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Electronic cigarettes are also known as e-cigarettes, e-cigars, vape pens or personal vapourisers. They heat liquid, which usually contains nicotine, into a fine vapour for inhalation into the lungs.
Products vary widely in design and operation, but typically consist of a battery, heating element, and a cartridge or refillable tank containing substances such as propylene glycol, vegetable glycerine, liquid nicotine and flavourings.
Read the safety concerns about electronic cigarettes.
Electronic cigarettes are smoking products
Under the Tobacco and Other Smoking Products Act 1998 (Tobacco Act), electronic cigarettes are smoking products and subject to the laws in place for tobacco cigarettes.
These devices cannot be:
used in existing no-smoking indoor and outdoor places
sold to children under 18 years of age
advertised, promoted or displayed at retail outlets
provided for sale in a vending machine.
More information about the restrictions and penalties for use.
Electronic cigarettes that contain liquid nicotine
Under Queensland’s Health (Drugs and Poisons) Regulation 1996 (HDPR), liquid nicotine is regulated on the basis that it is classified as a 'Dangerous Poison' under Schedule 7 of the federal ‘Poisons Standard’, which is published on the Therapeutic Goods Administration (‘TGA’) website. Accordingly, in Queensland, liquid nicotine is:
A 'S7 poison' and a 'regulated poison' under the HDPR;
Except when in preparations for human therapeutic use and provided as 'Prescription Only Medicine' as provided by Schedule 4 of the Poisons Standard. In that case liquid nicotine will be a ‘S4 restricted drug’ under the HDPR the use or supply of which is by or on the order of persons permitted under the HDPR to prescribe and is only available when supplied extemporaneously from a compounding pharmacist on prescription or through other TGA processes.
It is an offence for a person to manufacture, obtain, possess, prescribe, dispense, sell, advertise, use or destroy nicotine, unless the person is specifically authorised or holds an approval under the HDPR. A significant penalty applies.
As at 30 June 2018, no electronic cigarette products containing liquid nicotine have been approved as a therapeutic good by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) for sale in Australia. Persons seeking to access unapproved electronic cigarette products containing liquid nicotine for human therapeutic use may do so under the TGA’s Special Access Scheme, or the Personal Importation Scheme or Traveller’s Exemption. Under these schemes, the prescribing doctor would need to follow requirements prescribed by the TGA. Please contact the TGA for more information. The requirements applicable to a 'restricted drug' under the HDPR would also apply.
Electronic cigarettes containing liquid nicotine can be safely disposed of at a community pharmacy or a local public health unit.
To report illegal sale or possession of electronic cigarettes containing liquid nicotine, call 13 QGOV (13 74 68). |
Since the mid-90’s From Software has been making action RPGs. The likes of the King’s Field and Shadow Tower games afforded players the chance to experience bleak and deeply isolated settings, all of which were filled to the brim with lethal enemies. These games were also set in the first person and made the staple melee combat suitably challenging, doubly so when most enemies would and could kill you outright.
When these games transitioned to the third person in Demon’s Souls, the ranging of your attacks became far more manageable. As you had a visual point of reference of not only your character but also the slathering monster intent on bringing about your demise.
The difficulty from the prior games remained broadly unchanged in Demon’s Souls, though maybe more approachable. So to say that From Software somehow re-introduced difficulty to gaming is pretty ignorant, as well as a worrying indictment on the enforced accessibility and functional standardization of modern games.
The last two Souls games, Dark Souls and Dark Souls II, followed this lineage pretty much identically too.
Bloodborne looks to change all that.
Up until now, all these games have been given medieval fantasy settings set in the relative wilderness. The player is fairly slow on their feet and often has a means to actively block attacks. Whereas Bloodborne is a gothic horror fantasy set in the bleak cityscape of Yharnam. The player is also a lot lighter on their feet and, crucially, lacks any means to realistically block attacks. This is not to say that Bloodborne is somehow changing outright the core of what makes these games work but it is trying to evolve it.
Back at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, I managed to play through the Bloodborne demo a fair few times. In addition I also got on the alpha test, which was basically the same as the previous demo but with some additional online features.
The biggest and most obvious changes are two-fold; the lack of a shield means the emphasis is on dodging attacks, which in turn leads into the lock-on and quick step mechanics. In that once you are locked onto an enemy your standard Souls combat roll switches to a far lither orbiting quick step. This means you need to be more spatially aware, as once an enemy reveals themselves you then have the chance to lock-on to them and dance around them with oversized and decidedly pointy weaponry. These quick step mechanics aren’t for show either, as outright avoiding enemy attacks is a key element now.
There are additional concessions made to help this new setup, the first being that enemies can partially replenish your health upon killing them and the second is that you now have a gun. The gun isn’t overly strong but its main purpose is to stun enemies, so as to allow you to follow up with a killing blow. This is especially true when tackling groups of enemies, as the gun can be used to break the flow of their attacks and give you an opening. Your melee weapons now also have two states; weak fast and strong slow. This is so you can mix and match your combos, again to break the flow of enemy attacks by either dragging them out or finishing them off quickly.
In short, the new setup is much more technical as well as tactical and requires the player to be more aware of what tools they have to hand and what is occurring around them.
The only real downside is that enemies don’t really announce their presence very often. So you end up playing a twitchy memory game as you learn the level. In the previous, slower paced, games this was fine as you could take things at your own speed. Bloodborne is far more demanding.
Bloodborne is very much in the character of the previous games; with enemies being able to kill you very easily and bosses that are suitably terrifying in their potency. So the difficulty hasn’t changed in a balancing sense but the increased technicality of the game system means it is more of a challenge. So not so much a dumb increase in difficulty but an attempt to make something uncompromising more engrossing.
As you’d expect from a platform exclusive, Bloodborne does look and sound marvellous. From the positively cockney sounding human enemies to the twisted London-esque gothic architecture, this is a genuine next-generation game. The cityscape also looks wonderfully lived in and it’s clear that From Software understand the value of making engaging environments to help bed down the game’s setting and mechanics.
It’s also really quite gory, even gruesome, but it’s not overly frightening in a horror game sense. Enemies look grotesque and are meant to give real sense of repulsion but it’s not scary. Though there is a definite tension when you are on the last of your health and you have to deal with a group of enemies or a boss.
The online setup looks to be similar to the previous games too, with players aiding or invading your game. This wasn’t in the alpha build but has been alluded to. The online player ghosts are still present though, as is the messaging function (now displayed by skeletons breaking up through the ground to display a scroll with a message on it).
Some of the UI is a bit clumsy still, as picking up items or reading messages toggles a window that then has to be toggled off. This can be a problem once you enter combat and a big UI window is still present. This is very likely a simple early implementation issue though, so not a real issue as yet.
Overall then from what we’ve played, Bloodborne is a more technically demanding and brutally challenging game. The game still produces the same kind of elation on surviving a difficult encounter, like the previous games did, but it is doubly satisfying as the technical requirements mean you are more invested in the outcome.
Bloodborne’s February 2015 release cannot come soon enough.
Follow me on Twitter and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii.
Read my Forbes blog here. |
Mousavi calls on people to gather in mosques to mourn those killed in protests
Iran was braced for a fifth day of unrest today as the government intensified its crackdown on opposition figures with the arrest of dozens of leading critics and issued a further warning against reporting of the protest movement.
Saeed Laylaz, a leading journalist and a critic of government policy often quoted by foreign media, was among the latest to be detained, as protesters prepared for more demonstrations in Tehran.
"Iranian intelligence and security forces are using the public protests to engage in what appears to be a major purge of reform-oriented individuals whose situations in detention could be life-threatening," said Aaron Rhodes, a spokesman for the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
There is also concern for the health of Saeed Hajarian, a former adviser to Mohammad Khatami and supporter of the opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who was arrested yesterday. Hajarian, who was badly impaired in both mobility and speech in an assassination attempt nine years ago, needs constant medical attention and is unlikely to get it in the current circumstances.
Human rights groups said at least 100 people had been arrested in the city of Tabriz, a historic centre of protest and a Mousavi stronghold.
In a fresh challenge to the government, Mousavi urged supporters to stage peaceful protests or gather in mosques tomorrow to mourn those killed in the protests.
"A number of our countrymen were wounded or martyred," Mousavi said in a statement on his website.
"I ask the people to express their solidarity with the families … by coming together in mosques or taking part in peaceful demonstrations."
Mousavi added that he would also take part in the day of mourning.
He also repeated his call for "a new presidential election that will not repeat the shameful fraud from the previous election".
In a sign of the divisions in Iran's leadership, the interior ministry ordered an investigation into an attack on university students which they say was carried out by militia and police. It came a day after Iran's influential speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, condemned the assault on the dormitory of Tehran University.
There were, however, further signs of a crackdown today as the powerful Revolutionary Guards warned Iranian websites and blogs to remove content that might "create tension" or face legal action, according to the Associated Press.
Much information about the protests has come from blogs and websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The government yesterday barred foreign media from leaving their offices to report on the demonstrations, and reporters' visas have not been renewed.
Amid fears that tension might lead to further bloodshed, Gordon Brown today urged Iran to listen to its people. "The elections are a matter for the Iranian people, but if there are serious questions that are now being asked about the conduct of the elections, they have got to be answered," he said. "There must be no violence in response to peaceful protests."
Iran's foreign ministry summoned the British ambassador and his European counterparts to criticise their "interventionist and impudent" responses to the disputed election.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor general of the central province of Isfahan warned that those behind post-election unrest could face the death penalty under Islamic law. Mohammadreza Habibi alleged that anti-government protesters were being controlled from outside Iran and urged them to stop what he described as "criminal activities", the Fars news agency reported.
There were also unconfirmed reports that Mohammad Asgari, who was responsible for the security of the IT network in Iran's interior ministry, was killed yesterday in a suspicious car accident in Tehran. Asgari had reportedly leaked evidence that the elections were rigged to alter the votes from the provinces. Asgari was said to have leaked information that showed Mousavi had won almost 19m votes, and should therefore be president.
Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last night appeared to rule out any change to the outcome of last week's disputed poll by referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the "elected president".
Khamenei last night dismissed the protests as the work of "tension seekers". Khamenei's appeal for calm after four days of protests in Tehran followed an apparent concession when the regime promised to recount some votes cast in Friday's disputed election, officially won by Ahmadinejad. But the authorities rejected demands by the defeated Mousavi to annul the election. |
Everybody’s got a response to the State of the Union these days — including Occupy Wall Street. Or at least a branch of Occupiers in D.C. do. They were supposed to deliver it live post-State of the Union in McPherson Square in Washington.
(By the way, in yet another sign that the Occupy movement is maturing — or at least is becoming more mainstream media friendly — we received this text from their publicist, marked “embargoed” until after the SOTU. Really.)
The following was designed to for Occupiers to take turns reading a couple lines at a time, then the crowd repeating them, “People’s Mic”-style.
Mic check! [mic check] Mic check! [mic check]
Fellow Americans, good evening! [Fellow Americans, good evening!]
We are men and women of the 99 percent
Many of us have spent many months at Occupy Wall Street
and at other Occupations across the country and around the world
We are here tonight to report on the State of the 99 percent in America
Of course most Americans know the state of the 99 percent very well
But sometimes the one percent, on Wall Street and in Washington, need a reminder
Financially, the state of the 99% is not strong
That is an understatement.
Never in our lifetimes have so many hard-working Americans
Faced so many difficulties, so many uncertainties, so many indignities
In Occupy camps around the country
We find Americans from all walks of life
[3 personal story couplets]
Some of us have had it rougher than others
And it turns out living in camps is no picnic either
But we do not give up easily
And we take inspiration from the brave Americans who came before us
From Dr. King, who gave his life fighting for economic justice
From the Suffragettes, who insisted the voice of women be heard
From all of those brave or foolish enough to believe in America’s defining idea
theidea of democracy
That we are all created equal
And we all have an equal voice in shaping the laws we all live by
America
Let’s be honest.
When our courts tell us corporations have more right to speak than we the people do
That’s not democracy.
When pepper spray and midnight raids make a joke of the 1st Amendment right to assemble.
That’s not democracy.
When defrauding clients, blowing up our economy, forging thousands of documents and seizing people’s homes illegally is not a crime
but protesting all that is a crime
That’s not democracy.
Our America is not a democracy, not yet.
We all know why: Wall street owns Washington.
Bribery is legal, and the laws we live by are for sale to the highest bidder
That is why our government serves the very rich and powerful
at the expense of the rest of us
It protects the bonuses of bankers and Wall Street executives,
while failing to keep hard-working families in their homes;
It shields offshore tax havens for the very wealthy,
while letting our bridges, schools, and infrastructure fall apart;
There have been dark periods in our nation’s history, when corruption became the norm
when grave injustices stood in the way of America living up to its best ideals.
But time and time again, Americans stepped up to take back their government and correct our course.
Today Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement step into this proud American tradition.
But fear not, one percent!
We are not here just to help the 99% at your expense.
We are here to help you too.
For when you’ve begun to think rigging the game is fair game
When you regard hard-working Americans as undeserving of a middle-class life
and unworthy of the profit their own work creates
When you treat the people who build your buildings and serve your food and raise your children and patrol your streets
without respect
You have not only lost touch with our humanity
You have lost touch with your own humanity
You need to find it again, for everyone’s sake
Real democracy will do you good
We are the 99%
We are here to create the democracy we have all been promised.
We are the 99%.
Our finances are weak, but our spirit is strong.
We are the 99%.
Our spring is coming. |
Built for Edgar Kaufmann Sr., a Pittsburgh department store magnate, and his wife, Liliane, the house was finished in 1937. Now, it draws about 140,000 visitors a year -- and gasps of awe -- but it is failing in the most basic function of a house: providing shelter.
Since 1997 Fallingwater has required unsightly trusses to save it from falling into Bear Run Creek, in which case the world would also lose such Kaufmann-specified oddities as its 10 1/2-inch-high toilets, of which one exasperated visitor complained, ''Most wastebaskets are taller.''
The house was donated to the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1963 by the Kaufmanns' son, Edgar Kaufmann Jr., after which it was opened to the public. The conservancy has not decided how much it will raise the admission price for viewing the work in progress.
For any other architect, a gorgeous interior and an incompetent structure would be evidence of feet of clay. Wright's followers might call it a terra cotta base. For American architecture aficionados, Fallingwater is the Leaning Tower of Pisa, venerated for its structural flaws.
Architects who are not involved with the project agree that structural flaws do not reduce the value of Fallingwater.
''After 70 years, a little structural problem on the best house ever designed doesn't strike me as something that raises any kind of revisionist issues in terms of Wright's career,'' said Michael Sorkin, the director of the graduate urban design program at City College. ''He was working on some kind of edge, and a certain amount of risk is entailed.''
Mr. Sorkin said that was not as if any of the Wright buildings ''have collapsed or killed anyone.''
Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, said, ''When you're involved with an experiment, you're often ahead of the curve.''
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''The rewards are great, spacially and aesthetically,'' Mr. Stern added, ''but later on, things have to be done.''
Things, in this case, are rather major: the installation of the steel cables, running horizontally along the length of the major beams, which extend unsupported for 14.5 feet. The cables will be pulled taut with 200 tons of force, stabilizing the cracking beams.
The cure was designed by Robert Silman, the New York-based structural engineer who should know about the problems of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings. Fallingwater is the sixth he has worked on, and he is bidding to get the job on a seventh.
His firm, Robert Silman Associates, does not specialize in Wright buildings but its reputation has helped it win a lot of Wright work, said John A. Matteo, Mr. Silman's associate, who is overseeing the Fallingwater work.
Wright buildings have the leaky roofs that older houses are prone to, but often their roofs are worse, because Wright liked them flat, even in places with substantial snowfall. But most have more serious problems.
''They've all got structural defects,'' Mr. Silman said. ''Otherwise I wouldn't be working on them.''
To combat the leaky roofs of Wingspread, a Prairie-style home Wright designed for the floor-wax millionaire, Herbert F. Johnson in Racine, Wis., Mr. Silman's firm found the solution was carbon fiber, a material that did not exist when the house was built.
Mr. Matteo said that the structural problems now seen in Wright buildings had only one common thread. ''He was pushing the envelope,'' Mr. Matteo said. ''He was willing to take some risks for the sake of architectural design.''
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The risks, it turns out in hindsight, were real and, if the flaws were unrepaired, would be devastating. But Mr. Silman said of the Wright designs: ''This doesn't diminish their architectural brilliance one bit. One after another, they are absolutely breathtaking.''
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Fallingwater, these days, is a combination of breathtaking and breath-stopping. It was built as the centerpiece of a remote estate the Kaufmann family loved because of the waterfall. Family members assumed that their new house would overlook the most dominant feature. Wrong.
Swearing that his clients would become desensitized to the waterfall's power if they overlooked it, Wright gave them a house that sits on top of it. With Wright's typical concern about the flow of space from interior to exterior, Fallingwater seems in touch with every natural force at the site -- with the notable exception of one -- gravity.
The house was intended as a series of independent cantilevers, or self-supporting shelves. Mr. Silman compared the intent to the design of a pine tree, with branches stretching horizontally off a single core.
But Mr. Silman's forensic engineering work disclosed that the weight of the upper level, specifically that of the terrace off the master bedroom, in fact rests on the floor below, putting too much stress on it. The weight is transferred from the bedroom level to the living-room level by four window mullions, all thicker than the mullions used in the rest of the house.
The terraces on both the main floor and the master bedroom above bend by up to seven inches. The droop in the terraces is not evident from inside the building, and it is not new. The terraces began to bend when the building was new and seemed not to have troubled the Kaufmanns, who lived there until Mr. Kaufmann Sr.'s death in 1955 (Liliane died three years earlier). But engineers say the two terraces are not stable.
Mr. Silman investigated these errors with the aid of radar and an ultrasonic pulse velocity system. The latter sends a pulse of energy down the beam and listens for echoes; cracks produce a different pattern from solid metal.
As the house was being built, the problem with Wright's design was obvious to the Pittsburgh engineering concern, Metzger-Richardson. Mr. Silman said the company doubled the number of one-inch-square bars in each beam from what had been called for in Wright's design.
But Wright, hearing of the change, wrote to Kaufmann complaining: ''I have put so much more into this house than you or any other client has a right to expect, that if I don't have your confidence -- to hell with the whole thing.'' Kaufmann expressed his confidence, but the contractor's extra steel stayed.
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If it had not, Mr. Silman said, the building would have collapsed already. The plan now is to add what architects call post-tensioning cables to arrest the decline and possibly raise the droop up by a quarter-inch or so, but not to correct the problem any further.
''It has deformed over a very long period of time, nearly 70 years,'' said Lynda S. Waggoner, director of Fallingwater and vice president of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which owns the house.
''If we started lifting it up, invariably we would have cracking,'' Ms. Waggoner said. ''We can't afford it.''
Post-tensioning is not commonly used as a repair but is now frequently found in new construction of steel-reinforced concrete. The cable is laid in a conduit before the concrete is poured, and after the concrete hardens, the cable is pulled taut. The most common use is in a structure that was not a centerpiece of Mr. Wright's ouevre: parking garages.
That technique might have prevented the problem at Fallingwater, Mr. Silman said.
Another way to have designed the structure, said Ms. Waggoner, an art historian who studied architecture, would have been to rely more on the parapets to add rigidity. The proper form, she said, would have been something like a department store's cardboard box for packaging dresses, which becomes rigid only when the sides are raised. Mr. Silman said the analogy was apt.
The restoration work, scheduled to be completed by April 1, will also include a new sewage treatment system, to replace the system that serves the visitor center. There is also a landscape master plan, including redesign of some pathways and parking areas, to handle the crowds.
Maintenance buildings and administration offices will be moved away from the house ''to restore the intimacy that would have been there when the Kaufmanns were there,'' Ms. Waggoner said. The structural repairs come to just under $4 million of the total $11.5 million project.
It seems a worthy investment, all involved agree, for a Wright house that cost $155,000 in 1937. The original budget was $30,000. Wright was paid $8,000 for the job.
Tours are $10 on weekdays, $15 on weekends. While the house has been closed on weekdays during the winter, the conservancy plans to open it in on some winter weekdays this year.
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Unlike orthodontia, the restoration of Fallingwater should be fun to watch, curators say, but they recommend reservations for visits at any time (www.paconserve.org or 724-329-8501). |
This page has not been approved by the PsychonautWiki administrators. It may contain incorrect information, particularly with respect to dosage, duration, subjective effects, toxicity and other risks.
3-Hydroxyeticyclidine (commonly known as 3-HO-PCE) is a novel synthetic dissociative substance of the arylcyclohexylamine chemical class. It produces potent, dose-sensitive dissociative, hallucinogenic and euphoric effects when administered. Unlike its close structural analog 3-HO-PCP, this compound has no precedent in the scientific literature before being offered on the research chemicals market in the 2010s.[1]
Early discussions of this compound have revolved around whether it possesses an appreciable affinity for the μ-opioid receptor given its structural relationship to 3-HO-PCP, which has been shown to display affinity for the μ-opioid receptor in animal models.[2] Whether it produces any of its theorized opioid effects in humans is the subject of ongoing discussion. If it does, 3-HO-PCE may pose unique risks relative to other dissociatives, particularly when it is redosed.
Following other substances of its class, particularly methoxetamine (MXE), phencyclidine (PCP), and 3-MeO-PCE, it is speculated to to be able to induce a state known as "dissociative anesthesia". Early reports suggest that this state is difficult to reach relative to other dissociatives, and its general effects profile has been characterized as "lying halfway between 3-MeO-PCP and 3-MeO-PCE."
There is a lack of data of the pharmacological properties, metabolism and toxicity of 3-HO-PCE. To date, there have been no analytical studies conducted on samples of 3-HO-PCE distributed through the grey market via independent laboratories.[1] Due to an unknown toxicity profile and likely similar habit-forming properties shared by other hydroxylanated arylcyclohexylamines, it is strongly recommended that one use proper harm reduction practices if choosing to use this substance.
History and culture
This History and Culture section is a stub. As such, it may contain incomplete or wrong information. You can help by expanding it.
On October 18, 2012 the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in the United Kingdom released a report about methoxetamine, saying that the "harms of methoxetamine are commensurate with Class B of the Misuse of Drugs Act (1971)", despite the fact that the act does not classify drugs based on harm. The report went on to suggest that all analogues of MXE should also become class B drugs and suggested a catch-all clause covering both existing and unresearched arylcyclohexamines, which includes 3-HO-PCE.[3]
Chemistry
3-HO-PCE, or 3-hydroxyeticyclidine, is a synthetic dissociative of the arylcyclohexylamine class. The structure of 3-HO-PCE is comprised of cyclohexane, a six-member saturated ring, bonded to two additional groups at R 1 . One of these an ethyl chain bonded at its nitrogen group. The other ring is an aromatic phenyl ring, substituted at R 3 with a hydroxy group.
3-HO-PCE is an analog of PCE and structurally homologous to 3-MeO-PCE.
Pharmacology
While no formal studies have been conducted, 3-HO-PCE likely acts principally as an NMDA receptor antagonist.[2]
The NMDA (N-Methyl-D-Aspartate) receptor, a specific subtype of glutamate receptor, modulates the transmission of electrical signals between neurons in the brain and spinal cord; for the signals to pass, the receptor must be open.
Dissociatives inhibit the normal functioning NMDA receptors by binding to and blocking them. This disruption of neural network activity leads to loss of normal cognitive and affective processing, psychomotor functioning, anesthesia.[citation needed]
There is ongoing speculation as to whether this compound possesses μ-opioid receptor activity due to its structural relationship to 3-HO-PCP, which has been found to have appreciable affinity as a μ-opioid receptor agonist in animal models.[2]
Subjective effects
This subjective effects section is a stub. As such, it is still in progress and may contain incomplete or wrong information. You can help by expanding it.
The effects listed below are based upon the subjective effects index and personal experiences of PsychonautWiki contributors. These effects should be taken with a grain of salt and will rarely (if ever) occur all at once, but heavier doses will increase the chances of inducing a full range of effects. Likewise, adverse effects become much more likely on higher doses and may include serious injury or death.
Experience reports
Anecdotal reports which describe the effects of this compound within our experience index include:
Toxicity and harm potential
This toxicity and harm potential section is a stub. As such, it may contain incomplete or even dangerously wrong information. You can help by expanding or correcting it.
We also recommend that you conduct independent research and use harm reduction practices when using this substance.
The toxicity and long-term health effects of recreational 3-HO-PCE use has not been studied in any scientific context and the exact toxic dosage is unknown. This is because 3-HO-PCE has a very short history of human usage.
Tolerance and addiction potential
Early reports have characterized the chronic use of 3-HO-PCE as moderately addictive with a moderate potential for adverse side effects such as psychosis. In comparison to other dissociatives, 3-HO-PCE has been reported to be more potentially habit-forming than MXE, diphenidine, ephenidine, DCK, and ketamine. When addiction has developed, cravings and withdrawal effects may occur if a person suddenly stops their usage.
Tolerance to many of the effects of 3-HO-PCE are expected to develop with prolonged and repeated use. This results in users having to administer increasingly large doses to achieve the same effects. After that, it takes about 4 - 7 days for the tolerance to be reduced to half and 1 - 2 weeks to be back at baseline (in the absence of further consumption). 3-HO-PCE presents cross-tolerance with all dissociatives, meaning that after the consumption of 3-HO-PCE, all dissociatives will have a reduced effect.
It is strongly recommended that one exercise extreme caution and harm reduction practices when using this substance.
Users should avoid taking the drug multiple days in a row or becoming dependent/addicted to it as this seems to be the main common factor in the observed incidences of severe adverse effects.
The recommended dosage range should not be exceeded as high doses can trigger these effects as well.
Users should start with extremely low doses and work their way up as slowly as possible. Volumetric liquid dosing should preferably be used due to the substance's potency; most standard milligram scales cannot accurately weigh out doses below 10-15mg. [4]
Compulsive redosing before one has fully sobered up is not recommended and can result in too high of a dose, which can potentially produce serious adverse physical side effects.
Due to the risk of psychosis, it is not recommended to combine this drug with other substances, especially stimulants, psychedelics, or other dissociatives. Independent research should always be done to ensure that a combination of two or more substances is safe before consumption.
Urinary tract effects
In terms of its long-term health effects when used repeatedly and excessively for extended periods of time, 3-HO-PCE is likely to exhibit similar bladder and urinary tract problems to those produced by ketamine, albeit to a lesser extent. This has been speculated to be due to the fact 3-HO-PCE is far more potent than ketamine so significantly less of material needs to be consumed. Symptoms of dissociative-induced cystitis can become extremely serious and can be described as:
Urinary frequency - Urinary frequency is the need to empty the bladder every few minutes.
- Urinary frequency is the need to empty the bladder every few minutes. Urinary urgency - This can be described as a sudden, compelling need to urinate.
- This can be described as a sudden, compelling need to urinate. Urinary pressure - This is experienced as a constant sensation of fullness in the bladder that is unrelieved by urination.
- This is experienced as a constant sensation of fullness in the bladder that is unrelieved by urination. Pelvic and bladder pain - Pain can develop suddenly and severely, particularly as the bladder fills with urine.
- Pain can develop suddenly and severely, particularly as the bladder fills with urine. Hematuria - This is visible blood in the urine.
- This is visible blood in the urine. Incontinence - This is the leakage of urine.
Dangerous interactions
Stimulants - Both stimulants and dissociatives carry the risk of adverse psychological reactions like anxiety, mania, delusions and psychosis and these risks are exacerbated when the two substances are combined.
- Both stimulants and dissociatives carry the risk of adverse psychological reactions like anxiety, mania, delusions and psychosis and these risks are exacerbated when the two substances are combined. Depressants - Because both depress the respiratory system, this combination can result in an increased risk of suddenly falling unconscious, vomiting and choking to death from the resulting suffocation. If nausea or vomiting occurs, users should attempt to fall asleep in the recovery position or have a friend move them into it.
Legal status
This legality section is a stub. As such, it may contain incomplete or wrong information. You can help by expanding it.
United Kingdom: 3-HO-PCE is a class B drug in the UK and is illegal to possess, produce, supply, or import. As a derivative of 1-Phenylcyclohexylamine where the amine has been replaced with a 1-piperidyl group, further substituted in the phenyl ring with a hydroxy substituent, it is covered by the arylcyclohexylamine generic clause added to the Misuse of Drugs Act by S.I. 2013/239, which came into effect on the 26th February 2013.[5]
See also
Discussion
Literature
Morris, H., & Wallach, J. (2014). From PCP to MXE: A comprehensive review of the non-medical use of dissociative drugs. Drug Testing and Analysis, 6(7–8), 614–632. https://doi.org/10.1002/dta.1620 |
It was an eventful PAX for FFXIV. We (and maybe a thousand other fans) were treated to an hour-long panel by Yoshida in which he provided some sneak peaks at Heavensward, an early look at the soon-to-be-released benchmark, and a deep look into the process by which the development team adds new jobs. We posted a summary of the panel on Saturday. Of course, the big news is that we now have a release date for Heavensward of June 23, with early access starting on June 19.
Prior to the panel we were once again fortunate enough to be able to sit down with Yoshida and ask him a load of questions related to FFXIV. Given that we’re still a few months away from Heavensward, and will still be getting what will no doubt be an epic “conclusion” of sorts to ARR with the upcoming patch 2.55 (which has also been referred to as 2.5 part 2), getting new Heavensward info was a challenge, but as always we do our best to get a few nuggets of new information.
Because of the wide ranging (and lengthy) nature of this interview, we’re going to be paraphrasing and combining questions and answers here more than usual, so it will not be in our typical Q&A format. So without further ado, the interview.
Item Progression
We first asked about item progression in Heavensward, and how completed Zodiac weapons or Lucis tools would be addressed. Yoshida first confirmed that there would be new “relic” progression within the 3.x expansion. It is not yet finalized whether it will be identified as a continuation of the 2.x progression or a brand new concept, but it will continue throughout the 3.x expansion, starting at 3.1. For those who have completed Zodiac weapons, they are planning on having some advantage for those players in this new progression. Yoshida mentioned that players should understand, however, since the level cap will be increased to level 60 and with higher item levels, there will of course be new weapons with higher item levels. The new “relic” arc will start at 3.1. We also confirmed that level 51 gear will start below iLevel 135.
Yoshida also weighed in on the use of RNG in the Zodiac weapon progression. Having the whole thing based on a RNG system would be too much to bear, and unfortunately, even if they raise the drop percentages there will be people who are unlucky and don’t get the drop in the expected time frame. Yoshida confirmed that internally they know what the amount of time should be for a random drop, and use that to determine the length of time they want a certain phase to last. This is not unlike a grind phase (aka light farming or books), where they calculate an approximate length of time the phase will last. Using both approaches keeps the progression from being all grind or all RNG. Yoshida also mentioned that with RNG, once a player knows how long it should take to obtain a drop, there is a certain excitement when you obtain it, which is different from the satisfaction in completing a grind phase. In Heavensward, the same principles will apply for the new relic. Yoshida also mentioned that he finished his first Zodiac weapon while in Boston at PAX East, admitting that his preferred method of obtaining such high level gear is raiding.
For Disciples of Hand and Land in Heavensward, there will be crafter/gatherer “tokens” (name to be determined), and by doing smaller tasks on a more frequent basis you will be able to acquire these tokens and exchange them for a reward. For the people aiming for “end-game” crafting/gathering, there will of course be new gear and a continuation of the melding aspects, but the token system will be in place for players who want to progress in these roles at a more relaxed pace. Yoshida indicated that, by way of example, gatherers could utilize the tokens to obtain a permit (or talisman) that would allow you to go into new areas and obtain new materials. Also, for crafters, there will be a “Specialist” system incorporated in Heavensward to accompany the increased level cap though he was unable to go into any details about it at this time. Yoshida assured us that Heavensward will include just as big an update for crafters and gathers as for battle classes.
Content Progression
As we all know, ARR patches alternated between Coil and Crystal Tower releases, and also included “hard mode” dungeons with a new dungeon. Yoshida confirmed that the same structure will continue in Heavensward – at least as to the raid content. The details have not been announced yet, but there will be a new Crystal Tower-like raid which will alternate with the high-end raid of Alexander. Alexander will start with Patch 3.0, then the alternate raid in 3.1, and a new Alexander iteration in 3.2, and so on.
Another new large scale system being released with Heavensward is the new Free Company Airship system, which will continue to be updated throughout the 3.x patches. Yoshida didn’t want to call it a “raid”, but hasn’t quite landed on the new terminology yet either. As we progress through 3.x, there will be more and more things to do with your Free Company Airship. The crafting content of these airships will start at Patch 3.0. At first, a Free Company will be able to scout areas using their airship – without playable characters actually boarding. Soon after that, you will be able to board the airship and start exploring. Yoshida confirmed that small free companies will also be able to craft and make use out of an airship and the related content. Since the rewards from the missions will be distributed to those on the ship, larger free companies may even want to make multiple airships so that they can accommodate everyone. For the smaller free companies, they are also planning on implementing a way for a player to join you as a guest and help out without actually being part of the free company.
They are not currently planning on adding new modes (i.e. hard/extreme/savage) to existing ARR battles, although if there was sufficient demand for “Titan super hard extreme mode” he’d of course consider it. He has considered adding official speed runs on dungeons with a ranking system, so they are seeing what they can create on that aspect, which could include ARR dungeons. Yoshida is also still considering removing the class/job restrictions on existing dungeons to allow people to go in solo, or perhaps with a team of NPCs. The NPC system being considered, for example, is to be able to take members of your Grand Company and raise a team or squad that could fight with you. Unfortunately, this new system would not, however, include your Chocobo Companion. They are considering a gambit-system for the Chocobo Companion (and Magitek). This system is pretty definite, but includes a few aspects, and is perhaps a year or so away from release.
Yoshida confirmed that Gold Saucer will continue to receive updates throughout Heavensward, with 20 new cards to collect with 3.0. He also mentioned that there will be new Hunt targets.
New Jobs
On the topic of the new jobs, Yoshida indicated that they will be categorized as “Extra Jobs” and listed as such. Their actions will of course be obtained through leveling these new extra jobs. He implied that it is not really a separate system or complicated concept. Like with existing jobs, cross-class abilities will still function the same (and therefore presumably be usable on the new Extra Jobs). More specifics on which class actions can be used by the new Extra Jobs will, of course, be released as we get closer to Heavensward. We also managed to get some details about the Machinist. The basic concept for the attachments that the Machinist can use is that they will augment your DPS, and they are continuing to tweak it, but for example when you are attaching the attachment you will not be able to move. So while your DPS may increase, for example, you will be immobile. The turret accessories will be called out as a ground target and can be used to buff allies or debuff enemies depending on the situation. Another action specific to the Machinist will be a “reload” and “quick reload” action – but Yoshida assured us Machinist does not actually consume any type of ammunition in connection with this.
Lore
It was previously announced that Heavensward will feature two new main plot arcs – “The Dragonsong War” and “The Wyrmking versus Thordan and his Knights Twelve”. We inquired as to what would be happening to the ARR story arcs, identified as “The Mothercrystal”, “The Grand Companies versus the Garlean Empire” and the “Primals”. Yoshida confirmed that the ARR arcs will continue within Heavensward. For example the Garlean Empire will continue to have a presence in Heavensward. A lot more will be revealed in the upcoming Patch 2.55 – including, according to Yoshida, some shocking developments to the ongoing stories.
PvP
At launch of Heavensward, we will have a new Frontline battle, with a new map and new rules. It will continue to be Grand Company based, but while before each Grand Company would start at a select location and the map, in Heavensward we will see a randomized starting location which will impact play. Armor rewards associated with Frontlines will also be updated. After that point they will update the Wolves Den.
Apps and Platforms
Yoshida confirmed that Square Enix is working on releasing the Final Fantasy Portal app, currently released only in Japan, in other regions. He further assured us that until he can be sure that the app is available worldwide and the data from the app can be connected to in-game activities worldwide, they will not be adding that functionality to the Japanese version of the app. In other words, nobody will be able to use the app to play Triple Triad, and gain an advantage in game, until everyone has the same opportunity.
As Yoshida has mentioned before, he is an Xbox gamer and would love to have FFXIV available on the Xbox, but due to Microsoft restrictions they would not be able to have FFXIV be cross-platform in an Xbox version. Yoshida would not want Xbox only servers, since it could lead to situations where the single platform might not have enough support, or you could not play with a friend on another platform – Yoshida does not want that barrier/restriction. He did note that recently Microsoft allowed cross-platform compatibility between windows pc and Xbox, but as far as he knows there has not been any news from Microsoft about additional cross-platform accessibility. So he is still waiting on Microsoft at this point. Linux or Steam OS are not planned.
* * *
That about does it for our interview with Yoshida. He assured us that the amount of content being released with Heavensward is significant and to take care of our health and real lives. We of course, told him to do the same. |
In a one-hour PBS special, Host David Brancaccio visits communities across America using innovative approaches to create jobs and build prosperity in our new economy.
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Last week, Land Rover announced that it's making a plug-in hybrid version of the Range Rover Sport that's headed to the US for the 2019 model year. Today, the British automaker confirmed that the big-boy Range Rover will follow suit. The 2019 Range Rover P400e combines a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder and an electric motor for 398 system horsepower.
Land Rover
The Range Rover P400e features a permanent four-wheel drive system (of course) and can be operated in two modes, Parallel Hybrid or Electric Vehicle (EV) mode. In the former, both the gas and electric motors operate at the same time, while in EV mode, the internal-combustion engine shuts off for silent, zero-emissions cruising. The P400e's electric motor is housed within the Range Rover's eight-speed automatic transmission, and there's a charging port in the front grille.
Land Rover
The rest of the Range Rover lineup is getting an upgrade for 2018 too, with slightly revised exterior looks and new interior tech first seen on the Velar. There's a fancy dual-screen infotainment setup in the center stack, and long-wheelbase Autobiography models get fancy new rear seats.
Land Rover
Range Rover customers will get their choice of engines for the 2018 model too. The entry point is a 340-hp 3.0-liter V6 in the $87,000 SE model, while the top-of-the-line engine is the 557-hp supercharged 5.0-liter V8 in the $177,000 SVAutobiography Dynamic. You'll be able to get a diesel Range Rover with a 254-hp 3.0-liter turbocharged V6 too.
Land Rover
Land Rover says that the first 2018 Range Rovers should arrive in the US by the end of this year, but there's no specific timeline for the hybrid. We expect to see it arrive sometime next year. |
Do you ever feel like all the effort you put into your podcast is going to waste?
Like it’s just you and your mic, speaking into the void. You might have a few dozen or even a few hundred listeners, but it’s hard if not impossible to get them to engage with you.
Let’s face it, it sucks. And it often feels like it’s not worth it and that we might as well just give up.
Why I Almost Quit
I was feeling this very same way about my blog* recently. Wondering if the hours I spent laying it out and writing it were worth it, and if maybe that time was better spent elsewhere.
* Yes, this very blog you’re reading now!
See, I love writing, and I love talking about podcasting, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t have other motivations for putting the blog out every week.
One of those big motivations for me is growing my email list. When I started writing I didn’t really have a well defined funnel that my email list was leading subscribers through. It’s a bit better now, but to be honest it could use a lot of work to make it more valuable for both my subscribers and myself. Nevertheless I knew it was important to get the list established early so it was ready as I progressed with the content marketing aspect of my business.
Beyond the email list, I wanted to establish credibility and authority in the world of podcast production. I don’t really know how you track this metrically, but I suppose having people reach out with questions is as good an indicator as any.
Even further beyond that, it would be really great if at some point somebody actually identified with my personality so much that they actually wanted to work together in some capacity. This isn’t a goal I was really counting on materializing in the short term though.
When I first started writing and sharing my blog articles, I could count on getting 5 – 10 new email list subscribers a week. Many of those subscribers emailed me personally with questions and comments, and I’ve even jumped on a few Skype calls with some of them, a couple of which have lead to friendships.
It felt good. It felt like I wasn’t alone, like people were valuing what I was putting out there, it was exciting and motivating and it felt like it was all worth it.
But over the past month, I’ve been lucky to get one or two new subscribers per week, the interaction has dwindled, and it’s starting to feel like maybe it’s not worth the effort anymore.
On my post two weeks ago I got more traffic* on a single post than any other I had published to date, but no opt-ins, no comments, no love (at least that’s how it felt).
* Keep in mind, when I say more traffic, I’m talking in the low hundreds, not thousands or millions and especially not kajillions…
When it came time to write last week’s article I seriously questioned whether I should just skip it. It clearly was no longer helping me achieve my list building goals, it took up hours that could very easily be put to more practical work. I was seriously this close* to wrapping up the blog and moving on to some other list building strategy.
* You can’t see it but I’m holding my fingers super close together right now…
But I still had more to say. In fact, I had (and have) a list a mile long of podcasting topics to write about. So I sat down, got to work and wrote the article.
Why I Reconsidered
You’re probably expecting that this is the part of the story where it turns out to be my most popular article of all time, I get 5000 new list subscribers and then line up interviews on Good Morning America, Conan, and then host SNL with the Foo Fighters as the musical guest and I get to get up onstage and jam with them.
And in fact you would be… Wrong. Completely wrong.*
* But damn, would that be cool… I’ll keep hoping.
Instead, it was another week with the ol’ goose egg in the new subscribers column.
But then the day after publishing the article, I got an intriguing email in my inbox from a name I didn’t recognize*.
* No, it wasn’t Dave Grohl saying he wanted to jam…
In that email was a completely laid out podcast concept plan along with a paragraph thanking me for the information I had been putting out there through the blog.
What’s more, the email author expressed how great a fit they felt we were to work together, and how they loved the way I presented myself through my writing and felt like they already knew me.
Whoa. I guess I wasn’t writing into the void after all.
Why I’m Going To Keep Pushing
I know we don’t all get this kind of validation of our efforts in such perfect timing as I did this past week. For many of us it might take months, or depending on our endeavor, years. Some of us never get that validation.
But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth it to keep pushing, keep creating, keep sending our work out into the void.
Even if it feels like no one’s listening. Even if we feel like we’re all alone.
Because chances are, there are people out there listening, even if you don’t know it. And often, all it takes is one person, the right person to hear, or see, or taste, or feel what you’re doing to make it all worth it.
While the external validation is great, like I mentioned, it’s something some of us might never get, and it should never be the reason to keep recording, publishing, creating.
There are a couple important elements that I want to point out from my recent experience that are 100% applicable to podcasting, or content production of any kind.
1. From the beginning, I had a tangible business related goal motivating me to keep publishing.
I know I talk about this a lot, but I can’t stress how important it is to have a plan laid out for how your content production ties into your larger goals, and why podcasting is the best medium to help you achieve that.
Without a roadmap for where you’re going and a reason to keep creating even when the feedback is near (or completely) nonexistent, it’s easy to get lost and feel like you’re floating adrift without a destination.
I know there are exceptions out there, but most of the big time podcasters started out with a defined plan for how their podcasts would fit into either their existing business, or how they would build a business around it.
I don’t care if you don’t want to be a “business owner” and you just want to podcast for the pure joy of it. If you want to podcast full-time (which I know many if not most podcasters do), you had better buckle down and approach it as a business from the outset*.
* Or right now if you’ve already started.
2. Even when the tangible results declined, I still felt like I had more to say, regardless of the external validation
Ok, so this is basically a prerequisite to begin podcasting in the first place, and if at any point you find yourself feeling like you really don’t have anything left to say to your audience, it probably is time to move on, even if you are seeing great results at the moment.
On the other hand, if you’re not getting any type of meaningful validation from your audience but you still feel like you’ve got more to say, keep grinding. You know better than anyone if your content is valuable, and if anything you might want to tweak the format and experiment with how you deliver that content, but keep putting it out there consistently.
Despite the massive validation I got recently, the reality is that I clearly still need to continue refining how I deliver and promote my writing, the same reality many amateur podcasters I talk with fall into.
Funnily enough, this is something the pros are doing constantly, and for good reason. Even if you find something is working and your audience is reacting to it, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be doing better. Chances are it’s also not going to work forever.
So here’s to continuing to grind, tweak, experiment, and blasting your work out into the void until people can’t help but pay attention to you. You never know when that next listener might change everything for you, or you for them.
I’d love to hear your stories of quitting, or almost quitting. What was the reason behind it, and what pulled you through? Lemme know in the comments. Or don’t, I’ll keep writing anyways.
One of the biggest boosts to my motivation on a daily basis is having a supportive community of creators around me, both online and off. I can’t stress how important this is, which is exactly why I started the Cut The Bullshit Podcasting Community
. We’re a community of hundreds of the most dedicated, inspiring, fun, and supportive podcasters you’ll find, and we’d love to hang out with you! See ya inside 🙂 |
Lamont Evans, a former University of South Carolina assistant under head coach Frank Martin, was fired as associate head coach at Oklahoma State University on Sept. 28, 2017, a day after he turned himself in to the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City. Evans is facing indictment on federal charges in conjunction with a wide probe of fraud and corruption in NCAA men's basketball. (Photo: Sue Ogrocki, AP)
The University of South Carolina received a subpoena in September from a federal grand jury in New York seeking all documents, communications and evidence “regarding actual or potential NCAA rules violations” in the men’s basketball program.
The subpoena came as part of an ongoing probe by the United States Department of Justice into alleged bribery in college basketball. The probe has entangled some of the sport's high-profile programs in a controversy that involves alleged payouts to assistant coaches, recruits and players.
The subpoena was issued Sept. 26, the same day the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York announced charges in its widespread undercover investigation. The university had until Oct. 17 to comply with the subpoena and turn over records.
MORE: Former Clemson player Merl Code Jr., USC coach charged in federal fraud case
Former Clemson player and Adidas employee Merl Code and former South Carolina assistant Lamont Evans were among those indicted in the probe.
The subpoena was obtained by The Greenville News via the state’s Freedom of Information Act and sought “any and all documents and communications regarding actual or potential NCAA rules violations relating to the receipt of money, travel, in-kind benefits, or services by players and coaches for the University of South Carolina men’s basketball team.”
Merl Code Jr. (Photo: File)
The university has complied with the subpoena and is continuing to cooperate with the FBI investigation, said USC spokesman Jeff Stensland.
Evans faces up to 80 years in prison if convicted of charges that include conspiracy to commit bribery, unlawfully accepting property, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit mail fraud and defrauding the United States.
Evans was an assistant under South Carolina head coach Frank Martin from 2012-2016 when he left for a job at Oklahoma State University. A number of the incidents spelled out in the charging documents were alleged to have occurred while Evans was at South Carolina.
The grand jury also sought communications between South Carolina employees or officers, communications with the NCAA and any non-privileged material materiel from any NCAA or internal investigations.
The subpoena also sought communications between any member of the men’s basketball coaching staff or athletic department and a parent of any current or former member of the basketball team beginning Jan. 1, 2014.
The grand jury also demanded communications between USC basketball staff or coaches and three of ten men who have been charged in the case; former NBA agent Christian Dawkins, or financial advisers Martin Blazer and Munish Sood.
MORE: Ex-Clemson star Merl Code Jr. released on bond after arrest in recruiting scandal
In addition, the subpoena sought Evans’ personnel file and his NCAA certification forms.
It also sought any certification forms and student athlete statements for any current or former members of the men’s basketball program dating back to Jan. 1, 2014 and any communication about those forms.
Finally, it sought any information about financial aid, including scholarships, for current or former members of the men’s basketball program dating back to Jan. 1, 2014.
The grand jury’s requests were substantial in scope. It sought emails and text messages from any devices, including personal devices, pagers, tablets, computers, personal emails, cloud storage and messaging or social media accounts. It goes so far as to ask for any handwritten notes from employees or university board members.
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In a statement following Evans’ arrest, South Carolina Athletics Director Ray Tanner said the university was not the target of the probe and it didn’t involve any other men’s basketball personnel besides Evans.
That has not changed, Stensland said.
"We have received no information to indicate that any current or former member of the USC staff is involved in the federal investigation, other than the previously identified former assistant coach, Lamont Evans," Stensland said in an emailed response to questions.
MORE:Gamecocks' Martin denies knowledge of crimes
Tanner said the university would hire a third-party investigator to collaboratively investigate the basketball program alongside the federal investigation and in coordination with the NCAA.
Buy Photo South Carolina head coach Frank Martin reacts during an NCAA Tournament game in Greenville on Sunday, March 19, 2017. (Photo: KEN RUINARD/Staff)
USC has hired Bond, Schoeneck and King, a New York-based law firm that specializes in collegiate sports and NCAA compliance, to conduct an independent third-party review related to the federal investigation, Stensland said.
"The Athletics Department has an extensive education and monitoring program and conducts regular training sessions with coaches and student athletes on NCAA rules," Stensland said. "Our efforts have been praised and we expect this review to reaffirm that once again."
The grand jury also sought communications from Evans while he was at Oklahoma State, and it subpoenaed the University of Arizona, Auburn University and the University of Southern California, according to the Los Angeles Times. All of the universities have had former assistant coaches tied to the scandal.
The subpoenas to each university appear similar, seeking much the same type of information from coaches and communications between coaches and others tied to the scandal.
The subpoena the South Carolina was issued Sept. 26, the same day the FBI announced charges and made arrests of many of the suspects.
Two head coaches – former Louisville coach Rick Pitino and Miami coach Jim Larranaga – also had received subpoenas, they have said.
Evans, then an assistant coach at South Carolina, was indicted on charges that he accepted $22,000 in bribes to direct basketball players to agents or financial advisers. In court records, Evans was alleged to have worked with Sood and Dawkins as well as the FBI’s undercover cooperating witness who has been identified as Blazer.
The four met at a restaurant near the South Carolina campus on March 3, 2016 to discuss a then current USC player identified in records only as “Player-3,” according to charging documents.
Dawkins said that paying Evans help them sign “Player-3” as a client and also sign “five (Player-3s) down the line,” according to court records.
“You’ve got to get in bed with somebody like (Evans),” Dawkins said, “so you got complete access to a kid, because if a coach says nobody can come around, can’t nobody (expletive) come around.”
Evans left South Carolina in April 2016 for a job as associate head coach at Oklahoma State, where he was paid a $600,000 salary before he turned himself in on Sept. 27 in Oklahoma City and was fired Sept. 28 from Oklahoma State.
Evans, Code and six others were indicted Nov. 7 in Manhattan. Also indicted were former USC assistant Tony Bland, former Auburn assistant Chuck Person, former Arizona assistant Emanuel “Book” Richardson, clothier Rashan Michel and Dawkins.
All have pleaded not guilty.
Two others initially charged – Sood and Florida youth basketball coach Brad Augustine – haven’t been indicted.
Read or Share this story: https://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/2017/12/18/south-carolina-mens-basketball-program-subpoenaed-feds-basketball-scandal/949844001/ |
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As the Internet of Things (IoT) adds more and more devices to the digital fold every day, organizations of all sizes are recognizing the IoT's potential to improve business processes and, ultimately, accelerate growth.
Meanwhile, the number and variety of IoT solutions has expanded exponentially, creating real challenges. Chief among them: the urgent need for a secure IoT model for performing common tasks such as sensing, processing, storing information, and communicating. But developing such a model involves overcoming numerous hurdles.
Of course, there are multiple ways of looking at the IoT. For instance, the system view divides the IoT into blocks, such as connected things, gateways, network services, and cloud services, while the business view consists of platform, connectivity, business model, and applications. But one common thread connects all these views: security is paramount.
A prime illustration of security's importance is the major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in October 2016. This massive assault affected millions of Internet addresses and temporarily crippled the servers of popular services such as Twitter, Netflix, and PayPal. One source of traffic for the attack: the countless IoT devices that had been infected and hijacked by Mirai, a simple malware program readily available online, and used against the servers.
The Blockchain Model
Blockchain's big advantage is that it's public. Everyone participating can see the blocks and the transactions stored in them. However, that doesn’t mean everyone can see the actual content of a transaction; that information is protected by a private key.
A blockchain is decentralized, so no single authority can approve transactions or set specific rules to have transactions accepted. As a result, the model involves a great deal of trust, as all the participants in the network must reach a consensus to accept transactions.
Most important of all, it’s secure. The database can only be extended; previous records cannot be changed—or, at least, there’s a very high cost if someone wants to alter previous records.
Read the full article here on Open Mind. |
The Lac-Mégantic disaster shows once again that capitalists are self-interested, uncaring, anti-social actors, not worthy of presumptions in their favor.
Harry Glasbeek is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. His most recent latest book is Wealth by Stealth: Corporate Crime, Corporate Law and the Perversion of Democracy.
“If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one
is not he who commits the sin, but he who creates the darkness.”
-Victor Hugo, Les Misérables-
by Harry Glasbeek
It is always the same.
First the shock and horror, then the anger. A terrible environmental disaster inflicted by Beyond Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico; a horrendous explosion at Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant; a mine disaster, burying people at Westray in Nova Scotia; a factory building collapsing in Bangladesh; a train’s cargo exploding and incinerating people and the city of Lac-Mégantic.
Each time there are the same questions:
Why was anyone allowed to engage in this activity, given its known risks?
Why, more specifically, were people with poor reputations in respect of safety and/or people with little experience allowed to run these risky activities?
Why did governments not have better laws and regulations?
Why did governments not have better monitoring and policing of such laws and regulations they had enacted?
How dared the leaders of these risk-creating entities try to blame their hapless underlings?
How could they be so cavalier, so callous, so arrogant? Who was to pay for the compensation?
Should anyone go to jail?
The reasons for the shock and anger are obvious: the burned bodies, destroyed lives and livelihoods, ravaged environments, disrupted communities, misery all round. And each time, sombre-looking politicians and policy-makers walk around the sites, solemnly promise to learn from the event, assuring the stunned public that they will not let it happen again, that heads will roll if legal justice demands it.
Each time people are shocked and horrified because they believe that they live under a regime of a mature and civilized political economy.
They have been told that for-profit entrepreneurs care about their health and safety; they are taught that their elected governments will force entrepreneurs to put health and safety and environments ahead of profit-maximization.
They want to believe all of this because their daily lives would be miserable if they thought that their food was unsafe, that most products they use are unchecked for dangers, that there are hundreds and thousands of untested toxic substances used in profit-making activities and released into their environments, that their physical recreational activities are largely unmonitored and unregulated, that their workplaces are high hazard zones.
They are gulled into believing that everyone, profit-chasers and governments, cares about them because, at any one time, there is a high decibel vociferous debate, usually dominated by apparently respectable profit-seekers and their professional think-tanks, about how unnecessary government regulations impede the creation of wealth while, at the same time, they fail to protect society.
An impression is left that there is a great deal of supervision and monitoring. It looks to all the world that it is not the lack of regulation by governments, but its excesses, that impoverish and endanger us.
Thus it is that, when a Lac-Mégantic occurs, everyone is surprised that it could happen at all: surely something has gone wrong with the otherwise satisfactory operations of profit-seekers and /or the well-established government oversight over profit-making?
But, the only thing that is special about a Lac-Mégantic is the sudden manner in which a huge amount of harm is inflicted. The infliction of harms is a daily event; but it is experienced as atomized, isolated events, unworthy of news coverage. We hardly notice the steady dripping of blood, the innumerable illnesses, serious and minor, daily deaths and incremental deterioration of our physical environments.
We are systematically desensitized to the catastrophic dimensions of the injuries that regulated profit-seekers inflict. This is an amazing triumph for harm-inflicting profiteers.
While the trauma of a Westray, understandably and rightly, demands everyone’s attention, the 26 miners who died in one spectacular explosion are but a tiny fragment of the number of workers injured and killed every day. In Canada, roughly one thousand people are killed on the job each and every year, nearly 5 every working day; 10,000 die earlier than they might have because of occupationally related illnesses each and every year.
World-wide, 2 million people die at work every single year; 260 million more are injured while at work. And, yearly, 160 million are afflicted by job-related illnesses.
The number of deaths and illnesses attributable to environmental pollution and degradation are equally staggering; product contamination, unsafe vehicles, equipment, drugs and pharmaceuticals, all exact huge tolls.
Sadly, then, Lac-Mégantic is but an eye-catching example of a common phenomenon. It is but a vivid example of the routine operation of competitive capitalism, our supposedly well-regulated competitive form of capitalism. There should be no sense of surprise. Anger, yes, surprise, no. The key to this parlous state of affairs is the fact that our regulatory laws and standards are intended to legitimate a harm-causing, risk-shifting system. Regulatory law works on a set of assumptions:
Productive activities create material welfare;
All productive activities entail risks;
Productive activities create the most material welfare if they are undertaken privately for selfish motives;
Productive activities should be promoted and facilitated by governments and their agencies;
Any materialized risks may harm the producers, the consumers and users of the goods and services produced and the general environment;
Promoting and facilitating governments and their agencies should ensure, as much as possible, that the wealth generated by any productive activity outweighs the harms it inflicts. They are to engage in a cost-benefit analysis.
This framework assumes that private actors chasing profits are engaged in virtuous activities and that they are virtuous. All want to produce welfare; no one wants to do harm.
Thus, when risks materialize, we should compensate the victims and educate all concerned about that particular risk and, if necessary, enact laws and standards to ensure that appropriate precautions be taken to avert or diminish the materialization of this and similar risks.
The enforcement of those standards may well require imposing sanctions on those producers who violate them but we should not think of them as anti-social wrongdoers.
After all, we should be grateful that they are voluntarily engaging in the virtuous activity of contributing to the general welfare. Only in extremis should we think of them as moral lepers, as criminals.
The logic of this assumed state of play means that
Its cost-benefit approach does not require that all risks be eliminated. A price has to be paid for the general good, a price to be paid by workers, consumers, users, communities and their natural environments.
It legitimates a certain amount of acceptable harm, a certain amount of bleeding and illness, a certain number of deaths, a certain amount of environmental despoliation.
We are told that, in our desire for welfare, we must, and are assumed to be, willing to sacrifice bodies, lives and our ecology. The assumptions of our regulatory theory embody the crass social Darwinism of John D. Rockefeller, who wrote:
“The American Beauty Rose can be produced in the splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it…This is not an evil tendency in business. It is merely the working-out of a law of Nature and a law of God”.
The harms inflicted by the entrepreneurial class initiating productive activities are designed into them, either by not setting standards at all or by having some rules balancing benefit against what is deemed to be an acceptable level of harm.
This is why we are not shocked by the daily atomized materializations of risks built into the productive processes. We expect a certain kind and amount of damage. What we do not know in advance is who the victims will be or the full extent of the harm they will suffer.
It is only when a Westray or a Lac-Mégantic occurs that we ask questions and they are all about whether there was anything peculiar about the circumstances:
Were there defensible rules balancing benefit against harm in place?
Were they satisfactorily monitored and enforced or were the governmental regulators too lax?
Was the particular entrepreneur not virtuous, a rotten apple in the barrel of goodness, who flouted perfectly acceptable rules?
The questions about whether the existing regulations were satisfactory ones are not questions about the validity of the cost-benefit analysis that gives life to these kind of regulations, but rather about the difficulties that inhere in setting an appropriate and acceptable level of harm. And the questions about regulators arise because we realize they have an unenviable task.
The cost-benefit analyses required involves calibrating incommensurables.
There is the cost of putting in a preventive system which theoretically can be calculated in dollars and cents, although the asymmetry of information means that, in practice, regulators have to rely on data provided by entrepreneurs who have an incentive to exaggerate the expense to put in, say, a new ventilation system, and to be less than forthcoming about exactly how much profits they have to earn to be willing to stay in business.
On the other side of the equation, it is hard to measure the benefit bestowed by any one productive activity and even harder to measure the cost of the economic losses suffered by the victims of a materialized risk. This difficulty is compounded by our total inability to measure the pain, suffering or the emotional and psychic losses of such victims.
The design of regulations is always going to be contested and their legitimacy easily contestable, making for great enforcement difficulties. These difficulties are compounded by the complexity and dimensions of the problems of drafting these kinds of regulations.
There are innumerable productive activities out there, all to be welcomed, to be sure, but they are so many and so varied, that regulators have to rely on information provided to them. There is no incentive for entrepreneurs, other than their assumed virtue, to establish that their particular enterprise presents risks and/or that they should spend money to avert them.
Governments depend on their own instincts and, to some extent, on academic research (this is notoriously under-resourced) but, mostly, on the accumulated experience of harms suffered in the past. Hurt and killed workers, consumers, users, and visible environmental degradation are the main sources of information for regulators charged with balancing the supposed benefits of productive activities against the harms they inflict.
We get new safety standards when the harms inflicted by for-profit activities become too great, too politically embarrassing to accept. If one worker loses a hand in a machine, it is an accident; if ten workers lose a hand using the same machine, it is a cluster; if 100 lose their hand to this machine, we get a regulation requiring that a guard be put on the machine.
This is the history of our Factory Acts and the regulations now attached to our contemporary omnibus health and safety legislation.
And, it is the story of Lac-Mégantic.
The media already carry stories as to how railways are saying that they will revise their own safety rules in expectation of a barrage of regulatory activity by governments that now have the bodies, destroyed property and polluted air and water of Lac-Mégantic piled on their doorsteps. The rail operators hope that the optics of sincere concern will minimize the extent and expense of the inevitable regulations to come. (Toronto Star, 19 and 20 July).
When the regulators have information about the potential for injuries to people, their property or the environment, they consult with the entrepreneurs whose initiatives create the potential harms but whose initiatives they do not want to inhibit.
Thus, after the Lac-Mégantic disaster, we learned that federal rules already provided that trains left unattended must have sufficient handbrakes applied to prevent movement and that the operators of the trains must ensure that this has been done.
But, in promulgating this standard, the government had entered into an agreement with the regulatees, the train operators, and the definition of what had to be done to comply with the requirement of ‘sufficiency’ is still kept secret. (Toronto Star, 19 July, 2013). This imposition of a public duty was privately arranged. Regulators rely on, and trust, the people they regulate.
The cost-benefit analyses begin with the notion that virtuous actors must not be discouraged from engaging in virtuous activities. And the premise of the virtue of enterprise means that the field in which regulations will be crafted is seriously tilted in favour of allowing the benefit of production to be hyped and the risks and potential adverse impacts to be minimized.
The starting point is that the materials used, the equipment deployed, the technologies employed, the mode of operation, are not to be questioned by outsiders, lest efficiency is impaired, unless there is clear evidence that the harms they might cause are likely to occur and, should they do so, be grave.
The starting point, then, is that entrepreneurs and their choices are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
Asbestos, lead, mercury, iso-cyenates, DDT, vinyl chloride, thalidomide, fracking, nuclear power plants, off-shore oil drilling, unsupervised coltan mining by desperate people in Africa, peddling infant formula in poor countries without proper precautions, and so on, are all presumed innocent.
The assumptions about the virtuous nature of our private wealth generation regime and the attendant presumption of innocence mean that the regulatory balancing and bargaining takes place on a tilted field, tilted in favour of the so-called virtuous producers, guaranteeing that we will suffer more Westrays and Lac-Mégantics and thousands and thousands of unkind, hurtful, atomized cuts and harms.
What is wrong with the assumed framework is that it assumes capitalism away.
This piece has persistently referred to capitalists as entrepreneurs wedded to profits because this is the characterization regulatory relies on to work its magic. It permits the treatment of profit-maximization to be portrayed as one undertaken for the public’s well-being. But these benign-sounding entrepreneurs are capitalists and they do not care about the public’s welfare; only their own.
Capital and capitalists should not be seen as virtuous, as entitled to start with the presumption of innocence. Capitalists are out to maximize profits. They decide how much to invest, for what reason, for how long, where it is to be invested, what kind of equipment and resources and technologies will be used, how many workers and what kind of a labour force will be recruited, and so forth.
This is called business planning, but it is planning to enable them to become rich. It is planning that aims at the private accumulation of socially produced wealth. They are to do this by out-competing their rivals. Competition is the driver of the system. In recent times, this elemental force, competition, appears to have intensified, pushing capitalists to greater and greater extremes.
Capitalists need to, and want to, reduce the costs of production. They do this by forcing workers to compete with each other; unemployment is not such a bad thing; the increasing capacity to outsource work is a marvelous thing; they drive down wages and benefits by any means at hand, including the development of new technologies and innovative processes that allow them to displace human beings.
They also reduce their costs to improve their profits, of course, by externalizing the costs of production, that is, by making others pay these costs. This includes the harms inflicted by the productive processes and the goods and services they produce. Injured and hurt workers and their dependents, consumers, users, and the environment in which we all live are to pay the price.
Inasmuch as regulations are imposed to protect workers and to internalize some of those production costs otherwise shifted to non-profit seekers, they are unwelcome. They are to be resisted. And capitalists do resist. They threaten to withhold their capital if regulators threaten them. They ask for ‘no or, at worst, reasonable’ regulation.
It follows that a bargaining regime that lets these exploiters help set the limits on their exploitation is bound to fail. Capitalists will gild the lily when they tell the regulators about the risks and the precautions they are taking; they will prevaricate when they declare how high the costs of compliance will be; they will violate the standards set if this is likely to yield a profit, especially if they think they will not be caught and, if caught, not be punished very severely.
Lying and cheating are built into a legal regulatory framework that pretends that it merely has to address the problems of productive activities engaged in by virtuous actors for virtuous reason.
The frailty of this assumption is further demonstrated by the fact that regulatory theory ignores evidence all around us: in their drive to accumulate, capitalists will produce literally anything that sells, from food, to medicine, to tobacco, to alcohol, to guns, to body parts, to anything at all.
The obvious fact that capitalism and capitalists do not care a whit about the public welfare, should put some doubt in regulators’ minds about the virtue of ‘entrepreneurs’. Yet, it does not.
The ugly drive to make everything saleable has no logical limits in capitalism, corroding our values and cultures. Capitalists are self-interested, uncaring, anti-social actors, not worthy of presumptions in their favor. Capitalism and capitalists are not virtuous. The system is criminogenic.
So, while it is true that all productive activities entail risks, they are not the same risks for the same people or locales if the aim of production is not set by the competitive model to maximize profits by reducing costs. If people’s needs were the object of production, the safety of the workers doing the producing, that of the consumers and users of the goods and services produced, the maintenance of a healthy environment would be front and centre in what is now called business planning.
More, it would make perfect sense to have all these people whose needs were most likely to affected, participate directly in the planning and in the decision-making about what risks to accept and about what needs they wanted to satisfy, rather than have them participate by bleeding and dying. Productive activities would still entail risks, but risks more democratically accepted and acceptable.
Until we make the points about the toxic and fraught nature of our regulatory framework and the radical changes this demands, the bleeding, the dying, the illnesses, the degraded environment will continue, likely get worse.
Lac-Mégantic should make us angry. Let our anger be informed anger. Let us not go down the path of looking for reform to a regulatory system that is designed to fail us. |
The White House is signaling an interest in moving the tax-reform debate in a different direction.
A House tax reform blueprint, released last year as part of Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE’s (R-Wis.) “Better Way” agenda, had long been viewed as the starting point for tax reform. During the campaign, President Trump's tax plan was revised to more closely resemble it.
But the Trump administration is now drafting a new proposal, with officials considering a range of policy options beyond what Republicans in Congress have put forward.
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Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told CNBC in a video posted Wednesday that “it's too early to say” if the White House’s plan would resemble the House’s blueprint. But he suggested the administration wouldn’t hesitate to go its own way.
“The House can go and do what they want to do,” Mulvaney said. “We are going to formulate our own policies.”
The White House made clear after last month’s collapse of an ObamaCare repeal bill that it intends to take more of a leading role on tax reform.
In the last several weeks, Trump and members of his economic team have been meeting with lawmakers, businesses and industry groups to get their input.
A White House spokesperson said Trump is getting feedback from stakeholders “to help develop a plan that will provide significant middle class tax relief and make American businesses more competitive.”
Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in a statement that “our intention has always been and continues to be to coalesce around a unified GOP plan and those conversations continue.”
The most controversial aspect of the House’s plan is its reliance on border adjustability to tax imports and exempt exports.
While that tax is the cornerstone of Ryan’s proposal, the White House has yet to fully embrace it.
The Washington Post last week reported that the White House was looking at other ideas, including a value-added tax and a carbon tax, neither of which is in the House plan. The Associated Press, meanwhile, reported that Trump was abandoning his campaign tax plan.
The White House has pushed back on those reports, saying that a value-added tax and a carbon tax are not under consideration and that the campaign tax plan remains the administration’s foundation on tax reform.
Even if administration officials are simply batting around ideas, it seems clear that Trump’s team is open to a different approach.
“It definitely looks like they’re going to do their own scouting and come up with their own idea,” said Alan Cole, an economist at the Tax Foundation.
Trump has also floated linking tax reform with infrastructure, which is not part of the House Republicans’ plan. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.) said on NewsMax TV on Thursday that he thinks the two issues will be addressed separately.
Administration officials have suggested that they will move deliberately on tax reform and care more about getting tax reform right than meeting a deadline. But with the healthcare efforts floundering, White House officials are under pressure to get Trump’s legislative agenda back on track.
“That I think is their motivation,” said Marc Gerson, vice chairman of the tax department at law firm Miller & Chevalier and a former tax counsel to the House Ways and Means Committee.
One consideration for the White House as it weighs its next move on tax reform is whether the House GOP blueprint can pass Congress.
The plan is already facing pushback from some Republican lawmakers, particularly in the Senate, over the border adjustment provision. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch Orrin Grant HatchThe FDA crackdown on dietary supplements is inadequate Orrin Hatch Foundation seeking million in taxpayer money to fund new center in his honor Mitch McConnell has shown the nation his version of power grab MORE (R-Utah) said late last month that the Senate is unlikely to simply pass a House bill “without our members having significant input on the substance of the bill.”
“If tax reform happens, it will be because the president has picked out a plan and herded the members of Congress into voting for it,” Cole said.
If the administration opts against the border-adjustment proposal, it would have to find another way to raise revenue to pay for lowering tax rates.
The version of Trump’s tax plan that he released in September doesn’t include border adjustability but has a number of other similarities to the House GOP tax plan, including individual tax brackets of 33 percent, 25 percent and 12 percent. Both plans would also lower the corporate tax rate.
Given the similarities, the White House may still ultimately put out a proposal that is in line with the House blueprint, even if changes some of the details.
“I think there’s a lot of the Ryan proposal that works for them,” said Dean Zerbe, national managing director of alliantgroup and a former senior counsel to the Senate Finance Committee. He added that the basic elements of the Ryan plan would be in any Republican tax proposal.
Leading tax writers in the House have expressed support for the White House’s efforts on tax reform.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady Kevin Patrick BradySmaller tax refunds put GOP on defensive Key author of GOP tax law joins Ernst and Young Lawmakers beat lobbyists at charity hockey game MORE (R-Texas) said on CNBC earlier this month that it’s “encouraging and helpful” that administration officials are engaged in the tax-reform process and considering a range of options.
He said that Trump’s economic team is “trying to find the right, most pro-growth tax code.”
“The sooner the White House and Congress can get on the same plan, the better it is,” Brady added. |
Here in San Francisco- almost no one is talking about the Presidential election. The focus is on Proposition 8, the voter initiative ballot that seeks to make a constitutional change to effectively ban gay marriage in California, defining marriage as an act of union between a man and woman.
In the UK, we’re not used to political advertising on television or radio- indeed they’re actually illegal. Parties are given free airtime dependent on the number of candidates they field at set intervals; primarily centred around the Budget and elections.
But turn on any tv or radio here in California and you’ll hear arguments either in favour or against the proposition. They even seem to outnumber the adverts for extortionate “pay day loans” and prescription drugs. And as a Brit abroad, it’s a rather odd experience.
The proponents are arguing that children will be taught that gay marriage is equal to straight marriage in school, and of course that’s a bad thing. They also point to the “problems” of children being adopted by same sex couples.
But, they also admit that money has a lot to do with it. They claim that churches that continue to oppose gay marriage and refuse to allow ceremonies to take place could lose tax exemptions- as their actions become political. They also claim that their religious leaders could face prosecution for hate speech if they continue to oppose gay marriage.
Those opposing the proposition are airing glossy tv adverts endorsed by celebrities including Barbara Streisand, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Bridget Fonda, Melissa Etheridge, Mary J Blige, Brad Pitt and Ellen DeGeneres.
They are arguing that those behind the proposition are lying- that there is no impact on the way that children will be taught about relationships in school. They cite the fact that Californian law allows parents to exclude their children from lessons about health and family issues at school.
The state admits that if passed, the amendment will cost the tax payer millions of dollars of lost revenue.
Walk down any street in San Francisco and you’ll find a dozen houses proudly displaying posters saying “Vote No on Prop 8- Unfair & Wrong”. Far less than the houses displaying “Obama- Biden.”
But after four days of wall to wall “Vote No” signs- as we started to drive through the outlying suburbs of the city and past smaller towns, we started to see a few “Vote Yes” posters. Some were outside nice houses, but others outside rather run down shacks.
Yet, even in smaller towns, there is no one on the street corners urging you to vote for the proposition. But there are supporters of the no vote out in force. I think we’ve been asked about 10 times if we’ve voted yet.
After I’ve explained that we can’t vote, I ask them how they think they’re doing. “Not sure, we’re hopeful,” one lady said. Another: ” I don’t know, we’ll be fine here [San Francisco] but the weather can swing things.”
But, the owner of Worn Out West, a shop in the gay Castro district of the city said he’d been doing brisk business because of the vote.
While we were there a rather frantic young man was trying to work out the the ring size of his partner who was at home oblivious that he was going to be proposed to in an hour. “Don’t worry,” the owner said. “Just get it on his finger and come back and exchange it for one that fits.”
As the hours tick away before a day that could see the first black President of the United States, there is an eerie degree of nervousness within the gay community.
They may yet get a President who is making positive moves towards LGBT rights but also lose the right to marry the partner of their choice. If the Yes votes win, a precedent will be set which could see further moves to make federal constitutional amendments banning gay marriage. But if the No vote wins, the city’s 100,000 odd gays will have one massive party. .
Benjamin Cohen is the founder of PinkNews.co.uk and a Correspondent for Channel 4 News |
The pub was famous for ghosts and breaded tenderloins
Buy Photo Gaslight Inn, 2280 S. Meridian St., has closed. (Photo: Sam Riche/IndyStar)Buy Photo
The Gaslight Inn, famous for its ghosts and breaded tenderloins, has closed.
“Good morning Gaslight family, Friends, Brothers ’n’ Sisters all over the World...The Gaslight Inn is closed!!!,” owner Joe DeMore announced July 5 on the south-side restaurant’s Facebook page.
DeMore could not be reached immediately for comment, but on Facebook he blamed “family and health issues” for the closing. “Words can’t express the Thanks we give to you, the Best Customers in the World!!!!,” he said, and then noted in a P.S. that “Gaslight Inn can be Rented out for Events!!”
Catering will be available, DeMore added in response to customer reactions, many marked with tearful emojis, that flooded the post’s comments section. As one woman said, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!”
The Gaslight Inn was as celebrated for its paranormal activity and haunted tours as it was for its breaded tenderloins. DeMore bought the place in 2008 and transformed it from what he billed “a broken down little dive bar" on Indy's south side into "a destination that serves the best food around and features live music and comedy acts.” DeMore’s description was included in a Go Fund Me campaign he launched to raise money for building and grounds improvements.
The Gaslight building, 2280 S. Meridian St., is surrounded by cemeteries. Legend claims Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger drank there. Employees and patrons heard voices, gunshots and, in the basement, glass breaking. Shadowy figures or clear images of a girl, man or woman dressed in early 20th century clothing appeared. Some people felt like they were being touched or watched.
“We’ve had people find scratches on themselves,” bartender Amber Raia told IndyStar beverage reporter Amy Haneline in summer 2015.
CLOSE John Dillinger continues to fascinate more than 80 years after his death. Here are some interesting facts about the famous Depression-era gangster from Indiana. (Dwight Adams/IndyStar) Wochit
Indianapolis-based Paranormal 911 examined the place. The Biography Channel’s “My Ghost Story” featured findings in a 2011 episode. Investigators detected the girl and woman, as well as a male figure in the basement. The man was dressed in an early 1900s-style suit. “Our intuitive investigators have all associated the name ‘John’ with this presence. In-depth research indicated that a former owner of the building for 40+ years was named John Dransfeld,” Paranormal 911 reports at its website.
Perhaps spirits hung around to be close to what was considered one of Indiana’s finest breaded tenderloin sandwiches. Fans adored it and other pub food offerings such as chili, wings, fried catfish and bacon-wrapped filet. The Chicago Tribune in 2014 billed Gaslight’s tenderloin the No. 1 breaded tenderloin in Indianapolis.
“Aesthetically, it’s not a destination restaurant you travel long distances to visit; there likely is a closer place that satisfies your neighborhood pub requirements. But its breaded tenderloin is really something,” reporter Kevin Pang wrote.
“The half-pound slab was hefty, buttermilk dredged, with a glovelike breading reminiscent of super-crunchy chicken tenders. The hand-trimmed pork was thick enough to retain its juiciness. Seasoning was spot on. The Kaiser egg roll was toasted. I did not leave hungry. There aren’t many other adjectives left to explain this simple and well-executed sandwich. It’s just good.”
Follow IndyStar food writer Liz Biro on Twitter: @lizbiro, Instagram: @lizbiro, Facebook and Pinterest. Call her at (317) 444-6264.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/29xuDeA |
Sunday’s 19th annual Teen Choice Awards saw some of the biggest names in movies, TV, and music take home surfboards all in the name of teen fandom.
Stars from Riverdale, Teen Wolf, and Pretty Little Liars dominated the TV categories of the fan-decided awards, while Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 won big in the movie categories. Maroon 5 also walked away with the second ever Decade Award, Bruno Mars was honored with the Visionary Award, and Vanessa Hudgens was presented with the first-ever #SeeHer Award.
Performances included Louis Tomlinson with Bebe Rexha, Rita Ora and KYLE, alongside Lil Yachty, Clean Bandit with Zara Larsson, French Montana and Swae Lee with Triplets Ghetto Kids, Rae Sremmurd, and the cast of Fox’s Star.
See the full list of winners below:
MOVIES
Choice Action Movie (#ChoiceActionMovie)
“Wonder Woman”
Choice Action Movie Actor (#ChoiceActionMovieActor)
Chris Pine – “Wonder Woman”
Choice Action Movie Actress (#ChoiceActionMovieActress)
Gal Gadot – “Wonder Woman”
Choice Sci-Fi Movie (#ChoiceSciFiMovie)
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2”
Choice Sci-Fi Movie Actor (#ChoiceSciFiMovieActor)
Chris Pratt – “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2”
Choice Sci-Fi Movie Actress (#ChoiceSciFiMovieActress)
Zoe Saldana – “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2”
Choice Fantasy Movie (#ChoiceFantasyMovie)
“Beauty and the Beast”
Choice Fantasy Movie Actor (#ChoiceFantasyMovieActor)
Dwayne Johnson – “Moana”
Choice Fantasy Movie Actress (#ChoiceFantasyMovieActress)
Emma Watson – “Beauty and the Beast”
Choice Drama Movie (#ChoiceDramaMovie)
“Everything, Everything”
Choice Drama Movie Actor (#ChoiceDramaMovieActor)
Kian Lawley – “Before I Fall”
Choice Drama Movie Actress (#ChoiceDramaMovieActress)
Emma Watson – “The Circle”
Choice Comedy Movie (#ChoiceComedyMovie)
“Finding Dory”
Choice Comedy Movie Actor (#ChoiceComedyMovieActor)
Zac Efron – “Baywatch”
Choice Comedy Movie Actress (#ChoiceComedyMovieActress)
Ellen DeGeneres – “Finding Dory”
Choice Summer Movie (#ChoiceSummerMovie)
“Spider-Man: Homecoming
Choice Summer Movie Actor (#ChoiceSummerMovieActor)
Tom Holland – “Spider-Man: Homecoming”
Choice Summer Movie Actress (#ChoiceSummerMovieActress)
Zendaya – “Spider-Man: Homecoming”
Choice Movie Villain (#ChoiceMovieVillain)
Luke Evans – “Beauty and the Beast”
Choice Breakout Movie Star (#ChoiceBreakoutMovieStar)
Auli’i Cravalho – “Moana”
Choice MovieShip (#ChoiceMovieShip)
Emma Watson & Dan Stevens – “Beauty and the Beast”
TELEVISION
Choice Drama TV Show (#ChoiceDramaTVShow)
“Riverdale”
Choice Drama TV Actor (#ChoiceDramaTVActor)
Cole Sprouse – “Riverdale”
Choice Drama TV Actress (#ChoiceDramaTVActress)
Lucy Hale – “Pretty Little Liars”
Choice Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV Show (#ChoiceSciFiTVShow)
“The Vampire Diaries”
Choice Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV Actor (#ChoiceSciFiTVActor)
Dylan O’Brien – “Teen Wolf”
Choice Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV Actress (#ChoiceSciFiTVActress)
Kat Graham – “The Vampire Diaries”
Choice Action TV Show (#ChoiceActionTVShow)
“The Flash”
Choice Action TV Actor (#ChoiceActionTVActor)
Grant Gustin – “The Flash”
Choice Action TV Actress (#ChoiceActionTVActress)
Melissa Benoist – “Supergirl”
Choice Comedy TV Show (#ChoiceComedyTVShow)
“Fuller House”
Choice Comedy TV Actor (#ChoiceComedyTVActor)
Jean-Luc Bilodeau – “Baby Daddy”
Choice Comedy TV Actress (#ChoiceComedyTVActress)
Candace Cameron Bure – “Fuller House”
Choice Animated TV Show (#ChoiceAnimatedTVShow)
“Family Guy”
Choice Reality TV Show (#ChoiceRealityTVShow)
“The Voice”
Choice Throwback TV Show (#ChoiceThrowbackTVShow)
“One Tree Hill”
Choice TV Personality (#ChoiceTVPersonality)
Ellen DeGeneres – “The Ellen DeGeneres Show”
Choice Summer TV Show (#ChoiceSummerTVShow)
“Teen Wolf”
Choice Summer TV Actor (#ChoiceSummerTVActor)
Tyler Posey – “Teen Wolf”
Choice Summer TV Actress (#ChoiceSummerTVActress)
Holland Roden – “Teen Wolf”
Choice TV Villain (#ChoiceTVVillain)
Janel Parrish – “Pretty Little Liars”
Choice Breakout TV Show (#ChoiceBreakoutTVShow)
“Riverdale”
Choice Breakout TV Star (#ChoiceBreakoutTVStar)
Lili Reinhart – “Riverdale”
Choice TVShip (#ChoiceTVShip)
#BUGHEAD (Lili Reinhart & Cole Sprouse) – “Riverdale”
MUSIC
Choice Male Artist (#ChoiceMaleArtist)
Harry Styles
Choice Female Artist (#ChoiceFemaleArtist)
Ariana Grande
Choice Music Group (#ChoiceMusicGroup)
Fifth Harmony
Choice Country Artist (#ChoiceCountryArtist)
Carrie Underwood
Choice Electronic/Dance Artist (#ChoiceElectronicDanceArtist)
Calvin Harris
Choice Latin Artist (#ChoiceLatinArtist)
CNCO
Choice R&B/Hip-Hop Artist (#ChoiceRBHipHopArtist)
Beyoncé
Choice Rock Artist (#ChoiceRockArtist)
Harry Styles
Choice Song: Female Artist (#ChoiceSongFemaleArtist)
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Pele: My 'friend' Maradona couldn't head or shoot with his right foot!
The Brazil legend insists he and the Argentine icon are close, but says he was a much more complete player than the Albiceleste 1986 World Cup winner
EXCLUSIVE
Pele says he and Diego Maradona are friends, despite a constant war of words over the years, but believes the two former World Cup winners should not be compared.
The Brazilian won three World Cups, the last of those in 1970 in , while the former great led to the trophy in that same country in 1986.
In a book published last year about that triumph, Maradona hit out at Pele for criticism he said the Brazilian made ahead of the tournament, while the Argentine also often plays down the achievements of his South American rival.
"I can’t explain why Maradona is so concerned with that," Pele told Goal in an exclusive interview. "Because I always say that he was one of the best in the world, and that’s true.
"Now, we can’t say that Maradona was a great header. He didn’t score goals with headers. And we cannot say Maradona shot very well with both feet, because he didn’t shoot with his right, only mainly with his left…
"So from time to time, when people make comparisons, I make jokes about that. For me he was a great player, just that you can’t compare Maradona with Pele."
Nevertheless, Pele claims it is all in good humour and says he and Maradona are actually close, despite the constant quarrels over the years.
Article continues below
"We are friends," he said. "We are always joking. I always say to him: ‘Maradona, you can be level with Pele when you have scored more than 1,000 goals.’
"And he says: ‘I can’t now, but it doesn’t matter!’"
*** Pele was speaking at a Snickers event that saw competition winners from over 20 countries come to to play with the legend *** |
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Three people died and nine others were wounded on Friday after a gunman opened fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Gov. John Hickenlooper on Sunday called the shooting “a form of terrorism” and said the United States needs to do more to “keep guns out of the hands of people that are unstable.” Police have said a full investigation will take at least a week, but additional information about the hours-long attack continues to come to light.
Here are some of the key facts:
The Attack: On Friday morning, police received a call about an active shooter near the Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs. Officers exchanged gunfire with the man, who then made his way into the clinic with what’s been described as an assault-style rifle. The man eluded law enforcement for five hours but was apprehended after authorities smashed through the doors of the clinic in an armored vehicle.
The Suspect: The alleged gunman has been identified as Robert Lewis Dear, 57. Described by his neighbors as a loner and someone “you had to watch out for,” Dear had several previous run-ins with the law. They include two “personal intrusion” (Peeping Tom or eavesdropping) charges that were dropped, and two charges of animal cruelty for which he was acquitted. Dear is being held without bond on charges of first-degree murder at the El Paso County Criminal Justice Center. He made his first court appearance on Monday through a video feed as relatives of some of his alleged victims watched from the courtroom seats.
The Possible Motive: Multiple news outlets have reported that Dear mentioned “no more baby parts” in a statement taken by law enforcement after he was in custody. Though Dear’s motives for the attack have not been confirmed by investigators, “baby parts” is a clear reference to the widely debunked series of videos released earlier this year that show Planned Parenthood staff talking about fetal tissue research.
The Victims: One police officer and two civilians were allegedly killed by Dear during the attack. The officer has been identified as Garrett Swasey, 44, who was a six-year veteran of the force and worked for the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs. Swasey left the campus to respond to the shots-fired call. The two civilians have been identified as Jennifer Markovsky and Ke’Arre Marcell Stewart. Stewart, a 29-year-old father of two, was an Army veteran who served a tour in Iraq. Markovsky, a 35-year-old Hawaii native and mother of two, had reportedly gone to Planned Parenthood to offer support to a friend.
The attack is the most recent example of a dramatic increase in violence against abortion providers that has taken place since July. Harassment, violence, and threats of attack have shot up ninefold since the video series was released. |
Canadian federal agencies’ practice of continuous snooping on what Canadian citizens are posting via their social network accounts is set to be reviewed, as it may contradict the federal Privacy Act, local media report.
Treasury Board President Tony Clement promised that his staff will look into the issue of the collection of the Canadians’ personal data from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to a letter he wrote in response to the concerns raised by the country’s privacy commissioner Chantal Bernier.
“I have asked my officials to study this matter, collaborate with your officials and report back to me in the coming months,” he said in the March letter revealed to the public this week.
Bernier sounded the alarm back in February when she wrote to Clement urging an investigation of the matter.
Canada’s government is collecting data from its citizens through social media “without regard for accuracy, currency and accountability” and despite users’ “certain expectation of privacy,” said Bernier, adding that it contradicts the federal Privacy Act.
Under Canadian law, all citizens making their information publicly available still retain a “privacy interest” in it, so the data can’t be tracked or monitored without clear reasons.
“Should information culled from these sites be used to make administrative decisions about individuals, it is incumbent upon government institutions to ensure the accuracy of this information,” the letter read, questioning the accuracy of any information gathered online.
In a speech to the House of Commons on Thursday the Treasury Board president indicated that federal agencies are monitoring social media to learn what the public thinks about vital issues.
In his reply to the privacy watchdog he elaborated that social media helps the government learn about Canadians' views “in an extremely timely manner.”
However Clement added that he is “sensitive to the need to respect privacy concerns while carrying out this important work.”
“We are pleased that Treasury Board Secretariat has agreed to look into this issue,” her office said in a statement Thursday.
New Democratic Party (NDP) deputy leader Megan Leslie commented on the concerns raised by the privacy watchdog citing a newly published research on surveillance in Canada that pointed to the vulnerability of private information online.
The information gathered from users for one purpose can be shared between public and private organizations under other pretexts, defying fair information practices, said the recent research ‘Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada’, Canadian media reported.
Leslie stressed that due to data breaches, the government should be “hanging their heads in shame, not patting themselves on the back.” |
The firing of James B. Comey as director of the FBI has left the credibility of President Trump’s White House in tatters. The White House now appears to be an institution where truth struggles to keep up with events, led by a president capable at any moment of undercutting those who serve him.
This past week wasn’t the first time that the president’s spokespeople have been asked to explain the inexplicable or defend the indefensible. But what it showed is that this is far more than a problem with the White House communications team, which initially bore the brunt of criticism for offering what turned out to be an inaccurate description of how the president came to dismiss Comey. Whether the communications team is or isn’t fully in the loop is not the pertinent issue.
Instead, the responsibility for what has been one of the most explosive weeks of the Trump presidency begins at the top, with the president, whose statements and tweets regularly shatter whatever plans have been laid for the day or week.
It includes Vice President Pence, who in an appearance on Capitol Hill quadrupled down on what turned out to be, at its most benign interpretation, an incomplete and therefore misleading description of how the decision was made. It includes White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who must try to bring discipline to White House operations in the face of a president with a practice of frustrating those efforts and who then blames others when things go bad.
For Pence, this is the second time in four months that he has gone out in public with a description of events that turned out not to be fully accurate. In January, he was flat-out wrong when he vouched for Michael Flynn about whether the then-national security adviser had discussed sanctions against Russia in a telephone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. In that case, Pence repeated what Flynn had told him when Flynn was not telling him the truth. Chalk that up to misplaced confidence in an untrustworthy colleague who is now in legal jeopardy.
(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
On Wednesday, Pence did something different. He went to Capitol Hill and in a brief scrum with reporters described the decision-making process that led to Comey’s dismissal as one that originated at the Justice Department and moved up to the chain of command to the president for action. This wasn’t a statement made in passing. Four different times he pointed to the Justice Department as the catalyst and cited Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein’s memo critiquing Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state as being critically influential.
[Comey firing adds to pressure on Senate Intelligence investigation]
As Pence explained it, Rosenstein recently “came in [to the Justice Department], sat down and made the recommendation for the FBI to be able to do its job that it would need new leadership. He brought that recommendation to the president. The attorney general [Jeff Sessions] concurred with that recommendation.” Pence said the president’s role was to act on that recommendation, saying Trump provided “strong and decisive leadership” in following the Justice Department’s advice.
Everyone now knows there was much more to the sequence of events, based on reporting by news organizations. The Post, citing many sources, reported that the president had told his senior staff Monday morning he wanted to move against Comey — hours before his meeting with Rosenstein and Sessions. On Thursday, the president told NBC’s Lester Holt he had made up his mind to fire Comey before he heard from the Justice Department and that, no matter what Sessions and Rosenstein recommended, he was going to do so.
Pence said the decision had everything to do with restoring confidence in the FBI and that it had nothing to do with the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and whether there was collusion between associates of Trump’s campaign and the Russians. But the president told Holt that, when he was deciding to fire Comey, “I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story; it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’ ”
Pence cannot know what is in the president’s mind at any given time, but he did know that the president had included in the brief letter to Comey a reference to the investigation and the claim that he had been told by the FBI director that he was not under investigation. Russia was certainly in the background, even if the president did not explicitly say that to Pence.
A spokesman for the vice president declined to speak for the record on the matter. But he said that Pence “stands by what he said. … He made it clear it was the president’s decision. He made it clear a lot of it had to do with confidence. … His main point was commending the president’s decisive action.”
(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Pence has prided himself on being a truth-teller, no easy job given that he has been asked often to stand up for a president who has often made factually inaccurate statements. He did himself little good in this episode. White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders struggled during briefings to provide an accurate accounting of events. But Pence was supposedly in the middle of the discussions that led to Comey’s firing.
[Inside the president’s decision to fire Comey]
Priebus, the former Republican National Committee chairman, almost from the beginning has been a target of criticism of the administration, thanks in part to the initial organizational decisions by the president-elect.
Trump established a White House with few clear lines of authority, competing power centers and, as it turned out, fighting factions. No one knows what truly goes on behind the scenes, what efforts senior officials are making to constrain the president, the times they are able to head off problems. What is known to the world at large is what is said and seen in public. By that measure, this has been an extremely messy week.
After the administration’s rocky start, Priebus may have believed he was gaining greater control of the White House operations and staff, at least in limited ways. What he hasn’t solved is the indiscipline of the president. With days of controversy and conflicting statements over the Comey firing, it seems evident there may be no way to bring real order to the White House of President Trump.
The letter from the president to Comey laid the foundation for the story that Comey’s firing was triggered by the recommendations of Rosenstein and Sessions. “I have received the attached letters from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General of the United States recommending your dismissal as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Trump wrote. “I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”
Within 48 hours, the president undermined that assertion during his interview with Holt, the effect of which was to compromise all the senior officials in the chain of decision-making. However, it’s also possible there is a somewhat different explanation than the one he gave to Holt, one the president’s advisers cannot say themselves without undermining their boss.
Perhaps Trump has played down the influence of his Justice Department officials as a way of elevating himself, when, in actuality, it took the reassurances from Rosenstein and Sessions to prompt him to move immediately. Maybe he would have fired Comey on Tuesday no matter what. Or maybe not. In either case, the notion that Comey was fired because he mishandled the investigation of Clinton’s emails, as the original rationale suggested, doesn’t hold up.
Only those around the president know the full story of the firing and, more broadly, of the president’s style and operating behavior and what it is like day-to-day behind the scenes. But much more than problems within the communications shop are behind the credibility crisis that plagued Trump’s White House this past week. |
In the depths of the Militant Wolf Slayers Cultivation Gym.
A recovery pod towered over two meters high within the Gym leader’s private medical treatment room. Looking through the transparent glass observation panel, one could see Li Yao’s naked body submerged in a great quantity of strengthening drugs. His pair of eyes were closed as he bobbed up and down. A large quantity of bubbles curled around his body.
The bald tattooed man and Fiend Blade Peng Hai were standing right in front of the recovery pod. They stared with great interest at the unconscious and unwakeable Li Yao floating within the green liquid drug.
Fiend Blade Peng Hai seemed to have just ate to satisfaction. His entire face radiated with perfect content as he said, “Old Instructor, this bastard is truly worthy of being called a gold medal sparring partner. Not only did he withstand 3 minutes of my storm-like gale of attacks while I used 3% of my strength, he also surprisingly had enough energy left over to launch a counter attack at the end. It was really unexpected! I originally thought I could perfectly suppress my strength down to 3%. I never thought that under this bastard’s surprise attack, I would still fail at the end. I was forced to explode out with 1% more power!”
He paused for moment. Peng Hai still had some words he still wished to express. He licked his lips and said, “This 10,000 credits spent really is way too worth it! Old Instructor, ask for me later to see if he has time tomorrow night. I want three more minutes with him!”
The bald tattooed man scratched and scratched his head. He hesitated for a long time, before he replied with an expression of loss on his entire face, “Hey Hai, earlier I wanted to tell you this, but this youngster is not the gold medal sparring partner, Iron Turtle, that I had arranged for you.”
Fiend Blade Peng Hai’s eyebrows jumped up, “He’s not the Iron Turtle? Then who is he? There’s still such an amazing expert in Old Instructor’s gym? That’s not bad!”
The bald tattooed man’s expression turned gloomy as he said, “That’s the problem. This youth is not a member of my gym. I simply don’t know where the hell this guy spawned from. Oh that’s right. He was wearing the school trousers of your high school. Who knows, he could be a school mate.”
Having said that, the bald tattooed man brought Li Yao’s trouser over and pointed at the school’s crest for Peng Hai to see.
This time, even Fiend Blade Peng Hai was astonished to the point of jumping. With shock he said, “It can’t be. When I was sparing with this youngster, I could clearly feel out that even though his combat strength wasn’t especially strong, his combat sense was extremely good. He had plenty of combat experience. In that final moment he brought forth a smell that was violently and imposingly sharp. It was as if he had experienced several thousand years of life or death slaughter, sharpening himself on a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood! Crimson Nimbus Second. When did they produce such a fierce person? How could I not know?!”
Fiend Blade Peng Hai thought back to the time when he saw the students of the Important Class. Although there were a few who had pretty good strength, all of them were flowers grown in greenhouses. Not one of them had endured the onslaught of rain and wind, of trials and tribulations. This youngster with an imposingly sharp air was completely different from them.
Could it be that he was one of the elite graduates of recent years?
“Do you want me to use the special lotion to wash off the spider-esque design off his face? Then we can see his appearance and find out his identity,” asked the bald tattooed man somewhat worryingly.
Fiend Blade Peng Hai muttered himself for a moment before shaking his head, “He applied the Pattern Mask Glyph, that means he doesn’t want other people to know his identity. I did not feel any sort of hostility emanating off of this youngster’s body. Even if he was one of my hated enemies, he wouldn’t have assumed this kind of bastard role to come find me. I think there must have been some sort of misunderstanding. Let’s wait till he awakens. Then we can ask him clearly.”
In the Underground Ghost Market, removing someone’s guise without their permission was an extraordinary rash action, with the potential of breeding a kind of unceasing and undying hate. Fiend Blade Peng Hai did not fear making enemies, but he also did not want to disrespect the customs of the Underground Ghost Market.
“I don’t know when this youngster will wake up. For a typical person, staying in the recovery pod for an hour should be enough for them to regain their consciousness. It’s been exactly half-an-hour since this youngster has been in here, yet he’s still snoring loudly in deep sleep!” The tattooed bald man glanced an eye at Li Yao, having suddenly discovered this very strange thing.
The color of the strengthening drug in the recovery pod became diluted quite a bit just a moment ago. Originally, the deep green colored liquid drug churned along with Li Yao’s body producing a great quantity of bubbles. At lightning speeds it turned to a light green color, then to a sky cyan color, then finally it became almost transparent.
The tattooed bald man stared distracted. He walked in front of the recovery pod and brought up a hologram. “Pa Pa” he went on the hologram, after a few taps in rapid succession a string of digits appeared before his eyes.
“The strengthening drug’s concentration changed from 33% to 14%. It continues to decrease at a lightning fast speed of 1% every minute!”
“That’s enough strengthening drug to restore three to five buff guys that were beaten black and blue back to their original condition. Its just been 30 minutes and this youngster surprisingly engulfed it all? That’s impossible!” The bald tattooed man involuntarily cried out in alarm.
From the depth’s of Fiend Blade Peng Hai eyes bubbled forth a radiance that was serene and profound. He muttered saying, “It’s like this youngster’s body had been starved for far far too long. Anytime there’s the opportunity, his body would impatiently devour ravishingly any nourishment, fully absorbing an entire pod’s worth of strengthening drugs to process! I did not expect this. He surprisingly dragged this type of starved hunger with his body to come spar with me! If his body could ‘eat its fill’, what would he become?”
After muttering to himself for a moment, Fiend Blade Peng Hai wrote down names and dosages of several dozen strengthening drugs on top of the hologram, while saying, “Old Instructor, follow the prescription that I am writing here. Recalibrate three standard doses of this blend of strengthening drugs. Add it to the recovery pod.”
The bald tattooed man glanced at his writing with an eye. He frowned saying, “If I follow this prescription one standard dosage would cost at least 50,000 credits. And looking at his absorption rate, he may consume three to five doses every time I give him his medication. That’s a hundred-ninety to two-hundred grand. No matter how I look at him, he looks to be the type of person without money!”
Fiend Blade Peng Hai laughed with ha ha’s. He said with the least bit of concern, “It doesn’t matter. I will pay the costs.”
“Oi Hai, what you’re doing is……” The bald tattooed man did not understand.
Fiend Blade Peng Hai shrugged his shoulders and said, “Old Instructor, wait till the youngster wakes up. You ask him whether, for a month starting this day, he would be willing to come every night to this place to spar 3 minutes with me? If he is willing, I can sign a contract with him. The reward is 10,000 credits a day. Also, he will be supplied strengthening drugs in sufficient quantities!”
The bald tattooed man said, “The reward is a small matter. But after a month of this, the costs in strengthening drugs would not be a small amount of money. It might cost several million!”
Fiend Blade Peng Hai laughed lightly, “I have a premonition. This youngster is absolutely a monster. If I spar with him, my ‘strength precision control’ cultivation will be completed very quickly for certain. I will be able to stand firm in the high levels of the foundation stage!” What is several million credits worth in comparison? Going to the Fiend Beast Wasteland and hunting the head of a high stage Fiend Beast would make that money back!”
“Ding!”
The bald tattooed man’s portable processor rang out a pleasant sound.
Fiend Blade Peng Hai put on his military jacket and walked out to the exit as he said, “ Old Instructor, I just transfered 5 million credits to your bank account. Have it pay the costs of the strengthening drugs. Use however much money is needed to feed this youngster until he’s full. Tonight, I still need to go the Crimson Nimbus Second to give a few of the top students in the Important Class a course lecture on ‘Night-time Raiding.’ I will come spar with this youngster tomorrow night!”
He reflected on the three minutes just a moment ago, when he was filled to his heart’s content. Fiend Blade Peng Hai all of a sudden felt that the course he will be lecturing in a moment later would be somewhat dull. No matter how strong the top students of the important class were, they would never peak his interest.
This was because their bodies were missing a sort of air—— The murderous air of bloodshed!
When he walked to the entrance, Fiend Blade Peng Hai could not help but cast a glance back.
Within the recovery pod, Li Yao’s 36,000 pores were entirely spread open. They were absorbing nutrients in a thoroughly faminous and extremely vicious manner from the strengthening drugs. A wisp of strange luster surfaced on his ashy white skin with each undulation of his sternum. Each bundle of muscle fiber and each blood-filled vein gradually floated and surfaced, like a once hibernating Fiend Dragon sleeping in the abyss. They sketched a strong physique that was heart-shaking.
Fiend Blade Peng Hai laughed lightly as he turned around and left.
He was brimming with anticipation towards the three minutes of tomorrow night!
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Momodora III is a whimsical, Japanese-inspired platformer based on simple and addictive console and arcade classics.
Players play as either Momo or Dora—Dora being the easier option, as she has extra health and jumps a little better than does Momo—priestesses who must save the world from hell’s escapees. To this end, the player takes their chosen character through varied environs, from sunny plains to ancient ruins to frozen castles, defeating enemies and collecting collectables along the way.
Players’ abilities are limited: they can walk around, attack, and jump. There are but two, simple attacks, one of them a melee swipe, and the other a projectile in the form of paper seals. Mobility feels constrained, Momo’s especially, which does take getting used to, but it does make sense: this subdues the whimsy on display elsewhere in the title, which keeps the game from being entirely silly. It’s a good design decision.
Power-ups are in the form of persistent items, which players can equip; some items augment attacks, others alter attributes, yet others change how the world interacts with the priestesses, and one even summons a ghostly fighting companion. The game has all of one consumable, a healing jar, which also requires an item slot to use. Items are collected throughout the world, or bought at stores, which accept fluffy, pink asterisks as currency.
There are only three active item slots, while there are quite a few more items to collect, so there is some strategy in deciding what to have readied for a particular situation or level. These items can be swapped out on the fly, at the risk of leaving the player character open to attack, as opening the inventory does not pause the game.
Some people will take issue with the inclusion of particular power-ups, and I wouldn’t say that’s without cause. However, even with the most powerful of power-ups equipped, players will find themselves dying. That’s beside the point, anyway: the items exist as options, allowing players to tune the game to their skill level and playstyle. They serve that function well.
There’s a problem with the items, but their potency is not it. The problem with the game’s power-ups is that they’re far too grounded. There’s nothing crazy or surprising among the options. They don’t affect the gameplay in any interesting way, serving merely to make the game easier. Momodora III has no fire flowers or super mushrooms.
That’s not to say the gameplay is otherwise poorly conceived. Enemies are pattern-based, so the challenges should be easy; however, often enough, there’s enough going on at the same time that players will feel challenged. Boss battles especially focus on rhythm and timing, and can be quite the drawn-out ordeals, so maintaining concentration and accuracy long enough to overcome them can be difficult. Players will die over and over and over again, first while they figure out the pattern, and then while they try to circumvent it. Enemies aren’t the only dangers of which to be wary, as traps and environmental threats litter the world, from ground that at first glance appears firm but isn’t to pressure plates that loose arrows.
The default control scheme is less than ideal. Thankfully, input bindings can be changed. A gamepad is the better controller option, but a keyboard will work, too, provided it’s an anti-ghosting keyboard; players regularly need to use more than one button simultaneously.
Momodora III is well suited to speedrunning, as it’s both short and has a counter that keeps track of time; only successful runs between save points count toward the counter, so deaths don’t add time onto a run. Depending on how practiced and experienced a player is in 2D platformers, and how focused they are on reaching the end instead of exploring or collecting items, an initial run-through of the game will likely take between three to eight real-time hours.
Players may find themselves wanting to take a leisurely stroll through the levels, in order to listen to the music and enjoy the scenery. Unfortunately, that’s just not possible, as the enemies in every “room” refresh when players return to it.
The game is at least competent, and has pockets of brilliance—Old Madryn, the second level, being the best evidence of that. The music, art, and foes of that level complement each other beautifully, bringing an ethereal eeriness out of the game. The other levels fall short of Old Madryn’s artistry—in particular, the Dim Hideout and the last level feel drab and uninteresting in comparison, especially since they reuse enemies from earlier in the game—but they are all at least fine.
So where does that put the game on the totem pole of platformers?
This is a simple platformer, and also more. There are plenty of games that attempt to capture the lure of the genre, but they rarely do so with this much charm. Momodora III is an homage with a sophisticated sensibility. It certainly stands out, at least in parts.
The franchise doesn’t seem quite “there” yet, however. Despite its brevity, the game begins to drag and feel rather more repetitive the further one progresses. There’s just not enough here to compel people to search it out if it’s not in their wheelhouse.
Still, Momodora III is an adorable, infuriating little package. If you get the chance to play it, do, and if you find yourself hankering for a platformer, this may be one to have a look at.
Momodora III was reviewed using a code provided by Rdein. You can find additional information about NicheGamer’s review/ethics policy here.
The Verdict: 6.5
The Good:
Adorable
Points of intensely interesting stuff
Satisfying, and customizable, difficulty
Short
The Bad: |
I will always remember the first time I paused while flicking through channels and heard “boy, this planet really smells!” _I was immediately hooked. A_nd I spent the following long dark years before Serenity a fervent evangelist. That we even got our Big Damn Movie shocks me to this day and I want to make clear that I am more than content to sit back, wrap up my fandom with a little bow, put it on a shelf, and only ever trot it out when someone makes the mistake of asking the wrong question at a party. We got our ending–such as it is–and I have no illusions that our wildly successful cast will ever disentangle themselves from their various contracts in time to film anything other than Firefly: The Geriatrics.
However.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to consider the possibilities and the recent successful Kickstarter campaign for a Veronica Mars movie certainly set off quite a lot of chatter. What surprised me the most though were those who felt the story was finished and that any continuation would have to resort to the dark magic of prequeling, retconning or rebooting. That’s patently ludicrous and I feel it warrants a moment’s response. (Also–in a slightly more self-serving vein–the years have taught me that nothing revitalizes one’s writing like tapping into some geek righteousness. Spend months crafting a very compassionately nuanced and analytical exploration of objectification and pornography, get ten reads; feverishly slobber off some drelk on Star Wars, get ten thousand a day. And while I don’t have any illusions about the odds of striking readership gold again, that kind of piece always breaks my writer’s perfectionism and boy could I use a hand there again.)
Honestly I see Serenity as the perfect launching point for a really solid series and/or sequels. Here’s how Firefly continues in my head:
Remember that in all likelihood Mal and the crew are not famous. The whole point of Wikileaks was to keep B Manning’s name out of the papers and it’s very much not in the nature of Serenity’s crew to stick their heads up further than absolutely required. All the rest of the ‘verse knows is that a bit of video and possibly some boring records got leaked. Of course Mal’s name is finally very much on the government’s radar but there’s some reticence towards generating another big splashy scene hunting the crew down. A Pentagon Papers scandal like Miranda generates the kind of turbulence that changes which corrupt and privileged politicians/businessmen are holding the reins of political power, but it hardly shoves the majority of those responsible or connected to those responsible into the wastebin. Key members of parliament are going to remain, more or less, key members of parliament. Thus there’s incentive for the best repositioned factions of those in power to keep a walking potential after-tremor of the scandal like Malcolm, River and company alive and in play. It’s not in anyone’s interest to make Miranda into a truly tumultuous affair, no one wants systemic change after all, but once the news cycles have petered it out into background static, softly kicking the hornets nest again to re-malign one’s competitors becomes a survivable tactic. Insofar as those with the most amount of power post-Miranda ever consider Mal and the crew, they like that they have a piece in play that could get Miranda mildly back into the news.
But of course this is a two-sided coin. While the upper echelons of the police/military aren’t going to go on a land-burning and sea-boiling crusade for our Big Damn Heroes, there’s lots and lots of space and motivation for other hammers to come swinging at them. Those with–for whatever byzantine reason due to the most current web of politics at any moment–a stake in not having Miranda come up will very much like to see Serenity snuffed out in a silent explosion out on the ass-end of the ‘verse. As will any remnants of those with direct responsibility for Miranda carrying an itchy personal grudge at the notion of letting a flea get away after a bite. And of course River will remain–if not grow–both dangerous and valuable.
If Mal was unable to get underscrupulous jobs before because of his chaotic conscience and attention grabbing antics, now things are surely only peachy.
This is the real linchpin on which Serenity instantly transforms from a crescendo and coda to the opening salvo in our little old firefly’s real journey. Whereas before the crew were junior-grade lumpenproles, in constant danger of being crushed by a stray step but capable of eking out an honestly dishonest living begging for warm bowls of crime-filled gruel and saluting passing cops with their best pearly-white smiles, now they’re actual outlaws.
If Firefly was ever in any chance of returning as a series the first season or two after Serenity would be a tense affair of survival and piracy. Every relationship or period of sedentary safety would have an all-too-pressing expiration date and they’d have to be far more proactive about heists… and a little less discriminatory Sure the sense of soft familial love would be strengthened by Simon and Kaylee, but the tension of “me and mine” versus common humanity with strangers would be again be a salient running theme, and tensions of ends-and-means would surely heighten as the crew turns more and more to piracy.
But! Things are not quite so glum for our occasionally-intrepid mercenaries. There are alternatives to slowly filling the fleshy shoes of the Reavers, although perhaps even less palpable. In my mind Mal and the crew eventually find the kind of sponsors of hired-guns undaunted by the powers-that-be behind the Alliance: other Alliance powers-that-be. First corporate espionage/subversion/thuggery, and then later direct employ from figures inside parliament itself. Although the crew is never treated as anything more than a few steps removed pawn only sometimes on the edge of awareness of their situations, the potential for system-spanning plot entanglements and culture/paradigm clash is immense. As are the internal tensions and counter-schemes, because our Big Damn Heroes are hardly passive.
Firefly certainly did not die with Serenity, nor did the struggles of our crew.
There are quantum-telegraph cables to be cut, murderous gunmen to be tracked down, samples of vats of copyrighted plastics and proteins to be stolen, reavers dispersed by the Alliance into local raiding parties in garbage fields, denizens of small spacestations bandying together to fend off the thugs of spectrum monopolists…
I’ve always really, really wanted to see the crew rob a giant particle accelerator in space. I think there’s so much potential there in the implicit cultural and paradigmatic clash. Firefly borrows strongly from Star Wars’ complete disinterest in science, but explicitly contextualizes this tendency as a cultural and subjective perspective by working hard to make strides towards a believable scientific framework in the background. In much the same way that Joss Whedon is personally a fan of the Alliance’s social democracy (with universal healthcare), yet the story is shot primarily from a libertarian perspective with the other aspects of the underlying reality obscured in what seem like minor details.
Neither Blue Sun nor the history of Shepard Book were sufficiently handled on by the comics–if they’re even cannon–and there’s so much more room to touch on them, if only fleetingly. Just as the first season built up a pile of references and floating plots, so too would one expect any new series to continue shaking in references and background details to entirely new aspects of their society and relationships with new characters. There’s so much more to explore in the ‘verse and so much more to be mined from the cultural, aesthetic and paradigmatic clash between periphery and core that made episodes like “Ariel” so popular.
Cosmopolitan revolutionary and radical movements surely exist in the core of the Alliance and I’d like to thing we’d get to see them open up and explore the reference implicit in Simon’s friends. But sadly a treatment that looks anything like real revolutionary and radical groups rather than nth-iterated cartoonish abstractions of hollywood tropes kinda beggars belief. (It’s still viscerally painful for me to watch those scenes in Children of Men, so embarrassingly unreal are the supposed radicals, excellent though the rest of the film is.) So maybe instead of coming into the ranks of radicals and revolutionaries, the final apex of the story is one of finally actually saving people instead of watching them die or telling their tale. I love the idea of a different sort of social landscape opening up in the border planets over the course of the story, of the sort of wildcat labor struggles that filled the wild west after the civil war was won and the railroads established. Futuristic struggles and battles between Wobblies and Pinkertons would nicely parallel the actual west, where a volunteer Confederate soldier and abolitionist like Albert Parsons could ride with the Texas cavalry, start a paper in Waco, fight the Klan, marry an unbelievably badass freed slave, and die on the gallows in Chicago as an anarchist union organizer.
Serenity framed itself and the prior prelude of Firefly as Mal’s struggle to finally stand for something, to shake off the wounded defensive nihilism of the Browncoats’ defeat and come back into the world. But it also brought to the fore River’s similar but hidden journey in ways that hinted at her always being the main character, albeit temporarily obscured in the background detail. In that light Firefly Season One and its spectacular finale look a lot like opening chapter of a George RR Martin book: the person indicated to be of central narrative importance is there primarily to set things up and characters gonna die quickly.
Serenity ends with River exactly where Mal began five years before the show in that junkyard: a couple years after a personal hell, just beginning to coming out of her shell and looking up at what could be. That’s a lot of seasons to come. I can’t wait to find out what she finally comes to believe in.
Because that? That’ll be an interesting day. |
GOP presidential frontrunner billionaire Donald Trump tells Breitbart News in an exclusive interview that the women who former President Bill Clinton has allegedly targeted, including Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones and others, have “gone through a lot.”
When asked to respond to Willey’s comments to Breitbart Jerusalem Bureau editor Aaron Klein—where Willey thanked Trump for bringing the issue back to the forefront—Trump said he was “honored” that Willey thanked him.
“Thank you very much, Mr. Trump, for asking the right question at the right time. And please keep asking more,” Willey, who has accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault, stated.
She also called for more alleged victims to come forward:
I would just like to encourage any woman who has suffered at the hands of Bill Clinton to please try to find the courage and bravery to come forth. Because it’s okay now. Nobody can hurt you now. It’s as simple as that,” Willey said. “Nobody can touch you now. The word is out. You will be okay but you will be doing the right thing for all the right reasons and you will be helping your fellow sisters.
Meanwhile, Juanita Broaddrick—who has accused Bill Clinton of rape—told The Hill newspaper she likes Trump, even though she’s not a member of either major political party.
“He says the things I like to hear,” Broaddrick said.
Trump, in response to both Willey and Broaddrick, told Breitbart News exclusively that he was “honored” they said these things about him—and that he knows both of them have been through hell thanks to the Clintons.
“I was honored that they said that about me,” Trump told Breitbart News. “I know they’ve gone through a lot. But I’m honored that they said they said that about me. That was very nice, and very much appreciated.”
Trump also, in this exclusive interview on Monday, recounted how the whole battle has resurfaced. He said that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—who is running for the Democratic nomination for president, and is Bill’s wife—accused him of having a “penchant for sexism.” But, Trump said that Hillary’s decision to keep Bill around proves that is just not the case: It’s actually Hillary who has that issue.
“She said I have a ‘penchant for sexism,’ she used that exact statement,” Trump told Breitbart News. “That was before and she was referring to me.”
Trump is confident that if he wins the GOP nomination in 2016 that he will do better with women than Clinton in a general election.
“There’s nobody that respects women more than I do,” Trump said.
There’s nobody that will do more for women than I will—and included in that is that I’m going to make our country secure. That benefits women and men and everybody. There’s just nobody that is going to do what I am going to do for women, and there’s nobody that has the respect that I have for women. So when she said that I said ‘wait a minute, you have somebody who’s on the campaign trail right now talking for you and he’s had serious problems including all of the charges’ that you could go into if you want. That’s how it all started, and after that I haven’t been active with respect to this issue, but I just thought it was very inappropriate that she would mention such a thing. She wasn’t an innocent victim, she was an enabler. You can ask the people—and when we talk about things like women and women’s rights and all the things we want to talk about, she’s got a very big issue there. Look, nobody respects women more than I do and that includes Hillary Clinton.
Breitbart’s Klein has been spotlighted by the news media in recent days for exclusively interviewing Bill Clinton’s famous sex accusers, including Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Willey.
Gennifer Flowers, who had consensual relations with Clinton, also warned about a Hillary presidency on Klein’s show.
The interviews helped to spark the current debate about Bill’s alleged female victims, a topic that has engulfed Hillary’s frontrunning campaign.
The Washington Post on Thursday cited a Breitbart article in which Klein described how his radio program had become “a support center of sorts” for Bill Clinton’s female accusers — “a safe-space for these women to sound off about the way they were allegedly treated by both Bill and Hillary.” |
"The stock market has responded with a 20% dip in the value of Rarity, and record highs for Fluttershy shares."
Yay! After five months, the site has comments now! If you scroll to the bottom of any comic page, you can now sound off and tell me or other people or the forces of karma what you think! In theory, it might wean me off of replying to everything on EQD, but almost certainly not in practice.
There are two obscure references to other cartoons in this comic. A shiny e-doubloon to the lad or lass what can correctly identify both.
This is another of the comics I wrote before we officially started, and interestingly enough, before the Japanese release announcement. It was one of those moments where I was perusing the MLP Wiki in search of comic ideas and stumbled on the fact that the series released in several other countries, but not Japan. The universe eventually corrected this heresy, though it kind of defangs the comic now since the march of reality will inevitably prove it right or wrong. A nation could avoid complete economic collapse, or I could be right. I suppose that’s a win-win situation, isn’t it?
Fulfilling “the prophesy,” I watched a livestream of the first episode in Japanese. There’s an undeniable novelty to it, and they matched up the voices impressively, save for Applejack. I look forward to continuing, even if I couldn’t convince Reef to tune in for the whole thing. I will drag him down yet; after all, next week’s episode will have the first Pinkie song!
If you haven’t started keeping up with the IDW comic books, I can officially tell you to start now. Maybe not the single-character spin-offs, those have been... inconsistent. But with the first arc out of the way, Issue 5 strikes the structure of an MLP adventure episode hard. There’s less blatant fan-service and referential humor (not gone, mind you, just lessened), and I think it’s a far better story as a result. Two thumbs up.
This happiness sings out with a Hi Hi Hi!
GX |
26 03/16
It has been while (almost two years) since I wrote an article here and I’ve decided to make my triumphant return with an article I never managed to get around to writing.
As the title may suggest, this article is about streamlining validation with Laravel. While the final aim is to explain and present you with a quick and simple abstracted validator that requires minimal code in the actual implementation stage, before we get there I will need to cover the usual methods of validation which are default validation, form request validation and model validation. So let’s start.
Default Validation
When I say default validation I’m referring to Laravels base validator with no packages or abstraction around it. If you’re unfamiliar with this or need a recap, check out the documentation here.
Lets take a look at the example used on the documentation.
$this->validate($request, [ 'title' => 'required|unique:posts|max:255', 'body' => 'required', ]);
As you can see this is relying on the usage of the ValidatesRequests trait which is used in the default Laravel controller, but what exactly does this method do? Let’s take a look.
public function validate(Request $request, array $rules, array $messages = array()) { $validator = $this->getValidationFactory()->make($request->all(), $rules, $messages); if ($validator->fails()) { $this->throwValidationException($request, $validator); } }
There are some serious levels of abstraction here but let’s break this down into something you’d be more familiar with from previous versions of Laravel.
$validator = Validator::make($input, $results); if($validator->fails()) { throw new \Exception('Validation failed'); }
This approach is something that I have favoured since the days of Laravel 4.2. This approach actually covers the majority of the streamlining approach that I want to show you, simply by throwing an exception you’ve removed the need to manually check the status of the a validator every time you want to run one.
That being said, there are a couple of problems I have with this approach.
Firstly, while it’s nice to throw in an entire object representing the request and have the validator validate all input, it’s not something that you want to find yourself getting into the habit of. For a while now I’ve seen a lot of people using the $request->all() method when collecting user input, and while I’m aware that Laravel by default has some superb security and that a validator isn’t really doing anything that could be exploited by some malicious input, being lazy and just throwing handfuls of user input at parts of your application is a bad habit that you shouldn’t let yourself get into.
Secondly, this approach also requires that you define the rules for the validation in the controller, and while this isn’t really a security issue or a bad habit, you’ll find that later down the road when sifting through the controllers of a large application trying to find the definition of the validation rules you’ll wish that these were abstracted out.
In conclusion, Laravels default validation will suffice in a pinch, it’s good for getting started and rapid prototyping but it feels somewhat lazy and not very optimal, so lets move into the next one, form request validation.
Form Request Validaiton
Form request validation is a relatively new feature that was brought to us in Laravel 5.0, and while some of the underlying core code may have changed, the actual implementation and usage of this feature has remained somewhat static. If you’re unfamiliar with this approach or need a recap, check out the documentation here.
For a brief explanation of what exactly this is, let’s quote the documentation.
or more complex validation scenarios, you may wish to create a “form request”. Form requests are custom request classes that contain validation logic.
Essentially the idea behind this is that you have your own class that extends the Laravel Request class, except this class is capable of defining rules so that it may be automatically validated.
While in theory this is a pretty cool approach, and while it does provide us with a level of abstraction so that we don’t have all of this validation code within our controllers, it does mean that we’re offloading the task of validating data to the HTTP layer, and don’t forget, that some of Laravels validation rules will actually communicate with the database, so now we have the HTTP layer communicating with the database before it even hits our controllers, which should realistically be the start of our logic. This is bad, bad bad bad!
By all means have a play with this feature, see what it’s like and get your own feel for it, but I highly recommend that you do not use this is an actual production application, clear definitions and responsibilities are important for maintaining your codebase and limiting the amount of work required to change and/or fix something in the future. If you have to use an out of the box solution, use Laravels default validation.
Now we go from the start of the lifecycle to near the end, while somehow still being as bad.
Model Validation
Model validation is something that’s not part of Laravels core, but instead something often provided by packages or implemented at a basic level by the developer working with the system.
The standard approach for model validation often has you create models that look like the following.
class MyModel extends Model { protected $fillable = ['field1', 'field2']; protected $rules = [ 'create' => [ 'field1' => ['required'], 'field2' => ['required'] ], ]; }
Nice and simple right? The rules are defined in your model and would be called automatically by events hooking into Model::creating() or Model::saving() . This approach doesn’t actually take into consideration one of Eloquents wonderful features, mutators. For example, when creating a User model with Eloquent I will always create the following mutator.
public function setPasswordAttribute($value) { $this->attributes['password'] = Hash::make($value); }
If I were using this approach the validator would validate the hash of the password, rather than the actual password. The same goes for any other field that you may have a mutator for.
You may find yourself thinking
Hey, why can’t the validation on the model happen when a user calls fill()?
The answer is simple, because you shouldn’t be using the fill method, it’s lazy and when I see it used it’s either just having a whole mess of user input thrown into it (Usually from $request->all() ) or it’s through so many levels of abstraction that I genuinely have no idea what it is actually saving to the model.
Another thing to consider is that like the structure of your response, user input can quite often be totally different to how the data is stored. Maybe the user is submitting one form, but this data actually creates two maybe three models, that’s two or three separate instances of validation there, rather than the one that should be. If you believe there should be that many, remember that the validation of data (user input) has very little to do with the storage of the data. This actually brings us quite nicely to my final point about this approach.
YOUR PERSISTENCE LAYER SHOULD NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR VALIDATING DATA. Feel free to reread that a couple of times and let it settle in.
Got that? Well have another few more reads of it to make sure that we’re on the same page.
For those of you that are curious as to what a “persistence layer” is, the persistence layer is where data is persisted, typically this will be in a database but we’re in a place now where databases are not that only way to store data. This layer is sometimes called the “data layer”, “datastore layer” or “database layer”. The naming isn’t important, what is important is what it does.
This layers job is basically to take data and persist it, whether that means throwing it an API, into a database, datastore, whatever, that is its sole job, retrieving and saving data. Validating data is a logic step, and can be considered business and/or application logic (I’m not getting into the argument of definition) so it belongs somewhere else.
Just like the response layer or view layer has its own specific logic often referred to as “display logic” this layer has its own level of “data logic” which I think is a name that confuses a lot of people and leads to this. The logic that happens in this layer is specific to the storage of the data and/or the communication with the datastore. It doesn’t and shouldn’t care how valid or invalid the contents actually is.
Do not play with, use or contemplate this approach. While it sounds nice on paper, and it may “make your life easier” you’ll regret it in the long run, and you’ll find yourself getting into bad habits. I don’t know why I dislike this approach more than form requests, but I do.
FINALLY we’ve made it all the way through to the part you’ve all been waiting for, some of my wonderful code.
The streamlinked approach
Now that we’ve covered Laravels default validation, form request validation and even the third party model validation let me show the fourth and final approach of the day. This approach combines the one good part of form requests with the streamline approach of default validation, but throws in some nice magic in a more optimal way that doesn’t involve encroaching into the territory of your other layers.
For our examples, lets create it for users. Now you’ve got your application setup, you have the following classes.
User (model/entity)
UserController
UserRepository
In the lifecycle of our example application here the data will go UserController -> UserRepository -> User . So where exactly do we perform the validation? Well, my approach sits in the UserController but realistically could even sit in the UserRepository if you so wish. It doesn’t add an extra step, but instead provides a fire and forget approach just like the default laravel validation.
For this approach, we’ll want to create ourselves a UserValidator.
class UserValidator extends BaseValidator { public static $rules = [ 'create' => [...], 'update' => [...], 'password' => [...] ]; }
As you can see, the implementation of this approach so far, is really simple. You extend a base class and just define your rules as you see fit. To actually use this class in your controller you would have a method like the following.
public function store(Request $request, UserValidator $validator, UserRepository $repository) { $input = $request->only(['username', 'password']); $validator->validForCreate($input); if($user = $repository->create($input)) { Auth::login($user); return redirect()->route('user.dashboard'); } return redirect()->back()->with(['error' => 'Unable to create user']); }
You may be able to figure out what’s going on here, but I’ll clarify for those of you that are still uncertain. Firstly I’m collecting the user input, and only the user input that I need before passing it along to a method within the validator, which will validate against matching rules and throw an exception if it fails. The final part of the validFor method corresponds directly to the defined list of rules within my validator.
Usually as a final step of the validation I like to add an automated response for a validation exception inside the render method of the Exceptions\Handler class provided by Laravel.
public function render($request, Exception $e) { if($e instanceof ValidationException) { return redirect()->back()->withErrors($e->errors()); } return parent::render($request, $e); }
I’m aware that the above error handler only works for non api/ajax calls but that’s not our concern right now. The idea behind it is that I don’t have to fanny around creating validation logic for every part of the application, I just simply define my rules and the small amount of work that I did on this at the start guarantees that my validation is as automated as can be with users being taken back to the form with the validation errors, allowing me to focus on the actual functionality.
That’s it for the implementation of the method, but now comes the fun bit, the creation of the BaseValidator class.
abstract class BaseValidator { public static $rules = ['create' => [], 'update' => []]; public static $messages = ['create' => [], 'update' => []]; /** * @var \Illuminate\Validation\Factory */ protected $validator; /** * @param Factory $validator */ public function __construct(Factory $validator) { $this->validator = $validator; } public function __call($method, $arguments) { if (starts_with($method, 'validFor')) { $name = snake_case(substr($method, 8)); if (isset(static::$messages[$name])) { $messages = static::$messages[$name]; } else { $messages = []; } if (isset(static::$rules[$name])) { $rules = static::$rules[$name]; if (isset($arguments[1]) && is_array($arguments[1])) { $rules = array_merge($rules, $arguments[1]); } return $this->fire($arguments[0], $rules, $messages); } } } /** * Generic method * * @param String $action The action that define the validation. It corresponds to the array key on the Validator file. * @param array $data Array of data to validate against. * @param array $rules Additionnal rules that could come from the controller. * @param array $messages Additionnal messages that could come from the controller. * * @return bool * @throws \Exception */ public function validFor($action, array $data, array $rules = [], array $messages = []) { if (!isset($action) || is_array($action) || !is_string($action)) { throw new \Exception('Invalid validation rulset for ' . $action); } $rules = array_key_exists($action, static::$rules) ? array_merge(static::$rules[$action], $rules) : $rules; $messages = array_key_exists($action, static::$messages) ? array_merge(static::$messages[$action], $messages) : $messages; return $this->fire($data, $rules, $messages); } /** * Trigger validation * * @param array $data * @param array $rules * @param array $messages * @return bool */ private function fire(array $data, array $rules = [], array $messages = []) { $validation = $this->validator->make($data, $rules, $messages); if ($validation->fails()) { throw new ValidationException($validation); } return true; } }
To be honest with you, there’s not much I can explain about this that hasn’t already been or is covered by the docblocks.
It’s really quite simple, you have a class that represents the validation of an object/resource within your system, within there you define named rulesets such as create, update, login as well optionally creating messages for those rulesets following the Laravel validation message approach and keeping the structure the same as the defined rulesets. This then allows you to call a method with a validFor{ruleset} structure and have the data validated and the user automatically returned if they messed it up.
It’s actually a really simple approach, it’s streamlined and relatively powerful, it combines the good points from the existing Laravel validation into a nice little approach that you can reuse as many times as you see fit.
I hope this helps some of you with your application development and hopefully my first article after almost two years break isn’t full of mistakes and unstructured ramblings (more so than normal).
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Some of the birds have died while others have been taken to rescue centres
The substance found on hundreds of seabirds washed up on the south coast is a "mixture of refined mineral oils", the Environment Agency has said.
Wildlife experts have warned many more birds could be affected by the waxy substance found on washed up guillemots.
Hundreds of birds were found on beaches from Sussex to Cornwall on Thursday, many at Portland in Dorset.
The agency said the material was not vegetable, animal or palm oil.
Earlier, Environment Minister Richard Benyon said: "Every effort is being made to identify the cause of this problem."
'Rare occurrence'
He added: "I'd like to thank everyone involved in helping the seabirds affected and it's thanks to their efforts that many have been cleaned up and now have a chance of survival."
Several birds have died, but BBC wildlife presenter Chris Packham warned that could be the "tip of the iceberg".
Guide to UK Seabirds Guillemots (pictured) are the most common auk found in the British Isles
During spring they gather in huge breeding colonies, known as loomeries, on coastal cliffs and rock stacks
The females lay their egg directly on a ledge - but its conical shape prevents it rolling off
By contrast, puffins raise a single puffin chick (puffling) in an underground burrow Source: BBC Nature Watch puffins battling the odds against predatory great black-backed gulls
"What's particularly frightening is that if you're picking up a hundred on the beach, there could be very many more which have died and been lost at sea," he said.
A coastguard plane has been dispatched to search the coast between Dover and the Isles of Scilly for any trace of the substance.
A Maritime and Coastguard Agency spokesman said: "This occurrence of seabirds being washed up on south coast beaches contaminated with a product is rare.
"We have received no specific reports of pollution within the English Channel area, but we have sent one of our counter pollution surveillance aircraft to investigate the sea areas between Dover and the Isles of Scilly."
Dr Simon Boxall, of the National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, said earlier he thought the substance may have been dumped into the English Channel by a ship.
He said: "It sounds like - and it's pure speculation - that there's a ship out there somewhere that's flushed its tanks out illegally because it was being either too lazy or couldn't be bothered to pay the fees of having the tanks flushed in a port in the correct way."
Most birds have been found in Dorset but others are appearing in Sussex, Hampshire, Devon and Cornwall.
Image caption Some of the dead birds at Chesil Cove
The RSPCA said it had rescued more than 100 birds, which had been taken to the West Hatch Animal Centre in Taunton.
Wildlife officers said the rescued birds did "not respond well" to the cleaning techniques normally used to remove oil.
It has now begun using other products, such as vegetable oil and margarine, to clean the birds with some success. |
Toshiba has announced that it is moving forward with its plans to build a new memory chip plant without its partner Western Digital.
The company will spend $1.8 billion on the construction of Fab 6 of its new Yokkaichi semiconductor facility that will be located in Western Japan. Toshiba currently owns the land and buildings at the factor though it has divided investments in production equipment with SanDisk since the two companies began their joint venture in 2004.
The fact that Western Digital acquired SanDisk early last year has led to an ongoing legal fight between it and Toshiba.
Toshiba hopes to sell its share in the joint venture to recoup some of the multibillion-dollar losses from its nuclear power division. However, now that Western Digital owns SanDisk, the company believes that it has a say in the sale as well as the right of first refusal.
Kaori Hiraki, a spokesperson for Toshiba, shed some light on the current disagreement between the two companies, saying:
"Toshiba has held discussions with SanDisk over several weeks, but could not arrive at an agreement because of the vast difference in opinions over capital spending. We need to boost our production capability to meet increasing demand for Nand flash."
Western Digital expressed its disappointment with Toshiba's plan to build a new plant in a statement, which read:
"While we are disappointed by Toshiba's announcement, the agreements governing the JVs give us the right to participate in investments. That is exactly what we intend to do."
As both companies have failed to reach an agreement, the slowdown in the joint development project could have long lasting effects and give Samsung a huge advantage in the memory chip business.
Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Future plc Publication. All rights reserved.
Photo Credit: Anton Watman/Shutterstock |
VW was on the working group of car manufacturers that decided on the new turbo hybrid engine rules introduced this season
The Volkswagen Group, the world's second biggest car maker, is conducting a feasibility study into a potential Formula 1 entry.
Sources say the review is being conducted by ex-Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali, who was hired by VW's Audi brand earlier this year.
Its interest is being piqued by the global marketing success achieved by rivals and new F1 champions Mercedes.
But any entry would depend on management changes at VW or F1.
Ferdinand Piech, the head of the supervisory board of the VW Group, and F1 commercial boss Bernie Ecclestone have long had a difficult relationship.
At least one of them would need to leave their current position before a VW Group brand could enter F1.
VW was on the working group of car manufacturers that decided on the new turbo hybrid engine rules introduced into F1 this season, but decided against entering at that time - and, publicly, has not changed its stance since.
But sources say that some senior board members now believe F1 would be a more effective global promotional tool than its existing motorsport programmes.
BBC F1 chief analyst Eddie Jordan "The Volkswagen Audi Group is the second biggest car maker in the world and as such it needs to be in Formula 1. But it will not enter it while the sport remains under the control of Bernie Ecclestone, who VAG boss Ferdinand Piech dislikes on a personal and professional basis.Martin Winterkorn - the chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen - is being groomed as Piech's successor and he has always believed that F1 is a great platform for the group's brands. I am told he privately believes VAG should be a part of F1. If VAG did come to F1, I believe it would be with their own team, with the car designed and made in Germany."
Among the Volkswagen Audi Group's brands, as well as VW and Audi, are Porsche, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Bentley, Skoda and Seat.
VAG currently has three main motorsport programmes - with Audi and Porsche in the World Endurance Championship, Audi in the German Touring Car Championship (DTM) and Volkswagen in the World Rally Championship.
The global advertising value of Mercedes' television appearances during its F1 campaign in 2014 was $2.8bn (£1.8bn).
Experts believe the equivalent value for VAG of their sportscar and touring car programmes was about $30m (£19m).
Mercedes spent a net 130m euros (£103m) on F1, once external sponsorship and prize money is taken into account. VAG spent about 320m euros (£254m) on DTM and sportscars.
Some reports have linked a potential VAG return with the Austrian Red Bull team - Piech has a close relationship with Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz.
But sources say that VAG turned down an approach from Red Bull some years ago and that if it did enter F1 it would be with its own team based in Germany.
World champions Mercedes earned a total global media value through its F1 campaign in 2014 of $2.8bn (£1.8bn), a season in which Lewis Hamilton also won the drivers' title
Asked for a comment, a spokesman did not deny the information but pointed to an interview with the chairman of the VW board of management Martin Winterkorn in the German newspaper Bild Am Sonntag last month, in which he suggested the group was happy with its existing commitments.
Winterkorn said: "Our brands in motorsport are as successful as ever, whether in the DTM with Audi or Le Mans with Audi and Porsche, or in the World Rally Championship with Volkswagen. We feel we have really good position."
Audi chairman Rupert Stadler said in an interview with another German newspaper, Heilbronner Stimmer, that Domenicali had expressed a desire not to work in motorsport and that he was working in "organisation and new business fields in the areas of service and mobility". |
Roberto Rossi is one of Italy’s best-known Harley-Davidson concessionarias. He’s also got petrol coursing through his veins. His dealership includes a museum: a showcase for a personal collection of classic motorcycles bolstered by an authentic Mille Miglia Alfa Romeo 1750 GS Zagato (once owned by Tazio Nuvolari) and vintage tractors.
Rossi often turns his hand to custom motorcycles, and this is his latest. He describes it as “An unconventional Sportster modified for mountain joyrides,”—hence the name Stellalpina (Alpine star).
The core of this bike is a 2004 Harley-Davidson Sportster 1200, but Rossi has modified the tank—now set lower and further back—and shortened the rear subframe. Large-diameter Fat Boy forks have been grafted on, and the tires are now Firestone scrambler-style rubber, 19” at the front and 16” at the back.
The back fender is a modified Softail fitment. The front light is Bates, and the rear is Lucas. The bars, diamond-stitched leather seat and exhaust system of Stellalpina are all custom-fabricated.
It’s a clean and purposeful look, as much about function as form. The Sportster 1200 carries its weight lower, and is better suited to the twists and turns of alpine roads.
“The top of the mountain now is closer,” says Rossi.
Images by Luca Merli. |
K-pop haters will completely shift their paradigm after watching the documentary "9 Muses of Star Empire," now on its way to North America.
K-pop haters will completely shift their paradigm after watching "9 Muses of Star Empire." The eye-opening documentary -- which makes its North American premiere on July 26 (more info below) -- shows what goes into creating an act for the market. It follows the story of Korean record label Star Empire Entertainment, which spends more than a million dollars to debut girl group 9 Muses in 2010. If the story truly represents what goes on behind the K-pop scenes, then there's lots of tears, disappointment and rehearsing until you're sick.
Playing off their Greek goddess-inspired name, 9 Muses are marketed as nine model-esque girls crafting sexy, sassy K-pop. While the viewer does not see how the original nine were selected, when one member leaves 9 Muses, the Star Empire execs go to an agency that show them binders full of women (seriously) for the company to pick one to add to the group. The shallow means necessary to become a K-pop star seem to be highlighted, as execs first and foremost need a girl who is similar age of the other girls and is tall with singing and dancing capabilities an afterthought.
The star of the documentary is Sera, the original leader of the K-pop outfit. The viewer heartbreakingly follows the likable singer as she enthusiastically tries to encourage her members to work hard, though her effort is met with crushing results when she is blamed for 9 Muses' lack of success and removed from the position.
Moreover, while the doc highlights the glamorous life of shooting music videos and TV appearances, a dark side emerges in seeing the girls criticized for their makeup or when certain members get minimal TV show screen time. A critical moment of the doc comes when the group finally makes their TV debut and, despite a highly technical performance most Western girl groups could only dream of pulling off, 9 Muses' debut performance of "No Playboy" is considered a disaster.
The second half of the doc comes after the "No Playboy" debut when the mood is shifted with an unspoken (or unseen?) newfound focus on excruciatingly hard work. Now, rehearsals are absolutely mandatory even when the girls, bruised and bandaged from a car crash, continue their rigorous practice. A standout tragic moment comes when a sick member is crying in a backroom, telling another, "I can't tell him that I'm sick... they are the type of people who will give a painkiller and make me dance through tears."
By the end of the documentary, it's clear 9 Muses' discipline changed the group as the girls rehearse in hallways a minute up until going on stage. But at what cost?
The brilliant final scene ends with Sera singing a ballad in a rehearsal room. She tells the camera, "This could have been a beautiful documentary if it was up till our debut," agreeing that their lives became much more rigorous after their flaws were exposed on national TV. The doc leaves the viewer with an uncomfortable emotional stirring, wondering if these performers can truly be happy in the K-pop life, as Sera admits her stress is only relieved when she sings, despite a contradictory teardrop sliding down her face signaling otherwise.
Despite a few typos on the translated captions, the documentary's message is clear: "9 Muses of Star Empire" is ultimately an examination of how humans treat each other -- whether you're an artist or a CEO -- while following dreams in the Korean entertainment biz.
Directors: Hark-Joon Lee
Executive producer: Chung-Oh Bang
Producers: Suk-Kee Lee, Style Chosum and Min-Chul Kim, Mich & Films
Running time: 82 minutes
North American Premiere: July 26 at Film Society of Lincoln Center, as part of its Sound + Vision series, at 4:30 p.m. There is another viewing on July 30 at 8:30 p.m. Get tickets here.
Luckily, there is a happy ending for 9 Muses that the documentary doesn't show. The group is back together with nine members, which is beneficial for their namesake. As well, their latest single, "Wild," peaked at No. 18 on the K-Pop Hot 100 chart in May, continuing the group's upward chart climb. |
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YouTube took to VidCon today to announce that live-streaming is coming to its mobile apps and will be available to all users.
Google’s video platform detailed all the new video formats it was pursuing, including 360-degree videos and VR. During the keynote, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki stated that the platform contains the most 360-degree video content on the web. She added that YouTube was also pairing its biggest creators with VR companies to produce new content.
The most exciting news for general users, however, was the live-streaming update for the YouTube app. After claiming that YouTube was investing heavily in the format, Wojcicki gave the VidCon stage to Kurt Wilms, product lead of immersive experiences at YouTube, to show off the new feature.
As Wilms opened up the YouTube app, the screen behind him projected the live-streaming function. In terms of its UI, the design matches Periscope, in that it shows you live interactions in the form of speech bubbles that mount up on the left-hand side of the display. Other live-streaming icons include a viewer count, a “like” count, and a button that lets you switch between the front and rear cameras on your smartphone. As Wilms demonstrated, you can also take a photo beforehand as a title banner for your broadcast.
“I’m really looking forward to seeing how everybody here uses these creative tools,” Wojcicki said during the keynote. The live-streaming capability is currently exclusively available to a small selection of YouTube’s biggest creators, including The Young Turks, AIB, and Alex Wassabi, among others. It will be rolled out to general users soon, although YouTube did not reveal a specific date.
The update sees YouTube play catch-up with the likes of Twitter’s Periscope, and Facebook Live. The latter has been dominating the headlines of late, thanks to its spending spree to attract notable talent (including celebs and media companies) to its burgeoning feature. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has even been doing his own fair share of legwork to promote Live, including a series of broadcasts from Facebook HQ.
YouTube, in its own words, boasts that it has a better infrastructure in place than its competitors to take advantage of live-streaming. The Google-owned video platform undeniably has an existing hotbed of popular creators, which it is also promoting through its subscription service YouTube Red, that can help spread the word on the update to its millions of subscribers. It is also already home to the biggest media companies that will likely utilize live-streaming in order to reach YouTube’s audience of 1 billion users, who watch an average of 40 minutes of videos per day on mobile devices. Engagement is evidently not an issue for the platform.
The announcement heralds the arrival of a new heavyweight contender in the live-streaming arena. One that could potentially land a knockout blow to its rivals, Twitter and Facebook. |
In a previous life, Mr Cummings worked for Michael Gove at the education department, where his dim view of David Cameron and his team was an open secret.
So in a sense, it’s not news to see him suggesting that Downing Street and the PM have “botched” the plan to make all English schools into academies.
But it is news, of course, because of what it says about the state of relations between senior Conservatives in the context of the referendum.
Simply, the rage and vitriol of the campaign is boiling over, drawing Tories into new fights that have little or even nothing to do with the European Union.
Mr Cummings, keen to make the case that David Cameron and his team are incompetents who can’t be trusted to get Britain a good deal in Europe, has now handed ammunition to Labour MPs, teachers’ leaders and Tory council chiefs who don’t like the academies plan.
They will now cheerily fire Mr Cummings’ bullets straight at Nicky Morgan, the education secretary currently taking fire for a policy the announcement of which probably has more to do with George Osborne and Mr Cameron than her.
And people who fret about their kids’ education will quite likely conclude that the Conservatives are doing something that might hurt that education. After all, the man who used to help run Conservative education policy says the policy is “cackhanded” and the people behind it don’t care about children, just headlines. |
The Week The Universe And I Fell Out
My last post ‘Is Realism A Death Sentence‘ was all about the massive, life-changing power of reframing. How it can hugely improve the quality of your life, if that is, you take the time to master it and then use it on a regular basis.
To encourage people to try it I’m going to give a $25 Amazon gift card to the person that can come up with the best positive reframe in the comments section of that post before 20th January.
Within minutes of me hitting publish on that post things started to go wrong.
To begin with, I knocked a full cup of coffee over my keyboard and mouse mat shortly before I was due to start a client session. Initially I thought I’d saved the keyboard and even tweeted the reframe that my mouse mat was history, but at least my keyboard survived to tell the tale.
My gratitude was short lived however. Within a few minutes the keyboard had lost it’s grip on reality, or more accurately, the English language and was throwing out letters at random and refusing to type anything even remotely coherent. No jokes, about nothing new there then please!
It’s difficult to operate a computer without a keyboard so I called my client to say I’d be a tad late and drove to Best Buy to purchase a new one. I was back within the hour $80 lighter, but we still managed to fit the session in and I breathed a sigh of relief.
However, that sigh of relief was soon replaced by a sigh of exasperation when my blog fell over and refused to get up again. Little did I know, that was the precursor to a several days of online purgatory as I lost not only my blog, but my e-mail for hours at a time and for no apparent reason.
Was the Universe testing me? Was it thinking:
“Right then you smug bastard Brownson, we’ll see how good you really are at reframing. Reframe this sucker!”
I really have no idea. I think the thought of the Universe conspiring on our behalf can be incredibly uplifting and inspiring and really bring out the best in people.
And I admit to actively encouraging clients to stick with that belief if they already have it because they will be actively on the look out for the good in situations and not focusing on the bad.
But the flip side is to believe when things go wrong the opposite is happening That unimaginable forces are deliberately throwing banana skins in your path and snickering as you slip and slide from one crisis to another. That isn’t really a nice thought and not one I would want you to adopt.
Whether it was the Universe, or just a case of a few days bad luck is irrelevant, because it definitely is an opportunity to show that I can walk the walk and reframe what happened.
So here is how I reframed a week that really didn’t go anything like as well as I’d have liked.
It gave me the opportunity to prove that I can reframe and not just talk about it
I pass through about 10 sets of traffic lights on my way to Best Buy and every single one was on green
I just got some more points on my Best Buy card and I’m now due a $20 gift card back
I got the last Mac wireless keyboard in stock
There wasn’t a line at checkout
My keyboard was dirty and now I don’t have to clean it
I had a great client that was cool about us kicking off late
It was my last client of the day, so there was no knock on effect
I found out I could get hosting for less than half what I was paying and will save almost $200 a year
My techie guy (Tim Gary from Mindcue) wasn’t just as good as I thought, he was way better, and he dragged me out of a really deep, dark hole. Would yours stay up to 2.30am on a Sunday night/Monday morning sorting things out if your site crashed?
We didn’t lose any files in the transfer and the database didn’t get corrupted
I can now access tech support direct without having to go through a third party
Nobody got arsey with me for not replying to e-mails in a timely manner
I don’t think I lost any e-mails, although I can’t be sure of that one
I had a MobileMe e-mail account and could use that as a back up
I have some cool friends that took the time to let me know via Twitter my site was down
I got an idea for a follow up post on reframing which you are now reading
I got to use some of the time I would have been tweaking my site to meditate (boy did that help) and fit in an extra gym session
Let me know if you can think of any glaring reframes I’ve missed and what you would have done to have kept your blood pressure below 200 if it had happened to you.
Update: The Universe Was Conspiring Against Me After All!
On Saturday I took my car in for a standard service. I’d been having some trouble with the steering and asked them to take a look at it.
I got a phone call later on telling me there was indeed a problem and it would cost about $470 to put right.
Guess what it was.
Go on, guess.
I swear to you this is the truth.
The problem is the bearings on the……
Universal joint!
Coincidence? |
Become flexible. Reduce stress. Lose weight. Better health. Get exercise. Meditate. Center yourself. It’s trendy.
My Introduction to World Religion class’s response to why Americans practice yoga. Sorry to say, I expected as much and before writing this post, scanned various yoga studio websites in the city of my current residence. I paraphrase what a few of them said in regards to the benefits of yoga:
You can better your life and make a difference.
Build your strength and flexibility.
Be more open, and vital.
Physical and emotional benefits.
Increase your focus and stamina.
Increase energy, find balance, be free from stress.
Pretty standard stuff and, I am sure, fairly representative of other yoga studios across America.
Classes start at only 10 dollars. What a deal.
But wait! Don’t forget your mats, your yoga clothes, and your yoga accessories such as yoga socks, hoodies, and headbands. Mats only rage from 8-125 dollars on one website. And clothes–women’s clothes in particular start at only 45 dollars. Men’s clothes starting at 28 dollars. What a deal.
And if you are really gung-ho about your practice, make sure to stop by the Business of Yoga Conference August 7-10, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. After all, members only have to pay 489 dollars. So register now, because if you don’t you’ll have to pay 689 dollars for late registration. But it will all be worth it in the end because you’ll network and learn how to make even better business out of yoga. And hey, you might even see some celebrities too!
You might even find a niche and patent your trademark classes and your practice as did Bikram Choudhury, founder of Bikram yoga. Make sure you get your patents. That way, if someone tries to copy you, you can slap cease and desist orders on them (as did Bikram). Yoga is, after all, big business.
A 6 billion dollar business in 2013 alone according to Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/01/04/branding-yoga-good-business-or-blasphemy).
Before proceeding, I would like to make note that this is not a criticism of those who practice yoga in the west. Nor is it so much a criticism of those who decide to capitalize on yoga in America. It is America, after all, and you gotta make your money.
For those unfamiliar with the second term of this post’s title, the Upanishads are mystical treatises composed and passed down orally between the 700-300 BCE in India. The term itself means “to sit next to” or “come sit down near to me” (Powell 83) as in a guru, or teacher, inviting his student to sit down beside him for instruction.
The 8th century BCE marked a major transition period in India as many individuals renounced society for life in the forest in effort to seek Truth. The Upanishads are the results of these efforts and attempt to describe that which is indescribable: the immediate realization of Brahman, “the Supreme,” the infinite, all-pervading Reality and origin of everything: what in monotheistic terms might be called “God.”
The Upanishads, then, were the source of knowledge in regards to uniting with Brahman.
So how did these gurus achieve such an endeavor?
I turn to the Shvetashvatara Upanishad for a clear answer:
“Holding his body steady with the three upper parts erect and causing the senses with the mind to enter the heart, a wise man with the Brahma-boat will cross all the frightening streams. Compressing his breathings here in the body, and having his movements checked, one should breathe through the nostrils with diminished breath” (Van Voorst 52).
In other words, they practiced yoga.
The Upanishad continues: “Like the chariot yoked with vicious horses, the wise man should restrain his mind until it is undistracted” (ibid).
And naturally, yoga studios in which you take your classes you paid your hard earned money for did not exist. Rather, they practiced “in a clean, level spot, free from pebbles, fire, and gravel, by the sound of water and similar things favorable to thought but not offensive to the eye, in a hidden retreat protected from the wind” (ibid).
Returning for a moment to the above “like the chariot…” I ask my class to describe the workings of their mind. Responses include “chaos,” “a monkey bouncing around in a cage,” “always moving,” “a train wreck.”
The mind is the starting point–namely stilling the mind to prevent mental fluctuations such as thoughts, dreams, and memories. The mind retrained and undistracted is a mind able to distinguish between the true and the false (about which more will be said further below). For now, let us return to the text itself:
“Lightness, healthiness, steadiness, a clear complexion and pleasantness of voice, sweetness of odor, and scanty excretions—these, they say, are the first stage in the progress of yoga” (ibid).
Hey, now we’re getting somewhere American yoga! These ancient sages did report on yoga’s health benefits. (Whew! I wipe my sweaty brow.)
But wait, I skipped over something between practicing in a hidden retreat and the first stage’s health benefits: “Fog, smoke, sun, fire, wind, fire-flies, lightning, a crystal, a moon—these are the preliminary natural things indicating that Brahman is found in yoga. When the fivefold quality of yoga is produced, arising from earth, water, fire, air, and space, no sickness, old age, no death has he who has obtained a body made from the fire of yoga” (ibid, emphasis mine).
Uh-oh. The text says Brahman, the divine, is found in yoga and oh wait! One no longer suffers.
“Even as a mirror stained by dust brilliantly when it has been cleansed,” says the text, “so the embodied one, on seeing the nature of the Soul, becomes unitary, his end attained, from sorrow freed. With the nature of the self like a lamp, one who practices yoga beholds here the nature of Brahma. He becomes unborn, steadfast, and freed from his human nature. By knowing God one is released from all bonds” (ibid.)
Let us pause for a moment and repeat: “one who practices yoga beholds here the nature of Brahma.” One has united with the divine and like a lamp is a source of light for a world otherwise living in darkness, ignorance.
Ignorant of what? Brahman, true reality.
Now to return to my earlier point of departure–distinguishing the true from the false. This involved, in part, distinguishing between what I think I am from what I truly am. These sages spoke of the difference between the “jiva” and the “atman,” the former meaning “living being” the sense of the individual, the individual soul–the person I think I am and have come to identify with–the limited self attached to and consuming the sensory external world oblivious of its true nature.
“Opposite” the jiva is the “atman,” the supreme soul, the “immanent aspect of Brahman” (Powell 401), the “innermost nature…of all the forms of the manifest universe, of all living beings” (Danielou 17). In other words, it is the true self/soul.
If the atman is the true self/soul, then the jiva, the sense of the individual self, is a false self. As such, Upanishadic philosophy is a critique of the identification with oneself as being a separate individual, when in reality, according to the gurus, all is Brahman, all is unitary. So separateness, individuality, and basing our definitions of ourselves on such individuality, is ignorant and serves to perpetuate our suffering.
Now we can get back to our primary topic and this post’s central critique–the fad that is American yoga.
The timeless wisdom of Upanishadic philosophy as embodied in the practice of yoga is incongruous with an American lifestyle and worldview, where we the Declaration of Independence guarantees a certain pursuit of Happiness, which, in this author’s mind, seems today wrapped up with wealth. We pride ourselves on our individuality in America–we are not ones to conform. We seek to assert our individuality–each and every one of us. The irony, of course, is that when everyone is asserting his/her individuality–they are conforming to the norm.
And yet we love our yoga, which, as discussed, is aimed at destroying that false sense of being individual.
But is this not typical of America since before its founding? To take from another? It is how our country got here after all. The logic differs little than what we have done with yoga. We take what we want from it and I would not even say we discard what we don’t want from it, because as far as I can tell, from the beginnings of yoga in the west, the essential teachings regarding Brahman and divine reality did not make the journey from India. If they did, they didn’t last long.
In the end, the practice of yoga in America is a mirror to our lifestyle and worldview. It is a superficial practice designed to fulfill superficial needs/desires–for health, flexibility, strength, freedom from stress, etc–desires in Upanishadic thought being the primary means through which we perpetuate our ignorance and separation from truth. Our society is ravenous about its desires and we are driven by desire to possess the new–how many new cell phones do you really need? And yet that is what our society is driven by–the need to possess, the desire to have. If our desires perpetuate our separation from truth, from Brahman, creating such desires functions to perpetuate a great lie.
Maybe American yoga is a new “opiate for the masses” dressed in exoticism, otherness, spirituality.
Our guaranteed pursuit of happiness is in bed with consumerism, consumerism based in just that–to consume–to fill ourselves with junk we don’t need, and our society propels us to make the money to buy the stuff we so desperately hope will fill some void, some emptiness. We think buying stuff will help us suffer less.
Remember, the philosophy that developed alongside yoga was founded upon the teachings of men who rejected society–they gave society with all its norms, rules and regulations, and all of its fetters the BIG MIDDLE FINGER. America promises freedom. Are we really free? Sure, in one sense we are free, for the most part, to do what we want to do. No qualms there. I am thankful for that freedom. But we are free to do what we want to within certain, often unseen, confines–limits. As much as our society promotes freedom, such sense of freedom is externalized–internally our society perpetuates boundedness to our desires and our rapacious consumption–and yoga has been turned into just one more commodity–one more iota for consumption.
The gurus said yoga will lead to the cessation of suffering. Does the guarantee of the pursuit of happiness include the cessation of suffering? No it does not. Happiness is just one more thing to pursue–one more thing to gain, to possess. It is just one more desire. Hell, some even think they can buy it. Aren’t our products designed and advertised in such a way as to try to satisfy us in one way or another? Not happy with your dish wash detergent? Buy this one–then you’ll be happy with how clean your dishes are. But damn it! I don’t have enough money to buy that new state-of-the-art dish soap. So I guess I go on being unhappy with the one I currently use.
If the gurus responsible for the Upanishadic wisdom were to see our society today what would they think? They might say we are selfish, for rather than being changed through our confrontation with the Other, we take from it and mold it to our own purposes–purposes driven by desire, and capitalism. They might say we are ignorant and will continue on in our ignorance.
And with that, maybe–just maybe–they would feel a little compassion for us. Maybe they would lower and shake their heads, offer a little smile, and think:
“They know not what they do.”
But this is America. I am an American, so Amer-I-can! And when I can I will.
So don’t get in my way.
Works Cited
Danielou, Alain. The Myths and Gods of India. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1991.
Powell. Barbara. Windows into the Infinite: A Guide to the Hindu Scriptures. Fremont, CA: Jain Publishing Company, 1996.
Van Voorst, Robert. Anthology of World Scriptures. 6th ed. Boston: Wadsworth. 2013. |
End Times prepper pastor Jim Bakker grew emotional on his television program today while asserting that nobody is laughing at “stupid Jim Bakker” and his survival food buckets any more in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
“These things, when God does them, God doesn’t fool around!” Bakker bellowed. “Yesterday, I almost lost it. You know, for the last several years, preachers—even in this city—and evangelists have beat the you-know-what out of me and made fun of me because we store food.”
“They preach about it,” he claimed. “Whole revivals just preaching about Jim and Lori, ‘Ha, ha, ha, they’re storing food, that stupid Jim Bakker.’ I just came from the flood zone! Nobody was laughing at me! They all wanted the crazy preacher’s food!”
“When the crisis comes, you people that are ready, your kids that laughed at you won’t laugh any more,” Bakker added. “And I want to tell you something: You ain’t seen nothing yet!” |
NEW YORK CITY, New York — A pair of reports out on Wednesday evening from two of the nation’s biggest broadcasters brings gloomy news for the already hurting presidential campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton: The FBI has been “aggressively investigating” the Clinton Foundation for a year.
All of this comes as a third report, from the Wall Street Journal, walks through how “secret recordings” have “fueled” the FBI’s criminal investigation into the Clinton Foundation—a separate but parallel probe from the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
Pamela Brown, CNN’s Justice Department correspondent, announced on air on Wednesday:
My colleague Evan Perez and I have spoken to more than a dozen officials and agents and have learned that agents in the FBI wanted to aggressively investigate the Clinton Foundation several months ago. Earlier in the year, the Justice Department told the FBI essentially you don’t have enough evidence here for predication to get more tools such as warrants and subpoenas. ‘Go back and see what else you can dig up.’ We are told that after the Clinton email probe initially wrapped up in July that those agents wanted to continue their work on the case and again DOJ said ‘you don’t have enough evidence here to really investigate’ and so things are sort of on hold and this has sort of caused tensions to flare in the FBI and the Department of Justice. Some of those agents feel like those roadblocks are politically-driven.
WATCH PAMELA BROWN’S CNN REPORT ON CLINTON FOUNDATION CORRUPTION PROBE:
Similarly, over on Fox News, Special Report anchor Bret Baier dropped another bombshell on Wednesday night:
Two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton emails and the Clinton Foundation tell Fox the following: The investigation into the Clinton Foundation, looking into possible pay-for-play interaction between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Foundation has been going on for more than a year led by the White Collar Crime Division, Public Corruption Branch of the Criminal Investigative Division of the FBI. The Clinton Foundation investigation is a ‘very high priority.’ Agents have interviewed and re-interviewed multiple people about the Foundation case and even before the WikiLeaks dumps these sources said agents had collected a great deal of evidence. Pressed on that, one source said ‘a lot of it, and there is an avalanche of new information coming in every day—some of it from WikiLeaks, some from new emails.’ The agents are actively and aggressively pursuing this case and they will be going back and interviewing the same people again, some for the third time. As a result of the limited immunity deals to top aides including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, the Justice Department had tentatively agreed that the Justice Department would destroy those laptops after a narrow review. We are told definitively that has not happened and those devices are currently in the FBI field office here in Washington, D.C., and are being exploited. The source points out any immunity deal is null and void if any subject has lied at any point in the investigation.
Baier also had new information on the investigation—a separate but parallel criminal probe—into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Baier reported:
Meanwhile, the classified email investigation is being run by the National Security Division of the FBI. They are currently combing through former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop. They have found emails they believe came from Hillary Clinton’s server and that also appear to be new—as in, not duplicates. Whether they contain classified material or not is not yet known, but will likely be known soon.
WATCH BRET BAIER ANNOUNCE THE BOMBSHELLS ON FOX NEWS
The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday night also broke a big story on this front.
“Secret Recordings Fueled FBI Feud in Clinton Probe,” read the headline from the Wall Street Journal’s Devlin Barrett and Christopher Matthews, with a sub-headline reading: “Agents thought they had enough material to merit aggressively pursuing investigation into Clinton Foundation.”
“Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said,” Barrett and Matthews wrote.
In the wake of Breitbart News Editor at Large and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer’s bombshell spring 2015 book Clinton Cash, the Wall Street Journal reported that FBI agents “using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation.”
Agents wanted to pursue a more aggressive investigation, they reported, but officials at the politically tainted Department of Justice wouldn’t let them. The Wall Street Journal reporters wrote:
Starting in February and continuing today, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and public-corruption prosecutors became increasingly frustrated with each other, as often happens within and between departments. At the center of the tension stood the U.S. attorney for Brooklyn, Robert Capers, who some at the FBI came to view as exacerbating the problems by telling each side what it wanted to hear, these people said. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Capers declined to comment. The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment from the State Department under Hillary Clinton. Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said.
But more importantly, FBI agents actually presented the case to prosecutors—after which they were told by officials in the politically controlled DOJ to “stand down.” Barrett and Matthews wrote:
As 2015 came to a close, the FBI and Justice Department had a general understanding that neither side would take major action on Clinton Foundation matters without meeting and discussing it first. In February, a meeting was held in Washington among FBI officials, public-integrity prosecutors and Leslie Caldwell, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division. Prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York—Mr. Capers’ office—didn’t attend, these people said. The public-integrity prosecutors weren’t impressed with the FBI presentation, people familiar with the discussion said. ‘The message was, ‘We’re done here,’ ‘ a person familiar with the matter said. Justice Department officials became increasingly frustrated that the agents seemed to be disregarding or disobeying their instructions. Following the February meeting, officials at Justice Department headquarters sent a message to all the offices involved to ‘stand down,’ a person familiar with the matter said.
Most damning for the Clintons, however, is the revelation that according to the Wall Street Journal report, even FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe confirmed that the FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation was a “validly predicated investigation” to some people at the Justice Department who tried to shut down the case. |
The saga of Meriam Yahia Ibrahim took a welcome turn overnight. With death threats coming from her brother and others, the young Christian mother whom Sudan released this week from a death sentence fled to the US embassy in Khartoum, which has provided her refuge until Sudan allows her to leave the country:
A Christian mother formerly on death row in Sudan has taken refuge at the U.S. Embassy after being released from police custody for a second time. … A video report by the BBC’s Arabic service showed the Ibrahim released for a second time late Thursday. But Ibrahim’s passage to the U.S. may still be blocked as she now faces forgery charges relating to the emergency travel documents she attempted to use to get out of the country. According to Reuters, Ibrahim was released on the condition that she not attempt to leave the country.
Well, keeping that pledge might be a little … complicated, under the circumstances. After all, when the government and your own family have explicitly threatened to kill you for your religion, it’s a little difficult to think of reasons to trust them, no? The forgery charges are trumped up, too; South Sudan certified them as accurate, but Sudan clearly wants to make an example of her. Now that she’s being sheltered at the US embassy, that’s going to be more difficult for them to accomplish.
Meriam Ibrahim spoke to the BBC from outside the embassy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tqN9gvtkGU
According to Reuters news agency, quoting her lawyer, Mrs Ibrahim was released on the condition that she remains in Sudan. “Mariam was released after a guarantor was found, but, of course, she would not be able to leave the country,” Mr Mustafa said. “I would like to thank the Sudanese people and the Sudanese police,” she told the BBC in an exclusive interview as she left custody. “I would like to thank those who stood beside me.” Asked about her plans following her release, she said: “I will leave it to God. I didn’t even have a chance to see my family after I got out of prison.”
The issue of the guarantor came up yesterday as well. Someone — it’s not clear yet who — vouched for Ibrahim and her agreement to stay in Sudan in order to win her release. If she flees, the guarantor will be liable for her refusal to obey.
According to Modern Ghana (which refers to her as Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag), the entire family is being sheltered at the US embassy while the situation gets sorted out:
One of Ishag’s lawyers, Mohanad Mustafa, told AFP late Thursday that the family had gone to the US mission after her release from a police station where she had been held since security agents stopped them from travelling to the United States on Tuesday. The family think the embassy “is a safe place for them,” Musfafa said. Ishag is charged with forgery and providing false information in relation to a South Sudanese travel document she used to try to leave the country, a day after an appeal court overturned her apostasy conviction and released her from prison. … Her father abandoned the family when Ishag was five, leaving her to be raised by her mother, according to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Khartoum, which said she joined the Catholic church shortly before she married. On May 15 a court convicted Ishag under Islamic sharia law that has been in force in Sudan since 1983 and outlaws conversions on pain of death.
Kudos to the State Department for making sure that Meriam and her family have refuge in the United States, which includes the embassy grounds under diplomatic law. That creates a stalemate, of course, as it still would be tricky to get Ibrahim and her family out of the embassy and onto a plane, short of a helicopter — which would still have to transit Sudanese airspace. The best outcome would be for Sudan to give up on its weird and inexplicable persecution of Ibrahim and allow her to leave the country with her husband and children, but thus far the Sudanese government remains obstinate in the matter.
Keep praying, and hopefully the State Department will remain even more obstinate in protecting Meriam and her family. |
Minnesota framebuilder Matt Appleman designed and built a serious carbon fiber bike with a fun and whimsical theme.
Original reporting: Paul Skilbeck
As the eminent 21st century American philosopher Homer Simpson once queried, “Donuts...is there anything they can’t do???”
Add inspiring a custom bicycle to the list of accomplishments of this ubiquitous round, frosted pastry.
Minnesota builder Matt Appleman has a degree in composite materials engineering, and a background in manufacturing wind turbine and aerospace materials. His carbon fiber bicycles are examples of a clean, functional design aesthetic that wouldn’t look out of place in an IKEA catalog.
But Appleman also loves donuts (and who doesn’t?). He devoted a page on his website to this Donuts bike where he says:
“I like donuts...as most people do. For some reason, society picked up on my like for the delicious treats and pegged me as the "donut guy". There's no going back through that toroid, but I'm ok with that. Donuts are fun, whimsical, and totally mouthwatering. I've always had straightforward, no-nonsense, authentic frame design...so why not dress up a highly engineered frame a little?”
“I usually produce simple designs, but this time I got the creative itch. I wanted to go above and beyond what I usually do,” says Appleman.
Matt Appleman's Donut Bike at the 2017 NAHBS in Salt Lake City. Photo: Paul Skilbeck
The bike that was inspired by whimsy is a serious machine, designed as a gravel grinder for the many rolling, gravel back roads around Appleman’s Winona County, Minn. home. The carbon frame has full custom geometry, to the point where Appleman makes specific tubes to suit the requirements of individual clients.
The wheels are shod with thick 42mm tires with thru axles and disk brakes, using White Industries hubs and Hed Jet 4 rims. The drivetrain is a single chainset, 44-tooth, chained to a 10-42 block. Shifting is Shimano XTR with the Di2 electronic shifting system.
Bar and stem are ENVE, integrated and “frosted” by Appleman. The pink frosting extends (drips?) onto the top tube. Appleman says that a special epoxy resin with a frosting-like consistency was used, with the plastic “jimmies”, or sprinkles, added before the epoxy set.
Looks delicious, but don't try to eat it! Appleman's epoxy "frosting". Photo: Paul Skilbeck
“There's a lot of serious bikes out there, and I've built plenty of them. I wanted to do something different, something lighthearted, something...fun! It's a winning combo, bikes and donuts, donuts and bikes,” says Appleman.
No indications at this time that Appleman plans to offer these bikes in batches of a dozen. |
Stephen Colbert’s transition to network late night television is off to a good start. On the premiere episode of his new CBS show, Colbert delivered monster ratings. And while things have leveled off a bit since, Colbert is still performing much more ably than his predecessor David Letterman was.
DON’T MISS: This transparent solar-powered battery looks like a futuristic Tony Stark invention
For anyone who’s been keeping up with the show, you’ve probably noticed that Colbert has already hosted a few luminaries from the tech world, including Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Keeping that momentum going, Colbert later tonight will be joined by Apple CEO Tim Cook where the two will presumably talk about Apple’s recent product announcements.
“Siri, put Apple CEO Tim Cook on my calendar for Tuesday, Sept. 15. Oh, and come up with some questions to ask him.” pic.twitter.com/mXutum0Bp6 — Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) September 12, 2015
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
While we wouldn’t quite call Colbert a fanboy, he seemingly does have a thing for Apple. Last year, you might recall that Colbert pulled out an iPhone 6 on-air weeks before the device launched in stores. During the same segment, Colbert gushed, with his trademark sarcasm, over the Apple Watch as well. |
What do we love more than fries? Loaded ones! Take this universal snack, and watch how restaurants interpret its star quality. Those who know their spuds will recognize the term poutine; others are more familiar with an Animal-style variety. Either way, these dishes are over-the-top delicious.
Bosscat’s Pork Belly Poutine
According to our former Clubs Editor, Kristine Hoang:
“Even if Bosscat’s poutine is on the trendier side, it meets— and succeeds— the standards of a good, traditional poutine. For one, the gravy is sizzling hot, so the ingredients melt into what looks like a gravy-based potage. The heat also causes the potatoes to moisten (but they still retain crispiness since the skin is still on), and the pork belly slices seem to dissolve into the gravy’s thickness. When the egg is poked, the yolk runs down and injects itself into the mixture. By now, it’s pointless to try to decipher whether you’re chewing on a potato wedge or a slice of pork belly, because you might be tempted to do that. Instead, accept this dish’s amalgamated nature; the marriage of the flavors and textures, after all, is its winning attribute.”
Bosscat Kitchen and Libations, 4647 MacArthur Blvd., Newport Beach, (949) 333-0917; www.bosscatkitchen.com.
Dos Chinos Stoner Fries
It’s tough not to love these fully loaded potatoes. Piled high with goodness like rice, avocado, meat, sauce and that egg. You know these are best enjoyed after some serious partying. The real question is whether you want to share ’em. Our response: Stop bothering us; we’re busy. 201 East 4th St., Ste. 139, Santa Ana, (714) 383-0414; www.doschinos.com.
G Burger’s G-Style Fries
Edwin has some strong feelings about this dish:
“It’s redolent with cracked black pepper. The grilled onions are reduced to sweetness, the bacon brings salt and fat, and the fries— unlike In-N-Out’s— are crisp. The latter is essential, considering the potatoes are doused in a potentially dampening deluge of melting cheese and a squirt bottle drizzle of homemade thousand. Heavy and rich, it’s probably all you need to eat to red-line your cholesterol and saturated fat intake for days.”
G Burger has locations in Irvine and Fountain Valley. www.gburger.com.
Haven Gastropub’s Braised Beef Cheek Poutine
When we’re not ready for dinner, but want something to tide us over and have with our beer, we think poutine. Simple pommes frites are drenched in a red wine-rosemary gravy. Afterwards, cheddar cheese curds get all nice and melty on top. Looks like a hot mess. Tastes oh-so indulgent. Another round of beer, please! 190 S. Glassell St., Orange, (714) 221-0680; www.havengastropub.com.
Krave’s Loaded Kogi Fries
Best known for their Korean fried chicken, we appreciate the straightforward approach from Krave. Topped with marinated ribeye, scallions, jalapenos and sriracha hot sauce, it’s a meal onto itself. We don’t recommend using your hands, unless you are a fan of sticky fingers. Chow down on an order while you’re waiting for chicken. 2819 Main St., Irvine, (949) 379-6075; www.cravekrave.com.
Mighty Kitchen’s Street Cart Fries
The recently reviewed Mighty Kitchen had many oozy options.
” And that’s too bad because I could’ve used any of those things to offset the side of fries my combo platter came with, which I further enriched by upgrading it with crumbled chorizo, pepper jack cheese sauce, bits of tomato and squirts of garlic mayo. Though the standard fast-food-variety shoestrings went quite well with the toppings— becoming a salty, spicy, messy tangle of potato, cheese and meat— I couldn’t make much of a dent. But I was surprised to discover when I reheated the leftovers in a toaster oven the next day, the thing tasted even better.”
Mighty Kitchen, 11122 Los Alamitos Boulevard, (562) 493-6489; www.mightykitchen.com.
Mix Mix’s Cheese Steak Fries
Served as a snack, we got our first taste of their saucy fries over happy hour. Crisp Belgium style frites hold up to chef’s house made cheese whiz. Bits of scallion and sweet onion make way for oxtail. We found ourselves apologizing for decimating this shareable, but we can just order another. 300 N. Main St., Santa Ana; (714) 836-5158; www.mixmixkitchenbar.com.
Slapfish’s Chowder Fries
In 2012, Slapfish got three mentions in our Top 100. But only one belongs in our roundup. How weird is it that we are going to quote ourselves?
“I’m sure it’s our Bay Area roots calling, but nothing says home like piping hot clam chowder. And not the red stuff, either (stay in Manhattan!). We’re talking creamy, tater-on-tater action. The base is a pile of thick-cut natural spuds. Take what’s already a fried side and douse it with a ladle full of clam chowder made with red potatoes. Their toppings simply reinforce our devotion to this meal: toasted garlic, chewy double smoked bacon, herbs, plus their signature spice blend. What we end up with is a savory forkful/spoonful of warmth. It soothes our insides on a brisk Huntington Beach evening. Score one more for seafood so fresh, it ought to be slapped.”
Slapfish has more locations than we can keep track of. www.slapfishrestaurant.com.
Wok N Tandoor’s Szechuan Fries
Apparently, our restaurant reviewer eats a lot of fries.
“They actually reside on another part of the menu with the rest of the Indo-Chinese stir-fries. Bur if they may only loosely fit the definition of chaat or Indian food, they’re also the most filling. One order is enough for two and can pass as a meatless main course. The fries are wok-tossed to coat each crisp crinkle-cut potato with a sticky, not-inauthentic sweet-and-spicy Chinese glaze. If you’re feeling carb-crazy, it even goes well eaten with rice.”
Wok N Tandoor, 1948 North Tustin Street, Orange, (714) 782-7770; www.wokntandoor.com.
Wursthaus’ Drunken Fries
From the layout to the menu, you’ll see similarities between the LA Wurstkuche and DTSA’s Wursthaus. However, Edwin is quick to point out one difference.
“Perhaps the one important thing Wursthaus can say it has that sets it apart from Wurstkuche is the option of topping its fries with a Thousand Island-esque house Andalouse sauce, caramelized onions and any sausage. Our server described it as a version of animal-style fries, but for Wursthaus’ sake, don’t tell In-N-Out.”
Wursthaus, 305 East 4th Street, Santa Ana, (714) 760-4333; www.wursthausdtsa.com. |
I’m happy to announce ConfigMgr Client Health version 0.7.2. This version includes improved testing on the ConfigMgr Client, option to run more tests in monitor only, and a few bug fixes.
Download location: Microsoft Technet Galleries
Full documentation: https://www.andersrodland.com/configmgr-client-health/
Changes in version 0.7.2
New check on the ConfigMgr Client: CcmSQLCE.log exists and CM Client is not in debug mode. Local CM client database files (*.SDF) will be removed before CM client is reinstalled with a /forceinstall parameter added to the installation parameters to ensure any previous versions are uninstalled first.
Improved testing on WUAHandler.log, now testing against error code “0x87d00692” in addition to previously “0x80004005”
Improved DNS check for Window 8.1 / Server 2012 R2 and higher.
Added option “Fix” in config.xml for the following checks: BITS, DNS, Hardware Inventory, Software Metering and Updates. Set fix to “True” for script to fix any errors, or “False” to only monitor and report back.
Script will now trigger the CM client built in health check (ccmeval) when it’s done.
Bugfixes:
Local log file now honors MaxLogHistory configured in config.xml
Services defined as Automatic (Delayed Start) should now configure correctly
There are some changes to config.xml so make sure to implement those before you upgrade.
This version of the script requires database version 0.7.0. There is no need to upgrade SQL database if you’r already at this version.
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Scott Olson/Getty Images If you drive — or even if you don't — fuel prices are probably on your mind.
But paying more at the pump isn't the only thing that people are concerned about. They're also increasingly aware that relying on gasoline is terrible for the planet.
As far back as 1826, people have been researching alternatives to highly polluting gasoline. A brief history of biofuel shows that, in that year, a new environmentally friendlier option hit the market: ethanol. It was made by converting parts of plants into energy.
Ethanol soared in popularity during World War II as a result of fuel demands, but it never became the dominant source.
But here's the problem: It's always been more expensive than lead fuel. On top of that, countless companies have failed to keep promises of big improvements in ethanol, leading to a "boy who cried wolf" stigma surrounding the science.
But a new project is closer than ever to solving that dilemma.
Xylome researcher Thomas Jeffries and a team of supporters from the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) have tapped into a wild new source for ethanol production. They found that a yeast — S. passalidarum — living inside beetle guts is super efficient at converting xylose, a plant sugar, into energy. A little bit of engineering has made it even more efficient.
Timothy Donohue, principal investigator at the GLBRC and a microbe expert, says that "bacteria prefer to eat sugars like glucose and tend either not to metabolize xylose or do so very slowly and poorly."
REUTERS/Jerry Lampen
This is a problem considering that it means a waste of resources within the plant materials.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lists other alternative fuels, such as methane and electricity from wind. It's true that neither of these produce as much emissions — wind doesn't produce any — as the CO 2 released by the burning of lead fuel, but they aren't perfect, either.
Methane is released into the atmosphere at a lower rate, but it is also much more potent than CO 2 , enabling it to trap more heat and further global warming.
And wind energy may seem glamorous from the outside, but it's got its own flaws as well. Wind turbines result in mortality of birds and bats in a plethora of ways, including direct collision, habitat fragmentation caused by the need for space, and sudden changes in air pressure around the turbines leading to traumatic injury.
Few options seem to be able to compete with the combination of environmental friendliness and efficiency that Xylome's new product hopes to provide.
Says Donohue:
The more xylose that microbes will eat, the more fuel that can be produced (in this case, ethanol). Xylome is using these improved microbes to enhance ethanol production, thus providing more fuel per ton of biomass that is processed. This will also enhance profitability of making other fuels or chemicals from xylose in the future.
The new method works for not only the traditional corn crops, but also different types of grasses and wood and the nonedible parts of plants. This means that ethanol production isn't depleting an ever-demanded food supply. An even bigger bonus is that existing manufacturing locations will be used for the new production rather building new ones. Win-win for the environment!
The process is expected to totally change the economic dynamics of ethanol, as these strains will allow companies to better convert xylose into a host of products. The new method will make its public debut on June 20 to 23 at the International Fuel Ethanol Workshop & Expo in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. |
Here you will find all our free magic products. Some are individual tricks or samplers, others are entire ebooks or full length download videos.
If you are new to Lybrary.com or new to ebooks, download videos and digital media in general, this is a good place to start. Simply add one of the free products to your shopping cart, go through the checkout (there will of course be no payment) and then download the free product from your account.
It is also a great place to browse if you do not want to spend any money right now, but still want to find something interesting to read or watch.
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Suzy the Psychic Fish Dave Arch If you ever have the occasion to perform by a lake, ocean or river and would like to present a memorable performance piece, you might be happy you've downloaded and read this. The last time the author performed it he was on a pontoon boat in the middle of a lake. The magician introduces his mind reading fish - swimming unconcerned in a small plastic bag. The fish is released into the water and then performs an extraordinary feat of dramatic mind reading prowess. 1st edition 2019, 2 pages. 2019 / 2 / 7 $0.00 Au$0.00 Ca$0.00 €0.00 £0.00 ¥0.00 buy nowadd to cart to wish list PDF
Water Wizardry Dave Arch The Linking Ring magazine where I document ideas for turning your local craft store into your very own local brick and mortar magic store. This offering represents a small part of my passionate journey to document just how much entertaining magic can be created with two paper sacks, a bottle of water, and a paper cup. I would feel badly having simple ideas like this one get lost over time under a growing pile of more expensive gimmicks, books, and DVD's. In furtherance of this quest of mine, please also visit my new monthly column Craft Store Magic inmagazine where I document ideas for turning your local craft store into your very own local brick and mortar magic store. 1st edition 2019, length 7 min 2019 / 1 / 24 $0.00 Au$0.00 Ca$0.00 €0.00 £0.00 ¥0.00 buy nowadd to cart to wish list MP4 (video)
Alphabet Soup Dave Arch Many have seen this classic observation test. The rules are simple. Read through the paragraph in the logo only once - counting the number of F's in the paragraph. Most will find three F's. Some might even find six. Few will find all of them. And there are some very good reasons for that explained in this release. When understood, you'll be able to create your own paragraph to market your show in a manner that others just might keep to show others. 1st edition 2019, 1 page. 2019 / 1 / 11 $0.00 Au$0.00 Ca$0.00 €0.00 £0.00 ¥0.00 buy nowadd to cart to wish list PDF
Overhead Dave Arch No doubt you've seen "two person telepathy" party stunts where one person leaves the room while the other remains. After coming back into the room, the person is able to discern an object selected by those in the room to the puzzlement of those watching. This obscure version has one of the partners leave the room and stay in the other room while the remaining partner holds his/her hand above the heads of several people in the room. Each time s/he holds his/her hand above a head s/he repeats the single word "Overhead." Then finally the partner remaining in the room holds his/her hand over... 2018 / 12 / 14 $0.00 Au$0.00 Ca$0.00 €0.00 £0.00 ¥0.00 buy nowadd to cart to wish list PDF
Number Nonsense Dave Arch In decades of reading and performing magic, only four number-based brainteasers made my short list for consistent use with my audiences. I share them with you as a thank you for the support you've shown my work on Lybrary.com. The four number-based puzzlers in this package made the cut based on the following criteria: Each had to be obscure enough that my audiences would not have seen or heard of them before;
Although based on numbers, the process in the presentation needed to be direct and simple; and
Most importantly . . . each needed to illustrate a proven principle essential for... 2018 / 11 / 15 $0.00 Au$0.00 Ca$0.00 €0.00 £0.00 ¥0.00 buy nowadd to cart to wish list MP4 (video)
Squeaky Monte Dave Arch After being inspired by the YouTube videos where a chimpanzee or dog shows amazement at the performance of a magic trick, the magician tells the story of a magic trick he created for his dog. The audience plays the role of the dog as the magician shows that one of the dog toys squeaks while two do not. He then mixes the three and although the audience is sure they followed the squeaking toy, they are fooled multiple times even when the magician takes pity and reduces the number of toys down to only two. Once you've purchased three rubber squeaky dog toys it'll take you less than a minute to... 2018 / 10 / 26 $0.00 Au$0.00 Ca$0.00 €0.00 £0.00 ¥0.00 buy nowadd to cart to wish list MP4 (video)
Gypsy Eradication Ritual Dave Arch Just in time for your Halloween shows. While the rest of the group stands in a circle reading in unison the ritual instructions printed on what appears to be an aged piece of parchment paper, the person who'll be receiving the benefits of the ritual sits at a small table in the center of the circle with a piece of paper, matches, pen, candle, and plate. As that person follows the instructions being read by the group, the ritual unfolds - working itself. The only suggestion is to collect the ritual instruction sheets at the end of the ceremony to keep the mystery in the experience - preventing... 2018 / 9 / 10 $0.00 Au$0.00 Ca$0.00 €0.00 £0.00 ¥0.00 buy nowadd to cart to wish list PDF |
One took video of the confrontation, a graphic, two-minute clip that has since circulated the Internet.
Police said Thomas tried to run after officers searched his backpack and found items that weren’t his. They called in additional officers when he continued to resist, and the scene continued to escalate as witnesses watched.
What happened next has Thomas’ family, acquaintances and much of the city outraged.
The suspect was described as a homeless man with long hair and no shirt carrying a backpack, police said. When officers arrived at the scene, they found 37-year-old Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic homeless man who had become a fixture in downtown Fullerton and surrounding cities.
At about 8:30 p.m. on the night of July 5, Fullerton police officers responded to reports that a man was trying to get into cars parked near a bus depot on South Pomona Avenue.
An arrest that ended in the death of a mentally ill homeless man in Fullerton has many residents outraged and city officials looking for answers.
In the video (caution: contains strong language), Thomas can be heard screaming over the clicking sounds of the Taser. Bystanders also offer a commentary of the scene unfolding before their eyes.
“They’ve Tased him five times already,” a woman says. “That’s enough!”
“They’re freaking ruthless,” another man says.
Moments later: “I don’t know why they don’t just put cuffs on him and call it a night, instead of hitting him.”
Thomas sustained serious injuries, and was taken by ambulance first to St. Jude Medical Center, then to UCI Medical Center. He died five days later after being removed from life support.
An initial autopsy did not determine a cause of death, and Orange County coroner’s officials are awaiting additional test results.
The incident has caused an outcry in Fullerton. On Saturday, 250 protesters stood outside the Fullerton Police Department, wearing T-shirts bearing Thomas’ name and holding signs condemning police.
Later that evening, a candlelight vigil was held in front of City Hall. City council members said they’ve fielded hundreds of calls and emails about the incident.
“There seems to be a general sense of outrage and fear,” Councilman Bruce Whitaker said.
The Orange County district attorney’s office is conducting an investigation, standard practice for in-custody deaths and officer-related incidents.
About 25 investigators have interviewed about 80 witnesses thus far, officials said, but expect to talk to about 100.
The FBI also has opened an independent investigation, after a request from Orange County Supervisor Shawn Nelson to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Police Chief Michael Sellers said in a July 28 statement that his department was fully cooperating with investigators and was looking into the matter internally.
“The department believes it is in the best interest of everyone — the police department, Mr. Thomas’ family and the Fullerton community as a whole — to have a thorough and independent investigation conducted by an outside agency,” he said.
Of the six officers involved, one was placed on administrative leave. The others -– whose names were not released -– have been reassigned to nonpatrol duty. Two were injured during the altercation.
At the bus depot where Thomas was beaten, well-wishers have created a memorial, with heart-shaped balloons, sunflowers and candles surrounding a street lamp, bearing a sign that reads, "In loving memory of Kelly Thomas ... in God's loving arms now" and "Shame on the Fullerton Police."
Strangers stop to light candles or leave offerings. No one at the bus station Monday had witnessed the beating but several remembered Thomas.
"He was harmless," said Amanda Hendrie, 22, who remembered he used to go into the Target store where she works. "You could tell that something was wrong, but it wasn't a violent sort of disturbance."
Thomas' mother, Cathy Thomas, recalled him as a bright, loving kid before the onset of schizophrenia in his 20s. After that he struggled, going off and on his medication and on and off the streets.
He would stop by her house in Placentia but wouldn't tell her where he was staying. She believed he had been in Fullerton for five or six months.
"The police officers who patrol there would have known him. They knew Kelly, they knew he had mental problems, and yet they did this to him," she said.
His father, Ron Thomas, a retired Orange County sheriff's deputy, said he doesn't believe Kelly was trying to break into cars. The items in Kelly's backpack that police believed were stolen may have been letters he had picked out of the trash outside a nearby attorney's office, Ron Thomas said.
Kelly's parents said they wanted to see all six of the police officers in jail. They expressed frustration with the city's lack of action.
"They don't know what to do, it's clear, so they're doing nothing," he said.
Both the district attorney’s office and police department have asked anyone with information to contact investigators at (714) 347-8813.
ALSO:
Woman falls to death at Yosemite's Half Dome
Wife of man who tried to fix hernia with knife seeks help
Body in shallow grave identified as Rancho Cucamonga woman
-- Abby Sewell in Fullerton and Kate Mather in Los Angeles |
A few days ago, my friend David asked me if I could help him with a card trick. I said I could, hence this post. I managed to pin David down in front of my camera long enough for him to demonstrate the trick; a full explanation follows this video:
The basic trick is pretty well-known: Card Colm wrote about it for his MAA column a few years ago, and collected a pretty extensive list of people who have written on the subject. David came across it through Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham’s book Magical Mathematics, but hadn’t read the book in detail before we tried to work the trick out for ourselves.
A de Bruijn sequence of length $k$ on an alphabet $A$ is a cyclic sequence which contains all possible strings of length $k$ exactly once. It follows that if you are given a string of $k$ letters, you can tell exactly where it occurs in the sequence. Since it doesn’t matter what the symbols in the alphabet $A$ are as long as they’re all different, we can just refer to a de Bruijn sequence $(k,n)$, containing all subsequences of length $k$ using the numbers $\{0,\dots,n-1\}$.
We decided we were going to assign each card in a standard deck a 6-digit binary string (because $2^6 = 64 \gt 52$) and to arrange them in the order of a $(6,2)$ de Bruijn sequence. Then, if we asked someone to cut the deck, draw out six cards and tell us their colours, we could work out exactly which cards they had in their hand.
There can be more than one de Bruijn sequence for each choice of $k$ and $n$, so we could pick the one that was easiest to construct. For binary sequences, this rule always generates a de Bruijn sequence of length $k$: write $k-1$ zeroes followed by a $1$, then subsequent letters are given by $x_{i+6} := x_i+x_{i+1} \pmod 2$ — add two adjacent numbers to get the one six places along. Because addition modulo $2$ is the same thing as subtraction modulo $2$, the same trick works backwards: $x_i = x_{i+1} + x_{i+6}$.
So the only thing left to do was to assign binary strings to cards. I decided that four digits for face value and two for suit would do, since it lets you split the calculation up into two small steps. So the face values go from $0 = A$, to $12 = K$, and the suits go Diamonds, Clubs, Hearts, Spades. In a hand of six cards drawn from the deck, the sequence of red or black colours gives the value of the last card drawn.
The only problem is that there are twelve strings representing face values greater than $12$, and I don’t think it’s possible to construct a de Bruijn sequence where they all occur in one block. But equally, because there are $64$ six-digit binary strings, any sequence we used would have twelve unused strings at the end. So we had to make one kludge and manually swap “bad” strings in the usable part of the sequence with “good” ones at the end.
Now, decoding binary strings is pretty tedious work, and finding these unusable strings is especially so, so I quickly wrote a Python script to do the calculations for me. Here it is:
# de Bruijn card trick computatorator # by Christian Perfect # based on a trick by Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham #names of cards faces = ['King','Ace','2','3','4','5','6','7','8','9','10','Jack','Queen'] suits = ['Diamonds','Clubs','Hearts','Spades'] #generate de bruijn sequence sequence = [0,0,0,0,0,1] for i in range(6,64): sequence.append( (sequence[i-6]+sequence[i-5]) % 2 ) #get a string of binary digits representing an integer def binarise(n,length): digits=[] while n>0: digits.insert(0,int(n%2)) n=(n-n%2)/2 digits = [0]*(length-len(digits))+digits #pad to the desired length return digits #decode a string of binary digits to an integer def debinarise(digits): n=0 for i in digits: n*=2 n+=i return n #decode a six-digit binary string to a card def decode_sequence(seq): number = debinarise(seq[:4]) suit = debinarise(seq[4:]) return number,suit #turn a card into a six-digit binary string def encode_card(card): number,suit = card return ''.join([str(x) for x in binarise(number,4)+binarise(suit,2)]) #display a card's binary encoding and its name def show_card(card): number,suit = card return '%s: %s of %s' % (encode_card(card), faces[number], suits[suit]) # The actual computation! sequence*=2 #take two copies of the sequence to cope with the cycle at the end # Get the ordering of the (64, not all real) cards from the sequence cards = [decode_sequence(sequence[i:i+6]) for i in range(0,64)] # The deck of cards consists of the first 52 deck = cards[:52] # Get the unused cards from the end of the 64-deck which have usable values castoffs = [(x,y) for (x,y) in cards[52:] if x<13] # Separate them into red and black castoffs_red = [(x,y) for (x,y) in castoffs if y%2==0] castoffs_black = [(x,y) for (x,y) in castoffs if y%2==1] # Get the cards from the 52-deck that don't have usable values toswap = [(x,y) for (x,y) in deck if x>=13] swaps = {} # Match up bad cards in the 52-deck with good cards in the castoffs for card in toswap: number,suit = card b=castoffs_red.pop() if suit%2==0 else castoffs_black.pop() swaps[card]=b # Show the resulting ordering of the real 52-card deck for i in range(0,52): digits = sequence[i:i+6] card = decode_sequence(digits) if card in swaps.keys(): card = swaps[card] print(show_card(card)) # Show which bad codes are swapped with which good ones print('Swaps') for a,b in swaps.items(): print('%s -> %s' % (encode_card(a),show_card(b)))
And here’s its output:
000001: Ace of Clubs 000010: Ace of Hearts 000100: 2 of Diamonds 001000: 3 of Diamonds 010000: 5 of Diamonds 100001: 9 of Clubs 000011: Ace of Spades 000110: 2 of Hearts 001100: 4 of Diamonds 011000: 7 of Diamonds 110001: King of Clubs 100010: 9 of Hearts 000101: 2 of Clubs 001010: 3 of Hearts 010100: 6 of Diamonds 101001: Jack of Clubs 010011: 5 of Spades 100111: 10 of Spades 001111: 4 of Spades 011110: 8 of Hearts 011111: 8 of Spades 000000: Ace of Diamonds 100000: 9 of Diamonds 101000: Jack of Diamonds 010001: 5 of Clubs 100011: 9 of Spades 000111: 2 of Spades 001110: 4 of Hearts 011100: 8 of Diamonds 101111: Queen of Spades 110010: King of Hearts 100100: 10 of Diamonds 001001: 3 of Clubs 010010: 5 of Hearts 100101: 10 of Clubs 001011: 3 of Spades 010110: 6 of Hearts 101101: Queen of Clubs 011011: 7 of Spades 010111: 6 of Spades 101110: Queen of Hearts 011101: 8 of Clubs 101011: Jack of Spades 110000: King of Diamonds 101100: Queen of Diamonds 011001: 7 of Clubs 110011: King of Spades 100110: 10 of Hearts 001101: 4 of Clubs 011010: 7 of Hearts 010101: 6 of Clubs 101010: Jack of Hearts Swaps 110101 -> 010101 110110 -> 110000 110111 -> 010111 111101 -> 011111 111001 -> 101111 111011 -> 101011 111010 -> 000000 110100 -> 100000
The Python script constructs the de Bruijn sequence, decodes it into a sequence of 64 cards (some of them virtual), finds bad cards in the deck of 52 and swaps them with good cards in the pile of twelve “castoffs” at the end, making sure the colour is preserved. It turns out there are eight bad cards in the deck that need swapping.
So, we only need to remember eight pairs of binary strings and a simple iterative rule which constructs the sequence in order to perform the trick. Not bad for an afternoon’s work!
References
Universal cycles for combinatorial structures by Chung, Diaconis and Graham
Products of Universal Cycles by Diaconis and Graham
Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas that Animate Great Magic Tricks by Diaconis and Graham
What’s Black and Red and Red All Over? by Colm Mulcahy |
Democrat Doug Jones’s historic win in Alabama cuts the GOP’s lead in the Senate to 51-49, and gives the Democrats a narrow path to winning back the majority in the 2018 midterm elections.
Democrats face a tough task retaking the Senate, as their party has to defend more than 20 seats while Republicans are only defending eight. But President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE’s low approval ratings and a backlash against Republicans from suburban voters, first seen in Virginia’s elections last month and now in Alabama, are good news for Democrats.
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The path to a Senate majority is straightforward.
Democrats will need to gain two seats, first by securing a win in Nevada, the only state Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE won in 2016 with an incumbent Republican senator on the ballot next year. Arizona, where Sen. Jeff Flake Jeffrey (Jeff) Lane FlakeBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Poll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell Trump suggests Heller lost reelection bid because he was 'hostile' during 2016 presidential campaign MORE is retiring, has also long been seen as a potential pickup, while Democrats have a strong candidate for Tennessee’s open seat.
The party is also more hopeful about taking out Sen. Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzTrump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Trump endorses Cornyn for reelection as O'Rourke mulls challenge MORE (R) in Texas. The Lone Star State, long thought of as a GOP stronghold, could be attainable if anti-Trump sentiment mounts.
“At the beginning of the year, for a variety of different reasons, I didn’t think reclaiming the majority was possible for Democrats,” said Jim Manley, former aide to former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid Harry Mason ReidBottom Line Brennan fires back at 'selfish' Trump over Harry Reid criticism Trump rips Harry Reid for 'failed career' after ex-Dem leader slams him in interview MORE (D-Nev.).
“But in the last couple of months, I think it’s become more doable. What happened in Alabama is just the icing on the cake,” he said.
But while Alabama has Democrats optimistic about their chances of taking GOP seats, the party also has to protect its own incumbents. Trump won 10 states that are represented by Democrats up for reelection in 2018, carrying half of those states by double-digit margins.
Democrats acknowledge that hanging on to all 10 of those seats will be difficult, but they hope the ongoing feud between Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (Ky.) and Breitbart News chief Stephen Bannon over primaries could hurt the GOP’s ability to unite behind the best Republican candidates.
Democrats also feel encouraged by the results in the Virginia and Alabama elections. Enthusiasm in those races was high, particularly among suburban, female, black and young voters.
“There will be many more Alabamas in 2018,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer Charles (Chuck) Ellis SchumerBrennan fires back at 'selfish' Trump over Harry Reid criticism Trump rips Harry Reid for 'failed career' after ex-Dem leader slams him in interview Harry Reid: 'I don't see anything' Trump is doing right MORE (D-N.Y.) told reporters on Wednesday.
“So you put that all together — the base being energized, millennials, overwhelmingly Democratic; suburbs, swinging back to the Democrats — and it means that things are looking good for us,” he said.
The most realistic opportunities for Democrats will come in Nevada and Arizona. But Democrats are now looking beyond the two most vulnerable GOP-held seats.
Democrats were already feeling energized in Tennessee, after recruiting former Gov. Phil Bredesen to run for the seat. Bredesen was the last Democrat to win statewide office there, though he hasn’t campaigned for office in 11 years.
The party might also re-examine their chances in Texas, where Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke is looking to unseat Cruz. A Democrat hasn’t won a Senate seat in Texas since 1988.
High-profile Democrats, including Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro Joaquin CastroHouse to push back at Trump on border ACLU calls on House members to block Trump's emergency declaration The Hill's Morning Report - A pivotal week for Trump MORE, have already ruled out Senate runs. But some Democrats are hoping that potential candidates who have decided against challenging Republican incumbents in red states will reconsider after the recent Democratic victories.
With so many Democrats up for reelection, though, party resources could be stretched too thin to boost candidates with more difficult bids against Republican incumbents.
For example, Democrats cheered Bredesen’s bid in part because he has a reputation for putting his personal wealth behind his bids. But for now, Bredesen has said he won’t self-fund, which could be a setback for the party.
Meanwhile, O’Rourke isn’t accepting money from political action committees — a move that might endear him to campaign finance reformers, but will cut off another potential source of cash. O’Rourke has proven to be a prolific fundraiser, but he’ll need an extra boost to compete against Cruz.
“I think the smart play is to think real hard about going beyond those 10 senators up for reelection and start figuring out how to put some money into some other races that could, in fact, be winnable now,” Manley said.
Still, it remains to be seen if Democratic success in Alabama can translate. Jones pulled off his upset in part because he ran against a uniquely flawed candidate who had built up a record of controversies even before he was accused of pursuing teenagers sexually — all factors that could have helped Jones’s showing with black voters and women.
“We nominated a very flawed candidate even before the revelations came out in Alabama,” said Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee spokesman. “We shouldn’t forget that anger or dissatisfaction with a candidate is often the greatest [get-out-the-vote] device you have.” |
The American League East is going to be tough this year. The Yankees are projected to win 81 games and yet still finish last, is how tough. That same win total, for example, would place a team in a tie for second in the AL Central’s projected standings.
There are reasons to be more bullish on the Yankees than the projections suggest. Plenty of smart people around the team are. The young core, consisting of Gary Sanchez, Greg Bird, Didi Gregorius, Aaron Judge, and Clint Frazier, provides a fair amount of upside. If the bullpen proves to offer as much depth as it is does excellence at the top, you’d have two-thirds of a really good team.
About the rotation, though. First, there’s the front three. Opening Day starter Masahiro Tanaka has been great since he signed with the team — among the majors’ top-20 starters by most metrics. Michael Pineda remains an enigma, a pitcher with elite strikeout-minus-walk rates paired with bottom-tier ball-in-play results. Even with his contradictions, though, Pineda can still provide value for a team that scores runs. At 36, CC Sabathia isn’t a front-line starter anymore, but a discovery of a cutter last year may have given him a few more years of usefulness on the back end.
And then what? Who will finish out the rotation this year? Who will step forward between Luis Severino, Bryan Mitchell, Chad Green, Luis Cessa, and Jordan Montgomery? If they’re any good, they could help fuel a surprise team in a tough division.
In the high-variance game that is young pitching, the best news for the Yankees is that they have five worthy candidates for the last two spots. Projections don’t love that depth, but there are some real reasons for optimism about the pitchers in that group. For the most part, for example, they all have velocity!
Whatever happens, two of these five will throw a ton more innings than the other three. If they’re good, they could help fuel a resurgent Yankee team. So let’s get to know them now, using a few key stats to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their arsenals. Let’s have a few moving images, too.
Luis Severino Pitch Percentiles Pitch Spin Movement Velocity Four-Seam 73rd 71st 95th Change 56th 41st Slider 70th 93rd Four-seam movement = ride
Changeup movement = drop times two plus fade
Changeup velocity = velocity gap off fastball
Slider movement = drop
It’s good to start with a strong fastball, and Severino has gotten our attention with a booming fastball with a little ride. The rest of the picture has been a story of stops and starts.
Early on, Severino was all nerves and gas. His slider was too hard. Over the course of the year, it got softer, added more drop, and started getting whiffs. If you measure just from July 1st, when he settled in with the bigger slider, he had a pitch with a 14% whiff rate, which is just barely above average.
Even if you give him a plus fastball and an above-average slider, you really need a third pitch from Severino. The change… it’s not so good. At least not for whiffs. It’s below average by movement and velocity, and it didn’t get better as the season went on. In fact, he stopped trusting the pitch. Here’s the hope, though: that the pitch is actually in the 90th percentile when it comes to arm-side movement, as it proved to be last year. If so, that’s good for grounders. Sure enough, Severino had a 46% ground-ball rate on the changeup last year, and some months where it only got grounders.
If Severino puts it together, it’s because he gets grounders with the change, and whiffs with this type of slider.
Bryan Mitchell Pitch Percentiles Pitch Spin Movement Velocity Four-Seam 52nd 67th 82nd Curve 73rd 86th Cutter 91st Four-seam movement = ride
Curve movement = drop
Bryan Mitchell throws the ball hard, and he’s probably in the cat-bird seat for the fifth-starter role. He’s pitched more innings than anyone else this spring, and has had a strikeout per inning and four strikeouts per walk, so the results have been fine.
But the fastball isn’t as good as Severino’s — and might not be as good as Chad Green’s, either. When it comes to fastball spin, you mostly want a lot of it, but you can also succeed with very little spin, since that usually adds drop. Mitchell’s in that deadly halfway spot, and he doesn’t add movement to make it great.
His curve is great. It’s hard and has tons of movement, and you can even toggle the parameters to make it even more interesting. Among the 78 curveballs that average more than 81 mph, Mitchell’s seven inches of drop ranks ninth.
We don’t know what makes a cutter great, but at least Mitchell has a hard cutter. So far it’s had average results, with a 10% whiff rate. Curves aren’t known for their whiffs, so the 10% whiff rate on his curve is only a bit below average. He had a great debut for the Yankees, but unless Mitchell has plus command, or the splitter on which he’s working this spring is legit, he doesn’t have an obvious road towards excellence. For what it’s worth, he ranked in the 72nd percentile on BP’s Called Strikes Above Average, but didn’t have plus walk rates in the minors.
If it’s not all called strikes on the curve, it’s probably on the splitter to keep Mitchell overperforming his prospect pedigree. Here it is, in action, this spring:
Chad Green Pitch Percentiles Pitch Spin Movement Velocity Four-Seam 93rd 87th 79th Silder 65th 59th Cutter 80th Four-seam movement = ride
Slider movement = drop
Though it didn’t work out as awesomely for the last Green(e) in New York, and they both had multiple sliders and questionable changeups, I have hope for this year’s version. For one, his fastball is better. This fastball might be the sneaky best in the crew, actually. Severino’s has more gas, but very few spin it as well as Green. That’s how Green got an insane 16% whiff rate on his fastball last year.
The slider and cutter are different pitches, there’s no doubt. There’s six inches of drop difference between the two pitches, and six mph of velocity. The slider has good drop and velo, important qualities for a slider, so we can believe his 15%, above-average whiff rate on the pitch. The cutter gets half the whiffs, but it got a 50% grounder rate against lefties, and he didn’t give up a home run on it.
It’s possible those two pitches will be enough with the great fastball, but we’re probably still hoping for more. You may have heard this one before, but Green throws a splitter that he could stand to throw more often. Right now, it’s about perfectly average over the 19 he’s thrown. It’s not super impressive to the eye, either:
Luis Cessa Pitch Percentiles Pitch Spin Movement Velocity Four-Seam 40th 62nd 78th Slider 51st 45th Curve 19th 73rd Change 48th 83rd Four-seam movement = ride
Slider movement = drop
Curve movement = drop
Changeup movement = 2x drop, 1x fade
Changeup velocity = difference off of 4s
Cessa doesn’t have a single pitch that would beat out the standouts above. His fastball ranks behind all three or four other contenders for the back end of the rotation, his slider looks almost exactly average, his curve has some giddyup but little drop, and though his change has a good 10-mph velocity gap, the movement isn’t sufficient enough to make it above average.
In sum, it looks like Cessa could be a decent back-end guy, but he doesn’t have the upside of the guys ahead of him. His upside won’t come from adding another pitch, at least: he already has those. Given his lack of spin, it might make sense to drop the arm angle and go for movement over velocity and spin. If he does add grounders to an average slider and three usable pitches, he could easily be a good fifth starter.
For now, he’s a sixth or seventh starter who can wow you every once in a while with a beautiful tight slider like this one from last year:
Jordan Montgomery Pitch Grades Fastball Slider Curveball Changeup Command 55/55 50/55 50/50 50/55 50/55 SOURCE: Eric Longenhagen
There’s been some pushing for the least experienced member of this crew to get a job. While it’s true that he’s been pitching well this spring (13 strikeouts and 2 walks in 14.2 innings), and has been showing real improvement (his slider has more depth now), I’m not sure he’s leap-frogged anyone just yet. Eric Longenhagen, while appreciating the improvement in the slider, still thought that the pitcher “lacks a true swing-and-miss secondary.” I’m not sure “Montgomery’s command of a diverse pallet of junk should allow him to negotiate through big-league lineups multiple times” is a booming recommendation.
As River Avenue Blues points out, those spring numbers have come in the second half of games, when the competition thins. There’s an open spot in the bullpen, and maybe the Yankees will use Jordan Montgomery as the left-handed multi-inning middle reliever to complement the returning Adam Warren. Baseball, it seems, is producing more 100-inning relievers like this, and it might be the best place for a guy with command of multiple pitches, no real out pitch, and this spot on the starting-rotation depth chart.
There’s still the fact of his improvements this spring. he’s up to sitting 92-plus by his own account, so maybe he’ll have above-average velocity to go with a good curve and that deceptive delivery. Maybe this slider will be the out pitch he needs to make his way into the rotation?
This collection of arms isn’t built on a collection of top-10-prospect types. Most of these are finds, players who have pushed their way into this opportunity by producing. They each have their own set of flaws that have kept them off those lists, but they also have their strengths that make them possible breakouts in the future.
Will Green’s high-spin fastball, paired with two breaking balls, help him to continue putting up good strikeout rates despite the lack of a changeup, or will he improve his change? Will Mitchell’s splitter take hold? Will Severino learn to use his changeup to induce grounders?
It’s an interesting group of pitchers — each is almost an archetype of possibly undervalued starters. In Severino, Mitchell, Green, Cessa, and Montgomery, you have your velocity-over-everything guy, a high-velocity curveball dude, a spin-rate king, a kitchen-sink starter, and a deceptive, way-over-the-top guy. There isn’t a great changeup in the bunch, really, and “does he have a changeup?” was once a dividing line between the rotation and the bullpen.
For any of us following the group, we probably have our favorite, and so I’ll admit to being partial to Green. He has three pitches, even if one is a cutter, and the spin and velocity to get whiffs. He doesn’t have command issues, and if he trusts the splitter more this year, that’s just gravy. He’s starting in a great place with that fastball. If I had to pick two, and Severino was going to start the season in the minors, I might just add Montgomery, who has never relieved before, to see how his deception and newfound stuff will work against major leaguers.
At the very least, it does seem likely that one of these will step forward and shore up a hole for the Yankees this year. Start with (diverse) quantity, and you should find your quality eventually. |
The news on Wednesday that cities and states are suing some of the world's largest banks over Libor manipulation shows how this scandal could blow up into one of history's biggest bank frauds.
That's because interest-rate manipulation might well have kept your town or state from hiring firefighters or teachers, from paving roads or paying for indigent care or after-school programs for your kids -- adding to the human suffering of the economic collapse these same banks caused in the first place.
If it's any consolation, the lawsuits and fines over this manipulation could potentially cost the banks -- which include not only Barclays but Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and many more -- billions of dollars.
"This could get very ugly in a hurry for some banks," Peter Tchir of TF Market Advisors wrote in a note.
And this could finally be enough to make Americans stop reacting to the Libor scandal with "a shrug," as Joe Nocera recently put it, and push them closer to believing what Robert Shapiro, founder of economic advisory firm Sonecon, calls possibly "the biggest financial fraud in history."
Would it be enough, maybe, to finally cause banks to lose the argument that regulating them too much will hurt the economy?
The New York Times wrote Wednesday that several states, towns and other municipalities are rounding up posses of lawyers to sue big banks over their manipulation of Libor, a short-term interest rate that affects borrowing costs throughout the global economy. Barclays has admitted to manipulating the rate for years, paying $450 million in penalties. Other banks are under investigation for doing the same thing. The scandal has already engulfed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who have been asked to testify before a Senate subcommittee about rate manipulation.
The states and cities suing the banks often bought -- from some of the same banks they're suing -- credit derivatives called interest-rate swaps. The swaps protected them when Libor rose, but hurt them when Libor fell. If these states and cities can prove the banks manipulated Libor lower, then they could have a case that the banks owe them some money.
Other potential litigants -- hedge funds, maybe -- bought derivatives that cost them money when Libor rose. Again, if they can prove that banks manipulated Libor higher, then they, too, could have a case that banks owe them money.
How much money are we talking?
Some of Wall Street's best thinkers have scoffed that such lawsuits will likely result in small potatoes, or maybe tater tots at best. It could be hard to suss out how much financial damage somebody really suffered from this, or how much any one bank -- or even more than one bank -- is responsible.
And a lot of borrowers, maybe including the same states and cities suing the banks, arguably benefited when the banks manipulated Libor lower, because it lowered their borrowing costs.
But the sheer vastness of the derivatives market makes this a potentially huge headache for the banks. There's a general estimate floating around that Libor affects about $800 trillion in notional derivatives -- that's "trillion," not "billion" or "million." Banks are not going to be on the hook for anything near that much, as the bulk of this amount is "notional" -- meaning, roughly, "not real."
What is far more likely is that people with derivatives contracts tied to Libor lost tiny percentages of that $800 trillion with some regularity because of Libor manipulation. Some municipalities in the Times story estimate Libor manipulation cost them millions of dollars -- $13 million in the case of Nassau County, New York, for example. That's the same Nassau County whose crushing long-term unemployment is the subject of an HBO documentary, "Hard Times: Lost On Long Island."
That's "millions," not "trillions." Tater tots, if you're a bank. But priceless for a municipality struggling to hire workers, build infrastructure or take care of the people being crushed by the recession and painfully slow recovery.
And there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of municipalities involved in this. A 2010 Wall Street Journal article about how states and cities were losing money on derivatives noted that in Pennsylvania alone, 107 school districts owned interest-rate derivatives during the time period banks were allegedly manipulating rates.
That's 107 school districts in one state alone losing untold millions of dollars because of lower interest rates, which may have been lower than they should have been because of Libor manipulation. That's 107 school districts in one state alone that had a harder time paying teachers, buying computers, of funding art programs.
Peter Tchir of TF Market Advisors tried in a research note this morning to arrive at what some of the big numbers might look like, if all of these potential litigants decided to up and hit the banks all at once.
If the banks were responsible for moving the three-month Libor rate by just 1/100th of a percentage point on that entire universe of $800 trillion in notional derivatives contracts, then that would be worth $20 billion, according to Tchir's calculations.
Banks are probably not going to be on the hook for derivatives worth anything close to that $800 trillion. But if banks manipulated rates by more than that 1/100th of a point, or for more than 90 days -- the term of three-month Libor -- on even smaller notional derivative amounts, then the numbers can still get big in a hurry. And that doesn't even include punitive damages. And it doesn't include the estimated $10 trillion in mortgages and other loans tied to Libor, including $275 billion worth of U.S. mortgages, according to an estimate from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency referenced in the FT. |
You can buy your own copy of these patterns here: www.etsy.com/shop/pinkythepink
(Only three of the sets here because I must credit Hannah below!)
The wonderfulhas given me permission to create and sell some patterns based on her work. She's given me permission to do the entire group of eighteen princess!!It is an absolute joy for me to both worth on Hannah's gorgeous designs and create patterns that both me and many other stitchers will love for years to come.A massive amount of thank yous tofor letting me use her artwork.Mom jumped in to help me do color checks in person to insure that colors are as accurate to Hannah's original art as can be.pixel representation of thread colors is highly inaccurate. Real thread colors have been matched to Hannah's original artwork as closely as possible.Please, please, please... these are complicated pieces with blended colors, hundreds of beads, buttons, half/quarter/partial stitches everywhere, and literally over thirty feet of backstitching throughout. It's a labor of love that I hope you will share with me when you're finished.Each are approximately two feet tall on 18 count (or 36 count over two). All three use beads and metallics.uses 80 unique symbols: 26 blended colors, 41 solid colors, and 13 bead colors.1509 beads!uses 96 unique symbols: 31 blended colors, 55 solid colors, and 10 bead colors.197 beads!uses 48 unique symbols: 14 blended colors, 28 solid colors, and 6 bead colors.849 beads!18.5 hours24 hours11.5 hoursWIPs can be viewed in my scraps: pinkythepink.deviantart.com/ga… They will bejust like the other four sets.Fabulous watermark created byOriginal gorgeous deviations: |
The air in Paris has been as bad as some of the worst cities in the world recently. Strange as it may sound, it presents a huge opportunity.
According to the BBC, the air in Paris has been as bad as some of the worst cities in the world. At least at the moment. Due to unfavourable weather conditions of recent, particulate matter has accumulated in the air.
Car ban in central Paris
Officials have acted quickly with remedial policy measures including restricting driving (using the alternating licence plate method similar to Mexico City) as well as providing free public transit. Considering the majority of Parisian motorists use deisel fueled cars, the impact could be huge.
Policies working
And it was. On Friday March 14th, Paris had higher levels of air pollution than places like Shanghai and New Delhi. But with the new policies, air quality improved more than 3-fold over the weekend. Perhaps results were partially affected by changing weather, but the drop remains impressive. As an added affect, congestion is also down by 60%.
Once in a century opportunity
It’s rare a city of this size has a politically supportable reason to ban cars. While likely temporary, officials have an opportunity to research the impacts with actual data from their own city. Most regions would need to undertake speculative studies for years only to come up with unproven predictions. And then, for years, they would have to promote these predictions to a skeptical public convinced their city is different than those studied. Not Paris. They can look at what is actually occurring in their own back yard. Stockholm is a rare example of a city that was able to test impacts of a congestion charge. They introduced one, then removed it. Then, they reintroduced it again due to public demand.
Paris has a rare opportunity to re-frame their severe air pollution problem into a progressive pilot project. A pilot project otherwise nearly impossible to approve in normal circumstances. Will this be the case? Or will it just be another band-aid solution with little long term value?
Video – Pollution Alert hits Maximum in Paris
[Sources / literature: BBC, International Business Times, The Atlantic Cities] |
A US Department of Commerce task force recommended Thursday that Congress alter the Copyright Act in a bid that likely would reduce financial damages for file sharing copyright scofflaws.
The recommendations from the agency's Internet Policy Task Force don't call for doing away with the maximum $150,000 in damages available to rights holders per infringement. But if Congress adopts the task force's recommendations, it's doubtful there would be large awards, as one of the recommendations would require juries to consider a file sharer's ability to pay and, among other things, the actual value of the works that were infringed.
"We believe that litigants and courts would be well-served by requiring consideration of a uniform set of factors designed to result in an appropriate award based upon the facts of each case," said the report from the task force, which included members from the US Patent and Trademark Office, The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and other Commerce Department entities.
Here is a verbatim list of the nine factors the task force's white paper (PDF) recommends judges or juries consider when awarding damages:
(1)The plaintiff’s revenues lost and the difficulty of proving damages.
(2)The defendant’s expenses saved, profits reaped, and other benefits from the infringement.
(3)The need to deter future infringements.
(4)The defendant’s financial situation.
(5)The value or nature of the work infringed.
(6)The circumstances, duration, and scope of the infringement, including whether it was commercial in nature.
(7)In cases involving infringement of multiple works, whether the total sum of damages, taking into account the number of works infringed and number of awards made, is commensurate with the overall harm caused by the infringement.
(8)The defendant’s state of mind, including whether the defendant was a willful or innocent infringer.
(9)In the case of willful infringement, whether it is appropriate to punish the defendant and if so, the amount of damages that would result in an appropriate punishment.
The report wasn't all rosy for copyright scofflaws facing litigation, and it said in certain circumstances, file sharers should be dinged the maximum $150,000 in damages:
With respect to file-sharing, statutory damages must take into account not merely the defendant’s personal use, but his or her acts in uploading and distributing copies to potentially numerous recipients. And while statutory damage awards of $150,000 per work are rare, there may be cases, including in the context addressed in these proceedings, where such awards are justified due to the need to deter and punish willful infringement.
Still, the white paper said that assessing damages awards on one's ability to pay only makes sense. Outrageous awards, which are rare and usually not paid, could create disrespect for copyright law:
The Task Force recognizes the concern that some awards of statutory damages can be far beyond the capacity of the defendant to pay—whether an individual or a start-up business. Requiring juries and judges to consider the defendant’s financial situation (the fourth factor) when assessing the level of the award will help address that concern. This factor is closely tied to both the deterrence and the punishment aspects of statutory damages. The amount necessary to deter a multi-billion dollar company from infringing for commercial profit will be far greater than the amount necessary to deter a private individual with limited income from engaging in noncommercial file-sharing. Similarly, a judgment of a few thousand dollars may serve as meaningful punishment for an low-income individual, but not a major corporation.
The task force noted that taking into account the value of a work could deter rights holders with unprofitable content from becoming litigation trolls:
An award that takes into account the likely heightened magnitude of harm to the market for a pre-release work may enable the copyright owner to receive a more appropriate level of compensation than an award of actual damages. On the other hand, when the infringed work is of minimal commercial value, a lower award may be appropriate. This can help address concerns about "holders of low-value copyrights... using the threat of statutory damages to turn litigation threats into a profit center."
The white paper, meanwhile, recommends the creation of a so-called "small claims tribunal" in which participation by litigants would be voluntary. This tribunal would deal with "infringement claims of relatively low economic value," and damages would be capped at $15,000 per work and $30,000 "for all damages in a single case involving a registered work."
The task force is also recommending a changeover in the so-called "innocent infringer" defense. Under the current law, those found to be innocent infringers may only have to pay $200 in damages per work. Sometimes defendants say they didn't know the work was copyrighted, but if there is a copyright notice on the work, that defense is generally barred. But not if the task force has its way.
The existence of a copyright notice should remain a factor for the court to consider when determining whether to reduce the damages award, since it may bear on the defendant’s state of mind. If a defendant asserts that he was not aware of and had no reason to believe that the work was protected by copyright, the existence of a copyright notice would tend to undermine that claim. But if a defendant mistakenly believed that he was engaging in a fair use, the notice would not undermine that defense.
The white paper found no need to recommend changes in the areas of remixing and the first sale doctrine. |
Combine harvester reaps winter wheat at field in Koesching near Ingolstadt Thomson Reuters Invasive species, or non-native species that spread aggressively, can wreak havoc on ecosystems and economies all over the world.
These species arrive as stowaways on boats, planes, pets, and in wooden crates. Once in their new homes, they prey on local species, out-compete them for resources, kill their young, or spread disease. Notorious examples today include Asian longhorned beetles that have been decimating hardwood forests in the Northeast, Burmese pythons that have thrived in Florida's Everglades National Park, emerald ash borers that are killing North American ash trees, and Asian carp that have invaded the Great Lakes.
Economically, these invasive species can be devastating. Until now, research has focused on single country economic costs. A 2005 study reported that invasive species cost the US more than $120 billion in damages each year.
But a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences used models to quantify the cumulative threat of 1,297 known insect pests and fungal pathogens to crop production in 124 countries. They also determined which countries posed the greatest threats based on their trading partners and the numbers of invasive species they could spread. This is the first study to look at the global impact.
"Invasive pests and diseases are a major threat to agriculture, natural ecosystems and society in general," said Matthew Thomas, study author and professor in Ecological Entomology at Penn State, in a press release. "One of the challenges we face is predicting the next threat and where it will come from. This study explores some of these issues at a global scale."
Their results showed that invasive insects and pathogens could be a multi-billion-dollar threat to global agriculture. A third of the countries studied had a high likelihood of imminent invasion. Large agricultural producers, such as the US, China, India, and Brazil, could see the highest overall damage costs. But it is developing countries, specifically sub-Saharan African countries, that could suffer proportionately higher damage because of how highly reliant their economy is on agriculture.
Meanwhile, due to trade patterns and pest presence, China and the US, major agricultural producers have the greatest potential to spread these pests unintentionally to other countries. The maps below show how countries are likely to be impacted.
World map representation of model outputs. (A) The overall invasion threat to each threatened country; (B) the total invasion cost (in millions of US dollars) to threatened countries; (C) the total invasion cost (in millions of US dollars) to threatened countries, as a proportion of GDP; and (D) the total invasion cost (in millions of US dollars) from source countries. Those countries without color were not included in the analysis. Dean R. Paini et al. PNAS doi:10.1073/pnas.1602205113
The study authors hope that by identifying what regions are most vulnerable, it can help governments make informed decisions about how to protect their borders and agriculture industries from further spread of invasive species.
"[The findings] highlight the need for a world body to address, in a comprehensive manner, the continued threat of plant pests and pathogen invasions that result in enormous economic losses in the affected countries," Harold Mooney, environmental biologist not involved with the study, told Smithsonian.com. |
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On Wednesday, Google announced it is working even harder to bring better VR to entry-level price points. Specifically, the company is adding WebVR support to Google Cardboard and it is launching its WebVR Experiments showcase for anyone to access and experience VR.
WebVR is an open standard for creating VR experiences that are accessible with supported web browsers. The standard works with a variety of headsets, including the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and PlayStation VR. But more relevant to anyone looking for a low-budget VR solution is WebVR’s support for Google Daydream, which was added in February for supported smartphones via Chrome, and now Google Cardboard via Chrome on any Android device.
WebVR Experiments is a site that you can visit to check out a growing list of experiences on just about any VR device. Anybody can submit their own creations to the site and accessing them is as easy as firing up a WebVR device and clicking on a link.
Google highlighted a few of the WebVR Experiments listed on the site. There is interactive ping pong via Konterball:
Then there is the ability to “explore the world with your voice”:
Check out the sounds of various objects raining down:
Play Spot-the-Bot with the help of another player who is outside the VR experience:
Google notes that you can also play the experiences in 2D on the desktop or a smartphone via any supported browser. If you are a developer and want to create and upload an experience, then you can submit it here. Not every VR headset supports Chrome at this point, but Google promises that Chrome support is coming soon. |
Coming off the 2017 NFL Scouting Combine, the biggest story is without question John Ross and his now quantified speed. Ross ripped off an official 4.22 seconds time in the 40-yard dash, which broke Chris Johnson’s previously held record of 4.24 from 2008. We already knew Ross was fast, but this act proved he was on another level of speed.
Studying deep threats is one of the more enjoyable endeavors when scouting wide receivers. There seems to be a desire by some to simply lump all vertical threats into the “one trick pony” category, implying that outside of their speed on long catches, these players don’t offer much else. However, that more often than not tends to be an oversimplification on what a player can do, leaving aside what they might be asked to do.
It also appears that the public at-large seems to have a quite a distaste for the unpredictable, submitting to variance or forgoing the overemphasis of negative events. As such, when a player whose primary asset is deep speed falls into the negative side of variance on one too many prominent occasions, the bad taste often lingers for viewers who have these biases. Yet, we must accept and submit to that variance when viewing these players. You cannot reap the rewards of what these players have to offer without opening up to experiencing some negatives.
Personally, the most fascinating portion of studying deep threats is discerning what else they bring to the table. A player like John Ross fits the bill for this type of question. Even before his record-breaking 40-yard dash, we knew he was fast. A simple exposure to a highlight reel will tell you that. The question in my mind and that of many others is “What else can Ross do and what’s his projected ceiling in terms of an NFL role?” He could be strictly a vertical threat, or fall along a different branch of the archetype of small fast receivers like Odell Beckham and T.Y. Hilton who have taken their games to lengths beyond just winning deep with their speed.
Hilton, and especially Beckham, represent the peak of the small speedy receiver archetype as true No. 1 wideouts who win as technicians at all levels of the field. The question to answer with Ross is whether he demonstrates similar ability as to join those two or whether he likely falls in the next tier of speed receivers like DeSean Jackson or Mike Wallace at his best.
Alignment and Target Data
Games sampled: USC, Alabama, Oregon, Arizona, California-Berkeley, Stanford
At the University of Washington, John Ross primarily lined up as the team’s X-receiver or flanker. He only took 9.7 percent of his snaps sampled for Reception Perception out of the slot with all but one other coming at right or left wide receiver. The majority of his snaps, 60.5 percent, took place with Ross on the line of scrimmage.
Given Ross’ 5-foot-11, sub 190-pound frame it’s likely that his NFL team will look to make use of him in the slot more often than the Huskies football team did. With Phillip Dorsett and Donte Moncrief breaking in as starters outside, the Colts deployed T.Y. Hilton in the slot more this past year the ever before. Half of Hilton’s 155 targets this season came when he was lined up in the slot. As a result, the diminutive speedsters enjoyed more favorable matchup than he sees with bigger corners on the outside and turned in the best year of his career.
While such a utilization plan could benefit Ross in the NFL, he had no issues winning on the outside at Washington. One of the most productive receivers in the nation, Ross saw a target go his way on 32.4 percent of the routes he ran over his six-game Reception Perception sample. His conversion rate was a tick lower, with a catch coming on 19.2 percent of those routes, but much of that is due to the high degree of difficulty deep targets he received.
In-space and Ancillary Metrics
In his final season in school, John Ross tacked on another 417 kick return yards to his lofty receiving totals at an average of 24.2 per return. That mentality transfers over into his work after the catch in the open field.
Rather surprisingly, Ross was only “in space” (which is defined as a run after the catch attempt where a player can break a tackle) on 9.9 percent of his routes, which is under the two-year prospect average of 11 percent. Given his skill set, that could well be something that changes as a pro. However, when he did get his shots he made them count in the open field. Ross went down on first contact on 44.4 percent of his “in space” attempts, which is less often than the average college prospect charted. His multiple broken tackle rate was 22.2 percent of his “in space” attempts, good for 3rd best in the class.
Where we don’t get much exposure to Ross’ game is in contested catch situations. Indeed, over his Reception Perception sample, he only registered two contested catch attempts, one he caught and one he did not.
Naturally, Ross’ weight and smaller hands and arms lead to questions in contested situations and whether he’ll be able to win the ball in traffic. Odell Beckham and Antonio Brown have taken their games beyond what players of their frame normally do because they are both dominant at the catch point, consistently maintaining contested catch conversion rates over 75 to 80 percent in the last three years of Reception Perception charting. Ross may not be able to do that, or at least his college film left that question unanswered.
Yet, there is a positive to take from the fact that we rarely see Ross in contested situations if you’re willing to extrapolate the trail of this idea. Ross rarely finds himself in tight coverage because he’s routinely creating separation from the defenders covering him.
Success Rate vs. Coverage
In terms of Reception Perception’s primary metric success rate vs. coverage, which measures how often a receiver gets open on a route-by-route basis, John Ross is in rare company this season. He is one of just four receivers charted this year to score above the two-year prospect average in all four of success rate vs. man, zone, double and press coverage.
Ross’ 69.2 percent success rate vs. man coverage puts him at the 56th percentile among receivers charted over the last two years. His zone coverage 80 percent score is quite a bit more impressive, falling in the 71st percentile.
One notable data point here for Ross is his 60.7 percent success rate vs. double coverage. Opposing defenses double-covered Ross on 28 routes in his Reception Perception sample, second only to Taywan Taylor among charted receivers this year. Despite that extra attention, Ross rose to the challenge with a success rate mark 14 points higher than the prospect average.
What most will be dying to know regarding Ross’ Reception Perception is how he performed against press coverage. Ross’ statistical production fell silent against Alabama in the college playoff series with just five catches for 28 yards. This exacerbated concerns about how the slight receiver works against press coverage. Those concerns can be dialed back a bit as Ross maintained a 73.2 percent success rate vs. press coverage, which was the fourth-best score recorded this year and falls above the 78th percentile.
Releasing from the line of scrimmage is just about quickness, footwork and technique as it is about size and strength. Size tends to carry far too much weight, or perhaps just creates too many assumptions when it comes to wide receiver evaluations. If a player doesn’t have a variation of clean release moves, opposing cornerbacks will jam them prior to their route no matter how tall they may be.
On the other side of the scale, small receivers can be some of the best against press coverage if their technique integrates well with their agile nature. You can’t jam what you can’t touch. John Ross has the ability to elude press defenders at the line of scrimmage enough to mitigate his lack of ideal size.
Route Data
Here’s where the fun begins with John Ross’ evaluation. We can examine his route charts to decipher if there is more to his game than just winning vertical with speed.
Red is below the two-year prospect average, green is above and yellow is within the average.
As to be expected, the farther away we get from the line of scrimmage the higher we find Ross’ route percentages as it relates to the two-year college average. He ran the slant, screen or flat route at a rate that was below the prospect average.
It’s no surprise we see the corner and post route among the more popular routes for Ross as they are typically vertical-leaning patterns. The nine route was also expected to be high. In all honesty, seeing Ross ran the nine route (20.3 percent) at an average rate is a bit more of a shock. One would have expected it to be even higher given his burner reputation.
The more intermediate routes where Ross pops up with a rate above the two-year prospect average were the out (6.6 percent) and curl (18.1 percent). The curl, in particular, is key here. It was striking to see on film just how much cushion received from opposing defensive backs clearly terrified of giving up the deep ball. Ross is unlikely to get that in the NFL, but he’s already shown an understanding of how to sell the vertical route without tipping it with his eyes or head before snapping back to the quarterback on the curl or comeback. That will be how Ross makes a living beyond just a deep threat and amasses yardage in the short game.
With that in mind, it becomes even more important to see his success rate vs. coverage as it lends more credence to the idea that Ross functions well outside of just the bomb plays.
Starting with the negatives, Ross came in under the two-year prospect average in success rate vs. coverage on slant and post routes. Given his speed, quickness and strong technique, that was unexpected. It’s worth noting that neither his 70.4 percent success rate on posts or 74.2 percent on slants is all that terribly low, but the prospect average is particularly inflated on the slant pattern, in particular.
Otherwise, Ross’ route success rate chart shows nothing but positives. His 62.2 percent success rate on nine routes quantifies his dangerous ability to get over the top. His 100 percent success rate on comebacks and 78.8 percent on curls help exemplify that skill to sell the vertical pattern before chopping his feet and turning back short.
Ross ran the out route at an above average rate and his 83.3 percent success rate is all the more impressive because of it. The out is a difficult pattern and requires the deception of keeping your head steady along with the cut at a sharp angle to earn separation. Ross shows he’s up to the task.
Moving Forward
We posed the question at the onset of this study as to what kind of small receiver John Ross really was. Is he the type of deep threat that only helps out in the vertical game or was there potential to reach out to the T.Y. Hilton-esque upper branches of the archetype?
After taking in Ross’ Reception Perception results, we can conclusively say he has more to offer as a complete package in a small frame than just his deep game. He created separation at different levels of the field and his success rate vs. coverage shows a player who wins with detail and athleticism.
The on-field package is superb and something NFL teams salivate over. All that can stand in Ross’ way as a high-first round pick is a long and winding injury rap sheet, including multiple knee maladies and an upcoming surgery set for May. Those are major concerns and each team will have to weight them against a skill set that is quite simply, rare.
Heading into this weekend we already knew John Ross was fast. Yet, he showed us all we may have not truly known just how fast he was and put a 4.22 record-breaking time down to prove it. To the same point, perhaps you’d already seen enough on film to know that Ross was a better technician than credited and someone who could win at levels of the field. Seeing it play out in his Reception Perception results only serves to reinforce this reality.
If you’re interested in more Reception Perception analysis, make sure to visit our Reception Perception pages for college prospect evaluations and pre-order The Ultimate Draft Kit for access to 50 NFL players’ full data this summer. You can keep up with all of the work using the #ReceptionPerception hashtag on Twitter. |
Nevada National Security Site
MERCURY, Nev. -- From the side that faced away from the blast, you might never even have bothered to look at this concrete dome. But walk around the other side, and there's no question something extraordinary happened here.
Welcome to the Nevada National Security Site, formerly known as the Nevada Test Site. As part of Road Trip 2012, I've come to visit this 1,375-square-mile expanse of harsh desert and even harsher mountains that begins about 75 miles north of Las Vegas. Here, from 1951 through 1992, a total of 928 nuclear weapons exploded, many of them sending instantly familiar giant mushroom clouds high into the skies above.
Of those, 828 were detonated underground. But that means 100 were tested above ground, and people in Las Vegas were said to be able to see the light from the blasts, and even some of the mushroom clouds rising skyward.
On June 24, 1957, a 37-kiloton atomic bomb called Priscilla was detonated on a wide piece of Nevada Test Site known as Frenchman Flat. About three times the size of the 1945 atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, the weapon was meant to test, among other things, how a variety of structures could hold up to the initial fireball and the resulting pressure blast.
And that's why walking around the front side of this concrete dome -- which was built with a six-inch-thick reinforced concrete shell -- tells such a story. Essentially, it was ripped to shreds. Fifty-four years later, that wrecked concrete and twisted rebar, plus a nearby rail trestle whose thick, straight steel I-beams were bent into wide curves, and a reinforced concrete bank vault with one side torn to bits, are still a visible reminder of the power of nuclear weapons.
The Nevada Test Site
In the early years after World War II, the United States conducted most of its nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific Ocean. But according to a Nevada National Security Site fact sheet, "Security and logistical issues quickly illustrated the need for a continental test site."
The government considered a number of potential locations before settling in 1950 on what was then called the Las Vegas Bombing and Gunnery Range. And less than two months later, the first atmospheric test of a nuclear weapon was conducted there. Over the years, 100 above ground detonations took place at various locations around the giant site, until in 1963, when the newly signed Limited Test Ban Treaty required all future tests to be conducted underground.
Though the fireballs of the above ground tests were obviously quite spectacular -- leading to a "spectator sport" of VIPs coming to watch the detonations from the safety of a set of bleachers several miles away, according to Dante Pistone, the public affairs officer for the Nevada National Security Site -- the lasting effects of the underground tests may well be the more impressive visuals.
Throughout the giant facility, there are hundreds of what are known as subsidence craters -- caused when the dirt and earth, at first superheated by a blast as much as 1,000 feet or more below ground, cooled and subsided. These craters can be small and barely noticeable, or they can be gigantic and awe-inspiring.
Perhaps the most impressive of all is one called Sedan Crater. This was the result of a detonation that was part of what was called the Plowshare Program -- an initiative meant to explore the possible use of nuclear weapons for peaceful means. The idea was that the bombs could be extremely useful for large-scale excavation for projects such as dams, or canals, or quarries. Only after years of such experimentation was it decided that the resulting radioactivity made such a program impractical.
Still, the Sedan Crater is a testament to the power of these weapons. Created by a 104-kiloton bomb lowered 635 feet below the surface and detonated with the blast focused upward, the explosion displaced 12 million tons of dirt and earth, and left a hole in the ground 1,280 feet across and 320 feet deep.
Current missions
Though the Nevada National Security Site offers a stark lesson in our nation's nuclear history, it's also host to a roster of modern nuclear- and chemical-related missions being undertaken on behalf of a laundry list of government agencies and private companies.
There's also the matter of cleaning up the past -- literally. One giant quadrant of the site is devoted to storing the radioactive waste left over from those decades of tests. The waste that is buried there is cataloged and monitored, in order to be able to track any leakage, and the water table below is watched for contamination.
Another crucial mission is making sure that the country's remaining nuclear stockpile is still reliable all these years later. That involves conducting experiments where scientists from the country's leading laboratories -- Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia, and so on -- work on various methods of splitting small amounts of plutonium. In order to do that and guarantee that no new radioactivity is released into the environment, there's a network of deep underground tunnels, and a secondary system of side tunnels. The experiments are carried out there, and when finished, and all the relevant data is collected, the side tunnels are shut down and filled in with concrete.
At the same time, it's clear that first responders around the country need training on handling serious emergencies like the explosion of a dirty bomb or the threat of some sort of radiological weapon in public, and so the site is home to a training program where first responders come and learn how to tackle such situations.
In the end, though, unless you're privy to some of the secret work that goes on at the site -- in facilities like the ultrasecure Device Assembly Facility, where scientists put together the projects that are detonated in the underground tunnels, and others no one will talk about -- the thing that stays with you when you leave the NNSS is the image of the power of even a very small nuclear blast. After all, when you've seen a quarter-mile wide crater, you're not likely to ever forget it. |
Fulham midfielder Emerson Hyndman looks set to become an important part of the US national team under Jurgen Klinsmann in the coming years.
US national team head coach Jurgen Klinsmann has labelled Fulham’s American midfielder Emerson Hyndman as a ‘phenomenal’ talent after seeing the 18-year-old make his first-team breakthrough this season.
Having only made his professional debut in Fulham’s Championship opener against Ipswich Town, Hyndman received a surprise call-up to Klinsmann’s squad for the September friendly against the Czech Republic after just two appearances for the Cottagers, earning his first cap as a 67th-minute substitute in Prague.
The Texas-native didn’t make the 25-man roster for the upcoming games against Colombia and the Republic of Ireland, despite the former fixture taking place at his home ground this week, but Klinsmann’s subsequent praise suggests he is an important part of the German’s future plans.
“Emerson is phenomenal. This kid came to our first game after the World Cup, and in our first training session he played like he was always with us,” he told the Telegraph.
“He’s barely 18. I said to my coach: ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’ Everyone was like ‘woah’.”
Position Team Goals Assists Key Passes Total Passes Pass Acc Touches Dispossessed Unsuccessful Touch Appearances Mins Played Emerson Hyndman MF Fulham 0 0 6 274 90% 326 3 5 6 433
His mature performances so far setting him apart from other prospects, Hyndman was even compared to Andrea Pirlo by former manager Felix Magath in September, the departed coach telling Fulham’s official website: “I have never seen a player of his age play like he does; he passes like an old professional.
SEE ALSO: Fulham legend heaps praise on Emerson Hyndman
“I’m sure he will be a good player. His role could be similar to the one that Andrea Pirlo plays, responsible for the forward play of the team from deep.”
His statistics in fact placing him among the Championship’s most accurate passers, Hyndman hasn’t been a regular in the Fulham line-up under new boss Kit Symons, but there is no doubt that he is set for a bright future at both the club and international level. |
India elected an eloquent, some would say voluble, candidate as prime minister. Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks frequently, tweets extensively and writes sparingly. No one is surprised when he seizes the occasion and speaks. It is only when he ignores the occasion and withdraws into silence that questions are raised. Here are a few samples of his silence:
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VYAPAM: That is the acronym for the Professional Examination Board in Madhya Pradesh where a BJP government has been in office since 2003. Examinations were fixed for many years. The scandal was exposed in 2013 by a whistleblower. After many legal battles the case was transferred to the CBI. Meanwhile, 40 persons connected with the case (witnesses, investigating officers, accused) have met with unnatural deaths. Whistleblowers and activists have received multiple threats. In any other case, the scandal would have unseated the chief minister, but Mr Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s government survives. The Prime Minister is the silent fox. It is his silence that keeps Mr Chouhan in office.
Lalit Modi: He is the former boss of the IPL and is wanted in India for questioning. He fled to the United Kingdom where a friendly government bent the rules to give him refuge (even while hundreds of Indians who do not hold a valid passport are routinely deported). The Chief Minister of Rajasthan endorsed Mr Lalit Modi’s plea for being allowed to stay in the UK and requested that her letter may not be disclosed to the Indian authorities. The External Affairs Minister supported his case for a UK travel document after her ministry cancelled his passport. Mr Lalit Modi thumbs his nose at the Indian investigative agencies and holidays around the world travelling on a UK passport. The Prime Minister is the silent saviour of his minister and the chief minister.
Wages of intolerance
Kalburgi, Dabholkar and Pansare: One was an atheist. Another campaigned against superstition. The third portrayed the warrior-king, Shivaji, as a secular ruler. They were murdered, and the investigating agencies suspect there are common features in the three cases. Eminent writers voiced their protest by returning the awards given to them by the Sahitya Akademi. The Prime Minister was unconcerned and maintained a stoic silence. The literary world felt humiliated.
Rohith Vemula: “My birth is my fatal accident” wrote the Dalit PhD scholar, Rohith Vemula, before he took his own life. Campuses erupted in protest. It turned into a familiar battle between the ‘entitled’ and the ‘disentitled’. The Central government tried to prove that Rohith was not a Dalit. No one, so far, has been held responsible or accountable for his death. The Prime Minister remained a silent spectator. The disentitled are gripped by fear.
Akhlaq: Akhlaq was lynched by a mob who believed that he had stored beef in his home. A bizarre inquiry was launched, not into the lynching, but into the nature of the animal meat! Political leaders spoke in favour of the mob, communal tensions were aroused, and the Prime Minister’s studied silence invited comment. When he appeared to have decided to break his silence, it was only to deliver a homily on how Hindus and Muslims should fight poverty and not each other. On Akhlaq’s killing, he has maintained a studied silence.
Clumsy manoeuvres
Jawaharlal Nehru University: Suddenly, it was discovered that JNU was filled with anti-nationals. Barring members of the ABVP, every JNU student was presumed to be an anti-national unless he proved his nationalism by raising the slogan ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’. Police slapped sedition charges on students, lawyers roughed up journalists on the court’s premises, the university rusticated student leaders, and the Prime Minister erected a wall of silence between himself and the tumult outside.
The Pathankot attack: Barely days after the Prime Minister made an impromptu visit to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s home in Lahore, six terrorists attacked the Air Force Station at Pathankot. It was revealed that the government had received intelligence about the threat but mishandled it. The government’s clumsy attempt to forge a ‘deal’ on reciprocal investigation came a cropper. Pakistan sent its team to Pathankot, brazenly denied it got any evidence from the Indian agencies, and delivered a lethal snub by rejecting their request for a reciprocal visit to Pakistan. The Prime Minister’s response was grave silence.
Atrocities on Dalits: The false promise of ‘Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas’ is unravelling. Atrocities on Dalits are a fact of Indian life. The Una incident exposed the right-wing Hindutva brigade’s hypocrisy, exploitation and arrogance. The Prime Minister has observed a silence that is deafening even amidst the uproar.
Duty to speak
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In the 2014 elections, the Indian voter was swayed by the eloquence of Mr Narendra Modi. Not many have cultivated the art of public speaking as Mr Modi has. Is he now cultivating the art of public silence? I readily concede that a prime minister is not required to speak on every occasion or on every subject but, when there is a duty to speak, silence is unacceptable. Silence can be a strategy, silence can be a tactic, but silence can never be an answer to the ills of our polity and the fault lines of our society. When an eloquent and willing-to-speak prime minister deliberately chooses not to speak, decent citizens will be concerned, students will demand answers, Muslims will feel alienated and Dalits will feel threatened. All of those do not augur well. |
On Thursday, opponents of genetically modified food celebrated a big victory: They managed to get a major American food company to do something it didn't feel was necessary, just because public pressure had mounted to the point where resistance took more energy than it was worth.
Soon even purer than pure. (Paul Sakuma/AP)
The company is General Mills, maker of America's most iconic cereal brands, which found a way to make a line of Cheerios without any genetically modified ingredients. Not because it thinks there's anything wrong with GM crops: Its Q&A on the Cheerios site clearly states that they're safe, and a longer Web page explains the scientific consensus behind its position. Rather, simply: "We did it because we think consumers may embrace it," the company wrote in a blog post.
Despite the lack of evidence that there's anything wrong with eating GM foods, the demand for alternatives seems to exist. More than half of Americans worry that they're unsafe, according to an ABC News poll from the summer, and 93 percent support mandatory labeling. The concern is even higher among women, who also do more of the family shopping. Meanwhile, Whole Foods is asking its suppliers to develop special lines of non-GM products. General Mills may have figured it might as well get out in front of its Big Food competition -- there's always something to be said for gaining a first mover advantage.
And anyway, Cheerios were a relatively easy lift for General Mills. There are no GM oats, as it pointed out multiple times, so the recipe was most of the way there. It just needed to switch from beet sugar to cane sugar, find some non-GM corn starch, and figure out how to separate the streams of cereal production so the non-GM Cheerios could stay pure. It's almost the equivalent of slapping a "Trans Fats Free" label on something that never contained trans fats, or a "gluten-free" label on something that doesn't even have wheat, just because something "free" of anything must necessarily be better for you. (Unless it's "made with whole grains," which Cheerios could already claim as well.)
There are risks to that strategy. Even labeling some of its foods as GM-free might create the misperception that the rest of its foods are somehow unsafe, pushing consumers toward a product that's harder to make, or other brands that specialize in all-natural recipes. That's the argument that giant food companies have made against labeling requirements (General Mills says it supports a national labeling standard, which would be preferable to having to deal with the state laws that are cropping up around the country). To capture both types of consumer, some corporations have entirely different companies: like Danone, which has both Stonyfield Greek Yogurt (which is organic and Non-GMO) and Dannon Oikos (which is not).
In that way, it's kind of similar to how Philip Morris gave in and started producing electronic cigarettes, even though they might cannibalize its traditional tobacco business -- except that smoking has lost popularity in the United States for solid health reasons. In the case of genetically modified foods, the reasons for concern are much less clear. |
Look, up in the sky! It's another comic book show.
Syfy is turning to David S. Goyer — the man behind The Man of Steel — to develop Superman origin story Krypton, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
From Warner Horizon Television and DC Comics, Krypton takes place years before the Superman legend we know, when the House of El was shamed and ostracized. This drama, which is in development, follows the Man of Steel's grandfather as he brings hope and equality to Krypton, turning a planet in disarray into one worthy of giving birth to the greatest Super Hero ever known.
Ian Goldberg (Once Upon a Time, FlashForward) will pen the script and exec produce alongside Goyer. The story was conceived by both Goyer and Goldberg.
See more Syfy's Plan: More Space Operas, Less 'Sharknado'
The drama is in the same vein as Fox's DC Comics take Gotham, which tells the origin story of Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) and features a pre-teen Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) before he became Batman.
Krypton also becomes the latest DC Comics-inspired project to land on a cable network. Turner-owned TNT is developing drama pilot Titans, a drama based on a group of superheroes-to-be based on characters from the DC universe including Dick Grayson, who emerges from the shadow of Batman to become Nightwing, the leader of a new band of heroes including Starfire, Raven and more as a "Junior Justice League" of sorts. Akiva Goldsman and Marc Haimes are writing the take for Warner Horizon Television and DC.
Other DC heroes already on the small screen include Batman in Fox's Jim Gordon origin story Gotham, The CW's The Flash and Arrow as well as NBC's Hellblazer take Constantine. The CW also has a version of DC's iZombie set for midseason, while Supergirl is currently testing leads at CBS for Arrow and Flash's Greg Berlanti and his No Ordinary Family alum Ali Adler in anticipation of a pilot and hopeful series order.
For Syfy, Krypton arrives as the cabler is making a massive push back to its BattlestarGalactica sci-fi roots with scripted originals including Dominion, Ascension, 12 Monkeys, Olympus, Z Nation, The Expanse, Childhood's End, Hunters, Dark Matterand 3001: The Final Odyssey.
For Goyer, Krypton will mark his third series on the air joining Constantine and Starz's Da Vinci's Demons. The longtime comics fan counts scores of fanboy favorites among his credits, including The Dark Knight trilogy and the upcoming Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @Snoodit |
A judge ruled today that the Moghul Express restaurant in Edison, New Jersey, can be sued by a group of strictly vegetarian Hindus after the restaurant accidentally served them meat-filled samosas. It looks like the 16 afflicted non-meat eaters are going to get a free trip for their troubles.
The restaurant accidentally delivered meat samosas to the group for a party rather than the vegetarian ones they ordered. Now those who ate the samosas say that they need to travel to India to cleanse themselves in the Ganges River since they committed the sin of eating meat and they expect the restaurant to foot the bill. Free travel for eating bad food? Because I ate some criminally awful pad thai the other day, does that mean someone is going to pay for me to go to Bangkok? I think it's only fair.
[NJ.com, image via Shutterstock] |
WASHINGTON — The cannabis industry has flexed its muscles in 15 states where it's legal to smoke marijuana for medical purposes. Now the industry is ready to go to work in Washington.
A new trade group, called the National Cannabis Industry Association, is an attempt to bring together sellers, growers and manufacturers and to promote pot on Capitol Hill.
"Our intent is to be the go-to organization in Washington for this industry," said Aaron Smith, the group's executive director.
For the past five years, Smith worked as the California director of the Marijuana Policy Project.
"Coming out of California and expanding into this national field is pretty exciting," he said. "There's been a lot of enthusiasm. ... It's pretty clear that the medical marijuana industry is becoming recognized more and more by the mainstream as a fully legitimate part of the economy."
Even though California voters last month rejected a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for all adults, Smith said it was just a matter of time before the drug was fully legalized.
"Legalization is looking inevitable," he said. "It didn't happen in 2010, but it's likely to happen in 2012. ... It's going to be relatively soon we're going to see states move from medical marijuana into broader legal markets. And the federal government needs to catch up. Frequently the American people are ahead of the Congress."
But Smith will have a hard time finding many marijuana advocates in Congress.
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 400-4 to back a resolution sponsored by California Republican Rep. Wally Herger that calls on authorities to get tougher with those who cultivate marijuana on federal land.
In a speech on the House floor, Herger said the presence of Mexican marijuana cartel operations in national forests in Northern California "poses a serious threat to our public safety and use of our public lands."
Democratic Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin called medical marijuana "a misnomer," adding: "There is nothing safe about smoking. There is nothing safe about smoking an illicit product called marijuana."
Smith said the association officially formed this month, putting together a 23-member board that includes leaders in the cannabis industry, who represent dispensaries, operators, publications and insurance providers, among others.
The association's first target will be a federal law that prohibits marijuana use even if states have legalized it. The law has resulted in confusion amid overlapping jurisdictions, with state authorities enforcing state laws and federal officials enforcing federal laws.
But President Barack Obama's administration has been easing up. Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder ordered federal prosecutors to back away from cases against medical marijuana patients and to focus on higher-level traffickers or money launderers.
"I'd like to see that codified by Congress, to become the law of the land, not just an executive order," Smith said. "This industry's biggest challenges are the obstacles presented by federal law, so that's why we're focusing on the change to federal law first and foremost."
With Republicans poised to take control of the House, Smith said: "I can't say that I'm super optimistic, but we'll definitely be pushing the message of federalism, which the Republicans should listen to. All we're really asking for is to allow the states to essentially make up their own minds on marijuana policy."
Smith noted that the issue of medical marijuana has bipartisan appeal: Republican candidates won a clean sweep in Arizona last month, but voters still approved the use of medical marijuana.
"This is not a left issue," he said. "This is a mainstream issue, and Republicans should embrace it."
MORE FROM MCCLATCHY
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Sacramento turns pot shops into taxed and regulated industry
In spite of Prop 19 loss, California cities vote to tax pot
Follow the latest politics news at McClatchy's Planet Washington |
At least 116,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,800 coalition troops died in Iraq between the outbreak of war in 2003 and the US withdrawal in 2011, researchers estimate.
Its involvement in Iraq has so far cost the United States $810 billion (625 billion euros) and could eventually reach $3 trillion, they added.
The estimates come from two US professors of public health, reporting on Friday in the British peer-reviewed journal The Lancet.
They base the figures on published studies in journals and on reports by government agencies, international organisations and the news media.
“We conclude that at least 116,903 Iraqi non-combatants and more than 4,800 coalition military personnel died over the eight-year course” of the war from 2003 to 2011, they said.
“Many Iraqi civilians were injured or became ill because of damage to the health-supporting infrastructure of the country, and about five million were displaced.
“More than 31,000 US military personnel were injured and a substantial percentage of those deployed suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, and other neuropsychological disorders and their concomitant psychosocial problems.”
Citing figures from the website costofwar.com, which looks at funding allocated by Congress, the study said that as of January 15 this year, the Iraq War had cost the United States about $810 billion, “not including interest on debt.”
“The ultimate cost of the war to the USA could be $3 trillion,” it said.
“Clearly, this money could have been spent instead on domestic and global programmes to improve health. The diversion of human resources was also substantial, in Iraq, the USA, and other coalition countries.”
The paper is authored by Barry Levy of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and Victor Sidel of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
It appears in a package of investigations into the health consequences of the Iraq War, published by The Lancet to mark the 10th anniversary of the start of the conflict.
In 2006, estimates by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, also published in The Lancet, said 655,000 people had died in the first 40 months of the war. That figure was widely contested.
In 2008, a study by the Iraqi government and World Health Organisation (WHO), published in The New England Journal of Medicine, said between 104,000 and 223,000 Iraqis had died violent deaths between March 2003 and June 2006.
Those figures were based on home visits to around 1,000 neighbourhoods across the country. |
Olympic silver medal and Giro d’Italia white jersey stand out in Colombian’s best year to date
Rigoberto Urán has declared himself “very happy” with his 2012 season; his second at Team Sky. With all eyes on the team’s British stars - particularly on Bradley Wiggins’ Tour de France victory - the 25-year-old Colombian’s results almost went unnoticed, but an Olympic silver medal - taken in the London 2012 road race - and the white jersey of the Giro d’Italia represent his best ever year to date.
“I’m very very happy with how the season has gone,” Urán admitted on Team Sky’s website. “It’s been good from start to finish with some consistent results.
“The Giro was a highlight for me and a great moment – to be able to compete over three weeks and emerge with a top 10 and the white jersey was special.”
Urán has suffered with allergies over the years, but he credits getting over those problems as a key factor in his ability to take such good results this year.
“It’s definitely satisfying. The allergy problem got a lot better this year and you could see that on the bike. I was able to get some big results because of it.”
Along with compatriot Sergio Henao, Urán rode strongly at the Giro d’Italia, and both finished inside the top ten [Urán seventh, Henao ninth - ed] while at the Vuelta a España he was instrumental in securing fourth place for Chris Froome. His performances were far from restricted to stage races however, with his Olympic silver medal - as he made the decisive late break with Kazakhstan’s eventual winner Alexandre Vinokourov - added to a late-season victory in the Gran Piemonte and a third place in il Lombardia.
“When I feel like I am in good condition it doesn't matter to me whether it is a one-day race, or taking place over three weeks,” he explained.
Urán will be at Team Sky for a third year in 2013, and hopes that he will see another successful season. Exactly how this will be structured has yet to be decided however, with the team’s calendar yet to be worked out.
“What races I do obviously depends on the calendar the team sets for me,” he explained. “I'm looking forward to a good rest and ready for some renewed success with Team Sky. Hopefully I'll have a very similar programme to this year though.
In the meantime, Urán has taken the rare opportunity to spend some time in South America, and some relaxation before his preparation for 2013 begins.
“During the off-season I have returned home to Colombia,” he said. “The village I live in is situated 2000 metres above sea level, so even when you are not training hard it is great to stay fit.” |
Valve have just announced Steam Greenlight . The new service will work like the Steam Workshop, but for indie games. Creators can submit their work, whether it's an unfinished playable build or screenshots and videos, and gamers can then vote on the games they like. The best rated games will enter Valve's approval process for inclusion in the Steam store.
Steam Greenlight is currently due to launch at the end of August, and it should be a boon to any developer trying to make a living from indie games.
"Making the call to publish or not publish a title isn't fun," said Anna Sweet, in a press release the developer just released . "Many times opinions vary and our internal jury is hung on a decision. But with the introduction of the Steam Workshop we realized an opportunity to enlist the community's help as we review certain titles and, hopefully, increase the volume and quality of creative submissions."
Currently any indie game designer can submit their work for inclusion on the Steam store, but the approval process can be frustrating. Valve get far more submissions than they can quickly process, and indie developers whose games have been rejected often say they weren't given a clear reason why. Being accepted, meanwhile, can make the difference between success and failure as an indie game developer.
This new process should make it much easier for the best games to get on to the service. Best of all, gamers can make the difference. Have a favourite indie game that's currently not available through the Steam store? Convince the developer to submit it, then rally the community to vote it to the top of the Steam Greenlight pile. My first vote will go to the excellent turn-based strategy game Unity of Command .
Steam Greenlight was revealed at a private event in London for British indie designers, and the official website has more details. What indie games do you think should be on Steam? |
By Cassius Methyl
Another hit was recently attempted on the rising culture of educated people: people educated about “conspiracies.” Mainstream academic institution the University of Kent published a study claiming that conspiracy theorists tend to be narcissistic.
A Daily Mail article sports the headline “Believe in conspiracy theories? You’re probably a narcissist: People who doubt the moon landings are more likely to be selfish and attention-seeking.”
Right: the University of Kent experts have really pinned down the root psychological machinations of a conspiracy theorist.
Like other recent attacks on “conspiracy theorists” in mainstream academia, they associate “moon landing conspiracy theories” with all kinds of other historically proven, irrefutably true facts.
The article tries to paint these people as absurd, saying “Do you think the moon-landings were faked, vaccines are a plot for mind control, or that shadowy government agencies are keeping alien technology locked up in hidden bunkers?”
Here are some irrefutable facts to put reality in perspective: from an article titled “Governments and Biowarfare: a Brief History”
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The bottom line is, there are all types of historical facts, crimes committed by governments, events, pieces of information, that the ordinary person has not investigated. Once you learn about historical facts that are suppressed by governments, corporations, and their media partners, you realize this:
Nobody has a perfect measure of probability. Nobody has the ability to say “no, that can’t be true, that’s not probable,” because to have an accurate sense of probability, you’d have to know a lot more than you do.
There are so many historical facts that could obliterate a person’s perception of “probable.”
If an ordinary person spent a few days being educated by a person into these facts, a person who mainstream culture would condemn as a “conspiracy theorist,” they would never see the world the same again.
Mainstream academia cannot reasonably sit on a pedestal and claim that they have supreme ability to measure probability.
Moon landing conspiracy theories have little to do with an understanding of the irrefutable reality of hegemony and its conniving, conspiring nature: the conspiring history of Rockefeller and Carnegie, the industrial magnates of the United States, creating corrupt academic institutions such as the University of Chicago, for example.
Moon landing theories have little to do with the recent conspiracy facts of Halliburton being granted contracts in Iraq, or the US taking out Gaddafi in Libya to defend the petrodollar.
There’s an entire world of geopolitics, an entire obfuscated world of geo-economic warfare, an entire world of power beneath the curtain of mainstream culture. |
Philip K. Howard, a lawyer, is the chair of the legal reform nonprofit Common Good and the author, most recently, of "Life Without Lawyers."
America is choking on laws of our own making.
Once a law is in place in the United States, it's almost impossible to dislodge. Our political class assumes that, after a law is forged in the crucible of democracy, it should be honored as if it's one of the Ten Commandments - except it's more like one of 10 million.
We even have a hard time modifying laws that were explicitly designed to be temporary. Just look at the current battle over the Bush-era tax cuts.
Having that debate at all is unusual. Once enacted, most laws are ignored for generations, allowed to take on a life of their own without meaningful review. Decade after decade, they pile up like sediment in a harbor, bogging the country down - in dense regulation, unaffordable health care, and higher taxes and public debt.
A healthy democracy must make fresh choices. This requires not mindless deregulation but continual adjustment of laws. Congress could take on this responsibility if it followed a simple proposal: Every law should automatically expire after 10 or 15 years. Such a universal sunset provision would force Congress and the president to justify the status quo and give political reformers an opening to reexamine trade-offs and public priorities.
Unless forced to make tough choices, Congress will keep kicking the can down the road. The looming crisis of the national deficit, for example, is impossible to address without changing existing entitlement programs. But when the co-chairs of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform announced their proposals last month, including modifications to Medicare, the condemnation from Congress was swift. "This proposal is simply unacceptable," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Even Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican member of the commission who preaches fiscal discipline, refused to vote for the proposals.
"It's not true that bipartisanship is dead in Washington," Will Marshall at the Progressive Policy Institute recently observed. "There's a perfect bipartisan conspiracy to bankrupt the country."
On the other hand, the political scuffle over ethanol subsidies - with Republican fiscal hard-liners facing off against Republicans from farm states - shows how sunset laws can reinvigorate democratic debate. Critics have long questioned billions of dollars in subsidies (last year, $7.7 billion) for a product known to have serious environmental drawbacks. The issue has come to a head, however, only because ethanol subsidies, like the Bush tax cuts, are set to automatically expire at the end of this year.
Sunset laws have been proposed from time to time, and they were a domestic priority for President Jimmy Carter. "Too many Federal programs have been allowed to continue indefinitely," he wrote to Congress in 1979, "without examining whether they are accomplishing what they were meant to do."
But that effort stalled and, 30 years later, accumulated law has become a defining problem of modern democracy. To an amazing degree, our government's choices are dictated by political leaders who are long dead. Health-care programs and Social Security - eating up about 70 percent of each year's federal revenue - don't even come up for annual authorization and are not limited by a budget. Many programs outlived their usefulness decades ago: New Deal subsidies intended for starving farmers now go mostly to corporate farms ($15 billion annually), and inflated union wages on government contracts (more than $11 billion per year), another relic of the 1930s, have the effect of limiting public works and employment.
The political debate skims the top of this vast legal pile, though most of the problems are embedded in the structure underneath. Take health care: The Republican House leadership vows to repeal or cut back the recent "government takeover," which it calls unaffordable. But the unaffordability of American health care - which costs twice as much as care in other developed countries, with worse outcomes - is mainly caused by preexisting programs. In this bureaucracy, every incentive is misaligned. Elaborate reimbursement guidelines encourage expensive procedures, with no incentives for physicians to be prudent. Patients with insurance see health care as an entitlement, allowing hypochondriacs to clog doctors' waiting rooms. But neither party, we now know after the lengthy debate on health-care reform, will take the political risk of challenging these wasteful practices. |
Climate scientists have worked hard for decades to prove climate change. Why is the US House Committee on Science, Space and Technology working so hard not to believe them? Donald LeRoi, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center
On Sunday February 5th, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology published a press release alleging, based on questionable evidence, that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) “manipulated climate records.” The source of their evidence, according to Committee spokesperson Thea McDonalds, was a Daily Mail article. The Daily Mail is a British tabloid most famous for outlandish headlines such as "Is the Bum the New Side Boob” and "ISIS Chief executioner winning hearts with his rugged looks.” This is not the first time that the House Science Committee has used spurious evidence to dispute the existence of human-driven climate change. The piece, which quotes John Bates—a scientist who NOAA once employed—challenges the data used in the famous 2015 Karl study. The study, named after Thomas R. Karl—the director of the NOAA’s Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the paper's lead author—was published in Science and debunked the notion of a climate “hiatus” or “cooling.” The House Science Committee press release, which includes quotes from committee Chairman Lamar Smith as well as Darin Lahood (R-Ill) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz), misrepresents a procedural disagreement as proof that human caused climate change is not occurring. It's akin to pointing to a family argument as proof that they aren't actually related. "What the House Committee is trying to do, like they did in the past, is debunk the whole issue of global warming,” said Yochanan Kushnir, a Senior Scientist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. At the center of the argument is contention over how NOAA maintains climate data records. Climate researchers receive grants to process and develop climate-related data sets. Once those data sets are fully developed, it becomes the responsibility of NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center (NCDC) to preserve, monitor, and update that data—which can sometimes be what data scientists refer to as messy. “The problem,” said Kevin Trenberth a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “is that this is quite an arduous process, and can take a long time. And, of course NOAA doesn't necessarily get an increase of funds to do this.” Maintaining this data fell under the purview of Bates' group, and it’s this data that he has taken issue with publicly. “Bates was complaining that not all of the data sets were being done as thoroughly as he wanted to," said Ternberth. “But there's a compromise you have to make as to whether you can do more data sets or whether you can do more really thoroughly. And the decision was made that you try and do more.”
Ice core samples are used as proxy indicators for past global climate temperatures and atmospheric CO 2 concentrations. NOAA
Bates takes particular issue with the way Karl handled land temperature data in the Science study which addressed the so-called “climate hiatus." Early analyses of global temperature trends during the first ten years of this century seemed to suggest that warming had slowed down. Climate change doubters used this analysis to support their belief that—despite climatological data which includes 800,000 year ice-core records of atmospheric carbon dioxide—humans have not affected the atmosphere by releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide per year. “His primary complaint seems to be that when researchers at NOAA published this paper in Science, while they used a fully developed and vetted ocean temperature product, they used an experimental land temperature product," said Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst and environmental economist with Berkeley Earth. Because climate data comes from a number of different sources, methods of handling that data go through a vetting process that ultimately dictates the use of one for the official government temperature product. That can mean controlling for known defects in the devices that gather climate data or figuring out the best way to put them together. The product that Karl used for land temperature data hadn't finished that process. "That said," said Hausfather, "the land temperature data they used in the paper is certainly up to the standards of an experimental or research product.” So what does that mean for those of us on the outside? Not much. The record data that Bates takes umbrage with showed roughly the same amount of warming as the old record. And the evidence that the Karl paper cites as to why there’s no hiatus is based on ocean temperatures—not land. A government source who does not wish to be named emphasized that there is no evidence or even a credible suggestion that NOAA falsified data in the Karl et al (K15) study. And even if Bates' critiques were valid—and given that this methodology, after much peer review, is now the default way that NOAA calculates land temperatures, his complaints seem problematic—it doesn't upend the study's conclusion. As for the differences in water temperatures, that can be easily be accounted for by differences in the tools used to measure water temperatures. In the past, as PopSci previously reported, most ocean temperature data was taken by ships which pulled water into their engine rooms—rooms warmer than the ocean outside, making ocean temperature recordings slightly higher. When ocean temperature tracking switched to buoys, which stay in the water all of the time and don’t heat up, NOAA failed to control for the cooler (and arguably more accurate) water temperatures due to the lack of hot ship engines. The Karl study corrects for that temperature difference and Bates’ complaints do nothing to discredit it. "People should be aware of the fact that there are different groups that analyze the data," said Kushnir. "if you look at all of the sources together you get a bigger, more reliable picture of what's happening. There's the Hadley Center from the UK meteorology office that puts together a data set of global mean temperatures, there's NASA, NOAA, then there's the Berkeley group and the Japanese who have their own way of putting information together."
Zeke Hausfather at Berkeley Earth independently developed an updated version of Figure 2 in Karl et al 2015. The black line shows the new NOAA record, while the thinner blue line shows the results from raw land stations, ships, and buoys with no corrections for station moves or instrument changes. The two are quite similar over the last 50 years; over the last 100 years the corrected data [the one Karl uses] actually shows less global warming. NOAA
The Karl paper is also not the only one to tackle the hiatus. Studies in Nature by Stephan Lewandowsky of the Cabot Institute University of Bristol, and this one in the journal Climate Change by Bala Rajaratnam of Stanford University, all say the same thing. The Karl study’s high profile, however, has made it a frequent target for criticism. “The whole issue of this hiatus issue was discussed quite heavily in science,” said Kushnir. "And as scientists we understand what happened in this long period.” Basically, there’s the natural climate variability, and then there’s the variability caused by climate change. The natural variability during this period was cooler, but the climate change impact on top of it was not. But that isn’t even Bates' complaint, as the House Committee would imply—his complaint is that the data wasn’t vetted heavily enough. “I interpret a key part of the issue,” said Trenberth, “as, how deep do you go and how far into the research do you go for one particular data set, as opposed to moving onto the next data set and getting that into a much better state than it would have been otherwise.” Trenberth points to a backlog of data that hasn’t yet been released or updated, pressuring NOAA to focus on volume over perfection. If this sounds to you like an argument for more funding for climate change research instead of less, you're not alone. “Recommendations about doing these things have been made, but they've never been adequately funded. So we muddle along,” said Trenberth. “And Lamar smith under the house has been responsible for some of this, because they actually cut the funding to enable NOAA to properly deal with and process the data by 30 percent in 2012. So the ability to do this properly has actually been compromised by the House Science Committee and by Lamar Smith in particular.” The current administration has talked a lot about the “politicization of science.” Meanwhile on the House Committee’s website, Representative Smith states that Bates has exposed the “previous administration’s efforts to push their costly climate agenda at the expense of scientific integrity.” With the House Committee misrepresenting both Bates' complaint and the overarching scientific consensus, it does indeed seem that the politicization of science is a problem the administration needs to deal with. |
In the days since the general election, David Cameron has set his sights firmly on Europe and shortened the potential timeframe of his planned referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union.
But it’s worth remembering that the Tories managed to win only one out of 59 seats in Scotland, and that they had their worst ever general election vote share north of the border since 1865. Cameron’s mandate among the UK’s “family of nations” – to use his own term from the Scottish independence referendum campaign – is dubious at best. In light of the result in Scotland, the prime minister must recognise that it cannot be business as usual.
Cameron has promised to govern with respect. To have any hope of achieving that, it is vital to his own credibility and to that of the government he leads to apply core democratic principles to the EU referendum bill ,which is expected to be published on Thursday.
Best practice from the independence referendum must be followed – and that includes extending the vote in an EU referendum to 16- and 17-year-olds across the UK. Scotland’s 56 SNP MPs will certainly seek to amend the legislation to ensure that young people are able to take part in the vote.
Restricted franchise in EU referendum would make a mockery of democracy | Letters Read more
My own interest in this matter goes back many years – including devoting my maiden speech in the House of Commons in 2001 to the case for lowering the voting age to 16 across the board. Interestingly, when Winnie Ewing won the Hamilton by-election in 1967, her maiden speech called for the voting age to be cut from 21, as it was at that time, to 18.
Progress has been made, and one of the great successes of last year’s independence referendum was the franchise being extended to young adults. Scotland sent out the message loudly and clearly that 16- and 17-year-olds should have the right to shape the country they live in.
And as a nation we were not let down: 16- and 17-year-olds turned out in huge numbers to vote, and did not stop there. Young people in Scotland have embraced participative democracy like never before.
I don’t agree with having a referendum on EU membership – but if it is to go ahead, then Cameron has a responsibility to help ensure it can be an enriching and open debate. Young people are our future. It is their UK – and their Europe – so they must have their say.
Sixteen- and 17-year-olds can pay taxes, get married and join the armed forces, so it is only right and fair that they should also be entitled to vote.
The opposition benches must send a message to this Tory government that they cannot ride roughshod over our future
We will also seek to amend the legislation to ensure that no constituent part of the UK can be taken out of the EU against its will. We will propose a “double majority” rule, meaning that unless England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each vote to leave the EU, as well as the UK as a whole, Britain would remain a member state.
If Cameron continues to refuse to accept this democratic protection, then his independence referendum vow that Scotland is to have an equal voice will be in tatters.
We also support the idea of EU nationals living in the UK having their say. If a vote for the UK to leave the EU was successful, it could have deeply damaging consequences on the lives of those people who have chosen to live and work here, and on their families. Just like young people, and the UK “family of nations”, European nationals deserve a voice too.
North of the border, EU citizens can vote in Scottish parliament elections and local authority elections – and, of course, they had their say in the independence referendum. Although this is not yet the case for Westminster’s general elections, it would be wrong to exclude them from a vote on the UK’s European membership.
Cameron will be accountable for his rhetoric and his actions, and the SNP will – as we promised during the general election campaign – work to promote progressive policies.
And we will look to work across party lines in these objectives. As well as from our friends in Plaid Cymru and the Greens, we will also seek support from Labour MPs and the remaining Lib Dems.
It is important that the opposition benches send a strong message to this Tory government that it cannot ride roughshod over our future.
SNP MPs at Westminster will do all we can to ensure that everyone has a fair say on our future European membership – including the UK’s youngest citizens. |
(Video) Interview with Patrick Madrid – On Catholic Apologetics and the New Atheism
When Patrick Madrid started in Catholic apologetics back in 1987, it wasn’t nearly as popular as today. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, apologetics didn’t jive with the ecumenical spirit of the 60’s and 70’s, which put more emphasis on what Catholicism had in common with other faiths rather than what set it apart.
Yet along with Karl Keating, Dr. Scott Hahn, and a small group of others, Patrick helped revive the lost art. For eight years, he worked at Catholic Answers, an apologetics and evangelization apostolate, where he served as vice president and helped launch the group’s flagship magazine, This Rock (now called Catholic Answers Magazine.)
Since then he’s spoken around the world and has written or edited over twenty books, which together have sold almost a million copies. They include The Godless Delusion, Search and Rescue, and Surprised By Truth. His latest book is Envoy for Christ: 25 Years as a Catholic Apologist (Servant Books, paperback, 392 pages.)
Patrick recently launched a new call-in radio show called “Right Here, Right Now,” which you can hear Monday through Friday from 4:00pm-5:00pm ET on EWTN-Radio affiliate stations across the country, as well as on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio.
Patrick recently sat down with me to discuss several things including Catholic apologetics, the new atheism, and his favorite books on apologetics.
(As I explain in the video, the first two questions got cut due to a glitch. However, they’re transcribed in their entirety below.)
Watch or download our interview below:
Video
Watch the video here (14 minutes)
Audio
[audio:http://brandonvogt.com/wp-content/uploads/InterviewPatrickMadrid.mp3]
Download the interview here (14 minutes)
Topics Discussed
1:25 – How can Catholics defend their faith more charitably?
5:01 – What should Catholics know about the New Atheism?
9:25 – What are the must-read books on Catholic apologetics?
Patrick’s Recommended Books on Apologetics
Excerpt
(These are the first two interview questions that got cut out from the video.)
Q: Let’s start by talking about your newest book, titled Envoy for Christ: 25 Years as a Catholic Apologist (Servant, paperback, 392 pages). The book is part memoir, part apologetics. What can people expect to find in the book?
Well, in addition to how you just aptly described it, the greater part of the book is given over to a series of essays I have written over the last 25 years on many different themes in apologetics. Some are in regards to specific religious groups like Mormons, Protestants, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Also, there is apologetics for the culture, so dealing with things that are not religious per se but rather with the pressures and worldviews that are rampant in our culture.
I also wrote a good deal of new material to offset the material that is collected there from previous essays. This new material is largely a memoir including several behind-the-scenes anecdotes and stories which people otherwise would not know about. For example, I write about how I met Karl Keating and Scott Hahn, how I introduced the two to each others, and things we did back in the “olden days” when the popularity of apologetics was still being reestablished.
Q: In your history of being a professional Catholic apologist, which now spans more than 25 years, you’ve heard just about every objection to Catholicism under the sun. In your experience, what is the most common objection people have, and how can we explain or answer it?
If I may define that into two categories, I’d say that among non-Catholics, especially Protestants, at the top of their list would be the notion that Catholics do not follow the notion of sola Scriptura. It’s a Reformation principle which holds that Scripture is formally sufficient for Christian believers and that Tradition and the Magisterium are ultimately unnecessary with regard to interpreting Scripture properly. From that point of view flows so many other errors and heresies and problems, so when you see this issue of sola Scriptura is at the heart of many misunderstandings and problems between Catholics and Protestant it becomes easier then, once you’ve dealt with that issue, to talk about the papacy or Mary or the Eucharist.
Now for Catholics, the number one objection they raise has to do with birth control. Contraception is widely practiced by the vast majority of Catholics who, likely because of ignorance and improper catechesis, never really understood why the Church teaches what she does on this issue. So many of them have the idea that they can dissent from this teaching, ignore it, and go their merry way practicing contraception. Unfortunately, most Catholic couples are contracepting. So that is not only the de facto objection to the Church but it is one that requires good answers so that people understand this is not just something that the Church mandates in order to prevent people from having fun. There are good, solid, urgent reasons why they should not be practicing birth control.
And if you liked this discussion, you’ll find several more on my Interviews page. Subscribe free via feed reader or email and ensure sure you don’t miss future interviews.
What’s the most common objection you hear to Catholicism? |
At a public meeting, Northside residents said they don’t want their neighborhood disrupted by traffic from a proposed Meijer store at Keystone Avenue and 56th Street. (Photo: Michael Heinz/Journal & Courier file photo )
Neighbors have questions — lots of them — about a Meijer store slated to move in right along one of the busiest streets in Central Indiana.
Northside residents gave an engineer an earful Wednesday night, saying they don’t want their neighborhood disrupted by the big-box retailer.
The room at the Glendale Branch of the Indianapolis Public Library was packed to the brim. Residents did not get many solid answers Wednesday evening, because nobody from Meijer attended.
“I’m very concerned about the safety of pedestrians and commuter safety,” said Kerry Bender, who lives near the store’s proposed located.
Meijer has two entrances drawn up for its nearly 193,000-square-foot store at the corner of Keystone Avenue and East 56th Street.
Neighbors like Robin Bridges, who lives across the street, will be able to see the 56th Street entrance from her front door.
“I won’t want to come in my front yard if the traffic is in front of my house. What does it do for my property value?” Bridges asked. “I have a young child. I want her to be able to ride her bike on this street.”
Neighbors got word of the development weeks ago. It received attention quickly because some land Meijer wants to use, including a piece of property where an apartment building sits, would have to be rezoned.
Wednesday night dozens of residents packed the Glendale Library branch for a standing-room-only meeting, where a civil engineer working as a consultant with the company presented plans and attempted to gather concerns.
Neighbors grew restless, worried that their streets will become dangerous.
“What the heck are you going to do with all the traffic coming down from Kessler to make a quick entrance to your store?” one man emphatically asked.
Engineers stressed the project is still in an early stage of planning, adding that Meijer could back out.
Resident Kerry Bender said it all comes down to street safety.
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“It’s our neighborhood. We all have a vested interest in our residence,” she said.
Fox59 reached out to a Meijer spokesperson on Wednesday afternoon to ask why nobody from the company was there for the meeting. There was no reply.
The zoning request will be heard by the city in late October.
Earlier this month Meijer announced plans to hire 1,800 seasonal and full-time workers in Indiana at current locations.
This story was originally published on Fox59.com.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/1peX1Ol |
[John Wall celebrates with the crowd after winning Game 6. Photo Credit: Alex Brandon/AP.]
Washington just won the franchise’s biggest game of the last 35 years on the biggest shot of that same time period. But there is no time to savor the victory. The reason Washington’s Game 6 win was so big is that it guaranteed that the Wizards will play an even bigger game Monday night in Boston. Scott Brooks called it the two most exciting words in playoff basketball: Game 7.
Here are two things Washington needs to do to continue playing big games in May:
Stop Boston’s Cherry-Picking.
Celtics coach Brad Stevens needed to make an adjustment in Game 5. His team had been demolished in two straight games in Washington and his star player was having difficulty generating easy baskets against the Wizards’ double and triple teams.
So, he turned to one of the most annoying tactics in pick-up basketball: cherry-picking. Instead of boxing out or waiting around to see if a teammate secured the defensive rebound, the Celtics released their perimeter players down-court as soon as the Wizards shot the ball. Washington was way too slow to adjust, and Boston scored layup after layup after dunk. It was nearly ridiculous.
Boston started the first quarter of Game 5 with a 31-16 lead, including 15 fast break points, and Washington never made a meaningful dent in that initial deficit. Afterward, John Wall correctly noted that the Wizards eliminated Boston’s easy transition baskets in quarters two through four, but the damage had already been done.
In Game 6, Washington did a much better job getting back in transition — with one notable exception. For a brief stretch in the third quarter, Stevens went back to the cherry-picking well and the Celtics got three easy scoring chances on back-to-back-to-back possessions.
First, with 9:24 remaining in the quarter and Boston leading 44-43, Wall forced a driving layup and ended up on the floor. Isaiah Thomas grabbed the rebound and tossed it ahead to a streaking Avery Bradley who was fouled from behind on a layup attempt. He hit both free throws.
Next possession, Al Horford contested Beal’s 3-point attempt at the top of the key and just kept running down the court as Beal watched the ball bounce off the back iron. Thomas got the ball and tossed it ahead to a wide open Horford for a dunk with 21 seconds remaining on the shot clock.
After Brooks called a timeout, presumably to preach transition defense, it happened again. Brooks drew up a nice play to get Wall a driving layup, but three seconds later, Boston scored again. Avery Bradley sprinted down court as soon as Wall’s shot went through the net and Thomas quickly grabbed the inbounds and tossed it ahead to Bradley for an uncontested layup. Again, there were still 21 seconds on the shot clock when Avery scored.
3 straight possessions in 3Q BOS leaks out for easy baskets. #Wizards need to get back quickly when Celtics release early. #WizCeltics pic.twitter.com/JvwkOZZPFl — Ledell's Place (@LedellsPlace) May 14, 2017
Washington’s nonexistent transition defense was particularly troubling because the Wizards were in the midst of a seven-plus minute stretch without a field goal, having missed 14 straight shots spanning the second and third quarters. They were struggling so hard just to manufacture a basket while gift-wrapping scores on the other end.
Luckily, Washington was able to contain Boston’s cherry-picking outbreak to just those three possessions, but those easy Celtics points — especially in a game where the Wizards were struggling to score — can be the difference.
After practice on Saturday, Otto Porter talked about Boston’s pick-up strategy:
“It’s tough because whenever they contest our shots at the top of the key the guy that contested the shot is leaking out. Horford did it that one time, contested Brad and got back.”
The good news is Porter said the coaching staff has made it a priority to stop Boston from leaking out:
“We watched film today and definitely emphasized it. If we can’t get to the rebound we definitely have to get back to stop some of the easy points because those points definitely matter at the end of the game.”
Bring #DeathRowDC On The Road.
As you have probably heard, the home team has won all 10 regular season and post-season meetings between the Wizards and Celtics this year. This series feels like it was always destined for a Game 7, with the pressure on Washington to break the home-court dominance.
Porter seems to agree. Even after Washington was down 0-2, he was confident. “We knew we’d always win at home,” Porter said. “We just had that confidence.”
While Washington’s home-court mastery this season (36-11 overall) — is a good thing, the team’s confidence might have backfired in Game 5. Washington played the pivotal swing game like they knew they’d win Game 6 and have another shot at a road win in Game 7. Coach Scott Brooks said of the team’s performance in Game 5: “We didn’t have the appropriate focus to start out the game.” Otto Porter’s comment may explain why.
The Washington Post’s Jerry Brewer even suggested that Scott Brooks himself did not fully appreciate the importance of Game 5 when the coach said after practice the day before the game, “If we want to advance, we have to win a game up there. So we’re looking at [Game 5] as the first crack to do that.”
Whatever misconceptions may have existed with Game 5, they certainly do not exist with Game 7. There is no second chance after Monday. Brooks, as the leader of this team, presumably has the best feel for how his players will respond in the hostile Game 7 environment. He sounded confident after Saturday’s practice, sort of:
“We’re gonna play much better than we played Game 5. I can tell by our focus today, umm … at least I hope.”
Brooks’ answer sounded good until that last part. Porter seems to think that Boston will be feeling the heat on their home court: “All the pressure is on them now. We can go there and just play our game, and I feel like that’s what we’re going to do.”
It’s probably a good thing if the Wizards play loose and do not let the weight of the moment crush them. Just as long as they realize there will be enough tension in TD Garden Monday night to rattle both teams. So, they better bring a lot more focus than they packed for their last trip to Boston. |
It's nearly impossible to turn on the TV, open up a web browser, or scroll through Twitter without being assaulted with notifications of a new world disaster (or two, or three...). Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, alerts of shootings, plane crashes, ISIS beheadings, crime, war and human rights violations are constant -- and this incessant news of violence and destruction may be messing with our heads.
The world isn't falling apart, but it can sure feel like it. The news can be violent, depressing and emotionally-charged.
"Terrorism is newsworthy because it is inherently dramatic and threatening," political scientist Shana Gadarian wrote in The Washington Post in October. "Media competition means that journalists and editors have incentives to use emotionally powerful visuals and story lines to gain and maintain ever-shrinking news audiences."
This may be driven partly by our natural negativity bias, which leads us to pay more attention to things that are dangerous or threatening.
According to some psychologists, exposure to negative and violent media may have serious and long-lasting psychological effects beyond simple feelings of pessimism or disapproval. The work of British psychologist Dr. Graham Davey, who specializes in the psychological effects of media violence, suggests that violent media exposure can exacerbate or contribute to the development of stress, anxiety, depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
"Negative news can significantly change an individual’s mood -- especially if there is a tendency in the news broadcasts to emphasize suffering and also the emotional components of the story," Davey told The Huffington Post. "In particular... negative news can affect your own personal worries. Viewing negative news means that you’re likely to see your own personal worries as more threatening and severe, and when you do start worrying about them, you’re more likely to find your worry difficult to control and more distressing than it would normally be."
According to Davey, the way that negative news affects your mood can also have a larger affect on how you interpret and interact with the world around you. If it makes you more anxious or sad for instance, then you may subconsciously become more attuned to negative or threatening events, and you may be more likely to see ambiguous or neutral events as negative ones.
On a neurological level, when we're confronted with images of violence, we know that images or videos depicting violence are categorically different from actual violence -- so we don't process the input as threatening stimuli. However, we internalize the negative stimuli, which can affect mood and cause one to feel more negatively towards the environment more broadly.
"These images change our overall mood to a more negative one -- more sad or more anxious -- and it is this change in mood that leads to psychological changes in the way we attend to things around us (e.g. we are more likely to pick out things in our environment that are potentially negative or threatening)," Davey explains. "This can have a vicious cycle effect on mood generally for some time."
Some research has even suggested that viewing traumatic images in the media can cause PTSD-like symptoms. A 2001 study found that watching the events of 9/11 on television was enough to trigger PTSD symptoms -- such as worrying about future terrorist attacks and reduced self-confidence -- in some viewers. Severity of symptoms, interestingly, was directly correlated with the amount of time the subjects spent watching television.
A recent study also found that being frequently exposed to graphic, uncensored images of violence is emotionally distressing to many journalists working in newsroom settings. The journalists who were regularly exposed to violent video footage scored higher on indexes of PTSD -- including re-experiencing, avoidance and general anxiety -- as well as increased alcohol consumption, depression, and somatization (physical signs of distress in the body).
The researchers noted that over time, exposure to graphic violence can cause a process of either sensitization, in which the individuals becomes more sensitive to emotional distress upon viewing the images, or desensitization -- a sort of numbing process in which individuals become habituated to what they see -- to occur. This numbing effect, which causes the brain to exhibit less of an emotional response to disturbing stimuli, has been observed in those who have been repeatedly exposed to violent video games.
The diagnostic criteria for PTSD -- which was appended for the DSM-5 to recognize that not only experiencing something traumatic oneself but also witness a life-threatening trauma to another could lead to symptoms of the disorder -- acknowledges this to some degree. Davey notes, however, that the DSM description does say that these events should be witnessed in person.
Of course, it's important to note that exposure to negative news is unlikely to cause depression, anxiety or PTSD in individuals who are not already prone to these conditions. But it can still lead to a pessimism and world-weariness that leads us to perceive the state of the world in an overly negative light -- leading us to ignore and overshadow the many things that are working.
What's clear from this research is that more positive news is needed to outweigh the violence and destruction we're exposed to every day. As psychologist Steven Pinker and international studies professor Andrew Mack write in Slate, the world is not going to hell in a handbasket, despite what the headlines suggest. Violence has actually decreased, and quality of life has improved for millions of people. Journalism should reflect these truths. |
Marti Noxon: "To be perfectly candid I was struggling. My eating disorder morphed into an issue with alcohol and I got sober when I was 24, and then guess what? I thought I got better, and gave [drinking] another run right after I turned 50. I was aware that I needed to stop and I’d gone back into therapy for it, but I was still really struggling with addiction when I was writing the script. I was really working hard to ask myself why I would pick something up again that had done me harm in the past. I started to draw the parallels to when I was using food to try to control my life and I was able to understand that, even though [anorexia and substance abuse] work really differently, the goal was the same, which was to numb my feelings. To not feel whatever it was that I was afraid of... Control is, what’s underneath the desire to control it, it’s a desire to stave off something that frightens you or something you feel powerless over and those feelings are just so uncomfortable. But when we started to film, I was sober again and I started to need to turn to the other female producers quite frequently and say, ‘I’m going to need you to tell me that I don’t need to lose weight.’ |
At some point in our cannabis careers, we’re all posed with the question, “How long is my cannabis good for?” Maybe you’ve found a few nugs tucked in your winter jacket from last year’s ski trip, or when harvesting a medical crop you may need a way to safely store the excess buds until you’re ready to consume the fruits of your labor.
Like a fine wine cellar or whiskey barrel, cannabis is best when aged in a cool, dark place, and while there is no steadfast expiration date for cannabis, there are a few key elements to consider when storing cannabis for any extended period.
Ideal Temperatures for Storing Cannabis
Mildew and other molds on cannabis and other organic matter thrive in temperatures between 77° and 86° F, so basic precautions of keeping your cannabis in a cool, dark place will go a long way. Excessive heat can dry out the cannabinoids and terpenes that have taken months to develop. When these essential oils get too dry along with plant material, it can result in a hot, harsh smoke.
Lower temperatures also slow the process of decarboxylation of cannabinoids, the process that transfers THC-A into the psychoactive THC and eventually degrades into the less desired CBN. Additionally, warm air holds more moisture than cold air, which brings us to the next consideration.
Humidity Factors for Cannabis Storage
Humidity control is paramount to keeping mildew and other mold contaminants away from your cannabis. Keeping your cannabis stored in a controlled environment with the proper relative humidity (RH) ranges can be a bit of a balancing act, but the general consensus is to keep cannabis between 59% and 63% RH when stored to maintain and enhance color, consistency, aroma, and flavor.
Keeping your RH below 65% reduces the chances for mold to occur. However, if your RH drops too low, you risk your trichomes becoming brittle and drying out the essential oils.
Light Settings for Storing Cannabis
Harmful UV rays break down many organic and synthetic materials. Similar to the way your grass turns brown at the end of a long sunny summer, or how a car’s paint begins to fade when it is not garaged, UV rays will degrade your cannabis over time.
A study conducted at the University of London in the 1970s concluded that light was the single biggest factor in the degradation of cannabinoids. The same study concluded that cannabinoids maintain stability for up to two years when stored under the proper conditions, though it can remain effective and safe to consume for much longer as the essential oils slowly break down over time. Storing your cannabis out of direct light will also help you control the temperature.
Air Control for Cannabis Storage
While cannabis needs oxygen during growing and curing, storing your cannabis in a container with just the right amount of air is crucial to keeping it fresh and true to its original form. Having too little air can greatly affect the relative humidity, especially if the buds are not completely dried before storage.
Too much air, on the other hand, will speed up the degradation process as the cannabinoids and other organic matter are exposed to oxygen. There are a variety of hand and electric vacuum pump attachments available for canning jars that will help you minimize oxygen exposure.
How to Store Your Cannabis
Do – store out of direct sunlight in a cool, dry place
Do – store in containers with a neutral charge, like glass jars.
Do – use hygrometers or products like Boveda to monitor and control RH levels
Do – vacuum seal jars and containers to minimize oxygen exposure
Do – separate your strains to maintain their individual flavor profiles
Do – look for the many exciting new ways to store your cannabis. The cannabis industry is growing every day, with new products and companies like Cannador and The Bureau designing solutions for all of your cannabis storage needs.
How Not to Store Your Cannabis
Don’t – store in the refrigerator. The fluctuations in humidity and temperature can actually increase your chance of mold and mildew.
Don’t – store in the freezer. Freezing temperatures cause the fragile trichomes to become brittle and break off like little icicles when handled.
Don’t – store in plastic bags or containers. Plastic often has a static charge that can attract precious trichomes. If you must use a plastic bag, only use it for short-term storage of small quantities of cannabis.
Don’t – store above or around electronics or appliances that give off heat. Heat rises — instead, store your cannabis in a low cupboard, shelf, or in the basement of your house, much like a wine cellar.
Don’t – use a tobacco humidor. Most use cedar wood, which has oils that transfer and can influence the flavors of your cannabis. They also tend to employ sponges that use propylene glycol to regulate humidity and can oversaturate your cannabis.
Don’t – store grinders, pipes, or other paraphernalia with your cannabis. The ash and resin from burnt cannabis tends to linger and will stink up any storage container. Also, it is simply good etiquette to keep your supplies separate and clean.
Other Factors for Storing Your Marijuana
Products infused with cannabis, such as edibles and other perishable creations, will have different storage guidelines. We do not recommend that you store these items for long periods of time. Follow the directions on the package and store your edibles similar to ordinary, food-based items.
Alcohol tinctures and other cannabis concentrates seem to be less susceptible to mold and other contaminants due to the reduced amount of bio matter. However, we still recommend following the basic guidelines outlined above to protect potency and minimize possible contamination. |
Stream This Episode On Demand
As mentioned at the beginning of the show, this week, it’s a pretty gutsy thing to craft a list of albums and say they’re “the best.” Yet, every December, countless media outlets try to hammer you with their opinions of the best releases from the last 12 months. I don’t think art can be judged that way, so this week’s playlist features music from my favorite albums of 2014. – Johnny Full-Time
The show features a wide selection of Blues styles, and some truly independent releases alongside some big name artists like Gary Clark, Jr., Paul Thorn, and Janiva Magness, to name a few. There’s no featured selection from inside “Johnny’s Mailbox,” this week. However, several of these albums were featured throughout the year.
My absolute favorite album of 2014, although close to call, is, the posthumous release from Sean Costello by the Vizz-Tone Label Group. This episode closes with an incredible cover by Sean of Rod Stewart’s “You Wear It Well.” Don’t Miss It!
Remember, 100% of the proceeds made from the sale of this album benefit the Sean Costello Memorial Fund for Bipolar Research. You can find complete information on their official website: SeanCostelloFund.org
1. Paul Thorn – Too Blessed To Be Stressed – Too Blessed To Be Stressed
2. John Nemeth – Keep the Love A-Comin’ – Memphis Grease
3. Johnny Winter – My Babe ft. Jason Ricci – Step Back
4. Mark T Small – Stone Pony Blues – Smokin’ Blues
5. Eden Brent – Valentine – Jigsaw Heart
6. Thorbjorn Risager & the Black Tornado – Through the Tears – Too Many Roads
7. JD McPherson – Steal Away – The Warm Covers EP
8. Gary Clark, Jr. – Numb – Live
9. Janiva Magness – Everything Is Alright – Original
10. The Harpoonist and the Axe Murderer – Tea For Two – A Real Fine Mess
11. Jarekus Singleton – Come Wit Me – Refuse To Lose
12. Mike Farris – Mercy Now – Shine For All The People
13. Sean Costello – You Wear It Well – In The Magic Shop
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In order to implode and cost taxpayers $180 billion, AIG first had to make -- and lose -- positively massive market bets with other Wall Street firms.
It will come as a surprise to no one that the firm on the other side of many of those lost bets was Goldman Sachs.
In fact, as Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story reveal in the NYT, Goldman's hardball tactics and smart bets bled AIG dry.
But don't go blaming Goldman. No one forced AIG to do these stupid deals. All Goldman did was stick it to AIG at the negotiating table and then demand that AIG do what it said it was going to do. The only entity responsible for the collapse of AIG was AIG.
One very interesting nugget in this article: As AIG got more and more distressed, Goldman offered to cancel the insurance contracts AIG had written on Goldman's behalf AND buy the contracts AIG held with other banks at deeply distressed prices. This was presumably before Tim Geithner charged in and paid out those contracts at 100 cents on the dollar.
Although the details of what happened here will have to be fleshed out, it's conceivable that Goldman's offer could have significantly reduced the need for government involvement.
Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson:
In just the year before the A.I.G. bailout, Goldman collected more than $7 billion from A.I.G. And Goldman received billions more after the rescue. Though other banks also benefited, Goldman received more taxpayer money, $12.9 billion, than any other firm.
In addition, according to two people with knowledge of the positions, a portion of the $11 billion in taxpayer money that went to Société Générale, a French bank that traded with A.I.G., was subsequently transferred to Goldman under a deal the two banks had struck.
Goldman stood to gain from the housing market's implosion because in late 2006, the firm had begun to make huge trades that would pay off if the mortgage market soured. The further mortgage securities' prices fell, the greater were Goldman's profits.
Read the whole article here > |
Isn’t this pushing a jinx? If Senate Republicans insist on having Hillary Clinton testify before allowing John Kerry’s confirmation to proceed, aren’t they risking a torn ACL or turf toe for the outgoing Secretary of State?
Clinton has pledged to remain in the job until Kerry is confirmed, which Obama said he was confident would happen “quickly.” The Senate is expected to take up Kerry’s nomination in early January, but multiple Republican senators have already said they won’t agree to a vote on Kerry’s nomination until Clinton testifies about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi. Illness and a concussion has prevented Clinton from appearing thus far.
Clinton promised to appear before Congress at one point, but the State Department backpedaled from that position quickly after it became public. State then said that Clinton couldn’t testify until after Congress received the report from the Accountability Review Board’s investigation into Benghazi, which they hinted Congress might not see for another 90 days — or possibly never see in its entirety. They got the ARB report last week, at which point State announced the resignations of four officials who never actually resigned at all. Accountability!
So yes, there are plenty of questions to ask Hillary Clinton about the “systemic failures” and “leadership and management deficiencies” that arose under her command at State, now that Congress has seen the report. There are plenty of questions to ask Hillary Clinton about the surreal resignation dodge of the past week. Asking those questions requires her presence, however, and it’s becoming clear that Hillary has no intention of submitting herself to those lines of inquiry in public. She and State are trying to run out the clock and leave John Kerry in position to deal with the aftermath.
The question is whether Senate Republicans can actually block Kerry’s nomination. Stalwarts like Mike Lee and Tim Scott will certainly give it a go, and Marco Rubio suggested that he might put a hold on it. John McCain and Lindsey Graham may not go along with obstruction for very long, for collegial reasons concerning Kerry and Hillary as well as for “comity,” but they may come along for a little while. Harry Reid can move the question with 60 votes, which means that he only needs 5 Republicans to agree to a floor vote to break the impasse. I’d be surprised if he can’t find them, after a short period of time in which the Senate Republicans can make their objection known. |
*****#1 Strategy Game on the iPhone and iPod Touch*****
"One of the most engaging TD games we've played"
-Slidetoplay.com (STP Score of 4 out of 4 "Must Have")
"This is easily one of the best TD games currently in the App Store"
-Gamezebo.com (4.5 out of 5 Stars)
"Kingdom Rush can be filed in the thin folder marked "games that are pretty much perfect"
-JayisGames.com
"This is one kingdom you'll be in no rush to escape from"
-PocketGamer (Gold Award - Score 9)
"Kingdom Rush proves that the defense genre is still alive."
-148Apps (4.5 Stars out of 5) Editor's Choice
"Ironhide Game Studios’ new game Kingdom Rush adds a much-needed shot of non-EA blood to the iPad charts."
-InsideMobileApps
"TD with a Touch of Excellence"
-toucharcade.com (4.5 stars out of 5)
The acclaimed action fantasy defense game is now available for iPhone and iPod! Get ready for an epic journey to defend your kingdom against hordes of orcs, trolls, evil wizards and other nasty fiends using a vast arsenal of towers and spells at your command!
Fight on forests, mountains and wastelands, customizing your defensive strategy with different tower upgrades and specializations! Rain fire upon your enemies, summon reinforcements, command your troops, recruit elven warriors and face legendary monsters on a quest to save the Kingdom from the forces of darkness!
Kingdom Rush highlights:
• Epic defense battles that will hook you for hours!
• Command your soldiers and see them engage in hand to hand cartoon battles!
• 8 specialized tower upgrades to customize your strategy! Mighty Barbarians, Arcane Wizards, Forest Rangers to name a few.
• Over 18 tower abilities! Have your Sorcerers summon earth elementals and polymorph your enemies!
• Over 45 different enemies, from Goblins to Demons each with their own skills! (Beware of the mountain Trolls!)
• Intense boss fights never seen on a defense game!
• Hours of gameplay with over 50 achievements
• Extra game modes that will challenge your tactical skills to the limit.
• High definition awesome illustrated cartoon art!
• In-game encyclopedia with information from your towers and enemies.
• Retina display!!! |
Sunstone 'Sunset' Shimmer
- One of the few families who mostly escaped Sombra’s genocide of the Crystal City, those of House Shimmer were once among Queen Rhodonite’s closest advisors, and the trusted protectors of the Sun Stone – a mysterious artefact holding great power.
- Sunstone Shimmer is one of the very last members of the House, descended directly from the last Guardian of the Sun Stone. Her family maintained as much of their blood purity as possible throughout the ages, allowing her to display most traits associated with the near-extinct crystal ponies (she lacks the mane gradients and transparency).
- Sunstone gained the nickname of ‘Sunset’ due to the perceived end of her lineage, and by extension, that of all crystal ponies. She is much younger than her Equusian counterpart, being a few years younger than the Cutie Mark Crusaders, as opposed to several years older.
- Her parents died of a flu epidemic that swept Equestria when she was around ten years old, prior to gaining her Cutie Mark for a talent in magic. With no other family members to take her in, Sunset fled with nothing but a set of saddlebags full of food and bits, and the Sun Stone around her neck, and has resorted to stealing to survive ever since. |
Join us for the first Docker Chicago Meetup. This event will be hosted at Braintree Offices in Chicago. Security will be checking IDs at the door. Your RSVP must reflect your FIRST NAME AND LAST NAME matching your ID.
Schedule
6:00 to 6:30: Docker basics: What, Why?
6:30 to 7:30: Docker Demo*
6:30 to 7:00: Q&A and lightning talks**
* We are currently looking for volunteers willing to demo all kind of Docker use cases. Please tell us in the comments so that we can adapt our presentation accordingly.
**If you want to give a lightning talk, please let us know!
About Docker
Docker is an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale, in production, on VMs, bare metal, OpenStack clusters, public clouds and more. Read more (http://www.docker.io/learn_more/)
About Braintree
Braintree is a full-stack payments platform that makes it easy to accept payments in your app or website. Our service replaces the traditional model of sourcing a payment gateway and merchant account from different providers. From one touch payments to mobile SDKs and foreign currency acceptance, we provide everything you need to start accepting payments today. Read more (https://www.braintreepayments.com/) |
by
The dark times that haunt the current age are epitomized by the monsters that have come to rule the United States and who now dominate the major political parties and other commanding political and economic institutions. Their nightmarish reign of misery, violence, and disposability is also evident in their dominance of a formative culture and its attendant cultural apparatuses that produce a vast machinery of manufactured consent. This is a social formation that extends from the mainstream broadcast media and Internet to a print culture, all of which embrace the spectacle of violence, legitimate opinions over facts, and revel in a celebrity and consumer culture of ignorance and theatrics. Under the reign of this normalized ideological architecture of alleged commonsense, literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science.
Thinking is now regarded as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue. All traces of critical thought appear only at the margins of the culture as ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and most of the Republic Party in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughing stock of the world. Politicians endlessly lie knowing that the public is addicted to shocks, which allows them to drown in overstimulation and live in an ever-accelerating overflow of information and images. News has become entertainment and echoes reality rather than interrogating it. Unsurprisingly, education in the larger culture has become a disimagination machine, a tool for legitimating ignorance, and it is central to the formation of an authoritarian politics that has gutted any vestige of democracy from the ideology, policies, and institutions that now control American society.
I am not talking simply about the kind of anti-intellectualism that theorists such a Richard Hofstadter, Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, and more recently Susan Jacoby have documented, however insightful their analyses might be. I am pointing to a more lethal form of illiteracy that is often ignored. Illiteracy is now a scourge and a political tool designed primarily to make war on language, meaning, thinking, and the capacity for critical thought. Chris Hedges is right in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.”[1] The new form of illiteracy does not simply constitute an absence of learning, ideas, or knowledge. Nor can it be solely attributed to what has been called the “smartphone society.”[2] On the contrary, it is a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.
Gore Vidal once called America the United States of Amnesia. The title should be extended to the United States of Amnesia and Willful Illiteracy. Illiteracy no longer simply marks populations immersed in poverty with little access to quality education; nor does it only suggest the lack of proficient skills enabling people to read and write with a degree of understanding and fluency. More profoundly, illiteracy is also about what it means not to be able to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment, and critical agency. Illiteracy has become a form of political repression that discourages a culture of questioning, renders agency as an act of intervention inoperable, and restages power as a mode of domination. It is precisely this mode of illiteracy that now constitutes the modus operandi of a society that both privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops, and the need for instant gratification. This is a mode of manufactured illiteracy and education that has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship. It is important to recognize that the rise of this new mode of illiteracy is not simply about the failure of public and higher education to create critical and active citizens; it is about a society that eliminates those public spheres that make thinking possible while imposing a culture of fear in which there is the looming threat that anyone who holds power accountable will be punished. At stake here is not only the crisis of a democratic society, but a crisis of memory, ethics, and agency.
Evidence of such a repressive policy is visible in the growth of the surveillance state, the suppression of dissent, especially among Black youth, the elimination of tenure in states such as Wisconsin, the rise of the punishing state, and the militarization of the police. It is also evident in the demonization, punishing, and war waged by the Obama administration on whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Jeffrey Sterling, among others. Any viable attempt at developing a radical politics must begin to address the role of education and civic literacy and what I have termed public pedagogy as central not only to politics itself but also to the creation of subjects capable of becoming individual and social agents willing to struggle against injustices and fight to reclaim and develop those institutions crucial to the functioning and promises of a substantive democracy. One place to begin to think through such a project is by addressing the meaning and role of pedagogy as part of the broader struggle for and practice of freedom.
The reach of pedagogy extends from schools to diverse cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media, alternative screen cultures, and the expanding digital screen culture. Far more than a teaching method, pedagogy is a moral and political practice actively involved not only in the production of knowledge, skills, and values but also in the construction of identities, modes of identification, and forms of individual and social agency. Accordingly, pedagogy is at the heart of any understanding of politics and the ideological scaffolding of those framing mechanisms that mediate our everyday lives. Across the globe, the forces of free-market fundamentalism are using the educational force of the wider culture and the takeover of public and higher education both to reproduce the culture of business and to wage an assault on the historically guaranteed social provisions and civil rights provided by the welfare state, public schools, unions, women’s reproductive rights, and civil liberties, among others, all the while undercutting public faith in the defining institutions of democracy.
As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish—from public schools and alternative media to health care centers– there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values, and the common good. This grim reality has been called by Alex Honneth a “failed sociality”– a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice, a practice which acts directly upon the conditions which bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary.
One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators, students, progressives, and other cultural workers is the need to address the role they might play in educating students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy. At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish not simply in a democracy but at a historical moment when the United States is about to slip into the dark night of authoritarianism. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political, and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people and the general public with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable, and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the citizens necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people and the broader polity to challenge authority and hold power accountable?
What role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which the social has been individualized, emotional life collapses into the therapeutic, and education is reduced to either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation in which everything is reduced to a desired outcome. What role can education play to challenge the deadly neoliberal claim that all problems are individual, regardless of whether the roots of such problems like in larger systemic forces. In a culture drowning in a new love affair with instrumental rationality, it is not surprising that values that are not measurable– compassion, vision, the imagination, trust, solidarity, care for the other, and a passion for justice—withers.
Given the crisis of education, agency, and memory that haunts the current historical conjuncture, the left and other progressives need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented convergence of resources–financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological– increasingly used to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be political without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical political means being vigilant about “that very moment in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created.”[3] At the same time it means progressives need to be attentive to those practice in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. It also means developing a comprehensive understanding of politics, one that should begin with the call to reroute single issue politics into a mass social movement under the banner of a defense of the public good, the commons, and a global democracy.
In part, this suggests developing pedagogical practices that not only inspire and energize people but are also capable of challenging the growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies under the global tyranny of casino capitalism. Such a vision suggests resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality, endless assaults on the environment, and elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes, an audit culture, market values, and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed market-driven society. In addition, it rejects the notion that all levels of schooling can be reduced to sites for training students for the workforce and that the culture of public and higher education is synonymous with the culture of business.
At issue here is the need for progressives to recognize the power of education in creating the formative cultures necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the ideas of justice and democracy while also fighting for those public spheres, ideals, values, and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, thinking, social relations, and politics. But embracing the dictates of a making education meaningful in order to make it critical and transformative also means recognizing that cultural apparatuses such as the mainstream media and Hollywood films are teaching machines and not simply sources of information and entertainment. Such sites should be spheres of struggle removed from the control of the financial elite and corporations who use them as propaganda and disimagination machines.
Central to any viable notion of what makes pedagogy critical is, in part, the recognition that it is a moral and political practice that is always implicated in power relations because it narrates particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. It is in this respect that any discussion of pedagogy must be attentive to how pedagogical practices work in a variety of sites to produce particular ways in which identity, place, worth, and above all value are organized and contribute to producing a formative culture capable of sustaining a vibrant democracy.[4]
In this instance, pedagogy as the practice of freedom emphasizes critical reflection, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and difficult knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history and theory. However, among many educators, progressives, and social theorists, there is a widespread refusal to recognize that this form of education not only takes place in schools, but is also part of what can be called the educative nature of the culture. At the core of analysing and engaging culture as a pedagogical practice are fundamental questions about the educative nature of the culture, what it means to engage common sense as a way to shape and influence popular opinion, and how diverse educational practices in multiple sites can be used to challenge the vocabularies, practices, and values of the oppressive forces that at work under neoliberal regimes of power.
There is an urgent political need for the American public to understand what it means for an authoritarian society to both weaponize and trivialize the discourse, vocabularies, images, and aural means of communication in a society. How is language used to relegate citizenship to the singular pursuit of cravenly self-interests, legitimate shopping as the ultimate expression of one’s identity, portray essential public services as reinforcing and weakening any viable sense of individual responsibility, and, among other, instances, using the language of war and militarization to describe a vast array of problems we face as a nation. War has become an addiction, the war on terror a Pavlovian stimulant for control, and shared fears one of the few discourses available for defining any vestige of solidarity.
Such falsehoods are now part of the reigning neoliberal ideology proving once again that pedagogy is central to politics itself because it is about changing the way people see things, recognizing that politics is educative and that domination resided not simply in repressive economic structures but also in the realm of ideas, beliefs, and modes of persuasion. Just as I would argue that pedagogy has to be made meaningful in order to be made critical and transformative, I think it is fair to argue that there is no politics without a pedagogy of identification; that is, people have to invest something of themselves in how they are addressed or recognize that any mode of education, argument, idea, or pedagogy has to speak to their condition and provide a moment of recognition.
Lacking this understanding, pedagogy all too easily becomes a form of symbolic and intellectual violence, one that assaults rather than educates. Another example of such violence can be seen in the forms of high stakes testing and empirically driven teaching that dominate public schooling in the United States, which amounts to pedagogies of repression which serve primarily to numb the mind and produce what might be called dead zones of the imagination. These are pedagogies that are largely disciplinary and have little regard for contexts, history, making knowledge meaningful, or expanding what it means for students to be critically engaged agents.
The fundamental challenge facing educators within the current age of neoliberalism, militarism, and religious fundamentalism is to provide the conditions for students to address how knowledge is related to the power of both self-definition and social agency. In part, this suggests providing students with the skills, ideas, values, and authority necessary for them to nourish a substantive democracy, recognize anti-democratic forms of power, and to fight deeply rooted injustices in a society and world founded on systemic economic, racial, and gendered inequalities. A as Hannah Arendt, once argued in “The Crisis of Education,” the centrality of education to politics is also manifest in the responsibility for the world that cultural workers have to assume when they engage in pedagogical practices that lie on the side of belief and persuasion, especially when they challenge forms of domination.
Such a project suggests developing a transformative pedagogy–rooted in what might be called a project of resurgent and insurrectional democracy–that relentlessly questions the kinds of labor, practices, and forms of production that are enacted in schools and other sites of education. The project in this sense speaks to the recognition that any pedagogical practice presupposes some notion of the future, prioritises some forms of identification over others, upholds selective modes of social relations, and values some modes of knowing over others (think about how business schools are held in high esteem while schools of education are disdained and even the object in some cases of contempt). Moreover, such a pedagogy does not offer guarantees as much as it recognizes that its own position is grounded in particular modes of authority, values, and ethical principles that must be constantly debated for the ways in which they both open up and close down democratic relations, values, and identities. These are precisely the questions being asked by the Chicago Teachers’ Union in their brave fight to regain some control over both the conditions of their work and their efforts to redefine the meaning of schooling as a democratic public sphere and learning in the interest of economic justice and progressive social change.
Such a project should be principled, relational, contextual, as well as self-reflective and theoretically rigorous. By relational, I mean that the current crisis of schooling must be understood in relation to the broader assault that is being waged against all aspects of democratic public life. At the same time, any critical comprehension of those wider forces that shape public and higher education must also be supplemented by an attentiveness to the historical and conditional nature of pedagogy itself. This suggests that pedagogy can never be treated as a fixed set of principles and practices that can be applied indiscriminately across a variety of pedagogical sites. Pedagogy is not some recipe or methodological fix that can be imposed on all classrooms. On the contrary, it must always be contextually defined, allowing it to respond specifically to the conditions, formations, and problems that arise in various sites in which education takes place. Such a project suggests recasting pedagogy as a practice that is indeterminate, open to constant revision, and constantly in dialogue with its own assumptions.
The notion of a neutral, objective education is an oxymoron. Education and pedagogy do not exist outside of relations of power, values, and politics. Ethics on the pedagogical front demands an openness to the other, a willingness to engage a “politics of possibility” through a continual critical engagement with texts, images, events, and other registers of meaning as they are transformed into pedagogical practices both within and outside of the classroom. Pedagogy is never innocent and if it is to be understood and problematized as a form of academic labor, cultural workers have the opportunity not only to critically question and register their own subjective involvement in how and what they teach in and out of schools, but also to resist all calls to depoliticize pedagogy through appeals to either scientific objectivity or ideological dogmatism. This suggests the need for educators to rethink the cultural and ideological baggage they bring to each educational encounter; it also highlights the necessity of making educators ethically and politically accountable and self-reflective for the stories they produce, the claims they make upon public memory, and the images of the future they deem legitimate. Understood as a form of militant hope, pedagogy in this sense is not an antidote to politics, a nostalgic yearning for a better time, or for some “inconceivably alternative future.” Instead, it is an “attempt to find a bridge between the present and future in those forces within the present which are potentially able to transform it.”[5]
At the dawn of the 21st century, the notion of the social and the public are not being erased as much as they are being reconstructed under circumstances in which public forums for serious debate, including public education, are being eroded. Reduced either to a crude instrumentalism, business culture, or defined as a purely private right rather than a public good, our major educational apparatuses are removed from the discourse of democracy and civic culture. Under the influence of powerful financial interests, we have witnessed the takeover of public and increasingly higher education and diverse media sites by a corporate logic that both numbs the mind and the soul, emphasizing repressive modes of ideology hat promote winning at all costs, learning how not to question authority, and undermining the hard work of learning how to be thoughtful, critical, and attentive to the power relations that shape everyday life and the larger world. As learning is privatized, depoliticized, and reduced to teaching students how to be good consumers, any viable notions of the social, public values, citizenship, and democracy wither and die.
As a central element of a broad based cultural politics, critical pedagogy, in its various forms, when linked to the ongoing project of democratization can provide opportunities for educators and other cultural workers to redefine and transform the connections among language, desire, meaning, everyday life, and material relations of power as part of a broader social movement to reclaim the promise and possibilities of a democratic public life. Critical pedagogy is dangerous to many people and others because it provides the conditions for students and the wider public to exercise their intellectual capacities, embrace the ethical imagination, hold power accountable, and embrace a sense of social responsibility.
One of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, and other cultural workers is the task of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means developing discourses and pedagogical practices that connect reading the word with reading the world, and doing so in ways that enhance the capacities of young people as critical agents and engaged citizens. In taking up this project, educators and others should attempt to create the conditions that give students the opportunity to become critical and engaged citizens who have the knowledge and courage to struggle in order to make desolation and cynicism unconvincing and hope practical. But raising consciousness is not enough. Students need to be inspired and energized to address important social issues, learning to narrate their private troubles as public issues, and to engage in forms of resistance that are both local and collective, while connecting such struggles to more global issues.
Democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of those vital public spheres such as public and higher education in which civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Democracy should be a way of thinking about education, one that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good. The question regarding what role education should play in democracy becomes all the more urgent at a time when the dark forces of authoritarianism are on the march in the United States. As public values, trust, solidarities, and modes of education are under siege, the discourses of hate, racism, rabid self-interest, and greed are exercising a poisonous influence in American society, most evident in the discourse of the right-wing extremists such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, vying for the American presidency. Civic illiteracy collapses opinion and informed arguments, erases collective memory, and becomes complicit with the militarization of both individual, public spaces, and society itself. Under such circumstances, politicians such as Hilary Clinton are labeled as liberals when in reality they are firm advocates for both a toxic militarism and the interests of the financial elites.
All across the country, there are signs of hope. Young people are protesting against student debt; environmentalists are aggressively fighting corporate interests; the Chicago Teachers Union is waging a brave fight against oppressive neoliberal modes of governance; Black youth are bravely resisting and exposing state violence in all of its forms; prison abolitionists are making their voices heard, and once again the threat of a nuclear winter is being widely discussed. In the age of financial and political monsters, neoliberalism has lost its ability to legitimate itself in a warped discourse of freedom and choice. Its poisonous tentacles have put millions out of work, turned many Black communities into war zones, destroyed public education, flagrantly pursued war as the greatest of national ideals, turned the prison system into a default institution for punishing minorities of race and class, pillaged the environment, and blatantly imposed a new mode of racism under the silly notion of a post-racial society.
The extreme violence perpetuated in the daily spectacles of the cultural apparatuses are now becoming more visible in the relations of everyday life making it more difficult for many American to live the lie that they are real and active participants in a democracy. As the lies are exposed, the economic and political crises ushering in authoritarianism are now being matched by a crisis of ideas. If this momentum of growing critique and collective resistance continues, the support we see for Bernie Sanders among young people will be matched by an increase in the growth of other oppositional groups. Groups organized around single issues such as an insurgent labor movements, those groups trying to reclaim public education as a public good, and other emerging movements will come together hopefully, refusing to operate within the parameters of established power while working to create a broad-based social movement. In the merging of the power, culture, new public spheres, new technologies, and old and new social movements, there is a hint of a new collective political sensibility emerging, one that offers a new mode of collective resistance and the possibility of taking democracy off life-support. This is not a struggle over who will be elected the next president or ruling party of the United States, but a struggle over those who are willing to fight for a radical democracy and those who are not. The strong winds of resistance are in the air, rattling established interests, forcing liberals to recognize their complicity with established power, and giving new life the meaning of what it means to fight for a democratic social order in which equity and justice prevail for everyone.
Notes.
[1] Chris Hedges, “The War on Language”, TruthDig, (September 28, 2009)
online at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090928_the_war_on_language/
[2] Nicole Aschoff, “The Smartphone Society,” Jacobin Magazine, Issue 17, (Spring 2015). Online at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/smartphone-usage-technology-aschoff/
[3] Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, “Staging the Politics of Difference: Homi Bhabha’s Critical Literacy,” Journal of Advanced Composition (1999), pp. 3-35.
[4]. Henry A. Giroux, Education and the Crisis of Public Values, 2nd edition (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).
[5]. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell, 2000), p.22. |
Image copyright PA
The High Court is to rule on whether the government can begin the formal process of leaving the European Union without consulting Parliament.
Senior judges heard a challenge last month from campaigners who argue Prime Minister Theresa May does not have the power to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty without MPs' approval.
The PM has promised to trigger Article 50 by the end of March 2017.
Its author, Lord Kerr, has told the BBC he believed it was "not irrevocable".
Judges are set to give their verdict at 10:00 GMT.
Some of the leading figures in the legal world are involved in the historic case, which is expected to be appealed against to the Supreme Court whatever the verdict.
The announcement will be made by Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas, Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton and Lord Justice Sales.
The government insists it does not need to consult Parliament before triggering Article 50, which begins two years of formal Brexit negotiations.
Image copyright AP Image caption Gina Miller, centre, was chosen as the lead claimant
Image copyright PA Image caption Lord Thomas, the Lord Chief Justice, presided over the three-day hearing
It argues there is an established constitutional convention for the executive to use ancient powers of royal prerogative to withdraw from international treaties - and that the referendum result has given ministers the green light to begin Brexit.
But the claimants - led by investment manager Gina Miller - argue that rights granted by the 1972 European Communities Act cannot be taken away without the explicit approval of Parliament.
A number of MPs have also been calling for Parliament to be given a vote before Article 50 is triggered, saying the government has no mandate to decide the terms of Brexit.
But Mrs May has said their demands are akin to trying to "subvert democracy".
The government has said it is likely MPs will get to vote on the final Brexit deal reached after the negotiations - but campaigners say this is too late.
The prime minister has refused to give details of her key demands for the talks.
'Factually objective'
Among those calling for Parliament to be given a vote is the Scottish peer who wrote Article 50.
In a BBC interview, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard said he believed Article 50 was "not irrevocable", adding that the UK could choose to stay in the EU even after exit negotiations had begun.
Meanwhile the head of the civil service, Sir Jeremy Heywood, said it might be decades before the full impact of the referendum result on the UK was known.
Setting out the challenge facing Whitehall in his blog, he said Brexit had "few, if any, parallels in its complexity".
He also defended the civil service's role during the referendum campaign, when Brexit-supporting ministers were barred from seeing some documents under special rules allowing members of the government to campaign for either side.
"During the official referendum campaign, we were scrupulous in making sure that all documents issued were factually correct and objective," he said.
Exiting the EU will involve almost every government department and thousands of civil servants, he said.
'Titanic success'
Separately, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has been greeted by laughter after claiming Brexit would be a "titanic success".
Speaking at the Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year Awards, he appeared to compare leaving the EU to the cruise ship that sank in 1912 on its maiden voyage.
He said: "In the words of our great Prime Minister, Brexit means Brexit, and we are going to make a titanic, a titanic success of it."
After loud laughter from the audience, Mr Johnson corrected himself, adding: "We are going to make a colossal, a colossal success of Brexit." |
Fracturing in the ranks — Myles Allen, IPCC scientist, tosses renewables under the bus
Kudos to Myles Allen. He might think CO2 is a problem, but at least he is being honest and slightly practical about dealing with it. That’s a big step up from those who urge us to panic about CO2, but then choose the most useless and expensive options to reduce it. Allen effectively gives Abbott’s Direct Action plan a big tick. Finally (indirectly) Tony Abbott gets some credit for out-greening the EU, and offering a more effective and cheaper way to achieve what the Greens said they want. Like I said, Abbott got reductions for $14 a ton, the Greens should have loved him.
Anyway, Myles Allen’s done a study, published in Nature Climate Change, suggesting that there is no point in a few western nations driving in their economies into the dust to reduce their emissions when the rest of the world isn’t. So here’s one of the IPCC team repeating an argument that skeptics have said so many times: if we make ourselves a third world nation, we won’t be able to afford to look after the environment. Our children will have to burn the environment for breakfast.
In the end though Allen thinks the answer is to remove the CO2 from the sky. So we are still talking of stuffing a perfectly good fertilizer down a deep hole. As far as carbon capture at power plants goes, remember you can just throw away 40% of the electricity the plant makes… “like the GFC of Engineering”.
Despite the small sign of common sense, the cynic in me wonders if this is just Big-Renewables versus Big-Sequestration: a bun fight over the spoils.
But it’s a good sign. The litany is breaking up…
Wind farms blowing us off course, scientist says
Spending billions on new nuclear power stations and offshore wind farms could make it harder to prevent dangerous climate change, a study has claimed.
Such expensive ways of cutting emissions risk damaging economic growth and leaving future generations unable to pay for technology to capture and bury carbon dioxide, without which global warming will continue, the study from the University of Oxford says. It adds that the focus on cutting emissions in the short term is distracting attention and investment from carbon capture technologies.
Myles Allen, a climate physicist who has contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that projects such as the £18bn Hinkley Point C nuclear power station could be counterproductive.
“If you spend stupidly now and reduce economic growth, you impair the ability of future generations to pay to get emissions to zero. They will they need to pay for carbon dioxide disposal,” Professor Allen said. “It is time to divert some of our less productive subsidies into CO2 disposal.”
Finally, a tiny bit of praise for the US, Canada and Australia
Professor Allen said that the United States, Canada and Australia, which are regularly criticised by green groups for failing to act on emissions, were in fact global leaders in tackling climate change because they were investing in CO2 disposal.
The Times, and The Australian
Some History: It appears Myles Allen has criticised the Greens for being unenvironmental, and talked about people wasting billions on global warming before. I sense honesty and consistency. I like that.
RELATED INFO:
Wait ’til you see these numbers on Carbon Capture and Storage
$22 billion wasted on carbon capture which increases cost of electricity by 70%
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please wait... Rating: 8.4/10 (76 votes cast) |
A rash of threats against schools and students around the Baltimore area hit social media on Monday, with Baltimore County becoming the latest jurisdiction to report such threats.
Baltimore City put additional security measures in place at schools Monday after some of the district's middle and high school students were threatened over the weekend on social media. School officials said they don't believe the threats are credible but they sent additional school police to numerous schools around the city.
Baltimore County police late Monday also said they were aware of threats made on social media and were investigating them. County schools officials had been made aware, police said.
Anne Arundel County school officials said two parents called them to report "non-specific threats" had been made against schools. In one case, a parent said students on a school bus had been discussing a threat involving a specific school and a clown. In the other case the threat was to schools in general, according to spokesman Bob Mosier. Mosier said police were made aware of the threats but that the system did not add more police at its schools.
Threats were also made against schools in Prince George's County and Fairfax County, and police in Prince George's provided additional security there, the Washington Post reported. It is not clear if the social media threats in Maryland are related to one another, but in some of those Maryland cases, clowns were mentioned. Nationally police have reported instances of people dressing up as clowns and creeping in the woods in different states as a prank. In other cases, people have made threats about creepy clowns on social media.
Baltimore City school police and city police, who monitor social media, began investigating shortly after the threats were made, said Edie House, a city school spokesman.
City police officers have been asked to be particularly watchful around schools during the day and at dismissal times when students are leaving the building, according to statement from city police. Officials said there is no evidence to link the threats to students in the city with those in other school districts.
Harford County Public Schools alerted parents to an unfounded hoax of threats regarding clowns last week. Schools officials said they were monitoring social media after similar threats were made throughout the region.
Reporter Carrie Wells contributed to this article.
[email protected] |
Panax achieves drilling goal
Posted
Panax Geothermal has finished drilling and securing its Salamander 1 well at Penola in south-eastern South Australia.
The company has achieved its goal to reach the 4,000 metre mark by mid-March.
Panax Geothermal reached a depth of 4,025 metres in 44 days, setting a record for the Australian geothermal sector in the process.
The absence of oil and gas has been declared a positive and the company is now preparing to perform a flow test on the well, which is yet to reach its normal temperature after the cooling effect of the drilling process.
Panax aims to set up a 5.9 megawatt demonstration plant at the site by the end of next year before expanding to commercial production scale.
Topics: geothermal-energy, environment, alternative-energy, penola-5277, australia, sa |
Three high school football players have been charged with raping a 14-year-old girl at gunpoint after she left a Pennsylvania town fair.
The York Daily Record reports the 16-year-old boys from the Central York High School football team are charged as adults.
The girl says she was with friends at the York Fair on Sept. 16 and the boys followed them. She says when she left the fair she was "taken to unknown locations" and was "forced" to have sex with the boys.
West York police say two of the boys were picked up without incident Tuesday and the third arranged to surrender. The boys' relatives have declined to comment.
The school district says what happened was "a non-school related issue" and it has no comment on the police investigation.
A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Jan. 11. |
And, on the same podcast, Cutler said he felt like he could still play.
On Colin Cowherd’s The Herd Saturday Special Podcast in May, he quoted Miller as saying, “Jay Cutler has a lot of football left in him.”
How realistic is this scenario? Well, at least in the opinion of former teammate Zach Miller, pretty realistic.
The Miami Dolphins — a potential postseason team depending on their quarterback — are now in need of a quarterback.
Fast forward to now…you can almost smell the cigarette smoke in the air.
But, the issue with this interview is that it was a Fox Sports podcast, with Cutler appearing to promote his new job as an analyst. Cowherd steered clear of asking about a return to the field, likely to protect Fox’s new investment from any circus.
However, in a different interview, one with “Waddle and Silvy” on ESPN Chicago, they tackled the topic in some depth.
Cutler called his exit “permanent”, adding that he doesn’t “really see anything else happening.”
And while that may seem pretty clear-cut, it’s more of the Rafael Palmeiro approach. In my eyes, he was merely justifying his decision, protecting himself from the fact no one was banging down his door to come throw footballs for them. Had the Dolphins been in need back then, he probably explores that option before committing to Fox.
Besides, Cutler avoided the word “retirement” at all costs, actually saying, “I don’t know if retirement is the right word…”
That sure sounds like the door is cracked open a bit, especially is he’s feeling the regret he planned for.
“There’s zero doubt in my mind that there’s going to be some regret,” — Jay Cutler on “Waddle and Silvy”
Plus, we’re in August now. In that same interview on ESPN Chicago, he alluded to the “itch” that would come once training camp started.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that come the middle of August, September, there’s going to be that itch to play. And there’s going to be part of me where I know I still can do it.” — Jay Cutler on “Waddle and Silvy”
For a guy who is calling his pseudo-retirement “permanent”, he sure sounds like someone who is acting on temporary feelings.
If you broke up with your girlfriend, but then said, “there’s no doubt I regret how it turned out” or “there’s no doubt that down the road I’m going to want you back”, odds are you two are going to get back together. I’d bet on that, 10 times out of 10.
In Cutler’s case, I’d bet on him strapping up this year. But, for the love of Laguna Beach, let’s hope the Marlboro Man takes his talent to South Beach. |
“Pretty much every person I’ve met on Reddit has been super fucking nice.”
— Seth Thompson
For those more accustomed to reports about the seedy side of Reddit, that statement may come as a surprise. For Seth Thompson, though, the social news site has helped him in his travels as he hitchhikes across the U.S., making a Web series along the way.
Thompson, known as superfiedman on Reddit and Hitchbro (also the name given to the subreddit devoted to him) on YouTube, is using the Internet as one of his main resources for finding places to stay and people to help him get from city to city.
After losing his job and apartment “in rather quick succession,” Thompson, 22, decided it was time to set out on the road again following a hitchhiking trip last year, where he traveled from Marietta, Georgia, to Los Angeles.
This year though, he’s focusing on the northern states, eventually looping around to Seattle and Portland, and is interviewing ordinary Americans in whichever town he happens to be in.
While stationed at a Pittsburgh coffee shop with a pot of tea, Thompson spoke to the Daily Dot via Skype about his journey and plans for the future.
“What really pushed me to [start hitchhiking] was a post on Reddit last year,” he said,
“There was a guy who picked up a group of hitchhikers—four dudes and a girl—and he was like, ‘These are the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life.’ I was like, ‘wait, people still do that?’ I started doing some research and I was like, ‘oh, shit, I guess it is possible to hitchhike, still. So I guess I’m gonna try.”
One of the main things Thompson is attempting to do with his Web series is not to just tell his own story, but those of others as well. His editor (and friend) Eric, has been pushing him to get others to tell their stories on camera, since “that’s what people are interested in.”
Thompson added. “At this point in the journey and the Web series, they know who I am. So it’s less about me and more about the people that I meet. I’ve been getting interviews with my hosts and rides.”
When asked what he was hoping to discover by carrying out such interviews, Thompson replied:
“A better idea of the world around me. I was always the socially awkward kid and I was always the guy who didn’t like people—the regular anti-social asshole-type deal. I decided that if there’s any good way that would get myself out of my comfort zone, it would be hitchhiking because there is no comfort zone when you’re hitchhiking. I’m hoping to meet people and learn people’s stories. I feel like it’s really interesting that everywhere I go, there’s someone with an interesting story.”
A broken laptop meant having to rely on a netbook to connect to the Web, though, making it much more difficult for Thompson to send the footage he’s recorded over the Internet to his video editor. That’s led to a delay in getting some of the videos uploaded to YouTube, and created a hitch in Thompson’s plan to have a real-time (or as close to real-time as possible) vlog.
Thompson’s family thinks he’s “crazy” for undertaking such an endeavor. “My mom does not sleep at night until I’ve told her that I’m okay for the night. My little sister was crying when she dropped me off … It’s an emotional thing for sure.”
The stigma of meeting people from the Internet probably didn’t soothe his mom’s worries, though Thompson’s met a lot of interesting people of whom have been willing to help him out, though communities such as Reddit and 4chan.
“I met a dude on 4chan and I traveled with a dude on 4chan. He was like, ‘hey, I’m in San Antonio (Texas), come and meet me.’ So (last year), I left Baton Rouge, going to San Antonio, hoping that this dude would be there. … It was awesome. He actually had family in Southern California. When we went out to Southern California, we hung out with his family and friends.”
After hitting Washington D.C. for a couple of days for the Reason Rally, Thompson is returning to base (he splits his time between Georgia and Louisiana when at home) for a month or so. However, he has no plans to take it easy.
Instead, he is planning to launch a Kickstarter project, through which he hopes to raise enough money to purchase a higher quality camera and have an emergency fund so he can crash at a hotel if he can’t find anywhere else to stay.
“I’ve had a proposal submitted through Kickstarter since before I did this because that was my whole idea. But it occurred to me that I have nothing I can show [potential backers]. I started trying to put together a video being like ‘yeah, I trekked across the country last summer.’ It occurred to me as I was putting it together that I had nothing I could hold up and be like, ‘I could probably do this [Web series] if you guys gave me money.’ So I had no reason for people to trust me that I could do what it is I’m doing here. “The whole idea now is to show them this is what I can do with a shitty $60 camera and no budget. Imagine what I could do with a couple of thousand dollars for a camera and an emergency fund and money to do things. Having money to things as a result of that Kickstarter campaign would be an absolute dream. That is what I’m going for. I think it’d be not too lofty a goal.”
The first stage of the Web series journey only lasted a couple of weeks, so Thomspon could get some footage together for the Kickstarter campaign video, and show potential backers what he can do with some funding.
Regardless of whether the Kickstarter’s a success, Thompson doesn’t have plans to pull off the road and any time soon.
“I’m going to stop when I find something worth stopping for, whether that’s a job, a person or an apartment. I will stop when I find something worth stopping for. I think that’s a pretty good approach to this whole lifestyle as it is right now.”
That’s pretty good advice for anyone. |
UK media organisations have made string of corrections and retractions as result of one man’s campaign for fair coverage
British media organisations have been forced to make a string of corrections and retractions over recent months relating to coverage of Muslims following routine monitoring.
Miqdaad Versi, an assistant general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, has undertaken a personal project to track articles about Islam and Muslims in order to spot misrepresentations and inaccuracies.
He has secured almost 20 corrections and retractions, and a further 20 complaints are being examined by the press regulator, Ipso. Several complaints have been rejected.
Among the published corrections was a story published on the Sun website last week, originally headlined: “SUPERMARKET TERROR: Gunman ‘screaming Allahu Akbar’ opens fire in Spanish supermarket while ‘carrying bag filled with petrol and gunpowder’.”
After Versi complained, the headline was changed to “SUPERMARKET HORROR: Gunman opens fire in Spanish supermarket while ‘carrying bag filled with petrol and gunpowder’.”
The corrected text included a denial by local police and a spokesperson for the supermarket chain that the suspect had shouted “Allahu Akbar”. The Sun appended an apology to the story. Neither the Mail nor the Express corrected similar headlines.
Another was a story published on Mail Online suggesting the murder of a Muslim mother had been motivated by religion. The original headline said: “Mother of four stabbed to death while her family were at a funeral ‘may have been murdered in Islamic honour killing’.”
Versi complained to the news organisation, saying “honour killings” were rooted in culture not religion. Mail Online amended its headline to: “Mother of four stabbed to death while her family were at a funeral ‘may have been murdered in honour killing’”, and added a footnote stating: “An earlier version of this article said that police were investigating whether Ms Khan may have been murdered in an ‘Islamic honour killing’. We are happy to make clear that Islam as a religion does not support so-called ‘honour killings’.”
He also complained to Ipso, which ruled that the phrase “Islamic honour killing” suggested that “the killing had been motivated by Islam, when there was no basis for saying that religion had played a role in this killing”.
The Express corrected a headline claiming religious groups could ban the new £5 note because the Bank of England could not promise they were halal. The new version read: “New £5 could be BANNED by religious groups as Bank CAN’T promise what note is made of.” A correction appended to the story said: “Whilst the article quoted concerns of Hindu faith leaders in fact it did not refer to other faith leaders of the Muslim, Jewish or Buddhist communities. The use of the word ‘Halal’ in the headline was incorrect given the context of the article.”
Versi said: “Journalism plays a vital role in our democracy and the brilliant work by many journalists is being tarred by this consistent stream of negative and inaccurate reporting about Muslims.
“Newspaper editors need to seriously consider whether such a large number of inaccuracies on this one issue is in line with the basic standards of professional standards that they claim to adhere to, or whether it is indicative of the prioritisation of click-baiting over accuracy in the case of serial offenders. This has real-life consequences as far-right extremists share such false stories, leading to rising hostility towards Muslims.”
Ipso should consider stronger penalties for such inaccuracies, particularly for serial offenders, he added. “There needs to be a stronger deterrent to reporting that fails to meet the highest professional standards that members of the press subscribing to Ipso have undertaken to maintain.”
A study by Cambridge University last year found that the focus on “negative narratives” in media reporting about Muslims in the UK was contributing to an atmosphere of rising hostility. |
August is here, and if you watch NBC for more than 30 seconds, you know that means the Olympics are here with it. And for me, a former gymnast with an unrequited wish to be a commentator about the sport, the Olympics mean only one thing: leotards, and lots of them.
Growing up in Australia, gymnastics was my life for six years. It taught me focus and balance, and how to throw myself into or at something at high speed, with all my might and without hesitation or fear. It taught me how to fall and get up again. Unfortunately, it also taught me how to get injured, which I did, repeatedly, until there was no choice but to quit. Eight years on, I still love to watch gymnastics, and still find my muscles flexing and releasing as I watch and live vicariously though the gymnast who wobbles and struggles with all her might to stay on the balance beam.
So every four years when the Olympics roll around and a fresh crop of 16-year-olds in leotards grace our television screens, I sit down on the couch for hours at a time, watching routines, comparing teams and snapping at anyone who dares to disturb me. Today I went onto the website of USA Gymnastics to check the final roster for the women’s Olympic team, which was decided last week. I was pretty surprised to discover that the U.S. women’s Olympic gymnastics team is sponsored by CoverGirl cosmetics. The team’s three best and most photogenic members, Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin and Alicia Sacramone, are the new faces of the company, and USA Gymnastics is running a competition with a meet-and-greet with the gymnasts and a complete CoverGirl makeover as first prize.
Gymnastics is a sport that places enormous demands on its athletes. It demands strength, flexibility, speed, agility, grace and power. It demands that gymnasts throw themselves upside down, rotating and twisting, at once defying and depending on gravity. And if they don’t land with their feet stuck together, perfectly steady and without a step sideways, the judges take points off. Moreover, female gymnasts, if they are ever to reach Olympic standards, need to do so by a very young age, with 16 being the minimum age for the Games, and few gymnasts over 20 competing at world standard. As a result, gymnasts hoping to achieve that standard train for hours a day from before their teenage years and often move away from home to live with their coaches and teammates.
In recent years, the level of difficulty in women’s gymnastics has skyrocketed, and so too has the amount of makeup. The U.S. team, like many others, has begun to coif and buff its gymnasts so that close-ups of their faces as they prepare to dismount the beam show not only their concentration and determination, but also their perfectly applied eye shadow and long, mascara-coated lashes. This practice is not entirely surprising, and gymnastics is certainly not the first sport to do it. Recent attempts to doll-up WNBA players and sex-up other women athletes have garnered press attention, and the reactions of the general public and the sporting community have been mixed.
The fact that the team is now not only beautified, but also sponsored by a cosmetics brand, is no surprise either. The rise of tweens as a major consumer group means that girls like Johnson (16), Liukin (18) and Sacramone (20)—pretty, talented and slightly older than the tweens who aspire to be like them—are the Hannah Montanas of the sporting world. Making them, and the rest of the Olympic gymnastics team, a little easier on the eye this August will surely benefit the bottom lines of NBC, USA Gymnastics and now CoverGirl.
So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised upon arriving at the USGA website, but it was disappointing. Gymnastics, at its core, is not about beauty—at least, not beauty in the CoverGirl sense of the word. It can be beautiful to watch, and it requires grace and elegance, but at it’s about raw power, explosive strength and remarkable discipline. Is it not enough that women like Johnson, Liukin and Sacramone possess all these in spades? These women and the other six gymnasts going with them to Beijing have spent their lives missing school and family holidays and birthday parties to practice so that they could one day represent their country at the Olympics. They’ve torn ligaments, broken bones and herniated discs to reach this level of competition. Liukin and Sacramone are almost guaranteed medals and Johnson, the reigning world champ, is a safe bet for individual all-around gold. And yet, their faces will not appear on television or on the competition floor this August without first being coated with makeup. (Johnson and Liukin also have valuable endorsement deals with a number of other companies, including Coke, McDonald’s, Adidas and Visa, but the CoverGirl deal is unique in that the makeup is the only product that the gymnasts will promote by wearing during competition.)
The message this sends to young women, aspiring athletes or otherwise, is a worrying one: “Your talent, your determination and your success matter, but your beauty matters more.” Even though these girls are now completing stunts so difficult that they were once considered impossible for women to even attempt, endorsing and being sponsored by a cosmetic company says that no matter what she accomplishes, a woman is little more than a pretty face. Johnson, Liukin and Sacramone, as their membership on the Olympic team demonstrates, are so much more than that. So are thousands of young gymnasts across the country who will be watching them this August. |
Indian police are continuing their efforts to recoup funds from promoters of OneCoin, a digital currency investment scheme widely believed to be fraudulent.
Local reports indicate that investigators in Mumbai continue holding more than 18 individuals in custody for further questioning after they were arrested last week by undercover officers.
OneCoin is a purported digital currency sold through investment packages that are often pitched as sure-fire ways of making lots of money. Long accused of being a pyramid scheme, those solicited are often encouraged to purchase large packages of “tokens” (which can then be redeemed for OneCoins) and find other buyers to increase the size of their network.
The scheme has caught the attention of law enforcement and regulatory officials in a number of countries, including India. Speaking to The Hindu, a police official said that a new investigative team had been established to focus specifically on complaints tied to OneCoin.
“We need police custody for investigating the case and to get all details of the scam. We have got custody of the accused till May 3,” the official said.
That Indian police are shifting resources and seeking additional information from those held indicates that officials in that country are continuing to step up their fight against OneCoin. Recent reports show that other countries, including most notably Germany, are taking aim against the scheme in other ways as well.
As reported last week by CoinDesk, BaFin, Germany’s top finance regulator, issued cease-and-desist letters to major elements of OneCoin’s global operations, effectively ordering it to stop operating in the country.
Reports from last month also indicate that Kazakhstan’s government has also taken steps, ordering a OneCoin advocate under house arrest pending further investigation, according to a report from regional news service Tengri News.
Jail cell image via Shutterstock |
BY Rik Higham ON OCTOBER 2, 2017
When I lived in British Columbia, Canada, I used to go running in the forests behind our house. My housemate (appalled at the idea) insisted that I run with his dog to keep the grizzly bears away. At the end of one run I was chatting with a neighbour, a retired Canadian mountain guide with a huge grin and a beard to match: “Ain’t no point runnin’ with a hound,” he drawled. “Too fast. Yeh need a buddy slower‘an you are. Let the bear deal with him and you keep on runnin’!”
I never came face to face with a grizzly (and an irrational part of me is a little disappointed about that…), but I was reminded of this story recently when talking to a product-manager friend who was colourfully describing her last one-to-one meeting as a “mini-bollocking”. A few weeks ago she’d started a new project with her team but her group lead was now reproaching her for not having a clear plan and target metrics. As we talked through the project it became clear that she’d actually made good progress in understanding and thinking through the problem, and that – naturally – the issue was more complex than it had initially appeared. Most of her thinking, though, was just in her head.
Feeling like you need to have all the answers before presenting a strategy is certainly something that worries me. I don’t want to appear as though I’ve missed anything obvious and I find it hard to share a plan before completely comprehending the issues. This, of course, is a mistake (not to mention impossible). No plan survives contact with the enemy, and sharing a work in progress earlier means you could learn an important insight or discover a radical new possibility. Easier said than done though.
“No plan survives contact with the enemy”
– Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, German Field Commander
The gap Into Agency
Kate’s issue was not her lack of progress, but the gap between her actual progress and her perceived progress. Mark Logan, former COO of Skyscanner, would say the key to resolving this is to gain agency. In other words, building enough trust or confidence to get a licence to operate, and bringing your key stakeholders along on the journey. This doesn’t necessarily require in-depth reports or detailed plans. People may just need to hear the story of where you’re going, the steps involved, and where you are now. It’s your job to learn what you need to do to get agency. How to give yourself just enough space to breathe and stay far enough ahead of your stakeholders that they’re not worried about you. They have plenty of teams and projects to worry about, so you need to make sure that they think your project is on track.
You need to run faster than the slowest person being chased by a bear.
Joel Spolsky tells the story of when he was product manager for Excel Basic. Back in the 90s every major Microsoft feature got reviewed by Bill Gates. They were known as BillG Reviews, and the tradition was to count the number of times Bill said the F word. The lower the number of F-bombs, the better. The day before Joel’s BillG Review he noticed something worrying. Dates in most programming languages are stored as a number, counting up from some reference date in the past. For Excel, the reference date is 1st January 1900 (so the 2nd January 1900 is 2 and 9th September 2017 is 42987). However, for Excel Basic, the reference date was 31st December 1899, even though both Excel and Excel Basic store today’s date as exactly the same number! Joel did a lot of digging and discovered the reason was due to a cascade of quirks, including 1900 not being a leap year because it’s divisible by 400, and Lotus 123 Worksheets (which Excel needed to import) having to fit in 640Kb (yes, kilobytes) of memory. The BillG Review arrived. Bill Gates asked increasingly difficult questions until he expressed concern that Excel Basic wouldn’t handle all the date functions in the same way as Excel. “Yes, it will,” Joel replied, “except for January and February, 1900.” After a moment of complete silence, Bill got up, said “OK. Well, good work,” and left. Joel had gained agency. And a mere four F-bombs!
Controlling the Narrative
In Kate’s case she didn’t need that level of detailed technical knowledge, she needed to manage expectations and reassure that she had everything in control. She’d been tasked with building a product to automatically detect and repair failing micro-services. In a perfect world, success would be easy to measure: all failures instantly detected and repaired. A more nuanced version would put a realistic framework around that. For example: 95% of failures detected within 10 seconds, and 90% automatically repaired within one minute. Even that, though, describes an ideal end state of a large, complex project.
The key for Kate in gaining agency was to break the problem down into milestones – achievable targets or goals, each with a distinct outcome that moves her team closer to the (too-easily-stated) overall measure of success. Then she would need to ask “what do you need to achieve those” (for example, are there established methods for detecting failures or is that a body of work in itself) in order to uncover any smaller goals and determine where the primary focus should be.
For example, automatically detecting failures and notifying engineers would deliver value, even though the fixes would be done manually. It would also mean you could define a simpler target metric, as an intermediary, because you could temporarily ignore complications around automatic repairs. Similarly, being able to automatically detect one failure is a valuable step towards automatically detecting all failures. Especially if you target a high impact service. There are at least two ways of measuring impact in this scenario though: how important the service is, and how often it fails. Kate had done the correct product management thing of asking “is this a problem that actually needs solving?” without considering whether there was anything they could tactically achieve in the meantime. This led her to discover there was no tracking in place to be able to measure how often these services actually failed, and if they did, which of them failed most often.
At this point, Kate made the easy mistake of holding all this good thinking in her head – all the multiple scenarios and moving parts. Knowing that she had to work out X, Y, Z before moving on to Q, R, S, but forgetting that nobody else could see any of this. Her group lead was operating under the reasonable leap of faith that these services did fail (there were certainly qualitative observations to back this up) and that when they did, customers got a poor service and the company lost money (which appears logical, even if there was no measure of the actual revenue loss). Meanwhile Kate was operating under good product-management first principles: understand the problem, and assess the impact or opportunity.
She needed to close the gap between her and her boss. Crafting a narrative was a big part of this. Sharing the story of the high-level journey, with milestones and outcomes. Communication is the foundation of gaining agency, but execution also matters. Kate could demonstrate progress by working under the assumption the leap of faith is correct (while at the same time collecting data to support or refute it). In the interim she could use other, more readily available metrics (like the number of times a service is called), to identify a target service on which they could try out methods of automatically detecting failures. Each small step would build trust in her and her team.
One thing’s for sure: if I was trying to outrun a bear with Kate, there would be no one between me and the bear! |
For 2014, a record number of consumers — 54% — are considering making a financial New Year’s resolution, according to a study by Fidelity Investments. One reason could be that 26% of survey participants say they are in a stronger financial situation than they were a year ago, compared to 19% last year.
If you also plan to make a financial resolution, you may have learned from past New Years that it’s much easier to make a resolution than to achieve one. The same study found that about three in ten people fall off the bandwagon.
So what’s the key to succeeding? Having a well-crafted goal.
“It’s easier for us to stay motivated with goals that have certain elements to them,” says Dr. Will Meek, a psychologist in Vancouver, Washington. “If we shape a goal well, it’s something we’ll continue to pay attention to and that will help us stay motivated. If we don’t shape it well, we’ll lose track of it and lose our motivation, and it won’t come to be.”
Below are tips on creating strong goals in general and around the top three financial resolutions people make — as well as an extra one we think you should add.
How To Formulate Strong Resolutions
1. Be positive.
Goals should be positively worded, says Dr. Meek. For instance, instead of saying something like, “We’re going to spend less money on frivolous things,” say instead, “We’re going to spend money only on things we truly value.”
2. Focus ruthlessly.
It’s easy at the New Year to become over-ambitious and think you’ll overhaul your entire life. But if you try to do too many things at once, you’ll be spread too thin. If you really want to make some changes this year, focus on one to three things that really matter to you, so you can put in the time and effort to achieve them.
3. Be specific.
Dr. Meek says the key elements of a strong goal can be summarized with the acronym SMART, starting with Specific.
“We want the goal to be as specific as possible rather than general. It keeps our attention on point, so we don’t say, ‘I’m going to be healthier’ but instead, ‘I’m going to eat two portions of vegetables two days a week,’” says Dr. Meek.
4. Make your goal measurable.
Goals also need to be Measurable, he says. “If we can track our progress, it can help with our motivation,” he says. If you have a goal of paying off $2,000 in credit card debt, you can easily break it down into four $500 payments, and get a boost as you watch yourself get 25%, then 50%, then 75% of your way to your goal.
5. Keep your resolution attainable.
“If [a goal is] so out of reach, that’s demotivating,” he says. If you know your tendency is not to be realistic about what you can accomplish in a given period of time, start tracking your time or looking back at your past accomplishments and how long they took you to achieve to get a sense of what’s possible.
6. Choose a goal that’s relevant.
Dr. Meek also recommends making your goal Relevant — “this is something that matters to me.” If you make a goal because it’s something you think you should do, but you personally don’t care much about, you’re much less likely to accomplish it. Part of this is just about framing, he says. While you might personally be bored by the idea of saving more, if you connect it to giving your child the best college education you can, that will be much more motivating.
7. Make it time-bound.
Finally, your goals should also be Time-bound, so they have a deadline, as that pressure will help you ensure you reach your goal. So, for instance, your goal of paying of $2,000 in debt should have a deadline of, say, April, so you know exactly what date you are aiming for.
Once You’ve Made Your Resolutions …
1. Check in regularly.
Make sure you don’t lose sight of your goal. Create a prompt for yourself that will always remind you of it. For instance, decide that every time you pay the mortgage, you’ll revisit your financial resolutions. Make sure you are doing a check-in at least once a month, and during that time, appreciate what you've already achieved. If you’ve made it this far, you can reach your goal.
2. Remind yourself of your motivation.
Once you’ve got all your resolutions set, document all your goals and your reasons for committing to them. At FutureMe.org, email this to your future self a month, two months, six or 12 months in advance, or print out the letter and place it on the fridge, so you can be reminded of why these goals are important to you, especially when other demands are crowding your time.
3. Don’t give in to downward spirals.
Finally, if you get off course, don’t beat yourself up or dwell on your mistakes. It will only make yourself feel worse, and you’ll end up even further off track. “When you slip up, get right back on as soon as possible,” Dr. Meek says.
How To Create Strong Financial Resolutions
For the third straight year, the Fidelity survey found that the top three New Year financial resolutions are saving more (54%), paying off debt( 24%) and spending less (19%), with the debt resolution passing “spending less” for the second most popular slot. It’s also increased threefold since 2010, when only 8% of respondents intended to pay off debt.
Here are tips on making strong financial resolutions in each of these categories, plus a bonus one.
Saving More
If you intend to put away more money this year — whether for a rainy day, a down payment, a dream trip, your child’s college education or something else — Mary Beth Stojohann, certified financial planner and CEO and founder of Workable Wealth, says, “Always automate your savings. It’s hard to do a transfer on your own.” For instance, she recommends you set up automatic 401(k) or Individual Retirement Account contributions or automate a regular transfer from checking to savings.
If you’re just starting building up savings, make sure to get your emergency fund going — start small, like amassing $1,000, and eventually work your way up to stashing away three to six months’ worth of living expenses.
Paying Off Debt
First, stop contributing more to your debt. Track your spending with a tool like Mint or Quicken, and set up a realistic budget to keep yourself living within your means. Also keep a little rainy day fund of at minimum $1,000 so an emergency expense doesn’t end up on your credit card.
Second, she says, don’t chip away at your debt by sending random payments toward each debt every month. Instead, send as much as you can toward your debt with the highest interest rate, and then pay the minimum on all your other balances. “That will save you the most money in the long run,” she says.
Finally, as with savings, automate those debt payments.
Spending Less
Set a threshold for your big purchases, suggests Storjohann. “It’s one thing to spend $20 at Target on a whim, but if you ever want to buy something $50 or $100 or more, give yourself at least a 24-hour waiting period to make sure you’re reflecting on the purchase,” she says. “Ask yourself what you’re giving up in lieu of this purchase. Is it going to be that you’re not going to go out for the next month? Where are you going to make up the difference? Because it’s money that hasn’t been accounted for.”
She recommends setting your threshold at $50 or $100, depending on your budget. During your waiting period, ask yourself why you want this item and what it means for you — whether you really need it or want it to keep up with the Joneses. If it’s more the latter, remind yourself, “When you’re comparing yourself to other people, you’re seeing their best self — not the financial issues behind-the-scenes that make you keep up with them,” she says.
If there’s a particular category of your budget that needs scaling back, look at your past spending to set a limit. For instance, she says, “If you know you’re spending $400 a month on going out, say, ‘I’m going to cut that in half — I won’t go out to dinner but I’ll go out to lunch and brunch with friends.’ So, have a conversation about where you’re willing to make adjustments to meet this goal.”
Bonus Resolution: Earning More
When it comes to improving their finances, most people turn to “austerity” measures like paying off debt or spending less. But they often don’t consider making more money — and that resolution should be on a lot more lists, as it will make it easier for you to save more and pay off debt without having to spend so much time and energy on cutting back.
Get creative about ways to earn more. Start with your salary — check out websites like Payscale, Glassdoor and Salary.com to see what you could be earning for your position and experience in your city. Then, come up with a plan for wowing your boss, so you can make a strong case for a raise or some kind of increase in benefits — or, if you feel up for navigating what is a trickier dance, interview for other positions to get a counteroffer or even jump ship.
If you don’t want to leave your job and know that a raise won’t be entertained, set up side gigs for yourself, says Storjohann. For example, if you’re a teacher, tutor on the side. If you are a graphic designer, pick up freelance work. Or, make your hobby profitable by selling your wares on sites like Etsy. Pick up odd jobs on sites like TaskRabbit, Odesk or Flex Jobs.
Finally, consider decluttering — and profiting from it. Sell gently loved valuables on sites like eBay or Craigslist, or take brand-name items to consignment shops.
The Clincher
With these tips you’re unlikely to join the group of about three in ten respondents to the Fidelity survey who’ve made resolutions in the past but did not achieve them. But to help ensure you won’t be putting these resolutions on your list again next year, we’ve got one last tip for you: Promise yourself a reward for accomplishing them.
Now you’ve got resolutions that you can get behind.
Related:
Photo: happy_serendipity/Flickr |
Part of educated awareness during Breast Cancer Awareness Month is learning as much as possible about all aspects of this disease. Advocacy cannot be complete if we do not tell the whole story and part of the whole story is that male breast cancer can and does happen. Being a BRCA2+ mother of two sons (and a daughter too), this topic takes on even more significance in my family. But of course as we all know, breast cancer can happen in any family.
This is why I’m pleased to feature a guest post today by Oliver Bogler, a man whose life has been impacted by breast cancer not once, but twice. Thank you for sharing your story, Oliver, and thank you for your advocacy as well.
Cancer Changes Everything
By Oliver Bogler
I passed the one year anniversary of my diagnosis of stage III breast cancer in mid-September and after one year, feel I have some perspective.
The first thing I will say is that cancer changes pretty much everything in your life.
While the memories of the chemo infusions, the surgical drains and the daily visits to radiation are already rapidly receding, cancer is still a daily presence. Happily, many of the regular patterns of life have reasserted themselves, bringing the daily joys and challenges of a busy work and family life, but it’s not a return to the way it was before.
Being a cancer survivor (which I can’t help remarking, all people with this diagnosis are right up to the moment when they’re not) changes so much in your mental landscape. Let’s be honest, front and center for those who achieve “no evidence of disease”, is the fear of recurrence – the fear of dying from your cancer. While I’m pretty successful at keeping this at bay most of the time, it’s instantly present when the right stimulus presents itself.
At the moment the strongest trigger for me is my stepfather’s prolonged and heroic fight with his prostate cancer. He has been dealing with it for over 12 years and has kept his optimism and determination throughout. He is now facing mets with few treatment options still open to him. I think of him all the time. And when I think of him, I think of me too.
There are many other triggers, as cancer has become interwoven into our popular culture with cancer patients dotting TV and movie entertainment. And then there is the fact that there is no such thing as a cough that doesn’t make you wonder about lung mets, or a headache that better go away soon or it’s bound to be a brain met. Sometimes I can sit back and watch the rational side of my brain fight with the fear. And of course it wins; the cough goes away as usual and the headache responds to aspirin. Of course it does.
But what if one day it doesn’t?
Alongside the fear is the feeling that time is precious. You have been given a pretty strong notice that your days are numbered, and that you need to make the best use of them that you can. This can be a very positive motivation. It instills a sense of urgency, of not waiting too long to do things you want to do. It can also be an added pressure.
What would that best use of your time be?
I’m lucky in that I have worked in cancer research my whole life and presently work at the largest academic cancer center in the US, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. My current role is to support the academic mission of the center – the research and education that will lead to better answers against cancer. I feel very privileged to be a part of the near 20,000 people who go to work on this problem every day at our one institution. While my work presents daily challenges, I feel that I understand them and by applying myself, learning and working with others I can make a contribution. This makes me feel I am making excellent use of my work time.
As a man with breast cancer, I’m a bit of a rarity – only 1% of breast cancer patients are men and there are about 2,200 cases a year in the US. Although breast cancer in men is relatively rare, it can and does happen. Therefore, I feel another good use of my time is raising awareness about the risk of breast cancer for men. Since most men are unaware of the possibility of getting this cancer, there is a need for raising awareness. Even simple things like routine self-exams are not done and symptoms are often misunderstood or ignored. Also, as I have written at length about on my blog, Entering A World of Pink – a male breast cancer blog, there is essentially no research on the biology of the male disease, leaving doctors no choice but to treat us as they do women with this disease. While this has significant merit, and many men do well with this approach, the possibility that there are medically relevant differences needs to be explored. Personalized medicine, you know. And then many clinical trials for breast cancer exclude men, often for no good reason.
So I have become an advocate.
I am blogging, tweeting and asking awkward questions at scientific meetings. I am part of a team bringing David Jay’s outstanding SCAR Project, to Houston this October and David is now also photographing men (see photo). I am participating in film documentaries about male breast cancer. I have had a poster presentation accepted at this year’s San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium on this issue, in the advocacy section. I am beginning to speak publicly about the issue anywhere people will have me. In this work I feel I am out there without a safety net and am pushing the limits of my limited extraversion. But I feel a need to do it. Whether it will amount to anything is still uncertain, but I do feel that it is a good use of my time.
The hardest “best use of my time” by far is trying to be a role model for my kids and engaging with the family. Here I fear that I fail more often, as sometimes my anger and frustration get the better of me. Then there are times when I know I should spend time with the kids but feel the need to be alone, to replenish my limited energy and optimism. My kids are still young – our son is 11 and our daughter just turned 10 – so I am very aware they are watching me go through this. I often wonder what they think of how I am doing.
My wife, who is also a breast cancer survivor and five years ahead of me, has always been the foundation for the family and still is. She gets it all, and not needing to explain is probably the biggest gift that this double cancer burden has given us. She has led me through this past year and if I can continue to follow her example, I know I can make the best use of my time in this area too.
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If you have any questions or comments about male breast cancer, please let Oliver know with a comment below.
Have you ever known anyone with male breast cancer?
About Oliver Bogler
Dr. Bogler studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University graduating in 1988 and went on to complete his PhD in at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, University College Branch in London. Following a post-doc at the Salk Institute in Developmental Neurobiology, he rejoined the Ludwig Institute at its San Diego Branch. His first faculty appointment was in the Departments of Anatomy and Neurosurgery at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. In 2000 he moved to the Hermelin Brain Tumor Center, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2002. In 2005 Dr. Bogler joined the Department of Neurosurgery and the Brain Tumor Center at the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center as Director of Basic Research and was promoted to Professor in 2009. In July 2010 Dr. Bogler accepted the position of Vice President for Global Academic Programs where he manages academic relationships spanning over 30 Sister Institutions in 20 countries on behalf of MD Anderson. He was recently appointed Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and now focuses on overseeing the 300 people organized into 16 departments in this division who deliver support for the more than 5,000 academic personnel at MD Anderson. |
File Photo | Photo Credit: TOI Archives
New Delhi: Tata Teleservices, Telenor, Videocon and Reliance Jio are among five telecom firms which have understated revenues by over Rs 14,800 crore, resulting in a short fall of nearly Rs 2,578 crore to the exchequer, government auditor CAG said on Tuesday.
As per the report of Comptroller and Auditor General of India tabled in Parliament, government was paid Rs 1,015.17 crore less in licence fee, Rs 511.53 crore in spectrum usage charge, and Rs 1,052.13 crore as interest applicable on delay in payment.
The five telecom companies it named are Tata Teleservices, Telenor, Videocon Telecom, Qaudrant (a Videocon group firm) and Reliance Jio.
The government collection from Tata Teleservices is short by Rs 1,893.6 crore, Telenor - Rs 603.75 crore, Videocon - Rs 48.08 crore, Quadrant - Rs 26.62 crore and Jio - Rs 6.78 crore for licence fee, SUC and applicable interest charges.
CAG said: "To sum up the verification of records of five PSPs (private sector players) by audit indicated total understatement of AGR (adjusted gross revenue) of Rs 14,813.97 crore for the period up to 2014-15 and consequent short payment of revenue share on Government of India to the tune of Rs 1,526.7 crore."
It added that interest due on the short paid revenue share for the period up to March 2016 was Rs 1,052.13 crore.
The CAG findings are based on the audit of Tata Teleservices and Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Ltd from 2010-11 to 2014-15; Quadrant Televentures (2006-07 to 2014- 15); Videocon Telecom (2009-10 to 2014-15); Telenor (2009-10 to 2014-15) and Reliance Jio Infocomm from 2012-13 to 2014-15.
Videocon Telecom, Telenor (Telewings) and Tata Teleservices have sold their mobile businesses to Bharti Airtel, while Quadrant has shut down its mobile services.
CAG observed that telecom operators deducted discounts offered to dealers and customers; free talktime; interest earned from investments and some asset sales from their gross revenue. They should have been part of the adjusted gross revenue (revenue earned from telecom services) for calculation of licence fee and SUCs.
In case of telecom operators offering free talktime to their subscribers, the auditor said that "airtime is not a free commodity, has an intrinsic value" and by making free talktime or promotional offers, telecom operators "were foregoing the revenue resulting in avoidance of LF and SUC".
CAG pulled up telecom operators for deducting expenses incurred in the form of discounts to dealers and distributors, saying that these expenses are in the nature of marketing spent and cannot be deducted from revenue meant for calculating government's share.
The auditor found that Tata Teleservices had written off bad debt that resulted in understatement of its gross revenue by Rs 1,026.01 crore.
CAG said Unitech Wireless transferred its mobile business to Telenor's Indian arm Telewing Communications at a profit of Rs 251.5 crore in 2013-14, but this profit was not included for computing revenue share with government.
Most of the deductions considered by the CAG for computing of revenue of telecom operators are sub-judice matters.
Reacting to the CAG report, Reliance Jio, which had not commenced its commercial operations during the audit period, said that the charge is related to 'revenue share on realised forex gain'.
It added: "This is an industry issue and was referred to TDSAT which ruled in favour of telecom operators. However, the TDSAT decision was appealed against by DoT and this matter is currently subjudice with the Hon'ble Supreme Court." |
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s story about having “binders full of women” brought to him while assembling his Massachusetts state cabinet years ago is not true, according to a Boston Phoenix report Wednesday morning.
While Romney did get a binder listing qualified female candidates after being elected governor in 2003, reporter David S. Bernstein said, it was assembled not by his staff, but by a coalition of groups led by the bipartisan Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, which started collecting the information in 2002 as part of the Massachusetts Government Appointments Project (MassGAP).
“They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions,” Bernstein said. “They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.”
According to the caucus and MassGAP, Bernstein said, women accounted for 14 of Romney’s first 33 senior-level appointments. But on Tuesday, Romney took at least some credit for making that happen.
“One of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort,” he said during his debate with President Barack Obama.
The Huffington Post noted that, according to a study done by MassGAP five years ago, women went from making up 42 percent of Romney’s administration in 2003 to 27.6 percent in November 2006, shortly before he left office.
Bernstein also questioned the placement of Romney’s women appointees Tuesday.
“Those were almost all to head departments and agencies that he didn’t care about — and in some cases, that he quite specifically wanted to not really do anything,” Bernstein said. “None of the senior positions Romney cared about — budget, business development, etc. — went to women.”
Update: One of Romney’s statements Tuesday regarding employment of women in his administration is accurate, the head of the Center for Women in Government & Civil Society told The Raw Story Wednesday.
The center’s executive director, Dina Refki, said that, according to a 2008 study, 54.5 percent of his top advisors in 2004 — department heads or people who worked with him on a day-to-day basis — were women, which exceeded both the averages for both the New England region (45 percent) and the country (41 percent).
That year, Refki said, women comprised 50 percent of the department heads in Romney’s administration, which was also higher than the regional (35 percent) and national (29.7 percent) averages.
“I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my cabinet and my senior staff, that the [State] University of New York at Albany did a survey of all 50 states and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America,” Romney said Tuesday.
Update 11 a.m. EST: An Obama campaign spokesperson cited a 2007 study (PDF) by MassGAP and the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts-Boston Wednesday, criticizing Romney’s administration for contributing to “the lack of overall growth in women’s representation in top positions” between September 2002 and July 2004.
According to the study, women replaced other women in 24 percent of Romney’s appointments during that time period, while men replaced men 37 percent of the time. And during the same period, women appointees replaced men 18 percent of the time, while men replaced women in 21 percent of similar cases.
Update 1:47 p.m. EST: In an email to The Raw Story, a MassGAP spokesperson said both Romney and Democratic opponent Shannon O’Brien agreed before the 2002 gubernatorial election to “make best efforts” to appoint a “proportionate” amount of women to state positions, as well as to meet with the group during the appointments process.
“Following the election, MassGAP formed committees for each cabinet post in the administration and began the process of recruiting, interviewing, and vetting women applicants,” the statement said. “Those committees selected top applicants for each position and presented this information to the administration for follow-up interviews and consideration for appointment.”
[h/t The Daily Beast]
[Image via Agence France-Presse] |
What’s in a name?
When it comes to Scarborough Bluffs Park, the answer is confusion.
The city’s Parks, Forestry and Recreation department is recommending that the park at 61 Undercliff Dr. be renamed Scarboro Crescent Park after scores of people routinely show up with the erroneous assumption that they can easily access the beach from the park.
Many learn the hard way that such a trek is filled with peril. According to the motion calling for the name change. “visitors … use unsafe and dangerous methods to climb down the bluffs to the beach …”
That led to 25 rescue calls in 2016 alone for visitors who became stranded while trying to reach the beach.
The motion also contends that the confusion leads to “major congestion” at the park, which can’t accommodate the traffic. There is currently no designated parking at the location.
“Changing the name of Scarborough Bluffs Park to Scarboro Crescent Park would take the word “Bluff” out of the name and help to clear up some confusion,” the motion reads, adding that it would also “reduce the number of visitors scaling down the bluffs to access the beach … and reduce the number of emergency calls …”
The request for a name change will be considered at the Scarborough Community Council meeting on Tuesday.
Proposed name change for Scarborough Bluffs Park by CityNewsToronto on Scribd |
Los Angeles, CA — World premiere music videos, conversations between film legends and up-and-coming creatives and three female comedians have been added to the lineup for Sundance NEXT FEST, August 10-13 at The Theatre at Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles. They join music acts like Lizzo, Electric Guest and Sleigh Bells, the Los Angeles premieres of some of the Sundance Film Festival’s most talked-about films and NEXT FEST After Dark, Presented by Acura, featuring a 25th anniversary screening of Reservoir Dogs on restored 35mm and ceremony honoring Quentin Tarantino. More info, tickets ($15-35) and ticket packages are at sundance.org/next.
Ava DuVernay (13th, Selma) will join a conversation, presented by FilmL.A., Inc., with director Justin Chon after Saturday’s 4:00 p.m. screening of Gook. Also on Saturday, Gente-fied executive producer America Ferrera, director/creator/co-writer Marvin Lemus, co-writer Linda Yvette Chavez and executive producer Aaliyah Williams will be in conversation following the noon screening of all seven episodes of the series.
On Sunday, Emmy Award winner Larry Wilmore will join directors Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles and the subject of Dina for a conversation following the afternoon screening. Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show) will be in conversation with filmmaker Alex Ross Perry following Sunday’s 4:00 p.m. screening of Golden Exits.
Highlighting the connection between music and movies, three brand-new music videos have been added to the lineup and will screen before films.
Temptation — Joey Bada$$ Directed by Nathan R. Smith. Co-Direction by Joey Bada$$. A little girl journeys through Brooklyn as an omniscient Joey Bada$$ protects her from the alluring temptations she encounters. The track is featured on Joey Bada$$’ latest album, All-Amerikkkan Bada$$. The music video will premiere Saturday, August 12 with the 4:00 p.m. screening of Gook. Do It, Try It — M83 Written and directed by David Wilson. A family outing to a burger joint sparks an argument between the parents whilst two children draw pictures to entertain themselves, taking the viewer into their imaginations. This four-minute adventure of mixed media film, fusing live action and hand-drawn animation, premieres Sunday, August 13 with the noon screening of Dina. Fingers — Hundred Waters Directed by Allie Avital. Fingers is an eerie meditation on the dissolution of a relationship featuring 10,000 live insects.The music video will make its world premiere on Sunday, August 13 with the 4:00 p.m. screening of Golden Exits.
Kate Berlant will host the screening of Lemon and performance by Lizzo on Friday, August 11 at 8:00 p.m. Berlant has been described by The New York Times as a "magnetic improvisational comic" and named by Time Out New York as one of New York City's "Top Three Comics to Watch.” She is also one of Comedy Central's "Comics to Watch.” Kate Micucci will open the evening with a song leading into Saturday‘s 8:00 p.m. screening of Bitch and performance by Sleigh Bells. Micucci can be seen in The Little Hours with Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza, Dave Franco, Molly Shannon and John C. Reilly. Kate is co-creator and co-star of the group GARFUNKEL AND OATES, with Riki Lindhome. They were one of Variety’s comics to watch in 2010 and their two-woman show regularly sold out Largo and UCB. Natasha Leggero will host Sunday’s 8:00 p.m. screening of L.A. Times and performance by Electric Guest. Leggero has built her body of work with numerous roles on prominent television series including NBC’s Community, FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Arrested Development, Comedy Central’s Reno 911 and Drunk History, ABC’s Suburgatory, the sketch comedy Key and Peele, Comedy Bang! Bang! Chelsea Lately, and The Tonight Show, among many others.
NEXT DOOR, an outdoor social hub next to the Theatre, returns to Sundance NEXT FEST. Attendees can access with their tickets before or after screenings to mingle and enjoy drinks from Hochstadter’s, Stella Artois and wineries from the Santa Ynez Valley, samples from Califia Farms, experience an Acura NSX Virtual Reality test drive,participate in games from Allbirds and get your questions answered at the Los Angeles Times Ask a Reporter booth.
The weekend also includes a free panel on editing a film using Premiere Pro sponsored by Adobe. More info at sundance.org/next.
Sundance NEXT FEST supporters include: Principal Sponsors – Acura and Adobe; Major Sponsors – Hochstadter’s Slow & Low Rock & Rye, and Stella Artois®; Supporting Sponsors – Allbirds, Beachside, Califia Farms, Dolby Laboratories, Inc., FilmL.A., Inc., The Theatre at Ace Hotel, Utah Office of Tourism and Film, and Visit the Santa Ynez Valley; and Media Sponsors – LA WEEKLY, Los Angeles Times, Mashable and Time Out.
Sundance Institute
Founded in 1981 by Robert Redford, Sundance Institute is a nonprofit organization that provides and preserves the space for artists in film, theatre, and new media to create and thrive. The Institute's signature Labs, granting, and mentorship programs, dedicated to developing new work, take place throughout the year in the U.S. and internationally. The Sundance Film Festival and other public programs connect audiences to artists in igniting new ideas, discovering original voices, and building a community dedicated to independent storytelling. Sundance Institute has supported such projects as Boyhood, Swiss Army Man, Manchester By the Sea, Brooklyn, Little Miss Sunshine, Life, Animated, Sonita, 20 Feet From Stardom, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Fruitvale Station, Sin Nombre, Spring Awakening, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder and Fun Home. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
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Editor’s note: Press who wish to attend and cover Sundance NEXT FEST should complete the ticket request form by Wednesday, August 2.
Download a PDF version of this news release. |
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