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1 Posted Mar 6, 2011, 7:06 AM flar .......... Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Southwestern Ontario Posts: 12,071 The Chicago of the North THE EXCHANGE DISTRICT
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Winnipeg, Manitoba
W innipeg's Exchange District is one of the most intact early 20th century commercial districts
in North America. By the turn of the 20th century, Winnipeg had become a major railway centre
and the commercial gateway to Western Canada. The city quickly grew into Canada's third largest
and became known as the "Chicago of the North." The Exchange District covers an area of 20
blocks just north of Winnipeg's Downtown and contains a large collection of elegant brick buildings
and warehouses. In 1997, the Exchange District was designated a National Historic Site.
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RECENT PHOTOS :
TORONTO • SAN FRANCISCO • ROCHESTER, NY • HAMILTON • GODERICH, ON • WHEATLEY, ON • COBOURG, ON • LAS VEGAS • LOS ANGELES __________________ |
uugh, I feel like a goof and egotistical person 'advertising' my things, but
Probably the only (and if ever again, a rare) time I'll ever do this, but I thought along with some Spike doodles I did a couple of days ago, I'd post a few other Twitter doodles I did a while back for my pony account as well (with the Gilda and Dusty ones being fairly recent from tonight, actually)!Pony doodles (or even just characters from the show) helps get my drawing hand going surprisingly enough; and while I like posting ones I want to post just cause on my main account, I don't want to bother, or even annoy, folks that don't exactly favor for MLP stuff. Thus, I finally got around to making a new Twitter to post it at. twitter.com/RangoonPony Aside from doodles(I may often do for others) and the occasional headshots, I may post progression shots, or even sketches/drafts, of pieces I work on. Who knows!There yah go! |
2006); CL2 and CL3 have affinity for different hydrophobic amino acids in the amino-terminal side of the scissile bond, CL3 for Leu and lie, whereas CL2 has preference for Pro, lie, and Val, in addition to affinity for hydrophobic amino acids and the CL1 cleavage in polar amino acids Gin and Thr too (Bibo-Verdugo et al.
RNA and DNA present only two types of phophodiester bonds for cleavage, 5' or 3' of a scissile phosphate, and the fundamental chemistry is bimolecular nucleophilic substitution or [S.
group is able to attack the scissile peptide bond nucleophilically in the initial stage of hydrolysis.
N-terminal analysis has revealed the margins of the capsid proteins and the corresponding scissile bonds within the structural polyprotein (Valles and Hashimoto 2008).
So, they've been revving up the thrill-ometer (and added 3D, natch) for this ultimate road movie in which Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) and his best friend Mater compete in the World Grand Prix in Tokyo - and get mysteriously recruited by British intelligence vehicle Finn Scissile (Michael Caine) in the process.
The processing of Gag is regulated by the residues flanking the scissile bonds.
The playfulness of the cento, which Ausonius describes as a game, represents the master text as a scissile surface and in so doing suggests that the authority vested in the master text is only skin deep. |
Grand Theft Auto Online may be getting a handful of new strip clubs added to the game, if a recent discovery and speculation from YouTuber MrBossFTW holds true.
Apparently, a handful of files have been discovered that reveals new interiors layouts for upcoming buildings that players will be able to use. The YouTuber has linked the interior layouts that were discovered, with existing buildings in Los Santos.
The first is of “Hornbills”, a strip club in Los Santos that can not currently be entered, but looks similar to the interior map that was discovered.
The second, might not be a strip club at all, and maybe just a dance club like those found in The Ballad of Gay Tony. The YouTuber postulates that “Bahama Mamas”, another building that cannot currently be accessed in GTA V, could be a prime location for this sort of building.
New GTA V Strip Clubs |
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is “Breaking With Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Tampa, Florida.
While the Republican National Convention was canceled for the day—won’t start until Tuesday due to Tropical Storm Isaac—oh, there were other issues, as well, which had to do with whether Ann Romney, who was planning to be speaking tonight, would be broadcast by the networks, since they only wanted to do three days of coverage, but it was the storm that was cited as the reason for the cancellation tonight.
Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul held their own convention of sorts over the weekend. A two-day “Paul Fest” was held at the Florida State Fairgrounds. And on Sunday, about 7,000 people heard Ron Paul speak at the Sun Dome at University of South Florida. The event was described by some as a farewell rally for Paul, who was not invited to speak at the Republican National Convention. Questions remain if supporters of Paul will attempt to disrupt Romney’s nomination. At times, Sunday’s rally felt like a rock concert, with the crowd breaking into chants of “President Paul!”
Over the years, key parts of Congressmember Paul’s platform have included shutting down the Federal Reserve, ending U.S. wars, and slashing federal spending by eliminating agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education. Congressmember Paul has been a vocal critic of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His ties to groups like the John Birch Society have long drawn scrutiny. Over the weekend, the John Birch Society was among the vendors at Paul Fest.
In a moment, we’ll speak—we’ll play part of Ron Paul’s speech, but first we turn to his son, Senator Rand Paul. Many expect him to run for president in 2016 or 2020. He began his speech with a joke about the TSA. That’s the Transportation Security Administration.
SEN. RAND PAUL: Anybody here in favor of abolishing the TSA? You know, when I say that in Washington, they say, “What are you complaining about? You can go to the airport, and if you don’t have health insurance, you can get a free breast exam, you can get a free mammogram, and if you mention the Ron Paul revolution, you can get a free colonoscopy.” The only problem is, some of us would prefer that our physician not be selected by advertising that’s on the Pizza Hut box.
I had the director of TSA come before my committee, and he said, “Well, we’ve got to pat down these children.” And I showed him a picture of a six-year-old girl from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and the agent had her hands inside this little girl’s pants. And he said to me, in all seriousness, and he followed up with a letter, and he said, “Well, a girl in Kandahar set off a bomb, an eight-year-old girl.” And I said, “This girl is not from Kandahar. She’s from Bowling Green, Kentucky.”
There’s a professor at Harvard, and he wrote recently—his name is Noah Feldman—he wrote, “The next time the TSA asks you to put your hands above your head — 'No, hon, just a little bit higher. Nno, hon, a little bit higher' — and when you stand there for a vulnerable seven seconds, the next time you do this, you ask yourself, is this the pose of a free man?”
We have had the beginnings of some great victories, but we have yet to have the great victories. We did have a great victory in the House when we passed “Audit the Fed.” This is a credit to a certain congressman from Texas who got every Republican to vote for it—and a hundred Democrats to vote for it. A lot of news reports are saying it’s dead now and it’s going nowhere, and I can tell you that’s not true. One of the great things that’s come out of “Audit the Fed” is that people have heard you. They’ve heard you saying, “End the Fed,” too, but they’ve also heard “Audit the Fed.” But here’s the thing: because we’ve talked about “Audit the Fed” so much, we’re now talking about “Audit the Pentagon.”
Now, because of Hurricane Isaac, it’s not sure whether my message will get to the Republican National Convention, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be able to speak. But one of the messages that I will give to them is that Republicans need to acknowledge that not every dollar is well spent or sacred in the military, and we have to look for waste in every department of government.
AMY GOODMAN: Senator Rand Paul, Republican from Kentucky, speaking Sunday in Tampa at the Ron Paul celebration. Moments later, his father and Republican presidential candidate, Congressmember Ron Paul of Texas, addressed the crowd.
SEN. RAND PAUL: I give to you the guy that is my hero, the guy that is the greatest representative of the liberty movement in our time, my father, Ron Paul.
REP. RON PAUL: To me, the three problems that we have to face, number one that I see as the problem—and if we solve it, it probably would solve most of the other ones—and that is the attack on personal liberty. If people truly understood what personal liberty means, that you have self-ownership, that you have a natural, God-given right to your life, therefore you have a right to your liberty, and we defend all life and all liberty regardless of our judgment about how people are using that liberty, then we would have the natural sequence of saying, if that is the case, you have a natural right to keep the fruits of your labor—and all of it.
Personal liberty, when it returns, once again you’ll be able to drink raw milk. You’ll be able to make rope out of hemp. You will be able to feel secure in your houses, that the federal government will not be able to spy on you or bust into your house without a search warrant. You will be allowed, without a government permit, to buy nutritional products, when you please and what you please. No longer will government assume they have the responsibility of protecting you against yourself. Nobody can do that. The emphasis will no longer be on economic and personal security, the government will take care of us, but it will be emphasizing the government is there to protect our liberty. You know, they can give us security, you know, whether it’s economic, which always fails, or whether it’s personal security, but you will become—if they—if the government said, “We can provide you perfect security,” isn’t that what we do with animals that we breed to raise up and eat? I mean, this is what happens. They’re secure. You put them in cages, and you put them in fields. You fatten them up. You take care of them. They have all the food they want and the best nutrition—until it’s time to butcher. And this is safe. So what you want is liberty. You don’t want this false sense of security that governments cannot give you.
We’re spread too far around the world. We’re in 140 countries. We have 900 bases. They’re preparing right now to go into Syria, and it probably won’t be too long that we may well be in Iran. We don’t need another war. We need less wars, and we need to quit. In talking about foreign policy like this and emphasizing blowback, somebody, rather nationally, said the other day on the internet, they said, “Oh, yeah, if those Paul peoples had been in charge, Osama bin Laden would still be alive.” But you know what I think the answer is? So would the 3,000 people from 9/11 be alive. And so—so would the 8,500 Americans who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, they would be alive, as well. And also—also those 44,000 military personnel who have come back severely injured, they would not be suffering those consequences, and we wouldn’t have—and we wouldn’t have hundreds of thousands suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome as well as brain injuries. So I would say, if you take that and add in $4 trillion, our side wins that argument by a long shot. Of course, if we had our way and we remove these dangers, of course, a president would not be able to assassinate anybody, especially never an American citizen.
So, what—what is our—what is our big challenge? The big challenge is, is can we restore our natural rights, God-given rights to our people, so that we emphasize the fact that return of liberty can solve so many of our problems? Economic policies means private property, contract rights, gold standard, and get the government out of this business of regulating the market. And property rights regulates quite well. Under those conditions, guess what happens in a free market? They say there will be no regulations. No, the regulation is, if you go bankrupt, you go bankrupt, and you don’t get bailed out by the government.
So the really big question, I think, that we have to decide upon is which way are we going to go. We see the end of an era. Where is it going to go? And I think the choice is one of two. I do not think that there’s going to be another Marxist come along and restore enthusiasm for Marxism. I don’t think that tomorrow we’re going to have the same thing as a Hitler or Mussolini. But I do think we have to worry about fascism, an expansion of what we already have, which is corporatism, the buddy system between big corporations, big banks, with the government. And that is the reason that we have to be on the side of saying, yes, if you’re big and you made your money because you had special benefits and bailouts and protectionism from the government, that is wrong, but if you’re big because you sold a good product to us and we bought it and you got rich, you have a right to be rich for doing that.
AMY GOODMAN: Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul speaking Sunday here in Tampa. |
With the high probability of Andre Villas Boas becoming the new Tottenham Hotspur manager in the near future, so much so that mybet bonus code were not giving punters much in the way of a return. TPiMBW has taken an objective step back from his recent Chelsea venture to analyse just how Andre Villas Boas proposes that his teams play their football. English Premier League fans may be aware that he possesses facial hair styled to perfection and presents himself as the immaculate gentleman, but his time at Chelsea didn’t present him with the opportunity to get his concepts across – Tottenham however, is a whole different proposition.
What to expect: André Villas Boas is a manager to believes that the strength of his team is focused around a particular system and as we saw at Chelsea, is a manager who is consistent with his proposed style of play, even through poor spells. But don’t write him off just yet, to judge him on his Chelsea performance would be unwise.
With the ball: AVB prefers his team to be patient in possession and ‘pick the lock’ at the right moment. One of the key factors for his failure at Chelsea has often been suggested that AVB was lacking a creative midfielder, one just like Modric. A breed of creativity and flair that was also present in his Porto side through the talent of Joao Moutinho. André Castro was Joao Mouthinho’s understudy at Porto and under the supervision of Villas Boas appears to have become a play-making clone of Mouthinho.
Villas Boas has also demonstrated at both clubs he likes to play a formation with two dynamic, fast and goal scoring inside forwards/wingers. Sturridge and Mata were instructed to take up these roles at Chelsea and both did a reasonable job at adapting to AVB’s ideologies, however neither are naturally players positioned on the flanks. At Porto AVB boasted the skills and pace of Varela and Hulk, two players that Lennon and Bale are more than a match for, two game changers.
The basis of AVB’s strategy is that when his side are in possession, the pitch is made as big as possible by spreading the formation out wide and utilising the space created by getting the wide men on the ball as often as the centralised play-makers.
AVB is clearly a firm believer in the old footballing proverb that ‘possession is nine-tenths of the game.’ The logic behind this belief is twofold. If you have the ball, the other team cannot score and secondly, if your team have the ball the opposition become exhausted chasing you down. This therefore has two desired effects, one is that the opposition are so tired than upon winning the ball from you, they are easier to press and tackle in the following moments of play; secondly, their attacks become slower and a lot more predictable: either through a resort to long ball or the struggle to retain possession and get a foothold in the game. ‘Keep ball’ has the potential to act as a virtuous cycle.
Without the ball: AVB presses high up the field and is unlikely to sit back against anyone, not even Man City or United. One particular issue at Chelsea was that of a slow back line and it would be fair to say they failed to cope with defending any immediate counter attack.
AVB conducts his team in this way so that the pitch is made as small as possible for opponents: by squeezing up the back line and using the off side trap aggressively – the opposite to when in possession. This tactic requires quick defenders to successfully cope with any threat of the long ball over the top.
Pressing in the right areas and at the right times can lead to a significant source for lots of goals:
“A study in 1988 of 16 international matches showed that possession was won 13% of the time in the attacking third. A staggering 66% of goals scored were from this 13%.” Paul Cooper
The above image was taken from an excellent article about Brendan Rodgers’ pressing approach and shows just how effective high pressing can be – the left back in the above image is limited to route one or to play the ball back to his goal keeper, who is also likely to play a route one ball. Route one football more often than not results in the ball being turned over back to the defending side.
While Rodgers and Boas represent different schools of football philosophy, their approach to pressing is similar. Rodgers relies on the concepts derived from Tiki Taka football, AVB however you could argue takes much of his concepts from Rinus Michels’ totaalvoetball of Ajax in the 1970’s, a type of football that Michels actually called himself ‘pressing football’:
“I would describe what the journalists call ‘total football’, as ‘pressing football’. To me, this expression seems to put the emphasis on the type of football I was trying to create with Ajax and with the Dutch national team in the 1974 World Cup. What I wanted to create was a game in which all ten outfield players pressed forward all the time – even when we didn’t have the ball!” Rinus Michels, ex Ajax Manager and creator of ‘totaal voetball’
Differences however, lie in the rigidity of structure in formation between total football and Villas-Boas’ approach. Many would argue here that Tiki-Taka is simply a rebrand of Total Football, however there are many differences between the two that have come around as a response to player strengths within a team.
Formation : AVB prefers to prepare his team around an axis of three in the middle of the park, each complimentary of one another. Frank Lampard represents a type of player that AVB doesn’t see fit in any one of the three roles. AVB looks to field one defensive minded player and two players who are comfortable at playing further forward in possession, one of whom is still capable of acting as a box to box midfielder.
AVB likes players who can defend from the front and attack from the back. Full backs with attacking qualities would prosper in AVB’s tactical approach.
While the formation above shows both Modric and Van der Vaart both within the midfield axis, it is likely that Sandro will have a larger role to play. However, during AVB’s Porto days he played both Mourinho and Fredy Guarin in the same midfield – possibly suggesting that given he expects his team to be in possession more often than not, two ball playing midfielders would be acceptable.
Lastly, Jermaine Defoe may well be offered a lifeline and find a regular spot in AVB’s tactical approach. Radamel Falcao was a player who simply scored goals. Of course, there is nothing simple about scoring goals and the player who is selected to play up front is expected to be in the right place at the right time – all the time:
“The big thing is everybody says it’s being in the right place at the right time. But it’s more than that, its being in the right place all the time. Because if I make 20 runs to the near post and each time I lose my defender, and 19 times the ball goes over my head or behind me – then one time I’m three yards out, the ball comes to the right place and I tap it in – then people say, right place, right time. And I was there ALL the time” Gary Lineker
While the same players are all listed in the formation above as the familiar faces we saw under Redknapp, the most fundamental changes come from the pressing and build up play differences of the two styles of football.
Conclusion
AVB’s tactical foundations are based around a fluid passing game but in a strict and rigid formation. He has a track record in showing a belief that players should be selected that fit his system and not a system chosen to cater for the best players.
The possible appointment of AVB would represent a move away from Redknapp and his adaptive tactics to fit the best players in a side to Villa Boas’ approach to fit players to a system, a selection of the best team, not players.
Clearly, the key for AVB succeeding at Spurs comes down to whether he is able to keep players: Luka Modric and Gareth Bale in particular. Both are players who fall perfectly into place with his tactical set up and as Chelsea saw, it is not easy to implement AVB’s ideas without the correct typology of player in each given role.
The philosophy that AVB will propose aims to provide “freedom by design”, freedom of creative football by an implementation of structure.
The potential sales of both Bale and Modric however, would not be all doom and gloom as both would demand such large fees, which would therefore allow Villas Boas to actually go out and purchase players who fit his system – an opportunity he was never truly given at Chelsea. Don’t be too surprised to finally see AVB recruit some of his old Porto friends this time around.
It is worth reminding yourself however, that Tottenham have a youth player more than capable of stepping up to the big stage next season, a player who fits the creative midfield role like no other english player and impressed from start to finish in the NextGen Series last season: Alex Pritchard.
And Villas Boas is not one to be afraid to choose a youth player and allow him the opportunity, after all AVB’s career has been built around opportunities offered to him despite his age, and let us not forget… he is still only 34 years old himself! |
12-year-old children cannot give adult consent!
Jerry Brown advocates the chemical raping of children
What's next: Chemotherapy for schoolgirls?
Total California cave-in to the criminal vaccine industry
Here comes the public school vaccine propaganda
The STATE shall decide what gets injected into your child from now on!
Let the Governor know what you think
Hear more on the Robert Scott Bell Show
(NaturalNews) Insanity prevailed in California once again today as Governor Jerry Brown signed bill AB499 allowing 12-year-old children the ability to consent to being injected with Gardasil vaccines without their parents' knowledge; yet at the same time the Governor banned the use of tanning beds by anyone under 18 unless they received parental consent ( http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/09/us... ).For the record, HPV vaccines are widely linked to maiming and even killing countless children while contributing absolutely nothing to the body's real defense of cervical cancer ( https://www.naturalnews.com/031279_HPV_vaccin... ). The entire fabrication of quack science behind HPV vaccines is nothing but a corporation fantasy created to drum up sales for vaccines. In contrast to that, tanning beds have actually been scientifically shown toin people who are deficient in vitamin D ( https://www.naturalnews.com/024687_Vitamin_D_... ) -- and that includes the vast majority of the population living in California.The whole idea that 12-year-old children can give "consent" to being injected with HPV vaccines is a total violation of common sense and yet another encroachment of the nanny state upon the rights of parents.The idea that 12-year-old children can consent to invasive medical procedures that carry a very real risk of death is. Is the state now going to say that 12-year-old children are adults and can buy beer, drive vehicles and consent to sexual encounters with other adults, too? If Jerry Brown is saying that 12-year-old children are old enough to make such major decisions about their sexual health, then by implication he's also saying that 12-year-olds have the right to decide, for example, that they want to have sex with a 20-year-old.But that's crazy. This is why we have laws about sexual predators who target minors. It's based on the premise that, and that they are thus easily preyed upon by those who would approach them with their own selfish agenda.Such as the vaccine industry, for example. Now, by removing parental consent from the decision-making process for HPV vaccines,which sounds a lot like rape. And just as physically raping a child will leave permanent scars, HPV injections often cause their own permanent damage -- or even death!What I'm saying here -- and I want to be completely clear in my choice of words -- is thatThat he has sided with the vaccine industry over the lawful rights of parents is an outrage. This is disgusting, immoral behavior from a dangerously overreaching politician who now feels he has the power to usurp parents' rights and turn over their children to the whims of the-- the same industry that uses children as guinea pigs to run outlandish medical experiments in countries around the world ( https://www.naturalnews.com/019187.html ).The vaccine industry in particular is steeped in criminality, including one of its godfathers, Dr. Jonas Salk, who conducted illegal medical experiments on U.S. insane asylum residents ( https://www.naturalnews.com/031564_Jonas_Salk... ).At the same time, Gardasil has been found to be https://www.naturalnews.com/033585_Gardasil_c... ), meaning that thanks to Jerry Brown, this contaminated andmish-mash of chemicals can be injected into 12-year-old children without their parents even knowing about it.Thanks, Governor, for poisoning the children of California!Think about the implications of this precedent in California. If the state now believes it can selectively "grant" children the right to consent to highly invasive and evenmedical procedures, then where does this stop?Will schools roll outfor all fifth-grade girls with the claim that the state ifby injecting young girls with toxic chemotherapy agents? Will schools allow children towithout parental consent as long as those trials are excused as being for "public health?" Will California's public schools now start teaching children thatbecause even the little boys have been injected with HPV vaccines designed to preventcancer? Will they give lessons on oral sex in the classrooms to explain why even the boys are being lined up and injected with Gardasil?One day, parents in California will find their little boys coming home from school and telling them, "Today at school we learned about oral sex and got Gardasil shots to protect us from disease! Here's my permission slip, which they let me sign myself! Aren't you proud of me?"You see, the insanity just never ends once you start giving in to the dark side of the vaccine industry. By signing this bill into law, Governor Jerry Brown hasand delivered millions of fresh, young children to the vaccine industry's insatiable desire for profit at any cost.Yeah, this is blunt language, but these are issues of such seriousness that they call for total honesty about what just happened. Jerry Brown just let the vaccine industryof California with a provably deadly vaccine that offers absolutely no scientifically-supportable benefits (unless, of course, you believe all the quack science fabricated by the vaccine makers themselves, which shouldn't count in any honest assessment of efficacy).This is a reflection of the scam that Texas Governor Rick Perry tried to pull off with his ill-fated mandate of the Gardasil vaccine in Texas. That was eventually exposed as a total insider job with a key Rick Perry staffer being on the Merck payroll, and now Perry is paying the price in the Presidential race for his Big Brother vaccine mandate. Jerry Brown will probably never run for President, so he seems to be more concerned with leaving a legacy of some sort. What he doesn't realize is that his legacy will befrom the vaccine he "granted" those children the ability to accept without parental permission. This guy is going to bewhose lives were stolen from them by deadly chemicals which were dishonestly marketed to them as safe.Because what we're going to see now in California isthat pressures little children into being vaccinated through a carefully-planned social engineering assault.Public schools, which already lie to students about everything from world history to economics, will blatantly lie to the students about vaccines, stating things like "people who don't get vaccinated can spread disease" and then reinforcing vaccine acceptance with things like candy and donuts. This is the way social engineers operate: The make you unpopular or try to make you feel guilty if you don't do what they want you to do. But if you go along with their agenda, they reward you with social acceptance and food or monetary awards. I can see these schools even offering students $5 in cash if they accept the vaccine shots without parental consent.There is no end to the evil trickery and the downrightthat will be committed in California to force these injections onto schoolchildren there. As NaturalNews readers already well know, the vaccine industry will stop atto force its deadly chemicals onto infants, children and teens. Whether you think this is just a profit agenda or something far worse -- such as aagenda -- doesn't really matter. What matters is that by signing this law, Governor Jerry Brown haswhile telling parents "Hands off your own children!"Let's face it, the idea that a 12-year-old child can give "consent" to any medical procedure is a total fiasco. If it weren't so sad, it would be laughable.Keep in mind that by signing this bill, Jerry Brown is saying that children who arecan suddenly say YES to being injected with what is essentially anof viral fragments, toxic preservatives and neurologically damaging adjuvants.Is this not aon children? If you jab some kid with a needle filled with toxins, that's a felony, even if they give you permission, right? So why is it suddenly okay for public school nurses to do the same thing evenparental consent?Jerry Brown, you are a shameful human being and a sellout to the criminal vaccine industry. No matter what other good you may have done in public office, it can never outweigh the torrent of evil you have unleashed with this single irresponsible action. May these deaths weigh heavily upon your conscience as you burn in eternity for willfully violating the sacred bodies of countless innocent children who will now suffer and die because of your grotesque, nefarious actions.Whether you believe in the quack science of vaccines or not, for God's sakewhat should be done with their own children, not the (corrupt) state!You gotta love California, folks: This is the state that believesthat those who distribute it are charged with felony crimes and subjected to terror-level surveillance campaigns even when parentsfor their babies. But toxic, deadly vaccines are so "safe" that children can give consent to them without their parents' approval whatsoever!Contact Governor Jerry Brown at:This issue is being discussed in much greater detail on the Robert Scott Bell Show airing Tuesday, October 11th. You can hear it live at www.NaturalNewsRadio.com or find it in the archives (downloadable MP3s) at: |
LOS ANGELES — Something rare quickly becomes valuable. So it should come as no surprise that the latest target of thieves in a state suffering a historic drought is water. California thieves are cutting pipes and taking water from fire hydrants, storage tanks, creeks and rivers to get their hands on several hundred gallons of the precious commodity. They drive in the thick of night with a 1,000-gallon tank on the back of a pickup and go after the liquid gold wherever they can find it. Some have hit the same target twice in one night, filling up their tank, unloading it into storage and returning for a second fill-up. Counties, mostly in the more rural northern parts of California, are reporting a surge in thefts and illegal diversions of water from wells and streams. The prime suspects are illegal marijuana farmers desperate for water before the fall harvest, which would explain the surge in water thievery over the summer. “A lot of the wells have gone dry, and the marijuana growers have run out of water and have been illegally taking the water out of the creeks,” said Hank Weston, supervisor in Nevada County, an old mining area in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California’s northeast. (The county has been around longer than the state of Nevada next door.) “They have broken into a school district holding tank and in the fire department’s holding tank,” Weston said. “Some of the water trucks are pulling up near rivers and dropping water hoses in and suctioning it out.” All of which is illegal, of course, but does not usually amount to much more than fines and a misdemeanor — at least for now. Weston has lived in Nevada County since 1988. Despite a series of severe droughts in the past 30 years, he said, “it’s the first time I’ve heard of this.”
‘A lot of the wells have gone dry, and the marijuana growers have run out of water and have been illegally taking the water out of the creeks.’ Hank Weston supervisor, Nevada County
This water rustling wave evokes the Wild West and the adage that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting — an unconfirmed quote widely attributed to Mark Twain. In 2014 the fight to catch the water thieves is on. Local law enforcement and state agencies have set up hotlines for water theft reporting and illegal water diversions. Schools that have been hit have installed security cameras. Fire stations have put locks on water valves. The State Water Resources Control Board has received $1.4 million this year from the legislature for a pilot cannabis enforcement program to crack down on illegal tapping of water sources. The board is working with California Fish and Wildlife and regional water control agencies in charge of enforcing water quality to crack down on those who take water they have no right to take. “For many water rights violations, it might be a $1,000 a day penalty or even as low as $500,” said Chris Carrigan, the state’s top water cop. “But for water quality, fines are $5,000 to $10,000 a day.” The biggest deterrent has been a neighborhood watch campaign of sorts that asks residents to be on the lookout. Carrigan advises anyone who sees a thief in action to “take a photograph. Photograph the license plate number.” Some of those doing the stealing are companies that sell water to homeowners with dry wells. Ads that say “I will deliver water to your property” are quickly flagged, Carrigan said. His enforcement division calls the number, sets up a delivery and often catches the pilferers in action. “People have been caught, and people have been cited,” said Carre Brown, Mendocino County supervisor and chairwoman of a countywide drought task force. Mendocino, on California’s North Coast, is a hotbed of illegal marijuana grows. “I would say the main culprits were the ones who were looking to water marijuana gardens,” she said. “The penalties in California are not harsh enough.” At a construction site for a Highway 101 bypass, some water poachers tried to get into the water-truck line used by construction crews. Some tried to masquerade as fire crews to get at water kept at Cal Fire camps.
‘For many water rights violations, it might be a $1,000 a day penalty or even as low as $500. But for water quality, fines are $5,000 to $10,000 a day.’ Chris Carrigan California’s top water cop |
Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard have been named to the 2015 MLS All-Star team as Commissioner Don Garber’s picks for the AT&T MLS All-Star Game, it was unveiled Monday night during FOX Sports 1’s pregame show for the USA's Gold Cup Group A match against Panama.
Lampard and Gerrard, two of the league’s most recent international star arrivals who both have over 100 caps with England's national team, recently joined New York City FC and LA Galaxy, respectively, as Designated Players.
Gerrard made his debut for the LA Galaxy on Saturday night in a friendly against Mexican side Club América, playing 45 minutes after a two-week training period in Southern California. He is expected to make his MLS debut in LA's Friday night home match against the San Jose Earthquakes at StubHub Center (11 pm ET; UniMas).
Lampard was forced to sit out NYCFC's thrilling 4-4 draw with Toronto FC due to injury, but his head coach Jason Kreis said that the midfielder will likely be available for their upcoming match on Saturday at the New England Revolution (7:30 pm ET; MLS LIVE).
Gerrard and Lampard will face familiar opposition when they take on Premier League side Tottenham Hotspur at the Colorado Rapids’ Dick’s Sporting Goods Park on Wednesday, July 29 (9 pm ET; FOX Sports 1 and UniMas in the US, TSN and RDS in Canada). Lampard, who is the all-time leading scorer for EPL giants Chelsea, has 33 career appearances and seven goals against Spurs, while Gerrard has logged 25 appearances and five goals vs. Tottenham in his 17 years with Liverpool.
While July 29 will mark Gerrard's first All-Star appearance, Lampard previously appeared for Chelsea in the 2006 match (a 1-0 MLS All-Stars win) as well as the 2012 event (a 3-2 MLS All-Stars win), during which he registered a goal and an assist for the Blues.
The All-Star Game will mark the first time Gerrard and Lampard have lined up for the same team since doing so with England at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. |
The Honda CR-X, originally launched as the Honda Ballade Sports CR-X in Japan, is a front-wheel-drive sport compact car manufactured by Honda between 1983 and 1991. It was replaced by the Honda CR-X del Sol for the 1992 model year. Although there are many supposed definitions for the acronym CR-X, the most widely accepted is "Civic Renaissance X".[1]
In the US, the CRX (not CR-X) was marketed as an economy sport Kammback, with room for two passengers. The European-spec car received a ZC 130 hp (97 kW) engine and a 2+2 seating arrangement. Redesigned in 1988 and produced to 1991, the CRX was popular for its performance, nimble handling, and good fuel economy. Honda's 1992 CRX del Sol was marketed as a CR-X in some markets.
First generation [ edit ]
Overview Production 1983–1987 Model years 1984-1987
Chassis EC1 AF AE532 AS Powertrain Engine 1.3 L 58 hp I4
1.3 L 60 hp EV1 I4 (1984–1986)
1.5 L 58-76 hp EW1/D15A2 I4 (1984–85)
1.5 L 91 hp EW3/4 I4 (1985–87)
AU/NZ Spec:
1.5 L 108 hp EW5/D15A3 I4 (1985–1987)
1.6 L 135 hp ZC1/D16A1 I4 (1986–1987) Dimensions Wheelbase 2,200 mm (87 in) Length 3,675 mm (145 in) Width 1,625 mm (64 in) Height 1,290 mm (51 in) Curb weight 760–860 kg (1,676–1,896 lb)
Overview [ edit ]
For the 1984 model year, Honda introduced an all-new two-seater that shared the drivetrain with the Civic but offered unique styling and interior furnishings. In North America, the CRX was marketed in two versions: economy and sport. The economy model used a new aluminum 1.3 liter CVCC engine. The sport model featured an aluminum 1.5 liter four cylinder with three valves per cylinder and available with a 5-speed manual or 3-speed automatic.
For 1985, Honda replaced the economy model with an HF (high fuel) model featuring a 1.5 liter engine which uses an aluminum block but the 1984 CVCC cylinder head (two valves per cylinder) instead of the new aluminum head with three valves per cylinder. In spring 1985, Honda introduced an Si (Sports, injected) model featuring a more powerful 1.5 liter SOHC PGM-FI engine. The Si model included a power sunroof, standard dual remote exterior mirrors, rear wiper, 13-inch alloy wheels and an Si-exclusive ducktail spoiler for the hatch.
For 1986, Honda updated the CRX with new aerodynamic headlights. The Si received body color matched lower cladding, a revised rear spoiler, new bumper covers and 14-inch alloy wheels. The interior was upgraded and added a center console with cassette tape storage. 1987 was virtually unchanged from 1986 and would be the final year of the first generation CRX.
The first generation CRX was sold in some regions outside Japan as the "Honda Civic CRX". At its introduction, the CRX was available in Japan through Honda Verno dealership sales channels, and accompanied the Vigor, the Quint, and the Prelude.
1987 Honda Ballade Sports CR-X 1.5i (Japan)
Drivetrain [ edit ]
The Japanese Si and European 1.6i-16 models came with a 1590 cc DOHC engine putting out 135 bhp (101 kW; 137 PS) in the UK-spec model and 140 bhp (104 kW; 142 PS) in the JDM model. Though similar versions of the same engine, the Japanese Si engine was stamped ZC, while the European engine was stamped ZC1.
Japanese buyers took advantage of the largest, 1.5 L, engine while still paying the same amount of annual road tax.
1987 Honda CRX Si (U.S.)
Fuel economy [ edit ]
The original 1.3 liter car (chassis code AE532) had an EPA highway mileage rating of 52 miles per U.S. gallon (4.5 l/100 km; 62 mpg ‑imp )[2] in 1984 and was reported to often achieve over 70 miles per U.S. gallon (3.4 l/100 km; 84 mpg ‑imp ) in favorable driving conditions. The later 1.5 liter American-market CRX HF (high fuel economy) model (chassis codes EC1 and AF) could also reliably achieve very good gas mileage, more than a decade before gas-electric hybrids appeared on the market, and at no price premium over the base model; the 1.5 liter is rated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (under the new rating system) at 42 miles per U.S. gallon (5.6 l/100 km; 50 mpg ‑imp ) city and 51 miles per U.S. gallon (4.6 l/100 km; 61 mpg ‑imp ) highway.[3]
U.S. model curb weights [ edit ]
CRX CRX HF CRX Si Manual Automatic Manual Manual 1984 1,819 lb (825 kg) - 1985 1,819 lb (825 kg) 1,713 lb (777 kg) 1,953 lb (886 kg) '86-'87 1,865 lb (846 kg)[4] 1,898 lb (861 kg)[4] 1,713 lb (777 kg)[4] 1,978 lb (897 kg)[4]
Second generation [ edit ]
1991 Honda CRX Si in Tahitian green Overview Production 1987–1991 Model years 1988-1991 Powertrain Engine 1.5 L 62 hp D15B6 I4 (1988–89)
72 hp D15B6 I4 (1990–91)
1.5 L 92 hp D15B2 I4
1.5 L 103 hp D15B
1.6 L 105 HP D16A6 I4 (1988)
1.6 L 108 hp D16A6 I4 (1989–91)
1.4 L D14A1 I4[ citation needed ]
1.6 L 130 hp I4
1.6 L 120hp D16A8 I4
1.6 L 125-129hp D16A9 I4
1.6 L 140 hp D16ZC I4
1.6 L VTEC 150 hp B16A1 I4 Dimensions Wheelbase 2,301 mm (90.6 in) Length 3,759 mm (148 in) (1990–91)
3,754 mm (147.8 in) (1988–89) Width 1,674 mm (65.9 in) (1990–91)
1,669 mm (65.7 in) (1988–89) Height 1,273 mm (50.1 in) (1990–91)
1,270 mm (50 in) (1988–89) Curb weight 820–1,000 kg (1,808–2,205 lb)
Overview [ edit ]
The chassis was significantly changed in 1988, from its original torsion bar in the front and beam axle and trailing link in the rear to 4-wheel double wishbone suspension, in line with its sister Civic/Ballade models. Outside of North America, this second generation CRX was available with a 1493 cc SOHC or an updated version of the 1590 cc DOHC ZC engine. Many of these were fitted with fuel injection as standard.
Honda CR-X SiR
The VTEC-equipped models also received a makeover, with updated bumpers, lights, hood, brakes, suspensions and dashboard designs amongst other things. Additionally, some of these design changes were added to the concurrent non-VTEC models.
One of the options for the Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) CR-X was a glass roof, a fixed glass panel which stretched from the top of the windshield to the top of the hatch opening. Relatively common in Japan, these are sought-after models in other markets.
Drivetrain [ edit ]
In September 1989, Honda added the 1595 cc B16A VTEC engine to the lineup outside of North America. The VTEC engine used variable valve timing to provide increased power at high RPMs while still allowing low fuel consumption and better idling at low RPMs. The B16A produced 150 PS (110 kW; 148 hp) in the European 1.6i-VT model (where the engine bore the designation B16A1) and 160 PS (118 kW; 158 hp) in the JDM SiR model. The CRX was the second car to receive a VTEC engine, shortly after the Integra, although the CRX was more popular and common.
The CR-X equipped with the 1.6 DOHC engine (ZC engine) or the 1.6 DOHC VTEC engine (B16A) came with a different hood since the B16A and ZC engines were taller and required additional hood clearances in comparison to the 1.6 SOHC engines. The ZC engine was only slightly taller than the 1.6 SOHC engine and required additional hood clearance to clear the cam gear cover. A CR-X equipped with the ZC engine had a hood with a bump on one side which offered the additional necessary clearance. Cars equipped with a B16A engine came with a hood that was raised across most of the engine bay to offer additional overall clearance for the taller engine.
US market [ edit ]
Three different trim levels were available: The standard (unlabeled, sometimes called the "DX") equipped with the 16-valve 1493 cc "D15B2" engine and dual-point fuel injection (DPFI), the HF ("high fuel efficiency") model with the eight-valve 1493 cc "D15B6" engine and multi-point fuel injection (MPFI), or the Si (sport injected) model with the 16-valve 1590 cc "D16A6" engine and MPFI. "DX" models were available with an automatic transmission, all others had a five-speed manual transmission. A modification was made to the rear of the vehicle on all second generation vehicles in that a glass panel was installed on the upper half of the rear of the vehicle, above the tail lights which aided in rearward visibility in addition to the glass hatchback. This panel is heavily stippled black.
Features and equipment [ edit ]
Air-conditioning was a dealer-installed option on all models. The Si model came with a power sliding sunroof and 14-inch alloy wheels. Underneath, the Si model was equipped with a rear anti-sway bar along with variable ratio rack-and-pinion steering. The 90-91 Si models had 4-wheel disc brakes.
Colors and trim [ edit ]
There were a total of six colors offered each model year. Four color options were available on the CRX and CRX Si and two color options were available for the CRX HF. Color availability would vary based on trim package and the interior color would depend on the exterior color choice.[5]
1988 1989 1990 1991 Color name CRX HF CRX CRX Si CRX HF CRX CRX Si CRX HF CRX CRX Si CRX HF CRX CRX Si Blade silver metallic N/A X X N/A X X N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A Barbados yellow N/A N/A X N/A N/A X N/A N/A X N/A N/A N/A Superior blue metallic X X N/A X X N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A Polar white X X N/A X X N/A X X X N/A N/A N/A Rio red N/A X X N/A X X X N/A X X N/A X Flint black metallic N/A N/A X N/A N/A X N/A X X N/A X X Torino red pearl N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A X N/A N/A X N/A Celestial blue pearl N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A X N/A N/A X N/A Frost white N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A X X X Tahitian green pearl N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A X
Curb weights [ edit ]
CRX CRX HF CRX Si Manual Automatic Manual Manual 1988[6] 1,922 lb (872 kg) 1,819 lb (825 kg) 2,017 lb (915 kg) 1989[6] 2,048 lb (929 kg) 1,834 lb (832 kg) 2,138 lb (970 kg) 1990–1991[6] 2,103 lb (954 kg) 1,967 lb (892 kg) 2,174 lb (986 kg)
Changes by model year [ edit ]
1988
First year of the second generation CRX.
1989
Si and base model have door mounted seatbelts. Revision due to side impact collision changes.
Si model's horsepower increased to 108 hp (105 hp in 1988) due to revised camshaft.
1990
Minor changes to headlights, bumpers and taillights.
Instrument cover slightly more rounded.
Hazard switch relocated to the dash.
Si models now with four-wheel disc brakes.
Si models receive updated 14-inch alloy wheels.
1991
Final year of the second generation CRX.
Barbados yellow is replaced by Tahitian green on the Si model.
Production by model year [ edit ]
Model 1988 1989 1990 1991 Total Honda CRX HF 17,516 23,846 22,947 2,617 66,926 Honda CRX 29,000 23,000 24,000 25,000 101,000 Honda CRX Si 18,054 18,735 14,009 14,447 65,245 Total 64,570 65,581 60,956 42,064 233,171
[7]
Third generation [ edit ]
In 1992, Honda replaced the CR-X with a new, targa topped, Civic-based model called the Honda CR-X del Sol, otherwise known as simply the Honda del Sol. The del Sol was also badged as the CR-X del Sol in some markets, and known as simply the CR-X in others. It is because of this that the del Sol is generally considered the "third Generation CR-X" among enthusiasts, although it was arguably a very different car and Honda had seemingly quite different design goals when they built it.[citation needed] In the United States, the del Sol came in three trim lines: S (VXi in Japan, later VGi), Si (ESi in Europe), and VTEC (VTi in Europe) ; the JDM SiR model (not in US) featured a 170 hp (130 kW) B16A2 DOHC VTEC-engine. Production of the del Sol ended in 1997, and thus, the CR-X line was retired.
Comparison to other Honda vehicles [ edit ]
Articles on the 1st generation Honda Insight have compared its appearance to that of the 1984–1991 CRX.[8]
In 2010, thirteen years after the end of CRX production, Honda released the CR-Z, regarded as the spiritual successor to the CRX.[9]
Awards [ edit ]
The CRX was Motor Trend's Import Car of the Year for 1984 and 1990, with the CRX-SI model also taking that title in 1988. It also made Car and Driver magazine's Ten Best list for 1985. The redesigned CRX was on Car and Driver's Ten Best list for 1988. The 1988 CRX Si was named one of Road & Track's 10 Best Cars of All Time.
Consumer reporter David Horowitz tested the 1984 CRX's fuel economy claim in a "Commercial Challenge" on his TV series Fight Back! Commercials for the CRX claimed it could reach 60 miles per gallon fuel economy; according to Horowitz's test, it bested that figure, reaching 65 miles per gallon, and passed the test.
Safety [ edit ]
In Australia, the 1988–1991 CR-X was assessed in the Used Car Safety Ratings 2006 as providing "significantly worse than average" protection for its occupants in the event of side impact.[10] On the other hand, both versions of the CR-X got good safety marks (5 and 4 stars) in the NHTSA Crash Test Results for 1997 US NCAP.[11]
The U.S. version of the second generation CR-X employed the use of side impact door beams on some models. These models can be identified by the mounting position of the safety belts. If the belt is mounted in the door, the beams are present. If the belt is mounted in the body, there is no additional reinforcement. 88 and 89 HFs along with 88 SIs and DXs have the B-pillar mounted restraints, like all versions sold outside of the U.S.[citation needed]
USA [ edit ]
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the United States has determined frontal crash test ratings of Honda CRX of different model years.[12]
Model year Make Model Type Curb weight (lb) Frontal driver rating Frontal passenger rating 1984 Honda Civic CRX 1,882 1989 Honda Civic CRX 2,310
Motorsport [ edit ]
Honda CRX Si at an autocross
Like the Civic, due to the wide availability of parts, the CR-X is popular for motorsport usage. In the United Kingdom, there was a one-make series dedicated to the series 2 of the CR-X[13] which soldiered on a few years after the series 3 was introduced and was popular for showroom stock racing series. Today, the car is popular for use in drag, autocross and road racing events. |
The two individuals believed to be responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings on Monday have been positively identified as Tamerlan Tsarnaev, now deceased, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now in custody. These individuals are brothers and residents of Massachusetts. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a legal permanent resident and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Charges have not yet been filed against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and he is presumed innocent.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, age 26, was previously designated as Suspect 1, wearing a black hat. Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, age 19, was designated as Suspect 2, wearing a white hat. Both were born in Kyrgyzstan.
Once the FBI learned the identities of the two brothers today, the FBI reviewed its records and determined that in early 2011, a foreign government asked the FBI for information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The request stated that it was based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.
In response to this 2011 request, the FBI checked U.S. government databases and other information to look for such things as derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history. The FBI also interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev and family members. The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011. The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government.
Updates on Investigation |
A North Dakota woman isn't handing out treats to everyone this Halloween. Instead she says she'll be handing out letters to children who are overweight.
The woman says if she sees a child who is moderately obese, she'll hand them a letter to give their parents. She says she wants to send a message to parents that they're being irresponsible for sending their kids out looking for free candy just cause all the other kids are doing it.
The woman feels it takes an entire community to solve the obesity epidemic.
North Dakota State University Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology Dr. Katie Gordon studies eating disorders and says that children and adolescents in particular are very conscious of fitting in with peers. She says the letter might hurt more than help. "It's just that kind of thing that for some kids, if they're vulnerable, might trigger major problems."
Dr. Gordon says it's important to remember that one's appearance does not necessarily reflect whether or not a person has healthy eating and exercising habits.
Read more here |
Metaclasses in Five Minutes
It Ain't Such Black Magic Really
"Metaclasses are deeper magic than 99% of users should ever worry about. If you wonder whether you need them, you don't." —Tim Peters
Note There is a video of me giving this as a presentation at PyCon 2009, 11 minutes into this video: Lightning Talks at PyCon 2009
Originally a lightning talk first given at PyCon UK 2008.
Metaclasses have a reputation for being 'deep-black-magic' in Python. The cases where you need them are genuinely rare (unless you program with Zope...), but the basic principles are surprisingly easy to understand.
Everything is an Object Everything is an object
Everything has a type
No real difference between 'class' and 'type'
Classes are objects
Their type is type Typically the term type is used for the built-in types and the term class for user-defined classes. Since Python 2.2 there has been no real difference and 'class' and 'type' are synonyms. For classic (old-style) classes, their type is types.ClassType .
Honestly, it's True Python 2.5 .1 ( r251 : 54869 , Apr 18 2007 , 22 : 0 8 : 04 )
>> > class Something ( object ) :
. . . pass
. . .
>> > Something
< class '__main__.Something' >
>> > type ( Something )
< type 'type' > Here we can see that a class created at the interactive interpreter is a first class object.
The Class of a Class is... Its metaclass... Just as an object is an instance of its class; a class is an instance of its metaclass. The metaclass is called to create the class. In exactly the same way as any other object in Python.
So when you create a class... The interpreter calls the metaclass to create it... For a normal class that inherits from object this means that type is called to create the class: >>> help(type) Help on class type in module __builtin__: class type(object) | type(object) -> the object's type | type(name, bases, dict) -> a new type It is this second usage of type that is important. When the Python interpreter executes a class statement (like in the example with the interactive interpreter from a couple of sections back), it calls type with the following arguments: The name of the class as a string
A tuple of base classes - for our example this is the 'one-pl' (object,)
A dictionary containing members of the class (class attributes, methods, etc) mapped by their names
Easy to Demonstrate >> > def __init__ ( self ) :
. . . self . message = 'Hello World'
. . .
>> > def say_hello ( self ) :
. . . print self . message
. . .
>> > attrs = { '__init__' : __init__ , 'say_hello' : say_hello }
>> > bases = ( object , )
>> > Hello = type ( 'Hello' , bases , attrs )
>> > Hello
< class '__main__.Hello' >
>> > h = Hello ( )
>> > h . say_hello ( )
Hello World This code creates a dictionary of class attributes, and then calls type to create a class called Hello .
The Magic of __metaclass__ We can provide a custom metaclass by setting __metaclass__ in a class definition to any callable that takes the same arguments as type. The normal way to do this is to inherit from type : class PointlessMetaclass ( type ) :
def __new__ ( meta , name , bases , attrs ) :
return type . __new__ ( meta , name , bases , attrs ) The important thing is that inside the body of the __new__ method we have access to the arguments passed to create the new class. We can introspect the dictionary of attributes and modify, add or remove members. It is important to override __new__ rather than __init__ . When you instantiate a class both __init__ and __new__ are called. __init__ initialises an instance - but __new__ is responsible for creating it. So if our metaclass is going to customise class creation we need to override __new__ on type . The reason to use a new type rather than just a factory function is that if you use a factory function (that just calls type) then the metaclass won't be inherited.
In Action... >> > class WhizzBang ( object ) :
. . . __metaclass__ = PointlessMetaclass
. . .
>> > WhizzBang
< class '__main__.WhizzBang' >
>> > type ( WhizzBang )
< class '__main__.PointlessMetaClass' > WhizzBang is a class, but instead of being an instance of type the class object is now an instance of our custom metaclass...
What can we do with this? Well (I'm glad you asked)... our metaclass will be called whenever a new class is created that uses it. Here are some ideas: Decorate all methods in a class for logging, or profiling.
Automatically mix-in new methods.
Register classes as they are created. (Auto-register plugins or create a db schema from class members for example.)
Provide interface registration, auto-discovery of features and interface adaptation.
Class verification: prevent subclassing, verify all methods have docstrings. The important things is that the class is only actually created by the final call to type in the metaclass - so you are free to modify the dictionary of attributes as you see fit (and the name plus the tuple of base classes of course). Several of the popular Python ORM (Object Relational Mappers for working with databases) use metaclasses in these ways. Oh, and because metaclasses are inherited so you can provide a base-class that uses your metaclass and sub-classes inherit it without explicitly having to declare it. |
On the streets of Tokyo, a majority of people reporters spoke to on Tuesday said U.S. President Barack Obama does not need to say sorry during his May 27 visit to Hiroshima.
And an online poll by The Japan Times, which sampled viewers worldwide, found overwhelming agreement.
“I’m simply surprised that the president of the United States is finally visiting Hiroshima,” said housewife Ayako Nishio, 54. “It’s hard to comment on its political aspects, but I think many Japanese are feeling positive about his visit.”
A 36-year-old man who identified himself as Masuda agreed: “It is more important that the president of the United State wants to understand a big historical event than it being an apology.”
Some young people said the war is so remote it makes an apology unnecessary.
“I don’t really care about Obama apologizing for past events,” said 24-year-old Naoto Adachihara. “It was years ago and Obama has nothing to do with what happened in the war.”
Adachihara said he doubts many young people expect contrition: “And even if he apologized, I would think it was not needed. It wouldn’t make any impression on me.”
Aun Ota, 42, from Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture, stressed that Obama did not order the bombings and does not need to take responsibility, even though they were wrong.
“I don’t think Obama should make a personal apology but as a nation, America should admit the bombings were a mistake of the past and think of measures to prevent something similar from occurring,” Ota said.
Kazuki Sasayama, 22, a cake shop employee from Atsugi in Kanagawa Prefecture said he was aware that for Japan’s older generations, including survivors of the war, an apology would be unsatisfying.
“But instead of dredging up memories of the past, Obama could focus on future collaboration with Japan’s Self-Defense Forces or other positive steps for the future,” Sasayama said.
While calling the first visit of a sitting U.S. president to Hiroshima a “big step forward,” a 23-year-old female sales agent who did not give her name said an apology might trigger a negative response in the U.S.
“Some Americans believe Hiroshima bombings were justified so if he came to apologize it would anger them,” she said. “But for someone like me, who hasn’t experienced war, rather than whether Obama should or shouldn’t apologize, the more important thing is what we should do from now on.”
It was not only young people who said they are looking to the future rather than the past.
A 67-year-old man from the city of Shiroi, Chiba Prefecture, said he hopes Obama will visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where belongings of the bombing’s victims and other memorabilia from August 1945 are exhibited.
“I just want Obama to use it as an opportunity to see and contemplate what happened and why it shouldn’t happen again,” he said.
Tokyo-based IT salesman Yuichi Aimoto, 46, said Japan knows how it feels to be ordered to apologize, and Obama can be assured that won’t happen.
“Japan, too, hears demands by China or South Korea to apologize for war crimes committed against them, but I think it is not in the nature of Japanese people to seek recompense for past harm endlessly,” Aimoto said.
But for 74-year-old Tokyo resident Norihiko Fujii, Obama’s visit to Hiroshima “comes too late.”
He said that as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama should have made the visit long ago.
“In Americans’ understanding the bombings helped bring the war to an end, and they will never come to apologize. That’s something they just won’t do, culturally,” Fujii said. “They’ve never apologized for any war crimes … so why would they come to say sorry now. Even if Obama apologized during his visit, it would be too late.”
He added, he would not expect an apology from Americans whose perceptions of war crimes differ from those of Japanese. Moreover, he speculated that the decision is viewed unfavorably in the U.S.
“He’s losing popularity and knows he won’t be re-elected as president, so he doesn’t need to fear any consequences of his visit,” Fujii said.
Following Washington’s announcement of the visit Tuesday evening, The Japan Times began an online poll asking Internet users whether Obama should apologize.
More than 600 people responded as of 7 p.m. Wednesday, with about 62 percent saying he should not. About 38 percent of respondents said he should.
Of the total, 41 percent said no apology is needed, but they urged Obama to make a commitment to the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. |
Less than three months before Lenca leader Berta Cáceres was brutally assassinated, the social arm of Desarollos Energeticos SA (DESA)–the Honduran company leading the Agua Zarca dam project Cáceres was campaigning against–signed a contract with USAID implementing partner Fintrac, a Washington DC based development contracting firm.
The DESA representative who was present for the public signing of the USAID agreement was none other than Sergio Rodríguez, the company’s Social Investment Manager, who is now accused of Cáceres’ assassination along with another former DESA employee and individuals with military ties. The arrests also included Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, a retired military officer and the former head of DESA’s security detail. The trial against the accused murderers began on Monday.
COPINH’s Powerful Political and Economic Enemies in Rio Blanco
As one of the strongest and most recognized indigenous organizations in Honduras, the Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras, or COPINH, have challenged powerful economic and political forces while working to protect the environment and conserve the Lenca culture.
The Agua Zarca dam project is illustrative of DESA’s business dealings and of what COPINH is up against. DESA is owned by the Atala family, one of the most powerful families in Honduras. In fact, the dam project allegedly received funding from the largest bank in Honduras–Ficohsa, headed up by Camilo Atala. Although it has been recently under attack for its possible complicity with Cáceres’ assassination, it has a dark past including allegations of money laundering.
DESA also benefitted from military connections and support. In a newly released interview with Cáceres from 2013, Berta outlines these connections; the owner, David Castillo, is a West Point graduate and an expert in military intelligence. Moreover, Douglas Geovanny Bustillo who was the former head of security for DESA and a former military lieutenant is now being accused of planning Cáceres’ assassination. Military and police backing was also evident in the variety and quantity of armed forces during protests against the project that includes an elite US funded and vetted unit called Los Tigres, although they focus on combating gang violence and drug trafficking.
From the start, DESA counted on high level political support. The Secretary of Natural Resources and the Environment issued the company a 50-year Environmental License for the Agua Zarca Project without the consultation of affected community members. Perhaps more problematic, the Mayor of Intibuca supposedly received community consent even though the project was already way. Death threats even came directly from politicians themselves; on one of her last visits to Rio Blanco on February 20, 2016, the vice-mayor of San Francisco de Ojuera publicly asked that Berta be killed. Moreover, the Honduran Public Ministry in charge of the investigation into Cáceres’ assassination, was a co-plaintiff along with DESA in 2014 filings seeking an injunction against COPINH’s demonstrations targeting the company.
Development or buying support for Agua Zarca dam project?
According to the company, DESA’s Social Investment Program dedicates a portion of its profits to “create and implement projects focused on bettering the quality of life in the neighboring communities to the project.” For COPINH, these initiatives were the company’s attempts to combat the negative press surrounding the controversial project and another means of buying the support of those directly affected by the dam project. An example of this was when company purchased backpacks for school children with large DESA logos as part of their Education project. COPINH also criticized the Social Investment Program’s Infrastructure activities were roads were built but to transport equipment rather than to deliver “development” needed or wanted by the community. In reality, DESA was likely donating very little of its own profits given that they partnered with state and foreign organizations like the Honduran Ministry of Education and USAID through Fintrac.
Helping the Poor by Helping the Rich
Ironically, while USAID was giving money to DESA, a company owned by an elite Honduran family, through Fintrac, to what some claim was essentially buying local support of vulnerable people in Rio Blanco, it made this observation on its website;
One of many reasons Rio Blanco was part of a movement against the Agua Zarca dam project was that the dam threatens the Gualcarque River, on which they depend for their economic and cultural survival. Olivia Marcela Zuniga, Berta Cáceres daughter, addressed foreign financiers of, and accomplices to the Agua Zarca dam on her facebook page:
“development cannot trample over human lives, development should be to better the lives of living beings, not to kill life. The western world cannot impose its vision of development, because these are our territories, our bodies, our lives and our vision of development should prevail because it secures the existence of mother earth and that of humanity…it cannot be capitalist…Our vision of development is a vision of harmony, equilibrium and respect [with and,] for all living things”. (Original post in Spanish)
In a February 2016 action alert, COPINH denounced USAID for its complicity in maintaining a “smokescreen of “development, employment, clean energy and social responsibility”.
Fintrac and USAID’s Complicity
Proper due diligence on the part of Fintrac would have likely made this proudly “women owned company”, avoid getting into bed with DESA who was engaged in a dirty fight with one of Honduras most respected women leaders. From COPINH’s claim that the company’s dam project was moving forward without free, prior and informed consent of those who would be directly affected, to the claim that their security chief, Douglas Geovanny Bustillo, had threatened Berta with sexual assault, the allegations and evidence should have prevented their partnership with DESA per their code of ethics and other internal policies. USAID in Honduras on the other hand, would be hard pressed to claim ignorance about the conflict in Rio Blanco.
The contract between Fintrac and DESA was signed some time in December 2015 to provide agricultural technical assistance to 10 communities and 180 families in two municipalities in Western Honduras under USAID’s MERCADO Program. There is scarce public information about the contract other than a few local media outlets that covered the the contract public signing.
After Rodríguez, who signed the contract on behalf of DESA, was arrested, the company expressed surprise and claimed no involvement with the assassination. Yet, less than a month before Cáceres assassination, Rodríguez was among those denounced for “threatening the physical and emotional integrity” of members of COPINH in one of the organization’s urgent action alert in the last demonstration organized in Rio Blanco before the assassination on February 20, 2016.
The Cáceres family was told that the non-binding contract was canceled at the family’s request in the weeks following Cáceres’ assassination. While Fintrac and USAID quietly dissolved the contract with DESA, history will remember whose side they were on. Both organizations should be held accountable to the Honduran poor they claim to serve and the US taxpayers who fund them. |
Western Rite Orthodoxy, Western Orthodoxy, or Orthodox Western Rite are terms used to describe congregations that are within Churches of Orthodox tradition but which use liturgies of Western or Latin origin rather than adopting Eastern liturgies such as the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. While there are some ancient examples of Western Rite communities in areas predominantly using the Byzantine Rite before the Great Schism was fully consolidated (the Monastery of Saint Mary of the Latins, often referred to as Amalfi, is a common example), the history of the movement is often considered to begin in the nineteenth century with the life and work of Julian Joseph Overbeck.
Western Rite parishes and monasteries exist within certain jurisdictions of the canonical Eastern Orthodox Church, predominantly within the Russian and Antiochian jurisdictions in North America, with the latter having created an Antiochian Western Rite Vicariate (AWRV).
In addition, the Western Rite is practiced within religious communities outside the main Eastern Orthodox Church. The Communion of Western Orthodox Churches and the Orthodox Church of France are entirely Western Rite. Furthermore, there is a small number of Western Rite communities among the Old Calendarists, such as the former Western Rite Exarchate of the Holy Synod of Milan and the Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of North and South America and the British Isles. In the past, there have also been Western Rite communities within Oriental Orthodoxy.
Western Rite parishes are found almost exclusively in countries with large Roman Catholic or Protestant (particularly Anglican) populations. There are also numerous devotional societies and publishing ventures related to the Western Rite. Despite having a place within many Eastern Orthodox jurisdictions, the Western Rite remains a contentious issue for some.[1]
Origins [ edit ]
Territorial extent of Byzantine (southern) Italy during the early 11th century. Modern city names (in English) are provided alongside the medieval Greek names.
In the times prior to theological disputes that arose between 9th and 11 century, Byzantine Rite churches of the East and Latin Rite churches of the West were in full communion, confessing the same Orthodox, Catholic Christian faith. In the East, the Byzantine Rite was the predominant liturgical rite. In the West, the Latin Rite was the dominant rite. In the time of the final East–West Schism of 1054, most of the Churches that remained in communion with four Eastern Patriarchates used the Byzantine Rite, though there were still regions where other liturgies, including the Roman Rite, were used. One of such regions was Byzantine (southern) Italy.
In the time of the final split (1054) much of the southern Italy was still under Byzantine rule and was organized as the Catepanate of Italy. For centuries, church life in Byzantine regions of Italy was developing under dual influence of Latin and Byzantine traditions. During the 11th century, Latin rite churches in Byzantine Italy still did not use the interpolated Creed (Filioque)[citation needed] and were in full communion with Eastern Orthodoxy. During the Byzantine–Norman wars, Byzantine Empire finally lost its last positions in the West. The Norman conquest of southern Italy was completed with the Conquest of Bari in 1071. One of the main consequences of the political change was the establishment of the supremacy of the Church of Rome over the church life in former Byzantine Italy. The main theological challenge was resolved at the Council of Bari in 1098.[2] From that point, all churches in southern Italy were obligated to accept the Filioque clause into the Creed. Implementation of that decision soon marked the end of Latin rite Orthodoxy in southern Italy.
After the 11th century, the Byzantine Rite was gradually becoming dominant in the Eastern Orthodox world, almost to the point of exclusion of any other liturgy. Traditions of old Western Orthodoxy were still regarded with high reverence by Eastern Orthodox theologians,[citation needed] but for centuries no organized attempt was made to preserve or revive the Latin branch of Orthodoxy. This changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when some Western Christians converted to Orthodoxy but retained some of their Western liturgical forms of worship.
Nineteenth century [ edit ]
During the 1840s, William Palmer, a Church of England priest, corresponded with Russian Orthodox Church / Metropolitan Philaret Drozdov, of Moscow, and Aleksey Khomyakov.
From 1864, Julian Joseph Overbeck, a former Roman Catholic priest, worked to establish a modern Orthodox Western Rite. Overbeck converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism and married. He then emigrated to England in 1863 to become professor of German at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where he also undertook studies of the Church of England and Orthodoxy. In 1865 Overbeck was received as a layman into the Russian Orthodox Church (because he had married following his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest), by Father Eugene Poppoff, at the Russian Embassy in London.[3](p5)
As a part of his conversion into the ROC , Overbeck requested permission from the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church to begin a Western Orthodox church in England. Initially, Philaret was hesitant about Overbeck's request, but did not rule out the idea entirely. Overbeck outlined his rationale for a Western Orthodox Church in his 1866 book Catholic Orthodoxy and Anglo-Catholicism, a largely polemical work describing why the established Western churches should be rejected.[4] In 1867 Overbeck began to edit The Orthodox Catholic Review, a periodical for the advancement of Western Orthodoxy.
Overbeck convinced others about the feasibility of a Western Orthodox church and in 1869 submitted a petition containing 122 signatures, including many in the Oxford Movement, to the Holy Synod asking for the creation of a Western liturgical rite within the ROC .[5] A synodical commission investigated Overbeck's petition, in 1870 he stated his case before the commission in St. Petersburg. The commission approved the petition and he was instructed to present a revised Western liturgy for evaluation by the commission. He presented a revised Western liturgy in December. That liturgy was subsequently approved for use – specifically in the British Isles.[6]
Over the next several years, Overbeck developed liturgies for administering other sacraments and for praying a Divine Office. Overbeck attempted to woo[how?] Old Catholics to his scheme since they had recently schismed from the Roman Catholic Church over First Vatican Council's dogmatic definition of Papal infallibility, though to little avail. During this time, he continued to criticize Roman Catholics and Anglicans as well as those Western converts to Orthodoxy who utilized the Byzantine Rite.
By 1876, Overbeck appealed to other Orthodox Churches for their recognition of his plan. In 1879 he was received in audience by the Patriarch Joachim III of Constantinople, who recognized the theoretical right of Western Christians to have a Western Orthodox Church. Three years later, Joachim III and the Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate conditionally approved Overbeck's Western rite and Benedictine offices. However, Overbeck's efforts ultimately did not result in the establishment of a Western Orthodoxy. He was especially suspicious of the role which the Greeks in London (and the Church of Greece generally) played in the stagnation of his ambitions, directly blaming the Greek Church's protest against the plan in 1892.[3](p26) The Orthodox Catholic Review ended publication in 1885 and Overbeck died in 1905 without seeing a Western Orthodox Church. Georges Florovsky summed up Overbeck's experience in this way: "it was not just a fantastic dream. The question raised by Overbeck was pertinent, even if his own answer to it was confusedly conceived. And probably the vision of Overbeck was greater than his personal interpretation."[7]
Twentieth century [ edit ]
While Overbeck did not live to see his dream successful, the idea of a Western Orthodox church did not disappear. The early part of the twentieth century was characterized by a series of false starts. In 1911, Arnold Harris Matthew (a former Roman Catholic priest, later consecrated an Old Catholic bishop), entered into union with the Oriental Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch under Metropolitan Gerasimos (Messarah) of Beirut and, in 1912, with the Eastern Orthodox Pope Photios of Alexandria.[disputed (for: conflicts with multiple reliable sources) – discuss] Bishop Mathew's 1909 Old Catholic Missal And Ritual may have been approved as a Western Rite liturgy by Pope Photios of Alexandria,[speculation?] who wrote: "...We have thanked God...that you omit the Filioque clause, and that you do not accept money for celebrating Masses. We agree with you as to the observance of your autonomy, and of the Latin Rite in actual use, so long and so far as they agree with the Holy Dogmas and with the canonical ordinances of the Seven Oecumenical Synods, which form the basis of the Orthodox Faith."[self-published source][8] Both unions were contracted in quick succession and only lasted for an effective period of a few months. Though the union was protested by the Archbishop of Canterbury to Photios and the Patriarch of Antioch, Matthew's group claimed that communion was never formally broken off.[9]
In 1890, the first Western Rite Orthodox community in North America, an Episcopal parish in Green Bay, Wisconsin, pastored by Fr. René Vilatte, was received by Bishop Vladimir Sokolovsky.[disputed – discuss] However, Vilatte was soon ordained a bishop in the Jacobite Church, an Oriental Orthodox Church not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Other small groups using the Western Rite have been received, but usually have either had little impact or have declared their independence soon after their reception. Western rite parishes were established in Poland in 1926 when a half-dozen congregations were received into Eastern Orthodoxy; however, the movement dwindled during World War II.[10]
Orthodox Church of France [ edit ]
In 1936, the ROC received a small group led by a former Liberal Catholic bishop, Louis-Charles Winnaert (1880–1937), as l'Église Orthodoxe Occidentale (EOO).[11] Winnaert was received as an archimandrite, took the religious name Irénée, and soon died. Winnaert's work was continued, with occasional conflict, by one of his priests, Eugraph Kovalevsky (1905–1970) and Lucien Chambault, the latter of which oversaw a small Orthodox Benedictine community in Paris. After 1946, Kovalevsky began to recreate a Gallican rite based on the letters of Germain of Paris, a sixth-century bishop of Paris, numerous early Western missals and sacramentaries, and some Byzantine modifications; his development was The divine liturgy of Saint Germanus of Paris.[12]
Archimandrite Alexis van der Mensbrugghe, a former Roman Catholic monk, who taught at the Western Church's St. Denys Theological Institute but remained in the Eastern rite, attempted to restore of the ancient Roman rite, replacing medieval accretions with Gallican and Byzantine forms. Eventually, Alexis was consecrated as an ROC bishop in 1960, continued his Western Rite work under the auspices of the Moscow Patriarchate.[13]
In 1953, pressured by the Russian Orthodox Church[clarify] to adopt the Eastern rite, the Western Orthodox Church went its own way, changing its name to the Orthodox Church of France. After several years of isolation, the Church was recognized as an autonomous Church by Metropolitan Anastasy Gribanovsky of ROCOR and was in communion with ROCOR from 1959 to 1966.[12] Archbishop John Maximovich ( ROCOR 's representative in Western Europe at the time), became the archpastor of the Church of France. At this time, Maximovich had the Church change its name to l'Église Orthodox Catholique de France (ECOF). Maximovich also consecrated Kovalevsky in 1964 as a bishop. Kovalevsky took the religious name Jean-Nectaire. Maximovich's death in 1966 was a serious blow to the Western Orthodox Christians in France.
While the Russian Orthodox Church[clarify]'s Western Rite mission withered and ended, ECOF thrived; however, after Maximovich died, Kovalevsky was left without canonical protection until his death in 1970. In 1972, the Church found a new canonical superior in the Romanian Orthodox Church. Gilles Bertrand-Hardy was then consecrated as bishop and took the religious name Germain of Saint-Denis. In 1993, after long conflict with the Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church about alleged canonical irregularities within ECOF , the Romanian Orthodox Church withdrew its blessing of ECOF and broke off communion.[12] The Romanian Orthodox Church decided, which is contested by ECOF , to depose Bertrand-Hardy from all sacerdotal functions. This decision (which was never accepted by ECOF ) is applied by the canonical dioceses of the AEOF (Assemblée des Evêques Orthodoxes de France). The sanction was confirmed and explained in 2001 by another document, "Avis d'expertise canonique" from the Secretary of the Romanian Synod (a document which the ECOF considers to have no value). The Romanian Orthodox Church established a deanery under Bertrand-Hardy's brother, Archpriest Gregoire Bertrand-Hardy, to minister to those parishes which chose to remain in communion with the Romanian Orthodox Church.[citation needed]
In 2001, scandalized by the revelation within ECOF of Bertrand-Hardy's 1995 marriage and subsequent annulment, ten parishes separated from ECOF , formed the Union des Associations Cultuelles Orthodoxes de Rite Occidental (UACORO), and began negotiations in 2004 with the Serbian Orthodox Church to be canonically recognized, with the intention of the UACORO entering the Diocese of France and Western Europe. The laity and clergy of UACORO were received individually into the French diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church in 2006. These parishes are now predominantly Byzantine Rite, with the Gallican Liturgy served a few times a year. Of the communities that left ECOF the only ones which now retain the Western Rite are those that went on to form the Orthodox Church of the Gauls.
Although the name of the Church legally remains the Orthodox Catholic Church of France, it usually goes by its previous name, the Orthodox Church of France.[clarify]
North America [ edit ]
Saint Tikhon of Moscow's contribution to the Western Rite has been more enduring. While he was bishop of the ROC 's diocese in America, some Episcopalians were interested in joining Orthodoxy while retaining Anglican liturgical practices. Tikhon, sent the 1892 Book of Common Prayer, enquired about the viability of Orthodox parishes composed of former Anglicans using Anglican liturgical practices. In 1904, the Holy Synod concluded that such parishes were possible and provided a list of doctrinal corrections to the Book of Common Prayer's text of the prayers and rites that were necessary to profess in Orthodox worship. The Holy Synod also concluded that detailed changes in the Book of Common Prayer and in Anglican liturgical practices, together with compilations of new prayers, and entire rites, can only be carried out on location in America and not from Moscow.[14] While Tikhon did not receive any Episcopalians as none approached him for reception into the ROC , his efforts laid the groundwork for the later reception of Episcopalians into the AWRV following the 1975 revision of the Book of Common Prayer.
The most successful and stable group of Western Rite parishes originated within the Orthodox Church under Bishop Aftimios Ofiesh in the 1930s as part of the American Orthodox Catholic Church. In 1932, Bishop Aftimios consecrated an Episcopal priest, Ignatius Nichols, as auxiliary Bishop of Washington and assigned him to the Western Rite parishes. However, due to complaints from Episcopalians that the Episcopal Church was the "American" Orthodox Church,[15] the American Orthodox Church that Aftimios and Nicholas were a part of became estranged from what would become ROCOR and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). The subsequent marriages of both Aftimios and Nichols violated Orthodox canon law, and left the church and its subsidiaries without canonical recognition.[16]
In 1932, Nichols founded the Society of Clerks Secular of Saint Basil as a devotional society for clergy and laity dedicated to the celebration of the Western Rite. Nichols also consecrated Alexander Turner as a bishop in 1939. Turner pastored a small parish in Mount Vernon until Nichols' death in 1947, when he assumed leadership of the Society and concluded that there was no future for the Society of Saint Basil outside of canonical Orthodoxy. Turner described the situation the Society found itself in by saying:
It was ... during the tempestuous days following the Bolshevik Revolution that the Society had its inception as a missionary organ of the nascent federation of American Orthodox colonies under Russian suzerainty, though of local Syrian administration. With the collapse of that plan and the submission of the ethnic groups to the churches of their homelands, the Society was left in isolation.[17]
Through Father Paul Schneirla, he began unofficial dialogue with Metropolitan Antony Bashir. Even before this, Turner had been promoting Western Rite Orthodoxy through his periodical Orthodoxy. In 1961, the Society (consisting of three parishes) was received into the Syrian Antiochian Archdiocese on the basis of Metropolitan Antony's 1958 edict. Upon reception, Bishop Alexander Turner became a canonical priest of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, guiding the group as Vicar-General until his death in 1971, thereafter he was succeeded by Schneirla. However, after Turner's death, the sole surviving Basilian, William Francis Forbes, returned to the American Orthodox Catholic Church and was consecrated a bishop in October 1974.[18]
Besides the original communities associated with the Society, a number of other parishes have been received into the Western Rite Vicariate of the Antiochian Archdiocese, particularly as elements within the Episcopal Church became dissatisfied with liturgical change and the ordination of women. The first Episcopal parish to be received into the AWRV was the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation in Detroit, Michigan.[19] Additionally, several Western Rite missions have been founded within the AWRV , some growing into full parish status. Furthermore, when parishes of the Evangelical Orthodox Church joined the Antiochian Archdiocese in 1987, a few parishes joined as Western Rite congregations. However, many of these former EOC congregations subsequently switched to the Byzantine Rite.
Among Old Calendarist groups, the sole jurisdiction utilizing a Western Rite is the Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of North and South America and the British Isles, with approximately two dozen parishes. Due to their generally stricter stance, only older rites such as the Sarum are permitted.
Elsewhere [ edit ]
In 1995, the Church of Antioch also established a British Deanery to absorb converts from the Church of England,[clarify] though none of these congregations is now Western Rite.[20]
Western Rite Orthodoxy, in Australia and New Zealand, emerged mostly from Anglican and Continuing Anglican communities. Some communities were received[when?] into the ROCOR by Archbishop Hilarion (Kapral) of the Diocese of Sydney, Australia and New Zealand. Other were received[when?] into the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch by Bishop Gibran (Ramlawi) and Metropolitan Archbishop Paul (Saliba), of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia, New Zealand, and All Oceania. Saliba has recently[clarification needed] received around 30 Western Rite parishes in the Philippines.
Some Western Rite parishes are also a part of the Oriental Orthodox churches.[citation needed] The Syrian patriarchate of Antioch consecrated Antonio Francisco Xavier Alvares as Archbishop of Ceylon, Goa and India in 1889, authorizing a Roman rite diocese under his supervision. Additionally, in 1891 the Syrians consecrated Vilatte as archbishop for the American Old Catholics.
Current status in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia [ edit ]
On July 10, 2013, the recognition and status of Western Rite parishes within ROCOR seemed to significantly change. The Synod of Bishops of ROCOR , presided over by its First Hierarch, decreed that:[21]
ROCOR would no longer ordain clergy for Western Rite parishes.
would no longer ordain clergy for Western Rite parishes. Bishop Jerome Shaw of Manhattan would be censured for unapproved ecclesial services and forcibly retired without the right to perform ordinations.
Some ordinations performed by Shaw would not be recognized, and those candidates would be thoroughly examined before regularization.
A commission would examine how to integrate Western Rite clergy and communities into the Russian Orthodox Church.
Western Rite clergy and communities need to adopt the order of divine services of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but may preserve "certain particularities of the Western Rite".
Adherence to the rules and traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church in particular is required.
However, despite the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia never officially reversed this decision, new Western Rite parishes and monasteries continue to be founded by ROCOR and priests within the Western Rite continue to be ordained as of 2018, including in Sweden and the United States.[22][23]
Orthodox Church in America [ edit ]
Mention of the Western Rite was often made in the OCA , the most prominent being a mention during a speech by the primate of the OCA , Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen, in April 2009.[24]
On September 8, 2018, the Orthodox Church of America established a Western Rite mission parish in Alberta, Canada.[25] [26] However, the OCA has not yet officially established an organizational structure for future Western Rite parishes.
Liturgy [ edit ]
An altar prepared according to the rubrics for the Tridentine Mass . Many Western Rite Orthodox congregations celebrate a revised version of the Tridentine Mass under the name Divine Liturgy of Saint Gregory.
Western Rite parishes do not all utilize the same liturgy, but often use a particular liturgy depending upon their individual affiliations prior to entering Orthodoxy. At present, there are nine different uses available to Western Rite parishes:
The Divine Liturgy of Saint Tikhon – This liturgy is currently used by approximately two-thirds of congregations in the AWRV . The Rite of St Tikhon was developed utilizing the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican Missal. The Book of Common Prayer was altered by removing the filioque from the text of the Nicene Creed, adding prayers for the dead, the invocation of the saints, and strengthening the epiclesis within the Eucharistic prayer, and by adding the pre-communion prayers from the Byzantine Rite. It is utilized primarily by former Anglican and Episcopalian background parishes.
– This liturgy is currently used by approximately two-thirds of congregations in the . The Rite of St Tikhon was developed utilizing the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican Missal. The Book of Common Prayer was altered by removing the from the text of the Nicene Creed, adding prayers for the dead, the invocation of the saints, and strengthening the epiclesis within the Eucharistic prayer, and by adding the pre-communion prayers from the Byzantine Rite. It is utilized primarily by former Anglican and Episcopalian background parishes. The Divine Liturgy of Saint Gregory – Utilized by the remainder of the AWRV as well as some communities in ROCOR , this rite is a version of the Roman Tridentine Mass which has been altered to remove the filioque and by inserting a Byzantine epiclesis. It is used primarily by former Lutheran, Roman Catholic, or Old Catholic background parishes, including those incorporated from the Society of Saint Basil in 1961. In the Russian Orthodox Church, there are three versions in common use: that of Overbeck (which was printed in full in the 1960 ROCOR yearbook), the Use of Mt. Royal (based upon the Carthusian use, itself adapted from the old rite of Grenoble), and the derivative use of Christminster (Usus Providentiae) which includes an epiclesis from the Gothic Missal.
– Utilized by the remainder of the as well as some communities in , this rite is a version of the Roman Tridentine Mass which has been altered to remove the and by inserting a Byzantine epiclesis. It is used primarily by former Lutheran, Roman Catholic, or Old Catholic background parishes, including those incorporated from the Society of Saint Basil in 1961. In the Russian Orthodox Church, there are three versions in common use: that of Overbeck (which was printed in full in the 1960 yearbook), the Use of Mt. Royal (based upon the Carthusian use, itself adapted from the old rite of Grenoble), and the derivative use of Christminster (Usus Providentiae) which includes an epiclesis from the Gothic Missal. The Sarum Liturgy – A British use of the Divine Liturgy of Saint Gregory, which retained many local Anglo-Saxon, Gallican, and Celtic elements. It is celebrated within ROCOR by the St Bride Hermitage and by the Hermitage of the Holy Cross. It is also occasionally celebrated at St Nicholas ROCOR Monastery in Ft. Myers, Florida. [27] The text is based upon a nineteenth-century Pearson English translation of the Sarum Missal, corrected of post-Schism insertions. An epiclesis from the Gothic Missal is included. St Hilarion Press and St Gregory's Press editions of Sarum services were blessed for canonical use, in September 2008 and December 2008, respectively.
– A British use of the Divine Liturgy of Saint Gregory, which retained many local Anglo-Saxon, Gallican, and Celtic elements. It is celebrated within by the St Bride Hermitage and by the Hermitage of the Holy Cross. It is also occasionally celebrated at St Nicholas Monastery in Ft. Myers, Florida. The text is based upon a nineteenth-century Pearson English translation of the Sarum Missal, corrected of post-Schism insertions. An epiclesis from the Gothic Missal is included. St Hilarion Press and St Gregory's Press editions of Sarum services were blessed for canonical use, in September 2008 and December 2008, respectively. The English Liturgy – The Russian adaptation of the 1549 English Book of Common Prayer according to the criteria set forth by the Holy Synod of Russia in 1907. This liturgy has been augmented with material from the Sarum Missal, Gothic Missal, York rite, and 1718 Scottish Non-Juror liturgy. An epiclesis from the Gothic Missal is included. This liturgy is not the same rite as the Liturgy of Saint Tikhon, and the two rites differ in many respects. [28]
– The Russian adaptation of the 1549 English Book of Common Prayer according to the criteria set forth by the Holy Synod of Russia in 1907. This liturgy has been augmented with material from the Sarum Missal, Gothic Missal, York rite, and 1718 Scottish Non-Juror liturgy. An epiclesis from the Gothic Missal is included. This liturgy is not the same rite as the Liturgy of Saint Tikhon, and the two rites differ in many respects. The Liturgy of Saint Germanus – Utilized by the French Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church of the Gauls, and the Orthodox Church of France, as well as some parishes of ROCOR and the Serbian and Romanian Patriarchates. The liturgy of St Germanus is a reconstructed version of the Gallican mass, supplemented with elements from the Byzantine, Celtic and Mozarabic rites.
– Utilized by the French Orthodox Church, the Orthodox Church of the Gauls, and the Orthodox Church of France, as well as some parishes of and the Serbian and Romanian Patriarchates. The liturgy of St Germanus is a reconstructed version of the Gallican mass, supplemented with elements from the Byzantine, Celtic and Mozarabic rites. The Liturgy of Saint John the Divine – Utilized by a monastery of the Moscow Patriarchate, and in publication within ROCOR . It is a reconstructed version of the first millennium Celtic rite of the British Isles, from the Stowe Missal and other sources, and intended for modern use. The name is from the origin asserted by the Church in the British Isles before the Great Schism.
– Utilized by a monastery of the Moscow Patriarchate, and in publication within . It is a reconstructed version of the first millennium Celtic rite of the British Isles, from the Stowe Missal and other sources, and intended for modern use. The name is from the origin asserted by the Church in the British Isles before the Great Schism. The Mozarabic Rite – The Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of North and South America and the British Isles as well as the Holy Synod of Milan permit use of the Mozarabic Rite and the Sarum use.
– The Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of North and South America and the British Isles as well as the Holy Synod of Milan permit use of the Mozarabic Rite and the Sarum use. The Ambrosian Rite – The Ambrosian rite may be used in Western rite parishes of ROCOR .
– The Ambrosian rite may be used in Western rite parishes of . The Glastonbury Rite – The Glastonbury Rite was at one time used in the Celtic Orthodox Church.[29]
In France, Bishop Alexis van der Mensbrugghe, of the ROC , published a missal in 1962 which contained his restored Gallican rite and his restored pre-Celestinian Italic rite.[30](p276)[31][32] Neither of Mensbrugghe's restored rites are used by Orthodox groups.[30](p278)
Liturgical development [ edit ]
Most of the present Western Rite liturgies have been developed along the guidelines given to Saint Tikhon by the Holy Synod in 1904/07. As noted above, Tikhon's request to the Holy Synod concerned accepting Episcopal parishes into the Orthodox Church while permitting them to retain the liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer. While Saint Tikhon's request was specifically concerned with Anglicans converting, its recommendations came to be implemented for those parishes who did not have a specifically Anglican background. The two most important required changes included the removal of the filioque from the Nicene Creed and the addition of an epiclesis which specifically invokes the Holy Spirit and a petition for the Spirit to change the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ.
When the Antiochian Western Rite Edict was issued, it became necessary to determine what additions or corrections to western liturgies would need to be made to bring those rites into conformity with the 1904 Russian Synodal decree as well as the Ukase of 1936. To that end, the Antiochian Western Rite Commission was convened in 1958 composed of Fr Paul Schneirla, Stephen Upson, Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff for the purpose of determining "the mode of reception of groups desiring to employ the Western Rite, and the character of the rites to be used, as well as the authorization of official liturgical texts."[33] Meyendorff, Schmemann, and Schneirla were already familiar with the Western Rite both from having been in contact with members of the ECOF while teaching at Saint Sergius Theological Institute. Schmemann actively followed the Liturgical Movement in the Roman Catholic and Anglican Church and was an advocate for renewal of the Orthodox liturgy.[34]
In January 1962, the official Western Rite Directory was issued, "establishing liturgical usages and customs and discipline", drawing on principles of the 1904 Moscow Synodal response to Saint Tikhon, the authorization of Western Rite offices by Metropolitan Gerassimos (Messarah) of Beirut, and the 1932 Russian Ukase of Metropolitan Sergius.[35]
Liturgical books [ edit ]
Officially, the AWRV provides one liturgical book, The Orthodox Missal,[36] which contains both the Liturgy of Saint Tikhon and the Liturgy of Saint Gregory, with appropriate propers for seasons, feasts, saints, and prayers before and after Mass. The Antiochian Archdiocese publishes the Saint Andrew Service Book (SASB),[37] also known as The Western Rite Service Book,[38] which was developed by Saint Michael's Church in California under the leadership of the late Father Michael Trigg; the 1996 second and 2005 third editions of the SASB received official sanction from Metropolitan Philip Saliba, with the latter containing explicit reference to the authorized nature of all previous editions of the SASB.[37] In addition to duplicating the contents of The Orthodox Missal, the SASB also includes forms for Matins and Vespers, the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and the threefold Amen common to the Byzantine epiclesis but absent in The Orthodox Missal. The SASB was produced by the Antiochian Archdiocese without the participation of the AWRV .[38] The Orthodox Missal is an official publication of the AWRV and is the Vicariate's standard and approved text with the SASB authorized by the Archdiocese as an approved text.
Parishes within the AWRV are permitted to use either the Liturgy of Saint Tikhon or that of Saint Gregory. While most parishes use the Tikhonite liturgy, several use the Gregorian liturgy on weekdays or on specific Sundays of the year. Presently, there is no breviary specifically designed for the Orthodox Western Rite, though priests of the AWRV who celebrate the Liturgy of Saint Gregory are expected to pray as much of the Breviarium Monasticum as possible,[39] in the Anglican Breviary.[39][40] The same hours, in English or Latin, are approved for Christ the Savior Monastery under the ROCOR . However, priests who celebrate the Liturgy of Saint Tikhon pray a form of Morning Prayer and Evensong approved by the AWRV .
Also in common use within the AWRV , though not officially approved, are St. Dunstans's Plainsong Psalter,[41] The English Office Noted,[42] and the St. Ambrose Hymnal.[43] The St. Dunstans's Plainsong Psalter sets the Psalter and selected canticles to Gregorian and British Chant and includes orders for Morning Prayer, Evensong, and Compline. The English Office Noted includes Morning, Noonday and Evening Prayers, Compline and the Psalter set in modern notation. The St. Ambrose Hymnal provides musical settings of classic Western hymns as well as post-schism and modern hymns which are judged "not to contradict the Orthodox faith."
Within ROCOR , the Saint Colman Prayer Book has been authorized by Metropolitan Hilarion Kapral for use within the Diocese of Sydney, Australia and New Zealand. It has since received permission in other dioceses. The Book includes the Sarum rite, English rite, and Gregorian rite liturgies, together with a simplified version of the monastic hours. Most of the occasional services required by a Parish Priest through the course of the year are there, as well as the Rites of Holy Week and a Lectionary. In September 2008, Kapral blessed the Sarum Rite series published by St. Hilarion Press,[citation needed] originally under the auspices of the Holy Synod of Milan and edited by Hieromonk Aidan Keller,[44] for liturgical use.[discuss] The Holy Synod of Milan also published approximately 30 volumes of texts of pre-schism services.[citation needed] They contain complete forms for celebration of the Liturgy or Mass, the Divine Office, the Mysteries or Sacraments, and many other services, with full chant notation. In December 2008, the St. Gregory's Press edition was also blessed for actual usage; these contains full forms, with complete chant notation, for the celebration of the Liturgy or Mass and of the Divine Office, i.e., the Canonical Hours.
Church calendar [ edit ]
Among those Western Rite parishes that are within the Eastern Orthodox Church, some use the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar with the Byzantine Paschal cycle, while others use other calendars.
The Communion of the Western Orthodox Churches uses the Gregorian Calendar to determine the dates of the holy days and Pascha, while each member church has its own liturgical calendar. The Luxeuil Lectionary, Missale Gothicum, Missale Gallicum, and the Gallican adaptations of the Martyrologium Hieronymianum are the chief authorities for the Liturgical year of the Gallican Rite.
The Western Rite parishes of the Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of North and South America and the British Isles follow the Julian calendar.
Vestments [ edit ]
Priests of the Western Rite utilize standard Western vestments as a part of their liturgy, whether celebrating one of the Western liturgies or (as far as Antiochians are concerned) when concelebrating a Byzantine liturgy, with some exceptions (See Criticisms below). Antiochian Byzantine Rite Orthodox priests who concelebrate Antiochian Western Rite liturgies wear Byzantine style vestments and hierarchs wear Byzantine vestments when participating in Western liturgies.
Clergy using the Sarum or English liturgies use the vestments commonly known as Sarum but which were actually used throughout north-western Europe and the British Isles. These are typified by apparels' of the seasonal colour, added to the alb and amice for priest, deacon, subdeacon, clerk and servers in certain groups, although there is no evidence this was done before the thirteenth century.
Organizations [ edit ]
Unlike the 23 sui iuris Eastern Catholic Churches, which are autonomous ritual churches with separate hierarchies and canon laws, Western Rite Orthodox congregations of the Antiochian jurisdiction fall under the jurisdiction of their local Orthodox bishop. In North America, the Antiochian Church has established the AWRV and the Western Rite Commission to coordinate the activities of Western Rite congregations and to provide a single point of contact for persons and groups concerning Western Rite Orthodoxy. However, all the Western Rite congregations remain under the direct supervision of their normal diocesan bishop, with Bishop Basil (Essey) of Wichita being the "hierarch of reference" and advocate for Western Rite issues within the synod of Bishops. In the ROCOR , as of November 2009, all Western Rite Orthodox congregations and monastic houses fall under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan.
The Old Calendarists have two hierarchies which consider themselves Western jurisdictions and therefore have no liaison, citing the canonical responsibility of bishops to their local territories, opting to simply treat all parishes of Western and Eastern Rite equally. Of these, the larger Western Rite organization is the Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of North and South America and the British Isles, with the presiding hierarch, Metropolitan John LoBue of New York and New Jersey, the only Orthodox bishop in North America who regularly employs Western usage in his monastery.
Publishing houses [ edit ]
The official publishing arm of the AWRV is St. Luke's Priory Press in Stanton, New Jersey. Among their publications are The Orthodox Missal, the official service book of the AWRV ; The Orthodox Ritual, the official source for the administration of all the sacraments in the vicariate; and the annual Ordo Kalendar. They also publish several apologetic works concerning the Western Rite.
Lancelot Andrewes Press is the publishing arm of the Fellowship of Saint Dunstan and publishes material which is utilized by congregations and individuals in Western rites. The primary mission of Lancelot Andrewes Press is to publish material for the "advancement of historic Christian orthodoxy, as expressed by the liturgical and devotional usages of traditional English Christianity."[45] Among their publications are the Monastic Diurnal and St. Dunstan's Plainsong Psalter.
While not official publishing houses, St Petroc Monastery, Christminster, and St. John Cassian Press have published copies of liturgies for use by ROCOR Western Rite congregations. St. John Cassian Press distributes former St. Hilarion Press publications (see "Organizations" above) blessed for ROCOR use, including Orthodox Prayers of Old England (omnibus service book), The Holy Psalter (core of the divine office), Old Sarum Rite Missal, The Companion (epistle and gospel book), Chant Ordinarium (a kyriale), and Westminster Benedictional (a book of blessings), in all some 2,500 pages of approved texts, with chant. This body of work includes several apologetic works concerning Western rites and Orthodoxy in general.
The most voluminous texts of the Western Rite in English, however, have been produced by Old Calendarists: recently 10,000 pages of text of the Western monastic psalter in traditional English were placed online for free download and use.[46]
Devotional societies [ edit ]
There are also devotional societies within the AWRV :
The Orthodox Christian Society of Our Lady of Walsingham – dedicated to encouragement of devotion to the Theotokos, particularly under the title of Our Lady of Walsingham (and the preservation of the replica of the shrine of Walsingham). [47]
The Fellowship of Saint Dunstan – dedicated to historic Christian Orthodoxy particularly traditional English Christianity.
Parishes and missions [ edit ]
Parishes and missions belonging to the Western Rite can be found in a number of Orthodox jurisdictions. The single largest group of such communities is to be found within the Orthodox Church of France,[48] followed by jurisdictions of the Eastern Orthodox Church,[49][50] and the Communion of Western Orthodox Churches.[51][52][53] There are also parishes and missions belonging to the Old Calendarist tradition.[54] While certain member churches of the Oriental Orthodox Church have embraced Western Rite parishes in the past, there are currently no such communities within the Oriental Orthodox family of churches.
Africa [ edit ]
St George Orthodox Church, Douala, Cameroon – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
Saint Michael the Archangel Orthodox Church, Mbongo, Cameroon – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
Australasia [ edit ]
Saint Dyfan Monastery Mission, Hobart, Tasmania – ROCOR
Saint George's Mission – Waiwhetu, Lower Hutt – Antiochian
Saint Simon and Saint Jude Church – Rangoria, Canterbury – Antiochian
British Isles [ edit ]
Abbey Church of Saint Alban, Buittle Castle, Scotland – Old Calendarist
Saint Aldhelm Mission, Bournemouth, England – ROCOR
Saint Edmund the Martyr Mission, Nottingham, England – ROCOR
Saint Gwenn's Orthodox Church, Wessex, England – Celtic Orthodox Church
Saint Nectan Mission, Weston-super-Mare, England – ROCOR
Saint Tikhon Mission, Woolwich, England – Old Calendarist
Caribbean [ edit ]
Our Lady of Grace Orthodox Church, Martinique – French Orthodox Church
St Benedict Orthodox Mission, Haiti – Orthodox Church of France
North America [ edit ]
Christ the King Orthodox Church – Tullytown, Pennsylvania – ROCOR
Christ the King Orthodox Mission – Omaha, Illinois – AWRV
Christ the Saviour Orthodox Mission Church – Jacksonville, Texas – AWRV
Emmanuel Orthodox Church – Warren, Massachusetts – AWRV
Holy Apostles Orthodox Church – Tyler, Texas
Holy Dormition Chapel, New Jersey, USA – Orthodox Church of France
Holy Incarnation Mission – Detroit, Michigan – AWRV
Holy Paraclete Orthodox Church – Oregon – Orthodox Church of France
Holy Trinity Orthodox Church – Lynchburg, Virginia – AWRV
Michael and All Angels Orthodox Church – San Antonio, Texas – ROCOR
Our Lady of Glastonbury Orthodox Church – Hamilton, Ontario, – ROCOR
Our Lady of Grace Orthodox Mission Church – Melville, New York – AWRV
Our Lady of Regla – Miami, Florida – AWRV
Our Lady of Walsingham Church – Mesquite, Texas – AWRV
Our Lady of Walsingham Orthodox Church – Allison Park, Pennsylvania – ROCOR
Saint Aidan of Lindisfarne Orthodox Church – Nashville, Tennessee – ROCOR
Saint Andrew the Apostle Church – Eustis, Florida – AWRV
Saint Benedict Orthodox Church – Oklahoma City, Oklahoma – ROCOR
Saint Benedict of Nursia Antiochian Orthodox Church Wichita Falls, Texas – AWRV
Saint Columba Church – Lafayette, Colorado – AWRV
Saint Cuthbert's Orthodox Mission – Pawtucket, Rhode Island – ROCOR
Saint George Church – Lawrence, Massachusetts – AWRV
Saint Gregory the Great Church – Washington, D.C. – AWRV
Saint Gregory the Great of Rome Orthodox Church, Seattle, Washington – ROCOR
Saint James of Jerusalem Orthodox Church – Hanceville, Alabama – ROCOR
Saint John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church – Carlsbad, California – ROCOR
Saint John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church – Des Moines, Iowa – ROCOR
Saint John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church – Simcoe, Ontario – ROCOR
Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco Orthodox Church – Peoria, Illinois – ROCOR
Saint Joseph of Arimathea Orthodox Church and House of Prayer – La Porte, Indiana – ROCOR
Saint Joseph Orthodox Church – Sarasota, Florida – ROCOR
Saint Katherine of Alexandria Orthodox Church – Pelion, South Carolina – ROCOR
Saint Mark's Church – Denver, Colorado – AWRV
Saint Mary the Virgin Orthodox Church – Barrie, Ontario – ROCOR
Saint Mary the Virgin Orthodox Church – Madison, Georgia – ROCOR
Saint Michael's Church – Whittier, California – AWRV
Saint Michael Archangel Mission – Wichita, Kansas – AWRV
Saint Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Church – Spokane, WA – AWRV
Saint Nicholas of Myra Orthodox Church – Bush, Louisiana – ROCOR
Saint Nicholas of Myra Russian Orthodox Church – Acworth, Georgia – ROCOR
Saint Patrick's Chapel – Northville, Michigan – ROCOR
Saint Patrick Church – Warrenton, Virginia – AWRV
Saint Patrick Orthodox Church – Bealeton, Virginia – AWRV
Saint Patrick of Ireland Orthodox Church – Stanwood, Washington – ROCOR
Saint Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church – Houston, Texas – AWRV
Saint Paul the Apostle Orthodox Church – Kenosha, Wisconsin – ROCOR
Saint Peter's Antiochian Orthodox Church – Fort Worth, Texas – AWRV
Saint Peter's Church – North Miami, Florida – AWRV
Saint Stephen Orthodox Church – Springfield, Massachusetts [55] – AWRV
– AWRV Saint Thomas Orthodox Church – Mountain Home, Arkansas – ROCOR
Saint Vincent of Lerins Church – Omaha, Nebraska – AWRV
South America [ edit ]
Hesychastic Centre of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – French Orthodox Church
Hesychastic Centre of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil – French Orthodox Church
Vicariate of St John of Saint-Denis & St John of San Francisco, Argentina – Orthodox Church of France
Western Europe [ edit ]
Annunciation Orthodox Mission, Montpellier, France – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
Communion of the Saints Orthodox Chapel, Aubonne, Switzerland – Orthodox Church of France
Our Lady & Saint Thiebault Orthodox Church, Gorze, France – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
Our Lady of the Angels & St Anskar Orthodox Church, Kiel, Germany – Orthodox Church of France
Our Lady of the Fiat & St John the Evangelist Orthodox Church, Craponne, France – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
Our Lady of the Sign Orthodox Church, Saint-Dolay, France – Celtic Orthodox Church
Parish of the Visitation and the Holy Encounter, Nancy, France – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
Saint Anastasia, Croatian Orthodox Church
Saint Anne Chapel, St Vigor-le-Grand, France – Orthodox Church of France
Saint Anne Orthodox Mission, Paris, France – French Orthodox Church
Saint Athanasius & Saint Amand Orthodox Church, Brussels, Belgium – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
Saint Aure Orthodox Church, Paris, France – Celtic Orthodox Church
Saint Benedict, Croatian Orthodox Church
Saint Donatus, Croatian Orthodox Church
Saint Germanus of Parish Chapel, Le Mesnil Germain, France – Orthodox Church of France
Saint Gregory Palamas Orthodox Chapel, Lausanne, Switzerland – Orthodox Church of France
Saint Irenaeus Cathedral, Paris, France – Orthodox Church of France
Saint Joseph of Arimathaea Orthodox Church, Nîmes, France – Celtic Orthodox Church
Saint Marien en Bourbonnais, Audes, France – Orthodox Church of France
Saint Mary Magdalene Orthodox Church, Toulon, France – French Orthodox Church
Saint Nicholas & Saint Eubert Orthodox Church, Lille, France – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
Saint Nicholas Orthodox Church, Vérines, Switzerland – Celtic Orthodox Church
Saint Remy & Saint Clotilde Orthodox Church, Puiseux-en-Retz, France – Orthodox Church of France
Saint Seraphim of Sarov Orthodox Church, Coupiac, France – French Orthodox Church
Saint Theoroda Orthodox Church, Flensburg, Germany – Orthodox Church of France
Saint Titus – Croatian Orthodox Church
Saint Tugdual Orthodox Church, Saint-Hilaire-de-Chaléons, France – Celtic Orthodox Church
Saint Winwaloe Orthodox Church, Beuzec-cap-Sizun, France – Celtic Orthodox Church
Monasteries and hermitages [ edit ]
There are a few monasteries and hermitages which use the Western Rite:
Abbey of Saint Alban & Saint Æthelwold, Buittle Castle, Scotland [56] – Old Calendarist
– Old Calendarist Assumption of Mary Benedictine Monastery, Eisbergen / Porta Westfalica, Germany – ROCOR
Bethany Community – Gorze, France – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
Christminster/Christ the Saviour Monastery, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada – ROCOR
Holy Angels Hermitage, Woolwich, London – Old Calendarist
Holy Presence Monastery, Saint-Dolay, France – Celtic Orthodox Church
Monastery of Saint Benedict, Zadar – Croatian Orthodox Church
Our Lady of the Holy Presence Monastery, Toms Brook, Virginia, US – Celtic Orthodox Church
Saint Bride Hermitage, Edinburgh, Scotland – ROCOR
Saint Clotilde Monastery, Saint Dolay, France – Celtic Orthodox Church
St Michael & St Martin Monastery, Bois-Aubry, Luzé, France – Orthodox Church of the Gauls
St Michael du Var Monastery, France – French Orthodox Church
Monastery, France – French Orthodox Church Saint Seiriol Hermitage, Bodorgan, Wales – Celtic Orthodox Church
In addition to the established monasteries, some parishes also have among their members Benedictine oblates. Some are associated with Christminster Monastery, while others are not associated with any particular monastery and thus are not oblates in the traditional Roman Catholic sense. These latter oblates are individuals who follow the Rule of Saint Benedict to foster their spiritual development.
Canonical missionary societies [ edit ]
These groups are Canonical missionary societies with a core of canonical Orthodox laity served by canonical Orthodox clergy within the Orthodox Church with the goal of future reception of converts into the Western Rite of Orthodoxy. The societies themselves were formed inside the Orthodox Church for reception of converts, and not for the reception of the societies themselves. The Orthodox Church they are currently under the guidance of is also listed.
Saint Brendan OSS – Panama City Florida – ROCOR[57]
Criticisms [ edit ]
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware says that the Western Rite is inherently divisive; following different liturgical traditions than their neighboring Byzantine Rite Orthodox Christians, those using the Western Rite do not share liturgical unity with them and present an unfamiliar face to the majority of Orthodox Christians. Ware is particularly concerned about the further fragmentation of Orthodoxy in non-Orthodox countries, in this case in Britain.[58]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
This article incorporates text from Western Rite at OrthodoxWiki which is licensed under the CC-BY-SA and GFDL.
Liturgies [ edit ]
Apologetic sites [ edit ] |
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KANSAS CITY -- Kansas City Missouri Police have a bizarre case on their hands. A man who was reportedly high on PCP fell out of a moving car. He then got run over but was able to get up. The accident led to a child abduction attempt and landed the man in the hospital.
The accident happened around 2 p.m. on Saturday near I-70 & Blue Ridge Cutoff. Witnesses tell FOX 4 that a lot of people stopped to help the man who appeared to be seriously hurt.
The man then got up and tried to open the doors of one of the cars that tried to help him. When he opened the back door, he tried to take a one-month-old baby who was inside a car seat. The parents say they kept yelling at him and pulling the car seat so he couldn't take the baby. That's when other people who had stopped stepped in to help.
"He was just trying to grab her out of the backseat and I got out and grabbed him and told him let go of my daughter and he wouldn't let go," said parent Matthew Nicotra.
According to friends, the man involved in this abduction attempt is actually a victim himself. He lost his daughter about a month ago. They believe he saw the little girl and it reminded him of his daughter. They also say they don't think he was trying to hurt the baby.
As of now, the suspect is in an area hospital pending charges including attempted child abduction. |
BERLIN/GENEVA (Reuters) - European business is increasingly concerned about the potential collapse of the region’s 26-nation border-free zone under the pressure of a huge influx of migrants, with companies from automakers to logistics firms warning of serious losses.
Migrants argue with police near the Greek-Macedonian border, near the village of Idomeni, Greece March 2, 2016. REUTERS/Marko Djurica
Some use words such as “horrific” and “devastating” to describe the prospect of an end to the 30-year-old Schengen accord, seen one of the essential linchpins of post-World War Two peace and prosperity in Europe.
Schengen has already been temporarily suspended by seven countries to keep migrants from crossing their borders, and fears are rising of an European-wide reversal towards costly and delaying frontier checks.
Now stretching from Greece in the south to Iceland in the north and encompassing more that 400 million people, the Schengen area has offered border-free commercial and personal movement since an initial 10-nation pact in 1985.
It has been widely considered one of the European Union’s most successful, wealth-creating projects, stretching to several non-EU countries and excluding just Britain and Ireland in Western Europe.
One of the benefits of Schengen to manufacturers has been to allow them to work with very low stocks of components, relying on the fact they can be delivered on time as demand rises.
But the frontier-free zone is now on the brink of seizing up, driven to the edge by the crisis that saw more than 1 million refugees and migrants enter the EU last year, many fleeing wars in the Middle East.
Politicians have long warned about the danger.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday that the EU must come to an agreement very soon, possibly at a March 7 summit, on how to deal with the crisis in order to get Schengen back up and running properly.
Business, however, is worrying that it won’t happen.
“A breakdown of Schengen would be horrific for us,” carmaker Opel’s chief executive, Karl-Thomas Neumann, told reporters on Tuesday, noting Opel depends on the reliable transport of goods and components from Germany, Spain, Poland, Britain and Italy.
“We have huge logistics operations in southern Europe; any disruption would have an immediate impact on the bottom line.”
Airports association ACI Europe, meanwhile, warned that a Schengen collapse would create major congestion and cost larger airports hundreds of millions of euros to redesign terminals.
“The impact would be quite devastating,” Olivier Jankovec, the association’s director general, said, though adding that he did not believe this would transpire.
Other businesses - including delivery specialists DHL Express, UPS and TNT - played down the impact of Schengen unraveling, saying that they had ways of mitigating it.
But DHL cautioned: “Border controls would lengthen delivery times to most target countries. Parallel with this, fuel and wage costs for a given route would probably increase and new administrative costs could also arise.”
ECONOMIC HIT
The nature and scope of a Schengen closure makes estimates of the macro-economic impact hard to gauge - ranging from an immediate slowdown of commerce to knock-on effects on sectors such as tourism.
One study released by the European Commission, however, sought to assess the impact of just a small slowdown caused by border controls on roughly 57 million road transport journeys a year.
“Assuming that each of these crosses one border and has an additional waiting time of one hour. This could easily add up to a total cost of around 3 billion euros per year,” it said, citing an estimate by DG Move, the EU directorate-general for mobility and transport.
That is small in the context of a 13.9 trillion euro ($15.06 trillion) EU economy. But the impact could be far greater, especially if a shutdown was long lasting.
A study conducted for Bertelsmann Stiftung found that losses in overall EU growth as a result of reinstating border controls could reach 470 billion euros for the years 2016 to 2025.
Slideshow (5 Images)
Another study, from France, suggested that over time, “widespread border controls would decrease trade between Schengen countries by 10 percent to 20 percent.”
In the same vein, Morgan Stanley estimates that the overall loss of to GDP growth resulting simply from a 5 percent rise in transport costs would amount to 0.2 percent.
“A suspension of Schengen would undermine the functioning of the single market, hurting cross-border trade, transport and tourism,” Morgan Stanley said. |
(RNS) Losing his religion cost Bart Campolo a career as an evangelical ministry leader and threatened to alienate many of those he held dear — especially his beloved father, the well-known evangelical educator Tony Campolo.
Why would anyone choose that?
Well, it turns out, he didn’t.
“I didn’t choose not to believe in God,” Bart Campolo writes in his new book, “Why I Left, Why I Stayed,” co-authored with his father. Campolo, now humanist chaplain at the University of Southern California, adds: “Like so many other post-Christians, I didn’t manufacture my own de-conversion on purpose; it happened to me.”
The Campolos’ book is hardly the first conversation on the degree to which we control our beliefs. But coming at a time of growing religious disaffiliation, it casts helpful new light on why belief dies (or is never born) and, perhaps more important, what happens afterward.
Given the demonstrated benefits of religious participation, both for individuals and the larger society, wouldn’t it be better if all the ex- and not-yet believers went to church?
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat thinks so.
In a piece published on Easter weekend, Douthat, a conservative Catholic, urged the nonreligious to start or resume going to church. Accurately describing the political and cultural compatibility between progressive churches and the liberals who swell the ranks of the nonreligious demographic, Douthat suggests that church participation would not require much of a leap for these theoretical new attendees.
“I understand that there’s the minor problem of actual belief,” Douthat writes. “But many of you do believe in the kind of open Gospel that a lot of mainline churches preach.”
But for many, this “minor” problem of belief is actually quite major, especially when it comes to supernatural phenomena that are such a focus of worship. And Christianity, as a religion that hinges on core beliefs (more than actions) to a degree unseen with other major religions around the world, is uniquely vulnerable to this problem.
Whatever the hurdles, Tony Campolo argues someone who wants to believe can believe.
It’s a matter of making a choice, he contends, and then immersing oneself in “plausibility structures” that reinforce that choice and fend off doubt.
Such structures are, of course, the tried-and-true practices of contemporary Christianity: daily habits such as prayer, study groups, retreats, close social ties with fellow believers, and the like. Evidence — the existence of millions upon millions of sincerely believing Christians in this country — suggests that these belief-nurturing strategies work.
But not for everyone. And the number of those who cannot, or will not, make the leap continues to grow.
Increasingly, believers’ and prospective believers’ walks through life expose them to more secular people and social dynamics. As these pesky reminders of nonbelief become more frequent and conspicuous, the social penalty paid for being an “out” nonbeliever weakens.
All this points to another problem with plausibility structures: Why would nonbelievers feel compelled to strive for and nurture belief in something their thoughts and experiences tell them is not true?
As religion writer Jonathan Malesic pointed out in response to Douthat, “The biggest reason people have left the mainline is not sociological. It’s theological. People simply don’t believe what the churches teach about God. No social or material inducement may make a difference.”
Blame it on the secular zeitgeist, and the advance of a scientific mindset that makes people more suspicious of supernatural claims. Whatever the cause, belief is harder to muster than it used to be in the Western world, and for lots of people, no amount of wishful thinking will help.
Considering the testimonials of believers and nonbelievers, one begins to see that this is a debate with no clear resolution. It’s as likely to yield a final answer as that better-known conundrum about what comes first, the chicken or the egg.
What is clear is the imperative for people to navigate their clashing convictions with care and compassion, something the Campolos have done inspiringly well.
In the conclusion to their book, the father and son describe how, rather than denouncing one another and ending their relationship, they found a way to accept each other and celebrate all they continue to have in common, even after Bart’s de-conversion:
“While we come to it differently,” the Campolos write, “each of us always reaches the same conclusion about this life: Love is the most excellent way. Moreover, each of us is both sure and content that the other has found that way. For now, at least, that is enough.”
It certainly is. And if each debate about the existence of God and nature of faith could end on this gracious note, we’d all be better for it.
(Tom Krattenmaker is a writer specializing in religion in public life. His latest book is “Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower”) |
First things first: You know the Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 sound raucous. That flat-plane-crank 5.2-liter V8 cranking out 526 naturally-aspirated horsepower makes a noise you probably never expected to hear coming from the tail-end of a pony car.
You also know that, as intensely focused as the GT350 is, the track-oriented GT350R takes things even further, with sharper suspension and a lighter curb weight thanks to a stripped-down interior and a lack of luxury amenities.
Now, thanks to a brief video posted to Facebook by The Smoking Tire, we know how the super-hot GT350R will sound.
It'll be an ear-burner.
That's Ford's chief of performance vehicles, Jamal Hameedi, playing the loud pedal in this assumedly pre-production GT350R. You can tell the R apart from the "regular" GT350 by its big rear wing—and somehow, it sounds even louder than the last time we heard it just a few weeks ago.
Also, listen to how fast that engine revs up. No heavy flywheels or annoying rev-hang here.
We can't wait to see what the GT350R does in real life.
via Boldride |
ESPN's Jemele Hill ( @jemelehill ) engaged in a hate-filled Twitter rant about President Trump, based on the fact that she, herself, is black, and not hating and fearing Trump is a "white privilege". (Details here ) Of course, she hasn't been suspended from Twitter and fired from her job, or anything like that, and it looks like the original Tweets are still up.
Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists. — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 11, 2017
Jezebel, above, complains that her employers felt obliged to disassociate themselves from her hatred. But, as everybody on Twitter notices, they fire white guys instantly for that:
You fire other people for less, so it sure seems they do represent your position. https://t.co/ZU341FgWjD — Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) September 12, 2017
Can't load tweet https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/907767572246024192: Sorry, that page does not exist
So @espn suspended Linda Cohn for saying ESPN was talking too much politics. Didn't suspend Jemele Hill for saying Trump was a racist. — Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 13, 2017
We have tag I called "White Guy Loses His Job" based on the fact that it's almost always white guys who get fired like this. Razib Khan is one kind of exception, Linda Cohn, above would be another (because she's not a guy.)
This goes way back—in 2008, Peter Bradley wrote on VDARE.com that
That was nine years ago—but Jemele is safe, because she's not a white guy. |
North Carolina Sues DOJ Over LGBT Law; DOJ Sues Back
Enlarge this image toggle caption Chris Seward/Raleigh News & Observer/TNS via Getty Images Chris Seward/Raleigh News & Observer/TNS via Getty Images
Updated at 6:20 p.m. ET
After North Carolina's governor filed a lawsuit asking federal courts to keep in place a controversial law that places limits on transgender access to bathrooms, the U.S. Justice Department responded with a lawsuit of its own.
"We are filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state of North Carolina, Gov. Pat McCrory, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and the University of North Carolina," Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in a press conference Monday. "We are seeking a court order declaring House Bill 2's restroom restriction impermissibly discriminatory, as well as a statewide bar on its enforcement."
The DOJ's response followed swiftly after North Carolina filed its lawsuit.
The state's legal filing came ahead of an end-of-Monday deadline for North Carolina to respond to the Department of Justice over the law barring protections for LGBT people in the state.
"The Obama administration is bypassing Congress by attempting to rewrite the law and set restroom policies for public and private employers across the country, not just North Carolina. This is now a national issue that applies to every state and it needs to be resolved at the federal level," North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said in a statement about the filing. He said the lawsuit was an attempt to "clarify" national law.
In a statement Monday afternoon, McCrory also called for Congress to chime in.
"I think it's time for the U.S. Congress to bring clarity to our national anti-discrimination provisions," he said, repeating it twice for emphasis.
Lynch, however, said the federal laws concerning gender and gender discrimination are clear, and that North Carolina's law is in violation.
The state law in question, known as HB2, requires transgender people at state facilities, including schools, to use the restroom that corresponds to the sex on their birth certificate — not their identified gender. (The law also blocks local jurisdictions from passing their own anti-discrimination ordinances, among other things.)
Telling transgender people that "history was on [their] side," Lynch explained why North Carolina's law posed such a threat to Americans. She said:
"This action is about a great deal more than just bathrooms. This is about the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we, as a people and as a country, have enacted to protect them — indeed, to protect all of us. And it's about the founding ideals that have led this country — haltingly but inexorably — in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans. "This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. And we saw it in the proliferation of state bans on same-sex unions intended to stifle any hope that gay and lesbian Americans might one day be afforded the right to marry."
The DOJ, which said last week that the law violates the Civil Rights Act and Title IX, had set a Monday afternoon deadline for the state to reply and say whether it intended to enact the law.
Lynch said the state requested an extension that was under active consideration.
N.C.'s 'Bathroom Law' Energizes Voters On Both Sides Of The Issue Listen · 3:42 3:42
"But instead of replying to our offer or providing a certification, this morning, the state of North Carolina and its governor chose to respond by suing the Department of Justice," she said.
In the state's lawsuit, the governor and another state official instead say the DOJ's position is a "radical reinterpretation" of the Civil Rights Act and a "baseless and blatant overreach."
McCrory's lawyers also say there's nothing discriminatory about the law.
"North Carolina does not treat transgender employees differently from non-transgender employees," the lawsuit states. "All state employees are required to use the bathroom and changing facilities assigned to persons of their same biological sex, regardless of gender identity, or transgendered status."
Billions of dollars of federal funding may be at stake in the dispute.
"While the lawsuit currently seeks declaratory relief, I want to note that we retain the option of curtailing federal funding to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and the University of North Carolina as this case proceeds," Lynch said.
But for now, NPR's Carrie Johnson reports, the federal government is trying to reach "a resolution in which the state voluntarily complies."
McCrory's office responded to the DOJ's lawsuit in a statement Monday evening, saying North Carolina is "appropriately seeking legal certainty to a complex issue impacting employers and students throughout the country."
N.C. Officials Face DOJ Deadline To Change 'Bathroom Law' Listen · 5:41 5:41
It also accused Lynch of "using divisive rhetoric to advance the Obama administration's strategy of making laws that bypass the constitutional authority of Congress and our courts."
Toward the end of her remarks, Lynch emphasized that the "fear of the unknown" and "discomfort with the uncertainty of change" can cause people to reject what they don't know.
"This is a time to summon our national virtues of inclusivity, diversity, compassion and open-mindedness," she said. "What we must not do — what we must never do — is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human."
Additionally, top Republican lawmakers in the North Carolina Legislature on Monday filed their own lawsuit against the federal government Monday addressing Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. This action is separate from the governor's filing against the Justice Department.
A Swiftly Passed State Law
The law, which was passed over the course of 12 hours in a special one-day session of the state Legislature, was issued in response to a ordinance by the city of Charlotte that would have established protections for LGBT people. That ordinance would have allowed trans people in Charlotte to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity.
The state bill nullified that Charlotte ordinance and required all state facilities to go further and explicitly require that bathrooms be segregated according to sex as assigned at birth.
"It's either a common-sense measure, or rooted in ignorance, depending on whom you ask," Jeff Tiberii of WUNC reported for NPR's Morning Edition.
The law has mobilized voters on both sides, Tiberii says — the conservative base as well as the law's opponents.
"At least two corporations have decided not to expand here, well-known performers have canceled gigs, and even some elected officials have said this has damaged the state's economy and reputation," Tiberii says.
"And there's no consensus on which party this benefits the most."
The Rebuke From DOJ
The Department of Justice said that the law violates the Civil Rights Act, by discriminating against state employees, and Title IX, by discriminating against students at state schools.
In a letter to McCrory, the DOJ said that "the State is engaging in a pattern or practice of discrimination against transgender state employees."
The department gave the governor until close of business Monday to reply and say whether it will implement the law or remedy the violations.
One of the sponsors of the law, North Carolina state Rep. Paul Stam, told NPR's Morning Edition earlier Monday that he expected McCrory to fight the Department of Justice on the issue.
"That's what I would hope and expect him to do," Stam said.
Stam also said he wasn't worried about the possibility that North Carolina might lose federal funding over the law, saying it could take years for that process to happen.
"The idea that this is some imminent threat is an empty one," he said.
Stam told NPR the fact that the DOJ is citing the Civil Rights Act — which applies to companies with more than 15 employees — means "this is no longer a threat against North Carolina."
"Every business in the nation that employs more than 15 people is under threat ... that the federal government will sue them" if they don't permit trans employees to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender identity, Stam says. |
Democrats in Congress, under pressure from trade unions worried about the loss of manufacturing jobs from free trade, on Friday turned against the President at the eleventh hour on a bill intended to pave the way for the US to finalise the TPP with negotiating countries.
Unless the Congress grants Mr Obama so-called "trade promotion authority" (TPA), countries like Australia and Japan are unlikely to sign the TPP, a pact that would cover more than 40 per cent of the world's economy and set sweeping new rules for trade, investment, intellectual property, labour and the environment.
"Trying to ratify the TPP in US Congress without TPA will kill the agreement," said Shiro Armstrong, a co-director of the Australia-Japan Reserach Centre at Australian National University.
"The Japanese side has rightly made it clear it will not conclude the bilateral negotiation or show all its cards until the President has TPA."
President Obama has been hitting the phones all weekend to shore up a second attempt at a vote on the bill next Tuesday. Reuters
The House will hold another crucial vote on Tuesday in an attempt to win support for the trade legislation.
Minister for Trade and Investment Andrew Robb admitted the Democratic "no" vote was a setback, but remained optimistic a deal could be struck.
"There is always a lot of cut and thrust in these things and politics being played," Mr Robb said.
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"There is another opportunity to get the ducks lined up but second guessing the US is always difficult."
"I remain hopeful the relevant legislation will ultimately pass which would provide the necessary momentum to conclude the negotiations."
Major TPP countries like Japan and Canada are highly unlikely to sign the TPP and drop agriculture tariffs and import restrictions, unless they have confidence Mr Obama can push the TPP through Congress.
At the heart of the US domestic political debate is a fight between pro-free trade Republicans and sceptical Democrats worried about international trade sending blue collar jobs to cheaper labour countries like Vietnam (see below).
In an unusual alliance, Mr Obama has teamed up with Republican rivals like Paul Ryan, a former US vice president candidate and chair of the House ways and means committee.
Unless Mr Obama is granted TPA, also known as fast track, trade experts say the TPP won't be concluded by the negotiating countries.
TPA allows Mr Obama to finalise a trade pact with other countries, and prevents Congress changing the details of a deal, only giving lawmakers a yes or no vote on the TPP.
The House on Friday tried to pass two pieces of trade legislation, after the Senate approved the bill this month.
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The package fell apart after Democratic House minority leader Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues reneged on approving the proposal.
Democrats, largely for political tactical reasons, rejected a trade adjustment package of about $US1 billion intended to compensate workers disrupted by trade. The final vote tally was 126-302.
"Its defeat, sad to say, is the only way that we would be able to slow down the fast track," Ms Pelosi said.
The rebuff shocked the White House, because the measure was proposed by Democrats to offset the ostensible negative impacts on local jobs in return for granting Mr Obama TPA.
While the TPA part of the bill subsequently won a narrow majority of support in the House by a margin of 219-211, including 28 Democrats, the vote was in effect irrelevant.
TPA and trade adjustment authority for worker-aid both need to both be passed together, to match identical legislation approved by the Senate.
Mr Obama on the weekend urged lawmakers to reverse their opposition.
"These kinds of agreements make sure that the global economy's rules aren't written by countries like China; they're written by the United States of America," Mr Obama said.
If the US fails to secure the TPP with the 11 other countries, it would be a major blow to President Obama's "rebalance" to Asia. |
The New Bellwethers is a series examining counties, in key states, that politically mirror the country overall.
READING, Pa. — By 2044, the U.S. will be a majority minority nation. By 2060, 29 percent of the country will be Latino. This coming demographic shift has been the subject of much hand-wringing and “big thinking” in recent years, but for the city of Reading, Pennsylvania, those numbers are already a reality. Nestled in the center of Berks County, Reading had a Latino population of 60 percent in 2014, up from 37 percent in 2000. It is a city living, at least demographically, in the future.
This is likely not a phenomenon that Reading’s residents, largely descended from German stock, would have predicted in 1908 when the city got its pagoda. Sprouting seven stories off the top of Mt. Penn, with neon-lighted eaves and sturdy stone colonnades, it is probably the finest — if only — pagoda in all of southeastern Pennsylvania and the only one in the world to claim a fireplace and chimney, a bit of Pennsylvania-Dutch pragmatism. Built as a resort but unable to secure a liquor license, the pagoda now serves as decorative fancy, a place to snap a picture, smoke a contemplative cigarette or park a car and cop a feel. From up here, Reading looks the part of a small Pennsylvania city nestled in the patch of greater greenery that is Berks County — the streets are neatly laid out, there are steeples scattered here and there. Up close, though, the reality of the city and its county is much more complicated.
If Reading’s demographics are of the future, then the rest of Berks County is decidedly rooted in the present. Overall, the county is 75 percent white, home to a number of affluent Philadelphia bedroom suburbs, including the one where Taylor Swift spent her childhood. Thanks to its stark demographic divide, Berks is living on the political razor’s edge, as well; Mitt Romney won the county narrowly in 2012, 49.5 percent to President Obama’s 49 percent, even as Obama won nationally by 4 percentage points. But this year in Berks, Hillary Clinton has held an average lead over Donald Trump of 41 percent to 38 percent, according to data gathered by the polling firm Morning Consult, just about where her lead stood in the nation overall, on average, when the data was collected (August through early October).
Berks’s own particular political divisions have much to do with its lack of a cohesive identity. Once known for the Reading Railroad, which went out of business in the 1970s, the county’s sense of self is now divided along the stark lines of urban and suburban interests.
“It has become much more of an ‘us and them’ environment between the city and the county,” Pat Giles, chief impact officer at United Way of Berks County, said. “The city is where ‘those folks’ live and the attitude of the suburban and rural folks is not only do they not care about those folks in the city but they have a very negative opinion of who’s living in the city.”
A 2011 New York Times article naming Reading the poorest city in the nation did not help with matters of perception — journalists from as far away as Europe flocked to the city after that, Giles said, attracting an outsized bit of unwanted attention. But unlike other metropolitan areas with diminished industrial bases, Berks County and Reading in particular have not seen a population decline along with its uptick in poverty. This is in large part due to an influx of Latinos moving to the city from New York.
“The rent is too expensive,” Indiana Hernandez, 33, the manager of Lucy’s Barber Shop on North 5th Street in Reading, said of her reasons for leaving the Bronx. She moved to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic in 2006, and she said she liked her adopted city well enough — work in the shop was preferable to the waitressing and factory jobs she had in New York, though she’d rather be doing hair in the front of the shop than sitting in the back room, monitoring the security cameras. Another shop employee, Aidee Maria, 39, said that the Bronx was fine for work, but that Reading’s quality of life was preferable.
“I like the flowers,” Maria said of her new hometown, laughing.
When the topic of 2016’s race came up, both women said they were supporting Clinton and thought she would win. With the help of her iPhone’s translation app, I asked Hernandez if she ever worried about the prospect of a Trump presidency.
“Preoccupado?” she asked, peering at the screen to read what I’d typed in. “Yes! No Trump — he wants the Mexican people out.”
Down the street at Reading’s Latino community center, Centro Hispano Daniel Torres, bustling on a weekday morning, a flyer displayed on the reception desk was equally as blunt about the stakes of the 2016 election:
“This election year, many politicians are trying to scapegoat immigrant and Latino communities, instead of addressing our communities’ real issues and needs,” the flyer began. “Can we count on you to vote for respect and dignity on Tuesday November 8th?” A path to citizenship, public school funding, a $15 minimum wage and climate change action were listed as top priorities.
“I think the challenge that the Latino community has is that they just don’t understand the power that they have,” Michael Toledo, executive director of the center, said. “Just the sheer numbers of Latinos that live in the city — the Latino community could absolutely take hold of this city and be agents of positive change if they wanted to.”
The Latino vote in Reading may in fact be what’s pushing Berks further left than it was in 2012.
For now, the primary job of the center, Toledo said, was to help the newly arrived to the city acculturate, something the organization has been doing for 50 years, ever since a group of Puerto Ricans moved to Reading to work the nearby mushroom fields. Toledo’s grandfather was one of these first arrivals to the city, and he has lived in the area all his life.
“What we’re going through right now is no different than what the Irish went through, what the Italians went through,” Toledo said. “But it took those years to acculturate, to assimilate, to be a part of the fabric that is our community.”
The challenges remain steep, though. Reading’s poverty rate is at 40 percent, teen pregnancy is far more common here than it is statewide or nationally, and the graduation rate in the city’s schools is only at 60 percent. Giles said improvement of the school system was one of her priorities; Reading’s young Latino population is the city’s economic future.
“There was a point in time where it was like, ‘Oh my gosh what are we going to do, look at all these people coming here who don’t speak the language, look different, are draining resources,’” she said. “Now I think people are much more willing to recognize that this is our reality and we need to take the best advantage of the fact that we have a younger demographic, we have a growing demographic and more small businesses have been created.”
In other words, the new normal was slowly sinking in. The racial animus of the 2016 election, particularly with respect to immigrant Latino populations, has highlighted what is sure to be at the nexus of the country’s 21st century culture wars: what America should look like, should sound like.
Schools Giles said again, would be the key to a better future for the city, her profession’s mandated hometown optimism bubbling up to meet yet another out-of-town reporter’s skepticism. “I think that’s going to improve, and that in and of itself is going to support a lot of other positive things happening.”
Then she sighed. “I just don’t know it it’s all going to happen quickly enough.“
A 15-minute drive from the Centro Hispano in Reading is Wyomissing, a suburb of shady tree-lined streets, ostentatious Halloween displays and old stone houses set on wide-hipped lots — the stuff of assimilationist American dreams.
Joe Mandrusiak, the GOP field organizer for Berks County, works out of a small office park in the town, which boasts a median household income of $73,000. Most of his efforts, Mandrusiak said, were focused on areas such as Kutztown — median household income $46,000 — at the northeastern part of the county, right near Lehigh County’s Allentown.
“In Berks County outside of Lehigh there were a lot of manufacturing jobs,” he said, an area where it now seems to Mandrusiak as if every third house sports a Trump sign. And internal polls, he said, showed Trump with a lead in the county. “Folks are struggling to get by, and that’s a driving factor for Donald Trump that we see.” Despite a shared sense of economic hardship, though, residents in the outer borough see their struggles as a piece apart from Reading’s.
“To speak bluntly, I think it’s sad to see what Reading has turned into,” Mandrusiak said. “Lots of folks I talked to, whether it be in this Wyomissing area or the southern part of the county, rural parts of the county, they don’t even like to travel into downtown Reading anymore.”
Kevin Murphy, president of the Berks County Community Foundation, had a more optimistic spin on the area’s economic state, one that doesn’t center around a revitalization of Reading but rather embraces the county’s high-suburbia culture.
“I realize the affection for thinking of Pennsylvania as ‘The Deer Hunter,’ but that’s not the story of Southeastern Pennsylvania,” he said. “The story of Southeastern Pennsylvania is a booming economy with high-tech, huge medical research productions.” That New York and Philadelphia are becoming more difficult places for middle-class families to call home was only to Berks County’s advantage. He spoke of horse farms in the area, of new bike paths, Amish buggies and picturesque small towns. “We think we can attract, and we do attract, a kind of entrepreneurial class that’s attracted to the quality of life and the proximity to markets,” Murphy said.
Not all of the county’s towns were doing quite so well, he said, pointing not only to struggling places like Kutztown, but to pockets of rural poverty at the county’s northern and southern extremities. The identity of Berks is essentially balkanized, though, Murphy said, with each town or village identifying more strongly with their school district than as a member of, say, the greater Reading metropolitan area. The fortunes of many places in Berks remain to be seen — hence Trump’s anti-establishment appeal in parts of the county — but they don’t want to be dragged down by an association with Reading’s problems.
“There are 71 [municipalities] in Berks, there are 411,000 people in the county split among these municipalities and the media likes to come and talk about Reading,” Murphy said. “Which would be like coming to Pittsburgh and analyzing the Hill District and saying, ‘and this is what the region looks like.’ Sixty-seven percent of the poor people in Berks County live in this one municipality, so it’s really more like a neighborhood.”
Walking through Reading on a recent afternoon, I passed by all the things you can’t see from the pagoda on top of Mt. Penn. There were the bas relief depictions of the town’s railroad past on the stone walls of a building, posters for cheap collect calls to Central America, and the bustling scene and pawn shops of Penn Square not far from a newly opened luxury Double Tree hotel, a nod to downtown revitalization. There was also, unexpectedly, a pair of Trump signs.
I spotted them outside a dingy building attached to Tommy’s Auto Repair, a garage on North 8th Street, and wandered in.
They belonged, according to Tommy Acevedo, 39, to “the old man who owns the building.” Acevedo, originally from the Dominican Republic, owns the autobody business and a grocery store a few blocks away.
Sitting in the garage office, Acevedo and a few customers argued animatedly about the presidential race as soon as the topic of the Trump signs came up, the election being 2016’s one sure conversational accelerant. They talked Trump’s businessman appeal, Clinton’s emails and the threat of terrorism. Ultimately, though, Acevedo said, “I’m definitely trying to get Hillary in there.”
And the old man’s Trump signs would be coming down soon enough; Acevedo is set to open a car dealership in the front office where they hang. In the end, it didn’t matter much who won, he said.
“I’m just going to come here and work.” |
Key moments from President Obama's speech the morning after Congress passed a deal to raise the debt ceiling and reopen the government. (The Washington Post)
A visibly frustrated President Obama delivered a blunt message to Republicans with whom he had feuded over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling over the past month on Tuesday: Elections matter. I won; you lost. Deal with it.
That's a paraphrase -- obviously. Here's what Obama actually said:
"You don't like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country's about."
"Go out there and win an election." That's about as direct as you will ever hear a politician be about how he feels about his opposition and how they are conducting themselves. (It's not the first time Obama has used the "I won" construct. Remember the health-care summit in early 2010 when Obama told Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): "The election is over.")
Obama's argument comes down to this: He believes that the 2012 election -- in which he was reelected easily and Democrats surprisingly picked up Senate seats and won a handful of House seats -- was a clear signal that the American electorate prefers his vision for government to the one offered by Republicans. He views that mandate as a broad one -- encompassing fiscal matters, health care, immigration and pretty much everything else.
Republicans, obviously, disagree vehemently with the "elections matter ... and I won" concept -- noting that they still control the House, which means that simply accepting Obama's priorities in toto because he won reelection isn't representing their constituents well. (Democrats make the counterpoint that while Republicans control the House, they actually got fewer raw votes in 2012. True. But, that gets us into redistricting -- and that's a whole other can of worms we aren't opening in this blog post.)
At the center of this disagreement -- policy differences aside -- is what it means to be the loyal opposition. Obama believes that Republicans have the right to dislike/disagree/fight his policies but only within the bounds of standard operating procedure on Capitol Hill. ("Push to change it. But don't break it.") That sentiment, in truth, is probably shared by 80 (or so) House Republicans -- including Speaker John Boehner. But, for the other 140 House GOPers -- including the four dozen or so committed tea party conservatives -- opposing the president and his policies means using any means necessary to do so. That includes a government shutdown and very nearly going past the debt-ceiling deadline.
For that group of 140, elections matter, too -- their elections. And, their constituents not only don't blanche at their tactics but embrace them. In many districts in the country, being involved in an effort to repeal Obamacare -- even if it led to a government shutdown -- was a very good thing politically.
Obama's annoyance -- and call for cooperation -- then will fall on mostly deaf ears. It's hard to play a "fair" game when the two teams can't even agree on what the rules should be or what winning (and losing) looks like. |
We’ve been waiting for an official Star Wars virtual reality experience for some time. With the movie coming out next month, that time is almost now. In an announcement today on StarWars.com, we got some updates on what to expect.
Here’s what they had to say:
Coming on December 2 is a new virtual reality experience developed along with Google and Verizon. This will feature the first-of-its-kind serialized Google Cardboard Virtual Reality (VR) experience that combines a compelling story, which ties directly into the opening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, with the very latest cutting-edge Virtual Reality technology. The Google Cardboard Virtual Reality experience will live in the official Star Wars app and is available on both iOS and Android devices.
Yes, not only will there be content, but Google’s putting out some Star Wars-themed Cardboard thingy-doos to view the stuff. Forget the “Cardboard isn’t real VR” argument for a moment. You’re going to want to check this out.
You can snag one of the themed Cardboards in a Verizon store on December 2nd — exclusively. There are four different ones, and I’m sure that they’ll become collectible. As does anything physical having to do with Star Wars. Nice score by Verizon. The content will be available on the Star Wars official app for iOS and Android.
The group behind the content itself, Industrial Light & Magic’s ILMxLAB, has been cranking away on creating immersive content for at least six months, so it’s gotta be good.
While you wait, Star-Wars-Up your Google apps. |
Late last month when Motorola announced the Moto Z2 Force, fans were taken aback when the company said that the handset would cost about $800 when purchased unlocked, a whole $100 more than last year’s model. Motorola has now apparently silently dropped the price down to $720…
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When first made available for pre-order, Motorola listed the Z2 Force for $799 if bought outright or $33.33 a month for 24 months if financed. Now, Motorola is offering the smartphone for either $720 outright or $30 a month for 24 months. This price includes a free Moto Mod projector when pre-ordered and makes it the cheapest option for those looking to purchase the Moto Z2 Force.
While there is a chance that carriers could lower their rates, most have yet to do so. As it stands now, Verizon is offering the device for $15 a month for 24 months (for a promo, $31.50 normally) or $756 outright, AT&T will sell it for $27 per month for 30 months, and T-Mobile has the price set at $30 a month for 24 months or $750 outright.
All three carriers are also offering to throw in a free Moto Mod projector but T-Mobile is also offering a buy one, get one for free deal on the Z2 Force.
[Update] While the price was clearly advertised as $799, Motorola says the “$799 was an error when the site initially launched. The pricing for Moto Z2 Force Edition starts at $30/month and always has, and may vary depending on which carrier is selected.”
Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news: |
MOREHEAD, Ky. (AP) — After a five-day stint in jail for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis will return to work as soon as Friday to face another day of reckoning.
The apostolic Christian, now a symbol of strong religious conviction to thousands across the globe, would not say whether she would allow licenses to continue to be issued or try to block them once again, defying a federal court order that could send her back to jail.
Davis walked out of the Carter County Detention Center’s front door Tuesday, arm-in-arm with her lawyer and with Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee as thousands of supporters cheered and waved white crosses backed by a 150-voice church choir. Some in the crowd sang “Amazing Grace” and “God Bless America.”
Davis will take a couple of days off from work to spend with her family and will return to work Friday or Monday, according to an emailed statement from Charla Bansley, a spokeswoman for Liberty Counsel, the Christian law firm representing Davis. The statement did not say whether Davis would allow her office to grant licenses.
At 8 a.m. Wednesday, her office — at the Rowan County Courthouse in Morehead — opened as scheduled. Three protesters were there, holding signs. Deputy clerk Brian Mason said the office would issue licenses to anyone seeking them. He added that if Davis returns to work and tells him to stop, he’ll tell her that he can’t obey her order.
In lifting the contempt order against Davis, U.S. District Judge David Bunning said he was satisfied that her deputies were fulfilling their obligation to grant licenses to same-sex couples in her absence. But Bunning’s order was clear: If Davis interferes with the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples upon her return, she could go right back to jail.
“I just want to give God the glory. His people have rallied, and you are a strong people,” the clerk told the crowd after stepping outside, her arms raised like a victorious boxer, to the blaring “Rocky”-sequel theme song “Eye of the Tiger.”
Davis did not speak during a brief appearance in front of the news media seconds after her release, however, except to smile and nod when a reporter asked if her decision had been worth it since it landed her in jail.
“Kim cannot and will not violate her conscience,” said Mat Staver, founder of the Liberty Counsel, the Christian law firm representing Davis. As for whether she will issue licenses, Staver said only: “You’ll find out in the near future.”
Staver said the licenses issued to same-sex couples by Davis’ employees last week were not valid since they were not given under Davis’ authority. But the Kentucky attorney general’s office said it believes otherwise.
How Davis will act could become clear as early as Wednesday morning. At least one of the four couples that sued her have not yet received a marriage license. Five of Davis’ six deputy clerks — all except her son, Nathan — agreed to issue licenses to gay couples with Davis behind bars. In lifting the contempt order, Bunning asked for updates on the clerks’ compliance every two weeks.
On Wednesday, deputy clerk Mason said 10 marriage licenses had been issued since Friday, in Davis’ absence: eight Friday and two Tuesday — and seven of those went to same-sex couples.
Scott Bauries, a law professor at the University of Kentucky, said that if Davis returns to work and orders her deputies not to issue licenses, she would push them into a thorny legal conundrum of their own: They would have to choose whether to defy a federal judge or defy their boss. Bauries suspects that any deputy who chooses not to issue licenses could be held in contempt.
Davis, 49, has refused to resign her $80,000-a-year job. As an elected official, she can lose her post only if she is defeated for re-election or is impeached by the state General Assembly. Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School, said the state legislature should find the political will to boot Davis from office since she has ignored her oath of office in favor of her religious conviction.
“The claim she’s making is a clear loser. It’s a political claim, it’s not a legal claim,” Franke said. “That’s why she lost on the district level and the circuit level and she will continue to lose. She’s fighting for justice on the level of religious law. But we don’t live in a theocracy.”
It is unlikely the Kentucky state legislature would impeach Davis. The Republican president of the state Senate spoke at a rally at the state Capitol and filed an amicus brief asking Bunning not to hold Davis in contempt of court for defying his order. Several lawmakers have already filed legislation for the 2016 session that would exempt county clerks from having to issue marriage licenses.
Davis was locked up Thursday for the boldest act of resistance by a public official yet to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June that effectively legalized same-sex marriage across the nation. Citing “God’s authority” and her belief that gay marriage is a sin, Davis stopped issuing all marriage licenses.
Two gay couples and two heterosexual ones sued her. Bunning ordered Davis to issue the licenses, and the Supreme Court backed him. But she still refused and was held in contempt of court and hauled off to jail in handcuffs, igniting protests from religious conservatives. They rallied for days at her office, at the jail and outside the judge’s home.
Dan Canon, an attorney for the couples who sued, said they will ask the judge to again hold Davis in contempt if she returns to work and blocks her deputies from dispensing licenses.
“We are hoping she is going to comply with it. We’ll have to see,” Canon said. “But if experience is a teacher, Ms. Davis just doesn’t believe that court orders apply to her.”
___
Associated Press writer Claire Galofaro in Louisville, Kentucky, contributed to this report.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. |
Green Recorder is a simple recording program for the Linux desktop. It was written using Python and utilizes ffmpeg as its core. It also uses the GTK+ library. The initial version of the program was released around 1 month ago.
Today, we are excited to announce version 2.0 of the program. The most interesting feature is adding Wayland support (on GNOME session). The program now supports both Xorg and Wayland. It detects which display server you are using automatically on launch. And provides you with the possible functionalities according to each display server.
In Wayland, the compositor is the display server itself. This means that in order to create a recording program on Wayland, you have to deal with each compositor alone. The initial step today was supporting GNOME. Later KWin (if made available).
Green recorder uses the default audio device you have to record. So if you want to change the audio input source, you just need to change it from the system-side (using pavucontrol for example).
By default, On Wayland only, Green Recorder uses the V8 encoder instead of the default V9 encoder in GNOME Shell because of the CPU & RAM consumption issue (GNOME: #757172). Which should also give you better performance. On Xorg, each format uses its own default encoder.
The changelog in version 2.0 includes:
Added Wayland Support (GNOME Session).
Added ability to select a specific window.
Added ability to select a specific area.
Added ability to show/hide mouse cursor.
Added ability to follow mouse cursor.
Added ability run a command after finishing recording.
Indicator now checking for ffmpeg before running.
Fixed some issues about multi-recordings.
Here’s DOTA 2 running under Wayland’s GNOME session with Green Recorder:
Install Green Recorder 2.0
You can simply run the following commands to install the latest version on Ubuntu 16.04/16.10/17.04:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mhsabbagh/greenproject sudo apt update sudo apt install green-recorder
For other distributions, you can grab the source code directly from GitHub: https://github.com/green-project/green-recorder |
ATLANTA - A Georgia factory worker claims in a federal lawsuit that he was fired after he refused to wear a 666 sticker he feared would doom him to eternal damnation.
Billy E. Hyatt claims he was fired from Pliant Corp., a plastics factory in northern Georgia near Dalton, after he refused to wear a sticker proclaiming that his factory had been accident-free for 666 days. That number is considered the "mark of the beast" in the Bible's Book of Revelation describing the apocalypse.
Hyatt, who said he's a devout Christian, had worked for the north Georgia plastics company since June 2007 and like other employees wore stickers each day that proclaimed how long the factory had gone without an accident.
But he grew nervous in early 2009 as the number of accident-free days crept into the 600s. As the company's safety calendar approached day 666, Hyatt said he approached a manager and explained that wearing it would force him "to accept the mark of the beast and to be condemned to hell." He said the manager assured him he wouldn't have to wear the number.
When the day came on March 12, 2009, Hyatt sought a manager to discuss his request. He said he was told that his beliefs were "ridiculous" and that he should wear the sticker or serve a three-day suspension.
Hyatt took the three-day suspension, and was fired at a human resources meeting several days later. He then filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and his attorney Stephen Mixon said the agency granted him the right to sue the company in August.
The lawsuit, which seeks punitive damages and back pay, said the company forced him into a terrible situation: Keep his job or "abandon his religious beliefs."
The company, now known as Berry Plastics Corp., did not return several calls and emails seeking comment. It has yet to respond to the complaint in court. |
A petition has been launched to remove the "X-Men" director from USC's Division of Cinema and Media Studies.
A Twitter user going by the name Justin Smith alleged out director Bryan Singer made unwanted sexual advances on him when he was underage.
In a massive, 14-tweet-long message sent on November 1, Smith claimed Singer asked to see his penis and “tried to shove his finger inside me.”
VCG/VCG via Getty Images
“He had his other hand clamped on my shoulder so I couldn’t immediately move away,” he wrote. “He penetrated me for a split second before I shoved him away.” When Smith told Singer he wanted to go home, the filmmaker allegedly told him “I’d better not tell anyone because no one would believe me anyway.” (You can read the full tweets here.)
Smith says he believes other claims of sexual assault against Singer and said he “would’ve loudly objected to what I saw happening.”
Since then, Smith’s Twitter account has been deactivated and a story about the accusations originally appearing on Yahoo News was taken down. But the charges received renewed attention when actress Jessica Chastain retweeted another story about them. (Chastain is actually working with Singer in the upcoming X-Men: Dark Phoenix.)
Let us not forget https://t.co/0TNDxl8h1Q — Jessica Chastain (@jes_chastain) November 4, 2017
“I do not feel beholden to anything,” she told The Daily Beast. “I’m going to speak my mind about any injustice that I see. I’m not afraid of anything in terms of that… The greatest myth that an industry can create is to make people feel like they’re easily replaceable. I’m not going to allow that into my life.”
In 1997 Singer was accused of asking a 14-year-old extra and other minors to film a nude shower scene in Apt Pupil. An ensuing lawsuit was dismissed, though, as were two later sexual assault cases alleging Singer assaulted minors.
Maybe now is a good time to re-link to Buzzfeed’s expose on Bryan Singer and the Gary Goddard posse https://t.co/HpEoJdN5bo #KevinSpacey — Stephanie Tinsley (@AgentTinsley) October 30, 2017
In a controversial interview with Vulture last year, out Real O’Neals star Noah Galvin claimed Singer “likes to invite little boys over to his pool and diddle them in the fucking dark of night.” (Galvin later apologized to Singer and Vulture removed the quote, writing “this is a contentious issue, and after consideration, we decided to delete the reference.”)
But the renewed discussion about sexual predators in Hollywood has increased scrutiny: This week, students at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts launched a petition to remove Singer’s name from from the school’s Division of Cinema and Media Studies.
“It is completely unacceptable that this prestigious department within our school still carries the name of Bryan Singer, a man accused multiple times of sexual harassment, assault, and pedophilia,” the petition reads in part.
USC
USC recently refused a donation from Harvey Weinstein following allegations of his sexual misconduct. Singer transferred to USC’s film school from SVA in New York in the late ’80s.
“Our university should promote education, respect, and consent, as well as prepare its students to be model members of the USC and entertainment communities, and this continued relationship with Mr. Singer publicly negates those values.”
To date, the petition has garnered more than 1,200 signatures. |
By Duncan Geere, Wired UK
Move over solar, wind and wave power – there's a new renewable on the block. Researchers are experimenting with devices that can pull electricity from the air.
For centuries, scientists have been fascinated by the idea of harnessing the power of thunderstorms. Nikola Tesla experimented extensively with the topic, but significant understanding of the field of atmospheric electrodynamics has until recently proved elusive.
Fernando Galembeck, of the University of Campinas in Brazil, presented a report at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society that detailed a future where every house has a device on its roof that pulls cheap, clean electricity out of the air. "Just as solar energy could free some households from paying electric bills, this promising new energy source could have a similar effect," he said.
Originally, scientists believed that water droplets in the atmosphere were electrically neutral, and remained that way even after brushing up against charges on dust particles and other liquids. However, Galembeck discovered in a series of lab experiments that water droplets do in fact pick up a charge.
He used particles of silica and aluminum phosphate, both of which are common dust particles in the air, and found that they become increasingly charged as the amount of water vapor in the air increases. "This was clear evidence that water in the atmosphere can accumulate electrical charges and transfer them to other materials it comes into contact with," said Galembeck.
It could be possible to harvest this "hygroelectricity" from the air in regions that experience high humidity, such as the tropics. To jump-start this industry, Galembeck's team is already testing metals to see which might be of most use in capturing atmospheric electricity on hygroelectric panels.
A similar approach could help to avert lightning damage, too, by placing hygroelectric panels on buildings to take charge out of the air in the vicinity of places that suffer regular thunderstorms. "These are fascinating ideas that new studies by ourselves and by other scientific teams suggest are now possible," said Galembeck.
"We certainly have a long way to go. But the benefits in the long range of harnessing hygroelectricity could be substantial."
Image: Flickr/Bobby Dimitrov.
See Also: |
MIAMI/NEW YORK — Detroit officials hope the bruising bankruptcy battle ahead of them will be rewarded with the birth of a leaner, more efficient and ultimately prosperous Motown.
[np_storybar title=”Detroit battle with blight may be key to survival” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/2013/07/25/detroit-battle-with-blight-may-be-key-to-survival/”%5D
If you want to tackle Detroit’s thousands of abandoned homes and trash-strewn and overgrown lots, there are few better places to start than in Brightmoor in the northwestern corner of the city.
Continue reading.
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History, however, has few story book endings to offer as a guide when it comes to U.S. municipal bankruptcies.
Fact is, they are rare events – just 61 local governments have gone through Chapter 9 bankruptcy since 1954 – and while the process is devoted to restructuring debt and provides temporary cash flow relief, it does not help a city enhance its revenue or economic outlook. Furthermore, cities typically lose access to capital markets in the wake of a bankruptcy.
“Detroit has a very high level of debt and the bankruptcy can correct some of it, but is it going to turn around its economy quickly? That’s probably unlikely,” said Jeff Previdi, Managing Director and Co-Head of Local Government Ratings at Standard and Poor’s.
To be sure, Detroit’s financial disarray was decades in the making: a downward spiral of company departures and failures accompanied by a dramatic drop in its population, to just below 700,000 from a peak of 1.8 million, and a rise in crime.
Once the cradle of U.S. automotive industry and Motown music, Detroit appears to have run out of alternatives to bankruptcy barring a bailout from the state.
New York, Cleveland and Philadelphia previously teetered on the edge of bankruptcy but Detroit is the first major U.S. city to file for bankruptcy, pressured by US$18.5-billion of outstanding liabilities.
To this point, only much smaller local governments have gone the bankruptcy route without external help and facing similar issues.
Take for example Vallejo, California, with about 116,000 people. It spent more than three years in bankruptcy from 2008 to 2011, weighed down by generous labour contracts and retirement benefits.
The city, about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco, was allowed to terminate its collective bargaining agreements, but it never renegotiated some US$128-million of unfunded pension liabilities.
And while Vallejo generated about US$34-million in savings on some of the liabilities it faced heading into bankruptcy, those have been nearly matched by expenses related to the bankruptcy itself, according to a 2012 study by Standard & Poor’s.
Now two years after emerging from Chapter 9, it has yet to balance its budget, and the police force is roughly half its previous size. Vallejo remains shut out of the municipal bond market and cannot raise money to address much needed infrastructure repairs.
“We have not done enough, and the budget we just adopted in June still has a US$5.2-million dollar deficit on an US$82-million general fund budget,” Vallejo City Manager Daniel Keen said.
Both Vallejo and nearby Stockton, which before Detroit’s filing last week had been the most populous city to file for bankruptcy, have seen further increases in crime after seeking protection from creditors. Stockton, with nearly 300,000 people, was granted permission to enter Chapter 9 protection in April and will file a debt-adjustment plan later this year.
ORANGE COUNTY: A RARE SUCCESS
The brightest post-bankruptcy story is perhaps California’s Orange County. But its 1994 bankruptcy — the largest in history at the time — stemmed from US$1.7-billion in bad derivative bets, not the kind of grinding economic slump and population flight that feature so prominently in the Detroit case.
Orange County, home to Disneyland and with median household income of more than US$75,000, nearly three times Detroit’s, has suffered few lingering effects from its 18 months in Chapter 9.
“Most county residents were not impacted,” said Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California. “Police services, streets and road, schools, things that people depend on local government for, went on.”
Orange County also stands out as the only bankruptcy alumnus to successfully re-enter the municipal bond market. But its recovery bonds were fully backed by bond insurer MBIA Insurance Corp, an option that may not be available in the future since the 2007-2009 financial crisis crushed the bond insurance business.
JEFFERSON COUNTY: FUTURE IS CLOUDED
And the jury is still out on Jefferson County, Alabama, which before Detroit had held the mantle as the largest municipal bankruptcy ever at US$4.2-billion that stemmed from debts to overhaul and expand its sewer system.
The county, home to Birmingham, the state’s largest city, is on track to leave bankruptcy by year’s end. By many measures, it is thriving: its jobless rate is just 5.5% compared with the U.S. rate of 7.6%; it has a diverse employer base; and private business investment is robust, totaling US$579-million in 2012, more than double a 10-year average, according to the Birmingham Business Alliance.
Nonetheless, local officials are bracing for years of stunted government services such as few emergency crews to deal with deadly tornadoes, rising utility costs, and limited public resources for boosting local commerce.
“We have no money for economic growth,” said David Carrington, president of the Jefferson County Commission and a negotiator of the county’s debt-adjustment plan filed on June 30. “There will be on-going deterioration of infrastructure.”
Road repairs in Jefferson County, home to 660,00 people, already lag other sizeable Alabama counties, according to Carrington, who also worries federal officials will sue over the county’s below-par jails.
“Like any company, you have to grow, or you are going to die,” said Robert Brooks, finance professor at the University of Alabama. “This is going to be a strain and make it unattractive for businesses to move into the Birmingham area.”
Jefferson County also hopes to follow in Orange County’s footsteps in returning to the bond market, with a US$1.9-billion debt deal planned for later this year that is central to its negotiated reorganization plan. With slim prospects for the kind of bond insurance enhancement obtained by Orange County, however, the deal is likely to saddle the county with outsized interest rates for decades.
“Clearly, with such a huge liability for such an extended length of time, it is like having a ball and chain around our ankle,” said Brooks.
In the end, though, the enduring costs of a municipal bankruptcy are tallied in more than dollars.
“The impacts of a bankruptcy on a community are pretty hard to predict but they are not very good. There is a loss of confidence … there is a lot of anxiety in the city’s workforce,” Vallejo’s Keen said. “We are still the city that all know for having being in bankruptcy.”
© Thomson Reuters 2013 |
OKLAHOMA CITY – Uber is bringing #UberIceCream to Oklahoma City!
Friday, July 15, take some time out to indulge in a frozen treat with friends. Here in OKC, residents can request frozen treats (4 pieces for $20) to share with friends, family or coworkers.
Here in Oklahoma City, actor Gary Busey is helping Uber deliver the sweet treats in an ice cream truck.
Gettin ready to bring ice cream to OKC #UberIceCream pic.twitter.com/DwCmot7hHa — Gary Busey (@THEGaryBusey) July 15, 2016
Ice cream is the universal language of the world. — Gary Busey (@THEGaryBusey) July 15, 2016
We know ice cream isn't the most nutritious idea for #lunch, but if @THEGaryBusey is delivering it….we'll take some! @Uber_OK — FLINT (@FlintOKC) July 15, 2016
HOW IT WORKS:
Open the Uber app on Friday, July 15, between 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. Set your location and request ICE CREAM If connected, order away and Ice Cream will be delivered curbside in minutes
#UberIceCream returns for the fifth year running.
This is a global promotion that celebrates what we have in common and gives us an opportunity to come together once a year for a big ice cream social.
This year, millions of people will have the chance to “Indulge Together” in over 400+ cities where Uber operates around the world.
It’s as simple as ever: tap a button, and get ice cream in hundreds of cities around the world! |
With The Division out today, Ghost Recon Wildlands sneaking out before the end of the year and Rainbow Six: Siege being the best multiplayer shooter in months, 2016 could be a great year for Clancy-philes.
But if you’re not already up to date it can be daunting to look at picking your way through nearly two decades of games for the tactical gems so we’ve rappelled through every Rainbow Six game to find the ones worth your time and effort.
A couple of ground rules:
-No expansion packs.
-No entries on either mobile or handheld platforms.
-No games released only in South Korea (Sorry Rainbow Six: Takedown)
-Where games differ between console and PC versions, unless specified we’re talking about the PC version.
This brings us to a nice round number. Without further fanfare, let’s pass judgement on our favorite series of Tom Clancy games. |
Today at Apple’s WWDC event in San Francisco, Apple had a bunch of Cinema Display monitors mounted together on a wall showing what looked to be some sort of pulsating canvas. But a closer look revealed that it was actually a huge collection of icons for many of the apps available in the App Store, arranged by color. Apparently, when someone purchased one, that app’s icon would pulsate, creating the effect.
While it wasn’t quite real-time, nor was it entirely representative of all the more than 50,000 apps in the App Store, the visualization was pretty damn cool. Prettier than the Google Holodeck and it gave off less heat. Not surprisingly, onlookers were mesmerized by the pulsating apps.
Check out the pictures below and watch the video. It reminded me a bit of the lines of code falling down that the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar would see when trying to look into the The Matrix — only with fart apps. |
Erasmus Darwin, (born Dec. 12, 1731, Elston Hall, Nottinghamshire, Eng.—died April 18, 1802, Breadsall Priory, Derby, Derbyshire), British physician, poet, and botanist noted for his republican politics and materialistic theory of evolution. Although today he is best known as the grandfather of naturalist Charles Darwin and of biologist Sir Francis Galton, Erasmus Darwin was an important figure of the Enlightenment in his own right.
Education and early interests The son of a Nottingham lawyer, Darwin studied classics and mathematics at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and then engaged in three years of medical training at the University of Edinburgh. He moved to Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1756, where he ran a flourishing medical practice and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society (1761). His first wife, Mary Howard, died in 1770, leaving three surviving sons, two of whom subsequently died. But the youngest, physician Robert Waring Darwin, married the daughter of Darwin’s close friend, English craftsman and scientific entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. The young couple’s fifth son was Charles Darwin, who would later write the influential work On the Origin of Species (1859). In the early 1770s Erasmus Darwin had two illegitimate daughters with Robert’s governess, Mary Parker. In 1781 Erasmus married a young widow, Elizabeth Pole, who insisted that he move to her home in Derby, where he started writing scientific poetry and textbooks. Together they had seven children; their eldest daughter was the mother of Francis Galton, who in the late 19th century would found the science of eugenics. Darwin’s major early interests were medicine and invention, but in the late 1770s he became fascinated by botany. He translated textbooks and composed “The Loves of the Plants” (1789), which mainly comprises elaborate footnoted verses extolling Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus’s taxonomic system. An immediate success, this erotic dramatization was later republished as the sequel to a poem called “The Economy of Vegetation” (1791) in the two-part The Botanic Garden (1791). A related poetic work, “The Temple of Nature” (1803), appeared posthumously. Both this latter work and The Botanic Garden were strikingly illustrated by William Blake and Henry Fuseli.
Influence and later works The overriding characteristic of Darwin’s work is his commitment to progress. As a member of the Lunar Society, an informal yet influential group of scientific entrepreneurs involved in Britain’s early industrialization, Darwin encountered and influenced reformers keen to improve society through science, industry, education, and political change. As well as inventing windmills, carriages, and other mechanical devices, Darwin helped to transform British manufacturing by promoting canal systems and the use of steam power. He invested in development projects and celebrated in flamboyant heroic couplets the technological innovations of factory owners, such as Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, and Thomas Arkwright. Similarly, Darwin sought progress through introducing scientific techniques into agriculture. In Phytologia (1800) his recommendations included chemical fertilizers and other innovations for ripening seeds, enlarging fruit, and improving timber characteristics. Medical historians celebrate Darwin for his Zoonomia (or The Laws of Organic Life; 1794–96), an ambitious two-volume work aiming to classify facts about animals, to set out laws describing organic life, and to catalog diseases with their treatments. Unlike some contemporary physicians, Darwin endorsed active intervention with drugs and mechanical apparatus; some historians trace modern psychosomatic therapeutic approaches to his insistence on integrating mind and body. However, antievolutionists objected to Zoonomia’s rejection of biblical chronology and still more strongly to Darwin’s materialist suggestion that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist…would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament…possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity. Darwin also sought social reform. Aiming to improve girls’ education, he helped his two illegitimate daughters run a boarding school and published the influential work A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education (1797). Openly aligning himself with British author Thomas Day and other political radicals who supported the French Revolution and campaigned for the abolition of slavery, Darwin attracted hostility from British antirepublicans. In particular, an extended satire on the possibilities of progress and human evolution that was published in the political journal The Anti-Jacobin prompted Darwin to delay and revise what became “The Temple of Nature.” Subtitled “The Origin of Society,” this final work brought together and expanded the evolutionary ideas that Darwin had been gradually developing throughout his life. Supported by exceptionally long notes, this four-part poem presents human achievements as the culmination of nature’s innate progressive forces. In Darwin’s optimistic vision, virtue and reason triumph in the constant battle against the death and destruction necessary to prevent explosive growth. |
One month after its employees voted to unionize, the Salon Media Group, a digital media pioneer and a stalwart of the progressive press, has still refused to recognize the move. Sources close to the situation tell International Business Times that Salon’s management on Thursday approached labor with a counter offer to their request to unionize that workers did not take seriously.
The one-month mark came in the same week that the Guardian US announced it had swiftly recognized the union at its own shop under the auspices of the News Media Guild. In June, Gawker Media successfully unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East, which the staffers at Salon cited as a catalyst for their own efforts to organize later that month.
But after Thursday’s unappealing counteroffer from management, the stalemate goes on.
“Our employees are very important to us, and we are carefully considering their request.” Salon CEO Cindy Jeffers told IBTimes in an email on Wednesday.
According to Salon’s earnings statement, Jeffers last year made over $440k including a $225k salary, a $100k bonus and stock option awards of $115k. Entry-level editorial employees are offered a $30k salary.
Declining Ad Sales
Meanwhile, the business side of the operation took a stumble last year: Total revenue dipped 18 percent, from $6 million to $4.9 million, while losses increased by 80 percent, from $2.2 to $3.9 million. As of March 31, 2015, Salon had an accumulated deficit of $122.6 million.
The company says that the losses are primarily due to a decline in direct sales advertising and referral fees. It still relies on millions of dollars in cash infusions from John Warnock, chairman of Salon’s board, and investment banker William Hambrecht, who is father of former CEO and current chief financial officer Elizabeth Hambrecht.
Oddly enough, traffic is way up: under editor-in-chief David Daley, Salon enjoyed 17 million uniques a month by April 2015, a 52 percent increase from a 11.2 million average in fiscal year 2014.
Surging Traffic
That boom came at a certain price. Longtime Salon fans, such as writer Michelle Dean this week, have lamented the surge of frothy catnip that brought on the rising traffic numbers.
Highlights of recent Salon headlines include: “ My Boyfriend Lives In A Dumpster ,” “ Human-On-Dolphin Sex Is Not Really That Weird ,” “ What A Beheading Feels Like ,” “ 10 Strangest Facts About Penises ,” “ My Bunny Ruined My Sex Life ,” “ Having Herpes Has Made My Sex Life Better ,” “ 10 More Strange Facts About Penises ,” and an essay by a woman who expected a marriage proposal from her boyfriend but instead got an offer for anal sex .
On Wednesday, Salon’s editorial staff coordinated to tweet out their dissatisfaction with the slow-moving management. Joan Walsh, editor-at-large, former editor-in-chief and frequent MSNBC contributor, signaled her concern as well.
Yes @soniasaraiya, I was proud of our unanimous organizing drive. Didn't expect to be waiting this long to be recognized #SalonUnion — Joan Walsh (@joanwalsh) July 28, 2015
Employees tell IBTimes that they are looking to unionize to create a system for better communication between labor and management, much of which is currently ad hoc. They want things like employee reviews, greater clarity about editorial goals and scheduled updates about raises. Some complain of low salaries, while others say it is Salon’s duty as a progressive site to live out its pro-labor editorial stance .
Salon, historically unprofitable, was founded in 1995 by journalist and author David Talbot. Throughout the 2000s its main source of revenue were pay-to-view subscriptions, which it finally abandoned in 2012 after a “tepid response from users,” according to its earnings statement.
Last year, the management at progressive watchdog site Media Matters For America also fought a union drive by employees, declining to recognize a union through a card check of the majority of the staff. The organization instead forced a union election under the supervision of the National Labor Relations Board.
“Many Media Matters employees feel betrayed by the unexpected and unexplained path our leadership has taken in response to our efforts to unionize," the MMFA employees said in a statement. The union eventually materialized, but only after a long and grueling battle inside the self-described liberal organization.
With the employees at Salon gearing up to take their fight to the next level, Salon's brand is now wide-open to charges of hypocrisy, from inside and outside the company. |
Does your dog have a sense of self? Does your cat live her life with Zenlike awareness or is she just a pleasantly-packaged pet with mechanical eyes set in an unanimated, furry face?
Birds, dolphins, elephants, mice, pre-historic human beings... Do any creatures other than modern-day people possess what we call consciousness?
The fur might fly this summer at the first scientific conference to put that question on the stand. Brain researchers from around the world are set to gather July 7 at the University of Cambridge for what is being billed as the First Annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference (named after Sir Francis Crick, who, after co-discovering the structure of DNA, set his mind to unraveling the mysteries of consciousness). The meeting could mark the turning point in our assessment of how much we have in common with Fido, Flipper and even houseflies.
Or not. When the question is, "Do animals have emotional and intellectual lives?", the scientific community can fight like cats and dogs.
"Over the years, people have come to agree that animals have a level of perceptual consciousness," says Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Alex and Me (HarperCollins 2009). In her book, Pepperberg demonstrated that parrots are capable of intelligent communication. "Animals process information and make decisions. The extent to which they ruminate at the next level - being aware of being aware - is difficult to nail down. It's difficult to ask."
Pepperberg points to mirror studies in which elephants and dolphins seem to recognize themselves, a rarity in the animal world as anyone with a dog and a mirror can tell you. Such self-recognition has been linked to empathy and deception. "Some experts say mirror tests tell us something," she says. But others, she adds, point out that children who pass similar mirror tests are confused when their mothers enter the room during the test. "They run behind the mirror and look for her."
Pepperberg is to parrots what Jane Gooodall is to chimps; her work is helping us understand the animal mind. Many of us gained entry to the debate on animal consciousness through the delightfully written, heartfelt Alex and Me. Pepperberg also is author of and the more scholarly Alex Studies and her research will be presented at the conference.
For 30 years, from June 1977 to September 2007, Pepperberg studied an African grey parrot named Alex. By the time Alex died, the duo had shattered our previous conception of what constituted a "bird brain." Birds, Pepperberg claimed, were capable of intelligent communication.
But her findings met strong resistance.
Professionally and personally, Pepperberg ran an obstacle course to reach the point at which her research was taken seriously. Although today she is an adjunct associate professor of psychology at Brandeis University and a research associate in psychology at Harvard University, the scientific community marginalized her and her work for years. Her initial research, probing whether a parrot can use English labels to refer to objects, was rejected by the leading scientific journals Nature and Science. Meanwhile, the road to research funding was paved with rejection letters. "I was not only using an unconventional subject, I was using unconventional training techniques and unconventional testing techniques," she said. (In a 2011 interview with Nova, she told interviewer Neil deGrasse Tyson, "The first grant proposal came back asking what I was smoking.")
A lack of steady and enthusiastic support was nothing new to Pepperberg, who says she grew up with a cold and distant mother who blamed her daughter's birth for her own failed career as a bookkeeper. "In those days, when you got pregnant, you got fired," she says.
Like Marie Curie, Pepperberg persevered through professional and personal hindrances. Despite cramped lab space and little funding, her research continued on borrowed time at a handful of supportive universities, including Purdue, Northwestern and University of Arizona.
Alex and Me recounts her many roadblocks and eventual breakthroughs. With a scientist's restraint she writes of the day that Alex, who could count to six, was shown a tray of objects and asked, "How many green wool?" The answer was two. But Alex repeatedly squawked "One" or "Four." Pepperberg, suspecting Alex was messing with her, gave him a time out in his room. As she closed his door, the bird protested. "Two...two...two...I'm sorry."
On the night before Alex died in 2007, Pepperberg, who was careful for scientific reasons to call Alex's vocal production "labels" instead of "words," bid him goodnight.
"You be good. I love you."
Those were Alex's last vocalizations, not Pepperberg's.
Like every great story, this one had a denouement. The parrot's premature death (greys' average lifespan is 60 years) prompted an outpouring of grief worldwide. The Economist published a lengthy obituary. The New York Times science section led with the story. CNN, the Associated Press, The Guardian, All Things Considered, Nature News and other media outlets paid him tribute. Thousands of unsolicited emails and letters of shared grief found their way to the indefatigable scientist whose work had been roped off for years like a crime scene. Let the scientists fight all they want, these messages seemed to say. We know why your heart is breaking. You have lost someone you loved and who felt some emotion for you in return.
No doubt the scientists at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference this summer will hotly debate the topic of creature consciousness. The ideas are in their infancy and the answers, says Pepperberg, "await discovery." |
For other people of the same name, see Bill Graham
Eldridge Wayne Coleman[1] (born June 7, 1943) is an American retired professional wrestler currently signed to WWE under a Legends Contract. An iconic figure in professional wrestling, he worked under the ring name "Superstar" Billy Graham and gained recognition for his tenure as the WWWF Heavyweight Champion in 1977–1978. As an award-winning bodybuilder, he was a training partner and close friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is most remembered for revolutionizing the interview and physique aspects of the professional wrestling industry, and for his charismatic performance style. Some of his wrestling protégés include Hulk Hogan, Jesse Ventura, and Ric Flair.
Early life [ edit ]
Wayne Coleman was born into a working-class family in Phoenix, Arizona on June 7, 1943.[5] His father was from Mississippi, and his mother, who also claimed Cherokee ancestry, was from Arkansas.[5] Coleman was attracted to weight lifting in the fifth grade.[6] As a teenager he was an avid reader of bodybuilding magazines, his idols being Steve Reeves and John Grimek.[7] As a teenager, he became a devout Christian and traveled to religious revivals where he incorporated feats of strength into his sermons.[6]
Coleman was a shot put champion in high school.[6] He also dabbled in amateur and professional boxing, participating in the 1959 Golden Gloves.[8] At age 26, he tried out for the Canadian Football League's Calgary Stampeders but was traded to the Montreal Alouettes.[6] He played in only a couple of games.[6] In between football engagements, he worked as a bouncer in various nightclubs in Phoenix, New York and Los Angeles.[9] After tearing his Achilles tendon, he decided to pursue a career in professional wrestling.[6]
Bodybuilding career [ edit ]
In 1961 Coleman was the winner of the West Coast division of the Mr. Teenage America bodybuilding contest (Frank Zane winning in the East Coast division), and his photo appeared soon after in Bob Hoffman's Strength and Fitness magazine.[1] Coleman began to train intensively in 1968 at Gold's Gym in Santa Monica, where he worked out with Dave Draper, Franco Columbu and Arnold Schwarzenegger. At this time he was able to bench press 605 lbs (the world record, held by his friend Pat Casey, was 616 lbs).[10] One of Coleman's photo shoots with Schwarzenegger featured that year in Joe Weider's Muscle Fitness magazine.
When Coleman decided to become a professional wrestler two years later, he had the inspiration of marrying wrestling to bodybuilding. As a wrestler he weight-trained continuously, and in 1975 prepared for the World Bodybuilding Guild's Pro. Mr. America contest in New York City, where his 22-inch biceps won first place in the Best Developed Arms division.[11][12] At the peak of his wrestling career in 1977, Coleman weighed 275 lbs. From 1978 he gained more weight and in 1980, at 325 lbs, he took part in the World's Strongest Man competition in Great Gorge, New Jersey. He finished seventh in this contest in spite of injuring himself in one of the events.[1] On December 6 of the same year Coleman hosted the U.S. Invitational Powerlifting Championship in Phoenix, Arizona.[13]
Professional wrestling career [ edit ]
Early years (1969–1972) [ edit ]
In 1969, Coleman was encouraged by professional wrestler Bob Lueck to train with Stu Hart for the latter's Stampede Wrestling promotion.[6] He trained under Hart in Calgary before debuting on January 16, 1970 in a match with Dan Kroffat.[14] After wrestling briefly under his real name, Coleman traveled back to the United States in May, wrestling for a few months with Dr. Jerry Graham, Brick Darrow, Rick Cahill and Ron Pritchard in Arizona before he and Jerry Graham joined the National Wrestling Alliance's Los Angeles promotion (run by Mike LeBell) as a tag team the following August. He changed his ring name to Billy Graham, as a tribute to the famous evangelist of the same name.[3][15] Later, while wrestling in Championship Wrestling from Florida, the name would serve both as his ring name and to make him the (kayfabe) youngest brother of Jerry and the other Graham Brothers (Eddie and Luke).[1][9]
In late December 1970 Graham went north to join Roy Shire's NWA San Francisco promotion, working with Pat Patterson (his tag-team partner), Ray Stevens, Cyclone Negro, and Peter Maivia. Graham's nearly two-year run in central California included a stint wrestling in Hawaii in February and March 1972. It was during his Californian period that Graham developed a new aspect of his character; before a match he would stage an arm wrestling contest, encouraging public challenges to his title of "Arm Wrestling Champion of the World".[16][17]
American Wrestling Association (1972–1975) [ edit ]
On October 2, 1972, Graham premiered in Verne Gagne's American Wrestling Association (AWA) based in Minneapolis, where he took on the moniker "Superstar". As he toured the north-central states and adjacent areas of Canada, Graham feuded with Gagne, The Crusher, The Bruiser, Wahoo McDaniel, Billy Robinson, Ken Patera and Ivan Koloff, the latter becoming his tag-team partner.[1] By this time, Graham was integrating into his performances not only arm wrestling contests but also weightlifting challenges (mainly involving ex-Olympian Ken Patera) and posing routines.[18]
In September and October 1974 Graham took leave from the AWA to join the International Wrestling Alliance's "Super Wide Series" tour of Japan, where he fought such local stars as Mighty Inoue, Animal Hamaguchi and Rusher Kimura. Following his return from Japan, Graham formed a tag team with Dusty Rhodes. He left the AWA and returned to the NWA in May 1975, signing up with Red Bastien's Dallas-based promotion for five months and taking the local "Brass Knucks" title from Mad Dog Vachon on August 8. For most of October, Graham worked for the Mid Atlantic promotion in North Carolina, standing in for Ric Flair, who had just been injured in a plane crash.[19]
World Wide Wrestling Federation and return to NWA (1975–1976) [ edit ]
Graham made his in–ring debut in the World Wide Wrestling Federation (WWWF) on October 25, 1975, in a tag-team match at the Boston Garden in which he and Spiros Arion defeated WWWF Heavyweight Champion Bruno Sammartino and Dominic De Nucci.[20] At this time The Grand Wizard became the Graham's manager.[6] Another major feud at this time was with Polish muscleman Ivan Putski.
A brief contract with the NWA in Houston, Texas followed from June to August 1976, after which Graham went on his second tour of Japan, this time accompanied by Ivan Koloff. He feuded with Antonio Inoki during this Japanese run. After returning to America, Graham and Koloff made an unsuccessful attempt to launch their own wrestling promotion in Southern California.[21] In November 1976, on the invitation of Dusty Rhodes, Graham joined the NWA promotion in Florida, beating Rhodes for the Florida heavyweight title on November 22 at the West Palm Beach Auditorium. His work in this period included occasional visits to St Louis, Missouri, where he took on NWA World Heavyweight Champion Harley Race.[22]
Return to WWWF (1977–1981) [ edit ]
Graham in 1977
Graham returned to the WWWF in April 1977 after an agreement with promoter Vincent J. McMahon (Senior). Graham defeated Bruno Sammartino for the WWWF Heavyweight Championship on April 30, 1977, in Baltimore, Maryland.[1] Graham held the title for nine and a half months.[4]
During his reign, he wrestled across America and in Japan (February 1978), facing challengers such as former champion Bruno Sammartino, Jack Brisco, Dusty Rhodes, Pedro Morales, Don Muraco, Mil Mascaras, Strong Kobayashi and Riki Choshu.[1] On 25 January 1978 in Miami, Florida at the Orange Bowl football stadium, Graham wrestled against then-NWA World Heavyweight Champion Harley Race in a WWWF World Heavyweight Championship vs. NWA World Heavyweight Championship unification match which ended in a one-hour time-limit draw.[23][1][6] Although a defeat by Bob Backlund, who was to embody the virtuous junior "all-American" wrestler, had been written into Graham's current contract with the WWWF, Graham suggested another outcome to McMahon: that Ivan Koloff should turn on him, thus starting a feud that would make Graham a fan favorite. McMahon refused because of the handshake deal to make Backlund the new fan favorite champion and he did not want to go back on his word. It was also unheard of for a counter-cultural character like Graham to be a fan favorite, because McMahon and many old promoters saw Graham as a confirmed heel and therefore a negative role model. Graham eventually "lost" the title to Backlund on February 20, 1978.[1]
Another feud Graham had as champion was with Dusty Rhodes, which culminated in a Texas Bullrope match. His confrontations with Rhodes continued after Graham had been forced to drop the belt to Backlund.[1] Rhodes himself, a long-time friend of Graham's, recalled these matches with Graham in 1978 as among the most exciting and memorable of his career.[24]
Disillusioned by the premature loss of his belt, Graham left the WWWF in December 1978 and accepted an offer to join Paul Boesch's promotion in Houston, Texas, lending himself out for other NWA events in California and Florida as well.[1] In April 1979 he embarked on his third IWA tour of Japan, where he wrestled the same men he had worked with in 1974. In March 1979, the new Continental Wrestling Association (CWA) named Graham as their World Champion. On November 8, 1979 Graham lost the belt to Jerry Lawler in Lexington, Kentucky.[25] His following NWA engagements in Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Texas became fewer and rarer until he stopped wrestling in April 1980. Graham wrestled only two matches (one in Canada and one in Los Angeles) in the whole of 1981. He spent some time competing in Japan, where he added some martial arts techniques to his repertoire.[12]
Second return to WWF (1982–1983) [ edit ]
Graham returned to the now renamed World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in September 1982. He debuted in the promotion with entirely new look: lean, with a bald head and mustache, and sporting black karate pants. Graham later stated that he wanted to retire the "Superstar" character out of frustration with Vince McMahon Sr. for not letting him become a fan favorite.[26] After his return, he attacked Backlund, destroying his championship belt.[12] He challenged Backlund for the WWF Championship, but was unable to win the title.[9][12] He left the promotion in April 1983.[27]
Return to AWA and second return to NWA (1983–1986) [ edit ]
Graham signed up with the AWA again in October 1983, wrestling mainly in the Mid West. By the following year he had regained his earlier body weight and in April 1984 he began his NWA run with Championship Wrestling from Florida, first as a member of Kevin Sullivan's Army of Darkness and later as the group's opponent after he tired of Sullivan's abuse of his valet Fallen Angel and stopped Sullivan from beating her at ringside. From November 1984 Graham joined Jim Crockett Promotions (Mid-Atlantic Wrestling) in North Carolina, working for Paul Jones in his feud against Jimmy Valiant. It was during this stint, in the summer of 1985, that Graham bulked up further, and returned to his tie-dyed look, growing a full goatee and dyeing the mustache blond.[9]
Third return to the WWF (1986–1989) [ edit ]
Graham returned to the WWF one more time in June 1986, now as a fan favorite. After a few appearances, it was diagnosed in August that he required a hip replacement. The footage of Graham's hip replacement surgery was shown on WWF TV on September 27 as a means of promoting his comeback. He returned in mid-1987 and worked a heavy schedule from mid July to late October, feuding with Harley Race and Butch Reed. However, the strain on his hip as well as his ankles also deteriorating proved to be too much. In Syracuse on October 27, the One Man Gang supposedly retired him from active competition permanently with a running splash on the concrete floor after Graham's win over Reed. In this incident, aired on the November 14, 1987 episode of Superstars, Don Muraco came to Graham's aid, and Graham subsequently became Muraco's manager. Graham's last wrestling match, also against Butch Reed and at 44 years of age, actually took place on November 7, 1987, in St Louis, Missouri. Over the next year, in between bouts of surgery, Graham worked for the WWF as a commentator.[9]
Fourth return to WWE (2004–2009) [ edit ]
On March 14, 2004, Graham was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame class of 2004, the night before WrestleMania XX, by then-World Heavyweight Champion Triple H, whom Graham had helped inspire to become a professional wrestler.[1] Graham later sold his WWE Hall of Fame ring to purchase anti-rejection medications to help treat his liver transplant.[28]
Several months later, Graham joined WWE on a swing of nine televised events where he was interviewed by Jonathan Coachman (on December 28) before performing a skit which ended with Coachman getting knocked out.[1] On February 25, 2005, Graham appeared at another live event and was again interviewed by Coachman before knocking him out.[1] Three days later, Graham appeared on Raw, where he encouraged Randy Orton to do something to make himself notable.[1] On October 3 at WWE Homecoming, Graham participated in a Legends Ceremony with 24 other WWE legends.[1] On the January 23, 2006 episode of Raw, he promoted his book and DVD.[1] Graham parted ways with WWE in 2009.[29]
Fifth return to WWE (2015–present) [ edit ]
In November 2015, Graham announced that he had signed a legends contract (a long-term deal to make infrequent, non-wrestling appearances) in a Facebook post.[30]
Legacy [ edit ]
Roberta Morgan's 1979 kayfabe book Main Event wrote, "Although he is a rule bender, [Graham] has managed to stay very popular with the fans, probably because of his skill, strength, and colorful personality". As a headliner in Madison Square Garden, which was the WWF's primary arena throughout his tenure, Graham sold out 19 of 20 shows.[4]
Many wrestlers have based their looks and styles on Billy Graham. Some examples are Ric Flair, Austin Idol, Scott Steiner, Triple H, Hulk Hogan and Jesse "The Body" Ventura.[1][9] Graham was also famous for his characteristic use of the word "brother" in his promos, referring to either commentators or fellow wrestlers. This stems from his background attending evangelical revival meetings, where everybody referred to each other as "brother" or "sister" (in Christ). Graham's use of the word caught on, and since then countless wrestlers have also used "brother" in their own respective promos, most notably Hulk Hogan.[31]
Graham has often lectured young athletes on the dangers of steroids.[32][33] His autobiography, Tangled Ropes, was released by WWE on January 10, 2006.[1] WWE also released a DVD about Graham's career, titled 20 Years Too Soon: The "Superstar" Billy Graham Story.[1] Graham had a new DVD released in 2013 through Hannibal Pro Wrestling and Seriocity Productions titled "Superstar" Billy Graham: Full Disclosure.
Disputes with the McMahons [ edit ]
In the early 1990s US federal agents were investigating Dr. George Zahorian, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania physician who had been dispensing anabolic steroids and other drugs to World Wrestling Federation (WWF) wrestlers at WWF events. In 1991 Dr. Zahorian was convicted under the US federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 which prohibited the prescription of steroids for non-therapeutic purposes. This led to WWF owner Vince McMahon Jr., who admitted to being a steroid user himself, being put on trial on charges of steroid distribution in 1994. The trial concluded with McMahon's acquittal. During this time Graham personally sued Zahorian and the WWF, claiming that they had forced him to take steroids to maintain his position in the company. His lawsuit was unsuccessful, partly because he had been using steroids for a decade preceding his WWF debut.[29] Recalling the lawsuit on a 2003 episode of WWE Confidential, he attributed the litigation to his bitterness and claimed that he was an innovator of steroid use in the organization.[34]
Graham went on a public awareness campaign regarding the dangers of steroids during this time, including an appearance with McMahon on The Phil Donahue Show in 1992. During the Donahue taping Graham claimed to have witnessed WWF officials sexually abuse children.[35] McMahon claimed the abuse had never taken place, and Graham later admitted that he made up the allegations, hoping to extort "hush money" out of the WWF.[29] In his autobiography, Graham describes making the allegations as being "my most shameful moment, not only in the wrestling profession, but in my life".[5] Graham wrote an apology to McMahon but received no response until his 2002 liver transplant.[29]
Five years after being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, Graham was released from his consultancy position in World Wrestling Entertainment. He sold his Hall of Fame ring on eBay to help pay for medical bills and requested that he be entirely removed from the Hall of Fame after Abdullah the Butcher was inducted. Graham complained that Abdullah had never wrestled in the promotion.[36][37]
Graham spoke out against Linda McMahon during her 2010 Senate campaign, claiming that she was distancing herself from the racy programming that she profited from while acting as CEO for WWE.[38] Upon learning that his liver condition had worsened, Graham reached out to apologize to the McMahons, even offering to be a spokesman for Linda McMahon's campaign.[29]
In July 2015, Graham sent a letter to Vince McMahon requesting to take the position of Dusty Rhodes, who had recently died, at NXT. Graham received criticism from fans due to his timing and opportunism. He defended himself, calling his critics "evil, sub humans", and compared a possible reconciliation with McMahon to that of long-time WWE critic Bruno Sammartino, who reconciled with McMahon and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame class of 2013.[39]
Personal life [ edit ]
Family [ edit ]
As stated in his autobiography Tangled Ropes, Graham and his wife Valerie, whom he married in 1978, were never able to have children. Graham has two children from a previous marriage to Madelyn Miluso.[40] His daughter Capella was born on June 8, 1972.[40] She was named after a star he read about in the Atlas of the Universe.[40] His son Joey was born on March 18, 1975.[41] Joey was born with double pneumonia and an enlarged heart, which was later surgically corrected.[41] His godfather was wrestler Dusty Rhodes.[41]
Health [ edit ]
Graham received a liver transplant in 2002 from a 26-year-old female donor, who had died in a car crash.[42] Graham's liver was in the cirrhosis stage at the time of his transplant. Graham was again hospitalized on May 24, 2006, due to a bowel obstruction from an earlier surgery.[1]
In July 2010, Graham was hospitalized due to liver problems.[3] Afterward, he announced that he probably only had one year left to live without another liver transplant.[3] Graham reserved a burial spot at the Green Acres cemetery in Scottsdale, Arizona, next to Eddie Guerrero.[29] On March 31, 2011, The Phoenix New Times reported that Graham's doctor, Hector Rodriguez-Luna, acknowledged that Graham's advanced fibrosis may be early cirrhosis and that he could live for two more years if he took Interferon—a drug to help slow his hepatitis C—and stayed in shape.[29] By 2012, Graham was diagnosed with third-stage liver disease and cirrhosis.[42]
On January 17, 2013 Graham was hospitalized with double pneumonia and possible heart failure.[43] He was re-hospitalized for a liver complication in October 2014.[3]
On August 2, 2016, Graham was hospitalized while undergoing a medical procedure due to internal bleeding; he underwent the surgery on August 3 to identify the cause of the issues.[44]
Championships and accomplishments [ edit ] |
A: They're basically the same.
First of all, you need to add all this stuff to the RED SCARLET-X to be ready to shoot:
Second of all, the list price of the Canon EOS C300 is $20,000. Once it hits retailers like B&H Photo, that will come down. Let's take its closest competitor, the Sony F3, as an example: the camera's list price is $16,800, but B&H is selling it for $13,960 ($13,160 after a rebate). So let's take 20% as the estimated street discount, which brings the $20k camera down to $16k (which has also been a reported selling price of the C300 -- probably due to confusion between MSRP and street).
The RED SCARLET-X lists for $9,750 and that is direct from RED: no discounts. However, that is a "brain only" price (though it comes with a SSD recording module, Canon lens mount, and AC adapter). After December 31st, in fact, the RED's prices will go up. But if you include the prices of the things you'll need to shoot in each cameras' most basic configuration, many all of these things are included with the Canon but not with the RED. (A couple of them are not included with the Canon either, where noted).
Camera Body
Lens Mount
Side Handle (RED +$950)
Viewfinder/Screen (RED's 5" LCD is $1,600, though it's probably nicer than the Canon's EVF)
Media Module
Media for 1 hour of footage (a cheap $100 CF card for the Canon, but two $950 SSDs for the RED)
Media Reader (a cheap $50 CF reader for the Canon, but a $250 REDMAG for the RED)
Battery Charger (an extra $150 for the RED, though I'm not clear on whether the included AC adapter can also charge batteries)
Batteries for a few hours of shooting (an extra $150 battery for the Canon, three $195 REDVOLTS for the RED)
This brings the RED up to an even $15k. As you get into more realistic battery and media numbers -- I included the absolute minimum above -- the SCARLET-X becomes more expensive than the C300. Which is to say nothing of the fact that the C300's 1080P MPEG-2 files require much less computer power to edit and process in post than do the 4K R3D files (thus more expense on the back-end for the RED). Plus, I'm betting the Canon will be better in low light situations, which makes your necessary lighting budget lower (though just because you can shoot without lights does not mean you should).
Finally, while some pointed out during yesterday's brouhaha that "the RED will be available sooner," that remains to be seen -- RED's November 17th (for the PL mount version) and December 1st (for the Canon mount) dates are for when the SCARLET-X starts shipping. RED's history is not one of shipping on time (not in any real quantity, at least), and on top of that some of the required accessories are backordered, so by the time you're able to get your hands on a full SCARLET-X kit, I'm betting the C300 will be shipping in volume.
Certainly by the time RED has all of the SCARLET-X features enabled -- including a basic ability like playing back the footage in-camera (yes, this is not currently possible with the $28,000 EPIC) -- you can bet the C300 will be out in the wild. I'm not second-guessing my decision to order a SCARLET-X, but let's not pretend that the RED will be ready to shoot for $10k on December 1st. For all intents and purposes, both of these cameras are $16k (without lenses), and both of them are shipping in 2012.
But only one of them's being used to shoot The Hobbit in 3D!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHF536TJ0iE
UPDATE: some of the comments here and elsewhere have caused me to write Why I'm Ordering a RED SCARLET-X, and How it Relates to My Feature 'Man-child.' Hopefully that clarifies things. |
MONTREAL
UFC president Dana White has caused quite the stir among fans in recent days by saying that he didn’t think Georges St-Pierre would fight again, but that’s an opinion not shared by the fighter himself.
“He says he’s sure I won’t come back, that’s his opinion,” said St. Pierre, who is currently in his native Quebec. “I train, I keep myself in shape. I have marks on my body because my body bruises easily and I’m training hard.”
“It doesn’t mean I’m coming back, but it doesn’t mean I’m not coming back,” he added. “I’m thinking about it.”
St. Pierre said that his relationship with White and the UFC is still on good terms.
“Dana always does what’s good for the business side,” he said. “I was never angry at him. On the contrary, he had a good reason to say that to come back, you have to be hungry.”
Famished as he might be, the 33-year-old says he won’t be back in the ring until the UFC adopts a more stringent anti-doping policy.
“So far, there’s been some nice words, but nothing’s been done,” he said. “As long as they do nothing, I for sure won’t come back.”
Fresh back from a trip to Argentina, St. Pierre says he feels he’s at his best “now that nobody is trying to get me down.”
However, he admits that he misses competing. That’s why he wants to help his old training partner, Rory MacDonald, reach the summit of the sport.
“What would give me the most pleasure is to see Rory take the title,” he said. “I feel like I would have accomplished something new. My duty is to help him up. Right now, I am where I am, and if it had to end, I ended at the top. I ever want to go back, I’d snap my fingers and it wouldn’t be too hard to get back in fighting form.” |
Donald Trump's "working vacation" in New Jersey ruined a surprise skydiving spectacle for 250 kids at a day camp after the Secret Service denied clearance for the event.
For more than three months, the Tamarack Day Camp in Randolph, New Jersey, had planned a huge surprise for their color war "break" — a common camp tradition which signals the start of a competition between the kids, and which usually involves an elaborate spectacle for the children to enjoy.
This year's color war "break" at Tamarack Day Camp involved four skydivers dressed as superheroes who would jump down from a plane and "rescue" the kids from "bikers" who drove into camp, Jessica Grannum, the camp's assistant director, told BuzzFeed News.
Grannum said that months of planning had gone into the surprise, which had been set to unfold on Wednesday morning.
But a few hours before the event, Grannum said the Secret Service denied clearance for the plane, as it would have entered the no-fly zone created around Bedminster for Trump's 17-day vacation at his private golf club.
"This morning, we had the FAA clearance, the sky divers were ready on the plane and then the Secret Service shut us down for the no-fly zone," Grannum said. "Which was really sad." |
Horace Mann Middle School, a Temple Buell Art Deco brick masterpiece designed in 1931.
Named after the famous education reformer from Massachusetts, the floor plan view is a giant “H”.
And because the floor plan is clearly an “H”, I would suggest that the elevations also
represent abstracted “H”’s, as well.
Temple Buell is the master Denver architect repsonsible for the location of the Cherry Creek Shopping Center. In the 1930s, he designed Art Deco treasures, thankfully some still survive today. Other examples are the brick Mullen’s Home For Nurses and the terra cotta Paramount Theatre.
I cannot imagine how the designs created from the stacked brick could be planned out on a sheet of drafting paper or how bricklayers could even implement these plans.
(as always, click photos to enlarge) |
IAMDDB is the future.
The rapping singer-songwriter from Manchester has been causing a stir for the past year with her trap-licked R&B and, so far, "Shade", which she released only in August of this year, has had the biggest reception—mainly for its everyday life tales and hazy sonics. Already a club spinner, IAMDDB decided she wanted to ramp it up a bit more, recruiting Manchester remix master CHIMPO to bless "Shade" with some early 2000s grime stabs and ravey synths.
"I was gassed when D asked me to have a go remixing this tune," says CHIMPO. "I love this song, so it was a buzz to put my spin on it. This collab is long overdue too, as we're literally from the same musical family. The original is so sick there's nothing I could do to add to it being what it is, so I just put it in a totally different format and made it into an old-school grime tune. Love to Complex for hosting it and love to D for shouting me to flip it."
"Shade" appears on IAMDDB's latest project, 'Hoodrich Vol. 3'. Check it out here. |
Thorsen funneled millions of taxpayer dollars toward vaccine-autism coverup
(NaturalNews) The very legitimacy of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a trustworthy safeguard of public health hangs in the balance as evidence continues to emerge about rampant deception, fraud and even money laundering within the agency. Specifically with regard to vaccines and autism, key players involved in the propaganda campaign to deny this link are now being exposed as liars working on behalf of the vaccine industry.One such liar is Dr. Poul Thorsen, a Danish scientist who was indicted for stealing millions of dollars from the CDC and using it to cover up vaccine dangers. Thorsen, as you may recall, was heavily involved in producing a stream of fraudulent studies that supposedly "disproved" the now-evident link between vaccines and autism. The CDC has also continually cited Thorsen's studies as "evidence" that vaccines are safe, declaring the debate to be over in light of their findings.But, one by one, these and various other studies, including a prominent one published in the journal Pediatrics , are being called into question due to fraud and author conflicts of interest. And to make matters worse, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has yet to even follow through with its indictment of Thorsen, who continues to produce phony studies from his cozy position at Sygehus Lillebaelt Hospital in Kolding, Denmark.As we reported back in 2011, Thorsen had previously worked for the CDC, overseeing millions of dollars' worth of grant money that we now know was used to prop up the myth that vaccines are safe. The CDC had long perpetuated this myth, so it was in the agency's best interests to quell public fears by generating a series of studies to this end.Thorsen was later caught stealing money from the CDC and using it in his home country of Denmark to produce the infamous "Denmark Study," the holy grail that supposedly settled, once and for all, the vaccine-autism debate. Except it didn't. Thorsen was indicted by a federal grand jury in Atlanta, Georgia, on charges of wire fraud, money laundering and defrauding research institutions of grant money.That was more than three years ago, and Thorsen still hasn't been brought to justice. As explained by, Thorsen faces up to 260 years in prison and $22.5 million in fines if convicted on all charges. But as it currently stands, Thorsen remains a free man -- at least for now. With new evidence showing rampant fraud and data manipulation in other vaccine-autism studies at the CDC, justice could be on the horizon.As we've been reporting in the past few days, at least three top CDC scientists are now under the gun for their involvement in a 2003 study that, thanks to a key whistleblower, has been proven fraudulent. Like Thorsen's research, this particular study had claimed that no link exists between vaccines and autism . But according to Dr. William Thompson, an epidemiologist who worked on behalf of the CDC to investigate a potential link between vaccines and autism, data from this study was manipulated to cover up what has now been confirmed to be a definitive link."Dr. Frank DeStefano, Dr. Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsop, Dr. Coleen Boyle -- they knew," explains Dr. Andrew Wakefield in a new film on the scandal, referring to the three CDC scientists who were complicit in the coverup. "They let it happen and they could have stopped it."You can watch Dr. Wakefield's groundbreaking film here:You can also contact the White House at 202-456-1414 and request for President Obama to instruct Secretary Kerry and Attorney General Holder to bring Thorsen to the U.S. and prosecute him, and you can call Congressman Darrell Issa, Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, at 202-225-3906 and ask for a hearing to be conducted on Thorsen as soon as possible. Further nstructions for doing this can be found in the last paragraph of the following piece by |
On Tuesday, Baidu, China’s leading Internet search engine, confirmed its interest in blockchain technology by becoming a premier member of Hyperledger. China’s prohibitions of cryptocurrency exchanges and token offerings clearly have not dissuaded domestic blockchain development.
On October 17, 2017, Baidu – the company behind China’s top search engine – joined an open-source collaboration for blockchain technology known as Hyperledger. According to Amazon’s Alexa, baidu.com is the most popular website in China and ranks fourth globally. The Beijing-based conglomerate has a market cap of $93.95 billion at time of press.
Baidu previously expressed interest in cryptocurrency in June 2016 when it invested $60 million in Circle Internet Financial. Six months later, however, Circle removed its bitcoin buying and selling features and shifted focus to its mobile payments business. Circle launched a blockchain-based, no-fee foreign payments service in June 2017.
In China, over the last several months, regulators shut down vast swathes of the cryptocurrency world, banning token offerings ( ICOs ) and demanding that trading on cryptocurrency exchanges cease. Despite these heavy-handed decrees, the authorities appear more concerned about the economic impact of cryptocurrencies than blockchain technology itself.
It’s unclear if Baidu will immediately incorporate blockchain technology, but the company has a broad product base for experimentation. Readers can get a sense of the company’s breadth from just a small sprinkling of its products, which include maps, music, patent searches, cloud storage, and autonomous cars. |
Photo via Jagmeet Singh's Facebook
Well, here we are at the tail end of the New Democratic Party's leadership race. It's been a long road since the party unceremoniously dumped Tom Mulcair in Edmonton back in April 2016, but on October 1, we might find out who will be the standard bearer of Canada's social democrats going into the 2019 election. (If there is no winner on that first ballot, the lowest-scoring candidate is dropped and another week-long round of voting begins again.)
The identity of the future NDP leader is obviously still up in the air, although the consensus among most media types seems to be that Jagmeet Singh is the man to beat. Of course, this has seemed like the consensus since he entered the race—before there was much evidence for the argument, and even when there was some against it. (I was guilty of the same assumption the last time I wrote about the NDP leadership race, as many of you were happy to point out; mea culpa.)
So: does Singh actually have the race sewn up, or can Charlie Angus, Niki Ashton, or Guy Caron still surprise us? It depends on a number of factors.
The most important of these is the membership drive that wrapped up in August. As of last March, the NDP only had about 41,000 active members, down substantially from the nearly 128,000 members involved in the 2012 leadership that put Mulcair at the party's helm. An August poll of party donors—existing members who had given the party more than $200—found Charlie Angus as the favourite of more than 40 percent, followed by Niki Ashton and Guy Caron. Singh was dead last.
It's not surprising that Angus would be favoured by the Dipper die-hard set. Longtime party strategist Robin Sears has suggested in the Toronto Star that the federal NDP has been historically risk-averse in choosing their leaders. This could play into Angus' favour as a folksy, Northern, rural working-class stalwart—especially when compared to Singh, a trendy suburban upstart in a turban.
It's also worth noting how Singh's status as a visible racial and religious minority has repeatedly cropped up as a talking point over the course of the campaign. The high point was his on-camera shut down of a racist heckler at a campaign rally, which generated universal (if sometimes problematic) international acclaim.
The low point is definitely the intense (and ongoing) discussions about whether or not his leadership would jeopardize the Quebec wing of the party. Newly-minted Bloc Québécois Leader Martine Ouellet has even outright argued that putting the "visibly religious" Singh at the head of the party would alienate staunchly secular French Canada, although there are lots of reasons to believe that this is just posturing on her part. Fellow NDP leadership hopeful Guy Caron has also fired back saying that Ouellet's comments show that she has completely misunderstood the relationship between secularism and Québécois identity, which is a pretty withering charge to bring against a sovereigntist.
At any rate, as far as the leadership vote itself goes, the Quebec wing of the federal NDP only registered over 5,000 members, so it will have a marginal impact on the outcome of this race. Resolving the party's problems in Quebec will have to be a top priority whether or not Singh is the winner, but it would be fairly intellectually lazy to assume that the man is "too Sikh"—or that Quebec voters are too xenophobic—for that project to be dead on arrival.
Since we're back to talking about numbers: the party's membership rolls have swelled back up to 120,000 as of the August cutoff date, which is just shy of where it was in 2012 when the NDP was choosing Canada's new opposition leader. It's unclear how many of those members have been signed up by each federal leadership campaign. There have also been provincial leadership races this year in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, which definitely brought in new memberships.
Singh's team have claimed more than 47,000 new memberships, primarily in Ontario and BC. The party has not yet verified those numbers, but as the kids say: huge if true. As John Ivison has observed in The Globe and Mail, winning BC's lower mainland and suburban Ontario can hand you a federal election victory. If Singh has everything locked up in those two locales, it may already be game over.
But beyond the numbers, the ideological temperament of the party will also be a factor. Niki Ashton is running as the only unapologetically socialist candidate in the race, while Singh appears more like who Justin Trudeau might be if he had genuine progressive convictions instead of his (increasingly trademark) cynical window dressing on bargain-bin neoliberalism. It's tough to say where the party's head is at these days, but if the overall gestalt of the NDP is as risk-averse as they say, it's hard to see the membership stampede as far left as Ashton is positioning herself.
"Socialism" (so-called) may be in vogue among labour parties elsewhere in the English-speaking world at the moment, but Canada's NDP have been shying away from the concept long before they struck it from their constitution in 2013. Social democracy via parliamentary election is the name of the party's game; erstwhile revolutionaries need no longer apply. Unless we get a DSA North, the Communist Party of Canada is probably what you're looking for, and to be honest they seem to have a lot more fun.
Ultimately, if it does all come down to a pure numbers game, and Singh's campaign is right in its estimates, then it's possible the race could be called after the first ballot. But the NDP has been full of surprises (both good and bad) for well over a decade now, so there's no telling what might actually play out when they announce the results this Sunday.
Follow Drew Brown on Twitter. |
The Guardian Express has come across some very valuable information for all Americans, and all people on the planet as well. We have published several Press Releases in recent days from an organization called the One People’s Public Trust, or OPPT for short.
This group of people, trustees of the public wealth, were tired of things in the financial world structure being considered status quo, and used a UCC filing to foreclose on the people, businesses, and governments currently running the day-to-day financial goings on all over the World, evidently taking back what is rightfully the people’s wealth.
Now I am still trying to wrap my head around all of this information, and the information stream is considerable, and a gentleman named Andy Whiteley offered to help explain it to me, and to you as well.
So this article that you are about to read, is the explanation of all things related to the OPPT, the foreclosure they achieved with their UCC filing, and what that all means for all of the free people of the U.S., and the rest of the planet as well.
Hopefully, through this explanation, we can all have some understanding of this situation, because what has happened will change the World forever, and the way business gets done in it.
Please take the time to read it all, and try to absorb it all. The article will be in several installments.
Sam Davis
>>>>>>Many of you have heard, and many have not. Announced publicly on 25 December 2012, the system of Corporate-Governmental rule has been foreclosed. Legally foreclosed… via one of its own mechanisms. The “Powers That Be” are now the “Powers That Were”. All debt has been erased and corporations – including but not limited to Corporate Governments and Banks – have been foreclosed.
Sure, they may continue to play along in hopes we will play along with them. But thanks to a series of UCC (Uniform Commercial Code) filings made by the One People’s Public Trust (known as OPPT) the choice is now yours to make. A new framework for social governance is now in effect; a fact that has been ratified by the ‘legal’ framework of its corporate-controlled predecessor.
Systemically speaking… WE ARE FREE!
One People’s Public Trust
The conclusion of legal actions taken by the OPPT have generated a lot of excitement. And rightly so! The potential for positive change it creates is MOMENTUS!
But before we get into the implications I’d like to present to you the “what happened” and “how” of the situation.
Corporate-controlled Government and corporate-controlled Media refuse to announce their own demise – for obvious reasons. So, as informed global citizens, I believe our role is to understand what happened and how, so that we can inform others, and finally start the process of worldwide change we’ve all been waiting for.
But First, A Reality Check
Before I go on, allow me to state a few facts up front.
1) Governments are/were Corporations.
The Corporate Government phenomenon is not only demonstrated by the way “governments” behave as Beneficiaries (not as Trustees) of the government Trust, but the paper-trail also proves it! The United States, Canada, Australia, The United Kingdom, France, Italy, Brazil, Japan, South Africa…. and the list goes on…. all are US-based corporate entities, registered as such with the United States Security & Exchanges Commission… and operating as such at our expense. “The system” is oligarchical in nature, in that it is geared only to profit “the few” while the rest of us work to support it.
2) Persons are/were corporation.
At birth, a birth certificate application is signed by your parents which is used by Corporate Government to commence a Trust in your name. This Trust is used as collateral, and a collateral account is created and funded in your name. You are the Beneficiary of this Trust… but no-one tells you it exists. If you do not complete a Will by the age of 7, Corporate Government declares you deceased – under admiralty law of all things! – and you are officially considered by the system to be “lost at sea”. Seriously. Corporate Government then assumes financial control of your estate, and they – aware that most of us do in fact live beyond 7 – continue to treat us as living slaves. The funds generated by monetizing your life – using you as collateral – are loaned to you when you apply for bank finance, mortgages etc. You are then forced to work to repay those funds – plus interest – back to the system. Legally, you have no rights because you’re considered “dead” by the age of 7. You lose.
3) Mass media is the tool used by Corporate Governments to deliver propaganda directly to your home.
It is used to manipulate public perceptions of Corporate Government actions and inactions, to reinforce social norms, limits and behaviors, and to sell you crap by creating a “need” and then providing you with a product to fulfill it. And it isn’t limited just to Media; the psychology of the “old” paradigm is reinforced through educational and religious institutions as well.
Corporations, Governments and Media all tell the same lies. They are all part of the same beast.
4) As a result, the world’s economic structure is was a mechanism of mass slavery.
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property, and are forced to work. Slaves are held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, or to refuse to work.
Sound familiar?
You were born into “the system” without any say in how it works. You were raised and taught to contribute to the system. You must work exhaustive hours in the system, and you must pay taxes to the system. You must adhere to the rules of the system – most of which relate to property and ownership – or you will be punished by the system. By design, the system will deliver abundance only to a select few, and many others will go hungry. But if you don’t like it, you cannot leave the system. The system “owns” everything, everyone and everywhere.
Until now, you had one option: play along. It’s like living in a casino with no exit. And the house always wins.<<<<<<<<<
Stay tuned for more, but please, examine this content at length, and try to understand it all.
Up Next: Part 2 When Were Our Governments Corporatized?
Guest Author Andy Whiteley is the co-founder of Wake up World and is helping the OPPT trustees get the word out.
For more information, follow these 2 links.
http://oppt-in.com/
http://www.peoplestrust1776. org/
Sam Davis |
The state Department of Health Care Services is seeking to revoke the license of Costa Mesa substance abuse facility Pacific Coast Detox, after a patient died at the center and staff was accused of falsifying his medical records.
State spokeswoman Carol Sloan said the facility’s license has been suspended pending the outcome of a revocation hearing, which was requested by Pacific Coast. A date has not yet been set.
Officials at the detox center did not respond to phone calls or an email requesting comment on Monday. Pacific Coast’s website says it provides clinical detoxification services for substances including alcohol, heroin, opiates and other prescription drugs.
According to legal documents issued Nov. 7, an unidentified male patient died while detoxing at Pacific Coast. State certification standards require a newly admitted patient to be checked at least every 30 minutes during the first 12 hours after admission to monitor withdrawal symptoms.
The state investigation, however, found that Pacific Coast did not check the patient as frequently as required and “staff entered false information in decedent’s file,” the documents say.
At some point, staff attempted to awaken the patient without success. The documents say that as paramedics were on their way, two staff members made false entries suggesting observational checks had been made. Investigators observed security camera footage and found the patient was checked only once, though the documents, which contain partial redactments, don’t specify over what time period.
Contact the writer: [email protected] 714-796-3686 |
by
“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.” -Harold Pinter, Nobel Acceptance Speech “Obama is just a willing executioner. From the ruling class’s point of view, he’s the perfect figurehead because his mere appearance confuses and disarms so many. He seems to have spent his whole life trying to get chosen to play Judas. And that’s all there is in his resume.” -bevin, Comments line, Moon of Alabama
According to a newly-released Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, Barack Obama’s job-approval ratings have dipped to a new low of 41 percent with a full 54 percent of respondents saying they “disapproved” of the job he’s doing. Obama’s handling of the economy, health care and foreign policy were particular areas of concern for most respondents. On health care, Obama is seen as having strengthened the for-profit insurance industry with little benefit for ordinary working people. The survey also showed “the lowest-ever approval” for the president’s handling of foreign policy. And, on the economy, the results were even more shocking; a full 57% of the people polled “believe the U.S. is still in a recession” while “65 percent think the country is on the wrong track”. Widespread disappointment in Obama’s performance has weakened his support among blacks, Hispanics and women, traditionally, the most loyal groups in the Party’s base.
There’s no doubt that Obama has been hurt by the anemic recovery or by focusing on deficit reduction instead of job creation. High unemployment, flat wages and shrinking incomes have weighed heavily on expectations, which has put a damper on consumption and growth. Gallup’s Economic Confidence index now shows a “sharp decline in the outlook for the future” …”with some 57 percent of the respondents saying things are getting worse, not better.”
Indeed, things have gotten worse under Obama, much worse, which is why many of his most ardent supporters are falling off the bandwagon. And the disappointment is not limited to economic policy either. Recent surveys confirm what most people already know, that the public is tired of the interventions, the provocations, the meddling and the endless wars. The American people are increasingly isolationist and want the government to disengage from foreign conflicts. Here’s an excerpt from a recent survey by PEW that sums up the mood of the country:
“For the first time since 1964, more than half (52%) agree that the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own;” 38% disagree, according to a survey conducted Oct.-Nov. 2013. Similarly, 80% agree with the statement, “We should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our own national problems and building up our strength and prosperity here at home.” (U.S. Foreign Policy: Key Data Points from Pew Research, PEW Research Center)
The PEW poll merely expands on the findings in other surveys like this from the LA Times:
“Two thirds of Americans questioned in a recent poll said the 12-year war fought in Afghanistan…hasn’t been worth the price paid in lives and dollars… The survey conducted for the media by Langer Research Associates of New York found that disillusionment with the U.S.-led war was expressed by a majority of all political leanings. Overall, 66% of respondents said the war hasn’t been worth it. Those who identified themselves as liberals were most unhappy with the military investment: 78% said the war was a mistake.” (Poll: Two thirds of Americans say Afghan war not worth fighting, LA Times)
The same is true of Iraq. The war wasn’t worth fighting. Check this out on ABC News:
“Ten years after U.S. airstrikes on Baghdad punctuated the start of the Iraq war, nearly six in 10 Americans say the war was not worth fighting – a judgment shared by majorities steadily since initial success gave way to years of continued conflict. Nearly as many in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say the same about the war in Afghanistan. And while criticisms of both wars are down from their peaks, the intensity of sentiment remains high, with strong critics far outweighing strong supporters.” (A Decade on, Most are Critical of the U.S.-Led War in Iraq, ABC News)
And that brings us to today and the looming prospect of a war with Russia over developments in the Crimea. Here’s what people are thinking according to a survey in the Washington Post:
“A new poll suggests Americans have very little appetite for any real involvement in the crisis in Ukraine. Only 29 percent of Americans would like for the Obama administration to take a ‘firm stand’ against Russia’s incursion into its neighbor, according to the Pew Research Center poll, while nearly twice as many — 56 percent — prefer the United States not to get too involved in Ukraine. The poll reflects a war-weary American public that is still very reticent to get involved in international conflicts. The American people were similarly opposed to military intervention in Syria last year, despite President Obama calling for the use of force and seeking congressional approval for action.” (Few Americans want ‘firm stand’ against Russia in Ukraine, Washington Post)
Of course, Obama doesn’t care the American people want. He’s going to do what he signed-on to do; crack down on civil liberties, strangle the economy, and spread war across the planet. As far as the warmongering goes–he’s doing an even better job than Bush. Don’t believe me? Just check out this clip from the International Business Times:
“In their annual End of Year poll, researchers for WIN and Gallup International surveyed more than 66,000 people across 65 nations and found that 24 percent of all respondents answered that the United States “is the greatest threat to peace in the world today.” Pakistan and China fell significantly behind the United States on the poll, with 8 and 6 percent, respectively.” (In Gallup Poll, The Biggest Threat To World Peace Is… America?, IBT)
There you have it, the Obama presidency in a nutshell: “The United States is the greatest threat to peace in the world today.” Keep in mind, this survey wasn’t taken during the Bush years. Oh no. This is all Obama’s doing, every bit of it.
Let’s summarize: The majority of Americans think Obama is doing a lousy job. They think the economy stinks, and they think their financial situation is getting worse. They also think the country is on the wrong track, that America is a threat to world peace, and that they don’t want anymore goddamned wars.
Check, check, check, check and check.
So, what do you think the Obama administration’s reaction to this public outpouring has been?
I’ll tell you what it’s been. They’re happy. That’s right, they’re happy. Despite the plunging poll numbers and dwindling public support, the Obama team feels vindicated by the fact that they’re not as widely reviled as the Bush administration. That’s their benchmark: Bush. And they could be on to something too, after all, who would have thought that a president could repeal habeas corpus, destroy the economy, launch wars and coups like they’re going out of style, vaporize hundreds of innocent people in drone attacks, intensify surveillance on every man, woman and child in the United States, and claim the right to assassinate US citizens without due process, without inciting millions of enraged Americans to grab their pitchforks and head to Washington?
That’s what would have happened if Bush was still in office, right? But Obama gets a “pass”. Why? Because he’s an articulate, charismatic black man who the vast majority of Dems still admire. Can you believe it?
Obama represents everything these people profess to hate–war, drone attacks, Gitmo, austerity, Wall Street (no prosecutions), indefinite detention, executive privilege (to assassinate) etc–and yet they still put the man on a pedestal. Which is why we think that Obama is the greatest public relations invention of all-time; a beaming, exuberant, galvanic paragon who embodies all the laudatory characteristics of leadership and who–at the same time– is able to carry out the most despicable, inhuman acts without the slightest hesitation or remorse. He is man who feels nothing towards his fellow human beings, neither empathy, compassion, or mercy. What matters to Obama is that he faithfully follow the script that’s been written for him by his miscreant handlers, that odious amalgam of cutthroat corporatists, bank mandarins and loafing ivy league silver-spooners who make up America’s iniquitous Kleptocracy. The best description of Obama I’ve ever read was in the comments section of a foreign policy blogsite called Moon of Alabama by a blogger named “bevin”. Here’s what he said:
“I think that Obama is completely empty of scruples…just a willing executioner. From the ruling class’s point of view he is the perfect figurehead because his mere appearance confuses and disarms so many. He seems to have spent his whole life trying to get chosen to play Judas. And that is all there is in his resume… They present him as negligent, never responsible, never intentionally connected to an evil act, never drawn into the acts of duplicity by a conscious intent. This is the false image, the disinformation projected about who he is… It strikes me that Obama is all those things. And that this is the core of the evil in him- that he is without conscience or principle, just an ordinary butcher going about his business, fulfilling the terms of his employment, doing what he was asked to do… You see him as focused and intentional. I see him as someone who will sign a stack of death warrants without reading them, or thinking about them again. Remember just after November 2008, waiting to take office, how the Israelis attacked Gaza, obviously to show him who is boss? Didn’t you sense that even they were surprised at the insouciance with which he watched those extraordinary massacres pass before his eyes? He didn’t care. And he was, at last, relieved of the chore of pretending that he did care about such things. That’s really what he likes about being President: he can relax while the killing goes on, he doesn’t need to pretend it bothers him, he doesn’t need to pass any kind of moral judgment. Remember when he asked his step-father “Have you ever killed men?” The reply he got was “Only men who were weak.” He has adhered to that moral standard ever since.” (bevin, Moon of Alabama)
That perfectly summarizes the man; an empty gourd who never had any intention of fulfilling his promises, who has utter disdain for the fools that voted for him, and who finds it as easy to kill a man, his family and his kids, as to swat a fly on his forearm. As bevin notes Obama “is a pure confidence man and a sociopath.”
And now the sociopath has focused his attention on Ukraine where he’s determined to draw Russia into a conflict over the Crimea even though Moscow has assisted the US in the War on Terror, removed its heavy weapons from the Western part of Russia, reduced its conventional military by 300,000 troops, and fulfilled all its obligations under the Adapted Conventional Armed Forces Treaty in Europe (ACAF).
Moscow has done everything that was asked of it. And what has Washington done in return. Here’s how Valentin Mândrăşescu, Editor of The Voice of Russia’s Reality Check, sums it up on the Testosterone Pit website:
“Washington has defaulted on all of its key agreements made with USSR/Russia during the last 30 years. Gorbachev was promised that Eastern Europe would not be taken into NATO. Country by country became part of NATO and Yugoslavia was dismantled despite Russia’s objections. The US acted as the winner of the Cold War and guided its policies by the famous principle of “Vae victis!” Woe to the vanquished!” (Valentin Mândrăşescu, Editor of The Voice of Russia’s Reality Check, From now on, No compromises are possible with Russia, Testosterone Pit)
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the US has surrounded Russia with military bases, trained troops in Georgia that were eventually used to fight Russia in South Ossetia, instigated numerous color-coded revolutions in former Soviet states, and started to deploy a missile defense system in Eastern Europe that will give Washington first-strike nuclear weapons capability that will destroy “the strategic equilibrium in the world” and force Putin to resume the arms race.
That’s how Washington makes friends; by stomping their face into the pavement every chance it gets. Sound familiar?
On Wednesday, Obama met with Ukraine’s imposter prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, at the White House in a attempt to lend credibility to the coup leader’s Nazi-strew government. Obama used the White House event to applaud the putsch and to promise support for the aggressively anti-Kremlin government. Shortly after Obama finished his statement, blogsites released copies of a resolution that was issued by the European Parliament just 15 months earlier condemning the groups which are now part of the US-backed Ukrainian government. Here’s a blurb from the text of that resolution:
“The European Parliament…Is concerned about the rising nationalistic sentiment in Ukraine, expressed in support for the Svoboda Party, which, as a result, is one of the two new parties to enter the Verkhovna Rada; recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the EU’s fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic parties in the Verkhovna Rada not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party.” (Moon of Alabama)
How do you like that? So the European Parliament saw the danger of these groups and denounced them before they had a change of heart and realized that these died-in-the-wool, neo-Nazi, jackboot-thugs might be able to help them advance their foreign policy objectives. Now the EU nations are lining up behind Obama who’s doing his level-best to provoke Putin so he can push NATO to Russia’s borders, take control of critical pipeline corridors and vital resources, and install weapons systems on Russia’s perimeter. These are the administration’s goals despite the threat they pose to democracy, security, and regional stability, not to mention the possibility of a third world war.
Bottom line: You don’t get to be “the greatest threat to world peace” without really applying yourself.
Obama wants to prove he’s up to the task. Regrettably, we think he is.
MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at [email protected]. |
Photo by Bruce Bennett/Pool Photo via USA TODAY Sports
(Editor's note: Welcome to Sean McIndoe's grab bag, where he writes on a variety of NHL topics. You can follow him on Twitter.)
Three stars of comedy (Phil Kessel Stanley Cup edition)
Yes, we're going all-Phil this week, as the lovable everyman's Stanley Cup win continues to inspire the hockey world that you can achieve your dreams without doing sit-ups.
The third star: This fan—Somebody showed up at the Penguins' parade with copy of the infamously meme-able Kessel Team USA headshot. And not just a printout—that thing is professionally framed.
The second star: Mike Commodore—The former NHLer has some thoughts on how Kessel should celebrate his day with the Cup, which were definitely NSFW and later deleted. So we'll have to make do with this:
Congrats to Phil Kessel. The media just gives it to him for no other reason than he looks like a fat math teacher. Dude can play though. — Mike Commodore (@commie22)June 15, 2016
The first star: Nick Bonino and Carl Hagelin—This is pretty much the perfect Phil Kessel ideal moment, since it involves an adoring crowd, the Stanley Cup, and him standing in front of a microphone without having to say anything.
Outrage of the week
The issue: On his Fox Sports 1 radio show, Colin Cowherd suggested that hockey should no longer be considered a "big four" sport in the United States, having been replaced by soccer.
The outrage: That sounds like he's criticizing hockey. Get him!
Is it justified: No. Cowherd is right. In fact, nothing he said was even all that controversial. Greg Wyshynski has a detailed breakdown of the host's argument and laid out some possible hockey world responses here, but the short summary is that (for once) Cowherd is bang on. Of course soccer is a bigger sport in the U.S. If anything, we're probably years late in recognizing that. I'm not sure you could really argue against it at this point.
READ MORE: Why Sidney Crosby Is This Generation's Wayne Gretzky
And here's where you're probably expecting a repeat of last week's rant, in which I dumped all over the Gary Bettman and the NHL for the consistently meager TV ratings that fans have just come to accept with a shrug. But the reality is that this one can't be pinned on Bettman and friends. Soccer has long been the world's most popular sport, and as that world became more connected it was natural that the game's presence would expand in North America. The increased success of America's men's and women's national teams plays a role. So do demographics. So do increased media options.
Even NHL players are turning to soccer. Photo by Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports
And, yes, so does the decline in the quality of the NHL product. That trend, while obviously a subjective one, has been called out by fans and media for years. It's been a big part of the reason that the sport has been fading into the background of the American sports landscape, a fact borne out by this year's lackluster ratings.
The NHL and its leaders have a long list of things to be embarrassed about. The low ratings are one. Becoming synonymous with season-shortening work stoppages is another. So is the utter failure to properly market stars. So are two decades of laughable inaction around plunging scoring rates. So is the tendency to take the rare wins the league can earn and then beat them into the ground. So is signing a US TV deal right before a broadcast rights bubble sent rights fees through the roof, and making it long enough that it won't expire until after that bubble has likely burst.
But being passed in popularity by soccer? There's no shame in that. There's just too much working in soccer's favor to make this shift anything other than inevitable, no matter what the league had done.
There's so much to be frustrated about in today's NHL that hockey fans need to pick their battles. Being less popular than the world's most popular sport isn't one we should worry about.
Obscure former player of the week
Wednesday was a weird day in the NHL. In Pittsburgh, you had a Stanley Cup parade, with thousands of fans lining up to cheer on the game's greatest achievement. And at the same time in Detroit, there was Gordie Howe's funeral, with the hockey world saying its final goodbye to the game's greatest player. It was a hard-to-miss contrast between joy and sadness, and between the celebration of a single moment and the long history that leads us there.
I'm not sure you can reconcile that, or that you should even want to try. But for this week's obscure player, let's look at a player who crossed paths with both sides of Wednesday's coin. He's a two-time Stanley Cup winner with the Penguins, and he also played alongside Howe in the legend's final NHL season. He's journeyman defenseman Gordie Roberts.
Roberts was a third-round pick by the Canadiens in 1977 after having already played two years with the Whalers in the WHA. His chances of ever cracking the lineup in that Montreal dynasty were slim, and he never did, eventually ending up back with the Whalers when they joined the NHL in 1979. That allowed him to be part of Howe's 26th and final NHL season, suiting up alongside the legend he had literally been named after.
Roberts was dealt to the North Stars early in the following season, where he'd spend nearly eight years before stopovers in Philadelphia and St. Louis. The Blues dealt him to the Penguins on the eve of the 1990-91 season for an 11th-round pick. He'd go on to provide a physical veteran presence on the Penguins' blueline, helping them win back-to-back Cups in 1991 and 1992.
Roberts would head to free agency after that second Cup, signing with Boston for the final two years of his career. That added Ray Bourque and Cam Neely to the roster of Hall-of-Fame teammates he played with over the years, a list that also includes Mario Lemieux, Paul Coffey, Jaromir Jagr, Brett and Bobby Hull, Dave Keon and Howe, among others. All told, Roberts played 1,097 NHL games, becoming the first American to hit the 1,000-game milestone and earning a spot in the United States Hockey Hall of Fame.
Be it Resolved
The offseason is here, and we've already seen some weird moves. On Wednesday, the Blackhawks gave away Teuvo Teravainen just to get rid of Bryan Bickell's terrible contract. Yesterday, the Hurricanes re-signed pending UFA Cam Ward to a multi-year contract even though he hasn't been good for years. They even gave him a no-trade clause!
In both cases, the moves were criticized. But it felt... muted. As if something wasn't quite right. Hockey fans love to complain, and complaining about offseason moves is just about the best kind of complaining there is. But this week, everything somehow felt off.
I was ready to chalk it up to rust—we're all a little bit out of practice after the long postseason. But then I read this tweet, and I felt a chill go down my spine:
Prediction: every bad multi-year contract signed this offseason will be rationalized by that team's fanbase as expansion draft protection — derek (@itwasthreezero)June 16, 2016
My god, he's right. That's exactly what's happening. Next year's expansion draft will be the first in 17 years, and the first ever in the salary cap era. It's thrown a wrinkle into every team's plans, as they're left with one year to maneuver into position to protect as much value as possible. And there's no blueprint on how to accomplish that—everyone is kind of swimming in the dark here.
And that's been great. NHL GMs are such timid babies these days that anything that introduces a little uncertainty is a good thing. So fans were pumped for the expansion wrangling, and the chaos it could bring. But we missed the one terrible side effect: All of this also gives GMs a get-out-of-jail free card on their questionable offseason moves, since they can just point to the expansion draft and mumble something about long-term strategy. And fans will buy it, because we don't know what's going on, either.
When your favorite team signs Cam Ward to a multi-year contract with a NTC. Photo by Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports
This is unacceptable, and it must be stopped. Seriously, here's how I planned to spend my summer: 15 percent BBQing with a beer in my hand, 10 percent playing catch with my kids, 75 percent reacting to every minor NHL transaction by rushing to Twitter to randomly point to one or more teams and type "LOL, so dumb." And, if I'm being honest, those first two numbers may have been high.
An expansion draft exception will ruin everything. We need to stamp this out right now. Let's all agree that we can still make fun of every decision that NHL teams make, and only give them credit for thinking ahead to expansion in future years, when we applaud them for making the same moves that we ripped at the time. It's the hockey fan's way.
Classic YouTube clip breakdown
The NHL's annual awards show will be held next week in Las Vegas. The show is one of the sport's great guilty pleasures, one that's somehow survived over the years even as the fun has drained out of almost everything else the increasingly big-business league does. Awkward speeches, painfully bad banter, musical acts that you're not sure you've ever heard of... I love everything about the show, and I hope we never lose it.
This year's edition will be hosted by Will Arnett, which means it should be good. But I think it's safe to say that it will not be anywhere as good as the 1995 version.
This beautiful clip was initially unearthed a year ago, when it briefly made the rounds. But did anyone back then break it down frame-by-frame? No, because they're busy people who don't have the time. Luckily, I do.
Yes, the NHL awards used to be broadcast from Toronto, and yes, they used to be shown on ESPN. Yes, that seems weird now. Trust me, it's the least weird thing about the video you're about to watch.
We start off with a guy in a Penguins jersey catching a puck out of the air and then randomly flinging it away. Which is cool, because I didn't even know Marc Bergevin did choreography.
So much grunting.
Let's just start by pointing out the obvious: This is a highly choreographed number featuring dozens of presumably professional dancers, and the undisputed highlight is going to be the guy in the background in the Leafs jersey who just kind of sways around and claps. I desperately want to know what that guy's deal is. Like, the actual Leafs dancer called in sick and they had to just grab a guy from the production crew, right?
"Hey goalie, can you pass the test, add your name to the Vezina fest?" Oh neat, they let Glenn Anderson write this song.
The Penguins guy just became the first person wearing a hockey jersey to do a triple horizontal spin while bouncing on one arm and kicking both legs in the air, unless you count Dominik Hasek on every routine save he ever made.
I think it's kind of annoying how the people in American team jerseys are in the spotlight while all the Canadian teams just kind of stand in the background and watch. Oh wait, I'm sorry, that line was meant for next week's column, "A look back at the 2016 playoffs."
A Buffalo Sabres dancer and a Dallas Star dancer execute a combo slide move. Do you think the Sabres guy was always arguing over exactly where their feet should be while the Stars guy told him not to worry because nobody would care?
As per worldwide UN bylaws in 1995, the song will now be interrupted by everyone yelling "Go! Go! Go!" for a while.
The dancer in the Sharks jersey is in the middle of every number but never gets a solo in the spotlight, which in hindsight turns out to be the best metaphor for San Jose Sharks history I've ever seen.
Now the dancer in the Pittsburgh jersey is trying to do his job even though somebody else has jumped onto his back and is hanging there with all four limbs wrapped around his torso. Or, as Mario Lemieux called it, "every shift of my career."
Let's just address the elephant in the room: I'm honestly not sure where this ranks compared to the 1988 intro featuring Alan Thicke. I feel like Second Row Guy and the ghost Zamboni still puts Thicke over the top, but I could be swayed.
Oh, by the way, the lyrics are describing the various NHL awards. "A gentleman just doing his thing / Takes home the Lady Byng." "Best goals against takes the Jennings home / The Selke, best forward in a defensive role." "Get a lot of playoff points, the Conn Smythe we'll be feedin' ya / Unless you have a history of being awkward with the media." OK, I may have made one of those up.
Honestly, I think Awkward Blues Guy might be giving Awkward Leafs Guy a run for his money here.
The big finale comes when all the dancers tear off their jerseys to reveal a Devils sweater underneath, and break out a replica Stanley Cup. Our clip then cuts out, presumably because we don't want to watch the dancers have to awkwardly explain what the big silver trophy is to confused Toronto fans.
Epilogue: The Devils dancers then proceeded to teach everyone the neutral zone trap, and dancing hasn't been entertaining again for two decades. |
Photograph by Darren McCollester/Getty Images.
Google turns out a curiously partisan result when users type “Romney can win” into the site’s search bar. The search engine provides an ordinary-looking set of (more than 50 million) results—but also, at the top of the page, includes a suggestion:
“Did you mean: ‘Romney can’t win?”
Romney has maintained a tenuous position at or near the top of the Republican field for months, but he has struggled to gain broad support among the party’s base. (Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, is ahead of him in the latest CBS News poll.)
Is Romney’s lackluster support the reason behind Google’s not-so-subtle suggestion? It’s tough to tell without unpacking the complicated algorithms the site uses to rank search results. But so far, Romney is the only presidential candidate for whom the Google glitch applies. (And yes, we even checked Huntsman.)
It’s not the first time Google search results have provided Internet users with a taste of conventional political wisdom. From 2003 until 2007, users who typed in the term “miserable failure” into the Google search bar were greeted by the official White House biography of George W. Bush. That result—like other so-called “Google bombs”—was the handiwork of users who gamed the site’s search rankings by setting up large numbers of outside links to a certain page.
In this case, however, it appears that Google’s less-than-charitable correction concerning Mitt Romney’s chances for victory is only incidentally partisan, and not a clever trick by political pranksters. Not human ones, anyway. |
Opinions Apr 19, 2012 A Coalition of Dunces
Last week, the Pulitzer Prize board refused to give its prestigious award to any novel published in 2011. Something is clearly broken. We roused our commentators from the Tournament of Books, Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, for their remarks.
Credit: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Kevin: So, John, for the first time in more than three decades, the Pulitzer board refused to give an award for fiction this year.
As a pair of individuals who have been fairly immersed in the celebrated fiction of 2011, how are we supposed to feel about that? Intentional or not, it’s undeniably a statement about something. But reading all the mass-produced hullabaloo over the last few days, it seems like readers are as unable to agree about what it means as the Pulitzer Board was unable to agree about what a good book is.
Let’s deconstruct the process.
A committee made up of three people—Susan Larson, a former newspaper books editor; Maureen Corrigan, NPR book critic; and Michael Cunningham, novelist and owner of actual Pulitzer hardware—were assigned to send nominations to the board. So far, so good. They came up with three books: Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.
So let’s stop there for a minute. I’ve read Swamplandia! and The Pale King and I enjoyed them both a lot. I haven’t read Train Dreams yet, but I’ve loved everything else I’ve ever read by Johnson. Maureen Corrigan says in The Washington Post that these books were the “unanimous” selection of the three jurors—but it seems unlikely that all three jurors thought these were the three best books of last year. There was some discussion and compromise, right? At the Rooster, we have been going on and on about the arbitrary nature of these things for eight years—three different people on a different nominating committee almost certainly would have generated three completely different novels.
So they pass these books on to a 20 member board. That’s a lot of board to be deciding on the past year’s best work of fiction. Not to keep patting ourselves on the back, but that was kind of the joke that launched the Tournament of Books. I imagine getting a consensus about art among any 20 people is difficult. And I very much doubt the Bronte sisters ever agreed what the best book was in any given year.
Now let’s look at the makeup of the board. Perhaps not surprisingly it is made up of 19 newspaper editors and journalism professors and (OK, perhaps a little surprisingly) 2008 Pulitzer winner Junot Diaz, who sticks out on this list like the Short Circuit robot in a Whit Stillman film.
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize, or any other award, is not the “best novel ever” or even necessarily the “best novel of the year.” Its binding doesn’t cut glass or leave gold skid marks when you drag it across a coffee table.
I think if you take a hard look at this list of people you will realize the significance of the Pulitzer Board refusing to give an award for fiction this year—to the newspaper and academic folks, if not everyone else, the prize for fiction is an afterthought. It’s the undercard.
In fact, there might have been some integrity involved in the decision. Everyone feels bad that David Foster Wallace was insufficiently medaled in his lifetime, but almost nobody thinks The Pale King is his finest work, or even a completed work of fiction. And I can see 20 people having a difficult time reaching a consensus over Swamplandia! and Train Dreams. John, you didn’t really like Swamplandia! either. In fact there was a lot about it that drove you a lot crazy.
But the statement made by refusing to award any of the books forwarded to them by the committee is that no novel published in 2011 is up to the standard set by the Pulitzer Prize in over 60 years of arbitrary award giving. And that’s nonsense.
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize, or any other award, is not the “best novel ever” or even necessarily the “best novel of the year.” Its binding doesn’t cut glass or leave gold skid marks when you drag it across a coffee table. There were no doubt a hundred novels published in 2011 that were “good enough” to win the Pulitzer, and to not pick one, for whatever reason, seems not only arrogant, but ignorant. At some point, after the board’s deliberations seemed to be turning south, somebody should have interrupted and said, Come on people, get serious.
By making the de facto statement that no work of fiction last year deserved their award, they almost seem to want to undermine whatever credibility they have to award it in the first place.
John: I have seen two major awards in person, the Heisman Trophy and the Pulitzer Prize.
The Heisman was in the home of one of my childhood friends and longtime hockey defensive partner, whose father won the award in 1967, being chosen over a certain USC running back named O.J. Simpson who would win the next year. They were not the type of family to make a big deal of such things, and I saw it by accident, during a sleepover when I made a wrong turn for the bathroom, and wound up in a spare room where it rested on a shelf. I didn’t linger because that seemed rude, but it was cool.
The Pulitzer Prize I saw belonged to Robert Olen Butler. It was small, crystal, paperweight-sized, classy-looking. I’m pretty sure it was on a side table in his home, though to be honest it’s been 16-17 years and I don’t have a firm memory of the specifics.
Let me also just note that the report of the three-person jury reading “about 300 novels each over the course of six months” is, of course, ludicrous.
What I do remember is that it meant something, a lot of different somethings actually.
For Bob, it’s meant a lifelong career. Bob won the prize in 1993 for his collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which I read when it came out because he’d come to my undergraduate alma mater for a reading and stunned the audience with the title story, in which a dying man is visited by Ho Chi Minh who is covered in confectioners sugar because it turns out that Ho Chi Minh is a baker. Having heard that story, which felt like a kind of magic in that auditorium, I felt compelled to read the rest of the collection. At the time, Bob had already published six well-reviewed, but not tremendous-selling novels, the kind of mid-list career that used to be pretty common, but is increasingly being squeezed out of existence by the economics of publishing. I think winning the prize essentially meant that he would no longer have to worry about whether or not his next book would get published, though given his dedication to writing, it’s possible that he never worried about this anyway.
I chose McNeese St., where Bob was teaching at the time, for many reasons: the interesting nature of the place (Southwest Louisiana), the quality of the students already in the program, that it was for three years instead of two, the low cost of living, the cheap beer and billiards available at any number of local establishments, and yes, also because of that feeling I got when I heard Bob read “A Good Scent….”
The Pulitzer Prize didn’t really matter to me, but it did matter to other people. Every time someone asked me where I was going to school, and what I would be studying, I could say I was studying with a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and that was the end of that discussion because everyone knew that meant something.
There’s probably a dozen or more other books that you and I aren’t even aware of that could’ve made the grade, kind of like A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain in 1993, or Paul Harding’s Tinkers in 2010, which couldn’t have sold more than 1000 copies before its surprise selection.
Do I quibble with the trio of finalists that the jury put forward? I do. I do quibble, but I would quibble with just about any trio of finalists. While I think Swamplandia! is charming, but deeply flawed, and the inclusion of The Pale King is kind of like the push to get Martin Scorsese his Best Director Oscar for The Departed, it’s Train Dreams that is the sorest thumb. It’s a novella. It was published in almost identical form in The Paris Review in 2003. That doesn’t feel like the best full-length fiction of the year, no matter how good it is.
If there’s blame, it probably belongs with the system of choosing requiring a majority vote of the board. When you have to find a majority from a selection of three, you’re asking for it. I’m surprised the no-award decision doesn’t happen more often. Imagine the Tournament of Books if our Zombie advanced not to a special head-to-head round, but to a three-way competition in the finals. I can only think of one or two years where one of the books would have had a majority.
And before passing it back to you, Kevin, let me also just note that the report that the three-person jury “read about 300 novels each over the course of six months” is, of course, ludicrous. This would require reading almost two books a day, seven days a week, for those entire six months while also being, at least in the case of Maureen Corrigan, a professor of English at Georgetown. Bullshit. No one is capable of this, not if they have jobs, lives, or engage in basic personal hygiene. I’m willing to grant that the jury “considered” or maybe “reviewed” or “sampled” that many books, but “read”? Not a chance.
Kevin Guilfoile, baller
Kevin: I used to collect pictures of me with other people’s trophies. For example, one of me and a Bulls NBA Championship trophy. I don’t know which trophy it is—the Bulls have so many—and how we got it into what appears to be the kitchen of a house I once shared with a Chicago funk band is a memory lost to a pitcher of El Jardin margaritas. I trust it was safely returned.
The Baseball Hall of Fame used to have a thing called the Veterans Committee. It was a panel of old players and executives and sports writers, and they used to get together in a room each year and argue over which old-timers deserved to be in the Hall of Fame. Different individuals would make their case and they would vote and revote, like a jury. Usually they would come out of the process with a name.
Then about 10 years ago they changed the rules so that instead of a committee, the living Hall of Famers would each get a ballot and they would just mail their vote in. No meeting. No arguing. No compromising. And guess what? They never elected anybody.
So to their great credit they tweaked the process again, and that’s the story of how nine-time All-Star Ron Santo was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame about three minutes after he died.
Whatever the reason this happened, I hope the Pulitzer folk realize that the system here is broken. At a startling moment when one of only two novelists on TIME’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World is a writer of naughty Twilight fan fiction, we don’t need the Pulitzer saying that nobody writes good books anymore.
Literature needs champions. Be one.
John: The Downtown Athletic Club doesn’t decide to cancel the Heisman when the best they can do is Gino Torretta or Eric Crouch. They don’t call off the BCS Championship if the best teams have one loss. For better or worse, the Pulitzer is literature’s national championship, and it just feels dumb and miserly to deny the pleasure of arguing or cheering or scratching our heads over the choice.
At Bookslut, Jessa Crispin, someone who I rarely disagree with, called the decision “ballsy,” but that pre-supposes that the reason the jurors didn’t chose a winner was because they found the choices wanting.
In 1974, Thomas Pynchon was denied the prize for Gravity’s Rainbow after the voters rejected the jury’s unanimous recommendation. That was ballsy, or to my mind stupid, but it actually made a statement about literature.
The statement this time, I fear, is that they just couldn’t agree when presented with a list, and probably hadn’t read enough fiction from the last year to substitute a title from their own judgment. I guess it’s ballsy to decide you know enough about the state of the year’s fiction that you haven’t read to deny the awarding of the country’s most prestigious prize, but I can think of some better words for it.
Our friend at Book Riot, Jeff O’Neal, said that he likes the pot-stirring quality of the decision, and to wake you and I from our off-season slumber to chit-chat over books is a pretty mean feat, but the takeaway for the average reader (or non-reader) is that nothing was good enough to merit a prize, and I don’t think that takes us anywhere good. |
It's been a thousand years since the Arab Spring.
Whole generations separate the young men and women who peacefully clamoured for change in their countries, and the young men (mostly) and women who claim to have founded an entirely new one in the so-called Islamic State.
Continents stand between the countries the former had hoped for, and what the latter promises to deliver.
Watching, bewildered, is the rest of the Arab world.
There should have been no surprise that the upheaval that spread across the region three years ago would at first yield an Islamist political experiment.
Islamists were the unofficial opposition in several countries. The demise of the autocrats would be their dawn.
But few would have imagined the radical experiment that is ISIS. Nor what a setback its sudden infamy and its leaders' atavistic desires for the Arab world would mean for the region.
Long before the rest of the world heard of them, the Arabic nickname for ISIS — Da'esh — came to symbolize aberration.
Even in the context of Syria's murderous civil war, the widely shared videos of ISIS beheadings and crucifixions (of "apostates" and of Syrian regime loyalists among others) shocked the region.
The images of ISIS fighters burning mountains of cigarettes alone would have sent nervous shivers throughout the Arab world.
And as livid and concerned as so many in the region were about the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of Syrians, they were especially alarmed as its fighters threatened to expand. Particularly, when they bulldozed their way across the Syrian-Iraq border.
Syrian Kurds escaping ISIS fighters wait behind border fences to cross into Turkey near the southeastern town of Suruc late last month. The unrest has created a huge refugee problem that will also likely take a long time to sort out. (Reuters)
Meanwhile, those young Arabs who had agitated for change across the region were already demoralized by the gradual but certain end of their uprisings, by the fierce comeback of the old regimes or their facsimiles.
But the ascendance of ISIS is undisputed proof of the failure of their project, at least for the foreseeable future.
The Arab version of the Taliban
That's because ISIS sets the reformist cause back by decades. The war against it ensures not an inch of forward movement.
The reform minded must again stand aside as another "existential" battle between their respective states and Islamists once again trumps the desire for change.
This is a battle that is not only led by the U.S., but widely supported by governments from Israel to Damascus to Riyadh.
In fact rarely in the recent history of the fractious Middle East have so many nations lined up behind a single cause.
Many reformists might well agree with this fight, too, now that ISIS has morphed into the threat it is today. But they stand aside knowing there was a way to prevent all this.
For years, in a variety of studies, Arab states were reminded time and again of how far behind they had fallen. How dissatisfied their youth had become. How desperately their nations needed political and economic reform.
How even extremist Islamists derived more legitimacy with every injustice dealt by the state.
But instead of change, they delivered harsher crackdowns. Instead of providing hope they sowed anger and distrust.
Unsanctioned opposition groups, Islamist or otherwise, were consistently marginalized and discredited, their members often imprisoned and tortured into silence.
Economic development — the very idea of creating jobs for millions of idle youth — was made secondary to providing "stability."
The resulting uprisings proved just how obstinate those regimes could be. The chaos that resulted when those regimes fought back also made it possible for radicals to coalesce and grow.
So resistant to reform, the Syrian leadership chose civil war, gambling that even from the ashes of the nation it would emerge victorious.
Instead, from those ashes has emerged a new threat — the Arab version of the Taliban.
Here comes the U.S.
Sure, ISIS had its roots in the chaos of the post-U.S. invasion of Iraq. But it could not have flourished again without the chaos of Syria.
Like the authoritarian regimes that long provided the conditions for ISIS to emerge, the state it claims to run is also authoritarian: disinterested in freedom of opinion, or freedom of association. Never mind freedom of religion.
All can be — and are — punished with death.
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad (right), shown here meeting Ali Shamkhani, Iran's Supreme National Security Council Director, earlier this week in Damascus. Assad is no doubt happy that the U.S. is waging air strikes on his enemies. (SANA / REUTERS)
That extremism is the stated rationale for the U.S.-led effort to excise them, an effort President Barack Obama has said will take years. Arab reformists watch in despair.
The young men and women of the Arab uprisings and those of ISIS couldn't be more different. And yet somehow their fates have become conflated.
The advancement that reformers seek cannot proceed while ISIS thrives.
Those who want change watch as the old arguments against it prevail yet again.
In Syria's case, ISIS's surge has bolstered Bashar al-Assad's claim that Damascus has been fighting foreign Islamists extremists all along, not Syrians on a quest for freedom.
Damascus is quite pleased it has its own Sunni Muslim enemies in the region and that the U.S. is now doing the fighting for it.
So once again, change is delayed. Postponed for the greater good.
And scholars wonder why the Arab region is so stunted. Why there is so much discontent. Why thousands keep risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean in rickety boats.
And why reformists never seem to be able to win.
Once again in the Mideast, war is on the agenda. Reform is not. Much of the world doesn't seem to have a problem with that. |
Lose the Dogma
Been There, Done That
__________First of all, any time I shoot something with a monobloc, someone comments about it "not being Strobist," as if we had some kind of kosher standard going on around here. For Pete's sake, Strobist is the name of a website. I know, because I made it up in 2006. And there was no burning bush or stone tablets involved at all.I used speedlights most of the time as a PJ, because they are the flashes I always had with me. And I created L101 and L102 around speedlights. But that is because speedlights are small, portable and the most accessible way for people to learn about lighting.Most people learn to shoot with a little .22-calibre rifle, and save the .50 cal until a little later when they need to pierce an engine block at 700 yards.IMO, to extend the speedlight ethic into a frame of mind where monoblocs (or pack and head systems) are somehow not to be considered is just silly. I am an available light photographer. Meaning, if a light is available I will consider using it.Speedlight, monobloc, car headlight, iPhone -- I have used them all. If I think an ignited fart will improve a photo, then please pass the beans and matches. Speedlights are wonderful little lighting machines. But they are not the end-all, and they are not always necessarily the best tool for any given job.There. Just wanted to be clear on that.And I am kidding about the beans. Don't try that for a light source. At least, we don't to that in my family anymore. Not since that emergency room visit for my uncle Morris. (And I am not kidding about that, either.)For lighting large objects (or overpowering sun at a reasonable working distance) bigger flashes simply make more sense than speedlights. My "big" flashes are two old White Lightning Ultra 600's. They are very similar to the current WL models and to today's AlienBees, except my 600's have had the crap beaten out of them.I am currently re-evaluating my monoblocs and deciding which direction I want to go with them in the future. But I wanted to use the opportunity to take a moment and do a walk-thru for those of you who are unfamiliar with bigger flashes.Today, we will walk through a typical control panel, much of which will be familiar to manual speedlight users.__________(Click the pic for bigger in a new window.)Here is the control end of a WL Ultra 600, which is a 300 watt-second (WS) monobloc. It is typical in layout to most other mono's, and this one is about five times more powerful than your average speedlight.Up top, you'll see the power level adjustment. This is exactly like dialing down your manual power level in a speedlight, except in this case you are not limited to full- (or half-, or third-) stop increments. This is a continuously variable, minus 5-stop power control, and one of the reasons I love the White Lightnings and AlienBees.Actually, power level is an area where many speedlights and monoblocs intersect, too. For example, this a 300WS monoblock. If I dial it down a stop, it is now at 150WS. Down two stops is 75WS, which is getting into the neighborhood of an 60WS SB-800. So, they cross over in power output for the range of -3, -4 and -5 stops on the monobloc.The efficiency of the reflector in the WL gives a little more light output per watt-second. But you will still find an area of crossover between the two. This is convenient, as it means you can use both types of flashes in conjunction if you only have one monobloc and a few SB's.On the left is the modeling light switch, which will be of less importance to you if you have grown up using speedlights. They are nice to have, but also introduce some significant limitations when you try to power the mono's with batteries. More on that later.Across the middle you'll see buttons, jacks and lights. The red "test" button is exactly the same thing as the test button on your speedlight. You push it and the flash pops.Just above the test button is a "dump" light. This is an indication that the flash is storing too much power because you charged it up and then lowered the power level without popping the flash to bleed the unneeded juice. Most new mono's dump this power automatically. (They call it "auto dump.") But if yours does not this, is a good thing to know. If that light glows, pop the flash, Simple as that.That round hole is the sync jack. What is a coveted but much-missing feature on many speedlights is standard equipment on a monobloc. Which is good, as you cannot very well mount a mono on your hot shoe. Pay attention to the type of connection for this jack, when shopping for a big flash. It can either lock you into proprietary connectors or free you to use standard, cheaper cords. My preference is 1/8" or 1/4" audio-jack-type connectors.The white "model" button at center right actually helps you to know your flash is ready by turning off the modeling lamp until the flash is fully recycled. Some flashes can be set to emit beeps when recharged. A model-off-when-charging setting just gives you a visual confirmation.The white dome further right is the optical slave receptor. Slaves on mono's are typically pretty sensitive, but you cannot aim them well because they are always gonna point away from the direction that particular mono is firing.Speedlight slaves typically can be rotated to different directions from the flash head, which helps a lot. This is partially offset be the fact that the mono's will typically be firing more powerful light, so slaves can usually see the pulse better.At far right you have the power switch -- simple enough. Just below that is a proportional model switch, which can get you an apples-to-apples modeling light comparison with WL monoblocs of different power settings.Round that out with a circuit breaker (bottom left) and a remote control jack (far left). The latter allows the power and sync of a flash to be controlled by a wired remote.If it looks complicated, it is not. At it's heart, it is a big, manual flash with a slider power control, a sync jack and a built-in slave. You already understand all of the important stuff.And that's really all you need to know to handle most monoblocs just fine. They mount to your stands and light mods just like speedlights, as they have built-in umbrella swivels. And all of the theory and practice is the same -- you just have more power to play with.You'd think the fancy control panels would be where the most important differences lie. But really, it is the lighting flexibility (and power) at the business end that mostly separates these guys from the little flashes.More on that, in part two |
A former leader of the International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan will serve two years in prison for burning a cross in 2009 in Ozark, Ala., to “scare and intimidate residents of the African-American community by threatening the use of force against them.”
Steven Joshua Dinkle, 28, the former exalted cyclops of the Ozark chapter of the Keystone Knights, also will be on three years of “supervised release” after he gets out of prison under the sentence handed down Thursday by Chief U.S. District Judge W. Keith Watkins.
At the sentencing hearing, the judge said the purpose of Dinkle’s conduct clearly was “to terrorize people in the community” and that his “message was one of intimidation and violence.”
Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said Dinkle “chose to burn the cross at the very entrance to an African-American neighborhood so that anyone coming or going would see the fiery cross. He intended to intimidate the community’s residents in their own homes and neighborhood. There is no place for such conduct in our society and the department will continue to prosecute these violent acts of hate.”
U.S. Attorney George L. Beck, Jr., of the Middle District of Alabama, echoed those comments. “It is sad that, in this day and age, people are still filled with such hate,” Beck said. “To act on such hate and burn a cross turns that hate into a crime which should not, and will not, be tolerated. Prosecuting these type crimes will continue to be a priority of my office.”
Dinkle pleaded guilty Feb. 3 to one count of conspiracy to violate housing rights, one count of criminal interference with the right to fair housing, and two counts of obstruction of justice related to false statements he gave investigators.
He was arrested by FBI agents last November in Mississippi, four days after his mother, Pamela Morris, 45, the former secretary of the same KKK chapter in Ozark, was arrested. Dinkle admitted lying to FBI agents about his role in the cross burning. His mother is scheduled to stand trial Aug. 4 on two counts of perjury arising out of the investigation into the cross burning.
Court documents say Dinkle and KKK-recruit Thomas Windell Smith, whose age wasn’t provided by authorities, met at Dinkle’s home in Ozark on May 8, 2009, and decided to burn a cross in a nearby African-American neighborhood.
Dinkle wrapped a 6-foot wooden cross with jeans and a towel before driving with Smith in his truck to a nearby black community. The pair dug a hole, doused the cross with fuel and fled in Smith’s truck.
Smith pleaded guilty last December to one count of conspiracy to violate housing rights and faces sentencing Aug. 19, 2014. |
Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes
Perl is a dynamic, dynamically-typed, high-level, scripting (interpreted) language most comparable with PHP and Python. Perl's syntax owes a lot to ancient shell scripting tools, and it is famed for its overuse of confusing symbols, the majority of which are impossible to Google for. Perl's shell scripting heritage makes it great for writing glue code: scripts which link together other scripts and programs. Perl is ideally suited for processing text data and producing more text data. Perl is widespread, popular, highly portable and well-supported. Perl was designed with the philosophy "There's More Than One Way To Do It" (TMTOWTDI) (contrast with Python, where "there should be one - and preferably only one - obvious way to do it").
Perl has horrors, but it also has some great redeeming features. In this respect it is like every other programming language ever created.
This document is intended to be informative, not evangelical. It is aimed at people who, like me:
dislike the official Perl documentation at http://perl.org/ for being intensely technical and giving far too much space to very unusual edge cases
learn new programming languages most quickly by "axiom and example"
wish Larry Wall would get to the point
already know how to program in general terms
don't care about Perl beyond what's necessary to get the job done.
This document is intended to be as short as possible, but no shorter.
Preliminary notes
The following can be said of almost every declarative statement in this document: "that's not, strictly speaking, true; the situation is actually a lot more complicated". If you see a serious lie, point it out, but I reserve the right to preserve certain critical lies-to-children.
Throughout this document I'm using example print statements to output data but not explicitly appending line breaks. This is done to prevent me from going crazy and to give greater attention to the actual string being printed in each case, which is invariably more important. In many examples, this results in alotofwordsallsmusheduptogetherononeline if the code is run in reality. Try to ignore this.
Hello world
A Perl script is a text file with the extension .pl .
Here's the full text of helloworld.pl :
use strict; use warnings; print "Hello world";
Perl scripts are interpreted by the Perl interpreter, perl or perl.exe :
perl helloworld.pl [arg0 [arg1 [arg2 ...]]]
A few immediate notes. Perl's syntax is highly permissive and it will allow you to do things which result in ambiguous-looking statements with unpredictable behaviour. There's no point in me explaining what these behaviours are, because you want to avoid them. The way to avoid them is to put use strict; use warnings; at the very top of every Perl script or module that you create. Statements of the form use foo; are pragmas. A pragma is a signal to perl.exe , which takes effect when initial syntactic validation is being performed, before the program starts running. These lines have no effect when the interpreter encounters them at run time.
The semicolon, ; , is the statement terminator. The symbol # begins a comment. A comment lasts until the end of the line. Perl has no block comment syntax.
Variables
Perl variables come in three types: scalars, arrays and hashes. Each type has its own sigil: $ , @ and % respectively. Variables are declared using my , and remain in scope until the end of the enclosing block or file.
Scalar variables
A scalar variable can contain:
undef (corresponds to None in Python, null in PHP)
(corresponds to in Python, in PHP) a number (Perl does not distinguish between an integer and a float)
a string
a reference to any other variable.
my $undef = undef; print $undef; # prints the empty string "" and raises a warning # implicit undef: my $undef2; print $undef2; # prints "" and raises exactly the same warning
my $num = 4040.5; print $num; # "4040.5"
my $string = "world"; print $string; # "world"
(References are coming up shortly.)
String concatenation using the . operator (same as PHP):
print "Hello ".$string; # "Hello world"
"Booleans"
Perl has no boolean data type. A scalar in an if statement evaluates to boolean "false" if and only if it is one of the following:
undef
number 0
string ""
string "0" .
The Perl documentation repeatedly claims that functions return "true" or "false" values in certain situations. In practice, when a function is claimed to return "true" it usually returns 1 , and when it is claimed to return false it usually returns the empty string, "" .
Weak typing
It is impossible to determine whether a scalar contains a "number" or a "string". More precisely, it should never be necessary to do this. Whether a scalar behaves like a number or a string depends on the operator with which it is used. When used as a string, a scalar will behave like a string. When used as a number, a scalar will behave like a number (raising a warning if this isn't possible):
my $str1 = "4G"; my $str2 = "4H"; print $str1 . $str2; # "4G4H" print $str1 + $str2; # "8" with two warnings print $str1 eq $str2; # "" (empty string, i.e. false) print $str1 == $str2; # "1" with two warnings # The classic error print "yes" == "no"; # "1" with two warnings; both values evaluate to 0 when used as numbers
The lesson is to always using the correct operator in the correct situation. There are separate operators for comparing scalars as numbers and comparing scalars as strings:
Array variables
An array variable is a list of scalars indexed by integers beginning at 0. In Python this is known as a list, and in PHP this is known as an array. An array is declared using a parenthesised list of scalars:
my @array = ( "print", "these", "strings", "out", "for", "me", # trailing comma is okay );
You have to use a dollar sign to access a value from an array, because the value being retrieved is not an array but a scalar:
print $array[0]; # "print" print $array[1]; # "these" print $array[2]; # "strings" print $array[3]; # "out" print $array[4]; # "for" print $array[5]; # "me" print $array[6]; # returns undef, prints "" and raises a warning
You can use negative indices to retrieve entries starting from the end and working backwards:
print $array[-1]; # "me" print $array[-2]; # "for" print $array[-3]; # "out" print $array[-4]; # "strings" print $array[-5]; # "these" print $array[-6]; # "print" print $array[-7]; # returns undef, prints "" and raises a warning
There is no collision between a scalar $var and an array @var containing a scalar entry $var[0] . There may, however, be reader confusion, so avoid this.
To get an array's length:
print "This array has ".(scalar @array)."elements"; # "This array has 6 elements" print "The last populated index is ".$#array; # "The last populated index is 5"
The arguments with which the original Perl script was invoked are stored in the built-in array variable @ARGV .
Variables can be interpolated into strings:
print "Hello $string"; # "Hello world" print "@array"; # "print these strings out for me"
Caution. One day you will put somebody's email address inside a string, "[email protected]" . This will cause Perl to look for an array variable called @gmail to interpolate into the string, and not find it, resulting in a runtime error. Interpolation can be prevented in two ways: by backslash-escaping the sigil, or by using single quotes instead of double quotes.
print "Hello \$string"; # "Hello $string" print 'Hello $string'; # "Hello $string" print "\@array"; # "@array" print '@array'; # "@array"
Hash variables
A hash variable is a list of scalars indexed by strings. In Python this is known as a dictionary, and in PHP it is known as an array.
my %scientists = ( "Newton" => "Isaac", "Einstein" => "Albert", "Darwin" => "Charles", );
Notice how similar this declaration is to an array declaration. In fact, the double arrow symbol => is called a "fat comma", because it is just a synonym for the comma separator. A hash is declared using a list with an even number of elements, where the even-numbered elements (0, 2, ...) are all taken as strings.
Once again, you have to use a dollar sign to access a value from a hash, because the value being retrieved is not a hash but a scalar:
print $scientists{"Newton"}; # "Isaac" print $scientists{"Einstein"}; # "Albert" print $scientists{"Darwin"}; # "Charles" print $scientists{"Dyson"}; # returns undef, prints "" and raises a warning
Note the braces used here. Again, there is no collision between a scalar $var and a hash %var containing a scalar entry $var{"foo"} .
You can convert a hash straight to an array with twice as many entries, alternating between key and value (and the reverse is equally easy):
my @scientists = %scientists;
However, unlike an array, the keys of a hash have no underlying order. They will be returned in whatever order is more efficient. So, notice the rearranged order but preserved pairs in the resulting array:
print "@scientists"; # something like "Einstein Albert Darwin Charles Newton Isaac"
To recap, you have to use square brackets to retrieve a value from an array, but you have to use braces to retrieve a value from a hash. The square brackets are effectively a numerical operator and the braces are effectively a string operator. The fact that the index supplied is a number or a string is of absolutely no significance:
my $data = "orange"; my @data = ("purple"); my %data = ( "0" => "blue"); print $data; # "orange" print $data[0]; # "purple" print $data["0"]; # "purple" print $data{0}; # "blue" print $data{"0"}; # "blue"
Lists
A list in Perl is a different thing again from either an array or a hash. You've just seen several lists:
( "print", "these", "strings", "out", "for", "me", ) ( "Newton" => "Isaac", "Einstein" => "Albert", "Darwin" => "Charles", )
A list is not a variable. A list is an ephemeral value which can be assigned to an array or a hash variable. This is why the syntax for declaring array and hash variables is identical. There are many situations where the terms "list" and "array" can be used interchangeably, but there are equally many where lists and arrays display subtly different and extremely confusing behaviour.
Okay. Remember that => is just , in disguise and then look at this example:
("one", 1, "three", 3, "five", 5) ("one" => 1, "three" => 3, "five" => 5)
The use of => hints that one of these lists is an array declaration and the other is a hash declaration. But on their own, neither of them are declarations of anything. They are just lists. Identical lists. Also:
()
There aren't even hints here. This list could be used to declare an empty array or an empty hash and the perl interpreter clearly has no way of telling either way. Once you understand this odd aspect of Perl, you will also understand why the following fact must be true: List values cannot be nested. Try it:
my @array = ( "apples", "bananas", ( "inner", "list", "several", "entries", ), "cherries", );
Perl has no way of knowing whether ("inner", "list", "several", "entries") is supposed to be an inner array or an inner hash. Therefore, Perl assumes that it is neither and flattens the list out into a single long list:
print $array[0]; # "apples" print $array[1]; # "bananas" print $array[2]; # "inner" print $array[3]; # "list" print $array[4]; # "several" print $array[5]; # "entries" print $array[6]; # "cherries"
The same is true whether the fat comma is used or not:
my %hash = ( "beer" => "good", "bananas" => ( "green" => "wait", "yellow" => "eat", ), ); # The above raises a warning because the hash was declared using a 7-element list print $hash{"beer"}; # "good" print $hash{"bananas"}; # "green" print $hash{"wait"}; # "yellow"; print $hash{"eat"}; # undef, so prints "" and raises a warning
Of course, this does make it easy to concatenate multiple arrays together:
my @bones = ("humerus", ("jaw", "skull"), "tibia"); my @fingers = ("thumb", "index", "middle", "ring", "little"); my @parts = (@bones, @fingers, ("foot", "toes"), "eyeball", "knuckle"); print @parts;
More on this shortly.
Context
Perl's most distinctive feature is that its code is context-sensitive. Every expression in Perl is evaluated either in scalar context or list context, depending on whether it is expected to produce a scalar or a list. Without knowing the context in which an expression is evaluated, it is impossible to determine what it will evaluate to.
A scalar assignment such as my $scalar = evaluates its expression in scalar context. Here, the expression is "Mendeleev" :
my $scalar = "Mendeleev";
An array or hash assignment such as my @array = or my %hash = evaluates its expression in list context. Here, the expression is ("Alpha", "Beta", "Gamma", "Pie") (or ("Alpha" => "Beta", "Gamma" => "Pie") , the two are equivalent):
my @array = ("Alpha", "Beta", "Gamma", "Pie"); my %hash = ("Alpha" => "Beta", "Gamma" => "Pie");
A scalar expression evaluated in list context is silently converted into a single-element list:
my @array = "Mendeleev"; # same as 'my @array = ("Mendeleev");'
An array expression evaluated in scalar context returns the length of the array:
my @array = ("Alpha", "Beta", "Gamma", "Pie"); my $scalar = @array; print $scalar; # "4"
A list expression (a list is different from an array, remember?) evaluated in scalar context returns not the length of the list but the final scalar in the list:
my $scalar = ("Alpha", "Beta", "Gamma", "Pie"); print $scalar; # "Pie"
The print built-in function evaluates all of its arguments in list context. In fact, print accepts an unlimited list of arguments and prints each one after the other, which means it can be used to print arrays directly:
my @array = ("Alpha", "Beta", "Goo"); my $scalar = "-X-"; print @array; # "AlphaBetaGoo"; print $scalar, @array, 98; # "-X-AlphaBetaGoo98";
Caution. Many Perl expressions and built-in functions display radically different behaviour depending on the context in which they are evaluated. The most prominent example is the function reverse . In list context, reverse treats its arguments as a list, and reverses the list. In scalar context, reverse concatenates the whole list together and then reverses it as a single word.
print reverse "hello world"; # "hello world" my $string = reverse "hello world"; print $string; # "dlrow olleh"
You can force any expression to be evaluated in scalar context using the scalar built-in function:
print scalar reverse "hello world"; # "dlrow olleh"
Remember how we used scalar earlier, to get the length of an array?
References and nested data structures
In the same way that lists cannot contain lists as elements, arrays and hashes cannot contain other arrays and hashes as elements. They can only contain scalars. Watch what happens when we try:
my @outer = ("Sun", "Mercury", "Venus", undef, "Mars"); my @inner = ("Earth", "Moon"); $outer[3] = @inner; print $outer[3]; # "2"
$outer[3] is a scalar, so it demands a scalar value. When you try to assign an array value like @inner to it, @inner is evaluated in scalar context. This is the same as assigning scalar @inner , which is the length of array @inner , which is 2.
However, a scalar variable may contain a reference to any variable, including an array variable or a hash variable. This is how more complicated data structures are created in Perl.
A reference is created using a backslash.
my $colour = "Indigo"; my $scalarRef = \$colour;
Any time you would use the name of a variable, you can instead just put some braces in, and, within the braces, put a reference to a variable instead.
print $colour; # "Indigo" print $scalarRef; # e.g. "SCALAR(0x182c180)" print ${ $scalarRef }; # "Indigo"
As long as the result is not ambiguous, you can omit the braces too:
print $$scalarRef; # "Indigo"
If your reference is a reference to an array or hash variable, you can get data out of it using braces or using the more popular arrow operator, -> :
my @colours = ("Red", "Orange", "Yellow", "Green", "Blue"); my $arrayRef = \@colours; print $colours[0]; # direct array access print ${ $arrayRef }[0]; # use the reference to get to the array print $arrayRef->[0]; # exactly the same thing my %atomicWeights = ("Hydrogen" => 1.008, "Helium" => 4.003, "Manganese" => 54.94); my $hashRef = \%atomicWeights; print $atomicWeights{"Helium"}; # direct hash access print ${ $hashRef }{"Helium"}; # use a reference to get to the hash print $hashRef->{"Helium"}; # exactly the same thing - this is very common
Declaring a data structure
Here are four examples, but in practice the last one is the most useful.
my %owner1 = ( "name" => "Santa Claus", "DOB" => "1882-12-25", ); my $owner1Ref = \%owner1; my %owner2 = ( "name" => "Mickey Mouse", "DOB" => "1928-11-18", ); my $owner2Ref = \%owner2; my @owners = ( $owner1Ref, $owner2Ref ); my $ownersRef = \@owners; my %account = ( "number" => "12345678", "opened" => "2000-01-01", "owners" => $ownersRef, );
That's obviously unnecessarily laborious, because you can shorten it to:
my %owner1 = ( "name" => "Santa Claus", "DOB" => "1882-12-25", ); my %owner2 = ( "name" => "Mickey Mouse", "DOB" => "1928-11-18", ); my @owners = ( \%owner1, \%owner2 ); my %account = ( "number" => "12345678", "opened" => "2000-01-01", "owners" => \@owners, );
It is also possible to declare anonymous arrays and hashes using different symbols. Use square brackets for an anonymous array and braces for an anonymous hash. The value returned in each case is a reference to the anonymous data structure in question. Watch carefully, this results in exactly the same %account as above:
# Braces denote an anonymous hash my $owner1Ref = { "name" => "Santa Claus", "DOB" => "1882-12-25", }; my $owner2Ref = { "name" => "Mickey Mouse", "DOB" => "1928-11-18", }; # Square brackets denote an anonymous array my $ownersRef = [ $owner1Ref, $owner2Ref ]; my %account = ( "number" => "12345678", "opened" => "2000-01-01", "owners" => $ownersRef, );
Or, for short (and this is the form you should actually use when declaring complex data structures in-line):
my %account = ( "number" => "31415926", "opened" => "3000-01-01", "owners" => [ { "name" => "Philip Fry", "DOB" => "1974-08-06", }, { "name" => "Hubert Farnsworth", "DOB" => "2841-04-09", }, ], );
Getting information out of a data structure
Now, let's assume that you still have %account kicking around but everything else (if there was anything else) has fallen out of scope. You can print the information out by reversing the same procedure in each case. Again, here are four examples, of which the last is the most useful:
my $ownersRef = $account{"owners"}; my @owners = @{ $ownersRef }; my $owner1Ref = $owners[0]; my %owner1 = %{ $owner1Ref }; my $owner2Ref = $owners[1]; my %owner2 = %{ $owner2Ref }; print "Account #", $account{"number"}, "
"; print "Opened on ", $account{"opened"}, "
"; print "Joint owners:
"; print "\t", $owner1{"name"}, " (born ", $owner1{"DOB"}, ")
"; print "\t", $owner2{"name"}, " (born ", $owner2{"DOB"}, ")
";
Or, for short:
my @owners = @{ $account{"owners"} }; my %owner1 = %{ $owners[0] }; my %owner2 = %{ $owners[1] }; print "Account #", $account{"number"}, "
"; print "Opened on ", $account{"opened"}, "
"; print "Joint owners:
"; print "\t", $owner1{"name"}, " (born ", $owner1{"DOB"}, ")
"; print "\t", $owner2{"name"}, " (born ", $owner2{"DOB"}, ")
";
Or using references and the -> operator:
my $ownersRef = $account{"owners"}; my $owner1Ref = $ownersRef->[0]; my $owner2Ref = $ownersRef->[1]; print "Account #", $account{"number"}, "
"; print "Opened on ", $account{"opened"}, "
"; print "Joint owners:
"; print "\t", $owner1Ref->{"name"}, " (born ", $owner1Ref->{"DOB"}, ")
"; print "\t", $owner2Ref->{"name"}, " (born ", $owner2Ref->{"DOB"}, ")
";
And if we completely skip all the intermediate values:
print "Account #", $account{"number"}, "
"; print "Opened on ", $account{"opened"}, "
"; print "Joint owners:
"; print "\t", $account{"owners"}->[0]->{"name"}, " (born ", $account{"owners"}->[0]->{"DOB"}, ")
"; print "\t", $account{"owners"}->[1]->{"name"}, " (born ", $account{"owners"}->[1]->{"DOB"}, ")
";
How to shoot yourself in the foot with array references
This array has five elements:
my @array1 = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5); print @array1; # "12345"
This array, however, has ONE element (which happens to be a reference to an anonymous, five-element array):
my @array2 = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; print @array2; # e.g. "ARRAY(0x182c180)"
This scalar is a reference to an anonymous, five-element array:
my $array3Ref = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]; print $array3Ref; # e.g. "ARRAY(0x22710c0)" print @{ $array3Ref }; # "12345" print @$array3Ref; # "12345"
Conditionals
if ... elsif ... else ...
No surprises here, other than the spelling of elsif :
my $word = "antidisestablishmentarianism"; my $strlen = length $word; if($strlen >= 15) { print "'", $word, "' is a very long word"; } elsif(10 <= $strlen && $strlen < 15) { print "'", $word, "' is a medium-length word"; } else { print "'", $word, "' is a short word"; }
Perl provides a shorter "statement if condition" syntax which is highly recommended for short statements:
print "'", $word, "' is actually enormous" if $strlen >= 20;
unless ... else ...
my $temperature = 20; unless($temperature > 30) { print $temperature, " degrees Celsius is not very hot"; } else { print $temperature, " degrees Celsius is actually pretty hot"; }
unless blocks are generally best avoided like the plague because they are very confusing. An " unless [... else ]" block can be trivially refactored into an " if [... else ]" block by negating the condition [or by keeping the condition and swapping the blocks]. Mercifully, there is no elsunless keyword.
This, by comparison, is highly recommended because it is so easy to read:
print "Oh no it's too cold" unless $temperature > 15;
Ternary operator
The ternary operator ?: allows simple if statements to be embedded in a statement. The canonical use for this is singular/plural forms:
my $gain = 48; print "You gained ", $gain, " ", ($gain == 1 ? "experience point" : "experience points"), "!";
Aside: singulars and plurals are best spelled out in full in both cases. Don't do something clever like the following, because anybody searching the codebase to replace the words "tooth" or "teeth" will never find this line:
my $lost = 1; print "You lost ", $lost, " t", ($lost == 1 ? "oo" : "ee"), "th!";
Ternary operators may be nested:
my $eggs = 5; print "You have ", $eggs == 0 ? "no eggs" : $eggs == 1 ? "an egg" : "some eggs";
if statements evaluate their conditions in scalar context. For example, if(@array) returns true if and only if @array has 1 or more elements. It doesn't matter what those elements are - they may contain undef or other false values for all we care.
Loops
There's More Than One Way To Do It.
Perl has a conventional while loop:
my $i = 0; while($i < scalar @array) { print $i, ": ", $array[$i]; $i++; }
Perl also offers the until keyword:
my $i = 0; until($i >= scalar @array) { print $i, ": ", $array[$i]; $i++; }
These do loops are almost equivalent to the above (a warning would be raised if @array were empty):
my $i = 0; do { print $i, ": ", $array[$i]; $i++; } while ($i < scalar @array);
and
my $i = 0; do { print $i, ": ", $array[$i]; $i++; } until ($i >= scalar @array);
Basic C-style for loops are available too. Notice how we put a my inside the for statement, declaring $i only for the scope of the loop:
for(my $i = 0; $i < scalar @array; $i++) { print $i, ": ", $array[$i]; } # $i has ceased to exist here, which is much tidier.
This kind of for loop is considered old-fashioned and should be avoided where possible. Native iteration over a list is much nicer. Note: unlike PHP, the for and foreach keywords are synonyms. Just use whatever looks most readable:
foreach my $string ( @array ) { print $string; }
If you do need the indices, the range operator .. creates an anonymous list of integers:
foreach my $i ( 0 .. $#array ) { print $i, ": ", $array[$i]; }
You can't iterate over a hash. However, you can iterate over its keys. Use the keys built-in function to retrieve an array containing all the keys of a hash. Then use the foreach approach that we used for arrays:
foreach my $key (keys %scientists) { print $key, ": ", $scientists{$key}; }
Since a hash has no underlying order, the keys may be returned in any order. Use the sort built-in function to sort the array of keys alphabetically beforehand:
foreach my $key (sort keys %scientists) { print $key, ": ", $scientists{$key}; }
If you don't provide an explicit iterator, Perl uses a default iterator, $_ . $_ is the first and friendliest of the built-in variables:
foreach ( @array ) { print $_; }
If using the default iterator, and you only wish to put a single statement inside your loop, you can use the super-short loop syntax:
print $_ foreach @array;
Loop control
next and last can be used to control the progress of a loop. In most programming languages these are known as continue and break respectively. We can also optionally provide a label for any loop. By convention, labels are written in ALLCAPITALS . Having labelled the loop, next and last may target that label. This example finds primes below 100:
CANDIDATE: for my $candidate ( 2 .. 100 ) { for my $divisor ( 2 .. sqrt $candidate ) { next CANDIDATE if $candidate % $divisor == 0; } print $candidate." is prime
"; }
Array functions
In-place array modification
We'll use @stack to demonstrate these:
my @stack = ("Fred", "Eileen", "Denise", "Charlie"); print @stack; # "FredEileenDeniseCharlie"
pop extracts and returns the final element of the array. This can be thought of as the top of the stack:
print pop @stack; # "Charlie" print @stack; # "FredEileenDenise"
push appends extra elements to the end of the array:
push @stack, "Bob", "Alice"; print @stack; # "FredEileenDeniseBobAlice"
shift extracts and returns the first element of the array:
print shift @stack; # "Fred" print @stack; # "EileenDeniseBobAlice"
unshift inserts new elements at the beginning of the array:
unshift @stack, "Hank", "Grace"; print @stack; # "HankGraceEileenDeniseBobAlice"
pop , push , shift and unshift are all special cases of splice . splice removes and returns an array slice, replacing it with a different array slice:
print splice(@stack, 1, 4, "<<<", ">>>"); # "GraceEileenDeniseBob" print @stack; # "Hank<<<>>>Alice"
Creating new arrays from old
Perl provides the following functions which act on arrays to create other arrays.
The join function concatenates many strings into one:
my @elements = ("Antimony", "Arsenic", "Aluminum", "Selenium"); print @elements; # "AntimonyArsenicAluminumSelenium" print "@elements"; # "Antimony Arsenic Aluminum Selenium" print join(", ", @elements); # "Antimony, Arsenic, Aluminum, Selenium"
In list context, the reverse function returns a list in reverse order. In scalar context, reverse concatenates the whole list together and then reverses it as a single word.
print reverse("Hello", "World"); # "WorldHello" print reverse("HelloWorld"); # "HelloWorld" print scalar reverse("HelloWorld"); # "dlroWolleH" print scalar reverse("Hello", "World"); # "dlroWolleH"
The map function takes an array as input and applies an operation to every scalar $_ in this array. It then constructs a new array out of the results. The operation to perform is provided in the form of a single expression inside braces:
my @capitals = ("Baton Rouge", "Indianapolis", "Columbus", "Montgomery", "Helena", "Denver", "Boise"); print join ", ", map { uc $_ } @capitals; # "BATON ROUGE, INDIANAPOLIS, COLUMBUS, MONTGOMERY, HELENA, DENVER, BOISE"
The grep function takes an array as input and returns a filtered array as output. The syntax is similar to map . This time, the second argument is evaluated for each scalar $_ in the input array. If a boolean true value is returned, the scalar is put into the output array, otherwise not.
print join ", ", grep { length $_ == 6 } @capitals; # "Helena, Denver"
Obviously, the length of the resulting array is the number of successful matches, which means you can use grep to quickly check whether an array contains an element:
print scalar grep { $_ eq "Columbus" } @capitals; # "1"
grep and map may be combined to form list comprehensions, an exceptionally powerful feature conspicuously absent from many other programming languages.
By default, the sort function returns the input array, sorted into lexical (alphabetical) order:
my @elevations = (19, 1, 2, 100, 3, 98, 100, 1056); print join ", ", sort @elevations; # "1, 100, 100, 1056, 19, 2, 3, 98"
However, similar to grep and map , you may supply some code of your own. Sorting is always performed using a series of comparisons between two elements. Your block receives $a and $b as inputs and should return -1 if $a is "less than" $b , 0 if they are "equal" or 1 if $a is "greater than" $b .
The cmp operator does exactly this for strings:
print join ", ", sort { $a cmp $b } @elevations; # "1, 100, 100, 1056, 19, 2, 3, 98"
The "spaceship operator", <=> , does the same for numbers:
print join ", ", sort { $a <=> $b } @elevations; # "1, 2, 3, 19, 98, 100, 100, 1056"
$a and $b are always scalars, but they can be references to quite complex objects which are difficult to compare. If you need more space for the comparison, you can create a separate subroutine and provide its name instead:
sub comparator { # lots of code... # return -1, 0 or 1 } print join ", ", sort comparator @elevations;
You can't do this for grep or map operations.
Notice how the subroutine and block are never explicitly provided with $a and $b . Like $_ , $a and $b are, in fact, global variables which are populated with a pair of values to be compared each time.
Built-in functions
By now you have seen at least a dozen built-in functions: print , sort , map , grep , keys , scalar and so on. Built-in functions are one of Perl's greatest strengths. They
are numerous
are very useful
are extensively documented
vary greatly in syntax, so check the documentation
sometimes accept regular expressions as arguments
sometimes accept entire blocks of code as arguments
sometimes don't require commas between arguments
sometimes will consume an arbitrary number of comma-separated arguments and sometimes will not
sometimes will fill in their own arguments if too few are supplied
generally don't require brackets around their arguments except in ambiguous circumstances
The best advice regarding built-in functions is to know that they exist. Skim the documentation for future reference. If you are carrying out a task which feels like it's low-level and common enough that it's been done many times before, the chances are that it has.
User-defined subroutines
Subroutines are declared using the sub keyword. In contrast with built-in functions, user-defined subroutines always accept the same input: a list of scalars. That list may of course have a single element, or be empty. A single scalar is taken as a list with a single element. A hash with N elements is taken as a list with 2 N elements.
Although the brackets are optional, subroutines should always be invoked using brackets, even when called with no arguments. This makes it clear that a subroutine call is happening.
Once you're inside a subroutine, the arguments are available using the built-in array variable @_ . Example:
sub hyphenate { # Extract the first argument from the array, ignore everything else my $word = shift @_; # An overly clever list comprehension $word = join "-", map { substr $word, $_, 1 } (0 .. (length $word) - 1); return $word; } print hyphenate("exterminate"); # "e-x-t-e-r-m-i-n-a-t-e"
Perl calls by reference
Unlike almost every other major programming language, Perl calls by reference. This means that the variables or values available inside the body of a subroutine are not copies of the originals. They are the originals.
my $x = 7; sub reassign { $_[0] = 42; } reassign($x); print $x; # "42"
If you try something like
reassign(8);
then an error occurs and execution halts, because the first line of reassign() is equivalent to
8 = 42;
which is obviously nonsense.
The lesson to learn is that in the body of a subroutine, you should always unpack your arguments before working with them.
Unpacking arguments
There's More Than One Way To unpack @_ , but some are superior to others.
The example subroutine left_pad below pads a string out to the required length using the supplied pad character. (The x function concatenates multiple copies of the same string in a row.) (Note: for brevity, these subroutines all lack some elementary error checking, i.e. ensuring the pad character is only 1 character, checking that the width is greater than or equal to the length of existing string, checking that all needed arguments were passed at all.)
left_pad is typically invoked as follows:
print left_pad("hello", 10, "+"); # "+++++hello"
Unpacking @_ entry by entry is effective but not terribly pretty: sub left_pad { my $oldString = $_[0]; my $width = $_[1]; my $padChar = $_[2]; my $newString = ($padChar x ($width - length $oldString)) . $oldString; return $newString; } Unpacking @_ by removing data from it using shift is recommended for up to 4 arguments: sub left_pad { my $oldString = shift @_; my $width = shift @_; my $padChar = shift @_; my $newString = ($padChar x ($width - length $oldString)) . $oldString; return $newString; } If no array is provided to the shift function, then it operates on @_ implicitly. This approach is seen very commonly: sub left_pad { my $oldString = shift; my $width = shift; my $padChar = shift; my $newString = ($padChar x ($width - length $oldString)) . $oldString; return $newString; } Beyond 4 arguments it becomes hard to keep track of what is being assigned where. You can unpack @_ all in one go using multiple simultaneous scalar assignment. Again, this is okay for up to 4 arguments: sub left_pad { my ($oldString, $width, $padChar) = @_; my $newString = ($padChar x ($width - length $oldString)) . $oldString; return $newString; } For subroutines with large numbers of arguments or where some arguments are optional or cannot be used in combination with others, best practice is to require the user to provide a hash of arguments when calling the subroutine, and then unpack @_ back into that hash of arguments. For this approach, our subroutine call would look a little different: print left_pad("oldString" => "pod", "width" => 10, "padChar" => "+"); And the subroutine itself looks like this: sub left_pad { my %args = @_; my $newString = ($args{"padChar"} x ($args{"width"} - length $args{"oldString"})) . $args{"oldString"}; return $newString; }
Returning values
Like other Perl expressions, subroutine calls may display contextual behaviour. You can use the wantarray function (which should be called wantlist but never mind) to detect what context the subroutine is being evaluated in, and return a result appropriate to that context:
sub contextualSubroutine { # Caller wants a list. Return a list return ("Everest", "K2", "Etna") if wantarray; # Caller wants a scalar. Return a scalar return 3; } my @array = contextualSubroutine(); print @array; # "EverestK2Etna" my $scalar = contextualSubroutine(); print $scalar; # "3"
System calls
Apologies if you already know the following non-Perl-related facts. Every time a process finishes on a Windows or Linux system (and, I assume, on most other systems), it concludes with a 16-bit status word. The highest 8 bits constitute a return code between 0 and 255 inclusive, with 0 conventionally representing unqualified success, and other values representing various degrees of failure. The other 8 bits are less frequently examined - they "reflect mode of failure, like signal death and core dump information".
You can exit from a Perl script with the return code of your choice (from 0 to 255) using exit .
Perl provides More Than One Way To - in a single call - spawn a child process, pause the current script until the child process has finished, and then resume interpretation of the current script. Whichever method is used, you will find that immediately afterwards, the built-in scalar variable $? has been populated with the status word that was returned from that child process's termination. You can get the return code by taking just the highest 8 of those 16 bits: $? >> 8 .
The system function can be used to invoke another program with the arguments listed. The value returned by system is the same value with which $? is populated:
my $rc = system "perl", "anotherscript.pl", "foo", "bar", "baz"; $rc >>= 8; print $rc; # "37"
Alternatively, you can use backticks `` to run an actual command at the command line and capture the standard output from that command. In scalar context the entire output is returned as a single string. In list context, the entire output is returned as an array of strings, each one representing a line of output.
my $text = `perl anotherscript.pl foo bar baz`; print $text; # "foobarbaz"
This is the behaviour which would be seen if anotherscript.pl contained, for example:
use strict; use warnings; print @ARGV; exit 37;
Files and file handles
A scalar variable may contain a file handle instead of a number/string/reference or undef . A file handle is essentially a reference to a specific location inside a specific file.
Use open to turn a scalar variable into a file handle. open must be supplied with a mode. The mode < indicates that we wish to open the file to read from it:
my $f = "text.txt"; my $result = open my $fh, "<", $f; if(!$result) { die "Couldn't open '".$f."' for reading because: ".$!; }
If successful, open returns a true value. Otherwise, it returns false and an error message is stuffed into the built-in variable $! . As seen above, you should always check that the open operation completed successfully. This checking being rather tedious, a common idiom is:
open(my $fh, "<", $f) || die "Couldn't open '".$f."' for reading because: ".$!;
Note the need for parentheses around the open call's arguments.
To read a line of text from a filehandle, use the readline built-in function. readline returns a full line of text, with a line break intact at the end of it (except possibly for the final line of the file), or undef if you've reached the end of the file.
while(1) { my $line = readline $fh; last unless defined $line; # process the line... }
To truncate that possible trailing line break, use chomp :
chomp $line;
Note that chomp acts on $line in place. $line = chomp $line is probably not what you want.
You can also use eof to detect that the end of the file has been reached:
while(!eof $fh) { my $line = readline $fh; # process $line... }
But beware of just using while(my $line = readline $fh) , because if $line turns out to be "0" , the loop will terminate early. If you want to write something like that, Perl provides the <> operator which wraps up readline in a fractionally safer way. This is very commonly-seen and perfectly safe:
while(my $line = <$fh>) { # process $line... }
And even:
while(<$fh>) { # process $_... }
Writing to a file involves first opening it in a different mode. The mode > indicates that we wish to open the file to write to it. ( > will clobber the content of the target file if it already exists and has content. To merely append to an existing file, use mode >> .) Then, simply provide the filehandle as a zeroth argument for the print function.
open(my $fh2, ">", $f) || die "Couldn't open '".$f."' for writing because: ".$!; print $fh2 "The eagles have left the nest";
Notice the absence of a comma between $fh2 and the next argument.
File handles are actually closed automatically when they drop out of scope, but otherwise:
close $fh2; close $fh;
Three filehandles exist as global constants: STDIN , STDOUT and STDERR . These are open automatically when the script starts. To read a single line of user input:
my $line = <STDIN>;
To just wait for the user to hit Enter:
<STDIN>;
Calling <> with no filehandle reads data from STDIN , or from any files named in arguments when the Perl script was called.
As you may have gathered, print prints to STDOUT by default if no filehandle is named.
File tests
The function -e is a built-in function which tests whether the named file exists.
print "what" unless -e "/usr/bin/perl";
The function -d is a built-in function which tests whether the named file is a directory.
The function -f is a built-in function which tests whether the named file is a plain file.
These are just three of a large class of functions of the form -X where X is some lower- or upper-case letter. These functions are called file tests. Note the leading minus sign. In a Google query, the minus sign indicates to exclude results containing this search term. This makes file tests hard to Google for! Just search for "perl file test" instead.
Regular expressions
Regular expressions appear in many languages and tools other than Perl. Perl's core regular expression syntax is basically the same as everywhere else, but Perl's full regular expression capabilities are terrifyingly complex and difficult to understand. The best advice I can give you is to avoid this complexity wherever possible.
Match operations are performed using =~ m// . In scalar context, =~ m// returns true on success, false on failure.
my $string = "Hello world"; if($string =~ m/(\w+)\s+(\w+)/) { print "success"; }
Parentheses perform sub-matches. After a successful match operation is performed, the sub-matches get stuffed into the built-in variables $1 , $2 , $3 , ...:
print $1; # "Hello" print $2; # "world"
In list context, =~ m// returns $1 , $2 , ... as a list.
my $string = "colourless green ideas sleep furiously"; my @matches = $string =~ m/(\w+)\s+((\w+)\s+(\w+))\s+(\w+)\s+(\w+)/; print join ", ", map { "'".$_."'" } @matches; # prints "'colourless', 'green ideas', 'green', 'ideas', 'sleep', 'furiously'"
Substitution operations are performed using =~ s/// .
my $string = "Good morning world"; $string =~ s/world/Vietnam/; print $string; # "Good morning Vietnam"
Notice how the contents of $string have changed. You have to pass a scalar variable on the left-hand side of an =~ s/// operation. If you pass a literal string, you'll get an error.
The /g flag indicates "group match".
In scalar context, each =~ m//g call finds another match after the previous one, returning true on success, false on failure. You can access $1 and so on afterwards in the usual way. For example:
my $string = "a tonne of feathers or a tonne of bricks"; while($string =~ m/(\w+)/g) { print "'".$1."'
"; }
In list context, an =~ m//g call returns all of the matches at once.
my @matches = $string =~ m/(\w+)/g; print join ", ", map { "'".$_."'" } @matches;
An =~ s///g call performs a global search/replace and returns the number of matches. Here, we replace all vowels with the letter "r".
# Try once without /g. $string =~ s/[aeiou]/r/; print $string; # "r tonne of feathers or a tonne of bricks" # Once more. $string =~ s/[aeiou]/r/; print $string; # "r trnne of feathers or a tonne of bricks" # And do all the rest using /g $string =~ s/[aeiou]/r/g; print $string, "
"; # "r trnnr rf frrthrrs rr r trnnr rf brrcks"
The /i flag makes matches and substitutions case-insensitive.
The /x flag allows your regular expression to contain whitespace (e.g., line breaks) and comments.
"Hello world" =~ m/ (\w+) # one or more word characters [ ] # single literal space, stored inside a character class world # literal "world" /x; # returns true
Modules and packages
In Perl, modules and packages are different things.
Modules
A module is a .pm file that you can include in another Perl file (script or module). A module is a text file with exactly the same syntax as a .pl Perl script. An example module might be located at C:\foo\bar\baz\Demo\StringUtils.pm or /foo/bar/baz/Demo/StringUtils.pm , and read as follows:
use strict; use warnings; sub zombify { my $word = shift @_; $word =~ s/[aeiou]/r/g; return $word; } return 1;
Because a module is executed from top to bottom when it is loaded, you need to return a true value at the end to show that it was loaded successfully.
So that the Perl interpreter can find them, directories containing Perl modules should be listed in your environment variable PERL5LIB before calling perl . List the root directory containing the modules, don't list the module directories or the modules themselves:
set PERL5LIB="C:\foo\bar\baz;%PERL5LIB%"
or
export PERL5LIB="/foo/bar/baz:$PERL5LIB"
Once the Perl module is created and perl knows where to look for it, you can use the require built-in function to search for and execute it during a Perl script. For example, calling require Demo::StringUtils causes the Perl interpreter to search each directory listed in PERL5LIB in turn, looking for a file called Demo/StringUtils.pm . After the module has been executed, the subroutines that were defined there suddenly become available to the main script. Our example script might be called main.pl and read as follows:
use strict; use warnings; require Demo::StringUtils; print zombify("i want brains"); # "r wrnt brrrns"
Note the use of the double colon :: as a directory separator.
Now a problem surfaces: if main.pl contains many require calls, and each of the modules so loaded contains more require calls, then it can become difficult to track down the original declaration of the zombify() subroutine. The solution to this problem is to use packages.
Packages
A package is a namespace in which subroutines can be declared. Any subroutine you declare is implicitly declared within the current package. At the beginning of execution, you are in the main package, but you can switch package using the package built-in function:
use strict; use warnings; sub subroutine { print "universe"; } package Food::Potatoes; # no collision: sub subroutine { print "kingedward"; }
Note the use of the double colon :: as a namespace separator.
Any time you call a subroutine, you implicitly call a subroutine which is inside the current package. Alternatively, you can explicitly provide a package. See what happens if we continue the above script:
subroutine(); # "kingedward" main::subroutine(); # "universe" Food::Potatoes::subroutine(); # "kingedward"
So the logical solution to the problem described above is to modify C:\foo\bar\baz\Demo\StringUtils.pm or /foo/bar/baz/Demo/StringUtils.pm to read:
use strict; use warnings; package Demo::StringUtils; sub zombify { my $word = shift @_; $word =~ s/[aeiou]/r/g; return $word; } return 1;
And modify main.pl to read:
use strict; use warnings; require Demo::StringUtils; print Demo::StringUtils:: zombify("i want brains"); # "r wrnt brrrns"
Now read this next bit carefully.
Packages and modules are two completely separate and distinct features of the Perl programming language. The fact that they both use the same double colon delimiter is a huge red herring. It is possible to switch packages multiple times over the course of a script or module, and it is possible to use the same package declaration in multiple locations in multiple files. Calling require Foo::Bar does not look for and load a file with a package Foo::Bar declaration somewhere inside it, nor does it necessarily load subroutines in the Foo::Bar namespace. Calling require Foo::Bar merely loads a file called Foo/Bar.pm , which need not have any kind of package declaration inside it at all, and in fact might declare package Baz::Qux and other nonsense inside it for all you know.
Likewise, a subroutine call Baz::Qux::processThis() need not necessarily have been declared inside a file named Baz/Qux.pm . It could have been declared literally anywhere.
Separating these two concepts is one of the stupidest features of Perl, and treating them as separate concepts invariably results in chaotic, maddening code. Fortunately for us, the majority of Perl programmers obey the following two laws:
A Perl script ( .pl file) must always contain exactly zero package declarations. A Perl module ( .pm file) must always contain exactly one package declaration, corresponding exactly to its name and location. E.g. module Demo/StringUtils.pm must begin with package Demo::StringUtils .
Because of this, in practice you will find that most "packages" and "modules" produced by reliable third parties can be regarded and referred to interchangeably. However, it is important that you do not take this for granted, because one day you will meet code produced by a madman.
Object-oriented Perl
Perl is not a great language for OO programming. Perl's OO capabilities were grafted on after the fact, and this shows.
An object is simply a reference (i.e. a scalar variable) which happens to know which class its referent belongs to. To tell a reference that its referent belongs to a class, use bless . To find out what class a reference's referent belongs to (if any), use ref .
A method is simply a subroutine that expects an object (or, in the case of class methods, a package name) as its first argument. Object methods are invoked using $obj->method() ; class methods are invoked using Package::Name->method() .
A class is simply a package that happens to contain methods.
A quick example makes this clearer. An example module Animal.pm containing a class Animal reads like this:
use strict; use warnings; package Animal; sub eat { # First argument is always the object to act upon. my $self = shift @_; foreach my $food ( @_ ) { if($self->can_eat($food)) { print "Eating ", $food; } else { print "Can't eat ", $food; } } } # For the sake of argument, assume an Animal can eat anything. sub can_eat { return 1; } return 1;
And we might make use of this class like so:
require Animal; my $animal = { "legs" => 4, "colour" => "brown", }; # $animal is an ordinary hash reference print ref $animal; # "HASH" bless $animal, "Animal"; # now it is an object of class "Animal" print ref $animal; # "Animal"
Note: literally any reference can be blessed into any class. It's up to you to ensure that (1) the referent can actually be used as an instance of this class and (2) that the class in question exists and has been loaded.
You can still work with the original hash in the usual way:
print "Animal has ", $animal->{"legs"}, " leg(s)";
But you can now also call methods on the object using the same -> operator, like so:
$animal->eat("insects", "curry", "eucalyptus");
This final call is equivalent to Animal::eat($animal, "insects", "curry", "eucalyptus") .
Constructors
A constructor is a class method which returns a new object. If you want one, just declare one. You can use any name you like. For class methods, the first argument passed is not an object but a class name. In this case, "Animal" :
use strict; use warnings; package Animal; sub new { my $class = shift @_; return bless { "legs" => 4, "colour" => "brown" }, $class; } # ...etc.
And then use it like so:
my $animal = Animal->new();
Inheritance
To create a class inheriting from a parent class, use use parent . Let's suppose we subclassed Animal with Koala , located at Koala.pm :
use strict; use warnings; package Koala; # Inherit from Animal use parent ("Animal"); # Override one method sub can_eat { my $self = shift @_; # Not used. You could just put "shift @_;" here my $food = shift @_; return $food eq "eucalyptus"; } return 1;
And some sample code:
use strict; use warnings; require Koala; my $koala = Koala->new(); $koala->eat("insects", "curry", "eucalyptus"); # eat only the eucalyptus
This final method call tries to invoke Koala::eat($koala, "insects", "curry", "eucalyptus") , but a subroutine eat() isn't defined in the Koala package. However, because Koala has a parent class Animal , the Perl interpreter tries calling Animal::eat($koala, "insects", "curry", "eucalyptus") instead, which works. Note how the class Animal was loaded automatically by Koala.pm .
Since use parent accepts a list of parent class names, Perl supports multiple inheritance, with all the benefits and horrors this entails.
BEGIN blocks
A BEGIN block is executed as soon as perl has finished parsing that block, even before it parses the rest of the file. It is ignored at execution time:
use strict; use warnings; print "This gets printed second"; BEGIN { print "This gets printed first"; } print "This gets printed third";
A BEGIN block is always executed first. If you create multiple BEGIN blocks (don't), they are executed in order from top to bottom as the compiler encounters them. A BEGIN block always executes first even if it is placed halfway through a script (don't do this) or at the end (or this). Do not mess with the natural order of code. Put BEGIN blocks at the beginning!
A BEGIN block is executed as soon as the block has been parsed. Once this is done, parsing resumes at the end of the BEGIN block. Only once the whole script or module has been parsed is any of the code outside of BEGIN blocks executed.
use strict; use warnings; print "This 'print' statement gets parsed successfully but never executed"; BEGIN { print "This gets printed first"; } print "This, also, is parsed successfully but never executed"; ...because e4h8v3oitv8h4o8gch3o84c3 there is a huge parsing error down here.
Because they are executed at compilation time, a BEGIN block placed inside a conditional block will still be executed first, even if the conditional evaluates to false and despite the fact that the conditional has not been evaluated at all yet and in fact may never be evaluated.
if(0) { BEGIN { print "This will definitely get printed"; } print "Even though this won't"; }
BEGIN
BEGIN
BEGIN { if($condition) { # etc. } }
use
Okay. Now that you understand the obtuse behaviour and semantics of packages, modules, class methods and BEGIN blocks, I can explain the exceedingly commonly-seen use function.
The following three statements:
use Caterpillar ("crawl", "pupate"); use Caterpillar (); use Caterpillar;
are respectively equivalent to:
BEGIN { require Caterpillar; Caterpillar->import("crawl", "pupate"); } BEGIN { require Caterpillar; } BEGIN { require Caterpillar; Caterpillar->import(); }
No, the three examples are not in the wrong order. It is just that Perl is dumb.
A use call is a disguised BEGIN block. The same warnings apply. use statements must always be placed at the top of the file, and never inside conditionals .
call is a disguised block. The same warnings apply. statements must always be placed at the top of the file, and . import() is not a built-in Perl function. It is a user-defined class method . The burden is on the programmer of the Caterpillar package to define or inherit import() , and the method could theoretically accept anything as arguments and do anything with those arguments. use Caterpillar; could do anything. Consult the documentation of Caterpillar.pm to find out exactly what will happen.
is not a built-in Perl function. It is a . The burden is on the programmer of the package to define or inherit , and the method could theoretically accept anything as arguments and do anything with those arguments. could do anything. Consult the documentation of to find out exactly what will happen. Notice how require Caterpillar loads a module named Caterpillar.pm , whereas Caterpillar->import() calls the import() subroutine that was defined inside the Caterpillar package. Let's hope the module and the package coincide!
Exporter
The most common way to define an import() method is to inherit it from the Exporter module. Exporter is a core module, and a de facto core feature of the Perl programming language. In Exporter's implementation of import() , the list of arguments that you pass in is interpreted as a list of subroutine names. When a subroutine is import() ed, it becomes available in the current package as well as in its own original package.
This concept is easiest to grasp using an example. Here's what Caterpillar.pm looks like:
use strict; use warnings; package Caterpillar; # Inherit from Exporter use parent ("Exporter"); sub crawl { print "inch inch"; } sub eat { print "chomp chomp"; } sub pupate { print "bloop bloop"; } our @EXPORT_OK = ("crawl", "eat"); return 1;
The package variable @EXPORT_OK should contain a list of subroutine names.
Another piece of code may then import() these subroutines by name, typically using a use statement:
use strict; use warnings; use Caterpillar ("crawl"); crawl(); # "inch inch"
In this case, the current package is main , so the crawl() call is actually a call to main::crawl() , which (because it was imported) maps to Caterpillar::crawl() .
Note: regardless of the content of @EXPORT_OK , every method can always be called "longhand":
use strict; use warnings; use Caterpillar (); # no subroutines named, no import() call made # and yet... Caterpillar::crawl(); # "inch inch" Caterpillar::eat(); # "chomp chomp" Caterpillar::pupate(); # "bloop bloop"
Perl has no private methods. Customarily, a method intended for private use is named with a leading underscore or two.
@EXPORT
The Exporter module also defines a package variable called @EXPORT , which can also be populated with a list of subroutine names.
use strict; use warnings; package Caterpillar; # Inherit from Exporter use parent ("Exporter"); sub crawl { print "inch inch"; } sub eat { print "chomp chomp"; } sub pupate { print "bloop bloop"; } our @EXPORT = ("crawl", "eat", "pupate"); return 1;
The subroutines named in @EXPORT are exported if import() is called with no arguments at all, which is what happens here:
use strict; use warnings; use Caterpillar; # calls import() with no arguments crawl(); # "inch inch" eat(); # "chomp chomp" pupate(); # "bloop bloop"
But notice how we are back in a situation where, without other clues, it might not be easy to tell where crawl() was originally defined. The moral of this story is twofold:
When creating a module which makes use of Exporter, never use @EXPORT to export subroutines by default. Always make the user call subroutines "longhand" or import() them explicitly (using e.g. use Caterpillar ("crawl") , which is a strong clue to look in Caterpillar.pm for the definition of crawl() ). When use ing a module which makes use of Exporter, always explicitly name the subroutines you want to import() . If you don't want to import() any subroutines and wish to refer to them longhand, you must supply an explicit empty list: use Caterpillar () .
Miscellaneous notes
The core module Data::Dumper can be used to output an arbitrary scalar to the screen. This is an essential debug tool.
There's an alternate syntax, qw{ } , for declaring arrays. This is often seen in use statements: use Account qw{create open close suspend delete}; There are many other quote-like operators.
In =~ m// and =~ s/// operations, you can use braces instead of slashes as the regex delimiters. This is quite useful if your regex contains a lot of slashes, which would otherwise need escaping with backslashes. For example, =~ m{///} matches three literal forward slashes, and =~ s{^https?://}{} removes the protocol part of a URL.
Perl does have CONSTANTS . These are discouraged now, but weren't always. Constants are actually just subroutine calls with omitted brackets.
Sometimes people omit quotes around hash keys, writing $hash{key} instead of $hash{"key"} . They can get away with it because in this situation the bareword key occurs as the string "key" , as opposed to a subroutine call key() .
If you see a block of unformatted code wrapped in a delimiter with double chevrons, like <<EOF , the magic word to Google for is "here-doc".
Warning! Many built-in functions can be called with no arguments, causing them to operate on $_ instead. Hopefully this will help you understand formations like: print foreach @array; and foreach ( @array ) { next unless defined; } I dislike this formation because it can lead to problems when refactoring.
And that's two and a half hours. |
“We all are perhaps desperate to know what is on the other side of the veil after we die,” Mr. Baugher said, adding that his initial skepticism about the Burpo family’s story was short-lived. “This was a very down-to-earth, conservative, quote-unquote normal Midwestern family. We became fully convinced that this story was valid. And also that it was a great story that would just take off.”
The book was an instant hit in Barnes & Noble outlets and was near the top of the best-seller list on its bn.com. The chain’s religion buyer was an early advocate for the book, ordering copies for every store, said Patricia Bostelman, the vice president for marketing at Barnes & Noble.
“When you buy the religion subject, you are presented with many stories about heaven, personal experiences about near-death and the afterlife,” Ms. Bostelman said, noting that several other books with “heaven” in the title have sold well recently. “But what was unusual about this book was that it was the story of a little boy. It deactivated some of the cynicism that can go along with adults capitalizing on their experiences.”
Photo
Todd Burpo wrote the book with Lynn Vincent, who collaborated with Sarah Palin on “Going Rogue.” Mr. Burpo, the pastor of Crossroads Wesleyan Church in Imperial, a farming community in southwest Nebraska, said in an interview that he had shouldered some criticism over it.
“People say we just did this to make money, and it’s not the truth,” Mr. Burpo said, referring to anonymous online comments about the book. “We were expecting nothing. We were just hoping the publisher would break even.” (He said he planned to give away much of the royalty income and spend some of it on home improvements.)
At first, he and his wife, Sonja, were not sure if they could believe their son’s story, which came out slowly, months and years after his sudden illness and operation in 2003. The details persuaded them, Mr. Burpo said. Colton told his parents that he had met his younger sister in heaven, describing her as a dark-haired girl who resembled his older sister, Cassie. When the Burpos questioned him, he asked his mother, “You had a baby die in your tummy, didn’t you?” While his wife had suffered a miscarriage years before, Mr. Burpo said, they had not told Colton about it. “There’s just no way he could have known,” Mr. Burpo said.
And the Burpos said that Colton painstakingly described images that he said he saw in heaven — like the bloody wounds on Jesus’ palms — that he had not been shown before.
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Eventually the Burpos decided to tell their story beyond their town. Mr. Burpo, in his Sunday sermons, had already introduced some anecdotes to his congregation. Through a pastor friend, they met Joel Kneedler, an agent with Alive Communications, a Christian literary agency in Colorado Springs. Mr. Kneedler sold the book to Thomas Nelson, a publisher known for Christian titles like “40 Days With Jesus” by Sarah Young. The advance was in the low five figures.
Photo
The book’s list price is $16.99, but that is discounted to $9.34 on amazon.com.
At the outlets of Barbara’s Bookstore, an independent chain mostly in the Chicago area, the book is No. 1 on the store’s nonfiction best-seller list. Interest in it began to perk up around mid-February, said Greg Sato, a store manager.
“Of the nonfiction books lately that seems to be the one that people are asking about the most,” Mr. Sato said. “I have pegged it in the same vein as ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’ or ‘The Shack.’ Like an Oprah book, but a little more religious or spiritual.”
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Colton, who appears as a blond, round-faced little boy on the cover of the book, now plays the piano and trumpet, is fascinated by Greek mythology, listens to Christian rock and loves Nebraska football.
Telling his story matter-of-factly, Colton said he was pleased that people were finding the story inspirational.
“People are getting blessed, and they’re going to have healing from their hurts,” he said. “I’m happy for that.” |
PAULINE Hanson must apologise and retract her “crazy” peddling of “ignorant” advice about vaccinating kids, a former federal health department head said today.
Stephen Duckett said he was “disgusted” when the senator questioned their effectiveness and encouraged parents to do their own research.
“This is a situation where you’ve got a popular politician with a significant following who’s actually giving crazy, crazy medical advice,” he told ABC radio on Monday.
“She has to apologise and retract that statement.”
media_camera One Nation leader Pauline Hanson at Perth Airport last night. Picture:AAP
Senator Hanson also said parents should be allowed to have their children tested before booking vaccinations.
“Some of these parents are saying vaccinations have an effect on some children,” she told ABC television on Sunday.
But Mr Duckett, who is now director of health at the Grattan Institute policy think tank, rejected this.
“Vaccines are safe,” he said.
“I cannot stress how angry it makes one feel that she is putting lives at risk ... without any evidence whatsoever.”
media_camera Professor Stephen Duckett slammed Hanson’s comments as ‘putting lives at risk’.
Ms Hanson’s outspoken comments — in which she also appeared to liken the government’s No Jab, No Pay policy to blackmail and the actions of a “dictatorship” — were also linked to previous remarks she has made that seem to connect vaccinations with autism.
“What I’ve heard from parents and their concerns about it ... and what I have said is I advise parents to go out and do their own research with regards to this,” Ms Hanson said.
The right-wing senator went on to argue that parents needed to “make an informed decision”.
“What I don’t like about it is the blackmailing that’s happening with the government,” she told ABC TV. “Don’t do that to people. That’s a dictatorship. And I think people have a right to investigate themselves.”
NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard slammed the One Nation leader’s comments, saying: “Those who claim the right to represent and safeguard the community shouldn’t apply hocus pocus pixieland critiques of otherwise extremely well-founded, evidence-based scientific immunisation programs.”
media_camera NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard slammed the One Nation leader’s comments.
Opposition health spokesman Walt Secord said he shook his head “in total disbelief” at Ms Hanson appearing “on national television linking arms with the anti-vaxxers”.
The Australian Medical Association’s NSW president, Brad Frankum, labelled Ms Hanson’s remarks “very disappointing and really quite ignorant”.
“The way she has framed it is that somehow a non-medical parent is going to make a more informed decision about the value of vaccination than the entire medical profession,” Professor Frankum said.
“That’s very dangerous, really. It is going to give people the idea that they can avoid vaccination (for their kids).”
Prof Frankum also took aim at Ms Hanson’s apparent attack on the government’s No Jab, No Play policy, which prevents parents from receiving childcare rebates and certain other welfare payments if they have not properly vaccinated their children.
“It is not forcing parents to vaccinate their children but it’s sending the message that the government is trying to look after children,” he said.
Some groups continue to link vaccinations to autism and claim they pose serious health risks, but the study that popularised the supposed link has since been discredited and debunked.
The No Jab, No Play policy was introduced to counter an alarming drop-off in the rate of vaccination, which was exposing children to a range of deadly diseases.
“If parents choose not to vaccinate their children, they are putting their children’s health at risk and every other person’s children’s health at risk too,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said yesterday.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten described Ms Hanson’s views as “ plain dangerous”.
Ms Hanson created another stir yesterday by revealing she is planning to create a special One Nation boutique beer to help her “connect with voters”.
The VB-loving senator is aiming to capitalise on her brand name and said she was “interested in speaking to a range of craft brewers”. |
My previous electronics workbench was an old melamine office desk. It was not high enough to work comfortably on PCB assembly. I usually hand-solder small SMT components (0603, TSSOP, etc.) and I always ended up placing my PCBs on top of a box so I could see better what I was doing.
I looked online for a pre-built workbench, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Either it was too expensive or I didn’t like the design. I decided to build my own instead.
To be honest, woodworking isn’t one of my strongest skills, but in the end, I was quite satisfied with the results.
The design
I don’t have a shop in a garage or basement, I live in an apartment, so I’m limited on space. My previous setup was composed of two desks in an “L” shape configuration. The desk was 56” by 26” and a smaller bench on the left side for my drill press (36” by 18”). With the drawers on the desk, it did not leave too much leg room.
I wanted to get rid of the smaller table and install my drill press on my workbench. I made it 58” by 28” of which 24 inches is reserved on the left side for the drill. That leaves 34 inches for the work surface which I find is plenty.
The bench top is 31.5 inch from the floor. The total height including the top section is 82.5 inches.
Shelves
I designed the shelves to be part of the workbench itself so I wouldn’t have to drill holes in the wall to hang them. The top section is 41 inch high and has a perforated board backing (Peg board). There are two 32 inches wide adjustable shelves on the right side and one fixed shelf on the top which spans the entire width of the workbench.
Now, anyone who had to move a refrigerator down the stairs in a three story apartment building knows how much fun it is. That is why I made the top section detachable so the whole thing would be easier to move. The legs on the back extends 12 inch from the top of the work surface. The frame of the top section is held in place on those legs with two bolts on each sides.
Drawers
There was no practical places to install drawers for my tools. I recycled the drawers from my old desk. As it turns out, it fitted perfectly on the side of the storage shelf near my workbench. I Built a frame for them with 2x2’s and painted it black. I installed ball bearing slides instead of the cheap tracks I had before.
Plan
Here is the workbench plans (PDF) :
Download
Construction
Framing
I started by cutting each piece of the frame using 2x4’s. I assigned each one letters so it was easier to keep track which goes where and to avoid mistakes. Then, I made 1.5 inch deep notches on the front and rear legs so that the horizontal support could sit inside the notches. That way, all the weight you put on top of the bench is transferred directly to the legs instead of the screws.
Once I cut all the pieces, I began assembling the sides first. Then, the front and rear support beams and finally, the lower shelf. This shelf serves as additional storage space, but more importantly, it also strengthens the structure. On most workbench plans, it spans the entire depth. I made it 11 inch wide instead so it would give me enough leg room.
Bench top
With the base frame completed, it was time to install the bench top. I glued and screwed the top in place with three inches screws. I then covered the screws with wood filler. Now this is the step I would differently if I did it again. Altough I did match the wood filler with the natural color of the wood. Once I stained it however, it became more apparent. The proper way to do it would have been to glue another 1/4 inch sheet on top of the base sheet
Top section
The next step was to assemble the upper section frame and then add the perforated board. I added a seven inches back-splash on top of the perforated board. This was not part of the original design, it was a way to cover a screw-up i made. Anyway, I think it looks better that way.
I cut openings for the two device boxes. The larger one is for AC and the smaller one on the left is for low voltage connections (network access and USB).
Finishing
I originally planned to stain the entire workbench. The bench top looked fine, but trying to stain the 2x4’s was a mistake. I did one leg and it looked like crap. In the end, I decided to stain only the bench top and shelves and paint the rest with black melamine paint.
The melamine paint did not need any varnish (I’m not sure if it would be compatible anyway). To protect the stain, I used Varathane Nano Defence floor finish. The guy at the building supply store gave me the idea, I would never have thought of using floor varnish on a piece of furniture, but it actually works quite well. It is water based, so the smell was not an issue here.
To apply the varnish, I used a four inch wide foam brush. I applied about seven coats of varnish, sanding lightly between each application.
Lighting fixtures
Lighting is one thing I made sure I had plenty of. In addition to the two fluorescent tubes on the top shelf, I have two LED “tubes” under the lower shelf about 10 inches away from the work surface. I don’t have the proper tool to measure the total LUX, but I think one would have sufficient light to perform surgery.
I made those lighting fixtures myself from flexible LED strips (120 LED per meter) I bought on Ebay. Each fixtures is composed of two 40cm (16 inches) strip in parallel for a total of four 40cm strips. At 12 Watt per meter, they consumes about 19W @ 12V. They are powered by a 25W 12V AC-DC PSU (LS25-12) mounted on the frame behind the perforated board.
They are fixed on an “L” shape aluminum channel which helps dissipate the heat.
Electrical
There are two AC outlets: The white one is always on and the gray outlet is controlled by the switch on the right. The second switch controls both the fluorescent tubes and the LED strips.
Cabinet for my scope
With the drill press this close to my oscilloscope, there is a high risk of debris flying into the vents, especially when i’m drilling aluminum. Up until now, each time i was using the drill, I always put something over my scope to protect it, but that was not enough. There was always the possibility that I would lose my grip on the piece i’m drilling and that it goes flying towards the LCD screen, not a good thing… That’s why i decided to build this cabinet before something catastrophic happens.
There’s nothing too fancy here, it’s just a box with a door. It measures 23 1/2” long x 8” high by 12 3/4” deep. It’s made from 3 pieces of 12 inch wide, 3/4 inch thick plywood. The door frame is made from 2x1 pine strips with a groove in the middle to fit the 3/16 inch thick lexan sheet.
The cabinet itself is screwed to the shelf so that in case of an impact, it won’t hit the equipment inside.
As for ventilation, there is 2 inch clearance at the top and 5 inch behind which is not ideal, but good enough. I never leave the scope on with the door closed. |
by Mike Tate -
The recent discovery of the Bosnian Pyramids in Visoko, Bosnia by Dr. Semir Osmanagić has created worldwide interest among scholars and scientists alike, not to mention the fascination and curiosity sparked in the minds of the general public. Against scrutiny and overwhelming amounts of skepticism the "Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids" received international validation when observed by many well respected professionals in the various fields of science and has proven to be the largest (220 meter high) and the oldest (10,000-12,000 years old) known pyramids on the planet. This mass concentrated effort of analysis led to the discovery of an unexplained energetic radiation found inside, as well as above, the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun. Further analysis revealed an Ultrasonic Frequency Beam being emitted from the top of the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun out towards space, with the strength of the frequency becoming stronger the further it traveled away from the Sun Pyramid.
The first team to report this ultrasound frequency was in April of 2010 by a group of Croatian researchers led by physicist Slobodan Mizdrak. The instruments used in their research was an 823 EMF Gaussmeter with an internal probe and a 828 Gaussmeter with a 3D external probe, industrially calibrated with great precision and preciseness. Additionally, an oscilloscope and a spectrometer was used to analyze the frequency. The discovery was later confirmed by a team from the Russian Geophysical Institute Schmidt of Moscow (Dr. Khavroshkin and Dr. Tsyplakov). Also in 2010, Dr. Harry Oldfield, a British independent researcher, detected the elctromagnetic fields above the Sun Pyramid using a PIP camera (Polycontrast Interference Photography) and was able to reveal the ultrasound radiation accumulated inside the Sun Pyramid as well as it's release through the top of the Sun Pyramid. The ultrasound frequency detected has a continuous emission at 28 kHz (28,000 Hz) as confirmed by the Croatian team, and even found to have the same sinusoidal shape as found in the Vratnica's Mound as well as a few passages on the sides of the Ravne's Underground Complex.
On January 24th-25th of 2011, SB Research Group provided the initial decoding of the Bosnian Pyramid Frequency by recording the frequency using a Compander. A Compander is an instrument housing a supersonic sensor of very advanced technology containing highly miniaturized mechanical and electronic components integrated in the same silicone substratum. Moreover, a key technical detail is the assembly of a small microphone on the focal point of a metal parabola to collect the very straight ultrasound frequency waves at their best. Additionally, the SB Research Group brought their own Gaussmeter with a 3D external probe to test for magnetic fields above the Sun Pyramid, which none was found. This data is a critical piece of the puzzle because with no magnetic field found to be atop of the Sun Pyramid, data recorded with the Compander can not be attributed to radio waves by radio stations or repeaters placed nearby. One of these preliminary recordings can be found at www.bosnian-pyramid.org/storage/sound/sonda%20deset.mp3
The next phase of decoding the frequency was downscaling the signal to 700 Hz and removing all background noise. This process resulted in the frequency sound bite product having audible tones of inflection portraying that of a coded speech signal. This sound bite can be heard at www.bosnian-pyramid.org/storage/sound/Sun_max700Hz_Freqx800x800.mp3
This is when I received the signal and began my work.
Assuming that all other forms of interference have been excluded and this signal acquired is the pure product of scientific evaluations and processes, I began applying multi-dimensional audio processing to extract from the signal what I could. The technical data is as follows:
1. The signal was put through a Redux channel with a downsample value of 4.
2. Then put through a Frequency Shifter going down -1.24 kHz then fine tuned up 75.9 Hz.
3. Then through a Saturator as a Digital clip: Drive=-11.4 dB, Frequency=30 Hz, Width=100%.
4. Then put through a 4 Dimensional EQ with an output gain of 1.50 dB:
1-Frequency=5.90 kHz, Gain=14.8 dB, Q=0.48
2-Frequency=210 Hz, Gain=14.5 dB, Q=0.10
3-Frequency=9.88 kHz, Gain=2.70 dB, Q=0.71
4-Frequency=6.02 kHz, Gain=8.61 dB, Q=0.29
5. Then through a Dynamic Tube with an output of -15.0 dB and a tone value of 1.
6. Then the signal is routed to an 8 Dimensional EQ with an output gain of -12.0 dB:
1-Frequency=135 Hz, Gain=-15.0 dB, Q=18
2-Frequency=2.32 kHz, Gain=10.6 dB, Q=0.11
3-Frequency=1.58 kHz, Gain=-0.49 dB, Q=14.6
4-Frequency=441 Hz, Gain=8.85 dB, Q=0.10
5-Frequency=6.13 kHz, Gain=15.0 dB, Q=0.96
6-Frequency=80.9 Hz, Gain=13.8 dB, Q=0.27
7-Frequency=130 Hz, Gain=-15.0 dB, Q=0.85
8-Frequency=3.73 kHz, Gain=9.34 dB, Q=0.85
7. Then the signal was put through Volume Utility to bring it down to -6.67 dB
8. I then applied Multiband Dynamics to clear up the signal:
Input: Highs applied at 300 Hz=-24.0 dB
Mid=-3.50 db
Lows applied at 3.00 kHz=-14.5 dB
Output: High=-11.9 dB
Mid=-4.40 dB
Low= 0.00 dB
Channel Output: 24.0 dB
9. The signal was then put through another Saturator as a digital clip: Drive=13.7 dB, Frequency=255 Hz, Width 100%
10. Then another Frequency Shifter going up 100 Hz and fine tuned up to 30.7 Hz.
11. Then the signal is put through 2 Volume Utilities. One at -35 dB, then one at -20.6 dB.
12. The signal is then routed to a 6 Dimensional EQ with an output gain of -3.94 dB:
1-Frequency=2.41 kHz, Gain=15.0 dB, Q=0.34
2-Frequency=425 kHz, Gain=15.0 dB, Q=0.10
3-Frequency=3.81 kHz, Gain=15.0 dB, Q=0.71
4-Frequency=
106Hz, Gain=15.0 dB, Q=0.71
5-Frequency=965 Hz, Gain=15.0 dB, Q=0.10
6-Frequency=659 Hz, Gain=15.0 dB, Q=0.10
13. The signal goes again to another Multiband Dynamics channel:
Input: Highs applied at 2.50 kHz=-15.2 dB
Mid=-4.60 dB
Lows applied at 120 Hz=0.00 dB
Output: High=6.20 dB
Mid=5.40 dB
Low=0.00 dB
Channel output: 5.30 dB
14. Then I put the sample through a Mastering Rack:
Low Gain-8.25 dB
Mid Gain-10.9 dB
High Gain-24.0 dB
Comp amount- 100%
Comp ratio- 1 : 42.3
EQ Intensity- 200%
Stereo Width- 190%
Limit Gain- 9.00 dB
15. And finally the signal is put through one more Volume Utility to bring it down -14.4 dB.
<Click here to download audio file>
The result was a clearly audible conversation between 3-5 men. The language spoken is in English and they are conversing about something (a machine of some sorts) that they are trying to get "working" until something abruptly happens. So far, two names have been able to be identified...Chuck and Gene. Chuck is the main voice in the transmission, though you can hear them all interacting. Gene seems to be the leader of the group and Chuck may or may not be above the others in rank...though this is not military. Military operations do not converse in this fashion nor do they address each other by first name during operations. Please note that the technical data above is what initially brought the signal into a comprehensive form for me to begin something of transliteration. I have since experimented in changing those processing values variably to bring forth a conclusive interpretation of what exactly is being said in this transmission. Here is the transcription, of what my opinion is, on what is being said:
(there is one part that I am definitely not sure of, but I will at least guess since this part of the decoding is not actual science and all that's left to do is assume. That part is designated with a (?). I welcome other opinions.) The result was a. The language spoken is in English and they are conversing about something (a machine of some sorts) that they are trying to get "working" until something abruptly happens. So far, two names have been able to be identified...Chuck and Gene. Chuck is the main voice in the transmission, though you can hear them all interacting. Gene seems to be the leader of the group and Chuck may or may not be above the others in rank...though this is not military. Military operations do not converse in this fashion nor do they address each other by first name during operations. Please note that the technical data above is what initially brought the signal into a comprehensive form for me to begin something of transliteration. I have since experimented in changing those processing values variably to bring forth a conclusive interpretation of what exactly is being said in this transmission. Here is the transcription, of what my opinion is, on what is being said:(there is one part that I am definitely not sure of, but I will at least guess since this part of the decoding is not actual science and all that's left to do is assume. That part is designated with a (?). I welcome other opinions.)
Gene: You're good...
Chuck: It worked!
Gene: Yep
Chuck: Thank you... Hey... (talking to someone else)
Gene: (in background) we're good...
Chuck: Hey... (no response) ...yo?
1st background voice: oh!
Chuck: Hey
2nd background voice: Did it work?
(pause)
Chuck: Hey Gene?
Gene: What's up?
Chuck: I need your opinion...
Gene: What's the scoop?
Chuck: Area 2, x-208
Gene: You do?
Chuck: Ya...
Gene: Ok... (footsteps can be heard)
(pause)
Chuck: They did it right!
Gene: Then don't go...(Chuck cuts him off)
Chuck: (?)No, great white zero(?) (laughs)
Gene: Oh?
Chuck: Ya... (laughs)
Gene: You gonna work at it? (or "We gonna look at it")
Chuck: Ya..
(multiple laughs)
(pause)
Chuck: Look here...look
1st background voice: Look at what?
3rd background voice: Look at what?
Chuck: See this...there it is...
Gene: What happened?
Chuck: Maybe... Look at that, they're out!
2nd background voice or Gene: What happened?
1st background voice: Chuck!
(transmission ends)
Note: background voices may all be one voice. I just gave them labels based on how far the voices seemed to be from Chuck.
Here is just one of the many sound bite samples, after the processes were applied, in which this transcription was derived: (listen with headphones for best quality)
I can honestly say that it is more than possible that I am not 100% accurate, but I do believe I am in the 90-99% range of accuracy. They also seem to have something going on in the background which I believe can also aid to completely discovering what is going on here. I am currently working on decoding that and what I can say at this point is that whatever is in the background is talking about energy. I am not done yet, but the word "energy" seems said three times in whatever is happening in the background.
In conclusion, my guess is as good as any. My girlfriend said something that struck a chord of truth with me...she said "you never know, they could be speaking a whole other language and we just hear what we want to hear". This could be the case. I claim nothing more than the above. I do have my theories...but then again I'm just a musician with a great imagination and a thing for frequencies. In closing, I'll include part of an email between Dr. Osmanagić and I:
"...we are slowly beginning to understand the physics of it all. I believe in the "free" energy you speak about...and in Tesla, but I also believe that these ideas are just scratching the surface of the bigger picture. Time or dimensional manipulation may be a far-off thought regarding this transmission...BUT...one could say that it is possible that the guys in this transmission could be trapped in time, or somehow inside of another dimension, possibly from an American Military project gone wrong and maybe the routes of communication exist for them where these pyramids exist for us...? Who knows, but we certainly are living in exciting times aren't we..."
Mike Tate
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
If I can answer any questions I will |
More than 300 people were invited to attend the national dialogue, including Al-Wefaq representatives [AFP]
Bahrain's main Shia opposition group, the Islamic national accord association (Al-Wefaq) will abstain from parts of a "national dialogue", which authorities say aims to bring forward reforms in the restive kingdom, an opposition member has said.
The kingdom held the first session of its national dialogueearlier this week, where about 60 participants attended each of the simultaneous sessions on politics, the economy, human rights and social issues, the four themes of which the dialogue is to focus.
"We will boycott the meetings of the economic and social committees but will continue to attend the meetings of the political and rights committees," Khalil al-Marzooq, a leading member of Al-Wefaq, told the AFP news agency on Thursday.
"We believe the dialogue should discuss major political and security issues.
"This dialogue will not lead to a solution... and it does not fulfill the needs to pull Bahrain out of its political crisis."
The former MP said the dialogue participants do not fairly represent society and that those participating are not being given a chance to speak during the sessions.
Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, on Thursday welcomed Bahrain's move to begin the national dialogue, saying it can help bring about reconciliation if it is genuine and inclusive.
"We welcome the opening of a national dialogue in Bahrain. Conducted properly, it can be a force for stability, national healing and change," Ban said.
'Will of the people"
The national dialogue was officially launched on Saturday, with more than 300 people invited to attend, including Al-Wefaq representatives.
The dialogue comes after Bahraini security forces carried out a mid-March crackdown on Shia-led protesters who had been demonstrating for reforms in the Sunni-ruled, Shia-majority kingdom since February 14.
Al-Wefaq, which made a last minute decision to participate, only has five representatives at the dialogue, despite winning 18 out of 40 seats in the lower house of parliament in the last elections.
Marzooq told AFP that all options were open, including pulling out of the dialogue if it fails to address "the will of the people".
Hundreds of people took to the streets in several Shia villages across Bahrain on Thursday, chanting "Down, down [King] Hamad," witnesses said.
Police fired warning shots to disperse protesters in Bilad al-Qadeem near the capital Manama, the same sources told AFP. |
Floyd Mayweather beats women. This much is obvious, but for whatever reason it took Rachel Nichols on CNN's Unguarded to actually ask "Money" about his long history as a misogynist and domestic abuser in light of his upcoming bout Saturday against Marcos Maidana. His answers will leave you quite unsatisfied.
Last week, Floyd Mayweather announced that he will fight a rematch with Marcos Maidana on Sept. 13. …
The relevant transcript, from closed captioning:
>> Okay, you are someone with a history of domestic violence yourself. You have even been to jail for it, why should fans root for you with this kind of history?
>> Everything has been allegations. Nothing has been proven. So, you know that's life.
>> The incident you went to jail for the mother of your three children did show some bruises, a concussion when she went to the hospital, it was your own kids who called the police, gave them a detailed description of the abuse, there has been documentation?
>> Uh-huh. Once again, no pictures. Just hearsay and allegations. And I signed a plea-bargain. Once again, not true.
>> But the website Deadspin detailed seven physical assaults on five women that resulted in arrest or citation, are we supposed to believe all the women are lying including the incidents when there were witnesses like your own kids?
>> Everybody actually, everybody is entitled to their own opinion. When it is all said and done, only God can judge me.
>> We have seen, the public wants domestic abuse in the country addressed would you consider donating any of the $30 million that you will make this weekend to an organization that educates against abuse?
>> This weekend, what I will do with that millions and millions of dollars be saved for my children because my children are who I love and that's who i care about. |
Derek Shiekhi's father raised him on cars. As a boy, Derek accompanied his dad as he bought classics such as post-WWII GM trucks and early Ford Mustang convertibles.After loving cars for years and getting a bachelor's degree in Business Management from Texas State University, Derek decided to get an associate degree in journalism from Austin Community College as well. His networking put him in contact with the editor of the Austin-American Statesman newspaper, who hired him to write freelance about automotive culture and events in Austin, Texas in 2013. One particular story led to him getting a certificate for learning the foundations of road racing.While watching TV with his parents one fateful evening, he saw a commercial that changed his life. In it, Jeep touted the Wrangler as the Texas Auto Writers Association's "SUV of Texas." Derek knew he had to join the organization if he was going to advance as an automotive writer. He joined the Texas Auto Writers Association (TAWA) in 2014 and was fortunate to meet several nice people who connected him to the representatives of several automakers and the people who could give him access to press vehicles (the first one he ever got the keys to was a Lexus LX 570). He's now a regular at TAWA's two main events: the Texas Auto Roundup in the spring and the Texas Truck Rodeo in the fall.Over the past several years, Derek has learned how to drive off-road in various four-wheel-drive SUVs (he even camped out for two nights in a Land Rover), and driven around various tracks in hot hatches, muscle cars, and exotics. Several of his pieces, including his article about the 2015 Ford F-150 being crowned TAWA's 2014 "Truck of Texas" and his review of the Alfa Romeo 4C Spider, have won awards in TAWA's annual Excellence in Craft Competition. Last year, his profile of Wagonmaster, a business that restores Jeep Wagoneers, won prizes in TAWA’s signature writing contest and its pickup- and SUV-focused Texas Truck Invitational.In addition to writing for a variety of Internet Brands sites, including JK-Forum.com and Ford-Trucks.com , Derek also contributes to other outlets. He started There Will Be Cars on Instagram and Facebook to get even more automotive content out to fellow enthusiasts.Derek can be contacted at [email protected] |
Former Colorado and Seahawks player Anthony "T.J." Cunningham died Monday after he was fatally shot in a dispute over a parking space.
Living in a villa in Bali, owning a tattoo parlor and working construction in Australia. Here's how Miami's Louis Hedley became a signing-day star.
Ryan Day takes over for Urban Meyer, with Georgia QB transfer Justin Fields getting a chance to lead the offense.
Former Gophers football coach Jerry Kill was critical of current coach P.J. Fleck on Tuesday, saying in part that Fleck is "about himself."
Major Applewhite, who was fired as Houston's football head coach in December, is joining Alabama's staff as an analyst, according to AL.com.
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It's hard to imagine Matt Ryan losing a shootout on his own turf, but he knows Philip Rivers is capable of slinging it, too.
That should make for a fun matchup Sunday between the Atlanta Falcons (4-2) and San Diego Chargers (2-4) at the Georgia Dome. It will be a battle of two of the best quarterbacks never to make a Super Bowl, although Ryan's doing everything he can to get the Falcons there this year with his league-leading 2,075 passing yards. He has 15 touchdowns and just three interceptions.
Rivers has 1,647 passing yards with 12 touchdowns and three interceptions.
"It's going to be another good test for us," Ryan said. "Obviously, you mention Philip [Rivers] coming in here, and he's a guy who's always capable of making a lot of plays and scoring points.''
ESPN Stats & Info
Here are six opposing players to watch Sunday, courtesy of ESPN Chargers reporter Eric Williams:
OFFENSE
Hunter Henry: Selected in the second round of this year’s draft as the eventual replacement for Antonio Gates, the Arkansas product has been impressive. In his past three games, the rookie has totaled 13 receptions for 218 yards. Henry also leads the Chargers in touchdowns (three) and yards per catch (16.3). With Gates slowed by a lingering hamstring issue, Henry should remain a go-to target in San Diego’s offense.
Philip Rivers: The NC State product is tied for fifth in the league in passing touchdowns (12), fifth in passer rating (105.9) and ninth in passing yards (1,647). Rivers recently eclipsed Dan Fouts as the franchise's all-time passing leader with 43,094 passing yards, and should have a good matchup against an Atlanta defense that allows 285 passing yards a game, No. 26 in the NFL.
Melvin Gordon: After an uneven rookie year, Gordon is having a bounce-back season. He’s second in the league in touchdowns (7) and No. 14 in rushing (393). However, fumbling remains a concern, as Gordon coughed up two fumbles in the fourth-quarter of games against the New Orleans Saints and the Oakland Raiders that led to losses. With Danny Woodhead out for the year after an ACL knee injury, Gordon has emerged as the workhorse running back for the Chargers.
DEFENSE
Joey Bosa: Although he missed the first four games with a hamstring injury, Bosa filled up the stat sheet in his NFL debut. Through two games, the Ohio State product has nine pressures, four quarterback hits, three tackles for loss and two sacks. The Chargers were rewarded for taking a long-term approach to getting the team’s first-round pick fully healthy by Bosa’s performance over the last two weeks. So far, Bosa’s shown he can be an effective pass rusher at this level with his relentless effort.
Jatavis Brown: One of the pleasant surprises for the Chargers this season has been the play of the Akron product, selected in the fifth round of this year’s draft. With Manti Te’o out for the year after suffering an Achilles tendon tear in a Week 3 contest against the Indianapolis Colts, Brown has filled in nicely. He leads the Chargers in tackles with 42, and is tied for the team lead in sacks with three. Brown displayed speed and playmaking ability, totaling 14 tackles in a win over Denver while also recording a sack and forced fumble. But Brown will have his hands full dealing with Atlanta’s talented running back duo of Devonta Freeman and Tevin Coleman.
Dwight Lowery: The veteran safety faces his former team. Lowery played for the Atlanta Falcons during the 2014 season. With Eric Weddle leaving the Chargers in free agency to join the Baltimore Ravens, Lowery has provided stability in the back end of San Diego’s defense. Lowery is the only member of the team’s projected starting defensive backfield to not miss a game this season, and is fifth in tackles with 19. |
LOS ANGELES—Two-time Academy Award winner Tom Hanks, 53, once again invited a group of friends to his home and forced them to play a make-believe game of World War II with him, sources reported Saturday.
Director and producer Ron Howard, one of the guests, confirmed that Hanks made his visitors pretend they were a battalion of Allied soldiers for more than six hours.
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“We were told to come over for a late brunch, but as soon as he answered the door in his tanker helmet, I knew we’d be playing World War II with him again,” said Howard, adding that he realized he was in for the full treatment when he glimpsed Martin Short and Bruce Springsteen standing at attention in the foyer. “I suggested maybe having some coffee or a muffin first, but he stared at me and said that I was a private and should just follow orders.”
According to sources, Hanks barked out pretend mission objectives to his friends before issuing uniforms and M1 Garand rifle replicas to Springsteen and Short. Due to a “recent attack on supply lines,” Howard was given a green sweat suit and a tennis racket meant to be held backward like a gun.
“Bruce, you’re the tough guy from Brooklyn who cares a lot more than he lets on and everybody calls you ‘Brooklyn,’” Hanks reportedly said, pacing back and forth in an authentic 1943 U.S. officer’s field jacket. “Martin, you’re the funny medic named Dankowitz.”
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“Ron, you’ll be the weakling Irish kid everybody thinks is going to get us killed,” Hanks added. “Let’s just hope you don’t, soldier.”
Sources close to Hanks said the world’s No. 1 box-office star regularly forces family, friends, and delivery people to pretend they’re fighting World War II with him. Though he has been seen splashing in his pool on an inflatable lounger while shouting about kamikaze attacks, past houseguests confirmed Hanks’ favorite thing is playing Western Front.
On Saturday, Springsteen, a 20-time Grammy winner who has sold more than 120 million albums worldwide, acknowledged that Hanks was highly critical of his performance during the afternoon’s World War II game.
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“Right away he starts yelling at me that I’m standing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and I’m going to drown,” Springsteen said. “When I told him I was wearing scuba gear he went ballistic, screaming that I’m an infantryman and I wouldn’t have that kind of equipment.”
Hanks was also seen pointing at two chairs covered by a blanket and ordering Howard, Springsteen, and Short to “hit the barracks so you can write your gals back home and still get some shut-eye.” He then encouraged them to make snoring sounds to simulate sleep, and several minutes later hummed reveille through a closed hand he said was a bugle.
“Hey, Ron, you just wandered into Germany,” Hanks said. “BAM! They shot you and now you’re dead. You gotta lay down.”
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Next-door neighbor Stan Herzig, who was “drafted” last month when Hanks told him Uncle Sam needed an elite paratrooper to join Alfred Molina and Julia Roberts on a special mission behind enemy lines, said he would prefer the actor find a different game to play.
“Whenever I go get the mail, he runs out and tells me I have to wait until the naval blockade is lifted,” said Herzig, 83. “And I’m getting tired of explaining to him that the Soviets liberated Auschwitz, not the Americans.”
Short told reporters that Saturday’s invasion of Normandy was called off when Rita Wilson, Hanks’ wife, kicked the group out of the house, claiming everyone was making a mess and it was too nice a day to be inside.
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Though Short said that Hanks “always has to win, even when he’s playing Germany,” he admitted the afternoon could have been worse.
Said Short, “At least this time I didn’t get stuck being the mission control guy in his stupid moon man game.” |
Around 60 complaints have been made to the police in Cologne after a group of men attacked revellers in the city centre in a brutal and “completely unheard of” way, Wolfgang Albers, Chief of Police in the Rhineland city said at a press conference on Monday afternoon.
Around a third of the complaints were of sexual assault, regional paper Express reported.
“There was a very large number of sexual assaults there - and in a massive way. Women were grabbed and attacked,” said Albers, adding that in one case the alleged crime fitted the legal definition of rape.
“The crimes were committed by a group of people who from appearance were largely from the north African or Arab world,” the police chief added.
But the police have also insisted that many of the men had been known to them for some time and that they were not a group of newly-arrived refugees.
A group of around 500 men between the ages of 15 and 35 assembled at the central train station and in the area of the cathedral before throwing firecrackers into the masses of people celebrating the arrival of the new year.
This appears to have been a means of causing distraction, as during the disturbance groups of young men entered the crowd where they sexually assaulted women and pick-pocketed revellers.
Police then carried out a large-scale operation to clear the area of the miscreants, involving 143 local police officers and a further 70 federal officers. But due to the darkness and the sheer scale of people, Albers conceded that this operation was less than effective.
On Sunday police arrested five men at the central station who were accused of threatening and robbing female travellers. It is not yet clear whether these men are connected to the earlier crimes.
Cologne mayor Henriette Reker called for a crisis meeting to be held on Tuesday in the wake of the attacks, reports the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
“We can’t let it happen that an area beyond the law develops here,” she said.
Accusations of cover-up
As the extent of the crimes emerged on Monday, the story became the central theme of Twitter with #Köln and #aufschrei (outcry) both ranking in the top five hashtags.
ANALYSIS: Silence on sex crimes will make racism worse
Many people accused the national media of engaging in a cover-up due to the ethnic background of the criminals, with many pointing to the fact that it took days before the details of the story reached national attention.
One commentator wrote sarcastically that “it is fascinating that the event in Cologne on New Year made it through the media censorship.”
Faszinierend, dass es der Vorfall von #Köln in der #Silvesternacht mal über die #Medienzensur hinaus geschafft hat! — FrannyFine (@Frannylicious79) January 4, 2016
Another person tweeted that “the public broadcasters aren’t reporting the events of Cologne… Says it all - educational mission and all that!”
#Köln Die GEZ Sender melden die Vorfälle der Silvesternacht nicht ... Sagt ja alles, Bildungsauftrag und so! #ARD #ZDF — Simon Menz (@Oberbuxe) January 4, 2016
Other Twitter users worried that the attacks would lead to a backlash against refugees, writing “it makes me sad that the refugees who really need protection will bear the brunt of the hatred because of Cologne. We need to be able to tell the difference.”
Es macht mich traurig, dass die wirklich schützenswerten Flüchtlinge Hass abkriegen werden wegen #Köln. Man muss differenzieren können. — FrauleinGermanAngst (@WildEastBerlin) January 4, 2016
MP Steffan Bilger from Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, meanwhile, claimed the events in Cologne were proof Germany needed to reduce its intake of refugees.
“It can’t go on like this,” he tweeted. “Urgently needed: reduction of influx, secure borders, intensifying of deportations and meaningful justice.”
So darfs nicht weitergehen! Dringend nötig: Zuzug reduzieren, Grenzen sichern, Abschiebungen intensivieren, konsequentere Justiz. #Köln — Steffen Bilger (@SteffenBilger) January 4, 2016
Writing for the Huffington Post Deutschland, Anabel Schunke accused the police of covering up details about the suspected criminals in order to protect public order.
Questioning why no details were given on the appearance of the suspects when police called for witnesses, despite plentiful CCTV footage, Schunke suggested that police chose to leave important details out so that the public would not make a connection between the crime and refugees.
In its details, the case is reminiscent of the mass sexual assaults which took place in north Africa during the huge Arab Spring protests of 2011-2013, Schunke points out, writing of her concern that so many people are moving to Germany from “patriarchal, Muslim societies.” |
The U.S. is suing Bank of America on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with CNBC's Scott Cohn.
UPDATED 2:11 p.m. ET: The United States filed a civil mortgage fraud lawsuit against Bank of America, accusing it of selling thousands of toxic home loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that went into default and caused more than $1 billion of losses.
Wednesday's case, originally brought by a whistleblower, is the U.S. Department of Justice's first civil fraud lawsuit over mortgage loans sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.
It also compounds the problems that the Bank of America, second-largest U.S. bank, has faced since its disastrous 2008 purchase of Countrywide Financial Corp, once the nation's largest mortgage lender.
According to a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, Countrywide in 2007 invented a scheme known as the "Hustle" designed to speed up processing of residential home loans.
Operating under the motto "Loans Move Forward, Never Backward," mortgage executives tried to eliminate "toll gates" designed to ensure that loans were sound and not tainted by fraud, the government said.
This resulted in "defect rates" that were roughly nine times the industry norm, but Countrywide concealed this from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even awarded bonuses to staff to "rebut" the problems being discovered, it added. The scheme ran through 2009 and caused "countless" foreclosures, it added.
"The fraudulent conduct alleged in today's complaint was spectacularly brazen in scope," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan said in a statement. "This lawsuit should send another clear message that reckless lending practices will not be tolerated."
Bank of America did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Since paying $2.5 billion for Countrywide on July 1, 2008, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank has lost nearly $40 billion on mortgage litigation and requests by investors to buy back soured loans, Credit Suisse estimated on October 5.
Some of these costs related to Merrill Lynch & Co, which Bank of America bought at the beginning of 2009.
According to court records, the case had been filed under seal in February by Edward O'Donnell, a Pennsylvania resident and former executive vice president at Countrywide Home Loans who had worked there between 2003 and 2009.
The United States later joined the case. It seeks triple damages under the federal False Claims Act, as well as civil penalties.
It is unclear whether O'Donnell has hired a lawyer. O'Donnell could not immediately be reached for comment.
Federal regulators seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on September 7, 2008 and put them into a conservatorship.
Bharara's office has in the last 1-1/2 years brought five civil fraud lawsuits against other lenders under the False Claims Act over alleged reckless residential mortgage lending, involving loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration.
In February, Citigroup Inc settled its case for $158.3 million and Flagstar Bancorp Inc settled for $132.8 million, while Deutsche Bank AG settled in May for $202.3 million. Cases are pending against Wells Fargo & Co and Allied Home Mortgage Corp, Bharara said.
On Monday, Congressman Barney Frank, who chaired the House Financial Services Committee in 2008, said Bank of America should probably be shielded from government lawsuits over Merrill, which it bought in part at federal officials' urging, but he said he knew of no such urging to buy Countrywide.
Bank of America shares were up 2 cents at $9.38 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
The case is U.S. ex rel. O'Donnell v. Bank of America Corp et al, U.S, District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-01422.
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Thousands of gas wells have been drilled in Utah's Uintah basin. An investigation by NOAA & CIRES found that 6% to 12% of the gas produced near Ouray (by hydrofracturing) escaped to the atmosphere raising methane concentrations in air to shockingly high levels.
NOAA scientists were shocked to find levels of ozone pollution, as bad as the worst urban air quality, in the middle of desolate western Colorado in the winter of 2011. Since that discovery they have been trying to understand why the air quality was so bad in a region that had never reported air quality problems before.On a perfect winter day in 2012 NOAA and CIRES scientists sent up a sampling plane to determine the methane levels and the quantity of methane released from oil and gas production activities in the Uintah basin in Utah. The scientists found far more methane than anyone had anticipated.
Methane levels downwind peaked at the stunningly high level of 2080 parts per billion.
When the winds settled down on February 3, a pilot flew a single-engine Mooney TLS aircraft, carrying sophisticated instruments for measuring methane and other atmospheric gases, back and forth in the Uintah Basin. The aircraft measurements let scientists calculate the total amount of methane added to the air mass as it transited the basin. Combining those data with precise measurements of wind speed, made by NOAA colleagues using a ground-based laser, scientists could calculate the methane emission for the whole basin. The team determined that methane emissions from the oil and natural gas fields in Uintah County totaled about 55,000 kg (more than 120,000 lbs) an hour on the day of the flight. That emission rate is about 6 to 12 percent of the average hourly natural gas production in Uintah County during the month of February.
- See more at: http://cires.colorado.edu/...
Oil and gas industry figures for methane release are much lower. However, when wells are developed and produced by hydraulic fracturing, a large amount of gas is released in the process. A basin where fracking is ongoing may be releasing extremely high amounts of gas to the atmosphere.
Ozone pollution in this desolate part of Utah is already about twice the federal limit of 75 parts per billion on a bad day. The oil and gas industry's plans to add 25,000 more wells to the 10,000 wells producing today may run into regulatory compliance problems with air quality standards.
This winter, with the University of Utah also helping out, scientific SWAT teams have already gone out again as part of a more limited study of the basin to watch the pollution chemistry in action. Ozone exceeding the health-based standards rose to around 130 parts per billion, or not quite double EPA’s health-based standard of 75 ppb, said Brock LeBaron, deputy director of the Utah Division of Air Quality and leader of the study team. Federal regulators have told Utah Gov. Gary Herbert that Uintah and Duchesne counties are dangerously close to being declared out of compliance with federal Clean Air Act limits on ozone. Meanwhile, the oil and gas boom continues, with another 25,000 wells potentially being added to 10,000 already in operation in the basin.
"Most days we measured concentrations far greater than what we reported in the paper," Sweeney said. The new study was not designed to determine points of leakage. There are plenty of potential leak sources, such as wells, processing plants, compressors and pipelines. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that, on average nationally, just 0.8 percent to 1.6 percent of natural gas production escapes. Federal officials encourage use of natural gas because burning it emits less carbon dioxide — the leading greenhouse gas linked to climate change — than oil or coal. Methane, the main component of natural gas, packs a greenhouse punch 25 times greater than carbon dioxide. That means leakage rates exceeding 3.2 percent offset natural gas’ advantage in the short term, Sweeney said.
Assertions that natural gas from fracking has a lower greenhouse gas impact than conventional sweet crude are just not true. Atmospheric scientists will continue to investigate the complexities of release of natural gasses from gas wells developed by hydraulic fracturing, but it is now clear that industry estimates of gas emissions are far below realistic values. The EPA is also using gas emissions values that are far below the levels measured by the NOAA CIRES research team. Natural gas has been advertised as the bridge to a green future of renewable power and a stable climate. Fracking, on the other hand, uses enormous amounts of precious fresh water and releases massive amounts of the powerful greenhouse gas methane to the atmosphere. The EPA and the President have good intentions when they encourage increased gas production, but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. The massive methane emissions discovered by this study are the road to climate Hell. |
The death of Long Beach girl after a fight with a classmate has been ruled a homicide, a coroner’s official said Monday.
Joanna Ramos, 10, died of blunt force trauma to the head, said Ed Winter, assistant chief of the Los Angeles coroner’s office. The trauma resulted from an altercation, Winter said. An autopsy was performed on the girl Sunday following her death late Friday.
Police originally said she was 11, but her birthday is in two weeks.
PHOTOS: Long Beach girl, 10, dies after fight
Authorities were informed Friday afternoon that Joanna wasn’t breathing, and she was pronounced dead shortly before 9 p.m. following efforts to revive her.
Police said Joanna was involved in a fight with another student after classes ended at Willard Elementary. Her family has said the two girls quarrelled over a boy.
Family and friends said the girl vomited and complained of a headache after the fight, but had no visible wounds, according to news reports.
RELATED:
Bullying not suspected in fatal fight between 2 girls
Fatal school fight was over a boy, friends, family say
Girl who died after fight at school complained of headache
-- Victoria Kim
Photo: Stephanie Soltero, 10, center, hugs unidentified classmates Monday morning outside Willard Elementary School, which was mourning fifth-grader Joanna Ramos. Credit: Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times |
Sources at multiple financial institutions say they are tracking a pattern of fraud indicating that thieves have somehow compromised the credit card terminals at checkout lanes within multiple Safeway stores in California and Colorado. Safeway confirmed it is investigating skimming incidents at several stores.
Banking sources say they’ve been trying to figure out why so many customers in the Denver and Englewood areas of Colorado were seeing their debit cards drained of cash at ATMs after shopping at Safeways there. The sources compared notes and found that all of the affected customers had purchased goods from one of several specific lanes in different compromised stores (the transaction data includes a “terminal ID” which can be useful in determining which checkout lanes were compromised.
Safeway spokesperson Brian Dowling said the fraud was limited to a handful of stores, and that the company has processes and procedures in place to protect customers from fraudulent activity.
“We have an excellent track record in this area,” Dowling said. “In fact, we inspect our store’s pin pads regularly and from time to time find a skimmer, but findings have been limited and small in scale. We immediately contact law enforcement and take steps to minimize customer impact.”
Dowling said the problem of checkout skimmers is hardly limited to Safeway, and he hinted that perhaps other retailers have been hit by this same group.
“This is not unique to our company, and we understand some other retailers may have been more significantly impacted,” Dowling said, declining to elaborate.
Safeway would not name the affected locations, but bank industry sources say the fraud was traced back to Colorado locations in Arvada, Conifer, Denver, Englewood and Lakewood. In California, banks there strongly suspect Safeway locations in Castro Valley and Menlo Park may also have been hit. Those sources say ATM fraud has been linked to customers using their debit cards at those locations since early September 2015.
In order to steal card data and personal identification numbers (PINs) from Safeway customers, the thieves would have had to open up the card processing terminals at each checkout lane. Once inside, the thieves can install a device that sits between the keypad and the electronics underneath to capture and store PINs, as well as a separate apparatus that siphons account data when customers swipe their cards at the register.
Either that, or the skimmer crooks would have to secretly swap out existing card terminals at checkout lanes with pre-compromised terminals of the exact same design. In any case, skimming incidents involving checkout lanes in retail locations generally involve someone on the inside at the affected retailer.
In late 2012, bookseller Barnes & Noble disclosed that it had found modified point-of-sale devices at 60 locations nationwide. The year prior, Michaels Stores said it had replaced more than 7,200 credit card terminals from store registers nationwide, after discovering that thieves had somehow modified or replaced card machines to include technology capable of siphoning customer payment card data and PINs.
Sadly, I don’t have any skimmer photos to share from this story, but I have written about the growing sophistication of these point-of-sale skimming devices. Here’s a look at one compromised card reader, and the handiwork that went into the thieves’ craft. Descriptions and images from other skimming devices can be found in my series All About Skimmers.
The mass-issuance of chip-based credit and debit cards by U.S. banks to consumers should eventually help minimize these types of scams, but probably not for some time yet. Most cards will continue to have all of the cardholder data stored in plain text on the magnetic strip of these chip-based cards for several years to come. As long as merchants continue to let customers swipe instead of “dip,” we’ll continue to see skimmers just about everywhere swiping is still allowed.
Remember that you are not liable for fraudulent card charges, but that it’s still your responsibility to alert their card issuer quickly to any unauthorized charges. So keep a close eye on your bank statements. Also, this attack is another reminder of why it makes more sense to shop with a credit vs. a debit card: Having your checking account emptied of cash while your bank sorts out the situation can be a huge hassle and create secondary problems (bounced checks, for instance).
Update: According to reporting from the Denver Post, the Safeway incident affected three stores in Colorado. All of the affected lanes were self-checkout lanes, the publication reported.
Tags: Barnes & Noble, Brian Dowling, Michaels Stores, Safeway skimmers |
By now you must be pretty sick of reading and hearing about Hillary Clinton. Personally, I am ready for No Mas. But after I wrote my first column about Benghazi many readers wrote and asked me to promise I would not let the subject die. Since nothing has happened that has warranted dropping the subject I felt obligated to march on to find the facts. Hillary has now released her book, Hard Choices , with a 34 page chapter dedicated to the subject. I spent my hard earned money to find out if the Secretary of State answered any questions.
This is not the first time I have bought a Democratic Presidential candidate’s book (yes, she is running unless she continues to embarrass herself). My first adventure was reading Al Gore’s (ok, Vice-President) Earth in the Balance while walking around the Republican National Convention in 1992. Some thought that to be odd. But when Gore ran for President in 2000 the book was a blueprint of how to defeat the man in the election.
Reading the 34 page chapter you learn that Mrs. Clinton really cared about the people in her department and especially the ones that were killed that night. But more importantly does she answer questions about what happened before, during and after the attacks on the American Consulate in Benghazi.
On the fifth page of the chapter Clinton starts to describe the video that inflamed people “across the Middle East and North Africa.” She leans on this issue on numerous occasions throughout the chapter never divorcing her from making this a centerpiece of the uprising and attacks. She offers a defense of Susan Rice’s now famous news show statements the Sunday following the incidents and states the comments were “approved by the CIA.” But that has been disavowed by former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell.
What is more important is the timeline of how an Ambassador was in a barely defendable consulate. Clinton does state she had been getting daily briefings about security matters. There is no description of any enhanced security plans that were communicated to embassies regarding the anniversary of 9/11. In fact, Clinton states the tumult regarding the video started on September 8th. If anyone was not worried with 9/11 coming up they certainly should have been after that. But Clinton then hangs the decision on Ambassador Chris Stevens to go to Benghazi. On page 389 she states “U.S. Ambassadors are not required to consult or seek approval from Washington when traveling within their countries, and rarely do. She goes on to describe his knowledge of the lawless situation in Benghazi, but he went there anyway. In addition, she delineates Steven’s requests for security upgrades which she was not alerted about.
To recap, there is no elaboration of special warnings regarding 9/11, no heightened concerns regarding tumult beginning on Sept. 8th, no one correlated the inadequate security that existed in Benghazi with this special situation and once the protests started next door in Egypt no one called the people in Benghazi and told them to get on a plane and get out of there back to Tripoli which was safer. Otherwise, there was near absolute chaos in supervision of the situation. This is not the “Fog of War.”
Clinton brings into the discussion the panel appointed to review what happened in Benghazi (Accountability Review Board –ARB) and she stated she implemented all of their proposals (24) prior to her departure from the State Department. The ARB questioned the funding level for the State Dept. which Clinton repeated on Page 409. She then enhanced that by saying “I spent four years making the case to Congress that adequately funding our diplomats and development experts was a national security priority.” Thus she laid at the feet of Congress the cause of insufficient security because of denied additional funding. There are two aspects here: 1) the State Department receives $48 billion already and 2) What government department does not want more money and a bigger share of the pie. But that does not explain why diplomats went to an insufficiently secured location during an already tumultuous time on the anniversary of the worst attack on American soil in our history. Congress was not at fault here.
On the second to last page (414) of the chapter Clinton addresses her presentation to Congress in January 2013 where she made her now famous statement “What difference at this point does it make?” She provides the total statement she made and stated the line above was taken out of context. She then attacks her opponents for politicizing the issue during the 2012 election. This brings up two points: 1) Is it not possible the people who were questioning this at the time did it because of policy and Clinton attacking them is actually the politicization of the issue and 2) She still apparently does not know what difference it makes. Though she mentions in the chapter some of the efforts made after 9/11 she never answered specifically or generally what efforts she made to secure other embassies and personnel in light of the protests in Egypt and attacks in Libya. Were the embassies in Tunisia, Morocco and other countries directed to be locked down? What specific instructions did Clinton as leader of the State Department do to secure her personnel throughout the world? We still don’t know and that is what difference it would have made.
Though others may present additional unanswered questions reading Mrs. Clinton dissertation I still am left without answers to the same basic questions. What were the intelligence reports telling the President and Clinton a week before the attacks? What specific instructions were given to State Department personnel worldwide in anticipation of 9-11-2012 to heightened security? Once Egypt erupted what instructions were given to personnel in neighboring countries? Once the attacks on Benghazi started what was done to secure embassy personnel in high-risk areas?
Clinton answers none of these questions and adds very little to the discussion. Without these answers we only have her statements that local personnel make their own decisions on where to be in their respective country and Congress did not fund the State Department sufficiently. Otherwise, I take responsibility, but not really. |
Researchers in Germany and the Czech Republic have improved the clarity of atomic force microscopy (AFM) to probe the distribution of charges within atoms and molecules. The new ability could help in the design of solar cells, by unmasking the generation of charge carriers and how they hop to and from electrodes.
Normal AFM relies on the dynamics of a tiny oscillating cantilever, which is scanned over a surface under study. By monitoring the resonant frequency of the cantilever, a scientist can determine, with nanometer resolution, the shape and makeup of any surface features.
A variant of AFM is Kelvin probe force spectroscopy (KPFS), in which the cantilever’s tip applies a bias voltage to a surface. By varying the voltage, a researcher can measure that surface’s local work function – that is, the strength with which the surface holds on to electrons. KPFS might also be precise enough to map the distribution of charges within molecules, but this would require the cantilever tip to be brought very close to a sample where the influence of other chemical forces is uncertain.
Now Jascha Repp’s group at the University of Regensburg, together with colleagues at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, has determined exactly what these influences are, and how to overcome them. They studied two molecules that exhibited various charge distributions within chemical bonds, trimeric perfluoro-ortho-phenylene mercury (F 12 C 18 Hg 3 ) and its hydrogen-terminated counterpart (H 12 C 18 Hg 3 ). As the researchers performed KPFS closer and closer to the molecules, they found that the apparent charge distribution in the bonds was distorted by chemical attractions between certain atoms and the cantilever tip.
The way around this, the team found, is to measure the force on the cantilever as a function of proximity for two different bias voltages. That way, it was possible to cancel out any unwanted contributions from chemical forces.
Physicist Leo Gross, who develops AFM and other types of microscopy at the IBM Research Laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, calls the result a ‘great achievement’. ‘Probably this technique will be applied and further refined in the future,’ he says.
Repp believes one of the first applications of the refined KPFS could be organic solar cells. ‘Relatively little is known about some things, like where exactly the charges are generated, or how they hop from one molecule to another or to the electrodes,’ he says. ‘There, [our technique] could really help to watch charges on very local scales.’ |
• ‘I keep going and going,’ says Swiss expected to be re-elected for fifth term • Diego Maradona calls Blatter ‘a disgrace and a painful embarrassment’
Sepp Blatter, who is expected to be re-elected as Fifa president for a fifth term on Friday, likened himself to a Swiss mountain goat on Sunday, famed for its stubborn endurance.
Blatter will face a challenge for the presidency from the Jordanian Prince Ali bin Al Hussein at the Fifa Congress on Friday after two other contenders, Michael van Praag of the Netherlands and Luis Figo of Portugal, pulled out of the contest on Thursday.
They collectively represented those who think Blatter should quit after so many years in the job but Blatter told the NZZ newspaper in an interview: “I am a mountain goat that keeps going and going and going, I cannot be stopped, I just keep going.”
Blatter, who will be 80 next year, said in the interview that he “is a simple, devout man” and that the first thing he always does when he returns to his home town of Visp, where he was born, is to visit the family grave.
He said two weeks ago, he “connected” with his deceased mother, who bid him to join her. He said: “I’m doing well, it is not time yet.”
Blatter was first elected Fifa president in 1998 and is expected to be re-elected by an overwhelming majority of Fifa’s 209 member associations when the secret ballot takes place at Zurich’s Hallenstadion.
Meanwhile Argentina’s beloved former striker and manager Diego Maradona has launched a scathing personal attack on Blatter before this week’s election.
Writing for the Telegraph, the 1986 World Cup winner said: “Under Sepp Blatter Fifa has become a disgrace and a painful embarrassment to those of us who care about football deeply.
“While I find almost no one openly supporting Blatter, many think he will win a fifth term. Why? The whole notion of a fifth term is an absurdity in 2015.
“No one has argued that he is the best man for the job and deserves to win.
“Recently he pledged to follow through in addressing racism in football and promoting women in the sport. That made me laugh. My question is: ‘Sepp, what were you doing in your last four terms?’
“We have a dictator for life. I call Blatter ‘the man of ice’ because he lacks the inspiration and passion that are at the very heart of football. If this is the face of international football, we are in a very bad place.” |
Times News NetworkKOLKATA: After Anna Hazare , it is now the turn of Shahi Imam of Delhi's Jama Masjid Syed Ahmed Bukhari to endorse Mamata Banerjee as a future prime minister, saying, "She would make a better prime minister for secular India than others."Like Hazare, the Shahi Imam had written to all non-BJP chief ministers on January 30 inquiring about the implementation of recommendations of the Sachar Commission. Only Mamata replied on February 19 detailing the work she had done for minorities."After going through the details of the developmental work that she has done for the development of minorities and Muslims in the state, I personally feel India needs a secular leader like her who believes in work and not lip service," Bhukari said. "I feel she is a secular leader and will not go with BJP or NDA."Political observers would like to connect it with another development in Delhi where the Shahi Imam severed ties with Samajwadi Party. His son-in-law Umar Ali Khan resigned from the UP cabinet. If the Shahi Imam supports Mamata, it would be a boost to her attempt to go national and blunt the Opposition allegation of a "covert understanding" with BJP.Trinamool Congress MP Sultan Ahmed said, "The Shahi Imam has made his own assessment on the minority development works being undertaken in Bengal. He holds a respectable position and if he endorses Mamata Banerjee as the Prime Minister, many people will pay heed."Maulana Qari Fazlur Rehman, the senior cleric who leads Red Road Eid Namaz, had a different take. "To me, Mamata Banerjee is a secular leader. We need secular leaders in New Delhi. But I wouldn't like to say that she is the only such leader. I would choose to disagree with Maulana Bukhari on it," Rehman said."Mamata Banerjee has made a start in Bengal. But a lot needs to be done. Many projects for minorities are yet to take off for apparent lack of funds yet the government doesn't dither to spend lakhs in functions. It is not time yet to say that everything has been done. People will not believe it," he added.Nakhoda Mosque Imam Md Shafi said, "Mamata Banerjee is a secular face. We need leaders like her in the Centre. It will help people. She is doing her bit for Bengal, I believe given time she will do even better." The Nakhoda Imam said he would like Mamata as the Prime Minister, if only, to halt the communal forces. "Else it will be a disaster," he said.Bengal has 27% Muslim population which wields a considerable influence in at least 140 Assembly seats out of 294. Bukhari said he would visit the state in March.(With PTI inputs) |
In case you’ve missed it, there’s been a bit of back-and-forth between the White House and Washington state leaders.
RELATED: 16 years after Nisqually quake, are we ready?
Though local leaders seem to be dismissive of the threat of funding cuts, millions could be at stake in King County and Seattle alone if the federal government finds a way to keep its promise.
The potential loss in funding has been focused on government programs. But what if there was a real catastrophe? You know, one that might require actual cooperation between the two parties? For example, the looming earthquake that the commander of the entire Washington National Guard says will be a “catastrophe we have never seen” — the magnitude-8.0-plus earthquake that some say could happen in less than 100 years.
Is there any risk that Washington state could be ignored when the quake hits? We went to Eric Holdeman, director of the Center for Regional Disaster Resilience, for an answer.
In short, Holdeman’s answer: No.
“I don’t think in an actual disaster, where you have the Stafford Act and Emergency Management Agency coming in, those types of funds should not be impacted,” Holdeman said.
The Stafford Act was signed into law Nov. 23, 1988. It declares that in a case of disaster, federal and local governments are required to provide “orderly and continuing means of assistance.”
“There is no way I think he could withhold a presidential declaration for a really major disaster,” Holdeman said. “That would be playing politics with people’s lives. And I know some would say we see that happening all the time, I think a disaster is different.”
‘Big One’ prep could be shaky
That doesn’t mean the Trump Administration’s cuts couldn’t have an impact on the “Big One.”
Trump has campaigned on his ability to hold grudges and Washington leaders have gone out of their way to ensure the president’s first few months on the job easy.
Following Trump’s proposed travel ban, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson led a successful lawsuit that stopped the ban in its tracks. Trump followed with some angry Tweets. Meanwhile, Governor Jay Inslee said he was “disturbed” by the president’s intentions as our nation’s leader.
This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the administration would be keeping its promise of cutting funding to jurisdictions that consider themselves to be a “sanctuary” for immigrants. Seattle is one of those cities. Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes is confident that the city is following all of the rules and won’t be “bullied.”
Holdeman said funds that could be at risk are the ones provided via the Emergency Management Agency for pre-disaster preparedness, mitigation, and homeland security projects.
“Whether it’s buying equipment, doing training, doing disaster exercises like the ‘Cascadia Rising’ that was held last June — those are the funds that conceivably could be in jeopardy depending on what the administration chooses to do,” Holdeman said.
“Cascadia Rising” brought local and national agencies together to participate in earthquake drills. It was the largest exercise ever to be held in relation to a Cascadia quake. Federal officials estimated that over a four-day period, about 20,000 people were involved.
Along with preparing for a large-scale event, “Cascadia Rising” revealed the state was largely unprepared for such a natural disaster. An analysis of the state-wide drill found that the state’s disaster plans for such a catastrophe are “inadequate” in many areas.
Though Holdeman says Trump probably wouldn’t hold funding back in the case of emergency, he expects more friction between the state and the federal government.
“Depending on what happens on climate change – there could be a lot more points of friction between Washington state — our values — and that of the new administration,” Holdeman said.
Still, if the “Big One” rumbles in, Holdeman said Washington residents should feel confident that help will be on its way — no matter how bad it gets between the two sides.
“To withhold that would be a political disaster for the federal administration,” Holdeman said.
Of course, when it comes to national emergencies, it is often up to the president to determine whether or not federal assistance is needed.
Kipp Robertson contributed to this story. |
Note: This article was first posted on the front Politics page of the Huffington Post
It’s not poor Mitt’s fault. Jesus could be the Republican candidate this year with Lincoln as his running mate and the Republicans would still lose. That’s because the American people don’t have a death wish. You see we may all wallow in our own delusional fantasy lands but we want sane leaders.
I’ll explain. You might be a Christian like me who says he believes in the power of God to heal. But if I get a brain tumor I’d much prefer an atheist with an MD/PhD in neurosurgery if it comes to surgery than my pastor. The same goes for political parties. Members of the religious right, libertarians, conservative Roman Catholics, papal groupies, Mormons, you name it — from soccer moms to the the rest of us — love our particular mythologies. Notwithstanding our addiction to wishful thinking when it comes to presidential leadership we want someone who takes our idiosyncrasies seriously but that doesn’t govern according to them.
The difference between the Republican Party as it once was say pre-Roe v Wade and as it is now is illustrated by the fact that when I was a Republican Party/antiabortion activist in the 1970s to late 1980s, we of the “pro-life” right were outside agitators. We were knocking on the doors of insiders like Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp and George Bush senior. (I describe my family’s odd “contribution” to the Republican Party in my “God Trilogy” Crazy for God, Patience With God and Sex, Mom and God.)
But today it’s as if us outside agitators had been running for congress or for president. That would have been laughable back then. Come to think of it, it was laughable when Pat Robertson tried it in 1988.
No one’s laughing now.
Encountering the Republican Party today is like going to the hospital only to find that your faith healing pastor has replaced your doctor. When you’re offered Bible study instead of the surgery you were scheduled for your reaction is “Oh shit!” even if you’re a believer. I mean, most people know the difference between belief and fact when their lives are on the line.
See, we Americans want our beliefs (religious or otherwise) respected but not taken too seriously. For instance lots of us say we believe in guardian angels but most of us still wear a seat belt. In other words we want leaders to be nice to us and say pleasant things about our beliefs but not base policy on the Bible or health insurance on the Tea Party’s fear of “Death Panels,” or concoct a “military policy” based on what some xenophobic Christian Zionists say let alone the latest bomb-them-all neoconservative wet dreams concocted by the same people who talked Bush into Iraq.
The problem with today’s Republican Party is that it’s gone way past paying polite lip service to our weirdest beliefs and has become way to much like us. It’s as dysfunctional as we are.
Speaking of freaking the rest of us out, the Republican Party has allowed its Middle East policy to more or less be written for it by the buffoonish Prime Minister of Israel, the one who showed up at the UN with a Wile E. Coyote cartoon bomb and drew a red line on it. Part of that “pro-Israel” stance is manifested by the Republicans trying to use the murder of our ambassador in Libya as a political weapon to “prove” the President is “pro-Muslim” and “weak on terrorism.” (Never mind the 3000 Americans who were killed on 9/11 on W’s “watch” after he ignored repeated warnings from the CIA, but that’s another story.)
Pandering to the Israel lobby goes way past political genuflecting to the Christian Zionists waiting for Jesus to “return” and/or reassuring understandably the jumpy West Bank settlers. Rather Republican faith-based “policy” cuts to the heart of where our military personnel — people like my Marine son John who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq and who thank God! survived — will die, be maimed and scarred next. Again– No one’s laughing now.
The same general lack of good humor by most Americans towards the Republican Party goes for political “strategies” too. It is one thing to coddle bigots and reinforce their bigotry with obscure race-based flyers placed on windscreens in southern church parking lots, as happened when W Bush used his religious right surrogate Jerry Falwell and went after John McCain in 2000, by accusing him of having an illegitimate black child. It’s another thing to base actual anti-immigrant legislation on an ignorant “Tea Party” subgroup’s dumbest fears of the “other.” And it’s one thing for some know-nothing individuals to hate the black man in the White House just because he’s black, but it’s another thing for the Republican Party to openly work in 30-plus states to resurrect old voter suppression tactics most Americans are ashamed of.
And Paul Ryan has done enormous damage to the ticket. Everyone more or less knows that Romney only pretends to be a wild eyed far right nut in order to get the far right nut vote. But Ryan is the real Ayn Rand/libertarian-dismantle-the-government article and a true believer.
Romney has become the lightning rod for Republican pundit discontent because he has all too successfully pandered to the heart of his own party. Also, the Republican talking heads need someone other than themselves to blame for unleashing a lot of crazy ideas that aren’t flying, say like the need to bomb Iran right now, deprive women of contraceptives in the name of religious freedom no less, and ban gays from marrying. But how can you fault a candidate for trying to be loyal to his base?
Still, being loyal to one’s base as a Democrat brings very different results than trying to pander to Republicanism these days because most Democrats in that base aren’t touring the Creation Museum while denying global warming, evolution, the need for comprehensive sex education or worrying about frozen embryos’ “civil rights.” So when President Obama is loyal to his base he enacts legislation to give health care to all Americans, stops a war, tries to prevent Israel from lashing out at Iran, kills bin Laden, tries to calm the Middle East, shores up the American economy, defends and expands the civil rights of gay Americans and women and actually governs– in spite of being obstructed by a Republican Party dominated by extremists.
Romney will lose and then become the fall guy for the Republican pundits, as in “he was a bad candidate.” But Romney’s problems are a symptom of the disease afflicting Republicans, not the cause of that disease. He’s wacky because they are. He panders to the super rich because that is all his party actually does care about when not trying to stop blacks from voting or women from using contraception or gays from loving whomever they want to love.
When the Republicans bring back actual “doctors” (to overuse my metaphor) and send the “faith healers” back to where they belong, we Americans just might trust them again. Meanwhile we’ll reelect our sane president. I mean it’s pretty basic: President Obama believes in science, that global warming is real, that the solution to the problems in the world can’t be found in the book of Revelation, that the way to reduce abortions is through helping poor women and providing comprehensive sex education in schools, that Americans need Social Security and Medicare, and that most Americans like women, paved roads, our gay neighbors, our Hispanic friends and a working post office.
In other words our president is a smart compassionate decent grownup governing from the common sense center, something that used to be a prerequisite for Republican leaders too.
Not anymore.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of the New York Times bestseller Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps and Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back . |
June 26, 2016:
One year of nationwide marriage equality
On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have the same constitutional right to marry that different-sex couples do. Same-sex couples can move or travel from place to place without worry that their relationships have been legally nullified by stepping over a state border. Our vigilance didn't end overnight, of course...a number of Christian political bigots like Kim Davis of Kentucky and Sam Brownshirt—er, Brownback—of Kansas took it upon themselves in the weeks afterward to ignore the law...but they had been finally deprived of their last shred of legal foundation in doing so. The Republican Party discovered that it no longer had unilateral control of America's social discourse, and its 22-year crusade of DOMA acts and heterosupremacist constitutional amendments was reduced to naught. One year on, the notion of same-sex marriage has been normalized in most places, and I couldn't be happier about that.
Marriage isn't the end-all and be-all of equality
Of course, our work towards achieving a just world with equality of outcomes isn't over. DAMN it's not over, because there is so much more to LGBT civil rights than just marriage alone.
= LGBT people may live without fear of legal employment or housing discrimination.
= Cis LGB people may live without fear of discrimination; trans people do not.
= LGBT people may be legally discriminated against.
Employment and housing discrimination affects a larger subset of people than marriage prohibitions, but the current legal situation is absolutely embarrassing. In over half the states in the country...28 if you're cis, 30 if you're trans...it is completely legal to be deprived of a job or a home if your supervisor or landlord thinks that gay sex makes baby Jesus cry. Or any reason at all. You can get married on Sunday (thanks to the courts) and fired on Monday. And unless you're lucky enough to live in a city or county with an overriding protection, there's not a thing you can do about this.
How is this not an outrage?
The ENDA (Employment Non-Discrimination Act) has been tabled in some form or another since 1994, and it would almost certainly be law now if the Christian-nationalist Republican Party didn't seize an artificial legislative majority through gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a large contingent of insufferable, ignorant straight people who assume that anti-LGBT employment or housing discrimination is already illegal, and that legislation like ENDA is unnecessary. Thanks to crap like this and a surgical dose of anti-trans Christian bigotry, an anti-discrimination ordinance was repealed in Houston, Texas (the fourth-largest city in the U.S.) last year. More on that in a minute.
The next frontier of action
A tidbit of wisdom that ought to be repeated is that we can't always choose our own battles. If LGBT people had the privilege of planning their own moves in the equal-rights game, it's plausible that nationwide housing and employment protections would have been achieved decades ago while marriage would have been scooted further down on the priority list. But our adversaries forced our hand; they made the prospect of marriage the focus of their animus, and they set the stage for the battle that we eventually won.
What have our adversaries done in the year since their last humiliating sting of defeat? In a move that shows no shame, they've targeted trans people.
Transgender people are diverse, and they have wants, needs, desires, and experiences as ordinary or extraordinary as those of you and me. The only difference is that their gender identity and expression don't fit into neat little cis boxes tied to their body parts. As with other portions of the LGBT "alphabet soup," who they are and what they are harms absolutely no one. Yet, transgender people in many a place are forced from sight and consigned to the fringes of society. The suicide rates among transgender people hover at almost 1 out of 2.
In no place has this been made more apparent than in North Carolina, home of the awful new "Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act," tabled as the HB2 bill. The HB2 bill directly torpedoed a trans-inclusive anti-discrimination ordinance in Charlotte, the largest city in the state. It also...
Limits the use of public restrooms to members of a given "biological sex," enforced by birth certificate. (Presumably, we can now look forward to cops and guards asking for certificates at the door.)
Prohibits cities from establishing higher minimum wages (not relating specifically to LGBT people, but affecting them and punishing Charlotte in the bargain).
Specifically excludes gender as a basis for nondiscrimination protections, while highlighting "biological sex" with an underline.
Contains a "severability" clause proclaiming that the rest of the bill will stand even if (and when) parts of it are struck down in court.
Was pushed through in a single day and signed into law by Republican governor Pat McCrory, riding high on a wave of reactionary sentiment to put the state's increasingly liberal complexion down.
When North Carolina's HB1 bill was signed into law, crisis calls to the Trans Lifeline nearly doubled. A similarly insidious bill passed in Mississippi days later, and other anti-trans bills simmered in over a dozen other states. For a moment, it seemed that we were on the verge of a massive rollback of civil rights in every state in which the Christian-nationalist Republican Party had lockstep control; much like the anti-gay amendments of 2004 and 2006. Blogger Benny Vimes described this as a "sensation of helplessness."
Compounding this was a complete lack of subtlety: The laws took aim at the most marginalized sexual minorities and legislated away their very ability to partake in society. When Houston's HERO act was repealed, one bigot took it upon himself to describe transgender people as "perverts, the mentally ill, liars, and others who want to get in to opposite sex bathrooms"...and this is what we're up against. Their hatred is so proud, so naked, that it makes me scream.
The only good that's come out of this has been a backlash.
In a world where money exerts more influence on politics than words, these boycotts and business reactions have been heartening. But most have been focused exclusively on North Carolina: Mississippi is a state with minimal economic significance to make a difference, while Houston's ordinance repeal has inexplicably evaded a meaningful backlash. It's frustrating. Meanwhile, NC's HB2 remains on the books...
= Marriage equality
Starting in 2015, all fifty U.S. states and the District of Columbia recognize and permit same-sex marriages as a matter of civil law. Although the rapid political progress on this front is new, the issue is but a manifestation of a larger gay-rights puzzle that has simmered for many decades; a constant cat and mouse game pitting legal roadblocks and reactionary sentiments against the inevitable tide of humanistic social progress.
Jack Baker and Michael McConnell of Minnesota attempted to gain a marriage application in May 1970. At the time, there were few laws in force either permitting or prohibiting such arrangements. Several states reacted by explicitly banning same-sex marriages in statutes through the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, but the issue attracted little attention through the end of the Reagan era...sidelined by the AIDS crisis and the LGBT community's constant struggle at the time to simply exist.
The genesis of the modern marriage-equality movement is often cited as Baehr v. Miike, a lawsuit filed by three same-sex couples in Hawaii in 1991. Denied the right to marry, the couples brought their case to court...and on May 5, 1993, the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled in their favor, noting that they were discriminated against. The political backlash that resulted was immense. The court's decision was immediately remanded and stayed before same-sex marriages could come into effect, and an anti-gay statute promptly wrote the matter out of contention. In 1996 the national "Defense of Marriage Act" was reflexively rammed into law, prohibiting the federal government from recognizing any same-sex marriage (even though none were yet possible) and alleviating states from recognizing other states' marriages.
In 1999, a similar lawsuit in Vermont led to the establishment of civil unions...arrangements that provided same-sex couples with some of the civil and financial benefits of marriage without the trappings. In 2003, the legal train made its way one state south...and on May 17, 2004, Massachusetts became the first state with marriage equality in the country. Sadly, the national reaction continued to be virulent. Our president of the time (George W. Bush) verbally endorsed a Federal Marriage Amendment that would prohibit any state from recognizing a same-sex marriage...ever. Karl Rove promptly turned the issue into a weapon to drive up Christian fundagelical voter turnout; a successful ploy to keep Bush in office at the expense of real peoples' lives. No fewer than thirteen states placed anti-gay constitutional amendments on their ballots in 2004, followed by nine more in 2006. All were attempts to codify bigotry by the most concrete letter of law imaginable, and all were magnets for voters with the enlightenment of a lynch mob. In every state but one, the propositions (and bigots) won.
But slowly, the course started to change. Arizona in 2006 became the first state to reject an anti-gay constitutional amendment at the polls...although they went ahead and passed a slightly less-draconian version of the same thing two years later. California and Connecticut became the second and third states with marriage equality in 2008...although the initial California victory was bittersweet as much as it was short-lived. Marriage equality first passed a state legislature in April 2009, thanks once again to the lead of Vermont. Equal rights hit the massive state of New York two years later, and national public support started hitting the magic 50% mark around the same time. Finally in November 2012, marriage equality won at the ballot box with simultaneous referendums in three states: Maryland, Washington, and Maine.
However, what about the states where equality wasn't legal; where the toxic combination of religious demographics and Rovian tactics resulted in same-sex marriages being banned under terms of constitutional law? Until 2010, I would have predicted through past precedent and reputation that Wisconsin would be one of the first states to repeal such a measure. Thanks to the actions of my own neighbors and family, that was no longer possible. Oregon and Nevada were left as the most likely candidates for this course of action, while social progress in the Badger State got sidelined indefinitely by a gerrymandered legislature pandering to the worst elements of Christian idiocy and a psychopathic governor who was convinced that he had divine guidance and acted out the wills of his god.
Depressingly, similar scenarios existed in dozens of other states nationwide. Although Section 3 of DOMA was struck down, Section 2 (and myriad state-level prohibitions) remained in effect...meaning that even if they had the right to exist at home, married same-sex couples would have had their marriages instantly dissolved any time they stepped beyond the state line. And thanks to a complete absence of federal-level protections, it is still completely legal in twenty-eight states to be fired from a job or evicted from housing solely for being gay.
It is impossible to separate anti-gay animus from the religion from which it spawns, and both have been impossible to separate from one of America's two major political parties since the ascendancy of the Christian Right more than 30 years ago. Since 2007 organized opposition to marriage equality became monopolized by the newspeak-named National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a disclosure-adverse money-laundering organization led by Robert George and Brian Brown and bankrolled by the Roman Catholic Church. California's Proposition 8 in 2008 was funded by a laundry list of Catholic, evangelical Protestant, and Mormon benefactors and organizations. So was North Carolina's Amendment 1, Maine's Question 1, and every other anti-gay voter proposition that has ever existed.
There is not a single scrap or shred of anti-gay animosity in existence that is not religious in origin. You can easily defend anti-gay prejudice using the Bible; citing Leviticus, Corinthians, Jude, Deuteronomy, or any other chapter and verse that floats your boat. You can also defend genocide, slavery, misogyny, willful ignorance, genital mutilation, literal incineration, attempted murder, and raping and pillaging the world and being a total jerk so long as you pull the right strings to go to heaven anyway, just by citing words in those pages. Just about the only thing that can't be defended is the objective logic of using a corrupt, unethical, medieval book like the Bible as a moral guide to begin with.
If every person used empirical evidence and critical thinking as a basis for making decisions instead, every single roadblock to civil equality would have been tossed aside, repealed, and condemned decades ago. It's no secret that the states with the least-religious societal complexions were among the first states to legalize marriage equality, and there's no doubt that the most-religious states (culminating with Mississippi) would be the last if not for the courts.
I'm proud to say that even in the long-gone days of the 1990s...when marriage equality seemed like a pipe dream that would never happen...I never accepted why gay and lesbian couples who loved each other ought to be denied the same legal and financial benefits that heterosexual folks enjoyed. |
Dear friends, present and future, near and far,
I find myself in a position to ask for your support. On August 1st, I hope to begin production on my third feature film, I USED BE DARKER.
It’s a project I’m very proud of, my first co-written screenplay, featuring more awesome Baltimore locations, an amazing cast, and many of the same creative talent responsible for my first two features, HAMILTON (2006) and PUTTY HILL (2011).
Once again, this production will be shot 100% in Maryland by my long-time collaborator Jeremy Saulnier. I'm pleased to be working with Steve Holmgren (UnionDocs) and Eric Bannat (The Wire), and welcoming producers Amy Dotson (SWEETHEARTS OF THE PRISON RODEO) and Nashville-based Ryan Zacarias (Nomadic Independence Pictures) to the team.
Here’s the synopsis:
When Taryn, a Northern Irish runaway, finds herself pregnant in Ocean City, MD, she seeks refuge with American relatives in Baltimore. But Aunt Kim and her husband, Bill, have problems of their own: they’re trying to handle the end of their marriage gracefully for the sake of their daughter Abby, just home from her first year of college. What follows is a story of family revelations, people finding each other and letting each other go, looking for love where they’ve found it before and, when that doesn’t work, figuring out where they might find it next.
My co-writer, Amy Belk, and I wanted to tell an honest story about divorce, each of us having gone through it ourselves. We wanted to honor our experience, what we learned about how complex and full of life even the dying of a marriage is, how it is a beginning as much as it is an ending, for the couple concerned, and also for the people whose lives they touch.
It was equally important that the story not be narrow in scope. What really amazes us about relationships is how everything is happening all at once: the community, the family, changes when two people separate, but it does not stop, even for a second, having troubles and triumphs of its own.
How to tell it right? How to account for melody and harmony, discord and resolution, improvised riffs and aching silences?
Music plays an important part in this film. Pinned to Amy’s bulletin board is a little scrap of paper asking the question: When you are uncertain about what your heart feels, do you sing songs that help you transcend the need for certainty? We wrote the parts of Bill and Kim as working musicians because we wanted them to embody this in an active, creative way. We tailored the roles for Ned Oldham and Kim Taylor because their music and presence do so powerfully.
Several drafts in, we discovered Hannah Gross and Deragh Campbell, young actors whose relationship in the real world mirrored that of Abby and Taryn in a way that got us really excited. Their screen tests were explosive. Their understanding of their characters was uncanny from the start, nuanced and deep.
We believe that with the cast and crew assembled, I USED TO BE DARKERwill be a visually and sonically beautiful, emotionally powerful film. We hope it will inspire new ways of seeing the most difficult aspects of relating, that it will be a reflection of life on screen provoking thought, presenting possibility and providing hope.
Our total production costs are just over $100,000. If we can raise $40K or more with your support, coupled with first-money-in from private equity investors, we can keep the cameras rolling through August and get DARKER in the can. We are confident that if we are on a healthy pace toward reaching our goal by month's end, we can begin shooting and ultimately reach our goal when this campaign expires, mid-way through production.
I was overwhelmed with the amount of community as well as national and international support we received with our last campaign. The ask is higher in this case, as it reflects our project's needs, but we've created a variety of exciting incentives we hope you can connect with.
The magic of this project is in the collaboration that will occur when all our talent is assembled in Baltimore the first week of August. I sincerely hope you will join us in the effort to bring it all to life.
Let’s Don’t Stop,
Matt Porterfield |
The 30 miles of the Channel tunnel have until now offered a welcome pause from the trilling of mobile phones. Not any more. From this spring, Eurotunnel passengers will be able to tell callers: "I'm on Le Shuttle."
The north tunnel, through which the Eurostar and car-carrying shuttle transport passengers from Britain to the continent, is to be plugged into the mobile phone network for the first time.
British operators Vodafone and EE, owner of the Orange and T-Mobile brands, have signed a 10-year contract to offer their customers mobile and internet services beneath the Channel, and expect to have the service ready in March. EE is promising 4G by summer 2014, and Vodafone intends to make the fast mobile internet technology available in future.
The agreement is a boon for British travellers. France's three largest networks have run a mobile service in the south tunnel, which runs from France to England, since June 2012. Installed in time to serve customers travelling to the Olympics, it has until now had no southbound equivalent.
Eurotunnel said it had received letters and emails from passengers requesting the two-way service. The 20 million travellers passing through the Channel tunnel each year will now be able to make calls, send emails, research hotels and stream music.
"Being connected is such an important part of travelling now," said Fotis Karonis, chief technology officer at EE. He added that the service would make a big difference to business workers and people going away on holiday.
There will be no disruption to services in the north tunnel because the work to install mobile radios and cables has already been done. Eurotunnel hired Alcatel Lucent to wire up both sections in 2011 so that its drivers and technicians could make calls. The tunnels have radios every 740 metres linked by cables which "leak" signal so that the connection does not fade in and out between radio points.
Customers of the other two British networks, O2 and Three, will be able to use their phones underground by manually switching over to EE or Vodafone's service, although such calls will cost extra. British passengers travelling back can use their phones by paying extra to roam on the French networks."We are talking with the other operators to see whether they would like to join in as well. There is capacity for all the operators to use the equipment that is down there at the moment," said John Keefe, a spokesman for Eurotunnel. |
The new Moto Z2 Play was announced only a short few weeks ago, yet here we are with the Verizon model in house. You may be wondering why we care about a mid-tier-ish phone like the Z2 Play when we have the OnePlus 5 out, the Essential Phone on the way, and some others, and well, you must not have been reading Droid Life much over the past year. I loved the original Moto Z Play so much, I wrote a love letter to it. It was also our first ever somewhat produced video review. So it makes sense that we give the follow-up a good, deep look.
To recap, the Moto Z2 Play is very much a Moto Z phone, meaning you have Moto Mods compatibility and a similar shape to last year’s Moto Z line. In fact, this phone looks a heck of a lot like the flagship Moto Z from last year with its incredibly thin body. In terms of specs for this Verizon model, it packs a 5.5-inch FHD AMOLED display, Snapdragon 626 processor, 32GB storage with SD slot, 3GB, 12MP f/1.7 camera on the back, fingerprint reader, and Android 7.1 Nougat. It also features a 3000mAh battery, which is a big drop from the 3510mAh battery in last year’s Moto Z Play.
The new Moto Z2 Play is available at Verizon right now for $408 full retail or $17 per month.
So is the Moto Z2 Play a worthy follow-up to one of the sleeper phones of 2016 that I couldn’t get enough of? I can tell you, after playing with it off and on over the past few days, that it’s quite good even with the reduction in battery size. Once this OnePlus 5 review is done, we’ll find out for sure. |
More improvements and features for the UI this week!
Posted by ThinMatrix on Aug 7th, 2016
This week the UI makeover continued, with more aesthetic changes to many of the GUIs, as well as a couple of new features such as customizable animal names and a custom mouse cursor!
Editable Text Fields
The first big update to the GUIs this week was the addition of editable text fields. This was mainly to allow for save slots to be renamed (finally!) but it also meant that I could implement customizable names for animals!
Custom Cursor
I also properly implemented custom cursors this week, and created a few different cursor icons for different situations. For example, in the image above you can see the cursor icon changing to indicate that the item preview can be moved around.
General UI Polishing
Most of this week though was spent simply improving the look of various GUIs. One thing that I discovered was that having a slight gradient to plain background panels added a bit of extra "depth" to the UI, and so I added this to all the species icon backgrounds and to the backgrounds of any mouse-over pop-ups, which can be seen in the images above.
The notification GUI which pops up occasionally in the bottom right of the screen was also redesigned, and in the shops the newly unlocked items now "pulse" until you mouse-over them, in order to attract your attention. Check this out in the images below!
So that's it for this week! Next week I'm going to be adding the final couple of updates to the UI before moving on to adding in some new plants and animals.
Thanks for reading! :) |
UndercoverInfo
Leading up to the failed coup attempt in Turkey, military officers who were jailed as part of the Ergenekon trials, but later released, have been negotiating with the Assad regime on a Turkish-Syrian deal that would see the end of Kurdish autonomy forever. The deal seeks to stop all funding or military support of anti-Assad forces and militias in Syria, including the Kurds. Details of the ‘back channel’ negotiations and the main players involved are given below. Meanwhile, President Erdogan is expected to escalate the purge of his opponents and critics that began yesterday with the dismissal of almost 3000 judges. A statement by the Kurdish movement on the attempted coup and on Erdogan’s authoritarian aspirations is also given below.
A. The ‘deep state’ deal between Turkey and Syria
The Homeland Party is a nationalist movement, chaired by Dogu Perincek and its vice chair is Lieutenant General Ismail Hakki Pekin… |
Over the course of two a half years, the word “change” has come up in many of The Local’s 4,200-plus posts about the East Village. Now it’s time for some change of our own.
Next month the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute will launch an exciting new site with New York magazine. Bedford + Bowery will continue to cover breaking news, big issues, and cultural events in the East Village and Lower East Side while also exploring three kindred neighborhoods directly across the river: Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick.
The new site will launch June 17. As The Local publishes its final post today, please bookmark nymag.com/bedfordandbowery and follow @bedbow on Twitter. You can also sign up for B + B’s newsletter to get top stories delivered to your inbox.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this collaborative experiment in community journalism as much as we have. The Local’s robust archives will remain right here at NYTimes.com – because we know how important preservation is to East Villagers. Thanks so much for reading! |
(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)
This report from The Intercept got rather lost in the shuffle over the past two weeks, but it's no less chilling than it was the first time I read it. It seems that, almost covertly, the FBI has been tracking the infiltration into law enforcement of white-supremacist extremists.
"Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the ATF — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups," said Daryl Johnson, who was the lead researcher on the DHS report. Johnson, who now runs DT Analytics, a consulting firm that analyzes domestic extremism, says the problem has since gotten "a lot more troublesome."
As The Intercept story makes clear, critical to the rise of these groups within law enforcement was the severe backlash by mainstream conservatives to a 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security that revealed that white-supremacist groups and right-wing domestic terrorist organizations had been recruiting heavily among a number of groups in the country, especially among returning military veterans. Mainstream conservatives went completely bananas and, to her discredit, then-DHS Secretary Donna Shalala killed the report, apologized to various veterans groups, and disbanded the unit within her department that had done the research.
"They stopped doing intel on that, and that was that," Heidi Beirich, who leads the Southern Poverty Law Center's tracking of extremist groups, told The Intercept. "The FBI in theory investigates right-wing terrorism and right-wing extremism, but they have limited resources. The loss of that unit was a loss for a lot of people who did this kind of work."
That, of course, presented the people who actually were doing the recruiting with a glorious opportunity, of which they took full advantage.
Critics fear that the backlash following the 2009 DHS report hindered further action against the growing white supremacist threat, and that it was largely ignored because the issue was so politically controversial. "I believe that because that report was so denounced by conservatives, it sort of closed the door on whatever the FBI may have been considering doing with respect to combating infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacists," said Samuel Jones, a professor of law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago who has written about white power ideology in law enforcement. "Because after the 2006 FBI report, we simply cannot find anything by local law enforcement or the federal government that addresses this issue."
Pete Simi, a sociologist at Chapman University who spent decades studying the proliferation of white supremacists in the U.S. military, agreed. "The report underscores the problem of even discussing this issue. It underscores how difficult this issue is to get any traction on, because a lot of people don't want to discuss this, let alone actually do something about it." Simi said that the extremist strategy to infiltrate the military and law enforcement has existed "for decades." In a study he conducted of individuals indicted for far-right terrorism-related activities, he found that at least 31 percent had military experience.
This takes place in the context of a tacit policy of soft-pedaling right-wing extremism, particularly in the days since the 9/11 attacks. As the kidz say, read the whole thing, and then think about what might happen in the case of widespread civil disobedience.
Dogs: lie down with, get fleas.
I am going to reserve judgment on the moral component of this idea until after I see the interview. Sunlight, disinfectant, I get that, and generally, I agree with it. However, I can understand fully why, for example, the parents and friends of the schoolchildren murdered at Sandy Hook are steaming with outrage. Alex Jones is a blight, and a swindler, and a nut. I don't suspect that anything Megyn Kelly manages to get out of him will change any of those opinions. The fact that he's already got his victim drag on leads me to believe that the whole effort likely was futile and worthless. But, we shall see what we shall see.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Eh Las Bas" (Danny Barker): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's Marlene Dietrich, singing in Russia. This is not to be confused with singing about Russia, which I suspect will be a serious choral work in a few weeks.
This was my favorite thing on the Intertoobz this week. It was what convinced me that Maine Woman is the exact opposite of Florida Man. And a great job by the reporter. From The Bangor Daily News:
She met her mother, Elizabeth, at home, and together they drove immediately to Pen Bay Medical Center. The dead raccoon was retrieved by Borch's dad, who packed it into a Taste of the Wild dog food bag and handed it over to the Maine Warden Service. Hope Animal Control Officer Heidi Blood confirmed Wednesday that the dead raccoon later tested positive for rabies by the Maine Center for Disease Control. "Not to scare people," Blood said, but "when there's one [infected], there's typically another."
The reporter, Alex Acquisto, gets many props for including the precise brand of dog food of the bag used to transport the dead raccoon.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, IBTUK? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
The reptile – a new species of pliosaur – has been named Luskhan itilensis, which translates as spirit and master of the Volga River. The large marine creature was a fully grown adult, at roughly 5 metres long from tip to tail. It was found 20 kilometres to the north of the city of Ulyanovsk, in south-western Russia… The reptile was unlike any other advanced pliosaur of its time. The plesiosaurs - a group of marine reptiles including the pliosaurs - were thought to feed primarily on large marine animals and fish. The group included some of the most deadly predators on the planet.
I wouldn't mind going down through history known as The Spirit And Master Of The Volga River. There is some risk, however, that Paul Manafort may have the copyright on that and will now have to fight the descendants of the pliosaur in court. I'm rooting for the representatives of the things that lived then to make us happy now.
The members of the Committee always are suckers for the classics, so Top Commenter Chris Curtis is this week's Top Commenter of the Week for this blast from the far distant past.
"Does not Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms?" That's some serious subtweeting from 2400 years ago.
Indeed it is, good sir. Take 71.23 Beckhams out of petty cash.
I'll be checking in Monday from Georgia as Ossoff-Handel heads into the clubhouse turn. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, or I shall summon the Spirit Of The Volga, and you'll be in real trouble.
Respond to this post on the Esquire Politics Facebook page. |
Four jockeys hospitalised, one horse euthanased after shocking fall at Taree racecourse
Updated
Four jockeys have been hospitalised and one horse has been euthanased after a shocking fall on Monday afternoon at the Taree Wingham Race Club on the New South Wales Mid North Coast.
Maurice Logue from Racing NSW said during the first race of the afternoon, race horse 'Bazza's Boy' sustained a fracture to his leg when entering the home straight and fell to the ground.
Four jockeys close behind got caught up in the fall and came off their horses.
"Had it happened a little bit later the riders would have peeled out from behind each other so they wouldn't have been bunched,
"It was just one of those unfortunate things," Mr Logue said.
"There wasn't enough time to get around [the horse] or avoid him."
Jockey Samantha Clenton suffered fractures to her collarbone and left leg and was taken to Port Macquarie Base Hospital for treatment.
Fellow jockey Kaylee Kirkwood was taken to the same hospital suffering from a mild concussion and injury to her right leg.
Two jockeys with suspected rib injuries — Jackson Murphy and Nyssa Burrells — were airlifted to Newcastle's John Hunter hospital for treatment.
Mr Logue said Bazza's Boy was euthanased as a result of his injury, while the remaining horses escaped unscathed.
"It was an unfortunate accident, however there will be an investigation which will include an autopsy of Bazza's Boy to determine what happened and to see if there's any action that needs to be taken," he said.
Only hours after the incident, Melbourne Cup champion Michelle Payne was injured during a race in Mildura when she fell from her horse Dutch Courage.
Topics: community-and-society, horse-racing, sport, accidents---other, taree-2430
First posted |
It’s time for the Avengers to assemble as LEGO Marvel’s Avengers opens up for a digital preorder and predownload.
Not released until the end of January 2016, those who reckon they cannot do without a look at another LEGO title will no doubt be happy in the knowledge that they can splash the cash from today. Getting your pre-order in just prior to Christmas may be a bit strange in the old timing stakes, but if you want something bad, then you just gotta find the cash for it!
There are two flavours available although strangely both are currently priced identically. Details as follows:
Standard Edition – £49.99
Deluxe Edition – £49.99 – Contains full game, season pass and character pack.
Avengers Assemble! The best-selling LEGO® Marvel videogame franchise returns with a new action-packed, Super Hero adventure. Join the LEGO® Marvel’s Avengers team and experience the first console videogame featuring characters and storylines from the critically-acclaimed films and more. Play as the most powerful Super Heroes in their quest to save the world.
If you fancy a bit more LEGO action, then be sure to pop over to the Xbox One Games Store and get your pre-order and pre-download of Marvel’s Avengers in right now. You’ll be thanking us come the 29th Jan. |
Scientists have never fully understood what drives whole pods of whales to beach themselves in mass strandings along the world's coastlines, but it's possible the impetus may not originate on Earth.
The same phenomenon that produces spellbinding aurorae like the northern lights could also be triggering mass whale strandings, with powerful solar storms causing disruptions in Earth's magnetic field that throw off the animals' powers of navigation, according to a new study.
A team led by physicist Klaus Vanselow from the University of Kiel in Germany suggests that a mass stranding of almost 30 sperm whales on European shores in January 2016 and a pair of major solar storms that occurred only weeks before in December 2015 are no mere coincidence.
When powerful solar storms happen, large volumes of plasma, radiation and high-energy particles are hurled from the Sun in events called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which ultimately collide with Earth's magnetic field.
The collisions can cause geomagnetic storms, significant disruptions in the field which can cause wide-ranging shifts in the position of magnetic field structures.
During the December 2015 solar storms, the researchers calculate that these shifts exceeded 460 kilometres (286 miles) in the region surrounding the Norwegian Channel.
In light of previous research suggesting that whales and other marine animals navigate themselves through the sea by reference to Earth's magnetic field, Vanselow suggests that the disruptions produced in 2015 could have severely waylaid the group as they explored the North Sea – with fatal consequences.
"Sperm whales are very huge animals and swim in the free ocean so if they are disrupted by this effect, they can swim in the wrong direction for days and then correct it," Vanselow told Matt McGrath at BBC News.
"But in the area between Scotland and Norway, if the whales swim in the wrong direction for one or two days, then it is too late for them to go back, they are trapped."
That's because the 29 young male sperm whales that were the victims of the 2016 strandings fell prey to shallow waters in unfamiliar surroundings, and were unable to retrace their route before marooning themselves on beachfront belonging to the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and France.
The team suggests these animals, which hail from a region called the Azores in the mid-Atlantic, wouldn't have previously received much if any exposure to strong geomagnetic disruptions, something that could have also played a part in their stranding.
"Where the polar lights are seen, that's the region with the most geomagnetic disruptions on the Earth's surface," Vanselow told the BBC.
While there's no way to actually prove the researchers' hypothesis – as other factors could have also contributed and led to the whales beaching themselves – it's not the first time solar storms have been linked to mass strandings.
A team from NASA is currently investigating how whales and other marine animals appear to lose their way when magnetic anomalies strike – and the scientists think learning how solar storms influence animal navigation might even prevent the worst landfalls from taking place.
"If we understand the relationship between the two, we may be able to use observations of solar storms as an early warning for potential strandings to occur," says NASA collaborator Katie Moore from the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
"This would allow stranding responders in global hotspots, and really around the world, to be better prepared to respond, thus having the opportunity to save more animals."
That kind of intervention may be some way off for now, but it's reassuring to think that scientists are looking into ways to save these magnificent creatures from this cosmic re-routing they could never hope to naturally circumvent – which basically amounts to the Sun breaking their GPS.
"I think it's the same for whales," Vanselow explained to Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo.
"They do not realise that the Sun is changing the geomagnetic environment for a short time."
The findings are reported in the International Journal of Astrobiology. |
The ending of the beloved series Gilmore Girls left so many questions unanswered for fans of the show: What will become of Rory’s career? Will she ever get back together with Jess? Will Lorelei marry Luke? And what were Amy Sherman-Palladino’s planned last four words for the series before she left the show??
Now, some of those questions just might get answered: according to TV Line and The Hollywood Reporter, the series just might get a reboot on Netflix. The streaming company is apparently in talks for a limited-series revival that would involve series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband, producer Daniel Palladino.
According to TV Line, it looks like much of the original cast could be involved, including Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, Kelly Bishop and Scott Patterson—though no mention of Melissa McCarthy, who is now much more famous than she was in her days playing Sookie St. James.
Here’s hoping we all get to revisit Stars Hollow and all of its marvelous citizens.
A spokesperson for Netflix declined to comment. Lauren Graham weighed in on the rumors on Twitter, taking a rather cagey (but promising) approach:
[THR, TV Line]
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Anyone with half a brain can read the Second Amendment, and clearly articulate its intent. It’s not a complicated law. It’s not buried in high-brow legalese that is indecipherable to the average person. Once you understand the original meaning of the words when they were written, and the wider context of the Bill of Rights, its meaning is obvious. The Second Amendment protects an individuals right to own and use firearms, which is a meaning that has been upheld by the Supreme Court.
So it’s always somewhat surprising to learn that there are so many states with laws that disregard the Second Amendment. It’s baffling that it’s taken so long to strike down these unconstitutional rules.
In Michigan for instance, there is a law that effectively prevents adults from exercising their Second Amendment rights if they want to foster a child. A resident of the state recently filed a lawsuit against the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, because they wouldn’t allow him to foster his own grandchild unless he submitted to their anti-gun demands.
Caseworkers from MDHHS and a county judge told William Johnson of Ontonagon, Mich., that he had to choose between his Second Amendment rights and fostering his grandson, according to a complaintfiled with the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan. The 54-year-old Johnson is a retired, disabled Marine with a Michigan Concealed Pistol License. He and his wife were asked by the state of Michigan to foster their grandson. According to Johnson’s suit, however, the issues began as soon as he arrived at MDHHS to pick up the child. Johnson said he was searched for a firearm and, although he was not carrying a gun, officials demanded to see his concealed carry license. He was then told he would need to give MDHHS the serial numbers of all of his firearms, including rifles and shotguns, and register them with the agency. After questioning why he would have to register his firearms in order to foster his grandson, Johnson said he was told by one caseworker, “if you want to care for your grandson you will have to give up some of your constitutional rights.” When he objected, he was told there would not be a “power struggle” and MDHHS “would just take his grandson and place him in a foster home” if he didn’t comply with their requests. Two weeks later, during a hearing on placement of the child, Johnson said a Gogebic County Court judge similarly told him, “if you want to care for your grandson you will have to give up some of your constitutional rights.”
Can you believe that? How is it possible that in a supposedly free country, a judge can tell someone who hasn’t committed a crime to give up their constitutional rights, just so they can take care of their own grandchildren? How does a government official actually say that with a straight face?
But more to the point, how exactly does Michigan prevent foster parents from exercising their right to bear arms? It turns out that by law, they have to register their firearms with the state, and store them unloaded in locked safe, separated from ammunition. They can keep firearms, but they sure can’t bear them. Hopefully, this lawsuit will put an end to this blatant disregard for the civil rights of law abiding citizens in Michigan.
Article posted with permission from SHTFPlan |
Eric Trump (Credit: Fox News) Donald Trump golf story raises the question: Who's funding the Trump Organization? Eric Trump denies that he told a journalist that new golf courses were Russia funded. But there's a trend here
On Friday, an NPR station posted a big scoop from journalist James Dodson, who once covered a Donald Trump golf outing: Eric Trump had said that Russia was a major source of funding for the Trump Organization. The report posted by WBUR's Bill Littlefield noted the following:
"So when I got in the cart with Eric," Dodson says, "as we were setting off, I said, 'Eric, who’s funding? I know no banks — because of the recession, the Great Recession — have touched a golf course. You know, no one’s funding any kind of golf construction. It’s dead in the water the last four or five years.' And this is what he said. He said, 'Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.' I said, 'Really?' And he said, 'Oh, yeah. We’ve got some guys that really, really love golf, and they’re really invested in our programs. We just go there all the time.' Now that was three years ago, so it was pretty interesting."
Two days later, Trump the younger told the New York Post, "We own our courses free and clear," adding “It’s a recollection from some guy three years ago through a third person." Eric Trump added on Twitter on Monday that the story was "just another example of why there is such a deep distrust of the media."
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Dodson's claim happens to have been corroborated perfectly by Eric Trump's brother, Donald Trump Jr., who in 2008 said, "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets," USA Today noted. The paper added that a number of Trump projects have been funded by Russian backers — so financing a golf course isn't that much of a stretch.
But the Trump way has been to claim news stories as fake news, without evidence to back up counterclaims. And there's an easy solution here, one that would let the Trump Organization officials say that they have been wronged.
Release Trump's taxes. |
An American president’s highest moral, constitutional and political duty is protecting his fellow citizens from foreign threats. Presidents should adhere to our values and the Constitution, and not treat America’s enemies as morally equivalent to us.
If they do, they need not apologize to anyone.
The White House says that President Obama won’t apologize as he visits Hiroshima Friday. But who believes his press flacks?
His penchant for apologizing is central to his legacy. He may not often say “I apologize” explicitly, but his meaning is always clear, especially since he often bends his knee overseas, where he knows the foreign audiences will get his meaning. It is, in fact, Obama’s subtlety that makes his effort to reduce America’s influence in the world so dangerous.
He started in Cairo in 2009, referring to the “fear and anger” that the 9/11 attacks provoked in Americans, saying that, “in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals.” He later said, “Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions . . . based on fear rather than foresight” — a characterization Americans overwhelmingly reject.
In Europe, saved three times by America in the last century, Obama apologized because “there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.” And in this hemisphere, Obama said, “We have at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms,” culminating in his recent fawning visits with the Castros in Cuba.
The list goes on and on.
Then there’s his penchant for bowing to foreign leaders. He has bowed to the king of Saudi Arabia. He bowed to the emperor of Japan on a previous visit. He has bowed to China’s leader, Xi Jinping. And these are not casual nods of the head, but unmistakable gestures of obeisance.
For those who may wonder, the diplomatic protocol on bowing is clear: Heads of state don’t bow to other heads of state, monarchs or otherwise. Period. And Americans don’t bow to anyone. We fought a revolution to establish that point.
Obama’s apologies and gestures prove yet again, in his words, that he isn’t like those other presidents on our currency. And Friday, in Hiroshima, Obama may prove conclusively that, on national security, he’s no Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman.
Obama’s narcissism, his zeal for photo opportunities with him at the center, whether in Havana or Hiroshima, too often overcomes lesser concerns — like the best interests of the country. He puts his vanity before our nation’s pride.
Obama’s narcissism, his zeal for photo opportunities with him at the center, whether in Havana or Hiroshima, too often overcomes lesser concerns — like the best interests of the country.
Even without an express apology, there will likely be moral equivalence like: Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and we bombed Hiroshima. We’re all guilty, but let’s put it behind us.
Undeniably, World War II is history, and further strengthening the US-Japan alliance profoundly important. But there is no moral equivalence here.
Pearl Harbor was “a date which will live in infamy,” in Roosevelt’s words. Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) came after four years of brutal war and a desperate race against Nazi and Japanese efforts to develop atomic weapons. We won the race, and Truman acted decisively and properly to end the war.
Truman understood that not using the atom bombs would have condemned millions of service members to death or debilitating injury. Japanese resistance grew significantly as US forces neared Japan, and, expecting fanatical Japanese resistance, American military planners repeatedly increased projected US casualties. The calculus could not have been clearer.
Retrospectively, critics argue that Japan was incapable of winning the Pacific war, thereby invalidating any arguments favoring dropping the bomb.
But being unable to win is not equivalent to surrendering in defeat. Truman pursued Roosevelt’s goal of “unconditional surrender” because recreating the prewar status quo, with a belligerent Japanese military again threatening international peace, was simply unacceptable.
Truman wanted to end World War II and save American lives, and also lay the basis for sustained international peace. Before Obama casually trashes Truman’s courageous decision, he should reflect on what the alternative would have been.
John Bolton, now at the American Enterprise Institute, was the US ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006. |
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The Great Basin bristlecone pine is found in the western United States
Mayflies live a day, humans live a century, if we're lucky, but what is the oldest living organism on the planet? For scientists, accurately proving the age of any long-lived species is a hard task.
Under the boughs of a 300-year-old sweet chestnut tree in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, Tony Kirkham, head of the arboretum, confirms that trees are capable of outliving animals.
Proving this can involve some traditional detective work, as he explains: "First of all we can look at previous records, to find out if a tree was growing there at a set date. Then we look at paintings and artwork, to look to see if that tree was present. And old Ordnance Survey maps quite clearly show ancient trees, especially important ones."
A well-known way of measuring the age of a tree is by counting the rings in its trunk: one ring per year of growth. It's a process known as dendrochronology and only works for certain types of tree that have an annual growth spurt.
The obvious problem is that counting rings normally involves cutting down the tree.
Arboriculturalists get around this by using an increment borer, a drill that allows them to take out a core, and count the rings without fatally damaging the tree.
It's a delicate art, and, Tony says, back in the 1960s, one scientist's drill broke off inside the bristlecone pine tree he was sampling.
The kit is expensive, and to help him recover the lost instrument, a forester helpfully cut down the tree. Once felled, the tree could be easily aged, and was found to be 5000 years old.
Image copyright J.Zapell Image caption "Pando" is located in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah
"It was terrible but so much science came out of that opportunity, and since then, we've found trees that are as old, if not older," admits Tony.
A team of researchers in the US keeps a list, called the Old List, of officially dated ancient trees.
They've found a sacred fig tree in Sri Lanka that is at least 2,222 years old.
There's a Patagonian cypress tree in Chile which, at 3,627 years old, is as old as Stonehenge.
A Great Basin bristlecone pine in California's White Mountains named Methuselah comes in at 4,850 years old. But the oldest tree on the list, an unnamed bristlecone pine from the same location, has a core suggesting it is 5,067 years old.
This time-worn tree has lived through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. It was already established when the Ancient Egyptians started building pyramids.
We investigated the bristlecone pine tree after William Adams from London asked us: "What's the oldest tree or other living organism on Earth?" If you've got a science question you want BBC CrowdScience to look into, get in touch via the form below.
If you are reading this page on the BBC News app, you will need to visit the mobile version of the BBC website to submit your question.
Is this 5,000-year-old Great Basin bristlecone pine the oldest single living thing on the planet? That depends on your definition of a "single tree".
In Fishlake National Park in Utah in the US lives a quaking aspen tree that most people would struggle to see as "a tree".
It's a clonal tree called "Pando", from the Latin meaning "I spread", and for good reason.
It is so large that it is easy to mistake for a forest. However, Pando, despite being the size of Vatican City, has all sprung from one seed, and, over the years, has grown a single vast rootstock supporting an estimated 50,000 tree trunks. Accurately estimating how many years is problematic, says population geneticist Prof Karen Mock from Utah State University, who works on the aspen.
"There have been all kinds of different estimates but the original tree is almost certainly not there," he told the BBC.
Clonal trees grow in all directions and regenerate themselves as they go. This means taking a core from a trunk will not give you the age of the whole tree.
Scientists try to get around this problem by equating size to age. It's an inaccurate process and Pando's estimated age ranges from a few thousand to 80,000 years old.
Prof Mock hopes that a new technique, looking at how many DNA mutations are accumulated over time, could give them another way of assessing the age of this remarkable tree.
Take the quiz
Image copyright Getty Images
Quiz: What are the oldest living things on Earth?
If a tree can live to 80,000 years old, why stop there?
Is any organism on Earth immortal? No, according to ageing expert Joao Pedro de Magalhaes from the University of Liverpool.
"All organisms can die, so there's no immortal species per se," he says.
"You do have complex vertebrate species that appear not to age, like the Galapagos tortoise or a cave-dwelling salamander called the olm. I do say 'appear not to age'; we haven't studied any of them for 500 years. It's hard enough to get grants for five-year projects," he jokes.
How long you live depends partly on your place in the world; your ecological niche.
The organisms at the top of the food chain have very few predators, so are likely to live longer and to pass down that trait through generations.
Image copyright AWI/Tomas Lundalv Image caption Glass sponges follow a very sedate existence in the cold waters surrounding the Antarctic
Cold weather also plays a part: Antarctic glass sponges take the title of 'oldest living animal', with an estimated life span of 15,000 years.
"We don't know for sure," says Dr Magalhaes, "because, of course, nobody was there to check them 15,000 years ago."
The estimates are prone to error but according to Dr Magalhaes, sponges in Antarctica do grow very slowly because of the cold, which fits the model of slow-growing creatures having longer life spans.
However, the oldest, precisely measured organism living on Earth today remains, for now, a Great Basin Bristlecone pine tree. Pando the quaking aspen and Antarctic glass sponges could be much older but their ages are assumed from indirect measurements and educated guesswork.
Tantalisingly, Prof Mock and Tony Kirkham agree that there's still more to hunt for; the actual oldest living organism on the planet almost certainly has not yet been found. |
The campus community at the University of Texas at Austin has found a creative way to protest the fact that soon they will be allowed to carry concealed guns—but not sex toys—on school grounds.
On August 24, 2016, soon after the gun law goes into effect, students and alumni will stage a Campus Dildo Carry in which they strap "gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks in protest of campus [gun] carry."
"ANYBODY can participate in solidarity: alum, non-UT students, people outside of Texas. Come one dildo, come all dildos," states the event announcement. "You're carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I'm carrying a HUGE DILDO."
The "campus carry" bill, signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott in June, mandates that, starting in August 2016, public universities will not be allowed to ban guns on campus.
In contrast, "obscene materials" are banned on school grounds, according to UT rules, which cite the Texas penal code. According to event organizers, this means "You would receive a citation for taking a DILDO to class before you would get in trouble for taking a gun to class."
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"The State of Texas has decided that it is not at all obnoxious to allow deadly concealed weapons in classrooms, however it DOES have strict rules about free sexual expression, to protect your innocence," the announcement continues.
This is in a state where, until seven years ago, the sale of sex toys was banned.
The protest appears to have struck a nerve. Since Friday, over 5,400 people have responded in the affirmative to the Facebook event announcement, and the protest has garnered international headlines. This attention can only grow, given that the direct action is nearly a year away.
UT alumna Jessica Jin told the Houston Chronicle on Sunday that she decided to organize the event because she "couldn't believe that people could still sit there and defend their own personal gun ownership while watching families mourn the loss of their children... When I discovered that it is indeed against UT policy to wave dildos around campus, I just couldn't help myself." |
By deciphering the text, victims get to see more explicit images
Spammers have created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image.
The scrambled text images come from sites which use them to stop computers automatically signing up for accounts that can be put to illegal use.
By getting people to type in the text the spammers can take over the accounts and use them to send junk mail.
Text chat
The scrambled text systems used to defeat automatic sign-ups are known as Captchas or "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".
Typically they feature a disfigured word or one overlaid with artefacts that make it difficult for anyone but a human to decipher.
Many computer criminals have been trying to crack these systems to get at the net-based resources, such as e-mail accounts or blogging tools, they are designed to protect.
"The free e-mail services, so far, have been extremely successful at using Captchas to recognise a human being or an automatic program," said Raimund Genes, chief technology officer at Trend Micro.
The Windows game uses humans to crack anti-spam security
The novel system for getting round Captchas uses images of a woman called "melissa" who invites victims to decipher the scrambled text. Entering the correct text produces another image and another chunk of scrambled text.
Mr Genes said the Captchas seen with the first versions of the malicious program are all taken from the sign-up system for Yahoo webmail.
In the past many viruses have tricked people into opening booby-trapped attachments with the false promise of seeing explicit images, said Mr Genes, but this was one of the first to actually show people more images if people respond.
Because of the effectiveness of this technology, we have begun to see scammers adapt their tactics
Yahoo
Mr Genes said the program could prove because "the average male e-mail user would want to see more".
So far the two security firms who have spotted the program, Trend Micro and Panda Security, have not seen many copies of it in the wild suggesting few people have been caught out.
Mr Genes said it was very likely a proof of concept program that might find wide use in the future.
"Maybe they are trying it out to slip under the radar," he said. "More and more malware does not want to get any publicity, it wants to be silent and hidden."
The virtual stripper program arrives on machines that are already infected with malicious software, said Mr Genes. The program comes to life when the Internet Explorer browser is used on infected machines.
The Captcha-busting program can run on Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Server 2003.
Mr Genes recommended that people run anti-virus, anti-spyware and web watching programs to avoid infection and to install updates as soon as they become available.
A Yahoo spokesperson said: "Yahoo began deploying Captcha more than six years ago to help combat the ability for malicious programs to send spam.
"Because of the effectiveness of this technology, we have begun to see scammers adapt their tactics, where human beings solve the puzzles the viruses cannot."
The company added: "Yahoo is continuing to innovate in our defenses against this type of abuse. We have a number of mechanisms to help us detect and respond to abuse." |
CHILDREN have grown too big for their school chairs, a survey of 750 schools revealed.
Teachers said "desk and chair sizes were often inappropriate".
It is understood the NSW Education Department has been taking orders for custom-sized chairs.
Paediatric dietician Susie Burrell said children who were overweight often didn't carry obvious fat but instead looked older than their age.
She said children risked weight problems or diseases such as diabetes and fatty liver.
She said parents should check if their children's waist measurement at the belly button was less than half their height.
Having to wear clothing more than two sizes bigger than their age group could also indicate a problem.
A Teachers Federation spokesman said it was also common for students in Years 5 and 6 to be taught in Year 3 classrooms with small chairs.
The Education Department said schools were running healthy eating programs.
"The department takes the issue of childhood obesity seriously and works with a number of agencies to address the issue," a spokesman said.
"We have a number of initiatives to support school communities as well as promote healthy eating."
He said parents needed to enforce the message about healthy eating and a healthy lifestyle at home. |
Luke 8:40-56 New International Version (NIV)
Jesus Raises a Dead Girl and Heals a Sick Woman
40 Now when Jesus returned, a crowd welcomed him, for they were all expecting him. 41 Then a man named Jairus, a synagogue leader, came and fell at Jesus’ feet, pleading with him to come to his house 42 because his only daughter, a girl of about twelve, was dying.
As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. 44 She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.
45 “Who touched me?” Jesus asked.
When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”
46 But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”
47 Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. 48 Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”
49 While Jesus was still speaking, someone came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. “Your daughter is dead,” he said. “Don’t bother the teacher anymore.”
50 Hearing this, Jesus said to Jairus, “Don’t be afraid; just believe, and she will be healed.”
51 When he arrived at the house of Jairus, he did not let anyone go in with him except Peter, John and James, and the child’s father and mother. 52 Meanwhile, all the people were wailing and mourning for her. “Stop wailing,” Jesus said. “She is not dead but asleep.”
53 They laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. 54 But he took her by the hand and said, “My child, get up!” 55 Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up. Then Jesus told them to give her something to eat. 56 Her parents were astonished, but he ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened. |
After fresh revelations of Indians with accounts at HSBC in Geneva pointed to the who’s who of Indian industry, business houses, and politicians, the government on Monday promised to expedite and expand the investigation into all new cases.
However, most of those whose names emerged in the investigations—a collaboration involving The Indian Express, Le Monde of Paris and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)—denied having any illegal bank accounts abroad.
“There is no black (money). There is nothing to hide, nothing to worry. I am following all regulations and rules,” NRI businessman Naresh Goyal told reporters.
A Reliance Industries spokesperson said, “Neither Reliance Industries nor Mukesh Ambani have or had any illegitimate bank accounts anywhere in the world.”
A spokesperson for Anil Ambani said, “Mr Ambani does not have any HSBC overseas account.”
Congress leader and former Maharashtra chief minister Narayan Rane said, “Earlier, too, my name had come. There is no truth in it. Neither me, nor my wife, nor my family have any account abroad.”
Talking to reporters, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said, “Some new names have been revealed, whose veracity would be checked by the authorities.”
He, however, said the details that have come out newly were more or less in line with what was available with the government. Jaitley said that a case exists only if the additional names were those of resident Indians.
“If they are foreign citizens or non-resident Indians (NRIs), then there’s a different dimension to it. The names of resident Indians, which are additional…we’ll surely bring them under the scope of the government’s action,” the finance minister said.
Later, the finance ministry said in a statement that the Income Tax Department is in touch with the whistle- blower who apparently brought out the names of persons holding undisclosed bank accounts in HSBC, Switzerland.
“He has been requested to share information available with him with regard to undisclosed bank accounts of Indians in HSBC, Switzerland, and other destinations. His response is awaited,” the statement said after The Indian Express reported that the HSBC's Indian list has doubled to 1,195 names.
Until now, 628 Indians were believed to have accounts at HSBC.
Their names were shared in 2011 with India by France after an HSBC employee leaked the data.
Jaitley also said that after the government initiated 60 prosecutions against illegal accounts around seven months ago, these names had become public by way of cases lodged in various courts.
He said that assessments of around 350 account holders had already been done and that of the remaining accounts will be completed by March 31.
The Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigating Team (SIT) Chairman Justice (retd) M B Shah, meanwhile, said the scope of investigations would be widened due to the release of new names. Late on Sunday, British banking major HSBC admitted there had been lapses in the past on its part.
“We acknowledge that the compliance culture and standards of due diligence in HSBC’s Swiss private bank, as well as the industry in general, were significantly lower than they are today,” it said.
The bank said that its Swiss arm had not been fully integrated into itself after its purchase in 1999, allowing “significantly lower” standards of compliance and due diligence to persist. |
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