough.
Broadly speaking, special pleading is how we wound up in our current cheese predicament to begin with. Governments across the world — even including a statelet like San Marino, which, though surrounded by Italy, is not a member of the E.U. and which has just signed an embargo-skirting deal to supply Russia with Parmesan — manipulate dairy markets in response to often contradictory political pressures.
If this column has a point at all, it might be this: In the long run, everyone — consumers, producers, middlemen, grocers — would probably be better off if governments just left the dairy market to its own devices. And a lot of other markets, too.
Read more from Charles Lane’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.The woman, a 29-year-old paralegal, met the 43-year-old Kelly by chance. They texted, had drinks (at a bar draped in bras, a fact the Daily News seemed to relish in -- hardly the place for a romantic encounter, tut tut), and afterward he accompanied her to her workplace in Lower Manhattan, which is where the alleged rape occurred in October. Three months later, after reportedly becoming pregnant and having an abortion, she went to the cops, calling the incident rape. She said she'd been too drunk to consent. The articles, and the headlines, followed. In the end, the very argument the tabs seemed to make -- she thought he was "so cute," and therefore, this was consensual -- seems to have been, not to put too fine a point on it, the reason the case was dropped:
In a letter from Martha Bashford, chief of the Sex Crimes Unit, to the accuser's lawyer Andrew Lankler, the prosecution said its "investigation included interviewing numerous relevant fact and expert witnesses, and reviewing multiple items of physical evidence, including, but not limited to, receipts, security logs, text messages, and telephone records. Among those witnesses were the complainant and your client, both of whom were cooperative and were interviewed in the first days of the investigation."
Bashford's letter concludes, "After reviewing all of the evidence, we have determined that the facts established during our investigation do not fit the definitions of sexual assault crimes under New York criminal law. Therefore, no criminal charges are appropriate."
Spokeswoman for the DA's office Joan Vollero told The Atlantic Wire in a statement written Tuesday evening, "Earlier today, the District Attorney’s Office sent a letter to Andrew Lankler notifying him that we would not be filing charges against his client. We made a similar notification to the complainant. From the moment this matter was referred to this Office, we conducted a thorough investigation, consistent with standard practice. After reviewing all the evidence, we have concluded that the established facts do not constitute a crime under New York criminal law.”
There's no official word yet on when Kelly will return to Fox 5 -- in a statement, he said, "I am grateful to everyone at Fox 5, especially Rosanna Scotto, my co-host. I will always remember her kindness, and I look forward to soon resuming my post on Good Day New York next to her." Certainly, that's a day people will be watching.
The accuser, on the other hand, with her name and face revealed, faces a wave of commenters at the New York Post. Some samples:
Why hasn't the accuser been fired from her job as a paralegal? Picking up a trick on the street and shagging in him in the office is definitely a code of conduction violation.
Some are calling for even harsher sanctions:
Why hasn't the woman been charged?
There's no case there, a source tells the Post -- the paper that also printed her name -- "because she apparently still perceives that what happened that night" was an assault. Lawyer Paul Callan, not related to the case, interviewed by the Daily News, said Kelly could sue her for defamation, but probably wouldn't.
One wonders, though, for all the scandalous headlines and seamy details, what the past year |
own and reboots. Seconds later the screen flashes a message. To receive the four-digit code I need to unlock it I’ll have to dial a number with a 312 area code. Then my iPhone, set on vibrate and sitting idly on the table, beeps madly.
I’m being hacked -- and only have myself to blame.
Two months earlier I challenged Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president of SpiderLabs, the advanced research and ethical hacking team at Trustwave, to perform a personal “pen-test,” industry-speak for “penetration test.” The idea grew out of a cover story I wrote for Forbes some 14 years earlier, when I retained a private detective to investigate me, starting with just my byline. In a week he pulled up an astonishing amount of information, everything from my social security number and mother’s maiden name to long distance phone records, including who I called and for how long, my rent, bank accounts, stock holdings, and utility bills.
The detective, Dan Cohn, owned and operated Docusearch, a website that trafficked in personal information, and at the time, he was charging $35 to dig up someone’s driving record, $45 for his bank account balances, $49 for a social security number, $84 to trace a mobile number, and $209 to compile his stocks, bonds, and securities. The site offered a simple clickable interface and Amazon-like shopping cart. It’s still around today, boasting similar services. “Licensed Investigators for Accurate Results” reads the tag line, calling itself “America’s premier provider of on-line investigative solutions.”
For Cohn, digging through what I had assumed was personal information, was less challenging than filling in a crossword puzzle. He was able to collect this amalgam of data on me without leaving the air-conditioned cool of his office in Boca Raton, Florida. In addition to maintaining access to myriad databases stuffed with Americans’ personal information, he was a master of “pre-texting.” That is, he tricked people into handing over personal information, usually over the telephone. Simple and devilishly effective. When the story hit newsstands with a photo of Cohn on the cover and the eerie caption: “I know what you did last night,” it caused quite a stir. It was even read into the Congressional Record during hearings on privacy.
All it takes is a person or persons with enough patience and know-how to pierce anyone’s privacy — and, if they choose, to wreak havoc on your finances and destroy your reputation.
A decade and a half later, and given the recent Edward Snowden-fueled brouhaha over the National Security Agency’s snooping on Americans, I wondered how much had changed. Today, about 250 million Americans are on the Internet, and spend an average of 23 hours a week online and texting, with 27 percent of that engaged in social media. Like most people, I’m on the Internet, in some fashion, most of my waking hours, if not through a computer then via a tablet or smart phone.
With so much of my life reduced to microscopic bits and bytes bouncing around in a netherworld of digital data, how much could Nick Percoco and a determined team of hackers find out about me? Worse, how much damage could they potentially cause?
What I learned is that virtually all of us are vulnerable to electronic eavesdropping and are easy hack targets. Most of us have adopted the credo “security by obscurity,” but all it takes is a person or persons with enough patience and know-how to pierce anyone’s privacy -- and, if they choose, to wreak havoc on your finances and destroy your reputation.
I’ve never actually met Nick Percoco, which, for all he knows about me, might seem strange.
Earlier this year I contacted him to pen a guest post for PandoDaily. In it, Percoco warned that unscrupulous people could potentially intercept your private messages and inject malevolent code into your computer over a coffee shop’s Wi-Fi. I liked how he wrote the piece. He didn’t hype the threat. Instead he laid out the facts, relayed some anecdotes from his work, and offered basic, actionable prescriptions.
You can tell a lot about a person by the way he writes. As a journalism professor, I get to know my students’ writing better than they know it themselves. And Percoco, through his prose, struck me as someone who was smart, well informed on security issues, and careful with what he said and how he said it. “Comp-sec,” as it’s called – short for computer security – is rife with charlatans. It often seems the more fame someone accrues in that world, the less he’s accomplished and even less he knows.
For this particular job, trust would be vital. If I were to invite someone to wheedle his way into my life, sneak into my finances, sniff my email, capture my web surfing, maybe even break into my home, I had to be damn sure he and the people he worked with wouldn’t use this information for nefarious purposes. I checked up on Percoco and couldn’t find anything that reflected badly on his character.
Over the years [Percoco] has performed hundreds of pen-tests and physical break-ins, slipping into hospitals, insurance companies, manufacturers, magazine and newspaper companies, power companies, and many more.
Percoco, 38, considers himself a white hat hacker, and has been breaking into companies (with their blessing) for 14 years. In what is perhaps the perfect metaphor for what he does and who he is, he lacks recognizable fingerprints, a quirk of nature, he assures. Once in Colombia, he says, he was denied entry into a building because the turnstile, equipped with a fingerprint identification pad, couldn’t get a fix on his digits. Percoco prides himself on having the skills of a black hat hacker while maintaining what he calls the highest ethical standards.
Not only does he attack computer vulnerabilities, Percoco performs on-site intrusions. Over the years he has performed hundreds of pen-tests and physical break-ins, slipping into hospitals, insurance companies, manufacturers, magazine and newspaper companies, power companies, and many more – clients, he says, that he’s forbidden to reveal.
Once, he says, he was hired to gain access to a hospital’s computer systems housed in a data center. Wandering the hallways, he followed the signs until he saw one for the IT department. It led him to a server room behind a glass door. Inside there was a woman printing out patient records. All Percoco had to do was knock and she let him in, no questions asked. He ambled over to a computer with a mouse and in a few clicks logged on as the systems administrator. Now he had access to patient records, and could have, if he’d wanted, taken down the entire network. The hospital’s chief information officer had wanted more resources for security. He got them.
Percoco told me he was intrigued by my proposal because he and his team almost always investigate corporations, not individuals. He wondered aloud whether I would be easier or harder to attack than a corporation. Both he and I were eager to find out.
In 1999, detective Dan Cohn’s most powerful weapons were a telephone and unmitigated gall. True to his word, exactly one week after he started my investigation, he faxed me a three-page summary of my life. It began with my base identifiers – full name, date of birth, social security number, home address – which he obtained from my credit report. Companies like Equifax claim they have protections in place to prevent against fraudsters, but Cohn told me he went through a reseller.
Equipped with my credit header, Cohn had what he needed to access a Federal Reserve database listing my deposit accounts, some of which I had long forgotten – $503 at Apple Bank for Savings in an account held by a long-ago landlord as a security deposit; $7 in a dormant savings account at Chase Manhattan Bank; $1,000 in another Chase account. A few days later Cohn located my Merrill Lynch cash management account, which I had opened a few months earlier. He then had my checking and savings account balances, direct deposits from work, withdrawals, ATM visits, check numbers with dates and amounts, and the name of my broker. In addition to my finances, he also obtained utility bills and two unlisted phone numbers, which cataloged a bevy of long distance and local phone calls I had made.
Armed with this information, Cohn could have easily mapped out my routines. He knew how much cash I withdrew from ATMs each week, how much Forbes deposited into my checking account twice a month, the cafes and restaurants I frequented, the monthly checks I wrote to a shrink. He possessed my latest phone bill and a list of long distance calls to and from my home, including late-night fiber-optic dalliances with a woman I was dating and who worked for an advertising agency and traveled a lot. Cohn also divined phone numbers of a few of my sources, including a couple of computer hackers who had told me of their black hat activities.
While databases assisted him with my basic information, to secure the nitty-gritty detail of my life, he needed help, which he wrangled from the actual companies I did business with.
Part of the deal I struck with Cohn required him to tell me exactly how he did what he did, but he held back when it came time to pony up. To fill in the gaps I contacted my phone company (Bell Atlantic, now Verizon), long distance phone provider (Sprint), and bank (Merrill Lynch), telling them what Cohn had done and demanding an explanation. Each, in turn, launched an investigation. With the results I went back to Cohn, who confirmed the information and added additional detail.
Sprint informed me a Mr. Penenberg had called to inquire about my most recent bill. He posed as me, and had enough information to convince the customer service representative he was me. The caller had the operator run through the last couple of dozen calls I had made. It was a similar story with Bell Atlantic, only this time it was a Mrs. Penenberg who did the dirty deed.
He knew how much cash I withdrew from ATMs each week, how much Forbes deposited into my checking account twice a month, the cafes and restaurants I frequented, the monthly checks I wrote to a shrink.
With Merrill Lynch, Cohn also phoned customer service. This time, however, he was relatively upfront. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Dan Cohn, a licensed state investigator conducting an investigation of an Adam Penenberg.” Later Cohn told me official-sounding words like “licensed” and “state” make him sound legit, as if he worked in law enforcement. Then he reeled off my social security number, birth date and address, which he had gleaned from my credit report, and, he told me later, “before I could get out anything more he spat out your account number.”
Cohn wrote it down then told the helpful operator, “I talked to Penenberg’s broker, um, I can’t remember his name…”
“Dan Dunn?” the Merrill operator asked.
“Yeah, Dan Dunn,” Cohn repeated.
Merrill’s minion then recited my balance, deposits, withdrawals, check numbers and amounts. “You have to talk in the lingo the bank people talk so they don’t even know they are being taken,” Cohn said, obviously pleased with himself.
Such pretext calls are technically illegal under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, at least if used to obtain financial data from individuals or financial institutions, but it’s rarely enforced and hard to catch.
But I needn’t have worried, Cohn assured me. He promised he would never resell the information to anyone else. “Unlike an information broker, I won’t break the law,” he told me. “I turn down jobs, like if a jealous boyfriend wants to find out where his ex is living.”
At the time, I thought this was an odd statement, strangely specific, which he had volunteered. What I didn’t know was that at the same time he was digging up dirt on me, Cohn was embroiled in a tragic case involving a stalker, who had paid Docusearch to locate his victim.
According to court documents, on July 29, 1999, New Hampshire resident Liam Youens paid Docusearch for the social security number, home and work addresses for 20-year-old Amy Lynn Boyer, another New Hampshire resident. Docusearch went through a subcontractor, Michele Gambino, who relied on pretexting. She called Boyer in New Hampshire, lying about who she was and why she was calling in a bid to trick Boyer into revealing her employment information. Gambino passed this information on to Docusearch, which provided it to Youens.
A week later Youens drove to the dentist’s office in Nashua, New Hampshire, where Boyer worked. He waited in ambush while she got in her car and drove up beside her. Leaning out of his car, he put the barrel against her window. He called her name so that she would look up.
Then he shot and killed her.
Seconds later he turned the gun on himself.
“Amy never knew it was coming,” her stepfather, Tim Remsberg, said in an interview with the tabloid news show, “48 Hours.”
Youens, who was unemployed and lived with his mother, had been stalking Boyer for years, chronicling his obsessions on a web site. On it, he confessed that he had fallen in love with her in 8th grade. Later, after Boyer rebuffed his advances, he decided she must die. On the website, “48 Hours” reported, he foretold how he would kill her: “When she gets in, I’ll drive up to the car blocking her in, window to window. I'll shoot her with my Glock.”
Amy Boyer’s mother sued Docusearch, alleging that Cohn and his partner had invaded her daughter’s privacy and broke other laws when it assisted Youens in locating her while the online information broker claimed the information wasn’t private. After the case wound through the courts, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that the lawsuit could proceed to a jury trial, and Cohn and Zeiss ended up settling with the family for a reported $85,000.
Afterward, Cohn promised, “Our policies and the way we do business has changed as a result.”
After Nick Percoco and I hammered out the broad outlines of our project – his team would not break any laws, and they would leave my kids out of this – I signed a waiver (courtesy of Trustwave’s lawyers) that barred me from suing the company if my information ended up in the wrong hands. Percoco kept the timetable vague and frankly, after a month dragged into two, I almost forgot about it. But his team, comprised of security analyst Garret Picchioni, digital forensics specialist Josh Grunzweig, and hacker Matthew Jakubowski (Jaku), were anything but idle.
Percoco didn’t tell me who my investigators would be, and even if he had told me in advance it wouldn’t have done me much good. Like most information security professionals who pen-test for a living, Picchioni and Grunzweig had taken steps to limit their online footprints. Google their names and you won’t find all that much, other than they have all given presentations at hacker conferences on highly technical topics.
Garret Picchioni’s Twitter bio says “Information Security Professional for {redacted}, Network Engineer, and resident pain in the ass” accompanied by a photo of South Park’s Cartman wearing a cheese hat. His LinkedIn profile also reveals little. He’s been in the information security business since 2004, authored an academic paper that analyzed more than 2.5 million anonymized passwords, took six years to graduate from the University of Arizona, where he majored in history and minored in information security). Meanwhile, SpiderLabs “has performed over a thousand incident investigations, thousands of penetration tests and hundreds of application security tests globally.”
Josh Grunzweig is even more stealthy. His Twitter bio is simply “malware reverser | beer drinker | hockey fan” and his LinkedIn profile barely qualifies as a profile. He graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in Applied Networking and System Administration, and minored in criminal justice. Some activities he listed are information security, snowboarding, running, movies, music, traveling, and grabbing a drink with friends.
Of the three, Matthew Jakubowski, or “Jaku,” as he likes to be called, has the most Google juice. Last year he turned a dry erase marker into a tool that could pick a hotel lock in seconds flat. In the avalanche of media attention that followed, he revealed that he could steal credit cards wirelessly using a radio identification reader without your having to pull your Mastercard out of your wallet. His Twitter bio warns, “Neque dicas, quid neque,” which in Latin means "Don't tell me what to do." According to his scant LinkedIn profile Jaku majored in “Sandwich Engineering” and minored in “Witch Hunting” at “College University.”
Percoco told me they began the project by pulling up everything they could about me on the Web, sifting through my website and various writings, looking for anything that could point to potential vulnerabilities. They gleaned some interesting nuggets, including the type of computer I use (I’ve written that I’m an Apple aficionado), my home and work addresses (easily found through public records searches), and the location of the Pilates studio my wife, Charlotte, owns and operates. This helped them formulate a plan of attack.
Here’s the strategy they sketched out (from the confidential report I was provided afterward):
After doing some initial research on Adam and his family, a preliminary game plan was created before traveling onsite that included both technical and physical (security) attacks on Adam.
The initial rough plan is outlined as follows and included multiple attack vectors as contingency plans:
Just rereading that feels weird. Even though I brought this on myself, I still marvel at how many attack vectors someone like me can provide any would-be attacker. Substitute your name for mine; your wife’s, husband’s, or partner’s business for my wife’s; your office locations for mine. How would you feel?
SpiderLabs’ three-member team failed at some of these tasks, like 1) breaking into my apartment, 2) cracking the security on my Time Warner cable modem, and 6) gaining access to my computer and office at NYU. Sneaking into my home would have necessitated coming through neighbors’ apartments or trespassing through their yards, or climbing a fence at the courthouse down the street. One thing they did not want to do was violate any laws. Others, like 8) luring me to a malicious blog and 9) using my web designer to help them access my website, turned out to be unnecessary.
Still, what they did end up doing is impressive. They flew to New York on August 20th to stake out my home and immediately ran into problems that an urban environment can present. Brooklyn Heights is saturated with Wi-Fi networks. The team sniffed 1200 of them within a tenth of a mile radius of my brownstone. The fact they knew I use Apple computers narrowed it down somewhat, since they determine that through their canvassing. But they couldn’t identify, with any certainty, which specific Wi-Fi network was mine, and they could run afoul of the law if they intercepted traffic from someone else’s.
They then repaired to my wife’s Pilates studio, located 10 blocks away, and confronted similar wireless saturation. From the 2nd floor of a Barnes & Noble they could see through the studio’s side windows, which offers a limited view inside. While they had pictures of my wife they found online on her studio’s website – just typing that creeps me out – they couldn’t see her while she was working nor could they determine her work schedule.
One bench gave them a bird’s eye view of my front stoop if they looked through binoculars. From there they watched my wife and me come and go.
As a result, they hatched a plan for a “client-side attack.” A female friend of Jaku, the hacker, signed up for a Pilates group class at my wife’s studio. Since Charlotte only teaches private sessions at Streamline (although she runs a class at another studio she operates, but it has a private membership) the friend enrolled in an introductory class taught by one of the other instructors. Before leaving she left behind a large purple flash drive in a changing room. The SpiderLab’s team hoped an instructor would find it and plug it into the studio’s computer in an attempt to identify the owner. The flash drive held various payloads titled “Resume” but would actually install a remote backdoor on the system upon opening of the file and “phone home” to the team.
No one, however, plugged the thumb drive into the studio’s computer. A few days later Jaku took the decoy back to the Pilates studio for another session, this time equipped with another flash drive. After the class was over the decoy informed the instructor that she had a job interview shortly after class, and asked if she could print out her resume, which was located on the flash drive. What the team didn’t know was that the studio runs an old version of Apple’s operating system – so old, in fact, that the hacker program Jaku coded couldn’t execute its nefarious deeds.
Meanwhile, the team, back in front of my apartment, had to cope with nosy neighbors. I live in a city but my block is quiet and residential, home to many families. The SpiderLabs guys had a police scanner tuned to the local Brooklyn Heights precinct, just in case someone called the cops. Three men hanging around in front of my building, however, was bound to attract attention, and it did. While trying to secret a laptop computer behind a potted plant on my stoop in an attempt to try and isolate my Wi-Fi network, they spotted a woman in a red shirt glaring from a short distance away. Eventually she gave up. Another neighbor confronted the men as she was walking her dog, telling them she had noticed them hanging around the past few days. Picchioni, the team leader, finessed an answer, claiming they were from out of town, here on business, and wanted to work outside because it was such a nice day.
The SpiderLabs gang had been put on notice. They ended up renting a ZipCar and trawled around the front of my building by hiding in the back of the car and whiling away hours in a nearby park. One bench gave them a bird’s eye view of my front stoop if they looked through binoculars. From there they watched my wife and I come and go.
Around this time, I published a piece on PandoDaily about my experience with an iPad app that coaxes children into purchasing virtual crap if they want to progress in the game. I talked a bit about my own children’s screen habits and how they read insatiably on Kindle Paperwhites. I wrote: “I prefer ebooks to hardcovers and paperbacks because we live in Brooklyn and don’t have space for all the books they read. Our basement is packed with them. Feel free to come by and cart them away to your favorite library or charity.”
Shortly after my piece posted, a woman on Twitter asked if she could take me up on my offer. It was a real Twitter account, which, I learned later, belonged to a friend of Jaku’s. “We really wanted to get into your basement,” he later told me. Not suspecting anything, I responded that my wife and I would have to go through these books before we’d give any away.
Really, though, all this on-premises mishegas would turn out to be for naught. Like Dan Cohn, the team from SpiderLabs was able to get the information they sought through other means. Not with pretext calls, which are oh-so last century. Nick Percoco and his minions are children of the Internet, and have little need of a telephone. Instead, they know the art of the phish.
The first one they tried was a message to me from a student in Ohio who expressed interest in attending NYU to study journalism.
I read the email but didn’t open the attachment because it was a file type I didn’t recognize. I remember thinking why would a high school student send me an attachment with a JAR suffix? Plus, I was on break from teaching and filed the email away for the week after the semester would begin.
Since I didn’t reply the team took aim at Charlotte with a phish.
(Editor's note: Amber, whose last name has been redacted from these images, is a real person -- a Pilates instructor, in fact. The SpiderLabs team did what hackers often do, which was to use a real person's identity in case Charlotte looked her up online. The email address, however, was fake. The real Amber contacted us after the story was published. We then added the redactions.)
When Charlotte didn’t respond, they re-sent Amber's message, and at 4:30 p.m. ET on August 27, she clicked on the link and by doing so downloaded the malware that Jaku had coded especially for us.
The video didn’t work, so Charlotte sent a reply, telling Amber that while she couldn’t meet over Labor Day, she would like to see her resume, and said she couldn’t open the video clip.
There was, however, a bug in the malware (Jaku says this was his first time writing it for a Mac) and the SpiderLabs gang couldn’t maintain persistent access. So they replied to Charlotte's reply. This time, instead of a web link the payload was a zip file:
The newly updated OSX malware, which another member of the team, digital forensics specialist Josh Grunzweig coded, was dropped on to her machine. SpiderLabs now had complete access to her laptop whenever it was on the Internet.
They got into our checking and savings accounts, a corporate bond account, our credit card statements and online bills. They could, if they had wanted to, wipe us out financially.
On Charlotte’s machine were our family’s W2s, which included our social security numbers as well as our income and all of our deductions, paperwork and copies of credit card and banking statements. They also came upon a password to our home router. More frightening, they discovered her password and log in to our Chase online banking account.
Chase.com uses a two-step verification system, which momentarily stymied SpiderLabs’ hackers. Every time she or I logs on from an IP address that Chase doesn’t recognize, it offers to send us an activation code via text to our mobile phones. But a search of Charlotte’s hard drive revealed Chase cookies, which the team copied and used to convince Chase that she was logging in from home. While inside they got into our checking and savings accounts, a corporate bond account, our credit card statements and online bills. They could, if they wanted to, have wiped us out financially.
What’s more, buried deep on the hard drive, they located something else: old files of mine. Some years earlier I had bequeathed Charlotte my old PowerBook G4 Titanium, and didn’t bother to wipe clean the hard drive. Months later I smelled acrid smoke in our apartment and saw that the keyboard was on fire. After I put out the flames, the laptop refused to boot up. (The motherboard had melted.) We brought it to the Apple Store and staff -- I refuse to call them geniuses, except ironically -- copied the hard drive to a new Mac laptop. That was two or three computers ago, and each time my wife has had her hard drive ported over to the next machine. All these years these files of mine have persisted. One of them contained passwords for several online accounts, including Amazon.
In and of itself, you might think this wasn’t much of a find. So what? The SpiderLabs boys could rack up charges on my Amazon credit card. But like many people, I have developed my own system for passwords. Because I can’t possibly remember every single one to every site I use not only do I reuse passwords, I also have come up with an informal formula to create them. I might spell out a common name like Gracie (my old cat) but spell it ‘Gray see’ and use an ‘8’ to stand in for the ‘G’ and a ‘5’ for the ‘s.’ You get the idea. Recall that one of SpiderLabs’ team members is an expert in computer forensics. It didn’t take him long to crack all of my passwords.
The SpiderLabs gang broke into my Twitter account and tweeted “I love Stephen Glass,” which led to some head scratching on Twitter from those who know my role in that story. (I’m the one who outed the serial fabulist from The New Republic.) They breached my Facebook account and ordered 100 plastic spiders from Amazon then had them shipped to my home. And they cracked my iCloud password, sending me an email with the subject: SpiderLabs was here and a message consisting of a single emoticon: :-)
Once they cracked iCloud they activated the “find my iPhone” app. Apple had also enabled this functionality for laptops, so they put both my iPhone and laptop in stolen mode.
The first I learned to what extent SpiderLabs had penetrated my privacy was during my class at NYU, when my laptop shut down and demanded a four-digit code to gain re-entry and my iPhone began beeping.
During our debriefing, Percoco told me that I had been, in some ways, more difficult to get to than many of his corporate clients. With a company employing thousands, there are thousands of potential vulnerabilities that can be attacked. What’s more, the rules are more constrained. For example, a corporate client will tell SpiderLabs which specific servers to target once they’re inside the network or what division to focus on within the corporate hierarchy.
With me, however, there were fewer paths that could lead to the mother lode: my laptop, email, bank, social media accounts, and home. Once in, though, his team found few firewalls protecting my data, and mostly in the form of a pastiche of passwords and log-in credentials. These, I quickly learned, were not secure.
My wife, Charlotte, was practically speechless when I told her about the hack. I had not given her any advance warning, hoping to keep the experiment as realistic as possible. At first she was fascinated, but the more she thought about it, the more uncomfortable she became. The idea that an undercover client had visited her studio and a team of spies had put our home under surveillance made her uneasy. She was relieved, as I was, that our children had been off limits.
"Promise me you'll never do anything like this again," she said. And, of course, I did.
Earlier this month, Percoco left SpiderLabs for a new job as Director at KPMG, the professional services firm, in the Information Protection practice where he’s running the same kinds of penetration tests.
As for me, since we concluded this exercise I’ve changed my passwords and log ins but I don’t delude myself into thinking I’m protected from prying eyes -- the government's or anyone else's, if they belong to someone with the right combination of skills, resources and determination.
And if I’m not safe, are you?
[Illustrations by Alex Schubert for Pandodaily]AP/Carolyn Kaster Barack Obama. US President Barack Obama offered a new talking point to Senate Republicans on Monday — just two weeks away from Election Day.
Speaking on the Rev. Al Sharpton's radio show, Obama said the Democratic candidates who had been avoiding him were actually "strong allies who have supported my agenda." Many of these candidates are in conservative-leaning states where Obama's agenda is decisively unpopular.
"And so some of the candidates there — it is difficult for them to have me in the state because the Republicans will use that to try to fan Republican turnout," Obama said, according to The Hill. "The bottom line is, though, these are all folks who vote with me, they have supported my agenda in Congress, they are on the right side of minimum wage, they are on the right side of fair pay, they are on the right side of rebuilding our infrastructure, they're on the right side of early childhood education."
Neutral political observers said the quote was a gift for Republicans running in tougher-than-expected races in these more conservative states. Senate Republicans need to net six seats to regain the majority in the chamber. To accomplish that, they must pick off Democrats in states like Louisiana, Alaska, North Carolina, and Arkansas.
"Christmas came early for Republicans in tough races," the research firm Potomac Research Group declared Tuesday morning. "Big mistake. We've seen TV ads all around the country, and the GOP spots are scathing — if you vote for the Democrat, you're voting for Obama. The president apparently doesn't get it; he once again has made the election about him. Not a smart move."
NOW WATCH: 9 Maps Of Texas That Will Change The Way You See The Lone Star State
More From Business InsiderScheduled delivery:
Dec. 24th Engineering samples shipping
Jan.1st – Pioneering batch pre-order start
Jan. 20th –Pioneering batch shipping
Feb – mass production
Retail price and detailed features coming up…
Engineering Samples
We would like to send engineering samples to the community first. Allow us to thank our most active community member, DSO series can’t move forward without your insights and all the help!
– Thanks to BenF’s super cool DSO nano firmware, which is now v3.4!
The latest one is the version 3.4 in http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1399.
You could also find the former firmware from http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=12
v3.3 in http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1379
v3.2 in http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1358
The new features in his firmware are listed in Revisions.txt file of the zip package.
– Thanks to tormod and Antonio for the help migrate the project to GCC.
More details are in http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1350
http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1262.
http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1349.
– Thanks to dnordenberg, Shazam, Slimfish and traugott.guenther for actively suggestions in helping us made DSO nano better!
http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1406&p=4871#p4871
http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1405&p=4869#p4869
http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1350
http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1301.
http://www.seeedstudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=676
– Thanks to Justblair in early sharing his review of DSO Nano!
http://www.justblair.co.uk/seeed-studio-dso-nano-pocket-digital-storage-oscilloscope-review.html
Please take our sincere gratitude for the efforts and wits you guys shared with the community!
Merry Christmas and happy new year to everybody watching DSO Quad and Seeed Studio! 🙂The show we’ve all been waiting for has finally made it’s way to Netflix. It’s possibly the single most relaxing television show ever in existence, and we now have access to it whenever we want. Get excited, because Bob Ross is back.
In case you need a refresher, Bob Ross made a name for himself with his show The Joy of Painting, which aired on PBS from 1983 to 1994. Ross’s soft spoken voice and his incredible painting skills made for the most calming TV experience one could ever hope for in the ’80s and ’90s. Not to mention his trademark curly hair that made him instantly recognizable.
But just so everyone’s clear on what to expect — Netflix isn’t streaming The Joy of Painting, but rather Beauty Is Everywhere, a series that was filmed in 1991 a few years before Ross died of Lymphoma at age 52. The format is nearly identical to the original show, the only difference is, you probably haven’t seen any of these 25 episodes.
Netflix is promoting the show with the completely accurate tagline, “His teachings are eternal. His hair is immovable. He is Bob Ross.”
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We know what we’ll be doing for the next 25 evenings — cozy PJs, a glass of wine, and our long lost love Bob Ross streaming on Netflix. Life is good, and beauty is everywhere.While preparing dinner at a friend’s apartment a few nights ago, I asked if their cat should eat too. Then someone fed the cat. Then I asked if I should eat cat food too. Then people said “yes” and I did. I think that’s how it happened. I know it started as a joke but then it tasted surprisingly OK. Later at a deli I excitedly selected cans of wet cat food for a taste-test experiment I promised myself I’d do first thing in the morning. After my hangover subsided, I felt more able to seriously consider two futures: The one where I’d never know what wet cat food tasted like, and the one where I would. In both futures I’d eventually end up dead, but the one where I’d eat cat food seemed more exciting. With that said, actually making myself eat the canned reconstituted-meat morsels took longer than anticipated. I succumbed to misguidedly productive acts like finding the perfect eating-cat-food outfit (pink, striped dress: too naive. Button-down under a black sweater: too smart. Red, flannel dress: just right?), photo testing locations for the best place to eat (a plate on the floor: obvious and kitschy; sitting at a table: unrealistically ordinary; bed: psychotic), and letting “research-based” internet activity devolve into gawking at YouTube videos about cannibalism and falling asleep with a knife under my pillow. OK. Enough explaining, I’m introducing this like I’ve committed a sex crime or something. I ate some cat food. That’s all that happened. Here’s what I thought.
Purina Cat Chow: Naturals Plus Vitamins & Minerals
Packaging: 16-ounce green bag with a Ziploc seal for freshness. Features colorful clip-art-like illustrations of vegetables, grains, and a woman resembling Mona Lisa sleepily nurturing a happy, attentive cat on her lap.
Aroma: A little vitaminy.
Texture |
Mitt Romney. They have contributed $7,500 to the Romney campaign, and both are members of the Romney fundraising committee for Arizona. Amy Nelson also has given $50,000 to the Romney Super PAC, Restore Our Future. In making that donation, she used a Utah post office box as her address. Nelson told USA Today that his donations are not related to his business interests. “I’ve given to those who I feel can help our country,” he said. When the paper asked about his wife’s $50,000 contribution, Nelson said: “I’m aware of some of the things my wife does and some not.” Todd Nelson also donated $30,800 to the Republican National Committee in April.
EDMC receives 80 percent of its revenues from federal student financial aid. Apollo Group receives 88.7 percent of its revenues from such aid. Todd Nelson’s wealth has been enhanced, considerably, by us taxpayers.
Although he appears to downplay the intensity of support, it seems apparent that Todd Nelson really, really wants Mitt Romney to win the election. Indeed, as the truth catches up with the major for-profit colleges, it appears these companies are doubling down on a Mitt Romney victory as their last best hope to retain unquestioned access to a torrent of taxpayer money.
Government and media investigations have shown that many for-profit colleges use deceptive and coercive recruiting to lure veterans and low-income Americans into high-priced, low-quality programs — leaving students deep in debt, and leaving taxpayers, who fund financial aid at for-profit colleges to the tune of $32 billion a year, with wasted investments. Meanwhile, many of these companies, which get an average of 86 percent of their revenues through federal funds, have reaped huge profits. These revelations have now had a major impact — student enrollments and company stock prices are way down, and the industry appears to be in disarray.
President Obama’s administration has taken major steps to crack down on waste, fraud, and abuse by these companies. By contrast, Mitt Romney has chosen to publicly embrace this controversial industry as a cornerstone of his higher education policy, and he has promised to undo Obama reforms that would hold these schools accountable and channel federal aid to programs that actually help students.
On the campaign trail, when asked what he would do about the rising cost of higher education, Romney pointed to a for-profit college, Florida’s Full Sail University, as an innovator that knows how to “hold down the cost of their education.” Full Sail turns out to be the third most expensive college in America, with a mixed record of helping students and at least one program at risk of losing its eligibility for federal student aid because it leaves so many students deep in debt.
But if Full Sail has overcharged students, it has been generous to Mitt Romney. The Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future has received $135,000 from Full Sail CEO Bill Heavener and another $329,900 from C. Kevin Landry and P. Andrews McLane of TA Associates, the private equity firm that owns Full Sail. Landry also has donated $89,900 to American Crossroads, the pro-Romney Super PAC founded by Karl Rove.
As Republic Report and others have documented over the course of this year, Mitt Romney doesn’t just accept money from these owners of for-profit colleges, he’s also in business with them. Mitt Romney’s son Tagg and campaign finance director Spencer Zwick run the private equity fund Solamere Capital, which was launched in 2008 with a $10 million investment from Mitt Romney and has an investment relationship with Bain Capital. TA Associates is one of the firms that Solamere Capital offers to its clients for investment. TA Associates owns not just Full Sail but a number of for-profit schools including troubled Vatterott Colleges, marked by exploitative recruiting practices and high student loan defaults. If TA gets richer, the Romneys get richer.
For-profit college employees and political action committees have donated more than $225,000 to Romney’s campaign. The political action committee of the Apollo Group, owner of the University of Phoenix, which Romney has also praised by name on the trail, has contributed $75,000 to Restore Our Future and the maximum $5,000 to Romney’s campaign, the company’s only contribution to a 2012 presidential candidate. Goldman Sachs, the number one source of contributions to Romney, owns 41 percent of EDMC, the company Todd Nelson now runs. Romney’s campaign is also the top recipient of EDMC employee support for this election cycle, with over $25,000 in donations.
Romney’s education policy paper attacks the Obama Administration’s “gainful employment” rule — an effort to channel federal student aid to college programs that actually help students learn and get jobs, rather than to programs that leave students deep in debt and ruin their lives. The biggest for-profit schools have pursued a lobbying, public relations, and litigation blitz that has watered down and delayed — but not yet eliminated — the Obama rule. Romney has pledged to put the nail in the coffin of this common sense provision. Such a backward policy step would directly benefit Romney donors, and it would provide particular aid to Solamere Capital — eight of Vatterott College’s 39 college programs recently flunked the gainful employment test that Romney now pledges to eliminate.
Romney’s professed love of the free market is belied by the nature of the for-profit college industry, as well as some other companies in which Solamere Capital invests. These enterprises recognize that often the fastest way to a quick buck is through programs that are heavily dependent on the federal government. Once these programs get going, no matter how poorly the businesses perform, no matter how badly they mistreat consumers and fleece taxpayers, they can survive by using some of their profits to hire expensive Washington lobbyists and offer campaign contributions to block reforms and keep their profits flowing.
For-profit colleges have done well in Washington in recent years by spending lavishly to hire both well-connected Republicans like former Senate leader Trent Lott and Democrats like close Obama advisor Anita Dunn. They’ve managed to get the support not only of almost the entire Republican caucus of the House of Representatives, but also some House Democrats whose campaigns they help finance. But this year, there have been clear signs that the Obama Administration and Senate Democrats are not going to be cowed by the industry and instead have decided to pursue tougher reforms. When the industry’s main trade group, APSCU, replaced its top lobbyist, Democrat Brian Moran, earlier this year, it hired former George Bush aide Sally Stroup, giving APSCU an all-GOP top echelon — another sign that the industry has decided to put their all chips on red. A Romney victory would vindicate that strategy. Otherwise, their destructive free ride — fueled by your tax dollars — may be coming to an end.
This article also appears on Huffington Post.This week we present an interview with Lama Surya Das (bio at bottom, though well known to most of you). For the interview I solicited questions from friends and colleagues and chose a few to present to Surya Das. My great thanks to Lama Surya Das for taking the time to answer these questions and to the wonderful Erica Taylor for helping to bring this together, as well as to my friends Nick M, Nick W, Katherin, Emily, Warren, and Margaret for the questions. The first three questions focus on personal life and practice, while the last three focus on Buddhism in America. So, let us begin:
1) How do I “look for” or see the Buddha in my daily life? I understand Buddhism doesn’t emphasize a guiding relationship with any god figure; however, I enjoy the positive feeling in “seeing god around.” Can I grow that in Buddhist practice?
Buddha said that all beings are endowed with the luminous tathagata-garbha, or innate Buddha nature. We experienced Vajrayana (diamond path) meditators practice seeing the Buddha-nature, the buddhaness, the clear light in everyone and everything. That is what I like to call The Diamond Rule. Then we can grow closer to “Buddha” every moment, wherever we are, like what theists like to call the constant companion; and Buddha continues to radiate through us, beyond separation or joining. This practice is like an invisible friend with benefits!
“Wherever I go, I meet mySelf,” said a great Zen master of old. In Tibetan Buddhism, we have prayerful devotional practices such as “Calling the Master from Afar” which help us invoke and invite, exhort and bring closer the object of our respect and devotion, mainly in order to realize our primordial inseparability with him/That and open a world of sacredness before our eyes and our feet as we tread that path of a new awakefulness.
2) What is the best way to explain sunyata to a person who is curious about Buddhism but who refuses to budge on the idea of an “independent soul”? Is accepting the doctrine of no-self truly a key element for Buddhist practitioners in the West?
Mindfulness is probably the blue jeans of Buddhism in the West, good for any and all occasions, much more useful and effective for most of us than mere faith or doctrines. Sunyata and anatta—emptiness, and no-separate-independent-self– are the hardest nuts to crack in Buddhist thought. To explain sunyata to the uninitiated and unreceptive seems unnecessary and possibly contraindicated. However, exploring together the universal facts of impermanence and so forth can help loosen some clinging and dogmatism regarding various notions and concepts, including the soul theory. Anyway, it’d take a better man than you or me to clearly distinguish between the doctrine of soul, on one hand, and that of the unchanging and immaculate, unborn and undying Buddha nature or Dharmakaya, on the other hand– though people do try to teach about and explain that.
Let me go further in making waves where there’s no wind: How different, really—to the layperson, at least– is the theistic creator-God doctrine, from Tibetan Buddhism’s talk about the primordial Buddha, the primordial protector, the all-doer Samantabhadra? When we meditate and practice loving kindness and self-inquiry, and compassion in action, our hardheadedness and hardheartedness softens and certain distinctions and attachments, doctrinal or otherwise, can become a lot less problematic.
3) What is the place of dark retreats within the Buddhist tradition? How should one deal with difficult experiences within retreat?
Dark retreats as I know them in Tibetan Buddhism are mainly for practicing the bardo (afterlife) meditation experiences, and involves training in it for days and weeks at a time so as to be better prepared for when the moment of transition occurs. The secret Dzogchen practice of Togal (“leap over”, or “being there”) is also practiced sometime over periods of time in complete darkness. Removing visual along with other outer sense stimuli can help enhance and illuminate the “inner senses” and increase ones capacity for and experience of certain visionary realities. These kind of intensive practices are somewhat advanced and thus best undertaken with skilled guidance, to allow us to better develop and integrate all the experiences which occur along the path of practice.
4) What is a challenge unique to American Buddhist culture, and how can we use the experience of that challenge to grow stronger in the dharma?
One could mention challenges we face such as speediness and impatience; the habit and expectation of instant gratification; the commodifcation, thinning out and over- simplification of almost everything, and other particularly American character traits. Technology too plays its part, but cannot be turned back.
However, let me speculate that the big one is the great American leveling of everything, conducive to the common denominator and a sort of mere mediocrity rather than the great Golden Mean. ‘Good enough’ can too easily become the near-enemy of true excellence. The de-hierarchization of most if not all things in our society—although still suffering from racism and other forms of class inequality and even warfare, gross and subtle—leads to a disregard and utter disrespect from natural hierarchies of purity and intention, learning, experience, wisdom– and now, even of facts, where post-modern relativism and big money combine to make it impossible for the average person to sort through and sort out the facts, to the point where there are none in play and the loudest voice triumphs. This ignores the ancient American dictum that “All people are created equal, some more equal than others.”
We are drying up soul-wise and dying for spiritual elders and enlightened leaders whom we can trust and rely on to help us through dark times. For example, who has the chops and moxie to help us bring back the ‘higher’ into Higher Education, a wholistic life-wisdom education and emotional intelligence? Who embodies and serves the positive changes and qualities we long to see in the world today?
If these wounds and challenges are to become gifts, we have to be candid and dig deeper into ourselves and together carve out a new way and a new future, that future which begins now.
5) What do you think of the recent revelations of inappropriate behaviour towards their students by Western-born (as opposed to Tibetan-born) Tibetan Buddhist teachers, specifically Ken McLeod and Michael Roach?
It’s too soon to say, since the facts are not yet complete in these two cases; but I did write something about the general issue for the Huffington Post in late June of this year, called “ Spiritual Responsibility and Cult Awareness-<http://www. huffingtonpost.com/lama-surya- das/spiritual-responsibility-_ b_1597886.html.>
Whatever the relative merits (or demerits) of these particular cases are, or may turn out to be, or the local legalities, social mores, and commonly accepted norms; the complex and troubling problems arising through inappropriate behavior between teachers and students, priests and parishioners, the top dog and the underdog etc. is an old and pernicious one (sexual misconduct, exploitation, misuse of power, pedophilia, incest, rape etc.). This turns out to be more far-ranging and pervasive than originally thought, in most if not all of the religious and other power structure institutions today, and extending to sports coaches, therapy couches, medical offices, old age homes and hospitals, corporate settings and so forth, as the informed public has now been finding out. What we can do to help alleviate this affliction is our task at hand.
6) Recently, my friend Charles Prebish brought up your 10-fold plan for the American Buddhism of the future. In your 1997 “Awakening the Buddha Within” bestseller, you described the Ten Emerging Trends of American Buddhism: (1) Dharma without dogma; (2) a lay-oriented sangha; (3) a meditation-based and experiential sangha; (4) gender equality; (5) a nonsectarian tradition; (6) an essentialized and simplified tradition; (7) an egalitarian, democratic, and nonhierarchical tradition; (8) a psychologically astute and rational traditional; (9) an experimental, innovating, inquiry-based tradition; and (10) a socially informed and engaged tradition. Prebish endorsed most of this plan in his 1999 “Luminous Passage” book. How do you think this plan looks today? Are there any changes you’d make, given the last decade?
These ten trends seem even more prominent and developed than before. I suppose neuroscience has come on strong in the past fifteen years, as well as contemplative education and also Internet Dharma, but these are within the purview of the Ten Trends, especially numbers 8 and 9.
7) And lastly, perhaps the most relevant question for many of our daily lives in the next couple months: Who do you think will win the Super Bowl?
My team will definitely win!
About Lama Surya DasA GARDA DETECTIVE sent Clare Daly tweets mocking her immediately after she was arrested in 2013.
The TD was pulled over by gardaí after taking a wrong turn and arrested after a breathalyser failed to register a reading in January 2013.
Information about Daly being mocked online by a Twitter account linked to a detective garda has been included in a GSOC report into how information about the incident was leaked to the media.
Link to a journalist
As part of Daly’s complaint she alleged that gardaí had told the media that she requested that TD Mick Wallace be told about her arrest.
She said that she received contact from an Irish Daily Mail journalist asking why she had contacted Wallace – something Daly’s legal representation said was designed to embarrass her.
Read a breakdown of the full report here.
It has emerged in the report that the journalist who sent the text messages to Daly was in contact with a number registered to a detective garda.
The report found that a Twitter account linked to this garda was used to mock Clare Daly following her arrest.
The tweets
At 7pm on 29 January 2013 – the night that she was arrested – Daly received a tweet that said:
@ClareDalyTD Are you DRIVING to the meeting???
After this around 10 minutes later she received another tweet that said:
@ClareDalyTD How big was the hot whiskey? Boiling a bottle of Jameson & swallowing it doesn’t count as 1.
These two tweets followed an appearance by Deputy Daly on RTÉ’s Six One news, during which she confirmed that she had been arrested in an area of south Dublin she was not familiar with.
She also questioned how details of her arrest had become available to the media so quickly.
The following day further tweets were sent to the Dublin TD from the Twitter account connected to the detective garda which said:
@ClareDalyTD Hilarious – a media hungry attention seeking savage complaining about information being given to the media hilarious
@ClareDalyTD Probably a bit too late night or in the night to expect certain TD’s to be sober at this late hour
Subsequent to the incident Daly was cleared of drink driving and lodged a complaint with the Garda Ombudsman Commission and the Data Protection Commissioner about the leak.Casey Bloys, HBO’s president of programming, assembled the employees in the network’s Santa Monica offices Thursday in order to address the topic on many minds in Hollywood: the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger.
According to those present, he noted that AT&T executives are pleased with the performances of Warner Bros., HBO and Turner and consider retaining top executives and stars at those companies a major priority. He also said that AT&T executives had no plans to micromanage their new acquisition and were intent on having the three divisions stick to the kind of content creation that made the deal attractive in the first place.
Asked about the meeting, Bloys declined to comment about the merger, but said he was looking forward to meeting with his staff in the future to update them on the deal.
He did, however, discuss to address the fate of drama series “Westworld” and “The Night Of” at a time when HBO, long a leader in premium programming, is facing more competition than ever — as well as the looming end of the Westeros saga “Game of Thrones.”
When the winds of change swept through HBO earlier this year, Bloys, then the network’s head of comedy, ended up ascending to one of the network’s top jobs. One of his first orders of business was canceling “Vinyl,” and another was overseeing the launch of “Westworld,” which judging by the ratings so far (12 million per episode), has caught on with HBO’s viewers.
Related How 'Game of Thrones' Composer Told Jon and Daenerys' Love Story Through Music Everything You Need to Know About 'Big Little Lies' Season Two
It was long a custom at the cabler to renew new series before they’d gotten too far into their debut seasons, but Bloys has taken a more considered approach with the sci-fi saga, as well as the prospects of the hit summer series “The Night Of.” In an interview with Variety, he also offered a few thoughts on the “arms race” that has arisen in TV in the last few years.
Do you want another season of “The Night Of”?
Yes, absolutely. The only issue with doing another season is for them to come up with an idea that excites them. Steve [Zaillian] and Richard [Price] are talking and sharing ideas. I think it’ll be a longer process, probably. Both of them take their time and will only do something they’re really passionate and excited about. They’re not going to do another season just to do another season.
Would another season be just one case again?
I don’t know. My guess is, it would be [one case in a season]. I think they’re talking about a lot of different variations, so at this point, all I know is that they’re talking about it. They haven’t come to us with anything. They’re just trying to get themselves excited about a take.
Would it be with John Turturro again?
That would be my hope. I think that’s what they’re thinking. But all of it is speculation at this point.
I hope we would see his feet more.
It did do a lot for psoriasis sufferers.
You haven’t renewed “Westworld” yet. What’s going on there?
I want to get a very complete picture of the ratings, which seem to be doing very well, so we’re happy with that. [The executive producers are] going to talk to us about what they envision a second season being. But right now I would say it’s looking really good. We’re very pleased with how it’s doing.
What would you tell people to look for in the second half of the season?
All I would say is, it’s a very satisfying end. I think questions will be answered. I love reading the fan theories online. I think it’s great the way people have engaged. I’m just pleased to see the reception from an engagement point of view, and that it has started all of these conversations. I think people will get the answers they’re looking for by the end of Season One. A lot of the ones that people are buzzing about.
Have some people have already guessed correctly?
There are a lot of theories out there, and with some of them, I’ve been very impressed with how they’ve constructed the guesses. I’ll just say, they’re getting close.
One thing that has struck me is how much people have engaged with it on a puzzle level. But I would think, ultimately, you want it to be much more than a puzzle show.
Yes. I think a lot of the fans are engaging with Dolores and Maeve specifically, and so from an emotional point of view, I think that will grow, in terms of those characters’ journeys. And from a mystery point of view and a story point of view, I think you will get — I don’t know if “answers” is the right word, but maybe it’s “satisfaction.” You’ll see how Ford and the Man in Black play out by the end, story-wise.
It’s a show with a lot of violence of different varieties. Going forward, with this season or beyond, will that be as much of a feature?
After I hear the second-season pitch, I will tell you. But I know it’s something that [executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy] are mindful of. You brought it up, and I think rightly so. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a question where, if it continues, it will hopefully have some context to it.
Speaking of context, you have these two tentpole epics in “Westworld” and “Game of Thrones.” But aside from those shows, in the one-hour realm, it doesn’t feel like you’re commissioning a lot of other tentpole-ish shows. Is it fair to say that?
What I would like to see on the hour side is what we did on the half-hour side. We did everything from “Getting On” to “Ballers,” and everything in between, in terms of scope, scale, diversity, location. Having “Game of Thrones” and now hopefully “Westworld” going forward are two great tentpoles to have. I think that we will continue to develop other versions of a big event show. But I would also like to have shows that are not genre. Shows about families or shows that are smaller in scale, or shows that don’t take place in mythical realms. As I said at TCA, I’d like to have a little bit more diversity in all senses of the world on the drama slate.
The arms race in TV shows no sign of slowing down. I look at what’s going on, and it makes me a bit nervous. It’s great that so many new voices and creators are getting chances. But I don’t want to see the TV industry end up participating in the kind of arms race we’re seeing in the commercial film world.
I saw [FX president] John Landgraf speak recently, and I think he’s a really smart guy and very thoughtful. He did coin the term “Peak TV,” and it is scary. There are so many people making so many shows. I don’t know how it all gets — to use a tech word — monetized. I just don’t know how everyone justifies spending as much money as they do. I think with a creative process, any time that you are throwing money at something and feeling a sense of urgency…
And basing decisions on fear…
Yeah. And again, I’m talking about the whole industry. It feels like there’s so much money and there’s this rush, and I’m not sure what we’re rushing against. Time, I guess? But there’s this sense that it’s musical chairs, and at a certain point, the music’s going to stop, and you had better have a brand. I think we’re fortunate because we have a brand, and hopefully we’ll tend to that brand and hopefully not do anything to tarnish the brand, but I think that’s what’s happening. When the music stops, what that means — I don’t know, exactly. But I feel like that’s what everyone is racing against.
Canceling “Vinyl” — hard or easy?
Hard, because it means 250 jobs. It’s not something you can take lightly. Even if it’s a show that didn’t necessarily land the way we would have hoped, people put their creative energy and passion into it, so it’s never easy to do that. But it felt like the right thing to do for HBO. So from that perspective, I feel like it was the right decision. But it’s never an easy thing to say no to somebody or tell somebody they’re out of work.Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly denied Tuesday that the White House kept him in the dark about the contents of a controversial executive order limiting the travel of citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries to the U.S.
“We did know the EO was coming,” Kelly told reporters. “We had people involved in the general drafting of it.”
Multiple news stories published since President Trump signed the order Friday have suggested that Kelly was blindsided. A New York Times report describes Kelly dialing into a conference call to learn about the executive order, only to see on TV that Trump was already signing it.
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While Kelly insisted Tuesday that the order was not a surprise, he was less clear about when exactly he learned about the document's specifics. Pressed by reporters, he said repeatedly that he had known since the beginning of the Trump campaign that the order was coming, based on then-candidate Trump’s rhetoric.
“Clearly, this whole approach was part of what the candidate talked about for a year or two,” he said.
Kelly also said he was not involved in crafting the order's minutiae, but that there were drafts circulated within the agency — and that his legal staff was “involved.”
“It was a pretty busy week, I didn’t get involved in correcting grammar or re-formatting the thing,” he said.
Appearing with several other acting Homeland Security officials, Kelly tried to give the appearance that the implementation of the order had gone smoothly, despite reports of chaos at airports across the country as incoming foreign travelers, including legal permanent residents with green cards, were detained by Customs and Border officials.
“Our officers at the counter, so to speak — the only chaos they saw was what was taking place in other parts of the airport,” Kelly said, an apparent reference to protests that cropped up at airports to demand the release of detained travelers.
“I knew this was under development, and I think we were in pretty good shape in how it was implemented.”
Kelly insisted that “to the best of our knowledge,” no Customs and Border official “intentionally” violated the late-breaking court order imposing a stay and temporarily halting deportations.
Attorneys for multiple detainees have reported that officials defied the court by denying legal permanent residents access to lawyers, despite the court order.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
EAST FLATBUSH, Brooklyn—Police on Saturday located the illegal dollar van believed to be involved a hit-and-run that killed one man and injured a woman on Flatbush Avenue Friday evening, sources said.
Detectives assigned to the NYPD's Highway Patrol were taking photographs of the "bus" in East Flatbush, Brooklyn on Saturday as they awaited a search warrant, sources said.
The deadly crash happened on Flatbush Avenue between Avenue U and Avenue V across from Kings Plaza Mall in Marine Park around 5 p.m.
Angel Sagardia, 47, of Brooklyn was struck while crossing against the light and died at Kings County Hospital. The cause was severe head trauma and internal bleeding, sources said.
Samantha Sagardia, 50, was also struck and suffered internal bleeding. The force of the crash was so strong, it knocked her shoes off. She was listed in critical condition, police said.
The driver is believed to be a Haitian immigrant who allegedly drove the illegal "dollar van" without a license, sources said.
Witnesses say he struck the two people, looked back and kept driving. He turned westbound on to Avenue V while fleeing the scene.An engineer with a Vancouver logging company thought he was going to die yesterday as a mother grizzly bear tore the flesh of his arm and back, and tried to throw him in the air.
But George Knoll, 41, survived thanks to quick thinking, his work boots and luck.
Knoll, who works with A&A Trading, had been walking through the bush, flagging trees for logging along a creek at Burke Channel near Bella Bella, on B.C.'s Central Coast.
A mother grizzly bear attacked the engineer working with a logging company near Bella Bella, B.C., on Thursday morning. (Chris Darimont/University of Victoria)
At about 8:30 a.m. PT, he looked up and saw a mother grizzly bear and her cub.
Because of the sound of the rushing water, he hadn't heard the bear and her cub approach through the bush — nor had the bear heard him — until they were just six metres apart.
"I knew I was in trouble, because of the cub," said Knoll from his hospital bed in Vancouver Friday.
'This thing is going to eat me'
Knoll said he tried to run backward and sideways to get away from the bear, but she charged him from below.
"She basically tackled me," he said.
He tried to play dead, curling in a ball with his arms protecting his neck, but her teeth were ripping into the flesh of his arm and back as she tried to toss him "like a rag doll."
"I thought in my head, 'This is it, I'm going to die, this thing is going to eat me,'" he said.
"I thought, 'Oh man, what a shitty way to go … I'm not going to see my daughter and my wife again."
Rotten bear breath
The bear's face was so close to his, Knoll could smell and feel her breath.
"I remember distinctly the bad breath on that bear, smelled like rotten fish. Dirty fur."
Playing dead wasn't working, he realized. "At that point … I thought I better do something, so I kicked her in the face."
Knoll kicked the bear twice in the snout with his caulk boots, the heavy spiked work boots often worn by loggers.
She stopped attacking him immediately, retreating to pace and huff. There was blood on her snout, but Knoll didn't know if it was hers, or his own.
Another lunge, another kick, and the mother bear was gone.
Delirious walk to helicopter
Help came quickly. Knoll radioed his partner to tell him of the attack, and he used a pressure bandage as a tourniquet on his left arm to stop the bleeding.
He remembers being "delirious" walking the 200 metres uphill to a helipad, where the work crew's helicopter airlifted him to Bella Bella, before he was flown to Vancouver.
Sometime on the flight, he was able to call his wife. "I told her I loved her," he said.
Knoll is doing well in Vancouver General Hospital, with puncture wounds but no serious internal injuries, said Sgt. Len Butler of the B.C. Conservation Officer Service.
Conservation officers are still investigating, but since the mother bear had a cub with her, they consider the attack to be "defensive" — meaning she wasn't trying to prey on the engineer, and won't be killed.
"He's a very fortunate individual, he's going to be very sore... but he's a very lucky man," said Butler.
"If the bear wanted to kill the victim, she certainly would have."
Map: Burke Channel near Bella Bella on B.C.'s Central CoastAn Illinois state legislator has introduced a bill that would prevent anyone who has been convicted of crimes related to terrorism from teaching courses at taxpayer-funded colleges and universities.
The author of the legislation — Illinois House Bill 150 — is Rep. Charlie Meier, a rural-district Republican, The State Journal-Register reports.
The bill comes on the heels of a bizarro trend of terrorist hiring by the three-school University of Illinois system.
In the latest instance, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — the semi-prestigious flagship school of the state’s college system — hired, then sacked, then re-hired James Kilgore, a felon convicted of murder and a former member of the infamous Symbionese Liberation Army. (RELATED: TERRORIST UNIVERSITY: The University of Illinois System Keeps Hiring Terrorists)
The Symbionese Liberation Army was the notorious terrorist organization that kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. The group also attempted two bank robberies. Kilgore participated in a 1975 bank robbery during which bank customer Myrna Opsahl was murdered.
Opsahl, who bled to death on the floor of the bank, was a 42-year-old mother of four.
After a nearly three-decade life on the lam spent largely in South Africa under the alias John Pape, Kilgore was extradited in 2002 and served six years in prison in the U.S. for second-degree murder. While on the run, he got a Ph.D.
After serving his time, Kilgore reunited with his wife, Teresa Barnes, who had found a job as a history professor at the University of Illinois.
Kilgore also found a job at the school as a part-time adjunct instructor of global studies and urban planning. (He also quickly found things to protest vigorously, including a proposed $20 million jail.)
“He was convicted of terrorism against America and a second-degree murder charge,” Rep. Meier told the Journal-Register. “I think those are pretty strong convictions, and that’s what this bill’s about.”
Meier also noted that the University of Illinois system is losing millions in donations because it has re-hired the terrorist professor. (RELATED: PRIORITIES: Will University Of Illinois Employ Terrorist Murderer Or Take $4.5 Million Gift?)
“So once again our taxpayers are going to have to help cough up the millions that that university is not being given,” he observed.
A second state Republican legislator, Rep. Adam Brown, has signed on to co-sponsor House Bill 150.
“It’s disappointing that it had to come to this, that we have to spell out that terrorists shouldn’t be teaching our kids,” the University of Illinois alum told the Journal-Register. “But unfortunately that’s a reality we face.”
Kilgore chose not to comment in the local press.
In addition to the hiring of Kilgore in Urbana-Champaign, a second state school, the University of Illinois at Chicago, was the well-known professional home of unrepentant, never-convicted Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers from 1987 until his retirement in 2010.
Ayers, the wealthy son of a former CEO of Commonwealth Edison, was a cofounder and leader of the Weather Underground, a communist revolutionary group.
He was involved in Chicago’s” Days of Rage” riot in 1969, which cost taxpayers in Chicago and the state of Illinois about $183,000. That’s a little more than $1.13 million in today’s dollars. (RELATED: Bill Ayers Is Now A Feted ‘Visiting Scholar’ At Minnesota State University Moorhead)
The Weather Underground also conducted a series of bombings and attempted bombings of banks and the United States Capitol, the Pentagon and other government buildings. In 1970, three spectacularly incompetent colleagues of Ayers’ died in a Greenwich Village townhouse explosion trying to make a nail bomb. The bomb was allegedly going to be used at a dance for noncommissioned officers and their dates on an army base in Fort Dix, N.J.
From 1970 to 1973, Ayers’s wife, Northwestern University law professor and fellow Weather Undergrounder Bernardine Dohrn, threatened attacks on college graduation ceremonies across the country and expressed support for Charles Manson and his followers because “they killed those pigs.”
In 2010, the year he retired, Ayers was famously and unanimously denied emeritus status after a passionate speech by the University of Illinois system’s board chair Christopher G. Kennedy, who is the son of assassinated U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy.
Follow Eric on Twitter. Like Eric on Facebook. Send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.Hundreds of employees from some of Britain's biggest contractors are temporarily out of work, as a result of the U.S. political stalemate that has led to a partial shutdown of the country's government.
Those hit include aerospace and defense giant BAE Systems, security services specialist G4S, and Serco, which provides personnel services to governments.
In a statement on Thursday, BAE said that approximately 1,200 employees across its intelligence and security and support solutions businesses in the U.S. had been told not to turn up for work.
"Whilst the impact of this action has not yet been material to the group's overall financial performance, some progressive impact to the group's U.S. operations would result from a protracted government shutdown," BAE said in its interim statement for the third quarter of the year.
The federal government has remained partially closed since October 1, with a dispute over President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act leading to Democrats and Republicans failing to strike a deal on how to fund the government until year-end.
Approximately 800 |
ationalization of the railroads and postal service.
The manifesto was a huge break from the austerity policies that have dominated Britain for the past three decades. The establishment ridiculed Corbyn’s manifesto, but his popular policies tapped into the anger of young people and workers.
The Socialist Party of England and Wales, the sister organization of Socialist Alternative, said from the start of the election that “Corbyn can win with socialist policies.”
The result was a huge confirmation of our perspectives and approach. Our comrades have now called for a bold program of action to mobilize youth and workers behind a strategy to bring down the extremely weak Tory government as soon as possible and to bring to power a Corbyn-led Labour government on socialist policies.
4. When the left offers a bold alternative to the politics of the establishment, racism can be pushed back.
Corbyn’s surge in support also helped wipe the racist UK Independence Party (UKIP) off the map. UKIP’s vote collapsed from 12.6% in 2015 to under 2%. Part of this vote went to Corbyn.
This comes just a year after UKIP played a big role campaigning for Britain to “Leave” the EU, otherwise known as Brexit. At the time, we argued against all those on the left who interpreted the vote as a right-wing shift in British society.
In reality, the “Leave” vote was primarily a revolt against the establishment. But, because the left broadly supported the establishment’s “Remain” campaign, the right was able to capture the anger at the bosses’ EU and give it a right-wing coloring. The Socialist Party supported a “Leave” vote on a pro-worker, left-wing basis, defending immigrants and connecting our stand to fighting the Tory government, austerity, and for a socialist Europe.
Corbyn’s success on June 8 shows that when offered a radical, coherent, left-wing choice, a section of workers can be won away from right-wing populism.
5. This is just the beginning and we need to get organized for the battles ahead.
In the U.S., there is a strong mood among young people, progressives, and workers for unity against Trump, racism, sexism, and the right wing. At the same time, there are real differences between Sanders and the Democratic Party establishment over how to fight Trump. Like Corbyn, Sanders has fought for a radical program that speaks to the needs of working people.
There are similar divisions in the Labour Party, although the history of the two parties is very different. The establishment wing of the Labour Party – often referred to as “Blairites” after former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair – supported the Iraq war and austerity, and they viciously oppose Corbyn’s leadership.
Yet when they last led the party, the pro-corporate Blairites received 10 points and 3 million votes fewer for Labour in the 2015 general election.
In 2018, the Republicans would need to lose 24 seats to be denied another majority in the House of Representatives. Right now, it looks like the Democratic Party establishment is content to run another pro-Wall-Street, Clinton-like campaign. The establishment Democrats are more interested in defending their billionaire donor base and the capitalist system than risking galvanizing the anger of wide layers of working people and raising expectations.
Both the U.S. and Britain face a historic crisis of capitalism. Through further attacks and by fighting against the idea that society can be organized to meet the needs of all, big business will use all its power to make us pay for the crisis of their system.
This will find a reflection in further bitter battles within both Labour and the Democrats and the growing left-wing insurgencies led by Bernie Sanders and Corbyn. Splits in both the Democratic Party and the Labour Party are inevitable and reflect the bigger intractable struggle between the working class and the billionaire class. Socialist Alternative has explained that it is highly unlikely the Democratic Party can be reformed and that a new party will be needed.
Crucially, we need to get organized to win. We need mass movements to resist right-wing attacks and to demand the change we need. Ultimately, working people need our own mass movements, organizations, and political parties independent of, and wholly against, pro-capitalist politicians and the billionaire class.Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, who collapsed while delivering his State of the State address to legislators on Monday, announced he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. (Reuters)
Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton said Tuesday that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, following a fainting spell the night before during his State of the State address.
The governor fainted Monday night, slurring his words and then striking his head on a lectern as he fell to the floor.
His staffers caught him, and legislators immediately adjourned the meeting at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul.
The governor’s chief of staff said in a statement that “he quickly recovered, walked out of the Capitol, and returned home,” where he was checked out by emergency personnel.
Dayton said he would see doctors Tuesday afternoon at the Mayo Clinic as a precaution.
Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton collapses during his State of the State address in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday. (Glen Stubbe/Star Tribune via AP)
During Tuesday’s afternoon news conference, Dayton (D), 69, said he had planned to disclose information about the cancer next week after further tests and visits with his doctor to determine the best course of treatment. But, he said, following his sudden fainting spell, he decided to go ahead with the public announcement.
Dayton added that his treatment could include radiation or surgery to remove a tumor.
“I don’t expect it to impede my performance or responsibilities,” he told reporters, “but I’ll know more next week.”
Aside from skin cancer, prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in men in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health. Earlier data from NIH estimated that more than 180,000 men would be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2016, and more than 26,000 would die from it.
In its early stages, prostate cancer may not need treatment, according to the Mayo Clinic. But when treatment becomes necessary, doctors may consider hormone or other therapies, radiology, chemotherapy or surgery to remove the prostate gland, according to the Mayo Clinic.
The governor said his tumor was discovered during an annual examination and a biopsy confirmed it was cancer late last week, but there is no evidence to suggest that it has spread beyond the prostate.
“It’s grim, but it is what it is,” Dayton said of the diagnosis, adding: “You have to do what you have to do in life.”
This isn’t the first time Dayton has struggled with his health, according to the Star Tribune. He had a similar fainting spell about the same time last year at a political event; his senior adviser said he was hospitalized and treated for dehydration, according to the Tribune.
He has also had trouble with his back, undergoing two surgeries in recent years to help treat spinal stenosis.
On Monday, during the State of the State address, Dayton had appeared to stumble as he made his way into the house chamber, according to the Associated Press.
He later said he was sweating a bit but was not aware of any issues.
“It just came up on me before I could do anything about it,” he told reporters during Tuesday’s news conference.
About 40 minutes into his address, the governor started to tremble and lost his place in his speech, according to the AP. He took several sips of water before he fell to the floor.
Not long after the fall, however, the governor had reportedly bounced back and was making fun of himself, state Sen. Dan Schoen said, the AP reported. Dayton’s son, Eric Dayton, said in a tweet that his father was “doing great.” He later tweeted a photo of his father and Dayton’s grandson, Hugo, making an “advanced puzzle” together, adding, “that must be a good sign!”
“Governor Dayton and his entire staff thank the people of Minnesota for their outpouring of support and concern,” the statement read.
On Tuesday, the governor seemed in high spirits, saying he was grateful for the outpouring of support he had received, then he started poking fun at the situation.
“If I’d known that it was going to result in the Republicans not criticizing my speech,” he said, “I’d have tried it years ago.”
Before fainting Monday night, Dayton unveiled a broad vision for his final two years in office, calling for targeted “public investments” that include $371 million in additional funding for schools and the creation of a public health insurance option, the Star Tribune reported. He touted a falling unemployment rate and a projected budget surplus of $1.4 billion, a substantial improvement from the massive budget deficit facing the state six years ago.
He also discussed the need to address a number of problems in the state, including aging roads and bridges, diminished water quality and racial disparities. Dayton faces pressures from the now-Republican-controlled legislature to make broad health-care changes and offset massive premium hikes.
This post has been updated.
Read more:
Police group: Minn. governor ‘exploited what was already a horrible and tragic situation’
Minn. governor walks through crowd of protestersApple may have shaken things up with its Lightning connector's unique internals, but a leaked schedule reveals it's holding a conference to help accessory makers get a handle for crafting products with the tech. Taking place between November 7th and 9th in Shenzhen, China, the MFi (Made for iPad / iPhone / iPod) Technology Summit will acquaint manufacturers with the new standard and guidelines for developing gear with the cable. Rather than divulging how to create Lightning connectors, it appears that Apple will be keeping the specifications close to its vest and assume the mantle of gatekeeper. According to one of TechCrunch's sources, Apple will control the supply of pins for its connector and will only sell them to partners when accessories meet Cupertino's standards. This tactic would match up nicely with the current requirements for the MFi certification program, which already makes parts from Apple-approved suppliers a necessity. It sounds like a potentially pricey proposition, but the source also claims that Cook and Co. have a fair asking price for components doled out in bulk, considering the technology behind them. Curious to see what else is on the docket for the three day shindig? Hit the first source link below for the full schedule.by guest blogger Maya K. van Rossum, the Delaware Riverkeeper
Across the nation, communities are standing up for their rights to pure water, clean air, and a healthy environment.
People are banding together to champion for:
One of the biggest challengers to these rights is the fracked shale gas industry.
Every week, the body of science on the harms of drilling and fracking grows. There are now more than 580 peer-reviewed articles examining the environmental and human health harms of shale gas extraction. Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, award-winning and nationally recognized expert on shale gas extraction, has analyzed these studies and noted that, “94 percent find harmful impacts to human health, 69 percent find harmful impacts on water quality, and 88 percent find harmful impacts to air quality.”
One of the newest reports shows what would happen if the moratorium against shale gas extraction in the Delaware River watershed were lifted and just 4,000 wells were drilled. CNA Analysis and Solutions, an independent group of scientists and researchers, determined that if these wells were drilled, there would be a cascade of negative events that would jeopardize the drinking water, air quality, forests, and health of Upper Delaware River communities.
Some of the potential impacts of fracking in the Delaware River watershed include:
Increases in dangerous strontium and barium in the water by up to 500 percent, even if drilling is done in total compliance with state regulations.
Depletion of crucial stream flows of up to 70 percent in small streams in the Delaware River Basin during times of low flow, a time when the critters and communities need those waters the most.
Increases in land erosion by up to 150 percent during construction with an increase of up to 15 percent during day-to-day drilling operations.
Depletion of underground aquifers, which feed both our streams and groundwater wells.
Increases of 4 to 5.8 billion cubic feet of methane to the atmosphere each year.
And yet, politicians still defend fracking, claiming the need for a bridge to get us to clean and renewable energy technologies. The truth is, we already have that bridge with solar, wind, geothermal, and other clean energy technologies.
So let’s put our politicians to the test. Here’s a list of environmental issues and the questions you can use when speaking with politicians to see where they stand.
1. Health and Safety: Thousands of individuals have seen their health deteriorate, their drinking water impacted, and/or their safety jeopardized because of fracking wells and fracked gas infrastructure.
Ask your politicians: What is your position on ensuring that people have a right to safe drinking water from their household faucets—water free of contamination and toxins from the shale gas industry?
2. Property Rights: Property owners are increasingly having their land forcibly taken by eminent domain (or with the threat of eminent domain as leverage) for construction of pipelines to carry fracked gas and gas liquids. They suffer property damage, loss of property value, degradation of the land, and living in fear that a pipeline explosion or accident could cause harm to their families or themselves.
Ask your politicians: Do you oppose the use of eminent domain for fracked gas pipelines and associated compressors or LNG facilities?
3. Methane Leakage and Climate Change: A growing number of studies are finding that the leakage of methane into the atmosphere is more pervasive and significant than had been believed, that drilling and fracking are a significant source of methane, and that methane is 86 times more powerful than CO2 over the first 20 years for its climate-changing impacts.
Ask your politicians: Given this evidence, do you agree that drilling and fracking for shale threatens the future safety of communities that will be adversely affected by the floods, drought, and other extreme events associated with climate change?
4. Trans-Pacific Partnership: There is strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade proposal for a variety of reasons, one being it will allow companies to secure automatic approval for the export of fracked gas to foreign countries with free trade status. Another reason people oppose it is TPP will give corporations the power to challenge state and federal environmental protection laws (for example, local, state, or regional bans on fracking) that the companies claim impede their ability to make profits.
Ask your politicians: Do you support or oppose the TPP?
Maya K. van Rossum is the Delaware Riverkeeper, and has led the Delaware Riverkeeper Network (DRN) since 1994. The DRN is a regional nonprofit advocacy organization that monitors the river and all of its tributaries for threats and challenges, and advocates, educates, and litigates for protection, restoration, and change.
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Related Posts:The federal government is finally cleaning up the Gowanus Canal, and the Lightstone Group has just finished a 12-story rental building along the banks of the heavily contaminated waterway. Now the city has kicked off a long-awaited rezoning study for the industrial area around the canal, but officials offered few guarantees or timelines for the new zoning.
A few hundred residents came armed with questions to a public meeting at P.S. 32 on Hoyt Street Thursday night. Brooklyn City Planning Director Winston von Engel explained the city doesn’t “want to set a timeframe” for the rezoning, and that the new land use policy would be informed by community input and upcoming public meetings.
But many locals who attended last night had already sat through two years’ worth of meetings for Councilmember Brad Lander’s Bridging Gowanus process, which identified dozens of community goals for the neighborhood’s future. When they asked planners about potential displacement, development on NYCHA property, and public space along the Gowanus Canal, officials couldn’t offer concrete answers.
City Planning project manager Jonathan Keller explained that the city had started a rezoning study for Gowanus in 2007, but it was abandoned when the Environmental Protection Agency declared the canal a Superfund site. So the city will base its new zoning on the Bridging Gowanus framework, not the 2007 study.
“We’re not starting from where we left off in 2009 and 2010 [from the previous study],” said Keller. “A lot has changed in the neighborhood since then.”
In his presentation, Keller outlined the four goals from Bridging Gowanus: investing in infrastructure, encouraging mixed-use development, preserving and creating affordable housing, and preserving manufacturing.
He also spelled out the four main geographic areas in the study and the goals for each part. First there were the NYCHA developments. Wyckoff Gardens is part of the NextGen NYCHA program, which means a 50 percent affordable, 50 percent market-rate project will eventually rise on open space within the development. Then along the canal north of Third Street, there are “opportunities for a mix of uses including light industrial, arts, cultural, and residential when appropriate.”
In the Industrial Business Zone, between Third Street and the BQE, planners hope to preserve the manufacturing zoning and the jobs that come with it. Finally, DCP believes Fourth Avenues offers opportunities for affordable housing and pedestrian improvements.
David Briggs, an architect and director of the Gowanus by Design neighborhood advocacy group, wondered how the city would prevent commercial developers from putting up small stores with large parking lots, like Whole Foods, and discourage ground floor parking.
Council member Stephen Levin explained that the new kind of industrial zoning created for 25 Kent Avenue, a half-million-square-foot office building with light manufacturing space in Williamsburg, might address that problem in Gowanus. The 25 Kent zoning dramatically reduced parking requirements and allowed the developer to earn extra commercial square footage for including manufacturing space.
Dave Powell, a tenant organizer with the Fifth Avenue Committee, angrily noted, “We are still reeling from the 2003 rezoning of 4th Avenue. We’ve watched dozens of tenants displaced from their homes.” He asked, “Could DCP commit to a meeting and study about displacement? Would DCP consider an anti-harassment district [like Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Clinton]?”
An HPD official responded that they’d get in touch with Powell, but the agency couldn’t promise that anti-harassment provisions or tenant protections would be written into the new zoning.
The next planning meeting in the Gowanus rezoning study will be held on December 8 and focus on resiliency.
Subscribe to the YIMBY newsletter for weekly uxpdates on New York’s top projectsHello Pepper: Getting started to program robots on Android
I didn’t get to meet Pepper the humanoid Robot at Google I/O but I watched the video afterwards: A new development frontier: Android + Pepper the interactive robot. Love the robots’ dance! I was super excited to hear that Pepper will become available in the U.S. later this year, and Android developers can now program robots!
A few weeks after I/O, I attended a Seattle Java User Group meetup. That evening I met Pepper in person, and I learned about the Future of Social Robotics from Nicolas Rigaud (slides here).
Equipped with microphones, cameras, sensors and an intelligence to perceive emotions, Pepper was designed for social interactions. He has an Android tablet on his chest which is very convenient for displaying image, video and texts. Pepper is 4 feet tall (1.2 meters) and can connect to the network with either Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Pepper is multi-lingual in English, French, Japanese and Chinese.
I wanted to learn more about Pepper. So I followed the instructions from the Pepper SDK for Android and was able to quickly get set up and create my first robot Application with Android Studio.“FYI, I’d rather be home with my grandkids.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s relationship with the media is so bad that even the one reporter who was allowed to cover his trip to Asia called his press strategy an “abject failure.” Aside from transparency concerns, the lack of media access means Tillerson’s stumbles — such as parroting Chinese catchphrases about the U.S.’s relationship with the country and blaming an ally for a mistaken report that he was too tired to do his job – have received far more attention than whatever he might be doing behind the scenes.
But one message that Tillerson has managed to put forth is that he doesn’t really care what the American people think about him. He underscored this point in a new profile by the Independent Journal Review’s Erin Pike — the journalist who accompanied him to Asia — telling her that he didn’t want to be secretary of State anyway.
“I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job.” He paused to let that sink in.
A beat or two passed before an aide piped up to ask him why he said yes.
“My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.”
After watching the contortions of my face as I tried to figure out what to say next, he humbly explained that he had never met the president before the election. As president-elect, Trump wanted to have a conversation with Tillerson “about the world” given what he gleaned from the complex global issues he dealt with as CEO of Exxon Mobil.
“When he asked me at the end of that conversation to be secretary of state, I was stunned.”
When Tillerson got home and told his wife, Renda St. Clair, she shook her finger in his face and said, “I told you God’s not through with you.”
With a half-worn smile, he said, “I was supposed to retire in March, this month. I was going to go to the ranch to be with my grandkids.”
It’s no surprise that Tillerson didn’t expect to be offered the job, since spending your entire career at ExxonMobil isn’t usually how one prepares for a life of government service. Still, it’s notable that Tillerson wants people to know that while some candidates for the job were humiliating themselves over frogs’ legs, he had to be talked into bringing his talents to Foggy Bottom.
Tillerson said his wife convinced him that he’s “supposed to do this,” and when asked if he intends to remain in the position for Trump’s whole term, he said, “I serve at the pleasure of the president.”
Tillerson’s rebellious attitude does not extend to his new boss. The secretary offers plenty of commentary sure to please President Trump, from explaining how the campaign slogan “America First” guides everything he does, to criticizing the Obama administration for aiming to merely “degrade” ISIS (though President Obama said on numerous occasions that the goal was to “destroy” the terrorist group).
But there were some cracks in Tillerson’s confident demeanor. He said he’s fine with the White House’s plan to cut the State Department budget by 28 percent, but he admitted he hasn’t talked to the president about what exactly that means:
… even though Tillerson said he talks to Trump daily and has an open invitation to visit him at the White House whenever he chooses, he said they haven’t yet talked about what a dramatically different State Department will look like or how he will staff it.
His eyes darted down to his desk when he said, “We haven’t gotten that far yet,” as though he realized he had been caught.
Tillerson has also pointed out that he’s still finding his footing. “I would hope that people can maintain their patience in these early days and recognize I’ve only been at it six weeks,” he said.Ottawa's new professional basketball team will be called the "Ottawa Skyhawks" after its original name, "Tomahawks," which had been unveiled and subsequently pulled back in late February.
Ottawa's new professional basketball team name is Skyhawks after the original name, Tomahawks, raised the ire of some community members. (Photo courtesy of Bytown Sports and Entertainment)
Bytown Sports and Entertainment decided to quash its first choice mere hours after the official announcement at city hall due to public outcry.
Bytown president, Gus Takkale, had defended the name, saying it was not meant to appropriate First Nations culture.
He said they took the name from a type of slam dunk in basketball, not from the axe used by First Nations people. He also noted the logo would have been a basketball with wings.
Takkale also said he had consulted with aboriginal groups before unveiling the logo and name.
The team decided the replacement name would come from fans on its Facebook page. It will now prepare for its inaugural season, starting in November at Scotiabank Place, by choosing players and a coach.
The National Basketball League, which Ottawa will play in, also features teams from Windsor, London, Oshawa, Montreal, Moncton, Saint John, Halifax and Summerside.Now I needed measurement to ensure everything will be modified correctly for full functionality. With a caliper I measured the thickness of the broken file end to compare to the thickness of the lock picks. In my case; the file piece and 3 picks were the exact same thickness. I used a drill bits outer diameter measurement to determine the size of hole I would require to drill in the pick handles. In image 6 I am sliding the picks into the handle void to see just how far I can go before hindering the sliding pliers function. Once I determined how far I simply used a Sharpy marker to draw a line at the base. Also note that I marked where the holes will have to be drilled on the green tape that I put around all 3 picks.Friday, June 24, 2016
EU referendum vote posted by Richard Seymour The racists have successfully articulated a broad antiestablishment sentiment - originating in class injuries, regional decline, postindustrial devastation, generational anxieties, etc. - along bigoted, national chauvinist lines. The vote cannot be reduced to racism and nationalism - but that is the primary way in which it has been organised and recruited and directed, and that is the primary way in which the outcome will be experienced. That this was achieved so soon after the fascist murder of a centre-left, pro-immigrant MP, is stunning in a way. It says something about the truculence of some of the chauvinism on display. It says something about the profound sense of loss which a reasserted 'Britishness' is supposed to compensate for.
There is a lot of finger-wagging on Twitter and elsewhere about how the exit voters have just triggered economic self-destruction. House prices will fall, savings will be diminished, the pound will weaken, jobs will dry up. Well, that's all true. Except. Not everyone benefits from the insane property market. Not everyone has savings. Not everyone benefits, as the City does, from a strong pound. Manufacturing has suffered from that priority. Large parts of the country have been haemorrhaging jobs for years. 'The economy' is not a neutral terrain experienced by everyone in exactly the same way. And some of the votes, coming in core Labour areas, not necessarily strongly racist areas at first glance, indicate that. So people have voted against an economy that wasn't working to their benefit. (That doesn't mean the practical alternative will not be worse. I suspect it will be a great deal worse.)
Corbyn did the best he could in this scenario, offering a conditional, critical defence of Remain. Had he joined in the ra-ra cheerleading for the EU, had he not prefaced his support with some serious criticisms, Labour would be looking at a bleak scenario in these mid-to-north England areas which have gone Brexit. By at least sounding critical, and above all keeping his distance from the Tories, he has probably avoided a Scottish outcome for the party in these areas.
But Corbyn was also not the dynamic factor in this referendum. The racists were. The chauvinists were. And the culture wars now afoot were signalled by Nigel Farage, who greeted the victory with what can only have been a calculated dog-whistle: "we've done it without a single bullet being fired."
The racists have successfully articulated a broad antiestablishment sentiment - originating in class injuries, regional decline, postindustrial devastation, generational anxieties, etc. - along bigoted, national chauvinist lines. The vote cannot be reduced to racism and nationalism - but that is the primary way in which it has been organised and recruited and directed, and that is the primary way in which the outcome will be experienced. That this was achieved so soon after the fascist murder of a centre-left, pro-immigrant MP, is stunning in a way. It says something about the truculence of some of the chauvinism on display. It says something about the profound sense of loss which a reasserted 'Britishness' is supposed to compensate for.There is a lot of finger-wagging on Twitter and elsewhere about how the exit voters have just triggered economic self-destruction. House prices will fall, savings will be diminished, the pound will weaken, jobs will dry up. Well, that's all true. Except. Not everyone benefits from the insane property market. Not everyone has savings. Not everyone benefits, as the City does, from a strong pound. Manufacturing has suffered from that priority. Large parts of the country have been haemorrhaging jobs for years. 'The economy' is not a neutral terrain experienced by everyone in exactly the same way. And some of the votes, coming in core Labour areas, not necessarily strongly racist areas at first glance, indicate that. So people have voted against an economy that wasn't working to their benefit. (That doesn't mean the practical alternative will not be worse. I suspect it will be a great deal worse.)Corbyn did the best he could in this scenario, offering a conditional, critical defence of Remain. Had he joined in the ra-ra cheerleading for the EU, had he not prefaced his support with some serious criticisms, Labour would be looking at a bleak scenario in these mid-to-north England areas which have gone Brexit. By at least sounding critical, and above all keeping his distance from the Tories, he has probably avoided a Scottish outcome for the party in these areas.But Corbyn was also not the dynamic factor in this referendum. The racists were. The chauvinists were. And the culture wars now afoot were signalled by Nigel Farage, who greeted the victory with what can only have been a calculated dog-whistle: "we've done it without a single bullet being fired."
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
In praise of hate posted by Richard Seymour In this time of universal pleas for civility and respect - god help us all, and save us from those two domesticating constraints - I would like to push gently at first, and then rather roughly, against the wrong lessons that are being drawn from the murder, allegedly by a fascist, of Jo Cox MP.
There is, of course, a 'there' there. In the tropes of 'hate' - 'the well of hatred', and so on. When that became the synecdoche for everything that was fucked up in the sick hunting and grisly killing (one might say, in view of the brutality of the murder, the methods used, and the insistent repetition of their use, 'over-killing') of a centre-left MP, it seemed to be about more than fascism and racism. It was as if the killing reminded us how we feel about the vicious sewer-sluice of bigotry and bullying on social media, the id-stream of unutterable nastiness, particularly toward women, in politics but also more generally. As if it could be made to stand for the particular toxic misogyny aimed at women who gain success, and perhaps at a stretch the coldness and brutality of everyday life. As if it reminded us how much grief we might be carrying around for the wounds inflicted by this society, for its victims.
All of that is arguably what is going on under the rubric of 'hate'. And why not? It is a shame that some who, for reasons of habitus or something else, cannot empathise with the widespread sense of alienation from the political class and media, have taken this to mean that there is too much hatred of politicians. As if to say, this murder might not have happened if people were more respectful of John Bercow. As if politicians had nothing to do with cultivating the backlash against multiculturalism and the Islamophobic panic that is fuelling the reactionary surge. As if they have played no role in visiting on people the social misery and pain from which 'hate' might arise. As if there were not several multiple shades between hating something and murdering someone on account of it. But let that stand for a moment, and think about it another way. Start with where we are. Europe.
The EU referendum debate is structured around two poles that have barely shifted in the last couple of years. It is all about
Immigration is something else entirely. One can try, as lesser mortals like Nick Clegg have before us, to sanitise it and depoliticise it and stop it from being a 'political football'. No one buys it. It has long been treated by most people as a matter of 'fairness'. Somehow, though, the Right have been the only ones politicising the issue. They have spoken in a moral language about immigration. It may make us a bit more wealthy, they say, but it's not fair. It undercuts wages. It replaces good jobs with bad jobs. It makes the poorest workers more precarious. I will not, here at least, try to disprove these claims, though they are arrant nonsense, based on 'common sense' simplifications about how the economy works. It's sufficient to note the incredible attractiveness of these propositions when the language of 'fairness' is annexed almost exclusively by the Right. And in this debate, bizarre though it may be, immigration has become the only stable index of 'fairness': a constant sleight, a constant offence to people who were, after all, born here (and thus should come first).
This discourse of 'fairness' thus lies somewhere at them more.
This is where we have to make the appropriate space for social sadism - lavishly, opulently, beautifully theorised by China Miéville
But here is my point. We, those of us broadly on the progressive side of this argument, shouldn't be so quick to disown all that. It is as impossible to conceive of justice without punishment as it is perverse sexuality (most sexuality) without that idea lurking somewhere. Justice requires sanction. And the idea of a pristine, bloodless ritual of punishment, safeguarded by a division of functions, is a modern illusion. Its result is ironically that we punish more, with less satisfaction: we always feel short-changed. To disavow our aggressive impulses, our desire to punish, our rage, is to engage in a dubious operation of externalisation. There are at least two ways in which we can externalise 'evil' in this sense. We can, as Fanon suggested, project our aggression onto a racial Other, finding in them all that is bestial and barbaric in our own behaviour and desires. That is Farage and the faraginous hordes behind him. Or, we can project it onto those who we believe to be the racist hordes (whether they are or not doesn't necessarily affect the degree of projection).
To put it like this: we can no more live without hate than we can live without an idea of justice. We can no more live outside of resentment than we can live outside of pain, and blame, and unrealistic ideals. There is something deeply suspect about any politics, or any person, that professes to be free of it, that has nothing to despise. Show me a person without a hateful fibre in their being, and I will show you the collection of feet in their attic. The idea, one would think, is to find something creative to do with our hates, our rages. As to Europe, of course, we came far too late to the party to make any but the slightest difference to the debate.
But there is this. The reactionary wedge in this country, is not its future. The nationalist reflux is dangerous because it is the despairing backlash of something that is dying. The young are moving in a very different direction. So, here is a moment. Here is a unique chance to bury that Britain, that authoritarian, conservative rat-hole, that worshipper of the idols of Seventies light entertainment, that incubator of child rape scandals and football violence, that forelock-tugging Britain that adulates power and kicks the poor, and marches us inexorably toward something that is not so much pre-fascist as pre-apocalypse. Here is a chance to assemble the social forces who hate fascism and are terrified by the racist Right, to begin a frontal assault on their fortresses and bulwarks. A task whose success will, I submit, not be expedited by giving ground to the demand for the parliamentary gentrification of political life. In this time of universal pleas for civility and respect - god help us all, and save us from those two domesticating constraints - I would like to push gently at first, and then rather roughly, against the wrong lessons that are being drawn from the murder, allegedly by a fascist, of Jo Cox MP.There is, of course, a 'there' there. In the tropes of 'hate' - 'the well of hatred', and so on. When that became the synecdoche for everything that was fucked up in the sick hunting and grisly killing (one might say, in view of the brutality of the murder, the methods used, and the insistent repetition of their use, 'over-killing') of a centre-left MP, it seemed to be about more than fascism and racism. It was as if the killing reminded us how we feel about the vicious sewer-sluice of bigotry and bullying on social media, the id-stream of unutterable nastiness, particularly toward women, in politics but also more generally. As if it could be made to stand for the particular toxic misogyny aimed at women who gain success, and perhaps at a stretch the coldness and brutality of everyday life. As if it reminded us how much grief we might be carrying around for the wounds inflicted by this society, for its victims.All of that is arguably what is going on under the rubric of 'hate'. And why not? It is a shame that some who, for reasons of habitus or something else, cannot empathise with the widespread sense of alienation from the political class and media, have taken this to mean that there is too much hatred of. As if to say, this murder might not have happened if people were more respectful of John Bercow. As if politicians had nothing to do with cultivating the backlash against multiculturalism and the Islamophobic panic that is fuelling the reactionary surge. As if they have played no role in visiting on people the social misery and pain from which 'hate' might arise. As if there were not several multiple shades between hating something and murdering someone on account of it. But let that stand for a moment, and think about it another way. Start with where we are. Europe.The EU referendum debate is structured around two poles that have barely shifted in the last couple of years. It is all about immigration vs the economy. And if we find those two issues poised counter to one another, that is because of the curious way in which each issue is |
after the Stone Age, he says. The advent of agricultural societies deprived most humans of liberty and turned them into slaves and serfs. In the Stone Age, people lived as they now do in Balliol. Then came the Bronze Age and command economies (think of the pyramids), and it was downhill all the way.
Decline accelerated in the 16th century thanks to Francis Bacon, who is widely credited with inventing scientific method, and who argued that research was a precondition for progress and should be supported by kings and princes (ie the state). Bacon, Kealey says, was "a crook, a cheat and a fraudster", and science isn't as he described it at all.
That was bad enough, but three centuries later came free, compulsory education. This was quite unnecessary, in Kealey's view, because the churches were already educating the majority of under-11s, and Victorian England had near-universal literacy before the 1870 Education Act. Fees were modest and waived for the poorest. Free education was a state power grab, designed to undercut the voluntary schools, and it has been a disaster.
Kealey, who is 58, calls himself a passionate libertarian and that's what you'd expect from Buckingham, which was founded in the 1970s as Britain's only "independent" university. Other universities are technically independent, but Buckingham alone refuses to accept money from Hefce (Higher Education Funding Council for England). Its home students pay annual fees of £8,640 (for degree courses that take two years), though they are eligible for state loans and maintenance grants just as their lecturers are eligible for research council grants. No minister can tell Buckingham what to teach or how to spend its money. Kealey thinks all universities should be like this.
The prevailing winds are in his favour. The idea of setting public bodies free from state control is increasingly popular with all political parties. Kealey thinks it is time for more private universities, and is exploring the idea with philanthropists. Meanwhile, established universities face severe funding cuts, restrictions on admissions and even closure.
"There's a crisis, but it's moral, not financial," Kealey says. "Vice-chancellors shouldn't be cutting staff. They should be marching round parliament with placards demanding their economic freedom. Because they take government money, they lose the right to set their own fees and admit as many students as they want. Imagine Sainsbury's if a ministry of food dictated its product lines, its prices and the number of customers it admitted. I am shocked at the universities' response."
"Shocked" is Kealey's favourite word, and the theatrical way he uses it reminds me of Captain Renault in Casablanca who was "shocked, shocked!" to find gambling in Rick's Bar. This impression is reinforced when I learn that he is half French on his mother's side. Indeed, he attributes his "love of freedom" partly to a reaction against his French upbringing (he never knew his English father). "My mother had a very authoritarian way of looking at the world. Her father was a colonial civil servant in Lebanon and his job was to shut any Lebanese company that threatened jobs in France – he single-handedly closed the Lebanese silk industry – but she couldn't see anything wrong with that."
As a child, Kealey lived in "a bubble of Frenchness" in Kensington, west London, and didn't speak English until he started school. He was put down for Colet Court, the prep school for St Paul's, but "I thought it was a horrible ugly place, so I failed the entrance exam deliberately". He eventually went to Charterhouse, where he soon discovered he was a libertarian. "In my first year, I turned a corner and there were some 600 boys in uniform all lined up and being inspected by some general. It was the cadet force, and I thought: I just don't want to be another uniformed soldier in a mass of hundreds. So I joined the Boy Scouts, which was the alternative. I really am an individualist, you see."
He understood this with still greater force while studying at St Bartholomew's medical school in London. "I had a socialist phase, which lasted about six weeks. I told a friend I thought we should all be equal and I might join the Labour party. And he said if I did that I couldn't send my children to private school. I realised then that socialism wasn't about liberty."
He says he never intended to practise medicine and went to Bart's – which, he was "shocked" to find, was intellectually inferior to Charterhouse – to please his mother. He wanted to be either a historian or scientist, and eventually opted for biochemistry, doing postgraduate research at Oxford on skin glands and cystic fibrosis. He adored Oxford, "a perfect community, dedicated to the search for truth, driven not by love of money but by love of ideas". But lab space was limited and he had to leave for Newcastle, which he seems to have regarded as an English equivalent of Siberia. Nearly 30 years on, he still seems oddly upset about the whole thing and admits it formed his unforgiving views of scientists and scientific institutions. "How was it that you could commit yourself to a career in science and forego most conventional perquisites of salary and status and yet be treated like that?" he protests.
He returned to Oxford in 1986 as the university refused Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree, arguing that she had damaged higher education and particularly scientific research. "At the time, I had two loves: Margaret Thatcher and Oxford, and they clashed. Oxford said British science was in decline; she said it was more generously funded than almost anywhere else. I decided to find out who was right. And I discovered British science had grown 70% in a decade. Mrs Thatcher had cut state-funded science but the growth of privately funded science had more than compensated. The scientists were guilty of a completely dishonest presentation." Captain Renault – sorry, Kealey – pauses for dramatic effect. "I was shocked, shocked!" he cries.
He now had a set of provocative, counter-intuitive, broadly rightwing opinions that earned him a place in the Telegraph-Times-Spectator stable of writers. First, he decided, scientists are not dispassionate truthseekers, forming hypotheses and testing them against evidence, as the orthodox account has it. On the contrary, he has written, they "are liars … They choose facts that suit their theories, they ignore inconvenient findings, then they try to bludgeon their colleagues into agreeing with them."
Second, governments shouldn't fund research. State-funded science, he argues, crowds out privately funded science and, because it doesn't respond to market needs, contributes nothing to economic growth. If anything, nations go into decline when the state takes over science. "People believe science is a public good. It's not." Moreover, dependence on the state is bad for universities; German academics, heavily state-funded, raised scarcely a peep against Hitler. "Universities should be centres of critical scholarship, hassling governments."
Unsurprisingly, these views made Kealey unpopular among his fellow academics. "People wouldn't talk to me. I was seen as a traitor. One academic said to my face that academics were free to discuss anything except funding. State dependence had corrupted Oxford. It was very shocking to me." He moved to Cambridge in 1988, which was no more enamoured of his views. "But everybody knew me in Oxford and nobody did in Cambridge." Even at Cambridge, it became clear he would never get promotion, so when Buckingham offered the vice-chancellorship, he jumped at it.
Buckingham was then in the doldrums. Before the mid-1990s, it attracted middle-class students who preferred something called a university to anything called a polytechnic. But when polys were upgraded to universities, Buckingham's numbers crashed and it more or less dropped out of public consciousness.
Kealey put it on the map, recruiting a gallery of academic mavericks and eccentrics. They included Chris Woodhead, the head of Ofsted who earned the abiding hatred of teachers; Bruce Charlton, a psychiatrist who said working-class students have significantly lower IQs than their middle-class peers and so you can't expect top universities to admit them; and Anthony Glees, a security specialist, who proposes that universities ban faith societies and governments consider internment for Islamic extremists. Most recruits have less dramatic views, but a remarkably high proportion get quoted and published in newspapers, and don't mind upsetting conventional opinion.
Kealey has also diversified Buckingham from its core areas of business, law and accountancy into, for example, medicine and education. "He's an inspirational character, who has brought in lots of ideas," says Alan Smithers, who moved from Liverpool to head Buckingham's education and employment research. "He's not so good at implementing them, but he creates a very stimulating working environment."
The only cloud is a bad report from the Quality Assurance Agency – which has the power to recommend Buckingham lose its royal charter – but Kealey says the agency never went into classrooms, and just looked at paperwork and committee minutes. "It's really a process assurance agency." He points out that Buckingham consistently tops student satisfaction surveys. That is probably because its student-staff ratio is the best in the country and, since they're paying full fees, students have to convince themselves the courses are worth it. Kealey says there's something in both explanations though he adds, sweetly, "the main thing is that our students just seem to be incredibly nice".
It's hard to tell how seriously Kealey takes himself. He has an instinct for controversy, writing columns on, for example, why the "war on drugs" is bad, why patents should be abolished and (my personal favourite) how the hypocrisy, violence and torture of the Iraq war can be traced back to the American revolution. He's also good at the sex angle, with published articles about topless female statues in English churches, how sado-masochism evolved and, most notoriously, a piece in Times Higher Education (which he said was satirical) arguing that academics should enjoy a female student who "flashes her admiration" as "a perk". He has written a book called Why Chimps Have Large Testes and Other Bollocks, and his latest, elaborating his views on the state and scientific research, is called Sex, Science and Profits, though there isn't actually much sex in it.
He often contradicts himself – writing in one newspaper that "students are getting better grades because they are working harder" and, in another that "degree inflation has become a scandal" – and he seems as guilty as the scientists he criticises of selecting evidence to support whatever point he's making. For example, in a pamphlet on the 19th-century "nationalisation" of schools, he quotes figures to show that economic decline followed state takeover. In his book, he uses different figures to "prove" Britain continued to prosper despite the Victorian state's failure to fund science. But that's show business.
I suspect he'll do almost anything for publicity, and he's quite touchingly anxious about making a good impression on Guardian readers, asking whether or not he should wear a tie for the photograph. He says he only believes in markets "up to a point" and he really cares about the poor; it's just that he thinks liberty can do more for them than the state. He also says he has more in common with lefties like me than with Tories. "They are instinctive defenders of an elite that is privileged by our society. Whereas you, like me, are an instinctive analyst." On which flattering (to both of us) note, we go to a convivial lunch. Perhaps this, as Rick said to Inspector Renault, could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.Story highlights Chinese man executed for keeping six women as sex slaves and killing two of them
Li Hao convicted of murder, rape, illegal detention, prostitution and making pornography
36-year old dug the dungeon in the basement of a residential compound
Li met with relatives before being executed
A Chinese man was executed on Tuesday for keeping six women in a dungeon as sex slaves and killing two of them, state media reported.
The official Xinhua news agency said that Li Hao had been convicted of murder, rape, illegal detention, organized prostitution and making pornography for profit in 2012.
The 36-year old dug the dungeon in the basement of a residential compound he bought in 2009, Xinhua said.
The six women Li tricked into coming home with him were held there for between two and 21 months.
Li Hao was executed on Tuesday.
Li repeatedly raped the women, forced them to appear in pornographic web shows from March to April 2011 and made them have sex with customers for a brief period, it added.
The death penalty had been approved by the Supreme People's Court, Xinhua said, after a higher court upheld the sentence handed down by the Luoyang Intermediate People's Court in November 2012.
Li was executed "according to law" after meeting relatives in a detention house in Luoyang, Henan province, a statement issued by the Supreme People's Court said, according to Xinhua.
Three of the women held captive were also found guilty of murder over the killings of two of their fellow captives, the report said.
However, the court was lenient in its judgment of the women because of the circumstances in which they were held, finding they acted under instruction, and in one case coercion, from Li.
One of the women was sentenced to three years in prison and the other two were placed on probation.CONSUMER Homeware SodaStream* Lees Carpets Keter Plastics Caesaria Carpets* Mapal Plastics* Carmel Carpets* Palphot Stationery Shaked Carpets Brooklinen Bedding Toys/educational AMAV toys Tiny Love Taf Toys Tip Top Toys Star Interstar Halilit Edushape Ofrat Baby Toys Cosmetics Ahava Dead Sea -417 Vivo Nevo Sea Spa & Sea of Spa Moroccanoil Sabon Mogador The Body Shop L’OREAL Desheli Medical Teva Pharmaceuticals Lithotech Medical* Food Products Eden Water * Osem Sabra Dipping Co Habait Abadi Bakery* Adanim Tea Co* Ahdut Sweets* Almog Tradex* Psagot Winery* Shamir Salads* Teperberg 1870 Tishbi Estate Winery Yarden Strauss Group Max Brenner Carmel Winery Barkan Winery Binyamina Winery Golan Heights Winery Tempo Beer Industries Aroma Nama* Pastures of Eden Feta B&W Foods Tribe Hummus Fresh Produce Mehadrin (Jaffa) Carmel-Agrexco* Tivall Arava Aluma* Ada Fresh* Arava* Eitan & Inon Herbs* Hadiklaim Jordan River King Solomon Morten Export* Tamar Hazahad* Tekoa Mushroom Hardware Stanley Black & Decker Lipski Alibert Curver Jardin Contico Zag Clothing/Accessories Delta Galil Industries Home Skinovations Sabon Israeli diamonds Castro Victoria’s Secret Online MyHeritage.com AirBnB* (linked to Aljazeera: Price of renting Airbnb on illegal Israeli settlements) WIX.com (including
DeviantArt) Viber INDUSTRY Technical Tescom Software Testing Systems AFCON Control & Automation Contel ITS Maran Engineering Amimon Bar Ilan University Perion Network Conduit Financial Discount Bank* Arison* Hamashbir Holdings Hapoalim Bank Gemini Israel Ventures Landmark Ventures Leumi Bank Mizrahi Tefahot Bank* B Gaon Holdings Construction & Production Caterpillar Barad Co DNM Technical* Yamit ELI Filtration Distek Extal* Nesher* Automotive Equipment Group Readymix Industries* JCB Security G4S* El Far Electronic Motorola Solutions Shamrad Electronics Radwin* Star Night Tech Samy Katsav Group ODF Optronics Hewlett Packard (HP) Weapons Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Contact Int’l Elbit Israel Aerospace Industries Israel Military Industries Israel Weapon Industries Samy Katsav Group Defense Industries Int’l
*doing business directly involved in the Occupied Territories and illegal settlementsThe Honorable Jacqueline Hatch
I’ll say.
Prosecutors contended that [Officer Evans] drank eight beers and then drove himself to the Green Room, where he flashed his badge in an attempt to get into a concert for free. While inside, he walked up behind the victim, who was a friend of a friend, put his hand up her skirt and then ran his fingers across her genitals.
When bouncers threw him out, Evans told them he was a cop and they would be arrested.
The 43-year-old former Arizona Department of Public Safety officer was facing between six months and 2 1/2 years in prison, but the crime was eligible for probation. He will not be required to register as a sex offender, according to the sentence.
The judge said she considered the defendant’s lack of a criminal record and strong community support in her sentencing.
She also advised the victim to be more vigilant.
A jury convicted Evans of sexual abuse, a class 5 felony, on July 2.
DPS fired Evans shortly after his criminal conviction and following an internal investigation, according to officials.
The judge sentencing Evans, Coconino County Superior Court Judge Jacqueline Hatch, said she hoped both the defendant and the victim would take lessons away from the case.
Bad things can happen in bars, Hatch told the victim, adding that other people might be more intoxicated than she was.
“If you wouldn’t have been there that night, none of this would have happened to you,” Hatch said.SEATTLE — A former Uber driver pleaded not guilty to a second-degree rape charge Thursday after a Kent passenger accused him of sexually assaulting her.
Uber said the accused driver, Ismael Moussaoui, no longer works for the company.
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Q13 News obtained the 911 calls from the Sept. 4 incident. The first call is from a woman who said two of her friends took an Uber home to Kent. When they got to the destination, one of her friends came inside the apartment but the other one didn’t make it. The caller said the Uber driver disappeared with her.
“We don’t know where they went,” said the caller.
The caller said right before they vanished, the Uber driver was seen carrying their friend, who was intoxicated, toward the apartment building. But when they turned around, the two were gone.
A short time later, there were more 911 calls.
“I just heard a loud scream,” said one caller
“She’s still on the lawn,” said another caller.
Kent Police say they found the rape victim on the street with numerous scratches and bruises on her body. She told detectives she was intoxicated and woke up to Moussaoui sexually assaulting her. When officers caught up with the Uber driver, he was bleeding from the face but claimed it was consensual sex.
Women who use Uber say the news is disturbing and surprising.
“I’ve never had a situation where I felt unsafe,” Uber customer Joan Born said.
Uber says they do a thorough local, state and national background check on all of their drivers. They also do a sex offender check.
Moussaoui has no criminal history.
But at least one attorney in California, Lisa Bloom, says the company needs to do more.
Bloom is representing eight different women across the country now suing Uber over alleged sexual assaults.
Bloom says she wants Uber to put panic buttons and cameras in every car and maybe give female clients the option to choose female drivers. Born says she likes the idea of a panic button but not the other options.
“It’s a little too far in my mind,” Born said.
Q13 News did inquire about whether Uber is considering safety features like a panic button. We could not get a specific "no" or "yes" on the question but they did say they are constantly brainstorming ways to keep customers safe.
While riding Uber, the company says, make sure you get in the correct car identified in the app because Uber does track drivers using GPS.
Court documents say the women were having difficulty with the app but managed to flag the driver down in Seattle.
They agreed on a $40 ride home back to Kent.
It is company policy not to accept cash and not to pick up random passengers not matched through the app.Image copyright AP Image caption Mr Milinkovic had previously served as Serbia's ambassador to the OSCE in Austria
The Serbian ambassador to Nato has died after jumping from a multi-storey car park in Brussels airport.
The Serbian government confirmed that Branislav Milinkovic, 52, had died on Tuesday, but did not give details. It paid tribute to his work.
Emergency services were called to the scene, but were not able to revive him, sources at Brussels airport said.
Prosecutors in Brussels say they are treating Mr Milinkovic's death as a suicide.
He is thought to have been at the airport on Tuesday evening to meet Serbia's deputy foreign minister and other officials who had arrived in Brussels for diplomatic talks.
The incident happened at around 18:00 (17:00 GMT).
After talking with colleagues, Mr Milinkovic suddenly strolled to a barrier, climbed over and flung himself to the ground below, a diplomat told the Associated Press.
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr Milinkovic had seemed "completely normal, talking to journalists in the corridors of Nato", a Serbian journalist in Brussels told the AFP news agency.
Nato Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in a statement that he was "deeply saddened" by the news.
"Ambassador Branislav Milinkovic was a highly respected representative of his country and will be missed at Nato headquarters," Mr Rasmussen said.
Serbia is not a member of Nato but it does have a mission at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels because it belongs to the Partnership for Peace programme, which helps countries co-ordinate on defence and security issues.
Mr Milinkovic had been an ambassador since 2009.
He had previously worked as a journalist and was an active opponent of Serbia's former leader Slobodan Milosevic. He leaves behind a wife and a six-year-old son.Joe Bishop wasn't the only person to say the singer's Hard Out Here was racist. But why is she shifting the focus on to 'trolls' rather than addressing legitimate concerns about the exploitation of black women?
Well, here we are. Almost eight months after Lily Allen released Hard Out Here, the debut single from her latest album Sheezus, comes URL Badman, a song written about me. The song is a takedown of nerdy keyboard warriors, callow blog-toters who blindly follow trends and viciously abuse from the safety of their parents' basement.
My first reaction was to feel flattered; to have got on someone's tits so much that they would commit my memory to tape was a monumental achievement. But on reflection the events leading up to it told a much more complex story. My glee at being some kind of arch piss-taker turned to pity for someone who, after belligerently denying all counts of potential racism and sexism in a supposed feminist anthem, had chosen to focus on me, a relative nobody.
How did this happen? The video for Hard Out Here debuted last year on the same day I was scheduled to appear on Radio 1's Review Show with Edith Bowman. It was a parody of hip-hop culture, and had Lily singing "Don't need to shake my ass for you/'Cause I've got a brain" and pouring champagne on the rear of a black dancer, while a white dancer stuffed money into another black dancer's underwear. Lily is too good for that, you see. Too good to take her clothes off like these women, who painstakingly train their bodies for gigs such as this. She's too special.
Charges of racism beamed from all corners, not just mine, but Lily stayed defiant. On Twitter, she challenged me to come up with ideas to battle misogyny, as if a video of her rolling her eyes at scantily clad dancers whom she lyrically demeans was the musical equivalent of Emily Davison getting her chest cavity crushed by a speeding horse.
I moved on with my life. One night, drunk, I tweeted about a pizza delivery being late. Author John Niven retweeted it, and Lily called me an "entitled little shit". I pulled up something she said about Addison Lee not picking up a takeaway for her, and called her a racist again, in an admittedly unnecessarily caustic way, though this time not with the video in mind but a picture she once tweeted, in relation to rapper Azealia Banks, of a penis dressed as a golliwog. A spat ensued in which she spuriously claimed that a recent breakup of mine had spurred my hatred of women. It continued like this for a while.
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This anecdote, or any anecdote in which I have to use the word "tweet" more than once, isn't one I like telling. Part of the reason I'm writing this is so I don't have to tell this story again. It should be that it's a quirk, a laugh, that Allen has written this song. URL Badman is, obviously, terrible: outdated references to rappers who don't even make music any more, and clothing brands that have been around for more than 20 years; the notion of a blogger as a bespectacled spotty oik laying waste to any and all musicians who cross their Wotsit-dust covered paths. She is pop's answer to someone who has just come out of a coma and is desperately trying to make up for lost time by Googling "trendy clothes and music".
But that is not what is sinister. Why has she ignored the real guts of the controversy? After tweeting a non-apology over the video, in which she claimed the dancers had no problem with it, she has opted to take down "trolls" like me. "Trolls" with legitimate concerns over her behaviour and actions, who don't like seeing women of colour exploited for cheap, off-the-mark satire. Why not write a song about the controversy, as opposed to the stirrers? Why not address the meaningful part of the argument, and not the petulant bit? Because that would require some thought, some bravery, some integrity. These are things Lily Allen lacks, and no amount of celebrity-baiting or entry level lampoonery will ever change that.click to enlarge Photo by Danny Wicentowski
click to enlarge Photo by Danny Wicentowski
Air-conditioning tubes installed last month run into the windows of the Workhouse, providing relief for overheated prisoners.
click to enlarge Photo by Danny Wicentowski
By reputation, the St. Louis Workhouse is a mold-infested pit whose 700-plus detainees — nearly all of whom are merely awaiting trial — are drawn from the ranks of the poor, addicted, homeless and mentally ill. Inmates, lawyers and anti-incarceration activists have alleged that medical care is withheld for months and that guards dole out beatings and pit prisoners against each other in “gladiator-style combat.” In the summer, the cells broil with triple-digit heat, although temporary air-conditioning units installed last month may finally address that problem.On Friday,accompanied 15th Ward alderwoman Megan Green on an unannounced visit to the Workhouse. Green also invited a reporter from theand two activists from Decarcerate STL. We did not disclose our identities as media. Green introduced us as graduate students in social work studying the effects of mass incarceration.The tour lasted nearly three hours, and while the physical conditions appeared better than the sweating hellhole described by activists earlier this month, some horror stories appeared all too real. Among dirt and grime, detainees attempted again and again to get our attention. In some cases, they wanted to detail the bad conditions they face.In others, they simply wanted to remind us who they are, and why they are being held — in many cases, for the smallest of offenses, and simply because they don't have money for bail, condemning them to city custody while they're waiting for their day in court.spell out “Medium Security Institution,” but everyone knows the squat, barbed-wire compound sprawled on the north riverfront as the City Workhouse.There is irony in the nickname — it comes from an 1848 city ordinance that stipulated that prisoners who could not pay their fines would be committed to the “Work House” to pay off their debts, and then released. These days, many men and women in the Workhouse find themselves imprisoned because they cannot pay their bonds or traffic tickets. (Those accused of more serious crimes are typically held in the Justice Center downtown.) Although prisoners work in the jail kitchen or on cleanup crews, their meager pay cannot be used to satisfy their debts to the criminal justice system. And so they remain in the Workhouse, for months or even years, waiting for the wheels of justice to turn.After introducing ourselves as social work students, we leave our phones with the security station and pass through a heavy metal door into the visitation area. A lieutenant leads us through a wide hallway that smells of bleach, and a sign directs us to the “Resident Visiting Cages.” Here, prisoners in yellow uniforms speak to their families using telephone receivers and interact behind thick panes of glass.Our tour guide is a supervisor who started patrolling the Workhouse more than two decades ago, and despite her soft-spoken delivery and diminutive stature, she seems to command immediate respect from the inmates and guards we pass along the way. She notes that previous overcrowding had forced jail staff to place inmates on bunk beds in the gym. “We had a lot of prisoners here because they couldn’t afford their $100 traffic tickets,” she says. These days, several dorm and dayroom areas are empty and undergoing renovation.We come to a security office. Here, a flat-screen TV monitor on the wall shows sixteen camera views of various dorm rooms and sleeping quarters.Inevitably, talk turns to air conditioning. Last month, as a heat wave baked the city with temperatures as high as 107, protesters staged demonstrations at the Workhouse’s front gates, facing pepper spray and arrest as they demanded relief for the people inside the jail. In response to the outcry, Mayor Lyda Krewson arranged for temporary A/C units to be installed. Soon after, older sections of the jail, including the men’s daytime living quarters, were outfitted with what our tour guide refers to as “worms” — heavy white tubes running from outdoor cooling units and attached to windows.It wasn’t just the prisoners who were relieved by the newly cooled-down areas. Guards and jail staff were just as happy. Yet it only took days for the jail to experience the flip side. As another supervisor tells us, some areas of the jail “were like icicles.” Staffers started showing up to work with jackets. Inmates complained as well; one tried to use a broom handle to damage a vent to stop the flow of cold air.Green inquires about the number of inmates serving time on possession charges, and she presses for information about those who cannot afford to pay bonds. Gesturing at the “social work students,” she says we’re studying how the bail system effectively fills prisons with poor people.It’s true, responds the second supervisor. It’s not just drug possession. Some inmates are locked up for failing to pay child support — Missouri law considers it a felony to fall behind on payments by $5,000 — and Green stops her short.“For child support?” repeats the alderwoman, incredulous. “How does that help? If you can’t pay child support, you certainly can’t pay your child support when you’re locked up.”But while the logic is baffling, the law is clear-cut. As our tour guide leads us away from the security office, Green notes, with resignation, that changing the criminal statute would take action in the state legislature.The next two hours find us walking into various pods, dormitories and living spaces. It quickly becomes clear that detainees are desperate to get our attention, to share their complaints. They try both shouting and murmured messages. One woman hisses for attention, then whispers, “This place is hell.” As we depart the women’s pod to make way for dinnertime — the menu tonight is grilled cheese, beans, corn bread and chips — a female prisoner motions at the showers and tells us to watch out for fleas.We’re led to a pod labeled “close observation,” one of three special pods reserved for male detainees who can’t be housed with the general population. The inmates here might suffer from mental illness or depression or require protective custody. A different pod houses those on suicide watch.The “pods” don’t look like a normal cell block. The two-tiered rooms are ringed with heavy metal doors with small windows. Faces are pressed against the glass.Our tour guide takes us to one such cell, on the first floor, and chats with the man inside. He’s left a note stuck to the window, reading, “No rec for 3 days, want to talk to supervisor.”The men on the second floor begin raising bedlam, shouting about mold and roaches and rat bites. One yells, “Don’t listen to the shit they slinging! Shit’s fucked up here!”“Gentlemen, behave,” retorts a nearby guard.Our tour guide estimates that around fifteen percent of inmates require some form of observation or special care. She’s seen suicidal prisoners run up the pod stairwell and leap from the second floor. Working as a correctional officer, she says, takes a sense of duty to impart “care, custody and control” of those in custody.Dinner is not being served in the cafeteria today (too few staff, apparently), and so we are led to the “dayroom” area, where prisoners might be watching TV or just passing the time. Our presence sends dozens of inmates to the windows to gawk at the visitors.Turning a corner, we come face to face with a guard dangling a grilled cheese sandwich in a gloved hand. On a bench sits a detainee with long braids. He's scowling up at the guard and the sandwich.The guard, a well-built middle-aged man, grins at our tour guide. “He took this off a tray — shoplifting!” he says. The guard repeats the charge several times in a singsong, mocking voice. “Shoplifting! Shoplifting!”As we head to a flight of stairs to the second floor, a prisoner shouts at us, “This isn’t a place for human beings.”On the second-floor dorm rooms, we pass through one of the living quarters that’s been upgraded with A/C. Newspaper lines the bed frames beneath mattresses, and prisoners keep what few personal belongings they have — a Bible, a Koran, a bottle of soda, a small radio, a sheaf of hand-written notes — piled on the bed or beneath the small cots.Back on the first floor, we stop in a room full of kitchen workers wearing white uniforms, gloves and head coverings. One man has been here two months on a weapons charge, another ten months. Neither can pay his bond. They’re relative newcomers, and they say that inmates have been known to live here – uncharged and awaiting trial – for more than two years.Amid the crosstalk of inmates’ tales of mold and asbestos, a man with short braids and a clear, impassioned voice quiets the others. He declares that the living conditions will change “when we change ourselves.” He’s jeered and laughed at. “Come on, man,” his peers tell him. He laughs along with them and doesn’t bring it up again. I ask the man about the black mold. “It’s where we live, it’s in our dorm,” he says.As we leave the kitchen workers and make our way back to the entrance, prisoners again crowd the bars and windows separating them from the hallway. Some shout out their sentences. “I’ve been here sixteen months on marijuana,” one says. Another: “I’ve got two kids and a cousin at home.”Despite the repeated claims about black mold and rats, I spot only a few cockroaches in the hallway, though the building, which was built in 1966, is clearly showing its age. Waste and dirt are everywhere. At one point, I see a half-dozen black trash bags lean against a wall, right beneath a paper sign stating: “Please do not pile trash bags in the hallway.”, I ask Green what she took away from the tour. She’d last visited the Workhouse in October 2016. Aside from the newly-installed A/C, she remarks that conditions seem largely unchanged.“When we’re talking about people who are picked up on substance abuse charges, possession charges, and then assigned a $10,000 bond and have to put up ten percent to get out, that’s an extraordinary amount of money,” she says. “It’s an extraordinary amount of strain on our system.”It’s difficult to convey a broken system that most people never get to see up close. The Workhouse rarely grants tours to media. Green says that recent news coverage of the facility during the heat wave convinced her to arrange the undercover trip.“I think it’s important that people who are writing about it, experience it as well,” she says. “So you’re writing from a place of knowledge and not from a place of assumption.” Green concedes that “some people in political power are not going to be happy with me” for sneaking reporters into the jail.But Green also believes that city leaders, particularly the Circuit Attorney’s Office, need to look at reducing bail amounts and reducing the inmate population — a goal also shared by St. Louis mayor Lyda Krewson. People with addictions or mental health issues would be better served by treatment, not jail, Green says. If the city or state deployed resources to provide that treatment, we might not even need places like the Workhouse anymore.“The cycle just keeps going,” Green says, noting that addicts and the mentally ill are frequently re-arrested, shuffled to emergency rooms and then placed back in the Workhouse. “At some point in time we have to say that it’s not working.”At the same time, Green offers praise for the jail staff, especially the supervisors she encountered during the Friday tour.“Their budgets are continually getting cut, both from the city and the state level, and services that were there ten or fifteen years ago just aren’t available anymore,” Green says. “They’re having to get creative in how they’re able to address the mental health issues and substance abuse issues in there.”Green shares a similar goal with anti-incarceration activists and St. Louis Treasurer Tisharua Jones: What the Workhouse really needs, she argues, isn’t expensive upgrades or renovation. It needs to be shut down.Green later explains that she's planning to float a counter-proposal to the bill already proposed in the Board of Aldermen that would place a half-cent sales-tax hike on the November ballot. Green says her proposal would also create a tax hike, but this one would hit business owners with a payroll tax instead of residents. She claims it would raise $10 million more than the current bill.“These funds will transition the Workhouse into a rehabilitation center that helps to end the cycles of mental illness, addition and poverty that keep people coming back to the criminal justice system,” Green writes in an email |
current and projected population trends; geographic range and other symptoms of extinction risk. Species in the latter three groups are collectively referred to as 'threatened'.
To assess the relative prevalence of current hazards to biodiversity, we quantified threat information for 8,688 near-threatened or threatened species belonging to species groups in which all known species have been assessed (for complete list of taxa included, see Supplementary Information).
The basic message emerging from these data is that whatever the threat category or species group, overexploitation and agriculture have the greatest current impact on biodiversity (see 'Big killers').
Of the species listed as threatened or near-threatened, 72% (6,241) are being overexploited for commerce, recreation or subsistence.
The Sumatran rhinoceros (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis), Western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) and Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla, a scaly mammal), for instance, are all illegally hunted as a result of high market demand for their body parts and meat. These are just three of the more than 2,700 species affected by hunting or fishing, or by people collecting live specimens for the pet trade. At the same time, unsustainable logging is contributing to the decline of more than 4,000 forest-dependent species, such as the Bornean wren-babbler (Ptilocichla leucogrammica), India's Nicobar shrew (Crocidura nicobarica), and the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus strykeri).
The expansion and intensification of agricultural activity is imperilling 5,407 species — 62% of those listed as threatened or near-threatened. Africa's cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), Asia's hairy-nosed otter (Lutra sumatrana) and South America's huemul deer (Hippocamelus bisulcus) are among more than 2,300 species affected by livestock farming and aquaculture. And the Fresno kangaroo rat (Dipodomys nitratoides) and the African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) are two of more than 4,600 species currently under threat from land modification associated with the production of food, fodder or fuel crops.
Meanwhile, anthropogenic climate change — including increases in storms, flooding, extreme temperatures or drought that exceed background variability, as well as sea-level rise — is currently affecting 19% of species listed as threatened or near-threatened. Hooded seals (Cystophora cristata) are among the 1,688 species affected. These have dropped in abundance by 90% in the northeastern Atlantic Arctic over the past few decades as a result of extensive declines in regional sea ice, and so in the availability of sites for resting and raising pups.
Data limitations
There are three obvious difficulties in interpreting the Red List data.
First, the patterns we report here do not necessarily extend to taxonomic groups that haven't been monitored. The comprehensively assessed groups included here are not a random sample from the tree of life1, but those that are generally better-studied. All known bird species have been assessed, for instance. But information on extinction risk has been gathered for only some 0.1% of the more than 50,000 species of fungi thought to exist.
A second potential limitation of our analysis is that it treats threats as discrete when, in fact, hazards rarely affect organisms in isolation. Agriculture is a major driver of greenhouse-gas emissions, for example. And new roads to enable agricultural expansion can increase bush-meat harvesting, the incidence of forest fires and habitat fragmentation2. In fact, more than 80% of the species included in our analysis are affected by more than one major threat.
“Climate change will become an increasingly dominant problem in the biodiversity crisis.”
Finally, the balance of threats driving extinction risk for many of the world's species will change, even over the next few decades3. For Red List assessments, the impacts of future threats (including climate change) in reducing a species' population size are projected across three generations or over a ten-year period — whichever is longer. Hence, unless the species being assessed is long-lived (with an expected lifespan of 30–50 years, say), projections cover a period during which the effects of climate change, in particular, will be relatively modest.
Yet we do not think that any of these caveats alter the overall message. Because agricultural activity and overexploitation tend to occur in fertile places with naturally high levels of biodiversity4, the patterns emerging from our analysis probably extend to many of the other species that have not yet been assessed. Also, until a better understanding is obtained of how threats act additively, synergistically or antagonistically, a pragmatic course of action is to limit those impacts that are currently harming the most species5. Finally, studies have shown Red List categorizations reflecting projected extinction risk from climate change to be more robust than was previously thought6.
What next?
Of all the plant, amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal species that have gone extinct since AD 1500, 75% were harmed by overexploitation or agricultural activity or both (often in combination with the introduction of invasive alien species7). Climate change will become an increasingly dominant problem in the biodiversity crisis3. But human development and population growth mean that the impacts of overexploitation and agricultural expansion will also increase.
The aim of the World Conservation Congress is to translate sustainable development and carbon neutrality agreements into action. We urge delegates to focus on proposing and funding actions that prioritize the biggest current threats to biodiversity.
Thankfully, there are effective tools and approaches to alleviate harm caused by overexploitation and agricultural activities8. These include the development and governance of sustainable harvest regimes; the enforcement of hunting regulations and no-take marine protected areas; the maintenance of international policy mechanisms; such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species; and public education (for instance, on where ivory comes from) to reduce demand. Also powerful are the establishment of protected areas to safeguard key biodiversity areas9; the management of agricultural systems in ways that allow threatened species to persist within them; the regulation of pesticide and fertilizer use; the certification of agricultural sustainability; and the reduction of food waste, for example, using urban food-transfer programmes.
Crucially, ensuring that overexploitation and agricultural activities today do not compromise ecosystems tomorrow will help to ameliorate the challenges presented by impending climate change. Healthy ecosystems are better repositories for carbon. They are also more likely to provide the physical connectivity and genetic diversity needed to enable species to adapt to the large shifts in climate expected later this century10.
Conservationists, weary of tackling herculean, long-standing problems, could be forgiven for being drawn to newer ones. Nonetheless, we appeal to all concerned with the sustainability of life on Earth to take stock of the current balance of threats — and refocus their efforts on the enemies of old.There will be no ninth season for Emmy-winning series Regular Show. Cartoon Network said the series’ eighth season, set to debut on September 26, will be its last.
Regular Show, from creator and executive producer JG Quintel, has followed the lives of best friends and groundskeepers Mordecai (voiced by Quintel) and Rigby (William Salyers) whose lazy afternoon escapades are interrupted by misadventures with their gang of friends. Season eight will present the ultimate intergalactic battle of good versus evil as Mordecai and Rigby are joined by Pops, Benson, Muscle Man (all voiced by Sam Marin) and Skips (Mark Hamill).
“From JG’s original pitch on post-it notes, through eight successful seasons and more than 250 episodes produced, Regular Show has been one of the most original animated series of this generation creating indelible characters and signature comedy mayhem laced with heart,” said Cartoon Network chief content officer Rob Sorcher. “Our sincere thanks to this talented crew and cast for their incredible dedication, and I’m proud that they all agreed to go up in space together for one hilarious final journey.”
“Making Regular Show has been so much fun, added Quintel. “We got to tell all of the stories we wanted to tell, and making the choice to go out exactly how we want to go out. We’re so proud and excited for people to see how we’re wrapping things up in a big, big way. We’re bringing everything full circle.”
Regular Show began as a project by Quintel during his time as a student at CalArts, and was the first series to be greenlit from Cartoon Network Studio’s award-winning Artists Program in 2008. One of the studio’s longest-running series, Regular Show won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Short-Format Animated Program in 2012 for “Eggscellent,” and has been nominated for five Emmys since its debut. The series also spawned a feature-length film, Regular Show: The Movie, which premiered on Cartoon Network in 2015.
Here’s a clip from Season 8’s premiere episode.Hackers today claimed to have crashed the MasterCard website in revenge for the firm suspending services to whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.
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.
Anonymous, understood to be a loose-knit group of internet activists, tweeted: "We are glad to tell you that http://www.mastercard.com is down and it's confirmed."
Another message read: "There are some things WikiLeaks can't do. For everything else, there's Operation Payback."
Mastercard was not immediately available to comment but repeated attempts to load the site met without success.
So-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks also appeared to have been launched against PayPal, PostFinance, and the Swedish prosecutors office.
"We can confirm that there was an attempted DDoS attack on paypal.com," a spokeswoman said.
"The attack slowed some payments down for a short while but we remained fully operational throughout."
DDoS attacks, which are illegal in the UK, involve overloading a website with requests so it stops working.
"While we don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons," the Anonymous group said in a statement on its website.
"We want transparency and we counter censorship... This is why we intend to utilise our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy."
The WikiLeaks website has itself been hampered by repeated denial of service attacks and the withdrawal of services from banks and websites.
WikiLeaks relies on online donations from a worldwide network of supporters to fund its work but Visa and MasterCard yesterday suspended all payments to the whistle-blowing site..
On Monday, the Swiss post office's bank, PostFinance, shut accounts opened by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange containing a defence fund and personal cash of 31,000 euro (£26,000).
Spokesman Alex Josty said the bank's website buckled under a barrage of traffic yesterday but the onslaught seemed to have eased off.
"Yesterday it was very, very difficult, then things improved overnight. But it's still not entirely back to normal," he said.
The website for Swedish lawyer Claes Borgstrom, who represents the two women at the centre of Assange's sex crimes case, was also unreachable today.
On Saturday it emerged online payments processor PayPal had cut access for donations to WikiLeaks, with the company saying its payment service cannot be used for activities "that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity".
The company providing WikiLeaks with its domain name, EveryDNS.net, also cut off service because the domain wikileaks.org was repeatedly attacked.
WikiLeaks staff complained of a series of denial of service attacks, in which thousands of computers request information at the same time.
Online store Amazon stopped hosting the site last week saying WikiLeaks did not own or control the rights to the classified content it was publishing.
WikiLeaks has said it has lost assets worth 100,000 euro (£84,000) in a week as a result of the moves to end agreements with PayPal and other companies.
Founder Julian Assange was refused bail yesterday by a London court pending an extradition case over alleged sexual assaults in Sweden.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowUPDATE: Lawyer found dead
RARITAN -- A borough attorney has been accused of allegedly offering to represent female clients at a reduce rate in exchange for sexual favors, according to the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office.
Richard P. Schubach, 58, of Stockton was arrested and charged with three counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual contact after he allegedly propositioned a female undercover detective in a sting operation, according to a news release issued Monday.
In December, the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office received information that Schubach allegedly offered some of his female clients a reduced price for his legal fees in exchange for sexual favors, authorities stated.
On Jan. 28, law enforcement sent a female undercover detective to his law office located at 1124 Route 202 in Raritan to discuss a criminal matter she was facing, according to authorities.
At their first meeting, Schubach told her to return the next day with further documentation about the criminal matter. Prior to her leaving his office, he allegedly asked her to wear something "pretty" for their next meeting, authorities said.
N.J. man found not guilty of sexual assault
During a meeting the next day, Schubach allegedly approached the detective as she sat in a chair and without permission or prompting, placed his hand on and under her blouse and began fondling her breast, authorities said.
After briefly stepping away he reportedly again placed his hand on her breast and placed his hand on her inner thigh, authorities said.
Afterwards, the undercover detective stood up and said to Schubach, "I don't like this" and attempted to leave his office. As she attempted to leave, Schubach allegedly asked her to "hold on" and as she exited his office, proceeded to expose her right breast and place his mouth over it, authorities stated.
Before she left the building, Schubach is alleged to have asked her to turn around to face him and he lifted up her skirt, according to authorities.
Schubach was arrested at the scene and was released after posting $2,500 bail with a 10 percent option.
This isn't Schubach's first brush with unethical conduct. Since being admitted to the state bar in 1983, he has been disciplined three times by the state Supreme Court, including two 90-day suspensions.
The allegations include failure to perform diligently on his client's behalf, misconduct in a personal real estate transaction with his then-girlfriend and using her funds in personal business transactions and engaging in conduct involving fraud, deceit, dishonesty or misrepresentation.
The investigation into this latest allegation is ongoing and authorities are asking anyone with information to contact the Somerset County Prosecutors Office Special Investigation Unit at 908- 231-7100, or the Somerset County Crime Stoppers' Tip Line at 1-888-577-8477 or online at www.888577tips.org or www.scpo.net and click on either "Crime Stoppers" or "TIPS HOTLINE". All anonymous Crime Stopper tips will be kept confidential.
Dave Hutchinson may be reached at dhutchinson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DHutch_SL. Find NJ.com on Facebook.IN OCTOBER claims surfaced that Victor Bogado, a Paraguayan senator, had arranged two lucrative public jobs for his children’s nanny. A few weeks later 23 of his peers—a majority—voted against stripping him of the immunity from criminal proceedings that Paraguayan legislators enjoy. Instead of going unnoticed in a country where political clientelism has long been the norm, the story sparked outrage. Restaurants, petrol stations and beauty salons in the capital, Asunción, put up signs naming the “23 shameless rats”, and barring them as customers. Two weeks later a senate committee overruled the vote for immunity.
The case of the “golden nanny” is part of a wider citizen revolt against political corruption. In October the Supreme Court ruled that Daniel Vargas, a radio host, had the right to know the names and salaries of municipal employees. Six years earlier listeners had asked him to investigate; he went to court after being stonewalled. Without public pressure the Supreme Court would never have dared to move against Congress, says his lawyer, Benjamín Fernández. Rather than obliging citizens to seek the information piecemeal, Paraguay’s new president, Horacio Cartes (pictured above), told public bodies to publish it, though many are dragging their feet.
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Mr Cartes, a tobacco magnate, is a political neophyte who only joined the Colorado party in order to run for office in April’s general election. The Colorados held power for 60 years, 35 as a notoriously corrupt dictatorship, before losing in 2008 to Fernando Lugo, a former bishop whose left-Liberal alliance promised to redistribute land and cut poverty. In power Mr Lugo turned out to be weak and politically inept. After an unfairly abrupt, though constitutional, impeachment his Liberal vice-president, Federico Franco, replaced him in 2012. Lacking a strong internal candidate, the Colorados plumped for Mr Cartes.
Many assumed the new president would be his party’s puppet. Does his support for the anti-corruption fight show that the Colorados got more than they bargained for? On taking office in August, Mr Cartes named technically able outsiders to his cabinet and passed a fiscal-responsibility law limiting budget growth to 4% above inflation and the deficit to no more than 1.5% of GDP. Since most spending goes on wages, that will squeeze patronage.
A new law will allow the executive to auction infrastructure concessions without having to get approval from Congress, where the Colorado old guard holds sway. Some waterways should be auctioned in months, says José Molinas, a former World Bank official who is now minister of planning. Landlocked Paraguay relies on rivers to get its vast soya and beef exports to market. Intercity roads will follow. A law providing for disputes between government and concession-holders to be settled by international arbitration is planned for 2014.
The economy is predicted to have grown by 13.6% in 2013. But that is mainly because of a bumper soya harvest after drought saw GDP shrink by 1.2% in 2012. Paraguay is one of South America’s most unequal countries. A third of its people are poor and 18% extremely so, while 6% of farms occupy 85% of farmland. Though Mr Lugo failed to reform landholding, partly because of opposition in Congress, he did introduce modest handouts for the poorest. Mr Franco brought in an income tax, albeit at just 10% for the highest earners.
Mr Cartes, too, promises to cut poverty and create a fairer society. But his plans rely less on redistribution than on wooing foreign capital. He has ceaselessly plugged the opportunities offered by the coming infrastructure auctions, Paraguay’s abundant land, cheap labour, light-touch regulation—and, of course, low taxes. He vetoed a levy on the export of soyabeans, the economy’s mainstay. A rise in land taxes is the only one planned. He sometimes strikes an off-key note, as when he told Uruguayan businessmen that Paraguay aimed to be easy, like a beautiful woman.
But he has swiftly restored ties with Mercosur, a regional bloc from which Paraguay was suspended after the ousting of Mr Lugo. Mr Cartes has secured its readmission, partly by persuading Congress to ratify Venezuela’s admission to the group (which had occurred, in dubious fashion, when Paraguay was suspended). “It’s in Paraguay’s interests to be back inside Mercosur,” he says. “I don’t want to waste my presidency on fights.”
In Brazil strident calls for land reform faded when growth boosted jobs and salaries in cities. But even if Mr Cartes’s brand of trickle-down economics shows promise, many obstacles remain. Paraguay lacks the skilled workers to build all the promised infrastructure. And the Colorado old guard will surely regroup. “They are giving me time,” says Mr Cartes. “If I deliver results it’ll be fine.” He is counting on people power and openness to maintain momentum. “People get used to things getting better. If you give them improvements they won’t want to go back.”A majority of resident-hall advisers at Western Washington University have sent a letter to the university alleging the department that oversees them is doing a poor job of running the program.
Nearly three-quarters of the resident-hall advisers at Western Washington University have signed a letter alleging the university has done a poor job of leading the adviser program and has mishandled or discounted issues raised by the student employees.
Resident advisers, or RAs, are students who live in the university-owned residence halls and are paid to work as peer advisers, troubleshooters and problem-solvers for students living in the dorms.
The student letter, signed by 53 of the 72 RAs, sums up issues in the WWU department known as University Residences. In their letter, the students wrote of “sexually charged incidents,” poor security in some of the halls and a lack of training for RAs.
In an email, WWU President Sabah Randhawa told the students he took their concerns seriously, and that he was asking Leonard Jones, the director of University Residences, to respond.
Student Wayne Rocque, the vice president for student life in WWU student government, said Jones’ letter didn’t satisfy the RAs’ concerns because many of the complaints stem from Jones’ management of the office, and that students have raised these issues on a number of occasions, without getting a resolution to the problems.
In a letter addressing the RAs’ concerns, Jones expressed regret that students “feel disconnected and untrusting” of the staff, and said he would redouble efforts to bridge “the current perceived and real divides.” Jones invited RAs to a meeting on Thursday to discuss the issues.
In one case, students say, a felon entered a resident adviser’s room in Highland Hall and was found wearing her clothes. In their letter, the students say they were told not to share any details of the incident, and that there was no effort to make the dorm more secure by installing an external gate.
In his response, Jones wrote that Western made an arrest in the case and issued a campuswide alert. He said he would evaluate the safety situation at Highland Hall.
The students said they routinely exceed the 19 hours a week of work the job calls for, and that the adviser-to-resident ratio varies widely — with some students having as few as 27 residents to advise, and others having as many as 68.
In his letter, Jones says he has begun a systemic review of RA compensation.In 1972, on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, Pope Paul VI delivered a sermon that startled the world. Describing the chaos then consuming the post-conciliar Church, he lamented : “From some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”
Paul’s words were a warning to all who, taken with the “spirit of Vatican II”—rather than the Council’s actual teachings—had fallen under the sway of dark spirits. But Catholic dissidents didn’t want to be criticized, much less told they might be assisting the devil. So they struck back”with sarcasm, ridicule and contempt. One of Paul’s biographers describes their reaction:
Cartoonists refurbished their stock of clichés, producing cloven hoofs, long sinuous tails, ugly contorted faces and terrifying implements of torture. For the cartoonists Paul VI was definitely not a modern man.
Neither, as we’ve come to learn, is Pope Francis—if by “modern” we mean an abandonment of the supernatural, and a flight from Christianity’s most challenging teachings. Like his venerable predecessor, Francis has made it a point to draw the world’s attention to the wiles of the devil. But whereas Paul waited nearly ten years to speak so dramatically about Satan, Francis took only a day.
Within twenty-four hours of being elected, the new pope declared : “When one does not profess Jesus Christ—I recall the phrase of Leon Bloy—‘Whoever does not pray to God, prays to the devil.’” The following day, Francis continued : “Let us never give in to pessimism, to that bitterness that the devil tempts us with every day.” In his homily for Palm Sunday, he spoke of problems which appear insurmountable: “In this moment the enemy, the devil, comes, often disguised as an angel, and slyly speaks his word to us. Do not listen to him!”
In July, Francis consecrated Vatican City State to St. Michael, the Archangel, who “defends the People of God from their enemies, and above all from the arch-enemy par excellence, the devil.” And in early October, Francis powerfully rebuked those who deny the existence of Satan, warning against relativism, deceit, and “the seduction of evil.”
Striking as his words are, they are not surprising. During his formation as a Jesuit, Jorge Bergoglio adopted the intense spirituality of St. Ignatius, who always recognized the reality of spiritual warfare. In On Heaven and Earth, his 2010 book with his friend, Rabbi Abraham Skorka, the then Cardinal Bergoglio spoke of the devil in the starkest terms: “He is the tempter, the one that looks to destroy the work of God, he that brings us to self-sufficiency, to pride. Jesus defines him as the father of lies.”
Contending with the devil, he continued, “is precisely man’s battle on earth.” That same year, Cardinal Bergolio rose to publicly challenge Argentina’s move to redefine marriage:
At stake is the total rejection of God’s law engraved in our hearts. Let us not be naïve: this is not simply a political struggle, but it is an attempt to destroy God’s plan. It is not just a bill (a mere instrument) but a “move” of the father of lies who seeks to confuse and deceive the children of God.
President Cristina Kirchner, who pushed hard for the radical legislation, responded : “Bergoglio’s position is medieval.” But truth is objective and not time-conditioned, so Bergoglio’s defense of marriage stands.
During the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the devil was by no means downplayed: John Paul’s Catechism highlights his presence, and Benedict was inveighing against Satan long before he became pope, notably in the Ratzinger Report. But Francis has taken the subject to a new level. He has three very clear ideas about humanity’s struggle against Satan.
The first is that no one should ever use the devil to excuse scandal, immorality, and criminal behavior—as has sometimes happened in the Church. The faithful Christian always accepts personal responsibility, and understands that the devil can never force us to do anything against our will. He tempts, he misleads, he brings us to the point of danger, but in the final analysis, it is our choice whether to succumb to evil or not.
The second principle is never to allow our fight against Satan to end dialogue with our opponents. Back in May, Francis proclaimed, “You cannot dialogue with the prince of the world,” and his statement immediately provoked questions: How can we improve anything in a conflicted world, if we demonize our opponents and summarily end dialogue with them? But that’s not what Francis said, in context. In the very next sentence, he stressed the importance of dialogue, which is “necessary for peace.” What he meant by warning us never to dialogue with the devil is never to sacrifice ultimate truth when meeting with our opponents—not that we shouldn’t search for common ground, or try to win hearts for Christ.
The third principle is to be on constant guard against the devil, never assume we cannot sin like those we are trying to correct, and ask ourselves some pointed questions:
Do I guard myself, my heart, my feelings, my thoughts? Do I guard the treasure of grace? Do I guard the presence of the Holy Spirit in me? Or do I let go, feeling secure, believing that all is going well? But if you do not guard yourself, he who is stronger than you will come.
On all these points, says Francis, “there are no nuances. There is a battle and a battle where salvation is at play, eternal salvation.”
Those who support Francis’ exhortations should follow his lead, knowing they will meet resistance. Sin, evil, temptation, the devil, eternal judgment—these are not topics the modern world wants to discuss, or even that many Christians do. When Archbishop Chaput addressed the reality of Satan a few years ago, he called out the “many religious leaders” who were “embarrassed to talk about the devil” and spiritual warfare. Doing so invites charges of harboring irrational, superstitious, even dangerous beliefs. But the real peril is the denial of evil that began with Satan, and is still being fomented by his legions. “I believe that the devil exists,” Francis told Rabbi Skorka. “Maybe his greatest achievement in these times has been to make us believe that he does not exist.”
We need to keep driving that message home. For as Pope Francis keeps reminding us, until the Lord returns in his full triumph and glory, the smoke of Satan is here to stay.
William Doino Jr. is a contributor to Inside the Vatican magazine, among many other publications, and writes often about religion, history and politics. He contributed an extensive bibliography of works on Pius XII to The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII. His previous “On the Square” articles can be found here.
Become a fan of First Things on Facebook, subscribe to First Things via RSS, and follow First Things on Twitter.Yemenis gather near the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi airstrikes near the airport in Sanaa. (Hani Mohammed/AP)
The CIA’s drone base in the rippled surface of the Saudi Arabian desert has undergone major renovations over the past few years. Satellite imagery shows dozens of additions that appear to include living quarters, a new clamshell hangar for hiding aircraft and neat rows of freshly planted palm trees.
That base is one of the few components of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism campaign in Yemen that remain intact.
Agency and U.S. military personnel have been pulled out of Yemen amid escalating sectarian violence in recent weeks. Elite Yemeni units that the United States trained to hunt al-Qaeda have been scrambled by the government’s collapse. And millions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-provided military equipment has been destroyed in a span of days by Saudi airstrikes aimed at rendering those arms useless to the Iran-backed rebels who control the capital.
The vacuum, U.S. officials say, appears to have allowed al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to focus on rebuilding its strength after years of U.S. drone strikes against its leaders. A prison break in eastern Yemen on Thursday freed as many as 300 inmates — including a senior AQAP leader — in an operation seen as part of a broader effort by the group to shore up its ranks.
U.S. officials said that the CIA’s armed drones are still flying over Yemen, prepared to launch strikes against AQAP members. Officials also insisted that U.S. intelligence support to the Saudi air campaign has not diverted resources from tracking the group.
But the counterterrorism fight has gone from the most active battlefront in Yemen to a secondary conflict, swallowed up by a civil war that is serving as a proxy for a broader regional struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The United States has not carried out a drone strike in Yemen since mid-February, when Houthi rebels formally declared their takeover of the government. The drone campaign has been characterized by such pauses for several years, but U.S. officials said that they are likely to become more common and lengthy as ground-level intelligence missions in the country grind to a halt.
“With the deterioration in security, and a diminution in counterterrorism cooperation, the pressure has been taken off AQAP,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “We still obviously have intelligence in Yemen,” he said, “but we’re more reliant on our overhead assets.”
The chaos would appear to give AQAP a major opening, a chance to ramp up terrorist plotting against the West while also asserting itself as the defender of Sunni Muslims across Yemen who are threatened by advancing Shiite-dominated Houthi militias.
Before the Thursday prison raid, though, AQAP had been relatively inactive. Aside from claiming credit for a series of small-scale attacks against Houthi fighters — who see Sunni-dominated al-Qaeda as an adversary — the group has avoided exposure to more direct confrontations or lingering American drones.
“The initial evidence is actually that the Houthi advance has caused [AQAP’s] external plotting to be sidelined while they figure out how they’re going to deal with... what appears to be an emerging civil war,” said a senior U.S. military official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
For now, the United States and al-Qaeda are in oddly similar positions of warily assessing the course of the unfolding war in Yemen and the impact of that conflict on their abilities to proceed.
1 of 65 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Militia loyal to former president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi take positions along a street in Aden, Yemen, on Thursday. View Photos The campaign, with a coalition of Arab nations, is an effort to dislodge Houthi rebels sweeping through Yemen. Caption The campaign, with a coalition of Arab nations, is an effort to dislodge Houthi rebels sweeping through Yemen. April 4, 2015 Yemenis search for survivors in the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi-led airstrikes in a village near the capital city of Sanaa, Yemen. Since their advance began last year, the Shiite rebels, known as Houthis, have overrun Sanaa and several provinces. Hani Mohammed/AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
“The [U.S.] counterterrorism strategy has been kicked aside for a while,” said Khaled Fattah, a Yemen expert, adding that he expects AQAP to become increasingly involved in fighting the Houthis, especially in the country’s southern and eastern provinces.
U.S. officials continue to see AQAP as posing the most direct danger to the United States, even amid the rise of new terrorist groups including the Islamic State. Al-Qaeda’s Yemen franchise was linked to the attacks in Paris in January as well as to previous attempts to detonate bombs on U.S.-bound aircraft.
The CIA’s airstrip in Saudi Arabia has been a critical hub in the U.S. assault on AQAP, serving as a base for remotely piloted aircraft that have carried out dozens of strikes, including one that killed the U.S.-born al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011.
Satellite images show that the remote facility has undergone significant expansion since then, underscoring its importance to a campaign whose reliance on U.S. technical prowess has defined President Obama’s counterterrorism approach.
But other aspects of that strategy — including the U.S. dependence on local security forces to shoulder on-the-ground risk — have unraveled since its most staunch supporter in Yemen, former president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, was forced from office and then fled the country.
Administration officials have sought to play down the damage to U.S. capabilities. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said late last month that while instability in Yemen “does not enhance our counterterrorism efforts... we continue to have significant counterterrorism resources and abilities.”
Current and former U.S. officials said the American ability to find drone targets hinged on other streams of intelligence that have been disrupted, if not severed, amid Yemen’s downward spiral. Among the most critical sources of intelligence for the airstrikes was a network of informants established and run by Saudi Arabia, whose security services are presumably preoccupied with finding Houthi targets for the kingdom’s fighter jets.
“The human contact that allows intelligence to be exquisitely defined is now lacking,” the senior U.S. military official said. “Our other forms of intelligence remain available to us — it’s just a diminished capacity.”
In a measure of how chaos has confused battle lines, Saudi Arabia and AQAP — each committed to the other’s destruction — are now focused on a common enemy in the Houthi rebels.
AQAP has not condemned Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the conflict, according to Yemen experts who see the group’s silence as an indication that its leaders believe they stand to gain from the Saudi strikes.
By contrast, AQAP denounced a pair of mosque bombings aimed at Houthis last month by militants claiming ties to the Islamic State, a rival group also known as ISIS that has declared itself the head of a restored caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
The prison break Thursday, in which heavily armed fighters poured out of a pickup truck, was both a brazen move by AQAP to replenish its ranks and a sign of how completely security in the country has collapsed. The operation also echoed the origin of AQAP, which was launched in 2006 when 23 fighters escaped a Saudi prison. Among them was Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the group’s longtime leader and now al-Qaeda’s second in command.
Counterterrorism experts said that AQAP may feel pressure to consolidate its position in Yemen before asserting itself militarily but is unlikely to abandon its commitment to plots against the United States.
“I think the interesting question now is how much does AQAP reorient itself toward fighting the Houthis,” said Daniel Benjamin, a professor at Dartmouth who previously served as the top counterterrorism official at the State Department. Benjamin said AQAP may feel compelled “to try to crowd out ISIS in Yemen before ISIS becomes a powerful reality there.”
Hugh Naylor in Sanaa and Missy Ryan in Washington contributed to this report.
Read more:
Yemen’s Houthi rebels get boost from country’s ousted dictator
How the Yemen conflict risks new chaos in the Middle East
Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the worldTriple Giving Tuesday is Coming Soon
We are thrilled to announce we will once again celebrate #GivingTuesday as Triple Giving Tuesday. Jack and Dilla Cosgrove and Family have generously pledged up to $100,000 to triple your support for research.
If you give $250, the Cosgrove family will match $750 and your gift will be worth $1,000. WOW!
We are tremendously grateful to the Cosgrove Family and encourage you to donate to our Triple Giving Tuesday campaign. The campaign will begin on Tuesday, October 17 and will continue through Tuesday, November 28. (Photo Jack Cosgrove, Dilla Cos |
charities such as World Vision. Many of its students have been deliberately selected from remote villages.
But if Herat is hit by violence, the families are likely to take their daughters out of school and take them home to safety.
A deterioration in the security situation would likely hit pregnant women as well as midwife training.
Transporting women in labour from rural areas to clinics is already a tough proposition in a country where few can afford cars and roads are scarce and badly maintained. It will become still harder if gunmen have freer rein to target travellers.
The re-emergence in political life of groups like the Taliban, which banned education and the free movement of women, could also have a devastating effect on death rates.
Under their influence, a generation of potential female midwives and doctors has already been lost, midwife trainers say. This is particularly devastating in a country where male doctors treating women is still largely taboo.
PLUGGING THE GAP
But as big a problem for Afghanistan is money. The Afghan government is facing a $7 billion hole in its budget after 2014, which it will need to pay for security and other services. It is relying on foreign help to plug that gap.
The grinding poverty in which many women live means hygiene and nutrition are often poor. A recent survey showed only around half of Afghans have access to clean drinking water, and only a fifth use approved toilet and sanitation facilities.
The IHS’ deputy director, Dr Ehrary, says money is a major stumbling block to completing the five further rounds of midwife training he calculates are needed to provide a base number of healthcare professionals in the region.
“Training is not difficult, but finding funds is difficult,” he says. The institute is struggling to train this year’s government-recommended quota of midwives to the right standard.
“We told the ministry we could not run the class this year because we have only three teachers and we cannot meet their standards,” he added. “They have now been funded. We found another donor, (German humanitarian group) Cap Anamur.”
Slideshow (3 Images)
If meetings like the Bonn conference fail to deliver a plan for action on poverty and some kind of roadmap to stability, the fragile gains in maternal healthcare could easily slip away.
In rural Herat, villagers say they are determined to stop that happening. After decades of upheaval and war, they are tired of death and violence and want a safer future.
“Everybody hopes there will be no more war in Afghanistan,” says one senior shura, or village council, member from rural Herat. “The first thing we want is safety, the second is to improve people’s health. We need doctors — we need midwives.”We’ve taken refuge in an unoccupied corner of the local ruins for the night. The water here seems clean enough for drinking, and I even jumped in myself for a bit, once I was sure the area was safe.
Sam’s not doing so well. They’re suffering from the sickness – growing weak, losing hair. My parents told me that that didn’t really happen before the end – that people got sick, but you could usually figure out the source; that there were vast buildings and dedicated, brilliant healers who could help you. But for Sam all we can do is get them some extra water and let them rest a bit more. I don’t know how much longer we can keep them with us, though, if we want to keep moving.
I heard a story – I’m not sure if it’s true – but I heard a story of a man from the east named Stanislav Petrov, who said that he could have stopped it all from happening. There was a country called Russia, one of the two great powers that ended the world, and they had appointed the man to watch for incoming attacks. The thinking, at the time, was that if each power threatened to destroy the world if attacked, everyone would be completely safe.
(I’m not sure I can believe all these stories. What kind of civilization would have vast structures dedicated solely to healing people *and* have their greatest powers decide that destroying the world is a way to stay safe?)
And Stanislav saw what could have been an attack, using the runes and powers afforded him. And it was his sworn duty to report what he saw, so that the rulers could make good on their promise to end the world in the name of safety. He says, I’m told, he now says that he considered keeping the information to himself, to report that he had seen no attack and that everything should just continue on as before – but that he ultimately could not disobey the orders he had sworn to follow. He comforted himself with the thought that he had only done what he promised, what was right, and that whatever happened next would be someone else’s fault. And so the era of the civilizations ended, and lives beyond measure were lost.
I wonder, sometimes, what life would have been like if he hadn’t done that. If he simply lied to his superiors about the runes, so that the world could continue. I wonder what it would be like i there were still whole buildings full knowledgeable healers, and clean water that could manifest inside your home. If the people of that world would ever realize that their continued dream-like existence was enabled by this one man’s lie. If they learned of it, how would they celebrate it?
As I dream, I imagine a solemn day of silence, for what almost was. Or perhaps a day of reflection on the importance of defiance when it *really* matters. Or maybe just a day of celebrating their ongoing, charmed existence.
I don’t dream too long though. The days are getting shorter, and we have to make the most use of the light we have left. For that is the reality we live in, and not the dream world that almost was.
(Happy Stanislav Petrov Day)Pictures have emerged of Jeremy Corbyn quietly paying his respects to WWII veterans on Remembrance Sunday.
On the same day that the Labour leader was widely criticised for showing disrespect for apparently not bowing properly, the images show Mr Corbyn stood next to the railings applauding as veterans march past at the Cenotaph in central London.
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Tim Brown, an Ashfield Labour Cabinet member, tweeted a picture of Mr Corbyn with a number of veterans after the service, claiming: “Jeremy Corbyn went up to Horseguards to meet/talk with WW2 veterans while the other politicians went for VIP lunch”.
Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: Remembrance Sunday Show all 15 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: Remembrance Sunday 1/15 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and British Prime Minister David Cameron attend the annual Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph on Whitehall, in London 2/15 Prince Harry and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge attend the annual Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph on Whitehall, in London Getty Images 3/15 Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during the Remembrance Sunday ceremony at the Cenotaph in London EPA 4/15 (L-R) Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, the Duchess of Cambridge, Queen Maxima of the Netherlands and the Countess of Wessex during the annual Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph memorial in Whitehall, central London PA 5/15 Former Labour party Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair during the annual Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph memorial in Whitehall, London, held in tribute for members of the armed forces who have died in major conflicts PA 6/15 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn lays a wreath after speaking at at Royal Northern Gardens in Islington, in London Getty Images 7/15 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn shares a joke with veterans after laying a wreath and speaking at a war memorial at Royal Northern Gardens in Islington, in London Getty Images 8/15 Falling poppies are projected onto Parliament's Elizabeth Tower also known as 'Big Ben' to mark Remembrance Sunday in London 9/15 Wreaths lay at the base of the war memorial at Royal Wootton Bassett, where remembrance Sunday parade is taking place PA 10/15 The "Last Post" is played before a minutes silence in honour of Remembrance Sunday ahead of the Aviva Premiership match at the Ricoh Arena, Coventry PA 11/15 Members of the Armed Forces parade during the Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph in London EPA 12/15 Brass section players lead the parade along the High Street at Royal Wootton Bassett, where remembrance Sunday wreath laying is taking place at the war memorial PA 13/15 The sun breaks through the clouds behind a statue as both serving and former commandos gather during the Commando Memorial Service commemorate and pay respect to the sacrifice of service men and women who fought in the two World Wars and subsequent conflicts on November 8, 2015 in Spean Bridge, Scotland. People across the UK will gather to pay tribute to service personnel who have died during conflicts, as part of the annual Remembrance Sunday ceremonies Getty Images 14/15 Members of Scotland's armed forces and veterans stand together as they commemorate and pay respect to the sacrifice of service men and women who fought in the two World Wars and subsequent conflicts, in Fort William, Scotland Getty Images 15/15 1/15 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and British Prime Minister David Cameron attend the annual Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph on Whitehall, in London 2/15 Prince Harry and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge attend the annual Remembrance Sunday Service at the Cenotaph on Whitehall, in London Getty Images 3/15 Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during the Remembrance Sunday ceremony at the Cenotaph in London EPA 4/15 (L-R) Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, the Duchess of Cambridge, Queen Maxima of the Netherlands and the Countess of Wessex during the annual Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph memorial in Whitehall, central London PA 5/15 Former Labour party Prime Ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair during the annual Remembrance Sunday service at the Cenotaph memorial in Whitehall, London, held in tribute for members of the armed forces who have died in major conflicts PA 6/15 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn lays a wreath after speaking at at Royal Northern Gardens in Islington, in London Getty Images 7/15 Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn shares a joke with veterans after laying a wreath and speaking at a war memorial at Royal Northern Gardens in Islington, in London Getty Images 8/15 Falling poppies are projected onto Parliament's Elizabeth Tower also known as 'Big Ben' to mark Remembrance Sunday in London 9/15 Wreaths lay at the base of the war memorial at Royal Wootton Bassett, where remembrance Sunday parade is taking place PA 10/15 The "Last Post" is played before a minutes silence in honour of Remembrance Sunday ahead of the Aviva Premiership match at the Ricoh Arena, Coventry PA 11/15 Members of the Armed Forces parade during the Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph in London EPA 12/15 Brass section players lead the parade along the High Street at Royal Wootton Bassett, where remembrance Sunday wreath laying is taking place at the war memorial PA 13/15 The sun breaks through the clouds behind a statue as both serving and former commandos gather during the Commando Memorial Service commemorate and pay respect to the sacrifice of service men and women who fought in the two World Wars and subsequent conflicts on November 8, 2015 in Spean Bridge, Scotland. People across the UK will gather to pay tribute to service personnel who have died during conflicts, as part of the annual Remembrance Sunday ceremonies Getty Images 14/15 Members of Scotland's armed forces and veterans stand together as they commemorate and pay respect to the sacrifice of service men and women who fought in the two World Wars and subsequent conflicts, in Fort William, Scotland Getty Images 15/15
Labour has not confirmed whether the party leader had missed a VIP lunch, though it confirmed Mr Corbyn had a second ceremony to attend in his constituency of Islington North.
The DCMS, which is responsible for organising commemorations, has not responded to request for comment.
This article has been updated
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Subscribe nowA Michigan lawmaker said support and campaign donations were rolling in Friday, a day after she was barred from speaking in the House because she used the word "vagina" during a debate on an anti-abortion bill.
Rep. Lisa Brown, a Democrat from suburban Detroit, was silenced after Republicans who control the chamber said she violated decorum. While speaking Wednesday against a bill requiring doctors to ensure women aren't coerced into ending their pregnancies, Brown told Republicans, "I'm flattered you're all so concerned about my vagina. But no means no."
Brown, of West Bloomfield, and another Democrat were told they couldn't speak on the floor Thursday when the House spent hours considering legislation before a five-week recess. Rep. Barb Byrum, of Onondaga, said she was benched after referring to vasectomies.
"I really had no idea it would have this effect on people," Brown said Friday. "It's an anatomically correct term for woman's anatomy. It actually exists in Michigan statutes in three different places. This bill was about abortion. That doesn't happen without a vagina."
Email and phone messages seeking comment from Byrum and GOP leaders in the House weren't immediately returned Friday.
"I ask all members to maintain a decorum of the House, and I felt it went too far," Republican Floor Leader Jim Stamas told The Detroit News. He scratched Brown and Byrum from the list of speakers.
Republicans took control of the Michigan House from Democrats after the 2010 election. Rick Johnson, a Republican who was House Speaker until 2005, said the party in control has broad, unwritten discretion to police lawmakers on the floor.
"That comment would be very inappropriate," he said. "You have young children? Is that something you want them to hear from your state rep?"
Johnson said he never prohibited a lawmaker from speaking for a day, as in Brown's case, but he cut off certain privileges and found other ways to make his displeasure known.
"Every leader is different," he said.
Rep. Lisa Lyons, R-Alto, said Brown's comments were "disgraceful" and her "no means no" remark seemed to inappropriately compare the anti-abortion bill to rape. The House approved the bill on a 70-39 vote. The Senate probably won't consider it until fall.
Brown said the incident has led to unsolicited campaign donations. She didn't know how much but said she'd received many email notices from PayPal.
"The Constitution says free speech," she said. "I don't know why my rights should not be respected in a room where we take an oath to uphold the Constitution."Fall is not my favorite season. I dread the upcoming cold and long for more days of summer heat, green grass, and balmy evenings. But, this fall, my partner and I decided to kick off the season with a trip to Maine. A chance to reconnect with nature, with ourselves, and bid a sweet farewell to the last days of summer. I’m more of a beach-goer and would happily spend each and every day counting sand grains and listening to the waves roll in. But, every once and a while, there’s a place so beautiful that it almost makes me think I could opt for a woodsy retreat as a viable beach alternative. This was my experience at Acadia National Park. The park is full of trails for hikers/ climbers or all levels and there’s enough beautiful landscape to keep everyone happy. We had a chance to hike the Beehive Trail (a fun trail but not for the vertigo-afflicted) and take in the most beautiful views from the top.
What do you do to welcome the fall and reboot?
AdvertisementsWith the help of my NFL Nation colleagues, here’s a look at some coaches who could end up with defensive coordinator jobs, or at least be considered, whether it’s here or elsewhere:
Raheem Morris: The Washington Redskins' secondary coach is familiar with the defense, and his role here has increased over the years. But is this the sort of change that will produce real results? It would be surprising if he’s not considered for the position, given his ties to general manager Bruce Allen.
Kirk Olivadotti: He’s coached in Washington a long time, returning as the inside linebackers coach last season. He’s an excellent teacher and knows the culture in D.C. well. But he’s never been the one in front of the cameras; will that matter? He will be considered for the job.
Vic Fangio: The Redskins requested permission to interview former San Francisco defensive coordinator, according to Adam Schefter. It makes sense. He’s very good. He was on Washington’s list last season for the head coaching position, but the interview never took place as the Redskins hired Jay Gruden instead. Fangio shares an agent with Jay Gruden. UPDATE: The Redskins did not receive permission to speak with Fangio, according to a team source.
Mike Nolan: He coached here for three seasons, including one under owner Dan Snyder. It did not go well and Nolan was fired after the season. Remember the story about Snyder putting a bowl of vanilla ice cream in front of Nolan’s door? Would Nolan really want to work here again? Those close to him don’t know the answer. Nolan shares an agent with Gruden.
Ed Donatell: The Redskins requested to speak with San Francisco’s secondary coach, according to Schefter. His groups have done well. Donatell was a defensive coordinator with Green Bay (he preceded Bob Slowik) and Atlanta. He shares an agent with Gruden. UPDATE: The Redskins received permission to speak with Donatell, according to a team source.
Joe Barry: San Diego’s linebackers coach is another whom the Redskins have requested permission to interview, according to Schefter. Barry has ties to general manager Bruce Allen, having served as Tampa Bay’s linebackers coach during three of Allen’s five years with that organization. Barry served as Detroit’s defensive coordinator in 2007-08. He returned to Tampa Bay in 2009, coaching under Morris (Redskins executive Doug Williams was there as well). UPDATE: The Redskins received permission to speak with Barry, according to a team source.
Mel Tucker: Was criticized as Chicago’s defensive coordinator, though some there blame the Bears’ woes on personnel issues. Can’t imagine this would go over well with fans here. He does have experience in both a 3-4 and 4-3 system. He shares an agent with Gruden.
Steve Spagnuolo: Once a hot-shot coordinator who turned down the Redskins’ head coaching position. He excelled once upon a time as the New York Giants’ defensive coordinator. He’s currently a senior defensive assistant with Baltimore. He shares an agent with Gruden
Dennis Allen: The former Raiders’ head coach served for one season as Denver’s defensive coordinator (2011).
Winston Moss: Green Bay’s linebackers coach has been interviewed in the past for defensive coordinator positions. He also has the title of assistant head coach, so that could complicate matters.
Keith Butler: He’s coached Pittsburgh’s linebackers since 2003 and clearly knows the 3-4 system that Washington employs (it’s the same as the Steelers). But he’s also considered the heir apparent to Steelers coordinator Dick LeBeau. Butler played 10 seasons in the NFL.
Pepper Johnson: Buffalo’s defensive line coach (though with Doug Marrone departing there, not sure what Johnson’s status is) for the past season. He spent 14 seasons coaching with Bill Belichick in New England, but left there because he wanted to position himself better for a defensive coordinator’s job. He played 13 seasons in the NFL.
Ken Norton Jr.: Seattle’s linebackers coach for the past four years and also an ex-player (13 seasons). He’d be a candidate to replace current Seattle defensive coordinator Dan Quinn if Quinn leaves for a head coaching job.
Kris Richard: Seattle’s secondary coach, who is considered a strong young coach. But he’s only 35. Like Norton, he would be considered for the Seahawks’ defensive coordinator position if Quinn leaves.
Eric Washington: Carolina's defensive line coach for the past four seasons; has mentored a strong group. He was an assistant defensive line coach for three seasons with Chicago before joining the Panthers. Shares the same alma mater as Doug Williams (Grambling State).
Wade Phillips: The former NFL defensive coordinator has experience in a 3-4 front; his son, Wes, is the Redskins' tight end coach.One American scientist is taking pollution in the Arctic so seriously she's funding the start of a new project herself.
Carol Reinisch is paying out of her own pocket to start a study using mollusks, such as clams, to monitor pollution in the Northwest Passage.
The semi-retired scientist and environmentalist said there's a need to get baseline data now on clams along the Northwest Passage before it becomes a regular shipping route.
"My point is not to impede that — but my point is you must have an environmental monitoring program in place," she said.
"There's an absolute requirement for baseline data. We did not have baseline data with the Exxon Valdez, we really did not have baseline data in certain species with the BP oil spill. But I think it's absolutely essential to get baseline data with one species before this really opens up — and you and I both know that it's going to."
Reinisch has studied the effects of industrial pollution on clams in places like Massachusetts and Prince Edward Island.
American scientist Carol Reinisch takes a sample from a clam at the Nunavut Research Institute in Iqaluit on Wednesday. She is starting a project looking to use clams as environmental monitors for pollution in the Northwest Passage. (Daniel MacIsaac/CBC)
She said there is an established link between pollution and leukemia in clams. Clams don't move around much, so they indicate changes in pollution levels over time.
The Nunavut Research Institute hosted Reinisch during her stay in exchange for her expertise and work with the students. Students helped collect samples of both healthy and contaminated clams, and they also received training in taking samples from the clams and how to work with them in a lab.
Mary Ellen Thomas, senior researcher at Nunavut Research Institute, said Reinisch's project makes sense, though it is also ambitious and long-term.
"But if we can start by building local capacity do this work independently, then we don't need to rely on southern institutes to do this work for us," she said.
Reinisch hopes more institutions and students will carry on the project, providing a long-term way of monitoring pollution in the passage.
The American researcher has worked with Environment Canada in the past but said, because of budget cuts and the urgency of the issue, she decided to fund the start of this project herself.A recent study, affiliated with UNIST has introduced a new robotic tool for assessments of muscle overactivity and movement dysfunction in stroke survivors. Their robotic-assisted rehabilitation therapy, combined with standard rehabilitation, is expected to improve the mobility of patients surviving a stroke.
This breakthrough research has been led by Professor Sang Hoon Kang of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at UNIST in collaboration with Professor Pyung-Hun Chang of DGIST and Dr. Kyungbin Park of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
In their study, published in the May issue of the prestigious journal, IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, Professor Kang and his team developed a rehabilitation robotic system that quantitatively measures the 3 degree-of-freedom (DOF) impedance of human forearm and wrist in minutes.
Using their impedance estimation device, entitled the distal internal model based impedance control (dIMBIC)-based method, the team was able to accurately characterize the 3 DOF forearm and wrist impedance, including inertia, damping, and stiffness, for the first time.
Stroke, known as a leading cause of long-term disability, is a sudden loss of brain function, caused by the interruption of blood flow to the brain or the rupture of a blood vessels in the brain and an estimated 150,000 people die from it, each year. As a consequence of stroke, stroke survivors are often left with muscle overactivity, including spasticity. Spasticity is a muscle control disorder that is characterized by tight or stiff muscles and an inability to control those muscles. It is often manifested by increased stretch reflex activity and mechanical joint resistance.
"The dIMBIC-based method can be used to assist in the quantitative and objective evaluation of neurological disorders, like stroke," says Professor Kang. "Findings from this study will open a new chapter in robot-assisted rehabilitation in the workplace accident rehabilitation hospitals, as well as in nursing homes and assisted living facilities."
The research team expects that, in the long run, the proposed 3 DOF impedance estimation may promote wrist and forearm motor control studies and complement the diagnosis of the alteration in wrist and forearm resistance post-stroke by providing objective impedance values including cross-coupled termsWith Small Saviors and Small Saviors Redux, I've written about the little things—certain inexpensive items that can make or break a surf trip. Now it's time to really get into it: to talk about the act of surf travel itself. The following words mark the beginning of a series of blogs that break down the act of a surf expedition in detail—an attempt to share information and impart advice about traveling efficiently in the modern world.
International surf trips are so expensive today that, in order to get the most out of your travel budget, you need to plan and strategize a vacation like you're planning your own presidential campaign.
Recently I was able to put my travel knowledge to the test with a trip to Central America. For the first time, I actually remembered to scribble down notes about the trip itself, and about some key mistakes I made. As you will see, I have a lot to pass along—myriad ruminations and recommendations about treks in the modern era. So as not to overwhelm you, I've broken this information down into bite-size entries. Please feel free to comment on my opinions as these blogs unfurl, and make your own suggestions.
The Flexible Itinerary
This is perhaps the most exciting way surf travel has changed over the years. With advances in long term surf forecasting and deals on last minute flights, you can now limit your skunkings to a minimum. My suggestion is to re-think your entire approach—mainly to avoid temptation and not book a trip too far in advance. Here's what I mean: Instead of booking a trip to a certain destination, simply set the time aside. Then, maybe about ten days before your travel window, go online, check the forecast charts for a variety of possible destinations, and find the best airfare deals. Let surf and value be your dual-pronged criteria.
To maximize the potential of getting a good travel deal, try to use non-peak times for your vacation days. In other words, if possible, try to avoid traveling during Christmas or spring break, or in the Northern Hemisphere summer. Of course this isn't always possible: This past spring my only travel window was during Easter. Luckily, I was still able to get a good deal because of near-constant Internet monitoring. These days, airlines have sophisticated computer-selling strategies by which they change online prices constantly—sometimes as often as four times in a given week. As it turned out, the Caribbean, Hawaii, and even Mainland Mexico were steadily off-the-charts price-wise, but at the last minute a relatively good deal popped up for Costa Rica. Looking at promising long term forecast trends for the area, it didn't take me long to pull the trigger. With the necessity of guaranteeing yourself a spot for certain places (e.g., Tavarua, or the Mentawais), this last-minute strategy isn't always feasible, but should be employed whenever humanly possible.
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It should be pointed out that in conjunction with checking airfare, you should also check board bag fees. A quick Google search should bring up some recent articles about what each airline charges. Always keep these fees in mind—what good is it if you find a great price for an air ticket but are going to get dinged $200 each way for your boards?
On a less relative note, it's also important to keep your itinerary flexible once you reach your destination, mainly to not lock yourself in to certain accommodations for too long. This is a mistake I made this past trip. With the help of tripadvisor.com, I booked myself into a great place for seven nights, but when the swell subsided on day five—when I wanted to pack up and explore another part of the country—I was already committed to a week's stay. Vowing to learn from my mistake, I came up with a new four-day rule for myself: In the future, I would only book myself into a place for the first four nights of a trip—enough time to get my bearings, but not so long that you can't change your plans on the fly.
The last thing you want to look into pre-departure is the wind forecast. Specifically, in addition to checking predicted surf heights, make sure you know what exact direction winds are good for your possible destination, and find out what the local wind is suppose to be. The only thing worse than seeing a good spot torn to shreds by an inclement wind is not knowing about the other spots down the coast that are offshore. I prefer to use buoyweather.com for my wind knowledge, a forecast site that's almost scary in its accuracy.
So let's review: You know you want to go on a surf trip, so you set some vacation time aside. You try to avoid peak travel times. When the date approaches you aggressively check airfares on Orbitz, Kayak, or your favorite travel website. Then you transpose this information with board bag fees and long-term surf forecasts. Then, with possible help from Tripadvisor, you make sure reasonable accommodations are available. Then you book your airfare, lock-in a four night stay, and boom—your surf dreams have a better chance of coming true.
Stay tuned.Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.
One unbreakable rule of the revenge genre stipulates that at an early point in the narrative, when the hero is about to fall to the villain, all action stops. The hero, kicked to the curb bleeding, delivers a soliloquy declaring that he will track down and punish the villain, no matter how long it takes, no matter what pain must be endured, no matter how great the cost, justice will be done. The villain doesn’t need to be in attendance for the speech; it isn’t for him, it’s for the audience. The speech rises and rises until it reaches its climax. You have two choices, the hero will say. Kill me now or spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder, because I will be coming for you.
Mark Warner of Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, gave a squishy version of the revenge speech this week at a news conference he held with committee chair Richard Burr (R-N.C). He didn’t snarl like Liam Neeson does in the Taken trilogy. He didn’t slay 84 people as Keanu Reeves did in the first John Wick movie. Nor did he expire while trying to extract payback on a shark, like Robert Shaw in Jaws. But in giving his midterm report, Warner seethed with the single-mindedness of Clint Eastwood cast in a movie about a U.S. senator.
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Warner directs this controlled fury against President Donald Trump, who has taunted the committee with tweets disparaging the Russian affair as a hoax. This week, Trump zapped the committee again, demanding that it direct its attention to investigating the “fake news” media. Warner has good reason to be aggrieved. The president’s Republican supporters want every Russian inquiry, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe, shut down as politically motivated wastes of time. But like a crusading detective being pressured by the mayor to wrap things up before the election, he’s resisting.
“This feels like it’s taking a long time. It is taking a long time,” Warner said at the news conference. “But getting it right and getting all the facts is what we owe the American people.”
Burr held that note, telling the pressies that he would not realize his previously stated hope of concluding the investigation this year, and would not predict an end date.
The senators conceded that their investigation—which has gathered almost 100,000 pages of documents and conducted more than 100 interviews—has yet to bag any quarry. “The issue of collusion is still open,” Burr said, by which he meant “not proven.” This was an odd comment for Burr to make. Russians dangled information in front of Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 that “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” according to the email to Junior that set up the meeting. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Sure seems like collusion happened. What’s left to be resolved is how much of it went down, where and when. At least that’s what Senator “Dirty Harry” Callahan would say.
The real senators did, however, put another coat of varnish on findings of the intelligence community that Vladimir Putin’s people sent a torrent of propaganda through social accounts and hacked systems with the recklessness of teenagers during the 2016 campaign. Russia peppered Wisconsin and Michigan with Facebook ads just before the election. Was it just a coincidence that campaign director Paul Manafort sent a memo urging Trump to focus on those two states? And the Russians are still mucking around in our politics, the senators said, indicating that the revenge cycle will take several more turns before it ends. If it ever ends.
“Normally the way these things wrap up is you start running out of new information. That’s not the case,” said committee member Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). “We’re months and months into this, and we keep finding plenty of more stuff to look into.”
The intelligence committee hinted, however, that it had given up on unraveling the Steele Dossier, the smutty oppo-report about Donald Trump written by former British spy Christopher Steele and which Trump calls “totally made up” by a “failed spy.” We have “hit a wall,” Burr said—Steele won’t talk to the committee. Not knowing who paid for the dossier and clueless about the identity of the dossier’s sources, the committee has been unable to judge the document’s credibility. Lucky for the investigation, Action Hero Mueller has intervened to interview Steele, taking over the FBI inquiry into the dossier. As action heroes go, Mueller hews more to the Charles Bronson type, remaining silent for reel after reel. You recall that Mueller met behind closed doors with the committee in June to discuss “deconfliction,” the art of sharing information without interfering with one another. (On Friday, Mueller met with the chief judge of the D.C. federal court and other attorneys. This unusual meeting could be big, writes former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, if it pertains to “a leak or a security issue regarding a grand juror,” or it could be something more pedestrian, like a defense counsel challenging a subpoena.)
The Trump gang’s struggles with communications hygiene continued. Chief of staff John Kelly’s personal mobile phone came down with some mysterious malady, and the White House IT office concluded that the device had been hacked, maybe as early as December. The White House claims that he hasn’t used the phone since joining the administration in its opening hours. That doesn’t jibe with his months-long observation that the phone wasn’t working properly. If he wasn’t using it, how did he discover it wasn’t working?
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, whom soon to be ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson calls “the royal family“ behind their backs, got busted for having a third, and previously unreported, email account on their private domain. Hundreds of emails from the White House were sent to the account, which they share. (Politico had previously reported that Jared and Ivanka had used personal emails to conduct some government business.) The president, previously vocal about wanting to jail officials who use private email, has been silent on this issue.
Thanks to his shouting and warmongering, Trump has made it easy to frame him as the villain, so let’s do it. Having minted his brand in gold—everything from sink fixtures to seat-belt buckles to Oval Office curtains woven an auric yellow—Trump will be this feature’s Mr. Gold(short)finger. Preening, cruel and more than a little cocky. Too cocky. Compare him with Mueller, a living, walking Gary Cooper who doesn’t leak, doesn’t talk to the press, and has successfully sworn his posse to secrecy. Nearly invisible, he and his agents lurk everywhere, girding for the climactic struggle. No matter whether the run time on this movie is measured in months rather than minutes, you kind of know how it’s going to turn out, don’t you?
******
Had Charles Bronson challenged Clint Eastwood to a fistfight when both men were in their prime, who would have won? Let me know at Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts plan on being the next James Bond, my Twitter feed thinks of itself as the Anglo Jackie Chan, and my RSS feed takes pride in being an action coward.The first step in learning how to make memes is knowing what they are.
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as in the economic base, a change in the power of the different classes and their respective positions at the heart of society. But Stalin claims that the national language neither follows the rise of the substructure, nor of the superstructure, because it does not belong to one class but rather to the entire people of a given country. Thus, to rescue language and linguistics from the effects of the social revolution (and, softly-softly, to rescue national culture and the cult of the country), it is pulled to the banks of the churning river of history, beyond the battlefield of the productive substructure and safely out of the reach of politics and ideology.
According to Stalin (Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, 1950) in the course of the past few years in Russia, “the old capitalist base has been liquidated and a new base has been built, a socialist base. In parallel, the superstructure of the capitalist base has been liquidated, and a new superstructure has been created (…) Despite this the Russian language has remained fundamentally what it was before the October Revolution”.
These gentlemen’s only merit (we don’t know if the text was written by Stalin himself, or in his name by secretary X or bureau Y) is that they have mastered the art of dressing up their lies in clear, accessible language, the way you would write after a century’s immersion in bourgeois culture, and above all in a “casually concrete” manner. Everything seems easy to grasp, and yet it is all just a scam, relapsing entirely into the most rancid bourgeois mode of thought.
The entire transition took place “in parallel”. It’s that easy! To which we mustn’t simply reply that such a nice transition has not taken place, but also that if it had (or if it will) things would have happened quite differently. Stalin’s formula is that of a country snake-oil merchant. Nothing is left of dialectical materialism. Doesn’t the base influence the superstructure, doesn’t it act on the latter? And in what sense does this derived superstructure, which is not simply malleable and passive, react in its turn? According to which cycles, in what order, at what speed does this historic transformation take place? Oh, all that is byzantine distinctions. Just roll up your shirtsleeves, first the right then the left! Destruction! Creation! For God’s sake! Out with the creator, out with the destroyer. Such materialism cannot function without a demiurge, an autonomous creative force: then everything becomes conscious and voluntary, nothing is necessary or determined.
Whatever. We can confront Stalin’s reasoning with reality. The economic base and the superstructure, which were feudal under the Tsar, have become, through the course of complex events, fully capitalist by the end of Stalin’s life. Since the Russian language has remained fundamentally the same, language is not part of the superstructure, nor of the base.
It appears that this whole controversy has been directed against a school of linguistics that has been suddenly disavowed in high places, and whose leader is the university professor, Nicolai Yakolevitch Marr, whose texts are unknown to us. Marr apparently said that the language is part of the superstructure. Given who is condemning him, we could consider Professor Marr to be a good Marxist. In fact, Stalin wrote, “Once N.Y. Marr noted that his formula ‘language is a superstructure with respect to the base’ encountered objections, he decided to ‘readjust’ his theory and announced that ‘language is an instrument of production. Was N.Y. Marr right to classify language as one of the instruments of production? No, he was certainly wrong”.
Why? According to Stalin, there is a certain analogy between language and the means of production, which can also, to some extent, be independent of class relations. What Stalin means is that, for example, the plough or the hoe can be equally used in a feudal society as in a bourgeois or socialist society. But the reason why Marr is wrong (and Marx and Engels too, because for them, work and the production of the means of production occurs in combination with language) is that these means of production produce material goods, whereas language doesn’t. To which we reply: but the means of production also do not produce material goods! It is man who produces them, using these instruments! Tools are the means which humans use to produce. When a child first picks up the hoe by the blade, his father shouts at him: no, pick it up by the handle! This cry – which becomes a regular instruction – is, like the hoe, used for production.
Stalin’s smart-aleck conclusion proves that he’s the one who’s got it wrong. If language, he says, produced material goods, then windbags would be the richest men in the world! Well, isn’t that so? The labourer works with his hands, the engineer with his language. Which of them is the better paid? The landed gentleman smokes his pipe sitting in the shade and shouts ceaselessly at the day-labourer (who is working his fingers to the bone in silence): “Get on with it, dig!” fearing that the slightest pause will diminish his profit.
We are familiar neither with Marr nor with his books, but dialectics allow us to suppose that despite being menaced with thunderbolts from on high, he has not really “readjusted” anything. We have ourselves said, for example, that since the beginning of mnemonic choral singing during the age of magical-mystical technology, poetry has been the premier mode of social knowledge transfer, and is therefore a means of production. Then, we placed poetry within the superstructures of an epoch. It is the same for language. Language in general, and versification in general, are means of production. But a given poetry, a given school of poetry, within a particular country and within a particular epoch, distinct from those that went before and those that will follow, form part of the ideological and artistic superstructure of a given economic form and mode of production. Thus Engels writes that the upper stage of barbarism “begins with the smelting of iron ore, and passes into civilization with the invention of alphabetic writing and its use for literary records (…) We find the upper stage of barbarism at its highest in the Homeric poems, particularly in the Iliad”. We could also cite other passages and characterise Dante’s Divine Comedy as a funeral lament for feudalism, or Shakespeare’s tragedies as a prologue to capitalism.
For Marxism’s last Supreme Pontiff, iron ore would be a means of production characteristic of an epoch, but not alphabetic writing – because the latter does not produce material goods! But hasn’t the use of alphabetic writing been indispensable, among other things, to arrive at the specialty steels of the modern ferrous metallurgical industry?
It’s the same for language. Language is always a means of production, but taken individually, languages are part of the superstructure. For example, Dante does not write his poem in the classical Latin of the Church but rather in the Italian vernacular; likewise the Reformation marks the final abandonment of the ancient Saxon in favour of modern German.
Besides, it’s the same for the plough and the hoe. While it is true that a given tool can straddle two great social epochs separated by a class revolution, it is also true that the complete totality of tools of a given society “classifies” and “defines” it, and that the well-known collision of the forces of production against the relations of production compels them to assume the new form that is appropriate to them. We find the wood-turning lathe in the era of barbarism and the precision motor lathe in the era of capitalism. And every now and then an old tool will disappear and become a museum-piece, for example the spinning-wheel mentioned by Engels.
It’s the same for the plough and the hoe. Industrial capitalist society does not have the means to eliminate gruelling small-scale agricultural cultivation, work that twists the spine so proudly straightened by Pithecanthropus erectus. But a communist organisation with a comprehensive industrial base would not use anything other than the mechanized plough. And this society will have overturned the language of the capitalists: we will no longer hear the banal formulae which the Stalinists love to use when affecting to oppose them: moral, liberty, justice, legality, popular, progressive, democratic, constitutional, constructive, productive, humanitarian etc., i.e. all the words that form precisely the toolset thanks to which the largest share of society’s wealth ends up in the pockets of the braggarts, and which fulfils the same role as material instruments such as foreman’s whistle or the gaoler’s handcuffs.
11. The idealist thesis of national language
12. To deny that human language in general arises and functions as a means of production, and that particular written and spoken languages form part of the superstructure of a class society (even if the transformation of these superstructures cannot be immediate, but only gradual) is to fall back entirely to idealist doctrines and politically embrace the bourgeois postulate that the advent of capitalism brings with it a linguistic revolution, which marks the transfer of a common language to illiterates speaking different dialects, producing cultivated people in a politically united country.
Since, according to Stalin, language is neither a superstructure of the economic base, nor is it a means of production, we should perhaps ask what it is. So, here is Stalin’s definition: “Language is a medium, an instrument with the help of which people communicate with one another, exchange thoughts and understand each other. Being directly connected with thinking, language registers and fixes in words, and in words combined into sentences, the results of the process of thinking and achievements of man’s cognitive activity, and thus makes possible the exchange of thoughts in human society”. This should be the Marxist solution to the problem! It is hard to see what orthodox and traditional ideology would refuse to subscribe to such a definition, which clearly states that humanity progresses thanks to a research effort led by thought and formulated in ideas, and passes from the individual phase to collective application through the mediation of language, which allows the inventor transmit his achievement to other men. This conception turns material development completely on its head, such as we have previously illustrated with reference to our standard texts: from action to speech, from speech to idea; and since this process is not individual but concerns the whole of society, it would be better to say: from collective work to language, from language to science, from science to collective thought. The function of thought is only derived and passive in the individual. The definition offered by Stalin is therefore pure idealism. The alleged exchange of ideas is nothing but the projection of bourgeois commodity exchange onto the imagination.
Accusing the disgraced Marr of idealism is strange, as Stalin says he has arrived here by supporting the thesis of mutation of languages, envisaging a decadence in the function of language, which will one day be replaced by other forms. Marr is reproached for having fallen into the quagmire of idealism by imagining that thought can transmit itself without language. But the people who presume that they know how to stay afloat on this quagmire are the most pitiful. Indeed, according to them, Marr’s thesis contradicts Marx’s phrase: “Language is the immediate reality of thought… Ideas do not exist independently of language”.
But isn’t this clear materialist thesis completely contradicted by the definition reproduced above, which reduces language to a means of exchanging ideas and thoughts?
Let us reconstruct Marr’s audacious theory in our own way (which would have to allow us to have a party theory crossing generations and frontiers). Language is – so far Stalin is in agreement – a means which allows men to communicate with one another. But would communication between men have nothing to do with production? This affirms bourgeois economic theory, according to which each individual produces alone and only comes into contact with another individual in the marketplace, in order to swindle him. The correct Marxist formulation would not be, men communicate with one another in order to understand one another, but rather, they communicate with one another in order to produce. Thus the definition of language as a means of production is correct. As for the metaphysical “understand one another”: humanity is already 600,000 years old and the disciples of the same teacher still apparently do not understand one another!
So, language is a technological means of communication. It is the first of these. But is it the only one? Certainly not. Social evolution brings into being a complete raft of increasingly diversified means of communication and Marr’s research on what could in large measure replace spoken language is absolutely not irrelevant. Marr does not claim in this respect that thought, as the immaterial elaboration of an individual subject, will be transmitted to others without the natural form of language. With his formula on “the operation of thought” he indicates that not only individual metaphysical cogitations, but also the full range of technical knowledge relevant to a developed society will develop in forms that go beyond language. Nothing magical or eschatological here.
Let’s take a very simple example. The skipper of a rowing boat commands “On the stroke”. Same thing for a sail ship and the first steam ships: “Heave ho”, “Full ahead”, “Avast”. But when boats become too large, the captain yells his commands down a mouthpiece which communicates with the engine room. But soon that is insufficient, and before loudspeakers arrive – a really retrograde invention – they use a mechanical device called an engine order telegraph, later electrical, which consists of a round dial with an indicator, and which puts the commands right in front of the chief engineer’s eyes. As for the control panel of a modern aircraft, it is covered with instruments that transmit indications to all the sensory organs. Thus, speech gives way to forms of communication which, though less natural are no less material, just as modern tools are no less material than a branch ripped off a tree and used as a weapon.
There is no need to discuss the full range of means of communication embracing spoken language, written language, print, algorithms, internationally agreed mathematical notation etc. In all domains, technical or otherwise, there are universally accepted standards and conventions for transmitting precise indications (meteorological, electrical, astronomical etc.). All of the electronic applications (such as radar) and all the procedures for receiving and recording symbols are new connections between men, made necessary by the complexity of production and day-to-day life. In more than a hundred domains communication ignores words, grammar and syntax, in defence of whose immanence and timelessness Stalin breaks the back of N.Y. Marr.
How could the capitalist system admit that the conjugation of the verbs to have and to cost, or the way in which the possessive adjective is declined, is anything but eternal? How could it ever renounce the use of the possessive pronoun as the cornerstone of every utterance? Yet one day we’ll laugh at all that along with “your lordship”, “your humble and obedient servant” and salesmen’s expressions such as “it’s been a pleasure doing business with you”.
12. References and distortions
13. One of the fundamental theses of all Marxist texts on this question is that the demand for a national language is a historical characteristic of all anti-feudal revolutions. A national language is indispensable to the establishment of communication and business between all the newly established commercial locations within the national market, as is the free movement of proletarians torn away from feudal bondage across the national territory, the reduction of traditional religious, scholastic and cultural forms which rely on Latin as the intellectual language, and the shredding of local dialects as the popular form of language.
To support this theory of a language that sits above classes, one that is completely new to Marxism, Stalin attempts to overcome the obvious objections from all sides, based on texts by Lafargue, Marx, Engels and even … Stalin. The good Lafargue is thrown overboard, to be sure. In his pamphlet La langue française avant et après la revolution, he spoke about the sudden linguistic revolution in France between 1789 and 1794. Too short a period, retorts Stalin, and in any case it was only a small number of words that disappeared from the language and were replaced by new ones. Yes, but it turns out that these words are precisely the ones most closely tied to relations in social life. Some of these words were banned by decrees of the Convention. Let’s refer to the satirical counter-revolutionary anecdote:
“What’s your name, citizen?”
“Marquis de Saint Roiné”.
“There are no more marquises!”
“De Saint Roiné”.
“There are no more ‘de’s’” (‘de’ was an aristocratic designation).
“Saint Roiné”.
“There are no more Saints!”
“Roiné”.
“There are no more kings!” (‘roi’ is French for king).
“I am born!” (“Je suis né” – ‘né’ is French for born), the unhappy man yelled.
Stalin was right: the participle né hadn’t changed!
In the article “Saint Max” [a chapter in The German Ideology, which would only be translated into Italian in 1958] which we admit is unfamiliar to us, Marx writes that the bourgeois has “its own” language, which is “a product of the bourgeoisie” and this language is imbued with the style of mercantilism, of buying and selling. In fact, in the Middle Ages the merchants of Antwerp communicated with those of Florence and this is one of the glories of the Italian language, the mother-language of capital. While in music we still say andante, allegro, pianissimo etc., many Italian words were known in European city-squares: firma, sconto, tratta, riporto (firm, discount, draft, report). As to the smelly jargon of commercial correspondence (“with respect to your esteemed correspondence of the 25 th inst.” etc.) it became the same everywhere. How does Stalin manage to counter the incontrovertible citation? By inviting us to read another passage from the same text, where Marx speaks of “the concentration of dialects into a single national language resulting from economic and political concentration”. What of it? The linguistic superstructure follows the same process as the State superstructure and the economic substructure. The concentration of capital, the unification of the national market, political concentration in the capitalist State, are not inherent and definitive facts but historical outcomes linked to bourgeois domination and cycles of accumulation. It goes the same for the process that ensues, the transition of local dialects to a unitary language. The market, the State and power are only national because they are bourgeois. Language becomes the national language because it is the language of the bourgeoisie.
Stalin then cites Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England: “the working class has gradually become a race wholly apart from the English bourgeoisie […] the workers speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics than those of the bourgeoisie”.
Here again, he is grasping at straws: Engels is not saying that there are class languages, Stalin claims, since he is speaking about dialect, and dialect is a derivative of the national language! But haven’t we demonstrated that, on the contrary, the national language is a synthesis of dialects (or the result of a struggle between different dialects) aDropbox has thrown in its lot with Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other companies looking for permission to publish information about secret national security requests. The company has filed an amicus brief with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, requesting that the court give all internet companies permission to tell users how many national security-related information requests they receive and how many users are affected by them, even if the orders themselves are protected by a gag order. "The Court should not permit the government to invoke the mere label of 'national security' to justify the speech restraints it seeks," says the filing. While the filing isn't a lawsuit in its own right, it supports the suits filed by others, and a favorable result for any of them would also be an excellent sign for Dropbox.
Dropbox was one of the companies named as participating in the NSA's online surveillance program, and it's denied any broad information-sharing agreement with the government. While the orders remain secret, though, there's not much it can do to prove its innocence. After the leaks, companies won the right to publish rough numbers of national security-related requests, but only rounded to the nearest thousand. This policy, Dropbox says, is worse than useless. Currently, it can publish a number covering every non-gagged law enforcement request; 87 were reported in 2012. But "had Dropbox received just one national security request during that period, and had it wished to include that single request in its report," it would have had to replace that with a vague "1–1000" label.
This change "would shed almost no light on the data requests Dropbox receives, and could foster the impression that Dropbox received many more national security requests than it did," the brief says. While the NSA is attempting to declassify more information about its surveillance efforts, the FISA Court is currently handling suits from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo, all asking for permission to publish exact numbers of requests, though not the requests themselves. Like Dropbox, these companies have said they're being hamstrung by secrecy requirements, unable to stem public speculation about widespread spying.Youth organizations around Newfoundland and Labrador are pinching pennies this week, after the surprise news that their budgets have been axed.
While politicians debated in the House of Assembly if the cuts affected core funding or involved extra money, the impact is clear, according to the St. John's Boys and Girls Club.
The group said Wednesday that its grant will go from $72,000 to just $34,000.
"We found out just this past Monday through a letter in the mail," Executive Director Jason Fleming told CBC Radio's St. John's Morning Show. "It's definitely a big blow to us at this point in time."
Fleming said the cuts are contained in grants that his organization applies for each spring.
Normally the club learns in August or September what its budget will be. This year, it was told there would be a delay, but had no reason to expect cuts.
The Boys and Girls Club of St. John's is losing 53 per cent of its funding. (CBC)
The Boys and Girls Club runs after-school programs in Buckmasters Circle and in Mundy Pond for more than 700 kids.
"With no notice, this puts us in a deficit this year," said Fleming. "That's an impossible position to make up this time of year."
He said the club will have to meet to talk about options, such as reducing staff or hours of programming.
Government 'lied,' says Steve Kent
Other Boys and Girls Clubs around the province are being cut as well, on Bell Island, in Norris Arm, Buchans and St. Anthony.
The $5,000 budget for the Pools Cove community youth centre is being eliminated. Other groups, such as Allied Youth, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, the YMCA and 4H are also affected.
Scouts Canada's grant in this province goes from $38,000 to $25,000, according to information from the Office of Public Engagement.
Steve Kent accused the government of lying to youth organizations. (Peter Cowan/CBC)
"Why did you not consult with these youth organizations prior to making these drastic cuts," asked Mount Pearl North MHA Steve Kent in the legislature Tuesday.
He said ministers had promised earlier in 2016 that core funding to youth groups was safe.
"Six months passed without a sound, and now these organizations find out that they were lied to by government," Kent said. "How can the Liberal government justify their decision to cut funding?"
David Brazil leads off QP accusing government of misleading community groups who were told funding was stableand now has been cut <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/nlpoli?src=hash">#nlpoli</a> —@PeterCBC
Premier Dwight Ball said the provincial government had $1.5 million in requests for funding and had to make choices, giving money to 30 organizations.
"The Boys and Girls Clubs around the province receive over 20 per cent of the funding this year," he said.
"What was committed to earlier this year was core funding... This is not core funding. This is [project] grants to youth organizations."Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Ten libraries in Bury are set to close their doors for the final time on December 20.
It comes after cash-strapped council chiefs voted to shut more than two-thirds of the town’s 14 branches earlier this year.
Speaking when the closures were announced in June council leader Rishi Shori said: “Finances are an issue and the council has been under huge pressure to save money, particularly due to the rising costs of social care.”
The libraries set to close are Ainsworth, Brandlesholme, Castle Leisure Centre, Coronation Road, Dumers Lane, Moorside, Topping Fold, Tottington, Unsworth and Whitefield.
(Image: Google)
Bury, Radcliffe, Ramsbottom and Prestwich libraries will remain open.
Library members today (Friday) received an email announcing when the closures would take place.
It read: “Sadly, the 10 libraries scheduled for closure following the Library Review will be shutting their doors for the last time on December 20th.
“Bury, Prestwich, Radcliffe and Ramsbottom libraries will be continuing to provide library, leisure and learning opportunities across the borough, although opening hours will change from January 3rd.
“Staff at all libraries would like to thank you for all your support during this difficult period. Please look out for information regarding new community uses for some of the former library buildings.”
(Image: Paul Anderson/ geograph)
In September Bury council was ridiculed when it posted a tweet asking ‘could you turn a former library into a valued community asset?’.
Perhaps unsurprisingly the authority came in for a torrent of online sarcasm.
Asam Yasin was first to reply tweeting: “A book shop. One that lets you take books for free for a period of time as long as you return them. With a fee if you don’t.”
@adlynch replied saying: ‘is that a library, Asam?’, to which came the response - “No no. It’s a shop. If you call it a library they’ll only close it down again...”
Prestwich library will also close on Saturdays from May 2018.
For details on the new opening hours at the four remaining branches visit bury.gov.uk.Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said Monday that it's "laughable" for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid to argue that FBI Director James Comey may have illegally interfered the presidential election when it reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails.
Gowdy said on MSNBC Monday that Reid didn't make a similar charge after Attorney General Loretta Lynch's private meeting with former President Bill Clinton while the investigation was ongoing, or when President Obama "prejudged" the outcome of the investigation before it had been closed.
"President Obama is actively campaigning, right now, for a candidate for president, and that doesn't violate the Hatch Act," Gowdy said. "So how Jim Comey supplementing his record before Congress violated the Hatch Act is just laughable."
Reid sent a letter to the FBI director Sunday arguing that his decision to notify Congress about the investigation potentially violated the federal law that limits federal employees' political activities.
When asked whether he thinks Comey should brief Congress about updates into any investigation into Donald Trump, Gowdy said he counts the FBI director's letter as simply a notification, since it contained little of substance.
"I don't consider what Comey did to be updating Congress. I view it as supplementing his previous testimony," Gowdy said. "It was just a notification letter, is how I viewed it. Not an update," since lawmakers still haven't been told what's in the new emails the FBI is investigating.
Gowdy questioned whether it is fair for Comey to be criticized for making the announcement so close to the election, arguing that it isn't the FBI director's fault that the Clinton camp hasn't been forthcoming.
"I wish we had known this a year ago. But is that Comey's fault that we did not know she had a private server two years ago?" said Gowdy, who made the discovery about Clinton's server as chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. "He did not tell her to mislead the public about whether or not she sent and received public information. He didn't tell Huma Abedin, 'Don't turn over all your devices.' And God knows he didn't tell Anthony Weiner to sext with an underaged girl. None of that is Comey's fault. The timing is a direct and natural consequences and probable consequence of the decision Secretary Clinton made years ago."
Gowdy said he didn't anticipate Congress to pursue criminal action against Clinton when asked whether the public can expect more inquiries by lawmakers.
"We're not good at it, we don't have jurisdiction, and we can't do anything about it if we find evidence of a crime," he said.Teresa McKerracher is one of more than 100,000 British Columbians who rely on provincial disability payments, which give her $983 a month for rent, food, transportation and other essentials.
Last year’s provincial budget raised disability rates for the first time in a decade, but for her it was by the equivalent of $11 — and she is desperate for a much bigger boost this year.
“I’m hungry, to be honest with you. … There is just no money for a life,” said McKerracher, who has been on disability since 2008 when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
McKerracher, 53, has little money for food or luxuries after paying her own bills and some for her 28-year-old daughter, who also struggles with a mental illness. She is thankful for her subsidized one-bedroom apartment run by Island Community Mental Health, and supplements her meagre income by working part-time as a care aid.
“But my daughter and I have nothing,” she said in an interview from Victoria “It gets more difficult every year. Rates haven’t gone up with inflation.”
Disability recipients in B.C. get $11,796 annually, which puts the province roughly in the middle in Canada for these payments.
Cost of living struggle
But when measured against B.C.’s high cost of living, some economists and researchers say, those on disability here are disproportionately poor. One report, by the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, says B.C.’s disability payments need to nearly double to reach the bare minimum required to lift people out of poverty.
When measured against the poverty line, B.C. is third worst in the country, behind New Brunswick and Manitoba. (Alberta, the report says, has a lower rate than B.C. for temporary disability recipients, but also has the best rate in Canada for permanent disability recipients at $19,878; B.C. has just one flat rate.)
In last year’s B.C. budget, long-frozen disability rates were upped by $77 a month — but the government took away $52 bus passes and $66 transportation subsidies; McKerracher had been approved to receive the latter, so she was left with an increase of only $11.
The government faced an outcry over its treatment of disabled people; it softened the blow slightly by later removing a $45 annual fee attached to the bus passes. But the damage was done, and advocates continue to lobby for a real boost to the rates.
“There is a very urgent need for the rates to be increased so that people are not living in poverty. We are asking, and have been asking, that the rates be increased to $1,200 a month and that they be indexed (to inflation),” said Jane Dyson, executive director at Disability Alliance B.C.
The struggle is more emphasized at this time of year, when many fees, such as medical plan premiums, transit fares and Hydro rates, have risen. Living a basic life continues to get more expensive.
Vancouver is the least affordable of Canada’s major cities for people on disability allowances. The Caledon report calculated whether disability recipients in metropolitan cities could afford to buy a basket of necessary goods and services — including housing, food, clothing and transportation. (Health care costs were not included.)
The minimum cost of Vancouver’s basket was pegged at $19,763 a year; B.C.’s annual disability payments would purchase only 58 per cent of those life necessities, the report said. Smaller cities in the three Maritime provinces have slightly worse rates, while those on disability in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Regina fare much better. (Because of Alberta’s two-rate system, temporary disability recipients in Calgary are worse off than those in B.C., but those on permanent disability can afford 98 per cent of the basket.)
Government considering rates
Stilwell said B.C.’s one-rate system funds more clients per capita and has less strict rules than the more generous Alberta payments for people with a permanent disability, but she did not did not address the numbers or rules for Alberta’s second-tier disability rate in her statement.
Finance Minister Mike de Jong, who has overseen B.C. accumulate a $2.25-billion surplus, hinted in September that next month’s budget — to be tabled just three months before the May election — might provide relief for disability recipients.
Inclusion B.C., an advocacy organization, said last fall it took de Jong’s comments to mean he might boost rates this year for disability recipients, which include those with developmental disabilities, physical conditions and mental illnesses.
“They collect those benefits through no fault of their own and we have a responsibility to ensure they have access to a dignified life,” executive director Faith Bondar said in a recent interview.
“There is no way you can have any form of a decent life living on (disability). It’s a terrible rate, especially when we are the most expensive province in Canada to live in.”
The Finance Ministry would not confirm that the budget would increase rates. Social Development Minister Michelle Stilwell would not be interviewed, but in a statement said increasing assistance rates “is something we continue to look at.”
In a budget-consultation report released in November, the legislature’s finance committee recommended — for the third straight year — that Victoria consider disability increases to reflect B.C.’s high cost of living, including sky-high rents.
The many recommendations made by the committee, after receiving submissions from hundreds of citizens, represent a “utopia” wish-list for government, said chair Scott Hamilton, and it is up to the finance minister to decide what the budget can afford.
“I want to give as much money as possible to people with disabilities, that’s my personal feeling,” said Hamilton, the Liberal MLA for Delta North. “But the reality is we only have so much money to spend and we have to divvy it up appropriately.”
George Heyman, one of the opposition MLAs on the all-party committee, said the NDP has repeatedly lobbied for rate increases.
“We’ll see what this budget holds; it is an election year,” said Heyman (Vancouver-Fairview). “It is about time this government addresses the issue of people living in poverty.”
Living on disability
McKerracher was not reliant on disability until 2008, when she became ill and could no longer keep her job as a government administrative worker. She now finds it impossible to pay her bills and handle her debts.
She has cut expenses: She has no cable, Internet or home phone; she is getting rid of her car and has sold some of her furniture. She can’t use food banks because of an allergy to sulphates and preservatives in canned and boxed goods, but buys meat and vegetables in bulk when she finds a good sale. Still, her fridge and cupboards are frequently empty.
She regularly gives money to her daughter, who is being treated for cancer and addictions.
McKerracher works part-time on the weekends as a care aide, although that contract expires at the end of this month.
Her psychiatrist has cleared her to work two four-hour shifts a week. She has also worked in a laundromat and for a charity, but because she battles mental instability it is often difficult for her to keep a job.
“My daughter and I don’t want to live our lives in this way. Although we were both diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I believe that our lives matter and with a little help we can live healthy lives,” she said. “We both want to work — we may never hold a full-time permanent position but I believe that there is something that both of us can do.”
British Columbians on disability can earn to a ceiling of $9,600 a year at a job, but if they earn any more, the disability payments are reduced by the “excess” amount earned.
In Ontario, the ceiling is lower than $9,600, but the government only cuts the disability cheque by 50 cents from every $1 earned over the ceiling. That results in a higher income before being cut off completely from disability payments, said John Stapleton, a longtime Ontario government social policy worker now with the charitable Metcalf Foundation.
The B.C. system, Stapleton argued, thus provides no incentive for people on disability to make as much money as they can, which for some could lead eventually to leaving behind reliance on government payments.
Those in B.C. on disability who can work at least a few hours a week can live in “frugal comfort,” while those who aren’t able to work will live “much more toward the destitution end of the spectrum,” Stapleton said.
Related
In her statement, Stilwell defended her government’s system, saying B.C. was the first province to have earnings exemptions calculated for the entire year, rather than by month; this allows people to make thousands one month and nothing the next, as long as they don’t go over $9,600 in total.
McKerracher has another source of income but she cannot keep it. She qualifies for $756 a month from the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) disability program, as a result of her years of employment. But it is the policy in B.C., and other Canadian provinces, to deduct from provincial disability payments every cent that Ottawa provides through CPP.
In some other provinces, courts and tribunals have ruled against clawbacks of CPP on WorkSafe claims and veterans benefits, but experts say no rulings have come against clawbacks on disability assistance payments.
Advocates have lobbied to have this reversed in B.C., so recipients can keep their CPP and their disability.
The government finance committee also recommended that the next budget should put a halt to these CPP deductions.
“That was just one more thing the committee feels we could do to make the lives of people with disabilities a little bit better,” said Hamilton, the committee chair.
Dyson, of the Disability Alliance, commended the province for recent moves that have benefited people on disability, such as increased asset limits of $100,00 and allowing cash gifts without affecting disability payments, as well as no longer clawing back child support payments.
“Even with these improvements, people with disabilities are |
our rulers have infinite power and control, while in the absence of government they are forced to live by the same rules and standards as everyone else. Sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that anarchy means without rules, but what it really means is without rulers, there is a big difference.
Through the eyes of a tyrant, a world without complete dominion over the lives of others, is a life of lawlessness, chaos and disorder. This is not reality, but this is the deranged worldview that has driven the control structure to use such apocalyptic fantasies to describe a world where they are not given ultimate power. This is why a peaceful term like anarchy has such a negative.
____________________________
John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work he is also the owner of a successful music promotion company. In 2013, he became one of the organizers of the Free Your Mind Conference, which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance at bookpatch.com.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sending a BTC tip to John at: 19LXYYxEjXguRnQ1GNyF78RBoiCPEircicCanada is again being seen abroad as a country that can play an active leadership role as "an honest broker" in various conflicts, says the former United Nations high commissioner for refugees Antonio Guterres.
Guterres was introduced by Canada's new ambassador to the UN, Marc-André Blanchard, before giving a speech Friday morning at the Ottawa Forum, a foreign policy event organized by Canada 2020 and the University of Ottawa's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
"I think this is the moment in which the world needs a surge in diplomacy for peace," said Guterres. "It is my deep belief that Canada is in a privileged position to play an important role in this regard."
"With your new foreign policy, I believe Canada has all the conditions to be perceived as an honest broker," said Guterres, who is also the former prime minister of Portugal.
"Which means, if I may make a small joke, that you might move from a usual suspect to an honest broker, which of course, increases enormously your capacity to lead... for peace to be overcome."
Praise for resettlement efforts
Guterres also had high praise for Canada's resettlement program, ranking it as one of "the two best in the world" alongside Australia's.
"Canada has been, during the 10 years I was high commissioner for refugees, a very reliable partner and a strong supporter of our activities worldwide," said Guterres in a phone interview with CBC News on Thursday.
Guterres's tenure at the helm of the UN refugee agency was marked by some of the largest displacements of refugees fleeing conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
"More recently, Canada has adopted very important measures with the resettlement quota for Syrians and with the increased support to the humanitarian action of the UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies," Guterres said.
The Canadian government has committed to resettling 25,000 Syrian refugees, a mix of government-assisted and privately sponsored refugees, by March 1. Some 14,329 Syrian refugees have arrived in Canada since Nov. 4, when the Liberal government was sworn into power.
Prior to the Liberals coming into power, Canada had permanently resettled nearly 25,000 Iraqi and Syrian refugees since 2009, according to the government website.
Reversing 'negative tide' against migrants
Guterres said Canada's most recent contribution comes as the refugee crisis worsens and while anti-refugee sentiment has grown in cities around the world.
Guterres's tenure at the helm of the UN refugee agency was marked by some of the largest displacements of refugees fleeing conflicts in Syria and Iraq. He is seen here, third right, speaking with refugees and migrants on the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos, Greece, on Oct. 11, 2015. (Antonis Pasvantis/Associated Press)
"The Canadian initiative has been an extremely helpful initiative in trying to reverse this negative tide against foreigners in general, migrants and refugees in particular."
"Canadians can be very proud of the society they are building," Guterres said on Thursday.
Guterres's visit to Ottawa comes following a report by The Canadian Press that the previous Conservative government instructed visa officers in Jordan and Lebanon to track "areas of focus" for Syrian refugees identified by the UN for resettlement to Canada.
The officers were asked to identify whether someone was a member of a vulnerable ethnic or religious minority, according to the documents tabled in the House of Commons this week. The tracking would have taken place from February to November 2015, according to the report by CP's Stephanie Levitz.
'Totally against' picking and choosing
"I was not aware of this," Guterres told CBC News on Thursday, adding, "The only thing I can say is that … in the resettlement programs that are managed through the UNHCR, we are absolutely adamant to avoid any form of religious or ethnic discrimination."
"There is a set of vulnerability criteria," Guterres said, "and that set of vulnerability criteria needs to be fully respected."
'There was a huge pressure from some European countries to have only Christian refugees … and we have always opposed that very firmly.' - Antonio Guterres, former UN high commissioner for refugees
The UN refugee agency does not manage the resettlement of privately sponsored refugees, although sponsors can ask visa officers to be matched with refugees that have been identified by the UN agency.
According to the UNHCR, "refugees are identified as in need of resettlement when they are at risk in their country of refuge or have particular needs or vulnerabilities."
The list of persons the UN will prioritize for resettlement includes women and children at risk, survivors of torture and violence, refugees with medical needs, among others.
Guterres said the UN agency does not pick and choose refugees based on their ethnicity or religion.
"We are totally against that," Guterres told CBC News.
"There was a huge pressure from some European countries to have only Christian refugees … and we have always opposed that very firmly."
Guterres said that although the UN agency does not identify refugees on the basis of ethnicity or religion, it is possible for a member of a minority group to be deemed as some of the most vulnerable.
"To be part of a minority, can be in certain situations a source of vulnerability."
The Canadian Press also reported that a spokeswoman for the Immigration Department acknowledged in an email that while some tracking was done anecdotally, "no refugees were screened out of the resettlement process as a result of the areas of focus."
The Conservatives consistently refuted accusations they were prioritizing refugees by ethnicity or religion.
Guterres told CBC he had no first-hand knowledge of the claims in the media report, but said his experience with Canada's resettling of Syrian refugees has been positive.
"I have always had a lot of respect for what has been the Canadian refugee policy, so I would be surprised. It's something that would not be correct," he said.
Follow @SusanaMas on TwitterA new digital currency mining chip is being released next week that the manufacturer believes will severely decrease the amount of electricity needed to mine bitcoin, an important factor for miners.
According to Marshall Long, the CTO of FinalHash, a mining consulting firm, “these new chips will allow hobbyists to get back in the game. Power to the miners.”
The new chip is being manufactured by SFARDS, a new company formed from the merger of two other Bitcoin mining companies, Gridseed and WiiBox. Gridseed was a mining chip and hardware manufacturer, while WiiBox developed software and hardware for controlling mining rigs. According to Long, Frank Li is leading the team that is bringing this chip to market.
“This chip outperforms everything on the market by about 40 percent, give or take, on the bitcoin side, and about 130 percent on the litecoin side. Plus, you can mine both at the same time,” Long said.
The chip requires only 0.331 watts/GH, which is a measure of the electricity required to perform hashing operations. According to Long, this makes the new chip the most efficient ever produced. At the same time it mines bitcoin, the new chip will mine litecoin using 2.9 watts/MH.
Many companies have attempted to make more advanced, efficient chips, but SFARDS used an experimental technology to reach these levels. According to Long, the company used a process called Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator, otherwise known as FDSOI.
While most chips are made entirely on silicon, this process allows for alternating layers of silicon and silicon dioxide. Long explained that this “allows you to take a design and, with no alterations in the design,use this manufacturing process to keep the power consumption to a minimum.”
While it works in theory, no manufacturer has been able to do this method at scale, a fact Long admitted was a concern for SFARDS. “However, the 100 sample chips I saw were flawless,” he said. Long visited the SFARDS production facility in Beijing to test the chip in person and pick up some development boards.
SFARDS aims to release two production units. The first is a single chip USB miner for the average consumer who wants to experiment with mining. The second is a 16- or 24-chip full miner that is meant for enthusiasts and large-scale mining operations. Further, SFARDS plans to ship 50 development boards next week to developers who will be able to tweak the hardware to try to create an even more efficient chip.
According to Long, the optimal setting to run the chip is at 0.062V, which allows each chip to reach the capacity of 100GH/s, coming out to the 0.331 watts/GH. Long explained that he tested the chip in an open environment which enabled the chip to remain around 49.2 degrees Celsius; however, he admitted that in an enclosed environment the heat might be much greater.
Because this chip can mine both bitcoin and litecoin simultaneously, there are two sides to it. On the bitcoin side, it has 160 processing cores, while on the litecoin side, it has 125 processing cores. It also has on-chip RAM.
Is There Demand?
The mining industry has shrunken dramatically over the past six months due to the low price of bitcoin. On January 1, 2015, cloud mining company and GHash.IO mining pool operator CEX.IO announced that it was temporarily suspending cloud mining operations due to the bitcoin price drop. As the price has fallen lower, electricity costs and mining efficiency has become an even more important factor for miners. However, a new generation of high-efficiency chips, including this one from SFARDS, is in development.
“I have personally already talked to many major farms, and many are excited,” Long said. “SFARDS is being cautious, and batch one will be produced only in a quantity of around three petahash. And they will limit each customer to a small amount so everyone can try it out. However, big farms will be allowed towards mid-summer to order in bulk.”
Due to the chip being in the final PCB design phase, Long wasn’t yet sure what the price for the chip would be. He did say, however, that the price would be competitive and that, “I personally expect the first miners to be finished and ready to be shipped in under one month’s time from today.”
When it does launch, FinalHash, Dual Miner, and a few other distributors will be allowed to sell both units.NFL Network will launch an eight-episode documentary series about the importance of football in a small town along with two one-hour specials and a slate of returning programs in time with its ongoing coverage of NFL football in 2015.
The docu-series, “,” will explore small towns and cities where football is of paramount importance. The first season will debut Thursday, September 17 following the Thursday Night Football postgame show and focus on Barrow, Alaska, and the Barrow High School Whalers football team. Following the premiere episode on September 17, “Football Town: Barrow, Alaska” will air Tuesdays at 8:30 PM ET on NFL Network, with an encore Thursday following the Thursday Night Football postgame show.
A condensed version of the first episode will be available to more than 16 million followers of the NFL and NFL Network on Facebook beginning Sept. 15. The condensed version of episode one will remain viewable up to the premiere of the full version of episode one on September 17 following the conclusion of “Thursday Night Football.”
The network will feature two one-hour specials: “Catching Odell,” and the exclusive NFL Films special “Do Your Job: Bill Belichick and the 2014 Patriots.” In addition to the new original programming, NFL Network will return the Emmy-nominated series “Undrafted” for a second season, along with the fifth season of “A Football Life” and the one-hour show, “America’s Game.”
All original programming shows and series will be available on demand following their appearance on NFL Network in two ways: through a viewer’s cable or satellite providers on demand offering, and digitally through NFL Media’s NFL Game Pass subscription product.ZAMBIANS have good reason to distrust the IMF. In the 1990s, under the fund’s guidance, their government cut spending, scrapped subsidies, liberalised the exchange rate and privatised over 200 state-run firms. This “structural adjustment” was painful: employment shrivelled and, by the end of the decade, income per person had shrunk by 8%. In the words of Binwell Sinyangwe, a novelist, “they were the years of money first or else no friendship”.
So it was with some trepidation that Zambia welcomed an IMF mission, which concluded on June 10th. As in the 1990s, Zambia has been hit by plummeting prices for copper, its main export. The proposed package, which is likely to be finalised over the coming months, could be worth $1.3bn, which would be the country’s biggest with the fund in two decades.
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The retro feel extends across Africa, where GDP grew last year by 1.4%, the slowest rate this century. Ghana agreed on a three-year IMF bail-out in 2015. Oil exporters in central Africa are looking for help. Ivory Coast, the region’s second fastest-growing economy, is in a programme. In all, 19 sub-Saharan countries have borrowing arrangements with the IMF; many have been plagued by high debts resulting from public-spending binges.
Some things have changed, however. “Structural adjustments?” said Christine Lagarde, the fund’s boss, in 2014. “That was before my time.” The talk now is of more flexible conditions and of countries taking the lead in their programmes. In Zambia some sceptics are being won over: Alexander Chikwanda, the finance minister until last September, comments that fund staff are “not as theological” as before. A new IMF paper notes that, since 2010, almost all its programmes in poor countries have included some kind of social targets, such as spending floors for health care and education. In two-thirds of cases those targets were met.
Not everyone is convinced by the fund’s new cuddliness. Social targets are often non-binding, pointed out a study by Cambridge University academics in 2016. Whenever deficits are reduced, someone has to lose out. In Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, shopkeepers moan about cuts to fuel and electricity subsidies, made in anticipation of an IMF deal. Trade unionists are “apprehensive”. Civil activists note that cash-transfer schemes, on which the fund is keen, reach only a fraction of the poor.
Indeed, signs of a rapprochement may say more about Africa than they do about the IMF. Governments these days are more market-friendly. Countries from Senegal to Uganda have sought advice from fund economists; Ivory Coast has an ex-IMF staffer as its president. One Zambian official sees a fund programme as an “investment in perception”, signalling to capital markets that things are back on track.
It doesn’t always work. Last year the IMF suspended lending to Mozambique over $1.4bn of hidden debts. Its presence in Ghana did not prevent a $1.6bn budget hole. And in Nigeria, which has long resisted IMF financing, the old stigma remains. Muhammadu Buhari, its president, blames a fund-inspired devaluation for a coup against him back in 1985. Seun Kuti, a Nigerian singer, is pursued by a horde of briefcase-wielding zombies in the video for “IMF”, a 2014 hit. “The fool IMF no know what’s best for me,” he sings.KHARTOUM (Reuters) - Sudan said on Wednesday that an Israeli air strike had caused the huge explosion and fire at an arms factory in Khartoum that killed two people, but Israel’s defense minister declined to comment.
Sudan, which analysts say is used as an arms-smuggling route to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip via neighboring Egypt, has blamed Israel for such strikes in the past, but Israel has either refused to comment or said it neither admitted or denied involvement.
Asked by Israel’s Channel Two News about Sudan’s accusations, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said: “There is nothing I can say about this subject.”
A huge fire broke out late on Tuesday at the Yarmouk arms factory in the south of the capital which was rocked by several explosions, witnesses said. Firefighters took more than two hours to extinguish the fire at Sudan’s main factory for ammunition and small arms.
“Four military planes attacked the Yarmouk plant... We believe that Israel is behind it,” Information Minister Ahmed Belal Osman told reporters, adding that the planes appeared to approach the site from the east.
“Sudan reserves the right to strike back at Israel,” he said, adding that two citizens had been killed and the plant had been partially destroyed. Another person was seriously injured, he said.
Around 300 people gathered at the courtyard of a government building where the Sudanese cabinet was in an emergency meeting, shouting “Death to Israel” and “Remove Israel from the map.”
“Israel is a country of injustice that needs to be deterred,” Vice President Ali Osman Taha, standing next to President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, told the crowd. “This attack only strengthens our firmness.”
The governor of Khartoum state initially had ruled out any “external” cause for the blast but officials later showed journalists a video from the vast site. A huge crater could be seen next to two destroyed buildings and what appeared to be a rocket lying on the ground.
Osman said an analysis of rocket debris and other material had shown that the attack was engineered by Israel, which Sudan views as an enemy.
Onlookers gather to looks at a huge fire that engulf the Yarmouk ammunition factory in Khartoum October 24, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer
Sudan’s U.N. Ambassador Daffa-Alla Elhag Ali Osman called on the U.N. Security Council to condemn the attack “because it is a blatant violation of the concept of peace and security.”
“It jeopardizes peace and security in the entire region, not just in Sudan,” he told the council during a briefing on U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. “We call on you to stop foreign hands from meddling in the Darfur conflict and to help Sudan arrive at a final solution that would maintain peace and security.”
NOT FIRST ACCUSATION
Several residents living near the factory told Reuters they had heard planes or missiles before there was a huge explosion.
“I heard a sound like a plane or missile and then the sky was lit up and a huge explosion occurred,” a resident who declined to be identified said. “There was a big fire and several subsequent explosions.”
Two other residents said buildings near the plant had suffered minor damage.
Soldiers blocked access to the gated plant where the main buildings are located away from the main street, making it difficult to assess the damage when a Reuters reporter visited the area after the midnight blast and on Wednesday morning.
In May, Sudan’s government said one person had been killed after a car exploded in the eastern city of Port Sudan. It said the explosion resembled a blast last year that it had blamed on an Israeli missile strike.
Israel declined to comment on the May incident or the 2011 blast, which killed two people and neither admitted nor denied involvement in a similar incident in eastern Sudan in 2009.
The information minister declined to say whether any weapons from Yarmouk had ended up in Gaza, saying that only “traditional weapons in line with international law” were produced there.
Slideshow (4 Images)
Major damage to the Yarmouk plant would be a blow to Sudan’s army in its battle against insurgencies in the western region of Darfur and the southern states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile, bordering arch-rival South Sudan.
In 1998, the United States fired missiles at the El Shifa medicine factory in Khartoum. U.S. officials said it was producing chemical weapons ingredients and was partly owned by Osama bin Laden, who once lived in Khartoum. Sudan insisted the plant made only pharmaceuticals.
The attack followed the bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Sudan’s neighbor Kenya, which killed at least 226 people, including 12 Americans. The attacks were blamed on al Qaeda.Get the biggest Everton 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
We all knew Saturday was going to be Leicester City’s day. We all knew the champions had been partying all week and the celebrations were going to reach a climax on Saturday night. And we all thought the most unprofessional team this week would be Leicester.
It didn’t work out that way.
Apparently Leicester were back in training on Tuesday morning, after their title triumph was confirmed the previous night, and training was exactly the same as it had been all season.
They were the professional ones and Everton were the unprofessional ones at the King Power Stadium.
We never got after them, we never proved to them that we can be a good team too, and we let them play, let them pass and let them dictate the whole game. That was the most embarrassing thing for us.
Sure it was refreshing to see Leicester win the league. I agree with people who say it gives everybody else hope and it stops managers coming out with excuses now saying that they can’t compete financially with the clubs who challenge for the league title.
Saturday was an opportunity for the Everton players to prove how good they are individually against the champions - and they failed to take that opportunity.
Sure the speculation about the manager’s future won’t have helped.
I’ve been in that position myself and you do feel it as a player. You try and put it to the back of your mind and be professional, because at the end of the day you’ve got to play for yourself as well as the team.
But when you’re not all together, when you’re not all singing from the same hymn sheet, you start to see the cracks showing through.
That’s especially true if you have unhappy players in the squad. It’s hard to get any kind of rhythm going. You try and have a word with players who aren’t doing it, or you get the captain to have a word and say ‘Come on, let’s pull together. Let’s not be embarrassed.’
But that doesn’t seem to have happened at Everton.
It was Leicester’s day on Saturday – but it could have been a day for Everton, too.
The world was watching and Everton didn't want to know
I’ve been in the same position as Everton’s players – way back at the start of my career.
In May 1998 we went to Highbury battling for points to try and escape relegation, to face an Arsenal team who knew that if they beat us they would be crowned Premier League champions.
I always remember that day – for all the worst reasons
We lost 4-0 and it was the first time I’d ever played right-back – up against Marc Overmars!
I remember coming in at half-time thinking ‘I’m shattered here’.
They were so good at moving the ball and switching play, but we were trying, we were trying to get stuck in. They were just too good for us.
Arsenal were unmatchable that season. But we tried to match them. We couldn’t match them for ability so we tried to get stuck in and disrupt them. Look at the stats for that afternoon. I think half of our side was booked as we tried to get amongst the Gunners.
That was the disappointing thing at Leicester on Saturday. There didn’t seem to be any pride in the performance and it’s happened too many times this season.
Everyone knew the whole world would be tuning in to watch Leicester City and you thought our lads would have an opportunity to impress, too.
Those that want to move on would have had an opportunity to put themselves in the the shop. Those that are hoping to go to the Euros this summer had the chance to showcase their abilities to national team managers.
But they threw that chance away, just got back on the team bus and came home.
They didn’t seem interested and that’s not professional at all.
Time to give youth a chance
I’ve been saying for the last couple of weeks now that we should play more youngsters - and hopefully that will finally happen at Sunderland on Wednesday.
We’re not going to finish top 10 now, and with rumours flying around that we’re going to be spending a lot of money in the summer, the Under-21s lads deserve the chance to show they can be part of it next season.
They’ve done really well under David Unsworth and deserve the chance to show the first team manager - and the fans – what they can produce in the senior side.
Seeing youngsters in the starting line up creates an air of anticipation amongst supporters, it gives the fans a bit of a buzz – and that’s got to be better than the unrelenting negativity which has been surrounding the club recently.
Saturday’s team selection was effectively our full strength team available, but while Roberto Martinez has shown faith in those players all season, it hasn’t been repaid.
Young kids might be moved down the pecking order as a result of new faces arriving this summer, but a run-out tomorrow and on Sunday would at least give them the chance to show to the manager they deserve to be kept around at the football club and give the senior pros a run for their money.
I really do hope the manager does give at least three or four youngsters a run on Wednesday. At least it will give the fans something to shout about.BizBash is a premier website that tracks and networks the event and meeting industry, providing a resource for those putting on some of the most prestigious gatherings on the planet. Organisers of White House State Dinners and The Academy Awards head there for contacts, ideas and best practices.
So, when BizBash puts together a series of lists of The 100 Top Events, held in the United States in 2015, it’s something that movers and shakers sit up and pay attention to. And so should Comic-Con fans as San Diego Comic-Con has been awarded top spot out of the highly regarded collection of events in the Entertainment Industry category.
Beating out world-renowned gatherings such as the Upfront Week (#4) and the Miami Winter Music Conference (#7), and even the Sundance Film Festival (#2), it’s interesting that Comic-Con was selected for this particular category instead of Trade Shows, further highlighting SDCC’s place in the cultural Zeitgeist beyond its perceived networking and industry value.
AEISD has been in contact with BizBash and Anna Sekula, the Editor-In Chief of the site has clarified: the selections for the categories and the standings awarded aren’t down to any statistical models but have been determined by the experienced staff at BizBash themselves.
“Success comes in all shapes and sizes,” says Sekula, “this is not a list of the highest-grossing fund-raisers or the largest trade shows by square footage. Rather, it’s the mix of several factors—from economic impact to influence within a specific industry—that determines the rankings in the Top 100.”
The site also recognises the efforts of the Comic-Con International committee, including their staff and volunteers, as well as CCI’s efforts to work beyond the confines of the Convention Center and into the city itself. “The events on the lists consistently execute at the highest level through their own combination of the right speakers, venues, sponsors, attendees, technology, and a host of other logistics considered by the thoughtful planners behind them. They succeed because planners understand the powerful process that occurs when people come together through a common interest, whether something as basic as food or as complex as the global economy,” says Sekula.
We at An Englishman In San Diego would like to add our congratulations to everyone at CCI on the receipt of this prestigious accolade, and look forward to more and more recognition for their efforts to make SDCC the event worth travelling the globe to attend.
(Note: the quotes above from Anna Sekula were supplied to AEISD via Grazia Mohren, Vice President of Marketing at BizBash and we thank her for getting in to touch and responding to our enquiries for this post.)
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PocketNew Delhi: Terming as "unfortunate" the spat between Shah Rukh Khan and Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) officials, Union Minister Farooq Abdullah today advised the Bollywood superstar to be a "little more calmer".
"He carries a lot of weight on his shoulders. His behaviour matters to the industry tremendously, and to every young and old in India. Whatever happened, its unfortunate," he told reporter outside the Parliament.
Abdullah said Khan should be "little more calmer".
"I hope that his temper will calm down. As far as BCCI action or the Wankhede Stadium is concerned, I think they should sit down and find a middle way out," he said.
On arrest of Royal Challengers Bangalore cricketer Luke Pomersbach on charges of molestation, Abdullah said, "Action must be taken against them. So that it becomes a thing for all the world to see that India means business, and India is not going to tolerate such behaviour from anybody."
Asked whether such things bring a bad name for IPL, Abdullah said, "It gives the nation a bad name. IPL is only a small thing."
PTI
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Erik DeBill has put two interesting benchmarks on his blog. The first one compares the performance of different Ruby implementations in Rails development mode while the second compares their performance in Rails boot time. If you haven’t read them yet, please do it now.
Benchmarking code is an important practice, but it can be misleading if you fail to understand the root causes that lead to the different results.
Performance in development mode
In the first blog post, it is guessed that the root case for having slow requests in development is because Rails eager loads all models and controllers for each request:
Now, what I’d really like is a way to avoid recompiling everything every time. If I could have Rails recompile just the model or controller I’m working on and skip all the others, that’d be grand. I’ve taken a couple stabs at it, but I haven’t succeeded yet.
This is wrong! Rails, in development, only loads the model and the controller you are using in that specific request. This is very easy to verify if you create a new application, scaffold two resources and add a puts self.name in their class definition. If you access one controller, it will only load the model explicitly referenced in that controller. Even the model associations try to be lazy in that aspect, always loading the minimum it can.
So you may ask, why Rails is getting so slow after adding more scaffolds?
It happens because Rails 3.0 includes all helpers by default in your ApplicationController. So at the beginning of each request, Rails needs to load all helpers. Loading a helper in development mode is slow because ActiveSupport::Dependencies needs to track which dependencies were added when a file is loaded. This tracking basically happens by checking which constants were added invoking Object.constants before and after the file was loaded. Tracking these constants take more than 50% of the time in the request, mainly because invoking Object.constants is slow.
In other words, the main reason for an implementation to perform better in the benchmarks showed in the blog post is if it can calculate Object.constants faster. Those results do not mean at all that an implementation is more suitable than other for Rails development. In order to have real results, we would need a real application that is not made of 1000 scaffold (or, in this case, 1000 helpers).
In any case, if the root cause is in loading all helpers, how can we make it better? There are a few things:
1) Obviously, the problem can be fixed by having less helper files. Since Rails scaffold automatically generates helper files, it is common that applications have a bunch of empty helpers. Get rid of them. If you prefer you can even turn off the automatic generation of helpers in scaffold by adding the following to your application configuration:
config.generators.helper = false
2) If you simply don’t want to include all helpers, there is a method called clear_helpers that you could invoke in your ApplicationController. This method won’t fix the problem because it is invoked too late, after all the helpers were already loaded. So you get the feature, but not the performance improvement.
3) Rails master (upcoming Rails 3.1) has a configuration option that allows you to effectively turn these helpers off getting both the feature and the performance improvement:
config.action_controller.include_all_helpers = false
Boot performance
The second blog post shows how Rails boot time performs in different implementations. Since it was not made explicit in which environment those benchmarks were executed, I will assume it happened on development.
At the end of the second blog post, it tries to associate the performance of booting Rails in development with the amount of code inside the app. However, when you boot an application in development, no model, controller or helper is loaded at all unless you explicitly access them in an initializer or in your routes file. Once again, you can check that by adding some puts to your classes.
So, you may ask one more time, what makes booting up so slow?
Rails 3 has a new router that can match paths very fast, but in order to do so, it needs to compile each route into a regular expression and that takes some time (although it could probably be made faster). And it is exactly the routes compilation that is slow on boot time. We can easily reproduce it by adding the following to our router:
Foo::Application.routes.draw do 1000.times do |index| resources :"posts#{index}" end end
This took 55 seconds on my machine using REE which is quite close to the value that he showed on his benchmark.
Again, benchmarking code is important, but more important is to correctly interpret the results. In his example, it is likely that most of Rails booting time is spent on compiling the routes and the benchmark just shows how good different Ruby implementations are in handling all these regular expressions.
Wrapping up
Much more interesting benchmarks for Rails boot time would actually be performed in production environment, which actually has to load all the code inside the app folder and compile the routes file. Regardless, developers starting new applications should always be skeptical about choosing a Ruby implementation based on other application’s benchmarks.
When starting out a new application, any Ruby implementation should suit you just fine unless you have a stronger constraint (like Java integration). Once your application starts to grow and you want to evaluate how well it performs in different implementations, you should do your own benchmarks and see how it goes. In any case, don’t jump into conclusions. If you need to investigate deeper, each implementation has its own sets of benchmarking and profiling tools that may help you really understand what is actually slow and how to improve it.
I also want to thank ruby-prof authors and maintainers, for such an amazing tool, and Yehuda Katz, who helped me profile a demo Rails application in order to write this detailed response.
And you? Have you done benchmarks in your applications and found any interesting data you would like to share?The NHL Friday revealed the various potential rule changes, rink modifications and strategic innovations that will be tested during the 2010 NHL Research, Development and Orientation Camp fueled by G Series August 18-19.The camp, which will comprise four on-ice sessions over two days at the Toronto Maple Leafs practice facility in Etobicoke, ON, will feature more than 30 of the top prospects eligible for the 2011 NHL Entry Draft. Participating players will be announced next week."I think everyone involved with the NHL thinks that our game is in really good shape," NHL Vice President of Hockey and Business Development Brendan Shanahan said. "I think that this is just a way of being progressive and keeping ourselves well informed of not just the fact that things work but why they work. Most companies or industries have research and development and that's exactly what this is: it's studying our own product."Two veteran NHL coaches -- Ken Hitchcock and Dave King -- will take part in the camp and will be challenging the prospects with strategies which emphasize offensive play and creating scoring chances."We're very fortunate to have coaches of the caliber of Ken Hitchcock and Dave King working with these talented young players," Shanahan said. "Ken and Dave are two men who never turn off their hockey brains. They're always thinking of ways to make the game better and to approach game strategy from different and innovative angles."* Hybrid icing rule;* No line change for team committing an offside;* Crease reset rule;* Face-off variation (face-off controlled by whistle in place of traditional puck drop);* Overtime: three minutes of 4-on-4; three minutes of 3-on-3; three minutes of 2-on- 2 followed by shootout (5 players per team).* Bigger crease;* Verification goal line (additional line situated behind the goal line);* Wider blue lines;* Line changes zone in front of each bench;* Face-off variations (infringement results in the offending player moving back further, three face-off dots down the middle of the ice);* No icing the puck while shorthanded;* OT – three minutes of 4-on-4; three minutes of 3-on-3; three minutes of 2-on-2 with long line changes; followed by three shooters per team shootout (if tied after three shots then players who have shot previously can shoot again).Thursday August 19 (all times ET; subject to change |
do we need to learn to do so? There are many actions that we can take, and all of our actions must match the possibilities inherent in the places we live: our ecosystems and our communities.
What is sustainability anyway? We’ll focus on this last question in next month’s segment. Doing so will help us prepare for a future in which we not only survive, but maintain and advance the best of our humanness within an increasingly unstable world.
• This article initially appeared in New Clear Vision.When voters in the tiny country of Estonia, along the Baltic Sea, elected their local representatives on Sunday they made history in more than one way.
Almost 13 percent of voters – and 35 percent in Tallinn, the capital – cast their vote online this time. That’s more than ever before since the Baltic country pioneered e-voting – and e-government in general, in 2004.
But there was another breakthrough. In Tallinn, residents elected Abdul Turay, a black Briton, to sit on the city council, making him the first black person to hold an important political mandate in Estonia. Mr. Turay, a respected political columnist for Estonia’s bestselling daily, ran on the Social Democratic ticket.
“Something like him we've never had before,“ says Andrei Hvostov, a well-known Estonian novelist. “It's a sign that Estonia is opening itself.“
Estonia, under the iron grip of communism until 1990, is a largely white nation. There are very few black people or non-Christians. There is ethnic tension that comes from the mutual mistrust between ethnic Estonians and the Russian-speaking minority who settled in Estonia after what Estonians regard as a 50-year occupation by the Soviet Union. Russian-speakers make up a third of Estonia’s 1.3 million residents.
Lately signs of what some say is a latent racism have bubbled to the surface. Music groups PWA – Preserve White Aryans – and RMV – Racially Motivated Violence – perform for neo-Nazi skinheads and sympathizers. And there has been the emergence of the far-right Conservative People's Party with its slogan, “If you are black – go back."
During the campaign, Martin Helme of this new party told journalists that Turay was "just another argument against Estonia being a part of the EU, because in my eyes, Estonia is meant for Estonians and decisions about Estonia should be made by Estonians.”
Estonia’s sense of national identity is remarkably strong, linked to the country’s tiny size and its sense of vulnerability, most notably in regard to Russia, the dreaded neighbor. "It's a miracle that we exist at all,“ says Mr. Hvostov. He argues that this sense of nationalism has led to Estonian skepticism toward minorities.
Nevertheless, Turay’s victory holds huge symbolic significance.
"It is a sign of maturity, a sign that people do not accept the type of latent racism [that[ is here,” says Tallinn resident Maris Hellrand.
Ms. Hellrand explains that when Turay started to write as a columnist, people were not sure he actually existed. "When Abdul started writing in the daily and [there was] a picture of a black man, nobody believed that, that a black actually represented them."
Toomas Mattson, who works for Estonia's National Audit Office in Tallinn, gave Turay his vote because “It was very important to show... that black people can be electable in the eyes of Estonian voters,” he says. “Estonia must be a country where people are regarded by their qualities, not by the color of their skin, or language they speak as a native one.”
Turay says he got involved in politics to help make Tallinn a better place for his son. "Writing about issues for the newspaper was not enough," he says.
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Turay feels what he represents is European-ness, not blackness. He embodies the new Europe, an increasingly borderless continent.
"Precisely because there are no blacks here, I have no natural constituency, nobody to speak to as a black person, I cannot have a message that talks about black issues," he says. "So race literally doesn't matter."A prominent Egyptian, Muhammad Salim al-Awwa, ex-secretary general of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, appeared on Al Jazeera on September 15, and, in a wild tirade, accused the Copts of "stocking arms and ammunition in their churches and monasteries" — arms imported from Israel, no less, as "Israel is in the heart of the Coptic Cause" — and "preparing to wage war against Muslims."
He warned that if nothing is done, the "country will burn," and urged Muslims to "counteract the strength of the [Coptic] Church." Al-Awwa further charged that Egypt's security forces cannot enter the monasteries to investigate for weapons — an amazing assertion, considering that Coptic monasteries are not only at the mercy of the state, but easy prey to Islamist/Bedouin attacks.
Needless to say, these remarks have inflamed Muslim passions, not to mention paranoia, against Egypt's Christians, who make up approximately 12% of the population. To make matters worse, right on the heels of al-Awwa's "monastery-conspiracy-theory," Islamist leaders began to circulate baseless rumors that the Church and Pope Shenouda III "kidnap" Coptic women, who willingly convert to Islam, and then trap the women in desert monasteries, "torturing" and "re-indoctrinating" them back to Christianity — even when the women in question publicly insist they never converted to Islam.
Due to all these allegations, since last month there have been at least ten mass demonstrations in Egypt — most numbering in the thousands — condemning the Copts, the Coptic Church, and Pope Shenouda. The "Front of Islamic Egypt" issued a statement promising the Copts a "bloodbath." Most recently, on October 8, Muslim demonstrators chanted "Shenouda, just wait, we will dig your grave with our own hands," while burning the 86 year-old pope's effigy.
At the very least, the usually intrusive Mubarak regime could have easily dispelled the absurd rumor that Coptic monks, among Egypt's most humble figures, were stockpiling weapons for an imaginary coup d'état in Egypt, by formally investigating and clearing the monasteries of the charge. The same intervention could also have aborted the ludicrous rumors that the Pope is kidnapping and torturing Coptic women who freely convert to Islam — an especially odd rumor, considering that the reverse is true: In Egypt, Christian women are regularly kidnapped and compelled to embrace Islam.
There appears to be no one to stop it — not even those most accountable: America's friend and ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his government.
Worse, recent events indicate that the Mubarak regime is intentionally inciting Egypt's Muslims against the Copts.
To further exacerbate matters, on September 26, Al Azhar, a formal state body of Egypt, denounced a remark on Koran 5:17, which accuses Christians of being "infidels," made by a Coptic clergyman at an internal meeting on dogma, as "blasphemous." Moreover, it took this opportunity to state formally that citizenship rights in Egypt "are conditional on respect for the Islamic identity" of Egypt, thereby reversing any modern progress made regarding Egyptian equality, and reinforcing the Copts' historical role as dhimmis.. Pope Shenouda was further compelled to publicly apologize "if our Muslim brothers' feelings were hurt."
All this has been taking place in a nation where Christian and Jewish scriptures are systematically denounced as fabricated. Mere weeks earlier, a well known publishing house in Egypt issued a book dedicated to "proving" that Christians had forged the Bible. Such double standards are well entrenched: the Coptic clergyman had privately remarked on a Koranic verse, whereas the Egyptian government openly interferes with Christian doctrine, while preventing Muslims from converting to Christianity, in accordance to sharia's ridda, or apostasy, laws. For example, Mohammad Hegazy is one of many Egyptians who tried formally to change his religion from Muslim to Christian on his I.D. card —in Egypt, people are, Gestapo-like, categorized by their religion — only to be denied by the Egyptian court. (Many other such anecdotes abound.)
Considering the citizenship rights Copts enjoyed in the early-to-mid-20th century, how did things come to this pass? Much of this reversion can be traced to Mubarak's predecessor, Anwar Sadat, who altered Egypt's Constitution — by adding Article 2, "sharia is the principle source of legislation" — only to be rewarded, ironically, with assassination by the Islamist "Frankenstein monster" he had empowered. Since then, there has been a tacit agreement between the government and the Islamists. As Youssef Ibrahim puts it, the agreement "turned over to Islamists control in media, education, and government administrations in return for allowing Mr. Mubarak's rule to go on unchallenged, setting the stage … for his son, Gamal, to succeed him. As part of the deal, [Mubarak] agreed to feed Egypt's Christians to the growing Islamic beast."
The Copts now find themselves in a dire situation. Magdi Khalil, a human rights activist at the forefront of the "Coptic question," states that "Egypt is on the verge of chaos and change of regime, and there is a plan for Copts to pay the price of this predicted chaos, by directing the surplus violence, hate and barbarism towards them." This redirection onto the Copts is obvious even in subtle things: aside from the habitual anti-Copt indoctrination that goes on in mosques — all of the aforementioned demonstrations occurred immediately after Friday's mosque prayers — Egypt's state run public education system also marginalizes, if not ostracizes, the Copts (see, for example, Adel Guindy's "The Talibanization of Education in Egypt.")
More obvious proof of the government's complicity is the fact that, not only has it not prevented or dispersed the increasingly rabid demonstrations against the Copts — the way it viciously and unequivocally does whenever any protests are directed against itself — but Egyptian security, as Magdi Khalil affirmed in a phone conversation, actually facilitates, and sometimes participates, in these mass demonstrations. After all, Islamists who publicly call for the death of the Pope do so, writes Ibrahim Eissa, "knowing quite well that State Security will not touch them, since demonstrations are directed against the Pope and not the President, the Church and not the inheritance issue [Gamal Mubarak as successor of his father]. Those who go out in Jihad against 'inheritance,' democracy and election fraud are beaten mercilessly by security forces, but those who go out to incite sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians believe …that they are the friends and 'buddies' of the police and the State Security."
For centuries, the Copts — Egypt's Christian, indigenous inhabitants — have been subject to persecution, discrimination, humiliation, and over all subjugation in their homeland (etymologically, "Copt" simply means "Egyptian"). In the medieval era, such treatment was a standard aspect of sharia's dhimmi codes -- for dhimmis: conditionally tolerated religious minorities -- first ratified under Caliph Omar in the 7th century and based on Koran 9:29.
Conversely, during the colonial era and into the mid 20th century, as Egypt experimented with Westernization and nationalism, religious discrimination was markedly subdued. Today, however, as Egypt all but spearheads the Islamist movement — giving the world Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Aymen Zawahiri in the process. As Egypt reverts to its medieval character, the Copts find themselves again in a period of severe persecution.
As history teaches, whenever a majority group casts all its woes onto a minority group, tragedy often follows. This is especially so when the majority group in question begins taking on an Islamist—that is, intolerant, violent, and medieval — character. Yet if Egypt's "secular" government and its U.S. ally are willing to sacrifice the Coptic scapegoat to appease the ever-burgeoning Islamist monster it has been nurturing for four decades, to whom can Egypt's Christians look for relief?A proposal coming before the Berkeley City Council on Tuesday to examine new laws for the homeless is being called Measure S 2.0, and it is shaping up politically to be a repeat of the bruising sit-lie ordinance that was on the 2012 ballot.
Council members Linda Maio and Jesse Arreguín want to ask the city manager to examine a raft of laws that might ameliorate the behavior of the growing groups of homeless youth that frequent Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley. Only Arreguín has now withdrawn his support for the measure.
Read Berkeleyside’s March 18 update about the outcome of the vote.
“I definitely recognize there are some challenges on our streets in downtown Berkeley and Telegraph Avenue,” said Arreguín. “I originally thought that adopting laws and increasing enforcement was going to be the best approach, but in thinking more about it I really think without talking about [adding] services and the outreach … we are not going to make a meaningful difference.”
A group of activists and lawyers who successfully defeated Measure S have recently mounted a campaign to stop council from imposing a new set of laws. The group, which has adopted the name “The Streets are for Everyone” Coalition, or SAFE, plans to hold a march and rally Tuesday before the council meeting. They plan to gather at Telegraph Avenue and Haste Street at 5 p.m. and march to the Old City Hall building on Martin Luther King Jr. Way for a 6 p.m. rally. The regular council meeting starts at 7 p.m.
The proposed rules would ask the city manager to:
Examine preventing panhandling within 10 feet of a parking pay station
Review what other cities do to prevent public urination and defecation
Ensure public bathrooms are available, and ask BART to assist in this
Look into outlawing the placement of personal objects in planters, tree wells, or within 3 feet of a tree well
Look into preventing “deployment” of bedding, tenting, sleeping pads and blankets on sidewalks and the plaza from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Look into prohibiting cooking on the sidewalk
Maio and Arreguín agreed to address the problem at the request of the Downtown Berkeley Association, the business improvement district that has tried to improve downtown in recent years by washing the sidewalks regularly, hanging plants, installing planters, and hiring a roving team of Ambassadors to talk to the homeless population and call service-providers or police when necessary.
In a letter sent to council, John Caner, the director of the DBA, and its board president Suzy Medak, explained that their intent was not to further criminalize the homeless, but to ask them to abide by reasonable standards of behavior.
“Telling folks they cannot urinate or defecate on our sidewalks, or roll out their bedding during the day, seems to be a reasonable requirement,” the letter reads. “We provide public bathrooms for them to use. People can sleep in parks during the day, and in our commercial districts starting at 10 p.m.”
“The alternative seems to be an anything-goes environment, where our police department is unable to consistently enforce current ordinances. And where homeless or other citizens are able to act out in ways that drive fellow Berkeleyans from the public realm, retreating to more comfortable, safer neighborhoods and cities.”
Maio said none of the new rules were part of Measure S, which would have prohibited people from sitting on the sidewalk in commercial districts from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. They are just new rules that will help keep the downtown appealing to all, she said. For example, right now there are no laws to prohibit people from setting down a mattress on the sidewalk or sleeping inside a tree well, which damages the landscaping.
“I don’t want to criminalize anyone,” said Maio. “I want to send the message that it isn’t OK, that it’s not no-holds barred.”
Osha Neumann, an attorney with the East Bay Community Law Center, and a longtime homelessness activist, said the proposed laws are a form of criminalization of the homeless. Recent studies have shown that sit-lie ordinances and other laws just don’t work, so why create more in Berkeley, he asked.
“The real impact of this ordinance will be increased enforcement on the avenue and the littering of our municipal code with more ordinances,” Neumann said. “That just isn’t a solution.”
Arreguín said there is much more Berkeley can do to work with homeless youth before it imposes new laws. For example, Berkeley only has one homeless outreach coordinator for the entire city. Berkeley needs to do more outreach than that, since talking to homeless people has been shown to be an effective way to get them off the street, said Arreguín, who is planning to propose a 17-point amendment to the ordinance when it comes before council.
In 2009, Berkeley had a homeless population of around 680. The city spends around $3 million a year providing services to the homeless. The city is in the process of building a new housing project for the homeless on Berkeley Way. It would also include emergency shelter and supportive services.
After the rancor of Measure S, Berkeley officials tried to come together to develop a consensus on homeless issues. When Arreguín co-sponsored this measure, it looked like the two political factions on the council would be working together. With his decision to withdraw his support, it looks more like a repeat of the Measure S battle in 2012.
Related:
Berkeley works on a consensus homeless plan (01.31.13)
Berkeley considers visionary homeless housing project (09.11.13)
Has it gotten harder to be homeless in Berkeley? (01.02.13)
Measure S: Will it help or hurt the homeless? (10.31.12)
Measure S: We can do better with civil sidewalks (09.19.12)
Berkeleyside publishes many articles every day. To see all our stories in chronological order, and read ones you may have missed, check out our All the News grid.Big news everyone – Justin Upton is still on the trade block. He has been for about three years now, and he will continue to be until he is mercifully traded to a team that wants him more than Arizona seems to. With yesterday’s reports about Upton’s availability, more than a few people on Twitter asked me about Upton’s home/road splits, and whether or not we should expect him to regress significantly if he’s traded to a less hitter friendly ballpark. In case you haven’t seen them, Upton has enormous home/road splits, and it’s a career trend, not just a one year blip.
Split PA BB% K% ISO BABIP AVG OBP SLG wOBA wRC+ Home 1496 11% 22% 0.241 0.361 0.307 0.389 0.548 0.399 138 Away 1534 9% 24% 0.157 0.310 0.250 0.325 0.406 0.320 96
Over 3,000 plate appearances, Upton’s been one of the game’s best hitters while playing in Arizona, but a slightly below average hitter when playing anywhere else. Chase Field is one of the best hitters parks in all of baseball, and the numbers suggest that Upton has taken full advantage of the hitter’s paradise that he has called home for the last five years. In fact, if you look at the biggest home/road splits since 2008, Upton features prominently on the list.
This all makes sense. A Colorado hitter as at the top, a couple of Texas guys, right-handed doubles machine who played in Fenway, a a couple of power hitters in Chicago, and Upton are all among the 10 who have the biggest splits between their home and road performance. If you scroll to the bottom, you find Buster Posey, Chase Headley, Will Venable, and Adrian Gonzalez all among those who were hurt the most – a Giant and three Padres. Again, nothing surprising here. San Francisco and San Diego are notoriously pitcher friendly. While split data is often unreliable in small samples, over a five year period, you’re going to see things start to make sense. Justin Upton derives a benefit from playing in Arizona. Buster Posey is hurt by playing in San Francisco. None of this is news.
However, there can be a temptation to take split data like this at face value. After all, we’re dealing with over 1,000 plate appearances in both home and road data for most of these guys, so it doesn’t seem like small sample problems should exist. But they do, and while the lists above are interesting, you shouldn’t read too much into the specific numbers for the individual players, and you definitely shouldn’t treat a player’s road numbers as if they represent his park neutral true talent levels.
For starters, home field advantage is a real thing, and most players hit better at home than they do on the road. Last year, non-pitchers posted an aggregate.327 wOBA in their home parks and a.314 wOBA on the road. In 2011, it was.326/.315. In 2010, it was.335/.317. For the 714 players who have garnered at least 100 PA at both home and road over the last five years, the weighted average comes out to a 14 point wOBA advantage at home. Pretty much every player is better than his road performance alone suggests. Home field advantage is not solely an effect of the dimensions and weather, and hitters derive some benefit from playing in their home park even if it is not a hitter friendly park. It is entirely possible for the dimensions and weather to wipe out that effect, and then some, so that hitting at home is a net negative in some parks, but the negatives are smaller than the positives in large part due to the non-park related aspects of home field advantage.
If you’re more of a graphical person, here’s a visual representation of hitters home/road wOBAs over the last five years.
Second, we cannot pretend that “away” is the same thing for every hitter, nor is “away” an even playing time distribution in neutral parks. Upton plays in the NL West. Because of unbalanced schedule, his career road games have skewed heavily towards San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Colorado; 45% of his career “away” plate appearances have come in those four parks. Maybe Colorado and San Diego cancel each other out to some degree, but that still leaves a big chunk of games in cooler weather west coast cities, and not surprisingly, Upton hasn’t hit well in either LA or San Francisco.
In fact, when you look at a hitter who plays in an extreme hitters park at home, and then you only look at his road stats, you’re almost certainly going to be looking at a collection of parks that skew to the pitcher side, because you’ve automatically removed one of the few remaining hitters parks from the sample. Buster Posey’s road numbers include both Colorado and Arizona, but not San Francisco. We should not be surprised that these numbers are better than those published by a guy whose road numbers swap out out a hitter’s paradise for a pitchers haven.
Pretty much any west coast hitter is going to be at a disadvantage in road stats compared to an east coast hitter, due to the unbalanced schedule and the summer climate of the two sides of the U.S. The west coast is much cooler, much less humid, and is home to many of the most extreme pitchers parks in baseball. A guy who plays in the AL or NL West is not going to play half his games in a collection of parks that grade out as average run environments. And, because MLB has put Colorado, Texas, and Arizona — teams that are not actually on the west coast, and play in very different environments than the teams near the water — in the western divisions, the drastic differences in parks within the western divisions helps drive even larger splits. For guys in Texas, Colorado, and Arizona, not only is their home park a great place to hit, but their collection of road parks are heavily slanted towards extreme pitchers parks.
Finally, there’s the simple reality of necessary regression. Even over multiple years, we’re still dealing with noisy data, and noisy data has to heavily regressed if it’s going to be used in a projection. We know the left/right platoon split is real, but we still regress left/right platoon splits more towards league average than a player’s individual split up to the 1,000/2,200 PA levels for left-handers and right-handers. Regression is just a fact of life when it comes to split data, and if you’re not heavily regressing splits, you’re probably using them incorrectly.
If you want to see regression as it relates to home/road splits, Tom Tango did a study on individual player park effects about 10 years ago, but we’ll dig it up here, because it’s still relevant today. He was studying the idea of “reverse platoon splits”, looking for guys who hit well in pitchers parks or pitched well in hitters parks, but the concept of necessary regression for home/road data remains the same. Read the whole thing, but I’ll quote a couple of the more pertinent paragraphs below.
As usual, I am going to hypothesize that a player’s historical splits are not very predictive of his future splits – therefore our best tool for predicting a player’s splits is his average home park factor applied to his home stats. In other words, I am suggesting that the regression rate for a player’s home/road splits is near 100% for a small sample and 80 or 90% (maybe more) for even a large sample. If I am right, then it is correct to simply park adjust a player’s home stats in the traditional way if we want to compare players on a level playing field, without worrying about the fact that any given player might be uniquely affected by his home park in ways that are not captured by that park’s average park factor. … When you do a study like this, the most telling statistics are the aggregate results of each group. If you look at each individual player’s OPS ratio in one year and then the other, you will be tempted to make conclusions one way or another about each individual player. That is what you were trying to avoid in the first place and why you want to look at as many “extreme” players as possible combined in order to get a large sample. Here are the composite results: In 2002, the players in the hitter’s parks who originally all had a “reverse” OPS ratio of a combined.91, had a combined OPS ratio of 1.02 the following year. The average OPS park factor for these parks was 1.04. The players in the pitchers parks who had a “reverse” combined OPS ratio of 1.14 in 2001, ended up with a combined OPS ratio of.89 in 2002. The average OPS park factor for these parks was.96. While further (and better) study, especially establishing a larger sample size, is needed to address this issue, my preliminary conclusion is that a player’s sample home/road ratio, at least for one year, is not at all a reliable predictor of his future home/road splits, and that in fact, the best predictor of a player’s home/road splits is the average multi-year park factor of his home park.
He was testing single year data, which is noisier than multi-year data, but the need to understand the fact that home/road data contains noise is still important. If you don’t, you’re forced to draw some really weird conclusions. For instance, did you know that Andre Ethier has a 58 point wOBA gap between his home and road numbers over the last five years? Dodger Stadium isn’t the absurd pitchers park that it used to be, but we still don’t think that Andre Ethier is a product of his fantastic home hitting environment, right? But, here we are, with over 3,000 plate appearances, and he has a.393 wOBA at home and a.335 wOBA on the road. Given what we know about their home parks, Ethier’s gap is actually bigger than Upton’s, as it translates into 47 points of wRC+. That’s the fourth largest wRC+ gap of any hitter over the last five years. For a hitter in Dodger Stadium, who gets to go to both Colorado and Arizona when he’s on the road.
You know who shows up near the bottom of the list when sorting by wRC+? Poor Adam Dunn, who has had to toil in the pitchers parks of Cincinnati, Washington, and Chicago. Oh, wait, none of those are pitchers parks. And yet, he’s posted a.347 wOBA at home and a.371 wOBA on the road over the last five seasons.
This is noise. This is why you regress, even large samples. And this is why you’re better off using something like wRC+, which takes known park factors into account, then you are using a player’s individual home/road splits. Or, better yet, use a projection system that also accounts for aging curves and park adjustments.
Whatever you do, though, don’t just look at a player’s road stats and assume that it’s a window into his real talent level, with the difference between his home and road stats being a mirage of the park he played in. That’s simply not how home/road splits work.Admit it. We’re somewhat spoilt for choice these days when it comes to contests of strength. Though not as well televised as some of us might like, myself included, strongmen competitions have grown exponentially over the past decade and a half. We have the World’s Strongest Man (WSM) and its various qualifying rounds around the globe. We have fiercely contested domestic competitions and even contests in your local gym should you be so lucky.
Time was, that this was not the case. Indeed for a long period, the world of strongmen had but two real contests to look forward to, that is the WSM and the World Muscle Power Classic (WMPC). Showing my nostalgic side, today’s post will examine the rise and fall of the WMPC, a strongman competition that for a brief period, was every bit as contested as the WSM.
What was the World Muscle Power Classic?
The WMPC represented a growth in strongman activities. Since the establishment of the World’s Strongest Man in 1977, a creation previously detailed on this site, the sport had slowly grown in popularity and also competitiveness. Seeking to capitalise on this and also hoping to give strongmen more than one competition a year, organisers in Scotland set about devising the WMPC. The brainchild in part of Douglas Edmunds, known as Dr. Death on the strongman circuit, the WMPC differed quite significantly from its WSM counterpart.
Far from a shot in the dark, the WMPC proved highly popular in its first iteration. Illustrating this was the competitors list which included the undisputed stars of the WSM, Jón Páll Sigmarsson, Geoff Capes and Bill Kazmaier. Incidentally, Jón Páll won the event over Capes and Kazmier, a point no doubt appreciated by the Viking! Now unlike the WSM, the WMPC, which took place in Scotland, was inspired more by the Highland Games than anything else.
Thus unlike the WSM, which by the 1980s had attempted to somewhat glamorise the events, the WMPC interspersed strongman activities with events pitting local tug of war teams against one another. It interspersed the grunts of Jón Páll with a clown painting faces. In short, it took itself a little less seriously away from the arena.
Viewing the Games
At this point, it is worth pointing out that although information on the games can be quite tricky to get online, we are able to view many of the old competitions. What is fascinating for me is that we can see how the contest evolved through its roughly twenty year lifetime. Take a look at the 1986 games, whose coverage does a good job of highlighting the very local feel of these games.
What Events Were on Display?
This I suppose, is the crux of the matter. What did the WMPC provide that the WSM didn’t? Well very little in fact, when one remembers that the WSM has and will continue to cycle through a variety of lifts, including we remember a deadlift featuring a cart full of cheese!
Now in any case, the WMPC’s events took place over two days and while it varied in its own contests, competitors were generally treated to some of the following.
The wench.
The Tree Trunk Lift
The McGlashen stones
The log press
The Basque circle
The Anvil Hold
The super yoke
The Carry and Waddle
(If you’re struggling to remember what any of these lifts are, this old Samson Power article has some incredibly small images to jog your memory!).
You Mentioned Something about Scotland?
Yes, so as mentioned, the games originated in Scotland and were held there until 2002. In that time competitors were treated to the very best of Scottish hospitality. In 1998, the opening ceremony saw a procession of strongmen and bag pipe bands enter the field together. Competitors lined up in front of the ‘Chieftans’ table and Jouko Ahola, at that time the World’s Strongest Man, was given the honorary title of Chieftain. Dressed in a ceremonial kilt, Ahola initiated the start of the games by banging the ceremonial sword on the shield to the four winds.
Similarly the 2002 games, which were the last to be held in Scotland, opened with a procession of bag pipe bands.
What Happened to the Games?
Though a relative stable on the Strongman circuit, the WMPC began to suffer by the mid to late 1990s. In the 1980s, the WMPC was a competition in its own right. A decade later, it was second in command to the WSM. This, one hastens to add, was not solely a reflection on the WMPC. Strongman activities suffered during the 1990s as the contests gained less and less media attention. In a bid to stymy the rot, the WMPC agreed to become a qualifying contest for the WSM. Retuning to our Samson Power article, the contest was described as the second most important strongman competition of the year. It wasn’t a good sign.
In 2000, no event was held owing to a series of confusions about planning combined with a perceived lack of competitor interest. The Games returned in 2001 but were faced with the Strongman Super Series, which sought to provide an international grand prix of strongman events. Though the WMPC didn’t feature in the Strongman Super Series, it was nevertheless called the Scottish/Aberdeen Grand Prix. The attempt to incorporate the WMPC as part of the Super Series signalled the competition’s fall from grace.
In 2003 and 2004, the games were held outside of Scotland. Though the Quebec games were well received, hopes that a change of venue would reinvigorate the games were ill founded. 2004 saw a split between the International Federation of Strength Athletes and the World’s Strongest Man regarding who the true worldwide body was (a point for a future article…promise!). Stuck in the middle was the ailing WMPC. With no where to turn. The competition folded.
World Muscle Power Championships Results (1985-2004).
Courtesy of Wikipedia.
AdvertisementsDavid Benatar
Better Never to Have Been:
The Harm of Coming into Existence,
Oxford University Press, 2006,
238pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 0199296421 Reviewed by Christopher Belshaw, The Open University
There are seven chapters, with five of substance between an introduction and a conclusion. As Benatar acknowledges, most of the heavy work is done in the first two of these. So in Chapter 2, 'Why Coming into Existence is Always a Harm', he argues for the book's central claim. If you're not persuaded by the end of this chapter, you won't be along for the ride. Chapter 3 offers important supplements, and wants to show both that the harms here are considerable, and that our strategies for denying this uncomfortable truth are many and varied. The following chapters, 4-6, explore the consequences, many of them practical, of Benatar's claim. So he argues (in 4) that it is generally wrong to have children, (in 5) that if you've failed to grasp this, and you, or the woman you know, have already conceived, then it would be best to abort as soon as possible, and (in 6) that the ideal size of the human population is zero.
Such conclusions may well be shocking to some. But they do follow, more or less straightforwardly, and more or less predictably, from the earlier claims. And for that reason these later chapters are of relatively little interest. Even so, some of their details are worthy of note, and I'll say something about them here. Then I'll go back to the book's central claim and consider it more fully.
Suppose you accept that bringing someone into existence causes that person a serious harm, and that this harm isn't compensated by any substantial good. Could it, other things being equal, be right to start that person? Fairly clearly, this couldn't be right. Could there, even so, be a moral right for you to start this person? Benatar discusses this question at some length. He concludes that there couldn't be, and so isn't, such a right. Nevertheless, as a self-confessed libertarian he wants to maintain there should continue to be a legal right to have children. But perhaps he's getting cold feet. While a case can often be made for preserving as legal that which is immoral -- adultery, greed, mocking the afflicted -- this isn't easily extended to an area where very considerable harms befall utterly innocent people. It's as if we decide it should be legal to exploit some small third world country that cannot possibly benefit from our actions.
Suppose you accept that to have a child is to bring into existence someone who will thereby be seriously harmed. Could it be right to have this child? The blurb on the book's cover says that Benatar argues that having children is always wrong. That's a mistake. Suppose we can use this child to improve the health of many others, already in existence, who now suffer from considerable pain. Benatar thinks that this is in fact about the |
has designated his youngest son to be the country's next leader, according to reports in South Korean media. Two newspapers and an opposition lawmaker said South Korea's spy agency had briefed legislators on the move. North Korean officials were reportedly told to support Kim Jong-un after the North's 25 May nuclear test. There has been much speculation over who would follow Mr Kim, who is thought to have suffered a stroke last year. Analysts have said the North's recent military actions, including last week's nuclear test, may have been aimed at helping Mr Kim solidify power so that he could name a successor. See Kim Jong-il's family tree The reports in the Hankook Ilbo and Dong-a Ilbo newspapers quoted unnamed members of South Korea's parliamentary intelligence committee briefed by the National Intelligence Service, although the spy agency refused to confirm the reports. There have been months of speculation over who would succeed Mr Kim The Associated Press news agency reported that opposition legislator Park Jie-won, a member of the parliament's intelligence committee, told local radio he had been briefed by the government on the North's move. Mr Park said the regime is "pledging allegiance to Kim Jong-un", it reported. Little is known about Kim Jong-il's youngest son, who is thought to have been born in 1983 or early 1984. The Dong-a Ilbo added that the North is teaching its people a song lauding Kim Jong-un - who reportedly enjoys skiing and studied English, German and French at a Swiss school. Nuclear concern There is no confirmed photograph of him as an adult. Questions have also been raised over whether his late mother, a Japanese-born professional dancer called Ko Yong-hui, was Kim Jong-il's official wife or mistress. The youngest Kim has been reported as being the son who most resembles his father. The BBC's Seoul correspondent, Chris Hogg, says it is not the first time there has been speculation that the youngest son was being groomed to succeed his father. There were reports he had been named as his successor in January. In April the South Korean news agency, Yonhap, said he had joined the North's powerful National Defence Commission. Our correspondent notes that in a society that values seniority his youth could be a problem. FROM BBC WORLD SERVICE Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
More from BBC World Service Some analysts have urged caution, noting that in the absence of much verifiable information coming out of North Korea, there is a wealth of speculation and rumour. "We had rumours in September, October that it will be Chang Song-taek, Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law, then briefly there were rumours about his second son, then stories about his third son," Andrei Lankov of the Australian National University in Seoul told our correspondent. "Every few months we have a new wave of rumours." Who will eventually rule the nuclear-armed North has been the focus of intense media speculation since leader Mr Kim, 67, reportedly suffered a stroke last August. The last succession was settled 20 years before the death of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung in 1994, and publicly announced at a party congress in 1980. The reports of the naming of the next leader come amid growing international concern over the North's nuclear programme and its recent missile tests. South Korea has deployed a high-speed patrol boat armed with missiles to its disputed western maritime border with the North. It follows reports that the North has moved a long-range missile to a launch site on the west coast. Meanwhile, at the end of a two-day summit, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and leaders from the Association of South East Asian Nations (Asean) condemned North Korea's recent nuclear test and missile launches.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionMOONACHIE — A substitute teacher from Rutherford was arrested Friday and charged with engaging in sexual conduct with an eighth-grade student from the Robert L. Craig School in Moonachie, according to the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office.
Patricia Gallegos, 24, faces one count of endangering the welfare of a child after authorities say she carried on a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old male student on various occasions through March and April. The incidents occurred off the grounds of the K-8 school, where Gallegos had been substitute teaching for about a year, Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli said in a press release.
Gallegos is being held in lieu of $20,000 bail with no 10 percent option, the release said. She has been ordered to have no contact with the victim, nor with any other students.The Red Scare
Canada searches for communists during the height of Cold War tensions
At the height of the Cold War, Canada joined its southern neighbour in an effort to unearth homegrown communists, real or imagined.
Minister of External Affairs Lester B. Pearson cautioned against succumbing "to the black madness of the witch hunt" when Canada began to track down homegrown communists in the early 1950s. (National Archives of Canada, PA-126393) Communism was a dirty word in Canada and the western world after the Second World War. The common view was that communists were planning to overthrow democracy. Therefore anyone with communist leanings, or even progressive opinions should be under suspicion. In 1955, the jet aircraft manufacturer Canadair published an ad revealing typical anti-communist sentiments of the time: "Everywhere are evidences of the continuous underground, cancerous movements of Communism... Only eternal vigilance can protect us against Communism and its infiltration into our way of life." In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy led the communist witch-hunts in the 1950s. He convinced many Americans that members of the Communist Party had infiltrated the United States government. McCarthy's unfounded charge sparked a frantic search for "Reds" under every American bed. A parade of the nation's actors, writers, journalists and labour leaders appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, to be interrogated about political affiliation and beliefs. In Canada, Minister of External Affairs Lester B. Pearson cautioned against following in American footsteps. "Let us by all means remove the traitors from positions of trust, but in doing so, I hope we may never succumb to the black madness of the witch hunt." On the whole Canada proceeded forcefully but more discreetly that the Americans. Ottawa set up a sweeping system of security checks. In one year alone, 70,000 checks were done. The RCMP quietly investigated civil servants, scientists, university professors, and trade unionists, seeking out political or sexual nonconformity.
Premier Maurice Duplessis introduced the Quebec Padlock Act in 1937 to give police the power to seal off any property where communist literature or activity was suspected. (National Archives of Canada, C-031052) In Quebec, Premier Maurice Duplessis was a vociferous anti-communist crusader. "The world is in a crisis more dangerous and evil than the most grave and destructive of diseases. Nowhere else but in Quebec is there a law protecting people against the vile cocaine of communism. " The Quebec Padlock law gave police the power to seal off any property where communist literature or activity was suspected. Danielle Dionne was a Communist. She and her family became a target for Quebecs Red Squads. "When I saw five strapping provincial police enter my home, I experienced an instinctive moment of fear, but I quickly realized that there was nothing I could do but remain silent. They rummaged through drawers and bookcases, removing literature and books. We had to change apartments a few times, because of the raids. " A Macleans magazine columnist described the paranoid atmosphere of the time: "If a housewife in Ottawa hears a knock on her door, it can be one of only two people. The milkman or the RCMP". The anti-communist zeal extended beyond the government ranks. Gordon Martin was a British Columbia man who served with the Royal Canadian Air Force for four years during the war. He received an honourable discharge and went to the University of British Columbia where he graduated with a degree in law in 1948. In his application to the bar, the law society asked Martin about his politics. He had been a member of the Communist Party since 1938, but responded that queries about his political affiliation violated his freedom of thought and association. The benchers rejected Martin's application for membership in the society, which made it impossible for him to practice law in B.C., citing his candidacy in the Labour Progressive Party. Martin found work with a logging company driving a caterpillar, and later worked in a sawmill. Eventually he set up a television repair shop in Nanaimo. He died in 1974. Twenty-four years later the B.C. Law Society apologized to the Martin family. Canada's hunt for communists began to lose momentum in the mid-1950s as the anti-Communist fervour died down throughout the West. Senator Joseph McCarthy was discredited in the United States after he directed his anti-communist attacks on the American army. In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin died in 1952 and was replaced by the more moderate leader Nikita Khrushchev.Delhi Congress chief Arvinder Singh Lovely, along with supporters, holds a protest against the AAP government at Delhi Secretariat
The tenuous understanding between Delhi's ruling AAP and the Congress was tested to the extreme today as Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal received a tongue-lashing from the party he had relentlessly targeted last year after the fatal gang-rape of a young medical student in December 2012."For the Chief Minister to say he will look into the gang-rape case only next week is hypocritical. He should act on such incidents and not wait for days. They (AAP) didn't wait even a day before protesting after the December 16 gang-rape," said Delhi Congress leader Arvinder Lovely."Is this the same party that accused Sheila Dikshit of making excuses? Today when they should take responsibility, they say that we need to study this issue."Workers of the Congress, which provides external support to the AAP or Aam Aadmi Party, today protested outside the Delhi government headquarters demanding action in the gang-rape case.Arvind Keriwal is credited with defeating the Congress government of Sheila Dikshit in state polls after winning a massive thumbs-up from Delhi's voters for his litany of promises including safety of women, which struck a chord in a city scarred by the horrific assault on a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in 2012.The AAP, on the back-foot after the alleged gang-rape of a foreign national just weeks after they took power, has offered the same argument that it had pilloried the Sheila Dikshit government for - their government has no control over the Delhi Police."Why are rapes happening in Delhi?...If crime does not happen in Delhi, it is not because of the Dehli Police, but inspite of it," Mr Kejriwal said.Mr Lovely accused Mr Kejriwal of being "more interested in power supply problems" than the gang-rape case. On Wednesday, Congress MP Sandeep Dikshit, Sheila Dikshit's son, had scathingly said that the gang-rape was not an issue for the AAP as the Danish woman was not a voter.Stephen King “feels terrible” about the netting at Fenway Park, he wrote in an editorial published in The Boston Globe on Monday.
The novelist is a season ticket holder, and he received a call from a Red Sox spokesperson who informed King that his seats would be guarded by netting in the upcoming 2016 season. The additional netting was recommended by the MLB in December. Fenway park had two occurrences of fans getting struck by a bat and a ball during the 2015 season.
Yet King strongly opposes the netting. Here is an except from his editorial.
“There are questions inherent in the decision to net, and I think they’re bigger than baseball. Like when does protection become overprotection? Is the safety of a fan at a public event like a baseball game the responsibility of the organization putting on that event? (According to the back of every MLB ticket sold, the fan is responsible.) When do safety precautions begin to steal away the pure joy of being there? “I understand the Red Sox bear some responsibility, but I also accept my responsibility to take care of myself — to the best of my ability — when I’m at the ballpark. Is there a certain element of risk? Yes. Is the risk perhaps increased by being only two rows from the playing field? Yes again. But you can see everything from that vantage, not just the players but the breathtaking green of the grass, the bright white of the uniforms, the sky as it goes from blue in the top of the first to black by the bottom of the sixth. And hey, there’s always the chance that you can catch a foul ball instead of being hit by one. That chance goes away once the net is in place. In fact, a lot goes away. That netting may be a fine mesh, but you’re still looking through a barrier instead of right at the thing you came to see. Which means you’d do almost as well to sit home watching the game on TV. “… Also, there’s something almost ludicrous about wrapping America’s baseball stadiums in protective gauze when any idiot with a grudge can buy a gun and shoot a bunch of people. I’d much rather see some action taken on that little problem. “I’ll still be at Fenway Park every chance I get, and I guess I’ll keep my dugout seats — which are remarkably expensive real estate, given how poorly the Sox have played the last couple of years — but I feel terrible about the netting. It’s one more step toward taking the taste and texture out of the game I care for above all others. The bottom line? That net feels like paying good money to sit in a cage.”
Read the entire story on The Globe.In my submission to the Parliamentary Committee, I observed that the “trick” wasn’t “clever” – it was the deletion of inconvenient data.
The IPCC “trick” was not a “clever” mathematical method – it was merely the deletion of inconvenient data after 1960. Post-1960 values were even deleted in the reconstruction archived version at NOAA.
I provided an explanation with a graphic – which wasn’t quoted or cited. They cited a less precise submission by Peter Taylor on this point.
They noted that “UEA interpreted the use of the word “trick” differently” citing the following portion of the UEA submission [discussing the trick email describing the WMO 1999 graphic, not the TAR graphic – June 13, 2010]:
as for the (now notorious) word ‘trick’, so deeply appealing to the media, this has been richly misinterpreted and quoted out of context. It was used in an informal email, discussing the difficulties of statistical presentation. It does not mean a ‘ruse’ or method of deception. In context it is obvious that it is used in the informal sense of ‘the best way of doing something’. In this case it was ‘the trick or knack’ of constructing a statistical illustration which would combine the most reliable proxy and instrumental evidence of temperature trends.
Contrary to UEA’s claims, there is no valid statistical procedure supporting the substitution of tree ring proxy data going the wrong with instrumental temperature data to create a false rhetorical impression of the coherence of the proxy data. Indeed, as I observed in my submission, Mann himself had condemned the merging of instrumental and proxy data as follows:
No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually
find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum [realclimate].
Unfortunately, NIgel Lawson – who, to my knowledge, does not have in-depth knowledge of Climate Audit issues – was invited by the Committee to testify on Climate Audit issues and made incorrect and exceedingly ill-judged comments on the topic, comments that were seized upon by the Committee as follows:
These [ UEA]interpretations of the colloquial meaning of “trick” have been accepted by even the staunchest of critics: Lord Lawson of Blaby: The sinister thing is not the word ‘trick’. In their [UEA’s] own evidence they say that what they mean by ‘trick’ is the best way of doing something.
Chairman: You accept that?
Lord Lawson of Blaby: I accept that.
From these ill-judged comments, the Committee concluded:
[The trick] appears to be a colloquialism for a “neat” method of handling data.
This is absurd. The trick was not a “neat” way of handling data, nor a recognized form of statistical analysis. The trick was a clever way of tricking the readers of the IPCC 2001 graphic into receiving a false rhetorical impression of the coherency of proxies – a point understood at the beginning by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, but now misunderstood due to continued disinformation.
The Committee went on to consider Lawson’s testimony on “hide the decline” as follows:
61. Lord Lawson did, however, describe CRU’s treatment of the data as “reprehensible”, because, in his view, Professor Jones deliberately hid data that demonstrated a decline in temperatures. 62. The data that he believed to be “hidden” are a set of tree ring data that disagree with other data sources regarding temperature trends. Lord Lawson said: “when the proxy series […] departed from the measured temperature series, a normal person will say maybe that means the proxy series is not all that reliable”. In that context he made two specific claims:
• that the tree ring data were flawed because “for a long period before 1421 they relied on one single pine tree”; and
• that the divergence problem was not just for data after the 1960s, “it is not a good fit in the latter half of the nineteenth century either”.
Again, these comments by Lawson were ill-considered. I have no idea what he had in mind in his comment about the lone pine tree nor what his 19th century comment was about. Jones was able to rebut each of Lawson’s comments and the Committee accepted Jones’ rebuttal of Lawson’s comments.
On these points, the Committee did not consider or rebut any of my written points, preferring to deal with easier targets.
The Committee cited the UEA denial that they had ever sought to “hide the decline”:
CRU never sought to disguise this specific type of tree-ring “decline or divergence”. On the contrary, CRU has published a number of pioneering articles that illustrate, suggest reasons for, and discuss the implications of this interesting phenomenon.
Again, as so often, you have to watch the pea under the thimble. It is true that the decline was reported in publications by CRU authors – but this does not mean that CRU never sought to disguise the “decline or divergence”. As I pointed out in my submission (and others also), CRU authors – in their capacity as IPCC contributors – sought to disguise the decline in the influential IPCC spaghetti graph (and elsewhere, through such measures as not archiving post-1960 reconstruction values.)
Given that the IPCC report is the most influential representation of the data, this is hardly a minor incident.
The Committee reached the following conclusion on this matter:
66. Critics of CRU have suggested that Professor Jones’s use of the words “hide the decline” is evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to hide evidence that did not fit his view that recent global warming is predominantly caused by human activity. That he has published papers—including a paper in Nature—dealing with this aspect of the science clearly refutes this allegation. In our view, it was shorthand for the practice of discarding data known to be erroneous. We expect that this is a matter the Scientific Appraisal Panel will address.
Here the Committee either failed to watch the pea under the thimble or is itself moving the pea. Once again, the fact that the decline is discussed in a Nature paper does not justify the deletion of the inconvenient data in the IPCC spaghetti graph in order to provide the false rhetorical consistency that IPCC was seeking. The issues are entirely separate and the Committee should have been able to discern this.
In addition, their suggestion that Jones and others were doing nothing more than “discarding data known to be erroneous” is simply absurd. There was no testimony to the Committee (nor has it ever been suggested) that the tree ring data was measured incorrectly or that the data was “erroneous” – the data is what it is. The tree ring data goes down instead of up – but that doesn’t make it “erroneous”. It only means that the data is a bad proxy – something that was concealed from IPCC readers.
It is discouraging to read such bilge.This is just depressing:
When presented with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” just 45 percent of respondents indicated “true.” Compare this figure with the affirmative percentages in Japan (78), Europe (70), China (69) and South Korea (64). Only 33 percent of Americans agreed that “the universe began with a big explosion.”
Consider the results of a 2009 Pew Survey: 31 percent of U.S. adults believe “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” (So much for dogs, horses or H1N1 flu.) The survey’s most enlightening aspect was its categorization of responses by levels of religious activity, which suggests that the most devout are on average least willing to accept the evidence of reality. White evangelical Protestants have the highest denial rate (55 percent), closely followed by the group across all religions who attend services on average at least once a week (49 percent).ABOVE: K2C with BUIS, with stock fully extended. This gun is Cerakoated.
As many of our readers know, the K2 rifle and K1A “SMG” are the standard infantry personal weapons of the ROK armed forces. K1A is actually a 5.56x45mm carbine, but ROK Army nomenclature has always been that the K1A is an SMG. While these have been in service since around the early 1980s, there’s one surprising fact; they haven’t really been upgraded since adoption.
While there had been some very minor upgrades in the heat treatment method, or minor design changes of some parts, there have been no major upgrades, as have happened in the M16A1 to M16A2 or M16A2 to M16A4. In small arms, it is a very rare case of doing nothing, since almost all countries and manufacturers who can design and manufacture military small arms have gone through significant changes for their weapons designs during those years, especially after the 1990s when the US Army standardized the MIL-STD-1913 interface, the “Picatinny Rail.”
Even though their allies went with all those changes in small arms during last the 3 decades, both the Korean military and the manufacturer, Daewoo Precision as well as its successors, S&T Daewoo and S&T Motiv were surprisingly inactive during almost 30 years in terms of upgrading their rifles and carbines. Actually, all of these are the same company; they only changed names due to the change of management.
The author fires the new K2C.
Of course there are reasons. First, the ROK Army, the biggest military buyer in ROK (of the 600,000 members of the Korean armed forces, the ROK Army has 500,000), was not interested in upgrading their small arms. As you can see by the numbers, the ROK Army today is still a Cold War style force like the US Army before the 1990s. They have spent huge amounts of money on artillery and armor, so the infantry’s share of the budget is not large. Since they are too much focused on war with North Korea, who are basically a 1960s remnant, modern infantry tactics and weapons have not seemed urgent. Thus, they just kept buying existing rifles and carbines, without seeking upgrades.
In those circumstances, manufacturer didn’t see the need for upgrades; ROK military had bought about 2 million rifles and carbines(including a license-built M16A1) since the mid-1970s, and that means Daewoo Precision and it’s successors had supplied on average 40,000–50,000 rifles/carbines per year, during all of that 40 years period. If you can sell those numbers for a few dozen years, and the buyer says nothing about upgrades, and you don’t need to worry about competition, what motivation is there to change?
Another reason for this inactivity in upgrades was the manufacturer’s situation. Daewoo Precision was originally a subdivision of Daewoo group, but during the late 1990s the Daewoo group crumbled and Daewoo Precision was sold to S&T Group, and changed its name to S&T Daewoo, then changed again into S&T Motiv. During these changes and management chaos, stable R&D was not an easy option.
Comparison between K2 and K2C.
First Attempt: Adding a Rail to Existing Weapons
But that doesn’t mean upgrading attempts were non-existent. Most of them were from Special Forces and the private sector. Special Forces of course felt the need to upgrade the K-series weapons, since they couldn’t put any new optics or accessories from foreign sources on their Korean-made weapons. Some very elite groups could buy rail-equipped foreign weapons like M4A1 Carbines or G36s, but the majority of those Special Forces have to use Korean weapons. They tried to find a solution for the problem, and a few companies in Korea developed add-on rail systems for the K1A and K2.
Such rails have been offered since the early to mid-2000s, and small numbers were used within special operation groups. But the numbers were quite small, and it wasn’t until 2013 when the ROK Army finally adopted standardized MIL-STD-1913 rail systems for both K1A and K2. Actually, the first rail systems for K series weapons were developed for the K1A. K1A has no interface for optics or other accessories, and since it’s a standard personal weapon of many Special Forces, a solution to attach optics on K1A had some urgency for those special units. Until 2013 many non-standard rails from various companies were supplied in small numbers to Special Forces, but in 2013, the ROK armed forces selected standard rails, because of the introduction of new Dot sight.
ROK Army infantry aiming K1A SMG with PVS-11K and rail. Upper/lower rails are covered with hand guard. Usually, K1A is issued to vehicle crews, radio operators, commanders or other personnel who need a compact personal weapon, including most special operations operators.
Korean Armed Forces Finally Decided to Adopt a Standard Red Dot Sight
The PVS-11K (despite the PVS nomenclature, it’s not a night vision system- it’s an ordinary red dot, with night vision compatibility only), was adopted around 2012-2013. But for that purpose, they needed to find an interface for attaching the sight on the weapons. They decided to buy a rail system developed by DI Optical, the Korean company who also developed the PVS-11K.
Actually, it was DI optical who was the most active rail developer in Korea. Since they tried hard to sell their optics (mainly dot sights) to military, they also had to develop rails, especially for the K1A. Now when they could sell the optics, they could sell rails with them.
The standard rail systems for Korean armed forces are two; K1A’s and K2’s. K1A’s is a four-side rail hand guard system (side and under rails are usually not used, but can be attached easily if necessary), which is attached to the weapon’s barrel nut and hand guard attachment bolt. But the K2’s is only a short rail on the upper receiver, since the K2 originally has an optics mount on its receiver to attach it. Also, unlike the K2, the K1A is used by Special Forces, so they probably felt the need for a more elaborate rail on their K1A carbines.
Both rail systems are now in use by both regular and special units around the ROK military.
ROK Army infantry aiming K2 rifle with rail, PVS-11K and magnifier.
Second Attempt—The K2C
While new rails for existing weapons were developed and supplied, there has been another attempt to upgrade the weapon itself, at least for the export market.
In 2012, S&T Motiv introduced the new K2C, or K2-Carbine. It was a necessity born from demand. As you can see, the basic K2 rifle and K1A Carbines became more and more obsolete after 2000- not only without provision for modern MIL-STD-1913 compatible accessories, but also with somewhat obsolete concepts, both weapons had flaws on their designs. The K1A is not only a bit large for the modern 5.56mm “PDW” concept, but it also can’t provide a stable platform for modern special operation carbines, with its short barrel length and very uncomfortable stock design. K2 is also somewhat inadequate for becoming a modern tactical carbine, not only because of the lack of a rail attachment, but also with its length, which is basically only slightly shorter (less than an inch) than an M16A1.
To handle these problems, S&T Motiv designed the K2C, which is basically a shortened version of the K2 rifle with a flattop upper receiver and 4-way rail hand guard. They not only chopped the barrel to 13.5 inch, they also shortened the gas piston, and adjusted the front sight height to the new barrel. The rear sight is their newly designed detachable backup sight, but a version which retains the original K2 rear sight is also manufactured according to one African customer’s order.
The original K2 stock can be selected, but until today, virtually all customers opted to use an M4 style retractable stock; while the stock itself is folded to the right side just like on the K2, this can also be length-adjusted to each operator, an especially useful feature when they are wearing body armor.
Basic operation and functions are unchanged; like the K2, this is using an AK-style gas piston, only shortened to the new barrel configuration. Since it’s a short barrel and long stroke gas piston operation, it’s a bit less controllable than other comparable weapons like the HK416, M4A1 or SCAR, but it’s quite reliable- also, since charging handle is attached to the bolt carrier directly, it’s relatively easy to clear malfunctions like an AK or SG550 series rifle.
Weight is 3.3kg with empty magazine, and length is 875mm when its stock is fully extended, and 570mm with stock folded; it can use most STANAG magazines. Rifling twist is 7.3inch/1, and K2C can use both SS109(NATO) and M193 ammunition.
While still not adopted by ROK forces—Special Forces are considering it now, but are still undecided due to the budget—some K2Cs were exported to foreign customers, including Iraq government forces; it’s even used by their elite division, but some of them were also captured by ISIS and unfortunately used against their original owners.
The Third (but Not Last) Attempt: K2C1
K2C was a step forward from the old K-series rifle/carbine configuration, but the problem for its adoption by ROK armed forces is the highly rigid—probably one of the worst in democratic countries’ military—bureaucracy and less than up-to-date state of mind. Even Special Forces are not free from such drawbacks.
ROK Army’s upper echelon didn’t like the idea of a short-barreled carbine like an M4 or K2C; most of them still have a 1980s small arms concept in their minds, when the M16A2 was still deemed an adequate infantry rifle and carbine length weapons (such as today’s M4 carbine) were not for general infantry but limited for vehicle crews or special operation forces. Also, since K2C is in fact one new type of weapon, which is in the middle of a K1A “SMG” and the K2 rifle, they deemed it would take considerable time and bureaucratic effort to adopt K2C as a “new” type of weapon. One more thing; the Army high-level commanders didn’t like the K2C’s lack of a bayonet lug.
So the K2C1 appeared; it’s basically a K2 rifle, retains most of the basic features, but with a new rail hand guard, flat top upper receiver and new M4-style adjustable length stock. To some degree, K2C’s features were used to upgrade the K2 rifle. It is now distributed to front line troops to replace the old K2 rifles they have had for many years. It’s still used only in small numbers, and in 2016 there was a complaint from some users that the hand guard became easily overheated; but the main reason for this was lack of a method to cover or hold the hand guard properly, such as using a rail-attached cover or the vertical foregrip. The manufacturer actually recommended using these methods when it was first supplied to the Army, but they refused since “Such things (especially a vertical fore grip) don’t comply with our current bayonet fighting training manual!”
One thing to be curious about is the handguard. The Korean Army is usually very sensitive on weapons and equipment weight, so the K2C1 doesn’t have side and under rails on the hand guard- they can be attached easily when needed, but instead of more modern, more lightweight, more space-saving and virtually open-licensed Keymod or MLOK design, S&T used somewhat old fashioned screw attachments. Why didn’t they choose more modern attachments? One can only wonder.
The author didn’t have any chance to fire the K2C1, but since it’s only a K2 rifle with some external changes, it shouldn’t be that different from the original. However, since the weight is a bit heavier than the original (3.684kg vs. 3.37kg), it should be slightly more controllable than the original.This question already has an answer here: Understanding garbage collection in.NET 3 answers
... and by different I don't mean performance, debug-ability candies and so on, I am meaning different programs (programs that for the same input gives different outputs).
Take the following program:
static void Main() { object obj = new object(); WeakReference objRef = new WeakReference(obj); Console.Write(objRef.IsAlive); obj = null; GC.Collect(); Console.Write(objRef.IsAlive); if (objRef.IsAlive) { } else { } }
The program above give different results in Debug mode and Release mode, from.Net framework 4.0 onward.
In Debug the output is "TrueTrue" and in Release the output is "TrueFalse".
Note that if I remove the 'if' part at the end, the problem doesn't happen anymore.
So my first question is: What is going on here? Why the 'if' affects the behavior of the program and make Debug and Release different?
I know that the Debug output is not the same that the Release output, but I usually expect differences like performance optimizations, debug information, and so on...
I think that I should expect that in all the cases for a given Input, both, the Debug and Release programs should give the same Output.
In order of not to make any assumption let me state the previous sentence as my second question:
Should I expect that in all the cases for a given Input, both, the Debug and Release programs should give the same Output?
Obviously the answer to the second question is no, so I already make a program that is a counterexample. But also sounds very weird to me that a program is being specified outside the Language it self (by other means). That is, from a unique C# source I can get different programs i.e. programs that do different things.
But I would like to read other opinions?
Edit: Note also that IsAlive is a property so should not have side effects.Confidence
Noun
“a feeling of self-assurance arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities.”
When you give a girl confidence, you give her the power to live. When you give a girl confidence, you give her the ability to see her true self, despite what others say. When you give a girl confidence, you give her self-esteem.
Walking through a throng of people in daily life, it is easy to become caught up in the notion that you are one of many human beings, and you all are the same. Thinking like this leads our self-esteem to wither and hide in the depths of our beings. Our insecurities always seem to come out when there are numerous people around. But, I’m telling you, do not let them get to you. When you add confidence into your daily scenarios, your insecurities vanish.
When you give a girl confidence by telling her you love her passion, by telling her you love her mind, you are giving her the opportunity to focus on all of the good in her soul. From a young age, my mom always told my sisters and I that we could do anything in the world, to be anything we wanted to be. She believed in us and never looked down on our dreams. The fact that I had a confident, honest, inspiring woman believe in me and let me pursue my passions has made a world of a difference in my life. Being a female in this generation is not an easy task but having confidence in yourself, in your abilities, in your dreams, can change your outlook.
I was given confidence as a young girl and actively aim to give confidence to the women and girls who I encounter in life. In college, I knew I needed to surround myself with women that were focused on uplifting those around them, leading me to join Kappa Delta. When you look at the national website for Kappa Delta, the first words you see are, “Building Confidence. Inspiring Action.” From the very first moment, I knew that this sorority was more than just a social club; it was about giving back to the world that has given us so much to love.
One of Kappa Delta’s initiatives is the Confidence Coalition. Created in 2009, the Confidence Coalition is actively reaching out to women and girls to let them know that they are worth it and that their dreams are meaningful. They encourage women and girls to stand up to peer pressure, bullying, stereotypes, etc. and always promote the vision of confidence. Through the Confidence Coalition, Kappa Delta has been able to impact thousands of women and girl’s lives |
is no question that things are bad. Really bad. “I’m speechless,” he says, as she tells him her bucket system.
You get the impression that she is quite proud of this, as if she’s a clever girl to devise a method. There’s the other clue that we’re dealing with a severe disconnect in logical thinking. She chats him up, smiling a knowing little grin and asks, “This isn’t the worst house you’ve seen, is it?”
Matt: It’s the most dangerously unsanitary house I’ve ever been in.
Shanna: But— [she looks amusingly skeptical here] —do you think I meet the definition of a hoarder?
Matt: Hell, yes! Why do you think your house smells?
Shanna: [she’s excited to have an answer] It’s a musty smell! Mold and dust make a musty smell.
Matt: No, it’s the feces and the urine.
This is brand new information for her. She looks blown away, shocked even, to learn that human waste has an odor. She can’t smell it, but she’s heard that her house has a “musty odor.” Her house is filled to the ceiling with leaking bottles of shit and piss, there are bloody tampons on the floor, and…
Guys, this is mental illness. This is beyond hoarding and this is severe mental illness.
Fortunately Dr. Zasio arrives, is told by Matt how grateful he is that she’s there, and they get out of the way of the bio-hazard crew. And for the first time in Hoarders’ history, Dr. Zasio not only suits up, but puts on a rebreather. (And here is where I panic for Matt having been in there for hours breathing in who knows what. Matt? Get a booster for cholera, please. I’m a mother, I worry.)
Shanna gives push-back to letting things go, and it’s because she has the mindset that if a can is sealed, it’s fine. If something still has the plastic wrap, it’s sanitary. Well, Dr. Zasio explains, not really. The outside is covered in horrid awfulness. You touch that (and Shanna explained in the bucket brigade segment that she doesn’t wash her hands after carrying the bucket out) and then touch other things, and now all things inside and out are contaminated.
This makes no sense to Shanna. You can pick mold off bread! You can eat around weevils! Plastic wrap on the edge of a tub of lettuce keeps it safe! Matt says he won’t eat her poop salad, and she doesn’t understand why not. Honest and truly does not understand.
They have to tackle the poop bottles. It’s not like the team can grab them, toss them in a dumpster and cart it off—this is years-old fecal matter, harboring who knows what type of diseases. They have to be fully suited so nothing touches their skin, they put the bottles in huge garbage cans, pass that down to the outside where someone then has to open and empty every single bottle into a porta-potty so the chemicals instantly destroy the harmful bacteria.
There are hundreds of gallons of filth.
The family arrives, a sister and her husband, and a brother. They’re all so angry about this, they’re all so sad that their mother died of cancer in that home, and they don’t know who to turn their feelings on, so they turn on each other. Matt steps in, directs them to a healthier way of communicating, and gets them working on the house. At one point the brother-in-law Will almost vomits into his rebreather, so he leaves after ten minutes. Sean has been at it for hours and is relieved of…duty. (Hurr. Sorry.)
Matt gets Shanna in to explain why it’s so bad, and she still is under the impression that the toothbrushes in their plastic can still be saved. They’re resting on a mountain of “dirty water jugs.” No. They…no. She then tries to convince the doctor and Matt that she can eat her contaminated food because it’s like a “last high.”
She likes that she can eat that stuff, see that her house is filled with fecal matter, and she’s still standing. It’s a very bizarre survivalist game she has in her head, and it’s incredibly unhealthy on multiple levels. Dr. Zasio realizes that she gets actual pleasure from eating food with poop on it. Shanna is amused by their concern, and this is not a good situation for anyone.
Dr. Zasio makes a decision. With the family gathered, she tells them that it is her professional opinion that Shanna cannot live on her own. She requires therapy, medical attention, and some type of transitional or adult housing. Meanwhile, Matt is inside with a construction expert, who explains that the house will need to be ripped out to the studs and rebuilt in order to be habitable, to the tune of $150,000. Or, they can bulldoze it and rebuild a new house for $145,000.
The family is now aware of how ill their sister is, thank her for allowing them to actually help her, and you can see that they don’t just think she’s a “slob” anymore. She is not well. The cleanup shifts to getting the yard to code, and the family will decide later what to do about the house. (They decide to try and sell it as-is, so someone else can bulldoze it.)
After The Show
Shanna is working with a therapist and is in temporary housing. Her case-worker and family are looking for a permanent long-term care facility for her. She has a huge hill to climb.
And Matt Paxton has a new line of cleaning products – road tested, Hoarder-helper approved – at his website, Clutter Cleaner. Check it out and support a great guy doing great work.
Lynda, Montrose, Colorado
“I believe we are at the beginning of the End Times.”
Lynda is an elderly woman, reading The Book of Revelations from her Bible on its special stand and in its special quilted cover. She believes deeply in the Rapture, that the most righteous of God’s Children will be taken up to heaven in an instant when the end of the world comes.
See, her hoard isn’t for her. Because she won’t be there. Her hoard is there for the “Left Behinders.” Boy, am I intimate with food storage. I grew up in a religion that required dutiful members to keep and maintain a two-year supply of food, fuel, and clothing (they now only recommend one year). My aunt and grandmother’s “pantries” were like mini grocery stores, everything orderly, sorted, old food rotated to the front to be eaten and not wasted.
Nothing of the sort is happening at Lynda’s house. Everything is jammed where she can shove a box or toss a can. Clothing, blankets, books, sleeping bags, it’s all heaped and piled and shoved and stashed wherever she could heap, pile, shove, or stash. Her son, Tony, thinks she’s off her rocker.
We learn that Lynda has another house. She filled it to bursting and walked away to this new trailer home. She’s close to being evicted if the hoard isn’t addressed. The difficulty lies in the fact that Lynda believes she’s been called on by God to store up these treasures for His less fortunate children.
Tony says, “I can clean up the place. But I can’t do anything about how she thinks about these things.” [Don’t you love when a family member has such an insightful moment? That’s it in a nutshell.]
Dr. Melva Green arrives and asks her about the rapture and her reasoning behind her hoard. She laughs later on camera and says, “How do you dispute God?” Dr. Melva is good people.
Cory Chalmers arrives at the other trailer. When he opens the door, it looks like a shallow closet that someone has shoved a bunch of boxes in. But that’s because you can’t see past six inches. He tries to wedge himself in there and becomes stuck just under the ceiling. He can see, though, that rats have been in there chewing things up. There’s not going to be anything salvageable there, is his guess.
Dr. Melva asks Lynda, “Do you think the Lord is pleased with this?” She indicates the hoard as Lynda sighs, her shoulders sagging. She wants to do the right thing, but it’s going to be hard. And a big part of that is because she doesn’t trust her son. This is going to be the stumbling block.
Troy looks visibly worn out, and you can tell this isn’t the first time he’s tried to empty out his mother’s home. He doesn’t call her “mom,” he doesn’t have expressions of love for her. He’s at his limit. She clearly doesn’t think much of him, either. There is a lot of anger simmering under the surface here. She admits to not wanting him there and not trusting anything about him, so he walks out, snapping off his gloves and saying tersely, “Excuse me, gentlemen.” He leaves the property.
Dr. Green tries to get Lynda to do the work, to push through her fears and stubbornness and get things done.
“I know, I’m being bad and—”
Dr. Green cuts her off and says, “It’s not about being bad.”
Lynda starts talking about how she needs to repent and be the person God wants her to be. But she gets back to work.
Troy and his wife Debbie arrive late in the cleanup, and she immediately rubs everyone the wrong way. Debbie is a lot to take in—bossing people around, challenging the crew and Dr. Green and insulting them.
“Are you a professional in this? Have you ever done this before?” she asks Cory.
“For seventeen years,” he replies tersely. “I go around the country training people to stop hoarding.”
Debbie has her hands on her hips and rage on her face. She says she is angry at them for not pushing Lynda harder, yadda yadda. The best thing about this is watching Dr. Green’s cool and collected expression, just waiting for Debbie to lose steam. Troy jumps in first, though, and tells his wife to shut up then gets back to working in another room.
Cory tells the camera, “This ain’t God. This is a hoarder, pure and simple.” The Rapture is just a handy excuse for her.
Lynda and Troy are brought together to actually talk, because if they can’t get over their anger and frustration, nothing will change. Troy refers to her as “Mom” and gets a few “I love you’s” in there, and it makes all the difference for Lynda. She begins to cry softly, and Dr. Green points this out to him. “This is real. This a real moment.” This isn’t posturing or anything of the sort, this is Lynda breaking through her anger. (We don’t know why she was angry in the first place.)
Troy pulls her into a hug and says, “I’m not here for any reason but to take care of you.” She murmurs a thank you as they embrace.
The clean up hits hyper-drive, a crew comes in to paint and restore the trailer to the point where it truly looks brand new. She enters the house and says, “Oh, isn’t it beautiful?”
Debbie says to Cory and Dr. Green, “You know, you were right and I was wrong.” Yeah, they kind of know what they’re doing. I get it, she’s frustrated but for crying out loud. Cory is far more gracious than I am, telling her that he knows that was hard to say, and he thanks her.
Troy, looking far less hardened and weary, says that he feels like he has his mom back. Their relationship looks like a completely different one than we were introduced to. Outstanding.
After The Show
Lynda is working with a therapist and organizer. Her number one priority is to keep her home clean, and once she’s on top of that, she plans to work on her abandoned trailer and clean it, too.
Two good outcomes this episode, and I was so pleased that Shanna was not allowed to live on her own. She just doesn’t have the mental wiring to make it in any healthy way. Good for her family for stepping up and getting her long-term care, all while being supportive and kind.
Figuring out the cause is the key. Who knew? (We did.) And to any production staff at A&E: thank you for losing the hyper-dramatic music. I was able to see real people have real problems.Clearly fake
I've always been interested in compiling a list of petitions in the gaming sphere.
Seeing which ones worked, which ones didn't, and nail down a success rate. Many like Project Rainfall have gotten what they wanted, and others spawned unity like 100,000 Strong for Bringing Back Mega Man Legends 3 even if they didn't ultimately get their wish. Some have no chance -- like this Far Cry 5 petition.
Tired of "multicultural lectures and preachy games," this petition "draws a line in the sand," and demands that Ubisoft cancel the game. It should only take you two paragraphs (if that) to see that it's likely fake. My favorite part is the requested alteration of the villains to "misguided patriots."
The reaction Far Cry 5 has been getting is more entertaining than any clip, tease, or gameplay announcement.
Cancel Far Cry 5 [Change.org]
You are logged out. Login | Sign upAnd as we mobilize for tomorrow’s Demonstration, let's keep up the pressure by making phone calls to elected officials asking them to support the exemption!
MAKE YOUR CALLS! KEEP IT UP!
GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO: 518-474-8390
ASSEMBLY SPEAKER CARL HEASTIE: 518-455-3791
SENATE MAJORITY LEADER ANDREA STEWART-COUSINS: 518-455-2585
We also need to keep up the pressure on State Senators and Assembly Members by flooding their offices with calls! You can look up your representatives by entering your address at this link for your Assembly Member and at this link for your State Senator. Or call the office at 718-706-9892 or email media@nytwa.org so we can look them up for you!
When you call your Senator or Assembly Member, you can use this script:
My name is ___, and I am a member of your district. I drive [yellow cab/green cab], and I am a member of the Taxi Workers Alliance. I need an exemption from the Congestion Pricing surcharge because I cannot afford to lose any more income. More than 90% of my fares take place in the affected zone, and I could lose up to $15,000 per year in income at a time when I am already struggling. I need the assembly member/senator to support an exemption for yellow and green cabs!Singapore's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, died this weekend. He's being remembered as the man who transformed Singapore, since taking over in 1959 until leaving power in 1990, from an island with few natural resources into one of the wealthiest nations in the world by per-person average.
His rule combined capitalism and pragmatism, as well as authoritarianism (he banned critical media and crushed his opponents with defamation lawsuits, for example). Often, at the heart of his approach was attention to detail: get the basic conditions for prosperity right, and success will come.
There's a great example of this in an interview he gave for New Perspectives Quarterly's fall 2009/winter 2010 issue (thanks to Branko Milanovic for the tip). Asked about the secret to Singapore's success, Lee highlighted the importance of tolerance among different ethnic groups (the country is Chinese-majority, with sizable Indian and Malay minorities). But he also flagged up another factor that might surprise you: air conditioning.
Question: Anything else besides multicultural tolerance that enabled Singapore's success? Answer: Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.
Air conditioning might seem like a strange thing for Lee to cite in Singapore's 100-fold increase in per capita GDP between 1960 and 2011. But it's typical of his thinking: the basic things really matter.
It's a philosophy that can be seen elsewhere in the way he shaped this nation. Take his attitude to corruption: Lee believed that if he paid civil servants highly enough, they'd be less likely to steal from the public purse. Indeed, today Singapore is one of the least corrupt countries in the world.We knew that there would be some Kindle releases this year, after all, as with many consumer electrical devices today, Amazon likes to issue a yearly refresh. This time around, there have been suggestions of a Kindle Fire 2, with an improved display and all-round specs, Kindle e-readers that may feature LED front-lighting and, we know that colour e-ink displays are now widely available, should the firm wish to make use of them.
What we didn't know was exactly when some of these products may be released, however, recent changes on the Amazon US and UK websites signal that a release may be immanent. It has been noted that over the weekend, the Kindle Keyboard WiFi has disappeared completely from existence and that the 3G variant has been heading in-and-out of stock, suggesting a winding-down of production.
There's no exact science to Amazon's Kindle release dates, only that they take place around this time of year, typically ranging from any time now, up to October. The real question for us here in the UK is, will we see the Kindle Fire 2, or receive leftovers of the original Kindle Fire from the US? Only time will tell, though hopefully it'll spill its beans fairly soon.“The Democratic Party is in many ways right now where the Republican Party was when the Tea Party took over many years ago,” she said. “We are in a rebuilding moment.”
“There are a lot of things that have gone on here that have really caused folks to feel that leadership doesn’t care about them or their voices,” Ms. Ellis added. “The Democratic Party is not only changing but has changed. There are folks who haven’t gotten that memo. The way that we did things before is not going to work going forward.”
For many Democrats, what is particularly worrying is the extent to which the lingering battle illustrates the bitterness between supporters of Mr. Sanders and those of Mrs. Clinton. The California Democratic Party has seen a surge of active members since Election Day, not only in response to Mr. Trump and his policies, but also because of Mr. Sanders’s success in stirring enthusiasm.
But in some ways, these are the kind of internecine fights — be they between the old guard and new faces, or between liberals and moderates — that are common in Democratic circles, usually mainly of interest to the most inside of insiders. “Remember: We are Democrats. We do this all the time,” said Christine Pelosi, a supporter of Ms. Ellis who is the head of the California Democratic Women’s Caucus and a daughter of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader.
But the stakes appear higher in this case. For one thing, California Democrats face a critical political challenge in 2018 as they seek to capture as many as seven Republican congressional seats, most of them in Southern California, a central part of the national party’s effort to win back Congress. California is heading into a potentially turbulent governor’s race next year as Mr. Brown — a widely respected, stabilizing force in Democratic politics — steps down after two terms. The party could also be enmeshed in a Senate race if Dianne Feinstein, who is 84, does not seek re-election next year.
The fight in this bluest of states has national repercussions for Democrats facing similar struggles about what the party should stand for — and how aggressive it should be in challenging Republicans — as it prepares for the 2018 congressional elections.
For all that, Mr. Bauman, 58, is hardly your run-of-the-mill party leader. He is openly gay and an Orthodox Jew, a nurse by training who sprinkles his remarks with Hebrew and tears up when talking about his late mother and the time he heard Bill Clinton, running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, appealing for gay support at a rally in Hollywood at the height of the AIDS crisis.Since launching last year, the quarterly Stellar Build Challenge has galvanized scores of developers from every corner of the globe to build their own applications atop the Stellar Network. To highlight some of the great projects that have been built for the SBC, we reached out to a just a few of the winners of the last SBC to discuss their projects.
QRYPTOS has added XLM
Lumens are now available for trading on (XLM) on QRYPTOS.
The Mobius DApp Store Hackathon ends October 9th, 2017 judged by Jackson Palmer (Creator of Dogecoin) and the community. The winning submission to the DApp Store will win 50,000 MOBI. Mobius is building new standards to easily connect billions of apps, devices, and people to the blockchain ecosystem.
Announce your project by October 30th for the Stellar Build Challenge!
You have exactly 26 days left to announce your project for the Stellar Build Challenge! Already working on an idea? Announce it now so you can start getting feedback from both members of SDF and the community. We look forward to seeing what you’ll build for this next round!
Stellar is hiring!
Interested in working at Stellar.org? We’re hiring for a variety of developer roles. We don’t care about pedigrees but we do care if you are smart and can get stuff done. Be nimble. Be enthusiastic. We want spirited debates about how to build tools that will impact the future of money.
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A shocking TV documentary claims thousands of British women pay for sex each year - but they are too embarrassed to admit it.
The hour-long show, fronted by bodybuilder Jodie Marsh, couldn’t get a single British woman to go on camera to discuss why they use young male escorts - or gigolos.
In the end the 36-year-old Essex girl, who has been celibate four years, had to fly to America to get the inside story on Women Who Pay for Sex.
Jodie said: “It was ridiculous - there are thousands of women in this country who use male escorts. We spoke to many, but they refused to go on camera.
(Image: TLC)
“It is so weird - the British women are just so reserved and embarrassed by it all. In the end we had to go to the States where the women were much more open and happy to talk about their reasons why.”
These young men earn from between £50 an hour to £25,000 a WEEK - from women who want no-strings, no-commitment sex.
Jodie, famous in her 20s for tumbling out of nightclubs in skimpy clothing, insisted she has “grown up” now and was keen to be a “good role model” for other women.
She said: “I am a grown up now, thank god, it took me long enough. I think as somebody in the public eye, I think we all have responsibility to be a good role model.”
poll loading Would you pay for a male escort? 0+ VOTES SO FAR Yes No Only if he did cleaning
Jodie admitted the idea behind the documentary came after she searched online for a male escort - but didn’t go through with it after not finding any she was attracted to.
“I know what my motives are, she explained. “But I also know there are women who are actually doing it, and I wanted to find out if their motives were the same as mine.
“There are many reasons why women do it - for some it is the only way they can get sex, for others they have a higher sex drive than their partners.”
* Women Who Pay for Sex is set to air on March 18 at 10pm on TLCThe current judicial crisis offers and excellent opportunity to take a look at how New Jersey chooses and installs its judges -- and how that process differs from many other states.
In 38 states, at least some appellate and major trial court judges are voted in, either in an initial election or a "retention" election following a first term. Supreme Court justices face competitive elections in 22 states.
New Jersey is one of only eight states in which no judges stand for election -- presumably to keep the process free of politics.
But even without electioneering and fundraising, politics can -- and does -- play a large part in New Jersey's judicial appointments, much to the concern of many judges themselves, who are worried about preserving an autonomous judiciary.
This is how it's done in the Garden State:
Gubernatorial nominees: The governor gets to nominate all state-level court judges -- Tax Court, Superior Court and Supreme Court -- as well as judges of lower regional courts who handle cases for more than one municipality.
Governors traditionally have kept a political balance among judges -- nominating one Democrat for each Republican. In the case of the Supreme Court, this has meant keeping a balance of 3-3 with the governor in power being able to appoint the seventh member from his party if an opening arises. An individual town's judge or judges are appointed for three years by the municipality's governing body and not subject to state review.
Qualifications: The state constitution requires only that Superior Court judges and Supreme Court judges must have been admitted to the state bar for at least 10 years on their nomination. As a practical matter, there are a number of other qualities candidates must possess. Judges have usually been politically active in one way or another: some have made political contributions: others have made friends with state Senators; and others are former state legislators. While not spelled out, political party affiliation is also a factor in nominations.. Although the New Jersey State Bar Association does not have an explicit role in the process, the bar has historically reviewed judicial nominations and let the governor or Senate Judiciary Committee know how it rates the candidate.
Courtesy: Yet another unwritten factor influencing whether a lawyer joins the bench is senatorial courtesy. Reportedly dating back to the mid-1800s, the rule means that no judicial nomination can move forward until the senator or senators representing the district and/or county in which the candidate lives give their approval. Numerous prospective judges, as well as other gubernatorial appointees, have been derailed or delayed due to a senator exercising courtesy. It held up the initial appointment of current Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner and is reportedly one of the reasons there are 21 vacancies on the Essex County Superior Court bench.
Hearing: Each judicial nominee must clear the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by a member of the party in power in the upper house and dominated by that party, currently the Democrats. Confirmation hearings can be short love fests or drawn out and contentious. This process has also halted a number of nominees, including two of Gov. Chris Christie's choices for the Supreme Court. If the committee clears a nominee, it goes to the full Senate, which has the final say. Typically, a nominee who is able to make it out of committee gets confirmed.
Do it again: State judges receive an initial seven-year term and then come up for renomination. Again, according to the constitution, the governor gets to decide whether to return a judge to the Superior or Supreme Court. Should he do so, and the Senate -- following a hearing -- reconfirms the judge, the jurist receives tenure until age 70, when the constitution says judges must retire. There are provisions that would allow for the impeachment or removal of a judge but this would be a rare action. This reappointment process was the focus on much scrutiny over the past several months with the approach of the expiration of the initial term of Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner. Some interpret the constitution as meaning a judge should be reappointed unless there is good cause to deny tenure -- such as poor judicial temperament. Christie did renominate Rabner, but said as he did so that the constitution left that decision up to him. Since the 1947 constitution created the modern judiciary, governors have declined to reappoint some Superior Court judges. Only two Supreme Court justices have not been renominated, both by Christie.
Caveat: The Chief Justice, as head of the state's judiciary, has some say over moving judges within the court system. He can elevate Superior Court judges to the Appellate Division to hear appeals and choose the assignment judge for each of the court vicinages, which mostly follow county boundaries. He also can, and has had to, elevate the most senior appellate judges to the Supreme Court to fill vacancies -- New Jersey's has had two for a number of years.Imagine for a moment that you’re in charge of overseeing medical research approval for ethical concerns. One day, a researcher approaches you with the following proposal: they are interested in testing whether a food stuff that some portion of the population occasionally consumes for fun is actually quite toxic, like spicy chilies. They think that eating even small doses of this compound will cause mental disturbances in the short term – like and thoughts – and might even cause those negative changes permanently in the long term. As such, they intend to test their hypothesis by bringing otherwise-healthy participants into the lab, providing them with a dose of the possibly-toxic compound (either just once or several times over the course of a few days), and then see if they observe any negative effects. What would your verdict on the ethical acceptability of this research be? If I had to guess, I suspect that many people would not allow the research to be conducted because one of the major tenants of research is that harm should not befall your participants, except when absolutely necessary. In fact, I suspect that were you the researcher – rather than the person overseeing the research – you probably wouldn’t even propose the project in the first place because you might have some reservations about possibly poisoning people, either harming them directly and/or those around them indirectly.
Source: Flickr/Håvar og Solveig
With that in mind, I want to examine a few other research hypotheses I have heard about over the years. The first of these is the idea that exposing men to will cause a number of harmful consequences, such as increasing how appealing rape were, bolstering the that women would enjoy being raped, and decreasing the perceived seriousness of violence against women (as reviewed by Fisher et al, 2013). Presumably, the effect on those beliefs over time is serious as it might lead to real-life behavior on the part of men to rape women or approve of such acts on the parts of others. Other, less-serious harms have also been proposed, such as the possibility that exposure to pornography might have harmful effects on the viewer’s relationship, reducing their commitment, making it more likely that they would do things like cheat or abandon their partner. Now, if a researcher earnestly believed they would find such effects, that the effects would be appreciable in size to the point of being meaningful (i.e., are large enough to be reliably detected by statistical test in relatively small samples), and that their implications could be long-term in nature, could this researcher even ethically test such issues? Would it be ethically acceptable to bring people into the lab, randomly expose them to this kind of (in a manner of speaking) psychologically-toxic material, observe the negative effects, and then just let them go?
Let’s move onto another hypothesis that I’ve been talking a lot about lately: the effects of violent on real life. Now I’ve been specifically talking about video game violence, but people have worried about violent themes in the context of TV, movies, comic books, and even music. Specifically, there are many researchers who believe that exposure to media violence will cause people to become more aggressive through making them perceive more hostility in the world, view violence as a more acceptable means of solving problems, or by making violence seem more rewarding. Again, presumably, changing these perceptions is thought to cause the harm of eventual, meaningful increases in real-life violence. Now, if a researcher earnestly believed they would find such effects, that the effects would be appreciable in size to the point of being meaningful, and that their implications could be long-term in nature, could this researcher even ethically test such issues? Would it be ethically acceptable to bring people into the lab, randomly expose them to this kind of (in a manner of speaking) psychologically-toxic material, observe the negative effects, and then just let them go?
Though I didn’t think much of it at first, the criticisms I read about the classic Bobo doll experiment are actually kind of interesting in this regard. In particular, researchers were purposefully exposing young children to models of aggression, the hope being that the children will come to view violence as acceptable and engage in it themselves. The reason I didn’t pay it much mind is that I didn’t view the experiment as causing any kind of meaningful, real-world, or lasting effects on the children’s aggression; I don’t think mere exposure to such behavior will have meaningful impacts. But if one truly believed that it would, I can see why that might cause some degree of ethical concerns.
Since I’ve been talking about brief exposure, one might also worry about what would happen to researchers were to expose participants to such material – pornographic or violent – for weeks, months, or even years on end. Imagine a study that asked people to smoke for 20 years to test the negative effects in humans; probably not getting that past the IRB. As a worthy aside on that point, though, it’s worth noting that as pornography has become more widely available, rates of sexual offending have gone down (Fisher et al, 2013); as violent video games have become more available, rates of youth violent have done down too (Ferguson & Kilburn, 2010). Admittedly, it is possible that such declines would be even steeper if such media wasn’t in the picture, but the effects of this media – if they cause violence at all – are clearly not large enough to reverse those trends.
Source: Flickr/ϟ†Σ
So what are we to make of the fact that these research was proposed, approved, and conducted? There are a few possibility to kick around. The first is that the research was proposed because the researchers themselves don’t give much thought to the ethical concerns, happy enough if it means they get a publication out of it regardless of the consequences, but that wouldn’t explain why it got approved by other bodies like IRBs. It is also possible that the researchers and those who approve it believe it to be harmful, but view the benefits to such research as outstripping the costs, working under the assumption that once the harmful effects are established, further regulation of such products might follow ultimately reducing the prevalence or use of such media (not unlike the warnings and restrictions placed on the sale of cigarettes). Since any declines in availability or censorship of such media have yet to manifest – especially given how access to the internet provides means for circumventing bans on the circulation of information – whatever practical benefits might have arisen from this research are hard to see (again, assuming that things like censorship would yield benefits at all).
There is another aspect to consider as well: during discussions of this research outside of academia – such as on social media – I have not noted a great deal of outrage expressed by consumers of these findings. Anecdotal as this is, when people discuss such research, they do not appear to raising the concern that the research itself was unethical to conduct because it will doing harm to people’s or women more generally (in the case of pornography), or because it will result in making people more violent and accepting of violence (in the video game studies). Perhaps those concerns exist en mass and I just haven’t seen them yet (always possible), but I see another possibility: people don’t really believe that the participants are being harmed in this case. People generally aren’t afraid that the participants in those experiments will dissolve their relationship or come to think rape is acceptable because they were exposed to pornography, or will get into fights because they played 20 minutes of a video game. In other words, they don’t think those negative effects are particularly large, if they even really believe they exist at all. While this point would be a rather implicit one, the lack of consistent moral outrage expressed over the ethics of this kind of research does speak to the matter of how serious these effects are perceived to be: at least in the short-term, not very.
What I find very curious about these ideas – pornography causes rape, video games cause violence, and their ilk – is that they all seem to share a certain assumption: that people are effectively acted upon by information, placing human psychology in a distinctive passive role while information takes the active one. Indeed, in many respects, this kind of research strikes me as remarkably similar to the underlying assumptions of the research on stereotype threat: the idea that you can, say, make women worse at math by telling them men tend to do better at it. All of these theories seem to posit a very exploitable human psychology capable of being manipulated by information readily, rather than a psychology which interacts with, evaluates, and transforms the information it receives.
For instance, a psychology capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy can play a video game without thinking it is being threatened physically, just like it can watch pornography (or, indeed, any videos) without actually believing the people depicted are present in the room with them. Now clearly some part of our psychology does treat pornography as an opportunity to mate (else there would be no sexual arousal generated in response to it), but that part does not necessarily govern other behaviors (generating arousal is biologically cheap; aggressing against someone else is not). The adaptive nature of a behavior depends on context.
Source: Flickr/opus moreschi
As such, expecting something like a depiction to violence to translate consistently into some general perception that violence is acceptable and useful in all sorts of interactions throughout life is inappropriate. that you can beat up someone weaker than you doesn’t mean it’s suddenly advisable to challenge someone stronger than you; relatedly, seeing a depiction of people who are not you (or your future opponent) fighting shouldn’t make it advisable for you to change your behavior either. Whatever the effects of this media, they will ultimately be assessed and manipulated internally by psychological mechanisms and tested against reality, rather than just accepted as useful and universally applied.
I have seen similar thinking about information manipulating people another time as well: during discussions of memes. are posited to be similar to infectious agents that will reproduce themselves at the expense of their host’s fitness; information that literally hijacks people’s minds for its own reproductive benefits. I haven’t seen much in the |
Charges in that case have not been filed as victims have not stepped forward. Video of that incident was also posted to Facebook.
Thompson told police that since video of the incidents went viral on Facebook, his girlfriend has lost her job and they were evicted from their home. Thompson told police he has had to cut his hair, paint his girlfriend's truck and remove the Confederate flag and Trump stickers from it to "avoid controversy."
He told police he wanted to press charges against Jenner and has called Jenner multiple times to threaten him with a lawsuit.
Jenner said it's sad to hear about and witness such incidents.
"It's scary that this is going on and I'm hearing all the reports of people being attacked or bullied," Jenner said. "It's sad, it's very sad."
The affidavit outlined a third incident involving Thompson and an African-American man, but the subject in that case hasn't stepped forward so charges haven't been filed.
Holly Hill police interviewed Thompson after that incident and they said he admitted to getting into a verbal altercation with the man over a parking space. Thompson said the man insinuated he had a gun so Thompson armed himself with a baseball bat.
The confrontation de-escalated without any physical violence, police said.
Copyright 2016 by WKMG ClickOrlando - All rights reserved.The production of the Channing Tatum-led Gambit solo X-Men movie franchise spinoff has been on a rough road so far. There was a shake-up in the director’s chair, with Rupert Wyatt departing the film and Doug Liman taking his place. This led to a scheduling delay, with production not expected to begin until spring 2017.
Many fans will look at the troubled life of Gambit and think it is a bad sign, but producer Simon Kinberg insists the truth is the opposite, and that the delays are the result of the studio doing their absolute best to get Gambit right.
“I think the truth is when you have these movies that need a very special and unique tone, it takes a little while to find that tone,” Kinberg tells Slashfilm. “Deadpool feels like it exploded out of nowhere, but it was a 10-year development process on that movie. I think it was honed over those 10 years. “I hope that Gambit doesn’t take 10 years, but it takes a little honing to get that tone and that voice exactly right,” Kinberg continued. “The character has such a specific voice in the comic in the same way that Deadpool has a specific voice in the comic, that we want to make sure that we capture that voice on the page. Really it’s just about getting a screenplay that is worthy of that character, and I think we’re really close right now.”
Check out when Gambit and other movies are coming out in ComicBook.com's Movie Release Schedule.
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Have you seen Suicide Squad yet? Want to win a Hot Toys Joker figure from the movie? All you have to do head on over to ComicBook.com's Movie Database or click the image above and rate the movie to enter! A winner will be chosen August 19th, 2016!by The Commentator on 3 June 2013 10:58
Iraq's deputy prime minister for energy affairs Hussein al-Shahristani has warned Israel that it would "bear the consequences" for a violation of Iraqi airspace during any potential raid on Iran's nuclear facilities.
The comment from al-Shahristani is the first time a senior Iraqi official has publicly warned Israel against entering its airspace -- the most direct route -- to hit targets in Iran.
He also said that Iraq had received assurances from Washington that the United States would not use its airspace to attack Iran, which Western powers believe is trying to develop a nuclear weapon.
"The (Americans) have assured us that they will never violate Iraqi airspace or Iraqi sovereignty by using our airspace to attack any of our neighbours," Shahristani said in an interview in his office in Baghdad's heavily-fortified Green Zone.
"We have also warned Israel that if they violate Iraqi airspace, they will have to bear the consequences."
The minister said that the issue had been discussed in Iraq's national security council, and the warning had been passed to Israel "through countries that they have relations with".
Asked how Iraq would react to any such Israeli attempt to target Iran's nuclear programme, Shahristani said: "Obviously, Iraq wouldn't be disclosing its reaction, to allow Israel to take that into account."
Iraq lies across the most direct flight path from Israel to Iran, so an attack against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities could necessitate violating Iraq’s airspace. The US, however, can launch an attack from its naval vessels stationed in the Persian Gulf and therefore avoid entanglement with a third country, as highlighted in a position paper published last week by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and reported by the Times of Israel.
Early in 2012, Jonathan Marcus of the BBC described the route over Iraq for Israeli planes targeting Iran as "the central, more likely route" explaining, "With the US military gone, the Iraqi authorities are far less able to monitor and control their air space, effectively opening a door to an Israeli incursion".
But Baghdad has been accused by the United States of turning a blind eye to Iranian flights through its airspace carrying military equipment for Assad's regime. Shahristani said that because of Iraq's economic ties with its eastern neighbour, it would only abide by UN sanctions, and not those implemented by Washington and Europe.
"Iraq has its own national interest," he said. "Power generation is very critical... and there is no way we can fuel our new power stations, that are being constructed and will be ready before the end of the year, without having gas from Iran... given our geographical location, the only gas available to Iraq is from Iran now, and we have explained this to our American friends."SCP-2497
Item #: SCP-2497
Object Class: Euclid
Special Containment Procedures: 785 SCP-2497 instances have been detained in Biological Containment Area 36 with hand-knit Christmas stockings. Foundation spatial analysts have been assigned to monitor known areas of activity for SCP-2497 manifestations. Should an instance appear, containment teams are to be deployed, and a hand-knit Christmas stocking attached to the manifestation, localizing the anomaly.
Foundation personnel interacting with SCP-2497 are to avoid direct skin contact, and should wear layered, puncture proof gloves and protective gear. Should an accidental puncture wound occur, the punctured limb/appendage must be amputated within 30 minutes of the incident. Puncture wounds at non-amputatable sites result in termination of the exposed individual.
All prepared or bottled beverages within a 10 m radius of SCP-2497-1 instances are to be disposed of using standard sterilization techniques. SCP-2497-1 instances within Foundation custody are to be stored at least 10 m away from all piping systems, and liquid stocks.
Description: SCP-2497 are 785 identified Carnegiea gigantea which have been anchored to local reality by attachment of hand-knit Christmas stockings. When unanchored, SCP-2497 manifestations are subject to spatial instability, materializing and dematerializing in random locations across the southwest United States. Instances primarily appear in enclosed spaces, namely, bathrooms, closets, and other small spaces. SCP-2497 is indistinguishable from non-anomalous Carnegiea gigantea under normal biological conditions, until its spines penetrate the epidermis of a human subject.
SCP-2497's primary anomalous effects begin when a spine punctures the skin. Tissue surrounding the puncture wound will undergo rapid transformation into Plasticine, resulting in loss of sensation in the affected area. This effect will then spread outwards from the affected region, until either the limb/appendage is severed, or the organism has been completely converted. Complete conversion takes roughly 3 hours, and results in the creation of an SCP-2497-1 instance.
SCP-2497-1 instances are promptly reshaped to resemble a standard synthetic Christmas tree, sprouting branches, and artificial pine needles. The legs are closed and fused together to form a central column from which the branches sprout. SCP-2497-1 instances remain conscious throughout their transformation, and frequently manifest a number of fluorescent lights which they are able to control. These lights have been used for communication, albeit at limited frequency due to the amount of energy required by each SCP-2497-1 instance to use them. (See Interview I-2497-1).
SCP-2497's secondary anomalous effect begins upon complete manifestation of an SCP-2497-1 instance. Upon complete restructuring, all prepared or bottled beverages within a 10 meter radius of an SCP-2497-1 instance are converted into juice from the Saguaro's fruit, laced with Lophophora williamsii. Consumption of this fluid initiates a series of actions normally practiced during the American Christmas holiday, including:
Decoration of the instance with stereotypical ornaments and lights.
Prolonged singing of Christmas carols while encircling it.
Expressing or showing regret at the absence of the individual used to create the SCP-2497-1 instance.
Placement of wrapped gifts beneath it.
Opening of said gifts on the following morning.
Continuous consumption of the aforementioned fluid under the belief that it is eggnog.
Actions induced by the fluid will cycle continuously until affected individuals are subjected to detoxification, available liquids run out, or they expire from chemical overdose.
SCP-2497-1s appear to destabilize local reality through some unknown means, resulting in a higher frequency of SCP-2497 manifestations. This phenomenon resulted in an uptick of SCP-2497 manifestations at Biological Containment Area 36 from 2 in 2013, to 46 in 2014.
Update 25/12/2014:
SCP-2497-1-05 was observed responding to yes/no questions posed by staff working in Biological Containment Area 36's storage facility. The instance responded by blinking its lights once for yes, and twice for no. SCP-2497-1-05 was presented with a photo of Dave Sirling, and confirmed its identity when questioned. When questioned if such actions required energy, SCP-2497-1-05 confirmed that it did indeed tire from frequent use of its fluorescent bulbs.
Interview logsWithin a few weeks we’ll have a huge document full of legalese on the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, to replace the near-200-page order from 2010 that was mostly overturned by a court ruling last year.
But there are enough details in the 4-page summary of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal released today for us to tell you in general terms what it does and doesn’t do. FCC officials also provided further background in a phone call with reporters today. One thing they were clear on: this isn’t “utility-style regulation,” because there will be no rate regulation, Internet service providers (ISPs) won’t have to file tariffs, and there’s no unbundling requirement that would force ISPs to lease network access to competitors.
But the order does reclassify ISPs as common carriers, regulating them under Title II of the Communications Act, the same statute that governs telephone companies. ISPs will not be allowed to block or throttle Internet content, nor will they be allowed to prioritize content in exchange for payments. The rules will apply to home Internet service such as cable, DSL, and fiber, and to mobile broadband networks generally accessed with smartphones.
Internet providers will be common carriers in their relationships with home Internet and mobile broadband customers; they will also be common carriers in their relationships with companies that deliver content to subscribers over the networks operated by ISPs. That includes online content providers such as Amazon or Netflix.
The rules apply only to retail Internet providers, those that offer consumers the ability to access the Internet. They do not regulate Web applications or other network operators. Content delivery networks like Akamai, which improve performance by optimizing delivery of content across the Internet, would not be affected by the paid prioritization ban.
Here’s a more detailed look at what kinds of rules both fixed and mobile broadband providers will and won’t have to follow (assuming the commission approves Wheeler’s plan on Feb. 26).
Three “bright line rules”
The ban on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization is the biggest takeaway. “Broadband providers may not block access to legal content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices… may not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices... [and] may not favor some lawful Internet traffic over other lawful traffic in exchange for consideration—in other words, no ‘fast lanes.’ This rule also bans ISPs from prioritizing content and services of their affiliates,” the FCC said. The core provisions of Title II banning “unjust and unreasonable practices” will be used to enforce these rules.
Data caps
There’s no ban on data caps, but the proposal would let the FCC intervene when caps are used to harm consumers or competitors. Cellular providers have been experimenting with “zero-rating,” letting consumers access certain services without using up their data allotments. AT&T is charging companies for the right to deliver data without counting against customers’ caps; T-Mobile exempts certain music services from caps, but without charging anyone.
FCC officials on the call with reporters seemed less concerned about data exemptions that occur without payment than those that require payment, but did not commit to banning any particular type of practice. The matter will be handled on a case-by-case basis to determine whether a zero-rating program hinders competition for "over-the-top" services, those provided over an Internet connection. In the net neutrality order, the FCC is not taking any stance on specific programs provided today.
Transparency
Though the 2010 order’s anti-blocking and anti-discrimination rules were thrown out because of a lawsuit filed by Verizon, the court did not object to requirements that ISPs tell the public about their network management practices. ISPs will face greater disclosure requirements in the new proposal, but the fact sheet didn’t say exactly how the rules will be different.
Possible loophole? “Reasonable network management”
Net neutrality advocates have worried that exceptions to anti-discrimination rules would render them meaningless. Wheeler is allowing for “reasonable network management,” which “recognizes the need of broadband providers to manage the technical and engineering aspects of their networks.”
But ISPs cannot claim “reasonable network management” in order to meet a business need. “For example, a provider can’t cite reasonable network management to justify reneging on its promise to supply a customer with ‘unlimited’ data,'" the FCC said.
Some data services that don’t go over the public Internet will be largely exempt from Title II oversight. VoIP phone service offered by a cable provider is one example; another is a heart-monitoring service that doesn’t use the public Internet. These exceptions don’t change the transparency requirements, which “will continue to cover any offering of such non-Internet data services—ensuring that the public and the Commission can keep a close eye on any tactics that could undermine the Open Internet rules.”
A standard to cover unforeseen misbehavior
Just in case ISPs come up with some new way of creating a non-neutral Internet, there will be a “standard for future conduct” that would help the FCC determine whether new practices should be allowed. While not fully defined in the fact sheet, “the proposal would create a general Open Internet conduct standard that ISPs cannot harm consumers or edge providers.”
Netflix’s favorite part: interconnection disputes
Netflix and some other companies have complained about the prices ISPs charge for direct network connections. These connections ensure a smooth path into the network but don’t provide any priority thereafter. The net neutrality proposal doesn’t ban these agreements, but gives the FCC “authority to hear complaints and take appropriate enforcement action if necessary, if it determines the interconnection activities of ISPs are not just and reasonable, thus allowing it to address issues that may arise in the exchange of traffic between mass-market broadband providers and edge providers.” Besides companies like Netflix, content delivery networks such as Akamai or transit providers such as Cogent could bring complaints to the FCC.
New taxes and fees? Nope
Some Title II opponents tried to convince the FCC that Title II would bring $15 billion in new user fees per year, causing millions of households to stop subscribing to Internet service.
That’s simply not true, the FCC said. “The Order will not impose, suggest or authorize any new taxes or fees,” the commission said. The moratorium on Internet taxation will continue, as required by Congress. Today’s order does not require broadband providers to contribute to the Universal Service Fund (USF), which subsidizes telecommunications projects in underserved areas.
FCC officials noted that they have already begun a separate proceeding on USF funding that could ultimately put a USF charge on customers’ bills, similar to the USF charges on telephone bills. That will proceed independently of the Title II decision. But even so, the FCC could keep the entire Universal Service Fund the same size, so that surcharges on broadband would be offset by reductions in surcharges on phone lines.
While USF fees won’t be applied because of this order, the FCC said it will boost “universal service fund support for broadband service in the future through partial application” of the USF portion of Title II.
Google gets what it wanted: Pole access
Google asked the FCC to enforce Title II rules guaranteeing access to poles, rights-of-way, and other infrastructure controlled by utilities, making it easier for Google Fiber to enter new markets. The FCC said it would enforce the part of Title II that “ensures fair access to poles and conduits” to help new broadband providers.
It’s not clear how much this will really help. Google had a dispute with AT&T over pole access in Austin, Texas, but the companies settled and Google doesn’t seem to have been shut out of any market because of pole attachment problems. And broadband providers could actually end up paying higher pole attachment rates than they did before because “how you’re classified affects what you have to pay,” a cable industry lawyer explained to Ars.
Forbearance
As noted earlier, the FCC plan is to avoid imposing the strictest portions of Title II in a legal process known as “forbearance.” ISPs have complained that forbearance is too onerous a process but the FCC made it sound pretty simple: the commission simply won’t apply things like rate regulation, unbundling, or new taxes and fees. There will also be “no burdensome administrative filing requirements or accounting standards,” the FCC said.
Other Title II provisions that will apply to ISPs
There are dozens of sections in Title II, and some we haven’t yet mentioned will apply. These include investigations of consumer complaints, privacy protections, and protections for people with disabilities. The FCC will have to pick up some of the consumer protection functions performed by the Federal Trade Commission, which is prohibited from taking actions against telecommunications common carriers.
It isn’t the end of the world—really
ISPs have argued that Title II will bring certain doom to the broadband industry, but the FCC pointed to past experience to argue that it won’t. Though Title II hasn’t applied to wireless data before, it does apply to wireless voice, and that industry is thriving.
“For 21 years the wireless industry has been governed by Title II-based rules that forbear from traditional phone company regulation,” the FCC said. “The wireless industry has invested over $400 billion under similar rules, proving that modernized Title II regulation can support investment and competition.”
Broadband will actually face fewer Title II provisions than cellular voice. “When Title II was first applied to mobile, voice was the predominant mobile service. During the period between 1993 and 2009, carriers invested heavily, including more than $270 billion in building out their wireless networks, an increase of nearly 2,000 percent,” the FCC said.Top Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are independent and do not represent the views of Zavvi.
Ratatouille steelbook Another nice steelbook from zavvi, the embossing on the front is especially great looking and this is an all round amazing steelbook, great work zavvi! Was this helpful? Yes (0) No (1) Report this review
Chique This is another excellent movie. The steelbook itself steers clear of the traditional artwork from the original release. Big A+ for the design. Was this helpful? Yes (0) No (0) Report this review
ratatouille One of the best Disney/pixar movie there is. I love the design of this steelbook. I have a lot of steelbooks at home but this one is my favorite. the beauty of this design is in the simplicity of it. Was this helpful? Yes (0) No (0) Report this review
rat-a-too-ee Another perfect piece to my Pixar steelbook collection. At first, I didnt like the front side artwork very much, but now I find it adorable, as well as the rest of the artworks. The picture and sound of the movie is perfect. Was this helpful? Yes (0) No (0) Report this reviewPresident Obama answers questions about the government shutdown, October 8, 2013.
It’s within his power to avoid the ludicrous scenes of this “shutdown.”
Distilling a theretofore-untamed talking point into a single sentence, The Atlantic’s Abby Olheiser complained somewhat tenuously on Monday that the National Park Service, which has recently been running around the country doing all sorts of unconscionable things in the name of the federal shutdown, “wouldn’t have to become the next iteration of the Benghazi mantra if a bill — which is sitting in the House of Representatives and would fund the government at sequester levels — were brought up for a vote and passed, ensuring that the government, and the parks, would reopen as soon as possible.” This, suffice it to say, is rather obviously true.
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It is also wholly irrelevant. Of course the executive branch would be not be playing these games if the shutdown had not happened. In that case, the government octopus would be swimming inexorably forward as it usually does, all of its tentacles intact. The more important point to grasp here is not that the various heavy-handed antics in which the Park Service has seen fit to indulge itself since last Monday are unimaginable absent a shutdown, but that almost none of them had to happen because of the shutdown. The offending behavior has, in other words, been a choice — a deliberate ploy contrived and prosecuted by a man seeking to make a public point.
#ad#Perhaps it is the product of the Manichean way in which partisan fights such as this one encourage people to think. Perhaps it is a morbid fear of being accused of “false equivalence.” Perhaps tempers are just so frayed at this point that none of us can see straight. But whatever it is, few progressives appear willing to acknowledge that, regardless of where the blame lies for its arrival, the White House has not reacted to the shutdown well at all. Barack Obama has the authority to stop such troublemaking. Why has he not used it?
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To deny that the executive branch is going out of its way unnecessarily to make life difficult for people — as many still are — is to pretend that the hundreds of such stories, reported daily across the country, are falsehoods manufactured to hurt the president. Yes, government shutdowns have consequences — even shutdowns that leave 83 percent of the government operating as usual. But, consequences or not, there really is no good reason for the federal government to send barricades and wire-ties to unguarded open-air parks, to close off unmanned scenic overlooks, to evict homeowners from their private property on public land, or to threaten the livelihoods of hoteliers whose sole crime is to own a business on an unsecured public route.
There is no good reason, either, for the government to shut down the index pages of some, arbitrarily chosen, websites while leaving the rest of the pages running. No good reason for the federal government to try to close Mount Vernon and Claude Moore Colonial Farm, neither of which it owns or runs. No good reason for the federal government to threaten to cancel the Air Force–Navy football game when there were private donors waiting on the sidelines. And certainly no reason for armed rangers to hold senior-citizen tourists hostage inside their Yellowstone Park hotel for the high crime of stepping outside and taking photographs.
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As NR’s editors observed on Monday, there is a substantial difference between authorities’ barring access to sites that have gates and their barricading open spaces that do not. “It takes federal action to close the sites,” this website’s editorial noted, “and none to keep them open. This is not what an inactive government looks like, but a spiteful one.” An anonymous Park Service ranger confirmed that malice to the Washington Times last week: Staff, the employee said, had “been told to “make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”
Such orders are representative of a deep and unlovely philosophical instinct. The reason that services close during a government shutdown is that there is no money to pay for them. This is why staff are furloughed, facilities are closed, and, in extreme cases, why checks don’t get cut. But what happens if there is enough money? Traditionally, the answer is that every effort is made to inconvenience people as little as is humanly possible.
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Not this time. In Wisconsin, the Journal Sentinel reported early in the week, the federal Park Service “ordered state officials to close the northern unit of the Kettle Moraine, Devil’s Lake, and Interstate state parks and the state-owned portion of the Horicon Marsh, but state authorities rebuffed the request because the lion’s share of the funding came from state, not federal coffers.” Here, the federal government wasn’t so much regretfully informing the public that the money had run dry as it was attempting to remove its Royal blessing from a local Lord who does not rely on it. Nobody who genuinely recognizes government as the deferential servant of a naturally free people would view the state this way. Peeved Kings, convinced of their divine right and keen to demonstrate the folly of recalcitrant subjects, on the other hand, most certainly would. “It’s my party, and you’ll cry if I want you to,” our mandarins in D.C. appeared to say.
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Progressives who thrill to shrill accusations that their ideological opponents are “spoiled children” should be ashamed of the way in which their supposedly adult leaders have elected to respond. “Reality has a liberal bias,” one of my less original Twitter stalkers told me nervously earlier in the week in the course of manfully pretending that nothing was awry. No, not really. Reality has a truth bias. Blame Republicans for the wider impasse if you wish — or blame Obama, or Harry Reid, or the whole damn lot of them. But don’t pretend that the news popping up around the country is consistent with the “first-class temperament” that the president is supposed to possess. It is nothing of the sort — and people are beginning to notice.
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— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.It’s official: the Blue Cat Cafe will become Austin’s first cat cafe after meeting its Kickstarter goal of $60,000 yesterday. Rebecca Gray, the cat lady behind the cafe, told Eater she will speak to her realtor on Tuesday to scout potential locations. The campaign will continue to run until its original end date on Saturday, April 18 for extra funds "to build out a more badass cattery with intricate shelves and tunnels to play with," according to the Facebook post.
Since the Kickstarter launched in February, Gray has been hustling to raise funds. She pedicabbed during SXSW, hosted many kitten parties, and even organized a concert.
The Blue Cat Cafe will feature adoptable cats from local rescue organizations, coffee, and plenty of feline events for patrons. The food trucks on the patio will be all vegan, because, as Gray told Eater previously, "our core is animal love."The U.S. government “really blew it” on conducting surveillance programs that riled foreign leaders and domestic skeptics, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a television interview.
“They’re continuing to blow it in some ways, and I hope they become more transparent,” Zuckerberg, 29, said in an interview broadcast Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “These things are always in balance, in terms of doing the right things and also being clear and telling people about what you’re doing.”
The National Security Agency is facing scrutiny in Congress and abroad over revelations that it spied on foreign leaders, broke into fiber-optic cables overseas, and gathered e-mails and phone records of innocent Americans. Most of the revelations were exposed by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who is in Russia under temporary asylum.
Zuckerberg, whose Menlo Park, Calif.-based social-media company made its initial public offering in May 2012, has spent much of the past year getting involved in political issues, from education in New Jersey to infrastructure development in Africa. In April, he announced the formation of a group called FWD.us to lobby for changes to U.S. immigration policy, higher academic standards and more investment in research.
“The future of our economy is a knowledge economy, and that means getting the most talented people into this country is the most important thing we can do to make sure the companies of tomorrow are founded here,” said Zuckerberg, who has an estimated worth of $22.6 billion.
Fwd.us supports helping undocumented workers become citizens and is calling for an increase in H-1B visas, a program favored by the technology industry that lets skilled guest workers come to the United States.
Asked for his advice on what President Obama’s administration should do to resolve snags in the new government-run health insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act, Zuckerberg cited his company’s technological challenges.
“Sometimes stuff doesn’t work when you want it to,” he said. “We’ve certainly had plenty of mistakes and things that haven’t worked the way that we want to. The right thing here is to keep on focusing on building the service that you think is right in the long term.”By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Demand for biofuels will add to pressure on forests, the report warns Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the probable destruction of forests, a report warns. The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) says only half of the extra land needed by 2030 is available without eating into tropical forested areas. A companion report documents poor progress in reforming land ownership and governance in developing countries. Both reports were launched on Monday in UK government offices in London. Supporters of RRI include the UK's Department of International Development (DfID) and its equivalents in Sweden and Switzerland. The dual crises of fuel and food are attracting significant land speculation
Andy White, RRI "Arguably, we are on the verge of a last great global land grab," said RRI's Andy White, co-author of the major report, Seeing People through the Trees. "It will mean more deforestation, more conflict, more carbon emissions, more climate change and less prosperity for everyone." Rising demand for food, biofuels and wood for paper, building and industry means that 515 million hectares of extra land will be needed for growing crops and trees by 2030, RRI calculates. But only 200 million hectares will be available without dipping into tropical forests. Forest focus The report foresees demand increasing further into the century.
'New crops needed' to avoid famine It cites studies suggesting that "...if the current plateau in productivity continues, the amount of additional agricultural land required just to meet the world's projected food demand in 2050 would be about three billion hectares, nearly all of which would be required in developing countries." According to UN figures, the world currently has about 1.4 billion hectares of arable land and about 3.4 billion hectares of pasture. Some academics place their hopes in agricultural technologies including genetic engineering to boost crop yields. But since the spectacular successes of the Green Revolution, advances have been slow. In some areas, yields are falling - a trend which is likely to be exacerbated by climate change. However, eating into tropical forests to create extra agricultural land would, in turn, exacerbate climate change, with deforestation currently accounting for about 20% of greenhouse gas emissions. Reform call One of RRI's main conclusions is that reform of land ownership is crucial, if large-scale pillage of tropical forests is to be avoided. The conclusion have been supported by DfID, whose minister Gareth Thomas was one of the speakers at the launch event. "These new studies should strengthen global resolve to protect the property rights of indigenous and local communities who play a vital role in protecting one the most outstanding natural wonders of the world," he said. DfID runs programmes in West Africa aimed at helping forest dwellers acquire the legal right to manage their land. Many indigenous peoples need help in acquiring rights to the land they live on "It is clear that the dual crises of fuel and food are attracting significant new investments and great land speculation," said Andy White. "Only by protecting the rights of the people who live in and around the world's most vulnerable forests can we prevent the devastation these forces will wreak on the poor." But the second RRI report - From Exclusion to Ownership? - says progress in reforming ownership has been slow, with only a few countries such as Brazil, Cameroon and Tanzania handing over significant tracts to local communities. Moves to curb climate change by preserving forests in developing countries could help, RRI concludes. But it also raises the question of who owns rights to the trees - the rich Western countries that want to fund carbon sequestration, or the people who live in the forest areas? Sorting out ownership could not only help on the environmental front, but also remove reasons for conflict. RRI calculates that about two-thirds of the world's current violent conflicts are driven by land tenure issues. Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
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StumbleUpon What are these?Footage from US award ceremony revealed online
Footage of Daft Punk rehearsing for their performance at this year’s Grammy Awards has surfaced online. See above to watch the performance now.
The ceremony, which took place in January, saw Daft Punk team up with Pharrell Williams, Chic’s Nile Rodgers and special guest Stevie Wonder for a performance of ‘Get Lucky’ at Los Angeles’ Staples Centre.
The newly discovered footage shows the group running through their performance while Paul McCartney watches on from the seating area (from 5:02 mark). The clip was discovered by a Reddit user on the Daft Punk subreddit. The French duo’s performance at the ceremony was their first show since returning with last year’s ‘Random Access Memories’.
On the night Daft Punk scooped awards for Record Of The Year (‘Get Lucky’), Album Of The Year (‘Random Access Memories’), Best Pop Duo/Group Performance (‘Get Lucky’), Best Dance/Electronica Album (‘Random Access Memories’) and Best Engineered Album Non-Classical (‘Random Access Memories’).Coal is mainly used for “base load” electricity generation (to meet the part of the electricity demand that requires constant flows) and is an essential input in the iron and steel industry. In 2008, coal accounted for 22 percent of the world’s energy consumption in the industrial sector (including non-energy uses) and 4 percent of the energy consumption in the residential and commercial sector. Coal accounted for 41 percent of the world’s electricity generation (IEA 2010).
World coal production is dominated by China. China's coal production is projected to peak in 2027 with a peak production level of 5.1 billion tons. World (excluding China)'s coal production is projected to peak in 2027 with a peak production level of 4.1 billion tons.
This post is excerpted from a longer paper which can be read in its entirety here.
This is a guest post by Dr. Minqi Li. Dr. Li was a political prisoner in China from 1990 to 1992. He received a PhD in economics from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2002, and he has been teaching economics at University of Utah since 2006. He has published many articles on peak oil, climate change, and global economic crisis in journals such as Monthly Review, Science & Society, Review, Journal of World Systems Research, Development & Change, and Journal of Contemporary Asia. His book, The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy, was published by the Pluto Press and the Monthly Review Press in 2009.
In 2010, world coal production was 7,273 million tons. Figure 11 shows the annual coal production of the world’s largest five producers. The world coal production and consumption is dominated by China. In 2010, China accounted for 45 percent of the world coal production (by volume) and 48 percent of the world coal consumption (by energy content).
Figure 11
The BP Statistical Review of World Energy reports China’s coal reserves to be 114.5 billion tons. This is the number that is widely cited by media and used by virtually all international energy institutions as China’s “proved” coal reserves. In fact, the BP number has not been updated since 1992. Given the observed rapid growth of China’s coal production, the reserves number reported by BP is likely to have substantially underestimated China’s remaining recoverable coal resources. Some earlier studies that relied upon the BP number suggested that China’s coal production could peak before 2020 and the peak production level would be less than 3 billion tons (see Heinberg 2009: 55-73). In fact, China produced 3.2 billion tons of coal in 2010.
Tao and Li (2007) used China’s official coal reserves at the end of 2002 published by China’s Ministry of Land and Natural Resources and estimated that China’s coal production could peak between 2025 and 2032, and the peak production level was likely to be between 3.3 and 4.5 billion tons. However, the Chinese government does not regularly publish the official coal reserves. According to various news releases, at the end of 2001, 2002, and 2003, China’s official coal reserves were 189.1, 188.6, and 189.3 billion tons respectively.
Since 2001, The Statistical Yearbook of China (published by China’s National Bureau of Statistics) has published regularly China’s coal “reserve base.” While “reserves” refer to the economically recoverable coal that can be actually produced after mining losses have been subtracted, “reserve base” refers to the economically recoverable coal before the subtraction of mining losses. For 2001, 2002, and 2003, China’s reserve base was reported to be 334.1, 331.8, and 334.2 billion tons respectively. A comparison of the two sets of numbers suggests that the implied recovery factor (the ratio between reserves and the reserve base) is about 57 percent.
In this study, a 60 percent recovery factor is applied to China’s coal reserve base from |
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Only a handful of states and cities have passed any laws requiring that gun dealers keep track of who is buying ammunition.
“It’s a wide-open marketplace,” said Tom Mauser, a gun-control advocate in Colorado whose son was killed in the 1999 Columbine shootings. “The Internet has really changed things. You don’t have to show your face. It’s anything goes.”
Some top law-enforcement officers were among those calling for more restrictions on ammunition sales.
“I have an issue with people being able to buy ammunition and weapons on the Internet,” Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey of the Philadelphia police said on the ABC program “This Week” on Sunday. “I don’t know why people need to have assault weapons. There needs to be reasonable gun control put in place.
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“And we talk about this constantly, and absolutely nothing happens, because many of our legislators, unfortunately, at the federal level, lack the courage to do anything.”
The ammunition and arms Web sites are prolific online. They work like any small hubs of e-commerce, only with warnings to patrons that, under federal laws, they must have clean criminal records and must consult local laws before making their purchases. Buyers can pick up cases of bullets, clips, speed loaders, targets and a wealth of other gear associated with shooting, hunting or target practice.
A 1999 bill in Congress aimed at regulating Internet sales of ammunition was never adopted. Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced measures to restrict the sales of large-capacity magazines, but neither measure has gained any traction with the House controlled by Republicans, who tend to be strong supporters of gun rights, and election-year politics shunting politically volatile issues like gun control to the side.
“It is a war tool,” Representative Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York, said of the 100-round drum that the police say Mr. Holmes purchased online. “They’re meant to kill. They’re meant to kill as many people in as short a period of time.” Ms. McCarthy’s husband was among six people killed in 1993 by a gunman on a commuter train.
But after the Colorado shooting, Democrats and Republicans cast doubt on whether tougher laws could have averted the killing, diminishing the political stomach for any immediate changes in gun laws. Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Democrat, told CNN’s “State of the Union” that the killer might have built a bomb or found some other lethal device if no assault weapons had been around. And Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, defended people’s rights to own large-quantity ammunition magazines.
“The fact of the matter is, there are magazines, 30-round magazines, that are just common all over the place, and you simply can’t keep these weapons out of the hands of sick, demented individuals that want to do harm,” Mr. Johnson said on “Fox News Sunday.” “And when you try and do it, you restrict our freedoms.”
To gun groups, such an unfettered marketplace stands as a bulwark of their Second Amendment rights.
Dudley Brown, executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, said there was no need to track sales of ammunition or require ammunition dealers to follow the same strictures as gun dealerships. He said law-abiding sportsmen and target shooters often bought ammunition in bulk to save money, and may keep rounds on their shelves for years. He said they can easily blow through 400 or 500 rounds in one vigorous day at a shooting range.
“I call 6,000 rounds of ammunition running low,” he said.Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters starting pitcher/designated hitter, Shohei Otani, has now been officially ruled out playing in the WBC due to an ankle injury he suffered last year during the NPB postseason (aggravated it again during an International exhibition against Mexico)… Otani, personally, took himself out of the roster, fearing that it could get worse if he plays through it again, according to the report… his main objective now is to recover himself quickly in order to prepare himself for the upcoming season.
With the lingering injury, there’s been some talks that there’s still a chance that Otani could make an appearance as a pinch-hitter with him no longer pitching in the tournament… but it wouldn’t make sense at all, regarding about them winning, if pinch-hitting will be his only role in the classic (Samurai Japan wanted him to be at 100 percent), and the team appears now set to move on without him, as Shota Takeda will likely be replacing Otani now in the starting role.
Shohei Otani is a remarkable athlete, and is only one of the few chosen ones out there who could hit for power, and pitch outstandingly at the same time. After the NPB regular season last year, he will be used mainly as pitcher/DH for the upcoming World Baseball Classic, but, sadly, that won’t happen anymore.NECA/WizKids will release Star Trek: Attack Wing Wave 17 in August, and StarTrek.com has exclusive First Looks at the upcoming trio of ships, which we'll again showcase in a series of three articles. Today we will look at the I.K.S. T’Ong. The dated K’t’inga class ship has no concerns facing off against larger, more powerful ships thanks to its boost to attack when attacking those ships. K’Temoc shows his loyalty to the Klingon Empire by providing a discount to all of your Klingon upgrades. He is also a prime candidate for the Devotion To Duty Elite Talent, which can increase the attack potential of his damaged ship. Morag is the captain of choice for those who want the power to disable Upgrades on opposing ships.
With a Tactical Officer on the bridge, players gain the ability to reroll all of their blank results during the Modify Attack Dice step. Considering the numerous ways to increase the amount of attack dice being rolled, this is a tremendous boon to a Klingon player. When players find themselves in a tenuous situation, K’Ehleyr can be discarded to prevent an opposing ship from firing upon the Klingon player.
The final three upgrades introduce a new mechanic to Star Trek Attack Wing: Time Tokens. Rather than being disabled after use, some upgrades now require a player to place a certain number of Time Tokens onto the card after use. During the end phase, players remove one Time Token from each upgrade that has Time Tokens on it. Upgrades are considered Disabled while Time Tokens are on their card. Once all Time Tokens are removed, the Upgrade is able to be used as before. Concussive Charges and Photon Torpedoes both require a player to place 3 Time Tokens on them after use but are otherwise very similar to former versions of these cards. Cryogenic Stasis lets a player place two Crew upgrades underneath it which can be thawed out and deployed to a ship later in the game. Since a player has to place 2 Time Tokens on the deployed Crew, they will not be immediately available for use but will automatically become active without having to spend an action to enable them.
After many years in stasis, the Klingons are set to secure victory in the Long-Range Mission from the expansion. Can the Federation player convince the Klingons that the war is long over or will they eventually have to fire upon the I.K.S. T’Ong to keep the distant Federation outpost safe? Visit NECA/WizKids for additional information about Star Trek: Attack Wing, and keep an eye on StarTrek.com for a preview of the next ship in Star Trek: Attack Wing Wave 17.
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Follow us for more news at StarTrek.com and via our social media sites.This is the second part of a two-part Explained about information theory. The first part, on the Shannon limit, appeared on Tuesday.
In the 1948 paper that created the field of information theory, MIT grad (and future professor) Claude Shannon threw down the gauntlet to future generations of researchers. In those predigital days, communications channels — such as phone lines or radio bands — were particularly susceptible to the electrical or electromagnetic disruptions known as “noise.” Shannon proved the counterintuitive result that no matter how noisy a channel, information could be sent over it error free. All you needed was a way to add enough redundancy to the information so that errors could be corrected. He also demonstrated that there was a hard limit on how efficient those error-correcting codes could be — a minimum amount of extra information that would guarantee near-zero error. Since longer codes take longer to send, a minimum code length implied a maximum transmission rate — the Shannon limit. Finally, Shannon proved that codes approaching that limit must exist. But he didn’t show how to find them.
For the next 45 years, researchers sought those codes. Along the way, there were improvements of the kind that helped increase modem speeds from 9.6 kilobits per second to 14.4 kilobits per second in the early 1980s. But according to Muriel Médard, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at MIT, proposed codes tended to run up against a limit called the computational cutoff rate. That rate varied according to the transmission power and noise characteristics of a channel, but in practical communications systems, it might be only halfway to the Shannon limit.
Then, in 1993, at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Communications Conference, Alain Glavieux and Claude Berrou of the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne presented a new set of codes that they claimed came very close to the Shannon limit. “People almost laughed them out of the room,” Médard says, “especially because they were not coming from the coding side; they were coming from the electronics side.” The researchers had developed their codes — dubbed “turbo codes” — largely through trial and error and had no elegant formal explanation for why they worked so well. Nonetheless, subsequent investigation quickly confirmed their results.
Turbo codes are so-called iterative codes, which means that the decoder makes a series of guesses about what the encoded message is supposed to be. Each successive guess is fed back into the decoder, and the result is a more refined guess. Ideally, repeating the process over and over will get the error rate as low as you want.
The startling performance of turbo codes mobilized researchers to try to explain why they worked so well. Within a few years, investigation of iterative coding schemes had yielded a perhaps even more surprising result: a set of codes that worked at least as well as turbo codes had been around since 1960, when they were introduced in the MIT doctoral thesis of Robert Gallager.
Quiet revolution
The power of Gallager’s codes went unappreciated for so long because the decoding process he proposed was simply too complicated for 1960s-era technology. Which is ironic, since simplifying the decoding process was his motive in creating the codes. “The crux of the whole thing was, How do you design a good decoding algorithm?” says Gallager, who taught at MIT from 1960 to 2001 and still supervises graduate students as a professor emeritus. “And then given that idea for how to do that, how do you generate codes that you can actually decode in this way?” At the time, however, research on new coding schemes frequently depended on statistical claims about the performance of hypothetical ideal decoders. For researchers like Gallager, who were trying to develop codes that approached the Shannon limit, specifying a concrete decoding algorithm at all was already an uncommon step in the direction of practical deployment.
Gallager’s codes use so-called parity bits — extra bits that contain information about message bits. One parity bit might indicate, say, whether the sum of message bits 1, 2, and 4 is even or odd; the next parity bit might do the same for message bits 3, 4, and 6; and so on, through successive triplets of bits. Reliable information about any two bits in a triplet conveys reliable information about the third. “Iterative techniques involve making a first guess of what a received bit might be and giving it a weight according to how reliable it was,” says David Forney, an adjunct professor in MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. “Then maybe you get more information about it because it’s involved in parity checks with other bits, and so that gives you an improved estimate of its reliability — might go the same way, might go the opposite way — and through a series of computations like this, hopefully the thing will converge to where all the bits are known highly reliably.” Problems arise, Forney says, “if you begin to confuse yourself because you’re just feeding back reliabilities that you’ve already used in the same computation, so you get a false positive increase in reliability. It’s like a rumor mill. If you keep hearing the same rumor from the same people again and again, you can all begin to think it’s true, when it’s really just a closed circuit.” The trick to the design of Gallager’s codes, Forney says, was to minimize the likelihood of such closed loops. “It should take a long time for the telephone chain to go all around the world before it gets back to you again,” he says.
To date, Gallager’s codes have enabled the closest approaches to the Shannon limit for a given communications channel — closer even than turbo codes. They’ve been integrated into standards for wireless data transmissions, and computer chips dedicated to decoding Gallager’s codes can be found in commercial cell phones. During their long eclipse, did Gallager have any inkling of how good they were?
“I had a little bit of an inkling, but I also had a suspicion that they well might not be,” Gallager says. “And I spent a long time trying to resolve whether they were or weren’t.” His conclusion was equivocal: “What I showed is that with different classes of these codes, you could achieve positive [transmission] rates. As you change the class to make it more complicated, the rate would continue to increase. If you made it complicated enough, you could reach capacity — but you would probably never decode it. What’s happened since is that people have found ways of somewhat streamlining the way you choose the codes to make them better codes.”Technical debt
Third party libraries
Native MVVM
Separation of code
Typical mistakes
In order to offend the purists, I have to add this: sometimes you have to have code behind – even when you are manipulating the data. Reality is, you want to minimize it. Fact is, you can’t always eliminate it. That doesn’t mean you should not try.
Let’s take a look
MSDN: Older versions of Microsoft.NET Framework reference documentation indicate that the System.Windows.Input.ICommand interface is defined in PresentationCore, which is a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) assembly. That is no longer the case,System.Windows.Input.ICommand is defined in the System.ObjectModel assembly, so you don't need to take WPF dependencies in order to implement ICommand.
Some handy tips
Some developers like to make their View Model a singleton and reference it statically. I have done this, too. It allows you to reuse a View Model in different views without worrying about the cost of constructing it. This can also be overkill, so only do it if you need it. In WPF, CanExecute is called constantly. As a result, it could be a performance impact if the logic is costly. In WinRT, CanExecute is only called when CanExecuteChanged is raised. In my implementation, you will see, this event is manually raised by the View Model. It is common to create a base View Model. This can consolidate repetitive logic to a single chunk of code. It can also allow you inherit into a design-time view model which you reference for the sake of development but that is unused at runtime. I have also done this – almost every project. Snippets in Visual Studio help developers encapsulate common, recurring code into reusable chunks. In this article, I wrote about propnote. This is my favorite snippet – and one I add to Visual Studio every time I install it. It is a XAML developer’s best friend, as far as I am concerned.
Messaging
Conclusion
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Model View View Model or MVVM is, without question, one of the best things to ever come out of XAML development. MVVM separates the logic necessary to interact with the data from the logic necessary to interact with the UI. Where together it makes a muddled mess, separate it makes an elegant approach that is more easily maintainable.Why does maintainability matter? Maintainability is not the inverse of complexity. That’s because complexity can be controlled with good patterns like MVVM. But without good patterns, complexity is the logarithmic multiplier to headaches and troubles. I don’t mind picking up on a project that is well organized. I hate even smelling projects that have deep architectural debt It’s important to recognize that there are many high-quality, third party libraries out there to help developers build out MVVM solutions (like MVVM Light nRoute ). They are great. And, developers should not hesitate to adopt them if they like. Because I like to type, I tend to write my own similar framework with /just/ the code I need and nothing more. I like that. But the frameworks are fine, too.Look, there is no MVVM template. There is no MVVM base class. But there are plenty of conventions and plenty of framework candy to help MVVM implementations sail simply. XAML developers love MVVM, in fact, MVVM was invented by the original WPF creators. To that end, MVVM is lightweight, simple, and easy to learn MVVM is not an exercise to remove all the code from your XAML code behind files. Instead, MVVM intends to separate the logic you need to access and interact with your data from the logic you need to interact with your UI. For example, loading your data, validating your data, manipulating your data, and saving your data – that’s all part of the View Model. Conversely, running animations, responding to gestures, and adding the bling that makes your app stand apart – that’s part of the View.– it is not uncommon for developers to enjoy the simplicity of double-clicking Visual Studio’s designer and letting a click event handler be created for you. This is where RAD development really blooms. However, even if you only interact with the View Model in that handler, logic intended for data interactivity should be constrained to the View Model. In the video below, we will see how ICommand allows developers to stop implementing click handlers and start referencing the logic in their View Model.– it is not uncommon for developers (especially those new to MVVM) to get a little carried away with what they put in their View Model. For example, animations unique to the View belong in the code behind of the view. That logic /could/ be included in the View Model, but you need to start training your brain to separate code from data logic to interaction code.In the video above, I build out a real scenario for using MVVM, not only to fetch and avail the data in your application but also to interact with user actions by implementing ICommand within the View Model. The CommandDelegate (get it here ) contains the Execute function which implements the action itself. This is disabled based on the CanExecute in the same class.One thing I did not communicate was messaging. In MVVM, messaging is simply events raised inside the View Model that are handled in the View. This let’s the View Model “send a message” so some UI action is performed that is out of scope of the View Model. This approach is very common in projects where the View Model is in a different project where the UI thread is inaccessible.MVVM is pretty sweet puddin’. It’s more and more common even in JavaScript projects – and it’s no wonder. It just makes sense. It removes so much complexity. It helps in the organization of a solution. And it’s commonality aids in maintainability as new developers pick up the code.Best of luck!Razer, the gaming laptop and peripheral company, has acquired smartphone-maker Nextbit. A press release announcing the acquisition says that Razer “has acquired the majority of the assets of Nextbit Systems Inc. and has brought onboard the management and employees of the company,” but no financial details of the acquisition were disclosed. The deal closed on Friday, January 27th, 2017.
Nextbit, which was founded by former members of Google’s Android team and a former head of design at HTC, will remain a largely independent company, operating as a “standalone business unit under its own management,” according to the release. In an interview about the acquisition, Nextbit CEO Tom Moss said the “whole team” will be coming over and that the deal will give the company more resources than it otherwise would have access to. The Nextbit staff will remain in their current location in San Francisco and will not combine with Razer’s team at this time.
Nextbit will “continue on its mission to push boundaries in mobile”
Moss would not comment on any new products in the pipeline, but said that Nextbit will “continue on its mission to push boundaries and do cool stuff in mobile.” It is likely that we’ll see new hardware and software at some point, but Moss did not provide any details about future plans.
Nextbit has released one smartphone so far, the Robin, which became available just about one year ago, following a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. It garnered a lot of acclaim for its unique software design and promise to “never run out of storage,” but didn’t exactly upend the mobile industry. Moss said that Nextbit is committing to another year of software updates on the Robin and Razer will be backing up purchases with six months of hardware warranty, though the device has been out of stock in official channels for a couple of months already. The forthcoming Android 7.0 Nougat update is expected to arrive this quarter, and Nextbit’s promised battery improvements are due to follow shortly after that.
For Razer, Nextbit is one in a series of acquisitions, following last year’s very similar purchase of audio technology company THX. What happens in the future remains to be seen, but by all accounts, it seems that Nextbit has found a lifeboat of sorts in its new parent company.WARNING: Graphic content
AN Islamic State suicide bomber has killed at least 75 people in the deadliest attack to hit Pakistan in months.
The bomber entered the main hall of the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in Sehwan and detonated his payload amid dozens of worshippers, according to three security officials.
At least 20 women and nine children were among the dead.
Fazal Palejo, a senior health official in Sindh province, confirmed the toll.
The Islamic State group claimed the attack in a statement circulated by its Aamaq news agency, saying it had targeted a “Shiite gathering”.
The Sunni extremist group views Shiites as apostates and has targeted Pakistan’s Shiite minority in the past. It views Sufi shrines like the one targeted on Thursday as a form of idolatry.
Raja Somro, who witnessed the attack, told a local TV network that hundreds of people were performing a spiritual dance known as the Dhamal when the bomber struck.
“I saw bodies everywhere. I saw bodies of women and children,” he said.
Local TV showed graphic footage of the aftermath of the blast, with wounded worshippers crying out for help and the floors covered with shoes, blood and body parts.
Women cried and beat their chests in grief.
Ghazanfar Shah, the custodian of the site, said security was lax at the shrine, which is entered through two gold-plated doors.
‘LIKE JUDGEMENT DAY’
Local resident Haq Nawaz Khan Solangi said he and his friends were sipping tea at a stall some distance from the shrine when they heard the blast but thought it could be a tyre bursting.
“But soon our phones started ringing that there was a bomb blast at shrine and we rushed towards it,” he said.
“When we reached there, we thought that it was the judgement day as bodies were lying everywhere in the pool of blood.
“Some bodies had no heads, limbs or feet and those who were wounded were crying with pain and calling for help.”
CALLS FOR VENGEANCE
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed that security forces would track down the perpetrators of the attack, according to Pakistani state TV.
“Each drop of the nation’s blood shall be avenged, and avenged immediately,” Pakistan’s army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, said in a statement.
“No more restraint for anyone.”
The US State Department condemned the attack and offered its support to Pakistan in bringing the perpetrators to justice.
“We stand with the people of Pakistan in their fight against terrorism and remain committed to the security of the South Asia region,” said a statement by acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner.
US ambassador David Hale said in a statement the attack was cowardly while the European Union expressed its condolences to the victims.
“To attack peaceful worshippers in one of their sacred spaces is shameful and cowardly,” Mr Hale said.
Pakistanis vented their anger and grief on social media, with users calling the shrine a “capital of spirituality” and a “seat of interfaith harmony”.
OPTIMISM UNDERMINED
Pakistan has seen a dramatic improvement in security in the past two years, but a series of attacks this week — most claimed by the Pakistani Taliban — has undermined the growing sense of optimism.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, said it had carried out a suicide bombing in Lahore which killed 13 people and wounded dozens more Monday, days after the group had vowed to launch a fresh offensive.
The attack was the deadliest in Pakistan since December 16, 2014, when militants assaulted an army-run school in Peshawar, killing 154 people, mostly schoolchildren.
Pakistan has been at war with the Taliban and other extremist groups for more than a decade.
In recent years it has launched major offensives against militant strongholds in the tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan, but insurgents have continued to carry out attacks elsewhere in the country.
The Islamic State group has been expanding its presence in Pakistan in recent years and has claimed a number of deadly attacks, including a suicide bombing at another shrine in November 2016 that killed more than 50 people.
The government has downplayed the IS affiliate, insisting that only a small number of militants have pledged allegiance to the group.
Afghanistan and Pakistan have long accused each other of failing to crack down on militants who operate along the porous border.
The army spokesman, Major General Asif Ghafoor, said acts of terrorism were being carried out “from hostile powers and from sanctuaries in Afghanistan,” without elaborating.
Pakistan closed the main Torkham border crossing with Afghanistan shortly after the attack.
— with APAirport security screeners confiscated a record number of guns in carry-on bags last year, and most of them were loaded.
The Transportation Security Administration said it discovered 3,391 guns in carry-ons at checkpoints in 2016, a 28% increase from the year before. That works out to about nine every day.
The TSA said 83% of the guns were loaded.
The number of guns confiscated at checkpoints has climbed every year since 2007. One obvious reason is that Americans have more guns. The number of background checks conducted by the FBI for gun purchases and permits has climbed almost every year over the same period.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport had the most guns discovered last year, 198, followed by Dallas/Fort Worth International and George Bush Intercontinental in Houston. Georgia and Texas have relatively lax gun control laws.
Related: What does the TSA do with your weapons
Among the other prohibited items found by the TSA at checkpoints were fake but realistic grenades, cane swords, and knives disguised as combs, belt buckles and lipstick.
In a blog post, the TSA asked passengers to give their luggage a once-over before they bring it to the airport.
"Many people who have brought guns, ammunition, knives and other prohibited items say that they did so unknowingly," the agency wrote.Following months of backroom discussions, the Management Undergraduate Society (MUS) has announced the signing of Chipotle Grill as the new student cafeteria in the Bronfman Building. The surprise announcement follows news of the terminating lease of incumbent restaurant chain Sinfully Asian that had previously occupied the space.
After a period of polling that collected a wide number of student inputs and suggestions, including a popular Facebook group Students For Chipotle, the MUS conducted extensive consultations with franchise representatives from Chipotle Grill as well as McGill University administration officials. “It was certainly not an easy decision, but it was something we felt best served student interests and appetites,” said outgoing MUS President Jean LaPresse.
Based on financial statements acquired from the VP Finance, The Beef & Beans has found that the MUS conducted third-party focus groups and analytics services to determine the net benefit of having the first Chipotle Grill location in Quebec in Bronfman Building, including criteria such as walking distance for students from other faculties, break-even pricing, and nutritional values. VP Finance Ismail Jafari commented, “since it’s not every year we get to change a campus food provider, we wanted to ensure we were making the best decision on all fronts. That included ensuring a healthy and balanced meal at affordable prices.”
In a report submitted by the MUS, a number of high profile contenders competed for the lease in Bronfman Building, including local franchise St-Hubert BBQ, A&W (that instead chose to open a location on Rue University), and American chain White Castle. Franchises held company presentations over the winter break and provided blueprint designs for the location. Designs ranged from a more open-spaced area that could seat up to 100 students to vintage, diner-style booths. Though yet to be finalized, the Chipotle Grill will take a more standardized ambience to its other locations.
Given the lack of Chipotle Grill locations in Quebec, special consideration had to be given to Quebec language and commerce laws before a new lease could be signed. The Charter of the French Language, commonly known as Bill 101, requires that all menu items be listed in French and that the Chipotle Grill sign be translated to Rôtisserie Chipotle. The Quebec government has issued a Class B probationary business operating license, that stipulated random language officer inspections in addition to the monthly health and safety inspections for at least one academic year.
Though yet to release a formal press release, Chipotle Grill appears set to offer the standard range of menu items including burritos, burrito bowls, and tacos. Prices are estimated to range between $5 and $10. Specifically, Chipotle is said to be pricing relative to The Nest, McGill’s new student run cafe that opened this year. The franchise is rumoured to be aiming to put the cafe out of business by the end of the 2014-2015 academic year.
Stemming from widespread student support, part of the lease agreement will include a required disclosure of ingredients and nutritional values for all products offered in consideration of a large number of food allergies and intolerances. U3 International Business student Patrick Harris expressed relief over the news, “As a student with a mild gluten intolerance, I couldn’t afford to risk eating at Sinfully Asian – the staff never could tell me what was exactly in the food. $11 for a meal of rice and beef, and they can’t even tell me what’s in it.” Given that Chipotle does not offer a breakfast menu, the MUS has agreed to expand operations of the student-run Dave’s Store to include a number of breakfast items that can be bought from the store such as pastries, cereals, and coffee.
By operating an on-campus lease, Chipotle Grill aims to test reception in the Quebec market but guarantee long-term financial sustainability. “Campus locations are a great way to evaluate the broader local market without risking location-based financial risk. Every year there’s a new stream of students but they’re a well-diversified group that’s representative of various preferences,” commented Jafari.
Student opinion had been overwhelmingly positive towards the idea of a Chipotle Grill location on campus. The Facebook group in support of the move reached well over one thousand members, with largely supportive messages being posted. “I have to say, I didn’t seriously consider Chipotle at first,” admitted LaPresse. “However, after the initial wave subsided, we [the MUS] decided to take a serious look at the possibility. Luckily, things appear to have lined up nicely for all of us and I’m glad we can offer something so positive to students.”
The chain has taken into consideration infamously long construction periods in the city of Montreal and is expected to begin work on the new location early in May. Work is expected to finish late August with the grand opening to take place on the first day of school.San Jose, California, May 8, 2017 – Inspur will unveil a new ultra-high density AI computing server to accelerate Artificial Intelligence at the upcoming 2017 GPU Technology Conference (GTC2017), which is designed to provide superior application performance to science and engineering computing, taking AI computing to the next level.
Inspur will unveil the new AI supercomputer AGX-2 at its booth# 911 on May 10. The AGX-2 supports up to 8 NVIDIA® Tesla® P100 GPUs, offering either PCI-e interface or NVLink 2.0 for faster interlink connections between the CPU and GPU. This represents a successful innovation of Inspur in AI computing server, which will offer global customers more efficient computing power.
Presently, Inspur has the most complete CPU server product line in single-computer 2/4/8 card. At the IPF17 before GTC17, Inspur and Baidu co-launched hyper-scale AI computing platform AI-SR Rack Scale Server for larger-scale data collection and deep neural network, which has extended 16 GPU accelerator cards in single computer and met model training requirement of several hundred billion samples and trillion parameters.
As a leading cloud computing manufacturer in China, Inspur is always dedicated to providing strong computing power for artificial intelligence. Inspur is now a major provider of AI GPU server for three of the world’s Super 7 CSPs (Baidu, Ali and Tencent). Meanwhile, it maintains close cooperation in AI system and applications with such leading companies as Iflytek, Qihoo 360, Sogou, Toutiao and Face++, helping customers to achieve order-of-magnitude application performance improvement in voice, image, video, search and network, etc.
Inspur’s schedule for the GTC17:On Monday, an excerpt from an interview Rolling Stone conducted with the film's producer, Michael Bay, confirmed that Krang, a supervillain that looks like a disembodied brain, will appear in the 2016 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live-action film. However, he'll be without his trademark tentacles as Bay believed they made him look "like a stupid octopus."
Thanks to a member of The Technodrome, DVD_023, we now know what Krang and his mobile battle fortress, the Technodrome, will probably look like in Paramount's upcoming film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. Below, you can see photos of action figures based on the film that appear to be from an international toy catalog.
Aside from Krang, the images provide us with new looks at Bebop and Rocksteady, as well as new looks at a toned-down Shredder and the Turtles wearing fun and outlandish costumes.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows is scheduled to be released in movie theaters on June 3, 2016.BOIL WATER NOTICES for 11,300 people in Roscommon have been lifted, Irish Water has confirmed.
The HSE has lifted the notices for households in Killeglan and Castlerea, following EPA inspections of these plants early this week.
Environment Minister Alan Kelly said the development wouldn’t be possible without the creation of Irish Water.
“This now means that over 17,000 people can drink their water in Roscommon this year that couldn’t last year. This would simply not be possible without the creation of Irish Water.
“I have no doubt that similar successes will be replicated throughout the country.”
Kelly said the semi-state utility has implemented a €26.8 million programme that will allow boil water notices be lifted for 22,700 people in county Roscommon throughout 2015.
Some people in these areas have had to boil water for drinking since 2009.
Work on the Boyle Ardcarne Regional Water Supply Scheme was completed in December 2014, seven months ahead of schedule. Work on the Killeglan and Castlerea plants was finished earlier this year.
Water notices in Boyle were officially lifted for 6,000 people on 1 May.
Kelly noted that three other new water treatment plants at Lisbrock in south Roscommon, Ballinagard serving Roscommon town and Ballyfarnon serving Arigna, are close to completion.The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is the kind of fun, self-aware, stylish summer popcorn movie we don’t see often enough. Director Guy Ritchie‘s adaptation of Sam Rolfe‘s television series is one charismatic film with three leads we wouldn’t mind watching save the world, in impeccable style, every couple of years. Unfortunately, the slick action-comedy didn’t perform as well as it should’ve at the box-office back in 2015, making the odds of a sequel appear unlikely.
The makers of the film are still keen on bringing back Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) though. According to Hammer, the original film’s co-writer is currently writing a sequel. Below, read what the Free Fire star had to say about The Man From UNCLE sequel.
While recently speaking with Hammer, who’s well aware of how fun The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is, he mentioned he’d been asked more than a few times about playing the Russian super spy again. And then he shared with us that the film’s producer and co-writer, Lionel Wigram, is writing the sequel at the moment:
I called Lionel Wigram, the producer of the movie, and he and Guy produced it and wrote it all together. I was like, ‘Dude, what’s the deal? I get asked about this shit all the time. Can you just write a sequel?’ He was like, ‘You know what? Yeah, fuck it, I’ll do it. Sure, I’ll write a sequel.’ I was like, ‘If you write one, I’m sure we can get one made,’ so who knows? Today is the first day I’ve actually told anyone that story. I only told one other person |
below links;
https://reddit.com/r/tefl_tips_traps_scams
http://reddit.com/r/chinascamcentral
http://reddit.com/r/chinateachers
http://reddit.com/r/chinatefl
Now that all of Rebecca Tang's {aka Rosie Tang, aka Rose Tang, aka Ruby Tang} China jobs scams have been exposed she bought out a fairly reputable company 3 months ago called Foreign HR in Beijing, China previously owned by Eric Liu. This seems to be her attempt to buy herself agood reputation, but she immediately started using all of her old one-way and misleading contracts and her bait and switch tricks at Foreign HR which now even runs ads claiming Z visas and university degrees are not needed to work legally in China. (total horsesh*it).So now that Foreign HR was compromisedand exposed 7 days ago by China Scam Patrol, the clever gal starts using her partner in the UK called China-Uni Ltd. to start sending out thousands of emails "recommending" the old China ESL brand which was the scam that got Rebecca arrested and jailed back in 2014! She ran out of names! She is now recycling herold brands until she cranks up a new one (coming soon for sure). So her now is the uodate list of the Tang TEFL crime syndicate:Paul Lambert: Has taken Norwich from League One to the Premier League
Norwich City have announced that Paul Lambert has offered his resignation amid reports linking him with the vacant managerial post at Aston Villa.
The Canaries have not accepted Lambert's offer, while it is understood that his representatives are meeting with Villa Park officials on Thursday.
Villa are in the market for a new boss after parting with Alex McLeish's services at the end of a forgettable 2011/12 campaign.
They are believed to have identified Lambert, who has taken Norwich from League One to the Premier League during his time at Carrow Road, as the leading candidate to fill their coaching void.
Lambert has made no secret of his desire to test himself at the highest possible level and he has now taken steps to free himself from his contract with the Canaries.
Norwich are reluctant to part with the Scot's services, but have moved to reassure supporters that they are doing all they can to take the club forward.
"The club regrets to confirm that Paul Lambert has offered his resignation from his position as Norwich City manager," read a statement released on the club's official website.
Gratitude
"We have fought hard to keep Paul at Norwich and have not accepted his resignation whilst discussions with another club are taking place.
"However, whatever happens, we want to place on record our sincere gratitude for everything Paul has done for the club over the last three fantastic seasons.
"When Paul joined us in August 2009 were in 66th position in the English football pyramid and the club was on the brink of financial meltdown.
"Today we are a Barclays Premier League football club, on a financially sound footing and with a stadium full to capacity.
"Discussions with Paul throughout the last few days have been professional and amicable. Paul has already earned his place in Norwich City Football Club history and, no matter what happens, will always have a friendly welcome at Carrow Road.
"Meanwhile, contrary to some media speculation, the club does not need to sell any players and the finances are in place to substantially strengthen the excellent squad which helped us to finish in 12th position in the Premier League last season.
"Rest assured that everyone behind the scenes at Carrow Road remains absolutely focused on continuing to help the club progress."Indian boxers rounded off a thoroughly commendable performance at the AIBA Women's Junior World Championships, clinching three gold and two silver medals on the final day of the event at Taipei on Saturday.
Savita (50kg), Mandeep Sandhu (52kg) and Sakshi (54kg) struck gold for the country, while Soniya (48kg) and Niharika Gonella (70kg) settled for silver medals. Soniya was the first to take the ring for India, squaring off against American Heaven Garcia. She went down 1-2 to open the Indian account with a silver medal.Next in was Savita and she edged past her Ukrainian rival Kateryna Rohova 2-1 to clinch the first gold of the day for India.
This was followed by Mandeep's 3-0 triumph over Ireland's Niamh Earley before Sakshi made it three in a row by out-punching American Yarisel Ramirez 3-0. However, Niharika proved no match for Russian Anastasiia Sigaeva and lost 0-3 to settle for a silver medal. Earlier in the youth competition, Jamuna Boro (57kg) had bagged a bronze medal after losing in the semifinals.Liberals so ashamed
Bwahahahahahaha!
The story at CNN has 10,000 comments and climbing! Showdown over immigration: ‘This is an invasion’
By Ed Payne, Michael Martinez and Holly Yan, CNN
updated 11:43 AM EDT, Thu July 3, 2014
bachcole • a few seconds ago
It looks to me that the protesters are in rebellion against the United States of America. If the protesters were right-wingers, you can be sure that Obama would come down on them with violence.
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Willie • a minute ago
what they fear is that black and brown will continue to make more inroads into the seats of power…too bad it’s already happening and there isn’t a group of angry white bigots large enough to stop it
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unboundried • 3 hours ago
The irony is that we send billions to Israel for enforcement of impenetrable borders. We could spend some of that money at home.
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Free World unboundried • 3 hours ago
Hear Hear…….
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IllumiNUTTY unboundried • 16 minutes ago
Wow, blaming the Jews is your solution? Unbelievable…
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TeaPartyFREEParty unboundried • 17 minutes ago
The whole thing is Israel’s fault. All of it. The Jewish supremacists are trying to breed white Christians out of existence by flooding our nations with foreign beasts, because they know that we alone have the power to put a stop to their Zio-liberal agenda: destruction of traditional Christian values and communist revolution of the whole world.
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I Zimbra unboundried • 41 minutes ago
The irony is that the US is crying about how we’re losing all our wealth and resources to”illegals” when the US is constantly stealing the resources of other nations. It’s maddening when sometimes the current state of their nation (which is why they are fleeing) is partly due to the US. Referring to them as illegals is very smart by the way, whoever thought of it. Makes it easier to hate them, and not feel bad for it. Lets be honest, a HUGE portion of “illegals” are so because they are too poor to afford their legal way in. so essentially, you have to shell out a bunch of cash in order to not be callously judged by Americans. You know how many people have to get here first before they can even start thinking about gaining citizenship? Sometimes they can barely afford their trip here. It’s easy to have your rather self righteous point of view when you were lucky enough to be born in the US. If you had to live even a day in these people’s shoes, you’d be crying a different song. Maybe if we make a long depressing commercial with Sarah McClachlan singing in the background, Americans can gain some kind of empathy and treat these “illegals” as human beings! And don’t give me any of that law abiding stuff. Funny how must of us only care about people breaking the law if there is some negative stigma attached to it. All of us have broken a law before, but the ones you break are no big deal? Give me a break. I mean, these are children! At least act like an adult and take your fight to a more appropriate venue. If some American mother brought her children into some kind of hostile environment just to make a point, we’d all be scolding her. But I guess if the child isn’t American or needy (especially both) then we don’t care. I’m just going to copy and post what CNN deleted of mine. Here goes: When you tell the world, “Give me your tired, your poor and huddled masses..”, don’t be so surprised and upset when they take you up on the offer. Not everyone realizes we never practice what we preach in this country. Really, we should just switch it to “give us your tired, poor and huddled masses so we can criticize, ostracize and deport them immediately. Unless of course, you can afford our respect.” It’s mind boggling how many times I’ve heard people complaining about illegal immigrants and how a percentage of their paycheck goes to people who are less fortunate, but yet never seem to care about all of the unnecessary amounts of money they’re giving (or being cheated out of) to people that are even more fortunate than them. We DO have the resources to help these people, the rich just wants you to think we don’t. Absurdly rich psychopaths have not only convinced a vast majority of otherwise decent people that capitalism is an honest and “good” way to run a society, but that the poor and the illegals ARE the problem. The poor are poor because they either didn’t try hard enough or didn’t care enough to change their status and the illegals? well, you’re losing your money because of it. No. People are that poor, because others are that rich. Illegal immigrants and the poor are not the reason you don’t have that extra car or that million dollar yacht or even the reason you “can barely get by yourself”. Which, enough of that already. You’re doing just fine. Go poo on the poor side of a Liberian beach with the rest of them, hang around a little, and then tell me how you’re “barely getting by”. A poor American would suddenly feel like royalty. Meanwhile, Ted Bundy is pretty much running the world, and we’re not only letting him, we’re cheering him on. I realize a lot of you, especially you baby boomers, really had the importance of personal responsibility drilled into your head way before you were able to apply logic to the information given.. but trust me on this; you have been conned and brainwashed by people who not only could care less about you but NEED you to believe what they’re feeding you so they can keep effortlessly sucking up all the wealth. and it works. and it’s hard to stomach when you’re aware of it. I know you all would love to believe all that money is going to illegal immigrants and lazy moochers who choose to be that way so you can keep up with the lie you tell yourself (and everyone else) that allows you to not feel guilty for being jealous and not wanting to help others. If you don’t want to help people, fine (I won’t even think you’re a bad person); but don’t give me all these excuses as to why. You’re selfish (sometimes jealous) and that’s the reason. Own it, like you people so desperately want everyone else to do in their life. These are the same people who supposedly “support the troops” then complain and ostracize them once they’re sick, homeless veterans due to not being able to function properly after such repeated trauma they suffered for a cause that they probably were in favor of. The same kind of people who tell women they can’t have abortions, then complain when they have to take care of the child. However, don’t confuse my anti-capitalists views with communism. I’m not suggesting share everything. I just think if a business is racking in billions of dollars, it’s almost criminal for them to pay the human beings that make that happen barely a lick of it, then have them fight over left overs with people who have NOTHING! Psychopaths are so convincing. Messed or not, their success is disgustingly impressive. It’s also impressive if you actually read to this point. Peace.
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Paul Gennett I Zimbra • 26 minutes ago
So are you saying we let them all in, most of them requiring social help, food stamps etc, and let our economy bomb? Its the United States of America. Not the United States of the World
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pablo escobar Paul Gennett • 17 minutes ago
United states of AMERICA, we must all work together as one to solve this. Let’s stop thinking about ourselves;)
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AnotherGuessed pablo escobar • 9 minutes ago
Thanks…. You have helped me to complete my homework assignment… “Define Socialism”.
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pablo escobar AnotherGuessed • 7 minutes ago
How sarcastic 😉 do u know how it feels to be starving or poor? Of course not;)
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Plainer I Zimbra • 17 minutes ago
Wow, you are a throwback of the 60’s generation. We heard this story before when Reagan signed the Immigration bill in 1986. We believed it. But now, it’s getting old.
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rooster2k2 I Zimbra • 4 minutes ago
You don’t have a clue do you? Why even have borders? Lets let everyone in, they can stay at your place!
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Jodo I Zimbra • 3 minutes ago
Paragraphs help readability. Try it some time
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doughnuts64 unboundried • 22 minutes ago
No, we send them billions so they can spend it on military equipment made in the United States.
It’s a jobs program.
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unboundried • 3 hours ago
I’m not an Obama fan, but anybody bashing him for this mess should remember that the number of illegal immigrants doubled during the Bush administration.
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AmericaDS1234 unboundried • 3 hours ago
FIVE AND A HALF YEARS INTO THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION
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guest1 unboundried • 3 hours ago
Bush didn’t hire escorts to bring in 1000 per day.
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doughnuts64 guest1 • 23 minutes ago
Neither did Obama, you simpleton.
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rooster2k2 doughnuts64 • 3 minutes ago
Obama said… Children will not be deported. Google it. Hey what do you know, the children are here!
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RealRed guest1 • 7 minutes ago
Obama has actually deported 2 times more than the Bush administration.
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CarlMM unboundried • 20 minutes ago
Did Bush let out 85,000 illegals from prison and claimed they were “non-violent” offenders when there is no way to tell how many of them committed worse crimes that they never were caught doing? All of us have driven DWI or DUI many times but were only caught once, or still never caught so does that mean, since we weren’t caught, we’ve never done it?
There are thousands of unsolved crimes committed by illegals, including rapes, robberies, and murder and surely many of these illegals are getting away with murder.
I NEVER had suspicions on Bush’s 100% loyalty to the U.S. while I have endless suspicions on Obama’s loyalty including to Muslims, Putin, Iran, Arab Spring, Palestinians, while spitting on half of America, Israel, and countless other allies.
Did Bush order his ICE to overlook all types of laws when Holder and Obama, who are the Chief law-enforcement officers in the, don’t enforce many laws which is against their oath. Who cares what they think the laws should be and they should be enforcing every law as currently written, not what they think the law should be. What if Police got to pick and choose which laws they enforced?
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macstl CarlMM • 6 minutes ago
That tea has rotten your brain —oops racism is not curable.
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texdoc78154 unboundried • 3 hours ago
Obama has told the world he’s going to grant amnesty, so what happens, a bunch of people get here fast.
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RHP unboundried • 3 hours ago
It does not matter if the Founding Fathers started the problem, it is time to fix it.
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Darf Vader unboundried • 44 minutes ago
The point is nothing is happening!
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disqus_ZsmDHbsJLs unboundried • an hour ago
Exactly. Obama has sent more immgrants back home than any other president.
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Jim N disqus_ZsmDHbsJLs • 25 minutes ago
immigrants are not sent back home at all. ILLEGAL immigrants should ALL be sent back!
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jeff disqus_ZsmDHbsJLs • 2 minutes ago
yeah but how many times has “he” sent back the same ones?
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Clint unboundried • 14 minutes ago
In the military there is an unwritten rule. Anytime you move into a new role you get to blame the last guy for 10 minutes. When will Obama’s 10 minutes of blame be up?
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Punctus unboundried • 3 hours ago
Hey! Obama-phobes are almost as frightened of “facts” as they are of brown people! Be nice!
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Justinoinroma • 7 hours ago
do any of you regret electing, and re-electing him yet?
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dfb69 Justinoinroma • 7 hours ago
I voted for him the first time, and YES I regret the heck out of it
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Welcometotehshow dfb69 • 5 hours ago
Yeah I did too. Didn’t make that mistake the second time, but once was bad enough.
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Dan Crocker dfb69 • 7 hours ago
Well, DON’T do it again!
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Dan Crocker Justinoinroma • 7 hours ago
I bet the number is growing. Unfortunately the damage has been done….
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Hex Justinoinroma • 5 hours ago
My buddy voted for him. I don’t vote because I know there’s no one worth voting for and I don’t want to regret voting. Until they give us someone decent that really cares about what this country was founded on….I don’t see myself voting. I vote locally, but when the POTUS voting rolls around….nope. Even if I had voted for Obama it wouldn’t matter. I live in a red state.
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iwlnilla Justinoinroma • 7 hours ago
Again, no.
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linusrawling Justinoinroma • 7 hours ago
Absolutely not. Too but he can’t get a third term.
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Swayne linusrawling • 7 hours ago
Linus go suck your thumb
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Unlicensed Dremel linusrawling • 6 hours ago
Ha ha ha, there’s always gonna be that extreme fringe with blinders on – the Messiah can do no wrong. These kinds of people will not change their minds no matter how much evidence is presented. You are a theist (religious), too, right linus? That immutable loyalty of the mind which is set in stone at a young age and is immune to evidence to the contrary. People like you do make good party loyalists, parishioners, and even spouses however. Just like a mother and her kid that can do no wrong.
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exspworker • 11 hours ago
What a slap in the face to all that had immigrated to this Country the right way. Our govt. is a failure. And our politicians don’t want to lose votes from that community.
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DonDaMiddle exspworker • 10 hours ago
The right way?
Bringing Guns to a Bow & Arrow fight?
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Unlicensed Dremel DonDaMiddle • 6 hours ago
How well did the Natives’ lack of border control work out for them and their culture?
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HopeAlways DonDaMiddle • 9 hours ago
I Fell Down Laughing! You could not be more RIGHT!
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Hex HopeAlways • 4 hours ago
Try again…most whites came here in the 1900s….think before you speak or adopt an opinion sheep boy
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Hex DonDaMiddle • 5 hours ago
How is what one country did a long time ago apply to now? Most whites came here in the 1900s so your argument is bunk sir.
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Theedrich • 11 hours ago
Let’s face it: Obama wants a tsunami of underaged parasites to bring hope and change to this country. He hopes it will change us into a swampland.
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Michael Romine Theedrich • 11 hours ago
Screw u man. America does not need you. Children under duress means we must help. That is American. Not you and your gun toting ilk.
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Rob Michael Romine • 10 hours ago
best way we can help is to show them they should not just show up to the border and get in, mexico is doing nothing, as well as other central american countries. \
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Unlicensed Dremel Rob • 6 hours ago
Exactly.
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Unlicensed Dremel Michael Romine • 6 hours ago
“Children under duress means we must help” Really, that’s the standard? Children under duress means we must help? Do you know how many millions upon millions of children under duress there are in the world, such as Africa, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, South American, and elsewhere? Why do you suppose we are NOT following your prescribed policy doctrine in all those places, and bringing all those children here? I’ll give you 3 guesses to get the answer. Obviously, you are dead wrong. We can afford no such thing – we cannot even afford to pay our existing bills. Cities, states, and the fedgov itself are going bankrupt in a hurry without any new obligations. We are not the world police, and we are not the world red cross, either.
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Unlicensed Dremel Theedrich • 6 hours ago
Well, it’s of course a contrived plan of the demonrats that’s been *decades* in the making. Quite simple and obvious: (1) Maintain lax borders, allowing illegals to pour over for decades, while giving lip service and security theater to border issues. (2) After so many millions are here that it would cost a ton to deport them, make the argument that “we can’t deport, so give them asylum” (aka a “path to citizenship”). (3) Once the illegal welfare-suckers are citizens – Voila, they vote demonrat of course to get more benefits and to get their illegal friends over with more lax border control. It’s a simple and obvious plan. I’m not an repukelican; I’m just pointing out what demonrats are and have been doing for decades.
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SpiritOfBlackWolf • 10 hours ago
It was 10 years ago that building a fence was written into the law, but it did not get built. Mistake. We need a double fence with a cordon sanitaire between them. A no man’s land. If you are in it, you are a target. No questions asked. Towers, cameras, drones, patrols. Lots of jobs building it, maintaining it, manning it.
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J Lopez SpiritOfBlackWolf • 10 hours ago
Think of all the jobs it will create. We need it now!
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What?What? J Lopez • 9 hours ago
bbbwwwaaahhhhhaaaaa rather funny so early this morning!
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hippiesol SpiritOfBlackWolf • 10 hours ago
…i like that…
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Olympic Eagle SpiritOfBlackWolf • 10 hours ago
Killing people is not the answer. What is the difference between killing them in the field or rounding them up,sticking them on the train and gassing them?
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hippiesol Olympic Eagle • 9 hours ago
…huh?…
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Hex Olympic Eagle • 5 hours ago
Who said anything about killing people? Just fire a few rounds to scare them…detain them and send them through the wall. Simple way to put fear into the people that want to cross….no one has to die per say.
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pablo escobar Hex • 10 minutes ago
Dear American with guns, ask your self what would I do if I where them? Do u know how it feels to be starving or poor? Of course not;)
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pablo escobar SpiritOfBlackWolf • 14 minutes ago
We should stop wanting drugs 😉 we should stop giving them guns. The problem is not them it’s us 😉
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What?What? SpiritOfBlackWolf • 10 hours ago
Love the idea… rather “Romanesque’ don’t you think?
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Olympic Eagle What?What? • 10 hours ago
That is what Hitler said. Round up the undesirables.
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What?What? Olympic Eagle • 9 hours ago
I was thinking of Iulius Caesar’s campaigns against the Gauls. How he built a wall to keep the inhabitants from getting out. The men of the town thought themselves so clever sending the women and children out into the “no-man’s land” believing Caesar would let them come over and consume all their resources and then Caesar’s troops would be destroyed and the town would win. Caesar was too smart and let the women and children stay where their own men put them… In harms way. Stupid Gauls.
.
We must not be stupid Gauls…
.
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hippiesol Olympic Eagle • 9 hours ago
…your obsession with hitler is odd…
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Olympic Eagle hippiesol • 9 hours ago
If you study Germany in the 1920s and 30’s, you can almost see the parallels to many of the issues here today. It’s amazing! Germany’s insecurities in that period are very similar to what we are going through today. Remember, Hitler was elected!
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79Pacer hippiesol • 5 hours ago
Could be that he is either German or Jewish.
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Roger Telstar SpiritOfBlackWolf • 10 hours ago
This was designed at an estimated cost of nearly a trillion.
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Roger Telstar Roger Telstar • 10 hours ago
PS the part that was built with drones and tech and stuff cost hundreds of millions and it all failed to do a single damn thing. Surely you conservatives can understand this cannot work?
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Freethinker • 7 hours ago
Those who want a wall built please hit the up vote.
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AmericaNeedsTea Freethinker • 7 hours ago
Drone Patrolled…
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EB • 10 hours ago
These people who are coming here illegally have no education, no skills, no money, and can’t speak English. Instead of prospering here, they will end up being taken care of on taxpayers’ dime, and that is not okay. Send them home immediately, and we will see fewer of them attempting to cross the border.
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Michelle Chapman EB • 10 hours ago
like your ancestors?
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EB Michelle Chapman • 10 hours ago
You know what, that is a ridiculous argument. My ancestors came from England, but that does not give me the right to try to set up residence there without papers. Either follow the proper channels, or be deported immediately.
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J Lopez Michelle Chapman • 10 hours ago
I already said my ancestors had to have sponsors before their arrival. Enough with your argument. Obviously the Native Americans didn’t have any immigration laws, and look at what happened to them.
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Unlicensed Dremel J Lopez • 6 hours ago
Bravo, J Lopez. The Native American example pretty much proves our point in a slam dunk – want your culture destroyed? Have lax border control and lax immigration policy – surefire method.
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Hex Michelle Chapman • 5 hours ago
Funny. Mine came from Germany and were share croppers in Texas. They slowly built the family up to what it is now. Well educated productive members of society. Of course…my family came here legally.
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mike burton Michelle Chapman • 21 minutes ago
no more like your crackhead mother
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Jim N Michelle Chapman • 24 minutes ago
Look around you ……..apparently your are wrong.
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Michelle Chapman EB • 10 hours ago
children
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EB Michelle Chapman • 10 hours ago
First, they aren’t all children. Second, at some point you have to stop letting people tug at your heartstrings. We simply do NOT have the funds to support this kind of influx of illegal immigrants. Period.
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Barbara Chapman EB • 10 hours ago
Michelle Chapman is a Media Matters troll, I wouldn’t waste to much of my time on that one.
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pablo escobar EB • 3 minutes ago
Since when are u God 😉
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J Lopez Michelle Chapman • 10 hours ago
Pssh!! Children. The same ones who will be running the streets in two years with their homeboys carjacking and whatnot because they’re parents can’t keep a leash on them. Send them home. What stupid and irresponsible parents to let those precious children migrate here alone.
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Square Grouper • 9 hours ago
This isn’t immigration, this is an invasion!
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Rob Thompson Square Grouper • 9 hours ago
Pretty peaceful invasion though. If this follows historical precedent, this will not get violent until later.
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Unlicensed Dremel Rob Thompson • 6 hours ago
True, which is a great argument in favor of stopping it.
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whitmanguy Square Grouper • 9 hours ago
This isn’t an invasion, this is immigration.
Sorry. In your haste to make the relevant point you stated the direct reverse of the truth. Happy to correct it for you.
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79Pacer whitmanguy • 5 hours ago
This is actually an exploitation of children by their own country, otherwise their country would be guarding their borders to keep their children IN.
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oplease • 11 hours ago
Most of us feel compassion for them, but no one has the right to demand citizenship. Hell, I want to live in Monaco or Italy, but I just cant show up there. Their governments need to be annexed if they are too lame to care for their people.
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Roger Telstar oplease • 11 hours ago
annexed? By the USA? So you DO want to pay trillions to get them out!!!
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MysticLeviathan • 12 hours ago
This is really bad. They shouldn’t be letting them in at all. Throw them onto a raft and drift them out into the ocean for all I care. They are so incredibly selfish that that they can’t wait in line like everyone else did, and they give these stupid excuses as if they’re the only ones who have problems.
It’s absolutely ridiculous that this country would even let them in at all. Our country has really fallen over the past few decades, and I’m hoping it can be set straight again, but no Republican or Democrat is right for the job, which is the worst part. Even so, it’s not like anything can be done anyway with congress, which is why I applaud Obama for trying to actually get stuff done. I disagree totally with his immigration policies, but I respect him that he has the stones to at least try and get stuff done rather than sitting around waiting for nothing to happen.
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Ian Dean MysticLeviathan • 12 hours ago
I would be much more comfortable with letting them in if there were not MILLIONS of Americans out of work and over 500,000 American children in foster care with no chance of ever having a family.
But we do… so I don’t feel comfortable.
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Michael Romine Ian Dean • 11 hours ago
Nice to make up stuff. No chance of ever having a family? What are you sally struthers? By the way crybaby, there are 104,000 juveniles and children in foster care. not 500,000.But your way off point anyway so….
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Ian Dean Michael Romine • 11 hours ago
too bad I didn’t make it up… the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) reported 400,540 children were in foster care as of September 30, 2011.
you REALLY think think a mere 500 plus were not added to that number in 3 years?
Your BS number is far off.. I’m looking at the report right now.
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Ian Dean Ian Dean • 11 hours ago
here.. take a looksee for yourself.
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/faq/foster-care4
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Hex Michael Romine • 4 hours ago
Da’ facts Don’ Lieee. Google it now for ya’ freee facts!
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disqus_aw4XhYWCj9 MysticLeviathan • 11 hours ago
Get real! You tell me how letting all the illegals in our country,sending millions to support another country problems helps this country? Trust this,hes only out for himself and his agenda. As president of the country his only thought should be whats best for this country,not the FEELINGS of immigrants
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Michael Romine MysticLeviathan • 11 hours ago
You are so full of it.you would not send 50,000 children drifting on a raft. American bluster at it’s worst.
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Jt_flyer • 9 hours ago
The polls are correct Obama is the worst president since WWII. He’s tearing American apart with his campaign of political divisionism.
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Hex Jt_flyer • 5 hours ago
The media is responsible for the political divide. They always try to make it us and them.
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DonDaMiddle Jt_flyer • 9 hours ago
Go away… at least until you can say you have heard of EMTALA.
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Jt_flyer DonDaMiddle • 9 hours ago
How about we start with making illegal immigrants go away first?
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Piper • 8 hours ago
Undocumented immigrants….you mean illegal immigrants.
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What?What? Piper • 8 hours ago
Invaders, more like.
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pinheadlibs Piper • 8 hours ago
Crack dealers are undocumented pharmacists.
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Unlicensed Dremel pinheadlibs • 6 hours ago
Lol, pinheadlibs, truth – I’m using that one… Walter White was just an “undocumented pharmacist”, ha ha.
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JeffreyB • 12 hours ago
Inside the auditorium: majority of ‘legal’ law abiding citizens expressing themselves against Obama’s policies. Outside the auditorium: majority of immigrants and ‘illegals’ upset that people wont change the law so that they can all come and stay. I miss the logic. I guess I should just start robbing and stealing. When Im arrested my defense will be that these aren’t stolen goods. Its just undocumented property and I should be allowed to be free and the law changed so I may keep the illegally gotten goods.
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armburst JeffreyB • 10 hours ago
I remember the days a fella didn’t have to press 1 for English.
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less restrictive, and the tax was lower. Ultimately they settled on a compromise much more in line with the Senate. Lawmakers increased the tax from 12 percent, as called for in the referendum, to a total of 20 percent (17 percent to the state, and up to 3 percent to the community hosting a marijuana retail establishment). They clarified how municipalities can opt out of having marijuana businesses within their borders, by making it slightly easier for communities that rejected the marijuana initiative in 2016 to institute a ban. They restricted advertising and packaging to minors, and called for making sure communities disproportionately affected by the war on drugs are not cut out of taking part in the new industry.
The changes were accepted by Gov. Charlie Baker, who was an opponent of the referendum that legalized recreational marijuana. He seemed to begrudgingly accept that "the voters had spoken" and was happy to let the Legislature make the changes they wanted.
"I worry terribly about what the consequences over time will be," said Baker moments after signing the bill in his office. "And having spent a lot of time talking to folks in Colorado and in Washington, and in having talked to a lot of people who have talked to folks in Colorado and in Washington, there are a lot of pitfalls we need to work hard to avoid."
By the end of summer, the Cannabis Control Commission was finally in place, and it began taking steps to draw up policy to govern the new, legalized industry. With state law mandating they must have regulations in place by March 15, the CCC has been facing a time crunch, but has adopted a number of policies and draft regulations.
Steven Hoffman, chairman of the Cannabis Control Commission, speaks during its first meeting in September 2017. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)
Looking Ahead To 2018
The CCC decided they will issue social use licenses, making Massachusetts the first state to do so. It's not clear at this point if smoking will be allowed at those locations, however the CCC has vowed to make a decision on smoking by Oct. 1, 2018, at the latest, after considering the effects of secondhand smoke and workplace safety.
The commission is also planning on accepting applications for micro-businesses and craft cannabis cultivators. They are also, as required by the law, reaching out to those communities disproportionately affected by past marijuana laws.
One of the big questions lingering as 2018 is about to begin: Will there be plenty of marijuana shops open July 1?
That's a bit unclear. It is likely that the 17 existing medical marijuana establishments will be allowed to convert to retail sales. One problem facing the industry could be supply. Cultivators might not have enough time to grow an adequate amount of cannabis to meet demand. That could spell shortages and initially high prices soon after the doors open to retail sales.
The chairman of the Cannabis Control Commission, Steven Hoffman, is trying to tamp down some expectations, saying not to expect things to be like they are in other states that have legalized right out of the gate.
"We're not going to snap our fingers and have Colorado. What Colorado is now four years after passing their initiative, we're not going to be there on July 1," Hoffman said in October. "We will get there, but I think it's just important to, as I said, set expectations that we're not going to have Colorado on July 1st of 2018." He is predicting a robust industry will eventually emerge. It's just going to take some time.Lamb brains sold as food
Gulai otak, cattle's brain curry from Indonesia, cattle's brain curry from Indonesia
The brain, like most other internal organs, or offal, can serve as nourishment. Brains used for nourishment include those of pigs, squirrels, rabbits, horses, cattle, monkeys, chickens, fish, lamb and goats. In many cultures, different types of brain are considered a delicacy.
Cultural consumption [ edit ]
The brain of animals features in French cuisine, in dishes such as cervelle de veau and tête de veau. A dish called maghaz is a popular Muslim cuisine in Pakistan, Bangladesh, parts of India, and diaspora countries. In Turkish cuisine brain can be fried, baked, or consumed as a salad. In Chinese cuisine, brain is a delicacy in Chongqing or Sichuan cuisine, and it is often cooked in spicy hot pot or barbecued. In the southern part of China, pig brain is used for "Tianma Zhunao Tang". In South India goat brain curry or fry is a delicacy.
Similar delicacies from around the world include Mexican tacos de sesos.[1] The Anyang tribe of Cameroon practiced a tradition in which a new tribal chief would consume the brain of a hunted gorilla, while another senior member of the tribe would eat the heart.[2] Indonesian cuisine specialty in Minangkabau cuisine also served beef brain in a coconut-milk gravy named gulai otak (beef brain curry).[3][4] In Cuban cuisine, "brain fritters" are made by coating pieces of brain with bread crumbs and then frying them.[5]
Nutritional composition [ edit ]
DHA, an important omega-3 fatty acid, is found concentrated in mammalian brains. For example, according to Nutrition Data, 85 g (3 oz) of cooked beef brain contains 727 mg of DHA.[6] By way of comparison, the NIH has determined that small children need at least 150 mg of DHA per day, and pregnant and lactating women need at least 300 mg of DHA.[7]
The makeup of the brain is about 29% fat, most of which is located in myelin (which itself is 70–80% fat).[8] Specific fatty acid ratios will depend in part on the diet of the animal it is harvested from. The brain is also very high in cholesterol. For example, a single 140 g (5 oz) serving of "pork brains in milk gravy" can contain 3500 mg of cholesterol (1170% of the USRDA).[9]
Prions [ edit ]
Brain consumption can result in contracting fatal transmissible spongiform encephalopathies such as Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and other prion diseases in humans and mad cow disease in cattle.[10] Another prion disease called kuru has been traced to a funerary ritual among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea in which those close to the dead would eat the brain of the deceased to create a sense of immortality.[11]
References [ edit ]MELBOURNE captain Nathan Jones was apprehensive about letting surgeons cut into his neck this off-season but has no regrets after it instantly relieved him of crippling pain.
The 27-year-old had an operation on a prolapsed disc at the start of September, requiring doctors to make an incision at the front of his throat.
It came after the tough midfielder played much of the season with the injury, which was initially treated with cortisone injections to enable him to get through the year.
It wasn't an operation common for footballers, and unsurprisingly caused Jones some anxiety about whether it was the right move, given the delicate and complex part of the body involved.
But as the injury deteriorated throughout the season, Jones did his research not only on the procedure, but also the risks of delaying it until the end of the year.
After seeking several expert opinions, Jones and his wife, Jerri, were left completely comfortable with their decision to go ahead with the surgery.
A kick with Jesse, free coffee and a new logo: Demons launch fresh look
"My wife knows how much [playing] means to me but at the same time I didn't leave any stone unturned in terms of just checking up through with surgeons and second and third opinions," Jones said on Thursday.
"At no stage was it detrimental to my future or how I feel in the long run – it was more about the decision just for the current season.
"I was really nervous heading into it; I wasn't even sure if it was going to make much of a difference.
"I knew almost straight away within 24, 48 hours afterwards it was the best decision I made.
"I'm glad I made that decision to get it done post-season and I'll be right 100 per cent heading into next season."
Jones consulted with a number of neurosurgeons about how his long-term health could be affected as the season progressed, and spent a good month thrashing out what path he should take in treating it.
He was assured the worst-case scenario was that he could end up back in as much pain as he experienced before the cortisone treatment.
Jones in contemplative mood ahead of his press conference on Wednesday. Picture: AFL Media
So he waited, played out the year, and had the operation on September 14.
Afterwards, he didn't go on his usual surfing off-season holiday and instead visited Europe with Jerri and their infant daughter Bobbi.
There, he reflected on what he'd been through in managing the injury, getting it fixed and how he has felt since.
"I've had no real recurring nerve pain, which I had throughout the year, since the op and mainly now it's just really re-strengthening the muscles and stuff that were hindered by the nerve being blocked throughout the season," he said.
"I'm probably a fair bit ahead of schedule but the main thing that's going to hold me back is getting involved in contact.
"My surgeon is certain I can't get hit in the head for at least the next couple of months."
Jones has been running for nearly a month but won't take part in match play until after Christmas.
He'll officially start pre-season on November 23 with plans to ramp things up after the festive break.
Jones is bullish about the Demons' prospects for season 2016 and says finals might not be "too far out of reach".
He also believes last year's No.2 draft pick, Christian Petracca, will push for round one selection after missing all of this season with a wrecked knee.
"He's in terrific condition at the moment and I expect him to keep ticking the boxes," Jones said.
"He's a terrific talent and probably was almost definite to play round one last year before he hurt himself.
"There's no pressure on him, you just expect him to keep doing what he does and I look forward to seeing him in full training … if he keeps going the way he's going I expect him to put his hand up."
The Demons revealed a new logo on Thursday in a bold Melbourne city-centric launch designed to link locals to the club and appeal to a younger demographic.
"The stereotypical Melbourne of old has wanted to find a new direction, and along with the new logo we want to connect with the city and our name," Jones said.
"The footy club is the only team in the league that holds the Melbourne name, and [the logo is designed for the club] to become more edgy and cool and I think they've done that."
Nathan Jones in front of a mural commissioned for the Demons' logo launch. Picture: AFL MediaProperty taxes for Baltimore homeowners will drop again under Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's plan to gradually lower the city's rate to bring it more in line with the rest of the state.
The city's spending panel agreed Wednesday to lower the rate to $2.13 per $100 of assessed value — still double the levy of surrounding counties, but down 14 cents in the past two years. The reduction is part of the mayor's plan to knock 20 cents off the tax for homeowners by 2020.
The tax break, approved without discussion by the Board of Estimates, will lower the property tax bill for an average home by $174. The bill for a $145,500 house will drop from $3,269 to $3,095 in the fiscal year that begins July 1.
"Residents have been clear that they want to see action taken to reduce property taxes without a reduction to city services, and we're listening," Rawlings-Blake said after the meeting. "And more importantly, we're taking action that will lay the groundwork for growth in Baltimore."
The tax break is part of the Targeted Homeowners' Tax Credit. The rate for rental properties and businesses will remain $2.25 per $100 of assessed value.
Baltimore's rate remains the highest in the state, but some economists say the mayor is taking a reasoned approach that makes the city's rate more competitive without cutting services, such as public safety initiatives, after-school programs and trash pickup.
Anirban Basu of Sage Policy Group, an economic and policy consulting firm, said the action brings the city's rate "closer to being reasonable."
"The only way to deal with Baltimore's uncompetitive tax rate is to chip away at it in a way that allows for a combination of a balanced budget and taxpayer relief," Basu said.
The board reviewed another of the mayor's ideas to keep city residents and attract new ones by encouraging the development of apartment buildings. That proposal, which still needs City Council approval, would give a tax credit for 10 years to developers who build or renovate apartments throughout the city.
Intended to spur apartment construction and renovation citywide, the credit would give developers an 80 percent break on taxes due for any value added to the property by the project. The percentage would gradually decrease after five years.
A similar program has been available to developers who build and improve apartments downtown.
Together, the tax breaks could help keep members of the millennial generation — the children of the baby boomers — living in Baltimore as they get married, have children, pay down student loans and look for houses to raise their families, Basu said.
The millennials show a propensity to live in urban areas, but as they grow older, Baltimore must find a way to entice them to stay, he said.
"The mayor has begun to unleash a process that I think is very productive," Basu said. "There has to be a concerted effort to drive down these tax rates."
By 2020, Rawlings-Blake's plan will translate into a $291 savings on an average home property tax bill.
The mayor said she sees providing the tax breaks as "a critical component" of her goal to increase the city's population by 10,000 families.
"I understand in order to grow a city, you have to do many things. You have to attract new residents, but you also have to give the residents who are here more reasons to stay," Rawlings-Blake said.
Providing the property tax break will cost the city $20.2 million, which is built into the mayor's $2.5 billion budget that doesn't cut city services for the first time since 2008.
Critics note that while the city is cutting taxes, city water and sewer rates are rising by 42 percent over three years. Bills for a typical customer, including homes and businesses, jumped by nearly $100 this year, and are projected to climb by a total of $250 by July 2015. The water rate increases raise the typical bill from $690 in fiscal 2013 to $784 in fiscal 2014 to $944 in fiscal 2016.
The mayor has said the water rate increases are necessary to repair the city's "crumbling" infrastructure.
Rawlings-Blake has made sweeping changes to the city's overall financial picture. More money has been banked in Baltimore's rainy-day account and a series of changes, such as requiring city workers to contribute more to their pensions, is helping to shore up the long-term structural deficit.
The shortfall is down about $300 million from the $750 million that was projected a few years ago.
The city also is working to implement another tax break approved this year by the General Assembly that will be available to homeowners who move from one house in Baltimore to another in the city. The Resident Retention Credit is capped at $3 million, and will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis.
The city is expected to begin taking applications for the tax credit on Oct. 1. That application and others will eventually be available online, officials said.
ywenger@baltsun.com
twitter.com/yvonnewenger
Tax rates
Baltimore's property tax rate of $2.25 per $100 of assessed value is the highest in the state. Effective July 1, the city rate will drop to $2.13 for homeowners.
Other current property tax rates:
•Baltimore County: $1.10
•Harford County: $1.04
•Howard County: $1.01
•Anne Arundel County: $0.95This article is over 2 years old
The Liberal Nationals operate as a single party in Queensland but its members are designated as either Liberals or Nationals in Canberra
Move for LNP split from Liberal and National parties expected next month
Senator Ian Macdonald will bring a motion to the Liberal National party state conference next month to allow its members to split from the Liberal and National parties, reflecting his long-held belief that the Coalition is made up of three parties: the Liberal party, the National party and the LNP.
Senior cabinet ministers Mathias Cormann and George Brandis have played down a similar move by the LNP executive, which reportedly took intervention from the Nationals leader, Barnaby Joyce, to kill off.
A report in the Australian on Friday said the Queensland LNP executive considered a motion to assess forming a separate party room in Canberra.
The LNP operates as a single party in Queensland, although its MPs and senators are designated either Liberals or Nationals in Canberra.
The move could allow the party to demand more ministries and would require a second Coalition agreement with the Liberal party.
Although the motion was defeated, Joyce and Brandis, the attorney general and a Queensland senator, were reportedly forced to intervene to prevent it getting up.
Matthew Canavan: 'rock star' Barnaby Joyce can lead Nationals to great things Read more
Macdonald told Guardian Australia he had not been aware of the motion at the LNP executive but it mirrored his view that three parties make up the Coalition.
Macdonald said he would attempt to bring a motion to the LNP state conference in late August which would allow LNP members to sit as a separate, third party, or to continue to sit with the Liberal or National parties if they chose.
The Nationals have 22 members, including six MPs and two senators from the LNP.
Macdonald said the LNP was on track to win up to 28 Senate and lower house seats – the seat of Herbert is still in doubt and Senate counting has not been completed.
“Those respective strengths should be taken into account in any arrangements for a Coalition government, I’ve long said that,” he said.
“The LNP contribution to the federal Coalition government – not just in this election but the last couple of decades – has never been fully recognised in the make-up of the ministry.”
Speaking on Sky news on Friday, Cormann said: “There is no split. The LNP in Queensland is a division of the Liberal party associated with the National party.
“Individual members of the LNP choose whether to sit in the Liberal or National party room.
“We have a strong and united team. We’ve got high-quality ministers representing the Liberal and National parties out of the great state of Queensland.”
Asked whether the motion had been proposed and there were tensions over a proposed split, Cormann said: “Individuals in either the Liberal or National parties have views and ideas from time to time.
“There won’t be any split... The arrangements continue as they have been.”
The Australian reported that Brandis and Joyce did not deny travelling to Brisbane for the meeting, but had declined to comment.
Brandis told ABC radio’s AM program on Friday that of the 42 frontbench positions, eight were held by LNP members or senators from Queensland.
“The most important development in the reshuffle the prime minister announced on Monday was the promotion of somebody from Queensland, senator Matt Canavan, from the junior ministry to the cabinet, so there are now four Queensland cabinet ministers.
“That is historically an equal high – there has never been more than four cabinet minister from Queensland.”
Brandis said people would “always wish their state to have more representatives in the cabinet”.
“But I wouldn’t over-interpret the disappointment of some that Queensland doesn’t have even more representatives in cabinet.”Egyptian investigator in Italian's death has prior conviction linked to death of detainee-court documents, sources
By Ahmed Mohamed Hassan
CAIRO, Feb 15 (Reuters) - A senior Egyptian police officer investigating the death of Italian student Giulio Regeni has a prior conviction in connection with the torture and death of a detainee, according to security and judicial sources and court documents seen by Reuters.
Regeni, 28, disappeared on Jan. 25, the fifth anniversary of the 2011 uprising that ended President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule.
His body was found on the side of the main Cairo-Alexandria highway on Feb. 3. Egyptian forensics and prosecution officials have said he was tortured and killed by a blow with a sharp object to the back of the head.
Khaled Shalaby, now head of Criminal Investigations in Giza and one of the investigators in the Regeni case, and three others were charged in 2000 with torturing and killing a detainee inside a police station in Alexandria, according to the security and judicial sources and documents.
One document from the Alexandria Criminal Court shows that Shalaby and three other policemen were initially cleared of the charges related to the killing of Farid Shawqi Ahmed Abdel Aal.
A retrial led to the conviction of Shalaby and the three others in 2003 on reduced charges of failing to protect the detainee and not transferring him to hospital, according to a ruling from the Alexandria Criminal Court seen by Reuters.
The court handed Shalaby a one-year jail sentence with labour that was suspended.
The court documents show that the accused officers claimed that during his arrest, Abdel Aal hit his own head against a pole and later died of wounds.
Contacted by telephone, Shalaby denied any wrongdoing: "There are no cases against me and I don't understand what does this have to do with the Italians case?," he said.
Shalaby became head of Criminal Investigations in Alexandria in 2009 and was transferred in 2013 to Giza where he was promoted to head the Criminal Investigations unit, according to a security source.
The Criminal Investigation unit Shalaby heads is one of several involved in the investigation, which is led by Homeland Security and also includes Italian security officers.
On Feb. 4 the website of the pro-government newspaper Youm7 quoted him as saying Regeni's body bore no signs of a criminal act. "Preliminary investigations show he was the victim of a car accident," he was quoted as saying.
Egyptian Interior Ministry spokesman Abu Baker Abdel Karim did not respond to calls by Reuters but a ministry statement issued on Monday denied media reports that Regeni had been arrested by security forces.
But Ahmed Nagy, a senior prosecutor in Giza, said Regeni's body bore cigarette burns and slits to the ears. The Egyptian coroner's report has not been made public but other forensic and prosecution sources have said it found signs of torture including broken ribs and electrocution.
A copy of Regeni's professional biography provided by a friend showed he spoke Arabic and that his doctoral research at Britain's Cambridge University focused on trade union activity in Egypt after Mubarak's overthrow.
Friends of Regeni said his research may have led him to meet labour activists and critics of the current government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is waging the fiercest crackdown on dissent in Egypt's modern history.
Rights groups allege that Egyptians are often detained by police on scant evidence and beaten, sometimes to death.
The Interior Ministry and other Egyptian authorities denies police brutality is endemic and say any allegations of abuses are investigated.
Critics say investigations are not always thorough.
Regeni's death could complicate efforts by Sisi's government to project an image of stability to win back tourists and foreign investors scared off by years of post-uprising turmoil.Union Minister Manohar Parrikar at an event on Friday. (Photo: Press Trust of India)
Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar was referring to IK Gujral, say sources, when he dropped a bombshell by alleging that " some former Prime Ministers compromised India's deep assets " on national security.Mr Parrikar did not name anyone when he made the comment while explaining why he did not want to reveal details about a Coast Guard operation on December 31, in which a boat from Pakistan blew up after being intercepted off the Gujarat coast. The source of information might have been compromised, he said.Sources said today that the Defence Minister was referring to the dismantling of India's intelligence network in neighbouring countries during Mr Gujral's tenure as PM under what was called the Gujral Doctrine on foreign policy.Inder Kumar Gujral was the Prime Minster for just under a year in 1997-98 at the head of a United Front government supported by the Congress. He died in 2012.A furious Congress, which has been in power for much of the past six decades and has given the country six of its 17 Prime Minsters, asked the Minister to either give names or apologise. Congress leader Manish Tewari said the Defence Minister has made a "very grave charge."At an event in Mumbai, Mr Parrikar said about the Pakistan boat that blew up, "We intercepted it from 200 km away. For 24 hours, the boat was going in circles. Is that not enough proof? What more do you (reporters) want? I was asked to give 'proof' but I refused. I said 'absolutely not' because the source might be compromised. You have to build assets and you have to build deep assets. Deep assets are assets which have to be created over 20-30 years, but this country has seen PMs who have compromised deep assets. I won't take names. Many people know."Opposition parties, including the Congress, had questioned the Coast Guard operation and demanded evidence that the vessel that exploded with four men on it, was carrying suspected terrorists. Mr Parrikar mocked the Congress for making the demand. "Tomorrow, during such an operation, we will take along a cameraman and also the Congress spokesperson," he said.Rio Tinto's first-half profits plunge 80 per cent; $US4.4 billion in 2014 down to $US806 million
Updated
Global mining company Rio Tinto has suffered a major slide in profit in its 2015 interim results, revealing a drop of more than 80 per cent.
The miner released its first-half results today, showing its net earnings of $US4.4 billion last year had tumbled to $US806 million in the same time period this year.
The fall is largely due to the plunging iron ore price as a result of a glut in the market and slowing demand from China.
Rio's half yearly underlying earnings of $US2.9 billion in 2015 were down by 43 per cent compared to last year's figure of $US5.1 billion.
The miner said its global production of 154 million tonnes was 11 per cent higher than in the first half of 2014, following a ramp up in Pilbara production.
The company said it had reduced costs by more than $US500 million and had a net debt of $US13.7 billion.
Rio said it expected to return more than $US6 billion to shareholders this year.
The company said cost reductions, exchange rates and lower energy costs had offset the almost 40 per cent iron ore price decline.
Seeing signs of recovery: Sam Walsh
Rio Tinto's chief executive, Sam Walsh, said these were challenging times for the industry.
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Sam Walsh speaks to The Business (The Business)
"We've produced a very robust set of numbers despite what continues to be a pretty challenging environment for the mining industry," he said.
"For some time it's been apparent that the economic environment has been adjusting to what is now called 'the new normal'.
"But let's be clear - we'll see continued economic growth from this larger base, including an increase in the long-term demand for all of our commodities."
Mr Walsh suggested that while there was a shift to what he called the "new normal", demand for Rio's commodities should remain strong.
"Since 2008, developed markets in both Europe and USA have been through difficult periods.
"But we do now appear to be seeing signs of recovery.
"And we're starting to sense the potential from emerging market economies including India and Indonesia."
Mr Walsh predicted better times were ahead.
"The economic environment has been challenging particularly for commodities with some prices falling to levels not seen since 2009," he said.
"But this cyclical weakness will pass as the momentum of global economic growth picks up and the commodity markets rebalance."
Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton accused of collusion
Rio Tinto and its rival BHP Billiton were accused of being behind the massive slump in iron ore prices.
Fortescue Metals Group founder Andrew Forrest claimed the two majors flooded the market with iron in a bid to gain more market share by knocking out higher cost producers.
It led the Federal Government to announce it would launch an inquiry into whether the two companies were in collusion, but the Commonwealth later reneged on the move.
Topics: company-news, mining-industry, iron-ore, wa
First postedBelieve it or not, Verizon has the best full retail (off contract) pricing on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge. To see pricing for each carrier, you can check out our pricing guide, but the numbers are substantially lower in all tiers (32GB, 64GB, and 128GB) on Big Red than they are at AT&T and T-Mobile, or even US Cellular. Sprint is hiding their pricing and doing some gimmicky lease program, so we can’t really compare anything there.
If you start at the 32GB model of the Galaxy S6, Verizon is as much as $85 lower in some cases. At the 64GB level, they are also $85 lower, and at the 128GB level, they beat everyone by $85 once again. With the Galaxy S6 Edge, it’s an even bigger gap. At the 32GB level, they are as much as $115 lower. At 64GB and 128GB, you are also looking at $115 differences. We should also point out that because of these lower full retail prices, that their monthly payment plans split up into 24 payments are also going to be the lowest in most cases.
Here is a look at Verizon’s full retail pricing compared to the rest:
And here are each carrier’s comparable payment plans:
So does this all mean that everyone should run to Verizon to buy the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge? Well, no. First of all, it’s no secret that their service prices are hovering around the highest in the industry. You also have to keep in mind that their phones aren’t exactly great for jumping between carriers should you fulfill your payment plan or buy at full retail and want to go elsewhere. You should have no trouble locking onto AT&T’s HSPA network with a Verizon phone these days, but the chances of you getting an LTE signal are slim.
With that said, if you are open to any carrier at the moment and have decided to pick up the Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge, want to buy at full retail or through a payment plan, and also don’t mind overwhelming branding, Verizon is currently looking like the cheapest option (without factoring in service).
Edit: This post originally had early AT&T full retail pricing information that was distributed to reps. AT&T has since adjusted the full retail prices to higher, more even price points. We have updated the post to reflect these changes.2017 Women’s College Player Of The Year, Presented By VC Ultimate & NUTC
And the award goes to...
Ultiworld’s 2017 Women’s College Awards are presented by the National Ultimate Training Camp and VC Ultimate, as part of their season-long support of our women’s coverage. All opinions are those of the authors. Thanks for supporting the brands that make Ultiworld possible!
Ultiworld is pleased to announced our fourth annual College Awards. The criteria for each award can be found here — we consider both regular season and postseason performance in our selection of awards. Though the input of Ultiworld reporters is weighed heavily, final decisions for awards are made by the editors.
2017 Women’s College Player of the Year
Jaclyn Verzuh (Dartmouth)
Was there ever any question?
After leading Dartmouth Princess Layout to their first ever national championship, the accolades tacked on after Jaclyn Verzuh’s name are rivaling those of Khaleesi. Jaclyn Verzuh, Player of the Year. Jaclyn Verzuh, the best player in the college women’s division. The best player in college ultimate, period. The Greatest of All Time. We keep conjuring up ever more impressive superlatives that she turns into understatements in the next point.
Verzuh walked into Nationals with the award already tentatively in her corner. After missing most of last season due to injury, her regular season dominance in 2017 was unmatched in either division. She helped Dartmouth march to Florida Winter Classic and Stanford Invite tournament titles without challenge. The division’s best defenders lined up to give her their best shot and she still made scoring, hucking, skying, breaking, and bidding look like a casual walk in the park.
In Mason, OH, Verzuh had the most stacked stat line of the tournament — 33 goals, 24 assists, and 14 blocks — yet these numbers still undervalue her impact on the field. There are other women who can match her height in the deep space, but nobody else that tall has the agility and grace to catch the same disc eight feet in the air and eight inches off the ground, again and again.
Her complete control of the downfield gave Dartmouth an offensive cheat code at Nationals. When teams set pressure on Dartmouth’s handlers, they could always rip the disc deep for Verzuh to stride down and grab. Defense was simply unfair. Verzuh’s ultimate IQ, her elite club experience with Riot, and her physical strength nullified opponents’ deep shot ambitions. It’s not confirmed that she even broke a sweat at Nationals.
Like the Callahan award, the Player of the Year award tends to go to seniors who are peaking after a long career with their teams. Verzuh, however, is only a sophomore — and she may just be getting started. We all face the very real possibility that Jaclyn Verzuh could be the Player of the Year for several years to come. It’s time to start dreaming up new superlatives.
Runners-up: Julia Schmaltz (Texas), Han Chen (UCLA)Rabbi David Locketz has felt the sting of bigotry in his career, and even a death threat via Facebook last year.
But a recent wave of anti-Semitic incidents, including two bomb threats in the Twin Cities in the last five weeks, has struck a frightening and ugly chord that feels new to him.
“Our experience as a community in this country has never been that we have had to worry about an organized threat,” said Locketz, senior rabbi for the Bet Shalom congregation in Minnetonka. “That’s what has been unique about the last several weeks: It feels so organized and so massive.”
Minnesota is in the midst of a startling rise in anti-Semitic incidents, a chilling surge that started even before the two bomb threats phoned in to the Jewish community centers in St. Paul and St. Louis Park. Law enforcement records show 11 hate crimes against Jews reported in Minnesota in 2016 — a three-year high. The local Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC), which compiles its own list, also tallied a surge in hate incidents — 21 reports last year, up from 12 in 2015. And this year’s count is on pace to be even higher. Authorities across the country are reporting a similar spike in such threats.
In response, the FBI and other federal officials have ramped up their engagement with local JCCs, advising them on security measures and encouraging them to report any suspected hate crimes. Local police have increased patrols around Twin Cities synagogues during weekly services. And U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, the top federal prosecutor in Minnesota, said his office is participating in a nationwide investigation into the recent bomb scares, which he called part of a “different and heightened” climate of concern.
“This threat has rocked our whole community to the core,” said Soni Cohen of the Sabes JCC in St. Louis Park, which had to evacuate nearly 500 people after a Jan. 18 bomb threat. “Because it’s no longer just a drill.”
St. Paul police officers stood in front of the St. Paul Jewish Community Center after it was evacuated after receiving a bomb threat on Monday.
Authorities have been unable to pinpoint a single inspiration behind the latest hate incidents in Minnesota.
But the actions of one young Minneapolis perpetrator, documented by the Star Tribune through his online activity, helps pull back the curtain on the spreading influence of white supremacist networks.
Shortly after plastering the University of Minnesota campus with swastika-studded fliers earlier this month, the young man logged in online and accepted an invitation to join the local chapter of a popular white supremacist website called the Daily Stormer. Behind the anonymity of his web profile, he celebrated with his newfound digital brotherhood:
“I did it for all of you,” he wrote on a forum of the site, whose users reportedly have included Dylann Roof, the man who in 2015 killed nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church. “I never imagined that there were so many great racists and fine upstanding Nazis.”
Throughout the weekend, the young man, identified only by the username “Whitelash,” disclosed that he had “virtually no family” and “so little to lose.” Unemployed and “partially disabled,” he said he struggled to find the $6 to print the fliers and pay for a light-rail train to campus from his home near the airport. He promised “future exploits” and boasted that he didn’t fear punishment: “If I lose, I’ll be like a martyr for our cause.”
In an earlier thread related to an FBI investigation in South Carolina, “Whitelash” wrote: “Some day, when we are the authorities, we can purge our enemies with impunity.”
Tony McAleer, a former skinhead from Canada who now helps run a nonprofit aimed at reforming extremists, said the young man’s behavior signaled a troubled quest for belonging familiar to many who wind up in white supremacist circles.
“There are probably thousands of guys like him,” said McAleer, executive director of the Chicago-based Life After Hate. “When you scratch below the surface you find similar kinds of stories: Someone who doesn’t quite fit in, looking for their place in the world. They can’t find it in a mainstream way, but with very little effort he can make himself a hero by putting fliers on campus.”
For the Twin Cities JCCs, the recent bomb threats represented a new test of existing security protocols, said Steve Hunegs, executive director of the JCRC, the public advocacy voice of the Twin Cities Jewish community. At the |
ary a peep from them. John McCain was right, sort of. It IS a threat to the very fabric of Democracy, but he had the wrong emphasis of blame for that threat. As I've said here and elsewhere before, I hope and pray that this election is finally the one when people stand up and say NO! I am NOT going to accept this any more! Election fraud, voter suppression, purged voters and voter intimidation at the polls...it ALL needs to end now!
COMMENT #7 [Permalink]
... lizabeth said on 10/18/2008 @ 4:03 pm PT...
did anyone notice,during the debate. That Mccain kept refuring to ms palins, child as austic, we where all lead to believe her son had down sydrome. these are two very diffrent disabilites. Mccain dosnot understand the problems. and dosent speak with his fellow canadate very much. which has become very ovious.
COMMENT #8 [Permalink]
... Lora said on 10/18/2008 @ 5:22 pm PT...
Here's a second article about more vote-flipping in WV. The officials say it's all the voters' fault (d'oh!) and that stories like these shouldn't be published because folks might be scared away from voting. John and Brad, what were you thinking!
COMMENT #9 [Permalink]
... GWN said on 10/18/2008 @ 6:07 pm PT...
It's nice to see you here Kira. You were very helpful, explaining what the DRE's were etc, to me when I first came to bradblog.
I am sick/sickened and don't know if this is ruining my health (Like John Gideon said it was easier being naive) but we, Canada, are heading down this road and people don't believe it. Some people just give me that "she's off on a tangent again" look and you feel soooo alone.The Liberals lost many more seats than most expected,and it just doesn't look right. I am trying to find out if scanners were used to count...why voter ID was brought in last year BY Harper and there was no news on it until the election. (Many people were turned away, old people who didn't show address ID. University students too) Harper gained about 1% and spent 300 million to get his minority again. On a side note, Scott Ritter did say it would take ten years to clear out the old wood so if he was talking about ten years since bussssh was selected...you have only two years to go. Think positive!!!
COMMENT #10 [Permalink]
... Kira said on 10/18/2008 @ 6:52 pm PT...
Hi GWN! Thanks for the kind words. Yup, I know it's been hard on my health. I was surprised when Harper won again. I thought all signs pointed to booting him out. Our Canadian relatives were here from Toronto & said they still used paper ballots, but I know the EVMs are being used in Canada. Harper consulted with GOP propaganda-meister Frank Luntz and I think I remember reading some time back that he also consulted with our Republican Voting Machine companies. There's some kind of nefarious tie in there for sure. We definitely need a change in government - and maybe start a domino effect to oust the bums.
COMMENT #11 [Permalink]
... GWN said on 10/18/2008 @ 7:41 pm PT...
Kira, I did read that about Frank Luntz and he was here this year too. (I know the EVM's are used in the Municipal elections but didn't think they were in the Federal) Harper is quite happy about his "win" but in reality 62.37% of Canadians voted for others. There is a drawback to having more choices at times like this. If the people who voted NDP had voted Liberal, Harper would be gone.
This year and this year only, I think you guys should vote Obama, and then work really hard at getting other parties elected. It took our Green Party almost twenty years to get on the voters list. That's just MHO. (Sorry Erma )
COMMENT #12 [Permalink]
... Jean said on 10/18/2008 @ 8:00 pm PT...
Norma.....
What the heck are you talking about? The only Christian values are on the McCain ticket. Obama believes in partial birth abortion, he mocked the sermon on the mount and religious people in general and he does not like traditional values. He is a socialist with no conscience. I pray that God saves us from him.
COMMENT #13 [Permalink]
... GWN said on 10/18/2008 @ 8:04 pm PT...
OOPS, re my comment #11. We don't use EMV's here. I was thinking you meant Optical Scanning Machines. (sleepy) We do use the scanning machines at municipal elections.
Because
[snip]
"All ballots have to be accounted for and if some are missing, election results can be contested on the basis of "irregularity," Elections Canada says. Charges against two women, who whipped their ballots into a soy smoothie, and other ballot eaters were eventually dropped."
Paper or Not
COMMENT #14 [Permalink]
... Kira said on 10/18/2008 @ 8:06 pm PT...
I agree with you GWN about voting Obama - my family is - except for the mentally challenged ones who still have a bush/cheney '04 bumper sticker on their truck - I guess they fell into the gene pool when the lifeguard was taking a break I would love for Cynthia McKinney to be the chosen one - but Obama is very capable and a good man imho and has proven his leadership skills. One of his good qualities is that he does listen and will talk with people who have different opinions. We really need that kind of leadership in the top of our gov't. We'll have a bazillion times more chance of improving all elements of our gov't with O at the helm - more chance to open up to Green & Libertarian parties. If they had been represented at the debates just think how many issues the public could have been made aware of. Uh, that is if we could have a real debate for a change.
COMMENT #15 [Permalink]
... Kira said on 10/18/2008 @ 8:13 pm PT...
OMG Jean, what the HECK are YOU talking about? Simply lies, that's what. If McCain is a Christian he's totally backslid - I'd suggest you pick up your bible and read the words of Christ [the ones in RED] and compare them to the way McCain is running his campaign - fear & hate mongering & lying constantly to smear Obama's character. Everything you've said about Obama is absolutely untrue. Get your facts straight - quit listening to the bull.
COMMENT #16 [Permalink]
... Nunyabiz said on 10/18/2008 @ 9:45 pm PT...
What I want to know is what are we all going to do WHEN this election IS stolen? Same thing we did in 2000 & 2004? I mean really, we all know for a fact that Obama is ahead by a LANDSLIDE, yet we all know MCSame will magically be ahead by 51% to 49% late night on election day. So just what are we going to do THIS TIME? Please tell me REVOLUTION!
Because I really don't want to leave this country but I flatly refuse to live here under 4 more years of Reich wing NeoFascist rule.
COMMENT #17 [Permalink]
... Kira said on 10/18/2008 @ 11:24 pm PT...
Nunyabiz, if McFailin' wins by 51% to 49% late night I think there will be a revolt... if not from the Obama Headquarters then from the disenfranchised. Not everybody can move outta here. I think the GOP knows this. If plans for COG/Martial Law are enacted - that's another bad situation.
COMMENT #18 [Permalink]
... Phil said on 10/19/2008 @ 4:52 am PT...
God (whatever god that might be, satan, lucifer, jehova, odin, etc.. has nothing to do with Touch-Screen Votes Flipping. Man has everything to do with it. There's also nothing saying that the president has to be a Christian. I'd rather have a Wiccan or a "REAL Satanist" in charge than another "FAKE Christian" personally.
COMMENT #19 [Permalink]
... Susan said on 10/19/2008 @ 6:24 am PT...
DO NOT USE TOUCH-SCREENS TO VOTE! Insist on paper ballots with a receipt...or an absentee ballot. You can be sure that'switched' votes are being counted for McCain, even if your vote is corrected on the screen. If you use a touch-screen and it switches your vote, CANCEL it, exit the booth, and loudly proclaim the machine switched your vote and you insist on a proper way to count your vote.
COMMENT #20 [Permalink]
... Kmac said on 10/19/2008 @ 7:29 am PT...
This is totally frightening, although most of us who follow the elections closely are not in any way surprised. The question is: are we going to act on it? This should be all over every news media. Open and transparent to every citizen in every walk of life.... Being informed via the internet is advantageous, but persons who seek their news via this means are basically already well informed. It's the Fox News type we need to reach! WE NEED TO ACT NOW!
COMMENT #21 [Permalink]
... Nunyabiz said on 10/19/2008 @ 8:32 am PT...
I hope you are right Kira.
Because you know these Reich wing extremist are NOT going to stop.
They have gotten away scott free with a false flag attack on this country (9/11).
They have gotten away free and clear with BLATANT election fraud in the last 3 elections.
They have gotten away with MASS MURDER in Iraq.
They have gotten away with countless LIES.
They have gotten away with stealing TRILLIONS of tax payer dollars from the national treasury. They are currently getting away with purging voter rolls.
The Mainstream Media will cover up what is happening, I don't care if 50 MILLION get out in the street and protest you will never see it. So obviously these lunatics are NOT going to stop, they are not going to police themselves, they ARE going to steal this election or at least try to because these people are INSANE and they have gotten away with everything else the past 8 years so how can you blame them? These fascist brought a brigade of US military over for "crowd control" for a reason, got one guess what that reason is.
If We The People do not stand up in OVERWHELMING FORCE on Nov 5th then they win again and you may as well get used to seeing McSame Palin for the next 8 years.
COMMENT #22 [Permalink]
... Mugzi said on 10/19/2008 @ 9:02 am PT...
The first step is repealing HAVA, getting rid of private companies deciding the outcome of our elections! Let's do as our Canadian neighbors do, paper ballots, pencil, with oversight by both (all) parties. Of course, the Repugs will not be for this since they can't win elections on issues!!
COMMENT #23 [Permalink]
... Kira said on 10/19/2008 @ 9:26 am PT...
Nunya - criminally insane. It's a shame more people don't get it, but research is hard work [to quote a pResident.] Strangest thing... every now and then I hear detectives saying that, in their investigations, there is no such thing as a coincidence. But to believe the OCT, you have to believe in the Coincidence Theory - a whole bunch of them. Where are the detectives on this? It's the lynchpin; the only way to understand the whole story.
COMMENT #24 [Permalink]
... Oekoman said on 10/19/2008 @ 10:34 am PT...
If McCain and Palin win we must move en masse to reject the election.
COMMENT #25 [Permalink]
... Jeannie Dean (not in) FL-13 said on 10/19/2008 @ 11:31 am PT...
Nunyabiz (#16)~ Great question! A probable scenario I'd seriously like to kick around and brainstorm some strategies for. I've been mulling over a (silly) possibility for us if they DO steal it big. I haven't mentioned it much because it's just so very...silly. But I say we gather en masse on OPRAH's front lawn at her country estate in Illinois until she puts us on her show and/ or demands accountability for the hundreds of thousands of scrubbed black (and latino) voters. After all, OPRAH backed OBAMA as "the one"! (Unlike John McCain's labeling: "THAT one")... Obama is her brand! And lest we forget how unhappy she was with that "A Million Little Lies" author JAMES FRY for putting her brand's solid-gold reputation on the line. She COOKED that guy! Maybe she'd do the same to ROVE...? I know it's goofy, but think about it: There would be no protestor cages to pen us in, no 3rd infantry to shoot rubber bullets at us, a nice little PR stunt that will attract the media, and plenty of lovely golden retrievers for us to play with! Could be a great way to (more peaceably?) get out our facts/ stats/ proof of election fraud out to a national/ international community. I think if there were couple thousand people on her lawn, she might listen to us. She might also have us arrested, but hell, if that made the news it sure would make her "my favorite Christmas things" show seem appropriately trite. That, in and of itself, is a small but potent victory.
COMMENT #26 [Permalink]
... MarkH said on 10/19/2008 @ 1:36 pm PT...
I wonder how many times we'll have to see a touch-screen vote for a Dem switched to a Repub, with zero Repub votes switched to Dem, before people begin to realize something odd is going on and it's pretty one-sided.
COMMENT #27 [Permalink]
... Nunyabiz said on 10/20/2008 @ 6:43 am PT...
#25 Jeannie.
Not a bad idea, you never know what might work and sometimes the simplest thing can get picked up on. We need to do everything wee can and do it IMMEDIATELY not weeks or months later. I was thinking maybe the top 2% and whom ever really controls Washington were going to "ALLOW" Obama to win because he probably agreed with what ever they are telling him they want done. But it is looking like they are actually going to try and steal this election also. The best thing we can do is to stand up in MASSIVE numbers and DEMAND that Obama not concede because the election was clearly stolen.
COMMENT #28 [Permalink]
... FreedomOfInformationAct said on 10/20/2008 @ 9:38 am PT...
They phoned nancy pelosi's office about this fraud and they said call the secretary of WV, or the DOJ, anybody but them... so much for ol' Nancy defending the U.S. Constitution....time to replace her with Cindy Sheehan!
COMMENT #29 [Permalink]
... Hat said on 10/20/2008 @ 2:17 pm PT...
If the reports about the "switching to McCain" while voting for Obama is true we have a repeat of history when Bush won the elction in 2000 over Al Gore. Rigged! About Acorn...why would Acorn create fraudulent registrations and then report it. Republicans are dumb. Its obvious a republican group has filled in these micky mouse registrations and sent them to Acorn and them McCain tows the line and says Acorn did it and Obama is backing Acorn's fraud. Hello all of America is not republican... we think!! Another "staged set up against the Democratic ticket.
First the staged "town hall" meetings with mentions of Arab and muslim etc...then a staged Acorn fraud registrations and the latest was "joe the plumber" definetly McCain's man...since McCaina and Palin have repeadetly used him in their speechs and McCain brought him up in the debate...All set ups. shame on the rpublicans..the ONLY way they can win is by palying these fraudulant games and then have the cheeck to say "country first" McCain its always been "Me first" for you.
COMMENT #30 [Permalink]
... Bob said on 10/23/2008 @ 10:49 pm PT...
Wow. Calm down. I'm sick of claims of stealing elections whenever the candidate you support does not win. I'm sick of claims that voting machines will switch votes. I'm satisfied with those that have a paper receipt. I see voters cause scenes at polling places railing against the machines and happy to vote on paper that will be scanned. Don't they realize that the scanned paper is read and digitized just as the touch screen vote is? There is also voter intimidation but it is clearly practiced by both parties. If you do fair non-partisan research you will see verified examples of extreme and violent intimidation against republican voters. You will also see instances of rediculous conduct against democrat voters. In both cases, it is isolated and few. I hope Obama wins. But I hope noone charges that he stole the election. More likely, they will charge he bought it, considering the outrageous amount he is spending. With his war chest, he is the one more likely to be able to pay a hacker or bribe a manufacturer to fix the touch screen vote. I don't believe for a moment that he would do it and I don't believe republicans are doing it either. It is a waste of time, money and effort. It would not work. And, if caught, it would destroy either party. Don't get sucked in to the rantings of conspiracy theorists.
COMMENT #31 [Permalink]
... Bob said on 10/23/2008 @ 11:10 pm PT...
I voted early and my touch screen vote flipped from Obama to McCain! This is NOT TRUE. But I can report it, I can call the press and they will put it in a paper and if two friends agree to tell this unvarifiable story with me, it will fly through the blogosphere and become true. Confidence will be shaken, people will not bother to vote and that will be real voter suppression. Furthermore, Brad, you left out the quotes in the article that explained 1) what probably happened and 2) the quick fix, and 3) the very few times it has happened (a couple of calls per year). All forms of voting have some problems. Electronic (with paper receipts) have less risk of incorrect tally. "Deputy Secretary of State Sarah Bailey said, "When we received a call about this, we immediately called the county and told them to recalibrate the machines to make sure the finger-touch [area] lines up with the ballot. "Sometimes machines can become miscalibrated when they are moved from storage facilities to early voting areas," Bailey said Friday. "We get a couple of calls about this each election year." * * * "People make mistakes more than the machines," he said, "but I went in yesterday and recalibrated the machines. We are doing everything we can not to disenfranchise anybody."
COMMENT #32 [Permalink]
... jordan said on 11/1/2008 @ 12:16 pm PT...Every work of art, regardless of the creator’s intentions, has a set of beliefs, outlooks and ideologies embedded in its text. Video games, from “Call of Duty’s” celebration of American militarism to the snide consumerist satire of the “Grand Theft Auto” series, have never been exempt from this rule.
Games that force the audience to become an active participant (as opposed to the passive observer of cinema) deserve better than what AAA developers have reduced them to: celebrations of juvenile carnage and meathead gun porn.
That we are conditioned to judge a game’s merit solely on how “fun” it is demonstrates the utter failure on the part of both consumer and critic to engage with games in a meaningful way. When we view art from such a reductive perspective, it becomes easy to see why most mainstream video games have such a rigid, retrograde adherence to the status quo.
Thankfully, if “fun” is the sole factor that informs our judgment of video games, then “Tom Clancy’s The Division” fails on that front alone. Yet once one examines the moral odiousness of what the game chooses to condone, and, furthermore, what it compels the player to revel in, it demands further examination. Once that lens is applied, it becomes clear that “The Division” is little more than another example in a long list of generic, cover-based third person shooters that uncritically endorse fascism.
“Tom Clancy’s The Division” (though given that Clancy died only shortly after the game’s announcement, his involvement in the project seems minimal) sets itself in a paint-by-numbers dystopian universe devastated by a plague of smallpox. Though the American government has collapsed and civilization has fallen to pieces, you, the player, must “protect what remains.”
As part of the titular “Division” – an elite force of sleeper agents inexplicably trained for this highly specific scenario – you act as a government agent meant to defend private property from the “looters” that seek to defile it. Who is the main enemy that the game requires you to kill without remorse? Desperate poor people.
Based on the premise alone, the developers seem like the type of people who would look at Mitt Romney’s infamous 47 percent comment and applaud. In an instance of wretched dehumanization, the game clads its hoard of indistinguishable enemies in hoodies so that killing them becomes all the more easily stomached. This type of content would appear out of place in even the most jingoistic Michael Bay movie. Here though, such reprehensibility seems par for the course, and that fact casts a truly damning light on modern video games.
Imagine yourself a mercenary hired to defend private property from lower-class citizens of New Orleans, rendered desperate and hungry in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Imagine yourself hailed a hero as your body count nears the thousands. This frame of mind is one that “The Division” unapologetically sanctions. This mercenary is our hero. It salivates over its commitment to authoritarianism, and views your enemies – people who simply wish to survive – as vermin that beg for extermination.
There is no subversion or moral framing that justifies these grievous acts à la “Spec Ops: The Line.” Every time you commit an act of evil, every time you pepper a faceless non-player character with lead, the game assuages any moral misgivings you might have as it assures you that it is all for the greater good. We are in the right, the game says, because we are blessed with the most “stuff.” The weak are meat that the strong eat, and all resistance to these power dynamics must be stamped out of existence.
Even if one were to excuse the game’s adoration of mass slaughter (and given the uncritical mindset of most gamers, I doubt this hurdle will be a problem for them), I fail to see how one could derive enjoyment from such basic schlock. When enemies shoot at you, you hide behind cover. Then, when the opportunity arises, you shoot at them. This is the game, ad infinitum.
Given that “The Division” has broken sales records, it seems clear that lack of mechanical innovation is not so much an encumbrance, but a quality to be desired. There is comfort in the familiar I suppose, and if “The Division” refuses to challenge the status quo on a moral plane, it fits that it refuses to innovate on a technical level either.
Rampant fetishization of gear is on full display. The game rewards your acts of genocide with more mods, more guns and more “stuff.” One-fourth of the game will likely be spent with your eyes glazed over a hideous, cluttered crafting screen. You kill so that you can get cool upgrades, and you get cool upgrades so that you can kill some more.
Stray dogs populate the streets of “The Division.” They don’t attack you. You can’t pet them. You can’t play fetch. You can gun them down if your heart desires it, though. This mentality is what “The Division” cherishes – one where the only the form of interaction manifests through violence. Here exists a video game that spits on the plight of the marginalized and sees compassion as a greater plague than the smallpox that drives its plot.
Nate Taskin can be reached at [email protected]Has it really been 18 years since Mario Golf on the Game Boy Color, where Nintendo stumbled up on layering an RPG on top of arcade-y golf? Nintendo's released plenty of golf games since, most recently Mario Golf: World Tour on 3DS, but it's been a long time since someone, Nintendo or otherwise, picked up where it left off. The last Mario Golf in that same vein was Advance Tour on the GBA—in 2004. That's where Golf Story, a game I hadn't heard of until Nintendo announced it was a Switch exclusive last month, comes in. Though lacking the Mushroom Kingdom, it's basically a new Mario Golf RPG.
The game opens with players shooting a short round of golf with their dad, functioning as a tutorial and the emotional motivation for why, as an adult, you'd move out of your girlfriend's place, return home, and start playing golf again. (The game, sadly, doesn't have a character creator.) It's unclear, at least in the opening hours, why this was the time to pick up the clubs again, but the game makes some telling allusions to an "incident" involving your father. In any case, it's a justification for heading to a series of bizarre courses to whack some balls.
As with Sony's Everybody's Golf series (formerly Hot Shots Golf), Golf Story does not aim for pinpoint accuracy. It's over the top, with all manner of odd hazards littering the fairways and greens, hoping to get in your way. In an early course, animals await an errant bounce. They'll grab it and drop it elsewhere, often into a sand trap. Later, you can skip whole sections of a hole by timing shots to hit some friendly turtles, who'll let you use their shells for a bounce. These are not ordinary courses, but ones designed to surprise (and infuriate), growing in complexity over time.
Golf Story tries to crystallize the feeling of playing golf—setting up a swing, watching as random acts of nature and physics do their best to thwart you—into something accessible. Folks with knowledge of the sport might have an advantage (pay attention to slopes!), but anyone interested in a golf RPG, but has never swung a club, should be fine to jump in.
The "RPG" part of the game is basic, but serves as more than just aesthetic wrapping. In order to unlock new courses, you often need to complete a series of quests. Though a few are mindless (find "x" number of items in random spots), most require you to pull off bizarre golf tricks that force you to play the game in a different way. You might have to complete a hole by only shooting into bunkers (sand), another could require hitting the cart path before landing on the green. Or, uh, a character might ask you to hit them in the face as hard as possible, which is actually a smart way for players to realize hitting a swing at full power gives you an extra oomph beyond what your normal drive should be capable of pulling off.
You can also buy equipment for unique stat bonuses (i.e. 10% more distance out of sand). Most of the RPG elements—story included—feel basic. I'm hopeful there's more depth as it goes on.
The story that's there is damn funny, and Golf Story has some unique ways of depicting dialogue, clever tricks to provide a varied amount of expression. For example, when a dialogue window is transparent, it's an inner monologue. If someone's yelling, the text might get enormous, to underscore the emotion. If someone is being sarcastic, the bubble might turn diagonal and fall away.
The mechanics of hitting balls will be familiar to anyone who's played any golf game, with players tapping a meter at the bottom to designate how much power, while another tap designates accuracy. The closer you are on the latter, the better chance a ball will actually land where you hoped. Unlike other games, Golf Story doesn't ask you to calculate yardage when lining up shots, though you can switch clubs. Instead, you simply mark where you would like to hit, prompting the game to leave a shadowed icon on where you should time your button press.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
It's also possible to adjust the draw/hook of a shot, aka its mid-air curve, and by tapping the shoulder buttons, you can shrink the potential yardage of any given club, allowing you to more easily pull off more precise shots. If it all feels a little complicated at first, that's both because it is, and because of Golf Story's poor tutorializtion, which often hints at the more advanced mechanics to the player, without actually guiding them through how it works. It's easy to imagine people blowing past some of the text boxes, and never realizing the other options at their disposal. Even still, knowledge of a mechanic doesn't mean you'll use it well.
When your character levels up, they can upgrade a few different stats: power (drive distance), purity (draw), strike (accuracy), ability (degree control), spin (self-explanatory). As you add more power to a drive, the other stats might regress, forcing you to balance a desire for distance with a desire for control. As with the mechanics of play, however, Golf Story does little to explain what impact those stats will meaningfully have while you're swinging. In Golf Story, what's the difference between accuracy and control? Does spin really matter when you can't purposely choose backspin or bite? Maybe this becomes clear by spending more time with the game, but it would have benefited from more precisely explaining itself.
(Update: A reader tells me the game does have backspin, but it's only briefly explained by the game? I stand by my critique!)
More importantly, though, it feels good to hit shots. The physics are spot-on, and I can't help but admit it's plain adorable to be playing a fully simulated golf game in 2D. It would help if the game was putting me in more challenging situations, but I'm still early, so here's hoping the later courses begin making sharper demands of my skills. (Right now, things like slopes, shot count, distance to the pin, and wind haven't been much of a factor.) Two courses in, I'm coasting through.
The whole thing feels a bit like someone fell in love with Earthbound and swapped JRPG fights for golf swings. (There aren't any aliens yet, but there are, for whatever reason, cavemen running a very crappy golf course.) It's a charming game, one that overcomes its same-y pixel aesthetic with fun mechanics, genuinely humorous dialogue, and a sense that no one else was making a game like this, so heck, why not Golf Story? Hey, works for me.
Follow Patrick on Twitter. If you have a tip or a story idea, drop him an email here.
Have thoughts? Swing by Waypoints forums to share them!Dutch Prepare for Climate Change With Floating Houses
April 10th, 2008 by Sarah Lozanova
With rising sea levels and more extreme weather events on the horizon, the Dutch are building houses modeled after arks. These houses become buoyant during floods.
There is a string of 37 houses located along the Maas River in Holland that were designed and built by Dura Vermeer. Such houses can rise 16 feet without problems and contain flexible pipes, electrical, and sewer lines.
The foundation of the sits on the river bottom. If you were to drill a hole through the basement floor, water would come in (so this is not recommended).
When the river floods, the house becomes buoyant. Unlike a boat or an ark, two broad steel posts driven deep into solid ground hold the house in place.
“In the other village we have lived, there was always the water,” said Mariana Smits, a floating homeowner in Maasbommel. “I was very scared. Two times, we have evacuated to leave our old house. This was very scary for us. And we got the opportunity to buy this house. It’s a safe place.”
Design Advances
Floating houses are nothing new, but they are in higher demand and increasingly popular. Buoyant gardens are also being designed, because nobody wants to loose their daisy collection after an extreme weather event. Technology is now being developed to allow entire city blocks to float. Having multiple structures connected adds stability, benefiting everyone.
Rising Sea Level Increasing Demand
Some degree of climate change is inevitable despite emission reduction efforts and adaptation initiatives are being considered. “As global warming causes the sea level to rise, this is the solution,” explains Dick van Gooswilligen from the Dura Vermeer. “Housing of this type is the future for the delta regions of the world, the ones which face the greatest danger.”
Market conditions are ripe for this building design. “The momentum is just right,” said Koen Olthuis of Waterstudio, an architectural firm that specializes in living and working on water. “Because of the climate change, because of the Al Gore story, because of New Orleans, because of the financials of this moment, everybody is waiting for new innovations.”
[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/ed7Si9nPnXE" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
Photo Credit: Dura VermeerRegardless, the idea of taking anti-depressants certainly didn’t thrill me, but I was willing to try anything to get my sex life back to normal. In time, I did discover that the medication dulled the stabbing pains that plagued my vagina. Unfortunately, my muscles still made penetration an ordeal and left me with a terrible burning sensation afterward. The medication wasn’t without its downsides either. After a few weeks of consistently taking the meds, I found myself devouring everything in sight – particularly sweets, something I usually abandoned in favor of saltier snacks – which only enhanced my college freshmen 15.
The irreverent attitude I had towards taking pills on time didn’t help matters. The first day I forgot to take my pill, I woke up in the middle of the night unable to move, listening helplessly as people dug through the closet at the foot of my bed. They whispered that I had nothing valuable for them to take, that they were just going to rape me and slit my throat. These night terrors about menacing presences in my bedroom – far more terrifying than any illegal drug I’ve ever experienced – inspired me to stick to my pill schedule. Still, I began to question whether the side effects of this drug were worth the slight relief it gave me.
For the next few weeks, I spent my nights laying awake in my bed feeling sorry for myself. The muffled sounds of R&B hits emanating from my roommate’s headphones served as the background music to my despair, my world’s tiniest violin. I always considered myself an incredibly sexual person, and – though I didn’t believe in a higher power – I felt that I was being punished. It all seemed so unfair. For God’ sake, I’d been touching myself since I was 5 years old! I remember having my first orgasm before I’d entered the double digits. Why did the pain have to be so mysterious? I’d also read somewhere that vaginismus was usually reserved for the extremely religious and guilt- ridden. Why was this happening to me?This is the study group going to the movies (probably watching the new Inspector Spacetime movie, mabe this one [link]? hehehe).I did post a slightly different version of this edit on tumblr a while back - [link] - and now i thought i could also show it here.Making this edit was weird. On one hand it was so much fun to try to show the characters in their "typical behaviour" - like Jeff playing with his precious phone or Troy & Abed actually being the only ones excited (and Chang in full D&D costume stalking the group, because he's a crazy creeper like that).On the other hand i had some difficulties with the perspective and the seats (i didn't have rows of empty seats so i had to work a lot to remove the original people sitting there - yeah, still not happy with the result). And for the study group i only used screencaps and i hate working with screencaps!But enough complaining!I hope you like it and i also wanted to take the chance to say thank you again to everyone who liked my Inspector Spacetime poster and all the sweet comments i got. You're the bestbackground: [link] people: [link] textures: [link]Story highlights Juliette Kayyem: With hurricane,Trump will be judged on how well he lets bureaucracy he maligns as 'the swamp' actually do its job
Kayyem: His budget proposals have sought FEMA cuts. If things go poorly he won't be able to tweet against Mother Nature
CNN analyst Juliette Kayyem is the author of the best-seller, "Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home." She is a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, host of the national security podcast, "The SCIF," and founder of Kayyem Solutions, a security consulting firm. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.
(CNN) Hurricane Harvey is destined to be the first major homeland security and emergency management crisis the Trump administration has faced. And, ironically, it is at this moment that President Donald Trump will be judged on how well he lets a bureaucracy he so often maligns or denigrates actually do its job.
By all accounts, Hurricane Harvey will deliver a gut punch of rain, wind and storm surges in Texas. And though weather, like a teenager's mood, is unpredictable |
, and together they convinced Barma not to hang himself.
But the idea lingers. Now he fears the time when moneylenders, who have stepped up their pressure on him to pay, fearing he will soon commit suicide, will visit him at home with more than threatening words. “Someday they will come to torture me. But I have nothing to pay them, and nobody wants to buy my land because it has proven to be quite barren. The government has promised me 9,000 rupees ($140) as compensation, but that cannot pay for feeding or schooling for my children.” Barma’s youngest child, only 18 months old, stares at his father while he talks. He is barefoot, dressed only in tattered underwear, and shows a worrying lack of activity for a child of his age. His swollen abdomen indicates severe malnutrition. His mother, Shyambae, holds the baby on her lap and warns Barma: “If you kill yourself, I see no reason to continue living.”
In the small Indian village of Tendura, a set of dusty streets and mud houses that accommodate some 8,000 people in the northern province of Uttar Pradesh, the drama this family is experiencing comes as no surprise. In fact, in the first five months of this year, as many residents killed themselves. And everyone in the village is convinced that the number will continue to rise, because the harvest has been particularly bad and it adds to four years in which agricultural production has been hampered by another endemic problem: drought. “Most of the farmers have contracted debts that they now can’t repay. Many don’t see another way out, and just between March and May this year 65 people have committed suicide in the Banda district alone,” said Raja Bhaiya, director of Vidya Dham Samiti, an organization funded by ActionAid that is launching a grain bank “so that farmers can at least eat.”
A farmer spreads wheat to dry in the sun in rural Uttar Pradesh. More often that not, extreme weather devastates the crops, leaving farmers and families to struggle. (Source: Miguel Candela)
Uttar Pradesh is not the only state affected. In fact, suicides have become the deadliest epidemic in India since the country decided to liberalize the agricultural sector in the 1990s. According to official statistics – which numerous NGOs say underscore the magnitude of the problem because they don’t include many cases stamped as doubtful – more than 300,000 farmers have taken their lives since 1995. And although the Indian economy is experiencing a golden age, the weight of agriculture in the country’s GDP is falling steadily – currently at 13 percent despite providing jobs to about 50 percent of the workforce – and 2015 is becoming by far the worst year in the past two decades. “The number of suicides has doubled in most of the towns in the state. In some it has even tripled,” says K. S. Singh Yadar, health superintendent in the city of Lalitpur. Some specialists forecast that this year the toll will top 20,000.
Left: Sevarana Kushwaha’s husband died after he drank sulphate on March 19. (Source: Miguel Candela)
An Incentive for Suicide
For now, the only thing the government is doing to stop this crisis is to grant a controversial 700,000 rupees ($10,700) compensation to the families of farmers who take their lives, which many consider an incentive for farmers to take their own lives. And sometimes it is. Bhagunte Prajapati, a 37-year-old farmer, knows that well. Last March he found his father, Boothe Prajapati, hanging in the family barn. Boothe was 60, and he believed that the economic boost provided by the compensation after his death was the only way to help his family survive after the loss of almost all their crops.
“He had had two taciturn days, barely speaking. I found him dead when I brought him some food. I understand his desperation, because 28 family members depend on the harvest and we only managed to save around 300 kilos out of the six or seven tons we used to collect. That’s not even enough for our own consumption,” says his son, the eldest of six siblings and himself father of a further three kids, while holding the graphic image a local newspaper used to illustrate the event. “So now we barely have enough to eat and we will have to ask for another loan to cultivate the land next year. If we don’t get it I don’t know what we can do.”
Surrounded by her family, the widow of Boothe Prajapati holds a photo of her husband. (Source: Miguel Candela)
The Prajapati family has already begun the complicated procedures to apply for the government compensation, but they don’t know if it will be granted. “We are expecting the bank to write off the debt of my father, but he didn’t tell us how much he had borrowed from local loan sharks, which generally accumulate an interest of 10 percent per week. We will have to negotiate with them when we are given the compensation.” If they actually get it, that is, because the government does everything possible to prevent suicide cases from being certified as such. “We aren’t worried because the autopsy showed that he hanged himself and the press has published his photograph, but other people have taken their lives in vain.”
A doctor at the public hospital in Lalitpur, who requested not to be named, acknowledged the hurdles. “It is difficult to deny the obvious when someone has hanged himself or cut his wrists, but it is easier in cases of poisoning.” And many of the farmers, around 40 percent of those who commit suicide, choose to do so by drinking pesticide or hair dye. Brijmohan Shukla was one of them. On April 10 he decided to drink the PPD Indians often use to darken their hair. He was only 28 years old. “Some kids found him lying on the side of the road. He had been vomiting something black, and was already dead,” recalls his mother, Parvati Shukla. “But at the hospital they said he died of natural causes.” The autopsy attributes his death to a cardiac arrest, and that’s why Brijmohan’s parents will not receive any compensation.
“It is true that intentional poisoning can eventually cause death from a heart attack, but it is also true that there are some families trying to pass a natural death off as suicide to collect the compensation,” says Singh Yadar. Parvati, however, claims they are not trying to take advantage of the law. “My son was under too much pressure. The bank had begun to send notifications to demand repayment of a loan, and we had arranged his marriage to a girl from a nearby village. But the harvest had been much worse than expected and we have not received any help. A few days earlier he had told me he did not want to live like this, but I thought I had convinced him not to do anything stupid,” she recalls, unable to contain her tears. “This is how the land collects our debts here.”
Zigor Aldama is the Far East correspondent for Vocento, the largest media group in Spain, and a contributor to El País newspaper, and is based in Shanghai. Miguel Candela is an award-winning Spanish photographer based in Hong Kong. Follow him on Twitter @miguelcandela_.A Kean University graduate was sentenced to 90 days in jail, followed by five years probation and an agreement to repay more than $80,000 in damages caused by her fake tweets threatening to kill black students.
Kayla McKelvey, an African-American activist who claims she sent the fake tweets to "shine a light on an issue that is important to me," received the sentence after admitting she left a campus protest last November to create the fake Twitter account and send the messages. She then returned to the protest and told everyone about the alleged threats.
She pleaded guilty to a charge of creating a false public alarm, and will have to repay $82,328 to law enforcement for the investigation of the tweets, which caused a panic on campus. More than half of Kean students missed two or three days of classes due to fears that they would be targeted for violence.
Union County Assistant Prosecutor Shawn Barnes accepted the plea agreement, noting that this past Friday was the first time McKelvey expressed remorse for what she had done. He added that she only sent the threats to increase turnout at her protest.
"To say that these threats were made for the greater good is disingenuous. It was selfish. It was for her rally," Barnes said, according to NJ.com.
McKelvey sent the tweets from an account she created called @keanuagainstblk. The account stated: "I will shoot any black person I see at Kean University" and "Kean University Twitter against blacks is for everyone who hates blacks [sic] people."
Judge Robert Mega called McKelvey's crime "heinous" and rejected her defense that she had sent the tweets for the greater good of calling out racism. Another thing: Faking racism to call out racism doesn't make people believe racism is more prevalent. Instead, it makes them think twice about believing future accusations.
This is why hoaxers need to be punished as harshly as possible. It's important that those who create a panic such as this aren't allowed to just receive a slap on the wrist. The more hoaxes there are, the less people will believe actual racism exists at all. A person shouldn't be able to perpetrate a hoax, cost law enforcement (and taxpayers) tens of thousands of dollars for investigating and create a moral panic without suffering consequences.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.Home - Featured, mobile technology, News - Which Unlocked Phones Work With Your Operator? A Guide to US 2G, 3G, 4G and LTE Bands
Apple iPhone 6s (A1633) and 6s Plus (A1634) lacks T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
Apple iPhone SE (A1622) lacks Sprint band 41, AT&T band 30 and T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
Apple iPhone 7 (A1660), 7 Plus (A1661) lack T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
Apple iPhone 8 (A1863), 8 Plus (A1864) and X (A1865) lack T-Mobile band 71
Alcatel Idol 5s (6060S) lacks AT&T lacks bands 29 and 30 and T-Mobile band 71
BlackBerry KeyOne (BBB100-3) lacks EVDO (Sprint, Verizon 3G) and T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
Google Pixel (G-2PW4100) and Pixel XL (G-2PW2100) lack T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
Google Pixel 2 (G1011A) and Pixel 2 XL (G1011C) lack T-Mobile band 71
Google Nexus 5X (H790), lacks AT&T band 30 and T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
Google Nexus 6 (XT1103) lacks AT&T band 30 and T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
Google Nexus 6P (H1511), lacks T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
Motorola Moto X Pure Edition (2105) (XT1575), Moto G4 (XT1625) Moto G4 Plus (XT1644) and Moto G4 Play (XT1607 ), lack AT&T bands 29 and 30 and T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
, lack AT&T bands 29 and 30 and T-Mobile bands 66 and 71 Motorola Moto E4 (XT1767), Moto E4 Plus (XT1775), Moto G5 Plus (XT1687), Motorola G5S Plus (XT1806) and Moto X4 (XT1900-1) lack AT&T bands 29 and 30 and T-Mobile band 71
Motorola Z2 Play (XT1710-2) lacks T-Mobile band 71
Orbic Wonder (RC555L) lacks AT&T bands 29 and 30 and T-Mobile LTE bands 66 and 71
Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Unlocked SM-N950U lacks T-Mobile band 71
Samsung Galaxy S7 Special Edition (SM-G930U) and S7 Edge Special Edition (SM-G935U) lacks T-Mobile bands 66 and 71
Samsung Galaxy S8 Special Edition (SM-G950U) and S8 Edge Special Edition (SM-G955U) lacks T-Mobile bands 71
Essential Phone PH-1 lacks T-Mobile band 71
Updated 18-Mar-2018 - updated list of universal unlocked phones.
Wondering if that unlocked phone you are considering on eBay or Swappa will get 3G or LTE, or even work at all on your prefered operator? Here's a guide to the bands used by each major US operator.uses LTE, 5 (850),29 (700 d) and 30 (2300).Bands 2, 4 and 12 are AT&T's primary LTE bands. Band 17 is the subset of band 12 that AT&T uses. AT&T originally identified its 700 Mhz spectrum as band 17 but now identifies it as both 12 and 17 which allows phones that support either band 12 or band 17 to use it.Bands 5, 29 and 30 are used in areas where AT&T doesn't own any band 2, 4 or 12 spectrum and to increase capacity and speeds.AT&T's 3G and non-LTE 4G (UMTS, HSPA and HSPA+) services operate on the 850 and 1900 Mhz bands. AT&T shut down its 2G (GSM, GPRS) service at the begining of 2017.uses the 1900 Mhz band for GSM (voice) and EDGE (2G) and UMTS (3G) data. It uses the 1700 (AWS) band for UMTS (3G) data rather than 1900 Mhz in some markets.For LTE, T-Mobile uses bands 2 (1900),66 (1700 Mhz) and 71. T-Mobile's primary LTE band is band 4. Band 2 is deployed in former 2G only non-urban areas where T-Mobile doesn't have any band 4 spectrum. In some, maybe all, of these band 2 only LTE markets, 3G is not offered, only 2G and LTE.In some areas Band 12 is T-Mobiles only band of any kind. To make calls in these areas a phone with VoLTE support is required. There's a map of T-Mobile's band 12 spectrum here. Band 12 is a lower frequency band that provides extended range and improved building penetration compared with bands 4 and 2.Band 71 (600 Mhz) is T-Mobile's newest band. Band 71 deployment started in the third quarter of 2017. T-Mobile says it will deploy band 71 nationwide, including areas where T-Mobile currently has no coverage. It will take several years to complete band 71 deployment. As of September, 2017, the T-Mobile branded version of the LG V30 is the only phone that supports band 71.As forand, you can pretty much forget about using phones from other operators on either of their networks. With a few exceptions (some Motorola phones, iPhones from the Apple Store and the Nexus and Pixel phones from the Play Store), both operators will only activate phones that they have sold. It's still useful to know which bands Sprint and Verizon use when shopping for phones as older phones nay not support all of the bands currently used by either operator.uses 850 Mhz and 1900 Mhz for voice, 1xRTT (2G) and EVDO (3G) dataFor LTE, Verizon uses bands 4 (1700c), 5 (850) and. Band 13 is Verizon's primary LTE band. Band 4, which Verizon markets as XLTE and band 5, are used to provide increased speed and capacity in urban areas.uses the 800 Mhz and 1900 Mhz bands for voice, 1xRTT (2G) and EVDO (3G) dataFor LTE Sprint uses bands, 26 (800) and. Band 25 is Sprint's primary LTE band. Bands 26 is used to improve building penetration.To be sure that a phone will work to its fullest or at all with a given carrier you need to know which bands it supports.For phones made for the US market PhoneScoop.com is my favorite resource for checking specs. It provides a full page of detailed specifications for virtually every US phone model. Supported bands are listed in thesection of the specs. Click thelink to see which LTE band numbers are supported. With LTE It's not enough to refer to bands by their approximate frequency (850, 1700, 1900), as multiple incompatible LTE bands can exist in the same frequency ranges. LTE bands can only be positively identified by their LTE band number.For checking band support for non-US market phones I like PDAdb.net and frequencycheck.com Be sure you are looking at specs for the phone's exact model number rather than its marketing name (Samsung Galaxy i9500 rather than Samsung Galaxy S4), as most phones come in multiple versions supporting different bands.When comparing phones you will quickly discover there are relatively few truly universal unlocked phones that are sold unlocked and work across all operators. Work is a relative term as none of these support all the bands used by all the carriers. Here are the ones I'm aware of that are whitelisted by Sprint and Verizon and support at least the major bands used by all four national carriers:Sources: Cellular Binder Image: Cell phone tower in Oregon by M.O. Stevens some rights reserved CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia CommonsIt started with a conversation.
Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor in Madison, WI, had heard about Spain’s Mondragon cooperative complex and their union cooperatives in the U.S. He researched how labor could support cooperative development in this country. During his research, Gundlach read about the city of New York investing a million dollars for worker cooperative development. It sparked an idea for Madison.
Then he bumped into the mayor, Paul R. Soglin, at a community picnic. Gundlach told Soglin about his idea to have the city help with cooperative development, not just to create good jobs, but to support neighborhoods. The mayor, Gundlach, responded with: “This is something I’d been interested in as well.”
Soon after that conversation, Soglin initiated Madison’s Capitol Improvement Plan, “Co-operative Enterprises for Job Creation & Business Development.” This plan would authorize the city to spend $1 million each of five years starting in 2016 to fund “cooperative/worker-owned business formation for the purposes of job creation and general economic development in the city.”
The Madison Common Council, known as city councils or commissions in other cities, approved the initiative on Nov. 11, 2014. This allocation is the largest by a U.S. municipality. Earlier last year, New York allocated $1.2 million to help worker cooperative development.
City and community planners hope to use the money to not only create jobs and cooperatives, but to boost poor neighborhoods, form union cooperatives, create group entrepreneurship and to develop cross-sectoral cooperative collaboration.
Soglin, an activist mayor who has been elected mayor of the city seven times and who in his first term helped one of the city’s oldest cooperatives, Union Cab, to get funding from the Madison Development Corporation, said that Madison is excited to take the lead on the program.
“We know that worker-owned businesses are more likely to provide living wage jobs and profit sharing to their members, and are less likely to leave the community they are in,” he said.
“Planning is just getting underway, but we will be working with leaders, both in the labor movement and with established cooperatives in the area, to promote and grow the number of worker-owned businesses in Madison,” he said. “I can’t think of a better jobs program than this and I look forward to its long-term success.”
City of Madison officials have been meeting with the local group representing worker cooperatives MADWorC, the Dane (County) Cooperative Alliance, the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives, the Cooperative Network, and the National Cooperative Business Association to start formulating plans for how best to use the money. The first funds are expected to be approved for expenditure in 2016.
“It will be a cooperative cross-sectoral push,” said Ole Olson, of MadWorC, and a worker-owner of Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing, one of the city’s oldest worker cooperatives. For example, he said, producer and consumer cooperatives will be involved as well as unions that may leverage training opportunities.
Producer cooperatives are owned by farmers, fishers, foresters, or crafts people who cooperate by buying equipment, insurance, organizing sales and marketing services, and distribution networks. Consumer cooperatives are owned by the consumers and include grocery stores, housing cooperatives, and financial services (which usually are called financial cooperatives or credit unions).
Ruth Rohlich, a city business development specialist, said “The City has undergone a major initiative to begin looking at most policy and budgetary decisions through an equity lens. My hope is that with programs like this one we will show that it is investing money in business development in an equitable way.” The program has the following goals:
Building capacity for organizations offering technical assistance and lending for new and existing cooperative businesses; Converting existing businesses to worker cooperatives; Creating employment for the people of Madison who have been excluded from the traditional business model, including the formerly incarcerated, low-skilled, veteran and new American populations; Fundraising and technical support for creative problem solving such as creating corner stores and food stores in neighborhoods where none currently exist, gathering spaces, neighborhood amenities, and working with trade unions to create union cooperatives.
A union cooperative is a cooperative where the worker-owners own an equal share in the business, operate under a collective bargaining agreement that sets wages, benefits and working conditions and one in which the worker-owners have an equal share in running the business, and which operates under the Mondragon principles. Mondragon, which has 257 cooperatives and other businesses and 74,060 workers, has inspired worker cooperatives all over the world, including many in this country.
Rohlich also said that Mayor Soglin also has been interested in ways to achieve equity in the city of Madison for a time, as well as ways to invest city funds in supporting workers.
Madison is home to some of the oldest worker cooperatives in the country. Union Cab of Madison Cooperative started in 1979, making it 35 years old. Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing was started in 1980 and Community Pharmacy, started in 1972 as a volunteer pharmacy run by university students, has been operating as a collective business since 1973 and a worker cooperative since 1991, a total of 23 years. In total, the city has a total of 75 cooperatives, credit unions and mutual insurance companies, according to Anne Reynolds, executive director of the UW Center for Cooperatives. The state of Wisconsin has 773 cooperatives creating 64,000 jobs and bringing in $27 billion in revenue. Co-ops contribute $642 million in tax revenues to the state.
Reynolds, who has been teaching, researching and consulting at the Center for Cooperatives for 20 years, said that one of the interesting things about Madison is the city has institutions like labor, loan funds, economic development staff, attorneys with a long history of working with cooperatives, including startups, her office and “the cooperatives themselves that have a kind of a deep and abiding interest and a lot of actual experiences in co-ops.”
That’s an advantage, she said.
“We can point to real success in our community,” she said. “People can’t be so skeptical about workers making decisions. I do think that’s important. One of my hopes is that we are able to leverage all of that institutional support and bring new groups of people into thinking about worker co-ops and job opportunities and create something sustainable without city funding - that we have changed the city enough to have created a sustainable network.”
The unique piece about the Madison initiative is that “we have policy makers, financial resources and a lot of people-resources,” Reynolds said. “We have a very strong sense right at this moment in Madison around some big issues around racial equity that’s a huge part of the discussion.”
Reynolds said that their planning group is doing an analysis – to determine what those future workforce needs in Madison are “and seeing if we can be supportive of supporting co-ops in those areas such as health care and home care. This initiative will help to bridge bridges between all the co-ops in our community.”
Any plans would need common council approval. That approval is expected in November, Reynolds said.
The South Central Federation of Labor is an organization of 1,900 unions who represent unionized and non-unionized workers in the building trades, manufacturing, service industry, nurses, police officers, laundry workers and those who work in theatres, among others. The Federation also includes retired workers, immigrant workers and worker’s centers, as well as interfaith groups and other social justice organizations. Gundlach said that the work involves more than providing living wage jobs.
“One of the things I think is central is that the unions and co-ops work together to provide good paying jobs that stay within the community,” Gundlach said. “The unions have apprenticeships and training to make sure that there are jobs in those neighborhoods that have been ignored and that are economically suffering, and from there we work to make sure there are sustainable jobs that would stay in the neighborhood...We need to have purchasing power in the neighborhood first.”
”The union’s role is really the training, apprentice program, giving people the skills that they need,” said Gundlach. “That’s labor strength in this area.”
He also said that serious planning is necessary “if we’re going to look at raising up a neighborhood rather than just provide good jobs. The ideal is to invest in the neighborhood and the people who are living there.”
Gundlach said that sustainable jobs with purchasing power will produce workers who then have a stable income. “They can purchase things there [in the neighborhood],” he said. “From there, other little co-ops and stores will pop up that will sell things.”
As great as the potential is for solving many of the city’s issues, one co-op veteran prescribes caution.
John Kessler, one of four co-founders of Isthmus Engineering & Manufacturing cooperative, said that the attention being focused on co-ops is quite welcome and long overdue. However, he worries that co-ops are being oversold.
“Hardly a week goes by that I don't see some article pushing co-ops as the answer to the world's economic problems. Having spent 35 years navigating the business world in a very successful worker's co-op, I wholeheartedly agree that they could play a very large role in the world economy, but I don't think co-ops alone are going to save us. Co-ops are no better than their members and there are huge problems with scale. It is hard to imagine a co-op auto company. In this global economy, even the largest and most sophisticated co-ops like the ones from Mondragon are struggling to stay competitive while adhering to their co-op values,” he said.
“However, I am very hopeful that with the attention and energy being directed at co-ops, new ideas, different approaches and new visions will propel co-ops - especially workers co-ops - to heights never before attained. I have to say that of all the different political and social organizations that I have been involved with recently, the co-op groups are easily the youngest, sharpest and most energized groups around. If anyone can save this crazy world, they are at the top of the list.”
Go to the GEO front pageFive people were shot early Sunday morning outside a San Jose nightclub where Chris Brown was performing.
Gunfire was reported to police at the Fiesta nightclub, where four people were taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds, while a fifth walked into hospital with a gunshot wound later, the San Jose Mercury News reported. All five victims are expected to survive.
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Chris Brown had been performing at Fiesta for a private party, and he was not harmed in the shooting. Cellphone footage from attendees show Brown wincing as the shots rang out, then being ushered away, the Associated Press reported.
Police said they have detained several people as they investigate the shooting, but no further details are available yet.
[San Jose Mercury News]
Contact us at editors@time.com.Appearing on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports on Monday, Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy called out the host’s biased reporting in real time, ripping slanted segments that aired just moments earlier: “I personally think the biggest problem is the media attacks on the President. Just in the past 20 minutes listening to this show on [MS]NBC, we get the feeling the President is not appointing women, which is not true.”
Ruddy was referring to Mitchell’s coverage minutes before of President Trump holding a White House meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about promoting women entrepreneurs: “...when the President swore in his 30 top officials, his White House assistants to the president...maybe three of them were women. And Justin Trudeau comes here with half of his cabinet are women. So there's a notable imbalance here...”
Ruddy pushed back: “He just – two major cabinet appointments. Ivanka herself ran the Trump business, so you know, the idea that somehow he doesn't like women running things.”
He also scolded Mitchell for promoting the idea that Trump was conducting a “mass deportation” of illegal immigrants: “...he's not doing mass deportation. He is removing criminal aliens, which I think everybody in this country thinks should be done.” Ruddy concluded: “So many good things he's done are not getting out to the American public...”
<<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>>
Mitchell rushed to defend her and Democratic Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham attacking the Trump administration’s immigration policy just prior to Ruddy’s appearance:
The Congresswoman was presenting her complaint that she’s not getting real information from ICE and she’s asking for a briefing. And they do represent the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, so their states are involved. And the question here has been what is the threshold for criminal? Is it just that they are criminal because they came in illegally? Some of them 20 years ago. Or is it criminal because they are violent criminals? And that’s the distinction we're trying to – we’re simply trying to ascertain, we have not been briefed on it.
Later in the exchange, Ruddy actually complimented Mitchell for being “a tough reporter” who asks “good questions,” especially in contrast to a certain other cable network: “...I think there's other people in media, I was just on a network yesterday where they spent half the day accusing the President of being a pathological liar and mentally ill. I mean, I think even you agree, you've known Donald Trump for a long time, neither one of those things are true.”
He was referring CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday providing a platform to left-wing pundit Andrew Sullivan declaring Trump to be an “unstable figure incapable of accepting reality.”
Here is a transcript of Ruddy’s February 13 exchange with Mitchell:Please enable Javascript to watch this video
MILWAUKEE -- A Milwaukee homeless shelter is expanding -- but the construction project was halted after human remains were found on the site.
The construction project is an 8,000-square-foot expansion to "The Guest House" on Milwaukee's north side.
"Most people know us as a homeless shelter. We shelter 86 men every night. We're always full and always have a waiting list," Cindy Krahenbuhl, Guest House executive director said.
The expansion project is currently on hold.
"We anticipated finding a few grave sites and a few human remains, but we were quite shocked when the number of graves grew up to 44 and counting," Krahenbuhl said.
The construction site was part of a cemetery in the mid-1800s. That's why a UW-Milwaukee archaeological monitor was on site when the project began.
"When the streets came through, the city asked the church and the cemetery owner to move the grave sites. And from what it looks like, they removed the headstones but left the graves intact," Krahenbuhl said.
UW-Milwaukee crews are now removing the remains, and carefully carting them back to UWM for further study.
"It's extraordinarily time-consuming and labor-intensive," Patricia Richards, Ph.D., UWM associate scientist in the Department of Anthropology said.
They must avoid damaging the bones, and preserve the context of the burials. These officials are hoping the discovery offers a glimpse into Milwaukee's past.
"People were coming here they were immigrants they were excited about living here and they were undergoing all kinds of stresses that people who are in a brand new area were likely to encounter," Richards said.
UWM officials plan to spend about two to three weeks on site. Then, they'll analyze the remains, and file a report with the Wisconsin Historical Society.
"They are responsible for the final disposition of the individuals that are buried in this cemetery," Richards said.
We're told removing the remains has pushed the cost of the project up by about $100,000.
CLICK HERE to learn more about how you can help The Guest House with this expansion project.8 years ago
(CNN) - The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People released a new study Wednesday that claims to tie members of the Tea Party to white supremacist groups, anti-immigration organizations, anti-semitic groups and independent militias.
The study, conducted by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights analyzed the membership of six Tea Party organizations in the country.
According to the NAACP, five of the six Tea Party groups are headed by "birthers," people who believe President Obama is not a citizen of the United States.
The study looked at Tea Party literature as well as their websites and information about those associated with the Tea Party movement to analyze their ties. The report claims that Tea Party events are now forums for extremists "hoping to push these (white) protesters toward a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy."
"These groups and individuals are out there, and we ignore them at our own peril," Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP said in a statement. "They are speaking at Tea Part events, recruiting at rallies… the danger is not that the majority of Tea Party members share their views, but that left unchecked, these extremists might indirectly influence the direction of the Tea Party and therefore the direction of our country."
Amy Kremer, Chairman of the Tea Party Express responded to the report.
"Here we are two weeks out from a historic midterm election and they're doing this to attack us and change the message," Kremer said. "This is ridiculous, that's not what this movement is about. We're focused on the issues and we're going to continue to work to get conservatives elected."
Rev. C.L. Bryant, founder of One Nation Back to God responded on behalf of FreedomWorks, a conservative non-profit grassroots organization that provides much of the logistics and organization behind Tea Party events.
"It is unfortunate that the Chairman of the NAACP, Ben Jealous is making these kinds of statements at this time," Bryant said. "(It is) designed to distract would-be voters from the true issues of this election season to something as divisive as race."
In July the NAACP passed a resolution that condemned what if felt was rampant racism in the Tea Party movement. At the time, Tea Party activists denounced the action as unfounded and unfair as well.
–CNN Political Producer Shannon Travis contributed to this reportBrad Marsh took on Bakers Delight at the Fair Work Commission, claiming his 15-year-old daughter and her workmates were being underpaid under the 2006 agreement. Credit:Penny Stephens For a four-hour Sunday shift, under 16-year-olds at some Bakers Delight stores are earning $38.50 overall, but would receive $70 if they were paid under the award, an analysis shows. The controversy is the latest to surface over the issue of weekend penalty rates in Australia, and follows a string of high-profile scandals revealed by Fairfax Media involving big retail and fast-food corporations exploiting legal loopholes to pay lower rates. The Fair Work Commission is expected to hand down its long-anticipated ruling on whether to reform weekend penalty rates in several sectors nationally, including retail in just a few weeks. Bakers Delight now faces an attempt to force it to start paying higher penalty rates in Victoria, after a 15-year-old female bakery worker applied for the Fair Work Commission to terminate the 2006 deal and move staff onto the award or a higher-paying agreement.
Lesley and Roger Gillespie founded Bakers Delight. Credit:Josh Robenstone Pay shock The girl's father, Brad Marsh, said his daughter was left hundreds of dollars a month worse off due to the substandard, decade-old agreement while working at a Bakers Delight in Melbourne's inner east. "When she got her first pay cheque, she said she couldn't believe how bad it was," he said. "The company is bringing down their labour costs by holding on to this 10-year-old agreement, while other independent bakers pay their workers fairly."
Bakers Delight has 700 company-run and franchised bakery stores, the bulk of which are in Australia. It also has operations in Canada, the US and New Zealand. The embattled 2006 agreement governs the pay and conditions at all Bakers Delight's company-owned stores in Victoria, covering between 140 and 150 staff. The company is owned by co-founders Roger and Lesley Gillespie who in 2015 had an estimated shared personal fortune of about $150 million according to the BRW Rich List. Under Australian law, workplace agreements must meet a test that ensures all staff are "better off overall" than they would be under the award, the basic wages safety net. But the Bakers Delight Victorian agreement was struck during the Howard government's controversial WorkChoices regime that largely eroded this safeguard, until its repeal in 2009.
Agreements struck during this period that are still operational today are often referred to as "zombie agreements" – after former prime minister Tony Abbott famously declared WorkChoices was "dead, buried and cremated". Other notable companies that held on to low-paying WorkChoices agreements, including the Pancake Parlour and burger chain Grill'd, have been forced to terminate these deals in recent years. Initial win Lawyers for Bakers Delight last month succeeded in thwarting the young worker's initial bid to terminate the old agreement by arguing she had put in her resignation just prior to filing the application with the |
rebounds. Overall he must get stronger to win more battles on the boards, and to be able to succeed with his frame, though he is not afraid to get to the dirty areas of the ice. He might get knocked down by bigger defencemen, but you will find Bracco right back in the corners or in front of the net later on the very same shift. He has a relentless energy in the offensive zone. Bracco also has excellent hockey sense. He makes smart plays with the puck on his stick and is able to find open areas without it.
Jeremy Bracco’s defensive game could use some work. He needs to be more consistent in his effort on the back check as he can have a tendency to puck watch at time, and doesn’t always keep his feet moving. He also can fly the zone a little early at times, trying to get things started in the transition game at the expense of defensive responsibilities. This is something that should improve with some maturity and good coaching though.
Personally I see Bracco getting drafted a lot lower than what I have him ranked at. I think there is a good chance he will slip to the mid second round, due to his size. That said, his offensive potential is extremely high, and if he can overcome the size issue and develop to his ceiling, he has top line potential. The size does make him a boom or bust type of pick though. In terms of a player comparison, its easy to see how Jeremy Bracco’s game is similar to Calder candidate Johnny Gaudreau, though this is a style comparison and not necessarily a talent one.
Below are some highlight videos of Bracco in Action.
Bookmark the site and check back tomorrow for the #28 prospect on my draft board.Nicolas Sarkozy, a frontrunner for the nomination of France's centre-right Republicans party, is also in favour of forcing public authorities in Europe to use more products or materials made in Europe (AFP Photo/Georges Gobet)
Paris (AFP) - French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed that Europe apply a carbon tax on American imports if Donald Trump pulls the United States out of the Paris climate pact.
More than 100 countries have ratified the Paris global emissions deal, which was inked in December after marathon talks to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
"Donald Trump has said -- we'll see if he keeps this promise -- that he won't respect the conclusions of the Paris climate agreement," Sarkozy said late Sunday on the TF1 television channel.
"Well, I will demand that Europe put in place a carbon tax at its border, a tax of 1-3 percent, for all products coming from the United States, if the United States doesn't apply environmental rules that we are imposing on our companies," he added.
Sarkozy, a frontrunner for the nomination of the centre-right Republicans party, is also in favour of forcing public authorities in Europe to use more products or materials made in Europe.
Europe can no longer be "weak" or "naive", Sarkozy said, even as he defended the idea of the free movement of people and goods.
US president-elect Trump was elected on an overtly protectionist platform, promising to scrap international trade deals and railing against jobs and factories being sent abroad.
Economists fear that moves to protect national markets through tariffs or other barriers risk kicking off a global cycle of measures that would reduce international trade.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told AFP last Friday that Trump might reconsider his pledge to cancel the Paris deal, saying it would "create serious problems if anybody wants to undo it."
France's Republicans party will select this month their candidate for next year's presidential election. Ex-prime minster Alain Juppe holds a lead in the polls over Sarkozy, who was president from 2007-2012.Laurent Koscielny and Theo Walcott in their Christmas Jumpers to support Save the Children (Getty)
Arsenal are already missing key personnel for their crunch meeting with Manchester United on Saturday and Theo Walcott could make it even worse.
Marina Granovskaia unhappy with Kepa decision after bust-up with Maurizio Sarri
Hector Bellerin, Lucas Perez, Santi Cazorla and potentially Alexis Sanchez will all miss the match at Old Trafford through injury.
Now it’s emerged that Walcott could miss it too – but for a very different reason. The 27-year-old’s wife Melanie Slade is due to give birth to their second child at any moment.
Melanie Slade with Walcott in 2011 (Getty)
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Should she go into labour around the match, Walcott would be given special dispensation to join his childhood sweetheart.
While it would be baby joy for Walcott – it’d be a nightmare for Arsenal.
MORE: First Theo Walcott, now Hector Bellerin – Danny Rose is Arsenal’s injury nemesisMONTREAL -- Laurent Duvernay-Tardif might be the NFL’s most interesting man.
He juggles two full-time occupations, one playing offensive line for the Kansas City Chiefs and the other studying medicine at McGill University in his native Montreal.
Medical school is only the beginning of what makes Duvernay-Tardif a rare NFL player. He backpacked through Europe at 16. He has taken two yearlong sailing trips with his family. He’s bilingual, having picked up English to go along with French.
"If they ever want to do a '30 for 30' on an offensive lineman, it would have to be Larry," said Chiefs center Mitch Morse, using the nickname the Chiefs have for their French-Canadian teammate. "The guy is multi-talented."
For now, Duvernay-Tardif concentrates on the two occupations, each demanding in its own way. He tries to compartmentalize. He tells people that when he’s in Kansas City, he’s a football player who also studies medicine, and when he’s in Canada, he’s a med student who also plays football.
The reality is more complex. The 25-year-old has to keep one foot in his other life all the time.
Chiefs guard Laurent Duvernay-Tardif spends his offseason working on his medical degree at McGill University. Richard Messina for ESPN
Football was a hobby
While he was growing up in Montreal, becoming a doctor was always Duvernay-Tardif's goal. He enjoyed playing football, but it was mostly a hobby through college.
He turned out to be very good at that hobby. He moved from defensive to offensive line in college and turned into a dominant player. One of his position coaches at McGill, Matthieu Quiviger, predicted after Duvernay-Tardif’s first offensive practice that he would play in the NFL.
"We were practicing in helmets and no pads, but the kid was a savage," Quiviger said. "He just destroyed our best players. This guy was just so much better than everyone else he was playing against."
Duvernay-Tardif admits that keeping up with his studies and football can be challenging. After hospital shifts as an undergraduate, he sometimes slept on the locker room floor. Courtesy of Laurent Duvernay-Tardif
Knowing medical school was the priority, McGill’s coaches accommodated Duvernay-Tardif’s academic schedule. He was allowed to miss some meetings and practice sessions, as long as he was available to play in games. During his college football seasons, Duvernay-Tardif was required to be at local hospitals at varying hours as part of his curriculum.
"I tried to make practice as often as I could," he said. "Sometimes I would get off a shift, and practice was a few hours later. I would just head over to the locker room by the practice field, take a bunch of towels, put them on the floor and go to sleep right there. The next morning, my teammates would wake me up. They'd kick me in the ribs and tell me it was time to get to practice."
McGill decided Duvernay-Tardif was worth the trouble. He was that good.
"He just destroyed the competition," Darche said. "He was a man among boys up there. I would see video of him playing, and it wasn’t even fair. If he had played at Alabama, he would have been a top-10 pick."
NFL prospect
Word of this offensive line prodigy reached the United States and the NFL, and Duvernay-Tardif's medical studies were viewed warily by some teams.
"People were debating whether I was going to commit 100 percent to football when I had that good of a plan B," Duvernay-Tardif said. "The coach from another team was questioning me, 'How do we know if you have a bad year, you’re not just going to [quit football and] go back to medical school?' That’s a legitimate question."
Duvernay-Tardif had a meeting with Chiefs coach Andy Reid, offensive line coach Andy Heck and then-offensive coordinator Doug Pederson. They asked the same question as other teams: Why would a future doctor want to play football? They were satisfied with his answer.
"The Chiefs saw it that I was playing football because I loved the game," Duvernay-Tardif said. "Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here. For them, knowing I was able to manage both at the same time in college was a positive thing. They knew when I was going to be in K.C., I was going to have a perfect work ethic, I was going to stay later, I was going to watch film."
Between hospital shifts, Duvernay-Tardif works out at Montreal gym with a plan laid out for him by the Chiefs. Richard Messina for ESPN
Duvernay-Tardif presented the Chiefs with a plan before the 2014 draft: Until he graduated from medical school in 2017 or 2018, he would be all about football from the start of training camp to the end of the season. For the rest of the year, he would be a medical student who would stay in football shape.
"I told them when I was in Kansas City, I would focus 100 percent on football," Duvernay-Tardif said. “They were, 'All right. Cool. This guy has a plan.' I think that was a factor in their decision to draft me."
Reid recalled approaching that predraft meeting with Duvernay-Tardif with skepticism about his commitment to football. He said it didn’t take long for Duvernay-Tardif to change his mind.
"When you talked to him, you got the sense he was focused in and going," Reid said. "He wanted to play. He’s got a love for it. He loves that part of it, and he loves this part of it. You got that when you talked to him. I felt very comfortable about that when I talked to him.
"The way he’s wired is just different. He’s brilliant, but he can just get down and just be dirty tough. He’s able to separate that. But that dirty tough part, I don’t want him if he’s an orthopedic surgeon to do my knee replacement with that attitude. You understand what I’m saying?"
Reid believes Duvernay-Tardif has lived up to his end of the deal. The Chiefs point to his improvement as evidence. Duvernay-Tardif didn’t play as a rookie, but he broke into the starting lineup the past season. The Chiefs considered him one of their most improved players at training camp this year.
The team excuses him from the first couple weeks of the offseason conditioning program each year so he can fulfill his med school requirements. But Duvernay-Tardif said that when the Chiefs ended their offseason program in June, he had the lowest percentage of body fat among the team’s offensive linemen, at 18 percent.
"I want to be even leaner," he said. "My trademark is to be athletic and fast."
Becoming a Chief
Duvernay-Tardif was expecting to be drafted in the second or third round. At the time, he was serving in the neonatal intensive care unit at a Montreal hospital and expected to be finished with work by the time the second round started.
"I was ready to get out of there," he said. "But there was a lady who went into labor with twins, and she ended up having an emergency C-section. I was not in charge of doing the C-section or anything, but because I was in the neonatal intensive care unit, I had to be in the [operating room] to look after those two newborns and assist the head neonatal intensive care doctor to make sure everything was all right.
"I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and gave it to a nurse, and I was like, 'If there’s a call on that cell phone, can you please pick it up and say yes? Just say yes to whoever it is.'"
The call from the Chiefs came the next day. They drafted Duvernay-Tardif in the sixth round. He was seen as an oddity by his teammates the first time he walked into the Chiefs' locker room.
Duvernay-Tardif is all about football from the start of training camp to the end of the season. AP Photo/Rick Scuteri
"The first thing I heard from another offensive lineman was from Donald Stephenson," Duvernay-Tardif said of a player now with the Denver Broncos. "He said, 'If I was a doctor, I wouldn’t be here. Why are you here?' He didn’t understand. Donald was the one who said that to me, but I think the other guys were a little bit asking themselves that question."
Duvernay-Tardif had to prove his football commitment to his teammates before he did so with coaches. One way he tried is by playing to the whistle and sometimes beyond, even in practice. When there’s a scuffle at practice, Duvernay-Tardif is inevitably involved.
"The way I play, I go [all-]out all the time," he said. "That’s maybe, sometimes, even, not a problem but an issue in practice... It’s always 100 percent. When guys saw me on the field getting after it until the end of the whistle, they’re like, 'OK, we’ve got a lot of respect for that guy.' When you get on the field and show toughness, your teammates feed off that and respect that, I think.
"Now those same [qualities] that made people question me before, they give me my personality in the locker room now. People learned more about me and realized I’m not a nerd. I’m just a guy who loves [football] and has a passion for medical school."
Said Morse, who plays next to Duvernay-Tardif at center, "Sometimes he butchers the English language, and we get a good laugh out of it. Otherwise, he’s just one of us."
Dr. Duvernay-Tardif
Duvernay-Tardif has five months of clinical work remaining before he receives his medical degree from McGill.
"I’m never too far from medicine when I’m in K.C., and I’m never too far from football when I’m here," he said. "I have to stay in shape for football year-round, and I have to stay up-to-date with medicine year-round."
Duvernay-Tardif's July med school rotation, between the end of offseason practice in Kansas City and the start of training camp, often included 10- or 12-hours days in the emergency room of a Montreal hospital. In between shifts several days a week, Duvernay-Tardif worked out at Montreal gym according to a plan laid out for him by the Chiefs. The highlight of one such workout was four lifts of 345 pounds on the bench press. The workouts were a nod to the occupation that pays Duvernay-Tardif's bills. He will make a base salary of $600,000 from the Chiefs this year.
"Every day I’m up here in Montreal I’m thinking about football," he said. "Every day, I’m going to be thinking, 'Camp starts in a month,' or 'Camp starts in three weeks,' and I’m thinking about the things I want to accomplish this year. Even 1,000 miles away from Kansas City, I’ve still got to be ready for training camp."
There’s plenty of evidence that he does both. After an offseason practice in June, Duvernay-Tardif tweeted a photo of a book he was reading poolside at his Kansas City apartment. The title? Rapid Interpretation of EKGs.
Despite his NFL salary, Duvernay-Tardif's lifestyle in Montreal is in line with that of a typical medical student. He usually rides his bicycle to and from hospital shifts. His car is a four-door, black Volkswagen Jetta, another feature that helps him stand out from his teammates back in Kansas City.
"I live on a $60,000 budget. I respected that, with all the travel and the plane tickets for my girlfriend [between Kansas City and Montreal]," he said. "I’m proud of that. Sixty grand for a full year is pretty good. Hopefully, when I become a doctor, it’s not going to be a pay cut. I’m going to make a lot more money."
Duvernay-Tardif's bye week last season was unlike that of any of his teammates. He had postponed a med school exam on orthopedic surgery the previous summer because he had to report to training camp. His test was rescheduled for the Chiefs’ bye week in November, or four days after the team played the Detroit Lions in London.
"I tried to study for that exam leading up to the bye, but I wasn’t able to do it because I had so much football on my plate," he said. "So as soon as we jumped on the plane after that Detroit game, everybody else was partying on the plane, and I had my headset on. I was just studying, studying, studying.
"We got back to K.C. at 3 in the morning. We had a 30-minute meeting with coach Reid. He cut us loose around 4 o'clock. I took a cab straight back to the airport. I took the first flight out at 6 a.m. for Montreal, flew back to Montreal and studied the whole way back. As soon as I landed in Montreal, I slept two hours, studied two hours, slept two hours, studied two hours for three days straight.
"I passed the exam at 61 percent or 63 percent. It was borderline, but I passed it. It was a pass-or-fail exam. I was so pumped. I slept for two days and then flew back to Kansas City. That was my bye week."
Next steps
After graduation, residency is the next medical step for Duvernay-Tardif. He has yet to choose a field, though he is leaning toward emergency.
He’s in no rush. He can’t play football and do his residency at the same time. He will play football while handling medical school responsibilities until 2018 -- at the latest.
One, he believes, helps him with the other.
"In football, you learn that sometimes you lose, even while you’re excellent at doing it," he said. "In medical school, sometimes it’s really hard for people to learn how to lose. Sometimes you’re going to lose the battle in medical school.
"I remember the first time I did CPR on somebody who died. I think I was prepared to live that moment more than somebody who only had, like, straight As in med school and saw that for the first time. In football, you learn to deal with tough situations."
Duvernay-Tardif passed this message on to a couple hundred kids at an elementary school outside Montreal. He talked to the gathering about juggling the rare double of two full-time occupations. In a question-and-answer session, one girl asked what was the biggest accomplishment of his life.
"I told her I haven’t had it yet," Duvernay-Tardif said. "It will be when I’m able to tell people I’m a professional football player and a doctor."Mark Critz celebrates his victory in the special election in Pennsylvania's 12th district, pointing to his daughter's shirt which says 'Vote for Critz.' The GOP's special failure
All the evidence pointing to monster Republican House gains this fall—the Scott Brown upset win in Massachusetts, the scary polling numbers in once-safely Democratic districts, the ever-rising number of Democratic seats thought to be in jeopardy—was contradicted Tuesday.
In the only House race that really mattered to both parties—the special election to replace the late Democratic Rep. John Murtha in Pennsylvania’s 12th District—Republicans failed spectacularly, losing on a level playing field where, in this favorable environment, they should have run roughshod over the opposition.
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Given the resources the GOP poured into the effort to capture the seat and the decisiveness of the defeat—as it turned out, it wasn’t really that close—the outcome casts serious doubt on the idea that the Democratic House majority is in jeopardy and offers comfort to a Democratic Party that is desperately in search of a glimmer of hope.
The district itself couldn’t have been more primed for a Republican victory. According to one recent poll, President Barack Obama’s approval rating in the 12th was a dismal 35 percent, compared to 55 percent who disapproved. His health care plan was equally unpopular—just 30 percent of those polled supported it, while 58 percent were in opposition.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was even more disliked in the blue-collar, western Pennsylvania-based seat: Just 23 percent viewed her favorably, compared to 63 percent who viewed her unfavorably.
Still, Democrat Mark Critz managed to pull off an eight-point victory, 53 percent to 45 percent, over Republican Tim Burns in a district that John McCain narrowly won in 2008—the only one in the nation that voted for John Kerry in 2004 and McCain four years later.
The race marked the third highly-contested, fair-fight special House election that the GOP has dropped in the last year.
The seat Murtha held for 36 years is precisely the sort of Rust Belt district—economically populist and culturally traditional—that Republicans must win to claim the 40 seats necessary to take back the House.
Yet the way Critz and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee won the contest offered a reminder that the prospect of a GOP majority remains a mirage. And Tuesday’s result has Democrats breathing a sigh of relief, thinking they’ve found a formula to mitigate their losses in what will still be a difficult election season.
The playbook from the Pennsylvania special election isn’t complicated: Make the election a choice between two local candidates and not a national referendum on the Democratic Party or the state of the nation; savage the Republican from the outset and don’t let up; keep the focus on jobs and core economic issues; most important, separate yourself from your national party’s policies and politicians as necessary.
“The lesson will be define the choice very early,” said DCCC Chair Chris Van Hollen in an interview. “This is not a referendum on how you feel about the general direction of the country, it’s a choice about how we move forward. And you have to define the differences on key policy issues.”
In the case of Critz, that meant hammering Burns as being in favor of outsourcing jobs overseas and highlighting his willingness to cut Social Security benefits – significant liabilities in an economically-beleaguered and aging congressional district.
Meanwhile, Critz, a longtime Murtha aide, talked up what he had done on behalf of the district and pledged to continue in his former boss’s tradition of bringing home federal dollars to the region.Some BART escalators in San Francisco are receiving extra protection from the elements, as well as the tons of human waste that gum up the moving stairs, costing millions of dollars in repairs each year.
BART broke ground on the construction of its first "escalator canopy" at the Powell Street Station near Fourth and Ellis Streets today.
"We have a lot of syringes that are tossed into escalators or people with coffee or just tossing things and so the escalators, it's not good for them," said Bevan Dufty, BART Board Director.
Years of wear and tear by human excrement, trash, as well as the rain, have all taken a toll on the escalators, leading to frequent breakdowns. "They're just unreliable," said Dufty.
On Tuesday, BART unveiled its new $66 million plan to outfit nearly two dozen escalators from the Civic Center to the Embarcadero with protective canopies. BART passengers loved the transparent canopy and its sleek modern design. Not only will the canopies add a buffer between the elements and the escalators, but officials say locked gates will keep out the homeless and drug users at night.
"With these canopies we are going to see one third less service calls, breakdowns," said Dufty.
In order to mitigate the impacts on nearby businesses during the holiday season, there will be a construction moratorium from Thanksgiving through New Years Day, with work only taking place from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Sunday night through Friday morning.
"Half of this is being paid by the city, half by BART because all of these station entrances also serve Muni you know and they sort of fit into the historic grandeur of Market Street," said Dufty.
BART will also be mounting digital displays for train arrival times under the canopies, and it will be replacing 41 downtown escalators.
Some of the project's funding came from Measure RR, a $3.5 billion dollar voter-approved bond measure in November.
Canopies at the Powell Street and Civic Center stations are expected to be completed in five months.Last week my inflated expectations from the week before influenced my reaction to the second episode of the Supernatural season. This week, I went into episode 12.03 nervous and crossing every available appendage in hopes that this one would get season 12 back on track. With writer Robert Berens and director Bob Singer at the helm, I was cautiously optimistic. And guess what? They didn’t let me down. That Show I love with all my heart and soul? It’s back. With bells on.
‘The Foundry’ was an old-fashioned Supernatural episode, which is a very big compliment indeed. It was by turns creepy and terrifying and heartwarming and heartbreaking, all in 42 minutes. I screamed out loud, bit my nails, knocked over a chair in my excitement at one point, and used up half a box of tissues by the time it was over. And that? That’s Supernatural.
Thank you, Bob and Bob. Since we had three interviews with guest stars on this episode, we’ve linked to them in the appropriate sections. Or you can just see them all here.
Even the beginning was classic Supernatural. After a ‘Then’ which confused me for its scene mentioning Vince’s ‘beloved sister’ who we heard nothing about in the episode before, we launch into the opening scene starring some will-most-likely-be-killed guest actors. A couple of hipster foodies are chatting about gentrification and first world problems, and then the cry of a baby lures them into a house that anyone with half a brain would have avoided at all costs. But this is my Show being a mini horror movie, so in they go and it’s scary as hell, and we’re only 3 minutes in. Then the poor hipster foodie lady unwisely pulls the tattered blanket off the baby in the crib and EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! That was my first scream because it’s a creepy as hell DOLL and I am totally creeped out by dolls and Robert Berens, did you do this on purpose???!
Of course he did. And it worked like a charm.
Back to the bunker, where Mary is reading John’s journal, and I have a bad feeling about this. Samantha Smith is doing a fabulous job of letting us feel Mary’s restless uncertainty. You can see it in her expression, in the way she sits, in how she interacts with Cas. She’s trying so hard, but you can see she’s not succeeding.
Mary: After you left heaven, when did it feel like you fit, like you belonged here?
Cas: I’m still not sure I do. But you do. You belong here.
Mary is clearly unconvinced, and that little ball of worry in the pit of my stomach is growing. I liked Cas and Mary’s interactions from the beginning, the two of them bonding over that shared uncertainty about fitting in. She cuts her hair, trying to find something that will reflect the new identity that she just can’t seem to find – something that rang so true. It’s what humans do, when we’re lost and can’t figure out how or what to change. It’s those little touches that make Supernatural so powerful – even though it’s literally about things that aren’t real, its human moments are more real than most reality television. This was one of those brilliant moments.
Then it’s morning, and I want to hug Berens for giving us a few minutes of domestic Winchesters, having breakfast in the bunker kitchen. And looking unspeakably gorgeous.
There’s some nice continuity, for which I’m grateful, and we even get Dean and Sam TALKING about how much they want to destroy the British Men of Letters (and hoo boy, are we all on board for that one!) We get a reminder that Sam has been healed (at least on the outside, but hey, they mentioned it) and then the Winchesters actually talk about their feelings! Their feelings about their mother anyway.
Sam is as worried about his mother as I am; Dean is stubbornly trying to pretend nothing’s wrong, or at the very least, that what is wrong is temporary. His mom is back, and he wants desperately to just be happy about it, trying to stay in denial about the fact that Sam is right – Mary is struggling.
Cas heads out to find Lucifer, telling Sam and Dean “I think you’re needed here.”
Cas gets Mary in a way that Sam and Dean don’t; he can empathize. He’s been there.
Mary’s struggle plays out much as it often does for her sons: she doesn’t know quite what to do with all those pesky feelings, so she just wants to hunt. Avoidance and denial, the Winchester way.
Mary comes in with like a foot of hair cut off.
Sam: Did you cut your hair?
Me: (shaking head)
We get more of the Dean-takes-after-his-mom tidbits, as Mary forgoes the corn flakes and goes right for the bacon, cold or not.
Mary: It’s bacon!
Dean: We are so related.
Such a small moment, but it’s so poignant. Dean’s expression as he says that, as he finally has a chance to discover who his mother is and to identify with her in a way he never had a chance to, is absolutely joyous. He looks like that four-year-old for an instant, who adored his mother and had her taken away from him way too soon. I ache for him, to see how badly he needs that.
On the second watch, it’s even more obvious that Mary is trying to get some distance by going off on her own to hunt, but Dean doesn’t take the hint, gleefully announcing a ‘family hunting trip.’
The second watch was so much more heartbreaking than the first, knowing what’s coming.
Later it’s pointed out again how similar Mary and Dean are (and perhaps we didn’t need it to be quite so obvious, but I still enjoyed the moments for what they were). Dean and Mary share a love for chili lime jerky and playing loud classic rock in the Impala. Another iconic scene as Dean guns the Impala and they speed away, listening to ‘Born To Be Wild.’ (There were a bunch of fans watching filming that day, and apparently Jensen was showing off a bit for them – I love that they used that particular take!)
But for all their ‘family hunting trip’ bonding, every time Mary is left on her own, we can see her uncertainty. Kudos to Sam Smith for conveying so much with so few words – clearly she shares that similarity with Ackles and Padalecki just as Mary shares similarities with Sam and Dean!
Berens gets extra helpings of love from me for making the Winchesters into the Partridge Family when they change into their fed suits.
Nice little shout out to SPN alum Katie Cassidy too. We’ve got Rick Springfield on the show now, maybe her dad and Partridge alum David Cassidy is next! (Ackles as Cassidy? Fandoms collide!)
Meanwhile, Cas is looking scrumptious in his fed suit also and calling himself Agent Beyonce (which started trending on twitter almost immediately). That makes Crowley Agent JZ, and suddenly we have the unlikely duo teamed up once again.
Let’s hope it goes more smoothly this time than it did last time.
I confess to enjoying the dynamic between Cas and Crowley – both Misha and Mark have a chance to flex their comedy wings working with each other, and they’re both damn good at it! Cas fixing his hair in the mirror and totally botching his attempt to get Vince’s sister to open the door were amusing, and Crowley’s reaction even more so.
Cas (as she slams the door in his face): Do you think that happens to Sam and Dean?
Crowley: (probably eye rolling internally): All the time.
The thing about Vince’s beloved sister came out of nowhere, like I said. Editing glitch perhaps?
Eventually, Castiel’s actual concern and Crowley’s faux concern (those puppy dog eyes!) prevail and the twosome get a tip on where Lucifer – and Rowena – might be.
Cas is often more perceptive than he seems, and he calls out Crowley for what I keep thinking is buried (deep, deep) underneath the surface – an affection for his mother.
Cas: Now I know you just want to save your mother.
There are a lot of valid reasons that Crowley doesn’t want Rowena working with Lucifer, certainly, but I can’t help but think that Cas is partly right.
Fandom already has a ship name for this duo: Crass.
Hmm. I guess that should have one s…
Meanwhile, Ruth Connell is having a chat with Rick Springfield, who is awesomely frightening as he’s menacing her. Kudos to Connell for showing us both Rowena’s bravery and also the emotion she’s covering up, tears in her eyes that she refuses to shed.
But Rowena is not so easily cowed, and Lucifer makes a mistake in underestimating her. Why does everyone trust her to do the requested Spell A when she could just as easily do Spell B, which will, oh yeah, end up setting her free? Underestimating Rowena is a big mistake, and that’s exactly what happens. A shirtless Rick Springfield gets blasted right the hell out of there. (He should have known he was in trouble when she started calling him ‘my liege’…) Though I selfishly hope the spell doesn’t destroy that lovely vessel any time soon because damn, Springfield’s acting is one of the pleasant surprises of Season 12 so far!
A+ dialogue here too. Rowena: [You think you’re looking like Keith Richards?] Try Iggy Pop!
More fandoms colliding!
All these classic 70s references are making me very happy, Mr. Berens.
Meanwhile, the Winchesters investigate the case Mary found in a gorgeous flashlight scene that lets Serge Ladouceur work his magic. Sam and Dean leave Mary to go one way while they go another, which makes me bite my fingernails instantly because hello horror movie trope! Sure enough, Mary pulls the blanket off the creepy creepy creepy doll – and did it always have Mary’s blonde hair?? – and then she’s being touched by the ghost child and screaming.
Bonus points for extra creepiness because Mary Winchester leaning over a crib while a light bulb flickers and buzzes? Talk about classic Supernatural!
Sam and Dean to the rescue, both of them rather horrified at what’s happened to their mother.
Sam: Mom, you’re hurt!
They want her to stay in the motel room and rest up (i.e., be safe). Mary wants to get out there and keep hunting. It’s painful to watch her realize that she doesn’t know what she’s doing in 2016 the way she did 30 years ago. She’s their mom and having her boys tell her that “we’ll teach you how to do this, don’t worry” must be incredibly hard to take. In fact, they essentially bench her, too protective of her to do otherwise.
In typical Winchester fashion, as soon as Sam and Dean leave, Mary uses the old fashioned phone to do some leg work of her own, figuring out who the little kid ghost is by calling his mom (nice touch that the mom is also stuck in the past, talking on a phone with an honest to god cord on it!). Mary’s determined to follow her hunter’s instincts that the ghost child wasn’t trying to hurt her but to communicate with him instead. In other words, we’ve gone all The Sixth Sense – and I love it when Show intersects with one of my favorite movies. (My son was in it, I can’t help it – in fact, I’m in it too. For about 3 seconds.) Anyway, those scenes are terrifying. I’m biting my nails and trying not to scream, but Mary Effing Winchester just keeps on going. She’s every bit as brave and badass and headstrong and stubborn and awesome as her sons.
Sam and Dean, meanwhile, are on an old fashioned salt and burn, and once again I am so damn HAPPY to get back to Supernatural’s roots. Sam and Dean at a graveyard, tossing down a pack of matches. It literally made me smile a sentimental sort of smile because that’s the Show I know and love.
And then we actually get more Winchesters talking to each other! You’re killing me here, Berens!
Sam tries again to tell Dean how worried he is about their mom, but Dean isn’t having it.
Sam: I’m worried about mom.
Dean: She’s back. She’s still working out the kinks, but for once, can’t we just have one good thing in our lives?
Sam: She’s not a thing. She’s struggling. She’s trying to bury herself in hunting to avoid dealing.
Dean: How do you know?
Sam: Years of personal experience. Like mother like sons.
Dean can’t disagree really, but he wants desperately to cling to his denial, to believe that everything – for once in the Winchesters’ lives – is going to be all right. Sam, on the other hand, has had enough of that avoidance-denial cycle that keeps biting them in the butt. And, as someone on my timeline wisely pointed out, Dean and Mary are very much alike. Sam has spent a lifetime watching his big brother; he knows him. Knows when he’s struggling. So, of course, he can see it in Mary more readily than Dean can.
I should have known, right then and there, that we were headed for heartbreak. I’ve said it a million times here already – this episode was classic Supernatural. And that means you end up with your heart shattered, collapsed on the floor amidst a pile of tissues.
Mary successfully finds the ghost guy who’s behind the murders but ends up being nearly killed by him |
vegan café the other day when I was with my kids, and they got so excited. There were these people at the same table as me, and they sat right there. Normally you can kind of run away, but we were stuck in this really close situation. And this guy was looking at me, like, "Oh, are you so-and-so?" I was like, “yeah.” We were waiting for our food before we could go, and I was just like, “oh, fucking hell!” And my son was like, "Yeah! I've seen somebody recognize you!" He was really happy.Consumers will choose and eat more indulgent food after they see someone who is overweight -- unless they consciously think about their health goals, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
"Why do people often think back on a pleasant evening with friends and realize that they ate more and worse food than they wish they had?" ask authors Margaret C. Campbell (Leeds School of Business) and Gina S. Mohr (University of Colorado, Boulder). If any of those friends carry a few extra pounds, just being in their presence could trigger what the authors call a "negative stereotype."
The research suggests that merely seeing someone who is strongly associated with an undesirable behavior leads to surprising increases in the behavior. "Seeing someone overweight leads to a temporary decrease in a person's own felt commitment to his or her health goal," the authors explain.
In one study, researchers asked people who were walking through a lobby if they would take a quick survey. The surveys had photos of an overweight person, a person of normal weight, or a lamp. After completing the survey, the researchers asked respondents to help themselves from a bowl of candy as a thank you. "People who completed the survey that included a picture of someone who was overweight took more candies on average than people who saw either of the other two pictures," the authors write.
In subsequent studies, people who were invited to do a cookie taste test ate twice as many cookies or candy after seeing someone who was overweight. This was true even if the participants had a goal to maintain a healthy weight and believed that cookies and candy can lead to weight problems.
Two main strategies served to counteract people's tendency to overeat when in the presence of overweight individuals: thinking about health goals and being reminded of the link between eating and becoming overweight.
Because weight problems can spread through social networks, the authors have advice for people who are concerned about overindulging. "Thinking about personal health goals and reminding oneself of the undesirable effects of eating indulgent food at the time of possible consumption can help people avoid eating too much," the authors conclude.HONG KONG—Civilian life in North Korea, with all of its limitations and shortcomings, is often imagined in the context of Kim Jong Un’s nuclear program or the Juche state’s ersatz grandiosity. Through those lenses, people are props that dance and cheer for the regime’s greatness on the empty boulevards of Pyongyang, or they’re human pixels hoisting sheets of colored cardboard in a stadium, or even fodder deployed as slave labor to fuel the costs of missile development and a despot’s venal lifestyle.
But visit locations where North Koreans have in past years built up their commercial interests—for instance, in northeast China and Southeast Asia—and complexity catches up. Although private business ventures generate foreign currency that is sent back to the political and military circles in Pyongyang, a class of North Korean citizen, the donju, or “masters of money,” have carved out their niche in the DPRK’s spheres of power.
The donju trade anything—clothes, everyday goods, media entertainment, apartments, cars. (Small arms, like the enormous shipment seized recently in Egypt, are a special sub-category.) And most prominent among the donju is Cha Chol Ma. His biography, like that of many influential but spectral figures in North Korea, is incomplete to outsiders. What’s known is that he is one of the wealthiest individuals—if not the richest man—in North Korea whose surname is not Kim. He is the son-in-law of the late Ri Je Kang, a Juche ideologue who mentored current Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un before the death of Kim Jong Il.
Cha was once active in the DPRK’s political machinery, serving in a top position in North Korea’s legislative body, the Supreme People’s Assembly, from 2012 until 2015 or 2016. But his departure from the political scene has led to the amassing of incredible fortunes, building upon already substantial assets. He has overseen major infrastructure projects, such as the construction of a children’s hospital and a research center that seeks to streamline the cultivation of mushrooms, as well as business developments in China and Pakistan.
Cha remains close with those who occupy key posts in the Kim regime, and limited public sightings of him place the man with powerful company, rubbing shoulders with the likes of the premier of the cabinet, Park Pong Ju, or state officials in the foreign countries where he operates.
It is the donju like Cha who are reshaping the fabric of society in Pyongyang, at least in superficial terms. Sixteen years ago, Kim Jong Il began the slow shift toward establishing a market economy in North Korea. However, it was not until 2012, shortly after his son Kim Jong Un took over the reins, that the policy really took off. The country’s gross domestic product was estimated by the Bank of Korea in Seoul to be $28.5 billion last year, meager compared to its southern neighbor but still a huge increase from $12.4 billion in 2011.
Now, in the North Korean capital, young men and women spend hours in gyms each day to see and be seen; their wardrobes are packed with apparel from fast fashion outlets such as Zara or H&M, as well as handbags and accessories from the standard roster of Western European luxury brands.
Even those who still dress conservatively have their articles of vanity—perhaps a small Italian bag that holds cash and one or two smartphones, clutched not-so-discreetly under one arm as they head to the next business meeting. This is a marked disparity from the average monthly wage in North Korea, which is the equivalent of a few dozen dollars a month.
Over the border, China sees partial echoes of itself in these reforms (if they can be called that). The massive improvement in the standard of living is similar to what the Chinese population experienced in the 1980s and ’90s, after the Chinese Communist Party loosened its grip on some facets of life.
But Kim’s constant, belligerent bluster and U.S. President Donald Trump’s equally stormy responses, mean that armed conflict is a perpetual possibility, and as Beijing appears to be growing weary of such brinksmanship, its first targets would seem to be among the donju.
In late September, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued a notice that North Korean companies functioning within Chinese borders, including joint ventures with Chinese firms, had 120 days to cease operations. This restriction reflects China’s adherence to the latest sanctions on North Korea by the United Nations Security Council—at least on paper.
But that move is at odds with what Chinese companies and their North Korean partners want, particularly those that are part of industries involving intensive manual labor. Last year, Chinese businesses that operate near the border with North Korea requested an increase in the allowed number of North Korean “guest” workers, mainly because of changes in domestic labor distribution. Chinese workers have been moving to other provinces, or even other countries, where wages are higher, creating a shortage of skilled hands in the northeastern region of China.
One number tells us just how much these businesses need cheap North Korean labor for backbreaking work: In 2012, 40,000 North Koreans legally entered China on industrial training visas, with many more seeking off-the-books employment after being trafficked into the country.
Even though China is officially sanctioning North Korea, it remains to be seen how that will be put into practice. In the meantime, the donju still thrive, and likely will navigate any new restrictions with calm composure.
After all, harsh conditions at home just mean that the black markets will again thrive and become key conduits for basic goods to reach those who can afford them. And that is how many of North Korea’s masters of money made their first buckets of gold. With better contacts than ever before, it’s a trope that they could easily revisit, providing Pyongyang’s denizens with all manners of comforts, no matter how crooked their business methodologies may be, or how much bluster they hear from Washington.Note: This post has been cross-posted at Medium.
Lately I’ve been writing about the relative virtues of basic income and child allowance proposals to counteract poverty and inequality. These seem like novel ideas on the American scene today. But in fact, there was a time when both of these ideas were seriously proposed on Capitol Hill. After forty-five years of lost faith in government, we are simply rediscovering the ambitions we once held.
In August 1969, President Richard Nixon unveiled a basic income scheme for needy families with children called the “Family Assistance Plan.” (FAP) Under Nixon’s FAP, a family of four would receive $1,600 annually from the federal government, or about $10,500 in 2016 dollars. For families deriving income from work, the FAP would gradually phase out above a certain level. Indeed, FAP included a work requirement for most “employable” individuals.
Nixon’s FAP drew on proposals for a negative income tax from economists like Milton Friedman. It also drew on work done by the Office of Economic Opportunity in President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. A Johnson administration commission produced a report recommending a basic income, but Johnson rejected it out of hand in favor of an anti-poverty approach focused on skills training and education.
Nixon announced the FAP in a nationally televised address. He saw FAP as an opportunity to upend the web of New Deal-era welfare state programs and to leave a conservative mark on anti-poverty policy.
The FAP passed the House, but was attacked from both the right and left. Conservatives fretted that the FAP would expand public dependency and expanded the size of government. Liberals, on the other hand, thought that the basic income was too stingy and the work requirement to be punitive.
As an alternative, Senator (and future Democratic presidential challenger) George McGovern proposed a child allowance, which he called a “Human Security Plan” (HSP), on January 20, 1970 in a speech in New York City. McGovern’s HSP would have provided at least $50 per month ($310 in 2016) for every child in the nation. This entitlement would be paid for by eliminating the dependent tax exemptions, which today are worth up to $4,000 per child in reduced taxable income. McGovern’s plan also included guaranteed employment, including government-provided public service employment of last resort if no private sector jobs were available.
McGovern hoped that a child allowance would “very nearly wipe out poverty among most families with children [and] would also provide a critical boost in the income of middle American families.”
McGovern evidently anticipated that the HSP would be criticized for incentivizing people to have more children at a time when many worried about overpopulation. Indeed, the child allowance came into prominence in Europe for that precise reason: to serve pro-natalist population restorative purposes. As Tony Judt explains in his European history Postwar, “[f]amily allowances were a key element in plans to increase the birth rate,” particularly in countries that suffered heavy death tolls in World War I. Belgium introduced a child allowance in 1930, and was quickly followed by France, Hungary, the Netherlands, and others.
America in the 1960s had the exact opposite concern, fearing that out-of-control population would soon cause mass starvation and suffering. McGovern tried to allay these fears by pointing out that the United States was then (and now) one of the only advanced countries without a child allowance, and that in most countries, the policy had in fact been implemented without causing birth rates to explode.
McGovern’s HSP went nowhere in Congress, but served as a prelude to his presidential run. In January 1972, McGovern rolled out his own basic income proposal, which he called a “demogrant.” More generous than Nixon’s proposal, the demogrant would have provided $1,000 per person as a minimum annual income, or $4,000 for a family of four. This would replace the personal income tax exemption.
Liberals and conservatives revolted against McGovern’s demogrant plan. In the Democratic primary, Hubert Humphrey warned that McGovern’s plan would have caused substantial tax increases on the middle class and ballooned government spending. Others worried that the reach of the proposal would cover a large fraction of the country with new benefits. In the general election, the Nixon campaign ran an ad blasting McGovern’s demogrant for leaving “47 percent of Americans” dependent on “welfare.”
Under pressure, McGovern ultimately scaled back his plan. In the summer of 1972, McGovern dismantled his universal basic income proposal by “proposing a new categorical plan and by emphasizing the importance of work,” according to Brian Steensland’s The Failed Welfare Revolution. McGovern’s new plan was a “system of national income insurance” built upon work and public service jobs. “The best incentive is a job opening,” McGovern said. “The best answer to welfare is work.”
McGovern’s scaled back approach had three still fairly ambitious components: more generous Social Security, an employment guarantee for those capable of work, and income assistance for those who could not work, including mothers with children, at $4,000 for a family of four.
It’s not clear why McGovern did not revive his HSP child allowance plan when he retrenched from his universal basic income proposal. But his compromised version reflected the tendency for liberal welfare state expansions to hew toward categorical means-tested approaches instead of universal citizenship-based entitlements.
McGovern lost in a landslide to Nixon in November, shortly after Nixon’s FAP was unceremoniously killed in the Senate in September 1972. Nixon ultimately dropped the idea entirely by his 1974 State of the Union address as he battled mounting calls for impeachment. Congress eventually enacted a narrower version of the negative income tax concept underlying FAP, providing an Earned Income Tax Credit to top off the wages of the working poor.
The late 1960s and early 1970s arguably mark the zenith for American liberal policy imagination. During the course of the Nixon administration, the United States came tantalizingly close to enacting a universal basic income scheme, a universal government-run childcare system, and universal healthcare. It came less close to enacting a child allowance, but the idea was at least on the table.
Government was bold and full of ambition on the heels of the civil rights revolution and the War on Poverty. The public trusted government to act in good faith and competently solve big national problems. But the foundations were already cracking, and the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate crippled public trust in government for generations, even still today.
We’re fitfully trying to pick up the pieces and restore a government to meet the needs of the twenty-first century, drawing inspiration from the audacious plans floated forty-five years ago. But for now, the close of the 1960s seems to be the high-water mark for lofty public policy, too—one more place where, as Hunter S. Thompson once put it, “the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
AdvertisementsNEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Fox News on Tuesday removed from its site an inaccurate story that peddled a conspiracy theory about the murder of Democratic National Committee Staffer Seth Rich. The story had remained online for almost a week after CNN pointed out basic problems with its assertions.
"On May 16, a story was posted on the Fox News website on the investigation into the 2016 murder of DNC Staffer Seth Rich," a statement on the Fox News website said. "The article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting. Upon appropriate review, the article was found not to meet those standards and has since been removed."
"We will continue to investigate this story and will provide updates as warranted," the statement added.
It was not immediately clear if the reporter or editor responsible for the story were facing any disciplinary action.
Brad Bauman, spokesman for the Rich family, told CNN the family was grateful for the retraction.
"The family would like to thank Fox News for their retraction on a story that has caused deep pain and anguish to the family and has done harm to Seth Rich's legacy," he said. "We are hopeful that in the future Fox News will work with the family to ensure the highest degree of professionally and scrutiny is followed so that only accurate facts are reported serving this case."
Asked about Fox News host Sean Hannity's continued promotion of the discredited conspiracy theory, Bauman declined to comment.
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2017 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.The full text of the message reads as follows:"This is a message written by your brothers in the Syrian Army, who have been fighting al-Qaida for the last 3 years. We understand your patriotism and love for your country so please understand our love for ours. Obama is a traitor who wants to put your lives in danger to rescue al- Qaida insurgents.Marines, please take a look at what your comrades think about Obama's alliance with al-Qaida against Syria. Your officer in charge probably has no qualms about sending you to die against soldiers just like you, fighting a vile common enemy. The Syrian army should be your ally not your enemy.Refuse your orders and concentrate on the real reason every soldier joins their military, to defend their homeland. You're more than welcome to fight alongside our army rather than against it.Your brothers, the Syrian army soldiers. A message delivered by the SEA"Solohistoh said: Don't you mean Poi-hemian Rhapsody?
I see a little silhouetto of a man
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very fright'ning me
(Galileo) poi~, (Galileo) poi~, Galileo figaro magnifi-poi, poi, poi, poi...
(I'm just a poi boy, nobody loves me)
He's just a poi boy from a poi family
Spare him his life from this monstrosity
Easy come, easy go, will you let me poi?
Warships Mod! No, we will not let you poi
(Let him poi!) Warships Mod! We will not let you poi!
(Let him poi!) Warships Mod! We will not let you poi!
(Let me poi!) Will not let you poi!
(Let me poi!) Will not let you poi!
(Let me poi!) Ah, poi, poi, poi, poi, poi, poi, poi!~
Oh ma-Mamiya, ma-Mamiya, ma-Mamiya let me poi!
Wargaming has a user ban put aside for meeeee, for meeeee, for meeeeeeee!OAK RIDGE, Tenn., April 29, 2011 – With the creation of a 3-D nanocone-based solar cell platform, a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Jun Xu has boosted the light-to-power conversion efficiency of photovoltaics by nearly 80 percent.
The technology substantially overcomes the problem of poor transport of charges generated by solar photons. These charges — negative electrons and positive holes — typically become trapped by defects in bulk materials and their interfaces and degrade performance.
“To solve the entrapment problems that reduce solar cell efficiency, we created a nanocone-based solar cell, invented methods to synthesize these cells and demonstrated improved charge collection efficiency,” said Xu, a member of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division.
The new solar structure consists of n-type nanocones surrounded by a p-type semiconductor. The n-type nanoncones are made of zinc oxide and serve as the junction framework and the electron conductor. The p-type matrix is made of polycrystalline cadmium telluride and serves as the primary photon absorber medium and hole conductor.
With this approach at the laboratory scale, Xu and colleagues were able to obtain a light-to-power conversion efficiency of 3.2 percent compared to 1.8 percent efficiency of conventional planar structure of the same materials.
“We designed the three-dimensional structure to provide an intrinsic electric field distribution that promotes efficient charge transport and high efficiency in converting energy from sunlight into electricity,” Xu said.
Key features of the solar material include its unique electric field distribution that achieves efficient charge transport; the synthesis of nanocones using inexpensive proprietary methods; and the minimization of defects and voids in semiconductors. The latter provides enhanced electric and optical properties for conversion of solar photons to electricity.
Because of efficient charge transport, the new solar cell can tolerate defective materials and reduce cost in fabricating next-generation solar cells.
“The important concept behind our invention is that the nanocone shape generates a high electric field in the vicinity of the tip junction, effectively separating, injecting and collecting minority carriers, resulting in a higher efficiency than that of a conventional planar cell made with the same materials,” Xu said.
Research that forms the foundation of this technology was accepted by this year’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers photovoltaic specialist conference and will be published in the IEEE Proceedings. The papers are titled “Efficient Charge Transport in Nanocone Tip-Film Solar Cells” and “Nanojunction solar cells based on polycrystalline CdTe films grown on ZnO nanocones.”
The research was supported by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and the Department of Energy’s Office of Nonproliferation Research and Engineering.
Other contributors to this technology are Sang Hyun Lee, X-G Zhang, Chad Parish, Barton Smith, Yongning He, Chad Duty and Ho Nyung Lee.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science.
NOTE TO EDITORS: You may read other press releases from Oak Ridge National Laboratory or learn more about the lab at http://www.ornl.gov/news. Additional information about ORNL is available at the sites below:
Twitter – http://twitter.com/oakridgelabnews
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Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/Oak.Ridge.National.LaboratoryNafessa Williams (Code Black) and China Anne McClain (House of Payne) have landed leads opposite Cress Williams in Black Lightning, the CW’s DC drama pilot from Greg Berlanti, king of the CW’s DC universe, and the Being Mary Jane duo of Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil.
Written by Akil and Brock Akil, based on the DC character created by Tony Isabella with Trevor Von Eeden, and to be directed by Akil, Black Lightning centers on Jefferson Pierce (Williams). He made his choice: He hung up the suit and his secret identity years ago, but with a daughter, Jennifer (McCain) hellbent on justice and a star student being recruited by a local gang, he’ll be pulled back into the fight as the wanted vigilante and DC legend Black Lightning.
DC Nation
McCain plays Jefferson’s younger daughter, the teenage Jennifer Piere, an independent, outspoken scholar-athlete with a wild streak of her own. Williams is Anissa Pierce — passionate and quick-witted, Jefferson’s twenty-something daughter balances the demands of medical school with her job teaching part-time at her father’s school.
In the DC comics, Anissa and Jennifer follow in their father’s footsteps and become superheroes, taking on the names of Thunder and Lightning, respectively.
Akil and Brock Akil executive produce with Berlanti Prods.’ Berlanti and Sarah Schechter for Berlanti Productions and Akil Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television.
McClain is best known as music prodigy Chyna Parks in Disney Channel’s series A.N.T. Farm and as the feisty Jazmine Payne in the Tyler Perry sitcom House of Payne. She recently wrapped the Lionsgate/WWE Studios film Brother’s Blood opposite Trey Songz, and stars in Disney Channel’s upcoming Descendants 2. She is repped by ICM Partners and Morris Yorn.
Williams, who had a major recurring role on CBS’ medical drama Code Black this season, will next be seen in Showtime’s Twin Peaks reboot. She is repped by Link Entertainment and Concept Talent Group.Now news came to Hithlum that Dorthonion was lost and the sons of Finarfin overthrown, and that the sons of Fëanor were driven from their lands. Then Fingolfin beheld… the utter ruin of the Noldor, and the defeat beyond redress of all their houses; and filled with wrath and despair he mounted upon Rochallor his great horse and rode forth alone, and none might restrain him. He passed over Dor-nu-Fauglith like a wind amid the dust, and all that beheld his onset fled in amaze, thinking that Oromë himself was come: for a great madness of rage was upon him, so that his eyes shone like the eyes of the Valar. Thus he came alone to Angband’s gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat. And Morgoth came.
– The Silmarillion, Quenta Silmarillion: Of the Ruin of Beleriand and the Fall of FingolfinNevo Zisin has a "help" button tattooed on the inside of their right arm. Lane Sainty / BuzzFeed News
It's inspired by a slightly unlikely person: pop star Pink, who has a similar tattoo. Zisin is a huge fan, but the button is not meant to be an homage to Pink herself. It's about the way she inspired Zisin to be their own hero. "The 'help' button is in my handwriting because I don't need her or anyone else to help me, I need to help myself," Zisin told BuzzFeed News over a coffee in Sydney. "I have to be my own saviour, my own hero, and my own role model... Whenever I'm having a bit of an anxiety attack, I can press that button, remember that, catch my breath."
Right now, Zisin is riding high – if a little tired. The 21-year-old Melburnian, who is non-binary and uses the gender neutral pronoun "they", is in the midst of a whirlwind book tour for their memoir, Finding Nevo.
(It's pronounced Nev-oh, not Nee-vo, but Zisin said they understood the pitfalls of naming the book after the kid's movie.)
It's not lost on Zisin that they're quite young to be writing a memoir. The first line mentions their age, and when they were approached to write it – at just 19 – they thought "This is surreal. Who the hell am I?" But Zisin drew on experience, not naivety, in their decision to write the book. "A lot of this book has been rebelling against – it's ironic to say this to a journalist – but to other people's journalistic takes on my story," they said.
"I was interviewed so many times where people manipulated my story, to something that was not the way it was. So much 'Girl became a boy!' sensationalised media. And I thought, screw this, I've got a story to tell, I've got my own words, I'm going to write it." Zisin also felt they would be able to handle the inevitable backlash, trolling, and potential threats that come with being an out transgender person. "It's not glory and excitement to be so openly trans. It's terrifying and life-threatening. And I can handle that," they said. Finding Nevo tells Zisin's story of coming out as a lesbian, then as a trans guy, then as non-binary. It's primarily about gender, but Zisin also writes frankly about their blended family, their struggles with weight, and their relationship with Judaism. The book has pictures of Zisin from all stages of their life. Many transgender people, Zisin included, are critical of the "before and after" photos that often accompany transition stories – but Zisin felt documenting the entirety of their journey was central to the story.
"There was a time when I struggled to look at old photos of myself, because I felt it invalidated me now," they said. "But there was no stage of my life where I was less me." In the final scene of Finding Nevo, Zisin imagines attending a party with all the different incarnations of themself the book talks about – an enthusiastic six-year-old, a 13-year-old struggling with weight, and a painfully shy 17-year-old, and others, each presenting their gender in a different way. "I wanted people to be there with those people. They all have something to say for themselves, and an energy about them that you've got to see in the photos." To Zisin, it is "so naive" to insist only two genders exist.
"You do such a disservice to yourself to say I'm a woman, or I'm a man. What does that mean? The way you identify with your gender is going to be so different to everyone else in the world. There are seven and a half billion genders, and I want to know what makes your gender yours," they said. Being outside of the gender binary leaves Zisin feeling great on some days, but on others, awful. "When I wear nail polish and people just stare at me. It's just the looks that I get, the othering, how different I feel. And it's like, yeah I am different, but you're so boring. You look like everyone ever," they added. "Some dudes will call me mate, bro, man, dude, in one sentence. And it's like, who's insecure about their gender here? It's weird." But while Zisin's nature is jovial, they get serious on one topic: the hostility of the world to transgender people.
Lane Sainty / BuzzFeed
The link between anti-transgender rhetoric and poor mental health is not abstract to Zisin. They were caught up in the nationwide furore over the Safe Schools Coalition as one of the young people featured in the All Of Us teaching guide. When conservative media and politicians started to blow up the program in 2016, Zisin was crushed. "I've struggled with depression all my life, but that really flung me into a pit, because I was like, I am fighting everyone. No one is on my side. The government's not on my side, the public aren't on my side, no one is on my side," they said.
"It was everywhere. I couldn't escape it. And I didn't want to talk about it, I didn't want to read about it, I didn't want to go to rallies. I just wanted to lie in bed and cry and never get up again." Zisin started to get back on track – but then they were specifically targeted and named as part of the Australian Christian Lobby's campaign. The hard-right group referred to Zisin as "the transgender, Nevo" and accused Zisin and the program of promoting sex-change surgery for minors without parental consent. (This could not happen in Australia, where surgery or cross-sex hormone treatment for those under 18 can only occur through a Family Court process.) "I just went straight back into that pit," Zisin said. "I was climbing up – I wasn't near the top, but I was climbing, and then it just kicked me in the face. Right back into the ground."
Lane Sainty / BuzzFeedU.S. President-elect Donald Trump pauses as he talks to members of the media after a meeting with Pentagon officials at Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., December 21, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israel asked President-elect Donald Trump to apply pressure to avert U.N. approval of a resolution demanding an end to settlement building after it learned the Obama administration intended to allow the measure to pass, a senior Israeli official told Reuters on Thursday.
Israeli officials contacted Trump’s transition team at a “high level” after failing to persuade U.S. officials to veto the Security Council draft resolution and asked him to intervene, the official said. Two Western officials said that President Barack Obama had intended to abstain from the vote.
Trump then sent a tweet urging a U.S. veto and spoke by phone to Egypt’s president, who abruptly ordered his country’s delegation to postpone the vote scheduled for Thursday on the resolution they had sponsored.
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has had an acrimonious relationship with Obama, believes the United States had long planned the council vote in coordination with the Palestinians and intended to use it to “ambush” Israel on the thorny settlements issue, the official said.
“It was a violation of a core commitment to protect Israel at the U.N.,” the official said.
Israel had warned the Obama administration they would reach out to Trump if Washington decided to go ahead with the abstention, and Netanyahu’s aides did so when they realized the United States set on this course, the official said.
The Israeli government appreciated Trump’s efforts, the official said. Members of Netanyahu’s right-wing government have increasingly warmed to Trump, who has made a controversial promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Relations between Obama and Netanyahu were severely strained over the U.S.-backed Iran nuclear deal.
With the clock ticking down on Obama’s tenure, Israel remains concerned that the resolution condemning Jewish settlements could still go ahead with another sponsoring country –- with continued U.S. support –- before the president leaves office on Jan. 20, the official said.Why sin is no longer enough for Las Vegas
For many years, Las Vegas' success as a honeypot for sin-seekers made up for the lack of other trades. But now America's landscape for decadence has expanded beyond this desert oasis, Kevin Connolly finds the city needs a new selling point. If the South of France is a sunny place for shady people, then Las Vegas, Nevada, is a bright place where dark desires flourish. The city blazes its neon promise of wealth without work against the inky darkness of the desert sky so vividly, it is said to be visible from space. Now, speaking as an American taxpayer, I hope astronauts have something more useful to occupy them than verifying dubious urban myths about the visibility from orbit of the Vegas skyline, or indeed the Great Wall of China. But anyway, Vegas is synonymous with the doomed optimism of gambling. Indeed, it owes its very existence to the way in which hope can flourish where despair would come rather easily to hand. If you couldn't shoot craps or buy yourself a beer in the small hours of Sunday morning in Oregon, you could come to Nevada and do it there
Much of Nevada has the sort of parched and hostile appearance you might achieve by bombing the surface of the moon. But Spanish explorers rather optimistically named Las Vegas - which means "The Meadows" - in celebration of the life-giving springs of water they found there as they mapped their new world. And there is always been something a little different about Nevada. Trading sin In the middle of the 19th Century, this hot, forbidding and thinly populated territory out in the Western deserts was hurriedly granted statehood during the Civil War, to make sure the Union side would have the congressional votes it needed in the confused and divided peace that was to follow. There was a little money to be made in mining copper and lead, but as the decades went on it became obvious that Nevada lacked resources. For one thing, the state boundaries had been drawn around one of the few bits of the American south-west with no oil under it - and for another, Nevada is boiling hot. Until air-conditioning made it bearable, it was inhabited in summer only by hardy frontier families and Western desperadoes. Its solution was ingenious. In the words of one eminent American historian, it decided to treat its own sovereignty as an economic asset. In plain English, it decided to allow things that were not allowed anywhere else - and I don't mean the over ground nuclear testing which the US government carried out there in the 1950s. Getting married in Las Vegas is a major draw for tourists I mean the way Nevada decided to trade in sin - and then tax it. If you couldn't shoot craps or buy yourself a beer in the small hours of Sunday morning in Oregon or Arkansas - well, you could come to Nevada and do it there. If other states curtailed your right to drunkenly get married in the middle of the night to someone you'd only met after you'd started drinking earlier in the evening, that became legal too. And if it didn't work out - well, you could also get divorced more easily in Nevada than you could almost anywhere else in America. Even prostitution is legal in some parts of Nevada. One brothel recently started advertising a male hooker for the ladies' market. He's known as a prosti-dude. Taxing stupidity In general terms, sin has worked rather well. Las Vegas - Sin City - became rich and respectable. Where Vegas once stood alone as an island of sin, America's landscape of decadence is now much more crowded
Gangsters dug the foundations of the city's prosperity - and indeed sometimes buried each other underneath them - but big business eventually took over. To this day, the casino industry remains at the heart of the economy. It pays for the state education system for example - a particular irony when you consider that gambling could be considered a tax on stupidity, which relies on customers with a shaky grasp of maths. Sadly though, sin is no longer really a unique selling point. You can get divorced anywhere you like in America these days of course, and while it's still relatively easy to marry in Nevada, the registration bureau now shuts up shop at midnight. Is it just me, or does that take some of the spontaneity out of drunkenly marrying a stranger? But the biggest change of all has come in the profile of gambling in the United States - another area where the balance has shifted in recent years between the twin American impulses of Puritanism and the vigorous pursuit of happiness. Where Vegas once stood alone as an island of sin, America's landscape of decadence is now much more crowded. Gambling on tourism Casinos are still in abundance for those who flock there to gamble Atlantic City, New Jersey, for example, a clapped out resort in the early 1970s, turned to casino gambling to power its regeneration in 1976. Then, gambling rights were granted to America's 546 federally recognised Indian tribes. Now, 43 of the 50 states have legal lotteries and 19 permit casino gaming. American law remains oddly straight-laced about gambling over the internet as distinct from gambling in person at the roulette wheel - but Nevada no longer |
range may beneficially influence cognition in the older population." They assess this appropriately as "a hypothesis to be examined in future interventional trials."
"This isn't just for the elderly," Perlmutter continued seamlessly. "There are 6.5 million children in America carrying a diagnosis of ADHD. Two-thirds of them are receiving mind-altering medications, the long-term consequences of which we do not understand. Yet we fully understand that dietary choices have a huge role to play in how the brain works. Specifically in terms of risk for ADHD. That's the kind of stuff that no one is willing to talk about. People are desperate for the other side of the story."
"I keep getting this message of a third party creating a narrative."; I said. "You mentioned earlier a pill being promised. Who is pulling these strings, doing this misleading?"
"I don't think it stretches the imagination to see who's promising us the pill. That doesn't take a lot of cognitive effort to figure out in whose interest it would be for us to think that the answer is going to come in a pill." He alludes to the pharmaceutical industry. He then turns to government.
"Government doctrine in 1992 indicated that we need to be on a low-fat diet. That's saying in the same breath, high carb. Immediately, within 10 years, the rates of diabetes in America went up three-fold."
The number of people diagnosed with diabetes in the U.S. has nearly tripled in the last twenty years, according to the CDC. In 1992, 7.5 million people had a diagnosis. By 2002, the number was 13.6 million. By 2011 it was 20.9 million.
"That doubles your risk for Alzheimer's disease. We were told, "Eat more whole grain goodness. Eat more of what the U.S. Department of Agriculture is producing for you, and that will be good for you. Nothing could be further from the truth. Diets that are high in fat lower cardiovascular risk factors and are absolutely associated with a reduced risk for dementia. This was published in The Journal of Alzheimer's Disease in January of 2012, research from the prestigious Mayo Clinic. People on a high-fat diet had a 44 percent risk reduction for developing dementia. Those on a high carb diet, which the government continues to recommend, had an 89 percent increased risk."
That study is interesting and available in full text.
"So I'll let you figure out the conspiracy issues in terms of what we're being told."
***
"I find the whole thing a little bit sad, to be honest with you," Katz told me. "In several ways. Beginning with the fact that I actually like Dr. Perlmutter. He does some really interesting and innovative work in the area of neurodegenerative diseases. He"\'s cutting edge and is doing stuff that's a little bit out there. But he generally does this carefully and has actually provided some useful guidance we've applied in my own clinic; and I have a long-standing relationship with him — or at least his clinic — and we've corresponded and I generally think very highly of him. So I find it sad to be in a position to say that I think so much of his book is a whole bunch of nonsense."
Katz paused.
"Now, he's absolutely right that we eat too much sugar and white bread. The rest of the story, though, is one just completely made up to support a hypothesis. And that's not a good way to do science."
This launches the discussion of what science is — the critical point that confronts every mainstream media health and science writer. Most recently and famously we have heard about it in criticism of the works of Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer (outside of the latter's self-plagiarism debacle). The law of good science is that you can't say "I've got an idea and I'm going to fall in love with it and selectively cite evidence to support it."
"I also find it sad that because his book is filled with a whole bunch of nonsense, that's why it's a bestseller; that's why we're talking."
"You're only being a good scientist," Katz said, "if you say, "I'm going to try to read the literature in as unbiased a manner as I possibly can, see where it leads me, and then offer the advice that I have based on that view from an altitude." I don't see that going on here, and again, I think it's kind of sad because I think the public is being misled."
"I also find it sad that because his book is filled with a whole bunch of nonsense, that's why it's a bestseller; that's why we're talking. Because that's how you get on the bestseller list. You promise the moon and stars, you say everything you heard before was wrong, and you blame everything on one thing. You get a scapegoat; it's classic. Atkins made a fortune with that formula. We've got Rob Lustig saying it's all fructose; we've got T. Colin Campbell [author of The China Study, a formerly bestselling book] saying it's all animal food; we now have Perlmutter saying it's all grain. There's either a scapegoat or a silver bullet in almost every bestselling diet book."
The recurring formula is apparent: Tell readers it's not their fault. Blame an agency; typically the pharmaceutical industry or U.S. government, but also possibly the medical establishment. Alluding to the conspiracy vaguely will suffice. Offer a simple solution. Cite science and mainstream research when applicable; demonize it when it is not.
"It makes me sad that somebody like you is going to reach out to me, so you can get what I'd like to think are sensible comments about a silly book. If you write a sensible book, which I did — it's called Disease Proof, and it's about what it really takes to be healthy, brain and body — nobody wants to talk about that. It has much less sex appeal. The whole thing is sad."
The worst that could happen
Perlmutter is not new to practicing medicine. He talks again and again about experiences seeing patients in the early stages of Alzheimer's, or fielding questions from children of patients about what they can do to protect themselves. Years of saying, "I fix this" and conceding there&'s little that can be done — that prospect was the reason many of my classmates did not go into neurology. At the end of our interview, Perlmutter mentioned that his elderly father has Alzheimer's disease.
"5.4 million of us [in the U.S.] have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. That turns out to be a lot of influence on the rest of us. Our parents, our loved ones are getting this more and more frequently, and people are so concerned that they're going to end up like mom or dad. You know, I'm dealing with this every single day. Virtually every day, children of a patient will say "I don't want to end up like that. What can I do? Now the book provides those answers."
Perlmutter in fact dedicates the book to his father, who is in an assisted-living facility across the street from his son's clinic.
To my father, who at age 96, begins each day by getting dressed to see his patients — despite having retired more than a quarter century ago.
Perlmutter writes about how his father often does not recognize him.
The common defense of writers like Lehrer and Gladwell, and celebrity physicians like Mehmet Oz, is that they make people care to learn about subjects they otherwise would know nothing about. The message may be salacious, but the end result is a net positive. People might fail to consider their diet entirely if they aren't told it is destroying their brain. Is this book a problem? What is the worst that can come of avoiding gluten and limiting carbs?
That depends entirely on what you replace those calories with. I read the book with an eye for the most dangerous claim. What stuck out to me was Perlmutter's case for cholesterol. He basically says that we can't have too much.
"Nothing could be further from the truth than the myth that if we lower our cholesterol levels, we might have a chance of living longer and healthier lives," Perlmutter writes. He recommends disowning the notion that LDL is bad cholesterol and HDL is good cholesterol; rather, both are generally good. LDL is only bad when it is oxidized, and it only becomes so in the presence of the sort of oxidative stress brought about by carbs and gluten. Avoid those, and cholesterol is innocuous.
Beyond that, Perlmutter says that cholesterol-lowering statin medicines like Lipitor, which are prescribed for a quarter of Americans over 40, should actually be vehemently avoided. Cholesterol is necessary for the brain in high levels, he says, and lowering it is contributing to dementia.
I took this to Katz, too.
"Is there a weight of evidence that says we can totally ignore both dietary cholesterol and LDL? Absolutely not," he said. "You can legitimately say we're starting to rethink some things, but ignoring LDL could absolutely result in heart attacks and strokes. Perlmutter is way ahead of any justifiable conclusion."
The medical community's understanding of the danger of cholesterol is changing. Many cardiologists are starting to think that independent of other considerations, the level of LDL in our blood may not be as important as it previously seemed. In November, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology released new guidelines that redefined the use of statins. While they continue to recommend that people at high risk for heart disease and people with LDL levels above 189 take a statin, the long-standing goal of lowering one's LDL level to 70 is no longer deemed worthwhile to monitor.
Katz acknowledges that dietary cholesterol may be an innocuous part of an overall healthy diet. "The problem is that people are going to get their dietary cholesterol from things other than fish and eggs; they're going to get it from meats and dairies. The problem with diets like that is if you eat more of A, you're probably going to eat less of B. So people who are eating more meat and dairy and high-fat, high-cholesterol foods are eating fewer plants — they're not eating beans; they're not eating lentils. So yes, I think it's entirely confabulated and contrived, and potentially dangerous on the level of lethal."
***
Even as someone who was seriously skeptical of Perlmutter's story, after reading his 336 pages — and watching his whole YouTube channel and most every TV appearance — I have found myself hesitating around grain. His message is so ardently and unwaveringly delivered. That is how one-sided pop-science works, though. Katz wrote a tongue-in-cheek case that the 1974 advent of the Post-it note was the cause of the obesity pandemic, to show how easily correlations can be spun. If I read 336 pages on the evils of Post-its, I might set our office supply room on fire.
It comes with the certainty that you are doing something to save yourself from cognitive decline and mental illness.
Having talked to all of these people and read their work, here is how I walk away from this. Oxidative stress will increasingly be the target of medical treatments and preventive diets. We'll hear more about the role of blood sugar in Alzheimer's and continue to focus on moderating intake of refined carbohydrates. The consensus remains that too much LDL is bad for you. We do not have reason to believe that gluten is bad for most people. It does cause reactive symptoms in some people. Peanuts can kill some people, but that does not mean they are bad for everyone. I agree with Katz that the diets consistently shown to have good long-term health outcomes — both mental and physical — include whole grains and fruits, and are not nearly as high in fat as what Perlmutter proposes.
I hope people don't give up on nutrition science, because there is a sense that no one agrees on anything. An outlier comes shouting along every year with a new diet bent on changing our entire perspective, and it's all the talk. That can leave us with a sense that no one is to be believed. The scientific community on the whole is not as capricious as the bestseller list might make it seem.
When a person advocates radical change on the order of eliminating one of the three macronutrient groups from our diets, the burden of proof on them should be enormous. Everything you know is not wrong. Perlmutter has interesting ideas that I would love to believe. I'd love it if a diet could deliver all that he promises. There is value in belief. It's what the Empowering Neurologist literally markets. His narrative comes with the certainty that you are doing something to save yourself from cognitive decline and mental illness, which is probably the most unsettling of disease prospects.
With that belief also comes guilt; an idea that something could've been done to prevent a mental illness, when in fact it was bigger than us. To think that every time you eat any kind of carb or gluten, you are putting your mental health and cognitive faculties at risk is, to me, less empowering than paralyzing.
Empowerment comes in many forms. It is important to believe you're doing what's right.Last week Nancy Tang covered the detention of prominent feminist leaders in China shortly before International Women’s Day. She noted the hypocrisy that, as “Chinese state media celebrates women legislators and new anti-domestic violence legislation… the state is so afraid of young, vocal feminists that they must be detained right before International Women’s Day, so as to assure the smooth running of national legislative sessions.”
Nearly two weeks later, five activists remain in police custody, some in poor health and denied medical attention. Yesterday Foreign Policy published an interview with Zhao Sile, a reporter, feminist organizer, and close friend of several of the detained activists. In it, Sile provides a broader context for the detentions and feminist activism in China:
In the past, the public paid very little attention to feminist issues, but that has gradually changed in the last few years. We’ve had more support from women outside feminist circles and could mobilize more volunteers as more people began to pay attention. Starting around 2010, Chinese feminists became more active by taking our causes to the streets with song and dance performances, and feminist activism was one of the most visible forms of activism in China. In the beginning [of that period], we focused on specific issues, like the skewed gender ratio of public bathrooms and employment discrimination. But starting in 2014, our relationship with the authorities became quite tense as our activism has grown in depth and breadth. For the party-state, no socially active organizations and individuals are welcome, so it’s inevitable that we would become a target of the government organs that prioritize “stability maintenance” measures. We just never thought detention of our activists would come at this particular point because we believed that young women had some space to express their views. But now it seems that that space has disappeared completely.
Check out the full interview here. If you have legal expertise or political connections within China and are interested in helping out, get in touch with Nancy by tweeting at @NancyYunTang.
Header image credit: Foreign Policy.Using Laravel Translation Strings in Vue.js
Jeff Madsen Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 27, 2017
…or anything, really
One issue you will face if you need to make a multi-lingual site is how to keep your translations organized for both your back-end framework and your javascript components. I’m going to demonstrate the basic technique for this, using Laravel and Vue.js for my example.
What is this?
You should know right off the bat that the technique I’m showing is completely framework — and even language — agnostic. The idea behind it would work just as well for a.Net app fronted with Ember.js, for example.
I’m writing this at two levels, so you are free to read according to what you need to get out of this. If you are simply looking for a solution for your Laravel and Vue app, go ahead and look at the code boxes. If you read the paragraph above about.Net and are scratching your chin, we’ll explain a little deeper what we are actually doing in addition to working with the code libraries themselves.
Overview of the Process
First let’s look at what we are building, and why. The goal here is to have a single source of translation strings that can be used in our back-end language view files (Laravel blades) and also our front-end framework components (Vue). While it might feel easier to just have php files for one and a json file for the other, keeping the translations up to date is going to be much simpler if we go with a single source. However, the two languages can’t really talk to each other directly, so we need to build a bridge of sorts between them.
This means we need the following components:
Our.php files that keep our translations in a set of key-value pairs (aka, arrays) A service that will convert those files into something Vue can read A service to read that converted output and make it possible to import into the Vue component Some additional standard Vue code to make it easy to actually work with and display
The Backend Translation Files
The first bit comes with our Laravel framework — Localization or “lang” files, as they are commonly referred to. https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/localization. I won’t spend very much time on this as it’s already quite simple and well-documented above or in numerous tutorials. I would recommend making a “components” directory inside each language directory (ie, /resources/en/components ) for reasons you’ll see next.
The php files are convenient for staying integrated with the rest of our system, and perhaps using a third-party api for maintaining the translations themselves, but they are php files and have to be converted to something that is javascript-readable for the Vue components. There are different options for this: if you have a very small site you may find it simpler to create a Vue prop and pass a subset of values in to the appropriate pages, in the same way you would with other initialization data. That will get messy to handle very quickly, however.
Making a Single Translation File
The option we are going to use is to convert them all to a single javascript file we can later import into Vue. There are many good libraries out there for this; if you are working with Laravel, you might like Laravel-JS-Localization which works with all versions of Laravel. This is only converting the php to a js file, so it still doesn’t matter if we are going with Vue or Angular or anything else on the front end. Likewise, if you are not using Laravel you want to find (or make) an equivalent library to do this conversion (ex. a “CakePHP-JS-Localization” that would understand CakePHP’s system of translation files).
Configuration for this library is very simple, but I’ll just mention a couple of things I found when I set this up. The file config/localization-js.php has two configurations available; messages holds which files you want included in this translation file, so only list the php lang files for your Vue components. path is where that file will be made, so you’ll want to put it in your assets if you are using gulp or something. I might also call it something more clear than “translations” or “messages” to not get it confused with your other code. I used:
/*
* The default path to use for the generated javascript.
*/
'path' => resource_path('assets/js/vue-translations.js'),
To run this we’ll use the command ‘artisan lang:js — quiet — no-lib’ (those are normal commandline arguments with hyphens; Medium has decided not to let me type the way I want to today)
Each time that you add or change translations in the components subdirectory you’ll need to recompile this, because it is the vue-translations.js file that is actually being read into Vue, so this needs to be recreated. Depending how often you do this, you may want to add that command into your asset compiler (gulp, mix, whatever). It is very quick and won’t add much time to your builds.
Bringing it into Vue.js
If you look inside the vue-translations.js file what you’ll see is a big json dump of all the en/components/*.php files it read. So we next we need some sort of parser that can read that json and pick out the single translation we are after. To this we’ll use https://github.com/rmariuzzo/lang.js, which was actually written first and then the bridge to Laravel and other frameworks was built.
So, once again to be plain what we are doing — vue-translations.js is a standard format that Lang.js can understand and read from. It doesn’t matter how we get our translations into that format, just that we do so in order for Lang.js to use its own functions to read it. That’s why I said it doesn’t matter what framework or even programming language you start from. (You could write it all out by hand if you are masochistic enough).
Now we are on to step 3 — importing the Lang.js library into our own front-end code (in this case, Vue). The library itself has a simple api and uses lang.get('greetings.hello') style functions, but we want to import it into Vue for easy use in our components.
Looking at our main.js file (or whatever you call your “global” file for all the components to work from), we can create a custom filter like below:
Lang.js itself has a lot of nice functionality for doing things like pluralization you might want to look over in the docs, but this will suffice for our needs.
Finally — let’s put this on our page!
Add to the Vue.js Components
Our basic filter in Vue will work like this:
Notice the syntax for what will be, in Laravel, a file named “Faqs.php” in a subdirectory called “components” inside of “en” or any other language group. “question” is the original array key. The string ‘components/Faqs.question’ is piped into the trans filter with no arguments in this case and trans() will tell Lang.js to go find this key in vue-translations.js.
That’s the whole process. It seems a little complex at first, but to review what we are doing:
Create normal lang files in Laravel (ex. /en/components/Faq.php) Convert that to a single javascript file (vue-translations.js) Use Lang.js to read that json and pick out the key:value we need Create a Vue.js filter to easily use Lang.js functions in our components
So in the end we are left with a single source of translations we can import into any third-party service for translations.
Hope that helps!(Reuters) - Some investment banks seeking to be added as underwriters to Snapchat owner Snap Inc’s initial public offering registration document have been denied access to review it before it is made public this week, according to people familiar with the matter.
A Snapchat sign hangs on the facade of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., January 23, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
The unusual move underscores Snap’s relentless campaign to crack down on information leaks. For Wall Street banks, it pits their desire to appear on the front cover of this year’s most high-profile IPO against their reluctance to have their names featured in a regulatory document they have not seen.
Snap’s stance reinforces its reputation as one the world’s most secretive companies. It made privacy its hallmark by developing an app that sends disappearing messages, before rebranding itself as a “camera” company making video recording glasses and visual effects for video taken by smartphones.
“I cannot imagine any other deal in which banks would let something like this happen,” said Christopher Austin, an equity capital markets lawyer at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, who is not involved in Snap’s IPO.
While Snap’s lead IPO underwriters, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, had an opportunity to review and draft the registration document, the more than 10 banks that have recently signed up as IPO co-managers, including Citigroup Inc and Royal Bank of Canada, have been told they cannot see it ahead of it becoming public, the sources said on Wednesday.
Instead, the Los Angeles-based company has organized meetings with teams of banks to answer their questions about the document, and has also made lawyers from the lead underwriters available, the sources added.
Typically, banks have “commitment committees” to review IPO registration documents before gaining internal permission to have their name included in a registration document. They usually seek assurances that disclosures on a company’s business risks and accounting standards have been made properly.
“Commitment committees are there to keep bankers from making stupid mistakes, and to protect a bank’s reputation,” Austin said.
Most of the new banks involved became comfortable with their name appearing on the IPO registration document after speaking to Snap and its lawyers, according to the sources.
Some banks are still hoping for full access to the document before its public filing, though it is uncertain whether Snap will acquiesce. It is still possible that Snap will agree to give some banks access to the filing a couple of hours before it is made public, the sources said.
The sources asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential. Snap declined to comment. The banks either declined to comment, or did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
BRAGGING RIGHTS
Snap has already submitted its IPO registration document with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission under the Jobs Act, which allows companies with less than $1 billion in revenue to file confidentially. Snap is set to update the filing and make it public this week.
To be sure, banks hired by Snap for the IPO can simply wait for the registration document to be made public, and then ask for their name to be included next time the document is updated. Once made public this week, the IPO document will likely be updated several times before the launch of the offering that is expected in March.
Nevertheless, there are significant bragging rights for banks that have their names featured in the original publication of the IPO document, because subsequent updates to that document tend to attract less media attention.
What is more, big IPOs such as Snap’s have been few and far between recently. Proceeds from IPOs were down 40 percent last year from 2015. Technology IPOs, often a large chunk of the market, were down 56 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Snap is seeking to go public at a valuation of as much as $25 billion, and could potentially be this year’s biggest IPO.
“I don’t know any bank that would turn down the opportunity to be on the Snapchat IPO” said Kathleen Smith, principal at Renaissance Capital, which manages IPO-focused exchange traded funds.
(This version of the story has been corrected to show Snap’s valuation could be $25 billion, not the size of the IPO, in paragraph 16)Superman, Mr. Fantastic and Wonder Woman don't have to worry about wiring their salaries home to support a struggling family, but some immigrants face such challenges on a weekly basis, and the demands of these jobs inspired an entire series of costumed subjects for a photographer connected to immigration issues and angered by a recent law in Arizona demanding that state and local law enforcement officials detain anyone they believe to be in the United States illegally.
"Most of the U.S. national news about immigration is very sad: bitter political disputes in Arizona, or images of desperate immigrants trying to cross the border," photographer Dulce Pinzón wrote, describing the motivation for her photo essay for Foreign Policy.
tweetmeme_url = '//comicsalliance.com/2010/06/02/superhero-immigrant-workers/'; tweetmeme_source = 'ComicsAlliance'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/political_opinion/Arizona_Legislation_Prompts_Superheroic_Perspective_PICS';
"I saw a Spider-Man costume in a store in November 2001, and that's when everything came together in my head," she explained. "Comic-book superheroes have an alter ego, and so do immigrants in the United States. They may be insignificant or even invisible to much of society, but they are heroes in their homelands."
Each of Pinzón's images captures an individual and an occupation, as well as what they contribute to their family at home. See a few of the images after the jump and learn more about each subject at Foreign Policy.Publication history Edit
Plot Edit
The Men in Black is an international espionage organization which oversees and investigates both good and evil paranormal activity on Earth. Their remit includes alien life, demons, mutants, zombies, werewolves, vampires, legendary creatures and other paranormal beings. In order to keep their investigations secret, much of the global population are unaware of their activities, and are liable to be neuralyzed to blank their memory of any interaction with the agents. Notable members include Zed, Jay, Kay and Ecks. Ecks later becomes a rogue agent after learning the truth behind the MiB: That they seek to manipulate and reshape the world in their own image by keeping the supernatural hidden. An agent may use any means necessary, including death and destruction, to accomplish a mission. Agents sever all ties with their former lives, and (thanks to the neuralyzer) as far as the world is concerned, they do not exist.
Adaptations EditTech Today or Tech Tomorrow? Energy Debate 2
September 1st, 2008 by Michelle Bennett
“Can we solve our energy problems with existing technologies today, without the need for breakthrough innovations?”
Though we often envision debates as pitting two opponents against each other, hopefully in an intense battle of wit and wordsmithing, this one was not so. Both sides found themselves agreeing with each other more often than not, and parried with points on implementation.
Proposition
Mr. Joseph J. Romm, who sides with massive technology deployment, points out that massive renewable technology development should have a positive economic result. All that construction creates jobs, and studies have suggested that in the long term you can reasonably expect gross economic growth after implementing a plan like this.
Cleantechnica has written before that wind power is most cost effective after building regional manufacturing factories. Think of the cost of shipping a 50ft (or larger) turbine blade long distances! Similar principles also apply for bulky or delicate solar technologies.
There’s also an issue concerning the way some electric producers bring home the bacon. If they earn the most money when customers use the most energy, encouraging energy efficiency or decreasing CO2 emissions looks like bad business. In some places regulations have decoupled profit from generation. Energy companies earn money from energy efficiency, so they still get a cut when their customers use less. As a result, you see huge solar projects and initiatives rolling out of states like California.
So why is massive deployment better than improving our infrastructure? Two reasons: first, bigger is cheaper. Industries of scale are a great way to reduce prices. By building the existing renewable energy manufacturing base faster, hopefully you can make it cost effective sooner. Secondly, you give existing companies opportunity to learn from and perfect their products and their business strategy. Romm refers to a “learning curve“, which is necessary to bring any product to peak efficiency – the best possible product performance and business performance. Together, both can dramatically drive prices down. Then the market can take care of itelf.
Opposition
Peter Meisen believes that we need to upgrade our infrastructure first, then work on deploying all that renewable technology. The reason is simple enough: at the moment we don’t have the power lines to link remote energy production, like solar thermal and wind power, to population centers where it’s needed. He attempts to overcome two problems, base load and energy storage, with the same solution: a massive, interconnected energy grid.
With centralized power production, most energy is needed during the day so at night some power stations sit idle, which is not efficient. If vast regions across multiple time zones shared their energy reserves, in theory the energy could be used more efficiently. Available energy could move throughout a massive grid to where it’s needed, when it’s needed. This would naturally require a vast expansion of existing power grids, upgrading less efficient transmission lines, and sharing across multiple political boarders. Energy produced in Denmark could help power Paris under this scheme.
In the midst of this infrastructure upgrade/ restructuring, several priorities must be implemented. Energy conservation comes first, then energy efficiency and renewable energy.This strategy is better because it makes the most of the technology we have today, and it provides the opportunity to improve and upgrade our ageing technology. Building a new wind farm doesn’t help if you can’t connect it to the grid, and even then it’s possible that some of its clean energy will go to waste if extra energy can not be distributed to the places that need it. Conversely, if the wind (or sun) aren’t available locally, you can rely on a distant source of clean, green energy.
The catch is that both plans would require an intelligent and massive political and industry push that would last years, if not decades. To provide well-rounded points of view, guest comments from this week include the case for future technologies, and the need for continued research and innovation. There is also an expert comment favoring nuclear power. Reader comments also provide jewels of technical know-how and innovative ideas.
My only critique is the extra political will required for the Opposition’s side. Is it reasonable to believe that dozens, if not hundreds of countries would be willing to share electricity in a permeable, friendly way? If so, what about energy security in times of conflict or disaster? What happens if a natural disaster damages the grid of an entire nation? Or the nation’s neighbor?
The fact that both sides of the debate were mostly in agreement about technology playing a role now makes a potent point. Most people, and probably most experts, agree that the question is not whether to act, or when to act, but how to act. This debate calls for immediate planning and implementation. That’s why instead of disagreeing with each other over this or that solar technology, they move into differing views of how to use it now.
In fact, the debate was so amiable that some readers protested. What’s the point if both sides seem to be on the same side? Other readers, and indeed comments from Cleantechnica’s previous post, pointed out that both strategies – technology deployment and infrastructure improvement – need to be done simultaneously.
The Debate Moderator replied that economically speaking, “you cannot spend the same dollar twice.” It’s safe to assume that any given government and/or industry is not going to allocate infinite resources to a project of this scale, despite the urgency of the issue. With finite resources it is then necessary to find the most efficient strategy to get the biggest bang for each buck – hence the “this or that” structure of the debate question.
So which strategy is most cost effective?
I leave that question to you, the reader. Feel free to leave an opinion below.
All Photo Credit attributed to the Flickr Creative Commons. “Mo Sleep Friend” via Bill in Ash Vegas, “Wall-E Solar Charge” via Gymkata, “Wind Farm off Dee Estuary” via ➨ Redvers, “Arkansas Nuclear One” via Topato.It’s in the darkest of moments that a man’s true colors show; Detroit Tigers’ manager Brad Ausmus showed his during their grotesque losing skid.
The Tigers were having a hot month in may, treating themselves to a scolding six-game winning-streak. They swept both the Baltimore Orioles and the Boston Red Sox on the road. Things were shining on the motor city; talks of the World Series now brewed with glaring hope. Every one was confident; Ausmus’s Tigers were the best team in baseball, and Detroit was heading to face the lowly Cleveland Indians. Things were about to get better for Detroit, only Cleveland reversed roles and swept Detroit like dust, sending them into a three-game losing streak and much more perishment. The Tigers continued their tumble, only winning 9 of their next 29 games.
Hope was fading out of Detroit like the color on a worn shirt, Ausmus’s praise was beginning to evolve into criticism, and the aura of a World Series seemed like an ancient dream. The Tigers were a completely different team being plagued by sloppy defensive plays, untimely hitting, and subpar pitching. And if things weren’t already terrible, the Kansas City Royals gained first place in the AL Central Division.
People wanted answers. Ausmus was under the interrogation lights, players were scolded. Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer weren’t pitching well. The bats were cold at the worst possible times. Through it all, Ausmus kept his composure like a mayor in the face of angry citizens. He fed them impassive answers, showed emotionless expressions, and kept the same monotonous voice.
Ausmus was even bold enough — or crazy in others’ opinion — to make a joke about beating his wife when asked about how he’s handling these losses. It’s speculated he did that to relieve pressure off the players, shifting the line of fire completely to himself.
Proceeding that joke, the Tigers picked up steam and were back at it again, starting a seven-game winning streak. Detroit currently is 12-2 in their last 14 games. The offense has perked up tremendously, hitting and scoring at crucial points, the starting pitching is rolling smoothly again, and the Tigers regained their crown in the AL Central Division.
We give a manager credit when things go bad, therefore they deserve credit when things go well. Ausmus, a first year manager, refused to crack under the massive amounts of pressure he was enduring. He held his sanity, preventing himself from making crazy decisions to “shake up the lineup” the way fans and media screamed for. He didn’t yell in front of the cameras. He didn’t go on a benching spree and kick certain players to the curb; he stuck to his cool nature, made personal, educated decisions, and pulled his team out of a tailspin. He made a few slight tweaks to the lineup occasionally, based upon statistics he liked.
Being a first-year manager is difficult as it is; enduring a tailspin through it is even harder. Ausmus remained the same, looking like a veteran manager in the dugout. He could have thrown his arms up in the air and threw people under the bus. He could have made major changes to the lineup. He could have benched players, alleviating himself of criticism. But he didn’t. He believed in himself, his players, and his ideas and plans, the way an experienced manager would. The darkest times do indeed show a lot about a person’s character; Ausmus shined the brightest in his darkest moments.Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders made good Friday on his pledge to release his 2014 federal income taxes, showing earnings of just over $205,271 — and an income tax bill of $27,653.The Vermont lawmaker and his wife, Jane, made charitable contributions totaling $8,350, and earned nearly $46,000 in Social Security benefits.According to the Washington Post, the forms show most of the couple's 2014 income came from Sanders' $174,000 Senate salary, though Jane Sanders reported collecting $4,900 as a commissioner with the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission.Sanders's tax returns |
former spokesman for Jeb Bush, who has said that he can’t support the nominee, told me, “It’s noteworthy how few rank-and-file members have spoken up against Trump. I think that’s a mistake that people are going to regret.”
As Trump rose to the top of the polls last summer, the Republican Party turned out to be more at odds with its constituents than anyone had realized. Since 1964, when Senator Barry Goldwater was the Republican Presidential candidate, there has been wide agreement about the meaning of conservatism. The Party stands for lower taxes, less government, deregulation, free trade, and austere budgets. The debate has been about how much of the welfare state to dismantle, not whether it should be done. It was taken for granted that the same anti-government zeal that had fuelled the Reagan Revolution, of the nineteen-eighties; the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress; and the 2010 Tea Party insurgency would continue to drive the Party. But Republican Presidential candidates have lost the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections. After Mitt Romney’s defeat, in 2012, the Republican National Committee assembled five political consultants and Party officials to study what had gone wrong. In March, 2013, the group released its findings, which the press immediately dubbed “the Autopsy Report.” The national party, the report said, was “increasingly marginalizing itself, and unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win another presidential election in the near future.” The problem was especially acute among millennials and nonwhite voters. “Public perception of the Party is at record lows. Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” The Party sounded “increasingly out of touch” and was “driving around in circles on an ideological cul-de-sac.” The report called for “a more welcoming conservatism” and favorably quoted a Republican committeewoman who said, “There are some people who need the government.” But for the most part the authors didn’t challenge the Party’s neo-libertarian consensus about economics and the welfare state. America’s demographic changes made the project of reforming the Party more urgent. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term, the electorate was eighty-eight per cent white and two per cent Hispanic. In 2012, as the report noted, when Romney was defeated, it was seventy-two per cent white and ten per cent Hispanic. The only recent Republican who seemed to understand the crisis was George W. Bush, who, by running a campaign that anticipated many of the Autopsy Report’s recommendations, won at least forty per cent of the Hispanic vote in 2004. Romney, who recommended “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants, won twenty-seven per cent of the Hispanic vote, the Party’s worst showing since 1996. “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a G.O.P. nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence,” the report said. “It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.” Party committees generally serve one purpose: by providing money, opposition research, voter data, and get-out-the-vote operations, they help candidates get elected. Especially in the case of contentious issues about which their own elected officials are divided, they rarely endorse legislation. But the R.N.C. was making a major policy recommendation. “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” Comprehensive immigration reform sounds vague, but in Congress it had a specific meaning: a deal between Democrats and Republicans that included guest-worker programs, heightened border security, and amnesty or a pathway to citizenship for many of the eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. By July, a bipartisan group of eight senators, including McCain, who believed he lost the 2008 race partly because of the Party’s poor showing among nonwhites, and Rubio, who was preparing to run for President, had pushed a comprehensive immigration-reform bill through the Senate with fourteen Republican votes. Some of the consultants who wrote the Autopsy Report started laying the groundwork for the Presidential campaign of Jeb Bush, who, like Rubio, used the report as a campaign blueprint. Then the immigration bill moved to the House, where a faction of conservative Republicans has been in a state of rebellion against its leadership since the election of 2010, when the Tea Party backlash against Obama helped Republicans win the House. If there was a single moment when the Party of Paul Ryan began to turn into the Party of Donald Trump, it may have been July 10, 2013, the day House Republicans held a special meeting in the basement of the Capitol to debate whether they should take up immigration reform. Paul Ryan stood before one microphone and Tom Cotton, a thirty-six-year-old freshman congressman from Arkansas, stood before another. Ryan, who spoke first, argued for passing a version of the Senate bill, saying that reforming the immigration system would strengthen the economy, supplying U.S. companies with a steady number of immigrants to take jobs that other Americans didn’t want. Cotton, who is tall and scrawny and loves partisan combat, delivered an unexpectedly sharp rebuke. He told me that he condemned the Senate bill for giving priority to “the illegal immigrant population” over the plight of “natural-born citizens and naturalized citizens who are out of work” and warned his colleagues that Republican voters were against immigration reform. Cotton was eying a Senate seat in deep-red Arkansas, where voters were strongly opposed to it. He led the House opposition to the Senate bill, and Boehner, then the Speaker, decided not to bring the bill to the House floor. Cotton, who has said that he would not rule out becoming Trump’s running mate, had a modest upbringing in the small town of Dardanelle before attending Harvard and Harvard Law School. He spent two years working as a law clerk in Houston and as a lawyer in Washington before joining the Army. In June, 2006, he sent an e-mail to the Times from Iraq, criticizing the reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau for an article they had written exposing a Treasury Department program to thwart terrorist financing. Cotton called for the reporters to be jailed for interfering with security operations and violating espionage laws. The Times didn’t publish the letter, but it was posted on a conservative blog, and turned the young soldier into a minor hero on the right. Cotton told me that the Autopsy Report, the Senate, and Paul Ryan had it all wrong. “There’s no issue on which élites in both parties are more disconnected from the American people—in both parties—than immigration.” The conclusions of the Autopsy Report have become an article of faith among the consultant and donor class, but Cotton laid out an alternative argument, citing data from exit polls and even margins of error. George W. Bush won his historic forty per cent of the Hispanic vote in 2004 almost without a mention of immigration. John McCain made immigration reform a centerpiece of his 2008 Presidential campaign and received thirty-one per cent of the Hispanic vote. Four years later, Romney talked about “self-deportation” and won twenty-seven per cent. “It didn’t seem to hurt him nearly as much as you might’ve expected,” Cotton said. “So, whatever it is that we can do to appeal to Hispanic voters, it would seem, is independent of what we do on immigration.” The corollary to this view of the effects of an anti-immigration platform is that Republicans can appeal to Hispanics with an economic message. “If you’re a first-generation Guatemalan working in northwest Arkansas, legal, you’re working for Tyson or something, maybe you’re working for a landscaping company or something, maybe your wife is a nanny or something, you have the same concerns as the white guy living down the road from you,” Cotton said. “By and large, you want a job that pays a decent wage and some benefits and some prospect for advancement. You want safety on your streets so you don’t have to worry about crime against your family. You don’t want radical terrorists to blow up the mall when you go shopping for back-to-school clothes for your kids.” Henry Olsen, a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who is writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, argues that the Autopsy Report’s recommendations badly understated the severity of the G.O.P.’s crisis. “The establishment approach to overcoming this problem is to do a little bit of tarting up, put on a nicer image, say you care a little bit more, talk more about poverty, and people will move over to your side and endorse your core agenda,” Olsen said. He cited polls showing that Latinos and millennials support Obamacare and a larger role for the federal government. “They like a whole bunch of things that the standard Republican platform is not for.” The early favorites in the 2016 Republican field were Autopsy Report candidates, especially Jeb Bush. Several of those favorites, including Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker, were even mentioned in the report as models for the Party’s future. Then Trump jumped into the race and promised to build a wall to keep out Mexican rapists and provide more, not fewer, government services.
On May 13th, the day after the Trump-Ryan summit, nine of the twenty Republicans who chair committees in the House released a statement pledging fealty to Trump and asking “all Americans to support him.” The man who organized the effort was Tom Price, the chairman of the Budget Committee. Price is a sixty-one-year-old orthopedic surgeon who represents a wealthy district in suburban Atlanta. In the Georgia primary, Marco Rubio won Price’s district, one of only two in the state not captured by Trump. Price is close to Ryan, and he is frequently mentioned as a candidate for a House leadership position. Price has been committed to cutting taxes for the very wealthy, supporting international free-trade deals, and making deep cuts in Medicare and Social Security. How could he get behind Trump, who, in one of the few TV ads he has run this year, promised to “save Social Security and Medicare without cuts”? Like others in the Party who have made the endorsement, Price seems to have convinced himself that Trump will be malleable, and that Price will have more leverage than Republicans who wait. “I think we will work hand and glove, I really do,” he told me on May 16th. “When I talk to people who work closely with Trump, what they tell me is that behind closed doors he’s one of the best listeners they’ve ever worked for or with in their life. Which is kind of counterintuitive given what some of his public persona is.” “I’m halfway to my goal.” Price has turned into something of a Trump super fan, akin to Chris Christie. He even compared Trump to Reagan. He pointed out that the Reagan realignment took a few decades. “It took a Goldwater race in 1964 and then a Nixon appreciating that the Republican Party had a constituency broader than what had been conventional in the past,” he said. “And then the philosophical ideological nature of Reagan bringing together the three large groups”—fiscal, social, and national-security conservatives—“to prevail in 1980.” He added, “Mr. Trump is absolutely unconventional in how he came to this role and to this position.” Although the current upheaval “takes some digesting, both emotionally and intellectually,” given the state of the Party “that’s what absolutely must occur.” In early May, as the margin in the polls separating Trump from Hillary Clinton tightened, more and more Republicans sounded like Price. The so-called Never Trump movement struggled to find a third-party alternative, after prominent anti-Trump Republicans, such as Mitt Romney and Senator Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, declined to run. Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, one of the last Republican moderates from New England remaining in Congress, supported Jeb Bush in the Presidential primaries. When the choice effectively came down to Ted Cruz and Trump, she had a slight preference for Trump. “With Ted, I’ve seen over and over again his playing to outside groups rather than trying to work with his colleagues,” she told me on May 6th. “Those are words I probably should not say, since he’s going to come back and be one of my colleagues.” She said, “But I think, because I know Ted Cruz, and I don’t know and have never met Donald Trump, that with Donald Trump I hope he can minimize his weaknesses, change his approach, knock off the gratuitous personal insults, and draw on his strengths.” Collins agrees with Price that Trump’s victory signals a historically significant political shift in the Party. Maine’s paper mills have been closing in the past few years, and she has become more skeptical about free trade than she used to be. “There’s a feeling that’s very strong in my state,” she said, that trade deals have benefitted large corporations and hurt working people. “I understand completely why that resonates.” Republicans argue that free trade lowers consumer prices. “Well, if you no longer have a job, lower consumer prices don’t really do you a whole lot of good. You’d rather have the job.” She was unhappy with Ryan’s austere budgets, especially those which cut assistance to workers affected by free trade. Collins told me that she was still not ready to endorse Trump, and asked me to call her before publication “if things change dramatically.” She said, jokingly, “If he says, ‘On Day One I’m going to drop a bomb on North Korea,’ ” she wanted a chance to respond. “I mean, with him, you just don’t know.” Other Republicans have found the Trump candidacy more difficult to come to terms with. “I’m still in the first stage of grief—denial—like a lot of my colleagues,” Jeff Flake, a senator from Arizona, told me on May 4th. Flake, who has a strong libertarian streak, outlined the choices he was considering: “Find a way to get behind the nominee, or say ‘Still Never Trump’ and look for a third-party candidate, or go into the booth and make your own choice, or embrace Hillary, and say, ‘We’ll fight this four years from now.’ ” He went on, “Frankly, I don’t know where I am.” Several days later, his senior colleague in the state, John McCain, chastised members of Congress who did not support the nominee. Most Republicans could not imagine supporting a Democrat. “But, by the same token, trying to imagine supporting Donald Trump—a Donald Trump that doesn’t back away from some of the positions that he’s taken—I can’t fathom that, either,” Flake said. I asked Flake what he hoped would happen in the Trump campaign. “I guess the dream would be for Trump to get to a mike today and say, ‘I was just kidding on all this stuff!’ ” he said. He laughed, then continued, “If he were to say, ‘No, I really can’t leave my business. I’m going to let the Convention choose somebody else’—now, that would be a dream.”
Before supporting Trump, most Republicans must overcome doubts about his temperament, his ideology, his reckless statements, his questionable respect for the Constitution, and his potential to repel a generation or more of young and nonwhite voters. But, late last month, former Trump skeptics and those who are holding out the possibility of support seemed to unite around the belief that defeating Hillary Clinton is more important than any long-term effects Trump may have on the Republican Party. Prominent House members who have been frustrated by Obama’s willingness to use executive power on issues like immigration saw Trump as a useful instrument. Senator Collins and others were hopeful that Trump would somehow shed his most offensive behavior. Even people like Flake, who found supporting Trump unfathomable, wouldn’t rule it out. Charlie Dent told me that he remained unhappy with Trump’s “lack of policy specificity, and the general tone and tenor of the campaign, and the never-ending statements that offend P.O.W.s, people with disabilities, Mexicans, Muslims, women, of course, the David Duke debacle”—a reference to Trump’s initial refusal to reject the support of the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. Nevertheless, Dent said, “One thing I’ve learned in politics is never say never. I think that’s probably good advice for Donald Trump: Never say what you’ll never do.” Still, there is a minority of the Party’s officeholders who have concluded that the only principled response to Trump’s candidacy is to declare that they will never support him. The most prominent example in the Senate is forty-four-year-old Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, who wrote an award-winning doctoral dissertation at Yale on conservative coalitions from the nineteen-fifties through Reagan’s election. From 2010 until 2014, he was the president of Midland University, a small liberal-arts school in his home town of Fremont, Nebraska. Sasse served briefly in the Bush Administration, but for most of his career he was a management consultant, who spent more than a decade at Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey, advising large companies that were grappling with rapid technological change. “I’m drawn to stuff that’s broken,” he told me. “That’s how I ended up here.” The Senate race was his first political campaign. In February, Sasse posted an open letter on Facebook in which he described the First Amendment as “the heartbeat of the American Constitution,” and listed the ways that Trump had threatened the American idea: his attack on libel laws, his support for the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, his praise of Putin, his call for an anti-Trump conservative journalist to be banned from television and fined by the F.C.C., and his push for “closing areas” of the Internet. “A presidential candidate who boasts about what he’ll do during his ‘reign’ and refuses to condemn the K.K.K. cannot lead a conservative movement in America,” Sasse wrote, believing that other Republicans would join him. On May 4th, when Trump became the presumptive nominee, Sasse posted again on Facebook. “I’ve ignored my phone most of today, but the voice-mail is overflowing with party bosses and politicos telling me that ‘although Trump is terrible,’ we ‘have to’ support him, ‘because the only choice is Trump or Hillary,’ ” he wrote. Arguing that “there are dumpster fires in my town more popular than these two ‘leaders,’ ” Sasse called for a third-party alternative, but, despite pleas from the Never Trump movement, he refused to run himself. “I have little kids, and I’m an engaged dad,” he told me. When I sat down with Sasse three weeks later, he was sick of talking about Trump. But he continued to describe both Trump and Clinton as unacceptable candidates. Many of his colleagues see Trump as “a lesser-of-two-evils choice,” Sasse said. “I think if it’s merely a lesser of two evils then the American experiment has already lost. We live in a civic republic, and you have to be recognizing that voting is also an act of signalling about the ideal, about what America should be in twenty-five years. I don’t want more candidates like Donald Trump. So I can’t vote for him just because he’s not Hillary Clinton.” The most prominent anti-Trump Republican in the House of Representatives is Reid Ribble, of Wisconsin, and he is retiring this year. Ribble, the owner of a commercial roofing company, was an exemplar of the Tea Party class of 2010. Fed up with Obama’s stimulus and health-care policies, he ran for office and defeated a Democratic incumbent. Despite the Tea Party’s pugnacious reputation, Ribble, who attended divinity school, is soft-spoken, and is known in the House for his speeches about improving discourse between the two parties. He speaks earnestly of “Wisconsin nice,” and is proud that the state voted against Trump in its primary. “Everything that I’ve been preaching about for five years he just blew away,” Ribble told me on May 16th. “He appealed to the very worst, most base instincts of who we are as a people.” Ribble said that Trump was a direct threat to the low-tax, free-trade, entitlement-reform agenda that helped Republicans win the House. “What Trump is proposing is an economic disaster,” he said. But his greatest concern was Trump’s character. “Galatians 5 says, ‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, meekness, kindness, patience, and self-control’ ”—those are “the things that matter to me,” he said, and in his view Trump didn’t exhibit any of them. I asked Ribble what advice he had for Paul Ryan, also from Wisconsin, who was the most senior Republican still withholding support for Trump. He reminded me that a few days earlier Ryan had declared that he wanted “a standard-bearer who bears our standards.” Ribble realized that Ryan, as the Speaker of the House and the chairman of the Republican National Convention, was in a difficult situation, but “you need to go back to the core principles that give you your own center in life,” he said. “I just spoke about that verse in the Bible. Paul Ryan holds those same values.”
Two weeks later, on June 2nd, Ryan made his announcement that he would vote for Trump, in an op-ed on the Web site of his home town paper, the Janesville Gazette. He downplayed the policy differences between them, arguing that “we have more common ground than disagreement,” and adopted Price’s theory that Trump could advance the House’s agenda. Close readers of the column pointed out that Ryan never used the word “endorse.” “We’re not playing word games,” his spokesman clarified in a tweet. “Feel free to call it an endorsement.” Ryan might have hoped that his statement would be overshadowed by a speech that Hillary Clinton delivered that day, condemning, in scathing terms, Trump’s foreign policy. Instead, the news turned to Trump’s comments about Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge overseeing the case about whether Trump University was a fraudulent scheme. Trump repeatedly described the judge as “a Mexican” whose background made him unfit to preside over the case. (Curiel was born in Indiana to Mexican-immigrant parents.) Asked in one interview whether a Muslim judge would be similarly incapable of being fair, Trump said, “That would be possible. Absolutely.” Not only had Ryan won nothing from Trump before endorsing him; now he had to respond to one of the most incendiary comments of the campaign. Trump’s attack on Curiel, Ryan said, was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” He strained to explain that, despite the racism, he was still backing Trump. At one point, Trump’s candidacy seemed to represent an ideological challenge to the Party. His views on taxes, the size and role of government, immigration, and trade suggested that the Party could offer its struggling middle-class voters more than austere budgets, deregulation, and upper-income tax cuts. Not so long ago, it was popular in Republican circles to talk about “makers” and “takers,” and to note disapprovingly how many Americans—the takers—don’t pay federal income tax. In March, Ryan apologized for using such language. “There was a time that I would talk about a difference between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits,” he said. “But, as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized something. I realized that I was wrong.” Ryan’s speech was reported as an implicit rebuke to Trump’s campaign rhetoric, but it was also an indication that Ryan was moving closer to Trump, at least on the broad issue of being less hostile to the welfare state. Other ambitious politicians, like Tom Cotton, have turned to the issues that Trump has emphasized. “The people who are truly hurting in today’s economy are working-class Americans,” Cotton said. He told me a story about a woman he met at a factory in Texarkana. “She sure as hell pays the payroll tax, and she pays our state income tax,” he said. “And she pays a property tax on her small home, and she pays excise taxes every time she picks up a pack of beer or a pack of cigarettes, and she pays sales tax every time she goes to buy groceries.” Cotton has taken some steps in Trump’s direction with the way he talks about immigration and taxes. Ryan, who rose to prominence in the House by forcing his colleagues to support politically perilous cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and assistance to the most vulnerable, has lately tried to highlight anti-poverty solutions and some government programs, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, that he believes work well. Neither politician is challenging the core elements of the Party’s reigning economic philosophy, but Trump’s popularity could change that. Goldwater alienated as many voters as he attracted, and his opposition to civil-rights legislation turned generations of African-Americans away from the Republican Party. But by 1968 Richard Nixon had figured out how to borrow the more popular aspects of Goldwater’s agenda while shedding his more radical ideas, to win a majority.Ospreys team to play Glasgow By Ospreys Rugby | 07/05/2015
The Ospreys team for the PRO12 game against Glasgow at the Liberty Stadium, on Friday 8th May 2015, KO 7.35pm, is as follows:
15 Dan Evans
14 Jeff Hassler
13 Ben John
12 Josh Matavesi
11 Eli Walker
10 Dan Biggar
9 Rhys Webb
1 Nicky Smith
2 Scott Baldwin
3 Aaron Jarvis
4 Tyler Ardron
5 Alun Wyn Jones (Capt)
6 James King
7 Justin Tipuric
8 Dan Baker
REPLACEMENTS
16 Sam Parry
17 Marc Thomas
18 Dmitri Arhip
19 Rory Thornton
20 Dan Lydiate
21 Tom Habberfield
22 Sam Davies
23 Jonathan Spratt
The following players were unavailable for selection through injury:
Ashley Beck - Ankle
Rynier Bernardo – Knee
Ryan Bevington - Groin
Andrew Bishop – Back
Tom Grabham - Abdomen
Cai Griffiths - Bicep
Ross Jones – Ankle
Aisea Natoga – Knee ligaments
Lloyd Peers - Pectoral
Head Coach, Steve Tandy, commented:
“We’re all really looking forward to this one, it should be a great contest and the kind of game that you want to be involved in as a player, coach, or supporter. There’s going to be a good crowd at the Liberty and they can play their part from first whistle to last.
“This group is still maturing, still growing, but we have come a long way this season. We’re really proud to be the only Welsh side confirmed for the Champions Cup and to be involved in the play-offs, but we know that there is a hell of a lot of work still to be done. The first challenge is a very good Glasgow side that has had the better of us recently, and if we are able to put in the required level of performance on Friday night then we could be going to Connacht targeting a potential home semi-final.
“We aren’t getting ahead of ourselves though. We know how tough it’s going to be and what a quality side Glasgow are. After the Blues game there was a pretty tough review process because as well as the obvious good things there was a lot that we weren’t happy with.
“That’s the key really, never being happy with where you are but always striving for improvement, pursuing excellence. That’s always the expectation within this environment, and that has been very much the focus in our preparations for Friday night. We need to be more accurate, more clinical, and we need everybody to know their roles and how they fit into the plan. If we have that, and if we prepare thoroughly then we can look to put together a performance that could put us where we need to be to achieve our goal on Friday.”
Forthcoming Fixtures
Sat 16 May – 3.00pm KO – Connacht v Ospreys – PRO12
22/23 May – PRO12 Semi Finals
Sat 30 May – PRO12 Final – 6.30pm KOPresident Obama may currently be calling on the states to review their respective “stand your ground” gun laws, but he wasn’t always so opposed to the right-to-carry rule.
In 2004, while a senator in Illinois, he co-sponsored legislation that allowed for the same rights.
The pertinent legislation was SB 2386, amending the criminal code of 1961. It was introduced in the 93rd General Assembly session and passed into law on July 28, 2004.
The text summary read: “Provides that it is an affirmative defense to a violation of a municipal ordinance that prohibits, regulates or restricts the private ownership of firearms if the individual who is charged with the violation used the firearm in an act of self-defense or defense of another. Effective immediately.”
The Illinois General Assembly website indicates then-Sen. Obama signed on as a co-sponsor on March 25, 2004.
Fast-forward to 2013, post-acquittal of Florida resident George Zimmerman, and Mr. Obama is now denouncing the very same laws he once supported.
Last Friday he said, the Illinois Review reported: “I think it may be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations, confrontations and tragedies as we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations.
“I know that there’s been commentary about the fact that stand your ground laws in Florida were not used as defense of the case. On the other hand, if we’re sending a message as society in our communities that someone who is armed has a right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from the situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?”
Mr. Obama then posed the question: If Trayvon Martin had been armed, would he have been legally justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman if he had felt threatened?
“And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws,” he said.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Fashion model Junko Amo made headlines on Aug. 15, 2002, when she initiated a visit to controversial Yasukuni Shrine with a group of some 180 people she met via 2channel, Japan’s biggest Internet forum.
Amo, now 35, said she developed strong feelings for the shrine after visiting Okinawa in her early 20s and read accounts left by members of the Himeyuri Gakutotai (Lily Corps), a nursing unit for the Imperial Japanese Army, who died or committed suicide during the battle of Okinawa in 1945.
“I was moved by the women who were around my age or younger and courageously fought and died,” the model said. “I wanted to pay respect to and recompense them and anyone who died in the war by visiting Yasukuni.”
The visits have since become part of a regular routine. For her, going to Yasukuni is no different than visiting a shrine or temple near her home. But at Yasukuni, she feels the power of some 2.4 million war dead who she thinks may help her whenever big events take place in her life.
When she got married in December, she visited the contentious shrine with her nationalist husband, Eiji Kosaka, a member of the Arakawa Ward Assembly in Tokyo. The local politician caused a stir by landing on the disputed Senkaku Islands in August 2012.
Amo is far from alone in visiting the shrine. Despite its controversial links to the war, officials at the Shinto institution told The Japan Times that visitors have been on the rise over the past several years, a trend especially notable for the number of young people. The shrine registered 305,000 visitors from New Year’s Day to Jan. 3, up 25,000 from 2013.
“The Japanese people feel World War II was not a good war by any means and know that we should not repeat that tragedy,” said Shiro Akazawa, a professor emeritus at Ritsumeikan University. “But it does not necessarily mean the general public feels it was responsible for the war.”
Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead along with several Class-A war criminals, illustrates how the public is struggling to come to terms with history. While some like Amo view Yasukuni as holy ground and a bastion of patriotism, others consider it a symbol of Japanese militarism for the feverish spiritual role it played in fueling Japan’s war of aggression.
Even though Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to the shrine in December was criticized internationally, domestic public opinion was split over its legitimacy, mostly because the shrine glamorizes the Pacific War and claims it was conducted in self-defense.
A survey by the liberal Asahi Shimbun in December found strong support among young people for Abe, who has said he does not fully support the 1995 apology by then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama that stated Japan waged a war of aggression. The poll found that 33 percent of respondents in their 20s and 26 percent in their 30s believe World War II was not a war of aggression.
The survey also found that 60 percent of respondents in their 20s said they supported Abe’s visit, as did 59 percent of those in their 30s. Asked whether they were aware Class-A war criminals are enshrined at Yasukuni, 43 percent of those in their 20s said they were unaware of the fact.
The Tokyo gubernatorial election last Sunday also underscored this rightward trend in the younger generation.
According to the Asahi’s exit polls, former Air Self-Defense Force Gen. Toshio Tamogami finished second among those in their 20s and 30s, trailing only Yoichi Masuzoe, who won on the strength of his endorsement by the ruling camp.
The campaign platform for Tamogami, who was drummed out of the ASDF after he published an essay that said Japan did not wage a war of aggression, was in line with Abe’s stance, and he publicly endorsed the conservative prime minister’s visit to Yasukuni.
“I don’t think Japan was the only nation deserving of blame,” said Hajime Saito, 28, who showed up for one of Tamogami’s stump speeches. “I am going to visit Yasukuni after this to renew my resolution for peace.”
Views of history like these might be attributed to the decline of the older generation, the people who lived through and remember the horror and destruction of the war. This, combined with the lack of a unified state evaluation of individual incidents from the war, is degrading history education in the schools.
There have been numerous court battles and other disputes over how textbooks should treat the war. In one case, the education ministry in 2007 made an about-face and decreed that new high school textbooks would no longer acknowledge that the Imperial Japanese Army was responsible for the atrocities documented against the civilian population in Okinawa.
Although the education ministry says the current curriculum should teach that Japan inflicted serious harm to Asian countries, the curriculum also says there are many historical aspects that are difficult to evaluate because some fundamental evidence remains classified and there are differing interpretations.
As a result, there are textbooks with differing interpretations of the war being used in junior high schools, including some that downplay crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese military.
Yuko Sanami, author of a book called “Joshi to Aikoku” (“Women and Patriotism”), a collection of anecdotes about women who engage in nationalistic activities like regular pilgrimages to Yasukuni Shrine, said many young people feel they weren’t given a complete accounting of the war in school.
The anchorwoman of Japanese Culture Channel Sakura, a conservative Internet TV site known for its nationalistic flavor, said she doesn’t remember learning in junior high school why Japan had to go to war. Instead, her teacher focused on the atrocities committed by Japanese troops.
“Many women are worried about the future of Japan’s history education and how their children perceive Japan’s history,” said Sanami, who noted that she learned about its other aspects by interacting with former soldiers she met while collecting the remains of soldiers who died overseas — her lifework.
“Yet as for visiting Yasukuni, I feel it is really difficult to come up with a peaceful solution for everybody, including the families of the war dead and people in Asian countries,” she said.
Educators also say students don’t have an incentive to take elective courses on modern Japanese history — meaning from the Meiji Era, which started in 1868 — because that critical period plays only a limited role in the all-important university entrance examinations.
Taking Japanese history isn’t mandatory in high school, either.
As a result, it is estimated that more than 30 percent of high school students graduate without taking a Japanese history class covering any period, leaving them only with whatever they learned in junior high school. Alarmed by this, Abe said he would consider making Japanese history a mandatory subject, noting that countries like China teach wartime history as a part of “patriotic education.”
While the media has highlighted Japan’s drift to the right since Abe took office in 2012, experts say the public has been slowly moving in that direction since the early 1990s, after the bubble economy imploded and left Japan stuck in a prolonged economic malaise.
“The wealth gap has become very wide among the Japanese people. There was much frustration, and the identity of being Japanese was lost during that time while China and South Korea started to emerge as economic powers,” said Tetsuya Takahashi, a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo.
Takahashi also noted that it was around this time that Korean “comfort women” started suing the Japanese government for redress and an apology for forcing them to provide sex to Imperial Japanese soldiers during the war.
The Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which promotes nationalist views, was then launched in 1996. The group criticizes history education in postwar Japan as self-deprecating, downplays the 1937 Nanjing Massacre and denies the accounts of South Korean and other nationals on the comfort women issue.
“Such a view had been in the minority and the media did not really pay attention to it before the 1990s. Yet it has gathered more support since the mid-1990s,” Takahashi said. “Now it is culminating with the intensifying territorial disputes with China and South Korea.”
As a youth in the ’90s, Amo, the model, became frustrated with the way Japan had to keep apologizing for the war even though it had ended decades ago. She said she read all of the books she could find at the library and bookstores on the war, but |
getting bitten.
Ticks don't jump or fly, but climb on to your clothes or skin if you brush against something they're on. They then bite into the skin and start to feed on your blood.
Image copyright Lyme Disease Action
It's thought only a small proportion of ticks carry the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, so being bitten doesn't mean you'll definitely be infected.
Pets can also bring ticks home in their fur.
Source: NHS Choices
Matt Dawson has now joined forces with The Big Tick Project, which looks to raise awareness about the dangers of ticks and tick-borne disease in the UK.
Tied to researchers at University of Bristol, the project has conducted the largest ever study of ticks in dogs. They studied 14,000 dogs from 1,400 vets across the UK and found almost one-third were carrying a tick.
TV presenter and naturalist Chris Packham is working with the project to raise awareness among pet owners and vets:
"It is really important that pet owners understand how they can treat their pets for ticks and reduce the risk of the further spread of these horrible, debilitating and potentially dangerous diseases to the UK," he said.
The journey to recovery
After multiple heart operations and 18 months of treatment, Matt no longer has the disease.
But it still affects his life: "I'm still on medication and its going to take a lot of time for the heart to fully recover.
"This is not something that should be looked at like, 'oh it's only a tick, a tick is a bit like a flea, its fine!'," he said.
"These ticks carry some really quite potent, serious bacteria and they can cause you a lot of problems. Raising awareness of them is imperative."
Image copyright Supplied Image caption Matt, seen here with his family, has had to change the way he exercises
Get news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morningLast week Ontario Superior Court judge Michael Dambrot overturned a ruling that found York University graduate student Mustafa Ururyar guilty of sexually assaulting fellow classmate, Mandi Gray. Ururyar has been granted a new trial, which wasn’t exactly unexpected as Gray herself had expressed frustration at the trial judge’s unorthodox ruling.
READ MORE: Toronto man appealing sexual assault conviction, claims judge was biased
Dambrot made a point to criticize trial judge Marvin Zuker’s decision, which was unusually long and peppered with references to feminist texts such as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
WATCH: Ontario judge overturns conviction of Mustafa Ururyar
Speaking with Manisha Krishnan of Vice back in September of last year, Gray noted that the unorthodox ruling of the trial judge, coupled with the unconventional measure of having of Ururyar pay $8,000 for her legal fees would make a successful appeal that much more likely.
In a strict legal sense, Dambrot was doing what he – and many other legal scholars – thought was correct in granting the appeal and a new trial. However, this entire ordeal demonstrates the need for reform in our justice system as it pertains to sexual assaults, specifically, the need for an alternative to the criminal system.
One possible option for victims of sexual assault is to opt for an alternative dispute mechanism known as restorative justice. Legal scholars have been putting this idea to the forefront for quite some time now, including recently by Osgoode Hall Law School professor Daniel Del Gobbo in the Toronto Star.
READ MORE: Dal Dentistry restorative justice participants speak out for 1st time
Another alternative to the criminal system would be the civil system. Before you roll your eyes at this notion or get angry about the civil system not being an appropriate venue for a crime as heinous as sexual assault, it’s worth considering the very obvious advantages civil courts could provide over criminal courts.
One of the biggest hurdles for sexual assault complainants to overcome in the criminal system is the incredibly onerous burden of proof. Beyond a reasonable doubt is incredibly difficult to surmount in cases wherein little to no forensic evidence may exist, this is only compounded by the fact that victim testimony is seldom enough to convict.
This was made explicitly clear in the highly publicized trial against former CBC personality Jian Ghomeshi, wherein Judge Horkins asserted in his ruling, “There is no legal bar to convicting on the uncorroborated evidence of a single witness. However, one of the challenges for the prosecution in this case is that the allegations against Mr. Ghomeshi are supported by nothing in addition to the complainant’s word. There is no other evidence to look to determine the truth. There is no tangible evidence. There is no DNA. There is no ‘smoking gun.’ There is only the sworn evidence of each complainant, standing on its own, to be measured against a very exacting standard of proof.”
READ MORE: Sex assault victim says courts are making victims afraid to come forward
In a criminal system, where serious jail time is a possibility, this has its obvious advantages. But in a civil system with a lowered burden of proof, the penalties would also be much lower, with jail time effectively being rendered obsolete. There are certainly advocates for sexual assault survivors out there who would consider the lack of jail time an incredible miscarriage of justice, and that line of reasoning is understandable, but choosing the avenue in which to pursue a sexual assault should ultimately be up to the individual complainant. In an ideal system, the Crown would consult with the complainant to determine the best venue.
The adversarial nature of our criminal justice system also ensures that rape myths will endure, given that defense attorneys inevitably rely on them in order to inject reasonable doubt. Further, our own societal preconceptions of how a victim of sexual assault should act both before and after the assault, as well as the false notion that the majority of sexual assault allegations are false, end up bleeding into the criminal system.
Before rising for the summer, the House of Commons passed a bill put forward by former interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose that will require judges to undergo training in sexual assault law, which should alleviate some of these issues, but shouldn’t we be giving victims of sexual assault multiple tools and venues?
After all, justice can come in many forms, and there is no reason to ignore the potential and possibility of finding redress through the civil system.
Supriya Dwivedi is host of The Morning Show on Toronto’s Talk Radio AM640 and a columnist for Global News.William Fichtner Possibly Returning
Somewhere between 50-150 percent chance. — Paul T. Scheuring (@paultscheuring) March 12, 2018
Script for Episode 6.01 Complete
If you must know, I finished the 601 script. — Paul T. Scheuring (@paultscheuring) March 12, 2018
It’s unclear if the series, which stars Wentworth Miller, Dominic Purcell, and Sarah Wayne Callies, will be completely revamped for this new go-round or the current cast will just return for a sixth season. Back in December, Purcell wrote on Instagram that season 6 was “in the works,” so the latter seems more likely.
Source: Entertainment Weekly UPDATE: Following the panel, EW pressed Fox Chairman and CEO Gary Newman for more information. “No, it would not be an entirely new cast,” he said. “It’s very early at this stage. Paul Scheuring had an idea for another season, and he came and pitched it to Michael and the team. They were excited about it, but it’s super early. We haven’t seen any written materials at all.”It’s unclear if the series, which stars Wentworth Miller, Dominic Purcell, and Sarah Wayne Callies, will be completely revamped for this new go-round or the current cast will just return for a sixth season. Back in December, Purcell wrote on Instagram that season 6 was “in the works,” so the latter seems more likely.
Fox entertainment president Michael Thorn says a new version of Prison Break “is in the early stages of development.” No other info to share right now. #TCA18 — Jason Lynch (@jasonlynch) January 4, 2018
I'm not saying season 6 will never happen, but it has not been green lit by Fox at this time. Sorry to be such a bummer, guys. — Prison Break Writers (@PBWritersRoom) December 14, 2017
One of our favorite things about Dominic is how much he loves #PrisonBreak and how excited he gets about anything PB related. We wouldn't have it any other way. — Prison Break Writers (@PBWritersRoom) December 14, 2017
@prisonbreak #prisonbreak 6. In the works. A post shared by Dominicpurcell (@dominicpurcell) on Dec 12, 2017 at 7:15pm PST
It's unclear right now but Season 6 could either be officially happening or just be in development. We'll update when FOX confirms but please share your thoughts in the comments below.T-ara member Qri made a decision to turn down the offer of being in Japan's Fuji TV drama special, "Rhythm and Police" (Odoru-Daisousasen)."Rhythm and Police 4" is a Japanese film for the drama that will be broadcast on TV in September. The producers were looking for a good-looking foreigner who was skilled in Japanese, and considered Qri first. "Rhythm and Police 3" starred Joo Yeongin, Oda Yuji, Ito Atsushi and Uchida Yuki.According to officials, at the very start Qri was offered a big role in the Japanese film. Due to Qri's busy schedule with T-ara, she was highly regretful to have to say no to the offer and thus given the role to a fellow actress in her company, Lee Haein.Lee Haein shot to fame in tvN's "Roller-coaster". Now she'll be debuting in a girl group this coming May with seven members including actresses Choi Sooeun, Hwang Jihyun, and supermodel Kim Hyeji.Source: E-dailyTranslated by: Nathaniel @ DiademRobert Pugh, also known as Pughy is the official caster of the British structure Gfinity. He regularly streams many StarCraft II competitions on his personal channel and has recently become the coach of the TCM-Gaming team, which is composed of the two Korean players First and YoDa.
In order to know him better and hear about his future projects, we have had the pleasure to spend some time with him in the audio interview here below.
You can follow Pughy on Twitter and Facebook and watch his streams on his Twitch.tv channel.
Below the interview and its timeline, you can read a transcription.
x
[M] Corto : Hello everybody, Robert Pugh, also known as Pughy is a British StarCraft II caster that you have probably seen recently, since he has been casting many different tournaments.
He is also organizing his own tournament, the Pughcraft Invitational, the second edition of this tournament took place recently, and Rain won the final very convincingly against Trap.
To know him better and discuss about his future projects, it is my pleasure to have him with me today, so hello Pughy!
Pughy : Hello
To begin this interview, I wanted to speak a little bit about your beginnings in StarCraft II, and as I recall, I think you started as a player. You’ve played in different teams, and attended several British online competitions.
I found an interview that you gave in May 2012 during the Insomnia 45, I think it was James Banks who did the interview, and at that time you said that the thing you enjoyed the most was playing and I wanted to ask you: today you don’t play anymore competitively, I wanted to know what has changed since this offline competition, and is it something that you miss?
Yes, I definitely miss it. As a whole, back then I was very competitive and I focused on playing so I was a lot better that I am now. I still, as a caster, try to play as much as I can, because I believe that you have to be good at the game to be able to teach people, and sadly I really don’t have enough time. I was former, say, close to Grandmaster, I was playing Grandmaster level players.
And these days I’m around low-Master to high-Diamond. And I’ve also had to play other games for past projects, played a lot of Counter-Strike last few months, which takes me away from StarCraft. And I love playing other races, I like to play Unranked Terran and Zerg. My main race is Protoss, but at the moment I’m probably better with Terran, as a whole. I like to mix it up and also it helps as a caster to understand all the races.
It’s sad it just takes away from being able to focus just on StarCraft Protoss and playing competitively. Also, I’ve gone into the habit of trying to cast tournaments as opposed to play them, so if I go to mentality to play them, I end up missing an opportunity to cast them instead.
I don’t know if it’s related to your story, but everybody knows that StarCraft II is a very frustrating game, and there are a lot of European players at the moment who have a hard time to find motivation to keep training seriously, some of them are even considering switching to other games, like Heroes of the Storm, some did it already. How do you explain this trend today and do you think things will get better in 2015?
It’s an interesting trend, it’s kind of follow down from the "StarCraft II daedgaem". In my opinion, Swarmhost was a big catalyst for that because it was a very boring style and felt impossible to beat because it has the most cost efficiency in the game, so it feels somewhat unfair to the other races.
I guess some people to an extent realized that there’s not as much opportunity to go far or make up a good career of themselves. With esports, where I know there is a lot of people or personalities, gamers, pros, they’ll kind of hop wagon, they’ll change wagon to the next to be one of the first people to a new game so when it becomes popular, they already have an established fanbase like we’ve seen at the start of games like Hearthstone, StarCraft 2 in the beta,...
I think it’s a conflict of that and we should to an extent see it with Overwatch, which is going to be a very exciting game, and of course at the same time we do have Legacy of the Void which will have a high impact especially, like I am super excited to see some of the core design changes that they will be bringing. I think that will bring a lot of stability for the future of StarCraft II.
Do you think that during next year there will be a couple of things that Blizzard could do to motivate these players even further to continue playing the game?
Yes, the most requested feature has been said to be brought into the game which is automated tournaments. And that will bring a lot of hype because it’s automated so it’s nice and easy, and one of the hardest thing is that StarCraft II is a very frustrating game because you can play a thirty minutes game and lose because you move command into the opponent army and you can literally lose with a silly mistake like that when you are ahead and it’s incredibly frustrating.
And on top of that, it’s a very lonely game because it’s isolated, it’s a 1v1, so you don’t exactly get that, said, more support from teammates that you had in LoL or CS. They share that feeling with you, so there’s a lot of isolation and people I guess in extent they have a hard time get their anger or frustration out. For example, I know Miniraser (who is currently teamless, former Fnatic) used to be quite an angry player, and he’ll admit this but he started running, he’d go for like 5-10 minutes joggs. Just something gets your energy adrenaline out of yourself, it’s a good way to calm yourself down.
Let’s switch to your other passion, which is casting, other times you have become one of the most regular StarCraft II caster that we can see on different competitions, you have covered a lot of them: last week you covered the DreamHack as a community caster, we’ve also seen you a lot during the Gfinity tournament, Fragbite qualifiers, MSI Beat IT, I could name a lot of other competitions.
You’ve also diversified your activites, because as I was saying in introduction, you’re also organizing your own tournament, the PughCraft Invitational, and if you look backwards, what are for you the key moments in your eSports life that have pushed you to become what you are today.
Quite a number of things, that’s actually a question I would have to think about for a moment. Within esports, it kind of snowballs, you gain an opportunity and sometimes you nail it, and it kind of comes from that, you meet more people and a lot of esports is meeting people in my opinion, I would say one of the first things was of course joining Definitive esports, with Banks, who interviewed me at i45 which you mentionned earlier.
At the time we were sponsored by Antec, who were running the Antec Attack. I pretty much asked "Can I cast this?", Banks asked Antec and of course they said yes, I managed to broadcast them through the Definitive esports channel, and that’s how I first started getting off. That was a big opportunity. Then a little bit later in August, I got the cast at the biggest UK LAN i46, which was also very exciting.
But why did you ask for that? Was it something that you were interested in, how do you explain that you wanted to do that?
There was a combination of two factors. I knew the staff from Insomnia, and Banks was very familiar with them as well, so he, as my manager spokes to them, they sadly didn’t accept me originally as the caster, but unfortunately the caster that did accept had to pull out like two days before and they asked me, and I was going as a player, and I just went there instead and then casted.
And then, I guess I didn’t really do that much for a few months, I think I had actually very lucky opportunities I guess, like I won’t put this one down to more luck, but at the start of WCS 2013, the very first season, during qualifier #4, the ESL Studio computers kind of died, when Kaelaris was broadcasting them, and there was a community caster check for ESL, and Rogue, one of the admins, was like "Hey, can anyone cast it?" and I was like "Hey, I can!". And he gave me the stream key for WCS Europe, and he was like "OK, just broadcast this".
I got tuned in on it, very casual, I had like 8000 viewers, and that allowed me to kind of get a little bit more reputation, because ToD, who I kind of interacted with prior to that, he spoke to me he was like "You can cast with me pretty much now". And a little bit later we casted the Millenium Proleague Cup Final, which was another great opportunity because casting with ToD was a dream come true, he was a great commentator, and at that time he was the highest level of commentator I had co-casted with. That was a very big opportunity for me as well. And it just kind of snowballed from there as well, I applied for DreamHack, I got there, I applied for IEM, got those, ASUS ROG, HomeStory Cup, Acer TeamStory Cup, I just asked around I managed to get into them.
[…]
Final question, we’ve seen during this interview that you are doing many things about StarCraft II at the moment, many different things. Is it something that you would like to keep doing in the future, do you intend to stay in the professional esports scene in the future?
Yes, I’d love to. There’s a lot of aspects in the esports scene, especially as a commentator. For me, having fans is fantastic not because in a sense it makes you feel good about yourself to know that people appreciate you but to have fans, to have people that respect what you would say, your opinions, and also in a sense you do have these people that look up to you so you can in a sense motivate them as well.
That is something I love, and then on top of that, I love the people, nearly every person I meet in esports is fantastic, and there’s such a wide variety of people that you do get to meet so it’s very interesting, because I’m a very people oriented person, I love to meet people.
That’s why you love offline events?
Yes, I really do enjoy meeting people, actually I never went to a foreign even yet which is the biggest downer for me, I can’t wait to do that like a DreamHack, a Gamescom or an IEM maybe.
As a caster you mean?
Yes absolutely, I’d love First and YoDa to go just to manage them, just to meet people. It’s such a big thing to put a face to a voice, a name, an ID that you’ve known for many years. It’s very surreal. And also like a former competitor to put face on someone you might hate, because they always beat you, people you have a level of respect because they are good at the game.
And on the top of that, I love StarCraft, I don’t want to see it die or stop playing it, because even if, right now with the second Gfinity, imagine if StarCraft is dead, you’re fired, Twitch shut down, I’d be still playing StarCraft. I’m in it because I love it, not because I’ve gone to a point where I can’t quit now or something. It’s still driven by passion.
It was great to have you with me today and... I don't know, if you want to add something ; we talked already about a lot of things but maybe I forgot to mention other things that you are doing currently so don't hesitate to talk about it if you want.
There is not a huge amount, the MSI Beat IT did recently finished. So, I was a former team Fnatic, I left them back in June and that's when, of course, TCM contacted me and then I was also with the MSI Beat IT until it ended, because I was the head admin for that.
But right now I'm just with TCM looking after YoDa and First, Gfinity making good StarCraft runs as well as they can and just pretty much with those guys making things possible and of course... I'm a bit thrown off right now because I have got twelve days of extra leave because I was expected to be recuperating for my teeth, I'll be a bit thrown off for the next week or two.
Ok
Just give me a follow on Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and, of course, Twitch and just keep up to date with everything I will be doing.
Perfect, thank you a lot see you!
Goodbye!
Transcription by TinkeRMOUTHS aghast, fear is etched on the faces of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall as their limousine is attacked by a rampaging mob as student protests exploded into violence last night.
The heir to the throne and his wife were on their way to the London Palladium for the Royal Variety Performance when rioters spotted their entourage as it made its way through central London.
As the Rolls-Royce drove down Argyll Street, a number of people connected with the protest against the rise in student tuition fees lunged at the vehicle, smashing a window next to the Royal couple and daubing it with paint.
Almost immediately, close protection officers swung into action and gave the driver the order to speed away.
Within a couple of minutes the car arrived at its destination and Prince Charles and Camilla got out, looking shaken, but otherwise unharmed. Clarence House confirmed they had not been injured.
The incident was the most high profile act of violence on an evening which saw key political landmarks attacked and widespread disorder on the streets of the capital.
The protests by up to 30,000 students had been largely good-natured, but after the coalition Government won the vote in Parliament to raise fees to up to £9,000 a year the mood turned ugly.
Protesters attacked a number of Government buildings near the House of Commons, smashing windows at the Treasury and the Supreme Court and vandalising statues in Parliament Square, including that of Winston Churchill.
The chaos spilled out on to Oxford Street as a number of demonstrators continued their protest.
Police condemned the behaviour, with Superintendent Julia Pendry describing the demonstrators actions as outrageous She added: "This is not peaceful protests at all - this is acts of wanton vandalism, wanton violence and a complete disrespect for central London.
"Not only have we had attacks on Parliament, the attacks on our officers, weve now had the Supreme Court that has come under the attack of vandalism and the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall have also come under attack in Argyll Street.
"We have now got a number of protesters rampaging their way through London, committing acts of violence, acts of terror, not only to Christmas shoppers and to tourists, but to innocent people in London going about their business tonight.
"It is appalling, disrespectful behaviour to everybody else in London."
Prime Minister David Cameron's spokeswoman also said he condemned the unacceptable violence.
Some 38 protesters and ten officers were injured. Six officers required hospital treatment and four suffered minor injuries.
Dozens of people were arrested for offences including violent disorder, arson, assault on police, criminal damage, being drunk and disorderly and burglary.About
The Concept
A Wolf Abroad is a virtual, online travel show that utilizes VR Glasses (like the Oculus Rift, or Sony Morpheus) to immerse the user in the travel location. Shown in stunning 3D 360° HD Video and 3D 360° Omni-Binaural Audio - A Wolf Abroad puts the audience into exotic and beautiful locations. HD Video and Audio will rotate and respond to your movements for full virtual reality.
VR Glasses like Oculus Rift and Sony Morpheus make the show possible - but the show can also be viewed on any screen with headphones for 3D audio effect.
The Show
A Wolf Abroad will be a fun, comedic travel show with an emphasis on extreme sightseeing (sky diving, zip lining, rock climbing) for unique experiences. Your Host and Creator - Christian Wolf - Improv comedy actor and world traveller - will provide location info, travel tips, and history along the way!
Each location on the show will have a devoted 15 minute episode hosted by Christian, in addition to several hiking walkthrough videos with just our dummy head of audio/video tech for private moments in beautiful nature and cultural sites.
WHY?
A Wolf Abroad will take people on a journey to places that maybe they couldn't travel to - due to physical disability or fiscal reasons - to share the wonder of our world with everyone. Our revolutionary show will greatly reduce the high environmental costs of world travel and allow users to easily see places around the globe, all from their home.
We will transport our users on an immersive internet travel experience. Subscribers to our channel will be more informed on where to spend their travel dollar, picking their favorites to tour, and virtually traveling to the rest of the world with A Wolf Abroad.
Ultimately, A Wolf Abroad wants to inspire our audience to go out, travel, and affordably see the beauty our planet has to offer.
Pilot Episode
Your Kickstarter funding will allow us to construct our unique camera and microphone rig and shoot out the pilot episode of A Wolf Abroad to showcase the amazing realism of this new technology.
The A Wolf Abroad Pilot will take a look at 4 National Parks of the American Southwest:
Zion National Park
Grand Canyon National Park
Capitol Reef National Park
Bryce Canyon National Park
360 Video Examples
Binaural Audio Examples - wear headphones*
Here are some examples of 3D binaural audio (only single direction*).
A Wolf Abroad will feature 360° Omni-Binaural Audio that will follow with your head motions with VR Glasses.
Machu Picchu 3D Binaural Audio Walkthrough
HOW?
We use an array of GoPro cameras and Omni-binaural microphones to make you feel like you're there.
360Heros GoPro Array for 3D 360° HD Video the way humans see the world - all around you and with depth.
+
3Dio Omni-Binaural Microphone for realistic 3D sound in all directions - responding to your motions on VR glasses. Binaural audio allows you to locate sounds based on microsecond differences from L to R ears when played through headphones.
+
A Merlin Steadicam and vest system With information from a gyroscope to smooth video for clear vision the way we see nature.
=
Stunning Virtual Reality
Oculus Rift - on VR Player
Sony's Project Morpheus
Format
A Wolf Abroad will post content to our member's site for download, and then premiere public clips and full episodes 1 week later on our YouTube channel.
Users can watch A Wolf Abroad on VR Player with VR Glasses for full 3D 360 audio/video effect OR
Regular 3D video with 3D binaural audio
video with 3D binaural audio Traditional 2D video with 3D binaural audio
* when using headphones - one direction
Clips will contain long "virtual walkthroughs" (captured by our 3D dummy head) of various nature trails, city sights, and cultural centers.
Episodes will highlight the best moments from our walkthroughs with 3D audio narration about the history, culture, fun facts, and travel trips for the value minded from Christian Wolf.
Some Tech Specs
Video
An array of GoPro cameras will capture 1080p HD Video shooting at 60fps producing a resolution of 6000 X 3000 pixels.
12 GoPros capture 6 3D video feeds to stitch together for full 3D 360 HD Video
The outside radius configuration allows us to shoot at 3D ranges of 4.5 feet to infinity depth of field. When wearing the Oculus Rift or other VR Glasses, your frame of view will rotate with your motion. Projected in VR Player on Dome projection.
Connect With Us:
Media Coverage on "A Wolf Abroad"
Christian Wolf on HuffPost Live
Christian Wolf on HuffPost Live
Please check out our rewards, donate, and spread the word!
Thank you!' before he was found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning
Carter 'had sent Roy, 18, a series of texts encouraging him to take his life
A teenager who allegedly encouraged her friend to kill himself last year has enjoyed her senior prom and a trip to Disney World while awaiting her manslaughter trial, it has emerged.
Michelle Carter's mother, Gail Carter, has been posting images to her daughter's social media pages showing her on trips and hanging out with friends - activities her alleged victim, 18-year-old Conrad Roy III, will never get to do, his aunt has said.
'We will never see him enjoy these milestones,' Becki Maki told the Boston Herald.
'To see her awaiting her manslaughter trial on a trip to Disney World with her friends, going to school competitions and going off to prom - it just seems like she doesn't understand the gravity of the actions that have led to the case against her.'
Scroll down for video
Michelle Carter, pictured in juvenile court in April, has been enjoying trips to Disney World and nights out with friends ahead of her manslaughter trial - leaving her alleged victim's family hurt and confused
Carter, 18, was charged in February with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Roy, who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his truck in a Kmart parking lot in Fairhaven, Massachusetts last July.
She faces 20 years behind bars if convicted.
Police and prosecutors say the pair, who had met on vacation and attended different high schools, exchanged more than 1,000 text messages in the days and hours leading up to his death.
But the night before he died, she texted a friend saying: 'I'm losing all hope that he's even alive.'
Meanwhile she also allegedly messaged Roy: 'Let me know when you're gonna do it.'
According to the police report:'When he actually started to carry out the act, he got scared again and exited his truck, but instead of telling him to stay out of the truck... Carter told him to "get back in". '
Accused: Carter, left, allegedly encouraged her friend Conrad Roy III, right, to take his life last July in a series of text messages. He was found dead by carbon monoxide poisoning in his truck
Support: Carter's parents Gail and David, pictured in court, have denied she committed a crime
His body was found in the truck after his parents reported him missing, and police found the text messages after looking through his phone.
But after his death, Carter expressed her heartbreak on her Twitter page and even organized a suicide prevention fundraiser in his name.
'Such a beautiful soul gone too soon,' she wrote on the day of his death. 'I'll always remember your bright light and smile. You'll forever be in my heart, I love you Conrad.'
Three days later, she added: 'I will never understand why this had to happen.'
After her arrest, Carter, a senior at King Philip Regional High School, was banned from social media by a judge but her mother has been updating her page with images, Roy's aunt said.
'With her mother posting things to social media for her, it doesn't feel like a ban,' Maki told the Herald. 'It just doesn't feel like she's grieving - and that's really confusing for us.'
Tribute: In the hours after he was found dead, Carter shared this message to her Twitter page
Honored online: Just two days before her arraignment, she shared this image of Conrad, adding: 'Really missing you tonight'. She is free on bail but has been ordered not to touch her social media pages
Carter's attorney, Joseph Cataldo, said that the teenager was not violating the court order and was simply continuing 'with her day-to-day activities and her life'.
Following a court appearance in April, he said that Carter had not committed a crime and that they will prove Carter was actually trying to help Roy.
'Taking all the texts in context, she tried to talk him out of it,' Cataldo said, The Sun Chronicle reported. 'He caused his own death. She doesn't understand why she is being prosecuted.'
Roy, a stand-out high school athlete who worked for his family's marine salvage business, had previously tried to commit suicide over a year earlier and was battling depression.
Carter will appear in juvenile court on June 9 for a pretrial hearing.
• For confidential help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or click hereOne of Donald Trump’s great strengths as a politician is that he’s a hell of a counter-puncher. On the debate stage and campaign trail, he has flummoxed and thwarted much more politically experienced rivals like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio by responding to their jabs with a quickness and confidence they themselves lack. Yet Trump’s self-assurance deserts him completely when confronted with a female adversary, be it Rosie O’Donnell, Megyn Kelly, Carly Fiorina or, most recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Which bodes well, of course, for his likely general-election opponent, Hillary Clinton, whose formidable and unflappable character
make her exactly the sort of woman that Trump has the hardest time reacting to.
An old-fashioned sexist boor, Trump tends to divide the world into a simple binary: men are rivals to be bested and women are potential sexual conquests. When he’s confronted by a strong, assertive woman outside the mating arena, his synapses tend to short-circuit, leading him to odd and often self-destructive behavior. Before Carly Fiorina’s presidential bid fizzled out, she was the only Republican who had managed to faze Trump at all. He walked back his initial attempt to insult her looks and found himself booed by the debate audience on November 10 when he snapped, “Why does she keep interrupting everybody?”
When Trump met yesterday with the editorial board of the Washington Post, columnist Ruth Marcus asked Trump a question about racism in the criminal justice system. According to the transcripts, a few minutes later while answering another question, Trump made a strange aside: “Okay? I mean, [Editor’s note: Trump points at Ruth Marcus] she kills me, this one—that’s okay, nice woman.” At the same meeting, Opinions Deputy Digital Editor Karen Attiah asked Trump a question about his negative poll numbers among Latinos and his racially divisive rhetoric. After the meeting, Trump briefly chatted with Attiah. “I really hope I answered your question,” he said, then added, “Beautiful.”
This inappropriate comment—in effect, an attempt to dismiss her serious question by bringing in the irrelevant detail of her appearance—is the flip side of Trump’s reference to O’Donnell as a “disgusting pig” or Kelly as “crazy.” Trump’s long-running Kelly obsession notably began when she challenged him during the first Republican debate last August on his long history of flinging insults at women. The ensuing eight months of insult-flinging reveals him to be as touchy as a burn victim, a brittle bully who can’t forget a slight and keeps nursing his wounded pride to the point of making himself a public joke.Pioneer 10 is an American spacecraft launched on March 3, 1972. The main goal of the spacecraft was to flyby Jupiter and eventually fly out of the solar system. The spacecraft has many accomplishments to its name and some of them are as follows. It is the first spacecraft to fly beyond Mars' orbit, through the Asteroid Belt, flyby Jupiter and eventually flying past the furthest planet at that time, Neptune, on 13th June 1983. Thus, it became the first spacecraft to leave the Solar System. On January 23 2003, all the connections were lost with the spacecraft when it was 12 billion km (80 AU) from Earth. In the current speed of 12.51 km/s or 28,000 miles/hr (which is approx. 0.000041 the speed of light), the spacecraft would pass the nearest star in its trajectory, Aldebaran, in about 2 million years.Image Credit: Solar System Exploration Source: NASAAthens-Limestone public library in Alabama brings in strict new policy in effort to recover $200,000 worth of missing books
A library in Alabama has reportedly warned its customers that it plans to enforce strict new borrowing rules that include the possibility of jail time for anyone who fails to return a book on time.
In an effort to recoup about $200,000 worth of overdue books, the Athens-Limestone |
a topic of debate on Monday, when internet users searching on Google were delivered a bogus report saying Trump won the popular vote in addition to the Electoral College.
The numbers on a blog called 70News -- contradicting official results tallied so far by states -- said Trump received 62.9 million votes to 62.2 million for Hillary Clinton.
The blog urged those petitioning for the Electoral College to switch their votes to reflect popular will to scrap their effort.
"Hey Change.org, scrap your loony petition now," the posting said.
The bogus site was listed at the top of many search queries for "final election result."
Preliminary tallies showed Clinton won roughly 700,000 more votes than Trump despite losing the states needed for an Electoral College victory.
Google seeks "to provide the most relevant and useful results for our users," a company statement to AFP said.
"In this case we clearly didn't get it right, but we are continually working to improve our algorithms."
rl/vs
© 1994-2016 Agence France-PresseTBILISI (Reuters) - The security service in the former Soviet republic of Georgia said on Thursday it had detained five Georgian citizens who were trying to sell $3 million worth of radioactive uranium.
Security service officers did not say whether the group had a buyer for the uranium, nor where the group had acquired it.
World leaders have been concerned about the security of Soviet nuclear weapons since the Soviet Union's demise in 1991. Concern has also grown that radical groups are seeking material with which to make a 'dirty bomb'.
"The detainees were planning to sell nuclear material with total weights of 1 kilogram and 665 grams, which contained two radioactive isotopes - Uranium-238 and a small amount, 0.23 percent, of Uranium-235," security service investigator Savle Motiashvili told a briefing.
Motiashvili added that given the gamma ray emission, direct and long-term exposure to the substances was dangerous for life and health.
A Tbilisi city court put the group into pre-trial custody. They face five to 10 years in prison if found guilty.
Georgia's security service has foiled several attempts to sell uranium or other radioactive materials.
Earlier this month, they detained six Georgian and Armenian citizens who were trying to sell $200 million worth of the uranium-238 isotope.
In 2006, a resident of Russia's North Ossetia region was arrested for trying to sell weapons-grade uranium for $1 million to agents he thought were radical Islamists. He was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison.
(Reporting by Margarita Antidze; Editing by Vladimir Soldatkin and Toby Chopra)Pakistan is now the fifth-most populous country in the world. According to the latest figures, Pakistan has surpassed Brazil to appear in the top 5 list of most populated countries behind China, India, United States and Indonesia.
The population of Pakistan has gone past the mark of 220 million. In March 2017, Pakistan initiated to conduct the census nearly after two decades. The successful execution of the census was made possible largely because of improved security conditions in the region.
Also Read: Pakistan finally announces population census
According to Pakistan Bureau of Statistic (PBS), the census teams made sure to count every single individual along with their housing unit. The exercise was done nationwide to make sure that no single person in left uncounted.
The anticipation of the overall population figure was roughly 200 million. However, the list which government released on Friday, had a higher digits as expected and it was beyond 220 million mark.
Breakdown of the population province-wise
The numbers revealed that 207.77 million people reside in the four provinces of Pakistan and the tribal regions near the Afghan border. However, rest of the 15 million are located in the disputed territory of Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan in the north, near Pakistan’s border with China, as per the official of PBS.
The people of Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan do hold Pakistani passports; however, the population in the region is not included in that of Pakistan because of the disputes.
Not too long ago, Pakistan was the sixth-most populous country in the world. Their population was close to 200 million before the census. However, it has now taken over Brazil, which has a population of 210 million.
Quick Read: Pakistan’s population reaches 192 million
Unexpected growth in population
In the last couple of decades, Pakistan’s population has grown at an average rate of 2.4% even though the government is trying to control the speedy surge in the population.
A researcher with Islamabad-based Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Shakeel Ahmed Ramay stated:
“This is a surprising factor. The rate is much higher than estimates”
He further added:
“For a country like Pakistan with limited resources, such a huge population could become a burden if innovative policies are not made to turn the youth bulge into an asset. You got to have some policy framework to promote entrepreneurship to engage a sea of people … Otherwise, more individuals means more consumption of resources”
Read More: New cost-effective technology to conduct census 2017
It has been projected that by year 2050, Pakistan’s overall population will be 300 million while the world’s population at that time would be around 9.7 billion.
Source: Sky NewsBy David Amoruso
It’s a bad time to be a secretive criminal organization. Today, Italian authorities released video of a ‘Ndrangheta elite swearing-in ceremony after concluding a two year investigation resulting in the arrest of forty suspected members of the criminal brotherhood from Calabria.
“It's the first time that the swearing in, with the awarding of roles and tasks, has been documented live,” Milan Prosecutor Ilda Boccassini told reporters at a press conference. Until the recording, investigators only had information about the ceremony for the bestowal of the “Santa” given to them by former ‘Ndrangheta members who had turned “pentito”, witness for the government.
Now, they could view for themselves how this highest honor within the criminal organization was bestowed upon the man or men of the moment.
A moment that proved to be short-lived. Three of the forty 'Ndrangheta suspects arrested today were put under house arrest while the rest were taken to jail. Charges range from mafia association, extortion, to illegal possession of weapons and were committed across Italy and Sicily.
The suspects allegedly belonged to three clans of the Calabrian-based syndicate operating in the northern provinces of Como and Lecco in Lombardy, north of Milan, where they had infiltrated the local community.
The “Santa” is an elite membership and has never been recorded before. The mobsters organized their hierarchy during the ceremony and used century-old rituals and folklore to emphasize the importance of the meeting.
This video is the most recent one in a long line of taped secret Mafia ceremonies. In August, Italian authorities released a video made in Switzerland which showed a secret meeting of a local ‘Ndrangheta clan. And at the end of October, the FBI released audio recordings of a 1989 initiation ceremony by the New England Patriarca family.
It looks like keeping secrets is truly a thing of the past.
Watch video of the ‘Ndrangheta’s “Santa” ceremony below:
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Copyright © www.gangstersinc.nlApple, which never seems to be far from a courtroom these days, is fighting a claim by seven consumers that it has a monopoly over iPhone apps.
iPhone 5: Where else can you buy apps?
Yesterday the company asked a federal judge in Oakland, California to dismiss the case, Bloomberg reports.
Lawyers who filed the suit in 2011 say a monopoly exists - because an iPhone user who doesn’t want to pay what developers charge for apps in Apple’s App Store can’t buy them anywhere else.
iPhone software developers must turn over to Apple 30 percent of what they charge for an application, increasing prices and excluding competitors from the iPhone “aftermarket” of applications, claim the consumers' attorneys.
For Apple, lawyer Dan Wall said the company doesn’t set the price for applications - and charging a price for distribution of a product on a new and unique platform doesn’t violate any antitrust laws.
“There’s nothing illegal about creating a system that is closed in a sense,” he told Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.
Alexander Schmidt, for the consumers, asked, “Can a consumer go somewhere else to buy Angry Birds for the iPhone?If the answer is no, then Apple is a monopolist.”
Judge Rogers didn’t say when she would rule.Here’s what Castro did to (U.S. citizen) Howard Anderson (seen on right, with family )who resisted the theft of his filling stations and Jeep dealership by Castro’s gunmen in 1960. First the show trial:
“Death to the American!” screamed Howard Anderson’s communist prosecutor at his farce of a trial on April 17, 1961. “The prosecutor was a madman!” says a Swiss diplomat who witnessed the trial, “leaping on tables, shrieking, pointing, as Mr. Anderson simply glared back.”
Then the torture and murder: “In one final session of torture, Castro’s agents drained Howard Anderson’s body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”
Two days after his “trial,” Howard Anderson’s refused a blindfold, to glare at his executioners. Medically he was probably in shock at the time from the blood-draining. “Fuego!” The bullets shattered Howard Anderson’s body at dawn on April 19, 1961.”
Among ISIS’ many atrocious practices, they video their murders. So almost all U.S. politicians (and would-be politicians) want to “bomb the hell out of ISIS!” or to “CARPET-BOMB ISIS!”…right? Well, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were lovingly filming their murders half a century before ISIS caught on to the charming practice. (Murder-Video above left was on Che Guevara’s orders Jan. 19, 1959.)
That’s Raul Castro himself, by the way–tying the blindfold on a poor country kid who didn’t quite see eye-to-eye with the Castroite version of “liberation.” And that’s Raul Castro laughing uproariously when boasting to Life magazine about how many more he might shortly murder–“maybe a thousand more!–hah-ha-ha!”
Many other murders documented here.
But rather than carpet bombing, here’s what many U.S. politicians (and would-be politicians) desire for the terrorists who pioneered the filming of their many murders:
Yes, terrorists truly need bombing–and some of these are only 90 miles away.
“Le RRRONCA!!!”(Full disclosure, I am partially funded for my graduate studies through the Department of Defense NDSEG fellowship. This article (and this blog) are not endorsed by anyone, including the DoD. The thoughts and opinions below are my own or properly credited to the appropriate source. Reading on, and reading the linked Climate Roadmap may also help you with your own NDSEG application).
Earlier this week, some people in a large, 5 sided building (below), in a federal district that contains the seat of our government and approx. 700,000 people (but still no voting members of congress…), released a statement that probably surprised a few people.
The DoD (Department on Defense) is speaking out about threats to national security caused by a changing climate. The DoD is generally responsible for things like the US military, as well as national security. You can read more about what they say about climate change (and what it means politically), here. In summary, the DoD has been working with some of its internal committees on this subject for several years. They have actually drafted a “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap.” You may suspect that this report is all about how things like sea level rise will effect US military bases worldwide, but that is not the case. While sea level rise is part of the equation, the DoD is also worried about more flooding and more frequent storms (aka: more disaster relief), thawing permafrost and the opening of arctic shipping channels (more of a DoD presence in the arctic would be required), instability among other nations (drought, intense heat, intense cold, etc… may disrupt economies and/or lead to social or political instability), and damage to environments and ecosystems in and around bases (which they are required to attempt to conserve to the best of their abilities (hence my funding and funding for large scale ecological research at bases such as Camp Lejuene in North Carolina). All of these threats and problems are real and tangible, so it is not surprising to see the DoD attempt to address them. It should be pointed out that the funding required to execute the afore mentioned Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap has not been worked out yet, but it seems possible that some of the defense budget ($575 billion in 2015), may go toward preparing for, and mitigating the effects of climate change.
Now, it might be a little bit of stretch to say that climate change is the reason ISIS is currently so active. It may also be a stretch to blame climate change for the spread of ebola. However, these two buzz worthy events (as well as things like the polar vortex, superstorm Sandy, and the California drought) are all possible (and probable) indicators of a changing climate system. The social impacts of climate change (ie: drought= fewer/no crops= extremist action) is obviously a bit of a stretch, but it is possible (and logical) that there is a link there. In times of strife uprising can occur (good or bad). I don’t want to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, so I’ll stop there. If you want to read about how climate change may be impacting the spread ebola read these articles: 1 and 2 (tl;dr climate change will affect disease outbreaks worldwide and may be playing a role here, but it’s complicated).
Now that we’ve gone down that rabbit hole, let’s work our way back out to the big picture and talk about what the DoD plan means. It means that a government agency is prioritizing climate as a major concern and actually trying to proactively do something about it. We aren’t cutting emissions with this proposal, but at least we are seeing admission that climate is something to actually worry about and for once, a department is making an actual plan to mitigate damages. This is coming from a country where a significant portion of the population still “believes” that climate change doesn’t exist. This includes a large portion of elected officials. We also have articles like this one floating around. Admittedly, adaptation (and acclimation) are things we do quite well as a species, but not every species can do that, and we are very likely going to be unable to adapt as quickly as the changes are occurring. Saying differently involved a lack of understanding of genetics and geologic time. Seeing The Pentagon make a decisive public comment and then publish an actual plan shows that maybe we are starting to see action on climate in spite of the political turmoil. I really don’t want to get into that, but as I’ve said a million times. I wish that it was not a political issue. It has nothing to do with budget cuts, wanting money for pet project, or taxes. The issue at heart is the health and well being of the world’s people. Now, we can’t prevent all people from being in harm’s way. However, we can try to lessen the impacts of a global issue that is the fault of no one but ourselves. Humans should be trying to solve the ultimate human caused problem. I see this as a good, positive step toward America trying to do its part. Let’s hope it continues as we are facing the hottest year in the last 4,000 years on this planet and the slope of the temperature increase is higher than any other time in recorded history. The NYT just published a very informative article about this topic.
I’ll leave you with one last little helpful bit. It’s very important to look at long term trends when considering all of this. One of the best analogies I’ve heard is that of a dog and his/her owner taking a walk. The dog will wander all over the place, but the human is likely to walk in a consistent direction. I found this awesome video of that analogy today. Take a look and feel free to share (credit: Slate.com).
AdvertisementsSYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Charges filed against an "O.G. against violence" activist who was arrested last week while filming the Syracuse Police Department will be dropped, but new charges will be filed, according to the Onondaga County District Attorney's Office.
Maurice "Mo" Crawley, the activist, will be charged with harassment, a violation, the DA's office announced. The misdemeanor charges of second-degree obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest will be dismissed.
Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick announced the new charges Friday morning during a news conference. The news conference, held in the department's Syracuse office, was primarily held to discuss a Father's Day shooting where a Syracuse police officer shot and killed a man.
While Fitzpatrick said harassment is a proper charge for Crawley, Fitzpatrick also said he disagreed with how Syracuse Police Officer Vallon Smith -- the officer who arrested Crawley -- handled the incident.
"He made a mistake," Fitzpatrick said. "He overreacted, and he will suffer the consequences...with Chief Fowler."
The Syracuse Police Department has refused to discuss the arrest of Crawley that triggered a protest other than to say the matter was under investigation.
Crawley, 52, was arrested July 28 in the 100 block of South Avenue while filming Smith and another officer as they made a drug-related arrest.
The video of the confrontation made by Crawley on Facebook prompted a protest by a local chapter of the anti-police-violence group Black Lives Matter the next day. The video has so far received more than 110,000 views on YouTube.
Fitzpatrick said today that Crawley started stalking Smith after the officer issued him a ticket. He said he thought the ticket was related to a noise complaint.
Since then, Fitzpatrick said there have been "at least a dozen" incidents where Crawley harassed the officer.
In a criminal complaint filed after the arrest, Smith wrote that Crawley had been "increasingly appearing" at Smith's traffic stops and investigations.
"The defendant shouts at this officer, calling out my last name, stating the 'tornado' is coming and threatening lawsuits against this officer," Smith said.
In the July 28 video Crawley livestreamed to Facebook, Crawley stands across the street while officers handcuffed and searched a man.
Smith, at one point in the video, shouted at Crawley to keep quiet. When Crawley replied that he could not hear him, Smith crossed the street and told Crawley to put out his hands.
The camera then swung toward tress, powerlines and the sky. The remainder of the video contains audio.
"Don't (expletive) move, you understand me?" an officer said. "Don't you (expletive) move, I'm a (expletive) you up."
Fitzpatrick said Smith "screwed up" during the incident. Despite that mistake, Fitzpatrick offered praise for Smith and a condemnation of Crawley.
The DA said Smith is a veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan.
Contrasting Smith to Crawley, Fitzpatrick tossed a stack of papers he said was Crawley's rap sheet on the table in front of his lectern. He questioned the motives of Crawley, who often shows up at shooting scenes to protest violence.
Fitzpatrick said he believes Crawley cares as much about gang violence as Fitzpatrick said he does about the next episode of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians."
The DA also compared Crawley to Smith.
"If I was ever in a foxhole and the choice was given to me as to whether I wanted Maurice Crawley sitting next to me, who would probably steal my wallet, or whether I wanted Officer Vallon Smith sitting next to me, the answer is painfully obvious to everyone," Fitzpatrick said.The Gardiner East Follies returns for yet another extended run at City Hall beginning on Tuesday morning, when city officials present three scenarios for relocating the highway’s eastern end to free up valuable waterfront land.
For much of this year, and some of 2014, the lion’s share of public, policy and political attention has focused intensively on the stretch between Cherry Street and the Don River. (For more on the origins of the problematic loop, read this.)
First Gulf, which wants to transform the sprawling Lever Brothers site into Toronto’s Canary Wharf, has a strong interest in the alignment of the Gardiner/DVP interchange, as do the developers who own land along the Keating Channel. In a show last spring, suburban councillors pushed to keep the highway network in tact, while downtowners fought to replace that one portion with an at-grade boulevard.
After council backed the hybrid option, staff spent the summer consulting with waterfront activists, developers and engineers to figure out how to pull the Gardiner north towards the railway yard while re-conceptualizing the interchange as a set of ramps between two highways instead of a single continuous route.
The arm-waving about the interchange, however, has meant that almost no one is paying attention to that nasty segment of the Gardiner that runs astride Lakeshore Blvd East, between Jarvis and Cherry. Indeed, the latest city staff report notes that the section west of Cherry “will largely be maintained.”
And therein lies a massive missed opportunity, according to architect and planner Calvin Brook.
His firm, Brook McIlroy, has pitched city staff on an ambitious scheme to stack that stretch of the Gardiner above an expanded rail corridor as a means of creating a kilometre-long elevated linear park, 3.3 hectares of new developable city land and a fresh lease on life for Lakeshore Blvd East.
The plan [download it from DropBox] will be presented briefly during tomorrow’s committee meeting; city officials are sufficiently interested that they’ve commissioned a cost-benefit evaluation. Brook McIlroy’s consultants, meanwhile, estimate that the capital outlay for that new Gardiner segment will be $316 million — an amount that would be offset by land sales on 4.3 million sq.-ft of freed-up space.
Brook, who has been pondering how to unstack the Gardiner and the Lakeshore for many years, explained his proposal to Spacing last week.
Metrolinx, he says, plans to expand its GO service from 400 trains per day to over 1,000 as the agency moves to an electrified regional rail offering over the next 15 years. That means adding tracks through the Union Station corridor, and therefore widening the railway berm that has long been implicated in the waterfront’s poor accessibility. The city owns a long finger of land south of the tracks between Jarvis and Cherry, as well as the land beneath the Gardiner and the Lakeshore; the three slices are almost 70 metres across in some places.
If the City and Metrolinx can align their construction agendas, Brook says, they could expand the existing berm south to create not only additional track space, but a deck above the new tracks, upon which the four-lane Gardiner could run. The highway portion, in turn, could also be decked, creating a linear park overhead.
“The premise of this is very simple,” he states. “It’s to take two interruptions in the fabric of the city and turn them into one.”
Brooks points to several compelling arguments in favour of re-building the eastern Gardiner in this way:
Staging: the construction of the berm, the rail lines, the decking, the highway and the green roof could all be undertaken without making any alterations to the existing Gardiner. That translates into no construction delays and additional costs related to staging, which can significantly drive up capital outlays. When the new Gardiner is finished, traffic can be re-routed onto it, and the demolition of the old one can commence.
Unlocking city-owned land. By stacking the Gardiner on top of those new rail lines, the city frees up a stretch of land that’s about 40 metres deep and almost a kilometre long – more than enough space, Brook says, to develop point towers, mid-rise buildings and other structures along the north side of Lakeshore Blvd. East
Public space improvements. With new development now possible along the north side of Lakeshore, that street gains a second lease on life, and can be transformed into an urban avenue rather than a surface highway. Likewise, the linear park built above the decked Gardiner will serve the residents of those buildings developed north of Lakeshore, as well as other waterfront visitors and inhabitants. It also provides opportunities to create mid-block connections and even wider land bridges across the tracks that would link the East Bayfront community to St. Lawrence.
Brook points out that the linear park will be roughly at the same vertical elevation as the deck of the current Gardiner, so this extended structure won’t serve as yet another visual barrier. “What’s really important is that it’s very porous in a north-south direction,” he says, with easy pedestrian/cyclist access between Lakeshore, the linear park and gateway points on the other side of the corridor.
He also observes that Brookfield Oxford, the Canadian commercial development giant, has deployed new decking technology at its sprawling Hudson Yards project in mid-town Manhattan, allowing an active commuter rail yard to continue functioning while a massive intensification project is constructed directly above it.
The idea requires both political will, but also a leap of faith — not because it is technically complex or financially outrageous, but rather due to the fact that Toronto, with its incrementalist political culture, has long tended to shun big moves.
Yet the railway berm, constructed back in the 1920s to modernize access to an industrializing waterfront, was a big move, as was the construction of the Gardiner in the mid-1950s. Big moves, one could argue, must be met with other big moves. And that’s what Brook will be proposing tomorrow.
With the Gardiner East EA due to be submitted to the province by next spring, municipal and provincial politicians should listen to Brook because his idea is not only plausible; it has the potential to be transformational in a highly challenged geography that requires us, finally, to make no (more) little plans.
photo by Wylie PoonThe anonymous campaign behind the "Vikileaks" Twitter account has shut down, after having purportedly posted tawdry details of Public Safety Minister Vic Toews's divorce proceedings.
Following a political uproar in which Conservatives accused opposition New Democrats of authoring the tweets that made claims about Toews's personal life, the original account on the social networking site has now been deleted.
A message posted before the micro-blogger's account closed on Friday evening said, "I am shutting down before any other innocent people are targeted. Please keep up the fight against #C30 Canada."
Vikileaks gained notoriety this week as part of the protests against the federal government's new online surveillance bill, C-30.
Critics have raised concerns about potential privacy issues with the legislation, which would offer police easier access to data about web surfers by requiring internet service providers to surrender some client information to authorities without a warrant.
Under a text field reserved for biographical information on Twitter, the anonymous account user wrote: "Vic wants to know about you. Let's get to know Vic."
The Vikileaks account then proceeded to post a string of more than 90 tweets taking jabs at the minister and his home life, including alleged quotations from affidavits from Toews's divorce. None of the claims has been verified.
The minister himself responded on his Twitter feed that he would not "get involved in this kind of gutter politics."
Baird blasts 'dirty internet trick'
Toews has also stepped back from comments he made earlier about the objections to privacy breaches, in which he said Liberal public safety critic Francis Scarpaleggia could "either stand with us or with the child pornographers."
The Ottawa Citizen newspaper reported Thursday that an IP address — a unique number identifying computers in a network — traced the account to Parliament Hill.
P.O.V. Is internet irony an effective means of protest? Take our poll.
During question period on Friday, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird accused the NDP of having "been caught in a nasty, dirty internet trick" — an allegation NDP whip Chris Charlton demanded Baird retract.
In earlier tweets Friday, the anonymous twitter user wrote: "I am not in Ottawa. Many people have access to the email address. The Ottawa Citizen in particular is targeting the wrong person."
The user also wrote in the evening: "I set up this project to make a point, not ensnare innocent people in a government witch hunt."
Within just three days of going online, the Vikileaks Twitter feed drew more than 8,000 followers, inspiring hundreds of retweets and jokes, before it was shut down.Don Diego Simeone a guest Apr 30th, 2014 474 Never a guest474Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 3.01 KB Simeone has turned Atletico into one big Simeone. The only thing that was missing was an iguana on his shoulder. Besides that last Wednesday during the game Atletico Madrid – Barcelona, Diego Simeone looked like the head of a Colombian drugs cartel from a James Bond movie. His suit was black, his shirt was black and his tie was black. He had combed his sticky black hair backwards. The skin of his face was so pockmarked that it looked as if was covered with scars. En every time he laughed somewhere else on the world a hundred downy chicks died. The entire match I looked at him with open mouth. How he played with the crowd. How he secretly got in the way of a Barcelona player trying to make a throw in. How he asked for a card whenever a tackle was made on one of his players. How he killed the fourth referee (who complained about him leaving his coaching square) with his stare. What an asshole. What a delightfully disgusting face. What a charisma. Don Diego Simeone is the classic bad guy from a movie, but disguised as the manager of a Spanish football club. In the past as a football Simeone was already a bad guy. He kicked his opponents across the ad boards, tackles players with two legs stretched out and whenever possible he tried to lure his opponents into getting a red card. But as a manager Simeone fits his role even better. He has made his team into one big Diego Simeone: his players rush across the field with rage in their eyes, they walk straight through opponents, they hunt the ball as a pack of hungry wolves on a deer – and oh yes, they can play great football as well. The crowd cried of happiness at every counter. At last the ideal sons, the boring Catalans, the ballerinas of Barcelona were mercilessly crushed. Atletico played so intense that I at home on my couch was out of breath. The only one who didn’t show a hint of emotion was Don Diego himself. Simeone is the improved version of Jose Mourinho. He is scarier. He did not cultivate his ugly face for nothing with brylcreem coupe and undertaker suit. I suspect him of letting his players do their running sessions by letting a bunch of Rottweilers loose on them. Contract negotiations he does by hanging players at their ankles above a sharktank. ‘Tell my boy. Do you sign your contract, or would you rather take a bad with my sweethearts?’ And the first journalist who tries to ask a critical question will wake up the next morning with a horsehead in his bed. Simeone doesn’t do patience. He doesn’t wait on success. He takes what he wants. In one and a half month when his team stands in the finale of the Champions League. Which he will win, because in real life the bad guys always win. When he gets the cup with the big ears in his hands, he will see his own reflection in its metal. And he will see that something is missing. The next morning he will buy an iguana. Original text by Thijs Zonneveld at http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/5598/Sportcolumnisten/article/detail/3633614/2014/04/11/Simeone-heeft-van-Atletico-een-grote-Simeone-gemaakt.dhtml
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Simeone has turned Atletico into one big Simeone. The only thing that was missing was an iguana on his shoulder. Besides that last Wednesday during the game Atletico Madrid – Barcelona, Diego Simeone looked like the head of a Colombian drugs cartel from a James Bond movie. His suit was black, his shirt was black and his tie was black. He had combed his sticky black hair backwards. The skin of his face was so pockmarked that it looked as if was covered with scars. En every time he laughed somewhere else on the world a hundred downy chicks died. The entire match I looked at him with open mouth. How he played with the crowd. How he secretly got in the way of a Barcelona player trying to make a throw in. How he asked for a card whenever a tackle was made on one of his players. How he killed the fourth referee (who complained about him leaving his coaching square) with his stare. What an asshole. What a delightfully disgusting face. What a charisma. Don Diego Simeone is the classic bad guy from a movie, but disguised as the manager of a Spanish football club. In the past as a football Simeone was already a bad guy. He kicked his opponents across the ad boards, tackles players with two legs stretched out and whenever possible he tried to lure his opponents into getting a red card. But as a manager Simeone fits his role even better. He has made his team into one big Diego Simeone: his players rush across the field with rage in their eyes, they walk straight through opponents, they hunt the ball as a pack of hungry wolves on a deer – and oh yes, they can play great football as well. The crowd cried of happiness at every counter. At last the ideal sons, the boring Catalans, the ballerinas of Barcelona were mercilessly crushed. Atletico played so intense that I at home on my couch was out of breath. The only one who didn’t show a hint of emotion was Don Diego himself. Simeone is the improved version of Jose Mourinho. He is scarier. He did not cultivate his ugly face for nothing with brylcreem coupe and undertaker suit. I suspect him of letting his players do their running sessions by letting a bunch of Rottweilers loose on them. Contract negotiations he does by hanging players at their ankles above a sharktank. ‘Tell my boy. Do you sign your contract, or would you rather take a bad with my sweethearts?’ And the first journalist who tries to ask a critical question will wake up the next morning with a horsehead in his bed. Simeone doesn’t do patience. He doesn’t wait on success. He takes what he wants. In one and a half month when his team stands in the finale of the Champions League. Which he will win, because in real life the bad guys always win. When he gets the cup with the big ears in his hands, he will see his own reflection in its metal. And he will see that something is missing. The next morning he will buy an iguana. Original text by Thijs Zonneveld at http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/5598/Sportcolumnisten/article/detail/3633614/2014/04/11/Simeone-heeft-van-Atletico-een-grote-Simeone-gemaakt.dhtmlSoapbox time. Profanity ahead. I hate getting into complex conversations online because I think they require the nuance of live discussion, but this one bugged me enough to get essay length comments out of me because of how insane backwards and destructive it is.
TL;DR: This author blames Chris Rock, Barkley and Cosby for adopting holier than thou attitudes in addressing the underclass criminal element of the black community, and makes really dumb excuses for their behaviour. I find this incredibly short sighted because 'black leaders', civil rights groups and the media are reluctant to ever publicly decry black on black crime, black on white crime, or talk about the fact that statistically, black kids are becoming thugs and killing/robbing people well over 58%/67% of the time, or how we really need to fix that problem.
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This article is ignorant as fuck. I'm beside myself reading sentences like " It was the money from a grocery store robbery pulled off by an illiterate grandfather that kept the lights, gas and water on."
Sure dude, let's find a way to excuse and justify behaviour like this ( http://tinyurl.com/mv6hxqk ), and not point out how incredibly fucked up it is that tens of thousands of black kids easily become this disconnected from basic human compassion, because they are encouraged to do so by a subset underclass - a lowest common denominator that has somehow become representative of black people as whole.
It's bad enough we have to deal with vultures like Al Sharpton and 'black leaders' blindly defending horrible people just because they are black in all situations, but now this writer is criticizing the few who even bother to suggest that black people have a serious problem that needs to be addressed. It's infuriating.
You know what's way worse that 3 dead black teenagers killed by cops? Over 17,000 black men killed by gun violence in overwhelmingly black-on-black cases since 2008. The literally exponential number that are killed by other black people. But of course, that's a less juicy controversy. Media outlets and civil rights groups won't talk about that, because it's just another day in the hood, as expected, in places like Camden.
We instead rally around cases based entirely on who did the shooting, and cry out injustice before we even have the facts on what happened, and cry out that we're still living in the days of Emmett Till. Meanwhile, when a gang of senselessly sadistic, violent and compassionless thugs __literally__ commit crimes worse than Emmett Till (The Channing/Newsom murders) to white people less than 7 years ago, we do not rally around, decry the injustice, or even accept calling it a hate crime. We sit silent and excuse it as just another day in the hood, a robbery gone wrong, and sit guilty of the same passive racism of lowered expectations that keeps the media from even bothering to address black violence.
You can not just write off 5-digit death counts with "the cops mistreat us, so we lose compassion and become criminals because we are lashing out at our surroundings". That is insane. You know what's fucked up? Forget about racist cops for a minute. If you instructed |
park's parking lot — but somehow, the culprits retrieved the money and managed to get away. The case was reportedly dropped afterward and remains unsolved. That may suggest poor handling of the case, but Nokia's payment apparently was enough to make this surprising story a footnote in Symbian's history rather than what could have been a dramatic tarnish.About Me
Hello Cake/Pastry enthusiasts!!
I wanted to start my blog with a little blurb about myself so you know where my interest comes from, how it all started and why I chose to blog and share my baking experience with you “online“!
“A party without a cake is just a meeting”- Julia Child
As a born and raised Sri Lankan, I grew up in a household that baked lots and lots… My mother who is trained in pastries took immense pride in making most of our desserts and birthday cakes. This exposure triggered my interest in Baking.
At age 17, my focus was primarily in Life Sciences- to find an independent and successful career path in the field. I did my Bachelors (Genetics) in Bangalore, India. In 2007 I moved to Kingston, London to pursue a Master’s course in Biomedical Science after which I worked as a full time Research Technician at University College London (UCL), Cancer Research Institute.
2010 was wedding bells! With all the glitz and glam ….Meeting my new family and after weeks of celebration, I relocated to California. Here too I found a promising career in Life Sciences, at Stanford School of Medicine.
It is in the Nature of a Scientist to experiment!
During my free time I started experimenting baking. I began trying new recipes and played with ingredients creating my own personal touch. My (non-iced) cakes got raving comments from friends and family which has encouraged me to be creative and new each time!
Then came the children! This was when my interest into Cake Art took off. I am one of those mommies that loves to make personalized cakes for my kids with quality ingredients. My son’s first birthday was coming up. A full time career in science and having conceived my daughter, I couldn’t find the time and energy to make his cake. I looked up a reputable bakery at Menlo Park, CA that sold quality custom cakes and it came with a $$$$ prize tag (for a three tier cake, 100 servings) that incorporated my creative design. I told myself, the next birthday celebration regardless of the situation I will be making my own personalized cake!
I took up a basic cake decorating course that covered the foundation needed. Then on I found time to practice and perfect my decorating skills whilst developing my own creative techniques.
Here are a couple of highlights in my caking career this far…
My Daughter’s Vintage Lace Princess themed birthday–I took a career break after having my daughter. Like every parent it has been a delight to see my precious one grow. To celebrate these milestones I started making cupcakes that matched with her outfits every month!
The Big One was coming up and I wanted to celebrate my little princess’s birthday in the most unique way.. After months of planning and a week of no sleep, her “Royal Vintage Lace Princess” themed first birthday party was a huge hit!!
I made her FOUR cakes- A smash cake…
….a 5 tiered center piece cake and two more identical cakes (with different flavors) for the dessert table.
I didn’t stop there!! I also made cupcakes, cake pops, jar cakes, cookies, puddings and many other “themed” treats for the dessert table. Table skirts, cupcake/cake stands and all other table decorations were handmade and self decorated with hobby store craft supplies- all of which I am hoping to share with you in detail over the coming days- yes I promise you it is going to be exciting!
My first cake show experience– It felt incredibly humbling winning my first ever cake show! After weeks of planning and executing, couple of my cakes won prices (second in the fondant tiered category and first in the non-fondant single tier category).
I received great comments from the judges as well as the general public who were excited to meet with me and get to know the inspirations behind my creations.
Overall it’s been an exciting learning experience and hobby that I enjoy doing. You may wonder “how the short term success?”. I recently had a conversation with an acquaintance at the neighborhood park which somehow lead to cakes and my passion in cake art. Looking at my work she told me she never could make such beautiful cakes in such a short period of time. I shared with her my 5 principles that lead me to where I am today, and now here it is for you!
My 5 “P” THEORY to Perfecting cake decorating
This is solely my perspective, coming from a novice!
(1)PASSION– This is the first key ingredient to pursuing (not just cake but) any art form. Do NOT do it just because someone you know does it. Do it because you LOVE doing it. Do it because it makes your inner soul happy!! My passion in cake designing is based on it being my outlet to creativity.
(2)PRACTICE practice practice!!! I can’t stress enough on how important it is to keep practicing to perfect your decorating skills. Nothing comes easy. The beautiful cakes you see all over the internet were not first tries… it comes from not just knowledge but also with tons of experience. You could try volunteering at a local bakery to learn and enhance your skills and/or keep practicing and get creative with developing your own techniques that you are comfortable working with. Soon after the birth of my daughter I dedicated her nap time (3 hours during the day and 2 hours in the night) to read, practice and improvise which helped better my skills.
(3)PATIENCE-Another key quality is to have patience and not be too hard on yourself. Do not give up just because it did not go well the first time. I experienced many personal failures during my initial learning days which has only helped better my skills. Especially while working on sugar flowers, find time during the day when you are the calmest. Do not rush into creating intricate, delicate designs as it will show in your work.
(4)PERSEVERANCE-Believe in yourself and strive to work to your fullest capability. I had many reasons not to pursue cake art.. The time it consumed, the challenges every mother faces with two young kids, having to take care of your (already routine) chores, dealing with strong opinionated people that did not see my vision (oh yea!). I did not let “situations” get the worst of me. The result- I feel empowered!
(5)PLAN – Good planning helps you attain your goal with less stress. Schedule ahead of time! If you have a cake order coming up next week, then plan in advance such that it allows you to still take care of your other chores and personal needs. For instance for a cake with a fondant topper- the topper which is made of sugar paste/fondant can be made well in advance. This allows you to enjoy your work as well as fix any problems well in advance.
With the above 5 comes PERFECTION, our ultimate goal 🙂
GOALS OF MY WEBSITE and WHY BLOG?
Many of you wrote to me asking if I teach, conduct private/group lessons. This website is for you!!
My head in science and heart in desserts
After a fun couple of years in Cake Art I am heading back full-time into Science. The limited time I will be having in the future I would like to do what I love doing-productively explore creative techniques whilst educating anyone that is interested in learning from me.
I will be focusing on the following :
Guided Recipes– covering authentic as well as innovative recipes on desserts such as cakes (and cupcakes, cake pops, jar cakes), non-cake desserts such as cookies, pastries, puddings and other party treats with prime focus on creating themed treats. My personal recipes on fondant, gum paste, royal icing and buttercream icings. Picture guided tutorials– easy to follow picture guided techniques on fondant, sugar paste/gum paste, royal icing, cake/cupcake decoration, innovative and already existing strategies on decoration. I will be including tips, tricks and fixes that work for me. Classes & events– An added opportunity to attend in-person workshops and also connect with me via Skype and google hangout sessions where I will be more than happy to answer your baking and decorating related questions. …..and for that personal touch- for being the foodie and traveler that I am, I will be blogging away bringing you desserts from around the world!
By doing this online I am hoping to reach out to a wider audience, giving many an opportunity to learn at leisure, learn for free and learn from home!
I am working around the clock on creating content! I am hoping it will benefit anyone that not only wants to make a treat for their family, but also help anyone that’s passionate about learning this art, as hobby or for career development.
Best Regards
Thulashitha RDPrepare for a show like no other...
BABYMETAL have spoken out about what to expect from their upcoming UK tour with Red Hot Chili Peppers – promising ‘a powerful performance’ and plenty of surprises.
The Japanese metal-idol sensation will be hitting the road with RHCP for a run of UK arena dates next week. Speaking to NME about the support slot, BABYMETAL described it as a ‘great honour’.
“It didn’t really sink in for me when I first heard that we would be supporting RHCP,” SU-METAL told NME. “But when I heard people around us commenting on how incredible it is to be on tour with such a celebrated band, that’s when it finally sunk in and realised what a remarkable honour it is to tour with RHCP.”
YUIMETAL continued: “We met them during FUJI ROCK. Words cannot explain how surprised we were when we returned to the side of the stage and saw them checking out our performance.”
When asked how their live show for the upcoming Red Hot Chili Peppers dates will compare to the visual extravaganza of when they headlined Wembley Arena earlier this year, MOAMETAL replied: “Only the Fox God knows! Wouldn’t you think it would be boring if we already knew ahead of time? I am just so excited to be able to tour with such an acclaimed artist and am really looking forward to learning from their music, their performance, and as an artist. We have a shorter set length compared to our normal headline shows but despite that, we are hoping that we can warm up the stage for RHCP and give a powerful performance for the entire crowd.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvD3CHA48pA
When asked if BABYMETAL would be back in the UK for headline shows of their own in 2017, MOAMETAL replied: “I have no clue. I hope that we are going to be back on tour. For the upcoming year in general, I’m looking forward to meeting more people, acquiring more knowledge, and simply enjoying eating more delicious food!”
YUIMETAL added: “We want to continue to challenge ourselves and make sure that we do not lose our unique identity as BABYMETAL.”
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Speaking of their influences as live performers, SU-METAL said: “Like Muse and Linkin Park, we are also striving to be the one and only to create a new genre called BABYMETAL. We hope to be as cool as them”
And as for progress on their next album? “Only the Fox God knows!” said SU-METAL
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Asked about what other music they enjoy listening to, MOAMETAL told NME: “I really enjoy listening to Japanese pop aka J-POP and I also like listening to anime songs as well. Both of these types of music are unique to Japanese culture and listening to these types of music gets me going. Being involved with BABYMETAL has allowed me to acquire more chances to really become involved with music. As a result, I find myself noticing each individual instrument the band plays and I feel that I have found a new way of enjoying music on a deeper level.
“I’m just so grateful to be a part of BABYMETAL because without this opportunity, I wouldn’t have had a deeper connection to music!
BABYMETAL will be supporting Red Hot Chili Peppers on their upcoming UK tour. Full dates are below. Their new album ‘Live At Wembley’ is out now.
DECEMBER
05 – LONDON O2
06 – LONDON O2
08 – GLASGOW Hydro
10 – BIRMINGHAM Genting Arena
11 – BIRMINGHAM Genting Arena
14 – MANCHESTER Arena
15 – MANCHESTER ArenaThe Knicks didn’t make any significant moves at the trade deadline, but they made one on Monday. New York has waived backup point guard Brandon Jennings, who confirmed the news on Twitter.
Thank you to all the Knicks fans for the love all year long, and thanks to my teammates and the organization. — Brandon Jennings (@brandonjennings) February 27, 2017
Playing in the Mecca was an amazing experience and I'm looking forward to being back on the court soon playing the game that I love. — Brandon Jennings (@brandonjennings) February 27, 2017
Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated reported that Jennings had previously told the Knicks that he wanted to play for a playoff team. New York will sign former 76ers guard Chasson Randle to replace Jennings, according to The Vertical’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
This move doesn’t have much of an impact on the Knicks, who are clearly going nowhere this season. But Jennings could be a nice piece to a playoff team in need of a solid backup point guard. Jennings averaged 8.6 points and 4.9 assists per game for the Knicks in about 25 minutes per game, and filled in nicely as the starter during several games when Derrick Rose was out.
Jennings was a bona fide starting point guard for the Bucks and Pistons before tearing his Achilles tendon during the 2014-15 season. It’s unlikely he’ll ever reach that level again, but can certainly push the pace and provide bench scoring for a team that needs it.DENVER -- Los Angeles Dodgers left fielder Manny Ramirez is headed to the Chicago White Sox on Monday in what is looking like a straight waiver claim, a league source with knowledge of the situation said Sunday on condition of anonymity.
The source said there was still some chance the two clubs will work out a trade that presumably would involve one from a list of a handful of prospects going from the White Sox to the Dodgers, a development that probably would mean the Dodgers would pay some percentage of the $3.825 million remaining on Ramirez's two-year, $45 million contract, depending on the quality of the prospect.
Another league source, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Dodgers' preference at this point is to simply allow Ramirez to go to the White Sox as a waiver claim, in which case the White Sox would be responsible for the entire $3.825 million. The Dodgers have had that option available to them ever since the White Sox secured waiver rights to Ramirez on Friday.
The White Sox have until 1:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday to complete a trade with the Dodgers.
It is the White Sox, the second source said, who want the Dodgers to take a prospect in exchange for cash to cover a percentage of the money still owed Ramirez. The source either wouldn't or couldn't identify the prospect in question.The “TTC Leprechaun” — an unnamed Toronto bus rider whose searing obnoxiousness earned him local infamy last fall — has struck again.
“Up close, it’s the same person; he still has the beard, still has earrings and glasses, he looked exactly the same,” said Beth Lyn Ward, a Toronto communications consultant who was witness to a Friday incident in which the man obstructed the departure of a packed rush-hour bus.
Last September, the “TTC Leprechaun” became the focus of a city-wide social media hunt after transit rider Brenda Davie published a detailed account of a man who resolutely took up two seats on a crowded bus—and shoved her when she objected.
The man’s nickname was derived from his distinctive appearance: A bowler hat, tuft of beard and bright green shirt.
In a much-circulated Friday
Facebook post, Ms. Ward described how she was aboard a full-capacity 25 bus that was just about to pull away when a man clad in a wool cap tossed his bicycle on the vehicle’s front rack.
“The bus driver tried to tell the guy ‘it’s full, you can’t get on so take your bike off the rack and catch the next bus’—that kind of thing,” said Ms. Ward.
Instead, the man stubbornly sat on the bike rack to prevent the departure of the bus, and demanded a TTC supervisor.
“That’s when people started getting off the bus to get on the next bus, which was right behind us,” said Ms. Ward. Ignoring the insults of restless commuters, the wool-capped man strode onto the rapidly emptying bus and sat down.
Until the arrival of police, the bus sat completely empty, save for the wool-capped man, the bus driver and Ms. Ward, who stayed to act as a witness.
“I’ll stay as long as they need me. This is my TTC as well,” read her post.
TTC spokesman Brad Ross confirmed to the National Post that there “was a disturbance at Pape Station last Friday that required police and TTC special constables.”
However, Mr. Ross was unable to confirm the identity of the man — or link him to earlier sightings of the “TTC leprechaun.”
After a tense police encounter in which the wool-capped man repeatedly demanded the officer’s badge numbers and recorded their encounter via cell phone, he was arrested and removed from the bus.
“He said on the bus that he had sued the police before and that he had won and that’s what he was living off of now — his motives seemed very clear to me,” said Ms. Ward.
Toronto Police spokesman Cst. David Hopkinson said the man was “given a ticket for engaging in a prohibited activity.”
The fine is typically about $125. However, since the charge is not criminal, the man’s name could not be released.
In September, the behavior of the “Leprechaun” described by Ms. Davie was so outrageous that Torontonians were initially skeptical as to whether the event was a hoax. That is, until fellow passenger Juan Hodem stepped forward with video of the encounter.
His motives seemed very clear to me
The 40-second clip — which was captured just after the man allegedly shoved Ms. Davie — shows the bowler-hatted extending his middle finger as he keeps his eyes glued to his phone.
“Leave me alone I don’t talk to airheads,” the man tells Ms. Davie with a wave of his hand.
“What kind of a real man are you, you can’t let a woman sit down?” she shoots back.
“Pay attention,” the man replies, later saying “you get nothing; pay attention.”
Extensive efforts by the National Post to track down the “Leprechaun” last October came to naught, although a rough picture of the man did emerge from among a flood of tips sent in by readers.
Several sources reported that his first name was “Eric” or “Erik” and that he was an employee at a downtown Toronto telemarketing firm. Multiple sources also reported that he was a bass player, and has been spotted at The Best Deal in Town Rehearsal Studios, a rehearsal facility in the Toronto Port Lands.
He also appears to have a pattern of accosting strangers for perceived slights. A legal assistant also told the National Post she had been mercilessly berated by a man matching the Leprechaun’s description after he mistakenly believed she had butted in line at a Tim Hortons.
Ms. Ward said that as the wool-capped man awaited the arrival of police on the empty 25 bus on Friday, he boasted that he was “famous” — an apparent reference to his status as the unnamed Leprechaun.
“He was really proud of it,” she said.No matter where you come from, there's one countdown we can all join in together to celebrate: the end of the year. And across all time zones, cultures and traditions, there's one constant in this New Year's ritual: music.
Whether the bar band kicks into that special tune, blaring it out over the noisemakers and silent kissers, or the DJ eases the crossfade into that perfect song she's been holding onto all night, the music playing on New Year's Eve represents so much — where we are, where we're going and, most importantly, the moment itself.
From Prince and Van Halen to BTS, Tiësto and Queen Bey, here are nine songs ripe for any New Year's celebration that we promise will help usher in 2018 in sonic style.
Prince, "1999"
Sure, we may not be entering the actual year 2000 this New Year's, but wasn't this timeless Prince hit always metaphorical anyway? Now, 18 years after the night it imagined and a whopping 36 years after the song was originally released (on the album of the same name), "1999" stands as a definitive party anthem. Few other artists' songs demand the listener to move the way Prince's do, and as "1999" suggests, "Life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last." It also reminds us to live in the moment. — Nate Hertweck
Beyoncé, "Countdown"
If ever there's a couples jam for New Year's, it's gotta be Queen Bey's "Countdown." Through the "ups and downs" in love, Beyoncé professes love for her soul mate in this sweet and sexy confection, citing him as a perfect 10 and proclaiming, "He's still the one." Here's hoping you have someone to spend NYE with who's game to meet you at the finish line come midnight. — Tim McPhate
BTS, "Mic Drop"
K-Pop ambassadors BTS capture the attitude of living life to the fullest with their "Mic Drop" hit, which features a remix with Steve Aoki and Desiigner. The seven-member collective's "Mic Drop" boast — "Did you see my bag? It's hella trophies and it's hella thick" — bottles how BTS are capping their sensational year. If you're feeling unsure about the road ahead in 2018, try some BTS to bring your spirits up. — Philip Merrill
Otis Redding & Carla Thomas, "New Year's Resolution"
Get a jump start on making those New Year's resolutions with some classic soul by way of Otis Redding and Carla Thomas. As one might expect, the resolutions presented by the pair are perfect for couples looking back on a year's relationship: "Let's turn over a new leaf/And baby let's make promises/That we can keep." It all adds up to the perfect soundtrack for cuddling up to your honey as the ball drops and making a few resolutions to keep together. — Renée Fabian
Tiësto Feat. Jónsi, "Kaleidoscope" (Extended Mix)
Ethereal vocals courtesy of Jónsi, frontman/guitarist for the inscrutable Icelandic experimental rock band Sigur Rós, alternately counting upward from zero and encouraging collective unity, as "we sing in unison," open this extended mix version of the intro track from Dutch DJ/producer Tiësto's 2009 album of the same name. Over the course of more than five minutes, "Kaleidoscope" slowly builds across icy pads and airy, ratcheting percussion lines toward an ecstatic trance synth that burns like a bright white light before the bass finally drops and sets you free to dance your way into next year. Pro tip: Have the track cued up and press play at 11:54:05 p.m. The drop will kick in at exactly midnight. — Brian Haack
John Elliott, "At The End Of The Year"
In case you're feeling more reflective than turned up this New Year's, fear not — there's a perfect song for you, too. San Francisco singer/songwriter John Elliott's "At The End Of The Year," which was just released Dec. 15, is the perfect late-night/early-morning soundtrack for the baton pass from the old you, to the new you. On the first single from his upcoming album, North Star, Elliott sings with a fresh frankness, "Everything is changing down here at the end of the year," and somehow we know something better is just around the corner. It must be. — N.H.
Van Halen, "Bottom's Up!"
This deep track from Van Halen's 1979 sophomore LP truly bottles the template for the Southern California group's early combustible sound. There's Alex Van Halen's frenetic groove, Michael Anthony's steady bass playing and Eddie Van Halen's other-worldly riffing. Overseeing the musical proceedings is David Lee Roth, whose ringleader vocal antics make you feel like you're partying with the group right there in the room. Of course, the subject matter couldn't be more appropriate for celebrating New Year's. Per Diamond Dave, remember to fill your cup up. But please do so responsibly. — T.M.
Idina Menzel, "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?"
This classic New Year's Eve tune dates back to 1947, when it was written by Frank Loesser. It first charted for the Orioles in 1949 and since then it's been covered by everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Kacey Musgraves, and in 2014, Broadway powerhouse Idina Menzel. The "Rent" star included the track on her 2014 album, Holiday Wishes, and it reflects what so many of us are wondering on New Year's Eve: "Whose arms will hold you good and tight/When it's exactly 12 o'clock that night?" — R.F.
The Glitch Mob, "We Can Make The World Stop"
Bumping this massive 2011 dancefloor burner from electronic production wizards the Glitch Mob at full volume in a house filled with people is sure to help you forget the inevitable passage of time for at least the first five and a half minutes of 2018. "Stand still/pause clocks/we can make the world stop." Bonus points if your house comes pre-equipped with smoke machines and lasers. — B.H.
For The Record: B.B. King's "Auld Lane Syne"The Breakdown explains what's behind Southern California business and economic news. It describes the effects the headlines have on you: whether you're an investor, a business owner, an employee, homeowner, consumer or just someone who wants to know how to save a buck.
There's probably no more dogged critic of the Federal Reserve than Ron Paul, the Texas Republican congressman who's also running — and running, and running — for President. Paul had a halfway decent showing in the most recent primaries and caucuses. And there's a school of political thought that figures his staunch base and need to spend very little money to stay in the race will keep him hanging around long after more legitimate contenders had dropped out. Plus, he has an heir in his son Rand Paul, a Kentucky Senator.
Ron Paul is the most economic of the current crop of Republican presidential candiates. There are times when his entire campaign seems based not on solving domestic problems, nor pursuing America's foreign policy, but on getting rid of the twin evils of paper money and the Federal Reserve. A lot of people find Paul sort of daffy. See the video I've embedded above, in which he meanders through a host of very Ron Paulist conspiracy theories, laconically foiled by the Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke.
It doesn't matter. Paul's supporters know in their hearts that he's right.
Except that, on the facts, he isn't. Nor are many of the other Fed critics, who've been arguing for years now that the central bank's policies — flooding the struggling financial system with money, keeping interest rates at an effective zero rate — are inflationary. Why, it will only be a few more months until we're buying our milk with wheelbarrows full of mostly worthless dollars, just like those poor Germans after the World War I!
But the data doesn't say "inflation." It says the opposite. This is from Bloomberg, focusing on inflationary threats from the Fed's second round of so-called "quantitative easing," or QE2:
More than a year after Republicans from House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio to presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas warned that the Fed’s second round of asset purchases risked a sharp acceleration in prices, the surge has failed to materialize. The personal-consumption- expenditures price index rose 2.4 percent for the 12 months ending in December, near the central bank’s 2 percent target.
“The statements were politically motivated,” said John Lonski, chief economist at Moody’s Capital Markets Group in New York. With unemployment stalled above 8 percent for three years, “I don’t see how anybody in their right mind could form a strong argument for persistent, rapid inflation in the United States without the participation of the labor market.”
Even though the economy is showing signs of strengthening and inflation appears in check, Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who also are running for president, have said they wouldn’t keep Bernanke, 58, when his second four-year term as Fed chairman expires on Jan. 31, 2014. Gingrich said in September that Bernanke was “the most inflationary, dangerous and power-centered chairman” in the central bank’s history.
You have to contrast this view of the Fed chairman with what politicans thought when Alan Greenspan was pulling the country's central-banking levers. It didn't seem to matter what your party affiliation was. Greenspan was the Master. No one wanted to get rid of him.
Bernanke, however, has been slowly and skillfully transforming himself into an anti-Greenspan. The financial crisis he's been dealing with is miles and miles worse than anything Greenspan ever confronted. And unlike Greenspan, who kept interest rates low for too long to sustain a series of asset bubbles, Bernanke has kept rates low to give the economy time to heal. At first sight of "irrational exuberance" — Greenspan's infamous term for an overheated market — Bernanke's Fed will push rates higher.
Bernanke has also been pursuing of late a policy of radical openness, going against decades of perceived Fed secrecy. The man gives wonky press conference after Fed meetings, in which he answers any and all questions. Unlike Greenspan, who revelled in being incomprehensible, Bernake is rather plainspoken.
If he has a failing, it's that as the Fed has successfully held inflation to the bank's target (around 2 percent, which isn't much inflation at all ) and avoided deflation, in which prices collapse, he's seriously missed the mark on maximum employment, the other leg of the Fed's dual mandate. The unemployment rate is coming down, but it still stands at a daunting 8.3 percent.
In his defense, getting the economy going again while controlling inflation AND dodging deflation has set the stage for employment recovery and reasonable, if slow, GDP growth. We're beginning to see that now. Unfortunately, for most of 2011, the U.S. economy endured what I call "stuckflation," which Bernanke can be blamed for.
But inflation? No way. Ron Paul is wrong. Very wrong.
Follow Matthew DeBord and the DeBord Report on Twitter.The second Tyranid digital Dataslate is here, and bug players should be rejoicing. Just wait till you see what formation from the mists of time has returned!
via iTunes:
Dataslate: Tyranid Invasion – Rising Leviathan II $14.99
Description
The invasion of Satys enters a new and deadly phase as the Hive Mind drowns the planet in a deluge of biohorrors. Though tens of thousands lie dead already, the Catachans, led by Colonel Krelm, desperately try to hold key fortifications within the irradiated jungles, hoping to keep the swarm at bay. The surviving members of the Aurora Space Marine Chapter fight with them, determined to sell their lives if it means blunting the Great Devourer’s assault. Can they hold back the beast long enough for help to arrive, or will they too succumb to the chitinous claws of Hive Fleet Leviathan?
About the Book:
Tyranid Invasion – Rising Leviathan II is the second book in a trilogy of Tyranid Dataslates, each of which details the different stages of Hive Fleet Leviathan’s assault upon the planet of Satys. This second instalment showcases the invasion organisms of the Tyranid fleet. It contains formations, missions and rules so that you can re-create the unstoppable advance of Hive Fleet Leviathan in your games of Warhammer 40,000.
OH YEAH – Endless Swarm returns! If there is one hallmark formation that best reflects the horror of dread of fighting the Hivefleets is is Endless Swarm, and seeing it make its way onto the standard 40K tabletop is a good thing!Please enable Javascript to watch this video
ST. LOUIS (KTVI) - More than two months after the Missouri Supreme Court tossed out a pair of murder convictions against a man who sat on death row for more than 20 years, the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office intends to retry Reginald Clemons for an infamous double-murder case at the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge.
Clemons was one of four people tried and convicted in the April 1991 rape and murder of sisters Julie and Robin Kerry. Clemons, who was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder, was sentenced to death in 1993.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce said she believes modern DNA testing supports the prosecution's original case.
In addition to the murder charges, Clemons will also face charges of forcible rape and first-degree robbery when he goes back to trial.
Clemons will still be eligible for the death penalty, Joyce said.
The Kerry sisters went to the bridge with their cousin when they were confronted by a group of men. Their cousin testified the men raped 20-year-old Julie and 19-year-old Robin before forcing them to jump into the Mississippi River. Only the cousin survived the ordeal.
Clemons long maintained his innocence, saying he was not involved in either the rape or murder of the Kerry sisters. One of the other three men convicted was sentenced to 30 years in prison after cooperating with prosecutors and testifying during the trial.
Clemons and the other two co-defendants were sentenced to death at the time. One of those defendants was executed in October 2005, while the other had his sentence reduced to life without the possibility of parole.
The court appointed a retired judge to review the case, who determined Clemons was beaten by police into confessing his involvement and that prosecutors later suppressed evidence during trial.
The Missouri Supreme Court threw out those convictions in a 4-3 ruling on November 24, 2015 and ordered the case back to the local circuit court, which had 60 days from December 10th to order a retrial for Clemons.
Regardless of the outcome, Clemons will remain in prison for a conviction in an unrelated case. He was sentenced to 15 years for a 2007 assault on a state prison employee.This article is also available in: Bos/Hrv/Srp
Bamir Topi, the president of Albania, is caught unwittingly on film as he, like any other theatre goer, settles into his seat and looks around to see who else has come to watch the show at Tirana’s main concert hall.
Agron Hoxha fast-forwards the unedited video. The footage shows the host, a prominent local actress of Orthodox Christian origin, as she recites verses by Muslim mystic Rumi and passages from the Koran. She introduces the artists on the stage to a full audience at the capital’s Palace of Congresses.
Tenors and sopranos and mezzos and contraltos chant ilahis, the Muslim answer to Georgian chants, backed by the strings of the Albanian State TV Orchestra.
“The Arabs do not like this,” Hoxha, the public relations chief of the Muslim Community of Albania, MCA, says of the ilahis and the glittery show.
The ‘Arabs’ Hoxha refers to are actually Albanian Muslims; they are believers who embraced forms of Islam that were heavily influenced by some Arab schools of thought after the collapse of communism in the 1990s.
Atheist under communism
Albania was strictly atheist under the Stalinist regime that was in place for the second half of the 20th century. When communism collapsed, overseas Islamic charities came, largely from the Arab peninsula and north-eastern Africa, to assist the Muslim community.
These foreign Islamic groups were the main financial backers for the resurgent MCA, the official organisation that runs Islamic affairs in the country. Albania’s Islamic community was starved of funds and poorly organised, as public worship was outlawed under communism.
Secret worship under communism Enver Hoxha, the hardline communist leader who ruled Albania for much of the second half of the 20th century, imposed a ban on religion and, in 1976, declared Albania the first atheist state in the world. All forms of religious worship were banned and criminalized. Some believers – of all faiths – practised their religion in secret. Tahir Zenelhasani, now an Islamic educator in Albania, recalls how, during one Ramadan in the late 70s, his father was checked on by three party executives to see if he was fasting. They placed coffee and cigarettes in front of him. His father’s fasting was an open secret in their village, Zenelhasani says. However, one of those supposed to find out whether he was practicing religion had quietly entered his office earlier, drank the coffee and stubbed out a cigarette in the ashtray, so protecting Zenelhasani’s father. The ban of religion was lifted when communism collapsed in 1990. The current conflict between the older generation, who secretly practised Ottoman Islam, and younger people, influenced by ‘Arab’ schools of Islam, has been compounded by the absence of significant number of believers among the generation in between, and of home-grown religious leaders – a direct result of imposed atheism.
Seventy per cent of Albania’s 3m population are of Muslim origin, but the number of practicing believers is much smaller. The younger generation discovering religion for the first time after communism, did so via schools and mosques established by foreign, often Arabic, charities.
Up until 2001, Arab and north-east African Islamic organisations funded and ran all but |
general election campaign with Jeremy Corbyn at the heart of it on a daily basis, there will be a coherent narrative, just not one necessarily to Labour’s advantage. It appears Labour are intent on repeating the mistakes of 2015, a poor leader who doesn’t connect with the centre ground will lead to a traditional left-wing party competes with a traditional right-wing party, with the traditional result in 2020, as Labour’s most electorally successful leader would put it.
TSERepublicans have been raising concerns about how to pay for the $7.4 billion measure, while Democrats, led by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, have argued that there was a moral obligation to assist those who put their lives at risk during rescue and cleanup operations at ground zero.
The bill is formally known as the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named after a New York police detective who participated in the rescue efforts at ground zero. He later developed breathing complications that were common to first responders at the site, and he died in January 2006. The cause of his death became a source of debate after the city’s medical examiner concluded that it was not directly related to the attacks.
After the vote, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, a chief sponsor of the bill in the House, argued that Democrats should include the 9/11 health bill in the larger tax-cut legislation and, in the process, dare Republicans to oppose it in that context. Ms. Maloney added that the tax bill was the one piece of legislation that “Republicans won’t leave this town without passing.”
As the day wore on, it appeared increasingly unlikely that the Senate would include a provision providing health care for ground zero workers in any tax package it brought to the floor, according to senior Capitol Hill officials. But supporters of the 9/11 legislation said there was a possibility they could persuade Democratic leaders in the House to include it in any tax-cut plan that the chamber approved and win Senate approval during negotiations over differences in measures passed by the two chambers.
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The Senate action was a blow to sponsors of the bill, who mobilized a network of allies across the political spectrum to lobby on its behalf, including the New York City police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Ms. Gillibrand, the chief sponsor in the Senate, even reached out to former President George W. Bush. But her aides say Mr. Bush did not respond to her entreaties.
In a statement, the mayor chastised Senate Republicans for their “wrongheaded political strategy” and called on them to allow a floor vote on the bill. “The attacks of 9/11 were attacks on America,” he said, “and we have a collective responsibility to care for the heroes, from all 50 states, who answered the call of duty, saved lives and helped our nation recover.”
The bill calls for providing $3.2 billion over the next eight years to monitor and treat injuries stemming from exposure to toxic dust and debris at ground zero. New York City would pay 10 percent of those health costs.
The bill would also set aside $4.2 billion to reopen the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund to provide payments for job and economic losses.
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In addition, the bill includes a provision that would allow money from the Victim Compensation Fund to be paid to any eligible claimant who receives a payment under the settlement of lawsuits that 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers recently reached with the city.
Now, those who receive a settlement from the city are limited in how much compensation they can get from the fund, according to the bill’s sponsors.
There are nearly 60,000 people enrolled in health monitoring and treatment programs related to the 9/11 attacks, according to the sponsors of the bill. The federal government provides the bulk of the money for those programs.
If the bill is not adopted by the current Congress, its supporters will have start over again next year. With Republicans set to take control of the House, passing the bill in that chamber will be extremely difficult, the bill’s supporters say. That is a large part of the reason backers of the measure were pleading with Senate leaders to get it passed by this Congress."It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when."
The zombie apocalypse in "The Walking Dead" makes it one of the most intense and gripping shows on television, but it might surprise you to learn a real zombie plague could be closer than you think.
HuffPost Entertainment interviewed renowned Zombie Expert Matt Mogk who believes a zombie takeover can "absolutely happen." It's just a matter of time.
"I mean I don’t know if it’s going to happen in our lifetime, but it could happen tomorrow or it could happen in 100 years. I kind of see it in the same way you would look at an earthquake in Los Angeles. You never know when it’s going to happen, but any expert will tell you that we’re overdue for it. It could happen at any moment. So that’s kind of the way I see the zombie plague," said Mogk.
Mogk is an author, college lecturer, "Talking Dead" cast member and founder of Zombie Research Society, a club comprised of more than 350,000 zombie experts and enthusiasts across 6 continents. The ZRS board includes a variety of leading scholars in different fields, including a Harvard professor, an active member of the U.S. Navy and even "Night of the Living Dead" creator George A. Romero.
Romero with fans.
"What we do is we ask the question from a scientific side," Mogk explained, "If a zombie actually showed up at your front door, what would it look like? What would it smell like? How would it hunt you? How would its brain work? And then we extrapolate from that what diseases out there are mutating in strange ways that we don’t understand, or, now that we sort of have a working theory of what a real life zombie outbreak might be like, we look at what are real world survival strategies."
Without further ado, here's your five-step guide to surviving a zombie apocalypse:
Step 1: Watch "Zombieland"
Some zombie movies may give clues as to what a real zombie apocalypse would be like. Mogk explains that while popular zombie stories like "Walking Dead" have corpses reanimating, it's much more likely that a real world scenario would deal with what he calls a living zombie. This is a relentlessly aggressive human driven by a biological infection. (Zombie purists may disagree.)
Mogk said, "If you look at like '28 Days Later' from 2002, these creatures are technically still human. They don’t die and come back to life. 'Zombieland' incidentally was a living zombie movie, which a lot of people don’t even bring up. I would say from a practical point of view, if a raving maniac is trying to claw down my front door to get inside to attack me or eat me or turn me into one of them, I’m not really interested in having a philosophical conversation about: 'Is that really a zombie?'"
While researching his book, "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies," Mogk learned that, theoretically, scientists could make a disease to create living zombies in a lab today. In addition, though he says there are clear obstacles before this comes to fruition, Mogk points to rabies and vCJD, sometimes called Human Mad Cow Disease, as potential candidates for bringing on a zombie plague.
In the case of Human Mad Cow, he says this disease is 100 percent fatal and a variant can potentially cause a person to go violently insane and spread to others through blood, which, as it turns out, is basically the premise for "Zombieland."
Step 2: Check Facebook
Even if there were a disease creating living zombies today, the ZRS president says that a zombie outbreak isn't going to happen over night.
"You see this in every zombie movie pretty much the notion that one person gets bitten and then you cut to the end of the world. And that just really doesn’t hold true. It would be so many months of gray area and questions of what do we do," said Mogk.
Mogk says the disease would be on the news and in social media. Also, our cultural awareness to infectious disease, and even zombies in general, is a big advantage.
Mogk continued, "You ever notice people in zombie movies don’t watch zombie movies? They have no idea what a zombie is. They’re like, 'Oh, a homeless guy tried to bite me. Oh, that’s weird … let’s all go to sleep.' They have no idea. Meanwhile, when I see a drunk guy like stumbling out of a bar at 1:00 a.m., I’m like, 'That’s a fucking zombie. I’m going a different way home,' [Laughs] you know, for sure."
Step 3: Make Supplies Your First Priority
The Rule of Threes for survival says you’re dead in three minutes without air, three hours without shelter (Mogk includes anything that protects your body from the outside world the elements threats that sort of thing), three days without water and three weeks without food.
"I would start right there," said Mogk, "and I really think a lot about water because Los Angeles has very little. Human beings need a ton of water on a constant basis to keep from dying of dehydration. Access to clean drinking water would be a really high priority for me."
The ZRS presidents says the 2010 Haiti earthquake serves as an example of the importance of the Rule of Threes. Four years later, and the country is still dealing with a serious cholera problem from tainted water.
"Finding water can be difficult, but drinking tainted water is even worse. You die of dehydration from crapping yourself and throwing up until you're so dehydrated you drop dead," said Mogk.
Step 4: Stay Close To Home
The ZRS president explained, "Your survival plan in any disaster should be centered around surviving where you are. The grass is not greener on the other side in a zombie plague. If you think it’s really bad where you are, it’s worse somewhere else. Because you don’t even know that place so you have a whole another survival disadvantage."
Though Mogk says he's a huge fan of "The Walking Dead," and shies away from criticizing the show over minor details, one thing he points out that would definitely be different in a real zombie apocalypse is that cars would be ancient history. He points to examples of trucker strikes in Italy and Argentina that left some cities running out of fuel and food in days.
Mogk emphasized, "In like the first two weeks of any society imploding event, cars will be a legend you tell your kids about, and they won't believe you."
Step 5: Whatever You Do, Don't Go To Walmart
Mogk said, "One thing we can all agree on is that people make zombies. People need water, food and supplies, and if they don’t have that they may be forced to take yours. It’s not necessarily gonna be an '80s apocalyptic action movie where you’re gonna have gangs of dudes with pink mohawks and futuristic motorcycles riding around saying, 'Yay! We're breaking the law,' as soon as the zombies come, but there could be a lot of bad choices."
The ZRS founder recommends staying away from Walmart, other big box stores, gun stores and all the other places people are likely to go.
He continued, "When you're building your zombie plan, and you love it... you think it’s great... you're all good. First you have to ask yourself, 'Will other people be doing the same thing? Will other people be going to the same place?' And if the answer is yes, do not do that thing. That’s it."Donald Trump has launched a military strike against Syria, after President Bashar Assad launched a chemical weapons attack that left fifty people dead, including at least ten children.
In response, President Assad has offered Trump a Pepsi, claiming that he understands it’s a great way for opposing sides to sort out their differences. “Pepsi is a great way to project a global message of peace, unity and understanding,” he said. “If only it also tasted any good.”
But President Trump declined the offer, saying he’d just bought a heap of shares in the company that made the missiles. Lawmakers on both sides of Congress spent much of the afternoon buying shares in private military contractors, as news of the strike broke.
Meanwhile, Trump is reportedly considering Kendall Jenner into the dangerous warzone to try and prevent her from ever making advertisements ever again.Adults only catch flu twice a decade, according to new research.
Children catch flu every two years but infections become rarer as they enter adulthood and by the age of 30 they get it just twice a decade.
The Imperial College London study found flu-like illness can be caused by many pathogens, making it difficult to assess how often people are infected.
But by analysing blood samples from volunteers in southern China for antibody levels against nine different influenza strains that circulated from 1968 to 2009 the researchers were able to put a time scale on infections.
Dr Adam Kucharski said: "There's a lot of debate in the field as to how often people get flu, as opposed to flu-like illness caused by something else.
"These symptoms could sometimes be caused by common cold viruses, such as rhinovirus or coronavirus.
"Also, some people might not realise they had flu, but the infection will show up when a blood sample is subsequently tested. This is the first time anyone has reconstructed a group's history of infection from modern-day blood samples."
Dr Steven Riley added: "For adults, we found that influenza infection is actually much less common than some people think.
"In childhood and adolescence, it's much more common, possibly because we mix more with other people. The exact frequency of infection will vary depending on background levels of flu and vaccination."
The study involving scientists from the UK, US and China published in PLOS Biology also developed a mathematical model of how immunity to flu changes over a lifetime as different strains of the virus are encountered.
The immune system responds to flu viruses by producing antibodies that specifically target proteins on the virus surface.
These proteins can change as the virus evolves, but we keep antibodies in the blood that have a memory for strains we've encountered before.
The model supported evidence from other studies that the strains of influenza virus we encounter earlier in life evoke stronger immune responses than those we meet later.
• What the NHS says about the flu jab
The findings could help scientists predict how the virus will change in the future and how immunity to historical strains will influence the way vaccines work and how effective they will be.
Dr Kucharski said: "What we've done in this study is to analyse how a person's immunity builds up over a lifetime of flu infections.
"This information helps us understand the susceptibility of the population as a whole and how easy it is for new seasonal strains to spread through the population."ABC's Martha Raddatz asked American soldiers in Iraq what issues are most important to them when looking at the presidential candidates.
Though the military is not supposed to engage in partisan political activity, these soldiers spoke out about their personal endorsements, and their opinions are likely to matter. In 2004, 73 percent of the U.S. military voted for a presidential candidate, and officials believe it may be even higher this time around.
PFC Jeremy Slate said he supported Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., because of his stated intention to pull out of Iraq right away.
"That would be nice," Slate said, "I'd like to be home, yea."
SFC Patricia Keller also expressed support for Obama, citing his representation for change.
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Spc. Patrick Nicholls from Eggawam, Mass., pointed out that many soldiers on the frontlines frequently think about their families back home.
"We think about how our families are doing back home. That's a major concern, like how the economy is doing, also as well as where we're going to be in the future. Because really, truly, what we consider we're doing, we're doing a valuable job, we want to make sure that the efforts we make are appreciated."
He suggested he was too engaged in Iraq to keep up with politics back home. "I haven't really been following it too much since we've been over here, ma'am," he told Raddatz. "So, don't really know which issues are too important to me right now.... I don't know who's running, ma'am."
Lt. Leah Wicks said that, tied into concerns about her family's welfare, were concerns about the economy, "where we're going to be in the future."
Only moments before speaking with ABC News, the troops had been listening to Vice President Dick Cheney give a rousing speech, but it didn't change their political preference.
Spc. Imus Loto said he supported Obama. "It will be something different. But he's out there and he'll probably support us a lot more."
By support, Loto meant pulling out troops. "Pull me out, too." he said.
Though the military is generally a more conservative group, soldiers like Sgt. Justin Sarbaum are just as eager for a pull-out as the Democratic candidates. Sarbaum said he wondered which presidential candidate would be able to better the U.S. relationship with rogue nations, such as Iran, so that soldiers are not sent off to another war.
"Iran is obviously a big issue," Sarbaum said, "Here in Iraq for my third time; starting another war right now — is it really necessary?"
Sgt. Cory Messingham from Lewisville, Texas, said he wasn't following the race, but he was concerned about candidates' paying attention to the emotional toll that the war has taken on soldiers.
"My biggest issue is support for the military, military funding and our deployments, not having long deployments anymore. Because [the] majority of us are doing...15-month deployments. So, it's tough on the soldiers and tough on the soldiers' families. Those are really my biggest issues."
1st Sgt. David Logan said, "I am leaning toward Hillary. I think that we should have a gradual drawdown."
Though the soldiers have been living in Iraq, they listen closely to the candidates on issues far beyond the wars they are fighting.
"Education back in the states is one of my main concerns," Spc. Matthew Durkin said.
Economy and environment were on Staff Sgt. Derek Dion's mind. "Things like gas prices, and look at the environment and what we're going to leave our children."
Spc. Joseph Lindsesdt, who is from Alaska, said he was watching for consistency of the candidates' views. "The steadiness of the candidate, whether they've changed their views, constantly, over time, or with political wind, as I like to put it."
To that end, Lindsesdt's pick is Obama. "The fact that he's followed his views, regardless of what they have been [sic] and whether I've agreed with them or not, sometimes. But he's been steady the entire way."
When asked if he was concerned about criticism that Obama had less political experience than some of the other candidates, the battle-weary soldier replied, "No, I think being a decent leader doesn't have to do anything with experience much."
JUNG HWA SONG contributed to this report.Image caption Charity Africans Unite Against Child Abuse works with church leaders to improve their practices
"We're quite happy to talk about what is inappropriate belief when it comes to terrorism or paedophilia," said African studies expert Dr Richard Hoskins.
"But when it comes to fundamentalist religious belief affecting child protection, we don't seem to want to talk about it."
Dr Hoskins, who gave evidence at the trial of a couple who have been convicted for brutally torturing and killing a teenager in their east London flat, is among experts and charities calling for more to be done to tackle the problem of child abuse linked to witchcraft.
Eric Bikubi, 28, and Magalie Bamu, 29, from Newham, east London, have been found guilty at the Old Bailey of killing 15-year-old Kristy Bamu on Christmas Day 2010.
"What happened to Kristy is horrendous and scandalous," said Dr Hoskins.
"We've got to take action because I'd hate to think a child in our capital goes through anything like this ever again."
Scotland Yard said it had conducted 83 investigations into faith-based child abuse in the past decade. They include other high-profile cases such as Victoria Climbie in 2000 and the headless torso of "Adam", a five or six-year-old boy, which was found in the Thames in 2001.
'Ferocious onslaught'
Child abuse linked to belief in witchcraft is a growing phenomenon, according to evidence submitted to the Commons Select Committee's current inquiry into child protection. The government has said it is due to publish an action plan to tackle faith-based child abuse later this year.
Image caption In 2010 Unicef reported 20,000 children accused of witchcraft were living on the streets of Kinshasa
Bikubi and Bamu were originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where witchcraft - called Kindoki - is practised in some churches.
In 2010 Unicef reported 20,000 children accused of witchcraft were living on the streets of DR Congo capital Kinshasa.
However, Dr Hoskins said the Newham incident went way beyond any accepted practices in the DR Congo.
"What happened in the flat was feral," he said.
"It was the most ferocious onslaught.
"It's pretty inconceivable two people could do that for five days in Kinshasa - there is a community glue in place.
"But in London it is very easy to be anonymous and hidden."
The police investigation found Bikubi visited a number of African churches in north London.
'Rogue churches'
Debbie Ariyo, the head of the charity Africans Unite Against Child Abuse (Afruca), said a belief in witchcraft in the UK was "endorsed by various African churches, putting children at risk".
"If you look at how fast new African churches have grown since 2005, it's quite astonishing," she said.
LONDON CHILD ABUSE LINKED TO WITCHCRAFT BELIEF Image caption Victoria Climbie had many injuries when she died 2000 - Five year old Victoria Climbie died after being tortured in 2000 in Haringey, north London. Experts later linked the case to a belief in spirit possession.
2001 - The torso of a five or six-year-old boy "Adam" was found floating in the River Thames. Officers believe his death was a ritualistic killing and he had been poisoned.
2005 - Sita Kisanga convicted of aiding and abetting cruelty to eight-year-old "Child B" who was beaten, cut and had chilli rubbed in her eyes in a flat in Hackney, east London, because she was thought to be a witch.
"One of the key beliefs of these churches is in witches and exorcising them."
She said Afruca had worked with dozens of churches to improve their policies and practices.
"But we have churches who preach witchcraft - and this can lead to inciting people to harm children," she added.
"Dozens of rogue churches don't want to change their practices. Small churches can be hidden away in a living room or a garage."
Some churches are held in public centres, including leisure centres and school halls, and "no-one knows what's going on," she added.
Ms Ariyo said financial profit motivated some of these churches.
"The idea is to extort money from parents because if your child is branded a witch you will need to exorcise that child," she said.
There is currently no obligation for faith organisations to register with the Charity Commission or any other organisation in the UK, something which Ms Ariyo said needed changing.
However, the government said regulation would not change the behaviour of such churches and it was working with "faith and community leaders" and child protection charities to "improve awareness and understanding in different faiths and communities about child safeguarding".
Afruca has also been campaigning to prosecute those who verbally brand children as witches.
'Lack of training'
Dr Hoskins said he agreed this should happen.
Image caption Kristy Bamu was visiting London from Paris during the Christmas holidays
"When the first prosecution happens because someone is being accused of telling a child they're possessed, then we'll know action's happening," he added.
"For every case that we hear about there are at least 10 others," he said.
Ms Ariyo said there was a "lack of adequate training for police officers" to detect these abuse cases.
Scotland Yard set up Project Violet in 2004 to tackle faith-related child abuse.
Det Supt Terry Sharpe, who heads the project, said they knew it was an "under-reported crime" and the Metropolitan Police would be training officers better over such issues.
"Officers are now encouraged to consider not just the immediate family, but also the extended family and wider faith, culture or community links," he added.
However, some campaigners said they believed the fundamental problem was that politicians did not want to tackle the issue because they thought it would be too racially sensitive.
"There isn't the commitment by the government to bring this thing wide open," said John Azah, chairman of the British Federation of Race Equality Councils.
"They are too scared of being accused of racism."
The Department for Education (DfE) insisted it was a matter it was taking seriously.
A spokeswoman said: "Over the past year, voluntary, faith and community organisations, the Metropolitan Police, Association of Directors of Children's Services and the London Safeguarding Children Board have been working with the government on proposals to tackle faith-based child abuse.
"The proposals will be shared with a wider group of professionals, voluntary sector organisations, faith and community groups to build on what has been developed so far."After many a delay, Sony India has finally informed retailers of the price drop on the PlayStation 4 (PS4). The 500GB version of the company's latest console will cost you Rs. 32,990. It will not come with any games or accessories, rather the new price is for the console alone (plus one controller, HDMI cable, power adapter). This comes after Gadgets 360 exclusively reported that a price drop was in the offing and Sony India was conducting a stock audit prior to revealing its new price for the PS4. The new pricing should be visible at most websites and stores from Saturday.
(Also see: Expect a Price Drop for the PS4 in India Soon)
If you were expecting the quieter 1200 series (or C Chassis as it is also known) 500GB PS4 with improved thermal efficiency at a lower price, think again. The price drop pertains to existing stock in the country, all of which consist of older models. At this point in time the only consoles sporting the CUH-1200 model number is the 1TB edition that Sony is retailing for Rs. 37,990.
Nonetheless, we still feel that the 500GB PS4 at Rs. 32,990 is a solid deal. While it might lack the efficient, quieter internals of the 1TB console, you're still covered by warranty from Sony and if you need extra hard drive space, you can always swap out the existing 500GB and install a 2TB laptop hard drive easily.
(Also see: PlayStation 4 Price Dropped in Europe; India Soon)
Besides, given how e-commerce companies are falling over each other to provide the lowest prices, we won't be surprised to see the 500GB PS4 be available for under Rs. 30,000 in the weeks to come or a reduced price on existing bundles such as those that feature Sony's horror sleeper hit, Until Dawn.
Will you pick up the PS4 at its newly discounted price or do you prefer the improved 1TB model? Let us know in the comments.President Obama (Photo: Carolyn Kaster, AP) Story Highlights White House of chief of staff Denis McDonough makes argument for use of force in Syria
McDonough calls resistance to military action an "understandable sentiment"
Former White House aide says it will be hard for Obama to act without congressional backing
White House chief of staff Denis McDonough took to the Sunday shows to make the Obama administration's case for a military strike against Syria, as President Obama and his aides make their closing argument in their effort to win congressional authorization for action against Bashar Assad's regime.
McDonough was on all five major Sunday interview programs as part of the administration's sales pitch on Syria. Lawmakers, who are expected to vote on a use-of-force resolution this week, say they are hearing by large margins from constituents to vote against a military strike.
"That's an absolutely understandable sentiment, given all the sacrifice and investment the United States has made, and our armed forces have made in the last 11 and 12 years," McDonough said on Fox News Sunday. "That's why what the president has in mind here—and what we're consulting Congress on-- is a limited, targeted consequential action. Let me tell you what this is not: This is not Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not Libya—a sustained air campaign. This is not boots on the ground.
Obama is also set to sit down for six network television interviews to make his case on Syria on Monday, and National Security Adviser Susan Rice will deliver a major address on Monday afternoon in Washington on Syria.
Obama will culminate his push with a Tuesday evening address from the Oval Office. McDonough declined to preview the president's comments.
The latest effort by the White House to try to win support for Obama's call for a strike came as Assad said he didn't have anything to do with a chemical weapons attack on the outskirts of Damascus last month, according to CBS News' Charlie Rose, who interviewed the Syrian president on Sunday morning in Damascus.
Rose, whose interview will air on CBS and PBS on Monday, also said Assad expressed some remorse for the Aug. 21 suspected chemical attack on the outskirts of Damascus which killed 1,400 and spurred Obama to call for a military strike.
MORE: Charlie Rose interviews Assad
McDonough also seemed to acknowledge on Sunday that a limited military strike is unlikely to change the course of the 2 ½ year-old civil war that has left 100,000 Syrians dead. And he told CNN's State of the Union that the president carefully weighed many risks that could come with a military strike, including the chance that "somehow we get dragged into the middle of an ongoing civil war" and the possibility of retaliation against the U.S. or Israel.
A Syrian man mourns over a body after an alleged poison gas attack in Damascus on Aug. 21. (Photo: Media office of Douma City via AP)
But McDonough made the case that the "risks for inaction outweigh the risks for action." He also said on NBC's Meet the Press that Obama wants Congress to be "a full partner" in military action against Assad's regime.
"This is a person who has gone from using overwhelming conventional force to using napalm on children to now using chemical weapons…with the scale and scope we have not seen in three decades," McDonough said. "The question for Congress this week is…should there be consequences for this. The Iranians are going to watch for that answer. The Syrians are going to watch for that answer. Hezbollah is going to watch for that answer."
McDonough sidestepped questions on whether Obama would still move forward with a military strike if Congress rejects his call for authorization for the use-of-force.
STORY: Obama stymied by Iraq fatigue
"What the president has said throughout the course of this is: If Congress wants to make sure there is consequence for a dictator using these dastardly weapons against his own people—including children—then they are going to have to vote yes for this resolution," McDonough said.
"Our consultation with Congress and the president's request for authorization is not an empty exercise," McDonough added on CNN's State of the Union.
STORY: Biblical visions of doom in Syria?
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said Sunday that the Obama should withdraw his request from Congress, given the stiff opposition among lawmakers and many of their constituents.
"I don't believe support is there in Congress," McGovern told CNN."We're being told there are two choices: do nothing or bomb Syria.There have to be other alternatives out there."
If lawmakers vote against Obama's resolution to strike Syria, it will be "very hard for him to act," David Axelrod, the president's former senior strategist, told NBC's Meet the Press.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1fMclwSThe 2016 MLB season is over, and 29 other teams will try to find a way to win the World Series after seeing the Chicago Cubs won their first in 108 years.
As free agency begins, we MLB fans have to wait another 11.5 months to see who wins it all. Even though only one team will win the 2017 World Series, there can be up to five teams who win the next five World Series Championships. We have a good idea of which teams will dominate from 2017-2021. The Chicago Cubs have a great core of young players as well as an elite farm system. Ditto for the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals, among others.
This is certainly no easy task, but I took it upon myself to take a look at which teams are built to win now, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Here are my predictions for who'll face off and win the next five World Series Championships.
Continue scrolling to keep reading Click the button below to start this article in quick view Share Tweet Email Copy Link Copied
15 2017 AL Champion: Toronto Blue Jays
Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports
The Blue Jays may not have Edwin Encarnacion or Jose Bautista in 2017, but their pitching staff is more than enough to take them to the ALCS, as we saw in 2016.
The Jays owned the best ERA in the American League last year at 3.78. Their starters did their jobs against the Cleveland Indians in the ALCS, but when the offence can't score runs, the pitching goes to waste. The Jays will simply not face a pitching staff that dominant again. It was a once-in-a-lifetime performance from Cleveland.
For the Jays, you figure their bats will show up more like we saw in 2015. Kendrys Morales hits better for average than Encarnacion. Troy Tulowitzki and Russell Martin are due for bounce-back seasons. Devon Travis and Josh Donaldson also hit extremely well for contact.
And their bullpen won't lose 30-plus games like they did last season. Jason Grilli's back for a full season in Toronto. They'll ride a consistent rotation, bullpen and improved lineup to the World Series. All of the waiting will finally be worth it.
14 2017 NL Champion: Chicago Cubs
Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports
Sorry if you were hoping for something more bold here.
But the 2017 Cubs, who won the World Series (by the way) are only entering the early years of what shall be a dynasty. Kris Bryant should be an MVP candidate for years to come, and he's only going to get better. Ditto for Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez, and others. It's also the Cubs' rotation that'll make them dangerous next season.
The Cubs led the majors with a 3.15 ERA last season. Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, and Kyle Hendricks could all be NL Cy Young candidates for next season. Jason Heyward is also due for a bounce-back season after a forgetful 2016 campaign. The Cubs are fortunate to be playing in a weak NL Central (for once) as well as a fairly weak NL. They'll defend their NL pennant.
13 2017 World Series Champion: Toronto Blue Jays
John E. Sokolowski-USA TODAY Sports
As dominant as the Cubs' rotation was last year, it's natural to expect a bit of a step back. Arrieta looked more like an average no. two starter after his 2015 NL Cy Young season. The Jays rotation may not be as dominant as the Cubs, but both of them will put on clinics in the Fall Classic. Thing is, Cubs will come into this matchup with nothing to lose. The Jays will have everything to gain. The bats have been a mess over the last two playoffs, and they're simply due to come around in October when it matters most.
This Jays squad will almost be a team of destiny. Their core players are on the wrong side of 30 and will have every bit of motivation to finally win a World Series. Though this series matchup would be tough to call, the Jays will win a seven-game series. That'll be thanks to the AL winning the All-Star Game, giving the Jays home advantage.
12 2018 AL Champion: Boston Red Sox
Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
The Red Sox have easily been one baseball's most dominant teams of the past decade-and-a-half, winning three World Series championships and making the playoffs more consistently than most teams. The days of buying all the star free agents are long gone, and their farm system and young players will ensure they'll compete for a lot of championships.
The offence carried them last year. Dustin Pedroia and Hanley Ramirez provided veteran bats, but Mookie Betts is going to make a run at the AL MVP for a long time. Also, Xander Bogaerts, Andrew Benintendi, and Jackie Bradley Jr. are among their young stars that'll keep giving pitchers problems. The rotation isn't necessarily elite, but Rick Porcello and David Price are a solid one-two tandem. Craig Kimbrel is one of the league's top closers, too.
Boston will return to their fourth World Series in 15 seasons.
11 2018 NL Champion: San Francisco Giants
John Hefti-USA TODAY Sports
If it weren't for the Cubs, there's a strong chance the Giants would have found yet another way to win the World Series in an even year. This prognosticator is already assuming they'll win their fourth NL pennant in the last five even years. But it's not because of history only, but also the talent on this roster.
The Giants rotation can stack up against any other in baseball. Madison Bumgarner, Johnny Cueto, and Jeff Samardzija form one of the scariest rotations in baseball. Also, Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt, Hunter Pence (the guy who looks like Marv from Home Alone), Denard Span, and Buster Posey form one of baseball's top lineups |
cript: The Solution,” Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 5, 2017.
Annalee Newitz, “The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Has Finally Been Decoded,” Ars Technica, Sept. 8, 2017.
Natasha Frost, “The World’s Most Mysterious Medieval Manuscript May No Longer Be a Mystery,” Atlas Obscura, Sept. 8, 2017.
Sarah Zhang, “Has a Mysterious Medieval Code Really Been Solved?” Atlantic, Sept. 10, 2017.
Annalee Newitz, “So Much for That Voynich Manuscript ‘Solution,'” Ars Technica, Sept. 10, 2017.
“Imaginary Erdős Number,” Numberphile, Nov. 26, 2014.
Oleg Pikhurko, “Erdős Lap Number,” Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick (accessed Sept. 15, 2017).
This week’s lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Alex Baumans, who sent this corroborating link (warning — this spoils the puzzle).
You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset.
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Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.
If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at podcast@futilitycloset.com. Thanks for listening!by
Sorting through all of the misinformation on the Internet is nothing new to us. The old adage, “You can’t believe everything you read” has never been more relevant. For every informative and accurate story out there, there are dozens more that are either completely fabricated or utterly useless. Of course, this problem isn’t limited to just the Internet— it is difficult to find reliable information anywhere anymore.
I gave up on looking for reliable news sources a long time ago, but for awhile I still believed that you could trust the sports stories you came across, especially ones from seemingly reliable sources like espn.com or nfl.com. After all, these are established corporations with reputations to uphold, and how hard is it to report on sports? Who won, who lost, who got traded, how much did this player sign for, who got arrested, etc. It’s pretty hard to get these facts wrong, and these established companies could report the facts, leaving the rumors and speculation to us—the fans. But soon enough, these companies, like all big companies, got greedy and wanted it all—facts be damned. It’s not enough to just report facts anymore—they want to draw us in with the rumors and speculation too. Now, nfl.com reporters can just spout whatever they want because it’s not about reporting facts anymore, but about attracting traffic to your site by any means necessary.
Ian Rapoport’s latest reports on Ben Roethlisberger are a prime example. As everybody in Pittsburgh probably knows by now, Rapoport tweeted that the Steelers expect Roethlisberger to ask to be traded at the end of the season. Rapoport’s title is listed on nfl.com as “NFL Media Insider”. What the fuck does that even mean? Are we supposed to believe that Rapoport has some kind of inside access that others in the media aren’t privy to? The fact is that Rapoport is a former Boston Herald reporter who now lives in Dallas and covers all of the NFL—limiting the amount of access he has to the Steelers organization and Ben Roethlisberger. Lots of local Pittsburgh media who cover the Steelers on a daily basis have been quick to dismiss and even criticize Rapoport. That should go a long way in telling you how full of shit he is. Dejan Kovacevic of Trib Total Media said that there is “zero veracity” to Rapoport’s report. Roethlisberger himself adamantly denied the reports twice and Mike Prisuta of DVE writes that he believes Ben is sincere. Roethlisberger’s agent also denied the report. Even more telling is that Ian Rapoport’s colleague at the NFL network, Mike Silver, (also a dick, btw), came out and contradicted Rapoport the same day by saying that he was told that “Roethlisberger wants to finish his career as a member of the Steelers.”
Why would Rapoport make up this story? It’s likely that he had a conversation with someone remotely affiliated with the Steelers (Cafeteria worker? Maintenance man? Fan on the street?) who was talking about Roethlisberger’s frustrations with losing this season and this “source” flippantly opined that he wouldn’t be surprised if Ben asked to be traded. Rapoport saw this as a golden opportunity to attract attention and ran with it because he is a huge dick. Look at his face—it has “I am a huge dick” written all over it. Some people just have that kind of face. Also Jeremy Piven and Warren Sapp.
Now let’s dissect this fucking asshole’s tweets in detail:
He said the Steelers “fielded offers for him last offseason.” Holy shit, that is huge news! I had no idea that he was on the market. How was that not reported before? BECAUSE IT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT. Dickface comes out with this backtracking tweet just minutes later:
So they have “not had internal discussions about trading (him)”? What the hell? He just said they did. Which is it? Why is he contradicting himself? That’s why nobody should believe any of the bullshit that comes out of his stupid dickface.
Then instead of just letting it go, he tweets this after Art Rooney II makes an official team statement denying the team has any plans to trade Roethlisberger:
Is he serious? Once again he denies reporting it, then he coyly points out Rooney’s choice of the word “plan”. Are we to insinuate that they don’t have intentions of trading him but wouldn’t pass up a good offer if presented to them? I honestly can’t believe he had the gall to add that. I am so annoyed and confused by this garbage reporting.
Rapoport can now stand back and admire the mess he created, no doubt with more popularity and more twitter followers. Mission accomplished, right? Too bad Roethlisberger is once again left to answer uncomfortable questions and a fanbase is left confused and frustrated.
Ian Rapoport can get hit by a subway train. Here is that video of him getting hit in the face by a football.
I am tired of Rapoport and everyone like him trying to drum up attention and inflate ratings with bogus stories and bogus sources. If you can’t divulge your “source” then just shut the fuck up. We don’t want to hear about it. And if that source happens to be some random TGI Friday’s customer named “Craig” then don’t even bother.
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commentsIn her new book, Why I Lost, 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton puts some of the blame for her general election loss to Republican Donald Trump on her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders. Clinton writes:
His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” campaign.
Like 2008, many in the Democratic establishment assumed the primary would be a coronation for Clinton. When Sanders announced his candidacy, it was with little fanfare. The political intelligencia viewed the Vermont Democratic Socialist as a gadfly who would barely register support.
To Hillary’s chagrin, Sanders’ campaign became a movement. There was a vacuum, which he filled. Many in the Democratic Party felt that they had held their nose and supported candidates in the past who were too close to what Sanders terms “large financial institutions.” There was also an anti-foreign interventionist strand in the party, which was disaffected by the hawkish policies supported by Clinton, including her support for a troop surge in Afghanistan, an invasion of Libya, and her support for Israel during its 2014 military campaign in Gaza.
No other candidate filled that vacuum like Sanders. He became a tribune for voters who had lost faith in the political establishment. By Sanders becoming the voice of the disaffected left, Clinton became styled as a voice of the establishment. This made the primary a lot more competitive than most expected and cast Clinton as the candidate of the big financial institutions and militarists in the general election.
Had the Republican Party nominated an establishment-oriented candidate, Sanders’ supporters might have chosen Hillary, arguing that she is the lesser of two evils. However, the GOP nominated Donald Trump, whose message of economic nationalism, criticism of financial institutions, and oft-mentioned opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the U.S. intervention in Libya made him more palatable to the disaffected voter. Hillary was required to ameliorate the chasm between center-left and liberal Democrats. This was valuable time she could have been using to win over moderates. Consequently, 12 percent of Sanders’ supporters marked ballots for Trump in the general election. Data from Political Wire shows this to be enough to swing the election to Trump.
In addition, some Sanders supporters chose Green Party nominee Jill Stein, Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, or could just not bring themselves to select Clinton.
Despite Sanders’ request that his supporters vote for Clinton, some saw Trump as more in line with their populist ideologies.
There is a great similitude with the Democratic Party’s predicament in 2016 and 1968. In 1968, U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN), whose flagship issue was ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, lost the Democratic Presidential nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey had supported the policies of President Lyndon B. Johnson of continuing the war.
Iowa Governor Harold Hughes and Vermont Governor Philip H. Hoff unsuccessfully beseeched Humphrey to resign as vice president to separate himself from the unpopular administration, but Humphrey instead walked a political tightrope, not wanting to alienate himself from the Democratic establishment, while trying to secure the support of McCarthy supporters.
In part, because of the influence of McCarthy and his vociferous supporters, on Sept. 30, Humphrey announced that as president he would order a unilateral bombing halt in Vietnam “as an acceptable risk for peace.”
Even after that concession, McCarthy did not play the role of a good soldier by publicly supporting Humphrey. Many of McCarthy’s supporters stayed home on election day, unwilling to cast a vote for Humphrey. In fact, McCarthy did not formally endorse Humphrey until a week before the general election. His endorsement finally came as Humphrey, once far behind in the polls, had rallied to being within just two points of Republican nominee Richard M. Nixon.
McCarthy’s endorsement of Humphrey was less than enthusiastic. He proclaimed to his supporters: “I’m voting for Humphrey, and I think you should suffer with me.” McCarthy’s late and tepid endorsement was blamed by some Democrats for Humphrey’s whisker-close loss to Nixon.
Four years later, U.S. Senator George McGovern (D-SD), like Sanders and McCarthy, became a voice for the disaffected Democrats. McGovern overcame 200-1 odds to win the nomination. McGovern staked out territory on the left, supporting “a definite early date for withdrawal of every American soldier from Vietnam,” a $1,000 income supplement for every American, and a major truncation of the U.S. military budget. This message rocket launched him to unexpected frontrunner status. His opponents were forced in the unenviable position of running to his right in the Democratic primary.
Accordingly, Humphrey, running again for the nomination, appeared less progressive, hurting him with liberal voters. After a victory in the hard fought California primary, McGovern secured enough delegates to win the nomination.
In the general election, some moderate and conservative Democrats who supported more establishment candidates in the primary broke ranks and supported Republican Richard M. Nixon in the general election campaign. AFL-CIO President George Meany, who could have been a great help to McGovern, branded him: “an apologist for the Communist world.”
The group known as Democrats for Nixon used Humphrey’s denunciation of McGovern’s primary plan to cut military spending in an advertisement. The narrator states: “Senator Hubert Humphrey had this to say about the McGovern proposal. ‘It isn’t just cutting into fat. It isn’t just cutting into manpower. It’s cutting into the very security of this country.’”
McGovern won only the state of Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Nixon won 94 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of Independents, and an astounding 42 percent of Democratic voters.
Like 1968 and 1972, the Democratic Party is currently enveloped in a schism between establishment center-left Democrats and liberal insurrectionist progressives. Humphrey in 1968, McGovern in 1972, and Hillary Clinton in 2016 were not able to unify the two bloodlines and lost the general election.Community First Healthcare of Illinois Inc. signed an agreement to buy the Portage Park hospital. View Full Caption DNAInfo/Heather Cherone
PORTAGE PARK — Our Lady of the Resurrection Medical Center will be sold to Community First Healthcare of Illinois Inc. and remain open as a full-service hospital for at least five years, Presence Health officials said Monday.
Community First Healthcare of Illinois will also rehire Our Lady of the Resurrection hospital's 900 employees, Presence Health CEO Sandra Bruce said.
Bruce declined to reveal the price Community First Healthcare paid for the 269-bed hospital at 5645 W. Addison St., but said the recently formed company would invest $20 million into the Portage Park hospital during the next five years.
Heather Cherone details the sale and what this means for the Portage Park community.:
Ald. Tim Cullerton (38th) said he was relieved the hospital and its emergency room would remain open.
"A lot of people rely on that hospital," Cullerton said. "I think this is good news."
Vacation and sick time accrued by the hospital's nearly 900 employees will be honored by the hospital's new owner, Cullerton said.
Ald. Nick Sposato (36th) said the closure of the hospital would have caused a big hardship for elderly residents of the Far Northwest Side.
"We need that hospital in the community," Sposato said. "This sounds like good news."
A final sale agreement with Community First Healthcare is expected to be completed by the end of the year, Bruce said.
Presence Health, the largest Catholic health system in Illinois, will contract with Community First Healthcare to provide "proactive health care" services to residents of the Far Northwest Side to help them stay healthy and manage chronic conditions.
"The bottom line is that Community First Healthcare has a vision to coordinate and integrate the care of the Portage Park community," Bruce said.
Community First Healthcare is financially backed by "boutique investment bank" Muneris Capital Group, which specializes in acquiring distressed health care companies and works to return them to financial stability, said Community First Healthcare's Ed Green, a health care lawyer and partner at Chicago-based law firm Foley & Lardner.
Community First Healthcare is focused on growth, not cutting, Green said.
"No one will even notice the hospital has been purchased," Green said.
But the company may change the name of the hospital, which was once known as Northwest Community Hospital.
The firm is considering expanding and modernizing the hospital's emergency room, Green said.
"That may be one way to start down the path toward stabilizing the hospital," said Green, who praised the hospital's staff and doctors for their commitment to the hospital.
Community First Healthcare is a "benefit corporation," which means under Illinois law that in addition to maximizing profit it has "the increased purpose of considering society and the environment in addition to seeking a profit."
The firm will file an annual report with state officials documenting how it believes it has benefited the community, Green said.
"It is really a hybrid between a for-profit company and a not-for-profit," Green said.
Community First Healthcare is an attempt to navigate the changes in the health care industry prompted by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Green said.
"Portage Park will really be at the epicenter of this profound change," Green said. "We want to be at the forefront of this change."
One of the company's principals is Bill Brownlow, who was chief financial officer of Silver Cross Hospital in Joliet for 17 years before stepping down in 2013.
Community First Healthcare "made the most sense" as the new owner of Our Lady of the Resurrection hospital because it agreed to most of the requirements laid out by Presence Health in the request for proposals for the sale, Bruce said.
While Presence Health gave Catholic health systems or hospitals as well as not-for-profit firms preference over other bidders in the sale, Community First Healthcare is neither.
Allan Baumgarten, a Minneapolis-based health-care analyst who studies the Illinois market, said he was surprised that Community First Healthcare was interested in keeping Our Lady of the Resurrection Hospital open as a general acute care facility.
"However, 'acute care facility' can be defined broadly," Baumgarten said. "It will be interesting to hear more details as they become available."
Dr. David Fishman, the director of the hospital's cardiology department, said he and other members of the medical staff planned to meet Tuesday with representatives of Community First Healthcare.
Fishman said he was eager for more information about Community First Healthcare, but pleased the hospital would not close.
"The skeptics and the pessimists said Presence Health officials would announce that no suitable purchasers were found, and the hospital would be closed," Fishman said. "I'm glad that won't happen."
Presence Health announced in March that the hospital was being put up for sale after it lost $9.8 million in 2013 and $12.5 million in 2012, even after extensive cost-cutting efforts. Losses for 2014 could reach $20 million, officials said.
The hospital's serious financial challenges are due to the declining number of people being admitted to a hospital — an industrywide trend — and the high number of uninsured patients who seek treatment at Our Lady of the Resurrection, officials said.
Every year, more than 47,000 people visit Our Lady of the Resurrection’s emergency room, about 9,000 people are hospitalized there, and 3,600 patients undergo surgery at the hospital, which has been open since 1955, according to data provided by employees.Video service Crunchyroll announced on Tuesday that it will begin streaming the entire Akagi television anime series to Premium subscription members at 8:00 p.m. EDT. Free members will be able to watch six episodes on Tuesday, with five more episodes every week after. The streams will be available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Carribeans, and South and Central America.
One stormy night, Nangō is playing a game of Mahjong with the local yakuza. Soon, he finds himself on a losing streak. If Nangō loses, he will have to pay with his life. Suddenly, a young teenaged boy, Shigeru Ak agi, barges in, drenched from the rain. After watching a couple of games, he offers to replace the struggling Nangō. At that moment, a new legend was born.
This will be the first official English release of this 2005 anime. Director Yuzo Sato and the anime studio Madhouse adapted Nobuyuki Fukumoto's original manga before working on another gambling story by Fukumoto, Kaiji. Crunchyroll is also streaming Kaiji.Just before he and his wife, Zheng Yaru, flew back to Beijing this week, Liu Jianhui emailed me the Chinese text that I have translated into English below. From China he then emailed me the photographs that accompany this piece. He did this because he wants Canadians — with whom he has been unable to communicate due to the language barrier — to know something of his daughter and her family, something to supplement media coverage of her brutal rape and slaying three years ago, at age 23, at the hands of Brian Dickson, who was convicted of first-degree murder in Toronto earlier this month.
Over the past three years, Liu and I have spoken frequently by telephone about this case. He had many questions. I did my best to seek out the answers he needed. Both of us were worried that somehow the perpetrator of this awful crime would not be made accountable for the great damage he caused, not just to the victim but to her family as well. Justice has been done now, but the parents will never hear their daughter's voice again.
When I heard of the shocking events that led to Liu Qian's passing, I felt even worse that these unspeakable acts had been committed against her in my country, Canada, in Toronto, and at York University, where I worked many years ago. It is all so difficult to process.
Liu Jianhui and I have been close friends for years, and have shared many meals together in Beijing and in Canada. We have much in common. We are about the same age. We both attended university in China in the late 1970s. We are both educators. Liu and I have collaborated on projects at the Central Party School in Beijing, where he is a professor of history. And, like him, I have a daughter who recently left home. My daughter is in second year at the University in Toronto. His daughter will never be able to move up to second year.
Liu and Zheng and I sat together during breaks in the proceedings, and ate modest meals at Chinese restaurants nearby. Their graciousness, dignity and forbearance even in our private moments together fills me with respectful admiration. The bonds of friendship between me and Liu Jianhui and his wife are stronger than ever. I am proud to know them.
I was with Liu and Zheng in Courtroom 9 of the Ontario Superior Court during the trial. Their daughter was a lovely petite innocent, a loving daughter to her parents. In the courtroom, in front and to the left of us, was Brian Dickson, tall and beefy, a strong man. Staring at his outsized back for hours on end, the gruesome testimony of witnesses and forensic scientists left me feeling utterly revolted and profoundly saddened.
On April 15, 2011, our daughter, Liu Qian, had her young life taken away from us by the cruel action of a heinous criminal. Since then, her absence has rested heavily on us every moment of every day. And over the past three years we have yearned for the due process of Canadian law to come through to resolution. All that time we anxiously anticipated a verdict of the court that will see justice done for our daughter.
Sept. 9, 1987 was a most joyous day for our entire extended family because that was the day our daughter, Liu Qian, was born in Beijing. We were one of the first couples among our friends to be blessed with a child. Not only did she bring great joy to our family, but she had many “uncles and aunts” among the neighbours who would come around to our small apartment day after day to pick her up and bundle her in their arms. She was so loved by so many relatives and friends. Our daughter grew up happy and healthy in such an affectionate atmosphere.
We were just an ordinary family from Beijing with a single child, like so many others. We both made careers as teachers and researchers. Until April 15, 2011, we were a very happy family with good lives and what we contentedly thought would be stable years ahead of us.
Toronto is the place that has been the source of untold suffering and grief for our family. But it is also the place where our daughter made her life and was a promising student preparing for a bright future that will never come for her now.
At last the judicial part of it has been put to rest. The just and fair verdict that we fervently sought has been rendered. This has brought comfort to us and, we believe, to the soul of our beloved daughter, now at rest in heaven.
From a very tender age she demonstrated considerable gifts for language and art. She loved to make up stories, and was encouraged by her teacher to recount them to her classmates in the kindergarten. When she was in Grade 3, one of her drawings won first place in the Beijing Municipal Children’s Science Fiction Art Competition. How proud we were! We still have the prize certificate at home.
She was an honest girl, utterly without guile, an extrovert with a good heart. She was a very good person. Liu Qian was a regular blood donor, and involved in a wide variety of social causes as a volunteer. She was always doing things for others. When she was a little girl she came upon an injured kitten. She brought it home for us to care for. Unfortunately the little kitten soon died of its injuries. Liu Qian was inconsolable. She wept for days, such was her loving nature.
Our daughter was always a good student. She worked hard at her studies and had dreams for her future. After she graduated from university in China, with encouragement from her teachers, her family and her friends she applied to a number of foreign institutions and got into her first choice, York University in Canada. She later wrote that, after she graduated from York and returned to China, her ambition was to work to promote cultural exchange between our countries.
At first she had trouble adjusting to life in Canada, but soon threw herself into her studies. She started to achieve good marks and was bringing her English up to university-level fluency. We were pleased she was doing so well. We were so looking forward to her coming home for the summer holiday.
On the morning of April 15, 2011, she had a long video call with her mom over Skype. Qian said she would soon be finished exams and was about to buy an air ticket home. She would be back in Beijing in two weeks. She said she missed her family and couldn’t wait to see her us and her grandmothers again. She shared her room at home with her paternal grandmother; they were especially close. She talked about all of the Beijing foods she wanted to eat, and how she was looking forward to getting together with her old friends from school and the neighbourhood.
At about 2 that afternoon her mom received a telephone call from a boy. He was obviously very upset. He had been talking to Liu Qian by webcam when her killer entered. He said “Aunty, call the police! Someone has forced their way into Liu Qian’s room. Liu Qian is in danger!”
Her mom was completely taken aback by this. Her blood pressure soared. Hands shaking, she started to madly telephone everyone she could think of for help. Liu Qian’s dad was out of town on business. He had just spoken to Liu Qian over the telephone before lunch. Everyone was in a horrific panicked uproar, including our daughter’s 85-year-old grandma. We were desperately waiting for news that would set our hearts at rest.
But after more than 10 hours of agony, at about 5 the next morning, we received the news that we were dreading, the most difficult, hard to accept, devastatingly cruel news. Our only and beloved child would never be coming home again.
How could this be? We had just been talking with her over the computer a few hours before.
The horror of it continued day after day. In our pain we didn’t want to see anybody. We couldn’t bear the idea that people would speak of the child. We both fell into a deep depression. We couldn’t sleep at night. Her mom would sit motionless for hours, eyes brimming with tears, staring at the computer screen hoping her daughter’s image would somehow reappear on the screen and her sweet voice return through the loudspeakers.
Her mom had to take early retirement from her job teaching Chinese history to college students. Looking out from the lectern at young people who were about her daughter’s age brought a profound sadness that she could not hide, and tears would trickle down her cheeks. She loved teaching and her students, but it was no longer possible to carry on.
When we attended gatherings of our friends and coworkers, they were unable to be relaxed and happy in our presence, especially those who are mothers and fathers themselves.
We will never recover from this awful tragedy. Our lives have been permanently damaged.
Chinese festivals are the worst times for us. We have already had three Chinese New Years without her. We still prepare red envelopes of money for Liu Qian and put a plate of festival foods on the table in front of the chair where she used to sit. But her death has sucked all the joy out of it for us and taken all the colour from our lives. We don’t watch television. We frequently go to her memorial site on the Internet and in cyberspace give her flowers, burn incense, donate clothing and offer her ritual food.
Every weekend we take the bus over bumpy country roads to her grave in the Beijing suburbs. Our little family of three has a get-together on that cold tombstone. We remember. We pray silently. The pain is inexpressible.
It has been especially hard on her grandmothers, who had raised her, both of them now over 80. The reality of “the white-haired seeing off the black-haired” is the most bitter tragedy of their lives. When the other grandchildren come to visit, they weep because Liu Qian is not with them. We try not to speak of Liu Qian in their presence. It is better that way. They have both grown terribly thin as a result of their abiding grief. Like them, we have no appetite for food. The tea and rice has no flavour. Our health suffers. Our lives have been shortened by this.
We have to see doctors who prescribe expensive medicines that we can ill afford, because this tragedy has also caused us enormous financial loss. In addition to the cost of our three trips to Canada since this happened, the fact is we supported Liu Qian in her studies in Canada so she could give back to our country and give back to her parents. Under Chinese law, adult children have the responsibility to provide spiritual and financial support to their aged parents. We will not be getting that. This, of course, has nothing to do with Liu Qian herself, who was the most dutiful, hard-working and loving daughter any parent could hope for. Now we are both close to 60. We will never see her married and so we will never have grandchildren to carry on for us. This is a special tragedy in our Chinese culture. We only had the one child. Who will care for us in our old age?
Our loss and suffering is beyond any measure.
We wish to thank all of the organizations and individuals in Canada who assisted, supported and encouraged us over these past three years. Last week we were taken by friends to visit the place where our daughter lived at York, the lecture halls where she attended classes, the library where she studied, the places where she took meals, the tree planted in her memory on campus and the funeral home where her funeral was held three years ago. Everything is unchanged, except that our daughter is not there.
I must express my appreciation for the many kindnesses that we received from people in Toronto: the Toronto police who provided us with enormous support by assigning Chinese-speaking officers to us, their superiors who investigated this murder case, the lawyers who pursued it, as well as a very fine judge and a jury who made a just assessment of all of the evidence over a long trial.
The consular and education divisions of the Consulate General of China have been unfailingly supportive, as have Chinese Canadians and overseas Chinese organizations, the Chinese students and scholars at York University and University of Toronto, the president, students, professors and administrators at York, and the victim-support services of the Superior Court of Ontario that provided us with simultaneous interpretation into Chinese of the proceedings and explained to us at the end of each day the Canadian judicial process.
We send our respect and gratitude to all Canadians of good will — some of whom we know and some of whom are unknown to us — for their sympathy, understanding and support. This outpouring of benevolence and human kindness gives us the spiritual strength to carry on with our lives.
Translator Charles Burton is a political science professor at Brock University.Editors' Picks PHOTOS: Hurricane Sandy - One Month Later It's been one month since Hurricane Sandy devastated New York City's coastal communities, making landfall on Oct. 29, 2012. Aerial photographs show us that there is still much work to do. PHOTOS: Stunning images from National Geographic's 2012 picture contest No subject is off limits as photographers from all over the world submit their best snapshots to the 2012 National Geographic Photography Contest. Confidenti@l: Clubs may make LiLo a no-go, sources say Lindsay Lohan?s bad behavior has her thisclose to being banned from the few places where she still puts on a show worth watching? New York?s hottest nightclubs. Lohan's alleged sucker-punch victim hires high-profile attorney LiLo?s latest victim has lawyered up? and that could mean more legal woes for the endlessly troubled?Mean Girl.? Is Derek Jeter fat? No, 'It?s probably a wrinkle in the shirt' This is not the way Bronx Bomber fans want to see their beloved captain. Derek Jeter, who fractured his left ankle during Game 1 of the Yankees sweeping loss to the Detroit Tigers in the ALCS, was spotted limping around a South Beach hotel in a walking boot Thursday. Holy auction, Batman! Original TV Batmobile hits the auction block The 1955 Lincoln Futura that California custom-car designer George Barris pimped out into Batman and Robin?s ride on the 1960s hit TV show is set to be sold on Jan. 19. NYPD 'angel' who gave boots to homeless man says 'You just do what you have to do' A simple act of kindness turned a city cop into an Internet sensation, but he insists he was just doing his job. Police Officer Larry DePrimo was hailed as an officer and a gentleman after an Arizona tourist immortalized him in a photo giving a barefoot homeless man a pair of boots. 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The trial, which follows a series of graded in-port and underway demonstrations, evaluated the ship's propulsion plant, shiphandling and auxiliary systems.
The ship also performed launch and recovery operations of the 11m-long rigid hull inflatable boat, conducted surface and air self-defence detect-to-engage exercises, and demonstrated the ship's manoeuvrability.
US Navy LCS programme manager captain Tom Anderson said: "Another thorough trial by the Board of Inspection and Survey, and another ship with improved scores and at a lower cost than her predecessor.
"Detroit's performance during acceptance trial is a testament |
West suspects are intended to develop nuclear weapons.
China, which has close energy and trade ties with Iran, has urged a negotiated solution to the dispute and long opposed the use of force or unilateral sanctions on Iran.
The comments by Chen Xiaodong, head of the Foreign Ministry’s West Asia and North African affairs division, was China’s strongest warning yet not to use force to resolve the dispute.
“If force is used on Iran, it will certainly incur retaliation, cause an even greater military clash, worsen turmoil in the region, threaten the security of the Strait of Hormuz and other strategic passages, drive up global oil prices and strike a blow at the world economic recovery,” he said.
“There may be 10,000 reasons to go to war but you cannot remedy the terrible consequences of plunging the people into misery and suffering and the collapse of society and the economy caused by the flames of war,” Chen said on a web chat hosted by Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily.
Speculation is growing that Israel could launch some form of strike against Iranian nuclear installations, which Israel sees as a threat to its existence.
During a visit to Beijing last month, Israel’s foreign minister hinted it could launch a preemptive attack on Iran despite repeated calls by China to allow diplomacy to take its course.
Chen said the pressing task was for all sides to restrain themselves and resume dialogue as soon as possible.
“The international community has a responsibility to restrain itself from war,” he said.
More talks between Iran and world powers are expected to take place this month in an attempt to reach a compromise.
The most recent talks failed in January 2011 after Iran refused to suspend its uranium enrichment work, as demanded by the United Nations in several resolutions. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel)1. They don’t just talk about supporting the troops, they actually do it, even when it’s difficult and painful.
2. Probably more than once, they have had to pick up their whole life and move it to a different part of the country — or even another country altogether.
3. They make the best care packages in the entire world, and know how to put a feeling of “being at home” into a cardboard box. (And they always know to include a little something for their husband’s friends.)
4. When their husband is gone, they have to play the role of both parents, and explain something as big and scary as war to a little person who just wants to know where their daddy is.
5. They know what it means to sacrifice for the person they love — their time, their hometowns, sometimes even their careers.
6. They have to deal with the questions and pressure of other military girls which, even though I love you ladies, can be pretty intense.
7. Whether it’s with their families back home, or their man who is currently deployed, they are masters of the Skype date and making it feel like you’re right next to each other even when you’re thousands of miles away.
8. They have spent a lot of time in the boy’s club of the military, having to hold their own as a woman and take care of the men who take care of their country.
9. Even though they might not agree with our country’s leaders, they have to accept the decisions that they make and put their personal life aside to carry out what needs to be done. (Yes, some military wives are even Democrats! Shocking, I know!)
10. They have to live with a lot of stereotypes about what it means to love someone who serves, and about those who serve themselves.
11. They often form huge communities while their husbands are away with other military wives, to help each other get through the long deployments and raise their families. They know what it means to form a village anywhere you go.
12. When they vote, they have to think long and hard about the person they are voting for, because it will have a direct effect on the people they love.
13. They manage to keep it all together during the month before their husband returns home, aka the month where everything goes wrong and there are a million things to plan all at once.
14. They are a single mom and a married mom all at the same time.
15. Even though many of them have degrees of their own, the thing they have to be most prepared to do is “do what’s asked of you, and take care of your family.” Some of them have never even had the chance to use their degrees.
16. They make the best food. Sorry, but it’s true. The dinner she cooks for her husband the night he comes home is like no meal you’ve ever seen.
17. They look damn good in their husband’s cover.
18. They still know how to write real letters, and wait for them to come back in the mail (the longest wait you will ever experience in your life).
19. They know the true meanings of the words “goodbye” and “welcome home.”
20. They live the ultimate long-distance relationship, and most of the time don’t even roll their eyes when a civilian wife talks about being away from her husband for a few long weeks or a month.
21. When it feels like they can’t go on anymore, like they miss their husbands too much and their personal sacrifice is too high, they have to keep going. We have all had those moments, and we’ve all cried into a pillow or a teddy bear or our babies, but we keep going. Because even though most people might never say “thank you,” this country needs us, and so do our families.For those interested in natural cemeteries, but not so fond of being buried, allow me to introduce you to the Mushroom Death Suit.
The concept is the brainchild of artist and MIT research fellow Jae Rhim Lee, who became inspired to research natural methods to assist decomposition after learning more about the modern funeral industry.
"I am interested in cultural death denial, and why we are so distanced from our bodies, and especially how death denial leads to funeral practices that harm the environment - using formaldehyde and pink make-up and all that to make your loved one look vibrant and alive, so that you can imagine they're just sleeping rather than actually dead," she told New Scientist.
Lee's first design as part of her Infinity Burial Project is an organic cotton suit lined with a crocheted netting containing mushroom spores. Lee chose mushrooms because of their ability to not only quickly break down organic matter, but also because they're excellent at cleanning up environment toxins in soil. She's currently developing unique strain(s) of fungi (called Infinity Mushrooms) trained to not only quickly break down our bodies, but also dispel the toxins they contain.
"What also started it was the mycologist Paul Stamets who I studied with. He is kind of the grandfather of people who work with mushrooms," she adds. "He talks about the mushroom as being the interface organism between life and death, that mushrooms are the master decomposers. So what better organism to work with?"Friday, May 24, 2013
GLENDALE, ARIZONA --- The Phoenix Coyotes announced today that Executive Vice President and General Manager Don Maloney has signed a long-term contract extension. As per club policy, terms of the contract were not disclosed.
"We are very pleased that Don has agreed to sign a long-term contract extension with the Coyotes," said NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly. "Since joining the team in 2007, Don has done an outstanding job managing his team and building a competitive roster that has produced on the ice, even given less than ideal circumstances off the ice. The NHL remains committed to securing the Coyotes' future in Glendale under new ownership, and we believe Don's long-term agreement evidences that he is equally committed."
In six seasons under Maloney’s leadership, the Coyotes have posted an impressive record of 230-172-56 including qualifying for the Stanley Cup Playoffs three times.
"I am grateful to continue working for this franchise," said Coyotes General Manager Don Maloney. "We have a strong core of talented people, both on and off the ice, who are committed to building a championship team and a first class organization. I would like to thank NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly for their tremendous support these past few years."
In 2011-12, Maloney led the Coyotes to a 42-27-13 record and 97 points, securing their first division championship en route to the franchise’s first appearance in the Western Conference Final. It marked the first time in franchise history that the Coyotes had recorded three consecutive seasons with 40-plus wins. In addition, the Coyotes reached the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the third consecutive year, marking the first time the franchise qualified for the postseason in three or more consecutive seasons since the team clinched a playoff berth in its first four seasons in the Valley (1996-97 to 1999-00).
Maloney received the inaugural NHL General Manager of the Year Award following the 2009-10 season after steering the Coyotes through a turbulent off-season and charting the course for the most successful regular season in franchise history. The team finished the 2009-10 campaign with a record of 50-25-7 for 107 points, setting new franchise records for wins, home wins (29), points, and longest home winning streak (10 games; Nov. 21-Dec. 29) while qualifying for the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time since 2002.
In his first season as general manager of the Coyotes in 2007-08, Maloney’s club posted a record of 38-37-7 for 83 points, an improvement of seven wins and 16 points from the previous season. The 16-point increase represented the fifth-largest point increase by an NHL team during the 2007-08 season and was also the greatest one-season point increase in Coyotes history.
Among Maloney’s stable of highly-regarded draft selections during his tenure as Coyotes GM are: defensemen Connor Murphy (20th overall, 2011), Brandon Gormley (13th overall, 2010), Oliver Ekman-Larsson (sixth overall, 2009), Maxim Goncharov (123rd overall, 2007), goaltender Mark Visentin (27th overall, 2010), forwards Henrik Samuelsson (27th overall, 2012), and Mikkel Boedker (eighth overall, 2008).
Maloney was named GM of the Coyotes on May 29, 2007. He is the seventh general manager in Coyotes/Jets franchise history.
Prior to joining the Coyotes in 2007, the 54-year-old a native of Lindsay, Ontario, spent the previous 10 seasons as a member of the New York Rangers’ front office, most recently serving as the team’s Vice President of Player Personnel and Assistant General Manager. He was primarily responsible for assisting Rangers President and General Manager Glen Sather in all player transactions and contract negotiations.
Maloney also served as Assistant General Manager for Team Canada squads that won gold medals at the 2003 and 2004 IIHF World Championship in Finland and Czech Republic, respectively.
Maloney’s first front office position in the NHL was Assistant General Manager of the New York Islanders following his retirement as a player with the club on Jan. 17, 1991. Maloney later served as General Manager from Aug. 17, 1992 to Dec. 2, 1995. Among the players drafted by the Islanders during Maloney’s tenure with the club were Todd Bertuzzi, Bryan McCabe, Zigmund Palffy, Tommy Salo and Darius Kasparaitis.
Maloney also served as Eastern Professional Scout for the San Jose Sharks during the 1996-97 season prior to joining the Rangers’ front office.
As a player, Maloney registered 214 goals, 350 assists and 564 points and 815 penalty minutes in 765 regular season games over 13 NHL seasons with the Rangers, Hartford Whalers and Islanders. He also collected 22 goals, 35 assists and 57 points in 94 career Stanley Cup playoff games.
Maloney spent 11 seasons with the Rangers after being selected by the club in the second round (26th overall) of the 1978 NHL Entry Draft. He helped lead the Rangers to the 1979 Stanley Cup Final by posting 20 points (7-13-20) that postseason, a playoff record for rookies at the time (since broken). Maloney played in the NHL All-Star Game in 1983 and 1984. He was named Most Valuable Player of the 1984 All-Star Game.TYRRELL 006
"Tyrrell 006 was a short-wheelbase car that was difficult to drive, but very quick. I won five races in it in 1973 and it brought me my third and final world title, for which I will be ever grateful.
"I should have won the British Grand Prix in it too, but for a gearbox problem!
"The engineers and mechanics I had working with me in the Tyrrell team that season were absolutely fantastic.
"[Designer] Derek Gardner had yet again delivered a competitive car and Ken Tyrrell was probably the best team manager of his time."
TYRRELL 003
"I signed with Ken Tyrrell to drive the 003 for 1971. It was a very quick motor car and it won its first race, the Spanish GP at Montjuich Park.
"The car went on to win the world championship - and I think it's an amazing fact that a brand-new constructor could come in and win the drivers' and constructors' titles straight away.
"The 003 was good to drive and I won six grands prix in it. It was a very good year, but an exhausting one as I was also racing in the US in Can-Am.
"I crossed the Atlantic 86 times that year and nearly retired at the end of the season as I had taken too much on."
MATRA MS80
"The Matra MS80 with the Ford Cosworth engine was probably the best racing car I ever drove - certainly in single-seater terms. It was beautifully balanced and great to drive, so easy to drive too.
"Ken Tyrrell had helped to persuade Matra aerospace boss Jean-Luc Lagardere to come into Formula 1 in 1967. The team was wonderful to work with and we won five of the first six races together in 1969.
"One of the best races I ever had was in MS80 against Jochen Rindt at Silverstone that year. We passed each other 30 times! To eventually win my first world championship with this car was a very big moment in my life."
BRM P261
"BRM was a good choice for me in 1965 - my first season of Formula 1.
"I'd had an offer from Colin Chapman to drive alongside Jim Clark at Lotus and an offer from Cooper, too, but I chose BRM because I thought it would give me more time to learn.
"The P261 was very reliable, but not as quick as a Lotus. The car felt safe and robust - and the engine was lovely.
"That year I won the International Trophy at Silverstone and went on to win the Italian GP at Monza ahead of my team-mate Graham Hill. It was a big moment in my life.
"I made the right decision - it gave me a huge amount of experience for later in my career."
STEWART SF1
"The Stewart-Ford SF1 was the first grand prix car to bear my name and we finished second in only our fifth race - at Monaco in 1997 with Rubens Barrichello. That was something very special.
"It was a wonderful team, started from the Paul Stewart Racing staircase of talent in junior single-seaters, but it was the most tiring and demanding period of my life.
"Driving racing cars was a lot of fun, but running a Formula 1 racing team was a huge responsibility.
"I'm very proud of what we achieved and we sold it well: Ford bought it from us, rebranded it as Jaguar and, of course, it's now Red Bull Racing with many of the same people still there."
FORD LOTUS CORTINA
"The Lotus Cortina was about the most ridiculous car I've ever driven.
"It hardly ever seemed to be on four wheels. It was a car that you could not believe should handle the way it did.
"At first I thought there was something wrong with it. Colin Chapman told me, 'You're quite right, it is awkward to drive, but I promise you that's how it drives and it's quick'.
"I drove Cortinas for Red Rose Motors, Team Lotus and, of course, for Alan Mann.
"I had a lot of good battles in them with Jim Clark, John Whitmore and Jack Sears. It looked weird from the outside, felt much more weird from the inside but, my goodness, it was spectacular."
LOTUS ELAN
"The Elan was another example of a Colin Chapman car.
"It didn't feel good at all to drive. It felt fragile and yet, typically, very fast.
"I drove Elans almost all of the time for Graham Warner's Chequered Flag team. We often came up against the green Ron Harris Team Lotus so-called factory cars.
"Jim Clark also raced the Ron Harris Elan. I once asked him at Silverstone about where to brake at Stowe corner and he wouldn't tell me. I was flattered and thought that if he didn't want to tell me I must be a threat to him!
"I did quite well in the Elan from time to time but it wasn't an easy car to drive."
COOPER-MONACO
"One of my really big breaks early in my career was to be asked by David Murray, 'le patron' of Ecurie Ecosse, to drive for him.
He had a Cooper-Monaco, one of the most competitive sportscars of the time. It was slightly past its best but it was quick.
"I had a lot of success in the car, mostly in national events in the UK. Ecurie Ecosse had won Le Mans, beating Aston Martin, Ferrari, Maserati and the works Jaguars so they had a big reputation.
"My brother Jimmy had driven for them, too, so it was not just nostalgic, it was a great honour.
"It was after a drive at Goodwood in the Cooper-Monaco that the track manager called Ken Tyrrell and said, 'if you're looking for a good driver...'
"The Cooper-Monaco was a car very special to my career."
JAGUAR E-TYPE
"The Jaguar E-type was probably the most spectacular car ever built.
"It became the car to be seen in and, in racing, it was able to take on and indeed beat the Ferrari GTOs.
"In 1964 Lofty England of Jaguar had seen me drive a few times and suggested to top team owner John Coombs that he give me a test.
"He refused at first as he'd only ever had top, top drivers race for him - Graham Hill, Roy Salvadori, Dan Gurney and Jack Brabham.
"Lofty persuaded him eventually and I tested well at Silverstone. Driving the E-type was great fun and, for me, it was a very big deal that I was able to race for John Coombs in that fabulous car."Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling trolled Republican voters by asking them if they would support bombing the city of Agrabah — the fairy-tale setting of Disney’s “Aladdin” — and 30 percent said they would.
In a tweet, PPP said it asked the same question of Democratic primary voters and found 19 percent support bombing Agrabah.
The poll showed 36 percent of Democrats and 13 percent of Republicans would not support bombing the fictional city.
PPP is known for posing such loaded questions to Republicans in its surveys. A 2013 PPP survey on conspiracy theories asked Americans questions like whether aliens exist (29 percent said yes) and whether the moon landing was faked (7 percent said it was), Mediaite reported.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Just months after the U.S. intelligence community determined that the Russian government was behind cyberattacks during the American presidential campaign, the same thing appears to be happening in France.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault accused Russia of hacking activity in the country, calling it “unacceptable.”
“This form of interference in French democratic life is unacceptable and I denounce it,” Ayrault said in an interview that appeared Sunday in Le Journal du Dimanche.
Ayrault earlier told France’s Parliament that “after what happened in the United States, it is our responsibility to take all steps necessary to ensure that the integrity of our democratic process is fully respected.”
Aggressive election interference appears to be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest strategy to impose his will across borders.
Officials from the Netherlands fear that their country was the target of a fake information campaign last year to sway a vote on a referendum. A purportedly Ukrainian team helped convince the Dutch to reject a European Union trade pact with the country, The New York Times reported. But it turned out the team was actually Russian.
Dutch elections are coming up in March, and officials say hackers linked to the Kremlin have tried repeatedly to break into government websites. Votes are going to be tallied by hand to avoid possible voting-machine tampering, according to the Times. Now the Germans are also worried about what Russia might try in their upcoming elections.
Meanwhile, Norway revealed last month that hackers linked to Russia had attacked government ministry sites and the emails of the Labour Party in an operation strikingly similar to what happened in the U.S.
Ayrault argued that the Russians are targeting French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, a staunch supporter of the European Union — though there is no hard evidence to prove it. Macron’s campaign website and emails have been hit by hackers over the past month, reports Agence France-Presse. He has been the only candidate hit by cyberattacks. A fake news campaign linked to Russia has also been launched against him.
Macron’s rivals for the French presidency are Marine Le Pen, of the extreme-right National Front, and conservative Republican candidate Francois Fillon, who supports closer ties to the Kremlin.The six-year manhunt for African warlord Joseph Kony has ended.
The mission, led by United States and Uganda military forces, also known as the “African Union Regional Task Force (AU-RT),” began in 2013 after the deployment of 360 troops to Central African Republic (CAR) in response to Kony’s heinous crimes across the region. Since 2011, armed U.S. forces provided intelligence and logistics support, at the cost of about $780 million, according to Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Audricia Harris. All have been called off, according to the Associated Press.
Last week, Uganda officially started withdrawing 2,500 troops from their base in eastern CAR, with the U.S. pulling out of Camp Dungu, a remote outpost in the Northwestern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that was once a major point of operations for Kony’s insurgency. Full withdrawal is expected by September.
A former Catholic altar boy, Kony rose to prominence in the 1980s during the Ugandan Bush War, where he founded a rebel movement with fantasies of ruling Uganda in accordance to the Ten Commandments.
Leading the rebel militia group Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Kony has since plagued northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan with mass murder, sex trafficking, and the forced recruitment of child soldiers.
According to a U.N. report, the group is responsible for killing over 100,000 people.
After 9/11, the U.S. State Department designated the LRA as a terror group, later placing Kony on its list of “Specifically Designated Global Terrorists.”
In 2005, Kony was indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, but evaded capture. That same year, under military pressure, the LRA fled Uganda, moving first to Congo and then to regions of CAR covered in jungle terrain.
Kony became internationally notorious in 2012 after a 30-minute video highlighting the LRA’s crimes went viral. Produced by the U.S.-based advocacy group Invisible Children, “Kony 2012” received over 100 million views on YouTube and drew support from a number of celebrities, activists, and policymakers (including Michelle Obama, Bill Gates, and Kim Kardashian). The video later received public backlash for oversimplifying events in the region, encouraging “slacktivism” and failing to mention human rights violations committed by the Uganda military.
In 2013, under the Obama administration, the U.S. offered up to $5 million for information leading to Kony’s capture.
After fleeing Uganda, Kony’s forces scattered into multiple guerilla factions and are said to number less than 100. Despite the millions of dollars to catch him, Kony, now in his 50s, remains at large, though LRA defectors suggest he is sick and hiding somewhere in the vast, jungle terrains of central Africa.
Donald Trump first signaled the withdrawal in January when his transition team sent out a questionnaire to the State Department querying whether it was worthwhile to continue funding the fight against the LRA and al-Shabaab in Somalia.
“We’ve been hunting [LRA rebel group leader Joseph] Kony for years, is it worth the effort?” the document asked.
The end of the manhunt means Kony may never be caught, leaving the victims of his atrocities without closure. However, many believe the withdrawal is best for U.S. strategic interests and a re-allocation of resources will help others in need.
“I’m sad to see the work opportunity go away, but at the same time I don’t see the point in us continuing to chase him around,” an Air Force pilot formerly stationed out of Obo, a small village in CAR, told The Daily Caller. “There are more imminent threats to national security than a regional warlord.”
Davis Richardson is a writer whose work has appeared in VICE, Nylon Magazine, The Daily Caller, and WIRED. Follow him on Twitter.Strike 1
Just stay with me here...
While we were told not to do this in normal playing situations, we were required to do it as a technique exercise/warm up. Having spent the majority of my middle and high school music education being told specifically NOT to air attack, I found this sudden reversal of articulation methods to be a bit of a challenge.
"Nick, I know this is tough," my professor said. "But if you want to be a better player, this is what you need to be doing. You want to be a better player, right?"
"Yes," I answered (though I briefly considered saying 'no' just to throw him off).
"Good," he replied. "You need to make this a daily part of your warm up routine. It should be one of the first things you do when you begin playing and you need to do it for at least 5 minutes a day. After that I think you will notice a huge difference."
"And if you are still having trouble with it," he continued, "then you just need to do more ho's."
My brain had virtually no time to tell my mouth to shut itself before childish giggling spewed forth from my lips. My professor looked at me, rolled eyes his, and then began his speech of shame.
"Really? You think it's that funny?" he asked with one eyebrow raised to his hairline. "It's only funny because your mind made it that way."
He was clearly annoyed, but at least this time my professor admonished me with a smile. The next incident would not find me to be as fortunate.
Strike 2
During one particularly grueling semester, our professor got on a huge kick about posture. Now to be fair, much of his advice during this time was very appreciated and something that I still use today: Having good posture for playing a wind instrument is not just about sitting up straight, but also about sitting in a way that releases pressure off of your lower back so that you can better support your air.
My professor, however, never did anything halfway. He decided to bring in a "posture specialist" from another school to work with us on different breathing and sitting techniques.
We all figured it would just be a nun that would
strike us with a ruler when we slouched.
There was something about my professor being alone in his office with a female posture specialist and "feeling his shorts move" that made me absolutely lose it. Unfortunately, he did not see the humor in the situation at all. Unlike the last time, my professor sharply admonished me and suggested that I "grow up."
Strike 3
Despite the fact that he had repeatedly messed up his college career (and his life in general), he was still a very talented trombone player. Our professor decided to give him another chance, but had some misgivings about doing so. At the end of one of my lessons, he asked me if I thought he was doing the right thing.
"Well, I'm all for second chances," I began, "but this is chance number 127 for this guy. I want him to do well and get his act together, too. But I have to wonder if you would be giving him yet another opportunity if he wasn't as talented as he is."
"That's a good point," he replied.
"I also worry about enabling," I continued. "There's a chance that he will look at this as an opportunity to get things right...or he might look at it as an affirmation that he can do whatever he wants and get away with it. If this was one of the first times he had messed up, I'd be all about giving him another chance without any reservations. Since this has happened so many times before with the same result, I'm not sure what to think."
"Well, that's where you're wrong," my professor sternly replied. "Because this is the first time that he will be accountable to me. And you better believe that I'm not going to let him get away with any of the crap that he's done in the past."
At this point, my professor had made a confidence inspiring statement that would have been a great way to end the conversation...but he had one last thing to say that to this day is the most awkward statement made to me by a teacher that I have ever heard:
"He thinks he's untouchable. Well I'm gonna touch him like he's never been touched before."
hotstockmarket I tried not to laugh...I really did.
As my vocal chords betrayed me and laughter burst forth from my lips, my professor shook his head and sighed "It's always something with you, isn't it Nick?"
As anyone can see, the three incidents that caused me to laugh like a rabid hyena at my professor were all understandable. Unfortunately, he did not see it that way; he had decided that it was simply my corrupted and twisted mind (rather than his poor word choices) that brought unwanted attention and ridicule to some of the things that he said.
I learned an important lesson that day...
...well, actually, no I didn't. With the exception of the "shorts moving" statement, I really can't see many people not laughing in any of those situations. When it comes down to it, I'll carry the burden of misperception if it means that I get to keep my sense of humor.
A member of our trombone studio had recently been arrested on drug related charges. This was not the first time that illegal substances had gotten him into trouble, but it was the first time that he had been sent to jail for it. When he came out, he asked our professor if he could come back to the trombone studio.Despite the fact that he had repeatedly messed up his college career (and his life in general), he was still a very talented trombone player. Our professor decided to give him another chance, but had some misgivings about doing so. At the end of one of my lessons, he asked me if I thought he was doing the right thing."Well, I'm all for second chances," I began, "but this is chance number 127 for this guy. I want him to do well and get his act together, too. But I have to wonder if you would be giving him yetopportunity if he wasn't as talented as he is.""That's a good point," he replied."I also worry about enabling," I continued. "There's a chance that he will look at this as an opportunity to get things right...or he might look at it as an affirmation that he can do whatever he wants and get away with it. If this was one of the first times he had messed up, I'd be all about giving him another chance without any reservations. Since this has happened so many times before with the same result, I'm not sure what to think.""Well, that's where you're wrong," my professor sternly replied. "Because this is the first time that he will be accountable to me. And you better believe that I'm not going to let him get away with any of the crap that he's done in the past."At this point, my professor had made a confidence inspiring statement that would have been a great way to end the conversation...but he had one last thing to say that to this day is the most awkward statement made to me by a teacher that I have ever heard:
If you are ever in a college music studio for a particular instrument (like trombone), you will discover that each member of the group tends to fit a certain role that has been assigned to them: The perfect one, the disrespectful one, the weird one, etc.I was unfortunately saddled with the label of "the perverted/twisted one" through a serious of unfortunate and unfair instances that were (mostly) beyond my control. My trombone professor is the person who began referring to me as the one with a "dirty mind", but it was actually (mostly) his fault.My professor constantly and inadvertently used double entendres at some of the most awkward points of conversation imaginable. I know that you are probably thinking that he did this on purpose, but none of us really thought that he did. For starters, his actual attempts at humor were usually pretty terrible. The funny things that he said on accident were always much funnier. When anyone (especially me) would laugh at his unfortunate and possibly Freudian slips, he rarely if ever saw the humor in it.Through a series of 3 encounters like this that I was directly involved in, my professor developed the iron clad perception that I could turn any spoken phrase into some type of off color joke.One of the good things about our professor was that he knew more about different techniques for the playing the trombone than any other person on the planet. Unfortunately, this often manifested itself into various periods of intense and crushing focus on one way of doing things that may or may not have worked for everyone.One of these methods required you to form your embouchure, move toward your mouthpiece, and firmly air attack the note as soon as it touched your lips. The purpose was to make sure that you were setting up your embouchure and air for the right note before you tried to play it. Our professor called these "Ho Attacks."Before having us meet as a group, our professor actually scheduled an individual posture appointment on a Saturday morning for himself. On Monday morning, he came in and raved to us about all the work that she had done with him.One of the methods that they focused on was breathing from the "bottom up." People will often times take a big breath by loudly sucking in air while tightening their chest. This tension actually decreases your air capacity and support. What the posture specialist stressed was thinking of the air slowly filling up from your diaphragm to the top of your lungs.She even said to think about breathing in "from your feet." Our professor set the stage for his breathing "epiphany" by explaining that at his personal session with the specialist, he had just come in from jogging and was still wearing his running clothes"It was amazing." he excitedly began. "I've always been able to make my stomach expand when I breathe, but never like this. And when she told me to breath in from my feet and up through my legs,TEHRAN (Reuters) - Some 7,200 people have registered to run in Iran’s March parliamentary elections, when reform-minded opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hope to benefit from growing disenchantment with the hardline leader.
The March 14 vote could prove a tough test for reformists seeking a political revival after they were beaten by conservatives in a 2004 parliamentary election for failing to meet their promise to create a freer country.
They also expect the conservative-controlled Guardian Council, which vets candidates for all elections, to block most of their candidates as it has done in the past.
But the conservatives are struggling to show a united front despite controlling the armed forces, judiciary, powerful watchdog bodies, parliament and presidency.
The conservatives have so far failed to propose a joint lists of candidates, and the absence of a unified voice could cost them the election, following defeats in city and local council elections last year.
Analysts say reformists stand a better chance than in previous elections because many Iranians criticize Ahmadinejad for failing to deliver on promised economic change, including sharing out Iran’s oil wealth more broadly.
Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi said on Saturday that 7,200 people — including 590 women — had registered to run by Friday’s deadline. Candidates will compete for 290 seats in parliament.
He told a news conference that over 43.2 million people were eligible to vote in Iran, where the population is over 70 million.
“Those Iranians who are eligible (to vote) and live abroad will be added to this figure,” Pourmohammadi said.
POLICY IMPACT
The result of the election will have no direct impact on who is president, or on policies such as Iran’s nuclear program, which is ultimately determined by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But political analysts say it may influence the debate, and could give Ahmadinejad more political challenges.
Among the last candidates who signed up on Friday was Ali Larijani, a close adviser to Khamenei. A group of moderate-conservative parties had nominated him as their candidate for the vote.
Larijani, a rival of Ahmadinejad, stepped down as chief nuclear negotiator in October, exposing a rift with Ahmadinejad about tactics in handling nuclear talks with the West.
Iran is at odds with the United States and its European allies over its nuclear program, which the West fears is a cover to build nuclear arms. Iran denies the charge.
Former Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian, accused by a Swiss judge of ordering the killing of a member of an Iranian opposition group in 1990 in Switzerland, has also signed up.
A German court in 1996 issued an arrest warrant for Fallahian in connection with the so-called Mykonos affair in which the mid-ranking cleric was accused of having played a role in the killing of four Kurdish dissidents in Berlin in 1992.
Iran denies any involvement in the killings.
The final list of approved candidates will be announced on March 5. Candidates will then have one week to campaign.Like without question poc can |
after Warren said the deal might eventually undo Wall Street reform, one of Obama’s signature achievements and a major issue for Warren and her supporters.
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The White House responded that the Trans-Pacific Partnership would specifically prevent that unless Congress overrode the provision with a vote.
Obama, in an unusually frank critique, suggested Warren was seeking to bolster her political brand by going after the deal and that she was going too far in floating “hypotheticals.”
“The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else. And you know, she’s got a voice that she wants to get out there. And I understand that,” Obama said, according to Yahoo.
“On most issues, she and I deeply agree. On this one, though, her arguments don’t stand the test of fact and scrutiny.”
He said he would have to be “pretty stupid” to support a trade deal that could undo financial reform.
“Think about the logic of that, right?” he said. “The notion that I had this massive fight with Wall Street to make sure that we don’t repeat what happened in 2007, 2008. And then I sign a provision that would unravel it? … This is pure speculation [by Warren]. She and I both taught law school, and you know, one of the things you do as a law professor is you spin out hypotheticals. And this is all hypothetical, speculative.”
The comments are sure to ratchet up the fight over the deal, which has support from top Republicans but is opposed by many Democrats and conservatives.
Obama also went after Warren late last month, accusing her and other opponents of the trade deal of dishonesty and seeking to bolster their “fundraising base.” Obama made the comments, reported by the Washington Post, on a call with a small group of reporters.
"The one that gets on my nerves the most is the notion that this is a ‘secret’ deal,” he said.
"Every single one of the critics who I hear saying, ‘this is a secret deal,’ or send out emails to their fundraising base saying they’re working to prevent this secret deal, can walk over today and read the text of the agreement. There’s nothing secret about it."
Warren, a liberal icon whom many on the left want to challenge Hillary Clinton in 2016, is an increasingly vocal critic.
Republicans have used their last three weekly addresses to push legislation that is seen as crucial for finalizing the deal.
—This post was updated Sunday at 4:10 p.m.In the eyes of ex-Missouri chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, there is only one man standing in the way of a renewed Border War rivalry: Bill Self.
Loftin made that known in an interview with AL.com published Wednesday where the former chancellor criticized the Kansas men’s basketball coach for the rivalry’s dormant status. The two programs haven’t scheduled one another in any sport since the Tigers made the jump to the SEC in summer 2012.
Loftin arrived at Missouri the next year. While he said he held private meetings with then-KU chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little that included a lucrative offer to renew the Border War rivalry in football at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., Loftin laid blame for the inaction at the feet of one person.
"The problem was a man named Bill Self, who made it very clear this wasn’t going to happen," Loftin said.
New Missouri athletic director Jim Sterk told supporters at a fan function earlier this month that he would "like to see" the rivalry with KU renewed and called his program a "willing partner" in making that happen.
"I think they made it a point when we left the (Big 12) that they weren’t going to play anymore," said Sterk, according to a story in The Kansas City Star, "but we’re certainly open to that and I know (new men’s basketball coach) Cuonzo (Martin) will work on that behind the scenes and see if that can happen."
Self and KU, though, have remained steadfast in their public disinterest in rebooting the series. Asked for a response to Loftin’s comments, Self indicated he doesn’t make decisions for football or any program other than men’s basketball.
"Tell the ex-Missouri chancellor that I coach basketball, not football," Self wrote in a text message to The Capital-Journal. "That we would never play a game in Arrowhead or even discuss it. It’s too cold. We play our games indoors. But (I) look forward to meeting him someday if he’s ever in Lawrence."
The rivalry, which dates back to the late-1800s, wasn’t the only casualty of the 2010-13 conference realignment boom. Texas has yet to schedule rival Texas A&M, and West Virginia, which joined the Big 12 in 2012, has yet to play "Backyard Brawl" nemesis Pittsburgh, though the two are set the renew the series in football in 2022.
Loftin, who stepped down at Missouri in late 2015 and was previously president at Texas A&M, said he anticipates the Longhorns renewing their rivalry before the Jayhawks.
"I think it’s more likely Texas will bend than Kansas as long as Self is involved," Loftin said. "He has a big ego."Dos Santos vs. Velasquez II, Penn vs. MacDonald Expected to Headline UFC 152 in Toronto
UFC 152 in Toronto just got a lot more interesting.
The event currently planned for Sept. 22 in Canada was announced several months ago, but now it appears the UFC has targeted a main and a co-main event for the show.
UFC president Dana White confirmed following UFC on FX 3 that the promotion is hoping to lead the card with the heavyweight title rematch between champion Junior dos Santos and Cain Velasquez.
While nothing is a done deal at this point, White stated they are hopeful to have the heavyweight title fight head to Toronto in September.
The last time dos Santos and Velasquez met was in November 2011 with dos Santos coming out on top by knockout at just over one minute into the first round. Since that time, dos Santos defended his title against Frank Mir at UFC 146, while Velasquez came back strong from the defeat and put away former Strikeforce fighter Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva.
In addition to the heavyweights leading the way, the co-main event will feature the return of a future UFC Hall of Famer against one of Canada’s youngest and brightest rising stars.
Following a call out by Rory MacDonald just days ago, former lightweight and welterweight champion B.J. Penn accepted the challenge, and now it looks like the UFC is on board as well.
“Yeah, we’re going to do it,” White said about Penn vs. MacDonald. “Joe (Silva) is calling B.J. and his crew tonight to make sure that was the case, and then that fight’s going to happen.
“It will happen on the Toronto card, probably be the co-main event.”
It will be Penn’s first fight back since announcing his retirement following a loss to Nick Diaz at UFC 137 last year.
Look for UFC officials to make official announcements about the card in the coming weeks.
Follow @DamonMartin on Twitter or e-mail Damon Martin.
For more UFC News and UFC Rumors, follow MMAWeekly.com on Twitter and Facebook.Over the years and decades, quite a few tub-thumping radicals have stood up in Washington Square Park and railed at the world, but few, if any, have attracted a crowd like the one Bernie Sanders attracted on Wednesday evening. By mid-afternoon, the New York Police Department had cordoned off the park and the blocks around it. From Houston Street to Eighth Street, and from Sixth Avenue to Broadway, the area was sealed, and inside the barricades long lines of people were waiting to clear security. The campaign later estimated that twenty-seven thousand people attended, in all.
On the corner of West Third Street and LaGuardia Place, guys were selling official Sanders campaign T-shirts for twenty dollars, and posters saying “The Revolution Is On Fire” for ten. Down the block, someone else was selling less-official “Feel the Bern” T-shirts for ten dollars. A middle-aged couple in front of me stopped to look at one, but went with a “Fuck Trump: Keep America Great” shirt instead.
On the west side of the park, at the corner of Washington Place, a tall man was carrying a handwritten sign that said “Not Me, Us. Not I, We. We Can Win.” He told me that his name was Murray Herman, and that he was forty years old and a veteran of antiwar protests and the Occupy Wall Street movement. “In Presidential elections, I’m usually supporting third-party candidates,” he said. This year, he was making an exception for Sanders. “It’s not a campaign: it’s more of a movement,” he said. As I went to move on, he stopped me and asked if I knew that Bill Clinton had made two highly paid speeches in the United Arab Emirates at the same time the oil-rich country was asking the State Department, which was then headed by Clinton’s wife, to approve the construction of a screening facility at Abu Dhabi’s airport for passengers flying to the United States. I said that I thought I recalled something about the story. (The Wall Street Journal reported on it last December.) The request was approved, Herman said, adding, “Ask your readers why.”
By the time I got into the park, the rock band Vampire Weekend had finished its set, and, from a stage that had been set up in front of the Washington Square Arch, Thomas Duane, who was the first openly gay member of the New York City Council and the New York State Senate, was lauding Sanders’s record on gays in the military, same-sex marriage, and other issues. “The thing about Bernie—Bernie’s just always against everyone who’s against me,” Duane told the crowd. “Hillary, she’s never against the people who are against me. You gotta talk her into it.”
Duane was followed by a number of other speakers, including the actor Rosario Dawson and the film director Spike Lee. There were also representatives of labor groups, led by J. P. Patafio, a vice-president of the Transport Workers Union Local 100. Earlier in the day, Sanders had appeared on a picket line with members of the Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers, which went on strike against Verizon on Wednesday to protest benefit cuts and outsourcing. “When I saw Sanders come to my union hall today, speaking to my members, it was a great thing,” Patafio said, in a pronounced New York accent. “Then we went with Sanders to the Verizon building. Billion-dollar Verizon. Fuck Verizon.”
A large group of twentysomethings standing in front of me cheered wildly and started chanting “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” They didn’t have to wait much longer for him to appear. At 8:20 P.M., Jane Sanders walked onto the stage with her husband a few steps behind her, wearing a dark union bomber jacket. “There are a lot of people here tonight,” he said, after looking around and waving. “Jane and I left New York City when we were kids. It is great to be back.” Someone from the group in front of me screamed, “We love you, Bernie!”
For the next hour or so, Sanders delivered his usual stump speech. In the course of the campaign, he has expanded it a bit to include material on African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other minorities, as well as on issues like fracking and mass incarceration. But the core of Sanders’s message is exactly the same as it was last April, when he announced that he was running: that the American political and economic systems are hopelessly broken, that it will take a “political revolution” to make things right, and that this redemptive outcome is achievable. “Despite what others may tell you, yes, we can change the status quo,” Sanders declared.
Some of the Vermont senator’s patter is so familiar that his supporters now know it by heart. When he asked if anybody knew what the average donation to his campaign was, the entire crowd shouted, “Twenty-seven dollars!” When he brought up Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street companies, loud boos echoed across the park. He also took Clinton to task for supporting free-trade agreements, which he said had cost America many well-paying jobs; for consorting with Henry Kissinger; and for having a super PAC that has raised tens of millions of dollars from special interests. But he saved his harshest vitriol for Verizon, Big Pharma, the Koch Brothers, the Walton family (the founders of Walmart), and, of course, Wall Street. “This campaign is sending a message to corporate America: you cannot have it all!” he said.
Sanders did dress up some of his applause lines for his audience. For months, he has been saying that Clinton’s speeches for Goldman Sachs must have been corkers to have merited fees of more than two hundred thousand dollars each. Now he added, “It must be a speech that could solve most of the world’s problems. It must be a speech written in Shakespearean prose.” He also added a few local references. “Check out how much tuition was at City University, City College, Brooklyn College fifty years ago: virtually free,” he said. “If we could have virtually free tuition fifty years ago in America at our great public universities and colleges, we damn well can do it today.”
With his white hair shining in the light of the illuminated arch, Sanders at times resembled a radical preacher of the old school. Adding to the feeling of a revival meeting was the fact that part of the P.A. system, which was relaying the speech to all corners of the park, seemed to be operating on a delay of a second or two. So when Sanders said, “We do not represent Wall Street. We do not want their money,” his voice seemed to bounce off the Bobst Library and echo down LaGuardia Place, to SoHo, Tribeca, and the financial district itself.
Toward the end of his speech, Sanders acknowledged that he faces an uphill battle in New York. “It’s going to be a tough primary for us,” he said, citing Clinton’s record as a U.S. senator from the state, as well as the fact that independent voters, who form a large part of his following, can’t cast ballots in the primary. “But you know what I think when I look out at the thousands of people who are here tonight, the thousands of people we saw in Buffalo, and Syracuse, and Rochester? I think we’ve got a surprise for the establishment,” he said. “I think that if we have a large voter turnout on Tuesday we’re gonna win this thing.” With that, Sanders thanked the crowd, hugged his wife, and disappeared under the arch to the strains of David Bowie’s “Starman.”
I asked one of the twentysomethings who was standing in front of me, John Reinhardt, a twenty-four-year-old from Rockaway Beach, Queens, what he thought of the speech. “Fantastic,” he replied. He told me that this was the first political campaign he’d become involved with, and that he’d left his job in finance at two-thirty in the afternoon in order to get to Washington Square early. Why was he so enthused about Sanders? “Equality,” he said. “It’s hard to put into words, but he’s the first person who is talking about real change to the benefit of all Americans.”
As the crowd dispersed, I walked closer to the stage, where I ran into Duane. He told me that Sanders has been one of his political heroes ever since he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1981, by just ten votes. “He uses the term ‘capitalism,’ ” Duane said. “When I did that in the State Assembly, people thought I was crazy.” I asked Duane if he thought that Sanders had a realistic chance of winning Tuesday’s primary. For about ten seconds, he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “I’m still idealistic, and I get up every day hoping. I think he could win in New York, but I don’t want to think it too hard.” Duane fell silent again. Then he went on, “Somehow, the joy, the excitement, the reason I do this, is in the battle. It is fighting for a cause. And I really believe that he has changed the discourse. Whatever happens, his vision will stay part of the political discourse.”By George Friedman STRATFOR argued March 13, 2008, that Mexico was nearing the status of a failed state. A failed state is one in which the central government has lost control over significant areas of the country and the state is unable to function. In revisiting this issue, it seems to us that the Mexican government has lost control of the northern tier of Mexico to drug-smuggling organizations, which have significantly greater power in that region than government forces. Moreover, the ability of the central government to assert its will against these organizations has weakened to the point that decisions made by the state against the cartels are not being implemented or are being implemented in a way that would guarantee failure. Despite these facts, it is not clear to STRATFOR that Mexico is becoming a failed state. Instead, it appears the Mexican state has accommodated itself to the situation. Rather than failing, it has developed strategies designed both to ride out the storm and to maximize the benefits of that storm for Mexico. First, while the Mexican government has lost control over matters having to do with drugs and with the borderlands of the United States, Mexico City's control over other regions — and over areas other than drug enforcement — has not collapsed (though its lack of control over drugs could well extend to other areas eventually). Second, while drugs reshape Mexican institutions dramatically, they also, paradoxically, stabilize Mexico. We need to examine these crosscurrents to understand the status of Mexico. Mexico's Core Problem Let's begin by understanding the core problem. The United States consumes vast amounts of narcotics, which, while illegal there, make their way in abundance. Narcotics derive from low-cost agricultural products that become consumable with minimal processing. With its long, shared border with the United States, Mexico has become a major grower, processor and exporter of narcotics. Because the drugs are illegal and thus outside normal market processes, their price is determined by their illegality rather than by the cost of production. This means extraordinary profits can be made by moving narcotics from the Mexican side of the border to markets on the other side. Whoever controls the supply chain from the fields to the processing facilities and, above all, across the border, will make enormous amounts of money. Various Mexican organizations — labeled cartels, although they do not truly function as such, since real cartels involve at least a degree of cooperation among producers, not open warfare — vie for this business. These are competing businesses, each with its own competing supply chain. Typically, competition among businesses involves lowering prices and increasing quality. This would produce small, incremental shifts in profits on the whole while dramatically reducing prices. An increased market share would compensate for lower prices. Similarly, lawsuits are the normal solution to unfair competition. But neither is the case with regard to illegal goods. The surest way to increase smuggling profits is not through market mechanisms but by taking over competitors' supply chains. Given the profit margins involved, persons wanting to control drug supply chains would be irrational to buy, since the lower-cost solution would be to take control of these supply chains by force. Thus, each smuggling organization has an attached paramilitary organization designed to protect its own supply chain and to seize its competitors' supply chains. The result is ongoing warfare between competing organizations. Given the amount of money being made in delivering their product to American cities, these paramilitary organizations are well-armed, well-led and well-motivated. Membership in such paramilitary groups offers impoverished young men extraordinary opportunities for making money, far greater than would be available to them in legitimate activities. The raging war in Mexico derives logically from the existence of markets for narcotics in the United States; the low cost of the materials and processes required to produce these products; and the extraordinarily favorable economics of moving narcotics across the border. This warfare is concentrated on the Mexican side of the border. But from the Mexican point of view, this warfare does not fundamentally threaten Mexico's interests. A Struggle Far From the Mexican Heartland The heartland of Mexico is to the south, far from the country's northern tier. The north is largely a sparsely populated highland desert region seen from Mexico City as an alien borderland intertwined with the United States as much as it is part of Mexico. Accordingly, the war raging there doesn't represent a direct threat to the survival of the Mexican regime. (click here to enlarge image) Indeed, what the wars are being fought over in some ways benefits Mexico. The amount of money pouring into Mexico annually is stunning. It is estimated to be about $35 billion to $40 billion each year. The massive profit margins involved make these sums even more significant. Assume that the manufacturing sector produces revenues of $40 billion a year through exports. Assuming a generous 10 percent profit margin, actual profits would be $4 billion a year. In the case of narcotics, however, profit margins are conservatively estimated to stand at around 80 percent. The net from $40 billion would be $32 billion; to produce equivalent income in manufacturing, exports would have to total $320 billion. In estimating the impact of drug money on Mexico, it must therefore be borne in mind that drugs cannot be compared to any conventional export. The drug trade's tremendously high profit margins mean its total impact on Mexico vastly outstrips even the estimated total sales, even if the margins shifted substantially. On the whole, Mexico is a tremendous beneficiary of the drug trade. Even if some of the profits are invested overseas, the pool of remaining money flowing into Mexico creates tremendous liquidity in the Mexican economy at a time of global recession. It is difficult to trace where the drug money is going, which follows from its illegality. Certainly, drug dealers would want their money in a jurisdiction where it could not be easily seized even if tracked. U.S. asset seizure laws for drug trafficking make the United States an unlikely haven. Though money clearly flows out of Mexico, the ability of the smugglers to influence the behavior of the Mexican government by investing some of it makes Mexico a likely destination for a substantial portion of such funds. The money does not, however, flow back into the hands of the gunmen shooting it out on the border; even their bosses couldn't manage funds of that magnitude. And while money can be — and often is — baled up and hidden, the value of money is in its use. As with illegal money everywhere, the goal is to wash it and invest it in legitimate enterprises where it can produce more money. That means it has to enter the economy through legitimate institutions — banks and other financial entities — and then be redeployed into the economy. This is no different from the American Mafia's practice during and after Prohibition. The Drug War and Mexican National Interests From Mexico's point of view, interrupting the flow of drugs to the United States is not clearly in the national interest or in that of the economic elite. Observers often dwell on the warfare between smuggling organizations in the northern borderland but rarely on the flow of American money into Mexico. Certainly, that money could corrupt the Mexican state, but it also behaves as money does. It is accumulated and invested, where it generates wealth and jobs. For the Mexican government to become willing to shut off this flow of money, the violence would have to become far more geographically widespread. And given the difficulty of ending the traffic anyway — and that many in the state security and military apparatus benefit from it — an obvious conclusion can be drawn: Namely, it is difficult to foresee scenarios in which the Mexican government could or would stop the drug trade. Instead, Mexico will accept both the pain and the benefits of the drug trade. Mexico's policy is consistent: It makes every effort to appear to be stopping the drug trade so that it will not be accused of supporting it. The government does not object to disrupting one or more of the smuggling groups, so long as the aggregate inflow of cash does not materially decline. It demonstrates to the United States efforts (albeit inadequate) to tackle the trade, while pointing out very real problems with its military and security apparatus and with its officials in Mexico City. It simultaneously points to the United States as the cause of the problem, given Washington's failure to control demand or to reduce prices by legalization. And if massive amounts of money pour into Mexico as a result of this U.S. failure, Mexico is not going to refuse it. The problem with the Mexican military or police is not lack of training or equipment. It is not a lack of leadership. These may be problems, but they are only problems if they interfere with implementing Mexican national policy. The problem is that these forces are personally unmotivated to take the risks needed to be effective because they benefit more from being ineffective. This isn't incompetence but a rational national policy. Moreover, Mexico has deep historic grievances toward the United States dating back to the Mexican-American War. These have been exacerbated by U.S. immigration policy that the Mexicans see both as insulting and as a threat to their policy of exporting surplus labor north. There is thus no desire to solve the Americans' problem. Certainly, there are individuals in the Mexican government who wish to stop the smuggling and the inflow of billions of dollars. They will try. But they will not succeed, as too much is at stake. One must ignore public statements and earnest private assurances and instead observe the facts on the ground to understand what's really going on. The U.S. Strategic Problem And this leaves the United States with a strategic problem. There is some talk in Mexico City and Washington of the Americans becoming involved in suppression of the smuggling within Mexico (even though the cartels, to use that strange name, make certain not to engage in significant violence north of the border and mask it when they do to reduce U.S. pressure on Mexico). This is certainly something the Mexicans would be attracted to. But it is unclear that the Americans would be any more successful than the Mexicans. What is clear is that any U.S. intervention would turn Mexican drug traffickers into patriots fighting yet another Yankee incursion. Recall that Pershing never caught Pancho Villa, but he did help turn Villa into a national hero in Mexico. The United States has a number of choices. It could accept the status quo. It could figure out how to reduce drug demand in the United States while keeping drugs illegal. It could legalize drugs, thereby driving their price down and ending the motivation for smuggling. And it could move into Mexico in a bid to impose its will against a government, banking system and police and military force that benefit from the drug trade. The United States does not know how to reduce demand for drugs. The United States is not prepared to legalize drugs. This means the choice lies between the status quo and a complex and uncertain (to say the least) intervention. We suspect the United States will attempt some limited variety of the latter, while in effect following the current strategy and living with the problem. Ultimately, Mexico is a failed state only if you accept the idea that its goal is to crush the smugglers. If, on the other hand, one accepts the idea that all of Mexican society benefits from the inflow of billions of American dollars (even though it also pays a price), then the Mexican state has not failed — it is following a rational strategy to turn a national problem into a national benefit.Last week AMD launched their workstation graphics card Radeon Frontier Edition at 1000$. Today AMD tweeted they will be showing off their VEGA products including RX VEGA and other AMD products Ryzen Pro,Ryzen Threadripper,EPYC,Radeon Instinct at SIGGARPH-30st July.
Here’s the tweet:
Here is the another one:
The history of Capsaicin events:
March 2016 — AMD Capsaicin — “Radeon Pro Duo”
March 2017 — AMD Capsaicin & Cream — “Radeon Vega is Radeon RX Vega”
July 2017 — Launch of Vega products including RX VEGA
Leaks and Details:
RX Vega is enthausiast gaming video card based on HBM2 that will compete GTX 1070 GTX 1080 GTX 1080ti from Nvidia. AMD already released two Vega GPUs for the Apple Mac Pro series that include a full 64 NCU and a cut down 56 CU variant. These come with same number of cores as the Radeon R9 Fury series cards at 4096 and 3584 respectively. But, Vega delivers more performance throughput and has increased clocks. Vega also includes several architectural upgrades such as HBCC and Rapid Packed Math which should accelerate gaming app performance.
The listing identifies the graphics card vendor as AMD. It is a single graphics card setup with 8GB of memory, 1,200MHz core clockspeed, and 700MHz memory bus clock. that shows, Scoring very close to GTX 1070 that means Vega has something for GTX 1070. But Take with a grain of salt.
Expected Specs of RX VEGA:Taking a little break from the LunaMac, here's something entirely different...Looking back, I have realized that aside from DisLestia, no one really ships Celestia with anypony, not even an OC. But after reading the MLP Wiki and this and that, I have discovered a new ship- JoeLestia! And for the record, yes, princessesmarry kitchen boys. Seriously, why not? While Joe is quite the minor character, all his major appearances coincide with that of Celestia *cough*and*cough*. Not to mention that Celestia is a sweet tooth and would definitely appreciate Joe's cooking.Honestly, screw this "the Princesses are meant to be forever alone" crap. It just ain't right.Well anyway, enjoy dem ships. Thank you and have a nice day.Disclaimer: Donut Joe and Princess Celestia (C) Lauren Faust and Hasbrolyrics and melody (C) Counting CrowsIndependent MP Andrew Wilkie has launched a scathing broadside at Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce as the row over live exports flares up again.
Mr Wilkie has called for the trade to be phased out off the back of an Animals Australia video showing animals having their throats slashed and being left to bleed out in Middle Eastern and Asian countries.
"Barnaby Joyce doesn't just turn a blind eye to the cruelty - he rubs his hands together with glee at the prospect of it continuing," Mr Wilkie, who showed the video to the press in Canberra yesterday, said.
"I would challenge him to come out and say what we saw today is not wrong."
Mr Wilkie has called for the government to investigate the video and cease dealing with the culprits, who were, apparently, participating in the "Islamic Festival of Sacrifice", a component of Eid.
Barnaby Joyce (left), and Andrew Wilkie. (AAP) ()
Mr Joyce's office has said the footage is being investigated and made positive noises about the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System, which Mr Wilkie damned as mere "window dressing".
The EACS was introduced in 2011 following a Four Corners expose on the industry, but little had changed when the program followed up on the issue a year later.
Nonetheless, the Department of Agriculture insists that the system is working.
"The Department's review of ESCAS found that more than 99 per cent of exported livestock since the systems introduction in 2011 were handled and slaughtered in accordance with standards set by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE)," the department told The Huffington Post.
"The OIE itself has said Australia is leading the world in animal welfare and that industry's investments in improving the implementation of OIE welfare standards has its full and unequivocal support."
© Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019QUEENSLAND has proudly worn maroon in State of Origin since the rugby league series started in 1980, but why the hell is Brisbane Roar getting in on the act?
The A-League club will wear a State of Origin-inspired jersey for Saturday night’s clash with league leaders Sydney FC at Suncorp Stadium.
It sets up a clash between the Sky Blues and the maroon Roar to play on the “mate against mate” theme of rugby league’s toughest contest.
But it’s a pretty ridiculous idea.
Round 21 Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre Visit Match Centre
Even Sydney FC coach Graham Arnold is panning it.
“It’s not rugby league, it’s football,” Arnold told reporters on Thursday. “It doesn’t matter what colour jerseys they’re in. They’re still the same human beings — same bodies, same talent, same quality.
“We’ll go up there with the intention of suffocating them.
“It could also bring bad luck. They’ve never worn maroon.”
Maroon is the colour of Queensland, so it makes sense the only A-League club in the state tries to capitalise on that.
When the Roar first started (then called Queensland Roar) they had some maroon in their kit, but when your primary colour is orange it looks fairly awful.
Back in 2007, when Roar decided to combine maroon and orange. Source: News Limited
The colour switch is a big deal north of the Tweed River, with the jerseys presented to Roar players by Maroons Origin legend Billy Moore this week.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s rugby league, football or marbles. When sky blue plays maroon, everyone north of the Tweed cares,” Moore said.
But Roar need to realise the “state against state”, “mate against mate” thing is a league thing.
Why would Roar exports like Thomas Broich or Manuel Arana care about winning for state pride? Or former Socceroo Brett Holman, who hails from Sydney’s inner west?
The A-League has so many great things that sets it apart from the egg-ball codes, like the atmosphere within the grounds.
There’s no need to try and replicate rugby league ideas.
Next thing you know there will be cheerleaders and advertising for Rum plastered all over the field.
— With AAPIntro
This RX Vega 56 showdown is a follow-up in our Vega “unleashed” series. We benchmark 28 games at 4 resolutions to determine the overall winner between the GTX 1070 Founders Edition and the reference RX Vega 56 at the $399 price-point.
Last month, AMD released its new Vega 64 processor in a vain attempt to beat the GTX 1080 and to take the performance crown from NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 Ti. We have put our liquid-cooled flagship Vega 64 and the Founders Editions of the GTX 1080 and the GTX 1080 Ti through their paces with ten VR games and also each overclocked to the max with 28 modern PC games, and in most cases, the $549 GTX 1080 FE is faster while the GTX 1080 Ti is in a class by itself as the world’s fastest gaming video card. And now we are going to compare the GTX 1070 FE with the reference RX Vega 56 which are both priced at $399 although the Vega 56 is still mostly out of stock.
Since we are using the reference version of both cards, we have set each card to its maximum power and temperature limits – and in the case of the RX Vega 56 – we have increased its minimum fan speed and allowed it to spin up to maximum so that it does not throttle, and we saw our overall stock-clocked Boost average around 1646MHz. We had originally planned to post overclocking results between the RX Vega 56 and the GTX 1070 FE, but AMD’s latest 17.9.1 drivers do not allow the core nor memory overclocks to be set under WattMan.
Our testing platform is Windows 10 Home 64-bit, using an Intel Core i7-6700K at 4.00GHz which turbos all cores to 4.6GHz as set in the ASRock Z170 motherboard’s BIOS, and 16GB of HyperX DDR4 at 3333MHz. The settings and hardware are identical except for the two cards being tested. We will compare the performance of 28 modern games at 1920×1080, 2560×1440, 3440×1440 and 3840×2160 resolutions with maximum settings.
Let’s see how well a non-throttling RX Vega 56 matches up with a Founders Editions of the GTX 1070.The man suspected of vandalizing nearly 100 cars Friday in Lake Worth left a clue for deputies — or rather spray-painted one.
"Robanson" and "Nicolas" were painted across two of the cars vandalized early Friday between the 200 and 800 blocks of South F and South H streets, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said. A quick search of the name showed a 29-year-old Robanson Nicolas lived on South F Street.
Deputies found Nicolas that night wearing a black T-shirt with a fluorescent green skull and crossed swords as the man suspected in the vandalism. When he was stopped, he pulled four cell phones and a bag of marijuana from his pockets, a sheriff’s office report states.
Video footage from the LaHoya Village Apartments parking lot, where about 40 cars were vandalized, shows a man wearing a glow-in-the-dark shirt while cutting tires at about 4 a.m. A witness showed deputies cell phone video of what appears to be the same man vandalizing cars down the road.
Deputies estimate between 80 and 100 cars had slashed tires, broken windows or spray paint on them. So far they’ve obtained 12 written statements from victims, so have charged Nicolas with 12 counts of criminal mischief, according to a sheriff’s office report. He will face more charges if more victims provide statements. Those who have said their vehicles sustained between $50 and $550 worth of damage.
Video footage from the apartment parking lot shows the suspect touching many of the vehicles. Deputies are running those fingerprints — the man was not wearing gloves — against Nicolas’, according to a sheriff’s office report.
Records show Nicolas has been convicted on a number of drug-related charges in the last decade.
He is being held in the Palm Beach County Jail on a $6,000 bond, according to court records.
Anyone with information about the vandalizations is asked to call Crime Stoppers of Palm Beach County at 800-458-TIPS (8477)A master designed urban community in South Africa was chosen as one of the sixteen real estate project by the Clinton Climate Initiative Development (CCI). The Zonk’izizwe Town Center, a development of planned urban community in Midrand, Gauteng, South Africa is participating in this CCI program which will strive to reduce the amount of on-site CO2 emissions to below zero. According to Development Design Group (DDG), the mastermind behind this zero carbon plan, sustainable development and “Green” architecture figure prominently in the Zonk’izizwe design, with innovations like bio-water recycling/purification and solar power energy contributions.
This distinguished honor of winning the CCI |
were destroyed by inflation.[13]
Banks were supposed to be Warehouses of Gold, not Houses of Cards
Going by Maybury’s narrative, people invented money warehouses, which became banks. A person could deposit his gold or silver coins in a bank for safekeeping. He would then be issued an IOU by the bank for the amount of gold or silver coins. He could redeem the IOU for gold or silver coins from the bank whenever he wanted. And thus, the IOUs became banknotes. The most popular banknotes in circulation were aptly called silver certificates. Unlike today’s Federal Reserve notes, they had no legal tender statement. The statement on them read as:
This certifies that there has been Deposited in the Treasury of the United States of America One Silver Dollar Payable to the Bearer on Demand.[14]
World Wars, Depression and the Crash of 1929
Most people used dollars without ever converting them to gold or silver. But even guaranteed convertibility did not stop politicians from trying to violate the two laws once again. This time, they had an instrument known as the Federal Reserve at their disposal, which I will discuss later. They needed to print more dollars in order to finance American intervention in World War I. To quote Maybury, these newly created dollars caused the “Roaring Twenties” to roar and caused stock prices to skyrocket when people invested these new dollars into the stock market.[15] The inflation that followed set the stage for the Great Depression, which was heralded by the stock market crash of 1929. In this scenario, it was only guaranteed convertibility that prevented politicians from further devaluing the dollar. Depositors started switching their dollar assets to gold, and politicians were forced to reduce the printing of dollars.
This did not fare well with politicians, who wanted to further increase the supply of dollars to finance American intervention in World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt had Congress recall all gold certificates, and the printing of silver certificates was increased to substitute. America was quietly and unofficially put on a silver standard. Silver is not as expensive as gold, giving politicians more leeway to inflate its value.
Bretton Woods and the New World Order
At the end of the war, The Powers That Be across the globe realized how guaranteed convertibility could jeopardize financing of future wars, and decided to further distance themselves from guaranteed convertibility through the Bretton-Woods agreement of 1944. Under this system, signatory countries fixed their exchange rates relative to the American dollar. And America promised to fix the price of gold at $35 per ounce.[16] Instead of maintaining proportional gold reserves, a fractional gold standard was introduced, that allowed politicians to increase money supply under the assumption that most of the money created would never be exchanged for gold.
Rather than being an impartial economic recovery plan, the Bretton-Woods agreement was designed to weaken the currencies of non-American signatories by making them dependent on the American dollar instead of their local gold reserves. Every upturn or downturn faced by the American economy would be mirrored in the economies of these countries. For example, when America went off the gold standard, all the signatory countries, including Canada, went off the gold standard as well.
The Bretton-Woods agreement was also designed to finance a bipolar postwar world, using inflated American dollars. This New World Order was only meant to be dominated by America and the Soviet Union, as the Powers That Be had envisioned in the Yalta conference of 1945. Other potential emerging powers were to be offered huge inducements in exchange for aligning their currency with the American dollar and opening their markets to American economic intervention. In other words, their leaderships were being bribed into putting aside their nations’ pretensions of being independent world powers as they once were. Billions of inflated American dollars were channelled to these countries in the guise of aid for postwar recovery (Marshall plan). Despite the fact that Japan had made a huge initial recovery without such aid, while Turkey, a major recipient of such aid, went from being a respected sovereign power to a corrupt proxy state of NATO. In 1970, nationalist French President Charles De Gaulle decided to trade dollars received through such channels for gold. Realising that this could become a trend that would jeopardise this New World Order, President Nixon made the America dollar inconvertible to gold directly (except on the open market). The American dollar had finally transitioned into a fiat currency.
Why the Federal Reserve System is Unsustainable by Design
At this point, it is moot to ask whether or not the decisions being made by politicians were in accordance with Maybury’s two laws. The United States had moved beyond its humble isolationist origins towards interventionism. And its common law underpinnings were being overhauled to accommodate the demands of this New World Order. Supply of the new American dollar was governed by private banks through a complex mechanism known as the Federal Reserve. The practice of usury, or interest is taken for granted in the Federal Reserve, though Christianity staunchly prohibited it until the reformation. Judaic scripture still prohibits usury. Ironically, many Jewish people have risen to prominence in interest based banking.
A complete understanding of the Federal Reserve System is beyond the scope of this paper. To quote Maybury,
However, modern politicians don’t just run the printing presses. They use a more complex system. They use the banks and Federal Reserve. You don’t need to know how it works, all you need to know is that it does the same thing. It increases the amount of money, and that makes the money worth less. Prices rise.[17]
Maybury is implying that the United States has resorted to practicing the boom-bust cycle of increased money supply, followed by runaway inflation and eventual devaluation of the currency, as characterized in banana republics. But it is being done in a more controlled manner. We too could leave our understanding of the Federal Reserve System at that, but there are two reasons why a more thorough understanding of it is pertinent.
Firstly, the removal of the American dollar from the gold standard and the ascendancy of the Federal Reserve System may be related to the plateauing of the American standard of living (measured as a function of GDP), which had been constantly soaring upwards till the seventies (See Figure I).
Figure I: Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice (Placerville: Bluestocking Press, 1993), 221. Copyright © Bluestocking Press, All Rights Reserved. Reproduced for strictly academic/educational use under the Fair Dealing provision of the Copyright Act of Canada.
Secondly, the American government’s debt soared after 1971. It had taken politicians 194 years to have the American government accumulate its first trillion of debt.[18] After 1971, the American government started accumulating many more trillion in debt, in time spans even as small as two years (See Figure II)! To quote Maybury,
During the 1980s, the federal government’s uncontrolled tax-and-spend policy became an uncontrolled tax-and-borrow-and-spend policy. [….] To pay for its runaway spending, the federal government is now borrowing money at the rate of $1.4 million every two minutes.[19]
Today, the American government borrows at a rate of $4.14 billion per day.[20] It is clear that such practices were never meant to be sustainable. This is confirmed by the fact that the Federal Reserve has discontinued publishing the M3 monetary aggregate,[21] which gives the total amount of American dollars in circulation. Looming economic disaster could thus be kept hidden for a long time. And The Powers That Be are using the debt to pursue military objectives that have little relevance to the American population. Worse, the future devaluation of the American dollar will also hurt the prospects of all other currencies still pegged to it through the Bretton-Woods agreement, including the Canadian dollar.
Figure II: Ed Hall, “US National Debt Clock FAQ,” Brillig.com 4 June 2010
The only thing that seems to keep American dollars from immediate devaluation is a secret 1975 agreement between America and Saudi Arabia. The main purpose of this treaty was to end an OPEC oil embargo, which was started by King Faisal in response to American support for Israeli aggression. While this deal guaranteed American military support for the House of Saud, it also required OPEC countries to sell their oil in US dollars (Petrodollars). This created an unofficial, quasi-oil standard for the American dollar, which has since then saved the American dollar from immediate collapse. But at the present rate at which American currency is being inflated, even the quasi-oil standard of the Petrodollar will fail to catch up!
The Secret History of the Federal Reserve
The Federal Reserve System originally came into being through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. But it was only after the abolition of the gold standard in 1971 that the American Dollar became subservient to the Federal Reserve. As one may easily notice, the date of its inception coincides with the beginning of America’s boom-bust cycles. The Federal Reserve System was the agency used by the Powers That Be to first inflate American Dollars, even when they had their gold backing, creating the fractional gold standard. The Federal Reserve Act is documented to have originated in a 1910 secret meeting among top American politicians and financiers at Jekyll island. To quote Forbes magazine founder Bertie Charles Forbes,
Picture a party of the nation’s greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily hieing hundred of miles South, embarking in a mysterious launch, sneaking onto an island deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned, lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world this strangest, most secret episode in the history of American finance. [22]
Among the private bankers who attended, those aligned to the German Rothschild banking family figure prominently. In fact, Rothschild frontman J.P. Morgan is said to have arranged the trip.[23] And once the Federal Reserve Act was enacted, banks aligned to both the Rothschild and Rockefeller families became the most prominent member banks in the Federal Reserve System, on account of their large sizes. If the conspiracy theorists are to be believed, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 is related to the creation of the Federal Reserve. According to Bill Hughes,[24] some of the older wealthy families of America wanted a bigger share in the Federal Reserve, and threatened to oppose the creation of the Federal Reserve until their wish was granted. So J.P. Morgan had his White Star Lines build the Titanic. All these competing families were invited for the maiden voyage. But J.P. Morgan cancelled his booking at the last minute.[25]
The Federal Reserve: Private, Semi-private, Quasi-private or what?
The Federal Reserve System can be considered a quasi-private arrangement. The Federal Reserve Board consists of public officials. Private banks that opt for membership in the Federal Reserve System grant the Federal Reserve Board limited supervisory powers in exchange for some benefits not available to other banks. These benefits may be considered trivial when we take into account that Member banks become Federal Reserve Banks, and can act as monetary representatives of the United States government. They have a say in the issuing of banknotes and in the measures to control money supply. The quasi-private nature of the Federal Reserve System can be best illustrated by the logo of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (See Figure III). The logo bears the word “incorporated” which is designated for private entities. While the word “Federal” gives the connotation of government authority.
Most American banks are not members of the Federal Reserve System but the banks that are members constitute the largest banks in America, with more assets than non-member banks. The gold standard restrained the Federal Reserve System from increasing the money supply whimsically. But with the abolition of the gold standard in 1971, the American dollar became completely subservient to the Federal Reserve System.
It is clear that some of the giant banks have considerable say in the determination of American money supply, and all related policy, such as the determination of interest rates. In fact, the Federal Reserve System owes its creation to certain specific New York banks. To quote,
The influence of the New York bankers appears again and again. Earlier they had opposed a central bank in Philadelphia, while later on they had opposed one because they had in effect been able provide the central bank functions they felt beneficial to them. Did the Federal Reserve System give the New York bankers what they had wanted in light of the weaknesses revealed by 1907? New York City bankers were able to maintain a strong influence in the call loan market and hence in the stock market, and with a central bank the call loan market was now relieved of its previous, tenuous role as a source of emergency liquidity. The bankers also got lower reserve requirements and, perhaps most important, they no longer held the responsibility for controlling panics. The role of New York City banks was now to aid the commercial development of the country, that is, to serve as the source of financing business, and the reserve banks were to serve as the provider of emergency liquidity.[26]
The Federal Reserve System functions in a relative absence of transparency. For example, the Federal Open Market Committee, consisting of seven members of the Federal Reserve Board and five representatives of Federal Reserve banks meet several times a year to determine United States monetary policy. These meetings are not open to public. The Federal Reserve System’s quasi-private status allows it be insulated from Freedom of Information requests. It was only in 2009 that Congressman Ron Paul proposed a thorough audit of the Federal Reserve System. To quote Ron Paul’s speech to Congress when introducing his bill (H. R. 1207) to audit the Federal Reserve System,
Throughout its nearly 100-year history, the Federal Reserve has presided over the near-complete destruction of the United States dollar. Since 1913 the dollar has lost over 95% of its purchasing power, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve’s loose monetary policy. [….] The Federal Reserve can enter into agreements with foreign central banks and foreign governments, and the GAO is prohibited from auditing or even seeing these agreements. Why should a government-established agency, whose police force has federal law enforcement powers, and whose notes have legal tender status in this country, be allowed to enter into agreements with foreign powers and foreign banking institutions with no oversight? […] If the State Department were able to do this, it would be characterized as a rogue agency and brought to heel, and if a private individual did this he might face prosecution under the Logan Act, yet the Fed avoids both fates.[27]
Despite the bill acquiring a cult following among many Americans, many politicians came forward to hijack the bill, proposing modified versions instead, which allowed the Federal Reserve System to maintain its veil of secrecy. As of this date, the bill faces an uncertain future.
How the Federal Reserve “Pretends” to Work
The basic explanation on how the Federal Reserve System allows its member banks to profiteer runs like this. Suppose the government desperately needs $1 billion. In the absence of the Federal Reserve System, it would raise taxes, or use up accumulated taxes. But with the Federal Reserve System, it asks the member banks for a loan. The member banks grant the loan, and the Federal Reserve prints the $1 billion and issues it to the government at interest. How the banks “grant” the loan is hazy. They certainly do not transfer cash from their own private holdings to the Federal Reserve. To add another layer of abstraction, these processes are “computerized.” To pay back the loan plus interest to the banks, the government taxes the American people (income taxes constituted 43% of Federal receipts in 2009). It is important to note that when the government pays back the loan plus interest to the banks, the banks receive actual cash transfers from the government. If the loan is too big to pay (as is always the case), the government merely pays the interest on it (which accounted to 5% of Federal expenditure in 2009), and the banks become holders of American debt. Holding American debt has asset value, as it guarantees a steady trickle of interest by none other than the United States government. And therefore, it can be inferred that the banks in question are not that keen about repayment of the principle.
The government could accomplish the same results by having the Treasury print the money whenever needed, resulting in similar levels of inflation. But by inviting the banks to the table, the Powers That Be have managed to divert Federal expenditure towards paying “interest” for the banks’ “loans.” And in this process, these private banks have become the holders of American debt. More than half of American debt is held by foreign interests. When we try to understand how the banks “grant” the loan to the government in the first place, we are reminded of Class Action Suit filed by John Dempsey against major Canadian financial institutions at the Supreme Court of British Columbia on 15th April 2005. The lawsuit was dismissed as frivolous. But Dempsey’s objections to how banks “granted” loans to the Bank of Canada are still pertinent. To quote,
42. At all material times, these defendant banks and all of them have no legal standing to lend any money to borrowers, because: 1) these banks and credit unions did not have the money to lend, and therefore they did not have any capacity to enter into a binding contract; 2) the defendants did not have any cash reserve, they are not legally permitted to lend their depositor’s or member’s money without expressed written authorization from the depositors, and: 3) the defendants have no tangible assets of their own to lend and all their “assets” are “paper assets” which are mainly in the form of “receivables” created by them out of “thin air,” derived out of loans whereas the monies loaned out were also created out of thin air. 43. Other than bookkeeping and computer entries, no money or substance of any value was loaned by the defendants to the Plaintiff. In all of the loan transactions entered into between the Plaintiff and the Defendants, the financial institutions did not bring any equity to any of the transaction.[28]
A Comparison with the Canadian “Federal Reserve”
A system identical to the Federal Reserve System was created in Canada in 1935 with the establishment of a central bank known as the Bank of Canada. As in the case of the Federal Reserve System, which came into being to finance American intervention in World War I, the Bank of Canada was created as an instrument financing large-scale Canadian involvement in World War II, and later, the Korean war, by inflating Canadian dollars (See Figure V).
Figure V
When Canada became a signatory to the Bretton Woods agreement, the Canadian dollar was pegged to the American dollar. And when the American dollar was taken off the gold standard, the Canadian dollar still continued to be pegged to the value of the American dollar. The supply of Canadian dollars is governed by the main clients of the Bank of Canada, such as Royal bank, the Bank of Montreal, CIBC and the government of Canada.[29] But unlike the United States, these entities have not facilitated the creation of a gargantuan Federal debt, as in the case of the United States. They have even managed to shrink the Canadian Federal debt, creating a surplus instead of the expected deficit!
If we are to assume that systems such as the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada are created to assist private member banks in profiteering, how is it that both these almost analogous systems have produced completely different results in two neighbouring countries? To arrive at an understanding, we must assume that the Powers That Be created these systems for larger objectives than immediate monetary profit.
Beyond Profit: How the Federal Reserve is being used to facilitate Global Conflict
The Federal Reserve has helped underwrite continued American military expenditures, even after the World Wars. As of 2009, “Defence” accounts for 23% of all American Federal spending. And therefore, the gargantuan size of the American Federal debt is related to the continuation of American military interventions abroad. In contrast, Canada only piled up a huge Federal debt only when the Powers That Be decided to use its resources in World War II.
If we assume that such systems are primarily instruments of war, can we also infer that the World Wars could have been prevented in their absence. Most of us naively assume that the Federal Reserve only underwrote the American war effort. This is not the case. In World War II, the Lend-Lease program was used to ship supplies worth $759 billion in 2008[30] to other countries involved in the war. Some of these countries, such as Soviet Union and China, cannot be considered friendlies. Even more bewildering is the fact that the inflated dollars churned out by the Federal Reserve managed to find their way into Nazi Germany, through American private “investments.” Once we discard the myth that Germany recovered after World War I like a punching doll, it appears that the rearmament of Germany was largely the effort of American “investors” investing the new American dollars produced by the Federal Reserve. One such interesting case is that of the German chemical conglomerate, I.G. Farben, which was central to the rearmament of Germany. It had on its board of directors Paul Warburg, who also sat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.[31] Warburg is considered to be the mastermind behind the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Other board members of I.G. Farben also sat on the boards of Ford Motor Company and the Rockefeller owned Standard Oil. Suspiciously, the main I.G. Farben complex in Germany managed to avoid Allied bombing during the war.
War is a profitable enterprise. But the destruction of economies also hampers profits for banks and major commercial entities. An investigation into the motives of The Powers That Be with respect to the World Wars is beyond the scope of this paper. And this aspect cannot be fairly understood while fixating on monetary profit. But if we give credence to fringe historians, we can arrive at some basic conclusions. It could be that monopoly capitalists in the United States, such as J. P. Morgan (who is believed to represent the moustachioed Mr. Monopoly in the Monopoly board game) realised the limitations they faced in the Western world. And so, they decided to expand outside the Western world, creating societies free of the limitations they faced in the
West. In both the World Wars, only the Soviet Union made notable territorial acquisitions. While offering a panacea to capitalism, the Soviet system created an unprecedented concentration of power, creating a form of monopoly state capitalism, which was highly favoured by The Powers That Be. The Soviet Union may have thus been a modern day colony of “capitalists” based in places like New York and Calgary. There is suggestive evidence pointing towards the same. Notable capitalists took trips to the Soviet Union as if it were a country club. Since the Soviet Union did not allow private investment, these visitors may have had a direct stake in the Soviet Empire. While the United States spared no effort in creating a military industrial complex to counter the Soviet Union, actual operations against the Soviet Union were half-hearted. For example, the Vietnam War forced many Vietnamese people to ally with the Soviets. There is the case of Australian journalist Roland Perry, who wrote a book[32] suggesting that the late Victor Rothschild (the head of the British arm of the Rothschild banking dynasty) might have been the “fifth man” in the infamous Cambridge Soviet spy ring. In 1983, Congressman Lawrence Patton Macdonald took a flight to South Korea to warn South Koreans that American policy towards that nation was designed to placate the Soviets. The plane literally disappeared, very likely diverted to the Soviet Union. Then there is the case of General Zia of Pakistan, who had supervised the “jihad” against the Soviets in Afghanistan. General Zia was killed in a suspicious plane crash. Despite the death of an American diplomat who was also on board the plane, the FBI showed little interest in investigating the case.
The Powers That Be have repeatedly hinted that the American nation is more of a means to an end (manifest destiny?), and that the sustainability of the American economy and the middle class is not their priority. If the American dollar is not meant to be sustainable by design, what form of money is then sustainable? A growing number of Americans are stockpiling gold (as they are stockpiling bullets). Gold still retains its instinctive appeal. According to Carlton Brown, a commodities trader on Wall Street, when 9-11 happened, all traders on the floor instinctively became fixated on the price of gold.[33] As for the gold that was used to leverage the dollar prior to 1971, even Congressman Ron Paul has no idea of what became of it.[34]
Further Reading/Viewing
&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a HREF=”http://ws.amazon.ca/widgets/q?rt=tf_ssw&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;ServiceVersion=20070822&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;MarketPlace=CA&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;ID=V20070822%2FCA%2Fcabtim-20%2F8003%2Fee8bba8a-9a54-4b4c-97bf-168fd05c42ae&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;Operation=NoScript”&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Amazon.ca Widgets&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;
[1] Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened to Justice (Placerville: Bluestocking Press, 1993), 36.
[2] Maybury, Justice 67.
[3] Michael Parkin and Robin Bade, Microeconomics: Canada in the Global Environment 5th ed. (Toronto: Pearson Education Canada Inc., 2003), 148.
[4] Parkin & Bade, 148.
[5] Lawrence H. White, “The Federal Reserve System’s Influence on Research in Monetary Economics,” Econ Journal Watch 2.2 (2005): 325. 3 June 2010
[6] White, 339.
[7] White, 327.
[8] Richard J. Maybury, Whatever Happened Penny Candy (Placerville: Bluestocking Press, 1993), 21.
[9] Maybury, Penny Candy 22.
[10] Maybury, Penny Candy 22.
[11] Maybury, Penny Candy 31.
[12] Maybury, Penny Candy 32.
[13] Maybury, Penny Candy 33.
[14] Maybury, Penny Candy 30.
[15] Maybury, Penny Candy 56.
[16] Wikipedia contributors. “Gold standard.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 20 May. 2010. Web. 27 May. 2010.
[17] Maybury, Penny Candy 36.
[18] Maybury, Penny Candy 67.
[19] Maybury, Penny Candy 67.
[20] Ed Hall, “US National Debt Clock,” Brillig.com 4 June 2010
[21] Federal Reserve Statistical Release, “Discontinuance of M3,” 10 November 2005 rev. 9 March 2006 Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System 3 June 2010 < http://www.federalreserve.gov/Releases/h6/discm3.htm>
[22] Cushing T. Daniel, Real Money Versus False Money – Bank Credits (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2004), 169-170.
[23] Robert West, Banking Reform and the Federal Reserve, 1863-1923 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 71.
[24] Bill Hughes, The Secret Terrorists (Eustis: Truth Triumphant Ministeries, 2002)
[25] Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 146.
[26] Jon R. Moen & Ellis W. Tallman, “New York and the politics of central banks, 1781 to the Federal Reserve Act,”Working Paper 2006-23, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta 3 June 2010
37.
[27] Ron Paul, “Audit the Federal Reserve,” 26 February 2009 RonPaul.com 3 June 2010
[28]Dempsey et all v Envision Credit Union et all, 2005 BCSC S91786, 6-7.
[29] Parkin & Bade, 267.
[30] Wikipedia contributors. “Lend-Lease.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 5 Jun. 2010. Web. 5 Jun. 2010.
[31] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (Sudbury: Bloomfield Books, 1976), 35.
[32] Roland Perry, The Fifth Man (London: Pan Books, 1994).
[33] The Corporation, writ Mark Achbar, Harold Crooks, Joel Bakan, dir Jennifer Abbot, Mark Achbar, Zeitgeist Films, 5 April 2005.
[34] America: Freedom to Fascism, dir Aaron Russo, Cinema Libre, 12 December 2006.
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Loading... Loading...The Denver Broncos are patiently waiting for Peyton Manning to make a decision about his future, and things could get awkward if the 39-year-old decides he wants to play in 2016.
If Manning is on the roster when the new league year begins March 8, his $19 million salary for 2016 would become fully guaranteed. It’s possible the Broncos could bring him back at a cheaper price should he want to return. However, Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk cites a source close to the team’s thinking who believes they don’t want Manning back “at any price.”
The Broncos could, technically, cut Manning. They are reportedly hoping he retires so they won’t have to do that, similar to the situation between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Troy Polamalu last season.
While Denver is said to be holding off on contract discussions with Brock Osweiler out of respect for Manning, Florio reports that negotiations have already begun and are being kept private.
The exchange Manning had with Bill Belichick after the AFC Championship Game (video here) made it seem like the 14-time Pro Bowler is retiring. He could, of course, change his mind. But if he does, it’s likely that Manning will be playing for his third NFL team in 2016.Mississippi authorities are searching for whoever is responsible for setting a church in the Delta on fire and spray painting "Vote Trump" on the side. WAPT-TV reported that the incident happened Monday evening at Hopewell M.B. Church in Greenville, Mississippi. Investigators said the fire caused significant damage to the building. Additional details about the incident have not been released. The FBI has joined the investigation. Updates can be found on WAPT’s website. Keep up with local news, weather and current events with the WDSU app here. Sign up for our email newsletters to get breaking news right in your inbox. Click here to sign up!
Mississippi authorities are searching for whoever is responsible for setting a church in the Delta on fire and spray painting "Vote Trump" on the side.
WAPT-TV reported that the incident happened Monday evening at Hopewell M.B. Church in Greenville, Mississippi.
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Investigators said the fire caused significant damage to the building. Additional details about the incident have not been released.
The FBI has joined the investigation. Updates can be found on WAPT’s website.
Keep up with local news, weather and current events with the WDSU app here. Sign up for our email newsletters to get breaking news right in your inbox. Click here to sign up!
AlertMeA Consciousness-Raising Discussion about Motherhood and Birth Regret
The public is often harangued with stories of supposed “abortion regret”. A recent on-line discussion resulted with its opposite: birth regret. Women discuss their often mixed feelings about having given birth — or not — and its effect on their lives. We publish lt here as a realistic response to Mother’s Day. —The Editors
<O>
Susan:
I marched in New York for the big women’s march carrying a poster I made that said ABORTION IS EMPOWERMENT—SAVE ROE V. WADE. My reproductive years are way behind me but abortion rights are my ongoing issue.
* * *
Jane:
Susan, you were quoted in some magazine article as saying, “I have always known that I wasn’t meant to be a mother.” That struck me! I thought you were courageous and forthright and honest and revolutionary. And gloriously anti-the world’s expectations of you.
I was affected personally too. Because it is, oh, so difficult to find out that one was not meant to be a mother after you already are a mother. Much is made by the Right-to Lifers of “abortion regret.” No one ever talks about birth regret. So darling Susan, you carried that sign for me, too.
* * *
Kathy:
I like that, “birth regret”! I bet many women have experienced it.
* * *
Ti-Grace:
Jane, you just coined a new important phrase, “birth regret”! I wonder how many women have suffered from this and could never admit this even to themselves. “Oops! Too late.” And sentenced to a lifetime of childcare, one way and another. I’m sure many love their particular children but the “mother” role is a major bitch.
You’ve got guts!! Essential for a feminist. “Stubborn” is good also. Everyone on this list qualifies as “stubborn”.
* * *
Susan:
Yes! “Birth regret” explains the new mothers who are unable to cope with their babies and violently abuse their newborns. I don’t doubt the scientific evidence supporting postpartum depression, but it is not the whole story.
* * *
Carol G:
I think “birth regret” is wide spread and in my experience women do talk about it. Many years ago, in my first marriage, I was contemplating having children. There are several reasons I did not have them, but while I was trying to make up my mind I did what I usually do when perplexed — I public opinion polled.
There were many women in a small space on my job then and we all got along pretty well. Most were a little older than me and nearly all had children and had big family type photos on their desks and baby pictures. We all knew quite a bit about everyone’s kids. These were women in intact families with husbands making good salaries — and they made good salaries too. I’d call them middle middle class (they were not rich or classy — they worked in lower white collar jobs in school administration in Jax, Florida).
I must have talked with 4 or 5 of my women coworkers and just honestly told them I was trying to decide what to do and I was having trouble coming to a decision — what did they think? To a woman, they said virtually the same thing, which went like this:
“I love my kids, I’d kill anyone who touched a hair on their heads, but if I had it to do it over again I would have waited longer. I would have gotten more education, kept going at my career, traveled to see the world, experienced more of life first, read more books, written more poetry” — what ever the things were that they hating missing out on because raising children is such an all consuming project.
I was surprised because I was expecting them to tell me how great it was raising kids and that I’d better get going on it. My talks with them were influential in my decision not to have kids. I’d say these women had “birth regret” although I don’t think they’d have called it that.
* * *
Kathy:
I don’t think I’d call what you describe, Carol G, as birth regret, per se. To me, this outlines a feminist approach to becoming a mother — a message I understood in the 1970s. I did exactly what these women said they should have done before they had children, and I’m glad I did. Of course motherhood held me back in jobs anyway; no personal solutions to that big problem and I probably do have some health issues resulting from being an “older” mom. I agree with Ti-Grace who said, “I’m sure many love their particular children but the ‘mother’ role is a major bitch.”
* * *
Carol G:
Well, Kathy, they literally regretted having the children when they had them. And think about it — if they’d waited, anything could have happened. What’s interesting to me is why they went ahead before they really wanted to. I guess they didn’t know how terribly difficult it would be.
* * *
Ti-Grace:
Various women (feminists who have had one or more children) have told me over the years about a major annoying problem with urinary incontinence. This problem arose much earlier (in their 40s or even earlier) because of childbearing than it does in nulliparous women (for us, more like in their 70s). This was/is as a result of their internal organs being pushed out of place during pregnancy. The only adequate repair was through surgery. I have urged women to write about this but they’ve been embarrassed to do so. Too bad. This is a serious problem. And I don’t know if such surgeries are covered by insurance, etc. It might be considered “cosmetic” (but only by someone who has never suffered from urinary incontinence).
Is this what you had in mind, Kathy?
* * *
Kathy:
In terms of health, yeah, I’ve got the urinary incontinence thing, but I was mainly wondering if my thyroid would have gone out and whether I would have been able to regain my pre-motherhood weight if I had the children when in my 20s instead of mid 30s. Part of the weight thing is that tests of my thyroid didn’t depart from the so-called normal range for years (even though I had many of the signs of hypothyroidism right away) and part of it is that I never took time to take care of myself, I went right back to the lab 10 days after my first, and I worked at home feverishly slaving toward a grant deadline after my second was born.
* * *
Jane:
I am convinced that birth regret is widespread but we don’t call it that, or talk about it, because motherhood is put on a pedestal in the U.S. But we wouldn’t have so many foster homes if birth regret didn’t exist. And I suspect that what we call “postpartum depression” may actually be a form of birth regret.
I have found that older couples are more willing to talk about how sorry they are that they wasted so much time and money on raising kids. They feel there is no payback for |
club scene there than at Alabama, I think that's one of the things that deterred my mom from the school," he says. He mentions that that they were concerned about something else, but he can't tell me what. He promises to tell me the day after National Signing Day. All season, Minkah kept posting photos in Alabama gear on Twitter and Instagram. He tells me his recent visit to Alabama, for the Iron Bowl, was one of the best ones he went on. A few of the commits rode "off-roading golf carts" around Saban's property and just had a good time hanging out. He was committed for a reason, not just to have his name attached to the program, he added. But as we sat on the bleachers in mid December, side by side with our backs against the concrete wall during his free period, he was anything but certain that he would Roll Tide for the next three or four years. "When in your mind was Florida State ruled out?" I ask. He laughs, stares straight ahead. "Or is it?" I say, also laughing now. After a few beats, he grins as he says, "No, I don't think it is yet. It's not. "I know kinda where I want to be at, but it's like, each side has its own positives and negatives and you don't know which positive is better than the other and which negative is worse than the other," he adds. "Are you and your parents agreeing on which school you want to go to?" I ask. He doesn't answer, other than to laugh again, and then take a deep inhale. Finally he says, "And that's probably the main thing, that's probably the main thing." "Then I'm guessing you're leaning Florida State?" He just smiles. I know that Florida State's Kelly was at Minkah's house until 11:58 p.m. the previous Sunday. The dead period — in which coaches aren't allowed to visit — started at midnight. Jimbo Fisher and Nick Saban are scheduled to visit Minkah at home in January. "It's just something you have to go with your gut, pray about it, work wherever you're at, stay focused." He just wants to be 110-percent sure, even though, he also knows, that's impossible. "The next goal is just going to be one of the best defensive backs in the NFL and to use my talents to help people out." He goes on to say he'd be happy at either school, because, at the end of the day, he'd be playing Division I football. I can tell he's growing weary of my questions, though he assures me otherwise. But his answers are taking on the tailored tone professional athletes are known to give. Plus, I know he needs to get to class in the next few minutes. I close with a final question. Will all of this have been worth it if he doesn't end up in the NFL? "The first goal was to go to college for free, so I can get an education and use the education to provide for my family," he says. If he does make it to the Promised Land, "The next goal is just going to be, to be one of the best defensive backs in the NFL and to use my talents to help people out." In true Minkah fashion, he's looking forward. * * * As I watched Prep play in New Jersey during the 2014 season, I never saw a moment's struggle. They won by 38, 57, 49, 55, 69. Brandon threw short lasers, long, arcing bombs, and when he needed to, spun out of tackles and raced downfield. Minkah made 27 tackles and two interceptions. He also rushed for 503 yards and crossed the goal line 19 times. The lone blemish on their schedule came when they visited IMG Academy in Florida, where they lost 36-20. It was all of this perfection that made the state semifinal game even more nerve wracking. (Five minutes before kickoff, Heather nearly jinxed them, telling me, "I kind of hope they just lose, so I can start sleeping again.") They'd already played that night's opponent, Bergen Catholic, once this year, beating them in the Sept. 11 game that Notre Dame's LaFleur watched on TV. But somehow, at halftime of the state semifinal, Prep was trailing 14-10. The wind was whipping viciously that night, making it feel even colder than the 28 degrees showing on the thermometer. Yet when Prep went into the heated tent at halftime, I stayed outside. It was already tight enough in there with 75 or so players. As soon as the boys headed back to the sideline for the second half, though, I ducked into the tent, hoping to get the feeling back in my toes. By the time I did, the second half was already underway. As I walked back out, the boys along the sideline blocked my view of the field. A collective gasp from the stands told me to look up. There, I saw the ball sailing through the air, a perfect spiral seeming to hang forever. Suddenly Minkah was sprinting down the field, visible in the last 10 yards of the sideline. I stopped right where I was, just steps in front of the tent, a full baseball diamond between me and the football field. I watched the ball land in Minkah's hands as he crossed the 5-yard line. He caught it midstride, avoiding a diving defender and continuing straight to the end zone. He didn't miss a step as he shook a photographer's hand at the back of the end zone. "That's Notre Dame to Alabama," the announcer called. The ball had traveled more than 65 yards downfield through the air, even a bit longer when taking into account that the pass was angled toward the sideline. Experts in the local press and from MaxPreps would later argue over whether it was the longest pass in high school football history. There was Brandon, showcasing the incredible arm strength that first got everyone's attention years earlier. Only now, he was showcasing incredible strength paired with confidence and control. There was Minkah, making the game look easy and adding a touch of flair at the end. That pass, one of the final times Brandon and Minkah would connect on the high school field, was spectacular. In that moment, no one was thinking about recruiting, about the official visit that Minkah would take to Alabama the next week, missing three days of practice in the week leading up to the state championship game; that Jimbo Fisher would resolve his parents' reservations about Florida State and they would give him their blessing to choose either school. No one was thinking about teammates Corey Caddle and Chris "Goose" Geisler both going to Fordham or Dave Tolentino to Navy; about Jordan Fox taking the SATs five times in hopes of playing at Stanford; about Cheyenne Robertson and Dennis James still trying to figure out if they'd play college football. No one was thinking about Brandon finishing his high school career — a truncated two years on varsity — with 6,077 yards and 70 touchdowns, or that the Penn State scholarship offer was still hanging in a frame above his bed, even though he'd be playing at Notre Dame next year. Already, Hansen is introducing his underclassmen to recruiters. K.J. Grey, Kolton Huber, and Miles Strickland will be the biggest names out of Prep next year. A freshman received an offer from Rutgers last week. Hansen will remain entrenched in the process, long after the Class of 2015's 24 seniors move on. But in that moment, recruiting meant nothing. They were high school kids, chasing a high school dream. They were writing the final pages of the first chapter of their high school football careers. Two weeks later, on the eve of state championship game day, Minkah would tell me he was ready to just "play, win, and move on to the next chapter." That's exactly what they did, ending their high school careers with their greatest ride of all. The Marauders defeated nemesis Paramus Catholic 34-18 through pouring rain at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. Maybe one of them will be back here someday, wearing a different jersey, surrounded by a different group of guys, making millions. Maybe even both of them. First, though, they'll write another chapter in South Bend, Indiana, and in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Or, perhaps, just maybe, it'll be written in Tallahassee, Florida. After all, there's still nearly a week left to decide.Bombardier is again saying it will step up production on Toronto’s new streetcars after renewed criticism over its failed promises to deliver them. But efforts to “significantly accelerate” manufacturing mean the company expects to deliver only 16 new streetcars this year, the Montreal-based manufacturer said in a statement Monday. That’s well below what Bombardier promised earlier this year, leaving city officials including Mayor John Tory “completely dismayed.”
There are currently 17 new, low-floor streetcars in operation. There were supposed to be 73 streetcars on the tracks by the end of last year. ( Marcus Oleniuk / Toronto Star file photo )
“I think their performance has been woeful on this contract to date,” TTC CEO Andy Byford told reporters at city hall. “It’s about time Bombardier owned this problem.” There are only 17 new, low-floor accessible streetcars in operation so far, three of them delivered since January. Bombardier is therefore promising only 13 additional vehicles by year’s end — which averages out to fewer than two per month. The previous schedule promised at least four new vehicles each month starting in April, for a total of 54 by the end of this year.
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And it is far fewer than the number on the original schedule, which would have had 73 streetcars on the tracks by the end of last year. The new schedule — not the first to promise ramped-up production — comes after Byford said last week he’s still frustrated about blown deadlines. Bombardier recently appointed a new president for transportation in the Americas, Benoit Brossoit, who “has given his go-ahead to a plan for added capacity to accelerate the pace of delivery of the TTC (light rail vehicle) project.” The company says it will use a second manufacturing plant in La Pocatière, Que., along with an additional assembly line in an unspecified location to help with production that is currently being completed in Thunder Bay. Previously, problems with the sizing of parts for the streetcars’ frames shipped from Bombardier’s Mexican plant were holding up assembly.
A spokesperson said Monday “dimensional issues with some parts and sub-assemblies” remain an issue and that the La Pocatière site already has a track record of producing properly fitting components on time for the Toronto cars. Asked whether they’re doing enough to prevent further delays, spokesperson Marc-Andre Lefebvre said: “What Bombardier is implementing today is bringing online the full force of our integrated manufacturing model.”
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The company says it remains committed to its promise of delivering all 204 streetcars ordered by the end of 2019. “Bombardier Transportation is taking decisive action to ensure deliveries of streetcars to the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) and its riders,” said a statement from the company. “Bombardier acknowledges the disappointment of the TTC with regards to delivery of this project so far, but is still committed as ever to support its customer in the full delivery of this order.” The city is pursuing a legal claim for $51 million — or 5 per cent of the total $1.25 billion order — after Bombardier missed the first contracted deadline. On Monday, Tory said he is “completely dismayed” by the update. “It is no way to do business,” he said. “It is causing great harm to the city... It’s frustrating. What more can we do? We are the customer here who signed the contract; we’re paying on time, we’re doing everything we’re supposed to, and I really think the questions have to be asked of Bombardier.” Byford told a news conference that he pushed Bombardier officials to come up with a solution during an “uncomfortable” meeting last week and asked for a public explanation. TTC chair Councillor Josh Colle, flanking Byford on Monday, said the company has taken “encouraging” steps to increase production to meet the end-date of the contract. But he said Bombardier should do whatever it takes to meet the deadlines. “At this point, I think Bombardier owes the City of Toronto an apology,” he said. “The riders and the customers have been very loyal and patient. The city, who has invested a great deal with them, has done that all in good faith and continues to be disappointed.” Responding to Colle’s comments, Lefebvre said: “As we’ve said many times, Bombardier regrets that its performance on this project has been disappointing to the TTC and its riders and we apologize for it.” The delays have forced the TTC to continue refurbishing aging streetcars to keep operating at the current capacity — costs included in the legal claim against Bombardier. Byford said it’s not clear what the revised schedule means for those costs, but that the city is consulting with lawyers on its options. The current contract limits the city’s legal claims for damages to $51 million. - A STRING OF BROKEN PROMISES April 2009: Bombardier wins bid to build 204 streetcars. August 2014: First streetcars to arrive are put in service on the 510 Spadina route. Full delivery is promised by the end of 2019 December 2014: Only three streetcars are in operation after a prolonged strike and manufacturing flaws, while the contract promised 43 delivered by that time. February 2015: A revised schedule promises 30 streetcars in Toronto by the end of the year, enough to convert the 510 Spadina, 509 Harbourfront and 511 Bathurst routes. June 2015: TTC CEO Andy Byford says delivery issues are on track towards resolution, with just six streetcars in operation when 50 should have been delivered. July 2015: TTC officials say they will make legal claims against failed delivery as per the contract, while Bombardier recommits to all streetcars being sent by 2019. October 2015: Ten streetcars are in service, at a point when 20 were expected. A revised schedule promises only 16 by the end of the year. Bombardier promises to produce one car every five days in 2016. March 2016: Bombardier promises four streetcars will be delivered every month starting in April under a new revised schedule, and 54 by the end of the year. April 2016: An amended schedule promises ramped-up production, but reduces the 2016 promise to just 16 streetcars delivered by year’s end. With files from David Rider Moving targets 73: Streetcars originally slated to be in operation by the end of 2015 17: New streetcars actually in operation 54: New streetcars supposed to be running by the end of 2016, according to Bombardier’s March update 30: Total streetcars now supposed to be delivered by the end of 2016 204: New streetcars supposed to be delivered by the end of 2019
Read more about:Lough Neagh ( LOKH NAY) is a large freshwater lake in Northern Ireland. It is the largest lake by area in the British Isles, with a surface area of 151 square miles (392 square kilometres). It supplies 40% of Northern Ireland's water.[4][5] Its main inflows are the Upper River Bann and River Blackwater, and its main outflow is the Lower River Bann. Its name comes from Irish: Loch nEachach, meaning "Eachaidh's lake" ( Irish: [l̪ˠɔx ˈn̠ʲahax]).[6] The lough is owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury.
Geography [ edit ]
With an area of 151 square miles (392 km2), it is Ireland's largest lake, the 15th largest freshwater lake within the European Union[4][5] and is ranked 31st in the list of largest lakes of Europe. Located 20 miles (32 km) west of Belfast, it is about 20 miles (32 km) long and 9 miles (14 km) wide. It is very shallow around the margins and the average depth in the main body of the lake is about 30 feet (9 m), although at its deepest the lough is about 80 feet (24 m) deep.
Geology [ edit ]
Geologically the Lough Neagh Basin is a depression, built from many tectonic events dating back as far as 400 million years ago. These tectonic events are responsible for a NE-SW bedrock structure which has controlled many subsequent events. During the Paleozolic era, the Lough Neagh Basin was a depositional graben.[7]
Hydrology [ edit ]
Of the 1,760-square-mile (4,550 km2) catchment area, around 9% lies in the Republic of Ireland and 91% in Northern Ireland;[8] altogether 43% of the land area of Northern Ireland is drained into the lough,[9] which itself flows out northwards to the sea via the River Bann. As one of its sources is the Upper Bann, the Lough can itself be considered as part of the Bann. Lough Neagh is fed by many tributaries including the rivers Main (34 mi, 55 km), Six Mile Water (21 mi, 34 km), Upper Bann (40 mi, 64 km), Blackwater (57 mi, 92 km), Ballinderry (29 mi, 47 km) and Moyola (31 mi, 50 km)[10]
Islands and peninsulas [ edit ]
Towns and villages [ edit ]
Towns and villages near the Lough include Craigavon, Antrim, Crumlin, Randalstown, Toomebridge, Ballyronan, Ballinderry, Moortown, Ardboe, Maghery, Lurgan and Magherafelt.
Counties of Northern Ireland, relative to Lough Neagh
Districts of Northern Ireland, relative to Lough Neagh
Counties [ edit ]
Five of the six counties of Northern Ireland have shores on the Lough (only Fermanagh does not), and its area is split among them. The counties are listed clockwise:
Antrim (eastern side and northern shore of the lake) Down (small part in the south-east) Armagh (south) Tyrone (west) Londonderry (northern part of west shore)
Local government districts [ edit ]
The area of the lake is split between four local government districts of Northern Ireland, which are listed clockwise:[11]
Uses [ edit ]
Although the Lough is used for a variety of recreational and commercial activities, it is exposed and tends to get extremely rough very quickly in windy conditions.[citation needed]
Lough Neagh and settlements surrounding it
Water supply [ edit ]
The lough is used by Northern Ireland Water as a source of fresh water. The lough supplies 40% of the region's drinking water. There have long been plans to increase the amount of water drawn from the lough, through a new water treatment works at Hog Park Point, but these are yet to materialise.
The lough's ownership by the Earl of Shaftesbury has implications for planned changes to state-run domestic water services in Northern Ireland,[12] as the lough is also used as a sewage outfall, and this arrangement is only permissible through British Crown immunity.[citation needed] In 2012, it was reported that the Earl is considering transferring ownership of the Lough to the Northern Ireland Assembly.[13]
Navigation [ edit ]
Traditional working boats on Lough Neagh include wide-beamed 4.9-to-6.4-metre (16 to 21 ft) clinker-built, sprit-rigged working boats and smaller flat-bottomed "cots" and "flats". Barges, here called "lighters", were used until the 1940s to transport coal over the lough and adjacent canals. Until the 17th century, log boats (coití) were the main means of transport. Few traditional boats are left now, but a community-based group on the southern shore of the lough is rebuilding a series of working boats.[14]
In the 19th century, three canals were constructed, using the lough to link various ports and cities: the Lagan Navigation provided a link from the city of Belfast, the Newry Canal linked to the port of Newry, and the Ulster Canal led to the Lough Erne navigations, providing a navigable inland route via the River Shannon to Limerick, Dublin and Waterford. The Lower Bann was also navigable to Coleraine and the Antrim coast, and the short Coalisland Canal provided a route for coal transportation. Of these waterways, only the Lower Bann remains open today, although a restoration plan for the Ulster Canal is currently in progress.
Lough Neagh Rescue provides a search and rescue service 24 hours a day and has 3 stations, situated around the lough. These are at Antrim Ardboe and Kinnego Marinas, Kinnego being its headquarters and founding station. It is a voluntary service funded by the district councils bordering the Lough. Its members are highly trained and are a declared facility for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency which co-ordinates rescues on Lough Neagh.
Bird watching [ edit ]
Lough Neagh attracts bird watchers from many nations due to the number and variety of birds which winter and summer in the boglands and shores around the lough.
Flora [ edit ]
The flora of the north-east of Northern Ireland includes the algae: Chara aspera, Chara globularis var. globularis, Chara globularis var. virgate, Chara vulgaris var. vulgaris, Chara vulgaris var. papillata, Tolypella nidifica var. glomerata.[15] Records of Angiospermae include: Ranunculus flammula var. pseudoreptans, Ranunculus auricomus, Ranunculatus sceleratus, Ranunculatus circinatus, Ranunculatus peltatus, Thalictrum flavum,Thalictrum minus subsp. minus, Nymphaea alba, Ceratophyllum demersum, Subularia aquatic, Erophila verna sub. verna, Cardamine pratensis, Cardamine impatiens, Cardamine flexuosa, Rorippa palustris, Rorippa amphibia, Reseda luteola, Viola odorata, Viola reichenbachiana, Viola tricolor ssp. Violoa tricolor ssp. curtissi, Hypericum androsaemum, Hypericum maculatum, Elatine hydropiper, Silene vulgaris, Silene dioica, Saponaria officinalis, Cerastium arvense, Cerastium semidecandrum, Cerastium diffusum, Sagina nodosa, Spergularia rubra, Spergulaia rupicola, Chenopodium bonus-henricus, Chenopodium polyspermum. [15]
Fishing [ edit ]
Eel fishing has been a major industry in Lough Neagh for centuries. These European eels make their way from the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, some 4,000 miles (6,000 km) along the Gulf Stream to the mouth of the River Bann, and then make their way into the lough. They remain there for some 10 to 15 years, maturing, before returning to the Sargasso to spawn. Today Lough Neagh eel fisheries export their eels to restaurants all over the world, and the Lough Neagh Eel has been granted Protected Geographical Status under European Union law.[16]
Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney produced a collection of poems A Lough Neagh Sequence celebrating the eel-fishermen's traditional techniques and the natural history of their catch.[17]
Other fish species in the lake include dollaghan —a variety of brown trout native to the lake, salmon, trout, perch and pollan; bream, gudgeon, pike and rudd are also found, but are less common.[18]
Human History [ edit ]
Name [ edit ]
The lough's English name derives from the Irish from Irish: Loch nEachach, meaning "Eachaidh's lake".[19] In the aftermath of the Plantation of Ulster, the names Lough Sydney and Lough Chichester were variously applied, in honour of the Lord Deputies of the same name, however, they did not supplant "the more ancient though less refined appellation".[20]
Mythology and folklore [ edit ]
In the Irish mythical tale Cath Maige Tuired ("the Battle of Moytura"), Lough Neagh is called one of the 12 chief loughs of Ireland.[21] The origin of the lake and its name is explained in an Irish tale that was written down in the Middle Ages, but is likely pre-Christian.[22][23] According to the tale, the lake is named after Echaid (modern spelling: Eochaidh or Eachaidh), who was the son of Mairid (Mairidh), a king of Munster. Echaid falls in love with his stepmother, a young woman named Ébliu (Ébhlinne). They try to elope, accompanied by many of their retainers, but someone kills their horses. In some versions, the horses are killed by Midir (Midhir), which may be another name for Ébliu's husband Mairid. Óengus (Aonghus) then appears and gives them an enormous horse that can carry all their belongings. Óengus warns that they must not let the horse rest or it will be their doom. However, after reaching Ulster the horse stops and urinates, and a spring rises from the spot. Echaid decides to build a house there and covers the spring with a capstone to stop it overflowing. One night, the capstone is not replaced and the spring overflows, drowning Echaid and most of his family, and creating Loch n-Echach (Loch nEachach: the lake of Eochaidh or Eachaidh).[22][23]
The character Eochaidh refers to The Daghdha, a god of the ancient Irish who was also known as Eochaidh Ollathair (meaning "horseman, father of all").[23] Ébhlinne, Midhir and Aonghus were also names of deities. Dáithí Ó hÓgáin writes that the idea of a supernatural being creating the landscape with its own body is an ancient one common to many pre-Christian cultures.[23] A Gaelic sept called the Uí Eachach (meaning "descendents of Eochaidh") dwelt in the area and it is likely that their name comes from the cult of the god Eochaidh.[22]
Another tale tells how the lake was formed when Ireland's legendary giant Fionn mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) scooped up a chunk of earth and tossed it at a Scottish rival. It fell into the Irish Sea, forming the Isle of Man, while the crater left behind filled with water to form Lough Neagh.[24]
Gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]According to Alberts, Elkind, and Ginsberg the personal fable "is the corollary to the imaginary audience. Thinking of himself or herself as the center of attention, the adolescent comes to believe that it is because he or she is special and unique".[1] It is found during the formal operational stage in Piagetian theory, along with the imaginary audience. Feelings of invulnerability are also common. The term "personal fable" was first coined by the psychologist David Elkind in his 1967 work Egocentrism in Adolescence.
Feelings of uniqueness may stem from fascination with one's own thoughts to the point where an adolescent believes that his thoughts or experiences are completely novel and unique when compared to the thoughts or experiences of others. This belief stems from the adolescent's inability to differentiate between the concern(s) of his thoughts from the thoughts of others, while simultaneously over-differentiating his feelings.[2] Thus, an adolescent is likely to think that everyone else (the imaginary audience) is just as concerned with him as he himself is; while at the same time, this adolescent might believe that he is the only person who can possibly experience whatever feelings he might be experiencing at that particular time and that these experiences are unique to him.[2] According to David Elkind (1967), an adolescent's intense focus on himself or herself as the center of attention is what ultimately gives rise to the belief that one is completely unique, and in turn, this may give rise to feelings of invulnerability. Ultimately, the two marked characteristics of personal fable are feelings of uniqueness and invulnerability. Or as David Elkind states, "this complex of beliefs in the uniqueness of (the adolescent's) feelings and of his immortality might be called a 'personal fable', a story which he tells himself and which is not true."
Early literature on adolescent egocentrism and cognitive development [ edit ]
Elkind's work with the personal fable stemmed from Piaget's theory of cognitive development, which describes egocentrism as a lack of differentiation in a given area of subject-object interaction.[3] According to Elkind, in conjunction with Piaget's theory, adolescent egocentrism is to be understood in the context of ontogeny (referring to the development of an organism across its lifespan). These ontogenetic changes in egocentrism are thought to drive the development of logical and formal operational thinking. Elkind described an operation as a "mental tool whose products, series, class hierarchies, conservations, etc., are not directly derived from experience." However, a child in the concrete operational stage is not able to differentiate between these mental constructs and reality (their experiences).[2] For instance, a child in the concrete operational stage may understand that a dog is an animal, but not all animals are dogs; however, the child is not able to grasp a hypothetical concept such as "suppose that dogs were humans". The child is likely to respond "but dogs aren't humans, they are animals."
According to Elkind, the onset of adolescent egocentrism is brought on by the emergence of the formal operational stage, which allows the adolescent to mentally construct hypotheses that are contrary to reality.[4] It is at the onset of adolescence that the individual is "freed" from the confines of concrete thought, and begins to be able to grasp abstract or hypothetical concepts (thus the formal operational way of thinking arises). Here, the individual is now able to imagine the hypothetical situation involving dogs as humans and not animals. Thus, the individual is also able to imagine, and even come to believe, hypothetical situations in which everyone is as concerned with him or herself, and in which he or she is unique and invulnerable when compared to others. Such contrary-to-fact propositions are what characterize the personal fable.[4]
Egocentrism and the formal operational stage of cognition [ edit ]
Elkind[5] introduced the idea of an adolescent egocentrism, which according to him emerges in the midst of the transition to Piaget's formal operational stage of cognition(the final stage in which the individual is capable of abstract thinking: hypothetical and deductive reasoning). Although the construct itself remains widely used in research today, there has been no supporting evidence to suggest that adolescent egocentrism follows any age related pattern (as would be suggested by the assumption that it disappears when adolescents enter the formal operational stage, which in fact some individuals never reach).
In early, middle, and late adolescence [ edit ]
The onset of adolescent egocentrism tends to occur at about age 11–13 which is considered early adolescence. Since an adolescent is thought to develop the formal operational stage of thinking during this time, the personal fable phenomenon is thought to develop as well.[2] There are studies that support this hypothesis, showing that it is during early adolescence that the personal fable is most prominent (this includes both the uniqueness and invulnerability aspects of personal fable).[6] It has also been shown that both feelings of uniqueness and invulnerability increase significantly from age 11 to age 13.[7]
Middle adolescence is generally considered to be around the age range of 14–16. Past research has demonstrated that personal fable peaks at about age 13 during early adolescence.[8] It has also been speculated that the personal fable phenomenon ought to decline as one moves into middle and then late adolescence.[2]
Late adolescence is considered to range from the age of 17 to about 23. Although Elkind (1967) speculated that the personal fable tends to decrease in late adolescence, there had been evidence of a possible re-emergence of the personal fable (or at least adolescent egocentrism) during late adolescence.[9] It is hypothesized that this re-occurrence of adolescent egocentrism may act as a coping mechanism during the transition to new educational and social contexts (moving away to college, for example). Perhaps further research into the prevalence of the personal fable in late adolescence is required. An additional study was done to analyze whether or not personal fable (and imaginary audience) decreased, increased, or remained stable across an age range from sixth grade to college. The results showed that there was no significant difference between age groups with regards to the personal fable phenomenon, although it did seem to decline slightly. Also, the results showed that the imaginary audience phenomenon seems to decrease as one ages, more so than personal fable.[6] Furthermore, there was a study conducted to analyze the gender differences with regards to the chronicity (the pattern of the behavior across time) of the personal fable phenomenon across early, middle, and late adolescence. The results showed that the personal fable phenomenon, including invulnerability and uniqueness, tends to decrease as an individual moves into middle and late adolescence more so for females than for males.[8]
Gender differences [ edit ]
There has been conflicting evidence of a slight difference between genders in the uniqueness aspect of personal fable. Specifically, females seem to have a higher sense of uniqueness than male adolescents.[10] However, there has also been conflicting evidence suggesting that adolescent boys tend to feel unique more often than adolescent girls.[11] The study which found this conflicting evidence also found that male adolescents also felt more omnipotent (where the adolescent may feel that he is in complete control, all-powerful, and knows everything) when compared to girls.[11] There is presently no knowledge of replication of this finding. Another study found that there was no significant difference between male and female adolescents with regards to the personal fable in general.[6] In regards to the invulnerability aspect of the personal fable, it appears that boys tend to have higher instances of feelings pertaining to invulnerability and risk-taking than girls do.[7] With feelings of invulnerability, it can be said that an adolescent is more likely to participate in risk behavior. A study was done to analyze the role gender plays in sexual risk-taking. The results indicated that females had a higher instance of sexual risk taking (which involved sexual intercourse at a younger age and not using contraception.[12] This finding is somewhat incongruent with the finding that boys tend to have higher feelings of invulnerability (and thus risk-taking behavior) than girls.
Risk taking in adolescence [ edit ]
Adolescence was once believed to be a time of stress and turmoil. Although this is sometimes the case, research has shown that most adolescents rate their experiences as enjoyable and that the storm and stress of adolescence actually occurs at a fairly low rate and discontinuously.[13] Nonetheless, adolescence is still a time of significant change and development on all levels (psychological, social and biological). Along with all these changes adolescents are faced with situations in which they must make important choices and decisions. Namely, decisions made regarding risky behaviours become more prevalent at this time. Adolescents are faced with decisions on whether to make an effort to have safe sex and how to react to peer pressure regarding substance abuse for example. So how does the personal fable, a form of egocentrism usually considered to be characteristic of adolescence, relate to adolescents' risk-taking behaviours?
Research[14] suggests that when faced with a decision, adolescents perceive risks but they do not incorporate these into their decision making process. It has been suggested that egocentrism plays a significant role in this lack of risk evaluation. The widespread effect of the correlation between the personal fable and risk-taking behaviours is evident when we consider it has been identified in other cultures, such as the Japanese culture.[15] A study done among Japanese college students found a direct path from egocentrism to health-endangering behaviours.[15] Thus, even though universality can in no way be assumed, it is noteworthy that the correlation has been identified in other parts of the world.
Support for the hypothesis that egocentrism, and the personality fable more specifically, predict risk-taking behaviours is considerable in North America. In fact, the personal fable is commonly associated with risk-taking in research[7] It has been established that speciality and invulnerability are significant predictors of risk. Research[7] has found that egocentrism increased significantly with age and that the personal fable was positively correlated with risk-taking. Male students revealed significantly higher rates of invulnerability. The correlation between the personal fable and risk taking is considered to be of utmost importance. A valid and reliable measure of the personal fable would be an invaluable aid to assessing adolescent risk-taking potential and preventive intervention.[7]
Potential positive factors of the personal fable [ edit ]
Research has come to distinguish three main subtypes of the personal fable.[16] Omnipotence relates to the adolescent believing he has great authority or power (i.e. he is capable of what most others are not). Invulnerability is just that: the adolescent believes he cannot be harmed or affected in the ways others can. And finally, uniqueness is the adolescent's belief that he and his experiences are novel and unique to him (i.e. no one else could possibly relate). Distinguishing between the personal fable's three subtypes has merit. Research[17] has shown that omnipotence does not seem to be related to delinquent behaviour such as substance use, |
on the loudspeaker. I try to speak to them civilly, and it’s very difficult to do, because they’re looking for a confrontation.”
On the day of the protest, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu issued a certificate of recognition to Flip Benham and Operation Save America.
A spokesman for the mayor’s office told the Uptown Messenger that “It is routine for the City to provide standard proclamations to visiting non-profits, faith-based organizations and conventions that request them.”
In a posting on Facebook about the mayor’s proclamation, David Benham commented: “Are you serious? This is real?CLOSE Review of crime statistics for Paterson during the first half of 2017. Joe Malinconico
Paterson police patch (Photo: Tariq Zehawi/NorthJersey.com)
A Prospect Park man was arrested and accused of lying to police about a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Paterson, authorities announced on Wednesday.
Marcel Priest, 22, was charged with unlawful possession of a weapon, providing a false report to law enforcement, and certain persons not to possess a weapon, according to the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office.
Priest came to St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center on Tuesday night and told officers he had been shot in the hand, according to the prosecutor’s office. After an investigation police determined the wound was self-inflicted, the prosecutor’s office stated.
RELATED:Paterson man arrested in connection with July 21 shooting
PATERSON:Police kick off public safety campaign
Priest faces a maximum of 21.5 years in prison based on his charges, according to the prosecutor’s office.
The Prospect Park resident made his first court appearance on Wednesday afternoon. The state filed a motion for pretrial detention that will be heard Sept. 5 before Judge Donna D. Gallucio, the prosecutor’s office stated.
Email: jongsma@northjersey.com
Read or Share this story: https://njersy.co/2wUthoRWashington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III (10) is chased out of the pocket by Seattle Seahawks outside linebacker Malcolm Smith (53) during first quarter action in a play that aggravated his knee injury.
Jan. 7, 2013 Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III (10) is chased out of the pocket by Seattle Seahawks outside linebacker Malcolm Smith (53) during first quarter action in a play that aggravated his knee injury. Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post
The Redskins fell, 24-14, at FedEx Field in Landover, mounting little offense after the first quarter as star rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III aggravated his right knee injury and was unable to finish the game.
The Redskins fell, 24-14, at FedEx Field in Landover, mounting little offense after the first quarter as star rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III aggravated his right knee injury and was unable to finish the game.
The Redskins fell, 24-14, at FedEx Field in Landover, mounting little offense after the first quarter as star rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III aggravated his right knee injury and was unable to finish the game.
Can an entire city have knee surgery?
The civic joint pain was tangible Wednesday as Washington fixated on the Florida operating room where quarterback Robert Griffin III was having his right knee rebuilt. From firehouses to park benches, on the streets and in their tweets, the unexpectedly swift and extensive operation had fans worrying, praying... and talking, talking, talking.
“All day long, we’ve been talking about the knee,” said Erskine Gregory, 66, a retired union laborer hanging out with a group of guys near the Dupont Circle chessboards. He stepped away to get a quick break from a noisy boom box and the even noisier who-to-blame debate. (“They should have let the white boy play the fourth quarter,” shouted Nenja Garrett, 38, a cook from Southeast Washington. “Cousins is a good quarterback. That knee is on their hands.”)
The chatter was all ligaments and tendons as fans, following the medical news suture by suture, unleashed their inner orthopedists.
“Do we know if it was the ACL or the LCL?” asked David Smith, 43, a clerk at JR Cigars in downtown Washington, where the air was full of tobacco smoke and surgical gossip.
The Post’s LaVar Arrington wonders if Robert Griffin III will ever be the same quarterback after suffering another knee injury in the Redskins’ loss to the Seahawks and offers his injured pinky as a small example of this type of damage that a body can absorb during a career in football. (The Washington Post)
“As of this morning they were speculating that it was both,” replied his co-worker C.W. Hartmann, 52, his teeth clinched around a smoldering Neerup pipe. “We won’t know more for a couple of hours.”
“He’s a young man. He’ll recuperate,” Smith assured.
The Knee loomed over Washington high and low, black and white, official and unofficial.
At the White House, press secretary and Redskins fan Jay Carney described the constantly repeated image of Griffin’s leg buckling during Sunday’s wild-card playoff game against the Seattle Seahawks as “painful to watch.”
A few blocks away, burrito vendor John Rider said every third customer was bringing up Griffin’s surgery. “The overriding sentiment seems to be that they should have taken him out before the second half,” he said from the steam cloud filling his cart near McPherson Square.
Takoma Park firefighter Jesse Sandford said the surgery was the talk of the truck Wednesday morning as the squad returned from a call. He and his fellow EMTs see plenty of sports knee injuries, mostly soccer in that part of Montgomery County, but no one could guess how Griffin would fare.
“We take them in [to the hospitals] but never know how they turn out,” Sanford said. “I think he’s a strong-headed dude; he was going to play whether they wanted him to or not.”
View Graphic Surgeon James Andrews said he repaired the torn lateral collateral ligament in Robert Griffin III’s right knee and redid the reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament that Griffin tore in college. Ligaments let the knee bend while limiting its ability to rotate and flex sideways.
Sports talk radio went All Knee, All The Time, but still couldn’t meet the demand.
“We could take calls on this every second of the day, 24 hours — every line is constantly full,” said Chris Kinard, program director for 106.7 The Fan. The station has stayed with the knee story “pretty much 95 percent of the time” since Griffin’s potentially devastating injury Sunday. “One show ends and the next comes on, and immediately it has full phone lines,” he said. “We don’t even have to tell them what we’re talking about.”
Griffin’s knee figured into every part of Jason Carter’s day. The Seat Pleasant electrician woke his wife with news of the surgery Wednesday soon after dawn.
“Leave me alone,” she said, rolling over.
It was the first topic of conversation when he reached the restaurant he is helping to renovate on 14th Street NW. His supervisor called him twice to ask whether he’d heard any updates from the Florida hospital. Carter checked his cell phone for ESPN updates throughout the day.
“I’m genuinely concerned, not only from a football standpoint but a humanitarian standpoint,” Carter said. “I have mood swings: One minute I think he should have played, the next minute I’m like, ‘How could you let him play?’ ”
At Ben’s Chili Bowl on U Street NW, Tal Roberts and Rudolph Kelly sat down for a hot dog lunch. The former friends, both 81, hadn’t seen each other in 35 years, but the talk was still The Knee.
“[Redskins head coach Mike] Shanahan threw him under the bus,” declared Roberts, a retired stockbroker.
Kelly nodded.
“If RGIII had been Shanahan’s son,” Roberts said, “and he was hurt in the first quarter, Shanahan would have taken him out.”
Kelly kept nodding.
As the men left Ben’s, they passed Pat Mitchell, 65, of Columbia Heights, who was sitting in her friend’s car, a Redskins flag fluttering on the roof.
On Tuesday night, Mitchell recalled, as she lay in bed and watched the news about Griffin’s surgery, she closed her eyes and prayed.
“Oh Lord,” she said, “please put your hands on RGIII and the doctors so that his surgery will go well and his healing will go fast.”
At Regency Furniture in Brandywine, sales associates were clustered near the front door, between a bunching curio cabinet and a sofa-love seat combo. The talk at the Prince George’s County store was not exclusively about Griffin’s surgery; they also discussed the poor condition of the field Sunday, the quality of the team doctor and the culpability of the coaching staff.
“We should have pulled RGIII when we were up 14-0,” James Morrow maintained.
Antoine Craft disagreed. “I don’t think we should have pulled him,” he said.
A Dallas Cowboys fan from the store’s sales staff rushed past, providing a momentary diversion.
“Hey, Dallas,” Craft called. “We’re the NFC East champs. And RGIII is coming back.”
“I heard he’s not coming back next year,” Morrow fretted.
“I think it’s a six- to eight-month recovery,” Craft said.
Manager Fela Fuller said Griffin’s injured leg has been a constant topic in recent weeks.
“It’s either the debt ceiling or RG-Knee,” said Fuller. “I’m more worried about the debt ceiling.”
In that, he may have been alone.
David Nakamura contributed to this report.Team MYi Profile Joined June 2012 14 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-08 03:27:27 #1
My Intent is proud to announce the newest addition to the team, Adrian " KawaiiRice " Kwong. Adrian has been searching for the right team for a while now, and as part of that search has decided to join My Intent. We truly believe that they only way to understand the chemistry of a team is to experience it, and we are looking forward to seeing how he fits into the mix.
Follow KawaiiRice and My Intent on Twitter :
KawaiiRice My Intent
www.My-Intent.net
kill619 Profile Joined December 2011 United States 211 Posts #2 Gratz, now if only he would stop messing around with zerg all my dreams would come true
DenTenker Profile Blog Joined March 2013 United States 606 Posts #3 Congratulations to KawaiiRice and My Intent! Glad he found a team. If your all in didn't work, you didn't pull the workers.
w.s Profile Joined October 2010 Sweden 641 Posts #4 Wrong forum section, congratulations though, kawaiirice!
CecilSunkure Profile Blog Joined May 2010 United States 2829 Posts #5 What a baller, hope it all works well for you Adrian!
CrazyF1r3f0x Profile Blog Joined August 2010 United States 2106 Posts #6 Go Nydus King! "Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery."
KazeHydra Profile Blog Joined August 2010 Japan 2787 Posts #7 Grats Kawaii! o/ "Because I know this promise that won’t disappear will turn even a cause of tears into strength. You taught me that if I can believe, there is nothing that cannot come true." - Nana Mizuki (Yakusoku) 17:36 ils kaze got me into nana 17:36 ils by his blog
Team MYi Profile Joined June 2012 14 Posts #8 On April 08 2013 08:44 MyXoMoPBL wrote:
Wrong forum section, congratulations though, kawaiirice!
Doh! Just requested a move from the mods. Thanks for pointing it out! Doh! Just requested a move from the mods. Thanks for pointing it out!
Falling Profile Blog Joined June 2009 Canada 10082 Posts #9 moved! Moderator "Words are just words until action actually starts. And actions speak louder than words... but at the same time words speak louder than actions because sometimes it's the right thing to do." Overpass John
Adebisi Profile Blog Joined June 2010 Canada 1620 Posts #10 gogo KawaiiRice!
Torte de Lini Profile Blog Joined September 2010 Germany 30667 Posts #11 Congratulations :D https://twitter.com/#!/TorteDeLini (@TorteDeLini)
Leeoku Profile Joined May 2010 1394 Posts #12 "My intent is to represent my intent"
I see what u did there
shinyA Profile Joined November 2008 United States 468 Posts #13 On April 08 2013 09:00 Leeoku wrote:
"My intent is to represent my intent"
I see what u did there
so punny so punny twitch.tv/ggshinya
a9arnn Profile Blog Joined July 2009 United States 1532 Posts Last Edited: 2013-04-08 00:09:11 #14 Yeah Kawaii! Congrats on the new team :D!
Edit: And Tilea too (KnightLighT was always the sickest name ;P)!!! VOD finder guy for sc2ratings.com/! aka: ogndrahcir, a9azn2 | Go ZerO, Stork, Sea, and KawaiiRice :D | nesc2league.com/forum/index.php | youtube.com/watch?v=oaGtjWL5mZo
rei Profile Blog Joined October 2002 United States 3472 Posts #15 congratulations Krice! GET OUT OF MY BASE CHILL
( bush Profile Joined April 2011 321 Posts #16 nice
is he going to play both terran and zerg? oo
Master of DalK Profile Blog Joined June 2012 Canada 1610 Posts #17 Gratz on the pickup!
He's playing Zerg now too? =[ @MasterDalK | Technical Director at Waveform Entertainment | Streaming Every Esport Under the Sun
Ace1123 Profile Joined September 2011 Philippines 1163 Posts #18 Congrats!!! ForGG, Mvp, MMA, MarineKing, BoxeR,
Gamegene Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United States 8300 Posts #19 kawaiirice x gretorp > kawaiirice x tilea
;_; Throw on your favorite jacket and you're good to roll. Stroll through the trees and let your miseries go.
PiQLiQ Profile Joined January 2011 Sweden 696 Posts #20 Hey! Good luck kawaii ;~~; http://twitter.com/PiQLiQ
1 2 3 4 Next AllVATICAN CITY — In his first concrete step to address the clerical sexual-abuse problem in the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis will establish a commission to advise him on protecting children from pedophile priests and on how to counsel victims, the Vatican said Thursday.
The announcement was a forthright acknowledgment by the Vatican of the enduring problem of abusive priests, and fit with Francis’ pattern of willingness to set a new tone in the governance of the church nine months into his tenure.
Whether the new commission portends a significant change in how the Vatican deals with abusive priests and their protectors remains to be seen, experts on the church said. Yet the timing of the announcement, two days after a United Nations panel criticized the Vatican over its handling of abuse cases, suggested that the pope and his closest advisers wanted to at least be seen as tackling the issue with greater firmness.
Soon after he became pope, Francis directed the Vatican last April to act decisively on abuse cases and punish pedophile priests, in a meeting with subordinates at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church’s enforcement arm. But he had said little about the sexual abuse problem since.Step inside the immaculately designed Third Man Cass Corridor on a weekday morning. Strong, art deco lines frame the bold and packed space. A few shoppers stroll about inside. Everything is black and yellow. This gives it the immediate feel of a college gift shop. Enclosed wood-paneled booths — which look like large, overgrown classic radio consoles mixed with the Dr. Who phone box — are peppered throughout the back of the store. Upfront, it's racks of clothing, displays of turntables, beer mugs, Frisbees, and keychains. Hackey sacks? I don't think they have hackey sacks. There's a large bin of records alphabetized by artists' first names. There's a giant, blown-up photo of a rock band on the wall, from the 1980s or '70s. A clerk asks if you need help, and you importantly declare that no, you are there for an appointment.
In the back office, David Buick quickly scuttles out of view of his boss to throw on a black dress shirt over his black tee, and then adjust a yellow tie. Buick pretty much always looks like he just told a great joke to himself. And you want to make him laugh because he has an infectious chortle. "This isn't even my shirt; mine are at the cleaners," he mumbles to no one in particular. There's a dress code here. And even though that boss is hundreds of miles away at the main office in Nashville — his image flickers briefly on a large, wall-mounted monitor for a video conference meeting — the look on Buick's face changes to a fleeting "oh, fuck." It's that choir boy-late-for-church look. Nobody's in trouble here, though. This isn't James Brown's backing band. Managing to dress sharp in record time, Buick is not about to get fined. He was hired last year to help with Detroit operations and the reissue side of the label. The first two White Stripes 7-inch 45s were released on Buick's label, Italy, in 1998.
And yes, the boss in question is Jack White, co-founder of that innovative, two-person, stripped-down, color-coded, husband-and-wife duo who started here in Detroit in the late 1990s, became impossibly famous, played arenas, sold millions, and then broke up. And today White is a solo artist, a member of the Dead Weather and Raconteurs, a record producer, a family man, and the overseer of an increasingly sprawling empire.
The prodigal son
When Third Man Cass Corridor opened on Black Friday, the general narrative in the media was of label head White "returning home." This narrative was repeated over and over, and reinforced by the opening of the store in the new retail mecca of Canfield Street between Cass and Second in the former location of Willy's. The store is about seven blocks from the Gold Dollar, where the White Stripes played their first show. It was also reinforced by the unexpected signing of beloved local weirdos Timmy's Organism and Wolf Eyes. Third Man's staff talks of a "renewed interest in and commitment to Detroit music." And they plan to reissue the cream of the crop of Detroit's decades-old garage scene.
The coverage of Third Man also gave the impression that White was moving back to Detroit. He remains in Nashville with his family and much of the Third Man operation.
While most reporters discussed the fact that Third Man is opening a record plant, they failed to grasp the true import of this. By the time that record plant is operating this summer, White will have taken control of the means of production for his preferred method of releasing music, and in the process become perhaps the most self-sufficient label head/artist in history. And this is all happening at the same moment when his label has gone from an interesting curio for fans of folksy blues-garage music (and its constituent parts) to one of the most important labels for new and archival music on the planet. Recent releases include transcendent experimental noise from Michigan noise kings Wolf Eyes; a killer double album of weird old Greek music 78s that's eerie and beautiful, compiled by the brilliant Chris King; and the deluxe soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, scored by 87-year-old Ennio Morricone, who won the first non-honorary Oscar of his long career for the thing.
Oh man, there's so much to tell you about the true importance of this radical DIY-on-steroids venture! Maybe we can touch briefly on the label's history, how they obsessively cater to different levels of vinyl nerds and sell thousands of records direct to fans, and discuss a bit how records are made in the first place.
The shop's multimedia venue has already hosted Melvin van Peebles and Negative Approach (though not together); and while we touched on the branded tchotchkes for sale in their store, some of them are not even lame. Like, did you know they have their own brand of Polaroid-compatible film, which outputs images in the Third Man color scheme?
Dressing for success
But first, we have to get back to the uniforms. It's more than just a dress code. You get dressed up to go to work, but you also get dressed up to go onstage. It could be argued that these clothes belie four forces at work: a strong sense of branding, but also an earnest philosophy, some badass showmanship (which might actually be the same as the first item), and the lure of the cult — a close-knit family that you're not quite a part of who all dress the same. In Detroit, Anna Sui designed flowing, 1970s-style dresses for the shop employees. For men and women who work in the office as full-time employees —a number close to three dozen at this point — there are three levels of dress, from the shirt and tie on up to a full suit, with a vest in-between. At the flagship Nashville store, the female staff wears uniforms that are more akin to 1960s stewardesses. "[The uniforms are] a detail that adds to the overall visitor experience," says shop clerk Sarah Stawski, of Metro Times favorites the Pretty Ghouls. "A majority of my jobs have required uniforms, though none of the others were designer dresses."
Roe Peterhans, another Detroit hire who's known White since the mid-1990s, says the uniform supports the idea that simplifying some areas of the operation actually allows more creativity.
"Jack's original flagship upholstery company just used black and yellow," he says. "It reminds me of when the furniture designer Eames wrote that infamous letter to Henry Ford looking for an all-black, no brand, no badging, just a simple black vehicle; of course he was turned down, but it's that kind of idea. When you wear a yellow tie and yellow shoes, it's a little flashy, but it's that idea of just freeing up your mind to focus on other, more creative endeavors."
The family
Ben Blackwell and Ben Swank were contacted within the same week to start the label. Swank, a member of the excellent Soledad Brothers, to this day sometimes operates the Rolling Record Store, a sort of ice cream van for records. "The Dirtbombs were on tour, and we were outside of Arthur Bryant's Barbecue in Kansas City, one of my favorite restaurants in the country," Blackwell says. "[White] calls me on my cellphone, Halloween 2008. He just says, 'Hey, let's do Third Man Records. I bought a building in Nashville; I own the White Stripes back catalog. Let's just put that out. That should be enough to run a record label.' So my then-girlfriend and current wife and I moved to Nashville!"
Blackwell is White's nephew, has been a devoted fan from their first show, and helped Buick and White assemble the first run of Italy records, which White produced and/or played on. But that's not why he was hired.
"What I brought to the table was that I'd run my own label, Cass, out of my bedroom in my mom's house," Blackwell says. "I'd done 40-some releases in five years, almost exclusively vinyl. It was a one-man operation, except for when I was on tour. Then my mom would do the mail order. I brought in the knowledge of how the vinyl process works, the terminology, who the players are." Blackwell oversaw the first reissues of archival material, learning how to negotiate with labels and artists in the process.
Sometimes the fact that it was White's label made all the difference, as with Blackwell's pet project: to reissue the anthemic psychedelic garage band Public Nuisance. "I contact those guys, and they say, 'We get people asking us all the time to do this, but we're going to say yes to you only because White Stripes played a show in California and you guys put us on the list and we were there backstage and everyone was so nice and Jack covered a Public Nuisance song for us. You're by no means the first person to ask us for this, but thank you for how nice you guys have been over the past few years,'" Blackwell says.
Nearly everyone surrounding White at Third Man knew him before he was famous: high school friends, old band mates, Gold Dollar compatriots, family, and a slowly growing circle of people they each bring on board. Really, it's a family-run business, if that's not too cheesy to say. I ask Blackwell if this is some sort of policy, and he says: "You know so many people in your life, and really anyone can design a record cover — but who do you really want to also just hang out with, you know? It's as simple as that."
These aren't just cool, middle-aged folks who've known each other for years and are now working at their successful friends' place. These are people who believed in vinyl when no one else did, 15-plus years ago. They played on garage bands to release small label 7-inch records when audiences and pocketbooks were both super tiny.
Josh Gillis, another White nephew who works with Swank in Nashville, is partly responsible for the Wolf Eyes signing.
Peterhans says the signing shows Gillis' influence. "He knows a lot about that genre," he says. "That generation and that kind of aesthetic sensibility is coming out of the company, and broadening some of the artists that we're working with."
Power plant
Record pressing plants are maxed out beyond capacity, everywhere, thanks to the demand for both new records and specialty reissue product. Events like Record Store Day, which push the majors to repackage dollar-bin classic rock on 180-gram vinyl, have helped increase the bottleneck to the point where pressing delays of four months or more are not uncommon.
Many plants are not taking any new customers, either. As favored customers at their local Nashville plant, United, Third Man benefits from faster turnaround than most customers. But as they're able to get the funding together for the pressing plant, it makes perfect sense for them to make their own records. This is partly because they have such a large direct fan base — many thousands of customers who regularly subscribe to their Fan Club and Vault series.
Another reason to have a pressing plant, of course, is to allow others in on it. Third Man predicts that in the future, when a trained team is in place and they are running the presses on a three-shift, 24-hour-a-day basis, as much as 40 percent of the records pressed will be outside orders. Priority will be given to small acts, and everyone I speak to is careful to emphasize they're not trying to take away any business from local plant Archer Records. In fact, Third Man initially offered to purchase Archer, but was turned down, and later called to seek owner/operator Mike Archer's blessing for bringing in the new machines.
Eric Isaacson, who owns and operates the reissue-oriented record store and label Mississippi Records in Portland, Ore., was brought in to do a presentation on vernacular American sounds at the Nashville store, and he is super jealous. "Every record label is jealous of Jack's intense ability to realize these dreams of his," he says. "He's one of the few guys with money in this world that does bona fide cool shit with it. Most millionaires spend their dough on stupid status symbols like cars and fancy clothes. But Jack knows that it's way cooler to buy things like brand-new record presses."
Until now, running a record press has been a bit like having a car in Cuba; if anything goes wrong, folks are forced to spend countless hours fabricating parts themselves. The number of people who even know how to operate these things, let alone set them up and get them running, is dwindling.
"It doesn't matter if the record presses are brand new or 40 years old," David Mendoza, the chief press operator for Portland's Cascade Press, says. "You're still using the same old process of steam, hydraulics, air, and water to produce a piece of plastic with music on it — pretty much ancient technology in 2016. Don't get me wrong, I believe in vinyl as the incomparable medium for listening to music. But the pressing process is super delicate, and it is difficult to attain a high quality product unless you really know what you're doing."
So these eight machines en route right now are the first new record-making machines produced in decades, designed and constructed by a German consortium called Newbuilt, which already has decades of experience refurbishing old record presses. And these machines will be right here, in Detroit. As it begins to coalesce in the back room at Third Man, the whole setup looks more complex than the giant meth lab set up by the Pollos Hermanos guy in season three of Breaking Bad. Detroiter Randy Cholewa has 32 years of experience as an automotive manufacturing supplier. He's overseeing the build of the plant and will continue to operate it. "It's a lot of stuff in one place: a close-looped, high tech system of steam generator, chiller, and HVAC to operate the presses and control the atmospheric conditions of the plant," he says. "It's really starting to shape up."
It's also because of those loyal collector-type customers that these new record presses, which are manual, are ideal. Many Third Man releases receive limited edition versions — say, where an LP is sorted into a handful of 45s, then housed in a special box, with crazily colored vinyl. There are also special shapes, and records pressed into other records. There are records that play at different speeds on the same record. With White's 2014 Lazaretto, which set a record for vinyl units shipped at the time, every copy pressed contained not just hidden songs, and not only secret grooves, but friggin' holographic images that materialize when the record is spun. With these new machines, there will be even more ability to control everything, because the operator controls each press for every record. That means more picture discs, more craziness. "The colored vinyl, the limited edition, the hard to find, only available in one location, shit like that — we're record collectors, so that's why we make these things," Blackwell says.
The store
The plant will dovetail with bringing people into the store itself, as large windows that are already in place will look out onto the factory floor. Buses no longer line up outside of car manufacturers for schoolkids to witness the miracle of modern automotive assembly. Perhaps they can queue up here, to witness a record being born, and then ask, "What's a record?"
Third Man Cass Corridor isn't the first Third Man store, of course. The one in Nashville has been there since 2009. Mississippi Record's Isaacson flipped over that spot. "I've never seen a store more aesthetically focused. Every piece of trim on the wall and floorboard and employee uniform is there to reflect the aesthetics of the label. It is a total trip. I think Jack loves Orson Welles (hence the name of the label) and really tried to create his own Xanadu, à la Citizen Kane, there. It's a mix between Xanadu and Willy Wonka's chocolate factory."
When asked about the mass amount of tchotchkes and knickknacks for sale, Blackwell says it's because Third Man only sells its own records. That's in part because the Nashville location is a mile away from the classic and beloved local store Grimey's. And they didn't want to compete with a local indie store. More to the point, he says, "if you come in and the only thing we've got for sale is Dead Weather singles, that's not much of an experience. We want to be able to have stuff for people to buy, so merchandising makes sense and there's kind of something for everyone that comes in the shop. You know, dads want a baseball cap, and some people want shot glasses, and that's what people buy."
Isaacson singles out the children's record player they sell as the highest quality portable player on the market. Blackwell cautions us to not forget that all this goes back to the White Stripes era. "The White Stripes made cameras and they made theremins and they made record players with three-inch records, you know," he says. "It's not new to us; it's just a different color scheme, a different banner over it. The White Stripes were doing slip mats [for turntables] in 2003."
All this branded merchandise is a bit much to take in at first. Peterhans acknowledges the fine line they walk in trying to tweak the record store experience by including other "lost" and "lo-fi" technology, and that it puts them at the risk of feeling touristy. But if you have to take your grandmother someplace, it might be just as good as a store that sells $5,000 bicycles or $20 handmade pencils. If you can coax her to recite some poems that she had to recite in third grade and still remembers — and you end up with an acetate recording of grandma from the refurbished, 75-year-old "Record a Voice" machine that was the very same model used to record Neil Young for his excellent, funky 2014 Third Man covers album A Letter Home? Well, so much the better.
There's a photobooth that uses the Polaroid-style branded Third Man film, which was created just for them by the Impossible Project. You can also plop a token into another machine and watch as a wax injection mold of the Third Man van forms in front of your eyes, and nose.
And of course, it is a music-based store, with records, and stuff. I was curious if the shop staff had to pass any music trivia test to work there. "I think what mattered most about my experience with music, and the other ladies as well, was passion, more so than knowing historical facts or reciting catalog numbers," Stawski says. "And yes, now I know the catalog numbers and all the nitty-gritty, but going in, that was not required."
How confused is the average punter wandering into the shop for the first time, and what percentage of people there are super rabid fans?
"Talking to longtime fans on release days is great," Stawski says. "They know more than me. At live events and shows, we see a mix of everyone, people from out of state, and longtime locals too. My favorite is the high traffic we get from shoppers who haven't seen a 45 adapter in 20-plus years. They can't believe it when I tell them that people DJ with 45s today. We are turning people on to unpacking their old collections and getting their record players out of the basement. It's exciting!"
The enchilada
The Detroit venue has held several beyond-capacity freebie shows, notably the Gories and Negative Approach, which have gone off without a hitch. They're just beginning to project rare 16mm films regularly. Third Man Books head Chet Weise has overseen packed literary events there already. At least some aspects of the upcoming Memorial Day Trip Metal Fest will go down at Third Man's space. Among other projects, Third Man will imminently reissue the first 12 Italy releases, all 7-inch singles with the exception of one Hentchmen 12".
It's important to remember that White owns his buildings in Detroit and Nashville. In Nashville, acts playing their venue can even record directly to a lathe that cuts the sound right as it's made; it doesn't go through tape or any other medium before getting etched onto vinyl. That's also how records were cut back in the Paramount days. At a certain level, the only way to get more DIY would be for Third Man to go solar, creating its own energy.
Struggling to find a similar scope in terms of this level of label/production/store all in one place, I offer up Coxsone Dodd and his Kingston, Jamaica-based Studio One label. Blackwell suggests Cincinnati's storied 1950s indie label King "because King had a label, had a studio, had a pressing plant, and had a mobile record store, which I'm dying for a photo of," he says. "I've been told by multiple sources that King had like a fuckin' van they sent around Cincinnati and you could buy King records out of the van, at block parties and stuff."
Richard Branson infamously took proceeds from bong-ripping ambient records on his own record label Virgin to start up an airline. When I joke that White might be doing the same thing, Buick deadpans, "How do you know he hasn't already?" And there's just a one-percent chance he does know something, and isn't saying.
Read our interview with Chet Weise about the evolution of Third Man Books here.(CNN) Storm chasers and storm spotters came together Sunday to spell out a virtual tribute to Bill Paxton after learning about his sudden passing due to complications from surgery.
Storm chasers and spotters around the world unite to create a virtual tribute to the late Bill Paxton. #BillPaxtonRIP #twister pic.twitter.com/j73l4gvpBZ
They were paying homage to the man who played Bill Harding, a veteran meteorologist and storm chaser in the 1996 hit movie, "Twister." The character Paxton portrayed is an icon for many who took part.
They used the Spotter Network to post the tribute online. The network of storm chasers, spotters, and public servants provides real-time positions and storm information to help improve the coordination of severe weather warnings.
"Part scientist, part folksy," said John Wetter, president of Spotter Network who coordinated the event, "Bill Paxton's character in 'Twister' helped to make meteorology -- and the hobby of storm chasing -- cool."
The tribute covered portions of the states of Oklahoma and Kansas, the heart of tornado alley, and was centered around the town of Wakita, Oklahoma |
General Robert F. Kennedy to press the government about its callous response to the civil rights movement. No one had ever told me to study with care the Harlem in the way that he could keep a cigarette dangling from his lips, just so, balanced between a Blood's deep blues and a 125th Street cool.
They never told me just how much Baldwin loved his records — spirituals and Bessie Smith.
“The American triumph—in which the American tragedy has always been implicit—was to make Black people despise themselves,” Baldwin wrote in a forward to Angela Davis’s book If They Come in the Morning. He signed the letter Brother Jimmy and addressed Angela Davis as Sister Angela. When I was younger, the way Baldwin explained the conditions of “Negroes” to others made me question his devotion, but as I held his copy of Davis’s book in my hands and re-read those words, it was evident that America had never triumphed over James Baldwin. One afternoon, Trevor Baldwin, Wilmer "Lover" Baldwin’s son (the younger brother of the nephew addressed in Baldwin’s "Letter to My Nephew"), tells me about “Uncle Jimmy’s” visits back to the States, when he would return to the house that he had purchased for his mother on 71st Street. Trevor is a down-to-earth, forthright Morehouse man, a Harlem man, and he recalls what both he and his father admired most about Uncle Jimmy. “He walked with a certain sense of manhood,” Trevor told me. “You could easily see he was gay but [he] walked with his chest out and he’d cut you with his tongue.” “Which is to say he had self-pride?” I asked. “Yes!" Trevor said. “He had to move to Europe because he was seriously worried that he was going to kill somebody." Trevor always knew that Uncle Jimmy was in town because suddenly his grandmother’s house would swell with visitors. “Uncle Jimmy,” he laughed, “brought everybody to her, Maya (Angelou) included, and Toni, and said, ‘Here’s something else you don’t need, but I got another sister. You got another child.’ "He was the man of the house. He was the patriarch of us all.” I like this image of Baldwin, it is both vanguard and conventional, but I also enjoy the way Kali-Ma shudders when I ask her if her uncle was a patriarch. Of his sisters? His mother? No, she says. She looks for a word to describe what he was. I try to help. We are both writers, but we could not find a single word to describe this man who told his adopted sisters that they had to write down their stories and later pragmatically assisted them in their endeavors, who had best friends in many countries in all professions, and who taught his older brother and young nephews a rare, lasting lesson in bravery — that we must be brilliant and big enough to be ourselves. To have pink teacups and brown typewriters. Baldwin defined what made him a great writer on his own terms. He also ensured that his success was not dependent on his silences. He taught us all that the greatest black art demands that there be no “rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty” or our power. Some people will consider this vain, but isn’t this what all good warriors have always done: venerating, salvaging, and celebrating ourselves in between battles? Is this not our real inheritance?
I have spent months thinking about something his former agent’s granddaughter Eliza Mills revealed to me after she found out that I had been to his home in France. “James Baldwin used to play dodgeball with my dad and his friends. And he'd stay up and out all night and go to bed when my dad and his sister were going to school in the morning. My grandfather helped sell a couple of his books and would read/edit things. I think he was writing The Fire Next Time while he lived there. I've seen a note or two that he wrote to my grandfather in the books he left at their house.” Breathless at the idea of all of this, I asked her if she was for real or kidding me.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Baldwin's typewriter
“Yeah,” she replied, incredulous to my doubt. “One little inscription is written in rainbow ink and half in French.” Last week, when I got back from seeing his brown typewriter, I wrote down the word "joy" and underlined it three times, like it was an obligation, a chore, something that I would have to find, if not fight for. I did this because isn’t the more intimate, tenebrous story the one where we recognize each other not only in our despair but also in our joy? In your rainbow ink and your sleeplessness nights, in your demands and, in your nieces and nephews who love you like a black god. I will find you — in the enthusiasms of our people’s style, our verve and our wit, the way you slouched in your seat and crossed your legs, in the ways that they will misunderstand you but we will always know you, in the abridgments that we will make to history, changing it forever. Because I am telling this now, writing it all down, I am finding time to regard memory and death differently. I’m holding them up in the light and searching them, inspecting them, as they are not as what I want them to be. On that hill, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, I wanted to alter fate, and preserve things. But why? He did not need me — Baldwin seemed to have prepared himself well for his black death, his mortality, and even better, his immortality. Indeed, he bested all of them, because he wrote it all down — both on the page and in his beautiful gestures. And this is how his memory abides. On the scent of wild lavender like the kind in his yard, in the mouths of a new generation that once again feels compelled to march in the streets of Harlem, Ferguson, and Baltimore. What Baldwin knew is that he left no false heirs, he left spares, and that is why we carry him with us. So now when people ask me about James Baldwin, I tell them another truth: He is my brother, he ain’t heavy.
Waring Abbott / Getty Images James Baldwin in New York City on May 31, 1974.This 1912 vintage newsreel footage is among the earliest film recordings of Japanese martial arts techniques.
The film, which was probably shot in Paris, begins with a demonstration of formal jiujitsu waza (techniques) performed by Takisaburo Tobari, who had apparently travelled quite widely in Europe, visiting Germany and Austria between 1907-10. His partner in the demonstration is Taro Miyake, who had famously defeated former Bartitsu Club instructor Yukio Tani in 1905. Thereafter, Miyake and Tani continued to work as music hall challenge wrestlers, established the Japanese School of Jujitsu in London’s Oxford Street, and participated in the creation of the book The Game of Jujitsu. Both men also worked as challenge wrestlers and jiujitsu instructors in Paris, Miyake in particular being associated with Ernest Regnier’s dojo at 55 Rue de Ponthieu.
The second part of the newsreel features a spectacular and highly polished display of jiujitsu as gentlemanly self-defence against villainous “apaches” (French street gangsters). It is very probable that the participants in this display are S.K. Eida, Shozo Kanaya and Yuzo Hirano, all of whom also taught at the Oxford Street school. Possibly uniquely, it includes a demonstration of a jiujitsu defence against the infamous coup du père François strangulation trick.
The “apaches” evidently had a terrific time performing for the camera …Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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On July 29, US District Judge James Peterson called Wisconsin’s process for issuing voter IDs “unconstitutional,” “a wretched failure,” and “pretty much a disaster.” The state’s strict voter-ID law “has disenfranchised a number of citizens who are unquestionably qualified to vote, and these disenfranchised citizens are overwhelmingly African American and Latino,” he wrote. Ad Policy
The judge ordered that “Wisconsin may adopt a strict voter ID system only if that system has a well-functioning safety net” and that the state must “promptly issue a credential valid as a voting ID to any person who enters the [ID petition process] or who has a petition pending.”
But Wisconsin never followed the court’s order. On September 22, the same day Wisconsin assured the judge in a legal filing that everything was hunky-dory, Zack Moore, a 34-year-old homeless African-American man who moved from Chicago to Madison, was turned away from the DMV without a voter ID despite bringing an Illinois driver’s license, Social Security card, and proof of Wisconsin residency. He was told to go back to Illinois and get his birth certificate, or else it would take six to eight weeks for him to get an ID for voting, despite a sign in the DMV that said, “Get your ID to vote! No birth certificate? No problem!”
Reporting in The Nation and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, based on DMV recordings provided by VoteRiders, confirmed that across the state Wisconsin was systematically failing to promptly issue IDs for voting as required by the court order. In response, Peterson ordered an investigation and held a hearing on October 12 and 13.
Kristina Boardman, the DMV’s administrator, admitted on the stand that for two months after the court’s July order, the DMV was giving voters incorrect information about the voter-ID law. “I’m very disappointed to see that the state really did nothing in response to my order,” Peterson said on October 12. “There was really, as far as I can tell, no effort made…to inform the public.” He called the DMV’s voter-ID training “manifestly inadequate” and said, “Undeniably there are people who have been disenfranchised.” He concluded, “The state really needs to step up and make sure the IDs get into the hands of voters who can’t have them [under the current system].” Ready to Fight Back? Sign Up For Take Action Now
In his written opinion, Peterson said that “defendants have not complied with the court’s order” and “have done little to inform the general public that credentials valid for voting will be issued.” The judge ordered the state to immediately provide clearer information to voters about the law and promptly issue IDs for voting to anyone who needs one, but said “the court does not believe that it has the authority to suspend Wisconsin’s voter-ID law for the November election.” That means that, despite the well-documented problems, one of the country’s worst voter-ID laws will be in effect for November, and the very state agencies that have been non-compliant with federal-court orders will be relied upon to implement it.
Early voting is already underway in Wisconsin, and people are being disenfranchised. I wrote four stories in the last two weeks about longtime voters who could not vote because of the voter-ID law.
Zack Moore, a 34-year-old African-American man from Illinois who brought an Illinois driver’s license, Social Security card, and proof of Wisconsin residency to the DMV, but was not given a Wisconsin voter ID.
Claudell Boyd, a 62-year-old African-American man from Illinois who made 2 trips to the DMV, but was not issued a valid voter ID because one letter was misspelled on his birth certificate.
Christine Krucki, a 90-year-old white woman who’s been voting since 1948 and made three trips to the DMV, bringing an Illinois photo ID, proof of residence in Wisconsin, a birth certificate, and her marriage certificate, but could not get a Wisconsin voter ID.
Sarada Hanumadass, a 42-year-old Indian-American woman who’s been a naturalized US citizen since 8 but was told she’d need to pay $345 for her naturalization papers, which could take up to two years, to get a Wisconsin voter ID.
These are not isolated incidents, as the hearing this week showed. According to the Center for Media and Democracy:
In Madison, the clerk attempted to call hundreds of voters who failed to send in identification, yet 355 who were contacted still failed to get in proper identification. In Milwaukee the situation was worse. The Milwaukee clerk estimated that 150 voters who sent in ballot applications indicated they did not have the required ID at all, an estimated 1-2 percent.
Wisconsin is not the only GOP-controlled state where Republicans are ignoring court orders to restore voting rights.
Ohio has purged more than 2 million voters since 2011, more than any other state, and refused to mail absentee ballots to 1 million registered voters. A federal court struck down the state’s voter purge in late September and ordered the voters to be put back onto the rolls. But Ohio is now refusing to reinstate many of the purged voters before the election, according to Think Progress. “This is shameless behavior that endangers our democratic process,” says State Representative Kathleen Clyde.
In Texas, a federal court ordered the state to relax its voter-ID law and allow those without strict forms of photo ID to cast a ballot. But even after the court order, the state has issued misleading information for voters and is now threatening to prosecute voters who sign an affidavit instead of showing photo ID.
Texas county election offices still saying "photo ID required for Texas voters" even though it's not pic.twitter.com/Rwn4rIZ5RO — Ari Berman (@AriBerman) September 12, 2016
In North Carolina, after a federal court restored a week of early voting, the North Carolina Republican Party called on GOP-controlled county boards of elections to further cut early-voting hours and days. “Republicans can and should make party line changes to early voting,” wrote executive director Dallas Woodhouse, which included adopting fewer early-voting days and prohibiting Sunday voting, when black churches hold “Souls to the Polls” mobilization drives, and polling places on college campuses. The state board of election rejected many of these cuts, but five major counties in the state have reduced early voting.
It’s long past time for these states to comply with the Constitution and the law.There is something a bit unsettling about watching violent, foul-mouthed protesters waving the Mexican flag on American soil.
Over the weekend, Hispanic children lined the streets in Fort Wayne, Indiana – hurling filthy insults at Donald Trump supporters.
Click here to join Todd’s American Dispatch: a must-read for Conservatives!
“F*** you,” the youngsters shouted as they flipped off passerby. “F*** you.”
Video captured images of the angry protesters wearing sombreros and holding signs that read, “Brown Pride.”
What kind of a parent would allow their child to behave that way in public?
A similar protest turned violent last week in Southern California – as a horde of illegals and their supporters violently attacked Trump supporters, police and even a horse.
Yes, a horse.
Cole Bartiromo, identified by local media as a Trump supporter, needed a half-dozen stiches after the mob bashed open his head.
“Suddenly, out of nowhere I felt this thud in the front of my head,” Bartiromo told CBLA.com. “I started panicking – getting scared, thinking, ‘When are they going to stop? Are they going to kill me? I mean, these aren’t rational people.’”
The California mob spilled into the streets – blocking roadways and smashing police cars. They intended to shut down a Trump rally. They intended to silence Mr. Trump and his supporters.
They were angry about the wall he plans to build – to secure our border from the invading **horde** of illegals. They were angry about Mr. Trump speaking the truth – about how illegals are killing Americans – on American soil.
One of the most disturbing images in recent days came from California – a small child – holding a sign. It read, “Make America Mexico Again.”
There was a time in this nation’s history when having 13 million people breach your border would have been considered an invasion. We used to fight wars over such a hostile act.
But these days instead of repelling the invaders, the Obama administration gave them food stamps, free health care, and a voter registration card.
We’ve been invaded and our government has provided aid and comfort to the enemy.
In both Indiana and California the protesters tried to bully and intimidate law-abiding Americans into silent submission. They tried – but they failed.
You see, the illegals need to understand something – “We the People” will no longer be silent. We will not allow our sovereignty to be violated anymore.
The American taxpayers have reached a boiling point. We are tired of illegals taking American jobs. We are tired of illegals living off our tax dollars. We are tired of illegals causing mayhem in our streets.
And more than anything, we are tired of lawmakers who refuse to defend American sovereignty.
The truth is we don’t know who or what has been coming across our southern border. We don’t know what dangers lurk in our neighborhoods.
And we want a president who will put American lives first. We want a president who will do whatever it takes to keep our families safe. We want a president who will defend our sovereignty.
And if I see one more foul-mouthed protester waving a Mexican flag on American soil – I’ll personally donate a pile of bricks to help build Mr. Trump’s wall.3
consequence, if you so choose, you can likewise empower others with the opportunity to catalyze their
own learning potential… it’s truly the gift th
at keeps on giving, until someone decided to keep it a secret, and assume power to control the rest of our lives without our consent. Without access to the occulted information, and the i ntellectual tool-kit to allow you to take actions with certainty; it is a rigged game ensuring consistency, satisfaction, and order for those who occult
information… and uncertainty, fear, confusion, and chaos for those without access to the information and
the tools of learning. As a result, without learning to outgrow o ur current situation, many of us react emotionally and cannot out-think our reactions, devolving our state of response-
ability to that of fight or flight… powered by adrenaline…
emotions are not a valid method of attaining knowledge, and we tend to panic, instead of responding to the unknown with observation, logical thought, and informed action to make it known. This is the essence of how we as human beings are being controlled by other human beings using words. Who is doing this to us? The short answer: Pol ymaths who possess rationality without emotion.
Throughout history many groups have espoused this obsession to control the lives of others, whether it’s
the Atenists, or the eugenicists, or the ego-worshippers; they all support controlling you vis a vis the censorship and manipulation of information, better known as the concept of the Scientific Dictatorship. Some examples illustrating the idea of the scientific dictatorship would be the following members of the 20
th
century intelligentsia: 1. Edward Bernay s: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country....We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society....In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."
—
Edward Bernays (Propaganda, 1928) 2. Walter Lippmann:
―We have learned to call this propaganda.
A group of men, who can prevent
independent access to the event, can arrange the news to suit their purpose… …In order to
conduct a propaganda campaign; there must be some barrier between the public and the event.
Access to the real environment must be limited, before an yone can create a pseudo-environment
he thinks wise or desirable.‖ Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion, 1922)
3.
B.F. Skinner: Inventor of operant conditioning, ―Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything.‖
4. Bertrand Russell: "
Education should aim at destroying free will
, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmaster s would have wished." (Page 50 - The Intended Result of Educatio n) 5. Norbert Wiener: Author of Cybernetics, which focuses on equations to control human behavior, and illustrates how to corrupt our natural communication and feedback
–
or learning- processes, whereby game theory is u
sed to control the masses. ―As I have already hinted, one of the
directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication,
and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important partThe White House was attempting to contain a renewed outbreak of criticism on Friday over the 2011 attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi after leaked emails revealed that state department officials had edited out references to prior terrorism threats from official statements made in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, came under heavy questioning from reporters in a briefing following the leaks on Friday. He denied there had been any attempt by the administration to cajole the CIA into revising its account to remove reference to specific terrorist groups responsible for the Benghazi attack, and countered that the Republicans were attempting to "politicize" the tragic death of four Americans.
He accused the Republican party of leaking the emails that had been openly shared with congressional committees and the Republican leadership by the White House. "The Republicans have chosen to politicize this, to leak this information to reporters – information we provided months ago." But he added: "The whole effort here by Republicans to find some hidden mystery comes to nothing."
Despite Carney's protestations, the publication of extracts of the White House emails by the Weekly Standard and ABC News has rekindled the fire of controversy surrounding Benghazi. The US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans, died in the 11 September 2012 attack.
According to ABC News, 12 different versions of the talking points were produced. The first was an initial draft drawn up exclusively by the CIA, which then went through 11 further iterations before a final version was produced that was used by the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, to inform her comments made during a round of TV political shows on the Sunday after the attack.
The emails reveal that the State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland objected to a paragraph in the original CIA draft that referred to their having been "at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi" in the five months before the deadly assault on the diplomatic mission. Nuland commented: "Could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either? Concerned …"
The paragraph was removed from the final talking points. Nuland also objected to the CIA draft mentioning a specific al-Qaida affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia, by name. "We don't want to prejudice the investigation," she wrote. Though the group was removed from later drafts, Nuland came back again with the comment: "These changes don't resolve all of my issues or those of my building's leadership."
A meeting of senior officials was convened on the Saturday morning after the attack, to work on the talking points. The meeting included officials from the White House, State Department and CIA.
Carney on Friday attempted to push back on the billowing controversy by calling the sudden surge of media interest in the story "a distraction". He said the talking points were put together through a standard inter-agency process and were designed to provide guidance to administration officials about what was known at the time amid a very fluid situation.
The administration's interventions on the talking points, he said, were limited in scope and designed to prevent officials going beyond what was known into the realms of speculation. "What could not be known at that time was the relevance of warnings," he said, insisting that senior administration figures had made clear that extremist elements were involved in the attacks.
"Susan Rice, using the very talking points we are discussing, talked about the possibility that al-Qaida might be involved or Libyan extremists. That was not an attempt to play this down."
The media swirl around the talking point emails puts Carney himself into a tight spot. In a press briefing last November, he told reporters that the extent of White House and State Department involvement in editing the talking points was a "single adjustment" to change the word "consulate" to "diplomatic facility" as the building in Benghazi that came under attack was not a US consulate.
Asked by reporters on Friday to explain his earlier position, Carney said he stood by his earlier account. "The involvement of the White House was very limited and non-substantive."Private lawyers for President Donald Trump are trying to have a lawsuit filed against him dismissed. | Getty Trump asks federal judge to toss D.C. hotel lawsuit
President Donald Trump is seeking dismissal of a lawsuit claiming he's illegally using the presidency to profit from his luxury hotel just blocks from the White House.
Trump’s lawyers in a 20-page motion filed Wednesday asked a federal judge to reject the case brought by the husband and wife owners of a Washington, D.C., wine bar, who say their popular restaurant faces unfair competition because of its proximity to the Trump International Hotel.
Story Continued Below
“The premise of this lawsuit is that D.C. common law prohibits the President of the United States from owning an interest in a hotel, precisely because he is President of the United States. And the relief sought in this lawsuit is an order directing the President to rearrange his financial holdings or resign the Presidency. Neither D.C. law nor the Constitution permits this unprecedented assertion of power over the President,” wrote Trump’s team of private attorneys, which includes former White House counsel Fred Fielding.
An attorney for the owners of the Cork Wine Bar, who filed the lawsuit in March in D.C. Superior Court, argued at the time that Trump owning a hotel was “unfair and detrimental to other businesses in the city.”
The case has since been elevated to federal district court in Washington — and Trump’s attorneys in their dismissal motion Wednesday requested oral arguments before Judge Richard Leon, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush.
Trump’s attorneys argued that the bar’s lawsuit should be dismissed in part because of a Supreme Court precedent that protects the president from lawsuits based on his time in office — otherwise, he’d face “the distraction of virtually limitless litigation whose costs he would personally bear.”
Challenging Trump for unfair competition also won’t pass muster under Washington, D.C., common law, Trump’s attorneys said, because of the Constitution’s supremacy clause protections. “No state may regulate the President as President — and neither may the District,” they wrote.
Trump’s attorneys also challenged the underlying premise of the bar’s lawsuit, saying it hadn’t produced any factual claims of unfair competition, such as commercial bribery or false advertising.
Lawyers for the wine bar — who also are representing POLITICO reporters in some Freedom of Information Act litigation — did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.One half of the infamous Bonnie and Clyde duo, Bonnie Parker assisted her partner, Clyde Barrow, in a nationwide crime spree that lasted from 1932 until their deaths in 1934. Already married to an imprisoned murderer, Bonnie met Clyde in West Dallas, Texas in January 1930. The pair combined to commit 13 murders, numerous kidnappings, and several burglaries and robberies. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies engaged in one of the largest manhunts the United States had seen up to that time, capturing national attention. With most of their accomplices already dead or captured, Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed and killed instantly by a posse of lawmen led by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Louisiana. on May 23, 1934. Bonnie and Clyde's legacy of crime is remembered in the movie Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which inspired others, such as Natural Born Killers (1994)An engineering student thought to be in a coma for 23 years was actually conscious the whole time, it has emerged.
Rom Houben was misdiagnosed as being in a vegetative state after a car crash left him totally paralyzed.
But, in actuality, he was trapped in his own body the whole time with no way of letting friends and family know he could hear every word they were saying.
The 46-year-old, who can now tap out computerized messages and read books on a device above his hospital bed, has revealed: "I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.
"All that time I literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt," he said. "I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me — it was my second birth. I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy life now people know I am not dead."
His misdiagnosis was discovered by neurological expert, Dr. Steven Laureys, who fears there may be similar cases all over the world.
He looked at Houben's case again at the University of Liege, Belgium, using state-of-the-art imaging that showed the patient was aware of what was happening around him even though he had lost control of his body.
Laureys, who leads the Coma Science Group, was unavailable for comment when contacted by Sky News Online.
He told the Daily Telegraph: "In Germany alone each year some 100,000 people suffer from severe traumatic brain injury.
"About 20,000 are followed by a coma of three weeks or longer. Some of them die, others regain health," he continued. But an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 people a year, remain trapped in an intermediate stage: they go on living without ever come back again."
Click here to read more on this story from Sky News.CHICAGO - The Rugby Channel, a Rugby International Marketing (RIM) entity, will offer an exclusive live broadcast of the USA Eagles' match against the New Zealand Maori All Blacks Friday, Nov. 4, as part of "The Rugby Weekend Presented by AIG."
The match will kick off at 7 p.m. CT (8 p.m. ET) at Toyota Park in Bridgeview, Ill. The Eagles return to the Chicago area for the third consecutive year following international tests against the New Zealand All Blacks (2014) and Australia Wallabies (2015) at Soldier Field, witnessed by more than 85,000 fans combined. The Rugby Weekend will then continue Saturday, Nov. 5, with a matchup between the New Zealand All Blacks and Ireland at Soldier Field.
An over-the-top subscription platform available online and via popular mobile devices and streaming platforms such as Apple TV, Roku, and Chromecast, The Rugby Channel has broadcast every Eagles match live since its launch in April 2016, in addition to other domestic and international rugby events such as the Guinness Pro12, RBS Six Nations, HSBC Women's Sevens Series and Women's Rugby Super Series. Subscriptions to The Rugby Channel are available for $4.99 per month or $49.99 for a full year.
"We have had consistent and professional broadcasts made available to our USA Rugby members and new rugby fans alike this year thanks to The Rugby Channel," USA Rugby Chief Executive Officer Dan Payne said. "It's been a long time coming for our constituents to be able to find national team matches and international and domestic competitions in one place, and "The Rugby Weekend Presented by AIG" will be an amazing spectacle well suited for this platform."
Friday night's Eagles-Maori All Blacks match will also be broadcast on NBC Sports Network Saturday, Nov. 5, at 10 p.m. ET, just a few hours after the New Zealand-Ireland match concludes at Soldier Field.
The Rugby Weekend's presenting sponsor, AIG, is a proud partner of New Zealand Rugby and USA Rugby. In addition, Tokyo-based Astellas Pharma, whose headquarters for the Americas is located just outside of Chicago, has signed on as Official Healthcare Partner for the event for the third year in a row.
Tickets for the Friday night matchup at Toyota Park are still available via Ticketmaster, though there are limited quantities remaining. Official pre-game festivities in and around Chicago will also be announced soon.You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with
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Preview Track #1: Great Bank in the Sky
Twisting turning Angelspit mayhem at it's best. Pounding beats and cheeky lyrics.
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Preview Track #2: V is for Voltage
We take the formula of a standard electro dance instrumental track and we put it through a data shredder - this track is brutally fun!
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Preview Track #3 : Hidden Knife
Here's the third preview track 'Hidden Knife' from our new album BLACK DOG BITE - bubbling digital bass with haunting vocals.
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Preview Track #4 : Satanic Aesthetic
This track is corrupted with dark throbbing beats and dirty bass. This track is interlaced with ruin!
THANK YOU for helping us hit our goal and reach the $7k stretch - YOU ROCK!
$10K STRETCH GOAL:
We'll make a music video!
All shipments get a digital copy of the album
Host a Livestream Q+A.
Include cursed Wax Coins in all orders over $60 (courtesy of Hack+Slash!)...yup...they are genuinely cursed with Aztec wax.
$13K STRETCH GOAL:
We'll produce a remix album and send a free digital copy to all backers over $25
Remember those days when Angelspit would inspire you to throw your office chair through your monitor?
...well those days are back!
Angelspit's seventh album "BLACK DOG BITE" is released this Fall. Pre-orders are available now.
This album is brutal! Twelve tracks with lyrics that deal with politics and personal issues, and the music is firmly based in the slamming sound of early 90s cyberpunk.
Your support keeps Angelspit going, and this album will keep you going! The music and lyrics are a forceful act of defiance - and a reminder that you are not alone, and we will get through this...and distortion is AWESOME!
This album will keep you throwing office chairs at your computer monitor!
ROCK!
PHOTOSHOOT: Amanda Trumbull
HAIR: Amanda Trumbull
MAKE-UP + FASHION: Zoog Von Rock
MORE INFO ON REWARDS:
WE ARE PRESSING VINYL!
SIGNED VINYL
Printed on 150g vinyl with Heavy Splattered B+W pattern. Comes with poster, stickers and goodies designed for Black Dog Bite plus your name on the LP jacket. Shipped with $45 Signed Vinyl + Vinyl credit + MP3 and $65 Signed Vinyl + Tshirt + Vinyl credit + MP3 and $200 Signed TEST Vinyl (straight black vinyl) + DESTRUCTO Tshirt + Vinyl credit + Signed CD + MP3. FREE US SHIPPING!
Due to production time, this reward may ship later. MP3 album will ship day of release.
Penti-skull Tshirt
T-SHIRT
Thank you for helping us choose the Tshirt design - the PENTISKULL design was by far the most popular! Available in boy/unisex and baby doll cut. Shipped with $32 MP3+Tshirt and all pledges over $42
8 GIG USB
8 GIG USB
Available in the $33 8 GIG USB and $70 USB Drive + Signed CD +T + Credit perks.
Angelspit’s infamous USB SPIT PILL is a 8GB data key made from sturdy metal and comes preloaded with new MP3s from BLACK DOG BITE, plus high quality WAV files (96k 24bit) and other content.
*ALSO COMES PRELOADED ALL 6 PREVIOUS ANGELSPIT (MP3) ALBUMS*
KRANKHAUS: 14 tracks: 2006.
BLOOD DEATH IVORY: 11 tracks : 2008.
HIDEOUS AND PERFECT: 12 tracks : 2009.
HELLO MY NAME IS : 11 tracks : 2011.
THE PRODUCT: 13 tracks : 2014.
CULT OD FAKE |
image where you can see the all the doppelgangers of your subject creating a scene all by themselves.
Final editing
It’s completely up to the photographer’s discretion as to how they would like to enhance image further on from here. Use various filters, grey scale converters or any other technique that you like to create the desired feel in your image. Knock yourself out!
For this one, I’ll finish it by cropping it a bit to get my composition right, enhancing the structure in Nik Viveza and adding a vignette.
Images by Irfan HussainMany adolescents and college students innocently ingest large amounts of energy drinks to stay awake. But, new research shows that energy drink over-use is strongly linked with increased risks of engaging in episodes of heavy drinking and developing alcohol dependence.
A hallmark of college life is staying up late to study for an exam the following morning, and many students stay awake by consuming an energy drink. Also increasing in popularity is the practice of mixing alcohol with energy drinks. But these drinks are highly caffeinated and can lead to other problems, in addition to losing sleep. Unfortunately, the contents of energy drinks are not regulated.
New research indicates that individuals who have a high frequency of energy drink consumption (52 or more times within a year) were at a statistically significant higher risk for alcohol dependence and episodes of heavy drinking.
The results will be published in the February 2011 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.
Amelia M. Arria, the lead author of the study, Director of the Center on Young Adult Health and Development at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, and a Senior Scientist at the Treatment Research Institute, said that prior research has highlighted the dangers of combining energy drinks with alcohol.
"We were able to examine if energy drink use was still associated with alcohol dependence, after controlling for risk-taking characteristics. The relationship persisted and the use of energy drinks was found to be associated with an increase in the risk of alcohol dependence."
The study utilized data from more than 1,000 students enrolled at a public university who were asked about their consumption of energy drinks and their alcohol drinking behaviors within the past 12 months. The researchers found that individuals who consumed energy drinks at a high frequency were more likely to get drunk at an earlier age, drink more per drinking session, and were more likely to develop alcohol dependence compared to both non-users of energy drinks and the low-frequency users.
The results of this study confirm and extend earlier research about the risks of energy drink consumption. A major concern is that mixing energy drinks with alcohol can lead to "wide-awake drunkenness," where caffeine masks the feeling of drunkenness but does not decrease actual alcohol-related impairment. As a result, the individual feels less drunk than they really are, which could lead them to consume even more alcohol or engage in risky activities like drunk driving.
"Caffeine does not antagonize or cancel out the impairment associated with drunkenness -- it merely disguises the more obvious markers of that impairment," says Kathleen Miller, a research scientist from the Research Institute on Addictions at the University at Buffalo. According to her, the next steps in this research include identifying links between energy drinks and other forms of substance abuse, as well assessing the overall prevalence of energy drink use by adolescents and young adults.
"Also needed is research that directly assesses students' reported reasons for mixing alcohol and energy drinks. Anecdotal reports suggest that part of this phenomenon may be driven by the perpetuation of myths (e.g., mixing alcohol and caffeine reduces drunkenness, prevents hangovers, or fools a breathalyzer test) that could be debunked through further education."
Arria agrees, adding that further research and regulations are needed to curb this disturbing trend.
"The fact that there is no regulation on the amount of caffeine in energy drinks or no requirements related to the labeling of contents or possible health risks is concerning."Todd McShay doesn't expect LSU's Jamal Adams to sit on the board very long as the safety position becomes increasingly more important in the league. (1:34)
As the 2017 NFL draft draws closer, it's time to finalize our draft tier rankings, which uses our grades to separate prospects into segments. This is helpful when comparing players who are close to each other in the rankings. It also helps in predicting where players will come off the board during the first three rounds of the draft.
Here's the final version of our 2017 draft tiers, covering players with first-, second- and third-round grades (in parentheses next to each player's name). If you want to read our finalized reports for a player, click on the link tied to his name.
*Underclassmen are noted with an asterisk.
Tier 1
The elite class of the 2017 NFL draft. These players should be starters from Day 1 and project as perennial Pro Bowl players.
2017: 1 player | 2016: 0 players
1. Myles Garrett, DE, Texas A&M* (Grade: 95)
Garrett's production, tape and athletic upside put him on a different level compared to his peers. He's one of the elite pass-rushing prospects of the past decade and should be an easy choice for the Cleveland Browns with the No. 1 overall pick.
Tier 2
A notch below the elite class but still worthy of top-20 picks in most drafts. These picks are expected to be plug-and-play starters.
2017: 10 players | 2016: 8 playersThe Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has closed its investigation into the $750 million Google/AdMob buyout and given a green light to the deal. The reason is simple: Apple, Apple, and more Apple.
In its official statement (PDF), the FTC mentions "Apple" 10 times in a page and half, all because of Apple's own decision to launch a mobile ad network called iAd.
"The Commission reached this decision based on important developments in the mobile advertising marketplace, particularly actions by Apple that should mitigate the anticompetitive effects of Google’s AdMob acquisition," said the FTC. The vote in favor of closing the investigation was 5-0.
The Commission had been concerned over Google's dominance in online ads; purchasing one of the big iPhone ad players would have extended that dominance into the mobile space. Apple's announcement changes the game, though: "As a result of Apple’s entry, AdMob’s success to date on the iPhone platform is unlikely to be an accurate predictor of AdMob’s competitive significance going forward, whether AdMob is owned by Google or not. This is particularly important given that AdMob’s revenue and market share are derived largely from the iPhone platform."
Google, which has of late taken to publicly calling for quick action on the deal and vowed to fight a negative ruling, was predictably thrilled. "The decision is great news for the mobile advertising ecosystem as a whole," said the company in a statement today. "As mobile phone usage increases, growth in mobile advertising is only going to accelerate. This benefits mobile developers and publishers who will get better advertising solutions, marketers who will find new ways to reach consumers, and users who will get better ads and more free content."
Over at AdMob, CEO Omar Hamoui said that he was "extremely pleased with today’s decision from the Federal Trade Commission to clear Google’s acquisition of AdMob. Over the past six months we've received a great deal of support from across the mobile industry—and we deeply appreciate it. Our focus is now on working with the team at Google to quickly close the deal."A few days ago Google announced this crazy new feature that allows you to attach actual money to Gmail messages. We've discovered the feature is actually up and running, you just have to be invited!
To get invited, someone just has to send you some amount of money over Gmail - a penny will do fine. So, find someone who has access to it, give them your email, receive a penny, and you're in!
If you happen to find someone who has access, and they send you a penny, you'll get an email like this. Clicking on "claim money" will take you to the special wallet site that gives you access.
Non-US users (or people that Wallet just doesn't like for some reason) will see this screen, and be prompted for a social security number. Good luck tricking that.
Once you get access, you'll have the option to link a bank account. You can choose to not send money with you bank account and use a credit card instead, but, after the promotional period, there will be fees for that. Transferring money from a bank account is free! Here's the full fee details:
So after seeing that, a bank account sounds like a good idea. Let's do that.
You'll need the usual routing and account numbers, and you're off.
Then you'll need to wait a few days for the bank account verification to happen, but during that time you can take advantage of promotional fee-free credit card usage.
Within the next 30 minutes, you should be fully enrolled in the program, and buttons will pop up in Gmail and on wallet.google.com. Gmail is super easy, just attach money like it's a file or picture, and hit send!
Right now, you can only do this through the web site. It's not supported by the Gmail or Wallet Android apps, though, a million years ago, I did find evidence of P2P money transfers in the Wallet app. Hopefully this rolls out to both of them soon. Until then, just bask in the amazingness that is Gmail money transfers.
Welcome to the future! PayPal should be worried.
Thanks to Craig Tumblison for the info (and my invite!)WHEN rumours of a video allegedly showing Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto (pictured), smoking crack first surfaced in May 2013, Mr Ford questioned its existence and denied he was a drug addict. As the months went by with no sign of the video, despite the offer of a $200,000 reward by the website that broke the story, gawker.com, it seemed the controversial mayor had won a reprieve. That ended October 31st when Bill Blair, the Toronto police chief, confirmed in a news conference that among the deleted files on a computer police had seized in a drug, guns and gangs raid was a video file “consistent with what has been described in the media”.
The three big Toronto newspapers, the left-leaning Toronto Star, right-leaning Toronto Sun and centrist Globe and Mail, called for the mayor to step down immediately. Many former supporters on the city council distanced themselves from Mr Ford, who has run Toronto since late 2010. Yet in a brief appearance before the cameras after the news broke Mr Ford refused to go, saying “I have no reason to resign.”
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As Mr Ford’s opponents have already discovered to their chagrin, there is no way to force a sitting mayor out of office unless he is convicted and jailed for a crime. He successfully fought a judicial order in December 2012 that he step down for violating conflict-of-interest laws. And he has outlived a number of other scandals by ignoring them. That has left Toronto divided between hardcore supporters of the mayor, collectively known as Ford Nation and based mostly in the suburbs from which he hails, and those who either find his continuing reign embarrassing or who disagree with his policies.
Yet although the police have laid no charges against the mayor in relation to the video—the police chief said there was not enough evidence—documents released on October 31st in a related investigation contain plenty of reasons why Torontonians might want their mayor to go. Mr Ford kept popping up during police surveillance of known and suspected drug traffickers in the northwestern Toronto suburb he calls home. (His friend and occasional driver was arrested and charged with drug trafficking as a result of that operation and was charged last month with extortion.) He posed for photographs outside a home which the police have identified as a crack house with three people, two of whom were later gunned down in a gang-related attack.
None of this is a crime, but it is conduct unbecoming the mayor of Toronto and is damaging to its reputation. Mr Blair probably understated the reaction of the city’s residents when he said after viewing the video he was “disappointed”. It is unclear whether the public will ever be able to see the video because it is evidence in an extortion case that may or may not go to trial.
There is an unlikely beneficiary to Mr Ford’s latest imbroglio: Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister of Canada and a one-time Ford ally. Since parliament returned on October 16th Mr Harper has been under sustained attack by the opposition parties about his involvement in an expense scandal in the Senate. It may be only temporary, but the media focus on the colourful Mr Ford has pushed the Senate scandal off the front page.… by Ian Greenhalgh
Recent revelations have shown us that ISIS/ISIL/Daesh has never really existed and what we have really been seeing happen in Syria and Iraq has been the work not of religiously motivated fanatics aspiring to create an Islamic Caliphate; rather it is the work of mercenaries paid by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the faction of Kurds lead by Barzani; both being strongly supported by Turkey.
The motivation is not religion it is simply avarice – the destructive habits of ‘ISIS’ serving as cover for the wholescale looting by Turkey of anything of value that could be put on a truck and sent back to Turkey; the ‘ISIS’ offensive in Iraq that seized Mosul and the northern oil producing region of Iraq was not motivated by a desire to establish an Islamic Caliphate it was to allow the theft of billions of dollars of oil by the Erdogan family, oil that was trucked to Turkey to be sold on the open market.
When the ‘average’ person in the Western world hears the name ‘ISIS’ their thoughts invariably turn to images of sinister men in black balaclavas standing over victims in bright orange jumpsuits.
We have all seen the videos, they were played ad nauseum on all the mainstream TV news channels and were ubiquitous on the internet news sites, both the mainstream and alternative varieties.
The source of most, if not all of these videos, certainly all of the most theatrical and ludicrous head chopping ones is a for-profit Bethesda, Maryland-based company called the SITE Intelligence Group. SITE purports to track the online activity of White supremacist and Jihadi organizations. and is led by Israeli Rita Katz.
SITE brought us such classics as the fake Osama Bin Laden videos and the comically staged ‘beheadings’ of westerners such as Steven Sotloff and James Foley. Anyone who’s gone to the trouble to find and watch the uncensored versions of these beheading videos online knows they are laughably fake and the real reason why the mainstream TV channels never play more than a few frames is to hide how obviously fake they are.
Then there was the comedy classic of the Texas plumber’s truck turning up in an ISIS video; suggesting it was shot some where in Texas rather than Syria.
Sometimes, SITE has released the videos before ISIS themselves released them, making it pretty obvious who is really behind the production of these tragi-comic shorts.
Rita Katz has tried to explain away these incidents as being the result of skillful searching and hacking of Jihadi online resources.
In short, we know full well that the image of ‘ISIS’ has been manufactured through these videos; this places SITE at the forefront of the disinfo operation that is the ‘Islamic State’.
I don’t need to go into much detail to explain who is behind the SITE disinfo op – Rita Katz being an Israeli tells you all you need to know.
__________
The agenda couldn’t be more obvious – it is to demonise all things Islamic.
Which brings us to the latest release from the makers of all those ‘ISIS’ comedy classics – something new and creative intended to thoroughly disgust and spread fear of the big, bad ‘ISIS’ terrorist head choppers.
This time the head choppers have stepped the theatrics up a notch and rather than using an old blunt pen knife to slowly hack away at the dummy, sorry victim, this time they are using explosives!
Several images, purportedly stills from a new ‘ISIS’ video have been posted on Twitter by SITE:
https://twitter.com/siteintelgroup
#ISIS Al-Fallujah Province published photos of executing spies by explosive cord around neck, gunshot, & beheading.
One of the men has bright blue, explosive cord tied around his neck, perhaps the head choppers have got bored of simple decapitation; more likely, this is a cynical attempt to draw attention to the IS bogeyman and remind us we all need to be very scared indeed and support our government’s ‘anti-terror’ operations AKA bombing civilians in foreign lands.
Apparently the video was shot in Iraq, One man named as Mohammed Mahmoud Dayih, is accused of using his position as an administrator at a hospital in Iraq to send information to the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Another man, thought to be a policeman, is accused of passing information on ISIS to the Iraqi Army. Oh who cares, it’s all fake anyways.
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The network is the foundation for everything a digital enterprise builds to drive its business forward. And as the business demands more agility, flexibility, reliability, and security than ever before, it has become clear that networking has been left behind in today’s world of automation, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI).
“Networking missed out on the evolution to high-level programming,” says David Cheriton, founder of and chief scientist for Apstra. “We’re still programming networks like we did in the ‘60s.” Because the tools haven’t kept pace, network managers, in many cases, are still configuring devices manually and using outdated management tools to diagnose and fix problems. They’ve been so focused on keeping the lights on and fighting fires that they haven’t made the time to engage in more strategic endeavors.
That is now changing, as the networking industry is undergoing a sea change driven by the shift from hardware to software, the promise of programmable networks, and a new, potentially game-changing technology called intent-based networking.
Network visionaries and leading practitioners speaking at VMware’s second-annual future:net conference on August 30–31 in Las Vegas are clearly inspired by these new approaches to building and maintaining networks. “This is a very exciting time to be in the networking industry,” says Peter DeSantis, vice president of global infrastructure for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service.
C-BRIEF Networking on a New Level Download Today
Although programmable networking technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) and the software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) have gained traction in recent years, intent-based networking is a relatively new concept. So, what is intent-based networking, and how does it relate to SDN? One way to look at it is to say that SDN operates at the control plane, while intent-based networking operates at a higher level. Enterprises can deploy either or both, but they don’t need SDN in place to use intent-based networking.
“Intent-based networking is the true automation of networking,” says Cheriton, whose company provides an operating system for intent-based networking. With this strategy, users tell the network what they want, and the network figures out how to achieve that goal.
Infographic produced by MIT Technology Review Custom in partnership with VMware. Technology and concepts by Intentionet. To learn more please visit Intentionet blog
As keynote speaker Ratul Mahajan, CEO of Intentionet, a networking startup, points out, there’s a huge gap today between the network manager’s policy intent and actual runtime behavior. Manual processes inevitably introduce bugs that result in outages, security breaches, and reduced agility.
One promise of intent-based networking is that it will create a closed loop; a network manager expresses intent, and the network performs formal validation to verify the intent was achieved and is being maintained. The benefits of this approach include increased network reliability and agility, reduced costs, and faster time to market for the business.
Although pieces of the intent-based networking puzzle are being delivered today by companies including Apstra, Intentionet, Veriflow, and Forward Networks, it’s still early days. Traditional Fortune 500 companies are unlikely to deploy intent-based networking until the technology matures. However, digital-native companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook have embraced network automation using (mostly homegrown) software for many years. They shared their insights with the 300 attendees at the invitation-only future:net event, as did an impressive lineup of speakers from Netflix, LinkedIn, Bloomberg, Electronic Arts, Oracle, and VMware.
The key themes at future:net included the profound shift from hardware to software, the rise of open source software as a platform for innovation, and the issue of build versus buy when it comes to a networking strategy.
Trendsetters: Netflix and Bloomberg
Netflix clearly demonstrates what a company can accomplish when IT focuses on the business rather than on infrastructure. For example, Netflix's control plane runs entirely on Amazon Web Services, so instead of worrying about the network, its IT resources are freed up to develop the thousands of micro-services that run in the background, including the ones that decide which movies to recommend to Netflix's 100 million customers.
Netflix has zero employees configuring routers for the control plane, because Netflix owns zero routers in AWS, says Manish Mehta, senior security software engineer at Netflix. "People don't think about networks anymore," he says. When it's Christmas Eve and demand for movies spikes, for example, the Netflix network automatically scales up with no human intervention and no late-night alerts for Mehta.
Bloomberg, the financial services technology company, is another example of a forward-thinking organization with a complex, mission-critical legacy network—including 15,000 customer-premises equipment (CPE) routers and its own global Internet Protocol (IP)/Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network that carries stock market data, video, voice, and screencasts.
Truman Boyes, Bloomberg’s head of network architecture, says his goals are to reduce complexity and to reuse and recycle where it makes sense to do so, instead of trying to manage everything in-house. “If we can get it off GitHub or partner, that’s better than the artisanal crafted configurations that we’ve grown up with.”
Boyes says his guiding principles are to automate everything in the data center, use open source in situations where the company wants to make changes, use virtualization and containers for all applications, and use the cloud to scale the business.
Shift from Hardware to Open Source Software
Innovation in networking historically has been driven by hardware. It was all about speeds and feeds, says Rajiv Ramaswami, VMware’s chief operating officer for products and cloud services. Now, it’s all about applications that can run anywhere from an on-premises data center to multiple public clouds. “The future is all about software,” he says.
Brenden Blanco, staff engineer at VMware, adds a personal touch to the discussion by describing his journey as a software developer. He recalls when he started out in 2006 as part of a team of 250 people; they cranked out two major release cycles a year and were trapped waiting for the next hardware release. There was no open source, the Amazon cloud was still in beta, and “everything was big, slow moving, and complicated.”
The advent of cloud computing put pressure on IT organizations to become more flexible and scalable. All eyes turned to application developers to help build the next generation of software to automate processes, move networking functionality into the cloud, and transition from a centralized to a distributed infrastructure.
To meet those requirements, an arsenal of open source tools emerged, such as Open vSwitch, which gave developers a plethora of choices. Today, software engineers like Blanco work in small teams and use new, agile methodologies with short life cycles to develop innovative applications.
Software developers are empowered today to write code and move it into production with few of the earlier roadblocks, says Frans Van Rooyen, infrastructure architect at Adobe. Deploying an application at scale used to be extremely difficult. Now, open source containerization technologies such as Docker and open source orchestration technologies like Kubernetes enable developers to wrap code in a container and scale it as needed.
Cloud Security Insights
Cloud security remains a core issue. This is true both for enterprises determining which workloads they will move to the cloud and for cloud service providers whose reputations depend on ensuring the safety of customer data. The multi-tenancy and shared control inherent in the cloud create potential security problems, says Pradeep Vincent, an architect for Oracle’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud. What if a packet gets sent to the wrong company? What if an attacker gains access to someone else’s virtual machine within the same physical server?
Oracle has deployed a three-tier system of “defense in depth,” which includes narrowing the interface to the virtualization layer, creating multiple points of routing decisions, and building multiple trust zones to isolate high-risk devices from internal systems.
Amazon’s DeSantis adds that when he built the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), he “found religion around partitioning.” Amazon has 16 distinct regions and multiple availability zones, each essentially a separate network.
On the enterprise side, Prajakta Joshi, product manager at Google, recommends that companies adopt a new way of looking at security when moving workloads to the cloud. Instead of perimeter security, enterprises need to deploy pervasive security, which means securing every aspect of the network.
The Build versus Buy Conundrum
Another common theme during the conference was the issue of whether companies should continue to buy hardware and software or build some network components in-house. Amazon “abandoned black boxes” years ago, says DeSantis, and developed its own router and switch designs. In fact, Amazon is developing its own silicon.
Naturally, the typical enterprise isn’t going to go that far. However, Rob Sherwood, network engineer at Facebook, suggests that companies need to start thinking about what they might be able to build on their own, beginning with orchestration software and moving to network management. The benefits include increased business agility, faster time to deployment, and better security.
In his closing keynote, DeSantis recalled his early years at Amazon, prior to AWS, when the network was considered “an unreliable entity.” Whenever there was an outage, everyone’s first inclination was to blame the network. But that perception is changing. “The cloud has transformed the way users and practitioners interact with the network in cool and exciting ways,” he says.
DeSantis built a network to support AWS that isn’t perfect but is “indistinguishable from perfect.” The goal was to create the network “as a service,” to get to the point where the network just works and then gets out of the way.
His parting words of wisdom: “Once you can rely on the network, exciting things can happen.”
For more on the need for enterprises to take a fresh look at networking as a software-based endeavor, visit vmware.com.This morning, Intel and Google held a little event in San Francisco that was all about Chrome OS. Intel announced the Bay Trail processor that is available in a slew of new Chromebooks coming out later this year. Intel announced that just about every PC manufacturer is putting out a new Intel-based Chromebook this year. ASUS is one of the first out of the gate with a new Bay Trail processor. the ASUS C200 has been leaking out everywhere, and features the Intel Celeron N2830 processor. It also has an 11.6-inch 1366x768 resolution display, so it's about the same display as every other Chromebook out there, still no real HD display on an Intel-based Chromebook, unless you pick up the Chromebook Pixel. It also has 2GB of RAM, 16GB of SSD storage as well as Bluetooth 4.0, a USB 3.0 port, a USB 2.0 port, HDMI jack, audio jack, and SDXC card slot.
The C200 has a Bay Trail processor, which means we'll be seeing at least 11 hours of battery life out of the C200 Chromebook. Which is great battery life, and a slight upgrade over the Haswell processors last year, which were marketed as having 7-8 hours of battery life. 11 hours is just insane for a laptop, in my opinion. Although Apple has been doing that for a while with their laptops - namely the Macbook Air.
Still no word on when exactly the ASUS C200 is going to launch, but as far as we can tell, it'll be priced at $249 and should be launching any day now. Seeing as it's official now. It'll also be available at Amazon, Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, and just about any where else that sells Chromebooks and other laptops. It'll likely hit the top 10 Amazon's best selling laptops pretty quickly as well. How many of you are interested in picking up the ASUS C200 Chromebook?Share
Entering hostile territory… expect sniper fire, so keep down low… Copy that.
Increasingly it feels that as a gamer, I’m not allowed to like Call of Duty. It’s not fashionable to do so. When writing about CoD I’m supposed to complain that each game is the same as the last one (sometimes exactly the same), and this lack of originality makes it a bad game.
But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to lift my head above the parapet (always dangerous in first person shooters) and say that no, I like Call of Duty. I mean… have you played Ghosts?
One thing the CoD series does masterfully is ramp up the stakes and the scale relentlessly. In the first Modern Warfare there was a shootout in an irradiated Chernobyl… by the time the sequel came around (after the awesome, but relatively overlooked WWII shooter, World at War) the campaign had a sequence in which you shoot your way across the White House lawn and into the Oval Office!
As Charlie Brooker said on TV at the time – it’s like being part of a Bond movie.
The latest game, Ghosts follows this tradition. The first mission is a shoot-out on a space station for heavens’ sake!
Yes – there’s no freedom of movement like you get in sandbox games, and yes, the games are a sequence of predetermined set-pieces interspersed with shooting segments… but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t exhilarating.
And sure, the plots are never terribly well thought through – but then did you watch Expendables because of it’s nuanced take on the nature of masculinity in a post-feminist world? No, you watched it because at one point the man hurts the other man in a visually interesting and amusing way.
There’s no game quite as intense as CoD – the assault on the eyes and ears of the explosions, gunshots and bullets whistling past your head. There’s a genuine sense of relief when you manage to shoot your way out of a building whilst being pursued by hundreds of enemies.
And so what if it’s the same every year? The single player campaign is also maligned for being so short – maybe seven hours play tops. If it takes the developers a year to make an exciting and polished seven hours… then what’s wrong with wanting seven more hours of it the next year?
Nobody seems to complain that every new FIFA game is just the same old game. Why don’t they make matches last 100 minutes to shake things up? What about letting players use their hands, or changing the ball to an egg shape?
And of course – on a functional level, it is not a bad game. It’s very rare for a AAA title to actually be bad? Like how a $100m blockbuster, regardless of plot, will always be a visual spectacle, Call of Duty always plays well, with fluid controls – and with no weird bugs, or half-walking-through-walls and the like. It’s always a completely solid game world.
So who’s with me? Who’s going to join me in unironically liking Call of Duty again? If the anti-CoD zealots take me down, then I want you to seek revenge – ideally in the most ludicrous, and comically violent way possible… using a space station.
Expect a full review of CoD: Ghosts and Battlefield 4 to be posted soon.
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Like this: Like Loading...Abou Diaby, together with academy players Jack Jebb, Austin Lipman, Brandon Ormonde-Ottewill and Josh Vickers, are leaving Arsenal, having reached the end of their contracts.
Diaby leaves the club after 10 years in which he made 180 first-team appearances, scoring 19 goals.
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A hugely talented midfielder, unfortunately his time at the club was interrupted by a number of serious injuries. Diaby has also represented France on 16 occasions.
Midfielder Jebb, forward Lipman, full-back Ormonde-Ottewill and goalkeeper Vickers came through the Gunners’ Hale End academy together, and went on to represent the club at under-21 level.
Jebb, Lipman and Ormonde-Ottewill have all played for England at youth level.
Arsenal would like to take this opportunity to thank Abou, Jack, Austin, Brandon and Josh for their contribution to the club and to wish them well for the future.
Watch the video on this page for a selection of Abou Diaby's Arsenal goals.On this day in history, 9th October 1514, fifty-two year-old King Louis of France married eighteen year-old Mary Tudor, sister of King Henry VIII, at Abbeville in France.
Here is a primary source account of Mary’s arrival at Abbeville and the wedding written by the Venetian ambassador:
“Then followed the Queen, under a white canopy, above and around which were the roses, supported by two porcupines. She was alone beneath it, and Monseigneur [d’Angoulême] on her left hand, but outside. She rode a white palfrey, with rich trappings, and was herself clad in very handsome stiff brocade.
Next came her litter, very beautiful, adorned with lilies; then five of the principal English ladies, very well dressed; then a carriage of brocade, on which were four ladies, followed by a second carriage with as many more ladies. Next came six ladies on horseback; and then a third carriage, of purple and crimson velvet (veluto paonazo cremesin), with four ladies; after which a crowd of ladies, some twenty in number; then 150 archers in three liveries. In this order they went to the Queen’s house, which was near that of the King. It was a sumptuous entry, and these noblemen of England have very large chains, and are otherwise in good array.
Before the entry there was a heavy shower, which drenched them all, especially the ladies. The Queen was dressed in the English fashion. In the evening, “Madame,” the King’s daughter, wife of Monseigneur d’Angoulême, went to visit her, and they gave a ball. This morning the King had preparation made for the mass in his own hall (salla), whither the Queen came, preceded by 73 (sic) English barons and gentlemen; the King doffed his bonnet, and the Queen curtseyed to the ground, whereupon his Majesty kissed her. The treasurer Robertet then presented to the King a necklace, in which were set two beautiful jewels, and his Majesty placed it round the Queen’s neck; after which mass was performed.
The two candles were held, the one by Monseigneur de Vendôme and the other by the Prince de Vendôme. After the King had kissed the “1 pax” at the mass, he kissed the Queen. At the offertory Monseigneur [d’Angoulême?] gave the money to the King, and Madame to the Queen.
The mass by the Cardinal de Bayeux being ended, he gave the consecrated wafer, one half to the King and the other to the Queen, who kissed and then swallowed it; and after making a graceful curtsey she departed, the King and Queen going each to their own apartments to dine. In the evening the Queen arrayed herself in the French fashion, and there was dancing; the whole Court banqueting, dancing, and making good cheer; and thus, at the eighth hour before midnight, the Queen was taken away from the entertainment by Madame to go and sleep with the King.
I promise you that she is very handsome, and of sufficiently tall stature (de statura honestamente granda). She appears to me rather pale, though this I believe proceeds from the tossing of the sea and from her fright. She does not seem a whit more than 16 years old, and looks very well in the French costume. She is extremely courteous and well mannered, and has come in very sumptuous array …”
Another account in the Venetian Archives gives a description of Mary:
“She is generally considered handsome and well favoured, were not her eyes and eyebrows too light; for the rest it appears to me that nature optime suplevit: she is slight, rather than defective from corpulence, and conducts herself with so much grace, and has such good manners, that for her age of 18 years – and she does not look more – she is a paradise.”
She was obviously a beautiful woman.
You can find out more about Mary Tudor in my article Princess Mary Tudor.
Were the Boleyn sisters at this wedding? Well, Mary Boleyn would have been, as she had been appointed to serve Mary Tudor and would have travelled over from England with her, but Anne Boleyn may have missed the wedding. We know that Thomas Boleyn wrote to Margaret of Austria on 14th August 1514 to recall Anne from her court because she had been chosen to serve Mary Tudor in France, but it is unclear when and where Anne caught up with the royal party. You can read more about Anne Boleyn’s time abroad in the following articles:
Sources
Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 2: 1509-1519, 508
Ibid., 511
Image: Hever Castle tapestry depicting the marriage between Louis XII and Mary Tudor, photo by Tim Ridgway.
Categories: Early Life, Tudor CharactersIt’s no secret that President Donald J. Trump is a fan of fast food, but his favourite McDonald’s dinner order has now been revealed, and honestly, this man’s on a one-way train to heart-attack station.
It comes from a revealing new book about the presidential campaign, from Trump’s former campaign manager and deputy campaign manager.
And his favourite junk food to hoof up at Macca’s? Two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fishes, and a chocolate milkshake. That amounts to just over 10,000 kilojoules in one meal. The average adult needs around 8,700 kilojoules per day.
The authors – Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie – said meals onboard the presidential campaign plane were mostly total junk.
“On |
became more concrete, and her mind was restored even more. As she became more powerful, whatever thing that Ruby saw actually transformed into her mother. The joy on her face of seeing the one who she had lost so long ago was instantly clear.
Naze didn't care for that, though. He readied himself to leave, his initial goal having been accomplished. He would later talk to his new employee about arrangements for her body, but he would allow her time with her daughters, and her husband, first.A driver who used wooden logs and chicken wire to reinforce his vehicle’s suspension was ticketed and had his car impounded by police following a traffic stop in west Quebec.
The MRC des Collines police said they pulled the 1999 Toyota Tercel over on Sunday at about 10:45 p.m. on route du Carrefour in Val-des-Monts after noticing the car didn’t have working brake lights.
After pulling the car over, they discovered that the 28-year-old driver had no proof of insurance and an open beer in the front seat, police said.
A closer inspection of the car also revealed that three of the four tires showed signs of advanced wear (including no tread in some spots), it was missing its windshield wipers and had a rear suspension held in place by the wooden logs.
“It was basically keeping the vehicle up,” said Sgt. Martin Fournel.
After administering a sobriety test, which the driver passed, police impounded the car so it could undergo a mechanical inspection. In addition to the towing bill, the driver was also given a $481 ticket for open alcohol. He will also be ticketed for various safety infractions and failing to have insurance documents.
aseymour@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/andrew_seymourA Newfoundland man has been arrested in Fort McMurray for allegedly assaulting a police officer.
On Thursday Wood Buffalo police responded to reports of a drunk man at the Athabasca Lodge who refused to leave.
Scott Thomas Lake, 37, of Newfoundland was confronted by an officer wielding a taser who asked Lake to get on the ground.
Video of the event shows Lake swearing and demanding the officer to shoot him while protecting himself with a bag. The officer manages to knock the bag out of Lake’s hand but Lake picks up another bag, which the officer also manages to knock away.
When Lake goes for another bag, the officer shoots Lake with the taser and drops him to the ground, ending the standoff.
WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS STRONG LANGAUAGE
Lake is charged with assaulting a police officer, obstruction of a police officer, uttering threats and mischief under $5,000.
He is scheduled to appear in Fort McMurray Provincial Court on June 21.‘The noblest figure for us was a soldier in full kit covered in the sacred mud of Flanders, or the Somme. But on the other side of the line the scenic artist had raised, like a canopy, acres of picturesque landscape.’
Strange words from Solomon J. Solomon (1860–1927) in 1921, a London portrait artist who made a living in World War 1 painting posthumous portraits of husbands and sons who had been killed in action. He is not perhaps the first person one might expect to have given a Discourse at the Royal Institution (from the abstract of which these words were taken) but he was also an expert in camouflage.
Solomon first attracted military attention by his letter to The Times of 27th January 1915. A few sentences will serve to convey its flavour.
‘Sir — The protection afforded animate creatures by Nature’s gift of colour assimilation to their environment might provide a lesson to those who equip an army; seeing that invisibility is an essential in modern strategy…
‘The artillery officer is covering his gun with grey tarpaulin, but with a team of six or eight horses in front of it, the airman is not likely to mistake it for a butcher’s cart. The horses have merely to be covered with a thin grey-green stuff to make them equally inconspicuous. Wagons are a leaden grey, unlike anything in nature; a warm dust colour would be more harmonious…
‘The great thing, next to protective colouring, is breaking up the outline…’
After his letter appeared he was sent off to visit French camoufleurs (also artists) in the Pas de Calais and then asked to help set up a military ‘Special Works Park’ in Kensington Gardens, a short stroll from his home. That was the cover name for a place to teach the art of camouflage. In the patch of ground between the Long Water and the West Carriage Drive trenches were dug. Dugouts, guns, hangars and gas emplacements could be experimentally draped with various coverings in benign surroundings with a view to concealing the same along the front line.
A British Mark I tank draped with the Solomon camouflage scheme
Being a London geek, when I first heard about Solomon, I walked across this grass and studied Google Earth images to see if any outline remained, but there were none. Recently I came across the Discourse Solomon gave on the subject of camouflage in 1921 and it renewed my interest. But here was an odd thing. His Discourse was not about British camouflage. I was surprised to find that it focused on the German efforts.
I also tried the British Library for more detail about his life and the Special Works Park. I did not find what I hoped for, but I found a more exciting story, also about camouflage, and suddenly I understood the context of Solomon’s 1921 Discourse. In 2014 it is not unknown for an Ri lecturer to discourse on the subject of a forthcoming book, and so it was in 1921. Solomon had a book coming out: Strategic Camouflage, his revelation of a breath taking wartime secret as its subject.
In 1918 he came to view his own puny efforts in the context of, he believed, a colossal German triumph of deception. As Solomon saw it, his own successes in concealing a gun here or an observation post there were merely tacticaldeceptions, designed to protect individual targets from being shelled. The Germans, he argued practiced strategic deception. That is, they had successfully concealed a massive build-up of men and material. He wanted to warn the nation before it was surprised by this technique in the next war.
In World War 2 photographic intelligence was a decisive asset available to the Allies, of much the same importance as Bletchley Park. For example, it gave vital information about the V1 and V2 secret weapons. But photography also played a part in World War 1. Solomon remarks that the ‘extraordinary capacity’ of the camera was not appreciated until a camera was salvaged from a wrecked German plane and the film was developed. Observers and even pigeons were sent aloft with cameras. Solomon came into possession of some photographs of St Pierre Capelle and Sparappehoek taken by his cousin from a kite balloon. He had just bought a magic lantern projector, but found it disappointing. But what he did with his new bright light was to examine in minute detail the photographs he had been given. What he saw was that the shadows were wrong, that fields looked odd for the time of year, and that the landscape had inconsistencies and imperfections as if it was an imperfectly executed sketch.
As an artist, he understood how colour and shade can detach a feature in a flat painting from its background. In a war, your shadow could kill you. When draping nets over an object it was important to soften the angles. The nets should not just be pegged around the base of the object, they should slope gently away.
He was told that no traffic had ever been observed on the road from St Pierre Capelle to Nieuport despite it being the only road to the front from Bruges. Of course movements at night would go undetected, but with his analysis and the erratic shadows of the trees it was clear that lengths of road had been covered with painted nets to conceal day time activity. The more he looked the more he saw that the entire landscape was an elaborate hoax. Real railways were covered and decoy lines were painted. A few trucks were scattered in sidings, but these were just theatrical props on top of a busy railhead. He saw that large farm houses cast no shadows. It meant that huge canopies of netting and tarred paper had been raised to the level of the eaves and that the farm house was perhaps surrounded by a mass of invisible infantry and weapons. All that was visible was a row of haystacks in a field, the shadows, staying fixed as the sun traced its arc. In short, the Germans had been able to hide a whole army ahead of a major advance, Ludendorff’s spring offensive of 1918.
If we look now at his book, the black and white photos are grainy, the diagrams fuzzy and his captions are frustratingly terse and ambiguous. It has not been easy to select useful illustrations for this blog. Was Solomon deluded? He was not generally believed. ‘Alas, I was powerless — and could only wring my hands!’ he wrote.
A railway line at St Pierre Capelle runs nearly horizontally across the picture and a few trucks stand as bold rectangles on the tracks. It was Solomon’s contention that these trucks were flimsy dummies and sat on top of the real marshalling yard which was covered (from Strategic Camouflage)
Illustration of the deception (from Strategic Camouflage)
The yellow rectangle draws attention to one of the features that Solomon saw. We see inside it a couple of fields and a farmyard with a tram line running diagonally across the field before dipping down vertically like a bold white brush stroke. Solomon saw something quite different. This rectangle is roughly divided in half by a dark shadow which Solomon contended was really the summit of a very large roof or covering sloping away upwards towards the long side of the outline, and beneath which men or equipment could be concealed. The field and the tram line are a sham. The tram line, particularly, ends unconvincingly and was intended to take the eye away from the field. The vertical line is just a fold in the photograph.
The Spring Offensive was real enough and involved a surprise attack by hundreds of thousands of German troops withdrawn from the Russian Front. It is a cliché of war that history is afterwards written by the victors. So it is that we do not hear at length of a German triumph of strategic deception. But Solomon received anecdotal evidence of net canopies being found intact after a German retreat, and some German writings gave them mention. So, perhaps he was right.After receiving a fair amount of criticism for content droughts with the Wii U, Nintendo has made sure that the Switch wouldn’t follow that same path. Each month has essentially brought a high-quality release to the new system after its launch back in March from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, to Splatoon 2. Prior to its release, most people assumed Super Mario Odyssey was being positioned as Nintendo’s most important IP this year. As it turns out, the game is apparently selling much faster than people assumed.
In its six month financial report to investors, Nintendo revealed that Super Mario Odyssey has already sold more than two million copies in just three days since launch. Nintendo estimates that about 7 million Switch consoles have been sold globally, making the three-day numbers for the latest Mario game even more impressive. Ultimately, Nintendo is hoping that the game will eventually be seen as an evergreen title, showing solid sales longevity beyond the holiday market period.
Nintendo notes that part of the success likely stems from both the high review scores the game has managed to accrue last week, which directly led to a lot of positive buzz from players over social media sites. The game also managed to score many awards from media outlets at various tradeshows like E3 and Gamescom this year as well, helping fans perceptions of the title as well. With the holiday season fast approaching, Nintendo is bracing for another high demand season for not only this game, but the console itself by once again increasing production.
Though Super Mario Odyssey has already received its fair share of perfect scores, Nintendo took a slight risk with the latest title in its flagship franchise. The lives mechanic, which essentially dictated how many deaths a player could suffer before seeing a game over screen has been completely removed from Odyssey. While many would argue that limited lives added a sense of challenge, Nintendo felt that this system didn’t make as much sense as it has in the past due to the broad, exploration-focused gameplay rather than tight and focused levels found in previous games.
Super Mario Odyssey is available now on Nintendo Switch.
Source: Nintendo Financial Results BriefingThe coverage has been wide, the tone circumspect, the voices diverse as the 70th year since the partition of the Indian subcontinent has been marked across media and cultural institutions in the UK.
People I know from all generations and backgrounds have watched, read and listened; then, aghast, confessed that they had only basic prior knowledge of the brutal politics that caused one of the biggest migrations in human history, that saw the rape of thousands, the deaths and displacement of millions, the division of entire families, with repercussions still felt today.
I already knew how little place these devastating events have in our mainstream national consciousness – but this month brought it home.
My earliest memory of seeing partition and Indian independence discussed in the British media was in 1997, when India and Pakistan turned 50. A picture of Gandhi was on the front page of the Independent newspaper. I looked closer – it wasn’t Gandhi. It was Ben Kingsley as Gandhi from the film by Richard Attenborough, only the caption on the picture was wrong.
My parents were first-generation Indian immigrants; I grew up with the usual level of nostalgia, cultural protectionism and pride, balanced with the determination to excel at integration(without wearing denim, listening to Madonna or ever, ever smoking a cigarette). There was no clinging to notions of “Mother India”. But that newspaper error was piercing. Back then, I aspired to become a journalist, and suddenly the profession seemed tarnished. This felt carelessly offensive, even personal. In a strange reversal, I felt ashamed for Indians in Britain; embarrassed that a revered figure such as Gandhi could be usurped in a national newspaper by the actor who played him in a British film.
An apology was printed: “Sorry ’bout that”. It only made things worse. That apostrophe was a shrug, a bantering wink, a “nothing to get upset about, old chap”. In those words, I suddenly understood what the dividing line of “unconscious bias” – known, in its more ugly form, as institutional racism – looks like on the page, and what side of it I was being put on. When I finally did do a hapless week of unpaid work experience there, I remember zero other faces of colour on the whole editorial floor.
Before that, there had been 1974’s Plain Tales from the Raj series, which offered “a panorama of British India recorded by some of those who lived in it” on Radio 4. In 1987, when India and Pakistan turned 30, journalist Zareer Masani published a book from the research on his follow-up series, Indian Tales of the Raj. “Why are the British so obsessed with the Raj?” asked his Indian interviewees, who included industrialist Ratan Tata. That first generation didn’t want to look back, preferring to bury old trauma and humiliation. In the UK, their silence conveniently tallied with a mainstream white culture used to thinking about the Raj, at best in a cavalier “sorry ’bout that (but we did give you the trains)” kind of way; and at worst as a golden age for Britain.
Still, in 1997, I thought we were a long way from the days of Enoch Powell’s 1968 so-called “rivers of blood” speech, made as my parents arrived here to study and eventually to settle. To many like them, that speech hit deeply: Peter Brooke, researching Powell’s personal archive in 2001 notes that its language is rooted in ideas from Powell’s time working in Indian military intelligence between 1943-46. The rivers of actual blood spilled during Partition, with its British-as-innocent-bystander narrative, perhaps fuelled his racialist ideology.
The resurgence of Powell’s rhetoric and sentiments has had devastating effects on this country, stoking racial fears in white communities, reigniting insecurities in many first-generation Asian immigrants, undermining the confidence of those “who were born here”, even as in public we laugh off nonsensical calls that we should “go home”. I can’t help but wonder if greater representation of people of colour in schools, cultural institutions, media and arts industries, and better knowledge of empire and partition, imparted regularly to all via those same modes (in the way that the British glories, losses, heartbreaks and triumphs of the second world war are) might have helped to halt the pernicious re-use of Powell’s ideology. A shaming thought again – though this time I know the shame is not mine.
One of the most telling segments I heard this summer was on Woman’s Hour. Gul, an immigrant, and her second-generation daughter, Urvashi, talked about their relationship with Gul’s former home: Pakistan. One wanted to forget, the other longed to know it – one was so glad for Britain’s opportunities, the other wondered if she would have been happier there: being born and growing up in Britain as a person of colour, she never felt secure. That must have been difficult for her mother to hear, but it’s a feeling that too many young people of colour have growing up in the UK. It’s real source is not only in the silences at home, but the silences in our society.
Things are changing. In public life, this year it seems a new generation are making an English, sometimes regional-accented, noise about lack of diversity, confident enough to call out institutional racism in public. They came of age in the late 1980s and 1990s. Their history is refugee, their origins are immigrant. The gap in mainstream knowledge of how they came to be here is being filled, and by them. In some quarters, it seems they are being heard. But it’s an uphill struggle: we still have Raj-era nostalgia on our screens, a dearth of BAME role models in teaching, from primary to professorial level, at senior levels of publishing, arts and education administration and in the media. Three or four people of colour (if that) per organisation remain the exception, not the rule.
By the centenary of partition in 30 years’ time, I want to feel honour-bound and yet yawningly familiar with the Indian “lest we forget” archive footage being rolled out again, the recorded memories of those who lived through partition, even while being moved and deeply respecting their sacrifice. To see BAME names in the credits of all programmes, not just on BAME themes, and not feel a weird sense of pride in a person I’ve never met because they are from a minority community. I want to have people of all backgrounds roll their eyes, not in amazement, but because they already know more about the events than the radio is telling them.
Everyone in this country is a postcolonial subject, bound by a shared history, beyond religious or racial communalism. That’s what the prolific and diverse partition coverage this year has begun to admit into our national conversation – and it is way overdue.
Preti Taneja’s debut novel We That Are Young is published this month by Galley Beggar PressAn insecticide is a pesticide used against insects in all development forms. They include ovicides and larvicides used against the eggs and larvae of insects. Insecticides are widely used in agriculture, household and even in medicine. Insecticides are very widely used in agriculture, as well as in people's dwellings and workplaces. The use of insecticides is one of the major factors behind the increase in agricultural productivity in the 20th century. Because insecticides have the potential to significantly alter ecosystems and may be concentrated through the food chain, it is necessary to balance agricultural needs with safety concerns when using them. Classes of agricultural insecticides The classification of insecticides is done in several different ways: The systematic insecticides which are incorporated into the plants and the insects take up the insecticide while feeding on the plants. The contact insecticides which take action when they are brought into direct contact with the insect by aerosol distribution. The natural insecticides, such as nicotine and pyrethrum, made by plants as defence against insects. In contrast to the inorganic insecticides like arsenates copper- and fluorine compounds, which are now seldom used, and the organic insecticides which now form the biggest group. The point of action is also a good way of sorting the insecticides. The neurotocic insecticides, the acetylcholinesterase blocking and moulting blockers. The neurotoxic and coleterinas blocker are difficult because they are also toxic for other organisms. Where as the skinning blockers and the other insecticides which take action only in metabolism of insects are less likely to be highly toxic on mammals. The contribution as aerosol (liquid or solid) is mostly used for contact insecticides, as solid for the uptake by the plant roots is preferred for systematic insecticides and fumigation with phosphine or hydrogen cyanide is mostly used for sensitive products after the harvest. [edit] Classes of insecticides, a short history A series of classes of insecticides have existed, as time progressed one class has largely replaced the one before it. These trends in the classes of compounds in some ways has mirrored the development of chemical warfare agents. Heavy metals, eg lead, mercury, arsenic and plant toxins such as nicotine have been used for many years. Various plants have been used as folk insectides for centuries, including tobacco and pyrethrum. Chlorine based agents, with the rise of the modern chemical industry it was possible for form organochlorides. The substances used in chemical warfare tend to be more potent electrophiles than those used as insecticides. For instance mustard gas (sulfur mustard, HD) is a potent alklating agent which uses neighbouring group participation of the sulfur to make the alkyl chloride a stronger electrophile. While a typical insecticide such as DDT or lindane does not depend on an electrophile/nucleophile reaction to kill the insect. It is likely that the chlorine is used to tune the lipophilicity of the compound, and to alter the shape and electrostatic effects involved in the interactions of the insecticide and the biomolecules in the target organism. For insatnce DDT works by opening the sodium channels in the nerve cells of the insect. The next large class was the organophosphates, both the insecticides and the chemical warfare agents (such as sarin, tabun, soman and VX) work in the same way. All these compounds bind to the neurotransmitter acetylcholinesterase and other cholinesterases. This results in disruption of nervous impulses, killing the insect or interfering with its ability to carry on normal functions. Recent efforts to reduce broad spectrum toxins added to the environment have brought biological insecticides back into vogue. An example is the development and increase in use of Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterial disease of Lepidopterans and some other insects. It is used as a larvicide against a wide variety of caterpillars. Because it has little effect on other organisms, it is considered more environmentally friendly than synthetic pesticides. [edit] Environmental effects One of the bigger drivers in the development of new insecticides has been the desire to replace toxic and irksome insecticides. The notorious DDT was introduced as a safer alternative to the lead and arsenic compounds which had been used before. It is the case that when used under the correct conditions that almost any chemical substance is'safe', but when used under the wrong conditions even the'safest'substance can be a threat to life, limb and/or the environment. Some insecticides have been banned due to the fact that they are persistent toxins which have adverse effects on animals and/or humans. A classic example which is often quoted is that DDT is an example of a widely used (and maybe misused) pesticide. One of the better known impacts of DDT is to reduce the thickness of the egg shells on predatory birds. The shells sometimes become too thin to be viable, causing reductions in bird populations. This occurs with DDT and a number of related compounds due to the process of bioaccumulation, wherein the chemical, due to its stability and fat solubility, accumulates in organisms fat. Also, DDT may biomagnify which causes progressively higher concentrations in the body fat of animals farther up the food chain. The near-worldwide ban on agricultural use of DDT and related chemicals has allowed some of these birds--such as the peregrine falcon--to recover in recent years. The longlived organochlorine Dieldrin, if used with care, can prevent termites from destroying telephone cables, but it is clearly not suitable for aerial spraying to control insects in a field close to a school playground. While the overuse of DDT lead to a reduction in its use, opponents of traditional environmentalism often cite it as an example of environmentalism going too far and interfering with malaria eradication, going so far as to estimate the cost of human lives resulting from the DDT ban; for instance the novelist Michael Crichton states in his bestselling book, State of Fear: "Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler." This accusation, while sensational, is erroneous, as no ban exists on the use of DDT for eradication of malaria or any other insect borne disease.[1] Groups fighting malaria have praised the ban on agricultural use of DDT, since it reduces the rate with which mosquitoes become resistant to DDT, which is the main reason it is not used more often to fight malaria: "The outcome of the treaty is arguably better than the status quo going into the negotiations over two years ago. For the first time, there is now an insecticide which is restricted to vector control only, meaning that the selection of resistant mosquitoes will be slower than before." [2]. In fact, according to Agricultural production and malaria resurgence in Central America and India, Chapin, Georgeanne & Robert Wasserstrom, Nature, Vol. 293, 1981, page 183), the lives actually saved due to banning agricultural use of DDT can be estimated: "Correlating the use of DDT in El Salvador with renewed malaria transmission, it can be estimated that at current rates each kilo of insecticide added to the environment will generate 105 new cases of malaria." Lindane and other insecticides have had to be used as an alternative to DDT because the population of insects have become resistant to DDT. Some of the newer insecticides are more specific in their actions and are designed to break down into non-toxic components within a few days of application. [edit] Application methods Insect repellent, commonly referred to as "bug spray", comes in a plastic bottle or aerosol can. Applied to clothing, arms, legs, and other extremities, the use of this pesticide will tend to ward off nearby insects. This is not an insecticide. Insecticide used for killing pests—most often insects, and arachnids—primarily comes in an aerosol can, and is sprayed into the air or nest as a means of killing the animal. Fly sprays will kill house flies, blowflies, ants, cockroaches and other insects and also spiders. Active ingredients of many household insecticides include permethrin and tetramethrin, which act on the nervous system of insects and arachnids. Bug spray should be used in well ventilated areas only, as the chemicals contained in the aerosol and pesticide can be harmful or deadly to humans. [edit] Individual insecticides [edit] Chlorinated Main article: Category:Organochloride insecticides Several are now banned because of their ecological persistence: Aldrin Chlordane Dieldrin DDT Endrin Heptachlor Lindane Methoxychlor [edit] Organophosphorus Main article: Organophosphate Main article: Insecticide Chemically similar to Nerve agents Diazinon Malathion Parathion [edit] Plant toxin derived Derris (rotenone) Pyrethrum Neem (Azadirachtin) Nicotine Caffeine. thanks!!In 2010 Chandoo wrote a post about options to perform a VLookup to the left of the Reference Column
Mike one of Chandoo.org’s astute readers had noticed a post by DaddyLongLegs over at the Excel Forum which describes a technique for using VLookup to look to the left of your reference column. Mike made a comment to the effect at Mike’s Comment
Today at Formula Forensics we have a look at this technique and see why it works as well as looking at some extensions using the same idea.
As always at Formula Forensics you can follow along with a sample file here: Download 97-2013
VLOOKUP
Lets start with understanding what the Excel VLookup() function does.
VLookup uses the syntax:
So VLookup looks up a Lookup_Value in the first Column of the Table_Array and returns a matching value from the same position from another column in position Col_Index_No of the Table_Array.
Of note here is that the Table_Array is specified for the lookup area, not a Range.
A Table_Array can be a Range as specified in the Syntax above eg: A2:D8 or it can be a Named Formula or it can be a formula that returns a Range as a solution.
We can use this to trick Excel into accepting an Array which has Column 1 to the right of Column 2. Effectively meaning we are returning a value from the left of Column 1.
Mike’s Solution
Lets look at Chandoo’s first Question: Which person made sales = 1088?
Mike supplied the solution:
=VLOOKUP(1088,CHOOSE({2,1},$B$5:$B$17,$D$5:$D$17),2,0)
=John
Which we can manually see is correct and the answer is in fact to the left of the Lookup value of 1088.
Mikes formula: =VLOOKUP(1088, CHOOSE({2,1}, $B$5:$B$17, $D$5:$D$17), 2, 0)
Is a standard VLookup with:
Lookup_Value: 1088
Table_Array: CHOOSE({2,1}, $B$5:$B$17, $D$5:$D$17)
Col_Index_No: 2
Range_Lookup: 0
So we can read this as lookup the value 1088 in Column 1 of the Table_Array and return the equivalent value from Column 2 of the Table_Array.
But what’s this Table_Array of: CHOOSE({2,1}, $B$5:$B$17, $D$5:$D$17) doing?
In a Blank cell say I19 enter: =CHOOSE({2,1}, $B$5:$B$17, $D$5:$D$17) press F9 not Enter
Excel responds with: ={1592,”Joseph”;1088,”John”;1680,”Josh”;2133,”Jamie”;1610,”Jackie”;1540,”Johnson”;1316,”Jonathan”;1799,”Jagjit”;1624,”Jairam”;726,”Jessy”;2277,”Javed”;714,”Jimmy”;2682,”Juno”}
We can see this is an array of the elements from Column B and Column D
The 1592 is the first value in Column D, and Joseph is the first value in Column B
Then 1088 is the second value in Column D and John is the second value in Column B
Then 1680 is the third value in Column D and Josh is the third value in Column B, etc
You can see that Excel uses the “,” to separate entries in different columns in the same row and then uses “;” to separate the different rows
So the Formula =CHOOSE({2,1}, $B$5:$B$17, $D$5:$D$17)
Has setup an array where Column 1 is Range D5:D17 and Column 2 is Range B5:B17
Back to VLookup
VLookup looks up the Lookup_Value from Column 1 of the Table array in this case we saw above that this is the Range: $D$5:$D$17
Vlookup finds the position of the Lookup value, 1088, in our case is position No 2. And the goes to Column 2, which is $B$5:$B$17 and returns the value from position 2 which is John.
Why has Mike Used {2,1}?
Why has Mike Used {2,1}?
As it turns out it doesn’t matter what order the array elements are listed as long as the Ranges listed in the Choose function match the array order
If Mike had used {1,2} instead he would be still able to rearrange the formula to make it work
=VLOOKUP(1088,CHOOSE({1,2},$D$5:$D$17, $B$5:$B$17),2,0)
Noting that Choose position 1 is still D5:D17 and Choose position 2 is still B5:B17
You can check that out for yourself at Cell I21
Extending this Technique
You can add any number of ranges of data to the Vlookup function by simply extending the Choose Function, ensuring that the Choose Array ranges matches the Ranges order in the Choose function.
So the following function will allow us to look up a value from Column D (Column 1) and return values from either Column B or C (Columns 2 & 3 respectively) by simply changing the Column_Index_No 3
=VLOOKUP(1088,CHOOSE({1,2,3},$D$5:$D$17,$B$5:$B$17,$C5:C17),3,0)
You can see here that Both Lookup Columns are to the left of the Lookup Column.
There are a number of such samples in the Extension Questions and Solutions section in the example file.
Download
You can download a copy of the above file and follow along, Download Here – Excel 97-2013.
Formula Forensics “The Series”
This is the 28th post in the Formula Forensics series.
You can learn more about how to pull Excel Formulas apart in the following posts: Formula Forensic Series
Formula Forensics Needs Your Help
I need more ideas for future Formula Forensics posts and so I need your help.
If you have a neat formula that you would like to share like above, try putting pen to paper and draft up a Post like above or;
If you have a formula that you would like explained, but don’t want to write a post, send it to Hui or Chandoo.
Hello Awesome... My name is Chandoo. Thanks for dropping by. My mission is to make you awesome in Excel & your work. I live in Wellington, New Zealand. When I am not F9ing my formulas, I cycle, cook or play lego with my kids. Know more about me. I hope you enjoyed this article. Visit Excel for Beginner or Advanced Excel pages to learn more or join my online video class to master Excel. Thank you and see you around.
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Related articles:Image caption The opposition has staged major protests to demand the assembly's dissolution
Tunisia's constituent assembly has been suspended until the Islamist-led government and secular opposition begin talks to resolve a political crisis.
The speaker of the assembly said work on a new constitution and electoral law would resume once "dialogue commences".
There have been daily protests calling for the body to be dissolved since one of its members was assassinated.
Mohamed Brahmi was shot on 25 July, almost six months after fellow leftist politician Chokri Belaid was killed.
About 60 members of the National Constituent Assembly (ANC) withdrew in protest at the killings and organised a sit-in outside its headquarters in the capital, Tunis.
Later on Tuesday, tens of thousands of people participated in a protest in central Tunis called by the opposition to demand the assembly's dissolution and the government to resign, and to mark the six-month anniversary of the assassination of Chokri Belaid.
The powerful Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) called on its 600,000 members to join the rally.
'Hurry'
On Tuesday morning, the ANC was convened despite the absences. An empty chair where Mr Brahmi used to sit was draped in a Tunisian flag and covered in flowers and a picture of him.
The people are fed up with this situation Mustapha Ben Jaafar, Speaker, National Constituent Assembly
Prime Minister Ali Larayedh urged the assembly to "hurry and finish the constitution quickly" so that fresh elections could be held in December. The body has already gone eight months beyond its promised deadline.
However, on Tuesday evening ANC Speaker Mustapha Ben Jaafar announced on television that it would "suspend its work until dialogue commences, in the service of Tunisia".
Mr Ben Jaafar, whose Ettakatol party is part of the cabinet, condemned the failure of politicians to resolve the political crisis.
"Despite the gravity of the situation and instead of working towards unity, party leaders have unfortunately gone in the opposite direction - towards division," he said. "The people are fed up with this situation and can no longer tolerate this wait."
Mr Larayedh has refused to step down and appealed for "national unity".
The political unrest is the worst seen in Tunisia since President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown by a popular uprising in January 2011.
In a separate development on Tuesday, police shot dead an Islamist militant in the Tunis suburb of Rawad, interior ministry officials said.The most fuel efficient car in the world: Volkswagen XL1 does 300 MILES to the gallon (and it looks cool too)
Engineers in Germany used new construction techniques and a hybrid drive-train to create the lightweight, fuel efficient car
Volkswagen XL1 emits 24 g/km of carbon dioxide and is as large as a Polo but as low and streamlined as a Lamborghini
Only 250 of the cars have been made, they are being sold for €111,000 (£92,490) - and there is no right-hand-drive version available
Car manufacturers have long sought to create incredibly efficient cars to save motorists money and help the environment.
And now engineers at Volkswagen are selling what they claim is the world’s most fuel efficient production car, which can do a staggering 313 miles per gallon.
The Volkswagen XL1 ‘super efficient vehicle’ features new construction techniques, an |
protest Read more
The correspondence indicated he would not receive such a waiver. There was no explanation in the correspondence for why Turkey detained Khateeb.
The move comes amid growing anger among the global film-making community at Donald Trump’s policies.
At a rally against the travel ban in Beverly Hills on Friday, Oscar-winning actor Jodie Foster told demonstrators it was “our time to resist”.
The Silence Of The Lambs star, who was joined by fellow actors Michael J Fox and Keegan-Michael Key, said: “I’m not somebody who feels very comfortable using my public face for activism. This year is a very different year and it’s time to show up.
“We know the first attack on democracy is an assault on free expression and civil liberties and this relentless war on truth.
“It’s our time to show up and demand answers. It’s our time to tell our elected officials to do their job.
“We will not tolerate chaos, ineptitude and war-mongering.”
The Associated Press and Press Association contributed to this reportNBC’s Chuck Todd scored a huge interview with President Obama Thursday and opened things by immediately drilling down on the president’s relentlessly repeated lie that under ObamaCare you can keep your current insurance plan if you like it. The full interview is even more impressive than the clips that have been going around. Even after he elicits a “sorry” from Obama, Todd keeps after the point for almost ten minutes.
Ultimately, though, Todd came away with the impression that Obama doesn’t believe he lied. And Todd is probably right, which is a little unnerving.
During his own interview on the Hugh Hewitt show Friday with guest host Carol Platt Liebau, Todd said, “You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get.” Here is Todd’s entire quote:
You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get. I mean, I think that that’s, he’s taken issue with that before with folks off the record, and I got it’s a sensitive issue, felt like he did not sit there and say he intentionally lied. He said that he wanted to, he thought he was going to be able to keep this promise. I thought what was revealing in that answer, when I asked him that direct question about this, was this a political lie that you started to believe it, was he talked about well, you know, it turns out we had trouble in crafting the law.
If Obama has convinced himself he didn’t lie, that borders on pathological. We now know that as far back as 2010 the president knew eight to nine million people would lose their health insurance. We have him on video admitting to that:
The 8 to 9 million people you refer to that might have to change their coverage — keep in mind out of the 300 million Americans that we are talking about — would be folks who the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, estimates would find the deal in the exchange better. Would be a better deal. So, yes, they would change coverage because they got more choice and competition.
The key phrase is Obama admitting that those 8 or 9 million “might have to change their coverage.” And that video is the smoking gun equivalent of finding video of President George W. Bush admitting he knew all along that Iraq had no WMD.
And yet, straight through the 2012 election, Obama continued his campaign to reassure the American people that they could keep their insurance. Period.
—
—
Obama’s brazen and reckless lying is bad enough. But if Todd is correct (and I think he is) that Obama doesn’t believe or understand that he lied, that means it can and will happen again.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNCGurgaon, Haryana (CNN) In a hotel in the satellite city of Gurgaon, close to the Indian capital Delhi, 16 would-be beauty queens from across India helped to make history Sunday when they competed in the country's first ever transgender beauty pageant.
Miss Transqueen India aimed to celebrate gender fluidity and enhance the profile of India's trans community, with the winner being presented with an opportunity to represent India at the International Queen pageant in Thailand in March 2018.
Like other pageants, the event featured plenty of glitter and rhinestones, but unlike other pageants, Miss Transqueen India made a point of declaring all the participants "winners," in recognition of their struggle for acceptance and recognition.
In 2014, India's supreme court legally gave transgender people the right to identify as a third gender. But while the law was hailed as a victory by activists, many in the trans community continue to face discrimination in everyday life.
Sunday's event was overseen by an 11-person judging panel, consisting of Ms. Transsexual Australia and long-time transgender activist Gauri Sawant, who after lengthy deliberation, declared 26-year-old Kolkata-based Nitasha Biswas as India's very first "Trans Queen."
Read MoreWhite House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday contradicted statements that President Donald Trump and he himself made on a recent executive order that bans travel from 7 Muslim-majority countries.
“It’s not a Muslim ban. It’s not a travel ban. It’s a vetting system,” Spicer said.
Trump’s executive order bans the entry into the United States of citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations for the next 90 days while the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department review their visa screening standards. The nations are Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.
Spicer accused the media of misidentifying the executive order as a “ban”.
“When we use the word ‘travel ban,’ it misrepresents what it is,” said Spicer. However, Spicer referred to the executive order as “a ban” on Sunday in an appearance on This Week on ABC News.
“It’s a 90-day ban to ensure that we have further vetting restrictions so that we know who is coming to this country,” said Spicer. A copy of Spicer’s use of the term could be found on the official White House website as of publication.
Trump has referred to his executive order as a ban on multiple occasions. He defended the ban against global criticism on Sunday from the Oval Office. “It’s not a Muslim ban, but we were totally prepared. It’s working out very nicely,” said Trump. “We’ll have a very, very strict ban and we will have extreme vetting, which we should have had in this country for many years.”
Trump also dismissed criticism that many areas of the federal government and other nations didn’t receive proper advance notice of the ban.
If the ban were announced with a one week notice, the “bad” would rush into our country during that week. A lot of bad “dudes” out there! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 30, 2017
Widespread criticism of Trump’s controversial move on immigration reached a head on Monday evening when acting Attorney General Sally Yates announced the Department of Justice would not defend it in court. Yates was promptly fired by the Trump White House and replaced by Dana Boente, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Boente has instructed DOJ lawyers to defend the lawful orders of the president.
Trump on Monday night also replaced the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Daniel Ragsdale, with Thomas Homan, the head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operation.
According to Homan’s bio, he led “ICE’s efforts to identify, arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens, including those who present a danger to national security or are a risk to public safety, as well as those who enter the United States illegally or otherwise undermine the integrity of our immigration laws and our border control efforts.”Central Australia's Pine Gap spy base played a key role in the United States' controversial drone strikes involving the ''targeted killing'' of al-Qaeda and Taliban chiefs, Fairfax Media can reveal.
Former personnel at the Australian-American base have described the facility's success in locating and tracking al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders - and other insurgent activity in Afghanistan and Pakistan - as ''outstanding''.
Crucial: Officials have said that "the US will never fight another war in the eastern hemisphere without the direct involvement of Pine Gap".
A Fairfax Media investigation has now confirmed a primary function of the top-secret signals intelligence base near Alice Springs is to track the precise ''geolocation'' of radio signals, including those of hand-held radios and mobile phones, in the eastern hemisphere, from the Middle East across Asia to China, North Korea and the Russian far east.
This information has been used to identify the location of terrorist suspects, which is then fed into the United States drone strike program and other military operations.Toilet Radio slams that sickness with Will Smith of Artificial Brain Share:
On this electrifying episode of Toilet Radio, we’re talking with Will Smith of one of our favorite new bands, Artificial Brain. Join as Will describes the sci fi dystopian fiction that inspired their new record, shares some of his favorite slam recommendations, discusses his space-age performance goggles, and how it feels to have your extreme metal band be featured on a CBS primetime drama. Also on this episode, Joe and 365 dissect the plot of 2004 horror/comedy film Satan’s Little Helper as well as brilliant new horror films Get Out and The Void.
AS A BONUS, you can win a t-shirt of your choosing from Serial Killer Shop. Want to win? The first step is that you gotta like their page on Facebook. Listen for the other step to win.
Music featured in this program:
Artificial Brain – “Synthesized Instinct” from Infrared Horizon (Bandcamp)(Facebook)
Disgorged (Later known as Withered Earth) – “Master of the Larvae” from Thy Hideous Wake (Discogs)
(Image Via)
Did you dig this? Take a second to support Toilet ov Hell on Patreon!SEARCH for a term like “tennis balls” using Google, Bing or Yahoo, and two types of link appear. The majority form a long list of “organic” results. Companies pay the search engines nothing for these. But those at the very top and on the right-hand side of the screen are paid links, a form of advertising that accounts for most of the revenue of search engines. These search ads appear to solve a puzzle that has preoccupied advertisers since John Wanamaker, the 19th-century founding father of marketing, reportedly declared: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” But new research shows that the simple measures often used to assess the impact of search ads may be exaggerating their effectiveness.
Establishing cause and effect in offline advertising is hard. Ads are difficult to target: space on billboards and in newspapers is seen by lots of shoppers. Some of these eyeballs are worth spending money on; others, either because they belong to existing customers or to people who never will be, are not. And even when big ad campaigns are followed by strong sales, the intuitive conclusion—that rising sales are the result of good ads—can be misleading. Advertising budgets often rise in good times so that spending and sales grow together, even if the advertisements are useless. The ads and the sales have a common cause—strong demand—but may have no causal link.
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Internet advertising seems to offer a solution to both these problems. First, internet search ads are targeted: the links that search engines show are based on a combination of the search term a user has typed in and his browsing history. Second, because firms can track whether visitors to their websites come from search-engine links they have paid for, they can work out whether ads convert into sales.
Not so fast. Spurious correlations are also rife in the online world, as a 2011 paper* by Randall Lewis, Justin Rao and David Reiley, a trio of economists then working for Yahoo, shows. Individuals use the web in a lumpy way. On some days lots of sites are visited and many purchases made; on others usage is lighter. This makes comparisons across time unhelpful. On a high-activity day people will tend to perform a lot of searches (and see lots of ads) as well as make many purchases. The relationship between the ads and the purchases looks causal, but may not be.
To test this problem of “activity bias”, the authors recruited volunteers online and split them into two groups. The first group watched a video promoting Yahoo, and the other group watched a political broadcast. The first group used Yahoo around three times more after seeing the ad, giving the impression it was very influential. But the control group—those subjected to a bout of politics but no Yahoo promotion—also used Yahoo a lot more. Both groups happened to be in an active period of internet use. This is why they were recruited in the first place and why they used Yahoo more than in previous periods. Lumpy internet use created a false sense of advertising impact.
The problem of activity bias means that in order to assess the effect of search ads, a proper control group is needed. A 2013 study by Chris Nosko of Chicago University and Steven Tadelis of the University of California, Berkeley, shows how such a test can be designed. Together with Thomas Blake of eBay they examined how important it was for the auction site to buy ads that appear when the term “eBay” is used in a search (“eBay tennis socks”, for example). In March 2012 they switched off eBay’s brand advertisements on Yahoo and Bing, but kept paying for them on Google as a control.
The finding was striking. When the sponsored ad was turned off, search-engine users simply switched to the first “organic” link that mentioned eBay. Overall, the site retained 99.5% of its traffic. Users who type in a brand-specific search are already trying to navigate to eBay’s site. Even if they appear lower down, free search results work just as well as ones that are paid for.
Calling Mr Draper
Firms like eBay don’t just pay for adverts when their brand is mentioned, of course. They place ads in response to millions of other words that indicate the presence of a potential customer. So a second test also investigated ads associated with non-branded keywords (“tennis socks”, for instance). The researchers tracked spending on ads and the number of “attributed sales” (sales made within 24 hours of clicking on a paid Google link) over time. A simple correlation analysis showed a familiar result: ads and sales tend to rise and fall together. A 10% increase in spending seems to raise revenues by 9%. The ads appear to work.
To check these results the authors split America into 210 geographical segments. A third were picked at random, with all Google advertising switched off. Of the rest, the researchers selected regions where patterns of internet activity closely resembled those where the ads were turned off. This allowed them to isolate sales variations that were caused by ads, rather than lumpy activity. The isolated impact is far smaller: a 10% increase in ad spending raises revenues by just 0.5%. (Results for users who had never previously used eBay were stronger, however, suggesting that firms with lesser-known brands may gain more from ads.)
Bosses should still take Wanamaker’s fear seriously: a rise in sales after an ad campaign does not automatically mean that the ads worked. But it also shows how the online world is getting closer to solving the conundrum he posed. Far from being an industry where cause and effect remain murky, online advertising may yet become one area where the dismal science can predict how to get costs down and profits up.
Sources
"Industry and Trade: A Study of Industrial Technique and Business Organization; and of Their Influences on the Conditions of Various Classes and Nations", A. Marshall, MacMillan and Co, 1919
“Here, there, and everywhere: correlated online behaviors can lead to overestimates of the effects of advertising”, by R.A. Lewis, J.M. Rao and D.H. Reiley, Proceedings of the 20th international conference on World wide web, 2011Whenever the conversation about 'violent video games' surfaces, so do a lot of misconceptions. As fans rush to defend their medium --and so forth -- some nuance gets forgotten. Sometimes the problem people have with game violence isn't that it supposedly has real-world implications. Sometimes it's just that people are bored.Game critic Michael Abbott felt a little bit alienated by some of the presentations at this year's E3, particularly Microsoft's show. He analyzed the content on offer and found that "58 percent of Microsoft's E3 briefing contained images of characters killing, preparing to kill, or otherwise battling a deadly on-screen enemy." That's 52 minutes total out of the company's entire sizzling 90-minute presentation, and that's not even including "ominous situations suggesting pending havoc."Only 27.5 minutes out of a total 106 minutes of Sony's presentation contained similarly-violent imagery, although Sony spent more of its time talking (and spent, according to Abbott's study, about 25 minutes talking about hardware, PlayStation Network, PlayStation Now, Sony film and television, and similar). At the same time, says Abbott, "We can also fairly accuse Sony of delivering the two grisliest trailers shown at E3:and Suda 51's."So what's the problem? "What concerns me about the avalanche of shooters we see at E3 every year is the way they're showcased as the very best the industry can do," Abbott tells Gamasutra. "We�re told these are important groundbreaking games, but we can see for ourselves they aren't. This year the endless stream of violence felt more like pandering than ever, and I felt bored and alienated. And old. Every E3 is pitched to the same 14-year-old adolescent male as the one before. And every year I have less in common with that boy."The video game industry has had a problem for a long time with conflating "violence" with adulthood -- the label is "Mature content," isn't it, and therefore "maturity" tends to equate solely to as much gruesome imagery as possible. It's understandable to an extent: Video games have unfairly borne the mantle of moral panic for almost as long as they've been alive, and a dedication to brutality almost defiantly expresses that, and the cartoon stabbings and vivisections we play in our "adult" games have nothing to do with the real world, so please stop blaming "us" for school shootings, thanks.
But why is grit and viscera often our primary way of proving our "adulthood?" Shouldn't the pleasure of play be ageless, independent of a particular domain? Says Abbott: "Ironically, as that 14-year-old seems to want ever more 'adult' and grisly games, I find myself yearning for more 'adult' games that enable joyful imaginative play. Violence in games feels played-out. I�m hungry for experiences that tap into other human impulses. I�m not offended by violence -- Suda 51 intrigues me because he explores and exploits violence in ways other designers don�t -- I just don�t find killing simulators very interesting anymore."With the modern design vocabulary that video games' foremost innovators have developed, surely we can also explore tonalities of play that aren't solely blood-drenched in the way young men would describe as "sick". Violence isn't inherently bad, and can even be impactful. Yet where's joy?Funomena's Robin Hunicke is passionate about joy, even silliness, as a quality of the game experience, and I asked her about video games she's experienced as joyful. "Hands down, the mostjoyful game experience that had the biggest impact on me would be," she says. "Playingfor the first time, I knew I had to meet its creator. Everything about it was so fresh, vibrant and tactile... full of the spirit of curiosity, exploration and physical fun."Hunicke andcreator Keita Takahashi would go on to work together -- he now draws faces all over everything there. Hunicke also cites Masaya Matsuura'sas a "close second" influence: "From the rapping mechanics to the silly rhymes and characters, it just made me smile," she says. "It was actually the first game I had a party for on launch. We finished the game in one sitting, staying up soooo late! Giddy, silly, fun for everyone to sing along with... it was definitely a joyful experience."Before founding Funomena, Hunicke worked with ThatGameCompany on. For her, the studio's previousoccupies a position on the "contemplative" end of the joy spectrum: "The feeling of gliding through the air as the sun sets in the distance... it's amazing. Such an uplifting sense of freedom, motion and the beauty you find in nature. That's a lovely experience that so few games have captured."Is joy something that games can "design for?" I asked Ricky Haggett of Honeyslug, creator of colorful, bright games likeand, which releases on PSN in August (Honeyslug's website proudly declares, "Hello there, we make fun games"). "I definitely think it's possible to design for joy," Haggett tells me."Allowing the player to 'perform' within the game, with interactions rich enough to support a degree of creativity � perhaps even allow players to do some exuberant showboating," Haggett recommends. "Game actions which aren't required to succeed, but provided purely as a way to enhance the performance can help a lot here, as does the ability to chain together different game actions in interesting ways: the more variation the game allows in how the player interacts with it, the better.""Joy is a feeling -- a desired aesthetic outcome," Hunicke agrees. "If you want people to experience a particular feeling as the outcome of a design, you begin with that feeling and ask yourself what mechanics and dynamics will create it! Design-wise, joyful play spaces should engage your sense of exploration and curiosity... a la, with it's odd but pleasing parade of unique objects, carefully laid out for you to roll up as you explore different environments at different scales."Joyful games also engage the player's sense of humor, Hunicke suggests, as with's odd cast of characters, playful storyline and unexpected rhymes. Says Hunicke: "It's especially good at making silly sounds -- voices, sound effects and instrumentation -- which bolster the sense that the game doesn't take itself so seriously.""And there's the element of beauty as well," she adds. "'s interactive grass and dynamic swarm of petals, combined with the beautiful lighting and sweeping level designs, really take your breath away. That sense of awe can be key in freeing your heart to soar along with the flying, gliding mechanics."
I had an unusual feeling lately, watching Nintendo's E3 press presentation -- designed not as a traditional flash-bang stage show, but as a pre-prepared video throughout which the company aimed to seed plenty of spirit and character. As Nintendo unveiled its, it said part of its goal in designing the game was to "put a smile" on players' faces. I thought it was strange, and a little sad, how rarely I hear such a pure, simple goal stated as a priority. Why aren't traditionally-commercial games about joy more of the time?Haggett has some thoughts: "If the primary focus of the game isn't completing goals, players get a chance to switch off a bit and let the experience wash over them, which sounds like a bad thing maybe, but I think this is actually a huge part of achieving the sense of ease which is a pre-requisite for joy," he says."However, a game which doesn't focus entirely on having the player achieve specific things needs to be intrinsically fun," he adds. "This is often a lot harder to pull off than giving players tasks to complete, which is perhaps why so many games tend to avoid it. I find many modern games seem to be frightened of giving players space to enjoy just hanging out � preferring to bombard them with surplus contextual information about the game world and objectives (even in games which just hanging out is already fun).""Joy is often a fleeting feeling," Hunicke reflects. "As humans, we spend a lot of our time caught up in the stresses, anxieties, fears and frustrations of our lives. Perhaps our designs reflect this focus, helping us process and deal with these feelings? Or perhaps it feels a bit too indulgent to build games that are entirely joyful?""Looking at other media - what examples are there of truly joyful films, television programs, books, sculpture? Do people enjoy feeling joyful through art?" She poses. "I suppose the most joyful things I can think of that I regularly engage in are dancing, socializing and physical affection. Games that focus on this sort of thing (like Bounden or) may be the closest we get?"Game feel is a big part of the experience of communicating joy, Haggett believes. "Tactility, or 'juiciness' � having a game feel really nice, and give reliable, satisfying feedback helps players get into the flow of a game and stop being aware of how the game is controlled," he says.Tech, visuals and abstraction also play a role: "A solid game engine helps here �- for example, where the physics are reliable, or it runs at a consistent frame-rate," he adds. "Visuals play a big part here too: Joyful games are often associated with bright, colorful visuals and smiling characters, but actually I think it's more about abstraction -- the fewer realistic details the player needs to parse to read the world, the easier it becomes to achieve a sense of being at one with the game."Surprise and awe can be incredibly meaningful too, Haggett continues: "The ability for the game to present the player with nice things they weren't expecting helps to build a sense of wonder �- a background sense of anticipation about what might be coming next," he says. "Those moments when a game delivers a delightful punchline that a player wasn't exactly expecting (but was sort of ready for nonetheless) can be really powerful!"Hunicke agrees that there can be a falloff in joyful media as consumers age. Perhaps in their quest for "adult realism," games can forget that surprise, joy and ease are things people want at all ages -- perhaps especially adults, as reality can be devilish enough, and mature audiences may want more pleasurable escapes than further simulation of the horrors of the "real"."Children's books and films are often quite joyful, and their software and games are too," she says."Somehow, we get to a place where we step away from having that feeling on a regular basis. That's definitely something we should work on -- don't you think?"It began with a sex game in a dark room. No, seriously -- but the Copenhagen Game Collective isn'tkind of group, not really.was a very simple project: Two players take turns flicking two Wii remotes, and the game... makes low, excited vocalizations in a deep male voice.If they can coordinate their movements, the voice escalates. The goal quickly dawns on players. It's kind of uncomfortable, and that's what its creators, Douglas Wilson, Daiana Lau and some of their friends, were shooting for.Showing the game at exhibitions like IndieCade throughout 2008, Wilson hung out with like-minded designers, likecreator Nils Deneken, and realized something.He had to move back to Copenhagen, where he could find a rapidly expanding base of friends and colleagues with similar aesthetic sensibilities -- for bizarre game works that are often mean, frequently silly, and always fun and thought-provoking.At Nordic Game Jam in 2009, Deneken and Wilson showed their "silly multiplayer flash game" (as Wilson describes it),. And by the middle of the year, they had such a crew gathered that they decided to unite under the banner of the Copenhagen Game Collective. Together, they could aim bigger, they thought.Wilson stresses that the collective is not a "company", but a "constellation" -- like a record label for video games. Deneken and a colleague have their own company, Die Gute Fabrik, and while others among the collective work at a studio they call Copenhagen Game Productions (for now; the name seems set to change to avoid confusion with the Collective), some of the projects they do are for showcases and festivals, never intended to be commercial at all.All told, Wilson considers about ten people "core members" of the Collective, and none of them have AAA backgrounds. Rather they're mostly newly out of grad school or in research programs, a state of newness Wilson concedes may lend some naivete, but a fresh perspective is also the hope.Together, they consider participation in and influence on the culture of the game industry just as important as making games. They stage events and curate exhibits, such as two recent events at New York City's ultra-hip Babycastles indie arcade, and they hope to host an exhibition and party at the upcoming 2011 Game Developers Conference.Now, new audiences are learning of the Copenhagen Game Collective as progenitors of-- a project whose acronym stands for. It's one of eight nominees for the 2011 Independent Game Festival's Nuovo award, which honors abstract or unconventional games.A true party game, it's physical, participatory and silly, pitting players against one another in a series of one-button challenges. It's simple enough that players can try whatever strategies they like to try to outwit each other; it's more a digital framework for group play than a typical "video game", exactly. Even Wilson admits it prescribes rules it's unable to enforce -- and that players of the game are able to also play with the rules is part of what makes it fun.Recently in New York, Babycastles attendees played it while wearing t-shirts with Xbox 360 controllers taped to them. While Wilson served attendees liberal portions of Danish liquor, peculiar black licorice coins and fish on toast, players kicked off their shoes, donned the shirts and all but tackled each other in spirited competition before a giant projection screen, alongside a pounding DJ set from local chiptune artist Knife City.You start to realize people probably need the party atmosphere -- and maybe even the booze -- to enjoywith such abandon. Players seem to have to challenge their own self-consciousness to win. Like the weirdness of, that comfort zone is something the collective clearly enjoys pushing, widely lauding the concept of "abusive game design". For Wilson, the "Asshole Mario" series of YouTube videos -- they show a user's playthrough of a version ofhacked to the point of comical unfairness -- are an inspiration.In an age that prizes intuitiveness and accessibility, and "finding the fun", why would a designer activelyto torment his players, frustrate them and creep them out? Gamasutra decided to ask Wilson all about it.It all started with-- no joke. In 2008, the theme of the Nordic Game Jam was cultural "taboos." We realized that sex, for whatever reason, is a lot more taboo than violence, especially in gaming culture. The thing to understand is thatisn't really a game about sex. It's a game about people's cultural perception of sex.It was fascinating to see how embarrassed people would get playing it. Because there aren't any graphics, you and your fellow player often end up looking directly at each other while you coordinate your virtual sex. It can get awkward, especially when played in public. You think you're about to play a fun Wii game, then suddenly, bam, you find yourself having virtual gay sex with your buddy.Around the same time, I discovered the infamous "Asshole Mario" () videos on YouTube. Those levels made a big impact on me. Not only are they hilarious, but they're also ingeniously, inspiringly clever. To me, they felt really fresh.I started discussing these kinds of games with my adviser, Miguel Sicart, and the two of us ended up giving a talk on abusive game design at DiGRA 2009. Since then, we've written an even longer research paper on the subject. And I'm currently writing even more about abusive and dialogic game design in my PhD dissertation, so I suppose I'm a sucker for abuse, in more ways than one!At its best, abusive game design can create a kind of playful meta-game -- a battle of wits and willpower between designer and player. The kind of abusive game design that interests me most is "dialogic," in that it facilitates a back-and-forth -- maybe not a literal back-and-forth, but something that feels like it, as if you and the designer were "in each other's heads," so to speak.One of my favorite examples of this "back-and-forth" comes from one of the aforementioned Asshole Mario videos -- Stage 6, the underwater level. Right after the halfway mark, the player, R. Kiba, starts walking down a long tunnel. Then he suddenly halts; something feels wrong. We can almost hear his thoughts: This passageway is too narrow, too quiet. Takemoto [the designer] has ambushed me way too many times for me to fall for this again.Kiba turns around, realizing that he has a second option. Taking advantage of a quirk in the Super Mario World game system, he swims underneath the passageway, below the bottom edge of the screen. Lo and behold, his instincts are proven correct! As Kiba safely swims below the screen, a bullet shoots down the suspicious passageway. Had he continued down the tunnel, he would have fallen for another one of Takemoto's traps.Viewed in terms of the game itself, this small victory is rather inconsequential. Even if Kiba had fallen for the trap, he would have restarted at the halfway mark, right before the passageway. Having learned his lesson, he could have conquered the obstacle the second or third time around, without even having lost much time. But Kiba's victory here is not just over the level -- it is also the moral victory of predicting and outsmarting the designer. In this view, the game system and levels are ultimately just instruments employed by Takemoto, who himself looms as the "true" adversary.Thus, counter-intuitively, I think abusive game design can help humanize gameplay. It confronts the conventional and reminds us that play is something deeply personal.There's a lot of precedent in other media forms for this kind of "dialogic" interchange between creator and audience. Agatha Christie is perhaps the quintessential example. In my dissertation, I argue that she was more of a game designer than she was a "writer." To read one of Christie's novels is to "play along" -- to use the clues she provides (and avoid the red herrings) to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed.It's a kind of psychological contest. The more Christie novels one reads, the more one is able to understand how her mind works. But Christie was aware of this, of course, and she frequently tweaked her formula in order to stay one step ahead of the reader.The Serbian-born performance artist Marina Abramovic' strikes me as another important precedent. Like, her Imponderabilia (1977) played on the awkwardness of sex in order to embarrass and provoke her audience. Her latest piece, The Artist Is Present (2010), aimed to foreground the interaction between artist and audience. This is what abusive game design is all about -- shifting the focus away from individuals and towards the relationships between them.Yeah, that's the million dollar question, isn't it? Miguel and I write a little bit about this in our research paper. It's a question that haunts the design research literature (see the work of Bill Gaver or Phoebe Sengers). If you're deliberately designing for frustration or confusion, how do you distinguish "good" frustration from "bad" frustration?As I see it, abusive game design is all about successfully signaling intentionality to the player.is the quintessential example of a game that's way too difficult, but I don't personally consider it "abusive" because it feels more "buggy" than it does purposefully-designed.By contrast, when you play, you really feel the presence of the designer -- that whoever made the game is specifically "out to get you." This is partly a matter of consistency. At almost every turn,bucks common usability conventions, and in very showy ways. It doesn't feel accidental. The game even explicitly taunts the player, i.e. through its dialog boxes.It's no coincidence thatis a mod of an existing game.provides a perfect foil against which to surprise the player with untraditional design. The abusiveness feels very intentional because it's juxtaposed against a familiar reference point. It's no wonder, then, that other "masocore" games likefrequently reference classic video games. These games convey a strong self-awareness.Ultimately, the clearest indicator of a successful abusive game design is that the player feels like they're playing against a particular person (or team of persons), and not just against a game system.That said, we should remember that "success" here is very subjective. Different players will experience the game in different ways, depending on their background and the context in which the game is played. For this reason, it often behooves abusive game designers to target their games to specific contexts or specific audiences.was originally conceived at a birthday party in January 2010, in an impromptu fashion. Some of us were sitting around drinking, and we got to chatting about the GAMMA IV contest. The contest constraint was to design a game played with only one button.Without any prior plan that we were going to brainstorm a game, we stumbled upon an amusing idea: to subvert the contest constraint, we could incentivize players to push each others' buttons. Both literally and figuratively.Later that month, we would prototype the game late one night at our annual retreat on the west coast of Sjaelland. The very first playtest ended in hysterical laughter. Immediately, we knew we were onto something.At the time, I don't think any of us realized how far the game would eventually take us. On the surface of things, it's such a stupid game -- a silly "wouldn't-it-be-funny-if..." side project, initially prototyped in only a weekend or two. But we kept working on the game as we showed the game and more and more exhibitions. Now, to find ourselves nominated for IGF... it's quite surreal.We recently released the game on Xbox Live Indie, and we'll be releasing a PC version soon (stay tuned). We're also considering spending some time to make an expanded version of the game for PS3 and/or the Wii. We have some pretty amusing ideas about how we'd incorporate motion controllers, and we'd also like to utilize peripheral input devices like dance pads and drum sets.This is a fair reaction, and I've definitely witnessed it myself while demonstratingOne of the first times I ever demoed the game was to a morning workshop at my university. Suffice to say, it was entirely the wrong context.This is the downside of trying to get people to play console games in a very non-traditional way. It's difficult to challenge people's gaming habits, especially when they |
.2 acre fire. The crew reported that the fire was smoldering and moving into brush, timber and duff at a moderate rate of spread. Firefighters concluded there was no immediate threat to the area, or the Chilnualna Lakes Trail.
The fire crew hiked out of the area and the blaze is being monitored, according to Yosemite fire officials, who note that lightning strikes result in multiple fires each year in the park’s wilderness, which ensures a healthier forest where future fires will burn with less intensity.
Written by Tracey Petersen. Report breaking news, traffic or weather to our News Hotline 532-6397. Send Mother Lode News Story photos to news@clarkebroadcasting.com. Sign up for our FREE myMotherLode.com Daily Newsletters by clicking here. Fire information is located under the “Community” tab or keyword: fire
Local Burn Day information is here. If you see breaking news send us a photo at news@clarkebroadcasting.com.Not entirely unexpected, DC Collectibles had another strong presentation at this year’s San Diego Comic Con. And let me tell you something, the folks at DC Collectibles weren’t kidding when they said back at Toy Fair 2015 they were embracing the Animated line. They had a slew of new figures at the booth, that Included Zatanna, Etrigan and Klarion and the Demon’s head himself Ra’s Al Ghul.
The Arkham Knight line continues, as well, with new figures from Professor Pyg and a super creepy Man Bat figure.
A DC Collectibles presentation would not be complete without at least one reference of Powergirl. And here she is: A Stanley “Artgerm” Lau designed Cover Girls statue. I wonder if it’s too soon to pre-order?
They also had on display a new line of Designer Series figures. This new collection based on the work of Darwyn Cooke and featuring my two other favorites: Supergirl and Harley Quinn.
And speaking of the Designer series line, the Capullo line continues with one creepy Joker:
We’re getting closer to the official release of DC Collectibles Icons line. All the previously mentioned figures were on display. Along with a few new additions:
And let’s not forget Harley Quinn.
You can see way more of the DC Collectibles booth and the complete DC Collectibles Panel over in our gallery section.Vanellope Hope Wilkins, who had her first surgery within an hour of delivery, is believed to be first baby in UK to survive with the extremely rare condition
A baby girl born with her heart outside her body is believed to be the first in the UK to survive with the extremely rare condition after undergoing three operations, the first within an hour of her birth.
At a nine-week scan, Vanellope Hope Wilkins was discovered to have the condition ectopia cordis, with her heart and part of her stomach growing externally.
Her parents, Naomi Findlay, 31, and Dean Wilkins, 43, of Bulwell, Nottinghamshire, were advised “termination” was the only option, they said.
But three weeks after her premature birth, by caesarean section on 22 November, Vanellope, who is named after a Disney princess, has survived three operations at Glenfield Hospital, Leicester, to move her heart back inside her chest.
Experts, including the consultant cardiologist, have said they do not know of another case in the UK where a baby has survived such a condition.
Describing their emotions on first being told of her chances, Findlay said: “I burst into tears. When we did the research, we just couldn’t physically look because the condition came with so many problems.”
Wilkins said: “We still didn’t know what we were looking at when we saw the scan, it looked like a little hamster with a hat on.”
They decided against termination, preferring to leave it to nature, and worried throughout the whole pregnancy.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vanellope Wilkins undergoes corrective surgery, in what is believed to be a UK first, at Glenfield Hospital. Photograph: University Hospitals of Leiceste/PA
The couple said they were told the first 10 minutes after birth were crucial as her ability to breathe would be essential. “But when she came out and she came out crying, that was it. The relief fell out of me,” said her mother. Her father said: “Twenty minutes went by and she was still shouting her head off – it made us so joyful and teary.”
Vanellope has undergone three operations carried out by a team of 50 staff at Glenfield Hospital. Immediately after her birth, she was wrapped in a sterile plastic bag. Consultant neonatologist Jonathan Cusack said: “At around 50 minutes of age, it was felt that Vanellope was stable enough to be transferred back to the main theatre, where she had been born, to the waiting anaesthetists, congenital heart disease and paediatric surgical teams who began the task of putting her entire heart back inside her chest.”
She was transferred to the paediatric intensive care unit where she was due to stay for at least several weeks while she got strong enough and big enough for her heart to be placed fully within her chest and covered with her skin.
After seven days, her chest was opened a bit more to create space to allow her heart to fit back in. In the average baby, there is an indent on the left lung which leaves space for the heart, but she did not have this. Over two weeks, her heart naturally made its way back into her chest as a result of gravity.
I felt guilty for thinking negative thoughts because here she is fighting. I’m glad I stuck to my guns not to terminate. Naomi Findlay, Vanellope’s mother
The latest operation involved taking skin from under her arms and moving it to join in the middle of her body. Surgeons had created a mesh that protected her heart as she did not have ribs or a sternum. As her organs fight for space inside her chest, she is still attached to a ventilation machine.
Babies born with the condition – one estimate is five to eight per million – have less than a 10% chance of survival.
Branko Mimic, the lead surgeon at the East Midlands Congenital Heart Centre, said: “Cases such as Vanellope’s, where everything else appears essentially normal, are even rarer, and whilst it would seem more hopeful she will do well, it is therefore almost impossible to be confident of this.”
Frances Bu’Lock, a consultant paediatric cardiologist at Glenfield Hospital, said she had described the chances of the baby surviving as remote. “I had seen one in foetal life around 20 years ago but that pregnancy was ended.”
Findlay said all the way through her pregnancy that she was warned the “chances of survival are next to nothing”. After the birth, she said, “I felt guilty for thinking negative thoughts because here she is fighting, and there was I, about to give up. I’m glad I stuck to my guns not to terminate though, I’m so glad.”
Wilkins said: “I lost hope a few times, if she didn’t move I’d say: ‘Has she moved today?’ and then, the next thing, she’d suddenly move and you’d go: ‘Oh she’s heard me’.”
They named their daughter after a character in the film Wreck-it Ralph. “Vanellope in the film is so stubborn and she turns into a princess at the end, so it was so fitting. The Hope part of her name is the fact that she has brought us hope, and my mum and dad, because even they, as grandparents, thought they would never get to see their granddaughter,” said Findlay.
Wilkins said: “Some mums still terminate and if we can get out there that there is a hope, and that it can be done, then it’s giving all those mums out there a chance.” His daughter’s name was a reminder, he said, “that there is that hope”.Today marks the fifth release of the ReactOS 0.4.x series, as well as the fifth following the 3 month release cycle started by 0.4.0 itself. Progress has continued steadily, with a great deal of work going on in the background to improve ReactOS' general usability and stability. Many of these improvements were on display at the FOSDEM convention in Brussels that took place on the 4th and 5th of this month. Certainly one of the more notable albeit less visible additions was the incorporation of basic printing support by Colin Finck. At present ReactOS is only capable of sending print commands to a parallel port printer, but this is the first step towards universal support and Colin should be applauded for his effort. A video demonstration of it can be viewed here.
Another general remark can be made about the overal improvement of ReactOS in the following two photos.
Here we have ReactOS running on real hardware, running what we can probably all agree are non-trivial applications. What is more, compared to the 0.3.x series the overall improvement to the actual rendering of the applications is also clear. Where in the past toolbars and buttons always looked visibly ajar or improperly aligned, here the menus and icons look much, much more correct. There are still some slight problems, but overall ReactOS is nearing the point where it is genuinely usable, not just merely tolerable. That, more than anything else, is something that the team is proud to have achieved.
As usual, the general notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at their respective links. For those that want to try the releases, the bootcd and livecd images are available for your perusal.By Nathan Miller
Another season, another less than electric year for Darren McFadden. But this time it isn’t due to a lingering injury suffered on the field, in practice, or doing it Gangnam style across his imported mahogany floors. The culprit this time is a change in the Raiders offense to a zone blocking scheme during the offseason. Past history lulled us into thinking the change wouldn’t be a problem, but it is rearing its ugly head once the real games were underway.
Newly anointed head coach Dennis Allen installed Oakland’s new zone blocking scheme. The switch carries along with it a learning curve that can take time, and significant chunks of practice, to master. This is not only true for the front line that will be carrying out the new tasks, but also for the backs attempting to bounce through the holes the unit creates.
Most coaches will agree that zone blocking schemes can require a bit more mental aptitude than traditional man blocking assignments. This is largely due to the change from “block the big guy in front of you,” mentality to an assignment that can call for man blocking, double teams, peeling, and next-threat identification. Decisions must be made before the snap in terms of where any double teams will take place and then after the snap to determine which half of the double team will peel off to seek the next defensive threats.
Here’s just a small list of growing pains associated with changing to a zone blocking scheme:
Unnecessary double teams
Defenders running unblocked to the ball carrier when both blockers mistakenly peel
Confusion on where to target second tier defenders
A ball carrier learning to develop his instinct to identify holes or when to cut back
I can see three glaring issues with McFadden’s production after four games. The first, which should improve by mid-season, is that his line is confused. Barring his one touchdown run against the Steelers, he’s averaging less than three yards per carry on anything between the tackles. Time and time again, he is running into a mob of defenders and blockers or he’s getting violated behind the line.
Secondly, McFadden is instinctively having difficulty identifying the “correct” hole as it develops. He’s cutting into tight windows when larger holes are opening further down the line. He was well-suited for the angle blocks where he could use his incredible burst and fearlessness to hit the hole hard and dare defenders to hang on tight, much less catch him in the first place. For a zone blocking scheme, he needs to develop more patience.
The third and final issue is that McFadden is understandably overcompensating for his lack of production. He’s a Pro Bowl-caliber player that has not fully realized his potential in the NFL. This was mostly due to injury in the past, but now the issue has more to do with the change in scheme. After only one reputable season in four years he is healthy, but failing to maximize his potential.
It often appears that he is looking to prove himself on every play. With each unsuccessful run, this tendency becomes more pronounced. He is jumping at non-existent holes at the line and then proceeds to bounce, cut, and dance. The only moderately consistent success he is seeing is on the perimeter outside the tackles. This sounds a lot like Reggie Bush’s tenure in New Orleans after he was hyped as a franchise savior during the NFL Draft.
This desire to bounce everything outside might be more than the motivation to hit the home run and get into space. McFadden appears as if he’s motivated to avoid much of the line’s confusion with the zone blocking scheme that is tacking place as they transition to it. His instinct and patience will only develop with improved line play, which many in Oakland hope is sooner rather than later.
The first play is McFadden up the middle. San Diego’s 3-4 defense has the left defensive end shifted outside between the right tackle and tight end. The nose tackle is on the right shoulder of the center, gaining an advantage to that side. The tackle easily has positioning to force the left defensive end to the outside. Unfortunately, the right guard blocks down and double teams the defensive end instead of offering assistance to the center. After the snap the center is quickly overpowered to the play side, and the right guard takes himself out of position when he makes a move on a middle linebacker after the double team. The result is a no-gainer for McFadden.
Here is a play to right end. Initial blocks are appropriate, and would appear to open a lane for McFadden.
One of these linemen becomes part of an Oakland-San Diego sandwich (red circles), and the other heads down field to block…absolutely no one. Part of this problem can be explained by timing and length of blocks. The rest is a mystery. McFadden is quickly crushed for no gain.
The following play below is a product of McFadden’s lack of comfort with the scheme and his inherent impatience as a runner used to hitting one hole as hard as he can.
This off-tackle run shows very effective blocking by the entire line. The right guard and right tackle form a great wall on the left, and the tight end picks off the defender to the right. However, McFadden sees the hint of light noted by the arrow on the left and he takes that route. The problem with his choice is that the right guard and right tackle are blocking to that hole, which leaves the defensive end (red circle) completely open to stop McFadden.
Had McFadden been patient, and taken the hole designed for him to the right he would have made it to the second level and possibly further. His only home-run play between the tackles this year against Pittsburgh is a later example of what happens when everything works as planned.
Here is another play around end which reveals the increased complexity of the zone blocking assignments at the line of scrimmage.
With the right guard pulling, and having the right tackle block the man on his right shoulder, the combination would likely have been effective enough to at least delay defenders long enough for McFadden to get around them. This would leave the fullback, the pulling right guard, and the wide receiver out of this shot to lead McFadden down the road against the three remaining defenders.
The defensive end easily slips through the line due to the length of time taken by the fullback to get in position. The fullback completely misses the tackle. While the pulling right guard is able to stop one linebacker he is unable to do anything about a strong safety and linebacker coming into the play. The receiver on the edge blocks the cornerback with a bump, and then sets him free. This leaves yet another defender to pursue McFadden, who is forced to the boundary for no gain.
Here is an off-tackle play to the right.
To the left of the hole, you will notice the right tackle chasing after a blitzing linebacker. This presents two opportunities for the right tackle. Bump the linebacker into the pulling left guard and peel to the next linebacker since he has already lost position, or move straight on to the next linebacker since the left guard is on his way.
The line instead is chasing after lost blocks and/or continuing with double teams much longer than necessary while completely neglecting on-coming defenders. McFadden gains two yards on the play.
Here is another run to end for McFadden, and this is yet another play that initially looks like it could go the distance. As noted in red, two blockers were so completely absorbed by their double-team assignments, that they neglected defenders about to crush the play.
For all the Raiders fans out there, the play of 2012 for McFadden is perfect execution.
McFadden also works his own magic leaving the free safety in the dust with a quick juke, taking it to the house on a 64-yard run. There will hopefully more of that to come for the Black Hole inhabitants.
The bottom line is that McFadden hasn’t changed. He’s still a game-changing back with an elite skill set. Indications from Coach Allen are that the team will evaluate the zone-blocking scheme during its bye week. I would be surprised to see a complete abort of the scheme, but tweaking is likely, and advisable. That being said, the line will eventually gel and work much better together in time. All that’s needed is more reps in the system and time working together.
You can reach Nathan Miller via Twitter at @eklektique1 or eklektique1@gmail.com.Tell your Congressperson to vote NO on the USA PATRIOT Act in tomorrow's vote! The PATRIOT reauthorization bill being fast-tracked to the House floor contains NO reforms to the law, and will be voted upon with NO debate and NO opportunity for amendments to add oversight and accountability. Help stop this sneak attack on your civil liberties: there are only hours left to visit our Action Center and tell your Representative to vote "NO" on H.R. 514, the PATRIOT extension bill.
In late 2009, when PATRIOT reauthorization was originally being considered by Congress, many important PATRIOT reform measures were proposed and debated, and a bill filled with powerful new checks and balances was reported favorably out of the House Judiciary Committee. But, as Congress ran up against the renewal deadline, it decided that there was not enough time to fully consider those reforms. So, in February 2010, Congress instead extended the "sunsetting" sections of the law until the end of this February, with a promise to fully consider the issues before the next deadline.
But Congress is breaking its promise to consider reforms to the PATRIOT Act. In a legislative sneak attack, the new Republican leadership in the House is trying push Representatives to rubber-stamp another PATRIOT renewal. The House leaders just announced on Friday that they’ll be "suspending the rules" so that a bill introduced by Rep. Sensenbrenner to extend the expiring PATRIOT provisions until December 8, 2011 will go to the House floor for a vote TOMORROW, without any debate and without any opportunity for anyone to offer amendments to improve the bill.
In particular, the bill would renew the following dangerously unchecked PATRIOT powers:
• The government’s power under PATRIOT Section 215 to obtain secret court orders for Internet, phone and business records of people who are not suspected of terrorism or spying;
• The government’s "lone wolf wiretapping" power, allowing it to get court orders authorizing secret foreign intelligence wiretaps against individuals who have no connection to any foreign power or terrorist group; and
• The government’s power to obtain blank-check "roving" wiretap orders that can be used to tap any phone number, email account or other communications facility that the government believes is being used by its target.
These provisions should not be renewed, and certainly not without any debate or any new checks and balances to prevent abuse and protect civil liberties. So please act now to tell your Representatives that they should vote NO to the PATRIOT Act in tomorrow's vote!Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pennsylvania, is resigning effective immediately, he said in a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan.
"Upon reflection, I hereby make official my resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives effective immediately," he wrote.
The letter, written Thursday, after his conviction on a total of 22 separate accounts including racketeering, fraud and money laundering on Tuesday, reversed course on a letter he had sent Ryan on Wednesday that stated he would wait until Oct. 3 -- a day before his sentencing -- to resign, given his intent to appeal his conviction.
But with growing objections to delaying his resignation, Fattah on Thursday sent the revised letter to the speaker. His immediate resignation was first reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer and confirmed by CBS News.
"Out of respect for the entire House leadership, and so as not to cause a distraction from the House's work for the people, I have changed my effective [resignation] date," he wrote to Ryan.
DOJ: Rep. Chaka Fattah facing political corruption charges
In July 2015, the first indictments were brought up against the former veteran U.S. representative as well as four of his colleagues for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds, charitable donations and federal funds after a failed 2007 Philadelphia mayoral bid.
In a statement Wednesday evening, speaker Ryan was adamant about insisting on Rep. Fattah's immediate resignation.
"Mr. Fattah has betrayed the trust of this institution and the people of Pennsylvania, and for that he should resign immediately from the House of Representatives," Ryan said. "We must hold members to the highest ethical standard, and I hope that Democratic leaders will join me in seeking his immediate resignation."
Then, Philadelphia Republicans further seized on Rep. Fattah's original plan to hold off on his resignation despite his conviction.
Joseph F. DeFelice, Philadelphia GOP chairman, said he was "ensuring he can collect a paycheck while continuing to do nothing to benefit his constituents."
While he considered the timing of his resignation, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called Fattah's conviction "heartbreaking" and said, "I think he should think it through and he'll let us know."
Fattah served as a U.S. congressman since 1995. Last year, when he was indicted, Fattah had to step down as top Democrat on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Science and Justice.
His sentencing is set for October 4, and until then, remains free on bail.The NBA’s collective bargaining agreement has a series of nuances that can be confusing and vague, but one of the biggest potential loopholes has not been used to major effect … yet.
The NBA created the exception known as Bird rights to keep teams together; the initial use was to allow the Celtics to exceed the salary cap on Larry Bird’s contract. The exception, which kicks in after a player has been on his team (or on an unabridged contract) for three years, is fundamental to the NBA’s “soft” salary cap and the ability to keep great players on one team for their entire careers, if desired. Those rules get interesting, however, when a veteran player is willing to take a pay cut.
MORE: Ranking 23 best available NBA free agents
Last summer, the Spurs got Tim Duncan to agree to take a little more than $5 million this season in order to clear enough salary cap space for LaMarcus Aldridge, but the team did not lose the ability to pay Duncan his maximum for any future season by doing so. Given that Duncan is 40 years old, that may seem irrelevant. It is not.
The untapped potential of this marriage of Bird rights and low salary comes if a star player were willing to take a minimum contract for a single season, with an understanding or an expectation of a larger contract later. The team gets to pay a good player his lowest-possible salary for a year, yes, but the biggest value is seen in the following season: The player would have a minimum cap hold, meaning he could jump all the way back to a five-year maximum contract despite spending two offseasons barely affecting his team’s salary cap.
There are a few potential fits for this concept this summer, but none of them are more interesting than Dwyane Wade. The Heat have a long history of working salary cap magic and face a truly daunting task with Hassan Whiteside, particularly with the uncertainty around Chris Bosh’s future. The Heat want to keep Wade, the greatest player in franchise history, and Wade wants to stay in Miami, his only NBA home. Both sides have been clear about that.
MORE: Pat Riley has two-year plan to save Heat
That level of trust would be the key here. The team and player are not allowed to put anything in writing or make specific, binding agreements because they would be circumventing NBA rules, as the Timberwolves did with Joe Smith in what cost them three NBA Draft picks in the early 2000s. An unwritten understanding, though, would allow the Heat to sign Wade to a one-year minimum contract, giving them the room required to keep Whiteside and then upgrade the roster in both 2016 and 2017.
At a $92 million salary cap for 2016-17, Wade taking the minimum for one season would allow the Heat to sign Whiteside to his maximum first-year salary and still have about $16 million to spend on other players even without moving existing contracts like Josh McRoberts. If Miami could use that 2016 flexibility on players without any making heavy long-term commitments, they could even have the space to sign someone else to a max contract in 2017 on top of Whiteside, Wade, Bosh and Dragic. That likely would come with a luxury tax bill — though not necessarily a massive one because of the rising salary cap.
This nuance has not been a major factor in cap management before because we have not seen a league financial structure like this summer’s. The $1 billion of spending money around the NBA and the larger margin between minimum and maximum contracts changes the value of an NBA dollar and encourages cap squeezing. For example, San Antonio used a variant of this approach to bring Manu Ginobili back last summer, though he took the room mid-level exception rather than his minimum.
MORE: Every team's single greatest NBA Draft regret
While the Heat offer the most intriguing option for this kind of finagling, they are far from the only team with that capability. The Warriors (Marreese Speights and Brandon Rush), Wizards (Jared Dudley and Nene), Magic (Brandon Jennings) and Trail Blazers (Gerald Henderson) could all substantially improve their team long-term by convincing players to get on board with this kind of structure to give them extra space to use this summer.
This summer will change the NBA landscape for years to come. The teams willing to take risky moves may find long-term payoffs.What is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 all about?
Alan Moore: When we started the third volume of League, we got a vague idea of how the plot would progress and would enable us to use characters and situations from respective Leagues – 1910, 1969 and 2009. But as the book has actually progressed as it has been written, the prevailing thing about it seems to be a critique of culture. And the most noticeable thing is the decline if you like – diversification. It's always the most healthy thing for a species and it's probably the same for culture as well.
When we start out in 1910 we have a fairly rich background to draw from – we've got Brecht's Threepenny Opera which was set around that time, we've got all of those wonderful occult characters that were being created around then. By the time we get to 1969 we've got some equally interesting characters but they're a kind of different category. They're more often drawn from popular culture, because of course popular culture has expanded incredibly in the 50 years since 1910 when culture was still largely the preserve of an educated elite. But changes in society over the first 50 years of the century meant that by the middle years culture had changed. Certainly by 1969 where pop culture was predominant and previous culture was perhaps in danger of becoming increasingly marginalised. And by the time we return to the League story in 2009, it's a much bleaker cultural landscape still.
So I suppose inevitably you're going to find in this book that there are contrasts that are going to arise between the different eras. And there's also a marked sense that culture is possibly contracting in certain areas. There is the thing of the richness of the Victorian or the Edwardian era. That the range of characters and ideas to draw upon have nowhere near the same breadth that they seem to back in the day. This is something that has purely emerged from the story. Wasn't anything that we necessarily set out to write. But it seems to be the case.
Each of these eras have got their own particular atmosphere and of course whipping through all three of them – when we finally get the third issue out – in something like 230 pages, I think it will be quite a shock to see how far culture has come in only a hundred years. Which is not a long time.
And I think Kevin would probably agree with me. I know that he was worried about the 2009 book simply because the modern world doesn't really have quite so much to offer visually. But since he has remembered that we are not dealing with the actual modern world – only with the fictional modern world – he's got into his stride. And the artwork on the third book is probably the best of the bunch. In the third book he will rise to the challenge of what is a fairly bleak and barren modern landscape culturally speaking.
Why 1969 particularly?
AM: For plot purposes it gave us access to a number of interesting historical events that happened in the counter culture around that time. It also gave us access to a number of interesting fictions, notably the number of excellent crime films that were being made around that era, including oddities like Donald Cammell's Performance. With Jack Carter and all these various characters that we could refer to. I liked the idea of a turf war between four or five fictional gangsters of the period. All of whom were surrogates for Ronnie Kray. I liked the idea of including Jake Arnott's Harry Starks, Harry Flowers (who was the Ronnie Kray surrogate in Performance) Vic Dakin (the Richard Burton character, also a Ronnie Kray surrogate in Villain) and Doug Piranha (who was one of the Monty Python surrogate Kray brothers). So I thought the idea of having four or five surrogate Ronnie Krays involved in a turf war in east London – that was entertaining.
It was also an interesting period because – as best exemplified by Performance – it was a period in which the underground meant several different things. And there was an overlap between the psychedelic pop underground and the actual underworld in the criminals who were very flattered to have celebrities amongst their retinue. And of course through the pop and hippie connection you've got a connection to occultism. Whether that be Robert Plant and Jimmy Page having their flirtation with Aleister Crowley and occultism or the various occult posturings that a number of pop performers made back then. So 1969 was in a Venn diagram of crime, pop music and occultism. There is a very nice overlap in 1969 that made it a useful period for the purposes of our developing occult plot line that we had commenced in the 1910 volume.
The series is packed with details and references. Do you have fun letting readers discover them?
AM: What I take the most pleasure in is being able to have fun myself and with Kevin to have fun with his equal number if not greater number of contributions on the visual end. It's important that we have fun with that stuff. But I'd hate to think that the references ever overwhelmed the story. So that somebody who didn't catch all the references was missing out. Obviously, if you do see all of the references – and there are some in there that even I have to ask Kevin about – then it will be a richer experience. But you're going to get some of them. And even if you don't, the plot will still be completely comprehensible and lucid. And we also have the excellent Jess Nevins providing his annotations.
Why don't you do your own notes for League like you did for From Hell?
AM: Because I'm much much too busy. With From Hell I thought that it was important to write the notes and explain which bits were invented and which bits were actually taken from supposed evidence in the case. With the League it would be like explaining the joke. It would to some degree spoil the experience. It would certainly be a lot less enjoyable for me because the only reason for doing it with something like the League would be to explain how clever me and Kevin were being. Whereas, since we've got Jess Nevins who can explain how clever we're being then we can get that over without appearing conceited. So it's a much better arrangement. Also, Jess is very thorough and he sometimes picks up wonderful connections that were not actually there but which I really wish that I had thought of.
Do you think the League books could offer the reader a richer experience online through hyperlinks, or on a tablet device?
AM: I'm certainly thinking along lines like that and certainly the League would be ideal to have links in the text. I have nothing against putting it on one of those devices per se except that it would require a complete rethink of that actual medium. The way the comics companies I believe are producing online comics is that they are old comics uploaded online and made available. That I don't think is the way to do it, because comics storytelling is entirely predicated upon the print technologies of the late 1930s. We have six panels of page on average because that was the optimum numbers of panels to put on a page in a periodical of something like 32 pages. This is what has formed the very language of the comic book. The fact that you turn over the pages. And you can time it so that turning over a page will be the moment of some big revelation. Which you wouldn't want your reader to have spotted on page 24 just because it's opposite page 23. And subtler things that really affected the way that a comic story should be told.
So what I'm saying is that I don't think these devices are quite there yet but they have some very interesting possibilities. But before we would be thinking about putting something like the League into that format, I would want to think long and hard about the possible advantages of that new medium and the ways in which my storytelling craft would have to be adapted to best effect from this new medium. Much the same as when comics were just a 24-page thing that you drew on pieces of paper. I was always trying to find what the medium was capable of and to push it as far as possible. Like I said I've been having some thoughts about this. People shouldn't be too surprised if they were to hear something about me working in this kind of area.
Where does the series go after the final part of League volume three?
AM: There are a couple of possibilities. We have a little story that would jump back a few years to 1964. There are a couple of little hints in 1969 as to how that story might unfold. I have also got a book four in mind. Which is something that occurred to me at a particular point writing the last part of book three. I got myself and the characters into bit of a fix. And I didn't know how they were going to get out of it and I was going to get out of it. And I thought of quite a radical measure which worked beautifully with the plot. And then I thought of the ramifications of that radical solution. It won't be the last League story. But if it was, it would be a really good one. It would be set in 2011. There might be a miniseries which would jump back to 1964 and fill in a little bit of backstory. And it would actually resolve a number of hanging questions and unresolved loose ends that were raised, notably in the Black Dossier where there was a subtext in the fake William Shakespeare play and couple of the other pieces that related to the original formation of the League. And material about Prospero. And I thought how this could come together in a surprising and explosive way and enable us to take the League into the future in the way that we've always wanted to.
Because of course there are, as well as the fictional histories of periods like the Victorian era, there are also enormous quantities of stories written about the future. So the fictional universe reaches back in time but it extends forward. And it would be nice to be able to explore the basic concept of the League in that kind of territories as well. That would definitely be volume four. Whether it will be the next adventure of the League to be made available, I don't know. Me and Kevin are still deciding. And of course in the future, we've got the whole of time to play with – to still do stories based around the Prospero group or the Gulliver group. We could do stories potentially with Orlando that go back to ancient Thebes 3,000 years ago. So we have hopefully charted our connected world of fictions and we've got it so thoroughly mapped that we do really have the entire universe of fiction to play with. So there's no reason other than me and Kevin getting increasingly old and feeble why League should ever end.
How was it working with Kevin O'Neill and Todd Klein?
AM: It is an absolute pleasure to work with Kevin. He is one of the finest and most distinctive comic book artists this country has ever turned out. Also, he is the only one of my mainstream collaborators who is from a similar background to myself and who has ever taken my side in any of my bust-ups with the comic companies. This is why Kevin is the only person that I'm still working with. During the unpleasantness with DC, he was taking the brunt of it. Because I'd walked off and he still had to finish the book. They were very angry that we got sick of them and were taking it to another publisher. He is as good an individual as he is an artist.
As for Todd Klein, if you want a letterer then it's Todd Klein. There is nobody as good as him. The ideas he comes up with himself, for instance the colouring on the psychedelic bubbles during the trip sequence, they almost hurt the eyes but they were beautiful. And the way that he is so sensitive to sometimes drop part of what somebody is saying to lower case which gives a slightly different feel to the rest of the sentence. And it's |
where you just need the biggest creature you can possibly find.
[ccProd]Peregrination[/ccProd]
[draft]Peregrination[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
Paying an extra mana to scry is kind of a reach, but there may be decks that want acceleration at any cost. If seven truly is the new six, even bad acceleration might find a home.
[ccProd]Satyr Wayfinder[/ccProd]
[draft]Satyr Wayfinder[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
The tools for a graveyard-based deck are slowly but surely accumulating, and perhaps Conley’s BG Dredge deck might finally have everything it needs. This giving you a creature and a land while filling your graveyard is a solid bit of value, and the perfect enabler for something like [card]Nighthowler[/card]. If you aren’t utilizing the graveyard, the inconsistency and lack of choice when it comes to fixing probably make it worth finding another way to get lands.
[ccProd]Unravel the Aether[/ccProd]
[draft]Unravel the Aether[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
[card]Fade into Antiquity[/card] just faded into antiquity, as [card]Unravel the Aether[/card] is just a much better card for the role. Shuffling a card into their deck doesn’t really matter in Constructed, and saving a mana plus being an instant certainly does.
[ccProd]Chromanticore[/ccProd]
[draft]Chromanticore[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
Look, I don’t know how the mana is going to work or what you are putting [card]Chromanticore[/card] on, but I do know that this card is extremely powerful. It legitimately seems difficult to lose if you can slap this on something and bash, and there has to be a way to make that happen.
[ccProd]Ephara, God of the Polis[/ccProd]
[draft]Ephara, God of the Polis[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
I like the idea of a personal [card]Howling Mine[/card], and it doesn’t seem impossible to get there with Ephara. Every now and then, she might animate and go whack the opponent, but even if she doesn’t she could be awesome. Imagine a White Weenie deck splashing Ephara and Lyev Skyknight. Ephara shores up the attrition matchups and the rest of the deck is good against aggro.
[ccProd]Fanatic of Xenagos[/ccProd]
[draft]Fanatic of Xenagos[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
[card]Loxodon Smiter[/card] has always performed well, even if its text box is blank in most matchups. Fanatic of Xenagos gains trample in exchange for the opponent getting the ability to make some of his stats temporary, though they have to get attacked a turn early to do so. Overall I think that’s close enough to a wash that Fanatic seems solid, and the addition of red mana over white puts it in a color that has less options for large creatures (which is a point in its favor).
[ccProd]Karametra, God of Harvests[/ccProd]
[draft]Karametra, God of Harvests[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
You have to be pretty serious about ramping to want to resolve a 5-drop and another creature before getting a land, and I just don’t see the payoff right now. I like casting expensive spells as much (or more) than the next guy, but these days you should be killing them with your four- or five-cost cards, not setting up a future play.
[ccProd]Kiora, the Crashing Wave[/ccProd]
[draft]Kiora, the Crashing Wave[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
Planeswalkers that cost four mana, draw a card per activation, and have a decent way of protecting themselves have historically done very well. Kiora suffers a little from starting at such a low loyalty and not actually killing the creatures she stops, but the rest of the equation is there. I think she will fit quite neatly into the middle of the planeswalker pantheon, and see a decent amount of play as a result. As with most planeswalkers, she’s will be best in a controllish deck that can protect her, and the ramp aspect she offers rewards you for playing expensive cards, as such decks tend to do. Her ultimate is also remarkably cheap, making her an efficient win condition in matchups that have trouble removing her.
[ccProd]Kiora’s Follower[/ccProd]
[draft]Kiora’s Follower[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
[card]Sylvan Caryatid[/card], [card]Elvish Mystic[/card], and [card]Voyaging Satyr[/card] make it difficult for new entrants into the mana acceleration market, especially when those entrants cost two colored mana to cast. What Kiora’s Follower has above all these other cards is a second point of power, and a very relevant one at that. A mana elf (Merfolk) that can brawl with reasonable effectiveness is versatile, and even the tough casting cost will eventually be a boon once we have the UG God to worship.
Kiora’s Follower also gets to untap anything, not just lands, even if lands are going to be the most common target. That can complicate attacks for your opponent, get you multiple uses from creatures with activated abilities, and even do strange and insane things with artifacts if that ever becomes a thing.
[ccProd]Mogis, God of Slaughter[/ccProd]
[draft]Mogis, God of Slaughter[/draft]
Constructed: 3.0
If only Mogis cost five I could nickname him Slaughterhouse Five, since he’s definitely a house. Of course, if he cost five he would be substantially worse, and right now he hits at a very good spot. In an aggressive deck, he deals damage at a fast pace, demanding tribute every single upkeep. It is unfortunate that Elspeth kind of blanks him, but past that he requires a Detention Sphere before he will stop hitting control decks. It isn’t inconceivable that he animates from time to time, especially in a heavy red deck playing cards like [card]Boros Reckoner[/card], but his main use will just be a targeted [card]Sulfuric Vortex[/card].
[ccProd]Phenax, God of Deception[/ccProd]
[draft]Phenax, God of Deception[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
Don’t be deceived; I’m not that optimistic about Phenax’s chances. He is a God, which bears examination, and there are potential interactions ([card]Tireless Tribe[/card], anyone?) that are kind of neat. I think he’s going to have to remain satisfied with being the best God in Limited, because he just takes too long to have enough of an impact in Constructed (and is in colors that have the least creatures in general).
[ccProd]Ragemonger[/ccProd]
[draft]Ragemonger[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
Though I still think Minotaurs aren’t going to happen, I do have an obligation to mention any card that reduces cost. Those cards tend to be powerful, or at least have the potential to be powerful, though I wouldn’t move in on [card]Didgeridoo[/card] just yet.
[ccProd]Reap What Is Sown[/ccProd]
[draft]Reap What Is Sown[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
I think there are better ways to go about this if you want to give your team a boost, but triple-targeting is noteworthy in a world full of heroes.
[ccProd]Siren of the Silent Song[/ccProd]
[draft]Siren of the Silent Song[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
In general, drawing a card is much better than your opponent discarding a card, but a saboteur with evasion is interesting. I like siding such things in for control decks, though the odds that this sees play go way up once [card]Nightveil Specter[/card] rotates out.
[ccProd]Xenagos, God of Revels[/ccProd]
[draft]Xenagos, God of Revels[/draft]
Constructed: 3.0
Everyone wants to party with Xenagos, because who wouldn’t want to get much stronger and faster? He gives you a bonus even the turn you play him, making him one of the most dangerous Gods we’ve seen. He’s also in colors that are fairly likely to get him all riled up and ready to attack in person, which adds a ton more damage to the already massive amounts he represents. Red/green decks have a lot of good options at this cost, and Xenagos is definitely a relevant one.
[ccProd]Astral Cornucopia[/ccProd]
[draft]Astral Cornucopia[/draft]
Constructed: 2.0
Paying three mana for a 5-color mana rock isn’t quite good enough to see play, but having the option to double or triple up may give Astral Cornucopia the boost it needs. Good colorless ramp spells are few and far between, so they are worth keeping in the back of your mind.
[ccProd]Springleaf Drum[/ccProd]
[draft]Springleaf Drum[/draft]
Constructed: 2.5
Setting aside the use in Affinity, which this printing doesn’t change, all I can see coming from Springleaf Drum is a potential inspired deck, mostly on the back of [card]Pain Seer[/card]. I’m not sold on the idea, but it’s there.
[ccProd]Temple of Enlightenment[/ccProd]
[ccProd]Temple of Malice[/ccProd]
[ccProd]Temple of Plenty[/ccProd]
[draft]Temple of Enlightenment
Temple of Malice
Temple of Plenty[/draft]
Constructed: 3.5
As with the previous Temples, these are all excellent and will see a ton of play. I love having these lands in the format, and can’t wait until we get all 10.
Top 3 Green Cards
3. [ccProd]Fated Intervention[/ccProd]
2. [ccProd]Unravel the Aether[/ccProd]
1. [ccProd]Courser of Kruphix[/ccProd]
Even getting one card on par with Courser of Kruphix is a victory, and green also picked up a very solid sideboard card and a number of potential playables. Not a whole lot in the aggro department, but green midrange got a few interesting ones.
Top 5 Cards in Born of the Gods
5. [ccProd]Searing Blood[/ccProd]
4. [ccProd]Courser of Kruphix[/ccProd]
3. [ccProd]Bile Blight[/ccProd]
2. [ccProd]Spirit of the Labyrinth[/ccProd]
1. [ccProd]Brimaz, King of Oreskos[/ccProd]
White is the clear winner here, but all the colors except blue picked up some interesting additions to the world of Constructed. Blue at least got a couple multicolor cards of note, and once you get Sphinx’s Revelation, you have to resign yourself to the scales balancing over the next couple years. I’m excited to play with Born of the Gods, though my first experience with it will be the Modern Pro Tour in Valencia in two weeks.
LSVWe’re big fans of Brighton’s Great Escape Festival. Whilst it seemingly kicks off the summer festival calendar, it more importantly promotes all that is good about new music. Taking place across a variety of venues on 18-20th May, here’s six must see acts you should check out across the weekend.
Bang Bang Romeo
They’re truly in a class of their own, Bang Bang Romeo are embarking on what is already turning out to be a breakthrough year. Musically they are a mix of elegance and energy, think of a hybrid between Fleetwood Mac, Florence and the Machine, The Last Shadow Puppets and Jefferson Airplane. Songs such as “Johannesburg” and “Invitation” are prime examples of this. With a set consisting of new releases, you’d be a fool to miss them at this years Great Escape Festival!
The Blinders
With just four hours to get to Brighton from an earlier Leeds show, The Blinders cannot be faulted for their effort. Making huge waves recently, it is surprising to learn that their touring and festival commitments come in the midst of important university exams. If anyone deserves success, it’s The Blinders! Songs such as “ICB Blues” are politically relevant whilst “Swine” is an intrinsic mix of controlled chaos and intensity. Check them out, you won’t regret it!
BlackWaters
BlackWaters spent much of last year working on new tunes alongside a certain Carl Barat, bringing even more assertion to their already impressive sound. Arguably their most prominent single “Down” has already made waves throughout the industry. Its frantic sound takes inspiration from much of the 70s Punk onslaught.
The band lead somewhat of a punk revival, this is even more obvious in latest single “Fuck Yeah.” Their heavy sound makes their live show something NOT to be missed!
Cabbage
Where do we start with Cabbage… it is quite clear that they are perhaps the most important of all upcoming bands throughout the UK during such dreary modernity. Their compilation EP release “Young, Dumb and Full of…” is rapidly making waves throughout the industry as a result of its highly charged political connotations.
With an energetic and entirely relevant live show, now more than ever should you aim to see Cabbage – they won’t remain in venues of this size for much longer!
Cosmo Pyke
Cosmo Pyke is arguably one of the most multitalented artists at this years Great Escape Festival. His recent EP release ‘Just Cosmo’ proves this statement, an incredible array of sounds considering his relative youthfulness.
The artistry in songs just as “Chronic Sunshine” and “Wish You Were Gone” is apparent, his sound is like an intrinsic summery hybrid of Mac Demarco and The Beatles.
The Amazons
Having toured throughout well respected, small UK venues throughout the opening of the year, it is clear that The Amazons are rapidly growing to achieve bigger and better things. The release of latest single “Black Magic” epitomises this. The single would not sound of place in large venues and arenas alike, an ode to The Amazons’ massive sound.
Tunes such as “In My Mind” and “Stay With Me” make their live set something not to be missed!
The Moonlandingz
Having just released debut album “Interplanetary Class Classics,” it is clear that The Moonlandingz are rapidly amassing a large nationwide following. This is all the more surprising considering the projects secondary nature, it began merely as a side project.
However, the bands space-like, impressive sound is unbeatable. Songs such as “Vessels” and “Black Hanz” make up the ultimate going out playlist, its clear they wouldn’t sound out of place beaming down from the moon or satellites alike.
Rory Wynne
Having spent much of this year touring with Blossoms it is clear that Rory Wynne has the support of many industry insiders. However, he lets his music do the talking, made obvious through the release of debut EP “What Would Rory Wynne Do?” The EP is a sure sign of his musical development, his sound is far more elegant, confident and all the heavier.
Rory is already tipped for huge things, his confident abilities make him all the more likely to succeed.
The Great Escape takes place in Brighton from 18-20 May 2017. Ticket information here:
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Full line up:AUSTRALIA will consider upgrading the nation’s official terror alert after Britain upgraded the risk to “severe” overnight.
Attorney General George Brandis has confirmed that the decision of UK intelligence agencies to increase the terrorism alert level underlined the threat of foreign fighters returning to Australia.
Britain said the increased terror threat reflected concerns an attack was “highly likely’’ although they stressed there was no intelligence to suggest an attack was imminent.
UK RAISES THREAT LEVEL TO ‘SEVERE’
Up to 60 Australians are believed to have fought in Iraq and more than 100 citizens are believed to have been involved in the recruitment of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Australia.
“It is of serious concern that Australian citizens are active in these groups,’’ Senator Brandis said.
“The Government’s assessment is that approximately 60 Australians are engaged in fighting in Syria and Iraq, with an additional 100 involved in active facilitation and support.
“We remain in close contact with the United Kingdom and other partners about the threat from terrorist groups active in Syria and Iraq and from returning foreign fighters.
“As the Director-General of Security and I have said before, events in Syria and Iraq, and the large number of Australians participating in the conflict means Australia is facing its highest threat for some time.
Australia’s National Terrorism Public Alert System remains at ‘Medium’, which indicates that a terrorist attack could occur.
“This level is under constant review by the Australian Government and is based on advice from security and intelligence agencies,’’ Senator Brandis said.
“Australia’s threat level would be increased to ‘High’ if it were deemed that a terrorist attack is likely to occur.
“The Government is taking all necessary steps to keep Australia and Australian interests safe.”WHITE HOUSE, Tenn. (WZTV) - Garrett Preston, 19, says he "got off pretty lucky" after his vape mod exploded in his pocket, leaving him with severe burns to his stomach, knee and leg. Now, he wants to share his experience in the hopes of warning others about the potential dangers.
Garrett says in September of last year, he was finishing his first full shift at the Dunkin Donuts in White House around 10 p.m. when he went to make a sandwich at the store's oven. Inside his left pocket were his car keys, phone and IPV 3 box mod--used for vaping. Three seconds into making his sandwich, Preston says a "fountain of fire" came out of his pocket.
Preston ran to the back of the store and ripped off what was left of his pants and saw his keys and vaporizer "smoking" on the ground. A co-worker rushed to the back to check on Preston and after seeing his burns called for another employee to dial 911.
He was rushed to the Vanderbilt's Burn Center, where he was treated for two third-degree burns to his upper thigh and knee, as well as a severe burn to his stomach. After 14 hours in the hospital, Preston was released, but his recovery would take a month and a week before doctors cleared him of needing a skin graft.
Preston says he thinks he knows why the vape box exploded.
"I just want to share my experience, so that other people don't make a mistake and something worse happens to them. I want to promote safety about it. These vape batteries hold about four volts and could have done serious damage to someone's face," he said.
Preston's vape box was missing the back case that covers the battery, and after it had fallen off the teen thinks his keys touching the batteries caused them to "ground out" and ignite a fire. Preston says that although the batteries are usually wrapped, cuts in the battery wrapping could expose the batteries and bring the potential for danger. As for why the battery case was off, users can change the wattage in that area of the vape with the batteries, but the screws had fallen off. Preston was using the vape without issue like this for "five or six months," until he fatefully placed his keys in his pocket next to the exposed batteries.
Despite his injuries and the scars to prove it, Preston says he is still vaping, something he originally started to quit smoking regular cigarettes. While he considers it a "safer" alternative, Preston says many of his friends vape and have done so for a while without issue. He's just the "unlucky" one to fall victim to an accident.
"A lot of these stories about vapes exploding are user error," Preston says.
He's hoping his story can help others who vape keep from making the same mistake or worse.Mother's Day is just around the corner and Father's Day isn't much further behind. This handprint suncatcher craft is a great craft to make as a homemade gift for either occasion. And since it uses contact paper, even small toddlers can make one to give to their loved ones.
What you'll need:
• cardstock
• contact paper (You can buy a small roll of vinyl book cover at the dollar store, which works exactly like contact paper. That's what we always use for contact paper crafts.)
• coloured transparencies, tissue paper or coloured cellophane
• scissors
• pencil
You'll also love: Keepsake Craft—Baking Soda Clay Handprints
How to make it:
To prep the craft you will first need to trace your child's hands onto a piece of cardstock. Then cut out the hands. Next, place the cardstock cutout onto the sticky side of some contact paper. Cut the colored transparencies, tissue paper or colored cellophane into little strips. Or get your child to practice their scissor skills by encouraging them to cut the transparencies into strips.
Since contact paper is sticky, no glue is needed for this craft. Just place the colored transparencies onto the contact paper until the hands are well covered.
Seal the suncatcher by putting another piece of contact paper over top. Then hang and enjoy!
Isn't it a pretty way to capture your child's handprints?This post represents the latest link in an unbroken chain of more than five years of the weekly summaries of the best of the pro-nuclear blogs.
With the recent updated assessment by the IPCC of the outlook for climate change, the leveraging the nuclear energy to mitigate future growth of CO2 emissions comes even more prominently into the public eye. Want to know what’s going on? Read all about it here.
Previous editions of the Carnival have been posted at the blogs cited below and elsewhere. See the “Blogs We Read” sidebar at the ANS Nuclear Café for a complete list. It is published by the American Nuclear Society. A great site for the industry perspective is the blog and the dynamic blog roll at NEI Nuclear Notes. It cites new blog posts from around the nation as they are published.
For day-to-day breaking news and updates, check out the entries on Twitter list posted on this blog which contains more than 80 pro-nuclear sources. This is a Twitter list you can follow.
About these bloggers
The bloggers who write the posts cited here do so because they have come to see, based on experience, that nuclear energy is a cost-effective, carbon emission free, source of electrical power which can raise the standard of living for any population which benefits from access to it.
Your kind attention to these blog posts is appreciated. Please repost or cite in your favorite social media channels. There are live icons, with one click action, for doing so, at the end of this blog post
Carnival 281
Atomic Insights – Rod Adams
Why would UBS root for Entergy’s Merchant Nukes to Close?
UBS Investment Bank holds a large portfolio of loans to companies involved in extracting natural gas using the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Because of the healthy fees associated with generating those loans initially, UBS, along with several other large investment banks, supported drilling programs for production that was not justified by the existing demand for natural gas.
The inevitable happened; more gas was produced than customers needed or wanted. That led to a glut and rapid price declines. Many of the entities that borrowed money from UBS are now in danger of default because their revenue is insufficient to pay the carrying costs of the loans for much longer. Recent sales from the loan portfolio have closed at 65 cents or less on the dollar.
UBS appears to be addressing this business challenge by issuing analyst reports to investors encouraging the closure of several merchant nuclear power plants. Their permanent removal from the market will soak up the natural gas glut, push prices up, and restore the value of the loan portfolio.
Good for UBS and the underwater borrowers, bad for environment, bad for consumers.
Nuke Power Talk – Gail Marcus
Energy by the Numbers
Gail Marcus summarizes two recent comparative energy studies at Nuke Power Talk. One reports on fatalities by energy source, worldwide, and the other, on materials use. In both, nuclear power proves to rank significantly better than the alternatives.
Forbes – Jim Conca
Bill Gates Forges Nuclear Deal With China
Bill Gates and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Seattle to sign an agreement between his nuclear power company, TerraPower, and the China National Nuclear Corporation that will allow the two countries to collaborate on advanced nuclear technologies that address safety, environmental and cost issues, and even burns spent nuclear fuel from old reactors. Hovering over the meeting was climate change, cyber-theft, trade-sanctions and Chinese military aggression in South East Asia.
The Hiroshima Syndrome’s Fukushima Commentary – Leslie Corrice
Japan’s Press accentuates the bad and intentionally ignores the good
Japan’s public deserves to hear the positive about nuclear energy along with the negative. But, Japan’s Press has become so decidedly antinuclear that it seems its one-sided, negative-only reporting will continue unabated.
Nuclear Economics – Ed Kee
Nuclear power plants – flexible operation.
In September 2015, Ed Kee participated in a brainstorming session at the U.S. Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). The main topic of this session (and two earlier sessions) was how U.S. merchant nuclear power plants could operate more flexibly in the face of market challenges and a changing electricity industry structure. Some of the ideas discussed in the NEI brainstorming session are covered in this commentary.
US NRC Blog – Drew Barto
Spent Fuel Dry Storage 101
Spent fuel storage cask designs often rely on design features to make sure the fuel remains subcritical. When we review a cask design, this is one of the key elements the NRC looks at in detail.
Casks have strong “baskets” to maintain fuel geometry. They also have solid neutron absorbers, typically made of aluminum and boron, between fuel assemblies. The applications that we review must include an analysis of all the elements that contribute to criticality safety. Part of the analysis is a 3-D model that shows how the fuel will act in normal and accident conditions.
Videos
Yes Vermont Yankee – Meredith Angwin
Vermont Energy with Pat McDonald
Beyond the Sound Bite – Pat McDonald served many years in government in Vermont, appointed to leadership positions under both Democrat and Republican administrations. She also represented her community as a legislator in the State House for four years.
Early this summer, MacDonald started a community access TV show “Vote for Vermont.” The motto for the show is”Listening Beyond the Sound Bite.” About two weeks ago, MacDonald interviewed Angwin about energy issues in Vermont.
She always interviews her guests before the show is taped, to be sure she has strong, relevant questions. This week Angwin was on the show. Because her questions were so strong, the half-hour show flew by quickly.
Energy Reality Project – Rick Maltese
Michael Shellenberger video on energy issues and the Paris Summit on climate change
We need to share this message widely from Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute. It is vital and desperately needed. The timing is good when so many are looking to the Paris Summit on climate change this December 2015 for answers. It is not the heady intellectual ecomodernist jargon about “decoupling” that was present in the Ecomodernist Manifesto, that would risk losing people. Michael modestly and effectively delivers a great script.
# # #Life is busy for Sadie Robertson of the hit A&E reality show "Duck Dynasty": the 17 year old model recently reunited with her former "Dancing with the Stars" team, including Mark Ballas, in New Orleans, shortly after leading an all-girls Bible study for close friends and family.
The DWTS group, famously known as "Team QuackAttack" enjoyed seafood at Deanie's with Sadie's entire family, according to the 17 year old model's Instagram account.
"AMAZING performance tonight by EVERYONE! so proud of them & their hard work. it was great to get to see the Dwts family. #teamquackattack????1.28.15," Sadie captioned a photo of the group.
Ballas also expressed his excitement at the reunion, sharing a photo of the team along with the caption, "Trouble in the streets of #NEWORLEANS with my second fam @legitsadierob @bosshogswife @rebeccalorobertson."
He added later on, "It's rare you see me cheesin full smile in pictures. But when I do it's usually cos @legitsadierob be makin me laugh.. Loved seein my #teamquackattack partner last night #DWTSLiveTour."
Sadie's'second dad" and DWTS winner Alfonso Ribeiro also got the chance to catch up with the "Duck Dynasty" star, tweeting, "It was so great to see @legitsadierob tonight at #dwtslivetour I miss seeing her everyday."
A week earlier, the young Robertson shared an Instagram photo of small group of six girls who gathered with their Bibles to discuss Scripture. Surrounded by candy and colored markers, Robertson and the rest of the group focused on Mark 12:31's command: Love thy neighbor
"Great bible study with great people. I encourage you to make something special for someone who is special to you. Let them know how much you appreciate them. Pass on love. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love is contagious. You never know how much a little thing can encourage someone," Sadie wrote under the photo.
Included in the Bible study was Sadie's older sister, Rebecca Lo Robertson, a Taiwanese student who was adopted by Willie and Korie Robertson, and her future sister-in-law Mary Kate McEacharn, who is engaged to her brother John Luke Robertson.
In the meantime, the rest of the "Duck" clan, including Sadie's grandfather, Phil Robertson, his brother Si, and his sons Willie, Jase and Alan, are gearing up for the premiere of the "Duck Commander musical, which is headed to Las Vegas.
The musical is based on Willie and Korie's book detailing their rags-to-riches story, "The Duck Commander Family: How Faith, Family and Ducks Built a Dynasty," and will reflect the strong Christian values of the family.
"It's about redemption," Willie recently explained, according to Fox. "It's about all these decisions we had to make in our life and overcoming and ending up being on TV and all that. It's a great story and it's pretty powerful."
"Duck Dynasty" will will enter its eighth season on A&E later this year.Cassia shook her head, still ringing from the crash-landing. Murky green water was seeping into the ship-wrecked Astrid. Cassia unbuckled her harness and leapt to her feet, splashing into the swampy water. "C'mon, c'mon!" Cassia ran to the supply cabinet, quickly shuffling through its contents. "What do I do?" Nigel released his harness and stood up. The floor of the Astrid was tilted towards the front end, and already the ship was filled with green water past his knees. "Storage room in the back. Grab the survival kit, EVA suit, some straws. Anything that looks useful." "Right." Nigel ran up the sloping hall to the storage room, splashing through the swampy water. Cassia pulled an energy rifle from the locker and slung it over her shoulder, and attached a small laser pistol to her belt. She headed back to the pilotting console. She bent down to the screen, which displayed the warning: 'BATTERY DEPLETED – SYSTEMS INOPERABLE'. She entered a command, activating the Astrid's emergency beacon, and made her way to the door. "You ready?" She shouted towards the back of the ship. Nigel hurried from the storage room, stumbling under the weight of a large, bulging bag over his shoulder. He waddled awkwardly through the water now nearly at his waist. "Yea. Let's go!" Cassia hit the large red button at the exit hatch. It opened begrudgingly, mechanical components whirring and clunking. A flood of dark water rushed into the ship, quickly filling the ship nearly up to their chests. Nigel and Cassia slipped from the hatch into the alien world, leaving the Astrid behind them. Instead of open ocean, their feet met with soft, spongy ground -though there was water nearly up to their chests. Catching their breath, they took a look at their surroundings. There were tall, thin trees all around, with large, dark green leaves. Vines hung from the trees and criss-crossed above them. They were in some kind of jungle. The thick canopy overhead blocked out much of the sun, except where the Astrid had punched a large hole through to the cloudy sky. The water was dark with algae, and its surface covered with leafy plants. Strange animal noises emanated from all directions -whirring, buzzing, and chirping. Anpther more alien sound echoed all around them: a persistent chorus of distorted creaking and groaning. The trees all waved subtly, gently bobbing and weaving in place, like a mirage. Nigel and Cassia ducked their heads as a massive insect creature buzzed past them. "So it's not ocean after all." Cassia observed. "Looks more like a jungle." "I think the sensors were right. It's an ocean planet." Nigel and Cassia looked around, the dark swampy water up to their chests. "It's trees all around." Cassia observed. "On the way down too, that's all I saw -just green everywhere." "Yea, I know. I think the jungle's on top of the water -floating." Cassia focussed on the bobbing of the trees. She watched as the waves of motion rippled through the jungle. She felt the ground underneath moving with each passing wave. "You're right." The trees were growing out of floating material that carpetted the top of the ocean. As they took stock of their surroundings, the spongy ground below them lowered. The water rose up, now above their shoulders. "The ship's pulling it down!" Cassia shouted. "Let's go!" She started paddling away from the Astrid and towards the range of mountains, just visible through the dense foliage. Nigel followed, struggling with the supply bag. The ground underfoot sloped sharply down towards the sinking Astrid.The Trail Blazers traded up in the NBA Draft and plucked Zach Collins from Gonzaga last week. He joined me on the Bald Faced Truth radio show (12-3p on 102.9-FM and 750-AM) on Monday to talk about a variety of subjects.
Included?
His weight, the lack of leg room on commercial airline flights and how a video game correctly predicted that he'd go in the first round to Portland.
Collins also said he believes he can co-exist with Meyers Leonard and Jusuf Nurkic in a rotation, potentially. Leonard did an interview on Monday as well in which he talked about how he learned of the Collins draft pick.
On what he says to people who say he can't stay out of foul trouble:
"I mean the numbers are probably right," he said. "I just take that foul trouble as me going after everything. I'm not afraid to get shown up or get dunked on so I go after everything. I can be too aggressive so I get a lot of fouls."
Listen to more with Collins here:Over a year ago, we filled you in on a Thai action movie called Angels, which starred Sahajak Boonthanakit (Streetfighter: Legend of Chun Li), Dustin Nguyen (The Rebel), Gary Daniels (City Hunter) and Ammy Chanicha (The Hangover 2).
Sadly, Angels was never released anywhere, except Vietnam. But now, after a series of re-shoots, re-edits, newly added star power – and even a fresh movie title – Angels will be seen by the rest of world in the form of Zero Tolerance.
In Zero Tolerance, two former para-military operatives, Johnny and his police detective friend Peter, search Bangkok to find the killers of Johnny’s beautiful daughter Angel – Leaving carnage and retribution throughout city.
Angels filmmaker Wych Kaosayananda (Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever) had this to say about the Angels/Zero Tolerance makeover: “Angels has undergone some pretty radical changes since the start of 2014, we’ve done some additional shooting and added Scott Adkins to the cast and it should be released sometime this year under the new name, Zero Tolerance.”
In addition to Adkins being added to the cast, Kane Kosugi (Choy Lee Fut, Ninja 2: Shadow of a Tear) will also be appearing in Zero Tolerance. We haven’t seen a splice job like this since Jackie Chan’s The Protector. Regardless, having Nguyen, Adkins, Daniels and Kosugi in one movie makes up for any questionable production tactics. | Watch the trailer.
Updates: Lionsgate is releasing the DVD for Zero Tolerance (read our review) on December 1, 2015 (Pre-order at Amazon.com). Watch the official North American trailer right now!'She didn't affirmatively say no': Silence means consent according to defense in Ohio high school rape trial where passed out, drunken teenage girl was'sexually assaulted' by multiple football players
Defense lawyers in the coming trial of two high school football players charged with raping a nearly passed-out-drunk 16-year-old girl are expected to argue on the issue of consent.
In the case that has shocked the nation, prosecutors state that the inebriated girl was taken to a number of parties by a group of drunk teenagers, supporting her to walk when she wasn't physically capable.
The |
Nick Clegg rather surprisingly on board, Mr Cameron may not have to make the speech of his life (as Mr Blair did in 2003) to win either vote. To gain the support of a sceptical nation, however, he needs to do exactly that.
He will not achieve this with the long-winded and contradictory motion he has submitted to the Commons for debate today. His problem is that the British and American foreign policy, intelligence and military establishments have made a series of dreadful mistakes over the past 15 years. It can be stated with complete fairness that the Stop the War Coalition (a miscellaneous collection of mainly far-Left political organisations, by no means all of them reputable, which marches through London this Saturday in protest) has consistently shown far more mature judgment on these great issues of war and peace than Downing Street, the White House or the CIA.
More surprising still, the Stop the War Coalition has often proved better informed than these centres of Western power, coolly warning against the diet of propaganda masquerading as bona fide intelligence.
So Mr Cameron first of all needs to show us that we have solid evidence, capable of standing up in a court of law, that proves his claim that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on a large scale against its own people. On the face of things, it looks highly unlikely that Assad would have carried out such an action – let alone within three days of international inspectors arriving in Syria.
Consider this: the only beneficiaries from the atrocity were the rebels, previously losing the war, who now have Britain and America ready to intervene on their side. While there seems to be little doubt that chemical weapons were used, there is doubt about who deployed them. It is important to remember that Assad has been accused of using poison gas against civilians before. But on that occasion, Carla del Ponte, a UN commissioner on Syria, concluded that the rebels, not Assad, were probably responsible.
The rush to judgment by Britain and the US looks premature, especially in view of the record of our intelligence agencies in providing misleading and fabricated evidence as a justification for war before 2003. (This time it is said that they have been convinced by intercept evidence, but this too can prove seriously misleading.)
The second question that Mr Cameron must answer is: why now? There have been numerous other atrocities, many far worse, carried out across the Middle East in the past few years. For example, there is no doubt at all that the Egyptian military junta has shot dead more than 1,000 protesters, the vast majority unarmed civilians, since seizing power. Yet there has been no outraged condemnation. Indeed, the West, by continuing to supply arms to the Egyptian army, is quietly condoning this policy of mass murder.
The moral authority of Britain and America in the Middle East is shaky, as an article published in Foreign Policy magazine last week reminds us. It provides documentary evidence that the US helped Saddam Hussein’s Iraq launch a series of chemical weapons attacks upon Iran in the late 1980s, an offensive that killed approximately 20,000 Iranian troops – which dwarfs the number of victims of the Syrian attack. Iran, of course, is Assad’s closest ally. Our moral indignation over chemical weapons looks selective.
This raises questions about Western objectives. Are we merely intending to teach Assad a lesson? Or does an unspoken strategy to “rebalance” the war away from him and back towards the rebels lurk behind this intervention?
It must be said that something terrible happened in Damascus last week, and interventions of the sort that Mr Cameron will argue for today are not always wrong. The Prime Minister and President Obama are decent men, acting for honourable reasons out of horror at the atrocity that took place.
This means that there are some important differences between the circumstances of today’s debate and the one in March 2003. I do not believe that Mr Cameron and Mr Obama are part of a conspiracy to mislead the public and twist the truth, as Bush and Blair were. Significantly, France is part of the coalition, not against it, as was the case 10 years ago. The action contemplated is limited, and unlikely to lead to the dreadful consequences of Iraq.
Nevertheless, on the basis of what I know at the time of writing, I could not vote for war. As Talleyrand said of the Bourbon monarchs, London and Washington have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing since the invasion of Iraq.
They are showing the same contempt for evidence, for international institutions and for the lessons of history."We can confirm that the British Embassy in Pyongyang received a communication from the North Korean government this morning," said a spokesman for the Foreign Office.
"It said that the North Korean government would be unable to guarantee the safety of embassies and international organisations in the country in the event of conflict from April 10," he added.
The Foreign office declined to disclose how many staff are working in Pyongyang, but said no decision had yet been taken on whether to pull out. "We are considering next steps," the spokesman said.
Russia also said it had received the same notice. "Unfortunately, the situation (on the Korean peninsula) is not developing in the way that we would like. For us the security of our citizens is the priority," said a Russian Foreign ministry source quoted by Interfax, the Russian news agency.
The Foreign office said it is monitoring the situation in North Korea and is in "close contact with allies".
"We have been clear to North Korea that if it carries out any further provocations, it will be met with a robust international response," the spokesman said.
"Kim Jong Un needs to make a choice about whether he wants his country to become more isolated or whether he wants to work towards constructive engagement with the international community," he added.
Britain has had an embassy in Pyongyang since 2001 concentrating on counter-proliferation and human rights, according to the Foreign Office.
"We support small-scale projects aimed at improving the lives of the most vulnerable," says the blurb on the Foreign Office website.
There is also a British Council project to train English language teachers in North Korea and a consular section to serve the needs of the handful of British citizens working in the North Korean capital.
The current ambassador to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is Michael Gifford, formerly the British ambassador to Yemen and the deputy head of the mission in Cairo.
One junior diplomat at the embassy, Barnaby Jones, hit the headlines last summer when he was photographed on a roller coaster two rows in front of Kim Jong-un.The 1077th Anti-aircraft Regiment (Russian: 1077-й зенитный артиллерийский полк, 1077-y zenitnyy artilleriyskiy polk) under Colonel Raiynin, was a unit of the Stalingrad Corps Region of the Soviet Air Defence Forces which fought during the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942.[1] The Stalingrad Corps Region was part of the Stalingrad Military District and later subordinated to the Stalingrad Front during the battle for the city. The regiment, like many of the anti-aircraft units, was made up almost entirely of young women volunteers, barely out of high school. They are mostly known for their bravery in the defense of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), when they engaged an advancing Panzer unit by setting their guns to the lowest elevation and firing them directly at the advancing tanks.
Training and materials [ edit ]
English-language sources about this unit are sparse and contradictory. What seems clear is that, like most of the anti-aircraft units, they were poorly trained and under-supplied with ammunition.[2] They probably did not have armour piercing rounds, but rather fragmentation 'flak' rounds, and it is questionable how effective these would have been against armour. Their guns were M1939 guns which were 37mm copies of Bofors.
Defence of Stalingrad [ edit ]
On August 23, 1942, the German 6th Army launched its offensive on Stalingrad. After extensive bombing which turned much of the city into an inferno, the 16th Panzer Division advanced unresisted until it reached Gumrak airport, 15 km northwest of the city, where the tanks came under fire from anti-aircraft guns.
The 16th Panzer Division recorded that "right until afternoon we had to fight'shot for shot' against 37 anti-aircraft positions manned by tenacious fighting women, until all were destroyed."
The Soviet official history of the war also makes mention of this action:
The anti-aircraft troops first engaged the Panzers on August 23rd on the northern outskirts of the city. An attack from this quarter by the enemy had been unexpected, and so there were no rifle units in position to assist the batteries of the 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment in their defense against the strong concentration of German tanks and motorized infantry. Under the command of Colonel W. S. German, for two days the regiment fought alone and repelled the assaults of German submachine-gunners. During the combat, the regiment destroyed or damaged 83 tanks and 15 other vehicles carrying infantry, destroyed or dispersed over three battalions of assault infantry, and shot down 14 aircraft.
The 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment remained in service with the Soviet forces to the end of the war. In May 1945, the regiment was part of the 86th Air Defense Forces Division, itself subordinated to the Southwestern Front. In 1945, the 86th Division was charged with air defense support for the Kharkov and Odessa Military Regions, and also for the Independent Coastal Army.
Notes [ edit ]
^ БОЕВОЙ СОСТАВ СОВЕТСКОЙ АРМИИ 1941 - 1945 (Official Soviet Army Order of Battle from General Staff Archives). http://www.tashv.nm.ru/BoevojSostavSA/1942/19420801.html Archived 2014-05-02 at the Wayback Machine ^ Friedrich, Karsten (2011). The Cruel Slaughter of Adolf Hitler. ISBN 978-1446795705.
References [ edit ]James Tissot, often described as a dandy, seems to have dressed flamboyantly as a young art student in Paris and early in his career.
After Tissot found success (in the early 1860s), he began to present himself as a gentleman of business: he wore a frock coat, and there is no indication that he tried to compete with the stylish aristocrats he painted, even as he earned great wealth in his career. In this image, he wears a heavy, tan overcoat with his black frock coat, a cream-colored, high-cut waistcoat, a white shirt with a stand-up collar and notched cuffs, black cuff links, and a plain black tie.
Here is Tissot a few years later, in a portrait by Edgar Degas, and while he is well-dressed, he is not wearing anything flashy or trendy. He wears a black frock coat over a dark grey waistcoat and white shirt, with a black cravat, full-cut light grey trousers and black leather half-boots. His black top hat and satin-lined cape are on the table behind him, as if he might be prepared for an evening at the Opera or the theater.
Whether James Tissot was a gentleman or a rogue is debatable. He seems to have fought, however briefly, for the radical Paris Commune in the spring of 1871, before he relocated to London and soon took a young divorcée as his mistress. Though he seems to have tried to help his struggling painter friends, he accumulated great wealth and ended up being considered a rogue by Degas as well as James Whistler and, at times, Berthe Morisot.
By all accounts, Chichester Parkinson-Fortescue, 1st Baron Carlingford (1823-1898) was a thorough gentleman. He was a politically ambitious Irishman and Liberal MP for County Louth from 1847 to 1868. He became a junior lord of the treasury in 1854, and in 1863, he married the beautiful, virtuous and politically influential Society hostess Frances, Countess Waldegrave (1821 – 1879). Fortescue held minor offices in the Liberal administrations until he was made Chief Secretary for Ireland under Lord Russell from 1865 through 1866, and again under Gladstone from 1868 to 1870. From 1871 to 1874, Chichester Fortescue was President of the Board of Trade.
He was described as pedantic but with a fine intellect. In 1853-54, when Fortescue was a bachelor, John Ruskin often left him alone with his young wife Effie, whom he admired and who apparently confided in him. Fortescue would spend a decade in love with Lady Waldegrave before her elderly husband died; she chose him out of the three or four men who wished to marry her. They were very happy together, as he helped her become more educated, and she used her fortune, charm, and hospitality to further his career. Queen Victoria invited the couple to dine with her at Windsor; she enjoyed Lady Waldegrave’s vivacity and appreciated Fortescue’s pleasant and agreeable manner and gentle voice. He was a diffident man who detested all card games and could only relax in the company of Bohemian types like Edward Lear.
In 1871 Tissot painted Fortescue wearing a black frock coat and full-cut fawn-colored trousers with an elegant white shawl-colored waistcoat, a white shirt with a stand-up collar, and a black tie folded over in a single, loose knot accented with a pearl tie tack. His black leather half-boots shine.
This elegant man of business, with his neatly trimmed mustache and beard, spares us a glance as he checks his pocket watch. He is dressed in the latest fashion – a lounge suit: his sack coat, waistcoat, and trousers all are cut from the same fabric. This style was introduced in the 1860s for comfort in the domestic sphere; Tissot’s painting shows that by this date, it was appropriate to wear it in public. The light brown wool is a confident choice that would have set this gentleman apart from the sea of colleagues in black frock coats and also makes the top-stitched edging stand out. His crimson tie and commodious fur-trimmed black overcoat are further evidence that he is a flashy and very successful, individual. Imagine what a figure he’ll cut when he alights from the carriage, wearing the black top hat now at his side, and those white kid gloves, perhaps with the boiled wool blanket folded over his arm as he continues to his destination.
The Victorians immediately decided this image of a handsome man on an outing with two beautiful women was “More French, shall we say, than English?” Unless the women are the sisters of this junior officer, we might be right to guess that carting them off with a picnic hamper and three bottles of champagne makes him a rogue. He is not in uniform, but wears his black-and-gold naval cap with a loose, thigh-length, single-breasted black wool coat that has wide lapels and upper sleeves, and side vents. He sports off-white trousers with loosely turned-up cuffs, blue socks, and laced, tan-and-white leather spectator shoes with a low heel. Incidentally, Tissot featured the exact same shoes in The Return from the Boating Trip (1873), The Ball on Shipboard (c. 1874), Quarreling (c. 1874-75), and Holyday (c. 1876). Perhaps they were studio props, and certainly they are of more visual interest than the plain black half-boots popular with men at that time.
Algernon Moses Marsden (1847 – 1920) was no gentleman.
His father, Isaac Moses (1809 – 1884), owned the Ready-Made Clothing Emporium at Aldgate, and by the time Algernon was 10 years old, the family lived in a grand new house at 23 Kensington Palace Gardens with a bow-fronted ballroom at the back. At 24, Algernon married, but rather than join the family business, he established himself as a picture dealer in St. James’s. In an 1872 trade directory, his residence is listed as Bayswater, a suburb west of London. He may have sold Tissot’s In the Conservatory (Rivals, c. 1875) [see For sale: In the Conservatory (Rivals), c. 1875, by James Tissot], and Marguerite in Church (c. 1860) around 1876, the year he sold William Holman Hunt’s 1866 Il Dolce far Niente through Christie’s, London.
Algernon Marsden lived high and went bankrupt by the age of 34; his debts were settled by his father. Algernon and his wife now resided in Kensington with five young daughters, plus Algernon’s 23-year-old niece, and five servants. When his father died in 1884, he disinherited Algernon in his Will but provided legacies for his wife and children.
In bankruptcy court again in 1887, at 40, Algernon said that when money came in, he “got rid of it” by gambling, particularly at the racetrack, but also at Eastbourne, a fashionable resort. By age 44, he, his wife, nine daughters and one son had moved to South Kensington. Bankrupt for at least the third time, Algernon, at age 54, abandoned his wife and ten children and fled to the United States with another woman in 1901. In 1912, The Times of London reported that Algernon Moses Marsden was bankrupt, but he was living in New York, where he died at the age of 72 on January 23, 1920.
Tissot captured this consummate rogue at age 30, wearing an embellished smoking jacket, a crisp, wing-collared white shirt, and a shining gold ring on his left hand.
There’s no telling if these gentlemen are rogues. Tissot’s The Rivals (I rivali, 1878–79) is set in the conservatory of his home in St. John’s Wood, London. It casts his mistress, Kathleen Newton, as a young widow, crocheting while taking tea with two suitors, one middle-aged and one old. The haughty-looking younger man wears a black sack coat over a white shirt with a stand-up collar, a dark tie, and fawn-colored trousers. The older man, still wearing his gloves, leans forward earnestly in his fully-buttoned, double-breasted black sack coat. Perhaps due his girth, his white waistcoat lines the coat rather awkwardly. His dark blue tie is quite wide, and he wears dark grey trousers and an oddly dainty white boutonnière. Incidentally, while most men of this era simply folded their ties over in a single, loose knot, this man has fastened his with a four-in-hand knot.
We can’t suppose these two men are rogues, just because they seem ungentlemanly enough not to interact with the two women in their party. As usual, Tissot depicts an enigmatic situation: these individuals all are waiting for something. The man with the white whiskers and extraordinary matching eyebrows wears a tall grey top hat with a wide black band, which is echoed by his black cravat. He pairs his black frock coat with tan trousers and brown kid gloves. The other man appears to be wearing a black sack coat over his tan trousers. He wears neither hat nor gloves, and shows a bit of an attitude, the way he sits astride the carved chair. Perhaps the two young women are content, not having to converse with the stuffy gentleman nor the unconventional one! Note that Tissot painted this image in 1878, and the lounge suit is not yet so common that either of his male subjects wears it.
In this painting, the elderly, wealthy businessman is dressed conservatively in a black frock coat with a starched white shirt front, black cravat, and a black top hat. Victorian viewers snickered that he was off to visit his mistress. Gentleman or rogue?
Related posts:
Masculine Fashion, by James Tissot: Aristocrats (1865 – 1868)
Masculine Fashion, by James Tissot: Officers, soldiers & sailors (1868 – 1883/85)
Masculine Fashion, by James Tissot: The Casual Male (1871 – 1878)
Masculine Fashion, by James Tissot: Sportsmen & Servants (1874 – 1885)
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If you do not have a Kindle e-reader, you may download free Kindle reading apps for PCs, Smartphones, tablets, and the Kindle Cloud Reader to read The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot. Read reviews.
The Hammock: A novel based on the true story of French painter James Tissot, brings Tissot’s world from 1870 to 1879 alive in a story of war, art, Society glamour, love, scandal, and tragedy.
Illustrated with 17 stunning, high-resolution fine art images in full color
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
(295 pages; ISBN (ePub): 978-0-615-68267-9). See http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009P5RYVE.Over the last month, Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Kevin Spacey and other influential men in the entertainment industry have seen their careers all but destroyed because of reports detailing serial sexual predation.
While it took years to corroborate what had been open secrets, once the stories of those men went public, the consequences were swift: movies and television shows canceled, awards and honors rescinded.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the voting body for the Oscars, held an emergency meeting to expel Weinstein — striking action from an institution that usually moves at a glacial pace.
Yet as politicians (of both political parties) face accusations of sexual misconduct, it has been much rarer for them to face such dramatic consequences, if any at all.
Perhaps the starkest example of this discrepancy came after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape last October: Host Billy Bush was fired from his job at NBC’s “Today” show, while reality TV star-turned-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump — who boasted on the tape that “when you are a star, they let you do it. You can do anything” — was elected president of the United States.
Voters are not going to the ballot thinking that the problem of sexual predatory behavior is one that should influence their vote, and that’s where our real work lies.” Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates
So why has the political realm proved less willing to hand out moral payback? In part because political and ideological stakes are involved.
Voters who choose to overlook moral transgressions do so out of “political calculus” and “expediency,” according to Ellen Bravo, a longtime activist for policies helping women in the workplace.
“Even it it’s true, we have too much to gain by having that person in, and so we’ll put up with it,” she said of voters weighing sexual harassment allegations against their favored candidates.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) recently admitted that politics was the key factor in her decision on how handle the scandal that’s erupted in her state’s U.S. Senate election. Even though candidate Roy Moore has faced accusations of sexual misconduct from nearly 10 women, Ivey said she still backs him because ultimately, it’s important that he is a member of the Republican Party.
“I believe in the Republican Party, what we stand for, and most important, we need to have a Republican in the United States Senate to vote on things like Supreme Court justices, other appointments the Senate has to confirm, and make major decisions,” Ivey said.
Jonathan Bachman via Getty Images GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore has denied multiple allegations that he preyed on teenage girls by portraying those accusations as a partisan attack.
People are also more likely to dismiss sexual assault survivors if they see their accusations as partisan, said Caroline Heldman, professor of politics at Occidental College. And that is much easier if the accused is already a partisan figure, like a politician.
The accusers are assessed “through the lens of partisanship,” Heldman said, “as in, ‘Oh, maybe this is just a woman from the Republican Party who’s going after a Democrat.’”
Moore has played on this tendency, characterizing the allegations against him as a conspiracy.
“For many of his supporters, they view it as just being a partisan attack, which allows complete dismissal of multiple survivors coming forward, from different periods of time, telling the exact same story or similar stories,” Heldman said.
There are fewer means for holding lawmakers accountable.
Other dynamics that make it harder to punish alleged sexual harassers in politics go beyond the voters’ immediate considerations.
For one, there are more individual entities in private industry with the power to take decisive action.
“The pressure points there come from employees, come from customers, and should come from a board and from shareholders,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “There are a range of people who have a vested interest in a company getting it right.”
If the powers that be within Hollywood see these dynamics hurting their investments and/or causing them some very serious liability issues, then people will get fired. Vanessa Tyson, assistant professor of politics at Scripps College
“The burden just isn’t as steep when it comes to toppling a sexual predator in Hollywood,” said Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, a legal organization focusing on gender equality. “Bad PR generated by a few complaints can be enough to damage a celebrity permanently. And the industry has other tools to oust sexual predators, and justice can be served by the few in charge of those tools, like the producer of a show cancels it rather than feature a predator or the academy, which has control over its membership.”
Contrast that with the options for punishing lawmakers.
“The rules are very, very limited for holding members of the House or the Senate accountable and non-existent for the presidency, essentially, unless there’s some criminal investigation or charges,” Heldman said.
To report sexual harassment on Capitol Hill, lawmakers and staffers must go through a byzantine system that offers little transparency or recourse for accusers.
“Congress right now is in the business of policing itself,” Goss Graves said. “There isn’t really another body that’s an effective counter to what’s happening.”
Farrell said it isn’t a coincidence that “politicians make it hard for people to complain about them.”
“It’s made arduous by design,” she said. “This is the fox guarding the henhouse.”
The fear of economic consequences can push a private company to take quick action against harassers.
“If the powers that be within Hollywood see these dynamics hurting their investments and/or causing them some very serious liability issues, then people will get fired and can get fired,” said Vanessa Tyson, assistant professor of politics at Scripps College. “I don’t know that this, for instance, changes the hearts or minds of any number of executives that may have misogynist tendencies, but a lot of social movements have been able to demonstrate over time that speaking with your pocketbook, that hitting power with your pocketbook can achieve certain gains.”
By contrast, with lawmakers, the only concrete action that individuals outside Congress can take is through elections, which Heldman pointed out is an “imperfect mechanism” because it “doesn’t lend itself to immediate response.”
In other words, if Trump had faced accusations of sexual assault while he was still the host of “The Apprentice,” he might have faced swifter and harsher punishment than he did as a presidential candidate.
Famous accusers can expedite the process of taking claims seriously.
Farrell referred to Weinstein as “a convenient fall guy when it comes to talking about sexual predators,” because the number and nature of his accusers, who included A-list actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, “helped elevate the issue” and “move beyond the question of whether it happened to why it happened and the broader system.”
Of the accusations, Farrell said, “it was very clear that many knew them to be true, and his board knew them to be true,” in part because of the level of fame involved.
Bravo similarly noted that celebrity status can reduce attacks on accusers’ credibility. “They have a high-profile, visible position and a fan base that makes it hard to discredit them,” she said.
Bob Riha Jr. via Getty Images Harvey Weinstein and Gwyneth Paltrow celebrated at the Oscars in 1999, when "Shakespeare in Love" took Best Picture and Paltrow took Best Actress.
As a group, the women accusing politicians of sexual assault and harassment are simply not as famous as movie stars, and many had no significant public profile before they came forward.
“I actually think if famous white actresses had come forward and accused Donald Trump, that things would have gone differently,” Heldman said. “If Gwyneth Paltrow comes forward, I think most Americans are more likely to believe that it happened than if a nobody comes forward.”
In one key aspect, however, the situations in entertainment and politics may not be that different.
“Both in Congress and in Hollywood, you see processes where institutions are protecting the institutions themselves, certainly not protecting those who have been victimized by sexual predators and predatory behavior,” Tyson said.
While men like Weinstein have suffered direct consequences, they may yet make career comebacks, as society tends to be forgiving of men’s transgressions.
The men being punished now might just be “sacrificial lambs,” Heldman cautioned, rather than catalysts for significant, long-term change in Hollywood.
“There’s some action being taken, although my guess is that these men will work in the industry again,” she said. “Woody Allen and Roman Polanski have been working in the industry for decades, with very serious allegations, so I’m not entirely sure if there’s a big difference.”
Mike Blake/Reuters Less than a decade after going on an anti-Semitic rant at a police officer, and later being caught abusing his then-girlfriend, actor and director Mel Gibson received an Oscar nomination.
A common theme in sexual harassment stories across industries is women being forced out of their jobs and denied opportunities for advancement, which Tyson said is “part of the economic oppression of women.”
“That is such a massive amount of human capital that is essentially leaving these industries where they could make a profound difference, but they are being driven out in various ways, either by misogynists or by people who are unwilling to stand up to [the misogynists],” she said.
Farrell described the fact that politicians face relatively few consequences for sexual misconduct as “a really good barometer on how far we have to go” in raising awareness of the broader issue.Tankers!
This weekend we're focused on puttiing vehicles in the Gift Shop to help prospective tankers that are taking advantage of our most recent On Track to the Leopard 1 event. Use the T-25 or the M10 to train your crews, earn serious Credits, and work on your medium tank tactics!
Bundles Begin: 04:00 PDT (07:00 EDT) on August 16, 2013
Bundles End: 04:00 PDT (07:00 EDT) on August 19, 2013
For anyone taking advantage of the On Track to the Leopard 1, this tank will be very helpful in your quest. Not only is it a good Credit earner, it also can be used to help train any German medium tank crew. It also has excellent gun depression for fighting on hilly terrain and the Credits are being thrown in at no additional cost.
V T-25 Garage Slot
75,000
Okay, so maybe medium tanks are not your cup of tea. In that case we have the newest British heavy Premium that might be more your style. With good mobility and thick frontal armor this is a heavy tank that can keep up with some of the best. Like other Premiums, the Excelsior is great for earning Credits, as well as helping with the training of any British heavy crew without having to retrain them for this tank.
V Excelsior Garage Slot
75,000
Here's another tank that's handy for anyone currently On Track to the Leopard 1. This one, however, is tier VII and happens to have the highest hitpoints out of any of the tier VII medium tanks. This tank can also be used to train any of your German medium tank crews and the Credits are included at no additional cost.
VII Panther/M10 Garage Slot
250,000
Visit the Gift ShopThe Screen Actors Guild nominations are a family affair!
Jake wasn’t the only Gyllenhaal to score a nod on Wednesday, and he called in to PEOPLE Now to share his enthusiasm not just for his nomination, but for sister Maggie‘s, too.
Gyllenhaal, 33, is up for outstanding performance by a male actor in a leading role for his turn as Louis Bloom in the upcoming Nightcrawler – and he thinks it’s an “honor.”
“Particularly this kind of nomination,” he adds, “from people who actually do what you do and know the odd, fascinating process of creating a character.”
The actor’s process for this particular role involved a drastic 30-lbs. weight loss.
However, he seemed just as thrilled by his sister’s nomination for outstanding performance by a female actor in a television movie or miniseries for The Honorable Woman, calling her performance “extraordinary.”
Watch the video above to find out whether the siblings will be hitting the SAG red carpet together – and who takes longer to get ready.
The 21st annual Screen Actors Guild Awards will air on both TNT and TBS on Jan. 25 at 8 p.m. ET.Garlic Batard is an artisanal bread that looks like it came from a bakery but is just as easy to make at home. This bread has a great crunchy crust and a tender center. The garlic is present without taking over.
It’s been a while since I participated with one of my bread baking challenge groups. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t been baking bread, but I seem to bake the same ones over and over. One thing that I’ve never quite gotten is a bread with that crunchy crusty exterior. That is until this Garlic Batard. Garlic is the theme this month with our BreadBakers group, hosted by Karen with Karen’s Kitchen Stories.
A batard is like a baguette but has a rounder middle and tapered ends like a torpedo. I watched the King Arthur video on shaping bread several times. My loaves were not pulled tight enough, so my ends lost their points, and I slashed my bread incorrectly, but it’s always easier to get right the second time around right? Regardless, it tastes delicious![Tweet “Garlic Batard #BreadBakers #KingArthurFlour”]
You need to start this bread the day before so it’s helpful to read through all of the instructions before you start. This recipe instructed you bake on a baking sheet. I slid mine onto a heated stone using the parchment paper.
I roasted my garlic for this recipe. Roasted garlic is milder and I didn’t want anyone to bite into a chunk of garlic that they would be tasting for the rest of the day. I mashed it up and mixed it throughout the dough, and it was perfect. Every bite has a pleasant garlic taste but it doesn’t take over. This bread would be absolutely perfect with a pasta dish. These steps may look daunting, but trust me, they are easy to follow.
Don’t have time to make it now? Pin it for later!
5 from 10 votes Print Garlic Batard – #BreadBakers Prep Time 4 hrs 15 mins Cook Time 30 mins Total Time 4 hrs 45 mins An artisanal bread that looks like you bought it at a bakery but made in your kitchen. This bread has a crunchy crust and a tender center. The garlic flavor is present without taking over. This bread would be perfect with a plate of pasta! Course: Bread Cuisine: Bread Servings : 2 loaves Hostess At Heart : Hostess At Heart Ingredients Poolish 1/3 cup cool water
1/2 cup European-Style Artisan Bread Flour King Arthur (Bread flour will also work)
Pinch of instant yeast 1/16th tsp Dough All of the Poolish
3/4 cup cool water
2 1/2 cups European-Style Artisan Bread Flour King Arthur
1 bulb garlic roasted and mashed
1 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt Instructions Roasted Garlic Slice the top 1/4 off the bulb of garlic and drizzle with olive oil. Wrap completely in aluminum foil. Put into a 425 degree F oven for 35 minutes. Allow the garlic to cool to touch. Squeeze from the bottom to remove garlic into a dish. Cover and refrigerate for up to 2 weeks or 3 months in the freezer. Poolish In a medium-sized bowl, combine the poolish ingredients. Mix until combined. Cover and let sit at room temperature for 12 to 16 hours or until large bubbles and holes emerge. Dough Add the water to the poolish and mix to combine. Add the flour and garlic. Mix to combine. The dough will feel tough and look craggy. Cover and let rest for 20 minutes. This allows the gluten to start developing and will make kneading easier. Add yeast and salt. Knead the dough until it's fairly smooth, 5 to 7 minutes. It still will not feel elastic but will be smooth. Place the dough into a lightly greased bowl, flipping once to oil both sides. Cover and allow it to rise at room temperature, 1 1/2 hours. To allow the gluten to develop and distribute the yeast's food, turn the dough every 30 minutes during rising time; gently fold all four sides into the middle and turn the dough over each time. On a lightly greased work surface, divide the dough in half. Shape each half into a rough log, cover and let them rest for 15 to 20 minutes. This allows the gluten to relax. Shape the logs into 12-inch batards. See KAF shaping video if you need guidance. Place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Cover with lightly greased plastic wrap and allow to rise at room temperature about 2 hours. They should rise about three-quarters of the way to doubled. Don't over-rise or they will lose their shape. |
effectively unlimited lifetime for most uses, although they will still eventually fail at some point due to other ionization-initiated processes that limit the lifetime of all Geiger tubes). For these reasons, the halogen-quenched tube is now the most common.[5]
Geiger plateau [ edit ]
The characteristic curve of Geiger Muller tube response with constant radiation against varying tube voltage.
The Geiger plateau is the voltage range in which the G-M tube operates in its correct mode, where ionisation occurs along the length of the anode. If a G–M tube is exposed to a steady radiation source and the applied voltage is increased from zero, it follows the plot of current shown in the "Geiger region" where the gradient flattens; this is the Geiger plateau.[5]
This is shown in more detail in the accompanying Geiger Plateau Curve diagram. If the tube voltage is progressively increased from zero the efficiency of detection will rise until the most energetic radiation starts to produce pulses which can be detected by the electronics. This is the "starting voltage". Increasing the voltage still further results in rapidly rising counts until the "knee" or threshold of the plateau is reached, where the rate of increase of counts falls off. This is where the tube voltage is sufficient to allow a complete discharge along the anode for each detected radiation count, and the effect of different radiation energies are equal. However, the plateau has a slight slope mainly due to the lower electric fields at the ends of the anode because of tube geometry. As the tube voltage is increased, these fields strengthen to produce avalanches. At the end of the plateau the count rate begins to increase rapidly again, until the onset of continuous discharge where the tube cannot detect radiation, and may be damaged.[5].
Depending on the characteristics of the specific tube (manufacturer, size, gas type, etc.) the voltage range of the plateau will vary. The slope is usually expressed as percentage change of counts per 100V. To prevent overall efficiency changes due to variation of tube voltage, a regulated voltage supply is used, and it is normal practice to operate in the middle of the plateau to reduce the effect of any voltage variations. [5][7]
Quenching and dead time [ edit ]
[5] The tube can produce no further pulses during the dead time, and only produces pulses of lesser height until the recovery time has elapsed. Dead time and recovery time in a Geiger Muller tube.The tube can produce no further pulses during the dead time, and only produces pulses of lesser height until the recovery time has elapsed.
The ideal G–M tube should produce a single pulse for every single ionising event due to radiation. It should not give spurious pulses, and should recover quickly to the passive state, ready for the next radiation event. However, when positive argon ions reach the cathode and become neutral atoms by gaining electrons, the atoms can be elevated to enhanced energy levels. These atoms then return to their ground state by emitting photons which in turn produce further ionisation and thereby spurious secondary discharges. If nothing were done to counteract this, ionisation would be prolonged and could even escalate. The prolonged avalanche would increase the "dead time" when new events cannot be detected, and could become continuous and damage the tube. Some form of quenching of the ionisation is therefore essential to reduce the dead time and protect the tube, and a number of quenching techniques are used.
Chemical quenching [ edit ]
Self-quenching or internal-quenching tubes stop the discharge without external assistance, originally by means of the addition of a small amount of a polyatomic organic vapor originally such as butane or ethanol, but for modern tubes is a halogen such as bromine or chlorine.[5]
If a poor gas quencher is introduced to the tube, the positive argon ions, during their motion toward the cathode, would have multiple collisions with the quencher gas molecules and transfer their charge and some energy to them. Thus, neutral argon atoms would be produced and the quencher gas ions in their turn would reach the cathode, gain electrons therefrom, and move into excited states which would decay by photon emission, producing tube discharge. However, effective quencher molecules, when excited, lose their energy not by photon emission, but by dissociation into neutral quencher molecules. No spurious pulses are thus produced.[5]
Even with chemical quenching, for a short time after a discharge pulse there is a period during which the tube is rendered insensitive and is thus temporarily unable to detect the arrival of any new ionizing particle (the so-called dead time; typically 50–100 microseconds). This causes a loss of counts at sufficiently high count rates and limits the G–M tube to an effective (accurate) count rate of approximately 103 counts per second even with external quenching. While a G-M tube is technically capable of reading higher count rates before it truly saturates, the level of uncertainty involved and the risk of saturation makes it extremely dangerous to rely upon higher count rate readings when attempting to calculate an equivalent radiation dose rate from the count rate. A consequence of this is that ion chamber instruments are usually preferred for higher count rates, however a modern external quenching technique can extend this upper limit considerably.[5]
External quenching [ edit ]
External quenching, sometimes called "active quenching" or "electronic quenching", uses simplistic high speed control electronics to rapidly remove and re-apply the high voltage between the electrodes for a fixed time after each discharge peak in order to increase the maximum count rate and lifetime of the tube. Although this can be used instead of a quench gas, it is much more commonly used in conjunction with a quench gas.[5]
The "time-to-first-count method" is a sophisticated modern implementation of external quenching that allows for dramatically increased maximum count rates via the use of statistical signal processing techniques and much more complex control electronics. Due to uncertainty in the count rate introduced by the simplistic implementation of external quenching, the count rate of a Geiger tube becomes extremely unreliable above approximately 103 counts per second. With the time-to-first-count method, effective count rates of 105 counts per second are achievable, two orders of magnitude larger than the normal effective limit. The time-to-first-count method is significantly more complicated to implement than traditional external quenching methods, and as a result of this it has not seen widespread use.[5]
Fold-back effect [ edit ]
One consequence of the dead time effect is the possibility of a high count rate continually triggering the tube before the recovery time has elapsed. This may produce pulses too small for the counting electronics to detect and lead to the very undesirable situation whereby a G–M counter in a very high radiation field is falsely indicating a low level. This phenomenon is known as "fold-back". An industry rule of thumb is that the discriminator circuit receiving the output from the tube should detect down to 1/10 of the magnitude of a normal pulse to guard against this.[4] Additionally the circuit should detect when "pulse pile-up " has occurred, where the apparent anode voltage has moved to a new dc level through the combination of high pulse count and noise. The electronic design of Geiger–Muller counters must be able to detect this situation and give an alarm; it is normally done by setting a threshold for excessive tube current.
Detection efficiency [ edit ]
The efficiency of detection of a G–M tube varies with the type of incident radiation. Tubes with thin end windows have very high efficiencies (can be nearly 100%) for high energy beta, though this drops off as the beta energy decreases due to attenuation by the window material. Alpha particles are also attenuated by the window. As alpha particles have a maximum range of less than 50 mm in air, the detection window should be as close as possible to the source of radiation. The attenuation of the window adds to the attenuation of air, so the window should have a density as low as 1.5 to 2.0 mg/cm2 to give an acceptable level of detection efficiency. The article on stopping power explains in more detail the ranges for particles types of various energies. The counting efficiency of photon radiation (gamma and X-rays above 25 keV) depends on the efficiency of radiation interaction in the tube wall, which increases with the atomic number of the wall material. Chromium iron is a commonly used material, which gives an efficiency of about 1% over a wide range of energies.[4]
Photon energy compensation [ edit ]
Comparative response curves for G-M tubes with and without gamma energy compensation
Thin-walled glass G–M tube showing a spiral wire cathode. The tape bands are for fixing compensating rings
Thin-walled glass G–M tube with energy compensating rings fitted. The complete assembly fits into the aluminium housing.
If a G–M tube is to be used for gamma or X-ray dosimetry measurements the energy of incident radiation, which affects the ionising effect, must be taken into account. However pulses from a G–M tube do not carry any energy information, and attribute equal dose to each count event. Consequently the count rate response of a “bare” GM-tube to photons at different energy levels is non-linear with the effect of over-reading at low energies. The variation in dose response can be a factor between 5 to 15, according to individual tube construction; the very small tubes having the highest values.
To correct this a technique known as “Energy Compensation” is applied, which consists of adding a shield of absorbing material round the tube. This filter preferentially absorbs the low energy photons and the dose response is “flattened“. The aim is that sensitivity/energy characteristic of the tube should be matched by the absorption/energy characteristic of the filter. This cannot be exactly achieved, but the result is a more uniform response over the stated range of detection energies for the tube. [5]
Lead and tin are commonly used materials, and a simple filter effective above 150 keV can be made using a continuous collar along the length of the tube. However, at lower energy levels this attenuation can become too great, so air gaps are left in the collar to allow low energy radiation to have a greater effect. In practice, compensation filter design is an empirical compromise to produce an acceptably uniform response, and a number of different materials and geometries are used to obtain the required correction.[4]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
PatentsIt was planned already very long to add some remaining features from gae-search to nonrel-search and since we stopped developing gae-search we decided to make some of the premium features open-source. So let's see what changed.
We basically changed two things in nonrel-search: first it's possible to index a model via a separate definition i.e. without having to modify the model's source itself and second you can use our auto-completion feature from the good old gae-search days. :)
Separate indexing
So let's say you want to index some of your models. With the old version of nonrel-search you had to add a SearchManager to each model you want to search for. With the latest version of nonrel-search you have to define these indexes separately from your model like this:
# post.models from django.db import models class Post(models.Model): title = models.CharField(max_length=500) content = models.TextField() author = models.CharField(max_length=500) category = models.CharField(max_length=500)
# post.search_indexes import search from search.core import porter_stemmer from post.models import Post # index used to retrieve posts using the title, content or the # category. search.register(Post, ('title', 'content','category', ), indexer=porter_stemmer)
As you can see we use the new register function to make posts searchable by title, content and category leaving the author aside. The first parameter defines the model you want to index. The remaining parameters are just the same as for the old SearchManager. The register function automatically adds an index called'search_index'. Of course it's possible to add multiple such search indexes, just register more of them and pass in a name for the index:
# post.search_indexes... search.register(Post, ('category', 'title' ), indexer=porter_stemmer, search_index='second_search_index')
Here we define a new index called'second_search_index'.
In addition to defining the indexes we have to make sure that the register function will be executed. Nonrel-search provides a function called autodiscover which automatically searches the INSTALLED_APPS for "search_indexes.py" modules and registers all search indexes.
# search for "search_indexes.py" in all installed apps import search search.autodiscover()
You should call autodiscover in your settings.AUTOLOAD_SITECONF module to make sure that your indexes get loaded. See django-autoload for more information on auto-loading modules (so don't forget to install django-autoload). Now it's possible to search for models using the newly added search function:
from search.core import search posts = search(Post, 'Hello world')
search takes two arguments: the first specifiing the model to search for and the second argument specifies the query used for searching. search automatically uses the index'search_index'. If you want to use a different index just pass in the name of the desired index:
from search.core import search # use the auto-completion index explained in the next section posts = search(Post, 'Hello world', search_index='second_search_index')
Defining indexes separately from the model definition is especially useful for already existing Django apps so you can make them searchable without having to modify their source code. For example, it's possible to make users searchable via their first name and last name just by adding a search index in a separate module.
Auto-completion or "suggest-as-you-type"
Auto-completion is the first premium feature we make open-source. Let's say you want to add auto-completion for category names while creating posts. Nonrel-search makes this an easy job. In order to do so you first have to register a search index which uses the startswith indexer:
# post.search_indexes... # auto-completion index used to suggest categories search.register(Post, ('category', ), indexer=startswith, search_index='autocomplete_index')
Then you can use the LiveSearchField which can be integrated into forms to define an auto-completion form:
# post.forms from django import forms from post.models import Post from search.forms import LiveSearchField class CreatePostForm(forms.ModelForm): category = LiveSearchField('/post/live_search/') class Meta: model = Post
Just pass LiveSearchField the URL to the auto-complete view which retrieves your posts. You can also configure the auto-completion behavior with additional parameters. See the documentation for more information. You can then use this form in your templates to display an auto-completed input field. So, the only thing left is a view returning the data required for auto-completion and to include the necessary Javascript / CSS files into your html:
# post.views from post.models import Post from search.views import live_search_results def live_search(request): return live_search_results(request, Post, search_index='autocomplete_index', result_item_formatting= lambda post: {'value': u'<div>%s</div>' % (post.category),'result': post.category, })
Here, we use the function live_search_results and pass in the model class to search on, the name of the index to use for searching (default is'search_index'), and a formatting function which specifies how your auto-completed posts will be displayed. Note that this function returns a dictionary having two items: 'value' specifies how to display your posts and'result' specifies what to put into the input field when selecting a post from the auto-completed results list.
If you don't specify any result_item_formatting function, 'value' will be the escaped value of the first indexed property and'result' will be the unescaped value of the same property.
Note that request has to include a GET parameter 'query'.
Here is the remaining code you have to add so that all necessary Javascript / CSS files will be included using the django-mediagenerator:
# settings # list your css and js data here MEDIA_BUNDLES = ( ('main.css',...,'search/jquery.autocomplete.css','search/search.css', ), ('main.js',..., 'jquery.js', 'jquery.livequery.js','search/jquery.autocomplete.js','search/autocomplete_activator.js', ), )
and in your templates add this:
... {% block css %} {% include_media'main.css' %} {% endblock %} {% block js %} {% include_media'main.js' %} {% endblock %}
You can download the nonrel-search-testapp to get started and play around with nonrel-search. If you create some nice app using nonrel-search please let us know.His lunch was “the bomb.”
Airport officials detained a traveler who mentioned an explosive device at JFK — only to discover he was actually talking about food referred to as The Bomb, TSA sources said.
Jason Michael Cruz, 29, was on an escalator in Terminal 7 Thursday when a TSA officer overheard him tell a friend he “had the wrong kind of bomb” just after 1 p.m.
She reported the conversation to her supervisor, Robert Haddok, who sent officers to a security checkpoint to question the pair.
Officials ushered Cruz and his friend, Matthew Okumoto, to a holding area, where they learned the pair was talking about a sandwich called The Bomb, airport officials said.
Cruz told officers he was chatting about wanting to bring food on the airplane, sources said.
The TSA agent who reported the bomb comment explained that she had only caught a snippet of the conversation, and the pair was then released.
TSA officers held the pair until airport cops arrived, causing Cruz to miss his Los Angeles-bound flight.Hurricane Harvey forces Cougars to shift football operations to Austin
AUSTIN - The University of Houston is relocating its football operations to Central Texas in advance of Hurricane Harvey.
Hunter Yurachek, UH's vice president of intercollegiate athletics, said the Cougars plan use the practice facilities at the University of Texas at least through the weekend and possibly into early next week. UH is scheduled to open the season Sept. 2 at Texas-San Antonio.
"(Thursday) as it became apparent that Harvey was going to have a significant impact throughout the weekend and early into next week, we reached out to schools within the state of Texas that we have great relationships with, and inquired about the opportunity for our football program to practice and use their facilities as we are relocating outside of Houston," Yurachek said.
Yurachek said UH received offers from Baylor, SMU and TCU to use their facilities. Due to available hotel accommodations and proximity of the schools, UH opted to move to Austin.
"I called (UT athletics director ) Mike Perrin, and without hesitation Mike said ‘absolutely. We’d be glad to help. Let me run it up the chain of command here at Texas. I don’t foresee that being a problem.’ And within 10 minutes he called and said ‘we’ll make it happen.'
UH defensive lineman Ed Oliver (10) and his teammates will be practicing in Austin after Hurricane Harvey forced them to relocate. UH defensive lineman Ed Oliver (10) and his teammates will be practicing in Austin after Hurricane Harvey forced them to relocate. Photo: UH Athletics Photo: UH Athletics Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close Hurricane Harvey forces Cougars to shift football operations to Austin 1 / 17 Back to Gallery
"Mike is a Houstonian. I think he thinks a lot about what we’re doing, and understands the importance of us working together as state schools in a time where our area is getting hit pretty hard."
Hurricane Harvey is expected to make landfall early Saturday along the southeast Texas coast as a Category 3 hurricane with wind gusts of at least 111 miles per hour. The storm is expected to deliver torrential rain for several days, with some weather forecast projecting at least 20 inches of rain for the Houston area.
"Just keeping everybody in our thoughts and prayers," Yurachek said, "and hope that everybody is safe and does not take unnecessary risks and listens to all the advice we’re getting from the emergency management teams across the city of Houston and the state of Texas and heeds those warnings."
UH will practice Saturday and Sunday and will return to Houston as soon as possible.
"We are grateful to the University of Texas and its football program for opening their doors to us," UH coach Major Applewhite said in a statement. "We are also thankful to the other programs from across the state of Texas that offered shelter to our program during this time. We are hopeful for the best in Houston but are preparing for every situation. We ask everyone to keep the city of Houston, all affected areas across the Gulf Coast and its residents in their thoughts and prayers."TRENTON — State revenue collections outpaced the Christie administration’s projections for the sixth consecutive month in May, according to state Treasury figures released today.
The collections are beating Gov. Chris Christie's more modest projections, revised in February amid disappointing economic news.
The strong revenue figures got a boost from better-than-expected income and sales tax collections, which account for more than half of the state’s overall revenue collections.
“The report reflects ongoing improvement in the economic conditions of state residents,” said the state’s chief economist Charles Steindel. “Income tax collections continue to grow rapidly, even after the receipt of large final payments in April.”
Overall, income tax collections are up 13 percent this year and revenue from the sales tax is up 3 percent.
Despite the surges, overall revenue collections are only beating the administration's projections by less than 1 percent, due largely to disappointing collections in the early part of the budget year.
The state collected $22.77 billion in revenue through May, slightly higher than the $22.69 billion Christie had anticipated. June is the final month of the budget year, and those monthly figures won’t come out for a few weeks.
In February, facing a sluggish economy, Christie revised his ambitious revenue projections downward. The revision gave credibility to his critics who said he was using unrealistic revenue projections to bolster his political credentials nationally.
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• N.J. revenues slightly beat Gov. Christie's expectations last month
• More PoliticsTo borrow a phrase from a politician he loathes, Alex Salmond feels the hand of history on his shoulder. On Tuesday, his SNP government will launch its white paper on Scottish independence – to hear some people talk, the most significant political document in his country's history since 1320's Declaration of Arbroath. A day in 2016 has been set for formal secession from the UK: 24 March, the anniversary of both 1603's Union of the Crowns and the Act of Union of 1707. In its own way, news from the "no" campaign only underlines the sense of momentous times: on Saturday, like Banquo's ghost come to alert Salmond to his hubris, Gordon Brown materialised in the Daily Record, warning that an independent Scotland would be "worse placed, more vulnerable and less, not more, in control of key economic decisions".
In England, the intensifying debate north of the border is still met with a great sigh of indifference. Perhaps our news discourse has become so trite that it can't cope with something of such importance. Or maybe this is more proof that London so dominates the supposed national agenda that anything that happens this far away will be overlooked – and that in any case, 14 years of devolution has left English and Scottish politics hopelessly estranged. In addition, large parts of the establishment seem to think that with polls showing less than a third of Scots supporting independence, the referendum can be thought of as a momentary tantrum on the Celtic fringe, and ignored. As evidenced by recent warnings from the new Scottish secretary, Alistair Carmichael (who last week tried to "put the fear of god" into the cabinet), such thinking is misplaced, but more of that in a moment.
What's particularly striking is that averting one's eyes from Scotland seems to be particularly prevalent on the English left. Independence, we know, is synonymous with a deep fear of eternal Tory government, so grave that there seems to have been a collective resolution to not even think about it. As proved by an ongoing reluctance to think about their own country, too many left voices in England still get queasy about matters of nationhood. The fact that the Labour party is inevitably the prime mover in the "no" campaign only furthers the sense of shutdown: with Ed Miliband having somewhat raised the hopes of the left and a general election looming (which, let's not forget, would be thrown into chaos by a yes vote), too many people are once again assuming that the first progressive duty is to mostly do whatever Labour tells them.
In reality, though, something very exciting is afoot. In England, the spectacle of mainstream politics frequently suggests a world gone mad: heated debate about whether schools should employ unqualified teachers, varying degrees of nastiness towards immigrants and people on benefits, white men with expensive educations endlessly frothing about "social mobility". In Scotland, by contrast, within a political culture firmly fixed on the centre-left, the possibility of independence has sparked a snowballing conversation focused on just about every issue that gets picked apart on this site, and a common understanding that politics as practised in SW1 no longer works.
The best highlighting of this was recently put on the Open Democracy website by Robin McAlpine, a yes campaigner, and the director of the Jimmy Reid Foundation, an organisation now focused on nudging Scottish politics towards the idea of the Common Weal (or, as its blurb puts it, "mutuality and equity rather than conflict and inequality"). On the subject of independence, he addressed his English readers thus: "The big irony... is that you think this is something to do with identity. But Scotland crossed that bridge ages ago... We're talking about raising tax and nationalising energy generation. If you fall into the trap of writing us off as ethnicity-based gripers, you will not only miss the best political debate Britain has had in decades, you will play a part in quashing it. Come up, offer your expertise, help us build. If we succeed, finally you'll have the proof that Thatcher wasn't right with that 'there is no alternative' stuff." The Reid Foundation calls what Scotland must escape the "London orthodoxy approach".
Of course, it is easy to get carried away. On the face of it, the SNP wants to frame the independence debate in terms of a social-democratic renaissance, but it remains a rather Janus-faced set-up, with some of its high-ups also clinging to the distinctly London orthodoxy-ish politics of low taxes and light-touch regulation. We shall see what ensues on Tuesday, but the yes campaign is far from cutting through the no camp's clear messages on everything from an independent Scotland's currency to its defence arrangements. Moreover, for millions, a grim economic context will take a lot of getting over. As one Scottish friend of mine put it: "It's easy to scare people who are already afraid."
On that subject, over the weekend I spoke to a yes campaign insider who said that internal polling suggested an electorate divided into thirds. Hardened no voters, he reckoned, tend to be concentrated in higher socioeconomic groups. Those who will definitely vote yes are a more mixed bunch. The third group are undecided and, he says, are disproportionately found at the lower end of the class hierarchy. They are prepared to at least consider independence because the status quo isn't helping them, and they have relatively little to lose. If these people are to vote yes, he told me, they will need a degree of reassurance so far absent, though he seemed confident it would arrive.
But here's the crucial point. They and millions of others in Scotland know that 30 years of what some call neoliberalism has done them few favours, and that the current Westminster government – indeed, Westminster politics across the board – is making things worse. For all the complexities of independence, given the chance to forever leave behind the Conservative party and a rotten London establishment by voting for secession, you'd surely forgive them for grabbing it while they can.
All of which is a circuitous way of saying that if I had a vote in Scotland I would, with a mixture of trepidation and enthusiasm, vote in favour of independence. Hope rather than fear, and all that. But also something much more fundamental: a chance for at least one part of these islands to exit a decayed consensus, and beat a path towards something better.If you go on Facebook and browse the photo galleries of anyone between the ages of 18-25, chances are you will find people with an inexplicable urge to flash the bird at the photographer.
Today that would be me if Roger Goodell were the photographer.
And THAT would NOT be inexplicable!
Hey Baltimore fans, let’s just call Schedule-Gate what it is – a royal screwing courtesy the NFL! You are being asked to bend over and take it with a smile!
Charm City, you are supposed to enjoy the limelight of the NFL’s opening game of the season. You are supposed to be exulted. The city should be cloaked in all things purple. This is Baltimore’s chance to stand upon a stage and beam with civic pride because WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS…OF THE WORLD!!!
Instead you are now being told that despite your accomplishments, your emotional investment and the investment of your hard earned dollars right on through the Super Bowl and beyond on expensive things such as tickets, airfare, hotels, parking, concessions, memorabilia, licensed gear, etc., etc., that YOU don’t matter. They just don’t give a rat’s ass!
The NFL is essentially wearing their greedy grins, laughing at your devotion and mocking you Baltimore!
Taking the league’s opening night to a city other than that of the champion is like crowning the 3rd runner-up in the Miss America Pageant; it’s like adorning the 4th place finisher in The Preakness with the bed of black-eyed Susans; it’s on par with forcing the winner of the Daytona 500 to watch another driver take the victory lap; it’s akin to giving the Green Jacket at The Masters to the golfer who finished 2 strokes behind the winner.
This is a rip off of epic proportions!
How degrading is it for this disingenuous commissioner to stand up at his cushy little podium and say he and the league have done their best for the fans of Baltimore. The same pretentious prick who insults your intelligence by twisting your outcries against paying full price for preseason games and then uses that as his justification to expand the regular season schedule to 18 games.
The only thing the league and this commissioner care about is money. MON-EY!
Every action, every behavior, even the feigned community centricity has one thing, one goal in mind – more Benjamins!
The solution to this Thursday night dilemma has been staring the NFL’s head honchos in the face the moment the scheduling snafu was discovered. Move the damn game to Wednesday. They did it last year to step aside for the Democratic National Convention.
So why won’t they do it again?
Simple answer – MONEY!
The ratings apparently aren’t as good on Wednesday nights and what do weaker ratings spell – LESS MONEY.
So do us a solid Goodell. Don’t tell us you tried. You didn’t!
Don’t tell us you care. You don’t.
You are a freaking phony and please, don’t hand me this Rosh Hashanah BS. Not to disrespect the Jewish Community but games have been played on Rosh Hashanah before and they will be played again during this Holiday particularly if it means more profit for the league.
And for those of you who want to blame Mr. Angelos for this mess, forget about it! This isn’t on the Orioles or MLB. This one is on the empty suit who “earns” about a million per month.
Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti, I love the guy but come on paisan! If the league is going to stiff us and then make us go on the road, then just give up the opening game. Just give it up altogether!
Give us a Sunday home game a 1 o’clock and we’ll have our own little celebration. We should NOT open on the road. It’s like getting married again and then honeymooning with your ex.
Do something – ANYTHING other than this.
And let’s be real here, we all know where this is headed.
The Ravens will open on the road in Denver. The AFC’s third runner-up will be the showcased team. We’ll hear about how the Ravens have lost so much star-power. No Ray Lewis or Ed Reed or Anquan Boldin. And then it will get worse.
PEYTON!
PEYTON!
PEYTON!
It will a Peyton Manning love fest. He’ll be rested and we’ll hear repeatedly about how great Peyton is and how he and his brand new little toy named Wes Welker are developing a rapport until we’ll all just want to hurl.
In the end it will be a Denver celebration.
Not yours Baltimore!
That newly constructed defense without the benefit of Baltimore’s great 12th man and without a regular season game under their collective belt will be torn to shreds like Lindsay Lohan tears through an 8-ball. Manning will have a field day.
Can you see it?
Play the damn game at home and to hell with the National TV audience.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go take a few pictures and mail them to Roger Goodell.Community: One of the promises of Open Source. We're seeing the positive effects as a community of visual effects and animation professionals come together to solve problems more effectively today than ever before. This idea of giving stuff away is catching on and our industry is benefiting.
Our projects are seeing great adoption. Alembic, one of our most ambitious collaborations to date, is supported by most major 3d applications. OpenColorIO has also been widely adopted and is helping to simplify color pipelines in tools across our industry. Open Shading Language can be found in V-Ray, Autodesk Beast, Blender Cycles and other products coming soon. We're excited.
Please take a moment to check out these and our other open source offerings. They are provided with familiar, non-restrictive open source licenses and are already in use in studios around the world. These tools have already helped Sony Pictures Imageworks put films on the screen with greater ease, and we hope they can do the same for you.ClimateWorks, one of the two international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) recently restricted by the National Democratic Alliance government from funding in India, also funds another NGO, Global International, which, till recently, was headed in India by Union Environment and Forests minister When he took over charge of the ministry, the minister was proud to announce his association with the
also funds a third called Climate Parliament, a forum that had on board many parliamentarians, including the Bharatiya Janata Party's Rajiv Pratap Rudy as convenor. Both these organisations also lobbied for increased deployment of renewable energy, instead of coal-based power, in India.
The India office of ClimateWorks, registered as a non-profit company here in the name of Shakti Foundation, has sponsored or co-hosted research, events and projects of bodies such as World Bank, Planning Commission, the Confederation of Indian Industries, Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, The Energy and Resources Institute and Aspen Institute. is upfront in sharing this information on its website.
One of the board members of the US-based ClimateWorks, is eminent businessman Jamshyd N Godrej, chairman of the board of Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company Ltd. He was also a member of a committee on low-carbon growth set up by the government.
This is just an example of how complex, webbed and diverse the world of large environmental NGOs, globally or in India, has become and how enmeshed it is in policymaking on climate change, sustainability and environmental issues globally. (FDI) in the sector is, in fact, no different from the cross-holdings and the web of the corporate world.
The role of NGOs in climate change and other UN environmental negotiations is formally accepted and encouraged. There are just as many, if not more, better-funded business NGOs and corporate funded groups that also formally engage with one of the most complicated energy and economic negotiations ever undertaken in history; no government thinks of these as just environmental negotiations. Many assess the birth and death of business opportunities arising out of climate talks.
Diplomats and bureaucrats who have dealt with such NGOs in India, especially in the area of climate change, know this for years. They have handled them quietly, just as they have dealt with development agencies of developed countries and multilateral funding agencies such as the World Bank, trying to push their specific agenda through their projects in the country.
"You listen to them, engage with them on your terms, hopefully, and you take from them what you find to your advantage - information, knowledge or funding. You should know what you want from each," says a retired bureaucrat who has negotiated for India on environmental issues, on condition of anonymity.
He adds some NGOs are so well funded and influential that their members, at times, negotiate at UN talks as representatives of small countries. The Indian government and several other developing countries have pointed to the funding of delegations of some small countries by developed countries, through various routes.
"It's cacophony out there (in civil society) and countries try to channelise these for their own messaging. Naturally, developed countries have better resources to set agenda," says a serving negotiator. In 2012, the chief US negotiator was caught on tape berating a few international NGOs in a closed-door meeting. He warned them against raising demands for greater action against the US, reminding them the US had paid for them to be at these international meetings.
NGOs push debate in the public sphere and this has a multiplier impact in the international and domestic media, too. Many negotiators from large developing countries complain of the skew in civil society in favour of either the US or the EU. But that skew has lessened through the years, as South-centric NGOs have turned more organised and vocal, with encouragement from developing countries, of course.
Through the past decade, several international green NGOs set up shop or increased funding and focus on emerging economies such as China and India. Among these is Greenpeace. By intent, it takes a more aggressive public posture which includes media-friendly tactics. And, quite like its operations abroad, it operates by finding a high profile 'point of action' to support its larger campaigns in India - such as opposition to mining in the Mahan coal block in Madhya Pradesh. And, it makes no bones about it.
Greenpeace mixes a real and increasing domestic concern - the rights of millions of tribals - with its international climate change battle for closing green-field coal mining, without differentiating between developing and developed countries the way the UN climate change pact does. International lending agencies are being pressurised by many such NGOS to stop funding coal projects in developing countries and put their money into renewables.
Many officials in India feel these NGOs misrepresent the principle of equity between nation states at UN climate forums and try to 'internationalise' issues of equity between communities within a country's political and |
to entrench his group’s power rather than building a consensus that might tackle Egypt’s most daunting problems. The country’s economy, as a result, is somewhere between paralysis and meltdown. Many of the 83m people in the Arab world’s most populous country are growing increasingly fearful and angry as their currency falls, prices rise and jobs get scarcer. He has insisted that the sitting upper house of parliament, which was elected by only a tenth of voters and had been seen by many as a talking shop, is the sole legitimate legislature, even as it writes rules empowering the Islamists, whose media spew forth sectarian hatred, claiming that anyone who rebukes them is an agent of foreign powers. The proceedings that led to the recent death sentences for the football hooligans were secretive. Meanwhile, not a single policeman has been jailed for killing any of the 800-odd people who lost their lives for protesting against Mr Mubarak’s dictatorship.
Hope to hold on to
A general election, already delayed, is scheduled for April. With Mr Morsi resorting to methods reminiscent of the old regime, the country could be torn further apart before then. The risk is that this surge of violence will tip Egypt into a new bout of revolution, or that the army, with or without Mr Morsi’s connivance, may reimpose a dictatorship.
Yet it is too soon to despair of Egypt’s future. The army, which has retained many of its privileges and powers under the new dispensation, has no wish to rule the country again; and it is both in Mr Morsi’s interests, and within his power, to govern by peaceful rather than violent means.
Instead of rushing to tighten their grip on power and demonise their opponents, the Brothers should grasp that legitimacy in democratic politics comes from inclusive rule and tolerance as well as from the ballot box. Mr Morsi should present himself as president of all Egyptians, whatever part they think Islam should play in public life. He should offer to revise the constitution’s most divisive parts and discuss altering the rules governing the coming election. He should begin to reform the police and the courts and appoint a genuinely independent public prosecutor rather than a Brotherhood stooge.
Above all, Mr Morsi should clinch a long-delayed deal with the IMF, which has promised a vital $4.8 billion in return for tough but crucial reforms, including the targeted removal of fuel subsidies. Economic reform, in turn, should prompt a surge of foreign investment. Indeed, Mr Morsi’s best hope of restoring the Islamists’ popularity is to revive Egypt’s miserably stalled economy.
The outside world can nudge him in the right direction. Although American military aid is a poor bargaining chip—its main purpose is to bind Egypt to its peace treaty with Israel—a threat by Europeans and others to withhold development aid could be a useful lever. But ultimately the foreigners’ clout is limited. The lesson of the past decade is that democracy cannot be forced down unwilling throats: only the Egyptians have the power to decide whether their country eventually fulfils the hopes of two years ago or reverts to darkness and violence. Mr Morsi has a heavy responsibility.By: Robin H. Fogle, MD, ACRM
“Remember when having sex was fun?” You might be surprised to hear someone say this, but for couples trying to conceive, this may be exactly how they feel. Getting pregnant is all about timing. Once the egg ovulates, it remains alive in the woman's fallopian tube for 12 to 24 hours. Once the sperm makes it into the cervical mucous following intercourse, it survives for 48 to 72 hours. If the egg and the sperm don't “cross paths” during that window of time, then pregnancy won't occur. So, for couples trying to conceive, having sex becomes less of a spontaneous, fun activity, and more of a scheduled, well-thought out “means to an end”.
“Timed intercourse” is the terminology we use to indicate when to have sex in order to conceive. There are lots of definitions of timed intercourse - “sex every other day during the fertile window”, “sex every other day from cycle day 12 onwards”, etc, etc. That can result in a lot of sex... and a lot of stress for a couple... which can lead them to say, “Remember when having sex was fun?”
The best way to take the guess work out of “timed intercourse” is to use ovulation predictor kits. Using these kits, starting around day 10 of a menstrual cycle, will help predict when you are going to ovulate. When the kit turns positive, that indicates that ovulation will occur within the next 14 to 24 hours. That means that having sex on the day of the positive ovulation kit and the next day will cover the “window” when the egg and sperm need to get together. And if you still have the energy for more, you can have sex one more day to make sure plenty of sperm got to the egg.
People are often concerned about having “enough” sperm if you have sex 2 or 3 days in a row. Luckily, in men with normal sperm counts, they can have sex multiple days and still have enough sperm to “do the trick”. One important point, though, is to make sure you don't “save up the sperm”. Sperm that has been sitting in the epididymis for longer than 5 days tends to be a little sluggish. Having sex a few days before you anticipate a positive ovulation kit will keep those sperm swimming well!
For additonal information, check out our Blush page for other questions you may not want to ask your mother or doctor.
So, couples – go have sex for fun... just make sure you time it right when trying to conceive!!!
For more information or to schedule an appointment with Dr. Fogle please call 678.841.1089 or click here.Never miss the best stories and events! Get JewishBoston This Week. Subscribe Error
Pancakes are one of my favorite breakfasts (or lunches, or dinners). A pancake-less world is not one I’d like to live in, even if it’s just for the duration of Passover. Fortunately, I don’t have to, thanks to matzo meal pancakes.
Matzo meal pancakes are, well, pancakes made with matzo meal instead of flour. But making palatable Passover pancakes isn’t as simple as substituting the meal for the flour in your favorite pancake recipe. As I found out my first couple times making them, this results in little brick patties that even a healthy dousing of syrup and several pats of butter can’t disguise.
The matzo meal soaks up a lot of liquid as the batter sits, so you have to overcompensate for that by starting with a larger quantity of wet ingredients. But once you find that important balance, you’ll be making these sweet and light pancakes long after Passover is over.
Matzo Meal Pancakes
Makes about 15 pancakes
4 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
¾ cup whole milk
1 teaspoon
1 tablespoon sugar
1 cup matzo meal
1. In medium bowl, whisk together eggs, buttermilk, milk, salt, and sugar. Stir in matzo meal. Let sit and thicken for 10 minutes, giving batter a good stir halfway through.
2. Place wire rack in rimmed baking sheet and preheat oven to 200 degrees. Heat cast-iron or nonstick skillet over medium heat. Spray with cooking spray. When pan is hot, spoon in ¼ cup batter. Cook until first side is golden brown, about 2 minutes. Flip pancake and cook until second side is golden brown, about 1 minute.
3. Transfer pancakes to prepared wire rack and place in oven to keep warm. Repeat with remaining batter. Serve with pancake toppings of your choice.
This post has been contributed by a third party. The opinions, facts and any media content are presented solely by the author, and JewishBoston assumes no responsibility for them. Want to add your voice to the conversation? Publish your own post here.Photo
Glen Ellen, Calif.
YEARS ago, when selective logging was first introduced, a community near an old-growth forest in the Sierra Nevada was assured that the removal of a few trees here and there would have no impact on the area’s wildlife. Based on the logging company’s guarantees, the local residents agreed to the operation. I was skeptical, however, and requested permission to record the sounds of the habitat before and after the logging.
On June 21, 1988, I recorded a rich dawn chorus in California’s pristine Lincoln Meadow. It was a biome replete with the voices of Lincoln’s sparrows, MacGillivray’s warblers, Williamson’s sapsuckers, pileated woodpeckers, golden-crowned kinglets, robins and grosbeaks, as well as squirrels, spring peepers and numerous insects. I captured them all.
When I returned a year later, nothing appeared to have changed at first glance. No stumps or debris — just conifers and lush understory. But to the ear — and to the recorder — the difference was shocking. I’ve returned 15 times since then, and even years later, the density and diversity of voices are still lost. There is a muted hush, broken only by the sound of an occasional sparrow, raptor, raven or sapsucker. The numinous richness of the original biophony is gone.
Lesson: While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a soundscape is worth a thousand pictures.
A soundscape contains three basic sources: the geophony, which includes all nonbiological natural sounds like wind or ocean waves; the biophony, which embraces the biological, wild, nonhuman sounds that emanate from environments; and the anthrophony — man-made sounds, commonly referred to as noise.
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Soundscapes reveal many stories about the world’s habitats, illuminating the vital signs of life at one end of the spectrum and the effects of human noise at the other. In fit habitats, the biophony shows cohesion between all of its acoustic sources. In other words, the mating and territorial calls essential to each species’ survival don’t get masked or drowned out by competing sounds. Insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals establish their own “bandwidth niches,” which can be expressed as frequency (from the lowest to the highest sounds) and temporally (as when one creature vocalizes, followed by another, like exchanges between the chestnut-winged babbler and the Malaysian eared nightjar calling for mates in Borneo).Illustration by S. Kambayashi
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MANY people start the new year by resolving to change their old ways. Not China. On December 27th Zhong Shan, the country's vice-minister of trade, declared that China will continue to increase its share of world exports. Figures due out on January 11th are expected to show that China's exports in December were higher than a year ago, after 13 months of year-on-year declines. China's exports fell by around 17% in 2009 as a whole, but other countries' slumped by even more. As a result China overtook Germany to become the world's largest exporter and its share of world exports jumped to almost 10%, up from 3% in 1999 (see chart).
China takes an even bigger slice of America's market. In the first ten months of 2009 America imported 15% less from China than in the same period of 2008, but its imports from the rest of the world fell by 33%, lifting China's market share to a record 19%. So although America's trade deficit with China narrowed, China now accounts for almost half of America's total deficit, up from less than one-third in 2008.
Trade frictions with the rest of the world are hotting up. On December 30th America's International Trade Commission approved new tariffs on imports of Chinese steel pipes, which it ruled were being unfairly subsidised. This is the largest case of its kind so far involving China. On December 22nd European Union governments voted to extend anti-dumping duties on shoes imported from China for another 15 months.
Foreigners insist that the main reason for China's growing market share is that the government in Beijing has kept its currency weak. But there are several other reasons why China's exports held up better than those of its competitors during the global recession. Lower incomes encouraged consumers to trade down to cheaper goods, and the elimination of global textile quotas in January 2009 allowed China to increase its slice of that market.
How high could China's market share go? Over the ten years to 2008 China's exports grew by an annual average of 23% in dollar terms, more than twice as fast as world trade. If it continued to expand at this pace, China might grab around one-quarter of world exports within ten years. That would beat America's 18% share of world exports in the early 1950s, a figure that has since dropped to 8%. China's exports are likely to grow more slowly over the next decade, as demand in rich economies remains subdued, but its market share will probably continue to creep up. Projections in the IMF's World Economic Outlook imply that China's exports will account for 12% of world trade by 2014.
Its 10% slice this year will equal that achieved by Japan at its peak in 1986, but Japan's share has since fallen back to less than 5%. Its exporters were badly hurt by the sharp rise in the yen—by more than 100% against the dollar between 1985 and 1988—and many moved their factories abroad, some of them to China. The combined export-market share of the four Asian tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) also peaked at 10% before slipping back. Will China's exports hit the same barrier as a result of weakening competitiveness, or rising protectionism?
An IMF working paper published in 2009 calculated that if China remained as dependent on exports as in recent years, then to sustain annual GDP growth of 8% its share of world exports would rise to about 17% by 2020. To consider whether that was feasible, the authors analysed the global absorption capacity of three export industries—steel, shipbuilding and machinery. They concluded that to achieve the required export growth, China would have to reduce prices, which would be increasingly hard to manage, whether through productivity gains or a squeeze in profits. In many export industries, particularly steel, margins are already wafer-thin.
However, China's future export growth is likely to come not from existing industries but from higher-value products, such as computer chips and cars. Japan's exports also moved swiftly up the value chain, but whereas this was not enough to support durable gains in its market share, China has the advantage of capital controls that will prevent its exchange rate rising as abruptly as Japan's did in the 1980s. When China does eventually allow the yuan to rise, it will do so gradually.
Another big difference is the vastness of China's economy. China consists, in effect, of several economies with different wage levels. As Japan moved into higher-value exports, rising productivity pushed up wages, making old industries, such as textiles, uncompetitive. In China, as factories in the richer coastal areas switch to more sophisticated goods, the production of textiles and shoes can move inland where costs remain cheaper. As a result China may be able to remain competitive in a wider range of industries for longer.
Foreign hostility to China's export dominance is growing. Paul Krugman, the winner of the 2008 Nobel economics prize, wrote recently in the New York Times that by holding down its currency to support exports, China “drains much-needed demand away from a depressed world economy”. He argued that countries that are victims of Chinese mercantilism may be right to take protectionist action.
From Beijing, things look rather different. China's merchandise exports have collapsed from 36% of GDP in 2007 to around 24% last year. China's current-account surplus has fallen from 11% to an estimated 6% of GDP. In 2007 net exports accounted for almost three percentage points of China's GDP growth; last year they were a drag on its growth to the tune of three percentage points. In other words, rather than being a drain on global demand, China helped pull the world economy along during the course of last year.
Foreigners look at only one side of the coin. China's imports have been stronger than its exports, rebounding by 27% in the year to November, when its exports were still falling. America's exports to China (its third-largest export market) rose by 13% in the year to October, at the same time as its exports to Canada and Mexico (the two countries above China) fell by 14%.
Some forecasters, such as the IMF, expect China's trade surplus to start widening again this year unless the government makes bold policy changes, such as revaluing the yuan. However, Chris Wood, an analyst at CLSA, a brokerage, argues that China is doing more for global rebalancing than America. Rebalancing requires that China spends more and America saves more. Mr Wood argues that China is doing more to boost domestic consumption (for example, through incentives to stimulate purchases of cars and consumer durables, and increased health-care spending) than America is doing to boost its saving. America's total saving rate fell in the third quarter of last year to only 10% of GDP, barely half its level a decade ago. Households saved more, but this was more than offset by increased government “dissaving”.
Strong growth in China's spending and imports is unlikely to dampen protectionist pressures, however. China's rising share of world exports will command much more attention. Foreign demands to revalue the yuan will intensify. A new year looks sure to entrench old resentments.• Identities yet to be confirmed
NIGERIAN troops fighting Boko Haram insurgents in the Northeast have rescued no fewer than 200 girls and 93 women from Sambisa forest in Borno State.
Defence Headquarters, in a tweet yesterday, described the operation as ‘daring and precise,’ even as its men and officers continue to screen the women and girls to ascertain their origins.
“In a daring and precise operation, the Nigerian troops have stormed the Sambisa forest and rescued about 300 women and girls,” the tweet said.
The military also disclosed that three major terrorists camps were destroyed in the “well-coordinated attacks that include the destruction of the notorious Tokumbere camp in the Sambisa Forest.”
Director, Defence Information, Major General Chris Olukolade, confirmed the operation, but did not state categorically whether, or not, the girls were from Chibok community in Borno State.
Since April last year, there have been intense campaigns in the traditional and social media for the rescue of the more than 200 girls, who were kidnapped by the Boko Haram members.
But Olukayode could not confirm the identity of the freed victims and their origins. According to him, their identities will be made public after thorough screening and proper investigations.
He said: “I can only confirm the rescue this afternoon of 200 girls and 93 women in different camps in the forest. We are yet to determine their origin, as all the freed persons are now being screened and profiled.
Please don’t misquote me on their origin. We will provide more details later.” Acting Director, Army Public Relations, Col Sani Usman, in an electronic mail to The Guardian last night, described the feat as heart-warming.
“It is heartwarming to inform you that, today, troops continued the offensive and cleared four key terrorists camps in Sambisa forest, Borno State.
So far, they have destroyed and cleared Sassa, Tokumbere and two other camps in the general area of Alafa, all within the Sambisa forest. “The troops have also rescued 200 abducted girls (not Chibok girls) and 93 women. They are, at present, being processed. Similarly, a number of equipment and weapons have been captured.”
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Nigerian army rescues 300 women and girls, none from Chibok
Lawyers charge Buhari to rescue Chibok girls
Why Chibok girls are still missing one year after kidnap, by ActionAidThe Lotus Formula 1 team has suffered a $87.75 million loss after taxes for 2012, bringing the total debt of the company to nearly $150 million. The public tax filing of the company for the previous financial year has shown one of the biggest recorded losses of any team in F1 history. Some knowledgeable financial experts have added a caveat to the reported loss, by saying it is so large because the team has written-off the projected profits they would have received from Lotus Group.
But it is a well-known fact in F1 circles that this top F1 team, with a very strong history behind it, has been financially struggling for a few years now. The majority owner of Lotus is the Genii Capital Group, a Luxembourg-based private equity firm headed by Gerald Lopez.
Genii Capital had announced that they wanted to sell a 49% stake in the Lotus F1 team in 2012. But there have been few takers and the only new investor is the British real estate tycoon Andrew Ruhan. The Briton paid $1.5 million for a 2% stake and was given a position as a director in the company. Declining sponsorship revenue due to a lack of major sponsors to replace the erstwhile title sponsor Group Lotus has added to Lotus’s financial woes.
How did it come to this for one of the top F1 teams with as strong a DNA as the Lotus F1 team? Despite undergoing multiple ownership and name changes since its debut in F1 in 1981, the outfit has won four drivers’ championships and three constructors’ championships and 49 Grand Prix overall.
The current Enstone-based Lotus team started in 1981 as the Toleman Motorsport team. In 1986, it became the Benetton Formula 1 team after being purchased by the Benetton family. The team won two drivers’ championships (1994 and 1995) with the young Michael Schumacher and the 1995 constructors’ championship.
In 2002, the team underwent another change of ownership and name, when they were purchased by Renault and became the Renault F1 team. Further success followed with two more drivers’ titles won by Fernando Alonso (2005 and 2006) alongside two constructors’ championships also in 2005 and 2006. In 2009, in the aftermath of the Crashgate scandal, Renault sold the majority stake of the team to Genii Capital.
In 2011, Group Lotus, manufacturers of sports cars, became involved in the sponsorship of the team and it was renamed Lotus Renault GP. Group Lotus, owned by the Malaysian group Photon under the mercurial leadership of CEO Danny Bahar, was in the midst of its own financial crisis with debts of over $400 million. After a change of ownership at Group Lotus and a settlement of the dispute between the Malaysian-owned Caterham team and Lotus Renault GP on the use of the Lotus name, Group Lotus ended their title sponsorship of Lotus Renault GP.
The team underwent yet another name change to become the Lotus F1 team and has a five-year deal with Group Lotus to use the Lotus name, but a major sponsor and financial investor had exited the group, knocking a big hole in the revenues of the team.
Since then Lotus has announced a slew of sponsors like Total, Unilever (with their brands Rexona and Clear), Coca-Cola’s energy drink brand ‘Burn’, Microsoft Dynamics, Japan Rags and so on, but a likely major title sponsorship deal with Honeywell was not completed as expected.
With revenues continuing to remain static and rising expenditure the team’s loss widened from $51.7 million in 2011 to the current $87.75 million. In the current world economic situation and the dysfunctional nature of F1 economics which has seen teams and tracks struggle to stay afloat, major financial investors are hard to come by. This is the situation for even a team like Lotus, one of the most successful teams in F1, having finished in the top 5 every year since 2002, except for 2009, when they were eighth in the team standings.
Last year, the team finished fourth with comeback man Kimi Raikkonen finishing third in the drivers’ championship. They have a charismatic and very popular driver in the Finn, appropriately nicknamed “the Iceman”. In 2013, he has already recorded a win and is second in the drivers’ title race and has led the team to third in the team championship.
Having a high-profile driver like Raikkonen also costs money. In 2012, it was reported that the Finn had a base salary of $15 million with additional bonus money paid for podiums and points scored. The Iceman had a sensational comeback scoring 1 win, 6 podiums and 207 points overall. This strong showing meant that Lotus had to make a big bonus payout which they reportedly struggled to do.
The ace driver is being woed by Red Bull to replace Mark Webber, who is expected to hang his boots at the end of the season. Red Bull is a team with unlimited resources and could easily outbid Lotus for Raikkonen. The Finn who dislikes media and sponsorship engagements has thrived in the relaxed atmosphere of the Enstone team, but without an improved financial situation in the Lotus team, the lure of a more financially secure future and a potentially championship winning car at Red Bull Racing might be too much for Raikkonen. The loss of a marquee name like Raikkonen will further hurt the struggling Lotus team.
The overall situation is not being helped by their second driver Romain Grosjean. The speedy but crash-prone Frenchman is proving to be an Achilles heel for his team. In the six races in 2013, he has scored only 30.2% of the points scored by his teammate. In 2012, he scored less than 50% of the points scored by Raikkonen. Grosjean’s repeated crashes cost the team points in the constructors’ championship, where loss in positions means a big loss in prize money.
The crashes also mean damage to the car which costs money in spare parts and new chassis, which the team can ill-afford in a tight financial situation. His spectacular first lap incidents last year cost the team championship points and the Frenchman was also banned for a race. In the just concluded Monaco GP, Grosjean crashed four times during the weekend. His crash during the race has been penalized with a 10-place grid drop for the next race in Montreal. How long will a troubled team put up with his shenanigans?
With the 2014 engine changes looming, the expenditure of F1 teams is only going to increase. Lotus is already in conflict with engine suppliers Renault about the high costs of the V6 French engines (approximately 20 million Euro per year). There are even rumours that Lotus is already talking with other engine manufacturers to negotiate a cheaper deal.
The F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone is reportedly trying to broker a deal between Lotus and Renault that could see Lotus, the former works team of Renault, getting a better deal in return for advertising for the French engine manufacturer. Also, Ecclestone is trying to convince Renault to once again invest in the Lotus F1 team.
The May 2013 departure of Technical Director James Allison has cast a shadow on the team’s current campaign. Can the financially struggling team keep up the development pace and deliver a world championship for Kimi Raikkonen? Will Raikkonen’s success be enough to bring new sponsors and investors to the rescue of this very important Formula 1 team? Or maybe the strengthening and proper implementation of the RRA (Resource Restriction Agreement) between the teams will help financially struggling teams like Lotus and even out the playing field.
Sources : Lotus F1 teamOne reason Congress is so dysfunctional is that wealthy lawmakers are insulated from everyday concerns like getting paid.
This week, as part of a compromise to ward off a debt ceiling showdown and potential default, the House approved the No Budget, No Pay Act, which would withhold lawmakers’ paychecks starting April 15 unless they pass a budget. If you haven’t been keeping up with GOP talking points, this is the latest attempt to pressure Senate Democrats into producing a budget resolution, which they haven’t done in the last four years for various inane parliamentary reasons. But whatever you think of its intent, it’s an empty gesture and one that highlights the troubling disconnect between average Americans and their elected officials.
Despite its gimmicky origins, No Budget, No Pay has a certain intuitive appeal. As centrist commentator John Avlon writes, “If you don’t get the job done at work, you won’t get paid.” Sure, you or I would probably just get fired, but we don’t have gerrymandering to save us. Still, why should we reward Harry Reid and his crew for shirking their responsibilities while House Republicans have been keeping their noses to the grindstone and dutifully passing Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand fan fiction?
For one thing, it’s unconstitutional. Not “unconstitutional” in the wingnut sense that cutting the crusts off your sandwich is unconstitutional if there’s a photo of Barack Obama doing it, but unconstitutional in the sense that the 27th Amendment specifically prohibits Congress from mucking around with its own pay unless there’s an intervening election. To get around this little detail, the act is designed so that the members’ checks get deposited into an escrow account until a) they pass a budget or b) the term ends in 2014, at which point they get paid in full either way. In other words, it’s less of a threat to their livelihood and more of an experiment in delayed gratification.
But a more significant problem is that most legislators probably couldn’t care less if their pay was withheld indefinitely. As of 2011, the average estimated wealth of members of Congress was $6.5 million in the House and $13.9 million in the Senate. And unlike many of their constituents, they haven’t exactly been struggling through lean times recently. While average American households saw their median net worth drop 39 percent from 2007 to 2010, lawmakers’ rose five percent during the same period. That’s not to say that every member of Congress is set for life; some are deep in debt like true red-blooded Americans. But threats to withhold pay are ineffective when most of our representatives have enough money in their rainy day funds to last them through monsoon season. And if worse comes to worst, they can always exit through the revolving door and join a few corporate boards to replenish their bank accounts.
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203World's Largest Tokamak Reactor [Image Source: ITER]
Human development and regular day-to-day functionality are largely dependent on the constant availability of electricity. Nearly every piece of technology new and old is heavily reliant on a constant supply of energy. As such, humans have a massive taxing demand for more power, power that is often accumulated through less than desirable means. Be it burning fossil fuels or hydroelectric dams, all current power generators tax the environment to some degree. However, what if you could abolish all detrimental effects of current power generation with a generator able to produce one million times more energy than any chemical reaction- and use it to harness virtually unlimited power?
It seems like an engineering fantasy, however, the answer looms directly overhead. Fusion energy, the energy that powers the Sun and every other star across the Comos. It is the fusion of two particles, releasing a vast amount of energy to essentially unlimited ends. Hydrogen, the most abundant element on Earth and in the universe comprise the fuel supply. Tapping into fusion energy would provide virtually unlimited power with no carbon emissions, and no adverse side effects dealt unto the environment.
Early on in the 1900s, it was largely recognized as potentially being the most effective means of acquiring energy. However, scientists were incredibly naive, assuming generating and harvesting power from fusion generators would be easy. In the 1930's, physicists were already conducting the first experiments into fusion generation. However, it was not until 1968 that a major milestone was achieved in producing the two of the three critical conditions necessary to initiate the fusion process.
World's First Tokamak Device Russian T1 Tokamak at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. Accumulating just 0.4 cubic meters of plasmas, the device is 2000 times smaller than the world's largest tokamak currently in development, the ITER [Image Source: ITER]
The device used in the experiment was conducted with a tokamak- essentially a doughnut-shaped apparatus that utilizes strong magnetic fields to contain plasma within at temperatures exceeding that of the Sun. The tokamak became an essential component of thermonuclear research and still to this day is being used to further the development of producing a viable fusion reactor.
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The tokamaks function by pumping a gas into a vacuum chamber. Electricity is then pumped through the center (the hole of the doughnut). The gas accumulates a large charge and begins to heat up, but is confined by the intense magnetic fields generated by massive magnetic coils encircling the device.
Hurdles yet to be achieved
While the team devised a method in satisfying two of the conditions in creating a fusion reactor, developing a functional model proved to be uncannily difficult. It was not until 1991 that the first controlled release of fusion power was achieved. The generator, however, required many times more power input that what was produced, an obviously poor means and unviable way of producing electricity.
Fusion Energy
To initiate a fusion reaction, three conditions must be satisfied- that including: incredibly high temperatures (to stimulate high-energy collisions); adequate plasma particle density (to ensure a higher likelihood for collisions to occur); and a sufficient amount of time in which the plasma is to be confined (to retain the plasma, which has a tendency to expand, in a defined volume).
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Only when all three components are satisfied will the fusion process be initiated.
Entirely opposite to a fission reaction in which requires and expels highly radioactive material, fusion oversees particles fuse together in which releases immense amounts of energy in the form of heat, only requiring hydrogen as fuel and produces nearly no radioactive waste
The reactors will use two radioactive isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium, and tritium, to fuse together and create helium as one highly energized neutron is ejected which then speeds off to initiate the next reaction. In this method, a looping mechanism can be created to initiate a self-sustainging device.
Fusion Process [Image Source: Wikipedia]
The largest issue in creating a viable fusion reactor is developing a device able so sustain the immense pressure and temperatures of the plasmas which approach 100 million degrees- 6 times hotter than the core of the Earth. While scientists have achieved temperatures with a tokamak exceeding just under 50 million degrees Celsius, the experiment lasted just 102 seconds before the plasma collapsed back into its stable form. Up until now, creating sustainable conditions in which to produce and maintain a functional fusion reaction has remained entirely elusive.
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To achieve power generation, fusion scientists must meet the plasma energy breakeven point- a point in which the plasmas within a fusion device expel at a minimum the same amount of energy as is used to initiate the process. As of today, the moment is yet to be achieved. However, the current would record for energy releases was able to generate 70 percent of the input power. The record is still held by JET.
Now, however, after nearly 60 years of fusion energy research and development, engineers and scientists are readying the final stages of the world's largest tokamak reactor to initiate and sustain the word's first nuclear fission generator with a positive output of energy. The project is an international collaboration with the aim of generating an experimental fusion reactor said to be self-sustaining- essentially harnessing the power of a small star. The project, deemed ITER, is currently well underway.
What is ITER
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an international collaboration of nations in an effort to create the world's first self-sustaining thermonuclear reactor in which exceeds the breakeven point. The generator is currently being developed and promises a revolution in power generation in the 21 century. If it functions as planned, it will generate 500 MW of output power while only consuming 50 MW of input, rewriting a new chapter in history as the generation which harvested the power of the stars.
Spanning across a distance of 42 hectares, the plant will employ over 5,000 people during peak construction hours. It will be the largest tokamak reactor ever built, measuring 8 times the volume of the next largest tokamak.
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How does it work?
The monstrous apparatus will be the world's largest tokamak, with a plasma radius (R) of 6.2 m and a plasma volume of 840 m³. In the heart of the reactor remains the massive magnetic coils wrapped around the tokamak, an essential component in confining the temperatures which will approach 150 million degrees C. As all other tokamaks, the massive vessel will charge a gaseous fuel contained by immense magnetic fields. Using extraordinary amounts of electricity will force the gas to break down and become ionized as electrons are stripped from the nuclei. Plasmas will then be formed.
The plasma particles will continue to become energized at they continue to collide at increasing intervals and intensities. Auxillery heating methods will further the plasma temperature's until fusion temperatures are reached at 150 to 300 million °C. The highly energized particles will be able to overcome the natural electromagnetic repulsion, enabling the particles to collide and fuse, releasing immense amounts of energy.
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What will it do?
The first milestone will be creating a functional, self-sustaining thermonuclear reactor, a world first. Aside from the initial development, ITER has set a few goals.
1) Produce 500 MW of fusion power for pulses of 400 s
ITER has its sight set on producing 500MW of power, a 10 fold increase from its power input. The goal is then to sustain the plasma for at least 400 seconds.
2) Demonstrate the integrated operation of technologies for a fusion power plant
ITER pledges to bridge the gap between experimental fusion devices and a functional generator, demonstrating the capabilities of fusion power plants for the future. With the massive device, scientists will still be able to study the plasmas under similar conditions expected to be found in future fusion power plants.
3) Achieve a deuterium-tritium plasma in which the reaction is sustained through internal heating
Ideally, once the device is turned on, scientists are confident the machine will remain self-sustaining, with the only power input being utilized to power the massive electromagnets.
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4) Test tritium breeding
Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, could be a critical component in developing future power plants. |
, Qriously's CEO, says. "But our results are not wildly out of line with what other polls are predicting. It’s generally agreed that it will be a close-run election."
Read next This startup wants to fix fake news. But will it do more harm than good? This startup wants to fix fake news. But will it do more harm than good?
- Read more about who to vote for and how to vote and what is an exit poll
Furthermore, only 85 per cent of ‘very likely’ Labour voters are certain of their voting intention on Thursday, versus 92 per cent for the Conservatives. Turnout is predicted to be high at around 70 per cent. "Turnout estimate has increased from a few weeks ago, when we had 60 per cent," Kahler continues. "We think this might be because the outcome is no longer a foregone conclusion, which in turn has come from an unexpectedly strong Labour performance." The poll puts the Liberal Democrats on 6 per cent, the Scottish National Party at 3.8 per cent and the UK Independence Party on 3 per cent. The number of undecided voters is at 14 per cent.
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The survey also provides further insights into voter sentiment, reflecting how unpredictable this electoral campaign has become: 43.3 per cent of the voters surveyed believe that their neighbours will vote for Conservative, versus 37.2 per cent who believe their neighbours will vote Labour instead.
How to vote in the UK general election 2017 and watch the results online Voting How to vote in the UK general election 2017 and watch the results online
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"People generally believe the Conservatives will win," Kahler says."As to the impact on voting behaviour, that’s hard to say. It could galvanise Labour voters into action, or alternatively, it could make them feel the cause is hopeless and lead them to stay home. Likewise, it could make Conservative voters complacent, or encourage them to vote."
London-based Qriously is an ad-tech startup with an extensive list of clients including Vodafone, Audi, B&Q and organisations like the New York Police Department. Qriously conducts surveys by sending short questionnaires via mobile phone to billions of users in a matter of seconds. Using its platform, Qriously has been able to correctly predict the outcome of the Brexit referendum, the Italian constitutional referendum, the Dutch general election and the Turkish constitutional referendum. According to Kahler, they can theoretically reach 80 per cent of smartphone users worldwide.
Qriously conducted this survey between Sunday 4 June and June 7, interviewing 2,213 UK adults. Data was weighted on gender, age, region and income to be demographically representative.Spread the love
Kenosha, WI — Officer Pablo Torres was “justified” in killing Kenosha, Wisconsin resident Aaron Siler a year ago because the officer “reasonably believed” that the victim, who was “armed” with a five-gallon plastic bucket, posed a potentially lethal threat, according to Kenosha County DA Robert Zapf.
Zapf’s ruling focused on Torres’s subjective perception of a threat, maintaining that “the standard is what an ordinary, prudent, and reasonably intelligent officer would have believed in Officer Torres’s position, having the knowledge and training that Officer Torres possessed, and acting under the circumstances that existed at the time of the shooting.”
On the evidence of this incident — among countless other very similar ones — the “knowledge and training” provided to Torres represent a net subtraction from his ability to make reasoned, appropriate decisions, given that non-police witnesses on the scene clearly and accurately perceived that Siler did not pose a lethal threat.
Siler, who was wanted on a probation warrant in a domestic violence case, was pursued by Torres into a garage. According to the official police account following the shooting, Siler “brandished a weapon,” thereby forcing Torres to fire in self-defense. Torres later claimed that he thought Siler had threatened him with a pipe. In another version of the story, Siler supposedly wielded a metal jack handle. In yet another account, Siler supposedly pulled a knife. Eyewitnesses testified that the victim briefly lifted the jack, then dropped it and grabbed a bucket.
Torres gunned down Siler on his first day back on patrol after a vacation given to him following a previous fatal shooting in another residential garage ten days earlier. In that incident, Torres was one of two Kenosha PD officers who responded to a 911 call from a distraught woman saying that her 64-year-old husband had gone into the garage to kill himself. Within a few minutes of arriving on the scene, Torres had fatally shot the man, who was holding two knives.
That victim was a Vietnam veteran who suffered from lingering psychological trauma.
“I was screaming ‘my husband is a veteran. Don’t hurt my husband,'” the widow later recalled. “They know he had a mental problem. He was not out to hurt them — only himself.”
During his brief paid furlough following that shooting, Torres was provided with supplemental use-of-force training. That enhancement did nothing to improve the quality of his decision-making skills. It did, however, reinforce his claim to “qualified immunity” after he killed Aaron Siler.
For Siler’s family, the trauma of losing a loved one was compounded when the Kenosha Professional Police Association — the local police union — selected Torres to represent them in a billboard prominently displayed at a busy intersection expressing thanks to the community for their support. Given the public controversy over Torres’s mini-killing spree, that selection can reasonably be seen as a gesture of contempt toward the families of the victims, and other critics of the department.
Kathy Willie, a friend of Siler’s mother, Lisa Toppi, told Milwaukee’s Fox affiliate that “I felt like they were saying thank you for killing Aaron.”
Willie had the disagreeable task of telling Siler’s mother about the display.
“She just starts sobbing. You know, why are they doing this to us?” Willie recalled.
Prior to the back-to-back killings within a ten-day period, Torres had been the subject of eight excessive force complaints and seven administrative reprimands. None of the citizen complaints, predictably, were sustained. One of the complaints was filed by a woman named Kimberly Hollis, who was briefly detained and then assaulted by Torres outside a local bar.
“It turned my stomach because the first gentleman he shot was my old neighbor, so I knew him and his wife personally,” Hollis said in a media interview. “And then to find out he killed Aaron touched my heart because Aaron actually mowed my lawn for five years while he was growing up.”
Siler’s mother, Lisa Toppi, recalled in a television interview that she had one baby-sat the young boy who would grow up to kill her own son.
“Why, why did you have to kill my son?” the distraught mother asked. “Why couldn’t you have just tased him?”
The brutal answer to that anguished question is: Pablo Torres killed Toppi’s son because he had the means to do so, and the privileged status necessary to protect him from civil and legal consequences for his actions.Dear PE Gods,
===short version===
Issue: When client receives a disconnect packet, it tears down all UDP sessions.
Suggested solution: When the client receives a disconnect packet, only disconnect the session for that source address rather then tearing down the whole network session.
===long version & background===
In PE.11 server ops had capability to send a “strange packet” to the client which would redirect the client to another server. This could be done for example when the user clicks a sign, or walks through a portal, or any other thing tied to an event. It was flexible and gave servers BungeeCord like capabilities for game lobbies, etc.
PE.12 reacts a bit differently to the “strange” transfer packet. It redirects the user to the other server, but keeps both the current and previous UDP sessions alive, in effect ddosing the original server! If the client receives a disconnect from either server, then both sessions are terminated, rendering the solution unusable as the disconnect is "all or nothing." We could keep the client connected to both servers, but would cause network overloads.
I’m sure this behavior makes total sense on the client side, and I’m guessing no-one ever intended the strange packet to work, I just wanted to lay it out all here.
As a PocketMine server operator I'm extremely thankful for MCPE and hope you guys find a way to implement this type of functionality in a future version of the client in support of the community.
I've attached a copy of the "strange packet" written by Shoghi if you'd like to check it out. And the issue is profiled in detail here in Post #2:
https://forums.pocketmine.net/threads/current-major-core-issues-with-pm-1-6-non-php-7-build.11266/
Thanks!The fight over teaching evolution versus creationism has a long history in the United States.
Perhaps the most famous case is Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, better known as the Scopes Monkey trial, the 1925 case in which the state of Tennessee prosecuted a public school teacher for teaching evolution in his classroom.
The debate continues today, almost 90 years later. In 2008, Louisiana passed the Science Education Act, a law that allows schools to use supplemental materials in addition to textbooks in science classrooms, particularly when teaching about controversial topics, such as evolution and global warming.
Critics argue the law allowed teachers to promote creationism in the classroom.
Born and raised in Baton Rouge, Zack Kopplin was just 14 when Governor Bobby Jindal signed the Science Education Act into law. But in the past few years, Kopplin has made it is his mission to see the law repealed, and to end the teaching of creationism in Louisiana public schools.
It's been slow-going. Kopplin and other supporters have yet to get a bill out of legislative committees. But he insists he's making progress.
"We've gotten from a 5-1 loss, to a 2-1 loss, which is a remarkable shift," the Rice University sophomore said. "We will eventually win. I'm sure of that. But it will take longer than we'd like to take to have this all repealed."
Critics say Kopplin is engaging in a hopeless effort to bolster his own future as an activist. They say he doesn't have any hope of making changes in Louisiana, or any state with similar laws.
But Kopplin says that's absurd.US Exit From WTO Would Unravel Global Trade
In his latest attack on US trade policy, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump has threatened to exit the 163-country World Trade Organization (WTO), which the United States played a leading role in creating and fostering.
“We’re going to renegotiate or we’re going to pull out,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “These trade deals are a disaster. The World Trade Organization is a disaster.”
So What Is the WTO?
The WTO is a global trade body aimed primarily at setting rules for international commerce, settling disputes between its 163 members, and providing a global forum for negotiating lower trade barriers. Its goal, according to the organization, is “to help producers of goods and services, exporters, and importers conduct their business.” The WTO was created in 1995 but was preceded by the post-war General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT. “Essentially, the WTO is a place where member governments try to sort out the trade problems they face with each other,” the organization says.
The WTO now covers over 98 percent of world trade, and new members continue to seek accession to the organization. Why? To gain nondiscriminatory access to new markets, to complement politically controversial but important domestic economic reforms, and overall, to benefit from the security of a rules-based trading system.
In remarks at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) in September 2015, WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo reminded the audience that the United States “has played a very important role throughout the history of the multilateral trading system…. I don’t have to tell you that this leadership is going to be critical for the future steps that we have ahead of us.”
What Would Happen if the US Government Withdrew?
Withdrawal would upend 60 years of trade diplomacy and could prove disastrous, according to trade experts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
First, US exporters would lose critical market access around the world.
“One of the major risks of leaving the WTO would be the loss of ‘most-favored nation’ (MFN) rights in 163 countries; other exporters could replace some of US exports in those markets,” said Jeffrey J. Schott, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, adding that this would mean job losses in America’s most competitive and profitable companies.
Most crucially, the United States would face the very real risk of losing MFN trading status with all countries. The United States currently has free trade agreements (FTAs) with only 20 countries, which means US firms enjoy preferential access to these countries’ markets at mostly zero or low import tariff rates, with very few exceptions. However, US FTAs combined cover only 40 percent of total US two-way goods trade (and the majority is accounted for by Canada and Mexico); the rest of US trade—60 percent—is with non-FTA partners. In order to access these markets, the United States relies on nondiscriminatory MFN tariffs, which countries agree to under the auspices of the WTO. In other words, if the United States pulled out of the WTO, every country in the world would no longer have to apply its MFN tariffs to US exports and could raise such tariffs to whatever levels they choose.
As PIIE’s Chad Bown explains, “The implication is that US exporters would now have an even bigger cost disadvantage hurdle in trying to compete in world markets against Chinese exporters, Mexican exporters, Korean exporters, or whomever.” Put another way, a pullout from the WTO and other US trade agreements would reduce US companies’ access to 96 percent of the world’s customers.
Second, the United States would give up its right to defend the rules-based system that it helped create, losing access to an important forum for resolving trade disputes. The WTO is not just about market access; it plays a key role in the monitoring and enforcement of its rules. The WTO has been criticized for sluggish progress in recent trade negotiations, namely the Doha Round, but its dispute settlement function has been widely acknowledged as its crowning achievement. In 2015, the WTO reached the mark of 500 disputes received since its inception—282 of these have proceeded to litigation. The United States is one of the leading users of the system—it has been a complainant in more than a hundred cases, the most of any WTO member—of course, on the flip side, the United States has also been challenged by WTO members in just as many cases. Many of the cases pursued by the United States have involved the trade practices of major trading partners like China, for example relating to preferential taxes and other measures that favor Chinese firms, export restrictions, and lack of enforcement of intellectual property rights, among other issues.
Of course, outside of the WTO, the United States could retaliate against its trading partners by unilaterally imposing tariffs and continuing its use of antidumping duties to protect and support US producers. But overall, the most competitive US firms would suffer from the loss of MFN rights, which could translate to higher tariffs against US shipments to foreign markets, higher costs of US production at home due to decreased access to foreign inputs, fewer sales, and thus fewer US jobs.
Would this Affect other Trade Agreements?
The United States’ 20 FTAs are mostly with small economies. But of the large economies on that list, Trump has already signaled he is going to scrap deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the US trade deal with Korea. As mentioned, these deals mean the United States has better access to these specific markets and holds its trading partners to higher standards as well in areas like labor, environment, investment, and intellectual property rights, compared to WTO trade deals alone.
What Would Happen to WTO Leadership?
The WTO would survive even if the United States were to leave. But the move would have important geopolitical implications, says PIIE’s Gary Hufbauer: “US withdrawal from the WTO would hand leadership of the world trading system to China.”
This is already a major concern given that both presidential candidates have voiced opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement between the United States and 11 other countries, signed earlier this year but not yet ratified by the US Congress. China is actively pursuing a parallel regional trade initiative with Japan and Korea, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, as well as ambitious economic initiatives like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative.
The WTO has faced its own serious setbacks in recent years. Hufbauer and Schott (2015) have laid out how the WTO can go from “drift” to “deals.” Importantly, the institution regained some positive momentum with the conclusion of the Trade Facilitation Agreement in 2013 and progress in sectoral agreements among subsets of WTO countries, for example information technology, environmental goods, and services. US companies and workers in these industries stand to benefit from reduced tariffs in IT products that the United States designs and manufactures, such as high-tech medical devices, semiconductors, and software, and reduced tariffs in environmental goods like renewable technologies.
Unlike bilateral FTAs where Trump thinks he can renegotiate better trade deals, the United States could not renegotiate the terms and conditions of the WTO with 162 other countries. Abandoning the WTO at this critical juncture could well undermine the incremental progress made in the past several years—and indeed over the past several decades of global trade governance.Canada's premiers are asking the federal government for more health care funding, saying an increase would help transform the existing health care system and offset the impact of an aging population.
A statement from Premier Paul Davis of Newfoundland and Labrador says the premiers are asking Ottawa to increase the Canada Health Transfer to cover at least 25 per cent of all health-care spending by the provinces and territories.
The statement released by Davis's office after Thursday's Council of the Federation meeting in St. John's says that each province and territory faces similar challenges, including increased overall health care costs, a rising need for home and palliative care and support for "informal" caregivers.
"Premiers discussed the... growing financial pressures population aging will have on their governments, particularly regarding health care," reads the statement. "These financial pressures reinforce the need for the federal government to increase its funding for health care."
An emailed statement from Health Minister Rona Ambrose's office says the Conservatives have transferred the highest amounts in history to the provinces and territories for health care and are on track to reach $40 billion annually by the end of the decade.
It says Ottawa will provide $27 billion for health care over the next five years, and health funding was being increased at a higher rate than the provinces were spending it.
Outside the meeting, a small demonstration called attention to medicare funding.
Debbie Forward, president of the Registered Nurses Union of Newfoundland and Labrador, said the federal government is not paying its fair share for health care.
Forward said a report released Thursday by the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions estimates that proposed federal funding changes could drain more than $43 billion from the health system over the next eight years.[display_podcast]
Date: June 11th, 2015
Guest Skeptic: Dr. Greg Hall is Director of EM Ultrasound at the Brantford General Hospital in Brantford Ontario and Assistant Clinical Professor at McMaster University. He is Vice President of the Canadian Emergency Ultrasound Society, co-author of Point-of-care Ultrasound for Emergency Physicians, co-creator of the EDE 2 Course: Advanced Emergency Department Echo, and director of the EDE 3 Course, a leading edge POCUS workshop.
Case: An 18-month-old male presents to your small emergency department having a witnessed fall off a couch and hit his head on a hardwood floor. He threw up once and cried immediately at the scene. There was no loss of consciousness.
The parents are concerned about a serious head injury, particularly with the large hematoma, but understandably are not thrilled with the idea of the radiation exposure of a CT, need for sedation, and transport to another centre for the CT scan.
In the emergency department he is alert with a Glasgow Coma Scale of 15 and has no neurological deficits. Remembering your PECARN pediatric CT decision rules after listening to SGEM#112 with Dr. Anthony Crocco, you note that for children less than two years old a CT of the head is recommended if Glasgow Coma Scale<15, altered mental status, or palpable skull fracture. You would also consider a CT if non-frontal scalp hematoma, loss of consciousness greater than five seconds, severe mechanism, or abnormal activity.
This child looks great except for a large frontal hematoma and you want to be able to send him home but you know that the presence of a skull fracture increases the risk of an associated intracranial injury.
Honesty being the best policy, you acknowledge your lack of confidence in your ability to palpate a skull fracture and that forehead is kind of swollen.
Background: Point of care ultrasound (POCUS) is becoming a popular method for detecting various types of fractures. It is fast, can be done on less stable patients you don’t want leaving the department, can be directed to the area of injury, and can be repeated, particularly when fracture reduction is required.
Ultrasound has been found to have good accuracy when performed by clinicians for various fractures (Weinberg et al Injury 2010) POCUS has been found to be equal or superior to plain films and even bone scans involving fractures of some flat bones like the sternum (Jin et al J Ultrasound Med 2006 and You et al J Clin Ultrasound)
Head injuries are a common presentation in children and the push to reduce exposure to ionizing radiation in young brains is greater than ever. Decision rules like the PECARN CT Head rules help reduce the number of CT scans done on minor head injury patients but the presence of skull fractures is known to increase the risk of an intracranial injury by over four times.
Close observation or CT is going to be a consideration in these fracture patients. Finding fractures with skull X-rays is a problem as they are difficult to interpret and still miss a number of fractures.
The clinical exam is not accurate either for skull fracture as this study demonstrates with 5% found in the very low pretest probability group and 33% found in the low to moderate group.
Thus it makes sense to consider the use of ultrasound that has no ionizing radiation, is well tolerated in children, and is not technically challenging to perform.
There have been several other studies now looking at using ultrasound for pediatric skull fractures. Sensitivities range from 82% to 100% and specificity from 94-100% (Weinberg et al Injury 2010, Riera and Chen Paediatr Emerg Care 2012 and Parri et al J Emerg Med 2013).
Clinical Question: Is ultrasound in the emergency department useful to rule-in or rule-out skull fractures in children?
Reference: Rabiner JE et al. Accuracy of point-of-care ultrasound for diagnosis of skull fractures in children. Pedatrics 2013
Population: Patients 21 years old or younger presenting to the emergency department with suspected skull fracture undergoing CT scan Excluded patients presenting with completed radiologic studies, a confirmed skull fracture, an open fracture, or if urgent intervention was required.
Patients 21 years old or younger presenting to the emergency department with suspected skull fracture undergoing CT scan Intervention: Point of care ultrasound in the emergency department 60-minute training session for the EM physicians (30-minute didactic session to learn how to use ultrasound to evaluate the skull for fracture and a 30-minute hands-on practical session)
Point of care ultrasound in the emergency department Comparison: CT scan
CT scan Outcome: Test characteristics (Sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV, +LR and -LR)
Authors’ Conclusions: Clinicians with focused ultrasound training were able to diagnose skull fractures in children with high specificity.
Quality Checklist for Diagnostic Studies:
The clinical problem is well defined. Yes Comments: Head trauma is a common occurrence in children and often clinicians are wondering about the diagnostic possibility of skull fractures. Ultrasound, if found to be useful, can help modify the radiation exposure to children who are often investigated with radiography or CT scans. The study population represents the target population that would normally be tested for the condition (ie no spectrum bias) Yes The study population included or focused on those in the ED Yes The study patients were recruited consecutively (ie no selection bias) No The diagnostic evaluation was sufficiently comprehensive and applied equally to all patients (ie no evidence of verification bias) Yes All diagnostic criteria were explicit, valid and reproducible (ie no incorporation bias) Yes The reference standard was appropriate (id no imperfect gold-standard bias) Yes All undiagnosed patients underwent sufficiently long and comprehensive follow-up (ie no double gold-standard bias) Yes The likelihood ratio(s) of the test(s) in question is presented or can be calculated from the information provided Yes The precision of the measure of diagnostic performance is satisfactory Yes
Key Results: Point-of-care ultrasound was performed by 17 clinicians. There were 69 children under the age of 21years old with suspected skull fractures. The patients’ mean age was 6.4 years. The prevalence of fracture was 12% (8/69).
The test characteristics for detecting skull fractures were reported with 95% confidence intervals. More information on how to calculate these numbers can be found on MedCal.net.
Sensitivity 88% (53-98%) and Specificity 97% (89-99%)
PPV 0.78 (0.45- 0.94) and NPV 0.98 (0.91-1.0)
+LR 26.7 (6.7-106.9) and -LR 0.13 (0.02-0.81)
Overall this is a well-performed study on an important topic. More and more we are trying to limit the radiation exposure in children with closed head injuries. Point-of-care ultrasound offers the availability of quick, radiation- free results.
The results of this study are somewhat limited by the small number of patients included, a limitation that is evident from the wide confidence intervals. Another limitation is the sample used was one of convenience and not consecutive.
However, this is the largest single study looking at this topic. They used clinicians with one-hour focused training in skull fracture scanning and a technique of only scanning over the hematoma region.
Their single false negative patient (missed fracture) had a fracture adjacent to the hematoma so using a better technique of scanning on and around a hematoma would have likely discovered this fracture. The authors describe the patient with the missed fracture or false negative as requiring observation only and no specific treatment.
The first false positive was performed by a novice but over-read as negative by the senior clinician suggesting that training may be important to accuracy. The second false positive was called as a positive by both physicians reading the scan and negative on CT.
However, with small, non-depressed fractures, CT is not 100% sensitive either as demonstrated in the studies of other fracture areas. Thus this patient may have had a true positive on ultrasound and false negative on CT.
Comment on Authors’ Conclusion Compared to SGEM Conclusion: Agree with the authors’ conclusions that emergency physicians with 60 minute ultrasound training were able to diagnose skull fractures in children with high specificity.
SGEM Bottom Line: Ultrasound is a useful adjunct for detecting skull fractures and further risk stratifying minor head injuries when used along with a clinical decision rule like PECARN. However serious intracranial injuries can occur without fracture and the sensitivity of ultrasound for fracture is not yet sufficient to use it as the sole method for detecting injury and making discharge decisions.
Case Resolution: You could order a skull Xray but you know they are hard to interpret, involve some radiation, will miss a significant number of fractures, and don’t provide any information about intracranial injury. Instead you decide to use your department’s portable ultrasound machine to look for a fracture and combine this with your clinical decision rules.
With Mom holding her son in her lap, you gently scan over and around the region of the frontal hematoma. There is no fracture visible so, along with PECARN rule support, you are happy to observe the child for a few hours in the ED and send him home with clear discharge instructions for the parents. They are reassured by your examination, seeing their son’s intact skull on the ultrasound and are content to avoid doing a CT unless his clinical picture changes later.
Clinically Application: Point-of-care ultrasound, in the hands of competent physicians, appears to be a viable option to rule-in and rule- out skull fractures in children.
One concern, from a clinical standpoint, is that often children with enough findings to merit concern about a skull fracture, have enough clinical findings to warrant a CT scan to rule-out intra-cranial pathology.
Also, the incidence of pathology below a skull fracture in children is high, so finding one on ultrasound may merit further investigation with CT scanning. Judicious use of radiation is encouraged, as there is evolving evidence of the long-term risks to mortality and development for children exposed to ionizing radiation.
What Do I Tell My Patient? We can use an ultrasound device to check and see if your son has a skull fracture. This can help me decide if he is at risk of having a more serious injury and needs to get a CT scan.
Keener Kontest: Last weeks winner was Dr. Garreth Debiegun from Tufts University. He knew Wong Baker is the name of a validated pain scales using faces to assess pain in children.
Listen to the podcast for this weeks keener question. If you know the answer send an email to TheSGEM@gmail.com with “keener” in the subject line. The first correct response will win a cool skeptical prize.Drafting Drew Carey in Ohio
A group of libertarian-minded conservatives are attempting to draft television star Drew Carey into the Ohio Senate race against Sherrod Brown.
With no clear-cut Republican contenders having emerged yet for the contest, conservative activist Josiah Schmidt took it upon himself a little more than a week ago to construct a website and Facebook page to kick off the draft effort.
While Carey, who is from Cleveland but currently lives in Los Angeles as host of "The Price is Right," has not yet commented on the movement, Schmidt told POLITICO the Reason Foundation has already agreed to reach out to the television star about the possibility.
UPDATE @12:20: The Reason Foundation said they never agreed to reach out to Carey about a Senate race and Carey's publicist told POLITICO Wednesday he had no plans to run for office.
Reason, a libertarian think tank, partnered with Carey on a documentary series on the plight of Cleveland last year.
"Carey's outspoken libertarian-conservative policy advocacy, most notably through the Reason Foundation, has proven his credentials as someone who could be trusted to spare no sacred cows in his fight to reduce the size and role of government back to what it was originally intended to be. Furthermore, his name recognition, personal wealth, affability, and status as Ohio's favorite son would be a huge asset in an election," said Schmidt.
"Drew's increasing activism in local Ohio politics certainly gives us no reason to think he's uninterested in running for office. Also, his recent slimming down, the fact that he is in the last year of his five-year contract with Price Is Right, and the fact that he maintains a residence in Cleveland would all match up well with a 2012 Ohio Senate candidacy," he argued.
Right now, the movement is backed by a handful of fiscal hawks and activists in search of their own "Rand Paul to nominate" and 700 Facebook fans, but Schmidt said he's been reaching out to Republican party and elected officials to gauge interest.
Other potential candidates being mentioned are Rep. Jim Jordan, State Treasurer Josh Mandel and Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor.
But Chris Littleton, who heads a tea party group in western Ohio said he's been told by people close to Mandel and Jordan that neither of them will likely run.
"Jordan has said that he has a great opportunity to make a difference from the House in Republican Study committee and influencing leadership, therefore he wants to focus on this opportunity. Mandel is too new and has personal commitments to family," Littleton said.LOS ANGELES — Rodger Saffold — veteran offensive lineman for the Los Angeles Rams — moonlights as the owner of Rise Nation, a professional Call of Duty esports organization. At Variety’s Sports and Entertainment Summit, he spoke on the dualities and similarities between the two sports — and yes, Saffold considers esports a sport — and also about setting up scholarship funds for those pursuing a career in professional gaming.
“The biggest time you spend in both sports and esports is time,” Saffold said. “Everybody thinks you just show up on Sundays and play games. It’s very time-consuming. My days in training camp are going to be from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., and it’s going to be like that for three weeks. As far as gaming, some of my players play at least 12 to 14 hours a day, just to stay up with the times.
“With the new maps that come in, not all of them are MLG acceptable, so a lot of these times my players have to grind the game, grind out certain maps just so that they can stay up to par. And that’s the same thing with us (football players). The game always evolve in football, the game always changes. When I got to the NFL, I would get a peel block and it would look amazing. Now, you can’t touch (rushers) at all so you just try to get out of the way and hope they don’t run you over.
“But, on both sides, the intangibles are always the same. The physicality, of course, isn’t the same, unless you’re talking about hand cramps, but we’re definitely trying to bridge the gap between the two, and that’s another way I’m helping the brand of esports.”
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In a medium dominated by men — namely, those of East Asian or European ancestry — outreach into other communities is imperative for the sport’s future growth. Developing talent in places not commonly reached by traditional gaming institutions is something Saffold has been trying to do to help foster diversity in esports. Saffold, fueled by his own background, has set up a number of scholarships for underprivileged, aspiring gamers in order to help them realize their dreams.
“It was rough at first because we didn’t really realize (diversity) was much of a problem but it seems that a lot of people have been trying to get into the space of gaming and computer engineering and a plethora of different thing,” Saffold said. “We’ve been working with (the Entertainment Software Association) to try to get scholarships for these kids so that they can be able to go to school and do what they want to do. I’ve had a great time being able to sit with them face to face and have conversations with these people. Our first night we raised $75,000 in scholarship money, which I put a little into.”
“I feel like we’re the only organization doing so,” Saffold added. “I’m also a minority so I just wanted to get involved because I wanted to help esports as a whole and at the same time, if I can help everybody in the space, it’s a bonus.”
Saffold went on to say that kids who want to be professional gamers don’t have to pigeonhole themselves — they can be involved in esports from a variety of different angles: not just as the talent themselves, but on the business, marketing, communications, or content creating sides of the field.
“I know that a lot of these guys, especially these guys who are playing at the pro level, once they leave they kinda stay in the space,” Saffold said. “They go to Activision or Blizzard, they become liaisons. There’s a lot of opportunities outside the game — for players, you kinda just stay in the industry.”Trying to get that perfect POV shot with your GoPro, but you don’t want to spend money on a mouth mount?
It’s possible to make your own for pretty cheap. Mine ended up costing around $15, but you can probably find the polymorph plastic cheaper at your local store.
DIY Mouth Mount Materials:
J-buckle clip/mount (or pretty much any clip that comes with your GoPro)
Polymorph plastic
Yes that’s all you need!
The bad part is that you can’t use your J-buckle for anything else after you turn it into a mouth mount. So make sure you don’t need it, or get an extra.
Polymorph plastic is plastic beads that melt together when you boil them. This allows you to shape the plastic into any shape you desire, and it gets super hard when it cools down.
I got mine for about $10 on Amazon.com, but then I had to pay like $6 for shipping. So if you go to your local hardware store you can probably get some for cheaper.
7 Simple Steps
Attach J-buckle to your GoPro Heat your polymorph plastic. You just have to estimate how much to use. It’s better to overestimate, and then you can just remove any excess when you are done shaping it around the J-buckle.
Follow the heating instructions specific to your plastic, as it’s different for each product. I boiled mine for 2 minutes. Remove the plastic from the boiling water, and let it cool down until you can handle it. Form the warm plastic around your J-buckle. Gently bite onto the plastic (make sure it is cool enough) and let it form around your teeth. Carefully take it out of your mouth, and quickly submerse it in ice water. This will cool it quickly and harden it. Try not to let it touch the pot when you dunk it, because you don’t want it to lose its shape. Once it has cooled down, it’s all ready to use! If there is any extra plastic or rough edges, you can sand it with a dremel tool or just plain sandpaper.
Tip:
When biting down on the soft plastic, make sure the GoPro is pointed in the right direction. As you can see from the picture below, the GoPro was not aligned correctly when he bit down to form the plastic.
It seems simple, but it’s easy to forget in the moment.
Cheaper than buying a mouth mount
Fast (about 5 minutes total time)
Drawbacks of making your own mouth mount:To determine the age of the zircon fragment, the scientists first used a widely accepted dating technique based on determining the radioactive decay of uranium to lead in a mineral sample.
But because some scientists hypothesized that this technique might give a false date due to possible movement of lead atoms within the crystal over time, the researchers turned to a second sophisticated method to verify the finding.
They used a |
soft USA being on the brink of bankruptcy. With all these struggles, it seems that the game was only released in Australia on the Megadrive.
It was also revealed by the lead programmer that the game used a lot of the code from the Funcom-developed game based on the movie We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story.
Treasured Standard USA Releases
M.U.S.H.A.: $180 – $400
Shmup fans are always willing to pay good money for a quality shooter and on the Genesis, MUSHA is main target on the platform. The game earns its strong reputation through great graphics, gameplay, and an iconic hard rock soundtrack. You play a character in a mech (as opposed to a space ship) with the ability to pick up smaller ships to accompany you as power-ups. These smaller ships can take damage for you and fire in a variety of methods.
Coming from the Aleste series of shooters from Compile, MUSHA was relatively popular in Japan but the game never caught on stateside until well after the 16-bit generation was over. On a side note, it was never released in Europe, so importing is especially appealing over there.
As you can see from the historical values above, this one has been climbing the charts for quite a while. Currently, loose copies are in the $180 range, while complete vary between $270 and $400.
Crusader of Centy: $140 – $580
Crusader of Centy is an Action RPG that has the look and feel of an old-school Zelda game with a more youthful sense of style, but still containing a challenge. Originally published as Ragnacenty in Japan (and Soleil in PAL regions) by Sega but published in the US by Atlus, Crusader of Centy also presents a compelling narrative that touches on moral issues and pulls at heart strings.
Altus is known for doing smaller print runs for some of its earlier games and this one is no different, commanding a higher price tag than other similar Megadrive Action RPGs, such as Light Crusader or LandStalker. Usually their games have a bit more of a cult following after them, but Crusader is a bit more low profile — just gradually creeping up in value until taking off after being featured in our 2013 guide – increasing almost 400% in the last four years.
Splatterhouse 2: $60 – $260
The Splatterhouse series is well-known for being the precursor to the survival horror genre and being one of the first solid examples of a gory game that actually had solid gameplay to back it up (in the style of the 2D beatemup). The original arcade game’s most high-profile port was on the TurboGrafx–16, but the sequel was welcomed onto the Sega Genesis in 1992.
Interestingly enough, Splatterhouse 3 commanded a higher premium over this second installment up until a few years ago. Splatterhouse 2 has essentially doubled in value since 2013 while its sequel has increased just gradually.
Truxton: $40 – $225
This arcade vertical shooter from Toaplan was an early release for the Genesis/Mega Drive, hitting shelves not long after the debut of the console. The game still looks great and it will ooze nostalgia as Truxton feels a bit more classic than then the rest of the Genesis shmup library, feeling right at home with other Toaplan shmups on the console such as Fire Shark, Hellfire, and Grind Stormer (V – V).
As the Genesis is gaining more of a resurgence as a strong Shmup console, Truxton is becoming a necessary purchase and driving up demand without seeing many of those same copies being parted with later.
Castlevania Bloodlines: $53 – $210
Bloodlines is the only Castlevania title to be released on the Genesis and retains the classic feel of the NES trilogy, yet with the added power of the Genesis. The graphics aren’t as detailed or colorful as the SNES version, but it pushed the capabilities of the Genesis to achieve many effects that otherwise wouldn’t be possible on the system.
Many of the bosses are very large and are composed of many sprites that combined into one entity. Being innovative in both gameplay and graphical effects, Bloodlines has many features that make it stand out, including the option of two playable characters with distinctly different play styles. In the end, Bloodlines is typically ranked relatively highly in both the Castlevania franchise and the Genesis action library.
Trouble Shooter: $64 – $202
While M.U.S.H.A and Truxton rank rather high on the list of best Genesis / Megadrive shmups, Trouble Shooter leans more towards the rare oddity in the genre’s library. It has a quirky art style and sense of humor that is reminiscent of 90s anime and distinguishes itself from other Genesis/Mega Drive shooters by featuring two jetpack-wearing heroines instead of a space ship. You can choose your weapons at the beginning of the level and you have the ability to have both girls focus their aim forward or one fire backwards and one fire forward.
As fans of the scrolling shooter genre have built out their Genesis library, they have noticed than Trouble Shooter can be hard to stumble upon. Over the last few years, it has made its ways out of obscurity and become more of a collectors item.
The Punisher: $55 – $200
Licensed beat-em-ups were all the rage in the 90s and The Punisher jumped on the bandwagon, but with a rather limited Genesis/Megadrive-exclusive port of the arcade game. Interestingly enough, The Punisher was one of the few games Capcom published on the Genesis (they usually favored Nintendo’s platforms and let Sega port some arcade titles like Strider). Instead of porting it themselves, they outsourced the work to Sculptured Software.
A lot of graphical cuts had to be made and while the port played fine, it wasn’t especially great. Despite it being the only console port of the arcade game, it was a late release for the console (1995) and didn’t sell that well. Now it is a bit of a challenge to track down — especially in complete condition, which included a temporary tattoo that is often missing in listings on eBay.
Mega Turrican: $55 – $200
The Turrican series came to fame on the Commodore 64 and the Amiga platforms and is heavily inspired by the likes of Metroid (huge levels to explore and morph-ball function) and Psycho-Nics Oscar (visual design and weapons). Mega Turrican is technically a sequel to Turrican II, which was rebranded as Universal Soldier (based on the 1992 film) on the Genesis. Other than this interesting licensing move, Mega Turrican is the only game in the series to land on a Sega platform.
With very stylish graphics, a fantastic soundtrack, and a much more balanced difficulty level than its predecessors, Mega Turrican has steadily risen in popularity over the years. The developers, Factor 5, would go on to make more classics on other consoles, but this would be one of only two games they made for the Genesis. Their other game would be International Superstar Soccer Deluxe, which never received a US release.
El Viento: $40 – $185
Wolf Team (who has a diverse history of games, including the likes of Arcus Odyssey, Granada, Sol-Feace, and various entries in the Tales Of… series) created a trilogy of games on the Genesis and Sega CD known as the “Earnest Evans Series”, of which El Viento is first game released, but the second installment in the trilogy. It’s a fast and furious action title that is quirky and interesting, but does have some rough edges and odd design choices. El Viento is certainly ambitious, attempting graphical feats that were unseen on the MD at the time, such as huge explosions and screen filling octopi.
It’s not a game for everyone, but I can see how fans of the Genesis and unpredictable action titles (fans of Strider will probably enjoy it) would like to add this to their collection. It was released in 1991, but unsurprisingly
It’s not a game for everyone, but I can see how fans of the Genesis and unpredictable action titles (fans of Strider will probably enjoy it) would like to add this to their collection. It was released in 1991 but unsurprisingly, had a fairly small print run. If you’d like to see a review that captures the game (and some of Wolf Team’s other work) check out this video.
Gaiares: $35 – $175
Among the Genesis shooters, Gaiares rests relatively high among the bunch. The developers had no problem using the console’s color palette to generate some excellent looking visuals, especially with boss fights. What really sets Gaiares apart is the power up system. Following your ship is a Gradius-like option, but unlike Gradius you can launch it at an enemy and gain their unique type of firepower; repeated launches into the same enemy equals a more powerful version of said weapon. The game is not uncommon and can be tracked down relatively easily but a CIB version, raises the stakes of the investment.
Zero The Kamikaze Squirrel: $50 – $170
Released in a time when anthropomorphic mascot platformers were plentiful, Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel was a pretty good gem that moves at a quick pace (though slower than the SNES version), combined with unique flying and acrobatic skills for its time.
A spin-off of Sunsoft’s Aero the Acro-bat series, one of Zero’s more interesting features is the large numbers of offensive action (such as limited shurikens and nun-chucks) and flying actions like diving and swooping. Its innovative features can be a bit tricky to control, but it stands out from the crowd of mascot action titles and is a nice way to round out a Genesis collection.
Aero the Acro-bat 2: $25 – $170
Released around the same time as the aforementioned Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel, the second Aero the Acro-bat game improved the controls, speed, and diversity of the game drastically over the original.
Looking back, it is one of the more unique platformers on the Genesis, but it’s not surprising that it got lost among all the other platformers of the 16-bit era, leading to lackluster sales.
Grind Stormer: $40 – $160
Known as “V – V” in Japan, this shmup from Toaplan saw a rather limited release on the North American Genesis. For the longest time, this release went under the radar, but as Shmup fans are building up their collections, this one is joining MUSHA at the top of the list. It’s not without its flaws, mainly a lack of polish that other games (Thunder Force 4, Eliminate Down) proved were possible on the console. This is not the best shooter around, but if you are a collector or a Toaplan fan then it’s worth tracking down.
Another factor to its rise in value is the high amount of faulty carts (a known problem with certain Tengen Genesis releases), making functional copies worth much more. They can be repaired though, so if you have the know how you could potentially save there.
Splatterhouse 3: $57 – $155
Splatterhouse was the precursor to the survival horror genre and its third installment plays more akin to Double Dragon (but with more gore and violence, of course) than its sidescrolling predecessors. The game was also non-linear in the maze that you have to find your way through within the time limit, which if you run out of time may not end the game but will change the storyline and ending. Not many beat-em-ups took this more open-style approach during this period, making it ahead of its time.
Splatterhouse 3 was also the last game in the cult-classic series before the 2010 reboot of the series (which may have sparked interest in the previous games).
Elemental Master: $45 – $193
TechnoSoft is well known for their Thunder Force series, but Elemental Master stands as a worthy addition to their catalog of Genesis games. For this title the developers decided to break away from the science fiction themes of Thunder Force and Herzog Zwei and instead draw upon fantasy elements for the game’s visuals.
Players start with a standard parallel two-beam shooter, but unlike many shmups, all the additional weapons are permanent. The four elemental power-ups can be charged up to release an explosive blast; the main default weapon becomes chargeable after the first four stages are completed, which gives the player the game’s most powerful weapon. The game features vertical scrolling, but you can shoot both up and down. It’s a great addition to a Genesis shooter library, but easy to see why it may have been passed over when it came out.
Double Dragon: $23 – $150
One of the first big franchises in the beat-em-up genre, Double Dragon saw a few more common releases on the Genesis in the form of a sequel, a sub-par fighting game, and a mashup game where they teamed with the Battletoads in outer space.
However, this unlicensed, straight port of the original arcade game from Ballistic (Accolade) is the one to be one the lookout for. It’s also one of the best versions of the arcade original – especially for those that want full two-player action.
Gunstar Heroes: $60 – $140
As possibly the best 16-bit run-n-gun game and one of the most loved in the genre altogether, Gunstar Heroes has become a mainstay in the Genesis lineup. The basics of the game are very easy to pick up – you have four weapons to choose from, each of which can be combined in a variety of ways while playing. In addition to shooting, players can slide, jump, kick, and perform some basic melee moves (such as throwing). Each level of the game is relatively short (though well designed), but they function primarily as the lead up to some of the most memorable and impressive boss fights to ever grace the genre.
Gunstar Heroes also happens to be one of the best technical showpieces for the Sega Genesis with its impressive graphics (including scaling and rotations) and sound. The game isn’t terribly uncommon, but it isn’t one that Genesis action fans will give up easily.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist: $47 – $140
During this game’s release in the early 90’s the Ninja Turtles were at its peak and the arcade game “Turtles in Time” was bringing tons of quarters. The SNES received a great port of Turtles of Time, but the Genesis got a bit of a different take on the game. There are some similarities, but Hyperstone Heist has fewer, but longer levels in addition to some differences in special effects and audio. It is a more challenging game and has become a valued part of the Genesis library, but often got overlooked during its initial retail period.
Contra Hard Corps: $40 – $140
Much like the did with Castlevania Bloodlines (mentioned above), Konami reinforced the strengths in one of their best franchises. Hard Corps is the fourth major installment in the Contra series and retained the fast-paced “run ‘n gun” gameplay.
Hard Corps, however, slightly shifted focus from fighting onslaughts of enemy troops and vehicles to mainly boss encounters. (Much like Alien Soldier). Some other enhancements were established in Hard Corps such as multiple paths, endings, and selectable characters.
Warsong: $37 – $140
Also know by the name, Langrisser in Japan, this tactical RPG is the first in a long series from Nippon Computer Systems. Many have compared it to the Fire Emblem series that has a cult following on Nintendo platforms. Up until 2010, you could usually score this title relatively inexpensively. However, since then it has gradually crept up in value before becoming a standard collector piece.
Top Unlicensed / Homebrew Releases
While most people think of unlicensed games as the cheap crap that came out during the console’s heyday, the Genesis has seen a number of recent releases that are just as good as some of the high-profile games in the Genesis library. Because they were produced in rather small quantities and most of the original purchases aren’t looking to get rid of their copy, the values can stay quite strong. Here’s some of the biggest collector’s pieces.
Pier Solar and the Great Architects
First Editions: $180 – $500
Reprint Edition: $60 – $177
Pier Solar was a completely homebrew release that was developed by Watermelon Co (and started as a project of the classic Sega website, Eidolon’s Inn). This 2010 release also had the option to use the Sega CD for extra audio content. The first print run actually had three variations with different languages, different box artwork and different label artwork.
There are 800 of each of the three editions. The Posterity Edition is also first edition that was to thank the earliest supporters of the project. The Posterity Release has a sticker on the package and a additional magazine. The exact number was never published, so we can only estimate. It was limited to 500 copies but not all of them have been sold.The Reprint does not have all languages and the CD is not included. It has a different box (plastic clamshell) and a different box artwork and label artwork. Numbers were never been published for the Reprint Edition, so it’s completely unknown how many of them have been sold.
While they are still good collectors items, the copies of Pier Solar have decreased in value 25% to 50% since 2013.
Beggar Prince (First and Second Editions): $90 – $135
This is the game that kicked off the “new” Genesis releases. Beggar Prince was the first new Genesis product released since Majesco published Frogger in 1998, and gamers everywhere were excited at the prospect of owning the game in cartridge form, complete with box and manual. Though Beggar Prince originally appeared in Taiwan in 1996, the rest of the world had never seen it, so it was seen as “new” for everyone in the West.
The American company, Super Fighter Team created an English translation of the game and did the first commercial release in 2006. By September 8, 2006, all 600 copies had been sold. However, a month later, Super Fighter Team announced that they had begun taking pre-orders for a second production run of 300 copies. By June, 2007, this production run had also sold out.
The total print run for Beggar Prince with the original cover art is 900 copies. These first printings of Beggar Prince held their value a bit better than other homebrew releases, but have still seen a slight decrease over the last few years.
Beggar Prince (Third Edition): $70 – $100
This third print run included several changes including higher-quality cover art, became available for pre-ordering on October 9, 2007 and started shipping on November 27, 2007. This print run had 600 copies bringing the total print run of the game to 1,500 copies.
Back in 2013, this Third Edition held up in value to the first pricing rather wall (between there being less copies of the variant and the preference of many current Genesis owners for the new art), but over the last few years, the resale value of the third edition has declined about 40% (down from the $115 to $137 range in 2013)
Additional Valuable Japanese Imports
Vampire Killer (JP Castlevania Bloodlines): $350 – $500 (eBay)
Comix Zone: $200 – $300 (eBay)
Greylancer: $140 – $350 (eBay)
Snow Bros: $130 – $300 (eBay)
Twinkle Tale $120 – $287 (eBay)
Yu Yu Hakusho – $130 – $160 (eBay)
Ristar – $80 – $160 (eBay)
Contra – $80 – $160 (eBay)
Nagoya Home Banking –???
Additional Box Sets / Special Releases
Miracle Piano (Full Keyboard and Game Cartridge Set): $60 – $80 (eBay)
Ecco Tides of Time Box Set
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego Box Set
Primal Rage Box Set (picture)
The Rarest US Genesis Games At Affordable Prices
Each of these games have a rarity rating greater than 6, but routinely sell for less than $50 for Complete-In-Box. If you are a Genesis collector and see a boxed or sealed copy of any of these on eBay for a low price, you might want to snatch them up — you may never see them again.
Joshua Battle for Jericho: $30 – $35 (eBay)
Liberty or Death: $20 – $42 (eBay)
Rolo to the Rescue: $18 – $50 (eBay)
Crossfire: $8 – $15 (Sealed copy sold for $100) (eBay)
Additional US Sega Genesis Games of Value
These games are quite collectible; resulting in a high resale value, especially for complete, boxes copies.SEATTLE -- Police say a woman who broke into Lake City house was arrested Thursday after she lost both her shoes and pants.
A man who was with her is at large.
A woman arrived at her home in the 12300 block of 23rd Avenue Northeast about 11 a.m. Thursday. The gate to her house was open, and she saw a pile of suitcases stacked in her living room, police say.
Then she saw a man and a woman in yellow pants walking down her driveway. They were carrying several bags.
The burglars ran into a wooded ravine after the homeowner yelled at them.
The homeowner called 911, and police arrived with a dog.
The female burglar came out of the ravine and surrendered. Police said she was no longer wearing the yellow pants or shoes.
The 30-year-old woman was booked into jail.
Officers seized her van and found several bags belonging to the homeowner.The Apple TV hasn't had a significant update since March of 2012 when the box was upgraded to support 1080p video. The software has been updated a few times since then, but the hardware has only received mild internal tweaks.
A new report from 9to5Mac indicates that this may be changing in the first half of 2014—their sources say that Apple's working on a brand-new set-top box (not the fabled Apple television set) that will ship with a revamped operating system. And like the current Apple TV software, this OS will be derived from iOS. 9to5Mac's original reporting proved to be very accurate in 2013, which lends this rumor a bit more credence than it might have coming from more dubious outlets.
Sadly, the report didn't come with many other details, aside from (shakier) speculation about new Kinect-like voice commands and gesture input, as well as a game store that would turn the Apple TV into a mini game console. Rumors about an Apple TV-focused push into console gaming have been flying around since Apple introduced a game controller API in iOS 7, though that API has so far only enabled expensive, lackluster iOS accessories. The report indicates that "new types of content" will be available with the new hardware, but it isn't specific about what that content will be. As of this writing, only content providers who work closely with Apple are able to get their content integrated into the product, as there's no App Store equivalent available on the device.
The report indicates that Apple has "definitely considered" pushing out this software update to current-generation Apple TV boxes. Current boxes already run an iOS-based operating system, but depending on the new capabilities and content introduced, their older, single-core A4 and A5 chips may not be powerful enough to handle them. Apple may decide to upgrade one or both versions of the hardware, but it could restrict certain features to newer models as it currently does with its iPhones and iPads. We've reached out to Apple for comment on the rumors and will update if we receive a response.The latest stupidospheric controversy in Donald Trump's America is Donald Jr's hard-to-parse claims of attorney-client privilege; Junior told Congress to go fuck themselves when they asked him to testify under oath about a meeting he had with his father about Russian interference in the 2016 elections, saying he didn't have to answer them because his lawyer was present and thus the conversation was privileged.
In a characteristically excellent lawsplainer, former federal prosecutor Ken "Popehat" White explains what the hell Junior is talking about and whether he's totally deluded, or only partially deluded.
So was the conversation by Trump Jr. and Trump Sr. privileged, because there was a lawyer in the room, or their lawyers were on the call?
No, not necessarily. Just having a lawyer in the room, or on a call, doesn't make a communication privileged. The communication is only privileged if it's for the purpose of obtaining legal advice — if it's communicating things to the lawyer so the lawyer can give legal advice, or it's the lawyer communicating that legal advice. For instance, having a company's general counsel in the room or on the phone during a meeting about business issues doesn't make the meeting privileged, unless the purpose was to get the general counsel's advice.
You see this issue come up all the time in the modern era with email. Just cc'ing your attorney on an email to a non-attorney does not make the email privileged. The email's only privileged if it's to get legal advice — to tell the lawyer something they need to know to give advice, for instance.
So if Sr. and Jr. were just talking, and weren't conveying information for the purpose of getting legal advice from the lawyers who were on the call or in the room, the conversation would not be privileged. On the other hand, if they were exchanging information so that their respective lawyers could give them legal advice about what the lawyers heard, it could be. Jr. didn't really give enough information to judge.(CNN) Bruce Lee, the martial arts icon, was being interviewed by a Hong Kong talk show host when the man asked Lee if he saw himself as Chinese or an American.
"Neither," Lee said. "I think of myself as a human being."
Forty-three years after his sudden death in July of 1973, more people are starting to think of Lee as something else: A profound thinker whose mind was as supple as his body.
That may seem like an odd claim. Lee was a fighter, not a philosopher, according to popular perception. He left behind some of the most exhilarating fights scenes ever captured on film in movies such as "Enter the Dragon" and "The "Chinese Connection."
But his legacy also includes a revolutionary book on the martial arts and Eastern philosophy, and seven volumes of writings on everything from Taoism, quantum physics, psychotherapy and the power of positive thinking.
The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti poses for a portrait in 1971. Many say that Krishnamurti was Lee's favorite philosopher.
John Little, who examined Lee's papers after the actor's death, says he was stunned when he first entered Lee's library. He had at least 1,700 heavily annotated books. That's when he realized that Lee sharpened his mind as much as his body.
"The philosophy of Lee is more powerful than the martial arts of Lee," says Little, author of "The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee." "Everything that Bruce Lee did flowed from his mind and his thinking."
And it flowed from his pride in his Chinese heritage as well.
Lee was a devotee of Alan Watts, a 20th century British philosopher who introduced Eastern thought to Western audiences. Lee would tape Watts' lectures and play them back to his martial arts students in class.
Lee, too, saw himself as bridge between the East and the West. He wanted to show Americans the beauty of Chinese philosophy and its culture, his friends and biographers say.
"He told me that he could educate people about the East more in films than in books," says Dan Inosanto, one of Lee's closest friends and his training partner. Inosanto filmed an insanely exciting fight scene with Lee in "Game of Death" where both battled one other using Lee's signature weapon, nunchakus, a weapon that consists of two sticks connected by a short chain.
Muscles like warm marble
Of course, those old enough to remember when Lee was alive didn't go to his films to learn about esoteric Eastern teachings. They wanted to see him kick butt.
And Lee obliged. He hit the American movie screens in the early 1970s like a tsunami.
The philosophy of Lee is more powerful than the martial arts of Lee. Everything that Bruce Lee did flowed from his mind and his thinking. John Little, author of "The Warrior Within: The Philisophies of Bruce Lee."
American audiences had never seen an action star like him before. The liquid grace of his movements; his feline quickness; the weird, high-pitched shrieks he gave off during combat. People squealed in delight so much during his films that a viewer rarely heard all the dialogue.
Lee was a racial pioneer, too. Here was an Asian man who wasn't depicted as a bucktoothed buffoon or fortune-cookie-quoting sage. He was an unabashed sex symbol. Women marveled over his lithe physique; one person said touching his hardened muscles was like touching "warm marble."
But Lee's mind -- his grasp of philosophy and his willpower -- was the engine that powered his physical prowess, says Bruce Thomas, author of "Bruce Lee: Fighting Words."
"What Lee did was harness energies outside the ordinary energies that are used for daily life," Thomas says. "The martial arts were a way a life for him, a genuine path, a means of psychological development and spiritual development."
Lee's 'go-to' philosopher
Another thinker who helped Lee harness those energies was Jiddu Krishnamurti, a philosopher born in India who taught that truth can't be found through any religious tradition or dogma.
"In oneself lies the world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand," he wrote. Krishnamurti's emphasis on self-reliance and disdain for mindlessly following tradition shaped Lee's approach to the martial arts.
When Lee was alive, the martial arts world was rigidly divided by different fighting styles. He borrowed from virtually all of them to create his own revolutionary fighting called "Jeet Kune Do," which he later turned into a book.
Today, Lee is often called the father of MMA, or mixed martial arts, for his willingness to be, as he once said, "not one style, but all styles."
"Krishnamurti was his go-to thinker," Thomas says. "He taught that one must come to the present moment and not be tainted by rituals and dogmas. He took everything Krishnamurti said about religion and applied it to the martial arts."
How Lee's mind helped him survive a crisis
Lee's devotion to philosophy could have just remained an abstract pursuit. But it was also key to his physical speed and power. One martial artist said that Lee had the+ ability to move from perfect stillness and "explode like a firecracker."
UFC fighter Conor McGregor celebrates victory. Bruce Lee is considered the father of mixed martial artists like McGregor because he emphasized blending different fighting styles.
Lee could do that because he was able to tap into what ancient Chinese philosophers called "chi."
In his book, "The Warrior Within," Little described chi as a "vast reservoir of free-flowing energy" within all people that "when channeled to our muscles, can give us great strength and, when channeled to our brain, can give us great insight and understanding."
Lee's ability to summon chi at will was the culmination of years of philosophical contemplation and physical training, his biographers and students say.
Lee once described what it felt like to summon these energies within himself:
"I feel I have this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence... Whether it is the Godhead or not, I feel this great force, this untapped power, this dynamic something within me."
Lee also unleashed those energies through positive thinking. He was a fan of Norman Vincent Peale and read books such "As a Man Thinketh," by James Allen. He would also jot down homespun aphorisms in his spare time like, "Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed."
Lee's philosophical beliefs could have been confined to books, but they were refined by events in his life that would have broken lesser people.
First, he had to deal with racism -- from both sides.
He was born in San Francisco, but grew up in Hong Kong in an affluent family. His father was an opera star and Lee became a childhood actor who appeared in at least 20 Chinese films. Lee started studying martial arts when he was 13 but his instructor stopped personally teaching him when he learned that Lee's mother was part white, biographers say.
I feel I have this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence. Bruce Lee, martial artist and philsopher
That experience shaped in part his decision to teach the martial arts to Westerners after he moved to America when he turned 18, some say. Teaching the martial arts to Westerners was taboo at the time, but Lee didn't care, says Doug Palmer, who was one of Lee's first students in America.
"I think the fact that he [Lee] was part white had something to do with it," Palmer says about Lee's decision to teach Westerners. "He himself had to overcome obstacles in Hong Kong because he was part white."
Lee then encountered racism from Hollywood.
He had gone to Hollywood with an idea for a television drama about the martial arts. They took his idea but rejected him for a role in the series because they thought he looked too Chinese for an America audience. They gave his role to an American actor and dancer. The drama would eventually become a hit television show called "Kung Fu."
Lee also suffered a crippling back injury during training. Doctors told him he would never walk properly again and could never practice the martial arts. It was a low moment in his life. He was bedridden with a wife and two young children to support. At one point he only had $50 in the bank. He could have fallen into a debilitating depression but he overcame his injury through positive visualization, and he used that time to write his groundbreaking book, "Jeet Kune Do," says Thomas, one of his biographers.
"He healed himself," Thomas says.
Lee's belief in the power of positive thinking comes through in a letter he wrote to a friend during that shaky period in his life.
He wrote:
"I mean who has the most insecure job than I have? What do I live on? My faith in my ability that I'll make it. Sure my back injury screwed me up good for a year but with every adversity comes a blessing... Look at a rain storm; after its departure everything grows.
Lee's legacy today
Lee eventually broke through. He went to Hong Kong to make a series of films that caught Hollywood's attention. He then returned to Hollywood to make "Enter the Dragon," which became a huge hit.
But Lee never lived long enough to see the culmination of all of his work.
Just days before the American release of "Enter the Dragon," in 1973, Lee died in Hong Kong from an allergic reaction to pain medication he had taken. He was 32. Lee's son, Brandon, who would follow him into the martial arts and film, would later die in 1993 from a freak accident with a prop gun on a movie set.
Lee's friends still miss him. They talk less about his fighting ability and more about what fun he was to be around: his restless questioning, his optimism, his goofy sense of humor and his loyalty to friends.
"He was a very charismatic person," says Palmer, who is now an attorney in Seattle. "He could dominate most situations. You walk into a room and in most cases he would dominating the conversation."
English-born philosopher Alan W. Watts was such a favorite of Bruce Lee that he required his martial arts students to listen to Watts' lectures.
Lee's influence transcends the martial arts, Inosanto says.
"I got letters after he died from people from almost all walks of life, from musicians to skateboarders -- they all said he influenced him," Inosanto says.
Lee's global popularity is matched by only one other person, Inosanto says.
"Muhammad Ali and Bruce Lee are the most recognizable faces in the world," Inosanto says. "I was very lucky to have stumbled onto him. I never had a dull moment with him."
Lee's family is introducing the martial artist to a new generation today.
Lee's widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, and his daughter, Shannon Lee, established the Bruce Lee Foundation "to share the art and philosophy" of Lee. It gives out scholarships to students who embody Lee's passion for learning and provides martial arts training to underprivileged youth.
Lee's legacy is expanding in other ways too. There are now more authors writing not so much about Lee's fighting ability but his resilience as an example to anyone who wants to express their individuality and overcome obstacles in life.
At the foot of Lee's grave site in Seattle is a stone tablet with an inscription that reads: "Your inspiration continues to guide us toward personal liberation."
Lee's legacy is now bigger than any punch he ever threw.Gynophobia or gynephobia is an abnormal fear of women, a type of specific social phobia.[1] In the past, the Latin term horror feminae was used.[2]
Gynophobia should not be confused with misogyny, the hatred, contempt for and prejudice against women,[3][4] although some may use the terms interchangeably, in reference to the social, rather than pathological aspect of negative attitudes towards women.[5]
The antonym of misogyny is philogyny, the love, respect for and admiration of women.[6]
This term is analogous with androphobia, the abnormal or irrational fear of men.
Etymology [ edit ]
The term gynophobia comes from the Greek γυνή - gunē, meaning "woman"[7] and φόβος - phobos, "fear".[8]
Hyponyms of the term "gynophobia" include feminophobia,[9]
History [ edit ]
Gynophobia was previously considered a driving force toward homosexuality. In his 1896 Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Havelock Ellis wrote:
It is, perhaps, not difficult to account for the horror – much stronger than that normally felt toward a person of the same sex – with which the invert often regards the sexual organs of persons of the opposite sex. It cannot be said that the sexual organs of either sex under the influence of sexual excitement are esthetically pleasing; they only become emotionally desirable through the parallel excitement of the beholder. When the absence of parallel excitement is accompanied in the beholder by the sense of unfamiliarity as in |
. Harris points to public policies that built the white middle class in the second half of the 20th century -- policies like the the National Housing Act of 1934 and 1937, a series of housing programs enacted to pull families out of the Depression, and the GI Bill, which provided federal funding to returning World War II veterans to go to college and purchase low-interest homes in the suburbs. These programs were denied to black Americans, sustaining segregation and providing opportunities for generations of white people, the benefits of which persist today. But it's difficult for white people to identify how historical policies have shaped their communities and their position in life, said Harris.
There are other systems that perpetuate racial disparities. Harris points to the disproportionate number of black males in the prison system -- one in 15, according to a Center for American Progress report, compared to one in 106 white men. And when convicted, black men often face longer prison sentences than white men for the same crime, according to a report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
Harris, DiAngelo and Fisher all say that white Americans might not identify racism in their own community due to the ongoing lack of serious dialogue across racial lines. Many Americans simply don’t have an opportunity to discuss racism with someone of a different race because they live in deeply segregated communities. Eighty percent of white respondents in our survey stated that they feel "somewhat comfortable" to "very comfortable" having conversations about race, but a 2013 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that white Americans list mostly other white people as being among their closest confidants.
If we can have dialogue that begins with grace, love, dignity and demonstration that we recognize the humanity in one another, then we have a place to begin.
The opportunity to talk to someone whose experience may differ from their own is one of the reasons Harris thinks the gay rights movement has made such progress in such a short time in the U.S., while the modern civil rights movement has stalled. "A lot of white Americans who were trying to sort out how they felt about [same-sex marriage], had gay people in their families [or] people they knew," he said. That helped personalize the issue and build support for marriage equality among straight Americans. But fewer white Americans have experienced the same opportunities when it comes to racial equality, he posits.
One place to begin, Fisher says is "to have constructive conversations” about race. “If we can have dialogue that begins with grace, love, dignity and demonstration that we recognize the humanity in one another, then we have a place to begin," he said.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted June 24-29 among U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the poll's methodology are available here.Cardshark, trust funder, “King of Instagram” and SEAL washout Dan Bilzerian apparently doesn’t know when to use his poker face- this time referring to Marine Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer as a “retard.”
The feud began when Bilzerian filmed himself fleeing from the Las Vegas shooting that took place Sunday night, claiming he saw a woman get shot in the head- and abandoned her.
The seemingly opportunistic account from the ground -be it for attention or genuine panic- and subsequent response to the disaster sparked the ire of USMC Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer.
“This is why children shouldn’t classify heroes by their followers or their photos,” Dakota Meyer wrote on twitter. “Dan Bilzerian [,] this is what kills me about people like you. Always playing “operator dress up” and so so tough when the cameras are on. A woman just got shot in the head and you are running away filming[.] that’s not what operators do. Please stop trying to be someone your [sic] not. People are dying, you’re running away not helping them and pretending it’s worthy of a video is disgusting.”
Overnight, Dan Bilzerian became the subject of articles, memes and other such content that documented his ordeal.
In response, Bilzerian stared into his camera phone once again and responded to the bad press, calling Meyer a “retard.”
“So I wake up this morning, and the news is talking sh*t,” he said on October 3. “Some Marine saying that I was a pu**y for running away and that I should have stood my ground when I got a guy shooting at me with a machine gun.”
“So, I mean, if we follow that retard’s logic, we’d probably have, you know, 600 dead if everybody stood their ground instead of running for cover.”
Even ignoring that a SEAL-washout who never saw combat referred to an MOH recipient as “some Marine,” the poker-player then went on to attempt online absolution, claiming he went back to grab firearms and stayed in the area for three hours.
The actions of Meyer during battle in Kunar Province, Afghanistan speaks for itself; they clearly contradict Bilzerian’s statement regarding Meyer’s logic. Here is a portion of his Medal of Honor citation:
“Moving into the village, the patrol was ambushed by more than 50 enemy fighters firing rocket propelled grenades, mortars, and machine guns from houses and fortified positions on the slopes above. Hearing over the radio that four U.S. team members were cut off, Corporal Meyer seized the initiative. With a fellow Marine driving, Corporal Meyer took the exposed gunner’s position in a gun-truck as they drove down the steeply terraced terrain in a daring attempt to disrupt the enemy attack and locate the trapped U.S. team. Disregarding intense enemy fire now concentrated on their lone vehicle, Corporal Meyer killed a number of enemy fighters with the mounted machine guns and his rifle, some at near point blank range, as he and his driver made three solo trips into the ambush area. During the first two trips, he and his driver evacuated two dozen Afghan soldiers, many of whom were wounded. When one machine gun became inoperable, he directed a return to the rally point to switch to another gun-truck for a third trip into the ambush area where his accurate fire directly supported the remaining U.S. personnel and Afghan soldiers fighting their way out of the ambush. Despite a shrapnel wound to his arm, Corporal Meyer made two more trips into the ambush area in a third gun-truck accompanied by four other Afghan vehicles to recover more wounded Afghan soldiers and search for the missing U.S. team members. Still under heavy enemy fire, he dismounted the vehicle on the fifth trip and moved on foot to locate and recover the bodies of his team members. Meyer’s daring initiative and bold fighting spirit throughout the 6-hour battle significantly disrupted the enemy’s attack and inspired the members of the combined force to fight on.”
Bilzerian entered the Navy SEAL training program in 2000 but failed to graduate despite several attempts. He was reportedly dropped from the program for a “safety violation on the shooting range.”
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All rights reserved. The content of this webpage may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written consent of Bright Mountain Media, Inc. which may be contacted at info@brightmountainmedia.com, ticker BMTM.June 1, 2016
Our sympathies have not been enough. Our prayers have not been enough. And what our governments have done to help has not been enough.
In an attempt to jolt the world into action, a humanitarian group and various media sources have shared a tragic photograph of another child forever lost in their family’s attempt to seek a better life. This infant, not yet identified, was one of an estimated 1,000 plus people drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean just last week. These are just from the boats authorities and humanitarian groups were aware of. It is likely no one really knows how many people have paid the ultimate price trying to reach Europe during what many have labelled the Refugee Crisis. This most recent spike in deaths, along with the heartbreaking image of the young migrant, will surely generate another response from the global community. Perhaps it will look similar to what we saw after the photograph of Alan Kurdi went viral. But will it be enough to radically change how we respond to migrants in crisis?
Even after the general public were faced with the haunting images of Kurdi washed up on the shores of Europe, and spoke out in solidarity with the plight of Syrian refugees in particular, very little was done by our governments to address the situation. Canadian and European officials seem to want us to believe that they are doing everything possible within their means. However, when one considers the amount of refugees being hosted by Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon, it becomes impossible to believe that the extremely affluent, 28 member state European Union has genuinely been overwhelmed by the relatively small number who have reached their borders so far. This influx of migrants is only a crisis because of how the most wealthy nations have responded to it. Nations seem willing to spend untold fortunes on fortifying border crossings and waging war, yet claim they do not have the resources necessary to resettle even a modest amount of refugees. We can not accept this narrative any longer.
Canada has done no better. The new government’s celebrated increase in refugee quotas still does not reflect our country’s capacity for immigration and humanitarian aid, or the population’s willingness to open their doors. Just look how communities across Canada responded to those feeling the fires in Alberta. There is no reason to believe that same level of compassion would not be extended to those fleeing other desperate situations. A May 2016 Amnesty International survey seemed to confirm this hospitable attitude, with 80% of respondents expressing very positive attitudes towards resettling refugees. Yet the Liberal government still refuses to do any more, citing a lack of resources. This is unacceptable. We need to do our part as a prosperous nation. We need to open our doors to migrants in crisis - now!
Our dedication to human rights should never be based on a cost benefit analysis, especially one that consistently frames immigrants as a drain on the economy. This is especially troubling because it ignores the proven contributions immigrants have made to Canadian society and beyond. Even without acknowledging the positive potential each refugee holds, Canada, along with the EU members states, have legal obligations to accept those seeking asylum under the UN 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. More importantly, we have a moral obligation not to ignore such obvious cries for help and to assist our fellow global citizens however possible.
Wanting to secure the most basic human rights for our own families has to be one of the most natural instincts we have. This is what pushes parents to spend all their savings to put their children in leaky boats headed into the unknown. Coming from a life of privilege here in Canada, it is impossible for me to imagine the conditions which cause so many to risk not only the dangerous Mediterranean crossing to which the world has repeatedly bared witness to, but the extensive land crossings that face migrants on both ends of their journeys. These are long, perilous journeys to which no one would subject themselves if there were better options available. Whether they are fleeing war, poverty, oppression or environmental disaster, our response to their situation should be the same, compassion and generosity.
Of course there is immense value in understanding why people flee their homes, their countries and even their continent; however, knowing that humanity has always experienced large scale migration, and anticipating that we will likely see more of it, it seems prudent to establish more compassionate global and national policies to better handle these situations. The restrictive immigration policies of the worlds’ more affluent nations in large part force people to rely on human smugglers and to take more remote, dangerous routes. The appalling conditions of migrant detention centres and the painstakingly slow process of refugee resettlement also work to deter people from following legal immigration avenues. In this era of globalization, where endless resources go into the free movement of capital, information and natural resources, it is time we embraced the equally unrestricted movement of human beings. We all possess equal human value, and our nationalities should not determine whether we experience peace and security. The arbitrary borders that the world’s elite created (somewhat recently in our history) have worked to our collective detriment in so many ways, this most current loss of life is just the most recent example. If we fail to act as a global community - these latest deaths will have been in vain, and they will not be the last.
As individuals, and as a country, we need to start reimagining how we see our borders and those trying to cross them. Only when we embrace our global citizenship and start to view all migrants as potential neighbours will we be in a position to realize a world without borders, and thus, a world without refugees.
By: Jessa McLeanVancouver has seen a steady decline in the percentage of residents who own cars at a time when the cost to operate vehicles in the city has risen and the number of parking stalls has shrunk.
Insurance Corp. of British Columbia (ICBC) data provided to Business in Vancouver showed that 270,000 passenger vehicles were registered in the city of Vancouver at the start of 2016. That’s 3.8 per cent more than at the start of 2012, but Vancouver’s population during that same period rose 5.2 per cent to 666,996, according to BC Stats.
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These statistics jibe with a trend that the City of Vancouver has identified in its annual surveys of 2,500 Vancouverites conducted by CH2M and Mustel Group. In 2015, the city’s survey showed that, for the first time, 50 per cent of the trips that Vancouverites made were by foot, bus or bicycle. That is up from 47 per cent of trips using those modes in 2013.
Simon Fraser University city program acting director Andy Yan is eager to see the results of the 2016 census, which asked about transportation modes. He expects that data to be released in November and be more reliable than the city’s survey, given the census’ large sample size.
Still, Yan said he believes that car use in Vancouver is on the decline and that recent rapid-transit expansions, such as the Evergreen Line to Coquitlam, will encourage even more people to get out of their cars.
“The City of Vancouver does extraordinarily well in encouraging people to use other means of transportation than the car to go to work,” Yan said.
“When you get further out into the region, the percentages of people using modes of transportation other than the car are a lot less.”
The rising cost of operating a passenger vehicle has played a role in deterring Vancouverites from making those trips, Yan said.
ICBC projects that insurance premium hikes will be an average 4.9 per cent in 2017.
Gas prices have recently rebounded to around $1.35 per litre, but that’s still lower than all-time-high gas prices above $1.50 per litre in 2014.
Parking costs, however, have been on the rise. The city has introduced parking meters in more areas of the city while simultaneously removing parking spaces to make way for the Mobi by Shaw Go bike-share program. A new fee-calculation mechanism, whereby different parking spots will have varying hourly rates depending on demand, is to be rolled out in the first quarter of 2017.
The average price hike for a parking spot is yet to be determined but a 2016 staff report to city council noted that parking revenue to the city would rise in 2017 from the anticipated $55.1 million in 2016.
“Even if there are fewer on-street parking spaces [for privately owned vehicles], the number of car-share vehicles has doubled in the last couple years,” said Dale Bracewell, the city’s manager of transportation planning. That innovation may increase car use even as car ownership declines.
Bracewell pointed to the city’s annual surveys and said that 26 per cent of adult Vancouverites had subscriptions to car-share programs in 2015. That is up from 20 per cent in 2014 and 13% in the 2013 survey.•
gkorstrom@biv.com
@GlenKorstrom
For business news go to biv.comJoe Hockey gets job as ambassador to US, admits staying in parliament would have been about payback
Updated
Dumped treasurer Joe Hockey will become Australia's ambassador to the United States in the new year, and has conceded staying in parliament would have been about "getting even" with those who engineered his downfall.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has confirmed the widely anticipated news that the former treasurer will take over the Washington post from Kim Beazley in January.
Mr Hockey, 50, announced his retirement from politics after being ditched as treasurer by Mr Turnbull in September.
In a rare post-politics interview, Mr Hockey conceded that if he had stayed in parliament he would have been seeking retribution for his ousting.
The interview, filmed in the back of a Sydney coffee shop, was conducted with Australian businessman Mark Bouris for his online television show.
"The politics, at the end of the day, beat me," Mr Hockey said.
"If I was going to stay it'd have to be, it'd be overwhelmingly about getting even with people that brought me down.
"I love my country and my family more than I hate my enemies."
Mr Hockey said he wanted to look forward rather than "reflecting too much on what happened" and still wanted to contribute to the nation.
This morning Mr Turnbull heaped praised on Mr Hockey and outlined his credentials for the role.
"Joe is a great Australian, he is one of the most engaging, persuasive people I've known in public life," Mr Turnbull said.
"He's held very high office, he's got great contacts in the United States, he's a passionate patriot but [has] a good understanding of how Washington works already."
But the Federal Opposition has raised doubts about the ongoing working relationship between the pair, and the potential for diplomatic ramifications.
"Clearly, Malcolm Turnbull only a few weeks ago tore down Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey," Labor frontbencher Brendan O'Connor told Sky this morning.
"I'm concerned that the relationship is still a reasonable one, because if it's not, we're going to have some problems in our relationship with our biggest allies."
When Mr Turnbull launched his successful challenge for the prime ministership in September he told reporters, "the Government is not successful in providing the economic leadership that we need".
At the time Mr Hockey responded by defending the Government's economic record and railed against detractors, saying "the disloyalty of some has been outrageous".
Topics: hockey-joe, government-and-politics, federal-government, world-politics, united-states
First postedThe police murder in St. Louis and the militarization of American society
13 August 2014
Yet another unarmed young man has been shot to death, execution style, by police on the streets of an American city. In response to demonstrations of popular outrage, riot police have attacked protests with tear gas and rubber bullets and arrested scores of people. A pregnant woman says she was thrown on the ground, maced and held at gunpoint.
The victim this time is 18-year-old Michael Brown, riddled Saturday with a dozen bullets from the gun of a cop in the St. Louis, Missouri suburb of Ferguson.
The anger that has engulfed metropolitan St. Louis is entirely justified. The police put out brazen lies, the standard fare in the string of incidents of homicidal violence against working people and youth. The Ferguson police have chosen to go with the claim, used so often in past killings by police, that Brown “reached for the gun” of the killer cop.
But numerous eyewitnesses describe a wanton and brutal murder. As Brown and a friend walked down the street, they were ordered by a still unnamed police officer to get on the sidewalk.
When the youth failed to respond quickly enough, the cop backed his vehicle into them, grabbed Brown by the neck and shot him. His friend told the media the cop shot again, hitting Brown in the back as he fled for his life. He then shot the youth several times in the head and chest as he raised his hands and attempted to kneel to the ground.
The scene of Brown’s lifeless body, left lying in a pool of blood for hours, provoked an outpouring of outraged protest by family members and neighbors. Protests have continued in the face of police repression, reflecting the deep social anger that exists in every American city over police violence, unemployment, poverty and inequality.
Both the killing of Brown and the police response to the ensuing protests shed light on the militarization of American society. The police, armed with the most advanced weaponry, act as a law unto themselves, assuming the power of judge, jury and executioner.
Ferguson has been turned into what one police officer and several media commentators have referred to as a “war zone.” Hundreds of riot police from surrounding cities have laid siege to the neighborhood with armored vehicles, attack dogs, paramilitary weapons and helicopters. At the request of St. Louis County police, the Federal Aviation Administration has imposed airspace restrictions over the town, banning aerial media coverage and limiting the skies to police operations.
The scenes of SWAT teams clad in military fatigues, armed with automatic rifles and tear gas masks, accosting and arresting unarmed residents resembles nothing so much as the lockdown of Boston, Massachusetts following the Boston Marathon bombings last year.
Describing the crackdown Tuesday, “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams said it looked like a “police state,” adding that SWAT teams were using the “same tactical get up and same tactical weaponry we’ve come to expect in urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Under the direction of the Obama administration, local police forces have been equipped with billions of dollars in equipment transferred from the Defense Department, all but obliterating the line between local police and the military (see: America’s paramilitary police).
The murder of Michael Brown is the latest in a series of unprovoked police killings, including that of Eric Garner, who was choked to death by police in New York City on July 17. With at least 130 people killed by police in the United States since the start of 2014, hardly a week goes by without a video coming to light of some outrage by the police.
In the absence of any policies to address the worsening social crisis in the United States, police repression has become the de facto “urban policy” of both parties.
Austerity measures implemented by the Obama administration and the Democrats and Republicans at every level of government—from the slashing of food stamps and long-term unemployment benefits, to the attacks on health care, public education and retiree benefits—have only exacerbated the social crisis. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve floods the financial markets with unlimited and virtually free money, and corporate profits, buoyed by the lowering of wages and ever-greater exploitation of the working class, set new records.
The instinctive response of the ruling class is to treat working class neighborhoods all across the country as war zones, inhabited by a hostile population that must be suppressed. Democratic rights, including safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures and restrictions on domestic military deployments, have been effectively abolished.
The militarization of the police in America is the flip side of the violent foreign policy of the United States. Both processes stem from the economic decay of American capitalism and the recklessness of a ruling class that hopes to resolve its crisis through violence and plunder.
The war that is being waged is a class war. In this war, the working class as a whole is pitted against the financial aristocracy, the two big business parties, and the institutions of the state that function, with increasing openness and brutality, as guardians of private wealth and the capitalist profit system.
The response to the killing of Brown by local Democrats, the NAACP and the inevitable Al Sharpton should be treated with the contempt it deserves. The calls for federal investigations, appeals to the FBI, the Justice Department and the Obama administration, the attempt to focus anger entirely along racial lines—all of this is aimed at obscuring the basic class issues and channeling social anger back behind the very forces responsible for the social crisis engulfing America.
As for Obama himself, the president broke days of silence on the murder of Brown by taking a momentary break from his vacation at the wealthy retreat of Martha’s Vineyard to issue a perfunctory statement bemoaning the “strong passions” created by the shooting and urging everyone in Ferguson, Missouri and across the country to “remember this young man through reflection and understanding.”
So states the man presiding over the militarization of the police, massive and illegal surveillance of the entire population, torture and war crimes abroad and a class war program of austerity at home.
If these tendencies are to be successfully resisted, the opposition of workers and youth must find a conscious political expression. The fight against police brutality and all attacks on democratic rights depends on the independent political mobilization of the entire working class based on a socialist program to put an end to the economic and political dictatorship of the corporate and financial elite.
Jerry White
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Following a fourth-place finish at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in the NASCAR XFINITY Series on Aug. 12, James Davison is expected to be among the top contenders for the series’ Johnsonville 180 at Road America this Sunday, Aug. 27.
One question arises from the sport of NASCAR for the driver, who will race the No. 20 Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing for a second and final scheduled time this weekend: does James Davison want to do this more often?
Despite having just two starts the second division of NASCAR, the answer is a confident “yes,” as the Australian is open to becoming a full-time driver — for teams big or small — if opportunities present themselves.
“I’ll be open to anything,” Davison told Frontstretch. “Anything that would gain me experience. One thing I’ve learned to do… you’re best to swallow your pride when you know you’re not going to be in a winning situation, but it will help you get established. It will help when you get your big break.”
Perhaps a win on Sunday could springboard the 30-year-old to that full-time deal. However, it wouldn’t be the first time performance opened doors for Davison, who impressed Steve de Souza, evp of XFINITY and development at JGR, after his run in the 101st Indianapolis 500 earlier this year.
Filling in for an injured Sebastien Bourdais in the 500-miler, Davison started last and raced up into the lead in the late stages before a late wreck relegated him to a non-finish.
Still, the run was noticed by de Souza, who, prior to Indy, had spoken with Davison about a future partnership.
“I’ve been chatting with Steve since Homestead last year since I live in Miami,” Davison said. “We had mutual intentions of trying to put something together, and after I did the Indy 500 and had a good run, that helped motivate all parties to get the deal done.
“[Indy] was a good portion of the reason why I got the call. I had proven I could handle jumping in at the last minute, no practice, starting last and moving through the field. It was a fantastic experience, and it did my profile the world of good. I’ve become aware that the Indy 500 is very much followed and respected by the NASCAR fraternity. Steve was very complimentary of that, quite motivated to get me on board afterwards. It was the right breaks at the right time.”
Indeed, timing had a part in Davison’s opportunity with JGR in 2017. However, timing — and experience — is also where Davison lacks, as oval racing dominates the NASCAR calendars and is often piggybacked with years of ladder series warm-ups for young drivers. Combine experience with the importance of funding, and this NASCAR thing becomes complicated for any hopeful rookie.
“Obviously, it’s no different than any series, but especially in oval racing… you have to be in the right equipment,” he said. “I feel if I was able to get the opportunity to do an oval with JGR, it would prepare me well for a rookie going in with no experience. “I know how tough it is to be competitive on an oval in NASCAR, how specific the skill set is. How all these young drivers who grew up on dirt tracks, racing late models, ARCA, Trucks, how well prepared they are. They’re essentially like lab rats, NASCAR lab rats, specifically groomed to be in NASCAR.
“But they’re not groomed to be road course drivers, which is where this opportunity presents itself to me to run competitively in the No. 20 car. At this stage, I am best to focus on where I can put my experience to best use, which is road course. Try to at least become a road course ringer and build it from there.”
Road course racing, particularly in the XFINITY ranks, is where chaos meets close racing, dirt, sand and maniacal restarts. Though Davison is approaching only start three, he feels NASCAR is a perfect place to release his aggressive racing nature with loud cars and go-for-broke competition.
“Driving the car is a big balancing act,” he said. “They’re very heavy, have a ton of horsepower, high center of gravity. Driving the car consistently over a stint is quite tricky. That was a bit of an eye-opener.
“The racing, it’s quite a free-for-all and every man for themselves. I’m an aggressive racer; I certainly like NASCAR’s regulations where the driver sorts it out. The downside is when you deserve an X-place finish and you get knocked off the track on the last lap. But it absolutely suites my aggressive nature and style of racing.”
It’s never too late to learn something new. Following five starts in the Verizon IndyCar Series, including three of the last four Indy 500s, Davison is enjoying the factors that make NASCAR unique. Of course, Davison is inherently unique himself, driving in an American-dominated starting field. With these overseas roots, Davison hopes to do his country proud in competitive NASCAR equipment.
“I’m aware that NASCAR racing is all-American, centered around grassroots short track drivers,” he said. “I’m not going to be the kind of guy who pulls the Australian flag out and waves it in front of the fans. But I’m certainly proud to be Australian. Marcos Ambrose did a very good job of coming off as a nice guy. I’m taking that responsibility among the first Aussie to run competitively in NASCAR. There is an important responsibility there.”
With a growing experience level, appreciation for a top ride and a commitment to a long-term NASCAR career, the stage is set for James Davison Sunday at Road America.
“I’m expected to fight up there in the top three for sure,” he said. “I have experience, this team has a very good track record. Our plan is to combine them together and try and win.”By David Goodman
In two landmark decisions – Citizens United vs. FEC in 2010 and McCutcheon vs. FEC in 2014 – the Supreme Court changed the political landscape of the U.S. and, in the eyes of many, threatened our representative democracy. By narrow 5-4 majorities in both cases, the Court gutted the regulation of campaign spending limits.
Both decisions equated political money with free speech. The core of the Citizens United decision rested on removing spending limits from corporations and labor unions, now ruled as expressions of free speech, to influence political campaigns. In the wake of this decision, there was a virtual explosion of cash-rich special-interest groups, especially new Super PACs and 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations.
So-called “issue ads” became favorite tools of these unregulated groups that flooded elections, especially nominating primaries, with huge amounts of cash, often deciding who gets elected. Super PACs, such as Americans for Prosperity, have spent lavishly and run campaigns of distrust and disinformation and innuendo-based issue ads on TV and radio. The sole proviso is that none of the funds spent by the PACs can go directly to candidates or parties.
It didn’t stop there. Increasingly, donors of political money chose to avoid the spotlight of Super PACs for the cover and anonymity of the 501(c)(4) social welfare groups. They could spend bottomless amounts of “dark” money to buy political influence — all in secret!
Since 2010, spending by these tax-exempt organizations on political TV ads has exceeded spending by Super PACs. Both liberal and conservative groups funneled huge amounts of cash into issue ads and other campaigns, with the dubious claim of being unconnected to the candidates they favor; without disclosing the names of their donors, and under the umbrella of tax exemption. Under current IRS rules, they can get away with it.
Then came the McCutcheon decision. Undeterred by these distortions to campaign financing resulting from Citizens United, the Supreme Court again changed the rules. This time, the justices removed most of the limitations on individual contributions. The same 5-4 majority decided that aggregate limits to federal campaigns by individuals are unconstitutional. The prior “aggregate contribution limit” was $123,200 over a two-year election cycle – more than twice the average income for an American household. Donors like Shaun McCutcheon, exercising their claim of First Amendment rights, have been unleashed. Under the new rules, the wealthy can contribute more than $3.6 million to party candidates and party committees, as well as virtually unlimited amounts to supportive PACs.
Politics and money always have been cozy together, but in this new unregulated era, the politics of money may well reign over the politics of the many. We face the prospect of government becoming a vehicle of the wealthy donor class. The inequalities of our economy, which we accept as necessary for capitalism, could become the standard of our democracy. Rather than “one person, one vote,” has our democracy become “how many votes can Big Money buy”?
There are two ways to fight this corruption – one through legislation, another through direct citizen contributions.
One courageous congressman, Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), chose to embrace this fight by introducing the Government By the People Act of 2014 (HR 20).
The direct contribution approach is known as a “MayDay” PAC. Larry Lessig, a leading reform advocate, calls it the citizen “Super PAC to end all Super PACs.” Both HR 20 and the “MayDay” PAC emphasize small donors, but when multiplied by our numbers (the so-called 99 percent), our funds could rival the amounts spent by big donors (less than 1 percent) to purchase the government they want.
The Government By the People Act focuses on multiplying the power of small donations. Registered voters would qualify for “My Voice Vouchers” worth $50 in each federal election cycle as a tax credit. Everyday Americans would have their small-dollar contributions matched, 6 to 1, from public funds, if they give to a congressional candidate who foregoes outside Big Money and focuses on earning broad-based support from small-dollar donors. That could turn a $50 contribution into a $350 contribution.
The MayDay PAC (mayone.us) is a bold new experiment. Launched May 1, the first-round goal was to raise $1 million from ordinary Americans in one month. Nearly 13,000 individuals contributed more than $1 million in 13 days. That was matched, dollar-for-dollar, by a small group of millionaires — Democrat, Republican and Libertarian. Now, the goal is to raise $5 million by July 4. The PAC seeks to influence five congressional races in 2014 as a test. The bar will again be raised with bigger goals aimed at fundamental campaign reform in 2016. MayDay, a volunteer effort without lobbyists or consultants, seeks to make “government by the people” a national reality.
Let’s shine a light on dark money that corrupts our government and enable ordinary Americans to reclaim our democracy.
David Goodman, Ph.D., is a team leader for the New Jersey Congressional District 12 Committee of Represent.Us and a member of the Restore Democracy Work Group of the North Jersey Public Policy Network.
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Ordering Apple to access data against its will would be akin to making a reluctant drug company carry out a lethal injection, a US judge has said.
Judge James Orenstein was hearing a US government request to make it retrieve information from a locked iPhone seized by law enforcement officers.
On Monday, the judge expressed doubt that he had the authority to do so.
Apple has agreed to similar requests previously but is now refusing, saying it would erode customers' trust.
'Inflammatory'
Referring to the US Department of Justice's request for him to order Apple to help it unlock the phone, the judge said: "What you're asking [Apple] to do is do work for you."
And he compared the request to a hypothetical one in which the government was asking him to order a drug company to take part in an execution against its conscientious objection.
He asked the department's lawyer, Saritha Komatireddy, whether or not he would have the legal authority to do so.
Ms Komatireddy asked to respond in writing, adding that the hypothetical was "somewhat inflammatory".
"Purposefully so," the judge responded.
'Burdensome'
Apple has argued that the order the government is seeking would be burdensome, in part because of the erosion of its customers' trust.
The company also said it lacked the technical ability to unlock phones running its newer operating systems, iOS8 and iOS9, though the phone at issue in the case runs an older system.
Ms Komatireddy questioned whether unlocking the phone would really be a burden for Apple, noting the company "has been doing this for years without any objection".
The judge pressed Apple's lawyer, Marc Zwillinger, to explain the company's change of heart.
Mr Zwillinger said the company had become more concerned about customer data in light of recent high-profile data breaches.
"Right now, Apple is aware that customer data is under siege from a variety of different directions," he said.
The judge asked both sides to submit additional letters addressing his questions to the court by Wednesday and said he would rule as soon as he could.
Ms Komatireddy said at the hearing that the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI were taking part in the underlying investigation, which is not public.He must teach Pee.E! Four female kindergarten teachers discover colleague has been urinating in their thermos flasks when they set up hidden camera to find out why their tea smelt strange
Four colleagues set up hidden camera to catch teacher in Lianyungang city
It showed him undoing his flies and urinating into a pink thermos flask
Police arrested Gao Chao, 54, and tested him for diseases at hospital
But they cannot charge him with a crime because he caused no real harm
Urine the clear: Despite being filmed urinating into his colleagues' kettle, police say Gao committed no crime as he is free of disease
|
, Captain Osbon was late arriving for the flight and missed the routine crew briefing. The flight departed half an hour late. However, there is no evidence that he was agitated or acting bizarrely at that point.
At 07:28 EST, JetBlue Flight 191 departed New York for its 06:55 scheduled flight to Las Vegas. There were 135 passengers on board, many of whom were attending a security convention in Las Vegas. As a result, there was a large number of police officers and prison guards on the flight.
As they were climbing out of JFK, the captain referred to being evaluated by someone. First Officer Dowd did not know what that meant. Captain Osbon spoke about religion and the FO stated that his statements were not coherent. He became concerned when the the captain stated that “things just don’t matter.”
Osbon apparently spoke on the radio, telling the air traffic controllers to be quiet. He then turned off the radios and admonished his First Officer for trying to use the radio. I’ve not been able to obtain the ATC recordings of this interaction.
Osbon continued to speak whilst dimming all the instruments and made a number of comments which concerned his first officer, including “we need to take a leap of faith” and “We’re not going to Vegas.”
First Officer Dowd said that Osbon tried to “correlate completely unrelated numbers like different radio frequencies” and then began a type of sermon.
An off-duty JetBlue captain was a passenger on the flight and at about 3½ hours into the flight, the FO suggested that they invite him to the cockpit.
Captain Osbon ignored the suggestion and left the cockpit, breaking JetBlue procedure, to use the toilet at the front of the plane. He found it was occupied and banged on the door, shouting that he needed to go.
First Officer Dowd alerted the flight attendants to the situation and asked them to bring the off-duty captain to the cockpit. The First Officer then locked the cockpit door and changed the security code.
Osbon paced the length of the plane, speaking about 150 souls on board, religion, September 11 and terrorists. He appears to have walked to the back of the plane and then shouted “guys, push it to full throttle” while sprinting back to the front of the plane with the flight attendants giving chase. The Flight Officer announced over the PA system that Osbon should be restrained.
Osbon then tried to re-enter the cockpit and realised he was locked out. That’s apparently when he began to scream that the plane was going down. You can the captain at the beginning of this passenger video:
Flight attendants and several passengers pulled him away from the cockpit door and held him down in the forward galley.
The passengers were justifiably confused.
U.S. charges screaming, incoherent JetBlue pilot – Yahoo! News Canada
Passengers who were on the plane described a chaotic mid-flight scene in which a man in a JetBlue uniform, apparently locked out of the cockpit, began banging on the door and demanding to be let inside. Passengers subdued him. “People behind me, a bunch of big guys, started going up there and trying to help, and we found out that the guy banging was actually the pilot, and he was trying to get into the cockpit because the other co-pilot had locked him out,” passenger Grant Heppes told Reuters. “Everybody seemed pretty nervous,” he said. “Nobody was sure that was going on.”
Several male passengers were able to subdue him in the forward galley and restrained him using seat belt extensions and zip-tie handcuffs. A passenger said that in the end there were six men holding him down, with more congregating in the aisle ready to jump on the pilot if he broke free.
Affidavit depicts drama on Flight 191 | Amarillo Globe-News
Passengers described Osbon as a large man, standing more than 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighing roughly 250 pounds. They said that when they tried to apply zip-ties to his wrists, he snapped the restraints, forcing passengers to take off their belts to bind his arms. A passenger said they held Osbon for roughly 30 minutes as the plane diverted to Amarillo.
The ATC recording of the flight coming into Amarillo, Texas has been posted on YouTube. It is interesting in that it is unremarkable. The First Officer is calm and matter-of-fact as he diverts the plane and declares an emergency.
Flight 191 landed in Amarillo at 16:13 local time on Tuesday in Amarillo.
From the affidavit
The flight attendants elected to have the aircraft land without having the assisting passengers return to their seats, because the flight attendants felt they could not risk letting Osbon get up off the floor. The aircraft landed with passengers still restraining Osbon in the galley.
JetBlue stated that they are sorry that the passengers were put into the situation but are very thankful for their efforts. “What the customers did to help our inflight crew was amazing and we really appreciate their efforts, and also the cooperation of everyone on board – it contributed to the safe landing.”
Clayton Osbon has been charged with interfering with the duties of the flight crew which can bring a sentence of up to twenty years in prison. He is currently in a guarded facility at a hospital in Amarillo.
The NTSB have the cockpit recordings and are investigating.
BlueTales » JetBlue » Update on Flight 191
On behalf of the Crew of Flight 191, we would like to express our appreciation for the public’s kind words and well wishes for the crew. We understand and appreciate everyone’s desire to hear directly from the crew regarding their experience, but they have decided to decline all media opportunities at this time in order to spend time with their families.
I’m just glad that the airline isn’t arming their captains in case of emergency: now that could have been a real threat.
A round of applause for the passengers who helped to resolve the situation. Another reminder that it is everyday people — not technology, not air marshals, not airside security — that were able to respond. We can’t predict every situation but we can rely on people to do their best to resolve problems as they encounter them.Gran Turismo Sport Getting Limited Time Demo Next Week
Giuseppe Nelva October 3, 2017 10:39:28 AM EST
Sony just announced a limited time demo that will allow PS4 players to try out Gran Turismo Sport starting on October 9th.
Today Sony Interactive Entertainment announced that a demo of Gran Turismo Sport will be released next week.
The demo will be available fro a limited time only from October 9th to October 12th.
PlayStation Plus members will get a head start with the ability to pre-download the demo on October 7th at 8:00 AM Pacific time. They will be able to start playing on October 9th at 12:00 AM PT.
Those who don’t have a PlayStation Plus Subscription won’t be able to pre-download the demo, and will get to play at 6:00 PM Pacific time.
The demo won’t be accessible after October 12th at 8:00 AM Pacific time.
As a proverbial cherry on the cake, all the in-game currency (up to one million) you earn in the demo, and all the cars you grab will be transferable to the final game.
The demo will grant players access to Sport Mode, Campaign, Arcade Mode, Scapes and the custom livery editor.
Gran Turismo Sport releases on October 17th in North America, and on October 18th in Europe. If you of the Nürburgring 24 hour circuit on PlayStation VR.During the opening keynote at the Google I/O developer conference this morning, Google founder Sergey Brin bounded onto the stage for a surprise demo of the company’s experimental Google Glass project. To the delight of the crowd, a group of skydivers equipped with Google Glass headsets jumped out of a blimp and landed on the roof of the conference venue.
After that stunning introduction and an impressive demo, Brin announced that conference attendees would have the unique opportunity to preorder a special Google Glass "Explorer Edition" test unit. The Explorer Edition costs $1500 and is expected to ship next year. After a brief wait in line this afternoon, I was able to register a preorder.
Google Glass is an experiment in the field of wearable computing. The device consists of a heads-up display and camera embedded in the frame of a pair of glasses. It is designed to be worn on the head, allowing the user to take pictures and look up information. The concept was unveiled earlier this year and is still experimental.
It’s important to note that the Explorer Edition (which hasn’t received FCC certification) is not intended for regular consumers. It is a preproduction model that Google is making available to a limited audience of partners and third-party developers.
After I completed my registration, I received a commemorative glass block engraved with the number of the Google Glass unit that I will receive. According to a Google representative, the corresponding number will also be printed on the unit itself. My block, as you can see in the picture above, is engraved with the number 673.
Because the Google Glass Explorer Edition is not an end-user product, we will not be reviewing it as such. I’ll be writing about it from the perspective of a third-party developer, sharing my impressions as I test the unit. Assuming that an SDK is made available, I’m looking forward to shedding some light on what it is like to build applications for Google’s wearable computer.
Google Glass is an ambitious concept that promises to change the way that people communicate and access information. We are eager to see what kind of opportunities such a platform can open up for application developers.By Tim Baffoe–
(CBS) Growing up as the oldest of three boys, I had a lot of experience with my younger brothers trying to establish some sort of territoriality amid my alpha dog rule of our household. One brother might write scribble his name on every single one of his toys. The other would perhaps race to the kitchen to beat me to my favorite drumsticks on BBQ chicken night.
It was eye-rolling then to the savvy veteran that I was, laughably cute when I look back on it today. Oldest siblings can attest when I smile and sigh, “Oh, those young ones,” right?
In retrospect, I should have crushed them both when I had the chance. The Chicago Blackhawks need not make the same mistake I did.
Sighs and smiles were had a while back when the Nashville Predators first tried their cute little attempt at being respected by being anything but respectable. Remember in 2013 when they were so bothered by Blackhawks fans traveling to their city and arena and — gasp! — spending money? Money that the Predators were otherwise not making when the Blackhawks were not in town? The Predators disallowed anyone from buying single-game tickets when Chicago was the visiting team. Aww, those scamps and their dumb business acumen.
Then the Predators were surprised when the big brother Blackhawks took the bigger piece of chicken over their measly drumsticks and still showed up, so the colicky Predators hit Chicagoans where it really hurt: no more “Star Spangled Banner” for those alphas to cheer during. That would show them, while also making the rest of the league respect a paranoid professional hockey team in Tennessee.
Or not.
It isn’t cute any more, though. Actually, the Predators have jumped passed mildly annoying and are in full-blown psycho-spoiled-baby-brat mode. Which is why beyond any normal rooting interest for Chicagoans, the Blackhawks need to destroy them. Not just a series win, but an embarrassing sweep into college football spring practice season.
The paranoia has become so sad that the pretentious Predators started planning back in December what would become the following practices, per The Tennessean:
— The team allowed season ticket-holders to buy extra playoff tickets before they went on sale to the general public.
— Playoff tickets to the general public at first went on sale only at local Kroger stores and at Bridgestone, meaning buyers had to purchase them in person.
— When the Predators eventually put playoff tickets online, they were available only to purchasers within the team’s television viewing area.
That’s some lame “I’m gonna hide my candy where you’ll never find it” garbage that deserves various kidney shots and pink-bellies, but then these whiny pests took it beyond levels of decency. If fans bought tickets on StubHub, the pernicious Predators are trying to scare them away by saying those tickets will be no good and that you need to have a credit card scanned for entry. StubHub has assured fans that the team is lying.
Hopefully after every Chicago goal scored, a Blackhawks player does some sort of celebration involving a faux credit card swipe. Destroy these turds.
Oh, and there will be no more “God Bless America” sung in lieu of the national anthem because the pukey Predators realized that everyone was laughing at them. To drown out that laughter — and cheering Hawks fans — Nashvillbillies in attendance are being encourage to sing the anthem.
“It would almost be against God, country and apple pie to shout and cheer through the person next to you singing the anthem of the United States of America, wouldn’t it?” team president Sean Henry told The Tennessean.
What would it be if you abandon the song altogether in previous games because of hurt pride, though? Nevermind.
Heaven forbid actual hockey fans were present and loud during a Stanley Cup Playoff game. Yes, actual people with even a tangential knowledge of hockey. Because, see, those hardly exist in Tennessee. That’s not a stereotype by me— that’s an actual column in The Tennessean.
Or as the author calls it, “a primer.” In other words: “We have a playoff hockey team in our geographic area, so here’s how best to pretend you care until they lose.”
It contains plenty of helpful pointers, like how there’s no halftime, the name of one of the team’s best players, how there’s also Carrie Underwood’s husband and subliminal tributes to the Confederacy. (I’m assuming the last part because I stopped reading after my brain was overcome by the horn on the General Lee.)
The Blackhawks desperately need to put this petulant little brother in its place, lest it be allowed to grow into the scourge my siblings who don’t read my columns and make fun of me at family gatherings are today.
Kill with extreme prejudice, and then move the Predators’ corpse of an ego to Las Vegas where other Napoleonic failure siblings go.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.A convicted killer who twice escaped from his death row cell fought with guards to the end on Tuesday and stunned the authorities during his execution by spitting out a small handcuff key.
The inmate, Ponchai Wilkerson, mumbled, ''The secret, as of Wilkerson,'' as he spit out the key while lethal chemicals flowed into his body, said James Brazzil, a chaplain who was in the death chamber.
Seven minutes later, Mr. Wilkerson was pronounced dead. The authorities said they did not how he got the key.
Mr. Wilkerson, 28, had struggled with prison guards all day. Hours before the execution, guards had to use a Mace-like spray on him when he refused to leave his cell at a prison near Livingston for the 40-mile trip to Huntsville.
Then, he refused to leave his holding cell near the death chamber, and guards had to use additional restraints to bind him to the gurney for his execution.
Mr. Wilkerson was executed for the murder in 1990 of Chung Myong Yi, 43, in a Houston jewelry store where she worked.The Adelaide Football Club has signed more than 70,000 members for the first time in its 27-year history.
The Club’s current total of 72,930 members, achieved 12 rounds into the 2017 season, caps off three successive years of strong membership growth and surpasses the 2016 record of 67,874.
Importantly, the number of 11-game members who have access to every Crows home game at Adelaide Oval is once again among the industry’s best and the Club’s membership renewal rates are also market leading.
The figure is expected to continue to grow, with the Club hosting a further five matches at Adelaide Oval as well as travelling to Melbourne three times before the end of the season.
The Club still has 3-game Bronze membership packages available as well as Victorian General Admission memberships. For more information visit 19thman.com.au.
Attendances for Crows matches have also been among the strongest in the league this season, with the Club attracting an average crowd of 46,489 for the first six home games of 2017.
The Crows’ remaining home games include blockbuster clashes with Hawthorn (Thursday, June 22), Western Bulldogs (Friday, July 7), Geelong (Friday, July 21), Port Adelaide (Sunday, August 6) and Sydney (Friday, August 18).
Crows CEO Andrew Fagan thanked the Club’s members for their continued commitment and enthusiasm.
“To surpass 70,000 members is a remarkable and historic moment for our Club and demonstrates the passion and loyalty shown by our supporters,” Fagan said.
“We’re extremely proud to have reached this milestone, and also to have seen three years of really strong membership growth, and I’d like to thank our members who have either renewed or joined the Club for the first time in 2017 for their support.
“For the past four seasons, since moving to Adelaide Oval, we have consistently had amongst the largest home crowds in the AFL and contributing to that is the fact that our member attendance rates are market leading. We’re proud to see that trend continue this season, with our fans filling the stadium no matter what weather conditions or timeslot is presented.
“The entire Club is extremely grateful for the support we receive from our fans – not only on match days but also through merchandise sales, engaging with our digital platform, backing our community initiatives and of course supporting our women’s team.”
Crows membership numbers
2014 - 54,343
2015 - 63,038
2016 - 67,874
2017 - (at completion of Round 12) – 72,930IDEAS Stephen Colbert is a comedian, television host, actor, and author.
Good morning. Oh, what a day. What a lovely day. It’s a pleasure to be addressing the Wake Forest graduating Class of 2015. I want to start by thanking the administration and the Trustees for inviting me to speak. I want to thank them for giving me an honorary Doctorate of Humanities. I’m a huge fan of humans. And I have to thank them for this thing around my neck. There’s nothing you want on a chilly day like today than a nice scarf.
I especially want to thank the University president, Nathan O. Hatch, known to you as Nate Dawg, Natty O, the Hatchet, Hatch Adam, Sen. Orrin Hatch, Angel Dust. And I only made a couple of those up.
Of course, we mustn’t forget the parents, who, to get you students to this day, have sacrificed so many things, primarily money. I’m sure there are other things they’ve sacrificed, but I’m gonna guess that money’s the one they bring up most often.
Most importantly, congratulations to you, the Class of 2015. You did it.
And you look amazing. Although it’s a little embarrassing you all showed up in the same outfit. Really. Even all the accessories are the same. Everyone has a black and gold tassel. Or, is it blue and white? Grandparents, just know this was the issue that divided a generation. You had the Vietnam War. Your grandchildren had an ambiguously colored Tumblr post.
I am so proud to be your Commencement speaker today, cause I know I am following in some impressive footsteps. Last year, you heard from New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, who, unfortunately, lost her job just five days before her speech. Is there something you know about my new job that I don’t? Please. Just tell me. I really need that money. I have kids in college.
Of course for you grads, the future is a dark chasm of yawning uncertainty. But don’t worry. You don’t have to face the future for like two hours — first brunch then yawning uncertainty. But for now, you are still nestled in the beautiful, comforting bosom of Wake Forest.
There’s an interesting story about how this institution came to be. The father of Wake Forest, Samuel Wait, was trying to raise money for a different school, but during his travels his horse ran off, and he became stranded nearby. So the locals asked him to lead their new university. It was a simpler time. Back then, they just handed out universities to whoever’s horse had run off most recently. This man has no control over his animals? Surely, he has something to teach us all.
Of course, Wake Forest or Wack Fo as I’ve been asked by Provost Kersh not to call it, wasn’t always the purely academic institution it is today. It was founded as the seductively named Wake Forest Manual Labor Institute. And students spent half their day toiling in the fields. The first class had just 16 students, one of them just 12 years old. But, he was a prodigy. He could haul sacks of grain at a college level.
Back then, of course, if you didn’t get into the Wake Forest Manual Labor Institute, you could always settle for the North Carolina Crushing Toil Academy, which now, of course, is known as UNC.
Wake Forest has always been a leader. In the late 19th century, this was among the first Southern schools to teach biology in a lab. Before then, you weren’t supposed to learn biology until marriage.
In 1962, Wake Forest had the proud distinction of being the South’s first major private school to integrate. And, yes…they’ve kept it up. All right. Good. Good. You don’t know these days. You don’t know.
Even now, Wake Forest is a trailblazer. You were America’s first top 30 school to make standardized testing optional. The implications are huge. Consider this: In a group of 30 applicants, where 15 took the SATs, 10 took the ACTs and five took no test, calculate the ratio between…actually, forget it. You all didn’t have to know any of that stuff.
Still, while Wake has been a trailblazer, this is a school that respects tradition. Traditions like rolling the Quad with toilet paper after big wins. And this is actually an eco-friendly tradition because, looking at this season’s win-loss record, you guys saved a lot of paper.
Let me win you back. Duke sucks.
I do want to say one thing that I love about rolling the Quad. It really sticks it to the trees. I mean, covering a tree with the processed pulp of its relatives? That sends a harsh message. That’s like throwing wallets at an alligator or flinging piano keys at an elephant.
Speaking of the Quad. Streaking. Is anyone here naked under their robes? No? Just me. Ok. You are the rare school that not only streaks your Quad; you also have a 24-hour live webcam pointed at it. Come on. Naked on a webcam, really? You young people know that’s wrong. Those are the kind of pictures you’re supposed to Snapchat to each other.
You people also have campus traditions that are people. I want to give a shout out to Mr. Dean Shore, the University barber. There he is. Right there. Dean actually contacted me first by sending me a Facebook request the minute my plane landed. He is a friend to so many students, and a real throwback to a simpler time because when your biggest local celebrity is a barber, you’re basically a medieval village.
But of all the local celebrities, none is more famous than your mascot, the Demon Deacon. Everybody loves the Deacon. When he rides out on his motorcycle during basketball games, the crowd erupts with a madness that can come only from the passion of true fans or from inhaling motorcycle fumes in an enclosed space.
Clearly, Wake Forest has come a long way since it was a labor school founded by a horseless drifter. But as great as Wake Forest is, Wake is your past now. It is my responsibility as a commencement speaker to prepare you for what awaits you in the future.
Here it is: No one has any idea what’s going to happen. Not even Elon Musk. That’s why he’s building those rockets. He wants a ‘Plan B’ on another world.
But whatever happens, I think it’s entirely appropriate that I’m the one talking to you right now. Because I just spent many years learning to do one thing really well. I got so comfortable with that place, that role, those responsibilities that it came to define how I saw myself. But now that part of my life is over. It’s time to say goodbye to the person we’ve become, we’ve worked so hard to perfect, and to make some crucial decisions about who we’re going to be. For me, I’ll have to figure out how to do an hour-long show every night. And you, at some point, will have to sleep. I am told the Adderall wears off eventually. Good luck.
But this uncertainty is not new to your generation. The future is always uncertain. The only thing we can be sure will happen in 2016 is that we’ll elect a new president. And that between now and then, about this many people will run as the Republican nominee.
Yes, you are graduating into an election year, which is the technical term for “two years before an election.” A lot of candidates will be vying for your attention, and you will perform the ultimate civic duty: deciding for whom you will swipe left and for whom you will swipe right. Because I think we’re voting on Tinder now. At least the Republicans are. Democrats might be voting on Grindr. I don’t know.
And with all these people appealing to you, you’re going to have to learn pretty damn quick how to tell the difference between hype and substance. So to keep folks from selling you things and ideas that aren’t true, you will need a well calibrated BS detector. And luckily, I’m selling them today for the low, low price of just $89.95. Order now and I’ll include an anti-flim-flam travel case. That’s Stephen Colbert’s BS detector. If you buy it, that means you needed it.
And if there’s one thing you need even more, it’s your own set of standards. It may seem counterintuitive now, but once you leave here, you may miss being graded on all your work. Because when you’re out of school, there are no objective criteria for achievement anymore.
People my age will sometimes say to you, “Hey, that work you did, that thing you said, that cause you championed, it’s not good.” Well, having your own standards will help you weather moments like that. Having your own standards allows you to perceive success where others may see failure.
I’m reminded of one famous inventor who was ridiculed for his dream. But flash forward 15 years to the day. And do we or do we not now all ride Segways to work? We do not, but they are featured prominently in the movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop. That’s good, too.
Here’s another example. Over the years, I have given my work a lot of thought. I have my own standard for success now. I have a pretty good idea of what jokes will get laughs and a pretty good idea of what jokes may be iffy. But I’m going to say them anyway because I kind of like how iffy they are. Those who have watched my show over the years know I have made that decision many times. But having my own standards is why I could keep going at times when no one laughed or when I thought the person I was interviewing might throw a punch at me. It’s also why the epitaph on my tombstone will probably read, “Well, I thought it was funny.”
Of course, any standards worth having will be a challenge to meet. And most of the time, you will fall short. But what is nice about having your own set of standards is that from now on, you fill out your own report card. So do yourself a favor: Be an easy grader. Score yourself on a curve. Give yourself extra credit. You have the power. You are your own professor now. Which I know is a little creepy because that means you’re showering with your professor. But you have tenure. They can’t fire you.
So I hope you find the courage to decide for yourself what is right and what is wrong. And then, please expect as much of the world around you. Try to make the world good according to your standards. It won’t be easy. Get ready for my generation to tell you everything that can’t be done — like ending racial tension, or getting money out of politics, or lowering the world’s carbon emissions. And we should know they can’t be done. After all, we’re the ones who didn’t do them.
Your job, Pro Humanitate, is to prove us wrong. Because if you don’t prove us wrong, then forget everything I’ve been saying.
And instead, I’d like to leave you with a bit of wisdom I picked up from a documentary I saw this weekend: Mad Max: Fury Road. All you young people really need to succeed in the future is a reliable source of fuel and a fanatical cadre of psychopathic motorcycle killers. May you ride eternal, shiny and chrome.
Thank you for the honor of addressing you. And congratulations again to the Wake Forest Class of 2015.
Read more 2015 commencement speeches:
Alan Alda to Grads: Everything in Life Takes Time
Bernard Harris to Grads: You Are an Infinite Being With Infinite Possibilities
Bill Nye to Grads: Change the World
Colin Powell to Grads: Learn to Lead
Ed Helms to Grads: Define Yourselves
Eric Schmidt to Grads: You Can Write the Code for All of Us
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel to Grads: ‘This Is the World We Were Born Into, and We Are Responsible for It’
Gwen Ifill to Grads: If You See Something, Do Something
GE CEO Jeff Immelt to Grads: Become a Force for Change
Ian McEwan to Grads: Defend Free Speech
Jon Bon Jovi to Grads: Lead By Example
Jorge Ramos’ Message for Journalists: Take a Stand
Joyce Carol Oates to Grads: Be Stubborn and Optimistic
Katie Couric to Grads: Get Yourself Noticed
Ken Burns to Grads: Set Things Right Again
Kenneth Cole to Grads: Find Your Voice
Madeleine Albright to Grads: The World Needs You
Mark Ruffalo to Grads: Buck the System
Matthew McConaughey to Grads: Always Play Like an Underdog
Maya Rudolph to Grads: Create Your Own Destiny
Mellody Hobson to Grads: Set Your Sights High
Meredith Vieira to Grads: Be the Left Shark
Mitt Romney to Grads: America Needs You to Serve
President Obama to Grads: We Should Invest in People Like You
President Obama to Cadets: Lead the Way on Fighting Climate Change
Salman Rushdie to Grads: Try to Be Larger Than Life
Samantha Power to Grads: Start Changing the World By ‘Acting As If’
Tim Cook to Grads: Tune Out the Cynics
Contact us at editors@time.com.After a Frank Lampard double in this Capital One Cup hiding of Sheffield Wednesday took his Manchester City tally to three in three appearances, Manuel Pellegrini revealed it was “not impossible” for the midfielder to stay the whole season despite being on loan from New York City.
Lampard is due to return to New York in January. Yet with the new MLS franchise being City’s sister club, the manager suggested a deal could be done to extend his stay.
Asked if Lampard could remain for all of the campaign, Pellegrini said: “We will do what is best for the team and the player. We must talk about a lot of things but it is not impossible for him to stay here. It is an issue that we will see further down the line. We will see what happens in January and we have two or three months to decide.”
The MLS season starts in mid-March. Yet after Lampard opened and finished the scoring against Wednesday to lead City into the fourth round, Pellegrini’s revelation means Lampard could play in the final, which is on 1 March.
Of whether the midfielder’s goals give him a selection headache Pellegrini said: “For me it is never difficult to put good players in the team. The problem is when you don’t have [good players]. He is a very important player for our team and maybe, at 36, he cannot play three games in a row.”
At the close Lampard had perhaps his oddest on-field experience when a young fan ran on to the pitch and attempted to take a selfie with him, after his 47th-minute opener had been the catalyst for an easy victory that ended an unwanted statistic.
Pellegrini may have described Sunday’s 1-1 draw with Chelsea here as City’s best performance but the result meant the champions were yet to win in September.
To find a “W” on their résumé one had to flick back what felt an age to 25 August when Liverpool were dismantled, 3-1, on a Monday evening at the Etihad Stadium. While the run included a break for international football, Wednesday were the fifth opponents Pellegrini’s team hoped to defeat, after failing to get the better of Stoke City, Arsenal, Bayern Munich and José Mourinho’s weekend visitors.
Pellegrini sent out a formidable XI who were led by Yaya Touré, the captain in Vincent Kompany’s absence, as City started their defence of the trophy against a team placed sixth in the Championship.
As many as 5,400 Wednesday fans had taken up the full allocation for the trip from Yorkshire and they witnessed a first half that had a tame start, middle and end.
The period had only one genuine “ooh” moment when Aleksandar Kolarov swung in a corner from the left that Eliaquim Mangala met sweetly on the volley with a heavy left boot and the ball smashed against Chris Kirkland’s post and away innocuously.
Within moments of the second half starting so did City’s goal rush. James Milner whipped in a cross and Lampard forced the ball home.
Whereupon City took control. Edin Dzeko broke his duck for the term by hitting home a Jesús Navas delivery, then the latter fired home a rocket from a tight angle.
Kamil Zayatte’s night became forgettable when he was sent off for pulling down Lampard in the area and Touré scored the penalty before
Dzeko, the debutant Jose Pozo, 18, and Lampard completed the scoring. City host Newcastle United in the next round.You walk into your favourite coffee shop and today they ask you if you’d like to register for a loyalty card. All they need is your name and phone number. On the way back you stop for groceries and the cashier asks if you’d like to enter a prize draw. All they need is your name and phone number. It’s finally time to put that lawn mower you’ve not used in years on Craigslist but at the end of the ad, it asks you to enter your phone number so buyers can contact you directly. You need a burner phone! Let’s look at how we can use Kotlin and Twilio to build and deploy a burner phone application so that we can use multiple phone numbers for these situations. If you just want to download the code you can have a look at this repo or deploy it to Heroku using the button below. Our tools I will be using IntelliJ IDEA for the code but feel free to use your preferred IDE as long as it works well with Gradle.
One or multiple Twilio Phone numbers for creating various burner phones. You can get them here. The project Let’s start by creating a new Gradle project in IntelliJ and adding Kotlin (Java) as the library. I have described the entire process on the first part of Send and Receive SMS messages with Kotlin. You can follow it here. Alternatively you can just clone the repository as follows.
git clone git @ github. com : mplacona / BurnerPhones. git cd BurnerPhones git checkout starter - application
With that project open on IntelliJ, start by right clicking on App.kt and choosing “Run”.
In your browser go to In your browser go to http://localhost:8080/sms/ and you will see the default controller displayed. Let’s change one configuration in App.kt so the application knows where to forward the SMS messages and calls to. Inside the main function add the following:
fun main ( args : Array < String > ) { System. setProperty ( "MY_NUMBER", System. getenv ( "MY_NUMBER" )) SpringApplication. run ( App :: class. java, * args ) }
I have my telephone number set as an environment variable on my computer. My colleague Dominik wrote a nice article explaining how to set environment variables on Mac, Windows and Linux. Once you have the “MY_NUMBER” variable set correctly for your environment with your own telephone number we’re ready to start building the application. Forwarding SMS messages We still want to get every SMS message sent to our burner phones, but we want them redirected to our own number. The beauty of doing this is that if we ever get tired of being spammed from a certain number, we can just discard that number on the Twilio console and be done with it. Open SMSController.kt and create a new mapping called forwardSMS just below the one that is already there.
import com. twilio. twiml. Body import com. twilio. twiml. Message import com. twilio. twiml. MessagingResponse import org. springframework. web. bind. annotation. RequestMapping import org. springframework. web. bind. annotation. RequestParam import org. springframework. web. bind. annotation. RestController @ RequestMapping ( "/sms" ) @ RestController class SMSController { @ RequestMapping ( value = "/" ) fun helloSpringBoot () = "A nice looking sms controller" @ RequestMapping ( value = "/forwardSMS", produces = arrayOf ( "text/xml" )) fun forwardSMS ( @ RequestParam ( value = "From" ) from : String, @ RequestParam ( value = "Body" ) body : String ) : String { val message = Message. Builder |
on my desk right now, some yogurt culture that makes yogurt at room temperature, so that you don’t need to heat it up. Some people by like heating blankets or special like little incubation devices, which I have been using, but I want to try this. You just set it on your shelf, set the milk on your shelf with the starter and then once you use a starter that’s it, you don’t have to keep more buying starter, you can just use the old yogurt to make new yogurt.
So it’s going to fun to see how it turns out.
Brett McKay: That’s awesome. So Mark, a lot of on our website, we do some DIY stuff articles every now and then and we get a lot of young men, who are just really heart heated on this, like they’re just really interested, but what’s interesting is like when I talk to my dad or talk to my grandpa, who is like 94 it seems like a lot of this DIY stuff, right like how to fix things or how to make your own food or how to process your own deer, that you might have hunted.
It was that sort of information, that sort of knowledge seem like it was just naturally passed down to them like they just, I don’t know I guess the way things, the way we were as a society 40, 50 years ago. It just that, information just got passed down naturally, but nowadays it just seems like younger generations just don’t get that sort of stuff. Why do you think that is, why do you think younger generations lack DIY skills?
Mark Frauenfelder: Well I think looking pretty far back like over 100 years ago 1900, 80% of Americans either lived full time on farms or they worked every day on farms and lived in a very rural area and to be a farm worker or a farmer. You really have to be a jack of all trades, you have to, you’re really good at fixing and maintaining farm machinery and be really innovative and resourceful and coming up with ways to make new machinery and all that kinds.
So every farm had a working machine shop and wood shop on the premise. So people 80% of Americans were really good at making things and then if you compare today, only 2% of Americans live and work on farms. So I think that’s a big thing. We don’t need to make or fix our own stuff. Even people in the 50s who were repairing their own TV sets by pulling their back off and taking the tubes out, had that kind of mindset that the world was something that presented problems that they could solve as individuals.
Today, we really focus hard on these kind of hermetically sealed solutions to everything and if something goes wrong, the answer is either buy one or call someone to come over to repair it for you and so, that’s made people unable to make anything and so for us, for my generation and people younger than me. The idea of making things is kind of novel and it is once you rediscover how great it is to do that kind of thing, you want to kind of shout it from the rooftop and I think that’s like what Make Magazine does and what my book is like, hey everybody this is really cool.
Your father and grandfather, mother and grandmother were doing this kind of stuff and they had to do it. You don’t have to do it, but really you should look into it because there is something that you get out of it that you can’t, it’s inexperienced and that feeling of fulfillment that you can’t replicate any other way.
Brett McKay: Yes and it’s also very counter cultural in a lot of ways. We have a very consumer culture, but doing things by hand just totally cuts against the grain, I guess that pervasive culture we have in our society.
Mark Frauenfelder: Yes, definitely.
Brett McKay: Okay, so what do you think keeps people from trying to make things by hand because I know, you know a lot of people talk about it like they talk wishfully about, oh! I want to become a craftsman and make these wonderful handmade goods or I want to change the oil of my car, but a lot of times they never get around to doing it.
From your experience, what do you think is the biggest thing that holds people back from trying to do things by hand?
Mark Frauenfelder: I think that people have been trained to avoid making mistakes as much or not avoid it, they’ve been trained to fear mistakes to the point where they don’t want to take anything new on because they’re afraid, they might make a mistake and as soon as they do make mistake, they quickly lose interest and get discouraged from doing that anymore and I think one of the reasons for that is that, schools train people that mistakes or something to be avoided because when you make a mistake in school, you get a bad grade.
So you learn from childhood that mistakes are bad. So if you’re doing something and you make a mistake, you think I don’t want to do that anymore, which is like wired into you, but the fact of the matter is, that mistakes are really important way to learn and that the makers that I have met.
The makers, I have met who are like, who I consider alpha makers, who are really good at making stuff. The thing that is different from them and the rest of the population isn’t that they have a lot of skills, the true important difference is that they have learned to accept and even embrace mistakes as part of the process of creating things and they don’t go out and intentionally try to make mistakes, but they know that mistakes are going to be made, that they’re going to make mistakes and that they’re going to use them as ways to learn and as sources of inspiration and creativity.
And so that was something that I learned through the process of doing this stuff is that, mistakes are okay and I actually now kind of bailed that into whatever I’m making that, I think alright this is just going to the first time I make something and I probably have to do it four times, before it’s good enough for me to use and keep as a permanent thing or write about and it’s fine.
It’s like, don’t expect something to be perfect the first time you do it and that has been a like a big perception changer for me.
Brett McKay: I’m sure that carries over to other areas of life as well, maybe your work, your family and I mean even yourself. I mean, I guess maybe you’re not as hard on yourself, when you do screw up in some other aspect like personal developments, and look, this is a process. Okay, I take that mistake, get some feedback, learn from it and move on.
Mark Frauenfelder: Yes, definitely. Its such great attitude to have, is thinking. I made a mistake and what did I learn from it and then how am I going to do things differently, what did this mistake teach me?
Brett McKay: That’s handy.
Mark Frauenfelder: And yes so, just not equating a mistake with failure. The only time you fail, is if a mistake discourages you to the point where you give up.
Brett McKay: I’ve had instances where I tried to, I took on some DIY projects and yes, I messed up. Here’s the one that comes to mind. I wanted to make a teleprompter for my DSLR because I do YouTube videos and I’m really bad about talking off the cuff. So I wanted a teleprompter. I found some instructions online, how you can make this teleprompter with wood, with some picture frames and a few pieces of wood and a piece of glass and where I got into, I was really excited and then I just, I totally goofed it up and it wasn’t salvageable and I had to go back Home Depot and get some more supplies.
You know what, I’m just going, I’ll just go and find one and buy it instead and so I really feel kind of ashamed that I did not do that, you know I gave up. It’s like the ruins of this project or like in my garage in a corner, just sitting there. Every time I walk by, it sort of mocks, you know laughs at me.
Mark Frauenfelder: Well, another thing that I learned also is that, you have to keep in mind, the level of complexity of the project that you’re taking on, what works with the amount of time that you have, if you have kids or not, if it works with you know that the space that you have, the tools that you have and sometimes those things aren’t right and you can always go back to them and set your sites on a project that is manageable and challenges you at a level that is appropriate for your current skill level and environment.
Brett McKay: That’s so right. I think, I probably did bite off more than I could chew. So I guess being humble is an important aspect of the DIY.
Mark Frauenfelder: Yes, definitely.
Brett McKay: See yourself as you’re really are, not as what you want to be. Okay, so here’s another like whenever we publish a DIY article like how to build something or how to make something yourself or how to fix something in your house. In the common complaint or a common question we get is, people say that, oh! it’s a waste of time and money to do things yourself, just pay for it.
You know time is better spent doing something else. You could be working on a side project that actually earns you money sort of spending time, fixing a, patching a hole in your drywall. How do you respond to those people who say that DIY is a waste of time and money?
Mark Frauenfelder: Well, I think in most cases they’re right about the money. It costs more money to do something yourself than it does to buy it and that wasn’t always true, but it is true now. So when I become a chicken farmer, small scale chicken farmer with six chickens. The amount of time and money I spent building a chicken coop and then taking care of the chickens and stuff.
Those were the most expensive eggs that I’ve ever bought and so they’re right on that level, but then the thing is, like the eggs that I did get, I appreciated so much and the joy it brought me to work with the chickens and collect the eggs and have my kids collect the eggs was really worth every penny that I spent. If you get involved in something, you care about it so much more.
If you build your own chair there is a lot of things that happen. You could probably buy a nice chair for less money, than a chair that you built yourself and it might even look better, but if you build that chair you’re going to take care of it and maintain it because it’s your chair. If it breaks, you know how to fix it.
It makes you more observant of the world around you. You start looking at how other chairs are put together and how they’re fashioned and how did that guy designed, how did they join the wood there. The level of seeing the world with new eyes is really great and it also, one of the best things about is, it makes you appreciate how skilled and artistic other people are when you see a beautifully built chair, it makes you appreciate it on a completely new level, before you wouldn’t have even noticed that or thought about it.
So is that a waste of time and money to build a chair if you gain all of that kind of new awareness for some people maybe, but for me, it’s very much worth it.
Brett McKay: I’m there with you, totally on that. Mark, so I think you mentioned it throughout our conversation, but how has becoming a tinker or DIYer made you a better man in other areas of your life?
Mark Frauenfelder: I feel that it has given me the courage to take on all sorts of challenges that I would have either avoided or outsourced in the past. So I think that level of confidence that it’s given me in all aspects of my life has really helped a lot, you know, I feel like once I started kind of changing the world around me, I looked at myself and decided to do something about my kind of sedentary lifestyle with a not very good diet and started really researching the ways to exercise and stay fit and the kinds of foods to eat and improving my sleep and all those kinds of things.
And I think I’ve really improved my health quite a bit. I’ve lost a lot of weight, I think I’ve gained a lot of, I’ve become much leaner than I was and that just helps me feel stronger and healthier and better able to take care of my wife and kids too, when you feel good mentally and physically like that, you’re able to work harder and work smarter and I think it’s good for the whole family.
Brett McKay: That’s awesome. Do you feel like, you mentioned when you’re on the island that you lost that social network has becoming a DIYer like expanding your social network in some ways?
Mark Frauenfelder: Yes, it definitely has because one of the cool things about the Maker movement is that, you have seen a rise of they’re called makerspaces or hackerspaces there are places where people chip in a little bit of money every month $50 or so and they get access to a room full of tools and equipment and then most importantly, they get access to other people, who are also into making and so I will go to these places whenever I travel and there is one here in LA called Crash Space and it’s great hanging out with them and learning from them.
I pick up so many ideas from what they have to say and have made friends with these folks. So I think the social network aspect of making is one of the important things. Every year we have something calling Maker Fair and we have one in New York and one in San Mateo near San Francisco they’re two official ones.
And the one is San Mateo gets like 120,000 people a year.
Brett McKay: Wow!
Mark Frauenfelder: They love, the big thing is talking and hanging out with each other and seeing what other people have made and learning from them and lots of deals are made and lots of collaborations are form there and then there are many maker fairs that have attendance of 10,000, 20,000 all over the world.
So making is a very big social aspect of being a maker is huge.
Brett McKay: One of those mini maker fairs are actually is coming to Tulsa.
Mark Frauenfelder: Oh! cool.
Brett McKay: Yes, me and my brother-in-law we’re going to check it out, really excited.
Mark Frauenfelder: Oh! good.
Brett McKay: Well, Mark do you have any final bits of advice to our listeners, who are, they want to do this, like they want to become a tinker. They want to become a DIYer. Any final bits of advice for them help them get started?
Mark Frauenfelder: Yes, I would say like my particular interest in, when I wrote the book Made by Hand was that, I thought that food would be a good project for me because A, I like to eat and it’s something that I do three times a day and so having, getting involved with that would have a pretty profound effect on my life.
So my advice would be, find something you’re passionate about. So, you know say you’re interested in music looking into DIY music making your own musical instruments or making your own recording studio. There is got to be something that you’re interested in and that is going to have lasting value.
I’ve friends who are into robotics and make really cool robots. I personally would not be that interested in doing because I might have fun making the robot and everything, but once you’re done you have this robot and I’m like, okay it’s going to walk around and avoid the walls, but I would play with it for 15 minutes and then it would go in the closet.
So find something you’re passionate about and then the other thing I would say is, find figure out an appropriate challenge level. If you aim too high, you’re going to get discouraged and abandon it and if you aim too low, you’re going to get bored and so Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book called Flow, which you probably heard about, where he talks about, a state where you’re sufficiently challenged by something that you become engrossed in it and you don’t even, if you’re hungry you don’t think about eating, if you’re tired, you don’t think about sleeping.
You’re just like, this is all I want to do. I don’t want to do anything else. Find that and do it.
Brett McKay: Very good. Well Mark, it’s been a pleasure, it’s been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for your time.
Mark Frauenfelder: You bet, Brett. Thanks a lot. It was really fun talking with you.
Brett McKay: Our guest today was Mark Frauenfelder. He is author of the book Made by Hand Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World and you can find his book in Amazon.com. Well that wraps up another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast for more manliness tips and advice make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com and until next time, stay manly.A set of pictures getting a lot of attention shows President Trump sharing a laugh at the White House on Wednesday with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak.
Kislyak is a key figure in the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and whether there was any collusion with Team Trump.
The photos were Russian. No American press attended.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted a photo of a handshake between Mr. Trump and Lavrov:
The Russian Embassy then followed up with a tweeted photo of Mr. Trump shaking hands with Kislyak:
Ambassador Kislyak and President Trump / Посол С.Кисляк и Президент Д.Трамп pic.twitter.com/Ckkx2YL9KX — Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) May 10, 2017
CBS News' Anthony Mason spoke with foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan at the U.S. State Department and correspondent Elizabeth Palmer in Sochi, Russia.
How the meeting came to be
CBS News' Margaret Brennan and Elizabeth Palmer CBS News
"White House officials say that last week during a phone call, Vladimir Putin personally asked President Trump to meet with his top diplomat Sergey Lavrov," Brennan said. "The meeting in the Oval Office lasted around 30 minutes."
Brennan reported that Mr. Trump said Tuesday's firing of FBI Director James Comey had no influence on the meeting and the fact the president made the invitation despite the controversy shows how deeply he wants to improve frayed relations with Russia.
"They've been shunned and under sanction for some years now in Washington... so this was their very big, very sweet public comeback moment," Palmer said of Russia. "They made sure everybody saw that picture."
Surprise over images
"We later learned that the White House -- by their own admission -- was misled," Brennan said. "Russia told them that a state media agency photographer was actually the official government photographer."
Find more pictures of Sergey Lavrov's visit to Washington, DC on @MFA_Russia's Flickr account 📷https://t.co/TKMEUwjbDp📸 pic.twitter.com/zsJHbjBOh5 — Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) May 10, 2017
"You have to bear in mind that this is a hugely experienced team around President Putin," Palmer said. "They know how to play this game... hoping that the candidate they clearly favored in the U.S. election -- Donald Trump -- will bring them in from the cold with the endgame of course to get those sanctions lifted."
For more on this discussion, watch the video above.Don’t expect a raise from your boss next year, says a new survey from Aon Hewitt.
The human resources firm polled 347 Canadian companies about their salary intentions for 2016 and 2017. It found that variable pay is expected to average 15.4 per cent of payroll in 2017 — unchanged from this year.
Flat salaries are the result of economic uncertainty, says Aon Hewitt, as Corporate Canada continues to grapple with the crash in oil prices and anemic domestic demand.
“The Canadian companies we surveyed are clearly reluctant to earmark higher compensation increases as they prepare for a highly competitive landscape in 2017,” said Suzanne Thomson, senior consultant of global data solutions for Aon Hewitt.
Base pay is expected to increase by 2.8 per cent for the average worker in 2017, up slightly from the 2.6 per cent seen in 2016, but not much higher than core inflation.
Companies do see fewer salary freezes next year compared with 2016. Aon Hewitt says that 4.5 per cent of firms surveyed froze salaries in 2016, while only 0.4 per cent expect to have a freeze in 2017.
Canada’s labour market has been deteriorating for two years now, with a steadily rising unemployment rate and stagnant wages. Economists at TD Securities note that the country has averaged only 8,000 new jobs a month in the past six months. The latest job report showed that Canada’s unemployment rate rose from 6.9 per cent to seven per cent in August.
While the Canadian economy added 26,000 new jobs last month, Doug Porter, chief economist at BMO Capital Markets, notes that the overall trend is grim.
“It does nothing to break the bigger picture of very modest job growth, a stagnant unemployment rate and slowing wage growth,” he said in a report earlier this month. “Looking past the usual drama of the volatile monthly figures, the Canadian job market is simply stuck in a rut.”
Aon Hewitt says that certain sectors can expect to see higher than average salary increases. For employees working in the auto industry, chemicals, consumer products and life sciences sectors, salary increases will average three per cent. For high-tech and professional services companies, salaries will rise by 2.9 per cent.
Lower-than-average salary bumps will occur in the oil and gas, banking and transportation sectors. Oil and gas saw the lowest salary expectations, with the average worker expected to see their total salary grow just 1.2 per cent next year.
One group that is expected to still do well are so-called “top performers.” Nine out of 10 firms surveyed by Aeon Hewitt offered a variable pay plan and bonus payouts to their employees this year. Those that were classified as high potentials, top performers and in key positions received an average salary increase of 4.4 per cent.
“While the overall job market may be strengthening slowly, competition for high-performing employees remains high,” said Thomson.Ponte City[1] is a skyscraper in the Berea neighbourhood, just next to Hillbrow, Johannesburg, South Africa. It was built in 1975 to a height of 173 m (567.6 ft), making it the tallest residential skyscraper in Africa. The 55-story building is cylindrical, with an open centre allowing additional light into the apartments. The centre space is known as "the core" and rises above an uneven rock floor. When built, Ponte City was seen as an extremely desirable address due to its views over all of Johannesburg and its surroundings. The neon sign on top of the building is the largest sign in the southern hemisphere and advertised for the Coca-Cola Company prior to 2000.[2] It currently advertises the South African mobile phone company Vodacom.[3]
History [ edit ]
The principal designer of Ponte was Mannie Feldman, working in a team together with Manfred Hermer and Rodney Grosskopff.[4][5] Grosskopff recalled the decision to make the building circular, the first cylindrical skyscraper in Africa.[6] At the time, Johannesburg bylaws required kitchens and bathrooms to have a window, so Grosskopff designed the building with a hollow interior, allowing light to enter the apartments from both sides.[6] At the bottom of the immense building were retail stores and initial plans were to include an indoor ski slope on the 3,000-square-metre (32,000 sq ft) inner core floor.[6] The building was so tall because developers wanted a large number of units but only had limited land to build on.[6] The building is located 35 minutes from the OR Tambo International Airport and almost within walking distance of the inner city with theatres like the Market and the Civic within 5 km (3.1 mi).[3]
Decay [ edit ]
During the late 1980s, gang activity had caused the crime rate to soar at the tower and the surrounding neighbourhood.[3] By the 1990s, many gangs moved into the building and it became extremely unsafe. Ponte City became symbolic of the crime and urban decay gripping the once cosmopolitan Berea neighbourhood. The core filled with debris five storeys high as the owners left the building to decay.[6] There were even proposals in the mid-1990s to turn the building into a highrise prison.[3] In 2001 Trafalgar Properties took over management of the building and began making numerous improvements.[7]
New Ponte [ edit ]
In May 2007 Ponte changed ownership and a re-development project "New Ponte" was put in motion. David Selvan and Nour Addine Ayyoub under Ayyoub's company, Investagain, planned to revitalise the building completely.[8] The planned development would have contained 467 residential units, retail and leisure-time areas. Over the next few years, the Johannesburg Development Agency planned to invest about R900-million in the areas around Ponte City such as the Ellis Park Precinct project, as well as an upgrade of Hillbrow and Berea partly in preparation for the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
The subprime mortgage crisis caused the banks not to provide the funding required to finish the revitalisation, the project was cancelled and ownership was given back to the Kempston Group.[8]
In the arts [ edit ]
Movies [ edit ]
Books [ edit ]
German writer Norman Ohler used the Ponte as the setting for his book Stadt des Goldes ("City of Gold"), "Ponte sums up all the hope, all the wrong ideas of modernism, all the decay, all the craziness of the city. It is a symbolic building, a sort of white whale, it is concrete fear, the tower of Babel, and yet it is strangely beautiful".[14]
Photography [ edit ]
South African photographer Mikhael Subotzky and British artist Patrick Waterhouse won the Discovery award at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in 2011 for their three-year project "Ponte City", photographing the residents, interiors and exteriors of the building, and which produced a series of giant tableaux, made up of hundreds of contact sheets, presented in towering light boxes.[15]
Other [ edit ]
In 2017, Ponte City Tower was the subject of an episode of the Roman Mars radio program and podcast 99% Invisible. [16]
. Jeff Blumenkrantz, an American actor, composer and lyricist – who never lived in the building – wrote a song that tells a tale could very well have taken place somewhere on the upper floors of Ponte City. He was invited to write a song for a benefit concert for the organisation “Broadway in South Africa” in 2008, and as he tells it, he was struck by the drawing of an eleven-year-old girl. She had drawn a “row of buildings, but one was significantly taller than the others, with the word Voda across the top. I was intrigued by the ‘Voda Building,’ and so began my research into The Ponte City Tower.”[17]
See also [ edit ]POLK COUNTY, Fla. -- A central Florida woman has been arrested following the second “co-sleeping” death of a newborn within seven years.
Erin Piche-Pitts, 25, was warned by numerous agencies about the dangers of sleeping in the same bed with an infant following the 2009 smothering death of her 13-day-old baby girl, reports CBS affiliate WTSP. That death was ruled accidental.
Piche-Pitts reportedly gave birth to another child, a boy, on Sept. 18. She was warned again by a primary care physician about the dangers of sleeping with the infant during the infant’s Sept. 21 exam, the station reports. Police said the mother had also completed a “Healthy Start” training program and was provided “counseling and information” about how to properly put an infant to sleep on their back.
Despite the warnings, police say on Piche-Pitts fell asleep in her bed with the boy in the crook of her arm Oct. 6 at her Polk County home. She awoke about two and a half hours later to find the infant unresponsive under her, according to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.
The child was later pronounced dead at a hospital.
Piche-Pitts is charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child due to negligence in the boy’s death. Deputies determined that after the repeated warnings, the boy’s death was “through her own culpable negligence,” reports the Orlando Sentinel.
Deputies say Piche-Pitts has a criminal history which includes charges for burglary, possession of methamphetamines, battery and domestic violence.Gov. Rick Scott Wednesday lifted a legal hurdle to using West Palm Beach land to build a new spring training baseball stadium.
The governor signed a change to state law, approved by the Florida Legislature in April, that allows building on a portion of land that was once protected to guard against water pollution.
That clears the way for Palm Beach County and the city of West Palm Beach to finalize a deal to build a new spring training home to be shared by the Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros.
The Astros and Nationals have agreed to hold spring training in West Palm Beach if the county and the state will help pay for a new $135 million stadium and training facility.
The stadium, the teams’ offices, training facilities and a city park would be built on 160 acres at the southeast corner of 45th Street and Haverhill Road.
To have enough room to build it all, stadium proponents needed the state to shrink a protective zone that prohibited construction on the southern portion of the property that borders a canal. That canal helps supply city drinking water.
The teams maintained that the protected land was needed for grass parking lots that could be used to accommodate spring training crowds.
Stadium supporters say that building an improved drainage system on the property can keep pollution from washing into the canal.
With the state restrictions on the land lifted, city and county officials this summer are expected to finalize land swaps and other agreements needed for construction to move forward.
The county would pay for nearly half of the construction costs, using taxes on local hotel stays. The state and the teams would pay for the rest, according to the proposal.
The teams and county are trying to have the stadium ready for play by spring training 2017.
The county is already paying for Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, which is the spring training home for the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals.
Local business leaders pushed for building another baseball stadium as a way to boost tourism and help the local economy.
But building a new stadium for the Astros and Nationals could set a pricey precedent for trying to keep the Marlins and Cardinals. Also, some critics question the countywide investment into a new stadium that will likely bring the biggest economic lift to West Palm Beach.Media playback is not supported on this device Belgian rugby team Royal Kituro win match 356-3
A Belgian rugby team playing in the country's top division has won a game 356-3.
The match saw Royal Kituro run in 56 tries and 38 conversions to Soignies' lone drop-goal - which equates to more than four points a minute on average.
The problems began for Soignies in the run-up to the game when the referee failed to turn up on time.
The away team's coach and most of the players then left, assuming the game was off.
However the referee did eventually appear, more than an hour after the scheduled kick-off, and the game went ahead.
The 16 Soignies players still available seemingly did not compete in protest.
Soignies president Guy Calomme described the result as "catastrophic", while a Kituro spokeswoman said Soignies "didn't really play".
Soignies' only points came courtesy of a drop goal
Footage of the game shows the away team allowing the opposition to run past them uncontested and repeatedly touch down under the posts.
The away team were effectively forced to play and gain the 'loser's point', rather than forfeit the match and earn no points at all.
And despite Royal Kituro's hammering of Soignies, the losers still sit above the Kituro in the league by one point.
Soignies occupy third place in the table, although they now have a points difference of minus 264.Kenya’s defeated presidential contender files a legal challenge to his election loss in a major test of the country’s democratic system after a disputed vote triggered deadly tribal clashes.
Police used teargas to break up a rally of about 100 of Raila Odinga’s supporters outside the Supreme Court earlier in the day, but he called on his allies to stay calm and trust in the law to resolve his complaint.
Odinga refuses to accept last week’s slim first-round election win by Uhuru Kenyatta, Kenya’s richest man and son of its first president.
Vote manipulation allegations
Lawyers for Odinga’s CORD coalition said their petition to the Supreme Court covered allegations of vote manipulation, problems in the registration of voters and the failure of an electronic vote counting mechanism.
“These failures dwarf anything Kenyans have ever witnessed in any previous election,” Odinga told reporters on the doorstep of his office in central Nairobi.
He urged his supporters not to resort to violence. “We can not begin what is supposed to be a new era under a new constitution in the same old ways,” he said.
Dispute
Kenya’s 4 March general election was the first since disputes over a 2007 presidential vote, which Odinga also lost, touched off tribal bloodletting in which more than 1,200 people were killed.
At least one person was wounded on Saturday morning as police fired teargas to clear Odinga supporters from the front of the Supreme Court building.
Some of the crowd wore T-shirts marked with slogans “I support the petition” and “Democracy on trial”, an echo of Odinga’s statement that his petition would be a test of democracy in the east African country.
Throughout Nairobi the traffic was moving freely and there were no signs of further unrest in the capital.
Kenyatta faces charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court alleging that he incited the 2007 violence. He denies the charges.
That violence sent the region’s biggest economy into a tailspin and threatened the country’s image as a safe place for tourists and investors.~~Regarding Free Samples: You may choose ONE free sample with each item ordered. If you do not choose one OR if you indicate in the dropdown box you want to choose one and yet do not, we will choose one for you at the time we fill your order. *You will not be contacted if you do not choose your free samples.*
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for himself in MLS. But it was the Red Bulls’ second round draft pick that year, Tim Ream, whose outstanding performance in New York earned him a foray to Europe where he has twice received Supporters Association Player of the Year awards with Bolton Wanderers. In 2011, the Columbus Crew’s first pick, Rich Balchan, spent three injury-ridden seasons in MLS before moving to the NASL, whereas its second pick that year, Justin Meram, is still a regular contributor for the Crew. With this in mind, let’s turn our attention to Bruce Arena’s Superdraft record.
How has Bruce fared in the Superdraft?
In the 2009 Superdraft, Arena pulled off a coup that will go down in the annals of Superdraft history. While most coaches favor using their top picks on attacking players (it is no coincidence that the first three players chosen in this year’s Superdraft were strikers), Bruce Arena used his first pick on a defender from the University of Maryland, Omar Gonzalez. While choosing Gonzalez was not exactly an outlandish move (the 6’5” behemoth centerback was signed to a Generation Adidas contract), it is Bruce’s slightly more daring second round selection of which we must take note.
With the nineteenth pick in the 2009 Superdraft, Bruce added A.J. DeLaGarza to the Galaxy’s ranks. DeLaGarza was not only a fellow Terrapin, he was a key component to the defensive line that won the University of Maryland the NCAA Championship in 2008. Gonzalez and DeLaGarza played together for three years at the University of Maryland before joining the Galaxy together, and their symbiotic partnership is a crucial reason why the Galaxy have had one of the best defensive records in MLS for the past few years. Omar’s aerial prowess effectively renders useless opposing team’s attempts at crossing the ball into the box, while his size and strength neutralizes enemy strikers who rely on physicality in the attack. DeLaGarza, on the other hand, though eight inches shorter than his counterpart, reads the game quickly, positions himself intelligently, and is unerring in the slide tackle.** In other words, their strengths conceal each other’s weaknesses: Omar dominates opponents with his body in a way DeLaGarza cannot, but DeLaGarza maintains focus on the field whereas Omar has occasionally been prone to lapses in concentration.
On average, each MLS Superdraft produces only a handful of players who establish fruitful careers in MLS. By way of example, only six of the players taken with teams’ first picks in the 2011 Superdraft are still active in MLS: Perry Kitchen, Darlington Nagbe, Jalil Anibaba, Kofi Sarkodie, Zac MacMath, and C.J. Sapong.*** Some players chosen that year are plying their trade abroad (Omar Salgado, A.J. Soares) while others never managed to establish careers in professional soccer. Moreover, since teams that consistently have losing records also have a better chance of securing more talented players due to their picks being higher in the pecking order, for a team with a record of success like the Galaxy, consistently identifying diamonds in the rough is even more challenging.
Taking into consideration the Galaxy’s selection order in the Superdraft since 2009, Bruce’s record has been very good, though probably not the best in the league. Let’s take a look at how Bruce’s top picks have fared:
2010 – Michael Stephens – though no longer with the Galaxy, Stephens, who was selected with the number 16 overall pick in the 2010 Superdraft, established a career for himself in MLS and has logged seven appearances this year for the Chicago Fire;
– though no longer with the Galaxy, Stephens, who was selected with the number 16 overall pick in the 2010 Superdraft, established a career for himself in MLS and has logged seven appearances this year for the Chicago Fire; 2011 – Paolo Cardozo, a native Uruguayan, spent two years in MLS after being selected with the number 16 pick of the first round of the 2011 Superdraft, and then moved south to the Primera División de Costa Rica where he currently plays for Cartaginés;
, a native Uruguayan, spent two years in MLS after being selected with the number 16 pick of the first round of the 2011 Superdraft, and then moved south to the Primera División de Costa Rica where he currently plays for Cartaginés; 2012 – Tommy Meyer – Selected at number 19 overall in the 2012 Superdraft, Meyer plays regularly for the Galaxy first team and also contributes to Los Dos;
– Selected at number 19 overall in the 2012 Superdraft, Meyer plays regularly for the Galaxy first team and also contributes to Los Dos; 2013 – Charlie Rugg – Also selected at number 19 overall in the 2013 Superdraft, though Rugg has not been able to beat the likes of Robbie Keane and Gyasi Zardes to a starting position with the L.A. Galaxy, he is still on the team’s books, currently on loan with Indy Eleven in the NASL;
– Also selected at number 19 overall in the 2013 Superdraft, though Rugg has not been able to beat the likes of Robbie Keane and Gyasi Zardes to a starting position with the L.A. Galaxy, he is still on the team’s books, currently on loan with Indy Eleven in the NASL; 2014 – Kyle Venter – Selected in the second round of the 2014 Superdraft, Venter did not break into the Galaxy first team and now plays for the Tulsa Roughnecks in the USL.
Bruce’s record fares favorably to other coaches in MLS, particularly when compared to other teams whose picks tend to fall lower in the table.
Which brings us to 2015. Having won the 2014 MLS Cup, the Galaxy once again had the last pick in the first round. On January 15, 2015, Arena used the 21st pick to select the diminutive Spanish attacker, Ignacio Maganto. Maganto signed with the Galaxy two months later and since that time has made eight appearances for the Galaxy first team. On May 31, 2015, Maganto scored his first goal for the L.A. Galaxy in an away game against New England, making him the fourth player from the 2015 Superdraft to score for his team during an MLS league game.****
What does Arena’s selection of Maganto say about Arena? Well, Maganto was not the obvious pick. Maganto played college soccer for Iona College, which is part of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, a relatively small athletic conference. In fact, Maganto was the first MLS draftee in the history of Iona College’s soccer program. Nor does Maganto’s background or style of play exactly scream Major League Soccer. Maganto, raised in Madrid, spent his childhood playing in Getafe’s youth system. And for a league that loves size and strength, Maganto is instead small and technical. But Arena’s move was immediately praised by a few soccer journalists:
Though it is possibly too early to say, Maganto’s transition to the Galaxy first team has been relatively seamless, and his future with the team appears bright.
As a coda to this analysis, the MLS Superdraft can be used in more than one way to acquire players. It is common for teams to trade picks for allocation money or indeed for other players. For example, on January 14, 2009, Bruce Arena traded the Galaxy’s second round 2010 draft pick to the New York Red Bulls and in exchange acquired forward Mike Magee. New York subsequently traded that pick to the Revolution who used it in the 2010 Superdraft to draft forward Zak Boggs. Boggs made twenty-nine appearances and scored three goals during his two years with the Revs before leaving the club in 2012 to accept a Fulbright scholarship to study abroad. Magee made 105 appearances and scored 19 goals for the Galaxy, winning two MLS Cups and two MLS Supporters’ Shields in the process.
To summate, Bruce Arena’s history with the Superdraft demonstrates a willingness to take risks on unproven talent (Iona College?), a thorough understanding of MLS’ arcane and wacky rules (“I’ll trade you my 2nd round pick in next year’s draft for fifty thousand Garber-bucks and a bump in the allocation ranking”), and to paraphrase Shula, an understanding of how to combine players to maximize their respective abilities and win (Omar + AJ).
Stay tuned for the next in our series on Bruce Arena’s impact on the L.A. Galaxy.
* Though Seattle historically has not covered itself in glory with the Superdraft, it looks to be bucking that trend this year. Based on performances from the first half of the season, Cristian Roldan was the steal of the draft, and could earn himself a Rookie of the Year nomination come season’s end.
** Key evidence: DeLaGarza’s gorgeous 22nd minute pinpoint slide tackle on Charlie Davies during the 2014 MLS Cup caused Taylor Twellman to muse to himself over the microphone, “A.J. DeLaGarza, my goodness…”
*** To be fair, though, some players taken with a team’s second or third pick are still chugging along quite happily in MLS – I’m looking at you Jeb Brovsky, Michael Farfan, Will Bruin and Justin Meram.
**** On March 22, 2015, Fatai Alashe (4th pick overall in 2015 Superdraft) scored a goal for the San Jose Earthquakes against the Chicago Fire. On April 12, 2015, Cyle Larin (1st pick overall in 2015 Superdraft) scored a goal for Orlando City against the Portland Timbers. On May 19, 2015, Khiry Shelton (2nd pick overall in 2015 Superdraft) scored a goal for NYCFC against the Chicago Fire.
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commentsNiamey - Flooding unleashed by three months of torrential rain in Niger has killed at least 54 people and left nearly 200 000 displaced, the UN said on Friday.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said most of the deaths took place in the capital Niamey and that more than 11 000 homes were destroyed.
Niamey has been hardest hit along with Dosso in the south, Tillaberi in the west and the central-southern areas of Maradi and Zinder as Niger struggles once more with flooding which claimed more than 50 lives last year.
The recovery from the disastrous rains promises to be long.
Food production will also take a hit, with the flooding killing some 16 000 cattle and about 12 000 hectares of crops being ruined, the UN said.
With its 17 million population in a country three quarters of which comprises desert, Niger regularly is beset by food shortages caused by drought as well as severe flooding.
A humanitarian source told AFP on Thursday that exacerbating the problems were rising River Niger water levels, leading to fears of a repeat of serious flooding in 2012 which left dozens dead and some 500 000 homeless.
Last week, Niger said it had launched a campaign to destroy mosquito breeding sites to help combat the spread of deadly malaria in Niamey after the rain transformed some areas into swamps.President Trump plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in the Big Apple and all other sanctuary cities that do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
The list will inform citizens and others about “public safety threats associated with sanctuary” cities, according to an executive order Trump signed Wednesday.
“The [Homeland Security] Secretary shall utilize the Declined Detainer Outcome Report or its equivalent and, on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens,” the order said.
Mayor de Blasio said that New York — one of about 300 sanctuary cities across the US — would not change it’s policy in the face of Trump’s threat to withhold federal funding from cities that do not play ball with his order.
The NYPD said Wednesday the city has a list of roughly 170 criminal offenses that are not covered by the sanctuary policy, and that the department notifies the feds when illegal immigrants are charged with those crimes.
The list includes serious crimes such as felony assault, rape, murder and terrorism as well as gun smuggling and witness tampering.Antonio Conte celebrated the win with Chelsea's fans
Diego Costa's late strike gave Antonio Conte a dramatic winning start as Chelsea manager as his side secured a season-opening victory over West Ham.
The Spain striker found the net from 20 yards in the 89th minute to spark wild scenes at Stamford Bridge, with Conte celebrating among supporters.
Eden Hazard had put the Blues in front from the spot after Michail Antonio fouled Cesar Azpilicueta.
James Collins levelled for the Hammers, but Costa's finish settled it.
Conte's capers as Costa gets lucky
Only Cesar Azpilicueta (83) had more touches for Chelsea than Eden Hazard (81) - this touchmap shows how the Belgian drifted in off the left wing
After a disastrous start to last season, which led to Jose Mourinho's sacking in December and a 10th-place finish, Conte's arrival at Chelsea will at the very least inject passion and animation into a side routinely accused of lacking commitment last term.
The former Juventus coach, where he won Serie A three times, is fresh from taking Italy to the quarter-finals of Euro 2016, where he displayed tactical nous alongside animated touchline antics.
And Chelsea supporters hugged their new manager in delight as he sprinted along the front of the stands following Costa's low shot had crept into the net.
But the 27-year-old had been fortunate to still be on the pitch when, having already been booked for remonstrating with the referee, he escaped a second booking when he caught Hammers keeper Adrian high up on the shin with a late challenge.
Kante and Hazard shine
Media playback is not supported on this device Conte pleased with Chelsea's 'attitude'
The question of whether Chelsea can mount a strong title challenge will still remain after this display, with the Blues dominating possession but failing to finish off the visitors until late on.
But the all-action, energetic performance of £30m midfield signing N'Golo Kante - who won the title with Leicester City last season - and the vibrancy of Hazard, were positive signs.
Belgium winger Hazard looked particularly sharp and creative, following an impressive European Championship for his country.
However, Conte is likely to pursue further signings, with striker Michy Batshuayi - a late substitute - the only other new arrival.
Hammers yet to nail it
Media playback is not supported on this device Chelsea 2-1 West Ham: Slaven Bilic disappointed with sloppy mistakes
West Ham have brought in eight players over the summer and three of them started - Arthur Masuaku, Havard Nordveit and Andre Ayew.
Striker Ayew, a £20m signing from Swansea, had a miserable night as he limped off in the first half with a thigh injury.
And manager Slaven Bilic is likely to have also been disappointed with the performance of his side, who struggled to get a foothold in the game and did not produce a shot on target until Collins lashed home a loose ball after a 77th-minute corner.
Dimitri Payet, so often the Hammers' star last season, was restricted to coming off the bench after his exertions for France at Euro 2016 and was unable to make an impact in his 20 minutes on the pitch.
Man of the match - Eden Hazard
Much maligned for his performances last season, Eden Hazard was persistently Chelsea's most potent attacking threat
What they said - 'We played like tigers'
Chelsea forward Eden Hazard told Sky Sports: "It was good to be back on the pitch in front of our own supporters. We did very well and we played 90 minutes like tigers.
"It's not every year I score in my first game. Last season is finished - we are looking forward to the future. We want to bring a lot of emotion to the fans."
West Ham boss Slaven Bilic told Sky Sports: "When you lose a game and concede late, of course you are disappointed. Apart from the first 15 minutes until we equalised, they were much better than us.
"They were better on the ball, in pressing and much more aggressive than us. They had the individual class of Eden Hazard, Diego Costa and Willian.
"We came back into the game. We played well after 1-1, but we made the mistake in the middle of the park. We gave the ball away and conceded a cheap goal."
What's next?
Chelsea travel to Watford on Saturday after the Hornets started the season with a draw at Southampton. West Ham have a trip to Romania on Thursday for the first leg of their Europa League qualifier against Astra Giurgiu.Jared Kushner failed to disclose emails sent to Trump team about WikiLeaks and Russia
Jared Kushner shared emails within Donald Trump’s team about WikiLeaks and a “backdoor overture” from Russia during the 2016 election campaign and failed to turn them over to investigators, it emerged on Thursday.
Senators said that a disclosure of files to their committee by Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, “appears to have been incomplete” and was missing “documents that are known to exist but were not included”.
They said in a letter to Kushner’s attorney that they knew of emails received and then sent on by Kushner during the campaign that appear relevant to inquiries into alleged collusion between Moscow and Trump’s team.
Donald Trump Jr communicated with WikiLeaks during final stages of election Read more
“Other parties have produced September 2016 email communications to Mr Kushner concerning WikiLeaks, which Mr Kushner then forwarded to another campaign official,” said senators Charles Grassley and Dianne Feinstein.
“Likewise, other parties have produced documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite’ which Mr Kushner also forwarded,” said the senators, who are the chairman and ranking member of the Senate judiciary committee.
They also told Kushner’s attorney: “You also have not produced any phone records that we presume exist” in relation to several of their lines of inquiry.
In a statement, Lowell said Kushner had been “responsive to all requests” made to him by investigators.
“We provided the judiciary committee with all relevant documents that had to do with Mr Kushner’s calls, contacts or meetings with Russians during the campaign and transition, which was the request,” Lowell said. “We also informed the committee we will be open to responding to any additional requests and that we will continue to work with White House counsel for any responsive documents from after the inauguration. We have been in a dialogue with the committee and will continue to do so as part of Mr Kushner’s voluntary cooperation with relevant bipartisan inquiries.”
The Senate judiciary committee is conducting one of several investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election. Inquiries are also being conducted by the special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Grassley and Feinstein disclosed in their letter to Lowell that Kushner was refusing to turn over certain documents that he believed “might implicate the president’s executive privilege”, which allows Trump to withhold some information from Congress.
Kushner is also refusing to give senators material that he submitted as part of his application for a high-level security clearance, according to the letter.
WikiLeaks published emails hacked from Democrats during the 2016 campaign, causing chaos in the party as it worked to elect Hillary Clinton as president. US intelligence officials have said the emails were stolen by Russian operatives.
This week, the Atlantic reported that Kushner and several other senior Trump campaign officials were emailed by Donald Trump Jr about WikiLeaks after the group made contact with him over Twitter.
Details of the “backdoor overture” were not made clear in the senators’ letter. Kushner has denied reports that in the weeks after the election, he proposed setting up a secure communication channel between Trump’s team and Moscow to avoid snooping by the US before the inauguration.
Sergey Kislyak, the former Russian ambassador to the US, reportedly told his superiors in Moscow, during conversations intercepted by American intelligence, that Kushner had asked for the back channel during a meeting at Trump Tower last December.
Grassley and Feinstein said other people in contact with the committee had also turned over communications with Sergei Millian, the head of a Russian-American business group, which the senators knew had been copied to Kushner.
Christopher Steele believes his dossier on Trump-Russia is 70-90% accurate Read more
Millian, the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, was reportedly a source of some information that ended up in the dossier compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele on Trump’s links to Russia. He denies having any connection to the dossier.
Senators questioned Kushner in July about his connections to Russia. The closed-door session in Washington followed reports that Kushner had undisclosed contacts with Kislyak.
Kushner was asked to turn over various documents on 18 October and gave some to the judiciary committee on 3 November, according to Thursday’s letter.
Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, also attended a meeting with several Russians at Trump Tower in June last year.
Trump Jr arranged the meeting after being told in an email that the Russian attendees had damaging information about Clinton that came from the Russian government. Kushner claimed he knew nothing about the meeting’s purpose and left shortly after it began.
In their letter, Grassley and Feinstein also requested that Kushner turn over any communications with Mike Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser, on a range of topics relating to the Russia inquiry. They also complained that they had not received a transcript of Kushner’s interview in July with the Senate intelligence committee.The Millennium Arch climbed in Canyonlands by Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker
17.10.2016 di di Planetmountain
British climbers Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker have made the first ascent of The Millennium Arch, a circa 100m roof crack at Canyonlands, USA they have now graded 5.14.
Five years after the first ascent of Century Crack, famed as one of the hardest offwidth cracks in the world, Tom Randall and Pete Whittaker may possibly have taken things one stage further with the first ascent of The Millennium Arch, a huge roof crack once again below the White Rim in the Canyonlands, USA.
Randall and Whittaker located the route in May this year during their reconnaissance trip through Utah’s Canyonlands while searching for a route that would take their climbing to a completely different level. Armed with satellite photos, google maps and plenty of patience, the two spent a fortnight exploring both the East Side and West Side of the White Rim and although they discovered countless little gems, they failed to find what what they where looking for. On their very last day they abseiled into an apparently uninspiring cave but their jaws dropped as they realized they had just stumbled across "the holy grail of crack climbing", namely an absolutely perfect, 180 foot crack bisected by another crack which gave the appearance of a giant Crucifix.
The two flew home to the UK and started training furiously for what they dubbed The Crucifix Project, yet on their return this autumn they discovered that the difficulties are, for the time being, unsurmountable. Between one attempt and the next though they decided to try their luck on another line amazing they had spotted nearby, a huge arch that splits an adjacent cave. "We got distracted by one very, very big roof" explains Randall "This one is a once-in-a-lifetime climb as it's not every day you get to annihilate yourself on a 300ft roof crack."
Talking to planetmountain.com, Randall stated "The crack was intimidating at first, and trying to climb it proved a huge logistical problem. Up there, equipping it with trad gear, hanging upside down for so long… it was like trying to climb a big wall, only that this one long, variable-sized crack." The duo initially split the arch into three pitches, three logical sections along which they confess to have broken "all the rules in normal climbing." After having worked the moves and left the gear in-situ, they then proceeded on their their marathon free ascents - which lasted over two hours each - during which they even had to untie mid-ascent from one rope and continue with another as they ran out of rope…The Millennium Arch has been given an overall grade of 5.14, and Randall explains "We cannot say this is a trad route, nor is it a sport route. We simply call it a real climbing challenge." Climbing the feature without pre-placed gear is certainly possible Randall concedes, but would require splitting the route into 3 pitches.
When asked about how The Millennium Arch compares to Century Crack, Randall explained "It’s hard to be objective, five years down the line. At the time Century Crack seemed like such a big deal. It was like "There’s no way we’ll ever be able to do that." Now though we have far more experience and are far fitter. This could well be a step up".
Now that they have succeeded on their "process goal", Randall and Whittaker are once again focusing on the Crucifx project. Time is not on their side though and they may be forced to return home without a successful redpoint. This would mean more time training on their legendary off width crack in Randall’s cellar which is, quite amazingly, only a few meters long. "Yeah" Randall concludes "it’s amazing how specific, dedicated training can pay off and translate into such cool routes."
RELATED NEWS
05/11/2011 - Century Crack climbed all free
Pete Whittaker and Tom Randall have climbed Century Crack at Canyonlands, USA, without pre-placed gearThe excavated remains of the Milion zero-mile marker in Istanbul (the former Constantinople ).
Byzantine units of measurement were a combination and modification of the ancient Greek and Roman units of measurement used in the Byzantine Empire.
Until the reign of Justinian I (527–565), no universal system of units of measurement existed in the Byzantine world, and each region used its traditional measures. Justinian began the process of standardization that resulted in a specifically Byzantine system, chiefly due to the need of such a system for the fiscal administration. Official measurement and weighing was performed subject to an array of charges including the mestikon, miniatikon, zygastikon, kambaniatikon, gomariatikon, and samariatikon. Despite the central government's insistence on the use of official measures, other systems continued to be used in parallel, whether due to local traditions or foreign influences, or in order to cover the necessities of specific trades or crafts. In addition, from the 12th century, foreign merchants such as the Venetians, Pisans, and Genovese operating within the Empire received the right to use their own systems.
Length [ edit ]
The Byzantine Empire continued to employ the anthropometric units used by the Greeks and Romans.
Weights and measures acts were sometimes undertaken by the emperors as forms of tax reform. An 11th-century guide to Byzantine tax collection contains emendations concerning the Emperor Michael's[n 1] addition of a palm to the fathom used in computing the schoinion,[n 2] an act which reduced the holders' taxable area by about 5%.
Units of length Unit Greek name Greek feet meters Notes Digit
(Finger) dáktylos ( δάκτυλος ) 1⁄ 16 0.0195 also called monas ( μονάς ), "unit", as the smallest unit of length. Palm palaistḗ ( παλαιστή )
anticheir ( αντιχειρ ) 1⁄ 4 0.0787 Half-pous
Half-foot hēmipódion ( ἡμιπόδιον ) 1⁄ 2 0.1574 Span spithamḗ ( σπιθαμή ) 3⁄ 4 0.2361 Pous
(Foot) poûs ( ποῦς ) 1 0.3123 Derived from the ancient Greek foot, the standard foot length in Byzantium seems to have been 0.3123 m, but in practice the length fluctuated between 0.308 and 0.320 m Public Cubit dêmosios pêkhys ( δημόσιος πῆχυς ) 1 1⁄ 3 0.4688 lit. "forearm"
The Public Cubit counted 24 daktyloi and was used mainly in construction, hence was also called lithikos ("stone"), [xylo]pristikos ("[wood]-sawing"), tektonikos ("builder's"). The Imperial or Geometric Cubit counted 32 daktyloi and was used for the measurement of fields for the purpose of tax assessment. Local variants also existed for various other commodities. Imperial or Geometric Cubit basilikos/geômetrikos pêkhys ( βασιλικός/γεωμετρικός πῆχυς ) 2 0.625 (Single) Pace bêma haploûn ( βῆμα ἁπλοῦν ) 2 1⁄ 2 0.787 (=English pace) Double pace bêma diploûn ( βῆμα διπλοῦν ) 5 1.574 (=Roman pace) Simple Orguia
(Simple) Fathom haplê orguiá ( ἁπλὴ ὀργυιά ) 6 1.87 Derived from the equivalent ancient Greek unit (1.89 m) From the 14th century on local variants also existed, often called kanna from the Italian canna. Imperial or Geometric Orguia
Imperial or Geometric Fathom basilikê/geômetrikê orguiá ( βασιλικὴ/γεωμετρικὴ ὀργυιά ) 6 3⁄ 4 2.10 9 spithamai = 108 daktyloi, used for the measurement of fields for the purpose of tax assessment. To ease the farmers' tax burden, Michael IV introduced a longer version of 9.25 spithamai (2.17 m) for use in middle and high quality, while the lower value was retained for poorer fields. Perch dekápodon ( δεκάποδον ) 10 3.148 lit. "decafoot: 10-foot [length]" Schoinion skhoinion ( σχοινιον ) 60
72 21.30
25.30 lit. "little schoenus"
The basis of land tax assessments, variously reckoned as 10 fathoms in the fertile Balkan and west Anatolian themes and as 12 in the rest of Asia Minor. Plethron pléthron ( πλέθρον ) 100 31.48 The Greek furlong, one side of the ancient Greek acre
Uncommon in Byzantine texts Stade stádion ( στάδιον ) 600 188.8 Also stadion or stadium ( pl. stadia)
(=English furlong) Bowshot doxarioú bolḗ ( δοξαριού βολή ) 7003100000000000000♠ 1000 7002314800000000000♠ 314.8 Mile mílion ( μίλιον ) 7003500000000000000♠ 5000 7003157400000000000♠ 1574 Also milion
(=Roman mile) Schoenus skhoinos ( σχοινος ) 7004200000000000000♠ 20 000 7003629600000000000♠ 6296 lit. "reed rope"
33 1⁄ 3 stades, against various (usually longer) classical values Day's Journey hodós hēméras ( ὁδός ἡμέρας ) 7005150000000000000♠ 150 000 7004472200000000000♠ 47 220 Week's Journey hodós sabbátou ( ὁδός σαββάτου ) 7006105000000000000♠ 1 050 000 7005330540000000000♠ 330 540 Source: Loizos, unless otherwise noted. Metric equivalents are approximate.
Area [ edit ]
The ordinary units used for land measurement were Greek.
Units of area Unit Greek name square Greek feet square meters Notes (Square) Pous
square foot) poûs ( ποῦς ) 1 0.095 Stremma strémma ( στρέμμα ) 7004100000000000000♠ 10 000 991 lit. "turning"
Sometimes described as a (square) "plethron", although this is uncommon in Byzantine texts
The ancient Greek acre, originally defined by the distance plowed by a team of oxen in a day and continuing to vary according to land quality under the Byzantines between 900 and 7003190000000000000♠ 1900 m2 Modios
Zeugarion módios ( μόδιος )
zeugárion ( ζευγάριον ) 7004300000000000000♠ 30 000 7003297300000000000♠ 2973 Highly variable. Modioi were sometimes much smaller units that might come 100 or 250 to a single zeugarion. The "Modion" was originally a grain measure, and "zeugarion" referred to a yoke. Source: Loizos, unless otherwise noted. Metric equivalents are approximate.
Volume [ edit ]
Yassiada reconstruction in Thereconstruction in Bodrum's Museum of Underwater Archaeology, loaded with replica Byzantine amphorae
The museum's display of Byzantine amphorae styles
The ordinary units used for liquid measurement were mostly Roman:
Units of volume Unit Greek name Litras liters Notes (Liquid) Ounce ouggía ( οὐγγία )
ogkía ( ὀγκία )
ougkía ( οὐγκία ) 1⁄ 12 0.1824 (=Roman uncia) Cotyla
Half-xesta kotýlē ( κοτύλη )
hēmixéstion ( ἡμιξέστιον ) 1⁄ 8 0.276 (=Roman half-sextarius) Xesta xéstēs ( ξέστης ) 1⁄ 4 0.548 (=Roman sextarius) (Liquid) Litra
(Liter) lítra ( λίτρα ) 1 2.1888 (=Roman libra) Handful phoûkta ( φοῦκτα ) 1 13⁄ 24 3.367 (Liquid) Modios módios ( μόδιος ) 40 87.552 Source: Loizos, unless otherwise noted. Metric equivalents are approximate.
Weight [ edit ]
Five bronze commodity weights
[17] Bronze steelyard weights were often in the shape of a Byzantine empress
The ordinary units used for measurement of weight or mass were mostly Roman, based on the late Roman pound. This has been reconstructed on the basis of known legislation of Constantine the Great in AD 309 establishing 72 gold solidi (Greek: νόμισμα, nómisma) to the pound. As the early solidi weighed 4.55 g, the pound was therefore 0.3276 kg at the time. The solidus was repeatedly debased, however, implying average pounds of 0.324 kg (4th–6th century), 0.322 kg (6th–7th century), 0.320 kg (7th–9th century), 0.319 kg (9th–13th century), and even less thereafter.
Model weights were made in lead, bronze, and glass and (less often) from gold and silver. They came in various styles. Presently, archaeologists believe the bronze spheres sliced flat at top and bottom and marked with an omicron/upsilon date from the early 3rd to late 5th centuries, gradually being replaced by cubes marked with a gamma/omicron (𐆄) over the course of the 4th century. In the second half of the 6th century, these were replaced by discs until at least the early 9th century and possibly the 12th. The glass weights had numerous advantages in manufacture and use but seem to have disappeared following the loss of the empire's Syrian and Egyptian provinces in the 7th century.
Analysis of the thousands of surviving model weights strongly suggest multiple local weight standards in the Byzantine Empire before the Arab conquests. Under Justinian, the weights of currency were administered by the comes sacrarum largitionum and commodity weights by the praetorian prefect and eparch of the city.[23] By the 9th century, the eparch nominally controlled all official weights in Constantinople, although archaeology has shown others issued their own weights, including proconsuls, viri laudabiles, and viri clarissimi in the west and anthypatoi, counts, and ephors in the east.
Units of weight Unit Greek name Greek ounces grams Notes Scruple gramma ( γραμμα )
trēmísis ( τρημίσις ) 1⁄ 24 1.55 Semissis sēmísis ( σημίσις ) 1⁄ 12 2.27 Nomisma nómisma ( νόμισμα ) 1⁄ 6 4.55 Ounce ouggía ( οὐγγία )
ogkía ( ὀγκία )
ougkía ( οὐγκία ) 1 27.3 (=Roman uncia) Litra
(Pound) lítra ( λίτρα ) 12 327.6 Value c. 309, but diminishing over time.
(=Roman pound) Source: Loizos, unless otherwise noted. Metric equivalents are approximate.
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
^ r. 1034–1041). Probably but not certainly Michael IV 1034–1041). ^ [4] but is dated from its internal evidence. The text survives in a 14th-century copybut is dated from its internal evidence.
References [ edit ]
Citations [ edit ]The intersection of Parliament and Adelaide streets could be in for a major shake-up with the addition of two proposed new condo buildings. The similarly sized developments, planned for the northeast and northwest corners, which are currently home to a disused office building, a seldom used surface parking lot, and row of Victorian homes, could inject much-needed new life to the forlorn stretch of Parliament between Queen and King.
The proposals come at a time when large swaths of the King-Parliament neighbourhood are seeing similar changes. The new Globe and Mail headquarters is currently under |
. Samuel Johnson faces one count of rape and two counts of sodomy.
Details in this story may not be suitable for all readers.
According to the probable cause statement, the 20-year-old woman says she met Johnson via social media and was at a Kansas City north residence on April 16, 2016.
The woman says Johnson told her he forgot something upstairs at the residence and so she escorted him back to the room. She says at that time he removed his pants and told her he wanted oral sex. She began giving Johnson oral sex but told Johnson 'no' to vaginal/anal sex. She says he continued to insist and assaulted her in an upstairs bedroom where she had been staying. She says she repeatedly told Johnson to stop, get off her, and made Johnson aware that he was hurting her. She says he bit her face and neck.
The woman says she was finally able to break free and ran downstairs crying.
Two witnesses in the residence say the woman came downstairs crying and told them what happened.
One witness also claimed that before Johnson left, he said something to the effect of 'when your penis is inside a girl.. no means yes,.. that's how my ex-girlfriend liked it. She liked it rough.'
Johnson invoked his rights and did not provide a statement to detectives. Bond is set at $25,000.Everyone will reach a point in their lives when they are not happy with the direction it is going. It is during these times that creating a positive change will make all the difference in the world. Whether you need to change your life entirely or make the small changes that will help you at home or with your career, it is within your power to change your life in a positive way.
“The Secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates
Of course, it is one thing to want the change, it’s quite another to know what to do to make the change. Some may need an elaborate plan while others will only need to let things go. Whatever decision you make, it will need to be a positive one that affects reach change in your life. Here are ten ways you can create such a change and start right now.
What Provides Your Life with Meaning?
In other words, what gets you out of bed in the morning is what provides you with meaning in your life. If you have goals that you want to achieve, there is no time like the present to get started. So, if you want to write the “Great American Novel”, travel around the world, or start a new career all it takes to get started is recognizing what is important in your life and making the necessary changes so you can achieve your dreams. It may not be easy, but it will never happen unless you get going in the right direction today.
Let Go of the Past
Everyone has things in their past which caused embarrassment, ridicule, or worse. However, the past has nothing to do with the future. The decisions you made back then are now part of something that no longer exists today. You can start on a new path by putting the past in its proper perspective. Whatever you have done and the ramifications it has brought to your life can be changed starting with putting it in the past so that you can proceed to where you want to be in the future.
Write Down Your Goals
The goals that exists in your mind will not become reality until you make it so. You can start the process by writing down your goals which transports them from inside your mind to something that you can see. If every journey begins with a single step, then writing down your goals is the first step towards making them into reality. Remember, you do not have to tell anyone, but you will need to start by taking a piece of paper and writing down the goals that you want to achieve. It becomes the first step towards making them come true.
Go Outside Your Comfort Zone
No one ever changed their lives by staying inside their comfort zone. So, you will need to sacrifice it order to get where you want to go. That little bit of fear you feel is the indication that you are getting outside your comfort zone, so embrace it. By doing so, you will be on the path to making a positive change.
Put Fear into its Proper Perspective
Fear is a good thing as it warns us of danger and keeps us sharp in situations that we do not fully understand. However, you do not want fear to get in the way of making positive changes in your life. The fact that you feel a little fear when trying something new is normal. So, do not let it stop you when pursuing your dreams. By putting fear in its proper place, it will do you the most good without interfering with the positive changes you’ll make in your life.
Don’t Let Others Stop You
It seems that when anyone is trying to make a positive change in their lives, there is that friend or group of friends or family that tells them to stop. Keep in mind that such negative advice is natural because your friends and family want to protect you from what they do not understand. So, it’s okay to listen to their advice telling you to stop whatever changes you are making, but don’t let them stop you. Remember, it is your life and to make positive changes means that things will be different from now on.
Take Advantage of Opportunity
One of the most difficult things for many people to learn is that you should pursue opportunity in your life, not necessarily your passions. If you are taking up a hobby, then by all means follow your passion. However, if you are looking to support yourself in a new way, do so because the opportunity presents itself, not because it’s your passion. Success requires focus, talent, and persistence, not necessary passion although it can help.
Embrace Your Inner Child
You may notice that there are some people in life who remain in some ways children. You may also notice that they are probably quite happy as well. Everyone has an inner child and it’s someone that should be embraced. Your inner child lets you explore new frontiers and dream big so you can achieve desirable goals. To start on the path of positive change means having your inner child lead the way.
Don’t Worry About Tomorrow
Basically, do not worry about whatever negative implications that making a positive change in your life will bring. So, instead of being concerned about what might go wrong, focus on what will go right that will bring happiness into your life. You will need to make a thoughtful decision, but the results will outweigh the negative aspects as long as it brings a much-needed change.
Nothing Starts Until You Do
Nothing positive will happen in your life until you get started. Once you get going, do not stop until you reach your goal. You may find that other forces in your life will start to come together to help make it happen. Of course, nothing happens until you start down the path towards making the positive changes that pay off in the long run.
“Your life does not get better by chance, it gets better by change.” – Jim Rohn
SaveSaveAbout half of Americans say the growing number of “people who are not religious” is bad for American society. But a similar share say either that this trend is good or that it does not make much difference, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center.
In recent years, Pew Research surveys have found evidence of a gradual decline in religious commitment in the U.S. public as a whole. For example, there has been a modest uptick over the past decade in the share of U.S. adults who say they seldom or never attend religious services. The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion also has grown in recent years; indeed, about one-fifth of the public overall – and a third of adults under age 30 – are religiously unaffiliated as of 2012. Fully a third of U.S. adults say they do not consider themselves a “religious person.” And two-thirds of Americans – affiliated and unaffiliated alike – say religion is losing its influence in Americans’ lives.
The new, nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life asked Americans whether having “more people who are not religious” is a good thing, a bad thing, or doesn’t matter for American society. Many more say it is bad than good (48% versus 11%). But about four-in-ten (39%) say it does not make much difference. Even among adults who do not identify with any religion, only about a quarter (24%) say the trend is good, while nearly as many say it is bad (19%); a majority (55%) of the unaffiliated say it does not make much difference for society.
These findings are from a nationwide survey of 4,006 adults conducted March 21-April 8, 2013. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.
Members of all the major U.S. religious groups with large enough samples for analysis are more inclined to see this development as a bad than good thing for society. White evangelical Protestants are especially likely to say the growing number of people who are not religious is a bad thing, with nearly eight-in-ten (78%) holding this view. Majorities of black Protestants (64%) and white non-Hispanic Catholics (56%) say the same. Fewer than one-in-ten in each of the three groups says this trend is a good thing for society.
The balance of opinion also is lopsided among white mainline Protestants, among whom 45% say the increase in those who are not religious is a bad thing, just 6% say it is a good thing, and 46% say it doesn’t make much difference for society.
Among Hispanic Catholics, 36% say it is bad for society, 11% say it is good for society, and about half (48%) say the trend does not matter.
While those with no religious affiliation are less negative than other U.S. adults in their assessment of this trend, only about a quarter of the religiously unaffiliated (24%) say it is a good thing that more people are not religious. About as many (19%) say it is a bad thing, and a 55% majority says it does not make much difference for society.
Americans who attend religious services regularly are particularly likely to say that the growing number of people who are not religious is a bad thing for society. About seven-in-ten (69%) people who attend worship services at least once a week say this trend is a bad thing, compared with about a third (35%) of those who attend services less often who say the same.
The difference between weekly attenders and those who attend less often holds across nearly all major religious groups, including white evangelical Protestants, white mainline Protestants, black Protestants and white non-Hispanic Catholics. But there is no statistically significant difference in views on this question between Hispanic Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week and those who attend less often.
Men and women hold similar views on this question. At least four-in-ten of both groups say it is a bad thing that more people are not religious.
Younger adults (ages 18 to 29) are less inclined than older cohorts to consider the increase in people who are not religious to be a bad thing for society. A third of adults under age 30 say this trend is a bad thing for society. By contrast, a majority of adults ages 50 and older consider the trend a bad thing.
Younger adults also are less likely than their older counterparts to be affiliated with a religion. However, the association with age tends to hold even among those who have a religious affiliation. Among adults ages 18 to 29 who have a religious affiliation, 47% say having more people who are not religious is a bad thing for society, compared with roughly six-in-ten among their counterparts ages 50 and older.
About the Survey
This report is based on telephone interviews conducted March 21-April 8, 2013, among a national sample of 4,006 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (2,002 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 2,004 were interviewed on a cell phone). Interviews were completed in English and Spanish by live, professionally trained interviewing staff under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International.
A combination of landline and cell random digit dial (RDD) samples were used to reach a representative sample of all adults in the United States who have access to either a landline or cell phone. Both samples were disproportionately stratified to increase the incidence of African-American and Hispanic respondents. Within each stratum, phone numbers were drawn with equal probabilities. The landline samples were list-assisted and drawn from active blocks containing three or more residential listings, while the cell samples were not list-assisted but were drawn through a systematic sampling from dedicated wireless 100-blocks and shared service 100-blocks with no directory-listed landline numbers. Both the landline and cell RDD samples were disproportionately stratified by county based on estimated incidences of African-American and Hispanic respondents.
Several stages of statistical adjustment or weighting are used to account for the complex nature of the sample design. The weights account for numerous factors, including (1) the different, disproportionate probabilities of selection in each strata, (2) the overlap of the landline and cell RDD sample frames, and (3) differential non-response associated with sample demographics.
Statistical results are weighted to correct known demographic discrepancies, including disproportionate stratification of the sample. The table shows the unweighted sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the survey.
The survey’s margin of error is the largest 95% confidence interval for any estimated proportion based on the total sample – the one around 50%. For example, the margin of error for the entire sample is ±2.1 percentage points. This means that in 95 out of every 100 samples drawn using the same methodology, estimated proportions based on the entire sample will be no more than 2.1 percentage points away from their true values in the population. Sampling errors and statistical tests of significance used in this report take into account the effect of weighting. In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.Neither neighbors nor firefighters could save those trapped in the house as it burned just after 12:30 a.m.
"(Firefighters) were exhausted. They were in the front yard on one knee, and they saw me and they said, 'Chief, we did all we could,' because they knew the kids were in the house," Baltimore Fire Chief Niles Ford told CNN affiliate WBAL.
The blaze was so intense it melted a nearby car.
"I know (the deceased children) couldn't come out. They couldn't. They were trapped. And we heard that kids were yelling. They were yelling," neighbor Robert Spencer told CNN affiliate WJZ.
The mother and two boys, ages 4 and 5, remained in critical condition. An 8-year-old girl also was hospitalized and could be released shortly. She was credited with helping her mother and two brothers escape the large house in northeast Baltimore.
The ages of the other six children range from 9 months to 11 years old.
The father was at work and told authorities the home had a smoke detector and he had recently changed the battery, officials said.
The third floor of the home collapsed onto the second floor, hindering attempts by firefighters to search and rescue, Clark said.
The office of US Rep. Elijah E. Cummings identified the woman as a staff member who has worked for him almost 11 years as a special assistant in his Catonsville office.
"I am asking that our entire community pray for my staff member, Katie Malone, and her young family," Cummings said in a statement, "I am grateful to the Baltimore City Fire Department and all those who responded quickly to the devastating fire. My staff is a family and this unimaginable tragedy is shocking and heartbreaking to us all. I again ask for your prayers."
The missing children are two boys, 9 months and 2 years; and four girls: 3-year-old twins, a 10-year-old and an 11-year-old.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Spencer said the family was always "playing and laughing" on the porch.
He said he was devastated that he could not reach any of the children trapped inside.
"I heard the kids crying... I couldn't save them," he said. "It was just too much fire.
"You see how big the house is. That's how big the fire was. It was everywhere; it was coming from everywhere. You couldn't do nothing."Download raw source
MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.25.84.202 with HTTP; Mon, 15 Feb 2016 12:54:35 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: <7964C339-9545-4D51-A920-C662CDA8C57F@washpost.com> References: <7964C339-9545-4D51-A920-C662CDA8C57F@washpost.com> Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2016 15:54:35 -0500 Delivered-To: john.podesta@gmail.com Message-ID: <CAE6FiQ-njwfF7Gh6BcMnagZ1UpOsHs5HGD2ergtBu39JkG-xpg@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Fwd: Cooking story? From: John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com> To: Sara Latham <slatham@hillaryclinton.com> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=001a11411b9271f6db052bd53905 --001a11411b9271f6db052bd53905 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Gearan, Anne <Anne.Gearan@washpost.com> Date: Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 12:03 PM Subject: Cooking story? To: "jpodesta@hillaryclinton.com" <jpodesta@hillaryclinton.com>, John Podesta <john.podesta@gmail.com>, Jennifer Palmieri < jpalmieri@hillaryclinton.com> Hi John and Jennifer, In Iowa, John had suggested that since I now know how he behaves on a bus I should see how he does in the kitchen at one of your cooking fundraisers. Assuming you were serious I really want to do this. It would be a fun feature amid the chaos. How about the one below? With Melina for photos of you slinging a whisk? Ground rules could be a few ways, but I would need to be able to quote both you and Ms. Hall and to ask guests for comment. Let me know, and cheers. Anne Chef Carla Hall and John Podesta are making brunch! I want to make sure you are coming to our Campaign Briefing and Brunch on Sunday, February 21st Please join us for a Campaign Briefing and Brunch with John Podesta, Campaign Chair and Special Guest Chef, Carla Hall Co-Host of ABC=E2=80=99s The Chew Sent from my iPhone --001a11411b9271f6db052bd53905 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable <div dir=3D"ltr"><br><div class=3D"gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded messag= e ----------<br>From: <b class=3D"gmail_sendername">Gearan, Anne</b> <span = dir=3D"ltr"><<a href=3D"mailto:Anne.Gearan@washpost.com">Anne.Gearan@was= hpost.com</a>></span><br>Date: Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 12:03 PM<br>Subject:= Cooking story?<br>To: "<a href=3D"mailto:jpodesta@hillaryclinton.com"= >jpodesta@hillaryclinton.com</a>" <<a href=3D"mailto:jpodesta@hilla= ryclinton.com">jpodesta@hillaryclinton.com</a>>, John Podesta <<a hre= f=3D"mailto:john.podesta@gmail.com">john.podesta@gmail.com</a>>, Jennife= r Palmieri <<a href=3D"mailto:jpalmieri@hillaryclinton.com">jpalmieri@hi= llaryclinton.com</a>><br><br><br>Hi John and Jennifer,<br> In Iowa, John had suggested that since I now know how he behaves on a bus I= should see how he does in the kitchen at one of your cooking fundraisers. = Assuming you were serious I really want to do this. It would be a fun featu= re amid the chaos.<br> How about the one below? With Melina for photos of you slinging a whisk? Gr= ound rules could be a few ways, but I would need to be able to quote both y= ou and Ms. Hall and to ask guests for comment.<br> Let me know, and cheers.<br> Anne<br> <br> <br> Chef Carla Hall and John Podesta are making brunch!<br> I want to make sure you are coming to our Campaign Briefing and Brunch on S= unday, February 21st<br> <br> Please join us for a<br> Campaign Briefing and Brunch with<br> John Podesta, Campaign Chair<br> and Special Guest Chef, Carla Hall<br> Co-Host of ABC=E2=80=99s The Chew<br> <br> <br> Sent from my iPhone</div><br></div> --001a11411b9271f6db052bd53905--Kanwar pilgrimage, which commenced this year two days ago on July 10, is an annual month-long yatra in the Hindu calendar month of Shravana (Saavan) in which saffron-clad Shiva devotees walk barefoot with pitchers of holy water from the Ganga, balanced between shoulders using decorated slings known as Kanwars. The water is used by the pilgrims to worship Shiva lingas at shrines of importance in one’s village or town. This form of Shiva worship has a special significance in regions around the Ganga. Bearing similarities to the Kanwar yatra in north India, another important festival, called in Kavadi festival, is celebrated in Tamil Nadu wherein Lord Muruga is worshipped.
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The painstaking journey with the Kanwar potentially stretches for over a 100 kilometres. The pilgrims — a motley assembly including old and young people, women and men, children and even differently abled — can be spotted at holy sites by Ganga such as Gangotri, Gaumukh and Hardwar, spots of confluence of holy rivers and the Jyotilingam shrines of Shiva, chanting Bol Bam and Jai Shiv Shankar. The motivations to undertake the arduous journey could range from anything from personal devotion to unfulfilled wishes to seeking penitence.
The legend of the ritual goes back to samudra manthan or churning of the ocean of Milk, which is one of the best known episodes in Hindu mythology. From it, many divine beings emerged, but also halahala or a highly potent, lethal poison. All entities approached Lord Shiva to consume it for protection of the living worlds. As Shiva drank the poison, Parvati grabbed his throat in an effort to contain the poison and prevent it from affecting the worlds inside him. As a result Shiva’s neck turned blue from the effect of the poison, which earned him the name Neelkantha. The poison still had an impact and his body was inflamed. To decrease the effects of that poison, the practice of giving water to Shiva began. Another origin story of the Kanwar yatra is intimately connected with Lord Parshuram, the renowned, loyal devotee of Shiva. The first Kanwar yatra was believed to have been undertaken by Parshuram. While passing through a place called ‘Pura’ in present day Uttar Pradesh, he had been struck by a desire to lay the foundation of a Shiva temple there. He is said to have fetched Gangajal every Monday in the month of Shravana for Shiva’s worship.
Like other religious processions such as Durga Puja, Ganesh Visarjan and Muharram, Kanwar yatra also has exerts tremendous pressure on law and order, often intermittently resulting in its breakdown. Fatal road accidents and stampede deaths among pilgrims are in the news year after year.
While some pilgrims take part in the procession peacefully, a number of others annually have been guilty of causing a ruckus with their booming DJs and screeching loudspeakers, flouting the time rules and disturbing whole neighborhoods in process of their passing through towns and cities. Many so-called pilgrims part ways from the prescribed barefoot tradition by mounting on to motorbikes and other means to transport in large numbers which disrupts the traffic, resulting in jams. Crowds of such ‘Kanwariyas’ also pose more serious threats to law and order, due to disruptive behaviors, substance abuse and hooliganism displayed by anti-social elements in religious garb, manifesting mob-like behaviors, sometimes a stone’s throw away from giving rise to riot-like situations.
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This year too, extra vigil has been arranged along previously earmarked Kanwariya routes and directions issued to pilgrims to stick to them. DJs are completely banned and permissions and time limits enforced on noise making. In addition, pilgrims have been asked to carry valid ID cards at all times to ascertain their identities during routine checkings. In the wake of Monday’s militant attack on Amarnath Pilgrims, the pilgrims themselves could be vulnerable to an attack. A special alert has henceforth been placed in Delhi and security arrangements for the pilgrims stepped up.A few days ago the Trump camp started pushing the idea that Hillary Clinton was “America’s Merkel”, a reference to longserving German Chancellor Angela Merkel, by many measures one of the more successful European politicians of the post-war era. Trump even personally started pushing the Twitter hashtag “#AmericasMerkel. When I started seeing this my first thought was, “How many Americans do they think have even heard of Angela Merkel, let alone see her as some awful figure in a way that tying her to Clinton would send chills down people’s spines?” For better or worse, Putin is super high profile. Netanyahu is high profile. For your average American? Merkel is not high profile.
The answer’s obvious. But it didn’t occur to me until I read this very smart piece by ThinkProgress’s Alice Ollstein. Merkel is now a big, big deal (in a bad way) on alt-right and white supremacist websites where she’s become the poster-girl for feckless politician’s who are betraying the white race. Merkel led the way on pushing an generous refugee policy vis a vis the refugee crisis emerging from Syria. It’s certainly not that no one in the US knows about this. But presidential campaigns are mass audience affairs. And this is where it’s big. This is where it’s dynamite to make Hillary Clinton into “America’s Merkel.”
It’s not surprising. We’ve seen numerous instances and evidence and examples of how the Trump campaign is awash in the world of alt-right and white nationalist Internet culture, memes and ideas.
And then there’s this.
On Sunday’s CNN State of the Union show, now deposed Trump chief Paul Manafort told Jake Tapper that “You had — you had the NATO base in Turkey being under attack by terrorists. You had a number of things that were appropriate to this campaign, were part of what Mr. Trump has been talking about.”
Only this didn’t happen.
Now, spouting nonsense on a Sunday show is nothing new. But this was a certain kind of nonsense, as a sharp-eyed Hayes Brown from Buzzfeed noted. This ‘story’, albeit fake, got a huge amount of push from Russia Today and the Russian alt-propaganda network Sputnik News that I wrote about yesterday. Now if you wanted to be really ungenerous you might say Manafort was getting his talking points from someone at least east of Kiev or more plausibly that he reads a lot of Russian propaganda websites. But as Brown notes, it wasn’t just RT and Sputnik. Their stories were also “passed along on Twitter by accounts that are both pro-Trump and pro-Russian.”
Maybe it’s just that he’s awash in the Trumpite, white nationalist world where pro-Russian propaganda (specifically propaganda from Russia’s various state-backed English language propaganda networks) has become ubiquitous and he picked it up there. What’s notable is that this bit of misinformation germinated in a Russian propaganda mill and ended up on Manafort’s lips on CNN. The precise pathway it took from origination to final destination is fascinating but in some ways beside the point.
This isn’t to defend or excuse Manafort or Trump. It’s rather to distinguish what we think might be the case from what we can say with some certainty is the case. In this instance, we may not know Trump’s and Manafort’s true inner beliefs. But we can get a pretty good read of the milieu they’re operating in, the voices they’re listening to, both online and off.
And this isn’t just my inference. Recently, Fortune commissioned a social media analytics company to analyze Donald Trump’s retweets on his infamous Twitter account. They identified 2,000 “influencers” in the “#WhiteGenocide” community (yes, I’m sorry to say there’s a “#WhiteGenocide” community), and they looked at that influence matrix against Trump’s Twitter history. “Since the start of his campaign,” they found, “Donald Trump has retweeted at least 75 users who follow at least three of the top 50 #WhiteGenocide influencers. Moreover, a majority of these retweeted accounts are themselves followed by more than 100 #WhiteGenocide influencers.”
Is that a big deal? Yes, that’s a huge, huge big deal.
How can it possibly make sense to Trump and his top staffers to turn their campaign over to the head of the junk-right gonzo site Breitbart News? Do they think this is going to make winning more likely as opposed to striking a nail into whatever chance they have to turnaround a terrible trend? Who knows? A perfectly plausible answer that Trump is a committed white nationalist who simply wants to run this kind of campaign. To some extent it’s definitely true. But again, there’s speculation and then there are looser judgments that are nonetheless very edifying. And these little hints picked up by Ollstein and Brown are views into this world. A major party candidates, the nominee of the Republican party just in advance of the Fall campaign awash in the world of racist white nationalism, anti-American Russian propaganda and more. It’s quite a spectacle to behold.Image caption A lawyer for the 42-year-old artist denied the allegations
Rapper Nelly has been arrested after a woman accused him of raping her on his tour bus following a concert near Seattle.
Police in Auburn said they arrested the artist after a woman called emergency services at 03:48 (10:48 GMT) to report a sex assault.
The singer strongly denies the allegations and has now been released.
"I have not been charged... therefore no bail was required," he tweeted.
"I was released, pending further investigation."
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Nelly, 42, is currently on tour with the Backstreet Boys and Florida Georgia Line
The singer tweeted that he was "beyond shocked that I have been targeted with this false allegation".
"I am completely innocent," he said. "I am confident that once the facts are looked at, it will be very clear that I am the victim of a false allegation."
Nelly, whose real name is Cornell Iral Haynes Jr, was taken into custody on a second degree rape charge, TMZ said.
In a statement his lawyer also described the allegation as "completely fabricated".
"Our initial investigation clearly establishes this allegation is devoid of credibility and is motivated by greed and vindictiveness," Scott Rosenblum said in a statement.
Nelly is best known for his US number one hits "Hot in herre" and "Dilemma". He last released a studio album in 2013.
In 2015 he was arrested on felony charges after police found drugs and guns on board his tour bus.
The 42-year-old is currently on tour with the Backstreet Boys and Florida Georgia Line, and performed in Auburn on Friday night.
The bus was parked near a local Walmart at the time of the alleged incident. A police statement said they were continuing to investigate.
Nelly was due to perform on the Smooth Stadium Tour in Ridgefield near Portland on Saturday evening.Secret documents released by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden show that Australia's intelligence efforts against Indonesia involve a massive penetration of its phone networks and widespread data collection and are not just targeting suspected terrorists or key political figures.
And the documents reported in The New York Times have disclosed new details of how the Australian Signals Directorate offered its US counterpart surveillance of an American law firm representing Indonesia in trade disputes with the US.
Former US spy agency contractor Edward Snowden. Credit:Reuters
The documents show the level of co-operation between the US National Security Agency and the Australian Signals Directorate, and for the first time reveal the Australian electronic espionage agency's comprehensive access to Indonesian's national communications systems.
According to a 2012 NSA document, the Australian Signals Directorate has accessed bulk call data from Indosat, Indonesia's domestic satellite telecommunications provider, including data on Indonesian officials in various government ministries.1200 Demonstranten gegen 50 AfD-ler
Warendorf (pw) - Etwa 50 Sympathisanten der Partei AfD, die am Donnerstagabend zu einer Kundgebung auf dem Wilhelmsplatz zusammengekommen waren, haben annähernd 1200 Gegendemonstranten mobilisiert, die dem Aufruf eines bunten Bürgerbündnisses zum Protestmarsch gefolgt waren.
Rund 1200 Demonstranten zogen am Donnerstagabensd durch die Innenstadt zum Wilhelmsplatz, um gegen die Kundgebung der AfD zu protestieren, die nur etwa 50 Zuhörer verfolgten.
Die Kundgebung der „Alternative für Deutschland“ mit dem NRW-Landessprecher Martin Renner hatte noch nicht angefangen, da kam es bereits zu einer direkten Konfrontation. Der vom Marktplatz gestartete Protestzug, der von den Grünen initiiert worden war, aber von den Ratsparteien CDU, SPD, FDP, FWG sowie den Piraten und Linken, von Vertretern von Stadt, Kirchen, Vereinen und Verbänden unterstützt wurde, kam am Münsterwall zu Stillstand. Bis auf wenige Meter standen sich die Lager gegenüber, „Nazis raus“-Rufe hallten vom Vorplatz der Volksbank über den Stadtgraben zum Wilhelmsplatz herüber. AfD-Kreissprecher Dr. Christian Blex versuchte erfolglos, Führungskräfte der Bereitschaftspolizei zu beeinflussen, die mit Trillerpfeifen und Buhrufen agierenden Demonstranten, die sich aus seiner Sicht nicht an den vereinbarten Zugweg gehalten hatten, zurückzudrängen.
Insgesamt waren rund 80 Beamte der Kreispolizeibehörde Warendorf und der Bereitschaftspolizei aus Münster im Einsatz, um beide Veranstaltungen zu schützen. Laut Pressesprecher Peter Spahn, der mit der „mobilen Wache“ an der Marienkirche platziert war, hat es keine Zwischenfälle gegeben. Zwei „Wasserbömbchen“, die Richtung Podium flogen, trafen niemanden.
Kurz nach Beginn der Kundgebung zogen die Demonstranten weiter, zurück zum Marktplatz, wo die Gegenveranstaltung mit Reden und Live-Musik fortgesetzt wurde. Eine Reihe vornehmlicher jugendlicher Demonstranten harrte aber bis zum Ende der Kundgebung der „Blauen“ am Rande des mit Flatterband abgesperrten Platzes aus. Sie machten während der Reden lautstark ihrem Protest („Es gibt kein Recht auf Nazi-Propaganda“) Luft.
Als um 20.33 Uhr die Kundgebung für die AfDler mit dem Abspielen und Singen der Nationalhymne endete und Deutschland-Fahnen geschwenkt wurden, überquerte ein Heißluftballon in Regenbogenfarben die Szenerie. Pilot Benedikt Haggeney hatte ein Banner der Grünen am Ballonkorb befestigt mit einem Platzverweis: „No go Nazis“.The state government is using taxpayer-funded telephone surveys to gauge residents' support for council mergers in parts of Sydney where the policy has become a political headache for the new premier.
The telephone surveys, which were commissioned by the Department of Premier and Cabinet, were conducted over the past week as the Berejiklian government considers whether to change its council merger policy.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian's cabinet met for the second time on Thursday, but it is not known whether council mergers were discussed.
Among the areas surveyed was Mosman, where dissatisfaction over a proposed merger with North Sydney and Willoughby councils is expected to hurt the government at the upcoming by-election for the seat of North Shore. The seat was vacated after the resignation of dumped minister Jillian Skinner last month.Looking for news you can trust?
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I want to thank Ezra Klein for reminding me about this passage in Politico’s postmortem on the failure of the supercommittee to reach an agreement. It’s a description of the “wish lists” from each side:
House Republicans wanted to repeal Obama’s health care law, implement the controversial House GOP budget drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), save $700 billion by block granting Medicaid, cut $400 billion in mandatory spending, slash another $1.4 trillion in other health care mandatory spending, save $150 billion by slicing the federal workforce and put a $60 billion cap on tort reform. Republicans were no more pleased to see what Democrats wanted: the president’s $447 billion jobs bill plus well over $1 trillion in new taxes.
Right. Toss in the extension of the Bush tax cuts, which Politico leaves out for some reason, and you’ve got $3.7 trillion in tax cuts in addition to repealing Obamacare, making massive cuts in domestic spending, and adopting Paul Ryan’s scorched earth budget blueprint.
Democrats, by contrast, agreed up |
the car. Bill went bankrupt and left the Automotive industry soon after.
This situation my poor imaginary friend Bill found himself in is quite like our modern Health Environment. How did eating get so complicated? Most of us just want to feel good, look good and live a long life. You would think by now there would be a straightforward consensus on what our eating habits should look like, but we’re faced with countless trains of thought on the topic. Maybe we’re supposed to be doing the ABC diet or XYZ diet or something in between? One of the first “diets” was proposed by a man named George Cheyne in 1724. Now, on Amazon you can find over 50,000 different books on the topic.
Like Bill’s car, surely there is a simple way we should be fueling our bodies that is most suitable for its design. Obviously we’re not engineered, but we Homo Sapiens emerged around 200,000 years ago and the majority of that time, the food environment could not have been anything like today’s food environment. Agriculture didn’t even exist for a good 190,000 years of that time. Not even the fruits and vegetables we have today would have been similar as we hadn’t cultivated them to our liking.
So what way of eating did we adapt to? The environment would have chosen our diet rather than us. Your choices would have been to eat what was available or be dead. The idea that our body must have adapted to a certain ratio of macronutrients available in the environment is not novel; and recently has become quite well known due to the “Paleo Diet”. However, what I’m getting at is our body would have also had to have adapted to how often the food was available – there should be a natural frequency of eating that promotes health and longevity.
Where to start?
The logic would be that more nourishment, more food would make you healthier and live longer. But let’s take a look at this from the First Principles method as described by Elon Musk: “It’s kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than first principles. First Principles is a Physics way of looking at the world. And what that really means is you boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say ‘OK what are we sure is true?’ and then reason up from there. That takes a lot more mental energy.”
So what do we know about longevity? Other than exercise, the word “superfood” might come to mind. Maybe more Omega-3’s or some Red Wine or making sure to take supplements and drink less alcohol. There are a lot of things that contribute to longevity, but there is one method accepted by science that you can use to consistently increase longevity. Whether a yeast cell, a mouse or a rhesus monkey, research shows that calorie reduction will almost always increase longevity in animals. We had been seeing results like this since the early 1900’s. Depending on the animal, a 30% reduction in overall caloric intake can result in a 30% increased life span. Let’s reason up from here.
For some time, the conventional wisdom has been that you need to get 3 balanced meals a day to stay healthy. Ever since I was a kid, “Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner” seemed as natural as sleeping or going to the bathroom. Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, I needed a healthy lunch to focus the rest of the school day and being sent to bed without Dinner was child abuse. The situation is basically the same in Japan where I now live, as with the rest of the world. If we want to reduce caloric intake to increase lifespan, the only choice then is to eat less at each meal, because we need 3 meals, right?
But where did this 3 meals a day idea come from? As Abigail Carroll suggests in her book “Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal”: Eating three meals a day was basically invented due to culture, not out of biological necessity. It goes back to Middle Age Europe when they would eat a light meal before going out to work, then a heavy meal in the middle of the day, then another light meal at night. When European settlers got to America, they found Native Americans were basically just eating whenever they felt the urge to, rather than at specified times. The Europeans took their lack of defined eating times as evidence that they were uncivilized and had them change. In short: The 3 meals a day paradigm is not based off of our biological needs.
How our environment designed us
In a Hunter Gatherer culture it wasn’t surprising at all to feast on a big catch, then survive on very little or no food for an extended period of time until they were in need of another big source of fat and protein. In fact, the environment up until now would suggest that if we could not do that, we probably wouldn’t be alive to be reading about dieting. The Pirahã people, an indigenous hunter-gatherer group of the Amazon Rainforest was extensively studied by an anthropological linguist named Daniel Everett. He found they do not eat every day or even attempt to do so. They were even aware of food storage techniques yet never used them except to barter with Brazilian traders. When questioned about why they do not store food for themselves they explained “I store meat in the belly of my brother”.
Until the advent of Agriculture, eating 3 meals a day and in some cases even eating every day was a near impossibility. Some of you may be pointing to the fact that the life expectancy in the Paleolithic era was much lower than now at around 33 years, as a sign that our modern eating habits are healthier. However, infant mortality rate was a big factor in bringing that number down. You have to understand that one of the effects of modern civilization and technology is that you can be unresourceful or made up of weak genetic material and not die. As Doug McGuff explains: “[Life expectancy] didn’t really have anything to do with anabolic catabolic balance or long term health benefits because there were older survivors and the fossil evidence of those older survivors based on ligamentous attachments and bony assessment and bone mineral density was: they were extraordinarily robust.”
Glucose Metabolism & How “conventional wisdom” screwed us
The common misconception is that a stable blood glucose is necessary for survival, which would biologically justify 3 meals a day. Bear with me through a bit of Biochemistry to understand why constantly consuming Carbohydrates to maintain blood glucose is not only unnecessary but can be a detrimental and vicious cycle.
★This is the CliffNotes of Doug McGuff’s presentation, make sure to check out the video of him explaining it in depth
After you eat some carbohydrates- Bread, Pasta, Potatoes, Candy et cetera, Glucose enters the bloodstream and insulin is secreted to distribute the glucose properly. Via an insulin receptor, glucose enters the cells and a chain of enzymes act on it to produce energy in the form of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). This process produces a waste product called Pyruvate which is shuttled through the Mitochondria, “the powerhouse of the cell”. Mitochondria processes the Pyruvate through the Kreb Cycle which produces much more ATP. A waste product called Citrate is produced in the Mitochondria and when enough stacks up it blocks an enzyme called PhosphoFructoKinase in the enzyme chain creating a roadblock so excess glucose doesn’t harm the cell. When the process can’t continue downward, 70 grams is stored in the Liver, and in the Muscle 200 grams. So you have your morning bagel and some Frappacappa thing and you’ve stored all the glucose you can store. After that, glucose can’t be converted to ATP in the cell, stored in the Liver or in the Muscle.
Your body really doesn’t want glucose overloading cells or stacking up in the bloodstream because like pouring pancake syrup on a car engine, it can muck up the machinery in there. This is a harmful inflammatory situation called Glycation where glucose binds to proteins and inhibits their functions. So your body continues to secrete insulin to deal with the glucose. The insulin receptors on your cells become resistant to insulin everywhere, except on your body fat. Your fat cells do not have as complex machinery as other cells, so this probably the safest place to store it. As well as an energy storage depot, your body fat is protecting you from that Glycation damage.
The problem here is that if your energy levels start to wane, you can’t tap the energy out of your stored body fat because the Hormone that does that – Hormone Sensitive Lipase is sensitive to insulin. Insulin will not allow you to tap body fat for energy. If you have an elevated serum insulin and you need energy, you’re going to get ravenously hungry and will need to jack your blood sugar up short term with a snack to raise energy levels.
This is why if you’re following the recommended American diet, you’re usually going to be stuck in this loop of wanting to eat every time your blood glucose drops and 3 meals a day will feel very necessary. Even Medical Doctor Peter Attia fell victim to this: “Despite exercising 3 or 4 hours every single day and following the food pyramid to the letter, I gained a lot of weight and developed something called ‘Metabolic Syndrome’ “
Ketosis to the rescue
There’s another source of energy in your body that is a lot more efficient and stable than glucose. Ketone bodies are produced by the liver from fatty acids to produce energy, when you have depleted your Glycogen stores (which takes 10 to 12 hours depending on your activity level and body composition) ★Glycogen is the stored form of glucose. Ketone bodies can enter the aforementioned Kreb Cycle like Glucose to produce energy in the form of ATP.
You may have heard of this Ketosis state referred to as “Starvation Mode” in school, but this by no means suggests you are about to starve. I particularly dislike this term because it suggests that glucose/carbohydrates is our body’s primary fuel source, when in fact it is possible to live entirely without carbohydrates. Case in point: A 456 pound 27 year old man in Scotland fasted an incredible 382 days consuming only water and vitamin supplements. He lost 276 pounds and completed the fast with no ill effects. He was technically in “Starvation mode” this entire time and his body was using his stored body fat for energy.
Quick note: Ketosis and Diabetic KetoAcidosis are NOT the same.
Several years back, when I first heard about low carb diets, I was skeptical and frankly when I heard my close friend’s mother was trying the Atkins diet, I was worried for her. However, after doing a lot of research and finally properly understanding glucose metabolism, I started doing the ‘Paleo diet’. I felt great in general, had a better physique with less effort and much more stable energy levels. The downside was it got kind of annoying to have to plan my meals, so I would cheat a lot here and there.
The Benefits of Fasting
Even after people were in environments where they could eat much more frequently, the concept of fasting for health benefits has been around for some time. An Egyptian Pyramid Inscription from around 3800 B.C. reads “Humans live on one-quarter of what they eat; on the other three-quarters lives their doctor.” Plato apparently fasted for greater mental efficiency, the “Luther of Medicine” Philippus Paracelsus called fasting “the greatest remedy” and Mark Twain suggested fasting to be more effective than any medicine. The Romans even found that they cure people who were possessed with demons (actually poor misunderstood Epileptics) by shutting them in a room without food.
To simplify an incredibly complex process, aging in essence is the result of cumulative damage to your DNA. Professor of Genetics, David Sinclair and his team found that not eating stimulates the Sirtuin proteins which are directly responsible for DNA repair. Mark Mattson, a professor of Neuroscience at John Hopkins University, gave a speech at TEDxJohnHopkinsUniversity talking about the extensive benefits of fasting for your brain and body. In particular fasting stimulates the production of Neurotrophic Growth Factors, BDNF and FGF which promote the growth of new neurons in the brain. This explains why fasting has been linked to the prevention of neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
This information got me excited about Intermittent fasting. With intermittent fasting you’re not eating for 16 hours of the day which gives your body time to deplete the glycogen stores and start burning fat as well as reap the benefits discussed above. So many sources are pointing to the key being that whether you are doing extended fasting, intermittent fasting or simply eating less, you are giving your body a chance to deplete its Glycogen stores and dip into ketosis, leading to many health benefits. Check out these two studies: “Ketones Keep Neurons Alive” and “The neuroprotective properties of calorie restriction, the ketogenic diet and ketone bodies” I was keen on the fact that I could get similar effects to Paleo with more leeway in my diet. The problem with Intermittent Fasting was I found with myself craving food outside of the 8 hour eating period, and I still had to be somewhat strict with what I ate (although not as strict as my 3 meals a day regimine)
Upton Sinclair who was born in the the late 1800’s and lived to the swell age of 90, published a book in 1911 called “The Fasting Cure”(click here for full text). The book was inspired by the personal accounts of 250 people who cured some ailment with extended fasting. The ailments ranged from colds, headaches and constipation to arthritis, valvular heart disease and cancer. Dr. Alan Goldhamer spoke about how in 2012, a 42 year old patient cured her cancer (stage 3 follicular lymphoma) with a 21 day fast. Nowadays you can find personal accounts of people on Youtube who have cured some ailment of theirs with an extended water fast (consuming nothing but water).
My journey to one meal a day
“The Fasting cure” was one of the first materials that opened me up to the health benefits of more prolonged fasts. I had a lot of inhibitions despite all the incredible personal accounts in there, but once I learned about the Scottish man (mentioned above) who fasted for 382 days, I figured surely a week couldn’t be that big of a deal. I tried a week long fast and gave up around the 4th day even though I didn’t feel particularly bad. While I missed my goal and I didn’t really feel all that different afterward, over the following days I started to notice I didn’t have as much interest in junk food. I used to enjoy eating some delicious refined sugar crap while doing intermittent fasting since it was within my 8 hour eating period, but that fast had reset my eating preferences.
Around this time I came across a book called 「空腹が人を健康にする」”Hunger makes people healthy” by Dr. Yoshinori Nagumo which provides an incredibly compelling argument for limiting yourself to one meal per day. It touched upon many of the things I’ve talked about, some things I didn’t and it dispelled some worries I had like malnutrition and whatnot. (Also, It was easy to trust him since he’s 30 years older than me and looks younger than I do.) I decided to try eating once per day for 2 weeks.
For 3 weeks prior, I had been showing my little sister around Tokyo while eating basically anything and everything that looked good. I started the Nagumo plan the day after she left and the first three days were definitely the hardest. When the clock hit around 11AM, I realized I wasn’t getting the joy from eating that I was used to around this time of day and started really wanting to eat. My stomach didn’t particularly hurt, it was the equivalent of not being able to play video games when getting home from Middle School. Around 4PM is when I was convinced that I really was hungry and needed to eat. Waiting another 30 minutes until 4.30PM to eat was like pushing through a last set of squats. The next two days were slightly easier, and come the 4th day I realized I wasn’t looking at the clock thinking “Only X more hours to go!”.
I decided to test the diet a week later and do a 50 kilometer bike ride to Atsugi from Tokyo. I hadn’t been working out all that much and a usual bike ride for me was about 3 kilometers. It was unsurprisingly difficult, but I never felt physically weak. I had hunger pangs earlier than normal, but I didn’t feel like I had less strength from lack of food. This made me decide to stick with eating once per day. It’s been a month since I started and I feel great in general, my energy levels are very stable, tolerate less sleep better, I feel more focused and surprisingly I have less problems with hunger compared to Intermittent Fasting. It’s not until an hour or 2 before my usual eating time that I start thinking about food and if I’m focused on something I might even eat an hour later than normal.
Even if I don’t eat the healthiest meal I can now feel confident that my body will have more than enough time to empty out whatever excess glycogen or toxins I ingested. (The only time I do crave unhealthy food is when I’ve had some alcohol.) Looking back, it’s hard to imagine having to pile so much food into my stomach throughout the day.
Other than the health benefits, one other reason I do this is the same reason Steve Jobs wore basically the same thing everyday: It makes choosing easier and frees my brain up to focus on other things. (See “Decision Fatigue”)
For myself, the amount of new information I get only changes my behavior by a small factor. For example if I increase my knowledge about the detriments of alcohol by 60% maybe I’ll cut my intake by 30%. With this article alone I’m not expecting you to suddenly start eating once per day, but hopefully you can start giving your body a break and eat when you need to, not when the clock says you should.If you know anything about human evolution, it’s probably that humans arose in Africa. But you may not know how scientists came to that conclusion. It’s one of my favorite stories in the history of paleoanthropology—one that involves an anatomist you’ve probably never heard of and an infant who was attacked by an eagle and dropped into a hole almost three million years ago.
The idea that humans evolved in Africa can be traced to Charles Darwin. In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Darwin speculated that it was “probable” that Africa was the cradle of humans because our two closest living relatives—chimpanzees and gorillas—live there. However, he also noted, a large, extinct ape once lived in Europe millions of years ago, leaving plenty of time for our earliest ancestors to migrate to Africa. So, he concluded, “it’s useless to speculate on the subject.”
By the early 20th century, the world’s leading anatomists thought they knew the answer: Humans evolved somewhere in Europe or Asia. By then, Neanderthals had been found in Europe; Java Man (now known as Homo erectus) had been discovered in Indonesia and Piltdown Man (later exposed as a hoax) had been unearthed in England. Although these ancient beings were primitive, they clearly resembled modern humans.
In 1924, a fossil discovery in South Africa challenged this view of a Eurasian homeland and revolutionized the study of human evolution.
Raymond Dart, an Australian-born anatomist working at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, was interested in fossils. In the fall of 1924, as Dart was preparing to attend a wedding, two boxes of rocks blasted from a limestone quarry near the town of Taung were delivered at his house. Over the objections of his wife, Dart, dressed in formal wear, dug into one of the boxes. He found something amazing: the fossilized mold of a brain.
This was a special brain. The shape and folds on the brain’s surface implied it belonged to some kind of human—perhaps an ancient human ancestor, Dart thought. Further digging led Dart to another rock that the brain fit perfectly into. After months of careful chipping, Dart freed the brain’s corresponding face and lower jaw on December 23. “I doubt if there was any parent prouder of his offspring,” Dart later wrote in his 1959 book Adventures with the Missing Link, “on that Christmas of 1924.”
It was probably the best Christmas present a paleoanthropologist could ever receive. The creature’s baby teeth revealed that it was a child (probably 3 or 4 years old, scientists now think). Other features of the so-called Taung Child confirmed Dart’s suspicion that he was handling a human ancestor. Although the being looked apish in many ways, the face lacked a pronounced muzzle as seen in chimps and gorillas. And the placement of the hole through which the spinal cord exits the bottom of the skull—the foramen magnum—suggested the Taung Child had an erect posture and walked upright on two legs (animals that travel on four legs, such as chimps and gorillas, have a foramen magnum more toward the back of the skull).
Dart wasted no time in reporting his results, announcing in early February 1925, in the journal Nature (PDF), that he had found “an extinct race of apes intermediate between living anthropoids and man.” He named it Australopithecus africanus (“Southern Ape of Africa”).
Australopithecus africanus did not receive a warm welcome from experts in the field. In the minds of most academics, there was a lot to criticize. Many derided Dart for rushing to publication, and media hoopla surrounding the announcement—before experts had a chance to take a close look at the finding—irked more established anatomists. Researchers even ridiculed Dart for mixing Latin and Greek when inventing the name “Australopithecus.”
The biggest problems were scientific. No one had any idea what the Taung Child would have looked like as an adult. Furthermore, in addition to being from the wrong continent, the fossil was too ape-like to fit the early-20th-century view of human evolution. At the time, fossils like Piltdown Man indicated the earliest humans evolved big brains before other aspects of modern human physiology emerged—even before the ability to walk upright. Thus, experts dismissed the Taung fossil as just an old ape.
But at least one person thought Dart was right. Paleontologist Robert Broom took up Dart’s cause. While investigating several limestone caves in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s, Broom discovered numerous fossils of adult “ape-men” specimens that looked similar to Dart’s Taung Child. The mounting evidence—plus the uncovering of the Piltdown Hoax in the late 1940s and early 1950s—convinced even the most ardent skeptics that australopithecines belonged in the human family, and that Africa was the birthplace of humans. The work dramatically altered the trajectory of human evolution studies, changing where people looked for human fossils and what they expected to find.
Not all of Dart’s ideas have stood the test of time, however. As fossils of australopithecines were uncovered in South African caves, Dart noticed they were always found in association with animal parts—particularly the teeth, jaws and horns of hoofed animals. Dart believed these were the remains of an “osteodontokeratic” (bone, tooth and horn) culture, in which early humans used these broken bits as tools for warfare and hunting. Scientists later realized that predators such as leopards had accumulated the heaps of bones. In fact, holes on the Taung Child reveal it was the victim of a hungry eagle that dropped part of its meal into the entrance of the cave where the fossil was eventually found.
I never get tired of the story of Raymond Dart, in part because the Taung Child is kind of an adorable fossil. But mostly it’s because Dart’s work is a great reminder that nothing in human evolution is written in stone; you have to keep an open mind.After single-handedly beating Russia (sad face) in an Olympic shootout last year, the TJ Oshie #brand became more closely associated with the US National Team than the NHL team he played for, the St. Louis Blues. Now that he’s been traded to the Capitals, Oshie, much like this new RMNB T-shirt, is 1,776% more patriotic.
Now excuse me while I go shout some things. FREEDOM! APPLE PIE! EAGLES! KEN GRIFFEY’S GROTESQUELY SWOLLEN JAW!
Well thanks to @becauseNHL, we can now properly celebrate TJ Oshie’s arrival in Washington by having an Independence Day Photoshop Challenge featuring TJ Oshie’s face.
Take this.PNG and go wild. Put Oshie’s head on an eagle. Have him signing the Declaration Of Independence. Turn TJ into a Broshie and have him surfing while holding sparklers.
Upload your ‘shops in the comments and up-vote your favorites.
Here are a few examples that have been already been submitted to us on Twitter.
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PinterestJimmy Butler and his former coach Tom Thibodeau shared hugs before and after the Bulls’ 99-94 defeat to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Tuesday night at the United Center. Butler, now one of the NBA’s biggest stars, poured 27 points, 9 rebounds and 6 assists into his box score in Chicago’s worst loss of the season. It was the kind of performance Bulls fans have come to expect from the two-time All Star. But when Butler came into the league as the last pick in the first round of the 2011 NBA Draft, not many people expected him to become a household name, let alone a scoring machine.
There was one night, however, that Thibodeau pinpoints as the moment he knew the Bulls had found someone special in the Marquette kid. And it had nothing to do with his offensive game.
Bright Lights, Tough Gig
February 2, 2012. The Bulls are in New York taking on the Knicks at Madison Square Garden. Thibodeau is without the services of his best wing defender Luol Deng, who would’ve been tasked with guarding superstar Carmelo Anthony. Instead, Ronnie Brewer gets the tough assignment for most of the evening. It doesn’t go well, particularly in the 3rd quarter when the Knicks made a strong run to get back in the game. Anthony scored 12 of his 26 points in that frame on 6-10 shooting.
Clinging to a two point lead entering the 4th quarter, Thibodeau makes a bold move. He switches the untested Butler onto Carmelo. True to Thibs’ form, he hasn’t shown the rookie many minutes yet this season. He hasn’t earned the coach’s trust. Now he throws Jimmy to the metaphorical wolves, matched up with a superstar scorer on the NBA’s brightest stage. “That guy’s killing us. Go stop him, kid.”
And that’s exactly what Butler did.
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[USE ARROWS ABOVE TO CONTINUE READING]Valve Software is revealing details surrounding its efforts to share its innovative tracking technology with others, declaring: “ATTENTION INVENTORS, PRODUCT DESIGNERS, VR HACKERS, AND DEVICE MANUFACTURERS: Use the World’s Best 3D Tracking Technology, Royalty Free.”
Licensees of Valve’s SteamVR Tracking technology get access to “a hardware development kit including a reference tracked device, sensors, and software tools to help design and build new devices.” For the time being, Valve is requiring licensees physically attend a $3,000 session held by a partner company called Synapse to “propel your design team into the world of SteamVR Tracking.” The first sessions are in September.
We’re still digesting everything revealed on the page and the assoicated Q&A, but there are all sorts of interesting tidbits like the comment that “a host” is needed to integrate”3D positional information from multiple devices.” This is a PC “for now.”
The Q&A page also states there’s “no catch” — “it’s just the best tracking tech out there, and you can have it for use in your product. There is a cost for the introductory class, so that’s kind of a catch if you want to call it one. But: No licensing fees! No royalties!”
Valve uses bases stations with spinning lasers scanning the room combined with “simple trigonometry to find the location of each sensor to within a fraction of a millimeter.” These kinds of sensors are all over the HTC Vive controllers and headset and it is key to the Vive’s mind-blowing walk-around VR technology. Other companies like Optitrack and Oculus use different kinds of cameras to see markers or lights placed on headsets, controllers, or objects.
If you attach sensors to an object like a ping pong paddle would bring the paddle itself into a VR experience, providing the exact feel of a real object in VR. All you would need to do is make the paddle vibrate in the right spot to provide the exact feeling of playing a real game of ping pong. This is precisely the type of accessory licensees should be able to build with access to the technology.
It doesn’t appear base station design is part of what they are opening up to third-parties at the moment, stating “we need to make sure that there is complete compatibility among base stations and tracked devices. Longer term, we do want the hardware community to help us evolve base station design and to help innovate in that area, but given our own limited bandwidth we need to push that collaboration out to some future date.”
Details to come. Thanks to @steamDB and Martin Benjamins for alerting us to these pages.
Tagged with: steamThe economic effects of goods and factor market integration
Lorenzo Caliendo, Luca David Opromolla, Fernando Parro, Alessandro Sforza
The effects of international trade and of international migration have been central to the recent debate on economic integration. Evaluating trade and migration policies is challenging, however, because they often take place at the same time and reinforce each other, making it hard to distinguish their effects. This column uses a general equilibrium approach to quantify the effects of the 2004 EU enlargement. It finds that all EU countries gained from enlargement, but that the largest winners were the new member states, and in particular their low-skilled workers.
The economic effects of economic integration are a central topic of debate in Europe, the US, and other countries around the world. This is mainly due to an increased resistance to the process of globalisation in recent years. Two aspects of economic integration that have been specially questioned are the economic effects of international trade and the economic effects of international migration. In the case of Europe, the effects of trade and migration have been a central topic historically (for instance, during the process of the EU enlargement; e.g. Buti et al. 2009) as well as nowadays, with the influx of refugees from war-torn countries (Hatton 2011), and with Brexit (Baldwin 2016). What are the welfare and other economic effects of relaxing migration and/or trade restriction across countries?
The evaluation of the economic effects of changes to trade and migration policies is challenging in at least three dimensions.
First, countries have different production structures, endowments of infrastructure, and composition of labour force. Also, firms and workers across countries face different restrictions to move goods across countries or to migrate to other countries. Therefore, any evaluation must take into account these multidimensional interactions between heterogeneous countries.
The second challenge is to recognise that migration and trade go hand-in-hand not only because most free trade agreements have an explicit commitment to liberalise factor markets, but also because trade in goods has feedback effects on a country’s productivity and real wages, and, in turn, on the labour market impact of immigration.
Third, when evaluating changes to trade and migration policies, these policy changes must be measured. This is relatively straightforward for the case of trade policy since changes in tariffs are observed. However, it is more difficult to measure change to migration policy since the resulting change in mobility costs is not directly observable.
Quantifying the economic effects of the 2004 EU enlargement
In a recent paper, we propose an approach to overcome these challenges, and we use our approach to quantify the general equilibrium effects of the actual changes to trade and migration policies from the 2004 EU enlargement (Caliendo et al. 2017a). The 2004 enlargement is an agreement between member states of the EU and new member states that includes both goods market integration, and factor market integration. On the integration in the goods market, tariffs were reduced to zero starting in 2004, and the new member states resigned from previous free trade agreements (FTAs) and joined the EU's FTAs. On factor market integration, migration restrictions were eliminated, although the timing of these changes to migration policies varied across countries.
To quantify the economic effects of the 2004 enlargement, we first build a quantitative multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model with costly trade and costly migration. After that, we construct a complete dataset of bilateral gross migration flows by nationality and skill across 17 EU countries for the period 2001-2010. The raw data to construct these gross flows are from the European Labour Force Survey, a large household sample survey providing harmonised data. We then use our constructed data to identify the changes in migration costs due to the changes in policy. Finally, we feed into our structural model these estimates, as well as the observed changes in tariffs, and quantify the welfare and migration effects of the 2004 EU enlargement.
Our dynamic structural model features households of different skills and nationality with forward-looking relocation decisions. The decision to migrate depends on the household’s location, nationality, skill, migration costs that are affected by policy, and an idiosyncratic shock à la Artuç et al. (2010). Keeping track of each household's nationality is relevant in the context of changes to migration policies, as households of different nationalities living in the same country potentially face different migration restrictions to other countries because of the state of migration policy in each country. The dynamic decision of households on where and when to migrate is particularly important in the context of the EU enlargement, since countries reduced migration restrictions sequentially over time. Moreover, it turns out that the possibility to move in the future to another country whose real wages have increased adds to the welfare of a worker by raising her option value of being in a given location. In fact, even if migrants and natives obtain the same real wage in a given country, they value each location differently since they face different continuation values as a result of different migration costs.
The production side of our framework features producers of differentiated varieties in each country with heterogeneous technology as in Eaton and Kortum (2002). Goods in each country are produced with workers of different skills, fixed factors (structures, land), and the level of technology is assumed to be proportional to the size of the economy. The technology assumption captures the idea that there are benefits from firms and people locating next to each other. The fixed factor in the production function takes into account the fact that immigration can strain infrastructure in countries that lack of it. Goods are traded across countries subject to trade costs which depend on geographic barriers and trade policy (tariffs) as in Caliendo and Parro (2015). In the model, a change to trade policy impacts the terms of trade which in turn influences the effect of a change to migration restrictions. All these features shape the economic effects of trade and labour market integration. Understanding the overall contribution of these channels is a quantitative question that we answer in the context of an actual change in policy.
As mentioned above, evaluating the effects of the EU enlargement requires information on how trade and migration costs changed due to the policy. To identify the changes in migration costs due to the change in policy, we exploit the cross-country variation in the timing of the adoption of the new migration policy. We estimate the whole set of changes in migration costs due to the EU enlargement over the period 2002-2007. That is, for NMS nationals that migrate from NMS countries to EU countries, for NMS nationals that migrate across NMS countries, and for EU nationals that migrate from EU countries to NMS countries. Our identification strategy relies on the assumption that the trend in migration costs between countries that change migration policy and those that do not would have been the same in the absence of the EU enlargement. An assumption that we confirm by running several placebo tests. In terms of trade policy, we measure changes in trade policy with the observed changes in tariffs across countries.
We then feed into our structural model our estimated changes in migration costs due to the change in policy and the observed change in tariffs. We compute the model using the ‘dynamic hat algebra’ methodology developed in Caliendo et al. (2017b), and quantify the effects of the 2004 EU enlargement.
Our results
Starting with the migration effects, we find that the response of migration to the change in policy takes time, that is, we find a small increase in migrants from new member states into the EU countries in the short run, but a much larger increase in the long run. We find that the EU enlargement primarily fostered the migration of low-skilled workers and that trade policy helped to moderate migration flows and mitigate congestion effects.
Turning to the welfare effects, we find that the largest winners were the new member states, and in particular their low-skilled workers, although we find positive welfare effects for high-skilled workers as well. EU countries are also better off with the enlargement, but welfare gains were smaller. Importantly, we find that in the absence of changes to trade policy, the EU countries would have been worse off after the enlargement. We also find that the level of trade openness quantitatively impacts the welfare evaluation of changes to migration policy. Our results are robust to the inclusion of other mechanisms in our framework, such as the presence of public goods financed with labour taxes.
Concluding remarks
We provide a quantitative assessment of the general equilibrium economic effects of goods and labour market integration. The results of this study could be used to discipline the current debate. Yet, more needs to be done and we hope that more quantitative tools are used and developed to guide future discussions on the economic effects of economic integration.
Overall, our research contributes to the literature on trade and migration by proving a novel approach to quantify general equilibrium effects of actual changes to trade and migration policy. Crucially, our results show that abstracting from modelling the interactions across heterogeneous countries, and in particular from international trade, lead to an incorrect welfare evaluation of trade and migration policies. Our results for the case of the 2004 EU enlargement have also shown that economic integration, that includes both trade in good and migration, is not a zero-sum game, and can be mutually beneficial for |
a look back, I thought I’d share one of my favorite Rollins videos. I’ve already done a full-fledged Dark Match Dungeon for all three members of The Shield, so this is just a nice little bonus. Without further ado, here’s Seth Rollins leaping off a fan to attack Matt Sydal (also known as Evan Bourne).
If the video description is to be trusted, this is from an IWA Mid-South match in 2005. He goes down pretty much 100 percent on his head, but that doesn’t stop this from being awesome. In fact, I think he’s at his best when he’s realizing IN MID-AIR just how insane he is. He’s been the Wile E. Coyote of wrestling for a decade, and he’s now the top guy, so to speak, in WWE. I hope I’m not the only one who thinks that’s pretty cool. Also, I’m pretty sure that’s Chikara senior official and national treasure Bryce Remsburg with the unforgettable, “AND HE’S WITH CHILD,” call at the end.Segregation is baked into the way people and institutions discuss health care at its most basic levels. Racial differences in almost every health outcome—from infant mortality to life expectancy––are obvious and pronounced, especially between white people and black people. Perhaps because of the sheer size of the evidence of health disparities, all sides of health-policy debates acknowledge their existence, a consensus that has yet to be achieved in debates about education or criminal justice. Yet segregation in health care is rarely discussed in those terms, and its importance in shaping the larger narrative of race in America is often ignored.
Like other forms of segregation, health-care segregation was originally a function of explicitly racist black codes and Jim Crow laws. Many hospitals, clinics, and doctor’s offices were totally segregated by race, and many more maintained separate wings or staff that could never intermingle under threat of law. The deficit of trained black medical professionals (itself caused by a number of factors including education segregation) meant that no matter where black people received health-care services, they would find their care to be subpar compared to that of whites. While there were some deaths that were directly attributable to being denied emergency service, most of the damage was done in establishing the same cumulative health disparities that plague black people today as a societal fate. The descendants of enslaved people lived much more dangerous and unhealthy lives than white counterparts, on disease-ridden and degraded environments. Within the confines of a segregated health-care system, these factors became poor health outcomes that shaped black America as if they were its genetic material.
The sweeping tide of Civil Rights papered over the fissures that were built into Jim Crow-era health-care, but progress was slow and proved much more difficult to assess than progress in education or housing. Generations of strict geographical segregation left hospitals that served black people deeply segregated, understaffed, and under-resourced. The number of black physicians has never come close to matching their demographic share of the total population. Unlike the temporary integration gains in education, there is no real high-water mark for the state of health-care integration.
The 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act aimed to set that mark. The ACA functioned as a stealthy civil-rights achievement of the Obama presidency, promising to make health care less of a financial burden, end disparities in health-care coverage, ease barriers to access for people of color, and subsidize preventative health-care services that proved especially lacking in black neighborhoods.
Although the ACA has undoubtedly succeeded at some of those metrics and is still being evaluated for some others, the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in NFIB v. Sebelius seriously weakened its most key provision. The broad Medicaid expansion to poor people was effectively turned into a state opt-in, and state decisions to expand Medicaid have so far been largely based on ideological grounds. Southern conservative governors and legislatures opposing the ACA on party lines or concerns about expanded federal authority and the costs of the program have formed most of the resistance to the ACA. And many of their states have large black populations. Seven of the ten states with the highest black populations chose not to expand Medicaid. Overall, more than half of the people who are now categorically unable to access any affordable health coverage are people of color. Thirty percent of people without affordable coverage options are black.Now that he’s taken the Red Pill, the Reddittor who calls himself F9R recently announced, he’s “started seeing women as people rather than as magical beautiful goddess creatures.” That’s a good thing, right? Seeing women as actual human beings rather than some imaginary construct?
Well, not so much. Because it turns out that women are just terrible as human beings. No, it’s true! In a rambling comment in the Red Pill subreddit with more than 100 upvotes, F9R reports his scientific findings on the ladies of the world.
Now I’m disillusioned with them because women, for the most part, are boring people. 95% of them spend more time on their appearance than anything else, so as a result they never really have interesting hobbies or develop respectable skill in any particular area. This, in my opinion, could be one of the reasons that women have historically under-performed in almost every activity/industry.
Ah, that explains it! There haven’t been any women presidents, or Popes, or Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because the ladies are spending way too much time fussing with their lipstick and trying to find the exact right shade of eyeshadow.
There haven’t been more women inventors, not because women were denied education for thousands of years or because STEM fields are filled with angry manbabies who cry oppression whenever a woman comes near, but because women don’t have any fascinating, mentally stimulating hobbies like the Red Pillers of the world have. You know, like weight-lifting, or “Game,” or “saying terrible things about women online.”
So you swallow the pill, look around you, and see two groups of people. The first group, men, generally have no innate value and have had to work for everything in life. This is why the loser-winner spectrum is so broad for men; don’t work at all and you’ll end up homeless, work your ass off and you could make millions. The second group, women, have considerable innate value and don’t spend nearly as much time fighting to stay respectable, because they can always fall back on their female safety net; this is why there are almost no homeless women, but it’s rare to find a female CEO.
Ah, the old “female safety net.” You know, the free reserve of rent money and bon bons that all women have access to. Or does he mean “well, if worse comes to worst, you can always become a prostitute”
Not quite as easy to understand as the concept of an oppressive patriarchy, but demonstrably more accurate.
He’s got that right: it’s definitely not as easy to understand.
Tying this in with sex drive: an RP’er will have a hard time respecting plates or women they meet at the bar, because when looking at these women as people rather than as magical, mysterious women, the man will be underwhelmed by her bland personality and/or her obnoxious attempts to seem less bland by being a loud annoying cunt. Still, if she’s got a nice pair of tits and a round ass, you can forgive her personality and lack of emotional development.
Gosh, I am shocked that a whiny manchild who refers to women as “plates” can’t find anything interesting about them besides their sexy bits.
But then let’s say you get her in bed, and you fuck her, and you’re having a good time. As soon as you finish and are in that refractory period, you look over at the person next to you and see them differently. The tits and ass lose a bit of their appeal since you just finished, and now you see the person next to you for the immature person they really are, and it’s like you’re lying in bed with a child.
Huh. Just a thought, but if you want to date mature women you might want to start by dating, you know, mature women, instead of creepily fixating on women and girls much younger than you are?
Or maybe what’s really happening is that when you look over at the woman you just had sex with, she’s looking at you with disgust, wondering how the hell she ended up in bed with such an asshole, and you rationalize away her disdain towards you as her being “immature.”
It’s weird as fuck and you start to question your life choices. Next time you go out to the bar, you remember that moment, and decide to raise your maturity standards a little. To your dismay, no women measure up.
I hate to tell you this, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t a lot of mature women who see your bitter, immature ass as much of a prize.
That’s the Catch-22 of the Red Pill. It gives you all the women you could ever want, but you see them for what they really are.
Yeah, I’m sure that’s the problem. You’re dizzy with success.
So you’ve got two choices: work on your game and improve yourself in order to keep fucking barely-sentient organic sex toys, or go your own way and focus on your life instead because the game just isn’t worth it to you.
The grapes barely-sentient organic sex toys are definitely sour.
Men who choose the former are Red Pill alphas, and men who choose the latter are MGTOW. Blue Pillers just ignore the game and continue to get screwed over because they have no idea what they’re doing.
Keep telling yourself that.
And seriously, go your own fucking way already. Just do it. The further away, the better. If you think of women as barely sentient organic sex toys, stick with the non-organic, non-sentient variety of sex toy and leave the actual human beings alone.
Oh, and speaking of needlepoint, here’s my favorite song about crocheting. I know I’ve posted it before, but I don’t care. It’s not every day I have such a good excuse to post Julie Ruin.
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Like this: Like Loading...This Day in Hogan History: 1953 CHAMPION GOLFER OF THE YEAR
By: Mark Baron – On July 10, 1953, Ben won the Open Championship played at the Carnoustie Championship Course, to become the “Champion Golfer of the Year”. Hogan shot a 70 and a 68 in the two final rounds played that day, winning by four strokes over American Amateur Frank Stranahan, Antonio Cerdá from Argentina, Dai Rees from Wales and Peter Thomson from Australia.
In the Morning Round
Ben shot a 70 to tie for the lead with Roberto de Vicenzo who had a 69. In second place were Dai Rees and Peter Thomson, one stroke back.
Hogan was even par through the fourth hole, but bogied the fifth. He hit a beautiful 250-yard drive in the middle of the fairway, but pulled his six iron, the ball rolling over the green into deep rough, 30 feet from the green and 70 feet from the pin. His chip came out poorly and left himself 25 feet for par. He rolled it past the hole by three feet, but calmly sank the putt for a bogie five.
Hogan’s strategy in playing the 567 yard par five, sixth hole – placing his tee shot between fairway bunkers and the out of bounds marker, taking the direct route to the pin – paid off again as it had in the previous two rounds. He hit his best tee shot thus far for the day, a drive of at least 260 yards. His four wood second shot landed 20 feet in front of the green and 80 feet from the hole. He chipped to within 15 feet and dropped the putt for a birdie four.
On the 389 yard seventh hole Ben sank one of his best putts of the week, a 25-footer to take a birdie.
On the eighth, a 162 yard par three, Hogan hit a great tee shot, 35 feet short of the pin, but missed the putt by a couple of inches to take a par.
His tee shot on the ninth hole was just to the left of the fairway. Hogan took over a minute to decide upon his club selection. He finally hit and the ball landed on the green. He putted to within two feet and his par putt almost spun out of the hole, before dropping in. Ben stood on his toes as the ball trickled around the cup.
Hogan made par on the tenth hole, a 446-yard par four hitting driver and a three iron for his second shot landing him 40 feet from the hole.
Teeing off on the eleventh hole, Hogan hit his biggest drive of the week, at least 300 yards. He hit his pitch shot to within 20 feet, but missed the birdie putt.
After his drive on the twelfth, Hogan hit a five iron to 40 feet and barely missed his birdie putt as it rolled four feet past. His par putt stayed on the lip and he had to settle for another bogie.
Hogan bounced back with a birdie on the thirteenth making an 11-foot putt on the par three 167-yard hole.
He made another birdie on the 473 yard par five 14th hole after hitting another 300+ yard drive, hitting his second shot to just off the green. His approach landed six feet from the hole and he sank the putt.
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On the 15th hole he got a par four after a solid 250-yeard drive. His second was 40 feet short and on the approach putt he missed another birdie when the ball inexplicably jumped over the hole. He groaned aloud and the gallery groaned along with him.
Hogan double bogied the 17th hole, that started with a layup drive of 220 yards. His next shot landed in a deep sand bunker. He blasted out to within 35 feet of the pin. His first putt was five feet short and his next putt hung on the lip of the cup taking a six.
He came back with a birdie on 18 after a 230 yard drive. He used a two iron and landed 25 feet from the cup. His eagle putt missed by an inch, but settled for a birdie.
In the Afternoon Round
Over 15,000 spectators watch Ben shoot a final round 68 at Carnoustie, beating the course record by one shot that was set in the morning round earlier that day by American Amateur, Frank Stranahan, to win the Open Championship by four strokes over the second place finishers Stranahan, Antonio Cerdá from Argentina, Dai Rees from Wales and Peter Thomson from Australia.
In his second round of the day Ben played mechanically without showing emotion, chain smoking cigarettes, hitting every fairway and 17 greens in regulation with no bogeys and birdies at the fifth, sixth, 13th and 18th holes.
On the par four fifth hole Ben hit a shot that is considered one of the greatest in Major Championship history. He landed his second shot in a deep grass bunker beside the green, 30 yards from the hole. His chip shot boldly struck the back of the cup, bounced a foot in the air and fell into the hole for a birdie three.
On the par five 567-yard sixth hole, Hogan hit a huge 300 yard drive in the 25 yard wide slot between the fairway bunkers and the out of bounds markers. He hit his second shot 80 yards short of the green, chipped to within three feet and sank the putt for a birdie. The sixth hole at Carnoustie has bunkers in the middle of the fairway starting at about 180 yards from the tee, forming two paths to the green. The fairway to the right of bunkers is the safe route, the left route is only 20 yards wide between the bunkers and out of bounds lining the entire left side, but the angle for the next shot is much better from which to attack the green. Ben was the only golfer who bravely landed his tee shot between the fairway bunkers and the out of bound markers every round to make birdies. After the tournament the hole was officially named “Hogan’s Alley” in his honor.
Hogan played the 406 yard par four, tenth hole in the morning round with a driver, three-iron, and made his par. But during the afternoon round after a good drive, Ben reached for the three-iron again, but his caddie, Cecil Timms said, “The winds changed up there. It’s a 2-iron.” This was a critical moment in the tournament as he was tied for the lead at this point, Hogan glared at him, thought it over, and took out the 2-iron, and said: “If this shot goes through the green, I’ll wrap this two iron around your neck.” Timms later said that it appeared Hogan took the hardest swing he’d taken at any shot during the whole championship, trying to hit the ball through the green, just to prove him wrong. But the ball stopped on the green about 10 feet past the flag, and he easily two-putted for his par.
On the 167-yard thirteenth hole, he hit his tee shot to 12 feet and calmly sank the putt for birdie.
He finished with flair on the 503-yard par five eighteenth hole reaching the green in two shots and two putting from 35 feet for a closing birdie.
After the tournament Ben, being such a gentleman, refused to go to the podium to accept the Claret Jug for winning the tournament without wearing a jacket wanting to show the deserved respect for the tournament’s sense of decorum, the committee members and the spectators. At the time, it was misunderstood by those waiting that Ben was being rude, but the problem was that his jacket was outside of the golf course’s boundaries. Finally Hogan borrowed a jacket from Harry Andrew from the “Sunday Express”, so the jacket you see him wearing belonged to another man.
During the presentation Ben was quoted: “This is one of the toughest courses I have ever played. Every shot is either blind or semi-blind. These are the best galleries I have ever seen. There is bound to be some running, but on the whole I think the crowds have minded the stewards wonderfully. I really mean it – these are fine galleries. I cannot say now whether I will return to Britain in the fall to play in the Ryder Cup. Just now I feel tired. I cannot say whether I will be over here next year to defend my title in the British Open. That also depends on how I feel. I have a cold and I have been playing golf almost every day since March. During this entire tournament I have been so exhausted after each round that I have had to go to bed. I feel good, but so very tired.”
The Scottish people in Carnoustie showed Ben more adoration in the two weeks’ time he spent there than he was used to receiving in America, even though most of Ben’s comments about Scotland and the courses were not very complimentary when he arrived. He was quoted about the condition of the course: “Those greens are like putting on putty,” he said of the slow-running surfaces. “I think I’ll get them a lawn mower sent from Texas so they can cut them real close.” When told they’d been cut twice that day, Hogan shot back: “It would have helped if they had put the blades in the mower.”
But Ben warmed up to the Scottish hospitality. Valerie said she never saw her husband laugh as much as he did that week nor did she ever see him look happier or more at ease signing autographs or walking amongst the crowds. When he was served a silver dollar sized steak the night before the final day of the tournament Valerie told him that the staff at the guesthouse pooled their ration coupons to get it. He could not believe how incredibly generous they were to make that kind of sacrifice for him. As he was leaving to go back to the States the entire staff at the guesthouse lined up outside to wish him and Valerie farewell. They showed him that throughout the week they had filled his golf bag with good luck charms. There was not a dry eye as he went down the line offering his appreciation to every single person and bidding them goodbye.
After the tournament, Ben took a two week vacation traveling around Europe with his wife Valerie and was invited to play golf by the King of Belgium. Ben declined the invitation saying that he never plays golf on his vacation.
This was Hogan’s 10th and final major victory (We, of course, count the 1942 US Open, aka the Hale America Open). Only Jack Nicklaus (18), Tiger Woods (14) and Walter Hagen (11) have more, but their careers were not interrupted by world wars and head on collisions with a bus.
With this victory, Ben became the second person to win all four professional majors in his career (Gene Sarazen was the first, since matched by Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods).
He was the first person to win three professional majors in one calendar year, matched only by Tiger Woods in 2000.
He belongs to a list of five golfers who won multiple professional majors in multiple years Ben Hogan (3), Gene Sarazen (2), Arnold Palmer (2), Jack Nicklaus (4) and Tiger Woods (4).
He belongs to a list of 18 golfers who won two or more majors in a calendar year, Ben Hogan, 1948, 1951, 1953; Arnold Palmer, 1960, 1962; Robert T. Jones, 1926, 1927, 1930; Craig Wood, 1941; Gary Player, 1974; Gene Sarazen, 1922, 1932; Jack Nicklaus, 1963, 1966, 1972, 1975, 1980; Lee Trevino, 1971; Mark O’Meara, 1998; Nick Faldo, 1990; Nick Price, 1994; Padraig Harrington, 2008; Sam Snead, 1949; Tiger Woods, 1977, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2006; Tom Watson, 1982; Walter Hagen, 1924; Rory McIlroy 2014; Jordan Spieth 2015.
Ben is included in the short list of nine people who won the Open Championship on their first attempt: Willie Park Sr. – Prestwick (1860 – the first time the championship was held), Tom Kidd – St Andrews (1873), Mungo Park – Musselburgh (1874), Jock Hutchison – St Andrews (1921), Denny Shute – St Andrews (1933), Ben Hogan – Carnoustie (1953), Tony Lema – St Andrews (1964), Tom Watson – Carnoustie (1975) and Ben Curtis – Royal St George’s (2003).
He is on the short list of four champions who shot progressively lower scores in each round at this tournament: Jack White, 1904, Royal St George’s: 80, 75, 72, 69; James Braid, 1906, Muirfield: 77, 76, 74, 73; Ben Hogan, 1953, Carnoustie: 73, 71, 70, 68; and Gary Player, 1959, Muirfield: 75, 71, 70, 68.
Mark Baron Mark Baron is a Ben Hogan expert who posts daily about the legend. Check out Mark's huge following on the Ben Hogan Facebook Page and stay tuned for special Hogan anniversaries for Mark's insight. Check out the page here: www.facebook.com/benhogangolfOk, you guys.This might be a long comment but bear with me because it gets interesting and shows you what an absolute bitchass and hypocrite Vegan Gains is. There's this youtuber named Doc Testosterone who made a bunch of videos criticising VG. In his videos, he questions VGs credentials, his cherry picking of studies, his flawed methodology etc etc. VG is aware of these videos because he commented on one of them. So a few weeks ago, On his HomeGrown Big video. VG commented saying he "would respond to Doc Testosterone soon". There was even another discussion about Doc on VGs video titled "Why saturated fat and cholesterol in unhealthy". Now here's the strange part. Those comments were the top comments. VGs comment in that thread had 198 likes. They aren't there any more because VG went back and deleted the comments and the whole thread! That's why I find it extremely hypocritical for him to make a video saying "Bearing chickens out of debate" when he did the same thing, but did it in the most bitchass way possible! Unfortunately, I didn't screenshot the comments because I didn't think he would delete them. Many people are aware of this incident though. If you go to Doc Testosterones channel. There is a video called "Meat eater cooks his first vegan meal". Other people are saying the same thing I am.That VG said he would respond to Doc. The guy who started that thread (Trejos world) has his own channel and videos. And if you ask him, he will confirm this. VG even banned my other account from commenting on his channel because I was pestering him about it. Look, I dont care if you guys think Doc is clown or a goof or whatever. VG has time to make videos about the dumbest people (tana mongeau, niki avocado) and shit that doesnt even have anything to do with veganism, like Islam and video games. But when it comes to debating an actual qualified medical professional. VG backs out after HE HIMSELF SAID HE WOULD. It's a shame his fans dont hold him accountable to his word! PS IVE STARTED SCREENSHOTTING THESE COMMENTS AND OFTEN CHECK THEM FROM MY ALT ACCOUNT Just in case you delete them and ban my account from commenting om your channel
Read more Show lessAstonishing footage out of Minnesota shows the Mayor of New Brighton breaking down into tears after one fellow councilmember refuses to acknowledge her “white privilege.”
In an October 3, 2017, city council meeting, councilwoman Mary Burg lectures her fellow peers on why they should feel guilty for being white.
“Okay, we all have white privilege. We don’t know what it’s like to not have it because we do. We go everywhere and we’re just… we have that. We… we don’t know the difference. We don’t know what it’s like to not have it and I said we can’t do what… look at who’s up here. We can’t move forward as all being people of white privilege. We can’t, because we don’t know the difference of not having it.”
Burg’s outlandish assertions were immediately challenged by councilwoman Gina Bauman, who explained she was a child of immigrants and had to work hard for what she had.
“Because I’m white, you think I was privileged my whole life? Are you kidding?” Bauman retorts. “I grew up in an Italian neighborhood. They came here – my grandfather came – they didn’t speak English, but they assimilated.”
Bauman goes on to highlight why she finds Burg’s comments reprehensible, saying, “I resent that you think that I had white privilege.”
“Everybody I work for, or with is usually from another country and they say to me, here’s what they say, is we as Americans don’t realize – and it doesn’t matter what color we are as Americans, because I believe we are all Americans – is that we are privileged to just live here. “So I don’t want to think that this body doesn’t feel that they can’t represent people because they’re white, and that again to me is just saying, ‘I’m different because of color.’ No. I might be different because of culture, because of tradition, but those are the things that I think I always ask when I, cause I work with these people. “I ask about their country, I ask about their families, I ask how it is, how they feel about America. All of that. That’s how you get to know somebody. That’s how you get to understand where they come from, where their opinions come from. But I don’t think you can make such a broad brush and say that we’ve all been privileged or that we don’t understand because we’re white.”
The confrontation escalates when Mayor Val Johnson wades into the debate, proceeding to accuse Bauman of being “racist” for refusing to admit being white is wrong.
“You are the exact reason we need this commission,” Mayor Johnson tells Bauman. “If you don’t understand white privilege then you are not representing those people. You’re not willing to listen to them and what you have just said is the most racist…”
“Excuse me?” Bauman shoots back. “Don’t you ever, ever accuse me of that. You have no basis to say something like that in public and no basis to say something like that.”
“Let me rephrase that,” the mayor says, attempting to walk back the incendiary language. “That statement was one of the most racist things I’ve ever heard.”
“What statement?” Bauman inquires.
“That you are offended by the fact that you’re not feeling the white privilege thing,” the mayor answers. “White privilege exists and it is something that we need to accept in this country.”
The meeting descends into chaos when Mayor Johnson slams her hand on the table and exclaims, “You’re interrupting me! And by golly I’m running this meeting!”
“You know what? We’re on camera and you’re accusing me of something pretty big here,” Bauman says. “And it’s unacceptable because you have no case.”
“You’re out of order!” Johnson says.
“And you’re out of line!” Bauman asserts.
“Quit interrupting me. I’m gonna finish my statement. What I heard was a racist statement. What I heard was a racist statement. No you’re discrediting…. I… Goddammit Gina, I’m passionate about this,” the mayor says, choking back tears. “I am so passionate about hearing the other sides of the story, and for you to disregard the fact that white privilege exists is beyond me.”
The New Brighton City website indicates Johnson’s term expires on 12/31/2017.
The discussion is receiving fresh scrutiny after Youtube producer Mark Dice rehashed the incident in a recent viral video.
H/T: Mark Dice
Follow @AdanSalazarWins
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/adan.salazar.7351. http://s14.directupload.net/images/140729/289faxkx.jpg The south has more output amplitude units of the base area- Remove buildings and debris in order to have amplitude, to enter with heavy tanks.- Wooden Bridge to inf troops.- Clean spawn on the North base. There are holes that obstruct units on the road to spawn.2. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140721/29i65lyp.jpg - Move the crane a little backwards, to make way for heavy tanks.- Make ramp to vehicles/heavy tanks.3. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140721/nspgl4mr.jpg This map there is an area very good. And another area which is poor mobility and sight.- The green zone (playable area) show 4 capture points, by which players must fight for them.- The red zone (unplayable area) is a mess. Thousand buildings to enter, narrow corridors for tanks.- RECOMMEND: If the green zone is playable. Rework the red zone, to have 2 other green areas the same philosophy that the playable green.This map in the late game, this VP middle is crucial to victory/defeat.There are objects that impair entry vehicles/tanks, hinders the vision of them.Therefore it is desirable to remove the objects listed below.1. http://s7.directupload.net/images/140721/rx4cm3tt.jpg The early game is good 3 buildings to north, but bad in the late game that cannot pass the tanks.South players have more advantage to late game for its amplitude of land, a great line of attack, greater mobility and sight.- Change 2 small buildings for destructible objects such as trees or bush, because the north side defends VP with 3 houses and the south side has none.- Remove 3 wagons, why not let the approach of tanks in the late game.2. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140721/gheno7gr.jpg In South opened fences and make road. There should be easy access units between HQs.3. http://s14.directupload.net/images/140815/z87fcnxo.jpg 3_1.2. There should only be a house. That blocks the sight. And it is difficult to defend with 2 houses together.3_3. There should be a high fences shrub, which prevents the passage of troops and view across the road. Any enemy unit in these houses is very dangerous and very difficult to recover but the means to get help.3_4. A road more. To the south can enter the village area. Because the north has more advantage1. http://s7.directupload.net/images/140721/aqd782g6.jpg Mud, puddles, in areas of healing/repair, it is very difficult to enter/leave spends much timeand is slow. Many players heal and repair at the base for that reason. The mud in these areas must be removed.Mud in other areas should be removed by too slowly troops, the mud is like an equivalencedeep snow.The mud in ALL sectors should be removed. Except in the corridors (whoever fuels must capturepay the price to get in the mud)A balanced map, there is almost no buildings, but blizzards kill this map. I recommend leaving them blizzards to 1every 20 min.1. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140721/l7m2skh8.jpg Objects (dead stump, and more) on the road to spawn. Units MG / AT make many unnecessary turns. This delays their departure2. http://s14.directupload.net/images/140721/h4pvd9za.jpg Clean deep snow on roads/spawn on the bases. Objects (dead stump, and more) on the road to spawn.3. http://s14.directupload.net/images/140721/kdmhzmaz.jpg Remove giant object (coal elevator), hinders sight and pass units.4. http://s7.directupload.net/images/140721/a23wiad5.jpg At this point FUEL is very complicated defense / attack. The removal of these structures it is very convenient.5. http://s14.directupload.net/images/140721/imi93b39.jpg - Giant factories nearby change for a build of 1 floor.- Remove giant silo and adapt/remove tank traps.6. http://s14.directupload.net/images/140721/93thj4vf.jpg Snow on the west side. Make clean roads and remove deep snow.7. http://s14.directupload.net/images/140721/8nijegmt.jpg There is deep snow in the '1 'with coverage objects, in the area '2' should have also.8. http://s14.directupload.net/images/140721/qp67cmb2.jpg - In the city summer, there are roads from side to side.- Make roads to troops to equalize sides.9. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140802/o6rjmczg.jpg North have better access to their tanks.9_1 Move trinchere, are many tanks maneuvered.9_2 Change building to a house guardicion can protect the front like '3'.9_4 Remove to more amplitude of tanks9_5 Move 'generator_l_01' to the left9_6 Eliminate two deep snow areas. Easy pass to troops.9_7. Make road side to side. Made road to VP10. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140721/783v5e7v.jpg Make roads.11. http://s14.directupload.net/images/140730/p9nwemdq.jpg Clean spawn on the South base. There are objects (trees, dead stump, and more) on the road to spawn. Units MG / AT make many unnecessary turns. This delays their dispatch1. http://s7.directupload.net/images/140721/m3bzhkbn.jpg Remove giant object (coal elevator) of the factory, hinders sight and step units.2. http://s7.directupload.net/images/140721/4ec7df38.jpg Delete some sections of trenches, for In / Out troops of very wide.3. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140802/f5iu9rtt.jpg Certain items (dead stump, and more) on the road to spawn. A mg/AT have many unnecessary movements.Remove trenches there are more output amplitude for tanks.4. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140721/6mi7dxw2.jpg In game the mistakes of enter/exit of units heavy. In other bases, we can see a better entry units. In this base it should eliminate some trenches to In / Out units.5. http://s7.directupload.net/images/140729/iwshsbpm.jpg The great imbalance of this map are the south bases. The north is closer to the midpoints of the map. The south is more distant. The best solution is to advance the bases more to the center, having space. This movement impact of two sectors.6. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140902/9dr7de9m.jpg East-south. At the north do not have many objects blocking the sight to capture the point.Therefore in the east-south have to remove some walls and sidewalks.6_X Eliminate walls, curbs spline.6_1 Move spline curb6_2 Move 'fuel container'7. http://s7.directupload.net/images/140817/6nl3clwd.jpg In the south side have more amplitude. They have just houses. And they just land and few objects.If the enemy goes into some of these houses, the game is hard to turn it around. This will make the North players has sight and have amplitude with tanks.8. http://s1.directupload.net/images/140902/yib3dc6i.jpg In this map there are many giant buildings/objects of 2 floors near the base, should be eliminated orchanged by other smaller. Give more output amplitude units.- The 2 giant factories near the base change / replace for a build of 1 floor. Allow for more sight. South has wider sight.- Remove giant silo. This will allow the tanks to maneuver less.- Open fence.- (1) |
3, there were 2,000,000 mobile phones
in use in North Korea–meaning that approximately 1 in 12 residents possessed one of the devices at the time–though this figure would have undoubtedly grown by now.By Ben Corey-Moran, Fair Trade USA
Farmworkers are the backbone of coffee production. These women, men—and yes, sometimes children—are the labor force that drives coffee production, yet they toil behind the curtain of our industry’s awareness. In the well-worn hands of an estimated four million farmworkers rests the promise of great coffee, the hope for industry profitability, and a path toward the long-term viability of specialty coffee production.
If great coffee “doesn’t just happen,” we as a specialty coffee industry would be well advised to look closely at the economic and social issues related to the farm labor that plays such a great role in its creation. First, the prices that farmers receive are out of step with the reality of specialty coffee production. Secondly, on-farm labor shortages affect both quantity and quality of coffee. Thirdly, the violation of workers’ rights poses a reputational risk to specialty brands and the industry alike.
Our industry requires a product that’s something more than a commodity, yet we base the fundamental economics of our industry on market prices that routinely dip below cost of specialty production. Producing great coffee requires careful year-round attention to pruning and soil and shade management, work that climaxes with the harvest. When market prices are low (at or below the cost of production) corners must be cut, and they routinely are. The Central American leaf rust outbreak of 2012/2013 not only made it clear that the threat of climate change is real, but also exposed large-scale deficits in soil management, plant health, and farm renovation. Read another way, leaf rust has shown us how little farmers have been able to reinvest in their farms over the past few decades. Given this economic picture, cost reduction is an essential business strategy for farms to achieve some semblance of profitability. But cutting costs to achieve profitability requires more than just reducing inputs. A close look at coffee production reveals that it’s people who make great coffee happen: by some estimates, labor accounts for as much as 60-70 percent of coffee’s cost of production. The downward pressure of market prices create downward pressure on the wages of workers, not to mention workers’ access to adequate housing, food, safe cooking spaces, and sanitary bathrooms and washrooms, as well as schools and medical care.
What drives coffee farmers to produce a better quality product? It’s not only the price incentive that buyers offer farm owners, but also the incentives that farm owners are able to offer farmworkers, providing a reason to pick more selectively, fertilize more thoroughly, and dry more carefully. Great coffee requires great skill; and great skill is not a commodity, but the product of well-trained, well-paid, and well- treated workers. Who will spot the next leaf rust outbreak on the far corner of a farm, and enable that farm to effectively manage the blight? Who will ensure that mixed picking and imprecise processing don’t quickly erode the potential of a farm’s production? Great coffee requires an active collaboration between skilled workers and their employers, a collaboration that is only possible when workers are valued and included as co-creators of a great product.
Slumbering like an iceberg just below the surface lies the next big issue in coffee: labor shortages. Many growers in Central America and Colombia report seasonal labor shortages, especially during the peak of the harvest. The supply of workers—especially skilled workers who are required to produce great coffee—is shrinking as labor follows the natural path to better opportunities in cities, in other agricultural sectors, or to positions as migrant workers in more developed economies. Every year, farm owners across the specialty-producing world report more challenges in securing the labor they need for coffee production. The downward pressure of market prices is literally pushing workers towards better opportunities. Who will be left to produce the future’s specialty coffee? Leaf rust destroyed significant portions of specialty coffee production. There’s a growing rumbling at origin suggesting that labor shortages may do the same.
Our collective lack of awareness around the challenges farmworkers face not only undermines the future viability of our industry, it also presents a bevy of threats to the specialty coffee brand. The existence that most coffee workers must endure threatens to undermine our industry’s reputation as a leader in the sustainability space. Violations of worker’s rights include, but are not limited to: poverty wages, reliance on child labor, exploitation by criminal labor brokers, indentured servitude, and widespread acceptance of living and working conditions that fall well below widely accepted legal standards. Most particularly, they fall far short of the aspirations of specialty coffee to deliver a better way of life in the coffeelands.
There are many reasons for our industry to engage the issue of workers in coffee, ranging from our practical need to ensure the viability of our product, to our desire to demonstrate leadership in global agricultural sustainability. Doing so will add breadth to our collective work to create a long-term proposition for shared value and viability. Lifting the curtain on the issue of farm workers in coffee will also raise a new series of challenges our industry has never faced. Solutions will require new levels of collaboration, not only within our industry, but also with civil society and the public sector internationally. In the past, our industry has faced new challenges with a curious blend of denial and innovative leadership. As an industry we seem to be paradoxically so aware, and yet so slow to move; then, suddenly, we align and marshal our collective resources, and we break through. As we take a deeper look at the workers who make great coffee possible, let’s embrace our tradition of innovative leadership, expand our vision, and create a coffee industry that values the people who make it all possible.
Photos By Fair Trade USABefore I get into the meat and potatoes of my day (which is ironic, considering I didn’t eat till I got home at 8:30pm) I must declare that I have to omit certain facts regarding my team. This anomaly is just one in a series for the season and there are still more to go, I’ve promised to not reveal any information regarding advanced tactics and I intend to keep my word (Sorry resistance players, no Intel here.) Alright, with that little disclaimer out of the way, grab a drink and let the article commence!
On Saturday, the town of Portland, Maine was transformed into a war zone. Two factions littered the streets attempting to foil the opposition’s plans. I awoke at 8:30, made sure my external battery pack was fully charged then awaited for my fellow agent. Once we both had our equipment ready and accounted for, we ventured off on a trip that would change our lives for a whole day. The first obstacle that I faced was obtaining the address for the event, which was held at Tommy’s Park. In my short time with GPS based gaming, I’ve come to find out that cities don’t provide addresses to their parks. Luckily my team, whom were already on site, found an address 10 feet away from the park and relayed that information back to me. Even through all the traffic, occasional fires next to the highway and panhandlers, this was the easiest part of my day.
Once I arrived at Tommy’s Park it was time to find the Niantic booth to register, which led to a nice scavenger hunt (because Niantic didn’t have a strong presence and I had to ask seven people where the table to register was even though I was 20 feet away.) Now I don’t bash without it being due, but Niantic only handled registration and then took a photo. It felt like the community took the Anomaly more seriously than Niantic did, which did two things. First it made me question their loyalty to their fan base. Secondly, it made me feel like what I did didn’t matter. Going into this anomaly I was level 5, a low level as far as competitive play goes. I was in charge of shielding the portals that our team needed. This is a very important job and one that a lower level can do. Once we received our orders, we shipped out to our objective.
Going into the anomaly I thought it would be nonstop action, Enlightened and resistance players butting heads every second of the day and smack talk galore, this was not the case in the slightest. If I could describe it in four words it would be, Hurry up and wait. In some cases we achieved our objective without any resistance (pun totally intended) and in one case, we were out manned and lost our target (this was our first target of the day). What I enjoyed the most was feeling like what we did was building up to something. Every step of the way my team was being updated and it kept us going through the heat and the exhaustion that an August day brings with it. I had only been to Portland once prior to this event and I saw a totally different side of it and that is where Ingress shines. It relies on movement and exploration to earn points, gain levels and drop items.
As the sun started to wane in the sky, so to was the anomaly. It lasted roughly six hours, not including walking from one end of town to the other. Our original final destination was a park with all the trees, shade and fountains you could have asked for. As we were resting, low and behold, a portal 10 feet away became a shard. Shards are specific to anomalies and require you to link the portal with the shard to a nearby portal in order to move the shard to the other portal to score a point. Make sense? That’s okay, it took me around 4 hours to understand it. At this point we were ahead by a huge score, at least a couple hundred points. The resistance had withdrawn and were already hitting up the bars, that is to say, most of them.
As we were heading back to Tommy’s Park, we were rerouted to a portal across from a Dunkin Donuts (great bathroom there, I know from experience) luckily, it was on the way (my legs were killing me at this point, 5 hours after the start time). I had assumed from the ease of our battles previously that this target would be a piece of cake, boy was I wrong. Remember that nonstop action, chaotic war zone I was expecting? As we were waiting to score the point, no less than six resistance members start attacking our target. I’ve never had to put shields on a portal so fast and so often before in my life. Once my team got in the flow defending our portal, Resistance reinforcements arrived. Four men on bikes came from nowhere and really gave the resistance a good chance of thwarting our plans. After what seemed like an hour (was actually like 10 minutes) we scored the final point we were responsible for, we had stopped the resistance from stealing our point!
I realize this article isn’t as juicy as I originally wanted, but the devil’s in the confidential details. So here’s some information that I picked up that are just cool fun facts! Our ops team were all in a conference room coordinating where to deploy agents in both Portland and, get this, Poland. There were a few anomalies spread across the world happening simultaneously. I met people who had traveled from Philadelphia to Portland, Maine to take part in this event, which isn’t too far compared to others who live in California that came up. Most non Ingress players assumed we were playing Pokemon GO, which we were, in our down time of course.
The most amazing thing about Ingress is hands down its community. Like I said before, Niantic really dropped the ball when it came to getting us pumped and excited. I personally felt that they were short with me when I was registering and just calling it in that day. The community made up for this fact by creating a sense of comradery and friendship. By the end of the day, these players and I were friends. While I never got the chance to talk to our ops team in their conference room, I know we wouldn’t have done nearly as well without them.
I asked my my team captain, Mr. BlueSox, what Ingress means to him, he stated:
“While others do have deeper reasons for getting deep into Ingress, for me it’s still mostly just a game with a significant (and awesome) social aspect. From requiring 8 people to make a level 8 portal, to how much easier it is to wreck blue farms in groups, to the hundreds of people needed to coordinate regional (or larger) ops, it really does create some amazing communities.”
Would I do another anomaly? Yeah, I absolutely would. The anomaly was a fantastic way to meet new people, enjoy a new landscape and exercise. I walked about seven miles, no small feat for the big man that is I. While I’m not a big fan of hurry up and wait situations, I understood why it was important and that made me feel cool (like a secret agent.) My team even got someone who was on a date to take our picture (which you can see a exhausted reviewer!) and yes, before you ask, my shirt was pulled up, so you get to see some skin. I’m a trollop, I know!
That’s all I got for you guys today, If you haven’t downloaded Ingress, it’s on your local app store. Go download it, enjoy it and the community. I’ll throw a How to video below this paragraph. I personally think it’s got a leg up on Pokemon GO, which again, another thing Niantic dropped the ball with. Seriously, just have more community involvement, then we’ll be cool Niantic. Stay tuned throughout the week for my World of Warcraft: Legion review, i’ll be posting a first impressions article before the actual review. I’m saving the review for after I hit the new level cap. Stay well everyone, until next time!In some ways, the term fuel-efficient transportation eludes a precise definition.
There are distinct advantages and challenges for each of the myriad ways of moving things from one place to another. Some are better for moving freight; others are better at moving people. Some are practical; others less so. Some use little fuel but take only one passenger. Others can move lots of passengers but use a lot of fuel. The multiple factors associated with each makes it difficult to compare cars, trucks, ships and railroads.
Nevertheless, some generalizations about fuel-efficient transportation can be made. We'll get to those in a moment.
A metric commonly used to measure fuel efficiency is passenger miles per gallon. This measurement takes into account the number of passengers moving over a certain distance for each gallon of fuel consumed.
For instance, a car that gets 26 miles per gallon but typically transports only one person at a time would measure 26 passenger miles per gallon. On the other hand, a bus that gets five miles per gallon but carries an average of 14 passengers would measure 70 passenger miles per gallon.
There are similar metrics for measuring the volume of freight moved using one gallon of fuel.
To gain a better appreciation for the fuel efficiency strengths and weaknesses of different transportation methods, let’s take a closer look at a few of the major ones:
Rail
According to the Association of American Railroads’ April 2010 study entitled “Railroads: Green From The Start,” U.S. freight railroads in 2009 moved 1 ton of freight for an average of 480 miles per gallon. Since 1980, railroad fuel efficiency has risen by 104 percent.
Railroad freight volume has doubled since 1980, but the amount of fuel used to move that freight has remained constant, according to the AAR report.
When compared to trucks, railroads on average are four times more fuel-efficient, AAR says. Taking just 10 percent of long-distance freight from trucks and moving it by rail would create more than $1 billion in fuel savings each year, the AAR notes.
More recently, electric trains have been making even more strides in fuel efficiency by capturing the energy creating through braking mechanisms and redistributing it as electricity to be used in the overhead lines that run above the track.
Ships
The RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise ship required one Imperial gallon of fuel to move 49 feet (that translates to 1 U.S. gallon to move 41.2 feet) in the open seas. That would equate to about 128 gallons per mile or 0.0078 miles per U.S. gallon.
Taking into account the ship’s capacity of 1,777 passengers and 1,040 crew members, the QE2 (which was retired in 2008) achieved a fuel efficiency measurement of about 22 passenger miles per gallon (0.0078 times 2,817).
Not too great, but better than the one-time rumors that it took one gallon of fuel to move the ship six inches.
Automobiles
Fuel efficiency in automobiles seems to be improving every year. New technologies help cars get more and more miles per gallon. However, most cars only carry one person at a time and that brings down the average passenger miles per gallon.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the most fuel-efficient vehicle available in the 2010 model year was the Toyota Prius with a reported 51 miles per gallon for the city and 48 miles per gallon for the highway.
The average car in the United States typically gets between 15 and 40 miles per gallon.
Trucks
Trucks come in several shapes and sizes and, as may be expected, the larger the truck the more fuel it requires.
According to a 2004 study from the National Commission on Energy Policy, tractor-trailer trucks can get a base fuel economy of 5.3 miles per gallon. Platform trucks, delivery vans and super-duty pickups can get about 7.8 miles per gallon. And large pickups and SUV’s can get about 13.9 miles per gallon.
Tractor trailers use the bulk of fuel among all truck classes, but the U.S. government recently unveiled new standards that will be aimed at improving their fuel efficiency and reducing emissions by 20 percent.
Buses
One study out of Santa Barbara, Calif., found that a diesel bus could get about six miles per gallon of diesel fuel. If all 55 seats in the bus were filled, that would translate to 330 passenger miles per gallon.
That sounds great, but the average U.S. bus occupancy as of 2001 was just 10.75. That would translate to an average of 64.5 passenger miles per gallon.
Even at that lower number, buses outrank automobiles in terms of fuel efficiency.
Airplanes
When looking at the passenger miles per gallon, airplanes appear to be somewhere in the middle of fuel-efficient modes of transportation.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, domestic airline travel averaged 58 passenger miles per gallon in 2008. That’s about 8 passenger miles per gallon better than the 1998 levels.
For international airline operations, the numbers are a bit worse: planes recorded 47 passenger miles per gallon.
When looking at faster jets, the numbers become less efficient. A Concorde jet with a Rolls Royce/SNECMA engine typically gets just 17 passenger miles per gallon.
So, the numbers vary according to the aircraft, but what may be more concerning is that airplanes have not made significant fuel-efficiency improvements in more than a decade.
Closing thoughts
So, overall, rail service appears to be the most fuel-efficient transportation, especially for moving freight over long distances. Automobiles continue to improve and tractor trailers may be seeing progress in the near future as well, thanks to Uncle Sam. Buses can boost their numbers by increasing ridership. Airplanes, however, have not gotten much better over the years but that just means they have lots of potential to improve.
Got more thoughts on fuel-efficient transportation? Did we forget anything? Please leave us a note in the comments below.
Fuel-efficient transportation: An overview
What is fuel-efficient transportation? We analyze a few of the major ways to move people and freight from one place to another.CNet's Download.com has been secretly installing adware alongside the free and open source software in its archive, in violation of its own stated policies, which claim "zero tolerance" for adware. EFF has some harsh words and stern advice for the company to make this right.
So, CNET, here's what you need to do to really make it right:
Stop bundling adware into your installer. Failing that,
1. Rewrite your adware policy to admit that Download.com no longer has a “zero tolerance” policy for bundled adware, and make the change public, so users and developers know about it.
2. If you are going to allow ads, make sure they are not deceptive. This means it should be very clear that the ad is entirely separate from the install process (and no “accept” buttons where “next step” should be), and that the developer of the software the user actually wants has nothing to do with the advertised app.
3. Clean up the mess: prominently offer, on the front page of the Download.com site and as part of the ads themselves, to assist users with uninstalling any advertised software they may have unknowingly installed.
4. Right now, many users won’t know they can download the software without the adware. Direct download should be the default process, and users who choose to use the Download.com installer should know, before they do, that the process will include advertising or other software they might not want.
5. Until the “opt-in” procedure is well-established, cease bundling adware for commercial as well as open source applications.Last year, Sledgehammer Games raised $5,000 for Extra-Life, but this year they aim to double up and meet a $10,000 goal.
Extra-Life was founded in the name of Victoria Enmon in 2007, a gamer with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The community over at SarcasticGamer.com chose to honor Victoria by sending her games and gifts to show their support and raise spirits during her long hospital stays during the three bouts with her deadly disease.
There is a lot planned for Modern Warfare 3 creators Sledgehammer Games studio and their charity of choice, the Bay Area Children's Miracle Network Hospital. The kids they are supporting at this hospital are facing tragic diseases like cancer, cystic fibrosis, and injury due to accidents — all things that no child should have to suffer through without support.
On October 20th, the Sledgehammer Games crew will attempt to host a 24 hour gaming marathon in order to drive pledges and donations to present to the Children's Hospital. Any gamer who has ever sworn a blood oath against each of their clock's 24 hours know just how rigorous it can be to play through an extended game session, regardless of the cause for doing so.
The games being played will consist of mostly Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, as well as a variety of others played on a few different consoles.
You're welcome to show your support by following their efforts on Twitter, where they will be running steady prize giveaways — or by making a donation on their Extra-Life campaign page. All donations are tax-deductible and all proceeds go to support the children and their families.The knee injury that sparked Shawn Johnson's comeback put an end to it, too.
The Olympic gold medalist announced her retirement Sunday, saying repeated setbacks with her left knee made contending for a spot at the London Games impossible, and left her fearful she was putting her long-term health at risk.
"It just little by little gets worse and worse," Johnson told The Associated Press. "My body is to the point where I need time to rest and retire so I can be healthy for the rest of my life. It's hard to wrap my mind around. Gymnastics has been my entire life, and now it's no more."
Her announcement, four days before the start of the U.S. gymnastics championships, brings a melancholy close to a career that took her from Iowa to Hollywood, with a few world titles, a trip to Beijing and an Olympic gold medal sprinkled in between.
"It's just been a fun road with Shawn," USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny said.
After winning four medals at the 2008 Games -- only Michael Phelps, Natalie Coughlin and Nastia Liukin left Beijing with more -- Johnson took the next two years off. She won "Dancing with the Stars" and, with her bubbly personality and girl-next-door looks, became a bona fide celebrity. She left the door open to a return for a London, but it wasn't until she blew out her knee in a January 2010 ski accident that she realized she still wanted to compete. Her first stop after the doctor's office was her gym, where she and coach Liang Chow began plotting her comeback.
The long layoff would present enough of a challenge, but her knee made it that much more difficult. She had torn the ACL, MCL and meniscus, along with her hamstring, and it never returned to full strength. She made the team for last year's Pan American Games, where she helped the Americans win the team gold. But when she tried to increase her training over the last few months to get ready for London, her knee would not cooperate. She couldn't do the number of repetitions she needed, and there were days she couldn't even work out because the knee would be so swollen.
"That was a hard, hard thing," Chow said of watching Johnson struggle.
Finally, Chow sat Johnson down and said they needed to be realistic. She couldn't put in the training she needed, and she was looking at an entire knee reconstruction if she kept going.Pretty early into his Democrat-approved floor speech against Obamacare,* Sen. Ted Cruz deployed the debating skills that have made it into every snarky or earnest profile of his career—and compared his fellow Republicans to Neville Chamberlain.
“Look, we saw in Britain, Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis,’ ” said Cruz. ” ‘Yes, they’ll dominate the continent of Europe, but that’s not our problem. Let’s appease them. Why? Because it can’t be done. We can’t possibly stand against them.’ And in America there were voices that listened to that. I expect those same pundits who say it can’t be done, had it been in the 1940s, we would have listened to them.”
TPM quickly acquired video of this.
Personally, I find the ban on Nazi comparisons to be limiting, and think we should get rid of it. But I’m not an award-winning debater! I was shocked that Cruz glided so quickly from comparing his skeptics to those who didn’t think we could land on the moon to those who appeased Hitler.
*Technically it’s against cloture on the continuing resolution to fund the government, but that’s cumbersome, isn’t it?Unknown assailants have set fire to two buses which Israel began operating as Palestinians-only lines to be used by Palestinian labourers travelling between the West Bank and Israel.
"Two buses were apparently set on fire but we are looking into all possibilities," police spokeswoman Luba Samri told AFP news agency on Tuesday, saying the incident took place in the Arab-Israeli town of Kfar Qassem which lies very close to the Green Line.
Police sources quoted by army radio said the buses had been torched as a protest against the new transportation system which came into effect on Monday.
The incident took place just hours after Israel began running separate bus lines for Palestinian workers and Jewish settlers, in a move which was bluntly denounced by an Israeli rights group as "segregation" and "simple racism."
But Israel's transport ministry denied the charge, saying Palestinians with a permit to work in Israel were allowed to travel "on all public transport lines."
Sharp criticism
The controversy over the separate bus lines continued to draw sharp criticism from Palestinian officials on Tuesday.
"This is a racist policy of segregation," deputy labour minister Assef Said told AFP.
His remarks were echoed by the Palestinian Workers' Union which also denounced it as "a racist measure" and said the buses would become an easy target for attacks by settler extremists.
The new bus route ferries Palestinian workers from the Eyal checkpoint just north of the West Bank city of Qalqilya to several cities in Israel where they have permits to work.
The transport ministry says the new lines are to serve Palestinian workers entering Israel in a bid "to replace the pirate operators who transport the workers at inflated fares."
But Israeli media reports said the service was launched after Jewish settlers complained that forcing them to share public transport with Palestinians was a security risk.
Until now, the workers have been reaching Israel by catching buses which run from outside Jewish settlements which they would ride alongside settlers travelling to Israel.
Ron Nahman, the late mayor of Ariel settlement, had in November said he was in talks with the army, the police and the transport ministry to find ways of "stopping Palestinians from boarding the buses that go to Ariel."
"All of them are working on this problem, and we hope that they will soon find a solution to the reality that is bothering our people," he wrote on his Facebook page.I must admit that after downloading the guide to Huffington Post's participative "No Impact Week" experiment, my initial thought was one of dread. It seemed like participating was going to be a chore. But then I decided I was just being lazy and arrogant.
Are you feeling the same way?
What it boils down to is that while the guide wasn't intended to make me feel burdened, initially it did. It's not because what it asks me to do is challenging. It's because deep down I know that I can improve my efforts. Sure, much of the information inside the guide is not news to me. But it reminded me that I could do better to reduce my own impact.
I've lived in Peru with my family for the last few years. My primary job since we came has been as the primary caretaker of our daughter Coral. She was just four months old when we arrived and is now two years old.
So what's the relevance? In all honesty when it comes to doing the better thing for the environment, moving away from the U.S. and having a child has made me a little lazier, a little more prone to take the easy road.
I have had plenty of excuses for inaction: I'm a new dad, I'm living in a new country, maybe it's not safe to walk around, the circumstances are different here, doing something will take effort and might make me more tired than I already am, it's not part of the culture to do that here.
I've even found ways to compare our family to others in a way that perhaps isn't so positive. For instance, my family is the only one in our building that recycles. All it involves is putting a bag out on the street every Wednesday morning with our week's worth of bottles, milk boxes, and so on. Doing this made me feel good until now. After looking at the No Impact Week guide, I felt ashamed that this had become a sort of false crutch upon which I could hang my environmental credibility.
As I already wrote, I know I can do better.
The guide has provided me with some ideas about how I can make some improvements to our daily routine that aren't really going to rock the boat -- but could indeed lead to significant improvements in my family's life.
For instance, before I had a driver's license in Peru, I went to a local park more often with my daughter. It's just a short walk away. Even though the weather has been crappy for the past few months in Lima (we are at the end of winter here), the car has just made it easier to go places where we don't really need to go. For instance, we now make a lot of inefficient trips to the grocery store. It's been bothering me that we are wasting so much time there.
I've also become chubby. My daughter's preschool is a 25 minute walk away, and I've been telling myself that I want to lose weight and get more exercise. But nonetheless, the car has won out, as well as my desire to have the maximum time I can to myself while my daughter is out of my hands (and most of it is spent on the energy-sucking computer).
So what I am saying is that perhaps No Impact Week is the kick in the butt I needed. My guess is that I'm among a large group people who do care about the Earth and the impact they make, but perhaps have also become lazy or willing to cut themselves too much slack as to how they are helping.
Returning to my premise, will living abroad in Peru make No Impact Week harder for me? I doubt it. If anything I bet it will make it easier.
I plan to check in a few more times and write about my experiences during the week. Whenever it is relevant, I will try to provide commentary about my environmental impact and if my attempts to improve it are influenced by cultural and logistical differences in Peru. I'm also going to do my best to be honest about both my successes and failures, and hopefully embrace the project with a sense of humor. I hope you do as well.
If you'd like more information about No Impact Week and want to join me and countless others in taking part, please click here.OnePlus has been granted a breather by the Delhi High Court, which has lifted the ban imposed by the same court on December 16th. A bench headed by Justice Pradeep Nandrajog set aside the single judge’s order restraining Chinese phonemaker Shenzhen OnePlus Technology Co Ltd from selling its mobiles on the plea of Micromax, which had alleged that OnePlus is infringing on the exclusive deal it had signed with Cyanogen in September 2014.
The same single judge has now been asked to hear the case afresh as the bench felt that it was not a case for grant of an ad-interim injunction. The crux of the decision lies in the fact that neither OnePlus nor Micromax eats into the territory of the other.
The bench observed it was not proper of the single judge to finally decide the application without giving the parties time to file their pleadings. OnePlus was not allowed to file its response to the case filed by Micromax. Over the past week, OnePlus had hired senior lawyer, Mr. Kapil Sibal as its attorney to fight the case, who had argued that OnePlus was not given fair time to file its appeal and there are lot of points missed by Micromax while filing the case.
In view of the facts noted by us hereinabove, it would not be a case to grant an ad-interim injunction, for the reason we were informed that mobile devices launched in India by Micromax are sold at around Rs 8,000 per piece and that by OnePlus at around Rs 22,000 per piece. The consumer of one product is mid-segment and of the other is high-end and thus prima-facie neither competes nor eats into territory of other.
Cyanogen, the ‘Villain’
Micromax’s first device under the YU brand (for which it entered an exclusive deal with Cyanogen in India) was announced last week and will go on sale on January 13th for Rs.8,999. OnePlus had earlier entered into a non-exclusive deal with Cyanogen to provide the software support to its OnePlus One smartphone for two years. Cyanogen claimed that its exclusive deal with Micromax supersedes the non-exclusive deal signed with Cyanogen (at least in India).
But the court bench observed that Cyanogen was unfair to both OnePlus and Micromax in the way it dealt with both the companies. In a lighter vein, the court referred to Cyanogen as the “villain”, and directed the company to file its own statement in writing to the application filed by Micromax.
To summarize, in the next couple of weeks, both OnePlus and Cyanogen will be filing their responses to the application filed by Micromax and the single judge will start hearing the case afresh. The judge is required to allow a proper debate to take place on all the issues, including features of the software versions available to Micromax and OnePlus as well as the terms of the agreements of the two companies with Cyanogen.
OnePlus is expected to argue that the OS version of CyanogenMod running on OnePlus One (version 11s) is different from the OS version running on Yureka (version 11). OnePlus had already suggested that it be given three months time to sell its stock as well as develop another software to substitute Cyanogen, but Micromax did not agree with it. For now, OnePlus is free to import and sell the OnePlus One in India (through Amazon) and the case will start afresh within the next two weeks.
Save your popcorn, the drama is far from over.
Source:PTI / ETMike Segar / Reuters Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore speaks at a news conference with a gathering of U.S. State Attorney's General to announce a state-based effort to combat climate change in the Manhattan borough of New York City, March 29, 2016.
Former Vice President Al Gore is hosting his own climate change summit after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly canceled the one it had been planning for months.
Gore announced Thursday that he’ll hold the Climate & Health Meeting in Atlanta on Feb. 16 with Howard Frumkin, former director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, and a host of other health and climate groups: the American Public Health Association, The Climate Reality Project, Harvard Global Health Institute and the University of Washington Center for Health and the Global Environment.
“They tried to cancel this conference but it is going forward anyway,” Gore said in a statement announcing the meeting. “Today we face a challenging political climate, but climate shouldn’t be a political issue. Health professionals urgently need the very best science in order to protect the public, and climate science has increasingly critical implications for their day-to-day work. With more and more hot days, which exacerbate the proliferation of the Zika virus and other public health threats, we cannot afford to waste any time.”
Studies warn that climate change could undermine a half-century of health advances as more people experience health issues associated with heat waves, droughts and flooding.
The event serves to fill the gap left by the CDC’s canceled Climate & Health Summit, which was intended to explore the “translation of science to practice” in dealing with climate change’s consequences on our health. Despite being in the works for months, the event was canceled just days before President Donald Trump was sworn into office.
Health professionals urgently need the very best science in order to protect the public, and climate science has increasingly critical implications for their day-to-day work. Al Gore
CDC spokeswoman Bernadette Burden told The Huffington Post last week that the agency is “exploring options to reschedule the meeting while considering budget priorities for fiscal year 2017.”
The cancellation isn’t surprising given how politicized climate change is, Frumkin said.
“Sometimes the agency is subject to external political pressure; sometimes the agency self-censors or pre-emptively stays away from certain issues,” he told E&E News, who broke the news of the summit’s cancellation. “Climate change has been that issue historically.”MOSCOW, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Russia plans to invest up to 60 trillion roubles ($1.9 trillion) in its energy sector by 2030 in a drive to boost stagnant |
human beings.”
Rose declared that embryonic stem-cell research “is inherently unethical and a violation of fundamental human rights, and even materialists must admit that promises of its benefits have failed to deliver. There is no good reason to condone this practice; in fact, all it does is taint the ALS Association, whom I’d otherwise be happy to support.”
At least one Catholic archdiocese has publicly pointed out the troubling relationship between the ALS Association and groups involved in embryonic stem-cell research. Cincinnati.com reported that the Archdiocese of Cincinnati “has asked the principals at its Catholic schools not to encourage students to raise money for the ALS Association as the ice-bucket challenge becomes an internet sensation.”
A spokesman for the diocese said in a prepared statement that “we appreciate the compassion that has caused so many people to engage in [the bucket challenge]. But it's a well established moral principle that a good end is not enough. The means to that end must be morally licit.”
According to Cincinnati.com, the archdiocese requested “that any money raised is sent instead to the John Paul II Medical Research Institute in Iowa City, Iowa, where the research is only conducted using adult stem cells.”The SEC’s Office of Investor Education and Advocacy is issuing this Investor Alert to make investors aware about the potential risks of investments involving Bitcoin and other forms of virtual currency.
The rise of Bitcoin and other virtual and digital currencies creates new concerns for investors. A new product, technology, or innovation – such as Bitcoin – has the potential to give rise both to frauds and high-risk investment opportunities. Potential investors can be easily enticed with the promise of high returns in a new investment space and also may be less skeptical when assessing something novel, new and cutting-edge.
We previously issued an Investor Alert about the use of Bitcoin in the context of a Ponzi scheme. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) also recently issued an Investor Alert cautioning investors about the risks of buying and using digital currency such as Bitcoin. In addition, the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) included digital currency on its list of the top 10 threats to investors for 2013.
What is Bitcoin?
Bitcoin has been described as a decentralized, peer-to-peer virtual currency that is used like money – it can be exchanged for traditional currencies such as the U.S. dollar, or used to purchase goods or services, usually online. Unlike traditional currencies, Bitcoin operates without central authority or banks and is not backed by any government.
IRS treats Bitcoin as property. The IRS recently issued guidance stating that it will treat virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin, as property for federal tax purposes. As a result, general tax principles that apply to property transactions apply to transactions using virtual currency
If you are thinking about investing in a Bitcoin-related opportunity, here are some things you should consider.
Investments involving Bitcoin may have a heightened risk of fraud.
Innovations and new technologies are often used by fraudsters to perpetrate fraudulent investment schemes. Fraudsters may entice investors by touting a Bitcoin investment “opportunity” as a way to get into this cutting-edge space, promising or guaranteeing high investment returns. Investors may find these investment pitches hard to resist.
Bitcoin Ponzi scheme. In July 2013, the SEC charged an individual for an alleged Bitcoin-related Ponzi scheme in SEC v. Shavers. The defendant advertised a Bitcoin “investment opportunity” in an online Bitcoin forum, promising investors up to 7% interest per week and that the invested funds would be used for Bitcoin activities. Instead, the defendant allegedly used bitcoins from new investors to pay existing investors and to pay his personal expenses.
As with any investment, be careful if you spot any of these potential warning signs of investment fraud:
“Guaranteed” high investment returns. There is no such thing as guaranteed high investment returns. Be wary of anyone who promises that you will receive a high rate of return on your investment, with little or no risk.
There is no such thing as guaranteed high investment returns. Be wary of anyone who promises that you will receive a high rate of return on your investment, with little or no risk. Unsolicited offers. An unsolicited sales pitch may be part of a fraudulent investment scheme. Exercise extreme caution if you receive an unsolicited communication – meaning you didn’t ask for it and don’t know the sender – about an investment opportunity.
An unsolicited sales pitch may be part of a fraudulent investment scheme. Exercise extreme caution if you receive an unsolicited communication – meaning you didn’t ask for it and don’t know the sender – about an investment opportunity. Unlicensed sellers. Federal and state securities laws require investment professionals and their firms who offer and sell investments to be licensed or registered. Many fraudulent investment schemes involve unlicensed individuals or unregistered firms. Check license and registration status by searching the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure (IAPD) website or FINRA’s BrokerCheck website.
Federal and state securities laws require investment professionals and their firms who offer and sell investments to be licensed or registered. Many fraudulent investment schemes involve unlicensed individuals or unregistered firms. Check license and registration status by searching the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure (IAPD) website or FINRA’s BrokerCheck website. No net worth or income requirements. The federal securities laws require securities offerings to be registered with the SEC unless an exemption from registration applies. Most registration exemptions require that investors are accredited investors. Be highly suspicious of private (i.e., unregistered) investment opportunities that do not ask about your net worth or income.
. The federal securities laws require securities offerings to be registered with the SEC unless an exemption from registration applies. Most registration exemptions require that investors are accredited investors. Be highly suspicious of private (i.e., unregistered) investment opportunities that do not ask about your net worth or income. Sounds too good to be true. If the investment sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Remember that investments providing higher returns typically involve more risk.
If the investment sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Remember that investments providing higher returns typically involve more risk. Pressure to buy RIGHT NOW. Fraudsters may try to create a false sense of urgency to get in on the investment. Take your time researching an investment opportunity before handing over your money.
Bitcoin users may be targets for fraudulent or high-risk investment schemes.
Both fraudsters and promoters of high-risk investment schemes may target Bitcoin users. The exchange rate of U.S. dollars to bitcoins has fluctuated dramatically since the first bitcoins were created. As the exchange rate of Bitcoin is significantly higher today, many early adopters of Bitcoin may have experienced an unexpected increase in wealth, making them attractive targets for fraudsters as well as promoters of high-risk investment opportunities.
Fraudsters target any group they think they can convince to trust them. Scam artists may take advantage of Bitcoin users’ vested interest in the success of Bitcoin to lure these users into Bitcoin-related investment schemes. The fraudsters may be (or pretend to be) Bitcoin users themselves. Similarly, promoters may find Bitcoin users to be a receptive audience for legitimate but high-risk investment opportunities. Fraudsters and promoters may solicit investors through forums and online sites frequented by members of the Bitcoin community.
Bitcoins for oil and gas. The Texas Securities Commissioner recently entered an emergency cease and desist order against a Texas oil and gas exploration company, which claims it is the first company in the industry to accept bitcoins from investors, for intentionally failing to disclose material facts to investors including “the nature of the risks associated with the use of Bitcoin to purchase working interests” in wells. The company advertised working interests in wells in West Texas, both at a recent Bitcoin conference and through social media and a web page, according to the emergency order.
Bitcoin trading suspension. In February 2014, the SEC suspended trading in the securities of Imogo Mobile Technologies because of questions about the accuracy and adequacy of publicly disseminated information about the company’s business, revenue and assets. Shortly before the suspension, the company announced that it was developing a mobile Bitcoin platform, which resulted in significant movement in the trading price of the company’s securities.
Using Bitcoin may limit your recovery in the event of fraud or theft.
If fraud or theft results in you or your investment losing bitcoins, you may have limited recovery options. Third-party wallet services, payment processors and Bitcoin exchanges that play important roles in the use of bitcoins may be unregulated or operating unlawfully.
Law enforcement officials may face particular challenges when investigating the illicit use of virtual currency. Such challenges may impact SEC investigations involving Bitcoin:
Tracing money. Traditional financial institutions (such as banks) often are not involved with Bitcoin transactions, making it more difficult to follow the flow of money.
Traditional financial institutions (such as banks) often are not involved with Bitcoin transactions, making it more difficult to follow the flow of money. International scope. Bitcoin transactions and users span the globe. Although the SEC regularly obtains information from abroad (such as through cross-border agreements), there may be restrictions on how the SEC can use the information and it may take more time to get the information. In some cases, the SEC may be unable to obtain information located overseas.
Bitcoin transactions and users span the globe. Although the SEC regularly obtains information from abroad (such as through cross-border agreements), there may be restrictions on how the SEC can use the information and it may take more time to get the information. In some cases, the SEC may be unable to obtain information located overseas. No central authority. As there is no central authority that collects Bitcoin user information, the SEC generally must rely on other sources, such as Bitcoin exchanges or users, for this type of information.
As there is no central authority that collects Bitcoin user information, the SEC generally must rely on other sources, such as Bitcoin exchanges or users, for this type of information. Seizing or freezing bitcoins. Law enforcement officials may have difficulty seizing or freezing illicit proceeds held in bitcoins. Bitcoin wallets are encrypted and unlike money held in a bank or brokerage account, bitcoins may not be held by a third-party custodian.
Investments involving Bitcoin present unique risks.
Consider these risks when evaluating investments involving Bitcoin:
Not insured. While securities accounts at U.S. brokerage firms are often insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) and bank accounts at U.S. banks are often insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), bitcoins held in a digital wallet or Bitcoin exchange currently do not have similar protections.
While securities accounts at U.S. brokerage firms are often insured by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) and bank accounts at U.S. banks are often insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), bitcoins held in a digital wallet or Bitcoin exchange currently do not have similar protections. History of volatility. The exchange rate of Bitcoin historically has been very volatile and the exchange rate of Bitcoin could drastically decline. For example, the exchange rate of Bitcoin has dropped more than 50% in a single day. Bitcoin-related investments may be affected by such volatility.
The exchange rate of Bitcoin historically has been very volatile and the exchange rate of Bitcoin could drastically decline. For example, the exchange rate of Bitcoin has dropped more than 50% in a single day. Bitcoin-related investments may be affected by such volatility Government regulation. Bitcoins are not legal tender. Federal, state or foreign governments may restrict the use and exchange of Bitcoin.
Bitcoins are not legal tender. Federal, state or foreign governments may restrict the use and exchange of Bitcoin. Security concerns. Bitcoin exchanges may stop operating or permanently shut down due to fraud, technical glitches, hackers or malware. Bitcoins also may be stolen by hackers.
Bitcoin exchanges may stop operating or permanently shut down due to fraud, technical glitches, hackers or malware. Bitcoins also may be stolen by hackers. New and developing. As a recent invention, Bitcoin does not have an established track record of credibility and trust. Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are evolving.
Recent Bitcoin exchange failure. A Bitcoin exchange in Japan called Mt. Gox recently failed after hackers apparently stole bitcoins worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the exchange. Mt. Gox subsequently filed for bankruptcy. Many Bitcoin users participating on the exchange are left with little recourse.
***
Before making any investment, carefully read any materials you are given and verify the truth of every statement you are told about the investment. For more information about how to research an investment, read our publication Ask Questions. Investigate the individuals and firms offering the investment, and check out their backgrounds by searching the SEC’s IAPD website or FINRA’s BrokerCheck website and by contacting your state securities regulator.
Additional Resources
SEC Investor Alert: Ponzi Schemes Using Virtual Currencies
SEC Investor Alert: Social Media and Investing – Avoiding Fraud
SEC Investor Alert: Private Oil and Gas Offerings
SEC Investor Bulletin: Affinity Fraud
FINRA Investor Alert: Bitcoin: More Than a Bit Risky
NASAA Top Investor Threats
IRS Virtual Currency Guidance
European Banking Authority Warning to Consumers on Virtual Currencies
Contact the SEC
Submit a question to the SEC or call the SEC’s toll-free investor assistance line at (800) 732-0330 (dial 1-202-551-6551 if calling from outside of the United States).
Report a problem concerning your investments or report possible securities fraud to the SEC.
Stay Informed
Visit Investor.gov, the SEC’s website for individual investors
Receive SEC Investor Alerts and Bulletins by email or RSS feed
Follow the Office of Investor Education and Advocacy on Twitter @SEC_Investor_Ed
Like the Office of Investor Education and Advocacy on Facebook at www.facebook.com/secinvestoreducation
The Office of Investor Education and Advocacy has provided this information as a service to investors. It is neither a legal interpretation nor a statement of SEC policy. If you have questions concerning the meaning or application of a particular law or rule, please consult with an attorney who specializes in securities law.So, I was quite wondering. Should I:(a) Doing manual translation, which with my current translation speed and RL work, I would only be able to release 1 or 2 chapters weekly. But the content quality should be better and there should be minimum translation mistakes.(b) Do this method of translation (edited MT), which is much faster, and I could release 5-7 chapters weekly. But as I mentioned above, some translation might be totally wrong, and no spell checking / proof reading (well, maybe I can spend a few more minutes for the spell checking/proof reading).So here I post a sample chapter which I translated with this method (instead of wasting your time re-reading previous chapter, I translated the 7th chapter). Please guys, give me feed back. Thank you!Ivory Coast 3 Tunisia 0
Sabri Lamouchi claimed Ivory Coast have announced themselves at the Africa Cup of Nations after their comprehensive Group D win against Tunisia in Rustenberg.
Goals from Arsenal striker Gervinho, Manchester City powerhouse Yaya Toure and late subsititute Didier Ya Konan ensured they improved on a below-par win against Togo in their opening fixture.
The Elephants – who started without captain Didier Drogba – should now reach the quarter-finals, and Lamouchi was unable to hide his pride in the performance against the country of his birth.
“We really entered this competition today,” he said. “We caused a lot of problems for this very good Tunisian team and were never really threatened at any point.
“My first satisfaction comes from the victory and the second from the content.
“I didn’t play Didier Drogba because it seemed to me that the 11 players I picked were the best to overcome this good Tunisian side.
“I told my players that I had not seen great players, but a great team.”
Tunisia boss Sami Trabelsi was left to rue a slow start to the game as the Eagles of Carthage failed to trouble Ivory Coast keeper Boubacar Barry in the first half.
With five minutes of the game remaining, Saber Khelifa could have snatched an unlikely point however and Trabelsi felt his side were unfortunate not to secure a draw.
“Until the 25th minute we hadn’t entered into the game,” he said. “[Gervinho’s] goal that we conceded was due to a lack of focus.
“But after that, up to the 85th minute, we tried our best and were quite threatening at that stage until they scored two more goals.”It's like watching the Super Bowl at a local bar. But instead, this is all about online gamers and the global phenomenon is just starting to take off in the U.S.
It's like watching the Super Bowl at a local bar. But instead, this is all about online gamers and the global phenomenon is just starting to take off in the U.S.
WASHINGTON – It’s like watching the Super Bowl at a local bar. But instead, this is all about online gamers and the global phenomenon is just starting to take off in the U.S.
Around the world, nearly 20 million people watched an international online gaming competition Saturday. In Sweden, they actually watched it on regular TV.
But at Public Bar in Northwest D.C.’s Tenleytown, about 300 gamers gathered for the event.
Deric Ortiz made it happen. He’s president of One Nation of Gamers, a company that brings gamers together in North America to watch their favorite competitive video games at bars. Just like they’d gather for a Washington Nationals game or the Super Bowl.
But this is serious business with nearly $3 million up for grabs.
“You’re basically seeing the world’s best gamers compete and slug it out. In this case, for 2.9 million bucks,” Ortiz says.
Gamer Jacob Sweeny says the winner has a lot to gain.
“$1.4 [million] for the winner of first place and no small chump change for the second and third place either,” Sweeny says.
Ortiz says he’s been putting the events together for the past two years in D.C. and other cities across the U.S. They’re called pubstomps or barcrafts because gamers gather in bars or other public spaces.
Sitting outside Public Bar having a drink, Catherine Gellatly and a friend had no idea the bar was packed with gamers watching an international gaming championship and cheering for their team.
“I have never heard of this before,” Gellatly says. “My little brother plays a lot of video games. But I never imagined that someone would watch it on television for fun.”
Vacationing from Florida, Bridget O’Leary watched the gaming competition with her 13-year-old son.
“It is a sporting event. And as they’re showing the gaming on TV, it’s just like sporting announcers calling play-by-play,” O’Leary says.
While pubstomp and barcraft might not be a household name yet, Ortriz says to just give it a few years.
Follow @WTOP on Twitter.The UFC brings fans another great card this Saturday Night with a championship on the line, live from the HSBC Arena in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, it’s UFC 163. As always when the event takes place in Brazil, or any foreign, the card is heavy with Brazilian fighters who are fighting in front of their home crowd. The event was supposed to feature UFC Featherweight Champion Jose Aldo defending his title against Anthony Pettis, but Pettis pulled out of the fight with a knee injury, and was replaced by “The Korean Zombie” Chan Sung Jung. Another highlight of the card is a Light Heavyweight Bout between two top contenders in the division, as Phil Davis takes on Lyoto Machida in his native Brazil. On last weekend’s card, I went (8-4) and lost three controversial split decisions that I thought should have gone the other way. I plan on continuing that momentum at UFC 163. Let’s do it.
Preliminary Card (Facebook): Ednaldo Oliveira OVER Francimar Barroso, Viscardi Andrade OVER Bristol Marunde, Rani Yahya OVER Josh Clopton
Preliminary Card (FX): Ian McCall OVER Iliarde Santos, Sergio Moraes OVER Neil Magny, Sheila Gaff OVER Amanda Nunes, Vinny Magalhães OVER Anthony Perosh
Main Card (Pay-Per-View):
John Lineker (21-6) vs. Jose Tome (33-3) – Flyweight Bout – Interesting that this fight is on the main card to me, John Lineker is a talented fighter and Jose Tome has a great record, it is just rare that a fighter makes his UFC debut on the main card of a Pay-Per-View unless he has name recognition with the general public. No name recognition in the United states will hurt pay-per0view buys some on this card. Tome has a great record, he finishes fights which can be rare for a featherweight, with 15 KOs and 13 Submission wins in his 33 victories. Who was he fighting though? However Lineker has experience on the big stage, and won his two last fights in the UFC, as he climbs the ranks at Featherweight. Lineker is also eight years younger than Tome, and Tome is making a huge jump in competition levels, I have to give the nod to Lineker. THE PICK: Lineker By Decision
Thales Leites (20-4) vs. Tom Watson (16-5) – Middleweight Bout – This is one of the more interesting fights on the card to me. UFC fans probably remember Thales Leites, he had an impressive streak of five straight wins in the UFC between 2007 and 2009, and he eventually earned a Middleweight Title Shot against Anderson Silva at UFC 97. That was the famous fight that is called by many “The Worst Fight In MMA History”, as the fans booed due to the fact that there was no action, and referee Marc Goddard reminded both fighters that MMA was a contact sport. After losing to Silva at UFC 97, Leites lost to Alessio Sakara at UFC 101 and was quickly gone from the UFC roster. Since then, Leites has gone (6-1) in lower level promotions, and he is on a three fight winning streak, which has earned him a return to the UFC. Tom Watson is a tough English fighter, who won a back-and-forth fight over Stanislav Nedkov by TKO in February, which earned him both Fight-of-the-Night and Knockout-of-the-Night bonuses. For Watson to win this fight, he needs to keep Leites standing, and if he can do that he has a chance. Just one of Watson’s five career losses have come by submission, and he is a very tough guy, but I see him tapping out on Saturday Night. THE PICK: Leits By Submission In The Second Round
Cezar Ferreira (7-2) vs. Thiago Santos (8-1) – Middleweight Bout – Another strange fight based on the positioning on the card, but that was due to injury, as Santos is a replacement fighter for Clint Hester. Ferreira was supposed to face Hester, who many of you remember from the most recent season of “The Ultimate Fighter”, but Hester was forced out of the bout with an injury and replaced by Santos. I’ve know about Cezar Ferreira for a while now, he was the inaugural winner of “The Ultimate Fighter: Brazil” and is unbeaten in his only fight in the UFC. This is the promotional debut of Thiago Santos, and I am not going to lie to you, I know very little about him. Since this is the case, and since I have been impressed by Ferreira, I am picking him to win. THE PICK: Ferreira By Decision
Lyoto Machida (22-3) vs. Phil Davis (11-1-1) – Light Heavyweight Bout – This is the fight that I am most looking forward to on this card, because although this card is being called weak by many MMA fans, Machida vs. Davis is a fantastic matchup. Davis is a former four time All-American wrestler at Penn State, and is easily one of the best wrestlers in the Light-Heavyweight division. At UFC 112 he became the only person to ever defeat Alexander Gustafsson, when he submitted him with an anaconda choke in the first round, and Gustafsson is now the number one contender for the Light Heavyweight Title. Lyoto Machida is a former UFC Light-Heavyweight Champion and a veteran of the octagon, and he knows how to beat wrestlers. One of the craftiest fighters in MMA, he has defeated such wrestlers as Dan Henderson, Ryan Bader, Rashad Evans, Tito Ortiz and Randy Couture. That list is basically a “who’s Who” of wrestlers in the UFC’s Light Heavyweight Division over the last decade plus. It has been proven that Machida’s unorthodox Karate style works very well against wrestlers, and since Davis does not have a lot of experience against high level opponents yet, I do not think he will be able to make the necessary adjustments to beat Machida. I think Machida will fight a conservative fight, pick his spots to strike and take Davis’ wrestling advantage out of it. THE PICK: Machida By Decision
Chan-Sung Jung (13-3) vs. (c) Jose Aldo (22-1) – Featherweight Championship Bout – The Korean Zombie has been extremely impressive since debuting in the UFC in 2011. He is a perfect (3-0), and submitted Leonard Garcia with a twister, which was the first time a twister ended a fight in the history of the UFC. This submission earned The Korean Zombie the 2012 Submission-of-the-Year award, but he has a kickboxing background, and has also won a Knockout-of-the-Night award. The Korean Zombie is no slouch, but this is a major step up in competition, and I think that he has bitten off more than he can chew with Aldo. Jose Aldo is one of my favorite fighters to watch, and pound-for-pound, I believe he is one of the best in the world. Aldo’s one career loss came in 2005, when he was 19-years-old, and he has won 15 consecutive fights since. I expect Aldo to hurt The Korean Zombie with leg kicks and knees, his favorite strikes, and finish him with punches. THE PICK: Aldo Retains The Title By TKO In The Third Round
OVERALL RECORD:
Preliminaries (95-73-1) Main Card (80-53) Overall (175-126-1)
Main Events (22-5)
MMA PICKS RECORD (by event):
UFC on Fox: Johnson vs. Moraga –
Preliminaries (4-4) Main Card (4-0) Overall (8-4)
UFC 162: Silva vs. Weidman –
Preliminaries (4-2) Main Card (1-4) Overall (5-6)
UFC 161: Evans vs. Henderson
Preliminaries (2-4) Main Card (3-2) Overall (5-6)
UFC on FuelTV: Nogueira vs. Werdum
Preliminaries (4-2) Main Card (3-3) Overall (7-5)
UFC 160: Velazquez vs. Silva –
Preliminaries (4-3) Main Card (4-1) Overall (8-4)
UFC on FX: Belfort vs. Rockhold –
Preliminaries (5-4) Main Card (3-1) Overall (8-5)
UFC 159: Jones vs. Sonnen –
Preliminaries (5-1) Main Card (3-2) Overall (8-3)
UFC on FOX: Henderson vs. Melendez –
Preliminaries (4-4) Main Card (2-2) Overall (6-6)
The Ultimate Fighter Finale: Team Jones vs. Team Sonnen –
Preliminaries (3-4) Main Card (3-2) Overall (6-6)
UFC on FuelTV: Moussasi vs. Latifi –
Preliminaries (2-5) Main Card (3-3) Overall (5-8)
UFC 158: St-Pierre vs. Diaz –
Preliminaries (5-2) Main Card (3-2) Overall (8-4)
UFC on FuelTV: Sliva vs. Stann –
Preliminaries (2-3) Main Card (3-3) Overall (5-6)
UFC 157: Rousey vs. Carmouche –
Preliminaries (5-3) Main Card (4-1) Overall (9-4)
UFC on FuelTv: McDonald vs. Barao –
Preliminaries (1-5) Main Card (3-3) Overall (4-8)
UFC 156: Edgar vs. Aldo –
Preliminaries (3-3) Main Card (3-2) Overall (6-5)
UFC on FOX: Johnson vs. Dodson –
Preliminaries: (4-2) Main Card (2-2) Overall (6-4)
UFC on FX: Bisping vs. Belfort –
Preliminaries (3-3-1) Main Card (2-2) Overall (5-5-1)
Strikeforce: Marquardt vs. Saffiedine –
Preliminaries (5-1) Main Card (4-1) Overall (9-2)
UFC 155: Velasquez vs. dos Santos –
Preliminaries (6-1) Main Card (0-5) Overall (6-6)
UFC on FOX 5: Henderson vs. Diaz –
Preliminaries (2-5) Main Card (3-1) Overall (5-6)
UFC 154: St-Pierre vs. Condit –
Preliminaries (5-2) Main Card (2-3) Overall (7-5)
UFC on FUEL TV: Franklin vs. Cung Le –
Preliminaries (1-2) Main Card (4-1) Overall (5-3)
UFC 153: Silva vs. Bonnar –
Preliminaries (5-1) Main Card (4-2) Overall (9-3)
UFC 149: Faber vs. Barao –
Preliminaries (4-2) Main Card (2-3) Overall (6-5)
UFC 148: Sliva vs. Sonnen II –
Preliminaries (3-2) Main Card (5-1) Overall (8-3)
UFC 146: Dos Santos vs Mir –
Preliminaries (4-3) Main Card (4-1) Overall (8-4)
UFC on FOX 2: Evans vs. Davis –
Main Card (3-0)Never mind your mindless whining about privacy on the web. Never mind that you are already being tracked by your banks and credit card companies in ways that would make web advertisers blush. All the ways we currently think we are being tracked have just become moot.
I say this because thanks to biometrics R&D company Global Rainmakers Inc (GRI), in partnership with one of the largest cities in Mexico, Leon, the scariest future we could imagine is coming. Not tomorrow but once their pilot project rolls out in Leon it will spread like the worst weed you could ever imagine.
As reported today in a Fast Company post by Austin Carr our Minority Report future is right around the corner thanks to one of the biggest roll-outs out of iris scanning technology we have seen to date.
Announced today, biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI) is rolling out its iris scanning technology to create “the most secure city in the world,” according to the company. In a partnership with Leon, one of the largest cities in Mexico with a population of more than 1 million, GRI will fill the city with eye-scanners that will help law enforcement–and soon marketers–revolutionize the way we live. “In the future, whether it’s entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris,” says Jeff Carter, CDO of Global Rainmakers, who, before coming to GRI, headed a think tank partnership between Bank of America, Harvard, and MIT. “Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected within the next 10 years.”
And according to Carr these are no slight claims to be ignored as he found out when he had a chance to go one on one with the system where he found out the systems level of accuracy is unnerving exact even when running.
The sickening part of all of this is the sales pitch being used to sell systems like this to cities and companies. Citing things like convenience because then people don’t need to carry silly things like bank cards, transit cards or even ID cards GRI panders to the hearing the pitch. They even go so far as to brag that fraud, a $50 billion problem, will be eradicated – completely.
But where this gets really scary is when they suggest that because this is an opt-in method of control but an opt-in that is obviously driven by manipulation of the public by making it a defacto way of providing identification – even when it isn’t needed. The problem is that at this point those who choose to opt-out are automatically flagged – which GRI has no problem acknowledging
GRI hopes that the immediate value the system creates will alleviate any concern. “There’s a lot of convenience to this–you’ll have nothing to carry except your eyes,” says Carter, citing how of-age consumers will no longer be carded at bars and liquor stores. “And it’s interesting: When you get masses of people opting-in, opting out does not help. Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in.”
It’s easy to suggest that this would never fly in our countries especially the US but as a colleague said when I passed him the link to the Fast Company post “It’s a god save for those people complaining about illegal immigrants“. What better sales pitch to governments in the US than to tie in illegal immigration and say.. oh.. child predators. Instant sell.
Sure you could opt-out but besides the fact that doing so would raise even more attention there is the pressure of group dynamics that would drive this thing forward. After all if lets say New York City implemented this on their transit system and gradually phased out the cards and cash, after all the budget savings alone would be an enormous incentive, how would you get around the city?
Of course all these scenarios wouldn’t happen over night but you can be assured that if business and governments have the incentive to save money, decrease crime and increase security you can be certain that the most dystopian future is totally possible.
And it all starts in a city called Leon – mark that in your history books as a turning point in our society, and not a good one.
images courtesy of Fast CompanyMillennials lean more pro-life than the generation preceding them because of advances in medical technology and science, leaders in conservative media said Friday.
Dana Perino, co-host of Fox News Channel’s “The Five,” moderated the panel on the relevance of conservative principles to the millennial generation.
Perino noted that a survey by the Associated Press found a 12-percent decline nationwide in abortions since 2010, including in blue states such as New York, Washington, and Oregon.
Americans aged 18 to 29, part of the millennial generation, also have become more pro-life than their parents, according to a Gallup poll cited by Perino. In 2010, it found, 24 percent of millennials agreed abortion should remain legal in all cases, compared with 36 percent of those aged 18 to 29 in 1991.
Robert Bluey, editor in chief of The Daily Signal, said the ability for pregnant women to see an ultrasound of their baby in the womb has helped expand the pro-life movement.
“I’m the father of two children, and I think when you see that ultrasound and you have that experience … that changes a lot,” Bluey said during a panel discussion at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.
Bluey said pregnancy centers strategically located across from Planned Parenthood or other abortion clinics have allowed women to discuss what potentially could be a “challenging situation” and consider options.
Katie Pavlich, editor of Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor, appeared on the panel with Bluey and Benny Johnson, creative director at the Independent Journal Review.
“I’m excited that the millennial generation is pro-life,” Pavlich said. “I think that science has been on our side for a long time on this issue.”
She said the anger from abortion activists after Doritos aired its “ultrasound” commercial during the Super Bowl illustrates how “extreme” the pro-choice movement is.
The ad shows a mother getting an ultrasound while her baby kicks in her womb, supposedly trying to get closer to the expectant, oblivious father, who is munching on chips.
NARAL Pro-Choice America, a group that advocates abortion rights, immediately tweeted its opposition to Doritos for “humanizing fetuses.”
#NotBuyingIt – that @Doritos ad using #antichoice tactic of humanizing fetuses & sexist tropes of dads as clueless & moms as uptight. #SB50 — NARAL (@NARAL) February 8, 2016
Pavlich also called on men to join the pro-life movement, pushing back on Johnson for refusing to comment because he is “not a woman.”
“Just because you’re a man doesn’t mean you can’t comment on the issue.”A Maranao lawyer suggests the deployment of women soldiers, or Muslim women soldiers, to checkpoints and the inclusion of'sensitivity to culture and religion' in the implementing guidelines
Published 3:58 PM, May 28, 2017
MANILA, Philippines – With martial law in effect in Mindanao, lawyers who come from or have been working in the region have concerns with the authorization of warrantless arrests under martial rule.
President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus which allows the military to, under guidelines, arrest individuals they suspect to be involved in the rebellion in Marawi City.
Jamal Latiph Hadjiusman of the Philippine Muslim Society, a Maranao lawyer who was born and raised in Marawi City and obtained his law degree from the Mindanao State University (MSU), said the history of militarization of conflict zones in Mindanao is where a certain extent of distrust in the army comes from.
The presence of military in conflict zones in Mindanao has been marred by accusations of abuses including rape.
"We've been militarized since time immemorial. Takot kami sa mga sundalo dahil marami kaming naranasan na karahasan but the thing is dahil malayo kami, kaunti lang ang nagsasalita para sa amin, NGO o media," Hadjiusman told Rappler in a telephone interview.
(We've been militarized since time immemorial. We fear the soldiers because of our experience of abuses and |
- our monarch - our head of state is still the monarch of Great Britain," you know. "And by the way we share her with 16 other countries. And by the way, our flag has the flag of Great Britain in the corner," you know. And whenever the Royal family (inaudible), we give it a little wave. "And by the way, if you want to come here, we're putting a fence around the place. It's verboten to cross the border. It's alright if you fly in on a tourist visa into our main airports and overstay or run off into the community. We won't demonise you for that, but if you arrive in a leaky boat, we will."
LEIGH SALES: So the issue is though that I think a lot of Australians aren't sold on that message that you've just delivered.
PAUL KEATING: Well, they have to get sold - that's the point. You see, psychologically, Australia must understand it has to live in the region around it. Australia must find its security in Asia, it cannot find its security from Asia. The from Asia camp - this was the sort of John Howard line, you know, do what the Americans want, run off to Iraq. We're always looking for a strategic guarantor. It used to be the British and the British Navy; now it's the Americans and the American Navy, whereas a small country as we are, we can't exercise the unilateralist option. We're not strong enough. We have to do it by coalition-building in this part of the world. So therefore, the key matter for Australia is its psychological approach to the region, its psychology, more than it is any one particular thing.
LEIGH SALES: If I can just return to a leadership question. In the past seven years in Australian politics we've seen so many leaders dispensed with - three prime ministers and seven opposition leaders we've been through. Why do you think we're seeing that sort of churn and what sort of implications does it have?
PAUL KEATING: Well, it's - for a start, the public must not know where they are with it all, you know, the shifts. I mean, you would despair over it all, because these things I mention are real. You know, the world is changing. In last 200 years the world has been run from the Atlantic. Fundamentally, that's all changing. That's going now to developing - the developing economies and we have the largest one nearby - that's China, and of course, places like Indonesia and Vietnam. So, so, that's our situation. I mean, we are a country in that transition. You can see the transition affecting the east coast cities of Australia now vis-a-vis the west.
LEIGH SALES: But how does that explain that we've had 10 leaders between the two major political parties?
PAUL KEATING: Well, what I'm saying is they haven't broadly been on the case. They haven't been on the case. Here's the main game changing inexorably, you know, and we've run off to Iraq.
LEIGH SALES: Well what will it say then about federal Labor if they change leaders again in the relatively short term?
PAUL KEATING: Well, you know, that's for the party to make its mind up about. I'm not here to give 'em a running commentary on what - what the pulse is of the federal caucus. I don't belong to it anymore and it's not really my place to second guess them.
LEIGH SALES: You weren't very complimentary though about New South Wales Labor when they were churning through leaders.
PAUL KEATING: Oh, no, no, we had these bozos in Sussex Street knocking off parliamentary leaders. And worse than that, trying to determine the policy. You know, here they were destroying Morris Iemma over the electricity program. You know, and you've now got everyone convinced of the fact that these generating units should be sold.
LEIGH SALES: I wanted to ask you before we run out of time: this book is a collection of speeches, but I know many publishers have chased you to ask: will you write a memoir? Will you ever do that?
PAUL KEATING: Well, what it isn't: it isn't a show-and-tell book. It's a book of ideas. You know, it's everything from the state of the world at the end of the Cold War, the lost opportunity of 16 years, the two Clinton terms, the two George W. terms, the lost opportunity of removing nuclear weapons. It's a - fundamentally a book of ideas and I wouldn't even have produced that except the publisher, Allen & Unwin, said, "Oh, if you're not doing an autobiography, can't you do something with us?" And I said, "Well there's all those speeches I've sent to the archive." They said, "Well, what are they?" So...
LEIGH SALES: All the others have done show-and-tell books, though. Would you ever...?
PAUL KEATING: Yeah, but, you know, I had someone whose name begins with K with a very deep voice say to me once, "Paul, if you're any good, someone else will write a book about you."
LEIGH SALES: Mr Kissinger, was this? (Laughs). Paul Keating, we're out of time. Thankyou very much for joining us.
PAUL KEATING: Thank you, Leigh.Dialogue - A proposal By David Bohm, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett
Contents:
Dialogue, as we are choosing to use the word, is a way of exploring the roots of the many crises that face humanity today. It enables inquiry into, and understanding of, the sorts of processes that fragment and interfere with real communication between individuals, nations and even different parts of the same organization. In our modern culture men and women are able to interact with one another in many ways: they can sing dance or play together with little difficulty but their ability to talk together about subjects that matter deeply to them seems invariable to lead to dispute, division and often to violence. In our view this condition points to a deep and pervasive defect in the process of human thought.
In Dialogue, a group of people can explore the individual and collective presuppositions, ideas, beliefs, and feelings that subtly control their interactions. It provides an opportunity to participate in a process that displays communication successes and failures. It can reveal the often puzzling patterns of incoherence that lead the group to avoid certain issues or, on the other hand, to insist, against all reason, on standing and defending opinions about particular issues.
Dialogue is a way of observing, collectively, how hidden values and intentions can control our behavior, and how unnoticed cultural differences can clash without our realizing what is occurring. It can therefore be seen as an arena in which collective learning takes place and out of which a sense of increased harmony, fellowship and creativity can arise.
Because the nature of Dialogue is exploratory, its meaning and its methods continue to unfold. No firm rules can be laid down for conducting a Dialogue because its essence is learning - not as the result of consuming a body of information or doctrine imparted by an authority, nor as a means of examining or criticizing a particular theory or programme, but rather as part of an unfolding process of creative participation between peers.
However, we feel that it is important that its meaning and background be understood.
Our approach to this form of Dialogue arose out of a series of conversations begun in 1983 in which we inquired into David Bohm's suggestion that a pervasive incoherence in the process of human thought is the essential cause of the endless crises affecting mankind. This led us, in succeeding years, to initiate a number of larger conversations and seminars held in different countries with various groups of people which in turn began to take the form of Dialogues.
As we proceeded it became increasing clear to us that this process of Dialogue is a powerful means of understanding how thought functions. We became aware that we live in a world produced almost entirely by human enterprise and thus, by human thought. The room in which we sit, the language in which these words are written, our national boundaries, our systems of value, and even that which we take to be our direct perceptions of reality are essentially manifestations of the way human beings think and have thought. We realize that without a willingness to explore this situation and to gain a deep insight into it, the real crises of our time cannot be confronted, nor can we find anything more than temporary solutions to the vast array of human problems that now confront us.
We are using the word "thought" here to signify not only the products ofour conscious intellect but also our feelings, emotions, intentions and desires. It also includes such subtle, conditioned manifestations of learning as those that allow us to make sense of a succession of separate scenes within a cinema film or to translate the abstract symbols on road signs along with the tacit, non-verbal processes used in developing basic, mechanical skills such as riding a bicycle. In essence thought, in this sense of the word, is the active response of memory in every phase of life. Virtually all of our knowledge is produced, displayed, communicated, transformed and applied in thought.
To further clarify this approach, we propose that, with the aid of a little close attention, even that which we call rational thinking can be see to consist largely of responses conditioned and biased by previous thought. If we look carefully at what we generally take to be reality we begin to see that it includes a collection of concepts, memories and reflexes colored by our personal needs, fears, and desires, all of which are limited and distorted by the boundaries of language and the habits of our history, sex and culture. It is extremely difficult to disassemble this mixture or to ever be certain whether what we are perceiving - or what we may think about those perceptions - is at all accurate.
What makes this situation so serious is that thought generally conceals this problems from our immediate awareness and succeeds in generating a sense that the way each of us interprets the world is the only sensible way in which it can be interpreted. What is needed is a means by which we can slow down the process of thought in order to be able to observe it while it is actually occurring.
Our physical bodies have this capability but thought seems to lack it. If you raise your arm you know that you are willing the act, that somebody else is not doing it for or to you. This is called proprioception. We can be aware of our body's actions while they are actually occurring but we generally lack this sort of skill in the realm of thought. For example, we do not notice that our attitude toward another person may be profoundly affected by the way we think and feel about someone else who might share certain aspects of his behavior or even of his appearance. Instead, we assume that our attitude toward her arises directly from her actual conduct. The problem of thought is that the kind of attention required to notice this incoherence seems seldom to be available when it is most needed.
Dialogue is concerned with providing a space within which such attention can be given. It allows a display of thought and meaning that makespossible a kind of collective proprioception or immediate mirroring back of both the content of thought and the less apparent, dynamic structures that govern it. In Dialogue this can be experienced both individually and collectively. Each listener is able to reflect back to each speaker, and to the rest of the group, a view of some of the assumptions and unspoken implications of what is being expressed along with that which is being avoided. It creates the opportunity for each participant to examine the preconceptions, prejudices and the characteristic patterns that lie behind his or her thoughts, opinions, beliefs and feelings, along with the roles he or she tends habitually to play. And it offers an opportunity to share these insights.
The word "dialogue" derives from two roots: "dia" which means "through" and "logos" which means "the word", or more particularly, "the meaning of the word." The image it gives is of a river of meaning flowing around and through the participants. Any number of people can engage in Dialogue - one can even have a Dialogue with oneself - but the sort of Dialogue that we are suggesting involves a group of between twenty and forty people seated in a circle talking together.
Some notion of the significance of such a Dialogue can be found in reports of hunter-gather bands of about this size, who, when they met to talk together, had no apparent agenda nor any predetermined purpose. Nevertheless, such gatherings seemed to provide and reinforce a kind of cohesive bond or fellowship that allowed its participants to know what was required of them without the need for instruction or much further verbal interchange. In other words, what might be called a coherent culture of shared meaning emerged within the group. It is possible that this coherence existed in the past for human communities before technology began to mediate our experience of the living world.
Dr. Patrick de Mare, a psychiatrist working in London, has conducted pioneering work along similar lines under modern conditions. He set up groups of about the same size, the purpose of which he described in terms of "sociotherapy". His view is that the primary cause of the deep and pervasive sickness in our society can be found at the socio-cultural level and that such groups can serve as micro-cultures from which the source of the infirmity of our large civilization can be exposed. Our experience has led us to extend this notion of Dialogue by emphasizing and giving special attention to the fundamental role of the activity of thought in the origination and maintenance of this condition.
As a microcosm of the large culture, Dialogue allows a wide spectrum of possible relationships to be revealed. It can disclose the impact of society on the individual and the individual's impact on society. It can display how power is assumed or given away and how pervasive are the generally unnoticed rules of the system that constitutes our culture. But it is most deeply concerned with understanding the dynamics of how thought conceives such connections.
It is not concerned with deliberately trying to alter or change behavior nor to get the participants to move toward a predetermined goal. Any such attempt would distort and obscure the processes that the Dialogue has set out to explore. Nevertheless, changes do occur because observed thought behaves differently from unobserved thought. Dialogue can thus become an opportunity for thought and feeling to play freely in a continuously of deeper or more general meaning. Any subject can be included and no content is excluded. Such an activity is very rare in our culture.
Usually people gather either to accomplish a task or to be entertained, both of which can be categorized as predetermined purposes. But by its very nature Dialogue is not consistent with any such purposes beyond the interest of its participants in the unfoldment and revelation of the deeper collective meanings that may be revealed. These may on occasion be entertaining, enlightening, lead to new insights or address existing problems. But surprisingly, in its early stages, the dialogue will often lead to the experience of frustration.
A group of people invited to give their time and serious attention to a task that has no apparent goal and is not being led in any detectable direction may quickly find itself experiencing a great deal of anxiety or annoyance. This can lead to the desire on the part of some, either to break up the group or to attempt to take control and give it a direction. Previously unacknowledged purposes will reveal themselves. Strong feelings will be exposed, along with the thoughts that underlie them. Fixed positions may be taken and polarization will often result. This is all part of the process. It is what sustains the Dialogue and keeps it constantly extending creatively into new domains.
In an assembly of between twenty and forty people, extremes of frustration, anger, conflict or other difficulties may occur, but in a group of this size such problems can be contained with relative ease. In fact, they can become the central focus of the exploration in what might be understood as a kind of "meta-dialogue", aimed at clarifying the process of Dialogue itself.
As sensitivity and experience increase, a perception of shared meaning emerges in which people find that they are neither opposing one another, nor are they simply interacting. Increasing trust between members of the group - and trust in the process itself - leads to the expression of the sorts of thoughts and feelings that are usually kept hidden. There is no imposed consensus, nor is there any attempt to avoid conflict. No single individual or sub-group is able to achieve dominance because every single subject, including domination and submission, is always available to beconsidered.
Participants find that they are involved in an ever changing and developing pool of common meaning. A shared content of consciousness emerges which allows a level of creativity and insight that is not generally available to individuals or to groups that interact in more familiar ways. This reveals an aspect of Dialogue that Patrick de Mare has called koinonia, a word meaning "impersonal fellowship", which was originally used to describe the early form of Athenian democracy in which all the free men of the city gathered to govern themselves.
As this fellowship is experience it begins to take precedence over the more overt content of the conversation (sic). It is an important stage in the Dialogue, a moment of increased coherence, where the group is able to move beyond its perceived blocks or limitations and into new territory, But it is also a point at which a group may begin to relax and bask in the "high" that accompanies the experience. This is the point that sometimes causes confusion between Dialogue and some forms of psychotherapy. Participants may want to hold the group together in order to preserve the pleasurable feeling of security and belonging that accompanies the state. This is similar to that sense of community often reached in therapy groups or in team building workshops where it is taken to be the evidence of the success of the method used. Beyond such a point, however, lie even more significant and subtle realms of creativity, intelligence and understanding that can be approached only by persisting in the process of inquiry and risking re-entry into areas of potentially chaotic or frustrating uncertainty.
Dialogue is not discussion, a word that shares its root meaning with "percussion" and "concussion," both of which involve breaking things up. Nor is it debate. These forms of conversation contain an implicit tendency to point toward a goal, to hammer out an agreement, to try to solve a problem or have one's opinion prevail. It is also not a "salon", which is a kind of gathering that is both informal and most often characterized by an intention to entertain, exchange friendship, gossip and other information. Although the word "dialogue" has often been used in similar ways, its deeper, root meaning implies that it is not primarily interested in any of this.
Dialogue is not a new name for T-groups or sensitivity training, although it is superficially similar to these and other related forms of group work. Its consequences may be psychotherapeutic but it does not attempt to focus on removing the emotional blocks of any one participant nor to teach, train or analyze. Nevertheless, it is an arena in which learning and the dissolution of blocks can and often do take place. It is not a technique for problem solving or conflict resolution, although problems may well be resolved during the course of a Dialogue, or perhaps later, as a result of increased understanding and fellowship that occurs among the participants. It is, as we have emphasized, primarily a means of exploring the field of thought.
Dialogue resembles a number of other forms of group activity and may at times include aspects of them but in fact it is something new to our culture. We believe that it is an activity that might well prove vital to the future health of our civilization.
Suspension
Suspension of thoughts, impulses, judgments, etc., lies at the very heartof Dialogue. It is one of its most important new aspects. It is not easily grasped because the activity is both unfamiliar and subtle. Suspension involves attention, listening and looking and is essential to exploration. Speaking is necessary, of course, for without it there would be little in the Dialogue to explore, But the actual process of exploration takes place during listening -- not only to others but to oneself. Suspension involves exposing your reactions, impulses, feelings and opinions in such a way that they can be seen and felt within your own psyche and also be reflected back by others in the group. It does not mean repressing or suppressing or, even, postponing them. It means, simply, giving them your serious attention so that their structures can be noticed while they are actually taking place. If you are able to give attention to, say, the strong feelings that might accompany the expression of a particular thought - either your own or anothers -- and to sustain that attention, the activity of the thought process will tend to slow you down. This may permit you to begin to see the deeper meanings underlying your thought process and to sense the often incoherent structure of any action that you might otherwise carry out automatically. Similarly, if a group is able to suspend such feelings and give its attention to them then the overall process that flows from thought, to feeling, to acting-out within the group, can also slow down and reveal its deeper, more subtle meanings along with any of its implicit distortions, leading to what might be described as a new kind of coherent, collective intelligence.
To suspend thought, impulse, judgment, etc., requires serious attention to the overall process we have been considering -- both on one's own and within a group. This involves what may at first appear to be an arduous kind of work. But if this work is sustained, one's ability to give such attention constantly develops so that less and less effort is required.
Numbers
A Dialogue works best with between twenty and forty people seated facing one another in a single circle. A group of this size allows for the emergence and observation of different subgroups or subcultures that can help to reveal some off the ways in which thought operatives collectively.,This is important because the differences between such subcultures areoften an unrecognized cause of failed communication and conflict. Smaller groups, on the other hand, lack the requisite diversity needed to reveal these tendencies and will generally emphasize more familiar personal and family roles and relationships.
With a few groups we have had as many as sixty participants, but with that large a number the process becomes unwieldy. Two concentric circles are required to seat everybody so that they can see and hear one another. This places those in the back row at a disadvantage, and fewer participants have an opportunity to speak.
We might mention here that some participants tend to talk a great deal while others find difficulty in speaking up in groups. It is worth remembering, though, that the word "participation" has two meanings: "to partake of", and "to take part in". Listening is at least as important as speaking. Often the quieter participants will begin to speak up more as they become familiar with the Dialogue experience while the more dominant individuals will find themselves tending to speak less and listen more.
Duration
A Dialogue needs some time to get going. It is an unusual way of participating with others and some sort of introduction is required in which the meaning of the whole activity can be communicated. But even with a clear introduction, when the group begins to talk together it will often experience confusion, frustration, and a self-conscious concern as to whether or not it is actually engaging in Dialogue. It would be very optimistic to assume that a Dialogue would begin to flow or move toward any great depth during its first meeting. It is important to point out that perseverance is required.
In setting up Dialogues it is useful at the start to agree the length of the session and for someone to take responsibility for calling time at the end. We have found that about two hours is optimum. Longer sessions risk a fatigue factor which tends to diminish the quality of participation. Many T-groups use extended "marathon" sessions which use this fatigue factor to break down some of the inhibitions of the participants. Dialogue on the other hand, is more concerned with exploring the social constructs and inhibitions that affect our communications rather than attempting to bypass them.
The more regularly the group can meet, the deeper and more meaningful will be the territory explored. Weekends have often been used to allow a sequence of sessions, but if the Dialogue is to continue for an extended period of time we suggest that there be at least a one week interval between each succeeding session to allow time for individual reflection and further thinking. There is no limit to how long a Dialogue group may continue its exploration. But it would be contrary to the spirit of Dialogue for it to become fixed or institutionalized. This suggests openess to constantly shifting membership, changing schedules, or other manifestations of a serious attention to an implicit rigidity which might take hold. Or merely, the dissolving of a group after some period.
Leadership
A Dialogue is essentially a conversation between equals. Any controlling authority, no matter how carefully or sensitively applied, will tend to hinder and inhibit the free play of thought and the often delicate and subtle feelings that would otherwise be shared. Dialogue is vulnerable to being manipulated, but its spirit is not consistent with this. Hierarchy has no place in Dialogue.
Nevertheless, in the early stages some guidance is required to help the participants realize the subtle differences between Dialogue and other forms of group process. At least one or, preferably two, experienced facilitators are essential. Their role should be to occasionally point out situations that might seem to be presenting sticking points for the group, in other words, to aid the process of collective proprioception, but these interventions should never be manipulative nor obtrusive. Leaders are participants just like everybody else. Guidance, when it is felt to be necessary, should take the form of "leading from behind" and preserve the intention of making itself redundant as quickly as possible.
However, this proposal is not intended as a substitute for experienced facilitators. We suggest, though, that its contents be reviewed with the group during its initial meeting so that all the participants can be satisfied that they are embarking upon the same experiment.
Subject matter
The Dialogue can begin with any topic of interest to the participants. if some members of the group feel that certain exchanges or subjects are disturbing or not fitting, it is important that they express these thoughts within the Dialogue. No content should be excluded.
Often participants will gossip or express their dissatisfactions or frustration after a session but it is exactly this sort of material that offers the most fertile ground for moving the Dialogue into deeper realms of meaning and coherence beyond the superficiality of "group think", good manners or dinner party conversation.
So far we have been primarily discussing Dialogues that bring together individuals from a variety of backgrounds rather than from existing organizations. But its value may also be perceived by members of an organization as a way of increasing and enriching their own corporate creativity.
In this case the process of Dialogue will change considerably. Members of an existing organization will have already developed a number of different sorts of relationship between one another and with their organization as a whole. here may be a pre-existing hierarchy or a felt need to protect one's colleagues, team or department. There may be a fear of expressing thoughts that might be seen as critical of those who are higher in the organization or of norms within the organizational culture. Careers or the social acceptance of individual members might appear to be threatened by participation in a process that emphasizes transparency, openness, honesty, spontaneity, and the sort of deep interest in others that can draw out areas of vulnerability that may long have been kept hidden.
In an existing organization the Dialogue will very probably have to begin with an exploration of all the doubts and fears that participation will certainly raise. Members may have to begin with a fairly specific agenda from which they eventually can be encouraged to diverge. This differs from the approach taken with one-time or self-selected groupings in which participants are free to begin with any subject matter. But as we have mentioned no content should be excluded because the impulse to exclude a subject is itself rich material for the inquiry.
Most organizations have inherent, predetermined purposes and goals that are seldom questioned. At first this might also seem to be inconsistent with the free and open play of thought that is so intrinsic to the Dialogue process. However, this too can be overcome if the participants are helped from the very beginning to realize that considerations of such subjects can prove essential to the well-being of the organization and can in turn help to increase the participants self-esteem along with the regard in which he or she may be held by others.
The creative potential of Dialogue is great enough to allow a temporary suspension of any of the structures and relationships that go to make up an organization.
Finally, we would like to make clear that we are not proposing Dialogue as a panacea nor as a method or technique designed to succeed all other forms of social interaction. Not everyone will find it useful nor, certainly, will it be useful in all contexts. There is great value to be found in many group psychotherapeutic methods and there are many tasks that require firm leadership and a well-formed organizational structure.
Much of the sort of work we have described here can be accomplished independently, and we would encourage this. Many of the ideas suggested in this proposal are still the subjects of our own continuing exploration. We do not advise that they be taken as fixed but rather that they be inquired into as a part of your own Dialogue.
The spirit of Dialogue is one of free play, a sort of collective dance of the mind that, nevertheless, has immense power and reveals coherent purpose. Once begun it becomes continuing adventure that can open the way to significant and creative change.
Copyright © 1991 by David Bohm, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett
The copyright holders hereby give permission to copy this material and to distribute it to others for non-commercial purposes including discussion, inquiry, criticism and as an aid to setting up Dialogue groups so long as the material is not altered and this notice is included. All other rights are reserved.
If you will read the copyright notice on Dialogue - A Proposal (reproduced above) you will see that we are keen to get its message as widely distributed as possible. So if there are any listservers or FTP or WWW sites that it would be useful on, please put it out. We would like to know where it ends up if that's possible. We do want to keep the copyright notice intact because it makes the point that it not to be used without express permission for any commercial purposes.
This text was transcribed by Richard Burg. email: richard@simpleidea.com
There is an open letter, called "On Facilitation and Purpose" by Donald Factor, which refers to this paper. In that letter Don Factor modifies his views expressed in the section "Dialogue in existing organizations" and adds something about frustation.
This web page was created by William van den Heuvel.
email: admin@david-bohm.netThe Dark Knight Rises is one of the strangest films to hit mainstream consciousness this year. One critic called it an “evil masterpiece,” which seems about right to me. Sitting there in the dark IMAX theater, watching the film’s epic images and listening to its violent sounds, with the ghosts James and the departed, I kept wondering: What is the message of this movie? What morals does The Dark Knight Rises impart to us viewers?
Moral #1: IT IS WHAT OPPOSES THAT HELPS.
The Dark Knight Rises begins with Gotham at peace. Violent crime is at a record low, it seems. Yet, what has the “eradication” actually accomplished besides a false sense of security? The mob was put behind bars, but at what cost? The film quickly tells us the answer. The government officials and police, in their attempt to secure Gotham against terror, have driven it underground — literally and figuratively. What is more: as the strength of the government and police grew, it forced the criminals to become even stronger. Enter Bane and his subterranean network of criminals whose malevolence and demonic aspirations make Gotham’s past criminals (even the Joker) look pale in comparison. The ethical lesson here seems to be: fighting back fuels the fire. The more we attempt to secure the world, the more it drapes us in terror.
Moral #2:NO ONE IS INNOCENT.
“Innocent is a strong word to throw around Gotham,” says Miranda Tate to Batman. And who is innocent in this city? Isn’t everyone part of this interconnected network of greatness and atrocity? Bane begins his assault on Gotham just as Batman reemerges on the scene. Coincidence? Or are Batman and Bane part and parcel? Are the wealthy evil for not sharing their wealth? Or are the poor evil for resorting to violence and crime? Are the middle class, like the policeman who wants to capture Batman instead of Bane, evil for being so complacent and ignorant? What about the philanthropist who wants to save the world, but inadvertently creates the most powerful nuclear bomb on Earth? Is she innocent? Of course not, no one is innocent.
Moral #3: WHERE THE DANGER GROWS, SO TOO DOES THE SAVING POWER.
In The Dark Knight Rises, the viewer seems to be asked: What is the final aim of technology? Will technology unlock a better world or a much worse world? Again, think about the natural energy project. This venture begins as an attempt to save the world but as the film progresses it becomes the tool to end the world. The moral here seems to be that everything we do in the name of progress can also just be as easily be used for destruction, particularly technology. Technology is both good and evil.
Moral #4: EVIL IS NECESSARY (LIKE GOOD IS NECESSARY).
Perhaps the most horrifying moment of the Dark Knight Rises is when the businessman Roland Daggett tells Bane he is “pure evil” and Bane, before snapping his neck, simply responds “I’m necessary evil.” Is all the evil in Gotham (or even our real world) necessary? Just as technology engenders a saving power and a destructive power, does the good also engender the evil? Is the existence of Bane predicated on the existence of Batman and vice versa? Does good to exist need evil, like black needs white? Like the dark needs light? This seems to be the suggestion of the film. Evil is as inescapable as the law of gravity.
_____
One of Batman’s most famous lines is: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Have you ever stopped to consider what was implied here? In what kind of world are heros and villains just different sides of the same coin? It’s a world where what opposes helps; no one is innocent, evil is necessary, and the saving power is also the the destructive power — and the difference between the hero and the villain is simply a matter of luck, a matter of chance.A woman police describe as a high-end prostitute has been charged with manslaughter after allegedly injecting heroin into a tech executive on his yacht in Santa Cruz last November, then leaving him to die when he overdosed. Alix Tichelman, 26, of Folsom, also faces drug and prostitution charges. She is being held on $1.5 million bail.
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reported Tuesday that surveillance video from the boat shows 51-year-old Forrest Timothy Hayes losing consciousness.
Investigators say Tichelman made no effort to help him and instead gathered her belongings and even gulped a glass of wine before leaving. Hayes' body was discovered the next day.
Tichelman, originally from Georgia, was taken into custody last week after being lured back to Santa Cruz County in a prostitution sting.
According to The Daily Mail, Tichelman's Facebook profile shows she went to high school in the Atlanta area before majoring in journalism at Georgia State University and attending beauty school.
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that police convinced Tichelman that a client would pay her more than $1,000 for sex. She arranged to meet the fictitious wealthy man at a high-end hotel in Santa Cruz County on the Fourth of July and was arrested, police said.
She was initially booked into Santa Cruz County Jail for second-degree murder, destruction of evidence and transporting and providing narcotics.
Hayes' body was found on the boat in November of 2013, and detectives were called to the scene because his death appeared to be suspicious.
In the investigation Tichleman was identified as a suspect after they learned she had an ongoing prostitution relationship with the man. During interviews with authorities, Tichleman said she had more than 200 "client relationships," according to police.
Police say there is a similar case involving Tichleman in another state.
(Source: KTVU)A former president of the National Union of Students and chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips was once a leading member of what might be called the metropolitan liberal elite. He had the ear of everyone who mattered in the Labour party, and on matters of race and equality he was the go-to guy.
But then he began to have doubts about many of the political positions he held and started confronting what he saw as right-on shibboleths. Pretty soon he was being denounced as a turncoat in the same terms that he had once denounced others. In recent years, he has made several documentaries, with attention-grabbing titles such as Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True, that have aimed to challenge received wisdoms. The latest, which sounds like a homage to a Daily Telegraph letters page correspondent, is entitled Has Political Correctness Gone Mad?
Trevor Phillips: BBC2 is Britain’s whitest TV station Read more
I meet Phillips at his production office in Kentish Town, north London. Now 63, with greying hair and a slight stoop, he’s no longer the youthfully strutting figure who seemed to be everywhere in the 1990s. But as soon as he gets talking, the eyes light up and the old passion comes pouring out.
Political correctness is one of those terms that mean different things to different people. What does it mean to him? “The title is not mine,” he says, a little defensively. “It’s a Channel 4 title. I do not normally ever use the term political correctness, except with a heavy dose of doubt about its usefulness, because basically it has become a stick with which the right beats everyone else.”
In fact Phillips has used the term before. Two years ago he wrote in the Daily Mail and Sunday Times of “po-faced political correctness that cramps all conventional parties”. Still, his thesis in the film is that by trying to corral political debate into a tightly policed acceptability, the political establishment has created the conditions for insurgent figures such as Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump.
It’s a perfectly reasonable argument but the programme is a little too wide-ranging in its targets to make its case. It jumps from the anti-Islamic group Pegida to censorious transgender activists to social media trolls to students banning sombreros. Although worthy subjects for investigation, they don’t quite gel as an explanation for the rise of Corbyn, let alone Trump.
But what they do point to is Phillips’s increasing frustration with the conviction that if we can only control the expression of ideas, we will all be able to live together in peace and harmony. October 2000 saw the publication of a report commissioned by Phillips, then chair of the Runnymede Trust, called The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. It marked perhaps the high-water mark of multicultural thinking, and suggested that Britain should become a “community of communities” in which each community would respect the other by avoiding causing offence.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I believe fundamentally in solidarity and reciprocity, and I think most on the left have forgotten both of those things.’ Photograph: Ian Derry/Channel 4
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by a shell, the upper part of which is called carapace, with the lower portion called a plastron. The carapace and the plastron are attached by a bridge, which means that though the head and limbs of a turtle or tortoise may be withdrawn from the shell, the whole body can never be totally detached from it. These reptiles are generally reclusive and shy in nature.
Tortoises and turtles are both reptiles from the order of Testudines, but in different classification families. The major difference between the two is that tortoises dwell on land, while turtles live in the water some or nearly all of the time.
Differences in Habitat
Turtles live some or most of the time in the water, while tortoises live on land. Both turtles and tortoises lay eggs on the ground. The mother will dig a burrow and lay two to twelve eggs there. The future hatchlings will stay inside the egg for 90 to 120 days, incubating on their own. Once the incubation process is complete, they dig their way to the surface. Tortoise mothers provide protection to the hatchlings for about 80 days, after which they survive on their own, but turtle hatchlings are on their own from birth.
Differences in Physical Characteristics
Turtles have flat shells and webbed feet with long claws.
A tortoise has a dome-shaped shell and short and sturdy feet. Its legs are bent instead of being straight and directly under the body. A turtle has a flat, streamlined shell and limbs that are quite similar to a tortoise's, but the turtle's feet are webbed and have long claws which provide a good grip upon floating logs and help the reptile climb onto riverbanks. Some turtles might even have flippers, as is the case for the pig-nosed turtle.
Tortoise vs. Turtle Shell
A tortoise shell is shaped like a dome.
The shells that cover the body of these reptiles are very important as they give researchers a fair idea of how these reptiles live. As turtles generally prefer to live in water, the shell of a turtle is flat and streamlined to aid in swimming and diving, while the shell of a tortoise, which lives on land, is rather large and dome-shaped to provide protection from predators. Also, the shell of a tortoise is quite heavy when compared to a turtle's shell, which is lighter to avoid sinking and to increase swimming speed.
Differences in Diet
Most land-based tortoises are herbivores while turtles can be both herbivores and carnivores. This is a video of a turtle eating a pigeon.
Reproduction of Turtles vs. Tortoises
The eggs from a turtle are somewhat soft and leather-like, similar to the eggs produced by other reptiles. Turtle hatchlings stay in their nest on their own for 90-120 days.
Female tortoises dig burrows in which they lay anywhere from 2 to 12 eggs. Hatchlings take approximately 90-120 days to incubate within the ping-pong-ball sized eggs.
Difference in Lifespan
Tortoises can live about as long as humans, around 60-80 years, but some have been known to live for over 150 years. The longest verified tortoise life span was 188 years.
In contrast, the common lifespan of a turtle is about 20-40 years, while sea turtles average 60 to 70 years, with about 40 to 50 years of that required to reach maturity.
While it is sometimes reported that tortoises have lived for over 200 years in captivity, confirming the validity of these claims has been difficult. Most tortoises can live over 100 years in captivity, but living beyond that age requires carefully controlled, nurturing environments.
As Pets
Both are kept as pets, though small turtles are more commonly owned. Tortoises are actually easier to care for, but more expensive to own. Both require owners who are willing and able to keep a very long commitment. As such, neither is recommended as a pet in many cases.
Geographical Distribution
Tortoises are found mostly in Asia and Africa, while turtles are found in Africa and America. Turtles are primarily found in tropical and semi-tropical climates, similar to those preferred by most lizards, as they require warmer external temperatures to maintain proper body warmth. However, some turtles are known for hibernating during colder weather, usually alongside riverbanks. Tortoises are not known for hibernating, as their habitats are almost entirely warm, though some species can greatly limit their metabolism during periods of little or no food and water.
ReferencesAbout: I'm a highschooler who is interested in technology, science, and engineering. In my spare time I work on projects that allow me to learn new skills and concepts.
An electric longboard is a great way to get around! It’s also easy to make, lightweight, and it can be charged relatively quickly (with the right charger).
This longboard can get up to 32km/h using the motor before it gets wobbly and dangerous. The acceleration is also great, and the controller can be programmed to eliminate any wheelspins that may occur from a standing start. As for range, it can get a solid 10km range on a full charge; however, it is not-recommended to discharge lithium batteries more than 80% as it wears down their life.
A benefit of this design is that the trucks can be put onto virtually any longboard deck. This means that your longboard can be any size you desire. This is a huge benefit for me since I’m using this longboard to get to school and back, thus I need it to fit in my locker.
This longboard has braking and can also be programmed with different acceleration rates.
It also has regenerative braking, sorry for any confused commentators down below!
Want to follow the rest of our electric longboard builds? Here's my blog where I regularly post updates!
Denial MediaNudists Protest for the beach “Dolphin” in Bulgaria
Nudists and campers protest against the management of beach “Dolphin”, which has performed serious violations of its contract while preparing the beach for the summer season.
Nudists and campers are protesting in front of the Bulgarian Ministry of Tourism in order to protect one of the last natural beaches left in Bulgaria. According to the protestors, the firm concessionaire of the beach has performed series of legal violations which contradict the concession contract. It was demanded by the protestors that the contract between the ministry and the company “Tiva International” be ended immediately.
The protestors have gathered a folder with examples of the transgressions performed by “Tiva International”. Among the examples of misconduct are limitations of free access to the beach, lack of medical office, lack of lifeguards, physical assault of visitors, video recording against visitors’ will, and fining of tourists for practising nudism. The only response given by the Minister of Tourism Nicolina Angelkova is that there are no lawful grounds for termination of the contract.
The protest will take place on September 20, 2017 at 17:30 before the Ministry of Tourism and later on will mend with the ecologists’ protest before the national assembly, which will start on the same date at 18:30.
(Picture taken from: pochivka.bg)This article is over 2 years old
David Thomas, who became wealthy by pioneering mail-order wine, has become Australia’s biggest philanthropist to the environment, announcing a bequest that takes his donations to about $60m.
“Barbara, my late wife, and I – it was always our intention that we’d give about 50% of our wealth away during our lifetime and then we’d give the other 50% away when we died,” Thomas told Guardian Australia.
The $30m bequest was announced at a dinner in Sydney on Thursday night, hosted by Pew Charitable Trusts, the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network and the Nature Conservancy. The dinner was a celebration of conservation philanthropy in Australia and Thomas was held up as an example of what could be done.
“With this bequest, he would be, without a doubt, the largest donor by quite a long shot,” Amanda Martin, chief executive of the grantmakers network, told Guardian Australia.
If one person gives a substantial amount of money, it inspires others to give Amanda Martin, Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network
Over the years, Thomas has contributed to groups including the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Bush Heritage Australia and the Nature Conservancy.
Since selling his wine business, Cellarmasters, in 1997, Thomas and his wife created 6m hectares of land under private conservation or Indigenous protection.
He has expanded to invest in marine conservation, helping create the Great Kimberley marine park and funding the Fight for the Reef campaign – a collaboration between WWF and the Australian Marine Conservation Society, which has fought to stop dredging at Abbot Point and the dumping of dredge spoil on the Great Barrier Reef.
The money has been donated through the Thomas Foundation, which was set up to run for 20 years, ending in 2018.
Thomas said he was looking forward to enjoying Australia’s environment in retirement after that.
Besides his direct philanthropy, Thomas has encouraged other wealthy Australians to give money to environmental causes.
How the Great Barrier Reef got polluted – from farms and fossil fuels to filthy propaganda | Graham Readfearn Read more
“What often happens in philanthropy, if one person gives a substantial amount of money, it inspires others to give,” Martin said. She said Thomas’s public giving had leveraged a lot more money than he could give on his own.
“Many of our members have been inspired by what David has done. He’s really raised the bar on philanthropy in Australia.”
Barry Traill, Australian director of Pew Charitable Trusts, told Guardian Australia Thomas’s donations and his work in getting others to donate had had a direct impact on the survival of species.
“We have tens of thousands of species found nowhere else on the planet,” Traill said. “So that means that your dollars, your giving, does literally save species from extinction.”Most Germans have reacted relatively calmly to the recent terror attack in Germany. According to the Infratest Dimap polling institute, 73 percent of those surveyed feel "rather safe," while just 26 percent feel "rather unsafe." The poll was conducted by public broadcaster ARD and newspaper "Die Welt" at the start of the year, just two weeks after the attack in Berlin. Twelve people were killed and around 50 injured when a truck was driven through a crowded Christmas market in the German capital.
Overall, most Germans seem to be much less fearful than many politicians suspect. That is particularly clear for the fear of terrorism threats. The consent for increased video surveillance has actually dropped. There was also a decline in the attentiveness towards suspicious-looking people or objects. And despite the recent criticism of security authorities in the wake of the Berlin attack, most Germans feel sufficiently protected from the threat of terrorist attacks.
Politicians overestimate anxiety of voters
One state authority, which was the subject of a racism discussion at the end of 2016, fared well in the poll: the police. A year ago, following mass sexual assaults in Cologne and other cities, law enforcement was viewed much more critically. Now, that trust has been somewhat regained - 88 percent of people have a "great" or "very great" trust in the police. That is an approval rating that German intelligence authorities can only dream of. More than half of those surveyed had "little" or "absolutely no" trust Germany's domestic (BfV) and foreign (BND) intelligence agencies.
The NSA scandal has not helped the BND's reputation
One can only speculate on the reasons why. It is possible, however, the BfV's connection with the right-wing extremist National Socialist Underground (NSU) group played a part. For the BND, its role in the NSA surveillance scandal did not help its popularity. Nonetheless, confidence in the federal government overall has grown 6 percent.
Refugee crisis the biggest issue
Domestic security and guarding against terrorist threats is only the second most-important issue for German voters. In fact, only 11 percent of those surveyed believe it should be the government's top priority. The number one issue for most people is the refugee crisis. Some 40 percent believe it should be the priority. At the same time, there has been a slight increase in the fear of crime (plus 3 percent) and a drop in job market confidence (minus 10 percent).
In comparison to December, the political sentiment in the country has shifted in favor of the ruling conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian cousins, the Christian Social Union (CSU), as well as to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Both gained two percentage points in the so-called "Sunday Question" ("Which party would you vote for if the national election were on Sunday?"). The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), junior coalition partners with the CDU/CSU, as well as the Greens, saw an equivalent drop in their popularity. The Left party remains at 9 percent, while the liberal Free Democrats (FDP), who dropped out of parliament in the 2013 election, fell by a point to 5 percent.
Another 'Grand Coalition' looks likely
According to the current figures, another so-called "Grand Coalition" between the SPD (which sits at 20 percent) and the CDU/CSU (37 percent) would be possible. Both camps, however, garner little sympathy. A CDU/CSU coalition with the Greens would only be considered if the FDP again failed to clear the 5 percent parliamentary hurdle. An SPD-Greens-Left partnership, meanwhile, sits quite far from a majority at 38 percent support. The populist AfD is left on the outside looking in at 15 percent, as no other party has said it would be willing to make a coalition with them. A three-way coalition between the CDU/CSU, SPD and Greens, however, is theoretically possible.
It is some time until the national election in September, but that has not stopped the parties from focusing on the upcoming vote. Chancellor Angela Merkel, of the CDU, has already announced her candidacy. The SPD will officially unveil its candidate at the end of January, most expect it to be party leader and current Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel.February 12, 2016
Calgary, AB — Immediate Release
(Warning: May contain graphic images.)
On Monday, February 8, 2016, a brown and white female dog resembling a Basenji or Bull Terrier type was found running at large in the area of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha school in the community of Abbeydale (1005 Abbotsford Dr. NE). This dog has multiple large masses on her hind end and is in need of surgical intervention.
Brad Nichols, Senior Manager, Animal Cruelty Investigations said, “The condition of this dog is concerning. We need to identify this dog so we can talk to the owner(s) and get a medical history. We encourage the owner(s) to come forward. Anyone who recognizes this dog is asked to report the identity of the owner or the address of residence to Calgary Humane Society by calling (403) 205-4455.”Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney announces his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination June 2, 2011 at Bittersweet Farm in Stratham, New Hampshire. Darren McCollester
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke with many in his party on Friday when he said he believes humans have contributed to global warming.
"I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," said at a New Hampshire town hall meeting, according to Reuters.
There is widespread consensus within the scientific community that the earth warming and that human beings are at least partially responsible. But many Republicans dispute that conclusion, including Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Inhofe has suggestedthat global warming is a hoax that "started in the United Nations and the ones in the United States who really grab a hold of this is the Hollywood elite."
Romney reportedly said Friday that he believed the United States as well as foreign nations need to "reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases," saying they "may be significant contributors" to climate change.
As Reuters notes, one of 2012 GOP Romney's rivals, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, said last week that the push to address climate change is "the newest excuse to take control of lives" by "left-wing intellectuals." Gingrich had previously suggested that "our country must take action on climate change."
Gingrich is not the only Republican presidential contender to shift on climate change issues. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said in 2007 that "it's time for Congress to act by capping greenhouse gas pollution," but he now says it isn't the time to address the issue. And former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has backed offhis previous support for cap-and-trade energy legislation, saying he had been wrong in once calling for a cap on carbon emissions.ST. LOUIS – A national group is gathering thousands of signatures, hoping to convince a local school district to change its mascot.
The mascot has been around for decades. While some say it’s history, others say its hurtful.
In many ways, Freeburg, Ill., is just like many other small American towns, but something does make it stand out, its high school mascot.
“The Freeburg Midgets,” said Andrew Lehman, superintendent of the Freeburg community high school district. “That term can be very subjective. What’s offensive to one person or group of people is going to have a very different meaning to other people.”
However you feel about the mascot, there’s no doubt it has gone the distance. As the story goes, according to the superintendent, it came about in the 1930’s. The high school had a basketball team that wasn’t very tall but was very competitive. And a newspaper article apparently dubbed them the Freeburg Midgets, a name that stuck.
“It is absolutely a point of pride, yes,” said Lehman.
But to the organization, Little People of America (LPA), the mascot is a point of contention.
The group is having a convention in St. Louis and using the opportunity to address Freeburg’s mascot.
“Kind of a derogatory, objectifying, dehumanizing term,” said Gary Arnold, president of LPA. “If you have a family that happens to have a person with dwarfism down the road, you know, that’s going to create a very difficult environment for them to go to high school.”
The group is circulating an online petition, which has more than 3,600 signatures, urging the district to change its mascot.
“Some people are saying this is an act of bullying,” said Leah Smith with LPA. “This creates an environment that’s not safe for everyone.”
But Freeburg’s mascot has support. There’s a competing petition to keep the name.
LPA will close out its petition when the convention ends later this week. The organization will then present it to Freeburg School District leaders.
Ultimately, it’s up to the school board to decide if it will come up for discussion and a vote.I think that these profiles have been a little celebrity-heavy lately, and one of my goals is to focus on an attainable idea of positive masculinity. The problem being, of course, that it is hard to find non-celebrities who are people everyone knows about, or who I can describe in a brief blog post if they aren’t widely known.
One person who came to mind is DeRay Mckesson, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement who has been on TV a lot but was a community activist first, and only became something of a celebrity because of the political situation in the United States. A community organizer even as a teenager, he ended up being a school administrator, before quitting his job to move to St. Louis. He had been spending all of his free time working with people in Ferguson, MO, in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
First, here’s a manly image of Mckesson, one of many times he was arrested in Ferguson (and Baton Rouge, and other places):
Mckesson didn’t start the Black Lives Matter movement (three women were the originators: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi), but he did quit his job to move to the Ferguson area full-time as an activist and leader. He brought to the Ferguson movement a lot of skill with social media and communication, and rose to a position of visibility. He is one of the go-to voices and faces of BLM in the media because of what he has written and what he has risked.
I like what I know of his story, because what he has done is something that anyone could potentially do. Mckesson is not (to my knowledge) a world-class athlete; didn’t come from a prominent, wealthy family; he isn’t a celebrity in some other area who is lending his face and name to BLM. He didn’t strike it rich or have a particular string of luck – I mean, he is partly well-known because of how often he’s been arrested, and that’s not something anyone enjoys. He’s also not some kind of Everyman, but in his passion and commitment I think we can see the best of ourselves.
Black Lives Matter, and I support that movement, because I see it as a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement, which has been ongoing for generations now. DeRay Mckesson’s words and actions also matter, and the relationships he has built matter, and his arrests matter. His struggle matters and his suffering matters, and through him, we are able to get a window into a whole movement. Anyone who gives themselves to a cause can matter in these ways, and one thing he does is show us that. Anyone can fight for what’s right, and one doesn’t have to hurt anyone, or threaten to hurt, or have a lot of political clout.
For showing us what commitment to a nonviolent struggle, and integrity, and eloquence can do, even for those who don’t come into the world with any particular advantage, DeRay Mckesson is our Profile in Positive Masculinity.×
When applying gaming principles to business operations, companies should seek to advance strategic objectives—not simply promote routine performance goals.
It’s likely that your company will try out gamification techniques throughout the organization during the next few years. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2015, 40 percent of Global 1000 organizations will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations.¹ Gamification is about taking the essence of games—fun, play, and passion—and applying it to real-world, non-game situations. In a business setting, that means designing solutions using gaming principles in everything from back-office tasks and training, to sales management and career counseling.
Unfortunately, it’s also likely that your gamification initiatives will fall short of expectations: Gartner predicts that by 2014, 80 percent of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives, primarily due to poor design.²
What’s going wrong?
In many cases, organizations aren’t thinking boldly enough about their objectives for applying gamification. In seeking to motivate employees by using gaming principles, many organizations focus only on awards such as points, or a single routine performance goal. But gamification’s potential is much more strategic: Systematic adoption of gamification throughout the business and tight integration with the core systems that drive front- and back-office functions can be the source of a significant competitive advantage.
A Whole New Game
Gamification isn’t just about scoring points—it allows for new ways of imagining, designing, and implementing solutions. As business becomes increasingly social, more opportunities are arising to augment performance and promote strategic objectives by embedding gaming mechanics into traditional processes.
Organizations can harness gaming principles to improve morale, motivate behavior, and get stakeholders passionately engaged in finance, sales, HR, manufacturing, and customer service, among other functions. By aligning game objectives with their desired outcomes, organizations can promote the adoption of leading practices.
Even more powerfully, gaming mechanics can be almost imperceptible to users, who find themselves motivated to find new ways to work, collaborate, share ideas, and drive business outcomes. In this way, gamification will be a critical enabler of organizations’ “social business” objectives.
As an example of the possibilities, consider how Engine Yard, a platform-as-a-service provider, used gaming mechanics to build a self-help customer-support community. The company had been responding to customer issues through support tickets—a slow process that also didn’t promote the company’s strategic goal of getting customers engaged in its knowledge base and forums. The company moved the forums and related documentation to a customer-support portal, and then deployed gaming techniques to reward customers who use the portal. Customers can earn “achievements” for specific behaviors, such as searching the knowledge base, reading articles, and creating topics. They can also complete “missions”—where a series of customer-support tasks are grouped together—to win special rewards or badges. As users accumulate achievements or complete missions, they raise their experience status and reputation on the portal to a higher level.
Since deploying the gamification effort, Engine Yard has seen a 40 percent increase in forum engagement and knowledge base searches; a 20 percent reduction in tickets per customer, on average; and a 40 percent improvement in ticket response time by Engine Yard’s support team.
Putting Gamification to Work
To apply gamification effectively, companies should understand the organization’s inner workings, process interdependencies, and stakeholder behaviors, including the interplay between people and technologies. Success factors include the following:
Identify the relevant social networks. Given the interactive nature of gamification, social networks are the starting point for implementing initiatives based on game mechanics. Companies should identify the social networks relevant to a specific business objective. They can then explore incentives that will motivate members of those networks to engage in pursuing that objective. It is critical to identify constraints on the use of gamification to achieve the desired objective.
Form a multidisciplinary team to design the game. A game will likely touch on individual incentives, operational and organizational goals, analytics, end-user interfaces, and underlying IT systems. Companies should form a multidisciplinary team to represent these dimensions—including social scientists, marketers, game designers, line-of-business managers, data scientists, back-end systems engineers, and architects. When applying game dynamics to a business process or the business as a whole, designers should understand the complexity of the rules that govern the organization—and how to increase interaction and engagement with audiences. The game design should offer clear benefits to users—as well as to the organization.
Measure results and fine-tune the approach. To demonstrate tangible results, organizations should benchmark current performance, measure the outcome once the application is activated, and revise assumptions, approaches, or tools in response. To get past the pilot phase, it is critical to maintain momentum by encouraging users to continue participating. If the game dynamics are too difficult, participants will likely lose interest and disengage. The same is true if the dynamics are too simple. The new data generated by the game can be used to derive insights for adapting it in real time. Measuring outcomes and fine-tuning the approach should be continuous processes to enhance the model and keep players engaged over time. Organizations should consider how to keep this process exciting and interesting after the initial achievements and how rewards, incentives, and recognition might be changed in light of the data regarding behaviors and outcomes.
***
Badges and leaderboards have their place, but they are a part of a larger, more interesting opportunity. Companies should seek to avoid becoming stuck with isolated one-off concepts that incrementally improve only a small part of the business. Instead, executives should rethink what a gamified business looks like from the ground up. Understand who you’re trying to engage, what motivates them, and how gamification can change the way they look at—and work with—the organization.
—by Doug Palmer, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and Andre Hugo, director, Deloitte DigitalFirefighters have put out the four-alarm blaze that ripped through the Masonic Temple on Hancock Street in Quincy. But crews will remain at the charred building overnight to make sure it doesn't flare up again.
Firefighters have put out the four-alarm blaze that ripped through the Masonic Temple on Hancock Street in Quincy. However, crews will remain at the charred building overnight to make sure it doesn't flare up again.
As of 3:40 p.m., firefighters had stopped dumping water on the building and no flames or smoke were visible. The fire started at about noon Monday when two construction workers were using grinders on the heating system in the basement, Leo Martin, the realtor who has agreed to buy the building, said.
"All our history is gone," David Elsner, head of the Masonic Temple Association of Quincy, said. The Rural Lodge of Masons has occupied the building since it was erected in 1926.
As of 6 p.m., the section of Hancock Street that had been previously closed as crews battled the fire was partially re-opened to traffic.
Firefighters were ordered out of the building shortly after arriving because of the heavy flames, Quincy Fire Chief Joseph Barron said. Ladder trucks from Quincy and Boston's fire departments responded to the blaze.
Thick billows of black smoke could be seen from miles away. As flames shot out of the temple’s roof, large crowds gathered at street corners and in parking lots in Quincy Center, black-charred debris raining down from the sky.
Quincy Police Chief Paul Keenan said there were no injuries and none of the surrounding buildings were evacuated. However, a reporter observed that the Sovereign Bank and Citizens Bank near the temple had closed early Monday.
For several hours, a portion of Hancock Street - from the Adams Street intersection to the rotary at the Church of Presidents - was closed to all traffic. As a result, all drop-offs and pick-ups at the Quincy Center MBTA were diverted to the Burgin Parkway side of the T station.
Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch, who was attending a meeting on Hancock Street when the fire started, said the roof has collapsed.
“Hopefully the shell will survive," Koch said.
Leo Martin, a Quincy realtor who has agreed to purchase the temple, said the fire started shortly after noon when two construction workers were "grinding out a heat line" in the basement, and the insulation caught fire. The two employees exited the building safely, Martin said.
The Quincy Masonic Temple, a neoclassical structure built in 1926 for the Freemasons, is valued by the city's assessors at $3 million. The Rural Lodge of Masons currently have about 400 members, Elsner said.
"It's an architectural jewel," lodge member Jim Bennette of Weymouth said. Bennettee rushed to the temple once he heard about the fire.
"We love this building," he said. "We care about this building. It's a great loss for the whole city and the South Shore."
The three-story building, at 1170 Hancock St., was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. The building, 21,653 square feet in size, stands out because of its archaic stone facade, which includes four pillars and a gold Freemason symbol at the entrance.
Hanover-based broker 1st US Realty listed the property for sale over the summer. Elsner said Martin had plans to rehabiliate the temple and continue allowing the masons to use it.
"All our records are gone - our artifacts, especially our photos," Elsner said.
The temple was designed by J. Williams Beal and Sons, a Boston architectural firm that also designed other downtown landmarks such as the Granite Trust Building and the old Patriot Ledger building on Temple Street.
"It’s an amazing building. Inside is incredible," Koch said. "The room, the carpet and the craftsmanship. It’s really a shame to see it happen.”
This is a developing story. Check this website for updates.
READ MORE about this issue.The problem of resistance to the oligarchy
is how to hurt their interests at an acceptable cost to those doing the harm.
The traditional answer to this was solidarity and martyrdom. It is impossible to overstate how dangerous being a union activist right up to the middle of the 20th century was. You had to accept that you would be beaten, jailed and possibly killed. Violent confrontations with police and private cops were routine. Outright battles were not unknown, as when miners squared off against the military in a multi-day battle with over ten thousand casualties.
Nor did the early unions wring their hands about violence, even “criminal” violence. Clarence Darrow was a union lawyer for years. One of his most prominent cases was defending union members who set off explosives in a newspaper office, killing people in that office. The unions did not abandon those workers, who had clearly committed what we would call terrorism: they hired a star lawyer, one of the best in the country, to defend them.
The general strike, even more than the strike, was another answer: just shut the entire economy down. It was used because it inflicted real costs on employers: they still needed some workers. But a strike requires social solidarity: bringing in scabs must be socially unacceptable, either due to mores or because the scabs know they’ll have their kneecaps broken. A general strike requires enough workers to be willing to do it to shut down an entire city, region, or country.
The Gandhian resistance method is very similar to general strikes: it requires hundreds of thousands to millions of people to be willing to shut down the economy and dare the police or army to kill or imprison them all. When you have only a few hundred or thousand people, the police can deal with that easily enough: worst case they call in the national guard. Hundreds of thousands: not so much.
What all of these actions had in common is that they genuinely hurt the interests of the rich where it mattered, in the pocketbook.
You can also get change through making the lives of the rich unpleasant, or making them fear for their very lives. Social peace has often been bought by treating ordinary people better, when the rich genuinely feared the army and police couldn’t protect them.
But if the elites think that their security forces can protect them, and especially if they live in a bubble where they never have to face people whose lives they have made miserable, as is the case for most of our rich, who fly by private jet, travel about the city in helicopters or chauffered limos and live in gated enclaves; and if you can’t cost them any real money, why should they let you have any of the surplus of society beyond the bare minimum you need to remain useful to them? (Not to survive: as the cutting of food stamps in the US indicates, that’s not a priority for the oligarchy.)
Be clear that distribution of goods and money in an economy is almost entirely unrelated to any ethical idea of merit or deservedness. The bankers, amongst the best paid people in the world economy, destroyed far more money than they earned in the 00s, and yet are still paid billions of dollars in bonuses every year. They receive the money they do because they had the power to make the government make them whole after they lost everything, then the power to make the government make them even richer than before. They control a bundle of valuable rights from the state: the right to borrow at prime, the right to value assets to model (fantasy); the right to huge leverage; and the right lend, which is how money is actually created in our economy (aka. they can print money.)
This is why they’re rich: not because they produce net value: they destroy value; but because they have the power to make the government do what they want it to do and to make it not prosecute them when they break the laws, and even to change the laws so they can take even more money.
Distribution in an economy is based, virtually entirely, on power. A group receives goods and money because it can force others to give it to them. The libertarian fantasy of free markets and free choice is exactly that. They don’t exist today, they have rarely existed in the past, and to the extent they have existed they owe their existence entirely to government making sure they exist. As soon as any group gains enough power to take over government, they do, and free markets cease to exist because they make the government give them special rights,whether those are rights to print money, borrow low and lend high, or so-called intellectual property rights that let them continue to profit from ideas created 80 years ago.
Power, power is all that matters. Even distribution, or something close to it, happens only when there is relatively equality between groups in society or there is an existential threat to society which requires the willing participation of all parts of society.
If you ever want to see raises for ordinary people again, you must figure out how they will become powerful: and power means “what can they do to hurt people who cross them, hurt them really, really badly.”
Peace is the result of everyone knowing and believing in their hearts that if they break the conditions of the peace, others will react with overwhelming force. When it becomes clear that there is no cost for taking more of the pie, people will do so, and yes, did do so.
So: how do we punish the rich for what they have done? How do we force them (not convince, force) to give up more of the surplus crated by society?
If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.Image Text: CONFUSION: Karlos Cashe
FLORIDA POLICE arrested and jailed Karlos Cashe after confusing drywall dust found in his car as crack cocaine. The handyman was pulled over by authorities back in March for driving without headlights, yet once police inspected Cashe’s vehicle, they found drywall scrapping on the seat and floor. Cashe told a local news outlet he tried to explain to police it was from the drywall.
“I know for a fact that it’s drywall because I’m a handyman, and I said that continuously throughout the arrest stop.” Cashe told WFTV “
The powder was tested by a K-9 unit and came back positive for cocaine, police said. Cashe was on probation for marijuana and cocaine charges stemming from 2015 and he also allegedly violated his curfew.
After sitting in prison for 90 days without bond, lab results showed the dust found in Cashe’s car was indeed drywall.
“There’s no intent, when something comes back positive, we take it; it’s our probable cause and that’s why we send to FDLE to confirm,” Lt. Heather Capetillo of the Oviedo Police Department told Fox35 Orlando.
Cashe was released from prison but says he wants to be compensated. “I want some compensation for them. When I make a mistake, I’ve got to pay for it, that’s why I was on probation. It’s no different for them,” Cashe said.
Read every story in our hardcopy newspaper for free by downloading the app.I saw it stated in a newspaper that one of the surprises of the war has been the Mahratta. “Surprise” is hardly |
higher ground. The 2014 British Senior Open was contested at Royal Porthcawl.
48 (69) Wade Hampton G.C.
Cashiers, N.C., U.S.A. / 7,302 yards, Par 72
Built during the period when Tom Fazio was still working with the existing landscape rather than ignoring it, Wade Hampton is an exercise in restraint. The fairways flow through a natural valley between flanking mountain peaks. Some holes are guarded by gurgling brooks, but Fazio piped several streams underground to make the course more playable and walkable. Wade Hampton hosted the 2013 U.S. Senior Amateur.
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49 (39) Kauri Cliffs
Matauri Bay, New Zealand / 7,151 yards, Par 72
Like No. 16 Cape Kidnappers 400 miles to the southeast, Kauri Cliffs occupies an old sheep ranch atop an ocean-front plateau laced with canyons. Unlike Kidnappers, the 2000 layout by design-and-build guy Dave Harman of Orlando, has hills of native rough, stands of fern and more forced carries over gorges. The topography allowed Harman to string the seventh and eighth and 14th through 17th holes parallel to the edge of the Pacific, although several hundred feet above it. Sadly, Harman died in 2004 of tongue cancer. Kauri Cliffs was his finest achievement.
50 (65) North Berwick G.C., Scotland
North Berwick, East Lothian, Scotland / 6,464 yards, Par 71
North Berwick must be played in good humor. To do otherwise is to not properly appreciate its outrageous topography (some terrain is like an elephant cemetery) and outlandish holes, like the sunken 13th green beyond a stone wall, the renown Redan par-3 15th, blind from the tee, and the long, narrow 16th green with a gulch separating front and back plateaus, surely the model for the infamous Biarritz green.
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51 (48) Whistling Straits (Straits)
Haven, Wis., U.S.A. / 7,790 yards, Par 72
Pete Dye transformed a dead-flat abandoned army air base along a two-mile stretch of Lake Michigan into an imitation of Ballybunion at Whistling Straits, peppering his rugged fairways and windswept greens with 1,012 (at last count) bunkers. There are no rakes at Whistling Straits, in keeping with the notion that this is a transplanted Irish links. It has so much rub-of-the-green that some tour pros don't care for it, but it didn't bother Jason Day, who conquered it to win the 2015 PGA Championship. Next up for the Straits is the 2020 Ryder Cup.
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52 (55) Diamante G.C. (Dunes)
Cabo San Lucas, Baja Sur, Mexico / 7,160 yards, Par 72
Mexico's first true links, fashioned by Davis Love III and his design team along the Pacific Ocean from a fantastic set of white sand dunes, huge portions of which are without vegetation and seem like enormous snow drifts. Holes hug the flowing terrain with little artificiality. Two holes on the back nine once played around a long lagoon but have been replaced by new 12th and 13th holes on the beach. So now the entire second nine is adjacent to the ocean, amidst the tallest dunes. How unique is this course? No other links in the world has cactus.
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53 (37) Friar's Head G.C.
Baiting Hollow, N.Y., U.S.A. / 7,049 yards, Par 71
The challenge for architects Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw at Friar's Head was to design some holes in breathtaking sand dunes perched 200 feet above the Long Island Sound, with other parts of the course sitting in an ordinary potato field to the south. Said Crenshaw: "Our job was to marry the two distinct elements. We didn't want one nine up in the dunes and the other down on the flat." The solution was to move the routing back and forth and artfully reshape the farm fields into gentle links-like land. They pulled it off.
54 (56) Trump International Golf Links
Balmedie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland / 7,428 yards, Par 72
Just four years old, this Martin Hawtree design is set in as dramatic a set of sand dunes as there is in golf -- even better than those at No. 35 Royal Birkdale and No. 45 Royal St. George's. Some dunes sit 100 feet above fairways. And all are covered in deep marram grasses. Fairways pitch and tumble, often posing downhill lies to uphill targets. Every bunker is at least knee high, encircled with stacked-sod faces. Greens are perched and edged by deep hollows. Owner Donald Trump wants an Open; we suspect it'll someday host a Ryder Cup.
55 (28) Royal Melbourne G.C. (East)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia / 6,579 yards, Par 72
Former Australian Open champion Alex Russell and greenskeeper Mick Morcom built the West Course to Alister MacKenzie's plans, then added the East in 1931, on somewhat less inspiring land, flatter and more wooded. But the bunkering and green contours are very similar to the West. (Mackenzie had routed a nine-hole East Course that was never built, and so Russell incorporated a few of those holes.) A slight flaw might be that all four par 3s play in the same northern direction. For composite tournament play, East's holes 1-3 and 16-18 are used along with 12 of the West holes.
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56 (85) Casa de Campo (Teeth of the Dog)
La Romana, Dominican Republic / 7,471 yards, Par 72
The Dominican Republic is now a major golf destination, and Teeth of the Dog started it all back in 1971. The earliest international masterpiece by Pete Dye, it has been periodically rebuilt and updated by Dye following repeated hurricane damage. The routing is stunning: a clockwise front 9, counterclockwise back 9, with seven holes hunkered down on the ocean, no more than 20 feet above the surf. The sea is on the left on holes five through eight and on the right on holes 15 through 17. Every hole is unique and scenic.
57 (47) Riviera C.C., Pacific
Pacific Palisades, Calif., U.S.A. / 7,040 yards, Par 71
A compact but clever design by George C. Thomas Jr. and associate William P. Bell, Riviera features everything from a long Redan par 3, to a bunker in the middle of a green, to an alternate-fairway par 4. With its 18th green at the base of a natural amphitheater, Riviera seems to be tailormade as a tournament venue. It has hosted an annual PGA Tour event, but no U.S. Open since 1948. It's the site of the 2017 U.S. Amateur. Will that be a harbinger of a bigger USGA event to come?
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58 (NEW) Sentosa G.C. (Serapong)
Singapore, Republic of Singapore / 7,420 yards, Par 71
It took years to build the Serapong course back in the early 1980s. The site was a mangrove swamp filled with some 3 million cubic yards of sand dredged from Singapore Harbor. Designer Ron Fream, a globe-trotting American, routed as many holes as he could along the water's edge, resulting in the now-famed "Dragon's Tail," a loop of holes four through six with island fairways around a tidal basin. It was recently rebunkered by architect Gene Bates and his associate Andrew Johnston, who is now the club's director of agronomy. Sentosa has one of the legendary backdrops in the game -- the skyline of Singapore.
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59 (36) Prairie Dunes C.C.
Hutchinson, Kan., U.S.A. / 6,940 yards, Par 70
Prairie Dunes was the top nine-hole course in America for 20 years. By the time the club found funds to expand it to 18, original architect Perry Maxwell had passed away, but his son Press added nine more holes seamlessly, putting three on the front nine and six on the back. He also replicated his father's great greens. Prairie Dunes reflects all that is Kansas: sand dunes, prairie grasses, yucca plants, cottonwoods and constant wind.
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60 (45) Los Angeles C.C. (North)
Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.A. / 7,236 yards, Par 71
It's on the edge of tinsel town, but the architecture of the North Course at Los Angeles Country Club is solid gold since its 2010 restoration by architect Gil Hanse, his associate Jim Wagner and their colleague Geoff Shackelford. It matters not that Hanse's team didn't replicate the bunkering style of original architect George C. Thomas, but rather the more visually exciting style of Thomas's associate, William P. Bell. The bunkers will look sensational when L.A.C.C. hosts the 2017 Walker Cup and the 2023 U.S. Open.
61 (54) Swinley Forest G.C.
Ascot, Berkshire, England / 6,045 yards, Par 69
Due west of Sunningdale G.C. in London's heathland is Swinley Forest, which H.S. Colt described as the "least bad course" he ever designed. Much of its reputation is built around its five par 3s, each featuring its own personality and challenge. Colt supposedly located them first then connected them using an ideal balance of short and long par 4s on each nine. The par 3s are indeed outstanding -- the 17th looks like it might have been the inspiration for A.W. Tillinghast's 10th at Winged Foot West.
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62 (NEW) The Alotian Club
Roland, Ark., U.S.A. / 7,480 yards, Par 72
The Alotian Club gives us a hint of what Augusta National would have looked like had Bobby Jones established his dream course in hilly Atlanta. The first tee shot drops 70 feet to a fairway below, with the approach playing back uphill. The tee on the 205-yard par-3 sixth sits 85 feet above the green. Alotian, founded by Warren Stephens, son of former Masters chairman Jackson Stephens, is the first course in Arkansas ever to make the World Top 100. The Alotian name comes from the annual golf trips Stephens once took with his buddies. He called it America's Lights Out Tour, and they were the Alotians.
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63 (46) Pinehurst Resort (No.2)
Village of Pinehurst, N.C., U.S.A. / 7,495 yards, Par 72
In 2010, a team lead by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw killed and ripped out all the Bermudagrass rough on Pinehurst No. 2 that had been foolishly planted in the 1970s.Between fairways and tree lines, Coore and Crenshaw established vast bands of native hardpan sand dotted with clumps of wiregrass and scattered pine needles. They reduced the irrigation to mere single rows in fairways to prevent grass from ever returning to the new sandy wastelands. It was a highly successful experiment (and experience) when the men's and women's U.S. Opens were played on consecutive weeks on No. 2 in 2014.
64 (51) Kawana Hotel G. Cse. (Fuji)
Ito, Shizuoka, Japan / 6,691 yards, Par 72
C.H. Alison's 1936 design for Japan's first golf resort has long been dubbed the Pebble Beach of Japan, but it's far more mountainous. You see it on the opening hole, which drops down a tumbling fairway framed by twisted pines to a green with Sagami Bay as its backdrop. The sea also provides a backdrop on the steep downhill fourth, seventh, 10th, 11th, 14th and 15th holes. Unlike at No. 21 Hirono, Alison's bunkering here is subdued.
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65 (64) Lahinch G.C. (Old)
Lahinch, County Clare, Ireland / 6,950 yards, Par 72
Considered by some to be the St. Andrews of Ireland, the splendid links at Lahinch reflects evolution in golf architecture. After Alister MacKenzie remodeled it in the 1920s, only a few of Old Tom Morris' original holes, like the Klondyke par-5 4th, and Dell par-3 fifth, both with hidden greens, remained. In the 1980s, Donald Steel altered some of MacKenzie's holes and in the 2000s Martin Hawtree rebuilt everything and added four new holes. One classic MacKenzie par 3, the old 13th, is now a bye hole.
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66 (61) National G.C. of Canada
Woodbridge, Ont., Canada / 7,235 yards, Par 72
George Fazio once lost a U.S. Open in a playoff to Ben Hogan and his architecture reflected the sort of disciple needed to win that championship: tight, well-guarded fairways, big, well-bunkered, fast-paced greens and polished conditions. National G.C. of Canada reflects that and more, with gambling water hazards and double doglegs. In 2005, Tom Fazio, who helped his uncle with the original design, rebunkered some holes and created a new par-4 16th.
67 (NEW) Southern Hills C.C.
Tulsa, Okla., U.S.A / 7,184 yards, Par 71
A product of the Great Depression funded by Phillips Petroleum money and constructed by hundreds of workers who stood at the gate each morning hoping for a 25-cents-per-hour job that day, Southern Hills is architect Perry Maxwell's great achievement. The putting surfaces have the classic "Maxwell rolls," guarded by simple, yet effective bunkers. Maxwell, a former banker, negotiated his design fee on a sliding scale. He finished the job $17,500 under the anticipated $90,000 construction budget and earned $12,500. In an age of hard times, it was a most lucrative deal in golf design.
68 (NEW) Gozzer Ranch Golf & Lake Club
Henderson, Idaho, U.S.A. / 7,317 yards, Par 72
This is a Tom Fazio design with gorgeous views of Lake Coeur d'Alene to the north and west and the panoramic farm valley to the east. Little details elevate the architecture of Gozzer Ranch: a slight false right-front edge on the first green, the backboard slope behind the sixth green, the fairway contouring on the dual-fairway drivable par-4 12th that kicks even a short drive to the base of the putting surface. Its shaggy-edged bunkers are more than mere decorations. Some define targets off the tee and others pose options and challenges.
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69 (50) Kingsbarns G. Links
St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland / 7,227 yards, Par 72
Kingsbarns looks incredibly natural in its links setting, a tribute to owner Mark Parsinen and architect Kyle Phillips, who collaborated on transforming a lifeless farm field into a course that fools even the most discerning eye. The routing is ingenious and crescent-shaped along the Fife coast with holes on three separate levels (130 feet of elevation change in all) to provide ocean views from every fairway. Six holes play right on the shoreline, and every hole offers alternate angles of attack.
70 (New) Cabo del Sol (Ocean)
Los Cabos, Baja Sur, Mexico / 7,091 yards, Par 72
When Jack Nicklaus first saw this Baja Peninsula site, what can best be described as Scottsdale-meets-the-Sea of Cortez, he told reporters, "This is my chance to design a Pebble Beach." He took full advantage of that chance, routing an exciting 18 that plays from highlands of desert cacti, over dry washes and down to the sea on both nines. When the layout opened in 1994, Nicklaus said it had the three finest finishing holes in golf. That might still be true 22 years later, given that the greens at 16, 17 and 18 are all perched atop rocks above the crashing surf of Whale Bay.
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71 (49) Valderrama G.C.
Sotogrande, Cádiz, Spain / 6,990 yards, Par 71
Best known as the site of the 1997 Ryder Cup won by Europe in a squeaker, Valderrama was a favorite design of the late architect Robert Trent Jones. His tight, twisting fairways, pinched at every turn by squat olive trees, led to surprisingly small putting surfaces protected by Trent's trademark splashy bunkers. Valderrama contains one of the more controversial holes in golf: the par-5 17th guarded by water in front, which European captain Seve Ballesteros toughened for that Ryder Cup. Most agree it influenced the outcome.
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72 (95) The Honors Course
Ooltewah, Tenn., U.S.A. / 7,450 yards, Par 72
Considered radical in the early 1980s for its acres of tall, native-grass rough, unusual Zoysiagrass fairways and terrifying greens perched atop bulkheads of rock, The Honors Course is considered today to be a well-preserved example of Pete Dye's death-or-glory architecture. Other than reducing the contours in a couple of greens (particularly the 18th) in the late 1990s, Dye has left the course untouched. One might suspect he could return someday to update it.
73 (75) Shadow Creek
North Las Vegas, Nev., U.S.A. / 7,560 yards, Par 72
Back in 1990, $47 million to build a golf course was considered outrageous. Tom Fazio said that budget was necessary at Shadow Creek to perform what he now calls "total site manipulation," creating an environment where none existed, by carving rolling hills and canyons from the flat desert floor north of Las Vegas and pumping in plenty of water. Original owner Steve Wynn spent that kind of money because that's what casino hotel owners do: Create fantasies like Vermont in Vegas. Alas, this once-in-a-lifetime dream design has been too successful, triggering many expensive, but inferior, imitations.
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74 (NEW) The Bluffs Ho Tram Strip
Ba Ria, Vung Tau, Vietnam / 6,855 yards, Par 71
A 2014 design by Greg Norman, an Australian who now lives in Florida, so it's no surprise that Bluffs Ho Tram is very reminiscent of a Florida golf course, Jupiter Hills. Like Jupiter, it's separated from the ocean by a highway but plays through dramatic sand dunes covered in tropical vegetation, has joint fairways and even a pair of par 3s playing from a common dunes-top tee box complex to greens in opposite directions. As the name suggests, the Bluffs has some dramatic elevations, with the long par-3 15th green at the highest point, 165 feet above the South China Sea.
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75 (92) Spring City Golf & Lake Resort (Lake)
Kunming, Yunnan Province, China / 7,204 yards, Par 72
This Robert Trent Jones Jr. design on the shoreline of Yang Zong Hai Lake (as gorgeous as Lake Tahoe) opened in 1999. Holes sit along a tumbling slope leading down to the lake, with the opening and closing holes at the highest elevation. A spectacular trio down on the water's edge is most noteworthy: the par-3 eighth, plunging 100 feet down to a peninsula green, the par-5 ninth with the lake hard against the right edge and the par-3 10th, over a lake cove to a clifftop green.
76 (NEW) Punta Espada G. Cse.
Cap Cana, Dominican Republic / 7,396 yards, Par 72
Jack Nicklaus got his start in golf design working with Pete Dye, and his 10-year-old Punta Espada is a lively version of Dye's 40-year-old Teeth of the Dog course (No. 56) farther down the Dominican coast, from the to the broad waste areas of brilliant white sand usually associated with Pete's work, the low-profile greens and the eight green complexes right on the Caribbean shore. Punta Espada starts and finishes on the Caribbean and returns to it early in the back nine, with the awesome 249-yard par-3 13th directly over an ocean cove.
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77 (63) Olympic Club (Lake)
San Francisco, Calif., U.S.A. / 7,095 yards, Par 71
It seems fitting that, in a town where every house is a cliffhanger, every U.S. Open played at Olympic has been one too. For decades, the Lake was a severe test of golf. But while it still has canted fairways hampered by just a single fairway bunker, the once-dense forest has been considerably cleared away, leaving only the occasional bowlegged cypress with knobby knees. Still, the 2012 U.S. Open stuck to the script: Ball stuck in tree, slow play warnings, a snap hook by the leader on 16, and a guy name Simpson won.
78 (NEW) Memphrémagog Golf Club
Magog, Quebec, Canada / 7,498 yards, Par 72
Long, slender Lake Memphrémagog stretches from Vermont well into Quebec, and near its northern tip is one of golf's most exclusive golf retreats. The 2008 Tom McBroom design has been likened to the "Augusta National of Canada," and with its rugged tree-lined topography, meandering creeks and complex green structures, it's also been called "Tom McBroom's Monster." Of course, it probably gets those nicknames because few people can easily pronounce Memphrémagog.
79 (59) The Club at Nine Bridges
Andeok-myeon, Namjeju-kun, Jeju-do, Jeju Island, South Korea / 7,863 yards, Par 72
Our Korean affiliates call The Club at Nine Bridges the "Taj Mahal of Golf." After all, architects Ronald Fream and David Dale spent an estimated $40 million in the early 2000s creating it. (The entire project, including land, clubhouse, condos and spa, cost $100 million.) The site was volcanic rock, capped with 150,000 cubic yards of sand as a base for bent-grass fairways and greens. The site had natural streams edged with massive Japanese Maples and 20-foot-tall Korean Azaleas, but they also transplanted 300 mature evergreens like Kryptomeria and cedars for additional color. To control storm water drainage, several lakes were created, some with cascading weirs, and the par-5 18th finishes on an island green.
80 (NEW) Peachtree G.C.
Atlanta, Ga., U.S.A. / 7,414 yards, Par 72
A design collaboration by amateur star Bobby Jones and golf architect Robert Trent Jones (no relation). Trent was a forceful personality, so Peachtree reflects far more of Trent's notions of golf than Bobby's, particularly in designing for future equipment advances. When it opened, Peachtree measured in excess of 7,200 yards, extremely long for that era. It boasted the longest set of tees in America (to provide flexibility on holes) and the country's most enormous greens (to spread out wear and tear). As it turns out, Trent was a visionary, and decades later others subsequently followed his lead.
81 (29) San Francisco G.C.
San Francisco, Calif., U.S.A. / 6,830 yards, Par 71
San Francisco Golf Club's clever routing was done mostly by a trio of club members, who first staked out the course in 1916. A.W. Tillinghast remodeled the course in 1923, establishing its signature greens and bunkering. He also added the par-3 seventh, called the "Duel Hole" because its location marks the spot of the last legal duel in America. Three holes were replaced in 1950 in anticipation of a street widening project that never happened. In 2006, those holes were restored by Tom Doak and his then associate, Jim Urbina.
82 (81) Royal Lytham & St. Annes G.C.
Lytham St. Annes, Lancashire, England / 7,118 yards, Par 70
Perhaps the least dramatic-looking links in The Open rota, mainly because it's surrounded by houses and a rail line, with the seacoast being hundreds of yards distant and never in sight. Lytham boasts over 200 bunkers, most built a century ago, when the club was heralded as a pioneer of natural bunkering. Its par-3 first hole is unusual, while its finish, six straight par 4s, is a terrific challenge that was, in 2011, the downfall of Adam Scott and a triumph for Ernie Els.
83 (NEW) The Els Club Teluk Datai
Pulau Langkawa, Kedah Darul Aman, Malaysia / 7,284 yards, Par 72
When first opened in 1992, this Langkawa Island design by Australian brothers Geoff and Ted Parslow was called The Golf Club Datai Bay. In 1914, Ernie Els and design partner Greg Letsche performed a major remodeling and it was renamed The Els Club Teluk Datai. Running from the shoreline of the Andaman Sea to the edge of a tropical rain forest beneath the Mat Cincang Mountains, Els Club is the only course on the World Top 100 that has no sand bunkers. Els felt the extreme amount of annual rainfall would make bunkers a maintenance nightmare. Instead, he used trees and a natural meandering stream as his primary hazards.
84 (52) Nirwana Bali G.C.
Tabanan, Bali, Indonesia / 6,805 yards, Par 72
In this paradise east of Java, golf is found beside swaying palms, lily ponds and crashing surf. Designed by Greg Norman and his then-design associate Bob Harrison in 1997, Nirwana Bali winds through homes and rice paddies, both specially built to be incorporated into the layout, and touches the ocean on both nines. Most dramatic is the par-3 seventh, a shot over a ocean cove with Tanah Lot, a famed Balisian temple, to the left, on a rock outcropping just offshore.
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85 (NEW) Tokyo G.C.
Sayama City, Saitama Prefecture, Japan / 6,915 yards, Par 72
It is a common misbelief that Toyko G.C. was designed by C.H. Alison design, the talented Englishman who visited Japan in the early 1930s and transformed its golf architecture with such courses as Hirono (No. 21) and Kawana Hotel (No. 64). Alison did design a course for Tokyo in 1932, but its land was requisitioned by the Imperial Army in the lead-up to WWII. The club moved to a new layout designed by Japanese architect Kome Ohtani in 1940, while Alison's course became potato fields. Adding to the misconception is the fact that architect Gil Hanse, in his 2010 remodeling of Tokyo, strove to establish features that reflected Alison's philosophy of design.
86 (82) Sheshan International G.C.
Songjiang, Shanghai, China / 7,199 yards, Par 72
Sheshan International, at the base of Sheshan Mountain, is considered by some to be the "Augusta National of China" because of its opulent conditioning. The stylistic design, by Canadian Neil Haworth and his late partner Robin Nelson, incorporates a small forest, a canal, several man-made ponds and a small, deep stone quarry, over which both the drivable par-4 16th and long par-3 17th play. Sheshan hosted the World Golf Championships-HSBC event six times, most recently in 2013, won by Dustin Johnson.
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87 (NEW) The National G.C. (Old)
Cape Schanck, Victoria, Australia / 6,904 yards, Par 72
The oldest (1987) of three 18s at The National, all built on a rolling sandbelt peninsula south of Melbourne, this Robert Trent Jones Jr. design features fairways tucked in scrub valleys edged by moonah trees, hilltop greens that offer beautiful panoramas of the Bass Strait and crisp-edged bunkers reminiscent of those at Royal Melbourne. Loveliest hole on The Old Course is probably the par-3 seventh, a pitch-shot par-3 over a deep gully to a green backdropped by the sea.
88 (84) Leopard Creek C.C.
Malelane, Mpumalanga, South Africa / 7,288 yards, Par 72
Intended to merge with its Bushvelt environs, with Kruger National Park and the Crocodile River on the north and west, the Gary Player-designed Leopard Creek is really more akin to a polished, immaculate American layout, with a man-made stream diagonally slashing in front of first and 14th greens, the fifth, 15th 16th and 18th greens guarded by stone-bulkheaded ponds and the par-5 ninth green on an island. But no course in America has views of giraffes, hippos and crocs in the wild.
89. (80) The Golf Club
New Albany, Ohio, U.S.A. / 7,439 yards, Par 72
The Golf Club, built in 1966, may be the most authentic of Pete Dye's transition period, when he first chose to buck convention and start building lay-of-the-land layouts like those he'd seen during a 1963 tour of Scotland. In doing so, Dye re-introduced deception and misdirection into American golf architecture. Its construction attracted the attention of local boy Jack Nicklaus, who visited several times and made some astute suggestions. That led to a five-year Dye-Nicklaus design partnership. The Golf Club remained untouched for 45 years, but in 2014 Dye gently retouched most every hole.
90 (62) Bandon Dunes
Bandon, Ore., U.S.A. / 7,212 yards, Par 72
Chicago recycled products mogul Mike Keiser took a gamble when he chose tenderfoot architect David McLay Kidd to design a destination daily-fee on the remote southwestern coastline of Oregon. But the design Kidd produced, faithful to the links-golf tenets of his native Scotland, proved so popular that today Keiser has a multiple-course resort at Bandon Dunes that rivals Pinehurst and the Monterey Peninsula. Exceeds them, perhaps. None of that would have happened if David Kidd hadn't produced a great first design.
91 (57) Machrihanish G.C.
Campbelltown, Strathclyde, Scotland / 6,462 yards, Par 70
To reach Machrihanish, Old Tom Morris needed a train, a steamboat and a long carriage ride. Visitors today have to resort to much the same mode, so remote is Machrihanish, on the southern end of Scotland's Kintyre Peninsula. It's a journey rewarded, from the opening tee shot, which the bold will carry over a beach and Atlantic tide on the left, to the remainder of the links in some of the most rugged dunes known to golf.
92 (91) Sunningdale G.C. (New)
Sunningdale, Ascot, Berkshire, England / 6,729 yards, Par 70
H.S. Colt, who was the club's secretary from 1901 to 1913, laid out the New Course in 1923, after he'd established his reputation as a grand golf architect. It's considered by most to be tougher than No. 23 Sunningdale Old, mainly because Colt's greens are smaller, with subtle contours that nudge balls toward bunkers hard along the collars. It's a toss-up as to which course is prettier. Both have fields of heather, gorse, Scotch broom and clusters of pine, oak and silver birch.
93 (42) Cabot Links
Inverness, Nova Scotia, Canada / 6,854 yards, Par 70
The older sister to No. 19 Cabot Cliffs is not a natural links, though it looks and plays like it. Cabot Links was man-made by designer-shaper Rod Whitman on a coastal coal mine staging area that serviced mines beneath the sea. Bump-and-run on firm fescue turf is the game on this understated layout, with muted dunes, austere bunkering and gentle, generous greens. Call it Canada's Portmarnock, though Ireland has no match for Cabot's postcard par-4 6th, a dogleg-left around a tidal yacht basin. In early routings, that was going to be the closing hole.
94 (NEW) Sebonack G.C.
Southampton, N.Y., U.S.A. / 7,534 yards, Par 72
Not since Augusta National had the nation's greatest golfer teamed with one of the most highly-regarded course architects on a design project. But the joint venture by Jack Nicklaus with Tom Doak at Sebonack was complicated by the fact that golfer Nicklaus was also an esteemed course architect in his own right, and the project sat right beside two American icons, Shinnecock Hills and National Golf Links. Some pundits have reduced Sebonack to "Tom's bunkers, Jack's greens," but in truth it's just the opposite. Doak convinced Nicklaus to go with small greens of sweeping contours and little imperfections. Meanwhile, Jack insisted that Tom tone down his usual ragged, jagged bunker faces to make them palatable to high-handicap members.
95 (NEW) Emirates G.C. (Majlis)
Dubai, United Arab Emirates / 7,301 yards, Par 72
When Emirates G.C. first opened in 1988, it was a literal oasis in the desert, the first all-grass golf course built in the Middle East. Now it sits in the shadows of more than a hundred high rise buildings and thousands of palms and hardwood trees transplanted on the site. Designed by American Karl Litten, who'd previously specialized in residential development courses in Florida, the Majlis Course looks like a Florida transplant, with five lakes coming in play on eight holes. Where he'd normally plot housing lots, he maintained as desert. Some of those areas have now become homesites.
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96 (NEW) Naruo G.C.
Inagawa, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan / 6,564 yards, Par 70
The most mountainous of the several Japanese courses ranked on our World 100 Greatest, Naruo reminds many Americans of courses found on the Monterey Peninsula, with hilly fairways slashed by gullies that run to the sea lined by dense Monterey-like pines. Originally designed in 1920 by brothers Rokuro and Shiro Akaboshi, it was rebunkered by C.H. Alison during his 1930s tour of the country. With that dramatic deep bunkering, Naruo looks both lovely and lethal. Only the flattish greens, many on hilltop locations, seem out-of-place.
97 (NEW) Jumeirah G. Estates (Earth)
Dubai, United Arab Emirates / 7,692 yards, Par 72
development course with gorgeous white, graceful-though-deep bunkers that look suspiciously like those at Augusta National. A recirculating creek looks like it was appropriated from Muirfield Village. Plus there's even an island green. Site of a World Tour event since 2010, Earth was the first of what was intended to be four full-blown courses at Jumeirah. Only the Norman-designed Fire Course has been completed. The remaining two, Wind and Water, have been shelved.
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98 (NEW) Querencia C.C.
Los Cabos, Mexico / 7,050 yards, Par 72
Located several miles up the road from No. 70 Cabo del Sol and adjacent to the Jack Nicklaus-designed Palmillo Golf Club, this Tom Fazio design opened in 2000. The routing wanders the rugged high desert plateau on the outward nine, toward the Sea of Cortez, hopscotching a dramatic canyon on the par-3 eighth. After reach the far point on the par-5 ninth, the course turns for home over similar terrain, via two more outstanding par 3s, the 11th and 14th. Other holes have humpbacked fairway and greens tucked beneath huge rock outcroppings. The one discordant note are royal palms planted in many desert spots near greens. They seem too artificial among native desert plants.
99 (NEW) Gary Player C.C.
Sun City, North West Province, South Africa / 7,747 yards, Par 72
When first laid out in 1979 by American Ron Kirby and his then-design partner Gary Player, the course occupied a mountain valley in the independent state of Bophuthatswana, which has since reunited with South Africa. It's thoroughly American in its design, with huge flowery bunkers and massive greens, even |
Signalling [ edit ]
With the sun as light source, a mirror can be used to signal by variations in the orientation of the mirror. The signal can be used over long distances, possibly up to 60 kilometres (37 mi) on a clear day. This technique was used by Native American tribes and numerous militaries to transmit information between distant outposts.
Mirrors can also be used for search to attract the attention of search and rescue helicopters. Specialized type of mirrors are available and are often included in military survival kits.
Technology [ edit ]
Televisions and projectors [ edit ]
Microscopic mirrors are a core element of many of the largest high-definition televisions and video projectors. A common technology of this type is Texas Instruments' DLP. A DLP chip is a postage stamp-sized microchip whose surface is an array of millions of microscopic mirrors. The picture is created as the individual mirrors move to either reflect light toward the projection surface (pixel on), or toward a light absorbing surface (pixel off).
Other projection technologies involving mirrors include LCoS. Like a DLP chip, LCoS is a microchip of similar size, but rather than millions of individual mirrors, there is a single mirror that is actively shielded by a liquid crystal matrix with up to millions of pixels. The picture, formed as light, is either reflected toward the projection surface (pixel on), or absorbed by the activated LCD pixels (pixel off). LCoS-based televisions and projectors often use 3 chips, one for each primary color.
Large mirrors are used in rear projection televisions. Light (for example from a DLP as mentioned above) is "folded" by one or more mirrors so that the television set is compact.
Solar power [ edit ]
Mirrors are integral parts of a solar power plant. The one shown in the adjacent picture uses concentrated solar power from an array of parabolic troughs.[60]
Instruments [ edit ]
Telescopes and other precision instruments use front silvered or first surface mirrors, where the reflecting surface is placed on the front (or first) surface of the glass (this eliminates reflection from glass surface ordinary back mirrors have). Some of them use silver, but most are aluminium, which is more reflective at short wavelengths than silver. All of these coatings are easily damaged and require special handling. They reflect 90% to 95% of the incident light when new. The coatings are typically applied by vacuum deposition. A protective overcoat is usually applied before the mirror is removed from the vacuum, because the coating otherwise begins to corrode as soon as it is exposed to oxygen and humidity in the air. Front silvered mirrors have to be resurfaced occasionally to keep their quality. There are optical mirrors such as mangin mirrors that are second surface mirrors (reflective coating on the rear surface) as part of their optical designs, usually to correct optical aberrations.[61]
[62] Deformable thin-shell mirror. It is 1120 millimetres across but just 2 millimetres thick, making it much thinner than most glass windows.
The reflectivity of the mirror coating can be measured using a reflectometer and for a particular metal it will be different for different wavelengths of light. This is exploited in some optical work to make cold mirrors and hot mirrors. A cold mirror is made by using a transparent substrate and choosing a coating material that is more reflective to visible light and more transmissive to infrared light.
A hot mirror is the opposite, the coating preferentially reflects infrared. Mirror surfaces are sometimes given thin film overcoatings both to retard degradation of the surface and to increase their reflectivity in parts of the spectrum where they will be used. For instance, aluminum mirrors are commonly coated with silicon dioxide or magnesium fluoride. The reflectivity as a function of wavelength depends on both the thickness of the coating and on how it is applied.
A dielectric coated mirror used in a dye laser. The mirror is over 99% reflective at 550 nanometers, (yellow), but will allow most other colors to pass through.
A dielectric mirror used in tunable lasers. With a center wavelength of 600 nm and bandwidth of 100 nm, the coating is totally reflective to the orange construction paper, but only reflects the reddish hues from the blue paper.
For scientific optical work, dielectric mirrors are often used. These are glass (or sometimes other material) substrates on which one or more layers of dielectric material are deposited, to form an optical coating. By careful choice of the type and thickness of the dielectric layers, the range of wavelengths and amount of light reflected from the mirror can be specified. The best mirrors of this type can reflect >99.999% of the light (in a narrow range of wavelengths) which is incident on the mirror. Such mirrors are often used in lasers.
In astronomy, adaptive optics is a technique to measure variable image distortions and adapt a deformable mirror accordingly on a timescale of milliseconds, to compensate for the distortions.
Although most mirrors are designed to reflect visible light, surfaces reflecting other forms of electromagnetic radiation are also called "mirrors". The mirrors for other ranges of electromagnetic waves are used in optics and astronomy. Mirrors for radio waves (sometimes known as reflectors) are important elements of radio telescopes.
Face-to-face mirrors [ edit ]
Two or more mirrors aligned exactly parallel and facing each other can give an infinite regress of reflections, called an infinity mirror effect. Some devices use this to generate multiple reflections:
Military applications [ edit ]
It has been said that Archimedes used a large array of mirrors to burn Roman ships during an attack on Syracuse. This has never been proven or disproved; however, it has been put to the test. Recently, on a popular Discovery Channel show, MythBusters, a team from MIT tried to recreate the famous "Archimedes Death Ray". They were unsuccessful at starting a fire on the ship. Previous attempts to light the boat on fire using only the bronze mirrors available in Archimedes' time were unsuccessful, and the time taken to ignite the craft would have made its use impractical, resulting in the MythBusters team deeming the myth "busted". It was however found that the mirrors made it very difficult for the passengers of the targeted boat to see, likely helping to cause their defeat, which may have been the origin of the myth. (See solar power tower for a practical use of this technique.)
Seasonal lighting [ edit ]
Due to its location in a steep-sided valley, the Italian town of Viganella gets no direct sunlight for seven weeks each winter. In 2006 a €100,000 computer-controlled mirror, 8×5 m, was installed to reflect sunlight into the town's piazza. In early 2007 the similarly situated village of Bondo, Switzerland, was considering applying this solution as well.[65][66] In 2013, mirrors were installed to reflect sunlight into the town square in the Norwegian town of Rjukan.[67] Mirrors can be used to produce enhanced lighting effects in greenhouses or conservatories.
Architecture [ edit ]
Mirrors are a popular design theme in architecture, particularly with late modern and post-modernist high-rise buildings in major cities. Early examples include the Campbell Center in Dallas, which opened in 1972,[68] and the John Hancock Tower in Boston.
More recently, two skyscrapers designed by architect Rafael Viñoly, the Vdara in Las Vegas and 20 Fenchurch Street in London, have experienced unusual problems due to their concave curved glass exteriors acting as respectively cylindrical and spherical reflectors for sunlight. In 2010, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that sunlight reflected off the Vdara's south-facing tower could singe swimmers in the hotel pool, as well as melting plastic cups and shopping bags; employees of the hotel referred to the phenomenon as the "Vdara death ray",[69] aka the "fryscraper." In 2013, sunlight reflecting off 20 Fenchurch Street melted parts of a Jaguar car parked nearby and scorching or igniting the carpet of a nearby barber shop.[70] This building had been nicknamed the "walkie-talkie" because its shape was supposedly similar to a certain model of two-way radio; but after its tendency to overheat surrounding objects became known, the nickname changed to the "walkie-scorchie."
Fine art [ edit ]
Paintings [ edit ]
Painters depicting someone gazing into a mirror often also show the person's reflection. This is a kind of abstraction—in most cases the angle of view is such that the person's reflection should not be visible. Similarly, in movies and still photography an actor or actress is often shown ostensibly looking at him- or herself in the mirror, and yet the reflection faces the camera. In reality, the actor or actress sees only the camera and its operator in this case, not their own reflection.
The mirror is the central device in some of the greatest of European paintings:
Mirrors have been used by artists to create works and hone their craft:
Mirrors are sometimes necessary to fully appreciate art work:
István Orosz's anamorphic works are images distorted such that they only become clearly visible when reflected in a suitably shaped and positioned mirror.[73]
Sculpture [ edit ]
Anamorphosis projecting sculpture into mirrors
Contemporary anamorphic artist Jonty Hurwitz uses cylindrical mirrors to project distorted sculptures.[74]
Other artistic mediums [ edit ]
Some other contemporary artists use mirrors as the material of art:
A Chinese magic mirror is an art in which the face of the bronze mirror projects the same image that was cast on its back. This is due to minute curvatures on its front. [75]
Specular holography uses a large number of curved mirrors embedded in a surface to produce three-dimensional imagery.
Paintings on mirror surfaces (such as silkscreen printed glass mirrors)
Special mirror installations Follow Me mirror labyrinth by artist, Jeppe Hein (see also, Entertainment: Mirror mazes, below) Mirror Neon Cube by artist, Jeppe Hein
Religious Function of the real and depicted mirror [ edit ]
In the Middle Ages mirrors existed in various shapes for multiple uses. Mostly they were used as an accessory for personal hygiene but also as tokens of courtly love, made from ivory in the ivory carving centers in Paris, Cologne and the Southern Netherlands.[76] They also had their uses in religious contexts as they were integrated in a special form of pilgrims badges or pewter/lead mirror boxes[77] since the late 14th century. Burgundian ducal inventories show us that the dukes owned a mass of mirrors or objects with mirrors, not only with religious iconography or inscriptions, but combined with reliquaries, religious paintings or other objects that were distinctively used for personal piety.[78] Considering mirrors in paintings and book illumination as depicted artifacts and trying to draw conclusions about their functions from their depicted setting, one of these functions is to be an aid in personal prayer to achieve self-knowledge and knowledge of God, in accord with contemporary theological sources. E.g. the famous Arnolfini-Wedding by Jan van Eyck shows a constellation of objects that can be recognized as one which would allow a praying man to use them for his personal piety: the mirror surrounded by scenes of the Passion to reflect on it and on oneself, a rosary as a device in this process, the veiled and cushioned bench to use as a prie-dieu, and the abandoned shoes that point in the direction in which the praying man kneeled.[79] The metaphorical meaning of depicted mirrors is complex and many-layered, e.g. as an attribute of Mary, the “speculum sine macula”, or as attributes of scholarly and theological wisdom and knowledge as they appear in book illuminations of different evangelists and authors of theological treatises. Depicted mirrors – orientated on the physical properties of a real mirror – can be seen as metaphors of knowledge and reflection and are thus able to remind the beholder to reflect and get to know himself.The mirror may function simultaneously as a symbol and a device of a moral appeal. That is also the case if it is shown in combination with virtues and vices, a combination which also occurs more frequently in the 15th century: The moralizing layers of mirror metaphors remind the beholder to examine himself thoroughly according to his own virtuous or vicious life. This is all the more true if the mirror is combined with iconography of death. Not only is Death as a corpse or skeleton holding the mirror for the still living personnel of paintings, illuminations and prints, but the skull appears on the convex surfaces of depicted mirrors, showing the painted and real beholder his future face.[80]
Decoration [ edit ]
Chimneypiece and overmantel mirror, c. 1750 V&A Museum no. 738:1 to 3–1897
Glasses with mirrors – Prezi HQ
Mirrors are frequently used in interior decoration and as ornaments:
Mirrors, typically large and unframed, are frequently used in interior decoration to create an illusion of space and amplify the apparent size of a room. [81] They come also framed in a variety of forms, such as the pier glass and the overmantel mirror.
They come also framed in a variety of forms, such as the pier glass and the overmantel mirror. Mirrors are used also in some schools of feng shui, an ancient Chinese practice of placement and arrangement of space, to achieve harmony with the environment.
The softness of old mirrors is sometimes replicated by contemporary artisans for use in interior design. These reproduction antiqued mirrors are works of art and can bring color and texture to an otherwise hard, cold reflective surface. It is an artistic process that has been attempted by many and perfected by few. [ citation needed ]
A decorative reflecting sphere of thin metal-coated glass, working as a reducing wide-angle mirror, is sold as a Christmas ornament called a bauble.
Entertainment [ edit ]
Film and television [ edit ]
Candyman is a horror film about a malevolent spirit summoned by speaking its name in front of a mirror.
is a horror film about a malevolent spirit summoned by speaking its name in front of a mirror. Mirrors is a horror film about haunted mirrors that reflect different scenes than those in front of them.
is a horror film about haunted mirrors that reflect different scenes than those in front of them. Poltergeist III features mirrors that do not reflect reality and which can be used as portals to the afterlife.
features mirrors that do not reflect reality and which can be used as portals to the afterlife. Oculus is a horror film about a haunted mirror that causes people to hallucinate and commit acts of violence.
is a horror film about a haunted mirror that causes people to hallucinate and commit acts of violence. The 10th Kingdom miniseries requires the characters to use a magic mirror to travel between New York City (the 10th Kingdom) and the Nine Kingdoms of fairy tale.
Literature [ edit ]
Mjallhvít ( An illustration from page 30 of Snow White ) an 1852 Icelandic translation of the Grimm -version fairytale
Taijitu within a frame of trigrams and a demon warding mirror. These charms are believed to frighten away evil spirits and to protect the dwelling from bad luck
Mirrors play a powerful role in cultural literature.
Mirrors and animals [ edit ]
Only a few animal species have been shown to have the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror, most of them mammals. Experiments have found that the following animals can pass the mirror test:
Unusual kinds of mirrors [ edit ]
4.5-metre (15 ft) high acoustic mirror near Kilnsea Grange, East Yorkshire, UK
A hot mirror used in a camera to reduce red eye
Other types of reflecting device are also called "mirrors".
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]NEW DELHI: Amid speculation around who would be its chief ministerial candidate in Punjab, Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal on Friday announced deputy chief minister for the state would be a Dalit Delhi Chief Minister Kejriwal made the announcement at a rally organised at Phillaur, a reserved constituency in Jalandhar that has a sizeable Dalit population while releasing the party’s Dalit Manifesto on Friday.While the party does not have a prominent Dalit face yet, former Bahujan Samaj Party leaders Mohan Singh Phallianwala, who will contest from Firozepur, and Parkash Singh Jandali from Ludhiana are a few emerging names. Mohan Singh Phalianwala (60) is a prominent Dalit name on the list. The two-time MP was state president of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) for almost 15 years. Jandali was recently expelled from the BSP as party chief.According to Gurdev Singh Dev (Dev Mann), the president of AAP’s SC/ST wing and a contesting candidate from Nabha, a reserved SC/ST seat, the final decision will be taken by the party ‘high command’ which comprises Kejriwal, senior party leaders Sanjay Singh and Jarnail Singh and the party’s organisational builder Durgesh Pathak.Mann added that the party has been working at the ground level with the Dalits and sees this announcement as a positive move in fortifying AAP’s chances of winning the Assembly polls, due early next year. “We came up with a manifesto after deliberating over issues taken up during our Dalit Dialogue sessions at the grass root level. Such an announcement is a first made in the history of Punjab’s electoral history as it acknowledges the presence of Dalits as an important entity,” he said.Dalits constitute nearly 31% of the total population in Punjab, one of the highest in the country. With the Dalit vote spread across 34 reserved assembly seats in the state and a tight contest at hand, all three major parties — the SAD, the Congress and the Aam Aadmi party— have been trying to woo this chunk of the electorate. While the Congress had roped in Sufi Singer Hans Raj Hans at the behest of Captain Amarinder Singh, SAD has fielded former BSP leader Baldev Singh Khaira from Phillaur and prominent Dalit face Seth Satpal Mal from Kartarpur.However, according to Pramod Kumar, Director of the Institute for Development and Communication in Chandigarh, that recently conducted a ground prepoll survey in the state, Dalits in Punjab do not vote as a homogenous group in the state. “The population comprises of SC/ST’s Valmikis, Rai Sikhs and also Dera followers who vote differently. The population is fragmented, So I don’t see the point of a Dalit manifesto,” he said.AAP’s Dalit manifesto promises constituting a Special Investigation Team to inquire into cases of atrocities against Dalits in the past five years.Photo
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Jennifer Albrecht lost her job after being given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis last year – a turn of events that her husband, Hugh, described as feeling like “a building fell on us.” She stretches out her medicine because she cannot afford the refills, suffering worse flare-ups as a result. But last month, after seeking the help of a “kynector” – one of Kentucky’s counselors certified to help people sign up for insurance under the federal health care law – Ms. Albrecht found she qualified for Medicaid. Her coverage will take effect at the beginning of 2014.
“I know that starting Jan. 1 there’s some hope, there’s some relief there,” she said.
Ms. Albrecht, 42, is among the roughly 1,000 people a day who are signing up for coverage through Kentucky’s online insurance marketplace, or exchange, a volume that state officials say has far exceeded their expectations. The success of the exchange, known as Kynect, contrasts sharply with the technical failures of the federally run exchange serving 36 states. Even some state-run exchanges, including those in Maryland and Oregon, have struggled so far.
But to watch the sign-up process last month in Louisville, a city of 600,000, was to get a glimpse of how the rollout of the exchanges was supposed to work from coast to coast.
There are caveats. Most enrollments in Kentucky – about 85 percent – have been in Medicaid, the government program that provides health care to the poor, which is expanding under the law. The rest have been in private health plans offered through the exchange, with many applicants qualifying for federal subsidies to help cover the cost. If only the sickest people end up buying private coverage, the cost of premiums could rise and the exchange could fail. And if Medicaid enrollment under the expansion exceeds projections, the state could be on the hook for higher costs than it expected.
It is the job of people like Samantha Davis – the kynector who helped Ms. Albrecht sign up for Medicaid – to reach as many uninsured Kentuckians as possible over the coming months. Ms. Davis spends most of her time enrolling patients at Family Health Centers, a network of clinics here that serves thousands of uninsured residents. The organization used a $300,000 federal grant to hire Ms. Davis, eight other kynectors and an enrollment coordinator.
But Ms. Davis also helps out at community sign-up events, including one where she met Mrs. Albrecht on Oct. 1 and another where she met Patricia Bond, a breast cancer survivor whose daughter had pressed her to attend. Ms. Bond, 62, said she was paying $837 a month for health insurance, a cost that had leapt since her diagnosis.
“It’s been really hard to come up with that,” Ms. Bond, a seamstress, said. “I mean, that’s higher than my house payment.”
With Ms. Davis’s help, she found that she would qualify for a premium subsidy of $377 a month if she bought an exchange plan. “That’s the highest I’ve ever seen,” Ms. Davis said of the amount. Of the 24 plans that the exchange offered her, the most expensive would be a silver plan for $263 a month after the subsidy, with an $800 deductible. She went home to study her options, planning to meet with Ms. Davis again once she had narrowed them down.
Not every shopping experience on Kynect is so painless. Elaine Osborne, 57, who works at a discount store that does not offer her insurance, qualified for $212 in premium assistance when she applied with the help of Kelli Cauley, another kynector. She gasped when she saw that the plan with the lowest premium — $97 a month, including her subsidy – had an annual deductible of $6,300.
Donald Mucci, an insurance agent who is certified to enroll people in health plans through Kynect, said most people needed a lot of help understanding the different costs and deciding which amounts were right for them. He also said he worried that people signing up on their own would choose a plan without checking whether it covered their preferred doctors and hospitals.
“They have to make educated decisions about what they’re signing up for,” Mr. Mucci said, “and we need to help them do it.”Metal Detectors at Sports Stadiums
Fans attending Major League Baseball games are being greeted in a new way this year: with metal detectors at the ballparks. Touted as a counterterrorism measure, they're nothing of the sort. They're pure security theater: They look good without doing anything to make us safer. We're stuck with them because of a combination of buck passing, CYA thinking, and fear.
As a security measure, the new devices are laughable. The ballpark metal detectors are much more lax than the ones at an airport checkpoint. They aren't very sensitive -- people with phones and keys in their pockets are sailing through -- and there are no X-ray machines. Bags get the same cursory search they've gotten for years. And fans wanting to avoid the detectors can opt for a "light pat-down search" instead.
There's no evidence that this new measure makes anyone safer. A halfway competent ticketholder would have no trouble sneaking a gun into the stadium. For that matter, a bomb exploded at a crowded checkpoint would be no less deadly than one exploded in the stands. These measures will, at best, be effective at stopping the random baseball fan who's carrying a gun or knife into the stadium. That may be a good idea, but unless there's been a recent spate of fan shootings and stabbings at baseball games -- and there hasn't -- this is a whole lot of time and money being spent to combat an imaginary threat.
But imaginary threats are the only ones baseball executives have to stop this season; there's been no specific terrorist threat or actual intelligence to be concerned about. MLB executives forced this change on ballparks based on unspecified discussions with the Department of Homeland Security after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. Because, you know, that was also a sporting event.
This system of vague consultations and equally vague threats ensure that no one organization can be seen as responsible for the change. MLB can claim that the league and teams "work closely" with DHS. DHS can claim that it was MLB's initiative. And both can safely relax because if something happens, at least they did something.
It's an attitude I've seen before: "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it." Never mind if the something makes any sense or not.
In reality, this is CYA security, and it's pervasive in post-9/11 America. It no longer matters if a security measure makes sense, if it's cost-effective or if it mitigates any actual threats. All that matters is that you took the threat seriously, so if something happens you won't be blamed for inaction. It's security, all right -- security for the careers of those in charge.
I'm not saying that these officials care only about their jobs and not at all about preventing terrorism, only that their priorities are skewed. They imagine vague threats, and come up with correspondingly vague security measures intended to address them. They experience none of the costs. They're not the ones who have to deal with the long lines and confusion at the gates. They're not the ones who have to arrive early to avoid the messes the new policies have caused around the league. And if fans spend more money at the concession stands because they've arrived an hour early and have had the food and drinks they tried to bring along confiscated, so much the better, from the team owners' point of view.
I can hear the objections to this as I write. You don't know these measures won't be effective! What if something happens? Don't we have to do everything possible to protect ourselves against terrorism?
That's worst-case thinking, and it's dangerous. It leads to bad decisions, bad design and bad security. A better approach is to realistically assess the threats, judge security measures on their effectiveness and take their costs into account. And the result of that calm, rational look will be the realization that there will always be places where we pack ourselves densely together, and that we should spend less time trying to secure those places and more time finding terrorist plots before they can be carried out.
So far, fans have been exasperated but mostly accepting of these new security measures. And this is precisely the problem -- most of us don't care all that much. Our options are to put up with these measures, or stay home. Going to a baseball game is not a political act, and metal detectors aren't worth a boycott. But there's an undercurrent of fear as well. If it's in the name of security, we'll accept it. As long as our leaders are scared of the terrorists, they're going to continue the security theater. And we're similarly going to accept whatever measures are forced upon us in the name of security. We're going to accept the National Security Agency's surveillance of every American, airport security procedures that make no sense and metal detectors at baseball and football stadiums. We're going to continue to waste money overreacting to irrational fears.
We no longer need the terrorists. We're now so good at terrorizing ourselves.
This essay previously appeared in the Washington Post.
Posted on April 15, 2015 at 6:58 AM • 98 CommentsERBIL, Iraq — Facing a broad offensive from Iraqi and Kurdish troops, the Islamic State has defended villages around Mosul with its signature tactics of suicide car attacks and roadside bombs. But on Friday morning, militants attacked the strategic oil city of Kirkuk, far to the east, in the manner of a conventional army.
Dozens of uniformed Islamic State fighters, some of whom were believed to be part of sleeper cells and others who drove into the city in vehicles, assaulted Kirkuk, setting off gun battles in the heart of the city that lasted from dawn into the night. Imams shut down all mosques in the city, canceling Friday Prayer, as the city was turned into an urban battle zone that was livestreamed for much of the day by Kurdish news outlets.
The battle scenes and the sound of automatic gunfire in Kirkuk were reminiscent of the Islamic State’s brazen march across northern Iraq two years ago, when Mosul and other cities were first seized by the group.
The group’s sudden counterattack on Friday also involved suicide bombings on police positions inside the city, and gunmen later took up positions in a mosque, a school and a hotel, and on top of other buildings. The government quickly instituted a curfew, ordering civilians to shelter indoors.Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
According to Poliça frontwoman Channy Leaneagh, the band's new single I Need $ (spoken as I Need Money) contains a lyric that most represents the band's critically-acclaimed second album, 2013's Shulamith: "Chasing and wasting for our own desires, we love what we need until the need grows tired." This strange sense of push-pull, of attracting and then retreating, permeates most of the ethereal, R&B-influenced music they make, with Leaneagh's distorted vocals making it sound like it was recorded behind a wall of thick smoke. I Need $ is one of the more immediate songs on the album, featuring a bassline that could have been lifted from Solange's True EP, and a cluster of hovering synths that glide in for the gorgeous chorus in which Leaneagh details what she does and doesn't need (money she needs; love and a man she doesn't, thank you very much). The song's dreamlike state is anchored by the video – directed by Isaac Ravishankara and premiered here – which finds Leaneagh daydreaming her way through a job as a motel cleaner, exchanging pensive glances with one particular occupant for reasons that are never made fully clear.
I Need $ is released on March 3. The band play The Troxy in London on 12 February.Tony Blair has told unemployed British workers "not to blame migrants for having taken your job" claiming they should get a better education to "allow them to operate in the modern world" instead.
The former Labour Prime Minister also warned that a lot of the anger surrounding the migration debate is "prejudice" and an easy response to stagnating wages in the UK.
Mr Blair has been heavily criticised for his decision not to impose transitional controls on migrants arriving from Bulgaria and Romania, who have been blamed for pushing down wages in the UK.
Speaking at an educational conference in Dubai, Mr Blair added that making profit out of the school system is perfectly acceptable "provided you're educating the kids well".
He told the audience: "The answer to someone who is unemployed in a country like mine or anywhere else in Europe, is not to blame migrants for having taken your job, is to get the education and the skills necessary in order to be able to operate in the modern world."
The Labour grandee said there is "real anxiety" about the world changing and added: "If they think their incomes are stagnating and they aren't really getting anywhere in life, then this [migration] becomes easy to gravitate to.
Migration to the UK in 2015
"Whether in America or in Europe, that is the card that at least the right wing of populism will play. "The truth is the answer is around this concept of education."
On the subject of making profit out of the education system, the former Prime Minister said he would support such a move as long as schools are "educating the kids well".
He added: "The single most important thing is that they get a decent education. In our state system in the UK we don't have a for-profit part to it.
"But I personally think if you're starting now and someone can come in and run schools effectively or individual schools, this is just my experience in Government, that the benefit of the public sector is that it helps those who need help.
"The problem is that it's not good at innovating and I think if you have a range of providers, it allows you to see what might be possible and it allows people to adapt and adjust."
Photo: Rex
Asked about the rise of anti-establishment politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Mr Blair admitted he doesn't understand the phenomena.
He said: "It's all very interesting. There is a populism of left and right, there's a lot of anger about. "Anger is all very well but it's answers that deliver results. If I start going off about Donald Trump and Mr Corbyn, that would be a bigger story that my talking about education."
And in a nod to current Labour politics, Mr Blair appeared to suggest that those who do not agree with Mr Corbyn's leadership should speak out and do something about it. The party's leader is rumoured to be facing a leadership coup just months after taking up his new job, amid concerns that he is at odds with many of his own MPs.
He said: "When I look at politics today, I am not terribly sure that I quite understand it. If you want to push back on that populism, - and we shouldn't have that type of populism govern our politics - you've got to go out and make the argument."Burroughs High School not only beat their much higher ranked opponent, a team they’d never beat before, after this patriotic anthem display but they’ve not lost another game since. Photo Credit: Long Room and watch the video.
Once again those NFL players choosing to “take a knee” during the anthem have apparently suffered from Self Inflicted Degradation of Performance Syndrome or SIDOPS where every NFL team which had at least one player “taking a knee” during the anthem not only lost their game, but did so in embarrassing or record-setting fashion.
In September the original SIDOPS research suggested that protesting NFL players were inducing a performance debilitating conflict into their brain when they protested. The SIDOPS phenomena was revisited again in October in not only trending negative team and individual player outcomes, but included expanded the research to include similarly afflicted European and High School sports teams.
Now, during the NFL’s week nine all three teams who had at least one player kneel during the anthem, the Seahawks, the Giants and the 49’ers – all lost and lost well outside of their predictive “Vegas” odds.
Week 9 results
On Sunday the “kneeling” Giants hosted the “non-kneeling” Rams where the home team was a modest 3-point underdog. Yet the Giants lost in such an incredible fashion, 51-17, that it set a new “collapse” standard … modernizing the team’s 1964 52-21 drubbing taken from Cleveland.
Three thousand miles away, the NFL odds makers shouted confidently that the home team– 7.5 point favorites — would dominate their visitors claiming: “INJURY-PLAGUED REDSKINS ARE BIG UNDERDOGS VS LEGION OF BOOM”.
Yet it was the “non-kneeling” Redskins who played above expectations while the SIDOPS-impacted “anthem kneeling” Seahawks couldn’t seem to get out of their own way. The team came off of their anthem protest and promptly set a modern team record in committing 16 penalties (one would have to go back to the Orwellian year of 1984 to find a more penalized game for the Hawks) while missing all of their post-touchdown conversions and all three of their field goal attempts!
While the Seahawks and Giants demonstrated the lack of concentration and athleticism, no team so embodies the debilitating SIDOPS trend than San Francisco, which lost to the Cardinals by 10 despite being only 2-point underdogs.
This loss also extended the 49ers “taking a knee” record to 23 losses out of 25 games – that’s a 92 percent loss percentage since the team first supported the anthem protest in August 2016. It’s important to note that this “protest movement” was initiated during the important campaign period leading up to the 2016 Presidential election and despite well-published Harvard research that showcases that there is no racial bias in police shootings — the persistent cornerstone of the protestor’s claims.
In a positive turn of events, the last iteration of SIDOPS suggested there may be an opposite impact where a team showcasing unity and focus during the anthem may perform above their expectations. This theory held true when tiny California Division 9 Burroughs — relying on their backup quarterback — stunned their never-before-defeated Division 3 opponents after the home team sang a patriotic song, held U.S. Flags and honored the Anthem by standing. Moreover, perhaps as a tribute to the power of positive thinking, Burroughs has not lost a game since their “flag-waiving” miracle October 20 performance.
Now, despite the positive anthem trend from Burroughs California and possibly in response to the prodigious evidence impugning the basis of the NFL “kneeling” movement, that state’s NAACP President Alice Huffman has decided to honor the movement not by utilizing facts… but by simply bypassing the protest’s “logic” and instead looking to simply ban the national anthem altogether claiming this action will solve the NFL’s problems:
“We owe a lot of it to Kaepernick… I think all this controversy about the knee will go away once the song is removed.”
To this end, the NAACP has prepared two resolutions to submit to state legislators in January thus ensuring the NFL’s “taking a knee” exercise will continue to gain the national media and political attention the movement seeks for weeks to come — especially in California and with the 49ers. To this end, the SIDOPS phenomena should be factored into the official “Vegas” odds-maker system and the routine ‘under performance’ predictive analytic becomes more irrefutable.
— Andre Billeaudeaux
Andre Billeaudeaux is a retired military journalist and has published extensively on topics centered on social science, psychology, politics and history. He studied psychology under Dr. Phil Zimbardo of Stanford and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Native American Guardian’s Association.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Mr Hague spoke to James Robbins who is travelling with the foreign secretary
The Middle East peace process could become a "casualty" of the calls for change sweeping across the Arab world, the foreign secretary has warned.
William Hague, who is touring the region, said it could "lose further momentum" if |
iber River, where the mythical founders of the city, Romulus and Remus, were rescued and suckled by a she-wolf. For centuries, the waterway — once even deified as the god Tiberinus — bolstered the city’s greatness.
More recently, however, the Tiber’s fortunes have been something less than godlike.
Great stretches of the riverfront walkways that abut the high travertine embankments built after disastrous flooding in 1870 have been abandoned to the dubious artistic talents of graffiti taggers. Joggers and cyclists must dodge litter, overgrown vegetation and improvised encampments of homeless people, despite decades of promises by city officials to clean up the river’s banks.
The river’s filthy waterfront and murky waters are a painful reflection of the more widespread neglect and degeneration that has been increasingly blemishing Rome’s beauty, the inattention a symptom of turbulent — at times corrupt — governance on the part of inadequate city administrations.
Faced with the city’s inaction, which it justifies by citing a lack of means and money, several associations of do-gooders have been taking matters into their own hands. Some of these groups have adopted the Tiber as a neglected resource to promote, develop and defend through a variety of initiatives.Colorado has made an unusual plea to federal authorities: Let our colleges grow pot.
In a letter sent last month, the state attorney general’s office asks federal health and education officials for permission for Colorado’s colleges and universities to “obtain marijuana from non-federal government sources” for research purposes.
The letter isn’t more specific on how the state’s higher-education institutions might score weed. But it was sent pursuant to a law passed in 2014 requiring state officials to ask that Colorado colleges and universities be allowed “to cultivate marijuana and its component parts.”
“Current research is riddled with bias or insufficiencies and often conflict with one another,” reads the letter, written by deputy attorney general David Blake. “It is critical that we be allowed to fill the void of scientific research, and this may only be done with your assistance and cooperation.”
The request is a longshot.
While marijuana is, with qualifications, legal in Colorado, it remains illegal under federal law, and getting permission to conduct research on cannabis requires clearing a set of high hurdles — approval from multiple federal agencies and strict requirements on how marijuana must be handled and stored. Researchers that work without the federal government’s blessing risk losing crucial federal funding for their institutions, not to mention possible imprisonment.
An international treaty that the United States signed onto requires the federal government to designate only one place in the country that can legally grow marijuana for research. Since 1968, that place has been the University of Mississippi’s National Center for Natural Products Research, which cultivates cannabis on a 12-acre plot and sends it to approved researchers.
Coincidentally, the National Institute on Drug Abuse recently put the government’s pot-farm contract up for rebid. Applicants needed to have 12 acres of “secured and video-monitored” outdoor space and 1,000 square feet of indoor space to grow marijuana and to be able to make marijuana extractions, test for potency and “prepare, preferably by hand-rolling, a small batch of marijuana cigarettes,” according to the official solicitation.
The contract’s winner is expected to be announced in the next couple of months. A spokeswoman for the National Institute on Drug Abuse would not say how many institutions applied for the contract or where they were.
Spokesmen for the University of Colorado and Colorado State University said their schools did not apply.
The Drug Enforcement Administration this year massively increased the amount of pot the government’s official supplier can grow — from 21 kilograms to 650 kilograms. The increase was the result of a boom in marijuana research interest, and the University of Mississippi has pledged to grow new strains of marijuana to give researchers more options for their studies.
Still, the Colorado attorney general’s letter says the federal government falls short of being able to supply researchers with the kinds of products available in Colorado’s commercial marijuana market. State health officials have just approved up to $8.4 million in grants for marijuana studies, some of which will examine Colorado-specific products. But the attorney general’s office says more needs to be done.
“We need the support of our federal partners to overcome the inertia that continues to complicate state efforts in this area,” the letter states.
John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johningoldA rigorous screening process has always been central to the federal government's plan to resettle 25,000 refugees by the end of the year, says Health Minister Jane Philpott, amid security concerns after the attacks in Paris.
"We're all devastated by what happened in Paris on Friday," said Philpott in an interview Monday on CBC News Network's Power & Politics.
"Security has always been paramount to us. No less so, of course, because of the Paris attacks," Philpott told host Rosemary Barton.
"It will always be in the forefront of our response to this, but it will also not affect our ongoing compassion and our sense that we as a country need to respond to a humanitarian crisis."
Philpott's comments come as Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall called on the federal government Monday to suspend its plan to resettle Syrian refugees, citing security concerns in the wake of the attacks in Paris.
Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume, echoed Wall's concerns in a post on his Facebook page Monday.
Canadians should "open their hearts to human distress, but not to the detriment of security," Labeaume wrote in French, adding that the Paris attacks require the need for greater prudence.
Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall is calling on the government to rethink its plans to bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of the year 7:55
Conservative Party Leader Rona Ambrose also called on the government not to rush the refugee resettlement in order to meet the year-end deadline.
Ambrose, who also appeared on Power & Politics, said she would rather see Ottawa resettle 25,000 refugees over a longer period of time if it means putting the safety of Canadians first.
"I think they should allow more time," Ambrose told Barton on Monday. "It was election promise, they shouldn't hold themselves to that. Keep this a practical reality."
"I don't think it's possible to meet the commitment in a way that people are comfortable with," she said
Over the weekend, Ambrose urged the government not to pull out its CF-18 fighter jets from the U.S.-led mission against ISIS in Iraq.
Not 'a major security risk'
National security expert Wesley Wark said the attacks on Paris are not a reason for the Canadian government to stop fast-tracking the resettlement of 25,000 refugees.
Syrian children play at a refugee camp in the town of Hosh Hareem, in the Bekaa valley, east Lebanon, late last month. The federal government is working on a plan to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada from camps in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon by the end of the year. (Hassan Ammar/Associated Press)
"I don't think there is any truth to the idea that the refugee and migrant stream contains secret ISIS supporters and jihadists who are using that flow to position themselves for attacks," said Wark in an interview with CBC on Monday.
"If you're planning an attack, particularly a major co-ordinated attack abroad, the last thing you're going to do is count on one of your attackers getting through the refugee and migrant streams."
"I don't think it's a major security risk," he said.
If you're planning an attack, particularly a major co-ordinated attack abroad, the last thing you're going to do is count on one of your attackers getting through the refugee and migrant streams. - Wesley Wark, national security expert
Ottawa University law professor Errol Mendes said Canadians should not compare the flow of migrants fleeing Syria to Europe with Canada's plan to accept refugees from a camp run by the United Nations.
"Many of the ones we have already cleared, I think there's about 10,000 that we've already cleared, have been processed firstly by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees," he said in an interview with CBC on Monday.
Mendes said those 10,000 refugees will undergo additional security screening upon arrival in Canada, an approach "that's much more orderly, that's much more focused on security clearance than what's happening in Europe right now.
"One is an orderly refugee process," said Mendes. "The one in Europe is more like a migrant flow, which is almost unstoppable, with very little of those sort of safeguards in place."
'Responsible' plan coming soon
Philpott said a number of people across various federal departments have been working to address the refugee crisis while being mindful of health and security concerns.
"Many, many people have been working in the background over a long period of time to address how this can be done effectively."
The Liberal government has come under some pressure to announce details of the plan it's co-ordinating with the provinces and territories.
Philpott said she hoped the federal government would have more details to offer soon and that the government's plan will address security concerns in a "responsible" way.
"We need to do it in a way that we will look back on years from now and say we responded to that crisis in a way Canadians can be proud of … but we will do it in a responsible way," she told Barton.
"The most important part of it is responding to this humanitarian crisis while never, ever letting down our guard on the security needs that Canadians expect us to address."
Last week, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale indicated security screenings for Syrian refugees could possibly take place both overseas and on Canadian soil.
The government also has to determine where it will conduct health screenings, though Philpott would not provide specifics on Monday.
The minister, who is a physician, seems confident health concerns among the Syrian refugee population can be addressed.
"The vaccination rates have dropped off a bit, but in general they have been historically quite strong."
Philpott said she was confident the screening will be "very thorough" and that Canadian officials would be able to identify any health concerns and address them right away.School districts across the state received a surprising Open Records request today from a surprising source — the governor. Nathan Deal’s office wants “records of dues collected by the school system for the Georgia Association of Educators and Professional Association of Georgia Educators.”
It is no secret Deal hasn’t been happy with the opposition to his Opportunity School District by educators. The teacher groups contend he is targeting their source of financial support, member dues, as a way of conveying that displeasure with their resistance to the OSD, which is faltering in a new AJC poll released today.
“We see this as punishment for the opposition of teachers to the Opportunity School District,” says Craig Harper, spokesman for PAGE. “We are hearing from districts that they have gotten this Open Records request and are concerned about it and see it as indicative of this governor’s penchant for state intervention in things that don’t require it.”
In the official email from Chris Riley, Deal’s chief of staff, school districts are also asked, “Does the school system charge an administrative fee to collect the dues for PAGE and GAE? If so, what is the amount of the administrative fee?”
To read more about the Open Records request and reaction to it, go to the AJC Get Schooled blog.Shaun McCutcheon in front of the Supreme Court in Washington on Sept. 13, 2013. Photo by Gary Cameron/Reuters
Sing in me, Money, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of earning,
the jobs-provider, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Washington, D.C.
—The Odyssey, adapted for today
The Supreme Court can hardly be faulted for having docketed McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission on the eighth day of a partial government shutdown that has all but crippled the national capital and separated hundreds of thousands of Americans from their jobs and paychecks. It’s unfair to blame the justices for the fact that Tuesday’s constitutional free-speech challenge comes to protect only the 1,219 wealthiest campaign donors, who in the 2012 election cycle reached or almost reached the limit on what they could contribute to federal candidates, parties, and political action committees in any two-year election cycle. This isn’t the 1 percent. It’s who the 1 percent dreams of becoming someday.
The optics of having this particular fight this particular week are not terrific, an accident of scheduling that has Scrooge McDuck, Montgomery Burns, and Richie Rich ambling around the Supreme Court plaza on Tuesday, bemoaning the diminution of their voices in the national political conversation.
At issue in McCutcheon are the “aggregate” contribution caps that limit the total amount any one person can give candidates, parties, and political committees during a two-year election cycle. Currently that amount stands at $123,200. But the plaintiff, businessman Shaun McCutcheon, joined by the Republican National Committee, contends that by capping the number of entities to which he may give—McCutcheon doesn’t contest the “base” limits on what he can give each one—McCutcheon is being denied his right to speak and associate freely with as many candidates as he chooses. If McCutcheon and the RNC prevail in having the aggregate limits struck down, folks will be free to contribute millions of dollars (the range of $3.5 million to $3.6 million is tossed around) to the campaigns of hundreds of federal candidates in a single cycle. Which I think would be a nice problem to have.
In the 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo, the court drew a line between campaign contributions, which could be limited, and expenditures, which the court deemed protected speech. In 2010, when the court decided in Citizens United that the limits on independent campaign spending by unions and corporations violated their free-speech rights, it left intact the principle that limiting campaign contributions was still constitutional to avoid quid-pro-quo corruption or the appearance of it. The problem? It’s no longer clear at the court what corruption looks like in real-life politics. Which ironically leads Justice Stephen Breyer to cite as an example of corrupting money in politics, “If you want to say, ‘Is this a reality?’ Turn on your television set or Internet.”
Much of the first portion of the argument goes to Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan grilling McCutcheon’s attorney on all the ways they believe, in the absence of aggregate limits, a donor could craft a contribution of $3.5 million—for which, as Kagan puts it, “You get a very, very special place at the table.”
McCutcheon’s lawyer, Erin Murphy, dismisses Kagan’s and Breyer’s hypotheticals. (Justice Samuel Alito will later called them “wild hypotheticals.”) “I don’t think that’s a particularly realistic scenario under the existing regulations,” Murphy explains in response to one. “You can’t have the law designed to prevent one person’s circumvention by preventing everyone else from contributing,” she says. In her view, the aggregate limits “seek to prevent individuals from engaging in too much First Amendment activity.”
But it quickly becomes clear that all this talk of corruption and influence is happening in something of an alternate universe. Reflecting on how much campaigns tend to cost all together, Justice Antonin Scalia muses, “I don’t think $3.5 million is a heck of a lot of money.” To which Solicitor General Donald Verrilli replies doubtfully, “If a party’s got to get $1.5 billion together to run a congressional campaign—parties and candidates together—and you’ve got a maximum of $3.6 million, that’s about 450 people you need to round up. Less than 500 people can fund the whole shooting match.”
Chief Justice John Roberts appears to be the lone justice truly struggling to find some middle position between a constitutional speech right for billionaires seeking to purchase their own Personal Pan Politician and the genuine restriction on speech that follows when you allow someone to contribute to nine separate campaigns but not a tenth. “I appreciate the argument you are making about the three-point-whatever million-dollar check and the need for the aggregate limits to address that,” Roberts solicitously tells Verrilli. “But what do you with the flip side?”
Breyer lays out the flip side for the chief:
There are apparently, from the Internet, 200 people in the United States who would like to give $117,000 or more. We’re telling them: You can’t. You can’t support your beliefs. That is a First Amendment negative. But that tends to be justified on the other side by the First Amendment positive. Because if the average person thinks that what he says exercising his First Amendment rights just can’t have an impact through public opinion upon his representative, he says: “What is the point of the First Amendment?” And that’s a First Amendment point.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg puts it more succinctly: “By having these limits, you are promoting democratic participation. Then the little people will count some.”
The paradox of the world after Buckley and Citizens United is that the superrich can contribute to super PACs and other independent groups, but they can’t give money directly to the candidates and parties in unlimited amounts. Several of the justices press Verrilli to justify this state of affairs, as it appears to produce worse outcomes for the donors, the parties, and the public—or as Scalia puts it, “I’m not sure that’s a benefit to our political system.”
Kagan optimistically suggests that rather than struggle to distinguish contribution limits, the court could always roll back its Citizens United ruling: “I suppose that if this court is having second thoughts about its rulings that independent expenditures are not corrupting, we could change that part of the law.”
In the general Washington spirit of kicking the can down the road for a while, Breyer tries to muster enthusiasm for punting the whole case back to the lower court to create an actual factual record from which to decide all this. He amasses almost no support from his colleagues, proving yet again that when it comes to coordinated campaigns, the political left has a lot to learn. That leaves everything in the hands of Roberts who—precisely as has been predicted—has the choice to go big, go small, or go home. Again.Pinterest Scott Olson
Moore's wife published a letter of support with the signatures of 50 pastors without ever asking them about it.
As more national Republicans are turning on him, Roy Moore and his supporters are digging in. Breitbart is trying to discredit Moore's accusers, and Moore's wife, Kayla, has also thrown herself into the ring, posting a letter in support of her husband, who has been accused of initiating sexual encounters with underaged women. The letter says he's "an immovable rock in the culture wars" and that it's "no wonder the Washington establishment has declared all-out war on his campaign," and it's signed by more than 50 pastors.
Now, if you had a normal human reaction of feeling immense distress that 50 faith leaders would unquestioningly stand up for a politician when he's accused of coming on to teenagers, well, there's actually good news. The letter is bull. More specifically, it's a copy and pasted version of a letter from the primary, endorsing Moore over his more moderate opponent, Luther Strange.
So far, at least three of the pastors on the list have come out saying they actually do not stand with Moore. As AL.com reports:
Pastor Thad Endicott said he was not contacted about the most recent post from Kayla Moore."The list that has recently circulated was evidently copied and pasted from the August endorsements without checking to see if I still endorsed Moore," said Endicott. Endicott, pastor at Heritage Baptist Church, asked that his name be removed from the Moore endorsement.
AL.com confirms that two other pastors say they were never consulted about this letter and want their names removed from it. (You'd think there was a commandment somewhere about false statements or faking signatures.) One is even a pastor in Tennessee and told local news, "Not my state. Not my issues." However, Jack Jenkins of Think Progress has been contacting other pastors on the list, and though none of them were aware that Kayla Moore had put their names on this letter, most of them still support Moore.Which they may as well, since it looks like once the Moores get a hold of your name they'll just put it on whatever they want.
Watch Now:As the Mayor of Pittsboro, I welcome you to our unique and friendly town.
We are delighted you are here, whether you spend a couple of hours, visit family, tour our warm and welcoming town, or make Pittsboro your home.
Pittsboro is nestled in the gentle hills of Piedmont North Carolina. We are proud of our agricultural, academic and artistic lifestyles.
Agriculturally, we have led the State with the Sustainable Agriculture Program and an Innovative Culinary Program on the Pittsboro campus of Central Carolina Community College, utilizing produce of small farms, including one on campus. The County is home to over 1100 farms, some of which sell at farmers markets and to local fine dining restaurants. The Chatham County Agriculture and Conference Center is under construction on the west side of Pittsboro, on the campus of the Community College.
The Jordan Lake and timbered buffer occupy nearly 20,000 acres through the eastern portion of our county, and provide recreation for our area as well as downstream flood control. The lake was created by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960-70’s from the Haw and New Hope Rivers, Parkers Creek and other tributaries. Jordan Lake offers camping, eagle habitat, an educational state park, fishing, and boating for local residents and visitors.
Academically, we are within a short distance of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina Central University, Duke University, and North Carolina State University, as well as a cluster of private and community colleges. These universities and colleges serve not only as excellent academic centers, but also as research centers, medical centers, and employment centers within and nearby to our community.
Pittsboro is the home to diverse, small businesses, several fine restaurants, and artists’ workshops, murals and pocket parks. Please take the time to walk our friendly town, where you can step back in time to an old fashioned soda shop, the Woodwright’s school and tool shop, vintage clothing, and a variety of locally owned shops full of art, crafts and gifts.
Growth is coming to our town, specifically with Chatham Park, an expansive work-live-play community which is to occupy over 8,000 acres to the east of our town, and west of the Haw River. The Town Staff and Town Board of Commissioners will be working to insure that this project will complement our existing community as we move forward together.
Please check our Facebook page, join us for arts and crafts on First Sundays March through December, and our annual October Street Fair.
Again, welcome to Pittsboro!
Cindy S Perry
Mayor
Click here for the latest News & Public NoticesAFTER a disastrously bad year for humanity, Donald Trump and Brexit being the prime examples, NASA chiefs have been persuaded to bring back its Rover 4 satellite from Mars and have it orbit Earth instead.
The satellite will help monitor the search for intelligent life on Earth after 2016 displayed that there clearly wasn’t any.
“We think it may take a long time.” Said Anna Roberts, NASA spokesperson. “There are 7.5 billion people on Earth, sifting through all that dumbassery will be a lot tougher than the zero result we’ve had from sitting and monitoring Mars for the past couple of years.”
The Rover 4 will take approximately 3 months to drop our of its orbit and haul itself back home, it then needs to be reprogrammed before it can start to function properly for its new intended use.
“We need to recalibrate this thing before we let the average Joe anywhere near it. The amount of stupid that will need filtering is remarkable, even just a samply nearly disabled the Guinea pig satellite we have up there.”
“Once we’re up and going, anyone we feel is intelligent enough not to do stupid shit will be contacted and either given a command centre or brought to us in Houston Texas for further debriefing.”
loading…Co-founders of the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) consortium announced today that an upcoming Steam update would include support for open-platform VR content. This means that any game on Steam sporting the OSVR logo (below) should be compatible with whichever VR headset you connect to your PC.
Look for the OSVR logo on Steam.
“This is a great milestone for VR,” said Christopher Mitchell, OSVR lead at Razer via press release. “Giving users access to more hardware and content and driving Valve’s and OSVR’s shared vision of totally open VR content to everyone.”
Most people have heard of the three big players in VR: the HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and the Oculus Rift. Each has a dedicated storefront that is capable of denying access to the games on offer for people with competing headsets. There is some crossover, and many VR titles are released on all three platforms, but it’s true that we’re talking about three walled-gardens, designed to keep the competitors out.
OSVR aims to change that. “OSVR is a movement founded to create a universal open source VR ecosystem for technologies across different brands and companies,” reads the OSVR vision statement. “Giving you the freedom to combine different brands of HMDs and Controllers to experience VR the way they want to.” OSVR is supported by Razer, Sensics, Leap Motion, Intel, Gearbox Software, amongst others.
The backbone of OSVR is its software development kit (SDK), which allows developers to build support for all of the VR headsets on the market into their games. The intention being to reduce the hardware fragmentation that is forming around the big three.
"We are delighted to announce support for OSVR titles," said Valve’s Augusta Butlin. "Steam is an open platform for all developers, and adding support for OSVR further expands the massive content offerings for the millions of gamers on Steam."
The OSVR headset developed by Razer and Sensics.
OSVR and its Developer Fund program is offering up to $5m to incentivize developers to build games that support OSVR. Out of reportedly hundreds of applications, 38 games have been funded so far.
Read more about the new open VR platform over at the OSVR website.
Razer and Sensics have also released a low-cost devkit OSVR headset, in the hopes that other developers will take the concept and start developing their own VR headsets to work with the OSVR platform.Firebase: Serverless Notifications?!
André Tietz Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 26, 2016
Before Google IO ‘16, I was a bit unsatisfied with Firebase, searching for a better solution. Why? Because Firebase is supposed to be an all-round solution and only covered most but not all of our Problems. Let’s take a look what happened so far. This article will mainly focus on Notifications and FCM.
What are our Problems?
Data Persistence
Yes, this problem is covered with Firebase very well! As a developer you don’t need to take care of this. There may some cases, where you could wish of other behaviours, but to be honest, I cannot think of one.
Authentication & Authorization
This is covered by Firebase, too. The only problem we have is, that it is limited to a couple of 3rd Party OAuth Services. Which are (at the point of writing) Google, Twitter, Facebook and Github and optionally email and password.
Not perfect, but enough for most of the cases.
Notifications
What do we need notifications for anyway? Well, a simple case would be, someone writes a comment to some content in your app. The author could be notified with a notification about it.
Before Google IO ‘16 this wasn’t possible at all. There was a (nice and impressive) talk last year (2015) by Frank van Puffelen. I’ve been asking him about this problem. He came up with “not supported yet, but…” and a quite nice workaround.
He said (Frank, please correct me if I am wrong ;) ):
Use a small server component (it could be even a raspberry i.e.), which you also connect to the Firebase database, “listen” the to a specific dataset and trigger a push when a new element gets created.
This sounds easy to achieve, since Firebase offers a couple of SDK’s for different languages. If you take a look at these SDK’s, you’ll see that they all have a method which listens to data changes in the dataset.
Now all the time the “queue” dataset changes we get a message in our micro-backend via the Firebase SDK and send a push to the devices which registered a push token for this message.
With this knowledge it is possible, but brings up an issue we were hoping to avoid when using Firebase. We have to store device push tokens of the users. This comes with the problem of multiple devices per user and…. Let’s cut this down, it’s not the best solution and a backend required (even though it’s small).
Another approach could be listening on dataset changes in the client itself and create a notification using the Android NotificationManager if required. This comes with other problems. There must be a service running in background listening to the changes. How about in doze mode?! How does this effect the battery life? How about iOS? There are too many of such questions, telling me that this is a workaround only, not a convenient solution.
What changed on Google IO 2016?
As I heard at IO is, that there’s no server-side component required anymore to send notifications. I was super excited because finally we can write our apps without any additional backend at all.
During last week a friend and me thought about an app. And both of us were very excited to finally take a look into the new firebase all-round solution.
As we came to the point of notifications we saw that they splitted the topic into two different things, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM former GCM) and Firebase Notifications.
What’s the difference?
Firebase Notifications is an option to send a notification to your App, meaning that you can set a title and a message which will be delivered to your App. If the app is running in background, the user will get a notification in the system tray, tapping on it will open the app. Sending additional data is possible too, so you can jump into your app, even to a specific screen (using this optional data). Even in foreground the messages can be received. More details about Firebase Notifications you can find here. This solution comes quite close the one iOS offers. Silent pushes, if the app is in Background, are not possible with Firebase Notifications.
So you can send notifications to the user, but you have to do this manually or time based.
Sending Firebase Notifications
Firebase Cloud Messaging is basically the replacement for the former Google Cloud Messaging. With this you can also send silent pushes, meaning that you can decide if you want to show a notification or not. So you have to add your Messaging Service and an Instance Id Service, then you can handle the message yourself…. Wait a moment, if we have to create our own InstanceIdService, where do we send the push tokens? A backend is required again.
We end up with the same problem as described before.
Use Firebase Notification for our purposes instead?
Well, it would feel a bit like an eunuch, because silent pushes are not possible, but it could be possible, since most of the time we want to show a notification anyway. If there would be any way of sending an automatic notification on dataset changes.
Firebase-Team, please hear our screams! An easy (and imho for Firebase not that difficult to implement) option would be to trigger some events on specific dataset changes (maybe definable similar to your permissions-approach. Like: added, changed, removed). These events could be then available in the Firebase Notifications Console to trigger the push (Notification).
At the moment this is not possible either.
Other downsides
Firebase Notifications is enabled automatically. As soon as we integrate any kind of push (via FCM), even if we don’t need Firebase Notifications, we’ll have it. You can see this taking a look your apps merged manifest. This is because they’re using the same dependency “com.google.firebase:firebase-messaging”. That also means that there’s a Service running in background for this kind of notifications, pointless if you’re not using it.
From the UX perspective this is not good for the users. When marketing people find out that this can be used in every app (ios, android), they could (and some probably will) miss-use this, until the user switches off all notifications.
Summary
Firebase made big steps, announced at Google IO ’16. Cloud Messaging-wise they added a feature called Firebase Notifications, which is reasonable in their grow- and not in their developer- section. Firebase doesn’t offer a dataset-event based notification functionality, which makes us still depending on our own backends.
Update 03/13/2017:
Since the 9th of march Firebase introduced “Firebase Functions”. This is supposed to solve this problem already. Havn’t had the time yet to take a closer look.Update: Stephan T. Lavavej (aka STL) provided some feedback: “Overloading on true_type/false_type is still tag dispatching – indeed, it is the simplest, most common form.” I thought I had good reasons for distinguishing situations in which the type is pre-tagged by a trait or typedef as being “tag dispatching” from times when you need to calculate the tag or when the tag isn’t really documenting a concept but just an on/off kind of thing. I now think those reasons were flawed and any time you tag a type and then use that tag as an overload parameter is “tag dispatching”. There is a difference between these methods obviously, but not anything that distinguishes a separate technique. I’ve left the language in this article alone though.
There’s been some confused notions passed around recently that lead me to think there needs to be more information about probably one of the simplest, most powerful metaprogramming techniques that exist in C++: tag dispatching. The reason tag dispatching is powerful is that it leverages the language and the compiler to do work for you so that you don’t have to. It’s a technique whereby you use overload resolution rules to decide between otherwise ambiguous functions.
Concepts and tags
The first part to understand with regard to tag dispatching is the idea of “concepts”. Concepts are not yet a formal part of the C++ language, but they’re integral to discussing many of the components of the standard library–especially those parts that came from the STL.
There’s a good description of concepts over in the boost documentation. There they define a concept as:
A concept is a set of requirements consisting of valid expressions, associated types, invariants, and complexity guarantees. A type that satisfies the requirements is said to model the concept. A concept can extend the requirements of another concept, which is called refinement.
As that link discusses there are different aspects to a concept. There’s the legal expressions available for use on the types that implement the concept. This is the kind of thing that can be analyzed with introspection techniques–in C++ these often center around SFINAE. In this part of the concept we might ask whether, given value ‘x’ of type ‘T’ that implements a concept, whether ‘++x’ is a legal expression.
Other parts of a concept though can’t really be analyzed with C++ metaprogramming. The invariants for example can’t really be asserted at the static level. They can and should be asserted during debug builds, but most of the time that’s the only place where one could get the necessary information to check invariants. Complexity guarantees also can’t be statically analyzed and will be mostly impractical to assert in the product–you’re basically stuck testing if you even have that.
In C++ we address all this using tagging. We tag a type with something that can be accessed during compile time that tells us what concept a type is implementing. This unfortunately means we depend on the author of the type to tag it correctly, but there’s quite literally nothing we can do about that. We might be charged with not writing robust code, but we’re no less beholden to the developer than that we assume someone won’t subclass an interface and disobey the contract of that interface. There are languages such as Rust that try to solve this problem, but C++ does not so there’s really no solution to this problem here.
In C++ we tag types with other types. These tag types are just empty classes that will eventually be compiled out of the program. They may inherit other tags, which will be explained in the next section, but they’ll not be polymorphic so they’ll not have any associated RTTI information. We use them only as values as well and in such ways that they’re never actually used in the program–this allows the compiler to remove them from the final object code.
InputIterator is an example of a concept. The standard library provides the tag for this concept by defining input_iterator_tag. We gain access to this tag through iterator_traits, which contains an internal typedef called iterator_category. The standard also defines a default version of the iterator_traits template that tries to access the iterator_category within its parameter. This means that we can tag our custom iterators either by specializing this template or by just tagging the iterator internally like so:
struct custom_iterator { using iterator_category = std::input_iterator_tag; // much more stuff... };
The reason an external traits template is required is because pointers are also iterators, and we can’t tag them in this way. Thus the standard defines a couple partial specializations for pointers. Here’s the non-const version:
template < typename T > struct iterator_traits<T*> { using iterator_category = std::random_access_iterator_tag; //... other useful stuff... };
Even when this is not necessary though it can be beneficial to do provide a metafunction or traits template to retrieve the tag.
Concept refinement
Concepts can refine other concepts similar to how classes can inherit other classes. When a concept refines another concept it means that types implementing the refining concept also implement the refined concept. So for example concept ‘A’ might be refined by concept ‘B’. Say ‘A’ has the requirement that ‘x.foo()’ be a legal expression that results in a type convertible to bool. Concept ‘B’ can require additional expressions and can put further requirements on the result of ‘x.foo()’, saying it requires type bool rather than something convertible to bool for example–since bool is convertible to bool this is fine.
ForwardIterator is an example of a concept that refines another. It refines InputIterator and the main thing that it adds is the ability to iterate over the same range multiple times. This part of the refinement is an essential difference between an InputIterator and a ForwardIterator but it changes nothing about the static interface of the types that implement either. Using introspection alone you’d not be able to decide if an iterator has this ability or not–only tags |
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